Sandwichman got here throughout an interesting and disconcerting new dissertation, titled “Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Financial system of Oil Throughout the Renewable Power 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 gives as a result of the funding required for a nicely is 2 orders of magnitude lower than for exploiting a standard discipline and the payback time is far shorter. The draw back is that the associated fee per barrel of the oil is far greater. Till now unfastened financial coverage has buffered that value differential.
The strategic benefit of fracking, mixed with the volatility of oil costs over the previous 20 years and uncertainty about potential future authorities decarbonization insurance policies (what oil business 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 may sound like a great factor, what it implies is a full-blown vitality disaster occurring a lot sooner than any purported transition to renewable non-carbon vitality sources. I would not be stunned to see reactionary politicians and media agitate a “populist” motion to scapegoat “climate-woke” activists and scientists as saboteurs accountable for “cancelling” long-term funding in an affordable oil economic system.
I had forgotten the oil value 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 bear in mind my sense of awe on the time and dread that one thing actually, actually unhealthy 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 making an attempt to tell apart trigger from impact. Did the ultra-low put up 2008 crash low rates of interest by the way drive the following fracking growth? Or was particularly a fracking growth one of many core targets of the low rate of interest regime?
Whither “peak oil”? In line with Laherrère, Corridor, and Bentley in How a lot oil stays for the world to provide? (2022) “the top of low-cost oil” didn’t go away when the oil can was kicked down the street:
Our outcomes counsel that international 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 predicted to position rising strains on the worldwide economic system, exacerbated by the widely decrease vitality returns of the non-conventional oils and different liquids on which the worldwide economic system is more and more dependent.
If we add to traditional 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. Briefly, we overshot peak oil by a pair a long time with assistance from unfastened cash and tight oil, with somewhat extra assist from the Covid pandemic. These of us with a reminiscence longer than the information cycle could 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 as a consequence of document gasoline costs. Decrease demand for gasoline brings down fuel costs whereas greater rates of interest could discourage new funding in fracking posing the specter of an oil provide crunch a few years down the street.
The cartoon beneath illustrates the unfastened cash/tight oil — tight cash/peak oil dilemma:
