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It's fascinating. These things are monsters. Twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty, weighing 15 million pounds, taking years to build and costing $100 million dollars or more. According to the coal company exec they interviewed, these machines were developed in the '60s, when we used up all the coal in easy reach and had to develop ways to get at the coal too deep to mine by the old methods. One of the talking heads said it would take 200,000 men to do the work of one of these machines.
I really doubt we'll able to scale up coal enough to replace oil, once we're past peak.
Leanan, with all due respect but this is the type of claims that makes a lot of people dismiss peakoiler as nuts. Of course neither coal, neither nuclear or renewables can replace oil by themselves. But how about all of them together?
Here is my claim - with a proper mix of coal, nuclear and renewable energy on the supply side and efficiency and conservation on the demand side we can cope with the declining oil production for long enough time until we wean off completely of it. Note that I am not using the words "we will cope...". But for that we can do it I'm standing on 100%. Technically there is nothing stopping us, the burdens are within our society and within ourselves.
Both heavily rely on the current oil economy and not just to power the machines to mine coal and to build reactors.
IMO any energy source with high enough EROEI (say > 5) can very well fare and be used as a replacement to oil. Both nuclear and coal have EROEI well above 10, wind is claimed to be around 20, but with the hidden losses I'd rather put it around 10. If we go that deep the oil needed for coal/uranium mining, transportation etc. or for the wind turbines and solar panels can be easily synthesized. We definately can not synthesize all the oil we use today, but as for exploiting other energy sources - we can do it for sure. There could be for example built nuclear assisted coal liquification factories, where the heat from fission assists the liquification resulting a very high total efficiency of the process. And there will be other solutions we can not even imagine today...
Again the key word is that we can do it... but we also can feed the world with modern agriculture but we don't. Hence we have a societal problem not technical one.
The majority of streetcar lines were built between 1895 and the start of WW I, before the Age of Oil, with coal, iron & copper ore, manpower and horsepower. and not particularly large quantities of any of them compared to today.
Iceland has MASSIVE quantities of low pressure steam (not quite good enough for producing electricity) but good enough for all sorts of process heat. Add to this their wind potential, hydro potential and geothermal potential and they could be a decent % of world's renewable energy.
As I have stated before, replacing 18 wheel trucks with electrified railroads gives a ~ 1:24 efficiency gain. Urban rail about a 1:100 efficiency gain. Walking and bicycling (yes, oil based synthetic rubber is worn down for both + oil based food), perhaps a 1:10,000 gain in efficiency ??
If you took a 3 mile trip by your 25 mpg.car you would burn 4350 kcal of gasoline, so the savings are not that big :) Of course in walkable cities the distances are an order of magnitude shorter, so this is not a correct comparison. For example in Bugaria 3 miles would be the distance between the outmost quarters and the center of the capital (Sofia, 1.5 mln).
Back to efficiency - I think the most energy-efficient means for personal transportation would be electricity-assited bike.
Are your units correct? Isn't a kcal a thousand calories? I would understand a 3mile walk burning 200 calories, not 200,000, since we only take in from 1500-3000 a day. unless a calorie is annotated a kcal..(?)
I'm not sure that your electric assisted bike would actually beat just a bike alone.
Bob
yes, kcal stands for thousand calories. The scientific definition accepted for calorie is the energy needed to heat a gram of water by 1C ~ 4.19J. This is in the SI system and is also called small calorie or gram calorie.
For dietery information on products in USA the use the such called "large Calorie" which is equal to 1000 calories in SI. Hence 1 kcal (SI) = 1 Calorie on your diet.
In Europe they usually write "kcal" in the product information. Here they don't do that and I can only guess why.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
K-cal means 1,000 calories, hence the Kilo-calorie. Confusing terms I know. But I have been planning a diet for a Diabetic wife for 4 years and have taken several classes on the use of food and exercise to lose weight.
1,000 calories of food if using oil imputs takes about 10,000 calories of oil. Tractor on farm, truck the plant, Truck to wally world, Your car to get it. Not mention anything shipped 10,000 miles.
You can only lose weight through walking if you hike and do a lot of walking 5 to 10 miles a day, and by what you eat. 5 to 10 miles is 1,000 to 2,000 calories of food. you could get that with some of the sandwiches at a fast food resturant.
3 miles is only 600 calories.
I flex and upper and lower strength train, 4 to 5 hours a day, This includes times for walking, my fast pace is 3.5 mph. the regular stroll while can collecting 2.5 mph.
A healthy starvation diet is 800 calories, anything below that and you loss things you don't want to lose.
If I am heavily cross country hiking and pushing hard I could go threw 3,000 to 6,000 calories a day and still lose weight. 200 calories is the standard, But I have fast paced 3.5 miles in an hour. Say i walk 8 hours, That could be 29 miles.
For 6.3 billion people in the world kcal has another meaning. I don't know why God did not want americans to learn the metric system but it probably has something to do with Sun revolving around the Earth and US in particular.
I believe Burma-S rubber is the rubber made from Ethyl Alcohol. Go back to WWII documentation, they claim a 1/5 the energy cost to using Ethyl Alcohol as the base for rubber in WWII.
OIL IS NOT NEEDED TO MAKE RUBBER
I think the most energy-efficient means for personal transportation would be electricity-assited bike.
Compare a photon -> food VS photon -> PV -> battery to power an electric bike. YES an electric assist bike is a winner.
One of the fine laws Bush the Lesser signed - allowing a 1 HP elecric bike is street legal in the USA.
Now, if you can get Clear Channel to stop advocating running over bicyclists with their SUVs.....
That's their problem, not mine. The majority of Americans also think I'm nuts for believing in evolution instead of creationism.
Probably not, at least according to Goodstein's calculations. Maybe if we started 30 years ago, when Jimmy Carter warned us.
I think what people are not considering is the effect that high energy costs will have on all the alternatives. Which is sort of the point of this post, or at least, that's how I read it. Scaling up anything is going to be difficult without cheap oil. Coal, ethanol, nuclear, solar, wind...all of it. Ditto building railroads and other public transportation.
France was very smart, to build all those nuclear power plants while oil was cheap and it wasn't "economical." There are some real drawbacks to the free market.
Under some assumptions I can easily prove that the whole world can be powered for centuries by some 10 000 nuclear reactors built in the next 20-30 years. The resources to build and fuel them are available, and even the oil needed (a lot less than you imagine) can be synthesysed.
And I can easily prove the opposite - that we can not do it because we will lack the resources, the technologies or the social peace needed to do it (for example if I assume that we will not find enough uranium to fuel them, there will be wars etc.)
I absolutely agree that it will be a hard task, whichever path we take... but hard is a whole lot of different than impossible, right? And - with a reference to my experience in software development - it is usually the case that after you have commenced and made the first steps with some project; after that it usually happens to be not that difficult that it looked like before you started it.
I would ask a different question. Is it worth it?
Maybe we could quadruple our coal production, and build the infrastructure it would take to use it to power our cars. But is that a good thing, especially given the high probability of failure? Or are there better things we can be doing to with our limited time and resources?
I don't buy the "anything that's got a positive EROEI is worth it" argument. It's like saying that when your trust fund runs out, you plan to take 50 jobs at McDonald's to replace it. After all, they are each "money-positive," so it should work.
I guess your solution along the lines of this allegory, would be to stay unemployed and smell the roses. To this I'd say smelling the roses is good but being hungry sucks.
Personally I do not see why we can not do both things: cut back a little, give up that stressful carreers of a WallStreet monkey or an overworked employee, and become a fisherman, and still keep our houses warm.
I think we can do it and it is not necessarrily to be painful.
No. It would be to scale back your lifestyle. Do you need the mansion, the helicopter, the yacht, so much that you work yourself half to death, and force your wife and children to do the same to try and keep them? Or do you work reasonable hours and accept a lower standard of living?
Same as it ever was.
Tonight, on Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert hosts Robert Greenwald, of Brave New Films, who has produced Outfoxed and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, which I reviewed on IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0473107/
Colbert's Shtick is to parody O'Reilly, Scarborough and other self-absorbed pundits.
I love Colbert. Back when he was on the Daily Show, him and Stewart were freaking great. And Colbert Report for the first few months was witty and original. But, I think this particular Schtick is running out of steam. I mean, it's just losing alot of it's humor now.
SO, actinide breeders to avoid long term waste and running out of U235, wind and slowly increasing solar where appropriate/economical, some expansion of hydro, both in Canada and Arizona. All of these things will be possible when oil production is a quarter of today's - we began fabricating nukes in the late fifties. ASPO says we will be producing 1/3 of today's oil production in 2050, and ng, though past peak, will be higher than today. The market's hidden hand will not take us from a high standard of living oil based society to a high standard of living non-oil based society painlessly, but it is just amazing what very high oil prices will do to reduce consumption and bring alternatives to market. No doubt the longer we wait to start, the greater the pain, particularly for those unable or unwilling to invest in oil stocks. As usually happens in a crisis, the poor, young and old, will do poorly. Other things equal, it is simply better to be rich. However, as a society we are nowhere near out of time.
Poor countries suffering from vast incompetence and corruption (sub-Saharan africa, parts of south america, n korea, former soviet block, etc.) may in fact return to subsistance farming as their cities die because rich countries, already going through donor fatigue, are likely to become introverted. It does indeed remain to be seen whether the US, with its various record deficits, debts and foreign adventures, can still be considered to be a rich country.
As an aside, I wonder if much of the world has suffered from a lack of liquidity - consider China, jump started with US dollars, apparently unable to jump start themselves with their own currency - and the US, in running its trade deficit that the rest of the world gripes about, is merely supplying the needed liquidity, expressed as demand? Note that there is no real world bank that functions like the us fed reserve, supplying liquidity when necessary and (well, they used to) removing it when not. Perhaps asian economies can eventually generate the demand as their internal market, and confidence in their yuan, grows, at which point they might not need so many dollars, as many others have suggested. Luckily, their dictators fret about their grip and are accordingly quite conservative, therefore seem likely to maintain the status quo for some time after it is needed...
You are totally correct in my opinion. Somethings are not worth it. Why do we need McMansion? Joe has one dear. Okay lets hock the future to pay for a McMansion to live like Joe.
Well that is what everyone is doing and A house worth about 35 to 40 thousand sold for about 55 thousand, to people who are paranoid with their wealth.
We as a nation, Are VERY Paranoid about what the World will do to us.
Also you have to add to it the cost of maintenance. Which is something i have found no information on how any of these alternatives can be repaired/replaced when they break down without the current oil economy.
However todays' info through energybulletin reaffirms my doubts on nuclear, whcih I still strongly object
http://www.energybulletin.net/14485.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/tony_juniper/2006/03/can_we_afford_to_go_nuclear_ag.html
Nuclear power plants have been decomissioned all around the world and the costs have been nowhere near these heights. The practice shows they are usually somewhere in the range of 10-20% from building a new plant. Nuclear industry is the only industry where the cost of decomissioning is included in the current production costs in the form of payments for a decomissioning fund - which I believe you also have in GB. In comparison - the costs to decomission the four reactors in Bulgaria that were stopped because of EU pressure will be less than $1 billion. I don't believe you have 400 reactors that will cost $100 billion in GB, do you?
On a personal note I am already tired of repeating same old things. I decided just to let myself anticipating the rewarding process of watching Great Britain freeze in the dark - and I won't hide that I intend to enjoy the view. I think you deserve it pretty much - UK was among the stronger lobbists to stop the reactors in Kozloduy, which among other things quadrupled the price of electricity in just 5 years. For a poor country with poor people this is a huge hit - thankfully your own shortsightness will provide you with the opportunity to experience what this feels like. Enjoy.
Your quote: "One of the talking heads said it would take 200,000 men to do the work of one of these machines."
Gee, that means that there will be very little unemployment in our postPeak future. How does that old song go?
"You mine 21 tons, and wot do ya get.... 'nother day older, and deeper in debt." :-(
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
i wrote down the names during the broadcast.
big muskie
http://little-mountain.com/bigmuskie/
silver spade
http://www.stripmine.org/spdeup01.htm
9020
http://www.minepro.com/dragline_erection/estevan.html
Let's try to find out what is being used in the powder river region in june. these big machines are apparently only being used to remove the overburden.
i got some neat color maps on coal methane well drilling in the mail.
they think i'm a prospective investor.
regards
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/bpayne37/index.htm
"peak oil may overthrow the green revolution"
catchy?