For all our talk of an online future unbounded by physical limits,
life in our increasingly global economy still requires the movement of
actual people and things, often over long distances. And without a
steady supply of prehistoric hydrocarbons, that movement would come to a
halt. More than 95 percent of the vehicles on Earth--from cars to
trucks to freighters to jumbo jets--run on oil products, and without
them we’d be hard-pressed to commute to the office or import our
gadgets, much less till our fields or get food from the farm to our
kitchens. For now, we must have oil.
Our dependence on oil is driven less by the political might of the
oil industry than it is by the fact that oil itself is a terrific source
of power. It packs more energy into less space than any other commonly
available resource, and it requires much less energy to produce. In the
Middle East, where “easy” oil remains most plentiful, drillers need only
invest a single barrel’s worth of energy to produce a full 30 barrels
of crude. That is among the highest ratios of energy returned on energy
invested, or EROEI, for any widely available source of power on the
planet. (That same barrel’s worth of production energy, for instance,
would get you fewer than two barrels of corn ethanol.) Oil’s amazing
efficiency is one reason it remains in such high demand, especially for
transportation, and it’s also why finding an alternative will be so
difficult.
But find one we must. We have already burned our way through most of the
world’s easy oil. Now we’re drilling for the hard stuff: unconventional
resources such as shale and heavy oil that will be more difficult and
expensive to discover, extract, and refine. The environmental costs are
also on the rise. Oil production remains a significant local ecological
hazard—as we were reminded by the disastrous failure of the Deepwater
Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico last year--even as oil’s large carbon
footprint threatens the global environment as a whole.