 | What A Difference Two Years Makes | The Oil Drum | The Air Car Part 2 - Q & A With Louis Arnoux of IT-MDI |  |
378 comments on DrumBeat: January 19, 2008
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378 comments on DrumBeat: January 19, 2008
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Great visual aid! Two things I noticed about it are:
1. You want to explain ERoEI, but in your description you loose the word "return" and switch to the word "surplus". That is somewhat confusing. Stick with "return" so your audience can focus on the lesson.
2. Then if you do use "return" in your description you should change you picture so that farmer #1 gets a return of TWO bags of grain for his investment of one. This means one to eat and one for next year's seed. When I first saw the picture the thing that popped to mind immediately was that farmer #1 was going to be one hungry guy if he only harvested one bag of grain for the bag he planted!
(You could add a little curved arrow showing that one bag of every farmer's harvest is recycled to seed for next year - but that may add more complexity than it is worth.)
Greg in MO
The ‘seeds’ don't really correspond very well to the idea of ‘energy invested’, which is in fact more the farmer’s work, of whatever kind. People think seeds are cheap and you just buy them in store (or whatever).
Anyway, if you want to go with that, it would be better to distinguish the ‘seed’ icon from the ‘wheat’ icon in some way (eg. seed icon is a bag, wheat icon is a picture of wheat, and as Greg said, etc.) as with just a quick distracted look, it looks like one bag of wheat can equal one or many more new bags, but how? And Greg is right, the word surplus has to go. It is not surplus (unless you define it very carefully), just return.
Thanks for the feedback!
Ok, I am going to change this slide to Seeds Returned on Seeds Invested. The goal here is NOT to accurately model farming energy inputs and outputs. The goal is to give people who might have done some home gardening a crutch to understand why low EROI energy sources are not going to replace high EROI sources.
Seeds Returned on Seeds Invested is about the only system I can think of that behaves even close to energy production. I gave a presentation just talking about the equation of Energy Out/Energy In, but they just didn't get it. The same questions about surpluses were asked multiple times, so I know the idea was not crossing. (I fully admit not being a gifted public speaker).
I will also change the "return" part of the image so that the surplus is separated from the seeds that will be recycled for the next years production. And I will add an extra bag of grain for the sustenance farmer, because your right, he would starve!
But you seem, from this, to be observant and a quick learner.
Good Luck !!
that makes sense...
I have made simpler schemes..or rather laid them out for others to do. For young teens, for ex. The way to do that, I thought, was to make the energy invested simply ‘work’, ‘effort’, ‘time spent’, which is an intuitive notion - some things are tough, take a lot of physical energy, take time, etc. in contrast to other things that are ‘easy’ appealing to everyday experience, such as (in my case) skimming down a hill on skis, vs. walking up the snowy hill. The stuff harvested (it could be diamonds, or tomatoes, or wheat) are just somehow ‘there’ or appear, ‘grow’ automatically, it is left in the shade. That is a materialist, physicalist approach that skips the ‘economy.’ The metaphor is then something like apples in a orchard (in a closed system), which require ever increasing physical /technological effort to keep the apples coming out to market, and those who harvest them alive.
Eve eating a Big Mac Instead? Heh ;)
Yes, that extra bag for the farmer can be related to WestTexas's Export Land Model.
The farmer and his family, and his livestock must be fed FIRST, before he takes any grain to market. Assume each human needs 9000 seeds a year to feed themselves. Each seed invested will yield ten at harvest ( EROEI=10 ).
The first farmer has poor soil, he eats 9000 seeds a year, and eventually has to sell his farm to pay back his debt.
He harvested nothing. He loses
The second farmer works all by himself.
Problem is he is so inefficient by himself he can only plant one thousand seeds, getting back ten thousand seeds. He eats nine thousand seeds just to survive and power his body. He saves the last thousand seeds for next year.
He slowly loses his farm to the tax man. Overhead kills him.
The third farmer has his family. All together, they can plant six thousand seeds because his wife offloaded all the cooking and washing chores, and left him and his three kids to concentrate on planting and harvest.
They reap sixty thousand seeds. They end up eating 45 thousand seeds. and they save six thousand seeds for next year. This leaves 9000 seeds. Enough to feed the tax man.
The fourth farmer has a family and horse. He nearly doubles his productivity because of the horse. He plants ten thousand seeds, and harvests one hundred thousand seeds.
His family eats 45,000 seeds, the horse eats 20,000 seeds, 10,000 seeds are saved for next year, leaving 25,000 seeds for market. He's feeding his family, his horse, his preacher, and the tax man.
The fifth farmer has a tractor. He plants 100,000 seeds, reaps a million.
His family eats 45,000 seeds. Another 45,000 seeds are sold to buy diesel for the tractor. 100,000 seeds are saved for next year. 10,000 seeds go for tax. 800,000 seeds are available to feed the townspeople. The farm feed itself and almost 90 townfolk.
Now, a problem comes. Fuel for the tractor is getting expensive. Instead of exchanging 45,000 seeds for fuel, its 100,000 seeds. Six less people get fed.
Then its 200,000 seeds for fuel, and sometimes can't get fuel at all. Half the crop is lost because its harvest time and the tractor won't run without fuel. His EROEI has dropped to 5.
His family still eats 45,000 seeds. 100,000 are still saved to plant next year, the farmer is still out 200,000 seeds sold for the diesel fuel he did get. Taxes still got 10,000 seeds. Out of his meager harvest of 500,000 seeds, 145,000 seeds are left. Enough for sixteen people - but 90 townfolk were counting on him. Seventy four people will not get fed.
Having seventy four heads around without something to put in their tummies is not a pretty sight. There is apt to be much physical argument concerning which tummy gets the remaining food. If they destroy the farmer's infrastructure in the melee, even more tummies will not get fed.
Anyway, thats my take on this whole thing.
Part of what you are saying here makes sense; the tech innovations in modern agribuiness has allowed many folks to do something besides farm. You can't have proffessions such as ad salesman, manicurists, etc. You would not have vast numbers of folks attending university to take up psych, soc, apperal merchandising, etc if tey had to grow enough food to feed themself.
There is simply NO WAY in the world that agriculture is going back in time. NONE.
I read JHK's book, "The Long Emergency" and while I agree with a lot of it, he got agriculture TOTALLY wrong, and here's some reasons his view of ag in the future is WAY off;
1) Using horses to farm takes WAY WAY TOO much land. In the horse ag days, it took one-third of all ag produce to feed the horses that did the production. TALK ABOUT EXPENSIVE fuel! In the horse days, the amount of acres it took to grow that fuel made ethanol look like a garden plot.
2) Modern farms today have 300 hp tractors pulling 60 ft wide airseeders operated with AUTOSTEER. (That's right, our tractors use gps to steer) At 6 mph, by 60 ft wide, wasting not a penny on overlap, it takes VERY LITTLE fuel to farm with.
3) My farm uses 4.23 gallons/acre, while IA State says it takes closer to 9 gallons per acre. COMPARE THAT TO HORSE farming on a EROEI basis.
4) According to IA State, the ave corn yield on IA farmland on a 10 year ave is 173.4 bu/acre. Using all BTUs from fuel, fert, and pesticides, that's a EROEI of about 13:1. That's better than the North Sea in it's hayday. Including equipment expense, labor, deprec, insurance, etc, the EROEI is still around 10:1.
5) There is 395,000 BTU's in a bushel of corn. If you don't like my figures, check them.
6) There will ALWAYS be SOME oil produced. Even 50 years from now the production will be at least 20 mbpd, I'm guessing worst case scenario. Where do you think those barrels will go?
I'm 100% convinced those few barrels will go to the guy who adds the MOST VALUE to them. Whomever can get the most EROEI out of them. It ain't the soccor mom. It ain't Joe Suburb. It ain't the engineer designing the next widget.
The FIRST barrel produced will go to herbicide/pesticide, because it adds SO MUCH value vs the BTU content of the herbicide. (One pint of roundup = 20,000 BTUs. This pint will EASILY add 50 bu/acre. 50 bu corn = almost 20 million BTUs. EROEI of Roundup/herbicide/pesticide = 1,000 to 1.)
Once all the globes pesticide needs are met, the next barrels will go powering tractors.
Nobody out there will be able to OUTBID a farmer for petro, because nobody adds as much value to a unit of petro.
I've spent lots of time looking at Peak Oil, and I'm convinced we are here, but there's a BIG MISSING SUBJECT on the conversation about the outcome of PO. That is;
Where will those precious few barrels of daily production go in 20 years? Who will get them? Who adds the most value to them?
I say its the highest bidder. That person is me.
I think it's possible. What happens if peak oil means we can no longer maintain the technology that currently supports modern agriculture? If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?
I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?
I hope it's agriculture, but I have a feeling the lucky winner will be the military.
I agree, though the farmer I think will be a close second.
It seems to me in history some nation-state used soldiers to farm fields at a certain point ?
I would agree with that. But I wonder if we all are still assume too many givens when seeing the future.
Most of what we talked about is the distribution of remaining supply to farmers, Mil. etc.
That assumes a supply chain functioning to a great degree.
If there is no coherent 'Safe" distribution system in the country, many assumptions need to be changed.
Visualize Mexico in 10-15 years. What do you see? A functioning supply chain/distribution system for distributing goods?
Maybe not so stable. Who will get the "Distribution" of the remaining gas there? The Farmers? The Millitary? Banditos?
Oh, factor in the idea that we are already seeing people steal copper phone,powerlines. In 10-15 years (after-during the Greater Depression) Copper lines between towns, cities on those 20 - 100 miles of empty road may be somewhat at risk. Certain things stop working after that happens.
Who will get the "Distribution" of the remaining gas there? The Farmers? The Millitary? Banditos?
In 20 years it may be hard to distinguish between those last 2 categories ;)
..and not to forget the fact that 'An army runs on its stomach..'
Will the Armed Forces start planting victory gardens around their bases?
Will the exorbitant expenditures to 'Rent-a-G.I., Rent-an-MP and Rent-a-potato peeler' (KBR, Bechtel, Halliburton, Blackwater, et al..) start facing demand-destruction as their poor return-on-investment becomes unsustainable?
Bob
(edited for word-choice..)
The army seems to favor cattle farming, rather than veggies. They tend to lease out grazing rights.
At the bluegrass army depot in Kentucky, the cattle also serve as a warning of nerve gas leakage.
During the Tokugawa period in Japan, Samurai protected the fields and farmers from other armed individuals in exchange for the necessities of life. The farmer and the Samurai existed in a symbiotic relationship. Far different from the exploitative fudalism of Western Europe. The Shogunate through the loyalties of the individual Samurai provided an organization capable of repeling larger threats. When the threat was dealt with, the Samurai returned to the farms they were the protectors for. The Samurai at all times recognized the interdependence between himself and the farmer.
Absolutely, Switzerland is a historical example, though the details of who exactly plowed what field and gathered what % of potatoes or beets is not something I would like to venture into. I guess even the ‘top’ historical studies can’t sort that one out.
Today’s reassuring mantra here - Switzerland has a conscription army - is that division of labor will work: men do the hard stuff, women all the rest. The men are ready to go, in 24 hours. The hard stuff could be anything. Digging ditches, planting, etc. All that dates from ww2, and even before, and is very folksy. By such myths do we live.
This letter, PDF, short, to the NY Times in 1915, gives a bit of the very outdated flavor which sorta continues today:
link
Leanan, in 20 years, or even today, the military are not 'adding the most value' to the FFs they are allocated. Besides, 'a military moves on its stomachs', as we all know, so feeding a military is a priority for it to continue to function. From the perspective of the US citizen/taxpayers the costs of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq have been socialized while any 'profits' have been funneled into corporations that are favored by the current administration...This is not a sustainable business model for an empire or any other form of governmemt that I am familiar with. There have been no real 'profits' if one considers that the ongoing wars are being funded by creating ever larger budget deficits. It is my opinion that these wars, and even more wars, cannot be continued because at some point the US military, industrial, congressional complex will bankrupt the US and cause a collapse of the US economy and government. This isnt the day of Alexander, where empires were created by vast well trained armies...now there is the nuclear weapons factor to consider. After the US economy collapses from mismanagement, incompetence, theft and unprofitable foreign wars I believe that there is a good chance that a significant portion of any FFs that the US still has access to will be used for agriculture and for bootstrapping manufacturing for products needed for US internal consumption; ie, medicines, alternate energy, ag distribution, etc. TPTB will stick with the current model untill it collapses, 'dancing with the one that brung 'em', and then we will see a much different US...sans empire and SUVs and with a reduced population. Unfortunately the 'ship' we are on is too big and has too much momentum to turn before hitting that iceburg ahead.
I suspect that in the days of Alexander and in the Roman Empire, the return on investment of military conquests had to be very real and in a fairly quick time. There was the immediate plunder that the troops could bring home, but more importantly there was the ongoing tax base to support the empire.
Now we have a different story where the waning supply of cheap fossil fuel is supporting war efforts that don't necessarily promise any return at all. In fact the wars the US is involved in promise to be a continuing drain barring the miracle that Iraq is stabilized and vast amounts of oil revenue are siphoned off.
Sigh.... oh for the good olde days :-(
Alexander was at the right place at the right time. Farm production had increased to a level where there was sufficient excess supply in all the regions that Alexander attacked. He swept through the regions, took the excess supply, cut off the leadership and replaced it with his own. The system kept functioning. Basically Alexander scooped up the over production to feed his Army with out too much destruction of the cultivation. Brilliant!
Yes, interesting that the same areas of the world have been in contention by the major players for so much of recorded history.
More recently Hitler achieved one objective (the oil fields around Ploesti) only to have the British bomb them from air fields on Malta and in Egypt. The British had major buildups in those areas primarily to protect the interests of, uhm, BP. Ghawar was first tapped in 1938 by Chevron...
Ironically, it may be argued that BP saved the world from fascism. Hitler decided that the Ploesti oil fields had to be secured by invading Greece before launching Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. This delayed the launch of Barbarossa by some 6 weeks. It had been planned that the Slavs could be subdued before the Russian winter set in but the delay cost them.
The invasion of Greece also caused Rommel in North Africa to go short on supplies and replacements delaying his hoped for grasping of the Egyptian oil fields. When the German advance in Russia stalled in the Fall of 1941, at least partially due to long supply lines, attention was refocused on Rommel briefly. Some 22 U-Boats were diverted out of the Atlantic into the Med, essentially ending the supremacy of the British Navy in that area for nearly a year and enabling a re-supply effort to Rommel.
Rommel once again was able to pretty much push the British back at will, until El Alamein. At that point his supply lines were once again stretched to the limit and he was forced to deploy his vaunted Panzers in ways that conserved fuel, turning his tactical genius with mobile Panzers into stationary, defensive gun emplacements which the British could exploit.
Throughout the war the German machine depended on fuel for mobility and it of course faltered when supplies got tight. The resumption of the advance in Russia Spring 1942
saw a tougher fight put up by the Russians, although they were pushed back to Stalingrad. The stalling of the Russian front also allowed the U.S. time to pump a LOT of supplies into Russia via the Murmansk Run.
Sadly for Hitler, he ignored a primary teaching of Clausewitz, probably the most brilliant military German general of all time. He had already postulated the doctrine of the "diminishing strength of attack". According to this, every attack that does not lead immediately to peace is bound to grow weaker as it proceeds and at a certain point end up by turning into defense. Clausewitz called this moment the "culminating point".
Thank you BP, lol. If it hadn't been for the British forces present in North Africa defending their interests there, they would have been unable to threaten the Ploesti oil fields and Barbarossa would have begun on schedule, possibly knocking Russia out of the war. As it was, at one point Stalin was reported to be so desperate in meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt that it was evident that Russia was on the verge of collapse, Russian winter or no Russian winter.
More recently the ties between Britain and the the U.S. have been strengthened by the U.S. allowing BP to purchase several major U.S. oil companies, first Sohio, then Amoco and finally ARCO. No wonder that Blair has followed the U.S. lead so consistenly.
Sorry to get sidetracked, but just more oil trivia from the past, admittedly simplified. A take-away from all this maybe- Oil was always a primary strategic concern during WWII. To think that things might be different now in the midst of a new kind of war, with all the history from Alexander on, would be simplistic.
Here we are again, battling over the same reaches of real estate. The bridgeheads have been secured, the battle lines being drawn. Sigh...
i think amoco aquired/merged with sohio in '87, that was a remarriage of the former standard oil units. bp merged with amoco in 96 and bought arco in 2000.
It was BP that purchased Sohio. I was with Amoco at the time and thought nothing of it really. The Sohio name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
In '89 Amoco told the employees that they had been working with consultants to try and get a glimpse of what the future held for the oil industry. The conclusion of several years study was that by the end of the century there would be only 4 or 5 big super majors after a wave of consolidation. The main reason- they would all have to bulk up in order to get big enough to afford to go deep-water and fight for the remaining oil. Amoco began looking...
In June 1999 the uhm, merger with BP was announced, they had been in talks for about a year. We were told there would be no changes in North American operations. I was in the Lubricants Business Unit at the time. It had just been sold to Chevron. BP turned out to not be happy about that, they wanted it.
We discovered later that top Amoco executives had been given, er, employment guarantees. Within a year it was announced that headquarters would be moved to London and that the 96 story Amoco building, affectionately known as 'Big Johns' erection' after CEO of the 70s John Swearingen, would be sold. AIG purchased it, wouldn't be surprised if they have been looking for a buyer lately, hehe.
I was lucky for a bit. A position was found for me back in headquarters once again in the wake of the sale of Lubes. But in Spring 2001 our entire group was severed. Hard to find seats for 5000 people in an office park in the burbs, lol.
It was also announced that most U.S. refineries were on the block. Mandan, ND was purchased by Tesoro, never heard what happened to Salt Lake and Yorktown,VA. Whiting and Texas City remained, the two largest. Amoco, er, BP Chemicals up for sale also. The Amoco name began to disappear on gas stations, terminals, refineries, etc.
Yea, it was called a merger. BP Amoco was supposed to be the name, for a time. Then a contest was announced to rename the company. Beyond Petroleum was the eventual winning candidate and consultants were hired to come up with a new logo, the ecological sunburst getting the nod eventually. The BP initials of course remain.
Funny how that worked out, hehe.
There was some resistance among the motoring public. Gasoline sales dipped. Amoco premium gasoline had garnered a reputation as being a very high quality gasoline. To this day BP stations now sell premium with the Amoco or BP Amoco name still on the pump, but normally only on premium.
ARCO was purchased late in 2000. By this time many high ex-Amoco execs had taken 20 and 30 million dollar buyouts.
If it looks like a buyout and smells like a buyout, well you decide. But yes, nice to see former Standard splinters re-united, will they get the rest also? One might even go the other way.
thank you for the insights. i remember in the '70's arco was at the top of their game, sometime in the 80's i think they lost their mojo. around the time they acquired the anaconda co and i think things went downhill from there.
in the '80's majors and notsomajors were buying businesses they probably had no business in. they called it diversification. mobil bought wards, i dont think that was a real wise move.
About Rommel. Romel was brilliant when he was reading the US army attache's daily reports on exactly where the British were, where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there.
When we found out, Romel stopped being brilliant because he stopped getting reports.
WRT gps a farmer or group of farmers could set up low power synchronized transmitters to provide a more than adequate low cost substitute for sattelite based navigation. Aviation used such a system for over 50 before gps and these transmitters are still being used in the US and Europe. If as you suspect the military gets first dibs on whatever oil is left then they will certainly use a tiny fraction of their share to put up replacements as needed.
No other industry has the ability to be as self powered as agriculture. Using soybeans as part of a regular crop rotation plan means plenty of biodiesel will be available. Electric tractors using wind and solar are also possibilities.
RDF - radio direction finder
I had one on my kettenburg for sailing up and down the coast many moons ago.
Simple but effective.
not as pinpoint as gps even with several fixes.
Now a days I have heard of sending boats down the westcoast unmaned. just plot into gps, sinc with auto-pilot and drive down to intersept.
Oh yes, we can be that accurate.
What we do is modulate the carrier digitally with a pseudo-random number sequencer ( also known as a linear feedback shift register ). What this does is code the carrier with a mathematical "song", and like a song, you hear a few notes of it, and you know where you are in the song. Thats the beauty of the LFSR - if its a "N" bit, then by the time you get N bits, you know exactly where in the sequence you are, and can predict the next bit.
Now, being the carrier is digitally modulated, you can lock onto the "song" ( phaselock ), and look at the carrier.
The wave length of, say, a 900MHz carrier is around 13 inches. That is for every 13 inches you approach or retreat from the transmitter, you go through a complete cycle of carrier.
Ever sat in front of a TV with rabbit ears and noted you could shift in the couch the tiniest bit and cause the TV to misbehave? Its acting as a phase detector comparing the signal coming directly to its antenna, and the signal bouncing off of you. VHF Channel 3 is aroung 60 MHz.
Say you have four transmitters locked to each other and THEY are stationary. Each are sending a different "song", but all are locked on the same "beat".
On the tractor's receiver, it receives all the signals simultaneously. Each carrier is identified by the LFSR "music" encoded on it. At that point, one does phase analysis of the carriers, mixing them against each other adding known phase delay techniques to null them out.
By doing this, one can resolve one degree of phase shift, which is 0.036 inches.
This would use the same technology as cellphone towers use now. 900MHz is the cellphone band.
Although this does not tell you your ABSOLUTE position, you will have a fine RELATIVE position to the transmitters. If you know where the transmitters are, then you know where YOU are.
We have microprocessor capabilities to do this analysis on the fly using milliwatts of power.
I challenge the assertion that farmers will even use oil in their tractors in 20 years, or any significant amount of oil.
So what will farmers be using instead of oil? This should be interesting.
conservation
hybrid tractors
electric tractors
*sigh*
Wind driven ammonia for both fertilizer and fuel? The fuel use is already proven.
http://strandedwind.org/node/22
Burning ammonia is idiotic. NOx is a greenhouse gas and leads to the formation of ozone in the troposphere which is a serious pollutant and a greenhouse gas to boot. At least with CH4 you get more energy per molecule than with NH3. Fuel cells based on ammonia are another matter if they manage to cycle the nitrogen back into N2.
Your statement is completely and utterly ignorant. Ammonia burns cleaner than gasoline in terms of NOx output and what there is can be cleaned up with an off the shelf catalytic converter, just as is done for a gasoline engine. Or at least that is what I've been told. I am, however, far more inclined to take the word of a man standing next to an ammonia based engine mounted in a dynamometer undergoing durability testing, which doesn't start until emissions testing is complete, than the assertions of some random guy from the internet.
Do I sound snippy? Sorry, but after the tenth time I fielded this question in a Drum Beat thread I would have thought everyone would have internalized this particular bit of information.
Slaves.
Slaves, meet your new masters.
How can any solutions to the problems that beset us increasingly, how can we solve them if we think we are great? If we think we are wonderful, how can we fix our disgusting habits, our nauseating pus-dripping, diseased body that smells like a corpse? How do we find a cure when we keep saying we are hale and healthy?
Impossible! Words matter! And if we keep yelling,'I'm OK! I'm a marathon man!' as we stagger to the ground and throw up in the gutter. We sound like a stupid drunk! Always, the first step towards sobriety and health is to first admit that something is very wrong and then to correctly see what it is. If one is a drunk, one can't claim the wife or boss drove one to drink, for example. So it is with a nation: until we understand that we cannot consume much more of world resources than we produce, we will continue to fall into debt."
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/money_matters/
The general equities market must be calmed. Should the Dow crater, another major domino falls. Let's see how the PPT (Price Protection Team) brings the Dow in Tuesday morning in pre U.S. trading and then how Tuesday closes. The DOW better be higher each day than the indices are before U.S. trading or as the last two days demonstrated, the PPT has lost its tight control of the equities markets. Watch the pre-open indices and closing Dow very closely.
If the equity markets cannot be calmed then:
Here he has a nice long list.
I recommend reading it.
http://jsmineset.com/ARhome.asp?VAfg=1&RQ=EDL,1&AR_T=1&GID=&linkid=5669&...
A sample:
# The markets for general equities would all have to institute total trading halts every 100 points on the downside for 30 minutes each.
# All commercial call loans would be called.
# All debtors one day late on any payment, lacking grace period, would be liquidated. All debtors over one day of the grace period would be liquidated.
# It is clearly visible to anyone with eyes or a mind to think that the PPT has lost all semblance of control in the equity markets and will soon in all remaining markets.
# The commercial paper credit market which is almost dead will die totally
until we understand that we cannot consume much more of world resources than we produce, we will continue to fall into debt.
But it's not debt, it's theft. We have never intended to pay.
Mother Nature is going to foreclose on homo sapiens.
Go to the head of the class.
Once this meme gets out, it's EndGame time.
I read this article on Aegon, Scottish Widows and noted some
bizarre statements.
The comments section caught them as well
Panic selling shuts £2bn fund
http://2cents.dailyreckoning.com/viewtopic.php?p=284787&sid=7b99e67035f8...
... because you figure they will do ... what instead?
"If, say, we can no longer afford to launch GPS satellites?" Well, since the Europeans and Russians are both continuing to have trouble affording Galileo and Glonass, their versions of GPS, even now, maybe this is worth asking. However, do keep in mind that the trouble is purely political, the fraction of GDP involved is almost too small to measure. And even some of the most dirt-poor countries on Earth keep hugely expensive projects going for reasons of sheer vanity, so if GPS is truly valuable...
Nonetheless, if there is value in steering tractors automatically, one can always pound a few tall stakes into the ground, bolt pseudo-satellites onto them, and steer that way. The kind of electronics needed was already available by around 1990. It's still made in large quantities all over the world, mainly in rather less-developed places, as hardly anyone in the OECD can be bothered to touch it any more. You'll find it everywhere in all sorts of less-sophisticated electronic gadgets. Electric toothbrushes. Thermostats. Battery chargers. Plug-in air fresheners.
GPS is a very complicated, large-system way of steering tractors, which we use because (1) we can, (2) it's fashionable even though it's 25 year old technology, (3) it's standardized, so (4) it's less trouble to set up than alternatives. But it's not the only possible way.
Now, in the domain "anything's possible", civilization could fall so low that 1990-level electronics can be made absolutely nowhere on Earth. That, too, would be political, as there is plenty of sand in the world, and people have been fabricating small high-value objects since ages before oil. It need not happen. But if it does, these discussions simply will not matter, our crystal balls will have gone utterly dark - because most of us doing the discussing will not be alive or remembered anyway.
If we can still remember how to make diode lasers, or scavenge them out of old consumer electronics, they could provide a super accurate local positioning system. Think of current day surveying tools.
Does not change your point, but Russian system is expected to be world-wide functioning again by the end of this year. Many launches within last year made it functional again across Russia. Initial batch of the first consumer GPS+Glonass navigation gizmo was sold out:
http://www.insidegnss.com/node/482
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS9350234859.html
Leanan
You said,
"I posted an article a few weeks back about a farmer who bought a new half-million dollar combine every year. He had to, because it was worn out after a year's use. Is this really sustainable?"
Could you please provide a source for that? I know that here in KY we have combines that are 30 years old and are still working the fields every summer. Perhaps folks buying that half million dollar one should consider changing brands! (or are they Chinese combines :-), sorry couldn't resist....
RC
I did. I just can't remember what day I posted it. :)
However, it definitely was not in Kentucky. I can't remember where it was, but probably some place like South Dakota. The article said that it was the sheer amount of land farmed/wheat produced that wore out the combine and forced the farmer to buy a new one every year.
Only as a contract harvestor. Starting in south Texas in early June and ending at the Canadian border in Sept. A combine lasts longer than twenty days, the length of any local harvest season.
I could see the contractor harversters trading in on a new model each year, because that's their livelihood. No way is the old one ready for the scrap heap, though. Some frugal farmer somewhere will pick up a bargain and keep it running for years.
My wifes' stepfather farmed and his business was the holder of the equipment for a number of farms in his area in Indiana. He still has 2500 acres. He bought a new major piece of equipment each year. The combine would come up for replacement every several years. Not so much because it needed it, but because he liked relatively new equipment. It keeps downtime down he says.
Every winter it was not replaced it received a tune-up to the tune of $20,000 or so.
Maybe Ethanol boom a mixed bag?
Yeah, sounds like "new paint disease"
Where are you going to get the fertilizer? I assume you are in a monoculture situation with the rest of Industrial Farmers. Nitrogen might not be as much a problem as potassium and potash.
I like your thought process. You obviously know more about farming than most here (hence your login name?).
However, you are assuming that the world acts rationally when we get to those 20 mbd. I don't see that happening. right now we are squeezing out the third world, and no one is exactly consciously doing that. Not on purpose.
How are the farmers going to be able to afford the more expensive oil and oil products in the future, even if that is the most logical use?
The government won't be able to unless we transform to a benevolent dictatorship. I can hope, but no one is smart enough or savvy enough to take that role.
Tony
Eastern North Carolina
Good postings and lots of food for thought. Pun intended:-)
Benevolent dictators and philosopher kings are rarer than hen's teeth and in a crunch will be scarcer than oil. In order for the power(s)-that-be to be effective they will need the trust or at least the tacit consent of the people. That will be scarcer still. And then if Howard Kunstler is right, governments may be lucky to answer the telephone and do little else.
Mega-systems and complex societies require a great deal of energy to run.
Reliance on the fall-back positions of family and town would more likely be the order of the day.
Might be time to start being nice to the in-laws. That may be harder for some of us than plowing a field.
Here's the way I see modern ag going;
Whoops, let me first back up and discuss the third world and ag, and how subsidies work. Last week I traveled through a piece of rural Mexico. Ever notice that "Rural" and "Poverty" go hand in hand? To understand where ag is going, we must remember how we got here.
Whenever I travel, all I here is growth, growth growth. BS!! Not in farm country.
Walk down the halls of a highschool in rural farm country and look at the photos of graduating classes. Each recent one is smaller than the one before. We export 90% of our youth to suburbia. Most of the mainstreets lost most biz, and stores are empty, vacated, and falling apart. My hometown had 540 pop in 1915, its less than 20 people today. I live in central/western SD. IA is much the same when you look at the small towns 50 miles or more from its bigger towns.
Cheap energy is the ENEMY of rural America. It is a transfer of people and wealth from rural areas to the cities.
Here is how ag subsidies basically work;
1) Countercyclical payments. These kick in when grain prices are low.
2) Flat per acre payment. This one depends on where you live, but its roughly 20% of rental rate. This one ultimately goes to the landlord, because rent bids factor in recieving the payment. Hence if it were eliminated, it would reduce the rental rate by the same amount.
3) The BIG one is LDP. Its VERY VERY important to understand this one before ANY conversation about third world ag takes place. LDP = Loan Deficiency Payment. The gov't sets a price target for each grain, they are;
Corn = $1.80
Soybeans = roughly $5.80
Wheat = roughly $3.50
It goes like this, - The local elevator bid on corn in the fall of 2005 was $1.50 (depending on the day). That's 30 cents BELOW the gov't price target. Therefore, the farmer gets the missing 30 cents from the gov't. If the elevator bid was only $1, then the gov't paid 80 cents per bushel.
Every day the LDP changed, because every day the local bids changed. The old game was to hedge grain during summer rally, then pick up LDP during the harvest low. This game turned upside down as cheap grain said adios.
Subsidies 1 and 3 above GO AWAY when grains rise much. They've never risen much above target prices before for long, so we are in uncharted territory. Basically, except for subsidy 2 above, (Which gets embedded into rent and ultimately goes to landlord) ag is in a free market system for the first time since WWI.
How does this impact third world ag? Well, in the subsidized era, (Most of the 20th century) European and American farmers kept producing more and more BELOW THE COST OF PRODUCTION. This WRECKED HAVOC on third world ag.
Basically ag in the third world is in its infancy, because they HAD NO ECON INCENTIVE TO modernize ag production UNTIL NOW.
Fertilizer only went to subsidized areas, because we were the only ones who could afford the stuff. Now everyone can. Hence the price of fert has risen 800% in the past 2 years.
The END of cheap grain is a HUGE shot in the arm to struggling rural poor in the developing world. If US/European grain subsidies were their enemy, (which they were) then expensive grain will fuel a boom for farmers in Africa/elsewhere.
People do NOT starve due to lack of productive capability. People starve due to politics. Take Zimbabwe as an example. The country once exported half its ag production, today it starves. Why? Because left wing dictator decided to take from rich and give to poor. A recipe for disaster every time its tried.
So ag will need to become more efficient in its use of fertilizer, because there will be less to go around. This is a good thing for the environment. There are hundreds of ways to squeeze more production out of a unit of fertilizer without sacrificing yield, but until now, why bother? In the future, it will pay big to utilize best tech for utilizing fert including;
1) Site specific application using GPS and grid soil sampling.
2) Adding stabilizers to N fert that reduce leaching. (Been on market for years, but until now were cost prohibitive - cheaper to just apply more N)
3) Here's the BIG one! Biotech. Biotech crops that use very little fert are nearly EPA approval. This is GREAT news. They take a gene from one plant that efficiently utilizes fert, and inject it into a grain crop.
PO may be the death of suburbia, but its JUST WHAT global ag needed.
Hope this info shed light.
P.S. In "The Long Emergency" JHK claimed the highplains would do poorly, because we need subsidies. WRONG! The plains of SD, ND, KS, OK are THE LOW COST PRODUCERS of wheat. At these price levels, we neither need nor get subsidies.
Every PO "expert" has the future of agriculture 100% WRONG.
I wouldn't call myself an expert, but my prediction for some time has been deflationary trends in the housing/auto/finance sectors and inflationary trends in food & energy.
The big picture view is that net producers of essential goods & services (especially related to food & energy production) are going to do much better than net consumers. The three "P's." Produce, Pilfer or Perish.
HighPlainsFarmer,
This is a thought provoking post and I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I'd take issue with one point and raise a couple other questions.
I doubt, "Cheap energy is the ENEMY of rural America. ..." Cheap FOOD is the enemy of rural America. While increases in energy prices would eventually translate to higher food prices, the tremendous efficiency of modern farming, that you gave us such a detailed glimpse of, leads me to suspect that higher energy prices are not the primary driver of the current rise in food prices. I could be wrong here, I'm no expert and know very little about farming, then again, especially recently, "expert" often seems to be a synonym for "moron", so I'll continue.
I agree with you that farmers will do well going forward, but as you point out, rural farmers comprise a very small percentage of the present day population. If price is an indicator of availability then food is becoming more scarce. The United Nations Food and Agricultural organization, from Dec 17th bolsters this idea:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/17/europe/food.php
You mentioned policies which affect food prices, if I remember SS's work on fermenting the food supply, last year near 40% of domestic corn production went to ethanol. When you back up a minute and think about this and how quickly it has happened it is stunning. And if oil is 125/barrel at the end of this year and the goal is some absurd amount of ethanol is there any reason to expect that the majority of corn production won't soon go towards ethanol? The limit here would seem to be when the hue and cry about food prices leads to policy limitations on ethanol production. Yes farmers will be doing well, but will "farmers" be growing food. Along those lines is there a great deal of difference between corn grown for food and corn grown for ethanol production? I mean I honestly don't know, but would seem to have an impact on how fungible the corn supply is.
I really hate to be bleak, but I see the world burning (literally) through much of its food reserves as PO ramps up. When food prices necessitate policy changes regarding ethanol production we better hope the EROEI was poor for ethanol or that lost ethanol production will add to PO difficulties.
I do think there are solutions going forward but wow the past couple months have had some interesting headlines. We are fortunate ( ah hell the timings all off to say this, maybe I'll go into politics he he) to have such tremendous farmers here in the US, probably a good time to kiss up to .. er make friends with your local farmer. May I be the first to propose a National Farmers Day in October ... at least for those farmers who grow food.
BTW: I see one of the main benefits (and I am currently not part of the solution maybe this will change) of small local agriculture, as with distributed energy production, to be that it decreases the power of the state. i.e if you grow your own food, provide your own heat, electricity and shelter you are in a sense more free. In seriousness, better late then never, thanks HPF for helping feed the world.
40% is incorrect. Current production is 454 thousand barrels per day or about 7 billion gallons per year. Requires 2.6 billion bushels or about 20% of the current crop of 13.1 billion bushels of corn. a 15% increase this year would bring it up to about 23%
Well, cough, this was from TOD (rounded up) perhaps I shouldn't trust you guys.
It is well-referenced "Sources: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service for corn production, National Corn Growers Association for conversion efficiencies, and Renewable Fuels Association for ethanol plant capacities."
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431#more
As I look at it, you are correct though that it refers to ethanol capacity and not production. Sorry, my bad. Still a disturbing trend to my thinking.
I understand your well thought out logic. I think that I will get some type of preference so I can get to my oil and gas leases as well, since without the fuel - I can use gasoline, diesel or CNG, just in case - I have to shut them down. But there is a limit to giving those preferences. If you get some, and I get some, and the Doctors get some, and the judges get some, we are close to being right back where we started, except hoarding will precede all of this, and there will not be enough to be allocated !!!
Shortages will force all of us to adapt, and it will change the whole world. The people who do not have jobs will grow their own food, of some type, and that will by itself change the nature of agriculture, since the consumption side will change.
There went your "No chance...", but I didn't start this to be in an argument.
Irrigation will also change, and wells will have to be restaged on massive scales, up or down, to efficiently produce the irrigation water, with another energy cost. That assumes that the water has not gotten too high in mineral salts, or dissolved solids to be useful for the crops which happens as the water level in the aquifer is lowered.
The problem is that most people don't have a clue on how to grow there own food, and urban regions have no land to grow food anyway. Those living in the burbs, have treated there land with herbicides that make nice mono-culture lawns, and are containmented with household chemicals (Septic systems). Although its likely that a lots of people unaware of the dangers will plant anyway and endup getting sick.
Furthermore, at best we are taking about supplimental food, its virtually impossible to feed a household for a full year on a small plot of land. What happens when the weather is bad and the crops fail, What do these people do then? Further more, I doubt the elderly will be strong enough to feed themselves. Food theif would be another major concern.
This is already begining to happen in much of the US breadbasket states. Irrigation wells keep on getting deeper as the aquifiers deplete. Sooner or later large areas will have to be abandoned due to lack of adquete water supplies. Of course the biofuel boondangle is exerbating the problem by draining the aquifers even faster (not to mention the water use to make ethanol too). The best analogy is that we spotting the cliff ahead, but instead of stepping on the break pedal, we've doubled down on the accelerator.
Its virtually impossible for a person with good-will to become a dictator. This is because in order to get absolute power, one must be absolutely ruthless. No moral person is going to want to become a dictator simply because such an act would be against thier morals. This is why we trying democracy, in an attempt to put good people in leadership. It should be obvious to all that democracy (at least in the US and many other places) is failing, we have evolved a gov't of self-serving people, interested in obtaining gov't leadership for less than admirable goals.
Today the biggest debates of our gov't are vane, such as stem-cell research, gay-marriage, abortion, poltical correctness, and other even less worthy issues. less than a hand full of politicans in Washington, actively discuss our true issues, including declining energy and water resources, changing demographics, over population, and deteriating gov't finances. We dance on the small stuff, and ignore the real problems looming.
Even the smallest of towns are dependant on the Mega-systems. Except for perhaps for the tiny few religious communities that still use horses to plow their fields, we are all dependant on Modern-complex systems. In addition, we have also gone a futher step, by adopting the "Just-in-Time" system that reduces overhead costs (when the system is working), but drastically increase risks if the system should fail. For instance up until the early 1980s, the gov't use to stock pile grain and other strategic reserves that were spread out over different regions. In order to save money, these storage facilities were abandoned. Every year that goes by, we become ever more dependant on a complex system. Anything more than a very short term disaster and the system, will begin to unravel.
farmers will have money because everyone needs to eat. higher oil prices mean more income for farmers. if oil prices are too high farmers will go out of business and soon farm prices will go up because of lack of supply.
Ever heard of rationing?
Exactly, Alfred.
Some of the predictions on TOD are totally disconnected from reality. Doesn't anyone read history anymore?
Look, it is simple. All politicians know that you have to keep the mob happy. And the most important part of keeping the mob happy is keeping them fed. As soon as people start feeling actual hunger in their bellies, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they will take to the streets with placards and pitchforks and start demanding that somebody do something about it.
I'm talking a million angry people on the streets.
Five minutes later some politician stands up and says that the government will fix the problem.
The obvious way to do that it by providing subsidised fuel to agricultural producers, and if necessary requisitioning some supplies from fuel distributors to make sure the farmers have fuel available. And if you need to police and army to guard the fuel depots, supermarkets and tankers, then you call them out.
I work for a supermarket chain (head office) and I laugh everytime people talk about the supermarket shelves being empty because of lack of diesel.
Do you know how long a politician would last in office if we couldn't get diesel for our trucks?
Kim Jong-il is still in power, despite widespread famine in North Korea. Thanks to his "military first" policy.
And food was a problem for Rome in its waning days, but it wasn't good to be a farmer. Quite the opposite. Farmers abandoned land because of punitive taxation, even while the food dole in the city increased.
Subsidised fuel to agricultural producers, Hell No!
Cargill, ADM, Monsanto etc. have no need for subsidies whatsoever.
Targeted subsidies to farms under 100 acres - that would be ok.
Big agriculture hides behind the image of Aunty Em and single family farms to reap large subsidies from the government.
Don't be silly, Cid. The average farm here is 397 acres and the median size is probably much less with this coming due to land concentration. There are some farmers who've developed the ability to handle 1,200 to 2,500 acres and we're not talking corporate farming - my neighbor down the road ran 1,200 acres, raised hogs before he retired and he is just a regular guy. When we were kids he'd drive to town for coffee every morning and then a few minutes later his goofy white dog would come trotting by - the dog would find his truck and be sitting in the back when he came out, waiting for a ride home. If he were still in business he'd need 6,000 to 12,000 gallons of diesel annually for his operation, which would be just for the field work and would not include an allowance for joyriding house pets.
Like it or not, Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto, along with a thousand other smaller players you can't name, are a requirement for farming as it is rendered today. That all could change, but change would be incremental or disaster; there isn't going to be a magic reset to some new ideal that encompasses peak oil concerns.
You would think, as an organic farmer, I would disagree with you.
I don't.
I think commercial farmers are first in line for the fossil goodies once decline sets in big time.
Those who think that there's going to be this huge revolution and a "return" to organic farming are in for a big surprise.
For one, the "organics" movement is a joke. It's a marketing campaign to drive up the price of foodstuffs that are chemically and physically the same as commercially-produced, store-bought stuff.
That being said, I also think there's going to be a huge move by people to do what we're basically doing here in Maine: growing a lot of our own stuff, using the so-called organic method (I'm not "certified," though I work part-time at a certified farm and personally use no commercial chemicals--because I'm cheap).
Westexas has frequently mentioned the "victory garden" movement of the 40s as a model. I think that's very possible.
People like highplainsfarmer will continue the commercial ag business--but it's going to come at a cost to the consumer. Besides, if times get really tough, the population centers will get the first shipments from highplainsfarmer's harvests.
The rest of us will be making do.
"For one, the "organics" movement is a joke. It's a marketing campaign to drive up the price of foodstuffs that are chemically and physically the same as commercially-produced, store-bought stuff."
Chemically & physically the same? I think you are mistaken there.
Organically grown food has been proven to have higher amounts of essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals, and far less toxic residues of chemical agriculture like herbicides and pesticides.
In addition it is inherently more sustainable... not as much as permaculture, but way better then modern chem-ag.
Todd
This is what I thought too, Todd, but the studies don't hold up. The following is devastating:
http://www.skepdic.com/organic.html
I farm "organically" (I hate even using the word anymore) because it's cheap, it's self-reliant, and it reduces fossil fuel inputs, that's all.
In the citation you gave I didn't see references to the health of the soil. What about this issue? As well as the issue of the megatons of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides dumped into the biosphere? I can't believe that these issues don't have a bearing here.
b3 - I don't even want to get into your link but the reality is that NO FARMING METHOD IS SUSTAINABLE WITHOUT OUTSIDE NUTRIENT INPUTS. Not Permaculture, not biodynamics, not mulch, nor cover cropping, etc. be maintained to a greater extent but you can't take a crop off and not lose nutrients. And, I would note that this includes not only NPK but also minor/micro nutrients as well which include S, Ca, Mg, Fe, Zn, B, Mn, Cu, Mo, Cl. Hell, look at a bag of Grow More soulbe fertilizer - it's not just 20-20-20 soluble fertilizer/
What many "methods" do is "rob" nutrients from some place else, haul them to the growing area and then argue that this is sustainable.
Ugh!
#1Todd
As a PS, Louis Bromfield in, I think, Plesant Valley noted that he was called to KY in the bluegrass area because a lot of race horses were breaking legs. The soils which had had high Ca had been reduced by the horses grazing over the years and taking it off in their bones...even though the poop remained. Liming the soils stopped the problem.
In any case, Bromfield wrote a number of great Ag books including Malabar Farm, PV as noted above and Out of the Earth which I think was his last one. His farm, Malabar Farm went BK after he died. AFAIK, it has been a state park in OH for a number of years.
I have forever kicked myself that I never visited or knew of it at the time since his farm was only a couple of hours from my college and he was still alive while I was in school...but I was a chemistry major and didn't recognize that I should be in Ag. Damn, I would have loved to talk to him and it might have changed my life.
#1 Todd
Todd, ET, I agree with you.
The issue I was addressing was the supposed superior quality of organic produce:
It's a marketing campaign to drive up the price of foodstuffs that are chemically and physically the same as commercially-produced, store-bought stuff.
Just because one repeats a lie, does not make the lie true.
And you, sir, are a liar on the above quoted topic.
For the rest of you - Get a Brix meter and do your own research. If the above statement was correct, the Brix measurements would be the same. Plants from petro-ag have lower Brix readings.
I agree. Though agriculture will make adjustments to a lower energy world. But those adjustments will seem much more like tweaks to the current system and hardly at all like going back in time.
In some places with poor soil farming is not economic right now with not to expensive oil. And I'm sure we will se those land go back to horses or they will become forest again.
Prices
gallon of diesel in Poland $6.2
gallon of gas in Poland $6.45
gallon of diesel in England $8.07
gallon of gas in England $7.07
In England diesel fuel for farmers attracts much less tax, I don't have precise figures. The farmers diesel is coloured pink to stop other people using it. There was some scandal involving it around the time of the fuel protests.
Yep, although in a real pinch you could grow a few acres of sunflowers, harvest & press the seeds to make your own biodiesel. Not ideal, but you WOULD do this before you would go back to horse power or just give up.
This is why I don't lose any sleep worrying about how farmers are going to keep their equipment running.
If you get that hard up, those sunflower seeds will be bicycle fuel.
Human + bike = the most efficient way to travel EVER.
Remember to toss that about when Bill J talks about his 'parasitic loads'
Actually human + bicycle + aeroshield is the most efficient.
Aerodynamics of human + bike are not that good, especially in a comfortable position. At any decent speed , aero reductions make the added weight of aan aero shield worthwhile.
Best may be an aero recumbent (tricycle ?) with an aeroshield. Stable, efficient use of human power, low rolling AND aero resistance.
Best Hopes for cycling (bi & tri),
Alan
Hi Alan,
Thanks,
re: "Best may be an aero recumbent (tricycle ?) with an aeroshield."
Do you know if anyone's actually looked at this? (done studies)?
If you come across them, could you post?
Also, wondering if you have a favorite source for the aeroshield?
I actually am not that fond of recumbents, though confess I've only tried them in the gym. Does the shield work for regular bikes?
Someone else had a link to aeroshields for "regular" bikes and recumbents. I failed to bookmark it :-(
Extra weight "up high" is not good for stability and maneuverability.
Alan
Hello All,
Long time lurker, this is my first post.
The issue is not that industrial agriculture is more effective or not. The issue is, what do you do with millions of unemployed: former lawyers, real estate agents, office workers, etc...
They will have to do something for a living.
And in the long there is another serious issue: how will you support the infrastructure of industrial agriculture. The roads, the tractor factories, the food distribution system, large scale transportation and storage??
There is a reason why Cuba went to small scale farming. It gives work and food to people at a minimal cost. And you do not need horses unless you want to grow grains. Grains are less effective then root plants.
You don't even need horse & plow for corn. Native Americans grew it without, and some Euro-Americans as well.
The unemployed people will find jobs in areas with suddenly higher demand. So they'll:
- Build wind towers.
- Build nuclear power plants.
- Construct new rail lines.
- Mine iron ore.
- Work in insulation production plants.
- Work installing installation.
- Build bicycles.
- Convert cars to run off batteries.
- other work which helps us to adjust.
Some of those are possible activities, but we are at the end of an age. I think we're going to see a lot more survival mentality. I don't mean nutters in the woods with guns, I mean that economic activity will be more community based - do we have enough to get by, rather than am I enriching myself. It could very well be that we're going to take significant steps to expel corporate influences from our lives as part of relocalization efforts, as peak oil stretches the distance between locations.
Are you ready for six hours a day three days a week being all that is available? And the only security coming from the village or neighborhood's overall stability?
Look at what US industry did in World War II. I don't see why we can't do a massive mobilization to build new energy sources just as we did a massive mobilization to build tanks, trucks, ships, airplanes, and other military equipment.
Imagine huge mass production lines for wind turbine components.
Imagine huge mass production lines for photovoltaic panels.
Imagine huge mass production lines for nuclear power plant components.
Why can't all this be done? China builds 1 coal plant per week. We could build 10 times the rate they are building. We have lots of labor that can be freed up from totally optional activities.
I don't get why we are going to panic and just give up. I know I'm not. I know lots of engineers and managers who would be up for huge undertakings.
Imagine huge mass production lines for nuclear power plant components.
I cannot imagine this without a degradation of safety. Given the defunct industry and limited skilled personnel, the Dept. of Energy estimated in a study that we had enough skilled people to build eight new nukes in ten years IF all went well. Enough new trainees could come on-line in that decade to speed things up after that.
Else, you end up like Zimmer and Bellefonte, 99% and 80% complete nukes that are informed that their quality is too low to qualify for an operating license.
OTOH, you missed an even more important example (NOT wartime BTW), and the means to convert electricity to transportation, electrifying our freight railroads and building out Urban Rail at breakneck speed.
From 1897 to 1916, the United States (with ~1/3rd the population and 3% to 4% of the GDP, and no advanced technology) built subways in all of the major cities and streetcar lines in 500 cities, towns and villages.
Best Hopes,
Alan
People skilled at nuke building: Automation. Robots are more consistent than humans. We urgently need research into nuclear power plant construction automation.
To electrify more stuff (e.g. railroads) we have to generate more electricity. That's a problem.
My fear is that natural gas production will decline in North America along with global oil decline and that we won't be able to import LNG to make up for the difference. So our electricity from natural gas will go down even as the demand for electricity as a substitute for oil increases.
Then there's coal. Can we expand coal mining fast enough to substitute for natural gas plus provide enough electricity to serve as an oil substitute for imported oil that is declining at 5+% per year?
To electrify more stuff (e.g. railroads) we have to generate more electricity. That's a problem.
Hardly. A good estimate is that transferring 85% of the intercity truck freight to electrified RRs (plus their existing rail freight) will take a bit less than 3% of US electricity.
Today, 0.19% of US electricity is used for transportation. NYC subways, Amtrak's NEC, Long Island RR, subways in Chicago, DC, Philly, Boston, Baltimore, LA, Miami, Atlanta, and Light Rail in dozens of cities.
Increase that ten fold (just ten NYC subways would do a lot !) and 2% of US electrical demand would go to Urban Rail.
We trade 17 to 20 BTUs of diesel/gasoline for 1 BTU of electricity when we either shift from heavy trucks or cars/SUVs to electrified rail.
We can save 5% of electrical demand with better insulation, CFLs, etc., OR just "reduced economic activity" OR wind turbines (plus 8 new nukes in ten years).
Your plans include a massive build-out of non-GHG electrical generation. Nice, but my plan transforms that electricity to transportation.
Best Hopes,
Alan
What is your source for BTUs saved for shifting from trucks to rail? I've seen much smaller numbers for the ratio. I've also seen that the numbers depend on the density of what is being shipped.
My previous answer from my link. Focus on containers (like to like with trucks).
http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=168&It...
Hi Alan,
I'm curious...would it do any good, and if so how much, to mandate (assuming this could happen) a percentage shift from current trucking to current rail (electrified or not)?
How much additional freight traffic can the current rail system absorb?
Otherwise, I need to catch up on your previous posts and articles. Thanks for all your work.
Step One would be to finish Create (there is a CREATE II in the wings)
http://www.aar.org/Create/Create_main.asp
Last Thursday I got the President of the API to promise to send a staff member to the AAR and find out about CREATE.
A similar program is underway for New Orleans (both New Orleans & Chicago have 6 of the 7 Class I RRs, no one else has more than 4 AFAIK).
Step Two is some form of gov't incentive (tax credit, accelerated depreciation, etc.) for more and faster RR investment.
Link this to electrification.
Step Three is tolls on Interstate highways and US highways.
MUCH more possible, but this may be enough.
Best Hoeps,
Alan
We urgently need research into nuclear power plant construction automation.
Timeline to implementation (after bugs are worked out) ?
IMO, a very few specialized tasks could be automated for on-site construction (not factory) and it will be faster to train more humans in the next decade. Eight new Nukes 2008-2017, Thirtyeight new nukes 2018-2027. Average size about 1.5 GW.
Best Hopes for Realistic Planning,
Alan
I don't think we should build subways and trolleys. I believe we should build synfuel plants and keep running cars.
But it would be possible to quickly build a massive mass transit system. Politically it would not be possible, but physically we could.
Call it "the El", a system of elevated train tracks for lightweight trains. No mixing grades, no stoplights or stopsigns, ramps for people to walk up, put a hub every six blocks, you could do it even for the suburbs.
I just don't think we will. I think it is even less possible that we will build two dozen subways at a billion dollars a mile, or a thousand tramlines at five miles per hour.
But we could build the elevated if we wanted to and built enough steel mills to make the girders. Fast, convenient, but not cheaper or more convenient or faster than cars.
The problem isn't so much lack of skillset; Many engineering disciplines have large crossovers and the nuclear engineering that is so specific to the industry can be relatively quickly learned.
Its a problem of supply chains. LWRs need more steel foundries for massive pressure vessels to say the least, as well as the custom components for large heat exchangers, steam generators and whatnot.
You underestimate the on-site personnel issues. MANY trades require nuke certification and experience due to the delta between the way nuke plants are built & coal plants are built.
The DoE assumed no re-work (do detailed design and THEN build) and stealing a high % of the traveling workforce that goes from one refueling to the next (newly certified workers would fill those positions). And national agreements with the unions that allow maximum workforce flexibility.
But one does not walk into a nuke site as a master electrician, with years of industrial and medium/high voltage or instrument experience (residential & commercial experience has little value), and get nuke certification immediately. From memory, 18 months of apprenticeship is required on-site at a nuke.
And the number of master electricians with industrial experience willing to move to nukes and serve a second apprenticeship is "limited".
Nuke certified Steamfitters are an even rarer bird. Refueling outages always use nuke grade electricians but less commonly are steamfitters needed.
Best Hopes for Building 8 new nukes & finish Watts Bar 2 and Black Fox by 2018,
Alan
People will become far more likely to work 6 days a week 12 hours a day than 3 days a week 6 hours a day.
We will need to work long hours to create new non-fossil fuels infrastructure.
highplainsfarmer,
I agree entirely with your thesis. It makes eminent sense and that is why I am looking for getting some farmland over here, in the UK.
One point though, I had to Google "IA State" - I would not be surprised if some Americans also had problems recognizing Iowa!
Farming and gardening will be tough to do as severe weather becomes more frequent and intense.
My guess is that we will indeed end up trying to "grow" food in vats of various genetically modified cells.
This is already being done in labs.
Good old James Lovelock scoffs at the notion that we'll be able to continue farming as usual into the next 50 years.
http://cornellsun.com/node/25748
Of course energy and materials are needed to grow these very different kinds of foods in vats as well.
Imagine a farmless future:
At first the vats of genetically modified cell cultures were only meant for the poor and the armies. Some farms survived to grow food for the few powerful Corporatists who fought the last Great War --
"The Resource War to End All Resource Wars" as it was branded by those on every side who claimed to be the rightful heirs of the earth's bounty, and who backed up their claims by hurling weapons of mass destruction in every direction.
By now only a few scattered colonies of people survive in the far north and south. They are isolated and do not know of each other. People must live and work underground or in villages built into mountainsides, tending vats of foods growing and fermenting away from the volatile weather and damaging sunlight.
The ozone layer is mostly gone, and humans seldom venture outside in the daytime even in good weather. Few have the necessary protective gear to keep the harsh sunlight from burning into their skin and eyes...
The surface of the planet is mostly barren. A few plants and animals have mutated in strange ways that have allowed some to survive the sudden radical changes in climate and light, let alone the meltdown of the old human civilization.
There are few recognizable traces of that civilization, or of Armageddon -- the Great Oil War -- that ironically consumed our species' attention and resources in the last days of the old world.
The old world is now remembered in stories as "The Garden" where people could walk through huge fields of plants bearing sweet foods that one could simply reach out and pick and eat. There were places called "farms" where people could grow these plants right out on the surface of the planet, and many even fed various species of animals to slaughter and eat.
There are stories even more difficult to believe, of forests full of plants and animals that people could go and take without asking if they were hungry.
But all of that is gone, now, in the Eramazoic age, The Age of Loneliness. Our planet has become hostile to our species, and we pray daily for mercy....
Highplainsfarmer is apparently ignorant of the fact that what he does is made possible by a vast high-tech society around him that creates his fuels, pesticides, and fertilizers, that moves his crops from point of sale to factories to be processed, that builds his farming equipment for him and in building that equipment is dependent on other equipment for those factories to work. Highplainsfarmer suffers from a common case of tunnel vision.
Tell me, highplainsfarmer, what industry would you shut down first? Computers manufacturers? There goes the inventory systems and routing systems. Manual versions will be orders of magnitude slower and less efficient, meaning they can't process all the food you'll produce. How about tractor manufacturers? No? How about the parts suppliers for those manufacturers? No? But those suppliers cannot survive selling JUST to tractor manufacturers. They need the cash from sales to automotive and truck manufacturers to stay in business. You cannot even scale down these businesses to just support agriculture because they will collapse without further sales. What are you proposing in that case, communism?
There is a huge interconnected spider web of industries that drive our civilization today and to assert, as you have done, that agriculture will not be affected, is simply a statement of blind religious faith.
The equipment and practices of doing it without heavy chemical input are still here, sitting idle in outbuildings and the minds of the older farmers.
Some see BAU, others see disaster. I prefer the middle path - back to the small tractors and implements of yesteryear, no more computer controls and carbs & distributors are much simpler, and it all runs on locally grown biofuels or ammonia.
Greyzone;
Is it possible to post your objections without inviting a flamewar?
'Ignorant'
'Tunnel Vision'
'What are you proposing, Communism?'
Come on.. what kind of useful discussion has this kind of badgering gotten you?
He didn't say Ag would 'not be affected'.. just that it wouldn't go backwards, and that it would get the priority for dwindling oil supplies. They're debatable points, sure, but the sneering insults just invite wasted bandwidth.
Raise the bar, ok?
Bob
I suggest patience in such things - GZ has a point and his writing style sets people off. I often find that those whom I perceive to be somehow abrasive online turn out to be pleasant, knowledgeable, and fun in person. I get that a bit myself - "Hey, you're an asshole online, but you're nice in person - what gives?"
We had a lot of this going on over on the SCOX vs. IBM lawsuit discussion happening on the SCOX stock board ... a few conference calls later, courtesy of FreeConference.com, everyone was still sniping away, but it was much more good natured. I'd personally like to see something like this done with the Drum Beat regulars - maybe a once a week call where the contributors could expand upon their views? Verbal communication conveys nuance that writing simply can not ...
TOD contains nearly 3 years of articles discussing the problems of peak oil. Highplainsfarmer comes here 4 weeks ago and now asserts, without one shred of data, that every other assessment of agriculture done here at TOD and anywhere else in regards to peak oil is wrong. He could have at least attempted to assemble some data supporting his position but he didn't even do that. He simply strolls in here to TOD and declares that every one else is wrong and only he is right.
Ok, let him prove it. Let's see his proof, in spades. And his "because I say so" attitude isn't going to cut it with me. Oh, and did you notice that he's a cheerleader for GMO crops too? One catastrophe piled on another catastrophe. Without one single ounce of data. And you want me to take this guy seriously?
"And you want me to take this guy seriously?"
Not necessarily. I want to be able to take you seriously. You're generally a very good poster, but this is an achille's heel, IMO. The putdowns in the post I responded to came off as Petulant and Juvenile. It hurts your own standing in the argument, even if your points are solid.
Darwinian and Levink were doing the same junk yesterday. "Oh-my-god!!.." ... I thought I was at the mall between a couple Valley-Girls..
The namecalling and the 'Indignant Outrage' hardly bring the topic forward.
Bob
'Strong Words are a good sign of a weak cause' -fortune cookie
this is a dead thread by now, Bob, but I wanted to chime in. Sometimes the most petty gratuitous insults are thrown by posters I admire in an argument that seems really important. For example, yesterdays exchanges between Ron & LevinK about whether or not a nuke plant left unattended will safely shut itself down. An issue like that is critical for nuclear-ambivalent people like me, and there were two gifted posters hashing it out--TOD at it's best, except "...you are so ignorant! ...if you believe that you're unbelievably ignorant!!"...etc...seems like there should be more of a spirit of collegiality, it's not like a typical academic dispute, 'so vicious because the stakes are so small', these are arguably the most important issues facing the planet being addressed before an audience of well-educated lay people...the pettiness grates.
LevinK .... two gifted posters
You missed the parts 1-2 months ago where LevinK has been shown to be a liar about the safety of fission reactors however. Simple statistics proved his safety claims wrong.
Grey Zone,
I generally find your writing very pointed, which I appreciate.
Check out HighPlainsFarmer's site ;)
Yes -- we are all embedded in the same artificial web which is very vulnerable in terms of dependence on a stable energy environment and a stable climate environment.
We face a very unstable and increasingly chaotic in terms of both energy and climate.
Add to this the instability of political and military struggles already underway, and farming looks to me to be as fragile as many other complex threads of the web.
I'll bet that the politicos will use every effort to prop up the status quo until some combination of events and personalities gels into a declaration of martial law.
Who knows -- many of us are already seen as "useless eaters." Others are already on "no-fly" lists. Cooperation and civil rights are thrown out the door. The so-called "Free Market" has never been so, and will become an openly command economy soon.
Here's the funny part: the USA presidential election this year seems to be all about "Change!" What could be more ironic than a bunch of folks who abolutely stand for "No Change!" in the march toward tyranny tooting their horns about change?
The change that is coming -- open fascism by another "Americanized" brand name -- will seem sudden and extreme to some, but has been steadily building for many years.
FDR's middle Vice President Henry A. Wallace wrote an article at the request of the NYT (1944) about fascism in the USA. He noted that fascists were already moving to control the media back then. You can read excerpts of his article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm
The greater irony is this: the real changes coming are simply not governable in any way. These changes have to do with climate, resource depletion, and habitat destruction. Add to this mix the anger of billions of people who are condemned to short and brutal lives by a few, and add to this the scramble for control of militaries and weapons, and the next 20 years look very chaotic to me.
We will grow food, but I do think that farming will be radically altered -- in many cases it will be unrecognizable. Who will be the "Future Farmers of America?"
do computers use oil? how much? computers will be kept running because it's easier to communicate than having to drive or send a messenger or letter. who is to say we need oil to build computers?
why would industries shut down? most oil goes to trucking and cars. we can make cuts there and have more than enough left over. minimal amounts of our oil usage goes to manufacturing.
"But those suppliers cannot survive selling JUST to tractor manufacturers."
they'll downsize and some will go out of business until we have just as many as the market needs.
I suspect you will get lots of retorts on such a nonsensical statement. If you don't have a clue, as you seem not to, about how dependent the world's industrial systems are on oil, why even bother reading and posting on The Oil Drum?
John15 his a history of posting, well, crap. Things about "the free market" and how such functions.
I haven't figured out if John15 is some form of troll, or if he's attempting to figure out why there is something nagging at the back of his head, but keeps repeating the standard line as some form of hypnotic mantra.
Hirsch disagrees with you. So do professionals in the microprocessor fabrication business.
John15,
Some of the "simple" things you find in your local electronics store (computers, cell phones, flat screen TV's) are actually incredibly complex gizmos that took thousands if not millions of oil-dependent steps to manufacture --and of course truck to the store.
Did you know that the basic silicon which makes up most of your wonder chips must be melted in a hot furnace and drawn out as a specially crystallized solid?
(OK I mislead you a bit here. It's an electric arc furnace. But then the silicon has to be trucked to the next factory in the process. How will you do that without oil?)
There seems to be a trend for larger plants to be integrated. It is worth noting that the energy per unit mass delivered with solar is about 200 times that delivered with coal so that coal is more likely to take a transportation hit than solar.
Chris
One other point:
It will be A LOT easier to produce a plug in electric tractor/combine than it will be to produce a plug in automobile with a range greater than 400 miles.
For my part, I think oil will, more and more, be used for raw materials and less for energy as time passes.
Hi farmer,
Interesting to have your firsthand perspective.
re: "NO WAY".
So, do you think the agricultural system might collapse, then?
re: "There will ALWAYS be SOME oil produced."
Produced does not = available for use.
re: "...the guy who adds the MOST VALUE to them."
As determined by whom?
re: "Where will those precious few barrels of daily production go in 20 years?"
It occurs to me we also have to look at the water supply.
Also, wonder if you've seen this article below, and if so, what you think of it:
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/notill.htm
Aniya,
I wish I had read your reply before I wrote my own, basically the same argument. I want preferential treatment as well !
We "need" it all, as society stands today, but we are not going to have it all, and things are going to change.
'4) According to IA State, the ave corn yield on IA farmland on a 10 year ave is 173.4 bu/acre. Using all BTUs from fuel, fert, and pesticides, that's a EROEI of about 13:1.'
You missed a tiny detail - that corn used to be food/feed, now it is fuel that is burned. Unfortunately, the amount of farmland didn't double. That is the major difference between an oil field and a corn field.
the first barrel will most certainly go to military and government use. You think the EROEI for your farm
is really great? think about the ROI of having the weapons to come in and take everything on your farm by force.
While there is something to fight over and control, and while there is still fuel for industrial age armament,
the power structures and their armed muscle will be the ones coming in and taking what they need or want with
first priority. they don't need to bid for it. Now, your farm might be able to bid high for what's left after
that, for a while. that's not the same thing. You're assuming that everything else in the economy is still running
smoothly, and it's just that oil is a bit more expensive.
But think a little further. Nothing in this universe happens in isolation. What changes elsewhere in the scenery as that oil gets more expensive. Sure, for a little while, as there is still a lot of oil being produced, the economy goes
through the contortions of pulling in the belt and living lean. That only goes on for so long. Not only does
it mean an economy that has barely enough to meet its present operating costs, but it also means an economy which
has less and less, and soon none at all, of resources to invest in anything. Things fall apart faster and faster,
and just as this whole thing was self-reinforcing on the way up (because there was more to gain with every new investment)
so on the way down those investments can't even pay for themselves anymore, much less cover the cost of any new investments. And i'm not talking just money here, because money is a fleeting and artificial thing in times like that.
The power structures in the world, some big, some small, some bigger yet, all have an instinct of self-preservation just as individuals do, and to the best of their ability, wits, and luck, they are not going to just close up shop and
say 'sorry chaps, it was nice while it lasted'. no, they are going to hang on tooth and nail all the way down, and
anyone weaker or less lucky will be slaughtered to feed them as long as they can manage.
With, say, ten million bpd less being produced, how much of the economy withers? 20? 40? how many tens of millions fewer people
can aford to buy the food you grow? at the higher prices that you must ask to pay the cost of doing business?
With what will they pay you and what good will it be to you? Don't assume some kind of benevolent and wise and well-
intentioned government or other power structure to come in and organize everthing for the smoothst possible
decline. Quite to the contrary, look to zimbabwe for a picture of the future. Those power structures will be grabbing
onto anything ov value to themselves, especially primary inputs like food and fuel. They will first come wearing the suits of lawyers and tax assessors, and then they will come wearing the uniforms of the police, and then they will
come wearing the uniforms of the army, and after that, they will come as often as not wearing rags. As long
as they have the means, and as long as there is something to take, they will come to take it. Maybe they win, maybe
they lose, nothing is so certain in the details, but by and large, as in zimbabwe, the primary resources will be
monopolized as soon as possible by those in the strongest postion to do so- those who enjoy the greatest 'legitimacy',
backed up by armed might. Sometimes they will be genuinely inspired by some kind of desire to feed the urban masses -
in some places where there is a high degree of organization present and very strong power structures, they might
try for a season or to to work it out this way, but what will those teeming restive masses in the cities do? not
much demand for mortgage agents or web designers or whatever the hell else all these moderns do for a living,
not many factory jobs.. look again to places like zimbabwe. enormously high unemployment, huge inflation (those who
can print themselves money fast enough to stay ahead of the shrinking pie will try their best to do so, until the money itself is a joke few find funny), and rampant
crime/violence/troubles that come along with overcrowding and hunger. the cost of labor will go down to a bare
survival food wage.
It does not take any high-brow economic analysis, nor an altruistic benevolence, for those in positions of power to
want to do something about such great unemployment. A good instinct for self-preservation is sufficient. hungry idle masses have never been a good ingredient for keeping a ruler in power. if there is no other means to coax food
into the cities, and there is still food to be taken, then those masses will come out of the cities to take it
by force, whether or not existing power structures have incorporated the new swell of idle hands into their own
forces or whether they come in the form of gangs, some looking to work for food, some looking just for food, some
willing to take whatever they can get, and some just taking. Again, those in a position of power and cloaked in
the uniforms and shiny badges of legitimacy, who presently enforce their monopoly on the use of violence, will
be in the best position to get in on the ground floor here.
Those farmers who are defenceless will find themselves at best administering their farm for the benefit of someone
else's belly, with a mild but present threat of violence if they diverge from this course, and many more will find
themselves divested of the majority of their property, under one guise or another, as those masses come to 'farm'
them themselves. This will not work very well, no. Again look to zimbabwe. (and by the way, while many of the current
troubles were caused by events like mugabe's land redistribution, those events themselves were precipitated by
other preexsing problems, like huge masses of unemployed unhappy urban mobs..)
This of course does not last very long. In zimbabwe it has gone for several years, because of inputs from the outside
world which allay the immediate mass starvation and also provide small bits of effective modern power-concentrating
technology, like fuel for vehicles, ammunition for the goons in power, and luxury items to buy off other smaller
competing bosses.. it takes very little in the way of 'fuel' input to preserve that kind of power structure for some
years beyond its otherwise certain meltdown.
Now, in the greater global scheme, the high degree of interdependence in the industrial economy cannot handle
even such slight disruptions. There is no outside world to supply the basic fuels and materiel to a despotic
power structure desperately tring to keep order and hang on. And the more those power structures try to keep order,
the greater the disruption to the smooth running of the large integrated international machine that extracts,
processes, uses, and distributes those modern things- this is a self-reinforcing meltdown once it gets started, in
that once it starts to fall apart, it really quickly loses its ability to resist further falling apart.
Those power structures will fall apart more or less in order from the widest-flung to the most local, as there
ceases to be a positive return for a certain degree of organisation and those with force at their disposal think
closer and closer to home for their objectives.
In such an environment, a region like yours which currently exports its enormous agricultural surplus to the whole
world will find not only that there is no point to - or means of- shipping the stuff five or ten thousand miles
away, but also that there is no point in producing so much if there's nobody to sell it to. and before _that_ realization ever comes to the fore, those who want what you have will have been knocking on the door for a while already. There will be nobody to prioritize the sale of petroleum products to you, nor anyone who cares about
manufacturing fertilizer with inputs from thousands of miles off, for sale to customers thousands of miles off,
when they have their own similar problems on their own doorsteps.
Not only does oil production drop off quite significantly- much faster than geologically mandated production decline -
but so also does the degree of organization and complexity of the global economy.
The mere presence of fuel (even literally) is NOT sufficient to ensure the full use of it.
A good example is offered by some of that fuel itself- you can drop a lit match into a tub of kerosene and it
will very likely just put the match out. Put the same kerosene into a running jet engine and you can fly to another
continent on it. Once the juggernaut's health begins to fail even a little, once it loses enough momentum and the environment is no longer dripping with easy-to-pick fruit, when the cost of just staying in the game overtakes the surplus gained by doing so, very rapidly the thing starts to fall apart.
Good luck farmer with your bid for the remaining fuel.
In a stable world with no starving people and sanity prevailing you may have a chance.
When fuel supply is as low as you describe, (by the way the fuel supply will not arrive at that low amount smoothly) I doubt there will be any large commercial farmers, the protection money would be too costly, so in effect the mob will own your farm.
You wouldn't be outbidding mom's and dad's and MacDonald's, it's the black market you have to worry about. They will have the highest bidders. The manufacturers of your combine, tractor, ploughshares and other farming machinery won't even get a consideration.