The importance of oil

A good many Americans are aware by now that we use too much of the world’s oil to fuel our oversized SUVs and cars, and produce too much CO₂ as a byproduct. But few understand how completely dependent our entire way of life is on cheap petroleum.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have enough to eat. Oil is the source of the pesticides and fertilizers and machinery that make our farms about 10 times more productive than they were in pre-oil days. Vast amounts of oil are needed to make and fuel the farm machinery that allows less than 2% of the population to grow enough food for the rest of us, and yet more oil is used to transport that food throughout the country, and yet more oil is required to keep much of that food fresh with refrigerators. The average American corn field produces about 130-150 bushels per acre today. Before oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and modern farm machinery the average yield was around 14-16 bushels to the acre. (1) One acre of corn production in the U.S. requires approximately 140 gallons of oil (2) in the form of fuel, fertilizer and pesticides. To process 1 pound of coffee requires the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil by the time it is grown, shipped, processes and packaged (3).

The pre-oil world supported about a billion people. We now support almost 7 billion people. Let’s be optimistic and assume that technology (genetic engineering and the like) might double our potential non-oil food production capacity, so that in a post-oil world we could feed 2 billion people. That means the lives of at least 5 billion people hang on the balance as we run out of oil. And some of those people will be in our own nation.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have electricity, and without electricity most of our economy won’t run. Although coal is the fuel that drives the majority (about 60%) of our generating plants, cheap oil is what makes it economically possible to manufacture and run the equipment used to mine and transport the coal, to build and maintain the generating machinery and electric transmission infrastructure, and to build all the electric devices we depend on, from furnaces and air conditioners and refrigerators to Ipods and computers and electric light bulbs.

Without cheap oil many products will disappear or become prohibitively expensive, since oil is the feedstock for many chemical processes, including most plastics.

Directly or indirectly cheap oil makes possible most of our industrial capability, most of our technological advances, most of our imports, most of our food, most of our environmental control (heating and cooling) most of our medical services, most of our sources of entertainment and recreation, most of our information infrastructure, and almost all of our transportation.

The current evidence is that we will run out of cheap oil over the next few decades as we are forced to recover oil from more remote regions and in more inaccessible forms (such as tar sands) – that ought to worry us and be a source of wide public and political discussion. That fact that it isn’t widely discussed, certainly not in the political arena, doesn’t bode well for the world’s future.

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1. Walter Youngquist, “The Post-Petroleum Paradigm -- and Population”, Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 20, Number 4, March 1999
   

2. David Pimentel, Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology, September 2001
   

3. Chad Heeter, “The oil in your oatmeal - A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast”, 25 Mar 2006, The San Francisco Chronicle