Welcome to the New Digs...(an open thread...)
Posted by Prof. Goose on August 22, 2005 - 7:29am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Ideas? News items? Discussion? Thoughts?
Here's the place to do it.
Posted by Prof. Goose on August 22, 2005 - 7:29am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Here's the place to do it.
Unfortunately, this is not a preference that can be set on a per-user basis, so we won't be able to make everyone happy.
Keep up the good work, y'all.
Does anybody know about such site?
Yes, I know about peakoil.com wiki site, but this wiki do not address the arguments per si, it only explains the theory, lacking lots of issues.
For instance, we all have heard the argument that the market will provide what's in need at a given moment, as long as there is a demand in said market. We know that's not the case because we do not have sufficiently mature technologies to replace our oil economy with something else in short order. There are of course several other arguments.
I can't believe this stupid auto-html'er includes the period at the end of the sentence. The link in my previous message is broken as a result. I thought I tested it the other day and it was smart enough to ignore that, although commas fooled it. How many URLs end with periods or commas? Fix it!
That's exactly the issue that Fernando brought up at
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/8/21/13643/8236#14
And my "fair and balanced" answer to that one can be chased round-robin style by starting at:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/8/21/13643/8236#41
Everything starts with how you "frame" the debate and what linguistic deceptions you allow each side to bring into the debate room.
You will never see a fair and balanced assessment.
Everyone has some weird agenda.
You need to dig for yourself to get to whatever truth suits your needs for the moment. Welcome to the burrow-hood.
And Happy DigDay to You
:-)
http://lemmonledge.blogspot.com/2005/07/heather-at-home.html
http://www.9news.com/acm_news.aspx?OSGNAME=KUSA&IKOBJECTID=d17093f0-0abe-421a-000f-14ab536e0188& amp;TEMPLATEID=0c76dce6-ac1f-02d8-0047-c589c01ca7bf
or Hydrates http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/83/i34/8334ebus1.html
More potential here to alleviate the transportation crisis (since peak oil should have little impact on our ability to produce electricity).
"The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines"
http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ.html
"Day by day it becomes more evident that the Coal we happily possess in excellent quality and abundance is the mainspring of modern material civilization ... It is the material energy of the country -- the universal aid -- the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.
"With such facts familiarly before us, it can be no matter of surprise that year by year we make larger draughts upon a material of such myriad qualities -- of such miraculous powers.
"But it is at the same time impossible that men of foresight should not turn to compare with some anxiety the masses yearly drawn with the quantities known or supposed to lie within these islands..."
Of course his concerns became completely irrelevant with the dawning of the age of oil. Which no one predicted!!!!
It comes back to what I've argued before. Predicting the future is pretty damn hard. No one seems able to do it reliably. Chances are we will be surprised, just like everyone else has been throughout history.
Aren't we lucky that the world wasn't full of Peak Coalers back then, piling on carbon taxes and shutting down industries to force conservation? I guess there are still some people who wish the Luddites had won and we had remained mired in the wretched conditions of suffering and famine that were prevalent until the 20th century, and probably some of them are active Peak Oilers. But I count my blessings that such philosophies were not victorious in the early days of the industrial revolution.
I don't know what is going to happen in the future, but we should never forget the genuine costs which we impose on our posterity by embracing artificial scarcity and lowering economic growth. IMO the best way to face the challenges of the future is to see robust and vigorous growth of the economy, technology and science. It's a lot easier to deal with problems when you're rich than when you're poor, and that goes for the world as well as individuals.
We should expect that science and technology are making serious advances toward whatever the next step will be. Seems like the best solution is to take the potential scarcity of oil as a warning sign that we'd better start looking for alternatives. If we end up having too much energy available, well, great. We can throw ourselves a party.
Help us with the idea of "artificial scarcity." There has been artificial scarcity in the past--the Arab Oil Embargo was exactly that. Not today.
Scarcity is relative. We still have vast reserves of oil in absolute terms. But the world appetite is so gluttonous that oil is in short supply. A conservative assessment: Short-term, there aren't enough rigs to provide spare capacity. Longer-term, there's not enough oil to let us continue our consumption at current rates.
The world is on a knife-edge of supply and demand. We're burning every drop of oil we produce, and drawing down inventories in some quarters. The markets react to every little bump in supply.
It sounds like real scarcity to me.
Taking the long global view for the human race, it probably wasn't a particularly smart use of what may turn out to have been the best resource humanity ever gets access to. If we have indeed started to deplete oil in a hurry, we are now going to experience the consequences of using it recklessly. On the other hand, if we find a solution to this, we will no doubt use that solution to get even more numerous and even more impactful on the planet and then get in trouble a different way. The speed and lack of warning with which peak oil is, it seems, hitting us and needs to get handled should give some clue as to what happens as exponential growth starts to approach finite limits. The faster the whole globalized economy spins when it's operating at planetary scale, the faster it will run into massive unforeseen problems. Increasingly it will run into multiple ones at the same time.
I can see no distinguishing features whatsoever between the way a set of yeast cells approach a vat of grape juice and the way humanity approaches the planet. I expect the same mathematical dynamics to play out sooner or later (but for narrow selfish reasons, I care quite a bit whether it's sooner or later).
I guess my personal favorite outcome would be peak oil with moderate depletion, so that humanity gets a good scare and gets real about how to use the planet in a way that can be sustained long term (millenia at least), but survives without really horrendous consequences for us. However, at the moment, I can't see a way to rule out the scenario of peak oil with rapid depletion and very little warning, which I think will be horrendous.
Stuart.
Thank you for opening up a "New Digs".
As for this obssesive-compulsive Lemming, I'm still doing the Deep Dig into Freako-nomics because I believe it to be an important and inter-related side topic to the whole issue of Peak Oil and why there is a bug in "the system."
For an introduction to Lemm-Logic, ya all come and visit us at the Burrowing Center: http://lemmonledge.blogspot.com/2005/07/heather-at-home.html
After that, mosey on over to the Freako-nomics posts:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2005/8/21/13643/8236
This may seem like a dumb question, but does the stuff in Alberta and Colarado actually burn?
I mean, a crude but I think useful indicator for the quality of a carbon based fuel resource is what happens when you put a match to a sample of it.
Natural gas: fireball
Light sweet crude: ditto
Coal: Won't light from a match, but once you get it going gives a long hot fire.
Wood: Doesn't burn well at all when wet, but after drying burns a bit less well than coal.
So if we were all sitting around the fire in a freezing cold Alberta winter, and wood was running low, and we started throwing on handfuls of tar sands, does it put the fire out, or do flames leap up? Ok, maybe the sand kills oxygen to the fire. So if we suspend a basket of the stuff right above the fire, does the dripping bitumen help? Or does the cold soggy black mass of sand so close to the fire just hinder it?
Somehow, it seems like the answer would be more illuminating than shelves full of Shell and Chevron technical reports, yet I can't find it on the web.
Anybody know?
Stuart.
Looking further, we find that "Oil shales are reported to have been set afire by lightning strikes" in this (pdf) document SHALE OIL--THE ELUSIVE ENERGY published by the M. King Hubbert Center For Petroleum Studies at the Colorado School of Mines.
Tar sands we still don't know.
Stuart.
http://www.usssp-iodp.org/Images/flaming_hydrate.jpg
Here's a video of some hydrate burning away, http://www.aist.go.jp/GSJ/dMG/dMGold/hydrate/burnhydr.qt
Methane hydrate is a potential source of natural gas, if they ever develop a good way to mine it and work with the gas in some way. "The worldwide amounts of carbon bound in gas hydrates is conservatively estimated to total twice the amount of carbon to be found in all known fossil fuels on Earth." This is usually spun as bad news because of the CO2 problem, but from the energy perspective it is a great opportunity.
People worry about methane because it is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2, but of course if you burn it, it turns into CO2. Natural gas is methane and we burn plenty of that. Barring some catastrophic accident we would not be letting huge volumes of methane escape into the air, it would be a terrible waste of energy among other problems.
Guess I was wrong:
http://wcco.com/watercooler/watercooler_story_234093838.html
This would mean a shift of 3.5% of all energy consumption to coal (the share of oil is now 34.9%). The share of coal is now 23.5%. But because lignite production has stagnated for years the growth would happen in hard coal. Hard coal production was 4036.5 million short tons in 2003 (all numbers are here: World Coal Institute - Coal Facts
http://www.worldcoal.org/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=188). Replacing oil with coal would mean raising the world hard coal output by 20% or by about 800 million tons. This is more than the total volume of hard coal trade today (coal is fairly local). Would this be possible by 2020? Maybe, if the Chinese could increase their output by about 500 million tons. The projected US output in 2020 would be only 163 million tons more than now.
If 10% of oil should be replaced by synthetic oil from coal the coal production should increase 40% or by 1600 million tons. This is because producing 1 unit of energy as synoil uses 2 units of coal energy. Is this possible? Absolutely not.
But replacing oil would not be enough. After the peaking of oil production it would be mostly up to coal to maintain energy growth (ie. economic growth). This would mean 6.3% growth a year (hard coal production growth now is 3.3% and replacing oil production growth of 2% by coal will mean 3% - without synoil). This would mean doubling the hard coal production in 11 years. And we should add here that coal needed as replacement for decreasing oil production. This is clearly impossible with or without synthetic oil.
World coal production is already now not far from peak. Many major producers are already meeting depletion problems (Europe, India). How long can the Chinese keep up their record production growth of 7 - 10%? Probably no longer than 10 years. We might have peak coal sooner than we think. The usual view that the world has ample coal for 100 - 200 years more is based on the assumption of stagnating coal production. This is now changing. And in any case the global growth rate of coal production cannot be high enough to compensate fully the rapid decline of oil.
So we will quite possibly have the global Peak Energy in 10 - 15 years! (It could come in 5 years.) And in any case rather flat total energy growth after the Peak Oil. The alternatives cannot help significantly in this time frame. And remember, the oil production will go down a lot mote than 10%. So here we are. Don't even think keeping up the present energy consumption level.
To support your argument, I'd add that US coal production has fluctuated within a 10% range from 1999 through 2004, between a low of 1.014 billion short tons in 2000 and a high of 1.111 billion in 2004. It's unlikely to be elastic in the short term. You'd need a lot of capital, people, equipment and infrastructure to increase output, and that can't happen very quickly.
I also doubt that coal miner is near the top of anyone's preferred occupation list these days. New Zealand is recruiting their new miners in Northern England.
Given that we peak oilers are perhaps less than 100% certain that there is going to be an oil shortage during about the same timeframe, how does that prediction square with the absolute certainty of millions of oil-burning consumers dying of flu?
It seems that, depending on the numbers, there might be plenty of oil. And a few more epidemics like that, and we won't have an energy crisis at all.
Thoughts?
And they are allready cutting hard on oil use. Just do a www.news.google.com on "fuel shortage" or "oil crisis" and you'll know that in Indonesia, Zimbabe, Zambia, Nigeria, Iraq (yes Iraq), Equador, China, Namibia, Sudan, Malaysia, ShriLanka, Thailand, North-Korea, Yemen, Nicaragua and lots of other countries they are allready cutting hard on oil useage. Just caused by the high price. A price we can still afford.
So, no need for any kind of flu to cut oil-usage, the marktes will provide.
I have seen this in Ukraine. There the average monthly wage buys about 200 litres of gasoline. But nobody drives a hybrid car there. Most of the new cars seem to be gaz-guzzling SUVs and like. They who can by new cars can afford the gas, too. Those who cannot don't drive at all. There are besides lots of old cars which are probably very energy ineffective. But the owners cannot afford to buy a new, with better mpg. The country is in constant energy crisis and the news are full of energy stories. This doesn't affect the consumption behaviour in any way. New shopping malls are planned. But the economy is starting to stagnate. Energy problems do affect industry and investments. Here we see how it works.
We can see it in the US, too. For example, the high natural gas prices have already killed much of the chemical industry. This is one of the reasons for the trade deficit. The energy crisis is already having structural effects but they are showing with a lag and indirectly.
Here's my little Oil Story
Levitt's "Oops, there goes the whole peak oil argument. When the price rises, demand falls, and oil prices slide... Now we are back to $10 a barrel oil". Current world supply and demand are dead even and no financial analyst, including the oil futures market, sees any significant price reduction for at least the next 18 months. Will we ever get back to $10/barrel oil?
I'll make 4 optimistic assumptions.
- The CERA projection of an additional 16.4 mbd supply capacity by 2010 is true
- Demand zeros out in 2006 due to prices and actually drops 2 mbd the next year (2007).
- Depletion is constant at 4.1 mbd/year.
- Nothing bad happens (terrorism, big wars, coups in oil producing countries, big hurricanes in the gulf, etc.)
Let's start at 85 mbd = supply = demand. But wait, 16.4mbd new supply averaged over 4 years = 4.1 mbd (new supply) = 4.1 mbd (depletion) = 85 mbd each year up until 2010!OK, using my assumptions then, demand = 83 mbd and supply capacity = 85 mbd in 2007. Well! The worldwide economy is depressed but prices are no longer rising because supply now easily meets demand. In fact, prices are falling a bit. But as Levitt said, people respond to incentives. Usage will rise starting in 2008 because of dropping prices but can not exceed 85 mbd anytime before 2010 without shortages.
As my little story tells you, the period 2006 to 2010 represents what is commonly referred to as a peak in world oil production. What will happen after that is anyone's guess.
But I will say this, we will never see $10/barrel oil again. OK, now fire away.