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72 comments on Peak Oil and the Environment Part 3 - Day 1

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Robert Rapier on May 8, 2006 - 11:36pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
I am going to tackle Schweitzer's coal to liquids dream in an essay pretty soon. There is no doubt in my mind that we will do this sooner or later, but I think he is a bit too early for the economics to be favorable. GTL will play out first, and then CTL, followed by the melting of the polar ice caps, followed by BTL (biomass to liquids).

I had intended to go to the conference, but factors beyond my control prevented it. I wanted to throw my name in the ring as Schweitzer's energy secretary just in case he makes it that far. :)

RR

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Dave Cohen on May 9, 2006 - 12:19am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Robert, if we don't get the carbon sequestration in place, this is an environmental disaster. I know you're right when you say that we'll have to do this sooner or later. The economics are becoming more viable all the time.

There is always this tension between meeting energy needs and mitigating climate change. This needs to worked out but right now, in my view, the proper policy is not there. My fear is that the economics will win out and the climate change factors will get put on the shelf.

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eric blair on May 9, 2006 - 12:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
if we don't get the carbon sequestration in place, this is an environmental disaster.

There is already carbon sequestration in place.  It is called oil and coal in the ground.    To react the carbon to liberate heat makes CO2, then take the CO2 and try and tuck it away at an energy cost doesn't make sense.

What happens with the common plan of pumping it into the earths crust when the crust moves?

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Engineer-Poet on May 9, 2006 - 11:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There is already carbon sequestration in place.  It is called oil and coal in the ground.
Any kind of carbon in the ground will do, including charcoal in the soil (terra preta).
What happens with the common plan of pumping it into the earths crust when the crust moves?
The oil and gas in the ground don't seem to have been greatly disturbed by the last several tens of millions of years of seismic activity.
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eric blair on May 10, 2006 - 3:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Any kind of carbon in the ground will do, including charcoal in the soil (terra preta).

At one time you were for processing all the word and were calculating that wood waste alone would proved enough power.   Nice to see that you have finally read up on carbon in the soil.

The oil and gas in the ground don't seem to have been greatly disturbed by the last several tens of millions of years of seismic activity.

Ha!   Look at the oil in shale and oil in sands.   All the lightweight 'valuable parts' have evaporated over time.

So to claim 'no long term effect' is, well, uninformed.

CO2 gas is CO2 gas.   Pumping it undergound doesn't change that it is a gas and will, over time, get into the atmosphere.   If CO2 is 'the disese vector' the cheapest cure is to not produce it in the 1st place.   Wind, hydro,solar, and nuclear fission fit that bill.   The long term waste issues and non-renewable nature of nuclear are very important issues that should not be ignored.

The concete made in wind, hydro and nuclear are a concern WRT CO2.  
 

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Engineer-Poet on May 10, 2006 - 6:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Nice to see that you have finally read up on carbon in the soil.
I proposed holding charcoal as a carbon bank some time ago, but you apparently couldn't spare the attention.  Using excess charcoal as a soil amendment (perhaps with subsidies) is one way of guaranteeing sequestration and improving agricultural policy.
Ha!   Look at the oil in shale and oil in sands.   All the lightweight 'valuable parts' have evaporated over time.
Look at how old those deposits are:  Paleozoic.  They've had at least a quarter-billion years to leak, and how much of them have; half?  If you are talking about a phenomenon which could easily be fixed over a hundred thousand years by natural processes, putting stuff away with a half-life of even ten million is more than necessary.
CO2 gas is CO2 gas.   Pumping it undergound doesn't change that it is a gas and will, over time, get into the atmosphere.
Underground CO2 is not a gas, it is usually a fluid dissolved in water.  There are natural deposits of CO2 which have been drilled in places like Texas (to provide solvent for EOR).  That CO2 has been there for quite a while too.
to claim 'no long term effect' is, well, uninformed.
I love arguing with the ignorant, it's so easy to look smart.
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eric blair on May 11, 2006 - 10:58am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I proposed holding charcoal as a carbon bank some time ago,

No, you were proposing taking what is normally left on the forest floor and using it as fuel, thus removing the elements from the local biosphere of the trees.

That CO2 has been there for quite a while too.

Really?   So you have data on how much CO2 was there to start and how much is there now?

I love arguing with the ignorant, it's so easy to look smart.

Go ahead, show us all how 'smart' you are.   Show the amout of CO2 to start with.

Then show the amount of oil to start with in tar sands and oil shale.

I'll be waiting.   Odds are you won't bother, because, well you have a history of non-delivery.

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Engineer-Poet on May 11, 2006 - 4:43pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I really love it when stupid people show how poor their reading ability is, too.
you were proposing taking what is normally left on the forest floor and using it as fuel
You mean, like a forest fire "uses it" as fuel?  I've proposed a number of different things, quite a few of them having nothing to do with forests.
thus removing the elements from the local biosphere of the trees.
Wrong.  I've always supported replacement of the phosphorus and potash, either by returning them or substituting other fertilizer.
So you have data on how much CO2 was there to start and how much is there now?
You really show your poor reading ability here, because I never said that.
Go ahead, show us all how 'smart' you are.   Show the amout of CO2 to start with.
I never said I knew that, I only said that what's there is millions of years old.  That and the rate of production puts a ceiling on the rate of leakage.

I don't expect you to comprehend this either.

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Robert Rapier on May 9, 2006 - 11:22am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Robert, if we don't get the carbon sequestration in place, this is an environmental disaster.

Preaching to the choir, Dave. But I don't think environmental concerns will stop us. They haven't yet. :(

RR

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Engineer-Poet on May 9, 2006 - 11:56am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
if we don't get the carbon sequestration in place, this is an environmental disaster.
I'm certain you're right, but I think we need to act on warming much faster than we can get much done on carbon emissions.  That's why I proposed braking before the environment crash.
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Cherenkov on May 9, 2006 - 1:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Again, the theme seems to be, "How the hell do we keep the automobile paradigm going?" Not, "Jeez, this automobile paradigm is a stupid f*cking thing that is screwing us royal." Not, "How in the hell can we get this damned automobile albatross from around our necks?"

Why?

The stock answer gets shouted from the wings, "Because it will screw the economy."

Of course it will. The whole damned economy is based on the automobile.

Someone shouts from the cheap seats, "Go climb back up into the trees!"

What trees? Didn't we cut those down last week to fuel the Hummer with cellulosic alcohol for a ride down to the gym to get some exercise?

A few days before the 1929 stock market crash, an economist proclaimed that humanity had reached permanent growth. No more crashes.

Well, all those people who are telling us there will be no peak, at least for a long, long while, will be sucking hind teat when the SHTF.

For those who ask, "Well, what are you doing about it?"

I say, "I'm watching it all come down." We all die someday, but the last thing I'm going to do is die for some capitalist who says we should screw the environment with CTL in order to continue this moronic car cult. At some point the people will have to face their culture's mortality, and you can take it to the bank that the yayhoos will be sure that someone else dies before they do. My guess is they will off the rich first; after all, that is where the gasoline and food and money will be, cause the regular joes sure aint got it.

Up the revolution.

V

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Magnus Redin on May 9, 2006 - 2:07am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I globally hope for an average of about one car for each family but it usually do not need to be big and they should usually not have to use it every day. The unsustainable idea is that everyone should use their automobile for everything.

And to get rid of the car and the option of small scale personal transportation between random places of a few humans and some goods is about as dumb as having it as the only solution.

We need multiple transportation systems that complement each other and a sound mixture of dense and disperes housing. Then we can live with different lifestyle choices depending on what we enjoy, can afford and can handle in different stages of our lives. Again, having the same ideal and solution for everybody is lunacy.

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ChrisPhoenix on May 9, 2006 - 2:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Just-in-time carpooling. Networked carpool requests (integrated with GPS navigation) could recruit a driver who's going your way in real-time. A lot like hitchhiking, but accountable (with biometrics, if desired), and you can easily recruit drivers who are going very close to your destination.

Now it becomes possible to plan a convenient trip in two or even three rides. The first takes you from your origin to a well-traveled point somewhere near your destination. Then you catch another ride to get exactly where you want. If you had even a small fraction of the population participating (like, 1% or less in high traffic zones), you would wait just a minute or two for each ride, which is what makes the multi-ride trip convenient.

Also, with the network doing the negotiating, there are lots of opportunities for subsidies, taxes, and incentives for drivers. "<BEEP> You can make $2 by driving an estimated one-tenth mile out of your way and taking one male non-smoking verified passenger with an approval rating of 93%. Do you accept?"

Chris

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 7:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
When I was a kid (I'm 44 now) there were 300 bicycles locked up at the school I went to for K...Grade 6 on a nice day (the student population is 600 students) I went by there the other day and counted 6 bikes, 2 of which were adult sized, thus teachers or staff.

Why? Because of the new perception that we live in a world of sex offenders and serial killers, parents now drive their children to school

Check out the new releases section at your video store. A significant percentage of Hollywoods income is produced by stoking fears about "demons" of various sorts lurking around the edges of our culture.

The movie they would make about this idea would no doubt be called "Carpool". The plot line such as it is would involve a quite, unassuming guy living in a neighbourhood "just like yours" who passes himself off as a telephone installer, or computer programmer, or something, but who has hot wired the fingerprint scanner in his car to send false data and spends the day crusing the expressways of L.A. picking up single women, who wind up in mason jars under the floor of his basement crawl space.

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BrianT on May 9, 2006 - 7:59am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Good post. What used to be luxuries of the rich (getting driven to school) have now become necessities in the consumption-driven economy. Drive the kids to school then enroll them in an expensive weight-watchers program.The society has bought into the idea that the worth of something is measured by its expense.
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jim burke on May 9, 2006 - 12:51pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
YOu are exactly right. In my small town, the kids used to bike or walk around in their spare time, and go for hikes in the mountains or desert.

As near as I can tell, those are lost arts. I never see kids bicycle or hike, and rarely walk. In fact, I rarely see them at all, except for hitching to grassy park downtown to hang out. I guess they spend their time in the net (much as I do, which is why I'm writing this; but I still hike and occasionally bike...)

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:29pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Most urban North American children in this day and age who's parents would allow them to "go for a hike in the woods" would percive it as a pointless activity. Things "worth doing" are, by and large, activities that have been packaged and marketed to them as being "worth while" by television advertising / pop culture, and a walk in the woods has no "cool".

Hanging out with their peer group is sort of an exception to this, because even though it lacks a direct purchase component  children do have a hard wired developmental need for group acceptance and validation by peers, but you'll notice that importance is placed on donning the outward markers of "coolness" prior to them leaving for the mall/park/wherever What these are will vary depending on current and local fashion and the tribe or clique with which they identify as members i.e. "branded" clothing, hair, makeup, i-pod, goth garb, etc.

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john milton on May 9, 2006 - 2:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I sould add that many of the things that "the walk in the woods" now has to compete against are very powerful, and in some cases addictive.

Examples:

Television viewing: This is how most children aquire their culture (mostly from the commercials, but somewhat from the actual program content), as do their parents. Children have a powerful need for cultural knowledge, also, if you watch someone watching T.V., without watching it yourself they are clearly drugged, or at least "held in thrall" which I count as the same thing

Video games: Addictive, but not in the way t.v. broadcast programming is. Broadcast programming is a clearly a depressant, video games are a stimulant with the drug being adrenallin and the brains other fight / flight hormones

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tochigi on May 10, 2006 - 12:08pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hi JM,

A shockingly good couple of posts IMHO.
you are right about the tv brainwashing. it applies to radio too.
i know because I've seen it.
we don't have a tv so when our 8-yr-old watches it for a while at someone's house, the impact is amazing. and after he listen's to commercial radio in my wife's car for a few hours he parrots the ads for days.

and your comment about being held in thrall is dead right too.
when our son was about 14 months old, we went to an acquaintance's place who had a daughter 4 months younger. when the twice-daily public tv program for mothers and under-2s came on, this lively little girl just sat there motionless with her eyes fixed on the screen for the whole 10 mins. she was in a trance. and then it ended and she became human again.

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TJ on May 9, 2006 - 12:45pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'm going to make Dave happy and say that IMO if CTL isn't started immediately we'll never do it.  Investment costs for this kind of big-time industrial construction are lockstepped with the cost of energy, which means now oil and gas.  So is the cost of coal.  Once we get into an actual decline of the oil and gas supply it's too late; the guys with the capital for alternatives will have zero incentive to fund them.

Now I'll make Dave unhappy.  I hear of about a gazillion steam power plants being proposed.  Without sequestration I think we'll fry with or without CTL.

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72 comments on Peak Oil and the Environment Part 3 - Day 1

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