This
is a very deeply interesting documentary about oil, oil supplies, the
peak oil phenomenon, and the coming looming disasters which await us.
The documentary is not "balanced" in that they gave no voice to the
other points of view, but I suppose they think those other points of
view are so far out of truth to not be worth addressing.
It starts with some assertions of truth: Oil is the Blood of the
Dinosaurs, Oil is the Bloodstream of the Global Economy, Oil is the
Blood of the Earth
Our arrangements of using Oil is making ourselves dependent on
unstable regimes in nasty parts of the world. This isn't covered in the
documentary, but I wonder how much of that instability is due to
geopolitical machinations launched by the U.S. to secure the supply of
oil. In any case it's obvious from the daily news that the middle east
is unstable, and this is where our oil is coming from.
Assertion: It's important (to some) to keep us dependent on oil for as long as possible.
It would be in the business interests of the oil companies to keep
the world dependent on oil. Clearly if the world continued its
dependence on oil, the world will continue to ship money to the oil
companies.
Most people have no inkling of the problem we're facing. The looming
crisis includes unemployment, bankruptcy, starvation.. all this is the
normal behavior of a collapsed society.
Assertion by Colin Campbell: The bulk of the worlds oil was formed in
two periods of extreme global warming, 90 million years ago, and 150
million years ago.
If this is correct it makes oil a one time resource which will
"never" be recreated on this planet. I'm a little surprised and will
need to double check this assertion by Dr. Campbell. I always thought
there was a continuing process of creating new oil, it's just that the
planet takes a long time to do the process.
The work value of oil is phenomenal. Scientists can equate units of
human labor to the energy, and the energy content of $1 worth of oil
contains the energy equivalent to 25,000 hours of human labor. In other
words the drive to my job, 10 miles, uses energy equivalent to 40,000
hours of human labor. But I know from personal experience I can ride a
bicycle for that same distance, it takes me 45 minutes to ride, so
there's a huge wastage of energy (40,000 hours of human labor to drive
my car versus the 45 minutes of human labor it takes me to ride my
bicycle).
Assertion: "Oil is our God" and that whatever religion we profess to,
what we really worship is oil. Eh? What do they mean by "worship"?
70% of oil is used for transportation fuel
98% of transportation energy comes from oil
Constructing products like cars or computers or food, all these
things by modern production methods require more weight in oil to
produce the thingy than the thingy itself weighs. In Agriculture, for
example, it's widespread to use petroleum based fertilizer. Oil makes
plastics, insecticides, cosmetics and more.
"They're not making a lot of dinosaurs any more"
"Oil is a magnet for war. Oil starts wars." This speaker goes on to
claim the conflict in Darfur is really about oil. There are oil
supplies in southern Sudan, recently found. The Sudanese government
(based in the north) wants to control the oil, and are therefore
ethnically cleansing southern Sudan so the northern Sudanese can control
the oil.
However this "Oil starts all wars" is a strange short-sighted
statement. What about the wars which begun before Oil was discovered
and brought into use by humans? There were many wars fought before the
age of Oil, and clearly those wars were not fought over oil resources.
However it's ominous that she claims World War I was really about oil
(??Was it??). Many events in World War II were affected clearly by oil
supplies, especially the German attack into Russia so that Germany could
gain control of the Baku oil fields.
The first war purely about Oil was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
This was absolutely and fundamentally about a dispute over an oil field.
In the more recent U.S. stupid illegal invasion of Iraq, the U.S.
military did not secure the WMD areas. Supposedly the war was to
control WMD's, so why didn't they secure Iraq's military depots? By not
securing Iraq's depots the arms and other military supplies in there
instead were looted and were made available to the insurgents, who have
been blowing up U.S. troops ever since. Anyway, instead of securing the
WMD depots the U.S. military secured the oil fields. Instead of
securing the museums in Baghdad, the museums which contained the
original records of human civilization, the museums which contained the
cuniform tablets that are the earliest form of writing, instead of
securing the museums which were looted, the U.S. military secured the
oil ministry.
We're "Always just a drill bit away from a major new discovery" but
it's been a very long time since the last significant discovery.
Extracting oil from tar sands and other heavy deposits, it's
technically possible however it requires more energy to do so than you
get from the resulting oil. The Fischer-Tropsch process was invented by
German scientists before World War II and is how the Germans were able
to fuel their war machine while not having a supply of oil. They
converted coal into oil using this process.
Use of this process is only feasible as a last resort, because it's so expensive to do.
"Sustainable peak supply" -- what does this phrase mean?
They assert that oil allowed world human population to explode. At
time of christ, 300mil, by 1700's it'd doubled to 600mil. But as soon
as oil was discovered the population exploded to the 6billion it is now.
They're saying population increase came as a direct result of better
energy supplies. Maybe so, but weren't there other effects? Better
medicine? Also better food supplies, though better food is due to
better oil supply.
Richard M. Nixon: If our energy resources are sensibly developed they can provide for us for centuries to come
There's a belief many have had that oil is limitless and will always
be cheap. Businesses have written into their assumptions that oil will
continue being supplied as it is today. Again most people are clueless
as to what's about to happen.
A 30-40-50 mile commute only makes sense when there's cheap oil. In
the U.S. we've reconstructed the cities to make for 30+ mile commutes,
with people driving everywhere, the cities are organized for the
convenience of drivers, and there is resulting very little mass transit.
This is short sighted thinking which led us to suburbanize U.S. cities
under the belief that there would always be cheap oil and gas.
The U.S. evolved our cities for cars. The end of cheap oil means
we'll have to rebuild our cities from scratch to a denser style.
Perhaps.
e.g. riding bicycle's would be the kind of adaptation people will
have to make. But most people are unwilling to ride bicycles for any
serious amount of riding.
There are two options: a) militarize the taking of oil by force, b) prepare properly for the coming end of cheap oil
Technology can come to the rescue. Natural resources can be exhausted, but human ingenuity is inexhaustible.
Projections of current trends in energy demand say the human
population will require 14 terawatts of energy in 2050. This is
tremendous. It would require thousands of new nuclear plants (for
example) and by doing this with nuclear power would mean the uranium
supplies would reach their peak uranium production very quickly.
Living in the style to which we have become accustomed is not
sustainable. It is going to create for us a crisis. How will we get
through this?
Technosanity #4: Review: A Crude Awakening
Links: http://audio.davidherron.com/technosanity/e000004.mp3
Links: Peak Oil Links
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Technosanity #3: Peak Oil
Today I want to talk about the Peak Oil situation and do an overview of some of the current news related to this.
Let's start with a quick primer on what this is.
Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
http://www.7gen.com/website/peak-oil/23988-peak-oil
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum production is reached. The peak oil occurs at every level, for each oil field, for each country, and for the global production. After the peak oil point is reached, the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.
The same pattern happens for other limited resources. There will be a copper peak, a coal peak, a natural gas peak, a fish peak, etc. In each case there is an increasing demand for a resource, and a fixed maximum capacity to deliver that demand, and once the capacity is reached it damages the resource such that it can no longer produce as it did before.
Oil is the most critical resource for our societies existence and it is with oil that this Peak Resource phenomenon was discovered.
Oil is the key to transportation. Current transportation technologies generally require liquid fuels, and society has chosen that the only way to get liquid fuels is to use fossil oil. The direct result of tight oil supplies will be expensive transportation, and that will contribute to several secondary results to be covered later.
The ever-increasing demand for oil partly occurs as a natural byproduct of rising population. Each person who exists is responsible for consuming resources, so of course the more people there are the more resources which are used. Another cause is a shift from manual technologies like bicycles or horse drawn carts to mechanized technologies like cars and trucks. Some countries, especially India and China, are industrializing and are causing an increased rate of demand. As countries industrialize the amount of resources consumed per person raises as well.
Peak Oil
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-oil/23991-peak-oil
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/peak-oil.html
An interview with the authors of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil they suggest the U.S. might become so desperate for oil they would invade Canada to get its oil. Maybe the NAFTA is at least partly due to the need to have ready access to Canadian oil.
"The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It's an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe," Richard Gilbert said in an interview. The effects brought by oil in our society are so critical and fundamental to how we live, that without cheap oil we face starvation, riots, collapsed economies, more wars, and more.
The gushers are gone - "It's the end of the Beverly Hillbillies oil. The kind of oil that you stick a hole in the ground, and it starts squirting a gusher out under its own power." - All the big discoveries have already been made. There are two peaks in oil supply, the first peak is the peak in the rate of discovery of oil, and the second peak is the peak of oil production. The peak of the discovery rate has to precede the peak of production, and the peak of oil discovery is long past.
There's more in this article but we're focused on understanding peak oil here.
World Energy Outlook
http://www.7gen.com/website/government-and-environment/23994-world-energy-outlook
World Energy Outlook 2007 Edition
http://www.7gen.com/website/energy-policy/23996-world-energy-outlook-2007-edition
As Dr. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, said in testimony to Congress in January 2007: "The world is facing twin energy-related threats: that of not having adequate and secure supplies of energy at affordable prices and that of environmental harm caused by its use. " Not only is the supply threatened, the use of fossil fuels is threatening us all from environmental harm. The burning of fossil fuels releases poisons which directly cause a wide range of diseases. The burning of fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses which are directly causing climate change to be worse. Purchasing fossil fuels results in large capital flows into the Middle East.
"Oil supply is increasingly dominated by a small number of major producers, most of them in the Middle East" which then connects to a variety of global geopolitical manipulations. The oil industry needs to do massive investment in developing oil fields and infrastructure, a total of $4.3 trillion dollars between 2005-2030. However it is uncertain whether the key Middle East countries will actually do so, and it's possible they will deliberately keep investment lower than predicted. Why should they increase production when keeping production low keeps the price high? Or it's possible that a credit crunch might prevent producers from expanding capacity due to a lack of money to pay for the investments.
The Shape of Oil to Come
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-oil/23980-shape-oil-come
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3060
There are approximately two thoughts to how the peak oil phenomena plays out. The "sharp peak" model says production reaches a peak and rapidly declines. Nobody who has studied this carefully says we will "run out", instead the debate is in how quick is the decline. There are those who think production will, instead, "plateau" for a long time for one reason or another.
Oil megaprojects
http://www.7gen.com/website/oil-industry/23982-oil-megaprojects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects
On Wikipedia the Oil Megaprojects page tracks the known huge oil projects. It's a useful resource to look at and ponder.
The rise of the new energy world order
http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD17Dj04.html
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-energy/24136-rise-new-energy-world-order
The world energy crisis is upon us. Dwindling supply and rising demand leads to a simple economics lesson, rising cost. The old equation was cheap energy lead to untold wealth. The new equation is gonna lead to a totally different world power structure.
Technosanity #3: Peak Oil
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Links: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/peak-oil.html
Links: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3060
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects
Links: http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD17Dj04.html
Links: http://audio.davidherron.com/technosanity/e000003.mp3
Let's start with a quick primer on what this is.
Adapted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
http://www.7gen.com/website/peak-oil/23988-peak-oil
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum production is reached. The peak oil occurs at every level, for each oil field, for each country, and for the global production. After the peak oil point is reached, the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.
The same pattern happens for other limited resources. There will be a copper peak, a coal peak, a natural gas peak, a fish peak, etc. In each case there is an increasing demand for a resource, and a fixed maximum capacity to deliver that demand, and once the capacity is reached it damages the resource such that it can no longer produce as it did before.
Oil is the most critical resource for our societies existence and it is with oil that this Peak Resource phenomenon was discovered.
Oil is the key to transportation. Current transportation technologies generally require liquid fuels, and society has chosen that the only way to get liquid fuels is to use fossil oil. The direct result of tight oil supplies will be expensive transportation, and that will contribute to several secondary results to be covered later.
The ever-increasing demand for oil partly occurs as a natural byproduct of rising population. Each person who exists is responsible for consuming resources, so of course the more people there are the more resources which are used. Another cause is a shift from manual technologies like bicycles or horse drawn carts to mechanized technologies like cars and trucks. Some countries, especially India and China, are industrializing and are causing an increased rate of demand. As countries industrialize the amount of resources consumed per person raises as well.
Peak Oil
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-oil/23991-peak-oil
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/peak-oil.html
An interview with the authors of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil they suggest the U.S. might become so desperate for oil they would invade Canada to get its oil. Maybe the NAFTA is at least partly due to the need to have ready access to Canadian oil.
"The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It's an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe," Richard Gilbert said in an interview. The effects brought by oil in our society are so critical and fundamental to how we live, that without cheap oil we face starvation, riots, collapsed economies, more wars, and more.
The gushers are gone - "It's the end of the Beverly Hillbillies oil. The kind of oil that you stick a hole in the ground, and it starts squirting a gusher out under its own power." - All the big discoveries have already been made. There are two peaks in oil supply, the first peak is the peak in the rate of discovery of oil, and the second peak is the peak of oil production. The peak of the discovery rate has to precede the peak of production, and the peak of oil discovery is long past.
There's more in this article but we're focused on understanding peak oil here.
World Energy Outlook
http://www.7gen.com/website/government-and-environment/23994-world-energy-outlook
World Energy Outlook 2007 Edition
http://www.7gen.com/website/energy-policy/23996-world-energy-outlook-2007-edition
As Dr. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, said in testimony to Congress in January 2007: "The world is facing twin energy-related threats: that of not having adequate and secure supplies of energy at affordable prices and that of environmental harm caused by its use. " Not only is the supply threatened, the use of fossil fuels is threatening us all from environmental harm. The burning of fossil fuels releases poisons which directly cause a wide range of diseases. The burning of fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses which are directly causing climate change to be worse. Purchasing fossil fuels results in large capital flows into the Middle East.
"Oil supply is increasingly dominated by a small number of major producers, most of them in the Middle East" which then connects to a variety of global geopolitical manipulations. The oil industry needs to do massive investment in developing oil fields and infrastructure, a total of $4.3 trillion dollars between 2005-2030. However it is uncertain whether the key Middle East countries will actually do so, and it's possible they will deliberately keep investment lower than predicted. Why should they increase production when keeping production low keeps the price high? Or it's possible that a credit crunch might prevent producers from expanding capacity due to a lack of money to pay for the investments.
The U.S. imports more energy than the next 2 highest importers. Most of U.S. imports come from shaky or unfriendly suppliers. Many of the key suppliers are 1-2 months travel time away. There are many scenarios in which "energy" (a.k.a. oil) supplies to the U.S. can be disrupted. One of these unfriendly suppliers could turn downright nasty and cut off oil to the U.S. Or storms could wreck shipping facilities, refinery facilities. Or a war with Iran could block the mouth of the Persian Gulf, preventing shipment of oil from the Middle East.In other words we have to be smart enough to realize the game is changing. That we can no longer continue life in the style to which we have become accustomed. We have to change our ways.
The Shape of Oil to Come
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-oil/23980-shape-oil-come
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3060
There are approximately two thoughts to how the peak oil phenomena plays out. The "sharp peak" model says production reaches a peak and rapidly declines. Nobody who has studied this carefully says we will "run out", instead the debate is in how quick is the decline. There are those who think production will, instead, "plateau" for a long time for one reason or another.
Oil megaprojects
http://www.7gen.com/website/oil-industry/23982-oil-megaprojects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects
On Wikipedia the Oil Megaprojects page tracks the known huge oil projects. It's a useful resource to look at and ponder.
The rise of the new energy world order
http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD17Dj04.html
http://www.7gen.com/article-summary/peak-energy/24136-rise-new-energy-world-order
The world energy crisis is upon us. Dwindling supply and rising demand leads to a simple economics lesson, rising cost. The old equation was cheap energy lead to untold wealth. The new equation is gonna lead to a totally different world power structure.
Technosanity #3: Peak Oil
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Links: http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oil/peak-oil.html
Links: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3060
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_megaprojects
Links: http://atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JD17Dj04.html
Links: http://audio.davidherron.com/technosanity/e000003.mp3
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
"America is addicted to oil" - Looking back at the State of the Union, 2006
Given todays crisis with the rising prices for oil and the rising
prices for food, I thought it would be interesting to look back at
George W. Bush's statement "America is addicted to Oil". As
astonishing as it was for GW to be so honest as to admit the national
addiction, as I reread the State of the Union speech this statement was
embedded among some interesting promises related to freeing the U.S.
from dependence on oil. But in the end I think of those as hollow
promises because in the end this is President Enron, Vice President
Halliburton, and the rest, who have lied us into a war meant to capture
control of the Iraqi oil, and how honest could he really be to actually
propose that the U.S. stop spending money on Oil?
What does America is addicted to Oil mean? To me it refers to all the ways in which Oil use is taken for granted as the only way we can conduct business in the U.S.A. The default method to move your body from one location to another? Why, it's to hop in your car and drive. And for 99.999% of Americans that means burning oil. There are a few, like me, who have gone through the steps to have vehicles which don't require burning oil.
Here is the full context of what GW Bush said: (full transcript, State of the Union 2006)
What does America is addicted to Oil mean? To me it refers to all the ways in which Oil use is taken for granted as the only way we can conduct business in the U.S.A. The default method to move your body from one location to another? Why, it's to hop in your car and drive. And for 99.999% of Americans that means burning oil. There are a few, like me, who have gone through the steps to have vehicles which don't require burning oil.
Here is the full context of what GW Bush said: (full transcript, State of the Union 2006)
Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources -- and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.
So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative -- a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research -- at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy. (Applause.)
We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We'll also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn, but from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. (Applause.)He's not proposing any fundamental reform. He's simply proposing finding a way to keep business as usual (cheap energy allowing Americans to be fully wasteful) ... bleah.
Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. (Applause.) By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)
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