Tuckerfan, are you running for political office? Because comparing oil to computer software, whale oil, firewood, and McCarthyism are analogies so oblivious to the facts that I suspect even you know they’re false and are just throwing them out here for effect.
The reason most new oil finds are being made by “wildcatters” is because the big companies already realize there aren’t any unfound oil fields out there big enough to justify their expenses. The independants do succeed in finding some unknown fields, but they’re all smaller than the known fields. And the concept that finding oil is more of an art than a science is true but it deosn’t support your optimism. Oil only exists in certain geological formations. But it doesn’t exist in all of these geological formations. So while it’s impossible to find oil in someplace unexpected, it is possible to not find oil is someplace you might have expected it.
Nor is it true that there are unexplored areas in India or China. These regions have been explored for oil. So has Siberia, Central Asia, the Amazon, central Africa, the Australian Outback, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and every other area that’s merely inconvenient for exploration. The only areas that haven’t been well explored are the middles of the oceans and under the polar ice-caps (although there have been some explorations in both of these as well). There are no unexplored areas left where any major unknown oil fields are waiting to be discovered. The only undiscovered oil around now is undiscovered because its in such a small field it was overlooked in earlier explorations or because it’s so hard to get to (five miles under the Pacific or eight hundred miles inland in Antartica) that it was missed.
Again, you’re misunderstanding what the problem is. Suppose new technolgical means are developed. The result will be to make the problem much worse. If new technology is invented to produce oil faster it brings closer the day when the oil runs out.
Feasibility- There is nothing written in stone that we can match oil’s capacity and versitility. Sustainability and versatility are very real dangers. There is plenty of hard, well argued evidence that suggests matching the oil economy can’t be done yet or in the near future. Lots of optimism and ‘can do’ spirit. Can do spirit is great. But there are some very stubborn facts working against the optimism we do have that was largely a result of this very high ERI energy source (the optimism that is). Yes, nothing is static for sure. But IF, the price of oil goes to 100 a barrel and continues to climb indefinately, we will be caught without the cheap energy source to make that transition as well or smoothly. I suppose, for me, that is the crux. Wait too long, and we may get caught with our pants down. Now, the realist in me also notes that we will invade any country out of ‘national interest’ to further our economic goals. But, then we’ll have problems with the national debt. There’s just a lot of things that can falter if we have an overreliance on this stuff. Exactly WHEN are we going to ween??? And there have been inflationary trends lately.
I just don’t see this as the time for optimistic prognostication based on previous behavior and the ‘luck’ of oil. The ecological/biological concept of overshoot, in a nutshell, states that through some environmental happenstance, a certain temporary sustainability can be achieved, but when that happenstantial circumstance disappears, so does the sustainability. As another significant issue, I believe the density and ease of oil, and its versatiliy for vital things such as plastics and fertalizers, makes oil look like one of those happenstantial circumstances.
BTW, a note about earlier guesses about the amount of oil remaining. First, that was one company and not the industry as a whole, and the current estimations are by a broader group. Another equally significant point is that the technology to explore and the very exploration itself is at a much more advanced and sophisticated stage, hence it should be obvious which science and scenerio holds a better probability of being correct. I believe that example serves as a weak precedent, especially to be basing future policy on. Let’s say we’ve got another Saudi Arabia out there. That’s still merely, at present consumption rates, another 10 years to the peak. That would put us 10 years behind what the dept of energy is stating would be a good time to mitigate economic hardship. The mitigation scenerios should NOT be dismissed (and the likelhood of invading Canada has got to be extremely low while peak oil is a much greater a possibililty–so let’s not confuse geopolitical logistical contingencies with the growing scientific, economic, ecological awareness of the economic challenge of peak oil, increasing demand, and weak viable alternatatives. Not all contingency plans are created equal)
Tuckerfan, you might be right. We might turn the ship around and slowly move, in our SEMI-elastic world, toward a sustainable future. I firmly believe that is possible. Heck, I can even believe it is preordained through some sort of grand design into a future greater state of civilization. But if the math, logic, and theories are right, the time is now–or yesterday. I don’t like the concept of hanging our future on discoveries that have not yet been made in oil and in the new technologies that are in their infancy, OR with the greedy hands of politicians and their business partners. Exactly what side should we err on given the solid evidence mounting? How many MORE years of NO major oil discoveries and increase oil price would it take to turn this ship around. I don’t think the price of gas is high enough yet. Where would that have to be and for how long before people would slowly begin to doubt the viability of oil?
And you were the one who dragged bronto burgers into the discussion. Your point is? Whale oil does, in fact, have bearing on the discussion, since whales were hunted to near extinction for their oil and we faced a crisis similar to the one we will be facing with oil (be it in ten years or 100). We managed to find a solution that problem from an unexpected source. What evidence do you have that we won’t do the same thing again? At least one oil company is heavily invested in alternative energy research. Given the billions they have at their disposal (and let’s not forget that oil companies are making record profits right now), I’d lay money that they’re going to come up with something. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the theory that they’re keeping things like 100 MPG carbs off the market. :dubious:
My optimism doesn’t lie in the fact that I think there’s a huge pool of oil out there, larger than anything we’ve ever seen before. My optimism lies in the fact that we’ve faced similar problems in the past and beat them. I find it hard to believe that a species which has managed to solve the problem of energy dozens of times in the past could suddenly be defeated by it now, when we’ve got far better technologies at our disposal than we have in the past.
Who says that the only technology that will be invented is that which allows faster extraction from the ground? I see no reason why it couldn’t be feasible for us to reclaim the oil that was used in making plastics or tires. If so, then we’ve got tons of the stuff laying about. There are also plenty of people researching ways of making synthetic oil economical. If we can make the synthetic stuff, then it won’t matter how much there is in the ground, because we can make our own. Hell, if we’re really desperate, we could mine Titan for hydrocarbons! (I don’t think that it’ll ever come to that.)
The simple fact of the matter is that we know the oil won’t last forever, and that people are working on alternatives, and as the price of oil climbs, more and more dollars will be poured into those alternatives (probably by the oil companies themselves) and while there might be a few rocky years as we transition from one energy source to the other, it will not mean the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Of course there will be new energy sources developed to power transportation. The argument is that they will be far more expensive than oil, which has a high energy out:energy in ratio.
Whether it be biofuels or solar/geothermal to hydrogen, nothing can beat the CHEAP easy energy we get from this energy dense material which just needs pumping and distillation. Except, perhaps, nuclear fusion to hydrogen…maybe.
In the future we will probably have aircraft and ships running on biofuel and trucks and cars running on hydrogen, the argument is it will not be anywhere near a cheap as what we have now.
And if you’d have told people 20 years ago that a group of people would be able to build a suborbital spacecraft for $20 million that would be able to successfully fly three times, they wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told them that not only would that group do that, they’d plan on building a larger scale vehicle to carry tourists up at a cost of $200,000 a head, they wouldn’t have believed you.
The twists and turns of technological advancement are such that it’s difficult to predict anything accurately (I will note that predictions of gloom and doom are always wrong, however.), but given that cheap energy is the lifeblood of the global economy, and that the profits awaiting someone who comes up with it, that everyone from backyard cranks to multinational corporations and governments are feverishly trying to be the first to crack it. To think that they will fail is to ignore not only the caliber of individuals tackling the problems, but also to ignore previous examples in human history when we faced similar challenges. Personally, I won’t be surprised if we’re not having this same conversation ten years hence, while bitching that gas costs $5/gallon.
The 2003 blackouts across the Eastern U.S. was a blackout created by peak use in electricity (and not from a branch knocking out a power line, as was officially reported). 100% of the available energy was used in the summer resulting in the most massive blackout we have ever had. Demand is outstripping supply and natural gas cannot keep up. Matthew Simmons, President and CEO, simmons & company international of Houston Texas, the world’s largest energy investment bank (clients such as Enron, the World Bank, Kerr McGee, Bechtel, the biggest of the big) and also advisor to VP cheney’s energy task force 2001 says clearly that the blackouts were from maxing energy use. He cautioned clearly and emphatically that this was a hugh warning signal or a “fire drill” for what was to come. “Not a yellow light but a red light”. he also noted in amazement that this made no difference to people and politicians. What do you make of the CEO from the world’s largest energy investment bank and advisor to the current admin on energy talking in this manner. Just more political chicanery?
I’m not sure who said this, but I’ve always liked it: “Man plans, God laughs” If anything destroys us, I think it will be the hubris that fuels other human negative tendencies. We may make incredible gains, but it could be that ripe environmental conditions have led us into a trap of collapsing sustainability. All it takes is one tunnelvision error–the previous successes can all be damned in that light.
(btw, hubbert predicted the world peak for the mid '90s ‘barring perturbations’. Skeptics like to conviently leave out the ‘perturbations’ when they point out the apparent inconsistency in predictions. Well the pertubations of the 70s and 80s seem to have reduced consumption and production enough to account for the 10 to 15 years discrepency in the 2005 to 2010 scenerio. ALL evidence points to the growing probabiliy that M King Hubbert was indeed very good at what he did)
What is your cite for this? The extremely detailed report from the DoE says on Page 24 that they were not in fact at peak load on that day, and several generating units were down, including about 400MW of coal plants on forced (unplanned) outage:
https://reports.energy.gov/B-F-Web-Part2.pdf
What is your basis for claiming that the blackout was caused by something other than the “official reports”? Page 27 of the above link will start to take one through the chain of events on that day.
…which is completely at odds with new power plant construction in the US, and the DoE projections for added capacity from now until 2025. Prices are increasing and there are local crunches, but natural gas is headed for providing more than 1/3 of US power production by 2025 IIRC.
I think he’s being quoted out of context. High energy use was one factor of the blackouts, it was not the “cause” of the them. My cite shows that the system was able to cope with the power demand under normal circumstances, and had in fact coped with higher demand in the past. That’s not to say that a system near peak is not more vulnerable, but let’s not fall into the trap of oversimplifying the situation.
Well, you would seem to have your answer in your above paragraph. Who put out the “false” claim that it was because of a falling branch and why did they do it? Everything I’ve read indicates the fact that the electrical grid is antiquated had more to do with the blackout than anything else. And really, if the investment firm has Enron as a client, well, let’s just say that I don’t put much stock (pardon the pun) in what they have to say.
IOW, it doesn’t matter what we do, we’re damned anyway. If that be the case, then we might as well switch to Mad Max mode now and be done with it.
It’s called “fudge factor” and is pretty common in gloom and doom predictions. That way if the world doesn’t end, the creek doesn’t rise, or the oil doesn’t run out when you first say it does, you can always point to something and “That’s why it didn’t happen when I said it would. Give it a few more weeks/months/years/whatever and you’ll see, it’ll happen just like I said it would.” History is littered with failed predictions by experts. Bill Gates at one point said he could never imagine the day when PCs would need more than 640K of RAM. I know of plenty PCs running more than a gig of RAM now. Experts were predicting that the internet would be dead by 2000 because it couldn’t handle all the increased traffic. Remember the Y2K mess? With the guys who were rewriting the code saying that they wouldn’t be able to get the job done in time and that we’d all wind up living in caves eating raw meat? Ross Perot’s “giant sucking” sound of every job in the US going to Mexico? That the Coalition invasion of Kuwait to push Saddam out was going to result in a Vietnam-like quagmire?
Most, if not all of them, were made by individuals who were experts in their fields, and all of them were wrong for a variety of reasons. Given those results (and those are just from recent memory, if you want to go back through history, there’s zillions more) of gloom and doom predictions, why should I think that someone predicting when the oil runs out (be it now, or be it 100 years from now) we’re going to be screwed is anywhere near the truth in their projections? I’m not saying that we won’t run out of oil, or that we shouldn’t be looking at alternatives, or that there won’t be awkward moments during the transition times, but I think that by the time the last barrel is pumped from the ground, we really won’t care, because the alternatives will have been in place for so long, that no one will notice.
The thing is - the consequences of not coming up with an energy solution that is comparable with oil puts us in a position where we (society with current levels of consumption) are exposed to a high level risk.
20 years ago people would not have said - if we don’t carry space tourists into orbit for $200K per head we are stuffed (also this example is an a posteriori assessment - with the ‘oil problem’ we are considering something that has not yet happened).
If we do not come up with a solution, then transport, food and other consumables are going to be much more expensive than they are now.
On the likelihood side of the equation, I hope we are fortunate enough to discover that solution in time that is as cheap as oil - it seems like a big ask.
…"Now how many times has someone told you, “Oh, yeah, all my life they’ve been saying the oil’s about to run out, and it hasn’t done it yet”? In fact, the record of oil forecasting has not been an exercise in Chicken-Littlism.
Asking, “When will oil peak and begin its decline?” (not, “When will it run out?”), the prognosticators of the past came up with dates only five to 10 years ahead of many of today’s predictions. Roger Bentley of the University of Reading found that in the 1970s – during the last outbreak of peak-oil fever – analysts from “reputable organizations” (including Esso, Shell, the UK Department of Energy, and the U.N., as well as Hubbert himself) were nearly unanimous in predicting a world oil peak somewhere around the year 2000."…
Source, AlterNet, April 4, 2005
One thing to keep in mind is that research on alternative energy sources is still highly dependent on fossil fuels. That is to say, as the price of oil increases, the cost of alternative energy research will also increase.
Here’s an interesting quote that I find amusing:
“If there were commercial quantities of oil in Hell, Exxon executives would not call God and demand regime change. They would buy an extremely nice lunch for the Devil, and they would talk contract and concession terms.”
-Charles Featherstone
I’m reminded of a co-worker I once had. She was a heavy smoker. I once asked her if she had ever tried to quit smoking because of the health risks. She looked me straight in the eye and said that she didn’t believe that smoking caused any health risks. She acknowledged that other people had different opinions on this issue but in her personal opinion it was safe. So she had no reason to quit.
Here’s something new to me from today’s Guardian, Methane Hydrates.
The ship will hunt for methane hydrates, a weird combination of gas and water produced in the crushing pressures deep within the earth - literally, ice that burns.
The stakes could not be higher: scientists reckon there could be more valuable carbon fuel stored in the vast methane hydrate deposits scattered under the world’s seabed and Arctic permafrost than in all of the known reserves of coal, oil and gas put together.
At constant prices anyway. The obvious variable you’re missing, and the one that Tuckerfan is highlighting with his references to whale oil, is that price isn’t constant. At some point there will be so little oil that the alternatives (currently being developed) will, by comparison, be cheaper than that last remaining oil. As further developments and improvements are made to the alternative energy sources, the amount of oil that is economically infeasible to use, will increase.
Like he Tuckerfan (and P.J. O’Rourke) said, we’re way outta whale oil. And no one cares. In fact, not many people even noticed when we ran out. It had become economically advantageous for most people to convert to other energy sources - such as natural gas and electricity, long before it happened.
A previous thread on what it would cost for the US to switch over to a hydrogen economy within 15 years. I note that the cost (at least as far as the government is concerned) is roughly the same as what we’ve spent on the current mess in Iraq.
I am missing the point about whale oil. Did the economy then rely on cheap whale oil like we do for trucks, cars, food transportation, home heating. ?
I thought it was used for lighting and some machine lubrication. I could understand it would be a major problem for New Bedford Ma and Nantucket but the rest of the country would survive.
I am not conviced that the end of the world is approaching, but I could see severe conomic disruption due to ever increasing oil prices. But if this were going to happen our leaders would be taking this into account and planning for our well being? Right? ahem, cough, cough.
The entire country used whale oil for illumination and machine lubrication, not just New Englanders. A list of products made from whale oil can be found here. That doesn’t take into account other uses for things harvest from whales, like bones used in making corsets.
And whatever merits our political leaders may have, it seems fairly obvious to me that corporations are doing a lot of research into alternatives (GM alone is spending around a billion in researching fuel cell cars), so it may take the folks in Washington (though not necessarily the folks in Berlin, London, or Tokyo, for example) a while to catch up, it is not as if no one is doing nothing about the problem.
Which is precisely why I think we need to revoke the perceived entitlement to ‘opinions’. Perhaps we ought to call them something like extremely backward, poorly conceived, denial laden with rose colored glasses, wishful thinking brain farts. Just a better classification I think…
You know, you could always buy an air powered car and then you wouldn’t be reliant on oil.