171 comments on Plateau update
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
171 comments on Plateau update
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
- The Future of European Transport: iTREN-2030
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
—Henry Ford
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Still the peak in CO + NGL is probably local; barring world economic recession we'll see major production hikes in the South Atlantic offshore (probably only in 2009) that will adjourn the final peak to circa 2012.
Apart from politics and economic cycles, only a production collapse in KSA or Russia (or a simultaneous mild decline) might make 2005 the final peak epoch.
My prediction for 2007 is confirmed permanent production declines for both KSA and Russia.
Or at least that one of our predictions will be wrong.
Tony
"Just a clarification, here. Biofuels are only potentially renewable."
How true, and only patially renewable. If you count out the imput of natural gas (or coal or bitumen from tar sand, never mind CO2 as nat gas gets too expensive) I have never considered the major bio fuels (ethanol, bio-Diesel) as 'renewable" in the old sense of that word. They are more in the nature of a "fuel switching operation" than a renewable energy program.
The only added "renewable" energy in the bio fuels is the sun that shines on the crop, then has to be converted to bio-mass, which then has to be dehydrated and processed, and then carried to the sale point.....well, you get my point I hope...why not use the sun directly, burn the natural gas in the vehicle, or better yet, work to direct conversion of water to hydrogen by solar...ohh, that's right, it can't be done because it is not efficient enough, somehow it gets efficient when you add a half dozen extra conversion steps, and thousands of pounds of waste matter and CO2 per potential gallon in a centralized plant, so all the raw material and all the waste now and all the final product has to be shipped about....
Never mind. As Virginia Woolf once said, "It's like talking with your face pressed a closed door."
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
The only reason they appear efficient is because we chuck in a bunch of fossil fuels hidden as part of the process.
If fossil fuel is removed from the equation then logically, due to laws of conservation of energy the most efficient method should be the most direct.
No energy is "renewable".
The sun's fusion output rolls in.
It pauses for a moment here on Earth.
Then it radiates out into space.
Gone forever.
Renewability is a fairy tale.
One way flow is reality.
It has a funny other name: "entropy".
This distinction is made by calling the former power source renewable. No one who uses the term is under any delusion that the sun contravenes the conservation of energy.
Which is the least grown up, to use a common term with a well understood meaning even if not technically precise or to quibble over irrelevant linguistic distinctions that confuse no one?
We use words to define the map, they never truly fully represent that to which we assign them. It is simply common consensus that allows us to agree upon a definition. I believe I used it correctly.
Take a look at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy
This is a poor definition. Energy is never "replenished", this is confusing energy and the potential energy inherent in matter. e.g. filling a tank with gasoline does not "replenish" the energy in the tank, but it does provide a liquid which can be involved in an exothermic reaction from which some energy can do things we find useful. Likewise, solar energy is never "replenished", it is simply a continuous source.
Contrast the problematic definition of renewable energy with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_source
This is a good definition, at least from the point of view of humans.
Having said all the above, it is mostly useless because most people who use the term "renewable energy" understand these distinctions, and we can wave away the whole issue by simply defining the term to mean the right thing. Trying to promote the adoption of a more accurate term is not likely to work - see, for example, "hydro" to mean electricity when in fact it means water (see, e.g. Ontario Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, BC Hydro - all of which are or were electric utilities) or "America" to mean the United States of America.
Please.
Linguistics is vitally important.
One word in place of another does make a difference.
So if we, as supposedly scientific TODder's keep reinforcing the false concept of a "renewable" energy source, what chance does the lay public have to finally come to grasp with the truth of the situation? Suppose they vote to kill R&D in fusion because they believe "we" are instead developing "renewable" energy sources? Makes perfect sense in their mind. Renewable means renewable, doesn't it?
We need to be careful about what false delusions we unwittingly ingrain into the minds of the lay voters. It is their vote that counts, not ours.
With the exception of nuclear and geothermal, every other energy source we talk about here is a solar sourced one.
Wind is solar sourced.
Hydroelectric is solar sourced.
PV is solar sourced.
Oil is solar sourced.
Even "coal" (a.k.a. non-hydrogenated carbon) is solar sourced in the sense that the oxygen used to combust coal is a byproduct of photosynthesis.
Something I was thinking about in regard to KURT COBB's latest post regarding Copernicus, Darwin and .. Autistic Economics
I was less than thrilled with the concept of an "Un-Autisitc Economics" (an oxymoron IMO --no, it's dyslexia when you transpose your letters :-) ).
So I posted the following, linguistically directed comment:
Renewable is a word used to describe those sources of energy for which the amount we may use tomorrow and in the years ahead is not reduced by a significant degree by using that energy source today in the amounts that it is practical to use them and over the future time spans over which it is sensible to plan human activities.
The amount of solar, wind, wave and tide energy that we could practicably use today will not noticeably affect how much we can use tomorrow or over the next 200 years and thus fits within that definition. Oil clearly does not.
Talking about oil as being solar derived may be pedantically true but is likely to cause unwise choices by those of the general public who have not considered the problems and are only too ready to accept ideas that will avoid having to change immediately.
Talking about photovoltaic and wind energy as renewable may be untrue in the strictest pedantic sense but the difference is not going to cause any false decisions.
Fusion energy, if it proves practical, sits on the edge of being renewable by this definition. We cannot noticeably deplete the planet's deuterium by any reasonable future use.
Lithium is rarer but there are thousands of years worth of it that can be extracted using only a small fraction of the energy it will produce. Beryllium, used as a neutron multiplier in the blanket may be a problem in the long term with very heavy use.
The question of whether we can drop nuclear fusion research
because we are developing photovoltaic and wind energy does not rest on whether they are truly renewable or not but whether we can develop them in sufficient quantities and
in the right places and for an acceptable price and overcome such problems as intermittency.
Renewable energy is useful concept and is usually construed
correctly by the public in ways that are meaningful to choices about energy sources
You are assuming that the only time we will "truly" need fusion is when the sun finally runs out of fuel and implodes.
Not true.
What if we have extreme climate change and perpetual clouds ... meaning no sunlight gets to the surface?
Do you ever listen to politicians talking about that there "energy" stuff? Many of them are totally clueless. And they are the ones who cast the important votes --like whether to fund basic R&D or not.
Where do you get this idea from? In fact I support fusion research but the quite the silliest reason for doing so and the silliest reason not to install photovoltaic systems would will be that we might get perpetual cloud cover. If that happens agriculture will collapse and we are dead.
In fact the two do not complete on the medium term. Even the proponents at ITER do not see the first prototype commercial fusion power reactor delivering power for 50 years even with their fast track programme.
It will almost certainly be at least 70 years before fusion has developed to become a major part of the worlds energy supply. Build up cannot be much faster than this because of limitations in tritium supply. Deuterium/tritium fusion reactors use over 55kg per year per GW thermal. Reactors will be designed to breed their own tritium from lithium but will not produce much more than their own needs and the magnitude of the spare tritium will limit the rate of growth of new reactors.
Most of the world`s present supply of tritium is from the CANDU reactor which will have accumulated just 27kG for ITER from now to start-up in 2027.
2076 is well past the point at which all but the most starry eyed optimists think the oil production will have suffered major decline.
It is a major topic of this forum as to how we get over the intervening period. Wind and other renewables will be installed at increasing rates and economy and efficiency will be forced on us. Nuclear fission will see a revival and although they should not be used, filthy tar sand and shale will be used. Coal will be used in horrifying amounts with very little of the CO2 sequestered. Will this see us through? A range of opinions have been expressed here, Will renewables be cost competitive with fusion when it is available? Very difficult to judge at this point. Will fusion be practical even then? Far from certain. Will advanced technology and the budget surpluses to support it survive till then? There are many that doubt it.
However the prospect of generating multi-gigawatt power from one compact site near where the power is needed with fuel available for thousands of years from friendly areas and generating no CO2 in actual running, zero chance of a nuclear explosion and limited short lived radioactive waste is a prize so tempting that even at fairly long odds it is worth the price of research and development costs.
Oh and yes, the sun will swell up as a red giant and engulf this planet before finally settling down. It won't implode.
One could also build more CANDUs (perhaps using burned fuel from LWRs) and produce more tritium that way.
Best Hoeps for fusion,
Alan
According to this source nuclear weapons use about 4g each and it has been suggested that the latest designs do no use any. This makes it unlikely that military tritium production is much more than a kilogram per year.
10's of kilograms of tritium will be needed for each new start up and the only practical commercial way of getting to grow the number of reactors to substantial numbers is from existing reactors. If the tritium breeding blanket produces only 10% to 15% more than it needs for self sufficiency it will take 2 to 3 years to fund a new start up. Given a few months commissioning from delivery of the initial charge to full power, the doubling time will be 3 years or more. This means it will take about 20 years to go from 1 reactor to 100.
Total U.S. tritium production since 1955 has been approximately 225 kilograms, an estimated 150 kilograms of which have decayed into helium-3, leaving a current inventory of approximately 75 kilograms of tritium.
This was almost a half-life ago (12.3 years), so 37 kg or so left today.
Inserting Li6 into existing nuclear reactors for neutron bombardment seems the easiest/best way to produce tritium in quantity. Perhaps, slip one zirconium covered rod of Li6 into a fuel bundle and adjust the control rods slightly (or use slightly more enriched U in the other fuel rods).
IF fusion reactors are seen as our salvation, and tritium is the bottleneck for "more", then "ways will be found".
Best Hopes for Fusion,
Alan
Yes US military tritium production was about 7 or 8 kg per year up to 1988 when they closed down the last of the dedicated reactors but I suspect it it is now about the 1kg/year mark I suggested. It was produced at a staggering cost.
World production of uranium in 2004 was about 40,000 tonnes. Of this 0.7% or 280 tonnes was U235. Enrichment usually leaves about 0.2% of the U235 in the depleted uranium so only 200 tonnes a year of U235 finish up as reactor fuel
The fission of one atom of U235 produces an average of about 2.4 neutrons. To maintain the reaction an average of one of these must cause a new fission event. The others being lost or absorbed naturally or by control rods.
Commercial reactors are built to a fairly tight neutron budget and although there are some spare neutrons that could be released by pulling the control rods out further it is unlikely that, in such reactors, more than 10% of the neutrons could be diverted to tritium production without problems.
This leaves an average of about a quarter of a neutron per fission event or four fission events to produce one spare neutron which can produce one tritium atom. Four uranium 235 atoms weigh 940 atomic mass units and one tritium atom weighs 3 atomic mass units. Thus 313 tonnes of uranium 235 produce 1 tonne of tritium and the world's 40,000 tonne per year production of uranium could ideally produce 630kg of tritium per year if every reactor in the world were switched to maximum tritium production.
At 20kg initial charge for a 2GW(thermal) 1GW(electrical) that is a absolute maximum of 32 reactor start-ups per year if we rely on fission generated tritium. To put this in perspective china is at present installing an equivalent to 50 1GW(electrical) coal fired power station a year
This analysis ignores all sorts of factors that would reduce even that yield much further such as that much of it would decay and leak away in the reactor and the sheer improbability of converting every fission reactor in the world to tritium production.
As to the blind faith "ways will be found", I doubt you would be able to show your face on this forum if you said it about oil.
Tritium is a major bottleneck in the future widespread use of fusion and is widely recognised to be so.
I will not live to see the widespread use of fusion energy but I may, and hope to, see enough to know it will become so after my death.
However, if fission reactor produced tritium were able to seed 10 (not 32) 1 GW fusion reactors/year and each one of these went on to seed another within a decade (relatively conservative #s) AND some tritium reactors were built optimised for tritium production, then we could scale up to fusion power as the dominant energy source within a generation or so.
Tritium from commercial reactors would provide a larger base to start the exponential growth from.
And then there is the possibility of accelerator production of tritium.
Given the other many constraints on fusion reactor build out, even an unlimited source of tritium would result in a generation to "build out". Likley tritium is the "critical path" constraint, but far from the only one.
Best Hopes,
Alan
I think your "not reduced by a significant degree" is meant to make it possible to include geothermal as well, am I right? It's an interesting definition, but the point remains that it doesn't match the normal meaning of the word "renewable". Further, it doesn't match definitions you will typically find, which do focus on the word renewable.
You may understand the real meaning of the phrase, but that doesn't mean others will. Thus, it's a bad phrase, just as "hydro" is a stupid thing to call electricity (whether from hydroelectric sources or not).
An invisible being called God created all this beauty around us with the force of His intelligent Design and then, as he the infinitely powerful one, grew tired, He "rested" on the 7th day and decided to keep his microscope focused on the comings and goings of each of us little microbes as we brayed and prayed to him. And He spent the rest of his time doing nothing but answering our prayers, bringing into being the essence of each wish we make upon a star. Hope is forever renewable. Life is not a spiral. It's a circle, an unbroken hoop that forever renews itself. Ah, to sing again, with all the colors of the wind.
I often picture the Sun as a mighty river of energy flowing past us, and our 3rd little rock here in the river as intercepting the flow for, oh just a brief moment before it leaves our grasp forever.
Yes, indeed. See for instance the production of hydrogen: While it has the potential to be a clean fuel currently is is produced from NG, producing quite some CO2.
"All liquids" is a scam. It's basically double counting!
Clearly, analysts should focus on C + C to get a truer picture of what's going on.
Clearly, analysts should focus on C + C to get a truer picture of what's going on.
I wrote some on this, and thought a lot about it as I was writing my response to Westexas. The really relevant metric would be net total liquids. Not sure if anyone has used this term (its a bit of an oxymoron), but it would capture what is truly relevant. C + C ignores some legitimate contributions toward liquid fuels, and total liquids does do some double-counting. A net total liquids would take total liquids and subtract out any liquid inputs that went into making the finished product.
Now THAT would be a meaningful measure...