Glenn,
Thanks for (yet another) dire warning. I have a few questions/comments for
you:
1. Some time ago, you mentioned a drop in oil extraction from the North Sea
basin. Have you ever found out what caused this drop and is this decrease
continuing?
2. There is a lot of discussion about the limits to our fossil fuel
resources. There is the "Pollyanna" view that there will always be more oil
and gas "down there" and all we have to do is improve our exploratory and
extractive methodologies. Then there's the pessimistic view, yours being
one of them and I tend to share your pessimism. However, the truth is
probably somewhere in between: there's lots of oil that cannot be recovered
with current technology or at current costs but, when (not if) oil companies
can charge more for their oil, they will suck it out of the ground. To get
back to your example of a few days ago, where you owned a few percentage
points on a well in Fayette county in Texas, you mentioned that it cost 50$
to get 5$ oil. However, when oil becomes a scarce commodity and the price
shoots up to 60$, that well may be worth pumping. Thus, these resources are
"soft" and depend on our willingness to part with our hard-earned shekels.
So, the oil will never run out because there will always be some that we
cannot access.
3. The following dawned on me a few days ago: we tend to compare the energy
costs to get the oil out with the energy that the oil will give us. Yet, we
don't always apply this logic to all forms of energy generation. What we
may be ignoring is the form in which we want the energy carrier. There will
be (if there is not already) a premium on portable fuel in the future. For
example, we won't be able to use nuclear-powered airplanes when the oil runs
low but if we, as a society, want to continue to fly from one place to
another, we might consider running coal or nuclear power plants to generate
electricity (at 25-30% efficiency) or use solar panels to generate
electricity (at whatever efficiency) and use that electricity to synthesize
synthetic kerosene (at another poor efficiency) simply so that we can fly
from North America to Europe (or keep the F-18s flying). In fact, we
already do this with our space programs.
I recall a presentation some 20+ years ago on a proposal to build nuclear
power plants in Nova Scotia, one of our Maritime provinces. Nova Scotia has
lots of coal and (used to have) access to cheap oil from Venezuela (that was
before 1980!) The idea was to use the nuclear power plant to generate
electricity and use that to generate hydrogen by electrolysis. The hydrogen
would then be combined with the coal from the Nova Scotia coal mines to make
a synthetic fuel (note that the South Africans used to make synthetic fuel,
so this is not a new idea). The synthetic fuel would be then be used in
diesel locomotives. I asked the speaker if it would not be a lot simpler to
just electrify the railroads. His response made it quite clear that the
goal of the exercise had nothing to do with transportation, but to come up
with a "make work" project to keep the coal mines in Nova Scotia open. No,
I am not making this up! It's an example where the energy balance does not
even factor into the equation.
Comments?
Chuck Vandergraaf
-----Original Message-----
From: Glenn Morton [mailto:glenn.morton@btinternet.com]
Sent: Wednesday January 24, 2001 12:33 PM
To: Asa@Calvin. Edu
Subject: 4 sobering paragraphs on oil
Three paragraphs from an economist William E. Rees, "Revisiting Carrying
Capacity: Ara-Based Indicators of Sustainability," Population and
Environment 17(1996):3:195-215
"But there is another issue at hand. The world is running out of
conventional oil. Recent price hikes are mere tremors heralding the real
price shock to come. Surely this is not the time to be deepening our
dependence on fossil fuel."
"The evidence? Oil 'production' (i.e., extraction) in the US peaked around
1970 and in North America as a whole in 1984. Non-OPEC production is peaking
even as you read these words. Several recent studies project global oil
production to peak by 2013 or sooner, possibly as soon as 2007. Even the
necessarily conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) in its World
Energy Outlook, 1998 concurred for the first time that global output could
top out between 2009 and 2012 and decline rapidly thereafter. Indeed, the
IEA projects a nearly 20% shortfall of supply relative to demand by 2020
that will have to be made up of from "unidentified unconventional" sources
(i.e., known oil-sands deposits have already been taken into account). Other
studies show that by 2040 total oil output from all sources may fall to less
than half of today's 25-26 billion barrels of oil per year." [in 2000 we
produced over to 28 billion barrels of oil--grm]
"And running out of oil is not running out of just oil. Oil is the means by
which industrial society obtains (and over-exploits) all other resources.
The world's fishing fleets, its forest sector, its mines, and its
agriculture all are powered by liquid portable fossil fuels. Seventeen
percent of the US energy budget, most of it oil, is used just to grow,
process, and transport food alone. (It takes a gallon of fossil fuel to feed
each American every day.) Keep in mind, too, that petroleum is not just a
fuel. Oil and natural gas are the raw material for thousands of products
from medicines, paints, and plastics to agricultural fertilizers and
pesticides. Since oil is directly or indirectly a part of everything else
the coming scarcity of oil and the attendant price shock means higher prices
for everything else as well."
"But wait a minute. Many analysts will agree with energy economist M.A.
Adelman that rising prices will stimulate "..a stream of investment
[creating] additions to proved reserves, a very large in-ground inventory,
constantly renewed as it is extracted". Unfortunately, this argument is
dangerously misleading. The physical stock of exploitable oil is not being
"renewed"; historically, improved technology has simply made a dwindling
finite resource more accessible. Abundant short-term market supplies then
effectively short-circuit the price increases that would otherwise signal
impending real scarcity, even as finite stocks are depleted."
glenn
see http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
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