291 comments on DrumBeat: April 21, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
291 comments on DrumBeat: April 21, 2008
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
- An interview with Stoneleigh - the case for deflation
- The Future of European Transport: iTREN-2030
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“Pessimism of the Intellect; Optimism of the Will.”
—Antonio Gramsci
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Food & Energy. . . Food & Energy
In my opinion, the common connection between these two articles is the
Export Land Model, i.e., food & energy exporters tend to take care of
domestic consumers before they export. Food & energy prices are being
set at the margin as importers bid for declining food & energy exports.
On the energy side, our model and recent case histories suggest that
net oil export decline rates tend to get worse with time, i.e., the
decline rate tends to accelerate with time.
http://www2.nysun.com/article/74994
Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World
By JOSH GERSTEIN Staff Reporter of the Sun April 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/opinion/21krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sl...
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Running Out of Planet to Exploit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 21, 2008
I don't disagree with Krugman's conclusion that speculators are not driving the price of oil. But he errs when the evidence he provides for this conclusion is that inventories are about normal. On his blog he points to OECD inventories, which are about normal, but so what. Almost all new demand and an increasing part of total demand is coming from countries with no known inventory.
As noted previously on TOD, Krugman in his blog also heaps derision on the 'limits to growth crowd of the 1970's'. This only betrays Krugman's failure to grasp the limits of the economics discipline.
Still it's nice to see that Jeff Rubin isn't the only economist of note who silently peruses these pages. And it's decent of Krugman to offer a tip of the hat to TOD.
In an incredible excursion into Orwellian Doublespeak Land, a talking head on CNBC this morning blamed high oil prices on a shortage of refining capacity, and then wondered why oil prices were so high if there was insufficient refining capacity.
The most recent US refinery utilization numbers show that we are about 4 to 9 percentage points below our usual utilization rate for early April.
IMO, refineries in importing countries are caught between a rising crude oil price--as importers bid for declining oil exports--and the volume of refined product that consumers can and will buy.
"
* Imagine rubbing #40 sandpaper on your skin. Now guess what happens to every pipe, vessel, pump and valve that handles the tar sand slurry. The company has two separate process trains working in parallel, switching from one to the other in order to constantly replace worn parts.
* The giant 400-ton trucks that carry the sands cost $6 million. Their 3.550 HP engines have to be replaced every two years, at $1+ million a pop. Tires cost $60.000 - each."
Suddendebt gets it:
http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/
Speaking of Orwellian speak, Kunstler has some in his clusterfuck nation today:..(more equal) ..
http://www.kunstler.com/
With a feeling for dramatics he applies George Orwell's Animal Farm as an analogy to our social structure in a post PO environment.
And finishes off by saying:"It's imperative that this country gets serious about restoring the passenger rail system. We can't not talk about it for another year"
Got that?
It's hard to speculate on information you don't have. If they have inventories it actually makes the Peak Oil stance weaker (because then there could be evidence of hoarding).
Hmmmm... dunno about this one - it would be nice if he (Mr. Krugman) gave some more details on this. The wikipedia page on limits to growth seems more logical than scientific (we know we can't grow forever, but the specific details they give appear sketchy).
I haven't read Limits to Growth - but my guess is the best way to approach this is basic physics of energy and efficiency. Like the Circulatory System - it was originally thought that blood pump out of the heart and was replaced by new blood (didn't return, circulate), until someone proved (quite simply) this wasn't possible because of how much blood would need to be produced (something like the weight of the human body per day).
Oh actually more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harvey
This is the same fundamental deduction needed to get people on the right track. And I think that is the basic message Krugman is conveying.
I didn't see any "tip of the hat to TOD" there, but it did seem like a direct response to our criticism last week. So here's a tip of the hat back to Krugman! He may not be quite ready to throw in the towel on economics, but at least he "gets it," not just with oil but food and commodities and resource exploitation in general. If you think about it, given what the rest of the MSM is on about these days, he's staked out a pretty bold position here.
Yeah, well, he "gets it", but this is like 30 years to late . . .
This isn't an anecdote, my wife and I are building up a 6-month store of groats (wheat). We live in the Northwest and she bakes most of our bread. We grow most of our fruits and vegetables on our property (1/2 acre), and have 4 four chickens to supply all of our egg needs. We recently organized a club to buy a cow (naturally raised, no hormones or drugs) from a local farmer and our freezer is well stocked with 1/4 of the cow. Our next project is organize our neighbors into a cooperative food growing association.
Krugman's piece was preceded by a another oil crisis in the Week In Review (NYT) section Sunday. In just this last week or so a tipping point has been reached in which PO has crossed a threshold into the mainstream, perhaps not yet the dominant opinion, but certainly a respectable one. (Oh how I hate entertaining a respectable opinion.)
The big debate now (I will hazard) is going to be: what can be done about it, what are our options? Here I am happy again. I am with those holding the very disreputable opinion: our high energy way of life is doomed, that no combination of alternative sources can sustain it, and that there is no alternative but for humanity to cooperate in radically retrenching and radically changing our relationship with the biosphere.
I also happen to believe that Cheney and his ilk were early converts to the premise of the above but drew a different conclusion: Rather than planning for a graceful descent and retrenchment that accommodates everybody, let's prepare to keep the show going as it is, but for an ever smaller percentage of the population, by grabbing what can be grabbed and doing whatever is necessary to hold in check the ever growing masses of the excluded.
No one has demonstrated to me that we could not build up fission to about 60% of total energy by 2050 which would include a significant rise in the total from today. I am not trying to pick a fight. Just cannot let that claim go unchallenged.
If you look at the currently being written book at
http://www.withouthotair.com/
on pages 128-134 in pdf page-numbers there's some calculation. He basically says that the most rosy, optimistic assumptions yield energy/person on earth is only slightly higher than current energy consumption per person in the west.
Some points to note about the book:
(i) the author trained as a physicist but has done most of his research (which is high quality) in coding theory, so he's not a practicing nuclear physicist.
(ii) in case you don't read the whole book: his approach is to make lower and upper bound estimates of both energy usage and energy generation. Partly because he's "generous" in his generation estimates he gets higher figures than the people developing the technologies, but they're significantly less than energy usage (which he claims no-one really understands the magnitude of).
(iii) his policy is that resources ought to be shared equally amongst the 6 billion population. This is not universally held on the oil-drum and might change conclusions.
(iv) he's clearly got strong feelings about vegetarianism, consumption society, etc. He provides sources for all his figures and you'll have to decide the extent of bias for yourself.
This is a book that I read a couple of months ago, and I think it'd be of general interest to those on the oil drum. I hadn't mentioned it before as I was waiting until it was declared final. As mentioned above, his key point is that most people really underestimate how much energy is currently used when talking about future power sources.
Telling me he is a Marxist does not really help his credibility.
Perhaps we should hold off using his book as a source until it has been peer reviewed. A year down the road when we have been able to dissect his arguments we will know whether they hold up. Until then we have had great debates here on the subject and it is pretty clear to me that there are no good reasons why we could not build a primarily fission based economy that transitions us from the fossil fuel era to wind and solar and fusion and ocean sources or just sticks with fission.
The one best reason for me is fairly simple - we are incapable politically of dealing with the issue of nuclear waste disposal in a manner that is safe for us and future generations.
While not accepting that that contention is true, if it were, would that mean we should just rule out nuclear?
The Fission power industry is dangerous enough in the US of A that the government must have special legislation to provide it insurance coverage.
I'm stating a very simple and important fact that's used a lot in his calculations: he divides a total available resource by the world population to figure out the maximum sustainable level. He doesn't discuss how such equilibrium should come about, merely making the point that if you assume that the world's population eventually equilibrates economically then that gets you one physical maximum. If you follow the rhetoric of even right-wing groups like the American Enterprise Institute they profess to want other parts of the world to acheive a US standard of living via the free market. If they do then they'll have equal purchasing power.
I pointed out specifically because if you argue that one group uses more than their per-capita "share" (eg, having army bases to secure mid-east oil resources) or if you argue that free market rhetoric is just a smoke-screen, then conclusions might be different. (I'm not arguing either of those things here, just pointing out they're views that someone could take.) You're free to politically disklike the book, but it does provide concrete sourced numbers for various things that can be anlaysed, criticised and used, something that's often lacking seriously in discussions about the future.
Sorry but I went off on your post without really looking at your link, thinking I knew what it was.
I can think of several. First, there's not enough uranium (~50 years at current consumption), and breeder reactors are dangerous, dirty, and prime targets for terrorists. Secondly, fission produces electricity and our transportation system is entirely geared towards the internal combustion engine.
Note that I'm not opposed to expanding the use of nuclear fission (I've always preferred it to coal). I just don't see how it scales, and I don't see how it replaces oil.
So we build a new transportation system. The issue is whether there is any way to sustain a high energy way of life. Not whether doing so would be easy.
There are millions of years of Uranium. I have made the case many times here.
How many times does it have to be pointed out that "in place" does not equal economically recoverable (in any sense of the phrase). A much larger proportion of the earth is made of iron, but that doesn't mean we can mine millions of years of it at increasing rates, either...
To be fair for light water reactors there are only several tens of thousands of years worth of uranium at energy multiples we're familiar with for coal mining. These in place resources aren't economically recoverable because there is cheaper uranium to be had today, and thats all it means. It has little bearing on the economics of nuclear power itself given nuclear power accounts uranium as less than 1% of the cost of the production.
For breeder reactors the case is far more extreme.
For your analogy of iron... why couldn't we mine it for millions of years at increasing rates? Its everywhere.
"For your analogy of iron... why couldn't we mine it for millions of years at increasing rates? Its everywhere."
As far as analogy goes, apart from the general idea being ridiculous, you choose to ignore the power of the exponential function.
At a fictional modest growth of 1% per year, we would double production every 70-odd years. After only about 1400 years we would require more iron than there is in the earth every year...
The issue is whether growth can continue for the next 100 years or so, until people in the developing world can reach a decent standard of living and population growth naturally decline, not a strawman argument of exponential growth forever.
I agree. I was merely responding to part of his post. Of course, the idea of having the entire growing world at a decent standard of living in one hundred years, means we must support a high energy, high pollution, all-resource intensive lifestyle for billions of people for some centuries to come, not just those one hundred years... that's why I am very much against BAU, and all for power down -> immediate steps to curb population growth through having less children, and encouraging lifestyles of much lower energy/resource use. I doubt it'll happen in a voluntary manner, but we are free to work towards ideals.
I see BAU as a negative, in that respect, and most pro nukes implicitly support the idea of BAU. Even when they claim not to, the claims of virtually unlimited supplies of energy, converting over entire transport networks, growing the world for another hundred years until everyone is living high-energy lifestyles, etc. say otherwise.
I would agree with you that there are very many other serious issues in the way we manage things, not just energy use, for instance our dumping vast quantities of fertiliser into the sea from our river systems.
I would also agree that provision of adequate energy supplies also means that BAU can continue.
Where we would differ though is that I feel that it is precisely the availability of such energy that means that it is possible to clean things up and manage them, for instance in providing clean drinking water.
I would also feel that a 'power down' is just not going to work, and should we fail to provide adequate energy would go along with the 'doomer' scenarios, with a massive die-off and nuclear war.
There are too many of us to make some sort of survivalist and green low-energy lifestyle viable.
A lot of those idea come from places which are comparatively sparsely populated, like parts of the US and New Zealand.
The chances of those areas being left in peace whilst billions in the more densely populated areas starve is non-existent, in my view.
It seems simply weird to me that so many focus on the supposed dangers of nuclear energy when not having enough energy is likely to kill billions, or GW from fossil fuels also lead to massive die-offs after changes to the climate - in practise to date the massive coal burn arising from the failure to expand nuclear power may have already lead to irreversible climate change, and certainly has killed bucket loads of people, contrasting with the exemplary actual safety record of peaceful nuclear energy in the West despite purely theoretical concerns.
Don't get me wrong, I think that our first option should always be conservation, and will take with both hands any renewables that become in the right ball-park economically, but at the moment it seems to this observer to be the height of folly to reject proven nuclear technology to meet our needs - we need all the help we can get.
This has been taken apart over and over again. It just isn't so.
You really aren't familiar with breeders. They aren't necissary because we have so much uranium, so if they are to compete they'll have to do so on more than just fuel utilization.
Well it frees up coal for synfuel production and long term it can provide hydrogen production for synfuels.
I don't know Sterling you have been around here for a long time .. remember that „Uranium Report“ from December 2006 ?
anyways here it is and add your own imaginations - also hold that up against "that cubic mile of oil substitution-program"
EWG Uranium Report =>> http://www.energywatchgroup.org/Reports.24+M5d637b1e38d.0.html
That cubic mile =>> http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2320
That remaining uranium is gonna do a lot under all circumstances. 60% of all energy in 2050 possible, when most fossils are gone, that is.
I am not sure what you point is but your reference to the EWG Uranium Report suggests that you question the availability of Uranium. We have gone over and over this. I think the conclusions of the report are worthless. The bottom line is that that report relies on mining industry reserves. Think of these as short and mid term inventory. I argue that these numbers would never be expected to show more than 50 years or so of reserves no matter the amount of resource. Because once the mining companies have enough for their mid term business needs (50 years or so), they stop looking. It takes time and money to qualify resources as reserves.
This situation does not exist for the oil industry. They do not have enough inventory for their mid term business needs so they must relenlessly explore. That is why they have explored the areas that might have oil about 100,000 times more intensively that the comparable areas has been explored for Uranium.
The only way to estimate the amount of recoverable resource where not much exploration has been done is to extrapolate based on known resources distribution in the crust generally. Here is an example of that by Ken Deffeyes that shows recoverable resources in the one trillion ton range with decent EROEI.
I knew it, I have been through this once before .... with you Sterling, you are part of the Nuke-Super-Max-Triangle!
The EWG Uranium Report is still warm ... but you still cite old stuff like this :
"The following table is from Deffeyes & MacGregor, "World Uranium resources" Scientific American, Vol 242, No 1, January 1980 "
This is 2008 Sterling and welcome to the future
They aren't at odds with each other. One is reasonable assure resources from current plays at a set price, the other is ultimately recoverable resources with a set energy cost. They're not in opposition, and theres nothing that has been posted to counter the Deffeyes & MacGregor report in the nearly three decades since its been posted.
Fission powered what? Cars, busses, trains, airplanes, ships, harvesters, plows, backhoes, cranes, bulldozers?
It's too late for fission as an alternative resource for anything other than the Phd.s applying for the grant $.
Alternative societal structure is the only rational avenue we have left.
We all missed the boat, but walked off the dock anyway.
Jeff
Exactly. Did you not see Stuart Staniford's article a few months ago about building 4 billion electric cars?
I am not sure about airplanes, but I would not rule it out.
I am not trying to pick a fight. Just cannot let that claim go unchallenged.
I personally see nothing wrong with picking a fight -- over ideas and facts, which is what you are doing. En garde!
1. There are additional issues with fission which are not pretty. They appear solvable but depend much on fallible human beings.
2. There is a difference between could and will. Ponder that for several moments.
3. The growing financial crisis is going to make capital for investments very hard to come by and thus new infrastructure work less rather than more likely. If Bernanke fails, which even he has alluded to such possibility, then the entire economic system grinds to a halt. You probably fail to understand what that means but it's 1929 or worse all over again. That was when M. King Hubbert himself noted that we still had the factories, the mines, the lumberyards, but everything stopped because the odd thing we call economics ground to a halt.
The contention was "our high energy way of life is doomed, that no combination of alternative sources can sustain it". I was just taking exception to that.
I think that if it can be done, it probably will. If the only way to maintain the high energy lifestyle is to build 5,000 reactors (my 60% by 2050), then that will probably happen. I think it is very unlikely people will walk away from that.
I notice how you did not challenge the statement
Thus you let that stand as true and correct?
450-odd reactors today produce ~ 2650TWh.
World energy use is 118,000TWh (after all, you are talking about energy, right? Our high energy way of life = all external energy use, not just electricity)
Your 5000 reactors would be approx. 30% of today's required energy.
Your "60% by 2050" assumes 9 billion+ people live with with an average of about 1/3 the energy available per person today... and all that requires is 120+ reactors per year to be built, using a large portion of the world's PO mitigation resources. But that's okay. Let's push for BAU... do or die!
You are assuming that future reactors would be the same size as the current fleet.
New reactors are often around 1.6GW, much larger than the average for the existing fleet.
Using electricity to power transport is also much more efficient than using oil.
A lot of measures to reduce power use are also no-brainers, such as residential solar thermal for hot water.
Another way of looking at your 120 reactors a year figure, which you imply is unreasonable, would be to say that one new reactor needs to be built every year for every 75 million people. surely do-able, or to put it another way if you take $6bn as the cost per reactor then the build would cost $80 per person per year.
All this assumes no input whatsoever from improved solar PV and geothermal etc.
To take just the case for PV, it seems to be vanishingly improbable given the advances across a broad front that it will not make massive contributions to energy supply.
There seems to be no technical reason why an energy supply sufficient to provide similar standards to today's way of life in the advanced world can not be provided, although it may look more like Japan's way of doing things than America's.
That does not mean that the road to get there will not be bumpy though.
"All this assumes no input whatsoever from improved solar PV and geothermal etc."
All what? I never said anything about there not being other sources. I said why take away from PO mitigation by wasting the money on nuclear.
Assuming no resource or other constraints as would also be the case for building 5000 nukes, why not generate that electricity from solar? At the 30 trillion cost you are talking about we could have upwards of 70,000 of these, with money to spare and more power generation, no decommissioning costs would cover maintenance, and we don't have to worry about the waste, security is less of an issue, etc...
http://www.solarsystems.com.au/154MWVictorianProject.html
You seem to be making some pretty heroic assumptions about solar costs, storage costs and so on.
I hope it will fall to something reasonable, but I don't know so, and prefer to base plans on actual engineering.
France already produces most of it's electricity from nuclear power, and has some of the cheapest rates in Europe.
With the exception of residential solar thermal solar power remains to date fantastically expensive, even in warm countries.
A realistic near-term target would be to try to provide for peak power in hot areas with this, probably in the form of utility-scale solar thermal.
Currently only a tiny fraction of energy use is generated by solar means, and your assumptions on it's ability to run everything at any reasonable cost are unwarrented.
I would refer you to actual experience to date in Spain and elsewhere.
Hoping that something will work out doesn't make it happen.
Between the completely unnecessary and unrelated-to-the-GWOT war in Iraq on the one hand, and vast domestic internment camps being constructed across the US on the other, it's hard to argue that that isn't a possibility.
But I'm sure that the Neocons will be impeached, brought up on criminal charges, convicted of all the crimes they've committed during their tenures in office, and be thrown in jail. Just like Nixon was.
Oh, wait a second...
Jeffery,
How long do you think it will take before the grain exporting countries start pricing their grain based upon energy content tied to the price of oil?
The price per 100,000 btu for oil is one heck of a lot higher than the price per 100,000 btu for corn, wheat, oats, etc......
Why should the grain exporting countries pay high prices per btu for the oil they import to grow the grain crops and then sell them for much lower prices per btu to those exporting the oil to us?
I think we are selling our land useage and labor way to cheap!
Using all the grain (corn + wheat) in the country each year to make ethanol might replace 12 percent of the energy we get from oil. The danger of converting grain to ethanol, is that it is an irreversible process. You cannot convert ethanol to grain. If there were no laws requiring ethanol production then the price of grain might rise above the costs of profitable ethanol production and the grain would be saved. By requiring ethanol production without government mechanisms for monitoring the effects of biofuels production on grain stocks, an impending disaster might occur. One might presume malnutrition is on the rise in areas where people spend most of their income on food.
The Irish Potatoe famine might have eliminated more than 20 percent of the population of Ireland in one year.