Crude Awakening

I went without my car for two days last week while it was getting some work done. It showed me how dependent I am on my car. Indeed, how dependent we all are on our cars. I relied on my coworkers to drive me to and from work.

When I have my car, it takes 25 minutes to drive the eighteen miles of my commute. That’s a gallon of gas each way. At $2.30 a gallon, that’s close to five bucks a day. Though the money adds up, I drive anyway because I consider the convenience worth the cost.

On the other hand, what if oil prices keep rising at the rate they’ve been? What if a gallon of gas costs $5 next summer? Would it be worth driving then? What happens when it reaches ten bucks a gallon?

Oil is like real estate: they’re not making any more of it. It is a finite resource, absolutely guaranteed to one day be depleted. While we’ve got a ways to go before we get to that point, we will reach it.

And possibly sooner than later. Peak oil is the point where worldwide oil production peaks and then sharply drops. There is some evidence that we’re approaching that point where the good-time days of cheap oil are gone forever.

While there are millions of barrels still in the ground, once we’ve reached peak oil we’re on a downhill slope. That’s because at the peak, we’ve logically pumped all of the easy-to-get oil, that which is closest to the surface. The first half is easy. It’s the second half which is the hardest to obtain. Thus, the cost for those remaining barrels goes up considerably.

Add to this the surging demand of the developing world, places like China and India, and we’ve suddenly got a real problem. There is increasingly not enough oil to go around. At $60 a barrel, Saudi Arabia is pumping oil as fast as they can. They’re running at capacity now. Early this month, the Saudis quietly announced that they may not be able to meet oil demand in ten years.

Ten years. That’s just around the corner. If you think prices are outrageous now, imagine what they’ll look like then.

Even ten years might be optimistic. A friend who does work for the oil industry pointed out a telling sign: the Saudis recently awarded a gas exploration contract to the Chinese. The Chinese were chosen over the much more experienced American companies though they have little to no experience. Why was this done, my friend asks? Precisely because the Chinese are inexperienced. The Saudis want to maintain the appearance of massive reserves. My friend guesses the Saudis may be dry in as little as 10 years. This was all his opinion, of course, but it did make me wonder.

Occasionally, I’ll be going somewhere and come upon an elderly driver weaving in and our of her lane. This used to annoy me until the one day I realized that some day that will be me. People drive far longer than they should because they’re left with no other choice. If you can’t go where you need to go, you stop living. These old people are hanging on to their last meager bit of independence.

I pity those drivers, and then I think ahead to what I will do when I’m in their shoes. The conclusion I reach is unavoidable: I will have to get the hell out of Raleigh before I can no longer drive. There are just no alteratives to driving. Like far too many American communities, Raleigh was built for the automobile.

Raleigh was built on the promise of cheap oil. A promise made to be broken.

As citizens, we need to considering what we want our world to be like the day those oil derricks run dry. Will we switch to electric cars? Will we ride the rails? Will we work out of our homes and stay closer to them?

What will we do with all these roads?