Tuesday Open Thread
Posted by Heading Out on December 13, 2005 - 9:56am
On a chilly morning, a place for warmth ?
“The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.”
—JH Kunstler
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10437549/
So much for pie in the sky $25/bbl or even $40/bbl.
They are making drastic changes from their last-years long-term forecast to reflect things that become obvious in 2005! If they admit that 2004's forecast (for 20 years ahead!) was crap, how do they expect to take 2005's forecast seriously?
In this article it would appear that the IEA suggest that it is in the interests of oil producers like Saudi to invest in developing new supplies below:
The IEA gives much emphasis to the argument that increased production, involving huge investments, is in the interest of the oil producing countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It is argued that higher investments will result in higher overall income for these countries.
Somehow I can't see it. It looks obvious to me that money is not the base currency, energy or its basic materials are, by producing and selling the oil NOW they will be losing out on later value as money devalues against the base currency of energy.
Comments...?
Regardless of the silly previous thread that oil peaked in July, the IEA has announced this morn that the previous global extraction record of 84.7-mbd was surpassed in November: 85.0-mbd after the lapse to 83.8-mbd in Sept.
When Dec. 05 and Jan 06 numbers come out will we say OPEC is holding back on the throttle or is it the throttle that is holding back on OPEC? Hmmm...
It seems the two organizations are being treated as the same thing in the comments here.
A combination of satire with some phenomenal photoshop work. Click on the image for the whole thing.
Only partly related to oil, I suppose. Peak oil is such a downer of a subject - every so often you just need a good laugh.
http://www.dudehisattva.com/
Americans burning corn to cut heating costs
And why not.
Price of corn:
Price of natural gas:
There's a run on the stoves, however, because the cost savings over wood and gas are so great.
Sales of corn-burning stoves have tripled this year and distributors across the country have been sold out for weeks.
From this article:
"We are actually taking deposits for products for next fall - it's all you can do," said Ed Hiscox, owner of furnace retailer Hiscox Sales and Service in Valparaiso, Indiana, in the middle of the US corn belt.
"We have customers from very high-end homes to people who are not really in any financial condition at all. It doesn't seem to make a difference - everyone has problems with gas prices."
Ill look into the numbers but if even 1/3 of the people switched from nat gas to corn we would run out of farmland. This is another example (ethanol, solar panels, being 2 others) that make sense at the margin for certain companies and certain individuals but not the planet as a whole.
We need to stop looking to corn/soy for biomass. The only reason they are used is because they are heavily subsidized/lobbied for. There are far better crops for biomass, and no reason that farmers who grow corn/soy now couldn't grow them (and still produce enough food for everyone).
Historically speaking (i.e 8000 b.c. to recently), food has been harder for man to obtain than energy sources.
I wonder what he tells his corn stove customers?
We're up to Burn Level 2 of 5, burning about a 40lb bag a day, sometimes slightly more. I'm glad we got the Prescott because it holds almost two bags of pellets in the hopper. My wife wanted the cast-iron Hastings, which is attractive but terribly heavy and holds only one bag:
http://www.eventempinc.com/stcroix/stoves/stoves.html
Nothing bad happens to the stove if the pellets run out, but you will wake up to a cold house.
Abandoning all this "modern" housing and returning to heavily self-insulating structures like cordwood, strawbale, or earth sheltered is looking more and more sane by the day now.
I do suppose it depends on where you live, though. If that is Minnesota, it is not too bad. If it is Virginia, there is a serious trouble.
We're heating a 950 SF one-story frame house. I insulated most of it last year, but I still have to insulate the basement walls. We have single pane wood windows and aluminum storm windows, which I'd also like to replace.
They have an R factor between 35 and 50. My favorite aspect of straw-bale construction are the deep window sills and the fact that you can sculpt the walls and stucco.
The home that I helped build was a two story poplar stick frame with bale walls. The exterior was finished by spraying on portland stucco, and we did the interior by hand. We also installed a radiant heat floor. Very cozy house.
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/info/Grand_Designs.html
A step back in time.Called WhiteHawk.All residences are ferroCement dome like shells dug into slopes,and covered mostly by soil and yard grass for roofs.A Ghost of crises past !
http://www.pelletstove.com/
They claim higher efficiency as well. Not sure how good everybody's numbers are on such things, and how apples to apples things can be.
==AC
My wife grew up with coal heat. Her dad and most of her male relatives were often laid off from Conrail, so she's used to lean times. She's been very receptive to Peak Oil, and very practical about getting prepared for even leaner times.
Are there any stoves which use the outside air for combustion? Does anyone know if this makes a big difference or not?
I think you're correct about the negative pressure; the rooms get warm, but the walls are cold.
One other thing about really well sealed houses (which I suppose is not quite the same as well insulated) - I'm not very comfortable with being sealed in a house with all the chemicals released by modern building products, etc. There are some rather nasty things in the air in a modern home. A quandry!
This article describes the pros and cons.
Perhaps Super G would put a link to symbol QG which basically trades 24 hours with a 45 minute break from 230-315 EST.
"The EIA report, however, projected that natural gas prices, which have soared to more than $14 per thousand cubic feet in recent weeks, would retreat and return to below $5 a thousand cubic feet in the years ahead. It projected a likely price of $4.46 per thousand cubic feet in 2016 as demand for the fuel eases and supplies increase."
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10437549/from/RSS/)
Demand decreasing and supplies increasing? How much crack are they smoking??
I understand 5 years from now we might double or even triple our LNG capacity, but with 30%+ depletion rates on new wells, an increase in electric capacity using NG, higher demand for NG in the Alberta oil operations etc? What can that forecast be based on?
Turning cow manure into methane as supply substitute?
I thought one of the more interesting lines in the article was that the EIA is dropping it's projections for LNG import volumes because of higher than formerly anticipated global demand.
Between increased demand from the US and UK (declining production), and China (booming economy) the global demand for LNG is projected to double in the next five years. The winter is young and we've already seen spikes above $15/MBtu here and $30/MBtu in the UK. There is a lot of stranded NG around the world, but it will take time to bring the production on line. I wouldn't rule out a drop to $5/MBtu in a lull some distant springtime, but I would bet on prices continuing to be volatile and substantially higher than that for at least the rest of this decade.
By the time the global LNG market develops to the point it produces enough surplus over current projected need to hit EIA's projected 2016 target, declining oil production may well be upon us. Demand may never lighten up enough to allow prices to fall anywhere close to production costs. If you know of a public company with rights to some of those big stranded NG pockets there would be few better long term investments. Unfortunately the largest untapped reserves are in Russia and the Middle East.
Oil production: 72 milion barrels/day
Cost of oil world wide: 72 x 60 (light sweet = highest) x 365 = $1,576,000 milion
According to this oil cost is about 2,8% of world spending.
Economic growth for the world is estimated at 4,5% (source)
http://www.econbrowser.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/138
One of the commenters suggests that the price of gold may drop because of all the precious metals we'll be mining from the moon. :-)
Nothing fancy but it works:
http://www.xecu.net/thorn/
Greg, how did you get R50 insulation in the wall cavities?
I plan to use 2"x6" construction faced with brick veneer, but have been told the best I can do with the walls is R-21 (fiberglass batting).
I built 2 (2x4) walls (R13+-) with a 2 layers of foam insulation baords (R14.4 each, 4x8' sheets) between. I used a vapour barrier on the inner wall in the outside. I have one photo of one wall on my web page. I have seen some walls built using those "I" beam plywood trusses with blown in insulation.
In the ceilings I blew in about 3' of fiberglass. I have a 6" slab with R20 under it, this is for thermo storage. The floor in front of the windows gets really warm on a sunny day! I put in tubing for radiant heat, when I get around to it - I'll put in a solar hot water storage for cloudy days so the house will not use any fossil fuels for heat at all!
Your actual R-value will be a lot higher than R-50 because every layer, from the outside film of air to the inside film of air, contributes. Did you calculate in which layer the dewpoint usually occurs?
I did not calculate where the dewpoint would be. I placed the vapor barrier in the inside wall to prevent any moist air from getting into the wall. I have been told that should be fine. I wondered if it would be more of a problem in the summer since here in Maryland it can get pretty humid.
I use an air/heat exchanger to bring in fresh air since the house is so airtight. I find that I can keep the humidity up around 50% without too much problems with condensation on triple pane windows. It was a problem when the temp got down to 5F a couple of nights last year.
What about the studs? They can bring down the R values.
I'll tell you why I asked about dewpoint. I used to do townhomes all over the MD suburbs, and recall when the first energy shock led us to begin increasing insulation. We'd put in batt insulation as usual, maybe 6", but switched from composition sheathing (Abitibi) boards to foil-faced 1/2" RMax boards.
We didn't know it yet, but the foil trapped a lot more moisture inside the living space. IOW, they were vapor barriers. Well, lots of things in your home generate moisture, including you, and it "tries" to migrate out of the walls as water vapor. Water vapor stops at vapor barriers and condenses at the dewpoint.
Builders started getting complaints about moist insulation and wet sill plates. Some put vapor barriers just under the gypsum board to protect the insulation. They got calls about the paint peeling off the wall. Water vapor got into the gypsum board and couldn't move through. Nowadays we use vapor retarders, like Tyvek, instead of plastic vapor barriers.
So the moral is that you usually want to let water vapor through. Perhaps your exchanger takes care of that. You also want to plan your wall so the dewpoint does not condense water vapor in the middle of your insulation.
We didn't know it yet, but the foil trapped a lot more moisture inside the living space. IOW, they were vapor barriers. Well, lots of things in your home generate moisture, including you, and it "tries" to migrate out of the walls as water vapor. Water vapor stops at vapor barriers and condenses at the dewpoint.
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I remember reading about that. My dew point is probably in the foam boards so it should be fine. I have not had any trouble so far.
Someone told me about a bathroom that had some trouble with ice in the walls! Too much water vapor got thru and froze during a cold spell. Made a mess.
I did use Tyvek on the outside.
I'd like to use the pre-engineered styrofoam and concrete sandwich panels instead of traditional stick construction, but as none of the local construction outfits (all caught up in the surburban building boom of cheap, shoddily built stapled together chipboard and vinyl cookie cutter cul-de-sac homes) will touch anything remotely novel or out of their element.
One problem has been that all of the trades people have all of the work that they can handle. I know a guy who is an electrician, and he told me about one time someone called him up and asked him to bid on something. He looked at it, and decided that he wouldn't have time to take it on - instead of just saying no, he highballed the figure - thinking that the homeowner would just find someone else. Well, that was a mistake - the person said "well when can you start".
Now that the housing bubble/boom is ending - it may take a little while before they start to get lean enough that they have the time to consider something out of the ordinary - if by next summer these guys only have enough work to go half-time, you will find them much more reasonable to work with.
Did you have to worry about the 3' of insulation getting packed down in the attic just from the weight of it all?
That is about twice what I have. I have easy access to my attic (as long as climing a ladder still counts as easy), so I could easily lay down some bats on top of what I have. I just wonder if I would need to lay some 1x2 strips across the tops of the joists to keep the stuff on the bottom from getting packed down too much.
No. I used Johns Manville loose fill blow-in fiber glass insulation. They said it would settle alittle, but not bring the R values down much. I think it was more like 27-30" if I remember correctly. It is better than batts since it fills in everywhere, no gaps.
More info:
http://www.jm.com/insulation/building_insulation/products/bid0018_climatepro.pdf
One disadvantage is getting into the attic, it can be hard. I do not have anything up there that needs service. If I do one can suck it back out and blow it back in! I did use a contractor since it takes a special machine to blow this stuff.
That's one reason I did most of the house myself.
==AC
World oil demand growth to pick up next year: IEA
"The IEA said that global demand for oil in 2005 would total 83.4 million barrels per day, rising to 85.2 million barrels per day in 2006 after 82.2 million barrels per day in 2004."
http://tinyurl.com/a5pu7
OPEC reassures over oil supply
"Statements by some ministers on Monday suggested a meaningful cut in production was just around the corner.
"We are paving the way for the meeting at the end of January. I think that meeting will be very important," Qatari Oil Minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said. Libyan Energy Minister Fathi Omar Bin Shatwan said OPEC was preparing for an expected drop in demand in the second and third quarters of next year, when temperatures and oil stocks rise."
http://tinyurl.com/bnrvh
1) Are there geophysical reasons why Saudi Arabia should peak when relatively speaking so few oil wells have been drilled?
2) What were the number of wells drilled in the U.S. lower 48 at the time of our peak production?
3) Is there any evidence for a statistical relationship between the number of wells drilled per square mile in each of the world's oil producing countries, and the position of those countries along their individual Hubbert curves?
4) Assuming such a statistical relationship fails to hold when all countries are compared, is it possible that geologically similar countries (perhaps geographical neighbors) will be similar in their date of peaking relative to number of wells drilled per unit area (accounting in some way for the different technology of newer horizontal wells)? Could this data be useful to help predict when individual countries and world oil production may peak?
From what I have read, the Saudi's have made extensive use of horizontal drilling with their wells. That is, fields like Gwahar are more like offshore fields in that one well will have an extensive horizontal extent in the producing regions of the reservoir. The down side of horizontal drilling is that production decline is steep and happens very quickly.
Therefore, considering how much drilling technology has changed since the US peak in the early 70s, there may not be a direct comparison.
The Saudi reservoirs are also very porous if I understand correctly. That is, they drain well and have quite a bit of pressure. Perhaps that allows for better production from a smaller number of wells? I think you would need to look at reservoirs of similar porosity to get an idea of what the max number of wells associated with depletion would be. For example, "tight rock" natural gas formations can have a very tight spacing of wells.
I can answer some of your questions.
Oil in Saudi is trapped in a very few, large reservoirs. Oil in the US is in much smaller fields, and distributed across a plethora of formations and traps and rock types.
You could think of Saudi oil as a spot where the Gods set down their leaky drums while sowing oil across the world. The oil just pooled up in Saudi, around the leaking drums, while the rest of the world was covered by splotches and patches randomly thrown about by the oil Gods.
One reason that looking at number of wells drilled is misleading pertains to average field size - small fields take more drilling. You might have to drill 500 US wells to equal a single Saudi well in volume. Our resources are more scattered, theirs are concentrated geographically and geologically.
There are a lot of reasons that comparing wells drilled isn't very accurate, but this is the main one.
As far as drilling in Texas around the Peak, it picked up tremendously right at the peak, but production continually dropped. The rapid drilling only served to slow the depletion rate short term. Since everybody also knew East Texas was drying up, they began looking like crazy for other plays as well, fueling a rise in # of wells drilled.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/ghawar.htm
You'll find similar about other fields from his homepage:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/Oilcrisis.htm
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/investing/articles/0,15114,1139979-1,00.html
Unless, that is, they have an ulterior motive - usually involving very large $ amounts and / or a wish to gain selfish advantage at the expense of near everyone else.
Did you know that both GW Bush and Dick Cheney have state of the art self sufficient houses / ranches?
I note, however, that Richard Rainwater drives an SUV.
Initial recovery - clearing debris and temporarily rebuilding the road - was done quickly by oil-powered machines. Without oil we would have had to simply walk away...
Are we in Europe more gullible? or are Americans more stupid? or have you a better explanation for why the USA, almost alone of nations, is unable to see what is in front of its nose?
That's a sad story of yours, Retro, we've had some abnormal flash floods that sound similar here in UK these last handful of years :-((
Point well made about oil powered machines. It is relevant on a global stage too: how would we be able to provide assistance to large disasters like the recent tsunami and earthquakes? The answer is we wouldn't, so instead of killing, say, 100,000 they will kill 300,000.
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/051219/19energy.htm
A winter fuel crisis of high prices and shortages could darken homes and factories
I can't believe the hypocrisy.
He cries big tears for the fertilizer-manufacturing companies in his area that are losing their jobs (closing down) because domestic NG prices are up and it is cheaper for foreign manufactureres in Russia, Venezula to manufacture fertilizer over there.
Hell, well isn't that the "free markets" weaving their magic solution?
Where are his tears for labor that lost jobs to lowered-priced foreign labor?
Now that beloved corporations are losing their jobs, whoa, that is different.
Hipcro-assy.
So are we PO'ers just a bunch of NNBON's?
All we need to do is drill offshore & ANWR?
That? is the answer?
Cool.
He admits NG shortage is killing Ag business
King Spearheads Coalition to Find Ways to Lower Energy Costs for the Heartland
Vote for King Yeeha--He Voted YES on implementing Bush-Cheney national energy policy.
Agriculture is an energy-dependent industry that is affected by energy prices
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/themes/citizen.html
But what could it possibly have to do?
With persuading ordinary Americans that PO is about you?
The UK News Now web site is an excellent resource that gathers news articles from all over the web on specific topics.
Here is the link for OIL
Natural Gas
Energy/Utilities
Yahoo also has a page dedicated to Oil and gas news
enjoy
http://wired.com/news/planet/0,2782,69711,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4
How does pumping a gas into the ground dispose of it?
Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.
At least until the reservoir springs a leak, and then all hell breaks loose.
Duh. Most news reporters are ENGLISH majors! Theys never waz much good at that there science stuff. But poetry flowed eloquently from their gilden tipped quills.
If the words fit, then you can quit (thinking & asking questions). One need not worry one's pretty head about how real science works. Some company PR manger (also an English major) says the CO2 is disposerized of just like a diaper into landfill and that's that. Simple, no?
Our problem is that we output CO2 in the atmosphere faster then it can be absorbed by natural processes. If we delay todays output spike enough we are ok as long as we do not produce as much for hundreds of years and the sum of new slow seepages from the ground storage/disposal/whatever catches up with us.
A massive ammount of ground storage of CO2 buys us time to either figure out how to produce energy withouth CO2 or how to control the greenhouse effect even if we release large ammounts of CO2.
Then imagine the climate control debate...
I even think it will include rude words. :-)
Nice words.
Sound logic.
Just an annoying tidbit of information in the back of my head that keeps seeping up into consciousness.
When CO2 is mixed with water, it has a tendency to form carbonic acid. That acid has a strange tendency to eat through limestone which is why we find these amazing large caverns underground where water streams once flowed.
Just because a geological cavern is oil tight doesn't mean it is a good seal for carbonic acid.
http://money.cnn.com/2005/12/13/news/international/goldman_superspike.reut/
And in somewhat related news, the soaring price of NG has ConocoPhillips (#3 US energy company) and Burlington Resources (a leading NG supplier) in full on merger talks.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13129-1922817,00.html
From CNN: Economists surprised
The Big Chill
A winter fuel crisis of high prices and shortages could darken homes and factories
By Marianne Lavelle
US News
12/19/05
http://www.energybulletin.net/11695.html
Oliver Ryan, Fortune
Richard Rainwater made billions by knowing how to profit from a crisis. Now he foresees the biggest one yet.
The first link takes you to a story in US News discussing what may be a very bad winter, with commentary by Mike Ruppert (From The Wilderness). Ruppert is on the outer edges of conspiracy land regarding 9/11, but he dead on right regarding Peak Oil.
The second link takes you to an article on the Energy Bulletin, from Fortune Magazine, which discusses Richard Rainwater's take on Peak Oil. Rainwater is buying copies of Jim Kunstler's book in bulk and handing them out to friends. Rainwater hopes that Jim is too pessimistic about Peak Oil, but Rainwater seems to be following Jim's recommendation to move to a small town (which by the way is precisely what Mike Ruppert is also doing).