Happy 150th, Oil! So Long, and Thanks for Modern Civilization

By Alexis Madrigal
WIRED SCIENCE, August 27, 2009

One hundred and fifty years ago on Aug. 27, Colonel Edwin L. Drake sunk the very first commercial well that produced flowing petroleum. The discovery that large amounts of oil could be found underground marked the beginning of a time during which this convenient fossil fuel became America’s dominant energy source.

But what began 150 years ago won’t last another 150 years — or even another 50. The era of cheap oil is ending, and with another energy transition upon us, we’ve got to extract all the lessons we can from its remarkable history.

“I would see this as less of an anniversary to note for celebration and more of an anniversary to note how far we’ve come and the serious moment that we’re at right now,” said Brian Black, an energy historian at Pennsylvania State University. “Energy transitions happen and I argue that we’re in one right now. Thus, we need to aggressively look to the future to what’s going to happen after petroleum.”

When Drake and others sunk their wells, there were no cars, no plastics, no chemical industry. Water power was the dominant industrial energy source. Steam engines burning coal were on the rise, but the nation’s energy system — unlike Great Britain’s — still used fossil fuels sparingly. The original role for oil was as an illuminant, not a motor fuel, which would come decades later.

Oil, people later found, was uniquely convenient. To equal the amount of energy in a tank of gasoline, you need 200 pounds of wood. Pair that energy density with stability under most conditions and that, as a liquid, it was easy to transport, and you have the killer application for the infrastructure age.

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.

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. People discuss 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 search for alternatives is on. If that search goes poorly — as some Peak Oil analysts predict — human civilization will fall off an energy cliff. 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.

Yet humans with an economic incentive to be optimistic become optimists, and the harder we look, the more possible alternatives we find. The big question now is whether the cure for our oil addiction will come with a heavy carbon side effect.

Over the next 20 years, synthetic fuels made from coal or shale oil could conceivably become the fuels of the future. On the other hand, so could advanced biofuels from cellulosic ethanol or algae. Or the era of fuel could end and electric vehicles could be deployed in mass, at least in rich countries.

With the massive injection of stimulus and venture capital money into alternative energy that’s occurred over the past few years, the solutions for replacing oil could already be circulating among the labs and office parks of the country. To paraphrase technology expert Clay Shirky talking about the media, nothing will work to replace oil, but everything might.

If history tells us anything, it’s that energy sources can change, never tomorrow, but always some day.

“What is required is to operate without fear and to take energy transitions on as a developmental opportunity,” Black said.

slightly adapted from: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/

2009/08/oilat150/#ixzz0gW1mC0Zm, access on Feb. 10, 2010.

The author’s intention in this text is to