Peak Oil and Next Year's Heating Bills

The Citgo station on 199 east of town is having problems with their pumps

because they are an older model that will not register prices above $4 / gallon. Welcome to the world of "peak oil".

"Peak oil" is a phenomena common to all non-renewable resources.

The production and consumption rises over time to some peak. After that, most of the easily available resource has been extracted and production starts falling as the remaining resource becomes more and more difficult to extract. This has long been predicted by industry experts for world wide oil production, and the data now suggest that we are either at that peak, or just passed it. It doesn't matter how much oil is left in the ground, or what new discoveries are made in far off places of the globe. The amount of oil pumped per day will continue to decline from this point on. Even opening up ANWR (the Artic National Wildlife Refuge) to oil pumping will have a very minor impact on oil supplies and prices. For more information on the peak oil topic, you can see a short summary presentation that I put together at http://www.iggyweb.net/mike/peakoil.pdf

How will this impact us locally?

As high as last winter's heating bills were, there is a real possibility that next winter's heating bills could be almost twice as high. I don't have to tell anyone the amount of hardship that will create, especially for senior citizens and others on fixed incomes. 

How could we as a community prepare for something like that?

Well, here's some suggestions to start the discussion off.  It would be really helpful if there were local businesses specializing in making our houses much more energy efficient. For a small fee they could conduct an energy audit and tell the owner what are the most important things for them to do. For an additional fee they could arrange to have some of those things actually done. I would expect that such businesses could do very will in the coming years. I would also like to see someone set up a local office space in Red Hook where people could rent cubicles to work at instead of commuting longer distances to their office each day.

How does the town itself deal with this?

If things get really bad, could we shut down the town office building for part of January or February? The schools are probably the biggest consumers of heating oil. We may have to start thinking about whether or not it is possible to shut down the school buildings in January and giving the kids and extended Christmas break that will be made up at other times in the calendar.

If you haven't been giving these issues much thought yet, I can pretty much guarantee that you will in the coming months. So what are your thoughts now?