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53 comments on The Coal Crunch is Materializing
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53 comments on The Coal Crunch is Materializing
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One more nail in the coffin that leads us to think about Climate change as something that is going on, and is affecting us. Though I know some people will start a debate about why climate change is happening or even if it is happening, let us just think about it this way. Whatever is happening is not the Normal things of yesteryear, and things are all coming together into a fine pickle.
We have Stock piles of Coal in China going south right when they are needing a bigger supply of Coal, The Weather seems to be doing them a disfavor, and they are still trying to grow.
If they were to hit a bottle neck and fail to grow, what would it all mean for the Demand of Oil? Would their Oil demand go up or go down? That seems to be a question we need to have an answer to, if not at least some thinking done about.
If their economy were to crash might the world demand for oil also nose dive and the price Hide the fact that we are at or will soon be at Peak-Oil-Production?
I agree with your position on global warming, and just wanted to add that since the internal combustion engine is mandmade and spews CO2, a proven greenhouse gas, then humankind is responsible for global warming. One only need look at the extremes; e.g. with no CO2 in the atmosphere the Earth would freeze into an ice ball. With too much CO2 our planet would experience the same outcome that Mars did, which is loss of all of its surface water. So as the ppm (parts per million) increase incrementally from year to year, then the planet will continue to warm.
The idea of sequestering CO2 seems like a good idea, yet the coal plant the White House was touting as a new 'clean coal' plant was nixed due to overage costs. If the US cannot make one single coal plant that sequestors CO2, then how can anyone expect China to sequestor CO2 from all of their coal plants?
Fact is as China continues to bring a higher living standard to hundreds of millions of its poorest people, the price of energy production from burning coal must be kept to a minimum so it remains affordable.
As such we can figure China will continue to burn coal without sequestration at an ever greater pace.
The consequences of unabated increases in CO2 emmissions has already hit one tipping point in the artic, with the unprecedented melt in 07. The black ocean waters of the Artic absorb 90% of the energy from the Sun, whereas ice reflects 95%. As more energy is absorbed, the Artic ocean floor is only 1.3 degrees fahrenheit from releasing its methane deposits. When that starts to occur we will have passed a 2nd tipping point. The 3rd will be the release of methane from peat bogs in Siberia. The 4th tipping point will be the partial collapse of Greenland and West Antarctica, and the 5th will be the release of methane from the continental shelves.
Keep in mind that there is a dynamic known as thermal inertia. The oceans hold a thousand times as much thermal energy as the atmosphere, and the energy absorbed the oceans has about a 30-40 year delay to when it impacts our weather. So we haven't even experienced yet what is already in store from past emmissions, let alone having any idea what today's emmissions will portend in 30-40 years from now.
Couple this with the real possibility that as more and more fresh water enters the oceans at the poles, the thermohaline conveyer will slow and then at some threshold completely shut down. That will be our next ice age. But how is humankind going to handle an ice age with 6.5 billion people spread all over the world? They will have to migrate closer to the equator which is Equador through Brazil in South America, the Sahara Desert of northern Africa, and southeast Asia, a daunting vision.
Fact is humankind is facing peak oil and global warming, while their population and energy demands continue to expand. What we need is a magic bullet, an energy supply that won't exacerbate global warming and one that will allow for cheap energy. Any ideas?
CSlater8:
are you predicting that the shutdown of the conveyer would overcome any Global Warming effect up to that point? Whats the timeframe?
Ultimatley the only solution is to tap into Energy Products derived from nuclear forces. We have tapped them directly in recent years (nuclear Electrical Energy from fission decay) but most of the tapping has been done from its by products -fossil fuels that have captured the Suns output over millenia and are thus very concentrated- or weaker Sun Energy side effects like wind, wave, solar heating and photon capture (PV). The available direct potential is immense but thin and so the concentrated forms are preffered (time having done the concentrating work effort for us).
The main thrust of the doomer argument wrt. replacements is -using a drug analogy- that we have become so addicted to the hit of crack cocaine its going to be almost impossible to switch to 50 cups of coffee a day by way of a replacement. And so we are looking at a period of 'cold turkey' that most people just don't want to face up to: however Mother Nature has the padded cell prepared and is pushing us towards it.
There are a couple of promising ideas on the table to take us to the 'next level' -my personal faves at the moment are:
IEF -Inertial Electrostatic Fusion (almost laughably simple fantasy tech that if it works could be rolled out pretty quickly at low cost and will change everything)
Thin Films PV -every home should have one, a crash program of manufacturing plants: 250 countries with 100-1000 plants each perhaps would do it.
OTEC -why not use the thermal capacity of the sea 24/7/365? Major investment though.
-I expect nuclear will spring like mushrooms. Note all the solutions don't really prevent the liquid fuel crisis though. We might be able to use LNG, CNG or ramp up CTL/non-food bio as we switch but it will be tight. Overall I expect demand destruction and conservation to be the main winners 'Post Peak'.
Nick.
"We" seem to have invented the bullet already -- multiple copies and permutations of it. It's made of lead and depleted uranium and plutonium and U-235 and various nitrogen compounds, plus the growing political will to deploy it. It won't so much increase the energy supply as make it less necessary.
Of course, if human efforts fail, Mother Nature can help. There is always pestilence and starvation to fall back on.
My impression was that you're approaching the thermohaline inversion backward. It's not that it would plunge us into a new ice age, it's that it *might* plunge *northern Europe* into a new ice age. Warm water from the mid-atlantic flows north past the US continental shelf, turns east when it hits southward-running cold currents coming off Greenland's east coast, and then procedes to do a loop around England, Scandinavia, and the Arctic Ocean. Vacation spots in France, Italy, and Spain are at the same latitude (and therefore get the same amount of solar flux coming into their atmosphere) as snowy Vermont. London lines up with polar bear country in Hudson Bay. Denmark is at the same latitude as parts of Alaska. The main thing keeping these areas relatively warm are surface ocean currents, and the air blowing east off of them. It's one of the major reasons that the term has become "global climate change" instead of "global warming."
At the moment, I think the consensus is optimistic about all this, because it has recently been pointed out that previous simulations which showed the currents shutting down entirely did not take into account prevailing wind patterns.
It's a cautionary note that mirrors one of Schneier's Laws - Any person can design a climate simulation or theory that they are unable to detect flaws in.
I have seen people predicting that a shutdown of the Gulf Stream would give us a climate like Newfoundland or Siberia. They seem to asume it would be like Newfoundland and Siberia in the pre greenhouse world. In fact isn't Siberia hotting up quite a bit? Hence the melting bogs. Perhaps while the rest of the world heats up a shutdown would leave Northern Europe with a climate similar to the pre greenhouse norm.
Most of the world isn't showing damning, significant proof of GW one way or the other, in terms of average temperatures. The Arctic Circle, on the other hand... has exceeded all reasonably detailed models for the last few years, killing polarbears, melting permafrost, and opening up the Northwest Passage for the first time in historical memory. Things are not just at record highs, they're at landscape-changing highs - the Magnetic North Pole reaching *room temperature* in a summer heat wave. If the frightening regional temperature trendlines continue, we won't have a summertime Arctic ice pack to speak of in a decade, and Greenland's glaciers will be affecting water levels much, much sooner than people expected. Here's to hoping it's some freak abberation.
The fact that we don't really have any idea WTF is going to happen, but that a CO2 canopy's directly measurable effects are pretty clearly going to do *something* heat-related, is as scary to scientists as it is comforting to pro-corporate interests. Can raw, justifiable FUD ever coalesce into action when pitted against moneyed interests? We shall see.
I am a new contributor to this site, but have been an avid reader of the posts here for about a year.
I wanted to respond to Cslater8's question regarding any silver bullet ideas with a question of my own: What do people on this site think of the genomics angle?
For those not familiar with this, the genetics research pioneer, J. Craig Venter, and some MIT scientists are apparently working on coming up with a synthetic fuel source from artificial DNA. This is a kind of synbio process that makes use of so-called biorefineries and involves the use of large amounts of bacteria, as opposed to drilling through the earth's core at the bottom of an ocean.
From what I have read, such a fuel could also be designed in such a way that it would also capture its own carbon emissions. Talk about a silver bullet!
Is anyone familiar with the effort to create such a fuel and, if so, what are the chances of it happening in a timeframe that will enable us to avoid all Kunsterian emergencies, long or otherwise?
Hi, Risksorter.
Like other technologies that are coming onto the scene now, this one will likely bump into the limits of the system as it is now.
The bacteria presumably require nutrients and to replace the amount of liquid fuel we are using they would require a lot of nutrients. Currently, however, we are eating those nutrients ourselves and may not want to share them with the bacteria.
Each direction we turn there is a limit. Such is how it is just before collapse. All the buffers have been used up.
Best,
Andre'
Andre:
Thanks for tackling my question.
But what if those nutrients you describe come from something we are not already eating -- like seaweed or algae. Something that has not or cannot be over-farmed -- at least until we've had a chance to tap into the energy conversion cycle at a deeper, more fundamental level.
As energy is all around us, it is essentially a question of finer as opposed to grosser access. There may be ways of buying time, while pushing the process in the right direction. Given science, we cannot rule out the possibility of progressing towards a solution, as opposed to regressing to more primitive living conditions.
I am neither a cornocopian nor a believer in technology as a substitute for fuel, but we can never rule out the possibility of the kind of fortuitous breakthrough that the discovery of oil, itself, represented.
If we can come up with the R&D $, we can at least take a stab a this. Another six months of high fuel and food prices, and a lot of people -- even some influential ones -- will begin to wake up.
No. The global warming will overwhelm any local cooling e.g. in Europe. There cannot be another global ice age unless the human species goes extinct (James Hansen). Read from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research what may happen:
General publication list:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/index.html
THC
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/thc_fact_sheet.html
Sea level rises 0.5 m - 1.4 m by 2100 (without ice sheet disintegration)
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_science_...
There is also a study which shows that while the Northern hemisphere cools (relative to the THC not shutting down), the Southern Hemisphere warms up, e.g. in the Pacific.
http://iprc.soest.hawaii.edu/~axel/grl_waterhosing.pdf