The Oil Drum

On Saturday 26 July, the Sustainable Energy Forum and Engineers for Social Responsibility are holding a joint one-day conference at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand on the theme "Responding to Oil Depletion and Climate Change".

The programme is below. The registration form is available online at http://www.sef.org.nz/conferences/2008_Registration.doc

This is a guest post from Tim Jones of the Sustainable Energy Forum in New Zealand.

With the price of petrol hitting NZ$2 per litre, the Sustainable Energy Forum has proposed twelve steps for New Zealand to end its increasingly self-destructive addiction to oil.

Our addiction to oil has been bad for us for a long time. We’ve paid a high price for it in terms of high greenhouse gas emissions and cities choked by cars. But now we can’t afford our regular fix any more. So here’s what we need to do to conquer our addiction. It won’t be easy, but it will be worthwhile — and besides, we don’t really have a choice.

Cross posted from Peak Energy.

I seem to have spent half of this week criticising various energy articles in the local media, however there seems to be an endless supply of them coming down the pipeline.

NZ Petroleum Exploration and Production Association executive officer John Pfahlert had an opinion piece in the NZ Herald this week ("Minister out of whack on importance of gas") arguing that New Zealand should be building new gas fired power stations instead of trying to become carbon neutral.

A couple of interesting things emerged in the comment thread of the previous post. You might have seen us play with blogpulse in past posts. Well now, google has a new tool (posted by stiffpicken and expanded on by Mike A) that looks at trends in google searches. Here's a link to the 'peak oil' search, and here's a link to the 'peak oil' versus 'gas prices' search. Click around between the two, and you will notice a few things.

Stiffpicken says rightly: "I punched in "peak oil" ... search volume appears to have hit its own plateau but news volume is on the rise." Then Mike A notices: "What is really SOBERING though, is to compare search and news volumes between 'peak oil' and 'gas prices'. 'Peak oil' hardly shows a blip compared to 'gas prices', which implies to me that most people are still not making the connection. [...] Again, check the distribution of languages - in English 'gas prices' have far, far more results, but the Europeans seem to "get it", with 'peak oil' having more responses in Swedish, Finnish, Dutch & German (in that volume order)."

Then I was playing around and made a couple more observations: 1) Portland seems to be the most peak aware city via google, followed by Austin and Seattle. 2) BUT, even more interestingly, look at the regions tab. New Zealand and Australia have more raw numbers of people (i.e., not percentages folks) searching for "peak oil" than in the United States! What's the population proportion between the US and those two countries? 20m-ish for Australia and 4m-ish for New Zealand, compared to 300m-ish for the US!

We have much work to do in the US folks. Much much work. And good on you New Zealand and Oz!

One of the side benefits of attending the World Oil meeting in Denver last week was that I could pick up a few of the DVD's that Global Public Media had available including a long interview with Colin Campbell.  Watching the first half of that tonight, I was reminded by him, that while we are discussing the depletion rates for oil, the more critical one for immediate attention is that for natural gas.

When one taps an oil reservoir the oil requires a certain amount of differential pressure to push it towards the well, and with the passages it must pass being generally narrow, flow is relatively constricted.  Good well management means that, in order to control water and gas problems, the pressure difference between the well and the rock is carefully controlled, and this allows the oil to be effectively recovered at rates which, while worryingly increasing, are still generally considered to be less than 10%..

Natural gas, on the other hand, flows a lot more easily, and normally does not have a lot of the constraints that producing oil has.  Thus, if your pipeline can handle the flow, and there is a demand, the gas field can be drained much more rapidly, with a consequent dramatically more rapid conclusion to the flow.  As Dr Campbell pointed out fields may last just months, and then "boom" they are gone.