Peak oil also means peak renewables

Mainstream experts on energy promote some incredible beliefs. Today I was reminded just how fantastical are their beliefs by a conversation on Twitter with oil analyst Thina Saltvedt. She claims that thanks to technological progress, renewables can be scaled up at the same time as fossil fuels are scaled down. She doesn't dispute that peak oil will happen, and we even agree that peak demand will probably happen first, but we have very different beliefs about what this means for the future of industrial civilization.

According to the mainstream narrative, peak demand is nothing to worry about. By this logic, the prices of oil and other commodities are now dropping because we no longer need so much of these materials -- and if we did, prices would surely rise again to enable extraction. I have explained in a series of posts why contrary to popular belief, the oil price is not obliged to rise just because we need it to. Let me now address the other common fallacy: the notion that renewable energy can be scaled up in the face of peak oil (or peak demand, for that matter).

Most people, including celebrated experts on the subject, seem to think of renewable energy products as emanating from an alternative universe where fossil fuels play no role. All we have to do is send money to this parallel universe to get windmills and solar cells and so on in return. In reality, of course, we have at best externalized most of their production to places like China, but renewables still very much demand fossil energy input at every stage. There is not a single factory in existence capable of producing industrial renewable energy products using only renewable energy as input to itself and all associated supply lines. We are in fact so far away from this scenario that it boggles the mind to even contemplate. We would have to remake our entire civilization from scratch! And probably break the second law of thermodynamics, too.

So where would you get the energy from to scale up renewable energy even as fossil energy is scaled down? We know that nature doesn't provide energy loans. All the energy needed to produce a solar panel or windmill must be available before you can get any energy back, and then it takes several years just to break even. So are we to believe that the extra energy is going to come from renewables themselves? Because there is no other way if fossil fuels are leaving us, whether by peak demand or peak supply. Can renewables really break out of the fossil-fuel-based economy and reproduce themselves?

This is where it gets impossible. Proponents of renewable energy often claim that the EROEI of windmills is in some high ballpark like 25 or 50, so they must be sustainable. But you can't just look at EROEI in one small corner of the system and conclude that the whole system can work. When you factor in other things, such as energy storage or how to maintain the roads or have a functioning financial system or how to provide education and health care, renewables don't look so good anymore. People like Gail Tverberg have helped me understand that it is the whole system that is unsustainable. It took considerable reading before it became intuitive to me that renewables can't work. The issues are too complex sum up in a simplistic notion like EROEI, but the more I learn, the clearer it becomes that we can't make the transition.

Even if a transition to renewables could theoretically have been accomplished, we are out of time. Thirty years ago we might have had a shot at it, but not now. We had a one-time gift of fossil energy that could at least have sustained industrial civilization for very long time if we had used it wisely, but we didn't. We have no prospect of remaking industrial civilization to run on renewables when things are falling apart because we lack the energy to maintain the current system. Peak oil thus inexorably means peak renewables as well.

Take a look at the Tverberg estimate of future energy production again, which shows peak renewables at the same time as peak oil and everything else. I would be grateful if Thina Saltvedt or other cornucopians could explain how we can possibly defy this energy graph and have a future based on renewables. Because I sure don't see a way.

Depletion, aging and deflation

To understand why it is irrational to expect oil prices to increase in the face of depletion, consider the analogy of human aging. Aging entails progressively depleting strength similar to what is going on with natural resource extraction. Imagine a man doing manual labor. In his prime he is good at it, but as he grows old his productivity obviously declines, and so does his earning power in most cases. It would be delusional to expect a 90-year-old man to be paid more per hour for hard physical labor than a 20-year-old. Yet bizarrely, this is what we expect from oil. We expect oil to be worth more as it becomes scarcer and harder to extract and returns less and less net energy on our investments. I used to believe so myself before I got into the peak oil scene, but now I see how foolish this entire line of reasoning is. High oil prices will not save us from peak oil. On the contrary, too low oil prices will be the proximate cause of peak oil, and it is happening now.

To take the analogy further, consider a workforce of aging workers, with less and less vigorous young men to replace them. Attempting to power industrial civilization on shale oil and tar sands and the like -- or renewable energy, for that matter -- would be equivalent to expecting 90-year-olds to do all the work, and be paid more for it than we used to pay men in their primes. It is impossible, and things fall apart. Unfortunately, this is our immediate fate.