On Smil.

• Position: Letter to the editor

What a pleasant surprise to read Vaclav Smil's essay challenging those predicting catastrophe. Smil knows what he is talking about. I have read his many excellent books. Congratulations to World Watch for including Smil.

STEVE BAER

Zomeworks Corporation

Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.

What a sad and misinformed appraisal of the motives of people like Colin Campbell.

Campbell and others are pointing out that we have to be cognizant of peak oil as it will require precisely some of the alternatives pointed out in this article, but Campbell and others, as opposed to Smil, recognize the timeframes that these alternatives entail for implementation and also the realistic rates of delivery of energy from these alternatives by comparison to fossil fuels.

Smil suggests that previous estimates of peak oil have been wrong and therefore implies that all estimates will be wrong. I hope he's right! Michael Lynch goes back to the Greeks in suggesting that all estimates have never been right and therefore we have nothing to worry about. However, Hubbert was right in his forecast for the U.S. peak in 1970, even considering Alaska, despite Smil's insinuation to the contrary.

The widely criticized USGS assessment of 3 trillion barrels of ultimately recoverable oil will still see us peak in 2018 at 50-percent recovered. Smil totally misses the point. We don't have a resource problem, we have a deliverability problem. We have recovered the cheap, easy oil. The remaining oil is more expensive to recover (offshore, polar, and unconventional oil). Deliverability from these sources takes much longer and much higher capital investment than previous sources. Smil apparently doesn't look at the forecasts for unconventional oil, even from the optimists (such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration) of meeting less than 5 percent of projected 2025 demand even with massive growth in production.

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Smil falsely states that "even $70/barrel is at least 35-40 percent below the 1981 peak" (therefore no worries). In fact, in inflation adjusted terms, oil was at $89/barrel in 1981, which means that $70 oil is 21 percent below the 1981 peak. Economists such as Jeffrey Rubin of CIBC World Markets are forecasting $100/barrel oil by the end of next year.

Smil assumes that liquefied natural gas will create a world market for gas but ignores the infrastructure implications, in terms of time-to-build, geopolitics, and capital investment, as well as the full cycle emissions from this source (15-30 percent of the gas must be burned for liquefaction, transport, and regasification).

The realities of wind and solar are well understood; perhaps Smil should educate himself on the realistic contribution to a grid of these and on price (as well as energy return on energy investment). Although hydrates are purported as the panacea, and have been for a long time, they are energy negative and likely will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Nuclear fusion is as far away in the future as it was when I first heard about it in the 1960's; good luck! Is it wise to bank our energy future on pipe dreams?

Smil correctly assumes that we must utilize our remaining non-renewable hydrocarbon resources to better advantage, but to assume that "human inventiveness and ingenuity" will overcome the laws of thermodynamics is wishful thinking on the highest level.

DAVE HUGHES

Geological Survey of Canada

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Almost all of the Peak Oil Forum articles expressed plenty of technological optimism, that somehow our future technologies will solve our energy problems. Technology is not energy! It takes energy and land to get energy. In a world awash with cheap energy we can ignore the net energy required to get the "other energy sources," but in a more and more limited-resource future, that will not work.

The biofuels everyone is banking on are going to come from the land, the land that is already being degraded. Here in Iowa, the "Saudi Arabia of ethanol," we're drinking corn weed killers and corn fertilizers, and there are lots of impaired streams, not to mention soil erosion, due to too much corn.

Smil ridiculed the concerns about lack of planning for the post-peak era as alarmist and apocalyptic. The sky will not fall in one chunk, it will fall in pieces here and there. It has fallen for the people of Iraq, whom we have invaded to continue our oil-dependent lifestyle. It has fallen for us in Iowa where we have atrazine and corn nitrate in our drinking water.

There are actual physical and biological limits on this finite planet and our technologies will have to be subordinate to those limits. We cannot talk about...