PEAK OIL - another disaster in the making

     A bit of a personal post now.  I grew up in the "oil patch" -- my dad worked in the petroleum industry, his last gig being a pipe-straightening business, in conjunction with running a small motel in West Texas.  We lived through "boom or bust" periods -- chicken or feathers economy.  In good times, the "bunk house" might have three men alternating with one bed, and a total of maybe twelve men in the sleeping quarters, as their 8-hour shifts rotated them in and out of town.  When the "morning tower" crew came in, they'd roust out the "evening tower" guys and fall into an already warm bed to grab a few winks. 
     When I was still on the bottle, my dad would take me with him, out "to the field" to guage tanks.  He'd have been called a "pumper" in today's lingo.  I still remember my first memory of oil and rigs -- stinky, grimmy, scarey to be up on the floor of a working drilling rig.  I loathed the STINCH of worker's oil soaked work boots and pants -- but was told "that's the smell of money".  Black gold.  Crude cash. 
     Later, as an adult, I was Chief Technical Writer for the BJ-Hughes Training Center in Midland, TX -- crafting training manuals so a man with a 5th grade reading comprehension level could study up well (formation) fracturing procedures and not go out and blow himself or a half-million dollar frac truck to kingdom come (i.e. don't flow into closed manifolds on the frac lines). 
     The science of geology was much more fascinating to me than the oil patch per se, and I should have become a geologist but back in the late 1960's, mid 1970's when I was getting my "learnin'" it was not fashionable to women to go into such fields.  But even then, I had a suspicion -- an inkling of an idea that the good times might not roll on forever, and since ALL the oil in the ground was created during two unusual geologic / climatological events millions of years ago...  and we aren't crushing and cooking any more dinosaurs, we MIGHT run out of this FINITE resource.
     Now, the handwriting is on the wall -- we ARE going to "peak" in re: oil production -- and the ride down off Hubbart's peak will be a slippery slope for sure.  Probably the most important url on the net is NOT for this blog, but at http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ -- I urge ALL my readers (both of them) to study this site in depth.
     When I tenatively converted to Judaism some years back, I came across the story of a kid who asked his Rabbi, "Where IS God?".  The teacher replied, "Where is God NOT at?".  There is really NO place where we can't see evidence of a Divine Intelligence if you know what you are looking at -- even a chair reflects the Grand Design that did up the brains of the person who created the chair and materials in his or her mind before it took shape. 
     More recently, that same sense of omnipresence smacked me in the face with regard to oil -- there is NOTHING in our "modern" lives, other than the air we breathe, that doesn't have a petrochemical price tag attached to it.  All the food we eat required oil for fertilizer, diesel to harvest and transport it, for the plastic bags we put it in, for the microchips in the cash registers -- etc.  You get the picture. 
     The basis -- the very underpinning of our "civilization" is OIL -- and while we won't "run out" next week, this resource IS rapidly diminishing and as it becomes more scarce...  and more expensive -- it WILL impact all that we take for granted.  Not 1 out of 100 people have a ghost of an idea just how precarious our situation is -- being totally dependent on petroleum, and the potential consequences of NOT having a reliable source and supply of it.  Not 1 person in 1,000 could tell you what the daily consumption of oil is in this country -- here's some hints -- we are walking, two-legged SUV's -- our lifestyle takes, on average, FOUR gallons of gasoline/oil per day to sustain us.  And there are 300 million (give or take) of us in this country, legally or illegally.
     In the coming days, this blog will focus more and more on "Peak Oil" and what it means. Be well, get prepared and stay safe.