Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The British empire did dissolve during the twentieth cen-
tury, but exhaustion of coal had nothing to do with it;
coal remains in the ground but is hardly produced.
In the early 1920s, U.S. geologists predicted an early
end to the oil era, and Alderson (1920) believed that
retorting of oil from shale and the establishment of a
large-scale oil shale industry was the decade's key energy
challenge as ''the finger of fate points towards it.'' But
fate manifested itself with the discovery of a supergiant
East Texas oil field in 1930, and oil shale dreams were
revived (and abandoned) only during the 1970s. Putnam
(1954) predicted the global depletion of recoverable fos-
sil fuel reserves between 2000 and 2025, and 25 years
later the CIA warned that ''the world does not have years
in which to make a smooth transition to alternative en-
ergy resources'' (CIA 1979, iii). Did they really believe
that such a shift could be done in a few months? Two
decades after this prediction, oil's global R/P ratio stood
at a near-record level, but this did not prevent end-of-
millennium fears of the immediate peaking of oil extrac-
tion (see section 8.2).
Another powerful factor molding our perceptions is
the vision of the future as a replica of the recent past.
This influence was particularly strong after 1950, when
sustained global economic growth and tight energy/
GDP ratios provided a seemingly perfect foundation for
trend forecasts. Mesmerized by the regularity of such
indicators (looking further back would have shaken this
faith), forecasters ended up with exponentially rising
curves and enormous future consumption totals. U.S.
forecasts prepared between 1960 and 1970 fared particu-
larly badly. Their mean value for the year 2000 was just
over 170 EJ (maxima
>
200 EJ), whereas the actual total
was less than 100 EJ, a mean overestimate of nearly 80%
(fig. 12.8) (Smil 2003).
12.8 Forecasts of U.S. TPES for the year 2000, published
between 1960 and 1980, averaged nearly 80% above the
actual demand. Forecasts, identified by acronyms of the issu-
ing organizations, are plotted as originally published. From
Smil (2003).
