Without oil, modern civilisation doesn’t work

The media often imposes such views. In 2011 when the federal government approved the Wheatstone gas project in W.A. TheAustralian burbled that thanks to this sell-off “Australia is poised to become a global energy superpower”, and implied that Chevron had done us a favour by accepting the deal. 

In Pantera Press's forthcoming debate book Big Australia Yes/No? (of which I did the No case) I wrote: My opponents claimWe will have enough food and water. They do not consider energy, without which neither food nor water can be supplied to large cities in a semi-desert continent. Yet Australia has recklessly sold off its energy resources…True, the 2010 Intergenerational Report Australia to 2050: future challenges, says on page 91 that our known reserves of natural gas would last about 70 years if we continue to use it at 2008 rates. But this is unlikely. After Peak Oil, gas may be used at far higher rates, and hence be gone in a fraction of the time.   

We can’t assume that Australia will keep a strategic reserve of its own gas to protect us from the world peak in gas. Some experts predict global gas supplies will peak as early as 2020, though others predict no decline before 2030. Studies of how civilisations fall, such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, show a common cause is that populations outgrow their resources.

Sure there are plenty of politicians and advisers who think there is no problem. Maybe by the time our gas runs out, we’ll have invented something else. Or we’ll have discovered another major field that some enlightened future government won’t sell off.

Yet we have a history of grossly over-estimating energy resources. The desire of exploration companies to boost their share-price by overstating a find combines with the tendency of journalists, once they have taken on a story about a find, to exaggerate its implications. We have often been assured we have centuries’ worth of a resource when in fact we have only decades.

The U.S. Professor of Statistics Albert Bartlett gives a withering account of this pattern in his article Arithmetic, Population and Energy. He points out that despite claims that the U.S. had “more than 500 years” of coal, and more recently that globally "coal will last us for at least 119 years," it seems coal may in fact be peaking now. Similar points are cogently made in Richard Heinberg's Forward to the recent report Will Natural Gas Fuel America in the 21st Century?