Oil crisis ahead? 'Peakniks' build for future
Home will have energy, water, food while skipping fossil fuels.
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, February 10, 2008
If the day comes that oil grows so scarce that Austinites can't afford fruit hauled in from California and brownouts roll across Texas, Lester Germanio will live high, wide and cool in his West Lake Hills villa.
Germanio and other Austinites who have banded together to trade information and survival tips are preparing themselves for what they see as inevitable deprivations as oil production declines past its peak. Some call them "Peakniks."
Germanio's half-finished, 2,800-square-foot limestone home, called FoodWaterShelter, clings to a hillside off Terrace Mountain Drive. When completed, it will be powered largely by solar panels, provide all his water needs out of a 40,000-gallon cistern that will be filled by rainwater, cool him with old-fashioned ventilation and shade, and feed him from greenhouse gardens fertilized with fish droppings.
"The only way to beat them is not to need them," Germanio, a 55-year-old architectural engineer, said of the oil and other fuels that he blames for what he calls resource wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
His maneuvers are more sophisticated than duck-and-cover, but the anxiety is not dissimilar: As the anticipated peak oil crisis unfolds, Peakniks foresee a period in which the U.S. would devolve into the stone age. The economy would tumble; cars, even hybrids, would be useless; day-to-day goods would be hard to come by.
Recently, the peak oil movement got a shot of legitimacy from an unlikely source: the head of Royal Dutch Shell.
In an e-mail to employees picked up last month by the Oil Drum, an online forum, Jeroen van der Veer, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, wrote, "Shell estimates that after 2015, supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand."
The City of Austin is paying attention, too. Roger Duncan, Austin Energy's interim general manager, has organized the Energy Depletion Risks Task Force, which started meeting last year to discuss measures that the city can take if oil grows scarce. Duncan said the effort is based on a similar one in Portland, Ore., which released a report titled "Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas." The main recommendation was that the city reduce its fossil fuel use by half over the next 25 years.
But just when oil production might peak is a matter of debate. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a prominent oil forecasting group, issued a recent news release titled "No Evidence of Precipitous Fall on Horizon for World Oil Production."
In 2004, U.S. Energy Information Administration analysts wrote that the world production peak for crude oil is "unlikely to be 'right around the corner.' " They concluded that it will be "closer to the middle of the 21st century than to its beginning." (The agency said last week that those predictions have not changed.)
Scrutinizing production numbers, members of Crude Awakening Austin say they think production has already peaked. The group meets at least once a month in a Hyde Park church to share the latest reports of dwindling supplies in other countries, listen to speakers chat about biofuels, lend each other copies of DVDs like "Who Killed the Electric Car?" and examine the potential consequences of oil prices reaching $100 a barrel. (Light, sweet crude for March delivery was $91.77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Friday, The Associated Press reported.) Typically about a dozen people show up, and many members routinely read bulletins from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas-USA.
They are on the fringe, or, perhaps, the forefront, of people who are changing their lifestyles to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
Hyde Park resident and Crude Awakening President Larry Gilg pumps water from his rain collection system with a bicycle.
His wife and three adult children "listen to what I say, they sort of nod their heads, and they probably say their old man's cracked," he said. "They look at me like, 'What's wrong with turning on the faucet?' "
Gilg said when he chats with neighbors about energy use, he avoids theories of catastrophic "die-offs" espoused by some.
"One of these days we're going to go into the dark, long night and not come out," he said. "We have plenty of oil out there if we use it wisely, but we don't use it wisely. People take a ton of metal with them when they buy a sack of groceries. That's not a wise use of resources."
In meetings of the local resource network he has put together, he talks about how to satisfy needs for things that are typically imported: A meeting last month concentrated on growing backyard orchards. "Instead of going to H-E-B and buying an apple, you grow your own," he said.
"I talk about getting away from being consumers and being producers."
Gilg took over the group after its founder, Cal Perrine, moved to Oregon, saying he thought Central Texas would be ill-equipped to handle oil shortages.
"Things are spread out, and you need transportation to get around," Perrine said by phone from Oregon. "Texas grows relatively little of its food, so it's being transported by oil from other states or countries."
He said he moved to be closer to his children, because he worried that airplanes would soon become too costly to operate.
Out in West Lake Hills, Germanio said he will eventually buy a plug-in hybrid vehicle to get back and forth from his house, which he is largely building himself, with the aid of a son. Germanio predicts that his water and electricity bills will be next to nothing. (He installed an outdoor hose hookup to Travis County Water District No. 10 during construction and will maintain an Austin Energy electric hookup to his garage, even as the house is off the grid.) Sewage will be pumped through an aerobic septic system, disinfected with ultraviolet light and sprinkled over a corner of the property.
Nine inches of rain falling on his roof will fill his cistern, and he expects to harvest at least 20 inches in an average year. (That gives him more than 80,000 gallons a year to share with his wife and any guests in their three-bedroom, 21/2-bath house. Austin residents, by comparison, consume about 62,000 gallons a year.)
He and his wife, a teaching assistant at Casis Elementary, and another son live in a West Enfield house that he expects to sell soon to pay for the rest of FoodShelterWater.But with the house far from finished, he already faces a property tax bill of at least $7,000 a year for his 1.1 acres. "That's the one thing about sustainability I haven't figured out yet — the property taxes."
asherprice@statesman.com; 445-3643
