Oil Crisis

Dear me Godless, yes I've been on many a drilling rig and I think I know as well as you what the geologists are there for - I was, after all, one of those geologists. You are being a little simplistic to say they are on location only to determine if indeed there’s oil in the well , but we'll let that pass.
However the contents and character of a single well or the local knowledge of a group petroleum geologists are not what we are basing peak oil production on.
Your link to a popular examination of the abiogenic origin of hydrocarbons deserves a proper response. Too tired at present. What I will say is I would not bet $10 on its validity for odds of less than 1000-1.
Godless I am certainly not saying there are not alternative energy sources - see my above post. I am saying peak oil in the next couple of decades is a reality.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Investment hasn't, isn't, and never will solve energy science problems. That is a task of science. If science cannot solve a scientific problem, then it cannot be solved. No amount of money you throw at it will make it go away.

There is a whole host of scientific problems with perpetual motion and zero point/ "free" energy devices, but since science cannot solve them, then they will never be solved.

Coal as a substitute for oil would make our coal reserve base vanish astonishingly fast. if it wasn't for oil, we would have ran out of coal by now.

That needs to be done pre-peak. The capital for investment and energy and resources required to make those vehicles will have to be there while the economy is not crashing and burning due to $120 a barrel oil and big businesses downsizing and laying off like they're living on borrowed time.

They are little crystals at the bottom of the ocean floor. There are a whole host of problems with that being the situation right there alone.

There are substitutions, but not alternatives.

'Alternative' implies that we can just switch everything over and the problem's solved. Not gonna happen like that.

Every so-called 'alternative' only has the ability to generate a small fraction of the energy we are now getting from from fossil fuels. They all have severe problems. They either aren't sustainable, too expensive, or can't be upscaled.

Antimatter would make a great source of energy, but it's way too expensive.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Ever heard of Michael C. Lynch?

click

Oh! btw I found for you 180billion barrels of oil in Canada. click

This "oil crisis" is all a sham! and you've been had!.

click

Godless.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

There is no scientific problem with fusion. There are only residual technical problems. Throwing money at technical problems makes them go away. It is one of the great discoveries of the Industrial Revolution. [By way of contrast cold fusion is a science problem. Flinging money at it would do one of two things: produce some very happy researchers; eventually confirm that it was not possible.]

Absolutely agreed, as per my last point.

Golgo you have previously given some very thoughtful and accurate posts on the this energy topic. You really need to go do some basic checking of your facts here. I actually thought I was reading a statement by Godless (sorry Godless). This is simple nonsense. Please confirm you understand that so I don't have to dig up the data for you.

Let me be pedantic. They are at the bottom of the sea floor, not the ocean floor. Seas are shallower than oceans. They are a lot more acccessible than the oil that we currently are trying to access at fifteen thousand feet sub-sea. Of course it would require a whole new industry in order to exploit this resource, but again, it is merely a technical challenge, and frankly not a huge one at that.

First, as noted, two of our big alternatives are fossil fuels - coal and hydrates. Second, lets take wind power. It is perfectly capable of delivering 15% of the UK energy requirements in five years if we wished to make the investment. It will never need to provide 100%, because we go for a mixed source approach to energy generation.
The problems are large; the problems are current; the problems are solvable.

 

I agree that oil will become expensive soon; this will cause severe financial chaos, in all likelihood. Coal will still be around for a couple of hundred years; but it is a little difficult and expensive to produce jet fuel from coal.

But I have to take exception to the idea that renewable energy sources can never support an advanced civilisation on our planet; the solar energy falling on our world is 18,000 times the energy use of the world (1990's figures.)
If a sizeable fraction of that energy cannot be utilised to run civilisation I would be very surprised.
The current cost of producing solar energy is irellevant; the important consideration is, given an economy run completely on solar power, how much of the energy produced would be required to produce and maintain the solar cells? If it is less than 100% it is worth doing; some estimates suggest fifty percent or better is acheivable. The cost of solar power is declining at 4% per annum.
Other forms of collection of solar energy will also respond to economies of scale; wind power (which ultimately derives its energy from the sun) and ocean thermal energy conversion, another source derived from the Sun of course.
The figures given by Odum for net energy production seem to be over-pessimistic, based on the currently expensive production costs of small-scale solar power cell production. This is one of the technical problems that can be resolved, as Ophiolite suggests in a different context, by investment.

Once solar energy production breaks even in all respects, then the sky is the limit quite literally. The Sun gives out ten trillion times our current energy requirements; over time we will come to gather a larger and larger fraction of that energy.

And this is without successful fusion power production; with successful fusion the seas of our world would power our civilsation for many million years.

 

When driving through the dessert of mid west USA, as I saw all that land laid to waste, I only spoke of the "potential" energy production of gigantic solar pannels laid out flat as in farming the sun's energy.

If this were to come true, on a larger scale then curently. Then the cheap dessert lands out here would be a valuble commodity to own.

click

The winds of the southwest desserts of US, have blown buildings, large signs, sky high. There's also sightings of gigantic dust devils, blowing throught out Arizona dessert's. The potential of a well maintained and large capacity wind farm, could produce enough electricity power, to run 1/2 of or more of Phoenix's power needs in the windy seasons.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

And last but not least fusion power is been developed and studied as we speak. click

No the world is not at it's last leg, only because oil corporations and governments want to "manipulate" the price of fosil fuels. Fact is we are not taking this lightly, as I've shown alternative energy resources that are been implemented world wide, soon, oil will either be too expencive, or real cheap. If demand is cut say by 50% or more.

Godless.

 

Its more than a little ironic that old Michael the economist says that there is no reason why oil should be so high and that geology isn't the problem.

Well, if the economist is saying that geology isn't the cause of high oil prices, that only leaves economics as the explanation, which he, the economist, can't explain.

So, if the economist has no economic explanation (notice he no longer cites a terror premium, he just scratches his head), maybe he ought to leave the geological explanation to the geologists, like Deffeyes and Campbell, for an answer.

In the energy crisis about 35 years ago, we saw an ad from the American Electric Power company. It's a bit reassuring, saying don't worry too much because:

Now where did that 500 year come from? It may have had it's origin in a report to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs in the United States Senate, because in that report we find this sentence:

There is one of the most dangerous statements in the literature. It's dangerous because it's true. But it isn't the truth that makes it dangerous, the danger lies in the fact that people take the sentence apart. They just say "Coal will last 500 years". They forget the caveat with which the sentence started. Now what were those opening words?

At current levels.

What does that mean? That means if and only if we maintain zero growth in coal production.

So let's look at a few numbers. We go to the Annual Energy Review (3) published by the Department of Energy. They give this as the coal demonstrated reserve base in the United States:

Coal Demonstrated Reserve Base:

R = 4.7 x 10^11 tons*

It has a footnote that says:

* About one half of the demonstrated reserve base of coal in the United States is estimated to be recoverable.

You cannot recover and get out of the ground and use 100 percent of the coal that's there.

So this number:

R = 2.4 x 10^11 tons

is half of that number. We'll come back to those in just a moment. The report also tells us that in 1971 we were mining coal at this rate:

r0 = 5.6 X 10^8 tons/yr

20 years later at this rate:

r0 = 9.9 X 10^8 tons/yr

Put those numbers together and the average growth of coal producion in that 20 years was 2.86% per year.

And so we have to ask how long a resource would last if you have steady growth in the rate of consumption until the last bit of it is used.

I'll just show you the equation here for the expiration time:

EET = Te = ( 1 / k ) ln ( k R / r0 + 1 )

I'll tell you it takes first year college calculus to derive that equation. So it can't be very difficult. You know, I have the feeling there must be dozens of people in this country who have had first year college calculus.

But let me suggest, I think that equation is probably the best kept scientific secret of the century. Now let me show you why.

If you use that equation to calculate the life expectancy of the reserve base (or of the one half they think is recoverable) for different steady rates of growth, you find that if the growth rate is 0 the small estimate would go about 240 years and the large one would go close 500 years. So that report to the congress was correct. But look what we get when we plug in steady growth:

Lifetime in years of United States coal (EET). The lifetime (EET) in years of U.S. coal reserves (both the high and low estimate of the U.S.G.S.) are shown for several rates of growth of production from the 1972 level of 0.5 (x10^9) metric tons per year.

Code:

 
          High Estimate (yr)      Low Estimate (yr)  
Zero            2872                      680 
  1%            339                       205 
  2%            203                       134 
  3%            149                       102 
  4%            119                       83 
  5%            99                        71 
  6%            86                        62 
  7%            76                        55 
  8%            68                        50 
  9%            62                        46 
 10%            57                        42 
 11%            52                        39 
 12%            49                        37 
 13%            46                        35

Back in the 1960's, it was our national goal to achieve growth of coal production up around 8% per year. If you could achieve that and continue it, coal would last between 37 and 46 years.

President Carter cut that goal roughly in half, hoping to reach 4% per year. If that could continue, coal would last between 59 and 75 years.

Then there's that 2.86, the average for a recent period of 20 years. If that could continue, coal would last between 72 and 94 years. That's within the life expectancy of children born today.

The only way you're going to get anywhere near this widely-quoted 500 year figure, is to be able to do simultaneously 2 highly improbable things.

Number 1, you have to figure out how to use 100% of the coal that's in the ground.

Number 2, you've gotta figure out how to have 500 years of 0 growth in coal production.

Look at those figures. Those are facts.




Back in the 1970's there was great national concern about energy, but these concerns dissappeared in the 80's. Now the concerns about energy in the 70's prompted experts, journalists, and scientists to assure the american people that there was no reason to be concerned.

Now lets go back and look as some of those assurances from the 70's, so we can see what to expect now that the energy crisis is returning.

Here's the director of the energy division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory telling us how expensive it is to import oil. Telling us we must have big increases (rapid growth) in our use of coal. Under these conditions, he estimates "America's coal reserves are so huge, they could last a minimum of 300 years, probably a maximum of 1000 years."

You've just seen the facts, now you see what an expert tells us and what can you conclude?

There was a 3 hour television special on CBS on energy. The reporter said:

You've just seen the facts, now see what a journalist tells us after careful study, and what can you conclude?

In the Journal of Chemical Education on the page for high school chemistry teachers is an article by the scientific staff of the journal.

They tell us:

and they give a figure.

Well, let's do long division.

You take the coal that's there:

120 x 10^9 tons

divide it by what was then the current rate of consumption

/ 670 x 10^6 tons per year

you get:

= 180 years.

Now they didn't say "current rate of consumption". They said "present U.S. energy needs". Coal today provides about 1/5'th, about 20% of the energy we use in this country.

So if you would like to calculate how long this quantity of coal could satisfy present U.S. energy needs, you have to multiply the denominator by 5.

When you do that, you get 36 years. They said nearly a thousand years.

Newsweek Magazine in a cover story of energy said:

Now the .5 means they think it will run out in July instead of January.

If you round that off and say roughly 600 years, that's close enough to 500 to lie within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the size of the resource. So with that observation, that's a reasonable statement.

But what this led into was a story about how we have to have major rapid growth in coal consumption.

Well it's obvious, isn't it? If you have the growth that they're writing about, it won't last as long as they said it would last with zero growth.

They never mentioned this!

Dr. Bartlett wrote them a long letter and told them that he thought it was a serious misrepresentation to give the readers the feeling that we can have all the growth they're writing about and still have coal around for 600 years. He got back a nice form letter, had nothing to do with what he tried to explain to them.

From Time magazine:

Now think about that for just a moment...

... Let me paraphrase it:

"The more rapidly we consume our resources, the more self-sufficient we'll be".

Isn't that what it says?

David Brower has referred to this as the policy of "Strength through Exhaustion." (9)

Here's an example of "Strength through Exhaustion"":

William Simon, Energy Advisor to the President of the United States.

Simon says:

the more rapidly we can get the last of that oil up out of the ground and finish using it... the better off we'll be!

There are numerous more examples of this kind of lunacy and non-math based reserve estimates, but I won't list them all here for the sake of brevity.

So I give you a very fundamental observation:

Don't believe any prediction of the life expectancy of a nonrenewable resource until you have confirmed the prediction by replicating the calculation.

As a corollary we have to note that the more optimistic the prediction, the greater the likelihood that it is based on faulty arithmetic or on no arithmetic at all.



Sources:

1. "The call to greater energy independence". American Electric Power Company, Inc., ad in Newsweek, Nov. 3, 1975.

2. "Factors Affecting the Use of Coal in Present and Future Energy Markets". A background paper prepared by The Congressional Research Service at the request of Sen. Henry M. Jackson, Chairman of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate pursuant to Senate Resolution 45, a National Fuels and Energy Policy Study Serial No. 93-9 (92-44) (U.S. GPO, Washington, D.C., 1973) pp. 41, 42, 15.

3. "Annual Energy Review": 1991, U.S. Department of Energy, pgs. 109, 189

4. "Boulder Daily Camera", July 5, 1975

5. C.B.S. reporter Wagner, C.B.S. television special program on energy. August 31, 1977

6. "Energy Review", An article by the staff of the Journal of Chemical Education. April, 1972. pg. 253

7. Newsweek magazine, July 16, 1979

8. Time magazine, May 19, 1975. p. 55.

9. D. Brower, Not Man Alone, Vol. 6, No. 20, Nov. 1976; Friends of the Earth, 529 Commercial, San Francisco.

10. C.B.S. Television, August 21, 1977.

 

Yawns politely!,

Man if your world is falling apart because we are running out of oil "supposedly". you have very few choices!.

1. Shut the fuck up and do something abou it.

2. Conserve your own "oil" comsumption. "Start by turning off the computer"

3. Pick up a gun, and blow your head off!.

It seems you've given up, and have no hope for humanity. When push comes to shove, you've got those three choices above!!

And by the way. Oil is a commodity, so it does relate to the "fears and expectations" of investors when the prices fluctuate. One of the reasons oil is "high" according to economics. Which if we were to adjust economically from latter years inflation, up serges, oil basically is lower than when the "peak oil" scare of the 70's.

Thus investor fears, oil demand by China, Irag War, the US threatining to invade Iran, OPEC tightning or releasing the flow of "already producing wells" without opening or searching for new wells, oil companies manipulation of markets, governments manipulation of markets. And there you have a formula for conquest of a commodity. Thus the "fear" of no oil raises the price of crude. Making me a sweet profit btw. I boutht at 49 and can't wait till it hits 70!! or it depends "just how greedy I want to be". Or governments want to be, or Billionaire investors want to be, or Oil Companies want to be!!.

Godless.

 

Golgo, fine example of critical thinking. It seems to be a very rare quality in people today.

 

Well, if you choose to use the DRB rather than the Identified Resources (17.3 x 10^11 tons) or the Total Resources (39.68 x 10^11 tons) your figures will check out. Otherwise they remain an order of magnitude out.

Secondly, I thought we were discussing global energy not US energy.

Thirdly, you are assuming no significant change in mining technology and recovery rates.

Thorough, accurate, detailed calculations do not provide the correct answer if the assumptions are flawed.

 

or 4.) Prepare for the crash. Buy rural land, learn to grow and preserve your own food and maintain small livestock. Purchase a rifle and learn to hunt. Become as self-sufficient as possible and be able to live if there was any manner of tumultuous meltdown of industrial society for whatever reason.

Right now, nearly all food provided to major cities is supplied by huge agribusiness corporations that are only in it to turn a profit. It is able to be grown in the quantity that it is by using fertilizers and pesticides derived from petroleum in natural gas (both of which are in decline), and supplied by a transcontinental trucking industry that ships the food usually 1400 miles before it ever gets to the consumers' plate. And the only way that works is on the basis of cheap and plentiful oil.

The whole system is a stack of dominoes. If any key one were to topple, it could bring down the whole chain. And energy (which is defined as "the ability to do work") is the biggest of them all.

One has several choices, but that's besides the point. Are you willing to stake your survival on the idea that there will always be someone there to save your ass if need be? Because I'm not. I've studied history. That experiment has been tried several times before and it never works out. The only person you can depend on without fail is yourself and close comrades who you know would be by your side until the end.

I'm not depending on OPEC's overstated, demonstrably artificially inflated, and erroneous oil reserves; I'm not depending on the press-release economy; and 'm sure as hell not depending on the profitability of agribusiness corporations or politicians to put food on my table.

I'm working on getting out of the global system. If all this blows over, it turns out the Earth is flat and has potentially infinite resources, and it's business as usual, then I will resume normal city life and daily activities and be glad this whole energy crisis thing blew over. But if it turns out that we're headed toward that brick wall at 100mph, the brakes don't work, and we can't slow ourselves down enough to survive the impact like the evidence strongly implicates, then I will have made the best possible decision that could be made.

Either way, I see it as idiocy not to prepare for something this big that is guaranteed to happen within your life expectancy even at the most optimistic projections.

The 70's wasn't about world oil peaking, just U.S. oil.

All the energy crisies of the past were half political and could be overcome by negotiation. When OPEC cut all Israel supporters off such as the U.S. from oil and brought on the oil shock of the 70's, that was political. We couldn't produce sufficient oil domestically because 1970 was the same year that U.S. oil peaked and started going into decline. That was geological.

This energy crisis brought on by world oil going into decline is entirely geological. You can't negotiate, bribe, or coerce the Earth. You can't bomb oil wells into submission and force them to produce. When they've hit signifigant diminishing returns, then that's it.

And the fact that there's breaking news hitting practically every week reporting on oil fields going into decline like Cantarell and Ghawar, the 2 bigegst producing fields in the world.

Oil decline helps increase the scarcity of the resource and in turn drive up the price.

Or geology wants to be.

Oh, that's right. I forgot that contemporary economic theory dictates that the economy is ultimately in control of the environment and not the other way around.

The economy can demand that nature provide it with a resource, but ultimately the environment has the ability to restrict the economy's access to that resource. This is typically accomplished with positive feedback mechanisms such as bell-curve shaped extraction rates. The more of a resource the economy takes from the environment, the more the environment restricts access to said resource. Economists believe that with enough money, we will find a way around these facts.

An example of this blind dogmatic irrational faith in the power of little pieces of paper we move around called "money" comes from Morris Adelman, whose ideas exert a tremendous influence on the oil and gas industries. On pg. 483 of his book, "The Economics of Petroleum Supply", Adelman writes, "There are plenty of fossil fuels and no limit to potential electrical capacity. It is all a matter of money".

On a similar note, economist Julian Simon went on to explain that due to advancements in technology, the human race can go on increasing exponentially forever.

The doctrine that "there's no such thing as limits" is just plain juvenile. Physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out that if population continues steady growth at it's current rate, by 2600 the entire Earth would be composed of humans standing shoulder-to-shoulder and the electricity usage of the Earth would make it glow red hot.

Physicists like Hawking and Bartlett grasp the fact that the Earth is a finite sphere with finite resources, but economists like Simon and Adelman assert otherwise.

It doesn't matter how much the economists demand that the oil be there, when geology says "no", the only part of the economist's book that is accurate is the section about demand destruction.

Finite resources are a zero sum game. When you spend money, it stays in the system. When you burn oil, it's gone forever.

Well when the U.S. starts using more coal to make up for lack of oil, which they will have to, then the sudden growth spike in the consumption of the resource can just be plugged in to the exponential expiration time (EET) euqation, and you can then know how long the resource is going to last in the U.S.

If the U.S. has to start importing coal in addition to oil, natural gas, and uranium, then we are in some pretty hot water. The U.S. starts to become less important since it doesn't produce anything of real value. Our biggest export is our (petro)dollar, because it is the standard currenct for oil purchase. It's a vestige left over from the days where the U.S. used to be the largest oil exporting nation (now it's the largest importer. What a change of events, eh? Just goes to illustrate the finite nature of the resource). OPEC nations are moving toward the petroeuro. If the dollar dissolves as the standard for oil purchase, than the U.S. becomes irrelevant since it doesn't provide or produce anything of signifigant value and is just a big consumer nation.

I'm assuming nothing but business as usual. Until some new technique or technology comes along that raises the URR of oil/coal, at which point the EET and peak rates will have to be recalculated depending on how signifigant the additional percentage of recovery is, then there's no reason to speculate on them. They might happen and enable additional recovery, but then again they might not.

All I did was took the amount the Annual Energy Review from the Department of Energy said was there, took into account the fact that they say about half of those reserves are estimated to be reconerable, and proceeded thusly.

If they were wrong then there could be more coal, but then again there could be less as well.

I'm a stickler to the precautionary principle. Better to proceed with caution than say "We don't really know!" and proceed to engage in reckless abandon due to ignorance of the size of the resource.

This was succinctly illustrated in Dr. Bartlett's congressional testimony on energy policy.

We need to follow the conservative path.

 

Gezum crow guy. If you can't be concise, you probably don't know what you're talking about.

 

And if you aren't going to bother reading the material I presented, then don't make ignorant comments on it's validity.

 

Well, I have read it, and yes, it is fascinating. Oil is fast dissappearing, coal and other sources of reduced carbon would not last long if called upon to support a growing world economy, yes, that is right.
But you are wrong in saying that the various alternatives will not benefit from increased research, development and investment;
France is doing quite nicely on a nuclear power strategy, India is optimistic about the concept of thorium breeder reactors (thorium being more abundant than uranium), (but breeder reactors have many political difficulties associated with them which outweigh the practical difficulties)...

fusion power generation is at last beginning to break even, and as I have pointed out the greates fusion power source of the all, the Sun, gives out much more power than we can ever consume on ths tiny world.

It is wrong to think of our world as running out of resources apart from fossil fuels and fissiles; of the material elements that our planet is made of, none of them are leaving the planet in noticeable quantities- they are simply changing state from high energy forms to low energy forms.
So the only resource we have to worry about losing is energy. It is certainly advisable for the governments of the world to invest in renewable sources of energy now, if not sooner; the Sun is of course the best source of such energy.

But as Hawking has pointed out, a growing population cannot be supported on our small world forever, especially if the energy consumption per capita increases to western levels or beyond. The planet would evaporate in the waste heat.
However attempting to limit the human population of the world by decree is wrong, and to allow the population to suffer catastrophic collapse because of a shortage of wealth is reprehensible; the best way to limit population is to increase global wealth levels- wealthy countries have much lower population growth, and many have a declining population.
High population growth in poor countries is due to the advantage gained by larger families; more young people to support the family is seen as desirable. By contrast many couples in wealthy countries decide not to have children at all.

 

How can we tell if it's valid if we bleed from the eyes before we finish reading it?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Seriously, something worthwhile to contribute can be stated in fewer words.

 

Golgo 13
I'm not trying to hammer the value of what you're posting. Might be pretty good. But if I wanted to google up a few websites on the subject, then I could also get some pretty good information. I've got lots of stuff to do, so I don't have time to read every science page on the internet. That's an exaggerations, Golgo. The point is that a short comment on the subject gets read. By me and others. Screenful after screenful gets skipped. We leave saying to ourselves, "Yeah man, that Golgo sure is a brilliant chap. Wonder what he was saying?"

 

I wanted to start on this again im sorry I forgot you dont need to run out of oil for things to start gong downhill. It looks like we have just reached world peak oil or it is very soon and then production of oil will start going down and demand will still keep rising. I just ordered the book "The Party's Over" By Richard Henberg. Everything we do relies on oil i cant think of one thing i do that doesn't demand oil. I personally believe the collapse os society is impossible to avoid. Its just a matter of time and it is too late to try alternative resources and all that crap about hydrogen cells is bull crap lies all hydrogen does is carry energy it does not make it.

 

it is too late to try alternative resources

Not at all. Time is short, but not too late. The Sun puts out a trillion times as much energy as our civilisation requires; once we start to exploit the star in the middle of our system correctly the problem will be trying to think of things to do with all that energy.

 

Huuummmm... what would you sugest?

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I know what I would do if all the Sun's energy were available for the use of our civilisation; build s fleet of starships to travel to nearby stars and start the process there. Before too many millions of years are up the stars in our local region would be surrounded by solar collection swarms.