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Iceland to Voluntarily Go Oil Free in 30-40 Years
scottennis writes "Yahoo is carrying a
story about Iceland's plan to wean itself from fossil fuels.
The article states that Iceland is giving itself 30-40 years to kick the oil habit completely. Of course some researchers estimate that in 30-40 years we won't have much of a choice."
They benefit from sitting on one great big source of geothermal energy for a limited population. This isn't going to work for the rest of the world. Natural sources of energy are limited and the world's energy needs are exploding, which points to a shortage in the years to come.
I'm happy to see the alternatives being used and discussed, but we have got to start getting really serious about getting cold fusion to work, or else we're in big trouble in about 40 years.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
An alternative to geothermal would be huge mats of seaweed in the oceans that have been genetically engineered to convert the CO2 back into oil or ethanol.
At any rate, Iceland probably has a better chance with geothermal than with solar given its location.
As the price of oil increases we will simply shift to more expensive sources which could continue for hundred of years. Note that even if we stop burning oil for fuel, we will still need it for plastics, chemicals, etc...
It isn't like the Icelandic economy is booming, but 'weaning' themselves from fossil fuels will only put them at a disadvantage to the rest of the world. People need to face facts -- Fossil (which may not really be fossil after all) fuel is what drives the most successful economies in the world right now.
We are not going to run out of fuel, and even if we were, we'd figure out something else (move to hydrogen, etc.) but purposfully crippling your economy is just plain dumb.
But it is an interesting experiment, I just don't want to see it imported to the US, we have enough problems with the Enviro-Whackos increasing our energy costs.
Brian
Remember Lexington Green!
If you think you are running out of oil, Iceland, instead of acting like a silly celebrity thinking the sky is falling, call my friends down in Texas. I am sure they will be happy to sell you some oil from the massive underwater oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Its so abundant in the Gulf that if you SCUBA dive to the bottom you can see oil leaking from the sea floor all by itself. After that call, give Sting a ring and see where all that money that was donated to his Amazon forest campaigns went because it sure didn't go to the trees (the trees have no wallets or bank accounts...believe it or not).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
The oil will NOT run out in 30-40 years or any time soon. It will probably not run out in our lifetime.
If you do your research, you will find out that there are significant undeveloped oil prospects in the middle east (Afghanistan! ... makes me wonder about the real purpose of the war on terrorism) and in the arctic above Canada.
Also, if you do more research, you will find that the United States has more oil than any other country on the planet. But they do not tap it. They are saving it in case it is needed later and buying up the oil from Saudi and such instead.
And if/when the US does tap this oil far into the future, it will be the last major known oil reserve on earth, thus giving the United States a world monopoly on fossil fuel production and distribution.
I don't doubt that the Detroit News would run a piece like this, since the Detroit economy is heavily based on automobiles, and since most automobiles run on gasoline, which comes from oil....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Links, please? I'd like to know where you got all this information, because frankly, I don't believe it.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Thomas Gold of Cornell University says oil deposits may not actually be from decaying animal life but from methane left over from the Earth's origin. If that is the case, vast deposits would apparently exist throughout the earth, not just the surface deposits we are using now.
What that says about man's ability to destroy his environment, given a potentially limitless supply of tools, I hate to even think. No idea whether Gold'll be proved correct or not, but it's an interesting counterpoint.
In 1939 the Department of the Interior predicted we had 13 years of oil left.
Current predictions say we have 40 years of oil left (Fairhead and Leach 1998). That's "known reserves", and assumes that technology will stagnate, the price will stay constant and more oil will not be found. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.
They're still not counting the oil sands as part of known reserves: even though they are now profitably extracting. I've heard estimates that there are 100 years of oil in the Alberta oil sands alone.
Bryan
There was a very interesting article in a recent issue of Astronomy. To summarize (from memory)...
Carbon Stars (A particular period in the life of a star where the carbon produced in the core has reached the surface), seem to produce complex hydrocarbons in great numbers. This is suggested by spectrograms of the light produced. Some of these spectrograms seem to indicate that the building blocks of coal and oil (ketones) are being produced as well. The numbers, from memory are around 1 million Earth masses a year.
If the star previous to our sun had a carbon cycle (which i believe from reading this its quite common) then the deposits we are finding could be the remnants of what was deposited on the earth during the formation of it, rather then from organic matter.
If that were to be the case, then this could be the source that this article mentions.
That would mean that hydrocarbon energy could be nearly limitless.
Personally, I always had a hard time beliveing that enough plant matter could die in the same spot and be covered over to create oil fields that would hold millions and millions of barrels of oil. I mean, what plant matter/animal matter could possibly have died under the sea floor in those great #'s?. I can see the amazon rain bason, but there's alot of oil and gas and coal just about everywhere on earth.
The downside to this abundance, would be that everyone would just get SUV's and gas guzzlers and our air would go to shit. But we might just have to have the strength to let that be the reason to use less rather then keep talking about how the sky will fall. But the hydrocarbon family of molecules is a very efficiant energy store, and it just happens to be in the dirt.
You're right that the long term point isn't about whether oil is going to run out, but it's also not about how high the price goes.
In the long term, the point is about how much easily accessable oil we leave for our descendants to use. I mean the descendants that will need to bootstrap themselves after the next ice age or big asteroid impact. Because we're going to do squat to prepare for the first one; it's only after it happens (and it will) that our descendants will realise that we'd better get the hell off the planet while we still can.
Let's leave them some easily accessible resources, huh? This isn't some hypothetical piece of science fiction. We either care enough to plan for it, or we don't. What's it to be?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There was an old crack-pot scientist Tom Gold who had a theory that oil is being produced as a by-product of deep-underground microbes, and is a renewable resource.
In April, there was a study that revealed that a number of previously capped oil wells around the Gulf of Mexico are "mysteriously" refilling. As my sister (a chemical engineer) explained to me, underground oil is trapped at a very high pressure; this is why oil fields can get at the oil so easily, these are spots where the pressure is literally squeezing the oil out of the ground. After a while, the pressure equalizes with respect to the admosphere, and you actually have to work to get the oil out. After more time, it becomes too cost prohibitive to remove the oil, and the well is capped (even if there is still more oil to gather!).
Well, since you've been pumping all this liquid out of the ground, there is now low pressure in the well with respect to the oil that has been dissolved into the rocks around the reservoir, and oil will seep back into the well, so that the liquid pressures are equalized... and viola, the well refills!
Milton Friedman once expressed it very well. He said that if you looked at is from the standpoint of an engineer, then of course we're going to run out of oil. But if you look at it from the standpoint of an economist, you realize it's not such a big deal.
Some time in the future, when known reserves start to decrease, prices will increase. With increasing prices will come reduced usage, and alternative energy sources will become more cost-competitive. By the time oil prices get really high, we'll all be driving kool-aid powered Gingers or some damned thing.
And actually, we wouldn't ever actually "run out" of oil... prices will just increase to the point that we won't be able to use it the way we currently do.
It's always presented as if we're going to wake up one morning and find all the gas stations closed. That won't be the case. We'll have decades of slowly rising prices until, without any sudden shocks, we'll be using much less oil than we used to. But typical market fluctuations are greater than any 3-5 year change in the fundamental price that we'll see along the way. Remember, in constant dollars, oil is cheaper and more plentiful today than it was thirty years ago when all the hysteria started. Known reserves are also greater than they were 30 years ago... which means that we're still discovering oil faster than we burn it.
Of course, there are always those who figure that if we're going to run out of oil someday, then we should stop using it now. Can't see what good that could possibly do; you're just making the shortage happen sooner, and the alternative technologies are still pretty crude.
That is like saying, "I'm not going to eat anymore, since the Second Coming will happen any minute." Only it is worse since he was in a leadership position and therefore forced everyone else to participate in his point of view.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Colonization is a strange word to use. As if its population did not consist almost exclusively of the descendants of the vikings who settled Island about a thousand years ago.
Hmmm, lets see they blockaded the ports and imposed taxes to the extent that people were starving to death... Besides the population is quite different from the other Scandinavian countries, they stopped over at in England and Ireland for slaves. And, well, they took a lot of them, there are a lot of green eyes and red and brown hair in Iceland. Culturaly it's different too, they were literate 700-800 years before Denmark's citizens. They never had a king. Contrary to popular myth the island wasn't empty when the Vikings arrived, there were leftovers of Rome with a few monisteries there already. It was empty enough that there is no record of fighting between the groups, just curiosity. Vikings were quite content with marauding the 'primatives' they didn't live with. The Viking thing is way to played up though, the settlers were more interested in farming than war. If they had killed all the monks they certainly would have written about it, they liked books about that kinda thing.
Oil will probably never run out, it will get more expensive as the supply of it dwindles. The price will rise, but while energy demand will rise other sources of energy will displace it. So the price won't quickly become astronomical, simply because other energy sources will displace the demand. Stationary uses like power plants will move to other sources first, but planes and cars will continue using it, then cars will move to natural gas(which will have it's own rise and fall curve), etc.
./ might have a point when it comes to things like farm subsidies which keep way too much land in agricultural production. If we depopulated the less productive farming (which happen to be more energy and water intensive) areas now it would be easier to carve up parks and 'energy farms' out of them a hundred years or two hundred years hence.
I think the biggest shocks will not come from producers, there are more joining the global market, like Russia & co. The biggest shocks will be as demand is curtailed. At some point gas stations will just cease to exist because there won't be enough demand to support them. The loss of infrastructure will cause more drivers to switch and all of a sudden oil will be dirt cheap for maybe a decade or so. This is many many years out but it is almost inevidable (unless it turns out bacteria are making most of the oil or something. Then, ugh, government will be needed to get us of the tit.)
My biggest fear is that oil will run out before doing enough preliminary research, even solar power can be very destructive of the environment if it uses up land inefficiently. But just image if we switched to Coal in all US and Chinese power plants, we'd all be caughing up gallons of flegm. Or used windmills to the extent that it wiped out bird populations, or disrupted local weather patterns in a negative way. The funny thing is the pure market people infesting
The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because we run out of oil.
The Stone Age ended because better ways of doing the same things were found, making the old ways uneconomical or obsolete. The same thing will happen with the Oil Age, and it's great to see a small nation like Iceland setting this agenda.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource. Whether it's the 15 years I've heard geologists estimate, or 30, 40, or 500 years, we will run out. And when we do, there will be large gaping holes where Kentucky, Ohio, and other coal-rich states used to be, not to mention all the other energy resources (uranium for example). God knows how much poison there'll be from the byproducts of producing and using mineral resources for energy.
At some time, there will be a real crisis -- either the resources will be gone or the environment will be damaged. There will be a major shift in the way the world works, and it can be a positive change or it can be disasterous. It may not be in our lifetime, but it will happen. It's a fact, and your own numbers show it. Unless we can come up with renewable or unlimited energy. Being more efficient and turning to resources that were once not economically feasible only postpones the inevitable.
Saying it's okay to rape and abuse the Earth simply because we won't see the effects in our lifetimes is irresponsible and ignorant.
And, so you know, I'm a registered Republican, so don't mumble your "damn liberals" gibberish at me. Sound capitalism thinks about future profits as well as today's -- an economy that depends on non-renewable resources without looking for alternatives and destroys the Earth in the process is not an economy with a future.