I am often asked about the “peak oil” theory. I’ve even had some people send me junk mail predicting when the date would come. Sometime in June, 2006, I recall. (Unsolicited investment advice: go very long!) I didn’t really pay attention. And yet many do. There are websites, books, email lists, conferences, and tracts of every sort promoting this doomsday theory (here is a google of the subject, and, yes, the domain name peakoil.com is taken). In millennialist language, these people say that the human race is on the verge of a massive turning point because oil is nearly depleted. You can fill in the rest.
A contrary view: civilization as we know it will grind to a halt without the energy we derive today from crude oil, and that’s in and of itself is motivation enough to make sure that future energy is widely available at prices people can afford. [Full Article]
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Charles,
I probably scan the same data about discoveries that you do, and there are significant finds being made – but they tend to be in the hundreds of mmbls, rather than the old days of billion-barrel discoveries, and thats important when the world is using about 2 billion barrels a month.
A while ago, I did some modelling of Chinese energy demand, modelling it as a rural sector of 7* Bangladesh and an urban secotor of 4x South Korea circa 1980, and then plugged South Korean economic growth and per-capital oil demand into that.
Basically, I crunched out about a mmbl/day of extra Chinese demand, for each of the next ten years or so (South Korean per capita oil demand went up a lot in the 1980s).
A million barrels a day represents 20 decent offshore wells – and that just covers ‘marginal’ Chinese demand, over and above existing world demand.
Ian Whitchurch
The EE Times reported in Nov that a company called Sterling Energy Systems has developed an 11 meter parabolic reflector that tracks the sun and focuses it’s heat on a stirling engine that turns an A/C generator. A single dish generates 25kW, enough energy for 7 homes. A 100 mile by 100 mile farm would supply the needs of the entire country. I think this would make a good distributed energy system though. Neighborhoods could provide their own power, reducing the number of transmission lines needed. This could be the technology that steps in when oil prices start to rise.
–steve
Michael A. Clem,
perhaps you can tell this scientist exactly how the world economies will be capable of “business as usual” (ie. to “grow” exponentially, endlessly, to support out debt based money system) when the basic feedstock for economic output, energy, will be in decline?
Does the “change” to which you refer include the destruction of our debt based, fiat money, system? Is so, how will we avert the “devastating” effects of this?
First, I’ll say “you’re welcome” to everyone who has thanked me for my previous posts. I also appreciate all the interesting remarks that I have read here.
I wanted to briefly respond to a point that Greg and others have made. They stress that increasing energy prices won’t bring forth energy substitutes in sufficient quantity to replace declining hydrocarbon production, let alone meet the growing energy demand from China, etc. They go on to accuse Austrian economists of being apostles of unsustainable growth and obscurantist opponents of physics.
The “thermodynamics” criticism misrepresents Austrianism. There is nothing in Austrian economic theory which says that the economy must grow forever in defiance of the physical availability of energy. Indeed, even Mises expressly acknowledged Malthusian population concepts in his work (see for example his discussion of the law of returns in Human Action); the idea of physical limits to production is an integral part of Austrian thinking.
For my part, I previously said that human population and/or per capita energy consumption might have to decline in a transition to a post-hydrocarbon world. This Hubbert-friendly statement is consistent with both economics and thermodynamics; it is not contradicted by anything I have found in the theoretical writings of Mises or other Austrian school economists.
Okay, I get angry sometimes, and don’t make my points as well as I could. Vincent answered pretty well, already, but I guess I should still put in a word for myself.
I was trying to say that you’re confusing the current economy with economics. The current economy is, obviously, the current market and business activity. Economics, however, is not tied into any particular economy and holds truths that would apply to any economy.
Since our current economy is unfortunately tied into various government interventions, including central banking, it cannot remain the same, even if a decline in petroleum doesn’t occur.
The concept of “endless growth” is a concept of businessmen (or their critics), not economics. While the potential for wealth creation is infinite, at any particular point in time it is necessarily limited by available resources and productivity. And while control of the money supply is an important aspect of an economy, “wealth” is still goods and services, and money simply represents those goods and services. So, at least in one sense, money (fiat or otherwise) is secondary to actual goods and services, and thus, secondary to our concern about fuel and energy production.
Yes, our “economy” will change, and it could change drastically, I won’t deny that. My main point is that it’s not likely to happen suddenly, without sufficient warning for humans to adapt to the change, and I say this even granting that governments and politicians will likely try to deny the necessity of change. Economic consequences will be unavoidable.
As for Pollyann-ish faith in alternate energy development, I was reminded of Leonard Read’s essay, “I, Pencil”, (http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html)
wherein he stresses not just the division of labor in the marketplace, but the division of knowledge, as well. While this view might scare some people about the helplessness of the individual, the decentralization of knowledge can also be viewed as reassuring.
If the handful of people who post on the Mises blog couldn’t make a pencil, much less most of the other common goods and appliances we all have, it’s not surprising that we few don’t have the answer to the energy problem. And yet, pencils and all these other goods and such are made, in great quantities, every year. Is it “faith” to expect pencils to be available every year, at least as long as people want to buy them?
Who knows who will come up with efficient energy alternatives? Or how many people it will take? Or even what forms such alternative sources will take? Perhaps, as has already been suggested, we won’t discover any radically new or efficient energy source, but will simply incrementally increase our efficient use of current sources. But we do know that, if petroleum declines, there will be ever-increasing economic incentives for efficiency and alternatives, and a ready market for them. If that’s “faith”, then make the most of it.
The myth of “peak oil” article discussed commodity markets, various grades of crude oil, markets, but did not prove that peak oil is a myth.
The peak oil thesis is that a finite resource being consumed at an exponentially increasing rate will reach a peak output and then decline until the resource is depleted.
The earth is a closed system with respect to mass. Oil combusted is not reusable. Exponentially increasing growth in burning oil means that every doubling time will consume more than had been used up until that time.
To prove that this is a myth the mathematics must be proven false or that the total mass of petroleum available is infinite. The article adresses neither issue.
Counter-myths of unknown sources of energy magically arriving just in time to replace oil as an energy source do not make peak oil a myth.
Biomass “oil” will be faced with the problem that the amount of land avilable is finite and food and fodder will compete with biomass for land available. Agriculture has been described as a process which turns petroleum into food.I have read that it requires 8 oil BTUs to capture 1 solar BTU. Oil is also used as the feedstock to produce fertilizer for growing biomass.
The author says that scientists and government are incapable of contributing to solving the energy problem. Nuclear energy, the only new source of energy developed in the past 100 years, was produced by the Manhattan Project during WW II. This was a collaborative effort between government and scientists.
Deregulation, building more refineries, more oil burning power plants, will not solve the energy crisis but will only hasten the arrival of the oil peak.
The myth of “peak oil” article discussed commodity markets, various grades of crude oil, markets, but did not prove that peak oil is a myth.
The peak oil thesis is that a finite resource being consumed at an exponentially increasing rate will reach a peak output and then decline until the resource is depleted.
The earth is a closed system with respect to mass. Oil combusted is not reusable. Exponentially increasing growth in burning oil means that every doubling time will consume more than had been used up until that time.
To prove that this is a myth the mathematics must be proven false or that the total mass of petroleum available is infinite. The article adresses neither issue.
Counter-myths of unknown sources of energy magically arriving just in time to replace oil as an energy source do not make peak oil a myth.
Biomass “oil” will be faced with the problem that the amount of land avilable is finite and food and fodder will compete with biomass for land available. Agriculture has been described as a process which turns petroleum into food.I have read that it requires 8 oil BTUs to capture 1 solar BTU. Oil is also used as the feedstock to produce fertilizer for growing biomass.
The author says that scientists and government are incapable of contributing to solving the energy problem. Nuclear energy, the only new source of energy developed in the past 100 years, was produced by the Manhattan Project during WW II. This was a collaborative effort between government and scientists.
Deregulation, building more refineries, more oil burning power plants, will not solve the energy crisis but will only hasten the arrival of the oil peak.
yes
Exponentially increasing growth in burning oil means that every doubling time will consume more than had been used up until that time.
But as has already been pointed out, the cost of oil would increase, reflecting the decline of available oil, so an exponential increase in the consumption of oil won’t occur. It wouldn’t be economically sustainable. People simply couldn’t afford it.
Inevitably, at some point, the cost of oil would be higher than the cost of alternative fuels, and consumption of oil would be dramatically decreased.
Oh this is just silly. Oil is a renewable resource; the unrenewable part is energy. You can make any hydrocarbon product from any hydrogen and carbon source given energy, and we know how to do that today… When oil itself becomes too expensive, we’ll use coal and methane for diesel (Sasol does this today) and gasoline synthesis. When coal becomes too expensive, we’ll use methane hydrates. When thats not appropriate we can use limestone and water, if we’re still sold on hydrocarbons then.
The energy is avaliable in our time horizon… because really it doesn’t make sense to talk about economies thousands of years in the future when the entire world is unrecognizable in every possible way. There is enough nuclear fuel for millions of years, and sometime before the thorium is gone we’ll figure out nuclear fusion and cheap solar power.
Oh sure, eventually we run out of energy and materials, but from all the idle commentary here, you would think its sometime in the next century or perhaps next millinium.
Not a chance. It will take more than a thousand years to suck the galaxy dry. Maybe we’ll figure something else out before all the juice is gone, but we won’t be eating soylent green in the next thousand years.
The article on the myth of peak oil did not disprove the thesis.
Peak oil is based upon three concepts:
1 The amount of oil available is finite
2 After combustion oil is not recyclable
3 A resource being used up at an exponentially increasing rate will reach a peak output and afterwards the supply will decrease to ultimate depletion.This is the mathematics of compounding.
The article discussed commodity trading, grades of crude oil, markets, but did not address any of the basic concepts of peak oil. Instead there is an appeal to the magical appearance of substitute sources of energy just in time to replace oil.
The blanket statement that scientists or government cannot contribute to development of new energy sources is refutable. Nuclear energy, the only new energy source developed in the last hundred years, was a product of the Manhattan project in WW II. This was a collaborative effort between scientists and government.
Biomass as an energy source will pit land area used to grow food and fodder against land used for biomass. Land is a finite resource. Modern agriculture is described as the process of turning petroleum into food. I have read that it requires 8 oil based BTUs to produce 1 BTU of food. The objective of biomass fuels would require 1 oil BTU to capture 8 solar BTUs.Part of the oil input is in the form of fertilizer.
Appeal to water and limestone as an energy source is naive or disengenuous.
Deregulation, building more oil refineries, or power plants will hasten the arrival of the peak oil point.
The article on the myth of peak oil did not disprove the thesis.
Peak oil is based upon three concepts:
1 The amount of oil available is finite
2 After combustion oil is not recyclable
3 A resource being used up at an exponentially increasing rate will reach a peak output and afterwards the supply will decrease to ultimate depletion.This is the mathematics of compounding.
The article discussed commodity trading, grades of crude oil, markets, but did not address any of the basic concepts of peak oil. Instead there is an appeal to the magical appearance of substitute sources of energy just in time to replace oil.
The blanket statement that scientists or government cannot contribute to development of new energy sources is refutable. Nuclear energy, the only new energy source developed in the last hundred years, was a product of the Manhattan project in WW II. This was a collaborative effort between scientists and government.
Biomass as an energy source will pit land area used to grow food and fodder against land used for biomass. Land is a finite resource. Modern agriculture is described as the process of turning petroleum into food. I have read that it requires 8 oil based BTUs to produce 1 BTU of food. The objective of biomass fuels would require 1 oil BTU to capture 8 solar BTUs.Part of the oil input is in the form of fertilizer.
Appeal to water and limestone as an energy source is naive or disengenuous.
Deregulation, building more oil refineries, or power plants will hasten the arrival of the peak oil point.
The article discussed commodity trading, grades of crude oil, markets, but did not address any of the basic concepts of peak oil. Instead there is an appeal to the magical appearance of substitute sources of energy just in time to replace oil.
The substitute energy source is nuclear. Theres enough economically recoverable uranium and thorium to run the global demand for energy for nearly a quarter billion years.
Appeal to water and limestone as an energy source is naive or disengenuous.
I never suggested water and limestone are energy sources; They are raw materials for hydrocarbon products in the absense of fossil fuels. The energy source is nuclear. You crack the carbon out of the limestone, as CO if you can, and hydrogen out of the water for synthesis gas, pass this gunk over catalysts and you get diesel fuel. It takes energy to crack, but I in no way assumed it was magically coming from nowehre.
“The substitute energy source is nuclear.”
–Dezakin
Caltech vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics David Goodstein agrees, but he doesn’t seem as optimistic as Dezakin:
“As things stand today, the only possible substitutes for our fossil-fuel dependency are light from the sun and nuclear energy. Developing a way of running a civilization like ours on those resources is an enormous challenge. A great deal of it is social and political…But there are also huge technical problems to be solved.”
http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/CaltechNews/articles/v38/oil.html, see also http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/CaltechNews/articles/v38/sage.html
“Theres enough economically recoverable uranium and thorium to run the global demand for energy for nearly a quarter billion years.”
I’m not sure about thorium, but other estimates that I’ve seen put uranium supply–if used to fuel current energy demands as a complete replacement for oil & gas–at between 50-75 years.
Perhaps more uranium exists further beneath the Earth’s crust. I would imagine that such areas will be about as economical to tap as the last drops of oil will be.
Simply saying that a resource will be used up at an exponentially increasing rate doesn’t make it true. What part of “increasing cost” do you not understand? How much are you, personally, willing to pay for a gallon of gasoline? $5? $10? $25? $100? At what point does the cost of gasoline get expensive enough for you to stop buying and using so much of it and start conserving or seeking transportation alternatives? Prices change to reflect both demand and supply, therefore, “the mathematics of compounding” cannot remain constant, especially once the supply of the resource starts declining.
I’m not sure about thorium, but other estimates that I’ve seen put uranium supply–if used to fuel current energy demands as a complete replacement for oil & gas–at between 50-75 years.
Thats very true: for light water reactors using the once through fuel cycle with uranium recoverable from known high grade ore bodies at todays price of uranium.
(Oh, thorium is about three times as plentiful as uranium in the earths crust.)
Perhaps more uranium exists further beneath the Earth’s crust. I would imagine that such areas will be about as economical to tap as the last drops of oil will be.
Indeed the imagination runs wild then:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.htm
http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm
http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2001/delfrari.htm
Nuclear energy’s price is gated not on fuel, but on infrastructure. A tenfold price hike in uranium only marginally effects the price of electricity. Indeed, uranium is economically recoverable from granite and even seawater at modestly more expensive electricity prices.
“At ten times the current price, seawater becomes a potential source of vast amounts of uranium”
Indeed, even sedimentary rock is a source of uranium and thorium. It is not analagous to petroleum.
Caltech vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics David Goodstein agrees, but he doesn’t seem as optimistic
Someone else who wants to bet against Simon. There are no technical issues preventing using entirely nuclear power for the energy needs of man. All fuel can be synthesized at an expensive premium, though not a crippling one.
Though it is almost a foregone conclusion there will be technological developments that extend the time horizon of civilization further still than my quarter billion years.
Good points, thanks for the info.
This dialogue just gets curiouser and curiouser.
Dezakin
Can you please enrol with the majority of the other economists for a quick class in physics 101. The session will define the fundamental difference between energy profit and financial profit. It is clear this professional group have not yet noticed and are not at all fluent with this vital distinction.
Mr. Clem
You are quite probably right that energy units will not be bought at prices that people cannot afford, therefore causing those units to experience a reduced consumption rate (although some players consume at any price – ie expanding military acting to secure wider dominion over shrinking resource bases. Please don’t call that a public policy externality to your economics. such ‘service delivery’ haunts the core of such economics – ie seeing all things only as a measurable extrinsic value destined for privatised profit making)
Those output units most certainly will not be produced at energy input levels that outstrip the energy return. It will become impossible as energy becomes too physically scarce to continue to provide hidden production subsidies, REGARDLESS OF MARKET PRICE
Without this expanding energy supply either available or affordable in volumes that can furnish growth, can you please outline your plan for avoiding global debt collapse and the concomitant end of the world as we know it?
You say the market gives good warning. Can you please estimate how long it will take to get your plan into place ahead of that debt collapse? Is there anything I can do to help? I am sure the deadline will be tight as I can see these signals now, but funnily enough, economists can’t. They are arguing that the rising price of oil is not permanent and has no connection to the geological fundamentals of depletion that have been found to be sound in on ground application so far without exception. Perhaps you might outline what a price signal does in fact look like such that it does trigger remedial market response rather than bland denial
Pedant
Thankyou for sharply distinguishing the fundamental flaws in the article itself. Possibly it was a good article that had been given the wrong title. Taken as a response to the title as a set exam question I ‘m afraid it has to be given a fail grade.
Thankyou for also so succinctly summarising the resource improbabilities facing these common aspirations for energy system evolution. Similar basic arithmetic can also be executed upon the nuclear dream, illustrating it has no hope of getting the necessarily enormous and ever-expanding capacity roll-out onto the ground, either in time, or within the investment bounds of the energy supply.
Can you please enrol with the majority of the other economists for a quick class in physics 101. The session will define the fundamental difference between energy profit and financial profit. It is clear this professional group have not yet noticed and are not at all fluent with this vital distinction.
I guess in your great wisdom you see it fit to revoke my degree. I’ve detailed where the energy comes from. There isn’t an energy loss in extracting uranium from low grade ores. You presume I don’t know what I’m talking about? Did you even check the citations?
“Oh sure, eventually we run out of energy and materials, but from all the idle commentary here, you would think its sometime in the next century or perhaps next millinium.” -Desakin.
Dezakin, thank you for the citations.
What about this one: http://www.world-nuclear.org/opinion/mcnamara.pdf (from the World Nuclear Assocation used in 2/3 cites you gave)?
From the section, “Getting through the Winter:”
“The effects of political instability are clearly seen in the historical parts of Fig 2. [The Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) 2004 chart for oil and gas liquids, captioned, "The peak of conventional oil supply is now predicted to be at 2008. The US, EU, Indonesia, and many others will be almost out of oil by 2020." Cited with approval by McNamara. -C] The energy supply and economic variations in decline will be far more extreme without a huge political effort. Conservation is the only way to reduce the impact of the decline and extend supplies while new energy systems are put in place. Transport policies must recognise the Energy Winter: Cancel all new roads and airports, stop production of SUVs and their spares, encourage virtual travel by internet wherever possible, electrify all railways, and eliminate non-essential world trade in favour of local independence. Investors should avoid unsustainable enterprises. Natural gas should be reserved by policy and legislation, for transport, not for electricity. Building and zoning regulations must focus on conservation and minimum travel. Manufacturers should be penalized for designing goods to fail quickly. Change is good for business, though not for sustainability. Scrapping SUVs in favour of safer, more efficient vehicles will be good for GM, and what is good for GM ….” [ellipsis in original -C] –The Coming Energy Winter and the Future of Fusion, Brendan McNamara, Leabrook Computing, Bournemouth brendan@leabrook.co.uk
Goodstein, ASPO, and others are practically ringing alarm bells. Now your own man McNamara writes of a significant “impact” and of the need for some drastic responses. And yet you answer that the conversation is “silly” and “idle”; that technological developments are “almost a foregone conclusion” (there’s that inevitability again); and, by your tone, you imply that those developments will be rapid enough to seamlessly bridge any unfortunate energy shortages during the transition to nuclear.
Why not even concede the possibility of a difficult transition?
Now your own man McNamara writes of a significant “impact” and of the need for some drastic responses.
McNamera isn’t ‘my’ man. The links I posted were demonstrative of the supply of nuclear fuel, and not necisarilly because I share policy objectives in the opinion section. Lets not reduce the debate to tribalism.
And yet you answer that the conversation is “silly” and “idle”; that technological developments are “almost a foregone conclusion” (there’s that inevitability again);
It is inevitable, but for the sake of argument I assume that technological development has stopped. I honestly don’t believe that nuclear fission will be the primary source of energy 300 years from now. I only use nuclear energy to demonstrate that even if technological progress halts completely, human civilization has enough energy for the furthest foreseeable future.
But do you honestly believe we’re near the apex of human knowledge? Humanity will tear out the heart of the sun before its cards are spent.
and, by your tone, you imply that those developments will be rapid enough to seamlessly bridge any unfortunate energy shortages during the transition to nuclear.
Because they’ve allready happened. We know how to turn coal into diesel fuel and gasoline. We have the technological ability to turn limestone, water, and nuclear energy into diesel fuel and gasoline to fuel our transportation infrastructure when the coal is gone. These are solved technologies.
Why not even concede the possibility of a difficult transition?
Now, I dont assume such transitions would be painless. If oil shot to 300 dollars per barrel because suddenly the oil wells ran very dry, it would likely trigger a global depression lasting at least five years, because the infrastructure for coal liquifaction and nuclear energy takes time and energy to build.
But whether the transition will come suddenly or gradually is a different subject altogether. My vote is on the gradual drift towards nuclear and solar energy.
Dezakin
The only degree of yours I am aware of through this forum is the degree of your misunderstanding regarding the fundamentals of energy.
You say there is no energy loss in extracting uranium from its ore. Really. What do you call the energy inputs that are committed to the mining, processing, distribution, generation, plant construction and decomissioning and waste handling phases of the process? Externalities?
Of course the energy cost of waste handling is hard to assess because we are not yet even close to an adequate answer to the issue. The inadequate methods available though are all highly energy intensive and, adding to their inadequacy, only deal with end of chain waste. No-one is yet remotely interested in residual mine site contamination. Can this continue to be ignored if primary extraction is ratcheted up exponentially as you would have it be? Or do we just cram our closet full of externalities so that our world view can continue to look plausible?
Like many people, you do not recognise the categorical differences between uranium ore and liquid hydrocarbons in regard to their readiness to work, and thus their overall efficiency in yielding quantities of NET energy. You are effectively equating a banana with a pomegranite in the ease and efficiency of sustaining oneself. (If you don’t know what a pomegranite is, it is because they do not work well as food for a fat, frantic and rapacious culture and have not been widely commerialised.) You rate the power potential of Uranium without any calculation of the substantive energy costs necessary to squeeze its economic lifeblood from the stone (now being masked by abundant cheap oil inputs).
With regard to the economist’s Rapture, that human innovation will invariably lift us up above this and any future problem, it is pertinent to note that both nuclear and modern-scale ‘renewable’ processes have developed and remain utterly dependant within the fossil fuel envelope. There has been zero discovery or development that has yet de-coupled or even explicitly sought to decouple that nexus. Oh that’s right. The market signals aren’t there yet.
Net energy accounting is the challenge that stands ahead of understanding the situation and the reality of future options. Why are economists so bad at it? When this profession finally wakes up to how fundamental and precious energy actually is within productive systems they will hopefully shift to base their economic modelling around a ledgering and auditing of the energy units moving through and between those systems and measure profit in terms of net energy positions and dividends. This can only occur though if their current mad advice doesn’t prevail long enough to kill us all first
Greg Wood, you asked, “How do each of these alternatives get developed, operated and distributed without petroleum inputs? It would require a completely new technology matrix.”
That is completely incorrect, because it assumes that at that point there would be no petroleum.
There will never be “no petroleum”, just as there is now “whale oil” although no one uses it. Yet 150+ years ago, “whale oil” was considered a critical resource.
Petroleum will not vanish, it will simply slowly rise in price until its price crosses the price of alternatives. Whatever those alternatives are. And when petroleum isn’t being used for motor fuel, there is all that much more left for fertilizer.
You can discuss the petroleum higher order goods that go into the “alternatives” to motor fuel all you want, I don’t mind. Yes, if petroleum supplies decrease the prices of those higher order goods will increase too. But for every use of petroleum there are alternatives that, today, cost more. As I said before, as each of these uses of petroleum are priced out of use, there will be that much more petroleum left over for the uses for which petroleum is still less expensive than any alternatives.
And because of this decreasing use, even though the price for petroleum will be higher than it’s “peak” supply price, what is left will last longer, and longer, until there is no use left for which petroleum is worth extracting.
That’s it.
RE: “First, whatever ends up replacing petroleum will come in its own good time, later than we’d like but probably sooner than we expect. It will come because it stores energy and power better than gasoline does and more cheaply to boot…”
This is an incredibly asinine statement. First up, energy has to exist before it can be stored. The energy stored in petroleum ultimately comes from the sun and required millions of years to finally end up there. Energy sources have to get their energy from some where and the facts are that there are no other energy sources on this planet that have a fraction as much extractable energy as petroleum does. Not nuclear, nor solar, nor wind, etc. When the oil runs out we, the human race, are basically screwed. The only choice will be to figure out how to live with orders of magnitude less working energy available per person, period. All this talk about economically motivated discovery of new energy sources is pure stupidity on the part of people that have no concept of science and what is physically possible… and this is the real danger and tragedy of the situation.
The only degree of yours I am aware of through this forum is the degree of your misunderstanding regarding the fundamentals of energy.
Nice to see that the level of civility in this discussion is still top notch.
You say there is no energy loss in extracting uranium from its ore. Really. What do you call the energy inputs that are committed to the mining, processing, distribution, generation, plant construction and decomissioning and waste handling phases of the process? Externalities?
I call it ‘vastly less the energy produced.’ The economics of nuclear power work today on financial grounds. The energy economics work for all ore grades, including seawater. If you have evidence to the contrary that counter that, I honestly would be interested to know.
Of course the energy cost of waste handling is hard to assess because we are not yet even close to an adequate answer to the issue. The inadequate methods available though are all highly energy intensive and, adding to their inadequacy, only deal with end of chain waste. No-one is yet remotely interested in residual mine site contamination.
Indeed its certainly not evident that its remotely important. If the choice is made between some slightly higher percieved incidence of cancer near mines and the halt of industrial civilization, you can guess which way we will move.
Most of the waste from the nuclear industry right now is ‘spent fuel’, not mine tailings… when uranium becomes expensive, this waste will largely be consumed as fuel in reprocessing regimes and molten salt reactors, leaving only short lived fission products as the end wastes. The waste handling for these systems are only energy intensive because the public demands them to be so. We can quite easily pack said wastes up in concrete canisters in the desert and forget about them for centuries for all the harm they cause.
The costs here are political, not in energy.
Can this continue to be ignored if primary extraction is ratcheted up exponentially as you would have it be?
It sure can.
Like many people, you do not recognise the categorical differences between uranium ore and liquid hydrocarbons in regard to their readiness to work, and thus their overall efficiency in yielding quantities of NET energy. You are effectively equating a banana with a pomegranite in the ease and efficiency of sustaining oneself. (If you don’t know what a pomegranite is, it is because they do not work well as food for a fat, frantic and rapacious culture and have not been widely commerialised.)
Ah, another cheap shot. You must really think me inferior. I can assure you the net energy from uranium mining is significantly higher than the net energy from petroleum (except maybe in Saudi fields)… though petroleum is more useful as a fuel.
Studies done in the ’60′s that made worst case scenario assumptions show EROEI of around 4 are often quoted by the anti-nuclear lobby… of course these studies are awfully old and assumed that we exhausted all of our low grade ore, and were using the old thermal-diffusion process that was 50x less efficient than modern enrichment methods, and its still positive net energy. Indeed in molten salt reactors you dont have to do enrichment or reprocessing at all.
You rate the power potential of Uranium without any calculation of the substantive energy costs necessary to squeeze its economic lifeblood from the stone (now being masked by abundant cheap oil inputs).
I certainly do not; when the oil starts to dry out there will be costs, but nuclear power is self-sustaining and not prohibitively costly.
With regard to the economist’s Rapture, that human innovation will invariably lift us up above this and any future problem, it is pertinent to note that both nuclear and modern-scale ‘renewable’ processes have developed and remain utterly dependant within the fossil fuel envelope.
Only because its cheaper, not because there is any inherant energy sink going on.
There has been zero discovery or development that has yet de-coupled or even explicitly sought to decouple that nexus. Oh that’s right. The market signals aren’t there yet.
I really don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Uranium and thorium fuel cycles, both open and closed, are mature, as is fischer-tropsch fuel synthesis, and industrial processes to create the synthesis gas from limestone and water.
If suddenly all the oil and coal disappeared overnight, we certainly would still have nuclear power running (light water reactors today can run for at least 18 months before refueling) and could easily crack hydrogen and carbon to make synthesis gas (CO and H2) and diesel fuel to run todays infrastructure for long enough to ramp up the entire nuclear infrastructure.
I dont expect it will happen overnight, and neither do you.
And I honestly dont expect nuclear fission to ever be more than 50% of our primary energy source; We’ll perfect nuclear fusion or inexpensive solar, or some other innovation you seem to believe we are incapable of. But its illustrative that if we stopped developing new technology today we have reserves for well beyond the next several millinea.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/nuclear-faq.html
Crude oil is a finite resource, yes, but No One Knows how much of that ‘finite resource’ remains – this is a Big x in the equation.
To argue a peak production though has more to do with relative price(s) of production, demand/supply, tech constraints and not, substitutes, etc. – the argument must hinge on the changing condition of the world economy as well as the oil sector in particular.
The argument hinges not on an unknown but on the capital system itself, and its intrinsic – not material – limits. Pr ofit and its rate (not earnings) is determinant whatever the remaining quantity of crude.
Suggest that neoclassic economics with its one-sidednesses and false assumptions will get us exactly nowhere.
‘Peak oil’ is more religion than not.¯
There is no energy source as available is as dense as oil.
Nuclear is not a viable option. The cost and human resources needed to produce the number of plants needed is a real problem.
This represents how many new nukes must be put in
operation every year in the US, to give us 2% growth energy growth per year. The last column is the amount of energy the US would consume each year in nuclear equivelants. These numbers jump dramatically if we factor in actual depletion.
Nukes needed each year in the US to maintain 2% energy growth.
Current Status 492 4920
It would cost between $5 and $20 billion per plant, and there aren’t enough qualified engineers to pull it off.
And until the nuclear power advocates produce a solution to the problem of waste disposal and internment for the eons; it is simply not a viable option I could support. Pebble bed reactors types seem to bemuch safer and could be built as smaller more modular facilities in the 200 – 300 MW range, but they do not address waste disposal.
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Year New Total Energy
2005 98.40 5018.40
2006 100.37 5118.77
2007 102.38 5221.14
2008 104.42 5325.57
2009 106.51 5432.08
2010 108.64 5540.72
2011 110.81 5651.53
2012 113.03 5764.56
2013 115.29 5879.86
2014 117.60 5997.45
2015 119.95 6117.40
2016 122.35 6239.75
2017 124.79 6364.54
2018 127.29 6491.84
2019 129.84 6621.67
2020 132.43 6754.11
2021 135.08 6889.19
2022 137.78 7026.97
2023 140.54 7167.51
2024 143.35 7310.86
2025 146.22 7457.08
2026 149.14 7606.22
2027 152.12 7758.34
2028 155.17 7913.51
2029 158.27 8071.78
2030 161.44 8233.22
2031 164.66 8397.88
2032 167.96 8565.84
2033 171.32 8737.16
2034 174.74 8911.90
2035 178.24 9090.14
2036 181.80 9271.94
2037 185.44 9457.38
2038 189.15 9646.53
2039 192.93 9839.46
2040 196.79 10036.25
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How to use electricity to efficiently replace oil
(gasoline, diesel, kerosene) in the more than 700 million vehicles is a big problem! Now, where oil is used for electric power production, nuclear
fission can replace oil as a fuel. However, in the U.S. now only about 2 percent of electric power is generated from oil.
When examining alternatives to oil, you have to ask the following questions:
1. Is it easily transportable like oil?
2. Is the alternative energy dense like oil?
3. Is the alternative capable of being adapted for transportation, heating, and the production of pesticides, plastics, and petrochemicals?
4. Does the alternative have an Energy Profit Ratio (EPR) comparable to oil? Cheap (high-EPR) energy has formed the basis upon which all of our economic, political, and social institutions and relationships have formed.
5. To what degree does the distribution, implementation, and use of this alternative require massive retrofitting of our industrial infrastructure? How much money, energy, and time will this retrofitting require?
6. To what degree does the distribution, implementation and use of this alternative require other resources which are in short supply? Do these other resources exist in quantities sufficient enough that the alternative is capable of being scaled up on a massive level? Are these resources located in highly unstable parts of the world? To what degree are the discovery, extraction, transportation, refining, and distribution of these resources dependent on cheap oil?
7. To what degree does the distribution, implementation, and use of this alternative require massive upfront investments in money and energy, both of which will be in short supply as the world begins to suffer from severe oil shocks?
8. What are the unintended consequences of the distribution, implementation, and use of this alternative?
The nuclear option still wouldn’t solve the need to use oil for transportation. A battery to store all this energy would be required. Don’t expect to go far with an eletric car without recharging. Its funny to see nobody is producing economically feasible cars, I am talking about a car that is TINY, or just use something like a “goped”, these things are supposedly getting roughly 200+ miles a gallon according to http://www.getaped.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=11&products_id=2006 , Unfortunately it is probably not tue.
We (U.S.) must make gigantic tanks to drive around in, mostly carring 1 passenger when it could carry 20. Wasting oil on things such as mirrors, airbags, air-conditioning, radios, seats, seatbelts. All a waste of oil, just rip those out and save money, who CARES if someone dies because that someone had to ride a 2 ton vechicle. Most people just do useless service jobs, so useless, the world could be better without. Then they spend their money to destroy more resources. Most people have wasted some oil in the U.S. just for entertainment, cruises, and airplanes for travel.
A few points:
Prices do come from supply vs. demand, but with oil, supply isn’t the total amount of oil in the ground, it’s the total amount being extracted globally, with the amount in the ground treated as almost a ‘commmons’ (think in terms of the various depleted fisherys). We might see relatively cheap oil right up until the point where we’re sucking dregs, and only then see a drastic increase in price (since the dregs would be presumable harder to suck). The market might be denied the accurate (gradually increasing) price information it needs to properly allocate for the future because of the way we price and sell oil resources. Perhaps we should be allocating/selling the oil while it’s in the ground, as in a market where all the oil the world will ever produce is up for sale all at once, in order for the price to accurately reflect what it is we’re dealing with. I know oil ‘mining’ rights are brought and sold, but the problem with that is that the competing supply (and hence price) is based how much the rest of the world is sucking out of the ground (and not the global amount in the ground). The world could quite literally put the entire future world supply up for bid now (ignoring logistics) in order to get accurate price information for resource allocation (which we may not currently have).
Second, if there’s a 95% chance the world will be violently scaled back, I would prefer to risk that and have a 5% chance of escaping it through ingenuity, than to, with absolute certainty, scale ourselves back peacefully/voluntarily. The barbarians are at the gates: killing yourself before they kill you hardly seems like a good idea (even if your death will be less painful and especially if there’s some chance of escape).
Jordan, the problem with a market for “all the oil the world will ever produce” is that there is intense debate about how much oil exists, and that factor, even if known, could still be modified by new tecnological developments. Thus, such a market cannot exist. We have to stick to a market based on how much oil is being extracted and stored, because oil has no use value for humans until it is extracted.
I agree, the logistics of it are probably impossible. I’m just worried that something like that might be a nessecary prerequisite for the market to properly allocate and make decisions about oil. The current price could be artificial low because some kind of ‘commons/externality/imperfection’ is at work (or even just lack of information).
On the bright side, if everything goes to hell, we’ll probably have our sound ‘most marketable commodity’ money – energy itself (in some form or another).
With food, look at Eliot Coleman’s work, the http://www.sunnyjohn.com greenhouses, and John Jeavon’s books. Also other similar information. With building heat, look at http://www.thenaturalhome.com and http://www.annualizedgeosolar.com. I’ve cut my house heating bill by about 3/4 and have only indirect petroleum dependence here. There are answers, but investment in actually doing them is needed. Transportation will be a problem, probably solved by having less. The critical point is whether the solution develops faster than the problem. I suggest reading up on the new highly efficient organic gardening methods – if we don’t eat, the rest is moot.
Has anyone ever read the short story by Herman Hesse called The City? Some folks seem to think that every civilization exists forever.The historical record disagrees with this premise.Easter Island,the Anasazi andthe Khymer in Cambodia are just a few examples.
Look at fuel prices –they keep changing and energy reserves keep decreasing, efficient methods of energy conversion and utilization should be used .All new designs are really going to cut pollution. And all the car giants will have to start use alternative engines . If overall energy utilization at the national level has the priority, driving a heat pump by an electric motor is not the best method, due to the inefficient conversion of fossil fuel into electricity at the power station. Therefore, engine-driven heat pumps have been preferred using gas engines, diesel engines or gas turbines. The output of the heat pump is expected to be about 65% higher than electrically driven systems, based on the same amount of fuel used. The advantages of these systems are mainly due to local generation of shaft power and providing engine heat that can be usefully employed , by recovering part of the waste energy of the gases and engine coolant. Such systems can operate continuously in comparison with solar systems.. Primary energy was found to be saved by about 50% when using engine-driven heat pumps. The superiority of the gas turbine system was quite clear. This would be a kind of alternative to fuel engines on strong point of CO2 emission and global warming ,don’t you think? All that and some more I have pointed in my dissertation for Analysis of exhaust gas .In case some one interested or may need information for your researches ,you may look in here:http://www.coursework4you.co.uk/sprtengi3.htm.
That’s definitely the way to think if you want to die happy. But I would rather be far more concerned about the future it that helps me to live a bit longer.
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