{A reminder to my readers: I was down South recently to set up my daughter for her senior year of college, and next week we travel to New York for several days to set up our other daughter for her sophomore year. We’ll return at the end of next week just long enough to get ready for a ten day vacation, so it’s entirely possible that this will be my last post until after Labor Day. Thanks for your patience and continuing interest!}

I’ve written on several occasions (see this recent post, for example) about the difficulties we’ll face in transitioning from our fossil fuel-based way of life to “something else” … that something else not yet certain. To that end, some recent articles (links provided at the end of this post) address this same issue by pointing out some of the more precise difficulties we’ll be encountering as we attempt to transition away from our fossil fuel-dependent economic and personal lifestyles. As it stands now, there is no effective and clear-cut choice for Plan B, and thus the problem.

“The time for smooth, convenient solutions was decades ago, when scientists first began to raise the alarm about the greenhouse effect and peak oil, and the twin approaching disasters of a changing climate and an energy crunch. By now, the most we can do, and the least we have to, is to scramble however we can. Yes, even during a global recession, and even during the next ones. If you think upgrading the energy foundations of a planetary civilization is hard during an economic recession, imagine how hard it’ll be with a fraction of the energy available, and climate-related disruptions erupting everywhere.

“We need to make extraordinary advances in energy sources, and we have to do if fast, or, to put it simply, the 22nd century will look like the 17th. We need to constrain our use of fossil fuels as much as possible….We are in this fix because a few short decades ago we did nothing. If we do nothing, or even if we just don’t do enough, the fix we’re going to be a few short decades from now will be much, much worse.” [1]

Despite the occasional nincompoop who insists that our supply of oil is infinite, the truth is that oil is a geologically finite resource (as are the other fossil fuels), and increasingly harder to come by. I and many others have posted frequently explaining this basic fact which some still seem incapable of accepting.

(It doesn’t help when others offer truly fanciful assessments about the remaining reserves of oil and gas. Saudi Aramco President and CEO Khalid A. Al-Falih was recently quoted as having said that we can still expect to have available between 6 and 8 trillion barrels of conventional oil and natural gas liquids and about 7 trillion barrels of unconventional oil. [2] Not exactly the most objective source of information….I’m guessing that pixie dust is also in ample supply for those making such assessments.)

Just last week, Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency’s chief economist, once again expressed his concerns about the future availability of oil:

“The era of cheap oil is over. Each barrel oil that will come to market in the future will be much more difficult to produce and therefore more expensive. We all – governments, industry and consumers – should carefully choose the type of car we want to buy in the future and should be prepared for oil prices being much higher than several years ago.” [3]

In its simplest terms, this acknowledgement is a clear recognition that at some point in the not-too-distant future (and we’re past the point where it matters that that date may be next week, three years, or fifteen years from now; we’re too late to effect a painless transition away from oil), we are going to have to endure the disruptions, changes, and yes, the hardships of not having enough fossil fuels at the ready to meet our demands and expectations. We can hope that the changes in business practices, industrial production, and personal lifestyles will be effortless, but that will likely remain just that: a hope.

As the authors of the articles mentioned above explained, history is such that the transition from one dominant source/supply of energy to another is not a simple or easy process. It is a multi-decades long effort, as not only must the supporting infrastructure (transport modes, utilities, public services, etc.) be changed or adapted to new energy sources, so too must industry revise what goods and services it produces—and how. And then, the end users must be willing to accept what is then offered in the market place, necessitating that they in turn then adapt their own lifestyles to these “new” products and services. That’s going to take a good long while.

So too must we recognize the fact that effecting the transition from fossil fuels to whatever alternatives ultimately prove to be the most efficient and cost effective (we’re still waiting on that) will itself require massive amounts of fossil fuels in order to create, build, produce, and then supply into the marketplace the new infrastructure and products fashioned from some other energy source.

Perhaps the key stumbling block remains as yet unresolved: no alternative source of energy has yet proven to be as efficient, effective, readily available, or commercially viable as oil. Anything else will thus be … less, and more expensive.

So what’s the solution?

“Now, all sides are counting on a Green Economy: it seems that we all just have to firmly believe that researchers and engineers worldwide will develop alternative energies into marketable products that are similarly fungible as crude oil at precisely the right time; in this way people in the old industrialized countries would not have to abandon their lifestyles, and the middle classes in the newly industrializing countries would not have to give up their hope of comparable prosperity.” [4]

Good luck to all of us!

We may very well (and I hope we do) develop alternative sources of energy that prove to be perfectly capable of meeting our future demands, but those who are counting on that as a given are taking enormous chances.

Hoping is not the strategy we should be relying on.

Sources:

[1] http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/rinesi2010725 – Peak Oil and Climate Change: Between Too Soon and Not Soon Enough by Marcelo Rinesi
[2] http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/42230/20100810/petroleum-oil-energy-reserves-peak-oil-aramco-reserves-oil-futures.htm
[3] http://www.energybulletin.net/53805 – IEA: ‘Cheap oil is over’ as demand approaches new record by Matthew Wild
[4] http://peakoil.com/generalideas/peak-oil-yet-another-inconvenient-truth-2/ – Peak Oil – yet another Inconvenient Truth by Dr. Jürgen Wiemann

Links on energy transition referenced above:

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/4964/Wood-to-Coal-to-Oil-to-Natural-Gas-and-Nuclear–The-Slow-Pace-of-Energy-Transitions – Wood to Coal to Oil to Natural Gas and Nuclear : The Slow Pace of Energy Transitions By Robert Bryce

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5993/780 – Do We Have the Energy for the Next Transition? Richard A. Kerr

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6743#more – Lloyd’s ‘Sustainable Energy Security’ White Paper – Some hits; some misses by Gail the Actuary