The World After a Petrocollapse

[KingM34]

Human society has undergone wrenching changes over the past several generations. We have gone from horse and buggy and farm life to the age of the train, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the internet—some changes have been incremental, others revolutionary. The result is a world that has changed as much in a hundred and fifty years as in the previous ten thousand.

Recent history and the rapid pace of change show that we are still in a stage of flux; it is unlikely that the world of fifty or a hundred years from now will resemble our own. It is impossible to predict what the coming century holds; we could be facing an ever-more prosperous future, or stagnation, or even overshoot and collapse due to the depletion of our fossil fuel stocks.

Why a collapse after so many years of staggering progress and growth? It is not inevitable, but exponential growth is converging with the decline of fossil fuels to bring about a real crisis. Government and industry have not yet moved to alternative fuel sources and the longer they wait, the deeper the crisis that must be overcome.

Read the rest: http://theopinionator.com/energy/worldafterpetrocollapse1.html

[Deja Q]

1. I keep use of fuels minimal... what I ought to do is to study engineering,

chemistry. There has got to be a way to improve on existing products or stumble on something new. Being negative will get nobody anywhere.

[Turbineguy]

4. Simple thermo

The diesel engine is more efficient than the gasoline engine because of higher compression pressures. Better metalurgy allows higher temperatures and pressures and therefore higher fuel economy. The change from a coolant temperature from 180 to 192 was a big boost to auto fuel economy. Reducing internal losses (compression, friction cooling, and exhaust) and transmision looses would be a boon. As it is, a car is only around 15% percent efficient.

Large industrial engines now have efficiencies appoaching 60%. A 45% efficient car would translate to a CAFE standard above 75 miles per gallon.

But one thing that would help improve mileage in the here and now is dealing with acceleration. People pour fuel into engines roaring away from stoplights. Auto commercials are always on about "power" but never deal with the waste implicit in high power driving styles. I notice a lot of people drive as if somebody else pays for their gas. I accelerate slower but invariably get to the next traffic light at about the same time.

It would be relatively simple to introduce a "load program" device (which could be switched off) in cars that would accelerate the car taking inertia into account independent of the lead-foot driver. Ships are accelerated that way. It's how a ship can function with as much as 22,500 lbs of weight per installed horsepower in the case of tankers. The engine speed is increased only slightly faster than the ship is able to increase speed in the water thereby reducing propeller slip.

There is really no need for a economic collapse to achieve this, just the political and economic will to do so.

[4dsc]

9. But being realistic is another matter

Inasmuch as one tries not to be too negative about a future with less oil, a realistic approach is much better than wishful thinking..

[HereSince1628]

2. The conclusion re falling back to 18th century technology is crap

The 18th century was the 1700's.

Think about the technology we have since then we have...

The internal combustion engine...which doesn't necessarily run on petroleum products.

Reciprocating steam engines which have been used for ships, trains, construction and agricultural equipment and of course electrical generation.

Electrical generation from various sources (coal, hydro, pvc's, nuclear, wind, tide, fuel cells etc) wherein petroleum is only one energy source. Various combinations of these forms of energy will become available to replace petroleum as the power source for personal, domestic, commercial and agricultural applications.


1700's hay-burning technology is flawed as a solution to the 2000's. Since the 1700's we have too many people and not enough land to feed the beasts of burden required to get all the people around.

My point isn't that American street scenes won't change with the loss of petroleum, they will. Rather, my point is that we surely aren't going to end up with our streets and countrysides looking like they did in the 1700's.

[KingM34]

3. it's a worst-case scenario

I am a Peak Oil optimist and I think the odds of a hard (but temporary) crash about 1 in 4 and a total collapse as mentioned above about 1 in 10. An article like this is similar to considering the ramifications of an asteroid striking the earth; it may not happen, but what will the world look like if it does?

[HereSince1628]

6. The article concludes we go back to the 1700's.

It may well be a worst case, but that case is a strawman because of already available technology.

Will cars remain powered by internal combustion without petroleum? Maybe not, but that doesn't preclude all other known sources of energy for motive force.

[deFaultLine]

7. Food anyone?

A large part of the petrochemical input for our society is used to fuel the food we eat. I am not referring to the huge transport costs alone, but also the investment in growing food. The green revolution that has supplied the worlds food supply is due in large part to the growing of foods with the aid of petrochemicals.

When we do run out of oil, we will also be faced with massive starvation unless we can learn to rely on other enegy sources to get the job done.

It seems to me that few people really grasp the implications due in large part to the notion that food is an easy thing to produce.

[HereSince1628]

11. Well, since I do operate a modest farm here in WI this isn't news to me.

The future of agriculture doesn't involve going back to the 1700's.

[Ready4Change]

14. I agree. Going back to the 1700's would be nie, in comparison.

You're in WI. Imagine Chicago. Of it's citizens, less than 1% have the first clue how to raise enough food crops to feed themselves. All the rest depend on food brought in by diesel powered trucks and trains. All that food comes from factory fields that are farmed by diesel powered combines. And the productivity of those farms are sustained by petrochemical derived fertilizers.

Now, yank away petroleum. The few fields you can harvest with the last of your diesel will then fall into gray lifelessness, as there will be no petroleum fertilizers to rejuvinate them. The last of that food will be piled onto the last few trains able to run into the city, as using trucks is too wasteful. Those trains are mobbed by citizens who are just beginning to pay attention. There is no fuel left to take the trains out of the city, and no food production left to make that worthwhile anyway.

You now have 99% of the population of Chicago wondering where their next meal will come from. Most will head south, particularly if its wintertime. But some are going to head your way.

Unless action is taken to ease the uncoming effects of Peak Oil, things aren't going to the 1700's They're going Medieval, at least until enough people die off that less mechanized farming techniques can get food to them.

[Dead_Parrot]

15. In the western world, everyone's a specialist.

Very few people grow their own food - They live in cities, work in insurance, and just assume the shop will have food it. The roles that oil plays - as a fertilizer, a fuel for production and distribution, and as packaging, just isn't obvious: they have no reason to suspect any part of this could fall apart.

Ironically, the people in the best position for peak oil are subsistence farmers & fishermen who never use the stuff - you know, the one's we've been trying to "develop and civilise" for the last hundred years. :)

[dcfirefighter]

16. Heck, even in the 1700's most people were specialists

even if many of those specialists were agricultural specialists. You might have home grown vegetables and hogs, and maybe a milk cow, but you still bought your fabric, candles, metal goods, cooperage, etc.

Peak oil isn't a tap slamming shut, it's damped flow, to a trickle and then nothing. On that downward slope, energy will become more expensive. How much so, remains to be seen, but we've all seen studies of how this and that alternative technologies becomes competitive when oil hits certain prices. In other words, I don't think that the price of energy will go up -that- much: grid electricity will not stay above the large scale costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. This price will not stay above about 15c / kWh retail. Liquid fuels will not stay above the unsubsidized price of biofuels or liquid fuels derived from renewable energy sources. This price may be $10 a gallon.

These prices will cause people of all economic levels to shift their behaviors, some subtly, some abruptly. Production will shift slightly from economizing on labor costs to economizing on energy costs. Consumption will shift slightly from high-energy products to low energy products: to legumes from meats, to fired clay from black pipe and asphalt, from suburbs to urban nodes, from store-bought to home-grown; from new to refurbished.

The level of pain we feel, as a people, depends on our ability to allocate scarce resources: dwindling supplies of fossil fuels, maxed out stores of atmospheric ghg's, increasingly scarce fresh water. Some people advocating privatising scarce resources, such that the profit motive puts them to best use. Others advocate that a beauraucracy determine the allocation of such resources. I am of the opinion that neither one of these will work. The profit motive doesn't work when new production cannot dampen price increases, and planned economies are subject to rent-seeking, surpluses, and shortages.

I am of the opinion that these resources should not be privatize, but that neither should they be socialized. An effective solution that would give us the best of both worlds would be to socialize the flow of value attributed to the ownership of these resources. For example, the government's within a watershed could claim these water rights as the right of all people in the watershed - and auction the rights to extract water from it, using the revenue to fund public goods, or even 'water credits'. If the revenue is returned directly, in equal shares, to the people, it is economically equivalent to rationing the water, in equal shares, to all the people - with provisions for the people to trade portions of their share.

[deFaultLine]

17. Unfortunately

We have managed to kill off most of them and those that have survived have been subjected to cultural genocide over the past 400 years. There aren't many left that remember how to do things.

Although a lot of problems could come about with the post petrol worls we may see someday, I think problems like global warming and then in the American Midwest we have the massive desertification process that is proceeding. This is not because of lack of rain, rather it is due to the steady erosion we've had since the late 1800s. This actually has been increase due to soil compaction with the advent of 20 ton tractors compressing the soil for decades.

For more on that: http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/cropsystems/DC3115.html

In other words, the world may not have to worry about running out of oil, we'll run out of dirt long before then.

[depakid]

13. What is a Peak Oil optimist?

Sounds a bit like wishful thinking.

The US and indeed much of the world is well beyond its carrying capacity absent cheap petroleum inputs into its systems- particularly the macroeconomic system. Seems to me from the literature that collapse on some scale is not merely probable- it's inevitable.

[CAcyclist]

5. We'll start riding bicycles and remember how efficient they are

Cars and the pavement set aside for them do a lot more to damage the environment than just the consumption of gas. Edited - and maybe I'll learn to spell. Yikes.

[Kolesar]

8. We have to stop wasting resources on consumer junk &idle pursuits...

...that consume huge amounts of energy. Does anybody really need a 33" TV or a vacation in Cancun to have a fulfilled life?

[deFaultLine]

10. Vacations

Going to Cancun could be practical if you rode your bicycle.

The televison set isn't a big problem, provided you don't have it on all the time and don't buy a new one every year. That's the problem, most of the crap people buy these days is more or less disposable. It costs less to replace things than to repair them.

The worst offenders are computers...massive amounts get trashed for no other reason than they are working slowly and that they are full of spyware, so it's cheaper to replace them than to debug them. :(

[4dsc]

12. Ah yes, the collapse of complex civilizations

Although none of us can predict what the future holds for the good ole USA, one can predict will be changed dramatically with less oil and more dramatically with far less oil.. I believe that the author is asking us to do nothing more than to think of the ramifications of peak oil and whats in store for the world as we know it!! Collapse of civilizations have never been pretty!!

I firmly believe, for those unlucky enough, that the world in 30-50 years will not look like today but rather much more dismal.. Can anyone imagine what a world without oil will look like??

[KingM34]

18. it might be a better place

I don't think the end of the petroleum age will necessarily bring about a collapse and its horrific aftermath, although I think that's a possibility that grows stronger every year that we wait. But imagine if we'd spent the $500 billion we've waste in Iraq on this transition. We could have made serious inroads into electrifying our transportation system and moving to low-emissions electrical generation like nuclear, wind, and solar. We'd be much less vulnerable to a collapse of petroleum stocks and seriously reduced our greenhouse emissions at the same time.

Instead, we've poured our nations money, prestige, and time down a rat hole. Thanks, Mr. President.

[dcfirefighter]

19. Post oil electricity: $0.15/kWh, Post oil liquid fuel $7.5/gal

Electricity generated today by nuclear costs less than 5c/kWh to generate. On shore wind power, when it's blowing, costs about 50% more. Offshore wind power, when it's blowing, costs about twice that of nuclear. These technologies are scalable, nuclear in big chunks, wind in small chunks. A few hundered acres of land, anywhere, can support thousands of MW of nuclear power generation. To generate 2000 MW (avg) from wind would require 3000 2MW onshore wind turbines, or 1000 6MW offshore turbines. On land, this would require more than 300,000 acres, an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island. This land must be in a relatively high wind ares, either a coastline or a ridgeline, at least if they are to provide power to the sections of the country where most of the demand exists - on the coasts.

This points out that relatively carbon neutral & oil-free electricity doesn't cost much more than current electricity to generate. Eliminating oil & natural gas from electricity generation MOSTLY affects the cost of peak-time generation. Likely you will see more utilities charging higher rates for peak time generation, to encourage conservation of generation capacity during high demand hours.

As for liquid fuel, the most efficient producers of new (vs. waste vegetable oil) algae oil can produce it at less than $50/bbl. If scaled to meet the current national demand for oil, less productive locations would have to be used, such that the marginal cost of production would be near, but not over $100/bbl - which means that all algae oil would sell at $100/bbl. Oil at $100/bbl corresponds to at the pump prices of less than $5/gal.

If peak hour electricity generation is provided by surplus nuclear capacity, the off-peak electricity could be economically used to provide stored, portable energy. At 1 cent a kWh and 10% efficiency, some sort of stored power could be manufactured $3.70 a gallon equivalent.

Again, the prices of electricity and energy may spike, mostly due to uncertainty, but also due to demand exceeding supply during the formation of 'new' energy capital. During this time, owners of land on ridgetops, coastlines, over uranium ore, and in the sunbelt will see a windfall gain in wealth.

The relative increase in the cost of energy and fuel will tend to decrease the utility of roads as transportation networks, slightly suppressing sprawl and giving a slight advantage to locally produced goods and services. However, because ocean shipping is actually very fuel efficient, this increase will only very slightly effect the relative price of importing goods. Currently shipping coal represents a very large proportion of rail-freight ton-miles. Eliminating these shipments increases the available supply of rail shipping, which coupled with rail's inherent fuel efficiency, should see the relative cost of rail freight drop in relation to the cost of road freight.

The prices of oil and gas will likely force us to start making many of these changes relatively soon. However, the price of coal will, unless we make a powerful political effort, will likely allow the more short-sighted and selfish among us to continue polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, heavy metals, and radioactive particles.

Eliminating the uncertainty will allow prices to adjust slowly, and allow people to alter their consumption patterns in a non-disruptive manner. I would suggest creating a tax on carbon pollution, and scheduling increases in it, such that the price of gasoline is raised by $1 over 10 years (in addition to market-driven price increases), and the price of coal-fired electricity is raised by $0.10/kWh over the same period.

Such an increase in price of carbon based energy would gradually make these forms of energy less and less competitive with alternative forms of energy, as well as financially encouraging conservation. The revenue from such a tax would raise $50-100 Billion a year - money that could be used to offset harmful taxes on labor, provide families with energy assistance, or other positive measures.