We were never "running out" years ago, it is just that it was not economically viable to extract it (I remember learning this off a colleague 15 years ago), but it is now, we will probably never actually run out of oil (i.e. we will just have to work even harder, to make even more money, to afford it, we (the human race) will probably die out in a few hundred years from lack of clean water/over population/etc.. And i am a believer in peak oil. And, like we on GBF believe in reducing consumption first before the fancy stuff, we (the world) need to stop using so much oil (i.e. equivalents of: insulate, air tightness, etc.), before carrying on extracting more (create supply) to meet our (increasing) demand!

This one could be fun.

Posted By: SteamyTea PV is about £1200/kWp, so that will be about 4p/kWh for oil and (assuming 25 year life of system) 40p/kWh for PV (a quarter if what it was a few years back).
Now that is a ten to one ratio at present, but the present time does not last long.

This seems way to high for PV - ignoring inflation, time value of money and lack of storage (i.e. simple per kWh) I get:

£1200/kWp
1kWp yields about 800kWh/year
over 25 years that's 20MwH
or 6p/kWh (maybe 7.5p if you need a new inverter after 12 years)

a kwH of oil also doesn't generate a kWh of electricity...

Posted By: SteamyTeaWhen the price of one resource goes up we substitute it with another when the price matches

and that kind of hardline economics is a bedrock of your unsentimental view of how the world works, innit ST? Call it MROMI. How about the parallel EROEI calc? Doesn't that over-ride the MROMI calc? - otherwise dangerous absurdity.

Posted By: fostertomyour unsentimental view of how the world works

Economics does not have emotion attached to it, just as well in my opinion.
Now I am going to have to look up what those acronyms mean.
Had a look and found this http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3743

Posted By: SteamyTea

Posted By: fostertomyour unsentimental view of how the world works

Economics does not have emotion attached to it, just as well in my opinion.

that's what the economists would have you believe.

I call bull on that though.

I see ' The oil drum' is shutting up shop for new articles, shame .
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10059

Posted By: Jeff Band what about all the other things we need oil for anyway like plastics and pharmaceuticals?

Thank you, I do wish more people would consider this. We have a choice between a near-indefinite supply of raw materials or a few decades worth of energy.

There was a comment by Jonathan Callaghan on one of the OilDrum's Drumbeats that I thought most acute:

"I wonder how excited politicians and the general public would be if we could magically substitute the phrase "higher prices" for "blah blah technology" whenever an article talks about oil.

Here are some examples from recent drumbeats:

The successes of deepwater and oil sands developments are examples of how higher prices are key to delivering additional sources of liquid supplies to meet rising demand. Ten years ago, these supplies were barely on the radar screen.

Several developments lie behind this looming geostrategic shift. The first is the advent of shale oil and natural gas production made possible by higher prices.

Higher prices can boost fuel efficiency by 5 to 10 percent.

Given a sufficient distribution of energy resources and a large enough network of electrically conducting tubes, plus a bit of storage, these problems can be overcome—with higher prices.

New discoveries and higher prices have increased the oil industry's ability to increase production in recent years

Thought we were running out of fossil fuels? Higher prices means Britain and the U.S. could tap undreamed reserves of gas and oil

The economic and even political implications of these higher prices, which won’t be completely understood for some time, are already significant.

It paints a very different picture, doesn't it?

Any super hackers out there want to set up an alternative news feed where energy articles are first run through a sed script with about 20 lines or so like the following?

s/new technology/higher prices/g
s/new technologies/higher prices/g
s/technological revolution/higher prices/g
s/technological advances/higher prices/g
...
Jon"

Posted By: Jeff BSurely as long as we keep finding ways of squeezing yet more oil from the ground then the incentive to find alternative technologies is not there? Is necessity still the mother of invention? I presume the price of this difficult-to-extract oil will reach a point whereby a new but very expensive technology could become viable

Don't forget EROEI - Energy Return on Energy Invested - moving inexorably downward regardless of MROMI - Money Return on Money Invested.

Yes, higher prices enable more expensive technologies and in fact the oil cos make even more money than they did with 'easy' oil. But pretty much every new technology delivers yet lower EROEI (especially 'renewables').

So ever-increasing energy supplies may be dragged from the ground by expensive new technologies but these require so much energy input that there's less and less surplus left over for the world to use. So prices go up, so yet more expensive (and profitable) technologies provide yet less useful surplus.

Anyone spot the flaw in this scenario?

Turns out Peak Oil doesn't mean a peak in growth of out-of-the-ground supply, followed by decline (that growth does indeed look almost limitless, enabled by exponentially rising real-price).
Rather, it means a peak in growth of available surplus, at any price, after falling EROEI has had its effect. That effect is so sharply geared that the decline will be steeper than anyone has envisaged.

Note that there are no 'new technologies' anywhere on the horizon that would improve EROEI. All make it worse. Only another one-off bonanza like the discovery of fossil fuel could do that - or something like 'free energy from the quantum vacuum'!

NB by 'fossil fuel' we really mean the mid-phase of oil incl early gas - when great oilfields were easily drilled in shallow waters and benign climates close to centres of demand. Some of those had EROEI as high as 1000. They are long gone - till recently oil was in the low 100s and that is the EROEI that western/industrial society is built on and assumes for its workings.

Nowadays global all-source EROEI is down to mid-20s and falling fast. But western/industrial society is blithely unaware that it's running on a giant flywheel, and has absolutely no plans to adjust.

That is because EROEI finds no place in economic theory - there is nothing, no new technology, that can be classically substituted in case of falling EROEI, and Economics/Accounting, call it what you will, is blind to the concept.