Remember the Hirsch Report?
November 20th, 2009Jeff Vail at The Oil Drum has a blog post pointing out two things that must be kept in mind as we think about transitioning away from fossil fuels.
1. Net energy declines faster than gross energy. As the easiest and best resources were exploited first, the remaining fossil fuel resources are increasingly expensive in terms of both money and energy to exploit – it’s taking more and more in both energy and money to get each unit of energy out.
2. Even as net energy is declining more rapidly than gross energy, more of that shrinking supply of energy will have to be diverted to building alternative energy infrastructure. The energy investments needed to put in place the generating and distribution networks for renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have to be up-front. This means there will be even less energy left over for all other uses.
The longer we wait to begin building that replacement infrastructure – and the less the life-cycle EROEIs of renewable sources prove to be – the bigger the pickle we’ll be in.
This isn’t exactly news. The Hirsch Report reached the same conclusion back in 2005, warning that beginning a crash mitigation program 20 years before peaking would be necessary to make a more-or-less seamless transition. But it helps to be reminded.
The bad news is, we’ve now probably seen the peak in global oil production and the beginnings of any mitigation program, crash or otherwise, is still nowhere in sight.