Growth rates of production in the Russian oil and gas sector are declining. Last year, oil and gas condensate production increased by 2.2% (to 469.6 million tonnes) and gas production by 1% (to 640.6 billion cu m). In 2004, oil and gas condensate production increased by nearly 9%, and in 2003 by 11%. Sergei Oganesyan, head of the Federal Energy Agency, expects that this year's growth rates of oil production will stay at the 2005 level, or will be close to zero.
...
Therefore, among the priorities of the state energy policy, Russia's energy strategy for the period up to 2020 provides for the formation of new oil and gas production centres, primarily through the development of new fields in Eastern Siberia and the Far East and also shelf deposits of northern and Far Eastern seas.
The programme of the development of Eastern Siberia and the Far East is given special importance in the energy strategy. It provides for the creation of an integral system of gas production, transportation and supplies, with due account for possible gas exports to the markets of China and countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Explored gas reserves in Eastern Siberia and the Far East are expected to increase by 6.6 trillion cu m by 2030.
The Shtokman project in the Barents Sea worth $20 billion is undoubtedly the leader among major projects of the future. It is of key importance for Russia from the point of view of a new market (the United States) and possibilities to develop an LNG (liquefied natural gas) market.
Construction of new oil pipelines - the East Siberia-Pacific (Taishet-Nakhodka) pipeline and the North European gas pipeline will promote the development of hydrocarbon deposits in Eastern Siberia and the Far East and gas condensate deposits on the Barents Sea shelf.
Thanks for the update. Your information seems to confirm trends already noted. East Siberia, Shtokman and Sakhalin are the key plays. Western Siberia is declining but still the main production area.
We'll see as the future unfolds for the 2nd largest producer in the world.
I will note that the new plays are far more expensive to produce than the traditional Western Siberia source. As Kurt Vonnegut said in a book he wrote, so it goes.
Chevron Tests Africa Well Said To Be A Major Discovery
20:03 EST Monday, Mar 27, 2006
HOUSTON (Dow Jones) -- Chevron Corp. said Monday it has completed its first exploration well off Western Africa's coast in a discovery that's reported to have as much as 1 billion barrels worth of oil and gas.
A Chevron (CVX) official said the company is evaluating the results of the drilling, completed on March 15. The official declined to give specifics about the well, other than to say it's in waters of Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny archipelago nation near the equator in the Gulf of Guinea.
But initial geological studies of the well suggest there are around 1 billion barrels of recoverable reserves, according to a weekend report in The Business, a British newspaper, citing unnamed sources.
If the billion barrel mark holds true, it would put the discovery on par with the entire holdings of some large exploration and production companies, said Aliza Fan, senior equity analyst at John S. Herold.
"That's a significant size," Fan said.
Even if the well found a thick column of oil, discoveries typically require several more wells to delineate the size of the field and its commercial potential.
For Chevron, a major discovery would come at a time when the San Ramon, Calif.-based company is struggling to expand its reserves. Its oil and gas holdings stood at 9 billion barrels of oil equivalent at the end of 2005.
Chevron acquired rights to explore the island nation's waters in October 2004 and began drilling Obo-1, the location of the well, last January.
It now has a 51% stake in the site, with Exxon Mobil (XOM) holding 40% and the rest owned by Dangote Energy Equity Resources, a jointly owned Nigerian-British driller.
On Wall Street, Chevron shares were among the Amex Oil Index's (XOI) top advancers on Monday, rising 1.1% to $58.21. Exxon (XOM) added 0.2% to $61.29.
A former Portuguese colony, Sao Tome and Principe is eyeing its territorial waters in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea as a way to transform its agrarian economy. It sold its first production licenses in 2004.
Ronald Gold, vice president of Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, said that while the Obo-1 discovery appears to be significant, it doesn't represent a big impact in market terms.
"When Prudhoe Bay was found [in Alaska], it was announced at 8 billion ... so 1 billion barrels is very nice but it's not going to change the world oil supply," said Gold.
The JDZ Block-1 is located approximately 190 miles north of the city of Sao Tome and approximately 125 miles from the city of Port Harcourt in Nigeria.
That's what happens when the bottom drops out of the economy. Potholes of that size are one of the key selling points for the Hummer class SUV. That looks to be about a 4 Hummer hole.
I keep telling people (mostly from Boston) that about every three months, right in Downtown Boston somebody drives into a hole. One of my sisters finally said she believed me tonight. We have a serious problem with this in Boston. C'mon people. When is Menino going to get on top of this?
Sail is being considered,especially in Kite ships. There has been some work on using solar and windmills to drice the drive shaft. Also to convert wave action to drive the ship. The benefit of windmills is that the direction of the wind is irrelevant.
The value of kites is that the higher winds are more uniform and a lot stronger.
Where I live, windsurfing has been popular since its invention, but the new sport of kitesurfing has really gained ground. You need much less equipment (windsurfing requires many different rigs) and once you learn to kite, it's apparently rather easy, and fun!
Regular old sails are easier for someone with a 3rd grade education to invent and use, but kites, if you have the knowhow and materials, scream.
Accusations of "windsurfing for pleasure" in part cost John Kerry the election in '04. Too elitist, everyone said.
In one of the most egregious examples of advertising deviousness, Bush campaign operatives took the video of Kerry windsurfing in Cape Cod, and reversed the image to make it look like he was going back and forth. Flip-flopping, get it?
You can see it in this animated gif where the frames are reregistered with each other, note the reverse text.
Kites? Ahem, . . . when the wind commences suddenly to scream and howl, pray tell, how do you reef a kite? Or do you cut it loose?
Flying kites is fun, but sailing ships is a serious business, and he who cannot reduce sail in a hurry may be heading pretty quick for Davy Jones Locker.
I do not have a link as it was pre-web but there was a firm looking at panamax sized transatlantic freighters powered by wind.
The concept was taken through to prototype trials. I do not know the results of the trials but given the lack of further development the company must have had the wind taken out of its sails.
Key to the concept was the use of heavy instrumentation linked to servos that would trim and reef the sails. The marine environment is very unforgiving and my hunch is that the mechanism may have worked well in benign laboratory conditions but failed in real world conditions. The vessel was bermuda rigged with five or more masts.
During the same period as the above trial was being undertaken it was also common for offshore drilling rigs being mobilized between transatlantic locations to rig sails. With a fair wind this would add 2 to 3 knots to vessel speed and with dayrates of $150,000 and up, seconds count.
Perhaps the USA should invade Panama and renationalize the canal.
We'll seem pretty stupid for giving it away once higher energy prices and slower sailing speeds make sailing through the Strait of Magellon inpractical again.
... and in reply to Dons comment above, it would appear that the prototype shown in the movie is easily retrieved and stowed. And in any case, until the weather got really nasty, you could fly the kite at a different attitude.
It appears that they are targetting Frieghters and Tankers in response to the price of oil.
Easily retrieved? In a line squall? If you are cranking the kite as the wind is gusting up above sixty knots and the cable breaks at or near the kite, then my guess is you'll be looking at some deaths or amputations, because when tension is suddenly released, that sucker is likely to whip back in a nasty way.
As I've noted before, there are new ideas and good ideas, but there are few new good ideas, and I strongly suspect that sailing a commercial ship with a kite is not one of these few. Under ideal conditions, it would be fine to augment power with a kite (steady moderate winds well abaft the beam; I've done this on a small sailboat), but those conditions are not typical at sea.
So, it's useless because it might fail under the most rapid weather change condition that you could think of? Nothings perfect, and yeah it might, but it's an idea worth looking into don't you think?
You are not informing us. Share your knowledge. In a line squall, how long do YOU have to react? How frequent are they? If you are sailing along at 90 degrees to the wind (according to wiki this is "beam reaching") what will happen to a yacht? Do you not think that the kite could react by moving to its azimuthal position (ie mainly vertical lift) and if a certain strain level exceeded then for safety it could be released? Maybe those good German engineers are idiots? Attempting to live within the resource base of their own country without extending their energy leibenstraum... hmmm maybe some do adapt.
Please, less bluster more input/information.
I guess I better throw away that GPS... a solar flare might fry those satellites.
(although not a fixture here, I'm away for a week)
I would never bet my life on a GPS; they can fail about twelve different ways I know of, some of them subtle.
Maybe the kite idea will work; time will tell.
Here is what I have a problem with: There are tons of tried and proven designs out there that are robust and that have been proven for generations. Then somebody comes along with a brilliant idea . . . but is it so brilliant? People have been flying kites (mostly for fun) from boats for at least the last two thousand years. Occasionally, as an assist to other power sources, kites make sense, but IMO probably not as a primary power source.
How long do you have to respond to an unanticipated wind gust? That is a helluva good question, and I'll answer it by explaining how the question is handled on yachts that fly spinnaker on the Trans-Pacific yacht race from Calif. to Honolulu. There is a guy with an axe standing by the sheet that controls the spinnaker (a sail that has been around for about eighty years now and is well understood) whenever there is much wind. He watches the helmsman (who is steering and knows how the boat is handling). When the helmsman yells: "Cut!" the axe comes down, the sheet (which is a rope) is cut and the sail flies free, often being destroyed in the process. From the time the problem is recognized to getting out of trouble is about two seconds. Now I grant you, that is an extreme situation, because in racing sailboats you are always at the edge, and "safety last" is an unspoken rule, but as one who has a considerable experience with sails and with kites and some experience flying airplanes, my strong opinion is that the "failsafe" principle should be included in designs where lives depend on what happens when something breaks.
Maybe they have engineered on failsafe principles; it would be interesting to find out. But there are so many bad "new" ideas out there, such as the architecture underlying the NY Twin Towers or the graphite shielding on the Chernobyl reactor, that my tendency is to go with long-proven designs.
Late in the nineteenth century some robust and fairly efficient designs for multi-masted (four, five, maybe even six or seven masts) schooners sailed for many years, some with auxilliary power. We know that works. Why not go with proven technology, such as that one, or perhaps robust wind turbines charging big banks of batteries? We know those technologies and some others will work--all proven designs.
BTW, the hybrid car idea and prototypes have been around for at least fifty years; it was a huge problem for the Japanese companies to work out the bugs, and those things do not usually kill you (except maybe by electrocution) when they fail. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe a better idea would have been to forget about hybrid cars and focus instead on improving small diesel engines and their fuels, as in the case of Europe. Both diesels and biodiesel fuel have been around for about 125 years, which, IMO, is a big plus factor.
I've been wrong before, and I'd be delighted to be wrong about the limitations of kites for ship propulsion. That reminds me, March is kite-flying month, and I've yet to get one of my kites up . . .;-)
"Sir John Templeton: The Unsuccessful Innovations Have Disappeared
A man who has seen so much and still has his wits about him is a great treasure. If he is still solvent, that is even better. Somehow, he must have avoided the bad ideas, bad investments, and bad advice. Innovations are like genetic mutations. Most of them are mistakes. Most fail. Old people tend to reject new ideas, new styles, and new things. This is not simply because these dogs are too old to learn new tricks. What the oldsters know - from experience - is that the new tricks are probably not worth learning. What we have around us are only the innovations that succeeded. Companies, products, ideas, governments, clubs, styles - all that we see are the successful ones. The unsuccessful innovations - thousands and thousands of them - all disappeared."
IMO, the whole post is worth reading. Maybe I'm just another old fart who is out of touch...
BTW, how about that other out-of-touch guy I remember reading about many years ago...Graf Felix von Luckner?
One of the reasons I first became interested in peak oil is bc/, like many of you, I detest the automobile-oriented culture. Although I would like to see us switch to more walkable communities and mass transit, I fear the American love affair with the automobile will win out in the early post peak years. Here's why:
If the U.S. is currently consuming just over 9 million barrels a day of gasoline, and we assume gasoline consumption "wants" to grow at around 1.5 to 2%, then in 20 years the U.S. economy would be expected to require around 11 million barrels a day. Here are the savings that we could realistically obtain without completely derailing the economy. To be more conservative I'll base them on the current 9.2 million barrels a day not the projected 11 million:
Greater fuel efficiency. If average mpg could increase from 21 to 42, we could save 50% over 20 years. Considering there are already multiple cars on the market getting this sort of mileage, this does not seem unrealistic.
The dreaded 55 mph speed limit is 15 to 20% more efficient for freeway driving than the current 65 mph. Of course most driving is not on the freeway, but let's suppose we can save an additional 5% of gas from a restriction. Our remaining 4.6 becomes 4.4 million barrels.
Driving less. With gasoline being more expensive, people will vacation less and closer to home. More people will telecommute. Some may actually begin carpooling to work again, etc. Let's say people can decrease the driving distance per person by 10% over 20 years. Our remaining 4.4 becomes 4.
Thus our overall savings from these three basic measures over the course of 20 years is 5.2 million barrels a day. If we "want" to be at 11 million barrels a day and we subtract this 5.2, we get 5.8 million barrels a day or 56% of current 2006 consumption. Again, I wish we'd move toward walkable, sustainable communities, but I fear we'll find a way to maintain our automobile culture at any cost.
I think you are underestimating the "driving less" portion. 20 years is enough time for us to build much more light rail, better mass transit and find many other ways to reduce driving we can not even think of right now. Consider that 1.5 billion now China uses as much as that 4 million bpd you estimated and for a lot of other purposes than driving.
Overall there is so much waste around that I can not stop wondering how people are biting the idea of a die-off... Die-off why? Because we will not be able to drive SUVs? If we only give up and/or substitute non-crucial things like cars and tweak all those places we waste energy, the remaining declining production will be enough for maybe half a century or so... After that if we have not found substitute yet, we are going to synthsize it or whatever. There will probably be hard times in the meantime but we will not be dead without our cars, right?
Die-off why? Because we will not be able to drive SUVs?
That would be a "no." If there's a dieoff, it will be due to agriculture, not a lack of SUVs.
I personally am not expecting a dieoff right away. At least, not in the U.S.
Some possible U.S. dieoff scenarios: Warfare. Famine. Pestilence. Note that they tend to go together. A disease that would not be a big deal to healthy population will be brutal to a population that is overcrowded, underfed, and stressed.
Let's calculate that. They say modern agriculture uses (a very generous) 10 cal of fossil fuels for each calorie of food produced. So a 2000 kcal daily diet per person (hope ppl in Somalia don't read that) would require 20 000 kcal per day which translates to 0.0013 barrels per day per person. Multiplying that by 6.5 billion souls would result in 8.5 mln.bpd. So the whole world can be fed by modern agriculture with less than the US gasoline consumption! And this is today without conservation efforts, without substitution, without localy grown food etc... How long will it take for us to plunge below the 8-9 mln.bpd mark? A lot - probably not before the end of the century.
Again - to give up your car, even to lose your job is a whole lot of different than to be starving or being dead. These are two different worlds and I suspect that only people that never faced either one of them can not recognize the defference.
Warfare
The only thing I really fear of in the coming decades. But given that we don't actually need that oil (to survive), the only reason left for war will be just one: greed. Trying to maintain the status quo and not paying the price of weaning off oil should read greed. And this is already a societal problem we'll have to face sooner or later, and that's why I'm partially glad that PO is coming. I think it is more of an opportunity then a threat to our survival as species.
There's no way I can qualify or prove this statement, but I'm going to say it anyway:
You overestimate the rationality of a frightened animal.
I would love to think that we'll fight some resource wars and then suddenly realize the futility of it and live in peace forever, but that was promised at least three times in the previous century, and I haven't seen an everlasting peace yet.
So, you (and Leanan in a more indirect way) are actually assuming an endless cascade of resource wars. I'm not excluding that but I think they too far from being granted - a lot depends on what we do in the meantime. IMO, world is different now (that many countries have nukes) and it is not that easy to start a war without making a complete mess with yourself. Very soon the truth will come out and the people in your own country will start revolting. The costs will become too high for the ruling elites and the correct path will be forced on them rather sooner than later.
Of course I fear there may be several more attempts for resource grabs. But the only country that has the potential to do it is USA, and we are headed to a certain bancrupcy anyway - IMO only one more war and we're out. This will have the side benefit of freeing some oil for building the alternatives by the rest of the world and we'll be forced to follow how much we don't want it.
Yes, I think there will always be resource wars. If not between nations, within them. There always have been resource wars, we are fighting them now, why should that change? Peak oil will increase conflict, not reduce it.
IMO, world is different now (that many countries have nukes) and it is not that easy to start a war without making a complete mess with yourself.
And World War I was "the war to end all wars."
Very soon the truth will come out and the people in your own country will start revolting.
Like I said, the resource wars don't have to be between nations, they can be within them.
Calculations of the energy cost of agriculture need to take into account not just the current size of the world population, but its probable growth over the next few decades. Most of the projections I've seen indicate that there is enough momentum to top the world population off at something like 10 billion, 3.5 billion more than the present number.
Maybe a die back can be prevented. I'd like to think so. On the other hand, at best it's going to be what Wellington called "a damn close run thing."
That is why I think a dieoff may be inevitable in the long run. Peak oil will mean the reversal of many of the factors that lead to lower birthrates. I fear a lot of the progress we have made will unwind.
Also, the loss of cheap oil means the loss of our insurance. We still have the same problems farmers have always had: drought, disease, pests, bad weather. Cheap oil allows us to fix many of these. We can build irrigation systems, spray pesticides,and if worse comes to worse, buy food on the global market and transport it where it's needed. The population will be increasing, the available oil will be decreasing, and the same old problems will still be there. Possibly exacerbated by climate change, warfare, and other inconveniences.
I think we should start differentiating between "die-off" and "die-back". Die off in the biological sense of the word will come at the point we are so much desparate for some critical resource that we will start killing each other over it. In the end the system will reach a state where the competing elements are so few that the ERoEvI (energy returned on energy in violence invested) would be less than one.
A die-back in my reading is where a declining quality of life leads to a lower fertility, a femine etc. leading to a gradually decreasing population. This is a more feasible scenario and is even a quite desirable one, some time later in this century. As an incurable dreamer I would suggest though, that this transition would be much more pleasant if we succeeded in providing (at least to some extent) a western quality of life to the 3rd world. Education and TVs are proven to be much more effective population regulators than femine.
Die off in the biological sense of the word will come at the point we are so much desparate for some critical resource that we will start killing each other over it.
Not necessarily. In 16th century Mexico, 20 million people (out of a population of 22 million) died of what was likely a hantavirus outbreak. Exacerbated by drought and by the stress placed on the population by the arrival of the Spaniards.
Yea, I agree, we could reduce driving by much more than 10%. Although mass transit is the better choice, part of my point is that when the pinch of declining productin is felt, many Americans will probably prefer buying a more effecient car, vacationing closer to home, telecommuting, etc. instead of mass transit. thus, the blight of the automobile-dominated landscape may not regress for the first couple decades after the peak.
We'll see as the future unfolds for the 2nd largest producer in the world.
I will note that the new plays are far more expensive to produce than the traditional Western Siberia source. As Kurt Vonnegut said in a book he wrote, so it goes.
New oil province?
But good news for the people of Sao Tome - assuming they get to share the wealth.
Another good reason to drive a smaller car: lessens your chance of falling through the street.
That's what happens when the bottom drops out of the economy. Potholes of that size are one of the key selling points for the Hummer class SUV. That looks to be about a 4 Hummer hole.
The value of kites is that the higher winds are more uniform and a lot stronger.
Regular old sails are easier for someone with a 3rd grade education to invent and use, but kites, if you have the knowhow and materials, scream.
In one of the most egregious examples of advertising deviousness, Bush campaign operatives took the video of Kerry windsurfing in Cape Cod, and reversed the image to make it look like he was going back and forth. Flip-flopping, get it?
You can see it in this animated gif where the frames are reregistered with each other, note the reverse text.
Flying kites is fun, but sailing ships is a serious business, and he who cannot reduce sail in a hurry may be heading pretty quick for Davy Jones Locker.
Seems like kite sailing is no less serious than regular sailing to me.
Yes.
I do not have a link as it was pre-web but there was a firm looking at panamax sized transatlantic freighters powered by wind.
The concept was taken through to prototype trials. I do not know the results of the trials but given the lack of further development the company must have had the wind taken out of its sails.
Key to the concept was the use of heavy instrumentation linked to servos that would trim and reef the sails. The marine environment is very unforgiving and my hunch is that the mechanism may have worked well in benign laboratory conditions but failed in real world conditions. The vessel was bermuda rigged with five or more masts.
During the same period as the above trial was being undertaken it was also common for offshore drilling rigs being mobilized between transatlantic locations to rig sails. With a fair wind this would add 2 to 3 knots to vessel speed and with dayrates of $150,000 and up, seconds count.
We'll seem pretty stupid for giving it away once higher energy prices and slower sailing speeds make sailing through the Strait of Magellon inpractical again.
</facetiousness>
http://www.skysails.info/
There may be other companies...
It appears that they are targetting Frieghters and Tankers in response to the price of oil.
(I have no association with the product)
As I've noted before, there are new ideas and good ideas, but there are few new good ideas, and I strongly suspect that sailing a commercial ship with a kite is not one of these few. Under ideal conditions, it would be fine to augment power with a kite (steady moderate winds well abaft the beam; I've done this on a small sailboat), but those conditions are not typical at sea.
You are not informing us. Share your knowledge. In a line squall, how long do YOU have to react? How frequent are they? If you are sailing along at 90 degrees to the wind (according to wiki this is "beam reaching") what will happen to a yacht? Do you not think that the kite could react by moving to its azimuthal position (ie mainly vertical lift) and if a certain strain level exceeded then for safety it could be released? Maybe those good German engineers are idiots? Attempting to live within the resource base of their own country without extending their energy leibenstraum... hmmm maybe some do adapt.
Please, less bluster more input/information.
I guess I better throw away that GPS... a solar flare might fry those satellites.
(although not a fixture here, I'm away for a week)
Maybe the kite idea will work; time will tell.
Here is what I have a problem with: There are tons of tried and proven designs out there that are robust and that have been proven for generations. Then somebody comes along with a brilliant idea . . . but is it so brilliant? People have been flying kites (mostly for fun) from boats for at least the last two thousand years. Occasionally, as an assist to other power sources, kites make sense, but IMO probably not as a primary power source.
How long do you have to respond to an unanticipated wind gust? That is a helluva good question, and I'll answer it by explaining how the question is handled on yachts that fly spinnaker on the Trans-Pacific yacht race from Calif. to Honolulu. There is a guy with an axe standing by the sheet that controls the spinnaker (a sail that has been around for about eighty years now and is well understood) whenever there is much wind. He watches the helmsman (who is steering and knows how the boat is handling). When the helmsman yells: "Cut!" the axe comes down, the sheet (which is a rope) is cut and the sail flies free, often being destroyed in the process. From the time the problem is recognized to getting out of trouble is about two seconds. Now I grant you, that is an extreme situation, because in racing sailboats you are always at the edge, and "safety last" is an unspoken rule, but as one who has a considerable experience with sails and with kites and some experience flying airplanes, my strong opinion is that the "failsafe" principle should be included in designs where lives depend on what happens when something breaks.
Maybe they have engineered on failsafe principles; it would be interesting to find out. But there are so many bad "new" ideas out there, such as the architecture underlying the NY Twin Towers or the graphite shielding on the Chernobyl reactor, that my tendency is to go with long-proven designs.
Late in the nineteenth century some robust and fairly efficient designs for multi-masted (four, five, maybe even six or seven masts) schooners sailed for many years, some with auxilliary power. We know that works. Why not go with proven technology, such as that one, or perhaps robust wind turbines charging big banks of batteries? We know those technologies and some others will work--all proven designs.
BTW, the hybrid car idea and prototypes have been around for at least fifty years; it was a huge problem for the Japanese companies to work out the bugs, and those things do not usually kill you (except maybe by electrocution) when they fail. With the benefit of hindsight, maybe a better idea would have been to forget about hybrid cars and focus instead on improving small diesel engines and their fuels, as in the case of Europe. Both diesels and biodiesel fuel have been around for about 125 years, which, IMO, is a big plus factor.
I've been wrong before, and I'd be delighted to be wrong about the limitations of kites for ship propulsion. That reminds me, March is kite-flying month, and I've yet to get one of my kites up . . .;-)
"Sir John Templeton: The Unsuccessful Innovations Have Disappeared
A man who has seen so much and still has his wits about him is a great treasure. If he is still solvent, that is even better. Somehow, he must have avoided the bad ideas, bad investments, and bad advice. Innovations are like genetic mutations. Most of them are mistakes. Most fail. Old people tend to reject new ideas, new styles, and new things. This is not simply because these dogs are too old to learn new tricks. What the oldsters know - from experience - is that the new tricks are probably not worth learning. What we have around us are only the innovations that succeeded. Companies, products, ideas, governments, clubs, styles - all that we see are the successful ones. The unsuccessful innovations - thousands and thousands of them - all disappeared."
IMO, the whole post is worth reading. Maybe I'm just another old fart who is out of touch...
BTW, how about that other out-of-touch guy I remember reading about many years ago...Graf Felix von Luckner?
If the U.S. is currently consuming just over 9 million barrels a day of gasoline, and we assume gasoline consumption "wants" to grow at around 1.5 to 2%, then in 20 years the U.S. economy would be expected to require around 11 million barrels a day. Here are the savings that we could realistically obtain without completely derailing the economy. To be more conservative I'll base them on the current 9.2 million barrels a day not the projected 11 million:
- Greater fuel efficiency. If average mpg could increase from 21 to 42, we could save 50% over 20 years. Considering there are already multiple cars on the market getting this sort of mileage, this does not seem unrealistic.
- The dreaded 55 mph speed limit is 15 to 20% more efficient for freeway driving than the current 65 mph. Of course most driving is not on the freeway, but let's suppose we can save an additional 5% of gas from a restriction. Our remaining 4.6 becomes 4.4 million barrels.
- Driving less. With gasoline being more expensive, people will vacation less and closer to home. More people will telecommute. Some may actually begin carpooling to work again, etc. Let's say people can decrease the driving distance per person by 10% over 20 years. Our remaining 4.4 becomes 4.
Thus our overall savings from these three basic measures over the course of 20 years is 5.2 million barrels a day. If we "want" to be at 11 million barrels a day and we subtract this 5.2, we get 5.8 million barrels a day or 56% of current 2006 consumption. Again, I wish we'd move toward walkable, sustainable communities, but I fear we'll find a way to maintain our automobile culture at any cost.Overall there is so much waste around that I can not stop wondering how people are biting the idea of a die-off... Die-off why? Because we will not be able to drive SUVs? If we only give up and/or substitute non-crucial things like cars and tweak all those places we waste energy, the remaining declining production will be enough for maybe half a century or so... After that if we have not found substitute yet, we are going to synthsize it or whatever. There will probably be hard times in the meantime but we will not be dead without our cars, right?
That would be a "no." If there's a dieoff, it will be due to agriculture, not a lack of SUVs.
I personally am not expecting a dieoff right away. At least, not in the U.S.
Some possible U.S. dieoff scenarios: Warfare. Famine. Pestilence. Note that they tend to go together. A disease that would not be a big deal to healthy population will be brutal to a population that is overcrowded, underfed, and stressed.
Let's calculate that. They say modern agriculture uses (a very generous) 10 cal of fossil fuels for each calorie of food produced. So a 2000 kcal daily diet per person (hope ppl in Somalia don't read that) would require 20 000 kcal per day which translates to 0.0013 barrels per day per person. Multiplying that by 6.5 billion souls would result in 8.5 mln.bpd. So the whole world can be fed by modern agriculture with less than the US gasoline consumption! And this is today without conservation efforts, without substitution, without localy grown food etc... How long will it take for us to plunge below the 8-9 mln.bpd mark? A lot - probably not before the end of the century.
Again - to give up your car, even to lose your job is a whole lot of different than to be starving or being dead. These are two different worlds and I suspect that only people that never faced either one of them can not recognize the defference.
Warfare
The only thing I really fear of in the coming decades. But given that we don't actually need that oil (to survive), the only reason left for war will be just one: greed. Trying to maintain the status quo and not paying the price of weaning off oil should read greed. And this is already a societal problem we'll have to face sooner or later, and that's why I'm partially glad that PO is coming. I think it is more of an opportunity then a threat to our survival as species.
But it's not, is it? What makes you think that will change?
Will agribusiness grow food to feed poor people? Or will they grow fuel so rich people can keep driving?
See, I'm not worried that we won't be able to drive SUVs. I'm worried that we will.
http://finnishheritagemuseum.org/news/puukaasu/index.html
You overestimate the rationality of a frightened animal.
I would love to think that we'll fight some resource wars and then suddenly realize the futility of it and live in peace forever, but that was promised at least three times in the previous century, and I haven't seen an everlasting peace yet.
Of course I fear there may be several more attempts for resource grabs. But the only country that has the potential to do it is USA, and we are headed to a certain bancrupcy anyway - IMO only one more war and we're out. This will have the side benefit of freeing some oil for building the alternatives by the rest of the world and we'll be forced to follow how much we don't want it.
And World War I was "the war to end all wars."
Like I said, the resource wars don't have to be between nations, they can be within them.
Given enough energy, we can solve those problems. As we have been doing.
Maybe a die back can be prevented. I'd like to think so. On the other hand, at best it's going to be what Wellington called "a damn close run thing."
Also, the loss of cheap oil means the loss of our insurance. We still have the same problems farmers have always had: drought, disease, pests, bad weather. Cheap oil allows us to fix many of these. We can build irrigation systems, spray pesticides,and if worse comes to worse, buy food on the global market and transport it where it's needed. The population will be increasing, the available oil will be decreasing, and the same old problems will still be there. Possibly exacerbated by climate change, warfare, and other inconveniences.
A die-back in my reading is where a declining quality of life leads to a lower fertility, a femine etc. leading to a gradually decreasing population. This is a more feasible scenario and is even a quite desirable one, some time later in this century. As an incurable dreamer I would suggest though, that this transition would be much more pleasant if we succeeded in providing (at least to some extent) a western quality of life to the 3rd world. Education and TVs are proven to be much more effective population regulators than femine.
Not necessarily. In 16th century Mexico, 20 million people (out of a population of 22 million) died of what was likely a hantavirus outbreak. Exacerbated by drought and by the stress placed on the population by the arrival of the Spaniards.
Subsidies shift to larger farms
One of the "small" farmers they interviewed blamed the rising costs of fuel and fertilizer.