Too bad it takes so much water and pollutes so much more... but if we're going to keep the bubble going, all this new gas reserve is mandatory. Oh .. Global Warming? It's on.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 5:47PM BST 11 Oct 2009 Telegraph
America is not going to bleed its wealth importing fuel. Russia's grip on Europe's gas will weaken. Improvident Britain may avoid paralysing blackouts by mid-decade after all.
The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.
Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years' supply – and rising fast.
"There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources," he said.
This is almost unknown to the public, despite the efforts of Nick Grealy at "No Hot Air" who has been arguing for some time that Britain's shale reserves could replace declining North Sea output.
Rune Bjornson from Norway's StatoilHydro said exploitable reserves are much greater than supposed just three years ago and may meet global gas needs for generations.
"The common wisdom was that unconventional gas was too difficult, too expensive and too demanding," he said, according to Petroleum Economist. "This has changed. If we ever doubted that gas was the fuel of the future – in many ways there's the answer."
The breakthrough has been to combine 3-D seismic imaging with new technologies to free "tight gas" by smashing rocks, known as hydro-fracturing or "fracking" in the trade.
The US is leading the charge. Operations in Pennsylvania and Texas have already been sufficient to cut US imports of liquefied natural gas (LGN) from Trinidad and Qatar to almost nil, with knock-on effects for the global gas market – and crude oil. It is one reason why spot prices for some LNG deliveries have dropped to 50pc of pipeline contracts.
Energy bulls gambling that the world economy will soon resume its bubble trajectory need to remember two facts: industrial production over the last year is still down 19pc in Japan, 18pc in Italy, 17pc in Germany, 15pc in Canada, 13pc in France and Russia. 11pc in the US and the UK and 10pc in Brazil. A 12pc rise in China does not offset this.
OPEC states are cheating on quota cuts. Non-compliance has fallen to 62pc from 82pc in March. Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela et al face a budget crunch. Why comply when non-OPEC Russia is pumping at breakneck speed?
The US Energy Department expects shale to meet half of US gas demand within 20 years, if not earlier. Projects are cranking up in eastern France and Poland. Exploration is under way in Australia, India and China.
Texas A&M University said US methods could increase global gas reserves by nine times to 16,000 TCF (trillion cubic feet). Almost a quarter is in China but it may lack the water resources to harness the technology given the depletion of the North China water basin.
Needless to say, the Kremlin is irked. "There's a lot of myths about shale production," said Gazprom's Alexander Medvedev.
If the new forecasts are accurate, Gazprom is not going to be the perennial cash cow funding Russia's great power resurgence. Russia's budget may be in structural deficit.
As for the US, we may soon be looking at an era when gas, wind and solar power, combined with a smarter grid and a switch to electric cars returns the country to near energy self-sufficiency.
This has currency implications. If you strip out the energy deficit, America's vaulting savings rate may soon bring the current account back into surplus – and that is going to come at somebody else's expense, chiefly Japan, Germany and, up to a point, China.
Shale gas is undoubtedly messy. Millions of gallons of water mixed with sand, hydrochloric acid and toxic chemicals are blasted at rocks. This is supposed to happen below the water basins but accidents have been common. Pennsylvania's eco-police have shut down a Cabot Oil & Gas operation after 8,000 gallons of chemicals spilled into a stream.
Nor is it exactly green. Natural gas has much lower CO2 emissions than coal, even from shale – which is why the Sierra Club is backing it as the lesser of evils against "clean coal" (not yet a reality). The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said America may not need any new coal or nuclear plants "ever" again.
I am not qualified to judge where gas excitement crosses into hyperbole. I pass on the story because the claims of BP and Statoil are so extraordinary that we may need to rewrite the geo-strategy textbooks for the next half century.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Solar Thermal Energy in the Desert? Not So Hot
Source: New York Times
By TODD WOODY
AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs.
But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water.
Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water war. The public is divided, pitting some people who hope to make money selling water rights to the company against others concerned about the project’s impact on the community and the environment.
“I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” George Tucker, a retired chemical engineer, said on a blazing afternoon.
Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.
Conflicts over water could shape the future of many energy technologies. The most water-efficient renewable technologies are not necessarily the most economical, but water shortages could give them a competitive edge.
In California, solar developers have already been forced to switch to less water-intensive technologies when local officials have refused to turn on the tap. Other big solar projects are mired in disputes with state regulators over water consumption.
To date, the flashpoint for such conflicts has been the Southwest, where dozens of multibillion-dollar solar power plants are planned for thousands of acres of desert. While most forms of energy production consume water, its availability is especially limited in the sunny areas that are otherwise well suited for solar farms.
At public hearings from Albuquerque to San Luis Obispo, Calif., local residents have sounded alarms over the impact that this industrialization will have on wildlife, their desert solitude and, most of all, their water.
Joni Eastley, chairwoman of the county commission in Nye County, Nev., which includes Amargosa Valley, said at one hearing that her area had been “inundated” with requests from renewable energy developers that “far exceed the amount of available water.”
Many projects involve building solar thermal plants, which use cheaper technology than the solar panels often seen on roofs. In such plants, mirrors heat a liquid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. As in a fossil fuel power plant, that steam must be condensed back to water and cooled for reuse.
The conventional method is called wet cooling. Hot water flows through a cooling tower where the excess heat evaporates along with some of the water, which must be replenished constantly. An alternative, dry cooling, uses fans and heat exchangers, much like a car’s radiator. Far less water is consumed, but dry cooling adds costs and reduces efficiency — and profits.
The efficiency problem is especially acute with the most tried-and-proven technique, using mirrors arrayed in long troughs. “Trough technology has been more financeable, but now trough presents a separate risk — water,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with New Energy Finance, a London research firm.
That could provide opportunities for developers of photovoltaic power plants, which take the type of solar panels found on residential rooftops and mount them on the ground in huge arrays. They are typically more expensive and less efficient than solar thermal farms but require a relatively small amount of water, mainly to wash the panels.
In California alone, plans are under way for 35 large-scale solar projects that, in bright sunshine, would generate 12,000 megawatts of electricity, equal to the output of about 10 nuclear power plants.
Their water use would vary widely. BrightSource Energy’s dry-cooled Ivanpah project in Southern California would consume an estimated 25 million gallons a year, mainly to wash mirrors. But a wet-cooled solar trough power plant barely half Ivanpah’s size proposed by the Spanish developer Abengoa Solar would draw 705 million gallons of water in an area of the Mojave Desert that receives scant rainfall.
One of the most contentious disputes is over a proposed wet-cooled trough plant that NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility giant FPL Group, plans to build in a dry area east of Bakersfield, Calif.
NextEra wants to tap freshwater wells to supply the 521 million gallons of cooling water the plant, the Beacon Solar Energy Project, would consume in a year, despite a state policy against the use of drinking-quality water for power plant cooling.
Mike Edminston, a city council member from nearby California City, warned at a hearing that groundwater recharge was already “not keeping up with the utilization we have.”
The fight over water has moved into the California Legislature, where a bill has been introduced to allow renewable energy power plants to use drinking water for cooling if certain conditions are met.
“By allowing projects to use fresh water, the bill would remove any incentives that developers have to use technologies that minimize water use,” said Terry O’Brien, a California Energy Commission deputy director.
NextEra has resisted using dry cooling but is considering the feasibility of piping in reclaimed water. “At some point if costs are just layered on, a project becomes uncompetitive,” said Michael O’Sullivan, a senior vice president at NextEra.
Water disputes forced Solar Millennium to abandon wet cooling for a proposed solar trough power plant in Ridgecrest, Calif., after the water district refused to supply the 815 million gallons of water a year the project would need. The company subsequently proposed to dry cool two other massive Southern California solar trough farms it wants to build in the Mojave Desert.
“We will not do any wet cooling in California,” said Rainer Aringhoff, president of Solar Millennium’s American operations. “There are simply no plants being permitted here with wet cooling.”
One solar developer, BrightSource Energy, hopes to capitalize on the water problem with a technology that focuses mirrors on a tower, producing higher-temperature steam than trough systems. The system can use dry cooling without suffering a prohibitive decline in power output, said Tom Doyle, an executive vice president at BrightSource.
The greater water efficiency was one factor that led VantagePoint Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, to invest in BrightSource. “Our approach is high sensitivity to water use,” said Alan E. Salzman, VantagePoint’s chief executive. “We thought that was going to be huge differentiator.”
Even solar projects with low water consumption face hurdles, however. Tessera Solar is planning a large project in the California desert that would use only 12 million gallons annually, mostly to wash mirrors. But because it would draw upon a severely depleted aquifer, Tessera may have to buy rights to 10 times that amount of water and then retire the pumping rights to the water it does not use. For a second big solar farm, Tessera has agreed to fund improvements to a local irrigation district in exchange for access to reclaimed water.
“We have a challenge in finding water even though we’re low water use,” said Sean Gallagher, a Tessera executive. “It forces you to do some creative deals.”
In the Amargosa Valley, Solar Millennium may have to negotiate access to water with scores of individuals and companies who own the right to stick a straw in the aquifer, so to speak, and withdraw a prescribed amount of water each year.
“There are a lot of people out here for whom their water rights are their life savings, their retirement,” said Ed Goedhart, a local farmer and state legislator, as he drove past pockets of sun-beaten mobile homes and luminescent patches of irrigated alfalfa. Farmers will be growing less of the crop, he said, if they decide to sell their water rights to Solar Millennium.
“We’ll be growing megawatts instead of alfalfa,” Mr. Goedhart said.
While water is particularly scarce in the West, it is becoming a problem all over the country as the population grows. Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that as intensive renewable energy development spreads, water issues will follow.
“When we start getting 20 percent, 30 percent or 40 percent of our power from renewables,” Mr. Kammen said, “water will be a key issue.”
By TODD WOODY
AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs.
But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water.
Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water war. The public is divided, pitting some people who hope to make money selling water rights to the company against others concerned about the project’s impact on the community and the environment.
“I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” George Tucker, a retired chemical engineer, said on a blazing afternoon.
Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.
“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.
Conflicts over water could shape the future of many energy technologies. The most water-efficient renewable technologies are not necessarily the most economical, but water shortages could give them a competitive edge.
In California, solar developers have already been forced to switch to less water-intensive technologies when local officials have refused to turn on the tap. Other big solar projects are mired in disputes with state regulators over water consumption.
To date, the flashpoint for such conflicts has been the Southwest, where dozens of multibillion-dollar solar power plants are planned for thousands of acres of desert. While most forms of energy production consume water, its availability is especially limited in the sunny areas that are otherwise well suited for solar farms.
At public hearings from Albuquerque to San Luis Obispo, Calif., local residents have sounded alarms over the impact that this industrialization will have on wildlife, their desert solitude and, most of all, their water.
Joni Eastley, chairwoman of the county commission in Nye County, Nev., which includes Amargosa Valley, said at one hearing that her area had been “inundated” with requests from renewable energy developers that “far exceed the amount of available water.”
Many projects involve building solar thermal plants, which use cheaper technology than the solar panels often seen on roofs. In such plants, mirrors heat a liquid to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. As in a fossil fuel power plant, that steam must be condensed back to water and cooled for reuse.
The conventional method is called wet cooling. Hot water flows through a cooling tower where the excess heat evaporates along with some of the water, which must be replenished constantly. An alternative, dry cooling, uses fans and heat exchangers, much like a car’s radiator. Far less water is consumed, but dry cooling adds costs and reduces efficiency — and profits.
The efficiency problem is especially acute with the most tried-and-proven technique, using mirrors arrayed in long troughs. “Trough technology has been more financeable, but now trough presents a separate risk — water,” said Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst with New Energy Finance, a London research firm.
That could provide opportunities for developers of photovoltaic power plants, which take the type of solar panels found on residential rooftops and mount them on the ground in huge arrays. They are typically more expensive and less efficient than solar thermal farms but require a relatively small amount of water, mainly to wash the panels.
In California alone, plans are under way for 35 large-scale solar projects that, in bright sunshine, would generate 12,000 megawatts of electricity, equal to the output of about 10 nuclear power plants.
Their water use would vary widely. BrightSource Energy’s dry-cooled Ivanpah project in Southern California would consume an estimated 25 million gallons a year, mainly to wash mirrors. But a wet-cooled solar trough power plant barely half Ivanpah’s size proposed by the Spanish developer Abengoa Solar would draw 705 million gallons of water in an area of the Mojave Desert that receives scant rainfall.
One of the most contentious disputes is over a proposed wet-cooled trough plant that NextEra Energy Resources, a subsidiary of the utility giant FPL Group, plans to build in a dry area east of Bakersfield, Calif.
NextEra wants to tap freshwater wells to supply the 521 million gallons of cooling water the plant, the Beacon Solar Energy Project, would consume in a year, despite a state policy against the use of drinking-quality water for power plant cooling.
Mike Edminston, a city council member from nearby California City, warned at a hearing that groundwater recharge was already “not keeping up with the utilization we have.”
The fight over water has moved into the California Legislature, where a bill has been introduced to allow renewable energy power plants to use drinking water for cooling if certain conditions are met.
“By allowing projects to use fresh water, the bill would remove any incentives that developers have to use technologies that minimize water use,” said Terry O’Brien, a California Energy Commission deputy director.
NextEra has resisted using dry cooling but is considering the feasibility of piping in reclaimed water. “At some point if costs are just layered on, a project becomes uncompetitive,” said Michael O’Sullivan, a senior vice president at NextEra.
Water disputes forced Solar Millennium to abandon wet cooling for a proposed solar trough power plant in Ridgecrest, Calif., after the water district refused to supply the 815 million gallons of water a year the project would need. The company subsequently proposed to dry cool two other massive Southern California solar trough farms it wants to build in the Mojave Desert.
“We will not do any wet cooling in California,” said Rainer Aringhoff, president of Solar Millennium’s American operations. “There are simply no plants being permitted here with wet cooling.”
One solar developer, BrightSource Energy, hopes to capitalize on the water problem with a technology that focuses mirrors on a tower, producing higher-temperature steam than trough systems. The system can use dry cooling without suffering a prohibitive decline in power output, said Tom Doyle, an executive vice president at BrightSource.
The greater water efficiency was one factor that led VantagePoint Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, to invest in BrightSource. “Our approach is high sensitivity to water use,” said Alan E. Salzman, VantagePoint’s chief executive. “We thought that was going to be huge differentiator.”
Even solar projects with low water consumption face hurdles, however. Tessera Solar is planning a large project in the California desert that would use only 12 million gallons annually, mostly to wash mirrors. But because it would draw upon a severely depleted aquifer, Tessera may have to buy rights to 10 times that amount of water and then retire the pumping rights to the water it does not use. For a second big solar farm, Tessera has agreed to fund improvements to a local irrigation district in exchange for access to reclaimed water.
“We have a challenge in finding water even though we’re low water use,” said Sean Gallagher, a Tessera executive. “It forces you to do some creative deals.”
In the Amargosa Valley, Solar Millennium may have to negotiate access to water with scores of individuals and companies who own the right to stick a straw in the aquifer, so to speak, and withdraw a prescribed amount of water each year.
“There are a lot of people out here for whom their water rights are their life savings, their retirement,” said Ed Goedhart, a local farmer and state legislator, as he drove past pockets of sun-beaten mobile homes and luminescent patches of irrigated alfalfa. Farmers will be growing less of the crop, he said, if they decide to sell their water rights to Solar Millennium.
“We’ll be growing megawatts instead of alfalfa,” Mr. Goedhart said.
While water is particularly scarce in the West, it is becoming a problem all over the country as the population grows. Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that as intensive renewable energy development spreads, water issues will follow.
“When we start getting 20 percent, 30 percent or 40 percent of our power from renewables,” Mr. Kammen said, “water will be a key issue.”
Saturday, September 19, 2009
* Global Warming Solved, Results Automatic
Updated 9/19/09
According to the Sept. 16th edition of Bloomberg, " the average world ocean temperature from June through August was the warmest since 1880 for any Northern Hemisphere summer, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."
"In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program said global warming is causing drought, rising sea levels and flooding from heavy rainfall in the U.S., threatening agriculture, coastal regions, water resources and public health. This group said in 2007 global emissions need to be cut by 50 percent to 85 percent by 2050 to stand a chance of keeping the global temperature increase to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since industrialization in the 1800s, which might be enough to prevent the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and collapse of established agriculture. The U.S. Congress is debating legislation to create a cap- and-trade program that would set an overall carbon dioxide limit. UN-sponsored talks among 192 nations aim to draft a new treaty to fight climate change in December in Copenhagen. "
Somebody really needs to introduce the global warming scientists to the oil industry’s geologists. Perhaps these folks could all drive over the Starbucks for a coffee, since they really should chat a bit.
If one knows anything about the well established concept of “Peak Oil,” and we’re talking about a concept that’s been around and proven correct many times on less-than-global-scale since it was introduced in the late 1950’s by Shell’s Dr. M. K. Hubbart, all of this global warming planning is, at best, silly and at worst, a borderline-criminal diversion of resources and capital.
Global Warming - caused by man's burning of fossil fuels, if that's what causes it - is a self-healing wound, thanks to already-declining global oil production.
Since oil was first produced commercially 150 years ago, the planet’s oil reserves have been developed along an exponential rate along the growth side of a standard bell curve. (Exponential, until one reaches the top, or peak, of the bell, that is.) Most petroleum geologists and senior oil executives agree that Dr. Hubbert was correct in his calculations back in the 1950's, and that humanity has reached the top of oil’s global production curve. This is called "peak oil." All it means is that from this point on, we'll discover and produce less than we already have.
According to the International Energy Agency (AEI) and now, the US government's equivalent oil watchdog, global production has recently turned around and is now declining globally at a rate of 6.7% annually. This obviously means there will be about 7% less oil burned per year from now on, until this resource, petroleum, is totally depleted at some point in the not too distant future.
Global Warming, ostensibly caused by carbon emissions from ships, planes, automobiles, trucks and diesel trains - the planet's engines of commerce - and by the burning of coal (and gas) to produce electricity - requires no complex cap and trade marketplace or conservation efforts to solve.
Conservation - lowered carbon emissions - from now on will be automatic, whether we humans like it or not.
Civilization will pollute less, since we’re now producing less petroleum each year. We’ll burn less coal, since the entire modern pollution economy starts with and is maintained by oil. It cannot grow - or even survive on a mass scale - with less of the stuff coming out of the ground every year.
If the goal is to reduce carbon emission by 85% by 2050 and oil production is declining at about 7% a year now as we roll over the top of a bell curve, which means production decline will increase even more as we slide down the other side - simple arithmetic indicates that this significant conservation goal by the Global Wamers will be no problem to achieve. We'll exceed the goal substantially, since they're actually planning to burn more oil than there is in the pipeline with a 2050 deadline.
Here's the math: At today's rates of decline, the people of the planet can only burn 93% of the oil this year that we did a year ago. If the total oil burned last year is assigned a value of 100%, in only 10 years, by 2020, the global oil production capability will have declined to only about 40% of last year’s total capability (assuming a nice 7% annual decline and not a more accelerated slope). That’s a 60% decline in just 10 years.
By 2030, global oil production capability will be less than 25% of today’s levels, a 75% decline in only 20 years.
Reduce consumption by 85% by 2050? No Problem. There simply will not be an oil based energy supply available by that time. Perhaps whatever military powers remain may still be fighting over the remaining crude, using “strategic petroleum reserves.” This is not to say the people living under these regimes will have access to oil or a modern economy; strategic oil will be reserved for the military (and ultra elite class, if such a class remains outside of the military and paramilitary class by then.)
Global Warming is a self healing wound. These are, therefore, the good old days. The best of old days. There’s no reason to spend any time or money on “conservation” when supplies are limited by nature. Why further enrich the non-oil-producing elite class through cap and trade schemes that simply shovel what's left of the world's wealth into their coffers? Somebody tell Al Gore to pipe down. If he really cared about the state of civilization, he'd be talking about life after peak energy. Post-Peak-Oil .. is forever. At this point, it’s probably wiser to enjoy the amazing mass luxury we have available and let the planet take care of itself.
Perhaps civilized humanity has a place on the planet after 2030 or so, perhaps not.With our future as a civilization for now still based on cheap, reliable oil energy, the future we have expected all our lives simply won't happen as we've been led to believe it would.
Given this reality; that these days are the best of the good old days, we probably should do exactly what the ultra-elite has been doing - accumulating as much of everything as we can, while we can, and damn the debt service, since there will never be more ease in most people's lives - ever - as time marches on into an oil starved future.
When conservation is automatic, like it is now that we're "over the top," what's the point of voluntary cutting back? To leave more for the rich people, who'll be able to afford it long after we can't?
Life is Good, as they say, and it will never be materially richer for more people than it is today. After all, when the financial class figures out nobody's going to be able to repay a 30 year mortgage, the credit squeeze of the past year will seem no worse than a teenage zit on a long-forgotten date night.
Nothing can be done about peak oil, but it does eliminate having to worry about the Global Warming problem.
Finally. Some good news.
This is the last time I'm going to write about this topic, unless someone comes up with some facts that change the situation. Frankly, I'm pleased to have been able to sort this out, primarily for myself (so I can construct my own thoughts with a bit more of a quality standard than writing them in a personal diary requires) and be able to end the monologue on a positive note for now :-) sunny
According to the Sept. 16th edition of Bloomberg, " the average world ocean temperature from June through August was the warmest since 1880 for any Northern Hemisphere summer, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration."
"In June, the U.S. Global Change Research Program said global warming is causing drought, rising sea levels and flooding from heavy rainfall in the U.S., threatening agriculture, coastal regions, water resources and public health. This group said in 2007 global emissions need to be cut by 50 percent to 85 percent by 2050 to stand a chance of keeping the global temperature increase to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since industrialization in the 1800s, which might be enough to prevent the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and collapse of established agriculture. The U.S. Congress is debating legislation to create a cap- and-trade program that would set an overall carbon dioxide limit. UN-sponsored talks among 192 nations aim to draft a new treaty to fight climate change in December in Copenhagen. "
Somebody really needs to introduce the global warming scientists to the oil industry’s geologists. Perhaps these folks could all drive over the Starbucks for a coffee, since they really should chat a bit.
If one knows anything about the well established concept of “Peak Oil,” and we’re talking about a concept that’s been around and proven correct many times on less-than-global-scale since it was introduced in the late 1950’s by Shell’s Dr. M. K. Hubbart, all of this global warming planning is, at best, silly and at worst, a borderline-criminal diversion of resources and capital.
Global Warming - caused by man's burning of fossil fuels, if that's what causes it - is a self-healing wound, thanks to already-declining global oil production.
Since oil was first produced commercially 150 years ago, the planet’s oil reserves have been developed along an exponential rate along the growth side of a standard bell curve. (Exponential, until one reaches the top, or peak, of the bell, that is.) Most petroleum geologists and senior oil executives agree that Dr. Hubbert was correct in his calculations back in the 1950's, and that humanity has reached the top of oil’s global production curve. This is called "peak oil." All it means is that from this point on, we'll discover and produce less than we already have.
According to the International Energy Agency (AEI) and now, the US government's equivalent oil watchdog, global production has recently turned around and is now declining globally at a rate of 6.7% annually. This obviously means there will be about 7% less oil burned per year from now on, until this resource, petroleum, is totally depleted at some point in the not too distant future.
Global Warming, ostensibly caused by carbon emissions from ships, planes, automobiles, trucks and diesel trains - the planet's engines of commerce - and by the burning of coal (and gas) to produce electricity - requires no complex cap and trade marketplace or conservation efforts to solve.
Conservation - lowered carbon emissions - from now on will be automatic, whether we humans like it or not.
Civilization will pollute less, since we’re now producing less petroleum each year. We’ll burn less coal, since the entire modern pollution economy starts with and is maintained by oil. It cannot grow - or even survive on a mass scale - with less of the stuff coming out of the ground every year.
If the goal is to reduce carbon emission by 85% by 2050 and oil production is declining at about 7% a year now as we roll over the top of a bell curve, which means production decline will increase even more as we slide down the other side - simple arithmetic indicates that this significant conservation goal by the Global Wamers will be no problem to achieve. We'll exceed the goal substantially, since they're actually planning to burn more oil than there is in the pipeline with a 2050 deadline.
Here's the math: At today's rates of decline, the people of the planet can only burn 93% of the oil this year that we did a year ago. If the total oil burned last year is assigned a value of 100%, in only 10 years, by 2020, the global oil production capability will have declined to only about 40% of last year’s total capability (assuming a nice 7% annual decline and not a more accelerated slope). That’s a 60% decline in just 10 years.
By 2030, global oil production capability will be less than 25% of today’s levels, a 75% decline in only 20 years.
Reduce consumption by 85% by 2050? No Problem. There simply will not be an oil based energy supply available by that time. Perhaps whatever military powers remain may still be fighting over the remaining crude, using “strategic petroleum reserves.” This is not to say the people living under these regimes will have access to oil or a modern economy; strategic oil will be reserved for the military (and ultra elite class, if such a class remains outside of the military and paramilitary class by then.)
Global Warming is a self healing wound. These are, therefore, the good old days. The best of old days. There’s no reason to spend any time or money on “conservation” when supplies are limited by nature. Why further enrich the non-oil-producing elite class through cap and trade schemes that simply shovel what's left of the world's wealth into their coffers? Somebody tell Al Gore to pipe down. If he really cared about the state of civilization, he'd be talking about life after peak energy. Post-Peak-Oil .. is forever. At this point, it’s probably wiser to enjoy the amazing mass luxury we have available and let the planet take care of itself.
Perhaps civilized humanity has a place on the planet after 2030 or so, perhaps not.With our future as a civilization for now still based on cheap, reliable oil energy, the future we have expected all our lives simply won't happen as we've been led to believe it would.
Given this reality; that these days are the best of the good old days, we probably should do exactly what the ultra-elite has been doing - accumulating as much of everything as we can, while we can, and damn the debt service, since there will never be more ease in most people's lives - ever - as time marches on into an oil starved future.
When conservation is automatic, like it is now that we're "over the top," what's the point of voluntary cutting back? To leave more for the rich people, who'll be able to afford it long after we can't?
Life is Good, as they say, and it will never be materially richer for more people than it is today. After all, when the financial class figures out nobody's going to be able to repay a 30 year mortgage, the credit squeeze of the past year will seem no worse than a teenage zit on a long-forgotten date night.
Nothing can be done about peak oil, but it does eliminate having to worry about the Global Warming problem.
Finally. Some good news.
This is the last time I'm going to write about this topic, unless someone comes up with some facts that change the situation. Frankly, I'm pleased to have been able to sort this out, primarily for myself (so I can construct my own thoughts with a bit more of a quality standard than writing them in a personal diary requires) and be able to end the monologue on a positive note for now :-) sunny
Saturday, August 8, 2009
* Who is M. King Hubbert? And why should I care?
Bill Sepmeier (c) 2009
So, who is King Hubbert?
When I was two years old in 1956, the age my youngest daughter is today, a fellow who was then about my age now named Marion King Hubbert made a discovery that could have saved modern civilization, had it been heeded.
King Hubbert, as he was called, was born in the oil patch that was early 20th century
That year, back in 1956, Hubbert published a paper in which he predicted that, for any given geographical area, from an individual oil field to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production of the reserve over time would resemble a bell curve. Based on his theory, he presented a paper to the 1956 meeting of the American Petroleum Institute in
As you might expect, his prediction received much criticism.
Hubbert became somewhat famous when this prediction proved correct 24 years later in 1970. Probably a bit more accurately, King Hubbert achieved fame a few years after
Hubbert kept up his research and in 1974 he projected that global oil production would peak in 1995 at 40-GB/yr "if current trends continue". Various subsequent predictions have been made by others as trends have fluctuated in the intervening years. Hubbert's theory and its implications for the world’s economy remain the only factual proof about the case. Obviously, 1995 has come and gone, and 1974’s ‘trends’ fluctuated over time.
Unfortunately for the oil addicted world of today, recent events seem to provide the evidence in hindsight that Mr. Hubbert was correct again.
For example, when crude oil costs were bid up to record highs of $140 per barrel last year, George Bush, a personal friend of the al Saud ruling family which controls the world’s largest producing oil fields, implored for more production to lower prices. The Saudi’s, for the first time in decades, could not increase production. This inability to control pricing via production is a strong indicator that in
Second, the vast reserves on Alaska’s north slope and in the British/Norwegian North Sea are producing about half as much oil per day now as they did when they came online in the 1980’s and geologists expect the decline to continue rapidly over the next few years. These two fields provided the last 20 years of stability in energy pricing, coming online as they did just when needed to counter the OPEC and Iranian upheavals of the 1970’s, following America’s loss of its status as the world’s largest oil reserve.
Until the 70's, the US had the capability to vary production as needed to control oil prices. Until last year, the Saudis controlled global prices. Since everyone seems to be past peak, costs are driven by speculation now and predictable costs of energy are fading into the past. Without predictible medium to long term cost models and estimates, business cannot function. Since all business depends on oil, this presents a problem.
If you didn’t know, global oil reserve discovery actually peaked between 1965 and 1969 - with the Alaska and North Sea reserve discoveries. Every discovery since that year has been smaller than prior to 1965 and perhaps more notably, in locations which will require far more hardship and expense to recover (and Alaska's north slope and the North Sea weren't easy).
This increase in diminishing returns, where it costs almost as much in oil energy to obtain new oil as one receives from the new oil (compared to a 20:1 or more positive ratio in east Texas and Saudi Arabia during the last century) is part of the equation Hubbert used in forecasting the global production peak – a global peak which has evidently occurred.
In the brief past history of the oil age, when a nation based on cheap oil energy such as the USA reached peak production and was no longer able to fuel its exploding economy it simply imported the oil needed to continue growth from other countries who’s production was less mature. This capability itself was based on cheap oil's ability to extend its own supply lines up to 12,000 miles. Once the entire planet’s production capability is reached, further imports at stable costs become impossible.
The behavior of an economy dependent upon a stable, inexpensive supply of one source of energy suddenly losing access to this underpinning is predictable. (Many of the symptoms predicted can be found in this blog, simply by scrolling down through the articles following this post, and in today's financial section of your paper - if it is still being published!)
Needless to say, everything involved in the development and operation of our post-WW II global economy has been based upon cheap oil energy and as such, adaptation to a loss of this foundation will not be easy.
It may not even be possible.
M. King Hubbert believed a conversion to solar power would replace fossil fuels, but such a conversion, at the massive scales required today, may not be practical given both a post-peak decline the quantity and already unstable cost environment of the fossil energy needed to manufacture and deploy new solar technology.
The leading manufacturers of solar modules (invented in the USA) are Japan and recently, China. Simply getting the millions of modules required to support a portion of the country's present electric economy shipped across the planet - which effectively expands in size as easy fossil fuel contracts - might not be practical, even if political stability is maintained to allow such trade.
President Carter declared “the moral equivalent of war” towards renewable energy implementation over 30 years ago, a war that was canceled immediately upon the election of his successor, when new oil from the North Sea and
Mankind lived with renewable solar energy from the dawn of time until the beginning of the industrial age in 1750. Human population of the planet during that time never exceeded about 500 million people – this was the carrying capacity of a solar powered world.
Today renewable energy, used in vastly larger amounts than ever before in history, since we use large hydroelectric dams and generation today, accounts for only about 8% of global energy input, with our large hydro electric systems accounting for 80% of that figure.
Total energy input globally is today many orders of magnitude larger than it was before the oil age began in 1860 – close to 10,000,000,000 tons of petroleum equivalent per year, and if this could continue, is projected to double by 2050. Two thirds of that input comes from liquid fuels - oil.
Oil has allowed human population to exceed 6 billion, far greater than a solar-powered, green, renewable energy planet could take care of. Now that we’re close to or past oil’s peak production, there will be less and less each year available.
The decline will not be smooth.
We are already well invested and engaged in energy wars (
How many new
Why was the last administrations energy plan classified? Because it was simply a plan to invade and police the near and middle east oil producing regions – a plan well underway and continuing with the present administration.
The present administration seems to be trying to salvage the suburban home and strip mall economy that is
Many people assume someone, "they," will "come up with a replacement" as cost and price models meet demand. Human genius has always found a way around problems, after all, "we didn't replace horses because of a shortage of hay." But never in history has something as compact, portable and easy to store or ship at room temperature - the 42 gallons of gasoline in a barrel - been able to provide the energy in this mass. One barrel of oil's gas, 42 gallons - an SUV tankful - equals a staff of twelve full time servants working for one year. Nothing beats this but uranium, and best estimates show the world sitting on less than a 50 year supply of that, if it could all be mined!
Unfortunately, innovation and genius are no substitute for the 100 year long total exploitation of eons of distilled solar energy that was the cheap oil age which, by itself, allowed for all of the innovation of the same 100 years to be produced into products, suburbs, roadways, men on the moon, computers and everything else we take for granted as some form of entitlement today.
The raw underlying energy needed to try to sustain or better, build a replacement for the oil-fired suburban economy has to come from oil, which is in decline.
We’re simply waking up too late in Hubbert’s bell curve to be able to implement the miracle that would be needed to get around the basic laws of thermodynamics needed to provide the BTUs and kilowatts required to sustain the economy we’ve constructed by burning millions of years of stored energy in a century.
If we hadn’t thrown away the culture of a solar powered planet over our past three generations it might be easier to transition back to a renewable energy world such as the one we left in 1750. Sadly, with few exceptions, such as the Amish culture, most people have no “Plan B” for a post peak oil life.
It’s time we got to work on one. In the next post in this series we'll look at a few options.
