Oil, Oil, Everywhere

Okay, that should be a different title. Oil is becoming increasingly scarce, and within a decade or so the majority of the earth's oil will be coming from the Persian Gulf. Not exactly a great turn of events, for those of us who aren't fond of the bin Laden or Saud families. Of course, this issue is tied up with the problem of Peak Oil in general.

On that note, Kevin Drum at Political Animal has written a 5 part series on Peak Oil that's pretty good, if you haven't encountered Peak Oil before. He makes two good points, and one really bad one. The two good points are that a) Peak Oil is a geological problem, not an economic or technological one. We can't drill our way out of this. And b) Long before we hit the oil Peak, we're going to have to face the reality that our demand has finally caught up with supply, with an industrializing China and India. This means that the market is going to be tight for a long time to come, even if oil doesn't peak for another 20 years (as in the Department of Energy estimate.)

However, the part of Kevin's series I take issue with is when he comes to "how to deal with peak oil", and suggests further exploration as well as conservation. I can only assume that Kevin was trying to maintain the typically liberal "balance", because otherwise he wouldn't have bothered. Even tiny, tiny improvements in fuel efficiency would make any further oil exploration (such as ANWR) totally unnecessary. When we begin to face reality and start really cutting back on our oil use, ANWR becomes totally ridiculous. The Rocky Mountain Institute dealt with this best. It's not that it's dirty or dangerous (though it is that) but simply that ANWR becomes uneconomical if people start conserving fuel in any real way.

On top of all that, the alternatives to oil are becoming more and more apparent every day, if you know where to look. Just yesterday, I got two encouraging pieces of mail in my RSS:

• A british company has built a new type of electric motor which delivers 4 times as much horsepower as it's nearest competitor. This would be great for a battery-electric car, but would also work for hybrids and fuel-cell cars, because they'll all need a way to turn electrical energy in to motion.

• Also, an article in Science says that there may be a new way to create biodiesel from agricultural waste. Given that we'll still likely need to move cargo over roads or rail in the future, some kind of liquid fuel is going to be necessary. Biodiesel, if it can be produced cheaply enough (and in sufficient quantity) could plug that gap.

I'd just like to repeat that I got these two very encouraging pieces of news in one day. Barely a week goes by where I don't find a new piece of encouraging news, which is a nice contrast to the news from say, Iraq.

I think we're beginning to see the signs of an important trend - the increasing affordability and useability of biofuels, with the possibility (in many cases) of reducing or replacing oil use. Interestingly, this is likely to be a far larger "solar" economy than any possible amount of panels on roofs. I believe the statistic is that Rhode Island (that agricultural behemoth) collects more solar energy on it's farmland than the entire human species currently uses, in terms of kilowatts. So if the US were able to divert it's crop waste to fuel production, that's a truly gigantic energy source to tap. For the third world, it points to a much cheaper source of renewable energy than is otherwise available. Certainly, ethanol, methanol and biodiesel lend themselves more readily to the third world than photovoltaics - internal-combustion engines aren't exactly high-tech, regardless of the fuel.

Now, when you combine biofuels, wind, solar, and maybe some small-scale hydroelectric, then things get really interesting...