Oil settles at $93.53 ...

[GliderGuider]

That price is up 75% in the ten months since January! :wow:

What's happening to the world's oil supply? Will those nifty solar panels and cool wind turbines rescue us from a world of $30/gallon gasoline? To find out, read this analysis: World Energy to 2050.

Introduction

Throughout history, the expansion of human civilization has been supported by a steady growth in our use of high-quality exosomatic energy. This growth has been driven by our increasing population and our increasing level of activity. As we learned to harness the energy sources around us we progressed from horse-drawn plows, hand forges and wood fires to our present level of mechanization with its wide variety of high-density energy sources. As industrialization has progressed around the world, the amount of energy each one of us uses has also increased, with the global average per capita consumption of all forms of energy rising by 50% in the last 40 years alone.

This rosy vision of continuous growth has recently been challenged by the theory of "Peak Oil", which concludes that the amount of oil and natural gas being extracted from the earth will shortly start an irreversible decline. As that decline progresses we will have to depend increasingly on other energy sources to power our civilization. In this article I will offer a glimpse into that changed energy future. I hope to be able to provide a realistic assessment of the evolution of the global energy supply picture, and to estimate how much of the various types of energy we will have available to us in the coming decades.

...

Oil and Gas Combined

Oil and natural gas are the world's primary fuel sources, used for both transportation and heat. Together they supply a full 60% of the energy currently used by humanity. According to this model, their combined energy peak will come in 2012. By 2050 their combined output will drop by 80%. To the extent that we cannot replace this shortfall through novel uses of electricity from other sources, this decline represents an enormous challenge. It is a challenge that seems destined to alter the fundamental shape of our civilization over the next three or four decades.

...

The Effect on Average Per Capita Energy

One of the interesting, though very high-level, ways to measure of global wealth is to calculate the average energy available to each person on earth. While the resulting per capita average doesn't reflect the disparity between rich and poor individuals or nations or let us know what sorts of things people might do with their energy endowments, it can give us a general feeling for how "energy-wealthy" the average global citizen is, especially compared to other times.

Fortunately, the energy analysis we have just completed gives us the tool we need to establish this measure. By simply dividing the total energy available in each year by that year's population we can construct the graph shown in Figure 16.


Figure 16: Global Average Per Capita Energy Consumption, 1965 to 2050

As you can see, the rising population and falling energy supply combine to produce a falling per capita energy curve. In fact, if these models of energy and population are correct, we can expect to see a drop of almost 50% in average per capita energy by 2050. Each person alive in 2050 will have available, on average, only half the energy they would have today.

The article at the link above includes a complete analysis of our energy future for the next 40-some years. It looks at everything we have in our arsenal today, from oil and gas to hydro, nuclear power, wind and solar, illustrated by 17 informative (and often terrifying) graphs.

It also looks at how these changes will transform the world we know into a somber place with half the number of rich and over twice the number of abject poor as there are today. On this day of record oil prices, what could make better reading?

Enjoy! :scared:

Paul Chefurka (aka GliderGuider)

[spanone]

1. ...and Americans yawn......

criminal.

[TomInTib]

2. What a remarkable, concise article.

Heck, even I could comprehend what should be so clear to all.

One of the many things that draws me to DU is the diversity and depth of the experience and knowledge of the people here.

[Strelnikov_]

3. Peak Energy 2020 n/t

[robertpaulsen]

4. Thanks for all your great work!

:kick:

[Maven]

5. Kicking. This needs to be on the greatest page stat.

One more rec, guys.

[GliderGuider]

6. To whet peoples' appetites a bit further, here are a few pretty pictures from the article:

All these are from my article World Energy to 2050: A Half Century of Decline

Note: toe = "tonnes of oil equivalent", Mtoe = Millions of tonnes of oil equivalent.

The Growing Divide Between Rich and Poor

In order to get some idea of the magnitude of this effect, I have associated each of the 63 countries or regional groupings in this analysis with their current population, total current energy consumption and their population in 2050. I have arbitrarily decided that a per capita consumption of 0.75 toe/yr is the dividing line between between poverty and wealth. 0.75 toe/yr is a bit less than half the present world average, and only one tenth of the energy consumed by an average American.

The countries and regions that currently fall below that poverty line include Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan, India, Peru, Indonesia, Ecuador, Colombia, Egypt, much of Africa, many Asian Pacific nations and some Eurasian countries. Altogether they have a population of about 3 billion people. The rest of the world's nations, from Algeria to Kuwait, are in the rich half of 3.5 billion people.

In order to assess the effect of declining average per capita income, I decided to spread the pain evenly. The assumption is that most countries will see a similar drop in their level of energy consumption. While that expectation may not be complely realistic, it seems close enough for the purpose of this exercise. The result is that countries with a per capita consumption between 0.75 and 1.5 toe/person will lose enough energy to be counted in the group of poor nations.

The countries and regions that drop from rich to poor status include Algeria, Turkey, Mexico, Thailand, much of Central and South America, the non-oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and - most significantly - China.

When we add up the populations in 2050 of the rich nations that are left, it comes out to only 1.6 billion. Remember, their populations fell due to lower fertility, there are fewer of them and they lost China to the ranks of the poor.

The population of the poor nations is where the shock comes. Their total population in 2050 adds up to over 7 billion people. That number is more than the total population of the Earth today, all living at an energy level somewhere between Bangladesh and Egypt.



Conclusion
How many ways are there to say the world is heading for hard times? Losing most of our oil is bad enough, and losing most of our gas as well borders on the catastrophic. Combining these losses with the exponential growth of those nations that can least afford it is nothing short of cataclysmic. The ramifications spread out like ripples on a pond. There will be 7 billion people who will need fertilizer and irrigation water to survive, but would be too poor to buy it even at today's prices. Given the probable escalation in the costs of fertilizer and the diesel fuel or electricity for their water pumps, it isn't hard to understand why the spread of famine in energy-poor regions of the world seems virtually inevitable.

In normal times the poor would appeal to the rest of the world for food aid. However, these times may be anything but normal. Even the shrinking population of the rich world will see its wealth eroded by the drop in energy supplies and the increasing cost of producing the energy they do have. This decline in their wealth will in turn erode any surpluses they might otherwise have donated to international aid. In any event, there will be over twice as many hungry mouths crying for that aid, with less and less of it available.

This assessment doesn't even consider the converging and amplifying impacts of the other problems I mentioned above: the loss of soil fertility and fresh water, the death of the oceans, rising pollution, spreading extinctions and accelerating climate change.

The solution to this dilemma, if solution there may be, does not seem to lie in some Deus ex Machina or in a technological revision of the parable of the loaves and fishes. If the dark visions outlined in this article come true, we will be faced with a world in which the only way forward is to accept that Mother Nature does not negotiate. We must use our considerable intelligence to figure out ways to live within the ecological budget we have been allotted. More than that, we must change our values away from our current paradigm of growth, competition and exploitation to one of sustainability, cooperation and nurturing. The longer and tighter we cling to our present ways, the more damage we will ultimately inflict on ourselves and the world we live in. For many, the time for such a change has already passed. For a fortunate few there may yet be enough time to move toward the new ways of living and being that will be required in this brave new world.

[SoCalDem]

7. How nice for Mr. Oil

It;s comforting to know that Oil is "settled"..:puke:

[GliderGuider]

8. Mr. Oil (as in traditional "Big Oil") has remarkably little control over events any more.

http://www.globalization101.org/index.php?file=issue&pass1=subs&id=335">Globalization 101. Oil Supply II: Producers

National oil companies now “dwarf’ the supermajors in profitability and reserve holdings. Saudi Aramco, for example, has reserves equivalent to twenty times those of ExxonMobil, the largest private oil producer. (...) In general, the growing power of national oil companies at the expense of private firms translates into less oil on the global market. This trend constitutes a significant threat to the stability of global energy security.

Nefarious business dealings have very little to do with this. What we're feeling is the rock giving way under our feet as we stand, blind and witless, on the edge of the Energy Abyss. Even mighty Saudi Arabia will be humbled in the next ten years. If schadenfreude is your thing, just stick around.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. "settle" implies coming to rest. affected by gravity. stopping.

precisely the opposite of what will really happen to crude.

[libodem]

10. Been tellin' y'all for a year

Big oil is shootin' for $100.00 a barrel. Big Oil's, boy is King and this is the chance of a life time!!!! This is the pure unadulterated work of war profiteering. It so needs to be stopped.

[GliderGuider]

11. $100 a barrel? Why so stingy?

I've heard European analysts talking north of $300.

War profiteering has nothing whatsoever to do with it, though. This is the purest classical supply and demand effect you will ever see. Rising demand + constrained supply = rising price. It's really that simple. Look out further than your own borders - there's a big world out there, full of oil producing nations that don't owe jack squat to W's handlers, and still can't produce enough oil to dampen the rising price. Oh, and the price of oil has been rising since well before the shrublet took office, too.

You need to acquaint yourself with what's really going on with oil. If you expect that prices will go back down when your current gang of thieves gets the boot, you will be sadly disappointed. This has nothing whatsoever to do with parochial views of American politics. The oil supply is limited by geology, and the world price is a reflection of its value to our industrial civilization. Check the Peak Oil links in my article in the OP - what could a little education hurt, right?