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German Military Braces For Peak Oil
myrdos2 writes "A study by a German military think tank leaked to the Internet warns of the potential for a dire global economic crisis in as little as 15 years as a result of a peak and an irreversible decline in world oil supplies. The study states that there is 'some probability that peak oil will occur around the year 2010 and that the impact on security is expected to be felt 15 to 30 years later. ... In the medium term the global economic system and every market-oriented national economy would collapse.' The report closely matches one from the US military earlier this year, which stated that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact."
Well, the German military does have some past experience in having to manage without petroleum. : - )
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Ein Denkenpanzer?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Peak solar, that might be a problem.
That seems more cultish then actually helping. It promotes ideas that SEEM good, but are rather counter intuitive. Working holidays? Why not just stay home, where you don't burn fuel traveling? Or better yet, start a hydroponics garden. House swapping? Sounds like a great way to have your stuff stolen / Identity snatched. There is little proof that "organic" is truely organic. Especially since most enviromental factors are out of the farmers hands. Pesticides, metals toxicity , etc. Your basically paying extra for the same amount of pollutants. And it's not encouraging sane practices. Allowing large areas of land to be fed to grazing animals does nothing to encourage top soil retention. Nothing your site presents sounds sustainable long term. Especially when oil powers the farmers house, the house that your swapping with and the machinery the farm uses. That isn't transition, its commune propaganda.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Global warming won't be a self limiting concern until we run out of things to burn.
I'm sure the hybrid tanks and APCs probably won't run into the stuck accelerator thing.
Probably.
Sean
Seriously this is exactly what I said during the oil spill. People were shouting from the hills there should be a ban on deep sea drilling. Well when our reserves runs low the result will be drill baby drill.
The paper which can be got in German here has almost no signs of ability to think. Consider - there is DME http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_ether , which can be produced from coal/biomass, then read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel, then figure out , as Gregory Clark did http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/12/life-after-peak.html that up to the price of 500 dollars per barrel of oil will decline the economy for only 11 percents and at such prices - DME other synfuels will spring to wide use, so it is not possible that we live in era of 500 per barrel fuel for very long time. And then - not even 11% drop will be achieved - so if 5% drop in this recession did not kill all us, how then the comparable shock will make any worse?
It's not about to run out. It's about to--wait for it--PEAK. Production has been increasing since its discovery and soon it will begin to decrease--but 'decrease' (or even 'decrease fast enough to be big trouble) does not equate 'decrease quickly enough to solve global warming', especially considering the time lag.
Check out this google tech talk on Thorium reactors; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHs2Ugxo7-8
Some Wikipedia Articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
Thousands of years of safe carbon-emission free energy. Working reactors were developed and operated successfully in the 60s. Small scale reactors are currently running in India with plans for larger scale reactors. Nobody put any research effort into it back in the 60s because you can't make nuclear bomb material with it and the government wanted to go with only one design. Anyway, check out the video, it explains all the nitty gritty technical details.
I remember back in the 70s that oil was going to run out by the 90s. Now in 2010, oil is going to run out by the 2030s. In 2030 I guess oil will be going to run out by the 2050s.
I don't think that oil will run out by 2030s either, but it will be a lot more expensive.
There are oil basins that were considered unprofitable years ago but now, after the low-hanging fruits are gone, are being exploited.
Right now there are known hard-to-exploit reserves just waiting for a higher oil price in order to make economic sense.
Peak coal hasn't happened yet.
And states without fossil fuel alternatives usually collapsed after reaching peak wood.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Unfortunately the Hirsch report (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report) has been out for 5 years and people still ignore it.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
can't we transport our Sphere around the universe collecting more and more stars?
Well, possibly, if we were all Italian plumbers from the Bronx....
Monstar L
At what point will it become cheaper to just turn our massive coal deposits into usable petroleum?
The Baby Boomers put all the oil into the air as CO2.
We should put solar panels on the moon, laser the power down into the Earth's atmosphere, and crack that CO2 back into liquid hydrocarbons for making plastic, releasing its oxygen for the double whammy.
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make install -not war
Some people here are confusing 'global warming' and the 'green movement' with peak oil. You can argue all you want about whether global warming is really true or not, but Oil is limited, and we're running out fast. That is reality, face it.
The real enemies are those who scream bloody murder whenever the N-word is brought up. Mankind needs energy, and in the near future, our best and cleanest bet is nuclear power.
So you think that as soon as we run out of fossil fuels, all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will magically disappear?
The climate is already changing because of the CO2 currently in the atmosphere. We could stop burning fossil carbon today and global warming would still be a problem.
And what, you don't believe in peak oil? You think the earth is like a Tardis, bigger inside than out, with infinite reserves of oil? There will have to come a time when production starts to decline.
I just don't get how deniers can ignore simple logic. Oil companies will always find new reserves. We can keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere without it ever affecting anything. Yeah, right. Just because things are bigger than your tiny mind can comprehend doesn't mean they're infinite. If something isn't going to happen in your lifetime, that doesn't mean it's never going to happen.
Do you have children?
Nobody (except maybe the usual few paranoids, and perhaps the usual tabloid corporate mass media that loves them) said in the 1970s that oil would run out by the 1990s. What was said, by Kingman, who said in the 1950s that American oil would peak in the early 1970s and was right, was that global oil would peak in the 1990s. Peak does not mean end - it means the opposite, the maximum production. But Kingman's research showed in both cases that the peak would be followed immediately by a dropoff as steep and as short as was the ramp-up leading to the peak. However, demand continues to increase, so the shortfall grows even more rapidly, and immediately after the peak (once any relatively small surplus is consumed).
What Kingman's research did not have was the self-reflexive consequences of his research on the supply and demand curves. When America's oil peaked in the early 1970s, the resulting oil crunch not only changed the supply and demand curves that Kingman couldn't account for because the crunch and response data had never existed before. It also changed the appreciation of Kingman's research, and of his prediction that the global peak was coming. So that the world prepared in many ways for the next predicted peak, the global one. By the time the 1990s came, the effects were around: some peaking in large Saudi fields helped create the shortage pricing that we've never left since then. And the peak was delayed. But not for very long. Mainly what happened was that estimates of reserves were exaggerated (lies), in large amounts.
So we are indeed in the global peak oil period now, and in some ways have been since the 1990s.
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make install -not war
Gulf oil may run out. Which is good. No more money to sponsor Taleban and Hezbollah.
Other oil? Not so sure. Russians have always been operating a policy of "use 1, save 1". They have a considerable state reserve, so does USA in Alaska. Then there are all the fields that are in the Arctic or other places that are beyond current tech. Then there are all the fields that are not economically viable because of current land prices and environmental regs. Britain has petrol so does Germany, Netherlands, etc. However nobody wants to see an oil well in their backyard. Then there are all the places around the world with high density oil which are too difficult for current drilling processes. I own land on top of one of these fields in Eastern Europe and frankly I am eagerly waiting for oil to "run out". There is also a lot of high density leftovers which were never pumped out from fields that have been declared exhausted in Texas, Caucasus, etc. And so on.
Oil is not running out any time soon. It will just become more and more expensive. 200$ a barrel and 4-5$ per litre (not per gallon) at the pump are coming this way within the next 10 years and there is little we can do about that.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Britain came close to collapsing in the early 19th century. They had deforested the whole place and were heating their houses with coal that they had to get out of deep dark mines. They had a problem in that the mines would flood and they had no way to drain them. Their civilization could have easily collapsed at that point. However, they then invented this thing called the steam engine, and the rest is history.
Yeah, but when they mess something up with extraction, it will make the recent Deepwater Horizon incident a nice memory. Methane clathrates are quite unstable, and when things go wrong you get a big-scale fuel-air explosion.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Its so simple. 'You' were wrong in 1970 - "haha" - therefore any prediction of oil running out, including the fact that oil is running out right now and has ran out any many places already, will be automatically dismissed and ridiculed by us no matter what. No analysis, no fact checking, onward christian straw men...
Peak Oil is not the same thing as running out of oil.
What these systems analysts working for the military industrial complex are saying is that the rate of production of oil can no longer keep up with our increasing demand for it. And increased demand does not automatically create new oil into the market forever - the same way that the hunger of the economists locked up in my cellar do not create sandwiched for them. At some point the 'laws' of economics meet the laws of physics - one of them wins and its called resource depletion.
Resource depletion is just that: depletion. Initially you discover a resource, you bring it to production at a certain rate. That rate is not arbitrary. The more 'contact area' you have with the resource, the greater the rate can be. Eventually however the resource depletes to a 'level' where your contact area can no longer increase but begins to decrease. From this point on your rate of production will decrease no matter what until the resource is exhausted or the rate of production no longer justifies continuing. The rate of discovery did peak at 1970. Finally now its the turn of production.
This is exactly what you are taught if you're into petroleum engineer. The rigs out there aren't simply sinking their pipes into liquid gold and sucking free money to the surface. Every stake is carefully evaluated, every well is a huge risk to take. Will it produce, at what rate and for how long? And there is no technological fixes left. We have already thrown the kitchen sink into the play for decades: from 3D-seismic modeling, from fracturing to horizontal drilling. All used extensively in all the largest oil fields of the world - most of which are now in decline. The reason is that many of these 'production enhancing technologies' are just 'super straws': they artificially increase your initial rate of production - but they don't increase the amount of oil down there - you are just sucking it dry faster. There is no engineering around Peak Oil.
The many years I have been following theoildrum and I have come to learn a great deal about the capability of people to deny and dismiss the reality around them. With the global warming it was way too easy for them - the science was difficult even for the experts. With Peak Oil it was always only misunderstanding or pure ignorance that worked - because a lot of the facts were out there plain to see with no complex math involved. In fact there was no debate amongst the 'experts' either. Any rig hand you talked to seemed to know exactly what you were talking about and some of the big oil companies like Shell, PB for example are now publicly talking about Peak Oil as well as some governments and the military are starting to publicly use the Peak Oil term.
What is left then for the denilists? Hide in slashdot world? At least have the courtesy of informing yourself and coming up with more then the lame same cliches. There is the mandatory criticism section down there although its been struggling recently. Good luck.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Its funny you should mention the steam engine. It made the Industrial Revolution possible, destroying civilization as it was known in the 19th century. Which as you pointed out WAS collapsing.
That is Exactly the kind of shake up I think the world needs, a change in the paradigm of life. A Mr.Fusion, Zero Point Modules, 80+% PV cells, any and all, or nothing, would cause a new Revolution, as our current civilization collapses and something new takes it's place.
I still get warm fuzzies either way, paradigm shift or extinction (yes, unlikely, highly), doesn't really matter to me. I'll probably be dead in less than 40 years anyway.
If you haven't already seen them, "Connections" and The Day The Universe Changed are well worth watching. IMNSHO.
_
Someone please moderate +5
The deniers seem to be incapable of simple logic and mathematics, it's nothing short of fascinating just how short minded these people are.
The earth is not limitless in it's capability of producing food, oxygen, oil and hell even landmass and space to live in.
Sooner or later, oil will run out - once you understand just what's made with oil (hint: It's a hell of a lot more than just being used in vehicles) you'll start to understand.
Even if oil doesn't run out soon, eventually it will, it doesn't magically grow back every 6 weeks.
In 15 years? We already have a dire global economic crisis right now, its roots, I believe, in the fact that global oil production has been on a plateau for the last 4 years instead of growing in step with the economy. It is only the government and Fed injection of trillions of dollars into the European and American economies that is (temporarily) masking the effects somewhat just now.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
There is little proof that "organic" is truely organic.
Love it when button-pushing ability exceeds knowledgeability. /. so good for tech stuff, so amazingly bad beyond that. As a former fighter pilot i'm definitely sub-par at code, but, don't they teach you guys something like when you learn trigger control, "keyboard control"? You'd think among so many extraordinary primates, QC on the stuff that distinguishes us from the lesser primates would be more fashionable.
Seriously! Plot content quality on a 'scope, where 0 is the BS line i think it would be a square wave, max amplitude high for tech/geek, max low for everything else.
I don't know what a POV is, but raising taxes does not work to reduce consumption.
I drive in the UK where taxation on fuel is something like 75% and growing - nobody drives less, because if they drive less they're doing less work and get paid less. They just have less money to spend on other things.
Petroleum is really convenient in terms of an energy source, but we have a whole lot of others. That means, when push comes to shove, we can find other ways of doing things. Thus we aren't likely to face a real wide shortage. Nuclear is a good example. There is lots and lots of power to be had from nuclear sources. No it isn't a 1:1 replacement for oil but that's ok, we can deal with that.
Some of it is economic. The more expensive oil gets, the more alternatives are attractive. You may notice that there's been a big upswing in biofuel research and such things. This isn't coincidence or just green funding. It is the fact that the more oil costs, the more attractive an alternative is. Some of it is also just not listening to the crazies. Nuclear is a bad word in America and the green types lobby heavily against it. Well if it is that or no power, people will stop listening in a hurry and demand more plants be built. Some of it is just technological progress. We are getting better and better at alternative energy, energy storage and so on.
Also please remember that this won't be a wall, as in suddenly we can't turn the lights on one morning. It'll be a gradual thing, an increase in prices as supplies dwindle and/or harder to reach deposits are tapped. That means that there is also time for replacements, and incentive for those, as prices rise. Gradual change is something economies cope with relatively well. It is sudden change that is the real problem. So if oil production has peaked and things start sliding down, that isn't likely to be a big issue unless for some unknown reason it is abrupt and production just grinds to a halt.
One thing you may notice is that humans are pretty good at solving problems. They aren't so good at mitigating problems, looking ahead and making sure they never happen, but when a problem does happen they are pretty good and solving that problems. Thus it seems pretty likely that this sort of thing will get solved too. Supply starts going down, prices go up, alternatives are more profitable, etc, etc.
I keep hearing that the next World Wars will be fought over resources
The previous world war was fought over oil too. After the US cut off oil exports Imperial Japan decided to invade Indonesia to acquire its oil. The British in Singapore and the US in the Philippines were on the supply line that the oil would have to travel. Imperial Japan decided to remove the British and the US from the western pacific to secure that oil supply.
Ask the oil industry then.
Everyone there apart from a few creationist psychos knows that at some point oil supply is not going to be able to keep up with demand unless there are a few incredibly major discoveries. Certainly there's coal etc but that's straying off topic - peak oil is about oil - the really cheap stuff that comes out of the ground. Once more people want it than there is oil available somebody has to miss out, that is what peak oil means. For a lot of applications that just means switching to a different source of energy, but that takes time and costs more than the cheap oil we currently have.
It's not the end of the world.
It's just a point where things are no longer so cheap and easy.
When it takes more energy to extract, refine and transport the oil than what you get out of it, then that barrel of oil won't get extracted - no matter what the oil price is.
Not quite. While this is true if it takes more oil to extract the oil than what you get out of it, there may come some time in the future where oil becomes more valuable than its energy content.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
I'm all for efficiency, but two points:
1) You don't avoid a global Peak Oil with direct consumption/demand-side efforts, you mitigate it's effects. Because oil will peak is a feature of oil production, the only way to actually avoid it would be to produce less, which would obviously not help the people who want to consume oil. This is not a value statement in the usual sense. Though usually "mitigate" is worse option than "avoid", in this case the opposite is true. In the long run we don't want continue burning oil at ever increasing rate, so ability to avoid Peak Oil is useless in the best case and harmful in the worst case.
2) The 70's Peak Oil was a local peak in the US. It's effects were mostly cancelled out by increased production elsewhere and globalization that brought those resources to the global market.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
No one wants an oil well in their back yard until we are all screaming for oil to lubricate the gears off the economy. That sentiment will change.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Your problem, sir, is one I refer to as "reading comprehension failure"; possibly compounded by some things I call "dumb as a rock" and "willful refusal to be educated", but let's take one thing at a time. I'd rather think you didn't have time to read the material, or look it up, than think you were just too stupid to comprehend it.
Please allow me the privilege of raising your awareness level.
For instance, try this link. It should lead you to a wiki article on breeder reactors, along with a nice little news article about India's new reactor projects. Note: projects, plural; as in more than one.
Your reading, at this point, may enlighten you to the concept of a "sealed breeder reactor", which produces far fewer waste products than conventional reactors, is easier to control, and should it have a "meltdown", the effects are much less pronounced than "conventional" reactors (as in, the nearest 30 miles aren't irradiated, and nothing blows up).
A little further reading may grant you the information required to understand that thorium is hugely more prevalent than you seem to currently believe, and is actually easier to produce at a fissionable quality than uranium. As a matter of fact, one way to produce uranium is to put thorium in a breeder reactor. Ooh, look, a two-for-one deal!
So, it's cheaper, easier, and safer... a direct contradiction of your uninformed statements of "fact".
Yes, reactors of many types have been built. The problem (and my point) is that none of those experimental reactors built have delivered the safe and inexpensive power that was promised.
Worse, none have even shown that the respective technology has the potential to become safe and inexpensive.
Conclusion: Once you have a basic understanding of the topics you so vehemently protest, perhaps then we will listen to your meandering bullshit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The estimates are that the cheaply available fissile material will be gone in about 70 years at the current rates of production.
True, but extremely misleading. Nuclear power is energetically profitable even with very expensive fissile material. Nuclear power plants consume astoundingly small amounts of fuel - a pound of uranium generates as much energy as 400,000 pounds of coal. A 10% increase in the price of coal makes a big difference to a coal plant. A 10% increase (or even 10000% increase) in the price of uranium is negligible to a nuclear plant. The energetic and financial cost of nuclear fuel is miniscule compared to the overhead costs of operating a nuclear plant.
A lot of people (including you) have no real idea just how much nuclear fuel the Earth contains. If we allow breeder reactors (which President Carter banned for political reasons related to nuclear weapons), uranium fuel will last for billions of years at current rates of consumption. Even if you allow for a drastically increased rate of consumption, it's still enough for several hundred million years.
What's most striking about the calculation in the link above is that it is so simple. It's not like oil reserve estimates where governments can fudge the numbers, and even the experts disagree. Anyone can take a sample of seawater and check the concentration of uranium.
These figures are with presently proven technology. No assumptions about future technology are required.
Most of western Europe has a hefty tax on gas/diesel that leads to the move of smaller vehicles and rail systems. OTH, USA has a very small tax on it, to the point where other subsidies on Oil (ignoring the 'subsidy' of military) pretty much wipes it out. And then you have nations like Venezuela, China, Brazil, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc that actually HEAVILY subsidize their oil.
The West, mainly none EU nations, needs to put on a slowly increasing tax on fuel. In addition, use part of that tax to build up railroads as well electric cars. This approach is far better than spending money later on the military.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Estimates say there are 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska. The US consumes about 20 million barrels per day. So all the oil up there will only be good for about 500 days or one and a half year. The point is that the oil will run out whether the Alaskan oil fields are exploited or not. Delaying the inevitable with, at best, 1.5 years is hardly worth the effort.
Football Odds
And even during brownouts, Californians still don't want the safest cleanest mass production power plant available (nuclear) in their back yard.
The real problem is overpopulation.
"Let's also keep in mind that the only reason oil is approaching "peak" is that we aren't continuing to drill."
We are.
"Now, if the government allowed drilling in certain verboten areas, we'd be further away from "peak"."
By one or two years. At most, 5 years.