A Tale of Two Speeches--OPEC's Demand Side Fear Is Very Real
Posted by Prof. Goose on September 15, 2007 - 10:00am
This is a guest post by Roger Conner Jr., known on TOD as ThatsItimout.
(Throughout, all headlines in all caps are mine, to help structure the content of the remarks, extracted from the following speeches. Links are provided so that the original remarks and slides can be viewed in entirety by the reader)
Presentation by Dr. Nimat B. Abu Al-Soof, Upstream Oil Industry Analyst, Secretariat, to the OPEC-organized session "The Petroleum Industry: New Realities Ahead?", at the Offshore Technology Conference 2007, Houston, Texas, 30 April - 3 May.
http://www.opec.org/opecna/Speeches/2007/OPECSpareCapacity.htm
If we look at the future, however, the issue of security of demand, which is intrinsically linked to the issue of security of supply, is of very real concern. Without confidence that there will be demand for OPEC oil, the incentive to undertake investment will also be reduced because of concerns that this will lead to large levels of unused capacity and, in turn, to downward pressures on oil prices.
This would result in huge revenue losses and OPEC Member Countries, as developing countries with strong competing needs for financial resources, would be adversely affected in terms of available resources for education, healthcare and infrastructure.
THE THREAT OF NON-OPEC GROWTH
To complete the picture, I will now turn to non-OPEC supply. The impact of Engineering & Procurement capital expenditure increases on non-OPEC growth since 2002 has been positive. In fact on average, production has increased at record rates. Increased investment has also resulted in the stabilization of production in many mature fields by slowing the decline rate of many, enabled the development of marginal fields, allowed for more exploration and the application of more technology, and kicked off an expansion of projects under development and fields in production.
The one significant blip was 2005, when the Gulf of Mexico witnessed its most intense storms in 100 years.
Other events, such as the sinking of the world’s largest floating production platform in Brazil in 2001 and the collapse of Russia’s largest oil company in 2004 had very little impact on non-OPEC supply. In the six year period from 2000 non-OPEC oil production growth averaged 800,000 b/d per year, nearly five times higher than the period 1990-99, and one of the highest growth rates in 20 years.
However, the fact that non-OPEC production growth fell behind that of world demand growth for the years 2003-06 – reversing earlier trends of exceeding or matching demand growth – combined with the frequency of accidents and of downward forecast revisions, led the analytical community to under appreciate non-OPEC’s recent performance and to essentially write off its potential.
NON-OPEC GROWTH, FROM WHERE?
Regionally, Russia and the Caspian region will lead non-OPEC growth, with the bulk of the increase expected to come from the Caspian. Outside these areas, supply growth is driven primarily by increases in offshore West Africa, offshore Latin America, Gulf of Mexico and non-conventional in North America. The Middle East, OECD Asia and other parts of Asia will show modest gains, while Western Europe is expected to decline driven by a fall in output from the North Sea.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MAINTAINING EXPENSIVE “SPARE” CAPACITY?
But as a result of these uncertainties affecting security of demand, OPEC Member Countries will be reviewing their future capacity expansion plans. It also begs question: with these investment uncertainties where does the onus of maintaining sufficient spare capacity lie?
To conclude, there are challenges and uncertainties, but we believe the overall picture for the industry is positive. During the next few years we expect to see a strong increase in non-OPEC supply and OPEC capacity.
OPEC spare capacity is expected to continue to rise in the medium term and the required OPEC crude is likely to drop or remain flat at best until 2009. In order to ensure market stability, however, players in OPEC and non-OPEC countries must collaborate strongly.
This is all the more important given the challenges that the industry is currently facing and the uncertainties driven by factors like the growth of the world economy, consuming country energy policies (substantial downside risk to demand) and technological developments.
Below is the PDF link to slide used in a Presentation by Dr. Fuad Siala, Alternative Sources of Energy Analyst, Energy Studies Dept., OPEC Secretariat, to the World Refining & Fuels Conference, Brussels, Belgium, 8-10 May 2007
http://www.opec.org/opecna/Speeches/2007/attachments/Transport_Energy.pdf
-------------------------------
(Notes on above remarks) Both speaker and several other OPEC speakers have repeatedly stressed over and over that “Security of supply and security of demand are tightly related.”
Dr Siala recently made news when he expressed concern that oil was being “discriminate” against oil: (EUNN) London - OPEC is growing uncomfortable with all of the global criticism toward oil and talk of alternative fuels, according to Fuad Siala, alternative energy sources analyst at the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries who said in Brussels at a Hart energy conference, "We have great concerns about this ... about policies which discriminate against oil,"
http://moneynews.newsmax.com/money/archives/st/2007/5/9/120724.cfm
The OPEC speakers have made reference to concern about this regarding the “biofuels”. However, it seems hard to believe that the biofuels along are able to create much concern in OPEC nations about lost market share, although in some of their slides they do show that only a 5% percent penetration (above what is used to replace MTBE as a fuel supplement) could cost them billions, in particular in their big markets in Europe)
But let us consider another possibility: Is it possible that it is not biofuels that have the OPEC (i.e., the Saudis) nervous, but instead, developments such as this...
http://electricandhybridcars.com/index.php/pages/phoenixpickup.html
http://www.usatoday.com/money/autos/2007-07-25-toyota-plugin_N.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0946978520070809?feedTyp...
Conclusion
What we are seeing is a confluence of technology that gives us a real view forward toward to a possible future in which the transportation sector consumes less oil per vehicle mile traveled, potentially much less.
Batteries are advancing, and nano-technology makes the possibility of even faster future advance obtainable.
If grid based hybrids can be made viable, the OPEC nations face a 4 fold decline in oil consumption per new car sold if it is an advanced plug hybrid. What this means is that the grid based “plug” hybrid autos could have an impact out of all proportion to the numbers of them sold, with each one sold essentially wiping out the consumption of three or four vehicles. If one considers the possibility of using CNG (compressed natural gas) or LPG (Propane) in even a small number of such cars, the decline in transportation fuel consumption could revolutionize the energy markets. Using natural gas or propane becomes a real option in such advanced cars because the fuel carried on board is used in such small quantity, with 10 gallons providing the range that a 30 or 40 gallon tank of gasoline now provides.
The OPEC nations are being asked, sometimes very curtly, to make massive investments in oil producing and refining infrastructure based on increasing oil demand. It is well known that many of the OPEC nations face a future of growing populations and increased need for Western capital to satisfy rising expectations in their home countries, rising home energy needs, and to service increasing debt loads.
What if the predicted increasing demand for oil does not materialize?
What if unconventional oil, using advanced in situ extraction methods such as THAI in the Canadian Tar Sands, really begins to deliver big production?
The Europeans have already made it a stated goal to reduce EU fossil fuel consumption by some 20% by 2020. Many observers feel that goal may be far too optimistic, but the OPEC nations have to ask, could they do it, and if so, what are the implications for our revenue stream?
The American and Japanese automakers are now beginning to look at competition from other auto manufacturers, and being pushed to actually deliver the “clean” and lean autos they have been long promising. They in turn are pressing the battery makers for the product needed to do it, and creating innovative financing structures to be able to meet the market demand for affordability. Can they do it?
No one knows. Ironically, the people who most doubt Western technology advance are the Westerners themselves. The OPEC oil suppliers must shiver at the thought that once more, as in so many industries before, the technicians might just do the impossible.
The West and OPEC have one thing in common: All of our futures could very well hang in the balance based on what happens in labs and shops around the world. And the clock is moving very, very fast.
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Roger:
What you say with regard to auto fuel consumption is all well and good as far as it goes, but it seems to me that its really very focused on wealthy states patterns of car use. What about China, India, etc.? The car makers goal there is to bring an encono-box car to market at a retail price point of about $US 4,000.
http://www.carmagazine.co.uk/news.php?sid=783&page=1
The target market there is folks who are now driving a motorcycle or scooter, or using mass transit. Given the rapid economic growth rates in these regions and the relationship between income and car ownership we have seen in the past, even with more expensive car designs:
it seems to me likly that such a build-out might happen. I have not heard anyone suggest that a plug hybrid can be produced at this price point, or that the fuel consumption from these very cheap cars will be anything near as good as the scooters or mopeds that folks are driving there now, so it seems to me quite possible that the fuel savings from high tech cars sold in the north will be soaked up, and probably then some, a first time Indian car owner may well be able to out-bid an African farmer on the price of a gallon of diesel for some time to come.
When plug-in hybrids are proposed as a solution, it is responsible to discuss the massive amounts of coal and natural gas they consume - more in terms of barrel equivalent than the amount of oil consumed by conventional cars, because there is loss when coal and natural gas are converted to electricity, and there is loss when electricity is distributed.
Plug-in hybrids do not mean using less fuel. They mean trading oil for even more coal and natural gas.
Coal and natural gas have their own problems.
Natural gas production in America peaked thirty years ago, and in North America peaked recently. Importing natural gas from overseas requires liquefying the gas. This wastes 30% of its energy and makes for boats that can explode with incredible force.
Coal is far dirtier than oil, and any major transition from oil to coal may spark "peak coal" in our lifetimes.
Anyway, the problem with cars isn't what fuel they use. The problem is that the act of propelling one person 30 miles to work in a 2,000 pound box at 70mph is unsustainable, dirty, increasingly expensive, and destroys the natural world.
We can't assume that the lifestyle made popular by cheap oil energy will continue unchanged when oil is gone.
The allure of the glittering life of cheap oil is wearing thin. For example, once it was fun to dream about, and finally be able to purchase a cute little British sports car and drive the back roads, through the unspoiled wilderness of the Western USA -- etc., supply your own dream ("See the USA/ In your Chevrolet").
Maybe it's just that I'm getting older, but now the forests all are decimated, the roads are crowded, the restaurants are all the same, and a $300 hotel room awaits you at the end of the road -- I would rather stay home, and I do.
It seems a shame that people can't moderate their behavior and build a rational society for the benefit of everyone-- we all seem to have to stampede to collapse before something new can emerge.
It looks like Nate Hagens will have something to say about that at the ASPO conference; I hope the speech will be available on line, since I won't be able to go to Ireland.
Pure ICE vs. hybrid vs. EV vehicle overall Efficiency:
The answer on EV vs. ICE efficiency for plug-in hybrids depends on a lot of factors but my understanding is that it generally favors the EV side, depending on how much is from "plug-in".
This issue is very much in Engineer-Poet's camp and one resource is his now fairly static site, the Ergosphere as well as his posts here. From the EV side of the argument: Debunking the Myth of EVs and Smokestacks and PDF of same.
An older (2000) CA report "Fuel Cycle Energy Conversion Efficiency Analysis" pdf.
The Wikis Hybrid electric vehicle and Battery electric vehicle address the issue and provide a lot of links.
It partially depends where you live. In Ontario, electricity is nuclear and hydroelectric power for the most part, with fossil fuels only accounting for 36% of it.
But even if it were all coal or oil, back-of-the-envelope calculations seem to indicate that high efficiency coal turbines are more efficient (given higher combustion temperatures) than internal combustion engines.
A quick internet search reveals efficiencies of 45-59% being possible for coal plants (Wiki,e8.org). Even with losses for electricity transmission, rectification etc, this seems like a good deal compared with an average 20% efficient internal combustion engine. Possibly 10-20% better than a prius (36% efficient?), even after losses.
PHEVs don't seem like they're a SOLUTION per se, but they seem to be a decent silver BB.
You're right that our lifestyle won't continue as-is, but tiny Smart-car sized PHEVs will probably be part of how we adapt.
According to this, an all-electric car is about twice as efficient as a Prius, assuming a 60% efficient modern cogenerating electric plant, which would make it somewhere around 100mpg based on well-to-wheel energy consumption. One would expect a plug-in hybrid to be fairly similar, at least when running solely on electric.
Thanks. Note that the "double" is for natural gas fired plants. Still, even coal-generated electricity would be more efficient then gas, if not as convenient.
I worked this out a while ago, and keep reposting it as it keeps coming up. Turns out its really not the silver bullet some claim.
California gets half our electricity from natural gas. Assuming NG electricity is not so valid for the USA as a whole but maybe Tesla plans to market in silicon valley. For now.
Anyways the efficiency of gasoline powered cars don't matter if there is no gasoline.
I plan to charge all these EVs during the day with solar panels. How do you plan to fuel all those hybrids?
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
True.
Most vehicle use is during the day. Its tough to charge your EV during the day.
Most schemes I read plan to charge these EVs during the night on wasted capacity (coal plants don't shut down quickly so often are left wasting power overnight). And that was what I originally wrote the above for.
Solar has severe drawbacks for charging at night.
If I got to make the decision I'd go for nuke and wind.
Most vehicles are driven to work during the day and left in the company parking lot for eight hours. Google already has solar powered recharging stations for employees with PHEVs.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
robert2734's comment is good. The thing is, the average vehicle is parked 23 hours of the day, and 90% of the time it's offstreet.
It's just a question of putting a connection at that parking space. It's done in Canada & Minnesota at parking meters & garages for engine pre-heating.
Mostly true, but mostly beside the point.
When discussing massive numbers of electric cars, the typical concern is the additional generating capacity that would have to be added to power them. When adding new generating capacity, what matters is the efficiency of new generating plants, not the average efficiency of the decades-old ones that make up the grid now. Accordingly, the relevant efficiencies to consider really are the higher ones.
Moreover, electric vehicles are qualitatively better than gas-powered vehicles in the sense that they're much less constrained by fuel type. Peak oil is often described as not an energy crisis but a liquid fuels crisis; without that reliance on liquid fuels, electric vehicles are fundamentally different in peak oil terms.
With whatever's convenient, since they're not at all picky about fuel type.
One of the benefits of wide-spread plug-in vehicles would be a wide-spread network of batteries hooked up to the grid. Those would be exceptionally useful for smoothing out wind and solar PV generation more cheaply and efficiently than by adding pumped storage.
No disagreement here. Like I said, it all comes down to how you charge these EVs.
We are going to have to parallel deployment of large ev fleets with huge investments in elec generation and grid capacity.
My fear is this is going to come too little and too late.
"We are going to have to parallel deployment of large ev fleets with huge investments in elec generation and grid capacity. My fear is this is going to come too little and too late."
We won't need new generation and grid capacity for night time charging for at least 10 years, and wind can easily grow to the size needed in that time.
VW already has a 1L/100km car - it only carries 2 people in tandom. A Prius will never be a fuel efficient car as it's big and heavy and designed to go fast. It's got a monster engine that is running at such a tiny fraction of full throttle and has to operate over such a wide range of RPMs that it'll never be efficient.
The only real option is a 4hp IC/heat/turbine engine which generates the average power necessary for a car. That also generates a continous source of heat which is necessary for those of us outside la-la land where we have fall - winter and spring and -30C weather.
Parallel hybrids are useless with only marginal gains over a small IC car (and the gains are really only in the city driving - driving which is most easily avoided).
In short a parallel hybrid is a solution to a non-existant problem; it's just for people who wish to appear green and refuse to accept that radical reduction in energy use and change in lifestyle is necessary.
Oh, man, this made me actually laugh out loud. I take it you don't own a Prius, nor have ever driven one.
Big? Well, it's classified as a mid-sized car. So, not big, and not small. Compared to other mid-sized cars, at ~2700 lbs. it weighs anywhere from 500 to 1,000 lbs. less than other cars in its class. Granted, 2700 lbs. does not make it a potato chip, but then I'm less likely to get squashed by a Ford F-350. That 'monster' engine you refer to is a 1.5L four cylinder. That eliminates the 'fast' part right away. With the electric assist, it can get out of it's own way, but I'm not about to race for pinks anytime soon.
It's unfair to compare a 2 person VW test vehicle to a mid-sized production car that can carry four plus their luggage. I'm averaging about 50mpg in my Prius. Efficiency is not a destination, but a sliding scale. The Prius isn't perfect, but it's more than twice as efficient as my last car.
. . and please elaborate how a 4hp engine of any type will move anything heavier than a small motorbike.
"Plug-in hybrids do not mean using less fuel. They mean trading oil for even more coal and natural gas."
No, they don't. PHEV's fit very, very nicely with wind power, and will work just fine with solar if need be.
Yes of course, but wind and solar are intermittent, and since nobody's ever used them as the primary energy source for a society, we don't know yet how well they scale up. There are promising stories coming out of the wind and solar fields, but as fields they are still so tiny that it's hard to say.
"since nobody's ever used them as the primary energy source for a society, we don't know yet how well they scale up."
That's not really a serious argument, it's just a vague concern. There's nothing mysterious about wind or solar. Their engineering characteristics are very well known, and there's not reason to think they won't work.
Please note that we'll have many decades to phase out fossil fuels, and we'll have nuclear, wave, geothermal, biomass, etc to balance things out.
Of course wind and solar "work." People have used wind for hundreds of years to grind cereals into flour. Where they may not "work" is as the primary energy source for industrialized society. Nobody can really say if they can, because nobody ever tried. It's naive to assume that they will scale up just fast enough to replace the energy loss from declining fossil fuel, simply because we'd like them to.
It is a very serious concern that the exotic materials and simple metals required for high-efficiency wind and solar have never been produced by electric power before. All these things have only ever been produced with coal and oil power. We simply do not know whether it is possible for wind and solar to cover the energy cost of even their own maintenance and production.
"Where they may not "work" is as the primary energy source for industrialized society. Nobody can really say if they can, because nobody ever tried."
Not really. As I said, their operating/engineering characteristics are well know. It's straightforward to project how they'll work.
"It's naive to assume that they will scale up just fast enough to replace the energy loss from declining fossil fuel, simply because we'd like them to."
Not at all. Wind is here: it was 20% of new US generation in 2006, with 2.5 GW of new capacity. It's a straightforward manufacturing exercise to scale it up to the roughly 25-50GW per year that's needed, and the roughly $75B scale is not all that large or difficult. Nuclear could also do the job, if needed, and solar is right behind. We have decades to do it in, with many different technologies as alternatives. Relatively easy, and very low risk.
"It is a very serious concern that the exotic materials and simple metals required for high-efficiency wind and solar have never been produced by electric power before. "
Sure they have. Manufacturing is powered by electricity, not by coal or oil. At the moment steel needs coal, but we have many decades to find substitutes: they've never been needed before, that's all. Actually, the straightforward substitution is aluminum for steel.
"We simply do not know whether it is possible for wind and solar to cover the energy cost of even their own maintenance and production."
Sure we do. Wind has an E-ROI of 40-80. Solar is 20-50, depending on technology. That's what E-ROI means: they only need a tiny fraction of their own output for their own manufacture.
Sorry Nick its hard to believe anything you have said.
20% of new generation, so what, you will need to cover the whole of California if you want to approach what is generated by other means.
Solar needs Old Sol, its a joke. Coal power plants have millions of years of sun in their bunkers.
Nuclear is dirty in refining the Uranium and waste storage, the ore is finite maybe as finite as oil.
I surmise the reason nuclear power plants are not being built is that as the oil supply declines there will be no profit in it.
If you had $10 billion would you build an N plant?
What WOULD you spend your $10 billion on?
Manufacturing powered by electricity? Go ask a farmer what he relies on for power, manufacturing is made possible by feeding the populace and the transport of man, machine and raw materials to and from.
Steel from the ore stage needs much more than coal for manufacture, even recycling is not possible without oil.
"Sure we do. Wind has an E-ROI of 40-80. Solar is 20-50, depending on technology. That's what E-ROI means: they only need a tiny fraction of their own output for their own manufacture".
I nearly choked on this..........I don't take a great deal of notice of charts and figures used in other posts and I don't use them myself, common sense is my best guide but I would just love you to give me an example of your claim.
I'll bet you solar panels and wind turbines cannot be manufactured without oil.
I'll bet solar panels and wind turbines can't be manufactured with power supplied by itself.
I'd like to be proved wrong though.
"I don't take a great deal of notice of charts and figures used in other posts and I don't use them myself, common sense is my best guide"
I think this is your difficulty. Without learning numbers and doing calculations your "common sense" is just a compilation of other people's opinions, part information, part misinformation. You need to start learning basic quantitative energy stuff to inform your intuition...
Yep as I thought, typical of you, nothing to back up your figures plucked out of your imagination, so you get on a high horse and personal attack.
"You need to start learning basic quantitative energy stuff to inform your intuition..."
Why do I need? To be able to converse with your superior intellect or what?
As I said charts and figures here are used by posters to proclaim their personal legitimacy, most of the time I'm supposed to accept that they are correct, who knows if they are or not so I use common sense, I don't even have to be smart to use it.
The feeling I get is a lot of people here troll the internet for figures and generally make them fit the argument they are espousing.
I'm still waiting for your example.
Confirmation Bias
Some posters are more prone to this than others. I sometimes wonder if Nick's optimism towards EVs is a symptom of this.
"I sometimes wonder if Nick's optimism towards EVs is a symptom of this."
Not really. I looked at the numbers, and EV's clearly worked out.
I suppose it might help if I tell you some things I'm not optimistic about - those are climate change and species extinction. I have no confidence that we'll move quickly enough to prevent disastrous effects on our environment: rising sea levels, and ocean acidification. Species extinctions seem to be accelerating, and climate change is one of the drivers (along with habitat loss).
You certainly have looked at the numbers. I don't refute that.
It just seems you take the numbers at face value or more. You show no skepticism towards any marketing material or press releases.
When GM claims 2010 for the volt you think Jan 1 2010. I note that GM is now claiming "late 2010" and think that date is from some pointy haired exec and expect the volt to be 2011 at the earliest (possibly much later)
You claim triumphantly that HEV sales are 2.3% of the market and doubling every 18 months. Yeah true, but 2.5% of just the US and doubling from such a tiny number of sales is not a difficult feat.
You add up enough of these optimistic numbers and you can easily confirm the idea that EVs or PHEVs are here, viable, and a significant wedge.
In the end we are not far apart. I think these vehicles are coming, maybe 5 years later than you think, and not nearly the wedge you believe them to be.
Heck, if Ace's graph is right, even your optimistic view isn't going to happen in time to prevent a collapse.
"It just seems you take the numbers at face value or more. You show no skepticism towards any marketing material or press releases."
Not at all, I just know how to evaluate what they're saying. Take a look at gm-volt.com for more info.
I'll continue tomorrow...
Do you think I just fell off the turnip truck yesterday?!? Of course I've seen gm-volt.com
And I disagree, you are not objectively evaluating what you are reading. Like I said before, it stinks of confirmation bias.
For example a couple of weeks ago you were trumpeting that GM had selected the batteries for the volt, and it was only a matter of months till it hit the road. I checked gm-volt and sure enough, they had only accepted one of the contestants for the competition to determine the supplier for the production battery packs. And the battery pack delivered for the competition was only a fraction of what is called for in the production vehicle.
You just want to believe so badly your mind just isn't processing the data objectively.
"Do you think I just fell off the turnip truck yesterday?!? Of course I've seen gm-volt.com"
No insult intended. I simply think if you read gm-volt carefully you'll find it very encouraging.
" a couple of weeks ago you were trumpeting that GM had selected the batteries for the volt, and it was only a matter of months till it hit the road. "
I'm not sure what you're referring to, as I'm pretty sure I never said something quite like that, as I've been aware that GM hasn't announced a winner, and has said quite clearly that they won't until next summer. What I might've said was that a prototype was expected to be available within months, which is what both contestants have said.
"they had only accepted one of the contestants for the competition to determine the supplier for the production battery packs."
Actually, they simply promoted one of the contestants to "tier one" supplier status, which means that they work directly with them.
"the battery pack delivered for the competition was only a fraction of what is called for in the production vehicle."
I'm not sure what you're referring to. No battery pack has been delivered, AFAIK.
"You just want to believe so badly your mind just isn't processing the data objectively."
No, the information, and my interpretation, is pretty straightforward. A PHEV like this is a straightforward engineering exercise, and a new car takes 3-4 years to bring to production. GM started last year, and expects to start production in 2010, and produce about 60,000/year in 2010/2011.
Here's my take: GM was never enthusistic about EV's, and only produced the EV-1 half-heartedly, and scrapped it ASAP.
Since then they have stated publicly that 1) that was their biggest mistake in recent history, 2) they accept the idea of near-term peak oil, and 3) that their longterm existence depends on moving away from oil.
GM is acutely aware of the damage to their reputation from the EV-1, and the PR and sales advantage the Prius has given Toyota. They have put their reputation on the line in pushing for the Volt, and hope to use it to regain a competitive advantage.
There are three key questions here: is GM sincere, are the batteries adequate, and is GM realistic in their production
timeframe?
I think I've answered the first. It seems clear to me that the batteries are capable - it's certainly possible that there will be a glitch that will delay things, but that seems unlikely. It's important to note that GM has created redundancy with this competition, and that there are plenty of other potential suppliers as well. The worst that could happen is that neither of these work out (which is relatively unlikely), and that might add a year to GM's schedule. Finally, GM has it's flaws, but they really do know how to build a new car. The scheduling info they've given is consistent with my knowledge about production timing with other new vehicles, and I see no reason to doubt it.
You have to keep in mind the vicious competition between GM and Toyota (as well as Honda, and others). GM is hoping to beat the plug-in Prius by a matter of months, and they're pulling out all the stops to do so.
There will be several plug-ins in 2009 and 2010, including the Saturn Vue, the Volt, a likely Honda, and probably others operating in stealth mode.
"When GM claims 2010 for the volt you think Jan 1 2010."
No, I never said that. I have said that I think GM hopes to introduce the Volt ASAP - see my other note.
"You claim triumphantly that HEV sales are 2.3% of the market and doubling every 18 months."
That was a reply to someone who stated that sales were 1%. 2.3% is significantly greater, and the growth rate is important.
"Yeah true, but 2.5% of just the US and doubling from such a tiny number of sales is not a difficult feat."
Not really. Just a few years ago such a number was scoffed at by skeptics.
"You add up enough of these optimistic numbers and you can easily confirm the idea that EVs or PHEVs are here, viable, and a significant wedge."
Ah, well, they are. The numbers are real, and so are the EV/PHEV's.
"In the end we are not far apart. I think these vehicles are coming, maybe 5 years later than you think, and not nearly the wedge you believe them to be."
Well, I have no question that the impact of PHEV/EV's won't be as fast as we would like. We're looking at a difficult transition, just not certain doom.
"Heck, if Ace's graph is right, even your optimistic view isn't going to happen in time to prevent a collapse."
Well, Ace's graph seems a bit pessimistic to me. Also, it appears likely that US oil production will stabilize and slowly climb, CTL and biofuels will contribute a modest but noticeable amount, and vehicle efficiency and PHEV/EV's will contribute a large and increasing amount: PHEV's could be 50% of light vehicle sales in 10 years, quite easily, and there could be 30M PHEV's on the road, reducing light vehicle fuel consumption by 20%, a contribution which would grow further quite quickly.
Heck, we could reduce US oil consumption by 20% in 6 months with relatively painless and effective conservation measures - horrors, we might have to carpool....
Any figures are better than no figures, though.
Someone's common sense may or may not be right, but it can't be checked; figures are much better for communication simply because of how many ways they can be independently verified (e.g., check the reliability and authenticity of the source, check whether different sources agree, even check by directly measuring yourself).
Figures are what got us the computer you're writing on; one man's "common sense" is what got us an invasion of Iraq. Don't expect those of us who prefer figures to abandon them lightly.
No - to be credible. Unfortunately, your common sense - no matter how persuasive it may be to you - is nothing more than an opinion to anyone else.
More than that, really - common sense and intuition are built up by the things we deal with on an everyday basis, and for anything we don't deal with on an everyday basis - like wind turbine energetics, or science and engineering in general - common sense and intuition are demonstrably ineffective. So much so that in certain areas - quantum mechanics is notorious for this - students are warned in advance that their intuitions will lead them astray. And yet QM is one of the most rigorously tested theories in all of science; our intuitions are just wrong when we try to apply them outside the scope in which they were built.
That's not to say intuition and common sense aren't useful - they're extremely valuable for pointing us in the general direction. But only the general direction - details come from numbers.
So do you take for granted all the figures and graphs you see printed here?
You of course use common sense? If so we are not so different.
If not we are worlds apart.
Quantam mechanics is a fascinating field and I have read quite a few books discussing qm, string theory and particle theory, however it does not relate to what we are concerned about here but I think I understand the analogy you make.
If I came across as insinuating my common sense and or intuition is perfect I apologise.
Yes, but only as the beginning of my decision-making process.
Figures and graphs are numerical data, so I evaluate them numerically - I check their sources, check the reliability of those sources, check their agreement with other sources, and so on. Intuition is excellent for pointing out areas where figures or graphs need to be checked because they are likely to be wrong.
Likely.
Sometimes when intuition says a figure is wrong, it's the intuition that's wrong. That's great, it means I learn something, but it also means that "my intuition says no" is not a reliable reason for believing a set of numbers to be incorrect. And if I don't consider my intuition reliable enough, I'm certainly not going to consider anyone else's intuition reliable enough for that.
Intuition is a powerful and valuable internal voice, but it's at its best when it's just that - internal. It'll point you at the answer - usually - but digging it out requires more careful analysis.
"typical of you, nothing to back up your figures plucked out of your imagination"
I didn't mean to insult you: I gave you numbers, you said numbers weren't important, I replied that they were, and that you should learn some basic energy numbers so that you know that for yourself. That's not an insult, it's just the truth. Further, it's not unreasonable for me to suggest that you do some of the work in researching details, rather than just asking me to provide it all.
Nevertheless, you asked for backup. Here's an example:
"Wind has an E-ROI of 40-80."
Take a look at this Oil Drum article, keeping in mind that current wind turbines are 1.5MW to 5MW, so they're off the right end of Figure 2: EROI vs. wind turbine power rating.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/10/17/18478/085
Nick
A perfect example of what I said about figures and graphs.
They are biased to suit the argument being espoused.
Did you read all the comments on the article?
I think a true indication of EROI would be if they used wind turbine energy to manufacture and erect another wind turbine.
I doubt it could ever be done so in my opinion the EROI is meaningless.
"A perfect example of what I said about figures and graphs.
They are biased to suit the argument being espoused."
You've lost me there. I didn't see significant disagreement with the wind E-ROI figures in the comments.
"Did you read all the comments on the article? "
Sure.
"I think a true indication of EROI would be if they used wind turbine energy to manufacture and erect another wind turbine."
Sure, and it certainly can be done.
"I doubt it could ever be done so in my opinion the EROI is meaningless."
Ummm...why do you think so, specifically?
The political winds are blowing against coal. Capitalists have begun to become fearful about investing in new coal plants because they fear tougher emissions regulations and a carbon tax. For example, TXU scaled back its coal electric plans in Texas, About 30 requests to build nuclear power plants are about to get filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The capitalists are thinking that non-fossil fuels energy sources are safer bets for investments that will last many decades.
Therefore I do not see electric cars as necessarily meaning more coal electric plants.
I have to agree. Perhaps in 10 years we can get the US fleet efficiency from 20 mpg to 25, but in that time so many more cars will be on he road both in OECD and in the developing world that at best we are breakeven, more likely a slow rise in consumption. Hybrid sales at $3.00 gas are an anemic 1%, completely irrelevant. The idea that people will buy significant quantities of plug ins (or start taking trains that in most cities don't even exist) with gas below $7 is ridiculous.
Only one thing will reduce demand significantly, and that is $200 oil. And that is where we are headed.
My guess is that the Saudi fears about demand destruction have got to relate more to fears about what their society will look like in 50 years. I.e. they need to let oil rise to $200 now, so they can make a ton of money over the next several decades and pour it into industrial projects that will diversify their economies away from simple oil and gas production so that their grandchildren don't all starve to death.
That is what I would be thinking if I was in their sandals.
They can keep thinking, but they'll never make a microchip there. Eventually these countries will go back to the way they were. In between it will get very nasty.
Matt
mtn--
I agree--
These are societies based on superstition, with science and knowledge the enemy.
Any move toward a science or reason based economy are not possible.
The problem is that there are 20 million or so Saudi nationals now and they can't go back to herding sheep in the desert. It will be mass starvation. It is a gradual process moving from a traditional society to an advanced industrial economy, and oil revenues don't necessarily encourage development. Hopefully, the Saudi people see that they now need to adapt to a world beyond petroleum.
The Saudis see that just as clearly as we see the need to dig into that one supergiant field we have left - our own conservation. Notice how far that idea is progressing ...
We here believe that because we see something coming we can avert it. I don't have a history degree but I might as well for the reading I've done, and I think humans pretty much go right into "cats in a sack" mode over stuff like this. A forty something might be philosophical about life changes but a twenty one year old who can't get what he saw those just five years older than him have, even if it was transient, is tailor made for ... biting and scratching.
My son is fascinated with cars and racing games now. Every time this comes up I tell him "Things will be different when you're older." I hope he ends up sweating in the fields like my generation did, and not marching through them with a rifle over his shoulder like my father's generation, but I have no confidence in our leaders being able to face a total paradigm shift like the one coming at us.
Are hybrid sales 'anemic' or is the small percentage due to lack of production? Hybrid sales IMHO are constrained by a lack of batteries. There needs to be an order of magnitude increase in the production of batteries before hybrids can make up a serious percentage of sales.
The recent share price performance of my rare earth stocks (ARU, ALK) certainly implies that hybrids are never gonna happen on any significant scale but I prefer attributing this to market ignorance. Rare earths are used in both NdFeB-magnets (magnet flux density 1-1,5T) for electric motors and NiMH batteries (which require around 12 kg per car).
http://clients.weblink.com.au/clients/Arafura/article.asp?asx=ARU&view=6...
http://www.lynascorp.com/content/upload/files/press_releases/BCC_FINAL_R...
Current REE consumption growth rates are running at around 10% p.a. or a double every 7 years with world consumption at around 125kt. The reserve situation is murky to say the least and the USGS does its best to obfuscate the numbers through booking of potential resources which haven´t been found yet. E.g. they claim reserves of 13 Mio.t REE in the US, the country they should know best about whilst the only sizable deposit I´m aware of is the soon-to-be-recommissioned Mountain Pass mine in California, owned by Unocal, now Chevron, with resources of 2 Mio.t.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/
To give a ballpark number I estimate recoverable world reserves of REO at around 10 Mio.t. At 20kg REE/hybrid this even would not be sufficient to replace the current world car fleet with hybrids notwithstanding that the fleet is growing, REE have many other high-value-added applications with rapidly increasing demand, the mined rare earth mix is different from the REE demand distribution and after 10 years you´d have to recycle 100% in order to hold the number of rare earths in the cycle steady.
Or that they expect them to use lithium ion batteries, which don't seem to require the use of rare earths.
They would still need the neodymium for the electric motors which accounts for around 1/2 of the total value of all RE mined.
Lithium has a limited resource base as well (Again USGS claims that there are massive amounts of Li buried in Bolivia and Chile but I don´t believe them because nobody bothers developing them despite skyrocketing prices.); Li-ion/polymere batteries are around 5x more expensive than NiMH and, finally, Li has run into some snags because of working temperature restrictions. So, Li is no silver bullet.
BTW I´ve done a bottom-up analysis of the zinc-lead market and foresee a peak around 2015. If anybody´s interested I´ll post it here.
Very much. Please do post it.
"They would still need the neodymium for the electric motors"
Not necessarily: http://www.rasertech.com/
With diesel technology currently in existence allowing 60 mpg, there might not be a need for expensive hybrids. There were also many types of batteries. I recall you can even make a battery from a lemon sliced in half and a nail coated with zinc (galvanized) and a copper wire.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
I would think the decision to use a rare earth electric motor is independent of the decision to use a lithium battery. Unless someone can explain the connection to me. My bicycle has a rare earth motor and a lithium ion battery.
My guess is hybridization is still useful even if the diesel alone provides 60 mpg. The diesel engine is heavy and high inertia and won't peal rubber off the light worth a damn. We can run on electric until the diesel engine spins up to speed. Plus we can turn the diesel off at a red light. Plus we can regeneratively brake.
I've seen a clock run off copper and lead electrodes stuck in a apple. All that's required is two dissimilar metals and a electrolite. Since lemon juice is pH 2.5, it probably makes a better electrolyte. Rechargeable batteries that meet multiple specs simoultaneously is a different fish. High current charging and discharging, high efficiency, high energy density, low cost, low self-discharge, a million recharges, safety when abused, temperature sensitivity, no maintenance etc.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
I also agree.
All the changes in modes of transport should have been planned and implemented by now.
How can we realistically expect, consumers to buy these new hybrids in meaningful numbers?
Who is going to purchase their old vehicles (the government}?
If we did some how find the means and inclination to purchase these new vehicles what happens to the old vehicle manufacturing infrastructure and tooling, what incentive will vehicle builders need to mass produce the new products?
The answer I suppose is very high priced fuel but very high priced fuel will fuel inflation, recession and/or depression.
Consumers then will be much more concerned with the price of food not their family car, a cheap motor scooter can get you to and from work for maybe a month on a couple of gallons.
I only assume but I think oil will continue to be produced and sold simply because states with the ability to stockpile and hoard will do so. Strategic inventories will be increased if the opportunity presents.
What one country does not want another will gladly consume.
Because everyone knows oil is everything and it is a finite resource.
I don't know the answer but does anybody know how much oil goes into manufacturing a box of cornflakes and its delivery or a 2lb bag of flour. Are we eating oil?
The box of corn flakes is substantial - serveral times the calories contained in the corn flakes. Between the processing and the excessive packaging, much energy is lost. It is also very bulky at around 100g/l (varies widely by brand), so it takes more room on modes of transit, storage, retail, and in the household.
The flour should be much lower in embedded energy, as it is lightly processed and densely packed (about 1 kg/l). Large paper bags (or no bags at all) of milled or raw energy-dense foods such as flour, potatoes, corn, beans, etc are probably the most efficient way to grow and distribute food energy. Such products require no refrigeration, are generic (so no marketing & advertising losses, hopefully), are dense, are easy to grow, and are easy to store.
It is best to dig the well before you are thirsty.
Thanks Yartrebo.
Yes flour and rice are great for storage and convenience, they can feed the masses.
I believe oil though has enabled the mass production of these and other foods. It is the reason populations have exploded, they could not if they couldn't be fed.
Forget vehicles we need oil to eat.
As the oil prices goes up taking with it the price of food, the problem of the family car becomes moot.
If I could be assured the price of food will not rise (out of proportion)due to oil supply shortfalls then I have absolutely nothing to worry about.
[flour and rice are great for storage and convenience, they can feed the masses]
Not flour; it starts losing nutrient value immediately after milling. A better and cheaper approach is to make whole grains more easily available and get people to mill their own (coarser than they are used to, but not bad with fairly inexpensive modern home mills). Healthwise it would be far better to get people off processed flour and into whole grain products (both flours and cracked grains).
(An aside - I think we all have gotten the 'dig a well message'. ;o)
The population explosion is more likely due to 1) good sanitation and 2) modern medicine.
Oil and the 'green revolution' certainly helped places like India continue to expand their population, but that does not apply globally.
And we don't need oil for food. We just need oil for food 'as we now know it'.
We can raise (actually, excellent) food without petroleum based fertilizers and we can transport food to markets much more efficiently than we are now doing.
There's no reason why we can't move to 'locally produced' and organically grown food.
Sure, we won't have Chilean grapes in January. But we can do quite well with apples until the grape season rolls around again.
The oil peak is not followed by a oil precipice.
We ain't falling off into oblivion. We're just going to head off on a downslope of oil availability. And we need to get busy and build a new energy infrastructure.
(Call it digging a new well, if you like....)
Bob you are a smart man, you argue with class and knowledge and your utopian ideals are admirable but.........
I vigorously disagree that good sanitation and medicine are the reason for the population explosion.
Think for a moment, take oil out of the equation. What would the population of the world be now since 1900?
Look at the mass starvation which occurred in Bangladesh and Ethiopia. There is still huge starvation in Africa now.
Their populations did not grow because of good medicine and sanitation, it was because they could buy food with their labour.
Food provides life and sustains it.
Mass transportation, combine harvesters, crop dusters, refrigeration, pesticides and the motor vehicle are just a few of the oil uses which enable us to feed the masses.
Your other solutions are great, they will no doubt feed the few but the many will starve for lack of oil.
I'm hoping the decline in population will be gradual with the decline in oil as we adopt the solutions you suggest but if starvation occurs in a popluation armed to the teeth like the USA all bets are off.
Many fathers will not watch their child starve if they can take a shotgun and steal some.
Populations in developed countries have grown and largely stabilised at a sustainable levels. Due to birth control.
Big families are not desired or required.
The spread of HIV AIDS and other diseases is made possible by oil. Their containment was due to oil.
Various strains of flu spread throughout the world because of oil.
I could go on but what I still stand by is, that without the amount of oil we have right now we will not be able to feed everyone.
You'd be shocked.
On average, in the USA, about 10 Calories of oil is involved in every 1 Calorie of food you eat.
so, for example, a 12-oz. can of Coca Cola, with 160 Calories, took about 1600 calories of fossil fuels to get to your table.
Its the same with grain, vegetables, and manufactured foods. Its the fuel used by the farmer in his tractor, the petroleum-generated fertilizers and pesticides. The plastics and Styrofoam containers, the preservatives to keep it fresh (and the energy inputs to make THOSE petroleum products). The transport by land, sea, and air to get it to a processing plant. The energy the plant uses. More transport costs to your store, plus the refrigeration costs along the way. Then the costs while its in your own Fridge. Before you bother to sit down. Eating Organic removes only the pesticides and fertilizer, the rest of the input costs remain.
This is a common mistake, switching interchangeably between "fossil fuels" and "oil".
Those are not the same, however, and making that mistake grossly overstates the problems of peak oil. In particular, the largest fossil-fuel input into agriculture is natual gas for making fertilizer via haber-bosch.
Natural gas - as with all fossil fuels - is also limited, but it's on a different decline schedule from oil, so peak oil will not (directly) cause problems with fertilizer production.
"Hybrid sales at $3.00 gas are an anemic 1%, completely irrelevant."
No, they're 2.3% of sales, and doubling every 18 months.
Again, PHEV's are cost effective when gas exceeds $1.75/gallon.
That's great. The last number I remember hearing was 1%. I still don't think the overall fuel economy of the total fleet is going up, though, which is discouraging. A friend of mine just bought a new SUV despite my constant talk about "peak oil" and all the rest of it.
Really, people look at the price at the pump and make their decision. It's that simple.
Hybrid sales have jumped again - currently they're at 350K/year, out of 16M new light vehicles.
FWIW, here is a cite for 350K/yr and 2.3%. Sales are projected to increase to about 780K in 2010.
New fleet efficiency rose 3.9% from 2005 to 2006 - about 1 MPG.
New fleet efficiency rose 3.9% from 2005 to 2006 - about 1 MPG.
For where? The US? What about China? India?
Yet oil is 80 bucks a barrel and you can't even buy a PHEV. Something else must be going on here.
"What about China? India?"
Good question. Have any recent data?
"PHEV's are cost effective when gas exceeds $1.75/gallon.
- oil is 80 bucks a barrel and you can't even buy a PHEV. Something else must be going on here."
It's only been about 1 year since it was clear prices would stay above $1.75, and it takes 3 years to develop a new car. It's just normal capex lag.
Unfortunately not on hand. But we both know that a heck of a lot of cars are hitting the roads in these countries. They are going to easily wipe out any fuel savings 2.3% market share HEV are going to get you in the US.
The prius has been on the roads since 1997. Evs of one sort or another have been around since the dawn of the automobile. Gasoline has been over $1.75 since early 2004.
This is not just "normal capex lag".
" But we both know that a heck of a lot of cars are hitting the roads in these countries. They are going to easily wipe out any fuel savings 2.3% market share HEV are going to get you in the US."
Yeah. We have to hope they quickly grasp the value of PHEV/EV's. Given that the batteries and much other related stuff is being made there, I think they will.
"The prius has been on the roads since 1997. Evs of one sort or another have been around since the dawn of the automobile. Gasoline has been over $1.75 since early 2004.
This is not just "normal capex lag"."
No question there's enormous institutional resistance. OTOH, hindsight is 20/20; it wasn't clear that $1.75+ gasoline was essentially permanent in 2004; the kind of intelligence & ethics shown by Jimmy Carter & Toyota seems lamentably rare; and its been hard to fight against incredibly cheap FF's for a very long time.
The dam seems to have broken: GM has signed on to Peak Oil, and in an aggressive way. I think they really do see the Volt (and a related family of vehicles) as their future.
This is what I mean, You have just bought into the hype so bad, you just really need to believe its true.
GM is screwed, they know it, you know it. They got hit hard in the pr department by the movie "who killed the electric car". Some pointy haired exec thought it would be a good idea to move a concept car from the corner of the show room to the center to help fight the bad publicity. It worked, only it worked too well.
At the same time the volt came out Ford showed offed their series hybrid. Only they kept theirs in the corner just like GM should have. Toyota is just as cautious about their pHEV.
You got sucked up in they hype because you want to believe so badly. The Volt if and when it ever debuts will be a niche vehicle for a decade to come. And it very much has the possibility to sink what's left of GM should it flop. The liability from all those new untested battery packs in real world conditions is enormous. Even a small failure rate, spread over millions of vehicles would crush any of the major car makers. The others know it, and are proceeding much more cautiously.
The Volt is a PR stunt that got out of control. Now because of guys like you GM can't back out of it.
So now they have no choice but to make it work?
That doesn't sound so bad... ;)
I agree that the Volt was originally a trial balloon, without a lot of commitment. Now, though, I think they're committed. People like Chris Paine (of Who Killed...), and Calcars are taking GM seriously. They're frustrated that GM wants a no compromise car, and is therefore moving more slowly than otherwise, but they say that they believe that GM is serious.
"The liability from all those new untested battery packs in real world conditions is enormous."
Are you talking about fire hazard? Thermal runaway in li-ion's is pretty well understood. Toyota is stuck because the cobalt-based li-ion's require very high quality manufacturing to prevent fires (and they've had a number of other recalls, so they're afraid to risk a hit to their quality reputation), but other chemistries fundamentally don't have that problem.
"Even a small failure rate, spread over millions of vehicles would crush any of the major car makers."
Are you talking about fire hazard, or simply replacement liability? I'm not quite sure how you're figuring, and as you note elsewhere, it will take several years to get up to millions of units.
Please note that the Ford Pinto, for example, was the result of gross negligence on the part of Ford. If GM is careful I don't see the same kind of tort liability.
" I have not heard anyone suggest that a plug hybrid can be produced at this price point"
A PHEV with 20 mile range would require about 7KWH of batteries, which would cost about $400 using lead-acid. It's cost effective when gas exceeds $1.75/gallon.
That seems absurdly low.
Here's one actually observed datum, my own electric scooter. (www.egovehicles.com).
It weighs about 125lbs with lead-acid batteries, half that without. Most other electric scooters are toys and unsuitable for any real use.
Maximum speed is about 23 mph fully charged on flat ground, and realistic range (as I used it for commuting) over a moderate hill is 7 miles or so. Greater use of the battery capacity very quickly degrades lead-acid battery life. It is too slow to use on most trafficked streets unless there is a bike lane; it is about as fast as a road bike.
I replaced the batteries after about 1.5 years and 3000 or so miles at a cost of $180 shipped or so.
The 'fuel cost' (electricity) was utterly trivial for this scooter (maybe 5c a charge--my electric bill had no obviously noticable change), battery replacement not so. (As well as needing tires and tubes much more often than an automobile---3 or 4 tires at $30 each and more tubes at $5 each adds up).
Note these are not regular automotive batteries, they need to be high-discharge and high-rate-of discharge designed for scooter use.
This made me realize how far away electrics are---a gas scooter is more practical and useful for almost everybody. I didn't have one because I needed to use a path which was prohibited to engines, and the alternative was a 70 mph freeway where I'd also be illegal (and insane) unless I had a full strength motorcycle.
I can't use it for my current job, which is too far away.
Your scooter is doing much worse than the specs, at 20 mile range & 10,000 mile battery life - probably the lack of regenerative braking on that hill.
Anyway, you answered your own question: your batteries are 3x more expensive, because it's a small battery pack, and needs a high power to energy ratio.
Scooters are much less efficient than you'd expect: gas scooters are 40-80 mpg, and a Prius (at 20x the weight) gets 45 mpg.
Given their lack of safety, capacity, and protection from the elements, they are much less attractive in every way (including environmentally) than a PHEV/EV.
Unfortunately, it is absurdly low...wish it wasn't. Here's the problem.
226 AH Exide GC5 (6 volt) $105
http://www.sunelco.com/sunelcostore/productinfo.aspx?productid=641&categ...
(Trojan T-105's, which are quite popular are similar)
A good number for an EV is about 250 watt-hours/mile, any hybrid should use more (because of cooling demand on the ICE plus the extra weight, etc), but I'll use that lower number anyway. A 20 mile range will use about 5,000 watt-hours.
This is where the S Hs the F. Most PbA batteries are only capable of sustaining 1000amps. They'll cold crank 2000 for maybe 5 seconds, but after that all sorts of horror will occur. Thus 1000amps is your practical limit. Watts is a product of amperage and voltage. Watts is Power, the Tim Allen "argh! argh! argh!" factor. Those batteries listed above give 226amp hours at 6 volts.
You might be tempted to make a quick calculation:
Yay, only need 4 batteries($400)! Right? Well, depends on if you want to go anywhere.
That battery setup will only get you that at:
The problem begins. In order to get more horsepower, you need more Voltage(since you can't get more amperage). To get the voltage, you need to set the batteries up in series. To get to 12 volts you need to DOUBLE the battery pack. You might think this would double your range as well because if 6V+6V=12, why doesn't 226Amp-h+226Amp-h = 452Amp-hour? - Because you're getting it at 12Volts. When you combine two 6Volt batteries to get to 12Volts you do not add the Amp-hours together. So combining two 6Volt, 226Amp-hour batteries to get to 12Volts gives you ONE 12V, 226Amp-hour battery.
So for twice the battery pack (twice the money, twice the weight), you now have a whole 16 Horsepower potential and no improvement in range. "D'oh!" You might be able to get away with 32(potential) horsepower out in the world without getting completely run over, but now you're at four times the cost, four times the weight as the original calculation based on 6Volts.
A big however: Once you get beyond a certain amount of horsepower, you can make a reasonable argument that you'll not be using all of the battery's potential and additions to the pack to increase voltage will go towards range (since full power will not be used most of the time). That is, a 48Volt/200Ah pack run at 24Volts will give you 400Ah at those 24Volts.
No, but you do add the watt-hours together, and those are what provide range.
Tesla's sports car - at over 200 horsepower - requires 220Wh/mile on the EPA test cycle, so it's pretty clear that 250Wh/mile is the power consumption for an EV after it's at a reasonable performance level.
Say we want a 48 kilowatt engine. We provide 1000 amps at 48 volts DC. Maybe we go with wheel hub motors. Each of the four 6V batteries drives a separate motor that drives a separate wheel. No more hump. A computer sends control signals to all the motors.
Tesla's sports car uses lithium batteries so there isn't several tons of batteries to haul.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
OK, first, let's remember we're talking about a $4K car here. It won't weigh much, and it won't need 400HP.
2nd, each of your batteries have 6KW cruising power, and 12KW peak. Seven of them, as I specified, would have 56 HP cruising and 112 HP peak acceleration. That's not bad for a tiny car.
3rd, the Chevy Volt is spec'ed for 200 watt hours per mile, and that's a much larger car. Figure 150 watt hours per mile, for a range of 30 miles at 70% depth of discharge.
4th, as noted by Pitt the Elder, KWH's do indeed add up: double the voltage, double the KW's.
"because of cooling demand on the ICE"
I'm not sure what you mean there. Do you mean A/C for passengers? Cooling for the ICE engine?
Say your lead acid batteries can be recharged 400 times. So each trip costs you a buck worth of batteries and a buck worth of electricity. And you are dragging 150 pounds of batteries around the entire trip whether they have juice in them or not. And you have the PITA of recharging them. And they take luggage space.
Lead acid batteries do not like to be empty. You can buy deep discharge batteries with thicker lead plates or you can buy 14kWhs of batteries and discharge them half way.
I don't think PHEVs will be done with Pb-acid batteries. Or just because they save you a few pennies on every trip.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
I missed kennel's post. Your electric engine is too big to be legally a bicycle in California. Your state may vary. Will anybody pull you over for using it in the bike lane? Probably not. As they say, you can register your scooter as a moped anywhere.
You got a 800Wh battery and a 1500W motor. In "go fast" mode you can only power the motor for a half hour.
For the same cost, I got a 65 pound bike with a $400 360Wh lithium battery and a 400W motor. My top speed is 20 mph which is the maximum allowed for a bike in California. I can go 20mph for an hour. Realistically, my range without pedaling is 15 miles considering hills, wind, and bumpy roads.
My bike sucks on the hills. They say you can go 15mph up one. You are paying a heavy price for that much power.
Your moped is so heavy you are wearing out tires and tubes. I'm also curious how they gear it. I guess i can check the specs.
I haven't replaced the lithium battery yet, but they last 2-3 years whether you use them or not.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
Belt Drive
The eGO Cycle Classic and LX, use a quiet belt drive transmission. The 'whisper drive' requires no lubrication and is nearly silent.
Ok, your scooter has a belt drive which is less efficient than a chain drive. OTOH a chain drive will clank and might be unacceptably noisy. My bike has one fixed gear and simply sucks on the hills. End of problem. You have a "go fast" and a "go far" gear.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
" each trip costs you a buck worth of batteries and a buck worth of electricity."
Only 5 kwh's, or 50 cents worth is needed. The 8 KWH reduces depth of discharge. For 20 miles, that 7.5 cents per mile. Breakeven with $1.75 gas in an average ICE.
"you are dragging 150 pounds of batteries around the entire trip whether they have juice in them or not"
That's not much. They won't use luggage space in a newly designed vehicle.
"the PITA of recharging them"
Easier than a gas station.
"I don't think PHEVs will be done with Pb-acid batteries. "
Not in the US, but it can be done if up front costs are critical.
"Or just because they save you a few pennies on every trip."
We were talking about a $4k vehicle. Of course, if you're not concerned about gas prices rising...
PG&E charges 18 cents a kilowatt hour. Oilmanbob pays 14 cents a kilowatt hour in Galveston. You can get dirty coal electricity for 10 cents a kWh. Hydropower is a nickel if you live by a waterfall.
If the discussion is about additional capacity, they won't let you build a filty coal plant and all the good hydro sites are taken, 14 cents a kWh is not unreasonable.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
The average retail price in the US is $.10/KWH. The price at night, when most charging will happen, might be about $.03/KWH.
Of course, the topic here is Chinese/Indian cars, so the question is, what's the price there?
They aren't making any additional dime electricity. If it were up to me, I'd make the dirty coal plants shut down or clean up. But it isn't up to me. You are paying for that ten cent electricity with your medical bills and your lives.
If they go to time of day pricing, they'll charge three cents at night and fourty cents during summer afternoons. Your bill won't get smaller.
RobertInSantaBarbara
I haven`t escaped from reality. I have a daypass.
"They aren't making any additional dime electricity."
True, but wind will be pretty darn close, maybe 12 cents.
"You are paying for that ten cent electricity with your medical bills and your lives."
True. Time to replace it with renewables, especially wind.
"If they go to time of day pricing, they'll charge three cents at night and fourty cents during summer afternoons. Your bill won't get smaller."
No (if your useage pattern doesn't change), but it won't go up by much when you add night-time PHEV charging.
As a personal opinion only, I don't think OPEC is too concerned about the world's automobile industry at this point - declining oil production is OPEC's fate, and they are chained to the wheel of that decline.
It is people wedded to an automotive lifestyle that seem concerned about continuing that lifestyle, especially in the U.S. OPEC may be concerned about global warming and its various ramifications to its business model (Indonesia, for example, is an island nation), but I don't think they are worried about someone pulling a technical miracle out of a hat - except in terms of keeping themselves in wealth and power, which may be increasingly challenging going forwards. Iraq provides a glaring real world example of what various OPEC members may be subject to in the future - various power groups struggling over an ever dwindling amount of oil in the pipeline.
They have a tiger in the tank, and riding it to empty is their only option - assuming they remain on top, without being eaten.
expat,
I'm sorry, I must agree with Roger on this one. By my figures there's another 100 billion barrels in non-conventional oil in the US alone which is recoverable at today's prices and with todays methodology by redeveloping old fields. That's why I'm currently developing this kind of prospect.
It can't be brought on line quickly because of shortages of personell, but it can and will be developed. Same with the bitumen sands-if the THAI process works as advertised, and i see no reason to see it as differently, there will be a trillion barrels of synthetic crude availabele, more than enough to drown the globe with melting ice caps.
And Alans Electrification of Rail plan has the real potential of removing 20% of the US fossil fuel demand in 10 years of serious implementation.
All useage has to do is drop more quickly than depletion for oil prices to reduce substantially. If I were OPEC I'd be really worried about plug in electric cars and scooters plus conservation, especially if we get the Chinese and Indians leap-frogging fossil fuel for renewables and electric cars.
Bob Ebersole
There are plenty of hydrocarbons around, but in the case of OPEC, unrecovered oil elsewhere is not a major concern, it seems.
I do find the question about how much we will burn before we realize what it actually costs is a much more open topic than peak oil. And even grimmer, hard as that may seem to some.
On the other hand, if I understand the geography correctly, with both the Northwest AND Northeast Passages free enough of artic ice for shipping, we can save a lot of oil by using more efficient shipping routes. And Greenland seems to be a promising area for massive biofuel production, seeing as it is currently virgin territory.
Shame about NYC, Tokyo, New Orleans, Amsterdam....
expat,
The reality of exponential growth and population is that no solution can be permanent becuase of our increasing population. I was born in 1951. The world population was 2.6 billion then, its about 6.5 billion now. Gloobal warming and the peak production of hydrocarbons would not be nearly so significant if the world's population had stabiised at 1/3rd of its current level and certainly not speeding towards us in the quick trajectory that threatens us all with distruction.
The obvious answer is to decrease the population, yet its not an OECD caused problem. The vast majority of growth is in very young, very poor countries that are just now starting to be developed. According to the UN, approximately 1/6th of the world population lives on a per capita income of $2.00 a day or less in substandard housing without education or any way to achieve a decent life.
That's the areas of major population growth. A child adds to the income of the family very quickly as cheap labor. Few or no structures exist to help out except families. There are no old age pensions, no outside support except family if a person gets sick, nothing but a whole lot of nothing. In these societies the women are powerless in their relationships so they don't get a choice about having children. The women have children very young and continue all their lives.
The areas where the real growth in fossil fuel consumption are taking place are a couple of steps above this at least. They have struggled out of the abysmal pit of no income to where their family has enough income to afford a car, and enough electric to afford some appliances, and the electric is generated mostly with coal. Places like China, or Pakistan. Their attitude about global warming is that they've worked hard and suffered and they want a better life, screw the consequences. Children are more of a financial burden than in the very poorest countries because they must be educated so the population growth isn't as pressing, but each citizen's environmental impact is rising exponentially with the improvement in living standards. And the climate just can't afford it.
Meanwhile, the US has been totally taken over by the corporatocracy. There are very few real newspapers and almost no television news that are not controlled by huge corporations and the money interests. The internet is becoming a big hole in that wall, but we are mostly just ignored as insignificant.
I think the best solution for the climate problem, the energy peak and the terrorism problem is to get the rest of the world prosperous and with renewables like solar, wind and hydro as the basis for the energy system. The cost is cheap compared with the potential ecological collapse, but its going to take real leadership and vision and the cooperation of all the OECD nations.
We have 1.6 billion desperately poor people on our
planet. If we would start to build a windturbine for each village, and give each child a laptop and enough education to begin to use them, in a generation we could eliminate the cashless poverty of the worst kind. If we could help each developing nation build solar and wing with a base generator of nuclear we could stop the coal burning that's about to kill us all from climate change.
But most of all, we need to change ourselves. We need to demand that our governments stop construction of new coal power plants, and phase out the current ones as quickly as possible, replacing them with wind, solar and nuclear. We need to tell the car and truck companies that in a couple of years time, no more individual vehicles that get less than 40 MPG. We need to construct and adopt electric RR and urban rail as quickly as possible, and massive conservation in the mean time.
Its going to require huge economic dislocations, ending the fossil fuel industries as we know them and changing the whole face of industry in the world, but the continued failure to do nothing will kill us and the planet.
Bob Ebersole
Really nicely said.
Why are the bottom billion there and what to do about them?
Paul Collier, an economist formerly at the World Bank and now director of the Oxford CSAE: Centre for the Study of African Economies, has written a book on this very topic "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Amazon).
He is a good writer and, with the caveat that I'm only part way through, I recommend it highly. Most interesting is what he has to say about the trap associated with having and exporting a natural resource. With respect to TOD issues, Mexico comes to mind.
A Foreign Affairs review is here.
A 26 pg pdf that captures some of the main points, addressed toward the Pacific and providing data, is here.
Land under ice sheets has no soil at all because it's scraped away by the ice. Even if the temperature rose enough to support agriculture in the interior, you have to contend with a rain-shadow (central Greenland is very low and ringed by mountains), no soil, and still fairly cold temperatures that would rather support tundra or taiga than temperate grasslands.
To boot, much of Greenland's bedrock is under sea level, so it will flood should all the ice melt.
In short, even without the ice sheets, Greenland is not going to be doing much agriculture, no less large scale agriculture necessary for biofuels.
Um, I think you missed the point - if Greenland loses its glaciers, biofuels will be very low on the list of priorities of hundreds of millions of displaced people. Further, most of the facilities which we currently use for shipping will no longer exist, as they will be underwater.
Not everything on TOD is meant seriously, as some of us can be too sarcastic, and sarcasm is not easily conveyed in a few lines.
Another of my sarcastic quirks is that the Saudis are cutting oil production as their contribution to reducing climate change, for example. Who knows, maybe at some point, they will use that excuse too, but for now, it is pure cynicism
http://science.reddit.com/info/2pt0e/comments
if you are so inclined...
Have the OPEC and non-OPEC producers spent much time considering that all of their moaning about petro-economics and petro-politics is contributing to the sixth greatest extinction of species ever to hit this planet -- a die off which is largely anthropogenic?
Probably not.
All of our worry about the so-called Free Market machinations are like petty pissing matches compared to the stuff we need to work on.
The economic and political elites are a huge roadblock toward getting anything accomplished toward surviving as a species. Sitting in opulent comfort they can spin out yarns (Tall Tales, Narratives Designed to Decieve, Lies)to keep the Global Rape Machine going for another week or month or whatever, thus assuring themselves of another few weeks of opulent comfort.
To apply Margaret Thatcher's "TINA --There Is No Alternative" comment and mix it up with Rumsfeld's "You go to war with the army (or was it 'armor')you have, not the army you want." Our Global leadership is made up of criminals -- many of them who would be offended to be called that, oddly -- who have no clue about reality and who do not want to get a clue. But we face Mass Extinction stuck with the Ship of Fools Captains we have, not with the real leadership we need. And we are truly stuck -- there is no alternative."
"If we raise supply capacity, then prices might fall." My guess is that bankers and energy companies and governments all around the world are churcning out false narratives based on false premises just to keep the thing going a bit longer, and ultimately wasting precious time and energy and causing plenty of suffering along the way.
A million dead civilians in Iraq, now? No problem. Let's worry about corporatist profits, shall we? Never mind the genocide in the back yard. TINA -- there is no alternative.
Enjoying the Capitalist End Game of Last Man Standing Global Resource War? No? How about if we fly some live nuclear weapons around just for kicks? Are we having fun yet?
Sorry folks, but these idiots ought to be talking about changing the whole damn paradigm, and they would be if the current paradigm did not make them so damned comfortable.
Come to think of it, they are a lot like most of us. Just with more perks.
Why are they really talking about this stuff? If they have excess capacity, then they can just reduce production to make the supply last longer, no? If the economics of the so-called free market don't work that way, then maybe we need to scrap that sham and make better regulations, no?
I think this is all about those who are "winners" in the present system at the expense of "losers" trying to make sure that they keep their priveleged positions. Theconversation bears too little relation to anything of importance oputside the little bubble of elite fantasy to be explained any other way.
TINA. The planet burns, the poor are massacred and tortured just for fun along the way. Meanwhile, the elite keeps pissing on the corpses of the dead while pretending to have civil discussion, just for fun.
Beggar - Thank you for inserting some reality into this particular topic.
I made a similar rant (got a little to loud and pedantic according to my wife) at a small dinner party.
It is truly amazing to me how people can go from discussing GW, population/ hunger, resource depletion, politics, war, and then slip in to sharing plans for deluxe travel vacation, new purchases, how sexy the new (insert make/model here) is, remodeling the kitchen, again, etc.
My wife says “what good does it do to get mad?” For them? No good at all. For me? I do feel a little better. I am not apologetic. In fact I wish more people would stand up an speak loud.
And yet here we are, virtually discussing everyone else's hypocrisy with strangers in cyberspace on a global network of computers powered 24/7 by enormous amounts of fossil fuel, the emissions from which are right now driving some species to extinction...
I think we're all still working on internalizing this stuff. I see many posts by people who are sitting behind their monitors warm, dry, and fed, and they're trying to grasp what it all means. They can predict for others, but it seldom seems like they've got a grip on what it will mean directly and personally to them.
There is much rage against those who are making decisions right now but I don't concern myself all that much with what they do. Sure, they're making bad choices in the current system, but that ol' triumvirate of collapse is going to sweep that all away. How much of a federal government will we have when there isn't cheap oil to allow the projection of force? The state's monopoly on violence will end and perhaps swing entirely the other way, as those who are left behind turn to structure hits and assassination. Do the rich survive this? If things get bad enough quickly enough you'll see class warfare here with real live guns and in that situation bodies and motivation carry the day, not bits of paper symbolizing ownership.
I think we'd all benefit from some study of resource based collapses of civilizations. Unlike the political collapse - think the Soviet Union - there isn't a lot of upside for anyone after such an event, no matter how they were positioned initially.
Most likely the same amount. The US military spends about $10B/yr on energy (mostly oil), out of a budget of about $600B, or about 2%. They're going to be able to afford oil for a long time to come.
How bad do you expect things need to be before there's large-scale armed insurrection in the West? At what point do you propose people go from "I can't afford gas, so I'll have to sleep at work during the week" to "I bet my life would be much better if I burned and looted this city"?
"At what point do you propose people go from "I can't afford gas, so I'll have to sleep at work during the week" to "I bet my life would be much better if I burned and looted this city"?"
It sounds like you have not given this any thought whatsoever. You skipped many stages and symptoms in your simplistic question above.
I hope you do not seriously think Peak Oil/Energy will only impact the drive to work, or that people will actually "think" (rationally) when they are desperate, cold and hungry.
I think some people here have lived their entire lives in the cushy and comfy West and are completely ignorant of human nature and the rest of the world around them.
No, I'm saying "given me a well-reasoned argument for why peak oil will cause vast groups of people in rich nations to be desperate, cold, and hungry, since I've seen that assumed but never seen anyone back it up."
And I think some people here are living in apocalyptic fantasies.
Less oil doesn't mean unending misery. Europe uses half as much as the US, and is pretty comfortable. Eastern Europe uses half that and isn't so bad. China uses half that and is booming. India uses half that and can be rough in the rural areas, but is by no means collapsing - I was surprised by some of the most-rural areas, but also surprised by how fundamentally not-different towns and cities were from the West.
The amount of oil consumption we in rich countries could do without if we felt like it is enormous, and any mainstream peak production prediction (e.g., ASPO) leaves us with more than the minimum necessary amount for decades to come. So any kind of collapse leaving Westerners "desperate, cold, and hungry" will not be a direct result of lack of oil, and will spring squarely from sociological factors.
And, since the West has failed to collapse into a desperate-cold-hungry state for quite a while now, the onus is on someone claiming that it will to back up that assertion.
Care to take that challenge?
"given me a well-reasoned argument for why peak oil will cause vast groups of people in rich nations to be desperate, cold, and hungry, since I've seen that assumed but never seen anyone back it up."
Okay, I do not have the time or desire to spoon feed you on this subject here on a TOD post.
You want a well reasoned argument? Fine, go and actually educate yourself on this subject of collapse. You are clearly clueless - virtually every statement you make is clearly devoid of any thought and completely full of silly assumptions.
After you study the subject more, you will be able to answer your own simplistic and naive questions.
I'll take that as a "no", you're not up to the challenge.
Which is unfortunate, since backing up your beliefs would do a great deal to educate you about which ones are actually realistic. Which isn't many.
Go learn about the subject before you embarrass yourself further.
I'm not your mommy or teacher and don't have time to waste on childish questions from clearly clueless people whose egos prevent them from admitting their ignorance and then taking the time to dispell it.
Drop your petty ego, go answer your simpleton questions yourself, and come back and have a good laugh at yourself by reading your previous posts (at that way least you will be laughing with those who are laughing at you ;).
That someone disagrees with you does not mean they are clueless or deluded. Perhaps they have seen different data than you have. Perhaps they are working from different assumptions than you are. Perhaps there are flaws in your own reasoning.
You appear to be getting remarkably upset at having your beliefs questioned - you've become more than a little shrill and insulting. It's precisely such cherished beliefs that are most prone to holding unrealistic assumptions, and that are most important to clearly examine, support, and if necessary revise.
I'd be willing to help you with that, but until you explain why you are convinced peak oil will lead inexorably to a complete dissolution of society, there's really no way to judge the quality of your reasoning. (Other than by seeing if a challenge to your beliefs provokes a rational response or an emotional one, of course, but I'm not discounting the possibility that your reasoning could be valid despite that.)
I have to agree, I lived in an area of Florida that was hit with two hurricanes in two weeks Frances and Jeanne.
Before the first hurricane the pumps went dry from hoarding people tipping off their tanks, you could not buy a gas can or gas the day before the storm, and before the pumps went dry the lines were reminiscent of the post yom kipper war opec created oil shock. After the storm there was no gas for days. The store shelves were empty because the concept of store inventory is the just in time b.s.
even in an area that was damaged but not as bad as nola was things took a while to get restored to order.
If this had been a nation wide shock like in the 70's it wold have taken a long time to right.
The thread that keeps the wheels of commerce and society going are thin and getting thinner.
If we get into a situation nation wide in which people think that they might not be able to get gas for even a few days then every one will fill up, this will crash the system.
Most likely the same amount. The US military spends about $10B/yr on energy (mostly oil), out of a budget of about $600B, or about 2%. They're going to be able to afford oil for a long time to come.
The SPR will go to the military, also there is also Naval Petroleum Reserve Number Four. A 23 millin acre reserve that is thought to have significant reserves.
I too was at a dinner party over the weekend.
A guest challenged my assertion that "collapse" like the twin towers falling down is rapid while rebuilding takes time and enormous effort. They didn't quite get it that without gasoline in the tank a small medical emergency at home becomes catastrophe because you can no longer get to the pharmacy (or emergency room) in time.
I stashed twenty gallons of the low volatility summer gas with stabilizer in the one outbuilding we have that locks. Every time mom sets out to mow she asks "What are you going to do with all that gas?"
I finally answered her today. "Its just enough to get you to Rochester (large regional hospital) if you need to go."
Hopefully we've laid that question to rest. I wish I'd bought more before the summer mix disappeared ... the high butane winter stuff will boil off in the summer, as I understand it.
They probably "didn't get it" because it's a nonsensical argument.
Not only are you talking about a rare event as if it were commonplace, there are already alternatives for most people, such as ambulances and taxis. If it's really serious and none of those are available in your area, call 911 to have a police car take you to the emergency room.
Occasionally those won't work, but an average Joe speeding towards the hospital while in the throes of a medical emergency isn't the safest either, so it's not clear there's even a net loss of health security involved.
It only seems like a nonsensical argument because you have some sort of fantasy devoid of any serious thought about a future with declining energy.
The situation he describes may not be a "rare event" in the Post Peak Energy world where medical costs will continue to skyrocket beyond affordability for most, and where the cost and availability of essential medicines may decline dramatically.
And I notice you just assume uninterupted civil services like 911, police and fire. What happens if all the above are not working as your little fantasy daydream plans? What if response times for emergency services are hours instead of minutes?
You clearly have a very narrow view of the repercussions of peak oil. You just simply have too many childishly naive assumptions you have not yet questioned.
Seems to me that many of you are peering ahead to the "peak" and assuming that behind it is a cliff where we fall back to the stone age.
Reminds me of how people talked about the end of the (financial) world when the Dow reached 2,000. (And the calender 2000.)
Peak oil does not mean the end of oil.
It means, IMHO, an increase in the price per barrel slope. Price at the pump, price at the oil-generated electricity meter will inflate more rapidly. There will be wide spread upward pressure on prices in general.
But with that gradually increasing cost for oil will come new economic opportunities to solve transportation, heating, "power" needs in different ways.
It may be that in the near/mid future more of our personal incomes may be taken by energy and we may have to buy fewer clothes to hang unworn in our closets, fewer toys that we play with once and then store in our overfilled garages.
But in the further future we will most likely spend less of our income on energy. After the transition to wind/solar/wave/tide there are no more fuel costs. And there will be no more health costs due to fossil-burning pollution.
We will experience some market disruptions. But not the end of the world as we know it. The world will change, just as it changed when we abandoned slide rules for calculators.
Remember that when slide rules disappeared, we didn't go back to counting on our fingers.
I think it more likely that we're looking at a new round of growth emerging from those new endeavors. It may well be the end of the tired old dinosaurs of Detroit, but at the same time it most likely will be the dawn of new companies that better understand the new needs.
Water, now there's the scary commodity. Get ready for a lot, a lot, of mass relocation.
My, my - I didn't realize you were a mindreader! Your keen insight into my deepest beliefs is, well, pathetically wrong, really.
How about you stick to what people write, not what you assume?
He wasn't talking about the kind of neo-stone age you seem to be fixated on; he was talking about nothing more than not having gas when you need it.
You seem insistent on skipping straight from where we are now to a Mad Max scenario; don't imagine that everyone here is so single-minded.
If society has fallen apart to the extent that most people have little or no access to emergency services, then some people will die - fewer people will survive a heart attack or stroke, for example, since for those rapid medical attention does make a substantial difference. While it would be a big deal for those people, it'd be a relatively small deal for society at large.
Here's a narrow and childishly naive assumption worth questioning: why do you insist on assuming society will collapse to a post-apocalyptic state?
You're making a very strong claim; if you want to be taken seriously, provide a strong rationale to back it up. (Without using the word "olduvai" - the fundamental errors in there could fill a lengthy post of their own.)
Pitt, you and Bob here demonstrate your complete lack of understanding of the subject of collapse - you both have the very naive and simplistic Black/White model of "stone age", "end of the world" etc.
Based on the childishly naive things you've said in both posts above, you clearly have not taken the time to think about the subject (other than the typical 12-yr old's dichotomy of civilization or stone age).
Try studying history of past collapses and then start questioning your assumptions.
Too many bright people like yourselves seem to think that if you currently do not know, or simply cannot imagine "how" something could happen, it cannot happen.
There's no need to argue this further until you drop your ego's pants, put aside your 2D fantasies, and actually learn from histories many examples.
No, we're simply reacting to the simplistic black-or-white model of collapse that you appear insistent on throwing into the discussion.
We have been talking about societal hardship - expensive or unavailable personal transport fuel, lower consumption of other goods, lifestyle changes that would lower oil use, etc. - and then you barge in with a rant about unavailable medical care, non-functional emergency services, and accusations of everyone else being childishly naive.
Perhaps you did not realize the "stone age collapse" we were mocking was your position.
Try backing up the assertion that there will be a collapse. By assuming that past societal collapse tells us what will happen with peak oil, you're begging the most important part of the question.
Besides, I have looked up a variety of writing on societal collapse, and typically it's rather lacking. The type of unsupported assertions I see all too much of is "all empires collapse, no exceptions". That's used to argue that the US will suffer a devastating collapse, but somehow the recent example of the British Empire - which ended with nothing resembling a collapse - is conveniently ignored.
Similarly, recent historical evidence tells us that resource shortfall does not lead inevitably to collapse - plenty of countries faced severe shortfalls during WWII, but survived relatively unscathed; Switzerland is a common example.
Accordingly, recent historical evidence tells us that it is not a given that the end result of societies is collapse, and that it is not a given that the end result of resource constraints is collapse. Ergo, someone claiming that collapse is inevitable needs to back up their argument in order to overcome the weight of recent history.
I got a better one for you.
When you get there, sign up for one of those back country trips that takes you to the places where Mexico's poor and forgotten do live in close-to-stone-age situations.
Now, pretend YOU have a medical emergency at that moment.
More likely than not, you will be transported to a local pharmacy by well meaning natives; where a pharmacist --not a doctor-- will decide what medication is probably best for you based on gut intuition rather than use of expensive medical test equipment. That's how "they" live; day in and day out.
The pharmacist hands you a bottle of medication that says "Made in China".
In the instant before you toss the concoction down your throat, perhaps you might start worrying about what kind of impurities are mixed in with the alleged "medicine" so as to optimize its profit producing potentials. If you're lucky it might be just some left over pesticides and medimmune (sp?).
It's not history.
It's now.
It's already happening. Maybe just not in your immediate neighborhood.
It started first for our pets (medimmune) and then for our babies (think lead-coated toys for our tots, all in the name of globalization and profits).
"Medimmune" is the name of an american biotech company, I think the word you were looking for is "Melamine" a.k.a. 1,3,5-triazine-2,4,6-triamine, a compound used in plastic resins, paints etc.
This was added to pet food because it is 2/3 nitrogen, and the standard testing on food products for protein content actually measures nitrogen and infers the protein content from that measurement, so it was a cheap way of making the food look higher in protein than it actually was.
While a nasty practice for sure, adding pure Melamine probably would not have caused the high level of severe health problems seen in the pet food, the pure stuff is fairly biologically inactive; But it seems that what is commonly used to adulterate food in China is "Melamine Scrap", a waste byproduct from coal fed urea fertilizer manufacture. It contains a varible composition witches brew of other contaminants which were probably responsible for making the damage to the animals much worse.
Well, yes. I was talking about lack of instant personal mobility that we associate with plentiful amounts of cheap gas.
The one thing to understand about collapse is that certain assumptions we make; like availability for YOU at your moment of choosing of a 911 ambulance, are wiped out by the widespread aspect of collapse. Think of Hurricane Katrina hitting all of the USA rather than just New Orleans. Who is going to come to YOUR rescue when ALL of us are buried simultaneously in the deep doo doo? If and when you do get to the hospital ER room, do you dream that it is going to be empty with smiling doctors standing by just for you, or more looking like a war triage tent with hundreds of people like you piled in and begging for instant rescue?
How, precisely, is that in any way analogous to peak oil?
I don't dispute the problems inherent in societal collapse; I dispute that societal collapse is implied by peak oil.
In the 1973 Oil Shock, gasoline rationing lines appeared everywhere almost over night. Hardly anyone was ready for them. One day there was plenty of cheap gasoline for all and the next hardly any for anyone.
Once recognition of Peak Oil hits, we may see a repeat of that behavior; a sudden shock to the system rather than a gradual transition and soft landing.
Okay, yes, there's a run on gas stations and it's hard to buy gas for a few days until new supplies come in. How does this lead to society collapsing?
Even if there is a sudden "realization" that oil is finite - which IMHO is rather less likely than prices simply continuing to climb - then it leads to a rather temporary disruption. Pre-realization and post-realization, the level of oil supply is going to be exactly the same, meaning that the shock of such a realization is likely to ebb in due time.
Sure, that first week or two while everyone is filling their gas tanks, gas cans, and handy buckets would be a pain in the ass, but it's likely to be neither fatal nor permanent. Society didn't crumble the last time there was a gas shock people were unprepared for, so it seems unlikely to do so this time.
Pitt obviously you envisage a vastly different post peak world than most.
Lack of supply causing high prices only temporary?
The whole crux of peak oil theory is demand will continue to outstrip supply.
Most rational people now understand at least some of the consequences of dwindling fuel supplies.
One truly alarming scenario (for me) is the inevitable black markets, promoting crime and survival of the ruthless and richest.
Where have I ever said that?
Was it before or after I talked about "prices simply continuing to climb"? Or did you read into my post what you wanted it to say rather than what it actually said?
What I actually wrote was that a shortage-causing run on gas pumps would be likely to be a short-term reaction, and that the longer-term result would be a slow, steady grind of increasing prices.
Sort of like the last few years. As far as I can tell, demand is already outstripping supply, has been doing so for a while, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Prices will continue to rise, and consumption will continue to be prioritized by price, and replaced when it makes sense to do so and alternatives are available.
Deleted. Sorry, wrong thread.
Roger,
My own hunch says that oil price (potential demand) will continue to rise for the next 1-2 decades, in at least a linear fashion. Peak oil is now, and the profit per bbl is proportional to demand minus supply, as per yesterday's guest post. Therefore "peak profit" is also a bell curve, displaced a few years after peak oil, let's say 2013.
Once the taps are wide-open, there is nothing OPEC can do to manage the situation, other than talk and bribe (they are not in a position to threaten, that's america's role). Their greatest fear is that the invisible hand will act too soon, depriving them of their greatest profit opportunity.
I expect these statements. I expect bigger SUVs every year. I expect the big banks to keep lending GMAC billions. I expect $2500 cars, then cars for free like cell phones if you sign a 5-year gas supply agreement. Why would they do any different?
Arthur Robey
Read the signs and auger the entrails.
Free cars and 5 year fuel contract? I shall look out for that. And you look out for a collapse of aviation and the Feds understating inflation.
Does anyone have any other signposts that they can offer?
Arthur.
Keep in mind that some OPEC fields still have low lifting costs, ~$5/bbl. So at $80 to $100 they are making a good margin. Carmakers, on the other hand, are walking the razor's edge. Promotions like Mitsubishi's Gas Comes Standard offer make more money for the oil cos. than for the automaker.
Of course nothing will happen until electric vehicles do start appearing in showrooms. But by then a car is worth $2,500 and the gas ~$25,000, as long as demand doesn't drop.
Stranger things could happen..
Re: A Tale of Two Speeches
I want to thank everyone for the very informative feedback, it has been an informative and thoughtful discussion.
Just to clarify a few points:
(a) It must be stated that no one in OPEC is yet fearing a “demand collapse”.
In the PDF slide presentation by Dr. Fuad Siala, on slide 2, the reference case shows world oil demand growing 1.4 mb/d annually from 83.3 mb/d in 2005 to 117 mb/d in 2030, with Asia alone going from 14 mb/d to 34 mb/d in that same period. (We are leaving aside for the moment whether the world can actually produce that much at that time, and whether OPEC can deliver anywhere near what they claim they can)
(b) The difference is at the margins between the high and low case scenarios (slide 8) and it is a sizable difference, ranging between 32 and 41 mb/d approximate required OPEC supply. All three case scenarios show an increase in OPEC supply needed, but the spread as to how much is needed is approximately 25%.
(c) Slide 9 demonstrates what this difference means in money, a difference between just over 200 billion dollars and approx. 500 billion dollars (that’s from below one quarter trillion dollars to over one half trillion, just to belabor the point). Notice that all these are given in 2006 dollars. This easily explains the concern about declining values of Western currency, U.S. dollars in particular. When some OPEC officials discuss going to a “basket” of currencies, this can be viewed as just one way to attempt to reduce OPEC risk of making greater and greater investment with weaker and weaker currency based on demand that absolutely must then grow as much as expected.
(d) If one accepts that a difference of that magnitude in investment will make a difference in supply, one can easily see the OPEC claim that
“security of demand, which is intrinsically linked to the issue of security of supply, is of very real concern. Without confidence that there will be demand for OPEC oil, the incentive to undertake investment will also be reduced because of concerns that this will lead to large levels of unused capacity and, in turn, to downward pressures on oil prices.”
(e) The issue of “spare” capacity thus becomes paramount. If OPEC and other world producers fear that projections of demand, of economic growth, and of technical and policy stability cannot be trusted, they will tend to narrow the amount of “spare capacity” they are willing to provide. As is stated on the closing page,
“Investment in idle capacity wastes precious financial resources.”
OPEC is hemmed in on both sides: If demand does not live up to projections, additional investment could cost them billions with no real payback in sight.
If demand grows as or better than expected, and no real efficiency, alternatives or policy changes occur, the price of crude oil climbs, encouraging the alternatives and efficiency gains that they seem to be most concerned about.
One last point: The push toward alternatives and efficiency are being driven by concern regarding price and supply of course, but as the commentary above on this string of comments indicate, the environmental and climate change issues are putting increasing pressure on consuming nations to, as OPEC describes it, “discriminate” against oil in major policy making decisions. OPEC observers claim that OPEC is fuming about the major tax and incentive packages being put forward in Europe to reduce consumption of oil and natural gas. This could cost them billions, even if the European renewable program is only partly successful.
Frankly, OPEC does not have the same climate change issues as the West does. The major Persian Gulf producers have spent their whole history in the desert, they are used to an almost inhumane climate. The risk of starving to death in the desert with a growing population and declining income is of much greater concern than the danger of climate change to the desert Arab nations.
Climate change and environmentalism is something of an OECD (developed nations) concern.
For purposes of investment, the producing nations must attempt to plan a decade or more into the future, every bit as long as the Hirsch Report told us the consuming nations will need to plan for possible declining production.
The OPEC producers must at this time look forward a decade into the future and see a world in which the pressure against increased petroleum consumption is only going to increase, even if they are able to produce the amount they claim they can. Will there be growth in demand? Certainly. Possibly a great deal. But how much?
For the oil OPEC producers, it’s the half trillion dollar question, even at today’s dollars.
Thank you, Roger Conner Jr.
ThatsItImout
"Climate change and environmentalism is something of an OECD (developed nations) concern."
It's understandable that OPEC would see it that way, but we know that it affects developing nations at least as much.
OPEC's risk from pricing in dollars is not large. If the US dollar declines against some other currencies then people in those countries find their price of oil has declined and so they buy more oil. That drives up the price of oil in dollars.
The United States and countries that keep their currencies pegged to the US dollar would then face higher oil prices and therefore would use less oil. Oil consumption would shift from weak currency countries to strong currency countries.
As for OPEC's tough investment decisions: That's the life of capitalists all over the world. But as oil extraction becomes more expensive the risk will increase for investment in capital equipment to extract oil.
OPEC's biggest risk comes from better battery technology. With sufficiently better batteries the link between liquid fuel and transportation will be broken for most uses.
FuturePundit said,
"OPEC's biggest risk comes from better battery technology. With sufficiently better batteries the link between liquid fuel and transportation will be broken for most uses."
I think that is exactly correct. The idea that it is the "biofuels" that concern OPEC strikes me as a bit of a smokescreen. OPEC's best statistics and policy wonks must know that the biofuels cannot possibly be produced in the volumes needed to really dent OPEC oil sales, but the combination of hybrid technology and some alternative motor fuels such as CNG and LPG could make a difference. Would oil be replaced? Only in a few localized cases by 2020. But could the projected growth curve be changed considerably? Enough to cost OPEC billions in sales, particularly in Europe where the governments have proven willing to assist the newer cleaner technology with policy. OPEC would become thus reluctant to pour cash into expanding E and P (Exploration and Production) work, facing policies around the world that gave "non liquid" transport fuel a leg up on oil.
RC
I see the usual small amount angst about the future while most dither and discuss all the pros and cons of whatever strikes them as semi-important at the moment.
Now, one can sit before their computer and yammer constantly on this and that and it appears to transport one to a different world and paradigm...you might get the feeling your actually doing something..and you build an insular wall around yourself with valuable time spent banging away at the old keyboard...yes you are there and conversing ..granted a touchy subject but using the toys seems to sorta render it unreal. But you know down deep that its really a make-believe world and not real at all..its some sort of 'down the rabbit hole' Alice in Wunderland sort of world..the real world is out those doors into what some call reality. Not the bullpen,9-5 thing,not the 'lets go to Cancun' thing, not the watch Oprah and laugh thing,,its the REAL world...a place many don't visit often except thru rose colored shades.
Hey..its real and its coming. Check the weird weather thats actively affecting the crops this year. Frost already killing some crops and its only mid September.Frost in the spring tore hell out of the crops..summer heat stunted and killed a lot of the rest.
However when all the angst is finally expended and when all the Drumbeats have been throughly 'beaten'...then only one thing matters...and its what I have maintained for some time....
Its simply this...
Just what the hell ARE "YOU" GOING TO DO ABOUT IT????
Most here will duck the question. Feel good because they ARE doing something..yeah..they are chatting about it ...on and on and on and on while time slips away..and the price of land continues to spiral upwards and upward...(I know for I just sold some acres) and the price of food will climb higher and higher (I know for I am working in the harvest each day and week, right now) and the wheat reaches towards $9 / bu and the beans towards $10/bu and the corn still going for $4/bu..and nothings rightside up anymore .......but...
but...the question is still hanging there...and no one really is doing anything but talking...oh yeah a few...a slim few talk about what they are doing but its quickly hashed over and soon forgotten....
And now Airdale shuts down his computer , rises and goes out to plant some fall turnips and mustard greens.....
Sorry for the post...I had a moments weakness....
Truth is my whole garden was destroyed by the weather..It burned to nothing but masses of weeds and wild grass. I got some...I got the best part ..barely....it was really pitiful in the end. Trouble was that I was using 'conventional' methods..methods which the weather can easily defeat.
I am now better prepared..I saw just what can happen.
Climate change is what is now happening...piss on the oil crisis. Yes the oil will go dearly but along with it we have raped this planet to its death throes and its now striking back. Back with a vengeance.
Airdale- I could be wrong,
I have been wrong before,
I hope I am,,but I will play more carefully now..
PS. Doesn't matter what 'community thinks' or does...it only matters what YOU DO. "Community" has brought us here..its not going to be 'taking us home'.
Yo Airdale!
Great to see you posting man, always enjoyed your rants.
Yeah, most of my crops destroyed by drought.
thinking of turning some timber acerage on hilsides into olives and grapes. (ha)
Dismal, depressing summer for farming. Imagine how dismal and depressing when actually need for food.
thank god Harris Teeter not dependent on climate ;-)
Ahn well-- I stand in the dry heat looking at the dust that was so promisingly plowed in spring and think, "We're all freakin doomed..."
Yeah man I read you. Tennessee burned up and Alabama shot in the ass. Most of central Ky is gone. Illinois is not boasting of large corn yields. Frost taking some Minnesota crops..as per the farmer forums.
Notice the sound of 'silence' as to my post? Ahhh I never could get it on with the Yankees. They live in a different world IMO. No grits for them.
Cappuccinos, lattes and poggie bait can only take them so far.
Now I take my oath again to not be striving with TOD anymore.
I am feeling good since I went out to plant turnips and found my sweet potatoes had made some nice ones. The weeds overshadowed them enough to keep the soil from baking.
Tonite I might dine like a king. Peas and sweet taters. Mebbe some corn bread. Sweet iced tea also. A bit of hog jowl. Hard times are coming...not here yet.
AD..The Embarassed Survivalist....
note:misspelling intentional
Airdale, good to hear from ya'! Still out there diggin' up bones, that's a good sign....and U of K beat Louisville last night in the Gov'ner's cup, a sign that all things are possible! :-)
As to what can we do about it....save money (I know how to do that), save fuel (I know how to do that) and save seed...(not so good yet, but working on it....I let some of the skills of my youth lapse on that one!)....I am looking at my own life, and worrying more about "meaningful" than just good....Out here in Central KY we still have it pretty good, and lots of breathing room, the Ohio River...I don't want to say too much, it's already getting too crowded in many spots though...one day at a time, right, "sufficient for the day the evil therein...", take care, and good to hear from ya' again....:-)
RC
Airdale,
We're havin tomato pie, fresh fried squash blossoms, and marinated cucumbers. Made by my excellent cook.
We're rollin in late 'maters. Sweet, small and precious.
We have homemade wine from next farm over.
Nice.
Wow...you completely lost me here. I read all the articles, and couldn't find the stat this was referencing. More importantly, how could any car have a negative oil consumption? I mean, if I replace 1 gasoline powered car with 1 totally electric car (not even hybrid mind you) I have at most replaced 1 car's usage. How do I generate 3 more cars of fuel? Are you saying that the new generation of hybrid cars will generate oil as a by product of transportation?
I find this statement baffling. Can someone smarter than me please help?
Tom In Thailand
tominth,
your right, that was poorly worded on my part....(blush) let me try again....because I was trying to make an important point, I may have not made the point I was trying to though! :-)
The comparison would be as to the effect in the oil consuming market of one advanced plug hybrid vs. 3 or 4 non plug hybrid cars, cars of the technology we have and are selling now...
If I could and were to buy a plug hybrid car that gets 4 times the mileage of a current new car in comparison to a car of non hybrid technology, let's say 80 miles per gallon instead of 20, and you were to buy a new car of 20 miles per gallon, and we both drove 10,000 miles next year, your fuel consumption would be 500 gallon while mine would be 125 gallon on an equal distance.
Thus, you would be having the fuel purchasing impact on the marketplace of my car and three others like mine IF they were the type car mine is (advanced plug hybrid) and not the type yours is (regular internal combustion as we sell today). I hope that came across better....
My point was this, and I think the math backs it up, but correct me if I am wrong or missed something: Only a 10% market penetration of cars that get 4 times the fuel mileage of the other 90% would make the impact of the sale of these cars on the fuel market much greater than their raw numbers would at first indicate. In other words, advanced plug hybrid cars, or for that matter, extreme high mileage Diesels or full electric cars do not have to replace the entire fleet currently on the highway to have very large effects on the oil consumption market.
This is big from OPEC's (and the other major oil producers) viewpoint because to repeat what was in the first post, they are not talking about a "demand collapse", but are talking about the importance of changes in demand of only a few percent, which means a multi hundred billion dollar change in investment plans for them. One more minor point: Once the advanced transportation systems begin to scale, we may be surprised at the speed with which drops in consumption can occur, due to the extreme change in per mile fuel consumption. And so may OPEC. That's what worries them.
Thus, mitagation for a drop in fuel in fuel availability may be doable on a faster time scale than once thought (for example, the Hirsch Report projections), IF, and this is a big if, the decline in oil consumption per mile traveled is huge, on the order of magnitudes.
(note: We are leaving aside the energy produced on the grid used to charge hybrids for the moment, because what we were discussing was the impact on OIL demand and consumption. Very little oil is used on the grid.
Thanks for the feedback, Roger Conner Jr.
ThatsItImout
Roger, I think it would be more helpful to think in terms of fuel consumption, rather than mileage. IOW, a PHEV reduces consumption by 75%-95%, rather than quadrupling mileage. So, if 20% of vhehicle miles traveled (VMT) is from PHEV's, we reduce consumption by 15%-19%.
Please note that 50% of VMT comes from vehicles less than 6 years old.
As I noted elsewhere on this thread today: it appears likely that US oil production will stabilize and slowly climb, CTL and biofuels will contribute a modest but noticeable amount, and vehicle efficiency and PHEV/EV's will contribute a large and increasing amount: PHEV's could be 50% of light vehicle sales in 10 years, quite easily, and there could be 30M PHEV's on the road, reducing light vehicle fuel consumption by 20%, a contribution which would grow further quite quickly.
Heck, we could reduce US oil consumption by 20% in 6 months with relatively painless and effective conservation measures - horrors, we might have to carpool....
Nick, I think your way of figuring is more straightforward!
I am certain that I just got to looking at all the cars sitting in driveways, and got it in my head that if all of them could twice the miles per gallon, even if vehicle numbers grew 10%, we would still be well down on consumption. A bit of a "perception illusion", of course, because you would still have to build the cars, but it begs a question for the future....what if folks had one electric car, and one hybrid (plug or non plug) to cover all transportation? Most folks have two cars anyway, if they had the right two we are talking about big gains in efficiency without major sacrifice of transportation flexibility....hmmm, and if one of them were propane augmented on fossil fuel....hmmmm, this just gets more interesting every day.....:-)
RC
I think the future of PHEV's is simple: gradually growing batteries. As the cost of batteries falls, and the price of fuel rises, the tradeoff point would shift, and one could justify the larger battery. Gradually fuel use would be as low as one wanted it to be.
Eventually PV on cars will make sense, unless a battery breakthrough makes really large batteries dramatically cheaper, and eliminates the window of opportunity. PV will get cheaper & more efficient, and fuel more expensive. 50% efficient PV on 10 sq meters of car surface could generate a peak of 5KW, enough to power 125 miles of travel per day on average, about 4x the average US daily VMT. OTOH, it could provide (at peak) enough power to travel indefinitely at urban speeds, extending range enormously, especially in places like the US Southwest.
Of course, right now the grid is much cheaper, but this would extend the electric range of PHEV's substantially, which would have it's own value.
"50% efficient PV on 10 sq meters of car surface could generate a peak of 5KW, enough to power 125 miles of travel per day on average, about 4x the average US daily VMT. OTOH, it could provide (at peak) enough power to travel indefinitely at urban speeds, extending range enormously, especially in places like the US Southwest."
I like your thinking....and on a mini van type vehicle, low to the ground,built of lightweight materials, but with that big flat roof surface....like I said, more interesting everyday....:-)
RC