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Will the decline in world oil supply be fast or slow?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on April 18, 2011 - 11:15am
An Oil Drum reader wrote, asking the following question:
Dear Oil Drum Editors,
I have been reading quite a bit about peak oil recently. I get the impression (not based on data) that at some point there will be a quite steep decline in oil production/supply, and therefore we will see dramatic changes in how the world runs. However, when I look at oil depletion rates and oil production declines based on the Hubbert Curve, it seems to suggest a rather smooth decline. How is that some people expect a serious energy crunch in about two or three years, then?
Many thanks! --Curious Reader
Below the fold is my answer to him.
Dear Curious,
It seems to me that
(1) A slow decline assumes that the only issue is geological decline in oil supply, and the economy and everything else can go on as usual. Technological advances and switches to alternatives might also be expected to help keep supply up.
(2) A fast decline can be expected if one or more adverse factors make oil supply decline faster than geological factors would suggest. These might include:
(a) Liebig's Law of the Minimum - some necessary element for production, such as political stability, or adequate food for the population, or adequate financial stability, is missing or
(b) Declining Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) interferes with the functioning of society, so the society generates too little net energy, and economic problems ensue, or
(c) Oil becomes so high priced that there is little demand for it. This would quite likely be related to declining EROEI.
My view is that some version of the faster decline scenario is likely, because we will hit limits that interfere with oil production or oil demand.
Let me explain my reasoning.
Declining EROEI
EROEI means Energy Returned on Energy Invested. It can be defined as the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource. Wikipedia says,
When the EROEI of a resource is equal to or lower than 1, that energy source becomes an "energy sink", and can no longer be used as a primary source of energy.
The situation is really worse than Wikipedia suggests. An economy needs a certain level of energy just to keep its infrastructure (roads, bridges, schools, medical system, etc.) repaired and working, and citizens educated. So energy resources, to really be useful, need an EROEI significantly higher than 1 to maintain the system at its current level of functioning.
How much higher than 1.0 the EROEI needs to be on average will depend on the economy. An economy such as that of China, with relatively fewer paved roads and less expensive schools and healthcare system can probably get along with a much average lower EROEI (perhaps 4.0?) than an economy like the United States (perhaps 8.0), because of lesser infrastructure demands.
If the average EROEI available to society is falling because oil is becoming more and more difficult to extract, an economy with a high standard of living such as the US would seem likely to be affected before an economy with a lower standard of living, such as China or India or Bangladesh, because of the higher EROEI needs of the more extensive infrastructure. Ultimately, though, the world is one economy, so problems in one country are likely to affect the economies of other countries as well.
There a couple of issues related to declining EROEI:
1. High cost to extract. Sources of oil or natural gas or coal that are difficult (high cost) to extract tend to be lower in EROEI than sources that are low cost to extract. So high cost of extraction tends to be a marker for low EROEI. We are increasingly running into this issue, for both oil and natural gas.
2. Declining Net Energy. EROEI is closely related to "Net Energy," which is the amount of usable energy that is left after deducting the energy that it takes to make energy. When net energy decreases, we have less energy to run society, making it difficult to do things like maintain bridges and roads, and fund schools.
So high cost of oil extraction, low net energy, and low EROEI are all very closely related.
What did M. King Hubbert Say?
M. King Hubbert in various papers such as these (1956, 1962, 1976) talked about a world in which other fuels took over, long before fossil fuels encountered problems with short supply.
In such a world, there would be plenty of net energy from alternative fuels to run society. Because of this, even if fossil fuels ran low, it would be easy to maintain the economy's infrastructure, without disruption. In Hubbert's 1962 paper, Energy Resources - A Report to the Committee on Natural Resources, Hubbert writes about the possibility of having so much cheap energy that it would be possible to essentially reverse combustion--combine lots of energy, plus carbon dioxide and water, to produce new types of fuel plus water. If we could do this, we could solve many of the world's problems--fix our high CO2 levels, produce lots of fuel for our current vehicles, and even desalinate water, without fossil fuels.
He also showed this figure in his 1956 paper:
In this figure, most of the additional energy comes from nuclear energy, while a smaller amount comes from "solar" energy. By solar energy, Hubbert would seem to mean solar, wind, tidal, wood, biofuels, and other energy we get on a day-to-day basis, indirectly from the sun. His figure seems to suggest that solar energy would basically act as a fossil fuel extender, and would not last beyond the time fossil fuels last. The primary long-term source of energy would be nuclear.
In such a world, applying Hubbert's Curve to world oil supply would make perfect sense, because there would be plenty of other energy, to provide the energy needed to keep up the infrastructure needed to main extraction of oil, gas, and other fuels as long as they were available. Even liquid fuels and pollution wouldn't be a problem, if they could be manufactured synthetically. The carrying capacity of the world for food would eventually be a factor, but in one scenario in his 1976 paper, he shows the possibility of world population eventually reaching 15 billion people, thanks to the availability of other fuels.
Another Approach to Forecasting Future Oil Supply: Limits to Growth Type Modeling
Another approach estimating the shape of the decline curve is by applying modeling techniques, such as used in the 1972 book Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows et al. The factors considered in this model were population, food per capita, industrial output, pollution, and resources. Resources were modeled in total, not oil separately from other types of resources. There were 24 scenarios run. The base scenario suggested that the world would start hitting resource limits about now (plus or minus 10 or 20 years). There have been several analyses regarding how this model is faring, and the conclusion seems to be that it is more or less on track. This is a link to such an analysis by Charles Hall and John Day.
With this type of model, according to Limits to Growth (p. 142), "The basic mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse." This type of decline would seem to be substantially faster than the decline predicted by the Hubbert Curve.
One thing I notice about the Limits to Growth model is that it leaves out our debt-based financial system. Since so much capital is borrowed in today's world, it seems like including such a variable would tend to make the system even more "brittle", and perhaps move up the date when collapse occurs.
Also, the Limits to Growth model is for the world as a whole, rather than for different parts of the world. Different areas of the world can be expected to be affected differently, as oil gets in shorter supply. The effect of this would seem to be to push economies which have a higher need for oil (illustrated above with my estimate that the US requires a EROEI of 8.0 on energy resources) down toward economies that use smaller amounts of oil (illustrated by my rough guess that perhaps China could get by with an EROEI of 4.0), especially if they trade with each other. I explain how I see this happening in a later section of this post.
Demand for Oil (or other Fossil Fuels)
Even if there is plenty of high-priced oil extracted from the ground, if potential buyers cannot afford it, there can be a problem, leading to a decline in oil production. Demand can be thought of as the willingness and ability to purchase oil products. Many people would like to have gasoline for their cars, but if they are unemployed, or have a part-time minimum wage job, they are likely not to have enough money to buy very much.
Over the long term, declining demand can be expected because of declining EROEI, as illustrated by Prof. Charles Hall's "Cheese Slicer" model.
Declining demand, and ultimately lack of sufficient demand to support supply, is related to the much larger size of the big black "energy needed to create energy" arrow as resources become more and more difficult to extract, and the much smaller size of the red discretionary spending arrows. When the discretionary spending arrows are small, people can't afford the oil that is produced.
Lack of Demand Can Be Expected to Affect the More-Developed World before the Less-Developed World
Let me explain one way I see lack of demand for oil arising in the developed world today. This is related to the tendency of economies with high required EROEI to maintain infrastructure to be the first economies to be affected by declining EROEI, and by the tendency of free trade to lead to equalization among economies.
US energy consumption in general, and oil consumption in particular, has been relatively flat in the 2000-2009 period, and declining at the end of that period, indicating low demand. Prior to this period, it was rising.
More or less the reverse has happened in China and India. Growth in oil use and energy products in general was moderate prior to 2000, but increased rapidly after 2000.
When we look at the percentage of the US population that is employed (Figure 9), it has been decreasing since 2000, so there are fewer people earning wages, and thus able to buy oil and other products. Prior to 2000, the percentage of the US population working was increasing.
In fact, over time, in the US, there is a high correlation between number of people employed and amount of oil consumed.
This high correlation is not surprising for two reasons: (1) jobs very often involve often use oil in producing or shipping goods, and because (2) people who are earning a salary can afford to buy goods and services that use oil.
If we think about it, businesses employing people in China and India have three cost advantages over businesses employing people in the US:
1. People in China and India earn less, in large part because their life styles use less oil. As the price of oil has rises, a person would expect this difference to become greater, if salaries of US earners are raised over time, to reflect the higher cost of oil, as it rises. If the living standards in China increase, the salary differential could decline, but still might be very high in dollar terms.
2. The cost of electricity used in manufacturing in China and India is cheaper, because it is generally coal-based. The cost of electricity from coal is quite likely even cheaper than electricity from coal from the United States, because these countries are more likely to have poor pollution controls, and because the coal is extracted using cheap labor. The difference in the cost of electricity can be expected to become greater, to the extent the US imposes stricter pollution regulations, or switches to higher priced alternative power (say, offshore wind), or imposes a carbon tax.
3. Taxes and employee benefits are likely to be lower (in absolute dollars, but perhaps as a percentage as well) in China or India, because infrastructure is less complex, and because there is less in the way benefits comparable to Social Security, Medicare, etc. (This is related to the lower EROEI required to maintain the infrastructure in these countries.)
With these advantages, as trade restrictions are eased and more "free" trade of services is enabled through the Internet, I would expect an increasing number of jobs to move overseas, and more goods and services to be imported. Salaries will also tend to stay lower in the US, especially for jobs associated to goods and services that can be produced more cheaply in China or India.
With these lower salaries in the US, demand for oil in the US will tend to be lower, because people who are paid less (or out of work) will not be able to afford high-priced oil for vacations and other optional purchases. As more US jobs move overseas, unemployment and recession can be expected to increasingly become problems. Furthermore, it will become difficult to collect enough taxes from the lower number of employed people to pay enough taxes to keep the system operating. I write about this in What's Behind the US' Budget Problems?
One thing that happens, too, with this arrangement is that world's coal use has risen.
I wonder if all of the emphasis on CO2 reduction has not exacerbated the problem. Countries that reduce their own coal use and instead rely more on imports can feel virtuous, but they also set the stage for negative impacts. By using less coal, these countries leave more coal for lesser developed countries to import. These lesser developed countries probably burn it less safely (for example, with less mercury controls) and compete with them for jobs. The developed countries can be expected to have more and more budget problems, as their tax bases erode, and the number of unemployed rises.
When new electricity generation is planned in the United States, the usual practice is to compare expected costs with other types of new electricity generation that might be possible in the United States. It seems to me that this practice does not show the full picture. Goods and services produced in the United States will have to compete with goods and services produced around the world. Some of the electricity used will be from nuclear plants that have long been paid off; some will be from coal production; and a little will be from high priced new types of electricity production. As long as there are no tariffs or other trade restrictions, higher-priced US electricity will tend to hinder exports and help imports. I would vote for trade restrictions.
Conclusion
The downslope of oil production can be expected to reflect a combination of different impacts. Unless technology improvements truly have a huge impact, it would seem to me that the overall direction of the downslope is likely to be faster than Hubbert's Curve would predict.
Thanks for writing!
Best Regards,
Gail Tverberg (also known as Gail the Actuary)
File: Beyond Hubbert Presentation from the 3rd Biophysical Economics Conference, April 15-16.
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Precisely one mention of political stability as a factor in the future oil supply.
I think we can see in the Middle East right now, that political instability can lead to stair-step reductions in the oil supply, and these are likely to provide very rapid positive feedback.
For example - Rebellion starts in Libya, Rebels quickly gain control of eastern oil fields. Western propped dictator dropped like hot potato. Dictator proves stronger than expected. Western alliance starts bombing tanks. Rebels start selling oil.
Dictator changes tactics. Blows up pipelines in Eastern oil fields. Oil production falls to zero. Political and military stalemate.
Global production falls by 2% in 2 months.
Rinse and repeat. Once we become desperate for oil, we will interfere militarily. It will cause rapid collapse of the oil supply.
I agree. Political stability is a big issue. It is tied to having adequate food for everyone, and with food prices rising (in part, because oil prices are rising), this is becoming an increasing large issue.
Or maybe it's in the oil importer's best interest not to interfere. If the people in charge are willing to oppress their own people to export the most oil because they don't care about anything but lining their own pockets, why in-source the dirty work? Maybe the rest of the world will just let the feudal lords of Oilvania have their feifs as long as they keep selling off the oil.
Then when it's all gone, they and their cronies can take their money and flee the depleted country retaining their dough.
Gail, thanks for an excellent post. You are a bit pessimistic but I am even more pessimistic. I think the downslope will be higher than even most peak oilers anticipate. And it will be jerky, not smooth at all.
The reasons are, I think, very obvious. First it is likely that there will be even more unrest in Africa and the Middle East than we are seeing right now. As people's living standards go down you will see far more rioting and unrest among the disenfranchised people. Destroying pipelines and other parts of the oil infrastructure will be just too easy for those who blame the more wealthy for their plight. The situation in Nigeria will get worse and spread to other oil producing nations.
Then there will be the problem of hording. I know some people say nations like Saudi Arabia cannot possibly hoard their oil because they must have the income to buy food. This is true but if the price is high enough they just don't have to produce as much oil as they have been. They could cut their exports in half and still have enough money to buy food, especially if the price is higher. And they are likely to be far more worried about their future than they are our present. They just won't care what their lack of production is doing to the world.
Then the decline percentage is likely to decline. In Mexico and the North sea the decline was only a few percent right after the peak but then it increased to between 6 and 9 percent after only a few years.
Of course there is the EROEI problem you write about above.
Then there is the shark fin phenomenon, not just that one caused by EROEI decline but caused by the use of "super straws" that are currently so popular by Saudi and all countries that have giant fields. That is they use horizontal MRC wells that keep the oil flowing at a very high rate right up until the end. They suck the oil right off the top of the reservoir and that keeps the oil flowing at a high rate right up until very near the end.
I think that is what Saudi Arabia is doing right now with their Strategic Energy Initiative where they say they have gotten their decline rate down from 8 percent to almost 2 percent. And they did this largely by just sucking the oil out faster with the aid of new horizontal MRC wells. Sooner or later, because they are depleting their fields so much faster now, the water will hit these horizontal wells and then it will be almost over.
Ron P.
You are right. There are really quite a number of issues pulling supply down, some on the supply side and some on the demand side (not being able to afford the oil), and the results are likely to result in steeper drops, here and there. We don't really know when Saudi oil supply will begin to drop off, and that could have a big impact. Debt defaults and political disruption could also lead to steps down.
This post is quite closely related to the presentation I gave at the Biophysical Economics Conference in Syracuse NY on April 15-16. Eventually, there will be a web site up with the presentation (and audio recordings of some), but I think all that is up now is the agenda.
Great post, Gail. I like summaries that gather together the threads of thought wrt Peak Oil.
On another note, this weekend, I was riding a gondola at the local Ski Mountain while watching my GPS Map (60CSx) - at first, the gondola rises up gradually, comes over a peak, and drops precipitiously for a bit before returning to its ascent. The altimeter plot looked for a moment exactly like a shark-fin version of a Hubbert curve! That got me thinking a bit for the rest of the ride - how political instability is probably the greatest threat to the undulating plateau. Instead, it's a easy to imagine how, at first, the "poor suckers" get to go without and then finally, unprecedented (perhaps not) human misery.
As Dmitri Orlov puts it so succinctly:
Closer to the orange line than the green line, unfortunately.
Great chart Dude.
"Closer to the orange line than the green line, unfortunately."
Given the close link between food production and oil, would not a orange-like descent imply an equally staggering increase in outright hunger?
Yes, exacerbating the problem is a failing financial system, spiking food prices, exhaustion of aquifers and breakdowns in international trade that will cause the famines.
My money is that overall world population begins to fall in the next decade sometime, pretty close to scenario 1 of the LTG runs:
The Great Food Crisis of 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_o...
Bankruptcies have limited effect on productivity of arable land, from what I've seen. Whomever owns the land; the farmer, the bank, or a trustee, will usually have the land in production. There are enterprising farmers who will lease the land and grow corn, run cattle, something. Even in times of economic decline, someone will use arable land to grow something, whether or not it qualifies as human food. The limiting factor seems to be the cost/availability of inputs vs. the land's production value.
Do you have some data to back up this assertion? It seems a stretch to me. I can't imagine banks, for instance, going through all the work of keeping land in production in the depths of Great Depression II. Why would they bother?
How much work would they really have to go through lease farm land? It's not like they'd have to send out their own employees to farm it.
The bank owned property down the road is leased, only for cutting hay, and for a minimal fee. The bank benefits in that the land is maintained (fertilzed, mowed twice a year, and they are assessed at an agricultural rate for taxes). Another section I know of is in forclosure (I knew the previous owner), several hundred acres, and has been planted in corn for the last 2 years. As I said, not always human food, but good farm land doesn't stay fallow for long around here.
As for statistics, I'm not sure where one would look to ascertain the ownership status of arable land vs. its production.
That's not the point. If commodity food prices aren't high enough there is sometimes no point in planting. Yes, I do think that in a severe enough contraction we might have a temporary surplus of food and not enough people with money to buy it.
A bunch of monkeys controlled by magical price points that mean nothing and everything at the same time. Aren't these price point pressures supposed to lead to all kinds of cool stuff. It's seems like they make us stupid.
Maybe that should be a requirement, and they should be given hand implements...
During GDII the banks may have a considerable incentive to keep land in production;in the trhirties , there was little or no incentive, due to glutted markets and depressed farm commodity prices.
Taxes were very low then.
This time around, there will be few or no farm commodity gluts, and local and state govts are likely to find creative ways to make sure banks lease any land they hold to farmers at very cheap rates.
I haven't given this particular issue any extensive thought, but I suppose a county or state could find a legal way to tax the hell out of idle farnm land, while rebating most of the taxes on land in cultivation , for example.
Or a populist govtr takeover might solve the problem by forcing the sale of the land at dirt cheap prices to locals.
I hope you're right! For one thing, we'll need something for the hundreds of millions of unemployed people to do and farming could "soak up" a lot of those people.
OFM,
There is a downside to this of course.
IN my years around farming I have noticed that the care given by someone farming leased land is very seldom of the quality one would expect of an owner. Even when the owner of leased land is knowledegable about proper farming practices the person leasing often cuts corners or will do things that he would not do to his own land. An example of this is one of my neighbors has a 2nd farm about 100 miles from us. He leased the land out for corn production to one of his neighbors down there. On a visit last year he found HUGE ruts (2 feet deep) where the guy leasing the property had brought his equipment in when the ground was to wet. Messed up a bunch of ground. The place across the road from me has been leased for hay production for 15 years. The owner knows nothing about farming. Only once in that entire time has the land been fertilized and it has a huge percentage of weeds. The norm is only to get one cutting from it. ONe often sees much greater problems with erosion and poor irrigation practices as well.
Just saying that, whiole you are likely correct on the land still being used, there are some bad long term implications for such a situtation.
Wyo
I am not a farmer, but I have seen this anyway. Leasers are not owner. As simple as that. This is also the reason comunism don't work.
One big reason for keeping land in production is to generate rents or other income sufficient to continue paying the state property taxes on your land - thereby avoiding eventual seizure/auction of said property by agents of the state (at gun-point if needed). At least this is the civic wisdom behind property taxes that is sometimes argued in Economics 101 courses.
Now, aren't you ashamed of yourselves for assuming that it was all about common greed? ;^)
I agree that bankruptcy has little affect on the SHORT TERM production value of the land, but beyond that I would have to disagree. Temporary leasing
of the land to "enterprising farmers" tends towards using the soil as a medium for growing a crop and capturing the solar gain. At the minimum there
is a major impact on organic material in the soil. In fact I could generalize this to any temporary leasing.
Land that used to be fertilized with formerly cheap fertilizer will not yield the same output per hectare as the same piece of land being opportunistically exploited by some random successor to the bankrupt farmer.
In terms of Tainter's theory, a system brought to its breaking point by increasingly costly complexity will eventually exit the complexity treadmill via a collapse event. When that happens, by definition you no longer have all the outputs of the former system. But at least you have a form of stable dynamic equilibrium.
The same applies to the post's question about the speed of the oil decline. So far the decline has been slow and masked or compensated for by other low EROEI liquids being added such as biofuels, NGL, tar sands, deep water oil. We kept up the total liquids supply and dealt with that stress at the cost of stresses to the food and financial systems which had spare capacity to absorb stress. As the latter run out of capacity to absorb more, the stress is spilling over into the political and social systems.
If or when the total stress exceeds the total ability of the system to accommodate, the system shifts to fast decline mode. Libya's oil output over the last three months is an example of all the above.
You have good way of explaining things. Thanks!
Yes, very well expressed!
Thank you, I try, but the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words probably applies here too:
This Youtube video of a Windmill/turbine going wild and finally break (sic) probably does a better job than I ever could of driving home the notion that catastrophic collapse is the most likely failure mode of complex systems.
Is there any system more complex than our global technological civilization upon which 21st century oil extraction depends? I don't believe so.
To borrow an analogy from the wind turbine video, when we tapped ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuels we finally "broke the brakes". We've been spinning our blades faster and faster ever since.
Have we ever:
Historical Consumption of Various Resources and Other Factors Plotted Against Time
(Click to enlarge.)
Of course this ends in collapse when a system is put in this much stress.
P.S. I don't have the source of this graph so if it belongs to someone who is reading now please let me know.
Highly doubtful. It would really have to be a very concerted effort to kill off hundreds millions of people for the population to fall that quickly and would not be from lack of materials but a complex structural issue. Hopefully we don't chose to do that. It could happen, but we would have to try really really hard to keep the same resource distribution system running. Which is one of waste and misallocations.
My money is on quick economic collapse and hopefully some semblance of sanity in how we manage resources afterwards. But we all have our collapse fantasies
Sorry, highly doubtful that the LTG Scenario 1 would come to pass?
I view it instead as certain that population will decrease, given the reasons I stated above, and the question is only whether it will be slow or sudden.
The alternative, that we reach a stable state, is impossible — it ignores too many factors, like exhausting our aquifers, depleting our ocean fish, acidifying our ocean and other climate changes, destroying our biodiversity and of course depleting oil, that make that condition impossible.
And the other option, that we continue growing, is logically absurd, in my view. Only someone who has very little idea of the state of the planet and ecology (i.e. an economist) would consider that as possible.
aangel,
Just to reach zero population growth would require someting on the order of an increase in the death rate coupled with (if one could get it to happen) a decrease in the birth rate which together totaled something like 80-90 million a year.
This is a large number and to put it in perspective. During the worst death rate in modern memory (i.e. WWII) population growth barely was even effected.
I agree that there will be a large decline sometime in the future. But what form it takes is hard to say. My guess is that population will continue to climb for some time. Maybe another 20 years. I believe that there will be serious efforts to maintian BAU. Hurculean efforts even. Then it will all fall apart when it can no longer continue to be maintained no matter what is done. Climate change and peak energy will eventually overwhelm everything. But what do I know.
Wyo
Agreed...I see another 15 years of population growth, too, even with some rather nasty regional wars that are likely to occur as we fight over declining resources.
Could be, but compare these bar charts:
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/birth_rate.html
http://www.indexmundi.com/world/death_rate.html
The birth rate seems as if it could be at the beginning of a curve of accelerating descent, while the long term decline in death rate seems to have stalled out and is predicted to start rising in the next few years as the boomers start to go.
Of course, even of these nascent trends could stall or even reverse for a while, but trends of the last two or three years could put us at peak population in a decade or so.
Even if it jumps a little bit at first, the human race so deep into overshoot there's no way to go but down, and fast. I think the initial spasms of massive numbers of deaths will be in the Bay of Bengal vicinity and also in the overcrowded islands (Indonesia). It'll be of all sorts; infant mortality, lack of elderly care, resurgence of diseases (dysentery, etc.), lowered life expectancy, inability to care for injuries, revolution, fundamentalism, etc., etc.
This will all be revealed in time on your favorite news channel (unless you're already there).
Already now we eat more food than we grow. World inventories are going downwards. Using current trends, it will be down to zero in 10 years. But expect a faster run to there; in those 10 years there will be added another 850 million hungry mouths. And all the depletion issues to that.
When we are out of food stocks, what do you think will happen when there is a drought and consequent famine? No one will have any spare food to send. So we will have no options to letting them starve. It will be back to the medevial ages when the Grim Reaper came and harvetsed entire fields. Only thing lacking to make the image complete is a new deadly patogen we can't find a cure to.
Exacerbating these trends are of course increases in meat eating, bio-fuels and extreme weather events. The first two we have some near term control over. The third we are making worse with every extra molecule of CO2 we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
On the other hand, the middle ages weren't all bad '-)
And add UG99 to the picture. Google it, it is an interesting read if you have not heard about it before. Once a year I check out it's progress.
Andre (angel),
By the way, are you aware that the LTG authors say that whatever predictive value their models have only holds up until the downslope begins? (Page 142 in original LTG book) Their point is that the models they have put together are based on a growing world and rising resource use. They have no way of knowing how things will change on the downslope. For example, will women have more or fewer babies? Will there be breakdowns in supply chains that affect production more than the models would indicate?
I think they were trying to leave the door open for the downslope to be better than what was projected, but it is easy to see how things could work together to make it worse.
I wasn't aware of that...I have their 30-year update and I don't remember reading that (but could just have a faulty memory).
Yes, it all comes back to how complex systems fail, I think. They don't include that in their analysis. Their program assumes smooth transitions i.e. it doesn't know how to model complex failure modes.
I bought myself a used copy of the 1972 book, so I could really see what they said.
I don't think that they wanted to be more negative than they had to be--that is why they left the door open to things being better. But I think in fact the models are quite optimistic, because of many things they left out, like complex failure modes.
With respect to optimism, there is also a "steady state" model that they talk about. Essentially, it flattens out the amount of resources used, so that they last until 2100 (but not beyond 2100). In order for production not to fall greatly when they drop back in resource use, they must assume that something like nuclear can be used to keep production up--but I didn't explicitly see that assumption. Perhaps I missed something. I am also not sure how they deal with the declining EROEI issue. Declining EROEI would seem to mean that net resources would need to be flat, but gross resources used would need to scale up until 2100, then drop to 0. The number of babies permitted in each year would be equal to the number of people who died that year.
I am not convinced that the steady state model would have worked back in 1972. Now we don't have the extra resources to flatten out to use in future years, so the idea wouldn't work.
Obviously a steady state at anything like the current rate of resource extraction and environmental degradation is impossible.
After a vast power-down, pop-down, and consumption down, something like a steady state may be possible, unless runaway global warming and/or widespread nuclear catastrophes make much or all of the earth uninhabitable.
I think the one true steady state that the world has had was during the hunter-gather period, lasting through ice ages and extending in some places up to close to the current point in time. The hunter-gatherers, when they got too good at it, wiped out the big animals in their areas, so even they behaved in a way that extended beyond a steady state.
We have had an unusually stable climate in the last 10,000 years, and people were able to set up farming, allowing for a much higher population density. I am not sure that this has ever truly been steady-state though. (See this post, saying that the author believes the world population has been in overshoot since 8,000 BCE, because agriculture is basically not sustainable.) Population density gradually increased, as people improved on agriculture and more recently, since we have found ways to use fossil fuels to make agriculture more efficient.
It would seem to be possible to go back to a hunter-gatherer steady state, over quite a range of temperature fluctuations. What is not possible is to expect today's industrial agriculture (with its hybrid seed, developed for a particular climate and particular pests) to continue forever. We would like to think that there is a way of controlling climate / pests / energy supply, so that we can continue to dominate the world, but it is not clear to me that there is. The story that we can seems to be part of today's mythology. Maybe we can go back to a more limited agricultural society--we don't know yet how things will work out.
Edo Japan is an oft-cited example..
I've always said the same: "We went wrong after the hunter-gatherer stage". Hunter-gatherers share.
You should visit those times. Just a visit, nothing like privation or ordeal, just getting out, getting away. I went camping for ten years, bit extreme, but one week does not make a place "home". Had a great time. It's beautiful and free. Gathering wood and fetching water feels real. Walking down green paths arched-over by tall trees, dogs running free, the local animals getting to know you and coming to visit everyday: an illusion as close as one can manage. Keep dry in a nice "little house" of some sort with a wood-stove and a safe chimney. Have a cellphone. Take some friends. Drive a car. But just wind it all back for a while. If a trail beckons further, bud-off a simpler camp that lets you be there, too.
My two favorite anthropology shows are "The Western Tradition" PBS by Eugen Weber, and "Faces of Culture" PBS . Weber's narratives are illustrated with images of artwork. They explain so many of the things we are born into and simply accept; money, civil law, and military protectorates as examples. Faces of Culture takes a concept and illustrates it with examples from many different societies. They are available in libraries, at Amazon, and are sporadically posted as courseware.
The Western Tradition opening theme with credits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9uJOsREJC4&feature=related
just the artwork fullscreen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXszL_qwnGg&feature=related
I certainly agree that industrial ag is not sustainable nor frankly anything remotely resembling BAU.
I don't pretend to know everything about every society that ever existed and how sustainable they may or may not have been. I seem to recall that archeologist Colin Renfrew had identified a number of cultures who remained mostly peaceful and sustainable for centuries to millennia.
Pre-Greek Balkan societies were one example from archeology of a fairly advanced culture (indoor plumbing, art, beginnings of writing) that lasted a few millennia.
Perhaps the lack of EROEI consideration may be a result of great optimism of the early 70's - (I was an optimistic kid) - nuclear power generation a greater but yet to be reckoned with force (pre-3-mile), and so on.
We know more now, that we'll be hard-pressed to discover something fundamental to further propel us into a Sci-Fi technofantasy that will never occur because we've nearly exhausted all our momentum and primary resource. I don't think anything's going to pop out of the quantum foam and reveal a savior of sorts!
Moore's law is kaput.
The Kurzweil Singularity is still decades away (if it ever happens).
Nuclear Energy isn't the panacea that it was supposed to be (in the 70s), though it certainly has its share of interest.
Even the planes flying today are still fundamentally identical to the ones flying in the 1950s, just bigger and faster.
Even the planes flying today are still fundamentally identical to the ones flying in the 1950s, just bigger and faster.
Actually, they are not any faster.
If you look at the Hawker Siddeley Trident 2E, it had a cruise speed of 604 MPH (972 km/h) and was introduced in 1964.
The latest Boeing 747-8 which has yet to enter production has a cruise speed of 570MPH (917 km/h)
The A380 is somewhere in the middle of the above.
If you look at the Concorde and why it was a commercial failure (like the Trident), you will understand why planes have been slowing down.
I need hardly add that passing through an airport takes a multiple of the time it used to take when I was a kid and travelled regularly on Tridents.
We had a chance to develop 4:th generation nuclear power, but when Chernobyl happened, the momentum was lost. Now I doubt we have enough time. 4:th generation nuclear would have been a neccesary step towards techno-fantasy, but now I think we will miss the train.
If you were obscenely rich
and wanted a remote enclave
would you choose nuclear
or natural flows and fluxes
or find your own pocket of gas?
The nuclear needs high-rent staff.
It's failure modes are unattractive.
The enclave could become dark or deserted.
Electric transport or convert CO2?
Gathering wind and light takes more room.
A mountain lake is needed for storage.
Wind and thermal engines need rebuilding.
Electric transport?
Gas engines need rebuilding.
Logistics can run on gas directly.
(There is lots of gas in Alaska.
It's supposed to be getting warmer?
Or will it much more be getting stormier?)
Hmmmmmmmmmm
"hmmmmmmmmm
could be the human race is run"
-Pink Floyd Two Suns in the Sunset
I don't have a reference handy, but somewhere they stated exactly the opposite. Their scenarios are actually extremely optimistic because there is no accounting in the world model for war, revolution, genocide, terrorism, or any of a number of other less than favorable human reactions to the unpleasant ecological realities.
Cheers,
Jerry
Not hunger. Death by starvation.
Not necessarily, because only a small portion of oil goes to food production, so we would have to chose all are other allocations to stay the same and oil allocated to food production to decrease. So it's a choice.
I don't think it is really a choice. There are a huge number of supporting oil allocations that need to be in place, to allow oil to go to food production. For example, the roads need to be maintained, someone needs to be making spare parts for the equipments, someone needs to be making the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and there has to be a sufficient transportation system in place to ship all of these. There needs to be a system of distributing the food, and the electrical system needs to be kept operational, so that fuel can be transported by pipeline and pumped from stations. People need a way of getting to the places where food is distributed, and they need money to buy the food (or food stamps or some other allocation method).
So I don't see that keeping the food system operating is all that simple. If you start having allocation problems, people will go to the fields, and steal food from the fields, and the whole system will break down.
...feed for animals, packaging, processing, refrigeration, marketing ...... there's a lot of oil in our food. Witness the rising costs of food as oil prices rise.
This year I'm moving a good portion of our gardening to containers. This frees up the big garden for field grown crops; corn, onions, grains, etc. It also: gives me better control of soil mixtures; saves water; reduces exposure to the huge downpours we've been getting (erosion from water/wind); and since I'm growing stuff on the roof, it helps keep the house cooler. This is an experiment designed to see how much we can grow with minimum fuel inputs. Solar pumped drip irrigation, (very) locally sourced fertilizer, mainly from our chickens and compost, soil from my 'stockpile' which gets recycled into the compost pile, and having a portion of our production so close to (on) the house will increase food security and reduce the energy we expend for harvest. We are also growing potatos in used feed sacks. Last year, the super pigweed took over the potato patch, really cutting production. My buddy grew over 200# of nice potatos last year in 8 feed sacks. Not bad for an old hippie.
These may seem like small steps, but that's how it's going to work for many, IMO. The ideal is to grow most of our food with zero fossil fuels.
Nicely done!
From this article a pound of potatoes provides 400 calories.
200 lb x 400 cal/lb = 80,000 calories
Assume 2500 cal/day for a male (more if physical labor is part of the day but this is a start).
80,0000 cal / 2500 cal/day = 32 days worth of food.
Now, you wouldn't eat just potatoes but it's still a good amount of food from just 8 feed sacks!
What do you figure it cost your buddy to produce 32 days worth of food?
If he bought his seed potatos (5 per feed sack, maybe 1/2# total) about 65 cents, old feed sacks (free, sort of) homemade soil/compost (free, with labor). About 65 cents.
If he used chemical fertilizer (unlikely), add a couple of dollars. If he saved seed potatos from the previous year and used homemade fertilizer, no money exchanged hands. This would be his style.
This is a really easy way to grow a staple crop:
How to Grow Potatoes in a Garbage Bag
Once the plants are established, straw or dry leaves can be used to fill the bag as they grow. Anyone with a bit of space in the sun can do it. Some folks go out and buy bags of garden soil and grow right in the bag. The giant black contractor bags from the big box stores also work well, but I plan to use feed sacks saved from our chickens.
The potatos can be left in the sacks until use, in a cool, dry place.
Disclaimer: I do keep a stockpile of chemical fertilizer (10-10-10) that I got cheap last year. A little goes a long way when combined with our organic stuff (usually not needed unless a plant needs a boost). It could be useful for barter if we don't need it. Nice insurance/capital when one is starting from scratch, as I suspect many folks will be forced to do.
I have trouble with gophers, etc, , so I will a stack 3 or 4 old tires placed on hardware cloth.
Ghung, are you recycling the fertilizer you and your family produces as well? Lots of usefull atoms get flushed down the toilet if you don't.
I've put low raised beds above the septic drain field, so, in a sense, yes. Between my wife and building codes, a composting toilet wasn't an option when we built. I "mark my territory" regularly to deter predators and varmints, returning some nutrients to the soil. If things get tough you can bet that a humanure processing system will be a priority ;-)
Our codes wouldn't even allow a gray water system when we built (mid-late '90s, though I did pipe the gray water separately).. Not sure if that's changed.
"Our codes wouldn't even allow a gray water system when we built (mid-late '90s, though I did pipe the gray water separately).. Not sure if that's changed."
These are hings we will ave to change by doing and drag the codes along. Community becomes important when it is necessary to take a stand.
Excellent work. his is exactly the kind of thinking we need to apply to the problems at hand. Old wisdom coupled with scientific knowledge is an extremely powerful combination.
Food production worldwide has changed hugely in my lifetime - I turned sixty four months ago. When I was a boy mixed agriculture was very common where I live (eastern England) and the relatively small fields resulting from the enclosures of previous centuries were bound by high hedges. These both contained animals when the land was fallow and prevented wind blown topsoil erosion. Chemical fertilizers had already been introduced and already mixed arable farming was beginning its decline. Many more men worked the land then, however. Gradually hedges were uprooted to make way for ever larger machinery and monoculture dependent on 'improved' fertilizers and seed strains became practically universal. Now topsoil erosion is a reality and there is very little biomass or animal waste plowed back into the soil. The soil has consequently been reduced in some areas to a practically lifeless tilth dependent on artificial feeding. All this is the result of oil dependent agriculture. You can add in the pesticide revolution to complete the picture.
I know of one village (it can be replicated almost indefinitely) which had three farms employing seventy men in all before the war, now all those farms have gone and been absorbed into one much larger unit, and besides the farmer only two full-timers are employed. At certain picking seasons and for particular crops labour from Eastern Europe is employed, and gang-masters keep them in hostels and often treat them badly. The village cottages are now inhabited by town dwellers seeking that 'real' country experience and they commute fifteen miles each way to work, by car. The village post office and shop closed years ago and shopping has to be done seven miles away. The ancient cattle market in my city has been rebuilt as a shopping mall and many young people have no idea what a cow looks like.
All the brick-built barns have been converted to houses and the new industrial barns are fed and emptied by monster trucks. Nobody has a clue how to work with farm horses and anyway their stabling is long gone.
Reversing this situation will I fear be far harder than creating it, although some farmers are planting hedges again. And meanwhile the population has increased by a third.
The price of energy is having an effect, now, and I fear for what will happen in the very near future.
I have nicked, or rather gleaned, remaindered carrots left behind by the harvesters from the field, once, when I had run out and I was taking the dog for a walk, but if everyone came and took the farm produce there would be no incentive to plant again and it would consequently happen only once. Already farmers are having Diesel oil and machinery stolen and in some places sheep are being taken.
If oil supplies reduce quickly, or rather the price increases quickly, then I agree with Gail that maintaining food supply will not be easy. The horses are all gone, the appropriate equipment is in museums, and the infrastructure is blown to bits. And the resultant crops would be more dependent on the vagaries of the weather than now, I suppose.
I would expect that when the situation becomes serious all our ancient notions of land and indeed all property ownership will be called into question. Do not expect the free market to solve the problem in a hurry.
Apologies for the long waffly post.
No need to apologize it's a good post. The situation in Spain isn't quite as bad as you've described. Most of the old farms are fallow but there's a few old timers tending to their vegetable patch. In my mom's old village there's still a residual level of agriculture going on supplementating the diets of farmers on pensions. A few people still have a few cows and pigs, everybody has chickens and a vegetable patch. There's plenty of animal enclosures. A few city dwellers have bought homes in the area but they're in the minority. If worst came to worst it wouldn't be a bad place to be.
Brilliant description of the problem. How to reverse this is, I believe, the difference between uncontrolled collapse and controlled power down.
It's a conversation needs having.
"someone needs to be making the fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides"
In all scenarios, it is extremely important to remember these are utterly unnecessary for feeding the planet, but that land reform will be.
Agreed!
Gail, and everybody:
For some reason, modern fertilizer sources, methods and results have become arcane, obscure bits of knowledge outside of the communities directly involved. I don't have the details or statistics but at least I can present the general themes. First of all, far and away the most volume of the three types, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus fertilizers, are nitrogen. Second, far and away the largest volume (++95%) of nitrogen fertilizers are manufactured by the use of natural gas, in fact, I believe as much as 40% of ALL natural gas produced in the world today is used to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer. Finally, since the advent of this massive production and use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers around 50 years ago, the yield per acre of good farmland has more than doubled.
Peak natural gas is not upon us yet, but it can't be too far away. What then, Kimosabe?
Thanks for this detail. I for one count natural gas along with oil as an irreplaceable hydrocarbon. I know that since the advent of fracking every square mile of the earth's crust to smithereens to extract every last puff of the stuff we are told that reserves of NG are practically infinite, but I am not convinced. Also, the price of nitrogen fertilizer has ramped hugely recently so all that blasting needs to be accelerated! It does seem that now, however, some lucky consumers can now get gas free from their water taps, which has to be some sort of progress?
I can't help being cynical, but natural gas is as finite, or rather differently finite, as oil, so the basic thesis tends to hold.
And yes, agricultural land is getting more expensive by the day, but then it too is finite in a world with an expanding population. Or is it in fact diminishing in area?
Yep: peak gas, and peak pretty much everything really...
The rate of decline in the cost of PV has been too slow for the blue line to be realistic.
The only reason for optimistic at this point: necessity is the mother of invention. But is it the mother of enough invention?
If the world were a replica of the United States, that sort of pessimism could perhaps be justified. The rest of the world is not as far into overshoot as the US, though, and their political systems are, on the whole, not so dysfunctional. I think the green line is more likely, on the whole, though not quite the controlled process as implied by its title of "creative descent". There will be stumbles, partial collapses, and frequent application of the principle that "necessity is the mother of invention". Since renewable energy technology is already available, though, the descent into the Mad Max scenario is likely to be avoided.
On a somewhat different topic, Darwinian above said:
This makes the error of assuming a commonality of interest between the House of Saud & its subjects. We're talking here about an absolute monarchy which has nothing but contempt for its subjects and refuses to allow them the meagrest of freedoms. It needs backing from overseas (especially, but not entirely, in the form of weapons) to keep its subjects down. Therefore it cannot afford to cut off the supply of oil to its overseas sponsors.
The House of Saud was installed as ruler of the country named after it by Britain, at the end of World War I. After World War II, the US took over as overseas sponsor and supplier of weapons. The US is now on the way downhill (the negative ratings watch on Uncle Sam's AAA debt rating should be the wake-up call to the world) and the possibility exists of China taking over at some point. I note with interest the fact that the Saudi Government is improving its relations with China, so it would be unwise to rule this possibility out.
The bottom line, though, is that the House of Saud would lose its usefulness if it stopped supplies to its overseas sponsor and would be cut off. It would then have to face its subjects alone. And, considering the barbarity of its teachings to those subjects, its fate would be unlikely to be pretty.
Most think Saudi is already hording its oil so if they do have even one barrel of spare capacity then what you say is already proven untrue.
What Saudi is claiming to do right now is that they are cutting off oil from their overseas sponsors. They say they could produce 12.5 mb/d right now if they only wished to. They are telling their overseas sponsors that they are cutting off at least 4 million barrels from them.
So your claim doesn't hold water.
Ron P.
What I said was:
Saudi Arabia has not cut off supplies, but merely reduced them a little. And Obama has agreed with them that the world is "amply supplied": http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/saudi-cut-in-oil-production-st...
If I gave the impression of believing that the House of Saud is merely a puppet of Uncle Sam, I'd like to withdraw it. They have interests of their own and some autonomy with which to pursue them. What they don't have is the ability to hold their number one sponsor to ransom and get away with it.
In the words of the book "Limits to Growth":
I think the fact that the Peak Oil groups have tended to place so much emphasis on something that intuitively doesn't happen is a big part of why people don't believe the story we are telling. Nobody wants to explain that we are getting close to the edge, and the downslope doesn't look nice.
Just dreaming a bit, but wouldn't it be great if there was a building that housed to scale precisely accurate translucent views of the oil reserviors of all the major oil producing countries. And with that view we could see how far up the water is, and then based on flow rate determine when each well will tap out. No more asking the saudis, just look for yourself. Would probably scare people so much they'd have to close it.
Wow. A good, cut-to-the-chase question and a good, solid answer.
I've been following the peak oil issue and its ramifications since 2002, and I still have the same question that Curious did. Early on I was expecting serious problems to begin around 2010. Its interesting that it is still arguable whether they have in fact begun. I think a lot of us "early adopters" have become mentally and emotionally worn out with the long-term nature of the problem, and with constantly trying to answer this particular question.
This article presents an excellent summary of the reasons it is more likely to be faster than slower. I still haven't found anything that presents actual time-based scenarios that are convincing and helpful in terms of preparation.
Some time-based scenarios that some may find convincing and helpful in terms of preparation:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-18/peak-oil-versus-peak-ex...
Peak oil versus peak exports
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-02-21/egypt-classic-case-rapi...
Egypt, a classic case of rapid net-export decline and a look at global net exports
From Peak Oil Vs. Peak Exports:
Certainly, the rising consumption of oil exporters is part of our problem. Even if there were no other influences, from the point of view of oil importers, the down-slope could be expected to be steeper than the upslope.
It's not just rising consumption that is the problem. Given a production decline in an oil exporting country, unless they cut their consumption at the same rate as, or at a rate faster than, the rate of decline in production, the net export decline rate will exceed the production decline rate and the net export decline rate will accelerate with time. And of course, as outlined above, then there is the Chindia factor.
I do think that the ELM provides the most convincing time-based scenarios. I see no way in which the decade from 2025-2035 (my 50's) will not be extremely difficult for those of us in Importistan.
"Importistan"
Nice term. Your coinage? (Apt for "consumer" which we all are.)
Westexas
It is difficult to get ones head around what is happening in China, the first year they sold over a million cars was only 10 years ago. I have no idea how far back you have to go in the States for that level of sales 1920?
Yet this year they will sell over 16 million cars.
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=314&catid=13&subcatid=86
That coupled with increasing populations and consumption in OPEC countries will continue to add pressure on exports.
It's fairly simple to figure out what is happening in China. Twenty years ago, they were consuming less than 3 million barrels of per day and were a net oil exporter.
Today, they are consuming 9 Mb/d, and importing 5 Mb/d of it. Their imports are rising by 1 Mb/d every year, and with the number of cars they are buying, that trend is likely to continue.
They are now importing about half as much oil as the US does, and if it keeps growing on the current trend line, they will be importing more oil than the US before the decade is out. World oil production is not growing to match that demand.
Almost all of the cars the Chinese are purchasing are additional vehicles on the road and not replacement vehicles as many in the United States are. Their usage has nowhere to go but up.
In the financial crash of 2008 the Chinese and Indians "stole" a hole bunch of our oil imports. Millions of barrels a day that used to go to us (US/EU) now goes to them.
I fully expect a repetition of the crash after the summer (unless the fallout from Japan + tsunami gets us first as Kunstler believes) and then Chindia will take another chunk of our imports. And they will never give it back. This may very well repeat it self a few times over as long as there is anything to import.
Thanks, Gail. To this list ....
...I am compelled to add the proverbial external and always unpredictable event, refered to by some, of course, as the "Black Swan".
Whether complex systems have a tendency to crash rather than decline slowly is a basic question we often discuss on TOD. My belief is that they do both, sometimes simultaneously. During the decline (a precursor or subset of an impending crash), the system becomes more brittle or vulnerable to a crash. IMO, we tend to discount unpredictable events over time, and ignore increasing complexities in our systems in exchange for the ongoing benefits being realized from the success of the systems. Over time, while the possibility of a certain event may not increase, the range of events that may become critical increases over time. Therefore, the opportunity for a slow decline diminishes, oportunities for a crash increase, and the effects of the crash become more severe. I think the Fukushima situation is a prime example.
My sense of things is that our complex systems, including oil/energy, have passed beyond the critical point where a slow decline, managed or naturally occuring, can occur. The systems have become too complex, too interdependent, too neglected, overexploited and insufficiently resilient.
Hummingbirds will soon qualify as Black Swans.
I think there is a possibility of collapsing down to a less complex system. Perhaps the federal government will atrophy or disappear, and the states will issue their own currencies. Of course, if this happens, international trade could become a more complex issue.
I'm not sure; I suppose it depends on the nature of the collapse. Is a group of nationstates, each with it's own currency, laws, govt. a less complex system? Is the Fukushima situation less complex than it was before the quake/tsunami? Perhaps complexity doesn't just go away, it morphs into chaos. In cases of catabolic collapse, over time unsustainable parts of systems are discarded in a series of steps (ala Greer, et. al.). Incremental reduction in complexity is certainly preferable...
Even in a managed scenario, human systems seem to have a problem decomplexifying. I've worked toward reducing complexity in my life, though it seems I often exchange one form of complexity for another. My home's off-grid electrical system is far more complex than my sister's electrical system, though she is reliant on a far more complex system overall. Our attempts to replace fossil fuels with alternatives also result in increased overall complexity, a sort of trap driven by expectations.
Is it inevitable that there's a natural law that says the only way to dissipate the stored energy in our complex, maxed-out systems is an explosion of chaos, or can the system be powered down in a controlled manner? Timeframe is critical to these questions.
I think Joe Tainter would consider adding layers of administration more complex, and removing layers of administration less complex. So getting rid of the federal government would in some sense make the system less complex. There would be less $$ required, since social security, medicare, and all the federal government mandates would go away, all at once.
The "smart grid" is definitely an example of a more complex system that folks are considering adopting, in the hopes that it will help mitigate an electricity shortage, and help work our way around undependable wind and solar electricity supplies. I think it has a very good chance of making the system more prone to collapse.
In a sense, China and India's use of coal, without very good pollution controls, is an attempt to use a simple, cheap, less complex system. OECD has tended to go the opposite direction with its high tech wind and solar PV, plus the carbon market.
I wrote a post not too long ago on Our Finite World, telling what Obama should have said in his energy policy speech. The idea was to work toward simplification and local food production.
So, through your eyes I see a very serious "race to the bottom". The competing countries with the lowest standard of living, the most streamlined governance, the most capable population, and the least regulation of resource exploitation win. With the doors open to this lower potential, the higher lifestyles are rushing out of the more affluent homelands. The corporations have already bolted through and range the world. The world has flooded in.
The local industrial and economic decline has already been fast. Viewed in isolation, things appear grim.
Other nations stand ready to step in with trinkets and trade goods to sell to the newly impoverished natives of states in decline. Land will be purchased. The remaining resources will be exploited under new management. These transactions may blur the event's edge.
It is already known that the oil itself will retreat asymptotically into poor levels of return on investment. The full decline of civilizations are also known to take a long, though at times exciting, course.
I'm going to go with a slow decline in the world's oil supply and of some homelands. The rising-edge of population is dramatic. The falling edge has too many variables to predict.
___________________________
1915 technology is quite something. I have some pieces at the 100' telescope on Mount Wilson, Hubble's original. The telescope itself is the size of a city bus. Its pivots float in mercury. The supporting floor looks like a concrete overpass from the '70s. The mirror is made from old champagne bottles from France. The dome rotates on railroad tracks. The control relays for the motorized viewing-chair platform and shutter-opening means are mounted to tall marble slabs in lieu of the yet-invented plastics. There is a great, deep well in the basement where the heavy clock-weights ran to power the tracking of the stars. Everything was packed-in by mules in the beginning. This past century of technology will have some reverberation in the future.
I think you are confusing social complexity with personal life. In a complex society, more and more specialisation of roles occur, but each role can become more simple. Technology then fills the gap and makes each role complex again.
Putting the process into reverse does not work well, as we try to become baker, plumber, electrician, father, web designer, sewage engineer, teacher, etc, etc. Each role is far more comples than it was a century ago. We become overwhelmed.
Sooner or later many of these roles will fall by the wayside. Technologies will become lost. Life will become a lot less pleasant and shorter.
Who will protect the rich people from the poor if the government collapses? I mean that's it's job.
Here's what Adam Smith said:
Nobody, hopefully.
I wonder if public displays of wealth will get to be more of a problem. For example, solar panels and electric cars, if the electrical system is still operating. You see big fences in poorer countries. We may need these here, too, but I don't think that we will have the materials to build them.
I took a walk in the beuiful spring weather the other day. There I passed a very rich mans house. Or shall I say "palace"? "Mansion" is not enough to describe it. And the garden was hughe. I saw tha man there too. He sat on the veranda on the second floor, guarding over his territory. He was wearing a "cowboy hat". (This is in Sweden).
The entire garden was lined with a almost 2 meter high black fence (or rather palisade). There were surveilance cameras and signs informing about the security firm garding the house. This was just not the guy I would just walk up to and knock on the door for a chat.
Pile up wealth, fence in and insulate, live for your self. Thats the way to do it, if you are rich. When the collapse come, will I run to him for help? Will I offer my help to him? I hardly think so. When money is useless, this guy will be on his own.
The event gave me some stuff to think about.
Nice post Gail. I think Hubbert was using fission nuclear, but hoping then as we all continue to do now, for a fusion breakthrough. His fossil fuel curves would have been acccurate if nuclear had been safely developed as he anticipated/hoped. Alas, they have not been. If there is an economic-societal crash coming, a big one or even a series of smaller ones, then one hopes that the folks in charge of nuclear safety have a plan for long-term fuel storage in any event(s). Somehow I doubt that they do, e.g., Fukushima, and then the nuclear legacy becomes a potential nightmare scattered at various points across the globe.
Hubbert actually changed his mind about nuclear, due mainly to what he saw as the lack of accounting for the costs of waste disposal and de-commissioning plants:
http://mkinghubbert.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/hubberts-early-take-on-nucl...
Cheers,
Jerry
I have written several posts about the nuclear issue:
Is loss of electricity a risk for spent nuclear fuel?
Nuclear Options Going Forward
What would happen if we discontinued nuclear electricity?
Why oil shortages may make nuclear a less viable option
One thing a person needs to keep in mind is that there is a huge amount of nuclear electricity in use now. On the US East Coast, nuclear energy amounts to 30% to 35% of total electricity. We are likely to have major electricity problems, if we fail to renew licenses on existing aging nuclear power plants. This could easily push the downslope to be more steep.
There are other ways we could lose nuclear electricity--not being able to supply enough uranium for existing plants, because of oil issues could be a problem, or because of world financial problems. All of this could contribute to the downslope.
But keeping nuclear plants going isn't ideal either--we likely will have problems with decommissioning and spent fuel pools.
I would vote for the "slow decline" scenario. I think it's probably a symmetric, bell shaped curve. It took 150 years to get to this point, and it will take another 150 years to get back to zero.
In its initial stages it will resemble the "undulating plateau" that some people talk about, but after a few years the decline will start to get steep and it will become obvious to people that world oil production is in a state of terminal decline. It will be a bad experience for people who didn't anticipate it and plan for it, but most people will survive it. Most but not all.
You think it's going to be a symetrical ride down? You don't think as oil price rises to a threshold beyond what the economy can handle, more major steps downward in the economy will lead to greater degradation of the infrastructure this civilization operates from and lead to collapse? You think complex systems that took many decades to build up can uniformly simplify to support most people? Wow, you must be a very positive person.
Yeah, I think people will manage to cope with change, albeit with a lot of complaining. And, I know of a lot of alternative solutions to conventional oil that will become popular when people can't afford conventional oil.
What you say is true — and will happen after a significant simplification of our society. The transition is going to be wrenching and we still have the little problem of most people not having the slightest idea of how to create a reasonably self-sufficient and resilient household.
In a severe contraction like what I foresee all the stock brokers and accountants and software programmers and dog walkers and college professors are going to lose their capacity to earn hard currency. The economy simply will have no use for them. Then what?
Yeah, Andre, the list is long. I have a hard time getting folks to look at this aspect of decline. Perhaps they're afraid they'll be on the list. Once the feedback from the loss of discretionary and non-essential occupations has its first effects, it spirals around to more essential jobs and services which a huge chunk of previously employed folks can't afford.
Potato chip salesmen and florists spend money too, at least until the velocity of money drops to a crawl. We've already seen round one around here, it seems. A lady I know, a type A realtor, million dollar club and all that, made my sandwich at the supermarket deli the other day. At least she's willing to do anything to pay the bills. Some people will always find something to do. Most folks?
A big part of the problem is the fact that the population grew rapidly, during the first 150 years, because of the additional food supply.
On the way down, you have to deal with declining food supply, unless (like Hubbert) you can come up with some other way of generating the energy (including fuel for actual farm vehicles). Prices are likely to soar early on. By the time we are half way down, or two-thirds of the way down, there are likely to be riots for lack of food (or maybe they have started already in North Africa). There may also be fresh water and pollution issues.
Somehow we also need to keep roads paved, and pipelines in good repair. This will become increasingly difficult, with smaller oil supplies.
There are issues with the financial system, too, like increased defaults on loans, that are likely to destabilize the system. When the economy is growing, it is fairly easy to pay back loans with interest. This becomes much more difficult in a declining system.
I'm with Gail and there is very little, if any, difference in how we view this topic.
I think that it's a grave error to think the other side of the oil production curve will mirror the front side. After a bit of conversation with me on the topic Greer agreed to modify the curve below to make it look more like a shark-fin:
We both agreed that a collapsing society would not be able to extract the remaining oil as though it were part of a well-functioning system. Do remember that the remaining oil is all the difficult to extract stuff. To think we will get that difficult oil as our financial system crumbles and infrastructure is failing is, I believe, extremely inaccurate.
Complex systems can grow slowly and organically but because of the brittleness in the system (i.e. lack of resiliency/redundancy) they tend to fail catastrophically.
A bridge may take several months or years to build. That never changes, in other words, you never see a bridge appearing in an instant. It has one mode of construction.
However, a bridge generally has two modes of failure or perhaps just one with two minor variations. Failure can occur suddenly, like when its load surpasses even the usually generous safety margins — and then it fails catastrophically.
Or it can gradually weaken due to lack of maintenance until a particular load surpasses its now-lower capacity — then it fails catastrophically, a sort of hybrid failure mode. But the end result still tends to be catastrophic failure.
I think our systems will fail via the second mode. We are in the early stages of the system weakening. At some point there will be a proximate trigger that sets the collapse in motion and one of the early results will be a cascading worldwide stock market failure. Will it be some geopolitical event that sets off the dominoes? Probably but it really doesn't matter. The important thing is to be ready for it and not to assume the systems we count on will work even at a lower level. Besides, if a system loses just 20% of its capacity and you happen to be in that 20% it has failed enough to have stopped working for you. Do you have another method of bringing in food and water?
Readers interested in this line of thinking should watch Noah Raford's "Collapse Dynamics: Phase Transitions in Complex Social Systems." He explains what brittleness and interconnectedness mean in terms of complex systems and why they are the factors to examine in depth when making a judgement about how a system will fail.
He expands on this talk a little more with "Preparing for and adapting to radical non-linear change."
So, to the people who have not yet done the work of understanding how complex systems fail, I suggest you ponder the following slide, which I think has great merit:
Your image is great! I agree with what you are saying too.
Thanks, though I can't take credit for it.
I start most of my public presentations now with that image. With groups that are a bit aware I usually get a knowing chuckle because they recognize exactly what I'm pointing to. They started off confident then as they examined the situation more closely they became more pessimistic. I know I went through that process.
As Hirsch said at last year's ASPO conference, "This is a topic that gets worse the more you look into it."
"gradually weaken due to lack of maintenance until a particular load surpasses its now-lower capacity"
I think that's right.
I wonder how many of the towns recently destroyed by tornadoes will ever be fully rebuilt. As more tragedies hit, both in the normal course of events, and as GW gets rolling, we will have less and less ability to recover from them. Eventually the system will collapse fairly precipitously, but in the mean time it will just look like a death from a thousand cuts. The next couple years of busted state budgets are going to take their toll too.
That photo is hilarious, thankyou.
I always liked this one too, which is similar... I'll just sneak it in here...
"Do remember that the remaining oil is all the difficult to extract stuff."
No quite true. More accurate to say, "...the remaining oil is mostly the difficult to extract stuff."
SA will be producing oil for a long time to come, as will the US, Iraq, China, Russia... A correct premise is a good beginning.
Regarding who will be producing oil in the future, we don't really know yet. If there is too much war in the Middle East, or too much political disruption, we could very easily see oil production drop sooner rather than later. If there is disruption to international trade, we could see parts for drilling equipment become unavailable, resulting in production drops. If the financial system ceases to work well, it could make at least overseas trade problematic. If food becomes in short supply, we don't know what the fallout will be.
So whether or not the remaining oil is difficult to extract, we may not get it out--we really don't know for sure yet.
I wasn't quit clear enough: I was making a distinction between easy to get (easily extracted light, sweet) and the lower quality, harder to extract stuff. here's still a lot of light sweet in the ground.
The geo-politico-socio-economics are what they are and I wasn't speaking to them.
Andre, the downside of the oil production curve will very likely be a good deal steeper than the upside was. However -- and it's a very large "however" -- that does not by itself guarantee that the broader curve of social, political, and economic decline will be much steeper in any given place. Also, of course, "steeper" is a relative term; as drawn, your curve allows a century or so for the decline, which doesn't seem unreasonble to me.
So much of the fossil fuel currently produced is wasted -- consider the tourism industry, the world's largest single industry, which could be eliminated overnight (as it was at the beginning of the Second World War) -- that there's a great deal of room for efficiency, and planned and unplanned simplification, to take up existing slack. This is one of the reasons I like to point out the zigzag way that previous civilizations have worked through their own process of decline and fall.
The points Gail has made are valid, and over the short to middle term, they promise a whopping crisis. The point that too often gets mislaid in all this, though, is that human societies are adaptive systems, and adaptations -- as drastic as necessary, and enforced by any means necessary -- will be made in response to that crisis. My working guess is that some nations will collapse into failed states, many more will see famine and disorder, and even the lucky ones are going to have a very rough time of it.
A few decades from now, we'll be coming out the other side of this round of crisis into a period of temporary stability before the next wave hits. That's the way civilizations generally go down, and I see no reason why we should be exempt from that process.
Indeed.
Pri-de says:
And of course he is correct but that's not the whole story.
I also expect a great deal of the oil that is currently considered to be technically recoverable to flip back to the category of technically unrecoverable as the number of companies and countries that can access it declines. In forty years will Petrobras be able to get all the oil it is so diligently working on extracting currently? I have my serious doubts. Even if the technical know-how is still available the capital is unlikely to be available.
So while there are great efficiencies to be made, I see the pool of available oil also shrinking. Time will tell whether the two factors roughly cancel each other out.
I'm not a believer in the idea that food supply will decline just because oil production does. I think farmers will find alternative solutions. After all, China manages to feed four times the population of the US on 75% of the agricultural land area of the US, so there is lots of scope for improved output.
All the problems are soluble, it's just that people have to be prepared to solve them.
It's not just the energy of diesel being removed from the system that causes the problems.
We saw in 2008 that many farmers, many of them up to their eyeballs in debt, couldn't afford the cost of spiking inputs. They had to reduce the amount of land they planted. Upcoming volatility will cause many of them to experience that same problem plus they will have trouble paying their debt, thus causing them to go bankrupt.
Again, it's not just the decline of oil that will be a problem, a mistake many people make, in my view. It's the interaction of the financial system with the other systems that causes as much trouble as actual declining oil.
It is like every other failure of the system. There are lots of empty houses and lots of people homeless or living on relatives couches. There are lots of hungry people already in the US--1/3 of households are officially food insecure--but there is also so much surplus grain that we are pouring it into SUVs.
Things are going to continue to get more and more irrational as the needs get more and more massive and the inability to meet them even in the face of obvious vast resources still available. I keep wondering when enough people will recognize that the basic system is fundamentally, utterly, and irreparably broken and is not serving the best interests of most people. Of course, the recognition, if/when it comes, will not necessarily be accompanied by any kind of accurate diagnosis of the exact nature of the problem. There will be/are already many voices pointing blame in directions other than the corrupt plutocrats and the general banal consumerist society--immigrants, 'greenies,' gays, blacks, jews...the usual suspects and some new ones will all be trotted out, perhaps for execution.
Then you need to be willing to eat like the chineese do. And I tell you,it ain't chinese resturant food they eat there. My friend spend a few years in china and they had to remove his spleen. The diet broke it.
My brother has lived much of his adult life in China and his spleen is fine (as far as I know).
What is it specifically about the Chinese diet that you think is so hard on the spleen?
It is fine on the chinese, they eat it every day. He is a westener and the change of the diet was to hard on him. Just the same as when almost all white people died in tropical desises which the natives survied for years when they came to the warm countries back in the old days.
Apparently, "nigh soil" is still in use. Some reports of disease, but at 1.3 billion and growing, can't be that much of a problem. I do suspect they can't give it a full 2 years to "cook."
I won't paste in all of your post, but do agree with all of it, Gail. Once a person sees how one thing influences another and the interconnected implications moving forward on a net energy decline, it's easy to understand it won't be a gradual, uniform descent.
The next 150 years will be the non-low hanging fruit era. The things we take for granted today will be very expensive or non-existent. Lots more drudgery. Let's hope that the dregs will be used for farm tractors and back-hoes, not the military.
Hope is not a strategy...(U.S. Army saying).
Write and phone your elected officials...not just once, but often.
Write letters to the newspaper.
Organize.
Tell them that you don't want your tax dollars spent for the MIC, just like the Tea Parties rail against spending tax dollars on Medicare and Social Security.
Yeah, I would vote for that too. But the "slow decline" candidate doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected in my opinion. ;-)
Ron P.
That is extremely unlikely.
Unfortunately, that is probably a common misconception, and one that desperately needs to be corrected with more emphasis on systems thinking, especially the non-linear behavior of positive feedbacks.
I originally posted this in the comments over at Gail's blog "Our Finite World", but given this opportunity I felt it was worth a redux here:
The dynamics of collapse are not that hard to understand:
Eventually the costs become so great that society can no longer support a high level of consumption and experiences a collapse. This is the base case scenario presented in the Limits To Growth report, and is also loosely related to the reasoning behind Tainter’s theory of diminishing marginal returns.
Think of it this way:
Keeping in mind that costs are far more than just economic, but also higher energy and environmental costs, then it’s easy to see that at some point you are spending more for the buckets and shovels than what you can possibly get out in treasure, and you have to stop digging.
In other words, collapse can be sudden because our rates of growth are exponential, and the rate at which costs are growing are also exponential.
Think of it this way:
It has taken industrial civilization a couple of centuries to get to a glass half full, but our rate of drawdown is now so great that in the next couple of decades we will have rapidly slurped up that last giant sip. Even worse, if by some miracle we somehow managed to find another completely full milkshake and doubled the straws one more time, the whole thing would be gone in just one sip!
Now put it all together: The more we double our drawdown, the faster it gets twice as expensive. Finally, it gets so costly that it all comes to a very sudden and painful stop.
Why painful? Because the people who drink the most milkshake and spend the most buried treasure have convinced themselves, and almost everyone else, that they can somehow magically keep going faster and faster and never stop growing.
Or, put another way:
Cheers,
Jerry
Thanks! Good observation!
Jerry – A nice analysis IMHO. But it might be a surprise that I think you’re still being a tad optimistic. Let’s start with a simple but fairly representative model of oil production. Water drive is the primary reservoir energy. And the vast majority of such reservoirs have a similar decline profile. I’m going to cut to the bottom line quickly: it takes a much longer time to recover the second half of the reserves that the first 50%. It’s true that horizontal wells can cut the recovery time for the last 50% but it will still take much longer. More importantly, the vast majority of such reservoir are not viable for such acceleration. The examples where they work can be very dramatic. But only for a small percentage of the fields.
So back to the basics of PO: it’s all about rate…not future recovery. I doubt that we have 50% URR left to produce. But even if we do it will take a great deal longer…maybe as much as 10 times as long…to recover that last half. Consider the current status of the US: we are the 3rd largest producer of oil on the planet. But it’s coming out of the ground at the rate of 10 bopd per well. Consider that typically these wells initially came on at 100’s of bopd. IOW our last “50%” of our recover is producing at around 1/10 (or slower) than the first 50%. So if it took 60 – 70 years for the first half then it will take 500+ years for the second half? That’s probably not a very good numerical model but it does give some sense that the last 50% (if it will actually ever be produced) may not be much of a game changer.
Rockman,
I just want to say, thank you for all your posts, I find your information very helpful in understanding many of the practical issues of drilling, which seem not to be at all understood by others especially the MSM.
Consider the current status of the US: we are the 3rd largest producer of oil on the planet. But it’s coming out of the ground at the rate of 10 bopd per well.
I was looking at some data from a Canadian oil sands producer (Cenovus) yesterday. They have a couple of SAGD projects going that they are getting really good results from. They drill multiple horizontal SAGD well pairs off gravel pads into the oil sands; they inject steam into the upper wells of the pair, and produce hot oil out of the bottom wells. The horizontal well pairs are drilled in parallel about 100 metres (330 feet) apart, dozens of them off each gravel pad.
These wells come on like gangbusters after about 6 months of steaming, and each produce 700 to 800 barrels per day for several years, which makes the economics attractive to oil companies, who like to get their investment back as fast as possible. However, Cenovus has added a couple of tweaks to the process to boost the recovery toward the end of the well lives. First, they put NGLs into the injected steam to improve the efficiency and reduce the steam consumption. Second, they drill a "wedge" well between each of the SAGD pairs because they realized that there was a wedge of hot oil there that wasn't being recovered by the SAGD producers. These "wedge" wells produce 700 bpd with minimal steaming.
They're getting really good results with this - approaching 80% recovery of the oil-in-place, and operating costs of $12 per barrel (plus finding & development costs of $12/bbl). This has got to be like a license to print money for them at current oil prices, so they're ramping up production as fast as they can.
Not that I'm trying to promote any particular oil sands company, because there are other companies trying out different things, but I think it reinforces my contention that Canada will be producing more oil than the US in a decade or two.
It will not be a lot of oil by US consumption standards, and it's not going to put off Peak Oil by more than a few years, assuming we haven't already passed Peak Oil. But it is one of the reasons I am not expecting a steep crash in global production, just a moderately rapid decline with a long tail on it. It will only be a crisis for people who aren't ready for it - i.e. most of them.
Rocky - Great update...thanks. SAGD always looked good on paper but with so many assumptions we just needed enough pilot projects to prove it up. Great how many old projects suddenly become doable when oil prices jump. I'm going to try to sell my owner on 3 pilot projects this year. Nothing fancy: just infield horizontals in some shallow viscouse oil reservoirs. Reservoirs that contain over 1.5 billion bbls or residual oil. Seemed to make sense at $50/bbl. You can imagine how they look at $100/bbl. I actually cut my flow model back some. No point in promising too much if it works at lower flow rates. I ain't nearly as dumb as I look. LOL.
That is true for onshore fields. But offshore must produce enough oil to pay the lease of the rig to even break even. There is no stripper offshore wells. So my money is on a stair step down to only oil from onshore stripper wells. And that step down is gonna hurt. And leave a lot of oil in the ground.
Only if the population numbers are symmetric. I do not think the number of people will slowly and evenly decline going forward. I think it will come in steps as various region go down. Like the population of Russia stepped down after the Soviet Union died.
Anyone have a copy of the whale oil curve? I M sear E us.
THFG: I'm not sure,but, didn't the worlds largest fleet of light, sweet whale oil rigs just get sunk, or run aground?
I think it has more to do with the fact that we seem to be involved in a battle to the death to get the white whale. Was Melville right, and we end up floating on a spar in the ocean?
There is probably more than one whale oil curve.
The production of world whale oil is not comparable to the current situation, because we had other energy sources that could step in, when whale oil became difficult to produce. The whale oil situation is thus analogous to the situation Hubbert wrote about, with nuclear providing sufficient power to provide an "umbrella" of cheap energy and fuel, under which the world could continue to function as world oil production declined. Thus the world whale oil model is not analogous to our current situation.
The whale curve which I think is analogous is the one from Ugo Bardi's recent post Tainter's Law: Where is the Physics/ on his blog, Cassandra's Legacy, and reposted on Our Finite World. According to Ugo:
Gail,
In the link you so graciously provided, Mr. Bardi writes about Mr. Tainter's work on the collapse of societies.
Did Soviet society really collapse? Sure the Soviet Marxism, Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism, and finally Communism never worked but for very long, but is the Russian economy not better off now? What is so different between China and Russia after they had their 'democracy' movements? One was crushed, the other went merrily on. Both countries are now doing better economically. I would not work in the media in either country. Thanks for the reply.
Investigate their oil and gas production and you will see what supported their recovery. I promise you that if they did not have the reserves they do they would still be a mess.
All you need is better technology to catch the last whale...
LOL!
Dude seek help ;) Good 1.
Yes, he is a sick man, albeit with good photoshop skills.
Ugo did name this graph "whale" by the way, which is why I mentioned it here.
How to push the oil levers in the wrong direction
by Ugo Bardi
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/33715
I suspect the EROEI will go far lower before we stop extracting oil. Consider the electric car: with the current pricing and range of the Nissan Leaf, it would economic sense to many people to drive one if there were no internal combustion vehicles to choose from. And yet, the EROEI on rechargeable batteries is far below one. The reason they make sense to produce is that we're converting non-portable energy into portable energy, which is much more valuable.
An oil plant run by electricity generated by some other source accomplishes much the same thing, taking power from the grid and putting it into your gas tank.
Let's carry the EV thing a step further. If EV's become desirable or necessary due to a lack of FF or fuel price, why do people assume that BAU will continue? In other words, if energy has become dear, it seems likely that it will impact all segments of the economy negatively. The economy of BAU will have ceased to exist.
Todd
I don't see an energy crisis as much as I see a 'portable energy crisis'. There are alternatives to fossil fuels for electricity generation that are reasonably priced, such as nuclear and some of the renewables. But storing that energy in a portable form is still much more expensive than using gas, in some cases prohibitively so. I can't honestly imagine an electric tractor or gravel truck with current technology.
I can imagine an electric tractor (lots of others out there, too, just google it). But I still see much more than a 'portable energy crisis', as the scale and complexity of our current oil dependent system crashes around our ears.
Can you really see a farmer plowing his fields with one of those? Judging by the size of those lead-acid batteries, I'd guess about 30 minutes maximum of heavy work before they're depleted. And probably a lot less. Imagine you were using a lead-acid electric car to pull a heavy trailer - you'd be lucky to make it to 30 minutes. The energy density just isn't there. If you look at lead-acid trucks, you'll see the same thing - they max out at around 45 minutes of drive time.
To me, that's a tractor for the environmentalist who doesn't mind spending more and doing a lot less, not for feeding the world's population.
Back long ago Ferguson made a tractor that ran on TVO, the TE-20.
Tractor Vaporizing Oil was cheaper than gasoline. Don't want to get any on your tractor, though?
The Big Book of Massey Tractors:
http://books.google.com/books?id=DSanS8TFio4C&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=ferg...
Friends of Ferguson:
http://www.fofh.co.uk/
TVO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractor_vaporising_oil
____________________________________________
Got a Ferguson TE-35 sitting just outside.
Runs good.
____________________________________________
Background music?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZfRaWAtBVg
It is not economic sense though to abandon your current car and buy a new EV just as everyone decides to do the same... Should the EV companies still be around after the next shock through the economy.
Very good post, Gail.
Thank you.
I find it fascinating that the World economy and oil supplies have held up so well to this point.
I am not a big conspiracy theory guy, but I wonder how much behind-the-scenes management may be going on to 'extend and pretend'...in addition to the 'open stage' 'extend and pretend' we have seen.
It wouldn't be science fiction to think that the U.S. government (and other governments) have commissioned think tank studies to war game scenarios involving the inevitable decline of oil.
But...if there have been such (classified) studies (I am aware of the German study BTW)...then any management actions which may have been going on seem inadequate to me.
So, the possibility space is thus:
1. No serious studies have been undertaken that are not already known to the public (that is, no classified studies exist).
2. Such studies exist, but the authors have determined that no serious potential problems exist, and the study sponsors concurred.
3. Such studies exist, and they predict serious problems, and a subset of the World governments are attempting to manage such sort of transition/accommodation behind the curtain....the end point of such a scheme may be pleasant only for a small select minority of the population.
4. Such studies exist, they predict serious future consequences, but were/are dismissed as unbelievable due to a lack of vision/being unable to break free of BAU inertia/vested interests etc.
I am an analyst for a certain organization...but in a highly specific area (unfortunately not in the energy supply/usage arena).
I know the U.S. Government (USG) loves to conduct studies...I know that contractors/Federally-Funded Research and Development Corporations (FFRDCs)/think tanks love to make money conducting studies for USG...I know that there are organizations such as the CIA and other in USG which would have divisions which are tasked to look at the 'big picture' over a medium-to-long-term time domain.
Therefore I surmise that studies have been done, and likely are being done as we speak.
If so, the probability (IMO) approaches 1 that such organizations read TOD.
I am sure that most of the major organizations read TOD, since Oil Drum staff members sometimes have interactions folks from these organizations. I am doubtful that any major studies are out, because leaks tend to occur. It seems like we would have seen leeks, if there were actual major studies out.
I think more what has happened is a myriad of smaller peak oil interactions--a combination of individual people from major organizations informing themselves about what is happening in the peak oil area, plus individual people being asked to provide information to groups researching the issue. I know, for example, that Steve Kopits has talked to Congressional groups twice recently. I have been involved in discussions with people from important organizations also.
First post although I have read many erudite posts by many so I'd like to
start off with a nod to those who contribute.
Hope this is not off topic but in an interview William F Engdahl states the following about Hubbard:
But if you read his original paper of 1956, there is no scientific argumentation, it’s simply assertion. And the assertion is all based on the idea that oil is a fossil fuel and is limited. Nowhere is that proven.
You can read the whole interview here:
http://www.theundergroundinvestor.com/2011/03/a-history-of-rigged-fraudu...
Anyone care to comment on Mr. Engdahls choice of words :)
"....the assertion is all based on the idea that oil is a fossil fuel and is limited. Nowhere is that proven."
Jeez, or oil is not a fossil fuel and is unlimited, as in 'abiotic' and infinite? If we wait a bit the oil fields will replenish themselves? If we drill deep enough we will find the real source of all oil; the magic oilosphere....
...all evidence to the contrary.
Maybe the same man would ask us to prove that gravity exists ....
Maybe we haven't waited long enough yet...
I think a proper description of "Limited oil supply" is "Progressively more expensive to extract". I think with this definition of limited oil supply, almost everyone will agree that in some sense oil supply is limited. Technological inventions may help the extraction rates in some cases, but we don't have evidence at this time that they will truly produce lower priced oil. If technological inventions could produce a rising supply of lower-priced oil, our problems would be over. Our rising oil prices in the last ten years have illustrated that oil supply is limited. If it were not, supply would have flooded the market as prices rose (even if the price rise were 100% as the result of speculation).
So whether or not Hubbert proved that oil supply was limited, price trends in the last ten years, plus essentially flat production since late 2004, have since proved that oil supply is limited.
I presume you are wondering whether Engdahl is suggesting that oil is abiogenic. Probably. He's been saying all sorts of silly things for some time.
Mr. Engdahl, in the cited interview, also says:
Engdahl calls himself an "ex peak oil believer" -- or something like that. You won't find many of his fans around here.
But if you read his original paper of 1956, there is no scientific argumentation, it’s simply assertion. And the assertion is all based on the idea that oil is a fossil fuel and is limited. Nowhere is that proven.
No, he didn't prove that oil is a fossil fuel and is limited. But he was a petroleum geologist and he knew that was true. So, he just skipped over that step and got straight to the fundamental issue of "What does the oil production curve look like?" That's the fundamental issue, the rest is just stuffing and padding.
All Hubbert had was intuition. It was pretty clear he had only rudimentary mathematical skills. Laherrere said this regarding Hubbert:
So that was 18 years later and he didn't have any math yet. Only in the 1980's did Hubbert reference the Logistic curve and the idea of linearization from the Verhulst equation. Yet that turned out to be a heuristic as it never was theoretically justified. So Hubbert had tremendous insight but kept the math at the heuristic level.
It's kind of as if Newton could explain the law of acceleration due to gravity but never came up with the language of calculus to show it. We know that Newton did both but Hubbert only did half the job. In my opinion it is an interesting quirk of history that Hubbert just asserted the peaked curve and his forceful personality did the rest. If you don't believe that Hubbert could intimidate people, read what Deffeyes said about his senior colleague in his book "Hubbert's Peak".
It turns out that the derivation of the Logistic sigmoid curve is pretty simple. Any applied mathematician can derive it by considering dispersion over a finite volume. And no it doesn't have anything to do with the Verhulst equation, contrary to Hubbert's guess.
You asked, sorry if it deflated anyone's bubble of expectations.
The key thing is that Hubbert had the initial insight to see the problem, and he had the courage to push the issue. Remember, he was a Shell employee at the time, and pushing the idea of Peak Oil was not likely to be a career enhancing move.
Whether by math, or by forceful personality and heuristics, the important point is he did it. And he did it a half century ago.
I was under the impression that Hubbert's work on the dynamics of oil movement through water tables wasn't lacking in rigorous math.
I would like to see a reference. I do modeling of transport through porous media and never see his name pop up.
I would like to see a reference. I have done modeling of transport through porous media and have never see his name pop up. This looks like basic first-order physics concerning a gravity head:
http://www.duc.auburn.edu/academic/classes/geol/lee/IBA/iba-lee.ppt
king Hubbert - Google Scholar search. A handful of papers there, one with 925 cites. Him being able in maths is simply something I've heard allusions to, judge for yourself. A few of those papers look to be viewable sans payment. Likely they're more detailed than that .ppt.
The math in this one is pretty impressive => "Darcy's law and the field equations of the flow of underground fluids".
So I take what I said back, and only now wonder why he was so guarded in revealing any math he did for his peak oil work.
What about the 1982 paper Deffeyes extracted Q/T from? In his book Ken made it sound just brutally daunting, and seemed quite happy to find such a simple equation underneath it all. Also wasn't that was MKH revealing his secrets - and perhaps he simply was never pressed to explain it all in detail? Perhaps if he were alive today he'd just be showing .ppts with ample colorful slides, ala Laherrère.
Or was the '82 paper the one you referred to earlier?
I think the 1982 paper was the one that finally revealed his heuristics. The problem with this paper is that it is very obscure and not readily available:
This from "What is the limit of Chinese coal supplies—A STELLA model of Hubbert Peak" descrbes the earlier paper:
This paper is here (http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/1956/1956.pdf) and no way does it have 80 pages of differential equations because the paper is only 57 pages long. The differential equations are very rudimentary, appear on only a few pages, and basically describe integration. Unless an appendix is missing? A huge mystique has grown around Hubbert as you can see.
Gail, you may be correct about the lack of studies...but, I am not completely certain.
The U.S. information security classification and 'need-to-know' systems can have some very narrow and deeply buried crevasses.
At any rate, I applaud you (and other TOD Staffers and other PO/sustainability experts) talking to USG folks. I sincerely hope that your communication has some positive effect!
And there is the "study this" results VS the results put down on paper.
The Businesman's Plot - that putsch involving Smedley Butler. The published report to Congress claimed they couldn't figure out who/what happened in any meaningful way.
Gail,
Great post on your site.
I just added your site to my FireFox icon bar...a select group! I encourage all TODers to visit Gail's site.
I take issue with Dr. Chu's goals to increase battery life for EVs to 15 years, to increase energy density by 5-7 times, and to cut costs by a factor of three, to make EVs comparable with ICE cars.
The goal of 'EVs comparable to ICE vehicles' is a red herring, in my opinion.
EVs will be /just a part/ of what may enable a post-BAU paradigm...and they will not be 'comparable to ICE vehicles' in performance...that is an unreachable/unreasonable paean to BAU.
I could go with the reduce costs by a factor of three, battery life of 10 years, and the energy density about where we have it today, combined with a different lifestyle and expectations...starting with Bicycle Dave's idea of a 35 mph speed limit (at least in cities/urban areas). This would allow very low-mass vehicles with acceptable occupant safety and plenty of urban range given no advancement in battery energy density.
In any complex system, the system enjoys operating in a "sweet spot", and in a population of such system where most are in their "comfort zone" then homeostasis is optimized, and reasonable equifinality can be attained with limited effort. That is to say, every thing goes clicking along easily and efficiency, and though there may be outlier members of a set of such systems that fail, they are rare and uncorrelated. One view of this is a field of corn growing at Liebig's Minimum -- maximum output with minimum input, few weeds, little illness, etc.
Ratchet up the environmental stress and the systems move from "comfort" to "tolerance", where they survive just fine, but with greatly increased effort. Most of the corn doesn't die (maybe failure rates increase, but only a little), but yields are down while inputs are up. Stress is highly correlated, though one plant may be short of one mineral and another may be short of another -- each is trading off needs. Some weeds or other plants or bugs suddenly prosper too, as they better adapt to the stress.
Ratchet the stress a little more and suddenly a wide variety of faults occur. A few members profit as the competition drops in their locale, and variance explodes as the mean falls. The corn field suffers, with large losses. This corner is barren, while that side is dead except for weeds, and the other has blight. Here and there a few gleaming ears still manage to grow, but there aren't many, and the healthiest plants are Round-up resistant weeds. The system has passed its ability to self-compensate, homeostasis cannot by maintained, and failure results.
Once you hit the high-stress point it doesn't take much to generate failure, and individuals cross from "stressed but tolerant" to "rapid mortality". On a nation-state level, weaker states suddenly fail for all sorts of odd reasons that didn't seem that likely -- and individuals experience the same -- each fails uniquely, though many seem to fail together. To prevent spreading failure, you have to reduce the overall stress. The only way to really prevent failure given that stress must grow with declining energy, is to manage the rate of change so that the systems themselves can evolve and change. Even then, increased failure may occur, but as a more rapid death/rebirth rate, as better optimized systems take their place.
Really, this is the key point. If drought slowly happens over 1000 years, you have migration and adaptation of species, and SOMETHING will grow. If it happens in two years, you have massive die-back and then forest fires, and a vast area quickly dies, and there is no recovery for decades even IF rain returns.
Bringing it home, I don't expect fast or slow failure, but a series of stair-steps that vary from locale to locale, and with varying impacts to individuals. Some think we can all grow to be "comfortable" once again. Others think we'll all fail in the "mortality zone". I think we'll mostly all see a lot of stress, and failure will be soon for some, late for others, and not at all for others. For most, failure will be abrupt when it does come, whether from loss of livelihood, loss of life, or loss of freedom. Things will work OK for you until they just don't anymore.
Failure -- for when your very best just isn't good enough.
I agree with almost everything you say. I think the one thing I would wonder about is whether failure will come "not at all" for some. I would expect that if there are people in this category, they will almost all be living with virtually no fossil fuel inputs today, the way they have for thousands of years. So they can continue doing what they have always done.
Except for a few hunter gatherers in remote Amazon jungle, virtually everyone in the world today (including Eskimos in the remote arctic) lives with fossil fuel inputs.
Good points about environmental stresses, especially drought. Of course, as we saw in Pakistan this year, flooding can be as bad as drought, or worse.
We will see much more of both, and much worse cases, in the years moving forward. Hard to know how fast things will get worse, but worse they will get. Texas is being hit hard right now, with the kinds of fires you talk about. We saw Russia and then China suffer major droughts. The SW of the US is drying out. And of course water tables everywhere are falling rapidly, especially in Northern China and India.
I think a stair step pattern is likely, but I don't think we can rule out more general and precipitous collapses locally and globally.
The carbon cycle is now spinning out of control. Oceans and soils, which had been absorbing about half of our output are absorbing less and in the case of many soils starting to be net sources of carbon rather than sinks. These and other feedbacks will not be easily stopped. And the results in climate chaos will hit those living on little oil as well as those greatly dependent on it.
We have waited to long. We did not hold back in pulling the trigger that is runaway climate change. The dramatic loss in Arctic ice volume in the last four years was the sound of the click that is now sending a bullet straight into the head of the world climactic system. Bullets are not easily retrieved.
Like all things, I think the answer is relative. What is meant by fast or slow?
My personal take is that we are rapidly returning to BAU! And we will return there and stay there for a very long time.
To qualify that position just a bit, consider the normal state of human beings for lets say the last 10,000 years, and define the normal, usual condition. Achieving BAU and maintaining it becomes more obtainable.
Cheers,
ej
I take it that your BAU is essentially Scenario III on Figure 2 of this post (Figure 61 or Hubbert). After a few years, this is the true "Steady State" economy that everyone talks about. The catch is that it is one without fossil fuels, so it is at a pretty low level.
Gail, sometimes I think there are so many problems today that people are not very interested in problems in the future. They will only worry about gasoline supply if they see the gas prices go up or the pump is empty, or else think all must be well.
Some folks are now supporting Donald Trump for President who states that he will bring the price of oil down to $40 to $50 per barrel by telling OPEC they must lower the price. Good luck Donald.
I've been amazed that the US government almost always runs a deficit, whether times are good or bad. We are now seeing the consequences of that mounting deficit.
Stocks sink after S&P warns on U.S. debt
If I had been President of the US on Sept 11, 2001, the very next day I would have recommended raising the federal gas tax to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, shortly after 9/11, President Bush encourages Americans to go shopping to keep the economy going. Sacrifice is what someone else does.
I suspect it will be slow, and will get slower, contrary to what people here repeatedly insist. Not that remaining addicted to it isn't a lost cause. It IS!! But Jeremy Gilbert, former chief petroleum engineer at BP, and an active member of the peak oil crowd, believes that, following initial decline and rapidly increasing prices, there is likely to be a surge in enhanced recovery methods which will produce a plateau at about 65 MB/d for a decade or two.
http://oileducation.tv/jeremy-gilbert.html
Who knows...perhaps it will be a new method of extensive underground fracking, like detonating explosives in the reservoir. People will work hard to put nice big bumps on the downhill side of the curve.
shox,
Mr. Gilbert's vision may be technically possible...but at what price at the pump to cover the enhanced production costs which will come with further enhanced recovery methods?
And, as this scenario already posits a step down from ~ 85M bbls of oil per day to ~ 65 M bbls per day...would a shocked economy be able to stomach the necessary higher fuel prices brought about by the higher production costs?
If not, then that oil will not get produced.
If it is, it may not be bought by customers in the U.S.
People WILL pay $200 - $400 dollars a barrel. They already pay that in Europe, with the added taxes, and, even though they complain about the price, they can still comfortably afford many of the luxuries in life. I can tell you from experience that they pay that much even in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe, the taxes are deliberately imposed to reduce their consumption. Most European nations have not increased their annual consumption much since the 1970's oil crises. Germany's consumption hasn't even exceeded its 1979 all time high.
The only problem ultimately is that an increase in oil price acts as a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Prices of goods increase, oil industry costs increase, and oil price has to increase all over again. Ultimately, it will result in much reduced consumption.
The energy costs (EROEI) of exploration and recovery, however, are another matter.
I agree with you. As long as I still have a job, I could see myself paying double the present price (e.g. $250/barrel). I would not buy as much gasoline, but I would still be in the market for some.
I don't think Gilbert is including all the other systems that play a role. He is doing what I often see, which is focusing on just one system and convincing oneself that all will work out.
If one doesn't include the interaction of:
- the energy system
- the financial system
- the infrastructure system
- the resource extraction system
one will come to the conclusion he has.
Increasingly more people are understanding how the financial system can cripple all the others (tweaks Nick's nose) but not many people realize the mess we're in with respect to resource extraction. Copper ore concentrations, for instance, are down to 0.6%. The only reason we can process the quantity of rock we currently are is because of the abundance of capital and inexpensive energy. When both of those go, copper will plummet in its rate of extraction — another non-linear impact. Roughly the same will occur for all other extracted resources that are down to the dregs.
At that point it really is less energy intensive to dismantle a skyscraper that is no longer needed (boy will we have a lot of those soon) to reuse its steel (all that lovely embedded energy, much of it from petroleum!!) than to mine new ores.
This is the Salvage Society in the Greer slide I posted elsewhere. I suspect we will get there more quickly than the graph indicates, though, perhaps as soon as 2040 or 2050. Greer clearly points out that the boundaries between stages are far from distinct and we're already seeing some salvage occurring around the world. This will increase.
Again, if you can't see the non-linear tipping points in the system, I suggest that you have not yet done enough looking into on the topic.
I call them "societal switches" and have in that past written how one of them in particular, higher education, will largely turn off this decade. Combine a pool of educated workers and a contracting economy and it doesn't take very long before market signals get back to potential students that spending money and time on higher education is a waste. It doesn't take much contraction at all...just a few percent of contraction and the pool of unemployed, educated workers instantly swells thus convincing new potential students that their chance of landing a high-paying job that allows them to pay off their school debt is too low to be worth the risk.
This decade is going to be a blood bath for anyone in the higher education sector. In my courses I particularly emphasize to the college professors to get busy building their backup trade because almost no one is going to pay them for what they are doing now. This occurred in the Soviet collapse for professors and scientists that worked for the state.
Salvage of finite resources has been the norm throughout human hisory. In the UK entire Roman towns and cities with many stone buildings simply disappeared into the empty countryside over the centuries. Robbed away down to the foundation trenches. The only places where this has not happened have been where population collapses have reduced demand for stone. Rural Ireland is littered with abandoned medieval churches, often with Victorian churches built right along side.
True, I remember seeing Hadrian's Villa stripped of its marble.
We are going to have a lot of steel available to recover from completely unneeded office buildings.
We will have a lot of steel and other metals that we can use. The catch will be that they will not be of the high purity needed for high-tech equipments. So we will likely be able to make wheelbarrows and oxcarts, but probably not computers or replacement parts for the electrical grid or for oil drilling equipment. So we will have to drop to a much lower level of complexity.
Gail, you're certainly right that we'll have to drop to a lower level of complexity, but it's worth remembering that half a century ago, most of the technology in use in the US didn't require the sort of high-tech equipment that needs high-purity alloys. Now of course there are other good reasons to think that we won't be able to maintain a 1960s-level technology, but alloys aren't one of them.
You are right. 1960s' technology doesn't take you back too far. There weren't computers and calculators, but there were mechanical adding machines, that would chug along for enough iterations to tell you what the result of multiplication was. By subtracting enough times, they would tell you what the quotient was, and what the remainder was. The major limit with these calculators would be (1) getting the machinery set up to make them, and (2) maintaining electricity so they would run.
There were certainly cars and trucks and airplanes in the 1960s, but here we run into resource limits when it comes to oil.
I think the big issue is that we are not set up to go back to earlier technologies. It would take huge investment to set up new factories. At the same time, we would need to maintain our electricity infrastructure and a major subset of our oil and gas infrastructure, plus much of the roadway system. If we have troubles with the financial system, it is hard to see how this all will happen.
Technical advancement can only go forward, not backward.
Take for instance the medevial war technologiy. It started in the bronce age without iron or steel. Then they found iron and gradually new war techologies evoled. Until we have the knight in his shining armour. This all happened from the below and upwards, and slowly. Then someone invented gun powder,and those knights would be gone.
Now say we run out of sulfur sowe can't make any more gun powder. We can't just go back to medevial war fare. It took a lot of development and trial and error to get to that point. Most of the knowledge is gone. That knowledge would have to be developed again. Instead we would probably invent some low tech killomachine you might expect to find in a Kevin Kostner movie.
(And I am not thinking on his floating oil water separation machine).
After the fall of the Roman empire, many technologies were forgotten.
My understanding is that the Britons went back to making rubble walls, the Roman technology fading away.
"The widespread use of concrete in many Roman structures has ensured that many survive to the present day. The Baths of Caracalla in Rome are just one example. Many Roman aqueducts and bridges have masonry cladding on a concrete core, as does the dome of the Pantheon.
Some have stated that the secret of concrete was lost for 13 centuries until 1756, when the British engineer John Smeaton pioneered the use of hydraulic lime in concrete, using pebbles and powdered brick as aggregate. However, the Canal du Midi was built using concrete in 1670. Likewise there are concrete structures in Finland that date back to the 16th century. Portland cement was first used in concrete in the early 1840s."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete
Funnily enough sword combat is actually documented and still practised in England... and a lot of the weapons from medieval onwards can still be made. I've learnt broadsword, rapier and dagger and viking style sword/shield combo before. Not to mention knife throwing and archery are still around. You can also buy chain-mail armor if you know where to look.
All this devolution rests on the relationship of the costs of energy and labor. Increasing labor-intensivity is to be expected in powerdown, as labor becomes relatively cheaper than fossil fuel-derived energy. That's why paleocon's description of unevenness is spot on; powerdown will play out differently depending on one's region and class position. While aangel's point about system-wide non-linearities is certainly valid, we should expect social class differences to come roaring back into cultural prominence. No more "we're all middle class" ideological smokescreen.
"Tactical Nuclear Hyperfracking"
I'm sure it will be productive, cost-effective, and result in much lower coliform bacteria counts in the groundwater. Everybody wins.
LOL! Heading Out told us about a plan to heat kerogen from oil shale into oil with nuclear devices. This idea is even more way out.
I'm so comforted that the engineers are working with these problems with the macro-view in mind.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/26/nuclear-war-global-warming_n_82...
Yeay!! Let's nuke the shit out of global warming!
The net effect would be warming, once the dust settled. Global dimming is perverse that way. Hard to have a nuke war without putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, where it'll reside a loooong time.
Still, the experiment will likely be tried.
Here's an article about Saudi Arabia investing $100 billion in renewables; wind, solar, nuclear to replace some of their growing oil consumption.
Saudi Arabia Looks to Solar, Nuclear Power to Reduce Its Oil Use by Half
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-03/solar-nuclear-energy-to-reduce-...
This use of their resources is interesting. There are a few reasons I see they would be doing this:
-Economic reasons, such as they want to conserve their oil resource to sell to Europe and the US for as high a price as possible. They could perhaps reach this goal by limiting exports now in hopes that the oil will be worth more in the future. By developing alternative energy, they will have more to export
-They know that the oil is much more limited than they have let on, perhaps peak oil is a major driver here and maybe capacity is a lot less than what they have officially claimed.
-For environmental reasons they believe that oil use should be curtailed.
Since they know that very expensive oil can curtail demand and lead the world into recession, there must be some very good reasons they are investing heavily into alternative energy sources.
I would guess that the reason they are doing this is the second of your three suggested reasons:
I would definitely not think environmental reasons is why.
I would say that this IS an environmental reason.
Environmentalism is, at root, merely thinking for the long term rather than the short term, with respect to both 'sources' and 'sinks' and with the knowledge that both have limits.
Saudi Arabia investing $100 billion in renewables; wind, solar, nuclear....For environmental reasons
Err fission nuclear isn't renewable. And one can look to Chernobyl and post March Japan to see that Fission based Nuclear is not 'environmental' in a 'positive' way.
But what I find interesting is the utter silence on the idea that KSA having a source of fissionable material is just fine because, well, the IAEA exists and working with the United Nations will keep the atom peaceful.
At the present rate of population growth the Saudis will be chasing there tail. It is only going to get worse, the majority of the population are young and have not yet breed. Most of the work done is done be foreigners who would be out of there like a shot if there was a civil war. I personally think that there is a 50/50 chance of Saudi Arabia collapsing in the next 5 years and nearly 100% in the next ten.
Dimitry Orlov wrote a really outstanding article that directly answers the question posed here:
Peak Oil is History:
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/peak-oil-is-history.html
Cheers,
Jerry
How big of an effect in mediating a collapse could a large decrease in the US consumption have? What if we got lucky and gasoline in the US stays at $4 a gallon, never going below that mark again. Hopefully it will quickly go up to $6. At that point Peak Oil will no longer seem a fantasy to most people, behavior would begin changing and demand for oil begins seriously dropping - say down to 14 mbpd in the US over the next 12 months. Possibly more changes could be made to drop the consumption leven lower over the next two or three years, and meanwhile alternative energy is not only taken more seriously but demanded by the majority of folks. I would hope this would improve alternate energy efficiency usage faster. So, let's say we're down to 10 mbdp consumption in three years, mostly due to consumer demand and behavior mod.
Would flattening and extending the downslope by this amount enable most of our standards of living to remain relatively similar to what it is today, except for electric cars, carpooling, less plastic, less synthetic fertilizer, NG fleet vehicles, less consumption of stupid things that don't enhance one's life, etc.
Or are we past the point of no return no matter what?
Maybe a collapse of the US would mediate the downslope for the rest of the world. But I have a hard time seeing a voluntary change in oil demand.
Oil demand is mostly driven by people's wages. Even if they trade in their SUVs for something more fuel efficient, they still spend their wages on something else that uses oil. So the only way I would see a big drop in US demand is in a big drop in employment figures, perhaps accompanied by many more of the existing workers going from full-time to part time. With much lower incomes, the ability to buy oil would drop off rapidly, so oil consumption would drop. Most of us would think of an additional huge drop in employment as being pretty close to collapse.
When the banking system crashed in 2008 and oil plummeted it took immense "price point" pressure off the bottom 25% of the world. Hopefully we get another big drop off in unemployment soon, widespread panic would collapse the markets and that I consider progress. Trying to keep this arrangement is suicidal.
You ask a pertinent question LaurenB. This is where my thoughts keep going, is how do we visualize a future with 1/2 the oil we currently use in the US. Now, it may take longer than 3 years, but my sense of it is this: Anything and everything that can be thrown at peak oil will. Take for example superstraws, or tar sands, or Orinoco heavy oil, ethanol, shale gas, gasification. Right now all these alternatives to make up for oil plateauing in May 05, seem to be out of the view of cornucopians. But if that isn't enough to push a person towards peak oil, I don't know what is.
BUT, the complex edifice of BAU or as some say Empire, is becoming more fragile. Huge debt loads, crumbling infrastructure, high unemployment, regional unrest, and so many people struggling to keep their BAU as in tact as possible. At some threshold the edifice begins to shake. Too many bankrupt countries and individuals to keep the ball rolling enough to maintain value in currency, and hyperinflation speeds the drop towards collapse.
So I answer your question simply by saying there are two stages to collapse. The first is the all out efforts to maintain BAU, and the 2nd is an out of control closing of the books so to speak. We are still in the first stage. When the 2nd stage happens is unclear.
This is an important question and hard to answer. A large decrease in consumption as a result of high prices could mean people can not afford to drive to work which will precipitate one cycle of the collapse by dragging down the economy. But if we can make large efficiency gains without dramatically dragging down the economy, there is some hope.
Hope is tempered when you quantify how big the changes have to be. Read 'Renewable energy without the hot air' by David MacKay (available free online) to get some comprehensible numbers about how big the changes have to be to power our standard of living on renewable energy sources. If you consider the 5 billion people currently living on relatively little energy and note that they are expecting improved standards of living, it becomes harder to argue for a way to maintain the western standard of living.
But the last point is that there is space for optimism. There is plenty of renewable energy. There is solar power striking earth to power much more than the current western standard of living for 9 billion people. And the EROEI arguments in the article don't directly apply to solar power. (Solar has EROEI enough greater than 1 that you could divert a significant part of that power to build new solar power systems, and you have exponential growth and the limit is not EROEI but materials, land, liquid fuels needed in the manufacturing process, and most importantly lead time to build the systems). The problem is that even with a concerted national effort it will take several decades to build renewable energy infrastructure to power even a highly efficient lifestyle near our current standard of living. Since we show few signs of starting this huge effort in the next few years, the space for optimism is shrinking. And that brings us back to the question that initiated this article: How fast will the crunch progress? And the answer is...nobody knows. I suspect that the people declaring that western civilization will collapse in 2 or 3 years are getting caught up in their apocalyptic rhetoric. But it could be a hard landing over the next 10-20 years or oil might have a slower decline over 20-50 years giving us a chance to avoid the social instability that is the real danger.
One problem with adding a lot of wind or solar PV is that it is a net energy loser during the period of ramp-up, because of the front-end nature of the investment. So we end up net behind, for a very long ramp-up period.
Another problem with wind and solar PV is that they only produce intermittent electricity. This really doesn't replace oil. It doesn't even do a very good job of replacing base load electricity. So I don't really agree with your optimism.
No, wind and PV don't replace oil; other things or ways of doing things will be needed. That mostly affects transport. Wind can replace oil in maritime transport, after all, that's how we had world trade in the 1700 and early 1800s. The scale and speed are the things that may not be sustainable.
As for baseload power - do we NEED baseload power? I'm starting to think that the biggest problem with our ability to adapt is our stubborn refusal to imagine any way of life outside BAU. Including the doomer, perhaps especially so. Certainly some things require continuous power, but not everything, and I think we haven't even started considering what's needed. Energy storage on some level is probably necessary, but most households don't have active energy use at night, so a few batteries could do the job for many... Some shops were open at night even before electricity, so I doubt that we need baseload as badly as we claim.
adamx,
This seems to me like the right way to think about it. Things will be very different in the future, and it is really hard to look into the future and discern what arrangements people will make in trying to make the best of it. It clearly isn't going to be current US liquid fuel consumption, but I see no reason to expect for it to be early 19th century style subsistence living.
I fully agree that variability and baseload power is not the real problem for renewables. If we only had intermittent energy available, we could adjust most things to use energy when it is available.
Gail objects above to the infrastructure investments required by renewables. That is a bigger problem. It is too simple to say that it is the upfront energy that is the problem...there is still plenty of coal and natural gas to get us far enough along in building renewables so that renewable energy could power building more if we only consider the energy needed. The problem is the required materials, liquid fuels, political will, and social stability for decades in order to build the systems.
Good points.
Keep in mind that "base load" itself is as much a problem as some kind of necessity.
The fact that nukes and coal plants cannot be easily turned on and off as needed means that at night there is an over supply of electricity. A lot now goes into completely unnecessary lighting.
Gail, there are some great advances in solar thermal recently & in fact some of them are very close to grid parity (eSolar comes to mind among others). there are some concentrated PV with multi-junction cells that claim to have under a year energy return on energy used to manufacture. The problem of intermittent production is handled in the CSP case by storing molten salt for off peak electricity production. I agree with you on one problem though, its the frontloaded-ness of solar projects. This is the reason i feel we should spend every last bit of cheap fossil energy henceforth on developing the high EROEI renewables.
Another problem that currently plagues (& clouds) the renewable discussion is this divergence between the EROI and EROEI. IMO this is because of current financial infrastructure being developed as a result of energy extracted from high EROEI sources over long term. so the actual energy component's weight is low in EROI. This will definitely change as we move into a post peak world though. but still current years are very crucial IMO since we'll have lesser and lesser of surplus to direct towards front-heavy projects.
PS: some solar termal like eSolar claim to have about a year ramp up from scratch which is an acceptable reaction time once the realization of peak sets in.
Your post, Gail, and the associated comments from the hive mind, particularly Jerry's analogies and Andre's link to Raford make this worth bookmarking. Add me to the relatively vertical list. The reindeer on St. Matthew Island disappeared pretty darned quick. Granted, their system was much less complex, with less interplay of resources. But overshoot can cause a fairly vertical collapse, and we're pretty addicted to oil.
Good point, and thanks. I actually considered adding the St. Matthew Island example to my comment, but in the end I decided the milkshake metaphor was probably enough to get the point across.
Ecological overshoot is absolutely the larger context within which all other considerations of consumption / population / pollution need to be placed for any meaningful discussion of our predicament.
It really couldn't be simpler, consume resources faster than they can be replenished, and/or produce wastes faster than they can be absorbed, and you are in big trouble. Do both of those things at an accelerating rate on a global scale and, as Dimitry said, strap on your parachute.
Yet, I am continually surprised by how many people don't seem to understand even that most basic concept. Either that or they flat out don't want to hear it, choosing instead to dismiss it as fear-mongering, or worse.
Cheers,
Jerry
Yes. Every straw added to the milkshake, every spin of the windmill without brakes, every running step that Wiley Coyote takes over the abyss, every nuke plant with no off switch that we add, every deepwater platform that we drill with no hope of remediation, every profit-oriented fracking injection where we try to eke out a net-gain where none exists, all in the name of profit for the Corporation, spins us faster and faster just like Lumina's windmill video. I bookmarked that one too; also a great analogy. It is the energy density and quality of fossil fuels that has allowed us to get ourselves into so much trouble, like the occasional cocaine user who discovers heroin. We are at a unique point in the history of civilization in terms of complexity and resource availability--this time really is different.
If we were having this conversation 40 years ago, I would have said we could have a nice bell curve downslope. Now, not so much.
I remember exactly that: having this conversation 40 years ago. Already, the choices and consequences were obvious to everyone who was paying attention. The visionaries in systems ecology, population dynamics, energy, etc. were showing and telling us.
And I really believed we could have that gentle landing. After all, surely "they" would all understand and help take the necessary steps; after all, the alternative was so horrible...
Silly me. Just another deluded member of the Cassandra Club.
Myself, i was even more of an idiot forty years ago than I am now.
I knew about and discussed the problems the world faced with AGW and finite resources and energy. Yet I continued my merry life, I had children built a home and continued to consume and burn more than my share of everything. All the time I was doing it I was in denial and have no idea exactly what i was thinking.
I even failed to warn my two children,(although we talk much about it all now).
I suppose I was simply selfish and thought tomorrow would never come.
Jerry,
I would agree with all of Dmitry's reasons (and probably a few more as well).
In fact, I recognize all of the reasons as ones I have given at some time in the past, but probably not as nicely organized into a list as his. It is possible I got some of my ideas from him (and perhaps a bit of vice versa). We read each other's posts, so a little cross-pollination is possible.
Even with $4 gasoline, I am still seeing people driving big SUVs and trucks with paper plates - meaning recently purchased. What are these people thinking?
On the other hand, adjusted in price compared to gold, $4 oil seems cheap. Gold came close to $1500/oz today, less than a few dollars. In 2000 it was around $400. If one uses the price of gold as the "horizon" then it appears that gasoline, a similar commodity, hasn't really risen much at all. Its just the purchasing power of the dollar that has been taken out and shot. Imagine what a gallon of gas costs in Zimbabwean dollars.
A run-up in price could easily be mistaken for approaching the downslope of the Hubbert Curve, in the same way that a colder than normal winter may dispel someone of the fact of global warming and climate change. There is just too much signal to noise in trying to determine this from prices at the pump, especially when the dollar's purchasing power falls.
Empty pumps and gas lines I think will be a more sure sign. Then it really won't matter what size of vehicle you drive - though the hybrids and smaller ones might have to endure this pumping up ritual a little less. Where it will really hit is in all the other uses for oil, such as agriculture.
One last thought - I read yesterday that a Sherman Tank gets about 2 miles/gallon. Am wondering what the military is doing to prepare for oil's scarcity. Or if they will simply take and use it all.
I don't think we can ever expect to see empty pumps and gas lines. I think most peak oil people have the story wrong.
The problem is likely to be unaffordable oil products, not a shortage of affordable oil products. There will certainly be a huge amount of unaffordable oil left in the ground. This is why the whole idea of estimating the remaining reserves and spreading them out into the future is a silly exercise. We don't know how much will prove to be economically recoverable. If governments raise their tax rates, even oil that looks like it can be extracted at current prices may not to be economically recoverable.
Furthermore, even oil that is extracted and transported to the pump may prove to be unaffordable. With a huge share of the population unemployed, many people many not be able to afford a car of any kind.
The only possibility I see for empty pumps and gas lines is if governments can artificially hold down gasoline (or diesel) prices. In such a case, we may see the situation we had in Atlanta after the 2005 and 2008 hurricanes in the Gulf--not enough gasoline to go around.
Oil consumption is down since 2005 because of recession and layoffs and jobs moving overseas. (This is true for most of OECD--see graph above.) We should expect more of the same.
Maybe we won't see gas lines as before in the 70s,but we will see many of the quick-marts go out of business as their clientele buys only gas and not the high profit inside items. the gas lines will lengthen because there are fewer places to buy.
Ah, perhaps there is one place we see things differently, Gail :-).
First, the planet is a big place so I would want to know if in this statement "I don't think we can ever expect to see empty pumps and gas lines" you mean the U.S., North America, Western democracies or the whole planet. If you mean any level other than just the U.S. the statement is easily demonstrated to be incorrect. If you mean the U.S. now there is a bit of wiggle room for a discussion but still is incorrect since there are localized shortages all the time.
In my courses I always mention that the future will be lumpy i.e. not evenly distributed. Some places may well go for many years well-supplied with fuel but certainly not everywhere.
Now look at the source of why gas pumps can go dry. Here are a few reasons:
We will certainly see fuel disruptions in the U.S., in my view. It's only a matter of time.
For a near real-time view into energy shortages, see:
http://energyshortage.org/
Your are right. There are likely to be failures which will interrupt supply. In such a case, there may still not be lines at the pump, because there will be no gasoline, even at the end of the line.
I probably need to refine what I say about this issue. I think things will play out differently, in different places. There are already parts of the world that are experiencing shortages, because the financial system in that location cannot afford the high price of oil. There is oil somewhere else, but not in that country.
Perhaps, for a while, there will be some places with oil products, and others without, depending on the finances of the area, and the ability to keep up infrastructure. Gradually, the number of places with oil products will decline to 0.
"there may still not be lines at the pump, because there will be no gasoline, even at the end of the line."
I probably need to refine what I say about this issue. I think things will play out differently, in different places."
My concern is that those of us in rural areas, who are already at the 'end of the line' of liquid fuel distribution will be the first to realise shortages. While demand is much lower here, most folks drive farther to work and stores, etc., and there's no mass transit. I see cities and close-in towns getting first dibbs on what portable fuels are available. Tanker trucks may not even bother to deliver to far out towns unless some kind of intervention (govt.) occurs, likely for fueling farm equipment and govt./priority vehicles. Joy riding in the mountains will become a thing of the past.
I'm 8 miles from the nearest gas station and 28 miles from the nearest town of over 50k people. I have a 7kWh solar array and a lithium battery on my bike with a 25-mile range. Have racks on my Xttra-cycle so I guess I could carry about 8 gallons of gas easily (would highway robbery be an issue at this point?)
We also have a 500-gallon diesel tank we keep topped off to keep the tractor going. Maybe a 500-gallon gasoline tank is in order as well to keep the Prius going. Of course, wouldn't be enough to haul livestock to keep a living going.
If we're down to actually needing these things, there's going to be a lot more problems than transportation, I'm afraid!
What you will need is replacements when things wear out. Also, protection from others who want to steal from you.
As people have already pointed out, don't forget the military. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but the U.S. military uses a substantial portion of our energy supplies. If things get bad enough, or at least go downhill quickly enough, I also have no doubt the military will be given highest priority.
Should it come to that I would also suspect that critical infrastructure will be protected at all cost, things like power plants, refineries, water treatment, and food warehouses. Most of that actually lies outside of dense population centers, one exception being major ports.
Eventually, if the situation gets chaotic and hard to control, someone will probably be forced to do a ghastly cost-benefit analysis in which case I can easily imagine a situation like that portrayed in the movie "Children of Men" where entire cities are blockaded by force and the population inside left to more or less fend for themselves.
Cheers,
Jerry
"Gradually, the number of places with oil products will decline to 0."
Is this sentence offering, then, a slow decline of the world oil supply? Taken at the whole system level, spatially distributed with myriads of unknowns and interactions, the geologic facts may shine through the popcorn noise of individual economic system failures.
Gradually may not be all that many years in total. We really don't know. 30 years? 20 years? 10 years?
The next hybrids that we will use are probably going to be called mules.
Casey - Easy answer to your last question: where will the US mili tary get their fuel? Answer: the SPR. Just MHO but from the very beginning I always felt this was the govt's primary motivation. The rest of the rhetoric was just to appease the tax payers.
Very likely, Rockman, but the Western nations made a pact after the crises of the 70s to address oil shortfalls jointly. Undoubtedly keeping the military going would have been part of the rationale but not all of it.
IEA Response System for Oil Supply Emergencies (2011)
http://iea.org/publications/free_new_Desc.asp?PUBS_ID=1912
" Undoubtedly keeping the military going would have been part of the rationale but not all of it."
The US Navy gave up on its nuclear cruisers in the early 1990's as the gas turbine ships were so much cheaper to build, and oil was cheap, so they didn't care about the fuel efficiency. The only reason the carrier's stayed nuclear is the train of tankers that had to trial behind them.
If nuclear cruisers suddenly show up in the budget, I would take that as serious evidence that the oil supply situation is growing very serious, or seen to be becoming very serious in about 10 years, which is the least amount of time it would take to build a useful number of them.
The U.S. Navy has studied this issue and one study I recall determined that oil would need to cost ~ 150/bbl to economically justify nuclear-powered cruisers (Ticonderoga Class) and ~ $225/bbl to economically justify nuclear-powered destroyers (Arleigh Burke Class).
But, please don't take my word for it, I have included some sources here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/us-navy-may-get-more-nuclear-powered.html
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA488366
http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=4226195
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL33360.pdf
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL33946.pdf
As I have said in a recent prior post...the U.S. Government loves to conduct and publish studies...many of which are open for public scrutiny, and some which are not.
On this particular subject there appears to be considerable sunshine/transparency.
H
I am glad to see it frankly admitted here that an emphasis on CO2 reduction might be contributing to the problem, and also that lower-efficiency economies such as China are better prepared to weather the Peak Oil storm than higher-efficiency economies such as the US and Europe. These two observations go together, as I shall explain.
The complexity pyramid will crumble from the top downwards. That is to say, the most complex, exigent, and value-added goods and services will be the first to lose marginal utility in an energy-scarce environment, and will correspondingly be the first to be abandoned. Since a nation like China has relatively far less complexity, it has a much shorter distance to fall. As a matter of fact, there are still millions of poor people in rural China who may not have noticed that an industrial revolution had been occurring in the rest of the world. For them, life goes on much as it did in the year 1000 BC. I do not mean to overemphasize the point (for certainly such people have benefited from industrialization in intangible ways), but due to their close kinship with the earth and their complete lack of exigencies, the collapse-from-peak will affect the lives of the rural Chinese a good deal less than it will the life of the average New Yorker. Because they are already so far down on the pyramid, they can’t really go much lower.
But were does the technology of carbon reduction fall on the pyramid? As it so happens, it occupies the highest and most ethereal tippy-top of the teetering tower. It is an inefficient uses of scarce resources (you might even say an ironic use of scarce resources), since it requires energy, money, and high technology to implement, and produces absolutely nothing. Extravagancies like this can only be afforded by the very economies which will suffer the most from the dislocations caused by Peak Oil. This logic applies to all “green” technologies, generally speaking. Because they are among the most energy intensive and the least profitable, they will be the first to be abandoned.
I am firmly in the camp that believes that Peak Oil (which can actually be generalized as Peak Resources, Peak Order, or Peak Civilization, as the case may be) is a real problem, while Global Warming and Overpopulation are pseudo-problems brought about by irrational thinking. Any effort devoted to “solving” the latter will only complicate our efforts to address the former.
Thanks Gail, excellent post.
I agree it will be faster than most realize, but the feedback loops make things a bit murky.
I think population is part of our problem, but I don't see a good way of addressing it.
I tend to agree with you on climate change. If we are on the edge of collapse, addressing climate change using our usual complex expensive approaches will tend to exacerbate the tendency toward collapse. I don't think the authors of the Stern report understood the complex interactions involved.
Any population increase only adds to the challenges. Our population is also the source of our experts to improve our situation.
Our world is finite but many are living like it is infinite.
Time works against us as we delay taking action to address Peak Oil.
Many small incremental steps can be taken to improve our ability to deal with Peak Oil.
Eh, peak oil is not the problem - it's economic thinking, valuing mechanisms and the general "growth" model.
There seems to be a confusion between the demands of our economic model(Which require ever increasing amounts of resources and energy trajectories for "growth") and human needs. There is a big difference. Actually, the demands of our economic model are getting further and further away from what human needs are to the point where it's demands are causing immense social, environmental problems and general global dysfunction.
Looking at peak oil and saying "Oh no we need more oil" is the same as saying we actually have the least bit semblance of rational allocation, efficient use of material and equal distribution. When really, the opposite is true in all cases. We have massive disparities(60-1 in some cases), idiotic allocation and massively inefficient usage(profit demands it) All peak oil means is the demands of our economic model can't be met. Considering the massively stupid allocations with such things as shipping fish from Canada to China to be cleaned, then back to America for consumption. Or that the last few decades of building a hopelessly doomed, supremely inefficient and poorly made suburban living systems. Every where you look is waste and piss-poor, highly irrational allocations. Peak oil is probably the best thing to every happen to us if we don't lose our head from our ridiculous economic model collapsing - with any luck it won't drag on too long and we can stop wasting resources - while complaining we are not going to have enough. It's kind of junky mentality on a mass scale
Considering 30% of the population uses almost 90% of the resources pointing at population seems a little shortsighted.
Our big problem is too many people for existing resources. Before soil and water resources were degraded as badly as they have been recently, the world held supported fewer than 1 billion people, without fossil fuels. We don't really have the capability to get along without fossil fuels, at our current population level (about 7 billion).
Gail, I would love to hear you actually respond to what arraya said, because I think it would be an interesting discussion between two highly intelligent people each with good insight into our current predicaments.
In response to her comment that 30% of the pop (probably less, actually) are using 90% of the resources, you said: "Our big problem is too many people for existing resources."
You seem to be talking past arrays here, or maybe I'm missing something.
I could imagine any number of coherent responses and I would be interested to know which ones you might use, but just repeating that there are too many people doesn't really address the point of distribution that a is making.
I'll try again.
Our problem is that we have developed a very complicated system that is optimized for the way we do things today. It looks like it would be easy just to reallocate resources, from those who have too much, to the group as a whole, and from wasteful uses to more essential uses, but in practice this is likely to be difficult to do--or to do in a way that we would like.
In a way, our competition with China and India is doing what you are suggesting. We are finding that they are getting richer, and the richer countries are finding themselves with more and more unemployed citizens, and more and more people working part-time at minimum wage jobs. If this continues, at some point, most of us in rich countries will find ourselves living as poor people in third world countries do.
In order to equalize what is paid in the US (beyond the competition referred to in the previous paragraph), it seems to me that we would almost need a new dictator, who decrees that the top pay cannot exceed 10 times the bottom pay for any organization, and maybe a maximum and minimum overall salary. We would also need rearrangements of property, bank accounts, and stock ownership, so that everyone is closer to equal. I don't see that happening. I suppose taxes could be rearranged with somewhat the same result, but I don't see any legislator who is well paid and owns property voting for the new tax structure.
There is also the idea of voluntary simplicity. This doesn't work, because people tend to spend as much as they earn (or close to it). So if they don't buy one thing (say an SUV), they end up spending the money on something else (vacations by airplane, for example). There is also the real problem that what we spend on frivolous things is in fact, spending that allows someone else to have a job. If we cut out our spending, that person will lose his job. Quite often, the spending we would cut (say on SUVs) is disproportionately on locally made goods.
If we had 50 years to make the transition, maybe all of these difficulties could be gotten around. But given where we are now, and the capitalist structure that we have that encourages wealth accumulation by a few, I have a hard time seeing much in the way of changes being made.
There is also the issue that even if we did even things out at what will be our declining level of oil supply, there is not likely to be enough to go around for very long. That is the issue I wrote about before.
Another issue is that the whole "system" is fragile--trying to make all of these changes is likely to break it, if it doesn't break quickly, just from the stress of not enough net energy from oil.
"If we had 50 years to make the transition, maybe all of these difficulties could be gotten around."
There was a time we had 30, even 50, years to make the transition. We didn't do it then, when it would have been easier. We didn't even start. As far as I see it, it's impossible for us to make an orderly, smooth transition.
Going back decades:
Pretty Amazing
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-june-16-2010/an-energy-independent...
The linked video is a pretty amazing show. It includes clips of eight presidents saying the same thing--we have to reduce our oil imports.
Peak Oil is not the problem. It is the sulotion. I wish it would all happen tomorow morning.
Indeed.
If the magic button fell into our possession, how many here would quickly press it?
(Say, hand me that button for a minute, i need to check something.....)
Push the button! Make it stop!
In a heartbeat.
I need another year to get the garden sorted. Go near that button yet and handy pandys will get slapped >:|
The decline rate may be fast or slow, I don't know. I'd say plan for a fast decline and pray for a slow decline. That has the best outcome for either rate of decline.
Just look at the estimates for oil prices in the next two years. Donald Trump leads the charge for $40 to $50 per barrel. Others speculate that the price could be $200+ if there are problems in Saudi Arabia. Be safe, plan for higher prices and be happy if prices decline.
In the United States, the people and the government often do not act until there is a crisis. Unfortunately, in the case of oil, only taking the situation seriously after a shortage starts limits the options available and increases the pain of the shortage.
I think there are many steps we could take to improve our situation. People may say that some of the brainstorm ideas are insignificant or won't happen. That may be, but it is hard to run if we don't first start walking first.
A few Brainstorm Ideas:
Will you please share any Brainstorm Ideas you have to improve our oil situation?
Remove the U.S. ethanol blending subsidy (4.5 cents / gallon).
Speed limits should be lowered to 55 miles / hour.
Electrify long distance freight rail and start shifting long distance freight transport from semitrailer trucks to trains.
Eliminate CAFE standards for vehicular fuel efficiency which has resulted in low fuel efficiency for pickups.
Provide low cost urban housing near the jobs to draw people away from distant suburbs.
BlueTwilight, thank you for your suggestions. I don't understand why the CAFE standards would negatively affect pickups. Can you please explain?
Policies and programs that facilitate carpooling and use of taxis and jeepneys is the fastest and cheapest way to dramatically reduce the oil used in transport of humans.
I would go farther and eliminate all home interest deductions. It is mostly a benefit to banks as it encourages people to take out larger loans than they would otherwise do.
And 70 mph is also rather weak tea. Why not go back to 55?
The gas tax, too, should be much higher and increase faster. Any such tax is almost surely impossible to impose politically, but having it be coupled by tax reductions or actual checks in the mail might help make it more palatable. It might seem like this would be self-defeating, since people might just take those checks and use them to pay the higher gas prices. But it would send a clearer price signal--if they get more joy or utility out of something other than happy driving at this higher price, suddenly that would look more economically attractive.
Personally, I prefer straight up rationing. We have waited too long for half measures to be very effective. We now have to accept that we are in crisis mode. I don't want the ambulances and firetrucks to run out of gas because somebody decided to take a joy ride in their Hummer over the weekend. We have to start acting as if we were in the crisis that we are actually in.
Putting the Koch brothers and other purveyors of deadly lies in jail would be a good start, too.
Really, the most important moves are ending both corporate (super-)personhood and the requirement that corporations always and only act in the best interests of their stockholders' short-term monetary profits. Without this, there will always be another set of Koch brothers.
Corruption and delusion is so deeply interwoven into the system now, it is hard to know how one would go about rooting it out.
dohboi, thank you for your suggestions. I appreciate your insights.
If we are on the edge of collapse, addressing climate change using our usual complex expensive approaches will tend to exacerbate the tendency toward collapse.
Why don't we use low tech solutions which work much better? They have been used for thousands of years with minimal technology.
Co2 is not the problem, if I do get to do a post on this may help some people see things from another angle.
Sign up for a blog, make a post there, and then you can post a link to it here.
Well, if you are looking from the root cause perspective, no CO2 and methane aren't "the problem" — fossil fuel use is or perhaps the combination of fossil fuel use and a species that breeds like rabbits given the chance.
Anyway, though I don't believe in single causes, it's definitely fair to say that so-called green house gases are indeed already causing us trouble.
Would ocean acidification be occurring without all the extra CO2 in the air?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
China may be less complex than the west, but they all know and use
motorscooters and rototillers plus chain saws. Also, there is vast use of chemical ferilizer in China and India. The fall may not be as
far, but the margin of survival is also less. Not certain that they fare better in an oil short world.
According to this PDF, the primary feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer in China is coal, rather than natural gas that we use. So China is much less dependent on hydro carbons than we are. I am not sure about India, but they are also big coal users.
If all you are using oil/natural gas for is herbicides and pesticides and transporting other fertilizers, it goes a lot farther.
Would it be correct to rephrase your view as seeing Peak Oil as the disease, and Global Warming and Overpopulation as "merely" the symptoms?
I would say the disease is exponential growth in fossil fuel production and consumption in the context of a global capitalist system dependent on fiat money and debt expansion.
I would say that AGW and overpopulation are not "mere" symptoms but very serious symptoms, particularly overpopulation.
The solution:
1) Somehow we must learn how to consume fossil fuels at a much slower rate, expanding their time horizon, while still maintaining some form of industrial civilization particularly agriculture
2) Somehow we have to reintroduce stability to the monetary system; the most obvious way would be for the world to agree on a basket of precious metals as the reserve currency, with each national currency having quasi independence to determine exchange rates
I don't think either of these is possible - especially in a world ruled by global banks and corporations -which is why I'm a doomer.
Nicely put. Your first point is why I think the "Import-Land Model" is much more important than the ELM. If the US reduced it's oil use to a quarter of its current use, ELM would become irrelevant.
But at this point such adjustments would require some real pain, and it is now apparently politically impossible to recommend some pain now (besides sending boys and girls into harms way) to avoid greater pain in the future.
We are now locked into a death dance, though most are dancing with their eyes shut.
I sometimes envy them.
We could lower oil consumption easily - we just have to turn off the doomsday machine called the economy - before it starts to turn us off. This dismount is the problem. It seems to demand a completely insane behavior regarding resource management. Interestingly, this is what economists call rational self-interest and being a rational utility maximizer. We might want to rethink that.
No doubt, working under our current rules you have to be doomer - the only thing we can hope for is a fast economic collapse so we stop wasting so many resources and not lose our head while we rethink civilization.
A fast economic collapse would probably result in a much lower population at the end of the collapse than the beginning. With virtually no planning (as in this country) the result could be very bad indeed.
Ideally, we would like to be able to step down to a lower level of complexity, but it is hard to see how we can do this (with the lack of planning to date).
I don't know about Man of the West's views, but I see our basic problem as exponential population growth in a finite world, enabled by fossil fuels. At this point, we need huge complexity to keep the whole system going, but at some point soon, it will collapse from not having the resources to maintain the level of complexity.
Climate change may very well have been caused by this burning of fossil fuels, but to the extent that the burning of these fossil fuels is collapsing in the near term, regardless of what we do, fixing this problem doesn't need to be a priority--especially not fixing it by ways that add more complexity to an already overly-complex system. For example, substituting hoes for tractors may be a good choice (and help fix climate change), but adding a Smart Grid to enable electric cars and more wind capacity is just asking for problems from extra complexity. Cap and trade seems to lead to unintended consequences, opposite of those intended.
Population growth is not exponential. We have 7 billion humans and the rate of increase is slowing every year, we will have a couple billion more before this is through.
over. Most studies put it about 9 billion then declining - without starvation. Not much you can do about that except educate women, which seems to be the biggest birth rate slower around. But that is not for us to dither about, anymore than we already have. Fertility has dropped WAY off, and continues to drop; after the big boom of the mid-20th-century.
It is called the demographic transition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
is a model used to represent the transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as a country develops from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economic system.
The Green Revolution (GR) did not had much effect on population. The most you can say for sure is that it had a permissive effect -- which is not saying much, since the same could be said of other sets of technologies, if they had been supported to the same degree. The Green Revolution was not primarily about making more food available. It was about building the ag industry and profits. There are more efficient ways to grow food. Fossil-fuel and chemical and capital intensive industrial agriculture is very
inefficient, and a poor choice for most parts of the world. But they had it rammed down their throats by... you know who. The idea that we need massive amounts of oil to grow food is rubbish, mostly industry propaganda, with a liberal helping of American and Western exceptionalism ("They can't make it without US and our wonderful technologies! They just can't! They'll all starve!")
What is exponential is the fossil fuel energy demands of our economic model which it's not going to get. Thank God! Because our economic model is a basically a doomsday machine and the problem. The best we can hope for is a fast crash where we don't lose our heads and start screaming "There are too many people!"
It would be accurate to say that the behavioral trajectory of the more-affluent strata of humanity is clearly in the direction of overshoot, and if that behavior were to be replicated without limit, across all of humanity, then overshoot and catastrophic collapse would quickly, and inevitably, supervene. As it stands now, catastrophic global collapse is not inevitable. "Overshoot"is an accurate description of where we're heading, but it is not on account of our numbers; i.e. it is not baked in the cake. It is on account of the lifestyle decisions of some of us -- the more-affluent, as individuals and as nations - driven by junky mentality, fostered by corporate marketing and the need for ever expanding profits.
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/35/2/252
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/08/news/snmat.php
http://www.chartist.org.uk/articles/econsoc/sept02lee.html
http://www.sploid.com/news/2006/02/buying_crap_mak.php
The only realistic model for oil depletion assumes this premise. Technology will continue to accelerate in its capabilities for finding oil. In other words, our ability to discover locations for oil will continue to increase rapidly. This is part of the Dispersive Discovery Model profile that perfectly matches the historical data. The flip side is that when this accelerated rate meets a diminishing volume of unsearched locations, something has got to give. The amount discovered thus necessarily decreases. This is the math that Hubbert never did figure out, see above http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7786#comment-794358
Another commenter elsewhere in this thread said: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7786#comment-794304
This is also true in that one does not need to assume exponential growth for something to accelerate. Lots of phenomena are power-law growth laws which also accelerate yet don't compound like exponential growth does. I prefer to model with such power-law growth models which tend to give longer tails.
Yet all this careful modeling is pointless when confronted with the typical right-wing wingnut. This morning I listened to a radio host reporting excitedly about the recent Science News article on abiotic oil. He jumped to the conclusion that oil was a renewable resource, confirming his beliefs, and so our worries were now over. He was serious too, since he ended by saying "Liberals are going to hate this news". I push logic because real analysis and science is kryptonite to these people. They are smart enough to know that they can spin fake science (especially heuristicsts) to their advantage yet will wilt when confronted with the real thing.
This morning I listened to a radio host reporting excitedly about the recent Science News article on abiotic oil.
Do you know where this article is? I tried a Google search to find it, but all I found were some incredibly stupid statements by Dr. Thomas Gold. I hadn't realized before what a blithering idiot the man was, but then I had never read any of his work before.
I won't bother to look it up but I just assumed it was the one mentioned the other day here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7815#comment-793565
(I see you commented on the news already)
Oh, yes, the paper authored at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The MSM probably missed the disclaimer in the paper:
It's kind of a huge conceptual leap to go from a theory that postulates that 1% of the world's oil may have inorganic origins to the claim that oil is a renewable resource. And the paper doesn't address the other issue I mentioned - what are that chances the oil could get to the surface without being destroyed?
Well it just goes to show you how fast the right-wing media machine spins into action. They actually get to the recent science news, spin it into talking points, disseminate it to all their media outlets, who then spew it to their audience before we barely have a chance to comment on the veracity of the claims.
To them it doesn't matter if it is correct or not, just that they can spin grains of truth. It's actually pretty disgusting, yet tempting to apply the same fallacious arguing techniques that they use just to stay even.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwX80sb0e58
A lot to wade through... just skip to the last 1/6th.
This is less patient:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3KxU63gcF4
There is lots of this .... out there.
If you could get your hands on a book named "The KGB and Soviet Disinformation - an insiders view" by Ladislav Bittman I would highly recomend the reading.
In the book Bittman tells how the Kreml invent lies and then plant them in western or 3:rd world media to change our view on things. Among others, the term "US imperialism" was hatched in the Kremlin, as well as at least some of todays anti-israeli opinions. Probably a lot of what we believe in today in the west was born in KGB headquaters.
The take home from the book is this; when you lie, do not ever beleve in your own lies. If you do, you become your own prisoner. The russians never believed in their own lies.
But I am afraid the US right-wingers do. Hence, they are trapped and getting them out is a very hard work.
I have worked with Russian oil men (they were working in the West because the money was better). It was fairly obvious that they were not using abiotic theories to find oil. They were using the same theories as the Western oil men.
Actually, oil men don't use theories to find oil. They find oil first and then invent theories to explain how it got there. They don't use abiotic theories because they have drilled in many places that the abiotic theories say they should find oil, and haven't found any there.
The abiotic oil proponents claim that the petroleum geologists haven't found oil where they think it should be because they haven't drilled there. That's not true. If you scan the well databases (which is something I used to do regularly), you will usually find old wells there, all dry and abandoned. You won't see any sign of them on the surface, though, because no surface equipment was ever installed.
There is one famous case of a geophysicist named J.P.Burg who used a brand new theory to find oil. He came up with the idea of Maximum Entropy Spectral Analysis and tested it out on a prospect. It worked the first time as evidenced by the name he gave for the producing well, calling it "Rock Entropy #1". This is documented in The Oil ConunDrum.
The caveat is that some data was involved in this prediction and it wasn't precisely a de novo theory. That is the subject of the rest of the book ;)
I do agree that the abiotic angle is rubbish.
Thanks for pointing that out! I too have been guilty of tossing around the "exponential" buzzword without this deeper insight that it's really acceleration that we are talking about. This despite having a vague understanding that, as has been pointed out, exponential assumes a constant growth rate to get that regular interval of doubling time. I will try to be more careful in the future.
Cheers,
Jerry
Does the demographic transition work in reverse as well?
What I mean is: if a county or countries transition from an industrial system of a certain complexity to a much lower complexity industrial or even a pre-industrial system, would birth rates go back up because families want a tribe to bring in the crops, forage, or form a 'gang' for family protection?
And if that occurs when we have 7-9 Billion humans on the planet, what will that look like? Will the population resume a increasing trajectory to 10, 11B and beyond, with everyone scratching out a living by crapping in the rivers and denuding the land for the last sticks of wood to burn?
People will eventually breed more after death rates soared because of collapse. So the population would not go up, but it is allready to high in many parts of the worls (e.g. Africa).
The result is much higher selection pressure (because of high population density) in the die-off phase than today (Darwian world and patriachat again) and accelerated human evolution - for the good or the bad.
Dare,
Thank you for your answer!
The essence of my question is: If conditions in the U.S. become such that inhabitants are living at a low subsistence level, will fertility rates increase such that we grow to have a population density similar to that of present-day China (some 3x U.S. current population density) or even to the density of present-day India (some 9x the current U.S. population density)?
Does a large population increase necessary eventually follow a great decline in living standards?
Or, if the population crashed in the U.S., and the remaining folks live at a subsidence farmer level, will the population necessarily remain at a much lowered level?
For example, after the economy of Russia greatly contracted, did the Russian population contract somewhat due to poor health standards? If so, the birth rate did not commensurately increase I think.
So, maybe the demographic transition only works one way...higher standards of living equal lower birth rates (maybe the key factor is the education of women).
So...if the U.S. population crashed, and the populace hold on to the value of having well-educated and equally-empowered women (compared with men), then perhaps the birth rate will stay moderate?
But this will not be the case in the long run when a collapse of our "modern" western societies (including BAU) happens!
After a real collapse of BAU women will get once more powerless in most cases and most parts of the world. Modern (scientific) education and the fruits of the enlightenment will inevitable disappear. Knowledge (often web-based / computer based) and a high-quality schooling-system will disappear. In a real severce collapse modern contraceptives will disappear really fast too. People will struggle to feed themselves. So the birth rate will go up, but even more the death rate. This is how "the nature" allways regulated the humen population in agrarien societies (e.g. not in Australia/Tasmania). There is no chance for a big collapse with mainaining our "modern" value system of "the west", including well-educated woman, contraceptives, large-scale welfare and many other things.
You always see apologists for third world birthrates say "oh they have to have such big families to help on the farm, that's what they've always done". But if you look at pre-Industralisation, growth rates were very low. This is consistent with large families being rare. The main culprit would be disease. Less than 50% of children would have reached puberty. To keep the population stable in a pre-industrial agricultural society each women would have to have had on average 5(?) or so children with most of them dying early. If civilization collapses, then eventually we would have to return to such a regime.
Arraya
Survivability is the reason for the population explosion and it is also the reason the fertility rate is dropping. I guess a look at life expectancy and infant mortality rates. Take say Japan, infant mortality 2.8 per 1000 live births and life expectancy 85.59 years, then say Guinea-Bissau 101.64 deaths per 100 live births and life expectancy 45.71 years. Guess which country has the higher fertility rate.
It took several generations for couples in the western world, then others to trust and understand that their children have an excellent chance of surviving beyond about twelve years of age. Childhood diseases have all but been eliminated with inoculation. Education is not an issue.
Babies routinely survive when born ten weeks premature. They can be operated on in the womb, women when pregnancy is confirmed or when planning a child give up alcohol, cigarettes and other harmful practices. There is pre-natal care, ante-natal care and many forms of assistance and advice.
If we survive another couple of hundred years and as the world becomes more dangerous for children so again will parents return to the ways of old.
Of course our medical advances could not have occurred without copious amounts of cheap energy, nor can the medical systems we presently enjoy continue without cheap and abundant energy.
By that logic there is a chance we will see an increase in mortality while we still need generations to understand that we need to kick up birth rates as well. In that case, we may see a few generations of high depopulation rates.
I was guessing about the future as usual. I don't know if the downslope will be the same as the upslope.
Increasing childhood mortality rates could and probably would spur the fertility rate. All things being equal whether it would in turn, maintain or increase the survival rate is debatable.
I'm a deep doomer. I was just pointing out why fertility rates dropped and are dropping in developed and developing countries. We are going down no matter what I postulate about population behavior.
So many people in a world of global warming, diminishing education opportunities, environmental degradation, resource depletion and energy production decline among other things does not auger well, to put it gently.
I was just sugesting a possible outcome. Truth is I don't know. How could I?
But I agree with you on the doomer thing. I have studied these issues thoroghly for 2.5 years now, and I just don't think there is a way to solve these problems. If we started in the 1950ies and took he right action then it would have been doable, but not know. If I did not have my christian hope in a new world after this one is destroyed, I would promote eco terrorism. I see no other way out of this mess.
The irony is breathtaking.
Indeed. One has to merely shake one's head and walk away from that one.
Let me just point out that the very dramatic events taking place in the Arctic are likely sending the planet into a death spiral that there will be no recovery from. All other 'problems' pale.
I think Man of the West meant that the real illness is human stupidity (in the way we use our resources), and thus AGW and overpopulation is a direct consequence of that.
OTOH I do not think we are sending "the planet" into a death spiral - I am quite sure the planet's ecosystem will find its way to survive and adapt in the long run. It is US we are sending into a death spiral - though we are very adaptive too. Like rats or cockroaches.
Those rural chinese you are talking about tend to live in areas heavily affected by climae change (droughts mostly) and are going down NOW. They will never know what Peak Oil is, but they know all they ever need to know about Climate Change.
Might I ask you to define exactly what you consider to be a 'green' technology? A term which I actually dislike intensely.
However if I might go out on a limb I would like to argue that small scale distributed off grid wind and solar are not energy intensive and can be quite cost effective. Let me start by promoting solar cookers. This one is actually made in China for the Indian market... Would you call these, Extravagancies?!
Or small scale solar PV to charge a small battery to power a few LED lights and a cellphone charger.
Solar or wind powered irrigation pumps also come to mind.
Amen.
Fukushima was "complex" and "extravagant".
Compared to Fukushima, an array of photovoltaic panels - especially the off-grid variety - is far less complex and much less interconnected with other systems. It is therefore much more resilient with a far more benign failure mode.
Oh yeah! Wind and solar are extravagant...and the Alberta Oil sands are just an environmentally benign project to build a huge nature preserve that will make the land better than before, DIG! BABY! DIG!
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a8CkEQKBM3rI
And the Gulf of Mexico has completely recovered from the BP oil spill too. No harm done, it was a 'BIG' ocean!
Welcome to the Drumbeat, Man of the West, member for 1 week and 15 minutes.
Using only what you posted and nothing more short of logic and available facts, it can be shown that your claims are "ethereally" bunk, "irrational" and above all fact-free.
In your own words, China "can not afford" the "extravagancy" of "inefficient" technology of carbon reduction because the latter "produces absolutely nothing". This statement about China in particular is derived from your statements that (i) carbon reduction technologies can "only be afforded" by nations which will suffer the greatest dislocations from Peak Oil and (ii) that China is "better prepared to weather PO storm", "has less distance to fall", is "less complex", its rural population will be affected "a good deal less" by PO etc etc
Yet a cursory review of facts shows that China has overtaken or is about to overtake the rest of the world in carbon reduction technologies: please see recent articles here, here and here.
How can that be, Man of the West? As is plain from the facts on the ground, China envisages renewables as part of the solution to PO/AGW and above all ACTS on that vision, completely contrary to your prescription that China should not be touching the "extravagancy" of renewables with a bamboo-pole.
Therefore, either 1.2 billion people in China are delusional spendthrifts who would benefit from immediately coming to you for free expert advice on avoiding extravagant investments in the energy future of their country, or, which is more likely, once we discard all the "pseudo-"arguments and "irrational thinking" your post can be summarised by the three words that you went to great lengths to disguise:
"Drill baby, drill!"
Forgive me Gail, but I think you have missed out a huge element of the answer to this question: Decline rate for whom?
The mantra of a post peak world is unequal distribution of resources; why shouldn't it be, is has been on the upside. While some will increase their access to oil, even as global totals decrease, that will mean that some see very rapid decline rates.
It's what I have been banging on about for years, the 'lands model of resource inequality. Exportland is just one example of how political, geographical, technological and sociological forces conspire to give each individual their own personal decline curve.
While net exports will tend to favour producers over consumers, there are other similar effects. Market economies will produce price based inequality; rationing will create usage based inequalitities; military might; barter; EROEI, transition - all will create the circumstances where some individuals see their access fall from 'full' to 'zero' almost instantly.
Combining those individual effects, bottom-up, is what then defines the course of larger groupings - regions, countries, usage types, etc.
It's like a massive game of Jenga where you are randomly flicking out individual blocks, or where you can use a small degree of intelligence to plan which and where the blocks will fall. In the end the result is the same, but when the tower falls, and how much is left at the bottom, are up for grabs.
Adaptation; the ability of this tower to reconfigure to survive losses, is dependent on both the rate of decline, as seen at the nation level, and intelligence/strategy/foresight. Personally I see this as having a critical value somewhere between 2% and 5% - depending on the smarts of those in a position to create change. Slow decline at the national level gives the system the time to note the blocks being lost and implement changes to save the tower. Fast decline and the rate of loss of blocks overwhelms the system adaptation rate and it collapses.
In short, the geological decline rate is much less important than the combined impact of all 'land models at the group level. Inequality, via various mechanisms will be the determinate of survival or collapse.
I have at times talked about the collapse situation as a giant game of musical chairs.
With respect to oil, there will be some winners and losers, just as China and India today seem to be among the winners, and most of OECD seems to be among the losers. I don't know to what extent that there will be winners and losers at a finer level. What will tend to happen pretty quickly is that roads will fall into disrepair (because of lack of taxes), so no one can really use them, not even those with fancy electric cars (assuming the electricity for cars is still available). So no one will really be a winner, viewed over, say, a 25 year time frame.
I think that aspects of the system will tend to break down, so that if there are long term winners (or perhaps a better term is "non-losers"), it will be those who have never been oil users in the past.
I'd suggest its all about the finer level - if you want to know how the system of society will bend/break/collapse. Take as an example the commuters. As fuel prices rise they can, to a degree, pay more and more of their takehome in fuel costs. However the scope for most 1st world commuters to absorb prices rises is small, given they are in general geared to the hilt.
If changes are slow then ride sharing etc. can grow, rationing can be implemented carefully, more fuel efficient cars can be bought. However, if its fast then we have another credit collapse, people not being able to afford keeping their jobs, companies failing, etc. etc.
Unless you look at the personal circumstances of individuals and aggregate up; you can't see the limited leeway key groups have to absorb permanently higher prices. Maybe you think the Chindia driver will be unable to afford that fuel first, and so those jobs will collapse.
I'd tend to agree that the the non-losers will likely be those who do not have a great deal of energy intensity in the first place (wherever they are). However, if the lives of those individuals is heavily interconnected with other groups that will suffer - you can get strange interconnection 'jumps' in collapse.
As a for instance, think of the coffee growers in South America - and people cutting back on drinking coffee because the price in their market has doubled.
Saying that, a concious cutting of interconnection ties and dependencies is probably an optimal strategy at any level of granularity.
Yes of course population growth is part of oil depletion. This is the century when we have a solution to the population issue. It will be either lower birth rates or higher death rates or a combination of both.
Lower birth rates could be by government coercion, by education and opportunity for women, by lack of food/housing/money.
Higher death rates can be by the four traditional methods starvation, disease, warfare, pollution (formerly known as pestilence).
Of course locally there is the issue of movement of populations (immigration).
It's not clear that's actually true.
It seems that average industrial electricity prices in India were 7.8c/kWh in 2002, vs. 4.9c/kWh in the US, and appear to have risen at a similar rate.
Including links to data supporting the article's key claims and assumptions would probably help boost its persuasiveness.
Not only is electricity more expensive in India (even upper middle class people don't turn on air conditioning for their entire apartment; just one room at a time) its supply is erratic and unpredictable. One thing that increases the cost of doing business in India is the need for a diesel generator. Big IT companies in India have their own "gas stations" with 5000 gallon diesel storage tanks and massive generators. Diesel generated electricity is very expensive.
Very soon the government of India will face a choice. Either raise the price of petrol/diesel/kerosene/LPG cooking gas or deal with shortages. My guess is that they will raise the price after state assembly elections in May.
Thanks for the insights, "well put-together."
Can you provide any insights on the long- (or short-) term water situation in India?
And what will the effect of the price rise be on industry and politics?
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed.
Water situation:
1. Dependent on good monsoon
2. Falling water tables, especially in the bread basket
3. Badly polluted and over utilized lakes and rivers. River Yamuna, next to Taj Mahal, is now an open sewer. Ground water is polluted too.
4. Shortages of tap water in most neighborhoods most of the times; poor quality when available
5. Upper middle class people in many areas rely on bottled water, tanker water. Tanker water is bad quality; over chlorinated, hard water. Bottled water and tap water is often contaminated with fecal bacteria (let us not go there)
6. Many upper middle class car owning people easily spend more on water than petrol
Petrol situation:
1. Oil is bought by government owned oil companies
2. They are on track to lose around $40 billion this fiscal year
3. Government has already raised the price of petrol many times. It is still not enough
4. Diesel and kerosene is much cheaper since it is subsidized. Cheap diesel is meant for farmers but upper middle class people buy diesel cars to use it.
5. Since diesel and kerosene are much cheaper, petrol is often adulterated with it. Bad for your engine.
6. Inflation is high; if price of petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas is raised it will be higher.
7. Assembly elections are in May. Probably price will be raised after that. A few riots are inevitable but not a big deal in India.
8. In the next "LokSabha" (parliamentary) elections in 2014 the current government will probably lose. People are very angry due to a string of corruption scandals and high inflation.
9. Automobile industry is booming :-) Car market is growing by 30% every year. Everybody wants to drive although there is no infrastructure to support car driving. In urban India it can easily take 1 hour to go 2 miles.
Very insightful, thanks. Sobering to think that this is not confined to India. How many on our so-called "developing" world of seven-going-on-nine billion people face this situation every day of their lives?
Is this a view into the future of currently wealthy industrialized countries in the west as they slip on the downslope of peak everything? I would say almost certainly so, assuming somewhat optimistically that formerly well-off people face impoverishment without major complaint.
Cheers,
Jerry
Is this a view into the future of currently wealthy industrialized countries in the west as they slip on the downslope of peak everything?
That is what I think. Twenty years from now, the US and W Europe will resemble a less crowded and somewhat less poor version of today's India; maybe something like Brazil or E Europe. I don't believe in all this "collapse of civilization"/"Olduvai gorge" bull shit. Just a gradual decline in standard of living as more and more people are pushed out of the circle of affluent life style.
Just think about it: India with 1.2 billion people consumes just 3 mbpd of oil. And India is not in the Olduvai gorge; as a matter of fact most Indians are very optimistic and think that their country has a bright future. The US with 300 million people consumes 20 mbpd of oil. Even if US oil consumption drops by 75%, it will still be consuming a lot of more oil (per capita) than India. So why would civilization collapse in the US? I can understand that many people will lose their standard of living but the average standard of living in US will still be much higher than the average standard of living in India. We are not going to run out of material to build fences or tear down buildings for their steel. LOL.
If you want to protect yourself, buy hard assets.
Thanks for the insights, suyog.
I agree that there is an element of all-or-nothing thinking in peak oil circles.
Moving down the slope can feel much more frightening than living at the low level one is used to with some hope of future improvement.
India's is adding more bodies per minute than any other country.
This will surely be one place that will see a dramatic collision between increasing population and decreasing resources, particularly (clean) water.
Do you think there is an Egypt-like revolt in India's future?
Do you think there is an Egypt-like revolt in India's future?
It is possible but unlikely. One big difference is that India is a democracy. In Egypt and many Arab countries a single man has ruled for several decades. Naturally he gets the blame for economic stagnation and all other problems. The hatred and anger can be focused on one person. That is not the case in India. The government can change every 5 years. You don't have single person ruling the country for several decades.
They have a single party running the show almost all election periods since independence instead. But at least, those guys where elected.
I know in my presentation I modified what I said about electricity a bit, after some other similar comments by readers on Our Finite World.
Electricity price is one of the competitive areas, but it will depend on the particular situation. We have a lot of coal plants (and nuclear plants) where the original cost has essentially been amortized. So our electricity costs with respect to built infrastructure will tend to be very cheap in these areas. We also right now have very cheap natural gas, and plants for generating natural gas are also pretty inexpensive, so electricity from natural gas generated electricity is pretty cheap.
China and India are adding new infrastructure, so that adds to their costs--because "new coal" is more expensive than "old coal".
Electricity cost comparisons still make a difference in the overall price comparison, but the US may have an advantage more times than I originally thought. If we start adding high priced sources (like offshore wind), it would tend to make the comparison worse. A person really has to have good information on electricity prices charged to industry, in different locations, to make good comparisons. I didn't have that.
Debt is not an unsolvable issue. We can always declare the year of the Jubilee and cancel all debts. But this will still leave the issue of raising capital for large projects like building a new energy infrastructure. But there too we can revert to the old ways, that is force people to work (direct taxation).
When you declare the year of debt jubilee, who gets the assets associated with each debt? If it is a farm, is it the "owner" who may have only a few percent equity in the farm? Is it the bank? Or if the loan has been sold and securitized, which of the many owners gets the loan? If there is a tenant farmer, is the farmer able to continue to farm the land?
Banks, insurance companies, and pension funds can only exist because of debt. If there is a jubilee, do these all go bankrupt, and everyone who is depending on their promises just forget them?
Debt underlies most international trade, since someone has to promise to pay something in exchange for something else. Does international trade just come to a halt as well? If a country is not really making anything significant of value that it can sell (perhaps just tourism, that is going away), how can they expect to buy oil products in the future?
And as you point out, we use debt for obtaining capital for projects now. If there is a debt jubilee, how do we expect to obtain capital, except perhaps through direct taxation, or very wealthy families pooling their resources?
It seems to me that much depends on how inflation/deflation plays out. If hyper-inflation occurs, a farmer that only owes a few tens-of-thousands on his land may be able to pay off his loan by selling the family silver or a few cows. It may cost the bank more to foreclose than the loan is worth, not worth the trouble.
If major deflation occurs (ala TAE), the banks may end up owning a lot of land. This has already occured in our area during round one of this mess. Banks are dumping building lots especially, for pennies on the dollar.
In the year of the jubilee loans are canceled, slaves (debt slaves mostly) are set free. Farmlands are given back to its original owner (so you actually only sold the right of usage for a given number of years). The only thing where sold remains sold is urban real estates.
From Wikipedia, on periodic jubilee in biblical Israel:
That is, if you're going to do jubilees, people have to game your system one way or another, or else way too many things come to a halt, even under conditions more primitive than exist in all but the worst places in the world right now. In this case you have to diddle in complex ways with concepts of land ownership.
And there simply are always side effects, often major ones. In this case again, if land can't be sold somehow, then lessors can't become owners, leaving permanent owning and leasing classes. In the modern world, if you're going to confiscate savings, people will catch on at least to a degree, and, presto, little or no savings. That's the lesson of the 1970s - people learned fairly well to go head over heels into debt rather than save. While that may not have caused the ensuing series of debt-driven financial bubbles outright, it surely encouraged it mightily.
In other words, "eat-the-rich" seems to be a satisfying fantasy for some folks (even if for most it evaporates instantly when it comes to, say, happily forking over ever more and bigger bucks to ballplayers for moronic "entertainment".) However, it's probably delusional to think it can magically solve our problems, since the fantasy normally includes imposing conditions making the resource decidedly non-renewable. So it's certainly necessary to weigh the side effects and tailor specific measures accordingly, lest one actually make matters worse instead of better, even in narrow terms of whatever philosophy (if any) happens to be driving the measures.
When I discuss peak oil with my colleagues (engineers), they're receptive but want to know what the new *quantitative* constraints will be to think within when designing / planning for the future. So in the spirit of this post, I'm curious what Gail and everyone else thinks about where we'll be post peak in other metrics other than oil production.
For example suppose we consider 5, 10, and 20 years post peak; suppose an all-liquids peak is roughly 2015, these are for 2020, 2025, and 2035. (I put my very rough guesstimates in parentheses.)
What is the price in real terms (purchasing power parity) per KWh of electricity from the grid? (2x relative to today / 5x / 10x)
What is the price in real terms per KWh of electricity off the grid? (2x / 3x / 4x)
What regional variation (in standard deviation) is there in the price of electricity? (1.5x / 3x / 5x)
What is the reliability of the electric grid? (99%, 95%, 75%)
What is the price in real terms per ton of truck, sea, and air shipping? (3x / 10x / 20x)
What is the share of the average adult/family's income available to spend on consumer goods and services? (20% / 10% / 5%)
What is the unemployment rate (U3)? (12% / 15% / 20%)
What do you think? Any other similar questions that engineers of all stripes (from civil to computer) will have to consider?
BR,
That is a good question. What I have said in a post called, How is an Oil Shortage Like a Missing Cup of Flour? is that if oil (or any other element needed for production, such as electricity now in Japan) is missing, it will tend to affect other elements of the economy as well. So low oil supplies will tend to lead to recession, and lower electricity use, and fewer people working. There will also be less demand for steel and other products.
I think that the financial system is one of the things that will be first hit by the problem, so to me, it is hard to say how things will work out in terms of prices. Will the banks even be open? Will we have Wisconsin $ and Ohio $, neither of which is convertible to US dollars? If we can keep the financial system together, then we have a chance at things working reasonably well for a while (20% unemployment, other things available, but high priced). But if the financial system goes, then it seems to me that all bets are off. How does an electric company buy coal from Wyoming and pay its employees, if the banking system is no longer working? That is the really scary possibility that it seems like we must work to avoid.
Someone up-thread talked about a debt jubilee. It is hard to see how we could keep the international financial system together after a debt jubilee. I am not even sure that we could keep the US financial system working in such a situation. If we didn't have a debt-baed financial system, the future would have fewer question marks associated with it.
Gail - Agreed. I think we will eventually get to such a point where the financial system will have broken down to an extent that it's useless for most businesses and individuals to rely upon. However, I think while we will have crises between now and say 2035, I don't see the financial system as going permanently non-functional before then. (Maybe the 2040s will be the tipping point...)
In the shorter term (5 / 10 years post peak), I'm not sure the recession will be so severe that things will stop functioning. My best guess (and what I used to guess at those numbers) is that we'll have cyclic 2008-style recessions every 3-5 years for the next two decades. Each recession will be followed by a recovery, but the recovery won't bring us back to even where we were pre-recession before the next hits. The question, then, is how much does each recession impact us? It seems each recession might cause a 5% unemployment spike followed by a 2-3% partial recovery. Prices for oil and other commodities may drop as demand is destroyed and spike again during the partial recoveries, but the nominal price is less important as average purchasing power declines from recession to recession.
I'm wondering if anyone has tried to do a quantitative analysis of this kind.
I call that The Staircase Model:
A significant simplification at some point would look like this (note the big step down in the middle):
I've been asked to put some numbers behind the model but have always declined. They would be entirely dependent on various assumptions. Someone can either see how this plays out or they can't (or can't yet), in my view. Adding numbers to the conversation just gives the people in the second group one more thing to argue about.
P.S. The arrows should be moved to the right more now.
Yes. I guess we are 5 months away from a new step down. We'll know in september.
Thanks for the slides (I think I've seen them in one of your old posts). I mostly agree with the staircase model, though I don't think each step will be flat - there will be some sort of small partial "recovery" on each step, just like we're seeing now. (I guess the recoveries are the catabolism stages in Greer's model, where we consume something in our economy to get the "recovery" going again.)
I agree that the numbers give some folks things to argue about, but for me, that's not the purpose of the numbers. Engineers think in numbers. We think in constraints and try to build things around them. The reason I want numbers is I want to give my colleagues something to start with. Designing something when electricity is 2 times more expensive than today in real terms is very different than if electricity is 200 times more expensive than today. Ballpark figures can be very helpful in guiding our responses.
So I'd still be very interested in your take on the numbers.
Barath contacted me via email and I thought my response would add to the conversation. Barath, we can continue the conversation here so that everyone can listen in.
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I wouldn't look at it the way you are looking at it because our likely future is going to be one with very high volatility. Will the price of electricity be 2x or 10x more? "Yes." Will the reliability of the grid be 75% or 50%? "Yes." Will unemployment be 20% or 50%? "Yes."
In other words, in a lumpy future you will just have to wait a few years for the next system state to arrive or, if you don't want to wait, physically move to the next country to see different conditions there. The overall trend for some factors may tend to be down and for others they may tend to be up — but specific numbers are going to be valid only for a particular point in time and space.
Instead, pick some high numbers and some low numbers to form ranges and tell them that they are planning for all of it. I believe that your greatest contribution will be to get your colleagues to think in terms of preparing for volatility.
In addition, some countries will experience system collapse before others and they will join the Failed State Index:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/21/2010_failed_states_inde...
Explain to your colleagues that overall systemic efficiency must decrease (you mention that in the paper). Build in redundancy. Move away from just in time anything. Build stockpiles. Ask vendors to lengthen product cycles and to stockpile cash so that they don't go bankrupt. Write every new contract so that an organization can radically reduce its fixed overhead in a hurry (employees, real estate, long term equipment leases, etc.). Larger companies may want to take equity positions in key vendors especially if the larger company has large reserves of cash the vendor might need to tap into. NOCs should be located where there are multiple long-term electricity supplies, if possible. And so on.
That's how I would approach your paper. I hope that helps.
Thanks - those are some great observations. I had been thinking in terms of volatility, but you're right - they key is that volatility will mean that conditions will simultaneously be okay and bad depending on where or who you are. I'll think in terms of ranges - and maybe the way to express that is that the standard deviation will increase significantly more than the baseline will. (I think this is generally recognized as being likely for oil prices - that the general trend will be up, but that's gradual, and the volatility will be huge.)
Yep, a staircase it is and an oily one at that. Which unlike the Hubbert Curve, which is fairly "graceful" on its own, throw typical human response into the mix and we do like we historically do...slip on the first couple of "steps" then go down fast and break things and scream on the way down. Like to be a little more optimistic...but I just can't.
Yes. I've been telling people for some time that $10/gal gasoline isn't any scarier than $2 gasoline you can't afford.
Here are my estimates:
What is the price in real terms (purchasing power parity) per KWh of electricity from the grid? (1.5x relative to today / 3x / 4.5x)
What is the price in real terms per KWh of electricity off the grid? (2x / 3x / 4x)
What regional variation (in standard deviation) is there in the price of electricity? (1.5x / 2x / 2.5x)
What is the reliability of the electric grid? (99.5%, 99%, 99%)
What is the price in real terms per ton of truck, sea, and air shipping? (3x / 5x / 10x)
What is the share of the average adult/family's income available to spend on consumer goods and services? (20% / 15% / 10%)
What is the unemployment rate (U3)? (12% / 15% / 18%)
Thanks for your projections.
I'm a bit surprised how reliable you see the electric grid as being. I think that you may be right for big cities, I can imagine rural areas getting unreliable quickly, bringing down the overall average reliability.
Why is it that you don't see electricity getting that expensive (only 4.5x in real terms in 2035)?
BR, at present, the electical grid in the United States is very reliable. An average yearly outage duration is generally less than 0.1% (99.9+ availability). A 99% future availability corresponds with a ten times increase of an outage duration of 0.1% to 1%. I don't think the outage duration will actually be that great, so the availability should be at least 99%.
I think conservation will reduce upward pressure on prices due to less new generation being added. Also, wind, and possibly solar, will increasingly become less expensive and more widely available. They will tend to help cap the ever increasing price of electricity.
I can imagine quite a number of cities becoming uninhabitable (Las Vegas, Phoenix, perhaps Los Angeles, NYC). I don't know how that would fit into your model.
We are already seeing a chunk of Japan reaching this status. As our ability to repair problems decreases, natural disasters are likely to result in permanent changes to our infrastructure.
Continous growth is mathematically impossiable. What has been called exponential is usually parabolic growth. By reducing the compounding or growth rate you increase the time until the curve slopes up sharpley and asymptotically approaches infinity. Any rate of growth will eventually double. At 100% annual growth rate you double each year (exponential),any lower rate is parabolic. Using the Rule of 72, at 10% rate you double every 7 years, every 25 years it doubles at 3% and at 1.1%, world population growth, it doubles in about 65 years.
The US uses about 25% of the worlds crude oil, the US Department of Defense, DOD, uses 25% of Americas oil or over 6% of the worlds crude oil.Tanks and planes do not work on ethanol,electricity or any solid fuel. They require high energy dense liquids; diesel,gasoline and kerosene (jet fuel).
I can visualize a DOD POL Command (Petroleum Oil Lubricants) after rationing can not fill the DOD's needs. They will Nationalize or more likely subidize Companies to produce POL with a negative EROEI using alternative fuels, after all National Security depends on us invading other countries to steal their resources. I am afraid they will pay for this by cutting my military retirement, combat related disability and Social Security.
They are gunning big time for social security. Oh and by the way social security pays for combat related disability (one more way they hide the true size of military spending). Good luck to you.
Well it's pretty obvious. The military is a big waste of resources. That should be the first to be cut.
Almost all government is a waste of resources. My point being 80% of a barrel of oil is used for transportation (internal combustion engins) and government will have first call on high energy liquid fuels.I believe alternate energy will be used to produce negative EROEI high energy liquid fuels, coal to liquid, extracting oil from shales and marl, steaming heavy oils in the ground etc. This of course will reach a limit but it will give the appearance government is doing something, kicking the can down the road. "Delay is the deadliest form of denial." C Northcote Parkinson
A couple of points, Gail.
Even if a relatively gentle decline in oil production could be engineered, that would be catastrophic for a global economy that needs growth to continue functioning properly (and we haven't really seen that for some time). Indeed, even a plateau would mean expected growth couldn't go on. So a gentle decline is not a lot better than a faster decline, though the questioner appeared to imply that it was.
Secondly, a declining percentage of employed people in the US doesn't mean that fewer people are employed, as you inferred. In fact, the number of people employed has remained fairly constant since the turn of the century (which is bad for the US, given its near 1% population growth rate).
Good point. Either way the system collapses, as the German military points out:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-28/review-putting-bundeswe...
Lets all pray we do have a systemic collapse. The worst thing that could happen if we keep limping this ridiculous economic model along. Personally, I don't see us going down the back side of Hubberts curve with this system. It just does not seem to be a reasonable expectation.
Gail, how did you arrive at your estimates of the EROEI needed for China and the US? Surely the EROEI is a lot higher than that now, so what do those countries give up when EROEI reduces to 4 and 8 respectively?
Richard Heinberg once referred to some studies suggesting that hunter-gatherer societies existed on an EROEI (primarily food and human labour) of about 10:1 (or 5:1 at a minimum). Is Chinese society simpler than hunter-gatherer societies? Is US society of the same complexity as hunter-gatherer societies?
Pick numbers you like better. I don't really have a good basis for my numbers. My point was only that whatever the number was for the US, it was likely lower for China, because a lot of the country still has limited paved roads, not as many big modern hospitals, and operates using farming with a lot of manual labor.
Hunter-gatherers may have had a fairly high EROEI, but the absolute number of people such a society could support was quite low, because the resources they could gather with primitive methods were in absolute amounts very low.
I would think that China could be compared more to the US than to hunter gatherers. That is a very different set of technology. It was displaced by farming, with lower EROEI, because the absolute amount of net energy that could be produced was higher.
You seemed to be placing more emphasis on the EROEI need than you are now. Thanks for the correction. I really did get the point about China's EROEI being lower but that is a different issue to what EROEI is needed to support a modern (or developing) industrial nation. My point about hunter-gatherer EROEI had nothing to do with relative numbers within that society, versus now. In fact, that's somewhat irrelevant, I think, when talking about EROEI. EROEI is about how much energy and resources can a society (of any size) plough into its acquisition of energy to run that society.
Farming may have, technically, increased EROEI when first introduced, but I don't think that applies any more. Farming is an energy sink, now. Made possible only by, up to now, cheap abundant energy.
Way too doomy for my taste, but admittedly, we're all different.
Gail is saying that we essentially need to go back to the pre-industrial economy on her blog these days, saying things like electricity will become much less important and we need to go back to the man-made agriculture, learn knitting and essentially creep back into our medieval yurts to survive.
I don't know, I'm just not a big fan of the Orlov-complex, the ultra-doomers who foresee that the only way to move forward is by going backward 500 years, if we survive at all.
I think the world's much more resilient than this. Although it's true some areas of the world, especially Africa, might partially descend into this, I wouldn't bet that's the case with China et al.
Although I respect Gail for the work she has done, she to me has started to descend into the Orlov/Kunstler trap, but with the exception of being more articulate and reasonable. But the extreme, overblown ultra-doomer rhetoric, especially on her blog, are starting to creep in, but more softly packaged.
But each to their own.
Way too doomy for most people's taste.. But I'm afraid the future scenario is hardly a matter of taste or which possible outcome you would like best. She (and others) make a good case why the down slope of the oil production curve might be uncomfortably steep.
I haven't seen any indications that the globalized society is preparing for an orderly transition to a post-oil world on the scale needed, and time is getting shorter and shorter. The strategy for our leaders seems to mostly be to put their heads in the sand and to keep up appearances for as long as possible. This does not point in the direction of a soft landing or an orderly transition. It points to collapse.
There is no way in hell our economic model stays functional with such a steep drop off. No there will be no orderly transition, just a fast crash and reorganization. I can't imagine why people think the economy will continue to operate in the same fashion all the way down the backside of hubberts curve.
The monetary system will collapse and become dysfunction really fast the financial system will disintegrate. The good thing is those are the things that dictate such an idiotic use of resources and wacky behavior - the bad thing is nobody has a plan b.
I think it's a combination of bargaining and simply not learning how complex systems fail — a mix of psychology and simple ignorance (not stupidity, I just mean "not knowing"). Of course when I try to educate people on complex system failure often the psychology "protects" them from learning it. It's very difficult to burst a person's protective bubble and almost impossible to do so in a short period of time. I expect most people, perhaps like Leiten, are going to be surprised as hell at how fast things will fall apart. I don't think it will be overnight but even 15 years, what the German military report expects, will seem quite quick to have a whole world turned upside down.
Hirsch's projection shows one possible scenario:
but it's just not very likely, in my view, because it doesn't take into account a failing financial system. (I don't think Hirsch really believes it, either.) Something like this is more likely, I think:
Andre',
I think you would find it worthwhile to investigate motivated reasoning. There is a good article about it in the May/June Mother Jones magazine. In essence, people will believe what supports their views regardless of facts. One of the "bubbles" in the article says, "The science of why people don't believe science." Wikipedia has nothing of value but I didn't do a search any place else.
Todd
Thanks, Todd, I'll look into it! Even the term itself conveys so much.
Well, if we keep trying to do things the same way it will be bad. The good thing is we don't nearly need all the oil we use now. It goes to constant idiotic allocations, there are huge disparities(like 50-1) and unbelievable amounts of waste. With luck the economy will collapse fast so we don't do to much damage. Then we just have to distribute resources under a different logic. One that is not completely idiotic. Oh no we might not be able to ship plastic shit around the world, bought on debt that is not going to be paid back for the sake of economic growth. Oh, the humanity!
The thing you have to remember is that people's jobs are based on making all of the unnecessary things we have /use today. We can get rid of those things, but then we have that many more unemployed people, and we have less way of collecting enough taxes to pay for necessary repairs to infrastructure and basics we have come to expect like schools and some form of social security.
There really isn't any easy solution. Production of food locally comes closest, but it is hard to produce enough for the population we have today, and we are not set up to do this. Also, some parts of the world have good soil and a reasonable climate for agriculture, but a lot of the world doesn't.
One of the first things I learned when I discovered effective problem solving in engineering was - you don't just state the obvious reasons why things can't be done this or that way, and quit sulk in the corner - but you go further and ask why are those things so obvious...
I would ask: why would giving up on excessive consumption lead to massive unemployment of those in the manufacturing sector and service sectors? They have an enormous potential to take part in the economy which has replaced the unnecessary consumption. You see, just like you implied/assumed that "reducing consumption" ceteris paribus, leads to unemployment, which is obviously indisputable fact, I too can make the assumption that a local economy and massive government spending has given all those people replacement jobs. Now, what you imply is obviously a problem, the problem perhaps, but stating it as a reason for not pursuing (that which is anyway inevitable) reduced consumption is a pointless exercise in problem solving. Suggesting and recognizing preferred outcomes and ways to achieve them is what I'm trying to do... (below in my other post).
Then you go on to state something about taxes, local food production, problems of soil and climate suitability for a global scale solution ... as if these were throughoutly debated, researched and proven issues: like peak oil of HGW ...
Local problems need local solutions - people (surprisingly) tend to make the best of circumstances for their area, climate etc. Being right about gardening working in californian not being suitable for the arctic doesn't negate the fact that californian gardening works in california! The arctic has a sparse population - and to my knowledge the people's of Lappland are just fine, reindeer-herding, fishing and collecting and storing seasonal berries etc. As for those us living in the south of Finland, we are able to grow a few cereal crops as well as plenty of root vegetables which have sustained our populations for centuries here - even with 8 month long winters!
And as for (frankly stupid) comments people will give about starvation in the middle ages etc.: at least here in Finland there are still many people in the countryside deriving all their food needs plus surplus for the market from their own gardens and fields - as was the way for the most population - for past 50 years - as well as during the world wars.
And why would we abandon all the technology and science we have learned since? Why not apply it instead to sustainable local production - permaculture isn't some weird going back to the caves farming method - it is a very modern approach which enables us to produce MORE food with LESS resources - using all the knowledge we have of soil, plant, ecosystem, biology, systems theory etc.! Isn't that exactly what we need? What we will have to use for to grow anything beyond peak oil?
I mean what is the point in insisting on continuing using oil-intensive mass-agriculture after we run out of oil - arguing that only it can support such and such population and life-style - when the fact is it no-longer works - there is no oil for it - you need something else... Isn't that what we should be discussing, rather than repeating these mantras that get us nowhere?
- Ransu
But ... massive spending on what, financed how?
"Isn't that what we should be discussing, rather than repeating these mantras that get us nowhere?"
I admire your optimistic passion for problem solving, Ransu, but these aren't 'mantras', they are realities we've arrived at after hashing this out for years. Far too many people make their living bulding useless widgets from non-renewable resources, far too many people make their living marketing, transporting, selling and disposing of these useless widgets. Many, many more people do nothing at all, or provide services that produce nothing tangible, yet all of these people require inputs to live. The new jobs you say we will create also require inputs that simply won't be available, at least at levels anywhere near what our systems have been built upon, what people expect, what they feel entitled to. It's called extreme overshoot, made possible by massive depletion of non-renewable resources, made possible by the mother of all non-renewable resources: oil. And if I may, it has also been made possible by thinking like yours: imaginative, enterprizing folks who have found ways to create useless widgets and services, and imagined effective ways to convince people that they 'need' them.
Poof! All of these are going away: the resources; the jobs; the consumers, and there simply won't be enough resources or capital to replace them, even with "low consumption" employment and lifestyles. People's lives depend on the current level of consumption. Until the big reset in population and the following reset of societys' minimum operating level, there's going to be a lot less for most everyone.
As (like you) an engineer-problem-solver who has passed into acceptance of the above, I devote much of my time to addressing the basic problems of shelter, food and water, finding ways that folks can power down, if not gracefully, at least to a point above where people begin to turn on each other to take what they need.
Triage and damage control first.
I agree that food production, at least on a personal/local level, is one of the more solvable problems. Soil and fertilizer can be manufactured locally with the right techniques, at least in much of the world. Water can be used conservatively, reclaimed, and is storable energy. A lot of calories can be grown in a small area (see my post above about growing potatos in bags) if folks know how.
The mantra I avoid is that BAU can be maintained anywhere close to what it is today. The sooner folks get it, the better our chances. As I've said elsewhere, it may require generations of people, 'wandering in the wilderness', before we can purge our collective memories of the madness.
I agree that food production, at least on a personal/local level, is one of the more solvable problems. Soil and fertilizer can be manufactured locally with the right techniques, at least in much of the world. Water can be used conservatively, reclaimed, and is storable energy. A lot of calories can be grown in a small area (see my post above about growing potatos in bags) if folks know how.
Maybe. I'm starting to wonder. I picked up a salad on the way home last night from a chain restaurant who will remain nameless. I scanned it and it came up hot, about double background radiation (~20 CPM). I sat there watching it and repeating the counts for about 15 minutes while I pondered what to do. I finally picked the cheese off, which reduced the CPM, and ate it. I figure there will be a lot more where that came from. I lowered a mental bar last night.
At this time of year, in Anchorage, all of our cheese and greens are coming from somewhere south of here . . . . thinking about greenhouses again.
Well, the cheese was probably (but not certainly) made before the Japanese incident so, why did it reduce the count? Why was it hot?
NAOM
Good question. Could have been the leaf lettuce, but I'm thinking it was the processed cheese. And after reading about processed cheese, I'm better off without it. Back to slow foods.
http://www.biocatalysts.com/pdf/technical_bulletins/TB103_EMC.pdf
Ransu:
You are lucky to live where you are.
"in Finland there are still many people in the countryside deriving all their food needs plus surplus for the market from their own gardens and fields - as was the way for the most population - for past 50 years - "
I hear Georgia, near Russia, is like that still. I hear their independent agrarian culture is under siege.
"the people's of Lapland are just fine, reindeer-herding, fishing and collecting and storing seasonal berries etc"
They are very lucky to live that life. Will people living real lives, like the nomads of inner Mongolia, even notice what happens to the far away cultures flying the tiny dots that are jet planes, high in the sky?
"Californian gardening works in California"
The good lands are covered by asphalt and concrete or are owned, fenced, and defended by the police doing their job. The megalopolis of Los Angeles starts well out in the desert and ends in very expensive private properties going up the coast. Driving through it takes hours. I find it pretty scary, as I do not like to be 2 hours deep in the hive with no way out, no open land to be safe in, should something happen... like an earthquake.
___________________________
Georgian song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQJJ9KcfpGM
The people of Lappland are not as "native" as you may think. My ex-girlfriend is 1/4 sami (and most of whats left finnish) and grew up in Lappland. Her own assesment of the reindeer industry is basicly "helicopters and scooters". Heck, they even use motorcross bikes to herd those reindeers.
When the oil runs out, they will actually have to move in with the reindeers. Living in a kåta and learning how boil their coffe using the tiniest of twigs from the ground, just like their grandparents know. If the knowledge is passed down the generations. Wich I doubt, they are just a more exotic breed of cattle farmers these days.
True, true...
Same with the Inuit (Eskimos)...
But I imagine the distance back is not as far:
They are on the land and make their livelihood from it.
If my Pleiadian CNC chromosnipper runs out of -glueons, I can just go back to using a Bridgeport.
Far North is not livable without massive inputs from the south. At the risk of being politically incorrect, before access to "Western" tools, these northern people lived in the conditions equivalent to Stone Age. It's one thing to hunt with a Winchester from a Zodiac and another with bone harpoon (not a tree in sight!) from a skin kayak.
Yes, that is a sad thing.
The availability of things made with materials and energies they did not have has allowed them to increase their population beyond what the environment can support. An early story I was told was about a company's offer of free lanterns. They accepted many things. There is great sadness caused by alcohol.
Should the traffic in oil and guns and alcohol dwindle to a halt and the place empties out, will some remain? The place is made safe by its harsh and demanding remoteness. Some may remember the old ways... Some may sell Cheesy-Puffs to the folks manning the rigs sprouting where the ice used to be. We shall see.
RockyMtnGuy's telling of the Mongolian satellite TV experience (next) reminds me of an effect in New Guinea: A village got satellite TV. The lads watched and became enamored of the WWF wrestlers. The elders of the village just weren't as cool, in younger eyes, as the media stars. Their words then came to mean less.
RockyMtnGuy's telling of the Mongolian satellite TV experience (next) reminds me of an effect in New Guinea: A village got satellite TV. The lads watched and became enamored of the WWF wrestlers.
Yes, the guys in Bhutan were into WWE wresting as well. Our guide in Bhutan was a major fan of it. He knew all the wrestlers, and was astounded to learn that I lived near the same city (Calgary) as Bret Hart.
Now, the interesting thing is that he had a university degree, and most of the guides and porters we met in Nepal were using their wages to finance their college educations. These guys were not stupid. They had their eyes firmly fixed on the future, and they had a very good idea of what was going on in the rest of the world - probably much better than most Americans.
One of our guides in Nepal was learning Mandarin because he thought it was the wave of the future. He tried to check us into the largest hotel in one Himalayan town, and was astounded to discover that the Chinese had bought it since his last visit, and nobody there spoke Nepalese. However, they all spoke both Mandarin and English, and he could talk to them in either. It's the wave of the future.
I think you're quite naive about what is going on in remote places these days. I was at 5000 metres (16,000 feet) on the Tibet/Bhutan border, hanging out with the nomadic yak herders, and they had satellite dishes, mobile phones, and solar cells up there.
Nomadic yak herding is a business, and they needed the mobile phones to make deals to sell their yak cheese and yak meat in the cities. The yak herding business was obviously doing well because they had the money to buy these things.
Because they had satellite TV, the teenagers all were watching MTV and had Avril Lavigne posters on their walls. I had a little trouble with not being able to escape Avril Lavigne, even in the high Himalayas, but it's the modern world, you have to deal with it.
One of the mountain climbers up there broke his leg, so they took him to the nearest tea house. The tea house owner pulled out a satellite phone and said, "Give me your credit card number and I'll have a helicopter here in twenty minutes." Twenty minutes later he was on a Russian-built helicopter heading for a hospital in India.
Yes, I used a romantic image.
I love world music.
I watch Mongolian songs on their TV talent shows.
They comment on the internet.
The media and the trinkets are everywhere.
They've got their Yak and a place for their Yak.
They can make a go of it right where they are.
Even if MTV goes away.
Only having access to the likes of Walmart is a lot more fragile.
"I had a little trouble with not being able to escape Avril Lavigne, even in the high Himalayas..."
Trust me, it's not that hard. I live in San Francisco, with fat data pipes of all kinds leading into my lair, and I don't have the slightest idea who or what an "Avril Lavigne" might be. I don't think I'm even curious.
I live in San Francisco, with fat data pipes of all kinds leading into my lair, and I don't have the slightest idea who or what an "Avril Lavigne" might be.
Well, San Francisco is not really on the same planet as the rest of us, and you have cloned your own pop rock / punk rock singers in California, so she might not be as big as she was in Nepal and Bhutan.
According to Wikipedia, her latest album was #1 in Japan, Australia, Germany, Greece, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Czech Republic, and made the top 10 in the US and UK. It's called Goodbye Lullaby. The lead song is "What the Hell", which would be my reaction, too. I'm avoiding it to the best of my ability, just as my parents avoided my music when I was a teenager.
Oh,no! Our parents were right. ;^(
(And I know less about contemporary pop culture than anyone else within miles.)
Avril Lavigne - What The Hell:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE7dhplqLjs
Brain cleaner:
Isbruck, ich muß dich lassen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blg2it5PpSE
She is one of my favourite musicians. In 2003 the Canadian media were suggesting that Avril Lavigne could get the Grammy for "Best New Artist". When that award was won by Norah Jones, my immediate thought was "Who the hell is Norah Jones?".
Nora Jones is one of my favorite singers, but the teenage yak herders in the high Himalayas weren't that big into jazz, blues, and folk music. Teenagers the world over tend to be somewhat similar once they have access to MTV. Long-haired blonde punk rockers with black eye liner have universal genetic appeal. It's all in the genes and the jeans.
Human beings are evolving faster than ever, but we're evolving into creatures who are obsessed with blond-haired, blue-eyed pop rockers. See Are We Still Evolving?".
The fact that someone suggests the coming peak oil will force / allow us to return to using less electricity, man made agriculture (gardening), learning practical skills, making and mending things by ourselves
DOES NOT EQUAL
"medieval yurts to" or "going backward 500 years"
Instead I would call your characterization as "extreme, overblown rhetoric"...
I only have to go and interview my still living parents ...
they grew up in a post WW2-world where "electricity wasn't so important", for example they had no Air-Conditioning - yet managed to get through their adult working lives just fine without injury or death - they opened a window when it was hot. Can you even do that with modern office buildings?
They also were just fine having a small garden instead of useless lawn and car-park in front of house - from where they supplemented their family diet with seasonal fresh vegetables, a cellar below the house to store hardy roots for the winter, and jars full of jams made from berries and fruit from the apple trees and currant bushes around the house...
Instead of having multiple cars they had room in the garage for a small workshop where you could make most things, and certainly repair pretty much anything. Items of utility were considered too precious to be thrown away before at least attempting to fix them first. Even if they could afford to buy a new shovel - why waste the money, when you can just fix a new handle on it yourself. Consequently the house and around was just full of "stuff" that was waiting to be repaired or perhaps as a spare part ... they considered throwing away "stuff" any stuff just really really stupid!
They, and many others lived like this through the 50's, 60's and 70's ... only during the 80's having moved with jobs to a new suburb with less available land, they opted to cycle to the nearby forest instead - every summer to pick berries and mushrooms - just a hobby during the summer months - gathering enough for the whole winter for the whole family - and selling the extra to the neighbors...
They continue such a way even today, even as the city has enclosed them and the forest is miles away.
I'm ashamed to admit I haven't caught or followed their simple ways - supposedly being too busy with my career and all that. Pitiful excuses I know...
- Ransu
It is the system that is at the risk of "breaking". "Using less" has been advanced for a long time as a way of fixing the system, but it is not clear that it really works. For one thing, people tend to spend all of their salaries. If they don't spend the salaries on one energy-using product, they spend it on another energy-using product, so the net difference is not that much of an improvement.
Our system has been optimized for the current amount of oil, gas, electricity, etc we use. Even if we could make a big change, the likely impact would be something like our electric utilities going bankrupt. Nothing works out quite a neatly as we would like. Certainly a lot of people would lose their jobs, and the government would be in much worse financial shape, because of reduction to its tax base.
It is our lack of imagination that makes us static, unable to see any alternative future other than the ones we chip into our memories by repeating these mantras..
"Using less" is a direct and inevitable consequence of peak oil. Its not a matter of debate or preference - the only thing left to debate is how we are going to implement it. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem..
"What people tend to do" is not a fixed constant - even if they choose currently to spend their income of x - doesn't mean they can't be persuaded to change, or won't have to change when things become inevitable. Stating that the world is beyond our influence is pointless - it advances no argument other than nihilism..
Our system is anything but "optimized" - it could do with so much improvement, just from a purely 'technocratic' angle. Permaculture, localization of jobs, food and energy production are all 'technocratic'-projects, one could implement tomorrow. None of this is in anyway "impossible" - compared to what countries, civilized western countries, went through with the war-effort in the last world war. Some of most efficient, orderly, organized societies where those under war-time rule. And they had hugely less resources and technology at the time for this.
As for the local utility 'suffering' under people's consumption habit - tough! - I strongly believe in the 'free marker' - the real free market, constricted only by the necessary centralization of public services and national security which should only be given to under corporate charters under strict regulation and oversight - as a local utility, your stockholders have made a poor investment if they don't build smart grids and super grids that world of the future needs. They will be bypassed by other investors who do - and make lots of money for their investors from it. I don't see any problem with this. In the war time corporations adapted to the circumstances and many flourished. If you insisted on selling the same amount of nail-polish as during pre-war time, you deserve to go bankrupt!
And as for people loosing their jobs - in a low energy economy there is no lack of jobs for people to do - local production, supplying local markets. Large public works projects to change the infrastructure of the country. All the new energy projects, transmission lines, railway networks ... a new CCC would be needed! Giving a healthy upbringing and lifestyle to all the disaffected youth of the country.
And the funny thing is - I haven't even used my imagination, or 'thought out of the box, laterally or anything' - these are just things we did to get through world wars and recessions before in history. Think of what kind of ideas people WITH imaginations could come up with!!!
- Ransu
The problem is that local adaptations, based on doing with less, are overwhelmed by the seductions of mass media luring people into high consumption lifestyles - at the maximum of their income. I'm afraid it's rapidly become yak herders entranced with Avril what's-her-name everywhere.
Local groups (not just individuals) opting-out, spreading more widely through the population, is the real threat to the growth system (remember the hippies?) - but it's too tempting to defect or stray. Most of the hippie communes unraveled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
In a growth situation, waste occurs as organisms maximize power, resulting in waste and faster growth (spinning faster and faster) as ". . . system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency." As we plateau and descend, local adaptations will start winning over globalization and mass media as waste decreases and efficiencies and recycling improve. We can see it already happening everywhere now, just not fast enough, because of the lodged vested interests and feedback delays?
That is a very relevant theory and it basically maps to a measure of greediness, in that those who can harness the most energy can accumulate the most wealth and produce at the fastest rate.
The analog to this the Maximum Entropy Principle which says that states evolve to the most disorder unless constraints provided by energy limit its extent.
Thanks for providing the info.
"for example they had no Air-Conditioning"
Location, location, location. The old real-estate mantra. That was all fine years ago in a place like Helsinki where 85F/30C is a serious and fairly rare heatwave, and in a time years and years and years ago before drugs that mess with people's thermal regulation came into use. Of course there's winter, but it's a safe bet they had heat in some form, since heating can be had simply by burning something, a process much less complicated than cooling and requiring no electricity.
No electricity, or very dodgy electricity, might work rather less well in modern Phoenix or Atlanta, with those drugs now widely prescribed, and with those cities themselves having been made possible by air conditioning. After all, there is a reason why the old downtown in Phoenix is so tiny that it's almost a joke, and why Atlanta and other such places, with their thick, debilitating summer humidity were quite small as well.
I'd like to remind you that Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto get quite hot in summer. Tokyo was a very large city even in the 1800s. Air conditioning is not necessary in every building at all times. Adaptations will have to occur - cities will have to green up with trees to cut the heat island effect, buildings may have to take cues from those built 100 years ago, and people may have to go back to wearing kimono... In any case, they will need to dress for reality and not for show.
Phoenix may be impossible, but Atlanta, New Orleans, Tokyo, Damascus (perhaps the oldest city in the world), many cities existed and many people lived, for many hundreds of years, without A/C in warm climates.
My god, have we lost all perspective? We've become like limbless invalids due to technology and specialization, we can't imagine how to live even with still awesome technology (it won't all be abandoned unless we really, really mess up) and the example of thousands of years of human history. Trade from China and India to Europe existed even in Roman times, and in the 1700s worldwide shipping was a fairly mundane fact of life - spices, tea and coffee were popular in Europe despite having to be shipped nearly halfway around the globe. If we can't even manage to live to find a way to live in warm areas without air conditioning we are a shame on our ancestors.
Nice points. We lived in central GA for a while and we'd drive up to Atlanta to cool off.
But of course the world is also heating up, and in many places getting more humid. If GW goes the way it seems to be going--right off the charts--many of the most thickly inhabited places in the world will see heatwaves that will be unsurvivable without AC or other means of escaping the deadly combination of heat and humidity.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504155413.htm
I don't see air conditioning as a big deal in Atlanta. It isn't all that hot.
The issue I see is that the soil is not very good for farming. It is much better for growing of trees (and not necessarily the popular fruit and nut trees). The soil is clay mixed with rock, and it rains enough that nutrients get washed down to levels that tree roots go, but shallow roots do not.
There are acorns that people could eat (after enough processing) and some other foods that grow wild.
I think it is going to be an exercise in futility trying to grow enough crops here to support a very big population. That is the real issue. There are farming areas in the country for a reason.
Ransu,
I can't help but wonder how much your perspective is affected by living in a country that has grown only from 4 million to 5 million since WWII. And, how much my perspective is influenced by living in a country that has grown from
150m to over 300m in the same time. I do not see that the knowledge, energy nor other resources are there to allow for so many people to survive without FF. And world population growth has been more akin to my country (US), i.e. more than doubling, than yours - only increasing by 1/5. I guess we shall find out. But I'd rather be in your country than mine...
Great article. Very interesting to read the comments also.
Whenever the fast/slow collapse issue comes up, I always bring up my standard answer why i believe in a fast collapse. I'll do it again here:
The electricity grid. That is something that needs to be maintained or it wll fail. As we learnt in 2003 when there was 3 major black outs (in North America, Scandinvia and Italy) those failures can spread over very large areas by the speed of 200 000 Km/s and then stay down for a long while.
I think that when we lose resources to maintain those grids, they will become more and more fragile. At one point they break, and no one will put themup again. Then they stay down, and it is Run For The Hills time again.
Also, total export volumes of oil will fall very quickly when ELM effects kick in. I doubt there will be much export oil to buy in 15 years from now. That will be a killer.
At the suggestion of a TODster some time ago, I bought and read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/2045-Story-Future-Peter-Seidel/dp/1591027055
2045, A Story of Our Future
As a book (story, characters, etc) it was just OK IMO.
As a picture of a possible future for us humans and our environment, it was fairly interesting and depressing.
I very much agree with you about electricity needing to be maintained. If we try to add a whole lot more wind, plus smart grids, I think we will have a system that is even harder to maintain, that may fail even more quickly than otherwise.
The "plan" now is to run our electrical system closer to its limit. This is just asking for higher risk of catastrophic failure.
The electrical grid is being used in ways that it was not originally designed. Historically, the local utility generated most of its power and distributed it to its customers. How, there is significant flow on the transmission system due to regional transfers of electricity beyond utilty system boundaries.
There are several things that can be done to accomodate the new higher flows. Better monitoring allows the system to be operated stably with less reserve margin. New equipment like synchro-phasor measurement units can allow monitoring of critical locations throughout the entire grid. Additional facilities can be built (e.g. new transmission line, new transformers, etc.). Incremental enhancements continuously occur to address bottlenecks and to accomodate new loads.
President Obama's Vision (from 2008):
Countrary to what Obama says, we do not need a "whole new" grid. We merely need to enhance the grid we have, not replace it.
The Green Power Express is a proposed 3,000 mile (4,828 km) $12 billion 765 kV transmission system overlay in the Midwest to address President Obama's vision.
Since power capability flows a function of the voltage squared and the electrical losses are a function of the current squared, a higher voltage system is more efficient.
The development of The Green Power Express plan is contingent on regional cost-sharing.
This is not a plan, but the abcense of a plan, in my view.
On a global basis, the collapse question is limited to the collapse in production of crude oil. Gas, coal, fission, fusion, solar, wind, biofuels, etc. will all continue at current production levels and will increase in the case of the non-fossil fuel alternatives.
The decline in oil production mainly affects its two primary uses: transportation and travel.
The amount of oil required for water and rail transportation at current or even elevated levels is not large and transportation of essential materials and goods will have priority over travel by people. Transportation by air will decline markedly as fuel prices rise, but this can mostly be replaced by slower, more efficient modes. The few time-dependent air deliveries, such as the delivery of Columbian flowers to US florists, will either pay the price or end. Trucking will be limited to delivery of freight from railyards to local destinations, and will use either highly efficient diesels, compressed gas, or electric energy.
Most people around the world do not travel by personal ICE vehicles, even though this is a major consumption of oil. Walking, bicycling, and public transportation are the norm most places. Some people will, of course, pay the premium for continuing to drive, but these will be the elite -- the modern equivalent to the "carriage trade", the people wealthy enough to afford their own horse-drawn personal conveyance.
So the collapse in lifestyle resulting from the collapse of oil production turns out to be mainly a collapse in personal travel. While this may take considerable adjustment in the US, it will require less adjustment elsewhere. Even in the US, it may not be too traumatic after a period of adjustment. It was true that people would be born, live and die without traveling more than some dozens of miles from home, other than when they relocated to seek work, etc.
Estimated US Energy Use in 2009
You are blatantly misrepresenting the problem boundaries. It is true that petroleum accounts for 90% of energy used in transportation. It is not true that all of that transportation is "personal travel".
Furthermore, petroleum accounts for 40% of total world energy use. Given that there is a very strong correlation between energy use and GDP, then I think it is safe to say that any significant reduction in oil production and/or exports will result in a corresponding reduction in the ability of the world economy to perform useful work.
Nor would I count on other non-liquid or low quality sources, most of which are rapidly approaching their own biophysical, energetic, or economic limits, to make up for the shortfall in high quality liquid fuels.
Your poorly considered attempt to lull people into a false sense of complacency does not pass the smell test.
Cheers,
Jerry
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption, oil accounts for 33.5% of the global energy source. This is a smaller percentage than in the US, where it is 37.3% according to the Lawrence Livermore National Labs diagram.
I haven't found a diagram which breaks down the end use of oil for transportation and travel by automobiles, trucks, tractors, airplanes, buses, railroads, ships & barges, etc. Any pointers to this data would be appreciated.
I did find Indiana Energy Report 2007 which has some statistics.
Gallons (millions, 2005) US Motor Fuel Consumption 179,100 US Non-Highway Gasoline USe for Agriculture 1,077 US Industrial & Commercial Non-Highway Gasoline 1,214This indicates that fuel use for things like tractors and construction equipment is a small fraction of highway use by cars and trucks.
I've seen nothing to contradict my view that the predominant use of oil in the US is for personal travel by car and for transportation of goods by trucks. These are the most energy inefficient modes of travel and transportation respectively.
The US uses over twice as much energy per capita as Europe and over four times as much as the global average. We reached our peak of oil production long ago. It looks like we have reached our peak of oil importing in the last few years.
The decline in oil may be somewhat disruptive to the global economy, but it will be wrenching in the US. However, the US can adjust by:
"So the collapse in lifestyle resulting from the collapse of oil production turns out to be mainly a collapse in personal travel."
Uh-huh, and a few other activities, like eating.
Isn't it Jim Kunstler who says that modern agriculture is a system in which we pour oil on the ground and Cheetos pop up?
That wasn't even a good try, Merrill.
If the price of oil goes up markedly the ag and food system can adjust in several ways.
First, the oil energy in foodstuffs leaving the farm is not all that high. Pesticides don't use much oil, and fertilizer mainly is produced using gas to fix nitrogen. Tillage fuel costs are a small fraction of the energy in food.
Most of the fossil fuel energy in food is expended in transportation, processing, packaging, warehousing, distribution, retailing, personal travel, and restaurant and kitchen energy uses. We can certainly cut out much of these costs without going hungry. We may have to forego Chilean grapes in the winter. Mangos and kiwi fruit may disappear from our shelves. We can certainly eliminate bottled water and soft drinks with no harm to our diets.
Watch out, Merrill, the ultradoomers hate statistics and love gory language.
You're now on their hitlist.
Statistics? Is that what Merrill offered?
No, we got a link to a broad-brush graphic "estimate" of US energy sources and uses that doesn't even mention, oh... say... just for instance... food or agriculture. To even pretend that it supports his extraordinary assertion (or that it would if it conveyed relevant and meaningful information) is just silly.
As for gory language, where did you see any? Please make sure you're clear on the meaning of the word before answering.
Have we seen the ultradoomers show up yet in this conversation?
I always thought those were the folks who thought it all ends in a nuclear mushroom cloud as we lose control of the world's weapons on the way down.
Haven't seen any of those folks chime in yet. All I've seen is entirely rational discussion that outlines what happens when a species that likes to breed like rabbits encounters an exceptional storehouse of energy — and fails to plan for its inevitable exhaustion while simultaneously making a mess of its nest.
I also recall a few days ago you asserting that I didn't have the basic grasp of world petroleum production based on one graph that I posted. Given your seeming inclination for making assumptions, I wonder instead if it is you who is early in your understanding of the ramifications of oil's decline and is making unsupportable assumptions.
New folks come in here all the time, meet a large group of people who have been hashing this out for years now and who also have deep connections into various relevant areas from ecology to climate change to population dynamics. These newcomers call us doomers because they don't yet see what we see. If they stick around they eventually see what we're pointing to. Even Nick finally understood the impact of a collapsing financial system on the other systems (at least I think he did; it seemed like it in our last conversation).
I certainly bear no ill will toward you (we need more people to talk straight about our predicament to neighbors and governments and you seem very articulate) and, besides, it seems that Nick has taken a vacation and we need someone to keep us on our toes.
;-)
Hope= something that springs forth every spring
If we lived in a rational world, merrill, your scenario might have some legs.
But we don't.
Farmers will be priced out of putting crops in the ground or taking them to market even while SUV drivers are still stupidly burning up their children's futures. On a global scale, something like this is already happening--some billion people are chronically short of adequate food while we put our corn into our cars. It is all just sickeningly insane.
If we lived in a rational world, we would already be drastically curtailing discretionary travel and transportation of all sorts, carpooling en mass, investing in public transportation, rationing to make sure there was enough for crucial services like fire trucks and ambulances...
But instead we are pissing it all away, and will continue to do so in spite of the insanity of the whole project. We will go on fighting multiple wars to keep oil 'cheap' ignoring the cost in shattered bodies and minds, not to mention the multiple local, regional and global environmental disasters associated with the extraction, processing, transport and burning of oil and other ff.
The corporate criminals that oversaw the destruction of the massive, efficient and convenient trolley car system in the US is still in charge and they will never let such systems be rebuilt. More and more people will have to go back to biking and walking, but we have a system, particularly in the suburbs, but also in all more recently built cities, that is completely constructed around the car. Just getting across the parking lot of a mega-Target or Walmart is a major effort, not to mention trying to get to it when all or nearly all arteries are highways.
Planning a different infrastructure requires...well, planning. But the dominant right wing political paradigm is dead set against anything remotely like planning since apparently any careful thought about the future and how to prepare ourselves for it is tantamount to socialism.
I too would like social organizations to be able to predict the future, identify looming problems, and take proactive measures to forestall or mitigate them. But realistically, social organizations from local charities to the UN, including businesses, corporations, state and local governments, national governments, etc., have very little ability to do so.
Instead, realistic planning horizons are short, and organizations mostly react to problem that are already evident. You would think that middle managers in large corporations would be interested in postioning their organizations as well as possible for the future. But such is not the case if it involves giving up any advantage in the present.
Researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.
The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.
Researchers estimate the new model could shave almost 1,000 pounds off a car's weight currently taken up by conventional engine systems. Last week, the prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding.
Michigan State's team of engineers hope to have a car-sized 25-kilowatt version of the prototype ready by the end of the year.
----------------------
There's a youtube video at the site where I read the above (daily bail)
http://dailybail.com/home/new-car-engine-sends-shock-waves-through-auto-...
Has anyone heard of this before? It sounds like one of those too-good-to-be-true items.
Even if it's sounds to good to be true the logic behind it seems pretty clear.
It's hard to asses the overall efficiency compared to a normal engine but given the fact that less mechanical parts are moving, the simplicity of the design, the various type of energy it can use and the built in electric generator it's the perfect fit for a hybrid car .
If this works - and who am I to say it won't? - it will allow us to afford the more expensive slices of the oil cake. If the device use half the oil to get from here to there, it will alow us to pay for twise as expensive oil. Hence, this device will put more - not less- CO2 into the air.
And it won't even reduce consumption short term; we will save money wich will allow us to spend it on other stuff - say vaccations - and use the oil there instead. And should it actually reduce oil consumption, it will only free up oil for the chinese to buy.
Every carbon atom down there we can afford to pump up, we will pump up.
Excellent post and discussion.
One of the conundrums I face when looking at this is this:
How long will society be able to invest in new technology under conditions of energy decline, and are any of those technologies scalable in a timeframe capable of significantly mitigating peak?
I personally think the answer is "no", but this is just my hunch; there are far too many variables for someone like me to look at it very accurately. I do however think that new technologies should not be dismissed out of hand, in the sense that as critics of energy policy, we are more effective when we are able to specify precisely why these technologies are going to be unable to deliver.
Solar, for example, has been able to maintain its productive doubling-time in spite of the global recession and spikes in commodities prices. I find this quite interesting. Even so, a 24-month doubling time in solar, even if it somehow remains stable, will not start cutting into the global picture in nearly enough time to change the outcome. For that to happen, we would likely need something like a 100-200% annual growth rate, and I simply don't see that happening, even if the problem of tellurium recovery is significantly obviated.
Another potential contender is photocatalytics. For those not familiar, I advise looking at some of Daniel Nocera's lectures on youtube. Essentially it is a membrane that can produce hydrogen from water (includes waste and sea water) using sunlight. The mechanics seem sound. Most importantly, the technology does not require any rare-earths, is designed to be off-grid, and can theoretically be deployed at low cost. Ironically, Nocera himself does not seem to be aware of peak and appears poorly informed when it comes to the economics of fossil fuels; he's more concerned about climate change.
The main problem with photocatalysis is that a commercial prototype will likely not be ready for another 5 years, even under an optimistic scenario, and those are 5 years the global economy likely does not have to spare in terms of dealing with its energy base. Each year such a technology does not go into production, the slower its eventual deployment will be, assuming that the world economy's ability to invest in new production will continue to decline.
So long as we continue to have a global economy that can roughly be described as capitalist, the big multinationals will attempt to use coal and natural gas as a bridge fuel. The consequences of this will be devastating, first because the global environmental impact is likely to be worse than anything we have seen up to this point, and secondly because it simply won't work. If we map trends of energy decline onto trends of global wealth disparity, I think we can see that the dregs of the fossil-fuel economy will likely not soften the crash for the world's working people; at best it will used to maintain ever-smaller enclaves of plutocrats in an increasingly desperate and militarized world.
Saudi Output
I thought the Saudi's were cutting output because they didn't have more or wanted to be able to say they added more supply later. Here is the real story that the Saudi heavy oil is oversupplied.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/04/19/saudis-claim-sour-demand-c...
Wich confirms the old rants you here frequently here at the Drum that the saudis don't have any spare capacity for USEFULL oil left.
The end of BAU and Empire COULD come sooner rather then later if there is a revolution from the bottom up, among the disenfranchised. I suspect religion will have a major role to play here. Could it not be that a Ghandi- or a JC2 FIGURE will gain followers and bring it all down? No doubt helped along by higher and higher prices in commodities. In that case the peak oil decline will be relatively fast (as more and more people leave their BAU jobs and start following) but at least it will be organised. If religion will overthrow BAU, the negatives are the fact that minorities (gays, Jews foreigners etc.) are in grave danger again......
"Ghandi- or a JC2 FIGURE"
We have a history of assassinating such figures when they start to get too effective in the US.
Fast or slow, how long will it be before everyone agrees the Peak Oil train has left the station? Gives me the how long blues:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAIn3RQ_joU&feature=autoplay&list=PL9BB3B...
There seems to be a lot of "decline of economic systems" overlapping "decline of world oil supplies" in the thoughts the question stirred.
Realities of the immediate U.S.A. experience are shown here:
60 Minutes: "Hard times generation"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK_RnxYdrqU
People are put out of their jobs and houses quickly. Many immediately move into their vehicles. Some big-box stores like Walmart and Costco allow parking overnight or for a few days. Otherwise, it still costs money to live in a van, car, or RV: They have to be moved around constantly to comply with city regulations against camping and overnight parking. Bathing is a real problem.
An opportunity might be found in opening "cartels" where a safe parking place is provided with access to amenities. In reality, they are needed more and more, everyday. Another would be to operate portable shower facilities and make the rounds to the Walmarts and Costcos. This certainly points out the liability problems of any such effort. And costs? The water could be filled from a local hydrant, but the gray-water would have to be hauled. Too, some good part of the clientele are alcoholic, criminal, or out of their minds. Even as an opportunity to do good, it could bite-back hard.
People and families find themselves stranded among the riff-raff and moved-along by the police. They form into homeless encampments that are razed by bulldozers. The riverbed near me has 200 people living in it.
These ad-hoc systems can not absorb many more. Formalization may ensue, yes?
I know know the city of Santa barbara had established parking lots people could stay in overnight, I don't know if that is still true.
Most people were still working, just had to chose between food or shelter.
Try reading "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson - he was way ahead of you in thinking out what the collapse of governments/regulation could mean in that area. And he was being positive...
Sounds like fun!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash
"Hyperinflation has devalued the dollar to the extent that trillion dollar bills — Ed Meeses — are nearly disregarded and the quadrillion dollar note — the Gipper — is the standard 'small' bill."
"Much of the territory ceded by the government has been carved up into sovereign enclaves, each run by its own big business franchise (such as "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong")"
"Snow Crash established Stephenson as a major science fiction writer of the 1990s. The book appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 all-time best English-language novels written since 1923."
Thank you for the tip.
Hero rents space in a storage lockup as a home, and purchases use of 'facilities'. Roads are also privatised and many people have driven off in RVs to open roads, and pulled into the first available space as their new homes.
Hello, I've watched the clip. It is really strange for me. I come from a very poor country named Bulgaria. There was communism here 20 years ago. There are a lot of homeless people here, but what struck from the clip is how fast things could change in USA. Once you have a big house and a new car and in a matter of "minutes" you live in the car. Although Bulgaria is very very poor (not like the USA) most people own a small flat or a rural house (albeit with very bad quality)so there was not a such a hike in homelessness even in the most though year (such poverty you can not currently imagine). My gradnfather's state pension is about 80-90 us dollars a month and he is not homeless neither hungry - yet he produces most of his food himself.
Bulgaria depopulates in contrast to most of the countries in the world. It used to be 9 million in 1990, now it is less than 7 million. It is seen as such a big problem here. Other problem is the growing gypsy population now more than 1 million. I am pretty curious whether in the coming collapse here would be better than USA or other western countries like Germany for example.
Hello!
I read and hear that people were not put out of their houses in communist countries when the economy failed. In many areas they had gardens and grew food already. The people were closer to each-other and cooperated already as a part of everyday life. In America you have to pay for your house all the time. Houses are a major part of the economy. In what used to be an aerospace industry center, along Ball Road in Anaheim, most of the buildings are now home improvement stores and places to buy tile.
People often don't even know their neighbors. There are great cultural, ethnic, and religious divides and isolation among them.
"McDonald's" is more common than gardens.
I hear a fall in America would be harder.
Germany is another question. Whenever I came up with a science or construction toy, I was always told "Well, it might sell well in Germany!". I would rather be there than here.
Malka Moma in the collectivized style, but beautiful to me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv5-yhk7nJw
Good article and good comments... A good example of the sort of broad-boundaries question that well suits the posters here. Thanks, all.
Gail, I see a different reason why China's oil demand will be less elastic to price: China has a far lower need for oil to run its industry. High oil prices will do less damage to China's industries and therefore cut China's buying power less.
Who is going to burn the remaining oil? Whoever can either afford to buy it or control the oil fields. Economies most vulnerable to high oil prices will lose the most buying power as high oil prices undermine their economies.
January Production C&C
75,282,635 exceeding July 08 by 613,064 barrels per day.
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=50&pid=57&aid=1&...
The last 12 months average is now 73,863,577
Which has exceeded the last best 12 month period which was September 07 to August 08 at 73,800,823 and exceeded 2005 by over a hundred thousand barrels per day.
After studying the ELM model I concluded that net oil exports had to peak before global production started to fall. Looks like this will be the case.
Iraq has hit it's highest level of production for 10 years.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/27aac5ea-61e4-11e0-88f7-00144feab49a.html#axzz...
An increase of 200,000 barrels per day in last couple of months
I would expect more supply as prices increase. The question is how long the price increases can last.
If /when the prices crash, oil production can be expected to fall as well.
Gail
We are getting some more production, that is why we have seen the last two months higher than any other
December 2010 was 74,895,362 and Jan was 75,282,635 which is a million barrels a day more than any month of 2005.
However several countries which have increased production over the last 5 and 10 years, will not be able to do so again and a gradual decline will start.
How high will the oil price go, depends on what oil producers think the dollar is worth. One thing is for sure, China is becoming less dependent on the US for it's exports by the month, in many countries it has paid for the next few years of imports in advance. Such as loans and joint ventures, building power plants in Venezuela , China's exports to Brazil increased 60% last year and it secured oil for loans.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-14/petrobras-in-talks-for-new-loan...
China has built railways, roads, hospitals, refineries and pipelines in Angola, Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria. Why should this stop if oil goes to $200, we pay £1.20 a litre which is $350 per barrel.
Americans can build public transport and buy smaller cars, accepting a lower standard of living. Otherwise it will cause a recession and that lower standard of living will be imposed on people.
I do not think it a US recession will produce the global problems it did in 2008/9.
Are you sure that the last 12 month average was not 73,863,577.35809?
IMO, the latest EIA revisions demonstrate a couple of things: (1) The monthly data are pretty unreliable, especially given seasonal inventory changes, and (2) We should probably be rounding off to the nearest one mbpd.
The key point about the 2002 to 2010 data is that, at the 2002 to 2005 rate of increase in global C+C production, the world would have produced about 86 mbpd in 2010--versus an actual number of about 74 mbpd.
A failure to show a material increase in production, despite rising oil prices is common in post-peak regions, e.g., Texas & the North Sea.
Texas & North Sea C+C production (horizontal axis) versus annual oil prices (vertical axis):
The key difference between previous regional peaks and the world, post-2005, is that globally we have a slowly rising unconventional component.
westexas don't be tetchy.
As I said the ELM model says more about what is going on than total production of either C&C or total liquids.
Increased consumption in oil producing countries and increase in vehicle sales, mainly china, will cause upward pressure on prices from now on. There will be large fluctuations $148 down to $38 for example, but the lows will be higher than previous lows and of brief duration.
High oil prices will make investment and drilling in areas where $70 oil was not profitable, this will result in higher production, at least for while.
I stick to my prediction of oil peaking 2012 to 2018, conflicts, wars, terrorist activity, corruption and tax changes make a narrower estimate impossible.
I'm very late getting into this discussion, so probably wasting my time. Gail, I think that in early days decline will be slower than the Hubbert curve, because as prices go up we will address more and more marginal supplies, and as we address more marginal supplies technology will make another surge forward. Then after maybe 20 years or so decline may get steeper than the Hubbert curve, because we have shifted our society to use energy much more efficiently, to more conservation, and to viable alternatives at the alrready higher prices.
Don't think we can't go back to the living levels of prior periods, and do so quickly if necessary. Look how fast societies have adjusted to post-war deprivation. Also consider that, in the USA, while our population has doubled, our grain yields have also doubled.
We may be more energy efficient than China, but we are still profligate in energy use. There are so many easy adjustments, that we can buy 10 to 20 years easily, while alternate technologies develop. Murray
yes you are
"we" have already done that, been there
it's called deep water drilling
it's called Alaska and Arctic oil
these are the desperation moves
these are the "more marginal supplies"
there is bridge in one of the New York City boroughs that I wish to easily sell to you ;-)
You have a right to your opinion, however wrong, but your manner of expression is both arrogant and offensive. Grow up.
We have begun real tertiary recovery of old fields recently. It is effective and can grow a lot. Bakken production can probably be increased 10 fold in the next decade or so. Tar sands production will also go up rapidly if oil remains above $110. or so a barrel. We still have numerous areas to drill that have not been started yet, or are still off limits, that will be exploited when the price gets high enough. That is just the North America, which along with KSA is probably the most exploited oil region in the world. The bakken alone can offset 8 or 10 years of 3-4%/yr declines in the conventional USA supply. Will we have declines? Yes. Will it be steeper than the Hubbert curve suggests? Not likely for somewhere in the range of 10 to 20 years. You haven't begun to see desparate yet.
You should present your paper for publication here. I'm sure lots of people would love to see just how probable it is.
Yeah right:
News: Drilling fluid gushes from northern Pa. gas well
This is is a chart of planned capacity.
Here is an analogy: Just because you build a stadium that holds 250,000 people that doesn't mean 250,000 people will show up.
And don't reply with a beat-down, as you could have bothered to lift a finger and explained yourself in the first place.
---
Comment #500 !
Of course I realize that, but they wouldn't be adding all that capacity if they didn't think production wouldn't get at least in the ballpark of that capacity sometime in the reasonably near future.
One of the things I wonder about is that the financial cost of ongoing oil field development limits the financial recovery strategies available to the Obama administration and earlier to the Bush administration. Wells like the Mancondo are very expensive. Any disruption to the flow of capital supporting oil field development would have serious downstream effects. Therefore, allowing the "Too Big to Fail" to actually fail might cause a serious disruption in future oil supplies causing a death spiral of both finances and falling oil production. We hear a lot of talk coming out of the libertarians about allowing an economic reset but perhaps an economic reset would be a fatal blow to oil production causing a rapid decrease and the kind of scenario Gail the Actuary is talking about.
I agree. Lack of capital is likely to be one of the big issues going forward. Right now, a lot of capital is borrowed capital. Borrowing and paying back with interest doesn't work well in a flat to declining economy--it works much better in an expanding economy. What tends to happen is that banks get in financial difficulty, as they did in 2008. If banks are allowed to fail, then we have more of the capital problem.
The only way I see our current financial system continuing to work is through continued economic growth. A few countries may be able to maintain that for a while longer, but a lot of countries will find themselves losing jobs, and experiencing economic shrinkage. These countries in particular will have a problem with capital.
We need to keep in mind the Highly Likely scenario of a US$ collapse which S&P presaged with their warning of a negative downgrade of US Bonds should we NOT get our defecits and the debt under control. Karl Deninger gives a picture of just how dire our situation is:
"S&P has effectively called for the Congress and Administration to fashion a remedy for these deficits that will be effective before 2013.
If we assume that S&P is willing to tolerate a 3% of GDP deficit (they probably are, although they shouldn't) that means we must cut the deficit to $440 billion by 2013.
That's the first fiscal year after the 2012 elections. That is, whoever is President come January 2013 has to present a budget with no more than a $440 billion deficit.
There's no plan - credible or even proposed by either side - that will accomplish that.
Thus the (fully-justified) downgrade threat: Either do it or lose AAA status.
Here's the problem - at present the total debt is $14.309 trillion. Assuming a four percent blended interest rate that's $570 billion in interest a year. Notice that this means that the primary spending imbalance between income (taxes) and spending must be to collect that same $570 billion more in taxes than is spent.
Today we enjoy a lower interest rate, of course, but if the "economy" improves then the rate will go up. If the economy doesn't improve then the tax collections will not be sustainable. Therefore, assuming a lower interest rate is not only unwise it's ridiculous.
To put a bit more color on this the last three years have added about $4 trillion in debt. That alone is about $23 billion dollars in interest alone at a 4% blended rate - never paying off a nickel.
The danger is that we keep this crap up for essentially any additional amount of time. Obama says he wants to "cut" $4 or $6 trillion in accumulated debt over the next 10 years. The problem is that the CBO baseline essentially doubles our debt over that same period, so we're taking $4 or $6 trillion off another $14 trillion, which means we're still adding somewhere between $8 and $10 trillion in new debt over that period - or another $400 billion annually in interest expense which will never go away.
Even with these "plans" there will be over a trillion in interest expense by 2020. To put this in perspective that's about twenty-eight percent of all money spent this year by the government on everything combined. Put more-clearly, you could pay for all of Social Security or Medicare with that money and have over $200 billion left. You could pay for all other social spending (welfare, food stamps, SCHIP, etc) along with defense and be only short $100 billion.
It's that bad folks - we're sitting on the edge of a death-spiral, and the "we'll make it better by 2020" game is not going to fix the problem.
That is why S&P downgraded. It's not that they didn't believe Treasury and Obama were trying to come up with a plan, or that the "Gang of Six" wasn't, or that Ryan wasn't.
Rather, it's because those plans, even if one of them gets done, won't fix the problem and won't prevent the downgrade and spiral into the ground.
Wake up folks. It really is that bad."
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker
And with the near certainty that nothing will be done, the inevitable decline of the US$ will result in HUGE increases in oil prices for us on top of the price increases generated by reductions in export-available oil, destroying our economy and infrastructure as we attempt to cope with millions of homeless US refugees. Not a pretty picture !!!
It used to be that governments would fund their debt with long term 25 or 30 year bonds. What's scary is that governments have shifted much of their debt into relatively short term bonds to take advantage of low short term interest rates. What this means is that if interest rates rise, the cost of servicing the accumulated debt will increase very quickly.
It seems like those with too much debt either see their currencies decline greatly or see themselves increasingly "shunned" when it comes to buying exports. I am wondering if the latter won't happen.
jinxedebay, thanks for sharing the information. On Karl's comment about the $4 trillion in additional debt, wouldn't that result in $160 billion of interest at 4% versus $23 billion?
An objection to Hubbert's U.S. production curve as a benchmark for world production:
Summary of the objection:
Predictions for the future world supply of oil based on Hubbert's model are invalid because this model's bell curve only shows a rapid decline because of market substitution -- not total oil depletion.
Interpretation of the model:
As the cost of other non-U. S. oil producers became lower than U. S. producers, the market naturally shifted consumption to the non-U. S. producers. Thus, there is a decline in U. S. production as non-U.S. production is cheaper. This is the decline slope in the bell curve.
What this means for predicting future world oil production:
But I contend that this does not hold true for world production. As world oil prices rise, demand will slacken (econ 101). This in turn will reduce the price. This will go back and forth until an optimal price is reached. So instead of a decline, I see a plateau of oil production and consumption. There is no sufficient substitute that consumers can go to instead of oil, so we will not have the steep downward curve of the Hubbert model. And if we do come up with a better solution, then all so much the better. At that point there will be a steep decline, but this will be a good thing because this means a better alternative has been achieved.
Please refute.
Given that you've just joined, it's likely that you don't have much background in this conversation.
I recommend that you examine the following and start digging in:
TheOilDrum.com Archive 2005-2010
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7191
In a nutshell, the decline rate is expected to be far greater than the combined effects of all mitigation strategies we know of. The high oil prices crack the world financial system, are the cause of severe geopolitical issues and stress the countries of the world with hundreds of millions of unemployed and — as the highly specialized, energy intensive economy goes away — unemployable people.
People have different wrinkles but that's the basic story.
I've thought and looked into Peak Oil for a while now, even though I just registered to post this objection.
"In a nutshell, the decline rate is expected to be far greater than the combined effects of all mitigation strategies we know of."
How did you come up with the projected decline rate? My understanding is that this decline rate you are using was predicted based upon Hubbert's model of U. S. production decline. In post after post and article after article, I keep seeing people assume that Hubbert's decline scenario is gospel. My objection says that this model is insufficient in predicting a worldwide drastic decline scenario. Therefore, if my objection is correct, then the assumption of a drastic worldwide decline is not sufficiently supported.
Please refute the objection. Is there a paper or link that discusses why Hubbert's interpretation and model are correct? The common interpretation i see is that the rapid decline rate is solely caused by a lack of available oil after Peak. The interpretation I offer is that after the "peak" oil producers move on to other cheap sources of oil to maintain profitability. The decline shows that there are cheaper sources of oil elsewhere than the U.S. But in a world scenario, once all cheap oil is depleted you will not see a sharp decline in production, but rather a plateau because the price will rise and therefore demand will be reduced. Producers will produce less cheap sources of energy in order to profit from the high prices. Consumers will change behavior and find substitutes because of the high prices...etc...etc... Doesn't this show that Hubbert's model is insufficient for a world system?
Tiger Moose,
As a newcomer, you speak with a newcomer's tongue.
The words you use are all wrong. It's as if you wanted us to validate the flatness of the Earth because a basic assumption of yours is that the Earth "must" be flat.
It is unfortunate that in the early days, somebody coined the term, "Peak Oil" and then that terminology stuck.
A better term would have been: Peak of Global Production Rates of Conventional Crude Oil.
It's about "rates", about daily production rates (i.e. 74 million barrels PER day) and not about total amount and its "depletion". There are no supermarket aisles sitting about with one labeled, "Cheap Oil Here, Get It While it Lasts".
Oil has to be teased out through semi-porous rock.
You speak as someone who didn't take an economics course in college.
"Oil has to be teased out through semi-porous rock."
Yes, then it has to be distributed via a market economic system that efficiently allocates scarce resources.
Access to oil is like getting a license to print money. You own it and other people want it. That is Economics 101.
Oh au'contraire. I took many economics courses in college and post-grad.
Fully indoctrinated in economic theories this one was.
It took many rinse and repeat cycles to wash the indoctrinations out of the brain.
It took many hours of reading alternate views to finally see our economic system in a whole new light.
If I have a gun pointed at your head and you hold in your hand the miracle drug that cures cancer, let's see how "efficiently" the market system is working for you at that moment.
The US government does not have troops (Roman Legions) stationed all around the world because it plans to engage in fair and balanced market negotiations. Many of the negotiations are carried out with one party staring at a gun's barrel as well as at a smiling "diplomat".
_____
check out this link re efficient markets:
Secret memos expose link between oil firms and invasion of Iraq, Posted by Big Gav
Tigermoose,
There can be no optimal price for a depleting resource. Yes, there will be swings up and down, for both price and production, but a "plateau" is bad news for a world economy that has to keep growing. The real impacts are what models, including yours, leaves out. It's impossible to model the effects of the impact of a decline, or even a plateau, in my opinion.
The notion that US production has wavered because of cheaper overseas production seems absurd, to me, unless the cost of US production is not much less (or greater) than the current world price, which I very much doubt. Users of oil don't pay the production costs, they pay way above the production costs (for most grades) and the producers pocket a nice profit. I don't think the producers will forego a nice profit just because a national oil company somewhere can make a bigger profit.
There absolutely can be an "optimal" price for a depleting resource. It's called the supply and demand curve. Any good or service goes through this supply and demand process until an "optimal" price is achieved in the market.
The world economy is just going to have to adjust, gradually over time. This won't be quick and disastrous, but a slow and necessary shift. The biggest threats imho are political ones, such as OPEC cutting off supplies as a political weapon.
The cost of discovering new oil sources and paying extra extraction costs for deepwater drilling, tar sands, oil shales, etc are just some of the more expensive options that oil producers choose to skip while easy sources are available in other parts of the world.
But once this "optimal price" is achieved, does that mean production and demand are balanced? If so, what happens when depletion continues? Production starts to lag demand and the price rises. Demand eventually decreases, once the pain becomes great enough, and another "optimal price" is reached, perhaps with fewer participants. If demand and production aren't matched, at the optimal price, then the price will either rise (if production is lagging) or fall (if demand is lagging). There can't be any such thing as an optimal price for a depleting resource or perhaps you should define "optimal".
You exhibit a lot of optimism in assuming a decreasing supply can be adjusted to slowly without much pain (i.e. not "disastrous"). I don't think the world economy can adjust to no-growth. It's not built for that. Any adjustment, as you call it, will be painful and abrupt. There is no plan B for the global economy.
The "easy" sources of oil are less and less available in other parts of the world as national oil companies have the rights wrapped up or governments extract a high price. No, I'd say that a private oil company that can turn a good profit from more expensive oil, will go for that more expensive oil, if it's there. Provided, of course, that they think they can rely on a floor price that gains them a good profit. That they are not doing so says more about what's possible than I think you'd like to admit.
As fossil fuels slowly decline in their ability to meet the total demands for energy and thus increase in price, alternative energy will increase the supply and behavioral changes will reduce the demand until an optimal price for energy is achieved. If a disruptive technology or alternative energy source is achieved that is cheaper and more abundant than oil, you will then see a "good" crash in the production of oil.
Ah, so now you've switched to an "optimal price" for energy, not oil. I thought we were talking about oil?
Even if we're talking about energy, as a whole, the same argument applies if a large portion of that energy is a resource in decline. Oil is getting that way, with the other fossil fuels to follow. You won't see an "optimal price" for energy whilst the mix is as it is.
A cheaper and more abundant energy source than oil? Let us into the secret, please. It seems you believe in the infinite ingenuity of humans to extract themselves from the laws of nature.
Dream on.
Tigermoose,I agree we are all going to have to adjust. I don't know whether it will quick or slow, time will tell.
Due to the limited price elastic nature of oil, there will likely be major price escalations that some will label disastrous, whether they occur quickly or slowly.
The value for short-term price elasticity of oil demand and supply is sometimes listed as 0.02 (long-term might be about 4 times short-term). For just a 1% drop in supply, there is a 1% / 0.02 = 50% short-term increase in price. That is significant.
It's slow watching the oil price rise and adjusting your driving habits... until you get "let-go", then you realise that actually that was kind of a quick adjustment you just had to make.
The problem with this analysis is that the initial decline period for Texas and the overall Lower 48 corresponded to a massive increase in US drilling, primarily in response to the rapid increase in oil prices. In response to the biggest drilling boom in state history, Texas crude oil production went from about 3.4 mbpd in 1972 to 2.4 mbpd in 1982. And the US is the most heavily drilled area n the world.
The 1972 Texas peak linked up with the 1999 North Sea peak (C+C):
And the following graph shows Texas and North Sea crude oil production (horizontal axis) versus crude oil prices (vertical axis):
1. Present day technologies will allow producers to discover and tap previously unknown or unobtainable oil sources in "post-peak" countries such as the U.S.
-- examples are tar sands, oil shales, natural gas, etc, these are HUGE reserves
2. I don't disagree that oil is not as plentiful in post-peak countries or sources as it once was. I am arguing that enough fossil fuels exist to provide us with a gradual shift to distributed alternative energy production. I am arguing that the sharp decline in the Hubbert model is not a good predictor of world system production due to the ability of producers in the 20th century to go to other cheap sources to meet demand. As the world's cheap easy oil hits "peak", less cheap sources will be tapped and the prices will rise, but this will incentivize more production of the less cheap sources, more efforts to lay alternative energy infrastructure, and will change the behavior of consumers to demand less fossil fuel energy. This will be a plateau rather than a sharp decline, and we'll get along just fine.
I've never read that natural gas was an oil source (except for the GTL process), but I guess I learn something every day.
In any case, Texas and the North Sea were developed by private companies using the best available technology, with virtually no restrictions on drilling. The two peaks, as shown above, were 27 years apart, and these two regions accounted for about 9% of total global crude oil production through 2005.
I agree that higher prices provide a lot of incentive for unconventional resource development, but these plays tend to have a low rate of increase in production. The following chart--showing net oil exports from Canada & Venezuela, plus their combined net oil exports--puts Canadian net exports in perspective:
And speaking of net oil exports, these two recent articles look at some scenarios, based on recent data:
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-18/peak-oil-versus-peak-ex...
Peak oil versus peak exports
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-02-21/egypt-classic-case-rapi...
Egypt, a classic case of rapid net-export decline and a look at global net exports
Look, my overall critique is that you all don't seem to pay enough respect to the economic market's ability to allocate scarce resources and incentivize consumers and producers to change products or behaviors based on price.
Obviously, there is going to be a lag time between price and increased production by the energy producers. In the past, short term fluctuations have burned them. But in the long term, they will produce enough energy to meet demand. Demand for oil will plateau or even slightly decline as people's behavior changes, and new investments in alternative sources of energy come to fruition.
I understand that you are all emotionally invested in this cause and have spent a lot of time and energy. But I just have to tell you, this not a crisis. Open your mind to outside voices and study economics a bit more, and I think you will find that you have been adding more stress on yourselves than you really need.
If you need a cause, look to climate change. That's a problem that actually seems to be a crisis.
Look, we understand substitution — we really do. But we also understand that a transportation system that gets ~90% of its energy from oil is not going to flip over to whatever substitute you desire quickly or without enormous cost — costs that must be born when we are already in debt up to our eyeballs and are headed for, in my estimation, either extreme contraction (Great Depression II) or hyperinflation or one followed by the other.
Further, Westexas is explaining to you that sometimes physical processes cannot magically respond to price signals to produce the quantity of oil needed to make up for the decline of the easy-to-produce stuff. If I recall correctly, the highest yearly production increase in the tar sands has been 250,000 bpd and that was already causing extensive issues near Fort McMurray.
Various reports have estimated production from the tar sands will top out around 4mb/d.
So, as I said, look at all the mitigation strategies, add them up, compare to the decline rate, throw in a failing financial system and voila: we have a royal mess on our hands.
I'm sorry you can't see that yet.
Maybe some of these military reports will convince you we have an issue.
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-10-01/military-reports-leadin...
From the German military one:
If you don't have a serious concern about declining oil production, you clearly don't yet understand it.
As noted down the thread, the following US rig chart completely contradicts this guy's whole premise that the US can't be used as a model for the world:
http://www.wtrg.com/rigs_graphs/rigus.gif
What the data show is that an intensive drilling effort, far in excess of anything leading up to the US peak, failed to reverse the production decline.
That web site don't allow hotlinking. Anyone who can see the link who would care to show it to us?
Tiger-san, we all have studied the dismal science (economics) way more than you might appreciate
Quickly?
We do understand what you are getting at but you are missing 3 important points:
1)There is an entire broken economy riding on the price fluctuations of oil. Not only America but most of Europe as well, all connected, all still reeling from the last time this happened.
2)Markets can as easily collapse as change. In fact collapse down and dissolving excess money is actually a perfectly valid (and frankly typical) thing for the markets to do.
3) People will try to keep BAU as long as possible, that means they will deliberately make things worse (by hording for example) or by trying to fix it through some beurocratic nonsense doomed to failure. This will make the bubble bigger and/or the collapse worse.
You think when the price goes higher the producers will produce more oil. Before they produce it they have to discover it. Are you aware that the peak in discoveries was in 1964? Are you aware that for every barrel of oil we discover, we produce and consume over 4 barrels?
With price so high, Saudi Arabia and other exporters have every incentive to increase exports yet exports are now decreasing. How do you explain that?
If you are talking about alternatives to oil, what are they?
Tigermoose,
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're right and the market will somehow provide us with the energy we need as we make a mostly painless transition to a new energy mix. Would that solve all of the problems we have? Only infinite energy would allow us to overcome depletion of finite resources but even that wouldn't halt human induced climate change, the current extinction event, the death of our oceans, the loss of topsoil, the increasing scarcity of potable water, the passing of boundaries in multiple critical natural systems or the huge debt that country after country is hanging round our necks.
Remember, please, that the economy is a subset of the environment, not the other way round.
What "successful" means to markets and what "survival" means to human beings are two completely different things. One of the common misconceptions is the "idea" that markets, when prices are sufficiently high due to production constraints, markets will always produce new technology and thus overcome the current constraints but it almost never happens that way. No economist believes that idea; it is only propaganda; certainly the American military does not believe that idea.
Except the US has been producing flat out since the peak. If it were so expensive to produce oil from the lower 48, which was all we were producing when we peaked, then why did we build an 800 mile pipeline across mountains and frozen tundra to get more oil? We have drilled far, far more wells since the peak than we drilled before the peak. We started buying foreign oil because we needed more oil, not because it was cheaper.
We have been on a plateau of production and consumption since 2005. And a plateau cannot happen instead of a decline. To make that claim would be to claim that the plateau will last forever. No, the only question is how long will the plateau last before the decline. My guess is about 7 years. That would put the decline to start about 2012.
Ron P.
What matters here is the duration of the shift. If this plateau lasts for decades with only a slight decline in production due to the depletion of available fossil fuel energy sources, we will see a gradual increase in the use of alternative energy fuel sources that will meet the total demand for energy. My point here is that this won't be a crash. The only crash in oil production will be because of the gradual adaptation of distributed alternative energy sources. But that adaptation won't occur until the price rises sufficiently to increase the public's demand for such a solution.
Here is where people can't see the evidence right in front of them.
We've already had a crash. It was called the Global Financial Crisis and it was caused, in part, by high oil prices. The auto companies needed to be bailed out. About two dozen airlines went bankrupt. Countless other companies did, too.
The central banks rushed in to provide liquidity and saved the day. Will they be able to do that a second time? How about a third time?
The system we have created is enormously unstable right now. None of the modifications made either by Congress or Basel III change the fact that we have created a brittle system that depends on growth forever. As Deutche Bank points out, when oil reaches $120/barrel growth stops...but our credit-fueled systems needs growth to continue or it fails.
The public is screaming to the top of their lungs today... and nothing is happening. What will happen will be another recession, like the one in 2008. Or it would be better to call it a second leg down to the current recession.
Prices can never get high enough to create the impossible. Oil, has been in the past, the most economical, the most convenient, the most easily transportable and the most available form of energy ever dreamed of by man. There is no other form of energy that can even come close to replacing oil.
There is no "solution" that will replace oil. And higher oil prices will only knock down the economy... again, it will not lead to any kind of solution.
Ron P.
Darwinian said:
2012, eh? I hope you're not taking your own prediction too seriously. After all, you said almost five years ago:
Well, not only are we above 86 mb/d, we're over 88 mb/d.
Also you said:
Oops! In January we hit 75.283 mb/d.
I hope you're as confident about your 2012 prediction as you were about your 86/75 mb/d predictions!
I think we need to be very careful about the very different barrels that are all lumped together in the total figure. For example, biofuels from corn should be subtracted as it yields virtually no net energy and so just makes up the numbers. Other types of oil derivatives have lower energy content than crude.
As for crude + condensate, 2005 still remains as the peak year so far. That's pretty telling, considering it is the most profitable end of the oil business (and the highest energy yield) and oil prices have been trending higher over the last 5-6 years.
The difference between 75 mb/d and 75.283 mb/d is very small and within the margin of error. So I would say that so far Darwinian is right. You can come back when conventional crude production exceeds 80 mb/d.
It may also be worthwhile to note that the bigger production numbers are coming from more risky, more desperation type production sources, such as deep water wells.
These more risky production sources are more likely to be disrupted when "above ground" expected unexpecteds strike (e.g., hurricanes in GoMex).
Let's wait and see what the numbers are like after the "above ground" expected unexpecteds strike.
Except that he didn't say we would *max out* at 75 mb/d, in which case your observation would be correct, he said we would "never" reach it. "Never" has arrived.
OK so if we were at 74.99 mb/d instead of 75.283 mb/d would you admit he was right? Come on, stop nitpicking. These small increases don't matter. For all practical purposes we are at or just past peak oil. Would you agree?
If not, when do you think production will increase beyond 80 mb/day?
And, if it does, for how long do you expect it to stay above that level?
The shape of the Hubbert may in retrospect be Log-normal (less sharp decline, but a decline nonetheless) due to technology improvement. The U.S. is more or less a continent, a huge geographical area, why would the rest of the world be that much different? The rest of the world can be seen as many cumulative U.S.'s. Statistically this will even out to the U.S. model, but more smoothed out curvature.
Global peak oil itself is not an experiment. It is not an Hypothesis but an empirical certainty.
The only question remaining is when the peak occurs or occurred. My own guess: it is happening now in conventional crude C+C. http://bit.ly/fcisCD
Why would OPEC and especially the KSA have allowed 2008 to happen with $145/barrel? This was before MENA unrest. Had they had the spare capacity the KSA would have prevented it.
Spare capacity is a bitches brew.....
"The shape of the Hubbert may in retrospect be Log-normal (less sharp decline, but a decline nonetheless) due to technology improvement. The U.S. is more or less a continent, a huge geographical area, why would the rest of the world be that much different? The rest of the world can be seen as many cumulative U.S.'s. Statistically this will even out to the U.S. model, but more smoothed out curvature."
There is a HUGE difference when comparing U. S. production versus world production of cheap oil. If U. S. easy cheap oil is depleted, oil companies move to other countries to get to the cheap easy oil. Now, consider "the world." If all the cheap easy oil in the world is depleted, where can producers go? Mars? Venus? Nowhere. Therefore, there will be no "substitution" of a cheaper source that would maintain the low price. The sharp decline in the Hubbert model is a result of this substitution -- not necessarily that all oil has been depleted. So, therefore, in the case of the world running out of cheap easy oil, we will see the price increase, which will encourage more production of the less cheap sources, which will cause a greater supply combined with a lessening demand due to the high price. Basically I am just explaining the supply and demand curve at this point. So we will see more of a plateau of production than a steep decline. The Hubbert Model of the U. S. is NOT like a world scenario.
No, the Hubbert curve is based on depletion curves. It's ultimately based on the geological characteristics of oil fields. In any particular oil field, there will be a finite amount of oil. The cumulative production volumes for any oil field typically follow an S-shaped curve known as the logistics curve, and the production curve will be the first derivative of this curve, which is bell-shaped.
In any particular oil-producing region, there will be a finite number of oil fields. If you sum all the production curves of all the oil fields for the region, you will get a much bigger bell-shaped curve. This is what happened in the US, the North Sea, and any other region you name.
And, for the world, there will be a finite number of oil-producing regions. If you sum all the bell-shaped production curves for all the different regions, you will get one huge bell-shaped curve for the whole world.
At this point in time, we have drilled out just about the whole world (areas such as the polar regions excepted - and they are finite, too). Oil discoveries actually peaked in the 1960's, have been declining ever since, and we have probably found most of the oil we are ever going to find - the ultimately recoverable resources (URR).
We have been producing more oil than we have been finding for decades, and at some point this has to come to an end - you can't produce more than you find indefinitely. This is a mathematical certainty, so the real question is not, "Will oil production decline?", but "When will it start to decline, and how fast will the decline be?" The Hubbert curve attempts to predict what this decline will look like.
Price doesn't really change anything, it is just the mechanism by which the economy forces consumption to follow the production curve down. However, the production curve is ultimately based on the geological certainties of finite resources.
After US oil production peaked in 1970, the price of oil quadrupled within a few years. People at the time assumed that would cause US oil production to start growing again. It didn't happen - the US had already produced most of its oil and higher prices didn't cause more oil to magically appear. You can't produce oil that doesn't exist.
The oil geologists (including Hubbert) got the underlying interpretation of the Hubbert curve completely wrong. It isn't a single rate that applies to depleting a geological volume but a dispersion of rates amongst several operating regions that aggregate to model the curve.
If we segregate the rates into intervals the curves look like the following, with the aggregate in this case following the derivative of the logistic sigmoid:
This is essentially the way that discoveries accumulate, with the most technologically advanced regions (such as the USA) exploiting the dispersed regions first, and then the slower regions following.
This mini-thread was prompted by a commenter claiming that the Hubbert curve should be a logNormal, which is a variation of the "fat-tailed" curve. I wanted to chime in that dispersion is what really creates the long fat-tails and the only way to make the fat-tails thinner is to more aggressively exploit (both in search and extraction) of the resources. If we don't apply this accelerated pressure, natural dispersion will reveal these tails.
It is indeed nice to have a few non-heuristic models that explain the behaviors collectively. It's just going to be a tough slog to get the geologists and earth sciences to see the elegance of the interpretation. Until then, we will continue to have to put up with these hand-wavy arguments that although have some intuitive basis, completely fail at being able to both quantitatively and non-heuristically model anything correctly.
"Price doesn't really change anything, it is just the mechanism by which the economy forces consumption to follow the production curve down. However, the production curve is ultimately based on the geological certainties of finite resources."
I don't agree with that. Price does change production. If a price goes up, producers will invest more in production to take advantage of that price. So even if the cheap easy oil is largely depleted, producers will invest in other sources such as tar sands, oil shale, natural gas, deepwater drilling, etc. Then this will meet demand and exceed demand, which will then lower the price. This is the supply demand curve where an optimal price is reached. In the case of the U.S. "peak," this supply demand curve did not occur because producers were able to find cheap oil in other areas of the world. So therefore there is a steep decline in the number of oil discoveries and productions in the U.S.
"No, the Hubbert curve is based on depletion curves. It's ultimately based on the geological characteristics of oil fields. In any particular oil field, there will be a finite amount of oil. The cumulative production volumes for any oil field typically follow an S-shaped curve known as the logistics curve, and the production curve will be the first derivative of this curve, which is bell-shaped."
I do not see how you can extrapolate a model for economic supply and demand based on the geographical characteristics of an oil field. Economic principles do apply, and that dramatically alters the model.
As noted up the thread, if you completely ignore the facts about the post-1970 decline in US production, your theory makes some degree of sense.
Here, I found this comment on an article in The Economist that expresses my view better than I have.
http://www.economist.com/node/15065719/comments?page=2
FineFellow wrote: Dec 14th 2009 7:16 GMT
" [Another commenter that FineFellow is responding too] “when it takes the equivalent of the energy in a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil to the refinery, the pumps will stop."
I love these comic book scenarios people build about the end of the world to try and prove a point. You would never use a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil to a refinery, but even if you did you would just see the cost of oil double. More likely though you would see the use of other energy sources such as nuclear as inputs to offset production costs on oil as the more economically valuable product.
A lot of these "peak oil" theories are just Malthusian gambits, the people who are on the "peak oil" fear mongering train, would have been on the "we can never produce enough food to feed ourselves" train in the past. What articles like this want to ignore is the effect technology, innovation and development of comparative goods play in the equation. We are able to get oil from shale at economically profitable prices, where 15 years ago "no one" thought it would ever be possible. We are drilling deeper into new offshore basins that we didn't even know of 20 years ago. But instead of looking at how progress and technology and new exploration - the "peak theorists" focus on old exploited oil fields and impossible to know reserve states to build their little "give me attention" scenarios.
The reality is that we will more likely reach production plateau's rather than "peak oil" due to demand and speculation. As demand increases we will more rapidly develop comparatives (nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydro, etc.) as the inflated price of oil will make those comparable more feasible, and drive further innovation. At the same time spikes in the cost of oil will drive down demand and create efficiencies, especially in areas that can be readily changed such as consumer car/transportation choices. It will also force emerging markets to look at developing alternative energy programs to secure long term sustainable energy source to take them out of a gyrating oil price game they can't afford.
The movement to diversify the energy basket has been around a long time, but we are at the point where a lot of the alternatives actually make economic sense. Oil is still the king because infrastructure has been built around it and it still has the best bang for buck given its cost and its energy profile. But that isn't always going to be the case, the world keeps spinning and technology keeps improving, the "oil age" may give way to the nuclear or solar age.
My prediction is that far from "peak oil" we will see demand and speculative production plateaus, pressuring the more rapid development of alternatives and gradual usage pattern changes. Far from an alarmist "peak oil" nightmare stopping point, it is more likely that over time the alternative energy basket grows, displacing oil as the primary energy source long before we ever find a true "peak" for iol. As for time frames 2020 is no more some group of analysts spit balling numbers by looking at some subsection of data in one way. Saying 2020 is no more accurate than 2040 or 2120 - they have no more of an accurate crystal ball than anyone else.
Given the available "alarmist" theories to chose from,I would worry more about depleting the planets oceans of fish or the effects of rapid global climate change than "peak oil"... “
Because of improved technology and abundant oil supplies, the Economist Magazine ran a cover story in early 1999 that predicted $5 oil for the foreseeable future.
In case, the fact remains that you have completely misrepresented what happened in the US, post-1970.
I don't see how I am misrepresenting what happened. Producers in the U. S. could no longer find cheap, easily discoverable oil, so they moved on to other locations. The fact of the matter is that many other oil sources are still available in the U.S., even though they are not as easily extracted or as easily discoverable as the earlier finds. If the U.S. was a closed system, producers would tap into these more expensive sources and the price would have risen. Another fact you ignore is that technology in the 70s was not sufficient to tap many of these more expensive sources. Now they can. As soon as price hits a certain point, these sources will be tapped more. We are already seeing it in Alberta and in deepwater drilling. We are seeing Brazil use sugarcane with a decent ERoEI. As the price continues to rise, these other sources of energy will make up for any declines in the supply of cheap oil. And keep in mind, as the price rises, demand will slacken as well, so its not as if the demand will grow exponentially.
Drilling in the US intensified, after production peaked in 1970, because of a ten-fold increase in oil prices from the early Seventies to the early Eighties. The US rig count did not fall below the 1973 level until 1986, when oil prices fell to $10 per barrel:
http://www.wtrg.com/rigs_graphs/rigus.gif
A quote from a NYT article on bogus autism research might be appropriate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/magazine/mag-24Autism-t.html?pagewante...
Before Tigermoose can be expected to listen to his critics, he should be acknowledged for what he has got right. The valid point he is making is that there is a difference between a local peak and a global one, because local peaks can be evaded by obtaining supplies from elsewhere. This leads to production falling quickly because of a lesser price incentive than would apply without the outside supplies. On the other hand, a global peak produces much higher prices, which in turn provides an incentive to bring on higher priced supplies. Therefore, in the immediate post-peak years, production will be higher than when regional peaks occur. This is textbook economics and it is only by conceding this point that we can get Tigermoose to cease harping on it and listen to the other factors that render his conclusions invalid.
1. As Westexas has noted, drilling effort exploded in the US post-peak in response to the higher prices of the 1970s. Production, however, continued to fall.
2. Also as already noted, increasing production in response to higher prices doesn't increase the area under the curve. It merely drags production forward. Therefore, to the extent that it decreases the decline rate in the years immediately after the peak, it increases the decline rate later on.
3. We are already seeing the contribution of higher-cost sources of oil, like deepwater oil and tar sands. Prospects for these sources have been extensively investigated by Peak Oil people and there is no chance that they will be able to make a production plateau last for more than a few years. They will, however, make the production tail somewhat fatter. This is particularly the case with tar sands, since it appears they will hit a maximum extraction rate at not a lot more than what currently occurs, but they will be able to keep it up for ages.
If you have some non-liquidy form of oil buried X meters underground that is a thickness of Y meters, how deep and thick would it have to be before the gravitational work required to get at that layer by digging the layer on top of it out exceeds the energy that the material can produce? This is a purely non-economics problem and becomes a physics and thermodynamics problem.
No, it's when the well starts producing 100% water that the pump will stop. The production engineers say, "Well, I guess that one has produced all the oil it's ever going to do." And then they plug it with concrete, cut the pipe off 8 feet below ground level, cover it over with dirt, and that's the end of it.
The end for the oil field comes when all the wells produce 100% water.The production engineers say, "Well, it's time to blow down the field." And then they produce all the gas as fast as they can, and when the gas wells produce 100% water, they plug them with concrete, cut the pipes off 8 feet underground, cover them with dirt, and sell all the production equipment for scrap.
The end for the country comes when they abandon the last oil field, but that really never happens because production approaches zero asymptotically - i.e. it gets close but never really reaches zero.
The fundamental issue is that we have found most of the oil in the world, we have produced around half of it, and from this point on it's going to be a slower and much more expensive job to produce the second half. It approaches zero asymptotically so it never reaches zero, but a few decades after the decline starts it will become very steep.
Well if that's the case, why didn't the following happen?
1) Senator Ted Kennedy (of very rich family) gets brain cancer
2) His rich family bids a price of $100million for "production" of curative drug
3) The market responds with production of dozens of such curative drugs
Except #3 doesn't/didn't happen
The market produces bupkas
Wishing upon a star doesn't often get you very far.
You're still assuming an infinite resource. If the resource is finite, the total area under the production curve is a constant. So, if you are increasing production, you are not increasing the area under the curve, you are increasing the height of the peak. Since the area under the curve is the same, it follows that the curve is higher but steeper, and the production decline is more rapid to compensate for the increased height.
We actually saw this with the Cantarell field, which once was the second biggest oil field in the world by production. The Mexicans put it on nitrogen injection to increase production rates, and at one time were injecting half the nitrogen produced in the world to increase production. The crash, when it came, was spectacular - about 22% decline per year since 2004. Cantarell is now producing less than 1/4 of what it did at its peak, and is still continuing to decline. The area under the curve doesn't change, only the shape of the curve. It gets higher and steeper.
A list of straws to grasp at as we sink into the waters. Let's quickly review them.
Economic principles can't change the underlying geological realities - there is a finite amount of oil in the world, and at this point in time we have produced most of it. From here on, it's all downhill. Economic principles just predict how much we are going to pay for the steadily diminishing volumes that are left.
Hard to understand how a log-normal would show up in the the time domain. What I would say is that it could turn out more fat-tailed than expected by Hubbert.
Similar to fading and dispersion.
http://www.math.oregonstate.edu/~gibsonn/sss08-Gibson.pdf
Nakagami-m is the more general case
That is exactly why I have to keep pushing my work on TOD. Not everyone realizes that I have a model of oil discovery that applies dispersion in a fundamental way, see The Oil ConunDrum. I have a chapter devoted to the application of the maximum entropy principle to disperse the search rates.
The Nakagami-m looks like it is related to Rayleigh which is the maximum entropy distribution for phenomenon like wind speed distributions and signal strength scattering. This is all described in the link above. My general beef is that I have not had a case where I had to apply a logNormal, as something much simpler and more fundamental typically works out much better.
If you are really into this kind of analysis, take a look and tell me what you think.
Web
I believe that energy and money are deeply linked as they relate to the human economy. All economic transactions require first and foremost: energy. But money (in its current form) was bled into the system as a way of lubricating technology and resource consumption/transformation. Over time money discarded its role as lubricator and became the primary driver of economic activity, with resources (oil) playing catchup. Debt has grown more than GDP for 45 years in a row now - in effect debt is pulling future resource affordability forward in time.
Ergo, I think there is an inherent problem in geology based energy forecasts. Many of the analyses on these pages are actually financial forecasts masquerading as oil capacity forecasts. How do your dispersive discovery models take into account money/affordability/social systems or do they? (ie. oil discovered at $100 per barrel looks quite different 5 years later when the futures strip is at $25 as far as the eye can see)
You are making the same mistake that every economist makes, which is to build on a house of cards. I am giving you the econophysics foundation, which is to borrow from the world of statistical mechanics and explain how to count things. If you don't care how to count or to think in probability terms, then the stuff you pile onto this doesn't matter, because it will be wrong from the get go.
in other words, im worried about the garbage in/garbage out aspect of biophysical predictive models. if you run your models with data through ~1980 and instead of what we know really happened, our political system had disallowed all leverage in the financial system with strict rules and elimination of federal reserve. that would have made all subsequent datapoints for oil discovery/production to have been lower and probably significantly lower - that matters. so how would your models have adjusted to such a socio-economic change? either your logistic gets way stretched out over time giving the same URR/area under the curve over much longer period, or we are speaking past eachother.
(im not an economist or statistician btw - but a philosopher - far worse...;-)
All I am saying is that economists have no awareness of disorder, entropy, dispersion, and setting up and solving the most basic logic problems. I contend that the logistic can model the discovery curve. Is search acceleration an exponential? Then it approaches the Logistic sigmoid. Is it some power-law acceleration? Then it is a heavier tailed form. One has to apply a compartment model to shift the discovery over to production and that is what the Oil Shock Model is about ("so how would your models have adjusted to such a socio-economic change?").
This comment may be a nonsequitur, but as I wake up slowly this morning and peruse these posts, the influence of money/debt vs. geologic models seems to reflect dysfunctional foraging behavior for the uber-critter which is industrialized humanity. Its ability to locate and tap exploitable gradients has grown out of all proportion to its immediate metabolic needs, so it has contrived nuttier and nuttier rationales for using them quickly and distributing the dubious/abstract benefits. The geology provides one sort of limits, while the insanity provides another.
I have to say reading articles here and there lately about SA investing in renewables is a bit telling.The claims are that SA will invest AT LEAST 100 Billion Dollars(yes with a B) over the next 10 years in mostly solar and nuclear with a few others thrown in.SA says 100B but I believe they probably will go much higher and over the next 30 yrs they could very well be at nearly 100% powered by renewables.
Why debate if the decline will be slow or fast, we know that it will be slow, there is nothing, absolutely nothing to indicate that it will be fast. Just look at the decline of the US oil production after they passed their peak in 1970, 40 years after they still produce 60% of their peak value, so we are talking with less than 1% rate of decline. World production should be about flat between now and 2020, then decline at less than 1% rate, so we are talking of still producing 60% of what we are producing now by 2060.
In the same time we discovered Shale Gas that could fuel Nat Gas transportation and offset some of the oil decline (if not all) biofuels could produce up to 30% of the oil we consume today by 2050. Cars can be made much more efficient, alternative super efficient vehicle like this one can be developed http://green.autoblog.com/2008/03/05/geneva-2008-lumeneo-smera-tilting-e...
most of our trips can be done using bikes or ebikes. Electric cars and plug in cars are becoming a reality. Electrified public transportation can be extended. Aircraft that consumes 1/3rd of today aircraft will be developped see here : http://unbridledspeculation.com/2011/03/30/more-efficient-aircraft-designs/
energy can be harnessed from solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear , waste heat.
sure we are moving toward a world where energy will be more expensive but energy conservation can make prowess so it won't be the end of the world that some predict.
did I forgot something ?
Interesting points. The issue is what the crude oil decline will look like and whether the eventual URR will be closer to 2 trillion barrels or 3 trillion barrels. With 2 trillion barrels, there aren't many options on how the decline will proceed. Sure, other fuels can take over, but this is really looking at the crude by itself.
Yes, just every point that Gail and the commenters have made.
Start from the top and re-read the article and all the comments.
Yair...
"Did I forget something?"
You forgot the non negotiable American way of life.
You should get on to one of the machinery or trucking sites and tell the boys that they don't need a 7.3 litre pickup to haul their toolbox ass and lunchpail... you will see they will be very late adopters of dinky little cars....and won't there be another 500,000,000 people in the world by 2020?...and the fact that the US is still producing 60% of its peak value is due to the unique mineral rights arrangements that allow stripper wells to remain in production. I could go on but it is getting very late.