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Ask Slashdot: What If We Don't Run Out of Oil?
symbolset writes "The Atlantic recently ran an in-depth article about energy resources. The premise is that there remain incalculable and little-understood carbon fuel assets which far outweigh all the fossil fuels ever discovered. The article lists them and discusses their potentials and consequences, both fiscal and environmental. 'The clash occurs when renewables are ready for prime time—and natural gas is still hanging around like an old and dirty but reliable car, still cheap to produce and use, after shale fracking is replaced globally by undersea mining of methane hydrate. Revamping the electrical grid from conventionals like coal and oil to accommodate unconventionals like natural gas and solar power will be enormously difficult, economically and technically.' Along these lines, yesterday the U.S. Geological Survey more than doubled their estimate of Bakken shale oil reserve in North Dakota and Montana to 7.4-11 billion barrels. Part of the push for renewables over the past few decades was the idea that old methods just weren't going to last. What happens to that push if fossil fuels remain plentiful?"
Suggest you read this:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html
Oil is a finite resource, it will inevitably run out eventually. In the meantime it is getting harder to get out of the ground and tends to involve us with countries we would rather not be too closely involved with.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
what happens is we continue to convert carbon from lumps of matter stuck safely away under the ground to free floating carbon in the atmosphere and we slowly cook ourselves in a greenhouse of our own making, of the additional energy absorbed in the atmosphere doesn't cause such dramatic weather extremes that we starve/drown/fight each other to death first!
What if the moon is made of cheese?
We all get to roast in the human-induced Global Climate Change that results form dumping all that C into the atmosphere. More realistically, we get to starve as our crops and farming methods fail to cope with the variability implied by climate change, aggravated by the terribly, dangerously narrow genetic diversity in agricultural varieties in use because we've allowed major corporations to "patent" and "exclusively license" the genestock that feeds us.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
What happens if we don't run out of oil? We continue to pump out CO2 until we turn the planet into Venus. Switching to renewables isn't just about running out of oil.
The sun always shines, it just doesn't always make it to the ground where it's currently needed. However, we're working around that by planning huge solar arrays in places where it's almost always sunny like the Sahara and the American Southwest and then transmitting that electricity to where it's needed. Another proposal that's a little further out is to have huge solar arrays in space and then beaming it down to receiving stations on Earth (usually as microwave energy).
Personally, I'm hoping we find a way to have small, affordable fusion reactors in our basements to power the house and the car charging port in the garage. Giving each house or neighborhood its own source of electricity (assuming we can do it cheaply enough) would solve a lot of issues with transmission, etc.
I doubt we will ever run out. What will happen is that it will become more expensive as the low hanging fruit gets used up and efficiency and alternatives become a better bang for the buck and we migrate to other technologies. I'd rather be on the early adopters end of this one.
It's not just about supply. It's about the work you have to do to get to that supply. Deep sea mining? Compare that to an array of solar cells in the desert. Heck, compare just about anything to an array of solar cells.
We're steadily making inroads on every issue electric has (primarily generation, storage, transmission); and in the interim, the end user already has many advantages. Huge torque from initial RPM for motors (you want a fast car? Electric is your friend. You want individual wheel drive? Electric is perfect. You want efficiency? Electric motors are right up there. Etc.) efficiency for light and other applications. You want a device? Electric is what it'll almost certainly run on.
Right now, we need fossil fuels for other things: plastics, lubricants, etc. But even that will probably come to an end, assuming we can get to mining resources from outside our gravity well. That's a long way out right now, but it seems inevitable once we establish a real presence. Zero pollution, zero land disturbance, zero waste products, transport cost of "shove once"... sensors will advance so that asteroids and such can be interrogated at a distance, basically spectrometer type data, give us a good hint of where to go for what...
Eventually, tech will change everything, just as we've seen in the past. Prediction is almost always disrupted by tech. I mean, it's fun to engage in, but if you look back at various predictions from pundits, SF authors, etc... didn't turn out that way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If we do not get off carbon fuel we selfish parents leave a dying world to our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.
No hour on a horse is ever wasted. Winston Churchill
Fact is, we are and we have put too much crap into the air. The weather is changing. With that change, the food supply is in jeopardy. But it's all pretty well timed as everything else seems to be collapsing at a faster rate not the least of which is the economy. Do you think Europe is in a bubble? It's coming for us in the US soon.
Unless we find a way to sink as much carbon as we extract and convert to CO2, it should be obvious what would happen. More AGW.
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Granted revamping the grid to go to solar is big. But revamping to go to methane from oil is not a big deal. Both use the same concept - super heat water until it become high pressure steam which then drives turbines. Only the burners need to be changed. My dad worked for Boston Gas as an engineers for 40 years and I remember him talking about industrial sites which had the ability to switch back-n-forth between oil/gas depending which was cheaper.
There are a couple of economic reasons that will drive renewable adoption:
It's not the size of the reserves but the cost of extraction that will drive adoption of renewables. As long as natural gas is cheap (and prices can be hedged) utilities will build natural gas plants at the expense of renewables. If prices rise sharply, gas becomes less attractive (since much of the cost per KW is for fuel) and other energy sources become viable options.
The energy density of the energy source. If a lot of space is required per BTU fossil fuels will dominate in many places. For example, a gas plant is relatively compact compared to a wind farm of similar capacity; so it is much easier to acquire land for a gas plant. For small scale uses, such as automotive or home fuels, the ability to get a long range or have a reasonably small supply pipe vs large panels favors fossil fuels currently. The economic driver here is "what fuel source gives me the best return on my needs;" such as the ability to travel or not want a roof full of solar panels.
Economics is what limits OPEC's ability to rise prices - eventually alternatives are viable on a cost basis as well as an energy self sufficiency one.
Quite frankly, global warning is not as major concern to most people than the ability to afford fuel drive, cook, and heat their houses; so selling renewables on that basis is very difficult.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_a.htm
Last year, we consumed 6.8 billion barrels of oil. This has been a pretty consistent average over the past 5 years, all things considered (5 years prior it was 7.5B, but seems to mostly fluctuate around 7B). And this is US consumption *alone* -- not even factoring in the increased rate of Chinese consumption, or any of the European, African, Asian, Australian, South American nations (Antarctica gets a pass, because it's effing cold down there and they can use a little oil to not die while watching penguins)
7.4B to 11B barrels is 2 years AT BEST if we pare down our oil consumption. Then those resources are GONE.
Considering "oh, but there might be more than we think left over!" is pretty pointless when we alone are consuming oil at this rate. Absorbing the mild inconvenience of reducing our oil consumption should be priority #1 for all of us. It doesn't solve the problem but it will (a) give us a *little* more time to get off the sauce and (b) start altering our habits and consumption practices in a direction that will prepare us for the inevitable end of oil reserves, which are guaranteed to happen someday.
I had a Geologist come into my class once and state "We will never run out of oil, but it will become so expensive to extract that no one will pay for it." I think this quote is fairly true eventually oil will become so expensive that we will only use it when necessary and we will never be able to pull it all out of the ground.
Granted this could happen centuries from now but it does not mean we should not be looking to other ways of producing power so we can use oil in other ways after all we are using over 80 million barrels a day (last time I checked) and we can't support that type of production forever.
We use all that oil to make ourselves a Blade Runner/Terra Nova/Modern Chinese environment, or we save it, preserve the planet and use the massive fossil fuel reserves responsibly for space exploration.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Huge solar arrays in space also double as an excellent weapons platform. I wouldn't expect that to happen anytime soon, even though it's a cool idea in principle. In any case, it's not needed—we can generate what we need on the ground. Mr. Fusion would be nice too...
Storage is the problem. There are lots of solutions, but they haven't been implemented yet.
The major oil companies are promoting "No peak oil" stories to influence google results. They need to do this to keep asset prices up, soothe investors and keep the financing on which they depend flowing.
For a numerate look at exactly what we're facing, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil
"Peak oil" itself is a bit of a straw man. The problem is declining net energy from hydrocarbons. Net energy from shallow easy wells that produced light sweet crude was great. Net energy from deepwater gulf wells producing heavy sour crude or oil sands where the bitumen has to be heated in order to be liquid? Not so great.
So bottom line. The absolute quantity of net energy in the first half of the oil on the plant is much greater than the net energy in the second half. Oil supply is NOT the same as energy supply.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Even if we found out we had an unlimited supply of carbon-based fuels, if you factor in all of the associated costs with burning them (production, transportation, environmental, health) ... it turns out they're not really that cheap.
Unfortunately, we don't factor in ALL fo the costs into the price of our 'cheap' fuel sources ... we're incurring a huge debt because of it, and the books are going to balance sooner or later. The environment will get its pound of flesh.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
The only reason that things like shale oil and tar sands are economically viable is because the price of oil is so high. Bring oil back down under $50 a barrel or so, and it will be too expensive to extract. Undersea mining? Good grief!
This is tantamount to taking drinks from a bottle of water, and asking yourself if the bottle will ever become empty.
Yes, if our consumption of oil and other fossil fuels continues, unabated, they will eventually run out. You can debate when that'll happen, but it's inevitable.
How much oxygen do we have, and how does that compare to the supposed quantity of fossil fuels?
The Earth originally had a reducing atmosphere, and the fact that we now have an oxidizing atmosphere is because it has been "bioformed". Biological activity yanked the CO2 and other stuff out of the atmosphere, locked it away in some other form, and released O2, leaving us with the combination of nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other traces that we consider - pleasant and essential.
By burning fossil fuels we're essentially reversing that process. It's worth noting that those biological processes are still ongoing and to some extent auto-compensating. But one could make the case that by going after every last scrap of fossil fuel we would at the same time be going after every last scrap of O2 as well.
It's a rather simplistic argument, I'll agree. But we make far too many policies based on unrecognized externalities and the assumption of an abundant and inexhaustible biosphere. Most likely "using up all of the O2 with fossil fuels" is absurd, but perhaps "doing something to measurably reduce worldwide O2" isn't, and I would suspect that high-altitude nations would be as upset by this as sea-level nations are by current global warming issues.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If capitalism doesn't provide a profit motive to develop alternative forms of energy, government should.
We can create money to fund research into ideas that the free market doesn't immediately reward. The Fed creates money now; but it goes to the banks at 0%, who want to buy T-bills even if they only pay 2% or 3%; but the austerity-pushing Republicans want to limit the sale of T-bills. So the banks sit on the money instead*, and get interest on it if they store it with the Fed.
Instead, give the Fed's created money directly to people, in the form of a basic income. Encourage individuals to innovate on their own or through ad hoc collaborations facilitated to an unprecedented degree by the internet. (Note that the market was too short-sighted to fund the creation of the internet; AT & T felt the internet threatened their business model of telephones, for example.) In this age of MOOCs we can educate ourselves about energy and work on hypotheses that business won't pursue because they are too driven by the requirement that they show a profit on next quarter's shareholder report.
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* See http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h3/current/. Current reserves are at or near all time highs.
Of course we're never going to run out of fossil fuels. It becomes uneconomical to extract the stuff long before we run out. It never completely dries up, it just gets more and more scarce expensive and plays a lesser and lesser role in our lives. Take methane hydrates: we've known that there were massive quantities of energy stored in this stuff for decades, but we're only now getting to the point where anyone would think about using these incredibly hard-to-access, hard-to-process resources as fuel. Going back a few years, the same was true for shale gas, oil sands, deep-water offshore oil, etc. This is a point that Charles Mann unfortunately missed in his article: we're exploring this stuff because we're desperate.
This could be an okay thing if we replace oil with sustainable sources of energy (as the techno-utopians would predict) or a disastrous thing leading to the downfall of civilization (as the doomers would predict). I find myself in the middle camp: we will partially replace our fossil fuel use with renewables and increased efficiency, but the increasing cost of fossil fuel use will also force us to reduce the amount of energy we use and, consequently, our standard of living.
Pop over to the Do the Math blog. With current energy growth, somewhere between 400 and 500 years from now, the oceans start to boil. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
The oil industry has been saying this for... generations. Who is honestly surprised here? If the oil industry thought it was about to run out of oil they'd sell off their stake in it and reinvest in something with a longer future. Look at what Kraft and several of the tobacco companies have done... They see declines in previously stable industries. Junk food and cigarettes. So what do they do? They diversify and actually start selling off assets that they don't feel will last.
Oil companies though? They're doubling down. True, many of them are shutting down refinaries or getting out of the distrubution business. But that has more to do with regulations. In extraction... discovery... They're spending more on it then they ever have because they see profit in it. They wouldn't do that if they thought it was going to dry up in the near future.
I don't know how to say this without ruffling ideological feathers. Upsetting people is not my intention here. Just saying... possibly there are certain camps with obvious biases that should be taken with a grain of salt going forward and certain other camps that you should possibly trust because no one is better informed on the issue. We can disagree as to whether they're lying or not. But you can't really disagree that they don't know. Who in the end is more trust worthy? A clueless ideologue that probably wouldn't know the right answer to save their live? Or the self interested industrialist that knows full well the correct answer but might fudge the facts to squeeze profit?
Both are unreliable but only one of them actually knows what they're talking about. The ideologue can be outright ignored. He doesn't know what he's talking about. The industrialist might lie to you. But at least he knows enough to know what is and isn't the truth. That's an interrogation with purpose. Interrogating the clueless is like drinking from a bone dry well.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I agree that the ultimate goal is to use renewable energy. But in order for us to use that kind of energy, we need it to be cheaper and more efficient than what it is now.
So let's come up with a solution that allows us to work towards that goal but at the same time allows us to use our non-renewable forms of energy that have proven to be cheaper and more energy efficient. Let's frack and drill and use cleaner natural gas all while we are trying to figure out how to make renewable energy work.
I don't know the details of the solution, but we should figure out those details together. The ultimate solution may not make us happy as we will surely have to give up a little in what we individually deem as the optimal solution. But isn't that when you know a compromise is good - when proponents of both extreme sides of the issue are not happy?
Let's stop the extremism from both sides! It will not hurt us if we continue to use fossil fuels for 10-20 years while we WORK TOGETHER on finding an optimal renewable energy source. And it won't hurt us if we move to renewable energy sources in 10-20 years even if it is slightly less efficient or slightly more expensive than fossil fuels. But the path we are on now IS hurting us. We are NOT working TOGETHER to find the renewable energy source and we're allowing enemy countries in the middle east to dictate our policies.
Can't we just get along?!
I'm sure this has been said before, but we probably won't come run out. It will just become increasingly expensive, until the point that other renewable energy becomes more attractive. As per the last 2 "oil ceilings" around $120 (one of many examples) WTI (or was it Brent? I can't remember), it would seem that currently energy prices for trucks, planes, and consumers can't support >$120 price.
So basically, this problem is going to solve itself, and we won't run out of oil, because we will (mostly) stop digging for it when it's too expensive, and use something else.
The only risk is that energy companies take the profits from oil and re-invest it in making cheaper drilling techniques instead of alternative energy, and then we really do run out before we can use oil to find an alternative (since most certainly any research is going to require it). But that's pretty unlikely, considering "oil" companies are already investing in alternative energy to become "energy" companies.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Watched the weirdest conversation on @MorningJoe last week while flipping my way up to CNBC-about Winston Churchill changing the British fleet from coal to oil and causing the carve out of Iraq and the eventual radicalization of islam, was the smartest thing i'd heard all week but my brain couldn't compute that it was on MorningJoe......It was the first time i realized Donny Deutsch is actually a huge brain (was between him and The Atlantic editor) of course Joe just uhmed and ahed and cracked dopey jokes.
- https://www.facebook.com/LivePoliticalChat/posts/481408365263616
“When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.
This is dead wrong. The economic argument says that oil production is tied to the profitability of ever-more-expensive production technologies. We will never "run out of oil" because eventually we won't be able to afford to extract it, but this will happen while there's still oil in the ground. There's a similar physics argument, based on "energy return on energy invested": fossil fuel production ends when the energy required to pull it out of the ground is greater than the energy of the fuel itself. There will still be some in the ground, and it might be useful for making expensive chemicals, dyes, or lubricants, but it's pointless as a fuel.
So no, we won't ever run out of oil. But we will reach a point where you can't have any. To characterize this situation as "infinite supply" is ludicrous.
that new hydrogen thingy where water is separated on wafers or titanium would be a huge and easy way to access cheap energy..... if we developed the tech to safely extract shale and coal, two systems of burn per power generator if using fossil fuels, that could help with the air quality. rudolph steiner said that all the coal/oil had to come out of the ground.. it was a karmic thing or something.... but all that space opened up in the earth, MASSIVE new locations for housing, industry, etc. so we could get on to the business of making the bankers move underground and disposed to try to cull the herd of us eloi
Yes fossil fuel will run out. Not tomorrow, Not next year, Not next decade. It will run out. What we do have is time. Time to develop an economical alternative. What we need to do is continue to support research in renewable energy sources and energy storage. We do not need to waste money on implementing uneconomical costly technology that is not competitive right now. Having the government tax low income earners so they can subsidize rich people who want to install solar, wind thermal etc is crazy and bad for the economy and our future. How much research could have been done with the $500,000,000+ wasted on Solindra and others? Keep using fossil fuels as long as they are economical. It is becoming more expensive to extract them and over time the price will rise to reflect that. Keep working on solar, biofuels, fuel cells and batteries. At some point in time the cost of fossil fuels will be higher than renewables and the switch will happen. This type of energy switch has happened many times in the past from human to animal to steam/wood to steam/coal to steam/oil to Internal combustion/gasoline to internal combustion/diesel to internal combustion/natural gas to nuclear. These technologies coexist with varying levels of use depending on economic viability. Why should renewables get any special treatment? Market forces are very good at deciding what works best and most economical. Just get out of the way and let it happen.
Former Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani once said, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones."
Look at the aftermath of Super Storm Sandy (S3). People out of power for days or weeks. I'm pretty sure that most of those people would be willing to spend a little more to have locally generated power which will be available immediately after storms even if it is just during the daylight hours. I'm equally sure that everyone will be willing to pay a little less for a more reliable source of power. Once the construction cost for renewable energy, plus storage, is less than the construction cost of fossil fuel plants it's pretty much game over because there won't be an ongoing fuel cost associated with the renewables. Unless the fossil fuel companies can manipulate construction cost, or buy and kill the renewable companies, it won't really matter what they do with fuel cost.
...but we might run out of able to be cheaply extracted and processed oil and gas. We keep picking the low-hanging fruit. Technology marches on and fruit that was previously not low-hanging can become low-hanging, but that only goes so far. Over time, the cost of extracting and processing oil and gas will continue to increase. Presumably solar will continue to become less expensive. The hope is that at some point solar will start to be cost-effective relative to oil and gas even without govt. subsidies. At that point we won't completely stop using oil and gas, but global demand will take a nosedive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
The issue is no longer the volume of fossil fuels. In fact, we've known that there were more than enough fossil fuels to power the world for a VERY long time. There is enough coal to power the planet three times over for 100 years in the Appalachian mountains alone.
What the issue is are the costs associated with fossil fuels.
1. Health Care (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/science/earth/20fossil.html?_r=0)
2. Climate Change that are very expensive.
3. Icentives needed by governments (that are simply taking the money from private individuals) to keep the perceived cost of fuels down. https://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/subsidies/index.htm
4. Military budgets needed to keep the peace.
Then of course there is the fact that the cost to extract the energy that we are grabbing now is increasing in price SIGNIFICANTLY. The blunt truth is that the price of pulling energy from the ground, to process it and then transport it globally is simply going to be greater than the costs associated with solar modules running for 50 years.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/04/30/one-of-the-biggest-challenges-facing-oil-companies.aspx
We have PLENTY of material in the ground to burn. We just can no longer afford it.
Methane hydrate to methane -> methane to ethane -> ethane to n-propane -> n-propane to 2-methyl propane -> 2-methylpropane to 1,1,1,2,2,2 hexamethyl ethane aka 1-trimethyl-2-trimethyl ethane aka Jet Aviation Fuel. Octane Rating is 100: burns smoothly.
Neither the oil or automotive industries want you to know this.
It could burn great in automobiles too with the right ECM and design efficiencies to guarantee airflow along with cooling designs to handle the increased burning efficiency (i.e. more heat.)
They want you to burn the equivalent of corn-oil, otherwise JET-A would be $0.05/gallon and they wouldn't be able to afford $5000/hr Ukranian hookers to polish their golden knobs.
To paraphrase John Lennon, "Methane is all you need."
Pull my finger but if you want more methane, pull Al Gore's finger.
"Widely exists" is not automatically the same thing as "cost-effective to obtain and distribute". The main reason the Alberta tar sands are now cost-effective is simply that the overall price of oil has gone up. But that fact, however, also makes other technologies more cost-effective. So, oil and gas can only stay on top of the energy-generation heap as long as they are more cost-effective than, for example, solar panels. Will it be cheap and easy to process methane hydrates? If it was, we'd be doing it on a huge scale already!
Oil and fuel can be re factored from both coal and natural gas if necessary, so in truth, it's not a matter of amount, but a matter of price. Once the price reaches a certain level - other means of getting fuel become more economical. In fact, once oil reaches a certain price, you can literally use nuclear power (or hydro/solar) and pull co2 from the air, and reprocess it into fuel.
The thing which confuses me about peak oil theories is they don't account for the way economics and pricing work. Supply of oil isn't an on/off switch, it won't just suddenly evaporate in a year and thus yielding a worthless modern infrastructure that requires oil. Over the course of many years the price would go up because supply isn't meeting demand, that price is the ultimate signal which then has people switching to alternatives. And that doesn't mean that the only thing which happens is people stop using oil, but people will stop using services that require oil as well in favor of cheaper alternatives. Running out of oil isn't going to be a catastrophic thing (if it really does happen in our lifetime).
The basic premise seems to be: "If we continue our current consumption patterns indefinitely.... bad things might happen." That's not what an economy does, it's not a perpetual motion machine that continuously does the same thing over and over again, we innovate. Remember the biggest competitor to Rockefeller wasn't even related to the oil industry, it was Thomas Edison because he could replace kerosene lamps.
simply because the earth has an infinite size and because fossil fuels are (as the name suggests) not renewable (at least not on viable time spans).
cia factbook and the gp both said 19 million per day, not month
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
The USGS and several major oil companies estimate peak oil from conventional resources during the 2030s. Tight reservoir production released by fraking may add another decade. (Fracking has only been done in 10% of the world so far.) Vast methane hydrates offshore may add a couple more decades. (Only Japan has tried to produce these.) It merely a matter of sometime THIS century, not easy to pin down. The hope is this will buy time to develop non-carbon energy. A lot of clever ideas have been proposed here n Slashdot, but cannot economically compete with abundant methane yet.
Ther have been Cassandras who claimed "peak oil" since the 1860s, and always "next year" since then. But theiy are not very good geoscientists.
I've got the perfect renewable energy source. They are called "carbs" They come mainly from grains, but other food sources, too. People consume them and then do things for them self like walk or ride a bike or open the garage door or climb the steps or use a push mower or any number of things that people a few generations ago did instead of consuming large amounts of fossil fuels.
Somehow, in the 1950s, the average family of six got by with one vehicle. Today, the average family of three has two vehicles. Somehow in the 1950s, if you were bored, you either read a book or got up and went outside to do something. Today, chances are, you use an electronic device. Somehow in the 1950s, the local market was a couple blocks away and people walked to get their groceries. Today, we drive an extra 20 miles to save three cents at Walmart. Somehow in the 1950s, if you were hot, you turned on a fan, if you were cold, you put on a sweater. Today, we run air conditioners and wear sweaters in the house and furnaces while we wear shorts.
I'm not proposing we turn the clock back and return to the 1950s. However, if we want to use less energy, there are a number of things we could learn from what people did, not too long ago.
That isn't oil or anything remotely like it so it appears you are retrospectively twisting other people's words to mean something other than they meant at the time.
Suggest you read this:
http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/04/we-wish.html
Kunstler's op-ed piece provides some compelling counter-arguments arguments that are sadly cobblered up together with invectives to the point of being emotional. If we wanted emotional we could simply tune to BravoTV or some crap like that.
The "Atlantic" is simply running a hypothetical "what-if" scenario, and the potential consequences of it. It is a "what-if" (something you always want to see and debate if you are truly open-minded), not a "will-be" article as it is being presented (demonized/ridiculed) by the interweebz borg bovine-mind collective (many whom I'm sure have not had even RTFA in question, with the opening sentence quoted below):
New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.
Again, it is a "what-if" article pointing to a nightmarish scenario, not a nilly-willy "fuck solar/wind, let's burn moar dino juize" corporate campaign. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to most.
Funny thing is a lot of the trouble during Sandy was due to effectively unregulated electrical power transmission systems that had been "grandfathered" in and wouldn't meet the safety and other standards in most of the third world. The worst of the fires would have been easily prevented if there was not 1930s era transmission gear at the ignition point. The funny thing is I heard this from a guy that was actually working as an engineer in power transmission in the 1950s when the state he was in was getting rid of that stuff as being too dangerous (high voltage stuff nailed to wooden blocks!).
It's cheaper to build solar arrays on the ground than space. Even with batteries for at night and a larger array to charge them it's still much cheaper.
The world is like an egg, the energy resources are like the yolk, and we are like the chick in the egg. The egg comes with a finite amount of resources that the chick exploits to reach a point of maturation where it can break free of the shell and survive without the yolk. If the chick uses up the yolk and doesn't manage to break free of the shell, it fails.
[Note for the pedantic - this is is just to illustrate the point; don't confuse the map for the territory and take the analogy to places it doesn't work then claim victory over the original premise]
The problem isn't really the quantity of oil that's still to be mined. It's the rate of mining and ease of getting at it. The real problem is that what's running out fast is the cheap and easy oil. Our economy at the moment absolutely relies on oil being both cheap and easy.
To contrast unconventional sources and conventional (cheap, easy) oil: Canada's proven reserves are something like 1,000 times larger than Mexico's Cantarell field. However, despite the size of this oil reserve, and despite decades of development, the rate of production from Canadian tar sands is still only about the rate that Cantarell was producing at its peak.
Whether oil is available or not isn't the question. We're still going to have to make enormous (and hopefully not too painful) changes to the way we use energy (and thus to how the economy works) to be able to cope with the shift from cheap, easy to extract oil to very much more expensive oil and it may well just be cheaper to use something other than oil well before it runs out. The cited Bakken shale isn't something you stick a pipe into and oil comes gushing out, rather it's more like rock that has to be mined and then has to go through an expensive process to get usable oil out of it. It will always be vastly more expensive and vastly more energy consuming (much lower energy return on investment) than, say, British North Sea oil or the stuff that comes from Libya or Saudi Arabia.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
This is so stupid I don't even know where to start.
Where do you think all this stuff is stored? For all practical purposes, everything that has been extracted has already been burned up, as far as fossil fuels go. The storage capacity is a tiny fraction of even yearly extraction. The "billions" in contracted reserves are a drop in the bucket. The fossil fuel economy is measured in trillions, not billions. Daily U.S. oil consumption, in crude equivalent, is on the order of USD 1 billion worth. Get a sense of scale, will you, pwetty pwetty please?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Why can't we just let the market do its thing? When the economic balance tilts toward renewables we will switch to them no matter how much carbon is easily available. Eliminate all the special government rewards/penalties associated with any and all energy producton and the law of supply and demand will elegantly elevate the current best solution at any given time.
And not a very bright one at that.
Cause, should "the invisible hand" be the only thing that regulates the market that would mean that the market would be regulated ONLY BY MONEY.
Supply and demand can both be adjusted with money. I.e. They can be faked.
And more money you have, more adjustments you can make - ending with the situation where those with the most money CAN and DO regulate the supply and demand.
I.e. As long as you can afford food for yourself, you can also afford to let everyone else starve unless they pay what you are asking for the food.
Or, you can give away free food until your competition goes bankrupt and you buy them off for a pittance. And THEN starve everyone.
Invisible hand is suddenly visible and it turns out to be a monopoly instead.
That's because invisible hand is an imaginary concept based on the idea that markets are somehow naturally fair.
Monopolies, on the other hand, are very much real and they are based on GREED.
And they eventually end either with a bloody riot, OR with a position where ONE entity controls all the resources, using them for its personal needs - everyone else be damned.
You don't need markets or consumers if YOU already own everything.
But why is that particularly stupid regarding renewable sources vs. fossil fuels?
Well, there are many reasons but the main ones are that the renewable sources require VAST investments in research and development as well as in the production cycle, delivery pipeline etc. etc.
Renewables can be made to work on a large scale IF energy and effort is invested NOW while the energy is still cheap.
They are on the other hand practically unreachable from a position where we can no longer afford most very basic things we are used to today - like cheap food, affordable motorized transportation of people and goods, constant supply of electricity, refrigeration during summer, heating during winter etc. etc.
And that's all WITHOUT even going into environmental effects of "burning it all first and then looking for a solution".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Renewables will finally take over when the price/performance numbers are better.
They're getting more economical over time. In particular, solar seems to have been obeying something like Moore's Law in some ways.
If that doesn't stop, then at some point renewables will be more economical than even plentiful legacy energy sources, and at some point the gap will be large enough to cover the retooling costs over a pretty short time frame.
The availability of other usable carbon sources would merely delay this, not stop it.
More than meets the eye!
" ...to accommodate unconventionals like natural gas ...will be enormously difficult"
I stopped right there. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about. Conversion to natural gas is trivially simple and is going on rapidly as gas prices drop. The new generation can practically be dropped in in place of old coal plants. And it can be brought on line much faster than coal can when electrical loads rise. So it's a no brainer.
Yeah, solar is a different issue. But solar is tiny compared to potential natural gas capacity.
Undersea mining of methane hydrate may present some technical difficulties. But not to the electrical grid. Once that methane source is piped onto shore, its just natural gas and can be plugged into the existing infrastructure.
Have gnu, will travel.
So upgrading the electrical grid is a bad thing? Wow author is a real moron.
It seems to me that it's a two sided coin.
Peak oil stories would drive up the cost of oil because of the perceived shortage, and more buyers and speculators would buy futures that would increase the price, making more profit in the short term for the 'evil' oil companies, and probably get more money in the form of exploration funds. Of course, this will encourage investments in wind, solar, and maybe even nuclear.
On the other hand, downplaying Peak Oil concerns will keep prices somewhat lower. But if they are right, they are looking at huge decline in energy revenues due to declining commodity costs, which probably won't be great for the bottom line and stock prices.
This is my primary problem with the Green Party up here in Canada. When they started out, they seemed a reasonable choice. Then they decided they needed to be a "National" party and run a candidate in every riding. Which means they accepted any nutbar into their ranks as they needed warm bodies to lose races.
This has twisted a reasonable green party focused on sensible environmental policy combined with a more conservative fiscal policy. Now it is a more radical leftist environmental fear mongering hippy silliness. Were their policy decisions seem less based on real science and more based on ideology, which is what you are normally voting against in the normal Conservatives! All it is, is the other side of the coin, but no better.
It is my belief that Nuclear Energy isn't getting a fair shake. About the only thing I agree is that the traditional reactors do take a long time to build, and are very costly initially to construct. That isn't to say new more modern technologies are not more viable. What really gets me, is that people put the blinders on, and don't even want to further our research into these areas. I think it is absurd.
Hydro is great. It really has only two big issues. One it can only exist in certain physical places, and once you run out, you have no more places for Hydro. Secondly, is as the environmentalist will point out, but its very nature, you are basically flooding a LARGE area in order to create a resovoir. This irreversibly destroys habitat and ecology... though some might point out it creates a new one... i.e. a lake. I know in Canada, many of these have been in Quebec, and what has been a sticking point is that in may involve Native groups in one way or another (their land, disputed land, etc...) which is also a concern.
Hydro is also hugely important in that it is one of the ONLY sources of energy we use that can be used as a great big potential energy battery. I.e. when it is sunny out use solar, when it is windy out use wind, and power pumps to move water to higher gravity. Then when the sun goes out, or the wind dies down, you open the sluice gates, and produce hydro energy using the water you just stored. There are inefficiencies in the translation, but otherwise you have nothing. You are left with always on Nuclear, or easy to spin up Gas/Coal generation.
Solar is SLOWLY getting better. However per Watt is by far the most expensive. Also those panels have to come from someplace. That someplace is China. The production of them and the materials needed to construct them, and their life span... not great. Though I think government could do a lot more to promote this for individuals. Remove the barriers to sell power back to grid. Subsidize that. Let individuals and companies take care of the rest. Also from an electrical distribution perspective it makes much more sense, as you lose a lot in translation as it were moving current from one geographic area to another. Keeping generation local is a big plus.
No serious industry person thinks it is due to limits on production capacity. Upcoming years will tell.
It's cheaper, but solar arrays in space have the ability to be much more efficient as nothing is filtered out by the atmosphere, there's no night, no cloudy days and it can be beamed to a receiving station that's directly where it's needed. A bicycle is cheaper than a car, but that doesn't always make it better. We don't have the technology yet, but a prototype might be viable within a few decades.
1. Its still a dirty, poisonous product
2. Its still being priced and controlled by large behemoth monopolies that will gouge us for every penny
3. It still requires massive installations for refinement and transportation which remain dangerous points of failure
4. The byproducts are still going to cause massive health issues involving lung disease and cancer
5. It cant be used in space or on other planets
6. Regardless of the warming aspects, its still not good for the environment
7. The companies have a habit of tampering with democracies that are inconvenient
8. The devices used to convert oil to energy require too much maintenance.
We need oil to become obsolete.
One thing I've been saying for a long time is that we will never literally run out of oil. What we will run out of is cheap oil. As I understand it there is much more oil in tar sands and oil shale than liquid crude. The liquid crude we are discovering and developing now is far more difficult and expensive to recover than the oil we enjoyed 50 years ago. 50 years from now will fossil fuels still be cheap enough for many people to be able to drive a 6000 lb SUV 100 miles to work and back every day? I don't know. Will they be able to afford to heat and cool a 6000 ft^2 home? I don't know that either. Our high standard of living is fueled by cheap fossil fuels. As the price of energy rises our standard of living drops. Without incentives or a carbon tax I don't see renewables being a bigger energy source in the near future. Unfortunately a carbon tax by making energy more expensive would lower our standard of living which few Americans would tolerate.
Here's the problem. Every piece of energy we've ever had has come, originally, from Solar. We need to max out our solar power efficiency, and we need to do it soon. Fossil fuels are basically batteries, and we are currently abusing the fact that we are billions of years into Earth's having had life. There are a lot of random things in the ground that happened to have absorbed lots of solar energy and happened to be easy to burn. This makes the cost of energy seem much lower than it actually is, and so solar power would appear to be "cost inefficient".
Of course it is cost inefficient, when you compare it to these ridiculous batteries that have been storing power for billions of years in a highly compressed and easy to extract form! And it's lucky that during our industrialization phase, we had batteries like coal and oil. It's a very good thing, or else we never would have gotten to the stage of making good solar power.
Dyson's Spheres 4Ever Yo
GFA/M/S d-- s: a--- C++++ UBL++$ P+ L+++ !E- W++ N+ !o K- w--- !O !M !V PS++ PE Y+ PGP+ t+++ 5- X+ R tv@ b++ DI++++ D+ G
I read the article several days back and if you read carefully you will see that their conclusions betray their politics. Amongst other things the article literally doesn't even acknowledge nuclear energy when discussing all of the assorted form of low carbon energy. Considering that nuclear power is the cleanest form of main load power that we have this can hardly be an oversight.
The author is well aware of the human toll being extracted by the use of coal:
Natural gas would significantly reduce the source causes of these deaths and the author is aware:
However instead of supporting a transition to cleaner burning natural gas the author shows what they would rather have happen:
The authors radical viewpoint is exposed here with the following view which they know has never happened in human history. The fact that this could result in the economic collapse of society is sort of acknowledged by the author:
quadrupling the price of electricity
This is just scare-mongering. Germany is moving to renewables, and their electricity bills didn't triple because of feed-in tariffs. They have created 340k jobs, many high-tech, and have moved the country to 20% renewables even whilst growing relative to the rest of the world.
Solar/wind will soon cost less than oil/coal/nuclear, even when you discount the cost of pollution. We have already reached the threshold depending on how you measure. (Pricing a coal power-plant includes pricing the future cost of coal over 30-40 years, and that ain't easy.) Tata in India has already declared that they aren't building any more coal power plants because it doesn't make financial sense.
The economic scare-mongering just doesn't make sense. The label "Alarmist" is projection.
The traditional utilities and oil/mining companies stand to lose their rent income. They have money and political influence. Propaganda works.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The major oil companies are promoting "No peak oil" stories to influence google results. They need to do this to keep asset prices up, soothe investors and keep the financing on which they depend flowing.
bahaha -- hold up can't stop laughing. okay okay.....
The oil companies don't depend on financing they pay some of the larger dividends found in the large cap space. Access to credit is not something big oil thinks about as a 'risk'. Which is not to say they don't use it in these days of near zero sometimes negative real rates; but they don't *need* it and they don't worry about it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkchips/4254681996/
The only way we aren't running out of oil is if we stop extracting it or can't extract it because it's just not accessible. Given enough time and resources, we can exhaust all of the oil available to us on the planet. If we develop alternative methods of energy production that don't break the bank and they eventually replace oil-based energy, then we may not run out of oil but we won't need to worry about it either. Of course, the old rule applies:
Q: What if we don't run out of oil?
A: No.
I've been confused for a while about why people are worried about running out of fossil fuel. Isn't obvious to everyone by now that the atmosphere is what we should worry about? And what's this baloney about revamping the grid for electric cars? Electric cars have become very efficient with regenerative braking and improved battery and super capacitor technology. My electric car is programmable to start charging when the load on the grid is light in the the middle of the night. Electric cars don't really have to draw a lot more current than an air conditioner.
Greed is the root of all evil.
To stay under a 2 degree celsius global warming increase, we can pour about 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, fossil fuel companies are already planning on releasing 2795 gigatons from their proven reserves. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719
What happens if fossil fuels remain plentiful and we actually burn them? Everyone dies, that's what.
Some other resource will limit growth.
Duh.
The most important video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umFnrvcS6AQ
The following is a list of all the clean energy companies supported by President Obama's stimulus that are now failing or have filed for bankruptcy.
A123 Systems (received $279M)
Abound Solar (received $400M/only borrowed $70M)
AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy
Amonix (received $5.9M)
Babcock & Brown (Australian: received $178M)
Beacon Power (received $43M)
Brightsource (received $1.6B)
Chevy Volt (taxpayers basically own GM)
ECOtality (received $126.2M)
Ener1 (subsidiary EnerDel received $118.5M)
Energy Conversion Devices
Evergreen Solar
First Solar (received $1.46B)
Fisker Automotive
Johnson Controls (received $299M)
Mountain Plaza, Inc.
Nevada Geothermal (received $98.5M)
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsens Mills Acquisition Co.
Range Fuels
Raser Technologies (received $33M)
Schneider Electric (received $86M)
Solar Trust of America
Solyndra (received $535M)
SpectraWatt
SunPower (received $1.5B)
The National Renewable Energy Lab
Thompson River Power LLC
Willard & Kelsey Solar Group (received $6M)
80% of DOE Green Energy Loans Went to Obama Backers
The influence of existing interests (Koch/Exxon, etc.) will wane.
Thena small portion of Exxon's profits gets injected directly into the local economy
So you're going to pillage the profits of two specific companies after you've reduced their influence? That makes sense.
Electricity usage will come down
Is this because you are reducing the influence of oil companies or because your alternatives aren't going to provide enough to meet demand? Oh, I know, you're just going to legislate private energy consumption levels so electricity usage will come down!
It's really a non-brainer, and there is empirical proof that these are the effects, because other parts of the world (and the US) have already started trying these thing.
I have to agree with you here: you are merely spewing the ideals of socialist oppression, but you seem to lack the mental processes to think critically about the human suffering the policies enacted would inflict.
Phase-in requirements that oil and natural gas maybe used as feed stock for anything except as a mobility or heating fuel.
Preserve a dwindling resource for the production of plastics, fertilizers, etc., instead of pissing it away going from point A to point B or heating an apartment building.
Also: ban any price-per-gallon fuel signage with numbers taller than 8 inches and elevated higher than 15 feet.. With the CAFE levels we have now, there is no need; all those huge price signs do is egg-on consumer anxiety and anger, leading directly to deadly and stupid fucking foreign policy.
Yes, thanks for responding, and by the way, you're an idiot and you represent everything currently wrong with the American business education system.
The oil companies don't depend on financing they pay some of the larger dividends found in the large cap space.
Yes, like this I suppose ( http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-sinopec-aramco-complete-4-bln-financing-for-china-jv ). Yes, some oil companies pay dividends - today. Should their stock price tank, tomorrow (assuming you can think that far ahead), those dividends will halt with an almost audible screech. Their "capital," much of which is tied to their stock value, will no longer be available as collateral to finance exploration and they will have to start dipping into cash. This will work. For a while.
Access to credit is not something big oil thinks about as a 'risk'. In the past, they didn't. If they don't now, they're going to be out of business with some rapidity.
Which is not to say they don't use it in these days of near zero sometimes negative real rates; but they don't *need* it and they don't worry about it.
The people not worrying about it are nitwit "analysts" at a financial firms who have neither useful feedback nor consequences for failure. Executives at oil companies, and owners of small to medium sized exploration companies are worrying about it a great deal.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have said it many times that if a way to produce virtually free/unlimited energy was developed tomorrow the same companies would still be selling you energy at market rates. They may pass on some of the savings, but people will still have to pay to get it.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
For fossil fuels, the extraction rate far exceeds the replenishment rate. Usage will only go up as more countries develop economies that demand more fuel for transportation, more electricity and more raw materials for synthetics. That means that the supply will eventually be exhausted. We can push the date out by finding more supply, but there's a finite amount to be found and it's going to be harder and more expensive to extract as time goes on (because the easier, cheaper stuff gets found and exploited sooner). Eventually though we are going to hit a hard exhaustion date where we just can't find any new supply. When that happens, do we want to have alternatives in place and ready to go with minimal disruption? Or do we want a mad last-minute scramble to replace everything on short notice and with no prep time?
Kunstler is not worth reading. He occasionally makes some accurate points, but they're in the nature of a stopped clock being right twice a day. He is neither an environmentalist nor someone concerned with natural resources (although he often claims to be one or both). At heart he is, and always has been, an urban planner. His vision of the future is for every place to be like Saratoga, NY, and he will latch onto any currently fashionable dire future prediction in order to demonstrate the historical inevitability of his urban planning vision. Back in the 90's he claimed Y2K would do it, but when the world didn't blow up on 1/1/2000, he shifted to environmentalism and natural resource constraints.
I am not a "screw the environment" type, I believe that the limitless fossil fuel scenario in the Atlantic article is highly speculative (as the article itself says), and that AGW is real. However, anyone who tries to support their argument by citing someone as unserious and self-aggrandizing as Kunstler does their own argument a disservice.
Unlike pretty much any other industry, US liquid natural gas exporters have to get explicit permission from the US Department of Energy to export LNG.
Recently it was reported that the DOE will likely only approve would likely approve only three out of the 20 applications under review for exporting natural gas.
The price of natural gas in the US is way, way below the price of natural gas in Europe or Japan, and there is a huge amount of money to be made in exporting US LNG. Europe is currently held politically hostage by Russian natural gas supplies and prices.
However given the length of the DOE process and the time to build LNG terminals, it is unlikely the US will become a major player in the international natural gas market until 2020 at the earliest.
"most oil nations are so corrupt that social scientists argue over whether there is an inherent bondâ"a âoeresource curseââ"between big petroleum deposits and political malfeasance" link
That's because the 'democratic' west have made it their business to keep these countries corrupt, so as to maintain control of the OIL.
The Secret of the Seven Sisters
AccountKiller
"The premise is that there remain incalculable and little-understood carbon fuel assets which far outweigh all the fossil fuels ever discovered"
Methane locked up in ICE, which when melted escapes mostly to the atmosphere and is an even more efficient source of greenhouse gas.
AccountKiller
is that Henry Ford made his car to burn crude oil extracts (gasoline, diesel )[1], because these extracts were plentiful byproducts of processing crude oil. Even if we stopped using crude oil entirely for energy, we would still need it for rubbers, plastics, dyes, synthetic fibers, pharmaceuticals, etc.
As for wind power, the energy just doesn't come from nowhere. The energy comes at the cost of reducing the wind, which reduces the strength of the jet stream and the rotation of the Earth. The result global derotation [2] and weather stagnation.
Solar power is problematic. It's hard for an apartment dweller to use solar panels -- limited sunlight. As for using them in large tracts -- every acre used for solar panels is an acre taken away from growing green things that collect sunlight for photosynthesis.
To sum up this part, I suggest that anyone advocating for renewable energy learn the second law of thermodynamics.
The funniest thing however is that most of the people screaming about renewable energy are the ones that most oppose the one technology which has the greatest potential to displace oil as an energy source: nuclear power. I even remember when Clinton was first elected, he severely cut of funding to Argonne used to study safer ways of using nuclear power. Note that was not funding for nuclear power, but for studies to make nuclear power safer.
[1] as opposed to wood or coal. Automobiles could have used these, locomotives already did.
[2] If the warming chicken littles can blame blizzards on global warming I can claim derotation.
im loving how many people ITT are concerned about the economics of these problems; as though money will somehow help us out on a planet destroyed by human greed. you can't eat money. you can't breathe it. you can't drink it. the potential (or are they actual now?) consequences of these problems are far above and beyond the context which most people seem to place them in.
What we're after is NET energy, which has been declining since the first wells were drilled. Whether we've reached peak quantity of oil doesn't matter so much. It's Net energy/price over time that matters.
The bottom line is that nothing scales to the amount of energy that we get from oil (about 160 exajoules per year) except nuclear, and to sustain that, we'd have to start using thorium.
That, plus improved battery technology may keep a few billion or so from starving if we build the plants and infrastructure in time to keep supply chains running. Otherwise, we're in for a little "extinction event" around the turn of the next century.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Another way of looking at it is that the self interested industrialist will say or do almost anything to keep the gravy train a-rollin' for as long as can be finagled, and if it kills off the human race in a generation or two, well, that's their problem.
On the other hand, I've heard rumors that energy companies are already preparing diversification strategies. (While the other hand keeps the gravy train going...)
WALSTIB!
I don't agree that everything we hear is "OIL BAD", because you miss the other half of the market that claims everything except for oil will fail. Wind turbines were claimed to be killing birds. Solar power (not obama backed) has made progress but all people discuss in media is Solyndra.
Facts not discussed? How about the fact that Solyndra and other companies are being put out of business by Chinese companies that have more government money than our companies do, to ensure Chinese monopolization? Yet we refuse to address trade imbalance, enforce tariffs, and are planning to expand NAFTA to the Asia Pacific.
How about the fact that monopolization of energy has ensured that some companies simply fail? Why don't we punish the monopolies and/or collusion instead of ignoring it?
How about the fact that lobbyists (who should be jailed for offering bribes) are writing laws deregulating some industries while over regulating others?
There are many things to fix around the issue of oil. That does not make oil infinite as some people want you to believe. It also does not make coal/oil cleaner and safer than alternatives (which is what the overwhelming majority of "ego*" people are concerned with.).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Ah, winger math. Where every cent sunk into a solar panel is a part of the cost, but none of the following are a cost of using fossil fuels:
1. Higher A/C bills during record heat waves, like last year when parts of the south went more than a month with every day going over 100 degrees.
2. Higher food costs as droughts kill crops or require more irrigation.
3. Cost of fighting forest fires, made worse by drought.
4. Flood fighting costs, as warmer winter air carries more water, for wetter snow and more spring rains.
5. Rising cost of gasoline.
6. Spending a trillion a year on the military-industrial-complex. What, you think it's coincidence that our military, regime changes, and supported coups are focused on the world's gas stations?
7. Tornadoes and hurricanes turning huge swaths of the country into federal disaster areas. Warmer, more humid air == more powerful storms.
Finally, even if you want to bury your head in your....sand on climate change, energy costs money. SAVING energy means SAVING MONEY.
Well you can never say never...we certainly could run out of economically viable fossil fuels. Big elephant in the room in his argument is that he doesn't say when. That is because nobody really does know when peak oil will happen and everybody who has ever hazarded a guess has been completely wrong.
I won't hazard a guess when we would hit a wall...but it is absolutely fact that even with factoring in large growth in demand that other is well over a century..maybe two..before we hit a wall in terms of supply.
Anyone who does not accept the fact that even when our great grandchildren are senior citizens there will be enough oil and gas for everyone is deluded...just as deluded as those who think we can burn.it all with no effect on the climate or environment are deluded.
That is why all the experts of today harp on about CO2 emissions and caps and climate. The old argument about turning your thermostat down and driving less because the oil will out that we had before was flat out wrong..the climate argument is much more convincing.
Nonetheless there is still a peak oil strategy too. The whole anti-pipeline lobby is about that. The whole think about the chance of leaks etc. Is a sham..a distraction because the risk of a serious incident is extremely small. In fact the possibility of something as bad as Exxon Valdez or deepwater horizon is pretty much impossible with pipelines. The real reason for filibustering pipeline approvals is to create "artificial peak oil"...to make sure Athabasca oil sands and Bakken shale oil and tight oil and gas fields stay uneconomical when they don't have to be...unconventional oil is in fact profitable to produce at not much more than half WTI spot. The limiting factor is transport not production with today's tech and the visible environmental effects are quite benign (3/4 of bitumen reserves in Athabasca are too far down to mine and are recovered or will be recovered in-situ...no big ugly black pits and up grader smokestacks and such and the cost.and energy differential compared to conventional oil is shrinking rapidly.
In any case I am not saying that it is OK to burn oil and gas all we want...we certainly should examine alternative energy and even more importantly focus on conservation and efficiency. However the anti pipeline and peak oil crowd are being intellectually dishonest and I find that quite sinister. I don't know the whole solution but it isn't ethical to be manipulative and misleading with the facts as this particular environmental lobby is being. There is something to be said for being reliant on energy that doesn't have to be sucked out of the ocean floor or floated across the ocean on leaky tankers from nations ruled by maniacal dictators who hate us and abuse their citizens.
In the meantime perhaps we can have our governments encourage both domestic oil and gas production and transportation properly done AND conservation efforts...perhaps making investment in the latter a condition for industry to do the former.
Lastly another little thought to ponder...perhaps it hasn't occurred to many yet...but maybe climate change is not only a fact but that we've already pushed ourselves over the tipping point...that nature has already established positive feedback loops of its own and that even if Humans suddenly vanished that the climate change that started with us would continue for centuries to come?
Just like the thought that oil might not run out the thought that climate change is now unavoidable would ruin lobbying efforts to reduce consumption...it is dangerous thought perhaps but probably another inconvenient truth that we have to face...adapt or perish.
Did I say that? Once again, your own baggage.
No - every few years there's been a prediction. Now we've got a bump on the curve. Why lie about something which is just a graph of oil production over time?
I bought my SolarWorld 230W panels in 2010 for $2.30 a watt. Today I can buy 270W versions for $1 a watt. I can get Chinese A-brands, like Trina, for about $0.75.
US$? Because I'm seeing $2/W prices on Trina modules.
Please help metamoderate.
The gravy train isn't disrupted by telling people that a resource they control will be more scarce. That would increase fuel prices and make them more wealthy.
Econ 101.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"conventional" fossil fuel (and nuclear if you can find a way to shut up or bypass the nimbys) power plants can be put near where the powe is needed. They also for the most part* tend to generate power when the operators ask them to.
Renewable generation has to be put where the resources are and tends to be far more erratic in it's output**.
The result is that in a renewables powered world the grid will need to have much increased capacity for long distance transmission so that a supply peak in one area can be used to balance a load peak in another area. It is also likely to need storage.
* Yes I know there is some downtime but afaict most of it can be scheduled in advance.
** With the exception of dam based hydro
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Oh, like "scientists" suddenly arriving on-scene, at seemingly almost the last minute, to pitch in with their "findings", is a novel thing?
Let's consider a few other ecological tipping-points or resource bell-curves and see how well scientific findings were applied in those situations, as a comparison to how valuable these findings related to oil futures (futures, mind you) really are.
If global warming exists, it is history's most major industrial accident, so you'd think a careful study is backing the debate. Instead, self-proclaimed scientists argue conclusions predisposed by funding. Conflicting figures run amok, and science itself seems to break down: scientists don't know where 30-40% of projected carbon emissions "go" (Parsons, 145).
In the midst of the climate debate, deforestation estimates differ by tens of thousands of square miles as do assessments of original forest areas (Shoumatoff, 340; Richards, 11).
Not helping matters, in the 1990s the Global Climate Coalition, financed by large oil, coal, and auto industries, ran a disinformation campaign on global warming, finding an audience due to their emphasis on unbiased journalism (Casper, 143).
Climate and tree-cutting aren't the only muddied issues: fishing "is fraught with scientific papers trying to write and rewrite history to excuse some and blame others" (Clover, 111).
Scientists in the 1860s, pressured by British fishermen who had to fish farther and farther out to land any catch, began the inquiry into man's effect on "fisheries" (a term describing oceanic regions as industrial supplies.) Commission chairman Thomas Huxley maintained a view into the 1880s that: "in relation to our present modes of fishing... the most important sea fisheries... are inexhaustible," justified based on two assumptions: that fish catches are miniscule compared to what swims in the vast oceans, and that the effect of fishermen on their numbers was nil compared to that of their everyday struggle as marine life (Clover, 102). So began the tradition of failing to apply sound logic in solving the urgent problem of over-fishing.
During the 1990s, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization stated fish catches were increasing yearly. In 2001, two researchers revealed catches actually declined since the 80s. Chinese officials had overstated their national statistic, their operations of government subverted beneath operations of industry: the officials were promoted only if statistics reflected increased production. The Chinese officials had recorded "by-catch" (a term for unsalable fish) as productive (Clover, 22; Cousteau, 149). As a direct result of their inventiveness, fishing was not done as if a scarcity were underway, which it was. Jacques Cousteau remarks, "such lapses by those who lead nations bewilder explorers who have led a team" (94).
Cousteau notes further discrepancies: between the projected rate of nuclear power plant meltdown and the real thing (whereas pioneer risk assessments assured the world that a meltdown would occur only once for every 17,000 operating years per concurrently-operating plant, two meltdowns had occurred after only 4,000 operating years total for all plants world-wide); between the projected failure rate of space shuttles (once in 100,000 launches) and reality (Challenger, the 25th launch); and between claims versus motives when decisions affecting human lives are made "not to protect lives, but to protect investments" (pages 88, 92).
So you see, these "scientists" seem to only gain a major stage and only seem to be listened to when they're actually the puppets of major industrial interests.
Let's also take into consideration that oil trades on the global market and that the value of oil futures is volatile. Events like political instability in the middle east might make oil appear to be an unstable future and so values of futures will plummet. Saddam Hussein used this to his advantage numerous times by killing his brothers to drive oil prices down, buying oil futures, and then shaki
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
> Did I say that? Once again, your own baggage. You certainly did by claiming the peak was already reached in 2008. I had to correct your grossly inaccurate statements at least twice today.
Who cares if we run out of fossil fuels? The big problem is the impact that 50 more years of burning fossil fuels will have on the environment. Shoot all the oil into the sun for all I care, we need to protect the planet and stop exploiting it.
We like muscle cars. Vehicles that are LOUD that you can't not-notice. Its also expensive to drive because of fuel consumption, which shows that kind of money a guy can spend on a regular basis. Its what impresses the girls and is a key role in the human mating game. Thats a big market, and you can't do that with a fuel efficient hybrid or methane or propane or electrical or hydrogen based car as far as I'm aware. So as long as there's a market for loud vehicles that consume large amounts of fuel that cost a lot of money to own and drive, we're probably just gonna find something thats equivalent to, or worse than, gasoline.
Fossil fuels are humanity's swan song. We are too stupid and will die off. Oh well.
Social Credit would solve everything...
And what if crude oil is found not to be that of a decaying biomass from long ago? Could crude oil be classified as a renewable energy source? http://www.viewzone.com/abioticoilx.html
Grossly inaccurate is less than one percent now?
I'm not sure when that curve you are showing turned up, but at around this time last year the 2008 was the peak - maybe some more precise 2011 figures came up since.
I'd say it's instead "grossly inaccurate" to lump methane hydrates in with oil and to pretend that predictions of the inflection point (or whatever, hopefully just a bump this time) are equivalent to observation.
If we operate in a free market, we will never run out of oil. Instead, the price will just keep on increasing.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.