Dr Deffeyes defines a date
Posted by Heading Out on February 13, 2006 - 10:32am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: ken deffeyes, peak oil [list all tags]
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.
Imagine...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%)
- 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.
- 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.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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.