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227 comments on Will Wartime Mobilisation Address Peak Oil?
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227 comments on Will Wartime Mobilisation Address Peak Oil?
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Unfortunately, yes there will surely be some Manhattan type project here in the U.S., and probably in the U.K. too. The result will be capital expenditures on solar and wind, when the problem is that we need liquid fuels. And the development of solar and wind will consume oil, natural gas and coal.
The price of oil will skyrocket and a wartime mobilization will be bankrupt from the start.
There is little time left now to do much except focus on risk management.
Matthew Simmons indicated in the London Times a day or two ago that global oil production is now declining, from 85 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015, while at the same time demand will increase 14%. This is like a 45% drop in 7 years.
No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand is so high that it will always be higher than production; thus the depletion rate will continue until all recoverable oil is extracted.
We are facing the collapse of the highways, that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so too does the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cable, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid nothing works, including home heating.
Many countries will take different routes, especially those which have virtually no solar and precious little wind -- and no fossil fuels either. Bulgaria, for example.
They have a choice:
(a) go nuclear or
(b) freeze in winter and starve all the year round.
I reckon they'll opt for the former.
At least one study has shown that insulation retrofits make more sense than nuclear, solar and/or wind (in relation to carbon output, but I think it makes sense for EROEI as well).
The other area to concentrate on would be retrofitting old tractors to biodiesel and a crash program in breeding draft animals.
Many renewable advocates make this argument for energy efficiency. Often, completely incorrectly, implying that it is sort of a 'better option' than nuclear power.
Energy efficiency is on the demand side. Creating government programs to get people to retrofit their insulation will make zilch - squat of a difference. There is one way to get people to make their homes and businesses more efficient and only one way; increase electricity prices.
The very fact that we don't currently see demand destruction in the electricity sector shows that we need more nuclear and renewable power. However, another way to view it is that the highly regulated energy market hasn't been able to increase prices in light of the increased cost of new generation, which obviously come from increasing commodities cost and the push for (more expensive) carbon neutral and more sustainable sources.
So allow the government to increase prices to what it would be for the expensive new nuclear builds and wind power. Demand will fall and you won't have to build but half as many as you planned anyway, and then China builds a new fleet of coal plants and more manufacturing is outsourced there. Problem solved. (?)
Theanphibian,
You mention expensive new nuclear builds and wind power.
Nuclear power plants are expensive partly because of ridiculously demanding safety requirements --- a response to anti-nuclear hysteria.
More here:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/10/a-nuclear-reactor...
and here:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/index.html
I'm not anti-nuke, but I am anti-poorly sited/built/maintained nukes. They are not something to mess around with, they absolutely, positively MUST be done right the first time. No exceptions, no excuses. If doing things right makes things more costly and takes longer than doing things wrong, IMHO that is a price worth paying. The ultimate cost of doing things wrong can be a hell of a price to pay.
I believe the problem is that a lot of the measures are mostly bureaucratic paper-filling, and often have a vast impact on cost, but little on safety.
I won't comment directly on whether the paper work is useful or not because I don't have direct experience with it.
But it strikes me that complex technologies with extreme consequences should they fail probably require checks and rechecks then checks on the checks. Equipment must be within tolerances, backup systems must be equal to the job they will take over if the main systems fail, security must be tight, personnel training must be excellent, etc., etc.
I think people like to blame the "bureaucrats" or "the system" and fail to look at the root cause: nuclear energy is, as currently implemented, a complex, high-risk endeavor with catastrophic consequence if the system fails.
Very far from implementing a row of wind turbines, say.
-André
Even with the extra costs nuclear remains several times less expensive than off-shore wind.
The case is different in the US, where good resources on land make wind a good option.
There is no one 'right answer', and as long as appropriate safety concerns are answered but no useless padding included to pander to those who are in any case entirely ideologically opposed to nuclear energy and whom no conceivable safety measures would satisfy then a variety of resources should be employed.
In the West the safety record of the nuclear industry is second to none, and way better than the coal industry which has been the real beneficiary of opposition to nuclear power - that is where Germany in reality gets most of its energy, renewables so far have added greatly to bills without providing a very large contribution.
DaveMart, do you have a source for your assertion re: offshore wind vs. nuclear? I'm suspicious because Buffet walked away from building a nuclear plant despite $18B in government loan guarantees and extra perks because his people could not find a way to make it economically viable.
-André
The DOE in 2006 estimated the costs of wind power as around $1 million MW installed on land and $2 million for offshore:
http://www.renewables-advisory-board.org.uk/vBulletin/attachment.php?s=0...
Unfortunately since then costs of many inputs have risen drastically, with steel being notable.
Here are the latest estimates I have seen:
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1483748320080514?fee...
These still do not take account of the latest round of steel price increases AFAIK
From the Government paper it can be seen that the estimated capacity factor for off-shore wind in the UK is around 0.30, so you get a cost per MW of average hourly power generation of around $20million, or £10 million MW.
This does not include many of the costs involved in connecting up the turbines, or back-up capacity.
You can get a very generalised corroboration of these figures from the £100bn bandied around in the press as the estimated cost of the renewables commitment, which is overwhelmingly wind, although it does not include the full projected 33GW installed capacity for off-shore as much of that would not happen until after the time horizon, but does include a lot on cheaper on-shore wind.
Wind is a better resource than is indicated here as it is strongest in the winter when most needed by a factor of two, which helps a lot.
Unfortunately though you can get cold, windless snaps in the winter for several days, which means that additional back-up or transmission is needed, and also relies on natural gas for this, supplies of which are increasingly problematic.
For nuclear costs the highest estimate I have been able to find to date is from EON, who give a figure of up to £4.8 bn for an Areva reactor of 1.6GW:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilitie...
Nuclear reactors will cost twice estimate, says E.ON chief - Times Online
At a capacity figure of 90%, around current US practise that gives you average hourly output of just over 1.4GW (France gets lower capacity factors, but does not run its reactors for maximum output, as not all of it is always required) you come out with a maximum figure of under $7million MW average hourly production.
This would not include all connection figures, as the larger reactors would mean that that would need upgrading, but since they will be sited on existing sites that is by no means as challenging as connections for wind power..
No allowance is made either for cost reductions due to series build.
It is clear then that off-shore wind is around three times as expensive to build as nuclear.
Costings are very different for on-shore wind in the States, which has excellent wind resources, and things like speed of build and ease of finance help bridge any small gap in costings.
That gap is just too big in the case of off-shore wind in the UK for it to be bridged.
It would not be so bad if we were likely to retain our present earnings and ability to finance expensive projects.
As Euan has made clear with his articles, neither is likely to remain true, so in my view the projected build will simply not happen.
Does anyone have any info on how in(?)vulnerable nuke stations are to terrorist attacks of various sorts? One could imagine planes being flied into them like 9-11, or Jihadists getting critical jobs (due to need to avoid discrimination against Muslims), and thereby getting to do just about anything from inside.
We've only had one Chernobyl so far, and that was disastrous enough for Ukraine which was fortunately a rather spacious country. How about if six Chernobyls were simultaneously unleashed by anti-Western suicide terrorists? At an already power-critical moment of course.
This issue has been extensively discussed in the comments to this article on a grand solar plan for the US.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=1
It boils down to nuclear reactors being quite tough targets, and heavily protected.
The containment vessel at Three Mile Island for instance, did its job and prevented major releases - even with terrorist control, which would not last long as members of the special forces would be told to take the kid gloves off, it would be fairly difficult to breach the vessel.
Bowing up a natural gas tanker or poisoning a water supply is by comparison trivially easy, as would pathogen release.
Imagine the world's government's going onto War time footing to combat Peak Oil -- and going in the wrong direction!
The EU is already destroying rainforests and sucking up the cooking oil supplies from the world to power their transport; and the US is doing the same to grain crops.
Why should we imagine that governments will make intelligent choices? From the evidence, it would appear that they are far more likely to increase the damage, than to alleviate shortages.
I disagree. A government mandated and subsidized program for upgrading insulation in houses makes perfect sense to me. It could be done along with a rise in energy prices. Simply allowing the market to raise prices will just mean that millions more people will 'freeze in the dark' because, with a collapsing economy, they will simply not be able to afford the upgrades.
Oh, yeah. This is called 'demand destruction' isn't it?
This is exactly the beef I have with those who proudly stick out their chests and proclaim energy efficiency. If you listen to industry, it's more often referred to as "demand side management" (ie maybe we don't have to build those plants after all).
These are depressing concepts. Even if we insulate homes better, then we accelerate rent and housing costs of low-income people who just suffered a subprime mortgage meltdown. It would be nice to have a beautiful democratic solution where the government pays for insulation in the exact amount needed to offset the corresponding rise in electricity prices. Now the middle class gets hit from both sides of the equation, but the likely reality is even worse. Such programs will get paid for by deficit spending, which I maintain (often against passionate rebuttals) is the most severe government redistribution of the wealth (but from the poor to the rich) in our society.
Not to mention that government involvement will in principle lead to less efficient allocation of resources. In fact, look no further than the government for an organization that already doesn't use energy efficiently. It's not a problem to leave lights on in all sorts of places at all hours of the night if done under a 'security' pretense. The fact is, the most effective form of demand destruction is done by calculated changes to lifestyle and ways of business - which is the exact thing government SUCKS at doing.
Hillary Clinton and her daughter on the campaign trail talked at length about reducing energy use of government. YES! This is what we need, the fact of the matter is that the government sector is one of the stiffest demand responses out there to energy prices and the rest of us pay dearly for that. Local governments can almost never afford to lessen air conditioning a degree or cut routes of a service, as simple complaints will set democracy in action to keep the status quo as the books fall further into the red, advancing the trends that got us into this situation. Look no further than Washington DC for an area with a nearly fixed energy usage weather it be at $4 or $10 per gallon.
Directly subsidizing insulation refitting means that those most guilty of a crime demand that everyone else fix it, while the guilty party breathes down our necks and makes the very act of efficientizing less efficient.
Discussion of the concrete meaning of 'wartime mobilization' is long overdue, and personally, I think that something of the sort is the only plausible alternative to real disaster. I've skimmed my way only a short way into the comments thus far, but let me just say that I am skeptical of your seeming belief that any kind of price mechanism would trigger the kinds of responses that are needed, whether in the form of subsidies for insulation which you think are a bad idea, or letting the market set the price. What wartime mobilization means, to my understanding, is deciding which activities are essential, and allocating resources to those activities. If one thinks of all the industries and individuals that depend on activities which are by any rational measure unsustainable (the great majority of us, I'm afraid), should we wish to see them all pursue these activities just as far as possible, up to the moment when they are attritioned - i.e. forced from the market? Let them all tread water as we gradually increase the weights around their ankles, and let the best 'unsustainable swimmers' stay in the cesspool the longest. And then what happens to those who are forced out? Do they all wake up the next day with Priuses in their driveways? In so far as the system does keep going, that would be good in comparison with an outright collapse, for those dwindling numbers who manage to stay attached to it. However, it seems to me that it would be far preferable - indeed much more efficient - to simply decide that activities X, Y and Z have no future. The only choice involves the path to their elimination. Rather than let them each just go on to their slow, painful demises, or worse, try to maintain them far past the stage where they are viable, why not stop them tomorrow? Give the people who lose those jobs a modest ration of basic goods (and the ability to provide those basic goods will depend on the ability to direct resources to activities that truly are essential) and tell them to stay home and propagate useful perennials and otherwise transform the places where they live into something much more sustainable - because they are patriotic, because they are excited about doing something truly important, and because they care about the survival of their grandkids, not to mention their own. Stopping the activities in which they were previously engaged, together with all the associated commuting to work, will save a lot of energy that is therefore left available for some essential purpose.
Similarly, activities P,Q, and R would be gradually phased out or reduced in scale, according to a deliberate schedule - because those activities provide goods which really are essential in the short-term, and which have no immediately available substitutes. Aspects of the currently unsustainable food production and distribution come to mind, as one example in this category.
Finally, activities A,B,C,D,E and F - the kind of skills, tools and infrastructure that will be needed if society is to be sustained, say, for another 500 years or so - will be ramped up with all deliberate speed. Much of the needed infrastructure and manufacturing will necessarily be of smaller scale than that connected with New Deal employment programs and the WWII mobilization. Government efforts to sustain demand will be counterproductive for similar reasons. Though absolute levels of energy available will be greater that what was available during WWII and the New Deal in the case of the U.S. - even assuming that supplies are quickly reduced to what can be obtained domestically - we will be rather limited in terms of what we can do on the large scales of the earlier programs, for two basic reasons: (1) at our current level of complexity, activities of type P,Q and R, will be consuming a great amount of the available energy, and (2) the mobilization activities of those earlier time periods were aimed at creating infrastructure for a civilization of increasing scale and complexity, whereas we will be aiming in the very opposite direction.
These things being said, there may indeed be a place for a few projects on a larger scale - whether these be functioning rail systems, or the F.H. King Canal Project in the southeastern U.S., modeled on the Grand Canal of China.
Finally, while there may be something to the economists' conception which links preferences to efficiency, that is now rather irrelevant to the predicament we face. One way of describing that predicament is that our preferences are those of Hydrocarbon Man. Regardless of our preferences, they have got to change.
Great points Steve about those ABC-XYZs. Can we get governments to apply them?
The price of power gives almost no signal to the rental sector to encourage better insulation.
Your proposals amount to allowing the poor to freeze.
"Unfortunately, yes there will surely be some Manhattan type project here in the U.S., and probably in the U.K. too. The result will be capital expenditures on solar and wind, when the problem is that we need liquid fuels."
I wonder if Boone Pickens would agree with that.
He is building a wind farm to address a liquid fuels shortage.
Is Boone Pickens stupid?
I think not.
He is taking advantage of a concept we in the peak oil community seem to have dismissed: economic substitution.
Given that in the last decade, the vast majority of new electricity generating infrastructure has been natural gas fired plant, then obviously the usage of natural gas can be decreased by substituting renewables in it's place. To be sure renewables are (currently) more expensive and there is the issue of intermittancy. I would argue, however, that intermittancy is a cost issue and not a technical barrier since energy storage solutions exist. With continued price rises of fossil fuels at some point it becomes cost effective to build renewables along with storage instead of renewables along with fossil fuel baseload.
But to return to the point: why does building renewables allow you to use less liquid fuels?
Natural Gas can be used in converted automobiles.
We need to come to accept that we simply aren't going to have liquid fuels available in the amounts and prices they historically have been. We need to shift personal transportation to a rail based system. Thats one thing a Manhattan project style project can definitely help with. I can imagine a three tiered system: High speed trunk lines between cities, light rail local lines between localities, and electric street cars to communities and residences.
Battery powered vehicles will be expensive in the future, and are also based on materials and components, which like oil, come largely from overseas. Once we start mass producing 100 million of these a year, the way we do with autos now, the price simply won't be affordable for the average person. Look at what's already happened to the price of lead, nickel, lithium, copper, etc. over the past 5 years, and we've only just started producing electric vehicles.
He's smart,laughing all the way to the bank, knows the masses and government will invest there next. The bubble goes up, and he get out. Most oilmen know that you can get piss out of solar, wind, and bovine gasses.
Well gee golly willakers, why don't you go down into the basement and jump out of the window and end your misery....
I find it interesting that you focused so much on the potential failure of highways.
I do not doubt that we will be stressed by diminishing crude oil production, but I do believe that we will adapt OK. Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute says that we could get by with a LOT less oil consumption (less than 10% of what we use now), we just need to be a lot more efficient. That comment highlights just how inefficient we have been.
When I bought my house, I purchased it intentionally to be 1 1/2 miles from where I work. I ride by bike to work each day. My wife and I put in a ground-sourced heat pump to heat our house (which is 400% efficient). We use an electric lawn mower to cut our lawn.
With improved efficiency, oil will power our economy for a long, long time....
Our need to use highways will be dramatically reduced, so they will be a lot less to maintain (less wear, and they won't need to be as large).
What is needed, though, is leadership to guide us toward the changes we need to make. Thank heavens, George Bush will not be the person at the helm much longer....
Retsel
Well, don't know where you live, but highways where I come from are destroyed because of the weather as well as the heavy loads..
Cheers, Dom
And snow plows. Wonder how much longer the roads would last if we could just do without them, and stay put for much of the wintertime.
In some case, there are no doubt technologies - some of them low technologies - which can reduce fuel usage by a factor of ten. But reducing society-wide usage by a factor of ten is altogether another matter. Recall that Robert Hirsch - who in his "Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management" report - was assuming a quick doubling of the fuel efficiency of new vehicles, basically changing out the manufacturing plants in accordance with the dictates of a wartime mobilization, conjoined with their introduction to the fleet in numbers similar to new car sales today, found that it would take twenty years to have much of an impact. I think he was working quite a bit too far inside the box in his basic assumption that we need to keep a fleet on the roads at all costs, and was totally unclear about the nature of the "more sustainable society" (or words to that effect) which he mentioned in his interview with David Room, which his crash program was supposed to be a step toward. There is another problem in that, on his premises, only the fuel economy, not the manufacturing process - which I understand accounts for something like half of the total energy used by each automobile - was doubled in efficiency. But I do think, however, that his assumption of car output at rates comparable to today was at least less absurd than the even more absurd proposition of scaling up car output to such an extent that the overall fleet efficiency would dramatically increased in a significantly shorter period of time.
But of course, if the few cars/homes that achieved a tenfold reduction continued to be driven/heated, while all the others stopped, the savings would be extraordinary!
Not true.
He assumed that after 3 years all new vehicles in the US would be hybrids, with a 40% efficiency gain. Total displaced oil is about 2-3Mb/d after 20 years, or about 1/4 of current US passenger vehicle consumption. You can see this for yourself in the scenarios part of his report. He also assumed the car fleet would age and change at its normal rate (~15-20 year lifespan).
By contrast, doubling efficiency - a 100% gain - in short order would lead to a 50% reduction in fuel used, or about 5Mb/d, twice the size he assumes. 50% of vehicle miles come from vehicles < 6 years old, meaning doubling efficiency of all new cars would lead to savings of the size he assumed would take 20 years occurring in only 5-6 years, even with no change in replacement patterns. Replacement patterns would be likely to change, however, with a significant number of cars subtracted from the number on US roads for (AFAIK) the first time since WWII.
Quite.
He assumes no change in the size and type of vehicles being purchased, which we already know to be wrong. (He also assumes no effect from electric cars or PHEVs, but it's too soon to know how wrong he'll be about that.)
Basically, his report considers only (1) hybrid vehicles, and (2) ways to create more liquid fuel. He explicitly ignores all other conservation techniques, which means that his conclusions are virtually guaranteed to be overly pessimistic.
Alternatively, you could see his conclusions as "what is necessary to prevent a price increase?" Since we've already seen price increases, we're already outside the scope of his scenarios.
My neighbor has an electric mower. I get a laugh watching him splicing the wires back together every time he runs over the cord, which seems about every other week.
I think if we have to worry about a quart of gas for the mower then we really are in BIG trouble. Mine, by the way, holds two gallons (got a large yard which may be growing food soon).
lawns are an extravagance in the age of peak oil, especially if maintained by fossil-fuel powered mowers and fertilized with natural-gas derived fertilizers, and especially if they are only entered for the purpose of maintaining them, as most commercial property is. There are 30 million acres of them in the US, so if everyone eliminated half their lawn, it would make a huge difference. It would entail foregoing about 15 million gallons of gasoline or diesel a week during the growing season (it takes 1 gallon of fossil fuel to mow an acre of grass). Furthermore, an acre of well-maintained turf lawn emits a net 1/2 ton per year of CO2 due to the emissions of the activities required to maintain it, including the manufacture and depreciation of the mowing equipment. It gets worse if you hire a landscape contractor to mow/fertilize it, or have to water it regularly.
Reduce it down to the size of mowing it with a manual reel mower, and convert the rest to food production, native plants, xeriscaping (in arid areas), or beds of low-maintenance non-invasive trees, shrubs or perennials. All of these will reduce a C02-emitting landscape and convert it to one that sequesters carbon and reduces our carbon footprint. Native prairie and woodland, for example, can sequester between 0.5 to 1 ton of carbon dioxide per acre per year, facilitated by greater underground root mass and wood production.
Sow plenty of clover into your lawn. This fixes nitrogen. Mix all your lawn mowings into your compost heap, eventually to nourish your veg plot. No need to buy any fertilisers. Get a push mower to save having to go to the gym. Learn the skills of scythe-mowing.
Yeah, I'm thinking a scythe will be the way to go - you can use it for a lot more things than just mowing the grass. Unless you are going to be pasturing animals, most of the lawn will need to be transformed into garden anyway.
And yes, the amount of gasoline used to fuel a power mower each summer isn't very much. However, once motor fuel rationing is introduced (and it will be, it is just a matter of time), don't be surprised if dispensing fuel into anything other than a motor vehicle fuel tank is prohibited. Also, don't be surprised if you find that even that one or two gallons will be needed for more important things than mowing a lawn.
Our standby gasoline rationing plan has "white markets" for ration trading, so you can get as much gas as you want if you are willing to pay for other people's unused rations. http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=6307185 The rationing ensures a certain amount of gasoline will be available at the market price but you would pay more above that amount. Kind of like tiered electricity rates. In order to be sure that the market price is not imporverishing, we could attempt domestic price controls again to dilute the price but I think it would be better to ration enough to be sure that the world price goes down. This avoids exploring for oil that will be expensive no matter what. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2008/06/oil-is-too-expensive.html
Chris
Under intense lobbying, I suspect Congress would change this plan to be more friendly to corporations.
The current U.S. government is incapable of implementing a rational plan to deal with peak oil, and the two principal presidential candidates do not look any better. We can dream about appropriate actions, but the fact remains that President Bush has set us on a path of increasing oil production at any cost and producing ethanol from corn. He has linked the price of food and fuel in the markets and devalued the U.S. dollar with crushing federal debt, both driving inflation. Bush is interfering with placing photovoltaic and solar thermal systems on BLM land. McCain advocates a holiday for the federal gasoline tax. Obama is a corporate puppet as shown by altering his position to support telecom immunity and erosion of Constitutional rights. Congress is a corporate puppet. All of them support ethanol. None of them are proposing to electrify our long distance rail lines to replace semitrailer trucks allowing food to be efficiently transported from the heartland to the cities. None of them will revoke the powers that Bush has amassed. Using the pretense of terrorism, Bush has prepared the U.S. for our transition to a police state. The elite have decided we will drive peddle to the metal over the falling edge of peak oil to crash and burn at the bottom. Wartime mobilization to actually do something good for the people and harm to corporations will not happen in our present political climate.
meaning you'll be replacing your two-gallon mower with a two-gallon tiller? At least you won't have to till every week or two..
There are several advantages to not tilling, including the fuel savings.
In areas not suited to gardening then it seems unlikely that vegetation will be allowed to go to waste - a business opportunity appear to be to herd goats from one property to another.
Mowing problem solved!
Neither goats, sheep nor cattle would be allowed in the cities to graze.
Why not?
In the U.S. there are ordinances that forbid ranchers from taking their livestock into cities and towns to graze. They have to be caged. Zoning regulations classify land as vacant, residential, commercial or agricultural. I suspect one would have difficulty rezoning an urban lot to be a mixed class of residential and agricultural. The neighbors would complain about the noise, smell and flies. Farm and ranch animals are for rural areas.
If the animal is a pet, then it might be possible to sneak one by law enforcement. It would depend on the neighbors.
Why would you need a tiller for a space the size of a yard? Ain't ya never used a shovel?
Cheers
I'b eben so' my slabe laba fa muny-
Fo dolla an ara!-)
Amory does some good work, but sometimes he is, in my view, "too much of an engineer" in his thinking and loses track of how long things take to accomplish. Like Nansen Saleri in the recent WSJ article (enter 'nansen saleri site:wsj.com' in the search box of news.google.com).
You're correct that we'll see efficiency in various areas.
That will (maybe) take care of the first year's drop in oil post peak.
What about the next year's drop? And the one after that? And the one after that? And the one...
Most people I speak with about peak oil use whatever is mentally handy as a possible mitigation strategy and haven't yet thought through all the implications.
-André
"You're correct that we'll see efficiency in various areas.
That will (maybe) take care of the first year's drop in oil post peak.
What about the next year's drop? And the one after that? And the one after that? And the one..."
Well I think the economy will solve the problem:
Prices will rise. A lot of people will stop using cars (and find they don't need them). There will be a big recession.
The economy will reoriente round more sustainable and less fuel intensive transportation. Like walking, taking the bus and cycling.
Most North Americans are too pampered to know how far you can really walk. When I worked in the UK I walked 3 miles each way to work. Some people cycled 10 miles.
You don't need a car to go pick up a quart of milk at 7-11. You can walk.
To those that say "but what about the groceries? The nearest store is 10 miles away".
The answer is that it won't be. Mom and Pop stores will start to spring up.
I live ina 4 bed house - with 2 occupants.
Gas usage for last quarter 1200kwh
Electricity usage 680 kwh
Basically achieved with high levels of insulation, condensing boiler, solar water heater and CFL's
Your average steel mill, industrial chemical plant or oil refinery have anywhere from 500-5000 workers not all of whom really want to live within 1.5 miles of the plant. Not everyone will have the same choices as you and so a re structurally locked in to high energy lives. Your bike, electric lawnmower and ground source heat pumps are all a result of a highly complex industrial infrastructure being in place to produce them. If teh workers in those industries are forced tolive close to the plnts then we are back to the ol filthy industrial cities of the past. I don't know waht you do for a job but if it is in the West then it is highly likley that either the inputs or outputs or customers are highly dependent on oil so your job may not be that secure anyway. Choosing a house location purely on its function in todays circumstances may not prove to be so smart in the future, if the circumstances of your job change dramatically and the house does not have any other nearby infrastructure whih can sutain you in unemployment. Think community gardens, community workshops, libraries, parks, rivers or casotal fishing strips. If you live in the middle of sprawl with no access to any of these things then you are vulnerable.
It is realy easy to bicyle more then 1,5 miles and having 500 to 5000 workers living within bicycling distance to a plant were SOP before mass motoring. Manny local towns has kept and built on the bicycle lane infrastructure. The quality of life were realy good after modernisation of industries and sanitation.
This structure is still in place in small Swedish industrial towns such as Finspång (steam and gas turbines and aluminium painting), Oxelösund (heavy steel industry).
But lots of these industries has of course perished and manny has been moved to get more room for making them larger and more rational.
It is easy to add busses and so on to the solution and I do not understand why industries has to be filthy? But some stuff do need a buffer zone in case of fire or an accident.
"while at the same time demand will increase 14%. This is like a 45% drop in 7 years."
He did not say that at all. You are taking numbers from the article and fabricating your own reality.
The 14% was a number that BP places on reserves increasing over the past decade.
CJ, I would definitely take issue with his 14% demand increase, plus the Mega projects work doesn't suggest that high rate of decline. If the production decline were as great as he says, then I think that demand destruction would take care of his own projected demand increase. it doesn't make sense.
Hey RESEARCH 24, Demand is so high that it will always be higher than declining production, thus no demand destruction that will impact production [this is the missing and mysterious 4th law of thermodynamics] :). The 14% comes from 1.8% annual demand increase from the EIA, which most people adhere to, but pick your own %, as no one knows for sure.
Those production decline figures come from Matt Simmons, and prolly agree with Robelius and the Energy Watch Group. Simmons knows his stuff, as he is looking at the data with his own knowledge of rig counts, failing rigs, lack of personnel, companies and projects that will go belly up, and other real world stuff. In any case, you must admit that it does not look good. We will see soon enough :) Clifford J. Wirth
You can't have a 14% demand increase and a supply drop of the magnitude you describe. It is not possible. Demand only exists at a certain price and can only be measured as product supplied, which means it is, for all intents and purposes, going to always equal supply.
First you make up the 14% number now, now you attribute it to the EIA, saying "most people adhere to." That might come as news to most people here.
Matt Simmons may know what he is talking about, but you, Sir, do not.
As I said before the 14% comes from EIA, go look it up. And go look at the Peak Oil overview on this site.
Oh, I'm sorry, I must be confusing you with the other "cjwirth" who posted this in the first comment on the thread. My apologies.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_...
I don't see any post there, must have been deleted.
As I said before the 14% comes from EIA, go look it up.
And go look at the Peak Oil overview on this site.
Demand increase in this instance refers to an upward movement in the entire demand curve. If the supply curve remains at a constant level than the price point shifts higher due to the increased demand. Basically demand increases can be reflected with either higher prices OR higher quantity demanded.
Fine, if that's the way that you need to look at it. But you can't measure the theoretical increase in demand that you describe, therefore you can't put a number on it. x amount of barrels, 3%, 14%, whatever. You cannot consume that which does not exist.
You can't say that we are producing 90 mbpd, but demand is 114 mbpd. You can only say that we have been producing 87 mbpd at a constant rate, but the price keeps going up, therefore "demand is outpacing supply," or "we are in a bidding war" or something like that.
"Curves" are lines drawn on paper in an economics classroom in order to illustrate and articulate certain concepts. When it comes to buying and selling oil, curves don't exist. Just dollars.
Actually JustanotherEtc, dollars don't really exist either. They are just meaningless promises to pay themselves written on paper in the Fed's printing rooms.
Beware of mocking those economists' theoretical curves lest you find your own life gets more theoretical than you wish!
The Manhattan Project was a tiny tiny thing compared to the whole war mobilization. A mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project would be, by itself, utterly inadequate for what we face today. The people involved in the Project did not, at all, think of themselves as independent entrepreneurs. They were all paid by a single paymaster. There pay was sufficient to buy anything that was available in local stores (very limited selection). Their minds were mobilized before the Project existed. All thoughts of personal planning were expressed in term of 'after the war'.
In the early 1940s, US economy was still suffering aftermath of the 1930s depression. It had a lot of idle capacity that was ready to be put to work if only a paying customer could be found.
Germany, Italy, and Soviet Union all appeared to be doing better than US and UK. Private enterprise, as a way to organize a nation's economy was under substantial intellectual attack. In that atmosphere, a government plan to reorganize all of manufacture and commerce under government rules was plausible and was deemed necessary. That is not the zeitgeist of today.
Jimmy Carter in a much later time described the energy crisis as 'the moral equivalent of war.' When he said that, I thought immediately - no, not so. wars end.
And, yet, I think that we now need some serious planning of our means of production. We don't have enough wealth or time to simply try every response to the oil shortage. And we don't have enough understanding of how our economy works to make rational judgments as to what is working and what is failing.
Our response to petroleum shortage seems to be 'the moral equivalent of the war on terror'.
That phrase, 'the moral equivalent of the war on terror,' is just too ripe. You mean unending, but the moral dimensions of the war on terror are just facinating. Ethanol is the equivilent of torture? Drill everywhere is the equivilent of aluminum tubes? I guess shock and awe is the the equivilent of... well... errr... shock and awe....
Chris
A friend and I were talking several weeks ago and he said, rather than a Manhattan Project, we need a Marshall Plan.
However, there was some question about what other countries might pay for a Marshall Plan for the U.S.
The Russians - after we finally let their tanks drive in?
Weren't those wonderful days?-)