Economic Oil Supply Meltdown
Crude oil makes Kjell Aleklett think about wild strawberries.
Aleklett, a Swedish professor of physics, sees inescapable similarities between the steady depletion of the world’s most coveted energy source and the foraging habits of berry afficionados.
“In Sweden we have strawberry fields where you can go out and pick for yourself. If you go out there in the morning there is a possibility that you can pick a big volume of strawberries. But the first picker picks the big ones. The last one is left with the small ones. It’s very much the same thing when it comes to the production of gas and oil.
ยป Source: The Vancouver Sun
“The goodies, the big ones, have been picked. It’s true all over the world. Now we have to stick to the small ones. That means it’s harder to fill the basket.”
Aleklett made his comments during an interview in Vancouver, where he recently gave a speech on the future of global crude oil supply to the annual conference of the international Pulp and Paper Products Council.
Aleklett is a sought-after speaker on this topic — he is founding president of an ad hoc group of academics, geologists and politicians who have formed the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO for short).
The U.S. House of Representatives is among the groups that have invited Aleklett to present his message.
The basic notion is that the world’s oil producers are close to an absolute peak in terms of the volume of oil they can put onto the market in a given year.
Once that moment arrives, annual crude oil output will begin a long decline — with grim consequences for national economies.
Aleklett believes the peak could arrive as soon as 2008 — and that the struggle to adjust to the new energy reality could take 20 years, posing enormous challenges for developed nations.
Some observers suggest that the decline will prompt an economic and social meltdown on a scale last experienced in the Great Depression — or perhaps when the Black Death swept across Europe in 1347.
Even the International Energy Agency, which mulls global oil issues on behalf of Canada and 25 other developed countries including the United States, Great Britain and Japan, is exploring “barbarization” scenarios in which billions of people starve, national governments collapse, economies are forced to deindustrialize, and many regions of the world return to “semi-tribal or feudal social structures.”
“Oil wars are certainly not out of the question,” says the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Each day the world gulps down 82 million barrels of oil — virtually the same amount that is produced.
The United States Energy Information Agency projects consumption to increase to 103 million barrels per day in 2015, and 119 million barrels each day by 2025.
That means global production must increase by 45 per cent — about five times the maximum annual output available from Alberta’s oilsands — just to keep pace with ordinary economic growth.
There’s just one problem.
No one can say with confidence where all that extra oil will come from.
It has been 57 years since Shell Oil senior geologist M. King Hubbert asserted in the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the dominance of fossil fuel in the global energy mix is just a tiny “pip” in the course of human history.
