<Open Letter to Duncan ClarkeThe Oil DrumDrumBeat: August 17, 2007>

25 comments on Michael Klare: Tough Oil on Tap

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ThatsItImout on August 17, 2007 - 5:20am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

Michael Klare's article says,
"Again, the numbers involved are staggering. According to the NPC, an estimated $20 trillion in new investment (that's trillion, not billion) will be needed between now and 2030 to ensure sufficient energy for anticipated demand. This works out to "$3,000 per person alive today" in a world in which a good half of humanity earns substantially less than that each year."

So the next time you hear about the unsustainable expense of solar or other alternatives, use that number as an alternative. 20 trillion bucks.

The great thing is, just as the oil gets move from "easy oil" to the hard tough to get stuff, the alt energies are moving from hard to easy....

Think of it this way: The HARDEST kilowatt of power produced by PV must have been back in the 1950's, witht the first kilowatt. That first kilowatt would have taken all the lab work, all the chemical development, all the fabrication skill and testing embedded in that first few solar chips to produce.
The second kilowatt was a breeze in comparison, and the third.

With each scaling upward, we face the same thing: The first megawatt was a huge achievement....the second, much easier, the third, easier still, and the 100th megawatt now barely makes news....This is the FUNDAMENTAL advantage of the true renewables that the oil and gas industry does not want you to know about. Time is against the fossil fuels, as each barrel burned makes the next barrel harder to get and more expensive, while with the renewables, each megawatt produced makes the next megawatt easier to produce.

TIME IS ON OUR SIDE. The only question is, do we have enough time now to get out of the gate. We have wasted decades, and trillions already chasing the depletion curve. The perception has to become acceptable to the customer that throwing away another 20 trillion on a downward spiral is far from an assured gain, but instead an assured loss, while investing it on the upward side of a rising EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) and ROI (Return on Investment) is the only modern and intelligent way to go.

How many megawatts of clean, truly home made and renewable power would 20 trillion dollars buy? Any guesses from the math and stat geeks out there? :-)

RC
Remember we are only one cubic mile from freedom

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mbkennel on August 17, 2007 - 5:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Time is against the fossil fuels, as each barrel burned makes the next barrel harder to get and more expensive, while with the renewables, each megawatt produced makes the next megawatt easier to produce.

Only up to some point.

Just as fundamental geology limits oil production, fundamental physics limits practicalities of full renewables. It's unfortunate it is so, but it's truth.

The magnitude of renewables, except large-scale hydroelectric, is still so much less because of the much lower energy density of the input. There is no way to engineer around that immutable fact.

Consider 2.5 MW wind turbines---the biggest on-land ones, these give power-factor adjusted at best 1MW. Fifty of these on a ridge are very impressive, and noticable---drive by such a wind farm. You can see a large capital investment, and for some people quite an undesriable alteration to the landscape. And yet, this is nothing---you need at least 1000 to equal the useful electrical output of one single nuclear reactor. One thousand, to put where? And for but small increment to capacity? Modern nuclear plants have two or three reactors, as well.

Significant scale-up of nuclear seems quite difficult, but equivalent scaleup of PV and wind seems substantially further from practicality. But when people see the large numbers for PV and wind (so far from current) the dreamy optimism takes over---like for a caveman going to alpha centauri is not much harder than going to the moon. But, it really is.

How many megawatts of clean, truly home made and renewable power would 20 trillion dollars buy? Any guesses from the math and stat geeks out there? :-)

A heckuva alot less than the same invested in coal and nuclear. Coal will be cheapest for a very long time, but I think we ought to forbid it anyway.

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Bigelow on August 17, 2007 - 1:48pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Re: Other renewables

“Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment.

A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.

"The resource base for geothermal is enormous," Professor Jefferson Tester, the study's lead author, told The Associated Press.”
Energy search goes underground
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070804/ap_on_sc/drilling_for_heat;_ylt=AjvF...

“Ms Pontes says wave energy could someday supply 20% of Portugal's power. Wave energy could also provide substantial electricity up and down the European coast, as well as along the west coasts of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States.

Sean O'Neill, president of a Washington DC trade association called the Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition, says: "The total potential off the coast of United States is 252 million megawatt hours a year.

"That's equal to about six-and-a-half percent of our total capacity in the United States, equal to all the dams that we have in the US right now." “
Wave farms show energy potential
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6410839.stm

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Boof on August 17, 2007 - 7:01am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Sometimes I also think we are heading to dark places then along comes a story where the players do seem to be stumbling towards the light. The local Hydro Commission set up a windfarm subsidiary http://www.roaring40s.com.au/home.html to exploit the relentless winds at latitude 40+ degrees south. The Howard government wouldn’t extend the 2% renewable energy quota so several big local projects were mothballed and the Hydro sold 50% of the firm to China Power and Light. Talk about a lucky break. The Chinese have built a couple of medium sized operations and are talking about bigger projects; I think we’re talking hundreds of MW. The turnaround took one year.

So it’s not all doom and gloom.

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Engineer-Poet on August 17, 2007 - 10:19am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

How many megawatts of clean, truly home made and renewable power would 20 trillion dollars buy?<?i>

At today's prices, about 5 TWpeak worth (roughly 1 TW average).  But that kind of volume would push the price way, way down.

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oilmanbob on August 17, 2007 - 10:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

ThatsItI'mOut
RC
There's a couple of flaws in the reasoning of your analogies.

First, whwn oil was firs brought in as a fuel use was the 1860's in Pennsyvania with kerosene as a lamp fuel replacing whale oil. It was a replacement for an unsustainable renewable resource.

The second big flaw is that the best money and energy margins for fossil fuels in society occurred when the peak in production hit the largest oil fields. In the US it was when the East Texas field crashed the price of crude in the early 1930's and the price to the producers fell to TEN CENTS A BARREL!

The second example when this sort of thing happened is when the combination of overproduction by OPEC allowable cheaters and the deparation of the Russians led early 1990's oil prices to decline to $10.00 a barrel.

But just because I don't like your analogies, I still like your idea. For any number of reasons we absolutely need wind. We need nuclear too, and it would be helpful if we put the NIMBY people to sleep.

We have to have a baseload and a backup for the electric grid, and nuclear is both safe and a good power environmentaly. But it takes 10 years to get a nuclear plant built in an safe manner. In that time we can easily add the same amount of wind tutbine energy for less capital investment. We have plenty of locations on the bare mountains of Texas and the ridge lines on the edge of the Great Plains.

The second place you're right is the fantastic cost of adding new fossil fuel capacity to even deplace the decline. It costs $100,000 per barrel per day of level production to develop the Canadian tar sands. Check my figures, I'm bad with arithmetic, that meas it will cost 7 Trillion just to replace one half of our current imported oil of 14.25 million barrels of imports with synthetic crude from Canada with and additional $50 a barrel in production costs. And its not clear that we have the natural gas and fresh water to do it.

Its time to get rid of the ideas of preposterously expensive "solutions" like alcohol or tar sands. Just make it illegal to drive without a passenger-at least two people in the car. And start today.

Bob Ebersole

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