Peak Energy Update: Post-petroleum reality check

Russ Steele

Our local post-petroleum hand wringers are spending a lot of energy trying to convince the community we need to be preparing for a post-petroleum world by building sustainability gardens, chicken coops, and returning to a world before we had cheap energy. 

Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy is a grassroots group concerned about the repercussions of declining oil and natural gas in Nevada county.

As I have written before we are not running out of fossil energy resources with enough gas, coal, and oil  for over 500 years when shale oil reserves are considered. It might not be a cheap as it once was be we are not running  our of fossil energy reserves any time soon. The Congressional Research Service just published a new report that the US has the largest fuel reserve on earth. We just lack the political will to capture and use them.

Bruce McQuain at Hot Air has posted a summary of this reality in a report by Peter C. Glover in the Energy Tribune. Glover’s analysis of a recent Congressional Research Service study confirms that
we have hundreds of years of oil, gas and coal.

Glover writes:

In case anyone missed it, let me repeat something that is of a magnitude of 10 on the scale of news-quakes for Joe Public USA: America’s combined energy resources are, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CSR), the largest on earth. They eclipse Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th) and Canada (6th) combined – and that’s without including America’s shale oil deposits and, in the future, the potentially astronomic impact of methane hydrates.

The energy facts in the CRS report should be making front page news all over America. Mostly it isn’t. Given the devastating news from Japan and New Zealand, it may be right to postpone dancing in the streets. But something else is going on. Even though they are going to dominate global energy supply for decades to come the insidious war on vital fossil fuels continues apace.

While A.P.P.L.E is wasting time and energy to solve a non-existing problem for the near term generations, we have enough oil to maintain America's current rates of production and replace imports from the Persian Gulf for more than 50 years, without considering the shale oil reserves.

If Methane Hydrates are considered the US has enough Natural Gas for 400 years, and enough accessible coal for over 200 years.  America's recoverable coal reserves are estimated to be 262 billion short tons, and this does not consider the vast coal resources in Alaska, estimated to be 3,200 billion tons. For perspective, the US consumes just 1.2 billion short tons of coal per year.

With hundreds of years of oils and natural gas resources in the US, why are the folks of APPLE trying to scare local folks into returning to an early 19th Century lifestyle?