DrumBeat: August 13, 2006
Posted by threadbot on August 13, 2006 - 9:10am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Prudhoe Bay roundup:
Alaska oil pinch could hit farms
BP to keep oil flowing from Prudhoe Bay
ExxonMobil declares force majeure
To pig or not to pig? — BP’s big question
With global oil supplies as precarious as they seemed last week, you’d think security-obsessed officials in the UK and US government would ensure that the supplies they have a modicum of control over – domestic oil and gas production – were in the healthiest possible state.Not a bit of it. Instead, the dilapidated pipes and platforms of the UK and the US’s ageing oil fields are making production ever less reliable.
The CEO of FedEx asks: Are We Ready for the Next Oil Shock?
Pure market economics will never solve this problem. Markets do not account for the hidden and indirect costs of oil dependence. Businesses focused on the highest return on investment are not always in a position to implement new solutions, many of which depend on technologies and fuels that cannot currently compete with the marginal cost of producing a barrel of oil. Most important of all, the marketplace alone will not act preemptively to mitigate the enormous damage that would be inflicted by a sudden, serious and sustained price increase.
The September 2006 issue of Scientific American is a special energy issue. There's nothing online yet, but it's on newstands now. Articles include:
"A Plan to Keep Carbon in Check"
"Fueling our Transportation Future"
"What to Do about Coal"
"The Nuclear Option"
"The Rise of Renewable Energy"
"High Hopes for Hydrogen"
"Plan B for Energy"
Yet a growing number of Wall Street traders seem to be agreeing with the investment guru Rogers and the Iranian official. Louise Yamada, of Louise Yamada Technical Research Advisors, said that she expects oil to reach $84 a barrel in the “short term, then keep rising.” Back in July 2004, Yamada predicted that oil would reach $67 within months. Indeed bets on futures contracts for $100 oil tripled in the past three months: the number of options to buy crude at $100 this year stood at 53,047 in late July, triple the amount quoted on 21 April.
Kuwait's reserves queried again
Kuwait's parliament has again called for the government to reveal how much oil the country has in its reserves, reported the Kuwait Times. Speculation has continued for months that the country has 48bn barrels of oil in reserve, about half of the official figure of 99bn. Kuwait's new Energy Minister, Sheikh Ali Al Jarrah Al Sabah, who was appointed in July, has said that he will clarify the situation shortly.
A strike by tanker drivers causes fuel shortages in Port Harcourt
And the message was clear. Fuel scarcity had actually hit the busy city. If people actually thought that the Monday experience was a child’s play, then, by Tuesday morning, the problem had assumed an alarming proportion as the filling stations had remained sealed. No form of activity was taking place in them. The owners and the attendants had disappeared or apparently recoiled into their shells to avoid the teeming number of motorists and other users who were likely to accost them to find out whether or not they had the elusive black gold.
Bomb damages gas pipeline in Pakistan. I think that's the fifth time in a week.
Facing Reality in Derrick Jensen's 'End Game'
Greenland's Melting Ice Sheet May Speed Rise in Sea Level
Two new scientific studies measuring Greenland's rapidly melting ice sheet and the pace of Antarctic snowfall suggest that the sea level may be rising faster than researchers previously assumed.
There was an interesting bit about urban sprawl. ("Is Urban Sprawl an Urban Myth?") Turns out, it's not as bad we think. Cities have grown, but the development is not more scattered.
I guess it depends on your metric. If you compare us to Europe, then we have horrendous sprawl. Over there, you come upon a compact little village, and then leaving the village you are back into farmland unspoiled by half a dozen little subdivisions. Here, it seems like we have just sprawled all over good farmland, and I think we will ultimately regret that.
When visiting the US, I was struck by the impression that only the best, easiest agricultural land is used. e.g. the hills of North Carolina : all that superb rainforest was destroyed, the land grazed or cropped for a little while (a generation or two?) and is now reverting to forest. What happens next? Clear the forests again to plant biomass for fuel?
Drew Allen, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, worked out how much energy it takes to generate a new species.
"Interestingly, Lake Victoria dried up approximately 12,00-15,000 years ago (before becoming a lake again), suggesting that the rate of speciation in Lake Victoria cichlids is the fastest ever reported for vertebrates."
http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Cichlidae.html
Thanks for the great load of articles Leanan.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. The nylon-digesting bacteria resulted from a frame-shift mutation. That was just a normal division process that got screwed up. All it takes is one division in some cases, as you say, to form a new species.
I really don't understand thinking like this -- that there won't be coffee and tea available? Come on. That's really silly.
Even Kunstler falls into this ad absurdum line of thinking sometimes: plastics come from hydrocarbons and we're "running out" of oil therefore there won't be plastics for medical devices in the future. He says that the US won't be able to maintain it's nuclear arsenal because there won't be enough energy. Which is just stupid for about twenty reasons.
Stuff like this turns the whole argument into a cartoon. There are still at least a trillion barrels of oil available. Coffee and tea might get more expensive like all goods (as inputs and trasport get more costly), but the idea that two of the most-cultivated crops in the world will not be available in the United States, except in a James Lovelock-type "last few breeding couples picking through radioactive waste heap" type of future. (Which is a runaway warming scenario anyway -- one I personally think is much more dangerous than peak oil.) Energy of transport for a pound of tea is a negligable cost and would only slightly less negligable with $150 oil. Thinking like this is rightfully parodied about peak oilers: "A future without tea."
no it's not that silly. Simply put will they use what little farmland they have left after loosing fossil fuel inputs to grow this stuff rather then food to feed their larger population? They can't rely on trade to get the food either since everyone around them is in the same position.
plastics are very much dependent on hydrocarbons. either we use them as the feedstock for the chemicals to make the plastics or we use them to power the farm equipment, natural gas to make the fertilizer to make the plants grow that we would make the plastics out of because doing it without these would not yield enough.
no one who know about this would argue that we are running out of oil even kunstler in his book makes this point. but what they do and you do not is account for the fact that we are running out of the high quality oil and the only oil that is left is the less useful lower quality's not only that this lower quality oil is also harder to extract and process. we will reach a point where oil is just not worth the cost of getting it before we ever run out of the stuff, long before.
This whole thing is extremely foolish.
It makes no sense whatsoever to produce fertilizer from natural gas, none. We don't neeed methane to produce fertilizer, we need hydrogen, and it just turns out that its cheaper to produce hydrogen from natural gas than from the thermal (or electrical) decomposition of water. That won't always be the case.
Farm equipment can actually run off of electricity easier than cars can. It isn't traveling long distances, and is generally so large that amassive battery pack wouldn't be a big deal.
why all the doom and gloom? We use oil for this process because it's cheap, not because its needed.
you also need to look up something called the 'law of diminishing returns'
also just because it's possible to make fertilizer without natural gas, it is NOT possible to produce it as fast, as cheaply, or in such large amounts needed to continue to feed 6.5 billion people now and the 9 billion that will be alive by 2012. especially since the process is more complex to make it out of other thing then natural gas, this is why the old fashioned way of composting to make fertilizer can't do it in a fast enough fashion to beat our current way of doing it.
and while equipment can be made to run off electricity, it will end up costing more in the less obvious infrastructure to keep the electricity flowing which is NOT a trivial task.
As for farming, many of the best farming areas in the U.S. are also ideal locations either for wind or solar. Now, there may be some question of how to store that power, whether with batteries or pumped storage, or maybe just having a long power cord trailing along behind the electric tractor? In any case, with more decentralized power production in farming areas, we might be able to save on infrastructure upgrades and end up saving overall on the transition cost. Not to mention, there's also biodiesel and everyone's favorite ethanol which might be able to find some use in farming.
At the risk of being contentious, are you a recruiter for al Qaeda ;)
Be careful, notice what I said.
Current process is this...
- Dig up natural gas, pipe it around, and get it scrubbed down to something ready for use.
- Natural gas, convert to hydrogen.
- Catalyze hydrogen and nitrogen to produce ammonia.
It could just as easily work like this...- Use electricity to break down water into hydrogen and oxygen.
- Catalyze hydrogen and nitrogen to produce ammonia.
Which process do you really think is simpler?We don't need natural gas to produce fertilizer, we need energy, of just about any form. Electricity will do just fine. The end of natural gas isn't the end of fertilzer. This is a red herring.
Makes a lot of sense! Indeed, tractor tyres are generally half-filled with water to improve traction... massive low-slung battery packs are not a problem!
And as a rural dweller, I won't necessarily miss the noise and diesel fumes very much...
Thanks for the policy idea! In France, agricultural diesel is tax-free i.e. less than half price. Replace that subsidy with an electric-tractor grant, a switch could happen very quickly.
Anyone know why it isn't happening already?
as for raw materials the price will skyrocket, if we continue on our current path oil might be worth more then gold.
IMHO, this is one of the fundamental misunderstandings about oil peaking. I don't see any reason to believe that oil production will collapse tomorrow, but if you're staring down the barrel of a 50 mile commute with a gas guzzler and maxed out debt, it may not make a difference to you if gas costs $3/gallon or $6/gallon. It isn't affordable either way. Now the price of everything else is rising too, and your boss just frowns when you broach the topic of a pay raise. And coffee? It might as well grow on the moon for your ability to pay for it.
The same could be said of fresh fruits (like bananas) and sugar until early in the 20th century (many fruits will not keep in a fresh state for more than a couple of weeks without refrigeration....peaches come immediately to mind, as it was refrigerated boxcars that made the growing of peaches a viable agricultural product). Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today.
The spice trade (and routes, and cultural interaction that stemmed from it) of ancient times was based on a similar premise.
While coffee and tea will still be produced, once you factor in the cost of a 3000+ mile transportation network to get it to you, the end consumer, you might easily end up paying 10x what it costs today for the same amount.
As a coffee drinker, I can tell you that Coffee has already doubled in cost in just the last 5 years.
http://www.nps.gov/klgo/tonofstuff.htm
And so of course lists sprang up to satisfy that need. I think they are interesting on a couple levels. Partly because it shows that there's nothing new under the sun, and people were figuring these lists 100 years ago. Partly because I think people in 1890 had a better grip on the basics than we do. Partly because I could probably still pick up that list at the local markets.
The other point is that the Canadians were apparently attempting to require 1) a sufficient amount of provisions in the province for the people coming in, 2) a certain level of stamina in the people coming in, and most importantly, 3) that the people entering were people of means. No riffraff that can't afford a significant up-front outlay need apply. I agree with you that the list is good and that 100 years ago they understood provisioning better than many people today. It's a nifty, and maybe even valuable, artifact.
I don't really see what that has to do with the affordability of coffee and tea at the time, however. A better example would be evidence that the per-capita consumption of coffee and tea among low income people during the Great Depression was about as high as during the Roaring Twenties. Or even that overall consumption of coffee and tea was as high during the Depression as during the Twenties.
If you find the Mountie list (I think they required a year and left it at that) feel free to post it.
... and (pedantically) "affordability" is a different argument than distribution of use.
Note also that even during worst years of the Civil War, confederate troops still had coffee, albeit now made from boiled roots. People try to hang on to what they love and know, no matter the circumstances. It is natural human behavior.
"Coffee and tea were once considered "luxury goods", due to the fairly limited areas they would grow in naturally and inherent cost of transporting them from source to destination."
If we are going to be pedantic, I think the fact that gold miners put a limited amount of coffee on their lists sort of supports that. kinda. 10 pounds per year is maybe a luxury, but one within reach of the common man. 10 pounds of tea on the other hand, looks almost like a staple.
(I yield to nobody in pedanticism.)
http://www.burjdubai.com/content/downtownDubai.asp