The Oil Drum

ARE WE ADDICTED TO OIL?

An advertisement for BMW cars -and freedom, and power, and sex, and status.... (Click to enlarge)

Much of what we discuss at theoildrum is about supply - pinpointing problems and/or advantages of existing and future energy technologies. These are the 'means' by which society meets its day to day demands. But little time, (and certainly not equal time) is devoted to discussing the 'ends' - what is all this energy for. As many of you know, I am completing my Phd in Natural Resources at The University of Vermont, with a specialization in Ecological Economics. This hybrid field asserts that the economy is just a part of a larger planetary system (as opposed to the planet and its resources being just part of the economy). EE attempts to evaluate (monetarily and otherwise) the things the market system takes for granted (fresh air and water, biodiversity, healthy dolphin populations, stable climate, etc.) But a growing subset of ecological economists are addressing the 'ends'. By digging into the empirical datapoints that comprise human happiness, we are finding we can be happier with far less energy use. I initially wrote about this here. Below is a short essay, also posted on Grist, co-authored by my advisor Robert Costanza. In my opinion, the questions these authors raise should be preceding or at least accompanying policy discussions on how we decide to obtain and allocate more energy. Ends before means.

I was recently in a meeting with some State officials, and representatives of a large fossil energy supply company. The meeting was largely focused on State-centered efforts to increase the amount of renewable or sustainable energy. In the course of the discussion the company representatives raised the issue of water availability, and how this might impact some of the options. It is a subject that is starting to raise its head in more than just this type of discussion. If we look at the current drought status of the United States, for example.

The exceptional drought in the South East and the extreme drought in the South West are both evident. The growing impact of the sustained lack of water, or the need to provide water to an increasing number of people or a growing industrial base, from a fixed resource, is one that will have an impact that goes beyond just the immediate short term. And so, being curious, I looked at the major users of water, and what they did with it. And it was in this light that I then looked at one of the promising new technologies that Dave Rutledge had mentioned at the ASPO conference, the use of concentrated sun power (csp), and in the process I also looked at how they are handling process water in the oil sands of Alberta.

This is a guest story by Professor François Cellier.

François Cellier is a specialist in modeling and simulation of physical systems and is teaching system simulation and control at the Institute of Computational Science of ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

This article explores dynamic relations governing population growth, resource depletion, and world economics by means of a few simple modeling and simulation exercises. To this end, we start out by exploring the concept of an ecological footprint, representing the amount of land that a person needs to produce everything that he or she consumes: food, clothing, energy, shelter, the tools that are needed to make the clothing, etc. and place it in relation with the human development index, a measure of the quality of life of an individual. We then relate the ecological footprint to the per capita energy consumption. This discussion serves to provide a quantitative understanding of the limited resources that are at our disposal.

The article continues by exploring the dangers and seductions of exponential growth, and uses a system dynamics approach to illustrate why we are moving at a rapid pace toward global collapse with our eyes wide shut.

The article ends by discussing what we would need to do in order to avoid the looming collapse.

An oil production, consumption, import-export model for the 25 EU states (plus Norway, Iceland and Switzerland) is presented, based on data published in the 2006 BP statistical review.

Applying a 0.5% growth in consumption and a 8% production decline rate points to EU oil imports growing from 9.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2005 to 12.6 million bpd by 2012 - an increase of 29% over the next 6 years.

The EU will have to "fight" for these additional resources in an oil import market already hot with competition from the USA, China and other developing countries.

In digging just a little further into the natural gas situation, let's first have a quick glance at the current status on GOMEX production according to the DOE, which also includes information that all the customers in Florida who lost power during Wilma have now been reconnected.

The current lost production is given by the table

While the refinery situation, which has a little good and bad news, is also updated.
In the same way as oil must be refined before it can be used, after gas comes from the ground it has to be processed.