http://www.countercurrents.org/bardi240912.htm
Degrowth And Peak Oil
By Ugo Bardi
Hello everybody; I think you came to listen to me today because you want to know something about the situation with crude oil that is of “peak oil”. So what I can tell you is that the peak has arrived and we are now in the post peak world. It is an event that is taking place slowly over several years but I think we can say with reasonable certainty that the petroleum production peak was in 2008.
To prove what I am telling you I could show you data and graphs but I think that the best way for you to realize that the peak is past us is to think about how much people are discussing about oil substitutes. You know all those things that produce flammable liquids that we can use to fuel our cars: biofuels tar sands shale oil you surely heard about all that. And you surely heard about the idea of a “new age of oil” that some say it is coming and that is supposed to be a good thing. But this “new age” is based on dirty resources which have been known for decades (at least) and I am sure you understand that they are expensive if nothing else by looking at gas prices. Today we are forced to use these resources exactly because we passed the production peak of conventional crude oil. In this way we have been able to mask the peak for the time being avoiding an obvious decline of production of liquid fuels. In a sense we acted as those people who try to mask their age by dying their hair. They may succeed in looking younger but only for a while.
The problem however is not so much for how long we’ll be able to keep the production of liquids stable; it is that the resources we are using for this purpose have a low energy yield and do tremendous damage to a lot of things. We are destroying enormous areas poisoning the water aquifers and forcing agriculture away from food production. More than that we are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases generated for the same amount of energy produced. Emissions keep increasing and climate change accelerates as you could see from what happened to the North Pole this year.
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Ugo Bardi is a professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Firenze Italy. He also has a more general interest in energy question and is the founder and president of ASPO Italia.