DISQUS

cjwirth · 1 year ago

Peak Oil is real, and here is a summary of this coming catastrophe:

According to most independent scientific studies, global oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%.

This is equivalent to a 33% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always exceed production levels; thus oil depletion will continue steadily until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.

Surviving Peak Oil: We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

Actual demand will equal the supply of total liquids (oil + synthetic + biofuel).
Any "excess demand" will be destroyed by higher prices.

Counting up the actual oil megaprojects that oil companies are working on shows that oil production will be increasing this year, next year and into 2010 and will be at least stable after that until 2013. The list of megaprojects is more and more incomplete from 2009 onwards because companies (like in Brazil) will be actually starting and completing more oil projects.

Bakken oil will be more and more significant for the US and Canada up from the current 250,000 barrels of oil per day. The US will have more oil from the Gulf of Mexico over the next few years.

Even if there were a 33% drop in 7 years that level of reduction, (which there won't be) but say from 2013-2020, that level can be adjusted to.

<img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2392/2053359927_6de9adaec6.jpg?v=0">
Road pavement only uses 537,000 barrels of oil per day.

Miscanthus can be used to produce 20% of fuel with 9% of cropland or 50% of fuel with 23% of cropland. That is before genetic modification. A 300% productive boost to Miscanthus could ultimately be performed. Jatropha is a biofuel plant that can be grown in wasteland so it would not compete with crops. Seaweed can be used as Japan is working towards on a large scale. Again not competing with crops.

140 billion gallons of oil for the USA now.
20 billion gallon biofuel/ethanol target for 2015 [3 mbd] [this is before Miscanthus, algae and other more advanced biofuels]
Domestic US production in the range of 6.3 mbd in 2015 [more gulf of mexico oil]
(one third 45 billion gallons)
1-2 mbd imports from Canada. [oilsands and Canada's part of the Bakken]

7 years is plenty of time for cars and trucks to be converted to very high efficiency oil and gas usage and electrification.

trucks use 2.5 million barrels of oil per day in the USA and another 2.5-3 million barrels of oil per day for heavy machinery, agriculture, planes etc... Those applications get the oil and biofuels first. Process improvement and superconducting motors can reduce industrial usage by 20-30%. Process heat can be replaced by high temperature nuclear reactor as China is starting to build.

If the enhanced oil recovery works out then there is 218 billion barrels of oil in old wells in the USA to be tapped.
enhanced oil recovery which I had already linked to in the main article.

So as said - no catastrophe.

No catastrophe

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

Your link is talking about peak oil in 2006 when there are new production records for regular oil being made this year.
The link also talks about a peak in natural gas when even Gail the actuary at theoildrum is admitting there will be a lot more natural gas in the USA from better technology for accessing tight shale formations. Natural gas article from this site

cjwirth · 1 year ago

Global crude oil production has been on a plateau since early in 2005. There has been no significant increase in production, though demand during this time has increased at about 18% annually. Most all independent sources indicate that we are at Peak Production now for Peak Oil.

When oil hits $200 and $500 per barrel, there won't be much capital around for manufacturing the rigs for all of the drilling natural gas, transporting the equipment all over, and transporting the workers. and when the gas stations are closed???

it takes energy to get energy, and NG is no exception, and the energy it takes is oil

read below

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4376#more

westexas on September 5, 2008 - 11:24pm

Texas serves as a pretty good model [regarding how many wells must be drilled[.

In 1972, we produced about 7.5 TCF from 23,000 gas wells.

From 2002 to 2007, we increased our production from 4.8 to 5.7 TCF, but it took about 23,000 gas wells.

In other words, in order to boost our net production by 0.9 TCF over a five year period, it required the same number of wells that we had in total in 1972, when we produced 7.5 TCF.

It seems to me that in order to keep our total gas production rate increasing nationwide, we are going to have to have an infinite rate of increase in the number of wells that we drill, complete and connect to gas lines.

For Texas, the gas well count, at our current rate of increase, would like like this:

2002: 65,000 wells

2012: 118,000 wells

2022: 215,000 wells

2032: 387,000 wells

Note that the incremental rate of increase in net production per well has been about 100 MCF per day. On a BTU basis, this is about 17 BOE per day per well.

BTW, the Texas RRC has added a Barnett Shale summary section. So far, it looks like production is going to be approximately flat year over year in 2008, versus 2007.

Tjgreen · 1 year ago

Our species has suffered tremendous collateral damage to our genome in this predator prey arms race we call evolution. Once our genomes are sequenced, and we start removing these damaging gene variants, then we will also lose genetic variation. Survival strategies rely on genetic variation, once variation is lost a species is lost. We would need an immune system that was under our control to survive.

Austinnetx · 1 year ago

Except Peak Oil is not an issue because processes are more energy efficient over time and there is a lot of oil that is yet to be found.

Global climate change is not an issue because CO2 is not an appreciable greenhouse gas, the temperature record that the IPCC report is based upon is fatally biased by urban heat island effects, and the underlying science papers are fraudulent ( Wang).

DrBalthar · 1 year ago

This is an interesting debate. And I think both sides are a bit blinded by their point of view. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Oil + the Energy is a real issue and we have to put a lot more effort into this on economical, political and social level NOW!. China+India are not even there yet on their per capital energy usage to compared to Western Europe and even further away from that of the US and we already see serious shortage problems in all types of comodities, especially energy sources but as well as some ores. Which some of them are super rare. If the US does not come serious down with their per capital energy usage this will be a major headache in the future. But even with China+India, there are still another third of the world population at the moment still missing out with an energy per capital usage which is close to the middle age. Unless we solve this inquilbrium there will be major friction in the world leading to all sort of local and global conflicts.

Climate change is tightly connected to the energy problem. And both must be solved in one stroke or none of them will be. On the other hand if all the economical extractable fossil fuels run out there won't be any climate change. If geoengeneering is the right answer I am not sure. It sounds more like a last stroke solution. There should be run serious simulation on that problem before we use methods like that as long as the system is not fully understood tingering with it can have serious consequences. Too often men has done things thinking he knows what he is doing which lead to serious consequences up to natural disasters in the long run. We can not afford doing this sort of business anymore not on such a global scale.

nextbigfuture · 1 year ago

75% of CO2 is from US, EU, Japan, China, Canada, Australia, S Korea. A lot of the rest is from middle east/OPEC (who have oil and can waste it and subsidize gas to their population) and S America and non-EU europe.

The rest of the world is not going to be the main part of the issue for decades.
(Vietnam, India, and some other places are coming up a few decades behind China)

What we have now ready for volume is electric bikes and scooters and we should make an electric version of the Tata Nano ($2500 car) plus better industrial and power tech.

In a decade or two what we should have in place cheap electric cars ready for any new up and comers. Deep burn factory mass produced nuclear plants. Better renewables Coolearth balloon solar, Sunrgi, MIT concentrated solar windows, kitegen wind etc... there is also Calera cement (takes out 1 ton of CO2 from the air instead of adding it) for sequestering carbon in cement as something which should be big time ready in 6-12 years. So there are/will be ways to stop and rollback per capita carbon.

If the 75% of the current problem can get cut in half then the rest of world can double over the next 20 years and we would still be 12.5% ahead of where we are today.

If we get eastern europe, south america, south africa and OPEC nations to reduce carbon as well as the 75% then that would address well over 90% of the problem.

Mass production of Calera cement or some equivalent would cover all sorts of carbon dioxide issues. It could be an easy out. 2.5 billion tons of cement now that gets taken from positive 2.5 billion tons of CO2 to negative 2.5 billion tons. Drop to 21 billion tons of CO2 + growth from now until implementation and then ramp up cement beyond normal 50% increase over the next 10-15 years. 400% growth. would mean another 7.5 billion tons sequestered in cement each year. 13.5 billion tons of CO2 + growth in CO2 from now to implementation. A lot of the other clean energy and transportation plans are to stabilize or reduce the CO2. So some achievable new tech for CO2 and steel and climate change is fixable in a relatively painless way.

The good geoengineering proposals of Gregory Benford (diatomicious earth) or cloud seeding ships would both be cheap a few billion per year and can be monitored and reversed on a regional basis for testing before global scale up.