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Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak?
dido writes "Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December. From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline."
I remember in college a geologist was invited to demonstrate a "resource simulator" for our class. By today's standards it would be considered extremely crude (this was after all, in 1978), (wow, weird unintentional pun).
The simulation was basically a giant video game with a simple graphical display of the world's known and projected resources including but not limited to:
About 20 students in the class were given controllers, each to (again, crudely) simulate usage and comsumption patterns of all of these resources. Also, some students had controllers allowing them to spend resources to explore for MORE resources.
At the time, and years subsequent that demo stayed with me -- it left an indelible image of what could and probably would be.
The results? Basically, no matter what the students did to conserve, and what they did to increase the resources, the "world" pretty much always ran out of fuel and resources by the year 2020. At the time that seemed pretty far away and I don't think many people felt the need to care. Maybe that time has come.
Another interesting piece of the simulation: there were those students who pointed out these "estimates" of known and expected future discoveries of resources were just that, "estimates". The geologist obliged, and let the students rerun the simulations with a magnitude of latitude, i.e., ten times the estimated resources were allocated! The results then?, about an additional 10 to 20 years of resources before they ran out.
Note: the results (we ran many different trials) weren't ALWAYS about running out of oil and petroleum. On a few occasions there were severe food and water crises. A very interesting lesson.
Yeah but what time?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
If this is true, hope that hybrid technology and alternative fuels come along in a big way in the next few years. Otherwise, we'll be looking at significantly higher gas prices in the coming years.
Here's the site devoted to peakoil: http://www.peakoil.net/
D E9-42BC-920B-91E5850FB067.htm
A huge chunk of Saudi exports come from one gigantic field. This means our eggs are in this one basket. Here's an article that discusses that field, and the chance that the Saudis might have screwed it by over-extracting. If you do that, you limit how much you can get out later; you might lose the reserves. [I'm guessing you might damage it, but that some future technology might make it recoverable -- just at a higher cost]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
If this is true, it's extremely important news to practically everyone on the planet. With a 3% discrepency in what we produce and we consume (and presumably that discrepency will grow for a while), it's essential that we begin to displace oil with other energy sources. Essential. We are completely screwing ourselves otherwise. I mean right now, I'm sitting here reading slashdot instead of writing a paper that's due tomorrow. That's a really bad idea. But sacrificing what literally powers our lifestyle and existence as we know it is doubtlessly a whole lot worse.
And the scary part is, we've procrastinated for so long, I'm not so sure that we'll find a suitable replacement in time, at least not before there are widespread disruptions in global energy supply.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Wouldn't oil companies want to reduce production so that they can hike up prices for the oil that they currently have? Or am I missing a basic element of economics?
The rising prices make ethanol based petrol a much more viable alternative.
Perhaps new cars will implement the required modifications to prevent corrosion throughout the engines from higher percentages of ethanol in petrol.
There are a hell of a lot of other things which do not go to waste during the production process of oil and gas. Examples include the tar/bitumen you put on roads and paths, chemcials that go into make plastics - the list goes on (just hit wikipedia and look up Oil Refinery). Point being that most of these 'by products' are all consumed at the rate they are produced... they are going into useful products. You can expect to see rises across the board for all of these products as well.
Cutting down oil use is not going to be just about cutting petrol/gas usgae - it is going to be about making more durable consumable products than are currently churned out - and being happy to pay top dollar for them (just like out parents had to). Believe it or not, the 'good old days' of 'well built products' may just come back... that should make our grand parents happy.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Is this peak simply an artificial creation - an attempt by oil cartels such as OPEC to limit production and maximize profits on a finite resource - or due to some technical issue or actually pumping oil? The author also seems to support simple extrapolation by stating that "By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age" rather than attempting to analyze the actual cause of the problem.
Perhaps I've missed something, but I do not entirely trust his conclusions. If what I've stated is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.
So we can now make predictions about permanent peaks in vastly complex - and to a great extent, cyclical - industrial systems only two months after the peak? If we determine a peak after two years, I might believe it. Two decades, I'd certainly believe it. Two centuries, I'd say it was fact.
:(
But two months?
In other news, according to my analysis of the decline of light since I awoke, peak brightness was 10 hours ago. In other news, I became increasingly agitated over the last 5 minutes, and I reached peak happiness 7 minutes ago.
The faster we use up all of the economically obtainable oil, the sooner people can stop whining about using it all up and the sooner we can get on with whatever is next.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
We can only expect these problems to get exponentially worse with all the growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people getting wired for electricity and generally starting to use petroleum for the first time will come with a high cost indeed.
A big STFU to all the Hummer owners out there.
Just convince Hummer owners that painting them orange and plaid is really cool, then let Dick Cheney out on the streets with a shotgun. You solve the oil consumption problem _and_ any impending shotgun pellet glut, all in one, bold stroke.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You will then understand what it means to live in a bubble, where controversial issues are fully settled by politics and personal biases.
(One might also realize how popular elections are lost and won, despite the "genius" expressed in this forum.)
I suggest you read Slashdot
I've been reading about Canadian oil sands since the 1970s. They used to be a curiousity because the oil was too expensive to extract. Well with the spike in oil prices they are now competitive and have the advatange of not getting more expensive to extract. The estimates run between a 200 to 400 year supply. I hate to see them become the answer because it means more CO2 but they won't run out in our lifetimes. If you want proof Bush only cares about backing the American oil companies he won't even discuss Canadian oil with Canada. China is the country pursing Canada. Our oil companies don't control it so we aren't interested. This is about corporate profits. Shortages cause price increases which increase profits. The irony is if they can drive prices up enough Canada is going to get as rich as Saudia Arabia and they won't run out in a hundred years. The governemnt is shooting us in the foot and no one is even talking about it.
I have a minor in Geology and recently took a class on Geology and World Affairs, the Professor has his Ph.D in Petroleum Geology and worked in the field for around 30 years with a focus on the North Sea and Texas Oil. That professor also professed the Peak Oil theory, however a problem with him, and other Petroleum Geologists with a focus on "rock oil" is an over specialzation on "rock oil". When I asked during our discussions on Peak Oil about Tar Sands or Oil Shales, I was told that "...if it don't come up through a pipe most Petroleum Geologists don't know a damned thing about it." And that in particular, this Professor with his 30 years experiance didn't know a damned thing about it because that isn't what his firms worked on.
Now then, I don't know what Professor Kenneth S. Deffeyes background is, but I can see he is writing books on the subject as so has a vested and economic interest in this theory. Furthermore he seems to discount Ethanol, fuel cells, Methane hydrates, oil shale, and Nuclear power, as "shimmering dreams" so I think one needs to take what he is saying with a grain of salt since, as stated before, his vested interest to make money at this point is "peak oil".
The truth behind "rock oil" right now is that there is alot being used, and there is alot out there and there are still a good number of basins which have not been explored, including the Arctic Ocean and there is alot of oil we can recoved in "played out" areas with new techniques and with new technologies.
It was US oil production that peaked in the 1970s, not global oil production. There's a huge difference there.
So the price of oil goes up momentarily for what, a year? And this analyst decides that, since oil producers didn't instantly develop the technology to extract hydrocarbons from shale, or find a whole new set of oil reserves in areas we haven't even yet begun to look, that its all downhill from here? What bullshit.
That sounds an awful lot like the 1970's analysts who said we'd have no oil at all by 2000.
Or the brainiac reporter who insisted that Apple's iPod was not going to have any effect on Mac sales after interviewing 10 iPod users who didn't also buy a Mac on their visit to the Apple store in 2004.
Anyone can rub together two brain cells and write a report that glosses over market realities with some sensationalist simplifications.
Basic economics indicates that that the market can fall behind reality for several years. But obviously, at some point when oil rises to a level where it can comfortably stay, all kinds of results will kick in: conservation, alternative fuels, alternative oil discovery, alternative oil sources. To suggest that we've hit the end of the oil pan is plainly retarded.
We've only known about the middle east's oil for most of a century. There's plenty of places we haven't looked, and more we know about and chose not to exploit because either the market can't support it yet, or there is lower hanging fruit, or there are political or environmental concerns we can't resolve yet.
Good luck seeing this happen in this administration, regardless of the BS of reducing americas "addiction" that Bush spouted off... Sheesh he sounded like he was part of the green party !... I beleive this about as much as I beleive he didn't really know there were no WMD's in Iraq... Bush will let the inevitable happen, inflation is coming.. because it has to, to pay for these increased costs.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Not to denegrate Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes, but Mr. Simmons of Simmons & Co Intnl has been speaking worldwide on this subject from his own research for over 5 years.
Mr. Simmons pdfs and PPTs used with his speaches are avaialable at his website, and are incredibly detailed and convincing.
Nuclear power is the ONLY rational solution, near term.
Weak kneed leaders in the U.S. have been totally 100% cowed by irrational environmental types who do not use any of this data or statistical evidence or engineering facts to oppose anything but "green". What these so-called leaders and environmentalists miss is that they may have doomed the U.S. to great hardship, by delaying the inevitable move to nuclear fission, which other major countries have done and are expanding as we speak.
Bo
Since Hummer owners want to drive a military-style vehicle, I think we should give them the full experience: every hummer should come with an all-expenses paid 6-month stint as a chauffeur in Baghdad. Nothing shows one's masculinity and patriotism more than Supporting the Troops, right?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Here are some quotes from the National Center For Policy Analysis, regarding Oil Peaks and attempting to forecast oil production:
In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world's reserves.
Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world's supply.
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels -- more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.
With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. -- which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith -- reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).
Today's drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.
The vast petroleum resources of the world's submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).
The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.
Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.
Eh... money isn't the only issue. You also have a basic problem of thermodynamics. It takes X calories to extract and refine gasoline that will release Y calories when burned. As extraction gets harder, X grows. Once X == Y, an oil field becomes an energy sink, not an energy source, even if there are centuries worth of oil left in it.
All's true that is mistrusted
In 1956, geophysicist Marion King Hubbert predicted that _U.S._ oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. In fact, U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, so he was pretty close. U.S. production has been going down ever since. This current article is about _World_ production. Hubbert predicted that would peak around 2000.
Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in the 70's. He was right.
Based on his formulas, world peak oil production should occur during this decade.
I read a great article in the New York Times the other day (go figure... its available for free at my law school) about E85. Anyway I was shocked to read that to make a car compatible with E85 it only costs an extra $150. I'm hardly a rich man and I try to save my money, but $150 per car doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things, espically considering the way our modern day governments spend and tax the hell out of everything. I was skeptical, about that $150 figure, but here that price is quoute in another article http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20060122/BUSINESS/601220310/1003 And Since its so cheap why doesn't our government mandate all (or 50% of) new cars made and imported be E85 comptabile and let the consumer/market choose their fuel? Even if the federal government won't do this, you think some of the midwestern states would. Since the #1 problem with consumer adoption of E85 is its availability, wouldn't these state economies based on farming want to hurry up its availability so they could increase demand for their own product?
If I were an Iowa Legislator I'd want to make every car sold in the state E85 compatible and mandate every gas station sell E85. If the state can succesfuly force E85 onto the market it'd only be a matter of time until gas stations in the surronding states started selling E85 by choice to get those consumers and it spreads. Kind of like how McDonald's spread across America.
Other Problems with E85:
#2 promblem: You get less energy per gallon about 10 to 15% less. But E85 is aparently cheaper than gasoline. So at some point, I don't know where, and I can't find any information on this, there is a "Cost Per Mile" equilabrium between the two. Sure you have to fill up your gas tank more often if you use E85 because you get less milage, but maybe each mile is cheaper. This is a little harder than calculating "MPG" but I'm betting a savy company can add this metric to an onboard dash. If the Prius can calculate MPG, why not be able to enter how much it cost you to fill up the tank and then you get a cost per mile read out, so you can see which is cheaper for you.
What everyone so far seems to have missed is not "what are we gonna use to drive our cars back and forth to work with?!" but, "How the hell are we gonna feed ourselves?"
Oil is food, people. Don't think so? imagine the lines of connection going back from your local mega-mart - very little food is grown locally anymore, it all gets shipped in, and we, as faithful 'consumers' consume what's presented to us. Wanna move closer to a farm? Nice try, that wont work either, most food cannot be grown or survive without the very extensive use of, you guessed it, petroleum based pesticides.
Oh, well we can switch to a hydrogen based economy! Wrong again, can't make hydrogen without oil. Can't make fancy electric cars without a current reserve of oil.
Get a bike, get spare parts, and start riding, it's gonna be a long 75-150 years, everyone.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
But, being the terminally unhappy people they are, they'll just blame Bush and not MoveOn.
Quite the contrary. Most people I know who would fit in that description are quite happy about it
World food production has reached its peak!! Food demand is growing without bound, this is a complete disaster that threatens to destroy humanity. It's all over, the sky is falling, and we're all going to die. By 1850 we will all be dead!!!
"The more efficient you are, the less they'll produce. Prices will not change."
We're talking about the survival of human civilization, not bargain hunting at the mall. If we're more efficient, the oil companies produce less, the oil lasts longer, and it buys us some time to build out the energy infrastructure to supplant oil.
If it hadn't US troops would not be all over the pipeline areas.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
(This is from something I wrote up a couple months ago, regarding a question I asked Professor Deffeyes during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2011, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil. You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
But there are many areas where some minor federal intervention would be very useful.
The first thing the govt. should do is reevaluate the way it calculates fuel economy. The current system is grossly innaccurate, and doesn't give consumers a true picture of the gas mileage they can expect. Consumer Reports had an article about this and the auto industry rep. basically said that the auto companies know how the govt. tests, and optomizes their vehicles for the test (gear ratio tweaking, using prototype vehicles, etc.). Changing the test methods would give consumers more accurate information so they can make a more informed decision.
The second thing the govt. could do is raise the minimum required fuel economy and make light trucks subject to the gas guzzler tax. I work at a Dodge dealership and the fuel economy of new vehicles is attrocious. A new durango gets 14-18 mpg and pays no gas guzzler tax. A station wagon that got similar mileage would have a several thousand dollar tax associated with it. Treat SUVs like the cars that they are replacing and you will find that fewer people will buy one.
The third thing that the govt. and EPA could do to help is to standardize fuel grades. Under the current system, refiners have to produce something like 60-70 different blends to comply with various state enviromental regs. The govt. could reduce this clusterfuck by having perhaps 2 or 3 different blends; one blend for urban/enviromentally sensitive (pacific northwest, etc.) areas, and one blend for areas where pollution isn't as big of a problem. Current refineries in the US are running at or above full capacity, and this would help ease that situation, and allow oil companies to put current resources to better use.
In addition to the step above, I firmly believe that the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
Obviously, these aren't complete solutions to Americas oil addiction, but they are things that would help.
P.S. while writing this post, I came across an interesting ad that the sierra club ran in the new york times on Ford's 100th birthday. 100 years of "progress" indeed.
cast the first stone. Sure, that's a great moral philosophy, and it would be nice if people weren't so sanctimonious, but it runs into problems when used to dissuage VERBAL criticism.
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Yes they'll be a few years of high prices for domestic users. Oh dear, we'll need to economise, maybe take the bus. But that will be nothing compared to what will happen 10 years after that without oil they'll be little mass production of pharmaceuticals, fertilizer (food anyone?), plastics, etc. We'd need a new set of technologies accross the board to address each industry which is currently reliant on oil.
You're right! If I can only reduce my load on the system by 20%, I might as well not bother at all. Heck, if we're going to run out of resources anyways, and pollution is going to overtake us, let's just run everything into the ground as fast as we can.
Okay, enough sarcasm. I think you're probably right that in your comparison with America, Europe, and the tribesman and their relative impact. Problem is we don't know what exactly is sustainable, and we don't know how long it will take to get there. I think the current American lifestyle is unsustainable -- if everyone on the planet lived as we did it wouldn't work. But I don't think we all have to live as tribesmen either. This is a false dilemma that has come up ever since Regan said "I won't have Americans freezing in the dark".
I believe there is a comfortable lifestyle that is sustainable. I think technology is a part of that, but until it catches up I think conservation is another part of that. I'm one of those people everyone hates who recycles as much as I can, tries to avoid waste, buys organic products, and yes, even drives a Prius. What can I say: I am not willing to become a subsistance farmer, but I am willing to vote with my dollars for more sustainable ways to do things. I don't see how that's bad.
Is my current lifestyle sustainable? Hell if I know. Hell if anyone knows. I doubt it. But I'm doing what I can reasonably do as a working stiff to encourage things in what I think is a sustainable direction.
Cheers.
Instead of worrying about the fact that oil has reached it's peak shouldn't we be figuring out ways of leaving the carbon in the ground? (Remember that greenhouse thingy?) The focus in these debates always seems to be on how to produce more energy not use less. And that while we could easily save almost 50% of consumption using currently available technologies. If youu're interested in more details see this link from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4633160. stm "Energy's 'low hanging fruit'" by Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Oil from the ground is so 20th century I could care less about stories about it. Europe has begun licensing TDP tech and we have a full-scale refinery running near Kansas City. If we ever get serious about putting domestic oil production the whole idea of oil from the ground will be beyond quaint.
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
It works, it provides clean water and high grade deisel oil, cleans the air by providing higher octane product, less emissions from refinery gasses, can empty landfills of plastic, can clean the water supply from biomass waste. Don't as me why the hell the DOE hasn't gotten behind it. A tenth of the cost of the Manhatten project could make us the largest oil producers on the planet*.
Also check the Wiki references to plastic conversions. Say good-bye to plastic waste and ocean pollution as well. Grey water dumping would also be convertable on the cruise ship level. Plus domestic production nullifies the middle east cartels, and puts tanker accidents off our coasts to an end. The middle east argument alone is a national security problem and it's criminal that this tech hasn't gone into a crash program status.
And this blows all previous gas alternatives out of the water, doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
I'm confident that we will engage in this tech at some point - but it'd be nice to hear more about it. Try googling it sometime - you'll find almost nothing in the pop-press. I've even had dialogue with MSNBC about it - and they claim they're aware of it - but never say dick. Neither did Wired and they were talking new-oil on the fricking cover of their rag less than a month ago. FEH!
* The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
Your comment about the footprint on nature is important. Think about this, though.
I live in a studio apartment. I use energy efficient lightbulbs. I recycle. I mostly walk, but very occasionally take the bus. I haven't driven in five years.
Really, how much larger is your footprint than mine?
Now, my lifestyle is mostly maintainable because I'm young, it's true, but a Hummer still takes *five times* as much gas as an energy efficient vehicle. You don't need a Prius to get around 50 MPG.
It also reduces traffic efficiency because it's slow to accelerate and blocks peoples' view. Even apart from gas consumption, it takes vastly more resources to build a Hummer than to build a S.M.A.R.T. car.
Worse, people generally drive in SUVs alone. A vehicle that could carry four people is carrying only one. A carpool in an efficient vehicle is therefore *twenty times* as efficient as the usual SUV trip.
When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be.
"I'll never use as little as a starving villager does, so I might as well use as much as I like."
That doesn't fly.
Mankind is of course a cancer on this earth, and will soon exhaust all resources like yeast cells in a vat of merlot, however:
The article uses an unfounded and probably incorrect basis that production will peak when half the resurces are extracted. This can be a rule of thunb at best. Then it goes on to use this rule to extrapolate a date with 4 decimal digits. That's a joke.
There are for example enormous oil reserves in oil sand. Possibly more than all other known resources It costs maybe $30/barrel to extract, but at current prices, that is economical.
Prices will most likely continue to grow moderately as other new resouces become economical. This includes alcohol from grain and sugar cane, natural gas, and nuclear power (At least for stationary power)
"Fix it"
Despite all this noise about peak oil, oil futures remain reasonable, and oil prices are coming down in light of new supplies, suggesting that our access to oil isn't nearly as stripped as doomsayers want us to believe.
China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.
If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.
But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system.
To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years.
Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.
Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.
Peak oil is not about the decline of oil, it's about the decline of CHEAP oil. Some would dismiss peak oil as another Malthusian doomsday. However, one needs to consider the fact that oil is such a huge part of our lives, and the discovery of cheap oil (and the fertilizer made from petroleum products) helped stem the tide. It's not simply energy, it's also plastics and a multitude of other products. While we *may* find alternative sources of energy, can you imagine a life without cheap plastic? Go through your day today and see how often you use plastic.
Oil will always be present on our planet. The problem is that the Return on Investment (ROI) may be severely diminished. Right now, it's cheaper to find, drill, and transport oil than it is to use it. If it becomes more expensive to find and transport oil, we will have to find another source of energy. In case you hadn't noticed, energy consumption is going UP and not down.
It's not something to take lightly. There are people working on it, but we really need alot more effort behind it. I'm imagining bacteria in a petri dish consuming all of the resources. If people don't wake up soon, we could easily be faced with a situation where we simply will not be able to find a solution. Consider that research itself takes up resources, which will become more scarce and valuable. There is a doomsday possibility out there, but I like to hope that some governments will wake up and put alot of effort into finding alternatives. Humans should hopefully be able to think their way out of the petri dish.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Is cycling ok?
Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.
For an academic, this is a dangerously unthoughful piece. Or rather, while it is quite possible we have passed peak oil production, the understanding of economics in the piece are terribly naieve.
If oil production continues to decline (which it may well), then prices will rise. We'll see $100 oil. But, and this is the big but, if we see $100 oil then world oil demand will not rise 3%, it'll be down 5%. High oil prices mean less consumption of oil.
This happens in several ways: firstly, in areas like power generation, then oil become more expensive than (existing) competing technologies. Oil fired power stations cease to make sense relative to coal fired ones. (And it is no surprise that we are seeing an upsurge in interest in nuclear.)
Secondly, economic growth slows - especially in areas which are energy intensive. The price of a Ryanair, or Easyjey, or SouthWest Airlines plane ticket rises to reflect higher oil prices. Fewer people fly. Airlines mothball planes. Oil consumption falls.
Thirdly, we will see purchases (and usage) of cars change. In the 1970s, the average horsepower of a new American car more than halved. When people make the school run, they'll use a little car rather than their SUV. It's a fair bet too that we'll see hybrid sales rise and rise. (Similarly, we'll see the proportion of ethanol in diesel increase.)
Finally, rising oil prices make other energy sources economic. There is a wonderful piece from the IEA on the various costs of different power sources. Solar isn't cheap now. But if the oil price is $150 a barrel, it doesn't look so bad.
The Princeton professor poo-pooes oil sands, but if the oil price is more than $100, then there'll be an awful lot of energy produced from them. Similarly, we'll see coal to oil plants (again), and no doubt a second commercial gas hydrates "mine".
So: if we have passed Hubbert's peak, we'll see our energy consumption fall, and we'll see the proportion of energy production that is oil fall. This will not be painless. But nor will we return to the stone age. We may well see GDP growth drop to subnormal levels - perhaps even for a decade - but this is very different to total economic collapse.
--- My dad's political betting
...and may I just mention that you can thank the so-called European Left that there is a thriving industry developing energy conserving technologies for power plants, heating plants and transportation. I'm telling you, forget about the IT business, microelectronics, pharmaceutical companies. They won't save the world. Energy conservation is The Next Big Thing.
Oh, and by the way, we Europeans aren't all French. Actually, most of us can't stand them at all.
Not true, OPEC has always stated that oil should be in the $30 to $40 barrel range, not in the high sixties where it has been for a long time. They recognise that over $50 per barrel, it becomes economic for consuming countries to invest in alternative sources of energy such as oil sands and tar. Overpriced oil hurts producers long term plans.
What is almost unique about this situation is not that oil production is being throttled such as 1973-74 or 1980, it is that demand is running way ahead of supply. OPEC has called for consumers to cut back on consumption as there isn't enough infrastructure to get the stuff out of the ground, move and refine it fast enough to meet current let alone future demand.
Saudi Arabia is practically the only major producer that is planning on major increases in production in the near future, but there are plenty of geologists who believe that the Saudi reserves have been wildly overstated and that there is no way the country can ever meet these figures.
So what you've suggested is that there is no point in trying to minimize your oil consumption at all, and that if you use any oil you might as well be a complete glutton about it. Right... That's utterly idiotic but is something the rest of the world has come to expect from the average American. In many countries in the world you can't help but use oil to some extent to live a somewhat normal life, but that hardly means that trying to limit oil consumption should be disregarded entirely. How comical this would appear to somebody who has never seen a motor vehicle is entirely irrelevant and is an argument that would only appease complete idiots.
So keep driving to work alone in a vehicle that's meant to hold eight people just because you think it makes you look "cool". In reality, it makes you look like a sad pathetic retard who's compensating for a lack of self esteem.
Peak Oil News and Discussion has a lot of info and discussion topics on Peak Oil. It even mentions the current slashdot peak oil thread.
Nuclear reactors are the way to go! The Canadian Tar Sands need to build up the Nukes to power the extraction of the remaining Oil Sands; this will save all the Natural Gas that they are burning now. We need that Natural Gas to heat the homes in the North and to warm the planet with the green house gases so that we don't have as cold winters up north.
Nukes are clean environmentally friendly energy and with new reactor designs can use up to 95+% of the energy content of the fuel.
Let's get fuel from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and their moons. There's plenty of fuel there.
Hydrogen is awesome. Let's use Hydro, Nuclear, Wind and Solar to power the conversion of abundant water into pure hydrogen.
Let's save our fossil fuels. When we run out lets use the garbage dumps which have plenty of fuel potential in the methane and plastics embedded and not rotting quickly.
Let's mandate the replacement of all lights with LEDs as they are more energy efficient. Everyone needs to upgrade their computers and monitors to the latest energy efficient models.
Oh ya, how about GeoThermal energy. Just a few miles beneath the surface of the Earth is hot hot hot... let's make us of that and slow the planet's orbit down by letting it cool faster.
Let's take advantage of green house gases and warm up the planet so that we don't need to burn as much fuel in the winter.
Let's move to the tropics by encouraging mass migrations. Canadians move to Mexico, Americans move to Costa Rica and Panama while those in Quebec can move to the Caribean French Islands.
Let's Nuke em by building thousands of the new kinds of reactors. Let's grab all the enriched uranium fuel deposits that can be used for weapons and burn it to protect future generations and enable the extraction of energy now and in the coming future.
Let's continue to develop fusion technologies.
Let's put solar cells into the Lagrange point between the Sun and Earth and beam the energy to the Earth via microwaves.
Let's have all the humans on the planet get on bicycles and generate power or wind hand held energy cranks.
Bring it on. Technology to solve are problems.
Let's stop killing people. State sponsored mass killing won't solve the energy problems since wars consume a lot of energy and production capacity which also takes energy.
Let's Nuke Em by extracting energy from the 10's of thousands of nukes. The energy from the control detonations of the bombs will enable massive collection of energy.
Above all let's not freak out from those that predict the end of the world with their Quatrain's of doom and gloom. Embrace the Global Warming and accelerate it. It's the warmest it's ever been for 1200 years, bring it on! Heat is better than cold. Balance is for sissies. Let's make it happen.
Oh, ya all those other energy sources that I missed; let's do them too.
Oil discoveries have been surpassed by consumption in the mid-eighties. I remember a presentation with a simple chart at the Annual Meeting of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) 2005, Cincinnati about this. Since the usual lag between discovery and commencement of production is about 15 years (this is what I remember from my course in energy economy), the production peak was expected already about 2000. A few factors (wars, Russian oil becoming available to the west, etc) delayed this, but it's not like people never saw this coming.
New oil fields are being found all the time, but this is not compensating enough for the depletion of previous oil fields.
In case you wondered what is going to happen, remember that US production already peaked a long time ago (in 1971 if my memory serves me). In 1973 the Saudis noticed that they held the big levers now (Americans could not flood the marked anymore), and took the chance to become the market leaders.
What this means to us is exponential growth in gasoline prices. Smart countries stopped producing power with oil long ago (think oil crisis), moving to coal or nuclear for energy security (not necessarily because they were cheaper). Coal is going to be soon the most competitive fuel for power production. Nuclear will likely stay there in the corner where its poor economics has put it, since there is enough coal to burn all oxygen in the atmosphere.
Given that most transportation and building-heating sectors are based on oil in most countries and that these are big chunks of the total energy consumption, I expect some countries will find it cheaper to steal oil invading oil-rich countries, especially those countries that are very oil-intensive and where conservation is not considered an attractive option.
Furthermore, the US now have a base of operations (Iraq) in the middle of everything in the Middle East, already up and running. Invading the whole Middle East could become a real option in the next decades (it was actually already contemplated in 1973, but then we had the Soviet Union).
Interesting book to read: The end of oil, Paul Roberts, ISBN 0618239774.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
Your rant stinks like the new attack of 'moral relativism' that American 'conservatives' have started to throw around at everyone they don't like (themselves being among the worst offenders when it comes to bending their morals).
The idea that unless you're an African villager you can't point out great waste is beyond ridiculous.
Lets try it from a lefties perspective...
Unless you stop using the socialist, nationalised road system, you can't possibly say that Communist Russia was excessive, only someone in libertarian Somalia has the 'moral authority' to say that.
That sit nicely with you?
Of course not, but you will bend your morality to fit your argument anyway, as you have done. Now when some neo greenie comes along in this thread and screams that we *should* be living like African villagers you will argue that he is an extremist and he just goes to show how rediculous 'liberals' are, and you will have snuggly wrapped yourself up in a blanket of self righteousness smirking that your 'right' and everyone else is 'wrong' totally ignoring the issue at hand which doesn't matter just as long as you feel like you have won the argument.
SUV are the inverse of terrorist : you fight them at home in order to not have to fight them elsewhere. The problem is not with 30% of americans owning a SUV, it is with the 10% of chinese that can afford to do the same...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
We're not talking about the survival of civilation, we're talking about profit. If survival was at stake, we'd have moved to alternative energy sources years, even decades ago. It's not like fossil fuel being limited was news for the past 50 years.
You're forgetting that the high price will drive people to alternatives in droves, and the enormous boom in the alternative energy industry will lower prices with economies of scale and drive more R&D investment. Before long the world's energy sources will be far more diversified, efficient, and eco-friendly; possibly even cheaper; and it will be *because* of high oil prices, not in spite of them. Because capitalism works.
Also, I don't actually think OPEC is causing a major problem, because I don't think there is one. But if there was one, it could only be caused by market manipulation of the type OPEC tries to practice. And I didn't mean to say the U.S. had the most purely capitalistic system (absolutely pure capitalism is probably not a system I'd like to live under). I just think the U.S.' capitalistic system is the best (despite its many flaws) (and hence the flame-retardant gear...).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The fact that you don't like the answer or feel that it's not "fair and balanced" doesn't automatically make it wrong. Life is not fair and balanced. Cause leads to effect. Every effect cannot have all causes, no matter what you have been told or how much you want to believe that there is no global warming, that we are bringing freedom to the Middle East, that Reagan and Nixon weren't crooks, or that we won't run out of oil. Americans are spoiled brats, conservative Americans doubly so.
Reality is not "fair and balanced."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Part of the issue is when he refers to the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. It produces roughly 6% of the world's oil production (5 million barrels/day). The Burgan Field in Kuwait recently had to scale back its production because it couldn't sustain a pump rate over 1.7 million barrels per day (That's about 2% of the world production). When the two biggest producing oils fields in the World have their production rate capped: you either have to look else where for additional oil or you have to start using less. In the mean time you end up with more people who want oil then can be supplied. Then who ever can pay for it will get it.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I have been following Peak Oil Theory for the past 20 years and those that just scoff at the idea are in for a big shock. I like many others have seen it coming and I have seen the governments ignoring it.
A world with no affordable oil???
As the rich and privileged hog the remaining oil and leave the masses to fight it out society will collapse, there is no doubt about that. I am just glad I do not live in a society where every man and his dog has a firearm, now that society would truly descend into a hellish nightmare.
Scoff at your peril, or learn how to grow your own food (because there will be no distribution to your local supermarket) and then learn how to defend your food, because everyone will want what you have.
- Thus solving the problem once and for all!
- But...
- ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This whole subject makes me want to watch Mad Max over and over while I stroke a shotgun.
ender-iii
No, you need hot water. Is natural gas the only way to heat water as far as you know?
This whole debate is bollocks. We use oil because it's cheap. As it becomes more expensive we'll a) start exploiting more expensive oil deposits such as the Canadian shale, this will continue until b) it's cheaper to grow ethanol or bio-diesel or harvest sunlight or build nuclear reactors etc etc etc. Quite frankly, oil will NEVER run out, because there will always be plenmty left that is just WAY too expensive for us to extract.
Did you ever read Jared Diamonds latest book? Bottom line: civilisations collapse at the top of their power, because they rather die than give up their status symbols. So yes, if the choice is driving a hummer and starving, or riding a bicycle and eating, people will keep on driving until it's to late.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Really? I spend all my disposable income on buying tanks of CO2 and venting it into the air...
"Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory."
Why would you want to keep the price of oil down?
Yes, people would *like* to have cheap gas. But that's impossible in the long term. Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
'In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."'
Since when do you believe an advertisement?
"In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years."
Even though this is not an advertisement it was in the 19th century. Technology and science progressed enormously since then.
"In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels."
The USGS was proven to be wildy inaccurate even in their own country, I quote: "As recently as 1972, the USGS was releasing circulars that estimated US domestic oil production would not peak until well into the 21st century, and possibly not until the 22nd century. (See Theobald, Schweinfurth & Duncan, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 650)
This was despite the fact US production had already peaked in 1970, just as Hubbert had predicted. Richard Heinberg reminds us, "in 1973, Congress demanded an investigation of the USGS for its failure to foresee the 1970 US oil production peak.""
You say, that: "In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels."
Source?
"In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment."
Actually, no. Please see this link, I quote: "The USGS 2000 divides the petroleum assessments into 'categories of probability': F95, F50 (i.e. median), F5, and Mean (i.e. arithmetic mean). "F" means fractile, as defined by the USGS", and then "TOTAL GCOE at F95 = (approx.) 2,000 Gb
TOTAL GCOE at F50 = (approx.) 2,700 Gb
TOTAL GCOE at F5 = (approx.) 4,900 Gb
TOTAL GCOE Mean = (approx.) 3,000 Gb".
This means, by their EXTREMELY flawed logic, that if they take the probabilities and get a mean value from them, then thats how many oil is out there, while anything below F50 probability is wishful thinking only, if not outright dreaming. I'd say that the quote: "and the estimates for the world Grown Conventional Oil Endowment will converge somewhere between 2000 and 2200 BBO (i.e. near the F95 estimate in the USGS 2000 report). The peak of world oil production is within sight." is very accurate in describing the real reserves.
"By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056."
The problem is not that oil is gone, but that consumption is bigger than production and that production cannot be increased by any significant numbers!
We currently need 83.5 million barrels per day. We are projected to need 120 million barrels per day by 2020. On the other hand, when|since we hit peak oil production (will) decrease by around 1 million barrels per day of production per year. We just cannot tap into the remaining oil reserves quickly enough and in such way that it would be worth the costs (in monetary and energy terms)!
Dick Cheney said, that "By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves.That means by 2010 we w
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Part of the reasoning is that the term "Reserve" does not refer to the actual, physical quantity of oil present.
From This document
SPE and WPC stress that petroleum proved reserves should be based on current economic conditions, including all factors affecting the viability of the projects. SPE and WPC recognize that the term is general and not restricted to costs and price only. Probable and possible reserves could be based on anticipated developments and/or the extrapolation of current economic conditions. (emphasis mine).
In other words, the "gold standard" means of defining "reserves" allows producers to take into account the price of oil and the cost of extraction. If the price of oil rises, those bodies of oil which would previously be uneconomic to extract suddenly become worthwhile.
Hence the ability to triple your reserves in a very short time, with no requirement for extra discovery or exploration. It just happens that oil fields that you were previously ignoring start to look viable because the prices are high.
In no way does this reflect an increase in actual real amounts of hydrocarbons. But it does mean that you can increase CONFIDENCE in the supply. Almost by definition, reserves will start to increase the moment any kind of shortage begins.
Of course, it doesn't account for the inevitable increase in price (remember, if prices drop, reserves will DESCREASE instantly). Most of the benefits of oil to the economy are linked to it's high energy profit ratio. As this decreases, the inherent value of the oil decreases, and you end up in an economic downspiral. And that's the real kicker of "Peak Oil". We'll probably never actually drink the oil fields dry, we'll just get to the point where the world economy is so crippled that we can't afford to extract, refine, or ship it.
No, that's e-ink, Oil has always been infinite, at least until the last 15 years.
Errrr no. Oil and gas (and water for that matter) are held in pores in the rock - just as water can be held in the pores of a sponge. Loose sandstones make great oil reservoirs, the Saudi fields are in limestone deposited as dung in shallow seas.
When you extract the oil the rock remains. No huge caverns, no need for worry.
The phenomenon of oil field replenishment appears to be a fluke in certain fields which are linked by faults to deeper reserves. Lowering the pressure in the upper part of the field forces oil up by gas and water pressure. It has nothing to do with the highly dubious theory of Mantle oil.
HTH.
We all know Capitalism and ecomonics are driven by supply and demand, but it is important to realise that neither of those factors are naturally regulated any more. Before the industrial revolution supply was dominated by the relative scarcity of pretty much everything, and demand was purely about getting what you need to survive for the vast majority of people.
Since mass production was invented the scarcity of almost everything has been potentially negligable. Anything we need, we have the resources and technology to churn it out by the ton. In order for the economy to function demand must match supply as closely as possible. The sensible thing to do would be to cut back on production so that it matches the real demand. But then individual suppliers can't out-compete each other by virtue of economies of scale, so what is the alternative? Artificially increase demand. (the exceptions are monopolies and cartels which can reduce supply and increase price since they have no competitors.)
Make everything disposable so that people buy everything over and over again, and flood the public conciousness with advertising and create a culture of mindless consumption.
The more we waste, the more profit is made by somebody. This is the inevitable culture that is fostered by capitalism and economics. Its endemic. Its not a conspiracy or evilness or whatever, it is purely the way it works.
It is not coincidence that hybrid cars only become commercially available once oil peaks. And it isnt some conspiracy by the automotive industry and the oil industry. It the mechanism by which capitalism works. If we concentrated all non essential resources on figuring out cold fusion or finding some other viable energy source we would probably have it licked very very quickly. So why don't we? No one profits.
Once it is no longer possible to profit significantly from oil then we will see the right amount of effort expended on alternative energy. By then i only hope the environment isnt totally ruined.
Capitalism is an anachronism that is destroying our planet and causing pointless suffering to thousands of starving people around the world. Unless we lift ourselves out of that rut things will never get better, and i genuinely believe the human race is capable of so much more than this.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
True. However, the USGS is notorious in peak oil circles for having continued to raise estimates of ultimate recoverables (IE, total production possible over human history) in the continental US, even after domestic production had reached and passed the predicted Hubbert Peak (IE, the halfway mark). The USGS 1972 predicted US-48-UR was a value between 2 and 10 times the value currently accepted. (Hubbard, by contrast, was about 10-30% low... from a range of 15 years pre-peak.) And, if you examine the weasel words in their footnotes, you'll see the USGS and similar agencies effectively admit to fixing their supply predictions to equal the value for predicted demand. We're at the absolute brink of Peak Oil. It would also provide a plausible secondary motivation for the Iranian nuclear program, and explain why they are so adamant about pursuing the atom despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves: they also think that Peak Oil is at hand.
If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
This, however, assumes that oil production can remain steady, and that those reseve estimates are accurate. The premise of the Hubbert peak is that production rates will begin dropping at increasing rates, due to increasing difficulty in extraction.
I don't have time to address the problems with each of your silver linings, but looking at a few Peak Oil sites and a quick search for "Energy Profit Ratio" should leave many people skeptical about them.
Which, in Realpolitik terms, might well justify the invasion of Iraq completely, aside from the stupidity how the invasion was executed (IE, without detailed post-invasion planning or comrehensive allied support). And, no, I am NOT a fan of Bush or the Iraq war... largely because of the aforementioned stupidity in execution.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
See Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Which, as an aside, doesn't mean it won't be used at all; such oil might be a good way to turn nuclear power into plastics. It just means such oil won't contribute to a solution for the energy crisis.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Problem is we don't know what exactly is sustainable
That's pretty much the nail on the head right there. There's no such thing as one sustainable lifestyle. Sustainability just means renewability. So while everyone is moaning and groaning about how the Americna lifestyle is unsustainable they are forgetting to mention the fact that it is high technology that increases the level of sustainable lifestyles. Until solar power, ethanol, etc "sustainable" meant "what you can build with your hands". It is only thanks to advanced research that we may actually get a sustainable lifestyle that also involves such frivolous things as running water and medical treatment.
People who are all into "you can't justify going farther than you can walk" are the perfect example of a cure that's worse than the disease. If you can't go farther than you can walk you may save the environment but you completely decimate human society. Cities can not exist, universities can not exist, the bottom falls out from underneath society. You get a bunch of isolated pockets of survivalists who have no time for literature, art, or communal society. It's just neo-luditism. Why bother trying to save modern civilization if the answer is to destroy modern civilization? And by modern civilization I don't mean things like shopping malls. I have in mind things like physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and essentially all the human intellectual capital that rests on our ability to talk to one another over long distances and support specialists who don't have to tend their own fields every day.
Technology has made possible our ability to live the type of lifestyle that we currently live. Technology, in my opinion, is also crucial to increasing efficiency to a point where maintaining a semblance of this lifestyle can be done sustainably. It's no questions that we've annointed convenience as king of efficiency and we probably would have to give up things like hummers and civics (and priuses) to really become sustainable. But the question is - do you want to give up these for smaller, ethanol-driven vehicles or for your bare feet?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
You're wrong about the beer.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Many people don't realize that for a long time in the 90's oil was actually $15-$20/bbl. There are families (such as mine) that do rely on oil prices to make a living and we are not some huge cartel rolling around in piles of cash.
There is a large misconception that oil prices have always been high, because people incorrectly correlate gas prices to oil prices.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
Actually there is nothing left behind and the top collapses in. In Campache Mexico, the area is being supported by the largest Nitrogen Injection system on the planet. CO2 Sequestration is being used in some places. The situation is precarious to say the least. During well reserved "proving" blows at the Little Rock gas field in Alabama occurred the largest earthquake in Alabama History. Similarly last Saturday 2/11/2006 a 5.2 quake happened under Shell Oil's Brutus Rig. These are not natural events and they disclose the subsidence of rock due to the relief of pressure in Gas/Oil fields.
The Kuwait oil fired so severely damaged their oil fields that billions of barrels of crude were trapped under ground in the fractured rock strata due to this problem of caverns etc. Sorry for those who think otherwise, but the stuff comes out and it leaves spaces behind to collapse.
At Ache near the Shell gas works there can be seen on recent Google Earth photos (These may get taken down some time soon) at 4deg 44min 17.9 sec N and 95 deg 14 min 37.80 sec E one can see natural Gas Flares. This is massive stuff here. Such gas well proving blows can and do trigger earthquakes. This photo was taken shortly before the Ache Quake and Tsunami. Please look at the size of these flares. Some of these measure more than 8 nautical miles in cross dimension.
Such events leave us with serious questions about what is going on in the Oil Business and how much damage it is doing to our world. Mods get a life if you want to argue with facts. I am presenting fact here not opinion.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.
This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.
And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.
I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.
AlpineR
That's the stated aim. I think this is the first serious attempt by any government to ween their citizens off of "oil addiction". It's a pity Bush didn't put resources where his rhetoric leads but then his power-base would start whinging, no?
I'm sceptical that the Swedes won't be able to do it without nuclear power but kudos for attempting a difficult problem. I wonder if they'll get rid of all oil-based *products*. Replacing plastic bags with paper ones would be a start. umm. I'd like to see UK supermarkets replace their plastic bags with paper. Using paper instead of plastic for some products would encourage the planting of trees.
Will the swedes make a push in the EU at stopping tax-free fuel for air travel? Of course, that would be the end of cheap trips abroad but that's going to have to stop sooner of later.
I'd also like to see studies of mining operations in the asteroid belt and elsewhere in the galaxy. A space elevator is needed more than ever.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Folks, if the evidence is that it is all downhill from here, with respect to oil, then every day wasted in not massivly researching controlled nuclear fusion is just going to mean that much less power available later, when it is really needed. It does take time to turn successful research into power plants, after all. And, by "massive research" I mean that ALL the avenues should be explored, even the controversial ones like Pons/Fleischmann Cold Nuclear Fusion. Let's stop the arguing for a time, put a wad of money into it to END the debate one way or another, and if it doesn't work, move on to something else. There's still the proposed super-scaled-up Farnsworth Fusor, there's the new sonofusion results, and so on. Even traditional hot fusion could benefit from a major scale-up. Back in the early days it was noted how a donut-shaped magnetic field leaked because the magnetism was weaker on the outside of the donut than on the inside. But why use a TIGHT donut shape? How about something more like a bicycle inner tube, where the inner and outer radii are nearly the same? Put one of those in, say, the place where the SuperConducting SuperCollider had been planned (with something like a fifty-mile circumference), and the leakage problem all but disappears.
American companies switched to liters in the early 80s to hide the fact that they were replacing 350ci engines with 200ci engines in most mainstream cars.
Also, in America, anything that is European is automatically perceived to be more sophisticated (which is either good or bad, depending).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
There are NOT caverns down there, there are pores. A good reservoir rock might be up to 30% pores - 70% is still solid material. As oil is extracted from the top of a reservoir, groundwater tends to rise up from below under pressure to take its place. This is called water drive and is the main way oil is recovered from reservoirs in the early days of production. Gas pressure is a smaller component of production, but careful maintenance of gas pressure is needed, over-quick reduction can allow too-much water into the reservoir where it finds its way into the wells and brings an early end to production.
Subsidence is found in very few fields after prolonged extraction, most show no signs of the collapse you describe. The most famous subsidence is around Long Beach in California where there has been some 3m of subsidence - but no wholesale collapse because there isn't a hole to collapse into.
Campeche is receiving nitrogen injection because unlike many fields, Campeche does not receive a huge natural inflow of water into the reservoir below the oil. Water drive is normally relied on to push oil upwards; instead by injecting nitrogren above the oil, it acts to increase the pressure pushing down and keeps oil coming to the surface.
CO2 injection is a well-established technology in much of the US where it has been found that CO2 helps lower the viscosity of the crude. True carbon sequestration has been conducted by Statoil in the Sleipnir West gas field of the North Sea at a rate of approximately 1 million tonnes PA. The CO2 is recovered directly from the gas at the well-head as its concentration are above the legal limits imposed by European export limits.
Yes oil and gas extraction have been linked to Earth tremors at very shallow depth and are linked to the release of pre-existing stresses. The cause and effect of these tremors are well known from experiments conducted at Rangely in Colorado, where it was found tremors could be turned off and on by varying the rate of extraction. Similar tremors are known from fields in California, Texas and the North Sea.
The huge Sumatra 'quake was at great depth (30km) and distance from any hydrocarbon reserves. At 30km, even if oil source rocks existed, the oil would have been cracked into natural gas by a combination of pressure and heat. Furthermore, the physical characteristics of the 'quake are typical of those found in subduction zones, not the minor tremors found in oil fields.
There is no cause and effect between oil and gas production in Sumatra and the seismicity of the region - beyond the fact that the same tectonic pressures that caused the 'quake produce ideal conditions for the formation and entrapment of hydrocarbons.
The Kuwait fields may well have been damaged by a sudden release of pressure at the well-head when the Iraqis set off their explosives. This effect is well-known from oil-drilling history; many of the famous gushers of the early 20th Century that seemed to show vast resources were quickly followed by sudden collapses in production - the Spindletop field in Texas being the most famous example of what happens when pressures in fields are not controlled, it peaked in 1902 at over 17 million barrels p.a, but was down to less than 4 million in 1904.
There are good reasons to think that the harder we try to be efficient, the faster we'll end up using up our fossil fuels. Efficiency only works if the whole world cries out and does it at the same time. Failing that, someone in the world can, and will buy up the cheap oil in an effort to get ahead of those silly efficient people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I checked out your coordinates for the Shell gas works on maps.google.com. I don't see anything but empty ocean at that point. Are you sure you have the coordinates correct?
I challenge your assumption. A world population of less than 2 billion survived for tens of thousands of years before the use of petroleum products. That doesn't say diddlely about the current situation, where the population exceeds 6 billion. This recent increase in population (all of it within living memory: go talk to somebody in their 80s about their childhood) has been powered by fossil fuels. The continuing population growth is unsustainable without a continued increase in energy production and will probably follow the classic pattern of a short plateau (as increasing die-offs balance new births) followed by a catastrophic drop to sustainable levels.
I suggest that you review Economics 101, giving special attention to the reasonings of Malthus, and the reasons why his dismal predictions have not yet come true. You will find that his equations are correct and that his predictions have failed because new sources of energy have occasionally been added to the mix. Now for the first time an energy source is being gradually subtracted from the mix.... This is indeed dismal science.
And another part of the problem is warlords interrupting supply and 'taxing' (extorting money for passage) supplies being shipped. Often times there is plenty of food, but no safe way to deliver it in the quantity needed (air drops can only do so much). If the warlord of Iowa, for example, started blocking food shipments to Chicago you would see Katrina like things happening in Chicago also.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.
This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.
> If he is correct,
Don't worry, he is not.
> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.
Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?
> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.
The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.
Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Do you know why they are 20 times more expensive than normal bulbs? Because they take approximately 20 times more resources to make
20 times? Doing a quick look at lightbulbwarehouse.com I see a incandescent for 48 cents. A pin based florescent is $2.98. That's about 6.2 times as expensive, not 20. Secondly, since when were all resources equal in terms of environmental costs? I don't know what extra resources it takes to make a fluorescent, but what if it took more labor? That's not something we're exactly running out of, or something that people are talking about conserving.
You claim you won't save any money over the life of the bulb. Let's do that fairly simple calculation. On a 100 watt incandescent over 10,000 hours (which is the rated life of the fluorescent) you'll use 10,000*100/1000 kilowatt hours of electricity, or 1000 kilowatt hours. A Fluorescent uses about 1/4 of the energy to produce the same amount of light, so that's 10,000*25/1000 = 250 kilowatt hours. Around here electricy is pretty cheap at
The lifetime of the incandescent is 4000 hours (and I'm even giving you LONG LIFE incandescents), so you'll need to buy 2.5 bulbs, at a cost of $1.20. So the incandescent bulb saved you $2.98-1.20= $1.78 in bulb costs, but you paid an extra $52.50 in electric costs. That's an extra expense of $50.72 for the incandescent.
Now you claim that the florescents only last about as long as the normal bulbs. Ok, let's do that calculation. That's not true for most people but it's true for you, so let's say the florescent only lasts about as long as normal incandescents, which is about 1000 hours. You'll have to buy 9 more of them to get that same 10,000 hours. That's an extra $26.82 in bulb costs. You're STILL saving $50.72-26.82=$23.90
AccountKiller
Site showing a graph of U.S. oil production since 1973: www.hubbertpeak.com/us/
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett's congressional peak oil presentation is also quite good.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/05032 9132436.htm
If you make ethanol from corn, what you produce will not even be enough to run the tractors of your ethanol farm. If you count all the energy costs of farming, you consume six units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. And you destroy perfectly good land. This must be the dumbest investment ever, and the only reason people talk about it is because they want to win over "rural voters" who are slobbering for federal farming subsidies (tax handounts). Fucking leeches!
Ammonia can be produced without oil and farm equipment can be run on other technologies (such as hydrogen, batteries, or synthetic fuels) that are entirely grid powered. Our dependence on oil for farming is not fixed. It's based entirely on the fact that oil is cheap.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I first heard about Peak Oil about 2 years ago.
For a couple hours, I scanned websites, and read the ramblings of many predicting calamity and the end of the world...
These days, Peak Oil is getting more and more attention... But I don't worry about it...
As oil from current sources becomes more and more expensive alternative sources of energy become relatively cheaper... I heard recently that the oil sands in Canada have about as much oil as those in Saudi Arabia, but that it is 6 times more expensive to extract... Let's say gas suddenly costs 12 dollars per gallon... Well, I could afford to drive OCCASIONALLY... I would probably ride a bike to work... But it need not mean "The END of the WORLD! ARGH!" Like these Peak Oil nuts believe...
We currently have Nuclear power plants. We will not run out of oil over night, and these nuclear plants will not stop functioning immediatley... We will build more of these...
At worst, we MIGHT have to cut back on some consumption... But human ingenuity will satisfy demand...
td
hard core geek-ware
Ah, the beauty of one-dimensional thinking!
What about drilling for more oil to serve our (and emerging countries') current energy needs, while we build more nuke plants, ramp up alternative fuels, innovate with solar (a HUGE energy source), add more windfarms, research large-scale geothermal, and continue work on a hydrogen economy. Eventually we'll also get hydrogen fusion working as an energy source, which will effectively forever end energy as a bottleneck of human expansion and industrialization.
The Oort cloud is the limit! (For now at least...)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Parent is insightful. Was talking about this awhile ago, Malthus had come up.
I'll try to save the wikipedia link. Thomas Malthus noted that population grows exponentially(more people means more people to mate, which means more people...etc.). However, agricultural production grew at a linear rate(this is a rough simplification, plant a field, get a crop, plant 2 fields, get 2 crops).
Plotting the linear line and the exponential curve would have the two intersecting at some point. After this point, you don't have enough food to sustain further population growth, everyone at this point lives at only subsistence levels.
Inventing new technologies and using resources more efficiently is how this Malthusian equilibrium is thwarted. Agriculture hasn't grown as a linear line, instead we find "kinks" in it where technology increases the productivity faster than population growth.
Instead of referring to food in particular, you can imagine other resources in place of food, like energy. Unless we develop technology to produce energy at a rate faster than a growing population will consume it, we will be in deep doodoo.
We won't be able to sustain civilization by allowing supply and demand forces to shift us to accepting a lifestyle on little oil. Hopefully, the prices for oil will increase at a slow rate, slow enough that economies manage to struggle along while the high price on oil increases the economic profit of developing alternative energy sources.
The key is keeping alive long enough for new tech to appear. As long as the technology keeps being developed, we won't have to live at a Malthusian equilibrium. Faster technological development can be acquired by producing higher levels of education and research.
Speak for yourself. Actually, just operating at the TOP of the Maslow hierarchy is optimal. I am a passionate coder. An Amish way of life would mean for me to give up the thing I really like to do. Its like taking away a writer's pen or typewriter and forever denying him any chance of writing ever again. In short, "back to nature" means to give up LOTS of thinking and science. This may be your dream, but it is certainly not mine.
Also, you forget about the medical problems the Amish have.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
does the futures market still exist and continue to function as it presently does as demand exceeds supply by a significant amount? Oil supports the thing we like to call "the military/industrial complex" and there's a reason that the word "military" comes first. Who will do without? The military? I doubt it very much. Do they play by typical economic "rules" when they need something? History says that they don't... The real question here is what social and political evolution will occur to compensate for the gap between increasing demand and dwindling supply.
Peak Oil has been a constant discussion for years. This guy has some very interesting
info:
Peak Oil Debunked
Based on the information I've researched on the subject of alternative energy it becomes readily apparent that there is no silver bullet solution to oil. The available alternatives are all useful and should be developed but no single one of them can replace oil. It becomes more reasonable to start talking about solar and wind generation as a source of primary electricity which can be used for many things including production of synthetic fuel in the forms of biodiesel, ethanol, and as primary energy for thermal depolymerization, each of which would allow us to keep our current infrastructure while changing the source. A particular advantage of TDP is production of crude oil which can be used for all those nifty oil based products like plastic (and yes I know that they discuss plastic as the most effecient feed source for TDP, I refer to using organic feedsource). Also, solar and wind technologies (which is "free", discounting initial contruction costs and maintenece) can be used to generate the energy necessary to extract the less viable oils such as oil shale, tar sands, and some of the more energy intense forms of oil field extraction. And as we go alone we can start shifting to a more electricity based society for our transportation and production needs, i.e. electric cars and plants powered by electricity. A particularly important part of this will be transportation of this energy generated. As it stands at the moment long distance transmission of electricity results in huge losses to heat from the resistance in the lines. A solution to this would be a national network of superconducting transmission lines (similar in topography to the internet backbone) which would allow production of electricity anywhere without huge losses getting that energy back to civilization. These transmission lines are already in production and have been used on a limited scale in industrial applications, further development would allow us to lower cost and improve performance of them. Such a plan would eliminate problems of NIMBYism as you could place offensive and unsightly power plants in the middle of nowhere where nobody cares about what it looks/smells like. I would suggest vast solar generation in the Southwest, vast wind generation in the Rockies and Appalachians, and wave/tidal generation along the uninhabited areas of the coast. All of these technologies have had huge gains in efficiency and pricing as the demand for them has increased. Europe is leading the way in alternative energy with Germany recently installing wind turbines that are far more efficient than previous designs (and boy are they HUGE). And all the people that have talked about a changeover in terms of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Missions is absolutely correct. If you consider that a few billion dollars carefully utilized to setup such a system is trivial to the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS we've spent other countries (which happen to be major oil production nations) you begin to understand that the mouths will always be where the money is. But I contend that building such a system would benefit our enconomy far more than any other solution. It would be similar to the New Deal during the Depression, thousands of jobs would be created both during construction and the maintence afterwards. The Bush administration loves to talk about "national security" but true national security would be being free from extranational influence on the American way of life. Imagine an America where we are completely self-sufficient, all energy, raw materials, and consumable goods produced within our own borders. That sounds like national security to me.
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
Hotelling's rule... which assumes an otherwise stable economy. Of course, the problem is that diminishing petroleum supplies are likely to have substantial effects on the economy, including wide spread inflation.... which does what to interest rates?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
But the first-world lifestyle consumes vast amounts of energy. Energy production has peaked. So how does the third world get their cars and roads and air conditioning and TV sets?
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
How long do you think it's gonna take to get at that extra oil? How long do you think it's gonna last with our current usage? The answers are too long and not long enough, respectively.
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
Ok, lets agree on one thing. Oil is a finite resource. We are going to run out eventually.
Ok, now that we've agreed, lets also agree that there are significant, exploitable reserves left in the world, and additionally, left in the United States.
If "peak oil" has truly been hit, the only reason is because those significant reserves are not being exploited. And in almost all cases, this is happening because of political reasons. And people like you.
"The sky is falling!" is an excuse not to do anything: "Why should we exploit ANWR when it will only push back the clock for 10 years?"...because it will push back the clock for 10 years. Lets draw an analogy. A patient can have surgery that will allow him to live another 10 years, or he can die today. You guys would rather he die today.
The anti-oil people are ideological relatives of the "Earth First" crowd. Their goal is a massive reduction in world population and per capita energy consumption, and along with it, standard of living. Drilling in ANWR, exploiting offshore reserves, that stuff just pushes back the date when we can usher in Gaia and all million of us go back to living an agrarian or hunte gatherer life-style.
Humanity needs time. Time to build and generate alternatives to the petro-economy. Some of us actually like the benefits of an industrial, technological society and don't want to see it come crashing down around us because environmentalist idiots think that drilling in ANWR is going to be an ecological catastrophe. So when people start starving (because we can't make fertilizer or pesticides from oil by-products, and don't have gasoline to transport the food anyway), what do you think is going to happen to the cute curry animals? Famine is a worse ecological catastrophe than polution. Forests are burned and wild animals are slaughtered wholesale to stave off starvation in the third world.
The world needs time to transition. The neo-luddites like the parent of this post don't want to give the world time. They want those people to starve to death. You, your family, your friends, your city, state, country, your race, your species stands in the way of their vision for Gaia. Think of that the next time we consider voting to drill in ANWR or opening up some of the 98% of the coast in the US that is currently off limits for exploratory drilling.
Since Hummer owners want to drive a military-style vehicle, I think we should give them the full experience: every hummer should come with an all-expenses paid 6-month stint as a chauffeur in Baghdad. Nothing shows one's masculinity and patriotism more than Supporting the Troops, right?
I assume I can send the pool boy?
"There's a hundred years of coal in the US; even if coal has to take up the slack, big deal."
The deal is air quality. Maybe coal can be burned cleaner than oil. My bet is on: probably not.
"Basically, the worst thing that will happen is that worldwide economic growth will slow. "
Have you applied for a job at FEMA, I hear they are looking for someone with as much vision as Brownie. If that's really the worst you can imagine, I think you're in for a nasty surprise in the next decade when China comes knocking for energy.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The reduction in farmed land is pretty insignificant and takes place mostly on "highly erodable land" or in buffer zones around water. Neither of these are very appealing places to put back into rotation.
:-)
That's not entirely true. We've lost a lot of smaller farms as the farming industry has been consolidated into larger firms. As a result, we've dropped from 1.2 billion acres in the 1960's to ~968 million acres in 1997. That's over 200 million acres (or about 20% of previous capacity) to explain away as poor farmland!
The real answer is, of course, more complex. Farming technology has increased considerably, upping production across all farmland. Production is so high that it's been driving down prices and making it more profitable to convert the land to other uses. (Especially if it's not the creme de la creme of farmland to begin with.) Of the land that's left, the U.S. government actually pays farmers to leave some of it unfarmed. This helps prop up the market by artificially driving down supply to keep pace with the demand. If the demand were to suddenly rise, that farmland would become more profitable to use rather than leave empty.
The second point would be a good one except that replacing crude with corn would take a lot of land. Much more than we make up in increased yields.
That's my point, though. We can use the extra farmland we have lying around That 200 million acres could easily produce ~100 billion gallons of ethanol just from corn. Now if we factor in increases in Sugar Cane production (which is exceedingly poor in South America mostly due to farming through manual labor and wasteful burning of crop husks that could be recycled, and otherwise poor in the states due to overall low demand) we could easily produce enough Ethanol to offer E50 and E85 blends to all consumers. Futher increases in production plus the addition of Bio-diesel to power our trucking infrastructure could easily make up the difference to eliminate petroleum altogether.
In any case, there is a thread about algae elsewhere in this commentary that is worth thinking seriously about. There is also the possibility of using one of the microbes Venter found in his current voyage to extract hydrogen from water.
I'm definitely open to these sorts of concepts. However, in the short term Ethanol allows us to reuse our existing infrastructure and vehicles while new technologies mature and roll out to the market. Plus we have an existing supply to start from that can be ramped up with demand. For all we know, E85 blends with the petroleum coming from algea could be the way of the future.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"You can replace all of the world's power with a tiny fraction of the US desert southwest's almost worthless 50$/acre barren desert land alone with solar thermal (1.4kW/m^2, 20% atmospheric losses, 70% day/night/seasonal losses, 30% efficiency -> 100W/m^2 avg; 52M GJ/day -> 600 GW -> 6B m^2 -> 6000 km^2; New Mexico is 315,194 km^2)."
It's not exactly that simple. I'm not sure, but I don't think the highest space-grade solar cells get 30%. A better guess would be 10-15% for silicon solar cells. Now, there is the second problem. There is not enough high-grade sand to make that much square kilometers of silicon of the quality required to get that kind of efficiency. So, you would have to go to much lower quality sand, further reducing efficiency, but without reducing production cost. And there is the third problem. Silicon solar cells bottom out at around $5/Watt, so even if the other problems are dealt with you are looking at $3T just to build the total solar plant (not pricing distribution, land usage, political project delays, etc).
Now, that is not to say there isn't hope, because various labs/companies are working on non-silicon solar cells, and some labs are claiming target prices of $0.5-$1/Watt, and some claim good efficiencies too. Not all together (yet), and very much still in laboratory phase, not much experience with durability, etc. But it's hope.
My point is that it's not that simple, but we're on our way, and it needs more time.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I did say that cities are necessary for art. However it is a simple logical fallacy to take that to mean cities "cities exist to produce art / literature / culture." I agree with you that cities were formed initially around natural resources. In fact the oldest cities were formed around one central resource: water. Need for this resource is just as critical today as it was several thousand years ago. Cities that exist in fertial rivers basins have existed there for millenia. At the opposite end of the spectrum you have western ghost towns were a population sprang up around a resource (eg gold) that was quickly depleted leaving no further reason for the city to exist.
There are two essential things to notice, however. The first is that "resources" vary greatly by technology. Thousands of years ago salt was a valuable natural resource because there were no methods for extracting it from sea water economically. Now, however, there's no reason for a city to form around a salt deposit because it's simply not that rare. One thing that has increasingly become a resource, however, is the people themselves. If you look at the truly large cities like London or New York of Tokyo they don't exist because of some exploitable natural resource: the city becomes the resource. You stick the UN in New York because so many people are already there. So I disagree with your depiction of cities as transitory phenomena that sort of pop up and fade away as resources are found and exploited. As time goes by the natural resources become less rare, the cost of transporting them goes down, and the values of cities themslves (call it intellectual capital if you like) goes up. So cities increasingly become independent of transient economics.
The second thing to note is that cities don't just change where we live, they change how we live. The reason that cities are essential to the development of art and culture is simply this: they allow people to specialize. If you have 10,000 people spread out over 10,000 square miles they can not efficiently all trade with one another and therefore everyone has to be a generalist. If you have 10,000 people in 1 square mile you allow for specialization. Basic economics teaches that specialization and trading ALWAYS result in greater aggregate production by definition. It's this surplus of production that allows people to dedicate more or all of their time to fulfilling non-immediate needs. Translation: they can work on anything from epic poetry to particle physics as a direct result of the fact that they live in proximity to other people.
Now of course the definition of "proximity" also changes with technology. If we ever have the tech to reliable just bean oursleves around then - while gathering points would still be important - there would be less need for us to congregate in order to specialize. On a lesser scale the car has done this already - allowing suburban sprawl (although in my opinion this is a bad thing).
So - to respond directly to your post - I think your "dead animal" analogy is inherently flawed. Cities are no longer built around the dead animal of fossil fuels. If that were true - the oil fields would be huge metropolises. Clearly wateris more important and transport of fossil fuels is cheap enought that even though our cities depend on fossil fuels their location is independent of the location of those resources. So if you take fossil fuels away and replace them with any other power source the need for having cities is literally unchanged. Ur and Babylon existed well before industrialization and served the same purposse then as cities do today: provide an environment favorable to specialization.
Once you realize that the question of living in cities is wholly independent from fossil fuels (and while we're at it I think cities are more efficient than maintaining the same standard of living in a distributed environment) you realize that if the Mars colonies are pissed about a lack of resources it will be due to suburbanization - not urbaniza
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Mass is conserved. You're removing about 75,000 lb of matter (perhaps 80% of it carbon) from each acre of this system (per year). This has to come from somewhere. Where's that?
Oh yeah, he forgot to mention that the system also removes huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping to mitigate that other big problem, climate change (formerly known as "global warming"). I just knew there had to be a catch! Bastard!
Seriously: yes, you've correctly pounced on a less-than-fully-technically-accurate use of the phrase "closed-loop system". You could have just invoked Thermodynamics: "Ha-ha! It's not a closed system because it's using energy from the sun!" Or even simpler: "Oh yeah, wise guy? If it's a closed system, how are you gonna get teh oil out?"
Of course the biodiesel has to be made out of something. The point is that it can be a resource-friendly system because it can be a sorta "closed-ish loop", with respect to irrigation.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}