Conventional oil peaked in 71 as I said.
North texas panhandle has an area of 25k square miles. Assuming 10mw per square mile that’s 250gw of potential. Most of this is already used. The room left for growth is so small that turbines are being built in Midland and marginal areas. The quality resource is in the panhandle.
Clark county nevada has an area of 10k square miles. Assuming a 6kw system for solar needs 300 square feet that’s 600mw per square mile. Realistically counting spacing and other things that’s maybe 200mw and at 10% utilization that’s 20mw.
All of clark county would produce the same as Texas wind. That is pretty disappointing considering that’s already about 0.25% of the land area of the entire country. The EROI for solar is already pretty bad and as you extend it beyond the absolute ideal desert areas where that eroi was calculated it gets worse. If we cover the entire county in panels, we lose farmland, and even in the desert there is significant ground and surface water irrigation potential that could be used as farmland. So, hypothetically the US could starve a large share of the population and run on solar, but it wouldn’t make sense.
You ask me “why” bankers do things, but they apparently are just crackhead gamblers. The public oil companies like exxon, Chevron and BP actually have pretty good balance sheets. The private oil e and p companies have been pretty much wiped out by bankruptcy and consolidation. They never made money. Why would bankers stop being dumb? It is not a catastrophic law in every industry, it’s just the impossibility of infinite exponential resource depletion.
The eia estimates are not an ultimate recovery. They are not really any specific rigorous concept. Typically, a company will hire a geologist to go to an area, perform radar or drilling tests to see how much oil is in place, and report that. The reserve estimates are pretty generous and usually correspond to everything in an area being oil. For example Midland county is 1000 square miles. If oil is about a ton per cubic meter and 7 barrels per ton then everything to a depth of a mile in Midland would be 30 trillion tons or 200 trillion barrels. If 10% of that matters and 10% successfully formed oil that’s 2 trillion barrels of kerogen. Of that about 10% is oil. So you can see that reserve estimates are extremely generous and end up being more like a resource base for an entire general area oil is found. Using recovery factors from past shale fields everywhere from Wyoming to Bakken you get the few billion barrels left, and that is a lot of oil representing everything that could even fit in a large area of Texas.
Of course I could be wrong, maybe everyone wont starve and maybe kerogen could pick up fast enough to prevent social collapse. But its not clear that kerogen could even work and I could only give upper bounds on its reserves.
The majority of renewables growth is in China, which generally has very low quality resources lacking power lines and basic things, and Chinas capacity factor has been falling.
Chinas population is concentrated in the north and east, which are about 4x the size of texas and have vastly greater population. If texas is already struggling you can guess what will happen.
West kansas has the bulk of the wind, and it’s about the same area as the panhandle. The majority of this is built out and they are now upgrading rather than adding turbines, which is unsustainable as you cannot continue to exceed material limits.
Even if kansas gets by on having 1/3 its energy from wind, that’s still 2/3 of the population not, you know, being able to survive. Kansas specializes in high tech industry and not the dump trucks, steel, power equipment, and heavy items needed to run infrastructure. It imports all that. The manufacturing is all in places like ohio or illinois or china.
San Georgino is apparently using an underground line. They are obviously not snaking a single above ground 600v line to all of those turbines. If we assume they are spaced half a mile apart based on your picture-
A 0000 gauge copper wire, which is better than the steel wires they are actually using, will do 300 amperes. A 1.5mw turbine might produce 5000 amperes. Using the amperage diameter relation and assuming the 0000 weighs 5kg per 1000 feet, that’s about a ton of steel to reach the turbine.
These individual lines combine into a 35kv line that’s 50x wider by the diameter amperage relation and 2500x heavier by the diameter volume relation. So were already at 2500 tons just to reach our turbine. Assuming steel costs around 1mwh per ton, then including losses and whatnot it should cost over a gwh to get power from that single turbine. Scaling the turbine up simply raises these values because all we are doing is collecting power. And this is without a ground, transformers, grid, or anything else we would actually need.
A 1.5mw turbine running 1000 hours a year is 1.5gwh so you can see how excluding infrastructure costs can massively understate the cost. Kansas probably has 10000 of these turbines costing millions of tons of steel per year. The steel production of the entire US is 100 million tons and kansas produces none of that.
So just because it works in an area doesn’t mean its actually viable, and as the wires wear out and subsidies aren’t available these wind farms might fall apart. You can bet on it but I can’t promise wind will actually work. It could slow the collapse as you said but even then it is only a fraction of the energy produced in the united states.
Here’s the page on credit creation theory with a pic of ron Paul
It is also a good time to stand back, to reassess whether our economy is soundly based. I would contest that it is not … as it is debt-based … a system which by its very actions causes the value of money to decrease is dishonest and has within it its own seeds of destruction.
As for oil production, wages (which are fairly irrelevant and could be automated), rigs, and frac sand are the main inputs. Frac sand is all transport. Rigs are tightly correlated with steel prices. Steel in turn comes from coal, natural gas and iron, and iron is a bulk commodity that is all transport. except in a short term, perhaps when inventory runs down, it is all really oil to produce oil.