Ukraine and Energy Transformation

Believers like to say “God moves in mysterious ways.” I’m not much of a believer, but that saying did pop into my head recently. For over half a century, we Americans (and everyone else) have pontificated, postured and procrastinated about oil running out and global warming. Now Vladimir Grozny’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine may finally get us actually to do something about them.

The huge recent surge in oil and gasoline prices—at the mere suggestion of a boycott of Russian oil—is a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Some time this century, oil will run out globally. When it does, price surges like those we are now suffering will come on steroids. But they will be different: they will come in waves, and they will be permanent, not temporary. As oil runs out globally, those regions and nations that still depend on it will compete against one another for a rapidly dwindling supply. Other wars, for resources, may result.

Oil wells don’t come with little gauges telling how much oil is left in the reserve below. They can, and they do, run low and run dry unexpectedly. This is especially true for fracked oil, which is extracted, under high pressure, from an impossibly complex maze of underground cracks, fissures and tiny pools.

Petrostates like Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela own unusually big underground pools. In theory, they could constantly measure their remaining reserves by seismic and other means. But in practice they don’t. Why bother doing that, when it would cost money, take lots of time, and distract scientists and engineers from finding yet more oil, and you’ve already got the world’s biggest reserves anyway?

Of course they measured reserves when they started drilling, mostly decades ago. If they do any new reserve accounting today, they simply subtract cumulative production from their original reserve estimates and rely on that. (Accountants can do that, so they don’t have to bother the scientists or engineers.) Unfortunately, this shortcut doesn’t account for: (1) original error; (2) the vast improvement of reserve-measuring technology in ensuing decades; or (3) something unknown happening underground, which lets the oil slowly seep away. And bear in mind that all OPEC members have political and financial incentives to exaggerate the size of their reserves, because their bargaining power in OPEC depends on it.

So how quickly is oil really running out? In 2014, I made numerical estimates based on then-current known (and reported) reserves and then-current global consumption rates. Anyone can check my math with today’s figures; it’s not calculus, nor even algebra; it’s mostly arithmetic. Following is my original table, showing global-reserve lifetimes under various assumptions, but updated to account for the fact that eight years of consumption have gone by since then:

Working Life of All 2013 Global Oil Reserves Under Various Assumptions
(Based on 2013 global consumption, compounded at 1% annual increase)

Assumption	Total Global Reserves (Trillion barrels)	Remaining Life of Reserves after 2022 (years, rounded)
OPEC’s figures for Non-OPEC reserves are 50% low	1.774	35
All OPEC’s reserve figures are accurate and 100% recoverable	1.49	29
OPEC’s reserve figures for OPEC are 40% high or 60% recoverable	1.008	19
OPEC’s reserve figures for OPEC are 70% high or 30% recoverable	0.646	10

NOTE: These reserve-life estimates are probably at least 10% high because they are based on a 2013 global consumption estimate of 90.376 million barrels a day, while our own Energy Information Administration projects global consumption as over 100 million barrels a day for 2022.

These numbers assume that all non-OPEC oil reserves, as estimated by OPEC in 2013, are 100% recoverable. They speak for themselves.

Is using 2014 numbers now crazy? Probably not. I haven’t taken the trouble of collecting news reports of all new oil discoveries since then. But I don’t think I really need to. At a global consumption rate of 100 million barrels a day, a billion-barrel discovery would forestall run-out for ten days. If you were a condemned man on Death Row, and the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for 10 days, how much would you rejoice?

Bear in mind that a whole year’s stay of execution would require a discovery of a previously unknown reserves of 36.5 billion barrels. A ten-year reprieve would require 365 billion barrels, a over third of a trillion barrels. How many discoveries like that have you read about in the last eight years? (I don’t recall any.)

When the end comes, it will come suddenly, in months, not years. Why? Because the big producers have those huge, shallow, underground pools of oil. When they run dry, they’ll run dry suddenly, just like your car’s own gas tank. There won’t be any way to pump them for more oil, like a fracked well. And even if there is, it’ll be expensive and take time.

Think your nation’s entire industrial infrastructure will have time to adapt? Think your family will? And what will we all do with all those suddenly useless “stranded” assets: drilling rigs, oil pipelines, oil tankers, oil refineries, and gas stations, not to mention all the cars, trucks and buses that run only on gasoline?

That’s why what’s going on with gas prices right now is a good dress rehearsal for our species’ future if we don’t wise up. As the ancient Greeks used to say: “the suffered is the learned.”

To avoid prolonging this essay, I’ll make just one more point. It’s about what engineers call “positive feedback,” and what journalists call “a tipping point.” There are several known mechanisms of positive feedback in global warming, which I’ve discussed in several essays (the best are this one for an overview, and this earlier one with more detail). Suffice it to say that positive feedback, in the same time frame for oil running out, could render our Earth’s present climate, weather, sea levels and coastlines unrecognizable. Scientists suspect this is already happening, but they can’t say exactly when and how fast, because the most important underlying phenomena (permafrost melt, dissociation of deep-sea methane hydrates, and ice-shelf collapse) are hard to study and measure.

So if you think that what Putin’s vile war is bringing your nation and your family is an economic apocalypse, think again. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. If Putin’s damned war jogs us all to get serious about using solar, wind and nuclear energy, we might just avoid a far greater and more global apocalypse by the skin of our teeth. Give the Devil his due (but don’t buy his oil).


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