UMD researchers address economic dangers of 'peak oil'

Team identifies key industries for policy action

2013-10-16

(Press-News.org) COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Researchers from the University of Maryland and a leading university in Spain demonstrate in a new study which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk when global oil production peaks ('Peak Oil"). This multi-disciplinary team recommends immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce the vulnerability of these sectors.

While critics of Peak Oil studies declare that the world has more than enough oil to maintain current national and global standards, these UMD-led researchers say Peak Oil is imminent, if not already here -- and is a real threat to national and global economies. Their study is among the first to outline a way of assessing the vulnerabilities of specific economic sectors to this threat, and to identify focal points for action that could strengthen the U.S. economy and make it less vulnerable to disasters.

Their work, "Economic Vulnerability to Peak Oil," appears in Global Environmental Change. The paper is co-authored by Christina Prell, UMD's Department of Sociology; Kuishuang Feng and Klaus Hubacek, UMD's Department of Geographical Sciences, and Christian Kerschner, Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Read the article.

A focus on Peak Oil is increasingly gaining attention in both scientific and policy discourses, especially due to its apparent imminence and potential dangers. However, until now, little has been known about how this phenomenon will impact economies. In their paper, the research team constructs a vulnerability map of the U.S. economy, combining two approaches for analyzing economic systems. Their approach reveals the relative importance of individual economic sectors, and how vulnerable these are to oil price shocks. This dual-analysis helps identify which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk from Peak Oil. For the United States, such sectors would include iron mills, chemical and plastic products manufacturing, fertilizer production and air transport.

"Our findings provide early warnings to these and related industries about potential trouble in their supply chain," UMD Professor Hubacek said. "Our aim is to inform and engage government, public and private industry leaders, and to provide a tool for effective Peak Oil policy action planning."

Although the team's analysis is embedded in a Peak Oil narrative, it can be used more broadly to develop a climate roadmap for a low carbon economy.

"In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of the U.S. economy, which is the biggest consumer of oil and oil-based products in the world, and thus provides a good example of an economic system with high resource dependence. However, the notable advantage of our approach is that it does not depend on the Peak-Oil-vulnerability narrative but is equally useful in a climate change context, for designing policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In that case, one could easily include other fossil fuels such as coal in the model and results could help policy makers to identify which sectors can be controlled and/or managed for a maximum, low-carbon effect, without destabilizing the economy," Professor Hubacek said.

One of the main ways a Peak Oil vulnerable industry can become less so, the authors say, is for that sector to reduce the structural and financial importance of oil. For example, Hubacek and colleagues note that one approach to reducing the importance of oil to agriculture could be to curbing the strong dependence on artificial fertilizers by promoting organic farming techniques and/or reducing the overall distance travelled by people and goods by fostering local, decentralized food economies.

Peak Oil Background and Impact The Peak Oil dialogue shifts attention away from discourses on "oil depletion" and "stocks" to focus on declining production rates (flows) of oil, and increasing costs of production. The maximum possible daily flow rate (with a given technology) is what eventually determines the peak; thus, the concept can also be useful in the context of other renewable resources.

Improvements in extraction and refining technologies can influence flows, but this tends to lead to steeper decline curves after the peak is eventually reached. Such steep decline curves have also been observed for shale gas wells.

"Shale developments are, so we believe, largely overrated, because of the huge amounts of financial resources that went into them (danger of bubble) and because of their apparent steep decline rates (shale wells tend to peak fast)," according to Dr. Kerschner.

"One important implication of this dialogue shift is that extraction peaks occur much earlier in time than the actual depletion of resources," Professor Hubacek said. "In other words, Peak Oil is currently predicted within the next decade by many, whereas complete oil depletion will in fact occur never given increasing prices. This means that eventually petroleum products may be sold in liter bottles in pharmacies like in the old days. "

INFORMATION:

Contacts:

Laura Ours
lours@umd.edu
301-405-5722

Lee Tune
ltune@umd.edu
301-405-4679

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Poor rural youth in Haiti are rich in family ties, rooted in their own culture

2013-10-16

URBANA, Ill. – Haitian teens, especially those who live in the country's rural areas, are among the poorest persons in the Western Hemisphere, but they are rich in their family relationships and strongly rooted in their own culture, a University of Illinois study finds. "It's true that rural Haitian teens didn't directly suffer the major trauma of the 2012 earthquake, but they deal daily with the effects of poverty—not enough food, no money to go to school, a lack of electricity much of the time, little access to clinics or hospitals," said Gail M. Ferguson, a U of I ...

Keep your friends close, but…

2013-10-16

Counterintuitive findings from a new USC study show that the part of the brain that is associated with empathizing with the pain of others is activated more strongly by watching the suffering of hateful people as opposed to likable people. While one might assume that we would empathize more with people we like, the study may indicate that the human brain focuses more greatly on the need to monitor enemies closely, especially when they are suffering. "When you watch an action movie and the bad guy appears to be defeated, the moment of his demise draws our focus intensely," ...

Iraqi death toll from 2003-2011 war and subsequent conflict estimated at half a million

2013-10-16

A scientific study calculating Iraqi deaths for almost the complete period of the US-led war and subsequent occupation published in PLOS Medicine this week reports that close to half a million Iraqi deaths are directly or indirectly attributable to the conflict. A team of researchers from Iraq and the US led by Amy Hagopian, of the University of Washington, conducted a survey in 2000 households across Iraq and used the data to estimate death rates for the two year-period before the war began in March 2003 and the subsequent years until mid-2011. Estimates that extrapolate ...

Expert panel diagnosis for diagnostic test poorly described, experts not blinded to test under study

2013-10-16

Evaluation of diagnostic studies is often a challenge in diseases that are not defined by a specific test. Assessment of the accuracy of diagnostic tests is essential because they may be used to define who is considered to have a disease and receive treatment for it. However, measuring the accuracy of a diagnostic test requires an accurate gold standard, which defines which patients truly have and do not have the disease. Studies of diseases not defined by a specific test often rely on expert panels to establish the gold standard. In a systematic review and analysis of ...

Protective pathway identified to counter toxicity associated with Alzheimer's disease

2013-10-16

New research led by Marco Prado, PhD, of Western University has identified a pathway used by the brain to try to protect itself from toxicity that occurs with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Prado and his colleagues at the Robarts Research Institute and at the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in Brazil have done extensive work on the role of prion protein. They found that toxicity of amyloid-β peptides, one of the major culprits in AD, can be decreased by preventing it from interacting with the prion protein. When a protein called stress-inducible phosphoprotein 1 (STI1) interacts ...

Penn researchers take first step toward a macular dystrophy gene therapy

2013-10-16

Vitelliform macular dystrophy, also known as Best disease, is one of a group of vision-robbing conditions called bestrophinopathies that affect children and young adults. Caused by inherited mutations in the BEST1 gene, these diseases cause severe declines in central vision as patients age. With a new study, University of Pennsylvania researchers report "encouraging" findings that mark the first clear step in developing a gene therapy that could prevent vision loss or event restore vision in individuals suffering from these conditions. The research, conducted in dogs, ...

Study finds high variability among primary care physicians in rate of PSA screening of older men

2013-10-16

"No organization recommends prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening in men older than 75 years. Nevertheless, testing rates remain high," write Elizabeth Jaramillo, M.D., of the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, and colleagues in a Research Letter appearing in the October 16 issue of JAMA. The authors examined whether PSA screening rates would vary substantially among primary care physicians (PCPs) and if the variance would depend on which PCP patients used. Using complete Medicare Part A and B data for Texas, the researchers selected PCPs whose patient ...

For patients with diabetes, angioplasty and bypass surgery lead to similar long-term benefits for quality of life

2013-10-16

For patients with diabetes and coronary artery disease in more than one artery, treatment with coronary artery bypass graft surgery provided slightly better health status and quality of life between 6 months and 2 years than procedures using drug-eluting stents, although beyond 2 years the difference disappeared, according to a study in the October 16 issue of JAMA. Although previous studies have demonstrated that coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery is generally preferred over percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI; procedures such as balloon angioplasty or ...

Medication taken for nausea during pregnancy not associated with increased risk of major malformations

2013-10-16

In an analysis that included more than 40,000 women exposed to the nausea medication metoclopramide in pregnancy, use of this drug was not associated with significantly increased risk of major congenital malformations overall, spontaneous abortion, and stillbirth, according to a study in the October 16 issue of JAMA. More than 50 percent of pregnant women experience nausea and vomiting, typically early in their pregnancy. The care of most women is managed conservatively, but 10 percent to 15 percent of those with nausea and vomiting will eventually receive drug treatment. ...

Researchers estimate 1 in 2,000 people in the UK carry variant CJD proteins

2013-10-16

The survey provides the most robust prevalence measure to date - and identifies abnormal prion protein across a wider age group than found previously and in all genotypes. An accompanying editorial says that although the disease remains rare, "infection" may be relatively common and doctors need to understand the public health measures that are in place to protect patients. Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is a degenerative brain disease – often called the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or "mad cow disease." It emerged after widespread ...

UMD researchers address economic dangers of 'peak oil'

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: