New Open Thread
Posted by Heading Out on December 2, 2005 - 10:33am
Since we haven't had one in a while.
“Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.”
—George Carlin
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As I've pointed out on my web site several times, we're in the very early stages of a long transition to a significantly more diversified and distributed energy infrastructure. You can't make that level of change without pain, obviously, but we will make it, and we'll create a more stable and less polluting worldwide energy system. (And I don't mean to suggest that the pain will or won't be worth the brave new energy world we build; I have no bloody idea if it will be. It's a moot point, as we have no choice but to make the transition.)
To me, the key is understanding that there will be no silver bullet, but a whole series of silver BB's. Coal-to-liquids, ethanol, biodiesel, wind, solar, wave, electric cars, better liquid fuel cars, etc.
Our energy future will be a lot of things, but "dull" ain't on the list.
I am sitting in the midwest in December observing lows in the single digits and highs in the 20's for weeks on end. Heating livable space requires a lot of energy. Just to keep pipes from freezing requires more than just a wood stove and a cord or two of wood. And don't get me started on transportation or farming.
So much of modern life is taken for granted and much of this is due to fossil energy being burned. Replacing this with renewable energy will be an enormous undertaking. A significant change in behavior will be required to survive when available energy is less. There are many aspects of modern life that are luxuries that most people consider essential. Warm building, electricity on demand, washers and driers to be used whenever needed, bright lights, rapid transportation, enetertainment based on electric energy, etc.
I agree with many posters here that we can survive without these things. The problem is that most people I know will not do without them until absolutely forced to and those with money will not voluntarily give them up. This makes change at the infrastructure level unlikely. It appears to me we will have to go through a crash before we can rebuild with a more benign footprint with respect to energy consumption. Going through that crash is the scary prospect. I see no leadership that can steer us through it in a civilized way.
Yeah, homo sapiens has survived worse in the past but if we get to the point that we are calling a warm home and clean clothes luxuries then I think the doomer position wins by default because that is exactly what a collapse would look like. That's not a technological society you are describing. That's Richard Duncan's Olduvai theory run amok.
Our society is addicted to oil (and its many byproducts). Junkies typically do not react well when they go cold turkey.
Most people if their power goes off so does their phone, I was on my one, plug into the wall-jack no power from the house "old" type of phone.
The two folks that came outside after a while, I don't have my kind of phone, so they had no clue what was going on, I called the power company to see what was up.
Just the day in the life of a southerner in the rainy season. But extend it out to the times like last August when a lot of folks would have rathered to have a "dull" week, but got instead Hurricane Katrina.
The USA got a taste of Peak Oil that week, Millions of folks without power, or homes, and we did not handle it well.
Think about this on a world wide scale. When a few things go wrong most folks can handle it, but when a lot of things go wrong, most folks panic, and few keep their heads. What would Katrina been like in say 5 to 10 years from now, when "the electric car has a 50 mile range" and the Hurricane is going to hit up to 150 miles inland!! What happens when instead of 25-50 thousand that don't have cars you have 500,000 without cars ( they are a luxury, remember)?
Chaos on a new scale, never before seen by human eyes.
A tsunami, a hurricane, these happen because of weather, but the Oil crunch is going to happen whether it rains or shines, the weather is going to keep on punching us, can we all get in our ox carts and run for the hills in time?
There are two problems that get in the way of such benign adjustment, I think:
(1) Once past peak, it's going to be a few additional percent each and every year, and that adds up quickly. The first few years won't be hard to adjust to, but it'll get progressively tougher. E.g. 7% reduction per year is 50% after a decade.
(2) The real problem will not be energy, it'll be the collapse of the economy. The need to reduce energy use by several percent each year directly means reducing economic activity proportionally. Even as we adopt efficiency measures that allow similar quality of life with less energy, there will be sectors of the economy that will suffer, there will be many who will lose their income. And that will cascade into other sectors. E.g., if GM collapses that leaves a lot of former GM employees with less money to spend elsewhere. The debt-and-interest-based "economy" (a pyramid scheme, really) cannot survive the end of exponential growth. The Great Depression is the wrong model, since then there were no limiting resources, only a failure of organization.
The effects of GOM hurricane season will be impacting the economy and the gulf state residents for years to come. Grace Period for Gulf Coast Mortgages Ends Who knows how many people will be paying for homes that no longer exist for years to come. This is just one aspect of a big picture affecting a lot of people. It might seem that we coasted through "the little situation" because it is no longer on CNN 24/7 but for tens of thousands of gulf coast residents the suffering continues.
The effects of this years hurricanes season will be with us for years to come.
http://www.homesales.gov/homesales/mainAction.do
Louisiana had 3 pages as of this morning (Dec 3). It will be interesting to see how many pages are there in a couple months.
At that time, most married women earned little or no cash income. They spent their days gardening, cooking, canning, sewing, laundering, etc.
Credit financing was something reserved for the rather well off. A large percentage of farmers and home owners held unencumbered title to their property and property taxes were usually very low, since government provided few services then.
My father, and most farmers, used horses for much or all of their heavy work. The New Deal inspired REA brought electricity to our farm in 1942. Farmers were the last to get grid power and will undoubtledly be the first to lose it.
My older siblings rode to school in a horse-drawn Hack.
Most heating and cooking relied on wood or coal stoves. The wood frequently coming from your own land.
The list could get very long, but I think it should be obvious that for most of the population, the resource shortage made life a good bit more precarious, but didn't actually change it much. Mostly, because a majority of the population had never had much of it anyway.
That is certainly not the case with oil and NG. Almost everyone in the developed world has it coming out their pores. When we cannot get enough of it, just about everything will change. And, it is quite likely that it will not matter very much how much cash you have.
Perhaps, we will all be scorned by the cockroaches.
First, we're not talking about energy use per se, we're talking about fossil-fuel use. Chemicals have close to a 1:1 correspondence between fuel consumption and output, but most other things don't. Take natural-gas consumption and heat for living spaces. You can make a building which requires a small fraction (30% or less, down to almost zero) of the heat that traditional (hidebound) construction does.
Many uses of natural gas and oil have potential efficiency boosts of 70% to 200%. An oil-burning combined-cycle gas turbine at 55% efficiency is well over 3x as efficient as a car at 15.9%; feed a gallon (40.3 kWh) of oil to that turbine (22.2 kWh out) to a Prius+ (0.262 kWh/mile) and you get a whopping 84.7 MPG, plus the waste heat for industrial use. You can expand the economy on that while contracting fuel use at the same time.
There's also wind (no fossil consumption, offsets coal and gas), coal and nuclear. Coal isn't going to shrink for a while, and nuclear and wind will be coming up in a big way. Last, if we get intelligent about cutting oil consumption we redirect petrodollars into the US economy.
Your scenario might happen, but it doesn't look like it's inevitable.
No fossil consumption? Unless you're talking about those cute wooden Dutch windmills, you're wrong. A modern windmill is 300 feet tall, made of energy-intensive aluminum and steel. (The recent natural gas spike is killing the American aluminum industry, BTW.)
A 300 foot tall, hightech metal structure that requires helicopters for maintenance is not my idea of "no fossil consumption."
There is an important point to re-emphasize here. Yes, we have problems with all fuels, but the issues and solutions will be very different.
The electricity infrastructure worldwide is rickety, but there are a lot of generation fuel options available: coal, local NG, imported LNG, nuclear. There are also feasible renewable energy souces to generate electricity: hydro, wind, wave, geothermal, biomass, photovoltaic. If we ignore the environmental impact (and we will), we should be able generate large amounts of electricity for quite awhile. With some conseration, we should get by.
Transport fuels will be a huge issue. Cars, trucks, planes, and many trains run on gasoline, diesel, CNG /LPG, or jet fuel. Conversion to electricity is feasible for trains and public transport, but we're still waiting for a practical and affordable electric car. Don't hold your breath for an electric semi truck. The world will have to use less oil-derived transport fuels, period.
Oil-related feedstocks for industry will be a problem. Keeping goods moving in a global economy will be a problem. We will see structural shifts, with some industries moving to where the feedstock is (fertilizer plants), other industries declining (plastics), and less global trade.
I heard Kjell Aleklett of ASPO last week expressing a belief that the peak oil adjustment period might feel like the mid-1970's oil shocks. I think that's a best-case scenario, but he may be right.
It's doable today with Electric Fuel's zinc-air batteries as long as you don't demand long range.
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_ergosphere_archive.html#sepscribbles_item3
Battery technology is not standing still, however. This is one of the alt energy areas that is currently receiving a shot of venture capital. One of the more interesting battery companies that I've read about lately is www.a123systems.com . There are many others. US automakers gave up on batteries in favor of fuel cell far too quickly; the technological gap to lower cost, improve safety, increase performance and develop infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cells is far higher by comparison.
Think about it this way: The picture shows a 5 MW wind turbine. At full power it might replace fossil fuel (oil) at a rate of aproximately 8-9 barrels/hour assuming an oilfired power plant with 35-40% efficiency. If something happens that stops the turbine and requires servicing to restart, it would easily be economical energywise to use a helicopter if you could shorten the standstill period by only a few hours. If the turbine is offshore and the wind is strong you might have to wait for days to access the turbine by boat.
IMO, calculating the cost of a wind turbine in terms of barrels of oil in electricity generated is like calculating the cost of a car by how much gas will cost, while ignoring the car payments.
Post-peak, will we have the wealth and resources to build wind turbines? Will we be able to build helicopters, fuel them, and train pilots to fly them? Remember, everything will be more expensive. No cheap petroleum means steel and aluminum become more expensive. Fuel for the heavy equipment to build wind turbines becomes more expensive. Mining and transporting the ore that will become steel and aluminum will become more expensive. Heck, feeding and training helicopter pilots will become more expensive.
Complexity has an energy cost, and I don't think we will be able to maintain our current level of complexity without cheap energy. For awhile, yes, but long-term? No.
If aluminum smelting takes 13 kWh/kg then a wind turbine using 1000 tons of aluminum would take 13 million kWh to make it. That's 5 megawatts for 2600 hours, or 108.3 days. Making things out of aramid or glass fiber and resin might take much less energy.
It's the insane EROEI we get from oil that allows us to support our current population and our level of complexity. A hundred years ago, 97% of the population were farmers. Now, it's reversed. Only 3% of the population are farmers, and they are supporting the rest of us. Will we have that luxury post-peak? Will there be as many engineers and scientists and technicians? Or will we all be forced to do things that more directly support our own survival? I think it's the latter.
Even solar PV has a payback time of < 4 years (less than 2 years for thin-film) and warranties as long as 25 years. That's an EROEI of at least 6:1 before the warranty runs out (should reach 10:1 over a 50 year lifespan).
There's considerable work going on at the moment on production of synfuels from biomass by gasification followed by F-T or other synthesis. IIRC, one of the easier syntheses is ethylene; from there you go straight to polyethylene (aka Spectra). HDPE seems to be going for under $1.00/lb even today; if you can get 20% conversion efficiency from biomass to ethylene, a 5 ton/acre yield from something like switchgrass would produce a ton of ethylene. If prices rise to $1.00/lb, that's a potential $1000/acre of product.
I'm not sure what a wind turbine blade weighs (total weight of the 3.6 MW GE turbine is 290 tons), but at yields we're seeing from biomass crops today it would only take a hundred acres or so to make the fiber and resin for a new turbine per year.
I don't know the energy input required for a composite versus Al turbine blade, in part becuase the composite construction prosess is far more complex. If you run across a good resource please educate me. But I'm comfortable betting that one of the results of peak oil is that the price of composites rises faster than steel and aluminum. For applications where the strength/weight ratio is critical to perfomance (like aircraft and wind turbine structural elements) highly engineered materials like composites still make a lot of sense and will continue to be used despite higher production costs.
Recycling is a big advantage of Al versus composites post peak oil. Assuming a contraction of the population, there should be alot of fallow Al, with its large implicit energy investment already paid, ready for repurposing.
Our ability to make resin and/or fiber from bio-oil or syngas is probably more relevant than the recyclability of aluminum.
The blade is aluminum, and sometimes part of the tower. The girders are steel because it's cheap and strong, and the base is made of cement because it's cheap and heavy.
I think the gear box is made of steel and the motor is wound with aluminum and uses steel magnets.
Arkansas is made of low grade bauxite. It's called red clay. It's what's left when only the iron oxide, silica, and aluminum oxide is left and everything else has been leached away.
It's like electric cars. They use electricity from coal generating surplus power at night, and the coal is hauled in trains, which require diesel. So electric cars are really 1,000 MPG cars.
Windmills have energy payback in months. Cost payback is different for America because our labor cost is high, but if we started importing windmills from China the cost payback would be a lot faster.
As a species, we don't tend to think very far ahead, though there have been whole societies who did. Unfortunately that tendency toward short-sightedness is exagerated in modern growth oriented societies with thier emphasis on markets and the individual at the expense of the collective. And then throw in that in the most powerful nation on the planet (and the one consuming the most oil) that a good sizable portion of the population, including some at the highest levels of government, believe that we are in the end times just before the rapture.
I hold out no hope that any sizable portion of the planets population will have an epiphany tomorrow and start acting in a manner consistent with some sort of smooth transition. And I certainly don't believe that our (U.S.) government will suddenly start working toward your suggested goal. In fact, our gov't appears to be acting in a manner that suggests just the opposite, in supporting and encouraging consumption backed growth.
Really! Any examples in mind? Rome? Carthage? Egypt? Sumeria? Inquiring minds want to know. In particular, any societies even remotely democratic? It's an easy line to throw out but it may be hard to defend.
Most societies I have read about have depleted their resources and gone out of existence.
I once spent 6 months reading most of Toynbee's 12 volume "A Study of History" - same conclusion and he plots out the causes pretty carefully. The ultimate cause, according to Toynbee, is the "idolization of an ephemeral self." It is our own idolization of our petro based growth that will make our collapse especially ugly.
Japan, of course, is an island nation. And all of Diamond's successful societies are islands, from small Tikopia to Japan, the largest and best known. I don't think that's a coincidence. I suspect sustainable societies tend to be overrun by their less prudent neighbors, unless they are in some way isolated.
Which suggests that if we are to succeed, we must do it as a nation, perhaps even as a continent.
Somehow I missed this feature of the strategy; do please tell me all about it. You can start with the reason the PNGV was not un-cancelled immediately after 9/11.
"·... The DaimlerChrysler concept car, the Dodge ESX3, was a diesel-electric hybrid with an estimated fuel economy of 72 mpg.
· The Ford Prodigy was a diesel-electric hybrid with fuel economy estimated at more than 70 mpg.
· Two versions of the GM Precept were unveiled. The diesel-electric hybrid version of the Precept had a projected fuel economy of 80 mpg...."
do they build these cars....no...so what came of the results of the cancelled program???
"...Migration of PNGV technologies into production vehicles, such as
- production of a new, lighter, recyclable thermoplastic hardtop for the Jeep Wrangler in 2001,
- use of 412 pounds of lightweight aluminum in the 2000 Lincoln LS, saving 188 pounds,
- a new composite pickup truck box on the 2001 Chevrolet Silverado that is 50 pounds lighter than the traditional steel box- aluminum used for door, deck, and hood panels for Cadillac, Oldsmobile, and Chevrolet vehicles...."
man....it just gets you so steamed!Um, they don't get it, no. The PNGV was cancelled in 2001 by the same people who brought us the war.
What really bothers me about PO (which is not often mentioned) is that it will almost coincide with peak NG (maybe with 10-20 years lag globally, much sooner locally).
The combined effect of oil and NG shortages could be unpredictable and could exceed our ability of the society to adapt. We could well do without cars even in US. But if shortages hit our ability to heat our houses or the electricity generation grid... Houston, Houston...
Not to mention that most mid sized cities have poor public transit outside of the far between bus, or in some more mid-sized college towns or some small cities.
Work would almost stop in most places.
Heating our homes is only a problem in the winter, for some of us cooling is a problem of poor design in summer. BUT cars have become the "drive time" need of a lot of working class americans, take that away and you can pretty much SHOOT us right into chaos.
What do I mean? Car is a necessity but it is not a basic necessity. You will not die without it. Long before fuel shortages become chronic I'd expect some kind of rationing to be imposed firstly and second - a crash program to build an adequate mass transit. It won't be a pleasant time by no means, but this can give us maybe 10-15 years of time to learn to live closer and to work on alternatives.
On the other hand - if we experience significant drop of NG... just try to survive a week without electricity or without home heating in a cold winter month... Have you read Asimov's "Nightfall"?
Expressed in terms of prices, about how much do we think energy prices will shoot up? There must be some limit, since at high-enough prices, many alternatives will come into play.
I'm somewhat sanguine about the whole thing, since I'm a software engineer and watched the whole Y2K could-have-been crisis.
[I'm lucky in that I live less than two miles from work and have a job that won't be affected by economic fallout.]
Prices will rise because demand will outstrip supply. Someone will have to do without oil (& NG) that once had access to it. If everybody just pays a factor of 10 more for the oil there is no reduction in demand. This is a key concept to get to grips with.
Some people who use oil now, will not be able to use it after the peak. 100 years after the peak some people will still be using oil for some uses. The questions are who will do without? How much are you willing to do without? Are you going to be able to pay 10X more for oil and still get by with only 80% of what you use now?
If people are assuming that they can use an equal amount of energy in the future but just pay a lot more for it they are, by default, assuming others are going to use a LOT less than they do now. This is what will cause the problems. "I can afford to pay more for my energy but you will have to do without." If we get to that point bad things will happen.
Nobody is going to read this anyway since it is so far down the thread.
no it isn't, in fact a great part of the world does without what we call energy. I think you were referring to the energy that is required to feed your mindless consumerism and historically gluttoness lifestyle, your ancestors would cringe at your consumption.
nonsense.You make it seem like a day after the peak, there will be no oil and everybody's pipes will freeze. Pipes freeze because people leave houses unattended and boilers quit unexpectedly during subfreezing temperatures. And besides, water freezes at 32 degrees not when you turn your thermostat down to 66 degrees. Get a sweater. What a ridiculous statement.
If a significant enough amount of people can't get to work, or haven't moved closer to their jobs, the ecomomy will crash and the price of gasoline will be the least of our worries, people will be stealing it anyway.
If the economy crashes on the scale we are talking about here, dollar bills will be useless. Gasoline, food, water, and guns will be the only thing worth having. Build yourself a bunker and learn to swim.
We'll have to eat their dead bodies when the local Stop'n'Shop runs out of fresh bread. Hope you're getting better at growing vegetables in your backyard.
Yes you are, you just don't know it yet :)
I'm just referring to some concerns that I think are worth consideration. I'm not talking about the "rest of the world." I guess you never lived in Minnesota. Doesn't take much for pipes to freeze - happened twice to us for example - big mess. Houses in poorer sections of the city are old, with very poor insulation. They are very expensive to heat already. This is what I mean by "energy as a need." Old houses were built with poor windows and little insulation, new houses built much too large. Things are built differently when little energy is available (few windows, small dwellings). My point is significant increases in energy costs will be a very real problem for low income people, and once basic energy needs become unaffordable, which can happen easily, there are serious choices to make as a society. Did you notice how many thousands died in Europe in the heat wave the previous summer? These are not theoretical problems. If you check with social service agencies in both rural and urban areas with severe weather you will find great concern with elderly and/or vulnerable young families who are not paying utility bills because they can't afford them. Others can't get fuel oil deliveries because they've defaulted. This will increase drastically with increased energy prices and I'm just saying we will need to decide what to do about this as a society.
I personally drive an old 41 mpg civic and have PV on my roof. I do not partake in your "mindless consumerism." I may sound radical to you but I'm pretty average and try to give serious consideration to issues and various perspectives.
A calm political situation is a very doubtful assumption we make when we try to guess how we will handle PO. We somehow reason like that "Well we can handle prices 2-3-4x higher than these. So there is nothing to worry about - at a price 2x higher than current the alternatives will become feasible". Yeah, we, we we, but we are not the only ones in the equation, are we?
You're right, that is what is happening now. But I'm not so sure we will be one of the last to fall off the cliff.
Right now, we can afford to outbid other countries for oil (and just about anything else). But what if there's a dollar collapse? There are many economists worried about this, even without peak oil. We are 5% of the world's population, using 25% of the world's energy. How are we doing this? We don't manufacture much any more. We are borrowing in order to fund our consumption. What happens if other countries decide to stop throwing good money after bad, and cut us off?
My fear is that sometimes things happen even if they are against the interests of the majors. Dams break and enthropy rules over order. And maybe equally importantly the interests of the majors change.
I'm not sure this can continue forever, though. Especially in the face of peak oil. I could see a "run on the bank" type situation developing, where one big player decides to dump U.S. dollars, leading others to rush to do the same. Or perhaps some hardliner al-Qaeda type overthrowing the House of Saud, and deciding they will only sell oil for euros or e-dinars or gold, undermining the petrodollar.
My mother directed a battered women's shelter for 20 years and I spent many years doing volunteer child care, maintenance and lawn work at the shelter. This brought me face to face with poverty and many of it's ugly side effects. My father directed the Head Start program (a program for low income families) for 30 years. He was just forced into early retirement because the program funding has been striped over the past five years.
The "safety net" for low income families is being dismantled in the US as we speak. The numbers of poor people grows ever year as jobs move overseas. What kind of jobs are we creating here in the U.S.? You many not see this side of the U.S. but is there and not going away.....
This is the most vulnerable segment of US population, but then there is all the consumer debt that the middle class has racked up......................
So many people live paycheck to paycheck and we won't be able to pay the gas bill with a credit card indefinitely. It is this reality that makes high energy prices scary.
Overall, I see too damn many serious problems lining up at one time - they are not really independant. Our economy and political system are in crisis, and this will severely limit our ability to respond in any useful way.
No matter what previous crisis we try to compare this one to, there is always one crucial difference: population. There are a hell of a lot more of us now, possibly more than we will have the energy to feed.
About what they pay in some parts of Europe.
The price for methanol production used to be lower but you may have noticed that the price of coal, iron ore, steel, etc, has gone up. Also, we used to make methanol out of natural gas and we will have to switch to coal because we are running out of natural gas so that's why the new, higher price of methanol. We are already winding down our NH4NO3 fertilizer production from natural gas due to price increases.
Think about it hard for a few minutes, think about a crash and burn of the structure of our full debt to grave society!! Think about high prices not in terms of what you can afford, but what others that support you can afford.
The farmers, the guys empty your trash every night, The guys that bake that nice bread in the sandwich you bought at the deli, the little folks that live on the edge most days.
Most of my neighbors don't have computers, they do have tv's, and radios, they get their information from CNN or the local news. I get mine from reading the internet with a lot of selective filters built in. They don't they get it streamed to them by the mass market. Panic is a mass market supplied thing in most crisis.
Katrina proved to folks that Gov't can't do everything, that some things just can't be solved with a lot of thinking the problem through. 100's of thousands of homes are gone for all practical purposes, 100's of thousands of folks can't make credit card payments, or mortgages. 10's of thousands of folks have had to move to totally new and out of the way places, because there is nothing to go back to. Do the math, make everyone pay through the nose for higher prices on everything and our whole DEBT ridden living falls to pieces and along with a lot more jobs than you would have thought possible.
Think before you ASSUME your job is secure.
Collapse is inevitable, but with a soft landing, we can fool ourselves into thinking that it isn't. We'll tell ourselves that soon it will be back to "normal," and so not make any real changes. More and more people will fall out of the middle class every year. The divide between the haves and have-nots will become a chasm. We'll lower our environmental standards, burning all the coal we can mine, looking the other way as all our forests are cut down for fuel. The land will grow poorer, due to pollution, falling water tables, erosion, and soil exhaustion. And still, we won't make any real changes. The politicians will keep telling us not to worry, this is only a temporary problem. As soon as we succeed in our energy "Manhattan Project," or win the Middle East war, or complete the pipeline to the Artic or the new LNG terminals, all will be well. Prices will go down, you'll have a good job again, and we'll reinstate the environmental regulations. Only it will never happen.
IMO, this is why the aftermath of collapse is often a dark age. By the time a complex society winds through a catabolic collapse, resources have been completely exhausted, in a way simpler societies would never manage to do. When we're done with this place, forests will be decimated, water undrinkable, land barren. It won't be able to support the level of complexity the American Indians had.
Ethanol can help us alleviate the problem for a while but is utterly unsustainable in the long term. It will help us think wow if we built a little more of those ethanol/CTL/biodisel plants we'll be able to return to the good ol' days. And when the last drop of the natural capital will be invested in unsustainable practices (I argue etanol is unsustainable - not enough land) we will end-up in much bigger hole than the current one.
Better invest in true sustainability while there is still same capital left to invest. It would be much much more expensive initially, but it will pay-off in less then a century. The problem is that our idiotic capitalist system always picks the path of least initial resistance.
The government will then be facing the classic "guns or butter" question. Use the oil to fuel the military, or feed the people?
I can't help remembering how North Korea handled their oil shortage. They fed the military, at the expense of the people. Which meant the government stayed in power, but millions of people starved.
North Korea had terrible luck. A large chunk of their prime farmland was ruined when it was flooded by a tsunami. Combined with the sudden loss of oil, it was a brutal blow.
Cuba, OTOH, discovered oil of their own. Plus, they are in the tropics, where food can be grown year-round. They also had better trade relations with other countries, and were able to import staples like rice and beans.
That is to their credit, of course, but if there's a worldwide oil shortage, I don't think we'll be importing rice and beans from anyone.
I am not so confident as some in fairly specifically predicting the future, but it is hard not to envision increasing turmoil year by year. On a positive note, it doesn't mean individuals and families with some preparation and good luck can't get by and even learn to enjoy and even thrive on the physical and mental challenges of relative deprivation. It may just mean overcoming many nonsense ideas embedded in us - that to be happy we must have a high level of 'consumer confidence', that we can't walk 1 or 2 miles to get to a store or meet a friend, etc. etc.
What I'm wondering about is whether these earlier transitions were driven by actual shortages of wood or coal, or whether the transitions occurred because the new fuel (coal and then oil) were so obviously superior to the previous fuel. It seems to me that a transition being driven by a shortage would be much different than a transition made because we have discovered a superior fuel.
There is a funny bit where Will Ferrell spoofs the president talking about global warming.
http://www.devilducky.com/media/38792
I steadily see the Saudis making excuses now for not expanding capacities (both in crude and finished product). I think they are at peak, know it, and are skirting the issue for the moment.
Do LNG tankers still accomplish en-route cooling of their cargo by allowing LNG to boil off? (I've seen numbers suggesting that 8-12% of the LNG boils off in this fashion, when evap cooling is used to keep the cargo cold.)
If so, LNG tankers are far worse for global warming than burning coal for elctricity generation, since CH4 is one of the most potent greenhouse gasses.
To the extent LNG is allowed to boil off during transport, how is this (global warming impact of boil-off) figured in to such proceedings as permitting of new LNG terminals, etc.?
Les Lambert
http://www.abb.com/global/seitp/seitp161.nsf/0/e229b91ec8b8083ec1256c7f004123c2/$file/FrontRunner_09 04.pdf
See e.g. http://tinyurl.com/akwvo
Nowhere do I see indications that it's just allowed to escape into the atmosphere, which is heartening (for the global warming dangers mentioned). Since the release is controlled and regular, it's probably straightforward and economically sensible to hold onto it.
The boil-off rate I saw quoted is 0.13% a day.
I certainly agree about the profit motive for preventing excess loss!
It's a ClusterF%^k and the industry knows it.
Look @ Calpine, they are actually one of the companies trying to bring in LNG for their gas-fired power plants..if this sounds like a good deal you can pick up their stock cheap..about 33 cents this morning.
In our area we have 4 LNG proposals on the table. So 2 days ago our Chamber of Commerce put on a "information session" on the LNG business and the current worldwide energy situation....at least that was what was advertised.
The speaker was a Michelle Foss, it had to be the worst presentation I'd ever seen. She knew nothing of the LNG business and only offered EIA/USGS data (and we know how the get their data) as what the future of energy holds for the world. Her stats were wrong and misleading, she said that LNG prices will be in the $2-3 MBTU range well into the future. She also commented on "lightboxes" being available to power everything about 20 years into the future...right.
When I asked her about the differences between a Co-gen and a water open-loop system at a LNG terminal, she couldn't give an answer, other than to argue whether a Co-generator was actually called a "Co-gen".
When asked about peak-oil (Matt Simmons was her boss at one time) she responded that the peak is a long way off and "we are finding oil and gas everyday". She said nothing about decline rates in the US, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Kuwait, in fact she didn't say the world decline once.
After witnessing this disaster I feel sorry for a chamber that got fooled into paying money for this awful presentation.
I am going to contact the Chamber and try to get another speaker, does anyone know a decent speaker that could actually inform my area on the LNG business and our future energy outlook?
The speaker was flown in from Texas, so I think anyone from anywhere is a possible candidate.
At least some confirmation to something I've always suspected: diminishing energy intensity by country means nothing if you don't take into account global trade.
The environmental externalities of oil are huge. You point out that the carbon emissions migrated from the US to China. We should also note that neither country tried to mitigate the C02 output, and neither will pay for it under Kyoto. China and the US benefit, and the whole world warms.
just about daily, you hear about either oil or gas prices on the radio, their rise and fall.
Every time the price rises one day, the next day there's a ready explanation.
Recently, oil spike up. Less than twenty-four hours later, the radio is saying: "Oil rose on fear of cold weather," etc.
How do they know?
How do they conduct psychological profiles of traders in such a hurry? How do they know there's a cause-effect relationship?
It sounds suspiciously like mind-reading to me.
It also seems illusory: traders have always expected prices to rise at the onset of cold weather, so they bid up prices. Supply has nothing to do with this?
"They" (MSM) don't know. They just make up a daily excuse amongst themselves and then pretend as if they speak on behalf of God.
Damn. You caught "them". Now our whole society will collapse.
Probably most believers of the Adam Smith religion have no clue as to what is scientifically sound and what is not. Everything is plausible to them. So they accept whatever story gets put out by MSM, i.e. The "economy" is feeling strong, vibrant and robust today but tomorrow the poor thing may have a headache and a slight case of the sniffles.
Witness as an example, these two folk babbling about oil, Bush and the economy
USA and China working together
I am not sure it'll ever work out, but ya never know.
My feeling is that when the reality of peak oil finally permeates the economy and the collective conscience, the space program will receive little if any support. Watching a thousand tons of fuel burn for a launch is not going to impress cold and hungry people. If we are going to get anything significant done in space, we need to do it soon.
Anything we launch from now onward should be built to last decades or centuries, if possible. For valuable services like weather satellites or GPS, there should be multiple backup systems and satellites. It might even be good to have a doctor satellite that could visit and repair sick 'patients.' All satellites might need electrodynamical tethers for navigation and to counteract orbital decay.
Assuming a worst case, where we lose the technology to access satellite information, we could have satellites with a visual interface. A weather satellite could direct a laser at locations where a hurricane might make landfall. People could see this at night and be warned. A navigation satellite could identify a bonfire in the wilderness and use a laser to indicate the location of the nearest town.