Year: 2019

The controversial theory of Peak Oil

Whatever your feelings about the cost of oil, the means of obtaining it, or the effect that burning it has on the environment, one thing’s for sure: there’s a finite amount of it, so sooner or later it has to run out. At least, I hope so, because once all the oil’s gone, perhaps the planet will finally have a fighting chance against global warming. Many people, however, would take a decidedly negative view of the impending disappearance of the world’s oil reserves for all the obvious reasons. Either way, just how long will the oil last?

In 1956, a geophysicist named Marion King Hubbert developed a theory to predict future oil production. He assumed that for any given oil field, production follows a bell curve. After the well’s discovery, production quickly ramps up as new wells are added. But eventually, as the oil is drained from the underground reservoirs, the production rate hits a peak after which it begins to decline, eventually returning to zero. And what is true of an individual oil field should, Hubbert reasoned, be true for the entire planet as well. Using these assumptions and the best data he had available at the time, he plotted historical oil production on a curve and estimated that oil production in the United States would peak by 1970, and worldwide by the mid-2000s. The moment at which global oil production peaks came to be known as Peak Oil (or Hubbert’s Peak), while the overall theory that production of oil (or other products based on non-renewable natural resources) follows a bell curve in this way was called the Hubbert Peak Theory. After that time, there would of course still be plenty of oil, but the production rate would drop at about the same rate it rose, until eventually it was all gone.

Peak Performance

So now, over 60 years later, how did those predictions work out? Within the United States, at least, Hubbert’s prediction seemed for a while to have been off by just a year, as domestic oil production did indeed peak in 1971. But after several decades of decline, the number started rising again, and in 2018, U.S. oil production reached an all-time high. That false peak was due, in part, to the development of new techniques for extracting previously unreachable oil (such as hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, and the exploitation of oil sands). Presumably, if Hubbert had access to current data and knowledge of the latest technologies, he’d have had to revise his date forward considerably.

What’s true in the United States also goes for worldwide oil production. Although it appeared for a while that we had in fact already passed the peak worldwide—perhaps in 2004 or 2005—newer estimates put the peak far in the future, though experts are seriously divided as to how far. For every apologist of Peak Oil there’s also a naysayer, and the arguments against the theory are both wide-ranging and passionate.

Numerous researchers have taken exception to Hubbert’s math as well as his fundamental assumptions. To some extent, it appears that he started with a theory and tried to come up with data to support it, rather than the other way around. There’s no particular reason to assume, a priori, that oil production should follow a bell curve. It could have any number of dips and spikes, for many different reasons, over a long period of time; the aforementioned development of new extraction techniques is a case in point. Another type of claim is that anyone who buys into Peak Oil must have an agenda, either political or financial in nature; oil simply can’t, mustn’t, and won’t disappear any time soon. In any case, most critics admit that yes, there must logically be a worldwide peak in oil production eventually—with an end to oil production some time long after that—but that whenever this happens, it will be so far in the future as to make worrying now seem silly.

Increasingly, commentators have noted another factor: demand. Hubbert didn’t envision decreasing demand for oil, but if that occurred, then ipso facto, production would also decrease. Indeed, it looks increasingly likely that within our lifetimes, that will happen—even if peak production capacity has not occurred. In other words, “peak” doesn’t necessarily mean what Hubbert thought it meant.

Just Add Oil

But the most surprising criticism of Peak Oil is based on the claim that Earth can never run out of oil, because it simply keeps manufacturing more. We all learned in school that oil is a fossil fuel, created over many millennia by heat and pressure acting on the remains of plants and animals that lived and died eons ago. Because all that biological matter hasn’t been regularly replenished, once the planet’s supply of fossil fuel is gone, it’s gone. But according to supporters of the abiogenic petroleum origin hypothesis, oil never came from biological matter at all. It’s produced within the Earth’s crust and mantle by heat and pressure acting on ordinary and plentiful substances such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane. And what’s more, the production of new oil has never stopped: look in the right places in the right ways, and you’ll see oil reservoirs being replenished. This hypothesis first appeared in the 1870s, but it has never had much traction outside Russia and the Ukraine. Still, that hasn’t stopped Peak Oil opponents from using it to bolster their position.

Well, what if oil did run out—and what if that happened within, say, the next few decades? Once again, the reactions to this scenario vary dramatically. Some predict it will lead to a collapse of the worldwide economy, mass starvation, and perhaps even the end of the human race. Most pundits say it won’t be that bad; between now and then, we’ll develop the necessary technology to replace oil with something else for large-scale applications such as transportation; given the rapid progress in electric vehicles, that seems entirely plausible. And in between are survivalists who fear the worst but are figuring out how to live petroleum-free lives when the day comes.

Peak-a-Boo

What I find most striking about this entire debate is its emotional intensity. Websites both pro and con often consist of extremely long, sometimes boring, and often inscrutable rants accusing the other camp of all sorts of diabolical motives, along with insults and name-calling a-plenty. And all this over a theory that might never be proven one way or another—we could always end up finding massive, unexpected oil reserves (or easy ways of getting at more of the existing oil) far in the future, creating an entirely new production curve. Meanwhile, we already have the technology to generate our own oil from garbage, an infinitely renewable resource.

In short, if you want to worry about the price of oil, fine. If you want to worry about global warming, fine. I heartily support any and all efforts to develop alternative energy sources, conserve fuel, and protect the environment. But I can’t bring myself to worry about running out of oil. Either it will happen or it won’t, and if it does, it’ll be either sooner or later. But my money is on much later, by which time I fully expect the world will have either gotten over its oil dependence for other reasons or destroyed itself in any of several increasingly plausible ways. Either way: nothing to worry about.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on July 17, 2006.

A little piece of Spain in France

As an American, I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed at my limited grasp of foreign languages. I have friends in Europe who speak four or five languages fairly fluently, and they rightly boggle when they hear that most Americans are monolingual. But for complicated historical, cultural, and political reasons, that’s just the way things turned out. However, I did take French classes in high school (and picked up quite a bit more during the years I lived in France), studied linguistics as a grad student, and picked up a handful of phrases in half a dozen other languages here and there, all of which probably makes me slightly less clueless as a tourist than many of my compatriots. I usually know at least enough to recognize which language I’m listening to. Years ago while driving through Europe, we stopped at a gas station in Austria near the Italian border, and when we asked for directions to a certain castle, the clerk’s response included French, German, and Italian words in the same sentence. I got the general drift of what he was saying, but I marveled at how intertwingled the languages had become in this border region.

All sorts of interesting things happen around international borders, especially when those borders are not clearly defined. While looking at France and Spain in an actual printed atlas (remember those?), I saw something I’d never noticed before: a tiny region in southern France surrounded by what appeared to be an international border, but without any label whatsoever to tell me what it was. Andorra, a small country that straddles the border between France and Spain, is nearby, but this little blip was farther east in the Pyrénées and clearly something different. The light bulb went on shortly thereafter when I was reviewing my list of suggested topics readers had sent in: someone wanted to see an article about a curious place called Llívia. That was the blip! Due to a series of weird historical, geographical, and linguistic flukes, an entire Spanish town ended up completely within the borders of France. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

All Around Town

Officially, Llívia is considered a Spanish enclave within France. It’s a small town of about 5 square miles (13 sq km), situated less than a mile (about 1km) from the Spanish border and connected to the rest of Spain by a single, small road. The town’s official website lists its current population as 1,456, though I’ve seen considerably lower and higher numbers. Whatever Llívia’s population may be, it’s historically important that it be considered a town rather than a village.

Llívia was a strategically important area as far back as the time of the Roman empire, and was considered the capital of the region known as Cerdanya, which includes portions of modern-day France and Spain. But it wasn’t until 1528 that Roman Emperor Charles V (known in Spain as Carlos I) formally designated Llívia a town—apparently more for reasons of history than of population. This decision was to prove momentous a little more than a century later, when France and Spain signed the Treaty of the Pyrénées and thus settled the dispute over the border between the two countries that had been the cause of decades of war. According to the terms of the treaty, the border was to run primarily along the main crest of the Pyrénées, and all villages north of that line were to become part of France. Spain insisted that, according to the letter of the law, Llívia must be excluded from French rule because it was not a village but a town—and that’s why Spain continued to control a parcel of land entirely inside France.

Llivid About That Border

In 1868, the border between the two countries was finally surveyed and delimited explicitly with a series of bordermarkers, numbering in the hundreds, including 45 just for Llívia. Most of these markers are simple chunks of stone, numbered consecutively and marked with “LL” on the Llívian side and initials representing the nearest French village on the French side; a few markers were made by carving numbers and letters into existing rocks. Locating and photographing these markers with the aid of maps or GPS has become a common tourist pastime.

Despite the seemingly conclusive nature of the bordermarkers, and despite the fact that Llívia is just a stone’s throw from the Spanish border, the two countries have tangled over the details of the border numerous times, with little pieces of land going back and forth according to the terms of the most recent lawsuit. One conflict involved the short road connecting Llívia to the rest of Spain: it was supposed to be neutral, but a certain French road crossed it. Each country felt its citizens should have right of way at the intersection, and ignored the other’s stop signs. Eventually an overpass had to be built, at Spain’s expense, to make the issue moot. At another, smaller intersection, a similar conflict was resolved by constructing a roundabout.

Que Parla el Català?

Good information about Llívia in English is hard to come by, though you can find some coverage on the web in French and even Dutch. When I first visited Llívia’s official website, though, I assumed it would be in Spanish. The text had a familiar look to it, but some of the words appeared to be Spanish while others appeared to be French. It took me a while to figure out that I was actually looking at neither Spanish nor French, but rather Catalan, one of the three official languages of the region of Spain known as Catalonia. Catalonia, which also encompasses Barcelona, is one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities, with its own government and police force and considerable latitude to function, in many respects, independently of the nation as a whole. Thus, culturally speaking, Llívia is more of a Catalonian enclave than a Spanish enclave. (Times have changed since that first visit, by the way—the website is now also available in English, French, and yes, Spanish.) There’s now a popular movement pushing for Catalonian independence from Spain, which—if it ever takes off—could make Llívia’s status ambiguous once again.

Modern Llívia is scenic and quaint, known regionally for its annual music festival in August and a museum that contains Europe’s oldest pharmacy. You can stay in a three-star hotel and, during the colder months, enjoy good skiing nearby. If you happen to be passing through the Pyrénées, be sure not to miss it. (Helpful hint: going north, take the first right at Andorra and follow the signs…assuming you can figure out what language they’re in.)

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 12, 2006.