Damming India for the future

Bruce Nusabaum, in his book World after Oil published in the early 1980s, dealt with the oil crisis of 1970s, when oil prices had risen from $5 to $30 per barrel, and showed how the world dealt with the crisis by investing more in exploration, especially on the high seas, and severely reduced energy consumption of power-guzzler processes and machines via many computerised process controls (for example, the energy consumption for steel-making was reduced from 18 to 6 Gwh per tonne).

With reduced consumption in processes and machines and rising crude production, oil prices remained stable for many years, and starting rising again in the 2000s once the new finds started getting reduced. I recall Swaminathan Aiyar’s ‘Challenge of Hubbert’s Peak’ dated May 21, 2005, stating that oil prices will rise fast, and the world production will not be able to meet the rising demand of China and India. Hubert had predicted in the 1950s that US oil production would peak (Hubert’s peak after which production declines) in 1970, and it did.

Various studies show that the world would reach its Hubert’s peak in 2035, and we are moving towards a huge crisis. There are some other energy sources identified—such as shale gas—but they have huge environmental problems. Gas prices

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