*The Bottom of the Barrel*

Oil is running out, but no one wants to talk about it.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 2nd December 2003

The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved the
development of the biggest deposit discovered in British territory for
at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is a "huge" find,
which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in terminal decline. You
begin to recognise how serious the human predicament has become when you
discover that this "huge" new field will supply the world with oil for
five and a quarter days.1

Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource upon
which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk about it
because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in denial.

Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming ever
more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves peaked in
the 1960s.2 Every year, we use four times as much oil as we find.3 All
the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the 400 million
barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered piffling
in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery of small new
deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones. No one with
expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global production of oil
will peak before long.

The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are the
ones produced by the US Department of Energy, which claims that this
will not take place until 2037.4 But the US energy information agency
has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged: it has
based its projections for oil supply on the projections for oil demand,5
perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial markets. Other
analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin Campbell
calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010.6 In August the
geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he was "99 per
cent confident" that the date of maximum global production will be
2004.7 Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the oil
barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged today.

The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we
will burn 76 million barrels;8 by 2020 we will be using 112 million
barrels a day, after which projected demand accelarates.9 If supply
declines and demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the
people of the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage.
The price of oil will go through the roof.

As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost wholly dependent on
crude oil - principally transport and farming - will be forced to
contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil is cooking the
planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The problem is that our
lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy. Our sprawling suburbs
are impossible to service without cars. High oil prices mean high food
prices: much of the world's growing population will go hungry. These
problems will be exacerbated by the direct connection between the price
of oil and the rate of unemployment.10 The last five recessions in the
US were all preceded by a rise in the oil price.11

Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run. There
are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is likely to be
anywhere near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be extracted
from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the process uses almost
as much energy as it liberates, while creating great mountains and lakes
of toxic waste. Natural gas is a better option, but switching from oil
to gas propulsion would require a vast and staggeringly expensive new
fuel infrastructure. Gas, of course, is subject to the same constraints
as oil: at current rates of use, the world has about 50 years' supply,12
but if gas were to take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.

Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen, which is
produced by the electrolysis of water. But the electricity which
produces the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To fill all the cars
in the US would require four times the current capacity of the national
grid.13 Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive and lethal.
Running the world's cars from wind or solar power would require a
greater investment than any civilisation has ever made before. New
studies suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the ozone layer and
exacerbate global warming.14

Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about viable in terms of
recoverable energy, but it means using the land on which food is now
grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that running the United
Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area of arable fields
the size of England.15

There is one possible solution which no one writing about the impending
oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with which the British and
Australian governments are currently experimenting, called underground
coal gasification.16 This is a fancy term for setting light to coal
seams which are too deep or too expensive to mine, and catching the gas
which emerges. It's a hideous prospect, as it means that several
trillion tonnes of carbon which was otherwise impossible to exploit
becomes available, with the likely result that global warming will
eliminate life on earth.

We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every
available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and
civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses.

The only rational response to both the impending end of the Oil Age and
the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and
our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure,
and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People take to
the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice
between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I
suspect that most people would choose the tableware.

In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do
with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq (which appears to
have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not threatening other
nations), rather than North Korea (which is actively developing a
nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its intentions to blow
everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had something it wanted. In
one respect alone, Bush and Blair have been making plans for the day
when oil production peaks, by seeking to secure the reserves of other
nations.

I refuse to believe that there is not a better means of averting
disaster than this. I refuse to believe that human beings are
collectively incapable of making rational decisions. But I am beginning
to wonder what the basis of my belief might be.

The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can be
found at www.monbiot.com