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Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.
In what world are we nearing "escape velocity on energy"? We are not particularly close to fusion: there have been recent advances, but the EROI is still less than 1, and this is with a calculation that doesn't include the construction of the reactor or obtaining tritium (note that current fusion reactors only work with tritium to start the reaction, which is exceedingly rare in nature). Even if we were close, we'd have to have a massive buildout of new reactors in a declining energy environment (fossil fuel extraction is level or declining, which is not a good sign for the future of energy, even if reserves are large). Even if we do somehow manage a soviet style five-year plan buildout of reactors across the globe, there is still the electrification problem. Most of the global transportation fleet, heavy industry, and mining equipment currently requires fossil fuel usage. Many of these have electric alternatives, but again replacement takes time, and metal supplies that we do not have on earth (Simon Michaux calculated that current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient to even replace the global fleet of personal transportation vehicles with electric cars).
So basically consider me very skeptical that your suggested way to avoid Peak Oil relies on a technology that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist), a rapid buildout that has never been done before in history that relies on declining reserves of metals and fossil fuels.
"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.
Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.
Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...
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I think you misunderstood one point I had above.
Peak oil worries are about how fast we run out of oil and how soon.
Fast and soon being two different things.
Scenario 1: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.
Scenario 2: hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.
Scenario 3: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.
Scenario 4 hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.
Only scenario 1 worries me. And I think it is the least likely scenario.
I think #2 or #4 are more likely. I think oil reserves are effectively unlimited right now. Not easy oil reserves. But oil reserves plus some new technology. We already know of a bunch of marginal oil reserves like tar sands that are crappy but semi unlimited compared to current consumption rates.
I might be horribly off base in my assumptions. Willing to be corrected if I'm very wrong on those assumptions.
The fusion technology feels closer than 20 years. Ten years feels too optimistic. 30 years and something has gone horribly wrong in society or technology.
I'm pretty sure we are at Peak Oil right now. We've been on a long plateau since about ~2018 and certainly since 2022.
Pretty sure you're right about oil reserves, but you're missing the EROEI part: a lot of that oil requires a lot of energy to extract, meaning that we are effectively getting less net oil than we used to be because it takes more energy to get oil out of fracking or tar sands than it does out of gushers in Texas and PA. Of course if we have fusion this doesn't matter, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that we will ever have fusion.
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Most of the Motte (and the internet as a whole) are so divorced from any extractive industry that they’re like the kid from Deadwood: “Peaches come from a can. A man in a factory put them there”
Man I love that song. We used to sing it at summer camp when I was a kid not understanding any of the innuendos.
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So we'll transition to sodium ion batteries eventually? CATL is supposed to begin mass producing them in December this year, with a broadly comparable energy density to LFPs.
Sure, that seems like a good replacement for lithium actually! However, we still will have issues with copper supplies (although I suppose with unlimited energy you can just mine that from sea water) and rare earth minerals that are necessary for other electronics.
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