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IEA World Energy Outlook 2010: Questionable Assumptions and Major Omissions
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 13, 2010 - 10:55am
The World Energy Outlook 2010 makes quite a number of assumptions that seem wrong, and omits important ideas. Here are a few that Oil Drum staff members have mentioned. You may have others you think should be added to the list.
1. Net Energy. The WEO assumes all energy resources are equal, without considering "Net Energy" or "Energy Return on Energy Invested." Society needs a certain level of energy to maintain its current state of development. The resources we are talking about using now are of lower and lower net energy (oil sands, oil shale, arctic oil, very deep oil, coal-to-liquids; also many of the "renewables"). It is not at all clear that all of the resources being examined in the WEO are really of value in solving our energy problems.
2. Quality of Energy. One cannot simply substitute one type of energy for another. Even if we have a temporary surplus of natural gas, the vast majority of our cars cannot run on natural gas. Ethanol can be substituted for a small share of the gasoline in today's cars (10% for cars made prior to 2007 and 15% for those made since then), but if the amount of gasoline declines, so will the amount of ethanol that can be used for substitution--this is a major reason that work today is being done on "drop-in" fuels. Electricity is not substitutable for liquid fuels, without major changes in the machines now using liquid fuels--for example, a semi-truck or bulldozer will generally not run on electricity, and of course electricity does nothing to replace the many non-fuel uses for oil such as medicines, synthetic fabrics, herbicides and pesticides. Variable electricity, such as from wind and solar PV, reduces the fuel needed for electric generation, but it is not otherwise a replacement for fossil fuels.
If one wishes to have substitutability across qualities of energy, there are long term changes that can be undertaken to make this happen (for example, replace cars of one type with another type), but such changes are neither quick nor cheap.
3. Recession from High Prices (Low Net Energy). If we try to use lower and lower quality energy resources, prices can be expected to rise higher, because low net energy and high cost pretty much go hand in hand. There are strong indications that oil above $85 a barrel (in 2009$) sends the US economy into recession. (See this post by Dave Murphy. Others have come to a similar conclusion.) The recessionary impact may be the signal that the amount of net energy that the economy is receiving is too low. The IEA assumes that OECD economies can continue to grow, regardless of oil price or of alternative energy price, even though this is very questionable.
4. OPEC Politicized Reserves. Many of the countries that the WEO is hoping to obtain increased oil production from between now and 2035 are countries that have very politicized reserves.
Back in the early years of development, reserves were set by International Oil Companies, including some from the US, doing work in these countries. But after National Oil Companies took over, upward reserve "adjustments" were made by a number of OPEC countries, in moves that seems to be designed to help with getting increased OPEC quotas, or to elevate the countries in the eyes of their citizens and of people around the world. Very recently, there have been additional upward adjustments, which seem also to be political in nature. None of these amounts are audited.
It is possible that if we had 10,000 years for extraction, and could afford oil that sells for $500 a barrel, these countries might have the amount of oil claimed. But no one has reviewed how many resources can legitimately be claimed as reserves, in a reasonable time frame, at a cost that economies can afford to pay.
5. Questionable USGS Reserves. USGS published its last major set of reserve estimates in 2000, but it is not clear that these estimates are very useful in determining how much is actually extractable at prices economies can afford to pay. There are also questions as to whether there have been major mistakes in estimates. Just last week, the USGS announced that most of the oil resources it was expecting in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska were in fact, natural gas resources. (Natural gas reserves in this location are of little economic value, because the natural gas is too far away from markets--yet another low "net energy" issue.) How do we know that other resources (for example, the supposed resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), are not as badly mis-estimated?
6. Omission of Export Analyses. Oil exports available to importers have been declining for five years now. Oil use by oil exporters rises each year, since populations of these countries are growing, and since leaders want to keep their citizens happy. The oil available to oil importers is only what is left, after oil exporters have taken what they see as necessary for their own needs. WEO does not look at this issue. (See this post.)
7. Overly Rosy View of Unconventional Natural Gas. Production of shale gas is currently high and prices are low. The question is whether this is a temporary market aberration (to be followed by bankruptcies and reduced production) or something one can count on as a major offset for future natural gas shortages. The Oil Drum has published articles such as this one by Art Berman, and this one by myself, Gail Tverberg, suggesting that production costs are much higher than current market prices.
High costs here again are no doubt related to low net energy return. The typical Wall Street view is that prices can rise as much as needed to get the natural gas, but as with oil, this assumption may prove to be wrong. If natural gas prices rise very high, the result may simply be worse recession. This result could mean that extraction is taking more energy than the gas itself is producing--especially if one takes a broader view of required energy, including required infrastructure such as roads. So if the energy return of unconventional gas is too low, it may have to be left in the ground.
8. Failure to address why world oil production has been flat for six years. If the amount of available oil reserves is so great, why hasn't new oil been rushed into production in the last six years, as oil prices spiraled to $147 barrel? If there was difficulty raising production in the last six years, how can one possibly assume in the "Current Policies" scenario that oil production would continue to rise in the future.
One of the issues in the recent flat production is the flow rate of reserves. Some of the unconventional oil is extremely slow to extract. Reserves to production ratios can be extremely misleading, because the fact reserves are there, doesn't mean a reasonable amount can be extracted in a given year. It is a little like having a bank account with $5 billion dollars, that you can only remove $100 a year from.
9. Assumption that smart grid will be of more benefit than it will be. Great hopes are placed in the smart grid, but if use an approach that gets electricity from more renewable energy, our fluctuations in electricity availability will be more seasonal (spring and summer when rains greatest for hydroelectric; local seasonal variations for wind; summer vs winter for solar). A smart grid will do nothing to solve this issue. (See this post.) Having each electric company send out time of day and time of week rates, the way telephone companies did years ago (Call on Sunday when rates are low!) would seem to accomplish much of the same objective, at a lower cost.
10. Assumption that major improvements in energy intensity of GDP can be expected in the future. In the past, improvements in energy intensity of GDP have been observed for a variety of reasons--shift in the nature of the economy to one more focused on services; ability to substitute modern energy-efficient cars, appliances, power generating units for less efficient ones; and building of more energy efficient buildings, for example. WEO 2010 assumes huge continued improvements in energy intensity, particularly oil energy intensity:
Perhaps some improvement in energy intensity of GDP can be made, but I wonder whether we are kidding ourselves about the extent of the possible improvement. As energy availability reduces, the shift toward a service economy may very well reduce. This could especially be the case, if certain types of imports become too expensive relative to locally produced goods, and it is necessary to shift production back more to OECD countries. Also, it takes energy to make new cars, appliances, and power generating stations, and to build new energy-efficient buildings. If energy is more scarce, replacing these is likely to take place at a slower rate than in the past, not at a faster pace. Some proposed activities like carbon sequestration and coal to liquids would seem to act in the opposite direction of lower energy intensity of GDP. At a minimum, this issue needs to be examined more closely.
11. Failure to consider constraints other than oil. There are many limiting factors, other than oil. Water is already a problem in many parts of the US and in much of the rest of the world. Lack of availability of water may be a problem if carbon capture and storage is considered, or if new fossil fuel or nuclear generating capacity is added for other reasons. Minerals ores are becoming more and more depleted, and some, such as those for rare earth minerals and lithium, are available in only a few places on earth. Maintaining or increasing production will take an increasing portion of what oil is available. Biofuels are clearly limited by the amount of arable land available to plant them, and by their impacts on soil depletion. Normally, the soil is enhanced each year by the recycling of organic matter to it. If this is removed, soil quality can be expected to degrade.
12. Failure to put together all of the costs. Under any scenario there will be huge costs involved. For example, if we use a scenario with a significant amount of wind power, there will need to be an expensive networks put into place, with an upgraded grid, electrical storage, and fossil fuel backup generation. Carbon capture and storage applied to coal would require greatly increased coal mining, new railroads for all of the coal, greater fresh water use, and would reduce energy efficiency. Without putting all of the costs together, it is hard to see what is feasible and what is not.
One of the big concerns when considering all of the costs is the capital needed to finance all of these improvements. At this point, major governments are spending far more than they are taking in in taxes. All of the enhancements that are planned through government spending will need to be considered in addition to collecting current revenue shortfalls. The total costs may well put a cap on what can realistically be done.
IEA World Energy Outlook 2010: Questionable Assumptions and Major Omissions
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IEA World Energy Outlook 2010: Questionable Assumptions and Major Omissions
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309 comments
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The most glaring omission in the WEO report is where they expect to find all that lovely crude which has yet to be found, but that is absolutely central to their thesis. That is the light blue chunk of the above chart. Frankly, it is laughable. Anything else wrong with the report must take a backseat in terms of importance.
Just eyeballing it reveals that the world needs to find - and bring online - at least 10M bbl of new crude production in just 4 years!! That is FIND it first, then develop it and get it to market.
Time to wake up and smell the Peak Oil coffee. The debate is over. And this is from the most 'bullish', 'cornucopian' institution going.
"Amazingly, the IEA asserts we will need to find an extra 900 billion barrels of oil over the next 25 years to meet demand. But at the current discovery rate of only 10 billion barrels it would take 90 years!" Kjell Aleklett, ASPO President (http://aleklett.wordpress.com/)
I guess I was thinking this reflected that high USGS numbers, but it could be a separate item, if it is truly "yet to be found."
Hopefully, we will have some staff members writing more about these individual items.
The list I put up today reflects the ideas of a number of staff members--Nate, Luis, and Rune in particular offered ideas, and Rune made the graph.
I think there are those at the IEA that want to put out some info to let people know there is going to be a problem, but want to do this in a politically correct manner. They must mind their keepers, but someone is feeling guilty enough to let some insightful info pass along.
We need to keep a downloaded copy of this report because it may get "revised" in the near future. Just a gut feeling.
I'd suggest that that flat line out till 2035 of yet to be exploited/found is the biggest waving flag.
Nobody who wants their scenario to be taken seriously predicts dead flat, no change. Its spectacularly unlikely, requiring tight feedback loops in place. To predicted it is to call attention to the assumptions that create it - which is I think why it might be there.
And on a related note, the plateau since 2005 is beginning to ring my alarm bells. With all the producers, and the politicking, its stayed too flat. Essentially I think someone is tuning the production level to keep it there - sending a message that no more oil is on offer 'get used to it'. Prices rise as we move along the plateau, and the next move is down.
In fact, it's the smoking gun. My short assessment is here:
10/11/2010
IEA World Energy Outlook 2010: Global crude oil production will never grow again
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=2060
I think we have come close to consensus that the IEA report is to be viewed as a window into the minds of the authors rather than a serious statement of the actual situation. View this way, what do we see?
1 oil production is a unimodal function of time (i.e. peak oil is a valid concept)
2 the mode for oil production happened in year 2005 CE.
3 the conventional wisdom that peak occurs when the oil is half gone is mistaken.
In fact they depict a production curve which when integrated over time indicates that OOIP has been about 90% consumed. (The precision of my 90% figure is very low seat of the pants number. It just looks to me like the area under the curve going forward is about 1/9 th of the area looking backward to the beginning of the petroleum era.)
And they have done this under the noses of their political masters at OECD. I think this is a very commendable action by lackeys of the establishment. I respect them for it. I think we should stop criticizing them and put more emphasis on belittling those who refuse to recognize this as a revolt at the center.
LOL. Excellent interpretation of their graph HAcland. I BETTER BE ABLE TO STILL BUY MY COFFEE!!!!
Then you had better be prepared for Peak Coffee!
Coffee (and of course tea) has been available in the U.S. since (roughly) the mid eighteenth century. It travels well.
If you are a true coffee afficianado I suggest you move to Blue Mountain, Jamaica. There you can buy pure Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee for a small fraction of its cost in the U.S. Otherwise, you can go to a wholesaler such as the one in St. Paul, MN and buy a good 100% Jamaican blue mountain beans. I don't know the current price; it used to be $1,000 or so per keg. Now it is probably double that, but a keg will last you for years.
The kegs are handmade in Jamaica and are very nice when empty, though nails protrude on the inside of the keg.
To be fair, the light blue wedge is identified as fields "yet to be developed OR found" (my emphasis). So some of that, in particular the early portion in the nearest coming years, has already been found, just is yet to be 'developed'. But as for the fattening of that wedge in the further out years by that which has yet to be found, I am right there with ya in deeming it oh-so-far less than likely.
I am not in this field but I looked at the graphic and came to the same conclusion. The authors of the report would have better served their audience by breaking that out into two pieces:
---Known reserves to be developed
---Unknown reserved to be found
I look at the graphic and conclude as you do that this is the face of peak oil.
Elsewhere people are pointing out that this report didn't consider the cost/energy efficiency of developing the proven resources.
This graphic is a very clear warning to anyone who wants to listen. The cheap energy party is over.
On slide 7, you will find the same IEA graph but with:
crude oil: fields yet to be developed
and
crude oil: fields yet to be found
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/key_graphs.pdf
(why do they use 2 graphs..?)
Thank you. That second graphics adds a lot of clarity to the discussion. It still looks like the face of peak oil but doesn't look as immediately disastrous.
That should have been the only graphic provided since the first one generates a lot more justifiable scepticism.
Tried your link twice, but got
"Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to www.worldenergyoutlook.org"
Hmmm...
All the IEA websites were down for an extended period. Earlier this month they were down for three days with no explanation. That is not acceptable for a major international organisation. Makes them look like a bunch of incompetents.
Perhaps to add a bit of insight to the magic blue-wedge,
.
here's the breakdown between "yet to be developed" and "yet to be found"
Between 2015 and 2020, around 10mbpd are brought online from those "to be found".
I wouldn't count on "crude oil fields yet to be developed" turning up at anything like the projected rate. Maybe the reason there are 2 variants of the graph is because the second version doesn't look quite as worrying as the first.
Yes, and TPTB will use this graph for continued BAU for at least another decade. Won't they?
Remember, that wedge includes items such as KSA going to 15Mbpd, which they've explicitly said they won't, and most here think they'll drop from their current 10mbpd.
Also includes Iraq's miraculous assent in production 'planned'.
Probably a whole lot of other very dodgy claims.
Best to halve that wedge as a starting point, add on maybe 20% of the yet to be found.
Then subtract for the above ground factors that will limit new production.
1. From currently known but undeveloped fields, between 2009 (0 mbd) and 2035 (46 mbd) this graph shows approx 230 billion barrels being produced. Maximum production from such fields is no earlier than 2035 as it is still increasing to that year, so you'd have to postulate that at least that much production is still to be gotten, ie at least 460 billion barrels total.
Does anyone know if, right now, there are 460 bbl of reserves in known but undeveloped fields?
2. Production from yet to be discovered fields starts in about 5 years time, and grows steadily to be about 22 mbd by 2035, for a cumulative production around 85 bbl. Again, production in that category has not peaked by 2035 implying reserves of at least 170 bbl discovered between 2010 and 2030.
Does anyone have historical figures for reserve discovery rates, and as a sanity test what would a graph of discovery rates from say 1930-2030 look like?
Most of the points made are symptomatic of the the problems with these kinds of reports. What is missing is any kind of transparent and fundamental analysis. Without any details as to the underlying models, an outlook is obsolete the minute it comes out. So there is nothing of any substance for anyone to latch on to and perhaps extend or mature, and thus keep up to date. Does this not seem painfully obvious?
Oh, I'm sure there's detail in there somewhere. You have your choice of paper €150, PDF €120. Hey, cheaper than what CERA charges.
Hmmm, you can download the WEO 2008 for free now. Cool beans. They still demand the above prices for WEO 2009 but it's not much of a read anyway. And no, I didn't buy the thing - you think I'm nuts? I rather, oh, obtained it surreptitiously, let's say.
Heh heh, in the unintended pun dept:
From WEO 2008. Chapter 11, indeed.
Let me quote two well known smart people. Howard Zinn said, "governments lie." Noam Chomsky said, "governments are not moral agents." Or stated another way, governments will pursue agendas that are not in the best interests of the majority and they will be deceptive in that pursuit. If we invert this statement, they will pursue policies that are in the interests of the minority and because that minority generates the lies they hide behind, they are not deceived. It's all very logical.
Both Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are hominem and the sense of "ad hominem arguement".
Both are smart people but are hardly are expert on the actual internal workings of government bureaucracies. The first response to the above post is an ad hominem attack on Chomsky. This is really beside the point. The proposition is "Governments lie" True or False?
For me, governments are aggregations of people. On some things they are truthful and on other things they are not.
Well said; and all that needed to be said.
Are you listening everyone?
<-- agrees with DurangoKid.
The notion that governments are simply people, like everyone else, some of whom lie and some of whom do not, is either naive or disingenuous.
Those working at high levels in government have an overwhelming impact on out lives in the way, say, Joe the Grocer or June the Hair Stylist do not. The lies of the former thus matter astronomically more than the lies of the latter. It's embarrassing that such a self evident truism should even need to be stated here.
We are daily inundated with bogus government-generated statistics for GDP, CPI, unemployment, etc etc etc ad nauseam - often announced with great fanfare, but in the end amounting to nothing more than lies. Lacking, as another commenter put it, "any kind of transparent and fundamental analysis" in this report, there is little point in taking it seriously, IMO. The mistake I see people here making is a presumption that the data is offered in good faith. But the thoroughly politicized nature of the debate, and the thoroughly dishonest nature of the forces involved, ensures that the data is tainted, skewed, and distorted, thus useless for the purposes of honest analysis.
"We are living in a world of lies -- lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are children and grandchildren of lies."
-Chris Floyd
I'm sorry if you thought I was saying the lies by government officials do no harm. I certainly don't believe that. And you are correct in saying that the lies of some do more public harm than the lies of others. But I do think that the Chris Floyd quote goes a bit too far. Not everything is a lie. And often the speaker of a lie actually believes his lie himself. I wonder how to value such self deception.
I apologize if I misapprehended your remarks, geek7. We can agree to disagree regarding Floyd's comment - though note that his comment does *not* in fact imply that everything is a lie.
And I think you are actually making Floyd's point by acknowledging that "often the speaker of a lie actually believes his lie himself" - this is part of what I took him to be trying to say. I heard it put another way recently: "we have been lied to all our lives by people who have been lied to all their lives."
The human animal's boundless capacity for self deception - a highly adaptive evolutionary strategy, per the evolutionary psychologists - certainly plays a major role in societal and individual response to peak oil. Maybe we can agree on that? :)
I've never heard a convincing argument from anti-peak oilers to counter why production could not be stepped up while oil price skyrocketed. Bush went to the Saudi's to get them to open the spickets wider, but they declined. Why? An unprecedented profit margin was staring them right in the kisser, yet they declined, and we are left to wonder why. The only logical conclusion is they no longer had the capability to be The Swing Producer. That was a huge moment in time to understand we were at a peak of world production.
And note that we saw a large increase in global crude oil production and global net oil exports from 2002 to 2005, in response to rising oil prices, followed by flat to declining global crude oil production and global net oil exports from 2005 to 2008, in response to rising oil prices.
As noted before, this pattern of flat to declining production, in response to rising oil prices, is what we saw in Texas and the North Sea, following their respective peaks in 1972 and 1999.
If 2005 was Peak, then why have we not seen by now a significant decrease in global oil production by now?
undulating plateau
This has all been common knowledge to people that were thinking about it. I placed the undulating plateau in the context of the oil shock model a few years ago. It still reads OK:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2005/12/top-overshoot-point.html
Web, from your linked article:
I think we've hashed this out before, but presumably vis a vis more infield drilling of old existing giant fields. Pay me now or pay me later, turns into make as much money now, but pay later with much greater decline.
The big question then becomes when is the sharp slide down from the undulating plateau take place, if the worldwide plateau has been ongoing since 05? Is there a way of comparing a particular country's peak plateau duration to figure a timeline? Seems like there should be a fairly decent way of estimating a range of time.
I get your point. If we look at simply the extractive pressures, the turning point is when the extraction rate goes much beyond a reasonable point.
So when is that point 15%, 20%, higher ? Take a specific case:
leads to this profile with no significant new discoveries
This of course ignores the supplies from unconventional sources, but I imagine those are even more difficult to increase rate from at a moment's notice.
It seems odd that the best we can do is offer up a vague phrase like "undulating plateau" in response to a serious question. We should be able to get a better grip on how much uncertainty surrounds the date range that encompasses a period of peak oil. Given the extremely poor data we have on production, it is unreasonable to expect a forecast that is precise to the hour or day or week or month or even year. But, that leaves a question as to how broad a range should we be looking for, given the noise in our data?
This may be a little naive, but consider the Hubbert linearization provided by Deffeyes. You could use that data to calculate the variance and estimate a 99% confidence interval for cumulative production. Then (since time is not explicitly present in these linearizations) you could back-calculate to find how wide the corresponding date range would be. This would be not be definitive, but it would be a useful constraint when asking how much time you need for analysis before you could reasonably hope to identify a peak.
My scientific wild-assed guess is that the date range for a 99% confidence level would be on the order of plus-or-minus 10 years. If the results are different, then I'd be a bit worried that the data is has been artificially smoothed. (By "different" I mean if the results suggest +/- a century or +/- two months, either result would seem to be "reality challenged").
Of course, a truly compelling peak can only be seen "in the rear view mirror". You'll know that conventionally produced oil has peaked when you've got a decade where cost-per-barrel of the resource rises and production of the resource falls.
George
Hubbert Linearization won't work for any of this because it requires a symmetric peak. HL has offered some insight but it is really a dead-end since it has this massive constraint disguised as a brilliant simplification. Deffeyes really went down a dead-end alley with this "trick" of his. Better to use a real model.
Rather working with a confidence interval it is much better to used fuzzy logic the treat the fuzzy (uncertain) data.
If you have any examples I would like to see them.
HA - Good point as usual. I tend to avoid the debate over PO timing. I can't back it up with a viable model but just my gut instinct after watching oil field production for 35 years: I'm GUESSING an 8 to 10 year undulating Peak Oil Plateau starting around 2005-2007. Connect all the peaks and low during this time frame and we'll see two fairly flat lines. After the POP the connect the dot game MAY show a continuous down slope. PO to me has never been a day, a month or even a year. It was always going to be extended period of time when will roughly replace depletion with new fields.
Just my vision and not a prediction.
Increased enhanced recovery techniques and risky exploration / extraction techniques (i.e. BP deepwater???) We are increasing production of the known fields, pushing the center of the curve further and further to the right and causing the backend part of the curve to be that much more steep...just a guess on my part.
The initial decline tends to be low (e.g., Texas, overall Lower 48, North Sea), plus we are getting some contribution from unconventional production.
Deffeyes' prediction was that global conventional crude oil production would peak between 2004 and 2008, most likely in 2005, and that rising unconventional production would not be sufficient to keep global production on an upward slope. So far, he has been right on both counts.
Prior to 2005, there had never been a global peak in oil, so no one had any idea what the global 'downside' would look like. Hubble used a symmetrical model because it was less complicated than an asymmetrical model, not because he had any reason to believe nature naturally prefers symmetry. It was the most simple model that fit, and was given
as an illustration, not a detailed prediction.
We are experiencing a undulating plateau as the after peak behavior for oil. The next global peak, of something else, perhaps potable water. It might also exhibit an undulating plateau. Or it might not. The only thing we can be sure of is that, if the starts to rise again, we haven't actually experienced a peak, so whatever is happening at that future time is not "post-peak whatever".
What you are saying is that Hubbert didn't really have a behavioral model, but a heuristic and at most a geometric concept. The geometric concept was that the area under the curve was the URR.
I attended a seminar at Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the 1970s. Hubbert was the invited speaker. His topic was his work on US oil supply published in 1956. He apologized for fact the his view foils had not been updated since then (~20y). He went through how he arrived at an estimate of OOIP based of exploratory drilling of the USGS. He then used the Verholst Equ. to fit historical cumulative production, and his number for OOIP. This, he claimed, was an illustration of what you might see if you had a real model. He was not at all making wild claims as to the brilliance of his work.
It is my clear recollection that he did not use cumulative production data in estimating OOIP, though he did point out that OOIP must logically be greater than the cumulative production as of the date of his work in 1956. This was very much an aside, since the issue and argument had always been that conventional wisdom was that OOIP was vastly greater than his estimate, not that it was smaller.
I was a working elementary particle physicist at the time. The seminar was a bit off-topic for a LBL physics seminar. I went out of curiosity. I was impressed with the intellectual rigor of his work. Of course, I had my own prejudiced view of Texas (and Southern Calif) oil men. His talk lent support to my prejudice.
Thanks. That is very interesting info. The Verhulst equation only applies to situations where a carrying capacity applies. Oil has no concept of a carrying capacity since oil molecules don't give birth or otherwise reproduce. Thus it cannot reach an equilibrium set by a balance of births and deaths. So that turns into a big dead-end and it makes sense that this is as far as Hubbert ever got.
Interesting that you, geek7, are a particle physicist. The Fermi-Dirac distribution also follows the Logistic function. Does this not imply that the Verhulst equation can be used to derive Fermi-Dirac particle statistics? Do you see statistical mechanics texts talking about birth and death of electrons?
That is what I am getting at. Hubbert used the wrong model to get what he thought was the right result.
I think the problem was that Hubbert was just grabbing at whatever kind of mathematical function that looked like a bell curve. That is why I think it was just heuristics on his part.
No! No! No!!!!!
The Verhulst Equation is a mathematical equation. It is like a word used by Humpty Dumpty. Just as a word used by Humpty Dumpty meant exactly what he intended it to mean. So a mathematical equation means whatever is intended by the user. And the meaning is contained in the mapping of mathematical variables onto things in the real world.
In this application, the mapping of the limit at +infinity is onto OOIP, not onto a carrying capacity. The value of using the Verhulst Equation is that the form of its mathematical solution is known both to the speaker, and to his audience, and is not a matter of any uncertainty.
So, in a sense that I find highly commendable, Hubbert was more innovative that Fermi in his application of the Verhulst Eqn. Concerning birth and death of electrons, the authors of such usage are excused by a more general interpretation of the Humpty Dumpty defence than the one given above. Does anyone really wonder about whether these births are by sexual or parthenogenetic reproduction?
There is no problem, IMHO. Hubbert used something that he could confidently believe his audience already knew and understood to illustrate his interpretation of the data.
He did mention thinking about using the Gaussian error function, which also has the appropriate general behavior, but said he rejected it because the algebra of using it was too messy and following the algebra would detract from the point that he wanted to make. To me, to most physicists, and to Hubbert, mathematics was/is the hand-maiden of science, not its master. Observation (and data, which is recorded observations) is its master. I reject the pejorative use of the word heuristic.
Verhulst equation has been used to model the growth of mold in a petrie dish. I suppose humans are analogous to fungi which foul their food with waste until it is no longer edible and then stop eating and die.
Fermi-Dirac is the distribution of energy states of indistinguishable particles that obey the Pauli exclusion principle.
Neither of these theoretical distributions have any conceivable logical connection with current oil production.
Yes indeed. It is actually more useful to model the human condition than the oil condition with the Verhulst Petri dish model. It can also model chemical reaction models but those obey stoichiometric principles and so the carrying capacity model holds at equilibrium. You essentially want to use the right model for the observed behavior.
Your further point is that the Verhust equation solution and the Fermi-Dirac derivations also work as mathematical identities that coincidentally show a similarity to a bell-shaped curve. The fundamental connections just don't exist.
The Feynman quote is a good example of the lack of understanding I am trying to get across in the response below:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7102#comment-741342
Since you were the one that brought up the Verhulst equation...
The trap that Hubbert fell into is that the Verhulst applies to a cumulative quantity. The differential equations apply to the cumulative and not the instantaneous production level. Oil does not accumulate. It is extracted, used and discarded. Exponential growth applies to the instantaneous measure and it is just a quirk of the exponential function that the cumulative integral of an exponential is another exponential. And the only way to get the classical Hubbert shape is to take the derivative to the solution of the Verhulst, i.e. the derivative of the Logistic sigmoid. So it was actually quite a complicated and ornate framework that Hubbert set up for himself to get a symmetric looking curve.
So you fell into the same trap of causality. Do you believe that the Verhulst differential equation is able to peer into the future and use that information on OOIP to throttle down cumulative growth rates at the 5% stage of reaching the limit? So a differential equation is able to do this but we cannot detect it?
OOIP is a badly misapplied carrying capacity.
IMO, this path of reasoning is completely nonsensical and will make your head explode if you force yourself to buy into it. Some things are just wrong, but the sunk-cost investment in this model will keep it from making it go away. (Fortunately the Verhulst equation hasn't infected the Hubbert Curve Wikipedia page, as it is just a heuristic there) The really sad thing is that the true understanding is not very complex at all but simple reasoning at the logical level. See the dispersive discovery model.
This just shows how ignorant Hubbert was on how time-series actually work. Oil production is clearly a process of applying multiple convolutions to a discovery process. Each stage of the convolution, if it is stable (of the non-Levy variety), will cause the resulting profile to gradually approach a normal according to the central limit theorem. I can easily get the oil shock model to generate profiles that asymptotically converge to a normal.
The fact that Hubbert wanted to make it simpler for himself as opposed to truly understanding what was happening does not speak well for his reputation. I don't think he was being innovative but rather lazy in his interpretation.
Like I said, I could propose using the Verhulst equation to model Fermi-Dirac statistics but I would be LAUGHED off the stage by an audience of physicists.
Yet, I could take my dispersive discovery model and generate a Logistic and the same audience would stand in awe. I know how physicists think and they don't think like Hubbert did. The imporatant thing to a physicist is to obtain an understanding first and foremost. Without understanding, it is not physics.
WHT,
Hubbert did not fall into any trap. And certainly not a trap set by you. I offer a recollection of a seminar presentation many years ago. I offer testimony. I saw him. I heard him talk. He acted and looked very much like a real scientist, i.e. like a physicist. I think you are too taken up with your own explanation of reality. Hubbert was not your student. You should not judge him by how well he has parrots your grand vision. He predated you, I think.
The definition of physics that I learned in college was: Physics is what physicists do. There are now many thousands of degreed physicists in the world.
You appear to have your special view of what is true physics. I think there are many physicists who have other views. I think Hubbert was a legitimate scientist, every bit as worthy as a true physicist, and I think he would not have agreed with your view.
ditto
I have no idea what you are talking about.
I thought the universe was born from quantum fluctuations in dark matter before the big bang.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6aU-wFSqt0
Web - Am I remembering correctly: Hubbert actually said he couldn't predict the nature of the future down slope of the curve. I almost think he said he didn't think any one could with much credibility. That it could only be drawn accurately from a historical perspective. Or was I dreaming?
All I know is that he did not think of the curve as a stochastic arc, the entire profile essentially generated by a set of agents working at different rates over different volumes. This is completely at odds with any sense of certainty that the Verhulst equation implies. Hubbert was likely forced to say his curve didn't have any credibility because it was completely deterministic and we (and he) realized the real world isn't. The problem was that Hubbert couldn't come up with the notion of uncertainty that captures this behavior -- what I refer to as dispersion.
Laherrere has said this:
http://dieoff.org/page191.htm
I can't find the reference but Laherere says that Hubbert started showing his math derivations in the 1980's.
WHT,
It's plausible to think that Laherrere's quote refers to a 1h talk for petroleum engineers, not scientists interested in the details. You give a talk, skip the details, and tell people ... "it's something like a Gaussian, but if you're interested talk to me afterwards or read the papers". OTOH, talking to physicists he focused a bit more on the data and some reasonable curve (Verhulst).
Now you also have to admit that using a not-so accurate fit, and not so accurate reserves estimate, or using Heuristics may be the best way to go. Oil production is not an idealized population dynamics equation. It's humans making decisions. Sometimes there are coups, sometimes 911s, sometimes lack of investment, other times world wars or failed states. Other times nuclear energy renaissance, or exploding chindias, electric cars, countries with over 15% of renewables, or oil embargos.
Your models try to describe a scenario where we pursue more extraction careless about our children's children with some noise. But they have no black swan, no politics, no blatant lies in data, etc.
I think the date is largely irrelevant. It's fun to model, it's exciting (I'm also a scientist) ... it's challenging to improve the accuracy ... but econophysics is still a fluffy science, no matter how elaborate the models are. Applying your model to data of 1920-1979 with reserves from back then, would have not predicted the slowdown of 2005, I'm certain of that.
Model or not, the heuristics are clear. We need to think of new economic models or ways of running society with less oil, whatever the peak date (±20years)
Well you are essentially blasting the entire field of analysis-based research then. Why have dozens of journals on econometrics and whatever math-based discipline according to your logic?
Further, I would not call econophysics a "fluffy science", I would call it a burgeoning or emerging science. I have no doubt that the curious scientists that follow this path will make the most significant gains in understanding with respect to economics and constrained resources research.
As to your specific concerns:
That is why I call my production model the oil shock model. I realize that perturbations do exist and that we want to figure out how these figure into the bigger oil production picture. I don't think that Hubbert came anywhere close to thinking this comprehensively.
We need to do this, if not for oil production but for any constrained resource that might come over the horizon.
Hi WHT,
I didn't express myself too well then. What I'm saying is we have to stay honest about how far we are. Take quantum physics. One of the most successful frameworks of science (with predictions of amazing accuracy). For anything over a few hundred particles, we can only describe the full dynamics of ground states, small perturbations, etc ... anything else is too hard. but some would like to say that biology emerges from quantum mechanics. Well, yes and no. We have no clue about all the in-between, it's plausible and we should work to know more, but we should stay honest about our limitations.
The same applies to statistical models economic and social systems. I think we should think hard about it. I think refining models will teach us a lot about our knowledge, about the world and about the limits of our models. But there is no way to know if your models or a Gaussian with 20 years of uncertainty will turn our to be a better model for such a noisy system.
So I would say. Keep up the good work. But I wouldn't dismiss other models who stay honest admitting their limitations (Hubbert's simplified approach for example).
The problem is that there is the simple model, and then nothing above that. Someone has to fill in the gap. There aren't many ways to disparage a simple model other than to say it is too simple.
Most of the models taught in undergraduate economics classes are radically wrong due to oversimplification. The ones we learn in the Ph.D. program in economics are complicated, but most of them are no darn good. The reasons for the bad models is historical, and they are not very interesting.
I'm not talking about economics models, but oil depletion analysis models.
I think to explain the plateau, it's the response to the higher prices. First of all, recession is taking a toll on demand by taking drivers off the road. Next, higher prices are forcing a lot of people out of larger vehicles into smaller more fuel efficient ones, again reducing demand. Normally, these two factors would cause oil prices to tumble, but you aren't seeing it because of what would or should be the back side of the peak. If it was just one country or a region peaking, you would see the normal slope, but because we are seeing a worldwide peak, the market forces (peoples behavior) are causing the undulating plateau.
good - That's as good an explanation as I've seen. I think you're essentially describing a feed back loop superimposed on the natural distribution of oil fields. Assume (unrealistically) that oil sold for whatever it cost to develop and that the world could always afford to pay that price. The oil prospects that had any chance of working would be drilled. Obviously not all would be successful but all possibilities would be found eventually. This would generate the natural distribution of all remaining oil fields. I’ll avoid the debate on what this distribution would look like. We’ve have two large armies waging that war on TOD. We’ll just call it Future Oil Discoveries. Obviously FOD will never occur because oil will never sell for whatever it costs to develop. The SG plays proves that point: doesn’t matter if Devon’s finding costs for it’s SG wells is $5/mcf…NG is selling for less than $4/mcf. Equally obvious the world couldn’t pay $148/bbl of oil indefinitely.
And there’s the critical model that’s beyond my abilities to construct. I’ll leave that up to the resident smarties to argue over. The FOD model won't provide a good prediction of PO. Nor will a prediction of future global economic conditions generate a PO profile. It's going to take a melding of both models to do it. And maybe another factor or two...geopolitics and military intervention come to mind.
Does you use of PO, Peak Oil, mean "great discomfort"?*
Predicting great discomfort brings in all these other factors.**
There is also feed-forward: the known facts interact with the inputs to force the result.***
The single most useful fact that I think I understand, for oil, is that the really major discoveries were made long ago.
The rest of the arguments, for just oil, have no provable foundation. Further, as you say, they are in feedback with other systems.****
*
That oil will peak is obvious. If it peaks in some future where it's function has long been replaced, then that event would be benign.
Your words tie Peak Oil to economics, politics, and war. These interplays can bring about great discomfort.
**
"Questionable Assumptions and Major Omissions" offers that the official numeric foundations for the prediction of just oil are unsure.
In addition there is serendipity in the interactions of economics, politics, war, religion, crowd behavior, breakthroughs in science, engineering, and technique, timing, and even human adaptability, say, to global warming. These do not have calculable solutions.
***
(Feed-forward is inherently stable (as an aside): see "FIR Filter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIR_filter )
****
Feedback is inherently unstable: "IIR Filter" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iir_filter . The feed-back between the price of oil and the economic system makes the wavy, undulating "plateau" seen in the oil production's most recent trends: The cost goes up, the economy recedes, the cost goes down, and the cycle repeats. This is called a "relaxation oscillator": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator .
Well stated. Note that oligopoly theory also applies to oil pricing, and under oligopoly theory you do not get a stable equilibrium. Major fluctuations in price are predicted by oligopoly theory.
K - No...PO remains to me that point in time when (in the long run) oil production rates will not exceed past rates. Additionally I assign a diminished reservoir base for this inflection point and not economic/political causes. But as you point out the "serendipity in the interactions" post a huge imprint on the physical geology world. PO would just be another statistical marker were it not for the profound affect it will likely have on all of mankind. That is where much of the noise about PO is generated: a desire to script the future PO in terms that support one extreme expection from the other extreme end of possibilities. And then there's all the gray areas in between. And again I'll offer that "noise" is one of the best aspects of TOD. We blend the cold blooded analysis of smart folks like Web and others with more humanistic analysis and expectations/hopes.
Your interest, then, is in when the oil age ends.
May it all resolve without chaos.
For your wish to come true we shall need both good government policy and good luck. The U.S., up to now has always seemed blessed by the gods (or logos, if you prefer); let us hope that trend continues.
Don - You must be a religious person (judging by your comment).
But wouldn't you think a supreme Being - as in GOD - should also be non-prejudice (not just just blessing on country and keep the others in poverty to support its lifestyle)?
And what god/gods are you referring do? At last count there are several millions!
Umberto
When I used to teach Introduction to Philosophy I would rigorously disprove the existence of a Christian God in about forty minutes using the chalk board for elementary symbolic logic. The proof is relatively easy. Not one of my Christian students ever understood it, but some of the foreign students who were from Asia or Africa did.
My own views resemble those of Aristotle. Yes, there was a Prime Mover, unmoved. (Otherwise you get into infinite regress, which is logically absurd.) But this Prime Mover does not care about (or perhaps even notice) what humans do.
For a personal philosophy I like the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. They both believed in a philosophical (but not religious) logos. "Logos" in Greek changed greatly in meaning from 300 B.C. to 100 A.D. The Christians appropriated the word and changed its original meaning. (Interestingly enough, neither Judaism nor Islam did this.)
Except for Aristotle, I think all the "proofs" of God's existence are bogus. However, all the "proofs" of God's non-existence are even more bogus. Hence it would be correct to call me an agnostic, even though I do think that Aristotle was right about the Prime Mover unmoved.
Don - thanks for your reply.
Without wanting to go into a discussion about philosophy or religion (probably not the right thread) there are for sure a few interesting questions regarding that subject - as raised a few days ago by Congressman John Shimkus. His quote was a prime example of how religion is used/abused for specific purposes - as it was for millenia - and how the Bible and its true message is twisted into fitting said purpose and other objectives.
I am an avid reader of TOD for years now (to the dismay of my family sometimes) and I have gleaned some interesting insights, not only into technical aspects of various subjects, but also into human nature (therefore I thank TOD staff and contributors for their efforts).
But sometimes the discussions on TOD remind me off the occupants of a bus that drove over a steep cliff on a winding mountain road.
The bus is in free fall. One group of the passengers admire the view, oblivious were the buss is heading. An other group is hotly debating what trajectory the bus is taking and if some spoilers on the bus would change that. And some are even attempting to get a better seat. (replace this illustration if you like with similar ones involving the Titanic etc. etc.- you know what I want to say)
The real interesting questions to discuss would be different ones (because regardless of all the discussions on the bus at that moment the outcome will be the same): Who was driving the buss when it came of the road and why did it come of the road in the first place. And if there is a new bus in the future - who should be the driver.
And some of the answers to these question definitely involve religion - IMHO
Umberto
All sociologists know that religion is a one of the most powerful forces in human affairs. Except for a few elderly--very elderly--Marxists or Freudians, nobody in sociology or anthropology believes that religion is going to fade away. As I mentioned elsewhere, the late eminent sociologist Pitirm Sorokin forecast more than sixty years ago a return to religion in the U.S. The growth of U.S. Protestant fundamentalism fits right in with his model. Sorokin is still worth reading today. Should be in any major university library.
K - I don't even have such a phrase (when the oil age ends) in my vocabulary. In the next few decades the world will react to a diminished energy supply that cannot support all developed economies. There will still be a lot of oil produced. But the efforts to secure that oil will lead to a very dark time. Perhaps as dark as any period we've seen in the last 100 years. Thus you can imagine an end to the oil age has very little meaning to me.
Don - And we will be blessed with having young men/women who'll put on a uniform and do society's bidding in any effort to maintain BAU. They are our blessing and we are their curse. Such a waste.
Oh, I would say much darker. I've now come fully to Greer's point of view. We are going to enter a new Dark Age, except that this time it's unlikely we will get out of it (yes — ever).
We have now 7 billion people who soon are going to fight like cats in a sack for the remaining resources of the planet. We are moving into a fundamentally different sort of period for our species, because, as (IIRC) Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute points out:
THAT is the fundamental difference between Abundance Industrialism and Scarcity Industrialism:
Have you read Greer's THE ECOTECHNIC VILLAGE? In the very long run I find Greer to be rather an optimist. I didn't like ECOTECHNIC VILLAGE as much as I did THE LONG DESCENT, but there are some useful insights in the later book.
I think you're referring to The Ecotechnic Future. Yes, in the long run he seems very optimistic to me, too.
He and I don't always agree (but it's not on much that our thinking diverges) but we collaborated on that graph based primarily on his work. I asked if he were open to making the fossil fuel resource curve unsymmetric and he readily agreed. We also changed the length of the stages and added the two "social discord" periods.
The agreement we had was that if my thinking diverged significantly I would make a new graph and remove his name from it. The thing I would change would be to add more periods of social discord (randomly) but otherwise I'm quite satisfied with the model.
I think social discord is not random through time. See for example, Crane Brinton, ANATOMY OF REVOLUTION, in which he compares the American and the French and the Russian revolutions. His conclusion--later confirmed by historians and sociologists--was that revolutions were most likely during times when people's expectations were much higher than reality could provide. Ironically, this is not during the worst of depression times but rather when conditions had been improving (as they had been before the American and French revolutions and also in Russia after the Stolypin reforms shortly after 1900)--but the expectations of further improvement far outran the realities.
This observation helps explain both why the U.S. did not have a revolution during the Great Depression but also how Spain and Italy and Germany all went fascist at very roughly the same time. The U.S. could easily have gone fascist if Huey Long had not been assasinated. He probably could have beaten FDR in the Democratic primary, because FDR had many strong enemies, and Long had few. Indeed the oil companies loved Huey Long. Thus luck and accidents have a lot to do with the way history goes. We escaped fascism by the skin of our teeth and largely due to the accomplishments of one extraordinary man, FDR. The "great man" theory of history is not altogether wrong, though of course it is not the whole or even the main story.
I like that assessment...perhaps that's why Greer saw two periods of social discord when he did — because they were periods of wealth going to less wealth (relative to each time period, of course). We never spoke about it in any sort of depth but that's likely a good bet.
I wonder if Greer has read Brinton. Greer impresses me as a very well-read man, and the Brinton book is a classic.
I wouldn't doubt it. He readily says that he's taking the thinking of others and modifying it slightly.
This is the view of an acolyte, not a thinker. It's an admission of lack of critical perspective.
I've seen you post these charts, what, dozens of times in the past? Maybe more? I used to just scroll past them, thinking that perhaps you have some privileged insight that we mere mortals don't have, but now that I've witnessed you throwing up on the tablecloth in a previous thread, I know to be on the lookout.
You remind me of that football player who continually appears in public with "John 3:16" tattooed on his lower eyelids.
Not you, nor Greer, nor anyone else knows what's going to happen, and yet you post this stuff with continually escalating religious fervor.
But as of yesterday, the scales have fallen from my eyes (I say with irony of biblical proportions).
The Oil Drum is where 9/11 conspiracy theorists quote archdruids.
ad hominem fallacy
"This is the view of an acolyte, not a thinker."
This is not a supportable statement. If one says 'I have listened to a logical argument and come to the conclusion that I agree with it, via a process of rational cogitation' (which is my takeaway from aangel's statement) how is this then the view of a non-thinking acolyte??? Your logic is fatally flawed here.
"Not you, nor Greer, nor anyone else knows what's going to happen"
You clearly have not studied Greer, who explicitly says “prophecy works best when it pays close attention to history and uses the past to gauge the kind of events that will occur in the future, rather than trying to predict the events themselves.”
I think you are failing to grasp the distinction between the events which are going to happen (which nobody knows), and the KINDS of events likely to happen (which suppositions are amenable to human logic).
For example: move agriculture onto (and make it utterly dependent on) a fossil fuel platform and make it monoculture based (aka the 'green revolution'). Such a system is dependent upon cheap fossil fuel inputs to function. Now - create an environment in which those fossil fuels become 1) vastly more expensive, and 2) less reliably available (shortages). What happens?
According to the thinking you have expressed here, we cannot legitimately form opinions or draw conclusions from this confluence of conditions. That's nonsensical - and it stops the process of inquiry in its tracks.
To put it another way, aangel did not seem to me to be asserting Truth, but rather was expressing opinion: "I've now come fully to Greer's point of view." You adopted a straw man fallacy in response, implying that aangel asserted direct knowledge of the future. You've also done so in what seems to be a very personalized way, which does not reflect well on your capacity for objectivity or clarity.
From where I stand, it seems you are the one lacking critical perspective.
ditto
Yes, I post those graphs because new people are joining the conversation all the time, no? Part of welcoming people to a community means bringing them up to speed with some of the current conversation.
I'm sorry that you can't see the value of this.
I've also come to learn that people go through a process when it comes to peak oil. I went through it myself so that is why I'm now where I am. Here is a very short way of expressing the process that I've gone through over the last three years:
Said in words, it's taken that long (three years!) for me to finally get to the point Greer has gotten to. I imagine he got there first because he started earlier (that's certainly true).
Edit:
You are wherever you are in the process; mostly people early in the process think that people later in the process are too "doomerish." But — in my experience — it's almost always because they don't have a full understanding of the converging crises that face us and an pollyanna-ish overestimation of the power of technology to change the global trends. They almost always have no clue about the fragility of our monetary system.
That's just how it goes.
Funniest damn pic I've seen in years - had me in (rueful) stitches. :)
You raise an excellent point, which I would do well to remember: it really does matter where people are in the process.
This suggests an interesting experiment. Surveying those 'interested' in peak oil, one could plot a y-axis corresponding to increasing doomerism vs an x-axis of time passed since introduction to the thesis. Would this confirm the hypothesis? I'd intuitively expect some correlation.
That said, I think a chief barrier to accepting Greer's work is the illusion that we are effectively the masters of nature, and thus not really subject to ecological laws. Once that barrier has been breached, that illusion dismantled, it becomes quite difficult - IMO - to argue with Greer's core vision, which is essentially a restatement of those ecological laws, as applied to the human species. Seems like simple common sense to me.
As I implied in another post, though - I do not agree that acceptance of Greer's position makes one a 'doomer.' In fact, I see where peak oil carries a lot more potential for blessings than doom. It is only a doom if what is being destroyed is something positive, and I don't see the human (and especially American) attachment to convenience and consumerism as - on balance - positive. We have iPods and cars and fMRI machines, but we also have nuclear weapons and smart bombs and teratogens as artifacts of the same process. Most research I have seen indicates that there is no correlation between happiness and fulfillment on one hand, and access to high technology on the other. To put it bluntly, I think most Americans act like scared, whiny babies who are prone to apocalyptic fantasies.
I think peak oil carries a promise (not a guarantee) of re-establishing authentic community (after a century of injurious assault by public policy), reconnecting humans at the individual level and with the natural world, the reinvigoration of civil society, and other similar and profoundly beneficial dynamics which have been lost in our modern, industrial world. I'm a fan of Wendell Berry, what can I say.
I think it is often (not always) those who assert that peak oil = doom, and that there just HAS to be a 'solution' (preferably technology-based), who are succumbing to hysteria - not the so-called doomers. Personally, I'm looking forward to the really interesting and challenging days to come.
I cannot agree with your interpretation of Greer. He is a Deep Thinker and knows all about ecological and environmental limits.
If I were you I would not be "looking forward to the really interesting and challenging days to come." That would be like somebody in 1928 saying: "I'm looking forward to the really interesting days to come." The Great Depression was horrible. Something worse than the Great Depression is in our futures over the next twenty years as oil and other fossil fuels decline from their respective peaks.
I agree with your perceptions of Greer - I am a huge fan of his work, and find his arguments persuasive and his logic compelling. I read both 'The Long Descent' and 'The EcoTechnic Future,' (which I think is absolutely brilliant), and I am a regular reader of his blog, plus am engaged in his green wizard project. Perhaps I was unclear about this in my post.
But I am afraid I cannot agree with your interpretation of reality Don. :)
What is coming - in my view - is nothing like the Great Depression, which started as a typical economic downturn and was then converted into something else entirely by horribly misguided and foolish governmental and monetary (Fed) policies under Hoover (e.g. Smoot/Hawley), and then prolonged by even more egregiously misguided policies under FDR (Higgs: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=176). Additional misguided policies under FDR then willfully and criminally plunged us into WW2 (Day of Deceit: the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor - based on govt docs liberated by the FoI Act), which, contrary to popular, inculcated myth did NOT pull us out of that economic mess (Higgs, again: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=138).
Thus, the Great Depression was a government and central bank created disaster (much like our current circumstances, caused by money and power elites). Peak oil is something very different. Much bigger, but not just that.
The reason I am specifying all of this is because I can see from your posts that you probably disagree with most if not all of what I just said. We have very, very different worldviews, and this gives us a very different basis for assessing the future, and our attitudes toward it. I think FDR was a war criminal and a villain - you think he was a hero. I think government is primarily a force for evil, malevolent, the mafia with flags, you think it is primarily a force for good (at least, this is the impression I got from reading your posts - forgive me if I've mis-portrayed your views!). Etc.
It follows that you oppose anarchy (an assumption, again), while I favor it. Not in the mistaken sense of chaos and lawlessness, but in its proper sense, as a situation in which civil society (as, say, Dorothy Day saw it), absent the crushing weight of a predatory, murderous, virtually omnipotent State, is permitted to blossom. A situation in which relocalized voluntary action within genuine communities, at least to a greater degree than presently, can take the place of coercion and violence as the basis for social interaction. A situation in which reinvigorated local cultures spring up - and in which total war becomes more difficult to wage, and WMDs more difficult to build. A situation in which the direct dependence upon the natural world reasserts itself. There is no guarantee of any of this, obviously, but the chances improve, IMO.
And none of this is to say that there will not be great turmoil and suffering in the near term, but again, I do not see turmoil, or suffering, as 'bad' in and of themselves - as something to hide from or to fear. Suffering is an inherent part of the human condition - part of the package deal. We can't control that - but we can determine how we relate to it, and I think it is that which makes the difference between a life fully lived, fully experienced, versus one lived in fear and denial and delusion.
There is an enormous amount of suffering going on now in the world, after all, though most of us ignore it. I think the thing that really bothers many Americans who look into peak oil is that it promises to being the tumult HERE. To our shores. It frightens us.
But if you read the letters and other primary sources written by those who have lived through catastrophe - and this is a constant theme that disaster sociologists have documented across a century - you find that people consistently speak of their experiences as 'awakenings' and 'blessings' - saying they had never felt more alive, that they had never experienced that level of empathy and compassion with their neighbors, that they had never witnessed such acts of mutual aid and altruism, etc. Rebecca Solnit's 'A Paradise Built in Hell' is replete with such stories. I highly recommend it.
At any rate, for these reasons, it is not surprising that I would see the coming of peak oil very differently than most do. Fear not. I am not a dreamy wishful thinker who is blind to the stark realities that a post-peak world will present. I simply see those realities as a necessary stage we'll per force adapt to along the way to a more promising future than the one we could have hoped for absent peak oil. I take the whole thing quite seriously. It is the signal challenge of humanity, unlike anything else in centuries, perhaps millennia, and we happen to be lucky enough to be alive to see it unfold! I think there is therefore every reason to look forward to the interesting and challenging days ahead - rather than with dread and anxiety.
I think we've taken a wrong turn into a very bad neighborhood and we've been there for so long we've forgotten what a good neighborhood is like. Peak oil - if we're lucky - may turn out to put us back on a path to a sustainable and more *human* future.
So I'm going to relate to what's coming neither with fear, nor with naive optimism, but with a pragmatic and cheerful determination to face it on my feet, to find the good in it, and to be thankful that I'm alive in a time of such momentous change.
Anarchy will not work. Suppose you have a happy and well-functioning anarchy of 100 people. Then one outsider comes with a loaded assault rifle. Suddenly you have a dictatorship of the gun.
IMO there is no way out of this dilemma. All good governments are strong on self-defense and on keeping internal order. That was one of the insights of both Plato and Aristotle, and I'm an Aristotelian.
Don, I think you are making some unwarranted assumptions here.
For example, in response to your specific supposition, if those 100 anarchists (or some portion of them) are armed, too, then an outsider with a loaded rifle, assault style or not (any rife is capable of assault - it's a meaningless descriptor), would accomplish little. Anarchism does not imply pacifism or an inability to defend one's community. It also doesn't imply some sort of utopia. It simply implies the dedication to accomplish social interactions voluntarily, free from violence and coercion, free from force and fraud. I have never understood why people seem so threatened by this notion.
Your response actually highlights one of the most misunderstood aspects of anarchism: just because you do not have a government run police force does not mean you have no police force. A community could contract with some of its citizens to serve a police as a civil society function. That is, all functions which governments can provide, can also be provided privately. For an historical example of private law enforcement via mutual aid, see:
http://libertariannation.org/a/f21l1.html
Snippet:
"For purposes of security, the most important social unit was the borh. A borh was an association, typically of twelve people, who stood surety for one another's good behavior. If a member of a borh committed a crime, the other members were committed to bringing him to justice — but also to helping him pay restitution for his crime. ... It might be objected that such a system could not work in today's vast, impersonal, and highly mobile society, where the close ties and personal knowledge required for effective borh membership are often absent. Reputation, it might seem, can serve as an effective incentive only in a small community where everyone knows everyone else. But the experience of the Law Merchant suggests otherwise: this vast system of private mercantile law that operated via reputation, credit, and economic boycott, was able to regulate commercial transactions across all Europe in the late Middle Ages, among merchants of different nations, without the benefit of either face-to-face interaction or government enforcement."
As for living under a dictatorship of the gun, hell, dude, that's where we are NOW. If you don't believe it, try not paying your taxes.
As for the notion that anarchism won't work - that's quite an historically ignorant statement to make. It has, in fact, worked. Medieval Iceland under the 'Thing' system, for over 300 years (that's longer than our form of government has lasted - probably longer than it *will* last the way things are going), was highly anarchic. As Jared Diamond put it:
"Medieval Iceland had no bureaucrats, no taxes, no police, and no army. … Of the normal functions of governments elsewhere, some did not exist in Iceland, and others were privatized, including fire-fighting, criminal prosecutions and executions, and care of the poor."
And as David Friedman, son of your tennis buddy :) wrote:
"Medieval Icelandic institutions have several peculiar and interesting characteristics; they might almost have been invented by a mad economist to test the lengths to which market systems could supplant government in its most fundamental functions. Killing was a civil offense resulting in a fine paid to the survivors of the victim. Laws were made by a "parliament," seats in which were a marketable commodity. Enforcement of law was entirely a private affair. And yet these extraordinary institutions survived for over three hundred years, and the society in which they survived appears to have been in many ways an attractive one. Its citizens were, by medieval standards, free; differences in status based on rank or sex were relatively small; and its literary, output in relation to its size has been compared, with some justice, to that of Athens."
Doesn't sound so awful to me.
Additionally, anarchy is all around us - in the laundromat, the grocery store, on the road, at work, at restaurants, in shopping malls, on the tennis court, etc. Anywhere you act in non-coerced and non-coercive ways. We never get OUT of anarchy - we are ALL anarchists in some very important senses. We could say we are all 99% anarchists. Most of us simply fail to notice it because we've been conditioned to think we cannot survive securely without the State there to protect us from each other. This is nonsense, and it's time we grew up and started thinking for ourselves IMO.
I am not arguing for some utopian vision - as long as humans are involved, existence will be precarious and insecure. I am simply noting that peak oil will reduce the State's ability to project power and that this does not represent the end of civilization and the beginning of wholesale and unavoidable barbarism as many people seem to believe. That, too, is nonsense. This apocalyptic mentality is prevalent in America. I suggest thinking carefully about such things.
Sooner or later, transportation, communications, weapons systems, etc will all be degraded as we move into an era of energy decline - and so will government's ability to inject itself into all aspects of our existence. The tentacles will retreat, necessarily, though others may arise. One eminently plausible result would be an increase in anarchic conditions in some areas. We've been conditioned to fear this. I don't. Governments murdered 260 million people last century, the vast majority were their own citizenry - not a great track record. I'm more than willing to try something else.
You seem to me to essentially be suggested that fear and dread is the appropriate response: "The Great Depression was horrible. Something worse than the Great Depression is in our futures" - the need you stated to maintain "internal order" also sounds like it comes from a place of fear. I reject this. I see a very different way to relate to things. Fear mongering is the primary tool of manipulation by the State. I'd really love to see a culture in which people feel free to live their lives without others telling them how fearful they should be all the time - especially of their neighbors. I hope that the post-peak world includes many such cultures, because I think it could provide those, at least in some areas. Though probably not in California. ;-)
Solnit's book, for one, offers powerful evidence that living in constant fear is NOT a natural or necessary state, even under the most tumultuous of conditions. I recommend it. It could change your perception of reality.
Have you read NJAL'S SAGA? It is set in Iceland, c. 1000 a.d. and is an unremitting story of violence, vengeance, plotting, murder, and taking out enemies by setting rooftops on fire with flaming arrows. That was the reality of Iceland governed by the Thing.
I've studied anarchy extensively. It simply does not work. In addition to police you need a strong self-defense force for protection against invaders. Unfortunately, that also implies a military industrial complex. Or in Medieval Europe it was a military-feudal-lord-Church complex.
My political views are similar to those of Aristotle. I think the biggest unit that can be well governed is the city state. Aristotle advocated a mixed polity of democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and plutocracy. Aristotle claimed that all pure forms of government (e.g. pure monarchy or pure democracy) would self-destruct, and history has supported Aristotle's generalization.
Indeed we see all around us the self-destruction of the U.S. republic--and the military industrial complex will also fade away as the production of fossil fuels declines.
Don, I don't know what you are trying to accomplish here. Are you trying to convince me that the way I choose to relate to peak oil is 'wrong' because it differs from yours? That fear is a more appropriate response? I disagree.
I've studied anarchy extensively as well. Looks like my opinion based on that effort differs from yours. I'll stick with mine, thanks. I know mine was open minded and questioning and skeptical - I have no idea how you approached it.
I haven't studied Aristotle's Politics in detail, but given the 2,000+ years of data we've had since then to form an assessment of various forms of government, I think the conclusions are unequivocal. Mass murder on an epic scale tends to speak for itself.
As for Njal's - it's a story. I'd counsel against drawing absolute conclusions about a 300 year historical period from a work of fiction covering a few decades. Historical scholarship of the period paints a different picture. There is violence, after all, in ALL human societies. It's a question of scale. I'll take flaming arrows in my roof over daisy cutters any day of the week.
You are entitled to your opinion, even if it seems to me to be one that leads you to move forward from a place of fear. I'm not interested in doing that. The notion that we need to huddle in the midst of cops and soldiers to be safe is, IMO, misguided and dangerous, and not supported by either logic or the historical record. As I've said before, it goes hand in hand with the apocalyptic visions that seem to haunt Americans.
I do agree on one thing: we are witnessing the self-destruction of the US empire - although I'd note that the *republic* went down in flames quite some time ago. ;-)
NJAL'S SAGA (and the other Icelandic sagas) are pretty close to history, insofar as we have firm knowledge of Icelandic history. Note that in 1,000 a.d. all of Scandinavia was a history of unremitting large-scale violence. The Norwegians were always fighting the Danes. The Swedes took sides in this fight opportunistically. It was a bloody feudal society, especially before Christianity came to Scandinavia. Christianity actually helped Scandinavia to build four or five of the finest countries on earth today.
I think Medieval Christianity gets a bad rap, considering the alternatives. And the Scandinavian countries probably could not have developed to their current levels without the strong influence of their peculiar version of Lutheranism.
In Minnesota we have Swedish Lutheran churches (very liberal) and German Lutheran churches (very conservative). The Scandinavian (including Iceland and Finland of course) experience was unique in history.
"I think Medieval Christianity gets a bad rap, considering the alternatives."
An unpopular opinion these days, but one which I happen to share. It's easy to overlook the ameliorative influence Christianity exerted at times and in certain regions in light of the horrors it perpetrated, but it exists. I was arguing this to a friend the other day.
Well said and illustrated.
Life is full of promises and possibilities
for the young and innocent
The innocent and the beautiful
have no enemy but time.
__________________________________
In Memory Of Eva Gore-Booth And Con Markiewicz
William Butler Yeats
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-memory-of-eva-gore-booth-and-con-marki...
ROCKMAN
Do you see "Leadership" or "The Powers That Be", our guidance, our owners, bringing us to this darkness?
Does darkness follow a failure of ingenuity/luck to deliver a drop-in replacement for oil energy/feedstock?
Bad timing? No time left, due to bad management, to deploy any lesser, the best technology can offer, solution?
Overwhelming circumstance:
The litany of peak oil, peak phosphorous, economic crisis, spiraling population, wars, warming, soil, water... ?
There is a word, cliocide, meaning the death, the murder, of history. The last 100 years weren't that bad. There's billions of us left.
The last 2000 years includes the fall of Rome, another global empire. Our histories from that time were copied by scribes in monasteries.
Our globalization is much tighter. The elite don't have to live anywhere in particular. There are many flights a day from Los Angeles to Dubai.
During the fall of Rome, the wealth fled to the east, to where money had accrued, to what became Russia. Our wealth is already offshore.
The homeland is much predicted to turn into a place like Mexico or Nigeria: a powerless and impoverished population standing atop exploited resources. The world wants to use another currency or system than the U.S. dollar as its foundation. America is becoming irrelevant other than as an army, a loyal dog, in service of it's owner's/keeper's goals. If America got any ideas of it's own, perhaps the owners would disarm her rather than allowing actions against their interests. Maybe it is with a whimper rather than with a bang.
Viewed in isolation, the end of cheap oil is the end of empire. There are all kinds of things going on in this interconnected world.
If I were young and wanting to have kids, I would follow to somewhere the money has gone. Else, grow a garden, get some chickens, keep bees.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80XsfEbUdNM "The Garden of Allah" Don Henley
K - Unfortunately I don’t see our political leadership leading us anywhere. That’s THE problem IMHO. Our political system has become completely reactionary with the response being to follow a course that will win them re-election. And that course will be determined by public opinion. This is the source of my dark expectations. Preserving BAU will be Rule #1 by the American people IMHO. How dark the result will depend on the bloodlust generated by such a position. My concern is that a PO fueled mob mentality will become the guiding force. I live in Texas and thus violent reactions to bad situations is something of a birth right here. But, like most Americans, we do have a strong sense of fair play. So that’s the internal battle I see coming: doing what we are capable of doing to preserve BAU vs. doing what we SHOULD do on a moral level.
As far as I can tell, people have acted pretty similarly over time.
In other words, leaders aren't allowed to truly lead. At best only a small portion of the people will welcome it and the others will vilify them and do their best to stop them.
I realize that I'm in the minority but I have said this many times over my last few years participating here: I actually have compassion for the impossible situation that politicians are in.
They can step out in front of the group only so far otherwise their head is handed to them. Without the support of the people behind them, the politicians are powerless.
Andre,
You are so right! Politicians, by and large, are neither evil nor stupid. But situations largely determine behavior (see "situational determinination of behavior" on Google) behavior. Politicians, to get elected or re-elected HAVE TO focus on the short-term. Long-term concerns such as climate change or Peak Oil are simply squeezed out of positical discussion because of the pressing urgency of short-term concerns.
Politicians owe most of their campaigns to vested special-interst groups that fight change. This situation is unlikely to change until we get a dictator.
But dictatorship has a whole slew of problems, as pointed out by both Plato and Aristotle.
I have to totally disagree with the two comments above.
It may be true for politicians just 'getting into the game' but by the time a politician reaches the national, or even state (and often municipal) level, they know exactly what they are getting themselves into. Postulating that they are victims of their situations is, IMO, an absurdity. They THRUST themselves into those situations knowingly. This is a very different situation from one wherein an individual simply finds him or herself in a situation and reacts to it.
Most politicians are not in the game to benefit society, but to benefit themselves and those close to them. Whence comes this mythology about noble or selfless politicians seeking to do good for society? I see precious little evidence in the historical record - outliers at best.
Those who desire to wield power over others are those most attracted to the political realm. How could it be otherwise? And the worst tend to rise to the top. Bastiat contextualized it well when he said:
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
Most politicians are fully cognizant of the fact that they are joining the plunder class, and in fact they *fight* like hell for the opportunity to do so.
Furthermore, the only reason they fail to achieve the 'societal good' to which most assume they aspire is because the system was not designed to achieve societal good, it was designed as an arbiter of economic exploitation, which maps perfectly to what we've seen it accomplish. Far from a situation in which, as most today naively assume, the system is 'broken', it is in fact functioning perfectly, as designed.
I think this essay is also relevant to the subject:
http://www.independent.org/publications/article.asp?id=1982
It outlines the precautionary principle as applied to politics (and why should it be restricted to the environmental arena?)
I recommend both Aristotle's POLITICS and also his NICHOMACHEAN ETHICS. Originally the two books were combined as Aristotle wrote them. He regarded ethics and politics as one ball of wax. He was way ahead of his time. He worried a lot about population and also soil degredation and deforestation. He also knew that slavery was wrong but did not see how a city-state could sustain itself without slaves.
Aristotle was a very commonsense kind of guy. He said the soul did not enter the body until after the sixtieth day of pregnancy, so that abortions should be done before the sixtieth day. He opposed female infanticide, which was widespread in ancient Athens, along with infanticide of defective male babies.
Aristotle, who was as much an ichtheologist as he was a philosopher, claimed that the soul died with the body, because they were so closely intertwined. Makes sense to me.
Don - Interesting story about the A man there. Thanks. The chat about political will vs. practicality (read: self preservation) reminds me of a time long ago when I was a member of a small unique group. One constant lesson they tried to infuse into us daily: Don't be one of those folks who wants to live forever. Once you gave up that selfish attitude it's much easier to do the right thing. It worked for a while but difficult to maintain long term. Some days when I start feeling a little over whelmed I long for the simplicity of those days. But not for too long.
Seems as though our best hope would be a group of politicians willing to sacrifice themselves in the process. Talk about unsustainability. LOL.
In reply to Rockman:
Then one hypothetical is that failed leadership is delivering the people into darkness.
This offers that other paths are viable and could have been chosen.
A solution would be a change of leadership.
Another is that the population and actions of the elected leadership are based on public opinion.
It is widely held that the public opinion is dictated by the elite through their channels and holdings of the mainstream media corporations.
Money is equated with free speech with full rights extended to corporations, corporations being equated as citizens.
The asymmetry of corporate assets to those of ordinary, warm and fleshy citizens... silences them.
Perhaps a bloodless way to effect change would be to restore the media to the regulation, and for the good, of the people.
Somehow, without chaos, without treason.
With tongue in cheek, yes, the moral thing to do is to return the lands to the Indians with hurried apologies about the fish and trees and sorry about the buffalo and the air and water aren't so good now, soil's gone and those treaties! gee, our bad, like the smallpox ya know and you can probably put those mountain-tops back on an' sorry 'bout all the radiation, here's your buried ancestors back. Sure you'll all remember your languages someday, bye!
"May it all resolve without chaos."
We have witnessed increasing chaos as the industrial age has advanced. Professor RJ Rummel documents 262 million victims of 'democide' ("the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder") in the last century - the dark side of our technological prowess. I think mass murder on that vast a scale qualifies as chaos.
I'd like to think that peak oil will in fact - on net - ratchet down the level of chaos we as a species experience, because it promises to ratchet down the power of tools available to those who would do such harm.
I see peak oil, potentially, as a resolver of chaos far more than a generator of it. On balance.
This hope is predicated upon more than wishful thinking. In fact, data collected across the last century by disaster sociologists backs up this view. The notion of 'mob panic' - the basis for most apocalyptic visions (often idiosyncratically American) of societal collapse, representing the 'conventional wisdom' - is in fact *largely* fraudulent. This is very well documented and compellingly argued in Rebecca Solnit's 'A Paradise Built in Hell'. Arguably, one of the best peak oil books which has nothing to do with peak oil. I think that everyone who is serious about peak oil and its ramifications would be wise to read it, because it exposes one of the most widespread and potent unexamined assumptions we bring to the table.
Feedback is not unstable and some articles on sampling filters are not relevant.
Feedback can be stabilising if it is subtracting or destabilising if it adds to the input. Real systems typically have both cases at different input rates of change due to internal delay.
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/mastascu/econtrolhtml/Freq/Nyquist4.html
I think the issue with feedback is one of causality. If the feedback signal is coming from something that is not observable, such as some future URR, then it violates causality. That is not a good feedback model and what I was complaining about in regards to what geek7 was discussing above.
But yes, feedback is typically used to stabilize a system. The undulating plateau is likely a case of a stable feedback system. Relatively steady demand in the face of dwindling supplies is causing a feedback signal of increased extraction through whatever mechanisms available. The mechanisms could be dethrottling of production, stronger extraction rates, or else slight demand destruction. The latter is another kind of feedback signal that works as a negative feedback on the run-up to peak. On the back-side of peak, demand destruction will just reduce production, which is not exactly what we are seeing since the production is flat. Instead it is subtle dispersive changes in demand destruction in the USA and steady demand elsewhere in the world, such as China.
The effects of a real free-fall due to severe demand destruction is not even feedback, it is the lack of feedback because we lack any mechanism to increase production rates at some point in time. Then when the correction gets low enough, the real feedback mechanism will kick in again.
Bits of oscillatory instability will exist because of the latency effects as you say, but these won't cause the production levels to swing violently. I think this happens more often in terms of price speculation, which is just a s virtual proxy for the real production levels. So you see this with gold and silver prices at the hint of shortage, but the actual production may be stable. So the focus on price alone is very misguided to learn about the real stability.
My bad. I work with amplifiers in the GigaHertz range. Fed-back without compensation, they take-off. Computations in Feedback also offer instant instability. (Gee... Remember self-modifying code?) Too, cost is one of the only reliable numbers allowed us. And so the title of the node: Questionable Assumptions and Major Omissions. The "IEA World Energy Outlook 2010" was used in the Group of 20 meeting in Korea. Causality be damned?
Sorry... It's where my head is at.
The slow response times of most reality does stabilize negative feedback.
I should have said something about feedback offering instability or some such.
There are all kinds of feedback loops present in this situation. It is erroneous to imagine world oil production as a linear function - it is a textbook example of a non-linear dynamic system. In order to understand the undulating plateau, one should study the mathematics of non-linear dynamic systems - colloquially, 'Chaos'.
The parameter that determines the behavior of such a system is the strength, or velocity, of the driving force - in this case, the elasticity of the demand curve. The behavior of this system, at its present velocity, is unpredictable. As production reaches its limits, increasing marginal costs begin to feed back through demand destruction brought about by economic recession. As demand drops, price also falls, because there's not nearly enough storage capability to accommodate even a small part of the supply. It must be sold - at any price - to make room for the next portion of production in the distribution system. Lower prices cause an uptick in economic activity, as previously unaffordable projects are brought back to life. This sends production back up as the systems tries to adjust to increasing demand.
The factors that influence demand are varied, myriad, interdependent, and complexly linked in various feed-back and feed-forward relationships. I would expect exactly this behavior as the system ratchets up to the physical limits of our planet and infrastructure.
As 2005 was a peak, we have not seen any increase in production. The build up to the peak may last as long as the time it takes to come down. But isnt it fascinating that oil producers are so darn impotent. They cannot grow supply at high prices. Wow. That is a stunning fact.
What if?...
While I firmly believe that we are at peak, and that the rain is starting to fall on our BAU parade,I think people are too quick to rule out manipulation by swing producers like KSA. It is CLEARLY in their interest to hold back 10% of their production if it means the price is 20% higher, especially if they suspect that the price will be even higher in 10 years. They pumped hard 30 years ago to cripple the soviets, they could easily pump a little *softer* to increase both revenue and future revenue. They know this....the only reason to keep oil cheap is to keep the west happy which might protect them from regional hotheads, but that dosn't seem to be much of a risk right now.... I think prices will climb, but I also think that it is possible for KSA to seriously manipulate (drop) the price if they wanted to, at least for the short term. They ae not a company that needs to sell at any cost to generate revenue...they can set the price.
-dr
Denialist rhetoric has shifted, which is reflected in the IEA party line. It's not about denying that conventional crude has peaked anymore. That has been conceded. It's now all about TOTAL crude. In other words, nobody should even care that conventional crude has peaked because we have so much deep-water, tar-sands, arctic, and shale.
Either that, or the IEA is trying its best to let us know we're screwed.
But yeah it's probably one or the other, can't be both.
13. Failure to consider sovereign interests of oil producing nations.
http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=20...
14. Unrealistic model
The Uppsala Global Energy Systems Group spotted this problem with the WEO2008 and it likely exists with this one, too, since the numbers aren't materially different. That is, for the light blue area to occur requires the yet to be found fields to produce at rates never seen before in the oil industry to make up for the decline of the existing fields. For more see this comment: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7100#comment-740218
But here is the graph that makes the point:
The IEA graph is just someone drawing lines and would require the dotted line in the graph above to be actual future production.
However, if they were to use historical production rates in their projections they would see that the flat production they predict isn't possible. The colored lines above are what is possible using real-world production rates.
Again, their model is just drawing lines and the math doesn't support it.
Edit: Kjell mentions this issue in this blog entry:
http://aleklett.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/spin-slips-off-oil-production-numbers-world-energy-outlook-2010-–-a-cry-for-help
This looks like an excellent additional point to add to the list.
One wonders if the folks at the IEA who worked on this report, not all of whom can possibly be complete morons, are checking off the points made here against their own lists of intentionally omitted data and purposefully wrongheaded assumptions.
Seriously, many of these points are so apparent and so widely discussed, that to assume the IEA people somehow 'missed' them beggars belief. Willful blindness and magical thinking can only explain so much. IMO, it's propaganda, plain and simple. The less energy expended, so to speak, on such matters, the better.
I thought so, too, but it hasn't gotten much attention, it seems. (Perhaps due to our little diversion in the last 36 hours? lol)
In any case, a model should at least use real-world numbers for things like flow rates and such.
It's a little like me telling a coworker that I'm going to empty a large swimming pool in just 1 hour.
"Excellent! We need to get to work on repairing it. How big is the drain pipe?"
"Oh, just 1 inch in diameter"
"Um, you know that's not possible, right?
The papers I link to in the other comment show how the good folks at Uppsala have calculated their numbers. I imagine that were someone to do that for this report the dotted line would be just a little lower than on the graph above — but still thoroughly impossible.
Unconventional oil(at least 1 trillion barrels of oil sands, oil shale and super-heavy oil) is not being invested in because of denial about Peak Oil and free market speculation about futures.
Deepwater, arctic is not unconventional oil but it's also a lot smaller resource than anyone admits.
The fact is that all the high estimates of oil reserves are based on using abundant DISCOVERED unconventional oil resources(CERA).
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23977
The oil companies don't give a flying fig about EROI.
Big Oil hopes to transform to Big Gas and are abandoning the oil game--let OPEC do it....let Russia, China, India do it....let somebody else do it..(I want my life back).
Let's outsource the problem!
The buck passing mentality is in full mode.
This is the true mechanism of collapse.
What can take the place of oil-based liquid fuels?
Alcohol and natural gas have about 2/3 the energy density of oil.
Cars can be retrofit to run on alcohol CTL requires huge amounts of coal which exist mainly in six countries and which also are needed to generate almost half the world's electricity.
The self-styled TOD energy experts simply dismiss unconventional oil as thermodynamically impossible though it was possible for Victorian Scotland.
It seems that in 2035 the world will need 98 mbpd of oil per IEA.
We know where that oil is going to have to come from--Colorado, Canada and Venezuela.
Still, this is not known by the energy detectives at ASPO or TOD.
Hey! Colorado has to share the billing! Utah has half that basin! lol...
I agree in part. I think on the whole, TOD has been underestimating the potential of CTL - partly on the EROEI story and partly on a psuedo-economic marker of $80 (or 100 or 120 or 150 or 200) that will cause recession and demand destruction.
"Unconventional sources" are a mixed basket. We are going to see multiple players in that market - CTL, GTL, ethanol, and maybe algal fuels for aviation. And, for some countries, hybrid-electric, all electric, and natural gas conversions are going to broaden the consumer end, Probably an increase in mass transportation options as well. Trains, buses, micro-buses, subways, and 'free bikes.'
No single substitute on the supply side. No single substitute on the consumer side. But rather, a broadening of the market as a whole.
I'm an optimist this morning.
.
IEA production forecasts are not the only thing that is out.
The combined production of vehicle manufacturers in China could reach the astounding number of 32 Million by 2015
http://autos.globaltimes.cn/china/2010-11/588788.html
Since China increased vehicle production from 7 million in 2005 to 15 million this year, I would not be suprised if they get close to that number.
http://www.just-auto.com/news/2010-vehicle-sales-forecast-to-rise-10_id1...
Canada better get digging!
15. Receding Horizon
Many people believe that alternative energy will become more competitive as the cost of fossil fuels increase. In most cases alternative energy will always be x% more expensive than fossil energy because it takes fossil energy to produce the alternatives. And because with declining surplus wealth there will be less capital available to invest in alternative energy innovation.
Great point Kye - reminded me of a post written by Chris Nelder on this subject over 3 years ago:
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-renewables-energy/410
Snippet:
"The point is, any time we hear that oil has to be over $30 . . . or $40 . . . or $XX per barrel in order for some marginal energy project to make sense economically, we should instantly be skeptical.
Because when oil does get to that cost per barrel, the project’s costs often turn out to be based on the cost of oil back when they made the estimate . . . but now, because of that very rise in oil costs, the project is still too expensive to make sense."
Thanks for the shout-out Oz - I nearly forgot about that thesis, but it still applies.
I first articulated the concept of Receding Horizons on TOD in Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 1 (August 25, 2007) and Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 2 (September 9, 2007). Wish I could say we've come a long way since then...but I can't.
The trouble with Tar Sands: The Oil Junkie's Last Fix, Part 1 and 2 is that they are arguing that what is happening now can't occur. In reality, the oil sands are slowly and steadily going on production, and now account for nearly half of Canada's oil production.
You can argue that it can't happen, but it is happening. The avalanche of money that is descending on Canada from non-conventional oil production is just too big to pass up, so Canadians will make it happen.
So, based on what I know from 35 years in the Canadian oil industry, I would say that the IEA forecast of Canadian production increase is semi-realistic. Unfortunately, I think it is the ONLY country for which the forecasted increases are even vaguely realistic. The rest of the countries can't or won't do what the graph indicates.
I also have some problems with the IEA production split for Canada. They are assuming large increases in Canadian East Coast offshore and Arctic production. I know what the geology is in those areas, and am pretty sure that is not going to happen. East Coast offshore oil production is past its peak and they are now drilling in water depths that make the GOM look like a shallow pond. As for Arctic exploration - we already explored it and found a lot of natural gas. Not much oil, and no really good prospects left.
The non-conventional resources, though, are vast in scale and given enough time and money they will go on production. We have the money, so the only question is how long can you wait? Probably not long enough, given what's likely going to happen to the other producers.
RMG, I remember reading an analysis recently which calculated the amount of fresh water needed to really ramp the tar sands projects in Canada, and concluded that the amount required simply was not available, which could put a hard limit on those projects. Can't find that source now. Wondering if you or anyone else has seen that report, and if its credible.
Also, wondering if anyone from Canada could clue us in to any environmental action in regard to the tar sands. In America, we tend to think of Canada as a nation where enviro-minded groups swing some heavy clout. Is this happening, or no?
I have read some of the analyses being bandied about by the environmental groups such as Greenpeace, and I think they must be written by someone looking at the situation from the perspective of Mars or some other planet. It bears no relationship to anything I have seen in my years working in northern Alberta.
I think I know where they are coming from. They are working from American studies of oil shale developments in semi-arid places such as Utah, which are severely water-constrained. If you look at a river running through the area, such as the Colorado, the water in it is 100% utilized. The Colorado peters out in northern Mexico without ever reaching the ocean. Minimum flow on the river in the US is zero - it goes dry at times. If they ever developed large oil shale projects (not in the cards at this point in time), water would indeed be a problem. They would have to divert water from agriculture and big desert cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.
The Athabasca river runs through the Athabasca oil sands and is actually a bigger river than the Colorado (600 m3/s vs. 500 m3/s average flow). I've seen both rivers and can confirm that is true - the Athabasca is a bigger river. I looked at the water licenses for water use on the Athabasca, and there have been licenses issued for a total of 5% of the flow of the river. Agriculture is not a significant user, and the largest city taking water from the river is Fort McMurray, population 75,000. There are a few large pulp mills on the river (nobody seems to talk about them), but their water use is not large compared to the flow of the river. Currently, oil sands projects are taking about half of their licensed volume, and are using about 2% of the river flow. Future projections do not show oil sands development taking more than 5% of the river flow. Under maximum development scenarios, over 90% of the river will to continue to flow north and unlike the Colorado it will eventually reach the Arctic ocean. So, I have a problem seeing what the problem is.
So, I don't think water is a serious constraint on oil sands development. And I don't think the environmental groups who say it is know what they are talking about.
"Slow and steady" is a fair description. It looks like output from the tar sands has increased roughly 200,000 bpd since I wrote those articles in August 2007.
To dispute my overall thesis, however, one would have to produce some hard data on production from tar sands. And that is notoriously difficult to do, as Stuart Staniford detailed in his post from January 2010:
...which appears to agree with the 1.348 mbpd number given by CuriousCanuck downthread.
Coming up with useful data in August 2007 was even more difficult--I remember digging through reams of individual company reports, in search of useful numbers. I haven't seen any numbers since then to make me doubt my thesis.
To revisit my conclusion from that pair of posts:
Now let's look at a chart of the EIA data for Canada (which fortuitously fell into my lap today, courtesy of Gregor), which rolls the tar sands syncrude data into its overall C+C data:
Looks to me like my thesis was correct. The slight increase in tar sands production has, in fact, just balanced out the decline in conventional Canadian crude, without producing a net increase. (I hasten to add that I first heard that expectation from David Hughes, circa 2005-2006.)
Pretty much everyone who projects significant increases from the tar sands, including the IEA, the Canadian energy data agencies, and the EIA (which expected it to reach 4.2 mbpd by 2030 in its AEO 2009 report) all expect that additional production to come from in situ production. In my view, it's still too early to say whether in situ production can be scaled up that far, that quickly, as it has only recently achieved production volumes of any significance. I'm willing to entertain that hope, and any additional hard data that might support it...but that's as far as I will go.
I believe the Receding Horizons issue is still very much in play (as evidenced by various delayed and cancelled tar sands projects due to recession in 2008-9) and I will be very surprised if tar sands production ever gets to 5 mbpd. THAI/SAGD/etc. may yet deliver a happy surprise - they might also deliver some unhappy surprises (like the firewall going out of control and being very difficult to extinguish - just ask Heading Out about that!).
We shall see.
If a fire front is dependent on injected air to exist, how can it go out of control? Has there ever been an uncontrolled underground tar-sands fire?
Heading Out has the experience in this area, not me, but he told me some incredible stories about "putting out" downhole oil field fires only to see them come back later (even YEARS later) - it only takes a tiny fissure in the rock to let in enough air to keep a glow alive, and we don't have total information on every single tiny fissure in a given reservoir. It could be a minor issue, and no I am not aware of any uncontrolled underground tar-sands fires having happened yet, but it seems to me an underappreciated risk. I'm not at all convinced they would be able to shut down a fire front with confidence if they had to.
16. Failure to Understand Energy
Only a tiny minority of our species understands the laws of thermodynamics and the central role fossil energy has played in generating surplus wealth and thus everything we value in civilized society.
Suncor Energy 2010 second quarter results – strategy on track - (Oil Sands production company)
At $3.6 billion capital for 62,500 bpd, with a 5 yr straight amort, their capital cost / bbl is about $31.56 / bbl. Add in the $35.90 / bbl cash operating and their cost / bbl is about $67.46 / bbl.
Pretty safe to conclude there's "in the range of" 1 trillion bbl there which can economically be brought to market at prices "in the range of" $85.00 / bbl, ignoring future economies (scale, tech, etc.) and assuming systems like THAI etc. can access resources deeper than those SAGD resources now counted in the 173 billion bbl now counted as reserve.
That's 185 years supply for the US and Canada at 15 mmbpd.
Great! What a comforting calculation! I hadn't realized that no energy is actually expended in oil production from tar sands. Time to trade in my bike and Prius for a pair of Hummers.
With THAI, the heat energy needed for extraction comes from burning a small part of the bitumen in place. Other systems burn the coke carbon shed during the upgrading process. Of course, with natural gas as cheap as it now is, that's not a high priorty.
Nexen Inc. - Oil Sands
Nope.
Canada produced 2.722 Mbpd in 2009. out of which 1.348 Mbpd came from oil sands. Canadian Association of Petroleum producers predicts 4.336 Mbpd out of which 3.461 Mbpd from oil sands in 2025. These numbers might be optimistic as several large projects have been deferred due to costs.
http://www.capp.ca/library/publications/crudeOilAndOilSands/pages/pubInfo.aspx?DocId=173004#m8hpgxytwTVN
IEA gave 3.2 for Canada's production in 2009 and 5.3 in 2035 in their prediction. So the IEA number is off by 0.5 Mbpd at the raw data level....How reliable are other numbers, if production from one of the most transparent countries is off by this much?
Also, Canadian export were 1.95 Mbpd (consistent data between Department of Energy and CAPP), so the increase of 2 Mbpd will increase supply to the US to 4 Mbpd MAX by 2025,
assuming Canadian consumption stays flat.
One more issue is energy to run tar sands, to the point were Alberta considered (and rejected) installation of 12GW of nuclear power just serve oil sands.
Oneving Canada, oil "superpower" with a grand 0.8 Mbpd of balance. With internal consumption of 2.3 Mbpd, total of 1.5 Mbpd had to be imported by Ontario and Quebec.
Now you know that all that is simply a function of price, $Cdn / $US exchange rates, and skilled labour costs and availability. Completely unpredictable, including your predictions of no production.
Guess we'll just wait and see. How much you selling your Hummer for? LOL.
I will declare that I personally am hoping for a completely solar-powered future, including vehicles, but the costs of PV are going to need to drop dramatically if my hopes are to be realized. Some encouragement today from a group of researchers (at Simon Fraser, BC I think) who figured out how to fabricate blocks of a new superconductor large enough to be difraction analysed with hard X-Rays. Also another group (US I think) has figured out how to fabricate large sheets of pure graphene for transparent front-side conductors on solar cells without needing any rare earths. Will help costs a lot. Fingers crossed.
I'd also refer you to Canada's National Energy Board 2005 report - Canada's Oil Sands - Opportunities and Challenges to 2015: An Update - Questions and Answers
Now agreed, costs have risen considerably since 2005, esp. since the $Cdn today rose to exceed the value of the $US, a big change from the $0.62 days of early 2000's.
The IEA figure includes NGLs.
157 kbpd of pentanes/condesate is included in 2.7 Mbpd. And NGL is not oil anyway. By extension methane could be called oil, because it can be converted to higher hydrocarbons.
pentane/condensate is not NGLs but is natural gas condensate - liquid at room temp/pressure unlike NGLs such as propane or butane. However the fact is that the IEA liquids figure for Canada includes NGLs as well as crude and condensate and that makes up the supposed missing difference.
You can see the individual totals for crude+condensate, and NGLs at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=50&pid=58&...
lenny - I won't debate your cost numbers. Others better understand that aspect than I. But a simple question: when do you project the production rate of 15 million bopd to be reached? To simplify it matters little whether there is 1 trillion bbls of commercially recoverable oil or 100 trillion bbls. The question remains: what is a realistic expectation of flow rates from any of the unconventional sources?
And not to be rude but what is being put forward as a solid plan and not "what could be done".
But a simple question: when do you project the production rate of 15 million bopd to be reached?
A simple answer from someone who has had a lot of experience in oil sands: "Never". Canada does not have enough manpower to put 15 mbpd of oil sands on production, and the US does not have enough money to buy it.
The oil-sands developments are very labor-intensive, and there aren't many people living in the oil sands areas. At this point in time companies can't build more than one oil sands plant at a time without causing a severe labor shortage and having costs skyrocket. By 2035 I imagine there may be close to a million people living in Northern Alberta, but that won't be enough to put 15 mbpd of oil sands on production. That would require approximately the population of Texas moving to the northern boreal forests of Canada. I can't imagine that happening (Well, I can imagine that many Indians and Pakistanis moving there, but not Texans, who are the people with the required oil field skills). So 5 mbpd would be more realistic.
Also, I would pose the question to Americans, "How much fuel could you afford to buy if it cost $20/gallon?". Probably not 15 mbpd. So 5 mbpd would be more realistic.
So, there you have the basic parameters. Canadian oil sands production will probably not exceed 5 mbpd in the foreseeable future, millions of people will move to northern Canada, and Americans will pay $20/gallon for fuel. Not a bad future if you are Canadian, don't mind cold weather, and can learn to weld or drive a 400-ton dump truck; less good if you are an American living in the suburbs and can't afford $20/gallon to drive your Hummer to work or shopping.
No.
The will is lacking.
In 2000 China mined 1 billion tons of coal.
In 2009 China mined 2.96 billion tons of coal.
China has managed to triple coal production in 10 years with relative ease.
It takes 1 tons of oil sand to produce 1 barrel of syncrude.
Therefore to produce 15 mbpd would require the mining of 5.5 billion tons of oil sand per year or a 10 fold increase.
From a pure mining perspective, it is possible to achieve a 10 fold increase in 20 years, whether the mineable portion of the oil sand resource lasts that long is not certain.
The reports of SAGD,THAI seem to suggest that these methods will produce bitumen even more efficiently.
Heavy oil is not an inherently dilute source of energy. As long as there is easier oil to extract and process there won't be much use of it. However, once the price of conventional oil is high enough for long enough, technology will be developed that extracts and processes heavy oils and tars far more efficiently.
15 million bopd will happen when conventional oil production drops sufficiently or demand rises sufficiently above what conventional oil is produced.
Its really only the uncertainty over conventional production that stops it happening fast. No-one wants to make a massive infrastructure investment and then find that it doesn't pay because the Saudis open the taps. Eventually though, the shortage of conventional oil will be sufficient that heavy oil investment will not need to worry about being undercut by increased conventional production.
If conventional oil is that depleted in ten years time, 15 million bopd is possible.
Exactly. As long as everyone, esp. the US, refuses to put a graduated / scaled tax on imported crude to guarantee a minimum price to developers, the investments in oil sands production will be too risky to make. Possible result is they won't be made in time to avoid severe disruptions and much worse post-peak scenaria than necessary, though also possible that development will proceed just as required.
Who can know? Not anyone here. I personally think that the "artificial floor price for oil" tax, high enough and reliable enough to ensure rational alternatives development including alternatives like solar, is an wise bit of insurance (for the USA).
I find the notion of moving to a service economy ludicrous. Sure, some nations/societies might be able to do that but only in the context of a global economy where stuff is actually made elsewhere. The world, as a whole can't move towards a service economy (people can have lives by just offering or using services).
As real wages fall, more rich and middle-class families will have servants. Look at the huge number of servants in 1910 Britain, and to a lesser extent in the U.S. Middle class families always used to have at least a few servants, even during the Depression. Upper class families sometimes had hundreds of servants because they had several mansions to keep up.
After World War II the family that lived across the street from my family in White Bear Lake, Minnesota had three live-in servants. The head of the household owned a Lincoln dealersip as his only source of income.
There is plenty of room in our future for a service economy to grow. In the future many of us will be servants. A few of us will employ servants. That is the way it has been throughout most of history.
That would be a servants economy, not quite the sort of thing envisaged by the IEA as a service economy. It would also be utterly different from the western society we know now.
Full economies still need to produce stuff, and no less stuff; especially a growing economy.
Servant's wages count in GDP. To a slave you pay no wages, and I don't know how GDP would or could be modified to measure the output of slaves. I expect both slavery and serfdom to return within 100 years. Low energy societies typically have slaves or serfs and often both.
Don,
I don't know if you have come across a book called "The World We Have Lost" (or the second edition, "The World We Have Lost Further Explored"). It's about pre-industrial revolution England, viewed through the lens of a detailed study of parish records of births, deaths, and marriages. It's amazing how much they were able to discover about people's lifestyles, the effect of famines and epidemics, and so on.
I found the book fascinating, and I think you might enjoy it too. There were fewer servants and more nuclear families than one might have thought.
Thanks for the recommendation.
There were more servants in industrial England than in preindustrial England because the rich were much richer during the Industrial Revolution. Note that the courts of the various King Louis of France had enormous number of servants, possibly in the thousands, and the French aristocracy also had great numbers of servants.
An average upper-middle class family in England in the years before World War I probably had about twelve servants, plus or minus about three. The wealthy aristocracy had huge numbers of servants. Even lower middle class families often had two or three servants pre-World War I. After the First World War the number of servants in England decreased because the wealthy and middle class were not as rich as they had been. After World War II in England there were relatively few servants, though the upper-middle class might have one or two. The lower-upper class still kept about a dozen servants, and the very wealthy maybe double or triple that.
Of course the great majority of the population was working class and lower class. The servants were considered working class, because they were employed. A few top servants made pretty good incomes. It has always been hard to find a really first-class butler. Today an English-educated butler will cost you about $70,000 per year to employ in the U.S. You'd be surprised how many families in the U.S. and England still have butlers.
I went to a private high school where about half the students were from very rich families, and they always had servants, sometimes quite a few. The lifestyles of the very rich are quite different from those of the upper-middle or lower-upper class.
17. After the die-off "we" won't need all that much energy
_________________________________________
For some reason, two unrelated ideas merged in my head while showering this morning: (1) The apocalyptic movie: "2012" and (2)Republican thinking.
If you pay really close attention in the happy-ending movie, "2012"; probably a good 99% of humanity dies off during the apocalypse. But John Cusack is the "chosen one", the one out of 7 Billion Joe 6 Packs who miraculously gets onto the Noah's Love Ark together with his divorced-from family and thus he/they does/do not perish in the great die-off. (The Indian scientist/ loyal Kimosabi friend does die of course as all Indians must in Yankee style Cowboy and Indian movies.) So what does that have to do with Republican thinking? Well, there you go again. It's basically the same thing. All Republicans believe that they, individually, are the chosen "exceptionalist" one and therefore who gives a sh*t what happens to the lower 98% of humanity.
[ i.mage.+]
There is some overly-simplistic analysis in the post proper.
"Would seem", until one considers the effect of masses of dishwashers, clothes dryers, and even water heaters and electric car chargers waiting until 11 PM sharp before they switch on. Switch on a heavy load at the house level, and the lights dim briefly; switch on that many heavy loads at the grid level, and things go down.
Smart-grid measures are specifically intended to deal with problems like this. The grid regulation capability of the California ISO is about 1600 MW (page 3), which could be supplied entirely by smart-grid. If as few as 250,000 EVs were connected to the California grid with 220V 30A connections, they could supply the entire state's demand for grid regulation without any further actions. Smart Grid can balance demand with generation over periods of minutes to hours.
This is a mis-statement. The "fossil fuel backup" is the existing generation system; little or no further investment in it is necessary. Some components of Smart Grid can reduce costs to consumers. The value stream from regulation services can come to thousands of dollars per vehicle per year, paying for the vehicle's battery while also slashing fuel costs by 75%.
Poet,
Maybe you can help me understand this.
Lets say I have a shiny new EV in my garage and I hook it up to the smart grid. Now, without my control the elec company is cycling the very expensive batteries in my new EV. Depending on the severity of the draw, the elec company can potentially severely decrease the lifespan of my EV's batteries.
Keep in mind these batteries are very expensive because they have been optimized for mobile/high drain usage that an EV demands.
Why in the world would I consent to this? Why would the elec company do this when their are much cheaper ways of balancing power (since they have to compensate me for depleting the lifespan of my very expensive batteries)?
For the average EV consumer, hooking into a smart grid seems a very bad idea.
Understand? Easy.
Just follow a simple rule:
Go Ar Tee Eff A:
(bottom of page 11)
Note that this is for lead-acid cells with notably short cycle lifespans. Newer Li-ion chemistries are far less sensitive to cycling, even deep cycling.
Depth of discharge (DoD) is important, but even shallow cycling a battery will reduce its lifespan by a similar proportional amount.
http://www.mpoweruk.com/life.htm
Also it seems calendar life is not the limiting factor on Li-ion batteries. Cycle time is.
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/avta/pdfs/phev/howell_phev_...
Battery degradation is not proportional to cycle depth, or this graph of energy throughput vs. cycle depth for Optima Yellow Tops would be flat. It is anything but:
The degradation is related to the changes in physical dimensions during cycling, which breaks some electrode material away from electrical contact and/or bridges the electrodes, shorting the cell. I have already seen figures of 15,000 cycles to 80% discharge (that's a cycle a day for 41 years); there's no way that cycling could exceed battery or vehicle aging in such an application, even assuming 2x/day cycling.
Do you have a source for that graph?
Just glancing at it it looks like the curve with the diamond labled cycles is pretty proportional to the DOD
The above source addresses the issue rather directly.
Its rare when E-P misunderstands something. It certainly looks like the DOD is a very strong factor on longevity.
I replotted it in terms of a log-log plot and you can see it has a strong dispersive power-law dependence on DoD
The correlation coefficient is 1.00 ! Yet the power-law exponent is 1.14. If they were both 1, it would be real interesting to model. The two exponentials in failure rates and integrity levels would combine to give a simple power-law of order 1. The 1.14 indicates that there is some other subtle effect going on, likely making the integrity not a linear function of depth of discharge.
Thanks for showing this, as I think I can get a paper out of it.
Sorry Web, you lost me.
Re - Welcome to the club. LOL. I'm often lost trying to follow Web's discussions. Basicly I just lack the analytical skills to even follow his thoughts let alone argue agaisnt them (I'm just a rock licker after all). So I've found it easier to just assign Web to a godlike position where I'm left just to follow his thoughts on faith alone. Granted some day I may see proof that he is a false god and am forced to invade his temple and cast down all his false idols. But since I barely scraped through calculus with a b- he's probably safe from me.
Web's math is correct. Indeed, it reminds me a lot of what we did in microeconomic theory, macroeconomic theory, and also the theory of welfare economics. All he needs to do is to add bordered Hessians, LaGrange mucltipliers, and some hairy linear algebra, and I'd be right at home.
Not to get argumentative, but I stay away from anything hairy. BTW, LaGrange is the name of a sluggish ZZTop song, a few very hairy dudes. Lagrange is the multiplier.
I have not worked with Lagrangians for forty years--but I can still do them. I think math is sort of like riding a bicycle: once you learn how you don't forget how. Of course one does get rusty and forget a lot of useful formulas and definitions, but those are easy to brush up on.
Keynes used simple arithmetic and the very simplist (9th grade) algebra in his work on economics. He relied almost entirely on prose to get his points across. I try to model myself on Keynes.
"Keynes used simple arithmetic and the very simplist (9th grade) algebra in his work on economics."
That explains a lot. ;-)
/ducks
Note that Isaac Newton also wrote in prose--Latin Prose. I've read Newton's PRINCIPIA in the original Latin. Keynes was also a Latin scholar and majored in medieval Latin poetry as an undergraduate at Cambridge. The great economist Alfred Marshall was also a very good prose stylist and would always write out his equations in words, then graph them, and then in the footnotes do the same thing in calculus.
I reject the use of calculus in economics because most of the functions we're interested in are discontinuous and thus cannot be differentiated. Nevertheless, most economists today use calculus all the time, and I think that is one reason economics has gone into so many blind alleys over the past forty years.
I'm encouraged that we agree on that, Don. I do not see modern econometrics, or much of the other baggage of 'modern' economics, as being particularly useful for what we are facing.
Personally, I think the only economists worth a damn are those of the Austrian school, in part because they are the only ones whose predictions have proven to match reality as it unfolds (von Mises' notions of the business cycle, for example: http://mises.org/daily/606). Very few mainstream economists predicted the near-collapse of the global financial system in 2008 - so why do we keep listening to these people? Seems like a useful natural weeding out process has failed to materialize (or been purposefully obstructed, IMO). Tenure also may have something to do with that. Max Planck said 'science advances one death at a time' - meaning that you had to wait 'til older scientists who clung doggedly to obsolete theories died off before new, more accurate theories could make headway. I suppose this is as true of economics as of anything else.
I have a lot of respect for the Austrian economists, especially Frederick von Hayek. (He later on dropped the "von.") Note that he also wrote in prose and attacked the highly quantitative economists in his book, THE COUNTERREVOLUTION OF SCIENCE. Well worth reading today, though it is long out of print. Might be able to get one cheap one on amazon.com. I got my copy for fifty-nine cents from a remainder table about forty years ago.
However, I'm eclectic. I'm a great admirer of Keynes and also of Milton Friedman. Indeed, while playing tennis at the University of Chicago fieldhouse during the academic year of 1955-56 I met and talked to Friedman, mostly about tennis. He was a little tiny guy (five foot three) but he played tennis with a bunch of guys who were well over six feet tall, including some other eminent economists and also the statistician Wallis.
At the top of my game, when I was thirty years old, I might or might not have been able to beat Milton in his prime. A great many eminent economists are also very good tennis players. For examples, William McChesney Martin was a great player, as were Paul Samuelson and Alan Greenspan. There is something about tennis that attracts economists. On the other hand, I know few economists who sail. The people most attracted to sailing seem to be physicists, followed closely by engineers.
This one is very easy to explain and you guys have already filled in the blanks. The origin is basic physics of failure reliability arguments. The first idea is that you have the standard failure rate, which gives you the following reliability law:
P(t) = 1-exp(-Rt)
where P(t) is probability of failure after a certain time, t, and R is the Markov failure rate which is constant per time. This is the first-order law that every reliability engineer uses.
This leads to the following abstract representation for the time dependence of a failure occurrence. For a given sample, any one of a range of rates or velocities to breakdown can occur. Individually you model this as a probabilistic dispersion of rates .
Yet EP said "The degradation is related to the changes in physical dimensions during cycling, which breaks some electrode material away from electrical contact and/or bridges the electrodes, shorting the cell."
Well you can easily model this as an uncertainty in the critical width, w=Rt, that the process has to travel before breaking down the integrity of the component. This is just an integral of possible breakdowns
p(w)=1/W0*exp(-w/w0) over P(t)
This is a straightforward integral that gives a fat-tail reliability curve
F(t) = 1-1/(1+W0/Rt)
when t is large, F(t) looks like the probability of failure after a number of cycles, and R/W0 represents the uncertainty increase due to the larger depth of discharge and goes as as a power law of -1. When the depth of discharge gets closer to 100%, it reduces the effective width of breakdown or probability of shorting the cell. Click on the following if you want to see a graph
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log+plot+1-1%2F%281%2B0.1%2Fx%29+fr...
The only sticky point is that the power law is not -1 but -1.14. I would think that the depth of discharge does not map exactly to a critical length, but fairly close.
If I still lost you, what can I say. I do this kind of analysis all the time as part of my job. People think this is all kind of mysterious but I like to show how naturally it comes out if you use the right math. Interestingly, this math never turns out to be that complicated, it's just that you have to think about it in probabilistic terms, which many people have a hard time dealing with. I like the fact that you can understand how the depth of discharge is really a killer as far as battery reliability, which is something that I knew about but that you don't get an appreciation for until you compare it to the standard reliability law as I have done above.
A good reference book for this behavior is Didier Sornette "Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences". It shows up in everything from part failure to earthquake statistics.
So is the cycle life of a battery proportional to the DOD or not?
"Ignoring other ageing effects, one cycle of 100% DOD is roughly equivalent to 2 cycles at 50% DOD and 10 cycles at 10% DOD and 100 cycles at 1% DOD. "
Yes, according to the data it is just like you say.
To put it in other terms, this is really a variation of the Pareto Law, which is the reciprocal law.
1 cycle = K / 100%
2 cycles = K / 50%
10 cycles = K / 10%
where K is the Pareto proportionality constant. The Pareto Law variation that has the strict reciprocal relation is known as Zipf's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law).
This differs because the power is not 1 but 1.14. So the relationships look like:
1 cycle = K / (100%)^1.14
2 cycles = K / (50%)^1.14
10 cycles = K / (10%)^1.14
Close enough IMO to an exponent of unity to be seriously interesting.
Thanks Web.
You should also be aware of the influence of rate of discharge on cycle life. This is especially important for lead/acid batteries. Peukert came up with an equation relating discharge rate and battery capacity. Here's an illustrative graph to show the effect.
The equation is:
T = C / I^n
where C is theoretical capacity (in amp-hours, equal to actual capacity at one amp), I is current (in amps), T is time (in hours), and n is the Peukert number for the battery. The Peukert number shows how well the battery holds up under high rates of discharge - most range from 1.1 to 1.3, and the closer to 1, the better.
+5, Informative
Looks like the Peukert number may be 1.14 for the other curve above.
http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/8951/batterylifetime.gif
It makes sense because it is reducing the effective energy you will get through deep cycling. Unless it all coincidental.
It's equally rare when WHT does so. I've never disputed that cycle depth affects battery lifespan. What the above graph proves is that there is not a limit on energy throughput that remains largely unchanged with cycle depth; there is an optimum DoD (at least for those cells) and the total energy throughput varies by more than 4:1 between 25% and 80%.
See also the AC Propulsion report I linked in this comment.
Thanks, I knew I could draw out the fundamental issue from you.
There may in fact be a different metric called effectiveness that is Reliability * EnergyThroughput that we may need to consider. This treats reliability and energy throughput on somewhat equal footing. There might be a "sweet spot" for this effectiveness value as well.
Also I would suggest that perhaps that there are certain classes of behaviors that different battery configurations and types will follow.
It came from the commutercars.com website. Commutercars gave their source as Optima. The page with that graph has been removed, but maybe you can find it in an archive.
It's neither proportional nor inversely proportional. The one thing you can say is that it's monotonic. The interesting part is the total energy throughput (life * DoD), which peaks at about 25% discharge. That's the sweet spot for minimum cost/energy (for that particular chemistry and cell design).
Shallow cycling does not appear to decrease pack life in lead-acid cells, per AC Propulsion's V2G test:
These results are 8 years old now. We should have been acting on them; they could already be saving us huge amounts of fuel and money. If V2G service can reliably increase the capacity of lead-acid battery packs, it becomes a negative-cost option!
Didn't Web just confirm this?
"Ignoring other ageing effects, one cycle of 100% DOD is roughly equivalent to 2 cycles at 50% DOD and 10 cycles at 10% DOD and 100 cycles at 1% DOD. "
Also that study you just linked to stated "The long term effects on battery life were beyond the scope of the study". Isn't that exactly the point?
I'm asking you the long term cycle life of modern li-ion car batteries and you are pulling up studies for short term lead-acid.
From your study
The study is assuming lead acid batteries with a calendar life of 3 years. Modern Li-ion have a calendar life of over 10 years. So this study is outdated by quite a bit.
Not knowing all the details of how the experiments were done, it could be even more simple than I explained.
If you think in terms of a given number of energy usages that a battery can experience before irreversible entropy changes take over, then this is the invariant:
K = N * DOD
This makes sense since N is the number of cycles and DOD is in units of energy delivered per cycle. So in this case, the loss difference is in the fact that this is not a linear relation but has a power exponent which will reduce the number of predicted cycles you could get versus the perfect situation. The following is what the log-log plot says:
K = N * DOD^1.14
which is less than perfect by a compounded percent of the cycle depth.The plot that E-P produced looks even worse.
The deeper the discharge the more the chemical changes eat away at the integrity of the structure.
Ok, that I think I can follow.
A greater DOD will have a slightly larger impact on battery cycle life than shallow cycling it.
Hence the "roughly" in the following quote
"Ignoring other ageing effects, one cycle of 100% DOD is roughly equivalent to 2 cycles at 50% DOD and 10 cycles at 10% DOD and 100 cycles at 1% DOD. "
Given how long the calendar life for modern Li-ion batteries is, cycle life becomes the major factor in battery lifespan. I for one do not want the power company shortening the life of my very expensive EV batteries. And on the flip side I suspect power companies don't want to be paying to cycle very expensive EV batteries.
If EVs had lead acid batteries with short calendar lives, I could see the viability of V2G. But not with Li-ion.
I hear you.
It always takes a while to work through the analysis to get at the crux of the issue in the simplest terms possible.
I think you have pointed out a very practical concern, so thanks.
Why not?
Some of the figures bandied about for cycle lives for some Li-ion cells are in the region of 15,000 cycles. That's a cycle a day for 41 years! The car will probably be worn out in half that time or less, and indeed there is investigation going on to use "retired" traction batteries in utility service.
There's quite a bit of value to be obtained by having the batteries provide services to the grid. My point is that if the car is going to be plugged in much of the time, there is no reason to wait until the pack is retired. The value of services can offset the cost of the battery starting on the date of sale. The $5000/year figure is certainly too high for a market full of PEVs, but even $1000/year is over $80/month. Knocking $80/month off a loan or lease payment is serious money.
Nissan says the Leaf's battery is expected to last 5-10 years.
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/faq/list/technology#/leaf-ele...
Not 41 years.
A123 has pretty much the most advanced Li-ion out there and they claim much fewer cycles.
http://www.a123systems.com/cms/product/pdf/1/_ANR26650M1A.pdf
It looks like cycle life is the major life span limitation facing Li-ion batteries in EV application.
My point is that if the car is going to be plugged in much of the time, there is no reason to wait until the pack is retired.
There is a very good reason.
V2G will shorten the lifespan of a battery and degrade the range of the EV. If the elec company wants to cycle my EV batteries they are going to have to pay a premium for advanced battery chemistry optimized for mobile applications. And its going to have to be pretty hefty for me to compromise the already short life and limited range of my batteries. I'm not sure any premium would be enough. I'd opt out of V2G in order not to compromise the utility of my very expensive vehicle.
Even your reference backs up the Optima figures.
Note that lifetime goes to upwards of 15,000 cycles at 5% DoD... in a lead-acid. It also states this:
Now, going back to this:
You state an unequivocal claim, but:
For cells used for "microcycle" applications (small current discharge and charging pulses) a cycle life of 300,000 to 500,000 cycles is common.
Sure, we've already established this.
"Ignoring other ageing effects, one cycle of 100% DOD is roughly equivalent to 2 cycles at 50% DOD and 10 cycles at 10% DOD and 100 cycles at 1% DOD. "
What we need to know is how many 10C, 100%DOD cycles a battery can handle. A123 claims an excess of 1000.
1. You have no evidence to support this claim.
http://www.a123systems.com/cms/product/pdf/1/_ANR26650M1A.pdf
2. There is evidence from other testing that V2G use may cause no harm and could even be beneficial.
For a battery tech not used today. Moot.
3. Even if V2G use does degrade the battery, the economic return from the services could easily exceed the cost.
Now that is unsubstantiated. I can tell you that I as a consumer would find this unacceptable.
No you have not, and it is belied by your own graph. The non-linear characteristics are quite obvious; one cycle at 50% DoD is equivalent to about 6 cycles at 10% DoD, not 5. Allowing 2 cycles/day at 3% DoD in V2G use, the battery would use about 7300 cycles in 10 years; this is at most 20% of its cycle capacity vs. the graph (modern Li-ion would do much better).
That's one of the things we need to know. If you think that's all we need to know, you're not. (Thinking, that is.) Most battery cycles will be much shallower (just as most trips are nowhere near the full range of the car), and a full EV will get nowhere near to 10C discharge rates (discharging a 25 kWh battery at 150 kW is only 6C, and the continuous power rating of the motor system will probably be closer to 50 kW or 2C). The behavior of the battery under discontinuous charging will be very significant; pulsed charging is used to improve the capacity of lead-acid cells (de-sulfation), so it is very likely that the performance of Li-ion will be different on different charge profiles, and this may well play well with some V2G uses.
Show me that e.g. dissolution of dendrites and diffusion of ions isn't important in improving the lifespan of Li-ion cells. I've shown you experimental results, you have nothing.
It is substantiated in the V2G Final Report (which I gave you some time ago), which finds a value stream on the order of $3900/year/vehicle available from grid regulation services (page 40, top). That much money can buy a new battery every few years, and a new car every 10 years.
Whether you find it acceptable or not is irrelevant. If you want to leave money on the table, others will be happy to pick it up.
You are really not arguing in good faith here Poet. I'm not sure why, but its reflecting badly on you.
The non-linear characteristics are quite obvious; one cycle at 50% DoD is equivalent to about 6 cycles at 10% DoD, not 5.
Yes, its not strictly linear. No one said it was. But you are doing a great job beating up a straw man.
That's one of the things [100%dod cycle life] we need to know. If you think that's all we need to know, you're not. (Thinking, that is.)
You are quite correct. Its not the only thing we need to know. But if you want to compare cycle life of batteries its a great place to start. Apples to apples. Again great job on the straw man.
I've shown you experimental results, you have nothing.
For lead acid. Fine. Whatever. Let it go man.
It is substantiated in the V2G Final Report (which I gave you some time ago), which finds a value stream on the order of $3900/year/vehicle available from grid regulation services (page 40, top).
That number assumes the EV is attached to the grid via 80 amp connection both at work and at home for 94.2% of the time. That's hardly shallow cycling. Its pretty disingenuous to present these numbers out of context like you have.
You can have the last word. I think this topic has been pretty much hashed out. Thanks, I've learned a lot (and a lot about you).
Let me get this straight:
You are not just arguing in bad faith, your attitude has "sore loser" written all over it.
Belied here and here. You briefly conceded "roughly" before going back to a claims of a precise linear relationship contradicted by your own reference.
In other words, you've lost the argument but refuse to concede. I concede in advance that the same relationship may not hold for other chemistries or cell designs, but there is good cause for optimism and any deleterous effects must be established by testing. Show me shallow-cycling test results and we'll both be enlightened.
There's a table of values of services given different connections (both power level and time of day) on page 39. The smallest annual value is from a 32-amp (40 amp circuit) connection exclusively at home, which is $967. $967 a year buys a new Leaf battery in about 8-9 years. If cycling takes 2 years off the 10-year battery life but service fees pay for most or all of a new battery, you effectively get it for free or close to it. (The smallest value calculated for connections at both home and work is $1215; that's a $9000 Leaf battery in 7.5 years.)
From the report, page 35:
1 kWh of throughput in a 25 kWh pack is 4% cycling (note that the 20 kW power level requires a 240 V 80 A connection). You claimed this is "hardly shallow cycling". Are you dishonest, or did you just not bother to read the report?
"Tu quoque". You have all the context for the numbers as well as the numbers themselves, yet you fail to make any honest argument based on them. That says all anyone needs to know.
Thank goodness. And yes, I do attach to BSers like a pit bull. Lies and BS are the poison of our society, and refuting them is an unappreciated but absolutely necessary job.
It says "Ignoring other ageing effects, one cycle of 100% DOD is roughly equivalent to 2 cycles at 50% DOD and 10 cycles at 10% DOD and 100 cycles at 1% DOD. " in those posts.
I never once made a claim of a precise linear relationship.
This isn't the conduct expected from a TOD contributor.
You need to retract your claim.
No, not dishonest. I just made a simple mistake. Mea Culpa. I choose my words poorly. It is, as you claim shallow cycling.
Let me rephrase my point.
If your Leaf has a throughput of 1kw per hour (as you wrote). That's equivalent to driving 4 miles at .25kwh/mile.
Now the numbers you quoted above has the EV plugged into the grid for 22 hours a day. Potentially cycling my Leaf's batteries the equivalent of driving 88 miles. Since its a shallow cycle and the cycle life is not linearly promotional the wear will be less than the equivalent of 88 miles but not by a whole lot. I admit this wouldn't happen all the time every day.
Now all this cycling on a lead acid battery equipped EV isn't a problem since it will have cycle life left over after the calender life is used up. But this isn't the case with Li-ion as cycle life is the critical limiting factor of battery life. And this is why the report is out of date and isn't relevant to modern EVs or V2G.
So you are correct. I was wrong. I hope I cleared up the point. There was no dishonesty (on my part) involved.
The "other ageing effects" are substantial, which you'd realize if you'd just look at the lousy graph and understand what that kWh/lifetime curve, which peaks at about 25% discharge and 4500 cycles, actually means. If degradation was linear with discharge the "curve" would be a flat line.
You made an unsupported claim based on a faulty model. I gave you an example to show that things don't always work that way. Your objection is... I supplied data from an actual test of products available 8-9 years ago instead of what's going to be put into products just now being offered for sale.
Oooooo-kay.
Reality check: if you can get 4500 cycles to 25% out of an Optima D34 Yellow Top (rated 55 AH), at a bulk discount price of $180, that's about 740 kWh throughput or about $.24/kWh for battery degradation. Guessing 34¢/kWh total after paying for charging in a vehicle using 200 Wh/mi at the battery terminals, that's 6.8¢/mi for energy. You'd have to get 44 MPG to equal that cost with gasoline at $3/gallon. In other words, even lead-acid is competitive at today's gas prices (and much more so if an AGM cell can be made for a smaller premium over a conventional deep-cycle lead-acid).
Unsupported?
I supplied this
http://www.mpoweruk.com/life.htm
And Web supplied all sorts of fancy math.
Seems pretty supported to me.
They study you linked to is severely out of date.
Reality check yourself. Modern EVs don't come with lead acid batteries. They come with Li-ion. Even 8 years ago the EV1 and RAV4 EV were equipped with NiMH batteries. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with these yellow top batteries. I'm not sure what's the point of bringing up very outdated studies about lead acid batteries.
Seems to me there is a very big flaw with V2G. Battery cycle life of modern EV batteries. Unless there is some sort of change V2G might very well be still born.
Here is another look at it:
Discharging the battery deeply can lose up to 50% of the potential lifetime compared to a 1% DOD baseline.
That is on top of the battery lifetime being "stolen" by being on the grid. Unless this was subsidized or otherwise paid for, it does seem not fair for individuals to pay for this w/o everyone else chipping in. That's the take-home message I get.
What is the source of this graph? Its pretty hard to understand out of context.
I just took the same data and replotted it normalized to the depth of discharge of 1%.
It is a plot of (1-N*DOD/100,000)*100% where N is the number of cycles
There is no loss at N=1 and maximal loss at N=100.
I see. Sorta.
I started thinking about E-P's comment "If degradation was linear with discharge the "curve" would be a flat line." and thought that this would show the real dependence.
The degradation could be linear with discharge but the accumulated losses aren't.
The lifetime would not be "stolen", it would be paid for out of service fees. Let me quote V2G report:
Note that the cost of the battery is what makes EVs so hard to sell. If the battery was paid for out of service fees, or even leased at a nominal rate, EVs would be both cheaper to buy than ICEVs and much cheaper to run.
Sure and that makes perfect sense with lead acid batteries when the limit isn't cycle life.
Li-ions have a shorter cycle life than calendar life. As I stated above it would be very expensive, if not impossible, for the elec company to compensate me for the reduced utility of my already utility compromised EV
I will stay out of the argument from now on. It looks like a classic case of multi-objective optimization. There is an optimal allocation based on various trade-offs, but by its very nature this means that not all sides will be happy with the result.
We will have to get used to this happening as we no longer have ideal energy sources and have to deal with entropy.
I think that's a fair assessment of the debate so far.
Would V2G help stabilize the grid? Sure.
But you'll be pretty hard pressed to convince the average consumer he has to sacrifice the utility of his car to load balance his neighbors plasma tv.
I'm really finding it hard to see how V2G ever gets established in the market.
Me, too. Sounds like an interesting idea in theory by in practice any number of things would hold it up — especially and including the battery life issue you raise. Anyone with just a bit of knowledge of batteries would have to balance how much could be earned by participating in the program against the potential drawbacks and for most people I doubt the balance would be in V2G's favor.
Then, of course, there is the fact that we will soon be in The Scarcity Economy and it's extremely likely that once a person has obtained a battery they will want to hold on to it for a very, very long time. Everyone tries to make their equipment last as long as possible during financial contractions.
V2G is a BAU plan and since BAU is going away I suspect that V2G has just about no chance of coming into widespread use.
Nice idea, though.
E Poet. I have an upcoming battery replacement issue and could use some advice.
I have about 500 Ah of gel cell batteries. They will need replacing within 2 years. I have solar PV which provides excess power. My diesel engine will be replaced by electric motor.
With no price restrictions, what batteries would you reccomend ?
I am not the person to ask about specifics of today's battery offerings.
This is my experience from running lead-acid batteries on a mountain-top for ten years: A brand-new battery will supply something like its full capacity, once. A Group-27 battery is really only good for 20 amp-hours or less if you want to get some use out of it. After 400 charge/discharge cycles and only getting 5 amp-hours anymore, I would use them just to run a small (muffin) fan at night. 100 amp-hours@20hours? Maybe once. They can be reformed by discharging them to nothing using a lamp load, charging them backwards, discharging them, charging them forward, and repeating this many times. Takes a lot of time and availability of power.
Do you have a link for that reforming process please?
NAOM
No.
And in looking, I see the field is rife with nonsense.
I heard this one in the mid 80's and have used it to recover situations. Maybe I've had wonderful luck.
A recently ruined battery that accepts no current will accept current after the first cycle... so it does seem to work.
Here is a patent that describes the failure mechanism really well:
http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20100099025
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lithium battery news:
http://epoverviews.com/articles/visitor.php?keyword=lithium-ion%20batteries
Energy overviews:
http://epoverviews.com/featurearticles.php
Usually good news:
http://www.physorg.com/
Thanks, that was the problem I was getting while trying to find out more. I've been thinking of buying a couple of old batteries off my local scrapman to play with. Well, if I can't fix them I can always sell them back to him :)
NAOM
Except that level of accuracy isn't likely to be achieved, unless the controlling timers are in turn controlled by Naval Observatory radio signal. For timers set by hand, there will be some inevitable slop that will cause the load starting to be spread over five or ten minutes if not more.
If electric rates are time of day priced like phone rates, there will be at least three price bands, "day, evening, night", and some people will decide they can't wait for night rates and start their driers and dishwashers during the medium-priced "evening" band. If PV becomes common in urban areas, there could be another period of several hours during the morning or very early afternoon when solar power becomes so plentiful that "evening" rates prevail, and some clothes drying and car charging could take place then.
My major concern with V2G isn't wear and tear on the battery, but the possibility of not having enough power in the battery when I needed it. Just one instance of being stranded because the car ran out of "juice" would turn a lot of people off to letting the grid tap into their cars.
One way electric cars could help balance the grid without sending power to it, is by briefly halting charging to mitigate a surge in demand from another source. If electric utilities could send a signal telling cars "Stop charging for 15 minutes", this would allow a surge to pass while not causing a significant delay in charging or increasing wear on the batteries.
What's supposed to set the timer on the meter? People would use the same reference to avoid being billed at the higher rate. Most likely, the meter could be queried for the current time or price point.
No such slop when the meter is the reference and they're all synced by carrier-current signal. That's why it's a bad idea to schedule lots of loads that way. You want them to come on over an hour or hours, according to the power-ramp rate of the cheapest plants on the grid and the evening decrease of other loads. What you don't want is massive demand shocks on the hour, requiring lots of spinning reserve to keep the grid from crashing.
True, but daily weather and even passing clouds would require something more flexible than hourly block rates. That's what Smart Grid is supposed to do.
This is easier depending how flexible you are. If you e.g. program a certain minimum charge for essential trips plus reserve starting from home, work, the mall, etc. the Smart Grid system could use every bit of capacity between that level and full charge as a buffer. A central management system could be using every vehicle on the grid that way at once. You might even query the system: "If I go to the mall after work, what's the rate for bringing me up to my minimum charge before I head home?" That would essentially look at the auction rate for energy in the critical time slot. If you don't like the answer, you go straight home. If you know you want to go shopping, you request a full charge the previous night (which might cost a little more than the minimum, or might cost nothing extra because the wind was blowing or something).
That doesn't even require Smart Grid; smart loads can detect frequency changes due to load variations and modify their power demand to offset them. Such "dynamic charging" has been an element of EV schemes for a while.
Plenty of ways to spread loads. Use the electronic serial number of the meter to create a delay time after the start, that would give a spread. Define low rate as a window of say 8 hrs, while you may use up to 6hrs to allow for staggered start. Use grid signalling to control metering. Maybe, if low rate needs to be ended due to excess load signal a countdown so loads can turn off gracefully. Have an extra low rate that is not at any fixed time but has a fixed availability, say 1 or 2 hrs and usually at night. Connect your dryer, dishwasher etc to that so they start when available and are ready for you the next day.
We only do things the way we do because we have become used to a steady stream of electricity flowing out of the wall. If electricity when available was the rule we would have adjusted to that. We will need to adjust.
NAOM
My concept is a bit more sophisticated: the grid management system receives bids for high, medium and low priority power demands, and dispatches them in order. As e.g. the demand at "medium" tapers off, the low-priority loads get told they can consume energy at some duty cycle between 0.0 and 1.0 (probably no less precise than a 16-bit quantity). Each individual load takes its designated fraction of maximum or required power (perhaps by switching on and off according to a pseudorandom number generator, resolved down to individual grid cycles). That yields a very fine-grained control of demand.
To avoid cheating, the real-time dispatching function may have to be centralized in the meter. It could send power schedules to each downstream load as required.
The other element that's needed is a central system for totalling the energy required by the loads, and the energy they're capable of using (perhaps with several bins of priorities and price-points): e.g., the minimum needed charge level of EV batteries vs. their full-charge level. Matching requirements and capabilities to available generation and its changes (the least expensive generators tend to be the least flexible) is something that really needs to be done hours in advance, and providing schedules of demand to the utility makes this possible on a scale we've never had thus far.
I hope that makes sense, I'm tired.
Nice synthesis ! Thanks for that Gail
High oil prices --> recession is a good thing.
The recession produces unemployment.
The high oil prices encourage innovation we desperately need in high altitude wind energy and fission of not uranium.
It creates opportunity for people willing to do.
The leaders who do can then have access to cheap labour thanks to the unemployment to implement their energy project visions.
Or something like that.
Temporary pain, long term reward.
You'll have a tough time getting elected on that platform. More likely a bunch of senators will bankrupt everyone first trying to salvage a bunch of Wall St. speculators.
Do you work for Fermilab?
If cheap labor is the ticket to new energy sources then India and Africa has the brightest future while Europe, the USA and Japan is hopelessly doomed.
Energy is produced by mining large deposits of oil, gas, coal and uranium the location of which has nothing to do with cheap labor.
Wind turbines are made of steel which is made from coal and iron and fiberglass which is made from coal tar or oil products.
The ultimate in cheap labor is slavery however slaves like livestock don't require electricity, gas or oil.
There is a good science-fiction story (unfortunately I don't remember the author or title) that I read back around 1954. In it slave-labor was using pick axes to mine shale for oil. Come to think of it, the author may very well be Frederick Pohl. Prophetic perhaps? I think it was set roughly in 2050.
I think it was published in GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION magazine. The illustrations were in the style typical of GALAXY.
As to the World Trade Center there are two possible world theories,
1. The engineers who said on TV how it could fall were incorrect and didn't know what they were talking about.
2. The terrorists planned an elaborate scheme to drive gigantic jets into multiple buildings (NOT believing they would fall from the tremendous impact (force being determined by weight and speed) so they thought they needed a back up plan so they planted bombs (even in a smaller building like 7 World Trade)(and there is also either no or almost no evidence of that).
They could have also hired a team of old men to cut through the foundation in case the planes and the bombs failed. And maybe Bush knew...and maybe he was a member of that clandestine team that was the third back-up. After all, people who plan to kill someone shouldn't just shoot them, they should also strangle them, poison them, run them over with a car, run them over with a plane, etc. because the first just may not do the trick. I always say it is very important to be thorough and to have a back-up plan.
Another Point: The IEA (in spite of their very clearly and sadly flawed models) has sounded the alarm in the best way it can to (based on the very interesting evidence from the Oil Drum of political pressure that the U.S. has applied in the past). They said something like 'supplies should be adequate though mid-2011 and if there is a world economic slowdown supplies should be adequate though the year'. That is Not a reassuring statement on the world oil supply by any means. That is as clear a warning as they can apparently issue given that many governments have decided to put off the day when the world oil markets supply-demand equation determines the true situation.
At that time, I predict there will be more economic chaos (as if there isn't enough)in the form of cost push driven inflation and people will begin a fairly dramatic shift to tiny little cars in the U.S., less distant vacations, more reduced and shared living space...
Let us cut this off at the pass and put it in terms of an oil depletion analogy.
What are the odds of having two supergiant oil fields Ghawar and Burgan occur? Egads, impossible! Up to that point in time, giant fields were a fraction of this size and a supergiant could never occur according to conventional wisdom. But it did and people accepted the new knowledge that they could occur ... but we accepted that they would be rare. see The Black Swan, etc
The odd thing is that perhaps one or two people in the world have the intellectual curiosity to understand the origins of large oil reservoir probabilities, yet a whole growth industry is set up to evaluate bizarre WTC scenarios. Quite a sad spectacle, IMO.
If you whack a system with a pulse, it will read-out its transfer function.
I sort-of think that's what the reader "abundance.concept" acts as.
But the WTC thread did Mr. Dirac proud today.
Mr. KalimankuDenku, you speak in such abstract terms yet I can deduce (at least occasionally) the nuggets of wisdom from what you say, so continue forth.
Gail - Another excellent thread…thanks. And as usual it brings out all our TOD smarties. But at the same time I find my self getting very annoyed. Such strong support for the reality of the situation yet total public ignorance continues on like lemmings toward the cliff. Granted there's much on their plate right now with the economy and the recent elections. But if it’s going to take the MSM and the political power base to get their attention about PO it’s difficult to not be pessimistic. Granted the next time there’s a spike in energy prices they’ll focus. But even then will they see the true problem or just follow the same old worn rhetoric?
Gail - One small tidbit: you won’t see a big rush of bankruptcies in the oil patch. That’s not how the predators function in the oil patch. Financing is done by either the main stream banks and the “mezzanine" (or private investor base) companies. Since liquidating oil/NG is quite like unloading other properties there is seldom a formal repro process. Typically a wounded operator will negotiate with buyers to take over the properties and debt. If debt exceeds equity we negotiate some level of write down of the note. There have been many such “reassignments” closed since the bubble burst. And not just SG properties but across the board. Presently we’re negotiating two such deals (yes…we are a primo predator these days thanks to our big capex base). One GOM offshore property is worth around $35 million with a $60 million note against it. The note already has an April 2011 call on it. So the current owners are trying to negotiate a deal where they walk away with something in their pocket. Obviously the finance group isn’t going to let that happen when they are facing a $35 million write down. To avoid waiting till next year the bankers might let them have a little cut just to get a new operator in play that might improve the equity situation with a capex infusion.
But if we close this deal you’ll never see a press release about it. None of the parties, for different reasons, care to make the details known publicly. That’s why there’s been a pretty ugly blood bath going on in the oil patch with little public notice outside of the big corporate deals like ExxonMobil and XTO. In fact I will guess that most of the carnage will be over by next spring. A few players were hanging on hoping for this winter to bring higher NG prices. Few feel today there’s much chance of that changing the game significantly. Many companies who had their backs broken by low NG prices are quietly dissolving without any publicity. We do eat our own...we just don't advertise it.
I agree it's difficult to watch. Something I've started to recognize about our modern tech culture is the sheer quantity and forms of distractions 24/7. Even if you just watch football on Sunday, they distract the viewer from the time between hikes by using stats, stories, close ups of faces, then suddenly it's time for the next hike. The art of distraction is so widespread now in all forms of communication. Watch a political debate on TV, and the person losing on a point being made will distract the discussion by asking a question about something else. People today are distracted by so many topics in so many ways, it takes a concerted mental effort to become peak oil savvy.
How to get away from all those distractions to really penetrate the public's psyche is almost impossible. What it will probably take is another economic step down aka 08, and then maybe because it will not be distracted by a mortgage meltdown, the understanding of our predicament with oil will get through. We will see, or maybe it will take a 3rd step down.
I'm not sure how many step downs can take place though before it causes runaway collapse. But even if you could convince people of the situation, would they be willing to change their lives volunarily? Maybe only a crisis can do that.
I think they will respond to their immediate surroundings.
They will be still distracted by hucksters on the radio telling them how to get rich quick by exploiting the situation.
OT, but kinda interesting, IMO.
Rock, in regard to: "lemmings toward the cliff"
The notion of lemmings running off a cliff is a fraud. Wikipedia explains:
The myth of lemming "mass suicide" is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. In 1955, Disney Studio illustrator Carl Barks drew an Uncle Scrooge adventure comic with the title "The Lemming with the Locket". This comic, which was inspired by a 1954 American Mercury article, showed massive numbers of lemmings jumping over Norwegian cliffs. Even more influential was the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness, which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping into certain death after faked scenes of mass migration. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary, Cruel Camera, found that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming
Hmmm...maybe this isn't OT after all. Deception with respect to peak oil on the part of governmental and supra-governmental agencies...underlying an intention to launch the masses off a metaphorical energy cliff? Interesting...
ozzy - All so true but still you and everyone else understood the analogy perfectly. That's the great thing about all urban legends: whether true or not they work quit well in contextural terms. Just compare our 2 post: I achieved my goal in just 4 words. Took you many more. Therefore...I WIN!!!!! Just a friendly tease. Have a good weekend.
That's a game you will always win dude - my verbosity is the stuff of legend. ;-)
Good weekend back...
(shortest post ever?)
ozzy - Our TOD family should be thankful I don't have voice conversion software. I can run-on-at-the-mouth with the best of them. But I'm a 2-finger typer so my post have to be short. But one little side benefit of TOD is the very wide knowledge base we have. Your tutorial on lemmings was one of those little pluses IMHO.
Re 'lemmings'
I believe it is hard to evaluate and prioritise the threats. There is just too much noise.
How many of us that read TOD are fat or smoke or drink too much or are responsible for high C02 emissions or some other activity where there are professionals in another forum asking the same questions - 'what's is wrong with the lemmings who continue to [X] when we have made it so clear that [Y] will result'.
To say nothing of out-and-out nutters trying to convince of us some very unlikely outcome etc.
I think maybe we are all lemmings. Can anybody really be across all threats and evaluate and prioritise them perfectly?
I think that some of us are lucky to be in the right place at the right time. There are some very smart people on TOD, but if they had been born in the wrong place, they would never have had a chance and they would not be on this forum today, and they would going over the PO cliff with everybody else.
C - I know I could never be a lemming. They are lactose intollerant. I may have cut back on my Blue Bell Ice Cream consumption but I could never give it up completely.
Sir, I concede my position is devastated by the flawless reasoning above. The IEA needs you sir! :)
I continue to question the IEA's ability to run a website never mind anything else. Yes http://www.iea.org is down again. That's following a 3 day unexplained total outage earlier this month. If I ran the servers for a major international agency and had outages like that I'd expect to be sacked. What's going on?
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs1143.snc4/148533_458991977...
Here's the chart without the "yet to be discoverd or developed" wedge. I can't get it to display in the post, can someone help me out please?
Sure looks like the end of the bumpy plateau is 2010-2011...
Got ammo? There will be blood.
This is quite misleading, as it confuses a *regulatory* limit with a technical issue.
I have a 2001 Toyota Prius hybrid that has about 80,000 miles of running on 40-50% ethanol. Any car with fuel injection that runs on 10% ethanol will work with at least 20%, and up to probably 30% substitution with no problem. There are cases (like my prius) that will work on substantially higher substitution rates.. I do notice somewhat harder starting in the cold (which manifests itself with a rather nasty set of warning lights from the hybrid controller, which I promptly validate the trouble codes, and reset them, and then fill up with 'only' 10% ethanol to drop the substitution rate a little.
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Actually there are about 20 million flex-fuel cars on the road now that can run on 100% ethanol. It's also possible to convert gasoline and diesel engines to run on ethanol with minor modifications. Sweden runs their diesel buses on E95.
It's also possible to convert full hybrid cars like the Prius and Ford Escape to plug-in hybrids.
http://www.enginer.us/
There are a couple of obvious problems with fuel ethanol, which I will reiterated in case some people haven't heard about them.
The first is that you are converting food into fuel. Since the US obtains its fuel ethanol from corn, and exports most of its surplus corn to other countries, the net effect of producing fuel ethanol is that you are depriving people in third world countries of inexpensive food so Americans can drive. This has been known to cause food riots in countries such as Mexico, for instance.
The second is that American corn production is very energy-intensive, and the energy inputs into fuel ethanol are approximately equal to the energy obtained from it. In effect you are converting natural gas into automobile fuel via a very indirect and expensive process. It is much more efficient to burn the natural gas directly in cars. It's not very difficult to run an automobile on natural gas, although it does require a bit of hardware (e.g. fuel conversion kits, NG compressors, CNG tanks) to support it.
Converting a gasoline vehicle to natural gas is quite a bit more involved than converting one to ethanol. Plus there are very few natural gas refueling stations in place in the US.
The Mexican riots in 2008 were caused by high corn prices from commodities speculation, not ethanol production. The same commodities speculation that drove up oil prices. Since mid 2008 corn prices went down whilst ethanol production went up. So obiously the cause of the high corn prices was not ethanol.
Independent studies have shown that ethanol production is indeed net energy positive.
If you want to argue that ethanol production is depriving the third world of food, then you can also argue that all of the parks and sports stadiums across the US should be converted into ag land for food production.
Peakoilisbs, I don't think this represents a complete understanding of the situation.
First of all, the notion that speculation was responsible for the entirety of price spikes (in corn OR oil) is just an opinion and not provable fact. I've seen arguments on both sides, and find neither to be conclusive. Meaning we don't really *know*. I suspect there were numerous factors at work, of which one (a major one) was speculation. That does not rule out the possibility that another may well have been ethanol production. The way that such factors play together is not at all clear such that we can issue definitive statements such as yours. Complex systems include interdependencies and relationships which are not at all easy to disentangle. And the notion you advance that there is no relationship between ethanol production and food prices - when the former requires ag land - seems counter-intuitive at best.
Similarly, "independent studies" can be found which show that ethanol production is net negative - and others that it's net positive. Confirmation bias is usually the cause for picking one over another, in my experience. Again, I don't think we can say with certainty that we know. What *is* obvious is that ethanol is a low EROEI fuel, quite probably too low for it to make good economic sense, based on arguments I've seen, even if it turns out to be net energy positive - which is not, after all, the criteria. It would have to be *sufficiently* net energy positive. I am aware of no studies that place the EROEI at higher than 5:1, and I've never seen a ratio that high assigned to US corn-based ethanol. Seems to me consensus seems to range between about 3:1 and 1:1 for that source, though I should note that I haven't researched this thoroughly enough to make definitive statements on it.
As for the basic argument, simply imagine an asymptotic case, where we converted all of our ag land to generating ethanol. There would definitely be an enormous impact on world food supplies and prices. So there is a relationship, and to dismiss it out of hand doesn't move the debate forward, IMO.
BTW, if in fact by converting all of the parks and sports stadiums across the US to food production, we could preclude starvation in the 3rd world, I'd be all for it. Wouldn't you?
nice take-down ozzy
No I wouldn't be for it. I am for family planning, which is something the people in 3rd world countries should take a look at.
Ozzy, you are bang on but David Murphy has done the research and has created this slide:
In his review (I don't know off hand what his selection criteria were), no recent studies are above 1.6:1, the ones before 1980 cluster around 1:1.
But the main point is that they are nowhere near "real fuels" (his term, not mine) — not even close.
Again, these might make a difference in The Scarcity Economy because liquid fuel still has utility even if we make it at 1:1 or even a loss but they will not under any circumstances allow us to continue BAU.
Wow, aangel, beautiful! Worth a thousand words, indeed - that image paints the picture in appropriately stark terms, thanks. :)
And yet Brazil uses ethanol for 50% of its liquid fuel needs.
EROI is derived from a bogus analysis the behavior of hunter-gatherer nomads or the ecology of predators.
I have yet to see a single analysis validating EROI as a meaningful measure of anything, let alone a rigorous methodology.
I'm surprised that David and others don't seem to be concerned
about the incoherence of their core belief.
I can use credit cards to live on for an extended period of time. Doesn't mean it's sustainable in the long run. Government subsidies can certainly make actions that are economically nonviable, workable in the short term. Brazilian gasoline taxes are over 50%, whereas ethanol taxes are less than half of that, as low as 12%. You can get a lot of mileage (so to speak) out of that differential. It's easy to use taxation to skew behavior away (often 180 degrees) from the sustainable - just look at US govt subsides to the agriculture and energy sectors.
Also, as I understand it, Brazilian ethanol nets out at the highest EROEI of any ethanol - I heard 5:1 thrown around somewhere. Many times the EROEI of American corn-based ethanol. So it may well be that it is - given their economic circumstances - sustainable. But the context is all important and inductive reasoning - extending from the specific to the general - is often fallacious.
...dug it up - from the energy bulletin (http://www.energybulletin.net/node/21064):
"Ethanol yield (gallons/acre) for sugar cane under good tropical conditions is double that for corn. For all those reasons, sugar cane ethanol is seven times more energy efficient; its net energy, expressed as ERoEI, is 9:1 while corn ethanol has an ERoEI of only 1.3:1"
This makes my point about the inductive reasoning you are using majorian: we can't grow sugar cane in most of America, so we're SOL on that front.
Finally, you are citing EROI. I am citing EROEI. They're not the same thing, as I understand it. There was a thread here about that difference, and arguments for and against using EROEI, and Jeff Vail has written on that subject, as well, but the notion of net energy, IMO, is not only intuitive, but well nigh impervious logically. It does take an investment of energy to extract oil, ethanol, etc. The more you need to invest, the less is left over. I don't think that methodological squabbles - while they may be helpful in some ways - detract from that basic reality.
Yes, those studies are for temperate latitude biofuels, not Brazil's situation. Sorry for not mentioning that.
Majorian doesn't understand EROEI and his comments reflect that lack of understanding.
Much of Louisiana and Florida is ideal for growing sugar cane. Some neighboring states too. And of course sugar cane used to be the main crop in Hawai'i.
Looks like sugar cane in Hawaii is still a good sized business, Don. From wikipedia:
"Agricultural sales for 2002, according to the Hawaii Agricultural Statistics Service, were US$370.9 million from diversified agriculture, US$100.6 million from pineapple, and US$64.3 million from sugarcane."
An analysis of the potential for sugar cane ethanol generation from any suitable semi-tropical regions in US states would be interesting. Given that the Brazilian story is not breaking news, why aren't the places than can, not doing so? No subsidies for sugar cane? Or would that qualify? Seems like if ADM coulda made a buck off it, they would have.
As with other suggestions, timing is a big question mark. The current system has such massive inertia that making big changes like converting all available cropland, even if there is the political will, would take a helluva long time.
In Hawai'i today the biggest cash crop--by far--is mariajuana. I have heard that is also true for California, but of course I have no hard evidence to prove either case. Hard to measure the total value of illegal crops.
Much of Louisiana and Florida is ideal for growing sugar cane.
Yes, but they don't have nearly as much undeveloped rain forest as Brazil to clear to plant new fields. You need an area of prime sugar cane land the size of California, you realize.
And of course you will get no more Florida oranges or Louisiana shrimp because the new sugar cane fields will replace the orange groves, and the fertilizer runoff will turn the Gulf of Mexico anaerobic. The alligator population will plummet, too, because you will have to drain all the swamps.
And of course sugar cane used to be the main crop in Hawaii.
Yes, but they converted it all to tropical fruits, macadamia nuts, and potted orchids, which are much higher value crops. Hawaii doesn't have a lot of farmland, you realize.
And yet Brazil uses ethanol for 50% of its liquid fuel needs.
There are some obvious economic constraints on biofuel consumption which are illustrated in this article: Brazil drivers ditch biofuel over high sugar costs
The trouble is that Brazil has to devote a very large area of agricultural land (about the size of Portugal) to sugar cane production. Brazil has a vast amount of agricultural land, much of it ideal for sugar cane production, However, producing more fuel ethanol requires clearing the rain forests to plant more sugar cane, and beyond a certain point the demand for ethanol drives up sugar cane prices to the point where it is uneconomic for fuel.
Going to 100% biofuels in the US would require planting an area the size of California to biofuel production, and the natural gas demand for fertilizer production would drive the cost of both fertilizer and natural gas through the roof. US agriculture is much more energy-intensive than Brazilian agriculture. It would come down to a choice between eating food and heating your home on one side, and driving your car on the other.
What about Gas-To-Liquids (GTL)?
This has been discussed on TheOilDrum:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5752 as an example.
If Alaska is mostly gas, what about GTL conversion plants, running on and heated by gas, to feed pipelines?
GTL offers to fuel cars, without modification, from a local source.
Come to think of it, Methane can be made from, er, ah, waste.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranded_gas_reserve
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_to_liquids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas
.
Pretty song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxEl8J-bZ_c
GTL and CTL are TERRIBLE ideas from an energy viewpoint.
The idea should be to GROW the energy pie by adding in lower energy feedstocks like oil sands and oil shale (and ethanol).
The amount of energy required to convert these 'garbage fuels' into liquid fuels
is less than the energy produced(positive net energy).
In GTL, CTL you need to input twice as much energy as you get out(negative net energy), quickly shrinking the energy pie.
The best use of Alaska natural gas is as feedstock for relatively close Alberta oil sands.
If Alaska has 61 trillion cubic feet of natural gas per USGS and it were all piped to Alberta oil sands and if it takes 1000 cf of natural gas to turn tar into a barrel of syncrude, this resource could produce 61 billion barrels of oil.
If you turned 61 trillion feet into F+T fuel, it would only amount to 6 billion barrels of oil.
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Kudos for bringing up the non-fuel uses of oil. I see dweebs talking about how our goal should be to use no fossil fuels at all. And yet they completely ignore everything else that is derived from oil. Nor do they seem to consider how they would replace all those petrochemicals and especially plastics.
On another note, I worked in the natgas industry for about four years and was a faithful reader of Gas Daily. I watched the spot market go up into the $14+ mmbtu range. As supply became saturated and winter wasn't cold enough long enough to cause withdrawals from storage, the price began to fall. One major producer made a very public announcement that they were cutting back on drilling until prices rose. Then they cut back some more. I happen to live in the Marcellus Shale area, and the drillers here don't seem to notice that they're spending big bucks for a very small return. I'm reminded of Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" comment on a daily basis....
I'll have to admit to being a dweeb, I guess. Fossil fuels are finite. Meaning, if we do not set a goal of using none, nature will do it for us, eventually.
Why is it worthy of deprecation to notice that using non-renewable sources of energy is not sustainable (meaning, this process must ineluctably end, like it or not)? Getting a jump on that and moving to a usage model which goes to zero seems wise, rather than dweebish, to me.
The fact is that, based on economic viability, we have no idea when we'll hit that wall. Applying the brakes and coming to a stop, then getting out and walking if need be seems preferable to me.
In fact, to operate under the opposite assumption, that we have every right and duty to just convert everything we can into oil to perpetuate current unsustainable lifestyles, to use up non-renewable uranium and other finite resources, and all other similar arguments in that direction, boils down to transgenerational tyranny. In the end, whether that end is in 5 years or 5000 years, it's an argument to let our ancestors solve the problems we are creating. Whether we're talking economics or ecology, it seems reprehensible to me to saddle downstream generations with the responsibility for digging themselves out of the deep abyss we're creating for them.
Consider this: even in this age of affluence and energy abundance, we haven't been able - for various reasons, technical, economic and sociopolitical - to figure out a permanent solution for radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Does anybody really believe that in an era of permanent energy impoverishment, we'll suddenly step up to the plate?? Our vaunted human ingenuity has proven more mighty in creating problems than in devising solutions, to date.
So I guess I'd say it is not simply a matter of considering how we "would replace all those petrochemicals and especially plastics" - though there is in fact active consideration of exactly this, and by some damned intelligent people - but at a higher level to consider alternative modes of living and being which do not drive such a desperate NEED for those compounds and products at all. Isn't that a conversation worth having?
Very eloguent. Indeed, this could the the opening paragraph for one of Gail's posts.
I would find this sort of conversation most interesting. I am a confirmed doomer, but would love to leave a possible road map for our inheritors, if any. Seems The least we could do would be to leave a Rosetta Stone behind.
It's not "transgenerational tyranny", it's called "progress". There are solutions being worked on e.g.
http://www.solazyme.com/cellulosic-diesel-fuel-algae
Peakoil-is-bs, you may use whatever label makes you feel morally justified in screwing over your grandkids and their kids after them, but it doesn't alter the fundamental ethical argument, which you have failed to address via semantics. But then, considering that earlier you suggested your right to watch football trumped the right of kids in the 3rd world not to starve, I doubt we're going to find a meeting of the minds on the subject. Your blinders are firmly attached.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
I think Orwell may have been right about England's future--but instead of 1984 the date is more likely to be 2044 or thereabouts.
The problems with cellulosic fuels are so numerous many of us here (including me) don't think they will be solved in a large scale fashion at an acceptable price for this economy. In The Scarcity Economy it might help, a little.
Solazyme seems to be doing better than most but it's still very early days.
Two issues here:
1. If we have no moral right to use uranium, who does?
2. The energy available from uranium is staggering. I recently learned that the USA, from the Manhattan Project through the end of the Department of Energy's uranium enrichment program, had generated over 700,000 tons of depleted UF6. This is in excess of 470,000 tons of elemental uranium, and most of it is still in inventory. Used in fast-spectrum reactors, that much uranium could power the entire USA for over 300 years without mining another gram.
Uranium mining is currently proceding at over 50,000 tons per year; at 0.32 tons per GWth-yr, this is in excess of 150 TW of energy flow or more than 10 times total human power consumption from all sources. Thorium has a similar amount of energy as uranium but is about 4x as abundant.
Using that uranium can deal with actual problems, like carbon emissions and money flows to regimes which violate human rights. Far from being morally objectionable to use it, I claim it's a moral imperative.
EP, excellent question: who indeed?
It's not an easy one to answer, if you attempt to do so from an objective, ethical standpoint. I suppose I would say that we have to start by acknowledging the obvious fact that if we consume resources which are finite, then we are denying their use to future generations. This is basic, obvious, axiomatic - in fact, it's a tautology. The only logical loophole I can think of is to claim adherence to the abiotic oil cult.
Further, our use of such resources, ABSENT such an acknowledgement, has led to a situation sufficiently dire that all but the most willfully blind apprehend it - to wit: the ongoing and accelerating degradation of the biosphere upon which we depend - literally - for life. I would argue that cultivating denial and delusion in the service of one ethical breach invariably leads to numerous others, and that's what I think we're seeing, writ large. Climate change, species and ecosystem loss, desertification, oceanic dead zones and acidification, global fisheries collapse, heavy topsoil loss, massive declines in soil fertility, aquifer depletion, and the increasing, pervasive levels of toxicity of our environment, to list a few 'challenges', all stem in some measure from our injudicious use of and addiction to fossil fuels. Not real bright for an allegedly intelligent species.
I would suggest that the only ethical use of such resources, therefore, would be as part of a program which would lead directly to long term sustainability. In other words, one could make an ethical case for using non-renewables to establish a sustainable energy-use platform which we could pass along to future generations, which then could be considered un-deprived, so to speak. I've read your posts, and I know you are an intelligent guy with some really good ideas, so it may be that the program you suggest might fit into this larger sort of objective. And I'd like to hear any ideas you have along these lines.
But it's my contention that it's just not gonna happen this way. It is an impossibility, given the political and economic system we've created and in which we are inextricably enmeshed. The lessons of history, methinks, are abundantly clear in this regard. You said as much in your blog post to which you linked: " If you are one of the monied interests in the carbon-based fuel sector, these things represent huge amounts of wealth wiped out...They can't let that happen, even if it would take 50 years. That's why the Integral Fast Reactor had to die."
Exactly. What makes you think that this would somehow magically change? Absent a revolution, a fundamental restructuring of current political and economic ways of being and doing and thinking, is it reasonable to expect the attributes of the current paradigm to suddenly alter in our favor? I'm unconvinced. After all, things that *could* or *should* happen, and things that are highly likely to happen as a practical matter, are very often diametrically opposed. Absent a magic wand, we are forced to settle for the latter.
Consider the practical implications of a proposal to go on a building binge of epic proportions to build fast breeder reactors sufficient to provide the power we demand - consider doing this in an environment in which the US is insolvent, available excess capital (not liquidity - CAPITAL) has vanished - consider doing this in a time frame that must happen before existing necessary infrastructure for the project crumbles (i.e. existing system requires massive amounts of energy simply to sustain). We're talking about embarking on what would probably be the largest, nationwide (worldwide?) construction project ever. How much financial, human and natural capital would such a project require? How much oil, for that matter? And in what time frame? And that's without considering the political ramifications.
Einstein famously said 'you cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it' - I think he was right and I'd argue this warrants your serious consideration.
Further, I would suggest that, even staying at the same level of consciousness, a close study of history would lead you to modify the extrapolation you've made: that much uranium could power the USA - AT PRESENT LEVELS OF CONSUMPTION (I'm speculating that this is the assumption you made in your calculation - apologies if that's a mistaken assumption) - for 300+ years. But our demand for energy tends toward the exponential in the presence of increasing energy flows. And Jevon's Law (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6116), so-called, also argues that even were such a program put into place, your posited 300 year capacity would rapidly erode to...250? 200? 100? 72? 24? No way of calculating this, of course, but even if we throw all that way, and agree that we could run society for 300 years on this basis, what happens in year 301? We're merely postponing the problem - and in all probability (IMO) making it less permanently soluble the further we kick it down the road (much like we're doing with our current economic situation). Either way, the ethical dilemma remains.
I've not researched fast breeders, and so I will without objection accept your assertion that this sort of technical approach can deal with actual problems, but I think in so doing, it will - in part because of the issues outlines above - create others. The Law of Unintended Consequences jumps immediately to mind. What might those other problems, and those unintended consequences be?
In light of that question, I also think you might consider this: Complexity theory posits that an approach appropriate to a complicated problem (typically, the analytical approach) is unsuitable for a complex *predicament*. And the global impact of peak oil is most assuredly a complex predicament, NOT a merely complicated problem. More here (don't know how to embed hyperlinks):
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-12/complexity-it’s-not-simple
BTW, what are the waste issues associated with fast breeder reactors? I'd like to be educated on this and can think of nobody more able.
I'm not sure you can make that argument for uranium. With fifteen generations of supply in inventory and many times more remaining unmined, exactly who is being denied? Someone living in 2500 CE... and won't they also be denied the same thing if nobody's ever allowed to use it? Isaac Newton didn't die even 300 years ago; handing our future generations 300 years of energy neatly buttoned up in warehouses is far more than any of our ancestors gave us.
There are some things we should certainly save for people in 2500. Topsoil. Species. Our historic, artistic and cultural legacy. And most of all for their well-being, our scientific and technological knowledge and progress on which we should expect them to build. As an example of that, we've been able to make carbon nanotubes which are lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel and conduct electricity better than copper. Finding a way to make them economically means that future generations do not need to worry about shortages of metals for conductors; they can make them from carbon taken out of the air. That's better than any quantity of heavy metal we could leave to them.
The biggest thing we should leave to our posterity is a clean and livable environment. There is widespread (though disputed) evidence that our consumption of fossil fuels is one of the biggest threats to this. Burning uranium addresses the problem directly. That tradeoff favors going nuclear just as fast as we can. Uranium is of no use to anything else on the planet; it's ours by right.
I'd rather give them 300 years to figure it out than demand they get their one chance right amidst fights for power and resources, with a new and permanent stone age if they fail.
Look at the bloody noses the coal industry has taken over the last few years: very public collapses and explosions in mines, floods of toxic ash slurry as impoundments burst. Look at the changes in environmentalism: James Lovelock and one of the founders of Greenpeace have seen the light on nuclear energy. Things are different now, hardened positions are yielding. And it doesn't have to happen in the USA; if India decides to turn its thorium-bearing monazite sands into LFTR fuel, there isn't much that lobbies in Washington can do about it.
The required systems are actually rather small; the active core of the EBR2 produced 65 megawatts from a volume about the size of a beachball (rated power of 700 W/cc). The amount of steel and other materials required is similarly small. The limit on PWR construction is the ability to make very large forgings for the pressure vessel, but reactors cooled by sodium, lead alloy or molten salts run at ambient pressure and their vessels can be quite thin and light. Heat engines can also be much smaller and cheaper than currently; supercritical CO2 turbines can be so small, the actual turbomachinery for a 300 megawatt plant would fit in a couple of pickup trucks. The systems are small enough that they can be moved on trucks (unlike the barges required by PWR vessels and steam generators).
I've seen a proposal to de-carbonize the world economy starting with the electric power sector by making a factory complex to build a 300 MWe reactor (LFTR or uranium fast-breeder, doesn't matter) a day. The USA would install one a week, and export 4 a week. At 300 MWe per week 50 weeks a year, the USA would install 15 GW per year; this would displace the coal-fired capacity of the USA in 15 years. Then you can displace gas-fired electric, large-scale industrial process heat, switch from petroleum transport fuels to electricity, etc. (of course all of this would go on simultaneously).
Not even close; the Interstate system is many times larger and far more maintenance-intensive. Also, much of our current systems could be re-used; coal plants could be re-powered with nuclear-heated boilers given the higher temperature capabilities of metal- and salt-cooled reactors (albeit at a loss of efficiency over state of the art).
I'd argue that "more from less" is a significant change from "more of everything". He was also rather famously wrong about quantum mechanics.
A 2% annual increase would get us about 70 years out of our warehouses-full. That's 3 generations plus. If the only thing I did was allow people in 2080 the option of switching to something that became practical in the meantime or (gasp!) start mining uranium again, I'd count myself wildly successful. Of course, a lot of our increased energy consumption has come from population growth, which is driven almost entirely by immigration. People are getting sick of the costs of immigration, so that trend may be arrested in the near future.
Unemployment in the coal sector, certainly. Maybe we can put people to work in plants using nuclear process heat to turn garbage and crop byproducts into liquid fuels and chemical feedstocks; West Virginia may have a better future harvesting wood than digging coal.
I wouldn't dispute that, but a technology which involves many positive changes in different areas (no carbon emissions, minuscule waste volume, abundant fuel domestically supplied, issues of supply put off for generations, etc.) eliminates more complexity than it creates.
This is only a comment, and that answer requires a book. The short answer is "it depends on the technological choices made in the reactor and fuel cycle". Oxide fuels have thus far been processed using wet chemistry and organic solvents, which is very messy, costly and creates the sort of train wreck we see at Hanford. Electrolytic refining of fuel dissolved in molten salts (pyroprocessing) has almost none of those issues (e.g. there is no radiolytic decomposition of a fluid made of single-atom ions) and can be performed at the level of individual powerplants (the "Integral Fast Reactor"). There are proposals to deal with certain troublesome isotopes (Tc-99) by separating and transmuting them to stable forms; this is one of the things we can do with the luxury of abundant energy and neutron sources. The LFTR seems to be the simplest of all: uranium is removed by fluorine volatilization, and the wastes are separated from the remaining salts by vacuum distillation.
There may be troublesome issues involved with these ideas, but so far the biggest roadblock has been that they looked to work so well that they were too big a threat to Status Quo interests. If that dam can be broken, it looks like a flood of clean energy would follow.
Thanks for the very thoughtful and comprehensive response, EP. It's clear to me that I haven't done sufficient due diligence in these areas, so I really appreciate the info you've provided. It's a good start.
I definitely agree that "the biggest roadblock has been ...Status Quo interests" - and I think this is probably the stopper even if everything else were to somehow map out. Those interests remain firmly in charge, because the system was designed to ensure this. By the time that dam is broken, if it is (after all, it's one serious damn dam), we may well not have the time or resources to accomplish the sort of program you suggest. Supreme irony if there is a solution and our corrupt corporatist system disallows it, sending us all back to your proverbial stone age. Though, as I've noted elsewhere, I don't think this would necessarily be as frightening or awful as some others do.
Going back to a stone age means a drastic shrinkage of human numbers, because stone-age tech cannot support more than a fraction of the current population. That in turn means enormous damage to already-fragile ecosystems, because people will eat anything they can find and fight over the rest if they are starving. (Deer largely vanished a short time into the Great Depression, because everybody bagged what they could in lieu of meat they had no money to buy.)
Populations seem to shrink naturally in industrialized countries, dealing with the problem without catastrophe. Different parts of the world may go different ways. I wouldn't want to be in a collapse, or leave one to my children.
EP, 'stone age' was your term, which I used simply to tie the posts together. I don't honestly expect a new paleo/neolithic in our future by any means, though it is not out of the question, if things go very, very wrong.
I do expect a dramatic reduction in societal complexity, especially in America (much less impact on many in the 3rd world), and I don't doubt that localized depredation of resources would occur under such a scenario. In fact, that's happening as we speak in many corners of the globe already, some of it the direct result of our economic policies, which further impoverish already impoverished nations. But it's the current *global* onslaught that endangers already-fragile ecosystems on a scale that threatens the viability of our species. The deer came back, after all. Many of the species the current industrial system has driven extinct - at rates 2 to 3 orders of magnitude greater than the background rate - are never coming back. The greater danger to ecosystems isn't starving people - it's an affluent, industrialized society which offshores pollution and other environmental ills in the context of economic imperialism. Yes, there is more to it than that, it is not all America's 'fault' - but much of it is. America has intentionally crafted much of the world in its image, through its policies and through agent entities such as the World Bank, and so as I see it, America bears a heavy responsibility.
As for die-off, it's a straightforward ecological dynamic for species which radically outpace the available carrying capacity. We're bound by ecological laws as much as field mice. Can we avoid a die-off? Too many variables are in play. We've foolishly put ourselves in an exceedingly untenable position. The same kind of thinking which put us in that hole is, I think, unlikely to get us out. You can only double down so many times before the cards go against you. We do not seem to have learned that lesson, and I think it likely we will learn it the hard way before this is over.
That would only be true if our niche was fixed. Technology has been changing that niche, and biotechnology continues to do so.
As an extreme example, consider the recent discovery that archaebacteria can convert electricity and CO2 to methane with 80% efficiency. Methanotrophic bacteria (or engineered organisms) can consume methane, zoöplankton can consume the bacteria, and maybe one level up you have edible shrimp or filter-feeding fish. What happens to carrying capacity when you can convert PV electricity or even wind power to food calories? That's a niche nothing else can exploit, and a NPP perhaps ten times higher than any vascular plant on earth.
The West would be in a "hedonic contraction" if it wasn't for population being added from elsewhere. That would avoid a die-off by relieving pressure.
My point about native population trends in industrialized nations (if immigration is halted) is that there is no doubling down. Left to themselves (without the border policies imposed by political elites who are clueless at best, and hostile at worst), the trend would be towards lower population densities and ecological impacts. Eliminating the prospect of emigration and remitted wages would force the rest of the world to deal with its own problems too.
I think most people in most places will evolve into horticultural (gardening) societies and communities. On the other hand, plow agriculture with oxen may be viable in some places. I have read that oxen are more efficient than horses in plow agriculture, but on the other hand I've heard from farmers who use horses for plowing that that is not the case.
Horses are probably more efficient (I know that farm productivity leaped when collars suitable for horses were invented), but internal combustion engines are far better still. Gasify some wood chips or crop straw and you've got much more work from the same amount of productive land. And the great thing is, engines don't have to be fed when there is no work to do.
Yair...and then there are solar powered rotary production systems such as the "Circleworker".
Engineer-Poet:
Interesting posts. I checked out your links as well.
I agree with the general sentiment that the technology is there, and that energy alone isn't a problem.
Politics, finance, war - those are the problems (and not problems that demand some sort of collectivist solution, we are talking human nature here and that doesn't have a solution).
This is what makes me pessimistic. Understanding peak oil is like having a veil lifted, and one can see how screwed up we really are.
I should mention something else here about reactor fission products and radwaste.
Radioactive reactor products fall into two main categories:
The short-lived stuff vanishes on its own. If we created a million tons of Sr-90 and Cs-137 today, packaged it up in something like the Great Pyramid and came back in 1000 years, there would be around 100 grams of it left. Christoforo Columbo would really have lost twice if the natives of the New World had traded him neat, sparkly glowing stuff; we would almost literally have nothing to show for it today. ;-)
The long-lived stuff is different. It's not very "hot" but it hangs around for a long time. However, it can be separated chemically and then dealt with in other ways. Transuranics are "fuel" and can be burned in fast-spectrum reactors (that includes all the stuff from today's spent nuclear fuel). Transmutation of Tc-99 to Ru-100 (stable) by neutron bombardment has been demonstrated. Laser separation of isotopes has also been demonstrated and could potentially be used to divide radwaste into stable and radioactive fractions for further treatment (the minuscule energy requirements compared to the energy released in fission allows this), but as laser separation also makes it much easier to create bomb-grade uranium this is a proliferation risk if the wider world is allowed to use it.
I had no idea that much depleted uranium was out of the ground.
Other sources of pure, enriched, and reactive materials are the Atomic Bombs, past and present: Over 20,000 assembled bombs in 1990.*
If you like excitement, Godiva was an interesting reactor. Just don't stand too close.**
Which brings up a point: Most tinkers can deal with engines***. They take less complexity to support than do nucleonics.
Complexity itself is what drowns empires. Complexity also rolls-back as empires decline.
Build nuclear now, while the capability still exists... Buy time?
Build engines now... make a sustainable buffer to cushion the next step down in complexity****?
Turn everything and the dying into oil... keep the beautiful money lining the pockets that love it?
I think we have a winner!
The people will breed to surpass, into poverty, any level of sustenance supplied: There is no "enough".
A garden would be nice. Somewhere far away.
.
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_nuclear_warheads_1945-2002_graph.png
**
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device
***
Mechanical means of tapping into natural energy flows on the planet: Solar-Thermal and Wind as examples.
****
We landed on the moon! Then we went off gold.
My America, a lion, is confused and groveling.
Part Indian here.
"The white man will dig the pure things from the earth and destroy us all."
Iroquois elders sought benefit for the seventh generation ahead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_generation_sustainability
Part white guy:
"Let's see that quarterly report."
...And I have a primitive reptilian brain hiding under my neocortex! _ http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/bcp/brainbasics/triune.html
That's quite a spread, timebase wise: Decades, Months, Minutes.
Animals like us find it hard to leave any advantage unexploited.
Humans like us have been wiped-out by the animals.
With trepidation...
There was a long thread here which is rightfully gone now.
It demonstrated the existence of a great, deep distrust of the government, the leadership, the powers that be.
This distrust has gotten to the point where parents reject vaccination.
The chart presented by the IEA showing a magic stairway to heaven rising out of a decline to zero in production...
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7100
KD, I'd argue that the "the existence of a great, deep distrust of the government, the leadership, the powers that be" is well founded, based on the study of history, past and present, as well as simple logic. Given the automaticity of responses which imply a role for government as 'savior,' as well as those which rely upon government-generated statistics as a basis for arguing this or that position vis a vis energy, I'd further argue that it's entirely relevant to the peak oil discussion.
After all, if one concedes that government is a factor demanding consideration in these waters, then whether one assumes the government is likely, on net, to be part of the problem or part of the solution, will heavily impact one's thinking on the subjects under discussion. It becomes, in fact, one of a few key questions.
I would argue that perhaps the most important prerequisite to 'getting a handle' on peak oil is to pause and examine one's underlying assumptions. If you proceed with faulty boundary conditions, you probably won't get far. GIGO.
the popular view is that opec country reserves were increased during the ‘80’s to get higher quotas. that factor could provide a motive for increasing reserves, but does not offer any insight into whether opec reserves were understated before the reserve restatement or overstated after or neither or both. at least saudi arabia had a motive to understate reserves before the restatement.
if the motive of individual opec countries was to increase quota allocation, it does not appear to have been effective. only iraq had any increase in quota bracketing a reserve increase. uae’s quota decreased following a reserve increase in ’88.
iraq apparently did not participate in the quota allocation in november and december ’86 and all of calendar year ’88. iraq and kuwait did not a have a quota from april ’91 through jan ’92 . iraq has not had a quota allocation since apr ’98. Iran did not have a quota allocation from jan ’00 through jun ’00.
opec crude oil allocations:
http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/data_g...
a brief history of reserve restatements and opec quotas(eia data):
1) kuwait increased oil reserves from 66.7 gb at the end of ’84 to 92.7 gb at the end of ’85. kuwait’s allocation was 5.7 % from november,’84 until october, ’86. it does not appear kuwait’s quota allocation was affected by a reserve increase.
2) iran increased their proven reserves from 48.8 gb at the end of ’87 to 92.9 gb at the end of ’88. iran’s allocation went from 14.6 % in jan ’87 to 16.1% in jan ’88 and back to 14.6% in jan ’89.
Meanwhile, iraq’s quota went to zero throughout ’88. the increase in iran’s ’88 quota was apparently due to iraq’s quota being set at zero. iran’s quota from before the reserve restatement to after the restatement did not change. iraq’s quota during ’86 and '88 was distributed between iran, kuwait, libya,saudi arabia, uae and others. it does not appear iran’s quota allocation was affected by reserve increase.
3) iraq increased their reserves from 47.1 gb at the end of ’87 to 100 gb at the end of ’88. iraq’s quota allocation went from 9.5% at the end of ’87 to zero in ’88 and increased to 14.6% in ’89 to match iran’s. of the 6 countries studied, only iraq’s quota was increased coincident with an increase in oil reserves. the increase also coincides with iraq’s withdrawal from participating in opec quota’s during ’88.
4) uae increased their reserves from 33 gb at the end of ’87 to 98 gb at the end of ’88. uae’s allocation was 5.8 % in ’87, 6.5% in ’88 (coinciding with iraq’s quota being set at zero) and 5.5% in ’89. it appears uae’s reserve increase resulted in reduced quota allocation.
5) saudi arabia increased their reserves from 173 gb at the end of ’89 to 258 gb at the end of ‘90 . saudi arabia’s allocation was 25 % for ’89, 24.9 from jan ’90 through july ’90, 24.4 from august ’90 through march ’91( coinciding with the invasion of kuwait by iraq) and was increased to 37 % in april,1991, (coinciding with the us led invasion of iraq). It does not appears saudi arabia’s quota allocation was affected by reserve increase.
6) libya’s reserves were more or less steady throughout the ’80 and increased from 22.8 gb at the end of ’95 to 29.5 gb at the end of ’96. libya’a allocation was 5.7 % from oct ’93 through june ’96. it does not appear libya’s quota allocation was affected by reserve increase.
qatar did not materially change reserves through the ‘80’s and only increased reserves after 2000 coincident with the development of north dome gas/condensate field. qatar’s opec allocation was minor, only 1.6 % prior to ’98.
saudi arabia completed nationalization of assets in 1989. nationalization of aramco’s oil reserves was accomplished with payments to former aramco participants based on book value, giving saudi aramco a motive to understate reserves.
my conclusion: quota increases based on restatement of reserves is not substantiated by opec reserve and quota history. it is impossible to know if opec’s reserves are overstated, understated, or neither or both.
Oh great. The recession and collapse of the housing market has weakened the middle class's ability to cope with the coming run-away inflation caused by increasing oil prices.
What are we in for? Collapse of civilization ala Jared Diamond or Michael Ruppert?
I think Diamond has it nailed. Much better than Tainter, IMHO.
I had the opposite reaction - found Tainter's to be, overall, a more persuasive explanation than Diamond's, though to be fair, I think both make some solid points and are well worth reading.
IIRC, I found that the latter excluded some evidence that didn't fit his notions about exceeding carrying capacity, and stretched to make some evidence fit, so it came across to me as more contrived. I read it some time ago, so can't recall exact details, but I think I was reading some stuff about Mayans at the time, so may have been in regard to that segment.
Short version: read both, IMO.
P.S. I'm curious to know what people think about Greer's theory of catabolic collapse. He takes Tainter to task, with some justification, I think, but doesn't comment on Diamond's thesis, which resembles his in some ways.
I'm sure Greer has read Diamond's COLLAPSE book. I do not know why Greer does not cite him, since, as you point out, there are great similarities.
"It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"
By R.E.M. 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmxyj6iInMc
Lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeo0_3gN190 under "more info"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_End_of_the_World_as_We_Know_It_%...
I found it interesting that the projected growth rate in supply of 1.2%/year is the same as the projected growth rate of the global population - also 1.2%.
Assuming both projections are correct it means that the per capita available oil is not increasing and that the focus is going to be much more on slicing up the pie rather than increasing the size of the pie.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
Per capita consumption of oil on a global basis has surely been declining since late 2004, and may have peaked some years before that.
I've done some work on aggregates vs per capita. I'll dig it up.
Rgds
WeekendPeak
I'm looking forward to seeing that.
The numbers I'd most like to see are a time series from 1973 through 2009 on median real disposable income per capita in the U.S.
Table of numbers, please. Economists (research economists) rarely use charts or graphs; we like tables of numbers.
Interesting what you say Don because it gives me a lot of insight (if true) in the ways that economists deal with data. I would much rather see a chart, or a chart that has some empirical formula through the numbers, or a formula, or a distribution of numbers describing the statistics. Anything besides just a table of numbers. The idea is to manipulate the data to understand what it is telling you.
If by table of numbers you mean a spreadsheet that I could download and not have to transcribe, then I would agree. At least you can then manipulate the data..
This page (a compilation of data from the 2010 Statistical Abstract):
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/income_expenditures_poverty_...
Offers some raw data in excel format:
666 - Disposable Personal Income Per Capita in Current and Constant (2000) Dollars by State [Excel 73k] | [PDF 458k]
I DL'd the excel, and it only covers from 1980 - 2008. Data in current dollars and again in constant 2000 dollars. Closest I could find to what you're looking for Don.
Some graphs available - e.g. in this doc from the Fed, most of them are on a per state basis, though:
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2004/0815.pdf
Thank you. I've bookmarked the site.
Spreadsheets are fine and dandy. Research economists love to wallow in and play with numerical data. Graphs and charts are just for undergraduates. On my graduate theory seminars I was not allowed to use graphs--had to use equations. One of the problems involved inverting a 6 X 6 matrix with pencil and paper; that one took a long time. Of course this was decades before hand-held calculators. But we were not even allowed to use mechanical calculators or even slide rules. (For my Sociological Statistics course, on the other hand, a slide rule was mandatory, and for a while I was rather proficient at using a slide rule. Alas, the slide rule is gone now, and I'd have to relearn its use to regain my proficiency. It is a "use it or lose it" skill, unlike mathematics.)
Heh... I just dug in my desk drawer and found 4 slipsticks. All 3 of the serious ones are Keuffel & Esser.
Would you like to sell the slide rule you least like to me for what you originally paid for it? Actually, I'd be willing to pay more than you paid for it.
Send me an e-mail, please.
Aside from the metric converter, they're all heirlooms. I'm not willing to part with them, sorry.
You are wise to save all your slide rules; in fifty years they may have great value.
Maybe I'll try E-Bay. I've used two different kinds of slide rules. First was the cheap beginner model made by K & E--cost about three bucks including case back in 1957. Then when I became a pilot in the nineteen sixties I used a special slide rule for pilots that enabled quick computations for navigation and fuel consumption. One time when I was moving from a house to a small apartment I gave away about a ton of stuff, including my two slide rules.
If I'm alive in 50 years, I'll be damned lucky. Or maybe not, depending just how bad the world gets and what part of it I had the foresight to get to.
Ah, but what about your grandchildren? Or grand nieces and nephews? When I get a slide rule, I will most definitely try to interest my grandchildren in it. One of my granddaughters even at the age of 13 is showing some inclinations to be an engineer, and I shall encourage her interests in such things. This Thursday I shall give her an electric projects kit.
How about these
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/tools/be12/
NAOM
Still using my slipsticks
Thank you. I'll buy that slide rule, unless it is made in China. I make it a point to buy nothing made in China, because every Chinese product I've ever owned has failed to work out of the box or has broken or come apart. I do not understand why people buy stuff from China.
I always try to buy the best of everything. For example, all of my cold-weather clothing and boots are made in Canada or Sweden. My car was made in Germany in 1993 and is still going strong at 239,000 miles. When I buy tools I either buy U.S. made or German made ones.
Probably I'll end up with an old U.S. manufactured slide rule sold by an elderly and retired engineer on E-Bay or a similar site. Properly cared for, a slide rule will last for many decades--unlike our modern laptop and desk top computers, which seem to fail between four and seven years of age.
Perhaps I can teach my grandchildren how to use a slide rule--a skill that may be of great value in the future, as it was in the past.
I do buy from China but I understand your point of view.
A Russian friend of mine, in the US for perhaps just 15 years now, says, "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things."
The more I hear you describe it Don, the more I see the entire field of economics as some sort of alternate universe filled with voodoo practitioners.