By Eli Sanders

02-05-04 Some time this century -- and possibly as soon as this decade -- the Earth is going to start running out of oil. That's the frightening conclusion of two recent books that walk through profoundly important but little-discussed facts to build a case that this planet will soon face an insurmountable oil-supply crisis.
The crisis will come in two stages: First, there won't be enough oil to go around, and shortly thereafter, there will be no more oil. The visions these authors paint of a post-oil Earth range from bleak to apocalyptic.

In "Out of Gas," a short, fascinating work meant as a primer on "the relevant laws of nature" concerning the planet's oil supply, David Goodstein, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, reaches this stark conclusion: "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels."
Leavenworth resident Paul Roberts, who writes frequently on environmental issues, is no more reassuring in "The End of Oil," a much more detailed and lengthy book that is nevertheless equally absorbing. "Oil depletion is arguably the most serious crisis ever to face industrial society," writes Roberts, a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine.

"Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil"
by David Goodstein
W.W. Norton, 128 pp.

"The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World"
by Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp.

Sidestepping the phoney debates over exactly when and whether oil will actually run out, Roberts says that oil is undoubtedly running out quickly and our only choice is to begin shifting now to a new fuel supply: "The real question for anyone truly concerned about our future, is not whether change is going to come, but whether the shift will be peaceful and orderly or chaotic and violent because we waited too long in planning for it."
How do these men know the world is running out of oil? It's quite simple.

Oil is a finite resource -- meaning there's only so much of it and then it's gone -- and it turns out that experts have long since figured out that the planet only had about 2 tn barrels of oil in it when humans began sucking that up and using it to power modern civilization.
"The point can be seen without any fancy mathematics at all," writes Goodstein. "Of the 2 t barrels of oil we started with, nearly half has already been consumed."

That's perhaps the worst-case estimate, but even the best-case estimates admit the halfway point is likely to be reached within a generation. When it comes -- when humans have used up half the oil that was there initially -- we will have reached a point known to oil experts as Hubbert's Peak. As Goodstein explains, the peak is named after the geophysicist and Shell Oil employee Marion King Hubbert, who in 1956 correctly predicted that US oil production would top out in 1970.
Hubbert's Peak has since become an important predictive tool because it marks the moment when supply of a finite quantity such as oil begins to diminish with ever-increasing rapidity. Significantly, when US oil production reached its Hubbert's Peak in 1970, the country's demand for oil didn't peak. Instead, it kept right on rising.

In order to meet that rising demand, America was forced to quickly transform from the world's largest oil exporter into one of the world's largest oil importers. As both authors note, abundant cheap oil for American consumers has since become intrinsically linked to this country's global economic dominance. Today we have 5 % of the world's population, yet we consume 25 % of the world's oil.
The economic imperative to keep that oil flowing has made the US economy totally dependent upon, as Roberts puts it, "a small number of countries whose governments are unstable and corrupt and whose dependability as suppliers is increasingly in doubt."

What happened in the US foreshadows what is to come worldwide, with one key difference: When world oil production peaks, there will be nowhere else to look, no other country to import oil from. If world demand for oil doesn't slow drastically, or if alternative energy sources aren't found and put into place, then a desperate and chaotic race will be on among world powers to grab control of the remaining oil supplies (a race both authors believe has already begun).
Goodstein paints a worst-case scenario in which the declining oil supply, inevitably, is unable to keep up with demand: "Runaway inflation and worldwide depression leave many millions of people with no alternative but to burn coal in vast quantities for warmth, cooking and primitive industry. The change in the greenhouse effect that results eventually tips Earth's climate into a state hostile to life. End of story."

As both authors point out, the story doesn't have to end this way. They discuss in detail the potentials of alternative energy sources -- hydrogen fuel cells, solar energy, natural gas and more -- but find we're nowhere near ready to use any one of them as an oil replacement. They also discuss the possibility of making our current oil-burning machines (mainly cars) more efficient but note the depressing lack of political will to do so.
"We, or our children, or our grandchildren face some very difficult times," Goodstein writes. Even more alarming than this, both authors note, is the very real possibility that if we wait until those difficult times arrive before we do something, it may already be too late.

Source: The Seattle Times