Sandwichman got here throughout a captivating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled “Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Financial system of Oil Through the Renewable Vitality Transition” by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of many chapters, coping with fracking, was printed in Geoforum in 2021
As a few of you could know, the specter of Peak Oil was allegedly “vanquished” by the invention of strategies for extracting “unconventional oil” from shale formations (or “tight oil”), bitumen sands, and deep ocean drilling. A big a part of that story was artificially low rates of interest in response to the inventory market crash of 2008 and subsequent recession.
What Eckhouse’s dissertation and article clarify is the flexibleness benefit that fracking supplies as a result of the funding required for a nicely is 2 orders of magnitude lower than for exploiting a traditional area and the payback time is far shorter. The draw back is that the price per barrel of the oil is far larger. Till now free financial coverage has buffered that value differential.
The strategic benefit of fracking, mixed with the volatility of oil costs over the previous twenty years and uncertainty about attainable future authorities decarbonization insurance policies (what oil trade figures are paradoxically calling “peak oil demand”) are making giant, long-term investments in standard oil extraction — investments of the order of, say, $20 trillion over the following quarter century — much less engaging.
Though the latter would possibly sound like an excellent factor, what it implies is a full-blown power disaster occurring a lot sooner than any purported transition to renewable non-carbon power sources. I would not be shocked to see reactionary politicians and media agitate a “populist” motion to scapegoat “climate-woke” activists and scientists as saboteurs chargeable for “cancelling” long-term funding in an affordable oil economic system.
I had forgotten the oil worth rise of 2007-08 when a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude rose from $85 in January 2007 to $125 in November to $156 in April 2008 to $190 in June. Now I keep in mind my sense of awe on the time and dread that one thing actually, actually dangerous was quickly going to occur to “the economic system.” However then nothing occurred. Nothing, that’s, however the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, a inventory market crash, emergency financial institution bailouts, and subsequent central financial institution financial coverage of low, low rates of interest. However “the basics have been sound.”
It scrambles my mind attempting to differentiate trigger from impact. Did the ultra-low publish 2008 crash low rates of interest by the way drive the following fracking growth? Or was particularly a fracking growth one of many core goals of the low rate of interest regime?
Whither “peak oil”? In accordance with Laherrère, Corridor, and Bentley in How a lot oil stays for the world to supply? (2022) “the tip of low-cost oil” didn’t go away when the oil can was kicked down the street:
Our outcomes recommend that world manufacturing of standard oil, which has been at a resource-limited plateau since 2005, is now in decline, or will decline quickly. This swap from manufacturing plateau to say no is anticipated to put growing strains on the worldwide economic system, exacerbated by the widely decrease power returns of the non-conventional oils and different liquids on which the worldwide economic system is more and more dependent.
If we add to standard oil manufacturing that of light-tight (‘fracked’) oil, our evaluation means that the corresponding resource-limited manufacturing peak will happen quickly, between maybe 2022 to 2025.
Together with “all liquids” pushes that horizon out to 2040. In brief, we overshot peak oil by a pair many years with assistance from free cash and tight oil, with a bit of further assist from the Covid pandemic. These of us with a reminiscence longer than the information cycle might recall that the present spherical of rate of interest hikes by the Fed was initiated in response to inflation, which reached a 40-year excessive in June of final yr resulting from report gasoline costs. Decrease demand for gasoline brings down fuel costs whereas larger rates of interest might discourage new funding in fracking posing the specter of an oil provide crunch a few years down the street.
The cartoon under illustrates the free cash/tight oil — tight cash/peak oil dilemma:
