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InvisibleBlack -> RE: The End of Suburbia - 52 minute documentary on peak oil (8/24/2009 5:45:51 PM)
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If you define "peak oil" as "one day we will have used up all the easy to access oil and the price of oil will begin to rise" then yes, I believe in peak oil. If you define "peak oil" as "OMG! There's going to be massive drop in the amount of available oil and Western civilization will COLLAPSE! DOOM! DOOM, I SAY!" I think your understanding of the petroleum industry is sadly lacking.
The fact that no alternative energy technology has been able to successfully compete with fossil fuels is because fossil fuels contain so much more energy per volume, and are so easy to access, that none of them can. As the readily available oil fields that are inexpensive to access dry up (as they are starting to), newer and more difficult oil fields will be exploited (as they are have been). These will be more expensive but not ten times the price to access and, as time goes on, new technologies will be developed to get to them more cheaply.
There are already alternatives to oil, several of them developed by the major oil companies, but none of them compare favorably with oil for cost. My father worked for a major oil company and I recall him telling me in the 1970s that they'd developed a method for converting oil shale into gasoline back then, but it was so expensive that unless gasoline went over $5.00/gallon (in 1970 dollars) it wasn't cost-effective to bring it to market.
What I expect will happen is that as the price of oil rises gradually over time, as it will, alternative fuels will be explored and developed and at some point one or more alternatives will become cost-effective and will begin to take over. There won't ever be a crash.
In all honesty, diesel is more efficient than gasoline and a conversion from gasoline to diesel would be simple since refineries already exist to produce diesel and most major auto manufacturers already have models which can run on diesel fuel. Diesel could be switched to without having to re-tool or build from scratch an entire distribution network. This would reduce the rate at which we're consuming existing oil fields, buying us more time to develop alternatives and allowing the oil companies to retain their profitable refining and distribution networks. Since no one is talking about this, I assume the people in the know are not yet concerned about the supply of oil drastically tapering off anytime soon.
My friends on the commodity trading floors all told me that the wild rise in the price of oil a year or so ago was due to rampant speculation on the back end of the market and had little to do with the actual available supply of oil. I have no idea how accurate their assessment is but if you google things like "oil speculation" and 2007 or 2008, you'll get a ton of links to articles blaming the entire run up in the price of oil on market manipulation and not supply shock. Whether that's disinformation or accurate accusation, I leave to you.
Personally, if you were going to panic about the sudden vanishing of oil - gasoline and energy are the least of your concerns. You can always burn coal or wood to power a plant if you have to to get by until you can fire up a big fission plant. Cars can be made that will run on oil substitutes. What you should panic about is the loss of plastics. Everything these days is plastic. There is almost nothing in your home that doesn't have some plastic in it and there are an endless list of items that cannot be made effectively without the ability to injection mold. The loss of plastics would ruin most people's lives in ways they can't even imagine.
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