Is Portland prepared for peak oil?

Jim Jackson, adjunct professor of geology at Portland State, delivered a lecture last month for the Yachats Academy of Arts and Sciences titled “Peak Oil: All Geology is Local,” which covered the history and future of oil production, the many estimates of how much oil remains and the fact that global analysis of these issues has little to do with how a country’s energy policy is actually crafted.  

“Peak oil” refers to the peak of global oil production. Within the coming decades, and possibly this very decade, societies throughout the world will face a sudden and permanent shortage of their oil supplies as the rising demand for oil runs headlong into a finite supply. Once oil reaches its maximum level of output, economies that depend on the resource will contract, and human survival will have to occur on a local scale, according to the 2007 Portland Peak Oil Task Force’s final report.

According to Jackson, who worked for more than 20 years as a petroleum geologist for ARCO Gasoline before retiring from the oil industry in 1999, the daily global consumption rate in 2010 was 86.7 million barrels per day, adding up to an annual global consumption rate of 31.6 billion barrels. 

“I don’t think there’s any question that there’s a finite amount of oil out there, and we’re using it at a phenomenally fast pace,” said David Cohan, senior manager of Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance.  

Cohan served as the representative from the grass roots interest group Portland Peak Oil on the Portland Peak Oil Task Force. 

 “The entire economy is based on oil. That’s the thing that people can’t get through their heads,” Cohan said.

Michael Armstrong, one of the city staff who worked with the task force, said that the world currently depends on oil for “almost every facet of contemporary life.” 

The report’s forecasts are pretty bleak. It states that 50 years from now the peak of global oil production will be a distant memory, with the most common predictions for the peak year occurring between 2010 and 2020. 

In short, it is not a question of “if” peak oil will occur, but “when,” according to the report. As international demand for oil outstrips the available supply, peak oil will spell catastrophe for Portland and other metropolitan cities throughout the globalized, industrialized world. 

“There’s no city on the planet right now that could just switch to a non-petroleum future,” Cohan said. 

According to the task force’s report, peak oil will hit economically vulnerable citizens first and hardest. The fallout is likely to include widespread business failures, a reduction in imports and exports that are expensive to produce and transport, higher transportation costs that force the population to relocate from suburbs to city centers, disruptions in supply chains that decrease the amount of food available while pushing up its price and an overall plunge in living standards.  

Although Portland ranks seventh among U.S. cities in terms of “peak oil preparedness,” according to a 2008 report from Common Current, the city will not be exempt from these disturbances.  

“Portland is fortunate to have an outstanding public transportation system and a great network of bikeways and walk-able neighborhoods,” Armstrong said. “In this respect, Portland is better off than most American cities.” 

But these amenities will not be enough for the city to withstand the impact of peak oil, according to Cohan. At best, public transit and most alternative energies—which require petroleum-based technology for their proliferation, the report says—represent short-term solutions to a long-term crisis.  

He added that Portland needs to transition to a non-petroleum infrastructure sooner rather than later because the risks to society of reaching peak oil before the transition is in place are “unbelievable.” 

While Jackson does not claim to know when peak oil will occur—if it hasn’t already—he said that experts would need to know how much recoverable oil has been discovered, how much has been consumed, how much is left, and what future oil-demand rates will look like. Much of this information is off-limits, however, because members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—an oligopoly of oil-producing states—prefer to keep their reserve estimates classified as state secrets. 

Jackson parts company with other peak oil experts in believing that there will be no overarching public policy to confront peak oil. Any solutions to the planetary problem of oil shortages will have to emerge from local concerns and be locally tailored, he said.