OIL’S WELLS NOT ENDING WELL

This Is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like; Deepwater Horizon & the technology, economics and environmental impacts of resource depletion.
Richard Heinberg, June 14, 2010 (Post Carbon Institute via Renewable Energy World)

[click on the title to see a longer version of the brilliant Heinberg’s essay or see The End Is Nigh for the 4,000-word full-length essay.]

"…[P]erhaps it's a good time to step back a moment mentally and look at the bigger picture—the context of our human history of resource extraction—to see how current events reveal deeper trends that will have even greater and longer-lasting significance…

"…Even if further efforts to plug the gushing leak succeed, the damage to the Gulf environment and to the economy of the region are incalculable and will linger for a very long time indeed…Given the historic political support from this part of the country for offshore drilling, and for the petroleum industry in general, this really amounts to sacrificing the faithful on the altar of oil."

click to enlarge

"President Obama has called the spill a “massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster,” and his representatives are now referring to it as both the worst oil spill and the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history…But it’s much more than that. It is a sign that we’re nearing the end…I must repeat: we’re not even close to running out of oil, coal, gas, or most minerals. But we face a convergence of entirely predictable but severe consequences from the depletion of the concentrated, high-grade resources at the top of the pyramid…[T]he monetary and non-monetary costs of growth have been rising faster than growth itself, and it looks as though we have now gotten to the inevitable point where growth may in fact no longer be an option.

"The Deepwater Horizon disaster reminds us that, of all non-renewable resources, oil best deserves to be thought of as the Achilles heel of modern society. Without cheap oil, our industrial food system — from tractor to supermarket — shifts from feast to famine mode; our entire transportation system sputters to a halt…[including] the trains, ships, and trucks that haul the coal that supplies half our electricity. We make our computers from oil-derived plastics. Without oil, our whole societal ball of yarn begins to unravel."

click to enlarge

"But the era of cheap, easy petroleum is over; we are paying steadily more and more…not just in dollars, but in lives and health, in a failed foreign policy that spawns foreign wars and military occupations, and in the lost integrity of the biological systems that sustain life on this planet…The only solution is to do proactively, and sooner, what we will end up doing anyway…Everybody knows we must do this…Will we let this addiction destroy us, or will we overcome it?

"…It turns out that nearly everyone likes the idea of using less oil, but nobody wants to take the step of actually mandating a reduction in its production and consumption, because that would require us to dethrone our Holy of Holies—economic growth…Fair enough. But where does that leave us? In an oily mess at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico…We want more petroleum-fueled economic growth, but we hate what the pursuit of petroleum is doing to us (not to mention the environment)…There’s just no easy answer here, folks."