The situation in natural gas for the US is equally troubling. Last year our consumption was 22.0 trillion cubic feet in contrast to our extraction rate of 18.2 trillion cubic feet. The difference is imported mostly via pipelines from Canada and partly as liquefied natural gas from Trinidad and North Africa. US imports from Canada are just over one-half of Canada’s production.

The all-time extraction peak for natural gas in the US was in 1973. The data on discovery indicates that both the US and Canada are now in terminal decline in natural gas extraction. Depletion rates for natural gas are much higher than for oil. Natural gas prices have reached new levels and this has led to an exodus of investment for new industrial plants which have natural gas as their primary source of raw material. These trends can be seen in the drop of 20 percent in the industrial use of natural gas since 1997.

 The era of energy scarcity that we are now entering will become the central issue of the coming years. Our suburbs have trapped us in a culture of dependency on automobiles for conducting our daily lives. Many false solutions will be suggested and put into action. These include bio-fuels, such as ethanol from corn and bio-diesel from soybeans. Of  last year’s corn crop of 11 billion bushels, about 15 percent went to ethanol production. This is about the same amount that went to corn exports. Over one half of the corn production goes to animal feed, with the rest to the food industry. The size of the bio-diesel production is still small, less than 2 percent of the ethanol production.

 In order to keep us motoring, the latest car technology advocated is plug-in-hybrids. The batteries would be charged at night from a wall plug. Wide scale adoption of this way of powering our motoring needs would clearly increase the consumption of electricity, half of which is today generated by coal. Rather than moving us to cleaner fuels, plug-in-hybrids would be a step back and would surely lead to accelerated global warning. Similar roadblocks arise if we were to promote fuel cells for cars. The hydrogen used by fuel cells would most likely be produced by electrolysis of water, also leading to an increasing use of coal. The dream of powering our car culture with wind and solar power are distant hopes and will not be realized.

The most effective way to reduce consumption of transportation fuels is to move to public transportation. This is difficult because we cannot give up our cars quickly. Still, the need for light rail and intra-state rail systems will become absolutely necessary once we move past the oil production peak and into the era of energy scarcity. Unlike today when the population of the United States has been moving out to counties next to interstate freeways, the future moves will be to small towns with railroad stops and back to cities to districts along the rail lines. Higher density housing with its thrifty energy use will be a natural outcome of this trend. European cities are models for this kind of “transit oriented development”, and it is heartening to see it as a growing trend in our more progressive cities. With high diesel and gasoline prices, long haul trucking will diminish and our vacation travel to distant places will come to an end.

Energy scarcity will reverse the trend to globalization. Our lives will become more local by necessity. The difficulties we face need to be addressed together and the organizations that attempt to understand our dilemma in addition to the local Sierra Club (global warming), include 1000 Friends of Central Ohio (transit oriented development), Simply Living (local food production), and the Sustainability Roundtable of Central Ohio (sustainable business). The Central Ohio Relocalization Effort, of which I am a member, is a local chapter of the Relocalization Network of the Post-Carbon Institute. Its goal is to understand how society can cope with the various aspects which global energy scarcity will force upon us.

 Dr. Seppo Korpela is a professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State.  He wrote the chapter "Prediction of World Peak Oil Production" in the book "The Final Energy Crisis", Pluto Press, 2005, and has lectured on this topic in Finland, India, and the US. He is a member of the advisory board of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas-USA. General information is given on his website.