Peak Oil, Super Spikes, Fracking, Baby Boomers, and Telecommuting
Cappy delves into predicting the future world of oil and oil prices. With fracking and telecommuting there's hope the world won't run out of oil...at least during Cappy's lifetime, and that's all the really matters.
National scale peak oil is where problems occur. Local peaks are too small to matter and the global peak will have such a slow decline rate, distributed everywhere, that adaption won't be too hard. But the uncanny valley of national peak oil (and certainly production per capita), like in Egypt and Syria and Yemen, was a major cause of the Arab Spring.
There's a lot more coal left than oil, but national peak coal in the UK was a major factor leading up to WWII. Nations react badly to this kind of loss of power, literal power. Nationalism is demonized and globalism is lionized largely because of energy politics that are going obsolete within this century.
Much migration from Mexico is a result of their own peak and decline. Their economy is being propped up by the drug trade and remittances.
Mexico's oil production has fallen off a cliff since 2006. This kind of abrupt collapse within a single generation is what produces instability. It's the speed and scale of national peak oil that causes problems, local is too small and global is too slow.
In a way, renewable energy was developed in the 1930s. Nikolai Tesla built an electric car which which was powered by the magnetic field of the earth. No batteries. No recharging. The FBI seized it. Knowledge is power, ignorance is a weapon.
The key to understanding any resource is that it is about provable reserves, not absolute quantity: the total volume of oil hit it's peak right as the first caveman lit his first torch with pitch in it (or whatever ...). On the other hand, provable reserves is the quantity at any given time that can economically be extracted and refined: as reserves drop, prices go up, creating larger reserves (by both increasing the volume of oil that can economically be extracted from any given source, and by creating greater economic incentive for technological improvement) ... depressing prices. And we've seen that, over time. the pace of technology (and other factors) leads to both more resources and lower prices (i.e., Simon-Erhlich Wager).
This is not a new understanding, but it is clearly lost on the "Peak Oil" alarmists.
National scale peak oil is where problems occur. Local peaks are too small to matter and the global peak will have such a slow decline rate, distributed everywhere, that adaption won't be too hard. But the uncanny valley of national peak oil (and certainly production per capita), like in Egypt and Syria and Yemen, was a major cause of the Arab Spring.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot more coal left than oil, but national peak coal in the UK was a major factor leading up to WWII. Nations react badly to this kind of loss of power, literal power. Nationalism is demonized and globalism is lionized largely because of energy politics that are going obsolete within this century.
Much migration from Mexico is a result of their own peak and decline. Their economy is being propped up by the drug trade and remittances.
https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/crude-oil-production
Mexico's oil production has fallen off a cliff since 2006. This kind of abrupt collapse within a single generation is what produces instability. It's the speed and scale of national peak oil that causes problems, local is too small and global is too slow.
In a way, renewable energy was developed in the 1930s. Nikolai Tesla built an electric car which which was powered by the magnetic field of the earth. No batteries. No recharging. The FBI seized it. Knowledge is power, ignorance is a weapon.
ReplyDeleteGoogle "abiotic oil".
The key to understanding any resource is that it is about provable reserves, not absolute quantity: the total volume of oil hit it's peak right as the first caveman lit his first torch with pitch in it (or whatever ...). On the other hand, provable reserves is the quantity at any given time that can economically be extracted and refined: as reserves drop, prices go up, creating larger reserves (by both increasing the volume of oil that can economically be extracted from any given source, and by creating greater economic incentive for technological improvement) ... depressing prices. And we've seen that, over time. the pace of technology (and other factors) leads to both more resources and lower prices (i.e., Simon-Erhlich Wager).
ReplyDeleteThis is not a new understanding, but it is clearly lost on the "Peak Oil" alarmists.