[+] "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil"
by Dr. David Goodstein, California Institute of
Technology (Caltech)
[Editor's Comments: The articles below ask us to
ponder, "Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty of
reasons to wish you didn't." But how many people
today are actually able to remember what happened in
1973?
A person old enough (say 6 years old) to be aware of
an oil crisis (specifically, the one which occurred in
1973), would be 37 years old by now, so anyone who is
younger than that doesn't remember it. Anyone who was
old enough to drive (and may or may not have had to
fill up the gas tank in the family car) would be 47
now and anyone younger than that may not remember it
-- nor have any memory of the frustration of waiting
in line as a driver and wondering it you had picked
the right gas station to wait in line at, etc.
All college or university students, including
virtually all grad students and many of their
professors, and all high chool students and many of
their teachers, weren't even born yet in 1973. A
person could be old enough to run for President (35
years of age) and not be able to recall anything that
happened in 1973.
It would be interesting for Jay Leno to ask people on
the street what might have happened in 1973. I'm sure
some of them would give answers like "the
revolutionary war," "the birth of Beethoven" or
something like that.
As Dr. Goodstein suggests in his article below, we are
going to need good leadership -- and lots of it -- in
the next few decades. Attempts to turn back the clock
aren't really going to help.
:-)) Rick Mitchell, Editor
--- Dennis Brumm wrote:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/
Oil: Crude Awakening
A prominent physicist, Dr. David Goodstein, warns in
a new book that the world is running out of oil and
we're not doing anything to stave off the coming
crisis.
David Goodstein says facing up to the coming oil
crisis is 'hard and we're not trying'; he is the
author of the book - "Out of Gas: The End of the Age
of Oil" by David Goodstein.
February 17, 2004
WEB EXCLUSIVE http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4287300/
By Brian Braiker Newsweek Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Feb.
17, 2004
Feb. 17 - Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty
of reasons to wish you didn't. Chief among them
(right after leisure suits)would be the oil crisis
that began in October of 1973. The Middle Eastern
OPEC nations stopped exports to the United States and
other Western nations just as stateside oil
production was peaking. The artificial shortage that
followed had devastating effects: The price of gas
quadrupled in the United States, climbing from 25
cents to more than a dollar, in a matter of months.
The American Automobile Association reported that in
one isolated week up to 20 percent of the country's
gas stations had no fuel; in some places motorists
were forced to wait in line for two to three hours
to gas up. The number of homes built with gas heat
dropped.
But that was the 1970s and this is now, right? Not
according to David Goodstein. Saudi princes and SUV
drivers may do well to read his new book, "Out of
Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" (W.W. Norton), in
which Goodstein argues that our oil-dependent
civilization is in for a crude awakening when the
world's oil supply really begins to run out-possibly
within a few decades. "As we learned in 1973, the
effects of an oil shortage can be immediate and
drastic, while it may take years, perhaps decades, to
replace the vast infrastructure that supports the
manufacture, distribution, and consumption of the
products of the 20 million barrels of oil we
Americans alone gobble up each day," he writes.
Goodstein's book is not a happy read, but an
important one. In layman's terms, he explains the
science behind his prediction and why other fossil
fuels might not do the trick when the wells run dry.
Goodstein, a physicist and vice-provost at the
California Institute of Technology, recently spoke
with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about the fundamental
principles of oil supply and demand, and whether
civilization can survive without fossil fuels.]
Excerpts:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK: This is scary stuff. You're saying that
oil production will soon peak.
David Goodstein: The prediction that it will peak -
that is to say the crisis will come when we reach a
peak when half the oil has been used up - that
prediction quantitatively is unquestionably true.
But the quantitative question of when the peak will
occur depends on extremely undependable numbers. The
so-called proven oil reserves as reported by various
countries and companies around the world are often
just guesses and they're often not even honest
guesses. Among those who would analyze those figures,
some have predicted that it will come as early as
this year; others, within this decade. It could
possibly be in the next decade. But I think that's
about as far as you can push it.
NEWSWEEK: Let's start at the beginning. What is oil
and what do we use it for?
David Goodstein: Oil is hydrocarbons that grew up in
the earth when source rock full of organic inclusions
sank to just the right depth-not too little and not
too much - and got cooked over the ages. It took
hundreds of millions of years for the world's supply
of oil to be created. The oil is used to make
gasoline obviously, but also home heating oil, diesel
fuel but also 90 percent of all the organic chemicals
that we use. That includes pharmaceuticals,
agricultural products, plastics, fabrics and so on.
They are petrochemicals, meaning they originate as
oil.
NEWSWEEK: So our demand, regardless of supply, is
unlikely to decrease anytime soon.
David Goodstein: Well, the need for those hydrocarbon
materials has been increasing for 150 years and will
go on increasing especially because the world's
population is increasing. The poorer parts of the
world want to increase their standard of living,
which inevitably means using more energy. Fossil
fuels are our principal source of energy.
NEWSWEEK: You used an interesting word: "need." Do
we need the oil or is it something that we have just
become dependent on?
David Goodstein: We have certainly become dependent
on it. This is a habit that will be very, very
difficult to break.
NEWSWEEK: Knowing human behavior and how hard the
habit is to break, we probably won't, in all
likelihood, break it.
David Goodstein: I think we will not. One of the
reasons I wrote the book was in the hope that enough
people will become aware of the problem and we will
be a little better prepared.
NEWSWEEK: How do you suggest people prepare now?
David Goodstein: Right now we don't have the kind of
leadership that would take us in the direction that
would make major changes. As individuals we can do
things; I drive a hybrid car, for example. But as a
society we have to redesign cities so that people
live close to where they work. There are all kinds of
measures. We are so profligate in the use of energy
that even with the smallest effort we can reduce the
rate at which we use energy very significantly, as
Californians showed after the last energy crisis. But
what we really need is massive infusion of research
on all of the possible ways of ameliorating this
problem.
NEWSWEEK: You're talking about researching fusion
and fuel cells and -
David Goodstein: Fusion, fuel cells, biomass. There
are all kinds of possibilities, but none of them are
worth a thing unless you've shown that it actually
works. You've got to prototype it; you've got to show
that it can be scaled up, that it can be done on a
large scale. And so on.
NEWSWEEK: You write that the crisis doesn't happen
when we run out of oil, it happens when we reach the
peak, the halfway point. Explain that.
David Goodstein: We had a peak once before-it was in
1973. The production in North American had reached
its peak in 1970 and was declining. Supplies were not
available in North America and the Arab countries
embargoed the oil; they shut down the pipeline. We
had an immediate, instantaneous panic, mile-long
lines at gas stations and fear for the future of our
way of life. That was an artificial, temporary peak.
And it's just a slight foretaste of what will happen
when we reach the real [global] peak and supplies
start to decline and continue to decline forever.
NEWSWEEK: So what happens then? Do we revert to
coal?
David Goodstein: It's possible for us to revert
either to natural gas or to coal or both. Among
consequences are the increasing global climate
change. But another consequence is, let us suppose
you tried to substitute coal for oil. Natural gas is
a good substitute and it will last for a while but it
will have its own peak one or two decades after oil,
so it's only a temporary solution. If you turn to
coal, we're now using twice as much energy from oil
as we are from coal. So if you want to liquefy coal
as a substitute for oil in transportation - which is
its most important application-you would have to mine
coal at a rate that's many, many times at the rate of
what we're doing now. But the conversion process is
very inefficient. So you'd have to mine much more
than that. If you put that together with the growing
world population and the fact that the rest of the
world wants to increase its standard of living, you
realize that the estimates that say we have hundreds
of years worth of coal in the ground are wrong by a
factor of ten or more. So we will run out of all
fossil fuels. Coal will peak just like any natural
resource. We will reach the peak for all fossil fuels
by the end of the century.
NEWSWEEK: You mentioned transportation as one of
oil's greatest uses. Doesn't alternative technology
already exist?
David Goodstein: Not exactly, no. We tried electric
cars and that was sort of more or less withdrawn from
the market. I think there was plenty of demand. But
when I tried to buy an EV1 some years ago, they said
that the car had a range of 50 to 100 miles, but
there was an onboard computer that always told you
what your range was and when it was freshly charged,
it had a range of about 30 miles. And they only sold
them in California and Arizona because they were
useless in colder climates. So that's not the
solution. There are advanced batteries-the kind of
batteries that we use now in our cell phones and
laptops are lithium ion batteries and they have
about five times the energy density of the old lead
acid batteries. So if you could imagine something
like an EV1 with five times the range, that starts to
become believable. But nobody is showing that you can
scale up the lithium ion batteries to use in
transportation.
NEWSWEEK: And another alternative is nuclear.
David Goodstein: Nuclear is an alternative, but
remember you're not going to have any nuclear cars
and nuclear airplanes. Nuclear is not a substitute
for oil. There's a lot of talk about hydrogen because
of the president's initiative - the governor of
California has also announced an initiative. I think
what people don't understand about hydrogen is that
it is not a source of energy. You have to use energy
to make hydrogen - it's just a way of storing and
transporting energy. And with today's economics and
today's technology, it takes the equivalent of six
gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to
replace one gallon of gasoline.
NEWSWEEK: How do we know that all the oil that
will be discovered has been discovered?
David Goodstein: We don't know that all the oil that
will be discovered has been discovered, and this is a
somewhat controversial subject. But we do know that
the peak in oil discovery occurred decades ago. The
rate at which we've been discovering new oil has been
declining for decades. That's one of the arguments
that the peak in oil supply must be coming soon
because the supply curve follows the discovery curve
by a few decades. The United States Geological Survey
conducted an exhaustive study between 1995 and 2000
and gave out a statistical output in which they said
that the amount of oil that we started with, we could
be 95 percent certain, was at least 2 trillion
barrels. But they also thought there was a 50 percent
chance that there was 2.7 trillion barrels. The
difference between those two is 700 billion barrels
of oil-that's the entire reserves of the Middle East.
They were predicting discovering the Middle East all
over again. That's pretty implausible. But if you
really did add 700 billion barrels to the world's
oil supply, it would delay the peak by about a
decade. So we're not talking about really something
that does away with the problem.
NEWSWEEK: And opening up the Arctic National Wildlife
Reserve in Alaska?
David Goodstein: It makes no dent at all. It isn't
even worth talking about.
NEWSWEEK: Is there a silver lining here?
David Goodstein: I really don't think so. If the
peak comes and we can't get our act together fast
enough to make up for it, you will end up with
people all over the world burning coal as fast as
they can just for the space heating and primitive
industry. And if you do that the effect on the
climate is completely unpredictable.
NEWSWEEK: What about solar energy?
David Goodstein: Solar energy will be an important
component, an important part of the solution. If you
want to gather enough solar energy to replace the
fossil fuel that we're burning today - and remember
we're going to need more fossil fuel in the future -
using current technology, then you would have to
cover something like 220,000 square kilometers with
solar cells. That's far more than all the rooftops
in the country. It would be a piece of land about 300
miles on a side, which is big but not unthinkable.
But making that area of solar cells is one heck of a
challenge because all of the solar cells ever made
probably wouldn't cover more than 10 square
kilometers. This is not impossible. It's just
difficult. It's hard and we're not trying.
NEWSWEEK: You're a physicist by training.
David Goodstein: This is not my research field. I do
research in a completely different field. I just
thought that this was such an important problem that
somebody ought to write a book about it. I am not an
expert - there is no subject covered in that book
about which I know more than anybody else. If you
want to know about superfluid helium or certain kinds
of phase transitions I may know more than anybody
else in the world. I just thought I should lend my
pen to this cause.
NEWSWEEK: Have people been calling you an alarmist? A
doomsayer?
David Goodstein: What people have been saying is
'listen to what he's saying. He's not an alarmist.'
[Thanks to Dennis Brumm for forwarding this article
(and others) and bringing this very important topic to
our attention.]
Technology (Caltech)
[Editor's Comments: The articles below ask us to
ponder, "Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty of
reasons to wish you didn't." But how many people
today are actually able to remember what happened in
1973?
A person old enough (say 6 years old) to be aware of
an oil crisis (specifically, the one which occurred in
1973), would be 37 years old by now, so anyone who is
younger than that doesn't remember it. Anyone who was
old enough to drive (and may or may not have had to
fill up the gas tank in the family car) would be 47
now and anyone younger than that may not remember it
-- nor have any memory of the frustration of waiting
in line as a driver and wondering it you had picked
the right gas station to wait in line at, etc.
All college or university students, including
virtually all grad students and many of their
professors, and all high chool students and many of
their teachers, weren't even born yet in 1973. A
person could be old enough to run for President (35
years of age) and not be able to recall anything that
happened in 1973.
It would be interesting for Jay Leno to ask people on
the street what might have happened in 1973. I'm sure
some of them would give answers like "the
revolutionary war," "the birth of Beethoven" or
something like that.
As Dr. Goodstein suggests in his article below, we are
going to need good leadership -- and lots of it -- in
the next few decades. Attempts to turn back the clock
aren't really going to help.
:-)) Rick Mitchell, Editor
--- Dennis Brumm wrote:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/
Oil: Crude Awakening
A prominent physicist, Dr. David Goodstein, warns in
a new book that the world is running out of oil and
we're not doing anything to stave off the coming
crisis.
David Goodstein says facing up to the coming oil
crisis is 'hard and we're not trying'; he is the
author of the book - "Out of Gas: The End of the Age
of Oil" by David Goodstein.
February 17, 2004
WEB EXCLUSIVE http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4287300/
By Brian Braiker Newsweek Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Feb.
17, 2004
Feb. 17 - Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty
of reasons to wish you didn't. Chief among them
(right after leisure suits)would be the oil crisis
that began in October of 1973. The Middle Eastern
OPEC nations stopped exports to the United States and
other Western nations just as stateside oil
production was peaking. The artificial shortage that
followed had devastating effects: The price of gas
quadrupled in the United States, climbing from 25
cents to more than a dollar, in a matter of months.
The American Automobile Association reported that in
one isolated week up to 20 percent of the country's
gas stations had no fuel; in some places motorists
were forced to wait in line for two to three hours
to gas up. The number of homes built with gas heat
dropped.
But that was the 1970s and this is now, right? Not
according to David Goodstein. Saudi princes and SUV
drivers may do well to read his new book, "Out of
Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" (W.W. Norton), in
which Goodstein argues that our oil-dependent
civilization is in for a crude awakening when the
world's oil supply really begins to run out-possibly
within a few decades. "As we learned in 1973, the
effects of an oil shortage can be immediate and
drastic, while it may take years, perhaps decades, to
replace the vast infrastructure that supports the
manufacture, distribution, and consumption of the
products of the 20 million barrels of oil we
Americans alone gobble up each day," he writes.
Goodstein's book is not a happy read, but an
important one. In layman's terms, he explains the
science behind his prediction and why other fossil
fuels might not do the trick when the wells run dry.
Goodstein, a physicist and vice-provost at the
California Institute of Technology, recently spoke
with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about the fundamental
principles of oil supply and demand, and whether
civilization can survive without fossil fuels.]
Excerpts:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK: This is scary stuff. You're saying that
oil production will soon peak.
David Goodstein: The prediction that it will peak -
that is to say the crisis will come when we reach a
peak when half the oil has been used up - that
prediction quantitatively is unquestionably true.
But the quantitative question of when the peak will
occur depends on extremely undependable numbers. The
so-called proven oil reserves as reported by various
countries and companies around the world are often
just guesses and they're often not even honest
guesses. Among those who would analyze those figures,
some have predicted that it will come as early as
this year; others, within this decade. It could
possibly be in the next decade. But I think that's
about as far as you can push it.
NEWSWEEK: Let's start at the beginning. What is oil
and what do we use it for?
David Goodstein: Oil is hydrocarbons that grew up in
the earth when source rock full of organic inclusions
sank to just the right depth-not too little and not
too much - and got cooked over the ages. It took
hundreds of millions of years for the world's supply
of oil to be created. The oil is used to make
gasoline obviously, but also home heating oil, diesel
fuel but also 90 percent of all the organic chemicals
that we use. That includes pharmaceuticals,
agricultural products, plastics, fabrics and so on.
They are petrochemicals, meaning they originate as
oil.
NEWSWEEK: So our demand, regardless of supply, is
unlikely to decrease anytime soon.
David Goodstein: Well, the need for those hydrocarbon
materials has been increasing for 150 years and will
go on increasing especially because the world's
population is increasing. The poorer parts of the
world want to increase their standard of living,
which inevitably means using more energy. Fossil
fuels are our principal source of energy.
NEWSWEEK: You used an interesting word: "need." Do
we need the oil or is it something that we have just
become dependent on?
David Goodstein: We have certainly become dependent
on it. This is a habit that will be very, very
difficult to break.
NEWSWEEK: Knowing human behavior and how hard the
habit is to break, we probably won't, in all
likelihood, break it.
David Goodstein: I think we will not. One of the
reasons I wrote the book was in the hope that enough
people will become aware of the problem and we will
be a little better prepared.
NEWSWEEK: How do you suggest people prepare now?
David Goodstein: Right now we don't have the kind of
leadership that would take us in the direction that
would make major changes. As individuals we can do
things; I drive a hybrid car, for example. But as a
society we have to redesign cities so that people
live close to where they work. There are all kinds of
measures. We are so profligate in the use of energy
that even with the smallest effort we can reduce the
rate at which we use energy very significantly, as
Californians showed after the last energy crisis. But
what we really need is massive infusion of research
on all of the possible ways of ameliorating this
problem.
NEWSWEEK: You're talking about researching fusion
and fuel cells and -
David Goodstein: Fusion, fuel cells, biomass. There
are all kinds of possibilities, but none of them are
worth a thing unless you've shown that it actually
works. You've got to prototype it; you've got to show
that it can be scaled up, that it can be done on a
large scale. And so on.
NEWSWEEK: You write that the crisis doesn't happen
when we run out of oil, it happens when we reach the
peak, the halfway point. Explain that.
David Goodstein: We had a peak once before-it was in
1973. The production in North American had reached
its peak in 1970 and was declining. Supplies were not
available in North America and the Arab countries
embargoed the oil; they shut down the pipeline. We
had an immediate, instantaneous panic, mile-long
lines at gas stations and fear for the future of our
way of life. That was an artificial, temporary peak.
And it's just a slight foretaste of what will happen
when we reach the real [global] peak and supplies
start to decline and continue to decline forever.
NEWSWEEK: So what happens then? Do we revert to
coal?
David Goodstein: It's possible for us to revert
either to natural gas or to coal or both. Among
consequences are the increasing global climate
change. But another consequence is, let us suppose
you tried to substitute coal for oil. Natural gas is
a good substitute and it will last for a while but it
will have its own peak one or two decades after oil,
so it's only a temporary solution. If you turn to
coal, we're now using twice as much energy from oil
as we are from coal. So if you want to liquefy coal
as a substitute for oil in transportation - which is
its most important application-you would have to mine
coal at a rate that's many, many times at the rate of
what we're doing now. But the conversion process is
very inefficient. So you'd have to mine much more
than that. If you put that together with the growing
world population and the fact that the rest of the
world wants to increase its standard of living, you
realize that the estimates that say we have hundreds
of years worth of coal in the ground are wrong by a
factor of ten or more. So we will run out of all
fossil fuels. Coal will peak just like any natural
resource. We will reach the peak for all fossil fuels
by the end of the century.
NEWSWEEK: You mentioned transportation as one of
oil's greatest uses. Doesn't alternative technology
already exist?
David Goodstein: Not exactly, no. We tried electric
cars and that was sort of more or less withdrawn from
the market. I think there was plenty of demand. But
when I tried to buy an EV1 some years ago, they said
that the car had a range of 50 to 100 miles, but
there was an onboard computer that always told you
what your range was and when it was freshly charged,
it had a range of about 30 miles. And they only sold
them in California and Arizona because they were
useless in colder climates. So that's not the
solution. There are advanced batteries-the kind of
batteries that we use now in our cell phones and
laptops are lithium ion batteries and they have
about five times the energy density of the old lead
acid batteries. So if you could imagine something
like an EV1 with five times the range, that starts to
become believable. But nobody is showing that you can
scale up the lithium ion batteries to use in
transportation.
NEWSWEEK: And another alternative is nuclear.
David Goodstein: Nuclear is an alternative, but
remember you're not going to have any nuclear cars
and nuclear airplanes. Nuclear is not a substitute
for oil. There's a lot of talk about hydrogen because
of the president's initiative - the governor of
California has also announced an initiative. I think
what people don't understand about hydrogen is that
it is not a source of energy. You have to use energy
to make hydrogen - it's just a way of storing and
transporting energy. And with today's economics and
today's technology, it takes the equivalent of six
gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to
replace one gallon of gasoline.
NEWSWEEK: How do we know that all the oil that
will be discovered has been discovered?
David Goodstein: We don't know that all the oil that
will be discovered has been discovered, and this is a
somewhat controversial subject. But we do know that
the peak in oil discovery occurred decades ago. The
rate at which we've been discovering new oil has been
declining for decades. That's one of the arguments
that the peak in oil supply must be coming soon
because the supply curve follows the discovery curve
by a few decades. The United States Geological Survey
conducted an exhaustive study between 1995 and 2000
and gave out a statistical output in which they said
that the amount of oil that we started with, we could
be 95 percent certain, was at least 2 trillion
barrels. But they also thought there was a 50 percent
chance that there was 2.7 trillion barrels. The
difference between those two is 700 billion barrels
of oil-that's the entire reserves of the Middle East.
They were predicting discovering the Middle East all
over again. That's pretty implausible. But if you
really did add 700 billion barrels to the world's
oil supply, it would delay the peak by about a
decade. So we're not talking about really something
that does away with the problem.
NEWSWEEK: And opening up the Arctic National Wildlife
Reserve in Alaska?
David Goodstein: It makes no dent at all. It isn't
even worth talking about.
NEWSWEEK: Is there a silver lining here?
David Goodstein: I really don't think so. If the
peak comes and we can't get our act together fast
enough to make up for it, you will end up with
people all over the world burning coal as fast as
they can just for the space heating and primitive
industry. And if you do that the effect on the
climate is completely unpredictable.
NEWSWEEK: What about solar energy?
David Goodstein: Solar energy will be an important
component, an important part of the solution. If you
want to gather enough solar energy to replace the
fossil fuel that we're burning today - and remember
we're going to need more fossil fuel in the future -
using current technology, then you would have to
cover something like 220,000 square kilometers with
solar cells. That's far more than all the rooftops
in the country. It would be a piece of land about 300
miles on a side, which is big but not unthinkable.
But making that area of solar cells is one heck of a
challenge because all of the solar cells ever made
probably wouldn't cover more than 10 square
kilometers. This is not impossible. It's just
difficult. It's hard and we're not trying.
NEWSWEEK: You're a physicist by training.
David Goodstein: This is not my research field. I do
research in a completely different field. I just
thought that this was such an important problem that
somebody ought to write a book about it. I am not an
expert - there is no subject covered in that book
about which I know more than anybody else. If you
want to know about superfluid helium or certain kinds
of phase transitions I may know more than anybody
else in the world. I just thought I should lend my
pen to this cause.
NEWSWEEK: Have people been calling you an alarmist? A
doomsayer?
David Goodstein: What people have been saying is
'listen to what he's saying. He's not an alarmist.'
[Thanks to Dennis Brumm for forwarding this article
(and others) and bringing this very important topic to
our attention.]
posted by Rev. Rick Mitchell, PhD at 3:17 PM
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