Scientific American presents "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" in its November issue. In many ways, it sounds good. But let's think about the details: What would the end result look like? Would it really be sustainable? What would the costs really be? Is there any way we could afford to do what is proposed?

The authors of the article, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, propose substituting wind, water, and solar (WWS) energy for all other forms of energy by 2030, not for just the US, but for the world. The types of energy sources that would be eliminated include the following:

• Petroelum (including gasoline, diesel, propane, heating oil, etc.)
• Natural gas
• Coal
• Liquid biofuels, such as ethanol
• Wood and other biomass
• Nuclear

All that would remain would be wind, wave power, tidal energy, hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar. Because of the ambitious timeframe, the only techniques that can be used are ones that work at large scale today, or are very close to working.

Robert Cutler has an interesting article in Gundogar recently in which he asks, concerning the recent articles questioning the size of Turkenistan’s gas reserves “Who stands to gain?” from the imbroglio. His conclusion is that it is likely the Russians, and certainly not the Turkmen.

The story, in brief, is that after a steadily rising projection of the size of the gas reserves in the country, the Turkmen President called in a Western auditing firm to look over the books and validate that the projections were real. The British firm, Gaffney Cline & Associates, came, looked at two fields, South Yolaton and Yashlar and certified, a year ago that they held probably 6 and 0.7 Tcm each. To put this in context, it would make South Yolaton the fourth or fifth largest gas field in the world, and would mean that Turkmenistan might have reserves as large as 80% of those reserves in the entire Russian nation. Turkmenistan is currently getting its gas from the Dovletabad field and it is this that was supplying natural gas to Russia and points west prior to April this year.

This is a slide video of the presentation given by Gail Tverberg at the Oil Drum/ASPO Conference at Alcatraz, Italy in June 2009. Her talk is about Finite Resources: One Possible Explanation for the Energy Crisis ( Presentation PDF 1.3 MB).

Finite Resources: One Possible Explanation for the Financial Crisis from Rembrandt Koppelaar on Vimeo.

Shrinking to grow: Is Conoco plan a model for industry?

Although one company doesn’t represent a whole industry, a shrink-to-grow strategy adopted by ConocoPhillips illustrates pressures on the biggest operators in a world of shrinking opportunity.

ConocoPhillips has disclosed plans to cut capital spending next year to $11 billion from $12.5 billion this year and $14-15 billion in earlier years and to sell properties in 2010-11 worth $10 billion.

“We will be somewhat smaller,” said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva in an Oct. 28 conference call.

Mulva noted recessionary effects on credit markets and said diminishing access to large opportunities “is and will continue to be quite an issue.”

At the Denver ASPO conference, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Albert Bartlett. Afterward, Dr. Bartlett e-mailed me some material he had written over the years. The "Laws of Sustainability" were included in this material. They are part of Al Bartlett's contribution to the anthology The Future of Sustainability by Marco Keiner, published in 2006. The document by Dr. Bartlett from which these were excerpted can be found here.

LAWS OF SUSTAINABILITY

The Laws that follow are offered to define the term "sustainability." In some cases these statements are accompanied by corollaries that are identified by capital letters. They all apply for populations and rates of consumption of goods and resources of the sizes and scales found in the world in 2005, and may not be applicable for small numbers of people or to groups in primitive tribal situations.

These Laws are believed to hold rigorously.

The list is but a single compilation, and hence may be incomplete. Readers are invited to communicate with the author in regard to items that should or should not be in this list.

First Law: Population growth and / or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

Interview With Ian Gordon

IAN: Well I do subscribe to the theory of peak oil. But again, I think the demand for oil is going to drop precipitously. Simply because no one’s gonna be working. Again if we use the idea that 45% of the U.S economy is going to be halted. That means essentially that the same kind of oil demand is the percentage dropping oil demand is also going to occur in the United States. And we are only picking on the United States because she has the largest economy in the world but we are all going be in be in the same boat.

So the whole world economy is going to drop by that kind of percentage.

TRACE: But not necessarily a precipitous enough drop that we could see 90% of the earth’s population washed away in this winter because of unsustainability?

IAN: Well, you are not going to see that because, as you know, there is a significant part of the world’s population who basically do not have anything anyway. If we go into Africa, or huge parts of China, India, etc. even though they are emerging nations they still have a large percentage of the population that are extremely poor.

Energy Return of Water Invested (EROWI). From an article by Robert Service in Science Magazine. The data in the table originate from "Energy demands on water resources",report to the congress, 2006 link.

The following is a guest post by Dan Allen, a high school teacher in New Jersey. Previously on TheOilDrum, Dr. Allen wrote The Speech Obama Needs to Give.

Note from the author (Dan Allen): As a high-school teacher, I wanted to give my thoroughly-industrial, suburban-NJ students a more detailed peek at their upcoming post-industrial future. I felt the need to challenge their prevailing mindsets regarding our resource-depletion predicament: the “shorter showers & change the light-bulbs” crowd, the “engineers will surely come to our rescue” folks, and the “problem? -- what problem?” people. This essay and the before/after comparison chart that follows are part of my ongoing (unsanctioned) attempts at doing so.

Kunstler: It's Time to Rebuild Our Passenger Railroad System

The world economic fiasco, which I call "The Long Emergency," may be speeding us into a future of permanent nostalgia in which anything that is not of the present time looks good.

I say this to avert any accusations that I am trafficking in sentimentality where the subject of railroads is concerned. For the moment, any suggestion that a railroad revival in America might be a good thing is generally greeted as laughable for reasons ranging from the incompetence of Amtrak, to the sprawling layout of our suburbs, to our immense investment in cars, trucks and highways -- motoring culture now overshadowing all other aspects of our national identity.

Monday, November 2, Arthur Berman wrote in his blog:

Pressure from Petrohawk helps cancel World Oil column

In an act of extraordinary courage, a top Petrohawk executive threatened to cancel his free subscription to World Oil if the magazine continued to publish my column. Today, John Royall, President and CEO for Gulf Publishing, cancelled my November column.

I have accordingly resigned as contributing editor.

Heading Out (Dave Summers) and I have been talking about the issues Arthur Berman raises for quite a while now. Most recently, Dave wrote a post called Shale Gas Estimates Perhaps Optimistic - An Interesting and Worrying Talk at ASPO.

So what are the issues involved?