Work From Home Growth To Soar as Energy Costs Rise and The World Runs Out of Gas!

Will a Looming Energy Crisis Create a Dramatic Shift To a Work From Home Artisan Economy?              

Garden Office - Backyard Business In Your Future?

I came across a prediction from the U.S. Department of Labor the other day where they were projecting that by the year 2025 up to two-thirds of all Americans could be working from home.

Rising energy prices may require many Americans to work from home much sooner than that!

Both employees and employers may have to develop work from home strategies in order to survive a looming energy crisis that is already in the making.

Work From Home and move the information instead of having employees commute may become the order of the day.

Rising energy costs makes it impractical to continue to have workers shuttle back and forth across long distances to and from work.

Since most workers in western economies are now largely knowledge and information workers it makes more sense from an energy efficiency standpoint to shuttle the information back and forth over communication networks instead of moving the workers around.

This way employees can have access to the information and the inputs they need to process their data in order to perform their duties.

Let the employees work from home, but enable them with advanced technology and high speed networked communications, so that they have enhanced access to their information, associates and markets so they can complete their tasks.

If the U.S., could apply this strategy across the entire economy the fuel savings could be impressive.

A substantial reduction in rush hour congestion could be achieved, and many workers could find that they are saving not only the energy costs of commuting but also regaining several hours per week of leisure time.

Many current employees will be forced to work from home simply because long commutes may simply become too expensive.

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Question: If gas went to $10.00 per gallon how would that impact you or your company? If it was Rationed to 5 gal. per week. Per driver?
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Currently, oil at $75.00 a barrel looks very expensive.

Many oil experts are saying that oil could go to $100 or even as high as $200.00 a barrel.

At $200.00 a barrel that would give us gas at about $8.50 - $9.50 a gallon.

Fill up your big gas tank on your SUV once a week for a year and calculate what that amounts to!

I think you’ll agree then that the work from home option looks pretty good.

For many employees their companies won’t be able to adapt and they may find themselves looking for a way to make a living from home.

They may want to set-up a work from home based business or a backyard business of their own instead of working for someone else.

The important thing that you should be thinking about is what I refer to as PLAN B, ... how are you going to take care of yourself and your family when the next energy crunch comes … and it will!

Why do I think that the cost of energy is going to go so high?

The simple fact is … oil is a finite resource and we have been using it for over a hundred years at an ever increasing rate.

The gap between oil production and oil consumption has narrowed and world demand is soaring as much of the world (India, China) are becoming more industrialized and their populations continue to grow at alarming rates.

Unfortunately, the discovery of new oil sources has lagged behind consumption by a factor of about 9 to1 for at least the last 5 years and shows no signs of improving.

This is leading us into a “Perfect Storm” scenario where there is simply not enough oil to go around.

It get’s worse …

In the 1930s there was a geophysics professor, by the name of Dr. Marion King Hubbert, from Columbia University who came up with a theory regarding the life cycles of oil fields.

It's called the Peak Oil Theory.

It works like this … when you first strike Oil the Oil is under pressure and comes shooting out … easy to get.

Think of the life of an oil well as a bell shaped distribution curve.

The first half of the curve is the easy to get oil until you reach the peak of the curve and the pressure starts to falls off as does the well’s production.

Trying to continue to pump oil from the well on the last half of the curve becomes increasingly expensive and less productive until it becomes just plain impractical.

Every oil field has a life cycle.

The bad news is that most of the major fields in world have either reached or are approaching their peaks and their production will be turning DOWN.

So that means we will be looking at rising demand and falling supply.

That can only mean skyrocketing prices.

Estimates vary as to how severe this will be.

Once the oil fields peak is reached a reasonable estimate is that oil production could start to fall by 3-8% per year.

That works out to a supply shortfall of 15% to 40% in five years against a scenario of rising demand that still has to be factored in.

Once we reach a 5% shortfall prices will start to go crazy. A 10% shortfall will bring oil dependent economies to their knees.

My advice: take a look at work from home opportunities - start a backyard business, and think about how your can integrate it into you life before it’s too late.

Tim Youngman, webmaster of this site, invites you to visit often, submit articles for consideration for publication, trade links, and drop him an email if you have a question.

by Tim Youngman - Copyright August 1, 2007

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