| Peak Oil Impact on 2012 |
Peak oil is a topic that hasn't been discussed very much in the past, but is starting to be noticed by the mainstream media. Most people think Peak Oil means that we have run out of oil, but that is not true. In a nutshell it means that we can no longer produce enough to meet demand. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we have reached that point. For a more information about what Peak Oil is, see the Peak Oil Primer
This is going to play a major role in what happens in the next few years as we approach 2012. Oil is what drives modern society. Without it, we revert to the 19th century, and that means that a lot of us are going to die.
Modern farming requires vast amounts of oil to run machinery, and to produce fertilizer. Without oil, crop yields will plummet, and food shortages will ensue. Also, we are accustomed to eating a meal where the average distance each morsel traveled to get to our plate is 1500 miles. That cannot be sustained without oil. I recently bought a jar of peaches in my local store, which were grown in Peru, canned in Thailand, and consumed in the USA. No doubt the transportation cost more than the peaches.
Without gasoline, people cannot drive to work. People no longer live close to where they work, and in my neck of the woods, people often commute 100 miles one way each day. If people can't get to work, they can't pay their bills. So expect a lot of home foreclosures, and bankruptcies. With the rising cost of energy, a lot of manufacturing will be forced to shut down, which will exacerbate the employment problems even more..... major depression will be the result.
Without oil, a lot of people cannot heat their homes. Winters in the cold parts of the countries will be especially cruel without sufficient oil supplies. Expect a lot of people to die from the cold. If they were all to convert to electricity, it would put a rather large burden on the generating plants, and they may have trouble supplying their present loads due to shortages of natural gas. Whether heat is supplied by electricity, oil, propane, natural gas, or coal, it is going to get a lot more expensive in the years ahead.
The economy of the western world is very tightly coupled with oil consumption. Any forced decrease in consumption will certainly affect the economy negatively. So we have what is known as a feedback loop. Decreased supply causes high energy prices which cause a recession or depression, which lowers demand for oil which causes energy prices to decrease, which starts the cycle over. This will happen because we cannot produce more oil as required. If we had a substantial surplus of production, the economy could continue to grow, but sooner or later the same thing happens.... not enough supply to meet demand causing high oil prices, which starts the cycle.
All of these issues will culminate in a lot of civil unrest. War may be the result as we try to grab what oil resources remain. Because of the civil unrest, martial law may be instituted. Much of the stability we have known in the past will vanish. Expect food and gas rationing as supplies diminish each year. This could happen relatively quickly or could take several years, as world demand for oil could ease considerably due to a worldwide economic depression. In short, Peak Oil could destroy our civilization.
What about new technology? Won't that save us? No it won't. It is too late to bring any new technology onboard in time to save us. In fact there is no technology even being explored which could put a significant dent in the problem except perhaps biodiesel. Hydrogen is often touted as the wave of the future, but the truth is that it takes more energy to make hydrogen than it gives back. Its a good carrier, but produces no new net energy. Biofuels are also talked about a lot, and biodiesel holds a lot of promise, but we do not have the infrastructure at this point to make use of it. It would take over 3 billion acres of oil seed crops to make enough biodiesel to meet our transportation needs based on a yield of 30 gallons net biodiesel per acre. That would require land acreage larger than 100 times the area of Pennsylvania.
Bioalcohol (made from fermented corn) produces a small net energy gain, and functions more as a farm subsidy than a solution to the energy crisis. Ok, what about windmills? Well, windmills are great, but they don't produce near enough power, and they are continually fought by the environmentalists. Solar? Solar cells are extremely expensive for the amount of power they produce, and require a lot of energy to manufacture. So they are not the solution either. That doesn't mean we should not build windmills and solar plants; just that they alone will not replace the oil energy we are losing.
That leaves nuclear. That is our best hope (there is always hope isn't there?). Nuclear has proven itself to be the safest, lowest pollution energy we have ever had in the US (fortunately, we were smart enough not to build graphite reactors like Chernobyl). There are much better designs now than there were when the last ones were built. However, we haven't built a new plant for over 30 years. We may not even have the manufacturing ability to build new plants in the short term, and the lead time for planning and permits etc makes nuclear out of the time frame to save us. Too bad. Ultimately though, we are going to have to learn to live within a much tighter energy budget, until we reengineer our lifestyles, and our energy policies to make sensible use all the currently available alternatives, as no single one will be able to replace oil.
A very good candidate for a modern nuclear reactor design is the pebble bed reactor. It has the advantages of self limiting reaction (no chance of melt down), modular scalable design so one basic reactor would fit more requirements, the same design could use multiple radioactive fuel types, and it doesn't have to be shut down for re-fueling. See the Wikipedia entry for more information about pebble reactors.