Part Two

Urgency -  Add Quote Here

Numbers/Theory

Energy

          EROEI – Energy Returned On Energy Invested

          1 barrel of oil is equivalent to 23,200 hours of manpower

Statistics

            Bell curve – Oil Production Curve

             J-curve – Populations Curve

Theory

             Javon’s Paradox – Conservation = more capitol = more spending = more production

             The Olduvai Theory – From The Caves, To The Moon, To The Caves

             Economic Short Sightedness – System will (can)not stop until it is too late

Debunking Renewable/Alternative Energies  

All of the new technology offered up as an escape would be impossible without the original input of cheap oil. Once that cheap oil is gone, all of the technologies born of it will not last long.

Nuclear – Waste Management Costs – Scalability

Nuclear energy requires uranium, which is problematic because as David Petch explains in his article "Peak Oil and You", even in the most optimistic scenarios, uranium will soon be in short supply:



Figure 2 (shown in original article) illustrates the different projections of uranium depletion, pending an increase in annual consumption rates of 3%, 5% or 8%. Currently, uranium production falls incredibly short of the demand. As oil resources become scarce, uranium will have more pressure put upon it as a resource. All three different scenarios have a similar course until around 2013, where they part trails. By 2020, there is a serious uranium shortage.

Let's assume a Pollyanna position and assume that uranium deposits can be doubled up in the coming decade. Figure 3 illustrates the 3 different scenarios, depending on the net increase in consumption per year. Rather than 2013 being a focal year, it is stretched out by 3 years to 2016.

Uranium supply issues aside, nuclear energy (like solar and wind) is not an economically or energetically feasible transportation fuel. Put simply, you can't power your car with a nuclear reactor in the trunk. 

Even if these problems are assumed away, a large scale switch over to nuclear power is still not going to do all that much to solve our problems due to the cost and time frames involved in the of construction of nuclear power plants. s. It would take 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants to produce the energy we get from fossil fuels. At $3-5 billion per plant, it's not long before we're talking about "real money" - especially since the $3-5 billion doesn't even include the cost of decommissioning old reactors, converting the nuclear generated energy into a fuel source appropriate for cars, boats, trucks, airplanes, and the not-so-minor problem of handling nuclear waste.

Speaking of nuclear waste, it is a question nobody has quite answered yet. This is especially the case in countries such as China and Russia, where safety protocols are unlikely to be strictly adhered to if the surrounding economy is in the midst of a desperate energy shortage. It may also be true in the case of the US because, as James Kunstler points out in his recent book, The Long Emergency:

. . . reactors may be beyond the organizational means of the society we are apt to become in the future, mainly one with much weaker central authority, less police power, and reduced financial resources . . . in the absence of that (cheap) oil we can't assume the complex social organization needed to run nuclear energy safely.

Assuming we find answers to all questions regarding the cost and safety of nuclear power, we are still left with the most vexing question of all:

Where are we going to get the massive amounts of oil necessary to build hundreds, if not thousands, of these reactors, especially since they take 10 or so years to build and we won't get motivated to build them until after oil supplies have reached a point of permanent scarcity?

Remember, once we get the reactors built, we still have the not-so-inexpensive task of retrofitting a significant portion of the following to run on nuclear-derived electricity:

1.700 million oil-powered cars traversing the world's roads; 

Millions of oil-powered airplanes crisscrossing the world's skies;

Millions of oil-powered boats circumnavigating the world's oceans.

Scientists have made some progress in regards to nuclear fusion, but the road from success in tabletop laboratory experiments to use as an industrial scale replacement for oil is an extremely long one that, even in the most favorable of circumstances, will take decades to traverse.

Again, as with other alternatives to petroleum, all forms of nuclear energy should certainly "be on the table." But if you're hoping that it's going to save you from the ramifications of Peak Oil, you are sorely mistaken. Source = Lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and financialsense.com

            Shale/Tar Sands – Extraction Costs – Will only delay the collapse

            Geo-Thermal / Bio-diesel / Ethanol – Means Of Production – Scalability                    

For bio-ethanol to be sustainable, an even greater acreage would have to be put into production to replace our fossil fuel dependence. Assuming a required input energy of 100 (gasoline equivalent) gallons per acre, bio-ethanol production achieves only a net 100 gallons per acre, rather than the 200 gallon per acre figure used above. A sustainable bio-ethanol program for the United States would require 1.5 billion acres; more than half the land area of the entire country.

There is evidence that rainforests are being cleared to make land available for growing crops for bioalcohol.[16] This has been aggravated by an increase in the demand for biofuels in Europe.

More generally, environmentalists have a long list of objections to many modern farming practices, especially those practices most useful for making bioethanol more competitive ("factory farming"). If more third-world land were to be converted to agriculture to feed ethanol fuel demand, there is the possibility of trading today's automotive pollution for tomorrow's farm pollution. Ethanol could become a pollution export scenario, in which poor, ethanol-producing countries suffer the deforestation, extinction pressures, fertilizer runoff, etc. of heavy agricultural expansion, while the rich, heavily motorized ethanol consumers reap the environmental rewards. Source = wikipedia

              Hydrogen – Energy Carrier not producer – Scalability

All free hydrogen generated today is derived from natural gas. So right off the bat we have not managed to escape our dependency on nonrenewable hydrocarbons. This feedstock is steam-treated to strip the hydrogen from the methane molecules. And the steam is produced by boiling water with natural gas. Overall, there is about a 60% energy loss in this process. And, as it is dependent on the availability of natural gas, the price of hydrogen generated in this method will always be a multiple of the price of natural gas.

Ah, but there is an inexhaustible supply of water from which we could derive our hydrogen. However, splitting hydrogen from water requires an even higher energy investment per unit of water (286kJ per mole). All processes of splitting water molecules, including foremost electrolysis and thermal decomposition, require major energy investments, rendering them unprofitable.

Hydrogen advocates like to point out that the development of solar cells or wind farms would provide renewable energy that could be used to derive hydrogen. The energy required to produce 1 billion kWh (kilowatt hours) of hydrogen is 1.3 billion kWh of electricity. Even with recent advances in photovoltaic technology, the solar cell arrays would be enormous, and would have to be placed in areas with adequate sunlight.

We must also consider the water from which we derive this hydrogen. To meet our present transportation needs, we would have to divert 5% of the flow of the Mississippi River. This would require yet more energy, further reducing the profits of hydrogen. This water would then have to be delivered to a photovoltaic array the size of the Great Plains. So much for agriculture.

The only way that hydrogen production even approaches practicality is through the use of nuclear plants. To generate the amount of energy used presently by the United States, we would require an additional 900 nuclear reactors, at a cost of roughly $1 billion per reactor. Currently, there are only 440 nuclear reactors operating worldwide. Unless we perfect fast breeder reactors very quickly, we will have a shortage of uranium long before we have finished our reactor building program.

Even hydrogen fuel derived from nuclear power would be expensive. To fill a car up with enough hydrogen to be equivalent to a 15 gallon gas tank could cost as much as $400. If the hydrogen was in gaseous form, this tank would have to be big enough to accommodate 178,500 liters. Compressed hydrogen would reduce the storage tank to one tenth of this size. And liquefied hydrogen would require a fuel tank of only four times the size of a gasoline tank. In other words, a 15 gallon tank of gasoline would be equivalent to a 60 gallon tank of hydrogen. And, oh yes, to transport an equivalent energy amount of hydrogen to the fueling station would require 21 times more trucks than for gasoline.

Compressed and liquefied hydrogen present problems of their own. Both techniques require energy and so further reduce the net energy ratio of the hydrogen. Liquid hydrogen is cold enough to freeze air, leading to problems with pressure build-ups due to clogged valves. Both forms of hydrogen storage are prone to leaks. In fact, all forms of pure hydrogen are difficult to store.

Hydrogen is the smallest element and, as such, it can leak from any container, no matter how well sealed it is. Hydrogen in storage will evaporate at a rate of at least 1.7% per day. We will not be able to store hydrogen vehicles in buildings. Nor can we allow them to sit in the sun. And as hydrogen passes through metal, it causes a chemical reaction that makes the metal brittle. Leaking hydrogen could also have an adverse effect on both global warming and the ozone layer.

Free hydrogen is extremely reactive. It is ten times more flammable than gasoline, and twenty times more explosive. And the flame of a hydrogen fire is invisible. This makes it very dangerous to work with, particularly in fueling stations and transportation vehicles. Traffic accidents would have a tendency to be catastrophic. And there is the possibility that aging vehicles could explode even without a collision.

On top of this, we must consider the terrific expense of converting from gasoline to hydrogen. The infrastructure would have to be built virtually from scratch, at a cost of billions. Our oil and natural gas based infrastructure evolved over the course of the past century, but this transition must be pulled off in twenty years or less.

Automobile engineers and others within the industry do not believe we will ever have a hydrogen economy. Daimler-Chrysler has admitted as much. Rather than developing a hydrogen economy, it makes more sense—and will always make more sense—to buy a more efficient car, ride public transport, bicycle or walk. Source - http://www.energybulletin.net/11963.html

            Wind – Means Of Production – Scalability

Economics

• To compete with traditional sources of energy, wind power often receives financial incentives. In the United States, wind power receives a tax credit of 1.9 cents per kilowatt-hour produced, with a year inflationary adjustment. However, in 2004 when the U.S. production tax credit had lapsed for nine months, wind power was still a rapidly growing form of electrical generation. Another tax benefit is accelerated depreciation. Many American states also provide incentives, such as exemption from property tax, mandated purchases, and additional markets for "green credits." Countries such as Canada and Germany also provide tax credits and other incentives for wind turbine construction.

• Maintenance of wind turbines can be difficult and expensive. Repairs require a much more complicated and expensive operation than ground based generation.

• Many potential sites for wind farms are far from demand centers, requiring substantially more money to construct new transmission lines and substations.

Yield

• The goals of renewable energy development are reduction of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels, reduction of greenhouse gas and other emissions, and establishment of more sustainable sources of energy. Some critics question wind energy's ability to significantly move society towards these goals. They point out that 25-30% annual load factor is typical for wind facilities. The intermittent and non-dispatchable nature of wind turbine power requires that "spinning reserves" are kept burning for supply security. The fluctuation in wind power requires more frequent load ramping of such plant to maintain grid system frequency. This can force operators to run conventional plant below optimal thermal efficiency resulting in greater emissions. A recent European Nuclear Society study estimates that the equivalent of one third of energy saved from wind generation is lost to these inefficiencies.

CO₂ Emissions

• Electric power production is only part (about one to two fifths^[20]) of a country's energy use, and wind power does nothing to mitigate the larger part of the effects of energy use. For example, despite aggressive installation of wind facilities in the U.K., that country's CO₂ emissions continued to rise in 2002 and 2003 (Department of Trade and Industry). Six of the U.K.'s nuclear reactors were closed in this period.^[21]

• Groups such as the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change state that the desired mitigation goals can be achieved at lower cost and to a greater degree by continued improvements in general efficiency — in building, manufacturing, and transport — than by wind power. Such statements, however, do not take into account long-term costs and calculations, like drastically increasing prices for oil, gas, uranium etc. Also once an investment in a wind turbine is made, the electricity produced by that turbine is fixed for a period of 20 years.

Ecological footprint

• The construction of a large facility is also far from ecologically neutral if the location has no previous development. It requires roads, foundations, clearing of trees, and construction of power lines. The clearing of trees may be necessary since obstructions within a distance ten times the height of the turbine reduce yield dramatically. A distance of twenty times is preferred.

• While it might be true that during normal operation a windfarm does not emit any greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide or other air pollution (such as PM10 soot) it is important to consider the entire lifecycle of the wind turbine. To create a wind machine, steel, concrete, aluminium and other materials will have to be made and transported (using for example diesel). The energy, externality, and economic payback period of a wind turbine lies between four and six months, depending on the energy yield.

• A wind farm that produces the energy equivalent of a conventional power plant would have to cover an area of approximately 200 square kilometres. ^{[citation needed]}

• Offshore sites have on average a higher energy yield than onshore sites.

• Windmills kill birds, especially birds of prey. Siting generally takes into account known bird flight patterns, but most paths of bird migration, particularly for birds that fly by night, are unknown. Although a Danish survey in 2005 (Biology Letters 2005:336) showed that less than 1% of migrating birds passing a wind farm in Rønde, Denmark, got close to collision, the site was studied only during low-wind non-twilight conditions. A survey at Altamont Pass, California conducted by a California Energy Commission in 2004 showed that turbines killed 4,700 birds annually (1,300 of which are birds of prey). Radar studies of proposed sites in the eastern U.S. have shown that migrating songbirds fly well within the reach of large modern turbines.

• The numbers of bats killed by existing facilities has troubled even industry personnel.^[22] A six-week study in 2004 estimated that over 2200 bats were killed by 63 turbines at two sites in the Eastern US.^[23] This study suggests some site locations may be particularly hazardous to local bat populations, and that more research is urgently needed.

Scalability

• To meet the energy demands worldwide in the future in a sustainable way, a much larger number of turbines than today will be required. Naturally this will affect more people and wildlife habitat.

Aesthetics

• Perceptions that wind turbines are noisy and contribute to "visual pollution" creates resistance to the establishment of land-based wind farms in some places. Moving the turbines offshore mitigates the problem, but offshore wind farms are more expensive to maintain and there is an increase in transmission loss due to longer distances of power lines. One solution to such objections is the early and close involvement of the local population, like recommended in the sustainability guidelines of the World Wind Energy Association^[12] - in the ideal case through community/citizen ownership of wind farms.

• Some residents near windmills complain of "shadow flicker," which is the alternating pattern of sun and shade caused by a rotating windmill casting a shadow over residences. Efforts are made when siting turbines to avoid this problem. Source = Wikipedia

            Solar – Means Of Production – Scalability

According to author Paul Driessen, it would take all of California's 13,000 wind turbines to generate as much electricity as a single 555-megawatt natural gas fired power plant.

According to the European Wind Energy Association's Wind Force 12 report issued in May of 2004, the United States has 6,361 megawatts of installed wind energy. This means that if every wind turbine in the United States was spinning at peak capacity, all at the exact same time, their combined electrical output would equal that of six coal fired power plants. Since wind turbines typically operate at about 30% of their rated capacity, the combined output of every wind turbine in the US is actually equal to less than two coal fired power plants.

The numbers for solar are ever poorer. For instance, on 191 of his book The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, author Paul Roberts writes:

" . . . if you add up all the solar photovoltaic cells now running worldwide (2004), the combined output - around 2,000 megawatts - barely rivals the output of two coal-fired power plants."

Robert's calculation assumes the solar cells are operating at 100% of their capacity. In the real world, the average solar cell operates at about 20% of its rated capacity. This means that the combined output of all the solar cells in the world is equal to less than 40% of the output of a single coal fired power plant.

According to ExxonMobil, the amount of energy distributed by a single gas station in a single day is equivalent to the amount of energy that would be produced by four Manhattan sized city blocks of solar equipment. With 17,000 gas stations just in the United States, you don't need to be a mathematician to realize that solar power is incapable of meeting our urgent need for a new energy source that - like oil - is dense, affordable, and transportable.

According to Dr. David Goodstien, professor of physics at Cal Tech University, it would take close to 220,000 5.square kilometers of solar panels to power the global economy via solar power. This may sound like a marginally manageable number until you realize that the total acreage covered by solar panels in the entire world right now is a paltry 10 square kilometers.

According a recent MSNBC article entitled, "Solar Power City Offers 20 Years of Lessons:"

By industry estimates, up to 20,000 solar electricity units and 100,000 heaters have been installed in the United States — diminutive numbers compared to the country’s 70 million single-family houses. This means that even if the number of American households equipped with solar electricity is increased by a factor of 100, less than two million American households will be equipped with solar electric systems. Assuming we are even capable of scaling the use of household solar electric systems by that huge a factor, we must ask ourselves two questions:

What do the other 68 million households do?

What about the millions of companies, nations, and industries around the world on which we in the industrialized world are dependent?

Since oil, not electricity, is our primary transportation fuel (providing the base for over 90% of all transportation fuel) what good will this do us when it comes to keeping our global network of cars,trucks, airplanes, and boats going? Source = Lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

           Fuel Cells – Means Of Production – Scalability

           Other ‘Miracle’ Alternatives

Current Events  

US Oil  Production Peaks in 1970

No new refineries since 1976

The last refinery to be completed in the United States was in 1976, and Mr. McGinnis knows all too well that community and political opposition squashed earlier projects. His proposed refinery in Arizona has already been forced away from its original site near Phoenix, in 2003, after the state considered expanding the city's clean-air limits. Source = corpwatch.org

Discovery / hence Exploration is virtually nill

This is the world as a whole.
· The green bars show discovery, highlighting a few exceptional spikes in the Middle East.
· The oil shocks of the 1970s cut demand so that the actual peak came later and lower than would otherwise have been the case 
· It means that the decline is less steep than it would otherwise have been
· It reminds us that if we produce less today, there is more left for tomorrow. 
· It is a lesson we need to relearn as a matter of urgency.

Source = Colin Campbell

Most major reserves were over stated

Corporate Cannibalism – Mergers and Takeovers

Oil companies, executives, government officials are aware of this situation, and know there is no way out. There is no plan B.

Global Oil Production Peak 2005

Professor Ken Deffeyes is a geologist and professor emeritus at Princeton.  He is considered to be one of the leading experts on the question of "peak oil" and is the author of two books on the subject, Hubbert's Peak: the Impending World Oil Shortage (2001) and Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak (2005)  Visit his website, Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak at http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/.

In the January 2004 Current Events on my website, I predicted that world oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2005. In hindsight, that prediction was in error by three weeks. An update using the 2005 data shows that we passed the peak on December 16, 2005.

"A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires" that I present an update on the data sources and the interpretation.

1. The underlying methodology is Hubbert's postulate that the rate of new oil discoveries depends on the fraction of the oil that has not yet been discovered. Similarly, the rate of oil production depends on the fraction of oil that has not yet been produced. A test of Hubbert's hypothesis, using the long history of US oil production, is on pages 35—42 of my book Beyond Oil. An algebraic result from the Hubbert theory says that the production rate peaks when half of the oil has been produced.

2. The most accurate measure of the eventual total oil comes from the "hits" graph on page 48 of Beyond Oil. The input data for that graph are the dates of the first well in each oilfield. The February 2006 edition of Colin Campbell's ASPO newsletter contains his updated version of the ExxonMobil discovery dates. I enlarged Campbell's graph and scaled off data for 2004 and 2005. An update of the calculation reported on page 49 of Beyond Oil gives an unchanged estimate: 2.013 trillion barrels. (There is always a statistical nervousness when an estimate does not change. I make the estimates by stepwise trials, and the winning step was 2.013. What I know is that neither estimate was 2.012 or 2.014.)

3. The world peak would then happen when 1.0065 trillion barrels have been produced (half of 2.013). Following Hubbert, I used the Oil & Gas Journal end-of-year production numbers. It isn't that the Oil & Gas Journal reports are divinely inspired; their methodology is well explained and their reports constitute a relatively consistent data set. The cumulative world production at the end of 2004 was 0.9812 trillion barrels and at the end of 2005 it was 1.00748 trillion. During the year, we passed the halfway point. The graph shows the date of the crossover: December 16, 2005.

There are some interesting additional bits in the end-of-year statistics. Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline. The rise in production was largely from Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Angola. The Saudi production for 2005 was 9.155 million barrels per day. On March 6, 2003 Saudi Aramco and the government of Saudi Arabia announced by way of the Dow Jones newswire that they were maxed out at 9.2 barrels per day. In retrospect, that statement seems to be accurate. Further details are in Matthew Simmons' book Twilight in the Desert.

Could some new discovery come along and reverse the global oil decline? The world oil industry is a huge system: Annual production worth 1.7 trillion dollars. I don't see anything on the horizon large enough to turn it around.

So what are the policy implications? Numerous critics are claiming that the present world economic situation is a house of cards: built on trade deficits, housing price bubbles, and barely-adequate natural gas supplies. Pulling any one card out from the bottom of the pile might collapse the whole structure.

1. There are calls for embargoing Iranian oil because of the nuclear weapons situation. Pulling four million barrels per day out from under the world energy supply might trigger a severe worldwide recession. In the post-peak era, we're playing a new ball game and we don't yet know the rules.

2. Ghawar, the supergiant Saudi oilfield, is producing increasing amounts of water along with the oil. When Simmons sent Twilight in the Desert to the printer, the water cut at Ghawar was around 30 percent. There are later reports on the Internet (home.entouch.net/dmd/ghawar.htm) of water cuts as high as 55 percent. Ghawar has been producing 4 million barrels per day; when the Ghawar field waters out, you can kiss your lifestyle goodbye.

Since we have passed the peak without initiating major corrective measures, we now have to rely primarily on methods that we have already engineered. Long-term research and development projects, no matter how noble their objectives, have to take a back seat while we deal with the short-term problems. Long-term examples in the proposed 2007 US budget (Feb. 9, 2006 New York Times page A-18) include a 65 percent increase in the programs to produce ethanol from corn, a 25.8 percent increase for developing hydrogen fuel cell cars, and a 78.5 percent increase in spending on solar energy research. The Times reports that solar energy today supplies one percent of US electricity; the hope is to double that to 2 percent by the year 2025. By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age.

Ethanol, fuel cells, and solar cells are not the only shimmering dreams. Methane hydrates, oil shale, and the Yucca Mountain radioactive waste depository would be better off forgotten. There are plenty of solid opportunities. Energy conservation is by far the most important. Initiatives that are already engineered and ready to go are biodiesel from palm oil, coal gasification (for both gaseous and liquid fuels), high-efficiency diesel automobiles, and revamping our food supply. Every little bit helps, but even if wind energy continues its success it will still be a little bit.

That's it. I can now refer to the world oil peak in the past tense. My career as a prophet is over. I'm now an historian.

© 2001—2005 - K. Deffeyes All Rights Reserved. Source = DieOff.org

All the major wars since 1991 have been to secure oil resources

War On Drugs

911 (Planned pretext for invasion of Iraq )

War on Terror (War of terror for last bit of oil reserves)

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