DrumBeat: July 8, 2006
Posted by threadbot on July 8, 2006 - 9:45am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Fears growing in wake of expected 50% cost increase at Shell oilsands plant
Bob Gillon, an energy analyst with John S Herold in Connecticut, said the Athabasca expansion would now cost six times what the original project did, on a daily flowing barrel basis."It's not a knock on Shell or this project, everybody's facing it," Gillon said in an interview Thursday.
"But my Lord in heaven. If you're talking about something that cost you six times as much as it did six or eight years ago, even with the move we've had in oil prices, we're getting these things back to where the economics . . . are going to get skinny in a hurry."
Drivers have to wait days to get their petrol shares, which range between 25 and 40 litres per week, and local authorities recently announced electricity cuts despite soaring temperatures.Kremlin ignores democracy to snatch oil from the wildernessIt is not uncommon for drivers in northern Iraq to hang around in queues for several days before they are told that there is no fuel left at the station. On July 6, in the northeastern Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, about 500 drivers who had waited for fuel for more than three days poured into the nearby streets, set tires on fire and blocked four main streets of the city.
Countries need to oil their wheels:
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in conjunction with the UN, published a major agricultural study last week.The Real Oil Crisis is a free, 13 minute video from ABC Australia:The study said that there are very few countries in the world that are able to produce biofuels that can compete on price with conventional fossil fuels. In fact, with the exception of Brazil, all countries are finding it very difficult to reduce their dependence on oil at all.
What would happen if the world were to start running out of oil? Conventional wisdom says we’ve got 30 years, but there’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts it’s happening much sooner than we thought – that we are hitting the beginning of the end of oil now. So how soon will the oil run out, and can we stop our economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the real oil crisis?From India... End Of Cheap Oil, The Global Energy Crisis And Climate Change:
The increase in oil prices has led to protests, which have moved to the center stage of Indian politics, displacing the protests against reservations in medical and engineering colleges.Energy agency voices doubts on Gazprom deliveries
The Indepedent has a vision of How a 'green' Britain should look in the year 2020
Update [2006-7-8 9:53:22 by Leanan]: Record oil price sets the scene for $200 next year
With many commentators now on holiday the record $75.78 oil price last week was almost ignored. Yet with the world economy still hot the scene is set for a powerful rally in oil prices and the equally inevitable price spike. So will we see oil hit $200 a barrel in 2007?
More on upcoming EVs in Joel Makower's "Who's Reviving the Electric Car? "
(I saw "Who Killed the Electric Car?" yesterday, my ramble is here)
I think the real key is lifetime cost competitivness. When we replaced my wife's '90 Geo Prizm in 2005, we considered a number of fuel efficient cars but opted for a used 2004 Toyota Corolla rather then a new Prius. The initial cost of the Prius was $6k more plus I assumed we'd have to replace the battery pack eventually since we keep cars forever. These costs added roughly $10k and given our driving distances made absolutely no economic sense.
I agree though, if you can use a smaller car, there's no reason to pay the hybrid premium. Go even smaller and save more, with a Chevy Aveo, Honda Fitt, Toyota Yaris, or Scion xA.
According to the EPA's shared (real-world) mileage database, the Yaris does the best with 37.7 mpg:
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/mpg/MPG.do?action=browseList
The only regret I have with my car is it's a fucking sedan. I really wanted a hatchback, but I was on a time/price crunch and couldn't find any used hatchbacks in my area. There's been a few times where I've had trouble fitting large irregularly shaped objects into the back.
How much does a liter cost you?
Onto a more general question. If the US were to overhaul its existing fleet of cars and trucks,(hypothetically of course) and convert to hybrids, how much would this affect the cost per liter and do we have the resources to allow such a shift?
You say "do we have resources" when it's pretty clear we overspend. Do we have resources for a new line of Chrysler Hemis? Apparently so.
Sorry for not being clear enough. What I meant by resources is the electricty used to charge the battery.
But to figure it, we'd need to know:
- adoption rate
- charge capacity
then we could calc out how many MW would need to be available each year.A lot depentptn how battery tech evolves in the next few years though.
"The construction of an average car consumes the energy equivalent of approximately 20 barrels of oil, which equates to 840 gallons, of oil. Ultimately, the construction of a car will consume an amount of fossil fuels equivalent to twice the car's final weight."
So, to replace the 225 million or so automobiles in the U.S., it would require approximately 225M*20bbl = 4.5 billion barrels of oil to replace all the existing cars, or about a half-year's-worth of consumption in the U.S.
Of course, to replace all the cars in the world, it would take even more oil...
And I'm sure I'm missing some energy inputs in this calculation.
At $20,000 a piece, all these new cars would cost people in the US about $4.5 trillion. I'm sure the auto manufacturers would be into this plan...
Those hybrid critics stacked the deck. They claimed, quite arbitrarily I thought, that a "car" lasts 100,000 miles while a "truck" lasts 250,000 miles. Those convenient assumptions lead to calculations showing a lower per-mile energy costs for a Hummer H3 than for a Toyota Prius.
Someone happened to report the real numbers:
To name just one other funny numeric business:
So, you've got a few hundred million conventional cars on the road, their R&D all amortized ... what happens when you force an R&D accounting on any new technology? Fewer units to divide by, and higher "costs" ... even if they'd really be paid over time by higher production.
If we weren't avoiding bad words today ....
So the 4% is good news and bad news. It makes "electric cars" (as some fraction of the replacement fleet) more possible, but it also makes them one of the "silver bbs" and not the "silver bullet"
Does this mean cars on U.S. roads average 25 years before going to the great death assembleges of vehicles known as junkyards?
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/02/us_vehicle_flee.html
Given how I like to affect an Aussie accent, I liked this variation of the old ValuJet joke:
Q: "A ValuJet plane tried to make a mission to Sydney (Australia) but they missed! What did one croc say to the other?"
A: "Put another Yank on the barbie, mate!"
I do know that the older a car is, the fewer miles it is driven. There is an inverse age/VMT correlation. I suppose old cars tend to sit there in a multi-car family, or in the garage of retirees. They become the "extra cars" but aren't scrapped as long as they keep up registration.
My recollection of the '70s is that the number of passengers per vehicle increased with more carpooling, ride sharing and hitchiking. However, my perspective could be warped by the fact that I was a student throughout that period.
Seriously, though, a medium-sized SUV usually sits 4 comfortably. With one person driving, the vehicle may get something like 18 mpg and 18 passenger mpg. Put 4 people in the vehicle, and you have 72 passenger mpg or about the same as two people each driving his or her own Corolla.
If we couls utilize our present SUV and mini-van fleet similarly, we'd save quite a bit of embodied energy. However, I think that gasoline prices would have to go much higher before too many folks would be all that interested.
That part of the Matt Savinars representation of PO I found a little bit biased.
During the last 10 years, a number of Life cycle analysis (LCA)"cradle to grave" have been made on different aspects on transport. The best of these take into account most of the objections I have seen on the Drum. So no need to guess- but rather critizise.
One of the better LCA's is this , made by the VW. It is in german- but the numbers are self explaining.
http://www.volkswagen-umwelt.de/_download/sachbilanz_golf_a4_deutsch.pdf
The Functional unit (the is 1 car driven 150.000 km (93.300 miles) The Primary energy ( energy at the source- oil well, coal mine, iron extraction- including end- of life- that is scrapping and recycling)- cost for 150.000 km is between 70 to 150 MWh. This value is cradle to grave- that is raw material extractiuon and production, production of the vehicle, use + maintenance of the vehichle 150.000 km and scrapping and recycling. As a rule of thumb 1 kilo car cost presently 4 kilo +/- 0.5 kilo oil to produce.
What you do is you pass needed laws that both allow for suicide facilitation and allowing suicide kits to be sold in drugstores. That way, as people finally give up during the "powerdown" they have an "out". If Cuba means anything, a powerdown will be nasty at best. North Korea is a powerdown at an approximate worst.
Of course, you want to discourage childbirth. Any powerdown scenario is going to be some ugly stuff.
No need to kill off billions--though Malthus was right, in the long run.
But wait a minute . . . in the long run, we're all dead, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out.
Note that the Roman Empire did not fall due to overpopulation--just the reverse!
Spending more on electrified rail systems, and urbane, mixed-use neighborhoods around rail stations, could eliminate the need for a lot of replacement cars in metropolitan areas -- and preserve a lot of greenbelt land that we will need for local food production.
Car-sharing is another option that is finally catching on in US cities. It is a membership service, where one can use a car from a nearby "pod" and pay only for the miles you drive. Each car serves a lot more people, and our local nonprofit car share organization found that a third of their members' households get rid of a car -- sometimes their only car, and sometimes an infrequently-used second car. Car share organizations also have pickup trucks and vans in the fleet, so folks who can usually get by with a small car but occasionally need to haul something big can use the larger vehicle only when they need the extra capacity.
I know, I know -- alternatives like these won't work for everyone or in every setting, but as we accelerate into peak oil and global climate change, we need to simultaneously embrace a broad range of effective strategies for sustainability.
Well said. These alternatives transport methods will obviously help, but the headwinds created by the desire of personal convenience and time savings of one-two person transport will oppose this shift. To what degree is hard to determine as fuel prices increase, but I expect to see an future explosion of bicycles, scooters, street-legalized quad ATVs, and motorcyles in places of urban sprawl [like my Asphalt Wonderland].
I have posted before about keeping your used pickup or SUV for the occasional hauling of large loads or 3 or more people [or when the weather is simply atrocious], but buying a used small scooter/ATV for one-two person commutes or errands. Bicycles best of all, of course. I presently feel this is the most cost-effective way to be prepared if gasoline suddenly spikes out of sight.
My eleven year old pickup is only worth maybe $2000-2500, but only has 115,000 miles on it-- many years of life left on it. My recently bought used 2004 scooter: only 1600 miles [yes, only sixteen hundred!]-- estimated lifetime virtually unlimited until gas prices rise so high that some punk shoots me while I wait at an intersection to then steal my little scoot.
As a plus, sparetime hauling stuff for cash has easily paid for all the pickup's running expenses, and provided me with beer money. A lot of people would rather pay someone than rent a U-Haul pickup to do it themselves. Phx has a lot of 'bling-bling' pickups and SUVs with very expensive aftermarket accessories; I call them an ornate 'chrome penis'-- the last thing they want to do is fill the storage area with manure or crushed desert rocks for landscaping.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
That might be true in many places where it doesn't snow but that is only a small portion of the US. Not only do I have to often put chains on all the wheels of my (small) 4x4 truck but we still do get snowed in for a few days and up to a couple of weeks every year. We had friends that got snowed in for 4 to 6 weeks this past winter.
Todd
I've been tracking my mileage, and generally get 5L/100KM... or about 54-55MPG.
I'm on holidays now... so we've been city driving... but I haven't filled my tank yet in the past 3 weeks, so I don't know my mileage yet. ;+)
gas is 113.9c/L here in my neck-o-the-woods (about $US3.50/Gal) Port Alberni, BC... on Vancouver Island