Forest Man

Gail Tverberg wrote in February 3, 2021 in the article "Where Energy Modeling Goes Wrong", on the blog "Our Finite World" the following (below the headline [1] Summary: The economy is approaching near-term collapse, not peak oil. The result is quite different.):

 

 

This is really an incredible, astounding fact. The energy optimists brag so much about all the oil we have, and then comes this statement by the academic peakoiler Gail Tverberg, really a heavyweight of peak oil literature, who has a long experience in the peakoiler community. The optimists brag about the low-quality dregs of the oil industry that is left. They brag about tar sands, shale oil, heavy off-shore oil, oil from thousands upon thousands of small oil fields, which in the end are, for all practical purposes, uneconomical to exploit. 

 

They are happily unaware of Peak Oil educator Richard Heinberg's low-hanging fruit principle, which means that we always exploit the easiest oil first, and wait with exploiting oil more difficult to obtain. This is a principle which has always been in operation, and always will, because of economics and human greed. It is almost a natural law. It has to do with the EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) of oil. 

 

The words of Gail Tverberg are reinforced by what some climate scientists say we have to do to achieve climate targets. Just think twice about what is said in the paper "Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world" by Dan Welsby, James Price, Steve Pye & Paul Ekins in the prestigious Nature, volume 597, pages 230–234 (2021):

 

 

More specifically, they write that: "By 2050, we find that nearly 60 per cent of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90 per cent of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget."

 

 

 

 

But I think that when we get ecocide laws into operation (what people like my friend Pella Thiel are working with now), it will become a crime to exploit all the remaining fossil fuels. But I think the laws will be implemented too late. It will not prevent runaway global warming and climate disaster, which is visible already now. This makes the end of the oil industry only more certain. It will be abolished from two different angles: 1) from the collapse of civilization from climate change and oil depletion, and 2) from ecocide laws. 

 

We have to implement ecocide laws sooner or later, just to stop some of the damage done by civilization upon nature. It is never too late to stop some of the damage. 

 

The ecocide laws in the future will make the remaining oil reserves even more uneconomical to exploit. 

 

Some peakoilers, like Alice Friedemann and Chris Martenson, have appreciated the shale oil industry for buying us more time. I think it is foolish to thank that industry. We should not have embarked upon that project. It has caused immense damage to nature and life. 

 

If it were not for the shale oil industry, civilization would have collapsed by 2020, and we would now live in a post-apocalyptic world. Shale oil bought us some 10 years of more economic growth. But this is only good news for those who like civilization, and do not care for nature. For nature it is good that civilization collapses, therefore the shale oil industry was a scandal. 

 

But shale oil is a perfect example of oil that is uneconomical to exploit, save massive subsidies and investment money, which are burned through rapidly. When the Everything Bubble bursts, almost all shale oil production will stop, and we will soon lose around at least eight million barrels of oil per day, that is about 10 % of the global oil production volume (and this only account for US shale oil. China and several other countries also have some shale oil). Only that is enough to collapse civilization. Don't then forget all the old oilfields in the world which are kept alive by massive enhanced oil recovery techniques, like pumping massive amounts of water into oil reservoirs. This namely just makes the decline rate even steeper, when the decline begins in earnest.