I recently attended a task force meeting by our mayor on energy and efficiencies and afterwards mentioned peak oil to several people. They all acknowledged they were familiar with peak oil but then every one of them pointed the news they heard about the discovery in the gulf.. I pointed out that the discovery would in no way change the course of peakk oil worldwide but they seemed reserved in their opinions..

I believe the MSM story put any worry the people had about peak oil behind them.. It no longer on their radar..

 Do Electric Cars Have A Future?

I am using Future in a larger sense, as in "Do electric cars have the ability to displace the internal combustion engine? Or will they be instrumental in crashing the electric grid, becoming far more despised than the SUV?"

In a  smaller sense I hope electric cars have a future, if for no other reason that I would like to have one and hook it up to our off-grid, solar-electric system. But in the larger sense, they are extremely problematic.

Electric vehicles have a fatal flaw vis a vis scaling. Once enough people convert to them, the overstretched electric grid crashes and not only does transport suffer, but the entire electric based system crashes as well.  To prevent this would require an enormous investment to upgrade the grid.

But even if the investment capital were there, it is not at all clear that the energy to create additional electricity is available.

Coal provides 51% of electricity generated; nuclear 20%;  natural gas 17%; hydro 7%, petroleum 3%, biomass, geothermal, wind and solar 2%.

Hydro and petrol are static sources, natural gas is set to decline in the near term, and, unless more nukes are put online, the decommissioning of the old ones will cause an additional decline. Wind and solar (1%) will have to grow exponentially even to be relevant.

Which means coal will have to expand to cover these other declines, as well as covering new demand  -- or there will be shortages and rolling blackouts. So if large numbers of households switch from internal combustion engines to electric cars, thus doubling or tripling their electricity usage, they will place a burden on the grid which will at some point cause it to crash. This will not only stall a lot of transportation, but will also crash the infrastructure and damage the economy. If the blackouts persist, everything comes to a standstill; you won't even be able to buy groceries with cash, since the cash registers are electric.  

If rolling blackouts become routine, and are blamed on proliferating electric cars, you can bet the backlash against these vehicles will be fierce.  

Many oil companies in the past year have started investing heavily in deeper, harder to get to, heavier oil  - all on the back of the high oil prices. Oil price plummiting to such low levels as $20 would pull the carpet from underneath theri feed which they would not allow to happen

Any idea of SUSTAINED oil prices below $60 is wishful thinking. Nothing has changed the fundamentals of supply and demand right now.

Even OPEC have hinted at pinching supply!

Marco  

For a sense of scale, and remember they want to quintuple the size of the operations:
"Syncrude's dam, which holds back nearly three decades of [highly toxic] waste water, is the second-largest on Earth after the Three Gorges Dam in China."

Oil sands: the price of money

Along the river's edge, existing oil-sands operations and approved developments soon to follow have been granted licences to siphon 349 million cubic metres of the river's flow each year -- roughly the amount of water used by Calgary and Edmonton annually combined -- to extract heavy crude oil from the black muck that holds it. Including other projects awaiting approval, that allocation swells to 529 million cubic metres. "I don't think anybody who thinks about this realistically can believe it's sustainable," says David Schindler, the pre-eminent scholar on ecological policy and hydrology at the University of Alberta.

Schindler has participated in several public hearings, preaching prudence and moderation in the oil sands' growth to mediate the impact. His 30-year study on the river's flow level shows a disquieting trend: a decline in volume of 30 per cent over that span. And the river's banks have receded by nearly two metres over that time.

But industry's demand for the water will only grow. To free the crude oil, as many as 4 1/2 barrels of water are needed to yield a single barrel of oil. The leftover petrochemical brew, too toxic to be returned to the river, accumulates in tailing ponds with a combined surface area of 50 square kilometres, visible from space, that have been growing for decades.

Meanwhile, on the surface, millions of cubic metres of river water, thick with toxic by-products like naphthenic acid, bubble and build in the ponds, never to be returned. According to the U.S. Department of the Interior, Syncrude's dam, which holds back nearly three decades of waste water, is the second-largest on Earth after the Three Gorges Dam in China.

"If any one of those were ever to breach and discharge into the river, you're talking about a world-scale ecological disaster," Schindler says.

In just a few years, the Fort McMurray area has become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in Canada. By 2015, it's estimated the town -- projected population 100,000 -- will emit more greenhouse gases than the entire nation of Denmark, population 5.4 million.

The lands, most acknowledge, are gone, and for good. Companies have reclaimed abut 5,200 hectares of land by filling in expended pits, creating grasslands and nascent forests; so far, not one hectare has been approved by the province as certified reclamation.
While many companies say they can put the land back exactly as they found it, Schindler calls the claim to rebuild centuries-old muskegs and fens "total nonsense. Wetlands experts from all over the world know there's no way to put it back, period.

Addressing the offshore market, Lee Ahlstrom, director of investor relations at Noble Corp. (NE), pointed out that most deepwater drilling projects remain profitable even when oil hits $30 or $40 a barrel, let alone Thursday's closing price of $61.59 in NYMEX futures.

Its being reported that our area just experienced a 100 year flood. Currently many crops in lower areas appear to be damaged , not certain how much until they are surveyed.  Impossible to gain access to some areas.

Trees were blown down all over and people were trapped by rising water last night as our 9/11 and emergency services were pushed to the extreme.  

Milo and soybeans will likely be very much affected.

All of this appears to be very bad news for farmers.

Assessment is just beginning. It might take boats to even access some areas of croplands.  

What was starting to look like a very good crop season might now have to be revised.

Jesus doesn't drink bottled water

The religious objection to bottled water extends beyond the excessive markup, however. Water is mentioned throughout the Bible and is an important sacramental item for religious rituals, such as baptism.

That's why the objection to selling it can be intensely theological.

Ms. Geraets, the Ottawa Lutheran, said water is "a sacred gift" from God, and humans should act as stewards and not debase it by turning it into a marketable item.

"You don't sell a gift," she said.

The City of Santa Monica announced today it will sponsor and host the most comprehensive, technologically advanced exposition of alternative fuel and high MPG vehicles ever held. AltCar Expo, specifically designed for the public, will take place on December 9 and 10, 2006. Admission to the Expo, as well as a wide-ranging selection of seminars and advanced technology displays, will be free. The event will be held at Barker Hangar, located at the Santa Monica Air Center.

- more here

From there a lot of us don't even understand how the crude moves into production for say gasoline and the pricing decisions.

We have no or little knowledge on how refineries operate why they shutdown for maintenance how often etc.

There have been great posts on these topics but no compilation of the information.

Finally it would be great for the people that understand these detail to tell us what they think will happen post peak as supply does not meet demand.

How will refiners react ?
How will OPEC react ?
How will the population in exporters react ?
How will Russia react ?
How will the EU react to Russia ?
Japan will have to become aggressive again ?
China ?
The US/Canada/Mexico ?
South America ?
India ?
Poor Africa ?
World markets ?

Also I've noticed that a lot of oil producing nations
don't have enough refinery capacity to support the internal usage leading to external imports of refined products.
Nigeria,Iran,Iraq etc. Other poor countries have subsidized oil products. These subsidies are becoming ruinous. This is a problem that's not really been explored as the price of oil and finished products increases. The export land model has not addressed this and its important.

If we start theorizing on these issues I think we will find
that early indicators exist which can be watched to see if the hypothesis are correct.

My opinion is they will become far more concerned about ensuring supply of oil not its price thus the spot market will change dramatically and become more a market for real oil supplies for a extended period of time.

I just don't see how you can have a sport market like it works now under shortage conditions.

When I read about how people manage to survive under war conditions we see that in general someone corners and hoards the limited supply and its sold at very high prices on the black market and next bartered for protection support or other non monetary returns between powerful players. So you have a cartel effect.

It is really hard to find information on economics in shortage conditions mainly it seems war follows so quickly
on top of resource shortages that it becomes the distorted economics of wartime production. In the past their was always some or some place where you could take what you needed.

Is bin Laden dead?

Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, believed to be on the run in rugged terrain in the Afghan-Pakistani border region since the September 11 attacks five years ago, has become seriously ill and may have already died, a Saudi source tells TIME, echoing earlier reports in the French media.

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that Saudi officials have received multiple credible reports over the last several weeks that Bin Laden has been suffering from a water-borne illness. The source believes that there is a "high probability" that Bin Laden has already died from the disease, but stressed that Saudi officials have thus far received no concrete evidence of Bin Laden's death.

"This is not a rumor," says the source. "He is very ill. He got a water-related sickness and it could be terminal. There are a lot of serious facts about things that have actually happened. There is a lot to it. But we don't have any concrete information to say that he is dead."

As the old saying goes, "Watch what you wish for."

Khosla's Four Steps to Promote Ethanol

CNNMoney.com reports (http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/22/news/economy/ethanol/index.htm) that, speaking at a Cleantech Venture Forum conference in New York City, Sun Microsystems co-founder and ethanol investor Vinod Khosla outlined four steps he said would help the country use more ethanol.

    * a government mandate that 70 percent of all cars sold in the U.S. be flex-fuel - which is having the ability to run on gas, ethanol or other alcohol-based fuels - by 2014, and that 10 percent of all major-branded gas stations in the U.S. sell E85, a fuel that contains 85 percent ethanol.
    * the current government ethanol subsidy of 50 cents a gallon should be based on a sliding scale corresponding to the price of oil: 25 cents a gallon if oil is at $75 a barrel ranging up to 75 cents a gallon if oil falls to $25 a barrel.
    * lifting tariffs on imports of ethanol from Brazil, a move strongly opposed by U.S. farmers, in exchange for increasing corn-derived ethanol in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent, a move he said was supported by some in the agriculture industry.
    * it would be up to to industry or the government to pay for these mandates. He said installing the gas pumps would cost something less than a billion dollars and making cars flex-fuel amounts to $35-$100 a vehicle.

"The president loves biomass, the farmers love biomass, even evangelicals love biomass" because it decreases the county's reliance on the Middle East, he said. "As investors we should make this happen because its good for the country."

Biofuel boom worries Latin America

"It is worrisome that a new economic cycle based on biofuels would trigger the expansion of monoculture crops and, consequently, deforestation," says Délcio Rodrigues, an energy expert with Vitae Civilis, a Brazilian non-governmental organisation that is active in fighting climate change.

The sugarcane economy is not a good environmental model. In the southeastern state of Sao Paulo, which produces 70 percent of Brazil's alcohol, the companies generally do not obey the Forestry Code, which requires nature preservation of 20 percent of rural properties. Furthermore, the cane fields are burned to facilitate the harvest, which creates serious local air pollution, said Rodrigues in a Tierramérica interview.

Soy, the main raw material for biodiesel in Brazil, due to its massive current production, "has already become one of the principal factors behind deforestation of the Amazon and the Cerrado, a biome of savannahs and scrub forests that covers the extensive central area of Brazil," said the expert.

Biodiesel began to be added to petroleum-based diesel in Brazil at a proportion of two percent, and that will be increased to five percent in 2013. The country has opted for H-BIO, a process of hydroconversion developed by the state-run oil giant Petrobras, which adds up to 18 percent plant or animal oil in the petroleum refining process to produce diesel.

Petrobras has already adapted three of its refineries, and plans to begin production in December, seeking to save on imports of 256 million litres of diesel next year, and a billion litres by 2010. Soybean oil will be the main input. H-BIO will not affect biodiesel because they are complementary, say energy authorities.

Here's him with Gore, who convinced him that global warming was real

Now we just need him to make good on what he said two years ago(mov) - only $1 billion is devoted to for-profit alternative energy research, rather than GW mitigation.

There's two layers of distraction to get past - the primary focus of the program is on global warming instead of alternative energy, and the media is ignoring even the primary focus to take bullshit potshots as election-year tithe.

U.S. health care a miserable, costly failure

When compared to nearly two dozen other industrialized countries, the U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy for people who have reached the age of 60.

Those statistics were part of a sobering new look at the U.S. health care system released today by The Commonwealth Fund's Commission on a High Performance Health System.[..]

The study looked at 37 national indicators of health outcomes, quality, access, equity and efficiency and assigned a score to each.
The U.S. scored an average of 66 out of a possible 100, a failing grade.

If performance were improved in key areas, the nation could save an estimated 150,000 lives and perhaps as much as $100 billion annually, the report's authors concluded.

Full report here

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1879589,00.html