“Working around it”? The whole issue is that we have a finite supply of oil in the world and someday it’s going to run low. So how is pumping oil out of the ground and using it a solution to this problem? This isn’t “working around it” - this is “ignoring the problem”.
You can’t expect human beings to drastically alter their behavior for a problem that isn’t expected to fully manifest itself for another century. It’s never happened in history and there’s no reason to expect it now.
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Wind (and other green alternatives) can never meet consumers needs. In Ontario, green power is a mere 134 MW of a total capacity of about 25 000 MW.
Presently, Ontario gets about 1/3 of its energy from nuclear power. Ontario would like to build more nuclear plants and likely will but nuclear fuel is also a limited resource. If all countries chose this as an option, prices would rise drastically.
To expand hydro production, you need a river that can be dammed. Once you’ve dammed all the rivers you can (as we seem to have done in Ontario) then you cannot expand production further.
The leaves only coal which is the dirtiest of all the choices. Ontario just closed its Lakeview generating station because of smog concerns in Toronto.
I hope you optimists are right but I believe the transition to new energy will be expensive and painful.
Not true.
If the US Government had bought solar panels for it’s citizens instead of attacking Iraq, the resulting electricity generated would displace 200GW of generating capacity.
Since the TOTAL installed generating capacity is on the order of 1000GW http://www.eei.org/industry_issues/industry_overview_and_statistics/industry_statistics it’s apparent that it’s only a matter of priorities.
I’d like a cite on that. I get the feeling that buying 200GW of solar powers would raise the price of said panels just a tad, not to mention the cost of buying land and hiring the expertise necessary to install them.
So you’re saying if we had spent five hundred billion dollars on it, we’d have a cheap alternative energy source?
I’m not disputing that there are other energy sources that can replace oil in terms of producing energy. What I’m saying is that nobody has produced any credible evidence that any energy source besides oil can produce energy as cheaply as oil.
I don’t exactly understand your question. As conventional oil supplies run out, the world is switching to tar sands, etc. When those run out, we’ll use coal or uranium, or something else. Eventually the sun will burn out and maybe we’ll move to another solar system.
No, buying 200GW of solar panels would LOWER the cost dramatically. Basic economies of scale.
I didn’t say it was cheap, just not impossible.
It’s amusing how nobody ever mentions all of the other uses for oil. Plastics and fertilizers are only the beginning, but our modern world could not continue to function without cheap oil because it could not continue to function without those two things being cheap as well. I’m sure clever people would find ways to make coal answer for a few of the non-energy uses oil is currently put to, but it would take time we don’t have and money we could ill-afford to spend, especially in the early decades.
What is the projected increase in food prices when fertilizer prices spike? Does anyone even project those things? How about the cost of health care when plastic gets expensive?
Wind and solar don’t have to meet all our our needs. But the combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, oil, natural gas, clean coal, and geothermal will. Just in different ratios than they do today as the relative costs of each change.
Not really. Unlike oil, Uranium is distributed all through the crust and in ocean water. There are thousands of years worth of it available to us.
Yes, more exotic recovery methods could drive the cost of uranium fuel way up. At about 10X current costs, we can extract it from seawater, and that represents the price ceiling on uraniium, because once we start doing that we’ll have all the uranium we need.
And it’s important to note that a 10X increase in the price of uranium does not translate into a 10X increase in the cost of nuclear, because unlike other non-renewable energy sources, the cost of fuel is only a small part of the overall cost of nuclear. A 10-fold increase in the price of uranium might result in a doubling of the cost of nuclear power, but that’s about it. At that price, we can power society on nuclear alone for several thousand years. And we can also process spent fuel and reuse it. CANDU reactors can directly burn the waste of U.S. Light Water Reactors. So nuclear is certainly viable for a very, very long time.
Clean coal has very low emissions. If we can solve the carbon sequestration problem, coal and oil from tar sands could provide energy for centuries.
I would be worried if we had no alternatives that didn’t require breakthroughs, like fusion. But that’s not the case. We KNOW we can replace oil. Replacements are waiting in the wings and ready to go. It’s only a question of time and cost. And you’ll be amazed at how fast the market will start diverting resources into alternative energy sources when there is a true need to do so.
You’re right, I will be amazed.
This is a carbon society, born and raised.
If these alternatives are just “waiting in the wings” then why invade Iraq? But that’s a whole different thread.
Iraq wasn’t about oil. Iraq was about power. Power is always in desperately short supply…
…and is so easily squandered.
:rolleyes:
I suspect that, had the Iraq war truly been about oil, it might have worked out cheaper just to buy the stuff rather than pay however much it’s cost to invade and occupy.
Whatever this abortion of a war was about, it wasn’t about oil.
ETA - I guess this wasn’t a GQ post really. I’ll let it stand, with apologies.
The stuff they’re pulling out of tar sands is conventional oil. Oil’s not an alterantive to oil.
I’ve already explained that the issue isn’t whether we can get energy out of coal or uranium. It’s that we can’t get the energy out as cheaply as we can from oil.
As for the sun, it will indeed burn out in a few million years. The problem is that we’ll run low on oil sometime in the next century or two but people are acting like it’s not going to happen for a million years.
And I in turn didn’t say it was impossible, just not cheap.
Technically, I think you are incorrect:
However, I think I see your point, which seems to be that using tar sands, coal, etc. will only defer the day of reckoning. But the thing is - there’s tons and tons of coal, shale, tar sands, etc.
Here’s an article I found on the economics of nuclear power:
Nuclear does NOT seem to be significantly more expensive and may be cheaper than fossil fuels.
“As of 2004, nuclear power provided 6.5% of the world’s energy”
It’s hard for me to believe that we’re throwing away tons of money by using nuclear plants to generate 6.5% of the world’s energy. What seems more likely to me is that it would be economical to generate a lot more than 6.5% with nuclear, but peoples’ fears are holding us back.
What also seems clear is that even if oil is cheap, other sources of energy are not ridiculously more expensive than oil.
200 years is so far off that there’s not much point in worrying about it, at least in terms of what resources we will need and how we will get them. Think about a hypothetical person in 1807. Could he or she have foreseen with any confidence what sorts of resource issues the world would be facing in 2007? I doubt it.
I think Michael Chrichton made this point very well:
No, it isn’t. Conventional oil is liquid crude. Tar sands, shale oil, coal oil and so forth are oil but they are not conventional in any sense of the word. Most importantly all the Peak Oil doomsayers explicitely exclude such oil resoucres from the figures they use to predict the crucnh, So in the most meaningful sense for this discussion they stuff they are pulling out of tar sands is not conventional oil.
Once agian, you are trying to change defintions mid-converstaion. The thread is about the peka oil predictions that havfe been saying taht oil production wil peka within 20 years (and have been saying that for the past 70 years BTW). In this context oil means liquid crude, nothing else. As such oilis indeed an alternative to oil.
Aside from sands, tars, shales etc. oil can be manufactured from good old fashioned coal, or if we want to we can manufacture it from plant trash after we’ve harvested. Chemically, physically and in utility identical to crude oil, but in evrey sense a perfect alternative to oil in the sense the word is being used in this thread.
That just isn’t right. We can get energy out of uranium or coal far more cheaply than we can get it out of liquid crude. The issue is one of convenience: transport, pollution and so forth, not one of net energy return.
If you really think we can’t get energy out of coal or uranium as cheaply as oil, then ask yourself why ~80 of the world’s energy comes from coal and uranium, and less than 10% comes from oil? Do you really think that the world obtains 80% of its energy from the more expensive sources and uses the cheapest source for less than 10%? why would people do that?
Sigh. No they aren’t, they are simply acting rationally.
The pace of technological change is so rapid that trying to make take action based on what will happen in 200 years is just plain stupid. 200 years ago the world was running low on trees, both for navies and for steel production. Do you really think that it would have been sensible or worthwhile for people then to start planting forests so that today we would have enough trees for our steel production and battleship production? Honestly?
Yet this is precisely the type of action you are proposing we take today: that we start taking action to replace our oil supplies on the assumption that in 200 years time oil will be considered any more critical than timber is today.
(a) Never is a very long time.
(b) I agree - transition to new energy sources will be an incredibly enormous change that very few people, if any, really understand. I certainly don’t.
The biggest problem with green energy is that it has extremely low “energy density.” Fossil fuels have a lot of energy per area (mining or oil well area), where biomass, solar, and wind require enormous amounts of surface area to harvest similar amounts of energy. I recently heard a lecture in which the presenter proposed a unit of area for biomass energy as “one Iowa.” His estimate (which was reasonable) was that the U.S. transportation system would require 6 Iowas to produce enough ethanol (from corn, granted not the best approach) to displace current gasoline consumption. One Iowa includes **all ** the land area, including that for cities, parks, highways, homes, etc. And that did not account for the additional Iowas to produce the fuel to power the ethanol production process.
There’s another issue with the idea that we can immediately turn to green energy if we only invested enough (say, the money that went to the Iraq War). That is that there are very serious infrastructure limits for production and materials for things like solar panels. You can’t simply place an order for 1 GW of capacity and have it delivered in 6 months. Economies of scale help, but production depends on factory capacity, material availability and price, availability of technical expertise, and so on. This infrastructure does not simply pop into place overnight. And this doesn’t even touch on the need for investment capital to build the infrastructure.
I don’t know the total capital invested in the current energy system, but it has to be an enormous amount, and replacing it will only be more expensive. This is not something that can happen in a decade, and twenty years is probably on the highly optimistic side. I believe that the transition has to be made, but it will be a wild ride, to say the least.
I’m not a petroleum engineer (and it’s clear you’re not one either). The oil that comes out of tar sands is indeed liquid crude - what would generally be called conventional oil. But I’m going to keep repeating this until it bounces off some random neuron in your brain and makes an impression - the issue is not the existence of oil; it’s the existence of cheap oil. Crude oil you pump out of a well is cheap; crude oil you extract out of tar sand is expensive. Crude oil you make out of coal is really expensive. So we’re not peaking on oil; we’re peaking on cheap oil.
Really? I’d be amazed to see a cite from 1937 that was predicting world oil production was going to run out in 1957. As far as I know, peak oil theory was first discussed in 1956 by Marion King Hubbert. He made two predictions - that American oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970 (and he was right - it peaked in 1970) and that world oil production would peak around 2006 (he may have been off a year on that one - in fact 2006 oil production was slightly below 2005 production and 2007 production is expected to be lower than 2006).
These would indeed be comforting figures if they had any basis in reality. Let’s try these figures from the Energy Information Administration instead: “In 2005, petroleum (crude oil and natural gas plant liquids) continued to be the world’s most important primary energy source, accounting for 36.8 percent, or 169 quadrillion Btu, of world primary energy production.” Coal and nuclear power counted for 26.6% and 6.0% of world energy production - a combined total that’s less than half of your ~80% figure.
Now let’s talk about EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested). You can throw all the money into the world into an energy source but at some point you’re going to run into basic physics. There’s only so much potential energy in a kilogram of whatever energy source you’re looking at. And you need a certain amount of energy to get it out. Obviously you want an energy source where you get a lot out in exchange for putting very little in. Oil has always had a great EROEI rate - when it was first developed its EROEI rate was around 100:1. It’s currently around 10:1.
Now let’s look at some other EROEI figures:
Biodiesel 3:1
Coal 1:1 to 10:1
Ethanol 1.2:1
Natural gas 5:1 to 10:1
Hydropower 10:1
Hydrogen 0.5:1
Nuclear 4:1
Oil sands 2:1
Solar PV 1.1 to 10:1
Wind 3:1 to 10:1
Some of these look comparable. But that’s only looking at their best possible output. These figures do not scale up. Some European windpower generators have EROEI rates of 20:1. But they get this high figure because windpower is concentrated in a few small areas where there are naturally great wind conditions. If you tried to double wind generated power, you’d have to start building wind generators in areas that don’t have these great conditions - and as a result your EROEI rate would drop. You’d be spending just as much to operate the generators but you’d get less energy out of them. The same logic applies to hydro or geothermal or even solar. They’re great in some limited areas but they don’t work as a general energy source.
The same limitations apply to products like coal or uranium or natural gas. They are limited geographically because generators can be build anywhere. But they are dependant on mining. There are quantities of these products that are lying on the ground to be picked up. And there are quantities of these products that are buried miles beneath the surface. The easy-to-get-to stuff is cheap. But for every ton you use, you have to work harder and dig deeper for the next ton. We currently produce about six billion tons a year of coal; to double that to twelve billion tons a year would more than double the cost and ever addition billion tons would cost more than the one before. Uranium’s the same way, except we would have to import it from other countries as well. Natural gas is the worst of all - it’s already passed its peak production year and has worse long-term prospects than oil.
We’re already well past the price point necessary to make producing oil from tar sands economical and I don’t see the world economy grinding to a halt.