which is what I've been spending more time doing during my time off... To start:
A primer from a great site, including "five myths".
Basically, the U.S. uses oil and natural gas for about 60% of its primary energy. World oil production now appears to be at peak and decline appears immanent, and natural gas will probably do so soon. (Since natural gas expands on its own, it is more easily recoverable, but its production drops off much more quickly once decline starts.)
The Five Myths:
1) OPEC could produce more if it used current techniques
2) Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will save us
3) A small downturn can easily be made up with energy efficiency
4) Canadian Oil Sands will save us
5) Biofuels will save us
Although production is roughly symmetrical on the way up and the way down, the way down will not resemble the way up for (at least) three reasons:
1) Demand is now much larger, and continuing to grow, which will lead to increasingly large unmet demand, i.e., unmet needs for those who cannot afford the higher prices. See the Hirsch Report (PDF), from the U.S. Dept of Energy.
2) The oil which was easiest to take out of the ground has been extracted, and future amounts will be more difficult to recover. This is summed up in the idea of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI). Initially, EROI of oil was about 100:1. Now it's more like 15:1, and will keep falling. (See this graph from this presentation.) This means that the amount of oil we can actually use will fall faster than the amount of recoverable oil. (See the "Gross vs. Net Energy" graph in this presentation.)
3) Oil imports, on which the U.S. is highly dependent, will likely fall even faster than net production does. The idea in the "Export Land Model" is that demand for oil in countries which are still net exporters will continue to grow exponentially even as production declines, leading exports to decline significantly faster than production. Explanation of and support for this idea is provided at the link above.
So, the world, and the U.S. especially (Europe is much more energy-efficient), is looking at a large and rapid loss of an energy source on which it's completely dependent - for the production of fertilizers, production and transport of food, manufacture of medicines and about every other product in our modern lives, and transport of people from home to stores and work every day (not to mention air travel). So far, the most serious U.S. effort to prepare for this transition has been the invasion of Iraq (see "Is the Bush administration aware of this?" down the page at this site).
