Within the last 2-3 years, there has been a developing consensus amongst experts in the petrochemical industry, geologists and economists that the era of cheap oil is coming to an end. Although this notion of ‘Peak Oil’ has been described and written about at least since the 1950s, it is really only within the last decade that it has started to receive the widespread attention that it deserves. This is unfortunate given its profound ramifications for our civilisation and our current way of life.
Essentially, oil is the accumulation of organic hydrocarbons – the remains of life forms - in cracks and crevices in the rocks of the earth’s crust, which has been subjected to the telluric forces of heat and pressure over the millenia. Trapped in the chemical bonds of these simple hydrocarbon molecules is energy which can be released by oxidation when oil is burned. Oil has proven to be an exceptionally convenient source of energy because it is relatively pure, compact, easily transported, abundant and easily accessible. Where coal was the energy source that fuelled the Industrial Revolution, oil was the fuel of modern industrial, electronic and biotechnological civilisation, including its most recent development into computerisation and virtual reality.
While oil has been, and still is, used as a fuel for electricity generation, probably the use that has caused it to most spectacularly transform our society is transportation. The car has not only transformed our everyday work and leisure, it has caused us to completely re-design our cities and towns along the model of suburbia, especially in places like North America and Australia, where pre-existing urban structures were not of great antiquity. Air travel has become relatively cheap and has enabled millions to travel around the globe for very little expense.
However oil has also been the essential starting point for a whole range of chemical derivatives which have become so commonplace in their everyday use that most of us have forgotten about their origin: plastics and all that has been made out of them, pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, antimalarials and pesticides, cleansers and detergents, fabrics such as nylon, fertilizers for modern agriculture. A cursory look around our homes and a brief list of our typical activities in a week will show just how dependent our modern lifestyles have become on this incredibly potent substance, a substance sometimes called ‘black gold’ or ‘concentrated sunshine.’
Looked at in this way, we can see that the phenomenal rise in human population over the past century (2 billion in 1930, 6 billion in 1999) has been intimately tied to revolutionary advances in medicine and in food technology, or the so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s. Both of these advances have been dependent on abundant availability of petrochemicals.
The problem is that, while there are still huge reserves of oil left to be tapped, produced and brought to market, these reserves are becoming increasingly difficult to utilise. The first oil-wells spurted out oil under its own pressure, requiring practically no energy to be invested in order to extract the substance. However as a typical oil-field matures, and the easily extractable oil is depleted, the remaining reserves take much more energy to be invested in a variety of technologies in order to pump the remains to the surface. Inevitably, there comes a point where the amount of energy invested in the oil extraction process exceeds the amount of energy obtained in the oil extracted, making the activity pointless. When this occurs in any given oil-field, the field is said to have ‘peaked.’ In 1956, exactly this was predicted to occur in 1970 by geologist Dr M. King Hubbert with respect to the total oil production of the lower 48 states of the USA, to much derision from his contemporaries in the oil business. He turned out to be right, and the total production of oil from this region has continued to decline ever since.
Similarly, Russian oil production, that of Mexico and the North Sea have all peaked. There is uncertainty about the largest oil producers in the world currently, namely Saudi Arabia, Iran and the other Gulf states, in terms of whether they have reached peak production. However a number of prominent geologists and oil industry figures have been reaching increasing consensus that the world as a whole either will reach peak production in the next 5 years or so, or is actually at peak now. It is not a simple matter to determine this, as different players have different economic and political interests invested in their oil and in what information they release about their reserves. It does appear, however, that an ominous sign is sustained and very substantial rises in oil prices, together with fairly large fluctuations in prices, but an underlying inevitable march up the price scale.
To this analysis must be added the extra demand on oil supplies represented by the rapidly growing economies of China and India, together accounting for some 35% of world population. If anything, this will tend to bring the peak closer than if world demand remained the same, or if not, it will naturally cause prices to rise even further ahead of the actual peak.
Other energy sources are also widely used by our modern civilisation, such as natural gas, coal, wood, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar and others. These are almost exclusively used to generate electricity, but they are generally poor substitutes for oil for purposes of cheap and fast transportation. Hence, as the world navigates the ‘oil descent’ curve post-peak, it will likely be in the area of transport, and all that is dependent on it, that we will see the most serious problems looming.
For example, the greater population of Melbourne and other large spatially spread-out cities, resides in suburbs which are highly dependent on cars for transport – transport to work, to shops, to hospitals, to schools. Food retailing and fresh food supplies are totally dependent on road haulage, such that basic food prices will rise with the cost of petrol. Public transport exists, but is insufficient to meet the needs of suburbs of such large magnitude. Airlines find it hard enough turning a profit even with relatively stable fuel prices, but are already laying off staff, placing planes in storage and closing routes as well as raising ticket prices by up to 3-4% per month. Analysts are seriously talking about a doubling in the price of air travel by the end of this year.
This is just a small taste of the basic theory and implications of Peak Oil. Often dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ as recently as 3-4 years ago, it has suddenly become mainstream news in the most famous broadsheet newspapers around the world in recent weeks.
This may be related to two distinct, but inter-related astrological alignments this year and next: Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn and Neptune’s return to its discovery degree, which takes place in April next year.
Neptune
Neptune is often said to hold dominion over oil, but the reasoning behind this is somewhat obscure. It is true that the start of the modern oil industry and the birth of organic chemistry that followed on its heels both took place not long after Neptune’s discovery in the mid-nineteenth century. Neptune’s relationship to drugs, gas, liquids and overpowering vapours and smells is probably well-recognised. The panic over rapidly rising oil prices and the increasingly deceptive actions of world leaders in disguising their grabs for the last remaining oil deposits are redolent of the Neptunian chaos waiting to be released as the world begins the inevitable slide down the oil production curve post-peak.
Neptune stationed retrograde on 28 May 2008 at 24º15’ Aquarius, right in the middle of Australian federal government arguments over a ‘price-watch’ scheme to assist motorists identify the cheapest petrol on sale from service-stations. Neptune has been in conjunction with the Moon’s North Node and, more loosely, Chiron over the past 5-6 weeks, as oil prices have risen by about 20%, and internet blogs have been full of people asking when society will wake up to its collective madness in continuing to consume so much oil for such extravagant and unnecessary reasons. Next year, however, Neptune will finally reach its discovery position at 25º53’ Aquarius, on 11 April 2009, while partile conjunct Chiron and about 5 weeks short of a very exact and rare Jupiter/Chiron/Neptune conjunction. Is it possible we are coming face-to-face with the reality of the over-abundance, the over-population, the over-use of material resources and the painful truth of the shadow side of excess?
Pluto
But there is a darker side to oil that I think transcends the realm of Neptune and is more suited to the symbolism of Pluto. Oil comes from the depths of the earth, from forces of great heat and pressure, and contains tremendous amounts of energy which originally derived from the sun’s rays trapped in plant life. This energy has been the fuel behind the enormously accelerated growth in human life on the planet as well the huge impact of human choices – and mistakes – on the planetary ecosystem as a whole. This characteristic of enormous power deriving from something as superficially insignificant, even disgusting, as a slimy black fluid seeping from a hole in the ground, is classically Plutonian in its imagery and symbolic resonance. This is reiterated by the association of Pluto with great wealth, and indeed oil has really become the currency of the world (as instantiated in the petrodollar). The unseen manipulations and machinations conducted by the powers that be, lying behind some of the major wars of the past hundred years, have to some extent been connected with the need for nations and peoples to gain access to more oil so that their technological development and military and economic prowess can grow ever more mighty. Again, this seems to evoke the invisible and powerful work of the archetype of Pluto.
The conjunction of Nepune with Pluto in the late 1880s and early 1890s – followed by the long-drawn-out opening sextile from the 1940s to the 1990s – seems to be significant in that it occurred in the sign of Gemini, the sign of transportation, commerce and telecommunications, all of which have been utterly transformed by the impact of cheap oil.
Now that Pluto has moved into Capricorn, the phenomenon of Peak Oil is suddenly front-page news, and the degree to which the symbolism is concretised is almost trite: Capricorn is the peak and Pluto is the oil. Beyond the other looming difficulties such as water and environmental spoilage, species extinction and climate change, all of which are rooted in the common need for some sort of planet-wide taking of responsibility for our excesses, Pluto in Capricorn also represents scarcity and the societal impacts of ‘energy descent.’ The most common predictions for Peak Oil seem to converge around 2006 – 2015, with most of them around 2008-2010. If the analysts are correct, and the models replicate the behaviour of inidvidual fields and countries around the world over the past 50 years, Pluto’s move into Capricorn has coincided with a momentous and defining point in our civilisation’s sense of history. This is the time when we have to start cutting back, when we have to be more responsible in how we use the vast wealth of millenia of stored energy beneath the ground. This is a problem of social organisation, of physical lifestyle change, of rationing, of re-defining the responsibility of the individual towards the group.
This will not be an easy time, and the first major period of difficulty will probably coincide with the prolonged Uranus-Pluto squares of the early 2010s, perhaps kicked off by major events in July/August 2010 when the cardinal t-square reaches maximum exactitude (Jupiter/Uranus conjunction opposite Mars/Saturn conjunction, both square Pluto).
Useful websites to look up if you want to learn more about Peak Oil include The Oil Drum (www.theoildrum.com), LATOC (www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net), Energy Bulletin (www.energybulletin.net), www.oilcrisis.com and many others you can find linked from these. The more informed you are of what’s really going on, the better you will be able to weather the coming storms; take the responsibility to educate others about this important information, so that we can initiate some real change in our attitude to the resources that sustain us.
