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Comprehensive Projection of World Oil Exports
Prof. Goose writes, "This article is a comprehensive assessment of world oil exports, defined has the total amount of liquid hydrocarbons that are surpluses in producing countries. This assessment is made by projecting into the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in all countries where presently the difference between the two factors is positive. The outcome of this assessment is rather worrisome." Here is the money graph through 2020.
Until after the elections, that is.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
The only worrisome thing I see about this projection is that it's based on extending current trends into the future.
Probably because it's easier than predicting how technological innovation and the ebb and flow of the global economy will totally change the entire equation long before these simplistic predictions ever come due.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I'm not worried about these projections, I create my own oil by living off a strict diet of pizza and cheetos. Sometimes the squeezing is a bit labor intensive, but as soon as I figure out how to make gasoline out of my oily skin I'm on the road to riches!
http://vancouvercondo.info
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If the "money graph" loads slowly, I had better luck with the Coral Cached version:
r ters/ExportsAll.png
http://picodopetroleo.net.nyud.net:8080/temp/expo
The makers of that "money graph" don't seem to know how to do any extrapolation. Canada shows a decline in exports for the next 15 years which is absurd. As the Alberta Tar Sands become more and more viable Canada's exports will increase substantially. Shell is already heavily invested out there and so are numerous other oil companies. If anyone is interested they can check some of the statistics.
Given any graph of past oil production and future oil production predictions, one can always tell when it was produced.
The peak is always right NOW, and we are always about to enter a long term decline.
If all you chicken-little sky-is-falling types believe that graph (again), why aren't you fully vested in oil futures ?
Would people vote for a presidential candidate if he said something to the effect "I promise to increase taxes for the sole purpose of implementing whatever technology is prudent to quickly wean ourselves from foreign oil." My guess is no so we will just have to wait until the price of oil goes through the roof, crippling the economy before anything significant happens.
Predictions of the future from a one-sided, partisan anti-oil/peak-oil site?
What could possibly be more credible than that?
I have a story from the Sony web site saying the PS3 "rules". I guess I should have submitted it.
That's right folks, we're all going to starve!!!. Run for the hills, it's all over.
If anyone cares, the world is destined to run out of raw silver reserves long, long before it runs out of oil. Dozens of analysts are expecting a COMEX default on silver futures within the next couple years. It might not seem like a big deal, but just watch what happens to the price of silver when it does...
(Silver is used in tons of medical equipment. There's a lot of nanotechnology research being done to develop a good substitute, but its still years off)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
A report, based on SHELL OIL's predictions, suggesting that we might be running out of oil?! A surprise, one thinks not!
I honestly fail to see how this is "worrisome", it's great!
//0xFE
This means that we will run out of oil long before carbondioxide makes the world uninhabitable.
Well, you really don't want to factor future technological developments into the predictions, because that encourages people to just keep doing what they're doing, and might cause the technological developments that you were counting on, to never be introduced.
... and the crisis ends up being worse.
The point of these predictions, IMO, is to show us what will happen if we just keep bumbling along, doing what we're currently doing.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars
It's a self-defeating prophesy: if you make it look like we're going to do better than we're currently on target to do, taking no corrective action, then you encourage us to not take any.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Slashdot is like the hydrocarbon freak out center now...
The editors feel the future is doomed and its all the fault of industrialization / mechanization / tech level increases.
And this site used to pretend it was for the cyber punk. Now it is nothing but a grunting luddite...
F.S.U. is the second-largest exporter, just after Saudi Arabia. Who are they?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
If we could find a way to convert the oil from all the pubescent teens into fuels! We would cure acne and energy sustainability in one fell swoop.
C 3F-4A52-B544-24EF22343774.htm
All our oil reserves are dwindling...that is until new oil reserves are discovered: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/48651C0F-D
P226
I'm not attempting to dismiss the issues with using non-reusable fuels or the need for alternatives (both in terms of supply, and environmental reasons) but the fact that we have a fairly complex, somewhat erratic graph with a general increase, but with some steady periods and some occasional (fairly dramatic) dips over the 40 years of "real" data, followed by what amounts to a freefall in his 'extrapolation' makes me think that it is, at best an oversimplification, and quite possibly outright misleading.
The "money graph" shows that oil production is peaking "now" and will decline indefinitely.
Does that strike anyone else as somewhat.. skeptical?
They basically project that what we're getting *RIGHT NOW* is the most we'll ever get. Considering that oil production has basically been increasing for the past 20 years (graph), that's some leap to make.
It shows Canada steady, then declining, at about 1 Mb/day. The Canadian petroleum producers estimate it will increase to 4.8 Mb/day by 2020. It's all oil sands, so there's nothing hard about finding and extracting it (it's just expensive to do). Even the original paper the graph is from says it will increase to 2.8 by 2020, so the graph must be showing something else?
I don't know what this has to do with geekery or nerdology.
...maybe some business forum has been getting all our nerd news stories lately...
Seems like it should be posted on some business forum or something.
There's something that has to be said at the start of every discussion about "The end of Oil."
"We lived for thousands of years before Oil, and we'll live for thousands of years after oil; just not quite the same."
Yes, without being in transition to a full replacement for oil when we run out (of economically priced oil) we'll have a tough time. Probably be riots, war, social collapses. But as a species, we'll survive. And today, international cooperation has given me hope that alot more of us and our countries will survive. Sure, we're not sitting 'round the fire at the UN singing Kumbaya, but we haven't had a "real" world war in quite a while! We may not be in the best of situations, but it won't be the end of all civilization.
Demented But Determined.
of Warcraft.
As Sowell would say, there is not a shortage of oil - there is only a shortage of oil at today's prices.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
I mean who can take these folks seriously? Oil production will never peak, because oil is an infinite resource. When you want more, you pump more out of the ground. How hard is this to understand?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...which is nothing to panic about, because by then our Apollo program will have devised a way to move the starving masses to Mars.
You can always rely on good old progress.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I give up.
/.; it's fark.
It's not
Oh, look there's a new BOFH. Nope, just an ad that starts with BOFH. Bastards.
Scientific American used to be a pretty good magazine, too.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
The global supply of blood has dwindled, proving the theory that recent wars are an attempt to balance the blood-oil equilibrium.
...they need to invest some time in readability. Squashing a bitmap to a smaller size and leaving it unreadable (on the front page, no less) is a big red flag that this was thrown together by people who aren't bothering to do a thorough job. Sure, maybe if I click through I'll get the full-size bitmap in all its pie-wedge glory, but given the obvious lack of thought and review signaled by that graph, I'm not very inclined to read any further.
-- Old Man Kensey
FSU - Former Soviet Union
That can't be. In Former Soviet Union, oil used to export YOU!
Sadly, I am afraid I don't see Pat Riley on that pie chart.
Well, good old progress has allowed us to produce a lot more food than we could back in the 70s, when people were fond of predicting we'd all be dead of starvation by now, on account of there being too many of us to ever possibly feed.
As it turns out, the population has grown as predicted, but progress managed to keep up.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
In other words, we're not your daddy's peak oil site. Read the site at least a bit (and know what you're talking about) before you spout off like that, eh?
There was a lengthy article in the Economist magazine about how oil isn't running out. As technology improves, new oil reserves (such as the sand ones in Canada come on line).
Does anyone believe that this info is "new", or do you believe that this info has been well known to oil corp execs for years, even decades?
--
make install -not war
I love, really love, all the stats that show that We Are At Peak Oil Right Freaking Now (And Then We Will Plummet Like Mad). This to me is like saying The World Will End On October 18, 2006, So Repent Now Or Perish.
If maybe these studies showed We Hit Peak Oil Three Years Ago And Now We See A Definite Downward Trend, or even We Will Hit Peak Oil In About Ten Years, Give Or Take, then there may be something to it, but this Hey, Peak Oil Is Right Now, We Swear stuff just sets off my We Really Don't Know When The Fuck Peak Oil Will Be alarm.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Finally, everybody is starting to realize we only have a few years' worth of oil left. Duh! It's been that way for DECADES!
We now know that's wrong. The increase in prices from $20/bbl to $60/bbl only produced a modest increment in supply, and very little of that increase is from new sources. It surprises economists how inelastic oil supply is is, but it doesn't surprise geologists. Read Deffeyes. There is no remaining "long tail" in oil. Once there was, but we're in the tail already. The easy fields were pumped out years ago. There's never been another Spindletop, at 80,000bbl/day from one well, back in 1900. The US average today is ten barrels a day per well.
Demand is also rather inelastic. The runup from $20 to $60 resulted in about a 1% decrease in consumption.
The issue is not can you make money doing it.
The issue is can it be done at a net energy profit.
I'd be more optimistic if we were looking for ways to turn hudson's bay into a hydroelectric site to run the pumps.
That graph is one of the reasons I've held off on having kids. You better hope those guys at Steorn have something. Or sometime, between now and ~2030, someone comes up with something similar. Or makes fusion work. Or we're all toast.
..don't panic
No, not at all.
Predictions need to be made in a clear "if, then (uncertainty)" format.
That is, every time someone makes a prediction, they should be clear about the assumptions which are being used to create it. E.g., rather than just saying "Oil production will peak in 2007," it should be said, "If current rates of consumption and production continue, then oil production will peak in 2007, plus or minus two years." It states the assumptions, the prediction itself, and the uncertainty with which the prediction is being given.
That said, I maintain that the most useful predictions for people to understand, are the ones which extrapolate a current trend into the future, adding the minimum number of additional 'ifs.' Saying "if we continue to do x, then there is a y chance that z will happen," is not a scare tactic, it's honesty. Including a lot of trends, such as future technological developments which are difficult to predict, into the 'if' part of the statement, just make the prediction more difficult to use and increase its ultimate uncertainty.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The exchange of opinions and critique in the comments that follow the study are interesting, and worth reading. Be sure to take a look at those. This study seems familiar. Isn't one of these done every five or ten years? And the outlook is always worrisome. And then, ten years later, the "revised" outlook is again worrisome, while predictions of the past ten years turned out to be off-the-mark.
Perhaps this study is correct, and fuel shortages will pin the price of gasoline at $30 per gallon in 2020...I'd bet that other energy technologies will have made leaps and bounds by then, and petroleum will not be a problem for most economies.
Perhaps water and fresh air will be the problem...a sci-fi book or two are coming to mind...
Using energy, particularly derived from fossil fuels, is a RIGHT! Nay, an OBLIGATION!
Only a terrorist or a commie pinko would think of energy usage as a cost, something to be balanced and minimized!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What we always do when we run out of one thing is to substitute another. When we run out of liquid petrolium, we will substitute agricultural wastes. http://www.changingworldtech.com/ If we could do that now, we would no longer need to import oil.
o .jsp?osti_id=10158212
The oil from turkey guts thing seems a little over-rated right now but at the present cost of oil, it is profitable. We also have many energy from waste projects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy We can also depolymirize coal. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.bibli
I'm not remotely worried about running out of oil. I am, however, worried about greenhouse gasses. Fortunately, some of the oil substitutes are carbon neutral. In that regard, running out of oil might be a good thing.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/9/8/11274/836 38
we'll never get as much oil out of that as you've heard, my friend.
Actually, according to Shrub and co., there's plenty of oil and the economy is fine, unless the Democrats take over Congress and the White House, in which case the world will end and the terrorists will win!
You are advocating blatant propaganda, and the manipulation of poblic opinion through the biased use of what should be a neutral source of information and analysis.
Not at all. Not even slightly.
On the contrary, I'm saying that predictions should be made with the minimum of error-inducing assumptions.
Simply assuming that we'll develop (and implement!) some technology that will reduce our oil consumption seems very dangerous. Particularly since, in making the prediction yourself, you're altering the chances of that assumption being right.
Rather than packing all sorts of potentially unwarranted assumptions into the prediction, I think it's more scientifically valid to take what is known right now, and extrapolate it into the future, so that the reader can be presented with a clear if-then statement, along with an estimate of the certainty of the extrapolation. I.e., 'If some trend continues, this will probably be the effect.'
Unless the paper or report also has an in-depth discussion of the likelihood of various technological developments, I don't think that it is generally appropriate to include them in a prediction, since the reader will probably not have the information necessary to judge whether it's valid or not.
In short, building in predictions about future technological developments to the prediction seems far more prone to propagandization than simply drawing out a straight trendline based on currently accepted consumption and production/exploration data. The latter may not be valid for very long, but is at least easier for a reader to understand, interpret, and choose whether to believe.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
On "The Mythbusters," I was amazed to see how ordinary strained vegetable oil would power a diesel car. I was under the impression that you had to do a lot more to the old oil. I do understand that some (rubber?) parts of your engine will have to be changed for long-term use, but I am still impressed.
Dark Reflection
And how do we produce all that food? With petroleum-based fertilizers. We're using a finite resources that's getting harder and harder to come by to feed an exponentially growing number of people.
This topic always has people saying, "There's always been a fix for this kind of problem. We'll find the next one when we need it." OK, probably we will next time. And the next time. But if we keep pushing our luck, we're going to come up dry one of these days.
Now, I'm willing to do that feed people. But to indulge people's SUV habit? Uh uh.
No the peak they predict was past in 2005. Opec are cutting production because they claim they want to keep the price high, but it's $60 already. Protected reserves like Florida gulf and National wildlife reserves are being opened up, they total less than a years world consumption.
It's not really a prediction, more an observation of why oil is expensive and fluctuates wildly based on demand. Welcome to the peak, the demand dictates the price, and the supply only keeps pace.
Lots of agricultural regions of the world (and others) are having trouble with freshwater supplies, minable phosphates (a key component of artificial fertilizers) are nearing exhaustion, and other resource and climate effects are threatening food production, as well. We could very well see a crisis in food production in the not too distant future.
The study, though academically interesting was pragmatically dead before it was even published. It doesn't even begin to look at the entire global market; just a subset of it. And based on this subset that leaves out some of the world's largest consumers, they make projections on the future world oil market.
The basics of simulation dictate that you can't make predictions if your model inputs with the most significant gains (ratio of input move size to output response size) are left out of the model. Otherwise disturbances in the variables with larger gain are going to overwhelm the smaller gain variables. Right now I would say that China and India are large gain inputs to any projection of world oil markets. And this guy left them out.
Well, good old progress has allowed us to produce a lot more food than we could back in the 70s, when people were fond of predicting we'd all be dead of starvation by now, on account of there being too many of us to ever possibly feed.
As it turns out, the population has grown as predicted, but progress managed to keep up.
Too bad we've used up all the oil doing it.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
I'd rather not see Canada turn into a toxic wasteland and increase CO2 emissions so that Americans can keep driving their SUVs.
... it'll be becase of those bad old Americans who just came up and stole that oil in the middle of the night from the poor ignorant Canadians, and not because they willingly sold it on the open market for the going price.
Uh huh
Just keep in mind that a transaction requires a buyer and a seller. That oil isn't going anywhere unless the Canadians decide to sell it. If they want to sell it despite the environmental damage that it will do, that's their decision. You can't really blame the buyers for that.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Okay, so I skimmed that article. All these graphs and charts seem to be based on a non-zero origin - the export quantity of oil. Shouldn't you start with the total capacity of oil (not just exports), then subtract the projected use of oil to get a net supply-demand curve and extrapolate dollars (or future world collapse) from there?
Also, this whole discussion misses an enormous fact of economics - as one item gets expensive, consumers will find substitutes of comparable value to fill their needs. There is debate over the CPI in the US, as they use a (relatively) fixed shopping list. If the price of beef (for instance) doubles, people will eat more chicken until a more equitbale price point returns for beef. "Alternative" energy isn't quite as well developed, but we are seeing direct reactions to the oil prices of the last few years (I like to tell my Republican friends that I paid less than a dollar a gallon for gas at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, and I'm disappointed that their President has cost me more in gas than he has saved me in tax cuts). The movement of energy supply and demand moves on a larger time scale - several years to decades - simply due to the infrastructure required. Peak Oil, whenever it occurs, will not be an "event" but rather a long term, low angle curve which is extended indefinitely by technology and evolutinary changes in the energy market.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
We don't know how long PEX will really last. CPVC is no longer very wisepread. PB piping here appears to be caught up in litigation, too. There just isn't a 100 year track record on the stuff. I know of hydronic systems which have failed using it (though they are anecdotal, at best).
The fact is that copper works. It has its drawbacks (degradation under certain hard water conditions, water hammer effects), but it's durable and proven. If I'm building a half-million dollar house I plan to live in for the next 40 years, do I save the $800 on PEX over copper? Probably not. If I'm a builder with a 1 year statutory liability and 100 houses to build, I save that $80,000 and go buy me a new boat.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My father is a pres. of Shell USA and a VP of Shell Intl.
If that is true, you're the only one on slashdot who will buy a PS3. That is more shocking than anything you can tell us about oil.
n/t
All this is nothing, just analysts going at it again. The real shockers will come when we decide to invade/bomb another country with large contributions to the oil markets (let's say Iran). It is the news that makes the market move, the rest is a load of BS coming from people who have no idea what the earth holds or where, and that is being revealed on a non-regular basis.
Always good to be very prudent, but keep the tinfoil hats for the real situations.
You say that if we keep pushing our luck, sooner or later it's going to run out.
I say that if our luck consistently doesn't run out, after a while it's not really luck anymore, is it?
We don't say the cheetah is "lucky" because it's able to run so fast. We don't say the albatross is "lucky" because it's able to fly so far. Why should we say that it's "luck" that humans are naturally adaptive to changing conditions?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
There may be a large *amount* of reserves in the tar sands of Canada and the heavy oil of Venezuela, but it's useless if you can't produce it at a rate fast enough to keep up with global demand and the decline of old fields. I really do hope that new sources of energy can replace oil because the alternative is a doomsday collapse scenario. The risk here is the time lag between the market signal of high oil prices and the commercial availability of alternative transportation fuels in useful quantities. Even with rising oil prices, there will be a few boom and bust cycles where low oil prices make alternative energy unprofitable, and private investment will be risky.
We used up all the oil? That explains why the price per barrel hit $200 in the 80s, and has been going steadily up ever since... only, not so much.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
I live in Europe and I pay 1.25 USD approx per litre of diesel.
My car consumes about 6 - 6.5 litres per 100 kms . I get about 1000 kms on a tank at a rough cost of @ 80 USD. My car is also 150 bhp. It is very nice. That is efficient compared to your average US gas guzzler. Cars keep getting more powerful and more wasteful.
The focus should be on efficiency.
As far as I am concerned oil is too cheap.
All our problems can be solved by more efficient engines.
Dude, cheetahs will go extinct in our lifetime. They were doing fine as long as there were plenty of gazelles to eat. But soon, no more gazelles. And no more oil.
It seems that politics have invaded the issue. To propose stewardship of available resources or suggest conservation causes many to assume you are liberal.
It's a dangerous connection, I fear that the consequence of this becomming a political point of contention is that nothing will happen until the damage is done. Then both sides will likely blame each other.
I'm planning on purchasing a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" and hiding it away for awhile. Either way, it will be interesting to see it again when the kids are older.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Modern agricultural productivity is heavily dependent upon cheap energy. From the machines to the fertilizers and pesticides. The majority of advances in food production have come with the energy usage price tag. Although I figured the exaggeration of "all the oil" would be an obvious quip, the point still stands. If cheap energy is not available, food production will suffer.
It's an eventuality that we have to deal with, whether it's the late 2010's or 2050's, oil production will decline. Investing in the diversification of cheap energy sources cannot possibly work against us. Oh wait, scratch that, with the current leadership here in the US, we're likely to waste all the money through Congressional corruption. Switchgrass anyone?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Man, who knew Florida State had so much friggn' oil!
BUy HOT OiL ST0CK now, also, BUy ViaGRAA W1Th tH3 $$$$ YOU WILL M4KE S0 YOU CAN b0nE s0me HOUSEWIVES.
The outcome of this assessment is rather worrisome.
Well, isn't that the point?
I mean, I took temperature measurements from 5 different hours this morning and got the following results:
5am = 35 F
6am = 40 F
7am = 45 F
8am = 50 F
9am = 55 F
By midnight, trends indicate it's going to be around 130 degrees F! I need to post this on the intarweb, so everyone will know that the sky is indeed falling. My conservative projections prove it.
-Styopa
Given the professional "look" and general "sound" of the article, I am surprised at the quantity of typos that made it past the editors. I'm still in college--not in big business yet--but is this the norm out there? Was I taught all this spelling and grammar for nothing?
Some examples from the article:
"The well know [sic] energy crisis of the past . . . "
"Production stands at 9 Mb/d giving a low depletion rate of 1.9%,, [sic] which itself is reason to doubt the higher official reserve estimates [sic] The country is endeavouring [this, I think is a Britishism, not a mistake] to offset the natural decline of its aging fields . . . " Two errors very close together! In case you didn't catch; the second mark is for the lack of a period between sentences. It's "the new grammar."
"Sweet Oil production in Saudi Arabia has likely peaked leaving the country in some sort of momentarily [sic] difficulties . . . "
"Still this last estimate is used which make [sic] it plausible for Saudi Arabia to continue producing liquid hydrocarbons at rates in excess of 11 Mb/d."
"we tentatively favour an [sic] figure of about 60 Gb . . . "
The list would go on if I continued through the rest of the article.
I'm not saying these errors detract from the informational value of the article (facts remain true whether or not they are spelled correctly), but it does cause the reader to wonder about the sophistication of the author, and therefore the validity of the conclusion. It also causes the reader to doubt the thoroughness of the author's work, and shows that is was not likely peer reviewed, etc.--the implications go on. In other words, although facts remain true whether or not they are spelled correctly, the reader has to wonder if the author's claimed factual premises to his conclusion are facts at all!
And this site used to pretend it was for the cyber punk. Now it is nothing but a grunting luddite...
Or, more likely, those of us who pay for energy are concerned that there are no coordinated plans to replace oil, which is very definitely a finite resource and will run out at some point (whether or not you agree with the predictions in TFA, but not even the oil companies are pretending the supply is infinite. The only area of disagreement is "when").
The point here is that as the cost of energy rises it will become progressively more expensive to develop and build the infrastructure to replace oil. So we have the option of deciding there isn't a problem and let market forces shape demand once the price rises (which is too late), or we can make an issue of it now before it affects us, act while we have abundant, cheap energy, and reap the benefits of selling new technologies to the developing world, cleaner air in major cities, and less geo-political instability ($337,000,000,000 would buy a lot of fusion research, but apparently its better spent protecting the existing finite energy supply).
So no, it isn't a fear of the future, per se, its a fear of the future without cheap electricity; that truly is a geek's concern. If anything, continued support for the hydrocarbon economy is the luddite's realm...
Blank until
Dude, cheetahs will go extinct in our lifetime. They were doing fine as long as there were plenty of gazelles to eat. But soon, no more gazelles. And no more oil.
So you are proposing we start to mass-produce cloned gazelles as a solution to peak oil? That's brilliant! Now we only need to figure out how to increase the number of pirates to offset the CO2-emissions from the added oil production.
Cheetahs have a problem because their key surival trait is "run faster than gazelle, and catch them". When a cheetah runs out of gazelle, it's pretty much doomed, on account of its key survival trait suddenly being useless.
Our key survival trait isn't actually "consume oil", but rather "adapt to changing conditions". When humans run out of oil, we're pretty much not doomed, on account of our key survival trait being optimized for exactly that kind of situation.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This assessment is made by projecting into the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in all countries where presently the difference between the two factors is positive. The outcome of this assessment is rather worrisome."
Because the study selected the data so it WOULD look worrisome - deliberately cherry-picking the data by excluding ALL countries where the trend went the other way.
Eventually the supply will tighten - and the price will rise and STAY up, driving energy conservation and substitution of other energy sources. But this study has nothing to do with that. It is an exercise in use of a standard statistical-methods cheat to create an illusion.
See _How to Lie with Statistics_ for more.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You say that if we keep pushing our luck, sooner or later it's going to run out.
I say that if our luck consistently doesn't run out, after a while it's not really luck anymore, is it?
And if wishes were limosines, beggars would ride in style. Face it, our luck can run out. Powerful civilisations can fall over in a big heap before beacuse they exhaust thier resources. It has happened before.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Oops. I misread the text. The "positive" difference was whether they're exporters, not the trend. My appologies to the authors and those quoting them.
Go ahead and panic. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The world exports only a tiny amount of oil, and of that only a completely insignificant fraction has left the solar system.
I'd worry far more about the oil we use on-planet.
The only problem with SUVs are the people that just use the to drive to work and home.
Not a majority of the owners.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A lot of the advances we have made in the last 50 years to get us past problems like this because of petroleum. When the chemical that has got us past these issues goes away, then what?
I don't know the answer, but i do know I want people working on a solution...or at least a plan.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
But in order to adapt to new conditions you have to admit that they exist. It's not enough to say, "Oh well, when things get nasty we'll probably think of something."
Basically, you're arguing that we're so smart, we might as well be stupid. Not a sound strategy.
You've got to be kidding. Most SUVs are used for offroading and actual work? Not the hundreds I see every day. Most of their owners would be too afraid of scratching the paint!
Who's wishing? I'm referring to the historical record, and the plain fact that after hundreds of thousands of years of vicissitudes, humans are still here.
And it will undoubtedly happen again. Yet here we are, a mere millenium and a half after the Roman collapse, bigger and better than ever before. That's the trend I'm referring to: Not the trend of civilizations rising and falling, but the trend of humanity enduring, and adapting, and surviving, and rising again to even greater heights after each inevitable fall.
If this kind of adaptability and survivability showed up once or twice, I'd call it luck, and wish for more. But when it turns out to be the normal thing, repeated constantly throughout all of human history, it stops being luck and starts being the fundamental nature of the human species.
We adapt. We endure. We survive. We build and grow and prosper. We respond to setbacks not by going extinct, but by overcoming them and growing beyond them. This isn't wishing. This is a reasonable interpretation of the historical record.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You ***could*** infer internet acronyms on world oil production and see the following:
Kb = thousand barrels
Mb = million barrels
but:
Gb = giga barrels???
It's billion. BILLION.
What's next... KGb?
thousand, million, (and in the UK I believe thousand-million, and then), billion, trillion, quadrillion, etc!!!
Go back to grade school.
What are you wittering about? Its a study of oil exports, says so in the title. There is no point in talking about net consumers in that context. The point is, if its not there to export, its not there to buy and those net consumers will have to make do with what's left. What more frightening is that even though peak of production looks to be in the 2010 timeframe, peak in exports is earlier (eg now).
Economists tend to magic model numbers out of thin air, expecting them some how to be created, by someone else. Your numbers for China, India and the US growth only make sense if that magic happens. They are not input variables, they are output. The real world isn't the same as an economists' dream.
In any case, we approach with speed the point at which supply and demand graph predictions part company. If you're right we have no problems to look forward to; if I'm right we stand on the edge of a long lasting depression that will rewrite the entire game. May you live in interesting times.
You don't need to look much further than Afghanistan or Somalia to see what happens when that slips away.
I'll start to be mildly concerned when the $2 Shops (as they're called in Australia) cease to be able to fill their stores with cheap plastic crap from China. (However, my joy at seeing the end of the $2 Shops will no doubt overwhelm any worries about "peak oil".) We have lots of give in the consumption of oil through the manufacture of plastic -- so much stuff that's produced could simply stop being produced and the world wouldn't care.
Slashdot usually provides a forum where it would be hard to tell what continent people are from, at least from their attitudes. Generally intelligent people seem to have plenty in common wherever they sit. However, this discussion is fascinating - and seems, to a European, to shed more light on attitudes towards climate change than any amount of direct media coverage.
The conversation is about whether oil prices will lead to riots, whether we'll have neough oil for the future, etc.
Surely the sooner we run out of oil the better - a 20 year transition to fuels which don't wreck the planet would be a good thing. It's easy in gas-guzzler land to forget about the effects of climate change on the rest of the world - but it's probably the biggest issue our planet faces now, and barely gets a mention among this usually considered and intelligent crowd...
The only problem with SUVs are the people that just use the to drive to work and home.
That entirely depends on how far away home and work are. A 2 mile commute in an SUV is less harmful than a 50 mile commute in a Prius. That's why I support a higher gas tax rather than fuel-economy standards: it attacks the problem directly, rather than through an inaccurate proxy.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
In comfort and prosperity, obviously. There's a couple catches, though: One is, there's actually no compelling evidence that modern civilization will collapese between here and my grandchildren. The other is, there's actually no compelling evidence that there's really anything we can do today to prevent a hypothetical collapse from hypothetically occurring. I think my grandchildren will have much greater control over their own fate than I ever will.
The way I see it, this means we really have no fucking clue how this will play out.
Actually, we do have a clue: how things played out the last seventeen times the human race was faced with a new and unprecedented set of conditions: humans survived and prospered in the long run.
Fair enough, but don't forget that to begin with, no place on earth had the things you say slipped away from Afghanistand and Somalia. Every society on earth started out like Afghanistan and Somalia, and built from there. And the overall trend has been upwards, towards a better tomorrow.
It's obvious that suffering is part of the human conditioning, and that we bring a lot of our suffering on ourselves.
But the trend in human history is one of consistently overcoming hardship, recovering from setbacks, and building a better tomorrow.
I don't think that something as trivial as an oil shortage will be the magic bullet that ruins humanity. There's no precedent for it. Sure, it could happen. But it'd be pretty much the opposite of a predictable outcome.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
So when are Hummers going to come standard with a Freedom Flame on top?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Missing in the article was any assessment of the exploration potential of 100,000+ miles of continental shelf around the world. The Chevron find in the gulf of Mexico is an example of what awaits.
an ill wind that blows no good
Our dependance on oil could be alleviated if someone would pick up on my idea to harvest energy from gyms and kids playgrounds.
:)
Maybe you could get a rebate on your power or gas bill by taking your kids (and the neighbours kids!) to the park to play on a power generating see-saw
That upward trend is heavily dependent on the location and timeslice. Europe didn't recover for 500 years after the fall of Rome. Cold comfort to someone stuck in the middle of it.
I always thought that markets consist of supply and demand instead of just supply.
I think the USA is still the largest producer of oil. They just don't export any. But US reserves are a lot lower than other countries. So the US will have to compensate by importing more soon. The Soviet Union used to produce more oil, but they also consumed a lot more. Russia these days is a lot different. How about demand. Where is the oil going at the moment and how will it shift. China is growing very fast at the moment.
So just showing the exporting (and not even the oil drilling) countries and not the other side is incomplete.
And it will undoubtedly happen again. Yet here we are, a mere millenium and a half after the Roman collapse, bigger and better than ever before.
Right, and in between we had the Dark Ages. If you had told the Romans that their civilization was about to collapse, but not to worry because after a thousand years of wretched barbary and ignorance that a new enlightened civilization would arise, do you think they wouldn't have worried?
If this kind of adaptability and survivability showed up once or twice, I'd call it luck, and wish for more. But when it turns out to be the normal thing, repeated constantly throughout all of human history, it stops being luck and starts being the fundamental nature of the human species.
Adaptability is without a doubt an aspect of the human species, and it isn't "luck" any more than a cheetah running fast is luck. However depending on adaptability to bring us through any particular calamity, particularly when we cannot name what form that adapatability would have to take, is indeed luck. Just like being able to run fast doesn't guarantee a cheetah's survival -- being able to sprint won't produce game for them to hunt. Being able to understand and utilize new sources of energy won't cause one to appear.
I've read before that it is believed that mankind barely survived the last major ice age, with the worldwide population dropping to under a hundred individuals. However you slice it, that was a lucky break. For whatever reason that those hundred survived, it was clearly not an attribute common to humans in general, who for all their adaptability were unable to survive the harsh conditions. While those few may have had a (lucky) genetic advantage, I suspect it was more the praticulars of their environment. Which could have easily been different, and a hundred humans easily could have easily been wiped away by a thousand things that no amount of 'adaptability' would overcome.
We adapt. We endure. We survive. We build and grow and prosper. We respond to setbacks not by going extinct, but by overcoming them and growing beyond them. This isn't wishing. This is a reasonable interpretation of the historical record.
You can only say that we have failed to go extinct for the period that our species has existed, perhaps 100,000 years, which would hardly impress many other species. The dinosaurs had a reign of tens of millions of years before being wiped out. If you had gone off of historical trends during the late Cretaceous, you would have determined that while some specias may die out and others arise, the dinosaurs were there to stay forever as the dominant animals.
The only reasonable interpretation of the historical record is that we haven't gone extinct yet, and are not so ill-adapted that it seems likely we will soon.
But that notwithstanding, if your overal point is that humanity will probably not go extinct as a result of our failure to develop a new source of energy, then I remain thoroughly unimpressed. I personally would like to do better than that.
The enemies of Democracy are
It is pretty easy to guess that in 50 years EVERYTHING will be electric powered with the power comming from mostly nuclear power and some hydro plus other minor sources. No new technology needs to be invented. This will very good for the economies of the industrail world, all the money that is now flowing to oil producers will remain in-contry.
I only wish we'd run out of oil sooner
So we're really supposed to not worry about the end of our civilization just because another one will rise in a few hundred years to take its place?
Your interpretation of the historical record is very much not reasonable. We don't always overcome our problems. Sometimes our problems overcome us, and the result is fire and bloodshed and mass starvation. Just because such events eventually settle into some sort of equilibrium doesn't mean that "we adapted," but that nature adapted us to fit its realities, in the most brutal way imaginable.
The sad fact is that this time around we've burned up many of the resources that a resurging civilization would need. Rome at its peak wasn't obliterating non-renewable resources the way we are.
Finally, need I point out that the dinosaurs showed amazing adaptability and survivability for about a hundred million years? Runs of luck far longer than ours have ended badly.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The assumption is that the only way to make ethanol is through corn production. Unfortunately, that seems to be the standard apprach, but it's not the most efficient. There are a number of waste products (chaff from wheat threshing, unusable wood byproducts, hell, even unrecycleable paper if you want to get particular about it) that can be used for ethanol production without costing a single square meter of farmland.
Will it be enough to use just those waste products? probably not. But it'll be a start.
Hardly compelling evidence for a massive shortage of silver.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, look on the bright side - maybe we can figure out a way to use starved corpses as car fuel.
Oh, BS. You mean, with ammonia produced from natural gas, which isn't the same thing as petroleum.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Probably be riots, war, social collapses. But as a species, we'll survive.
If the war is biological/Nuclear, it is possible to make the biosphere inhospitable to man.
If the Global Warming people's worse predictions are right, the temprature within the atmosphere may rise to the point where microbes won't survive. That too would be the end of man.
So don't go starting any wars thinking "some will survive"
However, hydrogen can be obtained through coal gasification, or, if it came down to it, through electrolysis of water using electricity from any source, and research is currently going on into how to do high-temperature electrolysis (where most of the energy required is supplied as heat rather than electricity) at an industrial scale.
Any other "irreplaceable" petroleum products you'd like to add to the reasons we are supposedly doomed?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
> Having more oil than Saudi Arabia is meaningless if you have to use 70% of it just refining the next lot.
Flawed logic, since not all energy is oil.
If we need to spend X Joules of energy to obtain X Joules of oil, then that can still be a winning proposition if the energy we spend is something we have an abundance of, such as solar or coal. Most EROEI-based complaints fail to take into account this difference, and are largely worthless as a result.
Please cite a study by a respected physics professor or group endorsing the notion of a viable alternative fuel? You won't find any because unlike you dolts they understand thermodynamics and anyone claiming biofuel/hydrogen/hybrid replacements is a crank.
Okay, will do. From the site:
Yeah, 'cuz you're soooo open-minded and against spouting off, Mr. Comment #3.
Perhaps, if your argument didn't convince us, the problem isn't that we were unable to "come to grips with it". Maybe the problem is that your argument isn't all that convincing to someone who isn't already a believer, and that it's a whole lot harder to convince normal people than to preach to the choir.
But with paragons of rationality and open-mindedness like you guys, ready with such well-thought-out and informative responses to doubts and misgivings, I guess it's just plain ignorant (not to mention unscientific) of us to question you. Bad skeptic, no biscuit!
At this time, all of the oil produced on this world is consumed locally. On this world. I have a strong feeling that this trend will continue for the forseeable future.
Therefore, projected "world" oil exports are ZERO.
This is Slashdot, remember, there won't be any elections. Diebold pwnz j00!
This conclusively proves Russian roulette must be harmless, because I haven't died so far.
Humans were just adaptive and intelligent when they were dying of malnutrition and the Black Death as they are today.
Hint: technology and resourcefulness is no substitute for cheap fossil energy or the biosphere support system.
The sad fact is that this time around we've burned up many of the resources that a resurging civilization would need. Rome at its peak wasn't obliterating non-renewable resources the way we are.
Fred Hoyle pointed this out over 40 years ago in his book "Of Men and Galaxies". For our world this is intelligent life's only chance to become advanced technologically. I found it very depressing when I first read, primarily because it was so logical ... even though I am an optimist. If we collapse we wont have the resources to rise again.
A similar, more recent, effort at this kind of depressing analysis is an essay titled "The Road to Olduvai Gorge".
Bitter and proud of it.
Four bullet points:
1 - OPEC thinks there's too much capacity.
2 - Oil Inventories: far too large this year.
3 - Contango and Amaranth: Think California electricity market...
4 - Monopolists are happier producing a consistent little for a long time than ever worrying about running out. The math isn't trivial, but most good dynamic optimization books will have an example.
Short oil stocks now while the Peak Oil crazies will take the other side, because soon not even they would suppoort oil.
Rome didn't exhaust all of its natural resources. There were still forests, there was still plenty of iron, copper, tin, gold etc , coal if they knew how to use it, same for oil. They collapsed because of internal reasons and pressure from migrating peoples. Other civilisations collapsed because they exhausted the soil in their area or triggered salination of their fields ... given time this can recover. But once the oil is gone it is gone. It used to ooze out of the ground in places ... how likely do you think it will be to find sources like that after us?
Human beings are adaptable because they use their brain. They don't say "don't worry it will be ok" when faced with a problem. They work out what to do and head it off (unless it is long term), I don't see many farmers who don't plan for the year. There is a problem with our civilisation I think. Because we have had it so good for so long we are intrigued by disaster stories, but don't actually believe that anything bad can happen to us. So for many peak oil is entertaining but we keep on imagining that someone, somewhere will fix it for us. A technological Santa Claus. I don't believe in fairy tales. Bad things can indeed happen.
Bitter and proud of it.
The US is the largest energy user, the largest oil importer, and the third highest producer (Saudi Arabia is #1, Russia is #2).
The US hit peak oil in 1970.
This entire argument about whether or not technology should be factored into these projections, and how much, has gone off the rails.
The argument against factoring in technology is not that the author of the assessment should be making predictions that will push people in the direction he wants them to go.
The argument against factoring in technology is that the point of the assessment is to describe the direction we are moving in *now*.
An analogy: We are on a spacecraft moving along a particular vector.
This assessment is equivalent to a report saying "hey guys I've run the numbers and we are going to end up in the sun on our present course. We'd better do a correctional burn at some point soon".
The people saying "include technology, dammit!" are equivalent to someone saying "we're GOING to fire the rockets, dammit!".
Those people are probably right, we probably will fire the rockets at some point soon, and change course (whether or not the course correction will be sufficient to keep us all comfortable remains to be seen). But the guy making the assessment is also right to keep pushing the urgency of the course correction, and to keep pointing out that *unless* the rockets are fired, at some point our spacecraft (civilisation) will be destroyed.
This analogy is also appropriate in that the longer we wait the sharper and more violent the correction is likely to be, and personally I'd rather correct our course at 1G instead of 5G.
I'm afraid those ideas are severely flawed, we definitly do have the resources to rise again, that isn't the issue. The issue is that we built our societies on certain assumptions that after the fact were showen to not be true, this is a problem because setting into a different balance midstride is somewhat difficult. It isn't a problem though as long as you identify and compensate for it on time though.
Olduvai is incidentally fundamentally flawed, unlike what is claimed available winnable energy resources are much greater. Also we seem to already have scalable replacement energy systems, the world might take an economic hit to cross this problem, but I do not think long term wise this will be the thing to stop it. For now the best one is the least popular as well, nuclear power. But I wonder how long that will keep up if it proves to be the only resonable one for the short or even medium term. Long term development of fusion power is by now almost guranteed, considering our current technical abilities in it.
Not all units of energy are as good as each other. Oil is particularly useful because it's dense energy and easily portable. If we can use energy that doesn't have those properties, especially renewable energy, to get the same amount (or even less!) worth of oil energy, it'd be a net gain. For example, if we can use one barrel's worth of solar electricity to produce a barrel of oil, that'd be great, because all we'd be "using up" in the production process is an infinitely renewable resource.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Oh my GOD! What the fuck will we do without cheetahs?
That has been the implied argument -- that there is "market failure" and some kind of government action (high gas taxes, crash program on alternate fuels, electric cars) is required. Of course government action was tried in the 70's -- the CAFE program with mixed success, the synthetic fuels program proving to be a boondogle and research funds on nuclear fusion drying up in the face of falling oil prices.
I have surfed the Oil Drum, and they make some interesting arguments, and they also have their trolls over there who like to stir things up by claiming that Peak Oil (as in right now) is a fiction, and they like to get all self-righteous and pouty about how they are right and we are heading over a cliff.
As for the Oil Drum people, they seem to be predicting the peak of World oil to be now -- not 2008, not 2020, not 2040, but now. I guess history will take its course and we will find out soon enough if we are at peak oil and bad things happen. But will the Peak Oil team be granted a first down and allowed to move the chains down the field, or will this kind of thinking lose credibility if the Great Oil Shortage doesn't materialize?
The big point of oil over oil shale/tar/coal conversion etc. is that it doesn't cost much to get the finished products and mining often involves drilling a hole in the ground and installing a pump and some tanks to catch it. I have the bad feeling that we already live in the science fiction days of cheap energy - but yes, it's not the end of the world if there are no more large oil reserves.
Cane sugar is cheap but Congressmen are expensive. Australian or Jamaican sugar could undercut corn syrup and sell you all the sugar you want if it was not for US Government import restrictions.
As far as I see the peak oil thing it is a warning to optimise and have alternatives ready early because it takes many years to build large power plnts or switch to different engine technologies.
Here's the process for brazing copper pipe: assemble the pipe to the fitting. Schmear flux around the joint. Hold a blowtorch to the pipe until it's probably hot enough. (If you're repairing it in-place, try not to point the torch at those dry wooden structural members!) Touch the solder to the joint and watch it flow into it. Turn on the water, and yell "shit! turn it off! TURN IT OFF!" as it sprays onto the nearby bookcases. Fail to empty the water from the pipe, and end up boiling it off with the torch. Try to braze the joint again. Lather, rinse, repeat, ignore family members asking if they'll ever be able to shower again.
I've installed at least a hundred PEX joints. Slip the ring over the pipe, put the pipe in the fitting, slide the ring to the end of the pipe, and clamp. I have yet to see a single joint fail. It replaced the feed pipe to the washing machine, which had been leaking on and off for a year, despite our attempts to patch or replace pieces of it. We tore the whole mess out and replaced it with PEX in a single afternoon, and it hasn't leaked since.
Sure, it might all spontaneously dissolve tomorrow. But there are some pretty solid reasons for the DIYer to use it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
We have 2 trillion barrels of oil in the US in the form of oil shale. This oil is recoverable at $30 a barrel. There are many other forms of oil to recover and many new deep water fields left to explore.
In the mean time, we should continue to work on hybrid and other technologies to reduce our consumption. Doom and gloom on this is not justified or necessary.
Even though I'm edumacated and thought I understood the implications of exponential growth, I still found this enlightening:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
Dr. Bartlett explains what exponential growth really means, and how quickly things can go badly when you grow exponentially.
I hope some moderator do not flag this a troll, I am just pointing out that you can also have another point of view from the statistical review of BpAmoco
Bpamoco statistical review
where it is occupying(Iraq) or encircling(Iran) the last remining countries not directly under USA/West control. And I thought it was all about bringing "freedom and democracy" there!
I got permanently modded -1 because I dared to question Israel on
You say that it's getting easier and easier to contemplate drilling in the arctic. Why do you suppose that is? Why is drilling in such an environmentally sensitive place like the ANWR in Alaska being considered? Why all the expense to build the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, running as it does through such dangerous regions like Chechnya, Dagestan, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, which if they aren't already active war zones are all set to become such in the near future? Chevron's Jack No. 2 well lies under five miles of water and rock in a region that is heavy hurricane country. Why drill there, and not in some easier spot? Lately, all of the new oil discoveries and the distribution facilities needed to support them are either are in (1) environmentally sensitive regions (like ANWR), (2) dangerous regions (like the path of the BTC pipeline), (3) places which are very difficult to get at (like the Jack No. 2 Well), or some combination of all three. All the easy oil has run out, and now we're being forced to rely on oil sources that are increasingly difficult to obtain. This is the core prediction of peak oil theory, and the fact that we do see it happening today makes me inclined to believe that they're basically correct, even if their specific predictions as to the date of the peak aren't exactly spot on. After all, their best prediction (due to Kenneth Deffeyes) was last December 16, 2005, and we won't know if he was correct for a few years or so. The fact that they've slipped several dates doesn't make their core prediction wrong.
By the way, it's no good synthesizing petroleum, and to mention it at all misses the point. Synthesizing oil consumes more energy than it produces, no matter what the process, so you have got to have some other source of energy if you're going to do it (it is, becomes, just like the much ballyhooed hydrogen economy, a carrier of energy rather than an energy source). The reason why we use petroleum that comes from out of the ground is that we get so much more energy from using it than we consumed trying to extract it. In the early part of the 20th century we got as much as 100 times as much energy using oil as we expended to get it. Right now it's down to about 20 times, and falling. It's doubtful that any future energy source (with the possible exception of nuclear energy) that we can bring online within the next decade or so will have a comparable level of efficiency to that of petroleum, even at today's reduced levels.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Lions?
E85 plans are usually based on the fact that research and good engineering has yielded much more efficient processes for turning corn into ethanol. Add on the incredble drops in the price of cellulase and lignase, and soon we could be making ethanol from, well, pretty much anything that was ever part of a plant. Your grocery store could have an ethanol plant in the back that turns all the spoiled and unsellable produce (which works out to 30% of all their produce, apparently) into ethanol. This isn't even including, of course, the possibilities of engineered micro-organisms that just sit around and use photosynthesis to make ethanol from atmospheric CO_2 and water. And even then, it's not like every single road vehicle will be using E85; that's really just for light vehicles being used to travel long distances. Commuter vehicles would probably be electric, assuming people can ever come to terms with fast acceleration, smooth rides, low failure-rates, and minimal cost-of-ownership. The present generation of drivers despises those things, but who knows what people two decades from now will like.
Seriously -- you act as researchers who propose
If you read the research papers and if you do the math and put in some plain and simple thinking you will know this. If we do not get aware very very quickly we will have a huge problem in 50 years.
Oil reserves are running out and we are missing a energy source to bridge the gab between a oil driven world and a world working on a new energy source. Yes we could use nuclear power but this will not make your car run, and yes we could use hydrogen fuel cell cars but to be honest in the upcoming 50 years not everyone will be driving a hydrogen fuel cell powered car in the upcoming 50 years.
What will the cost be of the food you buy in the supermarket if the trucks transporting it will have to buy fuel for a $100 a liter? Could you still afford it? Will you still own a car? Could you still pay the energy costs to run your computer?
Think about flying? Will there be cheap flights? No way, because there is no alternative than the current way of flying airplanes will still need aviation fuels. That is to say, it will not be there in the upcoming 50 years. So you will not be able to pay a ticket anymore. Modern ships are running on diesel engines so transport over sea will become to expensive.
And now take a look around you, how many things you own are made of plastic, those will be hard to produce without using oil.
So if we do not take action right now there will be a great problem ahead. Do not even think about global warming or the ozone layer or things like that... most of us, if you are young, or most of our kids will not even be there to see this. And the co2 emission will not be enough to really start global warming. The problem to focus on is what to do for when there is no oil anymore. And for some reason nobody is recognizing this problem... why? I do not have a clue..
Regards,
Johan Louwers
Regards, Johan Louwers.
Solar is do-able. Just change all the roofing tile over to solar. Sure, rooves become more expensive (short term), but ultimately electricity would go way down in price. People are always nay-saying solar, but solar panels are just silicon right? Are we running out of silicon or something? Is it really going to stay expensive forever? Wikipedia says no.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics
Maybe somebody should throw me (or them) a clue stick.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
For some processes you really need oil or natural gas. For example to process canola to make biodiesel fuel you need to spend some oil. It's hard to power that tractor on solar or nuclear energy. To make the fertilizer to grow that canola, the primary ingredient is natural gas.
The take-home message is while it is possible to substitute some form of energy for others, in general it is :
1- less convenient
2- more expensive
than oil.
The #1 worry is that right now a lot of the conflicts in the world revolve around oil while we are nowhere near scarcity yet. It is not that we will completely run out of oil, it is rather than the comfortable times are over.
I work for a knowledge institute concerning itself with fossil fuels. I have to say that the stuff i read in this discussion forum is regurgitation of every conceivable argument or debate i have ever followed on the peak oil theorem.
you have:
a) a small minority of people who can get their heads around the fact that the world's oil and gas reserves will not be here come 2100, and that it will thus take roughly the span of two intellectual generations to change our entire (think about this for a second) way of life or at least (yes, sceptics) that part of out lives which is centered around fossil energy use, but how do these two differ?
b) sceptics, usually the large majority of people. They break down into freshmen-year economists (the famous "price goes up, substitution will take place" theorem). Techno optimists, such as the Malthusian "technology continued to feed our expanding population" (e.g the cooky jar is infinitely full) theorem, or the hydrogyn optimists, solar panels, nuclear energy, etc.
I personally believe that technological barriers are there to be broken, and that another form (most likely solar) will in the long-term replace our current fossil fuel usage (but probably not before we light up and smoke every cubic inch of vile material such as nuclear, coal, lignite, etc - freshman year economics, remember?). In that sense, the idea of energy shortage is very much that, an idea.
what worries me most is the notion that each country can solve its problems for itsel. People, the biggest challenge mankind faces in the 21st century is not "when and how will technology aid us" but rather, "will the transition be smooth, or will large groups of (poor)people miss out?".
don't forget oil and gas are the most energy-intensive substance on this planet, this means CHEAP energy. This is the driving force behind, for instance, the process of economic globalization (the fact that it is cheaper to ship stuff over thousands of kilometres), but it is also represented in our status symbols: big cars, big tvs, airconditioned cities right in the middle of the desert and high-tech energy guzzling military machines. What we are up against is not technology or econmics, it's mentality, its asking people if they would mind their economy NOT growing, it's ethics.
on a closing note i must say it seriously offends me that a story on North Korea's nuke draws approximately 3-4 times as many comments as something as paramount as this. But perhaps that largely betrays our inclination towards the short-term, the very mechanism that got us in this mess in the first place. ;)
However, you can get essentially any hydrocarbon feedstock you want for producing plastics from reprocessing coal, or for that matter biomass. Yes, the cost is higher, but not outrageously so. For the high-value products you mention like drugs, the cost of switching to alternative feedstocks will be almost infinitesimal in the scheme of things.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I'm afraid those ideas are severely flawed, we definitly do have the resources to rise again, that isn't the issue.
So wrong I almost didn't bother replying. OK smart arse. How do you get from stone age to nuclear without fossil fuels?
And what scalable replacement energy solutions? Don't mention tar sands, ethanol, biofuels, nuclear or fusion ... the lead times or inability to scale don't allow it.
Unless you have some brilliant solution I suspect your just mouthing over optimistic unrealistic stuff you read without questioning somewhere.
Bitter and proud of it.
And if this is really the case, why isn't silver attracting the stockmarket buzz that even two-bit uranium explorer, to take one random example, is right now?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
large parts of Florida
Most of Florida is excellent for growing sugar cane and rice. Any fermentable sugar is a stock for ethanol. The current level of sugar production in the US is artificially low. The high prices on domestic cane sugar are an outgrowth of tariffs on imported sugar and a governmental quota system for acreage allotments to grow cane. The same is true for peanuts and many other sources of oils and fermentable carbohydrates.
The technologic inovations already exist. They just need the market price for fossil fuels to rise above the inital production costs.
Brazil is using cane sugar to produce ethanol fuels at a price point below the current cost of imported oil. Cane avoids the 'cellulous conversion' issue you keep pointing at. Brazil is piloting bio-diesel production from soy, sunflowers and rapeseed.
Fuel grade soy oil can be extracted from the bean in current production facilities. The fuel can be distributed and used in currently fielded tankage and vehicles. Soy oil is one of the worst candidates for fuel. The production per acre is way below the production of ethanol from corn but the production costs are around $0.30 per gallon. There are many plant oils that can be used for fuel production. Here are some production rates for other crops grown in the US.
Soybean: 40 to 50 US gal/acre (40 to 50 m/km)
Rapeseed: 110 to 145 US gal/acre (100 to 140 m/km)
Mustard: 140 US gal/acre (130 m/km)
Jatropha: 175 US gal/acre (160 m/km)
Palm oil: 650 US gal/acre (610 m/km) [2]
Algae: 10,000 to 20,000 US gal/acre (10,000 to 20,000 m/km)
Commercial algae farming does not require use of arable land and could occur in costal waters. The issue for algae based fuel is production cost. The current price estimates are $61-$127 a barrel. The existence of any steady supply of fuel at a lower price point raises the risk of development of algae based fuels beyond the limit of most venture capitalists. No capitalization means no development of the resource.
The dinosaurs were destroyed by a bona fide out-of-context problem: a bigass meteor to which they couldn't adapt. I don't rule out the possibility that a major unpredictable cataclysm--say, the sun exploding--would totally overwhelm human adaptability.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
It's surprising that this works, but it does. More here -> http://www.biodiesel.org/ .
If your car is sufficiently old, the rubber parts that come into contact with the diesel fuel will degrade when they come in contact with vegetable oil (or a methyl ester like biodiesel). Newer diesels with synthetic rubber parts don't generally have this problem.
You also need to worry about starting in cold weather, as biodiesel becomes a solid at a higher temperature than traditional diesel fuel. There are a number of ways to deal with this (insulated/heated fuel lines, "glow plug" spark plugs, etc.).
-- If you're posting to be funny, and your sig is funnier . . . .
Point taken, but unless those other energy sources are abundant, cheap, and accessible, it's quite likely they'll use the energy from the oil itself. Heck, if a coal->synthetic fuel process (Fischer-Tropsch) is ~30% efficient -- and wikipedia implies 50% efficiency -- it may be better just to convert the coal and ignore the sands/shales.
Oil sands/shales are also among the most environmentally damaging energy sources out there. Assuming you use fossil fuel to refine it, it's producing ~3x as much carbon per unit of energy as drilled oil, and that after the strip mining generally used to collect the sands/shales.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The question is not so much the production of resources (food, oil, etc.), but what impact the waste has on the environment as the population continues to grow. Not unlike cancer, we can only bury and forget the waste for so long. Eventually it will not be ignored any longer and we're going to have to face the consequences.
Land fills are reaching capacity (waste is shipped from one state to another where there is still space), and waste pumped into rivers, lakes, and oceans are killing fish or keeping life away (the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico around the mouth of the Mississippi). Looking the other way isn't going to make it go away. It's just a question of when and how severely it'll come back to bite us.
--Udo.
Would I be right in assuming that you are not actively and directly involved, on a daily basis, in waste management efforts relating to the concerns you have raised?
I don't mean "do you recycle?"; I mean, "do you commit a majority of your personal time, energy, and wealth resources every day to solving the problem you describe?"
See, my theory is that real problems get solved in short order. Unreal problems, on the other hand, get a lot of lip-service from a lot of people who aren't really serious about solving them, as evidenced by their large amount of talk, and small amount of action.
To the extent that waste management becomes a serious problem, it will get serious solutions. To the extent that it isn't a serious problem, it will get a lot of people on the internet, taking time out from their non-waste-management-problem-solving lifestyles, complaining about how serious a problem it is and how we all need to take it seriously.
So which is it? Have you dedicated your life to the salvation of humanity, or have you dedicated your life to the twin grails of getting while the getting is good and of telling everybody else to take the problem seriously?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
You really should stop using logic and sound reasoning because you're standing out like a sore thumb. Try freakin' out and running around in tears while spreading FUD that is based on BS. Aw, come on, all the cool kids are doing it and you'll fit in much better. The sky really is falling, you know, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
I saw it mentioned on The Daily Show that despite the difference in total world production between Saudi Arabia and Canada (24%, versus 2%), the US imports nearly as much oil from Canada as from Saudia Arabia, and the trend is towards Canada's share of that increasing. I think most Americans would be very surprised to hear that.
Doing a quick search for numbers, I cam up with a reference (on Digg, of all places):
Last year we imported 792,691,000 barrels of oil from Canada. From the Persian Gulf countries we imported 838,922,000 barrels. However, this is the end of a lowering trend for Persian Gulf states and increasing trend for Canada (b/c of tar sands I'd bet). Let's check out 2001 also, in that year we imported from Canada 667,374,000 barrels while from the persian gulf we imported 1,007,807,000 barrels.
A few interesting things about that point. First of all, that implies to me that the Arabs don't necessarily *need* US as a consumer to still have most of their market. More imporatntly, if the US could cut its oil usage by 50% through aggressive alternative fuel usage, conservsation, and such, it could *eliminate* it's dependence upon oil overseas, and not have to invade and wage war in country after country to preserve its stock.
Yes, 50% is a huge decrease, but if a small portion of the funds saved on military presence were redirected into alternative fuel research, I'm pretty sure it could be done. (Of course, reduced dependence upon oil also reduces the demand on Bush and family/cronies personal oil interests, so there's a huge conflict of interest there.)
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Woah, someone's got socialism on the brain. To be clear, that someone is you. I know people are trying to provide things more cheaply to line their own pockets -- that's why the oil is being used up so fast, and why copper is now very expensive (and no amount of cleverness will reduce its price) . Finite supply, clever people thinking up bigger and betters ways to acquire and sell the resource -- that makes the supply dwindle FASTER. Am I proposing rationing? Of course not. Get your head out of the 70s. Cold war's over. We all love the free market (well, all of us except the people who whine every single time they gas up their SUV, which it turns is pretty much everyone). What I'm suggesting is that anyone who thinks that oil wont become completely impractical for use as a fuel someday is completely retarded and doesn't understand basic concepts like that exponentially accelerating usage will exhaust any finite supply.
> For some processes you really need oil or natural gas. For example to process canola to make
> biodiesel fuel you need to spend some oil. It's hard to power that tractor on solar or nuclear
> energy. To make the fertilizer to grow that canola, the primary ingredient is natural gas.
There really aren't all that many things which require petroleum-per-se, though; using it is only the way it's currently done, not the way it must be done.
I'm not sure which part of oil-to-biodiesel you're saying takes oil, but vehicles can and have been run on vegetable oil out of a deep fryer. Based on my understanding of the process, you're likely talking about hydrogenation, which is just adding hydrogen from any source -- solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is a non-fossil option for that.
Similarly, fertilizer is made with natural gas only because that's currently the cheapest source of hydrogen; solar- or nuclear-based electrolysis is, again, a non-fossil option for that process (although work in modern organic farming practices suggests our current heavy fertilizer inputs may not even be necessary; the Amish, for example, get surprisingly high yields despite low chemical inputs).
Finally, of course, the tractors involved are usually diesel anyway, and so can run pretty easily on biodiesel.
Obviously, it's not going to be a fun time when petroleum supplies start running short -- no argument there. I'm just pointing out that there are alternative options for generating liquid transportation fuels that need not rely heavily on petroleum.
> Point taken, but unless those other energy sources are abundant, cheap, and accessible,
> it's quite likely they'll use the energy from the oil itself.
As long as it's economic, yes, so you're right that it'll likely to continue to be the case for a while yet. I'm just pointing out that the process isn't required to work that way, so these are still viable options in the case of declining oil supplies.