Oil Crisis

[Karmashock]

this oil barron stuff is bullshit... if that were what was holding tech back, then the russians or chinese would have used this tech a long time ago. I mean... they're saying some guy can make a lawn mower go on this... if it were that simple, then someone would have made this go a long time ago, and I don't buy this conspiracy crap.


seriously, there are powers our there that are big enough to make this stuff on their own and well beyond the oil barrons... which I don't think even exist in the first place. sure, there is an oil lobby... but it's nothing insidious.


Perhaps I'm misinterpreting what its suggesting though... I know that hydrogen engines are going to be big... but they don't produce power... more store it better then batteries do... that's about it. Fuel cell are super batteries... but you still need the power from somewhere.

 

[Godless]

Get ready to READ! here come the links;
Corrupt government
NOPEC

CNN-on NOPEC

The Terrorists' Secret War Strategy

Well i'ts superbowl sunday! and here we are debating something we have no control of.

Godless.

 

[Karmashock]

That still doesn't explain why the USSR and China didn't/aren't developing this... None of your links addressed that. They're not bad engineers, so if this were anything but extremely hard to do, they would have done it already. If it's extremely hard to do, then you can't really blame our people for not having it done

 

[Golgo 13]

I should clarify that we are not running out of all oil. We've used half of the worlds oil, and much of the other half is unrecoverable and will just sit there, never able to be touched. What we are running out of is the cheaply extracted, easy to refine, light surface crude that has enabled exponential growth. Recoverable oil is what we're running out of, but even after we've used all the oil that we're able to recover from the earth, there will still be plenty of it deep down that we can never use as an energy source since it takes more energy to extract it than it produces.

What crossing over the peak effectively means is that oil will become harder to extract, take more energy to extract, be more energy intensive to refine, be of a lesser quality, and not as much can be extracted. These technical issues combined with increased scarcity will make fuel costs skyrocket.

Peaking means categorically that you no longer grow. Economic activity is predicated upon by hydrocarbon energy. No room for growth in consumption = no room for economic growth. The U.S. economy has to grow 3% a year to remain flat, anything less than that is a recession.

You don't have to drain every last recoverable barrel before you experience a crisis. The real problem comes around the halfway point, which is like right around now.

... I know that hydrogen engines are going to be big... but they don't produce power... more store it better then batteries do... that's about it. Fuel cell are super batteries... but you still need the power from somewhere.

Hydrogen isn't a form of energy, it's a form of energy storage. It is made through the input of energy, and you get less energy out of the hydrogen than what it took to make it.

All you need for hydrogen is electricity and water. But to have electricity, you need some other source of energy. Electricity is chiefly provided by natural gas. So in a world where we're short of natural gas, the last thing we need is a brand new user.

Hydrogen fuel cells also require 10 grams of platinum per cell. If we were to switch out the vehicles in the U.S. alone, this would require every gram of platinum that is known to exist on the planet. Hydrogen also leaks out of any container at a rate of 1.7% per day since it's the simplest element in the universe, so it has no long term storage potential. Each fuel cell has to be replaced annually as well.

It is for these reasons and several others that we will not have a sustainable hydrogen economy. What we need is a new source of energy, not a source of energy storage like hydrogen.

If you want more proof of the dangers of crack smoking, you need look no further than this:

The Bottomless Well: The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy

They explain why demand will never go down...

Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

... and how "energy waste" actually benefits us

That gave me a flashback:

 

[Ophiolite]

Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Brilliant!

 

[Karmashock]

... still the last 300 years of growth have been amazing.

 

[Godless]

Anybody who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Lets see; The earth is about 4billion years old, we have been around apx. 100,000 years, I'd say we barely getting started. You do understament the power of consciousness don't you?.

Godless.

 

[Golgo 13]

Lets see; The earth is about 4billion years old, we have been around apx. 100,000 years, I'd say we barely getting started.

We've only been using oil for about a century and a half.

In steady growth, it takes a fixed length of time for a quantity to grow by a fixed fraction. From this, it follows that it takes a longer fixed longer length of time for that quantity to grow by 100%. the latter is called the doubling time.

Now let's observe a steady 7% annual growth in oil consumption:

Every decade, we have to find and produce a quantity of oil equal to all oil consumption in all previous decades to continue 7% growth in oil consumption.

For 2010-2020, the amount of oil we'll need is the size of that whole page. Now only an idiot would think this sustainable.

Since the beginning of the oil age, we've consumed half of the world's oil, which is approx 1 trillion barrels, at an exponential rate of growth. According to the CIA, we have 1 trillion barrels of oil left. If you factor in the rate of consumption of the resource, this means that if we could consume 100% of the oil in the earth, it would last until 2032. However, we can't consume 100% of the oil and we can't continue to consume at a growing rate due to production peak and declining output.

You cannot have infinite growth against a finitre resource. That should be a no-brainer.

 

[Karmashock]

You don't know what will happen when things get tight. People always say we're headed for disaster with this stuff, and every time we side step it with ease.

Most of the oil out there has NEVER been tapped because it costs more to process. The difference in price isn't that great, but it's unprofitable so long as there is so much cheap oil.

Fusion power isn't far off

Who knows what could happen to solar... currently its too expensive to put everywhere, and to be effective it has to be put everywhere.

Geothermal power is really effective so long as you're willing to drill 2~4 miles down to find the hot rocks. Massive engineering project beyond any dam made so far... but we're talking about long long term power.

Instead of internal combustion we'll likely trend to hydrogen/electric engines.

But worst case, we do have very large coal reserves... though unfortunately much of it is under national park... so... we might just leave it there... if the lights go out, I doubt we will.

There is always nuclear power too... I'm not too hot on using a lot of that though as it's more finite then you'd think and it can't be replaced or subsituted as easily.


If you care about the ecosystem, the problem isn't so much all the extra carbon in the environment, but the diminishing global forests... that carbon released far out strips our industrial carbon output and more importantly, while before these trees would have helped with the carbon issue... now there is a blank. So if you care about global warming, the easiest way to stop it is to fund a massive replanting of the slash and burn farming/grasing that's been going on in the third world.


Anyway,
Love and peace, Karmashock.

 

[Godless]

Like I said! you don't have much confidence in human ability! you only look at things as getting worst, you only seem to consentrate as if oil will be the only source of fuel, you only see doomsday scenarios. Yet you don't determine the consequences of war, factor in the loss of life, that will be happening during that time, there won't be a growth of 7%, you don't know, how many arabs this country will continue killing, for oil, you don't know what will happen, in the future. No one can predict what will happen next.

I on the other hand see a potential, the loss of life, in war will be hopefully minimal, as soon as we get the neo-cons out of office, the imagination of humanity will come out with different sources of energy we have yet to fathom, after you and I are dead, the human race will continue on. It has happened now for several millineas, come christianity, catholicism, with their war on paganisms, Napoleans, Hitlers, Mao, with their war on humanity, and we are still here, as long as people are breeding we will remain here, unless we get a super-nova explosion of the sun, will we run out of a source for energy!!!

Godless.

 

[Golgo 13]

The Oil Age is Over

E-book that addresses oil an natural gas depletion, and why so-called 'alternatives' to fossil fuels will not allow us to continue this way of life.

Alternatives are going to be small clusters of energy at best. There is no alternative or combination thereof that is going to allow us to even power our energy demands of today.

"What it really basically means is that the continued growth in the energy-demand era is coming to an end unless we can quickly invent some other form of energy to take its place.

And we haven't started.

I don't think we have anything on the drawing board today that could even remotely be called an alternative to oil and gas can even remotely impact and offset the peaking of oil and gas."

- Matthew Simmons

What we really need to understand in order to grasp the full scope of the issue is the exponential function.

Bacteria grow by division so that 1 bacterium becomes 2, the 2 divide to give 4, the 4 divide to give 8, etc. Consider a hypothetical strain of bacteria for which this division time is 1 minute. The number of bacteria thus grows exponentially with a doubling time of 1 minute. One bacterium is put in a bottle at 11:00 a.m. and it is observed that the bottle is full of bacteria at 12:00 noon. Here is a simple example of exponential growth in a finite environment. This is mathematically identical to the case of the exponentially growing consumption of our finite resources of fossil fuels. Keep this in mind as you ponder three questions about the bacteria:

(1) When was the bottle half-full? Answer: 11:59 a.m.!

(2) If you were an average bacterium in the bottle, at what time would you first realize that you were running out of space?

Answer: There is no unique answer to this question, so let's ask, "At 11:55 a.m., when the bottle is only 3 % filled (1/32) and is 97 % open space (just yearning for development) would you perceive that there was a problem?" Some years ago someone wrote a letter to a Boulder newspaper to say that there was no problem with population growth in Boulder Valley. The reason given was that there was 15 times as much open space as had already been developed. When one thinks of the bacteria in the bottle one sees that the time in Boulder Valley was 4 min before noon!

The last minutes in the bottle:

11:54 a.m. - 1/64 full (1.5%) - 63/64 empty

11:55 a.m. - 1/32 full (3%) - 31/32 empty

11:56 a.m. - 1/16 full (6%) - 15/16 empty

11:57 a.m. - 1/8 full (12%) - 7/8 empty

11:58 a.m. - 1/4 full (25%) - 3/4 empty

11:59 a.m. - 1/2 full (50%) - 1/2 empty

12:00 noon - full (100%) - 0% empty

Suppose that at 11:58 a.m. some farsighted bacteria realize that they are running out of space and consequently, with a great expenditure of effort and funds, they launch a search for new bottles. They look offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the Arctic, and at 11:59 a.m. they discover three new empty bottles. Great sighs of relief come from all the worried bacteria, because this magnificent discovery is three times the number of bottles that had hitherto been known. The discovery quadruples the total space resource known to the bacteria. Surely this will solve the problem so that the bacteria can be self-sufficient in space. The bacterial "Project Independence" must now have achieved its goal.

(3) How long can the bacterial growth continue if the total space resources are quadrupled?

Answer: Two more doubling times (minutes)!

James Schlesinger, Secretary of Energy in President Carter's Cabinet recently noted that in the energy crisis "we have a classic case of exponential growth against a finite source."

The effect of the discovery of three new bottles:

11:58 a.m. - Bottle No. 1 is one quarter full.

11:59 a.m. - Bottle No. 1 is half-full.

12:00 noon - Bottle No. 1 is full.

12:01 p.m. - Bottles No. 1 and 2 are both full.

12:02 p.m. - Bottles No. 1, 2, 3, 4 are all full.

Quadrupling the resource extends the life of the resource by only two doubling times! When consumption grows exponentially, enormous increases in resources are consumed in a very short time!

- Exerpt from Arithmetic, Population, and Energy lecture.

Text version here.

 

[Karmashock]

Treating humans like bacterium has been used in these arguments before and they have never been right. They said as much about over population... which we all know isn't going to happen today...

BUT people 30 years ago were positive that it was... Just like with the last crisis. On and on. At what point do we realize that this logic is systemically flawed and stop using it? I guess never...

I'm not panicking. I think things need to be done. I think Kyoto needs to renegotiated so that we can sign it AND it can actually make a difference. Beyond that, I'm going to buy a mustang and enjoy life.

Love and peace, Karmashock.
Edit:

you only look at things as getting worst

this wasn't addressed to me was it?... hope not... I'm an optimistic mofo.

 

[Godless]

this wasn't addressed to me was it?... hope not... I'm an optimistic mofo.

Naaaa!! Look at G13's posts, seems this guy is depressed that we may be runing out of black tea, he only looks at doomsday, and end of times craptolgical perhaps he is in need of some Prozac.!.

Do you even know the meaning of the word "fathom" in the future after we are dead buried and gone, perhaps there will be sources of energy that we can't fathom right now!! you don't know.

Don't understament human inovation!.

Godless.

 

[Tristan]

"They said as much about over population"

World population has grown exponentially in the past few hundred years. In 1950, there was roughly 3 billion people. Its more around 6 now. There wasnt even 1 billion in the mid 1800's.

The fact is, finite resources are being used up really quick. And most people think its going to last forever.

 

[Repo Man]

Though I'm not an expert at this, my analogy is this; imagine a man shipwrecked on a small island. He manages to salvage enough canned food to possibly last for years. He consumes it a fast rate, confident that he will soon be rescued. He isn't, and soon the canned food is all gone. He continues to survive by fishing and learning to consume anything edible on the island, including some limited agriculture. But he is now always on the edge of starvation, and wishes he had been more conservative with his supplies.

 

[Karmashock]

Naaaa!!

ah good... I though you might have misunderstood me... or maybe you thought I wasn't optimistic enough... like you were going to tell me we'll have star cruisers in two months or something
*wants a star cruiser *

"They said as much about over population"

World population has grown exponentially in the past few hundred years. In 1950, there was roughly 3 billion people. Its more around 6 now. There wasnt even 1 billion in the mid 1800's.

The fact is, finite resources are being used up really quick. And most people think its going to last forever.

Humans don't apply to those models. We're self aware, communicate, cooperate, and innovate.

If the humans were in that bottle, they'd either burn a hole in the side to get breath of air or invent algae.

World population growth is fairly stable. It's falling in most of europe... it's even falling in china... so I don't get the panic...

But hey, if you want to panic, I can sell you some mittens so you hands don't get cold while you're waving them around in the air freaking out...

Love and peace, Karmashock.

 

[Golgo 13]

Naaaa!! Look at G13's posts, seems this guy is depressed that we may be runing out of black tea,

There's no 'may' about it. It's as sure of a thing as your car running out of gas when the 'low on fuel' light comes on.

he only looks at doomsday...

Aka. hard scientific data and not wishy-washy economist pie-in-the-sky energy fairy apeal-to-nonexistent-technology wishful thinking.

The "technology as a religion" crowd will come around when the price at the pump hits them like a deadiron sledge to the chest.

"'Oh, it doesn't matter if this here Titanic is about to hit an iceberg. We'll invent some way to save all the people aboard before we sink".

Don't understament human inovation!

Don't miscalculate physical limits.

You're appealing to humans, saying "Oh, we'll think of something". Well, the wolf is at the door, and so far nothing on the drawing board is going to save us.

The only thing we've done reguarding the issue is went to war over what's left. There's innovation for ya'.

Humans don't apply to those models. We're self aware, communicate, cooperate, and innovate.

If humans didn't apply, then there would never be any astonishingly similar historical events of human die-offs due to resource depletion like this one:

Excerpt from "The Oil Age is Over"

Beyond that, I'm going to buy a mustang and enjoy life.

Better get your licks in now while we're still in the oil age. When gasoline hits $4 - 7 a gallon, that Mustang is going to become a liability.

 

[Karmashock]

Sigh... here is a better graph...

not bacteria.

 

[Golgo 13]

Here's figures from the U.S. Census Bureau:

Monthly World population figures:

07/01/04 6,372,797,742
08/01/04 6,379,026,080
09/01/04 6,385,254,418
10/01/04 6,391,281,842
11/01/04 6,397,510,180
12/01/04 6,403,537,604
01/01/05 6,409,765,942
02/01/05 6,415,994,280
03/01/05 6,421,619,875
04/01/05 6,427,848,214
05/01/05 6,433,875,637
06/01/05 6,440,103,976
07/01/05 6,446,131,400

Right now: 6,417,456,449

That's 446,587,707 people in 12 months. A tremendous exponential growth.

446.5 million people use up a lot of resources. And just think, there'll probably be more this year.

Look at that exponential growth.

 

[Karmashock]

some how they're not starving... or if they are, then problem is solved right there. As the graph shows, the global population is expected to top out around 11 billion... might be cramped for some, but then I expect that you'll see a lot of what is going on in europe too.