Slashdot Mirror
Out of Gas
Oil -- and energy in general -- has long been a big topic among
Slashdot readers. Predictions about The End of the Age of
Oil (about which, claims the subtitle, this book provides "all you need to know") certainly are not new --
and if civilization lasts long enough, one day they'll prove true.
It's nice to consider that automobiles aren't necessarily
tied to petroleum, but mine certainly runs on 87 octane gasoline,
and there aren't enough turkey guts or grease to power everything that we use petro-fuels for right now (though places like Iceland are trying hard to tap other sources). Current gas
prices (in the U.S. at any rate) are higher than they have been in a
decade or so, but in constant dollars, gasoline prices have certainly been worse. How much to panic, and when? Read on below for Arthur Smith (apsmith)'s brief review of David Goodstein's Out of Gas for a rather gloomy look at the future of oil-based energy.
Out of Gas: All You Need to Know about the End of the Age of Oil
author
David Goodstein
pages
128
publisher
W.W. Norton & Company
rating
9/10
reviewer
Arthur Smith
ISBN
0393058573
summary
Why replacing oil is the world's most urgent and ignored problem.
Americans have started to notice prices at the pump with an unfamiliar '2' on the sign. Meanwhile, crude oil prices are hitting 13-year records close to $40 per barrel. As the International Energy Agency reports, there is "no relief in sight". All this should come as no surprise to readers of David Goodstein's Out of Gas - the only question is, have we left it too late to survive the inevitable shocks that are coming?
In this slim and subtly illustrated volume Dr. Goodstein, physics professor and vice provost at Caltech, explains in clear and simple terms why the fossil fuel age is coming to an end. A "massive, focused commitment" is needed to develop alternatives, and every year of delay in that commitment adds immeasurably to future human suffering.
In years, or at best a decade, we will reach the global "Hubbert's peak" for conventional oil, when production starts to decline even with rising demand. Such a peak was reached for US production in 1970. "Foreign oil" has sustained us until now, but Goodstein shows why it cannot for much longer.
A number of books on this subject have come out in recent years, some very pessimistic about the future (for example Heinberg's "The Party's Over", which warns of a greatly decreased world population). Goodstein offers some hope in alternatives, substantially based on the analysis of climate scientist and space solar power advocate Martin Hoffert.
Solar-based renewables and fusion are the only long-run energy solutions. According to Goodstein, natural gas and nuclear fission can help tide us over. All of these have problems, with the most scalable (solar power from space) still the least mature. Goodstein's longest chapter discusses thermodynamics and the physical laws that explain usable energy and its relation to entropy. As a physicist, I was pleased and surprised to learn something from Goodstein's clear explanation here.
Goodstein also discusses global climate problems with continued use of fossil energy, particularly an increasing dependence on coal. He concludes: "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we find a way to live without fossil fuels."
There were a few minor things to complain about. Transitions between the chapters are too abrupt, perhaps caused by the wide range of discussion in such a short book. A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?
But Goodstein's book is the clearest explanation yet of our need to get beyond fossil fuels. Is it enough to get the public, and our leaders, actually paying attention?
In this slim and subtly illustrated volume Dr. Goodstein, physics professor and vice provost at Caltech, explains in clear and simple terms why the fossil fuel age is coming to an end. A "massive, focused commitment" is needed to develop alternatives, and every year of delay in that commitment adds immeasurably to future human suffering.
In years, or at best a decade, we will reach the global "Hubbert's peak" for conventional oil, when production starts to decline even with rising demand. Such a peak was reached for US production in 1970. "Foreign oil" has sustained us until now, but Goodstein shows why it cannot for much longer.
A number of books on this subject have come out in recent years, some very pessimistic about the future (for example Heinberg's "The Party's Over", which warns of a greatly decreased world population). Goodstein offers some hope in alternatives, substantially based on the analysis of climate scientist and space solar power advocate Martin Hoffert.
Solar-based renewables and fusion are the only long-run energy solutions. According to Goodstein, natural gas and nuclear fission can help tide us over. All of these have problems, with the most scalable (solar power from space) still the least mature. Goodstein's longest chapter discusses thermodynamics and the physical laws that explain usable energy and its relation to entropy. As a physicist, I was pleased and surprised to learn something from Goodstein's clear explanation here.
Goodstein also discusses global climate problems with continued use of fossil energy, particularly an increasing dependence on coal. He concludes: "Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we find a way to live without fossil fuels."
There were a few minor things to complain about. Transitions between the chapters are too abrupt, perhaps caused by the wide range of discussion in such a short book. A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?
But Goodstein's book is the clearest explanation yet of our need to get beyond fossil fuels. Is it enough to get the public, and our leaders, actually paying attention?
You can purchase the Out of Gas: All You Need to Know about the End of the Age of Oil from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The fact that, adjusted for inflation, gas isn't at it's higest levels don't matter. What matters is the sudden increase in the cost of gas OVER A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME, that short period of time doesn't give us time to adjust and can result in massive inflation.
Milk is up 0.60 cent per gallor
Butter has went from 1.99 to 3.49
Ice Cream has increased in price by 35-45%
Store brand products are increasing in price by 5%-8%.
Namebrand products are increasing in price by 6%-7.5%
As to why none of this is being reflected in the inflations numbers...well, you tell me.
Our beloved President George W. Bush says that we'll never run out of oil, and since he has been appointed by God to save us from evil, it is truth from the mouth of God. Amen.
Neutrogena, people... you still won't get a girlfriend, but maybe people will at least give you the benefit of the doubt.
I gotta roll my eyes...the sheep are squealing, led by the glowing pictures of news anchors. Gas prices are not that high...they've been much higher historicaly. If a few cents a gallon is making such a huge impact, you are LIVING BEYOND YOUR MEANS...and you'll get fucked eventually.
Blar.
There's enough hot air here to power half the earth.
Check 'em out.
. ht ml#oilp ://www.dieoff.com/
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/index
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
htt
http://www.peakoil.net/
Any others worth checking out?
There is no way consumables like soda bottles or food packaging should be allowed to use plastic, which is made using petroleum. Not only do these goods cause ecological damage, they also use a strategic resource.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
In case any of you got that "May 19th is Gasoline Boycott Day!" e-mail, here are some articles on why it won't work:
Article by Matt Helms
Snopes Article
If all the idiots don't get gas tomorrow, just means less of a wait for me!
I belong to the ______ generation.
Uhh.. no it's not. Next article please.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Cyclists are gods.
Fuckin bring it on.
Cold Turkey by none other than great hero to the geek race Kurt Vonnegut. It compares America to a junkie who's having trouble finding that last fix.
A highly recommended read on what appears to be a similar topic. My favorite line:
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
1. Oil comes from hydrocarbons.
2. Hydrocarbons come from space.
3. Ergo, we will never run out of oil, and the value of oil is artificial like the diamond.
kulakovich
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Use twice as much shampoo. Double company profit.
A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?
Yes, when you think about what the majority of the grid's generators use as fuel.
US gas prices may seem rediculously high... but they actually aren't that bad. In fact, I'd argue that they should be higher. The US government subsidizes oil.
Of course, this concept is almost completely unknown to most people, I find.
http://mediagoblin.org/
For the masses that would be Not much and when its too late.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Hopefully people will start to drive more sensible cars...
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/p eakoil.net/
http://www.
Books:
_The Party's Over_ by Richard Heinberg
_Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage_ by Kenneth Deffeyes
...it's people!. This new fuel is PEOPLE! Oh, my god, it's people!
It would be way worse if the dollar was higher, I guess... after all the barrel is quoted in dollars.
Damn, I should have bought a diesel instead of a roadster that does 10l/100km (25mpg). *sigh*
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Sure. The inflation numbers that most people quote exclude 'the volatile food and energy sectors' because those sectors are deemed to introduce more noise usually than information.
If you are trying to figure out whether you have inflation issues or not you don't want to include a commodity that surges %40 for a couple of months and then drops %50 for a couple of months. The oscillations around the equillibrium price is just noise.
Now if the equillibrium price for energy were to rise in the long term that would be a problem, but as energy is vital to all other economic endevors it would be reflected in price increases in everything else. Same with food. So the better part of valor is to exclude them, and let the rest of the economy smooth out their effects on pricing by reflecting any increases in the equillibrium prices for those commodities.
Ever since living through that, I no longer trust the We Are Living In Dark Days prophets.
I don't know why nobody is hyping alcohol as a fuel replacement. Liquor is only expensive because it has to taste reasonable and it is loaded with taxes. If we can get distilled water for $1.00 per gallon, I don't see why we can't get a gallon of white lightning for $2.00 per gallon.
Also, it would take very little to no modification to get a petrol car to run on grain alcohol.
Most Americans do not seem to realize that they have been paying ridiculously LOW prices for gas for years. FYI, regular petrol has cost around 2 euro over here for the past two-three years. And before that, it wasn't much less. American prices are still much lower (2 dollars a gallon is about .50 euro/liter - most Europeans pay FOUR times that amount). The low prices have resulted in excessive petrol consumption in the US, with people buying ever more and ever bigger SUVs. The average American consumes about 7 times more energy than the average European and I think that the low gas prices have contributed to the fact that most Americans do not seem to be aware that energy actually comes at a cost. So, perhaps, the current rise in petrol prices will serve as an eye-opener and lead to a more conscious use of energy. One can always hope, no?
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
"Current gas prices (in the U.S. at any rate) are higher than they have been in a decade or so . . . "
Actually, current gas prices are higher than they have ever been.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
The american goverment spends piles of money on military. If they only funneled more of this cash towards research of new energy technologies, we'd be well on our way to a less dependant life on oil.
I.e. even if all cars & SUVs were electric/solar/bio, the U.S. would still have a huge demand for gas & oil to fuel the massive military machinery.
Can anyone here comment?
I picked this volume up after researching the issue myself over the web. There is an excellent Scientific American article on this issue from 1998 that serves to provide a similar view from the perspective of another geologist. I highly recommend it.
After reading these materials in early January of this year, as I watched oil prices rise higher and higher, I couldn't help but think about what I read!
The other interesting thing about this book is that it points out how petroleum provides us with benefits far beyond keeping our cars running. Plastics? Herbicides? Fungicides? CD-Rs? Certain medicines? All are dependent on keeping the oil flowing.
Suburbia is the killer. If our lives could be structured such that cars were not *necessary*, we can do fine. Residential infill, cohousing, mixed use zoning are all steps in the right direction. Oddly enough, so are rising gas prices.
Eventually, something will click in someone's head, and they will start to seek alternatives. I started looking at hybrids when my gas pump cut me off at $50.00 without filling my tank ('92 ford bronco, 11 mpg, 32 gallon tank). About a year later, I bought a VW New Beetle with the TDI (diesel) engine. Now it's *possible* to run my car with *no* foreign oil (biodiesel), and to date, about 1/3 of the fuel I've used has been from renewable sources, grown by my local farmers. It costs me $3.00 per gallon at the pump, but thanks ot a rebate program, I'm only paying $1.50 per gallon, net. I'd rather pay $3.00 to the benefit of my local farmer, and local economy, than sending it overseas to support societies that *hate* us. If I get particularly motivated (or more likely, when my warrantee is getting closer to expiration), I can recycle used vegetable oil into fuel at an estimated cost of $0.40-0.50 per gallon.
Not to mention the added benefit of getting 45 mpg without even trying. =)
James Howard Kunstler is my personal favourite "end-of-the-oil-age" critic. He takes the time to posit potential *solutions* to the problem of a transportation-dependent society.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
The biggest thing I find interesting in this is that in a free market economy High prices are pretty much Required to spur new invention and alternative sources. Ethanol, people complain, costs more than regular gasoline. But as prices increase this isn't going to necessarily hold (please no lon debates and rants about the cost of ethanol production, its just an example).
With totally alternate technologies, as gas prices increase they become more cost competitive with gas. The extra cost/complexity of hybrid vechicles becomes less of a factor. Savings from using (now expensive) gas and moving to other fuels can be calculated. If you project increase in gas prices into the future maybe starting to invest in hydrogen powered vehicles can have a faster ROI (regarding all the infrastructure required) than before gas prices went up.
Basically, to sum up, I'm saying higher gas prices just show the need for new technology, they actulally are required to make it happen.
At a 1930's World Fair, there was a "robot" answering people's questions about what life in the future would be like. One of the questions was when we would run out of fossil fuels. This is a topic people have been worried about for a long time.
Thus far, all the predictions of doom have been averted. New techniques for locating oil reserves, and tapping resources in previously unreachable places, through technologies like offshore platforms, have allowed new supplies to keep up with demand.
Of course, the total amount of fossil fuel is finite, even if petroleum engineers become clever enough to locate and extract every drop, that won't keep the world running forever. But much like with Moore's law, new advances have kept us from running into a brick wall so far, and will continue to at least for the near future.
Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes. I read this book shortly after it came out. If I recall, Deffeyes was a colleague of M. King Hubbert. Estimates of when the peak will come vary (10 to 50+ years), but few doubt it will come (except those who buy into Thomas Gold's hypothesis that most hydrocarbons originate from primordial methane dating from the earth's formation rather than the breakdown of organic material). It will be interesting to see if OPEC is able to lower prices by increasing production. Until now, we've relied on Saudi Arabia to open the taps when prices get too high. If they can't, then that's a good sign the peak is near (or already here).
One of the most annoying problems with using alternative fuels for powering cars is that petroleum has pretty much the highest energy density of any car sized option. Ethanol is an interesting alternative, but a complete conversion would require a 10-20% increase in the amount of land farmed. (The 1 billion acres number hasn't changed much in 80+ years. Machines simply allow more farming by fewer people.)
A pie in the sky idea would be micro-fission reactors. The reality however, is that such a reactor would require more shielding than is reasonable for such a small vehicle.
Hydrogen fuel cells have an energy density of ~1/2 to 2/3 of gasoline. The upshot is that solar and fission power can be used to create more fuel at very cheap rates. i.e. You'll have to "gas up" more often, but you'll pay less. Such vehicles could even be designed to use solar panels to convert water into a little extra fuel for your car. This would make such a vehicle far more cost effective than today's vehicles.
All in all, there's no "better" solution, but there are a few "good enough" solutions.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
End all subsidies to oil companies. Stop letting oil companies set energy policy by bribing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonating money to politicians. Create generous tax incentives for purchasing and using cars with high mileage. Create generous tax incentives for using solar, wind, or hydro (both consumer level and corporate level).
In other words encourage something other than the status quo and things will change.
More generally (and more importantly) oil is underpriced, period. Look at the costs to society:
I won't be buying gas for at least a week!
...Then again, I just filled up today, but it's the principle right? Am I on the bandwagon?
Gimme a break, the only way a "gas out" would make an impact is if it went on for at least a week, and there's NO way you'd get anyone to participate in that.
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
pre-note:
Yes, I know that moving to cars powered by electricity really only shifts the problem from the pump to the electricity-production facility, but I still think it would be progress.
Does anyone know anything about the Air Car? I read about them nearly a year ago, and haven't heard anything since. Are they dead? Any chance of them making it to mass production?
And while we're on the topic of alternative transportation, I know what happened to the Corbin Sparrow, but does anyone think that there's any chance of the company coming back from the dead? I really thought they had a promising product.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Actually, I believe it would, at least without coming up with an innovative way to deliver the power through the ground without killing anyone who walks over it. Let alone having to rip up all the roadways to put down the power rails.
Mass transit is easy to run on electricity, because mass transit always takes a known, consistent route. Vehicles are a known size and shape. It's easy to engineer.
How do you do that for personal transports with nearly infinite endpoints?
I suppose one thing you could do is energize the freeways and major thouroughfares, and then let the cars rely on internal batteries for the last mile or so...
I used to think printing on on Unix sucked. Then I figured it out. Printing on Unix *does* suck. Like a Kirby.
if we ever truly run out of petroleum, and I mean completely, we can still go back to other transportation technologies.
our ancestors survived well enough with them.
although it might take you a while to get to your vacation destination overseas...
This is a lie to justify high prices and wars.
Research abiotic oil.
Regardless of the abiotic issue oil is everywhere.
The saudies recently re-estimated their reserves in the trillion barrel range and said they could double output and sustain it for 50 years.
http://www.unlearning.org/editor30.htm
Wake up folks. The vested interests are manipulating your minds..
Think!
http://www.infowars.com/
Yes, we are of course running out of oil, and we of course need to find new energy supplies. People have been beating this drum for years. If it has taught you anything, it should be that scolding people and chanting predictions of disaster doesn't actually make people change their behavior. If you believe it's morally reprehensible that not everyone sold their SUVs and bought a Prius, that's fine, that's your viewpoint, but whining about it hasn't really changed much.
On the other hand, what will change things is the rising price of gas. This is a big news item lately, and the reactions kind of freak me out. People everywhere are outraged, and want to know when this will be "fixed". Like maybe they'll go back down next month, or if we boycott ExxonMobil for 24 hours. This is crazy. In the long run, they're gonna go up, forever. It's a resource we have in finitie quantity. It's running out. As it runs lower, it will get more expensive, until eventually nobody is using it to power their cars.
In the short term, the US has far lower gas prices than European countries. It's not like "they're screwing you" with crazy, unjustifiable markup. If you really think that "Big Oil greediness" is to blame, I suggest you start your own gas company and sell for $1.25. You'll certainly have plenty of customers, if you can sustain that profit margin.
Has all you need to know, and it's not crackpottery - just thousands and thousands of pages of studies and data from the Horses's mouth - Congress and the US Petrochemical industry. The people in power know what the deal is and it's not pretty. We will fight wars over oil in the future.
Ignorant people think gasoline is unlimited. I'll see the end of it, and the inevitable disaster is not going to be pretty. People think the government should lower prices - that's called communism, and it means shortages. Next time you gripe about the price of gasoline, wonder what you'll do when there is none.
I really hope those stories of the oil companies keeping free energy devices suppressed are true - because the oil companies aren't going to be oil companies for much longer.
Oil is far too valuable to be burning at the TREMENDOUS rate of consumption worldwide currently. There will be NO industrial revolution for most third world countries because of the lack of oil available to build infrastructure.
Green energy sources are a bad joke compared to the amounts of energy we consume from oil. The only long term solution is a 0 growth economy combined with population decrease. The alternatives long-term are not pretty.
Unless, of course, cold fusion works or a feasible technology for extracting energy from the ZPE is found. I sure hope something happens.
..don't panic
Don't get me wrong, Oil IS a finite resource. I just find it a problem that we still don't even know where the heck it came from, fossil fuel? WTF, who actually thinks this makes any friggin sense? Your telling me millions of dinosours crawled up into a hole an died, which subsequentially turned their decaying organic bodies into hydrocarbons? Not to say this couldn't happen, but it's an unnacceptable answer to this question. We need to find out the fundemental way's that oil is created so we can synthesize it (granted, this might take a million years as well).
Bottom line:
Build out the biggest friggin nuclear reactor ever created, stick it a few hundred miles in space, microwave that power back to earth. What's wrong with this? Nuclear power plants explode? who cares? Microwave power not beeming correctly? Have some friggin sense and build in error correcting and clear to send windows(eh, yeah im a network guy).
This isn't a flame bait, I just think the world energy crisis is so lame, because their's so many way's we can get around it NOW, yet nobody seems to care.
Personally, I think these high oil prices are just to jack up the profits for the oil company. Who would have thunk it!
Basically when you have an entrenched bureaucracy receiving huge amounts of money to solve a technical problem, they have an incentive to not solve it and indeed to make sure no one else solves it.
Seastead this.
How come you right wing retards never seem to log in?
gas: $2.xx
milk: $3.xx
That gallon of gas sure is expensive...
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
I've been hearing about the near end of fossil fuels for most of my 40+ years. It hasn't happened yet, and I have no reason to believe that it's about to happen. We keep finding new reserves, and whatnot.
On the other hand, fossil fuels cause astonishing trouble. Most of the bad craziness in the Middle East and Africa is fueled by petrodollars. Does anyone think that we'd be quagmired in Iraq if it weren't for oil? Certainly, we'd end more suffering by going into Sudan, or other places. Why do we coddle the House of Saud after they financed al Qaeda, if it isn't for oil and the promise of growing wealth for the House of Bush and the House of Cheney?
There is also a growing body of evidence that pollution is bad (prior to recently, it was purely conjecture).
It would be great to switch from fossil fuels, and to do it quickly. A Manhattan-Project-like effort for fusion reactors would be appropriate.
Unfortunately, the average SUV-driving American pinhead will keep this from happening for a long time.
This is high-quality oil, perfect for making gasoline. The process is 80% energy-efficient, so for that last 20% we'll need some extra source of energy...our existing nukes and hydro, maybe some of those nifty new solar panels, and we'll be in good shape.
If I had my way we'd be spending those hundreds of billions on thermal depolymerization subsidies instead of war in Iraq.
This isn't a matter of giving up our SUVs for hybrid cars. That isn't going to matter one bit. The fact is, we've spent the last 100 years building an entire economy around absurdly cheap energy. This energy is going to run out. If we do not find a way to run our world without petroleum and coal, we are doomed. What's really going to be fun is, when this peak occurs, the powers of the world are going to fight more and more visciously for the remaining scraps. We will face war, poverty, and social upheaval which will grow ever worse as the lights slowly dim... and then burn out.
The only way around this is some serious technological advances. We need to develop a sustainable energy economy, and we need to do it yesterday. Lifestyle changes, solar panels, wind farms, and hybrid cars won't do a damn bit of good without massive new technology.
Boys and girls, we have about 25 years. I suggest you study physics and chemistry. Hard.
dinner: it's what's for beer
For those that have read it, you know what I'm talking about. Any of these titles disregard markets as a means to force the hand of technology. Believe me, markets reflect scarcity, and new solutions arise as a result. Read back to the timber crisis in the early 1800's during the railroad boom, or the rubber crisis which led the way to synthetics and recovery/recycle programs. If we're running out of oil, it WILL get damn expensive and we'll find a better way of doing things. Many of these books seem to ignore this, making them very aggrivating to read. For a change, I suggest "The Doomsday Myth". For the record, I have a degree in economics and I've done a lot of environmental economic research. I'm tired of turning page after page of text basically written to shock the public.
Let's face it; high oil prices are bad for them because it encourages the US to seek alternatives. For all you anti-US trolls who are now foaming at the mouth, if you are honest with yourselves, you will admin that we are seriously the only ones who will 1) come up with a viable solution and 2) implement that solution.
Do we need an alternative solution? Damn straight. Burning petrochemicals is bad all the way around. To paraphrase the Late, Great Douglas Adams, we took all this poisonous stuff that was safely buried far underground, pumped it up to the surface and turned it into asphalt to coat the ground with, smoke to fill the air with, and the rest we dumped into the sea.
Are solar energy and/or fusion the answer? Solar in its current earth-based form is too erratic and takes up too much land to be workable. As for fusion, the technology is just not there yet either. And the same environmental shills that are screaming about oil will scream even louder about anything "nuculer." Perhaps space-based solar energy will be a better answer, but it will be extremely expensive to implement unless we break NASA's currentl monopoly on launches ($40,000 per pound of payload is a bit pricey).
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
I don't mean to attract flamebaiting or troll mod points - just take a look at these with a fairly open mind.
An aggressively liberal and unfortunately, anti-Bush viewpoint It still manages to raise interesting points.
Basic Education about the concept of Hubbert's Peak
A Dim View of what this change will mean
There is little doubt that life just two generations removed from ours will bear scant resemblance to the rich lifestyle we currently enjoy. Sobering but as true as tomorrow's sunrise, IMHO.
Had world oil supply peak around 1981. Coal in the Eastern United States tapped out by 1990.
Predictions worked! People were in a panic state. Lines at the gas pumps. Price of coal reached unbelieveable high. Life was good if you lived in Texas or West Virginia.
With all the fast food in the US, you'd think we'd have enough gas to keep us holding our noses for the foreseeable future!
Correct me if I screw up the explanation...
Oil refining doesn't only produce gasoline and diesel, there is a lot of other stuff that comes out of that oil which could not necissarily be used to run a vehicle, it is this crap that is left over that most plastics are made from. So it is not that much of a problem...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
The energy to grow (Nitrogen fertilizers), ferment and distill alcohol is less than the energy you get out of it.
If you think about it, you want to replace the energy of tens of thousands of years of concentrated sunshine (in the form of plant growth), with 1 years plant growth (distilled to form alcohol). So how can the energy every replace what we have now even if you used cow manure and sunshine stills.
A few years ago, one hell of a lot of "Singing Billy Bass" and "Rock Lobster" gag gifts were given at Christmas. At the time I said "All the oil used to make and transport these stupid things was completely wasted."
Oh, and we could ban auto-racing, truck pulls, the robosaurus that shoots flame and eats cars...
How much of your 4$/gallon is EU or local taxes? From my quick search it looks like the UK and France have gas price + 300% tax. That suggests $1gas plus $3taxes. These are 1997 numbers too. It's likely taxes have increased since then. (details)
The US has what we consider high taxes on gas. Hawaii is 53.5c (as of July 2002), California is 50.4c, and Texas is 38.4c/gallon. (details)
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I said that in another discussion. but it is worth repeating here in a more appropriate topic.
Several years ago, there was this article in Scientific American that stated conventional wisdom said that oil supplies will be steady and shortage would only happen in half a century or so, and by then there will be alternative sources. They gave several convincing arguments that the shortage would happen within a decade.
Here is a link to the article, The End of Cheap oil by Colin J. Campbell and Jean Laherrere, March 1998.
This web site, Hubbert's Peak seems to be dedicated to the same premise.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The cost of plywood and OSB has skyrocketed because the cost of steel has skyrocketed. As a result, people are building out of wood instead of steel.
Why, you might ask, has the price of steel skyrocketed? Because China is buying up all the scrap it can get and not selling any finished steel. We forgot how to make steel from dirt and since there's no scrap to make steel, the prices have gone into orbit.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Taxes on a gallon of gasoline here in the US is about 65 cents. Over in Europe, taxes shoot up the price to near double of what the US pays.
We all know what happens when the gas runs out. Things get crazy and we have to take care of them Mel Gibson 'Road Warrior' style.
What this probably means is that we screwed up when the mergers were allowed. Then again, we also screwed up 25-odd years ago when we used the half-assed measure of CAFE regulations instead of just taxing fuel. We screwed up again when we allowed the California Air Resources Board to try to mandate use of ZEVs (in practice, battery-only electric cars) before the battery technology was remotely ready rather than far more achievable HEVs. If 30% of all new vehicles sold in California since 1990 had been hybrids, we'd be way beyond Toyota and Honda technologically and the reduced fuel demand would have eliminated the refinery capacity squeeze too.
Right now we need to aim at plug-in hybrids, so that our cars aren't totally dependent on petroleum for energy. Even if they didn't get radically better mileage than current vehicles, the flexibility in energy supply would add elasticity to fuel demand and moderate prices.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Only reason I'm writting this useless comment is that it was brought up in conversation last night.
The Nazi's during WWII managed to make gas from coal. Is anyone knowledgable as to the downsides of doing this?
I'm guessing it was terribly desctructive to the envrionment. But was the gas produced as good as 87 Octane you get from today's pumps?
-- taking over the world, we are.
needs its fix 3 times day.
Actually, I've seen less of them on the roads in the past few weeks.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Is the book something like this?
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
username:oldwarez password:oldwarez
As one of the first posts in the article indicates, prices for all goods are going up because it costs more to ship them. Milk is more expensive because refueling milk tanker trucks is more expensive. Products derived from milk, like ice cream, take on the burden of the expense to ship the milk to the factory (which is passed on to the customers) and then pass on the cost of shipping THAT product to the stores' warehouses to the customers while the stores pass the cost of shipping from the warehouse to the retail stores to the customer. This is slightly multiplied by each company in the chain desiring to maintain the same relative profit margins.
I remember only a few years ago -- sometime before 2000 -- there was a summer where gas prices dipped below a dollar in my area. Gas prices are now twice that, and diesel prices are in the $1.50-1.60 range. A 50% increase in the cost of transportation hits the prices of everything hard. Oil prices have a ripple effect on the entire economy, not just the ~$20-40 you spend refilling a gas tank.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...but it might cost too much to get at it.
There are current theories (that the oil companies don't want you to consider) that suggest that oil does not originate in dinosaur-era plant life, but in reactions to high pressure and temperature in carbon-bearing rock in the earth's crust. See here for an article.
Points to consider: Some of the major oil basins have no connection to the primordial seas, and are much deeper than life ever existed. Also, no remains of life have ever been found in oil-bearing rock. Lastly, the makeup of petroleum is consistent with what can be made from meteoric carbonaceous chondrite rock.
Design for Use, not Construction!
setting up more and better public transit
driving smaller cars (tax the bigger ones)
putting more freight on the rail network (trains use less gas)
Taxing Electricity and use the money to subsidize purchases of energy smart apliances (much of the US's electric power is fossil fuel based)
Alchahol can be used in many engines if you adjust the fuel to air ratio
Use hefty commuter tolls going into major cities to encourage use of public transit
Try to make public transit less unpleasant, larger seats and cleaner interiors etc.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
do remember that cars that have used fossil-based diesel that suddenly switch over to biodiesel can get clogged fuel filters at first so you might wanna have a spare one in advance. Or did you think about getting it converted to using veggie oil instead? I find converting the oil to biodiesel a niftier thing as then your car does not require modifications. I believe you can buy filtered waste vegetable oil at a relatively low price or get unfiltered at restaurants for free.
Just incase you don't know, here's a nifty link on making biodiesel and suchlike.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
Took the words right out of my, er, fingers.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
First point: plants convert sunlight into chemical energy in the form of biomass. Some of this is eaten by animals, some decays, whatever. But in the end there's a hell of a lot of biomass from hundreds of millions of years of plant and animal life. It gets buried and turns into oil and coal. Why is this a conceptual problem for you?
Second, if you're going to beam power from space, it's easier and more efficient to beam solar power, since we have basically an unlimited supply of that. The problem is the beaming, not the source of energy. You don't need a nuke plant in space. And no, generally nuke plants do not explode (at least not properly engineered ones). The problem is more what to do with nuclear waste.
Geez, people...
Actually, Brazil prouduces alcohonafta (alcohol from "can~a de azucar") that can be used as a direct replacement for GAS (the mesures shows a 20% power drop from GAS).
For GasOil there's bio-diesel produced from any vegetal oil (simply choose the cheapest one) that works great for big diesel engines (I'm not so sure if it works on direct injection diesel engines).
Both options are far more clean that traditional petroleum based Gas.
Obviously there's no enough surface in the world to produce enough alcohonafta or bio-diesel to run every engine out there, but you can replace a lot of the consumed petrol, slowing down the burn out rate, giving time for the world to migrate to more eficient internal combustion engines (that can be drive with the world produced alcohonafta).
Fly-Weels are doesn't allow big shocks becouse of it giroscopic nature, and would require a hole new kind of machinery, while acohonafta won't change current technology.
As far as I remembered alcohonafta is profitable when petrol exceeds U$S40 the barrel (nowadays), I'm not so sure about bio-diesel but I think it's about U$S35 the barrel.
Alternatively we could power our cars from the biomass left behind after Gambian rats that have successfully detected mines.
The website of the M. K. Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply Studies has back issues of its newsletters online. Nothing newer than 2002, but perhaps some interesting reading.
I read last year that oil was found in the ocean off of Thailand much deeper than it was supposed to exist. The author of the report was apparently something of a crusader for the idea that oil didn't come from buried organic material, but was a basic part of the earth.
While that sounds silly at first, the rather intriguing issue is that sprectonomy has shown fairly conclusively that there are seas and atomspheres filled with hydrocarbons on the moons of other planets in our solar system. If hydrocarbons on earth come from the dinosaurs, this does lead to the interesting question of how they got so many dinosaurs out there on Europa.
So let's do devil's advocate and say this guy was right. There's an endless supply of deep oil and the northern oceans are simply bursting with hydrate deposits. In fact, there's so much hydrocarbon energy around it's not even funny. What we've really got is a great conspiracy between the Bush's and the Sauds to take everybody's money.
But what the hell are they going to do with all the money? That's the real question.
What happens if oil production grows less and less while demand skyrockets? Electric means of travel then reign, especailly small, efficient ones like the Segway!!!
And to think people laughed at people buidling cities around these devices.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The biggest problem with a car, the way I see it, is its gross inefficiency. Regardless of your energy source (electric, chemical, etc.), you're still moving around a ton of steel just to effectively transport one, perhaps two persons (on average).
The Raven
One of the most intelligent theories about the true source for oil is from a physicist named Thomas Gold. He explains his theory of the real source for oil and other hydrocarbons in this book.
This isn't even new to slashdot.
the meat of the theory is that the real source of these hydrocarbons seems to be that they are the byproducts of deep deep subterranean chemosynthetic bacteria. Makes FAR more sense than it being from dinosaurs. The continued point is that we'll never run out of oil, unless we kill these subterranean bacteria (which account for about 80 of the volume of all life on earth, so it might take a while). Oil is constantly being produced. Eventually, currently dry oil beds will refill. Will take a long while, but...how long is a matter of debate.
As others are pointing out, the difference between the price of gas in Europe and the USA are mostly due to taxes. In Massachusetts, the combined state and federal taxes are $.399 if I remember what was posted at the pump when I last filled up. Other states have different tax rates, and there may be additional indirect taxes factored into the price as well.
So why are European taxes so much higher? Because they tax as a percentage of the price, whereas the USA taxes as a amount per volume. Hence, if the cost of gas before taxes doubles, in Europe the price at the pump doubles, whereas in the USA the price may only go up 25%.
Now some will argue that the taxes are too low, as they don't cover all the related costs, but all of those studies have included environmental impact costs that are wildly subjective at best.
In short term, there is plenty of gas available. It is not the physical shortage, but the political one. On the other hand, there are so many alternative technologies available, which are of two types.
1. Preventive: This reduces energy usage.
2. Generative: This generates more enery.
None may scale to the level of solar enery from space, but nevertheless, may be enough. Some of these are Fuel cell, wind energy, solar cells, tidal enery, fission, hybrid cars, better home insulation and so on. This can easily sustain for several decades or perhaps few centuries.
There are other factors, like social ones. Car pool, public transport, lifestyle change which needs less transport, smaller house, compound families and so on, vegetarian diet (yes, the vegetarian diet requires much smaller energy input in agriculture than meat based diet).
Overall I believe, the energy crisis is overplayed. The bigger concern is pollution which requires more attention. Which means getting rid of coal and oil even if they are free. For this we don't have any real solution. People will stop using oil and gas only when the stock goes so low that they will be more expensive than non-conventiaonal energy sources. But by that time, it will be too late. So far, I haven't seen any solutions being seriously considered to address this.
for places like iceland, who are cursed with volcanoes and earthquakes, the silver lining is, of course, the potential ability to remain completely free of oil dependency because of steam generators that can be plugged right into the ground
in january i had the pleasure of visiting the largest such natural steam generator facility in the world on another island cursed/ blessed with geothermal activity, on the island of leyte in the philippines
it powers virtually the entire island, for free, as well as parts of samar and lower luzon
the natural steam sources are really quite amazing up there in the mountains: it is always raining, for example, downslope from the facilities because of all of the steam that is always issuing forth... and run off rivers of steaming brilliant cobalt blue from superheated hyperdissolved minerals from deep in the earth mixing with the cold muddy waters in the middle of the mountain jungle... and to find, deep in the poor rural mountain jungles where water buffalo roam free on dirt roads and unhusked rice dries by the roadside, to find what looks like an evil genius's lair of ultramodern technology and giant steaming generators surrounded by nervous machine gun toting filipino forces at military checkpoints
unfortunately, a few weeks after i visited the facility, it was overrun by local npa (communist) guerrillas... this was tied to election politics in the philippines, where remote rural guerilla forces often demand protection money in exchange for allowing voting to proceed... it would be hoped that the poor rural areas in the mountains north of ormoc city around lake danao would benefit from this facility more directly through tourist facilities and other infrastructure development
then they would be invested in the success of the plant, rather than it having be controlled by manila and calenergy from afar
but for those who are hellbent on imagining a dystopic future where civilization fails because we don't make the transition from oil to fusion energy, for example, know that there are oases in the world like iceland and leyte where mankind's power hungry needs can and will be satsified for centuries to come, virtually for free
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Ignore the book advertisements. Just read the front page.
http://peakoil.net/
And remember, this is NOT JUST ABOUT "GAS" FOR TRANSPORTATION.
This isn't about someone buying a Hummer or a Suburban instead of a Civic Hybrid or riding their bike.
Almost EVERYTHING modern industrial society needs is based on petroleum-based products and cheap energy. Plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, food processing, medicine, water purification...everything comes back to cheap energy and/or petroleum/oil-based products.
I argued both sides of the issue that year. I will never forget the vast quantities of evidence presented showing how the Earth would be completely without oil by the 1990s -- at the latest.
I know it will eventually happen, but that experience has given me a jaded eye toward all those folks who shout "The sky Is falling!" when they talk about energy.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
IANAE (I am not an economist, but the inflation argument that the price of gasoline once you factor in inflation is still lower than the times of the oil crisis is complete garbage. They are seriously just taking the overall inflation rate and compounding it against the price of gasoline back then, to come up with a figure in today's dollars. That is meaningless.
This is the expected condition -- Even when we start running out, the inflation on gasoline will always be lower than the overall inflation. If, temporarily, the price of gasoline inflates faster than the overall, don't worry, the rest of the economy will catch up shortly.
The reason you see this bullshit argument all over the news is the oil companies and your government want you to think you're not being gouged. Meanwhile the oil companies are making record profits.
Think bigger. A million cars all over the globe with no gas isn't the big problem.
When oil is too costly to use as an energy source how are we going to make the metal to build the factoies that make medical supplies? How are we going to build cleaner (nuke?) power plants when we don't even have the resources to make the raw material?
And this would be all happening after the wars over oil rich land. The first obvious war over oil have already happened.
Nuclear waste disposal isn't really a problem. It's a political football in the US, but that's a political problem, not a technical one. There are rock formations that have been stable for twenty million years. (Yucca Mountain isn't one of them, though.)
The problem is Chernoybl-sized disasters and air pollution from the coal. Everybody worries about the first, but the second is more dangerous.
America has huge oil fields off of all three of our coasts, yet only limited drilling is allowed in the gulf. And no more at all apparently will be allowed in Alaska.
If we were to develop those resources, get rid of the stupid EPA's '8 different types of gas' rules, and build more refineries, then the prices would drop back down.
But the people of the US (or at least enough of them in powerful positions) don't want that. So gas prices will remain high for now. But we won't be running out of oil in the lifetime of anybody here.
Even if oil starts running out there's no problem. Prices will go up. People will start considering more efficient cars. Prices will keep going up. People will be more willing to invest money in other forms of transport. Vehicle manufacturers will investigate other forms of energy. As the prices go up they'll work harder and harder. Eventually the price of other technologies will match gas. Those technologies will become more popular. The price of those technologies will drop as they are mass produced. Everyone will be happy.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I remmeber there was a book (Malthusian something or other?) that said that the whole world was going to end in 20 years or so because of the inability of people to be fed, destroying the climate, etc, etc. The ususal doom and gloom stuff. Written in or around the 70's, IIRC.
;)
What I also remember is a $1000 (US) bet between the author of the book and a professor who's name escapes me at the moment. The bet was that the cost of a cross section of commodities, picked by the author, adjusted for inflation, would be LOWER in 20 years than they were at the start of the bet. The book's author lost. Every time, he lost.
The problem? The books author took advantage of the then crises going on (stagflation, unavailable gasoline in the US because we wouldn't buy from countries like Iran) to prey upon people's fears to make money, or to promote their particular dicipline (physics professor pushing for fusion research? Who would have thought that?). This book seems little different.
Saying that we're going to run out of fossil fuels is fine. It'll happen. Saying it's gonna happen in the next decade, and that solar and fusion are the only long term replacements is assinine. What happens if someone figures out a way to make a gasoline replacement from genetically engineered microbes next year? The unpredicibility of the human mind and spirit in finding solutions are completely ignored, and when the author's predictions turn out to be as false as every other prediction, I have little doubt that thsese same attributes will be the culprit.
The current hike in the price of gasoline is not solely based on the availabllity of crude. It's as much, and possibly more, affected by the inability of refineries to process the crude oil into gasoline that is driving prices up. If prices, or demand, were going to stay this high, you'd think oil companies would be falling over themselves to build more refineries...but they're not. Why not? Because they know that, in the longer term, those refineries won't pay for themselves when the price of gasoline drops again.
---Postscript
Finally, I noticed that one of the authours wrote about a lower population in the future? Wouldn't that lead to lowered demand for petroleum? And a longer lasting supply? Or did doomsayer #2 forget to talk to doomsayer #1 before publishing (again)?
We will keep using oil until it cost more then other forms of power. Let's use it up, the sooner we do the sooner we will use a different form(hopefully renewable) of power.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Because you left wing retards just scream and shout and won't have intelligent debates?
Yes.. we will survive... because by then the enourmous economical necessity of finding alternative energy sources will have long since tipped the scales in favor of abandoning the energy technologies that we currently employ.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Look, we can curtail consumption dramatically overnight if need be. In fact we could increase the car efficiency by a factor of 3 overnight. Not only the technology is already here, but you can drive it off the parking lot today!
Do you know that the average mile per gallon today in the US is lower than in the mid-80s?
What would be the reduction in gas consumption if we all dumped our SUVs and bought Honda Civics?
Now, what if we then switched to Hybrids?
What if we gave up the back seat for our one-person commute and we all switched to smart cars?
What if we equipped said smartcars with super-efficient bicycle-like wheels as California is suggesting we do?
Mark my words: in two years people won't be able to give away for free their gas guzzling SUV (people who are old enough will remember that in the late 70s you could not give away your LTD Crown Victoria).
Americans have long been enjoying underpriced gas. Why the big surprise that the levels are rising to something that more accurately reflects the cost to society? It's not unfair, it's not a conspiracy, it's just about time.
What a load of bunk.
Non-Americans have long been "enjoying" overpriced gas. I don't see why your lot thinks that gas should just magically cost more than it does, just because you (theoretically) don't like it. It's Europe that has been artificially inflating it's gas (petrol) price all this time.
You're trying to tell me that the huge taxes we pay here nonetheless aren't enough? Their main purpose it to provide "highway funds" for our congresscritters to buy each other off with. Everybody, including the public balance sheets, would benefit if we just abolished gas taxes.
For one, the problem isn't running out of oil, it's running out of cheap oil. It takes some energy to get oil out of the ground. The less oil in the well the more energy it takes. When it takes one barrel of oil to pump out one barrel of oil, the well is abandoned (zero sum). The problem isn't running out of oil, it running out of oil that's relatively easy to get out of the ground.
Nuclear power would be a great short term stop gap, it's only problem is that it takes a decade to build a reactor.
My last point is that this issue is HUGE. Oil is used in the production of EVERYTHING including alternative energy sources and research. Just imagine how much time and money it would take to produce enough ethenol (or what ever) for everyone's cars, distribute/store it (would current distribution systems work?), and convert every car, truck, big rig, ambulance, firetruck, motorcycle, etc in the country! That only covers land transportation.
Look around you. There is in everything you see a number that represents the ammount of oil it took to create whatever you're looking at and bring it to the spot that it's currently at. Oil was used to produce and transport everything you own (except unimproved realestate). Oil is the constant in equation of everything we make or raise.
"public transportation" DOESN'T produce, package, or deliver your food to the stores and restaurants you frequent. Nor does it in the US-or any place else. The goods you all buy at the stores, from clothes to Cds to various hardware to..whatever--inevitably is reflected cost wise with the price of petroleum-and it's availability.
You don't even need a book, a simple two line graph will suffice. One graph shows world wide demand-that is going UP. Another graph line shows production-that will be going down as fields leave their "peak" where it's the cheapest to extract in terms of BTU's --> in to get BTU's -- out. Those lines will cross, then go in opposite directions, and the result is quite literally madmax, the movie, in spades.
In most fields outside the middle east, it's passed peak, and even the big fields in the middle east it's getting closer.
Those lines more or less cross within 15 years most places, some places earlier, other places later, but short of them developing some extremely energy efficient extraction techniques, and especially something that doesn't require high pressure water injection, we will be enscrewed.
BUT, the hard choices will not be made until it's too late to do much about it. We should already be using a significant proportion of the worlds petroleum energy to mass produce alternative enrgy devices, instead, we are using only a tiny fraction, waiting for the Mr. Fusion back yard perpetual motion machine generator.
Nuts, but there ya go.
I also think the "proven reserve" numbers aren't accurate, I think it's less in the middle east than what they say, but slightly more in the arctic circle. And there's some more to be gained in the gulf of mexico, etc, currently off limits to drilling, but once fuel gets to be about 5$ a gallon in the US, you won't find many people who give a care where we drill, unlike now when it's still fatcity and cheap and no one really is hurting yet-easy to complain OR ignore the problem as long as you are well fed, comfy, and want for naught. Once that changes, we could see what are euphemistally called in history books "major social changes".
Stuff can happen FAST, too, I personally paid 10$ a gallon for two gallons max back in the OPEC embargo days. And it doesn't matter how much you whine about it when it happens, scam or no scam, you pay, or walk. And with the current middle east situation, chaos theory says-you don't know, the whole dang place over there could el kaboom any day. No one can say it won't, you can't say it will, but the posibility is there for major war to seriously disrupt supply, and that would effect everyone in any nuymber of ways, irregardless if they are an urban bicycle/mass transit rider or not.
We are just way too dependent on oil, our entire economies revolve around it.
Heck, I just came in for a breather, about to go back outside and climb onto a diesel powered tractor, without that diesel, I can't work. PERIOD. Multiple that by another billion guys around the planet, one way or the other everyone goes to work, and diesel and gas make it happen. We simply cannot replace it, even by a massive switch to coal, can't be done now.
Gasoline is solar energy converted to hydrocarbons by plants, then processed by time and pressure.
But the real source of Energy is the Sun. Mankind's total energy useage per year is still MUCH less than the Sun's total output per year, and is even less than the amount of energy the sun delivers to the planet earth in a year.
It should be obvious that we might be forced to find other ways of converting that energy into useable forms, but that we have no need to worry about running out of energy.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The economic framework needed to attain an equilibrium is one that targets the various undesired side-effects (i.e. pollution) caused when energy is converted from some fuel to a useful form (like moving your car). That in place, the rest can work itself out in the free markets. Consumers are smart enough to buy better technology if it save them fuel costs, but that rationality is severly confounded today because to buy a device that gives you more usable energy per unit of fuel, you can't help but buy one that also gives you less pollution per useful work (work in the physics sense) done, for which the consumer GETS NOTHING but a fuzzy do-gooder feeling, which most people don't give a crap about. Consumers do not willingly pay for something they don't appreciate.
Oh, and by the way, please, PLEASE help me explain to people that Energy Efficiency, Pollution Efficiency, and Conservation are three different concepts.
Energy Efficiency: usable work per unit of fuel
e.g. your car is NOT more energy efficient than my SUV simply because it has less weight to carry around, since it obviously takes more WORK to move a bigger vehicle
Pollution Efficiency: pollution (somewhat subjective, i'll admit) per unit of useful work. Governments could target this figure alone, and let the markets take care of the test.
Conservation: Merely doing less work
but mine certainly runs on 87 octane gasoline
87? In sweden our cars runs on 95,96 or 98 octane gas... From what I've learned in school, the level of octane defines how well the fuel can take high temperatures without selfigniting. 98 octane is only here in high performance cars, so I presume higher is better.
Does cars that run on 87 octane fuel really suck then?
Right... but the time-scale over which oil is produced on Earth is very large, and we are consuming it at a _VASTLY_ faster rate than it is being produced, ergo... we will run out.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Simply make products as close to the consumer as possible, regardless of real cost or end price. Use the internet to distribute the plans, and make the physical hardware locally. Then you've just saved all the fuel that used to go for shipping, AND you've created more jobs locally.
Nah, that's TOO easy.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
1. Environmental regulations preventing the building of new refineries.
Oh, of courrrse.... A lack of refineries makes their input product (crude oil) more expensive? Shouldn't a lack of demand drive down the price of a supplied good? Perhaps you flunked the supply and demand portion of macroeconomics.
2. Environmental regulations forcing specialized, region-specific formulations across the country.
This effects the $40/barrel price of crude oil how? Hell, it doesn't even effect the gas price of people outside of those regions much, and if it did, the answer would be to adopt the better standards rather than to increase the smog in the big cities.
3. OPEC fighting against us in Iraq with the one effective weapon they have.
It seems that in talks to increase production. Only Venezuela and Iran are vocally against this.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The future is now.
If the Middle East (and Iraq) were not full of oil, then the U.S. would not be fighting a war in Iraq today. I am not saying that the U.S. sent troops into Iraq to steal their oil. The neocons sent troops into Iraq in the hope that they could stabilize the region and create a reliable source of future oil for the world.
A side benefit would be that the money spent on oil (e.g. to fillup your SUV) would be less likely to support terrorism (where do you think bin Ladin got his millions?). At this stage, however, it seems that the utopian vision of the neocons will not come to pass, and the future of the region looks more unstable than before the Iraq war.
Bully for you!
In the long run, of course, we are all dead, but also in the long run human cultures can and will adapt to a world of incredibly expensive, rare oil.
The question is whether that is a world that can sustain 8+ billion people at anything like the current astonishing consumption rate.
I'm given to understand that economists spend a lot of time measuring the theoretical epiphenomenon known as "productivity" within an "economy". I put it to you that a major input into measurements of productivity is in fact trapped solar energy in the form of fossil fuels.
The transition from a medieval society based on slaves/serfs and water/wind power to the consumption of fossil fuels on a vast, increasing scale over past few centuries is what has enabled us to move from agrarian to an urban societies. We no longer require vast armies of slaves and serfs to till our fields and shit in them - instead we burn fossil fuels to till the, and convert more fossil fuels into fertiliser. By burning 400 years worth of solar energy input every year, we have increased producitivty massively, freeing up hundreds of millions of bodies to work in urban manufacturing and service jobs. We have created our economies, literally, by burning fossil fuels.
Unlike economics, physics and geology doesn't work in a vacuum or a finely divisible continuum of graduated, switchable inputs. There is a finite limit to growth, dictated by several realities: total solar output, diameter of the earth, effectiveness of photosynthesis, energy conversion efficiencies, and so on. We could, as you say, transition our cultures to move from fossil fuels to other power sources, but what are the consequences?
Da Blog
"gasoline prices have certainly been worse."
Or great, depending on how you view it. Here in Norway, whose economy is based on the export of oil and natural gas, high oil prices are viewed as good.
I'm not saying that a high usage of oil is any good (to the world as a whole), but for some of us, high prices on oil is just perfect.
rather weak at something like 0.8 Euro. Other currencies, like the Yuan, appear OK but that's because they are actively pegged
to the dollar; hard currencies like platinum
show a clearer picture). The weak dollar doesn't help the price of gas, which is set by the international market.
The dollar is weak primarily because of our government's irresponsible fiscal policy and international poor perception of our activities in Iraq. The International Monetary Fund issued a special report to that effect last fall.
So, er, if you voted for Bush and support the war in Iraq, you're responsible for the high cost of filling up your SUV.
few doubt it will come (except those who buy into Thomas Gold's hypothesis that most hydrocarbons originate from primordial methane dating from the earth's formation rather than the breakdown of organic material).
Even if you accept this hypothesis, you still run into a crunch because the rate of metabolysis for oil is incredibly slow over human timescales. Whereas our economic growth rate and thirst for oil is incredibly rapid by comparison. Waiting for new petrol to be squeezed out of rocks is not going to keep those Hummers on the roads!
Da Blog
...and I don't mean just by buying huge SUVs and being generally glutonous. I mean by defeating Saddam!
See, when that crazy SOB was running loose in Iraq, Saudia Arabia and the other OPEC nations were scared. They needed their big buddy, the US, to keep him in line. Now that he is gone and Iraq has declined into a state of continuous *local* guerrilla war, the possibility of Kuwait or Saudia Arabia being invaded is zero. So now, things are a little different between the US and OPEC. Sure, we did them a huge favor by removing Saddam, but now, the US has nothing over them. So, if oil prices should drift up and up and up. So sorry. Pay me, sucker.
Actually, if you look back about a month ago there was quite a bit of news about dairy prices going up due to low production. This applies to all dairy products - milk, butter, ice cream, latte', cheese, and so on. This came before, and is not directly related to the rise in oil prices.
c pi.asp). How much are housing prices rising? How much are medical costs increasing? How much are technology costs rising? How much more do automobiles costs? All of these higher costs items may be holding the overall inflation rate lower than what we, as consumers, actually see from our wallet.
Why isn't this showing up in the inflations numbers? Because those include all sorts of things, "from the price of diapers and milk to funeral expenses" (http://www.investopedia.com/university/releases/
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Here's a friendly reminder to make sure you fill up your vehicles right now, and any spare gas tank you may have...
This weekend is Victoria Day Long Weekend and gas prices are bound to go up on Friday.
I remember when I was in High school, reading in my science book, that they were Predicting that the oil supply would be dry in 25 years.
:)
Apparently they were wrong, because the book was made in 1976. It's 2004 and I'm not living in a real life Post Apocalyptic "Mad Max" world full of thugs and killers spilling Blood for Oil.
Getting back to the point, I'll believe we'll be out of oil when I see it. Particulary since so far the analysts doing these studies haven't been right so far.
Pretty much all of the other stuff your going to find here is DittoHeads Vs FrankenSteins to see which radio Talk show host has the biggest head
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Suburbia has largely mutated into Edge City without most people being aware of it. So for example, I live in Woodland Hills, California, in a very cool house on top of a hill. I live about 3 miles away from my workplace. That's Edge City; my job is where I live, so I don't commute far at all. You might notice that in the Slashdot poll mentioned above, about 30% of people live within 6 miles of their work. This is the reason.
You don't need to squeeze everyone in massive high-rise apartment blocks or characterless row houses to let people live near their work. You do have to accept somewhat high density - I live on a 5200 square foot lot, not an acre (which is about 9x as much).
I really love the single-family home lifestyle and wouldn't give it up without a fight. It really is great to have genuine control over your own domain instead of being in an ugly, characterless block. Here is the kind of building "New Urbanists" want to squeeze us into. By comparison, here's where I live today.
It's unfortunate that the New Urbanism looks progressive compared to what's normally being built by today's builders. I feel very fortunate to be in an area built up during the 20s through the 60s, where builders took pride in what they constructed and big profits were not the sole motivating factor.
But this all being said, I don't think the New Urbanism is the answer to our nation's ills. In my view, the merits of suburbia - privacy, the potential for individualty and some nice outdoor space to stay in on a sunny day - outweigh the disadvantages.
D
Is coming and coming fast. As countries step up into "tier 1" women begin having far fewer babies. The birthrate in many civilized countries is already hovering at only the replacement rate. That means these countries populations can only grow via immigration. Birthrates in India and China are both crashing and while they are still higher than Europe or America in the next three or four decades they will approach replacement rate only.
Perhaps by as soon as 2030 or 2040 we might actually see a dip in total world population.
--- I do not moderate.
The author of the book is a physicist, not a resource economist, so it's probably be to expected that his conclusions about the future price of natural resources are wrong. People are notorious for saying silly thing when they speak outside of their area of expertise.
To summarize the views of many economists, the stone age did not end for lack of stones, and the oil age will not end for lack of oil. Eventually, other sources of energy will become sufficiently cheaper/cleaner/better, and the economy will gradually shift to them. But there's no reason to expect that the shift from oil to, say, nuclear fusion will be any more traumatic than the shift from coal to oil was a century ago.
One interesting article on the subject of oil prices, by MIT economist Morris Adelman, is here.
I mean, how much milk and ice cream can you eat in a month? Even if the price doubles...how much more is that out of your pocket? I just don't see the temporary increase being all that much! I feel people have become complacent on a stable economy...they've forgotten that things can happen to throw it out of wack, and they've stopped preparing for such situations.
While the price rise is real, I feel it is poor spending habits that give the rises the enormous impacts they do.
Blar.
from the article:
"There is only so much crude oil in the world, and the industry has found about 90 percent of it."
as petroleum engineering ph.d. from stanford university, i call this bullshit. the authors undermine the power of technology. for example, they dismiss deep water reservoirs by saying "much of the deepwater realm, for example, has been shown to be absolutely non-prospective for geologic reasons" and they dismiss non-conventional oil reserves by saying "but the industry will be hard-pressed for the time and money needed to ramp up production of unconventional oil quickly enough"
the above assessments are simply not true. deep water reservoirs are becoming more and more important for oil companies as we develop new technologies and understand them better. in 1998, they were deemed too hard and too expensive to work on but nowadays they are pretty standard as far as the big oil companies are concerned. non-conventional oil reserves are a similar story. once, they were thought to be hardly producible but now we know that we can produce them rather easily; thanks to again newly emerging techniques
sure, we don't have infinite oil reserves. but, the situation is not as bad as some people claim it to be. yet, that doesn't mean we should feel comfortable. the incentive to find hydrocarbon alternatives should *not* be the distorted 'fact' that we are going to run out of oil soon. it should be the fact that oil consumption is not good for the environment
-- ba
How are we going to get along without plastics? What about lubricants for our engines? I think the oil crisis is beyond just gasoline.
The war in the middle east is paid out of general governmental revenues. Before the current war, the US squandered 1.2 Trillion in the Middle East. If these costs were factored in, Middle Eastern oil would be seen as VERY expensive. What ought to happen is that the US should start taxing gasoline significantly--and reduce taxes on the general population. US produced goods and services would become less expensive-particularly if they were produced in areas that aren't terribly oil dependent. These wasteful expenditures in the middle east are subsidization of a failed technological policy. The US _can_ be energy independent and at peace with the rest of the world--but there is a need for some serious leadership and innovation.
OPEC is a cartel which controls the price of oil. They do this by setting a price and agreeing upon production quotas (supply) to meet that price from customers (demand).
Destroy OPEC and force member countries to actually compete with one another. Since most OPEC countries are corrupt, petty dictatorships, their rulers will lower oil to a dollar a barrel if it means keeping their palaces and armed thugs.
Domestically, decresase consumption not by "forcing your citizens" do make drastic uncomfortable changes - voters do not like these things and throw these sorts of leaders out of office (dictators seldom have these problems).
Rather, begin massive building of nuclear plants to offset demand - France generates over 60% of its domestic energy this way and I don't see anyone calling that country an environmental nightmare.
I mean there are oil powerplants, but almost none in the US. We use Coal. Of that, we have much. At LEAST 100 years worth on deposits available in our country alone. This is not to mention that we could produce a lot of enegry via nuclear power, if the restrictions to it's generation were removed.
PS: If you are stockpiling food and clothing to prepare for the collapse of civilization, you fail to understand what the collapse of civilization means. You should be stockpiling guns and ammo.
The Navy has an oil reserve in Alaska. We don't need it yet, and nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines never will.
Last, there's a lot of room to increase the efficiency of the military. There was talk about a hybrid HMMV replacement several years ago, with stealthiness (low thermal and audio signature) being a military advantage at least as great as the need for 50% less fuel. Hyperbar diesels could replace gas turbines in an M1A1 replacement, with probably a similar improvement. We could power ships with powdered coal if we wanted to, at some cost in range. I have not had the opportunity to study the issue in depth, but it doesn't look terribly difficult to me. The one intractable use is for aircraft fuel, but if you can divert large amounts from the land and sea to the airborne users it shouldn't be that big of a deal; a barrel is a barrel is a barrel no matter where you save it.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Think about oh so smart experts who write on slashdot. It is not only turkey guts, but pollution from deposits of petrocarbons can be processed as can human waste, biowaste, animal waste, plant waste, coal and any organic waste. Consider free energy from refuse, their is a lot of carbon out there. Then we can tap our ability to make biodiesel and with existing petroleum reserves and some conservation of energy there is more tha enough to go around if the population doesn't grow rapidly.
All I need is one bowl of Kaschi cereal in the morning and, within 3 hours, I'm guaranteed to have gas for hours afterwards. Works like a charm!
We'll never run out of oil. It will just gradually increase in price until the alternatives are more economically viable.
Different Century.
People have been claiming that we are running out of oil since the 19th century. I am in the oil business, and I don't see evidence of it happening anytime soon. I suspect that most of the predictions of depleting oil reserves are based on economically recoverable reserves. As oil prices rise there are a lot of previously unprofitable oil reserves that suddenly become economically attractive. The exploitation of previously unprofitable oil reserves will prevent the price of oil from rising too rapidly. Furthermore, the advance of technology means that we can exploit more oil reserves profitably which will tend to drive prices down. I believe Alberta alone has over 100 billion barrels of oil that are currently out of our ability to exploit profitably. With a rise in oil prices and improving technology, that oil will come into use.
To be honest, knowing what it takes to get oil (and then gasoline), I am amazed that we can deliver it to the customer for less than they pay for soft drinks (unless your local gov't taxes it at some insane level). The capital equipment needed to get at this stuff isn't cheap: http://www.cleddau.com/oilrigphotogallery.html
I'm not saying there is an unlimted supply of oil. I am saying that I'd closely examine the assumptions of anyone who said that we were headed for an oil crash anytime soon. Eventually someone will say it and be right. Until then, there will probably be a lot more people who say it and are wrong.
There are alternatives to oil, it just doesn't make sense to use them with oil so cheap and readily available right now. When oil does start to become scarce the price rise should be slow enough that the the invisible hand of market forces will have time for those alternatives to be smoothly integrated into our economy. When should we panic over oil running out? Probably never, anymore than toolmakers worry about a flint shortage.
Provide businesses with tax/other insentives for having a certain portion of their work force telecommute for 3-4 days out of the week would greatly reduce the amount of fuel use caused by suburbia.
And I would be the first to sign up. 30 miles to and from work is a dog in traffic.
/*disclaimer: I went to CalTech, and took a class from this guy as a freshman */
Did any of you take physics in high school? I did. At least once a week, part of our class would consist of a viewing of the venerable Mechanical Universe series of videotapes, hosted by none other than Dr. David Goodstein.
By far, the most famous and exciting episode is the one where he shoots the stuffed monkey as it's falling from across the room with a rubber dart fired from one of those toy guns. The pinnacle of my freshman year at CalTech (well, apart from the trip to Tijuana... and those little blotters with the all-seeing eye on them...) OK OK, the school-sanctioned educational pinnacle was seeing Dr. Goodstein REPEAT the demo from the tape in real life, in front of a live audience. People acutally APPLAUDED when the dart hit the monkey. That's when I knew that even though I was doomed to be a nerd forever... there were other people even nerdier than me.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
If you don't get your fix on time, you'll be feeling it for a while. Smaller cars can just go for longer on less heroine. When it's cheap we'll buy and use more, but that will just get us more addicted when it goes up in price.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is an issue we should take seriously, but I wonder if the book offers any practical responses to the issue. I have read a dozen well meaning articles on the topic that degenerate into a desperate attempt to scare the bejeezus out of the reader. This is the point at which I feel like I've been had, because in all fairness it isn't like the oil pipe will turn off overnight. Prices will gradually increase as supply decreases, making ripe an opportunity for alternatives.
From what I understand, the socially responsible thing is to conserve resources but to not lose your head over this stuff. We did manage to survive y2k, didn't we?
-- Solaris Central - http://w
...grow your own food.
I spent last summer at a friends country place and we went vegan for 6 weeks, eating only the food we had grown, sort of like SuperSize Me but in reverse.
No problem (if you know how to cook to give taste to food).
I did eat a 32 oz steak when I got home but if you had to, it would NOT be a big deal.
zeke
Reminds me of Jesus Plus Nothing - Best. Expose. Ever.
I was really disturbed to find that one of my senators is part of this wacko group.
"She was out of her depth in a shallow pool." -- Peggy Noonan on Sarah Palin
20 percent markup on $20 a barrel means $4 profit
20 percent markup on $40 a barrel means $8 profit
It is not in their best interest to get the prices down.
register to vote, and follow through.
regards
dbcad7
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
It is quite possible to produce a pound of beef without any gasoline. How the hell do you think people did it in the middle ages?
Someone in the audience mentioned Goodstein and Lewis made kind of a scoffing noise. Lewis seemed very skeptical of Goodstein's estimates of how soon we will run out of coal.
The real problem, according to Lewis, as I understood it, is not that we will run out of oil, but that we will probably not be able to meet energy demands without putting significantly more carbon into the air than there has been in the last half million years.
Supply and demand doesn't work if supply totally fails. To wit, we can not run out. They are just strangling us because a. They can. and b. They like it.
kulakovich
I keep hearing different things about global warming and the effects of Oil&Gas on the environment. Can we get a single consistent study of what is *Actually* going on?
Oil&Gas is a limited resource, we really should have stopped being so dependant on it long ago.
Personally, I'm using alternative energy sources.
*points to the solar panels on his tinfoil hat*
Take a world map, look at your pint sized country then look at the size of the US and-or Canada and try to figure out what the problem is.
Then travel to north america and see what is meant by urban sprawl and the driving habits of the natives (slashdot poll...how f***ing scientific).
As much as I hate yanks with their closed view of the worlds, europeans who live in closet sized countries giving us lessons annoy me more.
zeke
The problem isn't America's gas prices, it's the fact that it doesn't matter. The old economics idea is that once gas prices start to go up, gas use will go down. Problem is, the world RELIES ON OIL. There is no substitute for it, and as other readers have mentioned, products like platsic have no equal.
/. crowd, is not even *close* to an accurate representation of what the general population is like. I have a sneaking suspicion the average SUV-driving putz out there couldn't care less about oil shortages. At least not until he can't fill up his Expedition XLT Super-High-Ultra-Duty-I-can-tow-Staten-Island, i.e. when it's too late.
I'm sure a lot of us would make at least a modest effort to change our ways and live oil-free, but there's two important factors to realize. One, "a lot of us", the
Two, and more importantly, we can't live oil free. Given plastics, lubricants, hell, even f*$&-in' chapstick, oil is a part of everyone's life, even those of us who do make a modest effort for it not to.
We are VERY aware that energy comes at a cost, but we're also aware that public transportation doesn't go where it needs to, that we can't even buy WATER without using oil, and that the rest of us make too much money to care in the slightest about how much things cost.
The real question is whether the Saudi giant fields Ghawar, Abqaiq and Safaniya can match increased demand or whether they suffer the precipitous production declines seen at Oman Yibal, Alaskan Prudhoe Bay, or North Sea Brent. My guess -- no.
I would like to point out a simple fact that while oil prices are as low as they are, there is little or no hard incentive for alternative sources of energy.
The US has a VERY large reserve of oil, and the world's oil fields are completely under produced. We have at least enough oil for 50-100 more years, unless everyone in China & India start to drive. US consumption can be supported for quite some time.
Either way, if you think that gas-powered cars are evil, you should be rooting for higher oil prices. Otherwise, no serious effort will be made for alternatives.
That said, a serious effort at an alternative has been found and it is called nuclear energy (pronounced "new-clear" -- i know these new fangled science terms are hard).
It harnesses the power of the atom and can be made small enough to power your small car or large enough to power your small country.
Too bad that people think it is unsafe. It is understandable though, given a total of ZERO deaths caused by meltdowns in the western world.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
There is a very clear online recent lecture on this topic by Nathan Lewis, a chem professor at Caltech who is active in this field. It is titled "The Future of Power and Energy in the World"
_ no v.php
s -h ybPV.php
t 13 55h.htm
You can find it with many slides at http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/colloq/lewis1/
The summary is roughly that we need to make photovoltaics about 10 fold cheaper than they are today(about $4/watt ->$.40/watt), on the way to making them as as cheap as housepaint (say $.20/watt). There is no theoretical obstacle to doing this, and several promising lines of research. If (really when) we can do this ($.20/watt), solar electric energy will be cheap enough to electrolytically reduce CO2 to methanol (CH3OH) which is a fine fuel for transportation, etc., and is already nicely interfaced to out current energy distribution and use systems.
At this low cost, we can even pull CO2 out of the atmosphere directly, directly reversing the CO2 greenhouse effect (my own addition).
Furthermore, this is by far the best option, e.g. otherwise we would need 5000 new 1GW fission reactors to supply the growth in energy needs contemplated in the next 50 years (construction of 2/wk for 50 yrs.) This seems much too dangerous.
Since this is the best apparent practical way out, since we are really talking about a major determinant of the fate of the earth, and timing is critical, one might wonder why the federal funding is so low (about $10M/yr in the US maybe).
Some of the recent research, and the progress made by startup companies is summarized at
http://www.konarkatech.com/news_articles-forbes
http://www.konarkatech.com/news_articles-solrac
http://www.st.com/stonline/press/news/year2003/
http://www.nanosolar.com/advantages.htm
(this is an updated version of a previous post)
.
We have plenty of corn ( and soy ) to make ethenol to drive our cars and trucks..
Much of this country's corn is wasted, or sent to other places as 'aid'. We dont need any of the gasoline we are using now.
Even most lubricant oil can be replaced with soy oil..
The only real reason we still have an oil industry is due to the $$ it generates for washington.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oil futures prices are down 2.7% today. The rumor on the Drudge Report is that Iraq is already pumping oil above expected output...
Meanwhile, the USA is filling its strategic oil reserves to the highest levels ever. The thought is that with the proper reserves, they could soak any future terrorist attack that may cut off supply... recall that Bill Clinton tapped the oil reserves in 2000 for price control, a move widely seen as covering up effects of the dot-com recession that had begun earlier in the year. In 2000, it was noted that the reserves could support 100% production levels in the USA for two months, and that was at 571m barrels. Prices at the time were only about $26/barrel as shown on this graph.
Attendant: Out of gas.
Jake: Yep. Fill 'er up.
Attendant: No. We're out of gas!
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Coal is in the long run a better choice because we have so much of it--about four trillion tons in the US alone which translates roughly to 8 trillion barrels (global oil reserves are estimated at about 1 trillion barrels). One problem is that coal conversion plants are relatively expensive to build, and since there's little demand right now we don't have the capacity to start producing huge quantities immediately if there is a sudden spike in gas prices.
Methanol has about half the energy density of gas (so you'd have to refill more often) but it also has lower emissions. On the other hand the lower emissions are offset by the environmental damage from coal recovery, i.e. strip mining.
Pbblblbblbl!!!
I always find it sad that people worry about $0.30/gal changes in gas prices, causing maybe all of $100 or $200 a year in cost increases, but don't complain about our taxes adding up to about 50%. Who cares about $500 when you're paying $15000-$30000 in taxes? (note that gas prices are also about 50% tax).
The problem I can see is that you can only charge the battery back up to full, so to use meaningful amounts of grid power you'd have to run the battery down just as you get to a charging spot. So far as I know, there are no hybrids on the market which give you any control over charge management.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
As a geoscientist I can attest to the leaps and bounds that are made monthly and yearly in the petroleum industry for exploiting, locating, and distributing hydrocarbons. The transition to alternative forms of energy for personal transportation will eventually come, but it will hardly spell the end for the petroleum industry. Movement to pure hydrogen energy will only happen when a methods for producing free hydrogen don't require more energy than the use of the hydrogen itself produces. It requires energy to make that hydrogen folks. Hopefully all of you proclaimed physicists realize that.
The energy sector will move completely to natural gas alternatives (condensates, gas hydrates, LNG) long before it moves to free hydrogen. But this movement has already been happening and is already proving highly profitable for domestic and international companies (Double Cross, TXO, Chesapeake, Devon, CDX, Marathon, etc.). The petroleum industry is economically the largest industry on the planet. It has the resources to adapt to changing energy markets. In a way, the companies and people who work to bring you your hydrocarbon energy will never be out of business, their model will merely change. The end of the oil age shouldn't concern you nearly as much as the end of civilization due to demand for water and the rapidly declining availability of usable water.
Almost every part of the globe is seeing a decrease in available water supply. Disputes over water will be much more devastating than the disputes over oil have been. Not one hydrologist I've talked to has an optimistic outlook on the future of the worlds usable water supply. It's a problem that doesn't have even half of a percent of the resources or attention that is poured into petroleum and that's unfortunate because it's a problem that will kick the worlds ass a lot sooner than the lack of fossil energy.
NMG
Look, there was a time when a large percentage of nighttime lighting in the "developed" world was provided by lamps that burned whale oil.
The whale population plummeted, prices went up, and people discovered "alternative energy sources" such as kerosine.
Pretty soon, nobody used whale oil anymore, but there were still whales available. The population of whales began to recover, but whale oil prices didn't plummet and return us to whale oil because people had stopped manufacturing it and consumers had stopped demanding it.
If the supply of oil ever gets to the point where there is serious economic pressure, the world will move on to something else, and this will happen before we run out.
I'm in favor of rapid exploration of energy alternatives not because we're going to run out of oil (we're not), but because of the danger that intentional, coordinated terrorist action might take a large percentage of production offline too suddenly for normal economic evolution to cope with.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
That said, it would be a terrific achievement if it could be turned into a product. It would be doubly terrific if the car could run its first 10-20 miles of each trip on electricity; for typical local use, the average MPG could hit 3 digits.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I see a lot of anti-American sentiments here. Some of this is well-placed, I admit, but let's not go overboard, okay?
Gas prices were up near the two dollar limit just 4-5 years ago. Similarly, there were huge shortages of oil in both the 1970s and 80s. Seriously, in the early 1980s there was gasoline rationing, during which only people with odd numbered license plates (at least in some states), could only get gas on odd numbered days. It was common to have to wait in a long line at the gas station.
Now, yes, people forgetting about all of this and buying vehicles with terrible fuel mileage is inexcusable. Don't just blindly say "SUV," though. Small so-called SUV's are cars with different bodies. They get comparable gas mileage. Also note that most pickups are as bad as or worse than large SUVs, with MPGs in the mid teens. Rather railing against SUVs, it's more accurate to talk about veicles with excessively large engines (which these days means anything more than four cylinders). Some vehicles, like Suburbans and Grand Cherokees, are absolutely huge and have eight-cylinder engines in them. Why do people need vehicles that have engines twice the size of what's necessary, excepting people who need to haul cement and so on?
Is that a fact? Ever do the math on how much energy the ocean could generate? Ever look at a population density map and compare right around the coastline vs inside the mainland?
We could generate a LOT of energy from the oceans. The technology wouldn't have to be all that complex. How about a very large buoy connected to a very large crank at the bottom of the ocean? The tide comes in, lifting the buoy and turning the crank. The tide rolls out, lowering the buoy and turning the crank.
Sure, it would be a pretty big engineering effort, but we could do it with todays tech. And that's not even the only way to generate power from the ocean.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
which IS the assumption that you make when you say we cant get past fossil fuels
I'd love to be proved wrong and that there is a useful, compact energy source on earth that hasn't yet been tapped. But it's a long time since fission became viable - and that is a distinctly finite source as well. Fusion seems to present intractable problems. Perhaps dark energy will come along to save us all, but that seems to me a bit like waiting for Santa Claus.
Da Blog
Awww...lookee like the poo widdle amewicans are starting to pay more for gas. Boo freakin hoo! Hey: here's a solution: Why don't you fools vote Bush in for another 4 years, so he can invade other countries that provide oil (talk about biting the hand that feeds you) so he and his Texas buddies can keep the price of a barrel of oil high, and try and justify it on fictional, manufactured "evidence". That way, he and his buddies can continue to be super rich can maintain a stranglehold on the world. Then you Americans can continue to think he's the bestest president EVER, while the rest of the world angishes at his complete and udder stupidity. I can't wait for Moore's next film to come out - talk about timing!! TO HELL!!! Hey, this handbasket looks like it'll be mighty fine transportation to get us there!!
How big's the tank on that 'Vette, anyway?
I don't think the vette is the best example to use when talking about gas guzzlers. Newer vettes get considerably better mileage than any gas-powered SUV. In fact, a 350 horsepower V8 powered vette gets about the same mileage (city and highway) as a Honda Accord V6. And slightly BETTER mileage than a plain old Camry Solara.
V6 powered camry (fun yet sensible transportation)
350 horsepower corvette
In real life, even the 405hp Z06 model vette gets over 30mpg on the highway. That's only if you baby it though.
SUV's will guzzle gas whether you drive it like your grandma or not.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
ALL HAIL JOSS WHEDON!
...I like this place for the layman. The oil industry has it's own intelligence, and keeps their cards close to their cheast, but we just saw royal dutch shell a few weeks ago busted for over reporting what they claim they had-by 20%! That's an astoundingly LARGE amount of oil they claimed existed and does not exist. I have no idea if any of the other companies do it, but I sure wouldn't bet against it.
anyway, here ya go http://dieoff.org/
Best named website on the net if ya ask me
the best article off that site, for my loot, is
http://dieoff.org/page224.htm
I'm currently working with a company that has, for several years, been trying to get funding for a plant that will convert natural gas into petroleum products. Granted, this is still a dependence on a non-renewable resource, but it is an alternative nonetheless. If anyone has an extra $450M or so that they'd like to invest...
Well, at least we'll be reducing our pollution rate...
This includes bus/train fares.
Tech Public Policy stuff
One of the first sources quoted by the reviewer is the International Energy Agency, a forum for 26 industrialized countries. For those wo want to tap deeper there are a lot more - and diverse - statistics out there. For example the IEA's statistics on world consumption vs reserves are different from those of OPEC, and even different from state-run BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, which I consider more moderate than either of the two previous sources. The US Energy Information Agency site is also very comprehensive. Check out their Country Profiles section for comprehensive info on oil operations the world over.
http://www.energyspot.org
But Europeans should still be feeling the crunch since some amount of driving is neccessary except in metropoli with excellent public transportation. I would not burn less gas than I do even at 5.50/gallon. My gas usage is almost entirely non-discresionary. I have to get to work and to the grocery store, there are no busses, and the population density is not high enough to support them, probably even at $5.50/gallon. And I am not walking far to/from a bus stop when it's 0 degrees Farenheight ( -18 Celcius ) or in the rain. Therefore I drive my reasonably fuel efficient car X miles a week regardless of gas prices.
Eat at Joe's.
Note: it's a Word doc.
Mouse around the parent site for more info.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Or is this the answer?
hm....let's see....
Nope. Sky not falling yet. Enjoy your pancakes.
Please see this article in the Spring 2004 Regulation magazine which states:
There is not, and never has been, an oil crisis or gap. Oil reserves are not dwindling. The Middle East does not have and has never had any "oil weapon"...There is no indication that non-opec oil is getting more expensive to find and develop. Statements about non-OPEC nations' "dwindling reserves" are meaningless or wrong.
Check this page.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Oh, please. It has nothing to do with international opinion. The dollar is going down because the Fed is intentionally bringing it down, because it is insanely inflated.
It was kept artificially inflated for a long time after WWII to drive production to rebuild the economies of countries with damaged infrastructure (UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc). In order to keep it high(because the natural tendancy, as we absorbed & consumed everyone else's production, would be for it to fall) we got OPEC to only take dollars for oil, which made the dollar a defacto trade & reserve currency, which stimulated global demand for it, thus propping it up.
The reason we invaded Iraq this last time was because Hussein finally gave up on us and starting asking for Euros instead of dollars for his oil exports(via the horrendously corrupt Oil-for-food program). Of course, if the other OPEC nations got emboldened by that and starting taking Euros too, demand for dollars would drop, a substantial portion of the dollars in international circulation would come rushing back to the US, plunging the value downward. As the value dropped, everyone else would want to offload their dollars too, dropping the value even further.
Of course, for the US, this is utter catastrophe. We're talking Weimar Republic levels of inflation here, where you buy your lunch on the way to work because you won't be able to afford it at noon. So we show OPEC what we'll do to those who step out of line, while simoultaneously devaluing the dollar so that we don't have to continue to do it in the future.
you have two choices, live with technology and keep paying the price, or live completely raw native primitive. If you live in any industrialised world, you will not only be paying more, you'll be getting less and your standard of living will be dropping. This is inevitable now, it's going to happen, the only argument is "when". We have zero replacement for petroleum. You won't say no when the two choices are, go to work, make at least something, at least have something to eat, etc.
people seem to think it won't matter, ot that the "market" will taker care of it. what they always forget is that this oil stuff is a finite resource, we cannot make any more of it. with energy, as sophisticated as we think we are, we are still in the hunter/gatherer stage of existence. It looks snazzy and lotsa blinkenlights, but all we do is extract it, and it's running out fast. They've about exhausted any gains to be made from effieicny, because it doesn't matter if you can throw money at it, once it takes the same amount of energy to extract, refine, transport petroleum products as you can get from it, then production ceases. You can't run the energy business in a negative, and that negative leaning break -even point is rapidly approaching. people argue about that point, say it's centuries in the future or whatever, but I think you can find out it's within a decade or two and we'll have some SERIOUS problems on the old ball of mud here. Demand is going up dramatically, it is going to be so bad we WILL be seeing major wars over it, and I contend all this mid east jazz going on is directly tied to "who will own the oil for the next two decades". I don't think even the most optimistic figures show that it is possible for the bulk of the planet to have any sort of "middle class" existence like we have now, the raw materials simply do not exist, and the energy doesn't exist, and it won't exist. And this stuff is coming down hard, and fast now.
I am non complacent about it, I live rural, I try for a bigger garden every year, and I'll be adding to my personal altenate enrgy supply, and be working on transportation next. Once iot gets real expensive, the worlds rich and the worlds governments and militsaries will "own" all the good energy, joe civvies in any nation won't be getting much, and they will be working lots harder than they do now, that's for sure.
That's my opinion, but I think the data supports it.
We are IN the "good old days" now, in other words.
We had a sort of warning in the 70's, and they said we would run out sooner. Thankfully they explored, found more, and developed more sophisticated exploration and extraction techniques, but they about milked that dry now. What's left hat is "new" is at bad, expensive places to get to, and is very costly, energy-wise. There AREN'T any more, stick a pipe in the ground get a gusher fields left, the kinds that fueled the rise of industrialised west and japan, and built those strong economies. That stuff is gone, we used it up already..
And that simple change is the removal of sulfur compounds in motor fuels.
:-)
By reducing sulfur compounds to under 40 parts per million (the new EPA standard that comes into effect in 2005), we can apply the very latest in fuel-delivery systems and exhaust emission controls without worries about the presence of sulfur compounds that will turn into something akin to sulfuric acid and damaging these systems.
In the case of gasoline engines, this makes it possible to apply direct fuel injection, meaning you inject the fuel directly into the combustion chamber instead of mixing it with incoming air before the air-fuel mixture is drawn into the combustion chamber. This allows for extremely precise control of fuel delivery, which could mean gasoline engines could get as much as 20% improved fuel efficiency! So instead of a US-market Honda Accord LX four-cylinder saloon getting 24 miles per gallon city and 34 miles per gallon highway fuel efficiency you get 29 mpg city and 41 mpg highway!
In the case of diesel engines, the removal of sulfur contaminants means we can apply high-pressure common-rail direct-injection fuel delivery and the latest in particulate trap/exhaust catalyst technology, which will reduce diesel exhaust so it meets at least the Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard. Because diesel engines are far more fuel efficient than gasoline engines, imagine all of our SUV's, light trucks and minivans being switched over to the latest in clean-burnig diesel engines--we could raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) of these vehicles by an astonishing 50 to 70 percent! =:-O And best of all, petroleum-based diesel fuel could be mixed with biodiesel fuel derived from long list of plant sources and it'll still work on a diesel engine safely.
Another thing to consider is the effect of the modernization efforts going on in China. Bush wanted to help the U.S. steel industry right after he became president. I've heard that steel prices are up significantly now because China is using 30% of the worlds output to build things. All that stuff they are building now will likely require oil to run in the near future. The increases in global demand are probably due to China more than the U.S. at this point even though per capita demand is much lower there. Just a thought.
May 14, 2004--Portrush Petroleum Corporation is pleased to announce the results from the Mission River Oilfield in the Gulf Coast region of Texas, near Corpus Christi, in Refugio County, Texas...Out of the 120 cores removed from the well-bore 44 were analyzed as having "probable Production" of oil, natural gas and/or condensate (light oil carried in the gas streams)...Due to tremendous improvement in energy industry technology, rising prices for energy products and vast expansion of market outlook, the gas bearing strata in particular and thinner oil-bearing horizons previously penetrated but never produced during the original development era (1920-1950), many were overlooked or then unidentified oil and natural gas sands were left behind as being "non commercial".
..
...
...etc...
The Scotsman, UK - Apr 20, 2004
CAIRN Energy, the Edinburgh-based oil and gas exploration group, today announced a third and "potentially significant" oil discovery in Rajasthan, India.
Kerr-McGee makes deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil discovery - Apr 19, 2004... reported Monday the discovery of more than 250 ft of net high-quality hydrocarbon pay, primarily oil, with its Ticonderoga discovery well and initial sidetrack
May. 18, 2004 - Daugherty Resources went looking for natural gas in Eastern Kentucky early this year and got "a costly surprise." It struck oil. "We certainly didn't expect to find the oil field we found," the Lexington company's CEO, William S. Daugherty, said yesterday.
Connacher Reports First Quarter Results - May 11, 2004... Thirteen wells were drilled in the period. All were cased. - A significant oil discovery was made at Tompkins, Saskatchewan.
14/05/04 Oil Search Limited (OSH) this morning reported to shareholders that logging of their 25% jointly owned Neheb-1 well in Yemen has been completed. The oil and gas explorer explained that the data received has indicated the presence of hydrocarbons in surrounding sandstone.
Tullow Oil plc 2003 Preliminary Results... In May the company announced a significant oil discovery on the Acajou prospect, southeast of Espoir
May 5 -- Goodrich Petroleum Corporation today announced a Cotton Valley discovery on its North Minden Prospect in Rusk County, Texas.
May 12, 2004 - WOODSIDE Petroleum Ltd may have struck commercial oil in a new exploration well in Western Australia's Exmouth Sub-basin.
It's been... And gone...
t ml
Solectria Sunrise
Yup, it's true. A battery powered 4 seater electric car was developed in 1997. It had a range of 373 miles at a steady 55mph. That's as good as my petrol car. It would also do 0-60 in 7 seconds which is a damned sight faster than mine. Looks not bad too.
NiMH batteries, good for 100,000 miles worth of recharges. Right *now* there are lithium ion batteries which have a significantly higher energy density than NiMH and there lithium sulphur batteries on the horizon with higher still energy density.
http://www.evuk.co.uk/hotwires/rawstuff/art24.h
So... Where are the production models of all these electric vehicles which would allow me to run for a week on a charge and then charge it up on solar power? It's almost like there's some vested interests out there who don't want to see them on the streets.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Repeat after me, Synthetic Fuel. It's made from coal. The technology is mature, Germans fought during WWII using it. The only problem is that there is no guarantee of prices going down! Last synthetic fuel factory in Germany was closed in sixties being unable to compete with ultra-cheap arab oil. When investors will be sure that prices will stay high we'll see factories popping around the world.
The problem is not when we might need it (we will), but instead, the long lead times to develop an oil field in Alaska, particularly on the North Slope. It takes 10-15 years, and the exploration and development can only be done during the winter. Even if there was a huge crises and all environmental regulations were suspended due to national emergency, you still simply cannot drive across the tundra when it is thawed. Building a road is not an option.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska
You could take the train or light rail and do you share to save gas. Or change to a greener job. Or live near where you play ...
Certainly, North America and Europe don't have any frontier exploration areas
How about Canada? There is a great deal of oil that is very hard or impossible to extract below the Canadian Shield (large layer of precambrian rock).
As well, Alberta's oil sands contain as much oil as Saudi Arabia (article is in english)
If you read Yergin's "The Prize" about the first 120 years of the Hydrocarbon Age, the complaint about "running out of oil" occurs with regularity every 20 years or so. (Also a PBS documentary at your library.)
Blah, blah, blah, Bush, blah.
Now, its clear you don't like Bush and would like to blame everything on him but, how about I change lanes here???
How do you feel about outsourcing??? Do you dislike the trend, do you wish companies would start outsourcing? Do you know what one of the biggest influences against outsourcing will be in the next few years?
Its the value of the dollar. A stronger dollar is not what is needed. If we want international markets (including software) we will need lower value for the dollar. This will drive the cost of outsourcing up and bring value back into IT here in the US. Our trade deficit has been out of hand for decades now and currency values have not come around to balance this because the dollar always needs to have a "high value". My belief is that to grow the global economy (or as a result of it) the dollar cannot stay strong.
Peak Oil discussion at Damnthatscool.com
If the claims you make are true, why don't you set up shop next to the freeway and start selling them. Surely, someone somewhere will be interested?
Not my fault you put yourself in this position.
Oh, and come to my house....please. If my dog doesn't get you, I will with my legally purchased and registered firearm.
Internet toughguys...hehhee
Blar.
It costs as much to build a new refinery in the USA as it does a nuclear power plant: about $5 billion dollars. Both are costly due to environmental regulations. NO NEW REFINERY HAS BEEN BUILT SINCE 1975, just like the no new nuclear power plant, though both kinds have been upgraded since then. Its cheaper to decommission an old refinery than to repair them. To some degree off-shore refinering will pick up some of the slack, but prices will rise.
"We have plenty of corn ( and soy ) to make ethenol to drive our cars and trucks.."
.
Your food production relies on fertilizer produced by fixing Nitrogen from the air. Its incredibly energy expensive to do that.
Without that fertilizer you will be reduced to single crops per year and crop rotation
So forget about your car for the moment, what about food?
Also realise that the energy balance from Corn isn't good, with modern production methods it takes more energy to produce and distill than you get out of it, with simpler (SLOWER) production methods its claimed to generate 1.34 the energy put into it. Not great.
I always think climate change is just a cover for oil collapse. Its less scary if you explain that the world will get hotter a few degrees than to explain to people that 4 billion of you have to die because we can't feed you all.
I can't remember exactly where I saw it, but there was some news piece on the web a few months ago about what factors control gas prices, and war being one of the biggest, if not the biggest. They basically said that the reason that gas prices are going up (atleast in the U.S.) is because the government is using alot more fuel than usual (and might be digging into their "reserves") because of all the aircraft/vehicles they are supporting in the war. Now they say the last time crude oil prices were so high was in 1991? What were we doing then? Oh thats right, the U.S. was having a war.
Haha! Indeed...
Drill a hole in your backyard, get oil.
Regards,
aj
p.s.
There is quite possibly more oil in the earth then water...
p.p.s
The first law of thermodynamics says what? So why exactly are we paying 2 pennies for every 1000 BTUs? I wish I had that business!
Have you been around soybean oil for any length of time? It quickly turns rancid and stinks to high heaven. I hope it doesn't replace petrol lubricants any time soon in the products I buy.
And where exactly is that going to get you?
Sure, theres a trillion or so cubic feet up in Alaska, but they need pipes to get it down here, and everyone is up in arms about that, no small feat, anyhow. Meanwhile, the rest of us are pumping sand into out natural gas wells, in an effort to get more out...And the sand that we use is running out (takes a very smooth sand)
If your company would make a plant that could extract CO2 from atmosphere, change it into hydrocarbon fuel of whatever sort (ethanol would be neat), and use Nuclear (or solar/wind/water/geo) energy to do it, then I'd have to give you a big fat kiss on the cheek.
It's going to come down to a hydrogen economy (being generated by big plants, etc.), and it's not looking like we're going to be using plain ol hydrogen to do it; it's going to have to be in the form of something else.
Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6918:
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The Last Hour would not come before the Euphrates uncovers a mountain of gold, for which people would fight. Ninety-nine out of each one hundred would die but every man amongst them would say that perhaps he would be the one who would be saved (and thus possess this gold).
The current spike in prices is being caused by an unstable situation in the Middle East. It's not due to a shortage of oil. While this problem may last for a while it will correct itself in a number of ways.
The situation in the Middle East will stabilize.
If prices stay this high for a while, this will fund more and more research into developing known reserves that are currently too expensive. (Deep off shore wells that would cost 2 - 10 Billion to make). There will be so much money to be made in oil that big companies will put almost endless amounts of funds into producing more. Over several years this will drop the price.
Also if prices stay high more and more effort will go into finding more oil. There are plenty of places to look, and technology bets better at finding it all the time.
As for alternative fuels I really don't any change, because the incentive to replace oil is already there. Anyone who comes up with a practical alternative, (IE just as good as oil without the mess, and its cheaper) will be very, very rich. But the problem is that oil is a great resource, and it is still (even at these prices) cheap! I still pay more in car insurance each month then I do for gas. In fact Oil/Gas is the cheapest par of owning my car! (2000 Neon)
I think my first respondant didn't get the speculative, rather than totalitarian, tone I was using.
... was gas rationing in WWII totalitarian, or patriotic? The trouble with waiting for pure market forces to take care of waste like Billy Bass and Robosaurus is that by the time the market fixes the problem, the damage is done, the resource wasted. In WWII, the government (and all of us) needed gas to remain at a reasonable price for essential activities while not wasting it on the non-essential. Thus rationing. By the time it's uneconomic to manufacture and transport Billy Bass, it's uneconomic to manufacture and transport a heck of a lot of more important items.
But looking at both reponses, let's explore further
I'm not saying massive government intervention is always the answer, but I think the free market is going to need some help on this one. Maybe the combination can get us to biodiesel/electic hybrid engines.
The weak dollar is definitely a factor in the rising price of oil, but the oil pricing could just be a necessary cost of the strategy you've outlined.
I take it your idea of intelligence is the grandparent, then?
Wind and terrestrial solar are the way to go for renewable power generation. They are tiny, but growing at over 30% a year with no end in sight.
In my small province of Nova Scotia, we also have some tidal energy and hydro. Biofuel production is also underway from fish waste.
Of course the most cost-effective way to deal with energy is to find ways to use less for the same effect.
Planting shade trees to use less air conditionning, using compact fluorescent bulbs or new LEDs, solar hot water heaters, LCD monitors instead of CRTs, efficient apppliances, etc...
So, basically, all these discussions about whether we have or will soon pass "peak oil" are irrelevant. New energy sources are coming along, and we still haven't tapped the potential for efficiency.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Hemp seed oil ;-)
Make your own
Well, we need alternatives, fast.
Fusion would do nicely, thank you, either cold (for small vehicles and local power plants or so) or hot (for large power plants).
Someone gotta start pumping money into it, NOW.
Nu. Cu. Lar.
One of the best ways to reduce your dependence on fossil fuels to to walk or bike to work. Tommorow is bike to work day. http://www.bike2work.com/ In San Francisco, the San Francisco Bike Coalition will be on the streets handing out snacks and goodies. http://www.sfbike.org Walking and Biking can be effective ways of putting your money where you mouth is when it comes to energy independence, have great health benefits, and are a great way to meet people. Want to reduce your gas usage by maybe 20%? Bike to work one day a week.
The problem isn't technology.
The Solectria Sunrise car had a range of in excess of 350 miles at 55mph using NiMH batteries in *1997*. They do a less development vehicle called the Solectria Force which you can buy now and which has a range of up to 250 miles on NiMH batteries which are good for up to 100,000 miles worth of charges.
Lithium ion batteries are available now and lithium sulphur batteries will be available in the near future with better characteristics still.
No, the problem is not the technology. It's with mass production.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The dumbest part of all of this is that Americans consider automobiles to be necessary for 100% of society. It's quite odd that the automobile, which not only consumes a huge percentage of our income but also kills 1.2million people per year (globally). It also poisons our air and uses up non-renewable resources at an alarming rate. A large percentage of you don't need cars. You could bike, walk, or take public transit. Stop whining about peak oil if you drive a car. Stop wasting my tax dollars to subsidize you destructive activities. Stop blaming others. YOU are the problem. Do something about it.
Check out the air car!: 300 miles at highway speeds on compressed air alone. Betcha can't buy one in the US of Bush & Co. Inc.
How about glass? Like they used to?
Because it takes more energy to make and melt glass than it does to use a byproduct of oil, such as plastic.
Life is not for the lazy.
Has anyone thought how nice it would be for the poor working class to raise the minimum wage to help them pay for the increased cost of gasoline?
Well, you can say that many thousands of jobs would be cut off because of the increased cost of labor. So, what business will remain with the few employees left doing the work? Soon, they will get discouraged, having to do it all.
Too many people not caring about the kinds of car they drive, not caring about the environment, not caring ONE LITTLE BIT as long as they are literally smothered in comfort and leather, and to hell with the fuel economy!
Unfortunately anyone against this point of view has not been vocal enough. What with the internet, you'd have thought groups of anti-SUV culture could have gotten together, lobbied against the motor companies harder than has currently been. So now we have rising gas prices, oil reserves continuing to deplete (and push gas prices up) and we have what to show for it? A couple of hybrid cars on the market. That's it? That's pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Thanks to all the big corporations out there who are going to run my later life because they only cared about their own pockets.
Changing World Technologies is the company behind the "turkey guts" thermal depolymerization (TDP) plant in Carthage, MO, USA.
Running some back of the envelope calculations shows some interesting figures. First establish what we use today. In 2002, the United States used an estimated 19.7 million barrels. Per day.
A plant of this size produces 180,000 barrels of oil per year; it is claimed that this is over and above the energy it uses. That works out to 493.15 barrels per day out of 200 tons each day. There are 160 million tons of wood waste per year (1998 figures) alone. That works out to 1,080,876 barrels per day if we assume the same conversion rate of 200 tons of organic matter to 493.15 barrels per day. 5.4% of our daily total oil demand from wood waste alone. Enough to affect prices at the margin, where it counts. At current rates, we will import 68% of our oil by 2025. This same reference cites DOE figures that say we currently import about 50%, or about 10 million barrels. If we put this in place today, the percentage of imports this represents rises to 10.8%.
Pulling our focus back a bit, we find that agriculture produces about 1 billion tons of waste per year. Remember, agricultural waste streams are not the only feedstock; some manufacturing waste streams are also eligible. But for the sake of back of the envelope calculations, let's assume that all eligible waste streams for TDP amounts to 1 billion tons per year. That works out to 6,755,479 barrels per day, or about 67% of daily import demand today.
Even if we project out increased demand for petroleum in the future, the potential for this technique to affect prices at the margin should not be dismissed out of hand. It is highly unlikely that we can use this technique (assuming all the engineering, business and logistical details are worked out --- the reaction chambers need to be calibrated for the feedstock, and they don't have many "recipes" worked out yet, and don't even know what is or is not feasible) to supplant import demand. Fortunately, we don't need it to wholesale replace imports: if we can make it affect the marginal price, that's still a useful tool in our national assets.
If the Changing World folks really are on the up and up, and they produce a small net of oil from these big brother versions of the pilot plant, then this is a strong piece of evidence for the school of thought who contend that market mechanisms will produce solutions as the need arises. As others in this thread have already pointed out, we certainly have nowhere approached the theoretical physics-imposed limits of available energy that can be gathered from the sun.
The whole coal will last 100/200/250 years, or whatever, is total bullshit. Such numbers are based on taking some number for coal reserves and dividing it by present consumption. But present consumption is small because we get most of our energy from oil. Even in electricity generation coal generally makes up less than 50 percent of production (and it is used for very little else at present). If the switch from coal to oil and gas had not been made at the beginning of the the 20th century, all the coal on earth would have already been used up. Once oil and gas production starts to fall, coal consumption will rise dramatically and these numbers like 100 years will get a lot smaller.
Replace the kerosene with hydrogen or alcohol. However, seems like 10-12 mpg in 1906 wasn't doing too bad! (I could very well be wrong about this - I have no idea what type of mileage contemporary cars got in those days.)
;-)
Oh yeah, perhaps upgrade a few other aspects of the thing as well.
http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What this chart shows is that gas prices are very high, even taking inflation into account! Not the highest they've ever been, but higher than in the "gas crisis" late 70s, higher in fact than every other period except the early 80s.
What's really stupid is saying, "don't worry, inflation-adjusted gas prices have been higher - just look at the early 80s" when you consider the miserable unemployment and staggering inflation of the US economy in the early 80s! Is that what we have to look forward to?
Actually, I don't find it all that surprising, given the bigger picture. As I understand it, the U.S. currently has the capacity to provide practically all of its own oil/gasoline needs - but instead we opt to keep buying from the 3rd. world OPEC providers. (Maybe this is due to environmentalists pressuring the oil producers not to drill in many of the profitable places, or maybe it's a U.S. govt. scheme to "preserve" our own supplies for a time in the future when everyone else runs out? Who knows....)
I really doubt we're using THAT much more oil than we did in the last 30 years or so. The average American car driven in the late 60's or early 70's was getting somewhere around the 8-15 miles per gallon range. The only vehicles I see on the road today getting that poor of gas mileage are exotic sports cars (Dodge Vipers, maybe, or Ferarri's - and those aren't being driven on long road trips or anything), or maybe the largest of the SUVs and trucks. (Again, generally not driven lots of miles each year by their owners - because it's more economical to buy a 2nd. economy car to drive around for daily use.)
Even if you argue that today, more Americans own multiple vehicles - that doesn't change the fact that a person can only drive one at a time.
I also understand that the entire west coast of the U.S. gets their oil from the Alaskan pipeline -- not OPEC nations, yet the prices for gas are *higher* out there than much of the rest of the U.S. That tells me it's largely artificial price gouging....
Explain why what people say is overboard, instead of trying to command people.
Someday we'll all be negroes
I've often wondered if we're so screwed we can't feed ourselves when we run out of oil.
Well, the very few ultra rich will likely have no problem paying the mercenaries it will take to guard the farms and convoys to deliver them (and their servants) ample food.
The rest are targets.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I just wish they'd come clean and tell us that this is why the invaded iraq - instead of bleating on about "dictators" and "weapons a mass destrucion"
I've heard it's also due to China's fast growth; that car buying is booming. This can't be the totality of how gas jumped so much in 6 months though (if it were, it'd keep climbing at the same rate and we'd be screwed). Maybe that's a gas-company line.
Second, if it becomes worthwhile at the current high prices to extract more expensive gas, well, that won't make the gas price drop, it'll only, keep it from going too much higher.
Someday we'll all be negroes
So why are European taxes so much higher? Because they tax as a percentage of the price, whereas the USA taxes as a amount per volume. Hence, if the cost of gas before taxes doubles, in Europe the price at the pump doubles, whereas in the USA the price may only go up 25%.
In the UK only VAT (17.5%) is a percentage of the price, the rest of the tax is by volume, it's just that the tax by volume is much higher than in the US. This means that the price of crude oil plays a much bigger role in the price of petrol in the US.
Before from the Late 19th Century up until the 1950's Americans moved from rural areas into big cities. During this period the standard of living increase compared to rural america, as Cities provide public transportant, sewers and virtually unlimited clean water.
Once the American Car become the dominate transportation system, Americas fled the cities to the burbs. Cheap and easy transportation permtted Americans to live outside the large cities and enjoy the same services they had in the large cities.
When oil production declines, americans will once again move back into the cities. People will not be able to afford to heat their homes and drive to work because of expensive fuel costs. Mass transit and small apartments will be much more cost affective. I suspect this will begin in the next 10 to 20 years (depending on how fast oil costs rise).
By 50 years from now, all of the interstate highways will be converted into electric rail. The volume of cars using highways will decline starting in the next decade and will continue to decline until just a few people can afford cars. At that time providing rail service would be a more pratical us of the US interstate highways
Cities can also provide lower cost heating using steam plants (burning coal using clean coal technology). While coal could be used to heat homes, it would be very expensive for individual home furnances to be equipped with exhaust fume scrubbers to remove pollution generated by burning coal. A single steam plant could provide heat and hot water to thousands of apartments if they are in close proximity.
Unemployment will rise substantially, Only a fraction of people will have jobs 50 years from now. Most people will get by on food stamps. Without a cheap source of energy the prices of luxary good and services will rise, making them less affordable. Over time decades, the demand for goods and services will fall and few workers will be needed. Technology will also play a role in decreasing jobs as goods and services can be provided by machines and would also be more energy efficient than human workers. Whole industries that require cheap oil to operate such as Airlines, auto manufacturers, etc will be abandoned.
Over the next 10 to 20 years, taxes in the US will rise substantially, do to rising deficits and to pay for entitlement programs like SS and Medicare. Few people understand the dire straits the SS and other entitlement programs will have on the US economy. As of now, all of the surplus money collected for SS is spent. There is no lock box or bank that holds SS surpluses. It is spent and added to federal debt (now at $7.1 Trillion). When the baby boomers begin to retire in 2008, the SS surplus will turn to into a deficit. This will force the gov't to cut spending of services and raise taxes.
The US tax system will be forced switch to a progressive tax system, and the US economy will no longer the the global leader for investment. Oversea investors will look else where to invest their money, or will repatriate money invested in the US to pay for their own entitlement programs.
That money sitting in your 401K or IRA may never reach you. By time of all the taxes are paided up and coupled with inflation, you'll might only recieve just pennies on the dollar. In 401K and IRA plans, the money is taxed deferred. You pay the taxes on it when you reach retirement. What happens to the if the tax rate is 80% or 90% when you retire? If you had a 100K by the time your and the tax rate is 80%, you will only receive 20% or $20K. Couple that with inflation and your nest egg just becomes pocket change.
this works fine in diesel vehicles, plus vegetable oil comes from a renewable source. I think Top Gear here in the UK did a test where they took an old diesel volvo and actually got better performance out of it with the veg oil/meths combo than with normal diesel.
Also, what about rape seed oil, I remember watching tomorrows world years ago when they were extolling it as the next big fuel.
I am NaN
Check that site out, www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
It explains it all.
Either find the oil, or make it cheap using slave labour, or find a magic alternative.
Who knows, the fight of oil may be cause a www3 to start.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"Can so!"
"Can NOT!"
Can SO!"
Your point may well be true. Perhaps we can leverage technology to meet demand. But is this a wise bet? If you're wrong, the consequences are potentially catastrophic. If you're right, but we've invested in alternative energy, have we really lost anything besides depriving the oil barons of a few billion? It's mere pocket change, really.
Of course, being a PhD in the field, you're not at all influenced by the scarcity of research dollars.
You might also note that besides the US, China, Russia and a few other big players are filling their reserves.
Whooptydo?
No, filling fuel reserves is a precursor to war.
It may be a good time to figure out who's side you're on.
Lithium metal :A highly reactive alkali metal. May burn in moist air. Reacts violently with water, alcohol, acids and other oxidants. May spontaneously ignite in moist air.
Thionyl Chloride
Pretty much just about the most dangerous stuff you could ever put into a car.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
Check this out from our own government:
http://geopubs.wr.usgs.gov/open-file/of00-320/
> A pound of beef takes around a gallon of gasoline to produce.
Only the way we do it now, since gas is so cheap. We _want_ to do it that way, but we don't _need_ to. If gas goes away, beef becomes a little more expensive as alternatives are used for transportation (electric trucks) and feed (at worst, organic feed rather than the normal, heavily-fertilized stuff).
A long-term oil crisis would have an effect, but it would be significantly muted the further from transportation the product was.
I'm so worried about what's hapenin' today, in the middle east, you know.
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.
I'm so worried about the fashions today, I don't think they're good for your feet.
And I'm so worried about the shows on TV that sometimes they want to repeat.
I'm so worried about what's happenin' today, you know.
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.
I'm so worried about my hair falling out and the state of the world today.
And I'm so worried about bein' so full of doubt about everything, anyway.
I'm so worried about modern technology.
I'm so worried about all the things that they dump in the sea.
I'm so worried about it, worried about it, worried, worried, worried.
I'm so worried about everything that can go wrong.
I'm so worried about whether people like this song.
I'm so worried about this very next verse, it isn't the best that I've got.
And I'm so worried about whether I should go on, or whether I should just stop.
(pause)
I'm worried about whether I ought to have stopped.
And I'm worried about, it's the sort of thing I ought to know.
And I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow.
(longer pause)
I'm so worried about whether I should have stopped then.
I'm so worried that I'm driving everyone 'round the bend.
I'm worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got at Heathrow
I hate that spelling mistake and there I go an do it myself!
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
"A few technical things seemed wrong - for example, it is quite feasible to run transportation systems off grid electricity (electric trains, subways, etc. do this) - would it be so hard to do it for personal transport too?"
They seemed to have this concept down in "super mario brothers the movie" so it must be possible!!!
Maybe. But probably not -- Us Americans are too f'ing lazy in general and would rather pay up than do 'The Right Thing'.
Sure- you take paypal.
you think that california taxes and environmental costs are anywhere close to the rest of the country?
Well, there's several important differences between Europe and America. One you guys drive smaller cars than we do on average. Two you guys drive more mopeds, scooters, and bikes than we do. But that is changing (Americans, call your local shop. Ask them if their sales are up[1]). That makes a difference on the bottom line.
[1] I'm helping by buying a new Kymco ZX50.
More Soylent Green, please!
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
DO NOT BELIEVE A WORD OF IT.
The Club of Rome wrote Limits to Growth in the early '70s. Just google around for references to it. It has been widely dismissed by the right wing as having failed to predict things, which I've always thought as odd since its predictions were for the 21st century not the 20th (a seeming victory of ideology over logic). And they actually match up quite well with Hubbert's Peak considering when it was written ... in fact I would say they are more optimistic than Hubbert as far as the date goes. Their gloomiest prediction, that caused an immense amount of opposition, was of a spectacular 'die off' in the mid 21st century i.e. a global catastrophe. Rather than ignore this stuff, I wish people would take it to heart since 'planning for the future' is one thing humans do quite well as individuals and if done on a global scale may actually get us out of this mess.
Bitter and proud of it.
The author's daughter, Marcia Goodstein is CEO of Idealab. One of the companies they've invested in is Energy Innovations, which is trying to develop a solar energy system.
US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been going downward ever since. The only remaining untapped field is the National Wildlife Refuge on Alaska's North Slope, and that's got oil for nine months, at most.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
"public transportation" DOESN'T produce, package, or deliver your food to the stores and restaurants you frequent. Nor does it in the US-or any place else. The goods you all buy at the stores, from clothes to Cds to various hardware to..whatever--inevitably is reflected cost wise with the price of petroleum-and it's availability.
Not public transit as such, but yes, most places other than North America still use trains a great deal to move goods. You just don't see very many huge semis on the highways in Europe like you do in the US and Canada. And trains just are a hell of lot more efficient at moving stuff -- it's just that the absurdly cheap gas in NA screws up the economics here.
When was the last time you gassed up your car and saw somebody dressed up like an extra from Dune selling you peanuts?
You can think what you like about the Saudi's, but American resellers, American oil companies make tremendous profits on keeping an oil based economy going.
Its not the Saudi's leading us around by the nose.
Its rich American oil companies and rich American oil famlies.
I read in the news recently that while opec is making their usual money American oil companies are making record profits during this price hike.
Steve
It feels like the worset thing in the world while you are kneeling on your bathroom floor waiting to heave, but once you heave you feel a wonderful sense of relief.
When oil reserves get low enough to make using alternatives attractive there will be pain, but afterwards we can finally move on from this ridiculous situation from having our economy based on this stuff.
I think politically it will change more things then the end of the cold war.
Steve
Expensive gas raises prices, but really not all that much on most things.
They are pleanty of ways to get power..
... well you get the picture.
We will use all the oil until its gone, that is just human nature. Then we will make the change and not until.
Oh and as I said before just fix the F@#King traffic problems and we would save plenty of gas. Build some more roads, work from home, stagger office hours etc. If you cut 5 minutes off everyones drive time
> "Your point may well be true. Perhaps we can leverage technology to meet demand. But is this a wise bet? If you're wrong, the consequences are potentially catastrophic. If you're right, but we've invested in alternative energy, have we really lost anything besides depriving the oil barons of a few billion? It's mere pocket change, really."
all i am saying is, the *reason* to look for hydrocarbon alternatives should not be because we are gonna run out of hydrocarbons soon because that's simply not true. if we are going to accelerate the research for hydrocarbon alternatives ( and we should ), let's do it for the right reasons. let me put it in a different way: if we knew for sure that we would never run out of oil, would that mean we could relax and not worry about the alternatives?
you might, of course, say "hey, but, shouldn't we spend the money on the alternatives research instead of the pet. eng. research?". the answer to that question is "we should slowly shift the balance from pure pet. eng. to pure alternatives research". you have to understand that, changing the infrastructure of the entire world, which is pretty much depended on oil, is not a very easy thing. thus, the ideal approach to the problem is to continue working on pet. eng. research while slowly decreasing the research activities over the next 15 - 20 years
and, believe me, that is happening already: http://gcep.stanford.edu/
-- ba
It isn't that hard to see how this will play out. Like any scarce resource, it will gradually become more expensive (subject to fluctuations) and as it does so, people will migrate from their 12mpg GMC Suburbans living 45 miles from the office into toyota priuses and telecommuting most days.
The key is that there is a lot of oil in the ground at different costs to extract. As the price of fuel rises, it becomes worthwhile for oil companies to work harder to extract small amounts from remaining wells that were not viable at lower prices. Maybe it will taper off with gasoline at $50 a gallon or more but it will happen gradually so that humanity can slowly adapt to using less fuel.
As the auto and truck fleet ages it will be replaced by higher efficiency vehicles. Oil powered electic plants will be replaced by solar or (gasp) nuclear. People will become accustomed to video conferencing and telephone calls and not so interested in air travel. It will happen, it will happen gradually, and people will be bitching about it the whole time. Just ignore them.
In a couple hundred years, when oil is essentially gone, people will probably be celebrating a new "age", like the "cold fusion age" and looking back at how quaint it was when people burned oily goop to make explosions in a chunk of cast iron.
Those of us who don't drink milk can stop paying for something that has no public good.
In places where public transit is good more "normal" people use it.
I have lived in two different college towns where the buses were used mostly by faculty and staff of the university. I use it myself when the weather sucks, stops one block from my apartment very 15 minutes during commute time...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
more efficient solar or use of hydrogen might come about.
Solar is inefficient, and with global dimming its prospects are not improving. Also, making solar cells is extremely fresh-water intensive, and consumes dramatic amounts of energy produced by, yes, fossil fuels.
And hydrogen is not a fuel, but a storage medium. And quite a low-yield storage medium at that, especially compared to gasoline. ALso, the economics and physics of fuel cells are more suited to continuous consistent demand (think houses) rather then episodic, high-drain devices with long furlough periods (think cars).
Finally, considering the wastage introduced in every stage of energy conversion, the "well-to-wheel" efficiency and pollution output of hydrogen (even considering a ten-fold improvement in fuel cell yields and reduction in costs) is bested by current hybrid gas-electric engines.
So even with a wunderbar new fuel source, the prospect for cars as we know them (large, individualized, multi-KKg highs-speed transport pods) is problematic.
Da Blog
Anyone who thinks that is a very ignorant person.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
> Ethanol can be mass produced from sugar
Or from wood chips and corn stalks that would otherwise be burned as waste. Due to a neat new process just developed in Canada (Iogen), it's low-energy, too (since they use enzymes directly, rather than letting yeast ferment it).
> a solar panel ain't gonna cut it with 6+ billion people
Why not? It would take covering approximately 0.02% of the earth's land surface in today's solar cells to generate all the energy humanity uses in all (non-biological) forms right now. Considering about 5% of the US is paved, 0.02% is a trivial amount of land mass to give up. (Calculated from solarbuzz.com's numbers)
If the rate of increase in oil prices is slow, we will have adequate time for markets to react to the oil shortages and come up with a solution (solar, nuclear, zero-point energy, something).
If the rate of increase in oil prices is fast or is artificially low until sparked higher by some crisis or other, then we are screwed. Global catastrophies will ensue, many will die, all kinds of terrible things will happen.
I think we need to do three things.
(1) Commission a study to figure out the real likely rate of increase in prices. Hire whoever we need to, give them whatever resources they want, just get it done.
(2) Immediately transition as much of our energy economy as possible to existing proven renewable or longer-term energy technologies and conserve the gas we have. Build lots of windmills, put solar panels wherever we can, make cars a hell of a lot more gas efficient, etc. Again, cost is a secondary factor here, just get it done. Complaining people are also pretty much non-factors. SUV drivers, NIMBY people, etc. Build stuff far away from people if possible, just build it.
(3) Do a Manhatten-project style search for a renewable replacement to gasoline products, both for transportation and power generation. Solar, nuclear, wind, hydrogen, whatever. Spend a trillion dollars if we have to. Plunge ourselves into debt or recession if need be (though this shouldn't be necessary). Just do it, and do it now. This is this generation's sacrifice. I'm 24. My grandparents had World War II. My parents had Vietnam. This is our sacrifice. And the bonus to us is that we don't even need a war to do it. Just get it done: if we do not then the consequences may be too terrible to consider. We will need to do this sooner or later: might as well be now.
Apparently, the diesels are around 20% better - note that the figures quoted on that page are for rally driving, not a quiet cruise in the country. Certainly, some people are pleased by their mileage.
The obvious solution is to make and use "Freedom Peugeots" which are US-based clones of the French cars. (-:
Yes, many Frenchmen are stuck-up prigs, yes the Italians can make fancier cars, but between Citroen, Peugeot and Renault the Frogs are a hard act to follow in the quotidian automotive game.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
> you have two choices, live with technology and keep paying
/ 2004/20040427/default.htm, although that just notes that usage is up only 17% since 1973).
> the price, or live completely raw native primitive.
Or take choice #3: USE LESS OIL!
That's EXACTLY what the US did last time there was an oil crunch (70's) - cars were designed for better mileage, processes were designed to use less oil, homes were better insulated, and national oil usage dropped so much that it's _only recently_ getting back to 1980 levels (http://www.federalreserve.gov/BoardDocs/Speeches
Considering that Canada's tar sands contain more oil than the proven liquid reserves of the entire world, but are largely uneconomical to obtain, the problem isn't a shortage of oil, but a shortage of CHEAP ENERGY. If we really needed, we could use solar energy to refine tar sands to create the plastics we need.
Our oil consumption is a problem, but the "we're all dooooomed!" voices are just irrationally panicking. The likely worst case is that we run out of cheap oil and prices go up (and our standard of living drops somewhat) to pay for the creation and usage of alternative energy sources. We're not going to wake up one morning and find all the oil suddenly gone, so there's not going to be the catastrophic crash people are screaming about.
That doesn't mean it might not be painful; it just won't be fatal.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
Now which American with their head in the sand will be the first to push it all aside and lunacy from evil anti-capitalist swine?
http://www.dieoff.com
The current high price of oil is maintained by the oil cartel - absent the cartel prices would quickly drop to $10-$12 per barrel. The fastest way to drop oil and gas prices would be to fracture or break the cartel.
There is an abundance of oil in the world; it's everywhere. In some periods in history there was so much oil available that the price dropped to $0 per barrel - no one would buy. That's why Standard Oil formed - Rockefeller' Standard Oil formed a monopoly in oil and drove the price up to a level where it was a profitable business. After Rockefeller, the U.S. oil companies have always been allowed a bypass of monopoly laws by the government because of the strategic importance of oil. Governments defer to the oil companies for good reasons, but the oil companies of course take some advantage of this relationship to keep prices at a profitable level.
But really, how many of these things are you going to keep buying over and over again during the price spike? Probably not home electronics or furnishings. You mention vehicles run by the utility companies...but unless the price goes up and stays up for more than 6 months the company will just eat it and the effect on the consumer will be negligable. Maybe clothes, but doubtful...what's left...food!
:D
So I conclude that the one budget segment that will be noticably increased for the average citizen is their food budget. And you know what? Most people here could stand to eat less.
Meh...I say, it's not as big a deal as you say....get back to me one year from now and we can compare notes
Blar.
...these would be providing around half of our power already.
You could smelt Al at ten times today's rate with approximately zero pollution related to power production, or better yet smelt it at source and drop shaped Jumbo-sized billets of pure Al (or alloyed to taste) into a big artificial lake somewhere at regular intervals.
If you're worried about transmission leakage, why not just build a conductive pair of these to carry the electricity directly?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
People or so misinformed. Check the consumer associations organizing the boycott. It has nothing to do with supply, revenue, demand, or gas delivery to affect stockpile.
... no effect!
They know the boycott have no economical effect, they even say to people "if you are short make sure to gas the day before, as long as you don't go on that day".
The boycott has only one goal: send a message to Oil and politicians that consumers are concerned, talking and getting organized. Next it may even influence our vote or something. It's not to bring Big Oil to its knees, just to say "we are looking at you", just like Big Oil is doing in Washington to the politicians.
One thing is clear to Big Oil, no matter what happens we will be in line day in and day out to fill our tanks like little sheep. If the gas sold goes down 50% that day, it's a strong message, if as usual it has no effect on sales than it does just that
If not, how are they going to be planted, fertilised, harvested, maybe processed, maybe frozen, and shipped to you (probably via at least two warehouses) in the absence of fuel? On a fleet of Cannondales?
What does your city's power grid use for fuel? Odds are good that it ain't hydro or wind - and even if it is, it ain't all hydro or wind. How are you going to run your computers, telephone, lights, water pressure in the absence of fuel?
<thwack> goes the cluestick! <thwack> <thwack> <thwack>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
1. Increased manufacturing activity on the part of China and India over the past 18 months.
- These nations (China esp.) have been absorbing excess global supply in their consumption and manufacturing markets. They're busy making more stuff made out of oil (all petrochemicals like plastics, etc) as well as using it more for fuel.
2. Lack of refinery capability in the US.
- Not one new refinery has been constructed in the US in 20 yrs. There's plenty of oil to extract, just not enough ability to crack it into gasoline/kerosene/lubricants/etc.
3. Terrorism & global supply fears
- Prices today are determined not by the cost it took to get that gallon of fuel out of the ground and into your tank, but what the current oil futures contracts are selling for. This is key, but unfortunately why most folks don't understand the dynamics of oil pricing. The uncertainty of future production capability in important but volatile regions tends to exaggerate current oil prices.
- Other OPEC states are having big issues: Nigeria is getting ready to fall into civil war again, as is Venezuela. Non-OPEC Russians are having problems maintaining control in the Black Sea area.
4. Inconsistent local/state regulation
- Some states require an ethanol blend (corn producing states) others MBTE while others nothing at all. Gasoline refined in southern IL cannot be sent to fill Chicago's gas pumps. California has to refine 90% of its fuel in-state! These artificial barriers make markets much more inefficient than they should, and add extra costs to the distribution of oil products.
5. OPEC has not lowered production but put a cap (leaky as it may be) on new production.
- Although OPEC nations produce less than 40% of the world's oil, large producers like Saudi Arabia still maintain the ability to push production one way or another. The Saudi's are currently trying to regain some control over OPEC, and are doing everything they can to put themselves in a position to do so.
Consider it done. :P
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Either way. Heads, you lose, tails you're fscked. Pray that the coin of your life lands on its edge.
:-). I have never before been meta-modded as anything but fair. I really am such an all-around genius and generally nice guy that I constantly wonder how I remain so humble. (-:
[OT] Since there's all this space in this here <TEXTAREA> tag, I'd like to take the time to whine about SlashDot's m0d3r4t10on system.
I've been jammed against the karma cap since before they capped it (I lost a couple of thousand karma points in an instant, what a blow!
Today, I was meta-modded unfair twice and each cost my meta-moderation average five percent and my karma a hit, despite having spent over two hundred mod points this month. Not that I'm offended (I can still post - and even if I did care, I see that moderation by others has already bashed my karma back against the stops), but I can't see how this is going to intimidate nuisance moderations or inspire worthwhile moderation.
On top of this, the lack of heights to soar into WRT karma disinclines me to take any particular care with it. I'd rather see a fractional karma system where every 50 points of existing score multiplied the difficulty of obtaining the next full point, but a point lost is always a full point lost. Not that I'd make any guarantee that having pointspace to expand into would inspire me to anything other than my current recklessness anyway. (-:
Have we had the weekly "it's time to reconstruct SlashDot's mods" post yet? If not, deem this to be it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
People who've lived far from work will want to live closer or companies will want to be closer to the people. Out of this you get a construction boom (using reserves of petrol for materials transport).
People will scramble to find replacements and alternatives for petrolium products and the things that rely on them. Out of this you get a boom in R&D/investment.
People will scramble to do find ways of modifyinging or processing the things that have been rendered unuseable due to lack of petrolium products. This too will help the R&D boom as well as employ people to do the physical work of processing or modifications.
Invention and enginuity will burn with the fervor they haven't since the industrial revolution!
Most of the world's population consumes petro resources at less than 10% of the rate that the USA does.
Stanford's conclusion is based on some unproven but widely held assumptions. One of those is that the petrochemical-saturated fossils we find are so saturated because they (or their relatives) were the source of the oil rather than simply being crushed under the same debris which traps rising petroleum.
If that assumption fails under challenge, the (hah! black irony!) deadline will be pushed back somewhat, but I agree that we do need to stop the "Apres moi, le deluge" attitude held by so many people - and not just Westerners.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
That's 93% being burned. There's plenty of room for making other products long after you captains are forced to part with your land yachts. In fact, for the U.S. it's possible to stop importing oil all together (using oil centrally for making things rather than buring it)with considerable reduction of fuel consumption.
That was funny.
:-)
Now, to go back to the original meaning of "mark my words", I have to say that to be perfectly honest I'm not convinced oil will necessarily continue its path upwards... at some point Iraq will come online and Venezuela will start pumping oil again at pre-strike levels.
However, if oil prices continue increasing, SUVs will be go for peanuts, and I'll up my prediction one further: houses far out in the 'burbs will drop dramatically in value.... mark my words
This discussion is remarkably like the ones I remember from the late 70s. Essentially industrial civilization had ten to twenty years to go before oil ran out and most of us starved, according to very authoritative sources back then. Didn't happen then, and it probably won't in my lifetime or yours. The tricky thing about energy is that both supply and demand are very inelastic (they don't respond much to price increases) in the short term, but very elastic in the mid-to-long term. As a result, energy supply cycles between gluts and shortages. How does that work? Let's take gasoline for example: The price of gas goes way up. Demand initially goes down a little as people do less unnecessary driving, but it doesn't go down much. People figure it's just another blip and they keep doing what they're doing. If prices stay higher though, people buy Metros and Hybrids instead of SUVs. As that change works through the fleet of vehicles, demand drops more and more. If that isn't enough to cause prices to stabilize, in the longer term people react to the higher prices by taking lower-paying jobs closer to home because the high gas prices cancel out the higher wages. Those drops in demand take a while but when they come they come with a vengeance, and they don't go away for quite a while--it takes a while for people to start buying gas guzzlers again, and then it takes a while for the new cars to replace the existing fleet. Supply reacts the same way. Want to find investors in a tar sands oil extraction process that will only pay back their initial investment if oil is at $40 a barrel? Won't get many takers when oil is at $30 a barrel. Won't get many takers when oil spikes to $40 a barrel and then drops to $35 in a month or two. If oil goes to $45 and looks like it's going to stay there, you're going to get a lot of investment. Once that initial investment gets made though, the supply from tar sands may well keep coming. The initial investment's already been made now, so they'll keep cranking oil out until they start losing money on every barrel as opposed to just not making back their initial investment. The example of tar sands is just one of many possiblities for increased supply. Even before the recent runup, solar cell manufacturers were pushing aggressively into market niches that formerly used gas-fire generators. The solar cell industry has grown 25% or more per year for a lot of year. It's still minuscule compared to the oil industry, but if shortages push energy costs higher, that makes rapidly expanding solar cell production capacity more profitable, and that pushes per unit costs of the cells down in and of itself. Those bigger, better solar cell plants don't go away when the price of energy drops a little. They may not even go away when the price of energy drops a lot because the companies that own them have already made the capital investment and have presumably put some of their profits during the high-price time into increased R&D which should reduce cost of production. The bottom line is that a reasonably prolonged (two to four years) period of high energy prices results in reduced energy demand and additional supply for the next five to ten years, with some of the impact continuing beyond ten years. That's why the price of oil dropped so far and so fast in the 80s, and why it will drop again after a few years if the price rises much further and stays there long enough for people to decide they have to adapt.
hard currencies like platinum show a clearer picture.
For a second, I thought you meant EverQuest platinum. With all of the (latest) analysis of EQ's GDP, it seemed all too possible!
Favorite
I have been house shopping lately, and I cannot find anything that I can afford anywhere near downtown. I live in Columbus, OH and we have a halfassed bus system that is our public transportation. I wish I could live close, and ride a bike to work, I want to, but the housing costs are just too high any where near the city. This is true all over America, thats why people went to the suburbs, to get bigger houses. People in cities like NYC give up a lot to live in the city, but there its worth it for the city life, after 6pm here there is no city life. Not sure what to do, but felt like writing this.
"A pound of beef takes around a gallon of gasoline to produce. "
Eating beef is a horribly inefficient way for a human to get
energy.
Eating beef is an expensive luxury which is mostly enjoyed by
people in rich countries.
It's far more efficient to eat beans and rice, or some other combination of foods which use less energy to produce.
Oh, and it's a lot healthier too.
I'm writing a cookbook now ! Here are some of my ideas :
* Poached SUV driver
* Grilled Republican
* Boiled Slashdot geek
* Hard-boiled Neoconservative
* fried fundamentalist
You get the idea - a little creativity can go a long way,
when you're hungry !
"Anyone who thinks that is a very ignorant person."
Anyone who thinks the person who wrote the above isn't
a stupid hick from Iowa only needs to go look at his lame-ass
website.
Hey, Nicky, if you support the current administration and its plans for world domination so much, why not get your sorry little Iowa ass down to the recruiting office and ENLIST ? And please do it soon, before you and that hog of a wife Lisa have any kids !
"Anyone who thinks that is a very ignorant person."
Anyone who thinks the guy who posted the above has ANY sense should look over his posting history. He truly IS a dumb shit.
The real problem is not that we will run out of oil too soon. The real problem is that we will not run out of coal soon enough. There is enough coal in known reserves to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by about a factor of ten. Regardless what anyone thinks about how bad global warming will be when we double the amount of CO2 in the air, it's hard to imagine that increasing it from around 700 billion tons to 7000 billion tons would not seriously mess with the environment.
... but it is against car manufacturer's interests to implement them. Think about it: a car that would switch between electric and compressed air during trafic jam. Use gas when needed and switch to diesel when the cruise control is enabled on highways. As a bonus it could run on hydrogen and rechardge its batteries with a solar panel. All the parts already exist: The engine itself: qtusa.promci.qc.ca The electric engine: www.tech-m4.com ( They will be slashdotted... Evil Smile... ) Those are by no means the only solutions brought to this problem. So here is a proposal: Build high end police cars using these or similar techologies. Small volume, governement could take an interrest in participating. The goal is to make a car that is the same price, which is at least as good as any other police car. Prove that these cars are good first, you can't have a better field test, then downgrade them to consumer level prices. What do you think?
How would you react if gas went from $5.50 a gallon to $10.00 a gallon over the course of a year? That's the sort of increase that's happening here in the US.
You are so wrong. A comparable increase would be from $5.50 to $6.50 - just because your prices kind of doubled, doesn't mean it will double in the rest of the world. Most European countries (my own included) tax gasoline heavily to make us use less of it (and to get tax revenue) - this makes the increase much smaller as a percentage, since the tax is usually a set amount per gallon/liter, acting as an offset but not a multiplier.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I agree, trains are more efficient. That's why in the US they have been tearing out railroad tracks and converting them to trails that only a tiny fraction of the people use, mostly for sport/entertainment in the "rails to trails" project. Feel-good-ism.
It's nuts. They were already built, the right of ways established, so we went back in time a few hundred years for efficiency, to deer trails or something. I see it as similar to them tearing out all these community sized hydroelectric dams, just short sighted without any replacements on a one to one basis (or higher really). We are replacing hydro with jet turbine engines used as generators and fueled by natural gas. Nuts.
Even with crop rotation we should be able to feed ourselves. It takes something like 16 calories of grain to make a calorie of beef, so we could just get rid of most of the livestock and feed the beans/grain/vegetables to people instead of animals.
Solving the energy question does spawn abrupt chapters. Anyone want to send Dr. Goodstein some of my urls? www.newpath4.com/index.html#rocketscience shows a comparison between gasoline and a nitrogen-steam solution. I doubt he included anything about my work. Unfortunately the simple answers of my website are the hardest of all for eggheads to understand... Dr. Abraham Hertzberg of the Astronautic Hertzbergs, working at the University of Washington, has built a prototype engine that runs on compressed nitrogen (the LN2000). Unfortunately they de-compressed the nitrogen to such a low point -in order to lose the engine-freezing cold temperature- that the prototype would only reach about 30 mph. I simplified his complex engine by adding flash steam prior to the straight nitrogen injection. NO COMPRESSION IS LOST. THE ENGINE DOES NOT FREEZE TO A CRAWL. And the icing on the cake is that the weight of the vehicle can be harnessed to re-compress the nitrogen to be used over & over in a Closed Loop. The engine already worked before I ever saw it; I just completed the equation. Detroit knows of my work and my answer. Trouble is they've already invested so much R & D into THEIR ANSWER that they are forced to keep cramming the World full of their deficient half-answer product, instead of embracing the improved LN2000 engine. I apologize for my not being a trained academician and Rhodes scholar here but the ANSWER must stand alone, regardless of who I am or what I am. If everyone reading this wants this engine to be built you'll have to contact the automakers. They're the ones making your decisions for you now. How's it feel? Look past my page design flaws and lack of html training. I did the best I could for you since no one would help ($) me even when I asked. Woodrow Riley www.newpath4.com/steamedheatengine.html Now you know the rest of the story. OUR FUTURE IS VERY BRIGHT, FOR US, OUR CHILDREN, AND EVEN THE UK... hehehehe I know my answer is tough even tho it's very simple. Why is that? It's tough on us because we aren't used to being confronted with such an AWESOMENESS: the "Final Answer". We have trained ourselves to QUESTION EVERYTHING, SUSPECT EVERYONE, ACCEPT NO ONE WHO SAYS THEY HAVE "THE ANSWER". WELL, I CAN APOLOGIZE BUT I CANNOT RETRACT WHAT I HAVE DONE. I've made the ultimate answer that gives everyone a powerhouse engine that is much lighter, lasts much longer (think Wankel), requires v/little maintenance; AND IT WORKS IN A CLOSED LOOP. It does not need a radiator because the temperatures CANCEL OUT! If you don't like me or my website design or WHATEVER, FINE. This engine isn't requiring an emotional committment! It's just "THE ANSWER"; PERIOD. It's the best pizza ever made. It's the best date you've ever had. It's the engine befitting a planet that has 78% inert nitrogen! It isn't "ME" telling you it's the best answer; YOUR OWN PLANET IS TELLING YOU! Besides, it wasn't even MY IDEA. Go talk to Dr. Hertzberg. It's his engine. I just fixed it. He and his team are the experts and their credentials match every one of yours. The engine worked, their prototype ran, and all I did was show how to bump the efficiency 1000+%. It's in a way sort of like a heat pipe. If you understand one of those, you can understand that steam is a catalyst to the liquid nitrogen and the nitrogen is a catalyst to the Steam. Broaden your Mind y'all! It's a DUAL-CATALYST ENGINE TO REPLACE THE UNI-POWER GASOLINE. It is the answer from our planet that will not harm the planet. The only harm that will come from this engine is when the World Speed Record comes crashing down at the Utah Salt Flats... /.'ers are the smartest people I've ever found, and it is a pleasure to read many of your comments. About energy, new inventions. But every once in a while we all have to face the facts that sometimes we are faced with answers that have no superior. I believe the combination of steam & nitrogen is one of those. It's like the sky being blue and wheels being round. The best answer has to be a "Closed Loop" and that's what it is
Agreed. Certainly, your knowledge of the field is far, far greater than mine. Plus, I appreciate that you seek a reasonable evaluation and solution to the problem. However, let me emphasize that, despite the fact that the book's premise, specifically that we have already discovered 90% of the world's reserves, is open to dispute (and I clearly don't have the knowledge to argue one way or the other), the point that problems will start once demand exceeds available reserves and production capacity is salient and provocative. It is plausible that this date will arrive in advance of actual depletion of reserves, or improvements in extraction tech.
The time to change the world's infrastructure is in advance of the problems. Eg, if we had taken tough measures such as insisting on good MPG for new cars during the fat '90s, when we had the excess economic capacity to absorb the costs, we would be much better off now. Currently, we are facing economic slowdown, inflation, an aging population, and the poisonous fruits of war. Leadership is required, and the current momentum is in the wrong direction (specifically, more power to oil companies, more dependence on oil, no decent mass transit, treatment of symptoms rather that the fundamental problem). Perhaps Carter was right after all.
Ok, ok, I included the Carter bit to 'put the cat among the pigeons'. I'm incorrigible.
And a cluestick back to you:
Those who are adaptable, require less energy & materials, and live in or near urban centers will weather the gloom and doom more comfortably than those who live 45 miles from hospitals and markets and the like, and are too fat and out of shape from their sedate lifestyles to adapt.
And duh. Obviously the power grid and mass transit are oil run. I'm not saying there won't be riots & starvation in the city.
And another duh: I DON'T need a computer. I like computers. I use computers. But I won't die without one.
What I'm saying is that some people will be able to adapt better. If the shit really hits the fan, I can ride my bike to the country to pick up meat & vegetables harvested by hand. I already bike 40-some miles in the country every weekend for fun -- I'm ready to do it for food too, should the need arise.
And when the shit hits the fan, you bet your life there will be money in manual labor. I'm healthy, and in shape -- and I do what it takes to stay that way. When trouble hits, I can drop my cushy design job ( or whatever I'm doing ) and become a bricklayer or some other physical job. I'm adaptable. I'm already a capable machinist, I can adapt to other lines of work.
Could you? Or would you just starve to death while making snarky and ill-thought-out remarks?
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One of those is that the petrochemical-saturated fossils we find are so saturated because they (or their relatives) were the source of the oil rather than simply being crushed under the same debris which traps rising petroleum.
I have seen theories that oil is created as a byproduct of weird subterranean deep lithospheric extremophiles, or by exotic geologic processes.
However the *rate* of creation of oil in these theories is still glacially slow by human standards. This enabless you to calculate oil's rate of expression in terms of renewable biomass. Which still leads to an oil crunch as oil's slow putative genesis runs up against an expanding, developing global economy.
Da Blog
humans have no incentive to knowingly destroy their own environment. Not in the long run.
Tell that to the Mayans. Or the Polynesians. Or the Aborigines.
Da Blog
If it's $20K a piece to build 100,000, then build 100,000!
Solectria are a small company, they can't afford the manufacturing capacity.
This is bullshit. If their product works, then investors will support it. Investors will suport anything... witness the dot com boom and bust.
What's more likely is that their product has some serious shortcomings.
I'm curious about where that exorbitant amount of tax revenue goes. Environmental preservation? I seriously, seriously doubt it.
+++ATH0
Let's not forget other countries. Russia has huge natural gas reserves, as well as other areas. There is in fact, already an agreement with one such area.
In addition to the other reply, it's going to be easier (for certain values of "easy") to convert a central power plant to use non-petroleum than it is to convert every single car in the city (and suburb, and country). Maryland already has Calvert Cliffs (nuclear), and I'm sure that we wouldn't suddenly be out of fuel one day. We'd have time to convert the power plants. It might be tough for a while, but it's going to be a heck of a lot easier for cyclists. I have 3 spare tubes hanging around right now (plus patches); how many spare tires do you have? Can you inflate yours with a hand pump?
We also have plenty of local farmers, and again, it's not going to be like flipping off a switch. Produce companies will see the rising costs and seek out an alternative before SUV drivers do. People need food, so someone will figure out a way to transport the food so that it can be sold. You're responsible for figuring out how to get to work.
(Speaking of which, the thing about being in better shape in case of a massive job shift is also an excellent point.)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Even with crop rotation we should be able to feed ourselves. It takes something like 16 calories of grain to make a calorie of beef, so we could just get rid of most of the livestock and feed the beans/grain/vegetables to people instead of animals.
But it also takes 16 calories of cellulose (hay, corn stalks, sawdust, etc.) to make a calorie of beef, and humans can't digest cellulose.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Yes, although probably not as well as you. I already grow veggies, but I have a shonky back (car accident 15 years ago) and a few other health issues.
Remember also that you're competing with people who already live much closer to the veggies, many of which are grown from commercial seed and so won't self-sow.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The problem I can see is that you can only charge the battery back up to full, so to use meaningful amounts of grid power you'd have to run the battery down just as you get to a charging spot.
I'm not seeing the logic here.
If I drive to work and back and that doesn't drain the batteries fully, but I plug them in and recharge them to full, I'm still avoiding having to use fuel. I don't see why fully draining the batteries is a requirement, I assume these cars' batteries don't have a memory issue or they wouldn't be very effective.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
... it might work. Forced (government mandated)it probably won't. Smart people are doing similar right now, but in our society (US I am speaking of now), they are put down and ridiculed. I've long been a proponent of survivalism, which is to have backups for all your critical needs-as opposed to wants- and to be a producer on-site for as much as possible, and to work at home or as close to home as possible. Your energy, food, water, and so on can be entirely produced where you live, or at least a great part of it.. The bad part is as soon as you want to take it past single family homes into a small community, you get labeled as a cult or something, subject to government interference, suspicion by locals, etc. It sucks but there ya go. If you TRY to do the right thing,with energy, conservation, etc, both extremes of the neocon globalist right and the forced communistic globalist left will attack you, because your independence (of them) threatens their social outlook they seek to impose by force.
I think it's *possible*, but I don't see any large scale efforts towards those goals until the crisis hits hard, then it will be too expensive to mitigate effectively.
Hybrids need smaller batteries than pure electric vehicles, so they offer one technology for putting electric propulsion out there without taking the full cost hit of a battery pack sufficient for complete propulsion. Volume production of hybrids would also push the advances in battery technology.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
To make a serious difference you need a bigger battery and the ability to use its capacity to get to the next charging point. This is feasible but not yet done.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
www3=World Wide Web III ?
Dang, and here I thought we were still on World Wide Web version I...
The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil."
... there remain many unresolved questions regarding its origins."
Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation." A paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific research
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument.
In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures?far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed.
To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500 C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources.
- ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002).
Not only is it possible for oil to be produced in this way, but it is likely that this is how all oil is actually produced. The energy capacity of oil is too high for it to have been produced under low pressure near the surface from low-energy content biological matter. Methane is produced in this manner, to be sure, but oil is too energy-rich to come from this process.
So you can relax : no die-off today.
Are you freakin kidding? That guy is a laughing stock of the scientific community!
... and I'll give it much credit. But.....so far, we aren't seeing any replenished fields of note, despite some of them being worked for decades. They just gradually get pumped out to the point where it is impractical to extract any more. None of them really run completely dry, they just get so wimpy that it's useless to work them any longer, the so called "peak" period is reached, then they decline.
If and when they start filling back up,as per the enlightened hypothesis, I propose a new term, "epoch energy". If it takes an epoch for them to be formed and to be forced upwards into the pools where we find them, and we take much more than is produced in an epoch in just one hundred years, the effects are the same as if they were true "fossil" fuels.
Interesting regardless actually.
I think of better useage would be the tar sands, perhaps worked with solar heat. Those and the frozen methane hydrates, the quantities I have seen estimated are staggering. Just sorta hard to get to them now and deal with them.
Anyway,pretty funny, found this with a google search. At least one slashdotter is an expert in it, top of the thread. Bet he's got some good links.
I used to dive a lot, I've seen fairly large bubbles in freshwater lakes. Nothing on the scale to sink ships though or cause massive climate change.
thanks! I certainly HOPE oil is self renewing, and/or there is enough of it to insure we have a good chance of continual energy useage and not getting into any weird global "dieoffs" or world wars over it. And also perhaps we might be able to figure out a much better way to use it or burn it better, so as to reduce pollution.