Analog SFF, January-February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Betrayed by his own body at every turn. He no longer knew who—or even what—he was, but that didn't matter to his genes. They didn't worry about existential angst, only existence.

  How many other people lay awake tonight, wondering who they were? Even the ones who were normal inside couldn't answer that question. All they could really say with any certainty was who they wanted to be.

  His erection reached full height. Elaine, with the unerring instinct of millennia of evolution, slid her hand up his thigh and murmured sleepily, “Hmm, what's this?"

  “I guess it's just me,” Robert said, and he rolled toward her instead of away.

  Copyright © 2006 Jerry Oltion

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Science Fact: After Gas: Are We Ready for the End of Oil?

  by Richard A. Lovett

  "Growth, growth, growth—that's all we've known ... World automobile production is doubling every 10 years; human population growth is like nothing that has happened in all of geologic history. The world will only tolerate so many doublings of anything—whether it's power plants or grasshoppers.”

  —M. King Hubbert, 1975[*]

  [* From a blog post by Ron Schuler, rsparlourtricks.blogspot.com/2005/10/m-king-hubbert.html, October 5, 2005]

  * * * *

  In 1956, an oil-company geologist named M. King Hubbert made a bold prediction. U.S. oil production outside of Alaska would peak in the early 1970s and decline forever after. In 2001, Princeton University geophysicist Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a former colleague of Hubbert's, took the analysis a step further, predicting that world production would do the same sometime between 2004 and 2009.[1] Three years later, in a lecture at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he asserted that the peak would come sooner rather than later. In fact, we may already be past the peak by the time you read this.[2]

  [Footnote 1: I reviewed his book, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage, for Analog in September 2002.]

  [Footnote 2: That lecture is expanded in a second book: Beyond Oil: the View from Hubbert's Peak, published in 2005.]

  Then, in his 2006 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush drew headlines by announcing that America is “addicted to oil” and that the time had come to do something about it. He pledged to invest in alternative energies (including ethanol and hydrogen fuels) and to reduce Middle Eastern oil imports by 75 percent by 2125. He also promised increased funding for alternative energy, including hydrogen-powered cars.

  In combination, these announcements raise two alarming questions: (1) Are we about to run out of oil? (2) What are we going to do about it if we are?

  Let's start with the “are we?"

  The short answer is “no.” We may run low, but not “out.” That's because as oil gets scarcer, price rises will force us to cut back. At least a modicum will remain in the ground for a long time.

  A better question is when we will be forced to cut back. Conventional wisdom says that we can figure out how much oil we have left by dividing the amount that remains by the annual rate of consumption, with fudge factors for anticipated growth, both in demand and supply. Right now the world has about a trillion barrels of known reserves and is using somewhere around 30 billion per year.[3] That sounds like a thirty-plus year supply, but to Hubbertians it's not. There comes a point, they say, when the oil gets harder and harder to pump out of the ground. Even if there's several more years’ supply there, we simply can't get it out fast enough.

  [Footnote 3: These are 2004 statistics. Many of the figures in this article are taken from Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy, by George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert, and G.K. Surya Prakash (2006), which devotes its first 100-plus pages to an extremely detailed compendium of facts, figures, and history. Current information is tabulated on the website of the federal Energy Information Agency, www.eia.doe.gov]

  To many people, this was Hubbert's primary contribution: the realization that the rate of extraction increases, peaks, and then declines, long before the oil is totally gone. In any given oil field, there's initially a lot of oil available, but the field is underdeveloped. Then come more wells and increased production—until yields begin to decline no matter how many technological improvements you make.

  All of that makes intuitive sense: There's “easy oil” and “hard oil,” and by definition, the easy oil comes out of the ground faster. But Hubbertians take it a step further and apply the same analysis to the entire world. Initially, there's a lot of oil available, but extraction techniques are crude. There's not much demand yet, either. Then as technologies adjust, demand soars, mass-production becomes feasible, and the rate of extraction skyrockets. Until, that is, you can no longer keep up.

  Hubbert asserted that this process more or less follows a bell curve. His reasoning was complex (one 1982 journal article covered 125 pages), but once you've said “bell curve,” you know that peak consumption comes at the middle, when you've used up half of the world's total endowment.

  Remember those trillion barrels of reserves? Well, we've already used 900 billion (a bit more by the time you read this), so if that's all there is, we're getting close to the midpoint. Once we get there, Hubbertian theory says, our oil-consuming lifestyle will change, like it or not. Worse, it may change pretty quickly. David Goodstein, vice provost at California Institute of Technology, estimates that if Hubbert's peak hits today, we'll slide down the other side of it so quickly that world oil production will be halved within a decade. Deffeyes projects a 90 percent decline by 2019. That doesn't give us a lot of time to adjust.

  “We have a civilization firmly rooted in a mathematically impossible promise of an endless supply of oil,” Goodstein said in late 2004. “The oil will run out. The only question is when."[4]

  [Footnote 4: For more, see his book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (2004).]

  * * * *

  Hubbertians vs. Cornucopians

  To say that all of this is controversial is like saying it sometimes rains in my home state of Oregon. Hubbertian theory is wildly controversial.

  Part of the controversy lies in the fact that to know what fraction of the world's oil we've used up, you have to know how much there once was. That includes undiscovered reserves, plus known ones from which new extraction techniques will improve our ability to wring the last drops.

  Ideally you'd do this with a careful geological survey of the entire world, adding up everything you find. Instead, you have to estimate.

  The estimates are all over the map. Most geologists believe there are at least a trillion barrels left. The U.S. Geological Survey thinks there are nearly a trillion more undiscovered barrels. By one estimate, we're at the midpoint now. By the other, we've got several more years—fifteen at present consumption rates, fewer if consumption continues to increase.[5]

  [Footnote 5: There is yet another controversy, of course, over whether there are oil fields which, for ecological reasons, we might not wish to drill. In the big picture, though, these don't amount to much. Even a 30-billion-barrel oil field (about four times larger than the U.S. Geological Survey's mid-range estimate for recoverable reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) would only shift the date of the midpoint by six months.]

  But if you believe in Hubbert's bell curve, there's another way of calculating the total: simply find the best-fit curve to historical levels of production. That not only tells you where we now are on the curve, but it also corresponds to a specific level of initial endowment. Doing that calculation gives us a number on the order of two trillion barrels: very close to the lower-end geological estimates.

  If this is correct, it means that technology and mammoth new discoveries aren't going to come charging to the rescue. That doesn't mean we won't find new oil, merely that it's going to show up in increasingly small pockets. “Ninety-four percent of the oil we're ever going to find is in fields that are already producing,” Deffeyes calculates.

  Scoffers argue that the ent
ire analysis is vastly oversimplified. To begin with, political and economic factors in oil-rich countries can cause the rate of exploration to be erratic, making it look as though there's less oil available than actually exists. “This isn't science; this is forecasting,” says Michael Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research, Inc., of Winchester, Massachusetts.

  It's comparable, he says, to trying to make money in the stock market by fitting curves to companies’ performance, without understanding anything about their industries. “I think people who gamble on the price going up and up are going to be very, very sorry,” he says.

  Others note that even today's best extraction techniques leave half the oil in the ground. We can buy a lot of time if we can figure out a way to get the other half.

  Deffeyes counters that the world hasn't seen a major new oil discovery in three decades. (As this article was going to press, a new find was announced deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico. At 15 billion barrels, it is large, but it only increases the world's total reserves by about 1.5 percent.)

  Furthermore, Hubbert's equally simplistic claim regarding production in America's Lower 48 states turned out to be slightly optimistic: the actual peak occurred in 1970.

  Deffeyes calls his opponents “cornucopians” and strongly advises against banking too much on finding a way to extract the presently unrecoverable oil. A lot of research has already gone into trying to solve this problem, he says, and so far the oil is still in the ground.

  “I can't tell you what the price is going to do, but I can promise great volatility,” he added, a few months before Hurricane Katrina proved just how vulnerable U.S. gasoline prices are to even transient disruptions.

  * * * *

  No Panacea in Import-Cutting

  What about President Bush's desire to reduce U.S. from dependence on Middle Eastern Oil? It's a laudable goal, but more modest than it sounds. In fact, if the Hubbertians are correct, declining production will do it for us anyway. But even if the cornucopians are correct, it's a surprisingly modest goal. That's because, while the U.S. imports 60 percent of its oil, relatively little comes from the Middle East.

  Only one Persian Gulf country, Saudi Arabia, ranks among the top five foreign sources, and it's third, behind Canada and Mexico. According to the Energy Information Agency, a division of the U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. oil imports (as of early 2006) totaled 421 million barrels per month. Only 41 million came from Saudi Arabia. That's compared to 70 million from Canada, 53 million from Mexico, 37 million from Venezuela, and another 37 million from Nigeria.

  Reducing Middle Eastern imports won't cure our reliance on foreign oil, says Ray Kopp, an economist at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank. Even if we imported no Middle Eastern oil, we'd be vulnerable to political instabilities in that part of the world because global oil prices are tightly linked.

  We also have allies, most notably Europe and Japan, that are strongly dependent on Middle Eastern oil. “None of that would change if we change our own energy policy,” says Alex Farrell, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Still, President Bush's goal amounts to a 15 percent reduction in total U.S. oil consumption, and if there's anything at all to this Hubbertian stuff, that's a great idea.

  The simplest (but politically least palatable) approach is conservation. Increasing the average American car's fuel economy by only a few miles per gallon would be enough to do the trick. But that's a political minefield, because virtually all experts agree that the first place to start is by getting rid of SUVs (or at least radically cutting down on their numbers). Even then, low-mileage cars aren't going to go away overnight. Car models are planned several years in advance, and even when we do start making more efficient cars, the old ones will remain on the roads. “It takes 15 years to roll over the vehicle stock,” says Kopp.

  For many people, the solution lies in biofuels, particularly ethanol.

  * * * *

  Corn to the Rescue?

  Biofuel is one of the few energy topics on which liberals and conservatives seem to be in agreement. Partly, that's because growing fuel, rather than importing it, sounds good for the economy. But biofuels also appear nicely “green” and renewable: the perfect win-win solution for preserving both our lifestyle and the environment.

  In the U.S., ethanol is made by fermenting corn in industrial plants. (Brazil makes it from sugar cane.) But even though it's already a billion-dollar industry, it only produces four billion gallons per year, says Surya Prakash, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California. Because ethanol is a lower energy fuel than gasoline, that's only enough to replace 2.5 billion gallons of gasoline, less than one percent of U.S. usage. “It's a drop in the bucket,” says Prakash. “It can hardly cover three or four days."

  Worse, it may take more energy to make ethanol than you get back in fuel. That in itself isn't catastrophic—after all, biofuel simply converts solar energy first into plants, then into petroleum substitutes. We don't have to capture all of that solar energy to get a usable fuel. But the problem is that ethanol takes a lot of fuel to produce: enough that instead of making the nation more energy self-sufficient, it may, ironically, increase our need for oil and gas.

  In a 2005 paper in Natural Resources Research, David Pimentel of Cornell University calculates that it takes the equivalent of 1.29 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace one gallon of gasoline—and that's not counting the solar energy that falls on the cornfield. He reached his conclusion by adding up the energy cost of every input he could think of that goes into ethanol production, ranging from that used to produce the farmer's lunch (trivial) to the diesel fuel needed to power the tractor (substantial). He finds that it takes the equivalent of 271 gallons of gasoline to grow a hectare (about 2.47 acres) of corn—yielding enough corn to replace 450 gallons of gasoline.

  Lunches and tractor fuel aren't the only inputs that go into this calculation. The biggest is the energy that goes into manufacturing nitrogen fertilizers, which are mandatory for high-yield corn growing.These fertilizers are made by heating natural gas under conditions in which it will react with nitrogen in the air. Not only does that require heat, but it uses up natural gas that could have been burned as fuel.

  More energy is needed to turn the corn into fuel. Ethanol is produced by grinding corn, mixing it with water, and fermenting it in a process similar to that used to make beer or wine. The unprocessed product, in fact, is a lot like beer: 8 percent alcohol and 92 percent water—not something that's going to burn in a car engine. To make a usable fuel, all but 0.5 percent of the water must be removed. This is done by a distillation and chemical extractions that, according to Pimentel, use even more energy than was used to grow the corn. And that doesn't count the fuel needed to ship corn to the ethanol plant or ethanol to the pump.[6]

  [Footnote 6: An additional problem is that corn is an environmentally unfriendly crop. It contributes to soil erosion, and pesticides and the nitrates from nitrogen fertilizer contaminate creeks, rivers, and even the Gulf of Mexico.]

  In theory, all of these costs should make ethanol uneconomical to produce. But it can be produced affordably, because the government is subsidizing its production to the tune of $3 billion per year.

  Tad Patzek, a chemical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who collaborated with Pimentel, calls the whole thing a “politically driven initiative” by “confused people” who think it's good for the country.

  “We need a new liquid fuel,” Pimentel adds, “but this isn't the one."

  Hosein Shapouri disagrees. An economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he, too, has spent years studying the amount of energy needed to produce ethanol. His latest calculations, published in 2004, conclude that for each gallon of gasoline invested (or its equivalent in coal, electrical power, etc.), you get back the equivalent of 1.67 gallons of gasoline. That's up, he adds, from 1.36 gallons in 1996 and
1.24 gallons in 1991.

  Shapouri charges that Pimentel's work is based on an outdated understanding of how the industry works. “Corn production is becoming more efficient,” he says, “and ethanol is, too."

  Pimentel, on the other hand, accuses Shapouri of overlooking important steps in the farm-to-ethanol process. “The reason the USDA comes up with positive returns and we do not,” he says, “is that they omit about half of the inputs."

  One “input” that Shapouri has overlooked, Pimentel says, is the energy used to make and maintain farm equipment. “Have you seen many farmers raising corn by hand?” he asks. But the most important dispute involves how to account for the fact that fuel isn't the only product to come from an ethanol plant. The fermentation leftovers form dry distiller's grain, which can be used in food production. Because the grain represents nearly 34 percent of the plant's output, Shapouri argues that 34 percent of the total energy cost should be credited to it. That leaves only 66 percent to be charged against the ethanol: a big difference.

  Pimentel agrees that a credit is appropriate but argues that because soybean meal can be used for many of the same purposes, the appropriate adjustment is for the amount of energy needed to grow and produce soybean meal—vastly smaller than the amount needed for growing corn and making dry distiller's grain.[7]

  [Footnote 7: For more, see rael.berkeley.edu/ebamm.The whole issue was rehashed in early 2006 when a “meta-analysis” in Science argued that ethanol can indeed be grown at a net-energy plus. But there wasn't really anything new in the Science paper, which simply recalculated Pimentol's figures under Shapouri's logic, then attempted to claim that the two were actually in agreement—something Pimentel sharply disputed in subesequent press interviews.]

  All in all, it's a mind-bendingly complex argument that plays poorly in the battle of sound bites. And, at least for the moment, it looks as though ethanol proponents have won. In his State of the Union address, President Bush weighed in on their side, and at the grassroots level, ethanol proponents are pushing ethanol fuel bills in states ranging from the farm belt to the West Coast.