In the future we’re supposed to solve the petroleum-based fuel problem for passenger vehicles with electric motors. I heard a discussion on NPR the other day about using natural gas to run tractor-trailer engines for cargo transportation. What about military vehicles? Is CNG too dangerous to use on a battlefield? Would military vehicles become nuclear-powered? Or would mechanized warfare become a thing of ages gone by? Does anybody have any ideas about the future of mechanized combat or know of any resources that address this issue?
There will always be oil (or a synthetic substitute) for those with enough money, like the Army.
as has been pointed out downthread, your premise is wrong. Oil will never “run out”. It will just become increasingly expensive. Oil can be manufactured from many raw materials-coal, oil sands, even turkey guts (there is/was a plant in the US that turned offal from a turkey processing plant next door into diesel fuel. Not economic until one factored in the very high cost of doing anything else with the left-overs. The processing plant wasn’t allowed to put them in the landfill).
My impression is that the military is way ahead of the rest of us - due primarily to the need to continue working when oil is not available logistically.
Those big vehicles run on diesel multi-fuel engines, that can be adjusted by design to burn almost anything combustible, and have been for a long time (decades).
Running a diesel on veggie oil, kerosene, or grain alcohol is nothing new to them.
The Air Force has announced plans to have about half of its domestic fuel come from coal-to-liquid plants within the next eight years. Link. There is the possibility that the next Navy cruiser, scheduled to start being built in the next two or three years, may be nuclear powered. Link. And finally, the next-generation Humvee, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, could be a diesel hybrid. Link.
But as others said, oil isn’t simply going to run out. It will get more expensive as it gets scarce, but you can bet that consumers are going to slow down their purchases of oil long before the military does.
Well the M-1 abrams was supposed to be able to run on perfume.
Declan
I was pretty sure I hadn’t thought all the way into/through that idea. Thanks!
Just in case we are in a war fighting alongside Estee Lauder, you know…
The Nazis used coal-to-liquid fuel technology during WWII. Germany had fairly abundant coal available, but petroleum was in short supply. The Fischer-Tropsch process was invented in the 1920s, but has never been economical versus readily available petroleum. South African company Sasol is one of the larger current companies using the process - SA developed coal-to-liquids programs during apartheid because they were economically isolated and couldn’t import sufficient oil.
-
Nobody has a clue how much oil we have, but the fact is that we have far more readily oil in the ground than we have extracted to date, so there is no shortage of oil.
-
We ain’t gonna run short of oil anytime soon. And by soon I mean the next 400 years or so. Even the most rabid alarmists only predict and end to cheap liquid crude. There is more than enough non-conventional oil in the form of tar sands and oil shales to last us fior the next several centuries based on current projetcions.
-
When we actually run out of liquid oil we can transform coal into liquid oil quite simply. It’s energy intensive, but when you are running your cracking plants on nuclear power that’s irrelevant. There is enough coal to keep the world supplied with oil for at least the next 500 years. The military alone for the next 1, 000 at least.
-
When we run out of coal we can transform plant biomass or even the air itself into oil. Once again these are very energy expensive transformations, but using nuclear fuel sources they are quite economically feasible for the military of any reaosnably welathy state.
Fuel cell technology would be a possible future source. Methane gas, hydrogen gas powered.
The breakthrough is always just around the corner but there are already applications, small powered devices, that exist.
Hydrogen isn’t in any sense an alternative to oil. We use oil to produce hydrogen, it’s a net energy user, not an energy source. While you could produce hydrogen using nuclear power as an alternative to oil it would be far easier and cheaper to use that nuclear power to covert coal to oil.
Methane can be an energy source, but as it is highly flammable in its own right the most efficient use remains to simply use it as an alternative to natural gas rather than in fuel cells.
This isn’t true. There are numerous experts who have been working for decades to determine the size of oil reserves. There may be legitimate debate over some of their conclusions but you can’t support the claim that “nobody has a clue”.
And while it’s more disputed, many of these experts say that we’ve passed the halfway point on total oil reserves. So it’s hardly a proven fact that we have more far more ready oil in the ground than we have extracted to date. The most optimistic estimates say that we’ve extracted a sizable percentage of total oil.
You’re confusing two different issues; when we’ll run short of oil and when we’ll run out of oil. You’re correct that we’ll never run out of oil; there will always be some untapped natural reserves and we can make oil if needed. But we will run short of oil at some point by any reasonable definition of that term and there are no credible claims that put that point four hundred years from now. As I said above, we are generally in the area of having used half of the world’s oil and we have done so in just over a hundred years.
The military isn’t “way ahead” of the rest of us in terms of fuel. They are *thinking *way ahead of most of us relative to fuel, but in practice, they’re doing much of the same sort of testing that many organizations are doing.
One of their approaches to deal with fuel logistics is to specify that all tactical vehicles (those used in combat and direct support) will operate on one type of fuel - helicopters, aircraft, tanks, trucks, Humvees, ships - the works. They all use jet fuel, which is about the same as diesel.
Although diesel engines can use other fuels, you can’t indiscriminately put “anything” into them and expect them to operate as designed. The components of these engines are designed to use one fuel, and anything else can cause some serious operational problems - fuel filter clogging, poor startups, degraded performance, increased maintenance, etc.
I am aware of several research efforts by the Department of Defense to look at ways to produce fuel using local resources, coal, and biomass. They have done some testing as noted above, but they are a long way off from being able to disconnect themselves from petroleum based fuels.
Why is it that every time this peak oil nonsense comes up on these boards I have to explain the massive difference between reserves and the amount of oil available?
I highly recommend that you study this page. It explains very clearly and simply what an oil reserve is and why you can’t just swap the terms “reserve” and “amount of oil” the way you just did.
Until you understand that those two terms are not even correlated, much less synonymous, then your opinions really have no place in GQ, which is suposed tpo be for factual and informed answers.
Yeah, I can support that. Just as I can support, for example, a claim that nobody has a clue how life arose on earth. In both cases there are numerous experts who have been working for decades to determine the issue, and in both cases there is absolutely no hard evidence and endless speculation.
So yeah, I can support my claim that nobody has a clue.
Once again you have demonstrated that you have absoluytely no idea what reserves mean.
We had passed the halfway point on total oil reserves in 1890.
We had passed the halfway point on total oil reserves in 1920.
We had passed the halfway point on total oil reserves in 1970.
While it varies with price we have always been hovering between the 66% and 50% point on total oil reserves and we always will. It doesn’t matter how much oil we use or how much oil we find. So long as oil remains abundant basic economics says that we will always have just passed the the 66% and 50% points on total oil reserves when prices spike. The fact that for over 100 years we have always just passed the the 66% and 50% point demonstrates that this is true.
Anyone who understands what oil reserves actually are and who has done even basic reserach into the historical state of reserves knows that this is true and wouldn’t bother to state that many of these experts say that we’ve passed the halfway point on total oil reserves.
Of course they do. The fact that we have perpetually just passed the halfway point is proof positve that oil remains abundant.
What you have not done by stating the banal truism that we’ve passed the halfway point on total oil reserves is in any manner adress my claim that nobody has a cluew how much oil exists. How much oil exists and is availble is unrelated to the size of reserves.
No, I’m not.
You however are provably confusing reserves and resources. You ned to appreciate that, when we are dealing with oil, reserves are only related to resources after resources become limiting.
Oh, what a load of nonsense.
Would the University of Oklahoma University of Oklahoma be conmsidered a credible claimant?
“If all all shale in the United States is considered the size of the potential resources is 26, 667 years of US consumption”
“Uncoventional oil resources such as tar sands are likely to replace conventional oil and ensure apetroleum supply for about 100 to 1000 years”
The World Energy Council is probably the authority on this subject, and they willonly project out for 30 years because they know that projecting further is pointless. But they confidently state that “global oil production is not expected to peak before 2030” and that “The Earth’s energy resources are undoubtedly adequate to meet rising demand for at least the next three decades…. World energy use will increase steadily through 2030 in the Reference Scenario. Global primary energy demand is projected to increase by 1.7 percent per year from 2000 to 2030, reaching an annual level of 15.3 billion tonnes of oil equivalent. The increase will be equal to two-thirds of current demand. The projected growth is, nevertheless, slower than growth over the past three decades, which ran at 2.1 percent per year…. Fossil fuels will remain the primary sources of energy, meeting more than 90 percent of the increase in demand. Global oil demand will rise by about 1.6 percent per year, from 75 mb/d in 2000 to 120 mb/d in 2030…. The world’s energy resources are adequate to meet the projected growth in energy demand. Oil resources are ample”
So perhaps you would care to withdraw your ignorant claim that there no credible claims that put that point four hundred years from now.
You have just demonstrated perfectly that you have absolutely no understanding of what an oil reserve is.
And to forestall you making ridiculous claims that we have used half the world’s oil, rather than simply half the reserves, I would invite everyone to look at the actual figures for just liquid oil from the USGS.
Production of oil to date has been ~540 biilion barrels.
Current reserves are ~860 biilion barrels. That is, unsurprisingly, between 50% and 66% of cumulative production, just as it has been for the past 100 years.
Reserve growth is ~620 billion barrles: larger than the amont extracted to date.
Undiscovered oil is about the same magnitude as reserve growth.
So the idea that we have used half the world’s oil is pure fantasy. It’s a claim made only by those who don’t understand what the word “reserve” means when referring to oil.
Can you help me find a link to that information on the WEC page? Because all I can find is stuff like this graph, showing what appears to be a peak at about 2010, and this comment from “A Contribution to the Peak Oil Discussion”: “If the peak in world discovery occurred in the 1960s, as the data appear to suggest, it follows that a corresponding peak in production may be imminent.”
Maybe that’s from a report that’s been later changed, but it looks to me as if the WEC is not prepared to write off an oil peak just yet.
Blake, you mention MANY uncited things and link to a page that has barely more words on it than your own post. Most of that page is random quotes that only provide a vague focus by the guy who wrote the page, a Mr. Bill Kovarik… A professor of communications.
Next time I want an in depth study of communications and media issues should I ask a professor of geology that studies oil drilling? :dubious:
Blake, you shouldn’t be pointing any fingers here. I understand what I’m talking about. It’s you that seems to be confused.
I use reserves and amount of oil interchangeably because they’re the same thing. You, on the other hand, switch back and forth between using reserves to refer to known reserves or total reserves. Total reserves don’t increase. That should be pretty obvious. Known reserves are some percentage of total preserves. The amount of known reserves varies - it can increase if we discover new oil fields.
Actually it is. It’s just a matter of economics.
My brother is one of those experts: while we can estimate the capacity of the known oil fields, there are expected to be oil fields about which we do not know, and we do not know their capacities. Or at what price it will be economic to recover the oil. For instance, there may well be huge reserves in Antarctica, but recovering them will be hugely expensive. A further issue is the manner in which the oil is extracted - apparently certain suppliers are extracting their oil in a non-optimal manner. So while we can make fairly good estimates of reserves of known oil fields at various levels of price, we really do not know how much oil reserves there may be.
But moving back to the OP, it is in fact an interesting question. As oil becomes more expensive, it must have an effect on mechanised warfare. It will cost more and more for countries to build up their stocks for operations, and supply depots will become more and more valuable, and oilfields will become particularly valuable. Ships can be replaced by nuclear powered versions, but could you fit a reactor inside a tank? And planes need avgas. And alternative energy sources like hydrogen are not so easy to transport and necessitate more complex - and thus vulnerable - fuel depots. And then there’s the whole issue of asymmetric warfare. It’s just as easy to transport a gun or a missile launcher by horse or donkey as by vehicle. A bit slower, maybe, but effective as the Russians found in Afghanistan. Offensive warfare may simply become nuking the target areas and then sending in ground forces to kill survivors.
So to paraphrase, known reserves are some (unknown) percentage of the (unknown) total reserves. If we discover new oil fields, both known reserves and total reserves go up (by an estimated, usually disputed amount that may turn out to be way off-beam), and the difference between known and total reserves decreases by an unknown percentage.
That’s good to know.