That sort of doomsday scenario is not something I would classify as ‘easy’.
They don’t necessarily need to: they just need to get the vehicle from A to B.
I know what you mean, but the way you’ve phrased it, this isn’t actually relevant. Due to entropy, this is always the case. Beyond that, it’s a simple case of economics. If the producer can sell the petrol for more than the cost of production, he’ll make a profit. Petrol is easily portable, relatively stable, etc. All things which are valuable in their own right.
True, but I think that regarding these issues as problems is the wrong way to do it. For the right people, they’re opportunities. The sky is not falling; we can work our way around these issues.
We can easily synthesize liquid hydrocarbon fuels, the techniques for doing so have been known for generations. The only problem is that techniques to convert coal or biomass to liquid fuels are more expensive than pumping crude oil out of the ground and refining it into liquid fuel.
If gasoline were $10/gallon, would that mean the end of civilization? It would change people’s transportation habits for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely to turn us into radioactive cannibal mutants living in the desert and worshiping nuclear bombs. Only a plague that kills off all dogs and cats could do that.
The energy has to come from somewhere. Fossil Fuels by definition are in limited supply, and as time goes on they will probably get more difficult to extract - although it certainly is reasonable that someone will find a vast new supply somewhere such that the capital costs will be outweighed by the vastness of the supply and the small marginal cost of extraction. However, you can’t synthesize an energy source without using energy from something else.
There are lots of energy sources out there; the problem is their cost of extraction is currently only viable economically in certain areas. Wind, Solar, Biomass, and Hydro power are all infinitely renewable as long as Earth is inhabitable and Tidal power is available along as the Moon remains in orbit, but each is limited in their application due to geography. There might come a day when building vast earthworks to channel tides becomes economically viable, but it would almost certainly take a large increase in energy prices.
Do you have any kind of citation for that? Because that’s a pretty serious accusation.
There’s already promising research in superconducting power lines, able to carry electricity without loss. I see these as the late-21st century equivalent of oil pipelines, carrying energy from where it is produced to where it is needed. Small-scale local generation like rooftop solar panels will be useful, but a city’s main power will come from optimal remote locations, be they huge wind-farms, massive solar-power stations, reactor farms, hydroelectric dams or tidal generators. Laying these superconducting cables will be pricey, natch, but doable. The first barrier might not be expense at all, but legal obstructionism.
True, but the point I’m making is that battery powered vehicles are limited, and will remain so. The constraints are due to physics, it’s not simply that the technology is immature. It’s not as bad as my figures above show, as an electric motor is about 3 times more efficient than an internal combustion engine. However, that’s still a big gap in performance.
As our oil stocks run low, we’ll be placing higher demands on our power grids, as we’ll need energy to produce portable fuels and charge vehicle batteries.
Sorry for the consecutive posts.
There is a big, big gap between promising research and economical, practical engineering. If technological solutions bail us out, then great, but that’s not something we should be planning for.
Peak oil (no caps) is, of course, real…but the end of the world gloom and doom related PO scenarios are complete horse shit. As oil becomes more scarce it will simply go up in price until, at some point, it is cheaper to begin wide spread adoption of one of the myriad alternatives out there. The oil ain’t gona run out tomorrow, or next year, or in 10 years…and it’s not going to run out suddenly. It’s simply going to become continually more scarce, with the price going up, stabilizing for a while, then going up again.
The Peak Oil™ nutballs always seem to forget this key fact…and to forget that we have LOTS of coal, natural gas (and huge reserves of methane), and of course nuclear energy(which is more a matter of getting around public perceptions)…and we have time. Given enough time we will simply adapt. If the alternatives come down to starving in the cold and the dark and nuclear, I’m pretty confident which direction we’ll go. If not, perhaps we can toss some of the old style knee jerk anti-nuke folks on the fire to generate our power for us in a more eco-friendly way…and THEN convert to nuclear when they are all gone. 
I agree with what others in this thread have said wrt the collapse of modern civilization…it would take something really quick and utterly devastating to regress the entire world back to pre-19th century technology. Asteroid strike, super volcano, plague, all of our technology suddenly shutting down due to alien space bats…take your pick. But something really fast and really nasty would have to happen.
-XT
Well, where’s the transition from “promising” to “practical”? New York’s Project Hydra goes on-line next year and it’s not like it will require any breakthroughs in physics - at this point it’s an engineering problem and not even that much of one.
Anyway, I’ll bring up the issue again in 12 months when we find out if the cable works or not. I’ll just assume civilization won’t collapse in the interim.
That’s funny, I couldn’t play the piano before the accident.
No, it isn’t.
At $30/barrel we have several hundred to several thousand years worth of oil available in the form of tar sands, shales, bitumens and so forth.
So we are only going to run out of cheap oil if by cheap oil you mean <$30/bl. Even if that is what you mean, the world has just come out of 5+ years of oil at >$30.bl and the economy was surging the whole time. So arguing that an end of cheap oil will lead to an economic or technological slowdown seems to be contradicted by the facts.
We already have cheap substitute for oil, provided that $30/bl is considered cheap. So we are only going to run out of cheap oil if by cheap oil you mean <$30/bl. Even if that is what you mean, the world has just come out of 5+ years of oil at >$30.bl and the economy was surging the whole time. So arguing that an end of cheap oil will lead to an economic or technological slowdown seems to be contradicted by the facts.
Rising oil prices have been a concern for almost 100 years now. Not 30.
We discovered substitutes over 50 years ago. Do a Google search on Fischer-Tropsch as a starting point.
What trillion dollar discovery? Conventional oil is so abundant and so cheap that the alternatives aren’t economically viable until oil prices can be guaranteed to remain at >$30/bl for the entire 30 year life cycle of the mines and refineries.
Far form being worth a trillion dollars the discoveries are essentially worthless because oil is so cheap
We already have over 20 years of known resources after all the liquid oil is exhausted. We aren’t assuming this/ We know it.
A question Little Nemo: how much money have you have invested in oil? Because if you really believe with any certainty that oil is about to peak within 10 years you should have a fortune invested in it. After all if it’s going to become scarce with no replacement then you can’t help but get massive returns.
If I believed what you have posted here then I would have at least three quarters of my log term investments in oil. My retirement would be looking very sunny indeed. Right?
I don’t base my investment portfolio on events that occur over the course of a generation. Personally, I expect oil production to increase in the next ten years - the new accessibility of polar oil fields* will lead to supplies that will probably last for at least thirty years. So on a personal level, I think it’s likely oil decline will not be an issue in my lifetime.
*Note that this new accessibility was created by global climate change - something that some people have spend the last thirty years denying as it occurred around them. There’s a parallel there.
Exactly. So arguments based on a catastrophic decline next week are a bit meaningless, no?
Has anybody in the entire world ever denied global climate change? It was already universally accepted in 1900 AFAIK.
I think you might be confusing global climate change (an observation) with Anthropogenic Climate Change (a theory to explain that observation), Nobody denies the observation. That is entirely uncontroversial since temperatures have been rising steadily for ~150 years.
As meaningless as the argument that oil production will remain steady for the next million years. So I guess it’s a good thing nobody made either one of those arguments.
Well…the real fervent Peak Oil nutballs actually have been saying for a while that it could all go tits up any day now…wait for it…waaaaiiiiiitttttt fooooorrrrrr iiiiitttttt…
Ok, well, perhaps a bit later. But…any time…
-XT
And there are people who claim we’ll never run out of oil. Obviously both sides has a lunatic fringe that’s living in denial.
So let’s put a figure on it. I’ll go out on a limb and offer a hundred years as a prediction. I’ll go on record as saying that by 2109 oil production will have declined to the point that it will have a strong negative effect on the economy.
Is there anyone who will argue this specific point? Is a hundred years too far in the future for us to take any meaningful planning about it? Will society have changed beyond our imagining by then? Was 1909 so far in the past that none of the actions taken then have any effect on our present day?
Or perhaps someone would like to argue the question of declining production. We currently produce about thirty billion barrels of oil each year. Will someone like to go on record as predicting that we will continue to do so? That we will produce an average of thirty billion barrels of oil each year for the next hundred years? (I think I’m being more than fair here. World population had quadrupled in the last hundred years so a more honest standard would take that trend into account and demand a hundred and twenty billion barrel figure for 2109 to maintain our current per capita level. Unless of course, people are assuming the next hundred years will see a major reduction in human population.)
Now I’m sure some people are saying we don’t need to worry. New technology will develop and solve this problem. Okay, fine, I’m glad to hear it. But what new technology are you talking about? Give us a preview. Has it been invented yet? Do we have blueprints? Prototypes running? Is somebody working on these things? If we don’t have the new technology now, will we have it in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Sure a hundred years sounds like forever but it’s amazing how quickly the decades can fly by when you’re not paying attention. Are you still confident in predicting that we will have a technology that will completely replace oil in its present economic role in place by 2109?
So to summarize, those of you who say that “peak oil” is not a problem, could you please pick which of the following best expresses your reasons for this:
1 - 2109 is so far away it’s meaningless to make any plans for it.
2 - Oil production will not decline before 2109.
3 - New technology will have replaced oil’s role in our economy by 2109.
Had a quick look at it. Yes, the technology is improving, but a project like that will not scale to a national power distribution grid. It’s relying on liquid nitrogen cooling. It’s a useful technology, but it’s designed for short, high-capacity links. Something like that will not significantly reduce transmission losses nation-wide.
We’re nowhere near room-temperature superconductors, which may not
be physically possible.
First off you need to explain what you mean by “oil production”. Do you mean liquid crude, or all natural oil, or all liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The peak oil crowd has a track record of switching between these terms interchangably as it suits them. So for example “oil will peak within 10 years” followed by " and when oil becomes scarce there will be a scarcity of hydrocarbons to make plastics and fertilisers". Referring to two totally different materials in the same breath.
Then you need to convince me that oil will in fact have declined at that point, without invoking exactly the same arguments that were used in 1910. Because when a group has made a prediction about a shortage a dozen times and it has failed every single time that fails every time I’m not inclined to believe the same reasoning got it got it right this time.
Yes, in this instance yes, yes and in this instance yes. In that order.
In 1909 people were worried about running out of hay to feed horses, what to do with all that horseshit and where they were going to get the whale oil for their carriage lamps. Seriously.
So could we have taken any meaningful planning about oil and transport 100 years ago? No. So with the rate of technological progress accelerating what makes us think we can take more meaningful planning WRT oil and transport 100 years hence?
Has society have changed beyond the imagining of people in 1909 as it pertains to oil and transport? Hell yeah.
Would taking action to, say, produce horseshit silos and implementing a breeding program for more thrifty horses have had any effect on our present day? Besides costing a lot of money and possibly leaving us a little more technologically retarded it’s hard to see how such actions could have any effect on us.
Of course not. I’ve always argued that 100 years is way to far to make such prediction.
I will go on record as saying that in 100 years time people will drive exactly as much as they like, just like today, and that if they drive any less it won’t be because of any shortage of fuel. IOW I’ll happily go on record a saying that we will find a technological solution that bypasses any potential problems of oil shortage. Whether that be alternative sources of oil or an alternative too oil is impossible to say, just as 100 years ago nobody could predicted an alternative to whale oil and horses.
You;re not being fair or sensible.
The world’s population has already begun to stablise. It will peak at somewhat less than 9 billion people and then begin to shrink, rapidly. And every time this figure is reviewed the date of stabilisation is earlier and the peak population smaller. You can not extrapolate from the past 20 years
Absolutely. Either a replacement or an alternative source. If people drive any less in 100 years time it won’t be because of a shortage of fuel.
True.
Depending on how you define oil there’s no reason to believe this.
True if necessary.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3993569
http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/SAfrica/Biological/index.html
http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/zimbabwe.html
Also, read Ken Flower’s memoirs. And the transcripts of the trial of Wouter Basson.
Basically, what I said - users of biological warfare. Well-poisoners. Cowards. Also, men who fought in the other side’s uniforms. The kind of person who even the Geneva Convention says you can shoot when caught.