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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 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.
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.
And it's not like the decision makers haven't been informed of the consequences. They just felt the money was better for the moment.
It's literally sickening.
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.
One thing I've always wondered about regarding large desert solar arrays, is what happens when there's a sandstorm? I mean, what fills the generation gap when the sky is blanked out, and how does sand get removed from the array afterwards? Are the panels safe from damage from the scraping of sand being blown about or will this damage them? Will the weight of deposited sand after a sandstorm cause them to break or collapse?
I think people assume solar arrays in deserts are a magical problem-free solution, and I understand not all deserts are prone to particularly bad sandstorms, but the sahara is and it's often cited as a place for such a solar array. Has any effort been made into researching and finding solutions to such problems?
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.
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.
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/
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
The SEGS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems in California near Edwards Air Force Base uses pressure washer systems to wash sand and dust off the heat-concentrating mirrors. They use water from the local desert aquifer which is running out. They also use water from that aquifer to cool the condensers on the output side of their steam turbine setup since there's no convenient river or ocean to dump the heat into.
“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.
What if the moon is made of cheese?
Well the calorific value of cheese would give us a virtually limitless energy supply. With a supply of liquid oxygen burning cheese could probably be used to power moon to mars missions.
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.
...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.
The free market is not the answer. The free market may be the efficient decision maker, but it lacks the things we say makes us human. The free market has no empathy, compassion, intelligence, foresight, or shame. Would you ask a person lacking those trait to be your boss?
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
The best "decision" we could make as a society is to get rid of all the government distortions in the market.
There has never been a society with both a functional government and no government distortions in the market. That's because *any* government action distorts the marketplace.
If the government has a police force to enforce laws, suddenly there's a demand for cruisers, tasers, nightsticks, pepper-spray, etc that wasn't there before, distorting the market. If the government has a fire department (with a very real government interest that its cities don't burn down), there's a demand for hoses, trucks, pumps, hydrants, etc that wasn't there before, distorting the market. If the government builds a road (to ensure that its police and fire departments can get to where they're needed), that distorts the property values around the road (e.g. look at what happens at nearly every exit ramp of major highways). If the government fights a war, that causes major distortions in the markets for clothing, weapons, ships, fuel, food, and just about everything else. If the government sets up any kind of court system, then that creates an entirely new market for people who know how to navigate that court system (a.k.a. lawyers). And of course any kind of tax or fee system set up to pay for the government's existence also distorts the market.
And that's just the basic functions of what we typically see has government.
There's a legitimate question of whether a government should have specific involvement in the energy sector. But the idea that there can be no government distortion of the free market is simply wrong.
I am officially gone from
Individual wheel drive as usually envisioned is silly. Yeah, it looks cool to have a direct drive motor on a wheel assembly But that's unsprung mass and you want to reduce it, not add to it. Once you have to get power to the wheel through a driveshaft of one sort or another, there's no point in having individual anything as it just adds duplicated mass for stuff like housings, mounting, etc. One motor, one gearbox, and two wheel drive right where the motor is - that's what's the most economical in any and all terms: weight, material cost, servicability, etc. RWD with motor in the front is heavier, AWD is heavier, one motor per wheel is heavier, and so on. About the only cheaper but worse handling solution than FWD is to have RWD with a solid (straight) axle and rear-mounted motor. You save some weight by not having four sets of universal joints. That's about all of the optimization you can do in an electric car.
There's a point at which you're talking about really small number of moving parts compared to anything with a conventional ICE, and the point of diminishing returns is staring right at you. Just count the number of rolling contact, spline and friction interfaces between the piston and the wheel in a conventional FWD car. An electric car cuts this by an order of magnitude!
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
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
http://www.flickr.com/photos/monkchips/4254681996/
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.
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?
PLEASE lets get back to the thought that taxes are made solely to fund necessary govt services (federal and state), and should NOT be used to try to mold or direct human behavior.
It is not (especially the feds) their fucking role to try to mold my behavior or influence how I choose to live my life. They are there to answer to ME, the citizen, not the other way around!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As of last October simple googling led me to this:
"In fact, of the 28 funded projects -- involving 23 companies -- listed in a 2012 congressional report, only four involve businesses that were either sold or are not in operation."
So basically you are listing 28 companies that received money for projects that as of last october 4 had failed and yet you claim something like all of them failed?????
Most of what I have read about the stimulus investment points to a better than average return than a typical venture capitalist would expect at least in terms of percentages of success. The funding of the industry itself has led to more success stories than not. Green industries in general are a growing segment of the economy and the growth was largely spurred by the stimulus, but now even without the stimulus it is still growing. To me at least that seems to indicate sustained success for this newly developing segment of our economy. We should be cheering this development... not lampooning it. Green jobs will play an increasing role in our future economy and it is great that we are embracing this as a country. Why become the backward country who has to buy all of its tech from china and europe?
"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