The supply of oil that has supported global transportation, economies and even food distribution for the past century will soon be unable to match ever-increasing demand, author and professor Richard Heinberg told a crowd at the Eugene Hilton on Tuesday night.
Heinberg is a professor at New College of California, a small, private liberal arts school with campuses in San Francisco and Santa Rosa. He studies Peak Oil, the concept that petroleum is a finite resource and that production of it will eventually reach a peak and then decline severely.
Earth’s population has grown from 1 billion in the early 1800s to 6.5 billion today, which Heinberg attributes to the use of oil to transport resources from areas where they are abundant to areas where they are scarce.
Heinberg compared this to the growth of yeast in a sugar solution. At first the yeast feast on the sugar and proliferate abundantly, but when the sugar runs out, the yeast get poisoned by their own waste products and die off. This process is reliably used in the manufacturing of alcohol.
“So this raises an important question,” Heinberg said, switching to an overhead that read, “Are people smarter than yeast?”
Signs of oil’s decline are already apparent in the U.S., Heinberg said. In 1950, the U.S. was the world’s foremost oil producer and exporter, but today the U.S. is the world’s foremost oil importer. Virtually no new oil is being discovered in the lower 48 states, and most of the oil there has already been extracted, Heinberg added.
“If this happened to the U.S., it stands to reason it’s going to happen to the rest of the world at some point,” Heinberg said.
While it can’t be predicted exactly when Peak Oil will occur, Heinberg said it is not a distant concern.
“Many analysts are zeroing in on the next five years as the point where this is going to happen,” Heinberg said.
The world currently uses about 84 million barrels of oil per day. Citing a 2005 study in the Petroleum Review, Heinberg said an additional 30 million barrels per day of production capacity will be needed to offset depletion by 2010, but that the existence of only 16.5 million can be predicted.
Heinberg also cited a 2005 report by Robert Hirsch that the U.S. Department of Energy commissioned. Hirsch’s report concluded that Peak Oil is inevitable and will have serious consequences, and that intensive efforts to mitigate the consequences must begin two decades in advance.
While the technology exists to make cars that get 100 miles per gallon of gas, U.S. companies are not making those cars presently and would probably require government assistance to change their manufacturing, Heinberg said. According to the Hirsch report, it would take 10 to 15 years to replace even half of the cars in the U.S.
Heinberg said he is working on a book about oil depletion protocol. This proposal, initially developed by Irish geologist Colin J. Campbell, holds that no country shall produce oil above its current depletion rate and each country importing oil shall reduce its imports to the world depletion rate.
“There’s a pretty good argument to be made and we hope to be making it to the nations of the world over the next several months,” Heinberg said.
Throughout his speech, Heinberg emphasized the role of communities and volunteer groups in dealing with Peak Oil, adding that, as in Hurricane Katrina, federal response to the problem will probably not be sufficient.
“Your community can prepare rather than waiting for the feces to hit the rotary oscillator,” Heinberg said.
Ways to prepare, Heinberg said, include designing communities where people can walk to get what they need, keeping local farmers in business and manufacturing goods locally rather than importing.
“We just don’t have people in our communities who make clothes and shoes and toilet seats and all the other things we need any more, and we’re going to have to change that,” Heinberg said.
Eugene Mayor Kitty Piercy introduced Heinberg to the crowd.
“You know, when you look out here – and we even had to turn people away – it just makes you proud to be mayor of Eugene,” Piercy said.
University senior instructor of physics Stan Micklavzina said he saw about 650 people at the lecture, with 650 more turned away because of lack of space.
Heinberg gave a similar speech in Micklavzina’s PHYS 162: Solar and Renewable Energy class Wednesday morning. Micklavzina said he’s used Heinberg’s books in his class previously and that Heinberg’s message fits well with the topic of the class.
Sophomore journalism major Mike Perrault said he was impressed by the “sense of doom” conveyed in the lecture.
“Whatever we do, everything’s going to be depleted in the next 50 years,” Perrault observed.
“I think it’s a very well-informed opinion on the state of energy; one that I might not agree with, but one that we’ll need to know about,” said senior mathematics major Steve Crane, adding that he doesn’t think the current state of oil is as dire as Heinberg said.
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