AT: Huber
Huber’s argument is a flawed analogy-he misunderstands evolution.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 119-120) [Bozman]
Peter Huber, author of Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, is a lawyer and writer. He earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT and served as an Assistant and later Associate Professor at MIT for six years. He is currently a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In an article entitled ?The Energy Spiral? (2002), Huber claimed that the more energy humans use, the more they will be able to produce. According to Huber, hundreds of millions of years of biological evolution prove that nature is always finding ways of putting more energy to use. As manifestations of nature, human societies have likewise learned to obtain ever-greater amounts of energy; Huber calls this a ?chain-reaction process,? even a ?perpetualmotion machine.? In his view, the notion that humanity could ever run out of energy is absurd because the ?more we capture and burn, the better we get at capturing still more.? 28 Huber appears to be telling us that the more cake we eat, the more we will have. This may be a cheerful message, but is it believable? True, living things have evolved to capture more and more energy from their environments. But we may be mistaken in conflating that biological capture of solar energy, whose growth trajectory leveled off hundreds of millions of years ago and may actually have peaked in the Mesozoic era, with human drawdown of fossil fuels, which began only centuries ago and is still spiraling upward at an astonishing rate. The latter process perhaps more closely resembles typical bloom-and-dieoff events, as when yeast cells are introduced into a wine vat filled with grape juice. With plenty of food available, the yeast organisms at first proliferate wildly. Their capture of the energy from their environment of sugar-laden juice grows exponentially ? until their own fermentation byproducts begin to smother and poison them, whereupon all the organisms die. Here is the essence of Huber?s fallacy: he describes evolution as a one-way street ? with species capturing ever-more energy ? but omits any mention of the innumerable casualties that litter its curbs. For a species to run out of energy is hardly unprecedented; that?s what extinction is all about, and vastly more species succumbed to extinction in the past than exist today. Moreover, as was discussed in Chapter 1, history is full of examples of complex human societies that overspent their energy budgets and collapsed as a result. There is no natural law that exempts modern industrial societies from the limiting principles that govern other living systems. When we analyze it, Huber?s argument amounts merely to a flawed and misapplied analogy.
AT: Hubbert Indicts
Hubbert was right about U.S. oil fields and his projections are coming true today.
Nader Elhefnawy, Visiting Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Miami, April, ‘8
(The Impending Oil Shock, Survival, Volume 50, Number 2, p. Ebsco) [Bozman]
Nonetheless, Hubbert’s work has received widespread attention because he accurately predicted that US oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970 (it actually peaked in 1971). Other Hubbert predictions have proved less accurate (for instance, that the global peak would come in the 1990s).17 Still, consistent with his projections, the world’s oil production is today concentrated in mature, ageing fields from which the extraction of additional supplies is increasingly costly in money and energy.18 Even Saudi Arabia increasingly depends on water injection (pumping seawater into oil deposits to keep field-pressure high) and mechanical aids to induce artificial lift.19 Consequently, a shrinking number of fields will produce a dwindling amount of oil as they each peak in their turn, causing the world’s total production to drop toward a point at which it will become too expensive to extract any more.
Scientists have refined Hubbert’s curve so that it can accurately predict oil supplies.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 98-99) [Bozman]
Following his prediction of the US production peak, Hubbert devoted his efforts to forecasting the global production peak. With the figures then available for the likely total recoverable world petroleum reserves, he estimated that the peak would come between the years 1990 and 2000. This forecast would prove too pessimistic, partly because of inadequate data and partly because of minor flaws in Hubbert?s method. Nevertheless, as we will see shortly, other researchers would later refine both input data and method in order to arrive at more reliable predictions ? ones that would vary only about a decade from Hubbert?s.
AT: Hydrogen Fills In
Hydrogen requires large amount of natural gas, which is in decline, to be produced.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 165-166) [Bozman]
A hydrogen energy infrastructure would be quite different from our present energy infrastructure, and so the transition would require time and the investment of large amounts of money and energy. That transition would be aided tremendously if we were to switch present government subsidies from nuclear power, oil, and coal to renewables, fuel cells, and hydrogen. But, given the political influence of car and oil companies and the general corruption and inertia of the political process, the likelihood of such a subsidy transfer is slim for the moment. Yet if we simply wait for price signals from the market to trigger the transition, it will come far too late. An even greater problem is the current and continuing reliance on natural gas for hydrogen production. Hydrogen proponents assume the continued, abundant availability of natural gas as a ?transition fuel.? Without some transitional hydrocarbon source, there is simply no way to get to a hydrogen economy: there is not enough net energy available from renewable sources to ?bootstrap? the process while supporting other essential economic activity. As we have seen, prospects for maintaining ? much less increasing ? the natural gas supply in North America appear disturbingly uncertain. Within only a few years, decision makers will be confronting the problem of prioritizing dwindling natural gas supplies ? should they fund the transition to a hydrogen economy or heat people?s homes during the winter? Faced with a crisis, they would find it difficult to justify diverting natural gas supplies away from immediate survival needs.
Natural gas is running out meaning we cant produce hydrogen anymore.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘4
(Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, p. 20) [Bozman]
Hydrogen is not an energy source at all, but an energy carrier: it takes more energy to produce a given quantity of hydrogen than the hydrogen itself will yield. Moreover, most commercially produced hydrogen now comes from natural gas ? whose global production will peak only a few years after oil begins its historic decline.
AT: International Energy Agency Reports
The IEA ignores geologists-their reports are misleading and false.
Roger Bentley, Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading and Godfrey Boyel, Energy and Environment Research Unit of the Open University, October 29th, ‘7
(Global oil production: forecasts and methodologies, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2008, volume 35) [Bozman]
Particular remarks must be made about the IEA. Set up in the wake of the 1970s shocks with a remit to help forewarn the world of future shocks, the IEA has done many useful things. But on supply-side modelling, where it should be in the modelling van, it has been in the baggage train. For many years (and essentially still) the IEA's supply models simply assumed supply as sufficient, and equated this to demand. This view is not surprising, as it reflects the prevailing view among most energy specialists for the last twenty years or so. But by not listening to petroleum geologists with global knowledge the IEA has misled the world with a very inaccurate picture of the energy future.
AT: Lomborg
Lomborg is hopeful but vague-none of his arguments stand up to stasitical objections.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 123-128) [Bozman]
I have quoted Lomborg at some length because he presents his ideas well and forcibly, and because the arguments he advances are the principal ones also cited by other Hubbert-school critics. Let us examine each of his points in turn, beginning with his preliminary comments. The fact that some early oil-depletion predictions have failed does not tell us that all such predictions are bound to fail. Each prediction must be assessed on its own merits. Moreover, the work of Hubbert and his followers is based on far better data and a far more robust understanding of the process of oil depletion than was available in the early 20th century. Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak around 1970; it did. By now, roughly two dozen other oil-producing nations have passed their all-time production peaks. Nearly every year, another nation joins the ?past-peak? club. Thus the discussion of the phenomenon of peak oil is as much about history as it is about prediction. The degree of extrapolation needed narrows with each passing year. Why was there apparently more oil in the ground in 1956 than in 1955? Because these were some of the best years in history for oil discovery worldwide. Discovery rates have fallen off dramatically since then. The rate of discovery of new oil in the lower-48 US peaked in the 1930s; discovery worldwide peaked in the 1960s. Today, in a typical year, we are pumping and burning between five and six barrels of oil for each new barrel discovered. Demand for oil continues to increase, on average, at about two percent per year. From such information it should be possible to derive a working estimate of when global demand for oil will begin to exceed supply. Now, to Lomborg?s three main arguments. His first, that known reserves keep growing, centers on a subject to which Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère have devoted years of study. As mentioned earlier, those authors have shown that such reserve growth is largely illusory and is derived partly from unverified and inflated reserve reports of OPEC countries vying for increased export quotas. Lomborg implies that there is a vast amount of oil waiting to be discovered, but some specifics would be helpful. Where is all of this oil hiding? A few hints would surely cheer geologists who have spent decades applying the most advanced techniques to the problem of locating petroleum wherever it exists and who, on average, are finding ever smaller fields each year. Lomborg?s second argument is related to the first in that increased efficiency at recovering already discovered resources is often a component in the reported growth of existing oil reserves. Yes, new technology may enable us to increase the amount of oil extracted from any given field ? perhaps, in some instances, even doubling the ultimately recoverable percentage. But enhanced recovery methods typically do not delay the peak of production from any given field by very much; they merely extend the field?s production lifetime. Sometimes they merely enable recovery to proceed more rapidly, and thus cause the peak to occur earlier. Campbell, Laherrère, et al., have already accounted for such technology-based reserve growth in their estimates. Moreover, it is important to understand that technology rarely offers a free ride; there are new costs incurred by nearly every technological advance. In the technologies involved with energy resource extraction, such costs are often reflected in the ratio of energy return on energy invested (EROEI). How much energy do we have to expend in order to obtain a given energy resource? In the early days of oil exploration, when we used simple technologies to access large, previously untapped reservoirs, the amount of energy that had to be invested in the enterprise was insignificant when compared with the amount harvested. As oil fields have aged and technologies have become more advanced and costly, that ratio has become less favorable. This is reflected most clearly in figures for rates of oil recovery per foot of drilling. During the first 60 years of oil drilling (until 1920), roughly 240 barrels of oil were recovered, on average, for every foot of exploratory drilling. In the 1930s, as new geophysical exploratory techniques became available and the 6 billion-barrel east-Texas field was found by accident, the discovery rate reached a peak of 300 barrels per foot. But since then, during successive decades of drilling, discoveries per foot of drilling have dropped steadily to fewer than 10 barrels per foot. And this decline has occurred during a period of intensive exploration, using ever more advanced technologies, such as 3D seismic and horizontal drilling. Thus, while new technologies have enabled the discovery of more oil, the EROEI for the activity of oil exploration has inexorably plummeted. The same will no doubt be true of technologies used to increase the amount recoverable from existing reservoirs: we will indeed be able to get more oil out of wells than we otherwise would have, but we will have to invest more effort ?and thus more energy ? to obtain that oil, with an ever-decreasing EROEI. How important is EROEI? When the EROEI ratio for oil exploration declines to the point that it merely breaks even ? that is, when the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil must be invested in order to obtain a barrel of oil ? the exercise will become almost pointless. Even if oil remains a useful lubricant or a feedstock for plastics, it will have ceased to be an energy resource. EROEI is also an essential consideration in the substitution of one energy resource for another: if we replace an energy resource that has, say, a four-to-one EROEI ratio with an alternative that has a two-to-one EROEI ratio, we will have to produce roughly twice as much gross energy to obtain the same net quantity. Thus, when a society adopts lower-EROEI energy sources, the amount of energy available to do work in that society will inevitably decline. 30 The other half of Lomborg?s efficiency argument is that we are learning to use each barrel of oil more thoroughly, thus getting more work out of it. This is certainly true and commendable, but it is a fact that must be viewed in context. The all-important context, in this instance, is that our total petroleum usage, nationally and globally, continues to increase each year. In terms of depletion rates and production peaks, increased efficiency of use means nothing unless we are actually reducing the total amount of petroleum extracted and burned.
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