Lights Out! The End of the Oil Age

On a cold, wet night there's nothing better than coming home to a warm house, making a hot bowl of soup and then, after dinner, curling up under a reading lamp with a good book. But what if there was no gas to make the soup or run the furnace? What if there wasn't any oil to transport the dinner ingredients to you? No sweat, you may be thinking, I'm pretty hardy. If you really believe that, then I challenge you to sit in the dark for 15 minutes. It's no fun.

As that little mind game shows, trying to imagine life after fossil fuels isn't easy. Hydrocarbons are the very lifeblood of modern, industrial society. They are so fundamental to our existence that their role in creating our quality of life often goes unexamined. What our great grandparents would have considered luxuries we think of as necessities. But as even a casual look at history and a quick review of physics reveal, we are living an aberration.

A century and a half ago, we weren't dependent on fossil fuels. And by the end of this century--at the very latest--we will be so no longer. In the sweep of human history, the 20th century and the first part of the 21st are a carbon interregnum.

One doesn't have to be a shrieking Cassandra to say that the oil and gas age is coming to a close. You simply have to recognize the basic laws of science. As we all learned in elementary school, fossil fuels are not a renewable commodity. To wonder when the oil and gas we depend on will start running out misses the point: We've been running out ever since the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. Although oil industry types like to talk about "petroleum production," the fact is that no one is making any more of it.

A pair of recent books gives a long, hard look at what will happen when the carbon age ends. David Goodstein's Out of Gas and The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg bravely explore the consequences of the inevitable--and immediate--oil and gas scarcity. The steady depletion of oil threatens to be, in Heinberg's words, a "wrenching adjustment." As both authors agree, what we're facing is not a pretty picture.

Goodstein and Heinberg each rely on the landmark work of a little-known (but perhaps soon-to-be famous?) geologist named M. King Hubbert. In the 1950s, Hubbert was working for Shell Oil in the company's research laboratory. After looking closely at the pattern of oil discoveries in the lower-forty-eight U.S. states, Hubbert reached the conclusion that U.S. oil extraction would someday peak--that is, petroleum production would reach a pinnacle and then begin a steady decline. After figuring that discoveries of new oil fields in the lower forty-eight had climaxed in the 1930s, Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil extraction would peak sometime in the early 1970s.

Many of Hubbert's geologist peers dismissed his prophesy. Then it came true. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970. Today, the United States--which had once been the world's largest oil producer and exporter--imports nearly 60 percent of all the oil it uses.

Since Hubbert's death in 1989, a slew of scientists (most of them former employees of Texaco, Chevron and other oil corporations) have applied Hubbert's methods to studying world petroleum output. These geologists examined global oil discovery--which peaked in the 1970s--and then calculated the future rate of extraction. Their prediction? We will hit global oil peak sometime between 2006 and 2015. From that point on, the inexorable laws of supply and demand will make petroleum ever more expensive until it's no longer economically feasible for society to rely on it. According to a 1999 report by the investment house Goldman Sachs, the oil companies are part of a "dying industry."

For a time, natural gas may be able to fill the gap. Natural gas is already used to heat homes and light stoves, and its role in generating electricity is growing by the year. Compressed natural gas can also be used to power automobiles. But gas, like oil, is also held hostage to the rules of science. Geologists expect natural gas production to climax within just a few decades of the petroleum peak. The magic of convenient energy is about to do a disappearing act.