SamuM - this is a smart way of breaking down the problem. Declining light sweet production will likely control the rest.

Thanks for the comment. The answer is no. Peak discoveries (sometimes in the mid 1960s) was mentioned by several speakers, and various people talked about the distinction between conventional and unconventional oil, but no further distinctions were made.

Thanks, Chantal, for sharing this discussion with us.

I knew that Colin is thinking in these categories. He even mentioned it, albeit in a somewhat cryptic form. He talked about the agricultural revolution. It was mentioned that, before agricultural machines (all running on Diesel fuel!) became available, humanity was using slaves to work the fields. I don't remember his precise numbers, but he said something like: without the agricultural machines of today, we would now need 200 million slaves to plow our fields.

The comment about hostility toward foreigners is also very appropriate. We see this already now in South Africa (on the news within the last week or two). Switzerland is by no means immune to this. The Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) has as many followers in Switzerland because of their restrictive immigration politics. Many people say openly that they deplore the rise in crime rate here in Switzerland, and they blame the high percentage of foreigners for it. Food is, until now, not an issue, but it could very well turn into an issue in the future.

Your question is a difficult one. What we know for a fact is that, during WW-II, a population of 4 million people (little more than half of the current population) survived barely on a diet of 1800 calories per day (Wahlen's potato war). At that time, Switzerland had almost twice the arable land available that it has now (more of the land has been paved over in the meantime), and we had 14% farmers, whereas we currently only have 2% farmers.

Of course, the green revolution of the 1960s (nitrate fertilizers) has increased the yield of the land dramatically, but it takes lots of energy (though not necessarily fossil fuel) to produce the fertilizers.

Statistically, Switzerland doesn't have the highest population density in Europe, but practically it does. The reason is that only about 1/3 of the country is arable land. A second third are steep slopes at high altitudes that can only be used for grazing but not for planting. The final third is ice and snow.

I doubt very much that 7.5 million people can survive in Switzerland without massive food imports.

Yep. Don't rock the boat.

The first of the speakers to be shown on TV was Dr. Hartl, who explained to the Swiss public that oil production will continue to grow for quite a while. Then, they showed Prof. Ganser, who said in the excerpt shown that, when Peak Oil comes e.g. in 2015, it is better if we are prepared for it. Finally, they showed Dr. Campbell who philosophized in the excerpt shown about the physical nature of oil fields: they all mature and then start producing less and less oil.

The story ended with the observation of the commentator that all of the scientists agree that there is still enough oil for several decades to come, but ultimately, the flow of black gold will end.

How much primary energy does Switzerland produce from Hydro and is there room to expand this?

According to the official statistics provided, Switzerland is currently producing 60% of its electricity from hydroelectric power plants. The other 40% are mostly nuclear. Switzerland itself produces less than 2% of electricity from fossil fuels, and less than 1% of the consumed overall energy is from coal.

The statistics are a bit deceiving though, because Switzerland is trading electricity with neighboring countries. At the current time, Switzerland is still exporting slightly more electricity than it is importing. Some of the electricity produced in Switzerland is exported, especially during summer months, whereas some of the electricity consumed is imported, especially during the winter, when our consumption is highest. Some of the imported electricity is produced from fossil fuels, including from coal, and this is not shown in the statistics.

Switzerland has increased the amount of electricity produced from hydroelectric power plants over the last few decades by replacing many of its turbines. Modern turbines have a higher efficiency than the older types.

The natural sources of water at high altitudes are largely exploited, i.e., it doesn't make economic sense to build many more reservoir lakes.

However, this doesn't mean that hydroelectric energy is already at its limits. Switzerland is using many big pumps to pump water uphill into the reservoir lakes during hours of low consumption, to let it flow down again during hours of high consumption.

Once a higher percentage of our electricity is being produced using photovoltaics, which has to happen, the daily fluctuations in electricity production will grow. At that time, we'll need more and bigger pumps to balance supply and demand.

To get bitumen from a SAGD well requires at least 1 mcf of natural gas, that is about 1/6th of a barrel of oil equivalent. More energy was required in the upgrader in order to produce a light synthetic oil. There was a net gain of energy and the process was profitable.

In-situ operations might also be fueled with distillates produced by upgrading bitumen or by gasifying coke produced from upgrading and refining operations.

One barrel of oil = 42 gallons.

I heard a recorded conference where an oil executive stated an EROEI of 4 for tar sands operations.

I appreciate that you are reporting here what Colin Campbell said at the meeting but would you care to comment on where you think the ERoEI for producing the tar sands lies and does it really matter if the figure is 1 or 5?

Don't shoot the messenger! I was only reporting what Colin Campbell said during his presentation. I do understand how oil is being produced from tar sands, but I personally have no knowledge about the EROEI of these processes.

I have no reason to doubt your figure. However, the calculation of EROEI often depends on which parts of the process you include in the calculation, and which parts you exclude.

For example, do you include the amount of energy expended in either transporting the water to where the tar sand is, or alternatively transporting the tar sand to where the water is? Do you include the energy expended in reforesting the strip mines, after you are done with mining?

Colin may simply be a bit more thorough in which processes he includes in the calculation of the EROEI, but then again, I have not seen his calculations. I only attended his presentation.

The second point I have is in relation to this statement:

Peak Oil means Peak Food.

I have reached the provisional conclusion that humans will ultimately prove to be smarter than yeast and that energy resources will be prioritised to the agriculture sector and since agriculture uses less than 10% of our primary energy that we will continue to produce sufficient food for our own needs for decades to come - but perhaps not enough to feed the world. Would you care to comment on the socio-economic and political consequences of this for Europe.

I hope you are correct, but I have not seen much evidence of it yet.

Individual humans are most certainly smarter than yeast in their personal dealings, but humanity as a species may not be. At least, our reproduction habits are no different from those of lab rats, and although Hubbert started talking about Peak Oil in the mid 1950s, and although we started talking in earnest about the Limits to Growth since the early 1970s, we have done very little if anything as a species to counter the looming problems that we clearly recognize.

As long as we let market forces reign supreme, the rich and famous will continue driving their SUVs around, even if this means to take food out of the mouths of the poor, simply because they have deeper pockets and can outbid the poor for the remaining energy resources.

As a relatively recent immigrant to Switzerland it isn't obvious to me that the situation is as bad as presented here. Having come from Canada I'm in very little doubt that Switzerland is in a better position to cope with peak oil than most parts of Canada... (Alberta excepted). For a start Switzerland is fairly self sufficient in electrical production (figures I read vary slightly but something like 50-60% is Hydro and nearly all the remainder nuclear).

This is true. However, the Swiss government predicts a deficit of electricity starting around 2012. As oil becomes more expensive, more people will throw out their oil heating systems and replace them by heat pumps, which consume electricity. It can also be expected that finally, electric vehicles and/or plug-in hybrids will conquer a significant portion of the private transportation market. These vehicles consume electricity.

The Swiss are currently fairly wealthy, and they have always been good at embracing new technologies. For example, flat-screen TV sets have invaded Swiss living (and bed-) rooms faster than those of other European nations.

Hence we can expect that the demand for electricity will grow quite a bit over the coming years, and there are currently no new power plants in the making to fill that growing demand.

The transport network is fantastic and unlike many other European countries many of the smaller less used train lines have not been shut down so a large fraction of settlements still have train connections. The train network is virtually 100% electric.

This is true also. In fact, it is a Federal mandate that all communities can be reached by public transport. The smaller mountain villages are all reachable by our yellow postal buses.

I also think that this is a big plus.

As to food production vs. population, is it really any worse off than other European countries? A quick glance at wikipedia gives 181, 230, 246 people/km^2 for Switzerland, Germany and the UK, respectively. The type of farming here strikes me as much more sustainable than elsewhere as it is often much smaller scale with far less mechanical intervention than elsewhere (eg. cows walk up to pastures in the summer (no trucking) and lots of the hay cutting/gathering is done by hand or with smaller machinery which presumably is less energy intensive).

I explained this elsewhere in this thread. The population density is deceiving because of the large percentage of land area that cannot be cultivated due to high altitude.

It is true that the Swiss farms are on average much smaller than in many other countries, which will be a plus after the oil crash.

Moving the cows to the mountains during the summer months is a tradition here in Switzerland that is dictated by the local topology. The Alpine meadows cannot be used for anything but grazing, and by moving the cows away from the lower pastures during the summer, the farmers can cut some grass and store it to feed the cows during the winter months.

Switzerland has three levels of agriculture. The low lands (below 700 m.a.s.) are used primarily for plantations. The medium lands (between 700 m.a.s. and 1000 m.a.s.) are used for milk farming, whereby only some of the cows stay at these altitudes during the summer. All of the young animals and some of the cows are sent to the mountains for grazing between May and September. The high lands (above 1000 m.a.s.) are Alpine meadows that are only used during the summer months.

Manual labor is minimized, just like everywhere else. Hay may be cut by hand, but only on slopes that are so steep that the agricultural machines cannot negotiate them. Farms are small, but farmers help each other out, i.e., most farmers don't own all of the agricultural machines themselves, but borrow them from a neighbor during the time of harvest.

Figure 6 - Together the Conventional Fossil Fuels are set to peak before 2020 describing a single cycle. Sources:
Jean Laherrère [pdf!] for Natural Gas,
Energy Watch Group for Coal and
The Oil Drum for Oil. Click for large version.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3565

If you add up a lot of similar distributions of any shape, you get a Gaussian. I assumed that is why peak oil has that shape, and would be the same for peak gas, even if the shape for a particular well or field is quite different. I'd love to hear an expert comment on this.

This is true if you draw from independent samples. The samples are, of course, not independent here, because the larger gas reserves are found earlier than the smaller ones, just like in the case of the oil, but I doubt that this influences the distribution of the sum very much. I am inclined to believe that you are correct, i.e., that the distribution of the sum is still essentially Gaussian.

If you add up a lot of similar distributions of any shape, you get a gaussian. I assumed that is why peak oil has that shape, and would be the same for peak gas, even if the shape for a particular well or field is quite different.

The solution to the logistic equation has a shape similar to a gaussian. But I don't think they have much to do with each other.

Folks will say that the use of the logistic to model petroleum production is rather arbitrary, that the logistic just happens to fit. That is an overly weak analysis in my view, though probably appropriate in circumstances where the audience doesn't want to think very much!

The bell-shaped logistic curve is the solution to a differential equation:

dR/dt = aR(U-R)

If one adds up a lot of distributions of arbitrary shape, one can actually generate just about any shape at all. It all depends on the distribution of the distributions! If there were scads of little oil fields all over the planet, and each oil field had a roughly bell-shaped production curve - and if people started producing the oil from the different wells at random times over the course of several millennia or so, then the global production curve would be quite flat over those several millennia.

So a very interesting question is: why is the peak in the USA lower 48 so closely correlated in time with the peak in the Middle East? Maybe they'll be 50 years apart, but on the scale of human history, that's quite tight.

It seems quite clear that the reason is that technology moves easily around the world, both production technology and consumption technology. Well, and the oil itself gets shipped around the world. Once the USA production gets ramped up, then everyone realizes the value of the oil and also how to get it. (I realize that my history is too simple here - Caspian oil was also produced long ago, and probably elsewhere too - my point is merely that production and consumption is a global affair).