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One thing rarely mentioned is that we have three real levels of fossil fuel "reserves"
1. economically viable reserves - the reserves that you can get out, going on the money cost of doing so
2. energetically viable reserves - the fossil fuels that you can get out, given that you want to get more energy out of them than it took to drag them up
3. the actual physical reserves in place
(3) > (2) > (1)
Just as some uranium mines in the world have a negative energy return on energy invested, and are economically unviable, but people mine them anyway because they want the uranium for purposes other than energy and money, so too will it be with fossil fuels.
Even if you won't get the energy back and it's very expensive, it may be worth getting fossil fuels for fertilisers, plastics and so on. These things would be a lot more expensive than they are now, but might still be worth it to some people.
So while peak fossil fuels may mean the beginning of the end of burning fossil fuels, it need not mean the end of use of fossil fuels. This is often forgotten by people, especially the doomer "humanity will die off!" crowd.
Regarding animals on small farms and large, I didn't mention them because it's really not clear how much the Cuban smallscale localised organic agriculture depends on them, compared to how much they depend on conventionally farmed animals (imported or local). It is clear that they import a lot of soymeal and the like, and don't eat it themselves. Whether that stuff goes to Alfonso Juarez's backyard goat or his cattle in the field pumped up with hormones I don't know.
But it is clear that the Cubans are responsible for no more than 65%, and no less than 50%, of their own nutrition.
The flip side of this with say 50% of the food imported is that transportation plays a very large role in feeding the population. Thus even though we may continue to grow grain pretty much as we do today. Distribution of grain my become very uneven.
In the past grain was readily shipped worldwide. However transport of grain far from the ports or in our case rail lines may become difficult as the road infrastructure falls into disuse.
I've not done a formal calculation but I estimate that the current road network will have extensive failures 10 years or so after automobiles are not the primary transportation. The rail network will expand for sure but in the interim a lot of far flung communities may no longer be viable.
Do you know anything about the road network in Cuba.
Although this is probably slanted.
http://worldworx.tv/safety/americas/cuba/index.htm
Googling indicated that in general the roads are not very good outside of part of the main highway and in the cities.
This means that moving bulk goods back to the smaller villages is probably pretty expensive. I suspect that diets of the villagers are basically 100% local food. It makes sense that imported food is primarily eaten in the coastal cities. However your soymeal result also indicates to me that animal feed is in use.
It would be very cool if we had data on the diets of the urban areas vs rural. Since Cuba is a island you probably don't have large inland cities.
However Santa Clara seems fairly large 300,000 inhabitants and is reached by both road and rail. Google maps did not seem to show a extensive paved road network.
I think its save to say that retraction of the availability of goods to towns of reasonable size and reachable from ports or by rail or the remaining main roads is reasonable.
A interesting trip.
http://cuba.romanvirdi.com/santa-clara-03292001.htm
Well, I did read that in the rural areas basically everything they ate was locally-grown. We don't know how much that's true for the smaller cities or towns, nor is it clear whether the lack of imported food in the rural diet is due to poor road transport, rural poverty, or what. Probably all of those things.
There's not much point in maintaining the roads if there aren't many cars running. They didn't have many to begin with, add in fuel shortages, and...
I probably should also have noted that 203,000bbl/day is 74.1Mbbl/year, which for a country of 11.394 million people is 6.5bbl each annually. This compares to about 25bbl/yr for the US, and is actually about the same as Russia's per capita consumption. Though if you take out the 2/3 that goes to electricity generation in Cuba, that leaves you 2.2bbl/yr per person, which is a bit more like Peru, Indonesia, Albania, Nicaragua, countries like that.
So, not exactly what I called "wasteful industrial", but hardly a fossil fuel free life. And as I noted, their fossil fuel-using electricity generation being built at a cracking rate does not indicate a country that thinks it'll be seeing peak fossil fuels any time soon.
I don't think it's really true to say "Cuba adapted to peak oil", it's more like, "they put up with it for a bit and are now keenly using fossil fuels again in great and growing quantities." It doesn't look like we'll be seeing a "carbon zero" resolution from Cuba any time soon.
Thanks for your paper its important in my opinion.
Also note that tourism plays a big part of the economy and thats certainly something that will diminish as oil supplies decline.
I'll be interested to see if they have the money to move to electric rail and wind power.
A couple of things seem pretty obvious suburbia McMansion/SUV style is almost certainly dead. But in general it looks like we are looking at a slid towards third world standards of living with the poverty and political problems that result.
However on the flip side as I said above it will be interesting if Cuba can wean itself off off fossil fuel for electricity generation and maintain the standard of living. I'm a bit surprised they don't have a nuclear power plant I guess even the Soviets did not want to see Cuba develop a nuclear bomb but thats political.
Also despite the government in reading the link I sent on someones travel Cuba sounded about the same as the rest of Central America.
Actually, there need not be a lot of fossil fuels for them to have tourism, they're not even a hundred miles from a country with hundreds of millions of people. Absent the US embargo, I'd expect to see a regular ferry service start up, that needn't use a lot of FF...
I don't know if Cuba has the money for much at all. They only pay their civil servants US$11 a month and up. The CIA world factbook tells us that they have a PPP GDP of US$51 billion. They have $35 billion in revenue (70% of GDP!) and $36.7 billion in spending. I've not been able to get a breakdown of this spending.
But presumably if they can afford gas-fired plants, they can afford wind, solar, trainlines, and so on. Dunno really.
Cuba was building two 417 MW VVER-440 V213 nuclear reactors at Cienfuegos - for reference, a similar one operates today in HUngary, but this was stopped at the beginning of 1992 with the Communist bloc collapse. I don't know what arrangements they'd made at the time for the spent rods, presumably the Soviets would take care of them, since they would have had to be supplying them in the first place. Cuba only acceded to the NPT in 2002.
Edited to add: According to this Havana Journal article (the online newspaper, despite its name, is published from Cape Cod by US citizens)
(footnotes can be found in original text)
So apparently China, of all places, is helping with a more eco-friendly infrastructure. What does China get out of it? Oil exploration rights (adding more irony to the depiction of Cuba as an post peak oil ecotopia), mineral investment, Cuban biotech, and a spy base to listen in on US communications.
This is a good point. Ferry service is many times more efficent than air flight. In the future, fewer people will be able to vacation to Europe or Hawaii or Tahiti. If the embargo is lifted on Cuba (Isn't it about time? The embargo hasn't had the intended effect in 40 years. Maybe more trade and interaction might work.) then tourism to Cuba will be a bargain, at least to those located in the south.
Peak oil of course spells hard times for my state of Hawaii. High oil (the first FF to peak) means that tourism (25% of our economy) will be severly curtailed. Agriculture (coffee, pineapples, macadamia nuts, etc.) will become less profitable, since all the inputs must be imported from thousands of miles away. We're at high risk for fuel interruptions, and our electric bills will be the first to go up since 85% of our electricity is generated via oil. We're also at risk for food interruptions, since 90% of our food is imported. Our situation here is very similar to Cuba's, without the repressive socialist regime.
I visited for a week in 2000.
We traveled the autopista (divided highway) from Havana out to the country. Not well maintained and not much traffic. It was shared by every mode of transportation from pedestrian, animal to motor vehicle.
In Havana, many ride 2 to a bike. If you have transportation, you have friends. We saw 4 people riding a small motorbike.
And under every overpass on the autopista were people hitchhiking.