Energy Efficiency Leads to Higher CO2 Emissions?
Posted by Chris Vernon on February 2, 2011 - 1:09pm
Energy efficiency leads to higher consumption of fossil fuel and therefore higher carbon dioxide emissions.
Euan made this point in a recent discussion. It made me think. Euan's reasoning is that by increasing the energy efficiency we increase the energy service which in turn allows us to pay a higher price per unit energy. This enables higher ultimate production of fossil fuels with their associated CO2 emission to the atmosphere.
It's a compelling argument, especially as we are seeing increasing production today from expensive deep water, tar sands, shale gas etc. Here I offer a few thoughts around this idea. Please note this post is entirely qualitative, the numbers (percentages and dollars) below aren't related to the real world at all, they are purely illustrative.
One of the few points that pretty much everyone agrees with here at The Oil Drum is that fossil fuels and especially oil, will reach a production rate peak. There are numerous arguments about the timing and mechanisms and many different modelling approaches. Euan's comment above led me to a simple definition of peak oil:
Peak oil occurs when efficiency improvements fail to support the price increase needed for marginal production increase.
To unpack that: on the efficiency side, if the efficiency of a process doubles, then the energy needed to deliver the energy service halves allowing twice the price to be paid for the energy without impact. If America doubled the nation's vehicle fleet efficiency, $6 gas wouldn't seem so bad. On the production side, higher prices allow resources previously too expensive to be produced to be mobilised into reserves and produced. $100 oil opens the doors for Canadian tar sands and ultra deep water oil.
As time progresses two things happen: energy efficiency of an economy improves and the quality of the remaining oil reserves decreases. The exploitation of non-renewable resources is characterised by declining energy return on energy invested (EROEI) as naturally the best resources are exploited first. This results in the cost (or price needing to be paid) of new production increasing with time. This is illustrated nicely in 2008 data from Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) posted by David Murphy. High prices are allowing oil with a high cost of production to be brought to market.
Figure 1. Estimates of the cost of production for oil production form various locations. Data from CERA.
These two functions of efficiency improvement and cost increase are key to defining when the peak occurs.
My hunch, and without further research it is just a hunch, is that the rate of efficiency improvement decreases over time and the price needed to bring new marginal production online increases with an increasing rate. The key points are that efficiency asymptotically approaches some thermodynamic limit yet the marginal cost of production increases without bound. I'm more comfortable about the efficiency aspect of this hunch than the marginal price, it would be nice to see data. Dramatic technology change in production processes has potential to significantly change the marginal cost of production curve.
The following two charts illustrate my hunch.
Figure 2. Efficiency increases asymptotically to some thermodynamic limit.
Figure 3. The area in blue bounded by the two curves is the area we have been operating in during the fossil fuel age. It represents profit and growth.
Back to Euan's point of efficiency increase, increasing production and the associated CO2 emissions. I expect he's technically right; however, I suspect the impact of efficiency improvement on medium term (couple of decades) production is small as the marginal price increase will quickly outrun the efficiency improvements with the peak occurring before this process is able to make significant additions. The slope of the marginal cost curve, by definition, is greater at the peak than the slope of the efficiency curve: thus, large gains in efficiency correspond to smaller price increases. Quantifying the exact increase in ultimately recoverable reserve (URR) due to efficiency improvements would be challenging.
I am, however, wary about the potential resource to be produced well beyond the peak. A highly efficient global economy may not have much impact on the timing and magnitude of the peak, but could produce a significantly fatter tail (containing a lot of CO2) in the decades following the peak than an inefficient economy. For example, if a post peak economy was so efficient in its energy use to be able to afford $200 oil, then billions of barrels of Canadian tar sands may ultimately be available, however, if an economy could only afford $50 oil, that resource remains unexploited with its CO2 sequestered forever.
There need not be just one efficiency curve. The asymptotic curve I plotted in Figure 2 might be for one application (say oil fuelled transport). If a new application was invented, that managed to extract dramatically more value from oil than using it for transport, a new curve would be needed. If an alchemist worked out how to turn oil into a vital element in photovoltaic manufacture, facilitating a GW of PV to be manufactured for a barrel of oil, suddenly oil would be worth millions per barrel. Figure 4 attempts to illustrate the impact of demand-side technology shifts.
Figure 4. New technologies or applications may have new efficiency / affordable price curves.
Finally, this post has only discussed fossil fuels. As increases in efficiency push up the affordable price for energy, and declining EROEI increases the marginal cost of new production, there will come a time when renewables (which don't suffer from declining EROIE as fossil fuels do) become affordable in absolute terms and cheaper relative the fossil fuels. This scenario could have a dramatic effect on the post peak fossil fuel tail, truncating it fairly rapidly.
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Chris, I'm glad you wrote this post. You made a better job than I would have done, and folks may be more willing to accept this message from you than from me. And so just to recap:
1. Energy efficiency may enable higher price leading to higher ultimate production of FF.
2. The rate of production / consumption of FF is less relevant to eventual CO2 ppm than is the ultimate amount of FF that is produced / consumed.
And so to the shapes of your curves, a few points. The world as a whole may be somewhere around 30% mark at present. In essence what I'm saying is that given time for adaptation and invention we may end up being able to afford $250 (2011 money) in 20 years time and that may bring in a whole lot more FF into play.
As mentioned on previous thread, the boundary will be set by ERoEI as opposed to price and my gut feel is that ERoEI >>5 would be required to sustain a society with a semblance of today's. That would be average ERoEI and higher numbers will likely go on subsidising lower numbers for a fair time to come.
On Figure 3, what's missing is the volumes that may be accessed at certain price thresholds. I'm not sure that peak has to occur at your intercept of curves but rather an affordable supply of sufficient fuel?
First point is that this post is entirely qualitative, the numbers (percentages and dollars) aren't related to the real world at all, they are purely illustrative. I should make that point in the post a couple of times!
I make no judgement as to where we are on those two curves right now, or where they cross. I'm only exploring this framework.
You say "boundary will be set by ERoEI as opposed to price". I would argue that it is precisely the declining ERoEI that drives the price up as I describe - they are just two ways to describe the same thing.
On figure 3, peak has to occur at the intercept as that is the point above which we can't afford to pay any more, but we have to pay more to increase supply, we can no longer afford the marginal cost of production.
That dreadful Rogner paper from 1997 provides an analysis of volume against price, charts below. It is this analysis that the IPCC is based on and why they assume that fossil fuel supply will not be a limiting factor. Rogner doesn't consider ERoEI.
One critical aspect, is that there need not be just one efficiency curve. The asymptotic curve I plotted above might be for one application (say oil fuelled transport). If however a new application was invented, that managed to extract dramatically more value from oil than using it for transport, a new curve would be needed. If an alchemist worked out how to turn oil into a vital element in photovoltaic manufacture, facilitating a GW of PV to be manufactured for a barrel of oil, suddenly oil would be worth millions per barrel.
Does it not depend on the volumes brought on by each incremental rise in price relative to volumes lost to decline?
I would expect so. At some point the efficiency gains will only serve to fatten the tail. It seems to be that the more marginal oil also has a lower extraction rate.
I'm sure the stripper wells and tar sands will continue to provide a "base load" of oil for many decades to come. It's providing the other 80% of the required load that will prove impossible at any price.
Thanks to this great article by Chris, I now see what you've been getting at. But I do want to take issue with one of your basic assumptions:
A good fraction of the CO2 we're emitting into the atmosphere isn't staying there: it's dissolving into the oceans, where its effects on climate are nil. The ocean has a huge capacity to store CO2, but a fairly slow uptake rate: think of it as a giant warehouse with a very small doorway.
Of course it depends on what you mean by "eventual". On very long timescales (1000 years or so) what you say is true: the eventual CO2 ppm in the atmosphere is independent of the emission rate. But on those timescales it doesn't matter much, because the vast majority of that CO2 will be in the ocean, and atmospheric CO2 will be only a few ppm higher than now.
But what I care about is the *peak* atmospheric CO2 reached during the fossil fuel age: this is what might cause climate damage, and this *does* depend on how fast we burn our fossil fuels.
Here are a couple of graphs from a very simple box model of atmosphere and ocean carbon exchange. All numbers are only approximate, and serve to illustrate processes rather than make predictions. In the first case, humans burn carbon steadily at a rate of 7 GT/year for a century, and then stop.
Atmospheric CO2 (blue line) peaks at about 525 ppm.
If humans burned the same total amount of carbon steadily at 1/4 the rate for 4 times as long, we'd get something like this:
peaking at 375 ppm.
Now, we've blown our shot at option #2, and option #1 is also pretty much impossible unless we completely run out of oil and coal in the next decade or two, but it illustrates the point: to the extent that we're worried about climate damage from CO2 in the atmosphere, slow uptake from the ocean means that the *rate* of burning is crucial.
Your argument demonstrates quite aptly that higher efficiency with a business-as-usual mindset leads to greater overall consumption, but I don't think it makes strong predictions about consumption *rate*.
I doubt oceanic CO2 absorbtion is as fast as you say, but I have no numericals on this so I'll offer nothing but my doubts on the topic.
But; assuming that CO2 in the oceans are out of harms way (wich some people do, I don't know if you are among them) is totally wrong. Even if CO2 had no or negligeble climate impacts, what CO2 does to the oceans are reason enough to give up on emitting it. In short, it makes the water acid, wich prevents some types of plankton to form their carbid-shells. So they die. This breaks down the ecosystem from the bottom of the pyramid. At stake here is the entire oceanic web of life. And given that some 50% - give or take some - of all O2 comes from the ocans we may all suffocate as well.
I should think land erosion is also affected by ocean pH - surely the ultimate 'human' limiting factor.
Here's some:
According to the latest IPCC report:
In the 1990s we were releasing fossil fuel carbon into the atmosphere at a rate of 6.4 GT/year; the ocean was sucking up about 2.2 GT/year of that.
In cumulative terms, by the 1990s we had burned 244 gigatons of fossil fuels, plus 144 from burning down forests, for a total of 400 gigatons released. Only 165 gigatons of that ended in the atmosphere; much of the rest had been taken up by the ocean (about 120 GT).
Yes that is roughly the numbers I have come across. What I wonder is this: should we stop emit today, would then atmospheric carbon keep dropping by 235 Gigatons? Maybe the first year, but then the annual absorbtion would start to drop, as the concentration difference between water and air begins to narrow. And thething I doubt is that we would quickly aproach pre-industrial levels.
Take-up of CO2 by the ocean is complex. It can be roughly modeled as a two-part system. The first part consists of the surface waters of the ocean, down to the depth of wind and wave-induced mixing.
The surface waters of the ocean are in rough equilibrium with the atmosphere at all times. If atmospheric CO2 concentration changes, the concentration of CO2 dissolved in the surface waters changes right in step. In fact, the atmosphere and the surface waters of the ocean can be viewed as two components of a single carbon reservoir. They're of roughly equal size, in terms of carbon capacity. So for every ton of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, roughly half of it remains in the atmosphere, and half is "immediately" absorbed in the surface waters of the ocean.
The other part of the system consists of the deep waters of the ocean, below the thermocline. It's a very much larger reservoir than the surface waters, but largely isolated from them. The global thermo-haline circulation carries surface waters into the deep ocean, but I believe the time scale for turn-over is on the order of 1000 years. That defines a sort of "half life" for long term absorption of anthropogenic CO2 into the deep ocean system.
Bottom line: if we went to zero CO2 emissions tomorrow but did nothing to accelerate long-term carbon sequestration, it would be several centuries before our descendent's would see a noticeable relaxation of CO2 levels from what we've currently driven them to.
I think we would see a reduction of a few tens of PPM (maybe to roughly 350) in the first couple of decades, but then the decline would be very slow. Even with equilibration with the deep sea, the CO2 levels still remain high enough to for instance prevent the next scheduled ice age. The next reservoir comes from silicates weathering into carbonates. The weathering rate increases with temperature, but is assumed to take a few hundred thousand years. Given how much of an increase in the very high end precipitation events, which dominate erosion, we've seen with the little bit of warming we've already seen, I suspect the weathering component may be several times faster than expected (but still very slow).
I agree with Euan's point about rate being less relevant than total. Rate isn't inconsequential, but is less relevant.
This Nature Paper discusses it.
The Nature paper is concerned with a very short timeframe (2020-2050). The ocean uptake process I'm talking about is significant on timescales of a century or longer
So if you believe that CO2 emissions will totally cease in 30 years, then yes, ocean uptake is irrelevant and all that matters is total consumption. But if you believe we'll be burning fossil fuels for a century or longer, the rate at which we do so matters a lot.
I am confused by the graphs you show in light of this statement. The timescales are indeed on the order of 100's of years, yet the responses you show seem to damp down quickly.
This is more like what the impulse response looks like:
Note a fairly quick decline followed by a long tail. This is characteristic of a dispersive response. The ones you show look like classic damped exponential responses.
Yes, my model is an oversimplified linear model: its characteristic decay timescale is about 60 years, plus a "permanent" contribution of about 12%. Its impulse response is higher than your graph on 5-10 year timescales, and would be lower if you extended your graph out to 500 years, but on a 100-year time horizon, which is what we're interested in, it matches your graph almost exactly.
It matches only with your corrected graphs. I don't see the fat tail with the 10 to 30% persistence on your original graphs, only on the graphs you updated to.
This and similar graphs are highly misleading.
According to serious research on the subject (PDF article by Archer and Brovkin (2008)) the residence time is highly dependent on total emissions. Their Figure 2 shows a 5 teraton C pulse producing peak values around 1900 ppmv which drop to 1200 ppmv only after 5000 years. There is a flat tail of 1000 ppmv after 12000 years. A 1 teraton C pulse has a much faster decline but the atmospheric amount is still over 400 ppmv after 2500 years. In their model the former corresponds to a 7 degrees Celsius temperature change in global mean surface temperature and the latter to 2 degrees.
We are no longer in the 2 degree response regime. Every time GCMs are improved and observations are considered the forecast is climbing. We are looking at 4 degrees Celsius as the likely outcome of anthropogenic warming. So we are not going to see 70% CO2 reductions after 100 years like the graph suggests. This graph assumes, unrealistically, fixed sinks for CO2. They are not fixed and are actually a function of CO2 via its temperature effects on primarily the ocean. With the warming we are likely to see the oceans will stop being net CO2 sinks.
I showed the results from the IPCC models, which I would agree are on the conservative side. They show the fat-tails but don't go overboard predicting the cascading positive feedback effects that can occur. Archer and company definitely explore the extremes that may happen if a tipping point is reached or other negative feedback mechanisms don't cancel the effect.
So I don't think the one I showed was as misleading as the one that goodmanj showed.
It is an impulse response, in other words the response from a delta function. It has to decline to some degree otherwise we wouldn't have a carbon cycle and the notion of equilibrium. A sink always exists, it's just a matter of defining what equilibrium is.
I believe that the CO2 uptake by the oceans is a lot slower than you imagine.
co2
If we completely stopped emitting CO2 from FF today, the changes wouldn't be felt for many hundreds of years.
CO2 emissions are like having the engine of a Ferrari and the brakes of a push bike.
I believe that the CO2 uptake by the oceans is a lot slower than you imagine.
The oceans are currently taking up about 1/3 to 1/2 of the CO2 we're emitting into the atmosphere at the moment. This is a big deal now, and will be a bigger deal in the future, since the rate of uptake increases as CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere.
If we completely stopped emitting CO2 from FF today, the changes wouldn't be felt for many hundreds of years.
Need to be more precise here, it depends on what "changes" you're talking about. If we completely stopped emitting CO2 from FF today, atmospheric CO2 *would* immediately stop rising and begin to decline: in this respect, the change is felt immediately. However, it would take hundreds of years to get back to normalish CO2 levels, and that's exactly what you see in my graphs -- it takes about 200 years in my model. Other models are different, but the upshot is the same.
Your car analogy is pretty good, if we take "car speed" for "atmospheric CO2". But remember that even a Ferrari has to deal with wind resistance and road friction trying to slow it down constantly: these effects become bigger the faster the Ferrari is going. If I can stretch the analogy some more, Euan is trying to argue that the car's final speed depends only on how many gallons of gas are burned, not on how hard you stomp on the accelerator.
Changes being a stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 and the overall warming effect.
The CO2 sinks are not bottomless, and as they "fill up", they take less and less from the atmosphere. That's before you add the multitude of feedback loops from soil etc. There were reports in 2007 that the ocean was absorbing less CO2 than previously. It would appear that we've already changed the global carbon cycle balance point and to retreat to pre industrial levels could take eons.
In the car analogy, it's like getting and ever increasing tail wind reducing the wind resistance.
But I'm an optimist, it should all settle down again in a few hundred thousand years. No problem. If we burn through our remaining FFs in 50 years or 250 years won't matter a jot.
Yes, we should remember that the positive feedback loops are in addition to the long residence time of atmospheric CO2. The feedback can build on top of the fat-tail and make matters much worse. The uncertainties in what can happen also increase as a consequence of the propagation of the effects.
The linear lumped parameter model does that. A two parameter model would simply apportion the CO2 between two reservoirs, with the degree of fill of the reservoirs exponentialling approching each other. Since the total capacity is finite, the final concentration is higher than preindustrial. As you add more and more reservoirs to your network you approach WHTs dispersive models. I just think it is easier for people to think about a lumped model with only a few terms (say 3-5), then to think about a full blown dispersive model. Anyone with a clue to what an ordinary differential equation is -and can program say Eulers method for time integration should be able to make and play with some models to gain insight.
A nonlinear impulse response model of the coupled carbon cycle-climate model
See Figure 7 for approximately exponential decays of atmospheric carbon dioxide following a carbon dioxide impulse. The half lives are roughly 150 to 200 years. However, since the models are non-linear, you can't simply add up a train of individual impulse responses. Decays from levels of about 335, 500, and 1000 ppm of carbon dioxide are shown.
This fraction will fall by 70% in 2100 assuming just the standard CO2 emissions projections. If you add in all the permafrost and shallow Arctic shelf CH4 releases then the oceans become net CO2 sources and not sinks. Ignoring the fact that CO2 sinks are functions of CO2 gives worthless results. The concern is about the total release of Carbon in the 2000 gigaton range and not some tiny amount.
Your conclusion is reasonable in the shortterm, the first couple of decades would show decent drops in atmospheric CO2, but the decline rate would drop to a very small value, and it would still be many thousands (or tens of thousands) of years before we reacher preindustrial levels.
I think DoomInTheUK has got it right.
We will never get anywhere unless we pay attention to the actual dynamics. The suggestion for people interested in this topic is to research the phrases "CO2 residence time" and "CO2 impulse response" and "forcing functions".
The essential problem is that engineers and scientists outside of climate science assume that response functions are damped exponentials with a characteristic decay time. That is not what happens here. A simple argument helps explain the huge discrepancy between the quoted short lifetimes by climate sceptics and the long lifetimes stated by the climate scientists. These differ by more than a magnitude. By looking at the actual impulse response, you can see the fast decline that takes place in less than a decade and distinguish this from the longer decline that occurs over the course of a century. This results as a consequence of the disorder within the atmosphere, leading to a large dispersion in reaction rates, and the rates limited by diffusion kinetics as the CO2 migrates to conducive volumes for uptake. The fast slope evolving gradually into a slow slope has all the characteristics of the "law of diminishing returns" characteristic of diffusion.
This complicates the climate change discussion. Do climate change skeptics twist facts that have just a kernel of truth? I think so; "some" of the CO2 concentrations may have a half-life of 10 years, but that misses the point completely that variations can and do occur. I am almost certain that sceptics see that initial steep slope on the impulse response and convince themselves that a 10 year half-life must happen, and then decide to use that to challenge climate change science. Heuristics give the skilled debater ammo to argue their point any way they want.
So we see how a huge fat tail can occur in the CO2 impulse response. What kind of implication does this have for the long term? With a fat-tail, one can demonstrate that a CO2 latency fat-tail will cause the responses to forcing functions to continue to get worse over time.
So I side with DoomInTheUK and we not start these discussions unless all those involved read up on the non-intitive physics involved.
For what it's worth, I consider myself quite familiar with the various residence times involved -- I teach a climate change course which briefly covers this stuff.
I agree that there are multiple reservoir times involved here, ranging from decadal to millenial, and some of the consequences of the fossil fuel age will be with us for centuries or millenia.
For systems like these, if the reservoir time is short compared to the duration of the fossil fuel age, then only the emission rate matters, and total carbon delivered is irrelevant. If the reservoir time is long, rate is irrelevant and total carbon delivered is all that matters.
Your demonstration that multiple timescales are active proves my point: both rate *and* total amount are important. I agree that there's a "fat tail", but there's also a fast response that can't be ignored, and a lot of action in the middle.
The graphs I posted come from an extremely simple model which I cooked up over the course of an hour or so. You're right that it's a linear feedback model with an exponential character; the single reservoir timescale is based on modern ocean carbon uptake rate, as described by the IPCC -- this timescale is about 60 years, far longer than the climate skeptics wish to believe. It also includes long-term ocean storage and atmosphere/ocean equilibration, which results in a "permanent" climate change component.
I did make one error in the graphs I showed earlier, involving the "Revelle factor", which caused the model to underestimate the long-term impact of human activity. Corrected graphs can be found here and here.
But while this changes the "long tail" consequences of the fossil fuel age, it doesn't affect my main point: the peak CO2 levels reached during the carbon age depend *both* on how much carbon is emitted, and on the rate of emission.
While the fast exponential response removes CO2 from the system as it reaches uptake equilibrium, the fat-tail response keeps building up the atmospheric content.
If that part is settled, the rate and the amount of the forcing function are all that matter then. The forcing function is the amount of CO2 added to the atmosphere over time. This will keep building up with a time constant of dozens if not hundreds of years.
I really don't want to argue this anymore because the error that you made in your original graphs was quite severe, and with the corrected graphs you can clearly see the fat tail. I think that is the reason everyone was jumping on you. We would rather not see misinformation spread as there is enough to go around.
I think you're right. Efficiency leads to higher price and ultimate higher emissions but it may also slow the rate of emission. I say 'may' since at present any consumption we defer is being taken up by someone else.
Energy efficiency may be deployed as a policy or used as a response. With regard to peak FF, using energy efficiency as a policy may both raise the total amount of reserves and slow our consumption - so that is win, win, unless you come from the school that wants us to revert to simple living ASAP. With regard to emissions strategy, energy efficiency is a double edged sword slowing rate of consumption whilst raising the total amount CO2 emitted.
I think we need to review the science on this idea of CO2 absorbtion a bit. Review RealCliimate, Climate Progress and Skeptical Science for data.
The oceans are measurably saturating already. While oceans theoretically have the ability to absorb a vast amount of CO2 there are limits to how this happens that do not fit with your above assumptions. Research already indicates that the absorbtion rate is slowing (5% in the last 50 years). And will eventually cease for any useful purpose for us. Current uptake is only about 1/4 of the human emmissions of CO2. This uptake will decrease further as the ocean warms due to the reduced circulation between the deep ocean and the surface caused by stratification. Therefore while a simple assumption of how much by volume that the ocean can absorb of CO2 will give a mistaken result. The oceans will never absorb anywhere near that amount. Additionally, there will be releases of ocean CO2 caused by other factors(some already seen in the Southern Ocean). See:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/15/something-else-for-deniers-to-deny...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/11/is-the-ocean-carbo...
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/07/the-acid-ocean-the...
Other problems with assuming that the ocean absorbing our additional CO2 has no problems is the acidification issue. We are on a path to acidify the oceans to an extent that we will demolish the ocean food chain/ecosystem. This will not only cause an additional surge in extinction of species it will crush our ability to harvest food from the ocean. The surface waters will also become anoxic over time.
Rant
One of the things that continues to astonish me as I read TOD is the lack of time many readers here (at a site that prides itself on being fact based) put into reviewing the facts of AGW. There seems to be a widely held belief that Peak Oil/Fossil fuel issues will dominate the near to medium term and that AGW issues are not significant yet and can be defered until sometime in the future. A review of the data from scienficically performed research would not allow one ot come to that conclusion (the denialsphere is full of junk but if one wants to spend some time reading they will quickly realize that there is no basis for denial or ven real skepticism at this point). Climate change is upon us now. We have already reached levels of CHG's that will lead to catastrophic results and we are charging down a path to ruin. We already have enough reserves of fossil fuels to make this world unlivable and have no need to search for more. We have already dialed in dramatic climate effects for the future and seem determined to add to the problem.
The above curves are interesting from an economist/academic standpoint perhaps, but the real story is that it matters little whether we gain more efficiencies or not if we intend to use those efficiencies to produce even more. What we absolutely must do (and I am pretty certain that we will not) is refrain from burning most of the fossil fuels we already have access to. If we do not do this our grandchildren will not sitting around at the end of this century talking about how stupid we were.
I mean no offence personally by this rant.
Wyo
This is how I present them, I'm just exploring this framework of use-efficiency and future production. The broader implications a probably out of scope.
Amen. We are already seeing the type of events that are characteristic of the forecasts. Russia's 1 in 100,000 year drought event, record warm waters off the coast of Australia, another rainy day in Iqualuit on November 27th when the normal daily high for that month is supposed to be -16 celsius.
Remeber that record breaking year 1998 when it was way warmer than ever before? Well, now the last 6 years we have had 3 years with that type of heat. In other words: what broke records at neck breaking speed back in 1998 is now NORMAL. We are in a complete new climate system. Unfortunateley for us, we have never been there before, so we know not what will come.
That 100 000 year drought in Russia may be a 1 in 50 year event now, a 1 in 10 a decade from now and the norm in 20 years. That is how fast things happen.
Also do not forget that it takes time to heat up water, and the oceans are full of it. This causes the climate system to lag behind CO2 levels by some 30 year or so. Wich means that if the zombie apocalypse happens tomorrow and all our cars and industries stops, we will still see 30 years worth of climate change before it stops. And that assumes there are no feed back effects like tundra thawing or similar to run the show once we are gone.
What we need is CO2 reduction. Now.
Thanks for the links, they are quite informative. When looking at the oceans as a sink for CO2, one must remember that the oceans are presently quite stratified. There's a surface layer approximately 100m thick that is rather well mixed, but in most locals, the deeper waters are isolated from the surface layer and thus the CO2 can not easily be transported downward. The deepest layers are very cold, near freezing, because these waters are produced by the Thermohaline Circulation (THC), which occurs at only a few locations at high latitudes. The primary locations are the Nordic and Labrador Seas and the Southern Oceans around Antarctica. In these areas, the growth and decay of sea-ice tend to modulate the sinking, which only occurs episodically during the coldest time of the year.
There have been many model experiments conducted to address possible changes in the THC as the oceans respond to Global Warming. Generally, the models project a weakening or a complete shutdown of the THC around the North Atlantic, which would also seriously reduce the transport of CO2 to the deepest waters via this path. THC sinking in the Arctic Ocean is associated with the sea-ice cycle there and a major reduction in the yearly change in sea-ice volume could also reduce the high latitude THC sinking which would result.
On the other end of the flow of ocean waters, the Equatorial Pacific is an area where deeper waters are brought to the surface as the result of the ENSO processes. If this process strengthens, more CO2 rich waters would be brought to the surface, where later warming would release the CO2 to the atmosphere.
One might also think that one result of a shutdown of the THC around the North Atlantic would be a buildup of salt in the tropical North Atlantic, which could eventually produce a THC sinking of warm, salty surface water. If this were to occur, the warm water would raise the temperature of the
deepest layers, further reducing their ability to hold CO2. This scenario may sound far fetched, but there are now flows of warm, salty waters which exit the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf at depth and produce persistent layers at mid-levels in the larger oceans.
E. Swanson
Always love your explanations, thanks.
Just a shade off exact topic but very topical considering the winter much of the northern mid latitudes have seen:
Figure 5. These images show high and low atmospheric pressure patterns for January 2011 (left) and the January 1968-1996 average (right). Yellows and reds show higher pressures; blues and purples indicate lower pressures, as indicated by the height of the 850 millibar pressure level above the surface, called the pressure surface. Normally, the pressure surface is nearer to the surface around the pole, winds follow the pressure contours around the pole (the polar vortex), and cold air is trapped in the Arctic. This year, the pressure pattern is allowing cold air to spill out of the Arctic into the mid-latitudes.
—Credit: NSIDC courtesy NOAA/ESRL PSD
The NSIDC monthly report was posted on Ground Hog's Day ?- )
Goodmanj:
I only wish it worked that way. But alas your model is a single lumped mass model, with a very short time span. The real world is better represented by a multiple lumped model (think of the atmosphere as being connected to several CO2 reservoirs of different sizes and timescales). Some have a short time constant of only a year ot two, but some big ones have a time constant of many thousands of years. The response to an impulse, will at first be a very rapid decay, dominated by the fastest modes, but the long time behavior will be dominated by the slow modes. So the CO2 isn't going to go away for many thousands of years. Climatologists think we are already committed to skipping the next ice age because of that.
EoS to the rescue on these matters. Thanks.
EoS and WHT,
Thanks for confirming the fact that I really only count as an interested layman on almost every subject I've ever seen on TOD. :-) Your efforts and dedication are one of the reasons that I come back here day after day.
It's amazing to me how many pet theories there are that provide a exit from being responsible for or even concerned about CO2 emissions. Here's another one in which the oceans will absorb all extra emissions.
Wrong. The entire biosphere (which includes the oceans) can absorb and use a certain amount of CO2 per year. The remainder increases the CO2 in our atmosphere, and since data has been kept since 1958 that level has increased in every single year. The rate of CO2 ppm added per year is also increasing. In 1958 it was less than 1 ppm added per year, but in the last decade it has exceeded 2 ppm added per year. As the oceans become acidified, the various growth that can use CO2, such as plankton, reduces in quantity, in turn reducing the uptake of CO2.
CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing year on year because of human burning of fossil fuels increases, and the biosphere is reducing in its capability as a carbon sink.
Also, as CO2 in the atmosphere increases, it traps more heat/energy and that increased heat is aborbed by the oceans. Since the oceans have a thousand times more thermal energy than the atmosphere, there is a lag time, called thermal inertia of 30-40 years, between that heat increase and its effect on the weather. So we won't even know what the total effects of the CO2 we've put into the atmosphere are until 3-4 decades down the road.
Also, as the ice melts in the artic and glaciers more land is dark absorbing more heat causing an albido effect, a positive feedback system that will feed on itself. As this progresses, the danger will be the CO2 and methane stored in the tundra of Siberia, Alaska and Canada that will release which will DOUBLE the CO2 from the current 395 to 790 ppm. Add to that the methane and we are toast. Pack your bags for Antarctica or Greenland.
"2. The rate of production / consumption of FF is less relevant to eventual CO2 ppm than is the ultimate amount of FF that is produced / consumed."
True assuming it is all burned. if it's turned in a top-coating on a PV cell, or polyethylene, and neither is burned, then that would break the 1:1 correlation between FF and CO2.
If oil goes to millions per barrel or even to $1000 per barrel, we won't be burning it.
The paper by Steven Stoft: Renewable Fuel and the Global Rebound Effect (http://www.global-energy.org/lib/2010/10-06) describes another example of how supposed solutions turn out to be problems. Biofuels are automatically assumed to replace fossil fuels. In reality, they are simply an additional fuel (at least to a significant extent). It's similar to efficiency gains: the availability of biofuels lowers the price of fossil fuels a bit, which in turn stimulates demand a bit.
In the end, the emissions due to the biofuel production process and (in)direct land use change are simply added to the fossil fuel emissions: biofuels don't help the fight against climate change on bit, unless the oil production capacity is decreased by a similar amount by leaving commercially viable oil in the ground. Same story for efficiency gains: mandated efficiency gains must be linked to the closing of coal-fired power plant.
CO2 emissions will decrease only after peak fossil fuels, or after a global agreement to leave fossil fuel resources untouched. Unfortunately, the first is much more likely than the second, and much more disruptive because it is out of our control.
I've come up with a new technology (the way Sci-Fi authors invent stuff) that actually could help us ut here: artificial photosyntesis.
Assume an alchemist (to catch on with the latest trend) invent a solar panel based on the concept solar radiation + water in ==> motor gasolin out, and assume this has no moving parts or anything so a panel once installed last forever. Assume a 5 to 10 years write off for the installation cost.
Now nations like Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria converts huge areas of their desert to solar fuel production, exporting the stuff to Europe. Once the panels have payed of themself, they lower prices to levels that compete with saudi crude. Oil stay in sand forevvah!
I think I've seen plans for an ammonia production system that would work. It would need water input. And some way to collect and ship the product. And engines that would burn it. But it's a better fuel than hydrogen.
Who needs science fiction when you have a Department of Energy ?
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=ASM...
I agree with the assertions, but only if all other things remain equal (ceterius paribus). I don't think they can. I suspect for reasons I find hard to articulate that the relationship between energy efficiency and affordability will not be in any way linear, and will have returns diminishing at a serious rate.
There is also no reason why surplus capital generated by efficiency gains would necessarily be invested in more energy production. Dramatic efficiency gains would put temporary downward pressure on prices, stifling the development of URR, at least until the cycle came full circle again. In the meantime, that 'surplus' capital will be squandered elsewhere as the economy heaves a sigh of relief that those crazy peak oil theorists were wrong again. (Until the next cycle)
Any decline in EROEI would also erode real incomes (I think declining EROEI, whether internal to oil production or resulting from energy substitution is inherently inflationary), further dampening the predicted 'affordability' any efficiency gains may produce.
I suspect that what is demonstrated here will prove true on only one side/part/aspect of the price/production volatility cycles that bumping up against the geological limits to production will create.
As for production of low EROEI alternatives such as Canadian tar sands, I think they will remain a fringe player, as our erratic oil/economic cycles continually push the threshold of affordability towards the horizon. It wasn't that long ago that $40 a barrel was sure to bring all that Canadian tar into massive and profitable production. While we have tar production, it certainly isn't massive and like nuclear has proven to be an expensive niche player, not a game changer.
Just thinkin'
Oil sand production has been discussed to the hilt here, check RMG's posts not too long time ago, he knows well the stuff. Oil sands are constrained by logistics now, and will be so, these are massive projects, definitely not a game changer for the world, but a helpline for US.
The EROEI of oil sands is better than some people would have you believe (around 6 to 12, depending), and the break even point is around $40/barrel these days.
Oil sands production is growing at about 6% per year. If you apply the rule of 72, this means production will double in about 12 years - i.e. by 2023. There's already enough of it being exported to the US that it is depressing the price of West Texas Intermediate to $12 below the price of Brent or Dubai crude. Those now represent the real world price, which is over $100/bbl.
Western Canadian Select in Alberta is trading at $20/bbl below even WTI, and this is falling out on the bottom line of refiners who have access to it. Suncor, which is the largest oil company in Canada, just announced its profits are triple what they were last year, mostly due to improvements in its refining margins.
I wondered what keept the pricedifferense between WTI and Brent/Saudi Sweet Light and so on. Thank you for the clarification, I should have thought about that.
Regarding tar sand growth, there is a limiting factor; water. This comes from rivers,and by law they can only take so much water every day. Once they take their entire qouta, it's end to growth. With todays practices, this gives a limit on 5 million barrels a day, if I am rightly informed.
I checked the numbers. The oil sands plants are currently taking about 2% of the flow of the Athabasca river. That means they can't increase their production by more than 50 times. They are currently producing about 1.5 million barrels per day, so that means if they used the entire flow of the Athabasca, they couldn't produce more than 75 million barrels per day.
That's almost as much as the oil production of the rest of the world.
So, think this falls into the urban myth category. People are just making this stuff up for their own political reasons.
In reality, environmental constraints will probably cut oil production off at around 5 million barrels per day, which will take only about 7% of the flow of the Athabasca. By contrast, most of the southern rivers in Alberta are around 70% committed, and big US rivers such as the Colorado are more than 100% used. The Colorado River no longer reaches the ocean.
The real constraint on oil sands production is the supply of condensate to use as diluent for the pipelines, and at this point in time Alberta is having to import large amounts of condensate from the US to meet demand.
I strongly suspect that Athabasca River flow is highly seasonal. At a level MUCH lower than 75 million b/day, tar sands plants with junior water rights (using US law concept) will have to give everyone vacation in February till mid-March, when the spring melt begins.
Such a policy will hurt capital returns (and annual oil production) but may be welcomed by the workers.
Alan
Yes, it is, but those 2% of average flow translate to - hold on TWELVE cubic meters per second - 440 cu.ft/sec. That is the allotment. Here is a report from 2007 - but as we know not that much has changed:
Full report is here.
http://www.fossilwater.ca/fossilwater-report-sept-oct07.pdf
Note the following statement in the report:
Then compare it to the other statement in the report:
So, what they are saying is that the highest projected future allocation of water on the Athabasca (30 m3/s) is less than half of the lowest flow ever recorded on the river (75 m3/s), and less than 1/20 of its average flow.
The Overcommitted Colorado
Let's compare the allocation of water on the Athabasca River (average flow 633 m3/s, minimum flow 75 m3/s) to the Colorado River (average flow 500 m3/s, minimum flow 0 m3/s) under the Colorado River Compact
They have allocated more water from the Colorado (586 m3/s) than the average flow of the river in a good year. So, I would worry much more about the Colorado than the Athabasca, particularly in dry years.
I can see why Americans would worry about their own water, but I wish they wouldn't get obsessed with Canadian water. Canada has fewer people than California and far more water than the entire United States. It's like the people of California worrying about impending water shortages in Michigan.
Or Louisiana.
The average flow of the Mississippi River is about 17,000 m3 from memory.
Alan
Yes, according to Wikipedia, the Mississippi has an average flow of 12,743 m3/s and a minimum flow of 4,502 m3/s.
Those measurements are below the Old River Control Structure, where 30% of the flow is diverted into the Atchafalaya.
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/oldriver.htm
Lack of fresh water is not an issue here.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Uhuh!
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll225/Fmagyar/Productiongrowth.jpg
Lo and behold the parable of the Oil Sands... And it came to pass that the Canadians were so pleased with this opportunity that they offered the Americans a great reward in oil. The Americans, who believed in growth of production suggested the following: They would get one barrel of oil on the first square of the chess board map, two barrels on the second square, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc., doubling the number of barrels each time. The Canadians saw that this a great deal for them, and accepted.
We never learn, do we?
You really ought to syndicate a strip, great stuff ?- )
This post has been up a couple days why not post it here? Or is Warner that protective?
It's not Warner I'm worried about... even though this is not the Drumbeat I have suffered many a lashing there for posting my graphics, they take up more bandwidth than what is considered acceptable and have often been taken down for being deemed off topic, snide, sarcastic etc... in some cases deservedly so. So I have been less keen on posting content that doesn't fit in well with dry empirical data and graphs. If you know what I mean >;^)
A scalded cat is afraid of cold water...
You're assuming it is an exponential curve, when it is more likely to be a sigmoid curve. It is true that doubling production would increase production to 2.6 million bpd, and doubling it again would increase it to 5.2 million bpd by 2035.
However, that might be about the limit. It would amount to about 1/4 of current US consumption, but by 2035 it would probably be more than the US produced. The US would have to get the rest of its oil elsewhere.
No, I actually realize that. I was just taking a bit of artistic/poetic license to underscore the point that over the long haul our dependence on fossil fuel regardless of the specific source is a bad bet, one that cannot and will not pay off.
Yet we seem to be unwilling to confront that reality and continue to fool ourselves by pretending that we can continue to drill or squeeze oil out of rocks, etc... The underlying assumption seems to be that we can and should be doing everything in our power to just kick the can a little further down the road for now It continues to be BAU at any and all costs. I just find that to be a lousy way to contemplate the future. That's all.
I'd just like to see a fundamental shift away from our current paradigm.
Cheers!
I think that there is a flaw in Figure 2 - which says "Efficiency increases asymptotically to some thermodynamic limit. This would be true, if the only change that could be made for increasing efficiency was to improve existing versions of the same technology-i.e. make more efficient internal combustion engines, and more efficient coal fired power plants, more efficient natural gas fired power plants, etc.
It seems to me that where this goes wrong is that it is possible to switch between technologies. If a process that currently uses oil can be electrified, there is likely to be a huge gain in efficiency, besides reducing the demand for oil. Examples might include substituting heat pumps for oil fired home heating; electric lawn mowers for gasoline operated mowers; electric trains for trucks or even for diesel powered trains; and switching electric cars for cars with ICE. Switching nuclear for oil powered electricity generation would also work. Because of these types of substitution, the line in Figure 2 can be expected to slope somewhat upward, so the intercept is higher than one would otherwise expect. (Of course, we don't know where the same-technology intercept would be either. All of the illustrative numbers may be way too high.)
Switching technologies is slow and expensive, though, so it may not have a huge effect. As a practical matter, we are stuck with most technology we have. Even adding new more efficient electricity generation is a very slow process.
Yeah, I agree Gail. Figure 4 is an attempt to illustrate the impact of technology change. The question is whether leapfrogging up the technology staircase can keep up with the marginal production cost curve.
It seems to me that everything you suggest still depends on solutions that increase complexity. How about upping the ante a few notches? We certainly need to switch to simpler life styles. Complex solutions are too expensive in terms of the energy they require to be implemented.
I'm thinking more along the lines of down blankets and bed warmers, eliminating lawns altogether by making them illegal, ending superfluous consumption of consumer goods reducing the need for transport of non essential goods by all means, eliminating cars for personal transport... I think we need to warmly embrace the KISS principle. Anything else is doomed to failure.
I think the premise is valid absent external factors like a carbon tax. Increasing energy efficiency means the economic return from a certain amount of fuel will be greater, this increasing the amount one is willing to pay for that fuel. Usually that efficiency increase means an increase in capital cost for whatever is using the energy, so the efficiency increase won't happen until the cost of energy justifies it. Once it does happen and is written down, the economics will support a higher cost source of energy. This opens up formerly uneconomic source of energy including fossil fuels.
Now of course what I haven't seen mentioned is what this does to alternatives. Increased energy efficiency would also make other higher cost sources of energy more economic so it may slow the consumption rate of FFs.
Although I agree with this key post at the qualitative level, I suspect it applies, like Jevon's Paradox, only on the way up to peak energy. I think post peak we will see society simplify, (collapse) to a point where , although fossil energy will be used much more efficiently, the technology to extract the hard to get resources is no longer sustainable.
$200 oil will never be exhausted because the technological, political and social infrastructure needed to exploit oil that expensive will collapse before the oil is exhausted.
Look at Egypt. Past peak energy production, recently became a net energy importer, unsustainable population level, and the first thing that goes?
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-02-01/genetic-diversity-lost-damage-egypt’s-deserts-gene-bank
You just gave me a puff of insight.
EROEI shrinks.
Prices goes up to produce that oil.
Economy goes down.
We stop using oil for the more luxury things.
The value of the stuff we still do goes up. (Going to work, producing food, staying warm in the winter is more worth than importing the latest plastic toy from China).
Because that the stuff we can still do provides a much higher value, we will keep doing it at a higher price.
As oilprice climbs, the value of the stuff we still do with it will become higher and higher.
So, when we need 200 dollar oil to get food on the table, we will do it. We won't do alot of other stuff, but we will still do that.
We will keep digging out the last oil, till it cost more muscle energy to do so than the food energy produced in return.
Glad to be of help,
however my point is that, although we will still find a use for $200 oil, we will not be able to sustain the supply, Above ground factors will prevent us getting to the oil once we pass peak energy, because we will not be able to sustain business as usual.
$200 oil is difficult oil. Apart from the drip-feed of stripper wells, and the brute force of tar sands, much of it involves high tech operations in extremely challenging environments, in cyclone prone deep water far offshore, remote locations like the arctic, Siberia, etc., or in unstable regions like Nigeria (and Tunisia, Egypt and soon to be Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia...)
Will we still have the supplies of computer chips, high strength steel, helicopters, university educated engineers, and compliant dictatorships we currently need to keep oil flowing close to the geological limits?
Ralph W said far more simply what I was trying to argue earlier. I don't think the FF supply is going to get used up, as above ground social and economic factors triggered by a peak in production shred the foundations of our industrial economy. There will be massive efficiency gains like we saw in the late 70's, but they will only buy a brief respite and prolong the plateau a bit, until we learn to live within our means. (Which are a lot less than now)
Our obsession with economic growth demands that we beat our heads against the oil production ceiling until they bleed. this will trigger a mini cycle of boom and bust, with the trend towards bust ultimately winning. We won't be able to substitute the lower EROEI stuff because we're already in decline and don't have the capital and resources to substitute on any kind of scale.
We'll have a mad spike of sophisticated oil substitution like the 3rd Reich did, but like them, it will be too little too late.
I agree with whoever said that the concept of this post, like Jevon's paradox, only applies on the way up the curve.
In the existing examples of the Hubbert curve, production has declined at individual oil fields because prevailing prices (ie. competition from cheaper producers) have made it uneconomical to produce more.
Individual economies may certainly go bankrupt in the short and mid term as they find they cannot pay the fuel bills. Egypt is a perfect example and we should not be overconfident that no first-world economies will suffer the same fate. Environmental destruction, hunger and resource wars are already the norm ... there is no reason to expect this to cease, but the forms would probably change with constrained energy supplies. On the other hand, I'd be exceedingly surprised if such collapse did happen to every technologically sophisticated economy. Each bankruptcy reduces demand and consumption and prices a little, giving anyone with money still in the bank a little more time to adapt. Many people and places are already well advanced in their preparations for doing without cheap petroleum. Some countries have even been getting in some practise at being near-zero-growth economies.
I believe that industrial society in some form will survive whatever economic cataclysms are provoked by $200, $500, $1000 oil. Non-fossil energy sources can produce enough energy, and with a sufficiently high EROEI, that they will, at some price not much higher than $100/bbl, out-compete remaining non-OPEC (aka expensive-to-extract) oil.
Jevons will eventually defect to our side.
This, not wholesale permanent bankruptcy of an entire planet but the substitution of abundant non-fossil energy for petroleum, is the event that will bring about a clear decline in oil production growth and the final global Hubbert peak. And this is the event that will stop technological civilisation going the way of wartime Germany, pace Caraka below.
Now energy isn't yet directly fungible and it's clear that there won't be large volumes of non-fossil liquid fuels available to replace petroleum directly. That's ok I think, because many of the efficiency measures discussed here allow applications which now require liquid fuel to run on electricity instead, at the same time reducing the complexity of the end-use equipment (if not of the whole system). Energy may never again be as cheap as it was in 1999 but I'm sure it will still be available in quantity.
I too am glad Chris has posted his follow-up to the earlier discssion.
ASPO in January reported a relevant example of USGS calculations for recoverable arctic oil http://www.aspousa.org/index.php/2011/01/review-january-31-2011/
As Chris implies, I think, even oil might not be valuable enough to the industrial economy as a whole to justify such recovery in the future. Net utility from increased efficiency of use of, in this case, oil (I prefer this to the term 'value') might not be sufficient for the self-stoking overall economic growth we have seen up to now.
As a footnote, coal, historically once obligatory for all bulk transport, and for heat and light in new urban centers, and for most mechanization necessary for the first phase of industrial growth, survives as a fuel that is still being extracted for electricity generation and steel production. (It is interesting that on the other hand, oil use in power stations has rapidly declined from its early adoption). Use of coal seems to be reaching some kind of efficiency peak, with no further gain in process efficiency, although it is extracted in still increasing quantities globally and appears to underpin some of the recent overall economic growth. These usages of energy sources have feedback relations; 'productivity' will change, and even coal assets could become stranded, or with luck and invention, superseded?
In the generation of electricity, for sure. But is it conceivable that our use-efficiency of the electricity could double in the future, increasing the affordable price of electricity and thus support far more expensive coal mining operations?
I would argue that the vast majority of electricity is currently wasted, either directly by people leaving electricity consuming equipment, lights, etc. on when they are serving no function, or through less than best efficiency appliances, like incandescent lights, or in end use applications which are ultimately trivial (high powered computers to play games...)
A good standard of living is possible (from my direct experience) on one third of the average UK domestic electricity consumption, or maybe on sixth of the USA average. Non-domestic consumption could probably be cut in half without serious loss of utility.
An acceptable standard of living would be possible on one tenth of the UK average domestic consumption. However, that would require losing a lot of the trivial uses.
Yair...I'm an old(ish) bushman with a pretty basic outlook on problem solving. A lot of the ideas I see thrown around are unduly complex...to me they seem like counting a pen of bullocks by counting the feet and dividing by four.
It's the simple things that work...and could be made to work to everyones advantage unpopular though they may be.
I have mentioned before that (in a temperate climate anyway)a houshold can live quite comfortably on a twenty amp mains supply. Even youngsters soon learn they can't run their gizmos while Mum is washing and the big A/C is running in the lounge...the household can still have all the conveniences but some responsibility has to be developed to manage consumption...which will be reflected in the bill at the end of the quarter.
Yes, I remember living in Ensenada, Baja California with my parents in the early 1970's. A 3 bedroom house with reinforced concrete walls and roof, no insulation. No A/C, only fans in the summer. One or two space heaters sometimes used on winter mornings. Two 15 amp fuses in the 120V fusebox. Gas was propane for the water heater and stove. A 100Lb tank would last 2 weeks with the pilot lights in the stove on, over a month if you turned them off and lit the burners and oven when you needed them.
We got by just fine, didn't feel deprived of anything. My father was a University Professor (Astronomy) and he was just fine with it all. Of course, he also had disagreements with associates over using "The Appropriate Technology" vs "The Newest Technology".
Times have changed...
Chris and Ralph
Perhaps more efficient use of electricity could rather 'insulate' (sic) against otherwise inevitable, perhaps very large rise in the relative cost of that source of utility? To return your own argument Chris, if the economy can thus hypothetically 'afford' more expensive coal, then other primary sources of electricity might become competitive with coal, for example renewables?
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with Fred Magyar (below) that 'costly' solutions might not do the trick, and eventually we get back to what is locally sustainable through very hard human work, with a large decrease in what we have been pleased to call 'productivity.
phil
phil - A slight digression but you brought up a constant aggrevation for me: USGS reserve estimates. Often they don't offer the underlying assumptions but in this case you show their flaws quit clearly: "Based on exploitation costs of $300 a barrel, only 4.1 billion could be raised." Assuming the $300/bbl is in today's $'s (how the Survey normally expresses value) and not inflated, then one has to wonder how the $300/bbl won't cause demand destruction greater than we saw at $148/bbl. Considering that their reserve estimate isn't based on even a crude seismic data base let alone actual drilling efforts then one has to summerize their numbers: based upon the assumption that there are 10's of billions bbl of oil inplace in a region where no wells have been drilled and that the economies will readily support a $300/bbl price tag than we will recover 4.1 billion bbll of oil. Yep...if all those ASSUMPTIONS prove true then we have a lot more oil coming into the system.
IMHO any discussion that utilizes to some degree any of the Survey's "estimates" greatly diminishes any value that chat may bring to the table.
Rock
I'm glad you make these points.
USGS calculations of hypothetical difficult-to-get-at oil reserves result in silly numbers, but perhaps they illustrate how impossible it will be to burn all the reserves that might be 'technically recoverable', even if and when drilling were to reveal them?
A lot of 'stuff' is going to be left in the ground?
Jerome a Paris used to remind us of stranded NG assets, even at our recent zenith of global economy, and that some pipelines were not going to get built. Weakened economies presumably will not have the investment nor the market to use this stuff?
phil
I would venture to guess that what you are describing is just a subset of the overall increase in the cost of the complexities required to maintain the current status quo applied to one of many special cases . In simple terms it just means you have to work harder and harder just to stay where you are. It also seems to exemplify the classic case of the blind men examining the elephant and either concluding it is like a snake or a rope depending on whether they are grabbing at the tail or the trunk. None of them are able to grasp the fact that the white elephant in the room is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Trying to achieve energy efficiency through increases in technological complexity are ultimately doomed to failure because of the thermodynamics inherent in complex systems and the energy costs associated with them.
I'd say your hunch is pretty much on the money.
In Australia, all potential energy savings from efficiencies are cancelled out by demand growth from an aggressive immigration policy, driven by the development/housing industry.
The result is that the grid goes to its knees in hot summer nights
2/2/2011
Sydney's suburban grid too weak for growth
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=2552
But the public debate about a "big Australia" which implies perpetual growth is completely mislead:
9/4/2010
Australian Population Scenarios in the context of oil decline and global warming
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/?p=1300
Chris
One of the most interesting posts I have seen recently. I am still studying it to understand.
After reading your opening definition:
"Peak oil occurs when efficiency improvements fail to support the price increase needed for marginal production increase."
It raised a question in my mind. Since peak oil is a rate phenomena, can't the peak occur even if the price is right? In other words, the price may be sufficient to call for more from the tar sands, but the output from tar sands is so much lower (in rate) than conventional oil it simply cannot deliver enough rate to overcome decline. Or is that concept inherent in the definition?
Regards
By "marginal production increase" I mean a rate, a million barrels per day for example. The peak occurs when the efficiency improvements can't raise the 'affordable price' enough to further increase the total rate of supply.
Chris
I feel with peak oil, we need to be ahead of the production decline curve, ie decrease consuption voluntarily rather than it being forced to buy high prices.
To do this we also have to be ahead of the price curve in terms of efficiency, so when oil doubles the average vehicle by then, will travel over double the miles.
The only way this can be done, is by getting people to do now, what $200 oil will make them do later.
This can only be done via a tax system which makes large vehicles more costly over time and subsidizes hybrid and electric vehicles.
This would do two things, it would buy the time needed to make these changes and the government would also have the funds to build the necessary electrical infrastucture.
I we wait until oil is $200 there will be far less money to do this.
So efficiency is a time bridge to a non FF future.
Agreed, apart from where you say the only way to do it is via the tax system, but I agree tax has a big role to play. I guess the tax system is the main reason why Europe has a higher efficient vehicle fleet than the US, so in theory should be better able to afford higher oil prices.
Yair...here again there seem to be all these convoluted ways of applying a tax or rationing.
Talking to local folks I think the notion of a "pollution" tax (or levy) would fly a lot better than any notion of a "carbon tax"...keep it simple say what we mean...if you pollute you pay.
That is to say...if you drive an F250 you pay for what comes out the pipe, same thing if you drive a Jetta or a Prius.
The emissions from various vehicles are known and could be paid on yearly odometer readings. Any tampering with odo's becomes an enforced indictable offence.
There is nothing simpler than basic rationing...you get your allocation and burn it in a Hummer or a Moped it's completely up to you.
Thank you for concluding on this point.
I understand your point but under PO scenario, price will eventually reach the same levels anyway. The only difference between efficient (high efficiency gains) and non-efficient economy will be the speed of the price increase, e.g. if we invest in efficiency we will see $200/bbl by 2030 and in 2020 otherwise.
Now here is the important point to make - the only real, long term-solution to FF problems (climate change, depletion) is substitution, not efficiency. An efficient economy, dependent on a single non-renewable, non-replaceable resource will still use it up eventually, albeit more slowly. Hopefully at $200/bbl all kind of alternatives will become viable, the question really comes down to which ones we'll pick eventually. Under the 2020 scenario it is much more likely we will pick the "quick & dirty" ones - tar sands, CTL etc, and under the 2030 one, we will have the time to develop and bring down the costs of the harder but cleaner ones - nuclear, renewables, electric vehicles etc. This is the role which efficiency has to play and it is in fact a very important one. IMO it will decide how things will play out in the second half of this century.
PS. The question of alternatives is the most important one in this debate; if we don't develop clean alternatives, FFs will be used up until the last joule, period. We can argue how fast and what the effects, but after say 100 years people will look back and realize it wouldn't have mattered at all
IMO, just because something is viable it doesn't mean it is affordable in the amounts required.
A Rolls Royce car is a viable means of transport ... but for me (and most of the world's population!) it isn't affordable.
The assumption is that over time alternative energy costs will come down as technologies mature and the necessary infrastructure gets built around them. Whether the costs will go down and by how much is a separate topic, but even if they don't become much cheaper I don't see it as the end of the world - we will have to adjust to living with more expensive energy.
There is also an implicit belief that alternative energy sources won't be taxed as highly as the fossil fuels they replace. It is very amusing to see the techno-optimists orgasmic over the low costs of running electric cars, for example. Fools.
I wonder how the government would apply a tax to the electricity generated from my off-grid photovoltaic panels that I purchased 20 years ago.
Don't worry, in my municipality they figured they could tax RAIN WATER. The idea was that some people don't use grid water. Or less than a family of that size normaly do. Then just assume they use rain water instead, and tax them accordingly.
Translation: Even if you don't use city water, you'd better pay up anyway.
I never heard much of the idea since. Hopefully they saw the flaw of the concept.
For rooftop solar panels it is currently enough to remove all the subsidies, and it will make the already high price prohibitive. But I too am not "worried" how the govt will get its share - it always does. I'm seeing very bad indications in this direction - like the idea to tax vehicles per miles traveled instead of per gallon of fuel to counter the effects of increased vehicle efficiency.
He who laughs last laughs best! Once the panels are paid off the electricity is pretty much free if you are off grid. What are they gonna do, put a tax on incident sunlight? At least that way the fools who are tied to the grid will get taxed twice with half the benefit! Even so, I'm still a techno-pessimist... Forget democratic reforms and overthrowing the government, the ultimate revolution will be decentralizing access to energy and becoming free of the power company monopoly. Now that's real anarchy that everyone can support! If you are not with us you are part of the problem. May there be a bevy of levies on your house! Muhahahahahah!
Righhhht lets blow all the dams and let here rip. You do get carried away.
Meanwhile we northerners will take a look at throwing up the hydro project that was pretty well derailed by cheap Cook Inlet gas and gutless legislators back in the mid 80's after a mere 140 million or so had been spent in the run up to FERC licensing. The less than penny a kilowatt for the second 50 years operation should beat whatever sort of materials rooftop solar gen and storage will have to use to keep operational over time.
I'm sure backyard plants will be able to manufacture all the film and other components solar will continue need. They will furnish the heavy transport system needed to move the materials. Righhht.
Storage is a still a huge issue with solar, not to mention not everyone lives in sunny south Florida. But then how far is south Florida above sea level? Folks may need a bevy of levies to keep a dry house down that a ways if things go as they look to be headed--but not for quite a long while.
"Righhhht lets blow all the dams and let here rip."
Exactly. Let's. What is coming, is local production, local distribution, local consumption. Might as well accept it. Learn to live in Nature. Nature will live in you.
If it cannot be done with Solar, Wind or very, very limited Hydro, don't do it. Simple? Yes, but eventually it will happen.
Nuke? Just say no.
The Martian.
Almost 20% of the world's juice comes from hydro. Most from big projects and the power gets transmitted plenty far from the dams. Local may not be quite what you envision.
The centralized industrial world could morph in unimaginable ways--and I've a heck of an imagination...but cool and gentle doesn't describe what I see as most likely coming down the pike, at least in the more or less near term.
Well, I live just about at sea level in Hollywood and my girlfriend lives high up in the peaks of Hollywood Hills about four miles to the west at the lofty elevation of about 24" in. above me!
You're right when the tide comes in I probably do get carried away... despite the big levy for the levee!
>;^)
Cheers!
'Cryin won't help ya,
prayin won't do ya no good'
?- )
gotta smile, life is short
I believe I do support building our local big levee--900 ft high rock in the upper dam. Couple big fault lines aren't too far off though. Does make that 70s major remake of the old Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie 1929 song come to mind.
Local solar doesn't quite have that huge potential downside, that is for sure.
I'm not comfortable redefining "peak oil" like this, but this is nonetheless an interesting concept.
One thing to notice is that many of our early efficiency gains are technically extremely low-hanging and cheap; they are sticky because of social conventions. For example, smaller cars, car pooling, shifting to bicycles for short trips, and shifting to a more-vegetarian diet -- these are all changes that could be made relatively quickly and cost almost nothing, that would sharply cut back on energy consumption. We will, however, put them off as long as possible, and instead wait for energy to become painfully expensive.
One interesting possibility is how things might change when cars become truly self-driving; at that point, do you really want to own a car? Will "public transit" become small self-driving "busses", dispatched point-to-point, with a few detours? (And/)Or will ZipCar become something more like ZipCarPool, where the car comes to you, possibly with some people in it, and you proceed to destinations? (It will be just like public transit, except that you won't have to share space with "Those People", whoever they are.)
So the question might be posed as to whether people driving a 36 mpg average fleet of cars on $6 / gallon gas will drive twice as many miles as they do driving a 18 mpg fleet on $3 / gallon gas.
I think that the answer is no.
To double the fleet mileage using cars made in existing high-volume production factories would require making vehicles that are smaller, lighter, less sound-proofed, less accessorized, less air conditioned, aerodynamically shaped, harder tires, etc. They will deliver less comfort and status than the existing fleet.
Miles driven are unlikely to increase much at all. Gallons of gas used are likely to drop as prices increase due to cost push. I don't think that energy prices will go up because of demand pull.
Aren't these two situations the same, $0.17 per mile. Surely we'd expect exactly the same number of miles, not twice.
The difference though is that in the 36mpg world the oil industry is getting $6 per gallon rather than $3, so large new resources are mobilised into reserves to be produced.
In financial terms they are the same, but in total gallons used, the figure is halved. The danger is that with a massive drop in consumption like this, there is no requirement to go and find that really tricky oil as there would now be an over-supply. Only once this supply is tightened would there be enough incentive to go looking under every pebble for that sticky stuff.
It's the same logic that got us into the problem in the first place, and it seems to be the only one that the markets function with.
Demand for oil in relation to price is a down-sloping curve, which doesn't reach zero in any real-world scenario. There is no such thing as an affordable price. At $200/barrel, the demand today would be a lot lower, but there would still be a lot of it sold because it is so essential to our civilization. Therefore, I would discount the likelihood of efficiency having a significant impact on long-term ultimate consumption. A price that would trigger a total societal breakdown would have to be much higher than $200, since Europeans have shown that adapting to $8.00 gasoline is not that bad. Some forms of efficiency are not going to increase the potential demand for oil because they require the economy to redirect its resources into expensive substitutes. The savings that a Chevy Volt buyer achieves are going to go into paying off the extra $10,000 or so on the purchase price, mainly for the battery pack, rather than into additional miles driven.
Thanks Chris,
That was a really interesting post. Made me think hard about what development goals should be.
When you talk about efficiency gains, are you talking about global averages or overaged for OECD countries which would then be able to monopolise access to oil at a higher price.
Most developing countries are not expected to reach economic parity with todays EU economies for 50-150 years. There is no way that their economies will be efficient, or developed enough to handle fuel prices of $200/b. The result of increasing efficiency in developed countries could then be to price out oil for developing economies entirely. I guess this could be a real driving force for renewables development in the developing world. Possibly a strong driver for policy in that direction.
Another thing that it made me think about was to what extent efficiency gains will be implimented, whether the captial will exist to do so despite the potential return on investment. What the geographic distribution of implimentation might.
Sam
To get a quick handle on the scale of quick efficiency improvements possible, consider the elephant in the room of such quick wins - commuter traffic.
In the US approximately 50% of oil use is for personal transport uses.
I can't find good numbers on the split of these, but I feel saying 50% is due to commuter type activities is a good estimate (commuters, schools, etc.)
About 77% of these drive alone.
Combine these RoM figures with the ~20Mbpd of oil consumption and you get ~4 Mbpd of consumption that could be cheaply addressed. Getting the average occupancy up to 2 people would halve consumption, and double the efficiency of the transport in these cases would materially effect the $80-$90 limit on economically tolerable oil prices.
Couple focused effort in cutting stupid usages with a more nuanced pricing structure for key industries using oil and I see no reason why a status quo economy in the US couldn't manage $150 oil. Of course, other economic woes and exchange rate collapse could derail that - but there is much fat to shed with minimal change - opening the expensive development avenues.
No, the problem is where efficiency is already high. Third world usage will collapse, since the combination of high existing efficiencies and high relative prices will make higher priced oil uneconomic.
At the same time, airplane transport will collapse. There are few efficiency wins to be booked there, and fuel already accounts for a sizeable percentage of cost. Tickets doubling in price mean reduced numbers, which mean loss of economies of scale, higher prices again, and a collapse spiral.
It's these edge cases which run the risk of derailing the economy/society and curtailing efficiency gains. With an intelligent, planned strategy we can sustain much higher prices - its the lack of that intelligence that will sink us.
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/ for general transportation statistics.
However, vehicle miles by purpose can be found at http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/m/2010_fotw616.html
"to/from work" plus "work related business" account for about 34.2% of vehicle miles traveled. Some of the categories that make up the other 65.8% look like they could be trimmed back without too much pain.
That is clearly a false statement; so clumsy it is self contradictory.
More accurate is
Energy efficiency can only lead to higher consumption of fossil fuel and therefore higher carbon dioxide emissions IF the consumption of energy also rises by an amount that exceeds the efficiency gain.
Once the statement is factually correct, it is clear what actually drives the increase, is the increase in consumption.
Energy efficiency is going to happen because the markets make it happen. There is no way out of it.
Consumption is driven by population growth.
Seems to me that population and CO2 are proportional to one another and as long as there is fossil fuel to burn then CO2 will be going up and up.
Efficiency is not the driver at all of these increases. It is just a market mechanism to lower prices, allowing more people to consume the same amount as they did before.
jg, your argument only pertains to the rate of consumption, Chris's argument is that if other things remain equal higher efficiency enables the limiting price (poorness of ore grade) to increase, so the end result is more ultimate consumption.
You will note, that Chris's final paragraph is a caveat. His argument assumes that the only energy source available is the fossil fuels (and that we won't do CCS). But with other sources thrown into the mix (Nuclear, and renewables), things get more complicated. The big argument against low carbon energy sources today is the cost. But with higher efficiency we can afford a higher unit cost of energy. So it comes down to whether we will have the willpower to leave profitable FF in the ground, and use only no carbon energy instead. I maintain the higher efficiencies are a necessary but not sufficient condition for that to happen. I other language: We are completely screwed if we don't radically improve efficiency. We might still be screwed even if we do, but at least it gives us a fighting chance to choose a better way.
I think Chris is correct.
Bother.
Even if theoretically true, basically this is just an excuse to do nothing, therefore accelerating collapse, and so rendering the point more or less irrelevant.
Real point is to forget about growth as a positive thing.
Growth must simply be scratched as an objective, be it demographic or economic growth.
And the efficiency improved as much as possible, mainly regarding urbanism and architecture
On a practical point of view, fossile fuel consumption decrease should be a very clear objective for any country, rendering the point false on a CO2/year emmissions point of view, even if potentially still true on the total quantity point of view.
Within this quantity, efficiency improves functionalities provided for the same amount.
The US keeping its ridiculous gas tax level however, clearly shows its current commitment towards total economic suicide.
The argument confounds efficiency of production (EROI) and efficiency of consumption and Say's Law (supply creates demand).
Say's law doesn't always work as cited by Keynes; huge numbers of unemployed does not create a huge demand for the workers.
Certainly doubling mpg will not double the number of miles driven especially if the price of fuel remains high.
I think many at TOD have been surprised that production remained steady thru the tremendous price fluctations of the last two years.
The reason demand remains high has more to do with the worldwide
thirst for an energy intensive lifestyle more than the declining
EROI.
Energy efficiency in generation and therefore EROI changes slowly over a long time so the idea of a rapid feedback of declining EROI causing more energy use is seriously overwrought.
Have you noticed that the price of natural gas in the US has declined?
Technology as made more gas reserves available never mind that the technology is somewhat more energy intensive to produce.
Peak oil is about perception not EROI.
The 'size of the tap' mantra is just wrong; economy of scale shows us that the marginal per unit costs fall as investment increases.
If people think FF is finite(or a cause of GW) then long term demand for FF will decrease.
I believe the world has 30-100 years of FF is left based on geology which is a blind of an eye historically. At the end of that time the feast will end and the famine will begin. For energy poor countries the end will come sooner.
High prices cannot extend the Age of FF more than a 50 years so people will move to substitutes.
Energy efficiency in consumption will prop up our lifestyle somewhat.
The best course is to limit energy consumption by decree, not by market forces.
I must say there does seem to be endless debate on how to finesse oil consumption. Much of this debate surrounds numerous reasons why one idea or the other may or may not work compared with a simpler rationing/command economy model .
Rationing and command economies are boneheaded. If you want to reduce consumption of oil, increase its tax, and let the oil consumers rearrange their behavior in whatever way suits them best. There are a few cases where policy can make this work more easily -- car pool lanes give an extra reward to people who do that (you get the benefit of being less stuck in traffic), dedicated facilities for bicycles mean people don't have to "share" the road with cars, which is a major problem for many people.
Au contraire.
US government gas rationing in WW2 reduced number of miles of driven by 33% from 1941-1943. The standard ration was 5 gallons per week.
These were implemented along with price controls and a PR campaign to persuade consumers to pledge not to pay more than the legal prices set for goods.
Compare that to rationing by price. The short range price elasticity of gasoline is -.26 so to get a 33% reduction in consumption prices would have to increase by 128% (long range elasticity is -.58 to giving people more time to adjust assuming it is feasible). Imagine the chaotic effect of $90 x 2.28= $205 barrel oil on the economy with attending general inflation. Surely
rationing would be far safer than 'every man for himself'.
http://economics.about.com/od/priceelasticityofdemand/a/gasoline_elast.htm
The 1973 oil embargo dropped world oil production by 7% which drove up the price of oil 300%. The Arabs were producing 34% of the worlds oil(OPEC 53%).
Today the world is less dependent on oil
as an energy source
The effect of the gas price spike of 1979(not an actual shortage) was a reduction in driving of about 15%.
The 1980-1983 recession reduced world demand by 16% due to a price increase of 133%, a price inelasticity of -0.12.
If we are heading into truly horrible supply situation the market will be far more brutal than the mere inconvenience of ration books and small allotments of fuel.
Free markets are truly brutal in operation. The best course in a period of drastic shortages is rationing and a deliberate end to
rationing by price.
The 1974 55mph was expected to save 2.2% in fuel but ended up saving 1% or less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
Most of these carrot-stick halfway measures will minutely trim consumption at the margins.
"Free markets are truly brutal in operation. The best course in a period of drastic shortages is rationing and a deliberate end to
rationing by price. "
Easy to say for somebody that wouldn't like taxes to be added his gallon price, in a "let's just wait for the big mess" mindset, taxes on fossile fuel DO WORK, on miles driven but also much more importantly in this context, they influence the cars being bought and produced
majorian
The whole point with a well thought out tax system is that you do not wait til there is a shortage.
You tax the biggest and usually the most expensive vehicles the most.
This tax is used to subsidize hybrides and electric vehicles, this has never been done in the States.
The largest cars in the UK pay $600 a year for road tax, this makes people buy more fuel efficient cars.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Motoring/OwningAVehicle/HowToTaxYourVehicle/...
A £5,000 subsidy is going to be given to 9 electric and hybrid vehicles, I think £10,000 would get things moving faster, as they need to. The end result is a reduction of oil comsumption and co2 emissions.
Exactly want everybody wants, add in a £10 tax on all cars and destribute it to charities like this.
http://www.coloradotrees.org/benefits.htm#carbon
http://www.treeaid.org.uk/
Billions of acres around the world could be replanted and trees not only take up Co2 but absorb the heat from the sun very effectively.
But when the American people support $724 billion a year on military spending guess other things must give.
I'd agree with all of that apart from road tax. It's a tax on ownership, not usage. If all the tax is on fuel, then not only does it encourage more fuel efficient cars, but also a more fuel efficient way of driving.
I pay £120 for my road tax, but I get over 70mpg by driving carefully. The bloke sat opposite me pays £0 in road tax but only gets 35mpg with about the same distance travelled each day. I also own a 4x4 that does less than 1000 miles a year - just when it's really needed, but costs me £250 to tax before I even turn the key. It's these inequalities that hinder the whole process.
Hi Doom
Yes I agree there has to be a balance between Road tax and fuel tax, I do not agree with £0 road tax for any vehicle as they all damage roads. Also a displayed road tax disc makes people get an MOT and insurance.
On traffic cops a woman was stopped with no driving licence, obviously no insurance and she got a £150 pound fine. My insurance cost double that for a year.
Neither government has done a thing about this, we could easily get the 2 million illegal drivers off the roads with proper fines. This would get our insurance down at least.
I got hopitalized by a driver with no insurance he got 4 points a £350 fine £100 expenses!
I woke up in a ambulance!!!!
Jaz,
Unpleasant though it sounds, I think we just have to accept that there will be people who don't play by the rules. We can spend huge amounts of effort to try and catch them, but we just end up hurting the majority who are just trying to get along.
Generally, people who knowingly break the law don't expect to get caught. That's why the threat of fines, prison or even death just don't work as a deterrent.
By all means, we can fine them when we catch them, but we can't expect to stop them. We just have to try and have a valid safety net for people like mididoctors who meet them.
I'd be happy to have a £10 tax disc for all cars, and the tax put on fuel. The tax disc pays for the administration, and still requires a valid MOT and insurance to be obtained. The main revenue comes from use, regardless of how legal your vehicle is. Now queue the country folk moaning about having to drive further. :-)
Unpleasant though it sounds, I think we just have to accept that there will be people who don't play by the rules. We can spend huge amounts of effort to try and catch them, but we just end up hurting the majority who are just trying to get along.
Doom, I will diasgree slightly here. There IS an easy way to get those who don't play by the rules off the road - don't let them refuel. You simply have a system where to fill the vehicle up, the vehicle must have valid registration, and the driver a valid license. Wouldn;t even be that hard to implement - the license plate and driver's licence numbers are entered and validated before the pump is turned on. Here in Vancouver it is a provincial law that all fuel purchases must be prepaid or pre-authorised before the fuel pump is turned on (to prevent driveaway theft, after a petrol station attendant was killed trying to stop one). It would not be too hard to have it where the lic plate and drivers lic are scanned too.
That would probably eliminate 95% of the unregistered and unlicensed drivers in short order.
In regard to what to tax, there has to be an element of both road and fuel tax. The road system still needs maintenance regardless of how many miles are driven. Someone who owns a car and does not drive it still has the road system available to them whenever they want - so there should be some tax element to vehicle ownership, and possibly even drivers license ownership.
That said, progressively increasing rego taxes on vehicle fuel consumption ratings will help to deter ownership of large inefficient vehicles, but excessive subsidies to elec/hybrid vehicles is just wrong - it means everyone is effectively subsidising those people to drive. This hides the fact that ALL vehicle transportation is expensive, it is just that some do not spend as much on fuel. Ultimately, no country can subsidise itself to lower fuel usage, or to economic prosperity in general.
We do have registration plate recognition systems at the majority of petrol stations, and in principal that could be linked to the central database to check if the car is insured. This would work fine for the majority of cases, but times when a car is borrowed - with legitimate insurance via a separate policy - means that the driver would have a lot of explaining to do each time they fill up.
There are a number of police cars roaming the streets with these cameras built in, that automatically detect cars with no insurance or MOT, or even if the registered owner has been banned. Regardless of what checks are in place, some people will try and beat it.
With any automated system, it's too hard to cover every scenario, so some people will work out how to sidestep the process. Just think of the number of false passports that get found. These are supposed to be the best form of personal ID, but people still fake them.
One of the side effects of having an automated process is that people become over confident in its abilities. If you can convince the system to erroneously allow you fuel, then nobody will question you, because the computer says YES. Likewise, if there is a mistake in the system it becomes far harder to prove your innocence because the computer says NO. It's almost like trial by IT.
The road system still needs maintenance regardless of how many miles are driven. Someone who owns a car and does not drive it still has the road system available to them whenever they want - so there should be some tax element to vehicle ownership, and possibly even drivers license ownership.
Not quite sure I can go along with this one. The road system is also available to me if a use public transport, which I pay directly to use. I also have a passport, and therefore air travel is available to me. By this logic, I should be paying for the availability of airports.
I agree though that driving should become more expensive as a first round of demand destruction.
We do have registration plate recognition systems at the majority of petrol stations, and in principal that could be linked to the central database to check if the car is insured. This would work fine for the majority of cases, but times when a car is borrowed - with legitimate insurance via a separate policy - means that the driver would have a lot of explaining to do each time they fill up.
I didn't say the driver had to be the owner - merely that the both the rego and licence must be valid.
I do agree that such a system, if run by the government, may well have the usual problems of any government system, but that doesn't mean it can't be done properly.
I guess it really depends on just how big a problem unregistered vehicles are.
Not quite sure I can go along with this one. The road system is also available to me if a use public transport, which I pay directly to use. I also have a passport, and therefore air travel is available to me. By this logic, I should be paying for the availability of airports
Well, you used to pay for the airports - remember when BAA was govt owned?
The road system is a public amenity, like police, fire dept, military, national parks etc. Regardless of how many people use them, they have to be maintained, so it just becomes a question of how to raise the taxes. With public transport, the buses in UK pay a nominal rego and then get all the fuel tax rebated, so they are not paying anything. This, of course, is a deliberate policy to make running buses cheaper for municipalities and to encourage their use, and that is fine, but the roads must still be paid for somehow.
I have always wanted to see a true analysis of just what a national road system costs to maintain, and what the fuel taxes would have to be to cover it - I suspect most Euro countries collect more than they need.
People keep saying this but never really seem to be able to back it up. and they always play around with the issue at the edges... behaviour will somehow produce the desired effect... doesn't seem to be the case.
medidoctors
Much of this debate surrounds numerous reasons why one idea or the other may or may not work compared with a simpler rationing/command economy model .
They had that in Stalinist Russia and behind the Iron curtain and if you knew anything about those countries at that time as I do, you would stop talking nonsense.
command economies can work the usa and the uk operated with one during ww2..with a high degree of success.. they won right?
your right that the soviet system was rubbish.. highly wasteful and unresponsive that in time became chronically corrupt and failed utterly, but in part this was also due to a failure in the political system that disenfranchised people from investing any belief in the system..it just left everybody in a strange world they could make no sense of.
whats with the medi as oppose to midi btw?
The Soviet example is not all rubbish.
Russia an agricultural country became one of the largest industrial countries in the world. This was important ideologically as Marxism is based on an urban proletariat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-Year_Plans_for_the_National_Economy_of...
Hitler's Four Year plan exceeded the New Deal in size and scope.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Year_Plan
Central planning works where the goal is easily understood such as replacing polluting autos and power plants (or mobilizing to win a war).
Problems occur when central planning becomes social planning as in
Soviet collectivization or the Great Leap Forward, designed to turn peasants into proletarians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
A plan to make US electricity and US transport clean and renewable would work as well.
Some people have a nightmare that inevitably Government will become forever tyrannical. But history has shown that fear to be unjustified.
Please.
Three of largest genocides of 20th Century. Four Year plan was building Nazi military machine. Great Leap Forward was everything you can imagine and then some more. The first five year plans lead to famine. The subsequent plans were relatively irrelevant as they were mostly talk, but were adjusted many times withing those five years. Maybe planning works sometimes, but these are three worst example you cam pick. OK the Nazi one worked from the Nazi machine perspective. The others were monumental failures.
I was born and lived in a country devastated by first, indirectly affected by the second, and kicked when it was down by the tird
I am first generation descendent of the same incidents and have heard all the stories, starting in the Baltics, "relocation" to Siberia, passing through Auschwitz, and the Dresden fire bombing.
My family was spared the worst - but I remember playing as a child in collapsed ruins of not-yet cleaned war damage and looking with friends for misfires. It was in early 70s..still. True, central planning helped rebuilding certain parts albeit at the expense of other cities. True, central planning helped build thousands of schools, but these were strategic projects, which are by definition centrally managed.
central planning can be a an isolated solution to specific issues..it does not have to involve over management of every aspect of people life like the cultural revolutions great step forward (a really bad piece of central planning). Compared to the marshal plan or Apollo (better examples).
In my view, the worst part of central planning was not inefficiency, waste or lack of feedback, but resignation and loss of independence in acting - and thinking. Someone coined a term "Homo Sovieticus", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus
Mididoctors
I do tend to reverse and substitute letters quite alot.
Sorry to hear about your car accident, it is a disgrace that the fines are so low. I wrote to my MP about the issue four years ago, they are stopping more people but the fines are still less than the insurance.
Fact is after the war, we had a right to vote for a new govenment, an autocratic government which cannot be removed, always becomes more and more corrupt and oppressive. England's control of the States, tsarist Russia, communist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Communist China, Egypt, it's quite a long list. Peoples fears unfounded? some people must read different history books to me.
I would take slightly incompetent democratic taxes any day.
Some Contrapoints
Immediate Collapse of Civilization and Population will Minimize CO2
It is clear that an immediate collapse of industrial civilization, and the resultant collapse of population, will result in lower carbon emissions than any other policy option. A resurgent civilization in centuries or millennium will not have the resource base to develop our extraction technology. They will be unable to drill a BP Deepwater Horizon well for example.
The corollary is that if we do not become more energy efficient, there will be significant deleterious effects on the economy, civilization and population although we may emit less carbon.
Since the goal of reduced carbon is, for most people, to prevent deleterious effects on the economy, civilization and population we will have failed in our goal by other means.
The invention of Combined Cycle Natural Gas Generation is reducing carbon emissions today
Almost everyone agrees that burning coal has significant negative externalities. The invention of combined cycle natural gas generation (up to 60% thermodynamic efficiency vs. 44% for best coal and 33% for average coal) has made natural gas generation economically competitive with coal in many markets. This shift in generation has resulted in measurably lower carbon emissions in the USA for example.
Energy Efficiency will allow us to pay for renewables (and nuclear)
Almost everyone agrees that burning coal has significant negative externalities, but our economics of today make environmental destruction a free good. As I have pointed out elsewhere, if renewable generation costs 50% more as much but you use half as much, your bill will be significantly lower and renewable generation will be very affordable.
In other words, greater energy efficiency makes the pricing of externalities, such as carbon emissions much more acceptable economically and politically.
Delaying Carbon Emissions is Good
Slower carbon emissions have the following benefits
- It gives humanity and the rest of nature more time to adjust to a changing climate, which will significantly reduce the cost and disruption.
- It allows some % of carbon already emitted to be re-captured (CO2 half-life is on the order of 500 years)
- It allows other greenhouse gases to peak before carbon and make the cumulative effect of all GHG peak at a lower point. Methane (half-life 7 years) is an obvious target for reduction. We are already seeing a modest decline in chloro-fluorocarbons, phased out by international treaty.
Greater Energy Efficiency will increase the Alternative Uses of Oil
Petro-chemicals, and in particular plastics, do not necessarily increase the emissions of CO2. Today, several % of oil & NGL production is not burned but transformed into solids (and liquids). In the life-cycles of these products, a minimal % will be transformed into CO2 or other Greenhouse Gases.
If demand for burning is reduced through efficiency gains, a greater % will be diverted into non-GHG uses.
I am sorry for not reading all earlier posts before reading, but my time is limited.
Best Hopes for Breaking the TOD habit,
Alan
I am a longtime lurker and rare commenter...moreover, I am very much a novice/laymen when it comes to most all of TOD topics...simply read to try and learn. To further my caveat, I am not a numbers guy- more of a big picture kind of guy...
Alas, I am no doubt missing some key concept to the overall premise (which is why I am posting in hopes that some kind TOD'er will point it out) but...
..if fossil fuels are finite in amount, when we eventually run out won't we have used the same amount regardless of how long it took at actually use it?
Thanks in advance for any insight...
The difference is just how hard you scrap the bottom of the barrel.
The more resources you have, and the more efficiently you use FF, the better able you are to just keep scraping to get the lowest quality resources.
The less efficient energy users will just have to give up and starve before the more efficient ones will (per theory above). Both will starve in the end, but the more efficient ones will last longer and scrap more.
Hopes that helps,
Alan
Some people believe that oil prices cannot go to two hundred dollars due to demand destruction.I agree that such a price would lead to very severe economic shocks and quite possibly a major permanent economic retrenchment.
But speaking as a professionally trained farmer, it seems very likely to me that there are plenty of ways to burn two hundred dollar oil advantageously, given the alternatives.I would certainly rather buy diesel fuel for my equipment for six to ten dollars per gallon than to try to raise enough feed, and hire enough labor, to run our farm with horses and mules.It would be be MUCH cheaper to haul grain with a big truck and ten dollar diesel to the nearest rail siding than it would to haul it with a horse drawn wagon.
I would gladly pay ten dollars per gallon for gas for my chainsaw rather than resort to oiling up my the crosscut saws and axes and cutting firewood by hand the way my grandparents did when they were young.
There will still be an economy of some sort until we are either gone or until we regress to a prestone age level-there was a considerable trade in good stone for a long time before metals were discovered and put to use.
There will be a place for two hundred dollar oil in that economy.Just how much might be needed, and justified in terms of utility , at that price is not at all obvious-but we could run buses, farm machinery, and critically needed trucks , as well as manufacture lubricants, on two hundred dollar oil.Of this I am certain- there are at this time no cheaper alternatives, we would do it as a matter of absolute necessity.
I believe that two hundred dollar oil will be here within this decade,that the crybaby safety lobby will get kicked out its tender butt, and that we will be able to buy vehicles that will look like a hybrid between a large go cart and a well streamlined race car capable of hauling two people and groceries and getting well over a hundred mpg at less than the engineered in top speed of thirty five mph.
At that point of course electrics will also be truly competitive, at least for day to day driving.Charter buses will become VERY POPULAR and the primary means of getting from YOUR TOWN to the beach or the mountains, or to the football games and the the races.
I expect a populist government will tax air travel pretty much out of existence, if fuel prices alone don't bankrupt the airlines first.I personally intend to vote to clear the skies over rich folks contrails spoiling my view of the sky
Civilization ain't likely gonna come to an abrupt end in the next two or three decades, unless we draw a really bad hand and nuke it out. ;) or should that be :(
Or unless the greenhouse runs away a lot faster than anybody with serious climate credentials seems to think it will.:(
Your understanding approximates my own, especially since I spend last weekend with my chainsaw. And the wood splitter could be powered from the electric socket.
There was a very nice reverse trike (two wheels in front, one in back) that won an electric vehicle competition a few months back. That would do fine for most commuting if it didn't require a trike permit, which is even harder to get than motorcycle permit. Since it has conventional auto steering, and a conventional auto front suspension, you know it's going to act like a car.
But NO, it has three wheels, so it's a trike. It will only take one stroke of a pen to fix it, and a rail car of clue-by-fours to get the pen in position.
A more basic reason that oil prices can't get to (and stay at) that level is that alternatives already set an implicit cap on long term prices that's lower.
We'll never get to the point that cost of extraction rises much over one hundred per barrel (current dollars), because by that point synthesis is markedly cheaper. Of course synthesis requires expensive plants and a lot of external energy. We won't see it replacing extraction overnight. But methanol is already made and sold industrially at a price of something like $1.20 a gallon. Its Btu content per gallon is less than gasoline, but not that much less. If you had a vehicle equipped to run on methanol, you could today be filling up at a gasoline equivalent price of around $2.00 a gallon.
Today's bargain prices result from the current glut and undervaluation of natural gas relative to oil. Virtually 100% of industrial methanol made in the US starts with steam reforming of NG to make synthesis gas. From SG, one can make almost anything, but methanol is easiest and cheapest. And, yes, there's a substantial CO2 footprint for methanol -- and the various other GTL choices -- because the energy to drive the endothermic reaction for SG is supplied by partial combustion of the NG. That could be avoided by driving the reaction non-carbon electricity, but it would require a carbon tax to make it economically attractive.
I don't believe biofuels will ever take up a large share of the market at any energy price, for the reason that it competes with food. And already now we drain food inventories at roughly 9 years of 10. And 85 million mouths are added every year.
Did I say anything about biofuels? Biomass is one possible starting point for synthesis of liquid fuels, but not the only one. CO2 is also a perfectly feasible starting point. Hydrogen and CO2 make CO plus H2O; condense out the H2O, add more H2, and one has synthesis gas. From there, the whole world of organic synthesis opens up. The key is having enough non-carbon energy to make the necessary quantities of hydrogen.
The fate of the "fat tail" of the oil depletion curve that Chris alludes to in his last paragraph is what really drives the campaign of AGW denial. The longer that the transition to alternative energy sources and synthetic fuels can be delayed, the greater the revenue that oil companies will derive and the greater the value of the remaining fossil reserves to those who control them. The stakes are literally trillions of dollars for every year the transition can be delayed.
If I were the CEO of a major oil company and I were not funding a PR campaign to raise doubt about AGW and block the imposition of carbon taxes, then I would be breaching my fiduciary duty to stockholders. In our system, the duty of a corporate executive is not to the truth, the interest of the public, or the environment; it is to the financial benefit of the corporate stockholders. And where fossil fuels are concerned, the financial benefit of stockholders is unequivocally to ride the beast for as long as possible.
Problem solved then. All we have to do is add hydrogen to CO2. Why did I not think of that. Maybe because some of us have done the thermodynamics. Then it is not such a good idea.
BASF took a long hard look at such a process, as did the company I work for. A non-starter. The only viable process that can do this is photosynthesis and it has been evolved over billions opf years. Our genetic engineering friends or maybe fiends believe that somehow they will be able to tweeak the photo receptor antennae and make it function more productively.I wish them luck as there are no biological examples with which to work. Indeed were they to reduce the size of the antennae then they would quickly find that the current optimised antennae would rise supreme. It is called natural selection.
I recently atended a petrochemical seminar in which LNG, Methanol,XTL and others were presented. FT- XTL ia a boutique process at best. We were presented with a case that at $1-2 MMBTU it would be competitive with oil. Few in the audience beleived it. The capital costs are out of sight for GTL. Biomass is far, far worse. Apart from the capital cost there are the logistics. Just how are you going to find enough biomass for such a project. British Airways claim that they will take fuel from a BTL process which supposedly to be built in London, using free biomass. 500 kta of biomass to produce 50 kta of jet. This will be the most expensive jet fuel in the world. The capital cost will go off the clock. My guess is that it will remain a concept.
Do your homework. FT is extremely expensive, particularly when biomass is involved. The Germans used it, the South Africans used it, because they had to to. The Qataris are building GTL plants because they have too much money. It does not make sense to turn gas into fuels. As I pointed out to the presenter of GTL, turning 9 MMBTU into 6 MMBTU does not make sense. Far better turn NG into LNG or methanol; even methanol is dodgy because the best technology (Lurgi) consumes 30% of the gas in the process at best. 30MJ Nat Gas makes 1Kg of methanol with a HHV of 22.7 MJ or more realistically 20 MJ LHV. Moreover if we are to use methanol or ethanol as fuel then proper enegines designed to run on these fuels would be the best way forward to take advantage of the compression ratio and hence energy efficiency. http://www.lurgi.com/website/fileadmin/user_upload/1_PDF/1_Broshures_Fly...
Iceland looked at using a mix of CO and CO2 (from either a silicon steel electro-smelter or volcanic gases harvested from geothermal generation) combined with hydrogen from electrolysis of 100 C water (more effiicent at that temperature and hot water is cheap in Iceland).
9 out of 10 summers, Iceland spills about 150 MW of water (no demand), so seasonally, the electricity would be very cheap.
And use this methanol to operate part of their fishing fleet with.
Capital costs were too high a few years ago. I am not so sure that is true now.
Your thoughts ?
Alan
PS: The thermodynamics of CO are much better than CO2. I suggested separating the two or reacting only part of the available gas, assuming that CO would preferentially react..
Interesting concept but I bet it will never fly. Building a plant to capture volcanic gases would be a challenge in itself. Imagine the particulates which will not only be abrasive but laden with sulphur and other acidic species. Separating the CO from CO2 would also not be simple. I cannot immediately see a process. CO2 is normally removed by an amine stripper but whether it would leave the CO to pass through I am not so sure. One point to note is the purification steps would entail a lot of energy being consumed. CO when not used as syn gas is normally burned as a low BTU gas in refineries i.e FCC flue gas.
Then, realistically considering the potential and this becomes another boutique process. It would involve bespoke engineering to produce a relatively small amount of methanol, probably at 10X the cost what it could be bought for produced from NG.
As I said before I am not a fan of methanol as a fuel in an ICE or GT. It has a lot of baggage. The energy density is lousy. Why have a fuel containing 50% oxygen when you can get the oxygen for free from the air.
I know of fuel blenders blening methanol into EN228 gasoline to make it cheaper. But the amount blended is 1-2% max. China also practises methanol in gasoline blending. I am not keen on this approach because of the reactivity of lower alcohols with certain metals.Al, Mg to name but two.
The geothermal power plants evolve a fair amount of gases as well as steam. Quite a brew, from noble gases to H2S.
My first guess would be air liquification to separate the different components. If additional value could be derived from the other gases, this might work.
Far simpler is the exhaust for the specilaity steel foundry.
Alan
A more basic reason that oil prices can't get to (and stay at) that level is that alternatives already set an implicit cap on long term prices that's lower.
I have to disagree here. Most western countries give fuel tax exemptions to biofuels, such that the effective price they are competing against (retail fuel prices) is over $200 in Europe, yet biofuels ( to liquid fuel, not electricity) are virtually non existent, so no alternative there.
The non biofuel alternatives, of XtL,be it coal, NG or oil shale, can all be done, at enormous capital cost. But to scale them up to the point where they can displace a substantial portion, say half, the world's oil, is practically impossible.
So what I am saying is that even at $200 barrel, with all the alternatives in play, they won;t produce enough oil to depress the price to anything like $100 - it will only be at $200+ that they will remain in operation and produce significant amounts of fuel.
NG is not undervalued compared to oil - is simply worth less because it is not as versatile, and transportable (by ship). Once you go to the expense of liquefying it, it then trades at price not much less than crude oil.
I am a big fan of methanol as fuel - it has many advantages of gasoline and diesel, but it needs a systemic change to be adopted, which we are not going to see.
The whole conundrum is how to get alternatives to <$100/bbl oil - and the answer is, we can;t or not in any real quantity.
If a country is prepared to live with the results of $200 oil, then many alternatives are on the table. It is the economic restructuring to get there that is scary, and, currently, no government or politician is prepared to take that leap.
Who dares, wins.
If a country is prepared to live with the results of $200 oil, then many alternatives are on the table. It is the economic restructuring to get there that is scary, and, currently, no government or politician is prepared to take that leap.
I would argue that Denmark and Sweden are, although in different ways.
Best Hopes for more,
Alan
They are already there in terms of $200 oil, through taxes, but they certainly are not in terms of alternatives to replace oil. Their best alternatives are bikes and public transport, which are widely used, but otherwise they have not seen much of a rise of alternate motor fuels, which, I presume, are not taxed to the same extent.
Sweden does use a fair amount of ethanol, but most of this is actually imported, and it is still a small proportion of their oil use.
I would think Denmark, in particular, would be a good place for electric cars, but we'll see how they are adopted there.
They are already there in terms of $200 oil, through taxes
Very important point so often missed. If the market price of crude were $200 per barrel the revenue from the taxes would have to be forgone completely to hold the price to $200. Those taxes would have to be picked up elsewhere. The increased crude cost will come out of the economy somewhere, unless the value added to the economy per unit crude increases apace with the its increase in price.
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/983/bar1g.jpg
This graph has been done plenty of times, but I could not find one that would have only bars on it, so here is yet another incarnation. The numbers are not exact, but good enough. The left axis is in billion of barrels, the time axis in decades. The first in blue is discovery per decades, red is production, per decade. Numbers for 2010s, 2020s, 2030s are some sort of extrapolations, but for this argument it does not matter how accurate. The green is cumulative discovery, purple is cumulative production both scaled 10 times to fit on the graph. The difference between the two (green and purple) bars is approximation of oil in the ground in 2030s. That is the bottom of the barrel Alan is referring to. This also the oil BAU people refer to as "we never run out of oil". The second graph show cumulative discovery and production by decade. The difference between the two is oil in the ground at any given decade. Note, the graph goes from 1930s to 2030s, so 2010 is buried.
So not nearly all discovered oil will be produced, or if yes, over a very long time.
Edit: The numbers on the graph are glanced from the Oil & Gas Journal, Google apparently can extract some things from behind the paywall.
SR - IMHO you have grasped a key fact that most outside of TOD can't (won't) accept. I try to avoid getting drawn into the reserve number debate although there are time I just can't control my big mouth. Let's just use a hot new topic the last year or two: oil potential above the Arctic Circle. You're exactly right: it will be depleted over a period of X years. How that producion rate varies over time is another matter. IMHO it matters little if 1 billion bbls are produced from the play or 20 billion bbls. Let's assume it's really 20+ billion bbl of oil. First big question: when will the first big new oil field be discovered? My worthless WAG: 5 to 10 years. Consider that the first major oil discovery in the N Sea was made by the 93rd well drilled out there. Second big question: how long for this new field to be fully developed and producing it's max rate? My even more worthless WAG: add 4 to 6 years. Third big question: how long to put the first 50% of the new fields on production? My most absolutely worthless WAG: 30+ years.
Thus in my view of the future is going to be dominated by the above factors. If you don't already know I have a very dark view of how our "civilized" industrial economies will respond when the really bad effexts of PO kick in and stick. And IMHO how much oil may be recoverable from the Artic (or Deep Water Brazil for that matter) may be an interesting techical discussion but I don't feel time will allow such factors to be very important in the world we see develop in the next 20 years or so.
For this to occur the cost of making the equipment with higher efficiency must be negligible compared to the money saved by using less energy. For example, electric vehicles might be significantly more expensive to operate than gasoline powered vehicles causing a reduction in driving.
Another example, a refrigerator / freezer made in China that consumes 1 kW·hr / day but lasts only 10 years has minimal cost savings compared to one that consumes 2 kW·hr / day and lasts 20 years. Thus people will not purchase additional refrigerators / freezers because of a cost savings in electricity.
price of electricity: $.1 / kW·hr
Price of either refrigerator / freezer: $700
After 20 years, one must purchase two efficient units for a total cost of: $700 + $700 + 20 yr * (365.24 days / yr) * (1 kW·hr / day) * $.1 / kW·hr = $2,130
After 20 years the inefficient unit costs: $700 + 20 yr * (365.24 days / yr) * (2 kW·hr / day) * $.1 / kW·hr = $2,161
I think the statement is too simple to encapsulate the many variables.
Lots of folks have raised various reasonable objections to what Euan is saying; but I believe the proper way to interpret his argument is as an intellectual exercise with it understood that the ground rules being that the many possible variables outside the immediate argument are held the same;ceretus parabus.
I can't speak for him of course, but I am sure he would agree that there are many possible combinations of circumstances wherein his argument remains valid, but that the expected results would be obscured by noise introduced on the grand scale by politics, fiscal monkeybusiness, war, unexpectedly fast depletion of oil, etc, or other large scale factors singly or in combination.
OFM
I would still like to be sure that Euan's argument does not obscure the debate, particularly with regards to dangers from climate change. JM Greer quotes an insurance industry study of trends that suggests damage from 'weather' will increase to (hypothetically of course) use up global GDP in just repairing and maintaining our physical systems by 2060. Well, not going to happen; enough falls off the plank well before any such scenario could be reached, but it illustrates a point perhaps?
I think also the way we discuss 'efficiency' is based on previous thinking: the term has not been defined sufficiently IMHO to be useful in enough future scenarios. Yes, world 'output' of 'utilized power' (kW kinetic) from coal just about doubled every 10 years in the 19thC from 1840 to 1900, while utilized power from each tonne of coal increased 3 - 4 times over that 60 years. (Henry Adams, 1838-1918, quoted by J.Martinez-Alier in Rethinking Environmental History, 2007). But the industrialized world in those days was tiny (compared with the energy resource), and not remotely comparable with our extraordinary world that still expects to double its economic activity, again, within the next short decades.
phil
It depends, very much, on what tradeoffs you make to get that efficiency (thus my earlier remark). Bicycles cost very little, next to cars. Same for electric bicycles. Carpooling costs convenience, not money. One way to make a refrigerator more efficient, is simply to move its coils a little further from the box, and encase the box in insulation, plenty-enough.
Or if you turn down your thermostat, wear a sweater, or fleece tights. There's this assumption that lifestyles will not change even one single bit, and I think that is mistaken; minor changes can save a lot of money and energy, given moderately expensive energy.
If one improves efficiency by replacing an automobile with a bicycle, people will not travel farther on the bicycle because it is slower, requires more effort to propel, works poorly in inclement weather and carries less cargo. A bicycle reduces productivity as it reduces cost.
BAH! I'm beginning to get really tired of this kind of 'whiny, can't do, won't work, etc... attitude'. It's pure BS! This is a sign of being both mentally and physically lazy. People who think like this need to be ridiculed and ostracized and heavily taxed for their wasteful use of energy and their large CO2 footprints.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7406#comment-764795
We also need a lot more more people like this in the world!
http://www.trailspace.com/forums/paddling/topics/84496.html
Kayaker, 64, completes marathon paddle across Atlantic
I used a bicycle, motorcycle (45 miles/gallon of gasoline) and occasionally a car to travel a 14 mile round trip to work 20 years ago. I have and continue to use the same bicycle to travel 15 miles though mountainous terrain (dirt, gravel and paved highway) to pick up the mail. I know exactly what I am talking about in the real world. It takes more time to travel on the bicycle and more time to repair the bicycle because it is less reliable than my vehicle. When it breaks down, I can carry it to my destination although at the expense of additional time. I can not use the bicycle when the weather is too hot, too cold, too windy, rainy and snowy. You are laughable to pretend that I could pull 1,500 pounds of cargo up several 5% slopes over a 20 mile journey. My pickup does it. My bicycle can not. Urbanits will perish without rural folks growing and delivering their food. Todays cities do not exist without significant external support that can not be provided by bicycles.
A bicycle reduces productivity as it reduces cost.
Not at all !
People that bicycle to work live an average of ten years longer than those that do not. Not only longer, but healthier years as well.
Does anyone have data on sick days for bicyclists vs. control population ?
Best Hopes for Systems Thinking,
Alan
I believe the fundamental assertions of this piece are worth disputing...
The rhetorical sleight of hand is the bit about price. Allow me to offer a thought experiment that counters the sleight of hand.
Let's suppose that there are X units of fossil fuel in the ground, and it takes Y units of energy to produce them and turn them into energy services. This leaves (X-Y) units for energy services, which I'll call S. Altogether though, both Y an S are consumed, and thus X units of fossil fuel are consumed, either to produce more fossil fuel or to provide energy services.
The price of energy is affected by the relative size of Y and S. If Y is larger and S is smaller, then prices will be higher due to lower supply, and fewer people will afford the benefits of S. Conversely, more people will probably afford S if it is bigger. 'Achieving higher efficiency' is a way of making S bigger and Y smaller. Doing this effectively increases supply of energy services, allowing more people to benefit from them at a lower price than if the energy were only affordable to a few. More efficiency leads to more egalitarianism of energy consumption.
However, whatever carbon emissions are associated with X units of fossil fuel are unaffected by the size of Y and S. The only thing that efficiency of production and consumption affect is how much people benefit from the use of X amount of energy (both how many people benefit, and how much each individual benefits).
----
To be clear, I don't subscribe to such complete fatalism about the ultimate fate of fossil fuels. In my opinion, we have another option, which is stop using fossil fuel for anything except building a new infrastructure that can deliver energy without producing CO2, and to switch over to such an infrastructure as fast as can be done. And also, rates of consumption do matter, and are affected by efficiency as well as energy investments in carbon-free energy.
X is the amount of oil in the ground, but it is not the amount of oil that can be extracted at $90.
Efficiency IE buying a new vehicle, which does double the miles allows people to pay double the price for petrol. The oil company can now look for oil which costs $180 dollars a barrel, so the proportion of X they can extract is now much higher.
The most fuel efficient vehicles such as a 1.1 litre Ford fiesta cost far less than a F150, so it is obvious that efficiency allows far more oil to be extracted. Hard to get to fields but tertiary extraction methods become viable, the question is more to do with rates however.
Since most of the worlds oil is viable at less than $60 barrel eventually the decline rates in these fields will be greater than what comes on from expensive oil.
Only moving to nuclear and renewables at a cheaper price will we leave oil in the ground.
"double the miles (mpg?) allows people to pay double the price for petrol."
This is the extrapolation which made me largely ignore most of this debate. It's logic is as strained as that of the constant application of Jeavons Paradox. Too many other factor will clearly be in play, including the fact that with a Gas price doubling, both consumer behavior will be directly affected (along with the economy), and then there will be new balances as other options gain an economic advantage against this price rise.
'That can-opener conclusion was so good, let's imagine we have TWO can openers!' ('but Paul, we only have one can of food to open..')
X is the amount of oil that can be extracted at an energy profit. Some of it will be extracted at $90, and some of it will be extracted at $10. If more efficient means are used (either for production or consumption) then more will be extracted at $10, and more of it will be delivered to consumers. But there is no logical reason to believe that this affects the overall amount of oil extracted. It is more logical to believe that what it affects is mainly the amount of energy services delivered to consumers.
What you are saying is that if the efficiency of consumption is greater then the efficiency of production can be less, with consumers benefiting the same. This would be an interior shift in the nature of Y, but not change the value of X,Y, or S.
In the short term, efficiency of consumption actually has the opposite effect as what Chris is saying. Efficiency lowers demand, thus lowering the price at which oil can be brought to market. It has the effect of slowing down the rate of consumption, thus causing energy companies to hold off producing more expensive resources. In the long term, this is offset by the 'rebound effect', by which lower prices allow additional consumers to start consuming what was being saved by efficiency. Supposedly (although in the real world this is debatable) the rebound effect, after some time, brings consumption right back to where it would have been had the efficiency measures not been brought into place.
Euan and Chris are saying that efficiency affects the size of the resource that is ultimately recovered. I say they are wrong: The size of the resource that will ultimately be recovered is that portion of the resource that can be produced at an energy profit. Efficiency of consumption has nothing to do with it. Efficiency of production does have something to do with it. However, I think that in the real world we have reached something close to the maximum thermodymanic limits of production efficiency. This means the practical and theoretical meaning of 'can be produced at an energy profit' are close enough.
If the message here is that efficiency measures on the consumption size are going to increase the size of resource that is produced, I think that message is pretty much wrong and misleading.
(Keep in mind this is also all thought experiments, both Chris' piece and my comment. In the real world, the existence and size of the 'rebound effect' can be hotly debated with all kinds of empirical data, especially with respect to the downside of resource production curves. And, one might add, the speed of the rebound effect is just as important.)
There are two hypothetical paths forward.
An inefficient world will collapse before an efficient one, but both will collapse and die-off. The efficient world will leave SLIGHTLY more CO2 in the atmosphere since it lasted longer and scraped the bottom of the barrel a little harder.
Another hypothetical world will find non-FF alternatives for energy (my emphasis by the way) and will divert FF into non-combustion uses. Mainly plastics but also lubricants. Many plastics have very long half-lives (does PVC degrade if not exposed to sunlight ?) and thus oil, natural gas and coal need not contribute to GHG but to landfills and debris embedded in sediments.
In future centuries and millennium, this drive for non-combustion uses could push extraction of FF in future centuries well past the net energy loss point if demand does not shift towards bio-synthetics.
It is an open question if an enduring industrial civilization will increase or decades GHG. It is certainly possible for them to actively reduce GHG (control methane with far fewer cows, no CFCs, SF6 etc.) and net capture of carbon (trees and then suing the lumber for very long lasting uses).
Thus my focus on diverting transportation to oil free uses. Bicycling instead of Prius, renewable electricity trains instead of natural gas trucks, renewable powered urban rail instead of more Prius, etc.
Best Hopes,
Alan
Thanks Alan, I basically agree with everything you said.
I find plausible the idea that a more efficient civilization might last a little longer, and therefore use slightly more FFs. However, if the issue is that civilization is going to collapse, I think this barely matters. Moreover, this seems to barely relate to Euan and Chris' idea regarding how efficiency increases CO2 emissions. They are obsessed with a narrow focus on the rebound effect that misrepresents the way efficiency efforts relate to the climate change issue.
We need to switch everything to non-carbon sources of energy as much and as quickly as we can (and I'd add, even if we use some FFs to get us there.)
Firstly I have in mind the fact that China is increasing it's comsumption of oil by nearly one million barrels a day each year.
Also oil production of all kinds will be flat in the next few years, since there will not be enough oil for everyone, the price will go up.
If the U.S. becomes more fuel efficient year by year, this will release oil for others to use and the price will not go up as much.
X is not just determined by energy return but also by price, a field which has a billion barrels at a cost of $60 per barrel has a high eroei, which the cost reflects.
Another field may have the same amount of oil but none of it is extractable at that cost, however at $120 it is profitable. How does a person with the same income afford the latter?
Well a friend of mine could not afford to run his big car at current prices, so he bought a smaller car which does almost twice the mpg. Now he can afford the higher prices and more.
So efficiency of use does bring on oil which was previously a financial loss.
Yes, this is one type of 'rebound' effect. To repeat though, rebound effects are a) time delayed, which effects the rate at which we increase C02 in the atmosphere, and b) hotly debated, regarding under what circumstances, if any, they increase total energy use above what it would have been without efficiency measures.
This is a key point. I'm not sure it follows that we will recover all the resource that can be done so at an energy profit. For example, what if a process returns five barrels of oil for every one consumed - but is so complex and costly, that the resulting net four barrels cost $1000 each. With today's use-efficiency that resource would stay in the ground never to be exploited. But with a dramatically improved use-efficiency, we may be able to afford $1000 oil as today we can afford $100.
Is it possible for resource to be produced at an energy profit - yet be unaffordable? I would say yes. Consider the Canadian tar sands a few decades ago, we couldn't then afford the dollar cost of extraction even though they are energy positive.
$1000 oil
In a few years with battery technology improving, the average driver in a petrol/electric vehicle could do 90% of their driving on electric. A full tank of petrol could last some people a year with out refilling, so it is not out of the realms of possibility. Much of the freight today would have to go to rail, otherwise this will be a major inflation driver.
There are not many options with air transport and I think that will shrink over time, but if the government did it right the expanded the rail system it could take up all the jobs lost by the airlines.
the average driver in a petrol/electric vehicle could do 90% of their driving on electric.
Only in average weather.
Air conditioning is another major power drain, but cold weather will be worse. Significantly reduced battery capacity, a power drain to heat the car, more hours requiring head lights. Increased rolling friction with snow on the road and even more weight inside car (heavy winter coat).
A Chevy Volt may make only a dozen miles on electricity in Minneapolis on a day similar to today.
Alan
I have always wondered just how minutes of battery power used to create resistance heat and air circulation needed to keep the vehicle windows clear (and maybe keep ice from forming on the ceiling) in a small car carrying a couple warm water vapor exhaling passengers when its -10 or -20F translates to miles of travel range lost?
I'm not even talking about powering headlights or keeping the cabin above long john, hat and mitten temperature. I'm guessing in the far north the ice outside will necessitate using ICE under the hood of small transport for quite sometime. If it wants to keep rolling MinniePaul needs viable mass transit much more than it imagines.
If you try to guestimate the power output of heater in the car (that comes obviously from engine heat), I'd venture that at full blast it feels like one to two hairdryers. So 1.5-3kW for the heat that will keep you warm at -20.
Keeping the windshield unfrozen is actually question of keeping moist air away, you can use cold air. So when people sit down in cold cars, they "hold breath" and breathe out gently and down, not to let frost form. Once you get frost, to get rid of it you either scrape it (we are talking inside), or wait for heat. But you can drive with perfectly clean windshield with cold air blasting on it (and breathing gently). Obviously no air recirculation...worked at -16F this morning
I've driven a 67 VW bug (air cooled rear engine that never warmed the heat ducts its fed) at -30 F and used a sock full of rock salt to keep a section of the flat windshield clear that was a little bigger than the size my hand at best. The road was white with blowing snow, the frost was white on the windshield. I navigated from plowed berm to plowed berm, like a billiard ball bouncing between the rails, on my daily dark morning run to the sawmill on empty Michigan Hwy 28. I don't think I'd liked to have tried that trick in traffic.
Believe me the system will have to require less effort than you describe to keep eight lanes of cold weather commuter traffic rolling. I'm not saying it can't be done but I've yet to seen any studies on what demands heat and air circ put on electric rigs at really frosty temps. A couple guys run pickups up here (Alaska) that have been converted to fully electric but they have a fair sized lead acid battery payload for power storage.
One Light Rail line open (Hiawatha 12 miles), Another under construction (Central 11 miles but a couple of miles shared with Hiawatha) and at least one more planned. Plus one commuter rail line (Northstar).
Not nearly enough but a good base to start from.
Alan
And talk radio telling the commuters what an inefficient waste of energy and money the transit system is (got that from a dedicated St. Paul listener I know). Its an uphill battle Alan but I'm glad to know a guy with your grit is in the fight.
We also have a very good bus system up here in the frozen twin cities.
One thing I would like to see is heated stations for the light rail. Having the stations at 30-40F would make waiting much more bearable, and would increase ridership (right now they are open, unheated platforms).
And yes, talk radio does inform us daily that the light rail and busses are a commie plot that will destroy our economy and have us living in igloos before long.
Battery technology will have to improve, but in UK the average commute is 12 miles round trip, so the volt could already cope with most peoples average daily drive.
Don't hold your breath for major improvements in battery technology any time soon. Hitachi are working on their 4th generation cells that may be "upto" 50% higher power density. That's probably a while off though.
A lot of battery research is in improving the life and recharge/discharge rate.
And of course, the latest high-power cells will have an appropriate price tag.
There is a very basic thermochemical limitation to the energy density. First, when using hydrocarbons, we carry only the hydrocarbon, and the other reactant, oxygen comes from the air. Marginally it takes 48 grams of oxygen for 14 grams of hydrocarbon: "CH2 (14g) + 3O(48g) -> CO2 + H20". So if we had to lug oxygen with us, the power density would change 4-fold. (14g vs 62g for same amount of energy, never mind technical issues with oxygen storage. If we carry air, its another factor of 5 for nitrogen...)
Same story happens with lithium battery. Lithium with its huge electrostatic potential is good. The problem is that the mass (required by chemistry of the reaction) of both electrodes kills the power density. The Li-battery must carry with itself the other reactants for electrochemical reaction. And these reactants are heavy atoms or large molecules. Here is the pickle.
Wikipedia lists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery a few example of electrodes, and each and every one of them has at least one metal and a few non-metal atoms on both ends of reaction. So the hydrocarbon ratio 14 to 62 (see above) turns into 7 (Li only) to 151 (LiFePO4) for one of the examples in the table. These are ballparks because the energy (potential) differs between various electrodes (It is nice to be able to say that energy and potential are the same.... The scientists/engineers will forgive, for non-technical purposes here they are the same).
When we correct energy density of "raw" gasoline (45MJ/kg) by adding oxygen (goes down by a factor of 14/62 to maybe 10 MJ/kg), we are still roughly 20 times higher that Li-ion - 150Wh/kg -> 0.5 MJ/kg.
That makes the point very clearly, thanks Canuck.
It takes me back to the 'BumperCars/SlotCars' scenario, where you use vehicles that don't carry the power, but pick it up along the way.
Not too practical in many ways, but the improvement in reducing the mass to be moved would aggregate into a much less energy intense system..(while running all that wire would be the compensating expense..tho, like many renewables it would be high in investment but possibly much lower in operating expense..) maybe it would be just a few major roads, and cars would have a 'couple miles' of battery range to fill in the gaps..
I don't think this is realistic. In essence, the main reason that oil would cost more is that its EROEI would go down (i.e. that it would take more than one barrel to bring five to market).
You can't focus on efficiency allowing the consumer to pay a higher price while ignoring the fact that it also drives down demand, thus lowering the price again. Since you've expressly avoided referring to real world numbers, you should refrain from drawing conclusions about the relative effect of these two counter-phenomena.
I would assert that if it is possible to produce a resource at an energy profit, it is likely to be affordable to someone, at some point. If we are concerned about the ultimate levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, that is quite relevant.
I think this is incorrect. It's not that no one could afford it: if it had been the only option available, some people would have been able to pay. It's just that they weren't economically competitive with oil resources that were cheaper to produce. They are certainly 'affordable' now. But that's not due to efficiency, it's due to the fact that cheaper-to-produce resources are in lower supply. This would have happened without any improvements in efficiency (at least at the consumer end).
You can't focus on efficiency allowing the consumer to pay a higher price while ignoring the fact that it also drives down demand, thus lowering the price again. Since you've expressly avoided referring to real world numbers, you should refrain from drawing conclusions about the relative effect of these two counter-phenomena.
This would be true a few years ago, however India and China have in just the last few years become sizable oil importers, to the degree that changes the whole global balance.
In the States, the vehicle numbers are relatively flat, with about the same number of new cars coming on the roads as being crushed. So if the new cars are much more efficient, then total oil imports would go down year by year.
This would depress prices previously, however, as I said, there are now two new big players three (not forgetting massive rise of OPEC consumption).
Therefore what would have been excess oil is being readily taken up by China, India and OPEC with all their extra vehicles. China’s fleet is very young and there is little scrappage of old cars.
China sold around 18 million vehicles last year!! in 2003 it sold only about 5 million, so it is essential to understand this dynamic change.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870485840457613363233759229...
If there is any fall in price, it would last only a month or so. 1.5 million extra vehicles on china’s roads in a month, use quite a lot of fuel.
Also the efficiency of a vehicle makes lower EROEI oil available to more people, a vehicle which does 20mpg using oil of EROEI 10 is the same cost as one doing 40mpg with oil at EROEI 5.
One of the best selling vans in china has a 0.8 litre, diesel engine.
I think many people in the States will just puzzle, why they are getting poorer and the Chinese are getting richer. In most of Europe we pay around $7.00 a U.S. gallon which is the equivalent to $250 a barrel of oil. Many people in the states will struggle in the coming years, because your tax system has not protected you from reckless overconsumption.
Basically I agree with Euean comments; it is another version of Jevons Paradox - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox. As we derive more energy efficient methods we will consume more energy and hence emit more CO2 emissions.
The hidden effect is the EROEI.Future oil supplies will have an EROEI much lower than currently. If we look at the current conventional oil production of 74 million barrels/ day and an EROEI of say 18:1 then about 4 million barrels of the oil production are consummed in the production process. Oil refining will take another 5-6 million barrels per day. This leaves a net oil for the market of roughly 64 of the 74 million barrels per day of conventional oil.
If we consider the Heavy oil processing then the EROEI is more like 4:1 with a corresponding 4+ x Co2 emissions than conventional oil. The refining process will be similarly more energy intnsive as the bitumen upgrading will ncessitate botton of the barrel type conversion methods and intensive hydroprocessingand/or carbon rejection
Fast rorward to 2020 when we will be consumming- if we can get it- something like 100 million barrels per day. How this mix of supply will be made up can only be guessed at but one thing for sure is the the EROEI on the total will be much worse than currently. How much the convential oil can be expanded is open to debate. I certainly remain sceptical about the Middle East expanding production significantly and one thing is certain is that ocal consumption will increase dramaitically and oil exports will decline. The large amopunt of refining cpacity being installed in the Middle East will ensure this.
We will therefore be dependent on more expensive and lower EROEI sources of oil possibly those with an EROEI of 10:1 average. Using this example an aiming for 64 million barrels per day net oil to the market this would require around 78 million barrels of coonventional oil - +4 million b/d to stand still.
Look at the Chinese case of growth of about 1 million b/d in consumption. Most of this oil growth has come from imports, particularly from the ME, and both Aramco and KPC are building or have built refineries in China. That demand growth has hitherto been built on high EROEI oil imports. Were that demand growth to continue until 2020 then the Chinesse oil demand will be something like 18-20 million b/d of which 14-16 million b/d will be imported. Something like 10 million b/d will; have to be "found" most of which will from lower EROEI reserves = more CO2 to the atmosphere. Probably at least 1 million barrels of that 10 million barrels will be used for production.
Thus though energy saving measures may reduce the energy emissions due to transportation and possibly power consumption the total Carbon emissions are likley to continue to rise, and energy efficiency measures will allow the developement of lower EROEI resources for a while at least. Biofuels are never likley to be viable.
The real problem lies with Homo Philoprogenitus whose numbers are rising exponentially. On this topic our politicians have universally failed us. Mankind's long term survival will ultimately depends on using the resources created by the solar flux wisely. So far this has been a spectacular failure.
Your comment can be read as one giant contradiction: lower EROEI is lower efficiency.