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Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak?
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Feb 16, 2006 12:59 AM
from the the-sky-is-falling dept.
from the the-sky-is-falling dept.
dido writes "Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December. From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline."
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I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember in college a geologist was invited to demonstrate a "resource simulator" for our class. By today's standards it would be considered extremely crude (this was after all, in 1978), (wow, weird unintentional pun).
The simulation was basically a giant video game with a simple graphical display of the world's known and projected resources including but not limited to:
About 20 students in the class were given controllers, each to (again, crudely) simulate usage and comsumption patterns of all of these resources. Also, some students had controllers allowing them to spend resources to explore for MORE resources.
At the time, and years subsequent that demo stayed with me -- it left an indelible image of what could and probably would be.
The results? Basically, no matter what the students did to conserve, and what they did to increase the resources, the "world" pretty much always ran out of fuel and resources by the year 2020. At the time that seemed pretty far away and I don't think many people felt the need to care. Maybe that time has come.
Another interesting piece of the simulation: there were those students who pointed out these "estimates" of known and expected future discoveries of resources were just that, "estimates". The geologist obliged, and let the students rerun the simulations with a magnitude of latitude, i.e., ten times the estimated resources were allocated! The results then?, about an additional 10 to 20 years of resources before they ran out.
Note: the results (we ran many different trials) weren't ALWAYS about running out of oil and petroleum. On a few occasions there were severe food and water crises. A very interesting lesson.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Insightful)
So he wrote a program to demonstate the effect of exponential growth, and modeled some lame "conserve" and "research" options that didn't really effect the growth rate. It was a simulation designed to always come to that conclusion. Big surprise that it always led to that conclusion, huh?
Being college I hope somebody spoke up and challenged his assumptions, I also recall models that projected the population continuing to grow exponentially, though the reality has been far from that. Yes resources are being consumed far faster than they are being generated, but at the same time technology is moving fatser than ever too. My 295hp car just got 28 mpg on a 3 hour trip today, in 1978 that car would have gotten about 6-12mpg (since there were no 295 hp new cars in 1978, we'll have to estimate). One thing to keep in mind is that we DO have renewable sources of energy, and technology continues to lower the production costs of these while the non-renewable sources will continue to rise. At some point the two lines cross and we'll switch in a big way. The USA is real good at solving these problems.
Re:[*dons flame retardant gear*] (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.
Re:[*dons flame retardant gear*] (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you want to keep the price of oil down?
Yes, people would *like* to have cheap gas. But that's impossible in the long term. Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Funny)
Funny, Dick Cheney was saying the same thing just the other day. :-)
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Insightful)
For that matter, Africa also produces more food than its population could consume but has large swathes of famine. Why? Because the hunger problem is now about how much food there is, but where it is and who has it. It's a question of (mis)distribution, not production.
So, if we suddenly couldn't afford to gas up our trucks, all the food being made in Kansas and Iowa couldn't get to Baltimore and Chicago anymore. And, after about two days of that, the Superdome during Katrina would look like a playground scuffle.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
The big and rarely discussed impact of peak oil isn't going to be heat fuel at all - it's petrochemicals. Plastics, drugs, fertilizers... Each and every one of us probably has the equivalent of a barrel or more of oil within a few yards in these forms. Your average [Wal-Mart|huge big box retail chain] all by itself contains a non-trivial fraction of a tanker's load in these forms.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:5, Funny)
Since Hummer owners want to drive a military-style vehicle, I think we should give them the full experience: every hummer should come with an all-expenses paid 6-month stint as a chauffeur in Baghdad. Nothing shows one's masculinity and patriotism more than Supporting the Troops, right?
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're talking about the survival of human civilization, not bargain hunting at the mall. If we're more efficient, the oil companies produce less, the oil lasts longer, and it buys us some time to build out the energy infrastructure to supplant oil.
naive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If supply is fixed, let'd adjust demand. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true, OPEC has always stated that oil should be in the $30 to $40 barrel range, not in the high sixties where it has been for a long time. They recognise that over $50 per barrel, it becomes economic for consuming countries to invest in alternative sources of energy such as oil sands and tar. Overpriced oil hurts producers long term plans.
What is almost unique about this situation is not that oil production is being throttled such as 1973-74 or 1980, it is that demand is running way ahead of supply. OPEC has called for consumers to cut back on consumption as there isn't enough infrastructure to get the stuff out of the ground, move and refine it fast enough to meet current let alone future demand.
Saudi Arabia is practically the only major producer that is planning on major increases in production in the near future, but there are plenty of geologists who believe that the Saudi reserves have been wildly overstated and that there is no way the country can ever meet these figures.
Re:whats left underground? empty space (Score:5, Informative)
Errrr no. Oil and gas (and water for that matter) are held in pores in the rock - just as water can be held in the pores of a sponge. Loose sandstones make great oil reservoirs, the Saudi fields are in limestone deposited as dung in shallow seas.
When you extract the oil the rock remains. No huge caverns, no need for worry.
The phenomenon of oil field replenishment appears to be a fluke in certain fields which are linked by faults to deeper reserves. Lowering the pressure in the upper part of the field forces oil up by gas and water pressure. It has nothing to do with the highly dubious theory of Mantle oil.
HTH.
Let he who is without sin . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
There's still a question of shares (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in a studio apartment. I use energy efficient lightbulbs. I recycle. I mostly walk, but very occasionally take the bus. I haven't driven in five years.
Really, how much larger is your footprint than mine?
Now, my lifestyle is mostly maintainable because I'm young, it's true, but a Hummer still takes *five times* as much gas as an energy efficient vehicle. You don't need a Prius to get around 50 MPG.
It also reduces traffic efficiency because it's slow to accelerate and blocks peoples' view. Even apart from gas consumption, it takes vastly more resources to build a Hummer than to build a S.M.A.R.T. car.
Worse, people generally drive in SUVs alone. A vehicle that could carry four people is carrying only one. A carpool in an efficient vehicle is therefore *twenty times* as efficient as the usual SUV trip.
When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be.
"I'll never use as little as a starving villager does, so I might as well use as much as I like."
That doesn't fly.
Re:It probably doesn't make a difference (Score:5, Funny)
Re:There's still a question of shares (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know where you got the idea that manufacturing energy-efficient bulbs costs $10 for a single one. Nor where you buy yours. Like you said, it's competitive, you get good-quality bulbs for half of that today, and they typically last 5 times as long as a traditional bulb.
Still, 1 low-energy bulb tends to cost say $4 more than 5 comparable-output-and-quality traditional bulbs. It lives something like 10000 hours. Lets do maths:
- Normal bulbs: 10000h*60w = 600Kwh
- Low-energy: 10000h*12w = 120Kwh
- Saved energy: 480Kwh
- Break-even point (assuming low-energy bulbs cost $4 more upfront) 0.83 cent/kwh
I don't know what power costs where you live, but most places power costs 10 times that, delivered to the consumer. Even if your $10 was correct (which it isn't) the break-even point for this bulb would still be at 1.6cent/kwh, which is still a lot less than electricity actually costs for consumers.It gets sligthly less beneficial if you live somewhere where the extra heat is needed part of the year so it's not simply wasted. In the extreme case: you live in a electrically heated house, and the ligth is *never* on without the ovens also being on, you save nothing at all.
Re:Prius owners are as selfish as Hummer drivers (Score:5, Funny)
Is cycling ok?
Re:Prius owners are as selfish as Hummer drivers (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, and by the way, we Europeans aren't all French. Actually, most of us can't stand them at all.
Re:Prius owners are as selfish as Hummer drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that unless you're an African villager you can't point out great waste is beyond ridiculous.
Lets try it from a lefties perspective...
Unless you stop using the socialist, nationalised road system, you can't possibly say that Communist Russia was excessive, only someone in libertarian Somalia has the 'moral authority' to say that.
That sit nicely with you?
Of course not, but you will bend your morality to fit your argument anyway, as you have done. Now when some neo greenie comes along in this thread and screams that we *should* be living like African villagers you will argue that he is an extremist and he just goes to show how rediculous 'liberals' are, and you will have snuggly wrapped yourself up in a blanket of self righteousness smirking that your 'right' and everyone else is 'wrong' totally ignoring the issue at hand which doesn't matter just as long as you feel like you have won the argument.
Re:Prius owners are as selfish as Hummer drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty much the nail on the head right there. There's no such thing as one sustainable lifestyle. Sustainability just means renewability. So while everyone is moaning and groaning about how the Americna lifestyle is unsustainable they are forgetting to mention the fact that it is high technology that increases the level of sustainable lifestyles. Until solar power, ethanol, etc "sustainable" meant "what you can build with your hands". It is only thanks to advanced research that we may actually get a sustainable lifestyle that also involves such frivolous things as running water and medical treatment.
People who are all into "you can't justify going farther than you can walk" are the perfect example of a cure that's worse than the disease. If you can't go farther than you can walk you may save the environment but you completely decimate human society. Cities can not exist, universities can not exist, the bottom falls out from underneath society. You get a bunch of isolated pockets of survivalists who have no time for literature, art, or communal society. It's just neo-luditism. Why bother trying to save modern civilization if the answer is to destroy modern civilization? And by modern civilization I don't mean things like shopping malls. I have in mind things like physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and essentially all the human intellectual capital that rests on our ability to talk to one another over long distances and support specialists who don't have to tend their own fields every day.
Technology has made possible our ability to live the type of lifestyle that we currently live. Technology, in my opinion, is also crucial to increasing efficiency to a point where maintaining a semblance of this lifestyle can be done sustainably. It's no questions that we've annointed convenience as king of efficiency and we probably would have to give up things like hummers and civics (and priuses) to really become sustainable. But the question is - do you want to give up these for smaller, ethanol-driven vehicles or for your bare feet?
-stormin
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not hard to see what is going to happen.
Oh ya, "technology" will solve the problems all right, by reducing the population levels around the globe to a few percent of what we have now. Look right now, that's where the bulk of the really important cash for tech R&D is going, and where a ton of the brains wind up working. Inefficient as various governments can be, combine them with big factories and they "manage" to come up with a few pretty horrendous toys.
It is going to suck hard.
We'll keep building crap throw away stuff right up until it is too late to do anything important about it, because no leader would ever stay in power long (I am speaking first, second, third tier where they have a semblance of elected government, fourth tier are always run by pure anarchy and warlords) if he spoke the truth to the people, that they would need to drop their lifestyle down to a fraction of what it is now to eek another century out of what we have left.they just aren't going to do that to any extent beyond a few noises.
And we'd need to be doing it yesterday.
And it hasn't happened so there ya go.
Re:I've seen this simulated, it isn't pretty. (Score:5, Informative)
The Saudis claim they can can ramp up production, the reality on the ground is slightly different. In the 1980s Saudi Arabia added 88 billion barrels to its reserves without drilling a single well. The reason why? OPEC allocates exports on the basis of reserves - the more you have in your reserves, the more you can pump. At the same time Kuwait added 26 billion and Abu Dhabi TRIPLED its reserves. None of these countries have allowed external experts to study their reasoning for upping reserves. A team of independent geologists could easily prove these figures, but they are not allowed to do so. Think about that - we might all be banking on a lie.
Saudi Arabia plans to up production from about 10 million barrels per day to 15 million largely by developing existing fields, not bringing new reserves on-stream. Almost all of this oil will come from the four Saudi superfields - Ghawar, Safaniyah, Hanifa and Khafji - each of which is over 50 years old - an extraordinarily long period of time for a field to be productive. Almost 5 million barrels will come from Ghawar alone.
So can they do it? Seems unlikely, Saudi Aramco refuses to open its books, but the claimed figure of 258 billion barrels seems to be very high, a former director of Aramco has publicly said that proven reserves are no more than 130 billion barrels and the remainder must be extrapolated.
Other reports are coming out of Saudi Arabia that water is entering the oil wells which implies that the fields are near the end of their lives. Even Aramco admits that huge amounts of water must be injected into fields to maintain current production.
There are also serious reports that Saudi overproduction in the past has caused serious damage to the fields and that they will never generate the normal amount of oil that can be recovered from well-managed fields.
Tar sands - okay, let's set aside (as if we could) the environmental devastation these plants are wreaking on the Canadian landscape and the hideous greenhouse emissions related to producing syncrude. Let's take a look at the energy needed to make syncrude. Tar sand extraction in Canada uses natural gas to heat water; in 2004 Canada produced about 1 million barrels of syncrude per day which consumed 0.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas. Plans are to go to 2.2 million bpd which would consume 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas. So how are Canada's gas reserves? Production in 2003 (the last year I had figures) was 16.8 billion cubic feet per day - a 0.5 billion cubic foot DECREASE on the previous year. Canada's gas fields are entering long-term decline, just as a significant draw on their reserves comes along. Using natural gas to make LNG would make significantly better economic and environmental sense.
Oil shale in the American West is a non-goer, there simply isn't enough water around. The only significant source is the Colorado River which is overtapped already.
And with that, I'm off to work.
HTH.
Sheesh, so general (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but what time?
Further articles (Score:5, Interesting)
A huge chunk of Saudi exports come from one gigantic field. This means our eggs are in this one basket. Here's an article that discusses that field, and the chance that the Saudis might have screwed it by over-extracting. If you do that, you limit how much you can get out later; you might lose the reserves. [I'm guessing you might damage it, but that some future technology might make it recoverable -- just at a higher cost]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1
wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the scary part is, we've procrastinated for so long, I'm not so sure that we'll find a suitable replacement in time, at least not before there are widespread disruptions in global energy supply.
Re:wow. (Score:5, Informative)
And the other products (Score:5, Informative)
Cutting down oil use is not going to be just about cutting petrol/gas usgae - it is going to be about making more durable consumable products than are currently churned out - and being happy to pay top dollar for them (just like out parents had to). Believe it or not, the 'good old days' of 'well built products' may just come back... that should make our grand parents happy.
Use more oil... (Score:5, Funny)
and the price of oil has been up how long? (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds an awful lot like the 1970's analysts who said we'd have no oil at all by 2000.
Or the brainiac reporter who insisted that Apple's iPod was not going to have any effect on Mac sales after interviewing 10 iPod users who didn't also buy a Mac on their visit to the Apple store in 2004.
Anyone can rub together two brain cells and write a report that glosses over market realities with some sensationalist simplifications.
Basic economics indicates that that the market can fall behind reality for several years. But obviously, at some point when oil rises to a level where it can comfortably stay, all kinds of results will kick in: conservation, alternative fuels, alternative oil discovery, alternative oil sources. To suggest that we've hit the end of the oil pan is plainly retarded.
We've only known about the middle east's oil for most of a century. There's plenty of places we haven't looked, and more we know about and chose not to exploit because either the market can't support it yet, or there is lower hanging fruit, or there are political or environmental concerns we can't resolve yet.
Which oil peak are we on? Deja vu! (Score:5, Informative)
In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world's reserves.
Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world's supply.
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels -- more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.
With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. -- which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith -- reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).
Today's drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.
The vast petroleum resources of the world's submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).
The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.
Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.
Re:Which oil peak are we on? Deja vu! (Score:5, Informative)
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
A question I asked Kenneth Deffeyes (Score:5, Insightful)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes [princeton.edu], Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2011 [tradingcharts.com], which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
Gasoline/Fuel Oils are only part of oil use, (Score:5, Insightful)
The first thing the govt. should do is reevaluate the way it calculates fuel economy. The current system is grossly innaccurate, and doesn't give consumers a true picture of the gas mileage they can expect. Consumer Reports had an article about this and the auto industry rep. basically said that the auto companies know how the govt. tests, and optomizes their vehicles for the test (gear ratio tweaking, using prototype vehicles, etc.). Changing the test methods would give consumers more accurate information so they can make a more informed decision.
The second thing the govt. could do is raise the minimum required fuel economy and make light trucks subject to the gas guzzler tax. I work at a Dodge dealership and the fuel economy of new vehicles is attrocious. A new durango gets 14-18 mpg and pays no gas guzzler tax. A station wagon that got similar mileage would have a several thousand dollar tax associated with it. Treat SUVs like the cars that they are replacing and you will find that fewer people will buy one.
The third thing that the govt. and EPA could do to help is to standardize fuel grades. Under the current system, refiners have to produce something like 60-70 different blends to comply with various state enviromental regs. The govt. could reduce this clusterfuck by having perhaps 2 or 3 different blends; one blend for urban/enviromentally sensitive (pacific northwest, etc.) areas, and one blend for areas where pollution isn't as big of a problem. Current refineries in the US are running at or above full capacity, and this would help ease that situation, and allow oil companies to put current resources to better use.
In addition to the step above, I firmly believe that the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
Obviously, these aren't complete solutions to Americas oil addiction, but they are things that would help.
P.S. while writing this post, I came across an interesting ad [sierraclub.org] that the sierra club ran in the new york times on Ford's 100th birthday. 100 years of "progress" indeed.
Leave the carbon in the ground (Score:5, Informative)
passe oil (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
It works, it provides clean water and high grade deisel oil, cleans the air by providing higher octane product, less emissions from refinery gasses, can empty landfills of plastic, can clean the water supply from biomass waste. Don't as me why the hell the DOE hasn't gotten behind it. A tenth of the cost of the Manhatten project could make us the largest oil producers on the planet*.
Also check the Wiki references to plastic conversions. Say good-bye to plastic waste and ocean pollution as well. Grey water dumping would also be convertable on the cruise ship level. Plus domestic production nullifies the middle east cartels, and puts tanker accidents off our coasts to an end. The middle east argument alone is a national security problem and it's criminal that this tech hasn't gone into a crash program status.
And this blows all previous gas alternatives out of the water, doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
I'm confident that we will engage in this tech at some point - but it'd be nice to hear more about it. Try googling it sometime - you'll find almost nothing in the pop-press. I've even had dialogue with MSNBC about it - and they claim they're aware of it - but never say dick. Neither did Wired and they were talking new-oil on the fricking cover of their rag less than a month ago. FEH!
* The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
The Myth of Peak Oil... (Score:5, Insightful)
China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.
If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max [imdb.com] with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, [wikipedia.org] there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.
But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system [wikipedia.org].
To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years [ncpa.org].
Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.
Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy [wired.com]. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.
End of Cheap Oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil will always be present on our planet. The problem is that the Return on Investment (ROI) may be severely diminished. Right now, it's cheaper to find, drill, and transport oil than it is to use it. If it becomes more expensive to find and transport oil, we will have to find another source of energy. In case you hadn't noticed, energy consumption is going UP and not down.
It's not something to take lightly. There are people working on it, but we really need alot more effort behind it. I'm imagining bacteria in a petri dish consuming all of the resources. If people don't wake up soon, we could easily be faced with a situation where we simply will not be able to find a solution. Consider that research itself takes up resources, which will become more scarce and valuable. There is a doomsday possibility out there, but I like to hope that some governments will wake up and put alot of effort into finding alternatives. Humans should hopefully be able to think their way out of the petri dish.
Hubbert's Peak and Misleading Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
If oil production continues to decline (which it may well), then prices will rise. We'll see $100 oil. But, and this is the big but, if we see $100 oil then world oil demand will not rise 3%, it'll be down 5%. High oil prices mean less consumption of oil.
This happens in several ways: firstly, in areas like power generation, then oil become more expensive than (existing) competing technologies. Oil fired power stations cease to make sense relative to coal fired ones. (And it is no surprise that we are seeing an upsurge in interest in nuclear.)
Secondly, economic growth slows - especially in areas which are energy intensive. The price of a Ryanair, or Easyjey, or SouthWest Airlines plane ticket rises to reflect higher oil prices. Fewer people fly. Airlines mothball planes. Oil consumption falls.
Thirdly, we will see purchases (and usage) of cars change. In the 1970s, the average horsepower of a new American car more than halved. When people make the school run, they'll use a little car rather than their SUV. It's a fair bet too that we'll see hybrid sales rise and rise. (Similarly, we'll see the proportion of ethanol in diesel increase.)
Finally, rising oil prices make other energy sources economic. There is a wonderful piece from the IEA on the various costs of different power sources. Solar isn't cheap now. But if the oil price is $150 a barrel, it doesn't look so bad.
The Princeton professor poo-pooes oil sands, but if the oil price is more than $100, then there'll be an awful lot of energy produced from them. Similarly, we'll see coal to oil plants (again), and no doubt a second commercial gas hydrates "mine".
So: if we have passed Hubbert's peak, we'll see our energy consumption fall, and we'll see the proportion of energy production that is oil fall. This will not be painless. But nor will we return to the stone age. We may well see GDP growth drop to subnormal levels - perhaps even for a decade - but this is very different to total economic collapse.
Oil discoveries have been too low for long (Score:5, Informative)
Oil discoveries have been surpassed by consumption in the mid-eighties. I remember a presentation with a simple chart at the Annual Meeting of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) 2005, Cincinnati about this. Since the usual lag between discovery and commencement of production is about 15 years (this is what I remember from my course in energy economy), the production peak was expected already about 2000. A few factors (wars, Russian oil becoming available to the west, etc) delayed this, but it's not like people never saw this coming.
New oil fields are being found all the time, but this is not compensating enough for the depletion of previous oil fields.
In case you wondered what is going to happen, remember that US production already peaked a long time ago (in 1971 if my memory serves me). In 1973 the Saudis noticed that they held the big levers now (Americans could not flood the marked anymore), and took the chance to become the market leaders.
What this means to us is exponential growth in gasoline prices. Smart countries stopped producing power with oil long ago (think oil crisis), moving to coal or nuclear for energy security (not necessarily because they were cheaper). Coal is going to be soon the most competitive fuel for power production. Nuclear will likely stay there in the corner where its poor economics has put it, since there is enough coal to burn all oxygen in the atmosphere.
Given that most transportation and building-heating sectors are based on oil in most countries and that these are big chunks of the total energy consumption, I expect some countries will find it cheaper to steal oil invading oil-rich countries, especially those countries that are very oil-intensive and where conservation is not considered an attractive option.
Furthermore, the US now have a base of operations (Iraq) in the middle of everything in the Middle East, already up and running. Invading the whole Middle East could become a real option in the next decades (it was actually already contemplated in 1973, but then we had the Soviet Union).
Interesting book to read: The end of oil, Paul Roberts, ISBN 0618239774 [wikipedia.org].
Re:Isn't this exactly what oil companies want? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ethanol (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethanol is a hell of a lot closer than the far-fetched hydrogen economy proposed by the US's current executive administration.
Re:Ethanol (Score:5, Insightful)
If ethanol is economically viable, then let's quit giving Archer Daniels Midland tens of billions of dollars in corporate welfare, and see whether people still buy it.
-jcr
E85 - Ethanol (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why the peak? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's certainly overstating it a bit, but on the other hand, most people seem to be of the mindset that 'oh this peak oil thing was just something someone made up. Don't believe the hype!' They think it's like Y2K. Scary...until it really happens and it turns out it wasn't so bad after all....
I really, really, really, wish that was the case. But I'm afraid it just isn't. A lot of people are living in fantasy land right now and assuming that any spike in oil prices is going to be like the 1970s. But after a point, it won't just come back down. Extrapolation works rather well in this case because there's no real reason to believe that the world's oil consumption is going to dramatically decrease, and considering that oil-producing countries are basically operating on the same fields they always have been (because there just aren't very many new ones). Oil price fluctuates because of the rest of the supply chain, not because there are new wells being drilled and others shut down all the time. Relatively speaking, it's a fairly predictable economy.
Re:Why the peak? (Score:5, Informative)
At some point, the oil is not under so much pressure and doesn't squirt out so much. Perhaps the oil men need to drill deeper, or sideways, or use other fancy techniques and so the take per day is reduced. This may go on for some time, forming a flattening of the peak at the top. Maybe. More often, and especially over the last 20 - 30 years, the field is run flat out for as long as possible, so production stops more quickly.
As production dwindles, other techniques come into play, like forcing in seawater under pressure to push the oil out (as in Saudi Arabia), and many of these can damage the field, reducing the long term extraction total in favour for a higher extraction rate today. As time goes on it becomes harder and more expensive to extract the oil (diminishing returns) and eventually it's just not worth it, so the field is closed down.
This is the idea, there's a curve for every well and every field. If you add all the curves together, then you get one big curve, whith "Hubbert's Peak" in teh middle (the geologist who first noticed the production bell curve).
Now the problem isn't that suddenly all the oil's gone when we wake up next tuesday, it's that this month/year we produced less than last month/year, but -- and this is the problem -- we use MORE than last month/year. Demand is growing faster than ever before, just at the time when the supply is starting to drop off. This causes price increases and countries can be expected to squabble over an oil supply which continues to become smaller.
As an aside, people like to say that "They've been prediciting this for years, it's never happened before so whay should it happen now?" The answer is that it's been predicted to happen now. I have a text book from 1954 (that's over 50 years ago) which predicted that demand would exceed supply around the year 2000 -- and you could argue that we are later that this because of improved extraction (not production, you extract oil) technology and because of a drop in consumption from teh late 70's oil shocks.
The supply/demand gap is a political and economic (and military?) problem in itself -- whether or not there's still enough oil to make all the toy for the happy meals might be a problem, but even if it isn't, the gap between supply and demand is a big enough problem all by itself.
peakoil.net is where to go to explore the argument in detail -- it's not a greenie thing, it's not a anti-american thing, it's to do with geology and chemistry. Beware of people who quote reserve figures, not only to countries lie outright about the figures, but quoting reserves is a potential -- you can't ever get every single barrel out of the ground and leave dry dust behind, lots remains and will never be extracted. As for scientists saving us, bear in mind that the warnings of peak and the warnings that alternatives like ethanol are almost useless are coming from eminent, experienced talented scientists. Science is not magic, if we're using too many joules per day then you can't just create it. I'm delighted to discuss why every alternative is doomed, try me at drose@dtlm.homelinux.net and I'll explain why I reckon population will halved in the next fifty years.
get your facts straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And slashdot jumps the shark... (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on his formulas, world peak oil production should occur during this decade.
Oil sands reality (Score:5, Informative)
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. [oilsands.cc] Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil. You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway [nexeninc.com] to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
Re:Oil sands (Score:5, Insightful)