What does peak oil have to do with you or urban gardening? A whole lot, it turns out. And we’re not talking about the tomorrow that never comes. This is happening right now.

Take a look at this graph. It wasn’t drawn by “gloom-and-doomers.” Neither was it devised by Communists or Socialists or Nazis or employees of British Petroleum or Goldman-Sachs. But if you look at it carefully, it could show you the future.

The deeper you study this graph, the more alarming it becomes.

* Firstly, with the exception of “unidentified projects,” the total production of all liquid fuels, including alcohol and other biofuels, and “unconventional” fuels like tar sands, will begin to FALL at the end of next year.
* Oil production from “identified” sources will never again reach the peak it hit a couple of years ago.
* There will be a 10 million barrels per day (”mbpd”) shortfall from demand by 2015. That’s approximately 1/8 of present consumption. To make up the difference, the world would have to find another Saudi Arabia and get it into full production in five years – an impossibility.
* A 50% drop in the production of total liquid fuels is expected in the next 20 years.
* Meeting presently expected demand requires a completely unprecedented achievement: discovering, developing, and bringing to full production 60 mbpd of “unidentified projects” in the 18-year period of 2012-2030. That is roughly one Saudi Arabia in the next five years, two Saudi Arabias in the next ten years, and six by 2030. And just keeping production at its present level requires discovering four Saudi Arabia equivalents and bringing them to full production before 2030, when historically it takes thirty to forty years from discovery to get an oil field to peak production. How often has the world found a recoverable oil deposit like Saudi Arabia’s? Just once.
* Finally, take a look at the little green thread on the graph. That represents a diversion of 1/4 or more of America’s grain production to alcohol. Food in the day of multi-billion populations requires oil for fertilizers, for pesticides, for water-pumping, for tractors. If you look at the graph, within a few years humanity is likely going to have to choose between food and the fuel needed to produce it.

Do you see it? Do you even want to? This graph was created by the United State Department of Energy, and the United States military concurs. If it is about right, we stand together, at this very moment, on the edge of a precipice. Are you surprised that your governments aren’t declaring a state of emergency? No. The world’s 6.8 billion people are on their own. We are about to drive our SUVs straight off a cliff, and there isn’t so much as caution sign, “STOP! Cliff ahead. Exit vehicle now.” Even when French newspaper, Le Monde, questioned officials about this graph earlier this year, they would only admit that we “may be entering a plateau in production.” You don’t say?

Conventional vs. Unconventional

At this point it would be prudent to clarify the distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil. Conventional oil is the stuff that comes from conventional wells. It doesn’t have to be melted out of the earth like the tar sands of northern Alberta. It doesn’t have to be pumped from deep under the sea, like the oil recently found off Brazil and the oil that British Petroleum is spewing all over the Gulf Coast. The methodology and costs of retrieval are by this time well understood for conventional oil. Unconventional oil, on the other hand, is so much more expensive, more difficult to retrieve, and more energy costly, that it might as well be considered a new energy source altogether. More on that ahead. It is too much like fusion – a virtually limitless energy supply that the experts are always saying we can look forward to in several decades. But the cliff is now. So let’s look at the conventional fuel supply first.
It’s clear that existing conventional petroleum supplies make up the lion’s share of the known oil on the graph. Colin Campbell, a former industry geologist, is famous in peak oil circles for the 1998 Scientific American article he coauthored with French oil geologist Jean La Herrerre, “The End of Cheap Oil,” in which they predicted a peak of production in 2003 and a drop to 39 mbpd by 2030 (The above graph assumes peak production to have occurred a little later from a little higher, but predicts exactly the same endpoint of 39 mbpd by 2030). Campbell has published a striking graph of worldwide discovery versus production of conventional petroleum, showing that discovery has been on an inexorable steady downward trend since the sixties, notwithstanding massive exploration efforts and major improvements in the technology of exploration. He makes an observation so simple that only a genius could have thought of it: there are two undeniable facts:

“You have to find oil before you can produce it.”
“Production has to mirror discovery after a time lag.”

Peak production in any oil field has historically followed its initial discovery after 30-40 years. So, here we are, the peak in production has now occurred, about four decades after the peak in discovery. It could not have been any other way, and no sane person looking at his picture could think otherwise; an unimaginably large discovery of conventional oil, coming out of the blue after 40 years of downward discovery, could barely make a difference because of the time lag. This downward trend is just the documentation of a grim reality. The geologists have looked everywhere, and another Saudi Arabia is not going to be discovered any more than an elephant is going to be found under a cabbage leaf. The United States Geological Survey (USGS), however, issued a report in 2000 imagining the unimaginable: an additional 900 billion barrels of conventional oil in the “to be found” category (which would postpone the peak for decades), but in the subsequent 10 years the Campbell projections rather than the USGS projections have been born out.

Hubbert’s Peak

Shell engineer Dr. M. King Hubbert wrote a paper for the American Petroleum Institute in 1956 in which he extrapolated the curves of petroleum production for the United States and the world based upon nothing more than (a) the existing historical data on production and (b) the assumption that production would follow a bell-shaped curve with roughly half the oil being produced before the peak and half after. He showed that growth was already marginally less than exponential, so a peak had to be lurking out there.
As oil wells age, they lose pressure. As fields become more fully developed, new wells with solid flows are less commonly found. And, as the resource nears full exploitation, fewer and fewer new fields are found. In any event, Hubbert estimated from the slowing process when peak production would occur in the United States and the world. His paper, for whatever reason, was generally dismissed until the United States’ peak arrived within a year of his prediction. He also claimed the world peak would arrive around the year 2000. The shape of the Hubbert curve, implying that half the conventional oil would be produced on the up-swing and half on the down-slide, likewise said that the peak would come in the last decade, because that was when the halfway point through conventional reserves was reached, as perceived by most geologists. So a conventional-oil peak in the last decade was pretty much inevitable, in practice because of the observations of Campbell and his followers, and in theory because of Hubbert.

Surely there’s more oil … somewhere?

Let’s return to “unconventional” oil for a moment. One often reads of staggeringly large fields of difficult-or-impossible-to-retrieve oil: the Canadian tar sands, with estimated trillions of barrels, the Bakken field in North Dakota, also reported to have trillions of barrels, and the deep-sea fields off the Brazilian coast. Estimates appear to run to 10% of the oil in the tar sands being retrievable, with the inconsequential little yellow band on the graph apparently representing the tar sands. USGS has concluded that enough oil can be extracted from the Bakken to serve US needs for six months or global needs for six weeks, in round numbers – quite a large quantity of oil, but not enough to make the graph look different. While large deep-sea oil fields are being discovered at this time near Brazil, it is not yet known when or whether they will be economically feasible to exploit, and they are, in any event, many years off. In fact, the head of Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, relies upon a graph essentially the same as the one shown here, to assert that we have arrived at the edge of the ultimate downslope.

I see little reason to doubt the collective views of:

*oil banker Matt Simmons, the Bush Administration’s advisor on peak oil (who refers to the “unidentified projects” as “faith based”)

*geologist Campbell (viewing the unidentified projects as just a “euphemism for rank shortage”)

*the President of Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil company (who is adamant that a crash is coming on approximately the same schedule as the DOE graph)

*the United States military (foreseeing a severe petroleum shortage, 10 million barrels per day, by 2015, apparently the same 10 million barrels per day shown as “unidentified projects” by the DOE) (but seeing some possibility of eventual recoveries from Brazil)

*the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies (which has studied unconventional sources, both those identified in the graph and those “unidentified,” and estimates they are good for 6.3 mbpd in coming decades)

*energy analyst Dave Cohen (who says in his article, “Peak Oil is a Done Deal.” [ASPO/USA Energy Bulletin, July 16, 2008], that based largely upon the fact that Saudi Arabia’s largest field, the Ghawar, is now in decline it appears that neither the Saudis or anyone else has the resources to offset this decline)

Of course anything could prove them all wrong, but blithely optimistic dreams are no substitute for contingency planning.

Are the facts being covered up?

The oil industry has claimed the peak is decades away, but there’s no data to back this assertion up. As Simmons has pointed out, “With solid global field-by-field production data, Peak Oil timing can be proven.”

The actual records in many nations, especially OPEC, are nonetheless so blatantly concocted that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Typically, OPEC nations’ time charts of their reserves look like steps – up and over, up and over, never going down, with the “ups” coinciding with political events but not, as you might expect, coinciding with new discoveries. Independent analysts have been forced to rely on indirect calculations and extrapolations analogous to Hubbert’s; but Hubbert’s extrapolations would not be reliable today, because of variable efficiency of different means of pumping, and devices such as pumping water into wells to maintain the pressure beyond the traditional “peak.”
The net result? Enormous uncertainties, with those who know, not saying, and those who say, not knowing – a principle more familiar to afficionados of organized crime than to observers of businesses and their regulators. But then again, nothing ever perpetrated by organized crime could ever approach the callousness towards human life and welfare with which the oil industry and the producing nations have falsified and concealed the facts. Meanwhile the governments of the consuming nations have allowed it to happen. As recently as March, 2010, Oxford University researchers reported that the International Energy Administration (IEA) and the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) had been deliberately overstating conventional oil reserves by one third, sufficient to meet global demand at current rates for ten years, with the result that the agencies “could be failing to prepare governments for the oil shortages and price spikes that would accompany peak oil.” The graph shows that this is exactly what has occurred. If our global supply is only going to last another decade, that’s a pretty big “shortage,” don’t you think?

Reality Bites

Many of the 6.8 billion people on this planet depend on oil for their their food, their transportation, their home heating, and all the ’stuff’ they currently consume. Clearly things are going to have to change drastically. But governments and corporations are misleading us as to the severity and urgency of our predicament. (Do they really want 6.8 billion of us in any more of a panic than we are already?) Right now, government policy appears to be focused on damage limitation through careful livestock management. Those of us with our eyes pried open have to decide how we are going to cope with the end of oil, which is arguably right now. It’s time you asked yourself how you will survive without:

* gas for your car,
* heating oil for your house,
* fuel oil for electricity generation,
* oil-powered ships for moving grain and consumer goods,
* asphalt for repair of highways,
* capital or credit to fund the necessary changes.

Whether we like it or not, we are the last generation of oil addicts. Oil is an intrinsic part of almost every meal we’ve ever eaten, and almost everything we’ve ever done. This is not going to be easy. Oil is so deeply entrenched into our culture that many of us won’t be able to adapt. Millions will fall into the trap of believing that money is going to save them. However, it is far more likely, based on historical precedent, that it will be used to control them. Our mistrusted “authorities” will doubtlessly try to turn crisis into political opportunity. They will promote centralized solutions, most likely at the expense of our civil liberties. So be very wary of the strings attached to those government-issued “food rations.”
We need a new binding agent for our civilization, one which values the survival of our species as highly as our own. After all, they are one and the same. It is hard to see how a civilization can hold itself together outside of this fundamental axiom. We need to drop the false doctrine of the individual, where everyone believes it is their life’s soul purpose to selfishly accumulate creature comforts. This, after all, was the mindset that gave rise to the age of oil in the first place. We desperately need to investigate sustainable and local methods of food production. Rest assured, your skills as an urban gardener will be vital to you, your family and your local community. Talk to land owners if you need to. Talk to your friends and colleagues. Make a plan, even if it’s just planting a few extra rows of veggies this year, and do it! Count the people you inspire to do the same!
The more you can incorporate locally produced food into your diet, the less of a shock to your system it will be when you are forced to do it. So stay at home and tend the garden, get to know your neighbors and practice the Golden Rules: community and cooperation. We can adapt. Those of us who choose to, will survive. We would not be here right now if this were not the case.

WORDS: Nicholas C. Arguimbau. Nicolas is an appellate and environmental lawyer licensed in California and residing in Western Massachusetts.

Additional information:

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5154
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf
http://www.jala.com/energy1.php
http://www.greatchange.org/ov-campbell,outlook.html
http://www.eia.doe.gov/conference/2009/session3/Sweetnam.pdf
www.philhart.com/content/introduction-peak-oil
www.cera.com/aspx/cda/public1/about/about.aspx
http://www.enopetroleum.com/opecoilreservers.html
http://tinyurl.com/2cnvhg3
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/4835
http://ecoglobe.ch/energy/e/peak9423.htm
http://tinyurl.com/35wtoya
http://www.heatingoil.com/blog/petrobras-ceo-peak-oil-production-is-now205/
http://tinyurl.com/26aojjo