Dr Deffeyes defines a date

Ken Deffeyes has come out with a new statement about standing on the summit. It has been suggested that it have its own thread. So here it is.

The relevant bits are

I predicted that world oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2005. In hindsight, that prediction was in error by three weeks. An update using the 2005 data shows that we passed the peak on December 16, 2005. . . . . . By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age. . . . . . . Ethanol, fuel cells, and solar cells are not the only shimmering dreams. Methane hydrates, oil shale, and the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste depository would be better off forgotten. There are plenty of solid opportunities. Energy conservation is by far the most important. Initiatives that are already engineered and ready to go are biodiesel from palm oil, coal gasification (for both gaseous and liquid fuels), high-efficiency diesel automobiles, and revamping our food supply. Every little bit helps, but even if wind energy continues its success it will still be a little bit. . . . . . . That's it. I can now refer to the world oil peak in the past tense. My career as a prophet is over. I'm now an historian.
The floor is yours.
Can someone help me out? If we're in for a slow squeeze, how does that take us back to "the stone age" in just 20 years?
Imagine having to use half as much oil as we do today?? What ramifications can you imagine that having on everything associated with oil. From food production to transportation, oil is everything in America..  

Imagine...

Oh, I see. It would suck so bad if we couldn't ignore the issue of fuel efficiency when buying vehicles, as we do now.
Average fuel efficiency now in the USA is about 20 mpg (US), though obviously existing cars (not even hybrids) can easily get twice that.

Anyway the definition of "slow squeeze" I had in mind only gets up to 3% per year depletion toward the end of the 20 years. You'd need 3% every year for 20 years to get down to half of current production.

The other side of that is that Deffeyes was responding to a claim that solar might make 2% of US electricity by 2025.  I don't think we'll be in the stone age then either, but if we don't make a whole lot more juice from the sun we might well be.
Well, if we define photovoltaic silicon as stone, and we could sort of, then we should be in the stone age in about ten years. We really are running out of natural gas. Hydro and natural gas is all that is keeping our daytime airconditioning running in the summer. Since we are going to use our hydro to balance out our undependable wind, we will need to build enough solar photovoltaic to replace summer natural gas and hydro for peaking.
We might be able to do better than that sooner using Stirling engines.  The proponents are claiming about $2/watt at today's prices, and 30% thermal efficiency in 25 kWe units.  If you take the ~58 kW of waste heat and feed it to an absorption chiller, you get about 30 kW of cooling (which would take on the order of 10 kW of electricity to generate).  Bingo, you've just reduced electrical demand by 35 kW as long as the sun is shining.  Oh, you've also satisfied heating and DHW demand too.
How much efficiency do the stirling engine loose by rejecting heat on a higher temperature on the cold side?
Without knowing what that temperature is (ammonia absorption can run at input temperatures around 100°C) I have no way to tell.  The pictures of dishes I've seen have no obvious radiators, so T(lo) might already be rather high.
Basically Stirling engines operate on an approximation of the Carnot cycle. The thermal efficiency is then dictated by one minus the ration of the low to high temperature. Typically the thermal efficiency may be 40% ... so 60% of the thermal energy is rejected.
Stirling engines have some 'issues' but it is a 'doable' technology, especially for stationary applications. I worked on this technology in the 70s. We coupled it to a heat pump and the waste heat from the Stirling cycle improved the effective heating COP. The good thing is that it is a closed cycle. The bad thing is that its power to weight ratio is not too good.
In the district heating and cooling schemes that I know of, chilled & heated water can only be pumped a few miles (like 2 or so).

Solar power is a low value use of land, so they are likely to be located "in the middle of nowhere".  The demand for chilled water will likely be limited to the support staff.

Perhaps the bed of the Salt River in Phoenix could be covered with raised mirrors, but aesthetics and glare into offices would prevent this.  Not at the airport, glare into pilots eyes.

OTOH, storing hot oil till the sun sets and temperatures decline may well be worth doing.  Increase the natural gas supplemental heating (only 2% on NV 1, vs. 25% before) to offset any cooling but get greater thermodynamic efficiency.

You misunderstand.  Solar power may be a low-valued use, but roofs are low-value territory.  So's the air over parking lots.

Solar power is more valuable at the point of use than far away (avoids all the expense and losses of the transmission system); if the roof of the 7-11 sports a mirror array which powers the whole thing and the waste heat air-conditions it too, you've effectively gone off-grid while the sun is shining.  Have another unit or two to shade the parking lot, and you could supply excess power to charge the cars coming and going.

I see difficulties in the economics of scaling down to "7-11 size" and anything less than "Regional Shopping Mall" size.

Rooftops are NOT so cheap.  Additional structure to support solar load (weight).  Elevating them above parking lot has some additional costs as well (like elevating above river bed).

Also, great care must be taken to not break the watertightness of a roof, and any reroofing has to be done under/around solar collectors and their supports.

Still, I good see a 200 acre array mounted over some of the parking lots in Phoenix.  Concrete around each post to prevent accident knocking down pole and spilling 750 C oil everywhere !  Capital cost of lost parking spaces due to poles & guards is a high value loss and probably kills idea unless parking becomes "surplus".

Perhaps 0.5% of Phoenix load that way.

The tech to do a 7-11 size unit is already in the California desert; it's the 37-foot diameter solar Stirling dishes.  They require a post to mount them, but you could incorporate that into a corner of the building and make it do double duty.

It might be cheaper to do it with heliostats feeding a fixed collector.  If so, the result would not look all that much different from a filling station with roofed pump islands.

We shouldn't cover river beds with anything, let alone solar power plants. Weather is becoming undependable. I mean, even more undependable than it already is.
I suspect Deffeyes doesn't think we're in for a slow squeeze.  He thinks it will be a cliff.  The Olduvai Theory, basically.  The problem isn't really oil production, it's how individuals and nations will respond to energy scarcity.
Of course the problem with using Hubbert Linearisation to predict global oil production past the peak is that the global peak may be qualitatively different to regional peaks, precisely because societal response will be qualitatively different.

When regions peak, you can just import more oil from other regions, which is what we've been doing up until now. The result is a more or less symmetrical curve in regional production.

When global production peaks, the physical reality of oil shortage and the psychological (and therefore economic) impacts are likely to be entirely different.

We really are sailing into uncharted waters. What happens next is anyone's guess.

This is correct. A sometimes overlooked point.
Hmmm, maybe Deffeyes is circumspectly opining that the worlds oh so magnificent leaders will just simply find the Curt LeMay solution to problems too irresistable in the post-PO world.

For those who weren't here, Strategic Air Commander General Curtis LeMay strongly advocated using nukes to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.

Now you're making me feel really old by suggesting that many here don't remeber who "General Curtis D. LeMay" was and many may not have seen "Doctor Strangelove", the movie.

You're probably right. Yeeh Hah!  Yeeh Hah! (love that scene ---with "till we meet again" as the musical backdrop-- brings back memories of a time when the world was less crowded, 50%)

For the LeMay types in our government, they need to remember the following:

  1. Bombers aren't folks on the ground who can actually run oil wells, and people on the ground can get shot up, kidnapped, etc. by angry natives.

  2. Armies, navies (to a fair degree) and air forces still run on petroleum. The "just around the corner" nuclear powered aircraft of the 1950s is wayyy around the corner. Three-quarters or more of gasoline in a mechanized unit in Iraq is used to move -- gasoline to the actual mechanized vehicles.

In other words, we're highest up the hillside, so we've got the farthest to fall.
You guys are getting things slightly twisted. In Dr. Strangelove, George C. Scott plays a character named General 'Buck' Turgidson who has been rumoured to have been based on General Curtis LeMay.

In real life, Curtis LeMay was a person who was based on another person - a clone if you will. The real thing was Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris.

Ahmadinejad, keep talking pal - Hell Awaits.

Oil CEO,
You got that exactly right. Just watched "Dr. Strangelove" again, for about the twenty-second time, last night. In huge letters the claim is made that none of the characters represent anybody living or dead. Yeah, right.

Now, what about the mad scientist in the wheel chair? Somebody said he was supposed to be Herman Kahn, but that is nonsense, because the guy with the circular slide rule is clearly a Nazi, and Kahn (loved that guy!) was Jewish. So who is he?

Did you catch the name of our President? Merkin Muffley. You know what a merkin is? Holy Smokes, that film is so funny and has so many inside jokes.

Also I have heard that somebody was the prototype for Colonel Bat Guano, but the stories are unconvincing.

Where is Peter Sellers, now that we need?

Oh, and how Bomber Harris would like to have a go at Iran . . . . He'd have them back to the dark ages in a week.

Zeh Pink Panter iz now dizguised as Steve Martin.

Oh oh.
Are we the old farts remeniscing (sp?) about the good old days? Say it ain't so.

Then again they don't make movies with embedded wit in them like Dr. Strangelove/Peter Sellers anymore. It's part of the dumbing down of America. Instead we get Harrison Ford single handedly (at age 55?) fighting off a bunch of buff hoodlums while in his zoot suit and winning the Firewall fight. Now that is some deep blues.

Don't knock Harrison Ford. I sometimes dress up like Indiana Jones for Halloween and have been asked for autographs by people who think that I'm H.F. I think he is about 64 years old, and I am eagerly waiting for Indiana 4.

Old movies are bettter.

Take a look at "A Day at the Races" for wit and a concealed (scathing) criticism of wealth concentration and racism.

Watch "You Can't Take it With You" for an explicit rejection of materialism, hilariously effective criticism of the F.B.I.,and get this: Our Hero opts out of banking to go back to graduate school and learn how to do what? To get the solar energy out of grass. Date? 1936, though I could be off by a year.

Maybe audiences are getting dumber, and that is why we are getting dumber movies.

Why watch new movies? Except that "Match Point" is great as social criticism and "Syrianna" gives some hint of how things go in Saudi Arabia.

Thanks. Match Point was a more disturbing version of the Talented Mr. Ripley.
When did Sellers finish "Being There", 1978?  That wasn't too long ago, eh?  Today's young ones might be interested in finding out how the totally incompetent get into business mangagement, then go on to the White House.  Of course, that could never happen in real life, and most certainly not in our enlightened age.
Its diesel.
If you read the full statement on Deffeyes site, I think you'll see he means that longterm stuff like solar, hydorgen, ethanol -- at least on the scale of what's now being proposed for these things -- aren't going to cut it: if that's all we've got between now and 2025, in other words, we will be in the Stone Age. He then goes on to say that what we need is conservation and big-time coal-to-gas projects. He may be exaggerating a bit for effect, but I think his basic point is valid: if Peak is here, then the time is past for hoping that technology will pull a rabbit out the hat.
If the US and Europe are not considering coal to oil conversion in a big way then China certainly is according to china view.

"China Oil News reported last week that the government plans to spend US$15 billion to build plants that annually manufacture 16 million tons of oil products from coal in the next five to 10 years."

That is about 5% of their 2006 oil consumption.

Since, according to china.org they are building 144 new power stations with a capacity of 160GW this year alone, most of them coal powered and their car production rose to 5.7 million vehicles this year not including 1 million very crude inefficient and dirty single-cylinder diesel agricultural vehicles and is set to rise further, it follows that even with heroic efforts by the rest of the world there is zero chance of stopping a massive rise in carbon dioxide production and only Sweden so far seems ready to put in such heroic effort.

If conventional oil has peaked and is about to drop sharply, as Deffeyes  suggests, I suspect that before 2025 the environmental effects of even dirtier alternatives like coal to oil, tar sands, and oil shale will be so bad that further expansion of their use will have to be halted and we will have a catastrophe on our hands.

Only Stuart's slow squeeze with perhaps a couple of more years before peak gives us hope of introducing massive cuts to energy usage by us energy hogs in ways that leave us some form of reasonable life style while allowing poorer countries to develop sufficiently to prevent resentment growing so that the present guerrilla warfare against us that is draining trillions of dollars grows beyond all hope of countering  and beyond our ability to finance such countermeasures.

Even this course will require some use of dirtier technologies and allowing nuclear technology to spread widely to places we would ideally prefer not to have it as well as all the alternative energy production we can install.

The political reality is that even with the best efforts of the peak oil and environmental communities it will take several more years and even more obvious problems before a political party with a program of massive cutbacks will be electable in many of the countries that need to do so. If so many people can still be persuaded there is no problem, it will be a long time before people stop believing those that tell them that there is a problem  but is has a solution that allows them to carry on more or less as they have been.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that there are no good outcomes and that it is not even certain we have a choice between bad and catastrophic. When I first became aware of the peak oil problem I thought of it a short to medium term problem that could be tackled  before the slightly longer term climate change problems.

However as the environmental evidence has come in and the size of the global economic changes has become clear and the scale of the enmity against the West by so much of the world has grown I have seen these problems conflate to a single nightmare. We can but work in the hope that there is a merely bad solution.

Where's China going to get the water, when they're already a water-poor country?
Tibet
The melting polar ice-caps.
I tend to agree. It looks like the possibility of terrorism, embargo, and depletion are facing us. But I also think there are many energy sources. It sounds like 'King Coal' may return. I don't like to mention it too loudly but the N-option is also becoming more likely. Lovelock always said that nuclear was the way to go. We are facing a much different future if investment is not forthcoming to develop the 'options'. And, at the very least, we will be confronted with our 1970s conservation programs again. There is certainly a lot of elasticity in the American usage of energy so we can conserve.
i think he bets on nuclear war to happen as oil resources decline.
Olduvai!
The Oil Drum may need a glossary as well as a list of acronymns. Olduvai Theory is mentioned here often, but probably not widely understood. I had to Google it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

The Olduvai theory states that the industrial civilization will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.

Let me thunk on that one.
We got 5 fingers (nails? claws?) on each hand.
And that makes 100 a "magic" number?
Oh OK.
That makes me a believer that the number has scientific foundation.

BTW, crude may go below the magic $6"0" number today. At that moment, Wall Street will celebrate. Clearly they are rational thinkers.

Sorry Step Back. Your message is way over my head. Would you post it again at lemming level so those of us down here can understand?
Today crude closed at $59.45 and the stock markets went Yahoo! to the tune of plus 136 points. Why? Because we crossed the magic zero, we crossed below the $60 mark. There is no rational reason to celebrate 0 crossings of this kind.

I forgot to look down and see how many claws we lemmings have on each paw. Maybe we are not base 10 counters.

In my book, there are 10 kinds of people ....

those who count in binary and those who don't.