The Etp Model Has Been Empirically Confirmed

[Write4U]

Not really. The Etp model uses the average efficiency of internal combustion engines to calculate the maximum oil price curve.

And what is that average combusion engine work efficiency, say, between a battleship and a million lawn mowers? In order to come to any average, two dynamics must be known. The TOTAL number of combustion engines (each properly classified by efficiency) and the TOTAL consumption of oil. When a battle ship leaves port, should we stop mowing our lawns?

No. The Etp model forecasts the price of a barrel of oil. ---Futilitist

Which clearly seems to go up as the costs of finding, extraction, processing, and transportation increases. Am I correct?

If so, how on earth can anyone arrive at the conclusion that the price of gas at the pump will go down ? I can understand that "as prices go up" there will be less consumption. of oil, which will only extend the exhaustion of available oil for a very short time and be reflected in the ETP statistics. But that does not solve anything!

But the concept of "strength through exhaustion" (drill, baby, drill), is obviously not the answer.

At some point, oil will no longer be available for commercial use at all, at any price, for any reason, ETP be damned. There will come a point where the entire source of energy supply will undergo a total paradigm shift. This has already started with hybrid engines, but as long as oil (a FINITE source) is THE driving force of the nation's energy supply, the economy is in grave danger of total collapse (in the near future).

I understand the desire to find that specific time of "end of oil", but IMO, it is an exercise in futility. To be able to predict something from happenening, will not prevent it from happening. Moreover, none of the illustrations account for global natural disasters, which may require diversion of oil energy for "clean up" insread of productive (profitable)work.

The QUESTION is, will we be ready for such a paradigm shift or will the economy collapse back to "coal", amd when that runs out, back to "gas", and when that runs out, back to "wood"? Nuclear power seems a viable alternative, but we all know the consequences when something goes wrong with that.

When are we going to get serious about this looming global calamity instead of continuing reliance on (finite) natural resources? We are running out of time folks.

Has anyone asked the question how long it will take and the economic impact of switching an entire oil driven economy to an adequate replacement system? 20-30-40-50 years? or "overnight"?

 

[Billy T]

... Has anyone asked the question how long it will take and the economic impact of switching an entire oil driven economy to an adequate replacement system? 20-30-40-50 years? or "overnight"?

I have in several posts noted that globally replacing or adapting the gasoline powered car fleet to use pure alcohol would take at least a decade - People will not abandon a relative new gasoline car as it takes years for the fuel cost to even approach the capital cost now. (Due more to great improvements in mpg and more telecommuting, car-pooling etc. than the current low gasoline prices. People are driving less.)

Although abandoned pasture could be growing all the sugar cane needed for alcohol using cars in less than a decade (faster than the global fleet could be switched to using alcohol); the production of the necessary fermentation and distillation plants would need about a decade. Brazilian company (Debonie or some thing like that) makes more than half these plants for the entire world.

Summary: In about a decade, most liquid fuel cars could be using alcohol, but it would take government pressure*, like adding insulation to homes did. Also as most of the cane-farmers would be currently unemployed persons, they would become markets for many first world products - Economically a "win/win" change for all (including the environment).

* Brazil's military dictator ship mandated alcohol cars as they wanted to conserve foreign exchange for buying weapons, etc.

 

[Futilitist]

Has anyone asked the question how long it will take and the economic impact of switching an entire oil driven economy to an adequate replacement system? 20-30-40-50 years? or "overnight"?

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_report

The Hirsch report, the commonly referred to name for the report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, was created by request for the US Department of Energy and published in February 2005.[1] Some information was updated in 2007.[2] It examined the time frame for the occurrence of peak oil, the necessary mitigating actions, and the likely impacts based on the timeliness of those actions.

Mitigation
Operating under the assumption that existing services must be sustained, the Hirsch report considered the effects of the following mitigation strategies as part of the "crash program":

1. Fuel efficient transportation,
2. Heavy oil/Oil sands,
3. Coal liquefaction,
4. Enhanced oil recovery,
5. Gas-to-liquids.

Mitigation efforts will require substantial time.

• Waiting until production peaks would leave the world with a liquid fuel deficit for 20 years.
• Initiating a crash program 10 years before peaking leaves a liquid fuels shortfall of a decade.
• Initiating a crash program 20 years before peaking could avoid a world liquid fuels shortfall.

----------------

But, like I said before, Write4U, this is really old news. Ten year old news. We were warned. We didn't listen. Why dwell in the past? It is too late to cry over spilled milk.

It's time to get up to date.

The most up to date information from the Etp model forecasts that oil will reach the "zero state" and no longer be a source of energy for civilization by around 2021. That is less than 5.5 years away. During that time, we will lose 38% of our total energy and about 90% of our transportation energy. We are facing an immediate, massive net energy decline. It is *WAY* too late for mitigation. There is no crash program that will avert the coming crash.

And even if there actually were a physically possible way for civilization to avert disaster, diligent right-wing peak oil deniers like Russ_Watters, exchemist, and billvon, etc. will stop the effort dead in it's tracks. They will accomplish this mission by tirelessly doing everything they can to stop the truth about the dilemma from ever being known! When things really begin to go wrong, and we are all feeling the pain, we should lay the blame on the people who lied to us for all of these years.



---Futilitist

 

[Futilitist]

Hey Billy T.

You seem to have inadvertently skipped over my last post to you.

What do you think of the methodology used to create the Etp model? Speaking as a PhD physicist, specifically what, if anything, is wrong with the methodology used to create the Etp model?

(The methodology is clearly explained in my last post to you at the bottom of the last page. I can post it again for you, if that helps.)

And that, of course, leaves the question of how a physics model that is supposedly invalid could still have such uncanny, real world accuracy. How do you explain the fact that the Etp model forecast the yearly average price of oil from 1960-2009 with an accuracy of 96.5%?



---Futilitist

 

[Daecon]

Yeah, well the US domestic price of Uranium correlates with accidental poisonings by alcohol with an accuracy of 0.977456.

Explain that.

 

[Futilitist]

Yeah, well the US domestic price of Uranium correlates with accidental poisonings by alcohol with an accuracy of 0.977456.

Explain that.

Dude. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. I get it.

But I am not saying that the Etp model caused the price of oil. It just predicted it.

In this case, correlation does not imply causation. It does not imply anything at all. It just tells you the exact accuracy of a model designed to do a specific job. This is how models are verified.

The Etp model was designed to predict the price of oil by very elegantly applying the second law of thermodynamics to the problem. The methodology is straight forward and logical. When they verified the model against actual historical oil prices, it had a correlation coefficient of .965 over about 49 years. There would seem to be some justification for thinking that this is not the result of coincidence. That is why the high correlation is significant.

On the other hand, the US domestic price of Uranium may correlate over some unspecified timeframe with accidental poisonings by alcohol, but there is no reason to think these things might be remotely related in any way. So there is no reason to think that this is anything but a coincidence. That is why this high correlation is insignificant. So, bad argument.

Your canned, sophomoric argument is disingenuous. These sorts of coincidental correlations are very commonplace, and you know they are meaningless. On the other hand some correlations are very significant. Some people can tell the difference.


---EDIT---

I just noticed that this is post #666!

Correlation?



---Futilitist

 

[Daecon]

And why do you think your specific correlation is significant?

Because you want it to be? That's not good enough.

 

[Billy T]

... We stopped using whale oil when we started using crude oil. This transition resulted in a net energy gain for civilization. The situation is very different this time since we don't have a better energy source readily available to make a transition to. ...

Yes, true and we stopped burning whale oil in lamps when a better, cheaper fuel was available. We have started doing that again for the same reasons in Brazil. (and will in the US too when oil company lobbyist can no longer get legislatures to restrict it in many different ways.)*

What would that "better cheaper fuel" be? and when will it be available? you might ask. Well sugar cane based alcohol has an EROEI of lightly better than 10, which is at least 4 times better than shale oil, which the US is planning to import from Canada. The EROEI of some middle eastern fields is much higher, perhaps even 4 times higher, but the average EROEI is steadily falling and that EROEI of sugar cane does not consider the fact the heat released by burning the crushed cane far exceeds the heat required for distillation. So much so that Brazil generates about 5% of its electric power with this heat source. That is at least equal to the power generated by burning fossil fuels as 85+% of Brazil's electric power is hydroelectric; wind, solar and a little nuclear make at least 10% and are growing.

Most Brazilian cars (including mine) now run on that ethanol as it is cheaper on a per mile basis than gasoline. Theses two facts are why I say a better and cheaper liquid fuel is available and has been for about a decade. Please note this is prior to claiming the fact sugar cane alcohol is slightly net CO2 negative and RENEWABLE. The economic advantage would be huge, if emitters of CO2 had to pay for pollution of "the commons" (IE the air, especially if the fee rate included just the currently being caused economic damages - like more than 1000 homes recently destroyed by only two of CA's large fires.)

The situation is essentially identical to when whale oil lighting switched to kerosene lamps. A better and cheaper solution displaces the earlier less efficient and more costly one. There is nothing in the etp equations that limits them to petroleum. They apply equally well to whale oil. This time is NOT different - better and cheaper car fuel is in use where lobbyist can't block it adoption.

* Big Oil has huge power via the law, especially the "depletion tax allowance" and does not pay for the environmental damage it is doing. The Whaling ship owners were not nearly as effective in blocking progress, but they tried. For example as gasoline fraction of oil was then of very low value compared to kerosene, some was mixed into the lamp fuel, with the occasional explosion one would expect. The ship owners, had some influence with newspaper editors, so these "accidents" were widely reported, perhaps with small adjacent ad saying:
"Use natural, safe, whale oil like the wise do."

 

[exchemist]

And what is that average combusion engine work efficiency, say, between a battleship and a million lawn mowers? In order to come to any average, two dynamics must be known. The TOTAL number of combustion engines (each properly classified by efficiency) and the TOTAL consumption of oil. When a battle ship leaves port, should we stop mowing our lawns?

Which clearly seems to go up as the costs of finding, extraction, processing, and transportation increases. Am I correct?

If so, how on earth can anyone arrive at the conclusion that the price of gas at the pump will go down ? I can understand that "as prices go up" there will be less consumption. of oil, which will only extend the exhaustion of available oil for a very short time and be reflected in the ETP statistics. But that does not solve anything!

But the concept of "strength through exhaustion" (drill, baby, drill), is obviously not the answer.

At some point, oil will no longer be available for commercial use at all, at any price, for any reason, ETP be damned. There will come a point where the entire source of energy supply will undergo a total paradigm shift. This has already started with hybrid engines, but as long as oil (a FINITE source) is THE driving force of the nation's energy supply, the economy is in grave danger of total collapse (in the near future).

I understand the desire to find that specific time of "end of oil", but IMO, it is an exercise in futility. To be able to predict something from happenening, will not prevent it from happening. Moreover, none of the illustrations account for global natural disasters, which may require diversion of oil energy for "clean up" insread of productive (profitable)work.

The QUESTION is, will we be ready for such a paradigm shift or will the economy collapse back to "coal", amd when that runs out, back to "gas", and when that runs out, back to "wood"? Nuclear power seems a viable alternative, but we all know the consequences when something goes wrong with that.

When are we going to get serious about this looming global calamity instead of continuing reliance on (finite) natural resources? We are running out of time folks.

Has anyone asked the question how long it will take and the economic impact of switching an entire oil driven economy to an adequate replacement system? 20-30-40-50 years? or "overnight"?

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, according to BP we have about 50 years of proven reserves, at current rates of consumption. So allowing for growth in consumption, we would have maybe 30 years or so, if no more recoverable oil at all were to be discovered. But of course there will be more, given that the rate of discovery has not dropped to anywhere near zero. And furthermore, we can expect oil to become progressively more expensive, once the cheap supplies run down, or are restricted by geopolitics, so we may find that the peak consumption rate occurs quite soon, maybe within 10 years.

You say "we are running out of time folks", rather as if nobody is aware of this. But people, companies and government most certainly are, especially in Europe, in Japan and in California. And you can see around you the slow but accelerating march of the new technologies that will replace oil-fired heat engines. What we need is continuing pressure on governments to tilt the playing field progressively against oil consumption (CAFE, carbon tax, import duties, petroleum production taxes etc), which will accelerate the change. A lot of this is already being done, but the various screws need to be tightened further, especially in N America (where for psychological reasons, to do with their car-oriented society, most of the climate change refuseniks are located).

But I see no need for panic (indeed, panic is always a useless response).

 

[Beer w/Straw]

OK well, as some might guess, I'm a bit bored...

WARNING: We rarely feel the need to alert readers to explicit content. But our discussion of the online sex trade requires frank language, and some may find the topic distasteful.

http://www.economist.com/news/brief...haking-up-oldest-business-more-bang-your-buck

As far as prostitution goes, you just need the right boundary conditions for your control volumes. Otherwise you can easily lose thermodynamic equilibrium. It goes without saying, of course, that "fitness for use" must be properly assessed!

The laws of thermodynamics are very powerful and useful.

I looked for some statistics to correlate prostitution in with thermodynamics and could not. However, since oil is an economic commodity it should be inexorably tied into the cost of living and since prostitution is as well

Prostitutes in San Francisco, where the cost of living is high, charge more than those in cheaper cities such as Prague.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/08/economist-explains-7 the Etp model should also be able to make predictions regarding it. (The title is only misleading cause more prostitutes are using things like Facebook.)

Hence, the prostitution curve should reflect the Etp model.

You said I need the right boundary conditions for applying physical laws to the sex trade and there are a number of factors which make predictions difficult:

My question is, you say oil prices will go down and that should mean the cost of living should go down as well. Have you looked at all the variables in your predictions? For the Etp curve does not accurately predict the world sex trade curve (the price has been on the rise since 2014) which makes me think you haven't examined all the factors.

:EDIT:

On the side, something I cannot wrap my head around is this weird law:

Current laws on prostitution in Canada, introduced in 2014, make it illegal to purchase sexual services but legal to sell them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Canada

 

[Billy T]

To exchemist I would have "liked" your post 669, except having oil at current consumption for ~50 years more is not reassuring. In fact it is very scary. Burning that much oil in five decades will very likely make such large changes in earth's state that it can not sustain mammalian life. There will be few if any fish living in the greatly acidified oceans. Occasionally millions will die when the wet bulb temperatures remain at 35C / 95F (or greater) for an hour. Flooding in some locations and decade long droughts in others will drastically reduce food production capacity. The cost of about half the US's fruits and vegetables, which come from California, is already rising. And as I have said about large forest fires in several earlier posts: "You ain't seen nothing yet. - It is going to get much worse. -Too many positive feed back systems at work."

If I were able to, I would make oil in the ground have a half-life of about 10 years. Having 50 years worth within the reach of technological man is a curse, considering how lacking in wisdom and political capacity to act in his long term interest is vs. his strong desire to seek short term profits.

 

[Beer w/Straw]

Billy, there is also E85
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E85

 

[Billy T]

Billy, there is also E85
...

And in the US the corn based alcohol used to make it has an EROEI of no more than 1.1, so E85 lowers the net energy gain. Oil is stored sunlight from long ago and if obtained with "lift pumps" or if it will just flow out of the ground, then even a much higher EROEI than 1.1

Sugar cane based alcohol is also "stored solar energy" but has and EROEI of slightly more than 10, without even counting the heat, excessive of distillation requirements, that generates about 5% of Brazil's electrical energy. If any of the oil made into US gasoline came from "fracking" or especially from the very low EROEI shale oil of Canada, then making E85 out of sugar cane based ethanol, would raise the net EROEI of your car's fuel, not lower it as US's E85 d0es.

E85 is a minor reduction in oil company profits, so they don't fight it. It diverts attention form a better, cheaper, renewable, "CO2 net zero or even negative" fuel they fear. They tell lies about sugar cane alcohol, such as:
"If world switched to it all the rain forests would be destroyed that is where the oxygen we breath comes from." Etc.

The 10 fold higher EROEI of sugar cane alcohol vs. corn based alcohol is due mainly to fact that the fermented corn liquor is distilled with natural gas energy and huge amounts of oil based fertilizer are need to compensate for Iowa's short growing season. The nitrogen fertilizer applied is mainly converted into NOx compounds, which are both terrible for your health and powerful green house gases. In fact a Noble Prize winning soil chemists, has concluded that using E85 is much worse when these harmful "side effects" are considered than just using only gasoline!

 

[exchemist]

To exchemist I would have "liked" your post 669, except having oil at current consumption for ~50 years more is not reassuring. In fact it is very scary. Burning that much oil in five decades will very likely make such large changes in earth's state that it can not sustain mammalian life. There will be few if any fish living in the greatly acidified oceans. Occasionally millions will die when the wet bulb temperatures remain at 35C / 95F (or greater) for an hour. Flooding in some locations and decade long droughts in others will drastically reduce food production capacity. The cost of about half the US's fruits and vegetables, which come from California, is already rising. And as I have said about large forest fires in several earlier posts: "You ain't seen nothing yet. - It is going to get much worse. -Too many positive feed back systems at work."

If I were able to, I would make oil in the ground have a half-life of about 10 years. Having 50 years worth within the reach of technological man is a curse, considering how lacking in wisdom and political capacity to act in his long term interest is vs. his strong desire to seek short term profits.

I do not disagree in principle, though I do not necessarily sign up to your apocalyptic predictions either. I think price and policies will cause us to use the remaining oil more slowly than we do today, as these factors progressively bite, and as the alternatives come down in price and increase in availability. I certainly think that is what needs to happen.

Like you, I suspect our primary challenge is climate change, rather than running out of one of the main resources responsible for it.

 

[krash661]

the etp model may be basically correct;

it's obvious you did not do the calculations from the info we received.

 

[krash661]

You seem to have inadvertently skipped over my last post to you.

at this moment i have four. all physics and mathematics. i'm also a series 7, but what does this even mean ?
also,where is the sheet, can we observe the inputs ? now quite diverting and submit what will prove us all wrong.
why are you avoiding this? you clearly stated that one of the functions of this model has already collapsed.
all you have done was shown some lines on a graph, then say 'see it works', then we ask for evidence, then you resort to the typical 'they are just a bunch of idiots and cannot understand.' this is it, nothing more.

 

[krash661]

And that, of course, leaves the question of how a physics model that is supposedly invalid could still have such uncanny, real world accuracy. How do you explain the fact that the Etp model forecast the yearly average price of oil from 1960-2009 with an accuracy of 96.5%?

it' can be explained by manipulating the inputs, which is why i would like to see the sheet.
again, you already have confirmed one of the functions has collapsed.

 

[Billy T]

I do not disagree in principle, though I do not necessarily sign up to your apocalyptic predictions either. ...

There is no sign yet of any slow down in CO2 release rates. Just a day or two ago, I skimmed a new study that was telling China's use of coal was much greater than generally believed.

Also my "apocalyptic predictions" are more of a dire warning that we don't know how bad things can get with 24 positive feed backs interacting; the consequences could be worse than I fear they might be. Some things we are quite sure of.

For example you will die in about an hour, just sitting in a chair, unable to passively transfer the ~100Ws of internal bio generation heat to 95F wet bulb air. (Heat stroke with lose of consciousness before death.)

The dire warnings I make are made in an effort to get more to realize some things are more important than current profits made by "business as usual" so lets try to be "safe, rather than sorry." There surely is a "tipping point" where even drastic reduction in fossil fuel use will not save mankind because of the many positive feed backs now working.

Lets hope that point was not two years ago; but the system is much too complex and very imperfectly modeled to know if it was then or is still in the future.

 

[krash661]

it had a correlation coefficient of .965 over about 49 years. There would seem to be some justification for thinking that this is not the result of coincidence. That is why the high correlation is significant.

which is very odd and you cannot grasp this. i also want to see the margin of error. but i'm also sure that will be sidestepped like the input request.

 

[krash661]

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, according to BP we have about 50 years of proven reserves, at current rates of consumption. So allowing for growth in consumption, we would have maybe 30 years or so, if no more recoverable oil at all were to be discovered. But of course there will be more, given that the rate of discovery has not dropped to anywhere near zero. And furthermore, we can expect oil to become progressively more expensive, once the cheap supplies run down, or are restricted by geopolitics, so we may find that the peak consumption rate occurs quite soon, maybe within 10 years.

You say "we are running out of time folks", rather as if nobody is aware of this. But people, companies and government most certainly are, especially in Europe, in Japan and in California. And you can see around you the slow but accelerating march of the new technologies that will replace oil-fired heat engines. What we need is continuing pressure on governments to tilt the playing field progressively against oil consumption (CAFE, carbon tax, import duties, petroleum production taxes etc), which will accelerate the change. A lot of this is already being done, but the various screws need to be tightened further, especially in N America (where for psychological reasons, to do with their car-oriented society, most of the climate change refuseniks are located).

But I see no need for panic (indeed, panic is always a useless response).

not only that but oil is bought at least 3 all the way through six months even further out, ahead of time of need of supply. this etp model does not take this into account, so from this point it's already inaccurate, look where the front month brent is trading at,at this moment. i can buy or short contracts three years out from now, right now. brent is trading exactly like i said it would, it's setting up a bottom between 40 and fifty, then will move up to it's next range.