Understanding Peak Oil Part 1 Name______________________________________ per___
NOTE: DON’T WORRY IF YOU HAVE THE SAME IDEA IN DIFFERENT WORDS.
1. We are moving from an era of __cheap______________, __abundant__________ energy to and era of ____expensive____________, ____scarce_____________________,
__hard to get __________ energy.
2. We are making ourselves dependent upon some extremely _____corrupt_____ regimes in some very ___unstable________parts of the world.
3. Keeping the world dependent on oil as long as possible is__important________________.
4. Not 1 in ___100______ people in our country have any inkling of the problem we are facing.
5. Increased unemployment, poverty, ___starvation______, ___violence___________, are all the kind of things that happen when a society collapses.
6. So we enter a world of quite unbelievable dimensions, and yet it is only a few _years___ away.
7. The great bulk of the world’s oil was formed at just two very brief moments of extreme ___CO2 and high temperatures___________________ 90 and 150 million years ago.
8. Our oil supply was formed ____from algae______, _____by heat and pressure______ over geological time (“Quick” in geological time = a few million years). We are now using this stuff up (that took a few million years to make) over 1 or 2 ___centuries________________.
9. One barrel of oil (42 gallons) will produce as much energy as you will get from _12_______ people working all year for you.
10. It takes an average man performing physical labor for _25,000____________ hours, to produce the energy contained in 1 barrel of oil. That barrel of oil can be pulled out of the ground in Iraq for ___$1_____,
11. You invest ____$1______ and you get back 25,000 hours of _____human labor_ _____.
That is an energy source that is so dense it is essentially ______free_______________ energy.
12. Oil is probably the most ___valuable___________ natural resource we’ve ever discovered.
13. __70_____ % of oil is refined into transportation fuels.
14. ___97____% of all transportation energy comes from ____oil_________.
15. Construction of the average car takes between __27____ and ___54____ barrels of oil.
16. Every calorie you eat requires _____10__________ calories of hydrocarbon energy to make.
17. There are ____6__________ billion people on Earth. They are all fed due to the Green Revolution, that consisted of fertilizing farms with fertilizers that are derived from _____petroleum______________.
18. What are TWO products that are derived from oil? ____(put anything you want here)_____and ____(here, too)_____.
19. In Russia, in a place called Baku, people were simply ____digging__ __holes_____
in the ground. Oil production really took off.
20. By 1900, _____95__________% of Russian oil was coming from ___Baku____.
21. Baku then became a huge industrial center and one of the most _______affluent________ cities in the world.
22. The real beginning of oil in Venezuela was the 16th of December, 1922, when a ____blowout__________ released _______150,000__________ barrels of oil in a few days, known as the _black______ ____rain________.
23. At one time, Venezuela was the ______leading___________ exporter in the world.
24. Today, Saudi Arabia is by far the world’s leading oil producer. The United States was essentially the ___Saudi_____ _____Arabia____ of the world up until the 1950's.
Part 2: A magnet for War
1. What are the two main ways oil is connected to war?
__oil starts wars and oil keeps wars going________________________________________
2. According to the Russian expert interviewed, what was the reason Russia was able to defeat Germany in World War II?___oil from Baku_______________________________________
3. Though oil has been involved in causing, and allowing all modern wars, the first war that was absolutely about oil was___Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait (that started the FIRST Iraq war).
4. Which nation was the largest oil producer for almost a century?____USA_________________
5. In 1955, when Dr. M. “King” Hubbert predicted US oil production would peak within 15 years, what was the reaction of all petroleum geologists in America? He was “laughed out of his profession”
6. In 1950, we were finding 6 barrels of oil for every __1__barrel we consumed.
7. What would number 6 above suggest about when we are going to run out of oil? NEVER!
8. Hubbert realized that oil discovery in the US had peaked in the 1930's. How is that different from the peak of oil production that occurred in 1970?___You have to discover oil before you can produce it (get it out of the ground)________________________________
Part 3
9. Hubbert predicted US oil production would peak in 1970. Sure enough, in December, 1970, we peaked, meaning, we never produced as much oil. Ever again. At peak we were producing ____10.2____ MBD (Million Barrels a Day). 10 years later, we were drilling over 4 times more wells, but all that extra searching and pumping was yielding only ____6.9__________MBD.
10. In terms of eggs found per minute, how is oil production like an Easter egg hunt? At first the eggs are easy to find; you find more and more. But after you find most of them, your “eggs found per minute” declines.
11. What is the “strange irony” mentioned when discussing the GREAT job oil companies did in discovering new oil and producing it? _The better you are at producing oil from the ground (that’s a good thing), the faster you use it all up! (That’s a bad thing).
12. Remember back in Baku?–how in the early days, “people just dug holes in the ground” (with shovels)? It didn’t cost very much money to get oil back in those days. What does the SIZE of that offshore drilling rig suggest about how much easy-to-get oil is still out there?__ That rig is hecka’ huge. It is starting to be very expensive to get oil now, cause all the easy-to-get oil is GONE
13. If Edison Oil Company uses 10 barrels of oil energy to produce 9 barrels of oil, and oil sells for $100 a barrel, how much money will Edison Oil make?____negative $100____________
14. Since the easy-to-get oil is all gotten already, companies are stretching out to deep-water drilling rigs, and to squeezing oil out of “tar sands” (oily sandstone in Canada). How much money are these tar sands oil companies making?__ none–it takes as much energy to make the oil as they get from the oil they make.
15. Some oil companies say we have NOT reached peak oil–that there’s plenty of oil out there–no need to worry! Matthew David Savinar (“”Mr. Negativity”) makes a good argument that we are very close to reaching peak oil. What is his argument?___Just the fact that they are going for oil in tar sands means we are near (or even past) peak, cause they wouldn’t be going to get that really hard-to-get oil if there were any easy oil left.
16. M. King Hubbert was wrong! He predicted world (not USA) oil peak would be reached about “the turn of the century”. Why was world peak delayed?___The Arab oil embargo shocked Americans into using less oil, which left oil in the ground that we are using even now.
17. Why is it GOOD news that we have been able to delay reaching world peak by a decade?
_That demonstrates that, even though Americans don’t LIKE it, we can change our living habits and use less oil.________
18. Everything we call “the modern world” (including the addition of 4 billion people) “was made possible by the __cheap______________, ______plentiful__________ supply of oil-based energy.” (Sound familiar?)
19. The definition of “insatiable” is__never-satisfied______________________________
20. “In the early 70's over half the world essentially didn’t ___use oil___________________”
21.The two biggest “new mouths to feed” (countries that will be demanding LOTS more oil in the future) are _______China______ and _____India_____________.
PART 4 The End of the American Dream
22. A Hummer has __(about) 340_horsepower. Think about that. One HP = 745 watts. So how many watts are you using as you pilot your 8000 pound Hummer down Blackstone to Save Mart to buy a quart of milk? _______________ To put that into perspective, an average cell phone charger uses 1 watt. Fresno has around half a million people. If EVERYBODY in Fresno (except Mr. Ratcliffe) had a cell phone, how many Hummers would it take to charge them all?
23. For every __4________ barrels of oil consumed in the world, 1 is consumed by America.
24. For every____22_____ _humans on Earth, 1 is an American.
25. What percent of ALL the world’s oil is in America? 2%
26. With such a small fraction of the world’s population, and such a small fraction of the world’s oil, how do we manage to consume such a LARGE fraction of the world’s oil?
_we import it from other countries__
27. Gasoline costs about 20 cents a cup. A cup of coffee from Starbucks costs a lot more–so much that a gallon of Starbucks costs __$50_______________________.
28. Americans aren’t into conservation of gasoline. Are there any white people anywhere who ARE? Where are they?______Europeans____________________________ (Ask me about the 3rd largest oil producer in the world!)
29. “If we wait until we reach peak oil to start making the transition, there will be very serious economic consequences. . .To have no economic consequences, you need to anticipate peak oil by 20 years.” What do you think might be some examples of “very serious economic consequence”?
_stock market crash, war, starvation, Save Mart might run out of your favorite cereal
30. Why will anticipating peak oil by 20 years allow us to avoid economic consequences?_______It will give us time to develop NEW sources of energy
31. Why does the guy in the green sweater say we are “a victim of our own success”?
A big part of the American Dream is living in a big house in suburbia. When oil gets expensive, we won’t be able to afford to commute._
32. Why are European cities in better shape to meet peak oil than American cities?__They were designed before the automobile was invented, so people live closer to downtown, shorter commute.
33. What are the 3 things “Roscoe” says we need to face the coming crisis?
Money (we borrow this one from our kids)__, _time______, & __energy_____________
(Circle the only one that we can borrow from our kids.)
34. After World War II, American foreign policy in the Middle East said: “Rulers of Saudi Arabia?–You give us your oil, and we’ll give you__weapons to keep you in power over your dissatisfied, poor, citizens
. 10-15 years ago, the “per capita” (per person) income in Saudi Arabia was _$28,000. Now it is ______$6000_______________.
36. There is now tension between the vast majority of Saudi Arabians and their leaders. The fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia believe the government is totally ____corrupt________________–that the leaders are selling oil to the USA and getting paid in guns, and these leaders use these guns to keep their own people down.
37. Of the 19 hijackers that did 911, guess how many were from Iraq:___zero__________________
Part 5
38. As we head into the downside of the peak oil mountain, America has two basic choices to meet its energy needs. What are they?
1)__Use our military power to take oil from other countries_
2)__Start developing other sources of energy (wind, solar, etc.)_
39. “Mr. Negativity” says that even if everybody switched and drove a Prius, we’d still end up in energy crisis mode in 5-7 years. Why?_Remember exponential growth (those rectangles on the board?) If our economy keeps growing, so does our consumption of oil, erasing all the savings we’d get if everybody drove a Prius.
40. Can you think of ANY reason Mr. Negativity is wrong? (He says we must grow our economy, so in 5 to 7 years it will grow so much that we’ll be using the same amount of gas as now, even though everybody is driving more fuel-efficient cars).
_Maybe our economy WON”T always grow as fast it as it has in the past.
41. Yikes! Today, the world consumes about 90 million barrels a day. With growth in demand, how many MORE barrels of oil will we need by the year 2050?____200 MBD _
Technological solutions:
42. HYDROGEN! President Bush, and some scientists interviewed, has said the hydrogen car is the answer to our transportation problem. What does the professor in the light blue shirt say to shoot that idea down? We don’t have the technology to use Hydrogen yet
43. BIOMASS! (Make fuel out of palm seed oil, or corn or. . . ) Sounds great (so natural!), but
the video experts shoot that down, too. Why won’t biomass solve our fuel problem?
Making fule from biomass is low efficiency. In some cases, you don’t get any more energy OUT of the fuel you make than it took to make the fuel!
44. NUCLEAR! If we switched over to all nuclear energy (Fukushima notwithstanding), How many BIG reactors would we have to build? __10,000________How long, then, would the world’s uranium last?__20 years_____
45. WIND! Uh, only a small fraction of our needs. What’s wrong with wind?
It doesn’t always blow, and it is “low energy-density” (not many watts per square meter)
46. After we pass peak, and there is no more cheap oil, WHY does our expert with the British accent suggest there will be a stock market crash? All the companies on the stock market that make profits do so because oil is cheap. If oil gets expensive, profits drop, so investors won’t invest as much. Low investor confidence in companies can cause a depression
47. We’ve run the world on fossil fuels for longer than you’ve been alive! THAT seems like a long time, but, compared to all human history, how long IS it? (Draw a little graph to show the Petroleum Age here===================>
48. We’ve now got 6 ½ billion people on Earth. How many people does Roscoe (and other experts) think the Earth can support WITHOUT oil energy?__maybe 2 billion, tops
49. Why can’t we count on our leaders to make us aware of peak oil, and get us to act NOW so we’ll have a “soft landing”, instead of a “crash landing”, when we get past peak? Leaders that tell us the truth about peak oil are the “bearers of bad news”, and won’t get reelected.
