So This is How the Oil Age Ends (Article Title)

12 comments

1. If you look what’s being said by Rystad and even Exxon at this point the question becomes will we have a long plateau and a slow descent or a fast painful descent? Either way, Lotka’s wheel is going to slow down. Another hard question is how finance, which is an overlay over the biophysical reality of the human condition, handles the transition. There is a lot of debt outstanding and not even close to enough ecosystem services remaining to satisfy that debt.

   As someone with a strong investment record I get asked a lot what to invest in now, in 2025. I almost always answer the same way: ditch the database records and invest in topsoil and clean flowing water. Ecosystem services are true wealth. When push comes to shove you can’t a eat database record, whether or not that database is a global append-only ledger or a shareholder ledger for a tech company.

   Changes are coming that few expect or truly appreciate. The best thing you can do is to accept reality now and get ahead of the changes before too many others realize what’s happening.

2. They said the same thing about horses 125 years ago.

3. This is interesting:

   “This is why half a century ago less than 5% of the energy of a barrel of oil had to be reinvested into exploration and drilling, and why we now have to spend over 15% of the hard earned energy from crude on getting the next barrel. This ever growing energy demand per barrel retrieved has no upper limit and can be expected to increase to as high as 50% by the middle of this century.”

4. Note that we can have peak oil demand but not peak oil supply. A barrel of oil is turned into various types of products and we can have declining gasoline demand but increased jet fuel, petrochemicals and diesel which leads us to need to more oil supply to meet the correct growing demand while overall oil demand decreases. 

5. @/u/Pondy1 You keep posting these articles but I dont think you ever read the comments, else you would of course stop posting these kind of articles.

   This moron is claiming that consumer demand is crashing due to high oil prices, which is why demand is so low and why oil prices is so low.

   This makes sense to you?

   Secondly he is claiming that accessing low quality oil resources results in the same out put, which is just nonsense – there are vastly more low quality oil than high quality oil, which means oil output actually increases.

   Lastly its just nonsense that there is no substitute for diesel – in China we already have massive impact from LNG trucks for example on diesel demand.

   So @/u/Pondy1, do you actually read these comments or not?

6. My opinion is that the author is clinging to outdated notions. Oil will eventually become too expensive to burn. Replacements will need to be found for some uses, while others will continue for quite some time. Natural Gas will linger for a lot longer.

   On the horizon are methods to make methane from CO2 and H2O. Plastics are also made from other sources. EVs from kid’s toys to airplanes are being made now, and will continue to improve as the batteries do.

   I am not an expert. I do not know all of what comes from oil. I do know we have made very promising beginnings for a circular economy on many things.

   He is right about one thing. Prosperity based on cheap FF is over. Personally I believe that the decent will be swift.

7. Exactly wrong: “The age of oil ends when new oil becomes too expensive for buyers to buy, and at the same time too costly for producers to extract — not when a suitable replacement is found and deployed at scale.“

   The oil age is exactly ending because fuel-free electricity generation has become the cheapest ever in human history and fossil fuel importing countries are realising that a billion dollars spent on fuel-free generation kit (solar, wind, geothermal, etc.) generates forever vs a billion dollars spent buying fossil-fuel (in addition to the kit to burn it) runs out and pretty soon they have to spend another billion dollars buying fossil-fuel to keep the lights on.

8. I might have bought this guys argument in 2000 when there were no viable alternatives to oil in a lot of industries but vehicles use a huge portion of global oil demand and if supply gets short and the price of gas goes up it accelerates this transition. In a lot of ways consumers vehicles are early adopters. The more cars are electric the cheaper batteries get and the more sense it makes to electrify trucks and heavy equipment. Planes are going to be the toughest to electrify and perhaps heavy shipping but there are short range small electric planes for sale now and they stand to be early adopters of new lighter weight battery technology fueling a replacement cycle there too.

9. “Over the past two decades the concept of peak oil was dismissed as a fringe, disproved idea.”

   Not off to a good start. Nobody debates peak oil. This is an observed phenomenon and not a fringe theory. It is physical and cannot be changed. It is caused by the nature of petroleum deposits. As oil is produced, the pressure drops.

   What is debated is when. The only thing we really know for sure is the peak of new discoveries happened in the 1960s and we are now producing 3 or 4 barrels for every new one discovered.

   Also, people mistakenly believe that when EROI hits 1, oil production stops. This is false. So long as a barrel of oil is worth more than the electricity needed to get it to the surface, oil is viable even as an energy source.

10. Well, my click was successfully baited. It’s hard to even summarize a thesis to rebut. 

11. lol, i hadn’t seen the peak oil people for years, i guess they will never stop until renewables have completely replaced fossil fuels they will keep predicting the imminent collapse of civilisation from peek oil

12. Well it is true enough that oil is going to lose market share because it can’t compete on price with renewables.

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