Some of you, and here I’m referring to those who read lefty-type blogs regularly, may have heard the “peak oil” meme, which is rapidly gaining currency.

Bascially, a man named Hubbard predicted in 1955 that the US oil production would peak in the 1970s (which it did) and that the rest of the world would follow (which it didn’t). The basic logic behind the theory isn’t hard to follow–it takes millions of times longer to produce oil than it takes to extract it, so at some point, the exhaustible supply will start being exhausted.

Anyway, while I was trolling the blogosphere for stuff to write about, I came across Eric Grumbles Before the Grave on DadaHead‘s blog, and therein a post about how peak oil is a fallacy. So I wrote a comment which turned out to be pretty long, probably because I spent so much time verifying the numbers on a spreadsheet (make of that what you will, but I’m bad at math and need a calculator to do simple artihmetic). To wit (green indicates those are Eric’s words):

First, the statement that “OPEC nations routinely understate the amount of oil in reserve in a given field” isn’t just false, but diametrically opposed to reality:

“OPEC oil production quotas are based upon the oil reserve figures provided by each member country. After this quota system was implemented in 1985, a sudden leap in world oil reserves occurred – Kuwait’s reserves jumped 41%, Saudi Arabia’s shot up 50%, a 100% jump in Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, and a 200% jump in Abu Dhabi and Dubai” —http://www.eco-action.org/dt/oilfut.html

Second, “did you know that there is another 2 trillion barrels of oil reserves in just Wyoming, Utah and Colorado? That number’s right. That is oil that is contained within shale in those states. It is more costly to extract than normal oil reserves.”

Thing is, USGS’s estimates aren’t necessarily correct (http://channel4.com/news/2004/10/week_5/26_oil.html), but more importantly, you’re misunderstanding the energy costs of oil extraction; it’s not just about the price but the amount of energy it takes to extract the oil. If a barrel of oil takes a barrel of oil’s worth of energy to produce, the fields must be abandoned. Currently, shale wastes about 40% of its energy being extracted, transported and refined. The hope is that technological refinements will lower this number, which may well be true, but the deeper you mine, the more energy it requires.

“Assuming that the oil companies can get the environmental go ahead, expect to see shale oil production beginning very soon.”

Too late–shale oil has been in production for a long time. Leaving aside the Pennsylvania “rock oil” fields where Rockefeller made his first million, Estonia is the world’s largest producer of shale, followed by Russia, Brazil, Venezuela and China. (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Oil-shale) The problem is that not only is it monetarily expensive and energy intensive to extract, but environmentally dangerous. It combines strip-mining with tons of carcinogenic “waste rock” produced as a by-product.

Third, and most importantly, “peak oil” is about the impact rising prices will have, not that the oil wells will run dry in twenty years. Consider that Americans consume about 24.4 barrels per capita annually, compared with 4.4 barrels per capita in China (with 1.3 billion people) and about 2.1 barrels per capita in India (1.08 billion). When industrialization finally has its way with these countries (China’s oil demands are growing an estimated 12% per year right now, which would put them at about half of our per capita levels [in the next twenty years]), production will likely by outpaced by demand.

Peak oil theorists (not that I am necessarily one) are fully aware of the Athabasca and Orinoco “unconventional oil” deposits–you’re not bringing anything new to their attention. Due dilligence, Eric, due dilligence.

Here’s what I left out: it doesn’t matter if the math or even the amount of unproven reserves is wrong, the larger benefit of memes like “peak oil” is to scare us straight.

Consider the “Y2K” phenomenon. Remember when there was all this hysteria about four-digit years and two-digit years and all this horrible stuff was supposed to happen because of computer foul-ups? And then when 2000 rolled around, it looked like nothing happened and it was so anti-climactic? Well, something did happen–all that talk about impeding doom led to huge investments (and lots of employment) in making sure nothing happened–and it worked! All those lines of COBOL code got fixed,due in no small part to what I can delicately call “awareness raising,” some of it by lunatic survivalists, but much of it from sober computer scientists who figured out that this was a fixable problem if only the people in charge paid attention.

How about the ozone layer? Remember when there was all this talk of ozone depletion and aerosol cans? It prompted an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and lo and behold, after more than ten years of banning aerosol and other measures, the ozone layer is getting healthier and the hole is starting to shrink. I’m sure anti-environmentalists would have said that it proves there was never a problem in the first place, if the “shrinking ozone hole” story had gotten more press.

But we know that judiciously applied scare tactics do, amazingly, make a difference. So even if peak oil isn’t exactly right, we could do a hell of a lot worse than letting it scare us into cleaner energy production. Because one thing that you won’t hear from sand-oil extractors is how much worse for the environment “unconventional oil” is to produce than the “light, sweet crude” bubbling up in Saudi Arabia right now.

Read more about unconventional oil extraction here.