>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
>Behalf Of Vandergraaf, Chuck
>Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2001 7:40 PM
>To: 'Glenn Morton'
>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?
No. I haven't seen further monthly figures for North Sea production. I
strongly suspect that the August drop was due to maintenance but can't
verify that.
>
>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.
Believe it or not, I am among the moderates. The pollyannas, like the USGS
say that oil production will peak out in 2020 (with some people who have
never looked at the issue saying beyond that), the moderates say 2010 and
the pessimists, like Colin Campbell, say this year. Production begins to
decline when you have produced about half of the ultimately recoverable
reserves. With technology improvements that decline is usually slightly
after the half-way point in production.
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.
The ultimate limit to oil extraction is when it costs .2 of a barrel of oil
(useful work) to extract a barrel of oil. Why? because to get .2 of a barrel
of oil's worth of useful work will take the burning of a barrel of energy.
20% is about the real-life efficiency of burning oil for useful work. It is
due to our inability to actually reach the limit set by the 2nd law of
thermo.
>
>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.
We agree on this--see above. We can always get SOME oil out of the ground.
It will always be a matter of cost. But we won't be able to get economic oil
out of the ground and that is what is needed to run an economy.
>
>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.
Too true when we let governments run things. Part of California's problem
is that the government won't let PG&E charge what it costs to manufacture
electricity. Thus, PG&E is paying more for its raw material than it can
recoup in income. That means bankruptcy. But the politicians are happy
because they don't have constituents calling them telling them that
electricity costs are too high. The real fix is to pay the real cost of the
product.
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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