Transition Towns: A Tonic for the Peak Oil Blues

Transition Towns:

A Tonic for the Peak Oil Blues

 

by Alex Munslow

The term "Peak oil" warns of the end of cheap and plentiful energy. An expanding world population of 6.5 billion suggests a limit for growth will eventually be reached (if it hasn't been already) and no combination of current alternative energy sources will sustain the world's accelerating thirst for power. As oil production inevitably declines and resources become scarce, the world faces a turbulent descent.

We depend on a globalized economy that is completely reliant on ready supplies of this non-renewable resource. But envisioning a life without the luxuries afforded by abundant oil can quickly lead one to denial. It's much easier to absolve our responsibility to some higher authority – the government, the oil companies, technology, God.

The exact tipping point in world oil production cannot be plotted exactly until a clear decline can be seen, by which time it will be too late. Experts analyzing this situation are divided between "early tippers" and "late tippers" – those who think world oil production has already peaked, or is about to peak in the next few years, and those who believe there are decades left. The Hirsch Report, a US Energy Department study into the effects of Peak Oil, claims that without at least a decade of preparation, the world economic, social and political cost would be "unprecedented." Without this "timely mitigation," confronting the effects of Peak Oil and climate change will be like trying to put up a new tent in the dark. If government reports warn us that at least a ten-year transition period is required if we are to survive the energy descent, the burning question is: When do we begin the transition?

In the UK we have seen the emergence of the Transition Town as a preparation for the coming oil crisis. Like most good ideas, it doesn't seem like a new one so much as an idea remembered. Its origins lie in the raised beds of Permaculture, the Australian agricultural design system pioneered by David Holmgrem and Bill Mollison. Inspired by the ideas of author Richard Heinberg and Dr. Colin Campbell of ASPO, a Peak Oil awareness organization, the first Transition Town began in Kinsale, Ireland in 2004. Imagining a sustainable arrangement for life in the post-oil future, permaculturalist teacher Rob Hopkins and students from his Sustainability course collaborated on a town-planning strategy called the "Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan."

Hopkins and his team presented their plan in a timeline of achievable steps taken over several years. At the heart of their strategy was the idea to turn the obstacles of the energy crisis into opportunities for building local resilience and revitalizing the community. Encouraged by great enthusiasm for the idea, Hopkins took the Transition Town vision to Totnes in Devon.

The Transition strategy begins with the formation of a small steering group (designed with its own demise from the beginning). In the early stages, local awareness is generated by a series of lectures, film viewings, and meetings. Compelling Peak Oil documentaries such as The End of Suburbia and The Power of Community serve as tools of mass tribal initiation at these gatherings, awakening people to the challenges of the coming crisis. After the town hall screenings, local audiences are encouraged to discuss the issues raised by the films and suggest ideas and solutions to their own community's oil dependency.

Existing local environmental and community organizations are invited to jointly organize events that respond to these issues, with smaller groups assigned to specific concerns such as food security, waste and recycling, education, housing, transport and local economy. By a combination of serendipity and synchronicity, these roles are generally filled by the appropriate people at the required time. The momentum behind the project builds up over a period of months until the official "Unleashing" event finally launches the plan to the general public.

In order to assist communities working towards these goals, the Transition Network was set up by activist Ben Brangwyn to support and train town leaders as they adopt Transition Initiatives. Through its work across the UK, the Transition Network aims to "unleash the collective genius" within communities, leading to a more resilient and fulfilling lifestyle. Last September there were only two Transition Towns in the UK; inspired by the successes of Kinsale and Totnes, there are already around 90 towns now at various stages of transition, from "mulling it over" to fully "unleashed."

The Transition Town strategy avoids an "us and them" mentality, building bridges between community members and local government. The approach developed to relocalize the Totnes economy was endorsed by the Town Council, and a new local currency called the "Totnes Pound" is accepted by many local businesses and shops. Strategies like this may one day stop the flow of money out of local communities, providing a protective buffer between a healthy local economy and fluctuations in the national currency.

A general objective of Transition Towns is to preserve or reintroduce the importance of farming within a community, working towards local food production with less reliance on transport and chemicals. The benefits to this shift are obvious: local food production sustains the local economy and bolsters the overall well-being of a community. "Seed swaps" are an excellent means of strengthening local farming and working towards sustainability. At these events, heirloom seed varieties are freely exchanged in an effort to revitalize the genetic diversity of crops while bypassing legislations written to protect corporate monopolies. According to UK law, seeds cannot be sold legally unless they appear on the EU National Seed List.

Registration is expensive, so only a few seeds make it on, and these are generally owned by a handful of companies who have dominated the commercial market with hybridized seeds. These genetically modified seeds are designed to produce sterile plants, forcing farmers to buy a renewed supply each season and resulting in the extinction of many seed varieties. Seed swaps side-step the corporate seed industry and thus play a crucial role in reclaiming control of local food production.

Transition Town meetings often employ the self-organizing method of "open space." According to this arrangement, attendees are invited to create the agenda and host their own discussion groups, within which participants freely move about. Whoever shows up to the meeting are the right people; whenever it starts is the right time; and when it's over, it's over. Those who attend have chosen to be there and are willing to contribute. Each group records the conversations, and at the end of the day, the full group reconvenes for feedback and comments, which are then made available via an internet wiki.

Transition Towns provide training and courses to facilitate what has become known as "The Great Re-Skilling." This begins by interviewing the elders of the community. To return to a lower energy future, it is necessary to engage with those who directly remember a lower energy society and re-learn skills that their generation took for granted. To instigate change, it is important to first understand the psychological barriers to transformation. The Transition Town model offers a set of creative tools for communities to engage with the dual problems of both Peak Oil and climate change. It deals practically with the physical manifestation of the problem and can be conveyed very simply to a large number of people at once.

Cheap oil has allowed western societies to cut through the intricate web of beneficial relationships that once held communities together. Transition Town is a grassroots movement of people learning to relate to each other again. Behind the descent plan is the belief that with creativity and imagination, and under a well-designed strategy, the future without oil could be preferable to the present.

www.transitionculture.org

From Reality Sandwich @ http://www.realitysandwich.com/transition_town_tonic_peak_oil_blues ,

 

 

 

 What is a Transition Initiative?

 

It's a place where there's a community-led process that helps that town/village/city/neighbourhood become stronger and happier.

It's happening in well over a thousand highly diverse communities across the world - from towns in Australia to neighbourhoods in Portugal, from cities in Brazil to rural communities in Slovenia, from urban locations in Britain to islands off the coast of Canada. Many of these initiatives are registered on the Transition Network website.

These communities have started up projects in areas of food, transport, energy, education, housing, waste, arts etc. as small-scale local responses to the global challenges of climate change, economic hardship and shrinking supplies of cheap energy. Together, these small-scale responses make up something much bigger, and help show the way forward for governments, business and the rest of us.

Really, it's the opposite of us sitting in our armchairs complaining about what's wrong, and instead, it's about getting up and doing something constructive about it alongside our neighbours and fellow townsfolk. And people tell us that as a result of being involved in their local "transition initiative", they're happier, their community feels more robust and they have made a lot of new friends.

The video above is a brief introduction to Transition from Rob Hopkins, author of the Transition Handbook, co-founder of Transition Network and Transition Town Totnes.

 

What are we "transitioning" away from?

 

All industrialised countries appear to operate on the assumption that our high levels of energy consumption, our high carbon emissions and our massive environmental impact can go on indefinitely. 




And most developing countries appear to aspire to these ways of living too. However, any rational examination of our energy supplies, our economic inequalities, our diminishing levels of well-being, our ecological crises and the climate chaos that is already hitting millions of people tells us this can't go on much longer. 

We're saying that the best place to start transitioning away from this unviable way of living is right within our own communities, and the best time is right now.

 

 

What are we "transitioning" towards?

 

Whether we like it or not, over the next decade or two, we'll be transitioning to a lower energy future - essential because of climate change and inevitable because of diminishing supplies of fossil fuels (particularly oil). 

There are a variety of possible outcomes depending on whether we stick our heads in the sand or whether we start working for a future that we want.




Transition Initiatives, community by community, are actively and cooperatively creating happier, fairer and stronger communities, places that work for the people living in them and are far better suited to dealing with the shocks that'll accompany our economic and energy challenges and a climate in chaos. And here's how they're doing it...

 

Here's how it all appears to be evolving

 

It begins when a small group comes together with a shared concern about shrinking supplies of cheap energy (peak oil), climate change and increasingly, economic downturn. This group recognises that:

• Climate change and peak oil require urgent action.

• Life with less energy is inevitable. It is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise.

• Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with energy shocks.

• We have to act together, now.

• Infinite growth within a finite system (such as planet Earth) is impossible.

• We demonstrated great ingenuity and intelligence as we raced up the energy curve over the last 150 years. There’s no reason why we can’t use those qualities, and more, as we negotiate our way up from the depths back towards the sun and air.

• If we plan and act early enough, and use our creativity and cooperation to unleash the genius within our local communities, we can build a future far more fulfilling and enriching, more connected to and more gentle on the Earth, than the life we have today.

This small initiating group starts learning more about the Transition Model, adapting it to their own local circumstances in order to engage a significant proportion of the people in their community. Some may attend training courses, others buy books, some watch the movie "In Transition 1.0", many search this website for information on how Transition works, or for other people / initiatives / projects near them.

They then:

• start awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a fair and just community-led process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon emissions

• connect with existing groups, including local government

• hold focused events that help groups to form to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, psychology of change, economics & livelihoods, etc)

Each of these groups then starts up practical projects such as community supported agriculture, shared transport, local currencies, seed swaps, tool libraries, energy saving clubs, urban orchards, reskilling classes, draught-busting teams. As they do this work, they draw other people in.

As the initiative becomes more experienced, they often engage in a community-wide visioning process that recognises how crucial is it for us to a) cut fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions urgently and b) proactively figure out the kind of future that works for ALL of us rather than waiting for someone else to create a future that works for just a FEW of us.

These groups are beginning to create formal Energy Descent plans and to rebuild their local economies by starting up, for example, local energy companies, social enterprises and cooperative food businesses.

This co-ordinated local response strives to rebuild the resilience we've lost as a result of cheap oil, to address issues of inequality in terms of access to key resources and also to drastically reduce the community's carbon emissions.

And incidentally, in general these initiatives are not asking for permission to start this work - they're just getting on with it, sharing their successes and failures, their hopes and fears.

Where it goes from there is a path as yet untrod...

 

What about local and national governments and businesses?

 

When we emphasise the vital impact that communities can make in this process, we're not saying that national governments are irrelevant or that institutions like businesses aren't important - we know they're all vital. What we are saying is that for most people, their own local community is where they can have the quickest and greatest impact. Our hunch is that when the governments see what communities can do in terms of this transition, it'll be easier for them to make decisions that support this work.

 

The different shapes of Transition

 

The Transition model evolved in the UK, quickly moving to other English-speaking countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the US. We often wondered whether the model would be flexible enough for other cultures that face different challenges. It seems, from a couple of recent notes from Brazil, that it might be:

"In Brazil, climate change and peak oil aren't issues with the same public appeal of that in Europe. Other Brazilians working with TT probably will also have other subjects of main concern, such as assuring education and health for all, protecting biodiversity and enhancing autonomy of traditional (indigenous or not) local communities."

... and another:

"Just a brief message to say that we have enriching Transition processes going on in Brazil right now. Some examples: in Sao Paulo, transition is happening in Granja Viana, Vila Mariana & Brasilandia; there is a strong group in Joao Pessoa and emerging initiatives in Salvador and Recife; Santa Teresa, Grajau in Rio. Petropolis; in your region there is also a small town Andrelandia starting the process. Most recently, after the big land slides, Teresopolis decided to use the principles in their reconstruction process. In two weeks time I'll be running a Transition Training in Vicosa, organised by the Federal University, for which we have opened places for a group from Teresopolis.

We debate peak oil in the context of presal [Brazilian off-shore oil deposits] and as you know Brazil has also been hit by climate change."

We're working hard to ensure that the very broad range of groups experimenting with the Transition model across the world are able to share successes and failures, adding strength and momentum to the whole movement.

So far, initiatives have started up in over 35 countries around the world. It's a start, and there's a long way to go.

 

Cheerful disclaimer!

 

Just in case you were under the impression that Transition is a process defined by people who have all the answers, you need to be aware of a key fact.

We truly don't know if this will work. Transition is a social experiment on a massive scale.

What we are convinced of is this:

    •    if we wait for the governments, it'll be too little, too late
    •    if we act as individuals, it'll be too little
    •    but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.

Everything that you read on this site is the result of real work undertaken in the real world with community engagement at its heart. There's not an ivory tower in sight, no professors in musty oak-panelled studies churning out incomprehensible papers, no inflexible plans that MUST be adhered to.

This website, just like the Transition model, is brought to you by people who are actively engaged in transition in their own community. People who are learning by doing - and learning all the time. People who understand that we can't sit back and wait for someone else to do the work. People like you, perhaps...

From Transition Network @ http://www.transitionnetwork.org/support/what-transition-initiative

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Discovery backs theory that oil is not a 'fossil fuel'

Discovery backs theory that oil is not a 'fossil fuel'

Evidence supports the premise that Earth produces an endless supply

By Jerome R. Corsi © 2011 WorldNetDaily.com

A study published in Science Magazine presents new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil, which asserts oil is a natural product the Earth generates constantly rather than a "fossil fuel" derived from decaying ancient forests and dead dinosaurs.

The lead scientist on the study, Giora Proskurowski of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle, says the hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field were produced by the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in the mantle of the earth.

The abiotic theory of the origin of oil directly challenges the conventional scientific theory that hydrocarbons are organic in nature, created by the deterioration of biological material deposited millions of years ago in sedimentary rock and converted to hydrocarbons under intense heat and pressure.

While organic theorists have posited that the material required to produce hydrocarbons in sedimentary rock came from dinosaurs and ancient forests, more recent argument have suggested living organisms as small as plankton may have been the origin.

The abiotic theory argues, in contrast, that hydrocarbons are naturally produced on a continual basis throughout the solar system, including within the mantle of the earth. The advocates believe the oil seeps up through bedrock cracks to deposit in sedimentary rock. Traditional petro-geologists, they say, have confused the rock as the originator rather than the depository of the hydrocarbons.

 

Giora Proskurowski

Lost City is a hypothermal field some 2,100 feet below sea level that sits along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge at the center of the Atlantic Ocean, noted for strange 90 to 200 foot white towers on the sea bottom.

In 2003 and again in 2005, Proskurowski and his team descended in a scientific submarine to collect liquid bubbling up from Lost City sea vents.

Proskurowski found hydrocarbons containing carbon-13 isotopes that appeared to be formed from the mantle of the Earth, rather than from biological material settled on the ocean floor.

Carbon 13 is the carbon isotope scientists associate with abiotic origin, compared to Carbon 12 that scientists typically associate with biological origin.

Lost City Vents

Proskurowski argued that the hydrocarbons found in the natural hydrothermal fluids coming out of the Lost City sea vents is attributable to abiotic production by Fischer-Tropsch, or FTT, reactions.

The Fischer-Tropsch equations were first developed by Nazi scientists who created methodologies for producing synthetic oil from coal.

"Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water and moderate amounts of heat," Proskurowski wrote.

The study also confirmed a major argument of Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who argued in his book "The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels" that micro-organisms found in oil might have come from the mantle of the earth where, absent photosynthesis, the micro-organisms feed on hydrocarbons arising from the earth's mantle in the dark depths of the ocean floors.

Affirming this point, Proskurowski concluded the article by noting, "Hydrocarbon production by FTT could be a common means for producing precursors of life-essential building blocks in ocean-floor environments or wherever warm ultramafic rocks are in contact with water."

Finding abiotic hydrocarbons in the Lost City sea vent fluids is the second discovery in recent years adding weight to the abiotic theory of the origin of oil.

As WND reported in 2005, a NASA probe to Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, discovered abundant Carbon-13 methane that the agency declared to be abiotic in origin.

From Discovery backs theory oil not 'fossil fuel' http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=45838#ixzz1JxJsfXcU

Abiotic Oil: Science or Politics?

By Ugo Bardi

For the past century or so, the biological origin of oil seemed to be the accepted norm. However, there remained a small group of critics who pushed the idea that, instead, oil is generated from inorganic matter within the earth's mantle.

The question might have remained within the limits of a specialized debate among geologists, as it has been until not long ago. However, the recent supply problems have pushed crude oil to the center stage of international news. This interest has sparked a heated debate on the concept of the "production peak" of crude oil. According to the calculations of several experts, oil production may reach a maximum within a few years and start a gradual decline afterwards.

The concept of "oil peak" is strictly linked to a view that sees oil as a finite resource. Several economists have never accepted this view, arguing that resource availability is determined by price and not by physical factors. Recently, others have been arguing a more extreme view: that oil is not even physically limited. According to some versions of the abiotic oil theory, oil is continuously created in the Earth's mantle in such amounts that the very concept of "depletion" is to be abandoned and, by consequence, that there will never be an "oil peak."

The debate has become highly politicized and has spilled over from geology journals to the mainstream press and to the fora and mailing lists on the internet. The proponents of the abiotic oil theory are often very aggressive in their arguments. Some of them go so far as to accuse those who claim that oil production is going to peak of pursuing a hidden political agenda designed to provide Bush with a convenient excuse for invading Iraq and the whole Middle East.

Normally, the discussion of abiotic oil oscillates between the scientifically arcane and the politically nasty. Even supposing that the political nastiness can be detected and removed, there remains the problem that the average non-specialist in petroleum geology can't hope to wade through the arcane scientific details of the theory (isotopic ratios, biomarkers, sedimentary layers and all that) without getting lost.

Here, I will try to discuss the origin of oil without going into these details. I will do this by taking a more general approach. Supposing that the abiogenic theory is right, then what are the consequences for us and for the whole biosphere? If we find that the consequences do not correspond to what we see, then we can safely drop the abiotic theory without the need of worrying about having to take a course in advanced geology. We may also find that the consequences are so small as to be irrelevant; in this case also we needn't worry about arcane geological details.

In order to discuss this point, the first task is to be clear about what we are discussing. There are, really, two versions of the abiotic oil theory, the "weak" and the "strong":

- The "weak" abiotic oil theory: oil is abiotically formed, but at rates not higher than those that petroleum geologists assume for oil formation according to the conventional theory. (This version has little or no political consequences).

- The "strong" abiotic theory: oil is formed at a speed sufficient to replace the oil reservoirs as we deplete them, that is, at a rate something like 10,000 times faster than known in petroleum geology. (This one has strong political implications).

Both versions state that petroleum is formed from the reaction of carbonates with iron oxide and water in the region called "mantle," deep in the Earth. Furthermore, it is assumed (see Gold's 1993 paper) that the mantle is such a huge reservoir that the amount of reactants consumed in the reaction hasn't depleted it over a few billion years (this is not unreasonable, since the mantle is indeed huge).

Now, the main consequence of this mechanism is that it promises a large amount of hydrocarbons that seep out to the surface from the mantle. Eventually, these hydrocarbons would be metabolized by bacteria and transformed into CO2. This would have an effect on the temperature of the atmosphere, which is strongly affected by the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in it. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is regulated by at least two biological cycles; the photosynthetic cycle and the silicate weathering cycle. Both these cycles have a built-in negative feedback which keeps (in the long run) the CO2 within concentrations such that the right range of temperatures for living creatures is maintained (this is the Gaia model).

The abiotic oil - if it existed in large amounts - would wreak havoc with these cycles. In the "weak" abiotic oil version, it may just be that the amount of carbon that seeps out from the mantle is small enough for the biological cycles to cope and still maintain control over the CO2 concentration. However, in the "strong" version, this is unthinkable. Over billions of years of seepage in the amounts considered, we would be swimming in oil, drowned in oil.

Indeed, it seems that the serious proponents of the abiotic theory all go for the "weak" version. Gold, for instance, never says in his 1993 paper that oil wells are supposed to replenish themselves.¹ As a theory, the weak abiotic one still fails to explain a lot of phenomena, principally (and, I think, terminally): how is it that oil deposits are almost always associated to anoxic periods of high biological sedimentation rate? However, the theory is not completely unthinkable.

At this point, we can arrive at a conclusion. What is the relevance of the abiotic theory in practice? The answer is "none." The "strong" version is false, so it is irrelevant by definition. The "weak" version, instead, would be irrelevant in practice, even if it were true. It would change a number of chapters of geology textbooks, but it would have no effect on the impending oil peak.

To be sure, Gold and others argue that even the weak version has consequences on petroleum prospecting and extraction. Drilling deeper and drilling in areas where people don't usually drill, Gold says, you have a chance to find oil and gas. This is a very, very weak position for two reasons.

First, digging is more expensive the deeper you go, and in practice it is nearly impossible to dig a commercial well deeper than the depth to which wells are drilled nowadays, that is, more than 10 km.

Secondly, petroleum geology is an empirical field which has evolved largely by trial and error. Petroleum geologists have learned the hard way where to drill (and where not to drill); in the process they have developed a theoretical model that WORKS. It is somewhat difficult to believe that generations of smart petroleum geologists missed huge amounts of oil. Gold tried to demonstrate just that, and all that he managed to do was to recover 80 barrels of oil in total, oil that was later shown to be most likely the result of contamination of the drilling mud. Nothing prevents others from trying again, but so far the results are not encouraging.

So, the abiotic oil theory is irrelevant to the debate about peak oil and it would not be worth discussing were it not for its political aspects. If people start with the intention of demonstrating that the concept of "peak oil" was created by a "Zionist conspiracy" or something like that, anything goes. In this case, however, the debate is no longer a scientific one. Fortunately, as Colin Campbell said, "Oil is ultimately controlled by events in the geological past which are immune to politics."

[Ugo Bardi is professor of Chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is also member of the ASPO (Association for the study of peak oil). He is the author of the book "La Fine del Petrolio" (the end of oil) and of several studies on oil depletion.

From http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml

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The Imminent Crash of Oil Supply

The Imminent Crash of Oil Supply

By Nicholas C. Arguimbau

What’s going to happen and how it came to pass that we weren't more thoroughly forewarned

Look at this graph and be afraid. It does not come from Earth First. It does not come from the Sierra Club. It was not drawn by Socialists or Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or anyone from Goldman-Sachs. If you are a Republican Tea-Partier, rest assured it does not come from a progressive Democrat. And vice versa. It was drawn up by the United States Department of Energy, and the United States military's Joint Forces Command concurs with the overall picture.

What does it imply? The supply of the world's most essential energy source is going off a cliff. Not in the distant future, but in a year and a half. Production of all liquid fuels, including oil, will drop within 20 years to half what it is today. And the difference needs to be made up with "unidentified projects," which one of the world's leading petroleum geologists says is just a "euphemism for rank shortage," and the world's foremost oil industry banker says is "faith based."

The original graph is available here http://www.eia.doe.gov/conference/2009/session3/Sweetnam.pdf

This graph was prepared for a DOE meeting in spring, 2009. Take a good look at what it says, assuming it to be correct:

1`. Conventional oil will be almost all gone in 20 years, and there is nothing known to replace it.

2.. Production of petroleum from existing conventional sources has been dropping at a rate slightly over 4% per year for at least a year and will continue to do so for the indefinite future.

3. The graph implies that we are past the peak of production and that there are750 billion barrels of conventional oil left (the areas under the "conventionals" portion of the graph, extrapolated to the right as an exponent). Assuming that the remaining reserves were 900 billion or more at the halfway point, then we are at least 150 billion barrels, or 5 years, past the midpoint.

4. Total petroleum production from all presently known sources, conventional and unconventional, will remain "flat" at approximately 83 mbpd for the next two years and then will proceed to drop for the foreseeable future, at first slowly but by 4% per year after 2015.

5. Demand will begin to outstrip supply in 2012, and will already be 10 million barrels per day above supply in only five years. The United States Joint Forces Command concurs with these specific findings. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf, at 31. 10 million bpd is equivalent to half the United States' entire consumption. To make up the difference, the world would have to find another Saudi Arabia and get it into full production in five years, an impossibility. See The Oil Drum, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5154
5. The production from presently existing conventional sources will plummet from its present 81 mbpd to 30 mbpd by 2030, a 63% drop in a 20-year period.

6. Meeting demand requires discovering, developing, and bringing to full production 60mbpd (105-45) of "unidentified projects" in the 18-year period of 2012-2030 and approximately 25 mbpd of such projects by 2020, on the basis of a very conservative estimate of only 1% annual growth in demand. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, including the Canadian tar sands, implying a deficit of 18-19 mbpd as compared to demand, and an approximate 14 mbpd drop in total liquid fuels production relative to 2012, a 16% drop in 8 years.

7. The curve is virtually identical to one produced by geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere and published in "The End of Cheap Oil," in Scientific American, March, 1998, twelve years ago. They projected that production of petroleum from conventional sources would drop from 74 mbpd in 2003 (as compared to 84 mbpd in 2008 in the DOE graph) and drop to 39 mbpd by 2030 (as compared to 39 mbpd by 2030 in the DOE graph!). http://www.jala.com/energy1.php Campbell and Laherrere predicted a 2003 "peak," and the above graph implies a 'peak" (not necessarily the actual peak, but the midpoint of production of 2005 or before.

So here we are, if the graph is right, on the edge of a precipice, with no prior warning from either the industry, which knows what it possesses, or the collective governments, which ostensibly protect the public interest. As Colin Campbell, a research geologist who has worked for many large oil companies and studied oil depletion extensively (http://www.peakoil.net/about-aspo/dr-colin-campbell) says, "The warning signals have been flying for a long time. They have been plain to see, but the world turned a blind eye, and failed to read the message." http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html The world was completely transformed by oil for the duration of the twentieth century, but if the graph is right, within 20 years it will be virtually gone but our dependence upon it will not. Instead, we have

> zero time to plan how to replace cars in our lives

> zero time to plan how to manufacture and install millions of furnaces to replace home oil furnaces, and zero time to produce the infrastructure necessary to carry out that task

> zero time to retool suburbia so it can function without gasoline

> zero time to plan for replacement of the largest military establishment in history, almost completely dependent upon oil

> zero time to plan to support nine billion people without the "green revolution," a creation of the age of oil

> zero time to plan to replace oil as an essential fuel in electricity production

> zero time to plan for preserving millions of miles of roads without asphalt.

> zero time to plan for the replacement of oil in its essential role in EVERY industry.

> zero time to plan for replacement of oil in its exclusive role of transporting people, agricultural produce, manufactured goods. In a world without oil that appears only twenty years away, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting US grain to other countries, there will be no oil-burning airlines linking the world's major cities, there will be no oil-burning ships transporting Chinese manufactured goods to the billions now dependent on them.

> zero time to plan for the survival of the billions of new people expected by 2050 in the aftermath of ":peak everything."

> zero capital, because of failing banks and public and private debt, to address these issues.

Why zero time?

Because if we at any time use more oil than allowed by the graph, we will have even less later.

Because we are already committed to supporting 2.5 billion more people on what we have.

Because every day we continue upward in our oil consumption, even though we continue to have more people who need it and billions who deserve to rise from abject poverty, we are making the future supply shortage worse.

If you believe the graph, demand will outstrip supply starting at the end of 2011, and severely outstrip supply in five years. What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? We have no time to decide.

IS THE GRAPH RIGHT?

It is very unlikely that things can be better than the graph indicates. Why?

The great majority of authorities believe there is little more than 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil left. You can make a simple calculation from that: At the present rate of 30 billion barrels per year, 82 million barrels per day, it will all be gone in 33 years, and consumption has been rapidly increasing, not decreasing, so if anything it will all be gone sooner...

A closer look at the graph reveals that it was drawn on the assumption that the world's existing conventional fields contain only 750,000 barrels at this time, enough to keep us going only 25 years.

The graph assumes a decline rate of 4% per year. As long as the estimates of remaining reserves are right, that can't be far off. In fact, 4% is a relatively low decline rate compared to what has been observed in oil fields generally. Hold on, it's going to be a fast ride down!

The major oil companies, which presumably know better than we do how much oil is in their possession, "conspicuously fail to invest in new refining capacity, which would surely be needed if production were set to rise.'" Campbell, http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html . The excess of refining capacity over demand remained close to 10 million bpd during the nineties, but dropped to almost nothing in the last decade as a result of failure to build new capacity. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2006/01/chp1pdf/fig1_21.pdf. The United States Joint Forces Command has also reported the failure of the oil industry to invest in the refining capacity necessary to permit expanded production, and that "Even were a concerted effort begun today to repair that shortage, it would be ten years before production could catch up with expected demand." "Joint Operating Environment 2010," at 26. http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf

The most frequently discussed significant source of unexploited petroleum is the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Because a high percentage of the energy value of the tar sands has to be expended in their extraction, the reported quantity of reserves is misleading, and two independent researchers have estimated respectively that production from the tar sands by 2020 may be expected of 3.3 million bpd and 4 million bpd. Consequently, the likelihood of the tar sands making a significant contribution to the world's petroleum demand in the foreseeable future is low. Phil Hart and Chris Skrebowski, "Peak oil: A detailed and transparent analysis," http://www.energybulletin.net/node/30537

The shortfall, labelled "unidentified projects," that needs to be filled in 20 years is an unprecedented 60 million barrels per day, equivalent to 3/4 of today's total production. We have never in history done anything comparable to that. Although there are large deposits of "unconventional" oil such as the Canadian tar sands, most are making only slow progress at development and consume as much or more energy in their production as they can generate. The independent Oxford Institute of Energy Studies has estimated a possible development of 6.5mbpd of such projects, when we'll need more than that every two years just to keep our place. So the likelihood of anything at all making a significant dent in the shortfall is small. Indeed, the "unidentified projects" can be perceived as just a "euphemism for rank shortage" (Campbell http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html)

The United States Joint Forces Command has come to the similar conclusion: that of all potential future energy sources, "None of these provide much reason for optimism," http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf Petroleum industry investment banker Matt Simmons calls them "faith-based." http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Northern%20Trust%20Bank.pdf at 4

The "Hubbert Peak" theory of oil field depreciation, which predicted the peak and subsequent demise of the US oil industry 15 years in advance and within 2 years of its occurrence http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf, says that with normal production methods, a country reaches peak production in its oil fields when they are 50% depleted, with the production curve being bell-shaped. The peak can be postponed with innovative extraction techniques, but this only causes subsequent more rapid decline of the deposits and total extraction if anything decreasing. The world reached the midpoint of its reserves in the last decade, so the 2005 "peak" implied by the above graph is very close to what would be expected.

Astonishingly, Dr. Hubbert in the same 1956 paper predicted, based upon records of only 90 billion barrels of oil having been recovered worldwide, that the peak of world petroleum production would be approximately the year 2000; this apparently quite accurate prediction by Hubbert has largely been forgotten. http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf . One is tempted to ask why, if one man could predict the timing of the peak 44 years before it occurred, the United States Department of Energy is incapable of recognizing it after it occurred.

There's a common feeling that just because we don't know where the oil is, doesn't mean the Mother Lode isn't right around the corner. But if you've looked everywhere, the chances are a lot slimmer. The lag time between discovery and bringing to full production of a field is 30-40 years, which means that even the virtually impossible discovery of another Saudi Arabia would barely change the graph above, of production between now and 2030. But no such discoveries are left to be made.

The rate of discovery of new conventional oil has been steadily dropping now for FORTY years despite ever-more searching with ever-more-sophisticated technology. There have been two pivotal events: the peak of discovery around 1968, and the day in 1981` when discovery of new oil deposits no longer kept up with production. There is nothing complicated about this. As Campbell says, the warning sign there for anyone to see "simply recognised two undeniable facts:

You have to find oil before you can produce it

Production has to mirror discovery after a time lag

"Discovery reached a peak in the 1960s - despite all the technology we hear so much about, and a worldwide search for the best prospects. It should surprise no one that the corresponding peak of production is now upon us." Indeed, Campbell's second point means that the inevitable peaking of oil production in the early 21st century, should have been clear for all to see since the peaking of discovery in the late sixties.

Campbell does not stand alone. As the US Joint Forces Command observes, "The discovery rate for new oil and gas fields over the last two decades (with the possible exception of Brazil) provides little reason for optimism that future efforts will find major new fields." "Joint Operating Environment 2010," at 31.

Saudi Arabia's largest field, the Ghawar, is now in decline and it appears that the country has nothing to offset that decline. That has led many to conclude that "Peak Oil is a Done Deal." (Dave Cohen, ASPO/USA Energy Bulletin, July 16, 2008. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/45940)

IF IT'S A "DONE DEAL," WHY DID IT TAKE UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE TO GET HERE?

"We can wish it, we can dream it, but it will never be, oil is not renewable, and therefore in time it must be realized that THERE WILL BE NO OIL." ENO Petroleum Corporation, "Peak Oil - The Global Oil Crisis," http://www.enopetroleum.com/opecoilreservers.html. It is hard to conceive of an act or omission causing more pain to more people and creatures than the failure of "those in charge" to announce with reasonable forewarning that the oil supply was going to crash. But it is upon us with no forewarning to the general public at all.

The government planning agencies charged with helping the public survive the end of oil could not have performed worse than by recognizing peak oil only after it has happened. Like anthropogenic global warming ("AGW"), "peak oil" has been the subject of decades of denial. Notwithstanding Hubbert's famous coup in pinpointing the peak of US oil production through the simple observation that production naturally peaks when the supply is half gone, few would listen that because the worldwide supply of conventional oil would reach the halfway point in the first decade of this century, trouble was right around the corner.
The fact is, coming to that point meant we were in trouble regardless, because the early stages of development of an oil field (like the early stages of growth of virtually anything else) follow an exponential growth curve, and the world's growth addicts love exponential curves, but once you get beyond the halfway point, it is a mathematical certainty that the longer you attempt to conform the field to a pattern of exponential growth, the more the end is going to be precipitous. If you don't decelerate rapidly, that is precisely what has to happen - the decline after the halfway point can only be more rapid than the rise beforehand.

What Hubbert observed with respect to the US oil reserves has an intuitive sense to it - as the amount of oil in the field drops, its pressure drops, so the flow begins to slow down - the gusher goes down to a trickle. But if the owner of the field doesn't make full disclosure of what's there, outsiders can only make educated guesses from general geological principles and what the owner is selling, as to what the future holds. And as we all know, full disclosure is not the name of the game in the oil business.

If the field is just allowed to release its liquid gold at its natural rate, that's not too bad, because observations like the Hubbert Peak can be applied. But as technology improves and well pressure can be jacked up to compensate for declining reserves, (for instance by pumping water into the wells) the outside observer loses certainty. There remains information about the company's reserves, but the accuracy of that information is seriously open to question. Within OPEC, which allows its members to market in accordance with the amount of their reserves, Hart, "Introduction to Peak Oil," www.philhart.com/content/introduction-peak-oil, says there are great temptations to fudge.
Outside observers can follow a country's reports on its reserves, but those reports are highly suspect. They will remain constant for years while the country is pumping great amounts of oil without reporting any new discoveries, and indeed they can take sudden leaps upward also without reports of new discoveries. Such "records" lead to the inevitable conclusion that many OPEC reserves reports are fictional. If you would like to see charts of OPEC oil reserves mysteriously contorting themselves, you are invited to take a look at Hart's essay.
So if you thought the experts had it all in hand and would reliably warn us when trouble was a'brewin', think again. Not only do OPEC members have internal business reasons to exaggerate their reserves, but companies on the public stock market want to satisfy their stockholders of their long-term viability, and all oil producers want to make their customers confident that they can rely on oil for the long haul. By concealing their future from homeowners, oil companies have made trillions for the real estate business and the banks at the expense of those who chose urban sprawl over dense "near-in" housing, and the companies themselves will make trillions in the near future selling to consumers trapped into oil addiction, who might have sought alternatives more vigorously had they known how close the crash was.

Matt Simmons, the banker who has spent his post-Harvard-Business School career advising oil companies and serving as peak oil advisor to the last Presidential administration and specifically to President Bush, ought to know. And what he says is that Western oil companies like ExxonMobil would be strongly opposed to the idea of transparent data because it would reveal “how crappy and old their fields really are.” Energy TechStocks.com, "Meeting the Challenge Matt Simmons: Force All Oil Producers to Give Transparent Data," According to EnergyStocks.com, Simmons has warned that "the failure of Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers to provide transparent production data has left the world in a lurch, unable to know whether it can maintain an adequate supply of oil in the face of burgeoning demand Such uncertainty has led to indecision about whether the world should invest the huge sums of money necessary to develop alternative transportation fuel sources."

Just how bad the published reserve figures for the major oil-producing nations are, has long been understood. We like to say that what goes up, must come down, but not OPEC member-nation oil reserves. Their allowed production quotas depend upon their reserves, so there is a built-in temptation to overstate reserves and never reflect in reduced reserve figures, what they have pumped out. In 1988, the OPEC oil reserves "magically and miraculously increased twofold," without any corresponding discovery of new fields. The officially reported reserves follow graphs that would be comical were it not for the fact that 6.8 billion people, and counting, depend upon the real numbers. See http://www.enopetroleum.com/opecoilreservers.html

Now we are facing the consequences of the major oil producers "leaving the world in a lurch": almost complete inability to cope with the severe difficulties we face in transporting, feeding, housing, and keeping warm the burgeoning billions of our numbers. It is hard to conceive of how any private entity could impose so much pain on so many. It didn't need to be that way. The US Government and its cohorts around the world could have imposed transparency on the oil companies as to their true reserves, and we would have had fair warning and the possibility of coping. Yes, and the moon could be made of green cheese.

Of course, as noted, it is possible to produce a graph roughly like the one above with nothing more than production data and reserves data. The former are public, and the latter are known to a limited extent. It has been the consensus of decision makers for many years that the world had a total (both produced and still in the ground) of approximately 2 trillion barrels of conventional oil, and as pointed out by Campbell, four decades of dwindling discoveries have left us with an absolute inability to increase available reserves in a timely manner to mitigate the looming shortfall.
The two trillion barrel figure was absolutely critical for doing what planning could be done, but at the beginning of the last decade, the US broke ranks with the consensus of the rest of the world, declared through the historically-reliable US Geological Survey (USGS) that world reserves of conventional oil (both consumed and yet-to-be-consumed) were in fact in the neighborhood of three trillion barrels rather than two, a claim which if true immediately provided the world by sleight of hand with an extra thirty years' supply at present consumption rates.
To be sure, USGS former employees disputed its estimates as relying "heavily on guesses to calculate new oil discoveries," and on doubling the usual 30 percent recovery rate from reserves "with no technology in mind capable of doing that." Gordon, "Worries Swelling Over Oil Shortage," Energy Bulletin March 20-, 2005.
The concerns about overestimation of discoveries proved correct: they continued on their downward track. This alone created a discrepancy between the USGS projections and reality of approximately 900 billion barrels. At the same time, the production data appeared to peak in 2005, prominent Princeton University petroleum geologist Kenneth Deffeyes predicted that 2005 was the year, and Simmons suggested similar concerns. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4835 and http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/Northern%20Trust%20Bank.pdf (p. 31). Nonetheless, based upon the USGS wishful thinking, during the Bush Administration, the Department of Energy was forecasting a "production peak somewhere between 2021 and the start of the next century, with 2037 the most likely date." http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4835 Not to worry.

With the peak imminent in reality, like the global warming "scientific skeptics," industry in 2006 came up with a "theory" published in a non-peer-reviewed report, that "peak oil" was in its totality a false concept, and that the true behavior of an oil field or conglomeration thereof was a peak followed by an "undulating plateau" and then a gentle decline by around 2% per year, years, perhaps decades later. According to Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), "“It is likely that the situation will unfold in slow motion and that there are a number of decades to prepare for the start of the undulating plateau. This means that there is time to consider the best way to develop viable energy alternatives that would eventually provide the bulk of our transport energy needs." www.cera.com/aspx/cda/public1/about/about.aspx Not to worry.

CERA faulted the "peak oil" proponents with failure to take into account the facts that reserve estimates evolve with time and that so does the technology used in extracting oil. The criticism is disingenuous given that the industry refuses to disclose either the technology it is using at any one time or its true reserves, and the reserve estimates evolve with time more for political reasons than geological one.. The facts the proponents of "peak oil" fail to take into account are facts that the industry will not disclose. As Simmons has pointed out, "With solid global field-by-field production data, 'Peak Oil timing could be 'proved'." And, or course, if the "undulating plateau" theory is correct, all the industry has to do is to disclose their true facts to prove it, but they won't. Regardless, average decline rates of an oil supply are dictated by only two numbers: how fast we are now using the oil, and how much is left.
Lower decline rates now mean higher decline rates later. Those are immutable facts even if the "undulating plateau" is correct. So to avoid a rapid decline in available oil, we must discover and bring to production staggeringly large new supplies, right now today. Nonetheless, the CERA "theory" has sufficiently intimidated the bureaucrats that DOE's official position at the moment, as expressed to Le Monde, notwithstanding the graph, is that we are "entering a plateau." petrole.blog.lemonde.fr:80/2010/03/25/washington-considers-a-decline-of-world-oil-production-as-of-2011/

At the same time all of this was happening, the UN, the US Congress, the Obama Administration and the oil industry were negotiating over goals for global warming legislation. Miraculously, although arguably coincidentally, the percentage-reduction goals agreed to fit quite precisely the percentage reductions in oil consumption that will be physically forced upon us all if you believe the above graph: an 18% drop from 2005 by 2020, and an 85% drop from 2005 by 2050. (It is possible to extrapolate the graph, which assumes exponentially dropping levels of existing reserves at a 4% per year rate.)
This compares to reductions of CO2 emissions 17% from 2005 in 2020 and 80% from 2005 in 2050 in the bill. So it would appear that the legislative goals have been set, for whatever reason, so that the oil industry will have to do little if anything it won't have to do in any event because of dwindling reserves. http://ecoglobe.ch/energy/e/peak9423.htm . It is hard to see how the negotiators could have come up with such correspondence if they had not all been aware of the impending crash of production and the expected decline rate. Coincidence? Maybe, but somehow it seems unlikely. Whether or not by intent, the goals fit the needs of the oil companies rather than the needs calculated by the scientists.

In short, with all the evidence available, it is hard to see how the industry and the Department of Energy could have failed to see this coming. Their failure to warn the public, given the consequences, verges on the criminal. And if somehow they can claim innocence, then we still have to ask why they did not heed the warning of Matt Simmons, advisor on peak oil to the Bush administration, as to the importance of transparency. But they did not, and here we are.

CONCLUSIONS

We are on our own. We are rapidly going to have to deal with less and less oil, since there has been no forewarning and no planning. It is a time for communities to prepare for community energy independence, because only that way will be safe. This means relying on the sun and wind and water that have always been with us. It means cooperation with each other to get through seriously difficult times. It means finding alternatives to oil throughout our lives as quickly as possible - the oil that runs our cars, the oil that heats our houses, the oil that runs generators for our electricity, the oil from which chemical fertilizers and insecticides and plastics and polyester are made, the oil that brings countless manufactured goods to us from overseas, the oil on which farmers depend for irrigation pumps, for transporting produce to market, for working the soil to bring us food.
If you believe the graph, it will almost all be gone in 20 years. And the progressives and Tea-Partyers must remember that the people who brought this calamity to us are not our friends but are people we trusted and they trusted, so we must work together to cope with the mess that is upon us, and "to throw the rascals out.".

The author, Nicholas C. Arguimbau, is an appellate and environmental lawyer licensed in California and residing in Western Massachusetts. He may be contacted at narguimbau@earthlink.net.

From http://www.countercurrents.org/arguimbau230410.htm 23 April, 2010 

New Illuminati comments: In February 2011 - after this article was written -  it was announced that Saudi oil reserves have been overestimated by 40%...

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