On the other hand, so could advanced biofuels from cellulosic ethanol or algae. Over the next 20 years, synthetic fuels made from coal or shale oil could conceivably become the fuels of the future. "It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources." "Peak oil and peak gas and coal could really go either way for the climate," Pushker Kharecha, a scientist with NASA's Global Institute for Space Studies, said at least year's American Geophysical Union meeting. The big question now is whether the cure for our oil addiction will come with a heavy carbon side effect. The amount of energy we get back from drilling oil wells in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico continues to drop, and alternative sources don't provide usable energy for humans on the generous terms that oil long has.īut humans with an economic incentive to be optimistic become optimists, and the harder we look, the more possible alternatives we find. If that search goes poorly - as some Peak Oil analysts predict - human civilization will fall off an energy cliff. People quibble about the details, but no one argues that oil will play a much different role in our energy system in 50 years than it did in 1959. The scale of the oil industry is astounding, but it's becoming clear the world's oil supply will peak soon, or perhaps has peaked already. Perhaps it's not a surprising consequence of this innovation that at current consumption levels, Americans would blow through all the oil ever produced in Petrolia in less than three days. In a world that only had a tiny fraction of the amount of heat, light, and power available that we do now, people came up with all kinds of ideas for what to do with oil's energy: cars, tractors, airplanes, chemicals, fertilizer, and plastic. Pair that energy density with stability under most conditions (meaning it didn't randomly explode), and that, as a liquid, it was easy to transport, and you have the killer app for the infrastructure age. To equal get the amount of energy in a tank of gasoline, you need 200 pounds of wood. Oil, people soon found, was uniquely convenient. Some have estimated that for every unit of energy you invested sinking a well, you got back " more than 100 times as much usable energy. Not just money, but energy, was flowing from underground. Still, fortunes were being made and lost. Daniel Yergin notes in his history of oil, The Prize, that as more people poured into the oil regions "supply outran demand" and soon the whiskey barrels that held the oil "cost almost twice as much as the oil inside them." In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, 3.6 million barrels poured out of the region. A three to five year voyage would only yield a few thousand gallons of the stuff. Whale oil had always been a bit precious. Centered in the Oil Creek valley about one hundred miles north of Pittsburgh, the wells of Pithole, Titusville and Oil City pumped 56 million barrels of oil out of the ground from 1859 to 1873. The "little river valley" in western Pennsylvania earned the nickname Petrolia.
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