from Hacker News

Oil System Collapsing So Fast It May Derail Renewables

by reallydontask on 10/21/21, 7:55 PM with 95 comments

  • by wilburTheDog on 10/21/21, 8:29 PM

    People have been talking about 'peak oil' for years. It was predicted to peak about 15 years ago, at least in the US, but then the government started throwing money at the fracking industry (which as far as I know has never made a profit). This is not news for anyone who has been paying attention. If you haven't started planning how to live your life while our fossil-fuel based economy is collapsing around us, you should start now. Does you think that sounds alarmist? The EIA estimates about 80% of US energy consumption comes from fossil fuels [1]. And there are a large number of things we just can't do with renewables [2], at least not until we figure out how to store energy much more effectively than we can today. There are big changes coming. And I expect a lot of people are going to be caught unprepared.

    Edit: If you disagree, please let me know why. I would love to hear why I'm wrong about this.

    1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=45096 2. https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=1114

  • by throwaway832939 on 10/21/21, 8:29 PM

    According to the article, we we got 44 * energy input in 1950, and 8 * input in 2020.

    Bad maths warning - I think this means that for a given activity that uses oil, say driving a mile, ignoring all the energy that went into the car etc. you're burning 12.5% on top of what you put into the tank. Whereas in 1950 this was only 2.3%. Seems like a noticeable chunk of efficiency improvements are cancelled out just to keep polluting at the same rate as before.

  • by jl6 on 10/21/21, 8:37 PM

    > But this is not because the earth is running out of oil and gas.

    Well, it kind of is?

    > Rather, it’s because they are increasingly eating themselves to stay alive. The oil and gas industries are consuming exponentially more and more energy just to keep extracting oil and gas.

    i.e. we’ve drilled all the easy-to-extract (cheap) oil, and now all that is left is the hard-to-extract (expensive) oil.

    The thrust of the article is still correct though: the answer is to redouble efforts to move to non-fossil energy sources.

    Expensive oil might be the sense of urgency we need.

  • by JamesBarney on 10/21/21, 8:37 PM

    This article makes a terrible argument.

    > As economists Professor Tim Jackson and Dr Andrew Jackson of the University of Surrey have shown, there is now abundant scientific evidence that the decline in EROI is an underlying driver of the decline in economic growth.

    > This suggests that the last two decades of global economic turbulence are closely related to the global economy’s continued structural dependence on fossil fuels: a dependence that, if it goes on, will guarantee a grim future of energy and economic decline amidst mounting environmental crisis.

    It argues that increasing EROI has led to decreased economic growth, and therefore we should switch to renewables before EROI increases for oil in order to make sure we fuel economic growth.

    But it ignores how EROI decreases growth (mentioned in the article they link to), it does it through increased energy prices. But a switch to renewables is not going to decrease energy prices, if it did we wouldn't need to subsidize renewables.

  • by cosmic_shame on 10/21/21, 8:09 PM

  • by treespace88 on 10/21/21, 8:38 PM

    Winters in Calgary regularly go to -20c at night with periods of -30 to -40c.

    How will we able to heat our homes? I can’t imagine how much more electricity it would take to replace national gas, it could be many times our current electrical production.

  • by Factorium on 10/21/21, 8:15 PM

    We need to rapidly:

    Adopt modular nuclear reactors, and produce hundreds/thousands of them yearly.

    Electrify transport.

    Figure out how to get to a global population of 4 billion: ie massive family planning drive in Africa/West Asia encouraging 1/0 children. (Keep in mind this is just the population level from 1974).

  • by fallingknife on 10/21/21, 8:53 PM

    > Over the next decades, then, oil and gas investments will become ‘stranded’ due to three converging pressures: climate policies demanding that fossil fuels stay in the ground; plummeting demand as fossil fuels and combustion engines are increasingly disrupted by solar, wind, batteries and EVs; and accelerating “energy cannibalism” as the oil and gas industries, ironically, consume themselves into oblivion in the process of trying to keep going.

    I don't buy it, because as demand for oil drops, the supplies that will be taken off line are the low EROI ones. So a drop in demand should actually reverse the trend of declining EROI.

  • by iab on 10/21/21, 8:05 PM

    The oil industry collapses and there isn’t sufficient alternative capacity, while at the same time the climate firewalls are broken. What an incredibly perfect storm.

  • by maherbeg on 10/21/21, 8:19 PM

    What was really interesting in this article was the mentioning of "the decline in EROI is an underlying driver of the decline in economic growth".

    If we can remove our dependency on fossil fuel energy, then we can turn around economic growth models which is really exciting.

  • by fmajid on 10/22/21, 12:57 AM

    It’s strange, the study was authored by researchers at INRIA, France’s computer science R&D institute, not the Institut Français du Pétrole (IFP), their hydrocarbon research institute which is part funded by a tax on petrol products.

  • by mactavish88 on 10/21/21, 8:16 PM

    How long does it take to build a small-to-moderate sized nuclear power station? (Assuming reasonably well-operating supply chains)

    Asking because I have no idea and would love to know from someone who has some insight/experience on that front.