Peak oil inbound; watcha gunna do?

Considering oil is not a renewable resource in the human experience, peak oil — the point in which petroleum production peaks and forever declines — is a certainty. The question therefore is not whether it’s true or not but when we will reach it. Joseph Romm over at Salon makes the case that peak oil is rapidly approaching:

Massive, unsustainable consumption has more than peak oil doomsayers worried. In January, Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive officer of Royal Dutch/Shell, e-mailed his staff that the world will peak in conventional oil and gas within the decade. He wrote: “Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” It used to be unheard of for oil executives to talk about limits to oil production. Now it happens all the time.

John Hess, chairman of Hess Corp., a global oil and mineral exploration company, said recently, “An oil crisis is coming in the next 10 years. It’s not a matter of demand. It’s not a matter of supplies. It’s both.” In October, Christophe de Margerie, CEO of French oil company Total S.A., said that production of even 100 million barrels a day by 2030 will be “difficult.” In November, James Mulva, CEO of ConocoPhillips, the third biggest U.S. oil company, told a Wall Street conference: “I don’t think we are going to see the supply going over 100 million barrels a day … Where is all that going to come from?”

I have been slightly impressed with the oil industry as of late. They seem to have come around on peak oil and some are even conceding that global warming is fact. I think they see global warming as I do though, as a vehicle (excuse the pun) to pry us off of oil and onto their alternative fuel which presumably won’t require digging through third world hell-holes to access. Of course there’s one thing missing here: they don’t yet have an alternative to oil.

Setting that aside, we can decrease the amount of oil we use. Unfortunately, don’t seem to be making any progress in reducing our oil consumption. We’re still buying unnecessary SUVs, developing out instead of up in our cities, and building freeways under the banner of ‘public transportation.’ Seriously people, the writing is on the wall. Hell, even Bush’s Department of Energy gets it. Here’s a clip from their report on peak oil:

The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.