Peak_oil … anyone, what are the energy gains for a range of different energy sources at this point in time? eg. to find and extract 5 barrels of oil takes 1 barrel of oil (gain dropping over time).
How does this compare with nuclear, biomass, photovoltaic …
How are these energy gains expected to change over time?
I know that data. I helped the EIA to get it, in part. But that wasn’t what I was asking, I was asking what your discussion point was in your post.
No, it does not. You are comparing nameplate capacity, and that does not mean anything. You need to look at capacity factors.
From: Electric Power Monthly - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
For 2003 (last full calendar year) coal contributed 1,970,273 thousand MWh, out of 3,847,990 thousand total. That is 51.2%, which is between the 45-55% I cited. Note this is all sectors, not just utility.
No we do not. Nameplate capacity is not generation.
From: Electric Power Monthly - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
For 2003 (last full calendar year) petroleum contributed 101,542 thousand MWh, out of 3,847,990 thousand total. That is 2.63%. Note that much of this is not primary generation but supplemental firing with coal or startup firing with coal.
I don’t count petroleum coke since it’s an opportunity fuel anyhow, but if we want to, that 16,714 thousand MWh it contributes is pretty much nothing compared even to petroleum liquids.
It’s almost all Number 6, with a good helping of Number 2, BTW, not kerosene or diesel.
I think you might need to study this subject a bit more. Although not well organized, the EIA can give you good information if you consider the questions carefully before asking.
Peak_Oil said:
Fertilizer is not made from natural gas. Natural gas just happens to be a cheap way to make hydrogen, so it is used. If natural gas vanished tomorrow, we could still make fertilizer. We could get the hydrogen from seawater through electrolysis if we really had to. The price of fertilizer might double due to higher energy costs, but we could still make it.
It seems to me to be rather obvious what’s about to happen: Oil is going to gradually become more expensive over the next century. As it does, it will pass the cost per kw/h of alternative energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear, and they will come online rapidly and act as a brake on petroleum demand. That will slow the rate of increase. Eventually, the increase in the price of oil may stop or slow to the overall rate of inflation, because its cost has gotten to the point where it isn’t used much, and the supply is in relative equilibrium with demand.
Energy costs will increase, but energy will always be available. The net effect might cost us 1% of GDP growth per annum in increased energy costs to society. So the booms will be shallower, and the recessions deeper. On the other hand, technological innovation and the rise of the 3rd world into the industrial age may compensate for that or cause an even bigger boom.
But there’s no denying that from this point on, increasing energy costs are going to act as a brake on the economy.
I found this from an old “Peak Oil” thread located here.
ANd I requote:
"He adds dryly that Scientific American doomster Colin Campbell has been predicting that the peak of oil production is three to four years away for the past 15 years. "
Also of note is The New Pessimism
http://www.energyseer.com/NewPessimism.pdf
Which notes that Campbell seems to be reading what he wants from the source material:
“In fact, by relying heavily on a proprietary database, Campbell and Laherrere have generated a strong shield against criticism of their work, making it nearly impossible to reproduce or check.4 Similarly, there is little or no research published, merely the assertion that the results are good. (See below.)”
“For example, while Campbell and Laherrere (1998) states that “in any large region, unrestrained extraction of a finite resource rises along a bell-shaped curve that peaks when about half the resource is gone.” The first shortcoming of this argument is that no countries have ‘unrestrained extraction’—everywhere, a host of regulations and taxes, among other policies, affect the level of exploration and production. And in fact, few countries exhibit production in a classic bell curve, which is sometimes admitted by Hubbert modelers.”
“That lack of access has served as the first line of defense for the two, who often respond to criticism with comments such as (in response to Lynch) “Your problem is that you do not have any reliable database (and the experience to use it).””
And finally:
“Finally, those who have had access to the IHS Energy database dispute the findings of Campbell and Laherrere, including the geologists of the USGS, who relied on the database in concluding that reserve growth is not only real but substantial (600 billion barrels; see USGS 2000). Perhaps more damning, personnel at IHS Energy themselves estimate global reserve growth at 373 billion barrels and total URR at over 3000 billion barrels. Where Campbell and Laherrere foresee remaining recoverable resources of conventional petroleum limited to 1100 billion barrels, IHS estimates it at over 2200 billion, a huge difference. (Stark 2002) Perhaps the creators of the database understand it less perfectly than Campbell and Laherrere, but that is hard to accept without further evidence.”
In the terrible 1978 film “The Formula”, George C. Scott stumbles upon the “secret” formula that Nazi Germany used to synthesis gasoline. From what I understand, the Germans used a high-pressure reaction of hydrogen and coke to make fairley accpetable gasoline. This was (I belive called the Fischer-Tropsch process), and ran at 10,000 PSI. My question: since the USA has about a 500 year supply of anthracite coal, is it likely that we would ever turn to synthetic gasoline? Or are fuel cells a better, cheaper way to go? Heck, if we converted to hydrogen-based energy now (instead of waiting for oil to peak out in 10-20 years) we would be so far ahead, that we could tell the Saudis to shove it.
Any relaible guess of how much with would cost to conert our natural gas pipelines, filling stations, etc., to handle hydrogen instead?
IMO question has a false premise. What source are you basing 500 years of anthracite coal on? The US has economically recoverable reserves of all coals, anthracite through lignite B, of roughly 250-300 years at the current consumption rate, of which only a small portion of that is anthracite/semi-anthracite (and I’m not counting anthracite culm, which you wouldn’t use for this anyhow).
The price would have to be quite high to turn to anthracite, and we wouldn’t get very much out of it at all. And we’d have to deal with the recent decisions on mine permitting and mine tailings in Appalachia, which could effectively kill mine development unless everyone can work together and the environmental regs vanish.
Thanks. It looks like I have some reading to do. So nameplate production refers to the maximum capacity for that particular reactor, and actual production can be totally different.
I’ll read up on this tonight.
What has it got in its pocketses?
Correct. Not only is there a lot of idled oil generation (units that could but will likely never run again), coal and nuclear units tend to run for much, much longer time periods, and have capacity factors ranging from 50% up to 99% (for nuclear units). Capacity factor is essentially:
8760*Nameplate Capacity
Gas units have high nameplates but do not have the capacity factors of coal. Oil units fare better but as I mentioned, most of them are not running due to high average delivered fuel costs. As of EOY 2003, the EIA shows average delivered fuel costs to US plants as being:
Coal: 127.5 cents/MBtu
Oil: 445.1 cents/MBtu
Gas: 536.6
If you really want to have some quick stats at your fingers, try this link for the current Electric Power Annual.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa.pdf
No one’s born knowing this stuff, after all…
I agree. I’m very much a student of the debate and I have a great deal yet to learn. Also, I’m of the opinion that much of the information we have available to us is dubious at best, so finding out what we really really know and what we really don’t know and what we may or may not know… these are all important tasks.
Would you consider yourself an authority and a provider of firsthand knowledge like Deffeyes or Colin Campbell or Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, or would you consider yourself more in the category of Kunstler, Heinberg, (and maybe Ruppert) who deal with secondhand knowledge without personally verifying the actual numbers they work with? I’d think Matthew Simmons is in between those two groups, as is Bartlett. They seem to actually verify that the information they have is accurate rather than assuming it is. Maybe Ruppert does too, but unfortunately his political stance makes it hard for the more… respectable(?)… elements of our society to take much of what he says at face value. To be clear, I haven’t verified anything personally. I’m just figuring out now how to actually do so.
I’m just a hanger-on in this debate, and try to read everything I can and stratify the data by source. I’m interested in your reply.
It depends on the area of knowledge. I am an expert firsthand on practicalities and engineering aspects of energy generation by fossil fuel and biomass. I work directly with and often hire experts in other areas such as mining, resources and recovery, forecasting, transportation, economics, domestic and international politics, labour relations, and legalities and legislation. So my knowledge is often second-hand, but sometimes first based on experience. I would never hire myself out as a mining engineer, for example, nor a legal expert.
Exact verification of generation numbers is something the people I hire do. I gather data informally from experience in my work to add to that. In many cases the error is larger than many engineers would feel comfortable with - for example, it’s likely that coal burn rates estimates at power plants are within +/5% over a month time, which represents an uncertainty of +/-$50,000 O&M cost to as much as +/-$1,500,000 or more O&M cost per plant site, depending greatly on the situation.
Verification of mine resources is very difficult, but over time people get a feel for how to match up core samples and field mapping with actual experience at the longwall or in the pit, and people do the best they can.
The same is true for all fossil fuels. Amounts of recoverable oil and gas very with both fluctating prices and advances in technology.
The Peak Oil debate isn’t so much about that, however. It is to do with the notion that we have reached a fundamental limit in oil and gas (and coal) exploration. All the big fields have been found and all we are finding now is chump change.
Personally, I disagree with this idea. There is, of course, a finite amount of hydrocarbons out there. Even after sixty years of intensive exploration following WWII, we still don’t know the extent of them. Last year I was involved in a project in Russia where we drilled in an area that had never been drilled in before (the Sea of Okhosht). There’s massive potential for the whole region. Drilling in water depths of 2000 ft plus is a relatively new technolgy - one that opens up massive new areas.
Of course, just because we can pump all that oil out of the ground doesn’t mean we should – nor that, once we get it out, the best use we have for it is fuel. For one thing, we can’t burn it without adding still more CO2 to the atmosphere. Furthermore, in addition to fertilizers, most synthetic substances – including a lot of pharmaceuticals – are made from petroleum. We can’t afford to just burn it all.
I agree entirely with the idea that the simple ability to burn it doesn’t mean we should. However, I won’t necessarily agree that burning is not the best use nor will I ever agree that we can’t afford to burn it. A lot of other products like plastics and pharmaceuticals are made from minerla oil now because it’s cheap and avai;able in large quantity. But that doens;t make mineral oil essential. Those things could also be made from coal or wood pulp or plain old air if necessary. The reason they aren’t it would be harder to transport or more expensive to process to the required form.
The point is that the moineral oil in those things is just supplying a hydrocarbon backbone. Don’t get mislead by the peak oil alarmists into believeing thatif all oil ran out tommorrow we could no longer manufacture paint and plastic. That’s simply not true. The alternative may be more expensive and the price of paint might rise but by no means are we reliant on mineral oil as our source of industrial hydrocarbon.
The reason why I won’t agree that the oil can’t be best used by burning is because no one has fully investigated the alternatives. If we can plant forests as a source of industrial hydrocarbon and those forests act as a carbon sink and provide ecosystem services thenperhaps the best thing to do may be to use mineral oil only as a fuel.