peak oil production in 2009? - what next? 18

[davefitz]

There are rumblings that the peak in world oil production may occur in 2009, and that the demand for oil is increasing very rapidly in developing countries ( China , INdia) .

There does not seem to be any effort being made in the USA to reduce the rate of consumption or to reduce demand. Simple efforts such as the following are not being used :
a) increase CAFE ( auto gas mileage )
b) improve mass transit in major cities ( Seatle, Houston, LA, etc)
c) propaganda which is aimed at changing attitudes toward energy consumption.

What is the most likely end result in 2009 if noone takes steps to prepare for this event?

 

[StressGuy]

With the way things are going, I think a major war with China is strong possibility within my lifetime.

Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas

All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.

 

[funnelguy]

davefitz,
Nuclear. Elect me and I'll start building those plants now! Seriously, I would look hard at nuclear. Pretty good safety record. Acceptable environmental impact, IMO.

StressGuy,
Why?

 

[davefitz]

funnelguy;
Nuclear might address primarily power and perhaps ocean transport, but power demands can also be augmented by coal or natural gas. The oil peak ( and decline) primarily impacts transportation, mainly auto, truck, rail,and air transportation. Nuclear is unlikely to impact those in any significant degree, except for some proposals for generating hydrogen from nuclear power plants.

Anticipating a supply - based shock to the market, it would suggest a quick decline in the use of personal autos and the suburban lifestyle- but perhaps would add an impetus to tele-commute and tele-conference. Certain markets would be hard hit- SUV's, power boats, etc. and all the industies that cater to them.

 

[aspearin1]

The simplicity of it is, it's all political. When's the last time a government made decisions based on science and engineering? Energy shouldn't be the main concern. Nuclear will always be an option for us. We will always get more energy from nuclear power with less waste than any fossil fuel. When the oil is gone, what will become of plastics? We are at such a state where it is cheaper to throw things away than to recycle. And money talks. There's a lot of propaganda that suggests that the fuel efficient technology is very much a reality, at least for automobiles. Great for the environment, but what would it do socially? All domestic jobs based on the oil industry would face a catestrophic layoff. Corporations would surely fold. All international relations based on oil import/export (food for oil program) would die. Any country whose economy is based solely on natural resources would surely crumble. I'm all in favor of a greener planet, but the reasons above pretty much tell why engineers don't make the decisions.

By the way... we as people have no idea how much oil is left in the world. We speculate... but we don't know.

aspearin1

 

[jmw]

Nuclear? When your reort on the safety issue you are talking about fission reactors and that begs the question: What about Three Mile Island or Chernobyl? With or without a good safety record, its like air crashes. Air travel is pretty well the safest way to travel by far but one air crash is better than two hndre fatal car crashes from a new point of view, nuclear has the added dimension that people can be frightened into expecting children born with two heads or something. An emotive area. Just mention that the lobsters and other fish living in the nuclear power station cooling water outflow are twice the size they are elsewhere and everyone thinks mutation, not that they are benefiting from higher water temperatures. The higher incidence of Leukemia in families living around one nuclear power station in the UK led to the Pavlovian response that this was due to radiation posining. In fact the higher incidence of Leukemia is said to predate the building of the power station.
There ain't no such thing as a small nuclear incident. The press won't let there be. One thing you can count on, the less something is understood the more the pathological fear of oit in the populace at large. Statistics have no place in this logic.
Even so, I agree but only in so far as i see Nuclear fission reactors, like any other fuel source as but a step on the road to clean energy. For me this has to be nuclear fusion. The only question is, how badly will government mess up this development. Big is not necessarily better. Do we want big central power plants with a messy distribution system or lots of small local power plants, or even, ultimately, power plants sufficient for one house or one machine. One thing i could pretty well guarantee, we won't stop using oil because it runs out, but because we've found another fuel. There is still plenty of coal in the ground that will never now be extracted. Today we have more identified oil reserves on tap, so to speak, than at any other time. OPEC has a struggle to limit production to keep the price up where they can all make a profit. There are enough Venuzuelan orimulsion reserves for centuries, i am led to believe. Let's try and avoid some of the worst of the Club of Rome type prophesies of doom and take a good look at oil. As Russia begins to develop its known resources and to add value, and as secondary processing becomes even more prevalent we can expect that in the next few years we are going to see an even bigger glut of fuel available to us. Then factor in the Iraq oil which is flowing again (at above quota). OPEC needed Iraq oil like a hole in the head. Don't forget that oil exploration isn't just about petrol(Gas)its about petrochemical. Petrol is not said to account for much profit but it does pay for exploration and refining. Out of each barrel comes the high value products like the plastic industry feedstocks, Propane, Ethane, ethylene etc. If we take away petrol production, how profitable will oil exploration and refining be then? Take a look around at every day items and figure out how many you would have to do without if we do away with oil. Sure, we can use modern chemistry to produce synthetics. I guess we could start with grain alcohol instead but at what cost?
ANyway, yes we will stop using oil. But all in the fullness of time. Once the future is seen, development toward it will grow. Take a look at the interest in fuel cells and "green" energy (offshore wind currently just about qualifies, or at least, until they find out the downside of that). Ultimately we cannot escape the fact that what ever we do, the more of us there are the more power we use and hence the more heat we generate and never mind about the other effects of energy production. We can work at reducing CO2, NOX etc. but energy = heat. Best we don't lose sight of energy efficiency as a key goal. But developments there come from demand. If the boss of IBM was right and there was only a market for 5 computers. Just think what you would be using now to respond to this post! The whole manned space program could be done on a single laptop today. Go back to the Betchworth Park codebreaking machines and figure out the equivalent you'd need of that technology to give you the computing power of an off the shelf PC today.
OK, rant over. I'll stop now.

 

[aspearin1]

Well Said, JMW!

aspearin1

 

[CanEngJohn]

We speculate on oil reserves however if I recall my grade 13 and University geography courses properly almost all predictions are based on OPEC oil reserves which are the easiest reserves to get at.

However we seem to forget ...
...when OPEC runs low there is still Canada, Brazil and Russia with their Tar sands to step up and fill the gap. Yes they are not completely viable economically as commercial grade fuel for vehicles currently but when OPEC runs out .... who knows. Also I remember that in 1990 it was estimated that the Tar Sands in Alberta contained as many barrels of crude oil as all of OPEC. Brazil and Russia I believe were estimated as larger deposits.

Also as a side note Ontario is significantly nuclear in its hydro generation. And has been producing nuclear power commercially since 1962. It isn't like this is a new concept .... just expensive.

And finally we just successfully started integrating hybrid technology on production vehicles in the last year (thank you Toyota and Honda). If you think about it that would be the beginnings of a 5 year plan to address issues in 2009 would it not?

To quote the must successful five book trilogy ever produced ...

Don't Panic.

 

[bvi]

And also don't forget the shale oil deposits. In addition to coal and tar sands. In the long run, however, we will need a non fossil fuel source, such as fission or fusion.

Also, don't forget that nothing is without a price. Fossil fuels = carbon dioxide emmissions to the atmosphere with greenhouse concerns (more carbon dioxide the less the hydrogen content of the fuel, thus natural gas is "cleaner" than coal); fission = radioactive waste; reduced energy availability = lower quality of life (perhaps more arguable than the first two); fusion (we don't have it yet).

 

[jmw]

I look on fossil fuels being non renewable as irrelevant. We have never yet exhausted a fossil fuel reserve. True, we or our ancestors have made serious inroads into the forrests but they can and will grow back but peat bogs are less at risk being depleted for fuel than for garden centres catering to TV gardening fads to keep unsuitable plants happy. Coal is still abundant in the ground.
We don't live just for the present, w hope to build an ever better life for our children and future generations. SOme people made a case that we will have used up the fossil fuels that our children may need and we have squandered it on ourselves. Nonsense. Fossil fuels are like capital investment. If we use them in miserly amounts then we delude ourselves that we preserve something for future generations. If we sue them as we are doing we create a situation where we do have to worry about the future because it could be our own personal futures that are affected and that makes us invest our capital in developing an environment and society where it is necessary to create new advances in energy production. Without we periodically scare ourselves we wouldn't be investing in Fusion research. If we hadn't had the 1970 oil crisis maybe there wouldn't even be the fussion research that we have now. Maybe we do need a further crisis to scare more more money and sense of urgency into this research. Mankind has a habit of rsolving problems giving the right incentives. Probably we don't have the right incentives just yet, we have too much oil. If we clamp down too hard for environmental reasons we may force ourselves into a dead end street. For example, we may end up too dependent on wind power which has a limit and we may force ourselves to limit our development based on this imposed energy limit. The earliest civilisations are the water cultures like that founded between the Tigris and Euphrates river, the Egyptian and Chineese. While water was the great spur to development ultimately it lead to stagnation because the societal dependance on rivers was a dead end.
We need to use any available fuels precisely because if we don't want to stagnate we need to generate appetites that can't, ultimately be satsified by fossil fuels or wind power or tidal energy, especially if we don't want to see our own planet littered with wind turbines. (the current disinclination to have wind turbines on land wil come under pressure in a renewable energy culture as popluation grows and demand grows to the point where offshore can't sustain it.) Far better we create an environment in which we just absolutely must have fussion power and in small pocket sized generators. Then we can tear down wind turbines, gas power ststions, mine all the installed distribution grids for the minerals invested in them, recover the millions of cubic feet of gas locked up in pipelines etc etc.

 

[StressGuy]

I think the thing that being missed in this little chat is demand. Demand has grown steadily but has been limited to essentially a few major players (U.S., Europe, Japan, etc.) China and India each have a greater population than that total number of major energy consumers today and they are both moving in the direction of heavy consumption like the West.

I think I remember reading somewhere that the U.S. alone, with about 5% of the world's population, consumes about 30% of the world's energy output. That percentage is going to drop, but only becuase globalization is going to lead to the rest of the world to consume at levels much closer to what we do now.

On the one hand, that's good. It means that more of the world's population will be able to enjoy a western standard of living. But, it also means that there's going to be a lot more competition for that energy. Is the world capable of pumping oil to meet an energy demand about 10x what it is today? That kind of competition for resources tends to lead to war.


Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas

All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.

 

[funnelguy]

OK StressGuy, I understand your logic. The first gulf war was created by Iraq seeking to control more resources in a situation similar to your scenario.

I do not see either China or India as starting a military conflict over these types of issues as long as their economies are intertwined with other "western" nations, and especially the USA. The economic retaliation alone would serve as a significant deterrent. I do not believe the world would stand idly by while any one nation sought to vanquish another for natural resources.

Anyway, I hope you are wrong for the sake of my children and everyone else's as well.

 

[arunmrao]

My prediction is that the next war will be more or less for water rather than oil. Any comments. India is heavily dependent on oil imports and there is no let up on it. Small reserves of off shore oil are being exploited. But it is nothing compared to the demand. Natural gas and tar sands may be the next candidate materials.

Nuclear option may not be very popular with the Greens raising objections. Hydroelectric power is my bet, small hydels at the tail end of 1-20 megawatts capacity.

 

[RDK]

The media tends to overplay the deaths from nuclear and virtually ignore death from conventional fuel technologies.

The worst nuclear disaster Chernobyl pales in regards to the number of deaths due to conventional fuels.

Think about some of the deaths that we accept from conventional fuels.

Black lung in coal miners
Pollution related deaths in places like Southern California
Industrial accidents in the oil and mining industry
Deaths due to the transportation of bulky fuels (coal trains and vehicles at railway crossings etc.)
Drowning in hydroelectric reservoirs

Environmentally what about inundated land for hydro reservoirs and open pit mines?

I could go on but you get the idea.

As far as waste material goes, if we took all the nuclear waste produced and spread it all over the world evenly the increase in background radiation would not be detectable.

I do not have any hard numbers buy I would say that nuclear is a much safer fuel technology than any other on a fatality per unit of energy basis.

Right now we take complex hydrocarbons that can be used for many purposes such as plastics and other beneficial products and burn them. Not only that but we burn them in a very wasteful manner. (Do you really need a SUV to go to the corner store?)

When will the world wake up and see the writing on the wall?



Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[aspearin1]

Unfortunately, even hydroelectric power takes its toll on the environment. Any human intervention changes the ecosystem. There are studies devoted to fish habitat changes due to the implementation of a dam. Since they are pretty low on the food chain, this then affects all animals feeding on those fish... etc... "The Greens" will find fault in everything. You want energy? Pick your poison!

aspearin1

 

[funnelguy]

I understand the smallmouth bass fishing is awesome downstream from Three Mile Island. No, I am not kidding. Also, the fishing near oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is very good. Greens will not be happy until cloned T Rex's have eaten every last human.

 

[CajunCenturion]

The fishing in the Gulf of Mexico near oil rigs is indeed good, but it has nothing to do with pollution, nor with the oil.

As it turns out, fish have congregated near the rigs because the underwater support structure of the rig is a great foundation from which sea life builds up reefs.

 

[mabn]

In the grand scheme of things we are all just a type of virus or parasite. It's kind of bleak, but it's what we are. Most viruses (virusi??) find a way to survive.

 

[onlyadrafter]

Hello,

JMW - Its not Betchworh park its Bletchley Park. The Americans made a film about how they cracked the Enigma machine, but it was the British.

On a lighter note, when oil runs out, why not use Guinness, same colour, same consistency and, in my opinion, probable the same taste.

 

[RDK]

We are ignoring one fundamental fact.

The supply of oil is finite.

The earth could be a sphere of oil floating in space and the supply of oil still would be finite.

Couple that fact with the fact that we are increasing our consumption of oil at roughly 7% per year and we have a doubling of consumption every decade.

You are engineers and you can do the math. A geometric increase in the consumption of a finite resource will eventually exhaust that resource. Every doubling of a geometric progression consumes the same amount of the resource as was consumed in the entire sequence up to the start of the doubling period.

That’s right. Every decade we consume as much oil as we have in history up to the start of that decade. (Before you call me in this DO THE MATH).

I have read that if the earth was a sphere of oil, we would at present rates of increase in our consumption run out of oil in some 300 years.

So when we get to the point where the “experts” are saying that we have as much oil as has been consumed in the entire history of the world that means that we have a 10-year supply left.

Obviously something has to give. We could do something about the consumption rate. Do you really need that SUV to drive to the store for milk?

In the 1600’s England was faced with an energy crisis. The country was running out of wood for heating. This led to the discovery of coal, which fuelled the country for a couple of hundred more years.

Our economies now are such that they would collapse if we had a crisis of that magnitude now. We need alternate sources of energy and until they are available to the masses we must conserve the oil supplies that we have now.

See also “The Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis”. This was first written on the 1970’s and has been updated and is available at

http://www.npg.org/specialreports/bartlett_index.htm

This is the source of the 300 years to consume the earth-sized sphere of oil and explains the doubling concept for geometric progression. It should be mandatory reading for all technical people and politicians.





Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com