"Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"?

The "Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"? Hmmm....

Doesn't that sound like it could be Peak Oil?

Check out the graph above from page 12 of the "One Year Later" September 17th 2008 update to the 2007 "Hard Truths" report issued by the National Petroleum Council, an oil industry organization.

Go ahead, click on it. I dare you.

It's interesting how this oil industry group avoids the term "Peak Oil" at all costs. They don't want to call it Peak Oil. They want to sanitize it and call it a "growing liquids supply challenge."

Well, too bad. I'm going to call it what Hubbert called it, Peak Oil.

Peak Oil, Peak Oil, Peak Oil. There, we got that straight.

But, check out the graph. Do you notice anything scary about it?

See that prominent gray band starting from the left at about eighty-something million barrels of oil PER DAY? Then, going DOWN to the right, the gray band is prominently labeled "4-7% Production Decline."

Production decline, starting in 2007, and going DOWN all the way to the end of the projected period in the year 2030.

That means Peak Oil. Plain and simple. And, this data is mostly from 2006 and 2007 and was updated in 2008.

Peak Oil is HERE! Even the oil industry is showing this.

But, it gets worse. Notice the UPPER gray band? That range shows the projected DEMAND curve according to the 2008 International Energy Outlook.

Look how bad it gets. In just 2015, a mere 6 years from now, the projected shortfall in "liquids" is 30 to 45 MILLION BARRELS PER DAY!

By 2030 it is even worse, catastrophic! The projected shortfall, to keep up with the projected demand of about 110 MMBOPD is 70 to 100 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL PER DAY!

That is just outright ridiculous!

No way is the world all of a sudden going to find and produce an extra 70 to 100 MMBOPD in 2030 when we can't even keep producing eighty something per day in 2008!

No way!

Notice up at the top of the graph, it says clearly, "Increasing Demand and Natural Production Decline Create Growing Need For Significant  New Production Capacity"

That might be the understatement of the century.

This is why the Global Economic Crisis is about to get a lot more interesting.

Are you living sustainably, with your own private energy supply?

Houston, We've Got A Problem!

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Twitter, twitter, buzz.

Can you hear all the noise out there?

And not just the ModernMediaMachine.

It's on Twitter, it's on MySpace, it's on Facebook, on text messages.

Houston, we've got a problem!

But, is all the buzz, buzzing about the real problem? It's NOT just the economy, I can assure you.

Did you see "Apollo 13"? Classic.

Did you catch the part in the story line where the crew was scheduled to do a live broadcast while flying towards the satellite of a small, water covered planet, third out from it's sun?

And, the ModernizingMediaMachine of the time decided that watching real live human beings flying from the tiny home planet where they evolved to an entirely different celestial object was just not interesting enough for "ratings" to rate being broadcast?

Amazing!

What does that remind you of? All those Demon Derivatives weren't too interesting until they started to crash the global economy huh? Or sub-prime mortgages, or greedy bankers or sleeping politicians.

And, do you remember the part where they were buzz, buzzing, trying to figure out how to get the astronauts home again safely and finally, at one point, one of the engineers explains that the only thing that matters is ENERGY!

ENERGY!

That's all that matters. If you don't have any energy, nothing else on the spacecraft is going to work or make a difference at all.

Hmmmm.......

Is this sounding familiar?

Every day I talk to people about Peak Oil and for even the nicest, most intelligent ones, their eyes just seem to glaze over with the whole subject.

Pick a subject, any subject. Paris Hilton, pro basketball, the Academy Awards, whatever.

Anything is better than actually discussing our emergency situation with our spacecraft.

Make no mistake about it, the Good Ship Blue Marble is in trouble!

Ask yourself, if you are reading this, and therefore at some level you "care" about Peak Oil and our energy emergency, how many people did you tell about the problem today? What about yesterday?

Make a list. I dare you. How many people do you know that can even explain what Peak Oil is?

Global Warming is warm and fuzzy now. Lots of people are freaking out over that.

But hardly anyone seems to have the slightest concern that our main source of energy is crashing and we don't have a replacement ready.

Ever since I first learned about Peak Oil in 1981 I've watched with amazement while the people around me just kept burning, and burning and burning. And, I can assure you that nobody, I mean nobody wanted to hear about Peak Oil. I learned to only discuss that "strange" subject with other "earth scientists." Nobody likes a party pooper do they?

It makes you wonder if we will end up as "lucky" as Apollo 13 and make it home again?