RE: [asa] $4 gas is here to stay

Jack wrote:

> So what is your solution Glenn? I respect your opinion. I dont like
> your short fuse.

 Sigh, I didn't even get mad. I wasn't mad then, I am not mad now. People
always think I am mad when I am not mad. When I write things like, If one
can't dissect an argument on this list then what is the point? To sing
kumbayah and have group hugs?, it isn't a statement of anger. It is merely a
way of saying goodness gracious, why do people get upset when I criticize
their logic? Starting when I was a child of 4 years old and continuing, I
remember telling my mother things and she would often say, "don't be angry".
I wasn't angry. I was surprised she thought I was. Maybe that same thing
comes across in my writing as many feel that same way about me. Because of
that, I know many think I am angry when I am not. I often don't even know
what I am doing to tick people off other than, challenging their belief
systems. I will challenge people and many people are not used to being
challenged with loads of data. My comments about this list being antiquated
are also true and are not a statement of anger. It is a fact that one can't
post pictures here and that limits the discussion. This is a group of
scientists but we stay firmly attached to the technology of 1991. That too
is a fact. I admit to being frustrated that I can't enhance the argument
with pictures but it isn't anger. BTW it is a fact that an email list is the
technology of 1991 or so. That too isn't an insult it is a statement of
fact. But it is a fact that we apparently voted to keep the dinosaur
alive--not a statement of anger. If I am wrong, what year was listservs
invented? 1988? (once again that is a serious question not one of anger).

I expect people to come back at me and tear my arguments apart, not divert
off to other issues which are logically irrelevant to the topic at hand--as
in a late case, are we running out of uranium? I see no relevance to the
question of running out of uranium, what the political beliefs of Dittmar
are, nor do I see the particular relevance of his mistakes on other issues
like on whether or not tritium can do fusion. Fusion reactors tritium or
deuterium don't exist in break even mode and won't likely for a long time.
To me the question is: is he correct or not on running out of uranium.
There is no anger in the above, there is nothing but statements of fact and
logic. When Burgy said that Forbes opinion on oil didn't count because he
was a GW denier, I found that logically atrocious on two counts. One, it
assumes that the person you are speaking with doesn't share the GW view with
Forbes (which I do--I think it is unscientific). It is like (note the word
LIKE) saying no one with a mind would doubt global warming so his
credibility on the price of oil is zilch. That too is a logical
non-sequitur.) Secondly, even if Forbes and I are wrong on GW it doesn't
automatically make us wrong on everything else in the universe. If calling
an *argument* illogical is prima facie evidence of anger, then I plead
absolutely guilty and I will call such arguments illogical in the future.
There is no anger here. This is a statement of fact. I don't think one
should engage in that kind of argumentation and I will not let it slip by as
if it is a valid point against my position when I don't think it is a valid
point.

There may be many valid points against my position--like, IF we build lots
of breeders, we can have energy cheaply for centuries. But, amazingly, no
one actually went to the trouble to present them. There was an argument
which I interpreted as saying that because Dittmar is wrong on tritium he
must not be trusted on uranium. To then have it been seen as anger when I
said, That is arguing that because he is wrong there, he is wrong here where
there is no necessary logical connection between the two points, seems odd
to me. I know of one possible hole in my argument about
uranium--phosphates, but we are running out of phosphate as well and that
has huge implications for future agriculture (there is no anger in the
above--it is my opinion about the quality of the arguments I have
seen--surely I am not required to believe that all arguments on the ASA list
are wonderful am I???) No anger there,it is a rhetorical question but I
fear that if I don't explicitly state that I am not angry everyone here will
think I am angry when all day today I have not been angry once--at anyone,
Iain included (although I think he is mad at me but I would hate to say that
and find out that he isn't mad at me). When I am mad, I start making
personal invectives. I haven't done that yet in any of my posts. I do rip up
arguments and frankly enjoy testing ideas and the knowledge of those around
me. I learn lots when people push back. Unfortunately most people are shy
wall flowers and don't like being directly challenged. (no anger here, just
my way of speaking)

To the question you asked. When I was Director of Technology for Kerr-McGee
oil and Gas Co. I was charged with looking for new technologies to get us
into. Holding the view I do of oil, I searched for new energy sources we
could move into. I couldn't find anything that would replace oil.

And believe it or not, a case can be made that we are also about to have a
natural gas crisis as well (I can't post pictures here on this antiquated
technology from the 1990s--this isn't a statement of anger, just of fact but
maybe showing a wee bit of frustration.) I have a picture showing what is
about to happen to natural gas production in North American and it is scary
as heck. If the pipelines ever empty in a cold snap, it will be a very long
time before one gets them running again. Every house must have its gas
system checked to be sure that all the valves are closed. That is a door to
door search. Only then can the main valve to the neighborhood be turned on.
But if both oil and natural gas start declining that is almost half of our
energy supply. Yes there is lots of gas in the world but it is so far away
from the markets that the owner of the gas is being asked to freely donate
his precious commodity to make it economic to move it to market. There is
now some discussion about bringing natural gas from Prudhoe bay and other
Alaskan fields through Canada and into the US grid. It is a project that
will cost $27 billion and will take about 15 years. I have a friend who
works for a major contractor to the oil industry. He is an engineer. Over
dinner one night he casually mentioned that the steel for that project will
occupy the output of every Western Hemisphere steel plant for several
years!!!! And I am being asked here to provide a solution to our energy
problem. (no anger here, just a statement of irony. Is our society willing
to put that much steel into one project?).

Because of the importance of this problem I uploaded the picture to my web
page. http://home.entouch.net/dmd/FrighteningLaherrereGas04.png Make it as
big as you can. There is a labeling problem the Big red boxes are marketed
CONVENTIONAL gas. The green small box is marketed unconventional
gas--meaning shale gas and the like. The blue curve is the discovery curve
smoothed by 7 years running average and shifted 23 years forward in time to
overlay the production data. You can see that these two curves mimic each
other. But, as any calculus student knows when the area beneath the
production curve equals the area beneath the discovery curve, one has
produced what has been discovered. Notice how similar the areas are beneath
the two curves. Notice also the slight downward movement on the total
production curve. In the next few years production of conventional gas will
plummet because discovery of conventional gas plummeted 23 years ago. After
this happens North America will be left with about half its current supply
of natural gas. That will probably mean an emptying of the local pipelines
to your house and at least months before they can re-open them for you.

Now we could solve this by building lots of LNG regassification plants, but
everytime someone wants to build one, the neighbors sue in court and stop it
from happening. So, I am not optimistic about this solution either.

I don't think there is a chance of that proverbial snowball that we can
make breeders fast enough. The political risks of bomb proliferation are too
great,and there is the inherent danger (the only historical core melt down
was in a liquid metal reactor) and the time frame too short. We should have
been building like crazy since 1970 when the Club of Rome wrote the Limits
to Growth. As it is, we have wasted the time they gave us.

Solar. I told my reasons to think that solar won't work. To make a
conventional solar cell requires heating an oven to about 1400 deg C. That
is done with natural gas--which, as I mentioned above is becoming short in
supply but I can't show you the picture here. Ok I will use up some of my
own web space for it.

Wind--Don't live south of the Mason Dixon line. Best to live in North
Dakota.. http://rredc.nrel.gov/wind/pubs/atlas/maps/chap2/2-06m.html

Unfortunately, there is a lot of garbage out there.

" Globally, the resource is very large. In an in-press article, Archer and
Jacobson use worldwide weather stations (more accurate than the above GEOS-1
data, but not covering the oceans) and estimate the worldwide land and
near-shore wind resource. Their calculation of total wind resource is 72 TW.
This is seven tiems the world's electricity demand and five times the world
energy demand (all commercial fuels and carriers). Although the direct solar
resource is larger, in the higher speed wind areas the wind resource is at
or near economic viability today."
http://www.ocean.udel.edu/WindPower/ResourceMap/index-world.html

Are we really going to have a wind turbine on every corner? Somehow I doubt
it at a cost of $1.5 million per turbine. If we are, we better start making
those turbine blades faster.

Agriculture is going to be a problem. 40% of our food supply is directly
due to fertilizer use. But 1% of world energy is used in the manufacture of
fertilizer. I can tell you that the people around my ranch are griping at
the $680/ton cost of fertilizer. They can't afford it. If farmers quit using
it, crop yields will drop. This is not a statement of pessimism or optimism.
It is a statement of fact. North Korea was starving to death because they
couldn't get fertilizer. They didn't have natural gas or other energy
sources which is part of the process.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/ag-korea.htm

You want to know the real reason I invested heavily in oil and thus did
well? It was DEPRESSION and DESPERATION. In the late 1990s when I began to
realize the magnitude of the problem I got utterly depressed. I didn't like
what I thought life would be like in a city when oil runs out. I finally
figured out that if I invested in energy as it was getting short in supply,
I could make enough money to buy a ranch so that my family would have a
refuge as oil runs out. It is not a guarantee, but it gives them a chance.
This whole scenario is depressing, but so far everything in that 2000 PSCF
article of mine is coming to pass exactly as I laid it out.

This sounds just nutty, but I will tell you that my views are no longer
unusual among those in the oil industry. Most people in the industry now
agree we have a big problem and many are doing exactly what I am
doing--turning survivalist. I once asked a multimillionaire friend "Am I
nuts to believe what I do, I sound so weird?" To which, he replied, "We are
seeing it all play out before our very eyes!" And he is right. The Wall
street Journal had an article in the last month on fertilizer shortage and
the problem with its price. All the TV talking heads are talking about oil,
but many of them don't know diddly about the industry, and think, like
Daniel Yergin, that oil price is going to go down. That is wishful thinking.
(see http://home.entouch.net/dmd/cera.htm ) Oil jumped $11/bbl yesterday
probably because those betting that the oil price would fall were wrong and
they had to cover their short positions making for a buying spree in oil. I
expect it to fall Monday.

One more thing. When I lived in China, I came to know and got to meet many
very powerful people there. One fellow, whose position and name I will not
give you but who is high in the economy of China asked some interesting
questions at the lunch my boss and I had with him. After the amenities his
first question was "Do you believe in Peak Oil? We said that Kerr-McGee
didn't have a position on it but personally we both did. He did as well. He
indicated that China was trying to use less coal and more oil and natural
gas in electrical generation. Problem: there isn't enough natural gas in
China. In my many meetings with high government officials I came to know
that they consider oil supply as critical to their survival. That was a
refreshing thing when compared to my government's view of oil. We think oil
is like a booger on the finger--something to be shaken off and done without.
(see, I act towards our government just as I do towards everything else but
it isn't anger. I am sarcastic and now cynical as hell).

Now, the point of this excursion to China is this. They will do what they
have to do to get the oil. So will the US and that puts us on a collisional
course. My fear is that we will all get to see the other country's nuclear
warheads coming at us at slightly less than orbital velocity before all this
is over. Oil is going away. If anyone doesn't believe me take a look at
what is happening to one of the US's biggest sources of oil, Mexico.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/MexicanProduction.jpg This picture goes from
Sept 2004 to the present. Russia, the largest producer is now declining at
a 4% rate, the Saudis are trying to increase production but they are still
below their all time high. Norway is declining in production, the UK is
producing about half what it did when I moved there in 2000; Oman,
Indonesia, and many other countries are declining in production. I simply
don't know where the barrels are going to come from.

People are going to get desperate and economies are already showing the
strain. Add in that politicians can always be counted upon to do the
absolutely dumbest thing possible and it doesn't make for a pretty picture.

Let me show something that I sent privately to Iain.

"An example featuring mammals is provided by the reindeer of St. Matthew
Island, in the Bering Sea (Klein, 1968). This island had a mat of lichens
more than four inches deep, but no reindeer until 1944, when a herd of 29
was introduced. By 1957 the population had increased to 1,350; and by 1963
it was 6,000. But the lichens were gone, and the next winter the herd died
off. Come spring, only 41 females and one apparently dysfunctional male were
left alive (Figure 2)." by David Price, "Energy and Human Evolution,"
Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume
16, Number 4, March 1995, pp. 301-19 1995 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

That dysfunctional male was probably very very happy! But the real point is
that oil is our lichen. When it runs out, tractors don't run and we don't
plant 1.3 million wheat plants per acre, nor will we still plant 30,000 corn
plants per acre ( I know how many ears of corn most corn plants grow--it is
one per plant). Without oil we will have less corn, less ethanol and no USDA
prime beef.

You asked me what my solution was. I know of none that realistically will
work, unless the laws of baryonogenesis can be accessed via quantum
computing (but this note is already too long to get into that). With Russia
now declining in production, it won't be long before the world's total
production declines and we haven't solved fusion nor have we built many
breeder reactors.

Happy solutions are for 30 minute TV shows. If in 8 years the world is
producing 50% of the oil it currently produces, what do you think life will
be like? That scenario is based upon the same decline rate seen in the UK
and Oman. Maybe it will be less. Lets hope so, but lets plan that it isn't.

But one thing is certain. We can't keep having the population increase and
then have them all move into a western lifestyle and expect a finite earth
to continue to provide everything that is needed for that life. As it is,
by 2020 we need to increase the output per hectare from 3 tonnes of food to
4 tonnes of food, just to feed everyone. Are we going to plant corn plants
on top of corn plants? As it is each corn plant has a 1.5 sq ft area to
itself. Yet we must do this on less and less agricultural land and with
less and less water
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/05/ccwater105
.xml. Having lived in Beijing, I know how dry that area is where the water
table is dropping fast. Malthus wasn't repealed by the 1960s green
revolution, he was only delayed.

I will unsubscribe to the list now, not out of anger, but frankly because I
can get better discussion elsewhere where people have a bit thicker skin
and focus on the issues, not on my nasty personality and short fuse (not a
statement of anger, just of my perception of reality. In my opinion issues
are far more important than how one says things. I know most people don't
agree with that, which may explain my problem--and it is my problem). Burgy,
don't worry about answering my email unless you really do have new auto
fuels which will work. Those I would be very interested in hearing about. In
that case, email me privately, but know that I think Global warming hysteria
is ridiculous so I suspect I have little credibility on the price of oil
either, although my portfolio value would disagree. :-)

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Received on Sat Jun 7 23:05:33 2008