 | DrumBeat: April 8, 2008 | The Oil Drum | EROI on the Web part 2 of 6, (Provisional Results Summary, Imported Oil, Natural Gas) |  |
80 comments on Shell Sponsoring Peak Oil Communication?
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My post wasn't meant to imply if Matthew Simmons has a hidden agenda. Though I disagree with some of his opinions, I think he has performed a major public service spreading awareness. On the other hand, high oil prices help oil companies. So with a major investment banker talking about $300 per barrel oil that's got to look good on the balance sheet.
I agree that replacing oil is a huge problem. So when I said "Many proponents of Peak Oil" negatively skew EROI numbers for renewables, I didn't mean all. As a Peak Oil convert I'm a huge proponent of renewables. I've looked at the EROI numbers for wind and solar and they don't look anywhere near as bad as many are saying. But the fact is there is a substantial camp within Peak Oil who seem to think that nothing can ever replace oil as an energy source. At this point in time, I don't think that's a very healthy point of view to maintain. We need energy and renewables may help us navigate Peak Oil while reducing the catastrophic impact of climate change.
You may well be right. For my part, I respect your opinion and am glad to be a part of this debate.
Robert,
I thought your first post was valid, I just wanted to add my views, because Matt Simmons behaviour is somewhat odd for a man in his position, and vested interests cross my mind also, its just on balance I do feel his motives are (or were) to give out timely warnings. I say were, because he has been ranting on for about 8 years now, and nobody has listened. Many of his predictions are now looking much more plausable than when he first made them.
I am also a fan of renewables, and you're right that many people do twist the figures against renewables, particularly the nuclear lobby, while the anti nuclear lobby twist figurs against nuclear. Its all a bit of a mess and the truth is I'm not sure if anybody actually knows for sure what will hold without a fosssil fuel platform to fall back on, but we are fiddling while Rome burns. The twisting of figures to suit ones arguments are prevelent every where. The electric car lobby use the worst case figures for the ICE, and unrealisticly high figures for the electric drive system, often omiting to mention the losses of the battery charger (transformer/rectifier) it self. It won't help anybody when push comes to shove because the true sustainability of the alternatives will be out there for all to see and it will be "shit or bust"
We will need a massive effort and as JH Kunstler puts it, we may need to do a lot more hard physical work in the future and we have a few generations of our workforce not well prepared for this. Governments keep creating work by increasing legistlation. This has created a huge "non productive" body of people employed to ensure compliance, and it gets in the way of the "hardware" side of life that will keep us alive in the long term. I certainly don't have much optimism that sufficient volumes of the human race will behave in a rational enough way to make the changes necessary. If you are from the UK, just remember how people behaved during the fuel blockades in 2000? Sharing no, grab what I can get and sod the next person yes. I was lucky I drove a car that could run on LRP, that was all that was available because most cars had catylysts by then and could not use it.
I hope I am wrong!
Robert and Partypooper, Matthew Simmons is an investment banker to the energy industry.
Simmons & Company has a vested interest in being right! To suggest that Simmons' motives are only to drive the price up to increase his bottom line is cynical in the extreme. Simmons has recently been advising his clients to get out of Big Oil. His advice is to his clients has recently been to concentrate their investments in the oil service industry. His advice has been to concentrate their investments in companies like Schlumberger and Baker Hughes.
But my point is the primary job of Simmons & Company is to give advice. Simmons, like Jeremy Leggett, has a vested interest in being correct with his prognostications and advice.
Ron Patterson
Darwinian,
I know exactly what Matthew Simmons is. I read practically all his literature on energy with great interest and have listened to many of his interviews. I simply implied one could be suspicious of his motives, but I had overcome any suspicion. I said he has been "ranting on" and has been ignored, doesn't mean I think he was wrong, I said just the opposite.
I may not have worded my post that well, but if you read it again you may see I am an admirer of Matthew Simmons. I said (a little sarcasticly perhaps) that as time moves on he is looking more and more correct. John Tierney may have to dip into his pockets! I think MRS talks much sense, and as I stated in my post he has been ignored too long.
I hope you will read my posr again, sorry for missleading you if thats what I have done.
You got that right, 'pooper! ;)
I think we need someone without an agenda to do an honest assessment of EROI (maybe impossible) across the spectrum of alternatives -- wind, nuclear (nearly renewable with reprocessing), solar. My understanding is that they are all positive in a range that could sustain civilization if a large enough infrastructure were established.
One other point to make is that since no new easy oil is available the EROI imputs for oil are becoming worse and worse with time. Kunstler notes that average EROEI for oil in the US is 2:1. Not much different from that much maligned energy source -- ethanol. Perhaps the reason we are using so much ethanol now is because it has become nearly as economic to use it as oil and the infrastructure change for a rapid ramp up was available short term.
Now before we go into a huge flame out on ethanol, I want to say that I don't favor it as a long term solution. But I do see it as bridge, hopefully, to a V2G infrastructure. There is no way we can power all our transport on ethanol in any case but we can power a percentage. Even if it's just that all vehicles in the US run on 10% ethanol and we can use ethanol to keep our farm machines going then it helps us mitigate. If you know anything about emergencies, effective response is all about the timing and availability of mitigation.
All in all, increased use of depleting resources will not solve this problem. So oil, coal, and natural gas are not future energy sources. Rather, they are resource traps that sink our ability to create sustainable infrastructure. Furthermore they degrade the environment and negatively impact the carrying capacity of this planet. Not something you want in an energy crisis where food production is one of the primary mechanisms coming under stress.
Trouble is, everyone has an agenda. Opinions, attitudes, methodologies, etc., are predicated on normative criteria which differ from person to person. Dr. Hall himself said that how broad the input considerations should be is an important issue that needs to be addressed. I don't think there will ever be consensus on how to value intangible inputs. I don't even think that Mr. Spock the Vulcan could pull off an objective EROI analysis.
I won't go into a huge flame out on ethanol, except to say that I think it's morally wrong to grow food for fuel in a world where hunger exists. I feel that corn ethanol is wrong, and I feel the same way about growing alfalfa for cattle feed. Ligno-cellulosic ethanol may not seem quite so bad, since people can't eat the biomass feedstocks, but all that logging slash, grain stover, bagasse, whatever... needs to be returned to the soil in order to 1.) restore soil tilth & micronutrients, & 2.) sequester reduced carbon as humic substances.
I agree.
"Kunstler notes that average EROEI for oil in the US is 2:1. Not much different from that much maligned energy source -- ethanol"
But the quantum efficiency of energy conversion for gasoline into mechanical power is nearly twice that of ethanol. Talking about EROEI of "oil" is meaningless, because we have to run "oil" through a fractional distillation processor, then mix and blend the various components to end up with the various types of motor fuels. If we're talking about the EROEI of gasoline, then the comparison of the EROEI of ethanol is valid, since both ethanol and gasoline are used in internal combustion engines to produce motive power.
And at 10-20% blends ethanol adds to gasoline's efficiency.
I get the impression that you wouldn't think it was a very healthy point of view to maintain even if it was true. EROEI is always negative when all the energy inputs are taken into consideration. I think I'm beginning to see why ppl willfully chose to disregard inputs: doing so makes the future appear less bleak. It's a "faith based" initiative. 1:17 looks more hopeful than any realistic assessment such as 10^17:1. Pretending to not understand thermodynamics offers "hope."
You have made this point before. Yes, it is true that all of the energy of the universe was injected into it at the moment of the Big Bang. Entropy was at a minimum and has been increasing ever since. There are no exceptions. It’s a one time endowment (where have we heard that before?) This is true if you take the universe as a whole into consideration (though, according to your thinking, we should then ask where that came from, too.)
But what’s the point? Life happens to have evolved in the junction point where low entropy becomes high entropy like a windmill catching a preexisting wind. That’s the entropy island on which we live. The only question we are concerned with is how much of an effort we personally have to expend (increasing our own entropy) mining low entropy particles elsewhere (thus decreasing our own entropy by a greater amount.) These we use to keep us going for another day.
So everything we do to live and prosper is just mining fossilized entropy. None the less, life evolved where organisms could get more than they give, which I believe is the whole point. But you are correct, some day the possibility of decreasing entropy will end as the universe reaches maximum entropy and winks out of existence…then there will be another Big Bang. And the beat goes on.
But that’s not relevant to this discussion. If you go fishing, you don’t care how many bugs the fish had to eat, how many plants the bugs ate or how many photons of light the plants had to absorb to build a trout, all you care about is how many casts it will take you to get lunch.
Jon.
Very good. Thank you for conceding the point. Yes, I have made this point before, and no one seemed to listen. It's as if posters on this board are ignorant of elementary physics. Since I don't believe that to be the case, at least not with most posters, I must conclude that this disregard of inputs serves some agenda or other. I'm just trying to sort out & make explicit what those agendas are.
This doesn't seem to be the case. The amount of matter in the universe, including so-called "dark matter," has been estimated with a good degree of precision. It appears that the universe lacks by a full order of magnitude sufficient mass for gravitation to halt expansion and pull the universe back to the singularity. The "yo-yo universe" scenario you allude to has been refuted. Eternal expansion & heat death appear to be the fate. This sponsers the question of how the singularity formed in the first place, ~14 bys bp. At this point in our understanding "Goddidit" is as good a hypothesis as any.
While this is probably true of most people, it isn't true of me. When I have fished in the past it's been nonlethally (nets, electrostunning) and I very much cared about the energetic & other ecological relationships of the fish I was studying. My own personal little window of expertise is on the phylogenetics & phylogeography of certain clades of Neotropical catfishes. I love these droll creatures and would rather go hungry than eat them.
Thanks Jon for your respectful & honest post. It's good to get to know where other posters are coming from.
Very interesting. Still, you must have your heaping helping of low entropy particles three times a day to survive, wherever they come from. That would be a good cereal box advertisement: Now with Low Entropy!
They say that chemists are only interested in the outer most electron shells of atoms whereas physicists are interested in what is inside. It is not that chemists do not accept particle physics, it’s just not relevant in their discipline. EROI calculations, correspondingly, ‘aren’t interested’ in origin entropy. Only harvesting and harvested energy. If the energy harvested is not greater than that required to harvest, the crop is useless.
My pleasure. I am interested in anthropology, so people like Tainter, Diamond, etc, appeal to me. My master’s thesis was a computer simulation of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, which yielded some interesting results with a few custom strategies I cooked up.
By the way, the idea that there will be another Big Bang comes from the multiverse theory, which I am sure you have heard of. Michio Kaku is a popular proponent of that. There is no scientific proof or evidence, but there is philosophical proof. I.e., if our universe happened once as a random, chance event, then it will happen again. Given infinite time, anything that can happen will happen, and it will happen an infinite number of times.
Kind of a scary thought, actually.
Jon.
Are you telling me that there will be another George W. Bush, and that he will be elected president again? :-0
Now that's just crazy talk.
:)
Jon.
This is a good analogy altho it breaks down somewhat when you consider that the redox reactions that drive photo- & oxidative phosphorylation depend on the relationship between the e^-s in the outer shell & the electrostatic attraction & repulsion between those e^-s & the nucleus & inner shell e^-s, respectively. When a photon excites an e^- from its ground state, the degree to which chlorophyll transitions from a weak to a strong reducing agent depends on the relationship between that e^-, other e^-s in inner shells, & protons in the nucleus. The properties that make the water molecule such as it is depend largely on the electronegativities of H relative to O, which is in turn determined by more than just the outer e^-s. So it isn't entirely apt to claim that all but outer shell e^-s are irrelevant to chemists. But then, no analogy is perfect, or it wouldn't be an analogy! :)
Okay, so long as it is stated explicitly that for the sake of ongoing analysis, the decision has made made & agreed upon to ignore the energetic inputs of the sun, of chemoautotrophic archaen metabolism, of the gravitational force that applied heat & pressure, etc., then we can move on. But I have said all along that I'm not just talking about the sun. On the input (cost) side, the opportunity costs of lost environmental & aesthetic benefits must be included. Both Nate & Dr. Hall have promised to provide their proposals for how to go about valuing these costs, but haven't explicitly done so yet. Personally, I don't believe that such costs can be valued in a nonarbitrary fashion, that a plurality of ppl can agree on. Of course, it can be decided that these costs, too, will be simply disregared but is there any utility left at all to EROEI analysis if we make this decision?
Wouldn't it be cool if Jesus had been right; that a "turn the other cheek" strategy won out over "tit for tat" in an iterated game of Prisoner's Dilemma? Alas, flame wars are perpetuated on message boards because tit for tat does seem to be the optimum strategy. Maybe this is what all our problems boil down to!
I read Kaku's "Hyperspace" a dozen or more years ago. Have read Brian Greene's popularizations, et al. I took a year of undergrad physics many years ago, that's all. Hell, all the quantum mechanics in Pauling's "Nature of the Chemical Bond" kept me from ever finishing it. I have a layperson's interest in cosmology & the like, but I'm certainly no authority on that kind of stuff.
Nice chatting with you Jon.
- off topic but along some of the lines in this subthread.
The movie "The Man from Earth" has gotten a fine 8.2 rating at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
(it is labled drama/sci-fi ... I'd say it's not sci-fi, rather brilliant philosophy and food for thougth...)
Splendid and recomended if you are fed up all the "regular shooting stuff"
Usually when I hear people arguing some point of view, I come away saying, ‘That’s true, but incomplete.’ Sometimes we have a tendency to cherry pick our facts and create shadow box proofs. Then someone else, equally sincere but ill directed, creates their own shadow box philosophy in response. ‘Talking past each other,’ I believe the phrase is. People aren’t automatically dishonest (or enthralled to some global conspiracy) because they do this. We just consider the facts we think important and discard those we think aren’t. (Well, maybe with a fair amount of exaggeration and intellectual dishonesty thrown in for good measure. But let’s not talk about Fox News.) You are right that we need to declare our assumptions from the start.
In my PD simulation, I created a scenario where the players were allowed to create offspring, according to how many points they accumulated during interactions with others. Individual players also died eventually and were removed from the game. They also died if their point score dropped to zero (I changed the points so that the sucker prize was negative on the assumption that you invested energy in an interaction with another player and got nothing in return. Hence your net outcome was negative.) Also, players could belong to groups sharing the same strategy. This created an evolutionary incentive for a strategy to succeed. The strategy I created was called Honor Among Thieves. Basically, you always cooperate with another member of your group and you always cheat any outsider, regardless of which strategy they employ. The players also had greater memory of past interactions with outsiders. They were surprisingly robust against all others.
If it is possible to say that this strategy ‘models’ any behavior, you could say that it models cooperation amongst one’s own clan and suspicion of outsiders. It also favors generalizations (blood relative/clan member=good. Outsider=bad.) and prejudice (ditto.)
This is why I don’t count on large scale solutions to what is very quickly going to become painfully local problems. When the simulation hits the fan, we must all find who we can trust and rely on them.
Jon.
JonL
IMO This is something that spoils the Oil Drum as a discussion site. People make valid points but within certain boundary conditions. If those boundary conditions are removed from the quotations (the cherry picking you refer to)then the quotation becomes inapplicable or even invalid.
An example;
If we try to electrify 700 million road vehicles, the price of nickel and lithium may rise to prohibitive levels, due to difficulties in refining these reletively scarce metals at the rates required. Lithium is present in the earth's crust 18 grammes per tonne and is therefore 3500 times less abundant than iron by weight or 215 times by volume. For nickel, its 626 times and 714 times respectively
Missing the last part off this sentence removes the bundaries from which the statement was made. Because nobody knows the future all, statements are incomplete as you say, thats why the conditions on which the statement is made should be retained in the quotation.
In some instances, I believe replies deliberately ignore the context of the post they are replying to. This is not constructive.
yes Partypooper , this is so very true and actually a main pain with forums and blogs.
In an oral conversation these issues can be cleared within a second.
OTOH it is difficult to incorporate all sorts of if'd and but's when on a forum/blog ...
There are a couple of Quarrelers here at TOD who only zooms througt the replies to find someting to argue about ; no one named, no one forgotten .... you all know who I'm having in mind