"Oil Shale Development Imminent"
Posted by Robert Rapier on June 18, 2006 - 9:12am
Update [2006-6-18 10:34:44 by Super G]: A large portion of this article was cut off when it was originally posted. I have just added in the rest.
I have recently noticed an increase in oil shale coverage in the media, so this seems like a good time to take a look at the potential for oil shale to meet a portion of our energy wants (as opposed to “needs”).First, what is oil shale? Wikipedia has a nice overview on oil shale here. Briefly, oil shale started off just like the plant material that was ultimately converted into oil, but the material was not subjected to high enough temperatures and pressures to convert it completely to oil. But it is feasible to complete the process that nature started and convert oil shale into oil and natural gas by heating it. Given that the U.S. has an estimated oil shale reserve of a trillion barrels or so, it is not surprising that billions of dollars have gone into figuring out how to economically extract the oil from oil shale.
The headline on the newspaper that state Rep. Bernie Buescher keeps in a box at home captures the allure of the vast petroleum riches under the rolling hills and arid mesas north of this western Colorado city. "Oil Shale Development Imminent," the paper reads. That edition of the defunct Grand Junction News, Buescher notes, was published at the dawn of the 20th century.
So, attempts to develop oil shale are certainly nothing new. The development of oil shale has been “imminent” for over 100 years. This should be the first indication that there are some fundamental challenges that have proven difficult to resolve. The article goes on to describe the potential energy riches at stake:
There is no dispute that a thousand feet below the isolated ranch country here on Colorado's western slope lie almost unimaginable oil riches. It's locked in sedimentary rock — essentially immature oil that given a few million years under heat and pressure would produce pools of oil easy to extract.The Energy Department and private industry estimate that a trillion barrels are here in Colorado — about the same amount as the entire world's known reserves of conventional oil. The entire Green River Formation might hold as much as 2 trillion barrels.
Pushed by the Bush administration and legislation from Congress last year, and spurred by oil prices above $70 a barrel, the energy industry is mobilizing to unlock the secret of oil shale. As it has before, oil shale holds out the hope of a USA no longer dependent on foreign oil.
The potential payoff is huge. But I see this as somewhat akin to the vast amount of gold in the ocean. There are trillions of dollars of gold in the oceans, (2) for anyone wishing to extract it. The problem, as has historically been the case with oil shale, is that it costs more to extract gold from ocean water than the gold is worth. But Shell is developing a new process for oil shale extraction, which the article briefly discusses:
Shell's new process involves sinking heaters deep underground, cooking the rock at 700 degrees and recovering the oil and natural gas with conventional drilling. Early results are promising, says Terry O'Connor, a vice president in the oil giant's unconventional resource division. But, he admits, "no one has been able to develop oil shale on a commercially sustainable basis." Shell has four more years of research here before it will know if it has the answer.U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., who heads the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, was less cautious at a tour of Shell's test site Wednesday: "This is not pie in the sky. It's real this time."
Here we have Shell saying it will be four years before they know the answer, but Sen. Domenici is already saying “it’s real this time”. However, there are some things we can investigate, and the other article gets into a bit more depth on the problematic areas. The Colorado Springs Business Journal recently published "Oil Shale Exploration Near Rangely: Bonanza or Bust?" (3) The article quickly frames the debate:
Shell Oil is attempting to wring oil from the rocks in the Green River Formation near Rangely. If successful, supporters say the oil shale could supply the nation's energy for decades; detractors claim it's expensive, inefficient and environmentally hazardous.
The article went on to describe the Shell process in greater detail:
Despite a century of trying, and $10 billion in investment, oil shale currently provides an infinitesimal .0001 of world energy, said Randy Udall, director of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency in Aspen. The (Shell) technology is incredible - incredible in an insane way, incredible in a fantastic way, maybe both.Shell decided that previous efforts to exploit oil shale used too much energy, too much water and displaced too much land. Instead of taking rock out of the ground, heating it inside enormous retorts and releasing unstable hydrocarbons that must immediately be refined into oil, Shell plans to do something different, said Jill Davis, public relations director for the Shell Mahogany project.
Imagine a football field, Udall said. Now, imagine that they freeze the perimeter of the field to about 2,000 feet deep. Then, they take the water out of the middle of the field. Once the water is removed, they will drill wells 30 to 40 feet apart, and insert long electric heaters. Shell then plans to heat the rock to about 700 degrees Fahrenheit, and keep it that hot for three years - completing the work that nature would have done if the oil shale had been buried deeper, Udall said.
I have to admit that this sounds insane. Heating up rock to 700 degrees Fahrenheit and maintaining that temperature for 3 years sounds incredibly inefficient. However, I try to keep an open mind about these things, despite my skepticism. Previous efforts to extract oil from oil shale involved digging the oil shale up, retorting it, and then replacing the processed shale. This is similar to the processing of tar sands, with the environmental concerns that go along with that process.
But Shell says that despite estimates that the process is very energy intensive, it has a positive EROEI:
To do it on a large scale you'd need a power plant larger than any power plant in the history of Colorado. And you'd need a new power plant for each 100,000 barrel increment. Davis says estimates about power plants and energy costs are premature because Shell has not decided to take its experiments to a commercial level. We are not releasing what our power needs would be, she said. So anything coming from opposition would be estimates. But, when you compare how much energy is spent - apples to apples, BTUs to BTUs - you get 3.5 more energy units out of the oil shale than you put in through the process. Davis said those figures come from coal-fired electricity, off the grid. But Shell hasn't decided how to create the electricity that would be used on a commercial project.
An EROEI of 3.5 is not great, but it is comparable to tar sands. But how is that EROEI defined? Is it based on the actual electricity used to heat the field? Or is it based on the coal used to make the electricity? That distinction is very important. If it is based on the electricity used, then we must take into consideration the energy efficiency of turning coal into electricity. That is only around 30%, so that would reduce the “net” EROEI down to about 1. Proponents might argue that this doesn’t matter, since you are taking something that can’t be directly used as transportation fuel – coal – and turning into a usable liquid fuel. I have seen this argument applied to producing ethanol from corn using coal as the heating source.
I strongly suspect that the net EROEI is around 1 or less. Why? Because if the overall EROEI was 3.5, the U.S. would probably already be exploiting oil shale instead of depending on Canada to develop their tar sands. The EROEI of tar sands is in the 2-3 range, and due to the similarities of the process, the capital costs should be comparable. So, I am left to conclude that the EROEI of oil shale is poor compared to tar sands.
Shell claims that their process is economic when oil prices are above $30/bbl. (4) However, it is always important to note that this is a moving target – especially with a low EROEI process. A process with a low EROEI by definition is very susceptible to increases in the cost of the energy inputs, and $30/bbl presumes that the price of the energy inputs is not increasing along with the cost of oil.
It is important to note that the EROEI calculations also don’t take into consideration the steps that will be required to protect the environment. Shell is just now getting ready to do those experiments:
The success (of the pilot studies) means Shell is moving to the next area: testing a freeze wall to keep oil from contaminating ground water. We're moving ahead, but we want to protect the environment, she said. We'll be testing on a larger scale on our private property, and we'll know the results within 18 to 24 months. That will give us more confidence to go forward.
Mitigating ground water contamination will certainly lower the EROEI beyond that of just extracting the oil. The article goes on to explain how long this test will last, and gives an estimate of what would be required to produce just a fraction of current U.S. oil usage:
Shell's next tests will be determining ways to protect the groundwater: Udall's frozen football field. Construction of the freeze wall is expected to be completed by 2007, and the experiment will run for 13 years, according to Shell's web site, www.shell.com/us/mahogany .But with today's technology, the potential energy comes with a steep price, says Udall and others who are opposed to producing oil from shale. The energy required is a 'gigabunch,' Udall said. To produce 100,000 barrels a day, would require raising the temperature of 700 billion tons of shale by 700 degrees Fahrenheit. How much coal, how many power plants? One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. Given the expenditure of energy just to get the kerogen out of the rock, oil shale is a poor contender to solve the nation's energy problems, Udall said.
Call me a skeptic. Current U.S. oil usage is over 20 million barrels a day, and it would require 10 new power plants and five new coal mines to replace less than 5% of our consumption. Add to that a multi-billion dollar capital expenditure, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and a process with a marginal EROEI. Consider that we could “create” the same amount of oil by simply cutting consumption by 5%. It seems to me that enacting conservation policies would be far more cost effective than developing oil shale.
References
1. Oil shale enthusiasm resurfaces in the West, USAToday.com, June 1, 2006.
2. Seas hoard treasure; bugs have green, skinny hearts, USAToday.com, March 25, 2005.
4. Shell's Ingenious Approach to Oil Shale is Pretty Slick, Rocky Mountain News, September 3, 2005.
Contact
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- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
the article cuts at
I think we need to add articles about oil shale, tar sands, renewables, ethanol, etc. to the TOD tab titled "First time here?"
Before I found TOD I started a series of blog posts at Belly of the Beast about all of the supposed technologies that were potentially going to save us from Peak Oil. The first one was called "Oil Shale will Save us".
There are also numerous comments on Shell's process at this previous TOD post called Denver Post: Oil shale may be fool's gold
Steve Mut, Shell's managing director for its oil shale progam stated at the ASPO-USA conference last November in Denver stating the following (as reported by TOD's Stuart Staniford:
This is the Shell's main cheerleader for their technology, so take his estimates with a grain of salt. But even if we took them at face value, 5 mmbopd by 2030 is a drop in the bucket. Even according to Daniel Yergin we will be past the Peak by then.
To every investor I meet I tell then not to invest one single dime on oil shale. It is truly "Fools Gold".
This fellow's remarks were lawyered up accordingly, and should not be considered to be cheerleading by any stretch of the imagination unless the speaker has gone completely off the reservation.
The cheerleaders in the whole scheme are analysts and brokers employed by the various and numerous investment and brokerage houses.
I too have bagged shale oil before - and I agree with Robert that the EROEI is likely to be 1 or less.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2005/08/question-of-shale.html
Quoting M King Hubbert:
Yea, shale oil!
We can keep growing the economy, the population, the size of our vehicles.
Weeeeeee!
Who needs to worry about global warming, overpopulation, soil degredation, air pollution, population pressure, ocean desertification, land desertification, shrinking aquifers, when we got the smarts (hyuck hyuck) to bring shale oil online.
Yup. So long as we got that whole fossil fuel thing for our ridiculous autocentric economy sussed out, the rest should just fall in line, 'cause we all know that cars have nothing to do with all those other problems. Nope. Those cars exist outside of physics. See, now stay with me here 'cause I gotta use some of that G. W. Bush intullectual reasoning to pull this off, cars are MAGIC. Or, maybe they are like intelligent design, they just sort of were put here by some super-duper nerd with a cosmic pocket-protector, the ole immaculate industrial process!!
Yup. Don't worry people. We gots plenty of fuel for our holy automobile. No, put away any thoughts of having to do without, the automobile god will be appeased.
Why? 'Cause we is such smart people.
Just ask G.W. Bush. Remember how he set us all straight on global warming?
Look, I'll happily go back to horses just to help save the beauty of the West.
Cherenkov,
Your points are well taken, but a bit of a rant....and once more, like so many people, you confuse several fundamental intellectual positions into one "fusion" argument:
- We can discuss whether oil shale will work, and at what cost (environmentally, economically, etc.)
- Or we can discuss whether even if it will work on a large scale, it is morally and asthetically right to do it.
Those are completely different arguments. It's the same case with the car: Try a thought exercise: Suppose a clever technician could create a car that used ZERO ENERGY (we don't know how, but just suppose) made no pollustion, and the materials in building the car could be recycled, so that 99.9% percent of the raw materials could be re-used to make yet another car...no waste.Would "The Car" be a morally acceptable choice then? Or could a claim be made (perfectly valid) that in all of human history, cars are a recent oddity, and that humans are socially, spiritual, asthetically and morally damaged by being able to travel long distances at relatively high speeds in comparison to history. This would be an asthetic and moral decision, having nothing to do with the technology of the car.
So it is with several oil alternatives. Many of those who find technical advance a hateful thing seem to most terrified that solutions can be found!
Take an example: The Amish community have never tried to make the case that cars and modern technology does not work. They simply take the moral position that modern technology is morally corrupting. It is their right to take this position.
It is NOT in any way a technical argument, however.
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Hmm. Perpetual motion. Nice thought experiment. However, this sort of strawman argument is precisely why western civ is in such trouble. The techies are constantly promising silly crap like your perpetual motion car. Just imagine if we could all have our own personal aircraft! Soon nuclear energy will make electricity too cheap to meter! Dioxin is harmless! Asbestos is good for your baby's sleeper! Don't worry, we'll fix that little thalomide baby with these really keen artificial limbs!
But the comments I make earlier still hold. This issue is not if we can do this ridiculous thing, the issue is should we given that a continuation of this environment destroying technology will continue to destroy the environment.
I've got news: no environment, no humans.
I make the argument that cars do work. So what? They work to destroy the environment. As to whether it is a technical argument, of course it is a technical argument. The technical aspects of so-called advances in society are destroying the natural world without which we cannot live. TECHNICALLY, that would be a really stupid thing to do, no matter how cool the tech may be.
Think outside the box, the self-limiting box the techies love to create. Think in terms of systems, planetary systems, not the niggling little worries about whether we should kill the planet with THIS cool automobile or THAT cool automobile.
Here is a thought experiment, think of a world without the car. Ahhhhhh. See? So pleasant, so calm.
I have already detailed why continued use of fossil fuel will be a spectacularly dumb thing to pursue. That covers point one. I have no doubt that someone will come up with a way to use it. None. But why do so? Why keep the human factory going? Do we need to continue to grow? Do we need more humans? Do we need more autos, clean or otherwise? Can you see that the environmental footprint of the automobile is immense and destructive?
As far as the second part, separating morality from can-do-itness is the bane of western civ. So, you would have me believe that we should separate the two. It's okay to research Cyklon-B so long as we don't talk about what it does to people in "showers." It is okay to talk about the technical aspects of GM corn as long as we ignore the morality of peasant farmers having their fields contaminated. Waterboarding is okay as long as we don't examine the morality.
Yeah, I can see why it is so important to separate morality from our little technical projects. Wouldn't want to have to think about consequences or some such wooly-headed idea.
Hateful? Saving millions of people from the inanity of our techno-civ is hardly hateful. Not that it will happen. Too much money to be made in murder. Look at war, look at refugees in Sudan, look at our system of destroying whatever we need to in order to insure our way of life.
Our idiotic healthcare system is a fine example. You did know that people without insurance pay as much as ten times as much for the same service as the insured? All that technology and we ration it. We essentially let people die in order to enrich the insurance companies. All that technology and we let people die. Nope, don't look at the morality, because It will only make you not want to look in the mirror.
The other night I saw a reprise of a 60 Minutes interview with Mel Brooks. He was talking about his show the Producers, the show that features such fun songs as, "Springtime for Hitler."
Asked why he wrote something like that, something that seemed to make light of such a dramtically awful and scary subject, he said he did it because it is the only way to deal with such dreadful people. To kill them would be to become them. To ignore them would enbolden them. But, to laugh at them, to point and laugh at them and get the rest of the world to do so, now that is accomplishing something.
I am now pointing and laughing at the people who believe that we can tech our way out of this crisis. They are unknowingly acting as Fuhrers leading the world down a really bad and destructive path. They think they are doing right by the world, but they are not. Physics pretty much puts the kabosh on that.
So, I encourage everyone to point and laugh at the techies. Their illogical ways need to be drowned out with laughter.
Cherenkov
You covered so many ideas and positions that it would be impossible to stay up,so just let me return to one of your sentences which essentially says it all...
"Here is a thought experiment, think of a world without the car. Ahhhhhh. See? So pleasant, so calm."
That is potentially true (although lack of cars in no way ASSURES a pleasant, calm world). But, of course, it also posits another set of problems. Two of my three living sisters live hundreds of miles from me. So a world without some type of transport would mean that I would probably never see them again. Of course, we could say, well, we will use trains. I have nothing against that, but of course, trains are not "So pleasent, so calm" either....they are large, consume metal, consume labor to build, consume fuel of some kind...and will in the end result in consumption of at least some resources.
Your other interesting sentence, "Yeah, I can see why it is so important to separate morality from our little technical projects. Wouldn't want to have to think about consequences or some such wooly-headed idea."
Some may feel that way, but that was decidedly NOT what I was saying in any way. But giving up technology is a moral choice with real consequences. Just tonight, I spen 5 hours laying on my back in an emergency room with serious blood pressure issues. Without the technology to try to cope with this problem, I would for all practical purposes be gone from this world, and "peak oil" or "carbon release" would not trouble me.
Before this century, life really was "brutish and short". Suffering was MUCH more commonplace in all locations in the world, and options were few, except for the very wealthy. Saying that we should STOP technical development is indeed a very, very cruel blow to inflict on somebody else (and most folks who say it still have cars, TV's, computers (including access to TOD! :-), air conditioned homes, and central heating. It is easier to say we should stop technology, as long as someone else has to give it up (I have spoken before about the elitism implied in many of the "no fossil fuel, no carbon, no tech" arguments. It is, to say the least, extremely disturbing)
If you say to me, "All scientific indications are that carbon release should be reduced by X, and that fossil fuel should be reduced by X to achieve this, unless non carbon release energy can be used, indicating a possibility to X reduction in fossil fuel....", then we are simply arguing about the value of X...this is a technical discussion, and it DOES take in the moral discussion (i.e., that humans and the environment will suffer if we exceed X), and does not simply dismiss the suffering of humans.
On the other hand, if someone says, "I demanb 0% percent carbon release, and I don't care who has to suffer to achieve it!", that would be a moral position and could be seen as no more moral than "release the carbon, I want to drive!"
W.H. Auden once said that the measure of any culture, (and he meant all the way back before the oil age) was, "Variety achieved with Unity retained."
Such it will be with the post fossil fuel era, and the future. It is human nature not to accept less that the most that can be sustainably achieved. The argument, and it is at THE VERY HEART of decisions being made RIGHT NOW, is what can be sustainably achieved?
So, there are those who can point and laugh all they wish. As long as they are still driving, using electricity, and on TOD, it will be assumed that they mean for "some one else", the proverbial "they" to give up any hope at variety of life so they can continue to live the way they please. It will be seen as elitism.....so just stay out of the street while pointing and laughing or there is a risk of being run over!
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
By the way.....
By the way....
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/06/us_oil_consumpt.html
According to BP's just-released Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, consumption of oil in the US dropped 0.16% in 2005 from the year before, declining from an average of 20.732 million barrels per day (mbpd) to 20.655 mbpd.
Global consumption of oil, however, increased 1.3% from 2004 to 2005, climbing from 81.444 mbpd to 82.459 mbpd. US share of global consumption thus dropped from 25.46% to 25.05%.
The 2005 decline is US consumption was the first since 2001, when it dropped 0.27% to 19.649 mbpd from the year before.
China, the second-largest consumer of oil behind the US, saw its consumption climb 2.9% from 6.772 mbpd to 6.988 mbpd. Japan, in third place, also increased its oil consumption 1.4% from 5.286 mbpd to 5.360 mbpd.
....and the U.S. still has so many tricks up it's sleeve to cut production, we haven't even began to scratch the surface, and without hurting peopeles lives (in fact, as they reduce fuel consumption, they will start to realize that their life is better than before)....you ain't seen nothing yet! :-)
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Free the rest of the article please, guys!
I've heard this hackneyed argument so many times it makes me wanna barf! Roger, I would really expect better of you. Sure there are nice things that technology delivers to us, I'm not denying that. But.... the "nasty, brutish and short" notion comes from the so called 'dark ages' and not from pre-agricultural human societies where there is actually solid evidence that indicates people were often healthier than their agricultural descendants.
I don't fall into the 'technology is BAD' camp, nor do I fall into the opposite camp of 'life nasty, brutish and short without technology.' Why can't someone acknowledge the dark side of technology without getting bashed like this.
If there is any camp I'm in, to be brutally hontest with all and with myself, it's the 'have our cake and eat it too' camp. Much simpler life-style with certain essential technologies. They can be extremely simple technologies. We don't need 99% of the technology we have today to enjoy avg. life expectancies equal to or better than we have in the US (several countries with simpler tech. bases already do this).
Anyway, end of this rant.
I have the highest respect for the Amish, but I would not want to live that way myself.
It's called "Freedom", and thank God we have that here in the USA (at least for a little while longer?)
Those farmers that go to a lower energy/lower fuel type farming will do well. Those that demand to do "farming as usual" will need more loans, debt, and will eventually leave farming (except perhaps as farmhands).
Price ammonia fertilizer. Tell me that a smart farmer is not trying to figure out how much to cut back.
If you are not looking for what is the smallest piece of farm equipment that will "do the job", then you may not die a farm owner.
(My grandfather got some ribbing about his Ford Ranger, loaded with hay bales one level above the top of the cab, and three more bales on top of that to hold them in place. He started life as a sharecropper in the hills of Kentucky and died owning 800 acres of Kentucky bluegrass free & clear. He was always critical of farmers that spent too much on equipment that "couldn't pay it's way" and was "more for show").
Anyway, that will give you some idea of what my outlook is on farming. I would agree that loans and debt are a good way to get yourself out of farming (or anything else) I don't own a vehicle I didn't pay cash for and while they are all 30+ years old I can still do all the maintainence on them easily myself (which you can't do with the "new cars". Rebuilt the engine and transmission in my 77 pickup 2 years ago. Just finishing dong some major work on my '62 VW Beetle and should have it back on the road in a week or two. Had a new VW convertible in '62 and just had to have another VW so I can listen to the sound of the engine going down the road <smile>.
Modern "Summertime" farmers that only grow grain crops are going to have some problems in the future I think. The "old ways" of keeping a variety of livestock on the farm will have to return. And then you have manure to fertilize the fields for free. Also, it is a lot more effieient to raise cattle on grass pasture than to raise them in a feed lot and grow corn and haul it and process it into feed and then have to dispose of the "hazardous waste" (manure) by hauling it somewhere to dump it.
I think you grandfather and I would have agreed on most things about farming. Especially on getting your farm paid for and then NEVER putting a mortgage on it again. Darn double digit increases in property taxes are more than enough to contend with.
Mowing your lawn with sheep and chickens is a lot more energy efficient than mowing with a riding lawn mower. (After you put up the fencing) City folks will have to go back to - Push Mowers! Remember them. I still have a couple that I am rebuilding - Just in case <BG>
Have a nice day!
Thanks for the rant; et
A great modern ongoing example is the ongoing civil waranarchy in Liberia and the Congo. Life expectancy has declined to 37 years according to the World Health Organization and the region is infested with child armies and tribal warfare with solid rumors of cannibalism and slavery.
It does seem a daunting task to get oil out of shale with a financial profit (and a positive energy return on investment).
The article drives home the point that we use vast amounts of energy and that if that energy is expensive to obtain (in energy terms) then there will be tremendous amounts of energy flowing through our society just to obtain the energy we need to live our lives.
I wonder if energy efficiency isn't our blind spot just as pollution was a blind spot 50 years ago or more. It's not that people didn't think about pollution back then but they didn't view it as a major limit on society.
Today people talk about energy efficiency and it is seen as virtuous but it is not commonly accepted that we need it to survive. Perhaps when people start to see multiple power plants being built and long coal trains feeding them in order to obtain the power they need then they will accept as common sense that driving high mileage cars, using fluorescent lighting etc. will obviate the need for those negatives in their town.
to nature carbon neutral means for every ton of c02 you put into the air you must take one ton out.
for humans, especially politicians and product promoters carbon neutral is more like fuzzy accounting.
for example a nuclear plant doesn't generate c02 while making electricity BUT to make and maintain the nuclear plant produces 75% of the amount of c02 as a running coal plant.
at the same time it doesn't remove any c02 from the atmosphere. they call it carbon neutral because supposedly during it's lifetime it will 'make up' at least same amount of energy needed to make the plant but without emitting the equivalent amount of c02.
nature only cares about the former, it's the latter that humans believe is true(and i did till i sat down and worked it out) it's also going to get us in the end too.
The utter stupidity of such statements is getting stronger than my first reaction to pass them by. If you emitted 75% of the carbon in building and maintaining a nuclear plant why bother to build it?!? Just burn the coal directly - it will cost you less, you will not need to invest billions and wait for decades to get your investment back, you will not need to overcome NIMBYsm etc. etc. I'm getting sick of ecoterrorism - show me the detailed estimate or please stop using frivolous statements. Compare yours to this one for example:
http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2005/10/co2_emissions_f.html
The consensus seems to be from 0.5 to 4% with 33% (compared to gas, not coal!) as a worst case - low-grade ores etc. etc.
The people exploiting fear (isn't this what terrorism stands for?) against almost any modern advance (not only nuclear power here) in their majority do not understand anything about ecology - which by definition is the science of interrelationships between species. IMO on the top most of them are political functioners and on the bottom are many well-intentioned, but not quite acquainted with the realities of the world we live in idealists. De ja vu, isn't it?
BTW was what I just said ad hominen? If you ask me - this depends on your part, not me.
The utter stupidity of such statements is getting stronger than my first reaction to pass them by.
Really? Well, lets take a look at your cited source.
...CANDU cycle.....CANDU cycle.... Now, is this the cycle that is used today all over? (The answer to that would be NO).
So you are upset because someone is choosing to use a fuel cycle that is in place VS a fuel cycle that has been shown to work and is not the majority-use fuel cycle?
Now, lets look at failure modes. When the coal energy cycle suffers a failue, something burns down, miners die, or a boiler explodes. When hydro fails, a vally gets flooded. When PV fails, someone gets cut on glass shards. When a wind tubine fails a blade or tower comes to the ground. When oil fails, the ground/water gets oily.
Now, what happens when nuclar power fails? (and it will fail because humans are flawed) Nuclear power, due to the cost of failure, is un-insurable in the United States without the federal government claiming they will take on the upper bound liability.
I am worried about the normal release of sooth, mercury,
CO2 and so on.
That nuclear powerplants should release 75% of the CO2
of an equivalent coal powerplant is pure bullshit.
There is not even need of for a technical argument to
refute it. Any such use of fossil fuel would
make running a nuclear powerplant uncompetitive with
running coal powerplants unless the fossil fuel
industry would give them fuel for free out of the joy
of having a significant competitor.
I then usually get the argument that nuclear power is
subsidised with mostly an enourmous government
insurance guarante but such subsidies do not give a
money flow you can buy any fossil fuel with.
CO2
I'm shocked you didn't include the radiation release.
nuclear power issubsidised with mostly an enourmous government insurance guarante
Which costs nothing.
Sorry, I dident need the whole artillery battery to sqash this argument.
> Which costs nothing.
Thank you for making my argumnet clearer. But I personally find money flow less abstract then cost, cost is a number, money flow is movement of wealth. Cost is the "preassure" or "voltage" in the economy, money flow is the "mass flow" or "energy" moved.
What argument? That coal and nuclear fisson as widly implemented are poor choices WRT the environment?
Which costs nothing.
Thank you for making my argumnet clearer.
How so? The US govenment will somehow follow its own law, and do such in a compentent manner?
I assume that a governmnet will pay nothing for accidents that do not happen, no money is needed untill there actually is a major accident.
And no money is needed afterword if the government doesn't follow its own law. What are the irraded citizens going to do? Rise from the grave and go after the government?
Regarding the failure point - I've often said that I grant the privilege of fear to anyone. Like any civilisation advance nuclear is a faustian deal - it comes with its backsides. And don't be fooled - wind&solar are also faustian deals, the real question has always been which deal you choose.
But if we leave fear aside, just look at the facts. The Chernobyl disaster was the worst type of disaster that could theoretically be caused by a nuclear plant, and even it took the lives of just 40 people. Of course many others are claimed to be affected by radiation, but little is hard proved by now. It is the radiophobia that created most of the harm in the public opinion, not anything showing real adverse effects.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on this one.
I sometimes wonder if what we want gets mixed up with what we have to do. That is:
1) I oppose nuclear power on principal but see no other way to supply power in the next few decades on this planet to way too many people on it. It has to be used for a bridge to the future.
a) But if I am a purist/saint against nuclear power (I am clearly not now, though I once was), than do I twist arguments around to fit my position?
b) If we as a planet are going to exploit shales and sands, I am beginning to come around to the French proposal to use nuclear power plants in oil shale and oil sand areas of the planet to supply the power needed to do so.
c) Clearly we need to make more solar panels available. To think in central and northern California that has PG&E with 5.2 million customers and only 10,000 solar accounts in the system - that is pathetically too few.
That's what I would call a realistic view. If I knew about energy source that could both do the job and did not have the side effects I would be opposing nuclear power both in principle and in particular. I don't. Anything else currently is promoting coal.
a) But if I am a purist/saint against nuclear power (I am clearly not now, though I once was), than do I twist arguments around to fit my position?
No, but you could be tempted. Wishful thinking is the root of all evil.
If we as a planet are going to exploit shales and sands, I am beginning to come around to the French proposal to use nuclear power plants in oil shale and oil sand areas of the planet to supply the power needed to do so.
If we as a species were capable of acting rationally as a whole we would replace coal and NG for electricity with nuke+wind+solar and use NG + electricity for transportation and heating. Well since the predicate is obviously wrong (no proof applied) this path is highly unlikely. I would place my bets on your scenario, but I see coal and NG as the major source of heat at least in the short term.
c) Clearly we need to make more solar panels available.
Agreed, but what we need more is a breakthrough in reducing solar cell costs and electricity storage methods. Any dollar for those is not wasted, but what if these things are simply not meant to come true? It's a high stakes game to gamble with.
I wonder which is bigger, people's fear of anything having to do with radioactivity, or their hunger for oil. My bet is on the oil.
and before you bring up Chernobyl.
first the wildlife you see are the ones who have not gotten sick yet and/or have internal problems that do not hamper them in survival yet.
second it's way too early for them to have evolved to a point where they are immune.
I guess the public fears radiation just because of such statements. First what does "any radiation above the normal background level" mean? It is barely known that when you travel by plane you are exposed to radiation many times exceeding the "normal background level". It is shown that a single transocean flight equals 2 X-Ray shots. But nobody gives up flying, and even flight crews are not shown to be affected (though there are certain researches on that). The only fact we know for certain is that the likhood and the severety of radiation effects increase with the dosage received, and therefore the word "any" in your sentence is misleading at the least. From wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome#Table_of_exposure_levels_and_symptoms
The consensus is that permanent effects/serious health dangers result from short-term exposures above 1 Sv which is about 300 times more than the average annual dosage from all sources (including natural radiation).
Surely there is a small amount of evidence, often with conflicting conclusions, about radiation effects and not a lot of concensus?
Also, I think TrueK was referring to chronic exposure ie if you lived in an area. Do we agree that the effects are acummulative?
My argument was that the initial statement by itself was meaningless and obviously meant to provoke emotions (fear). Yes, an argument can be held about the effects of acute or chronic exposures but if we are going to be serious then we need to use some numbers, some evidence etc. Otherwise it's only cheap words.
FWIW enough studies are showing no proven dangers from chronic exposures many times exceeding the average natural background (thanks Alan for the Indian villagers). It is worth reminding that radiation, just like sunlight, wind and water is a pure natural phenomenon. Yes it can kill you or make you sick, but so can sunlight, wind or water too. Actually the death toll from the latter ones is several orders of magnitude above the first one.
Sorry but I forgot to comment on that.
Unfortunatelly there is quite a lot of evidence - thousands people have suffered acute or chroninc radiation exposures due to the bombings in Japan, because of the nuclear weapons tests, as a result of accidents (Chernobyl) etc. Almost none have suffered from improper management of the nuclear waste which is currently the main target of demonization for the public. Studies have been conducted for decades and all of them have served as a basis for the above metioned standards. Of course there is uncertainty and therefore the standards are much tighter that the studies have shown to be safe (see the links).
As a side note I consider it very distructive for people to question each and every point others have worked for years to prove. Yes you have the right of doubt, but for the sake of the argument I suggest we accept what people with much more expertise than us have discovered with the respect due.
Otherwise we are going to end in the trap of
Natural background radiation in thorium rich areas of India (and Leadville Colorado) are higher than the average exposre for nuclear plant workers.
It can be speculated that the assumption that any level of radiation is bad for the organism (and just increases with dosage) could be completely wrong. FWIW billions of people are voluntary exposing themselves to huge dosages of ultraviolet radiation, for some reason convinced that it is great for their health.
Makes you wonder who the hell called us Homo Sapiens.
It's not generally understood by the public that you can safely hold a solid chunk of Plutonium 239 in your hand. The amount of radiation emitted by Pu239 is not that great, and it's alpha radiation which has very little penetrating power (it cannot even pass through your skin). On the other hand, you would surely not want to drink water from a well that has been contaminated by Plutonium 239.
That's really the big issue with nuclear power - making sure that you handle the (very toxic) waste properly. I'm not anti-nuke by the way, only pointing out that radioactive heavy metals need to be handled with care. Pu239 is especially worrisome, since it remains toxic/carcinogenic for 250,000 years.
If you're going nuclear, best solution might be a breeder reactor, in which all such heavy metals are consumed and none are left as waste.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, so if anyone here is, please correct me if my above assessment is wrong.
The heavy metals issue is real, but is actually quite exaggerated. What is rarely talked about is that coal power plants worldwide emit in the form of ashes some 5000 tons of uranium and 10000 tons of thorium per anum - an amount comparable to the nuclear waste (~60 000 tons) which at least is managed (stored). Obviously we have to go completely mad/irresponsible to permit nuclear waste to "just lie around". A more troublesome danger is for released waste due to a nuclear incident (aka Chernobyl). But even this tragic incident (a necessarry lesson in the path of humanity IMO) did not release such significant amounts of radioactive metals to harm the environment except in the immediate vicinity of the Chernobyl plant.
We have indeed lived with radiation from the start. What we have not lived with however are the artificial radionuclides and physical forms of natural radionuclides like aerosolized depleted uranium that have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on biological organisms. These are man made. As someone said as well, it is false to assume that background radiation is harmless. What happens is that it is impossible to weed out the effects of background radiation with the limited resources we put into such studies. Plutonium can be handled as a chunk safely YES, but I bet you would not crush it up, put a fan on the dust and breathe it in. It can be found in that form quite often, particularly around reprocessing plants and will be an increasing issue if we go to breeders and reprocessing.
A final item of note. Despite the claims, I know of no nulear fission technology that has been proven to be able to consume all the actinide and longish term waste without simply shifting the waste to a different nuclide element. This includes all the advanced paper design breeder technologies. Those pesky nuetrons have a habit of irradiating the non-radioactive elements. Hence, long term storage of waste will still be necessary.
... but not a causual connection with the nuclear incident was ever proved. The geographical disparity proves the opposite hypothesis - if there was a causual connection then the increased mortality and abortion levels would be correlated to the nuclear fallout. It just doesn't make sense not to have them in Belarus and to have them in the US. This is a classical example of a lucrative argument - in fact at any moment of time you can find regions on Earth that suffer increased infant mortality because of all kinds of causes you can not even think of.
Yes, there are number of studies, but I am taking them all with a huge grain of salt. I suspect political motivation for shifting the results in both ends of the spectrum, but of course the forces to exaggerate the effects of the disaster are much stronger.
This includes all the advanced paper design breeder technologies. Those pesky nuetrons have a habit of irradiating the non-radioactive elements.
You are contradicting yourself - first you state (correctly IMO) that the major problem is actinides. Then you obviously reject breeders as a solution to that problem, because the "nuetrons have a habit of irradiating the non-radioactive elements". I assume you know that irradiation of light non-radioactive isotopes produces short-lived light isotops, not the long-lived actinudes which are the source of those fearsome multi epochal calcualtions.
The only responsible solution for the future would be to process the spent fuel and handle actinudes separately (which are comparatively small amounts) and store the rest (plus the irradiated equipment from decomissioned plants) for the decades needed to cool off. Not such a complex task, but excaberated to unthinkable extent by the lack of public support and the various forces interested in protracting the problem (including within the industry itself).
If this is starting to sound like a working definition of "forever" to you I'd agree!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
And just to be up front: I have worked in the radiation safety field (health physics) for 20 years.
On a more general note I can't help to mention that IMO a good bunch of modern health problems are due to our tendency of isolating ourselves from the environment and from those "harmful things around". It all comes back to us.
"Wild vs. lab rodent comparison supports hygiene hypothesis"
"The prevailing hypothesis concerning the development of allergy and probably autoimmune disease is the "hygiene hypothesis," which states that people in "hygienic" societies have higher rates of allergy and perhaps autoimmune disease because they -- and hence their immune systems -- have not been as challenged during everyday life by the host of microbes commonly found in the environment. "
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-06/dumc-wvl061406.php
Believe anything you want about radiation. That first phrase in your wiki citation "potential for cancer" clearly causes you no concern, it makes me pause. We can differ. What you cannot reasonably suggest is that I should have to accept increased levels of radiation every moment of my life in the only environment that we have. It is an inconceivably arrogant notion that someone can say we need just a little radiation release here and there for one purpose or another and then impose the results on the entire population of the planet. If you could clean up your radiation mess it would be different but you can't. What you suggest is roughly the same as dumping your trash at my front door.
And some people do give up flying. For a variety of reasons.
Otherwise I can not stop you for fearing whatever: be it radiation, Fidel Castro attacking US or alien abductions. This is your personal choice, but please beware that it is written solely on your account.
Burden of proof on the one who brings something new & evil into the world & you are nowhere near a case
Wholesale broadcast distribution of ionizing radiation is my idea of eco-turr'rism
I don't remember advocating anything even remotely similar to such a cause. You are twisting my words and in a not very polite way. I'll try to put my only thesis as simple as possible:
"Radiation is a natural phenomen. It is not that dangerous that most people think".
That's just it. Over and out. How does it preclude the thing you just said? You are clearly extending my words into another dimension.
My basic problem here is that the thread addresses a deadly serious issue with a sneer, a fling of an ambiguous cite to wiki does not let you laugh at radiation.
My dad spent the last years of his career as head of nuclear safety for one of the Edison companies. The firing offense was drunk and asleep in the control room. No one would take it seriously. When dad and his personal authority left it was not possible for the Indians who succeeded him to fire for drunk and asleep in control. It was just something to laugh at. People who laugh at the hazards of radiation scare the shit out of me and when they do it for ideology rather than mere stupidity it's terrifying.
I don't worry about their running nuke plants there, it will help solve the problem. I do worry about their being trusted to run them here.
Nuclear power can be a safe way to produce electricity, but greed can screw up anything!
Don't fear the radiation, fear the accountants.
What puts me on the proactive side of this argument is that I am convinced that screwing up is a necessary part of the path forward. If we fail somewhere then we have to find the means to continue the path forward. If this requires a higher level of morality which we don't are not really having then we are going to be messing up again and gain until we reach it. I think that's what humn progress is all about.
They really are quite realistic. Wind is competitive, and dropping in cost. Solar is just beginning to be competitive, "conventional" PV (i.e., silicon) is reliably falling in cost, and there are dozens of companies, some of them very serious and respectable, developing cheaper approaches. The same is true for battery technology (search Amazon for "dewalt 36-volt").
Wind is doubling in size every 2 years in the US. Solar is doubling every 2 years in the world. These rates of growth are accelerating, not slowing down.
I think the chances are vanishingly small that wind (in the short-term) and solar (in the medium-term) will fail to fulfill their potential to replace fossil fuels.
Yes, wind and solar could win out. They are the right size, can be put anywhere, are scalable and gaining ground.
Don't forget the humble solar water heater. They should be on every house in the USA. They are essentially electric generators, as they eliminate the fuels needed to heat water.
For transportation I use an electric bike. It can go 25 mph for about 20 miles and recharges overnight for 6 cents. We don't even need electric cars to get around. Take a look at: egovehicles.com. It uses plain old SLA batteries and does quite well. Newer batteries that I could buy for it are NIMH (Nickle Metal Hydride), 1/2 the weight, and Li-ion, 1/4 the weight. With the new batteries we will have real transportation options.
Personally I think this would be a total insanity, but I can not rule it out - once shortages appear, the public may become ready to accept and even demand currently unthinkable ideas. IMO it would be useful to try to rule out some of them while we as a society are still capable of acting responsibly (well at least to some extent...).
not good enough at conducting heat to make it reasonable
to use very expensive point sources of heat such as
nuclear reactors.
Nuclear reactors would generally work if it was not for the problem you just mentioned.
This technique was actually used in the Rulison project which was a project that used underground nuclear explosions to release natural gas.
We got this amendment on the ballot because of concerns that underground nuclear blasting in Western Colorado would contaminate the ground water, potentially reaching the Colorado river.
How does 1 barrel of heavy oil from tar sands compare to 1 barrel of light sweet ? Ie how much of each usable fraction can you get out of it, and how much bitumin is left over at the end. Or is it just a case of how much energy (natural gas?) and cracking you are willing to do on the heavy oil ?
How do you know this? I was under the impression that it traded at a premium to WTI since it was of such high quality.
" And what we're doing in the heavy oil is chewing through natural gas primarily as a heat source and potable water too often to create steam to melt it into basically low quality crude. And that's where I say, "Gentlemen, we have just turned gold into lead.""
That is why I thought it.
However, it appears that what leaves the tar-field for the refinery is a high-quality, crude - not a heavy-oil.
After a ton of processing you can get it to be something high quality, I guess it is where you draw the line from the orginal product to the refined state. I can eventually work coal to liquids and end up with a high quality motor fuel, but I would not call coal a source of light fuel. The bitumen is cracked with hydrogen to make the lighter products, sounds like refining to me.
Coal is a resource like oil sands, like oil shale. If there is no intermediate product that is the equivalent to oil in the process of turning coal into vehicle fuel, buy you still want to do a comparison, then I think you need a different equation.
I'm drawing the line at the product that you can sell to most conventional gasoline refineries. As far as removing the sand and "upgrading" the bitumen to oil, I see that as much like the Saudis separating the water from their crude. I don't consider what comes from under the desert sand some kind of heavy-water/oil that needs to be refined into oil.
So NO, the gunk that originally comes from the tar sands is NOT light sweet stuff, it is very heavy and very sour stuff. It is much more expensive to refine than even the heaviest gunk out of Venezuela or the Middle East.
It takes massive amounts of natural gas to heat the water that washes the bitumen from the sands, more natural is required to hydrogenate the stuff in the cracking plant. The whole operation depends on an awful lot of very cheap natural gas.
It's my understanding that bitumen is hydrogen deficient, and one of the things that natural gas is used for is a hydrogen source to convert the bitumen to syntheric oil.
"I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain't going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don't are totally deluded."
It would be interesting to hear his thoughts on the current state.
As I see it the problem is not that can we make synthetic crude to replace fossil fuels, because we obviously can, but rather what process is cheap enough to maintain our lifestyle and help the rest of the world get rich without totally destroying the only planet that we know our children can live on. And folks, we ain't figured it out yet. According to Shell the EROI is 3 on shale oil.And that doesn't include the transportation of synthetic crude, the costs of refining said crude,the costs of delivering the products to the consumer or the ecoloogical costs to our shared common environment. The numbers don't work for shale oil any more than they do for coal oil or biodiesel or ethanol,and I am unconvinced that they can work .
Most human problems have a lot of little solutions, not some blindingly clear answer. And even if we arrived at a consensus plan to save modern civilization on planet Earth, people respond a lot better to example than to rants and exhortations. And change starts with one person doing the right thing, 'cause the some total of good in the world is the result of the billions of people in our common ancestrey doing the right thing while we try to do better too.
Wow, way to elevate the level of discourse. Perhaps this kind of venom is not the answer... oops, I forgot we shouldn't discuss morality here on TOD! Just kidding. The fact that it is seen as looney to so many folks to actually examine the morality and ecological implications of technology doesn't instill one with confidence about the future, imo! To me, Cherenkov is one of the moral centers of this board, and I appreciate his contributions just as much as all the practical technical talk. If we do not examine all aspects of the problems we face, how can we find any real solutions? The main drawback of technology is that we never fully foresee the repercussions!
"I guess we can grow indefinitely." and "Yea, shale oil!"
I mean, did he even read it?
In the face of that, I found oilmanbob's (flagged and avoidable) rant to be some humorous relief. Sorry. Maybe if Cherenkov hadn't used a pessimistic article as the entry point for his standard anti-technological spiel maybe I would feel differently.
Even so, it should have been clear by what was posted that I was not advocating oil shale. According to TrueKaiser's note, it looks like about the first third of the article did originally come through fine. That should have been sufficient to see that I was not promoting this as the solution to our energy needs.
RR
My real point is that we must all clean up our own act in order to get a message across.People will resist a message that is delivered with anger and telling folks to do something the author is not doing, but will follow a good example. Look what the personal courage of Gandi,Dr. King and Confucious gave the whole world. Every one of us needs to be conserving and not having more kids. That is not a joke.
Also, I would like to thank Robert for a very stimulating and well-researched post.
I do think oil shale seems to be another case of blowing smoke up our wazoos ,just like ethanol, biodiesel and tar sands. And it makes me wonder why. Are people so resistant to change that they will grasp for any preposterous solution rather than examine their own behavior?
I've followed the Estonian use of oil shale for production of electricity and I think that's the only economical use possible. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I think using some of its burn energy to mitigate its pollution would still be far more reasonable than trying to convert it to liquid fuel.
That's one power plant for every 100,000 barrels, but it takes four years to install, heat, and extract this oil. Therefore that is one power plant for every 25,000 barrels per year. That's thirty power plants per million barrels per year.
In 20 years we could possibly be up to 3 million barrels per day. And the oil sands could be up to 3 million barrels per day by that time, and perhaps the Orinoco bitumen the same. And the worlds supply of conventional oil is, by this time, declining by from three to five million barrels per day per year.
At any rate I have serious doubts about this shale oil project. Three hundred power plants in the Colorado desert? And it will take a city of employees to run these plants. Power plants take a lot of water and the city to house them a lot more. Somehow I just don't think so.
That's 90 power plants in the Colorado desert. Sorry about that.
On a serious note, great article, Robert. I liked your insight into the EROEI factors. It seems to be one of the more complex issues we deal with here, so any simplication is appreciated.
I give up.
As you imply, there are other issues. One of the concerns about the new Pueblo unit was whether there was enough water (TPTB eventually decided there was). Obtaining the rights to enough water for ten plants would be an issue -- this would be a new use, and under Colorado water law this use might be WAY down in the pecking order. Unless the units are very close to the shale, major new transmission facilities are probably required. Unless the units are very close to the coal mines, major new rail facilities are probably required. Building either will have its own set of problems.
One 750 MW unit with an 81% duty cycle is equivalent to 810 2.5 MW wind turbines with 30% duty cycles. 8100 wind turbines to produce a million bbl/day from the shale. I wonder whether there are enough suitable sites for turbines in that general area?
That's a wind turbine on the ridge line every two hundred feet for thirty miles.
But 810 2.5 MW wind turbines is entirely doable and practical.
A big project, yes.
Off on a tangent, about 20% of current US annual consumption of 3.97 trillion kWh comes from nuclear plants, all of whose licenses are scheduled to expire over the next 25 years. Replacing them as the licenses expire with 2.5 MW wind turbines with a 30% duty cycle requires 121,000 turbines, or almost 5,000 turbines per year.
We should be at half that rate in 2007 and well more than half in 2008.
But we are going to build SOME new nukes. How many is open to question.
As for oil shales, the operative word in RR's article is "insane". I see no point in arguing about Shell's 13 year feasibility study. It will end, perhaps prematurely, and they'll call the whole thing off when they see they're wasting their money. Shell will see that they can probably pull off this stunt but it will never scale up and remain profitable.
Regarding insanity, this is the result of only being able to think about our energy problems from one point a view--let's produce oil anyway we can. This kind of tunnel vision is not going to solve anything. It also kind of rests on the assumption that coal reserves are infinite and climate change doesn't matter. Even precious natural gas & water are sacrificed to make oil. This gives you some idea of the supreme importance of this magical elixir in the modern human psyche.
I explained Shell's in situ method as described here in RR's article to a friend of mine. She looked at me like I was from Venus or some other galaxy far far away. I said, "Hey, don't blame me, I'm only the messenger. I think it's crazy too".
Next up on the insanity front, Methane Hydrates.
If the surrounding water tabels are protected by a frozen wall you have to keep it chilled nearly indefinately since a large mass of rock takes a very long time to cool and it will even then contain mobilized oil. I would compare this with the support of an overground high level nuclear waste facility with the difference that nuclar waste takes much less energy and equipment to keep safe.
See Suncor Upgrader and OPTI Integrated Process.
www.shell.com/us/mahogany on their oil shale efforts.
A couple of clarifications: The 3.5:1 ER they cite is based on source energy at the powerplant. Our calculations suggest that this is for a combined cycle gas plant with a 50% efficiency.
This number would fall to about 2:1 if you used a coal plant.
Steve Andrews and I have written a 4 page primer on oil shale at http://www.aspencore.org/images/pdf/OilShale.pdf There are sources at the end of this doc, including the Rand report on oil shale. The real energy return is probably lower than 2:1, but no one knows right now. Sen Domenici, Hatch, and Salazar held a hearing in G Jct, Colorado recently, the first two to pimp the resource (Domenici: "This can shake the world! It's our ace in the hole") while Salazar said go slow.
It's very intriguing what Shell is doing. Madness or inspiration? They have spent tens of millions on this. To do
100kb/d would require a $3 billion power plant for starters.
Doubling production would require a second plant. Even with one, this would be the largest single use of electricity on the face of the planet. We conclude in our paper that oil shale is the petroleum equivalent of fool's gold, but perhaps we are wrong.
I don't think you are wrong. That was my assessment as well. I have read oil shale articles over the course of several years, and have looked at the patents and technical literature. I never came away from any of them thinking that this had very much potential for success.
RR
1) In situ kerogen cooking:
Shale is not very porous or permeable.
Normally oil migrates from a source rock to a reservoir.
Does cooking the shale change the rock properties to such an extent that it then behaves as a 'reservoir'?
Does the newly cooked oil migrate to an adjacent formation that can act as a conventional oil reservior?
Is the shale fractured to release the new, in situ oil?
Thanks if you can shed some light on this.
2) EROI
I am sure that the EROI is quite low in this case. However, at some time in the future, EROI may not be the imperative that it is now. Access to an energy dense liquid fuel may be the strategic imperative. Of course, this would not be likely for benefit of 'the average man in the street' , but it would have a serious military consideration. A thirteen year feasibility study takes you to 2019. By then, the world may be a very different place.
As far as the EROI; there are arguments that in some cases it is OK to operate with an EROI of less than 1. An example often given is turning coal to ethanol. However, the question I always pose is: "Aren't there more efficient uses of coal then inefficiently turning it into ethanol (or using it to process shale oil)?"
RR
Still struggling to get my head around this.
I understand that cooking shales normally increases the volume of the shales. This expansion must take place in situ with 2000 foot of overburden under normal geo-pressure rates. The newly mobile oil and gas fraction will be prone to migrate.
Incidentally, very nice primer. I recommend it for anyone interested in this debate. I didn't realize you were the Randy Udall quoted in the original article. You seem to have a very good read on this issue.
RR
Randy, excellent paper. I'd be interested in hearing your take on tar sands.
I end up musing into the philosophical, but what most strikes me is the insanity of spending ANY resources at all on non-renewable, low-density, difficult-to-extract fuels sources like oil shale SIMPLY because the products LOOK like what we already have.
Diminishing returns will surely kill us in the end, and so I imagine we just have a HUGE "pyramid scheme" where the early investors make a killing with no accountability for costs and wasteful consequences of the bust cycle that must follow.
Despite that judgment, I do have a HARD time on the claimed "moral" issues of modern life. I've got more than my fair share of guilt at participating in a big lie, even as I feel lucky to do my little things like bicycle and try to reduce my heating/electricity consumption.
I'm more comfortable with the "diminishing returns" argument. Can we admit our direction won't work sooner or later? Let's move in a direction we STILL WANT TO TRAVEL in 100 years, even 500 years maybe, not one that will delay our day of reckoning a few more decades. (I know this site participants aren't supporting shale oil production, more trying to identify technical evaluations of the feasibility.)
As a human living in the modern world, uncertain of my place in the order of things, I'd like to KNOW if our descendants have ANY HOPE at all for living a life with opportunities like mine. Somehow we need resources directed to finding "hope", rather just our next fix.
Nicely put.
But it's not insanity that driving the "what we already have" paradigm, it is a legacy paradigm. We are dragging the last 100 years of industrial development with us on the fuel spec sheet.
Why else would a company dig thousands of feet into the ground to recover a fuel base that's so deficient? Logic dictates building a simple wind turbine instead. (Or a bunch of them)
Then... inventing something to use that power configuration.
They did, before the Age of Oil.
Electric streetcars, electric trolley buses, Electric subways (NYC is near it's 100th year) and elevated Rapid Rail, cross-country electric railroads.
All in use today. No new technology required. If Thailand can afford to build $16 billion worth, the Swiss 31 billion Swiss francs worth, how much can the US afford ?
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2005-02.htm
The thing that is in the way isn't inventiveness, it's politics... or perhaps an intersection of economics and politics.
Shell can't sell me a unit or two of power on a public transportation system. GM can't sell me a ticket or a seat. Therefore mass transit isn't a solution for corporations; it's a solution for people. (now if Halliburton got into the train business, I bet we see some mighty quick subsidies... <g>)
And as Walter Cronkite used to say, "that's the way it is...."
The future won't be like the recent (within 150 years) past. The coal and oil it was easy for our forebears to stumble across won't be there. Instead, where there is oil and coal, it will only be retrievable using the large and complex machinery left lying fallow around it - the same machinery that fell silent because there was no more energy to run it.
I can see small-scale retrieval of oil and coal, if it's possible with human/horse power, and for local use.
Folks, we're close to 7 billion on the planet and we need to go back to less than one billion. The Native Americans, Polynesians, etc went through 90% dieoffs, who are we to let them have all that fun to themselves historically? And it's not a matter of choice anyway, it's going to happen.
This site is the best one on the Peak OIl situation, but there's a large componant of the discussion that's on the them of Preserving Our Way Of LIfe No Matter What. I know it's hard to imagine going back to a "primitive" way of life. Foraging and some farming, sewing your own clothes, washing 'em by hand, going barefoot in warm weather to save on shoes (which are only worn in more formal situations) and eating far less calories. I've lived that way and I have trepidations too. But this BS about oil shale and possibly using nukes to process it, and building tons of trains and all that, well, it just isn't going to happen. All this technology has been riding on the shoulders of cheap oil, and that includes the nuclear industry. I'm convinced a real, hardheaded, analysis of the nuke industry would show an EROEI of less than 1. It was never intended to produce power, it was, and is, a weapon. Just like the airlines, which don't make sense (where trains sure did) but are kept going because we need the test/techology/production bed to keep us in fighters and bombers. Even the airliners are by law "enlistable" as troop transports if needed. Sad to say, high tech has always been for our oil-rich society to better fight rival oil-rich societies.
How many real back-to-the-land types are here? I think there are a few, maybe one or two, but most of us are just plain computer geeks. We collectively have grown up in an environment of TV and Hot Pockets, Mom driving us to the mall, everyone having a car in high school, and if your clothes got a hole you replaced 'em unless you were trying for an "effect". We had glasses, braces, and Childhood Pudge. We had dogs, cats, rats, gerbils, fish, and the occasional parrot. We were never, ever, in the position to seriously consider eating these pets. (My own experiences were far down on the poverty end, but our dogs were still never considered a possible dinner, they just got all skinny and ribby along with us.) The thought of walking most everywhere, a severe test to see if we'll be part of the 90% who won't make it through the dieoff (which make take a short time or a generation or two, hard to say) and the thought of no Nintendo or family car is really very scary to us whether we admit it to ourselves or not.
So, we set on the alter of Technology the icons of solar power and fusion and ethanol etc., and pray to them, "If we do this this way, it can work, if we take this biomass from here, we can give up our cars and get around in hovercrafts....". I guess down at the bottom of it much of what's seen here about how techology can save us is the prayers of the truly scared.
I think Shell believes they have a chance at pulling this off, but I don't think any of the other oil majors do (or they would be doing their own experiments). I think their chance of success is very low.
RR
- Wind is getting cheaper, oil more expensive
- Sell to the grid the highest value electricity, that at peak, and even a lot at shoulder time power.
- When heating the ground (or cooling it), sell "spinning reserve". Be willing to turn off ground heating/cooling equipment in 1/10th of a second (automatic break) if there is a problem elsewhere. This is an extra income source at no marginal cost.
- Buy surplus power from other wind generators on a minute by minute basis for cheap heating. If Florida Power wind farm in Eastern Colorado has a 12 minute surge from a gust of wind, they now get zero for it. Just their "contribution". Set up an automatic system where Shell resistors in wells B2, B3,& B4 automatically kick on for 12 minutes whenever signaled by Florida Power. Extra power in the grid at one spot, extra load in another part, all =. Shell cuts FLA Power a check at VERY low cost (say a penny/kWh + grid fee). In some cases (lots of variables) 10% of wind power goes for free today. At home, Shell wind turbines NEVER dump free juice into the grid.
- GREAT publicity ! Worth it's weight in gold to DC lobbyists and ad people. A zero profit venture could "make sense" in the larger social/political context.
Look at it another way. Shell, like Florida Power et al, can make money from wind turbines for the grid. But they, unlike the others, have a use for the "scraps". 3AM power, power from unscheduled wind gusts, margin between promised power in the next hour (conservative estimate) and actual. And spinning reserve.Natural gas is a great complement to wind power, as it is to solar, particularly the thermal variety. According to the NREL wind maps and a poster here, there is considerable wind power potential in Wyoming, including a couple of class 5/6 locations in southwestern Wyoming not far from the Shell site.
As wind dies down and the sun falls to the horizon, one can quickly ramp up a turbine. In addition, natural gas can directly supplement some solar thermal systems so as to keep a uniform current going or to "top off" energy collected on a cloudy or off-peak day, thus utilizing what energy is produced then.
I would expect that there will be a glut of combined-cycle gas turbine generators on the market now that natural gas is expensive and only become moreso in North America.
E85: Spinning Our Wheels
I guess none of these media types majored in math, nor engaged in even a bit of in-depth investigation.
RR
How to get the real true cost? Get a bunch of qualified experts to list all the cost they can think of, and then add 20% for what none of them can think of but what is got to be there, since none of us, not even TOD, are smart enough to think of ALL the true costs.
Then, by methods I am unable to conjure up short of dictatorship, force everybody to shell out that true cost for any energy they use.
THEN, they will be forced to solar power, and solar thermal power more specifically, and I will get rich as is my true desert for sticking with it for so long thru poverty, ridicule and mountains of logic (of the economics variety, not real logic, of course).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_tax
And of course, a carbon tax is the base necessity for a world with global warming. env-econ has a recent post on that:
http://www.env-econ.net/2006/06/sachs_on_pricin.html
Precisely why I favor a carbon tax. It will punish those lower EROEI ventures like corn ethanol, and reward those ventures that can squeeze out a higher EROEI.
RR
The exeption is when you can dump some waste or use some resource for free, that problem can often be traced to a lack of ownership or it being hard to establish a sensible ownership.
The market mechanism is often slow and it is affected by speculation and the intrest of old wealth but it is harder for things to go way of of ballance with such a system then with a command economy that tries to trace and adjust for all costs and so on.
The market gives a lower limit. Then you can debate all kinds of possible inclusions.
Our farmers sell their fuels with local production as a benefit but they have not concentrated on one fuel even if ethanol is the biggest so far. More then one kind of crop is grown and you need several fuels to utlize them all. And there is some self fueling intrest in using RME and biogas. A nice detail is that left over glycerin from RME synthesis and mash(?) from ethanol fermentation is valuble for biogas production. The same must be true for press-cake(???) from rapseed oil production. The primary use for ethanol and rapseed oil leftovers is as animal feed but the volumes will be too big for that.
I have wondered some about the origin of the methanol used in (R)ME synthesis but since there probably will be a DME from black liquor pilot plant and the raw material for DME is methanol we will get a methanol from biomass pilot plant as a side benefit.
You have to think of these things as systems to get them to work. There will be a lot of work to get all kinds of politicians and other leaders to think in systems and not single solutions. This even seems hard for manny TOD people. Perhaps it is a hard thing to do?
In the mean time, these E85 boosters will be visiting the pump 30% more often. At some point neurons will fire and they will see ethanol in the same class of lies as the air-swirling turbo-injector-mileage-enhancers or those gadgets that magnetize the fuel line.
BTW, my father tried E10 and carefullty measured his gas mileage for alternating tanks, (5 gas, 4 E10) and found an 8.5% decrease in mileage for E10. He stopped using it.
When talking about corn derived ethanol during his knee recovery, he was fumbling around for words to describe his question aboout fertilizer & fuel inputs vs. energy outputs for ethanol. I suggested "Energy Return for Energy Invested" and he said "Exactly !"
I owe an enourmous amount of who I am, what I know and even more to "how to think" to what I learned at my father's knee !
THANKS DAD !!
Regular $2.85
Plus $2.95
Premium $3.05
Ignorance Premium $3.11
Diesel $2.75
RR
So, I will address these posters in sequence.
First, Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Lord. That smacks of the all sorts of flawed arguments that have reverberated throughout small minded American social and political discourse. Like, for instance, "The reason I don't like (fill the appropriate race, creed, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation) is because one of them stole my bicycle."
The reason that we are no longer a socially integrated society is because of the automobile. If you really wanted to live near your sisters, you would live near your sisters. Darn potential of living before automobiles is keeping me from my kinfolk. Hoo-haa.
More than likely, your blood pressure issues are related to the food you eat, the highly processed, overly abundant, oil subsidized, food we all cram in our mouths. And it is also likely the result of driving around in automobiles instead of walking. Your argument says essentially I need an iron lung because I smoke. Don't make me quit doing something stupid when we have technological Band-Aids should I keep doing the stupid thing.
Now, this is one of the greatest distortions of truth in the history of technological man, on par with the WMDs in Iraq. First, the idea of short and brutish as being somehow relegated to the past. The truth is many people right here in the United States live lives that are short and brutish. They are drug dealers, coal miners, convenience store clerks. Some make big money and are gunned down. Some are crushed or suffocate in mines that are not properly maintained because of the lovely way we manage to not look at the morality of our actions. Some are people who will never get a stab at the brass ring, who must live on the fringes of society on minimum wage. Have you ever had to live on minimum wage and support a family? I doubt it. Talk about short and brutish. Yeah, for the people at this site who are essentially a bunch of lonely old tech people who find comfort in talking shop, the rest of the world is just a peachy keen place where all tech is good all the time. Never mind the cancer clusters, never mind the starvation in the rest of the world, never mind that the vote was stolen because of that wonderful technological advance known as touchscreen computer voting.
Second, the average longevity of preindustrial man is much greater than the often touted 37 years of age cited by this poster. Recent studies of aboriginal man in remote settings have reduced that chestnut to a hoary myth. Just like our current age, there were bouts of starvation, disease, war, pestilence and, gee whiz, life expectancy averages came down. But the idea that living as a hunter gatherer, or even as someone without "modern" medicine results automatically in shorter lifespans is bunk.
This part just chaps my ass. What can be achieved in a sustainable fashion? Well, not shale oil. That is so painfully obvious that I am truly baffled why you bring it up as the VERY HEART (dunh, dunh, duhn, duuuunnnhhhh!) of the argument. There is no argument. It is flatly not sustainable. To think so is to be deluded. It is to be non-scientific. It is to be kinda, well, dumb. To have long rambling discussions of whether it can be done with coal plants creating electricity to warm the ground, or nukes to do the same, or certain kinds of microbes to process the material, is insane. Of course it can be done. DUH. The problem is we know it is not sustainable. Why continue hitting yourself in the head with a hammer when we pretty much know that it will not improve your health? Why keep doing something that is going to continue a paradigm that is doomed to failure? Why prop up the dead guy?
Ah, yes. Elitism. That wonderful scary word that conservatives love to drag out when logical argument is too tough to maintain. What the hell does it mean?
That neighbor of mine is putting solar collectors on his roof and growing his own food. That elitist!
Hey, Bob is getting to work on a bicycle. That elitist!
Essentially the use of this term is that of pounding down the nail that sticks up. Calling someone an elitist is the same as dragging someone off the ladder of success. It is social control. I imagine that Jesus and Buddha and Gandhi and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and so many others who had the temerity to challenge the status quo were called "elitist," or worse.
Next, oilmanbob.
Yup, those who want to improve things should just go kill themselves. Perhaps if we mounted chippers in our Hummers and we picked up bums on the streets and tossed them in to collect the fat and use it for biodiesel? You up for that too, oilmanbob?
How the hell can you be an extreme ecologist? As opposed to an extreme technologist? Let's see. The extreme ecologist wants the planet to live within natural boundaries. The extreme technologist wants to use up ALL the resources and grow the population to its highest point before crashing it and causing even more untold deaths than a rational deindustrialization plan would.
Yeah, extreme ecologist. Hoo haa.
Next, odograph
Yes, I read it. As opposed to the few here who openly admit not reading my "rants."
My point is not that we can or can't produce oil from shale oil, the question is should we. To debate this without the reference point that shale oil is ridiculously unsustainable and strikingly irresponsible, is well kinda Orwellian.
Next, OilCeo
The reason I say this again and again is you often seem to forget this inconvenient truth. Like the builders of perpetual motion machines who are shown the laws of thermodynamics again and again, the posters here seem to suffer the same flaw. Yeah, we know that it is not sustainable and can never be so, but let's just gab on and on and on about how many technos we can fit on the head of shale oil operation. Maybe if you talk enough, it will come true like Tinkerbell?
Finally, tomruen
The most sensible post, even more than mine, is that posted by Tom Ruen. No need to elaborate.
Yet my opening essay, phrased this issue in terms like "insanity", concluded that the EROEI was terrible, that this would never work, and that we would be far better off investing in conservation measures. That's why your rant didn't make much sense to me, and I just presumed that you jumped to conclusions based on reading the small portion that was originally posted.
RR
I agree with your conclusions. I did jump the gun posting so early, but as is usual, my comments did develop relevance as the discussion unfolded. Though I did not know the content of the unposted material, I rather presciently nailed the tenor of the commentary to follow. I.E. all the talk about using nukes and coal and natural gas to cook up some synth oil.
Your post is excellent. Please do not confuse my "rant" as being against actual scientific discussion of the thermodynamics of shale oil. Anyone with a modicum of science education should be able to see the folly of shale oil. It requires no "discussion." I liken the posts as to the discussion one experiences after a horse race. We know the winner, yet people will still argue that the three-legged blind horse could have won if only the jockey would have gotten off and pushed.
Good job and keep up the good work.
Cherenkov
The techies would push for anything that would keep industrial society going, no matter what the cost to the environment or the planet's health.
The greenies would push for renewable energy and living within the parameters of the natural world, even if it meant a simpler lifestyle.
The oil drum is great because we're playing out the politics of the 21st Century every day right here.
Unfortunately, most Americans remain oblivious to these questions, so the choices will ultimately be made by a very small minority of educated and politically connected elites.
I had never really thought about it before, but I guess that's how I view myself: a techie who thinks green. I am optimistic about the future, and believe technology will play a big part in preventing a massive die-off, but this is going to require us all to "think green". We are going to have to make some big sacrifices, and even then I am not completely confident that we can avoid the big die-off. But I am mildly optimistic, and constantly thinking about how we can muddle our way through.
RR
I have a hard time asking people to make sacrifices even if I can be a little gleefull when gross stupidity faces hard reality and wastefull habits have to be adjusted. I rather figure out how to get good things in a more efficient way.
I think our western culture will come thru this perfectly ok but mismanaged countries, regions and lots of people will live poorer lives. I dont think we will have a die-off unless we get some kind of panic induced warfare.
A subtle point, likely to be missed by far too many readers of TOD. Hard to imagine that in today's America's, walking somewhere on a summer day does seem to be a sacrifice, and not simply a chance to enjoy another nice day (and for those living in places where the weather is 'unbearable' - there is a reason why people didn't live in such places in large numbers 50 or 100 years ago).
Also 10', 12', 14'& 16' ceilings, seersucker cotton and white linen suits.
No one's humidity is worse than ours*. If climate were the only criteria, New Orleans would not be here. But it is the "Essential City". A city needs to be here.
* Except Amazon river ports.
I absolutely do not want to sacrifice my car but I only use it a few times per week unless I have some transient commuting need. I use it more often during wintertime when the weather makes bicycling very uncomfrotable with freezing rain or packed snow freezing into uneven ice on the bicycle lanes. All weather exept +/- 3 degrees C is fairly good weather. I also cheat when it is -20 C but that only happens for a week or two on average. Now it is +29 and not especially humid, when it gets a few degress higher I realy start to wish for an AC in my car. I dont have one since it made my car cheaper and a could afford one about a year less old. Its a small Skoda Felicia that use less the 7 l per 100 km and I will soon need to buy a new car, probably a small diesel. I live in a favorable climate where most of the climate control need is heating.
What has limited my car use is my need for exercise to stay healthy and during my last 3 years of studying also my economy. I could have bough a brand new car but why take the value depriciation hit for the first few thousands of km? The bicycle lane network helps to motivate bicycling and I prefer to travel by train if the schedule fits and my goal is a town. This gets easier with time as train service is improved.
The main reason for buying a small car were the capital cost, not the fuel cost. If I get rich I will for nerdy reasons buy a plug in hybrid and buy bicycles more often to have a better spare bicycle.
Studying for three years were an econiomical sacrifice but I mostly see it as a kind of investment. Apart from that I dont feel like I have made sacrifices when my car use have gone up or down, I have changed it to fit what I wanted to do with my life. But then I live in a society with parallell transportation infrastructures, all of them slowly improving with some multi year lapses in road maintainance.
You brag abourt being dynamic and adaptive, I use to take such statemnts as litteral truths as long as any error in them mostly affects the people making the statements. You have other good things we admire over here, your constitution and your masterfull logistics for instance. We have a lack of checks and ballances over here in Sweden, it more or less work on politicians volontary good will and that is not fully dependable.
This is one reason peak oil is such an interesting topic - it offers a certain reality based hope that the way America currently exists will be forced to change. The problem is, it is hard to imagine a way for America to change for the better under the current social, political, and economic structures/conditions.
I am not saying that it won't happen, merely that your idea of change not being sacrifice already is very likely to sound bizarre to most Americans. Maybe I am wrong, and most Americans will freely give up their suburban existence in a car to live better lives in terms of sharing their lives with other people, but I certainly don't expect to see it.
one must give up what was to have what will be.
I am definitely a greenie but will not endorse anything just because it has a "renewable" or sustainable" label attached to it.
Ethanol looks to me like a giant-scale industrial ag operation that will deplete topsoil and will have a very questionable energy return. And, there was an article the other day in the Denver Post noting the pinto-bean farmers in the Four Corners area are switching to sunflowers to grow fuel crops.
We had this entire argument back in the '70s and '80s, and the answer finally came down to "Appropriate Technology."
Basically, smaller-scale technologies that were less wasteful and tended to be renewable. We got started in on it, but then got waylaid by the "morning-in- America" full-scale dive into consumer society.
Now we're in a fix ...
I think biofuels divides green into two camps: those that want to move ahead with life as we know it and those who don't.
Ethanol offers an opportunity to fuel vehicles with less impact on the environment and far, far less on the climate. The only reason to oppose it is because you hope that there will be no solutions and mankind can't continue life as we know it.
Technical rigor has nothing to do with it. Politics does.
I strongly disagree. I have nothing personally against ethanol, but the way we make it in the U.S. today it has a great impact on the environment (herbicides, pesticides, soil depletion, aquifer depletion) and the greenhouse gas emissions are only a small improvement over gasoline due to the poor EROI. So, you are dead wrong to say "the only reason to oppose it....". There are better solutions, and much more ecological ones that we should be pursuing.
RR
The World Watch Institute gives a return on fossil fuels of 8 for Brazilian ethanol from sugar and cites massive carbon offsets. So your points in that regard are inaccurate.
What is a "better" solution for a tropical country than sugar-based ethanol? And even if ethanol is the second best solution for the same country, why should it be discarded?
There is nothing at all deceptive about it, because I am not applying it more broadly. I specifically indicated that I am talking about the U.S.
I have no problems with ethanol in Brazil. I think it may make sense for them, provided they aren't consuming rain forest and mining topsoil. EROEI is not the entire story, you know. But here in the U.S., we don't have a great EROEI. Ethanol in the U.S. is mostly a sham, although it may make some sense in some areas of the Midwest. Outside those areas, it makes no sense at all the way we do it now.
RR
I do think that Brazil's experience with ethanol is among the most important sucesses in developing alternative transportation fuels that the world has to draw on. I think it will be expanded by Brazil and replicated elsewhere - Thailand next.
I do not think that ethanol alone can solve oil shortages, nor do I think it stands alone as the best solution. However, I can not think of any solutions - tried or proposed - that I would call better.
I think the US can better prepare for ethanol as a fuel supplement by reducing import tariff's than by massiove subsidies for local production - same for the EU.
Cheers, guys!
- able to be maintained
- exploiting natural resources without destroying the ecological balance of a particular area
If the stricture of sustainability was applied to all the proposed techno fixes re. peaking oil etc. presented at TOD there'd be damned little to discuss, except perhaps, how to go about dismantling this toxic civilization.For thoughts and ideas on that subject read Derrick Jensen's ENDGAME
Library Journal Review:
Jensen, Derrick. Endgame. Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization. c.512p. ISBN
1-58322-730-X.
Jensen, Derrick. Endgame. Vol. 2: Resistance. c.432p. ISBN 1-58322-724-5.
ea. vol: Seven Stories. Jun. 2006. bibliog. pap. $18.95. SCI
Activist Jensen's absorbing and insightful writings and speeches have placed
him in the vanguard of the environmental movement. For some time, he tried
to work within the system, but ultimately he realized that we cannot "vote
our way to justice or shop our way to sustainability." In this two-volume
work, the final part of a rough trilogy that includes A Language Older Than
Words and The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen hopes to encourage those who
care passionately about our planet's ecological crisis to become more radical and militant. Our industrial global economy, he argues in Volume 1,
creates untenable and infinite demand, poisons our bodies, pollutes our
surroundings, and leads to domination by the greediest. Such degradation of
the natural world has to be stopped before every living thing is destroyed.
Since those corporations that abuse the earth will not change their
ruthlessly aggressive behavior, and since governments on the whole support
corporate interests, counterviolence is an appropriate response. In Volume
2, Jensen supports this controversial premise with intelligent and logical
arguments, analogies, dialogs, personal experience, and facts. Written with
passion, anger, frustration, hope, and even humor, this massive work is
highly recommended for public and academic libraries.-Ilse Heidmann,
Washington State Lib., Olympia
Jesus! no wonder this country is in such sorry shape with such quivering jellyfish urging caution while watching it continue to sink into a fascist dictatorship. Pathetic. We deserve everything that's coming to us, and it is surely on its way.
What you should have noticed is, that I recommended (advocated if you will) reading a book. And horror of horrors one that might be construed as controversial -- oh my god! One that spends about nine hundred pages discussing the origins of violence in this sick culture; abusive relationships between the powerful and vulnerable, from the family to ultimately this culture's war against all life on this planet. And, oh yes, extensive discussion is devoted to exploring the philosophical issue of violence as defense against violence. Now, if you think I should try and distill that nine hundred pages down to some sound bite to fit your puny attention span, well forget it. I'm not some translator for Mr. Jensen. He speaks for himself with an intelligence and eloquence I'm incapable of. Thus, I merely offer my recommendation. If the issue of violence, offensive or defensive, is of concern to you, try taking a HUGE risk and sneak down to your local library and check the book out under someone else's name. If you by chance live in Washington State, feel free to use mine: Reed Thomas
Oh my, how provocative. Were you hoping that I respond in kind? Why can't I just buy the book? You did list a price. The book actually sounds interesting, I definitely want to have a look, at least. I also wouldn't have any problem using my own name at the library.
One bit of advice, however. You should probably be a bit kinder in your responses. I am after all responsible for affording you some of the scant attention you are getting.
My apologies for the overheated reply. Following on what I felt was an unwarranted warning against reading a book that while certainly controversial, is not, I would hope, yet eligible for banning or soon burning, my defenses were hair triggered by what I construed as an accusatory tone to your comment. Sorry to be so rude. Your rebuke is well taken.
Certainly, purchasing the book would no doubt benefit Derrick Jensen, who is not getting wealthy off his efforts. I assure you that my effort to drawing attention to his work was not motivated by a desire to draw attention to myself. I lack the communicative skills to enjoy it. With a final apology I wish to withdraw from the fray.
Derrick Jensen's website: http://derrickjensen.org/
Jensen's books are in stock at one of my local bookstores. I will be reading tonight. I am at least curious.
Your open-mindedness has completely disarmed me. I can't refrain from one more comment. From comments you've posted previously, I assume you are, well, perhaps a political moderate conservative to libertarian. The willingness to read, what I expect will not be a congenial philosophy with any incremental lack of prejudgment is both unusual and exemplary. Most individuals who harbor an enthusiasm for political ideas tend to become more conservative with age. With a bent toward contrariness I've gone the other direction, spanning the spectrum from conservative to Ayn Rand objectivist to left libertarian. While still harboring libertarian sentiments, a growing awareness of the collapsing state of the environment and the limits of finite resources has finally brought me to the realization that the problem is not which political philosophy offers a solution, but that civilization itself is the problem. It is unsustainable. This is where Jensen is. He's a "reformed" engineer (Colorado School of Mines). He understands the lingo. It's not that he doesn't understand science and technology. Good luck with your ideological confrontation. You are now warned. May your courage hold.
*There was no way I was going to read Vol. I before Vol. II. That would take days. But if his writing is a tenth as good as anything I've read in 'Resistance' - it is next.
Unless this is a total put on I am just fucking amazed. Hope it spreads. I almost didn't come back here to check if there was a response. Whew.
I'm really glad you tried him. He was recommended as an author I should read by someone I highly respected as a writer, and I took the bait and have been hooked ever since. I find him, as you say, extremely convincing. Maybe it has partly to do with how reading him seems like carrying on a conversation with someone who is passionate and deeply cares for all forms of life. It's easy reading for being so long, but I feel like I don't want it to stop. I've read nearly all his work. He offers a subscription service at his website. You purchase a time period where you have access online to all the writing projects he's working on as he revises and adds portions etc. fiction and non fiction, as well as interviews he has conducted with other writers and activists. I have no writing skills, but it's a trip to see how someone who does, goes about it. He sends emails on his feelings, updates on his efforts, and various personal problems he may be experiencing. I wish he was a close personal friend, but subscribing to his writing club is the next best thing. Enjoy.
I'm an asshole. Sorry. I'm so excited at CEO's response I'm willing to shower apologies anywhere needed. Seriously, I did over react to your comment, and will try to keep my inner jerk on a much shorter leash.
Mainly we all tend to agree here, that's just obfuscated by a few factors:
#1 natural competitiveness and not wanting to appear to "back down", even though it's obvious we're most often in agreement and just stating the same thing in different ways.
#2 Not so much among the regulars, but there are a lot of people who have been told in 27 different ways complete with statistics that oil shale is workable (that Kunstleresque article on it, cited above, is a must-read!) or that nukes are really clean and safe or that we can continue our Way Of Life on sugarcane. There's some friction during the process of further enlightenment.
#3 this is a biggie, going back to an Amish or even hunter-gatherer-scavenger lifestyle scares the shit out of almost all of us, and we tend to bluster more when we're scared, and especially when we're scared but can't quite yet consciously face, to ourselves, that we're scared.
You know, the "end is near" guy with the sandwitch board is an old cultural icon.
For what it's worth, I was up early and saw the original short post, and your response. I was puzzled because "we can grow indefinitely" is not an idea I saw advanced.
To be honest, I think you are painting more moderate positions with a corucopian brush - for your rhetorical purposes.
I don't understand the rational behind turning shale into synfuel. Why not:
- coal ->electricity -> electric cars -> exergy
- coal -> CTL -> synfuel -> internal combustion engine -> exergy
instead of :It seems to me that switching to electric cars makes a lot more sense!
RR
You can't haul produce to market (commercial or farmers) with a Prisus. You need at least a full size 1/2 ton pickup minimum.
To haul a livestock trailer takes a minimum 3/4 or 1 ton preferrably with duals and the biggest engine you can get when fully loaded.
To haul grain out of the field takes the same pickup as the cattle trailer and to haul it from the farm to market takes a semi tractor trailer rig.
If you want to keep eating, farmers have to have the necessary liquid fuels to grow and transport their food items.
And hauling everything to the farm needed to live and operate on the farm takes a full size pickup as well.
So we are going to continue to need liquid fuels and full size trucks in significant quantities.
The reality is that you will get me out of my full size American pickup when you can pry my cold dead fingers off the steering wheel <BG>.
Neither I nor the majority of Americans are going to give up our way of life without one hell of a fight, and we vastly outnumber those who want to force us to live some type of primitive lifestyle.
I am not going back to working the fields with a horse or ox! You folks in the cities will starve first.
We need to find a way to dramatically reduce the population and to find ways to supply the liquid fuels needed for a sustainably sized population to live as good or better than we are living today.
I think we're going to keep right on doing what we're doing, and bombing babies on the other side of the world or whatever it takes. If that's not palatable to Americans now, it sure will be once they're on low rations.
And, we're gonna have us the biggest, most convoluted, violent, and gut-splattering game of Last Man Standing we can have! You know like those things with the dominoes, where some people set up this big complicated thing and then it all comes down? Imagine a really big complicated one - the only reason it doesn't happen at once is there is some size and complexity to the thing, but they do all fall down.
Today the butcher could get by with a pickup type Prius and/ or Ford hybrid Escape to haul a couple of beeves back.
Economics will force a change in farming (and eating) habits. Grain feedlot beef may become much less common.
Farmers may do less shifting of stock between pastures than today. Grain harvesting requires fuel and is often done today by contractors with their own equipment. No till farming has been growing for years. And some of those abandoned rail lines in the Midwest may come back.
95% of the time I see farmers driving large pickups, they don't need it. There is, I suspect, little reason that 90+% of your driving could not be done with a Prius or Ford hybrid Escape, with the big one used "occasionally".
BTW: My grandfather tossed 6 tons of hay a day in the winter to his cattle with a Ford Ranger pickup (beefed up options). No half ton required.
The life I live today is not a primitive lifestyle (it was last winter as I had no natural gas > hot water & heat except a little floor fan electric heater) but extrmeely enjoyable, I know hundreds on my neighbors, walk most places or take the electric streetcar. I think it is a superior lifestyle despite using 6 gallons/month.
Neither I nor the majority of Americans are going to give up our way of life without one hell of a fight, and we vastly outnumber those who want to force us to live some type of primitive lifestyle.
I am not going back to working the fields with a horse or ox! You folks in the cities will starve first.
We need to find a way to dramatically reduce the population and to find ways to supply the liquid fuels needed for a sustainably sized population to live as good or better than we are living today.
This would be the most repugnant statement I've seen on this site. It combines the misanthropy & scientific illiteracy of the "dieoff" brigade with the "up yours - I'll consume all I want" attitude of the cornucopians and produces an invitation for a conspiracy to commit genocide. My conscience compels me to speak up.
Some facts are in order:
- Mr Kutz is putting up a straw opponent. The real threat to his lifestyle is not the fact that some people want to take his pickup truck off him. It's the fact that he'll go broke paying for the petrol.
- No matter how low the population gets, the Kutz lifestyle is unsustainable. Being so incredibly wasteful of all types of resources (oil being only the first one on the list), you would have to reduce the global population very far indeed. By the time there are few enough people in the world for everyone to drive pickup trucks & pursue what some people consider the "American way of life" and still have an ecologically sustainable world, the division of labour that produces the goods & services involved would be economically impossible.
- If Mr Kutz wants to turn the energy crisis into a "lifeboat ethics" scenario, he'll find other people can play that, as well. If there's a lifeboat with 20 people and an oaf with a pickup truck wants to eat as much of the rations at the other 19 combined, my money will be on the 19.
Finally, readers should not let themselves be blackmailed by the "you'll all starve if you don't give us farmers all the cheap oil we want" line. US agriculture is the most oil-intensive in the world. US agricultural exports only exist because of the massive agricultural subsidies handed out by the US Congress. If US agricultural production drops because rising oil prices render it uneconomic, there are plenty of other countries, with much less oil intensive agricultural sectors, which will be only too happy to replace it. Many of these countries have millions of farmers who have recently been put out of business by exports of subsidised US agricultural products. If the economic situation changes, they will be in business again.On Fact no 1., I have to admit that I sure will go broke paying for the gas (unless I can con the "Government" to give me a subsidy <BG>)
Fact 2., I would disagree with your statments. I can very easily grow enough soybeans on the farm to crush the oil out of and then convert that soyoil to biodiesel and run diesel tractors and my diesel trucks. With these, I can grow enough food for myself and enough extra to sell or swap to maintain my "country" lifestyle. But, as I am old and retired it is much easier to buy the fuel. But I can switch if I have to.
No 3. If I was 20 again I could eat that much, but not anymore. As to survival, I would bet that there will be a lot more farmers survive a major depression than city people? (Farmers are the "Lifeboat" for the city people!)
And finally, your comments on the operatiing efficiency of American farmers vs those of other countries is just plain wrong. On the basis of food produced per unit of energy input, American farmers are more productive than any farmers in the entire world. A good part of that is that most American farmers are working much larger fields that are easier to apply the economics of scale to reduce energy input and costs.
As to subsidies to farmers, there are subsidies to farmers of one kind or another in every country and Europe in particular provides much higher levels of subsidies than in the USA.
Isn't it nice that we live in a country and an age where we can have very different opinions on things and can openly discuss (and cuss <BG>) them while still being friends! On this, I was particularly impressed with the April 5 comments on Mr. Deffeye's web site where he detailed how after having a very energetic debate that he went out to supper with the other side and had a good evening of discussion and camadarie!
We need to find a way to dramatically reduce the population and to find ways to supply the liquid fuels needed for a sustainably sized population to live as good or better than we are living today.
He also says:
Isn't it nice that we live in a country and an age where we can have very different opinions on things and can openly discuss (and cuss <BG>) them while still being friends!
This assumes that we both live in the same country. We don't. Observant readers will have noted in my previous post that I'm not using American spelling (I live in a country where some people are currently on trial for thought-crime. I don't agree with what they're thinking, but I'll defend to the death their right to think it).
Finally, on the subject of agricultural subsidies. I agree that farmers in the European Union get more subsidies than in the US, though I wouldn't call it a huge amount more. Farmers in Japan get huge subsidies too (& they probably take the prize in terms of subsidy per unit of output), though at least they don't generate great surpluses that are used to drive farmers in other countries broke. Apart from that, however, most countries in comparison give little or no subsidy to farmers.
Check out the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters, which has been trying to get both the US & the EU to stop corrupting global agricultural markets. They've got a web site & here is their list of members:
http://www.cairnsgroup.org/map/index.html
Please, however, don't hold me responsible for the actions or policies of any of the governments involved. There is not a government on Earth that I support.
RR
I do not know if that is what they did.
As an example: I was emailing my sister, we exchange emails just about daily, and I was saying in response to her claim to be "liberal" that she's not liberal, she's whatever is convenient. Where she lives, it's socially an advantage to claim to be "liberal" but in fact she's opposed to anything that is anti-business in any way shape or form, she's a good Army wife, drives the biggest car she can get and drives it everywhere (would not be caught dead walking, she used to walk more years ago but basically does all she can to avoid it now), likes all that is large, ostentatious, and expensive, heck last night went to a Gordon Biersch which I don't think any real liberal would be caught dead in. I concluded that she's not anything, just does what's most convenient. Politically, economically, etc, she's a member of the Most Convenient Party.
She replied to that by "Who, anywhere, isn't for the most convenience?"
There you have it, life gauged by the most convenience = the most good.
All I could do is say "Oops, you're right, I got all mixed up, sorry". Mentioning many noble people and philosophies over time that eschew convenience and comfort for principles wasn't going to get me anywhere. St. Francis of Assissi, Jesus, Zen, and almost every memorable philosopher and wise man/woman from the Greeks to Einstein in his legendary carlessnesss and socklessness, to my sister, never existed. The Japanese Tea Ceremoney pales in comparison to Lipton's Instant.
And this is the one of us who actually managed, by the skin of her teeth, to go to a good preparatory high school. Me, I'm a public school dropout.
Life As Convenience. Isn't that what inspired the Nazis to build the Autobahnen and their Kraft durch Freud cars? To use their enemies as slave labor to save themselves the work? Isn't Life As Convenience, if not the actual root of all evil, pretty damned close to it?
This is what we have to deal with here.
versignificant evil people, by history.
This really is a point that we should both stress when teaching our children, and internalize ourselves, that sould we wind up as an "evil" person we won't realise it at the time, the human animal can rationalise almost any degree of horrific conduct as good in terms of whatever more or less arbitrary value system they have cooked up in their heads at the time.
should be: "very significant evil people"
sorry!
This pretty well matches any reasonable analyses of the people who ignore the facts of peak oil and are unwilling/unable to examine their own behavior and try to do the right thing in reguards to the world.
It is of great importance to resist the temptation to call anyone "evil" simply because they disagree with me.....
Roger Conner known to you as ThatsItImout
Unlike conventional oil where the EROEI slowly declines as we extract the easy stuff first, the EROEI for oil sands and I would assume shale, can increase as technology is applied.
That doesn't mean I'm necessarily if favor of them doing it, but let's not thrown around garbage math.
Got a link? I have searched for some good numbers for tar sands, but have never found a good analysis. I know from experience what the number is for conventional oil, and I know that tar sands is lower than that. But I haven't ever seen a good analysis. I suspect 3.5 is in the ballpark. What do you suggest the actual number is?
RR
I'd just like to throw this out there and see what people have to say about it.
There are at least 15 large companies currently producing synthetic crude oil from Canadian oil sands. They are operating on dozens of "leases" in Alberta around the Fort McMurray area. Leases in an ever expanding area seem to be being bought up. There are numerous projects in the works slated to come on-line until past 2012. These companies are working together in consortiums and independently(some are doing both). There is clearly money being made. This business has been in the works for years.
These companies seem to be spending between $15 and $25 to produce a barrel of oil. In this case they are actually "producing" oil, not just pumping it out of the ground. This oil is then being sold for $70 a barrel.
So the question is this. They are basically using $25 worth of hydrocarbon energy to get $70 worth of hydrocarbon energy. Is this relevant to the discussion of EROEI? Can we use this as a quick and dirty estimate in this case to make a rough determination of 3:1 EROEI? If not, can someone give a simple explanation why this type of comparison is not valid.
How could these companies be so successful if they were outputting less than they were were inputting? I know dollars are not units of energy, but can't we use them as some type of proxy here?
This is in general a good approach to validate the EROEI estimates. Where it would break down is if you were using a relatively cheap source of energy, like coal, to produce the $70 worth of hydrocarbon. If coal was the primary source of energy, you might get by with $15 of coal (for illustrative purposes) to get $70 of hydrocarbons. But, your approach does give a reasonable ballpark estimate.
RR
Regarding the energy quality discussion, there is 'theoretical energy quality' and 'real' energy quality. Theoretical is the ability to do work. Real is what society needs right now and is willing to pay for. Natural gas is as high of quality as crude oil, but right now the market needs liquid fuels, hence using nat gas to steam the tar sands.
Also,
This assumes that all of the energy input is electrical. If electricity is 40% of the total, then it would drop the EROI from 3.5 TO 1 to 3.2 TO 1. (Net energy is EROI-1, so net energy, the 'free energy' if you will is 2.5. 40% of that is 1.0 and 30% of that is .3. 3.5-.3=3.2 ). This is called quality corrected EROI and Cutler Cleveland wrote a paperon it (and Im trying to write an update)
Over the long term, this might help bring energy costs into balance through "energy arbitrage" and maybe help sort out questions like these. If companies are in the practice of converting cheap energy into expensive energy at a net energy loss, then a global energy-unit market would help bring the relative cost of different forms of energy into balance. The goal would be to ensure that oil or gas creation schemes with negative energy returns are also money-losing schemes.
I have recently noticed an increase in oil shale coverage in the media, so this seems like a good time to take a look at the potential for oil shale to meet a portion of our energy wants (as opposed to "needs").
And Barb said...
Under U.S. securities laws, executives and spokespersons for publicly traded companies, like Shell, must be extremely careful in what they say to the investing public. The penalities for making false or misleading statements can be enormous. Consequently, the statements made by this Shell executive were either completely straitforward or likely a bit pessimistic on the prospects for Shell's technology in order to avoid shareholder suits.
This fellow's remarks were lawyered up accordingly, and should not be considered to be cheerleading by any stretch of the imagination unless the speaker has gone completely off the reservation.
The cheerleaders in the whole scheme are analysts and brokers employed by the various and numerous investment and brokerage houses.
Now thats the damn truth!! And you can include the newsletter peddlers. The sharks have arrived and the feeding frenzie has begun. In fact just today right here on the home page under ads by google was a link to "the Next American Oil Boom." Its gone now but was there a few hours ago. Its an article by Nick Badaili who is a spin-meister for Stansberry & Associates, a cabal of newsletter purveyers.
Thats a commercial endeaver but now I'm finding all kinds of articles and news pieces directly quoting from him.
He has a sister article floating around the web called "The U.S. Government's Secret Colorado Oil Discovery." They've been chasing Colorado black gold for over a hundred years now but the word "Discovery" in the title implies something new eh? Well, it gets worse.
Here's a cut and paste lifted from the piece that I'm finding pasted into news articles in some of that ramped-up media coverage Robert is referring to...
There are over 16,000 square miles of oil shale in the Green River formation...
Each acre holds 2 million barrels of oil -- it's the most concentrated energy source on earth, according to the Energy Department.
The last half of that last sentence may be true. Estimates vary widely but the general consensus is from 1 to 2 TRILLION barrels might get squeezed out of the gazillions and gazillions of tons of rock in the formation. Thats alot of molassis, more than the current total global reserve of light sweet crude.
But did Badiali give us molassis or malarky? Actually those are not energy department estimates as he says. Those estimates come from a Rand Corp article authored by James Bartis et al. Bartis is hyped as a senior policy annalysist and the d.o.e. used his report as a policy basis. It was also relied on heavily by researchers and writers of the Energy Policy Act of 05... staffers for co-sponsors Pete Damenici and Joe Barton.
Further, what Badiale said is... 16 THOUSAND sq miles of oil shale lands with 2 million barrels per acre.
So here's a free math lesson for Badiali and everyone else who didn't take the time to question if this is really molassis or malarky coming from him before they so ignorantly quoted him...
There are 640 acres in a sq mile.
16,000 sq miles is 10,240,000 acres.
10,250,000 X 2,000,000 = 20,480,000,000,000
Least all those zeroes fry anyone's brain as they did mine thats over TWENTY TRILLION BARRELS!!
Did this self-proclaimed oil expert make a legitimate mistake or did he intentionally jazz the numbers?
According to the Rand document the vast majority of the reserves in the 16,000 sq mile formation, over a trillion barrels of it, lay under 1200 contigious square miles in the Piceance Basin within the formation. If you do the math on that it does come out to about 1.3 million barrels per acre.
But Badiali didn't tell us that. Maybe because 16,000 miles is a whole lot bigger than 1200 miles and just maybe he didn't want to tell us that this mother lode lies under as much as 500 to 1000 feet of overburden and veins extend to depths of 2000 feet below that.
Case in point Barb.