Experts Think ‘Peak Oil’ Could Be Here As Soon As 2030

Peak Oil Gaph
ADVERTISEMENT

One of the quirks of modern life is that there’s almost nothing less controversial than talking about the weather, and nothing more controversial than talking about the climate. The extremely important COP28 Climate Conference is going on right now in Dubai and the big topic is climate, transportation, and just how far electric cars can take us.

If you love talking about energy you’re going to love this installment of The Morning Dump. I want to look at some of the new assumptions undergirding the world as it meets to discuss ways to prevent an environmental apocalypse. I’ll also explore, a bit, the way banks have to think about this.

And, finally, even if you don’t believe global warming is all that bad, one of my favorite thinkers in the energy space has a paper out on the economic/security risk of oil dependence.

Not to be crude, but let’s freakin’ do this.

Can EVs Get Us To Peak Fossil Fuel Usage In 2030?

Byd Exterior Rear

I suppose 2030 isn’t that far away. It’s about as close as 2018, which is hard to fathom. The world keeps consuming more energy as it grows but, with temperatures also climbing, the world is also considering where to source that energy.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a large, quasi-governmental group formed by a bunch of non-OPEC countries (specifically, OECD countries) in response to the 1973 Oil Embargo, which itself followed multiple armed conflicts between Israel and its neighbors.

It’s an imperfect organization, but the group has produced a number of reports in advance of COP28 that policymakers will be referencing, so let’s take a look.

In particular, the recently released “World Energy Outlook” looks at the Paris Agreement and attempts to find out how close the world is to the agreement’s stated goal of limiting “global warming to 1.5°C” which means “greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030.”

According to the report, things are improving, but not fast enough and we’re not going to get there until we can triple global renewable power capacity, double the rate of energy efficiency improvements, and do a bunch of other things.

One bright spot in the report is that peak fossil fuel use for transportation and energy might come sooner than you’d guess. This is the “good” way we reach Peak Oil, by reducing demand. The “bad” way is by maintaining demand (or increasing it) and running out.

“A legacy of the global energy crisis may be to usher in the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era: the momentum behind clean energy transitions is now sufficient for global demand for coal, oil and natural gas to all reach a high point before 2030…”

As you can see in the paragraphs above, a lot of this is based on China, where there’s both a slowing economy and a boom in electric cars and solar/renewable energy, though advanced economies like the United States and Germany also play a key role.

Still, it’s not happening quickly enough. Again, from the report:

The key actions required to bend the emissions curve downwards to 2030 are widely known and in most cases very cost effective. Tripling renewable energy capacity, doubling the pace of energy efficiency improvements to 4% per year, ramping up electrification and slashing methane emissions from fossil fuel operations together provide more than 80% of the emissions reductions needed by 2030 to put the energy sector on a pathway to limit warming to 1.5 °C. In addition, innovative, large-scale financing mechanisms are required to support clean energy investments in emerging and developing economies, as are measures to ensure an orderly decline in the use of fossil fuels, including an end to new approvals of unabated coal-fired power plants.

This was all a prelude to COP28, so how’s that going?

COP28 President Says Ending Fossil Fuels Will “Send Us Back To The Caves”

Cop28
Source: COP28

Oops. On the verge of COP28 starting, the conferences’s president, the UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber (this guy!), said some things that didn’t exactly please everyone.

Here’s The Guardian with the scoop:

The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

Oh boy.

Everyone is still going forward, and Dan Jorgensen, the Danish climate minister, rose to Al Jeber’s defense. From Bloomberg:

“At none of the many meetings and talks we have had has he ever spoken against a science-based approach to climate change and never denied the science,” Jorgensen said. “On the contrary, he has said that the phase-down and the phase-out of fossil fuel is inevitable. In fact, it is essential. Let that guide our further negotiations.”

The actual language of an agreement on fossil fuels to come out of COP28 is still up in the air but the Bloomberg report also includes a lot of support from various sides for the tripling of renewable energy and more investment in new technologies.

What Role Do Banks Play In All This?

Cop28 Panel
source: COP28

Speaking of investment, there’s a lot of pressure on banks and financial institutions to account for how much money they’re pouring into companies that increase global emissions. Specifically, transportation is a huge contributor, but how do you count it?

Ahead of COP28, S&P Global Mobility put out an interesting report that suggests some possibilities:

Properly calculating vehicle emissions requires three key steps: estimating Well-to-Wheel (vehicle lifetime) emissions, projecting manufacturer-level emissions projections, and conducting portfolio-level analysis.

Step 1: Estimating Well-to-Wheel (Vehicle Lifetime) Emissions: Well-to-Wheel emissions are typically broken out into Well-to-Tank (fuel extraction, processing, and transportation) emissions and Tank-to-Wheel (combustion) emissions. Calculating Well-to-Tank emissions includes the upstream CO2 production for gasoline (including extraction, refinement, and shipping) and electric (including mining extraction, charging needs and grid emissions) vehicles. Next, calculating Tank-to-Wheel emissions requires projecting vehicle lifetime mileage and vehicle CO2 production per mile for each vehicle type in the bank’s portfolio, from ICE to hybrids to battery electric vehicles. This information should be calculated on vehicle Tank-to-wheel emissions by make, model, and powertrain combinations, accounting for geography and usage.

Step 2: Calculate Manufacturer-Level Emissions Projections. By using the vehicle-powertrain level well-to-wheel emissions, the bank should project create manufacturer-level average emissions by year of production for each major vehicle manufacturer. These projections should extend to 2050 to align with various international net-zero agreements.

Step 3: Calculate Financed Emissions and Set Net-Zero Goals. Armed with forecasted emissions for each major vehicle manufacturer, banks and financial institutions can estimate the vehicle emissions financed by their automotive portfolio, and set clear, informed 2030 and 2050 emissions targets and identify paths to net zero.

This is super nerdy, but I’m into it.

Verleger: Let’s Stop Letting Oil-Producing Terrorize Us

Intleconomy

I’ve linked to energy pundit/economist/consultant Phillip Verleger, Jr’s stuff before and I’m glad I’ve got a reason to share his latest paper in the Fall 2003 issue of The International Economy Magazine (like Mad Magzine but with better cartoons)

He’s got a link to the whole thing right here. As always, I’ll pull out some highlights. His main point is that there are a bunch of legacy industries trying to maintain our dependence on oil and natural gas which, even if you don’t buy the environmental stuff, is a huge threat to our economy.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, OPEC launched a five-month embargo on oil sales to countries that supported Israel after the Yom Kippur attack by Egypt and Syria. Oil prices skyrocketed, and the global economy entered a period
of contraction. Events since 1973 have demonstrated that, during wars and revolutions, oil markets and now natural gas markets are subject to extreme fluctuations that have serious economic impacts.

When war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980, spot oil prices rose by almost 100 percent. The increase worsened the global recession already started by U.S. monetary tightening.

And then, of course, 50 years later we’re now seeing another conflict in the Middle East though, this time, we’re less dependent on OPEC and its oil.

While it’s important for the government to invest in alternative fuels, he argues, the government also does a bad job of picking winners. Instead of just giving money to research, Verlger says the government should also work to remove regulatory blocks:

Far greater success in innovation occurs when governments remove regulatory barriers to entry and allow new ideas and companies to flourish. Here, the lesson from the telecommunications industry is important. It was the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to force AT&T to open its network connections to devices built by firms outside the AT&T family that gave the cellular phone industry the opportunity to grow, culminating in Apple’s phenomenal success. More recently, the ability to play videos on phones, tablets, and other devices through internet sources such as YouTube has broken the monopoly of the cable television industry and major television networks.

The whole thing is a good read.

The Big Question

Do you think we’ll reach peak fossil fuels by 2030? If so, how? If not, why not?

Top Image: IEA. Licence: CC BY 4.0

About the Author

View All My Posts

150 thoughts on “Experts Think ‘Peak Oil’ Could Be Here As Soon As 2030

  1. I just want trains and buses going everywhere. Also protected bike lanes. And other things too – as many different diverse transportation options as possible.

    The places in the world with the best traffic, best driving roads, cleanest air, least traffic fatalities, and most fun cars happen to also be the places with the best public transportation. Cars are optional, you only drive one if you want to, and many people are happy to take the train or bus instead so even those traveling by car have a faster commute on safer roads with less stressful traffic. And if your car breaks down, oh no, anyway… the train’s still there.

    Everybody wins when cars aren’t the only way to get somewhere, even car enthusiasts. I wish this country could get that into our heads and build some proper public transit. Where I live, only the capital city has buses, and they’re pretty good buses to be fair, but if you don’t live in the city your only option is a long drive in a private car where you inevitably get slowed down because somebody crashed and now there’s a bottleneck. If we could take a bus or train, this wouldn’t happen, and people would be happier and healthier because you can sleep or read or watch movies on a train rather than get stressed before you’ve even arrived at work because of traffic.

    1. Everyone wins, except for OEMs and that’s why it hasn’t happened in the US. Culturally, we see domestic… something? manufacturing? engineering? (nah all of that left a while ago) as geopolitically important, so any attempt to undermine GM (primarily a subsidiary of SAIC in all but name), Stellantis (a European company with a couple of redneck antisocial cousins in America), and Ford (the last legacy American car company) gets a lot of push back.

  2. “Experts Think ‘Peak Oil’ Could Be Here As Soon As 1921 1965 1971 2000 2003 2005 2006 2008 2011 2013 2020 2030”.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil)

    Well for sure, it’s gonna happen sometime, I guess.

    Unless petroleum products are being continuously produced by abiogenic processes deep in the Earth, for example. (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2008RG000270, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264817210001224, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421508001274, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61644-5)

    1. BTW, this is a serious scientific consideration and does not in ANY WAY justify the continued burning of petroleum products at the current rate. Petroleum products are much too valuable to burn, IMHO, as they are the feedstocks for most of the chemical industries we have and are useful for producing plastics, fibers, vitamins, fertilizers, etc., etc., etc, besides all the damage we’re doing to the atmosphere and climate by frivolously burning them.
      https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products%20Made%20From%20Oil%20and%20Natural%20Gas%20Infographic.pdf

  3. They’ve been telling us we would reach peak oil within a few years for the last 40. Remember when it was supposed to happen in 1977? Or 1984? Or 1991? Or 2002? We’re nowhere near peak oil. We have a 300 year supply of natural gas under US soil. Not for the country, for the world. We’re being sold a bill of goods.

  4. The solution to this has existed from over half a century, it’s called nuclear energy, but they’d rather power the world with squirrels than use nuclear energy for whatever reason

    1. Also public transportation. That’s existed for more than a century and works great, everyone wins when public transit is good, for way more than just climate reasons. Keeps traffic low so car enthusiasts can have better road conditions too.

      1. Yeah it is expensive but I’m pretty sure it’s more cost effective than covering huge amounts of land with solar and wind and pray it’s a shiny and windy day. Plus, you don’t need batteries with nuclear as you can produce on demand

  5. Natural gas (NG) is the cleanest burning fossil fuel and is considered as the best fuel to replace coal and oil to transition us into the future carbon-constrained world. Therefore, the world’s demand of natural gas is projected to increase sharply by 44.0% now till 2040 (annual growth rate of 1.7%) reaching a quarter of the primary energy mix (i.e. oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewables). Thus, rightly so, the International Energy Agency (IEA) terms this century as the “golden age” for natural gas. The supply of NG has been increasingly met by the shale gas boom and the future demand can be met by the prospects of methane hydrates (MHs) adding to the reserves of unconventional natural gas. MH is the most abundantly available resource of CH4 in nature. In fact, the energy trapped in MH is more than twice of all the fossil fuels combined [2].”

    1. Yeah, oil is not like Doritos, you can’t just make more (well, you can but it’s not cheap), although I think if you squeeze hard enough, you can get oil out of Doritos.

      1. Now I want to research if you can make oil in a lab, I mean we can now make diamonds in a lab that are cheaper than natural diamonds (yeah yeah only cause DaBeers keeps the price high). But is it really that hard to make some sweet texas crude, not talking synthetic, bio fuel, or such, but the real thing.

        1. Diamond formation occurs when carbon deposits deep within the earth(approximately 90 to 125 miles below the surface) are subject to high temperature and pressure

          Petroleum and coal cannot be prepared in laboratory because their formation is a very slow process and conditions for their formation cannot be created in the laboratory. They are the result of decomposition of living matter under huge pressure and heat for millions of years.

          Kinda sounds like the same “process”.

          1. Isn’t this exactly what Porsche is touting with their synthetic gasoline, they use renewable energy to pull CO2 out of the air, to make a carbon-neutral fuel

            1. Yeah but I want the real thing.

              Interesting in my googling, that British scientists created synthetic fuel over 10 years ago proving the process works, so why isn’t it a thing by now?

              1. The Nazis made oil out of coal. There was (maybe still is) a Butterball plant in Carthage, MO making synthetic “gas” out of turkey offal. I think they were running their local trucks on it.

                1. Oh yeah, coal liquefaction is feasible at scale, just expensive and not exactly clean (though the synthetic oil produced does at least burn cleaner than coal when it makes it to the end user).

                  And, of course, the whole reason natural gas is even called natural gas is to distinguish it from the synthetic town gas made from pulverized coal that was the standard in the 19th and early 20th centuries

            2. Here’s the funny part, some call synthetic fuel Net Zero. Simplified it takes a pound of pollution, creates fuel, and it’s emissions is a pound, so zero effect. I flew recently and Delta has a big campaign to be net zero, I wondered how the heck is that possible for them, now I think this is how they can say to achieve that. It’s not that they won’t produce any pollution, its that they are banking on synthetic jet fuel that will be produced from pollution recapture equal to what their planes produce. Not exactly beneficial to the overall fight, essential the truth is they wont produce any MORE pollution than they do today.

              1. That is the definition of net-zero… Of course your supply chain also has to go net-zero and the energy used to produce the fuel has to be renewable.

                Where there is an issue is the way companies end up being actually net-zero, which is by buying carbon credits, which don’t necessarily actually produce a carbon offset.

                20 minute video on it for anyone interested:

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW3gaelBypY

          2. It can take nature a long time to blunder its way into making fossil fuels but that doesn’t mean that’s the ONLY way to do it. For a long time it was thought diamonds also demanded high pressure and high temperatures over millions of years; now we can make diamonds quickly at very low temperatures and pressures via CVD. Nature does it too…in space.

            There are also fungi that have been shown to decompose wood directly into a product very similar to diesel fuel, so similar IIRC it could be used as such without refining. I don’t think the wild form of that fungi was commercially viable as the process was too slow but its a damn sight faster than millions of years. Its not inconceivable a strain of such fungi could be developed that could decompose wood into diesel on a timeframe and in volume to compete with fossil fuels.

            And who knows, maybe under the right conditions fossil fuels might be made much, much faster. For example lets see what happens when a bunch of gross, nasty sewage is injected into depleted oil fields and allowed to stew down there for a few hundred years.

        2. Synthetic oils are in fact a thing, and so are synthetic fuels. They’re just expensive, so presumably in a future scenario with no fossil fuels, synthetic fuels would mainly be for niche applications where electric drivetrains don’t quite cut it, or for us weirdo classic car enthusiasts who like archaic technology.

        3. “Houston-based energy company Nacero Inc. announced Friday [30 October 2021] that it is building a new $6 billion natural gas-to-gasoline plant on the site of a former coal mine in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. 
          The manufacturing facility, which Nacero plans to construct in Newport Township and Nanticoke, will produce “tens of thousand of barrels” per day of the company’s zero sulfur gasoline, which Nacero describes as low and zero lifecycle carbon footprint fuel made from natural gas and renewable natural gas. 
          The product, according to Nacero, is a competitive, retail-grade gasoline that cars and trucks can use without modification. “


          “The project, according to other media reports is expected to begin within the next two years and take four years to build. Once complete, the plant will use gas from the Marcellus Shale reservoir.
          Nacero is planning two other facilities in Arizona and Texas, both within the same price range as the Pennsylvania plant. The company said in April that the Texas factory, which will be located in the city of Penwell, will be its first facility and, like the Pennsylvania plant, will take about four years to build. That project is expected to create more than 3,000 construction jobs and ultimately produce about 100,000 barrels of Nacero’s gasoline per day.”

  6. Forget all this crap. It seems if used food fryer oil can be repurposed for biofuel, why can’t used engine oil ve refined or repurposed for other uses. But hey the desert of Dubai used to be beach front property so climate change yes human caused no.

        1. Because it isn’t 100% recoverable, motor oil isn’t 100% oil, it has lots of other additives, and there’s additonal volume loss from transportation, storage, and reprocessing. And just like when you recycle lots of other things, the resulting raw material isn’t of a suitable quality to use for all applications, it might end up going in, say, asphalt instead of gasoline. Also, lubricating oil is hardly the only thing oil is used for, even if that use case was a completely closed end to end system with no inputs (which would also exist only if the amount of engines requiring lubricant stayed at a static number, which it doesn’t), oil is still being consumed for other purposes – fuel, synthetic fabrics, plastic, asphalt, synthetic rubber, fiberglass, building materials, etc etc

  7. Fall 2003 issue? You mean Fall 2023? 😉

    Also, Peak Oil is already here 😛
    https://i0.wp.com/pqia.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Peak5W30-1.png

    Why aren’t we doing more with ethanol and flex fuel? Why isn’t every gasoline-engined engine flex fuel by now? Every gas engine should be flex-fuel E100, E0, or any combination in between.

    Corn-based ethanol isn’t that great, but we can get it from sugar, which does have a better yield. We have lots of sugar in Florida, Texas, and Minnesota.

    COME ON, Brazil has been doing this shit since the 70s. A fucking third-world country has been using ethanol fuel successfully for like 50 years. So why can’t we do it here?

      1. That’s not so cut and dry. Corn is HEAVILY subsidized, and the corn lobby (big corn?) has a ton of influence. Hell that’s why HFCS is a default sweetener even though it kinda sucks.

        The problem with “follow the money” is that sometimes there is a lot of money from all sorts of different directions. Not much simple in both ag and oil lobbying.

        1. Corn starch, cornmeal, corn flour, there are so many other uses of corn that I have to wonder if we could go a long way towards fighting food crises around the world by getting rid of ethanol in fuel but not cutting back on corn growth, just making different things out of it.

    1. Because Brazil has a different climate, both physical and regulatory. Growing up in corn country, ethanol isn’t about making a product but getting “free” money. The ag industry in the US is all sorts of borked. Placing solar panels where fuel corn is grown would be far more economically and ecologically valuable than continuing to grow corn there, but people rarely do what makes sense

    2. >Why aren’t we doing more with ethanol and flex fuel?
      The infrastructure to increase the availability of E85 never materialized. It’s not like electric where you can slap a charging station down and hook it into the existing grid. You’d need to retrofit an entire gas station to add E85 capability.
      The US government touts E85 for one reason: corn prices. In 2007, 25% of all US corn when to producing ethanol and biofuels. Per the USDA, increasing usage of biofuels and the subsequent increases in corn/rice/wheat prices in the mid-2000s culminated in the 2007-2008 world food crisis.

    3. Flex fuel capability is required in Brazil, so they got it. The market was heading that way in the US, but then manufacturers switched to direct injection and did not want to risk possible higher warranty costs by making all of those engines flex fuel. Bean counters going to bean.

      Corn ethanol production gets better every year. Efficiency gains of 1-2% each year has added up over the last 20 years. Corn growing yields have gone up greatly as well. I get targeted with google ads for ag chemical products to get 300 bushel yields. Twenty years ago 300 bushel per acre yields was a pipe dream, but now the highest producing farmers are pushing 500. I do not think higher yields from sugar is still a true statement.

    4. Hello I lived in Brazil for three years–all the gearheads there know that ethanol is not good and will encourage you to use actual gasoline in your flex fuel vehicle instead. Ethanol is cheaper per gallon but provides less energy and has detrimental effects on your engine (in large enough quantities)

      Also, check out this Engineering Explained video–explains why ethantol might be WORSE than gasoline, as far as greenhouse gases are concerned:

      (3) America Was Wrong About Ethanol – Study Shows – YouTube

    5. See, “fuel from plants” seems like a no-brainer at first. The plants take up CO2 from the atmosphere and we burn them again and put it back. It’s a zero-sum game. Not great but also not terrible.
      Except we’re making our fertilizer from… fossil fuels. Oops.

      Nitrogen fertilizer production uses large amounts of natural gas and some coal, and can account for more than 50 per cent of total energy use in commercial agriculture. Oil accounts for between 30 and 75 per cent of energy inputs of UK agriculture, depending on the cropping system.

      (Woods J, Williams A, Hughes JK, Black M, Murphy R. Energy and the food system.)

      The energy-intensity of the process contributes to climate change and other environmental problems such as the leaching of nitrates into groundwater, rivers, ponds, and lakes; expanding dead zones in coastal ocean waters, resulting from recurrent eutrophication; atmospheric deposition of nitrates and ammonia affecting natural ecosystems; higher emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), now the third most important greenhouse gas following CO2 and CH4

      (Smil, Vaclav (2011). “Nitrogen cycle and world food production”)

      Well, shit.

      We’re just going to have to accept, sooner or later, that the planet just doesn’t support 8 billion humans. Either we figure it out on our own and stop rewarding people for having kids and stop messing with peoples’ family planning for religious reasons, OR nature is going to teach us the hard way by killing off the excess humanity with droughts and desertification.

  8. Do you think we’ll reach peak fossil fuels by 2030?”

    I’m not sure. If it doesn’t happen by 2030, then it will likely happen within a few years after that.

    “if so, how? If not, why not?”

    And how it will be done is relatively straightforward… We have to migrate people and businesses away from ICE vehicles to BEVs as much as possible. And where it’s not possible, then look at hybrid electric powertrains.

    We have to replace diesel locomotives with electric ones powered with overhead wires as much as possible.

    We need to implement more fuel saving tech for boats either by harnessing wind, have more ‘flying boats’ that have far less drag at speed and have more electric or solar-electric tech.

    And we have to keep adding solar, wind, nuclear, tidal and hydroelectric power generation while getting rid of coal power generation.

    And we should also focus on capturing methane instead of letting it escape into the atmosphere. And once captured, use that methane for home heating or generating electricity. And I’m not just talking about the methane released from oil extraction, but also other sources… like in cattle farming, methane that builds up in sewage systems and the methane generated from rotting garbage.

  9. Yes, let’s have our big environmental conference in Dubai! We can all take our private planes and see it before the ocean returns it to which it came.

    2030 might be a little ambitious, but I think there at least close. Really where is a significant usage growth going to come from? The planes, trains, boats and cars are getting more efficient. You have your major growth in Nigeria, Ethiopia, India and Indonesia etc. But that’s all mostly highly urbanized and often close to the sea. Power generation seems like your most obvious growth point, but none of these countries are particularly oil rich and would likely look elsewhere for power generation. With growth primarily concentrated in the global south, solar likely pulls more weight. Population growth overall is decreasing. And in places declining among wealthier countries. Sure, EV adaptation has its place, but seems fairly minor in overall use. So, Pending significant global conflict, 2030 seems about right to me.

      1. I’m not saying that these countries are going green. It’s that they will likely not be as dependent on natural gas. A.) because they don’t have a large local supply (Nigeria excluded here, however their access to their oil is let’s call it complicated) thus being pushing into a global market were you often have to swear allegiance to a global power (US, Russia, China etc). Which for developing nation can limit your economic prospects. B.) they have other stuff locally, namely the Sun as most are pretty close to the equator. But in Indonesias case, they have a shit ton of coal. Like worlds top exporter level, so it makes sense that’s were their dependence will rely.

      2. Interesting even though Indonesia is 10th or so for pollution by country, their per capita is only about 2t per person which isn’t bad, crazy to think there is about 275 million people there.

        1. I’ve been there and can attest that it is “cozy” to say the least in Jakarta. Personally, that is not a country where I would judge it on a per capita measure. Some of the islands are sparsely populated and relatively lush on land, but the ocean is poisoned. When you get to the big cities, it is New Delhi level dirty. I guess it’s just a stat, but per capita doesn’t seem to represent the ecological effect in my mind.

          1. It’s all these other countries most don’t think about. Googled and it seems Jakarta has the worst air pollution in the world and Indonesia’s pollution has tripled from 1990-2020. I visited New Delhi 10yrs ago, and if its worse than that geez it’s really bad. Supposedly it cuts 7+ yrs off your life. The more you learn, the worse the story gets, kinda just starting to accept we are all doomed.

            1. There’s an interesting theory on life in the cosmos the speculates even if it does/did exist, they would have destroyed themselves long ago through war, pollution, or resource depletion.

              It would be interesting the be in suspended animation and wake up 1,000 years from now to see where humanity ended up; Star Trek or extinct.

    1. That’s a different definition of Peak Oil.
      Back in the day, it was the point where we would have as much production as we ever would have, and then start running out. Lets call this Peak Oil Supply (POS)
      The challenge for POS is that technology advances and gets cheaper over time. The recent Bakken field was known to exist for decades, but it wasn’t cost effective until the technology for drilling advanced.
      There really won’t be a POS event. There’s lots of known reserves left, just waiting for industry to advance and become more affordable.

      What we’re talking about here is Peak Oil Demand. The consumption has reached it’s apex, regardless of supply, and that usage will start to tail off over time.

  10. 2030’s, IMHO. Not 2030.

    We are collectively still driving cars from the 80’s and 90’s pretty regularly. I guess the % is pretty low, but the concept still applies. It’s 2023, so 2063 we’re still going to be driving cars from 2023. Those will need gas. Again, small numbers, but numbers.

    I am a intellectually against completely phasing out ICE’s in the immediate future. I am emotionally completely FOR phasing out ICE’s in the immediate future.

    In order for this to actually happen, we need to take emotions into account. People should not be forced to scrap their working vehicle just for the sake of converting to electric. This MUST happen organically, with rational incentives to make the switch. Humans tend to revolt when they are forced to do stuff. But, generally accepting when they are part of the process.

    1. I think you’re hitting on a great note here. Politics – in the US, at least – have turned BEVs into a hot button issue by making it an emotional issue. “They” are going to take your car! “They” want to keep polluting! You may also be able to frame this as identity; people have a poor emotional response when their identity is attacked. If “they” are going to take your car, then “they” are taking away what makes you, “you.”

      I go around and around with a family member about BEVs (and the climate in general). I think BEVs are the way forward, even if it isn’t a “perfect” solution currently (don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!). However I also get excited and geeked out about some of the absurdity of what manufacturers are throwing at the wall as they try and out-gimmick one another (I went on and on about the Rivian R1T when it came out, or the absurdity that th Hummer battery weighs more than a Miata). My family member just keeps attacking this enthusiasm because politics says to; emotion says to.

      1. The Prius did this to hybrids, it became the favored car of the, how to phrase it, educated, upper class, San Francisco, NPR listening crowd, and was turned into a for them/not for us thing along political lines, which made manufacturers more timid about marketing other sorts of hybrids

        I mean, just imagine, the first real mass-market hybrid had been a Mustang or an F150 or something instead of an egg shapped little FWD hatchback, I think things would have shaken out quite differently

        1. Was chatting about this with some friends recently-and I made your exact point more or less. My friend made the counter argument that BMW, Porsche and Acura (admittedly just the NSX) and maybe some others did try making various performance hybrids-and some instances (BMW, Porsche, Acura) flagship performance cars and as near as I can tell it didn’t change anyone’s opinion in spite of being the polar opposite of the Prius et al. GM did sell Hybrids of its full size trucks and SUVs and as I recall they sold very poorly and so got dropped. Perhaps as you point out if these had come out before the Prius hybrid tech would’ve been taken more on its own merits but I wonder if it would’ve added enough benefit vs cost back then for the average person to want to pick them up.

          1. Yes, they were too little too late as far as establishing public perceptions – and GM’s hybrid trucks were also kind of half-assed in terms of execution, made for a poor value proposition, plus supercars have a tendency to use their hybrid system to boost performance, taking advantage of the hp bump of the electric motor, rather than for improved fuel economy, which kind of pulls the conversation in a different direction

            1. Well I think that was kind of the point was on the supercars it added performance with relatively good fuel economy (for what it was) which in theory should’ve had more of a halo effect? Though maybe a pointless one if you can’t buy a “regular” performance car with the tech (the point of halo cars). The GM hybrid trucks are a head scratcher to me as AFAIK there was no real gov’t reason at the time to make them, so why even offer them if they weren’t going to do it well? But as I type I realize GM’s history is littered with good ideas that were then poorly executed and cost cut into failures or were indeed even too far ahead of their time and not left in the market long enough to make an impact. Case in point I think they deserve real credit for the Volt – the first PHEV if I’m not mistaken, and rightfully it should’ve sold better if it wasn’t for the devotion of greenie car buyers to the Prius.

              1. Also GM did a piss poor job promoting the Volt when it came out, their own spokespeople couldn’t even give straight and consistent answers about how the Voltec powertrain worked, you’d get a totally different explanation from two different people at the same auto show. If GM’s own employees didn’t really understand what it was GM had just built, how were they supposed to sell it to the general public?

  11. Not to dismiss the entire issue, but I can’t get too excited about peak oil predictions since they’ve been wrong for longer than I’ve been alive. Sure, we will reach a peak one day, but I find specific predictions to just be sensationalism which hurts the message. I suppose it makes for a good headline, though.

  12. There’s a very large number of things that have to occur for peak oil to happen by 2030, and while yes EVs are a part of this, they are a relatively small part. International shipping and flight is a gigantic percentage of fossil fuels, and their emissions even more so than that of cars due to unrestricted emissions output. I think approaching a price parity (or even getting close) with synthetic fuels would help considerably, as they could be substituted for the cheap and dirty fuels burned by cargo ships, but that technology is too far away to be the answer. All that to say, I don’t know if peak oil can truly be reached in 2030, I would believe 2035 or even 2040 to be more realistic at this rate.

    1. To be clear: Shipping and aviation don’t allow for “unrestricted” emissions, at least not in the US (though I would venture that most other countries have at least some guidelines in place).

      One could argue that loopholes and/or enforcement need upgraded to catch cheating, but the guidelines are there.

      1. The concern in shipping is not in countries, it’s what occurs between them.

        Regulation enforcement 1000 miles offshore is nearly impossible. I think the number I saw last year was that despite international agreements to run no more than 88% bunker fuel, ship fueling was still at nearly 97% with it. Lying is cheaper than compliance.

  13. Peak oil might happen around 2030 (I’d guess more like 2035), but the problem is that we may stay at the level for longer than we should. The goal is to drop usage quickly, but I suspect fossil fuel usage will taper off very slowly. Air travel, freight, manufacturing, and a whole lot of gas vehicles will still be using oil for some time after we get new vehicles moved over to electrified or electric. And, as I’ve said before, I suspect that there will be some price decreases for oil when EVs start to gain too much market share, really selling people on the last generation of gassers. That last gen will stay on the roads until they are too expensive or inconvenient to operate, via repairs, gas prices, or reduction of gas stations.

    If we pretend every new vehicle produced in 2030 is a full EV, we’re still looking at some time before we see really meaningful decreases in fossil fuel usage. Could that year be the peak? Maybe, but it’s still going to be a bit before we come down the slope on the other side. It’ll feel like the oil mesa, rather than peak.

  14. In an interesting bit of timing, the heads of pretty much every banking institution is testifying before a Senate subcommittee right this moment. Jamie Dimon (J.P. Morgan) was just speaking to the transition from fossil fuel too early. To paraphrase him, he made the point that forcing a transition before it’s overwhelmingly cost-effective will do major economic damage to poor people/poor countries, as it will increase the cost of energy past what is “affordable.” Doing so prematurely only pushes those countries farther back and harms the global economy.

    So there is that. The tech has to get better first.

    Also, as I briefly mentioned yesterday about what is probably gonna happen between Venezuela and Guyana, well it’s starting. In case you haven’t seen this news this morning, Madero announced the plan to annex that part of Guyana that has the new oil, and as a result, Guyana requested help from the US military to defend itself.
    Let the games begin…

      1. This ignores learning curves. The more you build of something, the better (and cheaper) it gets.

        I remember people said that solar needed to get cheaper. Then California and Germany subsidized it and increased the volume of production.

        Now solar is cheaper than fossil energy without subsidies.

        Same thing with EVs – aside from temporary supply shocks, increased EV production has already lead to dramatically lower costs for batteries, motors, power electronics, etc.

        Tesla and China are making EVs cheaper than ICE vehicles. And on the premium vehicle side, Lucid is the same cost as an S Class with better performance. Rivian is less expensive than a Range Rover. It’s ok to start with premium vehicles and work down.

  15. Wait…so you’re telling me that an unfathomably wealthy, religious fanatic, autocratic ruler from a country built on slave labor that’s entire economy is based on oil isn’t too keen on the idea of clean energy? What are you going to tell me next?!?!

    1. What do you mean slave labor, those people happily travel and stay there! They just happen to have their passports stored securely for them, and seem to have a lot of accidents. They often even get paid. If they’re passports weren’t so securely stored they might accidentally travel somewhere else or even go back to their families which would clearly be bad for them.

  16. Peak fossil fuels by 2030, not likely with the current struggles of the EV industry. Even reducing ICE increases the need for electricity which is largely done from fossil fuels globally.

    I wish someone would write a complete article that sums it all up and get mass attention. Then everyone would understand the situation. Peak oil, temp change, pollution reduction, etc are usually talked about without realistic details on the big picture and what is truely needed to get there.

    Current global pollution 37 billion metric tons.
    1950 global pollution when supposedly climate change started 6 billion metric tons.

    Therefore we must get under 1950 levels for global warming to stop increasing. Getting to this level will not fix anything.

    Getting to global 1950 pollution requires a shit ton of life changes, 100% EV adoption isn’t even close helping as today they only reduce vehicle pollution by 80% at best. Any pollution reduction today is offset by 2/3 by population growth, so its impact is only 1/3, which makes it really difficult. The US has reduced it’s per capita pollution by 50% since 1990, but its total is the same.

    Experts say Net Zero is needed for the planet to start repairing itself, no one has a concrete or realistic plan for achieving this. If and when it happens, temps will likely be 2-3C above 1950 levels.

    Once you get Net Zero and maintain it, it will take 300-1000 years to reverse the global temp change. By then the artic will have fully melted and the south pole will prolly turn into a green lush paradise.

    I am no climate change activist, just researched the complete picture out of my curiosity. Will tell my children to find a way to buy some prime Antarctica land as it will be the hot real estate market for their great grand children in 150 yrs.

  17. “I suppose 2030 isn’t that far away. It’s about as close as 2018, which is hard to fathom.”

    It’s hard to fathom because it’s….. not correct? 2030 is 7 years away. 2018 was 5 years ago.

      1. it is 1,801 days from Dec 31, 2018 but 2,218 days until Jan 1, 2030. So it’s not exactly splitting hairs, that’s a 417 day difference, or over a year.

            1. It sure was. But the point is measuring where the middle is. Using the end of the start year is like asking what distance is farther away from the middle in a 100-yard dash while moving the starting line up 20 yards.

              1. Here’s a better analogy: city blocks

                If you’re standing on the sidewalk of First Street, south of Block B, much closer in reality to Block A than Block C, but the addresses for Block A start at the corner further away from you, just because you’re farther from #1 A Street than #1 C Street does not, in fact, mean you are further away from Block A.

  18. The Sultan isn’t wrong – I will say that was a bold thing to blurt out to a room full of people that have their identity wrapped up in disagreeing with it. The way of life in developed countries *requires* fossil fuels right now and will continue to do so for a while yet. That doesn’t mean he’s a “climate denier”. You can simultaneously hold the views that fossil fuel use contributes to climate change and that we need to keep doing it for a while longer.

    This is to say nothing of developing countries, who rightfully are like “wait you burned a ton of coal, oil, and gas to get to where you are now, why can’t we?”

    1. “… why can’t we?” Because you’re even less well positioned to cope with climate change than we are. Yes, it is our fault. Yes, it is criminally unfair. And yes, if we don’t all do our part, we’ll suffer but you’ll suffer more.

    2. I wonder if the point he was trying to make was that if you eliminated all fossil fuels right now, global pollution from all other sources would still be high enough that temps would still rise. If he said that he wouldn’t be wrong.

    3. This is to say nothing of developing countries, who rightfully are like “wait you burned a ton of coal, oil, and gas to get to where you are now, why can’t we?”

      Let’s change the narrative a bit here: Why aren’t the developed countries helping to get the developing countries set up with better, cleaner power grids? You’re right that there’s the whataboutism regarding developing countries’ use of fossil fuels, however there’s nothing to say that the developed world can’t help make the jump to better technology. This is going to need to be a team effort.

      1. As I wrote above, as one example, Indonesia got $20 Billion to go green. They are in part using that money to fund a district that will house a joint venture by CATL and Tesla to build batteries. The power for these factories? Well, that will come from brand spanking new coal plants.

  19. No we will not reach peak oil consumption by 2030. Say by 2023 every “first world” country moved to BEVs for all vehicles that drive on the roads. Well with the shuttering and no real production of new nuclear powerplants along with moving from coal powerplants to natural gas ones oil consumption will go up, and every other long distance vehicle (planes, trains, ships, etc.) are still going to burn oil. All the developing countries are going to burn a metric shit-ton of oil becoming developing countries. Our military burns more oil alone than most countries.

    Even if every country got rid of every ICE vehicle we’d still consume 20% of the oil we do currently just in manufacturing of plastics alone.

    We’re probably not ever going to be oil free in my lifetime.

    1. Speaking of military, can we get China to agree to not invade Taiwan as a part of meeting their CO2 reduction commitments? Or, at the very least, require them to find a way to make the invasion and occupation carbon neutral before going ahead with it?

      It’s already bad enough Russia hasn’t been offsetting their emissions from operations in Ukraine

  20. I sure hope so. Winter sports are fun! Local winter sports are even more fun. I’m doing what I can to cut fossil fuel use in my personal life while fully cognizant one person can only do so much.

    I don’t think we’ll get there unless a lot more government money gets thrown at the problem in a transparent way. None of this tax rebate nonsense that benefits the rich and is dependent on remembering at tax time what qualified. Point of sale rebates with the government money on the purchase clearly indicated will help a lot of technology like heat pumps get into more hands. Then we can save the fossil fuels for stuff we just cannot replace yet.

      1. Brilliant.

        I’m thinking about hedging a little.
        Buy properties at 1 ft increments above sea level. Then sell them as beachfront as each of them comes to that level.

  21. What I cannot wrap my head around is this:

    Isn’t oil a finite resource? Like as in, “We are absolutely going to run out someday, and there will be bloodshed over it.”?

    It’s generally said that we have less than 50 years of oil left. That is NOT a lot of time. We are closer to the end of oil than we are to the invention of the VHS tape.

    That alone should be enough reason to drop our use of it, to at least try and extend that timeline.

    1. Reserves are oil supplies that have been proven through actual drilling and have funded and permitted plans for development or are actually being actively extracted. Prospective supplies aren’t counted toward reserves (as in, we know there’s oil here, but we haven’t studied it enough to accurately quantify the amount, or we know there’s oil here, but we’ll never be allowed to pump it), also it doesn’t include new exploration, as finds still happen not too infrequently (eg, Guyana finding a new 11 billion barrel field 8 years ago)

      1. There are unextracted oil reserves that are not viable economically. There is a lot of $200 per barrel oil still in the ground. There’s less $75/barrel oil.

        This is true for almost all mining. For example, Nevada still has a lot of gold but it’s not worth mining at today’s price of $2,000 per ounce.

          1. Yes, or if someone found a way to extract it for ~$1000 an ounce. And that’s where we are with oil. They continue to find more affordable ways to extract oil that previously wasn’t worth it, plus prices are expected to go up as we run out of the more easily extracted oil.

          2. Yep, that’s my point. If OPEC+ choked their deliveries and prices reached 2-3X today the non-OPEC producers would crank-up extraction of oil sources that are not economically viable at today’s price. I’m not an economist, but it is likely in such a scenario prices would stabilize at a higher price/barrel.

    2. The problem with this line of thinking is that predictions 50 years ago said we’d be out of oil *now*.

      As known reserves dwindle, new technologies help us extract more.

      Of course, it’s ultimately finite, but be very very wary of anyone professing to put a date on the “end of oil”.

      1. There needs to be the will to drill though, correct? I read an article last year where a US oil company CEO said under no circumstances would they do any more drilling or exploration; it did not make financial sense to do so. (I believe this was around the peak prices last year). As I understand it, our problem is not drilling, it is refining capacity. The newest large US refinery was built 50 years ago.

        About an hour ago, I read a marketwatch article predicting the Saudis are going to ramp up production in 2024 to crash US oil prices. The article noted they had used this tactic in 2014, and 2020. Clearly that worked both times, I distinctly remember paying in the $1.XX range for fuel in both 2014 and 2020. It also mentioned reduced demand, which we saw in 2020 as well.

        This is interesting to me, as I had heard the opposite theorized on a political podcast, that they would cut production to drive up prices and hurt the current president leading up to the election.

        1. under no circumstances would they do any more drilling or exploration; it did not make financial sense to do so.

          If the price is high enough, they will drill.

          As I understand it, our problem is not drilling, it is refining capacity

          Now that is legal to export crude, this means less than before.

          predicting the Saudis are going to ramp up production in 2024 to crash US oil prices.

          I don’t believe they have the power to do this. The vast majority of our oil comes from North America, and the US alone produces 50% more than Saudi Arabia. They can play around on the margins, but they can’t cripple us no matter what they do.

          1. If the price is high, wouldn’t drilling add additional supply to the market, thus bringing the price down? I believe that was why the CEO had said no drilling.

            I wonder if all the people railing on about “energy independence” realize how much crude we actually export. What they want would seem to require nationalizing the oil industry. Which I’m not against.

            1. If the price is high, wouldn’t drilling add additional supply to the market, thus bringing the price down?

              Eventually that’s possible, but in the meantime you’ve presumably made profits on the barrels you’ve sold.

              Tight oil in the US has a much shorter cycle of startup and production vs traditional fields. It’s easier to ramp production up and down based on prices.

          2. Yeah, Saudi Arabia aren’t quite the big movers and shakers they were a few decades ago, they’re still big and important, but not dominant in the way they used to be.

            They have a 13% global market share, so, yeah, they can do some things to nudge prices one way or another, but they’re not quite big enough to completely collapse them or massively run them up, unless they work in close concert with one or two other big producers.

            Incidentally, the United States is at 21%

            One thing people forget too is that oil prices are determined by the global market. If futures contracts run up to $125 a barrel, than $125 a barrel is the new price, regardless of where its going or where it came from, nobody’s going to sell for less than the market is telling them their product is worth if they can help it.

            Also, the consistency and composition of crude oil does vary from field to field, refineries are specifically designed to process certain types of crude and can’t just randomly switch from one source to another on a whim, so you get into situations where maybe the United States has enough refining capacity on paper to process the volume of oil we produce, but we don’t actually have enough refineries equipped to handle Bakken shale oil or Alaska North Slope oil as opposed to, say, Venezuelan oil. So, we export the oil we can produce but can’t process and import oil we can.

            Hell, I work in building materials, and our industry has shades of that. Oftentimes, we get stuck buying various grades of crushed stone from competitors at 4 or 5 times the price of what we can produce it for ourselves, simply because the competitor is located physically closer to a particular job and the logistics and cost of transportation make buying it instead of making it more efficient. Same thing plays out with refineries – it may well be cheaper for a plant in New Jersey to buy oil from Saudi Arabia that can be put in a tanker and shipped right there in one mode of transportation vs buying domestic oil from Alaska that might have to go through several modes of transport to make it to the East Coast

            1. The reason that US refineries want to keep processing high sulfur “sour” oil grades is that they invested lots of money in processing units to remove sulfur and want to see a return on investment. They could process more Bakken shale oil but this would idle existing investment.

    3. Oil is renewable: bury some dinosaurs now and you’ll get lovely fresh oil in a few hundred million years. Chemically synthesise those dinosaurs or dinosaur equivalents and you can have your new fresh oil next week.

      Solar on the other hand isn’t renewable. That sun is definitely running out.

    4. As a child of the 70’s, we were taught we would have run out of oil by now. Obviously there were great advances in the exploration/extraction business in the ensuing decades. Whether we should have done so or not is an entirely different conversation. The sooner we get off of our oil/coal dependency the better.

    5. “It’s generally said that we have less than 50 years of oil left. That is NOT a lot of time. We are closer to the end of oil than we are to the invention of the VHS tape.

      That alone should be enough reason to drop our use of it, to at least try and extend that timeline.”

      Why bother? Fuck it, I’ll be dead by then. I can’t take it with me and if I can’t enjoy it for all its worth nobody can. I’m gonna enjoy every second I have left doing the same fun things I’ve always done for as long as I can and if it takes burning through a shit ton more fossil fuels, everything I got from my ancestors and all of my decendent’s inheritance to do it I’m gonna do it. The world is for MEEEE!

      – Boomerz

  22. I don’t think so. Even if North America/Europe/China are all, yay EVs, there’s still Africa, India, Russia, Central/South America, that don’t think are as big on this EV/clean energy train. Last I checked that’s like half the world.

    Also we need more nuclear.

    1. At the very least, rapidly shutting down nuclear before all the required renewable replacement capacity is in place is a bad idea. Switching back to coal and natural gas as “bridges” between nuclear and renewable is idiotic (we’ll start doing the complete opposite of what we want before we do the thing we want)

      1. Folks complained loudly about giving a subsidy to a local nuclear plant at risk of closing for economic reasons. It went into place anyway, which is a positive thing IMO. That carbon has already been released constructing it and mining the uranium. May as well use it. And a funded nuke plant is a safer nuke plant.

        1. Generally speaking in the US (and I likely have some minor details wrong) all Nuclear power plants are required to have very large (8-9 figure iirc) trust funds established for them upon construction that is entirely for demolition. This ensure that no matter how bad a plant is in financially, it can be safely, fully, and effectively decommissioned without and risk of a disaster or event. That said, well funded plants still stand to benefit everyone.

    2. Even if the top 10 polluting countries eliminated 80% of their pollution, which is 2/3 of the global number, it still would not be enough according to the data. India is #3 and Russia #4. Like you said all the other countries combined it’s more difficult for them to go green, especially South American & Africa. South America is about 6% and Africa 4%, that combined is almost enough for global warming to still continue.

Leave a Reply