Una , yes which I why I said not practical in the US, I was thinking the missing oil might be a global problem
Bridge road and rail limits are often an accelerated fatigue issue rather than a single catastrophic failure issue. Either can be overcome by saying ‘screw it we wear it out faster, that’s less of a priority right now’ or you run multiple single loads or reduce fill the loads for critical sections. That is basically an efficiency issue with raised fuel consumption to make the moves. Certainly not something you would consider under current the climate.
Congestion becomes prioritisation - what gets it, consumer goods or fuel for power? Based on my experiance in the caspian region where oil is regularly shipped (very inefficiently but given minimal other routes, nessacarily ) across the Caspian in rail cars on ferries, oil wins every time.
I rather like the idea of transporting coal “by wire” i.e. building as many coal-fired electrical generation plants as we possible can right next to the coal mines. How quickly could they be built? And how much could we minimize the use of petroleum needed to power the equipment to build the power plants?
It seems like the best hope would be to use electricity to power as many things as we could, and greatly step up or electrical generating capacity. This would mean getting every last Kw that we could from hydro, solar and wind, but more importantly, utilizing nuclear power plants as much as possible, and building as many new ones as possible ASAP.
Forget abut the environmental concerns, years-long legal battles, NIMBYism, and nuclear waste-storage problems that currently hobble expansion of nuclear power generation. If we were backed into an energy-supply corner as serious as the one outlined in the OP then all that crap would have to be pushed firmly to the side (at least for the foreseeable future) forcibly, if necessary.
I mean, if this dire scenario came to pass then martial-law and other extreme civil-rights infringements (as needed) would be a necessity and hence, a certainty. Even the majority of the flower-power crew would hopefully glean the extreme seriousness of the situation and know enough to get out of the way.
This would be a crisis of unprecedented proportions and the Federal government wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever they needed to get this whole thing rolling, That would be totally justified too, I think. Not very pretty, but nothing this Earth-shattering never is.
[QUOTE=xtisme;12207306 They brought up Brazil several times, saying that they would be the new worlds superpower [/QUOTE]
If I had to pick a new superpower based on this bizarre scenario, it would be Australia. The country has massive amounts of coal, mined with electric draglines and longwallers. Most of that coal is then transported to the coal power stations and ports using an extensive electric heavy rail network.
IOW the country is ideally placed energy wise. The electricity wouldn’t even stop flowing. The biggest problem would be the trucks used to move coal from the coal face to the rail loader. It would probably take a matter of months to fit the whole fleet with coal gasification plants.
Because of the existing electric rail networks, most places would still be within easy reach of operating heavy transport infrastructure. In the short term the movement of essential supplies from the rail heads to other areas could presumably be carried out using animal traction. But once again, trucks can be rapidly fitted with coal gasification plants, and it’s not like the Aussies haven’t used that solution before when oil was scarce. I imagine that within 5 years the entire fleet will either be converted to producer gas.
Within 20 years there would be so many plants converting coal to oil that it would be the biggest soil producer in the world.
So I’d pick Australia as the rising superpower out of the ridiculous scenario simply because it has the energy source and the existing infrastructure in place to mine it and move it. In comparison Brazil has potential biofuels, which we can’t even prove are net energy producers.
That is just incredible, a coal plant uses an entire 100 plus car train in one day! I can’t get over the logistics necessary to assemble and load 100 car trains that arrive unload and keep the system going every day! Unbelievable I had no idea coal is used at such rates.
A large coal plant can. Most plants would only burn from 1-2 trains a week if all units were at full output. And in the case I’m using (from the PRB region), we must keep in mind that on a mass basis, the coal is quite a bit lower heat content than an Appalachian coal (8,400-8,800 Btu/lbm, versus from 11,500-13,000 Btu/lbm) so there is a multiplier in there for needing more trains for the same net Btu (and actually if we want to get technical about it, the “net” difference also has to include about a 5% additional loss of efficiency factor for the PRB coal due to…well, I really don’t want to write a 5-paragraph essay on it, just take my word for it).
If there are absolutely no permitting, legal, or legislative barriers, right now one might build an 1,800MW (2x900MW SC) coal plant in about 3 years, +/- 1 year or so. However, due to a lack of construction equipment, lack of capacity to make the plant equipment itself (many items are one-offs for power plants, and despite what Google might tell one, I’ll quote Maramduke Surfaceblow and say “there’s no such thing as ‘sister’ units!”), lack of skilled engineers to design the plant, and lack of skilled construction craftsmen to build the plant, there would be a serious barrier to a major ramp-up of coal. I can’t put an exact number on it. (lack of operators I’m not worried about; you can train them pretty well while the plant is being built).
Coal, wood and Nat Gas still would be almost immediate replacements for fuel, though it would be a hard transition. I suspect that biofuels would actually be sidelined during this time as the most direct replacement available fuel for a IC engine is natural gas and bio-fuel actually uses a great input of conventional fuel.
The remaining oil would be needed for lubrication.
The data is from 1996. That’s well out of date. The USGS chart is based on unreliable data: you may remember that some years ago there was a big scandal about reserves being misrepresented. My brother was tasked with getting the correct figures for his particular area and the misrepresentation went back many years.
Further, there have been major discoveries since then. Like the Caribbean, Brazil, Brunei / Malaysia, and others. And who knows what they’ll find around the Falklands?
On the basis of the analysis of all 47 investigated oil producing countries, the results of our study estimated that the world ultimate reserve of crude oil is around 2140 BSTB and that 1161 BSTB are remaining to be produced as of 2005 year end.
(7)The world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014 at a rate
of 79 MMSTB/D. The world crude oil reserves are being depleted at an annual rate of 2.1%.
That’s a much better cite. But I’m not sure what they’re including as oil. They don’t seem to be including Canada’s oil shales, for instance. Likely I need to read the thing again.
I think you are correct, they are reporting on conventional oil, not tar sands, shale oil, etc.
Isn’t the problem with tar sands & oil shales the rate at which it can be extracted and made into liquid oil? A few million barrels a day vs current demand at 80 million?
Canadian oil sands in 2006 averaged 1.25 million barrels day
80 million at a decline rate of 2% = 1.6 million needed to be replaced per year assuming no demand increase? So Candian oil sand production would need to more than double every year to keep the oil supply even.
