Peak Oil Thread (1 Viewer)

[L. Anton Dencklau]

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[Philip Hamm]

Right, the reason for the doom is that we are using so much oil today that they believe society as it exists can not function without massive oil inputs and that the only possible conclusion is catastrophe. The reality is that we are using so much oil precicely because it's cheap and plentiful. Since it is so cheap and plentiful there is massive waste / luxury use of the stuff. Look at the airline industry and personal transportation. As we go over the hump on oil production usage will diminish because it's expensive. People will carpool, public transportation will be ramped up, farming will become more local, etc. etc. Since it's a capitalist / market society the market will drive all these changes.

There's an old saying "Necessity is the mother of Invention" it's quite apt here. It hasn't been necessary to replace oil yet, but we're getting there.

And do some research on modern nuclear energy. With Gen-IV reactors and reprocessing (which the French do very well), fission is for all practical purposes renewable and infinite. All with current technology that is on the ground, ready to biuld out today. The next generation of nuclear powered electric personal transportation vehicles is just starting to be mass-accepted in the form of hybrids and the upcoming Chevy Volt.

A good page: Environmentalists For Nuclear ™ - International home page homepage (EFN)

Right now there are a lot of things that I think are dead ends. so called "shale oil" people have been trying to develop for well over a hundred years. It's hopeless. Coal needs to stop. It's wrecking the planet in many ways. I don't want West Virginia to become a big savanah.

 

[Philip Hamm]

That is a fringe kook theory that nobody takes seriously (or seriously enough to bother debunking) except wack jobs.

 

[Philip Hamm]

One of the reasons that PV panels are "so expensive" is supply and demand. There are not enough of them being made for the demand. Furthermore, they're actually not expensive at all holistically. If you look at the energy costs over the lifetime of the panel they are cheap.

They only work well where there is a lot of sun. They would be a complete waste of money in the rainy NW. Besides you guys have so much (too much!) hydro up there.

 

[Don Solosan]

"Have any of the "cornucopians" you were responding to in this thread expressed this view? If not, it is a strawman argument."

Carl, I was just pointing out that not everyone agrees with you. This is one thing that we happen to agree on, however.

"Correct. So far, they don't. But they will become increasingly viable with time and especially as oil becomes scarcer and more expensive."

As oil becomes scarcer and more expensive, our economy continues its downward slide, and then we won't be able to afford all of these pricey alternatives. It'll be interesting to see, as more fuel-efficient cars become available, how car sales go in the future.

"The article to which I linked used the "at current consumption rates" quote in the very first sentence. I guess that's all you bothered to read; otherwise, you'd have noticed that that the "thousands of years" conclusion actually takes future expansion of nuclear power into account."

Actually I did read the whole thing, and I like the idea of breeder reactors creating new fuel. Industry people tend to overstate their resources, thus you have oil industry and government energy agency people saying that not only are petroleum supplies fine, but they expect them to grow at enormous rates. They have a vested interest to maintain the status quo. Surely you can see that the nuclear power industry might respond to the same forces?

And again, all this stuff is expensive and takes years to bring on line. The problem you're all ignoring is: what do we do now?

 

[Don Solosan]

Philip, basically what you're describing is what I've been talking about. The entire world has to change to some new paradigms. This is never easy, or cheap. We only disagree on the extent of that. Time will tell how it's all going to work out.

"That is a fringe kook theory that nobody takes seriously (or seriously enough to bother debunking) except wack jobs."

That's probably what they said about M. King Hubbert!

 

[DaveF]

Thanks

Let us suppose we have 50 years until the oil is all gone, and in the interim its price will increase, reaching some large cost per gallon (say, $30 - $50 per gallon at the pump).

What do we do about it?

 

[Edwin-S]

I'm going to burn my share. I don't have kids and I'm not going to have kids. I've got maybe a couple of decades left if I'm lucky. After that, who cares what happens. The next generation can worry about it.

When I hear the "Green Freaks" talk, I always get the impression that they would like the human species to go back to swinging in the trees and living in caves: except for the large group of them who would just like the human species to become extinct all together.

I figure they want mankind to go back to its prehistoric roots, so I'll help by using up as many resources as I can now.

I know that sounds selfish, but so what? I'm sick of these do-gooders telling us about peak oil, greenhouse gases, and global warming: all while living in huge mansions, flying around in Lear jets that guzzle more fuel in an hour than I use in an entire year, and driving around in chauffeured limousines.

 

[Buzz Foster]

I'm not saying that mag-lev is the solution for the price of asphalt. I'm pointing out that innovation can provide alternatives that look nothing like the past. Just becasue we may not be able to make roads out of asphalt in the future, does not mean that the only alternative will be making them out of gravel and driving horse and buggy over them.

The highest use of petroleum is personal transportation. Conservation is the lowest-hanging fruit, and if gasoline continues its upward climb, people will be carpooling in Scion XBs, riding motorcycles, etc. The days of soccer moms driving solo in Suburbans will be over. The highways will be safer, because OTR trucking will be all but dead. Trains are running at 100% capacity because they can move goods at vastly efficient energy costs. We need more rail investment for goods transportation.

Replacing Suburbans, Hummers and big rigs with Priuses, Smart cars, motorcycles, and eventually Volts will have the added benefit of making roads last longer due to the lower weight placed on them.

Eventually, we will have electric personal transportation as the norm. With that revolution will come a sharp drop in the demand for petroleum.

Petroleum for other needs, such as air transportation and farming can come from sources like shale oil, which, without the demands of transportation, can last us a very long time.

It's not that I am trying to solve the problems myself, I'm just saying that there are alternatives. We can get there. I don't think that the eventual end of oil means the end of civilization, massive die-offs, and a return to agrarian economics. It probably does mean an end to exponential growth, and the transition to sustainable economics.

Come on, man. Have at least a little faith.

 

[Edwin-S]

Keep dreaming that trains will replace OTR trucking. It aint happening. The Just In Time structure of our economy rules out that trains can ever replace trucks. Trains can haul huge amounts of goods over large distances, but the inflexibility of their scheduling makes them inefficient for operation of a JiT inventory system. The only thing that works for that is trucks.

Companies are not about to go back to holding huge inventories of stock and parts. JiT is here to stay and with it OTR trucking.

As for carpooling and public transit, I' ll do it when I see our elites riding buses and carpooling.

Also, if the government wants me to buy a Prius to replace my Acura then they can give me the forty grand it takes to buy one, because I certainly can't afford one on my own. The hundred bucks I got from my "benevolent" provincial government, to soften the blow of the 2.4 cent per litre "carbon" tax they are imposing, just isn't going to cut it. Hey, maybe I can buy the lugnuts of a Prius with that hundred bucks. It's a good start. At that rate, I should have the rest of the car in about 40 years.

 

[KurtEP]

Regarding JIT. JIT has only really been around as a major force in the US since the 80s. It's not so entrenched that it can't go away pretty quickly. Besides, it has its advantages and disadvantages. The primary advantage is lower carrying costs. You don't have to fund so much inventory at any given time, and you don't have to pay for the storage space to keep it. The primary disadvantage is that if you have some sort of interruption in the supply chain, you're not going to be producing anything until it's solved. Also, the dirty secret of a lot of JIT is that it simply pushes the warehousing down a level to the suppliers, who now warehouse the inventory for the primary manufacturer. There really isn't much of an overall gain in efficiency in the economy.

Just getting the urban middle class out of SUVs and pickup trucks would be a huge step forward. Almost anything uses less fuel than a large truck. Vehicles like the H2 are just waste for the sake of waste. If anything good comes from this price bubble, it will be the end of the SUV craze.

 

[DaveF]

Indeed. Dell, a current corporate model for manufacturing efficiency, requires suppliers to keep warehouses stocked at their cost onsite at Dell's plant. Dell has zero inventory excess because they make their suppliers have constant supply a stone's throw away.

Moreover, all the JIT components are shipped by super cargo ship from China. Those tankers aren't JIT, so what difference does truck versus train matter at that point?

 

[Don Solosan]

"Let us suppose we have 50 years until the oil is all gone, and in the interim its price will increase, reaching some large cost per gallon (say, $30 - $50 per gallon at the pump).

What do we do about it?"

Obviously this is a tough question, because everything we try has unintended consequences. Push for Ethanol, and the price of tortillas shoots up in Mexico. Try to conserve fuel, and you depress the economy further.

Have you heard of Jevon's Paradox? From Wikipedia:

"In economics, the Jevons Paradox is an observation made by William Stanley Jevons, that as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, total consumption of that resource tends to increase, rather than decrease."

Studies have shown that people who buy hybrid cars tend to burn more fuel, because they think they're being so efficient that they drive more. As I've read more and more about peak oil, I keep running into problems like these. We need to keep mining to produce more steel, more coal, more uranium, but the supersized tires the equipment run on are in short supply and it's limiting/shutting down operations. It's that whole "for want of a nail" thing, where a seemingly insignificant component fails and wipes out power to several states, the kind of a problem that we can't foresee because we're too far removed. You've heard about our huge supply of shale oil, right? Think again. This is from CNSnews.com:

"(CNSNews.com) - Reports circulating on the Internet tell of an oil field spanning parts of western North Dakota and eastern Montana where 400 billion barrels of oil supposedly are just waiting to be tapped. However, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tells Cybercast News Service that those huge estimates are "a myth."

A USGS report issued in April estimates that there are between 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels of oil in what is referred to as "the Bakken Formation" -- well below the 400 billion barrels discussed on the Web, but up from the previous estimate of 151 million barrels made in 1995."

Four billion barrels would last the US about half a year, but we'll only get it stretched out over the next few decades. It won't save us.

This is why I'm a doomer. Human nature and physical limitations are coming into conflict. What do we do? All the options involve pain, and your average person doesn't want to hear that. Like Edwin says, pass it along to future generations.

 

[Buzz Foster]

I just was reading that Lockheed Martin has entered into an exclusive contract with EEstor to represent their electric storage medium in military applications, putting a lot of creedence behind the product's existence and future applications in electric cars.

With some belt-tightening conservation, we can survive the peak itself without too much difficulty in the short-term. If EEstore comes online, and cars start being produced, we could see a drastic reduction in petroleum demand here in the US within just a few years.

The problem with seeing peak oil as disastrous is the assumption that the peak, demand curve, and supply curve all meet at the same place. It is possible to curb demand quite a bit.

 

[Eric_L]

A telling sign in all of this was part of Saudi Arabia's response to why they increased production; they DON'T WANT us to develop alternative fuels! What will they have to sell us then? Camel toes?

I am unconcerned with civilization ending as oil becomes more expensive/scarce. The fact is: there ARE alternatives fuels already developed - they just don't currently have the same cost benefit as fossil fuels currently offer. As ff prices increase alternative fuels get closer to the threshold of competitive efficiency. At that time we'll see something similar to the format wars: except instead of blue ray and HDDVD it will be electric, hydrogen, natural gas, etc. I suspect in the end it will be a dual system with electric for local driving and a combustible for long distance driving (because of the ease of refilling)

 

[Don Solosan]

"the product's existence and future applications in electric cars."

The thing about cars is that they have lots of plastic/rubber parts. So if you ramp up production of electric cars, you're still going to need petroleum. And I don't know if you can just say, "well, the gas we'll save will more than cover for that." See, they fraction the crude into various grades, and one grade is gasoline. Can that gas be used to make plastics? I doubt it. Can the fractioning process be changed so it produces less gas and more of the other stuff we need? I don't know.

"It is possible to curb demand quite a bit."

Demand destruction is already happening in the US. However, a lot of that is people not going on vacations, not going out to eat, etc. So airlines, motels, restaurants, theme parks, gas stations that serve the freeway exits, all manner of businesses are being impacted. This may not impact you, but it will hurt a lot of other people if it continues.

 

[Don Solosan]

"A telling sign in all of this was part of Saudi Arabia's response to why they increased production; they DON'T WANT us to develop alternative fuels! What will they have to sell us then?"

Did they actually come out and say that? I can think of one thing they have in abundance: sunlight. They can build lots of solar condensing plants and use the energy to desalinate water, turn the desert into paradise, and sell any surplus energy to their neighbors.

Actually, that's what southern California should be doing!

 

[Buzz Foster]

"And I don't know if you can just say, "well, the gas we'll save will more than cover for that." See, they fraction the crude into various grades, and one grade is gasoline. Can that gas be used to make plastics? I doubt it. Can the fractioning process be changed so it produces less gas and more of the other stuff we need? I don't know."

So, since you don't know, the obvious answer is that we are all doomed?

 

[Don Solosan]

"So, since you don't know, the obvious answer is that we are all doomed?"

No, the obvious answer is "Don't worry, be happy!" Ignorance is bliss!

 

[Buzz Foster]

I don't think either answer is appropriate.

Point being, there aren't two answers. You seem to think anything other than "We're all going to die horribly!" constitutes blind cornucopianism. I'm not that absolute.