Micro, Macro and Me

Summary: We will not run out of oil. But we will run out of cheap oil and the oil "production" will drop because of this. It is getting more expensive to extract oil over time and eventually oil will be too expensive to extract. In the last blog post, I discussed how much oil we have, how much "new" oil we find and how much oil we consume. To understand this, it is essential to understand the economy of oil and the theory of peak-oil . Economy of Oil - EROI When one decides whether or not to extract oil from an oil field, one will consider how much effort is needed and how much returns one can expect. The specific energy of crude oil is 11.6 kWh per kg and that is the upper limit of the efforts one would put in to get oil - it would be much more energy efficient to take a nap than to spend 12 kWh of energy to get 11.6 kWh of energy. One of the first towers of the Spindletop oil field in the early 20th century . Initially, it is easy to extract oil (hig...

When I digged into the numbers for this blog post, I found some of my misunderstandings about our relation to oil: Renewable energy is replacing fossile fuels: False Globally, the share of renewables increased by 14% between 2016 and 2017 (an increase of almost 70 Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalents). The global share of fossile fuels decreased slightly from 85,5% to 85,18%. But the total supply of fossile fuels increased by almost 180 MTOe. Fossile fuels is growing more than twice as much as renewables! This is a school-book example of why it is important to distinguish absolute increases from percent-wise increases. Sweden has phased out fossile fuels and is a role model for the world : False. Sweden imports some 10 million tonnes of oil per year - one tonne per person. The global consumption is 4.5 billion tonnes per year -  600 kg per year and person. Nope. Looking at the oil reserves, this is bad news. I'll start discussing why without mentioning Global Warming in th...