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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

I still personally believe that the real underlying truth of "peak oil" was that as lower EROEI sources replaced higher ones, even though we would be able to grow the total number of barrels per day, the net-energy provided to drive the economy from those barrels would(is) plateau(ing). Everyone who points to fracking (or even worse tar sands) as a disproof of peak oil never understood the underlying argument about how the "economy" is effectively our word for total/net energy consumption and a fracked barrel of oil provides vastly less energy to the system.

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If you think about it, a lot of the arabian/russian/corupt oligarchs money from oil were spent in ludicrous ways, like luxury beyond belief. The economy is getting less value from a fracked barrel, but those money are spent more wisely, returning back into the industry. This is not just sticking a pipe in the ground anymore, we are advancing our tech by using fracking. This is a new economic engine, maybe it's not as big as the free oil, but it's something.

It's an interesting thought; I think you'd also have to look at the absolute dollar amounts of "luxury spend vs. capital/research reinvestment" to get the full picture. (Since the actual benefits accrued to society are proportional to the absolute spend on R&D).

Also, is R&D in fracking transferable? Or is it just tech that will be irrelevant in 20-30 years? (I don't have a good picture on this one; I could see a reasonable argument that we will be using natural gas for a long time, even when we're a mostly-renewable economy, since it's a convenient-to-transport form of energy as LNG).

I can't imagine fracking is too transferable unless there's some other easily flowing substance you want to get out of the ground besides water, oil, or natural gas.

EDIT: It might be useful for enabling greater storage density of CO2 in rock formations if we attempt to sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-co2-underground-curb-carbon-em...

Fracking is important in geothermal. An experimental form uses drilling to dry hot rocks and injection of water (even waste water or grey water) to produce steam.

Destructive uses of aquifers may mean we need skills in underground water table remediation. I don't think fracking directly helps (I think it hinders) but we're going to need to understand how to use it to fix things as well as extract things.

Well, too bad fracking in the US is on its way down. By the looks of it, it will last maybe 3 years before it peaks out. Then the barrels/day will crash. Not kidding though, and higher ups know... which is probably why the US is intervening in Venezuela, for example.

Source on that?

Most of it was stockpiled in US dollars.

End of the day, the dollar will inflate away in the long run. We will have created more value with oil than the shieks and Russian mob bosses yielded in dollar terms.

AFAIK, the well accepted theory was always that as EROEI of fossil fuels get lower, more and more of the economy would be targeted (directly or indirectly) into fossil fuel extraction, and less would be available to the end-goal wealth. Thus even with the GDP and total extraction growing, we would get poorer and poorer, until the fuel extraction business becomes so large that something breaks.

We seem to be experiencing that. But people have been great in avoiding the EROEI collapse that some expected, so it does not seem to be a large factor on the world's economy. It is very unlikely that the current stagnation can be attributed to peak oil.

I tried to put together a case for this yesterday in a thread on Germany and coal. The comment is probably relevant here too, so I'll copy it with minor adjustments. The US-centric figures are because I was arguing about the US, but I think the picture actually covers a lot of countries.

There is some evidence that we are either hitting peak oil, or rising competition from previously-developing countries is choking the West out of energy markets. Energy prices are not cheap at the moment (I'm not accounting for inflation, but according a back of the envelope check these numbers are all growing much faster than inflation).

Crude oil prices went from $35 -> $70 around 2005 and have generally been floating around there since, with short periods of time (a year or two) where they drop down [0], coal did something similar from $50 -> $80 [1]. In the US, coal use for electricity immediately started dropping off, and Natural Gas has been replacing capacity but not overwhelmingly [2]. There was a 5 year period where gas (ie, car fuel) prices were just out of control, and a long period of time where they were just high.

Most of the US's energy is sourced from petroleum and coal [3, 4]. I'd suggest that although cheap natural gas has absorbed some of the shock, there is evidence of cost pressure. This all seems like a pretty substantial problem (read: threat to political stability at a grand scale), I'm constantly surprised it doesn't get more press.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha... [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=coal-austr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Electricity_by_type.pn... [3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_Flow_US_2017.png [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Su...

Energy intensity is going down [1], so it seems like the economy is less about energy consumption than it used to be? But averages can be misleading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity

To some extent that's because, apart from construction, we're outsourcing the manipulating-atoms business to other countries which results in higher energy intensity abroad.

There are two interpretations. The first is that energy doesn't matter, and the second is GDP doesn't matter. GDP was only important when it was a proxy for energy (for a long time, the correlation between energy /capita and gdp/capita was very strong).

IF you assume that GDP is no longer a good measure of energy but that the people care about energy more, it provides an interesting interpretation of Trump's 2016 victory, the fracturing of politics and the widespread condemnation of politicians. People's lifestyles are no longer being buoyed by a rising quantity of cheap energy, and they are angry without quite understanding why their lives don't seem to be improving.

It is easier to put tensions aside and work together when you are seeing an increase in your living standards each year - even if you don't agree, it obviously works. Harder to do when they are falling - even if you agree, something seems to be going wrong.

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