Peak Everything (25 page)

For many Climate Change activists, theirs is primarily a moral issue having to do with the fate of future generations and other species. Their message implies an appeal to self-preservation, but since they cannot prove that the most horrific climate consequences being predicted (the drowning of coastal cities by rising seas, rapidly expanding deserts, collapsing agricultural production) will occur within the next decade or two, the motive of self-preservation is often downplayed. This emphasis on the moral dimension of climate activism is clear in Al Gore's documentary film,
An Inconvenient Truth.

It is probably safe to say that most Peak Oil activists are motivated more by their immediate concerns for preservation of self, family, and community. They see the peak of global oil production as happening soon and the effects accumulating quickly. This concern for self-preservation is prominent in the quasi-survivalist tone of several Peak Oil websites.

Climate Change activists see the argument that depletion will take care of the carbon emissions problem as a threat, because it could lead to apathy. They argue that there are enough fossil fuels left on the planet to trigger a climatic doomsday and, to underscore the argument, Climate Change activists often quote robust estimates
of remaining oil reserves and amounts awaiting discovery issued by agencies such as the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), and by companies like ExxonMobil and Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) — which seem unrealistically optimistic compared to the majority of expert forecasts. Climate activists understandably feel fully justified in doing this, because, after all, these are
official
estimates and forecasts.

Peak Oil activists adhere to more pessimistic resource estimates and production forecasts, and it is tempting to think that this is partly because doing so makes their case appear stronger. However, the track record of prediction by the optimists is not good:

This pattern of unrealistic optimism on the part of the official forecasting agencies has continued with regard to other countries, and thus probably, by extrapolation, to their forecasts for the world as a whole. So it might be unrealistic for the climate activists to give credence to such forecasts, or even to assume that the truth lies equidistant between the extreme resource estimates of the so-called optimists and pessimists.

Parenthetically, both Peak Oil and Climate Change activists have reasons (though different ones) to regard ExxonMobil as an arch-foe. That company has consistently funded groups undermining public concern about Climate Change. And recently ExxonMobil has placed prominent magazine ads proclaiming that the global oil production peak is so far in the future that we need not worry about it. One ExxonMobil executive has been widely quoted as saying, “Peak oil theory is garbage.”

These differences in perspective lead to somewhat divergent policy recommendations.

For Climate Change analysts and activists, emissions are the essence of the problem, and so anything that will reduce emissions is viewed as a solution. If societies shift from using a high-carbon fossil fuel (coal) to a fuel with lower carbon content (natural gas), this is an obvious benefit in terms of climate risk — and a potentially easy sell to politicians and the general public, because it merely requires a change of fuel, not a sacrifice of convenience or comfort. And so, again, climate analysts tend to accept at face value official high reserves estimates and production forecasts — in this case, for natural gas.

However, as with oil, production forecasts by the official agencies for natural gas supply have tended to be overly robust. For
example, in the US the EIA issued no warning whatever of future domestic natural gas problems prior to the supply shortfalls that became painfully apparent after 2000, as prices more than quadrupled. Nevertheless, a few industry insiders had noted disturbing signs: companies were drilling at an accelerating pace in order to maintain production rates, and newer fields (which tended to be smaller) were depleting ever more quickly. By 2003 the US Energy Secretary was proclaiming a natural gas crisis. In the following three years, warm weather (perhaps due to Climate Change) and demand reduction (from the off-shoring of many industrial users of natural gas due to high domestic prices) led to a partial relaxing of prices and general complacency. However, US domestic production appears set to decline further, and likely at a rapid pace.

For depletion analysts and activists, societal dependence on vanishing, non-renewable energy resources is the essence of the greatest dilemma that our society currently faces. We have created a complex, global economic infrastructure built to run on fuels that will start to become scarce and expensive very soon. From this perspective, natural gas is not a solution but an enormous problem: even if the global peak in gas production is 10 to 20 years away, regional shortages are already appearing and will continue to intensify. This means enormous risks for home heating, for the chemicals and plastics industries, and for electrical power generation. Natural gas is and will always be a fuel that is, for the most part, regionally traded (as opposed to liquid fuels, which are more easily shipped). Thus for many nations critical to the world economy — the US, Britain, and most of continental Europe — gas cannot serve as a “transition fuel.”

Coal presents another controversial topic for both depletion and emissions analysts. Most members of both groups feel a keen need to articulate some politically palatable transition strategy so as to gain the ears of policy makers. If coal were entirely ruled out of the discussion, such a strategy would become more difficult to cobble together. However, the two groups tend to think of very different future roles for coal.

Some emissions activists and analysts look to “clean coal” as a partial solution to the problem of Climate Change. “Clean coal”
practices include gasifying coal underground,
in situ,
separating the resulting greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide), and then burying these in ocean sediments or old oilfields or coal-mines. This theoretically allows society to gain an energy benefit while reducing additions to atmospheric greenhouse gases.

Many depletion analysts are skeptical of such “carbon capture” schemes, believing that when the world is mired in a supply-driven energy crisis, few nations will be adequately motivated to pay the extra cost (in both financial and energy terms) to separate, handle, and store the carbon from coal; instead they will simply burn whatever is available in order to keep their economies from crashing.

Some depletionists see the world's enormous coal reserves as a partial supply-side answer to Peak Oil. Using a time-proven process, it is possible to gasify coal and then use the resulting gases to synthesize a high-quality diesel fuel. The South African company Sasol, which has updated the process, is currently under contract to provide several new coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants to China and has announced a plant in Montana.

CTL is not attractive to emissions analysts, however. While some carbon could be captured during the gasification stage (at a modest energy cost), burning the final liquid fuel would release as much carbon into the atmosphere as would burning conventional petroleum diesel.

A few depletion analysts tend to take a skeptical view of future coal supplies. According to most widely-quoted estimates, the world has one to two hundred years' worth of coal — at current rates of usage. However, factoring in dramatic increases in usage (to substitute for declining oil and gas supplies), while also taking account of the Hubbert peak phenomenon — extraction rates will inevitably begin to decline long before the coal actually runs out — and the fact that coal resources are of varying quality and accessibility leads to the surprising conclusion that a global peak in coal production could arrive as soon as a decade from now.
¹
That raises the question: does it make sense to place great hope in largely untested and expensive carbon sequestration technologies if the new infrastructure needed will be nearly obsolete so soon? Imagine
the world investing trillions of dollars and working mightily for the next 20 years to build hundreds of “clean” coal (and/or CTL) plants, with the world's electrical grids and transportation systems now becoming overwhelmingly dependent on these technologies, only to see global coal supplies dwindle. Would the world then have the capital to engage in
another
strenuous and costly energy transition? And what would be the next energy source?

Other low-grade fossil fuels, such as tar sands, oil shale, and heavy oil are also problematic from both the depletion and emissions perspectives. Some depletion analysts recommend full-speed development of these resources. However, the energetic extraction costs for them are usually quite high compared to the energy payoff from the resource extracted. Their already-low energy profit ratio (also known as the energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI) would be compromised still further by efforts to capture and sequester carbon, since, as with coal, these low-grade fuels have a high carbon content as compared to natural gas or conventional oil. Currently, natural gas is used in the processing of tar sands and heavy oil; from both an energy and an emissions point of view, this is rather like turning gold into lead. Many depletionists point out that, while the total resource base for these substances is enormous, the rate of extraction for each is likely to remain limited by physical factors (such as the availability of natural gas and fresh water needed for processing), so that synthetic liquid fuels from such substances may not help much in dealing with the problem of oil depletion in any case.

By now a disturbing trend becomes clear: the two problems of Climate Change and Peak Oil together are worse than either by itself. Strategies that are proposed to keep lights burning and trucks moving while reducing emissions are questionable from a depletionist point of view, while most strategies to keep the economy energized as oil and gas disappear imply increasing greenhouse gas emissions. As we will see, the closer we look, the worse it gets.