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Biography: Chris Rhodes. www.fresh-lands.com Professor
Chris Rhodes is a writer, speaker and researcher who became involved with
environmental issues while working in Russia during the aftermath...
Gap Oil
21 Jan, 2009 04:52 pm
It is Gap Oil not Peak Oil that is the problem. Rising demand for oil will exceed the quantity of it that can be withdrawn from the earth, resulting in a supply-demand gap. Once production does peak the gap will be enlarged from both sides, drawing down the supply side against rising demand. This I suggest should be termed "Gap Oil". Energy efficiency and a reduction in our demand for oil is paramount and a growing dependence on what can be grown, to create a sustainable "bioeconomy".
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The world gets through around 84 million barrels of oil on a daily basis, which adds-up to just over 30 billion barrels a year; a staggering quantity which underpins the modern industrialised global mechanism and a relentless global population of 6.7 billion souls. Only time will tell history what extent that number will ascend to, but if the WHO is to be believed it will be over 9 billion by 2050 and rising perhaps to 12 billion in the subsequent century, all fed by oil. I have noted on previous occasions a Hubbert analysis, similar to that made for oil, that predicts instead that world population will rather peak at 7.1 billion by 2024 and then fall to around 2.5 billion by 2100. As I say, only time will tell us which manner of estimate is correct.
Demand for oil appears equally inexorable, and there are estimates made that in two decades China will be using more oil than the U.S., and that the world in total will demand another 50% by then. It is obvious that no matter how much recoverable oil there is in the ground, if it cannot be recovered at a sufficient rate to match the prevailing demand for it, then a gap will ensue between demand and supply, as happened last summer with the effect of driving-up the price of oil to almost $150 a barrel. This state of "gap-oil" will maintain a similar consequence: namely that the price of oil will soar from its present low value and the impact on the world economy will be severe, with oscillations of unparalleled amplitude to the global markets. There will be actual shortages of oil too, with supplies going to the highest bidder, and a shift of economic and political power being placed in those hands that hold the oil.
This will happen irrespective of whether we are at the peak of world oil production. The concept of world peak oil is misleading in any case, since all oil wells are at different phases of their relative depletion and so Russia will still be producing oil long after the North Sea, for example, and Saudi Arabia long after that. Hence some countries will be dependent on others. World peak oil can be thought of as the peaking of the largest fields, and once e.g. the giant Ghawar field peaks we can begin to kiss our lifestyles goodbye. This should auger-in a new age of energy efficiency and a growing reliance on sustainable economies, necessarily localised and so less dependent on transportation, and based around the bioeconomy, i.e. on what can be grown.
Technological solutions, e.g. the hydrogen economy will not be with us for decades if at all, and at the very least we need some interstitial solutions. The future of humankind will depend most viably on sustainable photosynthesis, rather than on the fossil fuel products of photosynthesis that were laid-down millions of years past. Once peak oil does strike it will enlarge the gap further by drawing-down the supply side, which will fall ever consummately against demand. It is gap-oil we need to fear, the state when supply fails demand and which is both inevitable and imminent.
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- “Peak Oil” is Nonsense… Because There’s Enough Gas to Last 250 Years.
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Peak oil is a perfectly clear descriptive term: the peak rate of extraction. Oil peaks, and then starts to decline.
Gap oil sounds like a bad sex lubricant.
but you say : "You heard it here first: GAP OIL. I"
I say NO, I , paal myrtvedt used the term "gap-oil" on January 15, 2009 via this poat here : http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4969#comment-460058
If you read my comments here you will find that I mean "there is no such thing as Gap-oil in the world, I'ts all imaginary oil ...", thus rendered nonsensical.
Oil is traded at an auction, and as you imply in your essay , it will become more expensive with time. Thats all there is to it.
After reviewing literally over 2000 pages of material over the internet, on my own time, and with no salary at all, it appears to me and other researchers of peak oil that:
1) Oil has already peaked.
2) It is clear that new discoveries have dropped off to but a small fraction of what discoveries were in 1950-1960. That means there are no new significant finds of oil to be made.
3) Canadian tar sands- it's very hard to get that oil out.
4) Oil shale - commercial production was never begun - and from what I see it will not begin.
5) Large amounts of enhanced recovery techniques are being used in Mexico and the Middle East - pumping large amounts of water or nitrogen into the oil fields to get the oil up - the amounts being used are increasing - and it contaminates the remaining oil. This leads me to think that some of the oil coming up soon will be more expensive to refine or even completely unusable.
We need to move to an electric system of moving vehicles, if this isn't done soon, the number of personal vehicles in use will plummet - this isn't really a catastrophic outcome, but the effect on western economies will be staggering, many more layoffs in the auto industry with knock-on effects. Considering how no real movement in this direction has happened in China or Europe or North America, this is a likely outcome.
I also think that people are used to symmetric bell curves and don't see that the down side of the peak will produce more oil than the up side. This is due to technology improvements and price factors.
The best thing about "peak", is that it's obvious that it's all downhill from here.
Besides, Peak Oil would be a much better sex lubricant than Gap Oil.
Why does gap oil sound like bad sex lubricant? What do you get up to exactly? Don' t want to know!
Back to the matter, though. If we agree that we are not going to be able to keep production going to meet demand then we need some clear consensus on what to do instead.
The gap can come before the peak anyway, even if we are not quite there yet, especially if the economic turndown halts new extraction projects. But the actual arrival of the peak will simple make it all and irrevocably worse.
The downturn in prices has almost everyone fooled. Peak oil is almost certainly a historic term because investment in new supply has been seriously curtailed. Nevertheless the term is OK - it has a meaning that is broadly understood by many; and avoided at all costs by the politicians.