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By Root 1120 0

away from oil onto some combination of nuclear energy, increased coal consumption, and/or alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind, or maybe even algae biofuels. While each of these energy sources will play an important role in mitigating the down slope of oil, none of them individually or in combination can ever completely plug the gap left by oil’s slow departure. Remember, the challenge here is not only to replace what will “go missing” as oil fields deplete, but also to increase the total energy supply of the world by a few percent each year as our exponential economy demands. Simple math, combined with the realities of time, scale, and cost, illustrates why this is improbable.

Simple Math

Energy itself comes in many forms. We don’t value one source of energy over another for the form of the source itself, but rather to the extent that each can do useful work for us. By putting different types of energy on equal footing through a singular measure, we can compare them more easily. For our examples, we’ll use a measure of power called watts.2

In 2009, the world produced and consumed 84.43 million barrels of oil per day (mbd), or 30.8 billion barrels for the year. Converting all of those billions of barrels into their energy content using watt hours, we discover that the world consumed around 52.4 quadrillion watt hours of energy in the form of oil. Assuming we wanted to get the same amount of power from other sources, this would be the same as:

More than 6,800 nuclear reactors running at the same efficiency as the United States’ current 104 reactors (or roughly 6,400 more nuclear reactors than were operating worldwide in 2009)

Nearly 6 million new 1 megawatt wind towers running at their idealized output (assuming the perfect amount of wind blows every day of the year and no maintenance is ever required), or 17 million running under more realistic conditions

Nearly 13 million acres, or slightly over 20,000 square miles of land, to be covered by solar PV panels (assuming ideal locations in the southwest United States or elsewhere)

More than 16 billion acres of farmland converted entirely to soybean biofuel production, representing 135 percent of the total amount of world agricultural land4

Those are some big numbers. But that only gives us 2009 levels. Now suppose that we want to increase our total world consumption of energy from petroleum at 1.0 percent per year from here to 2030, as the EIA assumes.5 Each of the above numbers needs to increase by 26 percent by 2030, according to the assumed rate of growth in oil consumption. Of course, there’s demand growth for electricity to consider as well (which we haven’t), but the point here is to merely put our petroleum use into context.

Clearly we aren’t going to instantly need to replace all of the energy that we currently get from oil, because it will not “run out,” but will instead wind down over many decades. So the numbers above are simply a useful way to illustrate how much energy we currently derive from petroleum and how many nuclear reactors and/or alternative sources we’d have to build or pursue to make up for the energy we currently enjoy from oil.

More realistically, instead of scaling these numbers against all oil produced, let’s suppose that the world’s oil output peaks in 2014 and that our goal is to merely replace the amount that goes missing each year. For this scenario we will assume a very modest 5 percent rate of depletion for existing fields (less than the 6.7 percent recorded by the IEA), and we’ll (very) generously assume that OPEC has 5 mbd of spare capacity, Iraq will deliver 9.5 mbd by 2019 (a nearly 500 percent increase from current levels), and another 15 mbd of assorted other new projects will come on line over the next 10 years, which adds up to 30 mbd of new or incremental production. But, we’ll also need another 1.3 percent of oil growth each year to reflect the amount of petroleum growth that we’ve enjoyed over the 20 years from 1989 to 2009.

Remember, the point of all this is to see if we can