Lots of motorists are ticked off that refinery outages in California have pushed the price of gasoline to $2.20 or more a gallon. But if they understood the real cloud hanging over our energy future, their anger would rightly give way to a different emotion: fear.
People, of course, have heard all this before, and many dismiss it as Chicken Little rhetoric. The prospect of running out of oil is always a vague threat in the distance; it sounds bad, but it never seems to get any closer to becoming reality.
Despite price run-ups, like the one Californians are now experiencing, "people are told there is plenty of oil around," notes David Goodstein, a physics professor and vice provost of Caltech in Pasadena. "They don't perceive a crisis."
This time, though, Goodstein believes they well should.
In a new book called "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" (W.W. Norton), Goodstein looks at the history of oil exploration and finds that 2 trillion barrels is as high as proven reserves have ever gotten.
We have run through almost half of that total today, he says, and are no longer replacing all that we consume through new discoveries and development.
"The world," Goodstein writes, "will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil."
In November, the International Energy Agency projected that it would cost about $16 trillion to meet projected energy demand during the next 20 years -- far more than had been spent in previous decades. Indeed, big investments will be needed even to maintain, much less increase, output from places such as Saudi Arabia.
"When producing energy becomes extremely capital intensive or energy intensive -- using more energy in processes like liquefying natural gas to get less out -- you're already fighting a losing game," Goodstein says.
"Civilization as we know it will not survive," he adds, in an unabashedly dire tone, "unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels."
The challenge -- and it's no small one -- is to create a sufficient amount of carbon-free fuel from solar energy or nuclear power.
One of Goodstein's Caltech colleagues, chemistry professor Nathan S. Lewis, has calculated the total energy used in the world today, coming up with a grand total of 13 trillion watts consumed annually. That figure, he expects, will rise to 28 trillion watts in the next 40 years or so as the world's population increases from 6 billion to 10 billion.
