Peak Oilers have been ridiculed and are keeping their heads down for now. An OLO commenter has opined that since recent oil prices are moderate then oil cannot be in sight of serious depletion. Like some kind of Magic Pudding. Others are suggesting from now on oil could be cheap until the last drop. I guess many of the billion internal combustion engines that fire up each day won't feel the need for fuel. That includes essentials like journey to work, aviation and farming.

I see a hint of Magic Puddingism in AEMO's submission to the Finkel review. They suggest we need less combined cycle gas baseload more open cycle turbines which can run on presumably always abundant liquid fuel when gas is in short supply. They don't seem to envision a big switch to electric cars which would also need baseload power.

If I recall the Office of the Chief Economist said Australia imported $24.4 bn of liquid fuels last year, including both crude and refined fuel. If crude oil goes to $100 a barrel the import bill could double to $50 bn yet we seem blithely unprepared. Unless there is a fabulous local gas and oil discovery to give a temporary reprieve things must get tougher within a few years.

We've all heard this story before and used to separate the ignorant from their energy dollar?

The 1.8 trillion barrel Edmonton reserve will, given modern technology, keep production well above demand as will the change over the next 15 years to vastly less costly to run, rechargeable electric vehicles!

And tantamount to cooking the goose that lays the golden egg on the part of the price gouging foreign oil companies, whose only patriotism is towards the almighty dollar A k A the ever rising profit curve!

If any of these massive multi-trillion dollar companies was headed by (a) hard headed rationalist(s), they would now be pouring their R+D dollars/investment dollars, into Thorium based energy generation and still be principle players in the energy business one and a half decades from now!

Especially if, earnings returned for investment, was the actual goal!
Alan B.

Ahhh yes, if only the politicians etc had taken notice of Colin Campbell in the 1990s.
Some people even poo pooed Shell's announcement that they are planning
how to leave the oil industry.
Many do not understand that crude oil production peaked in 2005 and it
triggered the GFC in 2008. Then that started off the tight oil rush
which has been a nice gap filler but that has now peaked.
Exxon's profit fell from $70B to $3.8B and Conoco made a loss.
Shell likewise had a bit fall in profit. Forgot the amount.
Just to make it all more difficult, world coal production has peaked !

Unfortunately I think it is too late to rush about building nuclear
power stations for our electric cars.
Face it we will not have cars or aircraft !
There is a real risk that we will not be able to build a reliable
electrical system due to difficulty in borrowing the necessary funds.

If you want to see the future, watch Egypt.
85 million people and the Nile can support 40 million.

Then just to put a bit of icing on it all;
I have read that the US government had congress permission to keep
borrowing but that expires on 15th March.
The US government will have $200B in kitty. It will be broke about mid year.

Sleep tight, the Financial Stability Board will find your deposits.

Interesting the author seems more a sustainability activist than a qualified expert in oil science and economics.

The author's broader description is http://theconversation.com/profiles/frederick-trainer-8622 :

The author "...has taught and written about sustainability and justice issues for many years.

He is also developing Pigface Point, an alternative lifestyle educational site near Sydney..."

Enough said.

The future Bazz? No need to journey up the Nile, when all you need is to go to the crowded and well watered, well oiled,(comparatively) Philippines.

Take a butchers at Manilla and its permenant traffic jam (bedlam) to understand just what overcrowded underfunded looks like and surrounded on all sides by wealth, the shrinking moderate and the abusive, arrogant, fat, expanding, gorged, obscenely wealthy.

Then slip across to even smaller, vastly less well resourced tiny Singapore, if only to understand, the answer just does not lay in extreme exploitative capitalism/corrupt cronyism.

Then slip over to Ceylon, to understand that conflict solves nothing and ultimately armed struggle just produces victims/sorrow/heartache/grieving widows and orphans. And poor folks all the poorer for the experience.

Except the oil merchants, arms dealers and the ubiquitous, divisive sabre rattling politicians!

We have the technology and the finance to turn this nation into a veritable garden of eden for all its inhabitants!

All that's missing is a (Lee Kuan Yew type) no nonsense visionary at the helm, with the wit to enable its fruition?

As opposed to do nothing hand wringing blame shifters, and where they almost to a generic man, excell!?

Currently we're hell bound on a path that all but guarantees, we can out Filipino the Philippines. God give me strength!
Alan B.

Hmmm, well Alan, Egypt is a classic example, declining oil, declining
money, increasing debt, continuous land bridge to Europe, 45 million
people that have to die or go somewhere.

What I find depressing is the total lack of any sense of urgency from
the powers that be. Even your favourite solution is probably too late.

Is peak oil the end of the world?
In a really sudden oil crisis, governments would mandate emergency rationing to essential infrastructure. Most Australian’s live on the coast. Interstate trucking could be replaced by cargo ships quickly converted into emergency sailboats. This could be a worldwide trend. The United Nations reports that “Half the world’s population lives within 60 km of the sea, and three-quarters of all large cities are located on the coast.”
http://www.unep.org/urban_environment/issues/coastal_zones.asp

We’ll probably reduce some lines of supply and relocalise as others have suggested, much like the WW2 Victory gardens or even the extreme gardening makeover Cuba went through as the Soviet Union collapsed, their only way of buying oil. We’ll develop apps that help us car-share, use buses and public transport more efficiently, and of course, we’ll buy more bicycles. Indeed, as many become unemployed in oil vulnerable industries, the population could become a lot fitter as rickshaws and bike-trailer industries spring into action to supply our goods and services. Goods arriving by cargo ship could be distributed by bike-trailers. Why not? I’ve seen groups that move house by bicycle!

Mines could replace diesel trucks with electric trolley-buses. It’s an old and proven technology. In a hideous emergency, coal-to-liquids could be implemented in Australia, keeping at least some infrastructure. But the climate implications are awful. The rationing and substitution programs above would see us through the bottleneck as corporations like Tesla suddenly exploded onto the world stage.

A study by NREL in America concluded that 84% of family cars and light trucks, including buses and council garbage trucks, could run on today’s grid – if all power plants were turned up to full. That’s most cars and light trucks running on electricity. I saved the study here.
https://eclipsenow.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/phev_feasibility_analysis_part1.pdf

So much for light trucks and cars. In the next post, what about diesel?

But what is going to replace diesel for that difficult interstate trucking? The cargo sailing ships will have to deliver our goods until the next big thing. But what might that be?
My first preference where the route is busy enough would be rail. It can use electricity directly and efficiently. That would reduce the traffic on the roads, and is my first preference.

But what about routes that are not frequent enough, and might only require one delivery truck every few weeks? There are 2 main options:-
1/ Dr James Hansen thinks one contender might be boron. It is discussed in a book Hansen recommends called “Prescription for the Planet”. See Chapter 5 “The fifth element” on page 155.
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/prescription-for-the-planet.html
2/ “Blue Crude”, or SYNTHETIC DIESEL from seawater can be affordable, with the cost of building the nuclear power plants that run the process included! Diesel trucks can gradually switch over to synthetic diesel which is infinitely renewable as the industry ramps up the other side of any peak oil bottleneck or rationing crisis.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2013/01/16/zero-emission-synfuel-from-seawater.html

Nuclear power has an EROEI of 75, more than enough to run all of society, including the transport sector.

It will need government with a attitude of whatever it takes.
If all diesel that was available was reserved for food transport and
all rail movement was reserved for food transport many problems could
be worked on with less of a sense of urgency.
Certainly petrol & diesel rationing will have to be implemented.

The trouble is all these ideas that we may have will be either possible
or impossible in varying degrees, depending on exactly what does happen.
The really big worry is the Seneca Cliff effect and the phenomena
of the Collapse of Complex Systems.
The Seneca Cliff means that the system maintains itself with increasing
difficulty but then suddenly collapses.
Trainter's Collapse of Complex Systems shows that such systems have
declining returns on effort which when I read his book was just
another way of saying ERoEI. Seneca and Trainter 2000 years apart
described the same phenomena.

Gazza put your posts up again in 100 years time and we can see if those Micky mouse stories you read have any merit. The doomsayers international.

Exactly Doog! There *are* alternatives to oil, but we may have left it too late for an *easy* transition. There could be some sort of rationing, even major economic crisis with a bit of a "war-time-economy" emergency measure shifts if necessary. However, there is a *vast* difference between even a Greater Depression and Mad Max. Nuclear power has all the EROEI we need for it to recharge the other transport industries.