Peak oil doesn't mean we run out of oil, it just means that the cost rises to the point that it's no longer affordable for most uses. Production is unlikely to decline for many decades, it's just that demand for energy is growing rapidly while production is static.
At $20 or $30 a gallon, oil is completely unaffordable as a fuel but still perfectly viable as a raw material. Obviously we'll substitute out other materials for the least important use-cases, but we won't have to radically rethink the manufactured world. According to the DoE, plastic production accounted for just 4.6% of petroleum consumption and 1.5% of natural gas consumption in the US.
The costs of all raw materials are rising, many of them much faster than the price of oil. Many metals have doubled or tripled in price over the past few years. Commodity foodstuffs have surged in price. Quality hardwood is increasingly scarce. We fetishise oil, but we have a generalised resource problem due to the rapid improvements of living standards in the developing world. There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to consuming much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.
> There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to consuming much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.
And from three scenarios, the second is at the moment impossible because of physics and the first because of current state-of-art of economy and politics.
Note that those that claim there's "enough energy" for at least 100 years always calculate "at current consumption rates" which means "no growth" whereas economists and politicians both assume steady growth. As soon as you include the "measly" (from the politicians view) growth of only 3% per year you have to expect double consumption in only 25 years, four time that in 50 years, eight times in 75 and sixteen times in a 100.
And from three scenarios, the second is at the moment impossible because of physics
Even if it was possible, who knows if we could even get them built. I half suspect we (as a country) will pick WWIII over nuclear reactors, we're so afraid of them.
The bigger problem is the medication sector which is based on the petrochemical industry (eg. aspirin). I'd rather eat on wooden plates than stay with a head-ache. probably even more life-indispensable drugs are made of petroleum.
Plastic is easily replaceable with cleaner and healthier materials (glass, wood, ...) Not everywhere, but on the basic necessities for sure.
Also, we don't need to use new storage materials every time, but reuse more quality ones.
> I'd rather eat on wooden plates than stay with a head-ache
As a hobbyist wood turner who makes my own wooden plates and bowls, I suggest that eating off of wooden plates (or "treen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treen_(wooden) as it was called) is actually kind of nice. It takes no more time to wash, the texture is earthy and solid, it's hygenic, and it makes you feel in touch with your environment.
(NOTE: I'm not a crazy hippy. I write Ruby, build CNC machines, and look forward to living in the asteroid belt some day...but it's still aesthetically nice to use stuff that has a personal imprint and local texture to it)
Using petrol on personal transportation is such a waste. I'd like to see a heavy carbon tax so that this fantastic, but finite, resource would be directed to things where it really adds value. The US subsidising wars to get more of it makes selfish sense, but to burn it immediately instead of building infrastructure is shameful.
> Using petrol on personal transportation is such a waste. I'd like to see a heavy carbon tax so that this fantastic, but finite, resource would be directed to things where it really adds value.
Forgive me if I respect the decentralized distributed thinking of 6 billion people, including millions of economists, engineers, materials scientists, etc., over one random commenter on HN, but I personally have no reason what-so-ever to believe that your judgement that the ROI on oil is higher in plastics mfgr than in transport.
Distributed thinking isn't rational even if the actors are, it all depends on the rules of the game. For example, the optimal strategy in a prisonner's dilemma hurts both players; tragedies of the commons have similar effects at a larger scale. There is no objective standard saying how much future discounting is rational, although obviously I'd prefer one that doesn't discount significantly until after one or two lifetimes.
Burning the stuff now is a perfect example of future discounting: it values having energy now over having something that can be used and reused. It's also an example of tragedy of the commons: the energy utility goes to whoever uses it, climate change is a cost for everyone, and unregulated markets don't minimise those costs.
I see no reason we can't make plastic out of biomaterials like corn.
By the way, I never understand why they don't make roofs on houses out of plastic. It seems like they'd never degrade or leak, and it would be faster to install.
There are premium roofing shingles and tiles made from plastic. If you see an unusual color of slate roof with regular shaped tiles or a repeating pattern of a couple feet, you may be looking at one.
Cost wise, they fall between asphalt shingles and clay tiles or slate (that's a big spread). They can last better than asphalt and should need fewer repairs if you live in a hail or extreme wind area.
Not only is it made from the lowest-grade oil, but this low grade oil constitutes the majority of all the oil (and near-oil substances) that's left, e.g. tar sands, oil shale.
I think Kunstler's site is a bit over the top, but it's an interesting "ha ha, only serious" view of peak oil.
Things like this peak plastic article remind me that we better get to work on crazy stuff like fusion or orbiting solar powered microwave transmitters (to run Google's asteroid mining data center, of course) if we want to avoid a long slow decline into another dark age.
Except we would hit peak uranium pretty soon, and be left with a bunch of new reactors that never got close to pay back the investment it took to deploy them. Not to mention the poisonous, radioactive debris to deal with for a long long time afterwards.
I would be much happier if we committed those resources to maintain the nuclear infrastructure we already have in place, to keep it going safely for as long as possible.
We will never hit peak uranium. The "exploitable uranium resources" numbers floating about are for deposits that would be commercially exploitable roughly at present prices. The thing is, the cost of the raw uranium is a very small proportion (less than 0.05%) of the cost of running a fission plant. In other words, you could multiply the market price of uranium by 1000 times, and it would only increase the cost of running the plant by 50%.
But, well before that, it becomes cost-effective to separate uranium from seawater. Where we have enough for tens of milennia. If that runs out, it then becomes cost-effective to mine and refine nuclear fuel in space and return it to earth. At present-day launch costs. Peak Uranium will never happen.
And if it somehow did, thorium is roughly a thousand times more plentiful than U-235.
I think fission is probably a lesser evil than burning mountains of coal, but yeah, it's a stop-gap at best until we get fusion working, or make much better use of that big fusion reactor nearby that's already been running for 4 or 5 billion years :-)
The thing is, of the oil taken out of the earth, what percent has been used for plastic? I'm not sure but a very small portion.
Now even if we're at peak oil now which is certainly not necessarily true, the Hubbert Curve (where the definition of peak oil comes from) shows that peak occurs when 50% of the oil has been extracted.
Thus we can assume we have at least half the oil available to humanity not yet extracted (let alone all the non-traditional oil techniques like tar sands which boost reserves by an order of magnitude).
My point is that while the price of oil will go up as supply can't keep up with demand, we are nowhere near being in the position where oil is not available for materials. We're also nowhere near being in a position where oil's not economic for materials, because as plastic, oil is arguably very valuable.
Sure we may reach a point where oil's primary value is as plastic, once we solve the other-energy-source challenge. But we don't need to worry about running out of feedstock for plastics, and we certainly won't need to excavate old landfills for the stuff. At least not soon.
The $1000 question is what the downside of the curve will look like. Will it be a sharp drop-off or a long plateau and decline? It's looking more like the latter at the moment.
It was my understanding that the oil used for vehicle fuel and the oil used for plastic isn't even the same stuff. And that part of the refinement process for crude is to separate this out.
IIRC heating oil is a more-direct competitor for the particular type of oil that is used in plastics.
Plastic is one of the most valuable things that can be made out of oil, and one of the things we will still use oil for when its availability is limited, simply because the utility per barrel of oil is much larger for plastic than for fuel.
Thus we will likely commute shorter distances before we cut down on plastic, though we may use fewer disposable plastic products than before.
Well, we'll probably find out a way to synthesize plastic out of other materials rich in hydrocarbons, like algae. It's going to be pretty expensive at first, but I can see biofuels occupying their own niche even in an economy that is dominated by hydrogen or some other "clean" resource.
Considering plastic doesn't have the CO2 emissions that oil-for-fuel does, there's no reason to use non-oil-based plastic any time soon. We can move off oil for fuel and keep using it for plastic!
Actually there is at least one plastic that does fairly well cost-wise vs other plastics and is made out of typically corn in the US, PLA [1]. The main reason that it doesn't get used more is that it's properties don't make it ideal for a number of other cases where you need better impact resistance or heat resistance. A number of the plastic cups out there these days are made of the stuff.
While it's true there are more sources of plastic other than fossil fuels, the big disadvantage is the extra amount of energy and water needed. I doubt we'll be able to scale alternative plastics to match the levels produced from fossil fuels. But I do think we can get a lot of plastic from simply recycling it (maybe dig it back up from landfills). We can also reduce a lot of plastic demand by using reusable containers for things like groceries.
Automated sorting tech is becoming practical in more scenarios now as well, which should improve yields on recycled plastic. Traditional human-based sorting into bins by type of plastic often produces poor-quality output that has to be "downcycled" (e.g. into park benches, not a new coke bottle), because the percentage of mis-sorted impurities is too high.
Convenient how you completely sidestep the issue of endocrine disruption, BPA, massive toxicity in the environment, or how plastics affects the human physiology.
Toxic, oil-based plastics can not go away fast enough. You chemists have been poisoning humanity for far too long and now you seriously want to advocate using them more instead of looking for alternative solutions?
At $20 or $30 a gallon, oil is completely unaffordable as a fuel but still perfectly viable as a raw material. Obviously we'll substitute out other materials for the least important use-cases, but we won't have to radically rethink the manufactured world. According to the DoE, plastic production accounted for just 4.6% of petroleum consumption and 1.5% of natural gas consumption in the US.
The costs of all raw materials are rising, many of them much faster than the price of oil. Many metals have doubled or tripled in price over the past few years. Commodity foodstuffs have surged in price. Quality hardwood is increasingly scarce. We fetishise oil, but we have a generalised resource problem due to the rapid improvements of living standards in the developing world. There are only three plausible scenarios - people getting used to consuming much less, the development of nuclear fusion, or a third world war.