@BerriesOnTop
You are conflating two things. One is the investment to extract fossil fuels. No one is running out of oil, natural gas or coal (or uranium for that matter). But extraction and processing needs a level of investment that hasn’t come through because of political reasons (and the big funds horrendous ESG strategies). Big oil just came through several difficult years due to the lack of demand during Covid (and the price war between Saudi and Russia). And China has the coal, but again there was a crunch for political reasons, not for supply reasons.
You’ve mentioned peak oil, but your third sentence shows that you don’t actually know what it is.
No one is going to “run out of oil”. That’s not what it means at all. What it does mean is hitting a production peak as all available efforts to increase output fail. Like has been happening since 2018, where investment with a high price market was doing well after the low points of the 2014 slump caused by the fracking market being attacked by OPEC+.
Using Rystad Energy data, you can see in the first figure attached, that out of all oil producing nations, only 23 have produced more than they were doing in 2017, while 65 have lost production regardless of investment, some quite catastrophically. In fact, since the 2018 peak, they are now a combined 5 Mbpd below it and over 7 Mbpd from their combined all time high peaks. Sixty percent of all oil production comes from the 23 gainers in this scenario.
And your ESG bogeyman isn’t the blame. This is simple geology. Has been for decades.
www.offshore-energy.biz/oil-gas-discoveries-in-2021-to-hit-lowest-level-in-75-years-rystad-says/
Remember, oil was doing gangbusters until 2020, then an unsteady 2021, but they’ve been well above average price ranges of late the past twelve months. And yet, nothing has radically changed. Because this was the state of things before the pandemic. It isn’t ESG or COVID that has caused this at all.
China indeed has the coal, as does Russia. Thing is, they don’t want to go back to a state where they literally had several thousand people die per day because of smog. Another poster mentioned particulate health matters. Apparently you’re okay with breathing toxic air. I’m not.
As for nuclear, the reason we don't have more is because it's not cost economical without massive gov't subsidies. And if we did have the number of reactors needed to replace all FF produced energy, we'd be running seriously short of fissile material within a short time too. Thorium may extend that, but doesn't drastically change the final outcome even if it worked.
Natural gas is the least dirty of the two and also the most expensive to transport without pipelines to local users, but oil is basically the premier energy source and coal is getting a resurgence because idiots like Merkel went all in on the Energiewende, or they railed against nuclear. At the end of the day, fossil fuels power the world.
But they are getting more expensive. There are no more oil deposits at $10/bbl. Those barrels have been used. All the cheap energy has gone. Exxon just made a discovery literally today in Guyana, a finding of 11 billion barrels, or less than a third of a year’s global usage. Not that that matters, given it will only be able to output at under 1 Mbpd, akin to getting the Euromillions winning ticket, but only being able to withdraw £100 a day. Useless.
Now that Big Oil has record profits that should be plowed back into extraction and refinement—and would be, if not for politicians wanting to place windfall taxes that are not going to get to the people who need money to heat their homes or turn on the lights.
Except they’re not doing that. There’s too much volatility. There’s a reason no one is building refineries, and it’s because it’s not cost economic. The price they need to charge is higher than the consumer is willing to buy as the gap has narrowed over the last few years. There is zero reason to invest in such ventures, hence dividend payouts instead.
I cannot believe you do not value modern civilisation—without it hundreds of millions of people could die due to lack of food and heating, even more would die because they can no longer protect themselves from climate-related disasters.
People like you need to be placed very very far from the levers of power. Or maybe you can just destroy Europe … as a cautionary tale.
Firstly, I never said any such thing. I said civilisation was a mistake, not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s awesome that I can get a hot shower whenever I want and watch global events from a small black mirror in the palm of my hand.
But I’m also not a moron who thinks infinity exists outside of human stupidity. Your fossil fuels will run out, sooner than you think, and even if they didn’t, other things will certainly produce the Liebig minimum: the point where the limiting factor stopping economic growth becomes very evident.
One of those outside of other minerals or water or food, is simply the energy cost of energy. The oil industry now consumer 15.5% of all net energy produced. Net energy is the only reason any kind of civilisation can exist. Subsistence farming did not produce much excessive wealth outside of the elites.
www.researchgate.net/publication/354885905_Peak_oil_and_the_low-carbon_energy_transition_A_net-energy_perspective
To quote the authors:
“… either the global energy transition takes place quickly enough, or we risk a worsening of climate change, a historical and long-term recession due to energy deficits (at least for some regions of the globe), or a combination of several of these problems.”
I’m guessing you’ve not cracked open any ecology textbooks. Are you aware of Matthew Island? You see, while you can sit there and say I’m condemning people to a less prosperous life, I’m here trying to stop people like you from putting their foot on the accelerator when all signs point to a cliff.
You either willingly want to destroy the world through climate change by embracing the most energy dense and most polluting sources of said energy, or you don’t even understand a thing about thermodynamics and what overshoot is.