What is oil peak?
Richard Heinberg

Richard Heinberg discussing 'The Party's Over - Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies'

Very often when I talk to people about the likelihood of oil shortages or price hikes in the future, they come back to me with the statement ‘well I read that we have another 50 years of oil or 70 years or whatever it is’. And, what they are really saying is, it will be 50 years before we run out of oil. Actually, in fact I think it will be a lot longer than that. I would guess a century from now there will still be oil in the ground and probably some way of pumping a bit out now and then. But, the question of when we will actually run out of oil is absolutely the wrong question to be asking. We should be asking when will production peak?

Back in the 1950’s, M. King Hubbard, the petroleum geologist who worked for Shell and a bunch of other companies and taught at UCLA and MIT and a bunch of other universities, realized that for any given oil province, when about half the oil has been extracted it becomes more difficult to extract what is left. And so the rate of extraction begins to taper off and the production peaks. And he reasoned that if that were true for east Texas or Oklahoma, it would probably be true for the United States as a whole. And he predicted that oil would peak in the U.S., the rate of production of oil, the rate of extraction of oil, which is really what we are talking about, would peak in 1970. And at the time everyone thought he was nuts, crazy. And events of course proved that he was absolutely correct. In fact, production of oil in the lower 48 U.S. did in fact peak in 1970 and has been going down ever since. Up until the 1950s, the US was extracting more oil than any other country in the world. We were not only the leading oil producer, we were also, for a long time, the leading oil exporter. But now, we are at the point where the US is importing 60% of what it uses. That is a result of oil depletion. We are past peak. We can’t produce as much oil now per day or per year as we did back in 1970 when we were at peak.

Now what Hubbard and his followers like Campbell have pointed out, discovery of oil peaked in the 1930s. So there is this inevitable lag between the rate of discovery of oil and the peak in the rate of production. It makes perfectly, obvious sense, you have to find oil before you can extract it. So what Campbell has does is extrapolated this Hubble Curve to the global situation. So when did in fact discovery of oil globally peak? This is a bit difficult to figure out, because the reporting of reserves and discoveries is somewhat politically loaded. And part of the problem is that sometimes the increases in the reserve figures appear on the books and it is difficult to tell whether those are actually new discoveries or simply increases in the estimate of how much is in the province that was discovered, say 20 years ago. So what Campbell had to do was backdate those reserve increases to the actual time of discovery so that he could figure out when the discovery rate peaked. He found that the rate of discovery peaked in the 1960’s, around 1964. So that being the case, it is not so difficult to figure out when the rate of production, or the rate of extraction, is likely to occur. And it turns out that is probably somewhere in the range of 2006 to 2015, roughly speaking. So that’s basically what we are talking about.

We are talking about ‘When is the rate of extraction going to peak?’ That is the all-important date. Not ‘When is oil absolutely going to run out?’ ‘When is the rate of extraction going to peak?’

Why is that important? It is important because, from that day onward, from that year onward we will have less oil to go around each year from then on. In the US after peak production we solved the problem just by importing the oil from elsewhere. We saved our industrial economy, our industrial way of life, just by importing oil from other countries. But when the globe as a whole peaks in oil production, there is no place else to import it from. So then we get to the real problem, which is that we are tremendously dependent on this energy resource. Hugely dependent. Our whole industrial way of life that we have built up over the 20th century is absolutely tied to oil and natural gas and to a somewhat lesser extent coal, which is also a non-renewable fossil fuel. And once these resources begin to be depleted, once the rates of extraction peak, then we have nowhere else to turn. We have to completely reorganize our way of life to do without them. And virtually no one is planning for that eventuality right now. It seems absolutely insane that that would be case because of course anyone at a moments thought would know that a non-renewable resource that you are using at a prodigious rate is going to run out. So, it perfectly makes sense to make other plans for what you are going to do when it does run out. But no one has done that. That is the real tragedy of the time we are living in.

Part One - Q2. What do the critics of oil peak say?

JD:
In your book you discuss some of the critics of Colin Campbell, Laherrière, Youngquist, and all the rest of them. The critics are called cornucopians. You call them that and various other things - flat earth economists, so forth. What are the arguments of these cornucopian critics? And perhaps you can tell us what a Cornucopian is. And why do you personally view their arguments as misguided?

RH:
Right, well of course the word cornucopian goes back to the mythical cornucopia, the horn of plenty, from which all good things emerge. And, Cornucopianism is actually not confined to a few critics of Hubbert, Campbell, Laherrière and those people. Cornucopianism is the dominant ideology of our modern world. It is taught in every school of economics. It is the subtext of every political speech. And virtually, we are soaked in this point of view. The assumption is the economy can grow forever. Human population can grow forever. And we will never actually meet up with any physical limits to the growth of our economy or population. Now again, a few moments thought should point out the absolute absurdity of that way of thinking. But some how it has weaseled its way into our dominant ideology, primarily through the field of economics.

In economics, of course we look not at resources per se, we look at how resources are mediated by money. And money, of course, is something that can be created infinitely and indefinitely. Money is created through the making of loans, and banks create money all the time. So there is no physical limit to the amount of money that can be created. So economists assume that if there is enough money to go around, then when one resource actually starts to become scarce we can just substitute another resource for it. It’s the magic of the market that leads the perpetual growth; the order of the day for eternity.

It’s a very happy way of thinking. And it is a way of thinking that says - that just as our way of life is more opulent and fast paced than our parents and our grandparents, our children’s way of life will be even more opulent and more fast paced, and on and on to infinity. Of course technological changes fed into this too. We developed all kinds of new technologies generation after generation – from the radio, to the television, to the computer, to the cell phones, and so on. And so if technology can continue to become more complex and effective and powerful into the future, where is the limit to that? Where is the limit to human ingenuity? So these are the arguments of the Cornucopians.

Specifically with regard to the oil issue, Cornucopians say ‘Well, we just haven’t looked in all the right places. Surely there is much more oil than we have discovered yet. And we can of course substitute other things for oil. We can substitute coal and natural gas. When we run out of those, we can substitute wind and solar and hydrogen and so on.’ Some of them even say, ‘We are not running out at all. If you look at the reserve figures, reserves of oil are growing in many cases and we are developing new technologies to extract oil more efficiently. So in a particular oil well where using old technology could only extract maybe 20 to 30% of the oil, now we have new ways of accessing maybe 40 to 50% of oil from that same reservoir. So that should keep us going for decades longer until we figure out some real, ultimate solution to the energy crisis. Like fusion for example, or some kind of exotic, free energy devise.’ This is all, again, happy thinking. It puts a smiley face on our thoughts about the future. But when we actually get to looking at the real figures, it is not so simple.

Looking, for example, at oil reserves and oil reserve growth, as Colin Campbell has done. Looking at it closely, one discovers that much of the reserve growth that has been reported is actually political. Back in the 1980s, OPEC changed its rules to say that the amount of oil it would permit countries to export would be based on the amount of reported reserve those countries had. So countries were motivated to increase their reported reserves in order to increase their export quotas, so they can make more money. Immediately when this rule was made, every country in OPEC reported dramatic increases in reserves, in some cases increases of up to 100%, when no new discoveries or few new discoveries actually had been made. These were purely hypothetical, political reserve increases. And yet, the Cornucopians take them at face value. So all of that oil is actually there, waiting to be extracted.

And the United States Geological Survey has bought into this way of thinking entirely. I suspect there is political motivation there as well. USGS has been wrong consistently about future oil production, going back to the days of M. King Hubbert. They were a critic of Hubbert’s Curve from the very start. And they failed to foresee the US oil peak in 1970. Actually they were taken to task by Congress for that. So the US Government’s official cornucopianism has been pretty well dedunct already in the past, and yet the USGS continues to sail onward predicting billions, trillions of barrels more oil than probably actually exists.

Part One - Q3. What is net energy and why is it important to understand the consequences of oil peak?

Julian Darley:
There are clearly going to be a lot of different kinds of consequences from not having enough cheap energy anymore. Since we've based our whole civilization in the west and the industrial world on it. But, before talking about that would you say a word about net energy, which is a complex concept not really understood but of extreme importance to a wider grasp of oil depletion and its consequences?

Richard Heinberg:
Lets just talk about the net energy per say and then we can get into talking about the consequences of oil depletion. Net energy is is one of the most important concepts for people to grasp if they're going to understand our energy reality. It takes energy to produce energy and this is true at every level from a bacterium on up. A bacterium has to expend energy in order to get a bit of food. Human beings have to expend energy in order to get their food and energy. We have to expend energy in order to search for oil or coal or other energy resources. And the name of the game of survival is making the amount of energy you have to invest to get your energy less that the amount of energy that you ultimately harvest. If the amount of energy that you have to spend to get your energy is greater than the amount of energy you eventually get. In the biological world, you die. That's pretty much the end of the story. Well, when industrial societies discovered fossil fuels, and that's what industrialism is all about, was the discovery of fossil fuels. When industrial societies began using fossil fuels they had come upon a source of energy with an extremely high net profit. This was true for coal and spectacularly true for oil, particularly in the early days. You have to remember oil in many reservoirs is under pressure. There's huge pools of this black energy dense liquid underground and basically all one had to do was stick a pipe down there and the oil under pressure would flow up through the pipe and all you had to do then was find some way of getting it into the barrels or tanks or pipelines to take it where you wanted to to use it or refine it. This was natures free gift of energy that had been produced millions of years ago and stored through geological time, and the net profit on oil as a form of energy in those early days was way over 100 to 1. In other words by expending 1 unit of energy in exploration and drilling and so on. One could reap 100 units, 200, 300 units of energy profit. Now other sources of energy don't have such a spectacularly high energy profit ratio. In fact virtually none of them do, and that's true of coal, that's true of nuclear energy, it's true of wind, solar and all the rest. And in fact oil itself has a variable net energy return, and its net energy return is being reduced year by year. Why's that happening? Well, the stuff that's easy to find, the stuff that's under high pressure is the stuff that's being depleted first. It makes sense, if you're an oil company you're going to look for the stuff that's cheapest to extract first and only when that's gone are you going to want to invest in extracting the stuff that takes more time and energy investments. So, we have at this point extracted almost half of the oil that's going to be extracted economically. About 1 trillion barrels, and that first trillion barrels that we've extracted is the easy stuff. It's the stuff that's easy to find, it's under high pressure, you just have to stick a straw in the ground and it comes bubbling up. What's left, the oil that's left is going to be more costly to extract, so the net energy profit from that oil, instead of being, you know, 100 to 1, 200 to 1. Oil exploration and extraction are already down to by some figures 20 to 1, 30 to 1, 40 to 1 in that range. And within the continental US, the activity of oil expolration has an energy profit ratio that by some estimates is down to about 1 to 1. In other words it costs as about as much energy to search and extract a barrel of oil in the continental US as that barrel of oil actually contains. So what this means is the net energy available to industrial societies is being reduced year by year. Industrialism as a way of life, as a pattern of existence on this planet for human being succeeded because of this immensely huge energy profit ratio that existed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. That's what permitted us to build the vast infrastructure of agriculture and industrial production and transportation that we have now. It costs energy not just to grow that infrastructure, but just to maintain it, and where's that going to come from? Not only as we reach petroleum extraction peak, but also as we pass. As we have already have passed the peak in the net profit from investment in energy resources. What we're headed toward inevitablity is a much lower energy form of society. Industrial societies, if they're to survive, have to find a way of working on the basis of using vastly less energy per capita then we've become accustom to. Whether they're up to that, whether it's possible for industrialism as a way of life to function in a much lower energy environment is an open question, and I think that's actually the most important question that will be facing us during the next century.

Part One - Q4. Why do you talk about the 'fate' of industrial societies - why is it rather bleak?

Julian:
In your book title you say ‘The Fate of Industrial Societies’. Sounds pretty ominous. What do you mean by that? And you can take that one separately, … During that answer would you propose to mention the pathological money system and its relation to the ideology of growth and how might this might cause a financial crash and monetary collapses, which I think you may be about to allude to. And, you also mention economies can crash when there is an expanding energy supply, as 1929 so clearly demonstrated. But is it possible, you ask in your book, for an economy to remain healthy through an energy crash?

Richard:
There is so much here to unpack. I’ll start and if I don’t get to some of those points we can come back to them. Theoretically, I believe that it is possible for industrial societies to convert to a much lower energy regime. It would be theoretically possible, for example, for the United States to divert hundreds of billions of dollars a year in investment in say weaponry, entertainment, sporting events, things like that, into production of windmills, into research, into new kinds of solar applications, and so on, into subsidizing – putting photo-voltaic panels on the roof of every office building, every home in the United States. That is theoretically possible. And if that were done, it might be feasible for an industrial way of life, a different kind of industrial way of life than we are used to. Certainly not the growth economy where we are constantly saturated in advertising images telling us to buy and consume more; where we are surrounded with twenty kinds of any particular product, twenty different brands to buy. Walk into the supermarket and there are fifty different brands of breakfast cereal and all of that. That kind of industrial growth economy will soon be a thing of the past, in any case. But some version of industrial lifestyle could persist if we were to undertake a deliberate and coordinated process of transition that would inevitably involve a tremendous amount of sacrifice on the part of the individuals and also large institutions.

Now the real tragedy of Cornucopism, the way of thinking that says there is always going to be more and tomorrow is going to be a brighter day for the economy and new technologies will always come to rescue us. The real tragedy of Cornucopism is that it’s telling us that that kind of sacrifice is not necessary. That we are really not going to have to face at any point hard choices regarding resource depletion population pressure. And so we are not as a result of our cultural belief in Cornucopian ideology, we are unlikely ever to undertake those kinds of coordinated efforts and deliberate sacrifices that will be necessary to make that transition.

That’s true because of the nature of our economic system, where money only exists because it is loaned into existence and therefore every dollar or euro of money in existence carries a price tag for the compound interest. And which structurally requires economic growth in order to forestall economic crash. It is also true because of our political system. No politician wants to stand up and say ‘Look folks we are in this horrendous fix. We have gotten ourselves out on a limb here with our industrial growth of the past and our use of non-renewable resources. And we are all going to have to tighten our belts. We are going to have to undertake a collective period of hard work and sacrifice in order to change our way of life. And we can’t really expect more and better and more expensive and more diverse products and so on for our children. In fact, were going to have to perhaps even limit our population increase. To reduce our population, we have to in some ways reduce aspects of personal choice.’ What politician is going to stand up and say that? None. First of all, the people aren’t going to vote for them. Second of all, the corporations aren’t going to fund their election campaigns.

So we have an economic system that is based on perpetual growth, not just ideologically but structurally. With compound interest being charged on all loans, and loans being the basis of the money supply, without economic growth, the money supply collapses and the economy collapses. So we have an economy that is structurally based on perpetual growth and a political system in which no one is able to see the truth or name the truth – which is population pressure and resource depletion. And no one is able to stand up and say ‘This is what we need to do’.

So as a result of that, I think the likelihood of a collective conversion, a collective transition, to a sustainable, lower energy way of life in the future is unfortunately extremely low. Its true one politician has done this. In the 1976 Jimmy Carter wrote the following words:
‘We must face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by inexorable laws of nature.’

Those are probably the truest and most courageous words ever written by a sitting US President. And yet we all know what happened to Jimmy Carter. I think even today probably Jimmy Carter would be hesitant to write or say anything quite as bluntly as he did back in 1976. The consequences are unfortunately pretty chilling to contemplate.

Part One - Q5. Is it possible for an 'advanced' industrial society to survive a large energy decline?

JD: Do you want to say anything about whether you thought it was possible, or looking at the evidence, because that's of course, that's what is so interesting is not so much empty speculation, its analysis based on evidence and speculation based on evidence. You said very interestingly, you made the comparison between economies that crash when there is expanding energy...

RH: Right.

JD: Do you want to say something about what we're facing the opposite of that and what the possibilities for that are?

RH: Right, in the 1930's, we had an economic crash even when there was still an abundance of labor, resources, raw materials, everything that was actually needed to make an economy work was there. But, because of over-production essentially, during the late 1920's, it was impossible to maintain the same rate of industrial expansion, and therefore expansion in loans and economic activity and an expansion of the money supply. The result was a sudden contraction in the money supply, deflation, and so people were thrown out of work and there was basically no money to buy anything. Banks were closed, mortgages were foreclosed, and so on.

We're facing a similar situation today in regard to over-production that we were in the 1920's. Just as in the 1920's, there was a bubble that had been created through investment in new technology of radio, and of course, the automobile had created a whole new realm of consumer indebtedness that had never existed before consumer credit. We have a similar situation now in the early part of this century where consumer debt is at record levels and investment in new technologies of the Internet and high tech and so on have proven to be overly optimistic, shall we say.

So, bubble after bubble, real estate bubble, derivatives bubbles, all of these are beginning to deflate. And the likelihood is that just on the basis of, as it's been called, the business cycle of inflation, deflation, investment, production, over-production and eventual crash. Just on the basis of the conventional business cycle, we are due for a serious recession at this stage. But, add to that the reality of the peak in oil and particularly right now, natural gas production in North America and the likelihood is that we not only are headed for an economic crash, but its likely that is one from which there is no real, sustained, long-term recovery.

Now, in some ways, an economic crash may be, it could be a good thing, at least theoretically. It's difficult to say how things will actually work out. But, reduced economic activity means reduced demand, there is no money available with which to buy more "stuff" and therefore, less "stuff" is being produced, which means that less energy is being used. So, its almost an enforced conservation program. This is part of what happened back in the 1970's, after the first politically-created energy crash in 1973 and in later 1979. The global economy went into a tailspin, and as a result, consumption of oil and other energy resources plummeted during the 1970's and if you look at a graph of global oil extraction and consumption, it's this one long ramp upward until about 1973, when suddenly, there's a dramatic dropoff. And it's because of that dramatic dropoff in oil extraction and consumption in the 1970's that we are sitting here today. Because if that hadn't occurred, the global oil extraction peak would have probably occurred around 1990-1995 instead of happening in 2006 to 2015 and we'd all be sitting here in the middle of a huge economic depression and other terrible consequences.

So, basically the economic downturn of the 1970's bought us time. Now, we haven't used that time very wisely. We've used it to again increase industrial production and resource extraction. But, its theoretically possible if we have another major global recession that we could buy ourselves the time to undertake, as I was saying earlier, a coordinated transition to a much lower energy-renewable, sustainable economy. Again, the likelihood of that happening, because of economic and political reasons, is very low but at least that possibility exists.

Part One - Q6. What is your view of hydrogen & other substitutes for and alternatives to hydro-carbons - won't they allow us to continue our industrial way of life?

Juian Darley:
What's your view of hydrogen and other alternatives to fossil fuels? Won't they be able to permit the survival of our industrial way of life, and Imay add to that, what about futurists, and then eco-futurists, and the eco-capitalists, and also what about nuclear and coal? Because the futurists, of course, are wild about nuclear and coal, the eco-futurists are not so, but they'll throw fusion in there. We're talking about the general topic of 'substitution will save us', if you like?

Richard Heinberg:
Yes, well recently George Bush in his State of the Union address suggested investment in hydrogen as the fuel of the future and I think this probably came as a surprise to many environmentalists because they had been proposing hydrogen as the fuel of the future, the hydrogen economy themselves and I think Bush made a politically motivated effort to co-opt the issue, and perhaps successfully so. Of course Bush was talking about making hydrogen from coal and nuclear electricity where as many of the eco-activist's are talking about making hydrogen from wind or solar produced electricity. But whether it's made from renewables or non-renewables, the question is hydrogen going to save us? And I hate to say this but I think it's extremely unlikely. Hydrogen is not an energy source, there is no hydrogen reserves sitting around beneath the the soil, beneath the rocks that we can tap into the way we tapped into oil. Hydrogen has to be made, yes it's often said that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. True enough, tons of hydrogen on the Sun, there's tons of hydrogen in the methane on Jupiter, but it's not so easy to get at. Where hydrogen is most abundant interestingly enough is in fossil fuels. There's a lot of hydrogen in coal, there's a lot of hydrogen in gasoline. As a matter of fact, there's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of of liquid hydrogen. Go figure that out, but it's true. Why? Because, when hydrogen is bound molecularly with carbon in hydro-carbons it takes up less space. Free hydrogen is even in its liquid form extremely diffused. That's one of the problems with transporting hydrogen and using hydrogen as a fuel.

One of the many problems actually. The main problem is simply that it takes more energy to produce hydrogen then the hydrogen itself has, it's always a loser. So if you're going to make hydrogen from natural gas and by the way virtually all commercially produced hydrogen right now is being made from natural gas. If you're going to make hydrogen from natural gas, well you're going to lose energy in the process of converting the natural gas to hydrogen and then when you convert the hydrogen to electricity in a fuel cell say. That process is also inefficient, so you lose some energy there as well. From a strict energy standpoint, you'd be much better off just taking the natural gas and using that directly. Similarly with the natural gas that you're making from hydrolysis you're using electricity say from photovoltaic panels to dissociate hydrogen from oxygen, from water, takes some electrical current from the solar panel, runs it through water dissociate the oxygen from the hydrogen, then use the hydrogen to power a fuel cell and get electricity from that. Well each stage along the way you're losing energy. You're much better off from an energy standpoint simply to plugging your photovoltaic panel directly into whatever it is you're trying to run. The only advantage of hydrogen is a storage medium, that is it's only advantage. And the only reason it could possibly be of use to us is if it's a more effective or efficient storage medium than say a battery. The best way to think of hydrogen is as a fancy battery. And in order for hydrogen to function as a very effective battery it needs a huge infrastructure that we presently don't have. We need an infrastructure of storage. How do you store hydrogen in tanks? Well it difficult because the hydrogen atom, it's the simplest atom it has the characteristics of tending to make metals brittle. So if you have a metal storage tank it's not going to last long, and a certain percentage of the hydrogen is going to leak out the tank. Something like 2% per day which is not negligible of the hydrogen is going to leak through the walls of the tank every day. So there are a lot of technical problems that have to be solved in order for hydrogen to be of use in say powering automobiles. And do we have the necessary investment capital and not just monetary but also energy capital to get from here to an hydrogen economy? I don't think so and is there any cheese at the end of the tunnel in any case? I seriously doubt it.

Can we run airliners on hydrogen? Conceptually very large ones. Ones about 3 times the size of a 747 might be practical to run on hydrogen, planes any smaller than that really aren't because you have huge storage tanks just with the ratio of the size the aircraft to the size of the storage tanks. It would really only make sense with with very large planes. Are we likely to design and build huge airliners 3 times the size of the 747s to run on hydrogen given the fact that that hydrogen is likely to be extremely expensive, very unlikely I think. I think the hydrogen economy is simply a non-starter.

So what are the other alternatives? Natural gas. Well, here in North America natural gas extraction is is peaking even as we speak and we're seeing right now, we're talking in the later part of February, 2003, and we're seeing natural gas prices at historic highs as a result of depletion in the US and Canada and Mexico. And it's very difficult to transport natural gas from continent to continent, even though there's a lot of it say in the middle east. It's very difficult to transport that to the US, so natural gas is not going to be a very good substitute for oil.

Nuclear, well nuclear has a very low net energy yield to start with. It costs a tremendous amount not just in dollars but also in resources and materials to build nuclear power plants and then to de-commission them at the end of their lives is an extremely expensive process, and during their lifetimes they're producing nuclear waste which we haven't figured out what to do with. Investing more in nuclear energy would be a huge mistake for industrial societies. We would be making problems for ourselves and our children's children for 100s of generations into the future. Problems that I'm sure they would roundly curse us for, assuming they exist.

Coal, there is a great deal of coal left to be mined, but the stuff that is easy to get at is becoming scarcer and scarcer. The net energy profit ratio on coal is declining rapidly. Right now most of the the easy to get at coal is surface coal from strip mining and that's becoming more scarce. So what's left? Well, it's coal that's deep underground and coal mining is not a particularly attractive profession to get into. Most coal miners would rather have their children go into some other line of work and it involves not only hard work, but also skills, and most of those skills have been lost. There aren't that many coal mines in operation these days because most coal is being strip mined and so the skills, the equipment and the motivation for mining coal from underground are fast disappearing. In order to ramp up coal production dramatically to make up for peak oil extraction again would require not only investment but also would entail huge environmental consequences. Coal is nasty dirty stuff. There's just no getting around that and the process of extracting coal ruins land and the process of burning coal ruins air and water and forests through acid-rain. It's a form of energy production that has already resulted in huge environmental costs and the idea of ramping up up coal production is pretty much an acronym to anyone that has the knowledge and care about the natural world.

So what are the other possibilities? Well there are other unconventional sources of petroleum like materials, tar sands, heavy oil and the like and there are potentially huge amounts there but again the net energy profit from those unconventional forms of petroleum like materials is very, very low. For example in Canada about 200 thousand barrels a day are being produced in Alberta of non-conventional oil, but it takes about 2 barrels of oil in energy investment to produce 3 barrels of oil equivalent from those resources and again the environmental costs are horrendous and the process uses a tremendous amount of fresh water and also natural gas, both of which are in limited supply. So it's unlikely that we'll see unconventional petroleum reserves making up very much of the shortfall from conventional oil. And then there are the really exotic things like fusion, in which 10s of billions of dollars have already been invested and the fusion researches keep saying, well you know we're 50 years away from having a useful fusion reactor and that's what they were saying about 25 years ago, and that's what they're still saying now. It keeps receding toward the horizon the further we go. So fusion is not likely to be of any help to us. And then there are people that talk about really exotic forms like coal fusion, zero point energy. People who talk about the US government having secret energy programs stolen from space aliens and so on. Who knows! Could be, I mean the US operates all kinds of black programs off the books. research programs, mostly in weaponry, maybe they have something that they're not telling us. But the fact is, exactly 0% of our commercially produced energy comes from all these exotics put together, including fusion, coal fusion and zero point energy and all the rest of them. Exactly zeros coming from those sources right now. The idea that we can somehow research them, develop them and ramp them up to replace the immense amounts of energy we're getting right now from fossil fuels in any foreseeable kind of time frame is extraordinary wishful thinking and I don't think we should be putting our eggs in that basket either.

So at the end of the day, once you've examined all of these alternatives what you come up with at least what I come up with is essentially the recognition that the only solution to the depletion of oil and natural gas and somewhat later coal is going to be simply using a lot less energy per capita and in total as industrial societies. Again whether industrialism per say can persist in a much lower energy environment is an open question. I kinda doubt it but it sees to me we really have no choice. We have to find a way of changing not only our energy infrastructure toward this much lower energy environment, making that coordinated transition but also changing our economic system and our political system at the same time. It's a huge, huge undertaking. Are we up to it? Right now I'd have to say no. The only real hope that I see is for the general public to become aware of the situation that we're in and that's really why I've written my book and that's why I'm talking right now. I think the only hope is for us to bypass the conventional economic and political system and to spread this information as far and as wide as we can among the general public. So that the people themselves will be motivated to begin to undertake changes in their own personal lives and their own communities. Essentially bypassing the conventional political system.

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