 | DrumBeat: April 8, 2008 | The Oil Drum | EROI on the Web part 2 of 6, (Provisional Results Summary, Imported Oil, Natural Gas) |  |
Shell Sponsoring Peak Oil Communication?
Posted by Chris Vernon on April 8, 2008 - 10:00am in The Oil Drum: Europe
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Click on the image to the right to download the .pdf of a full page "advert" which appeared in both Time and Fortune magazines over Easter. It was written by Jeremy Leggett, the prominent peak oil and climate change commentator and proponent of renewable energy (also Chairman of Solarcentury).
On peak oil Jeremy doesn't pull any punches:
The interesting point here is that that Shell sponsored the thing. So, what's in it for Shell? |
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It looks to me that 'Shell' is set up to be the first to fall when we are in full 'peak'. I can see where it would be to their advantage to be the whistle blower.
Jeremy has been a vocal messenger for some time on peak oil. See his Peak Oil meets Climate Change speech captured on YouTube.
Just thinking aloud here, but weren't oil execs up before Congress recently to explain their record profits? Although the majors are increasingly powerless compared to national oil companies like Aramco, they remain the public face of the oil business. If scarcity and inevitably higher prices are to come, some pre-emptive explanation of their situation may well be in the oil companies' interests. It is they who are in the firing line for any backlash that is to come.
US Congress has no interest debating risk/reward of oil and natural gas exploration as they like most Americans have a "gas pump" mentality and believe we have a GD given right to cheap energy. Their debate ignores competition for energy supplies and regardless of Peak Oil that easy stuff is long gone. They browbeat real energy suppliers while encouraging the "what if". Big (and little)oil will continue to invest in the opportunity created by small DC minds.
I watched that hearing. John Hofmeister explicitly denied (under oath) that we are at peak oil, and indicated that he sees global oil extraction rates reaching 110 million barrels per day.
Jeremy is just doing his job, that is, working for his company to maximise profits now and in the future. Looking for any selfless motive in his words is folly and naivete in the extreme. Within years, Shell and the other oil companies will be making enragingly-high profits as oil goes ballistic, and as an angry public seeks scapegoats. He is positioning his company so that it cannot be sued for knowing the truth and saying nothing (see Big Tobacco).
So nothing to see here, move along.
It is not a given that just because a man works for an oil company that they have no selfless motives. Would you have been as cynical in the late 1950s when M. King Hubbard was warning about US oil production peaking. Would you have said, Mamba, that looking for selfless motives in the words of M. King Hubbard was naivete in the extreme? Remember Hubbard worked for Shell also.
Cynicism is sometimes justified but some people carry it to the extremes. It is just possible that Jeremy Leggett, like Hubbard, actually sees peak oil as the disaster coming down the pike and is desperately trying to warn both his company and the world of the impending disaster in hopes that it may be mitigated slighted if swift and desperate action is taken.
Ron Patterson
There's a huge difference between a scientist like MKH and an oil CEO. My comments stand.
Jeremy is not an oil CEO; quite to the contrary, his firm is almost exclusively renewables. I personally see quite a few similarities between M. K. Hubbert and Jeremy Leggett.
Jeremy Leggett is not an oil CEO and never was. He was once a consultant for Shell but no more. He is now the CEO for his own created solar energy company. Obviously he foresaw the demise of the oil industry and is concentrating his efforts in something that will make a difference, something that just might help mitigate the coming collapse. Leggett is a trained geologist just like M. King Hubbard.
So because you thought Leggett was the CEO of an oil company, it is obvious that your comments are way off in left field. ("Off in Left Field", that is an American euphemism for "Totally unaware of what is really going on.")
Ron Patterson
LOL! Sometimes this is too easy. Hope others got a laugh out of this too, ;)
Reasons why this does not surprise me:
1. Peak Oil, true or no, creates the perception of scarcity which helps increase prices. Matthew Simmons -- "Oil is too cheap at 15 cents per cup." This has got to be music to oil execs ears.
2. Peak Oil theory focuses on scarcity which implies we need more. It makes a nice counterpoint to environmentalism which denies the need for oil and pushes instead for alternatives.
3. Shell is positioned very aggressively in the possible solutions to Peak Oil -- synthetic oil and oil shales.
4. Many Peak Oil proponents do not recognize the validity of alternative forms of energy and spread disinformation that negatively skews EROI estimates for all alternative sources.
5. Peak Oil focuses on the economic benefits of oil and shifts focus away from the environmental impacts of oil.
If they succeed in controlling the Peak Oil debate in their favor, it's a win, win, win for the oil industry. That said, Peak Oil is a two edged sword and the same arguments highlighting depletion can be used to attempt to validate new energy sources. So the industry needs to have a hand in the Peak Oil game so that the issues come out in their favor.
Robert,
I'm not sure whether Matthew Simmons has a motive behind his campain of not. He is getting on in years now and I would guess his pension is well catered for. He seems to me to genuinely concerned, he does have a number of daughters who will have to face the consequences if it all goes wrong. I agree with him oil is too cheap, the price should have been higher years ago and that would have probably curtailed economic (and population) growth and we would not be in the complete unsustainable mess we are now. Politicians (or more correctly the polical system that votes them into power) are the ones who have lead us up this route. The UK has squandered its natural gas and oil reserves and had what will turn out to be a very short party in doing so. The belief that we are entitled to ever more and at lower cost has starved us of future investment, a renewable energy infrastructure for example. As I tried to point out on another post, the use of internal combustion engine shows no sign of abating, infact the situation is just the opposite, with India and China producing them in numbers that will dwarf the european car fleet.
The proponents of peak oil point out the difficulties to replacing oil, but I think this is the reality. I am pro renewables, but cannot see how to get out of this mess with the current mindset. We believe we need a consatant uninterruptable energy 24/7, and to maintain our current economic model that is true.
Man does not cooperate with man very well when things don't go his way. Rather than getting our act together and risking sacrifice for the common good of our species, I suspect it will all fall apart in one big riot once people start to feel cheated by the system if/when shortages begin. Human nature is the bigest obsticle, we are not programmed for the mass cooperation that times of plenty have enabled us to "tolerate".
For those who want to pick an argument, what I have said above is my opinion, based on what I have observed in 44 year of life on this planet, it does not mean I am right, but I might be!
My post wasn't meant to imply if Matthew Simmons has a hidden agenda. Though I disagree with some of his opinions, I think he has performed a major public service spreading awareness. On the other hand, high oil prices help oil companies. So with a major investment banker talking about $300 per barrel oil that's got to look good on the balance sheet.
I agree that replacing oil is a huge problem. So when I said "Many proponents of Peak Oil" negatively skew EROI numbers for renewables, I didn't mean all. As a Peak Oil convert I'm a huge proponent of renewables. I've looked at the EROI numbers for wind and solar and they don't look anywhere near as bad as many are saying. But the fact is there is a substantial camp within Peak Oil who seem to think that nothing can ever replace oil as an energy source. At this point in time, I don't think that's a very healthy point of view to maintain. We need energy and renewables may help us navigate Peak Oil while reducing the catastrophic impact of climate change.
You may well be right. For my part, I respect your opinion and am glad to be a part of this debate.
Robert,
I thought your first post was valid, I just wanted to add my views, because Matt Simmons behaviour is somewhat odd for a man in his position, and vested interests cross my mind also, its just on balance I do feel his motives are (or were) to give out timely warnings. I say were, because he has been ranting on for about 8 years now, and nobody has listened. Many of his predictions are now looking much more plausable than when he first made them.
I am also a fan of renewables, and you're right that many people do twist the figures against renewables, particularly the nuclear lobby, while the anti nuclear lobby twist figurs against nuclear. Its all a bit of a mess and the truth is I'm not sure if anybody actually knows for sure what will hold without a fosssil fuel platform to fall back on, but we are fiddling while Rome burns. The twisting of figures to suit ones arguments are prevelent every where. The electric car lobby use the worst case figures for the ICE, and unrealisticly high figures for the electric drive system, often omiting to mention the losses of the battery charger (transformer/rectifier) it self. It won't help anybody when push comes to shove because the true sustainability of the alternatives will be out there for all to see and it will be "shit or bust"
We will need a massive effort and as JH Kunstler puts it, we may need to do a lot more hard physical work in the future and we have a few generations of our workforce not well prepared for this. Governments keep creating work by increasing legistlation. This has created a huge "non productive" body of people employed to ensure compliance, and it gets in the way of the "hardware" side of life that will keep us alive in the long term. I certainly don't have much optimism that sufficient volumes of the human race will behave in a rational enough way to make the changes necessary. If you are from the UK, just remember how people behaved during the fuel blockades in 2000? Sharing no, grab what I can get and sod the next person yes. I was lucky I drove a car that could run on LRP, that was all that was available because most cars had catylysts by then and could not use it.
I hope I am wrong!
Robert and Partypooper, Matthew Simmons is an investment banker to the energy industry.
Simmons & Company has a vested interest in being right! To suggest that Simmons' motives are only to drive the price up to increase his bottom line is cynical in the extreme. Simmons has recently been advising his clients to get out of Big Oil. His advice is to his clients has recently been to concentrate their investments in the oil service industry. His advice has been to concentrate their investments in companies like Schlumberger and Baker Hughes.
But my point is the primary job of Simmons & Company is to give advice. Simmons, like Jeremy Leggett, has a vested interest in being correct with his prognostications and advice.
Ron Patterson
Darwinian,
I know exactly what Matthew Simmons is. I read practically all his literature on energy with great interest and have listened to many of his interviews. I simply implied one could be suspicious of his motives, but I had overcome any suspicion. I said he has been "ranting on" and has been ignored, doesn't mean I think he was wrong, I said just the opposite.
I may not have worded my post that well, but if you read it again you may see I am an admirer of Matthew Simmons. I said (a little sarcasticly perhaps) that as time moves on he is looking more and more correct. John Tierney may have to dip into his pockets! I think MRS talks much sense, and as I stated in my post he has been ignored too long.
I hope you will read my posr again, sorry for missleading you if thats what I have done.
You got that right, 'pooper! ;)
I think we need someone without an agenda to do an honest assessment of EROI (maybe impossible) across the spectrum of alternatives -- wind, nuclear (nearly renewable with reprocessing), solar. My understanding is that they are all positive in a range that could sustain civilization if a large enough infrastructure were established.
One other point to make is that since no new easy oil is available the EROI imputs for oil are becoming worse and worse with time. Kunstler notes that average EROEI for oil in the US is 2:1. Not much different from that much maligned energy source -- ethanol. Perhaps the reason we are using so much ethanol now is because it has become nearly as economic to use it as oil and the infrastructure change for a rapid ramp up was available short term.
Now before we go into a huge flame out on ethanol, I want to say that I don't favor it as a long term solution. But I do see it as bridge, hopefully, to a V2G infrastructure. There is no way we can power all our transport on ethanol in any case but we can power a percentage. Even if it's just that all vehicles in the US run on 10% ethanol and we can use ethanol to keep our farm machines going then it helps us mitigate. If you know anything about emergencies, effective response is all about the timing and availability of mitigation.
All in all, increased use of depleting resources will not solve this problem. So oil, coal, and natural gas are not future energy sources. Rather, they are resource traps that sink our ability to create sustainable infrastructure. Furthermore they degrade the environment and negatively impact the carrying capacity of this planet. Not something you want in an energy crisis where food production is one of the primary mechanisms coming under stress.
Trouble is, everyone has an agenda. Opinions, attitudes, methodologies, etc., are predicated on normative criteria which differ from person to person. Dr. Hall himself said that how broad the input considerations should be is an important issue that needs to be addressed. I don't think there will ever be consensus on how to value intangible inputs. I don't even think that Mr. Spock the Vulcan could pull off an objective EROI analysis.
I won't go into a huge flame out on ethanol, except to say that I think it's morally wrong to grow food for fuel in a world where hunger exists. I feel that corn ethanol is wrong, and I feel the same way about growing alfalfa for cattle feed. Ligno-cellulosic ethanol may not seem quite so bad, since people can't eat the biomass feedstocks, but all that logging slash, grain stover, bagasse, whatever... needs to be returned to the soil in order to 1.) restore soil tilth & micronutrients, & 2.) sequester reduced carbon as humic substances.
I agree.
"Kunstler notes that average EROEI for oil in the US is 2:1. Not much different from that much maligned energy source -- ethanol"
But the quantum efficiency of energy conversion for gasoline into mechanical power is nearly twice that of ethanol. Talking about EROEI of "oil" is meaningless, because we have to run "oil" through a fractional distillation processor, then mix and blend the various components to end up with the various types of motor fuels. If we're talking about the EROEI of gasoline, then the comparison of the EROEI of ethanol is valid, since both ethanol and gasoline are used in internal combustion engines to produce motive power.
And at 10-20% blends ethanol adds to gasoline's efficiency.
I get the impression that you wouldn't think it was a very healthy point of view to maintain even if it was true. EROEI is always negative when all the energy inputs are taken into consideration. I think I'm beginning to see why ppl willfully chose to disregard inputs: doing so makes the future appear less bleak. It's a "faith based" initiative. 1:17 looks more hopeful than any realistic assessment such as 10^17:1. Pretending to not understand thermodynamics offers "hope."
You have made this point before. Yes, it is true that all of the energy of the universe was injected into it at the moment of the Big Bang. Entropy was at a minimum and has been increasing ever since. There are no exceptions. It’s a one time endowment (where have we heard that before?) This is true if you take the universe as a whole into consideration (though, according to your thinking, we should then ask where that came from, too.)
But what’s the point? Life happens to have evolved in the junction point where low entropy becomes high entropy like a windmill catching a preexisting wind. That’s the entropy island on which we live. The only question we are concerned with is how much of an effort we personally have to expend (increasing our own entropy) mining low entropy particles elsewhere (thus decreasing our own entropy by a greater amount.) These we use to keep us going for another day.
So everything we do to live and prosper is just mining fossilized entropy. None the less, life evolved where organisms could get more than they give, which I believe is the whole point. But you are correct, some day the possibility of decreasing entropy will end as the universe reaches maximum entropy and winks out of existence…then there will be another Big Bang. And the beat goes on.
But that’s not relevant to this discussion. If you go fishing, you don’t care how many bugs the fish had to eat, how many plants the bugs ate or how many photons of light the plants had to absorb to build a trout, all you care about is how many casts it will take you to get lunch.
Jon.
Very good. Thank you for conceding the point. Yes, I have made this point before, and no one seemed to listen. It's as if posters on this board are ignorant of elementary physics. Since I don't believe that to be the case, at least not with most posters, I must conclude that this disregard of inputs serves some agenda or other. I'm just trying to sort out & make explicit what those agendas are.
This doesn't seem to be the case. The amount of matter in the universe, including so-called "dark matter," has been estimated with a good degree of precision. It appears that the universe lacks by a full order of magnitude sufficient mass for gravitation to halt expansion and pull the universe back to the singularity. The "yo-yo universe" scenario you allude to has been refuted. Eternal expansion & heat death appear to be the fate. This sponsers the question of how the singularity formed in the first place, ~14 bys bp. At this point in our understanding "Goddidit" is as good a hypothesis as any.
While this is probably true of most people, it isn't true of me. When I have fished in the past it's been nonlethally (nets, electrostunning) and I very much cared about the energetic & other ecological relationships of the fish I was studying. My own personal little window of expertise is on the phylogenetics & phylogeography of certain clades of Neotropical catfishes. I love these droll creatures and would rather go hungry than eat them.
Thanks Jon for your respectful & honest post. It's good to get to know where other posters are coming from.
Very interesting. Still, you must have your heaping helping of low entropy particles three times a day to survive, wherever they come from. That would be a good cereal box advertisement: Now with Low Entropy!
They say that chemists are only interested in the outer most electron shells of atoms whereas physicists are interested in what is inside. It is not that chemists do not accept particle physics, it’s just not relevant in their discipline. EROI calculations, correspondingly, ‘aren’t interested’ in origin entropy. Only harvesting and harvested energy. If the energy harvested is not greater than that required to harvest, the crop is useless.
My pleasure. I am interested in anthropology, so people like Tainter, Diamond, etc, appeal to me. My master’s thesis was a computer simulation of the Prisoners’ Dilemma, which yielded some interesting results with a few custom strategies I cooked up.
By the way, the idea that there will be another Big Bang comes from the multiverse theory, which I am sure you have heard of. Michio Kaku is a popular proponent of that. There is no scientific proof or evidence, but there is philosophical proof. I.e., if our universe happened once as a random, chance event, then it will happen again. Given infinite time, anything that can happen will happen, and it will happen an infinite number of times.
Kind of a scary thought, actually.
Jon.
Are you telling me that there will be another George W. Bush, and that he will be elected president again? :-0
Now that's just crazy talk.
:)
Jon.
This is a good analogy altho it breaks down somewhat when you consider that the redox reactions that drive photo- & oxidative phosphorylation depend on the relationship between the e^-s in the outer shell & the electrostatic attraction & repulsion between those e^-s & the nucleus & inner shell e^-s, respectively. When a photon excites an e^- from its ground state, the degree to which chlorophyll transitions from a weak to a strong reducing agent depends on the relationship between that e^-, other e^-s in inner shells, & protons in the nucleus. The properties that make the water molecule such as it is depend largely on the electronegativities of H relative to O, which is in turn determined by more than just the outer e^-s. So it isn't entirely apt to claim that all but outer shell e^-s are irrelevant to chemists. But then, no analogy is perfect, or it wouldn't be an analogy! :)
Okay, so long as it is stated explicitly that for the sake of ongoing analysis, the decision has made made & agreed upon to ignore the energetic inputs of the sun, of chemoautotrophic archaen metabolism, of the gravitational force that applied heat & pressure, etc., then we can move on. But I have said all along that I'm not just talking about the sun. On the input (cost) side, the opportunity costs of lost environmental & aesthetic benefits must be included. Both Nate & Dr. Hall have promised to provide their proposals for how to go about valuing these costs, but haven't explicitly done so yet. Personally, I don't believe that such costs can be valued in a nonarbitrary fashion, that a plurality of ppl can agree on. Of course, it can be decided that these costs, too, will be simply disregared but is there any utility left at all to EROEI analysis if we make this decision?
Wouldn't it be cool if Jesus had been right; that a "turn the other cheek" strategy won out over "tit for tat" in an iterated game of Prisoner's Dilemma? Alas, flame wars are perpetuated on message boards because tit for tat does seem to be the optimum strategy. Maybe this is what all our problems boil down to!
I read Kaku's "Hyperspace" a dozen or more years ago. Have read Brian Greene's popularizations, et al. I took a year of undergrad physics many years ago, that's all. Hell, all the quantum mechanics in Pauling's "Nature of the Chemical Bond" kept me from ever finishing it. I have a layperson's interest in cosmology & the like, but I'm certainly no authority on that kind of stuff.
Nice chatting with you Jon.
- off topic but along some of the lines in this subthread.
The movie "The Man from Earth" has gotten a fine 8.2 rating at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/
(it is labled drama/sci-fi ... I'd say it's not sci-fi, rather brilliant philosophy and food for thougth...)
Splendid and recomended if you are fed up all the "regular shooting stuff"
Usually when I hear people arguing some point of view, I come away saying, ‘That’s true, but incomplete.’ Sometimes we have a tendency to cherry pick our facts and create shadow box proofs. Then someone else, equally sincere but ill directed, creates their own shadow box philosophy in response. ‘Talking past each other,’ I believe the phrase is. People aren’t automatically dishonest (or enthralled to some global conspiracy) because they do this. We just consider the facts we think important and discard those we think aren’t. (Well, maybe with a fair amount of exaggeration and intellectual dishonesty thrown in for good measure. But let’s not talk about Fox News.) You are right that we need to declare our assumptions from the start.
In my PD simulation, I created a scenario where the players were allowed to create offspring, according to how many points they accumulated during interactions with others. Individual players also died eventually and were removed from the game. They also died if their point score dropped to zero (I changed the points so that the sucker prize was negative on the assumption that you invested energy in an interaction with another player and got nothing in return. Hence your net outcome was negative.) Also, players could belong to groups sharing the same strategy. This created an evolutionary incentive for a strategy to succeed. The strategy I created was called Honor Among Thieves. Basically, you always cooperate with another member of your group and you always cheat any outsider, regardless of which strategy they employ. The players also had greater memory of past interactions with outsiders. They were surprisingly robust against all others.
If it is possible to say that this strategy ‘models’ any behavior, you could say that it models cooperation amongst one’s own clan and suspicion of outsiders. It also favors generalizations (blood relative/clan member=good. Outsider=bad.) and prejudice (ditto.)
This is why I don’t count on large scale solutions to what is very quickly going to become painfully local problems. When the simulation hits the fan, we must all find who we can trust and rely on them.
Jon.
JonL
IMO This is something that spoils the Oil Drum as a discussion site. People make valid points but within certain boundary conditions. If those boundary conditions are removed from the quotations (the cherry picking you refer to)then the quotation becomes inapplicable or even invalid.
An example;
If we try to electrify 700 million road vehicles, the price of nickel and lithium may rise to prohibitive levels, due to difficulties in refining these reletively scarce metals at the rates required. Lithium is present in the earth's crust 18 grammes per tonne and is therefore 3500 times less abundant than iron by weight or 215 times by volume. For nickel, its 626 times and 714 times respectively
Missing the last part off this sentence removes the bundaries from which the statement was made. Because nobody knows the future all, statements are incomplete as you say, thats why the conditions on which the statement is made should be retained in the quotation.
In some instances, I believe replies deliberately ignore the context of the post they are replying to. This is not constructive.
yes Partypooper , this is so very true and actually a main pain with forums and blogs.
In an oral conversation these issues can be cleared within a second.
OTOH it is difficult to incorporate all sorts of if'd and but's when on a forum/blog ...
There are a couple of Quarrelers here at TOD who only zooms througt the replies to find someting to argue about ; no one named, no one forgotten .... you all know who I'm having in mind
Individuals, including those of our own species, never sacrifice for the common good of the species. Such long repudiated group selectionist thinking displays a very outdated or misguided understanding of biology. Worry about your own wellbeing, & that of your kids, & let the species adapt or go extinct as nature takes its course. You've likely already lived out half your life. None of this will matter to you once you're dead. So relax & enjoy yourself. That's my opinion.
Robert Marston said,
"4. Many Peak Oil proponents do not recognize the validity of alternative forms of energy and spread disinformation that negatively skews EROI estimates for all alternative sources.
5. Peak Oil focuses on the economic benefits of oil and shifts focus away from the environmental impacts of oil."
An astute observation. For the longest time, I felt like the Cassandra on this, alone in the TOD US wilderness. I have noticed recently that more and more folks are starting to notice. Thankfully. (I think many Europeans have always seen the error of dismissing alternatives as marginal, and now have a growing alternative energy industry. The Americans once again let themselves fall badly behind.)
RC
Re: Europeans ...have a growing alternative energy industry. The Americans once again let themselves fall badly behind.
Behind who? France in nuclear but that was a conscious choice of environmentalists and hardly a case of let falling behind. Germany in wind maybe. But we are catching up. Brazil was the leader in ethanol, but no more. Perhaps we are behind Japan in conservation, but the Japanese don't produce any of their own oil and have a powerful economic incentive.
Here in North Iowa we have a growing alternative energy industry. Iowa despite rumors to the contrary is still part of the Unites States. Iowa now produces the highest percentage of it's electricity from wind of any state. Other states like Texas and Minnesota produce more but not as a percentage.
Iowa leads the country in ethanol and since the United States is or soon will be the worlds largest ethanol producer America can hardly be said to be falling behind in that alternative energy. Bio-diesel is well on its way if diesel prices keep rising. Japan is still testing ethanol to see if it works, believe it or not. So is Germany: the Germans have banned it because of food price concerns and claims it fouls up car engines there even though it works fine in millions of cars, including German ones, in the U.S. and Brazil.
Please remember that the United States producers a lot more of its own energy than competitors like Germany and Japan. We still produce 5 mbpd of oil and enough coal that we export to the EU. Corn energy, which is renewable, is exported at prices below its energy content market value. Who are we behind? If there is any other country in front I would like to know who it is.
To comment on your first point, I thought it was more advantageous for oil companies to over-report, not under report, how much oil they have in reserve given that a company’s share value is dictated by how much that company reports having in reserve and NOT by the price of oil. Also, if people knew the truth about peak oil, wouldn’t this create incentive to curtail oil consumption, consequently driving the price of oil down?
Having this said, the Shell-sponsored ad on peak oil baffles me. Perhaps we (or oil companies) have crossed the line on how much we can deny the peak oil phenomenon until we start feeling the effects, and Shell is beginning to realize this.
(I got the info on under-reporting oil reserves from www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net - it has some pretty interesting stuff there).
What a great advertisement. Jeremy Leggett is one of the most eloquant speakers about Peak Oil and for him to be behind a campain such as this is great news. The article speaks fairly plainly about our future risks in a manner which many people will understand. Unfortunately much of the discussion of Peak Oil is only on the internet and is mostly spoken about in the academic circles of society. Even though Fortune and Time magazines are not the types your average Joe would read at least it is a bit more prominent in the MSM.
In Australia there is a very limited knowledge of our inevitable problems (even though there was one brief mention of James Howard Kunstler in the Sydney Morning Herald letters section yesterday). If advertisements such as this start seeping into the tabloid media then we might just have a chance of educating everyone, not just the academia. I'll be the first to put in a few bucks!
Thanks Jeremy and TOD, this is great news.
Interesting catch Chris.
While I've got a lot of sympathy for Robert Marston's interpetation above, it would make more sense if Jeremy Leggett wasn't the face of the campaign and wasn't talking about the need to switch to renewable energy.
Shell seems to be the weakest of the majors when it comes to conventional oil, and they've always been the pioneer in scenario based planning for what lies ahead for the energy industry. Their latest set of scenarios (Blueprints Or The Scramble) did talk about - and recommend - the need to transition to a sustainable energy future, so maybe they are starting to lean much more towards a gas + sequestration and renewables option than trying to scale up the tar sands (which is a fairly risky approach if a Kyoto successor with teeth emerges).
I don't think Leggett is in any way a face for Shell. But I do think this is a win, win for Shell (reasons above). Given, Shell may well greenwash in advertising. What I want to see from Shell is a substantial portion of its budget/profits invested in renewable energy.
Shell selling out of the solar business doesn't really make it look like a champion of renewable energy does it?
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=178601033
In the advert, Shell is dumping the responsibility of dealing with Peak Oil on the world while it sits pretty in a position to reap the profits. In my opinion, those who benefit the most from scarcity should responsibly act to ensure an economic future exists at all rather than using clever advertising to deflect blame or implying they are part of a solution when they are really not.
While I'd also like to see Shell devoting most (if not all) of its investment directed towards renewables, regarding the solar sale its worth noting that it didn't include their thin film business - and a lot of observers seem to think thin film has a brighter future than conventional PV.
They also seem top be doing some biggish wind power projects - I think the London Array is a Shell project.
But these are still tiny compared to the oil and gas side of things.
Big Gav, you write:
Particularly when JL makes such extraordinary claims as Any self-respecting solar company ... can put up zero carbon buildings in a matter of weeks.
Perhaps that is true of temperate climate zones, such as the south of England. But for Winnipeg, central Canada, with average winter temperatures of -10 degrees Celsius?
One DOES get the impression that JL is trying to sell something, and not just to further the pursuit of knowledge.
But for Winnipeg, central Canada, with average winter temperatures of -10 degrees Celsius?
Drake's Landing near Calgary, Alberta is using solar thermal with seasonal storage, and is expected to generate 95% of their own heating needs with this system.
http://www.dlsc.ca/
Note that only a small minority of the world's population lives in such cold environs, so let's not focus on outliers.
The zero carbon building is a complete nonsense. The embodied energy to create and transport all the materials and tradesmen to site is huge. Once the building is erected, and I am thnking a medium size commercial or residential building in a reasonable city location, it may be able to run on solar PV or windmills for its energy input but will it be able to deal with all its own shit, or use only rain water collected by its roof top, etc without connecting to the municiapl systems that are defineitly run by large scale, energy intensive processing plants.
The zero carbon concept also neglects the fact that you have to get people, goods and services into and out of the building. The activity of transport required by a building necessarily induces energy use and much of this energy would currently be of the carbon based type.
The idea that we can continue society as it is currently built by switching to new forms of energy and transport apparatus by sticking up brand new, cool, looking "green" buildings is ludicrous. We need to look at the systems as a whole from a God's Eye perpective. Seeing how economic and social linkages create demands which feed resource exploitation which creates environmental feedbacks are where we need to start. The question is not how to make the building carbon neutral but do we need the building at all?
"The zero carbon building is a complete nonsense."
most people realize that what they mean is that the building uses very little emission once it's constructed. the payback for a zero energy building is probably very quick considering buildings are responsible for a lot of our energy usage per year.
LoL Here we go again with the debate over which inputs to include & which to exclude. This is the issue in a nutshell. I got jumped all over the past couple weeks for pointing out that ppl simply ignore certain inputs whenever they do efficiency analysis, yet posters keep coming back to this topic. It can't be simply swept under the rug. No, most ppl DON'T realize that what "they" mean is that certain inputs should arbitrarily be ignored. Each person has her or his own view regarding which inputs to ignore & which to include. If you want to achieve pariah status on this board, just suggest that NO inputs should be ignored. The regs will hate you for it! :))
Carolus Obscurus pontificated :
Sure - he's trying to sell solar panels.
I just don't think that is a product (and philosophy) that aligns all that well with Shell's primary business at present, which is what is puzzling about the 2 joining forces.
Either Shell views itself as a nat gas + thin film PV vendor going forward - or there is something odd about this...
The important point to me here is that he's trying to sell solar panels because of what he believes rather than believes (says) stuff to sell solar panels. The fact that he's putting his time and money where his mouth is by developing a solar power business adds credibility, rather than reduces it through the "he would say that 'cos he's trying to sell solar panels" argument.
I think that asking oil companies to support renewable energy is like asking the the natural ice business to support the new fangled refrigerators. Its not the same as how buggy makers transitioned to cars. I don't understand the premise of the oil companies become the next gen renewable energy companies. Since its primarly a electricity game electric companies make at least some sense.
Better for the oil companies to buy back all their shares and let the share holders decide how to invest.
This oil company -> renewable is one of the stupidest arguments that floats around dealing with peak oil. Sorry to be blunt but people need to wake up and start dealing with companies like electric utilities that are the buggy makers of today not the guys out cutting ice in the winter on a pond.
Memmel, Bad analogy my friend. There were no buggy companies that transitioned to automobiles. Two of the largest horse carriage companies in New england were in my home town. They fought the new fangled inventions all the way. It was the bicycle companies that transitioned to the car. Like most large companies, "We've never done it that way before!"
Studebaker. They made freight wagons.
Fisher Body started as a carriage maker, IIUC.
Holden (Now General Motors-Holden Australia) started as a saddlery.
Chris,
What's in it for Shell or indeed CNN the other sponsor or Jeremy for that matter?
I suspect Jeremy hopes he will make a lot of money from peak oil, presumably Shell hopes to as well.
Why not ask Jeremy yourself the next time you and he both turn up at a House of Commons APPGOPO meeting? If you don't I will. :-)
BTW, I just looked at Upstream,
Tapis is above $115 ... (38 x 3 = 114) ... so it's a
in the far East at least!
It may not be too many years before Yergin is assuring us that oil prices "next year" will fall back down to $380 per barrel.
WT
There may be more truth in that statement than may be you intended!
As the saying goes: "Many a true word is said in jest"
Or when the price is $250/bbl, he might say "I can see scenarios where the price might reach $400/bbl. And yet, there is a strong chance the bottom will fall out, bringing price down to a reasonable and respectable $160/bbl." Since he's been burned so many times, his most current projections are somewhere between $40 and $150. It's getting to the point where most energy analysts realize the usefulness of his projections.
I heard this the last time prices approached $114.
What does one yergin represent? the price he thought it would average in 2008?
In a Forbes column published on November 1, 2004, Yergin dismissed concerns about oil supplies, and asserted that rising oil production would drive oil prices down to $38 by November 1, 2005. Note that oil prices crossed the $60 mark prior to the two bad hurricanes that hit the US in 2005.
In any case, I defined a new oil price unit: One "Yergin" = $38 per barrel.
My "Yergin Indicator" suggests that oil prices will trade in a range about twice Yergin's predicted price, within one to two years of his prediction. Based on a Yergin prediction of lower prices in the summer of 2007, I issued, for the benefit of trader types, a "Red Alert," because Yergin had predicted that oil prices should be back down to $60 or so in 2008, which as noted above suggested that $120 oil was not too far away.
For more info, do a Google Search for Daniel Yergin and click on "Daniel Yergin Day."
We have a local Yerginite over here in Norway as well.
Mr Arnstein Wigestrand in SEB Enskilda (a bank) and he is naming himself as "an expert in the field of oil-price-analysis (cost of a barrel) "? (hehehe, good one )
Now Mr Wigestrand's AVERAGE prediction for the "year of the lord" 2008 , is 55$. That number was decided late 2007. Now, as of April 3rd, he has index-regulated this due to the falling dollar, so running average is set to 65$ for the year 2008(!)
http://www.dn.no/energi/article1371695.ece
(norwegian language alert, but you will understand the word kollaps and those numbers..:-) )
Jeremy Leggett's plug is a curate's egg -- good in parts. It deserves close reading.
Two criticisms:
First, no mention whatsoever of the N-word (nuclear energy).
Second, propagation of the myth that "we can run the world on renewables and efficiency".
Still, the fact that Shell has de facto acknowledged that the writing is on the wall lends this advertisement the status of a historic document.
propagation of the myth that "we can run the world on renewables and efficiency".
I wouldn't so much call it a myth as I would say that it would be difficult to do so at the high level of energy overconsumption and waste rampant in the US, Canada, Australia, and to a lesser degree the rest of the G8. Some countries have a very high level of renewable energy in their mix. There is no one answer, as each country has it's own level of potential for renewable energy sources and level of comfort currently expected by its citizenry. Norway, for example, generates 99% of its energy from hydro, and Canada produces 57% from the same. Costa Rica utilizes 99.2 percent renewable energy, followed by Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti and El Salvador, with more than 80 percent.
The three keys to the level of renewables in an energy mix are;
- What renewable resources are available? (includes the Solar Supergrid mentioned by Stuart Staniford)
- How much can the populace conserve (includes Demand Management)?
- What energy storage resources (or technological advancements) are available?
I personally see a place for nuclear as a portion of baseload, as we transition coal/gas baseload to geothermal, solar thermal baseload plants in sunny places, a supergrid of solar/wind/hydro, solar thermal building energy, or most likely some combination of all the above.
Thanks -- impressive. Obviously you're a pro!
What better way to discredit someone than sponsor them. The conspiracy theorists love this stuff.
"LOOK, he's funded by an oil company! Peak Oil is a scam! Artficial Scarcity!"
It's good to see the resource extraction (peak oil) and pollution sink (global warming) discussed together as two sides of the same coin.
Is there a serious economic downside in peak oil for any player in the supply side of oil (nations holding resources, nationalized oil companies, the traditional "major" oil companies, etc.)? The range of political, cultural, consumer, and ecological downsides seem easier to list than the negatives for the suppliers.
Seriously, how is peak oil bad for the ones holding the supplier cards in today's game over the time window important to their decisionmakers?
Shell selling out of solar: That was monocrystalline photovoltaic, and they may have concluded that the technology was going no place.
An oil refinery is in large part a big set of heat exchangers, and one could imagine an oil company concluding that they had a natural expertise in concentrating solar.
While few carriage companies became car companies for long, there is some hope that the importance of adopting to change is better understood than it was 50 or 100 years ago.
If one looks at Suncorp 'history' one will find a picture of wind towers under the title Energy for the Future
(1990s & 2000s).
There was green advertising that paid for itself. I only wonder why the current brochures are not still full of those pictures. Maybe it caused too many working at Suncor to throw up?
I don't really get what this guy is saying.
but he's the chairman of the company that's trying to solve the crisis?
http://www.solarcentury.co.uk/who_we_are/company_profile/
So is there a solution or not? What if we use solar energy to power plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles?
Plug-In Hybrid feature on CalCars.org and Felix Kramer
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7BvaFjdNl-E
Seems straighforward to me-he is saying that there will be a huge demand for solar energy which is currently being underestimated by the marketplace, so his company has a bright future, in his opinion. Nobody elected him to take care of the entire human population of planet Earth.
He explains in more detail in his book. Basically I think his point is that although renewables are the future - they can't fill the gap left by oil. That gap is too big and too soon. I think he's right.
Chris,
I've read Jeremy Leggett's book ('Half Gone') and I think he is somewhat inconsistent. On the one hand he DOES seem to think that renewables are the future. In an eight-page tirade against nuclear energy (pages 221 to 228) -- which is the only non-fossil fuel alternative to renewables -- he writes:
But a few pages later these 'far more attractive options' seem to recede and he writes about the upcoming 'tsunami' and 'one giant wave of unstoppable panic', since people will not listen to the alternative energy advocates and, ergo, the shit will hit the fan. Thus, renewables are not the future precisely since people will not realise that they ARE the future (if I follow his train of thought correctly).
Jeremy Leggett's book is a mixture of first-rate promotion of peak oil awareness and second-rate rehashes of the old Greenpeace ideological school of thought. Nowhere in his dissing of nuclear energy does he discuss relative risk -- the sure sign that, in some ways, he 'just doesn't get it'.
I think that Leggett is far too smart to really believe that renewables alone will suffice, yet he is too ideological to consider nuclear energy as an acceptable option and too optimistic to acknowledge that disaster is thus inevitable. Hence the contradictions.
So John15 is probably right when he writes "I don't really get what this guy is saying". I don't either. Either renewables can replace fossil fuels or they can't, and if they can't we're done for unless nuclear energy can postpone the agony for a bit, as a kind of last resort or deus ex machina.
Still, Leggett is the most prominent convert to the peak oil cause ever, so perhaps one shouldn't be overly critical. It's just that clear thinking is not always his forte.
what's the number though? is it oil production down 5%? 20%? also remember peak oil isn't peak energy.
He's saying that we'll be in the shit, but we have a choice between being in the shit over our heads, or just up to our waist. His company aims to help us be in just to our waists, and make a profit along the way.
It really helps if you set aside the either/or, black/white way of looking at the world. It's not either business as usual or doom and mass death.
Shades of grey, baby. Shades of grey.
I'm amazed by the diametrically opposed viewpoints of Peak Oil between Shell and Exxon. Shell appears to be playing the Liberal Peak Oiler, while Exxon is playing the Conservative Infinite Oiler. These two giants obviously have very little in common, except when it comes to bilking us at the pump while this Admin. takes a blind eye to corporate profits. Remember the most important economic policy is to provide hundred million dollar plus bonuses to CEO's. That has a positive effect on the economy. Just understand that as you get bilked, some fatcat is riding high, and that is the most important economic component.
Shell is definitely NOT playing the "liberal peak oiler"
Last week, John Hofmeister testified before a US congressional committee that we're not at peak oil, and that the (global) extraction rate will reach 110 million barrels per day.
Didn't Deffeyes make the point that Hubbert was working for Shell Oil when he proposed the peak oil concept, and Shell tried to shut him down? Maybe this is some kind of atonement for past sins. Does this imply that corporations have a conscience?
Hi Chris,
Thanks for bringing this up.
I may differ with you in one respect - that Jeremy "pulls no punches".
Notice a couple of things:
1) "If the peakists are correct..."
Who are the "peakists"?
Who is not a "peakist"?
Is there some doubt that "peakists" *are* correct?
2) "Yes, we can run the world on renewables and efficiency."
We can?
Or, I should say - Who is the "we"?
And we *can* - how?
In the same manner as at present?
No. Not at all.
But then, isn't this a somewhat misleading sentence?
As a Canadian, it is interesting to read the article siting the Alberta Tar Sands as a viable option for future energy extraction. Firstly, the sands are currently up for sale - in a free-for-all auction to any bidder with a bit of cash. Secondly, Canada, although seen as a future heavy weight in the peak oil debate is not even able to provide a continuous supply of energy to their own population.(Many areas of the eastern provinces this year experienced shortages and even losses of energy during the very cold Canadian winters)
The tar sands are also dependent on an enormous amount of energy in order to extract any oil at all.
"This first step of tar sand extraction is estimated to result in gasoline that carries a burden of "at least five times more carbon dioxide" then would conventional "sweet crude" oil production." So much from an environmentally friendly society I guess we're all going down anyway, and Alberta will definitely be the first to jump on the bandwagon.
Cited:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/alberta_tar_san.php
Other Sources on the Tar Sands as well as interesting reading:
http://www.energy.gov.ab.ca/OurBusiness/oilsands.asp
http://www.tarsandswatch.org/
http://www.desmogblog.com/report-alberta-oil-sands-most-destructive-proj...
Hi again Chris,
And another thing...
re: "Yes we can run the world on renewables and efficiency."
Efficiency is not the same thing as conservation.
The phrase "running on efficiency" does not make literal (grammatical) sense. It seems to me it's meant to be evocative.
What does it evoke?
Something that can continue as "usual" - and yet be different.
Outsourcing is efficient. Dismantling a US plant and putting one up some place where labor costs are lower, etc. - is also increasing efficiency.
Also, "running on efficiency" does not deal with the factor(s) that overtake efficiency. Namely, growth itself.
"Efficient" in terms of energy use might make sense. But still the same questions arise.
Is he afraid to use the word "conservation"?
If so, why?