On Treehugger Lloyd Alter suspects the oil industry won’t be disappearing just yet, despite the claims of some industry watchers on the green side of things:
Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.
Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.
We wrote post after post about Hubbert’s Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are “in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak.”
Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became “a punchline rather than a visionary.” And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn’t talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.
In this very different type of forecast, oil production doesn’t necessarily begin to decline at a particular point. But our need for it does. And it’s not just a theory: Experts on all sides of the issue say that it’s really coming. At some point over the next 25 years, a number of cultural, political, and technological factors will combine to slake our global thirst for this once most essential of fossil fuels. After decades spent planning for scarcity, oil companies are now busily preparing for something that they never saw coming: their own marginalization.
To be fair, I thought the same thing two years ago, writing Sooner than you think? A prediction that electric cars will cause the next oil crisis. They don’t have to take over the market totally, just enough to tip supply of oil up over demand, like fracking did. But I suspect that the NRDC is being over-optimistic about oil company marginalization.
We wrote earlier about how the oil industry isn’t taking this lying down, and is seriously pivoting to plastic. They are investing US$180 billion to increase plastic production by 40 percent.
And, for Lloyd, this is a problem because we don’t recycle plastics in any substantial way. For the oil industry, that’s glorious news – new product going out the door. It seems to me that this may be a time for government to step in and say This material has to be recyclable and reusable or you can’t sell it. Of course, the screaming will be remarkable, both from industry and from the libertarians who think markets always automatically adjust, but it’s not going to happen without the managing entity – government – waving a hand.
People can be endlessly clever. It’s something worth remembering.
