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Published on 22 Jul 2007 by European Tribune. Archived on 22 Jul 2007.

Facing the Hard Truths about Energy - the NPC report, commented
by Jerome a Paris

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http://www.energybulletin.net/32445.html

Published on 24 Jul 2007 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 24 Jul 2007.

The Free Energy Delusion
by Graham Strouts

I am often asked about this or that “new” idea that promises some kind of “free energy” and whether I had looked into it because it could “change the debate” about energy.

The answer is usually that I havent looked into it because I already know that these “new” ideas will not change the energy debate. Arrogance! Closed mindedness! How can we possible know such things wont work unless we find out about them? After all, we cannot really be sure they wont work, can we?

A recent example that has been much publicized is the Irish company Steorn who placed an advert in the Economist earlier this year claiming to have produced such a device called the Orbo which uses magnets to produce energy. (Magnets are a standard “free energy” idea; another would be various different kinds of electrolysis to extract hydrogen from water etc..)

There is a good BBC report (thanks to Tom!) with commentary by Professor Sir Eric Ash who explains very well how we can know these things wont work, or, leastwise, cannot do what they claim. It is all to do with the Laws of Thermodynamics which we know to work at all times and in all places. According to Ash, the confusion is caused because these scientific Laws are commonly believed to be on a par with the rather random dogmas of Religion:

“The law of conservation of energy…states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant, although it may change forms, into heat or kinetic energy for example. In short, law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Denying its validity would undermine not just little bits of science - the whole edifice would be no more. All of the technology on which we built the modern world would lie in ruins.

There is no flexibility in the acceptance of the law as true - at all times, and in all circumstances.

It is the failure to appreciate the difference between this scientific law and a law of religion or of society which is why we know - without having to examine details of a particular device - that Orbo cannot work. “

But how can it be in this day and age that otherwise well-educated and sophisticated people- members of the most educated generation perhaps of all time- growing up in a world surrounded by the gadgets and conveniences of a science-based modern society be so misinformed about the difference between scientific understanding and religious beliefs? Why this strong conviction- often encountered in the environmental movement, and, Im sorry to say, amongst Permaculture people who really should know better, that science can’t really “be sure” of anything?

This is an important issue, because it helps us understand why, for example, so many people are even now easily swayed by propaganda of the climate change denial industry etc.. and are so ready to doubt any scientific pronouncement.

Some of these ideas are explored by the incomparable Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion” (thanks again Tom!) which is one of my Books of the Century and should be read by everyone who has an interest in understanding the world.

But I think that as regards belief in free energy, there are a few points worth making about why it is so appealing, and these are all to do with the way the abundance of cheap energy has effected belief systems.

In effect, oil has been like free energy. I dont think any of us can fully grasp just how much of a leap it has been for humanity to move from a society that relies on the daily solar income to living off the capital of ancient stored sunlight. Having oil has been simply magic. You push the button, things work. We fly around the world and buy any kind of exotic fruit whenever we want.

My generation has had more opportunities than any previous one. We live like kings and queens and can dream of going to the stars. We have grown up in a world of new devices and gadgets every year, each one more fantastic than the last, but as consumers, we are rally quite divorced from the less savory aspects of obtaining and using this energy in the first place. The environmental destruction and pollution left behind in places like Nigeria and the Amazon after the oil companies have got what they want. The displaced people, the toxic waste. The extraordinary injustice and inequality caused by this global industry of greed which benefits only a minority of humanity.

Beliefs in “free energy” are common amongst the beneficiaries of the oil industry- ie middle-class consumers in the West- and I believe this is because fossil energy and the technology it has made possible has created for us a mythical fairy-tale world in which all our dreams and fantasies can be answered. Peak Energy seems to have brought with it Peak Fantasy.It has kept us in a state like little children believing that anything is possible if only we just believe. Father Christmas will always come on time, or the Fairy Godmother, wave his or her magic wand and give us all the goodies and free energy we could wish for.

Unfortunately- or perhaps fortunately- the world just doesnt work like this. We are indeed in this physical realm inescapably tied to the rules of the game which are the Laws of Thermodynamics. It is painful to grow up but that is what we are called upon to do if we want to find appropriate responses to the end of the Oil Age.

More than that, the basic assumption that “Free Energy” would be a good thing needs to be severely questioned, for two reasons at least:

Firstly, as I have written before, the use of energy is inherently destructive. So we need to be very careful how much we have and what use we make of it. Ideally, the amount of energy available would be limited to the level of moral responsibility we can demonstrate. A child should not be entrusted with the keys to the car, access to the chainsaw or the lawnmower, until it has reached an appropriate level of maturity to handle these powerful machines.

Secondly, the myth of Free Energy is inherently dis -empowering; it is not much use unless you can actually manifest it. Simply believing in it while you remain dependent on fossil energy for everything is just no good. What I mean by this is, some obscure invention somewhere by some maverick hero of the New Age who once managed to do this or that with magnets or whatever but was then assassinated by the CIA or just “disappeared” is really no use to anyone.

We need energy solutions which are accessible to ordinary people, that can be readily replicated on an individual, regional or community level; that can be repaired and maintained with minimum fossil-inputs, preferably using local resources that are carefully managed by the community. Energy sources should be multiple, diverse and above all democratic, not the preserve of distant geniuses or centralised state authorities. To build a resilient sustainable society requires far more personal and community involvement in and responsibility for the resources we use, and much more local decision making in how they are actually used.

Still not convinced about the Laws of Thermodynamics or natural limits to available energy? Next time the “Low Fuel” light comes on, dont just head for the nearest petrol-station. Just wish upon a star.

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Published on 12 Aug 2007 by The Oil Drum. Archived on 12 Aug 2007.
How vulnerable to oil shocks are we, really?

by Davidyson

Fossil fuels at peak (11-part series)
John Rawlins, Whatcom Watch / Raise the Hammer
Retired nuclear physicist looks at peak oil and how it will affect us.

Peak Oil Hits the Third World High Oil Prices Bring Energy Shortages
Chris Nelder, Energy and Capital

Sharon Astyk comments: Here's What Peak Oil Actually Looks Like.

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Immunize yourself against future hype
Dave Cohen, Energy Bulletin / ASPO-USA
A breakthrough in oil & gas industry technology is not inevitable. Indeed, it is not very likely. Painstaking linear growth in technological advances permit more oil to be recovered each year, but Seidensticker's myths about technology change apply to the oil & gas industry just as they apply to most human endeavors.

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http://globalpublicmedia.com/peak_moment_t...cts_of_peak_oil
Peak Moment: The Social Effects of Peak Oil21 Aug 2007 |
How will rising oil prices affect low- and middle-class lives? Sociologist and professor Rowan Wolf sees at-risk populations growing while government services and class divides are increasingly strained. A member of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force, she discusses relocalizing our economies, to counter globalization based on an unsupportable grow-or-die economic model. Episode 69.Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action. How can we thrive, build stronger communities, and help one another in the transition from a fossil fuel-based lifestyle?mp3

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A CLOSER LOOK AT "ESCAPE FROM SUBURBIA", By Dale Allen Pfeiffer

Escape from Suburbia

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Horse Power
A practical suggestion that would transform the way we live
by Richard Courteau

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http://news.independent.co.uk/business/new...icle2966842.ece

Oil industry 'sleepwalking into crisis'
Former Shell chairman says that diminishing resources could push price of crude to $150 a barrel
By David Strahan and Andrew Murray-Watson
Published: 16 September 2007
Lord Oxburgh, the former chairman of Shell, has issued a stark warning that the price of oil could hit $150 per barrel, with oil production peaking within the next 20 years.

He accused the industry of having its head "in the sand" about the depletion of supplies, and warned: "We may be sleepwalking into a problem which is actually going to be very serious and it may be too late to do anything about it by the time we are fully aware."

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday ahead of his address to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil in Ireland this week, Lord Oxburgh, one of the most respected names in the energy industry, said a rapid increase in the price of oil was inevitable as demand continued to outstrip supply. He said: "We can probably go on extracting oil from the ground for a very long time, but it is going to get very expensive indeed.

"And once you see oil prices in excess of $100 or $150 a barrel, the alternatives simply become more attractive on price grounds if on no others."

Lord Oxburgh added that oil majors must invest more heavily in developing viable alternatives to oil and gas. "If you look at it from oil companies' point of view, effectively what they're doing at the moment is continuing business as usual, and sticking their toes in the water in a number of areas which might become important in future.

"But at present there is a relatively poor business case for making significantly greater investment in these new areas."

Commenting on whether "peak oil" – the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline – was likely to be reached in the near future, he said: "In a way it scarcely matters; what really matters is the gap between production and demand. I don't know whether there is going to be a peak in world oil production, whether it's going to plateau and then slowly come down.

"It could well plateau within the next 20 years, and I guess I would be surprised if it hadn't."

The price of crude oil closed above $80 a barrel for the first time on Thursday, as a hurricane in Texas raised supply concerns.

US light crude hit $80.20, two cents higher than the price it touched on Wednesday. Oil prices have risen 30 per cent since the start of this year and are four times higher than their 2002 level.

The latest figures from the US Energy Information Administration show that global liquid fuels production in August was almost a million barrels per day lower than the same period in 2006.

The International Energy Agency has forecast what it calls an oil "supply crunch" by 2012, a prediction that Lord Oxburgh said could possibly come to pass. Lord Oxburgh is currently chairman of D1 Oils, a biodiesel company listed on the AIM market.

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http://energybulletin.net/35076.html

Peak oil conspiracies
by Kurt Cobb




We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
--Richard Hofstadter
Ancient peoples often imagined that any calamity natural or otherwise was the work of displeased gods. Today, we are more enlightened. When we suffer misfortunes such as rising energy prices, some of us immediately imagine small secretive groups in high places engaged in elaborate conspiracies.

In fact, it is a good thing to take a skeptical view of those in power. And, one does not have to invent motives of greed or a desire for domination in such people, but only read the headlines. However, it is a particular turn of mind that endows a tiny cabal with fantastical powers to control every major facet of world society. Historian Richard Hofstadter described this mind in his famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It is a style, he admits, which is found elsewhere and which stretches back far in time. It is not limited to those with disturbed minds, but rather expresses itself broadly, especially in societies under stress. And, it is not confined to those who lack intelligence for many very bright people succumb to it. It continually finds new venues for manifesting itself. And so, with oil prices rising in recent years and now reaching all-time highs, one of those new venues is peak oil. (It's worth noting that few were puzzling over such grand oil-related conspiracies when oil hit $10 a barrel in 1999.)


Peak oil conspiracies as outlined on the Internet range from the collaboration of greedy oil companies seeking to maximize their profits to a grand conspiracy of the secret illuminati to impoverish the common people and possibly solve the overpopulation problem by starving much of the world of food and fuel. It is not my purpose here to refute such theories point by point, but rather to show how they fit into the historical pattern outlined by Hofstadter.

One of the characteristics of the modern-day paranoid style is that it believes society has been seized from average folk who must now mount a campaign to take it back "to prevent the final destructive act of subversion" as Hofstadter puts it. (Hofstadter was thinking of the contemporary right of 1964 when the essay appeared, but believed the formula could be applied to any such group.) To quote from The Myth of Peak Oil already cited above:
Publicly available CFR [presumably the Council on Foreign Relations] and Club of Rome strategy manuals from 30 years ago say that a global government needs to control the world population through neo-feudalism by creating artificial scarcity. Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.
So we are counseled that unnamed "social architects" have first deindustrialized the United States and now intend to starve the excess population using peak oil as a cover. (It is a puzzle why "global government" would feel it necessary to starve people if the world is awash in resources since this would crash the very economy that gives them and their supporters wealth and power; it's also a puzzle why they would wait 30 years to start doing it if it were really that necessary to their plan--but I promised not to try to parse the logic of such screeds, didn't I?)

Here is a more mild version from Peak Oil is Snake Oil!:
The oil and gas market as currently construed and managed is a manipulated and propagandized marketplace that has enriched the oil companies beyond the wildest dreams of Croesus while the rest of the nation absorbs the ancillary costs and is left to deal with their impact on our society.
I do not here intend to defend the world's oil companies. They are guilty of many misdeeds, and there is credible evidence that they have on occasion tried to use their market power to manipulate prices, especially in the refining market. The point I want to make is that the paranoid style in this case seems to have reverted to an older style described by Hofstadter in which vague, shadowy villains lurk in the background. Here all oil companies are lumped together leaving out the important distinctions between the gargantuan government-owned enterprises that are mostly part of OPEC and therefore explicitly seek to manipulate prices, the publicly traded international oil companies, and the small independents. The authors of The Myth of Peak Oil also refer to "the elite" (who seem to be associated with the CFR or the Club of Rome) as well as "the oil industry," but never go further than this in detailing who is included in the peak oil conspiracy business.

A third characteristic made clear from the examples above is that the danger does not come from without so much as within. It is the product not of an attack, but of a betrayal. The villains are not invading our country; they are already in place.

A fourth element of the supposed conspiracy is that many agents for the conspirators are hard at work. In this case these agents are planting stories about peak oil to keep the public supine while their money or even their lives are taken. The agents include nonprofit organizations such as the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas and other peak oil groups; the International Monetary Fund; vague "establishment-run fake left activist groups;" and even Rolling Stone Magazine for an article it published by James Howard Kunstler adapted from his book, The Long Emergency.

A fifth element is what Hofstadter refers to as the renegade. These are people who have once been part of the conspiracy in some way but have now seen the light. A recent example is a piece entitled Confessions of an "ex" Peak Oil Believer. The author explains his turnabout as follows:
Peak Oil is not our problem. Politics is. Big Oil wants to sustain high oil prices. Richard Cheney and friends are all too willing to assist.
Such revelations give supposed "inside" confirmation of the conspiracy to a skeptical world. And, the conversions themselves provide examples of a path to redemption, an essential feature of conspiracy narratives.

The sixth element is the paranoid style's obsessive concern for evidence. Hofstadter describes it as follows:
One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
Perhaps not all who engage in this style do so without expecting to change many minds. But these advocates do often marshal considerable selective evidence which on its face can sound quite convincing. What could be more convincing that peak oil is a fraud than the notion that the Earth is filled with endless amounts of oil deep down (so-called abiotic oil), that Russian scientists have proved this, and that this is the reason Russian President Vladimir Putin didn't want Russian oil companies to fall into Western hands. The West would have acquired technology and know-how that, if kept secret, will make Russia the world's pre-eminent oil power for a century to come.

I will add a seventh element of my own. The peak oil conspiracy theorists can only think in terms of the social world, not the natural world. In this regard they are cornucopians. Therefore, agency must come from the social world. Someone is responsible for what is happening, not something. It is simply not possible that the world is really nearing a peak in oil production. Someone is only making it appear so.

Hofstadter goes on to tell us:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization.
Perhaps some in the peak oil movement believe we are faced with something similarly apocalyptic. But this apocalypticism is derived not from fears about a giant conspiracy, but rather from the evidence of geological constraints.

I have yet to see a plan of action spelled out by the peak oil conspiracy theorists. Hofstadter sheds some light on why. Those caught up in the paranoid style tend to live outside the give and take of the political process. They regard themselves as having been excluded from it and therefore powerless. I would add that from their position outside the political struggle they conjure up a politics that is merely a forum for conspiracy at the top and delusion among the masses. Since the process itself cannot be trusted, there is no real way to bring one's grievances into the political arena and seek some kind of resolution.

This, however, may be a saving grace. For all the irritation that the peak oil conspiracy theorists may cause those in the peak oil movement, I do not believe the vast majority of these conspiracy theorists will ever leave behind their passivity and actually do something. But unfortunately, they add to the dead weight of inertia that keeps many others from taking the peak oil threat seriously.

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The age of scarcity industrialism

by John Michael Greer

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http://energybulletin.net/36739.html
Big melt meets big empty: Rethinking the implications of climate change and peak oil

by Richard Heinberg

[crystallizedtear]

thank you for the info on peak oil, we've been learning about it through clubs and seminars at school and though I knew we were ruining the world, I never realized the entire impact on our world if we had no oil. We were given the example of Cuba managing to go without oil from the US or the Soviet Union and how it grew organic farms and such...
anyways, thanks, i've bookmarked this. I think a lot of people don't realize how everything material around us won't be around sometime later. Or that a lot of the stuff we buy is made from oil...or that oil is made from crushed animals from billions of years ago (learned that in our 'Friends of Animals' club...actually learnt most of it from there) anyways i'm rambling on... gonna come back and read all this info to educate myself...

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Crystallizedtear, you're welcome.

http://www.energybulletin.net/38936.html
http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2008/...es-we-seek.html

The services we seek
by Kurt Cobb


It is now almost de rigueur for any self-respecting peak oil activist engaged in a conversation about energy to announce that the automobile era will soon be over; that cheap air travel and cheap food will soon be a thing of the past; and that life as we know it will generally disappear.

If anybody--most probably someone already in the know--is still listening at that point, the conversation may continue. But just as often those who are out of the peak oil loop will ask to talk about something else, as if the peak oil activist has made some thoughtless remark about one of his listeners lacking an arm. Perhaps a different approach would yield better results.

Economists tell us that it is not goods which people seek, but the services which goods provide. We would have scant use for cars if they didn't provide transportation. Air-conditioners would be of little import if they didn't produce cool homes and offices. Processed foods would be of no interest if they did not satisfy our hunger and our need for pleasurable tastes. Unfortunately, most people, especially those in North America, equate their cars with transportation. They may also equate air-conditioners with a cool environment in summer. And, they may unconsciously think of grocery store shelves as the point of origin for their food. To simply tell them that all of this is coming to an end because it is unsustainable seems to imply that every service they depend on for mobility, comfort and nutrition will abruptly disappear. People either won't believe it or they'll say that the situation as described seems hopeless.

But neither the need for these services nor the means to provide them will disappear. Rather the mode in which they are offered and the cleverness and amount of effort needed to get them will change. The challenge then is to get people to think not about such notions as electric cars, but rather about how to get the mobility they want, say, through public transportation, passenger rail, cycling and even walking. They need to be led to contemplate how they can keep their homes and offices and themselves cool in ways other than turning on their air-conditioners. They need to be encouraged to think about alternatives to getting the food they need such as farmers' markets, local farms, and home or community gardens. In short, they need to participate in the response. All of this seems plainly obvious. The point then is this: It is only half a discussion to talk about the things we'll have to give up after peak oil and not about the ways in which we'll obtain the services those things represent.

It is precisely this "thing" orientation which has to date prevented us from thinking clearly about organizing our lives and our societies. Instead of building beautiful, densely populated, pedestrian-friendly cities, we have sprawled out into the countryside because cheap energy and inexpensive private automobiles made it possible. The result has been that the distance between the services we need everyday has gotten much greater--because it could. We think we've gained mobility and saved time. All we've really done is swap the cheap, easy, low-energy mobility of walking, cycling and public transportation, for the privatized, high-energy, high-maintenance mobility of the car. This thing called the car which was supposed to liberate us ends up only isolating us and degrading our social and physical health as well as the health of the planet.

Admittedly, it is difficult to convince people that a different way of doing something will provide satisfactory results. But as long as the emphasis remains on an energy transition that for example, simply replaces one kind of car with another, the real work of adjusting to a low-energy society will be unfinished. Rather, we need a thorough-going inventory and analysis of the services we seek and new ways to obtain them with a lot less energy.

Much of that thinking is already being done, and many experiments are underway. The task is to introduce the "services" way of thinking into peak oil discourse so that 1) we are not inadvertantly promoting the idea that gadgets and products that are "greener" are always the best route to adaptation and 2) people can have confidence that there are, in fact, ways--perhaps many good ways--to get the everyday services we seek.

Dmitri Orlov's book, Reinventing Collapse is forthcoming. See Club Orlov.

From the Archdruid Report:
Adaptive Responses to Peak Oil
Lifeboat Time
Solvitur Ambulando

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Richard Heinberg on The Reality Report
mp3

A quantitative assessment of future net oil exports by the top five net oil exporters
by Jeffrey J. Brown and Samuel Foucher

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http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/...T14_54_16-08_00
The Long Emergency: Orlov and Kunstler (Podcast)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
KMO welcomes author Dmitry Orlov back to the program for a discussion of keeping people fed in times of turmoil and for a reading from Orlov’s soon-to-be-published book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. After that, James H. Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, drops by to talk about the fate of surburbia in the post-petroleum era.
(9 January 2008)

mp3

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Another Nail in the Coffin of the Case Against Peak Oil (PDF)
Matthew R. Simmons, Simmons International

[SillyYun]

JAKARTA, Indonesia - Investors dumped Indonesian stocks Tuesday, dragging down the benchmark index more than 9 percent, led by a sharp fall in blue chip commodity issues.


The Jakarta Stock Exchange (JSX) composite sank as low as 2,255.1 in moderate trade, off almost 18 percent since the end of last year.

Prices fell across the board, with metal and palm oil stocks _ which rose several hundred percent in 2007 _ leading the way down.

PT Timah, a major tin producer, shed 15 percent, crude palm oil company PP London-Sumatra dropped 14 percent and PT International Nickel Indonesia lost 13 percent.

The Indonesian currency, the rupiah, fell 0.6 percent against the dollar, but stabilized after an intervention by financial authorities at Bank Indonesia.

Indonesia, a major exporter of natural resources such as natural gas, gold, silver, nickel and coal, is still recovering from the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis when it suffered the worst economic meltdown in decades.

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http://www.energybulletin.net/39308.html
Published on 10 Jan 2008 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 20 Jan 2008.
Peak oil: Why is it so difficult to explain/understand?

by Martin Payne

After several years of partial success in explaining the physics-based phenomenon sometimes known as “Peak Oil”, this author has come to one conclusion: Peak Oil is difficult to explain, and it is difficult for most people to understand.

Now, some folks make the conscious choice to avoid considering a concept like Peak Oil because it might imply future hardship or a change in lifestyle, and they’d rather dwell on “positive” matters. Others would consider the acceptance of Peak Oil to be defeatist – ie, a surrender of man’s great ingenuity and/or his ability control his own destiny. Make no mistake about it, this author has a high regard for the power of positive thinking, for man’s ingenuity and for his ability to help influence his destiny.

For others, the difficulty with Peak Oil might be a subconscious one. Theories such as “cognitive dissonance” and “consensus trance” have been advanced, and these are likely manifestations of what is sometimes referred to as “crowd behavior”.

But for this exercise, let’s set aside these willful and subconscious roadblocks.

So, why do rational, intelligent, objective people have a hard time with this concept?

Well, a good guess might be that we are barraged - on a daily basis - with volumes of commentaries, data and unintelligible statistics:

* “Oil inventories are down this week.”
* “OPEC is increasing production by 500,000 barrels per day.”
* “There are trillions of barrels of tar sands around the world.”
* “They just found a new, 8 billion barrel field in Brazil.”

Who has the necessary time to sort through it all, and have any chance of understanding? Who has the time to continually determine what's good data, what's bad data, or what's skewed data? Or, what's "big" (important) and what's "little" (not important) in terms of scale? What's the maximum rate that can be produced from a new discovery? How long will it take to drill all the wells and get the infrastructure in place? Then how quickly can the field be depleted?

Without continuous study, it all becomes a fog. And sometimes even WITH continuous study, it is still foggy! As a result, most of us resort to: “Just tell me the answer! And tell me something good!”

The term “Peak Oil” is really a shorthand. It is an abbreviation for “peak production rate” or “maximum worldwide production rate”. Peak Oil is a manifestation of the physics of the depletion of a finite resource. And physics indicates that over the life of a group of all the fields in a country - or in the world - there is a maximum rate that can be achieved, and that rate occurs when roughly half of the RESERVES are depleted.

Currently, the average rate of oil consumption/production is around 85 million barrels per day, and many believe that there is little current "surplus capacity". Some believe that Peak Oil may be 80 – 85 million barrels per day, ie we are “already there”. Others believe that the world may be able to achieve 100 million barrels per day by 2011 or so. And the IEA has forecasts that indicate that it will be possible to produce as much as 120 million barrels per day in 2030!

But what if the world population grows, developing nations develop, and 2.4 billion Chinese and Indians just want to use a little more oil? Well, if the demand is 110 million barrels per day, and the world can only produce 100 million barrels per day, then the price will go up until the demand abates. And if worldwide economic growth is proportional to the rate of growth in energy consumption (as it has been since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution), then if we can’t grow energy consumption, we’ve got a problem with growing the economy!

To make matters worse, after the maximum oil production rate (Peak Oil) is reached, then the rate begins to decline - at least within a few years! (Hirsch's recent work with respect to "plateaus" is not encouraging.) So, post-Peak Oil, the economy not only can't continue to grow, but it must contract – IF economic growth is proportional to growth in energy usage (as it has been in the past).

So far we’ve talked about production RATE. Now let’s cover one other concept: RESERVES. RESERVES are "how much oil that there is left in the ground, which can be gotten out".

Once again, understanding RATE and RESERVES are the keys to understanding Peak Oil:

* RATE (in our context) is the maximum rate of oil production for a group of fields, or for the world.
* RESERVES are how much oil that is in the ground that can be ultimately be produced (for this analysis we won’t even differentiate between oil types, ie tar sands v. light oil, or different categories of reserves, based on risk).


So, many folks believe that the world was endowed with around 2 trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil. So the RESERVES for the world were 2 trillion barrels before any oil was produced. Most folks think we have produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil. So, that would leave current RESERVES of 1 trillion barrels.

Now, that’s a lot of oil! Why all the fuss? Well, here’s the punchline, and it has as much to do with the lack of cognition of Peak Oil as anything:

The maximum production RATE for a given field or group of fields in not arbitrary! In other words, it can’t just be anything you want it to be! For instance, if a field has RESERVES of say 10 million barrels, the maximum RATE might be several thousand barrels per day, but it could never be 1 million barrels per day.

Why? OK, here is the key take-away:

Due to the physics of the flow of oil through rock, a field’s (or a country’s, or the world’s) maximum oil production RATE is not arbitrary but is dependent on the RESERVES:

* SIZE (how big is the field in terms of area and thickness?)
* AGE (is the field newly discovered/produced, or is has it been producing for 40 years?)
* QUALITY (how well does the oil flow through the rock?)

Examples:

* All of the world’s largest oil fields – Ghawar, Cantarell, Burgan and Daquing - have excellent SIZE and excellent QUALITY ... but their AGE is old! Hence, all of these (except possibly Ghawar) are in decline (their RATE is declining each day).
* The Athabasca tar sands, on the other hand, have excellent SIZE, they are essentially “new” in AGE (relatively little compared to the RESERVES has been produced so far), but they have the very poorest QUALITY – the oil is so thick it won’t flow and must be melted with heat, dissolved with solvents or mined.

Most who take the “no Peak Oil” (or no Peak Oil until 2030 and then an “undulating plateau”) side of the debate speak of RESERVES. They don’t often address the difficult topic of trying to explain where the RATE will come from.

Recently this author attended a trade conference concerning “unconventional resources”. “Unconventional resources” is another way of saying “difficult to produce at a high rate, but prevalent in a given area”. For the most part, it’s what we’re left with, especially in the United States. So, a representative from IHS (who owns CERA) gave a talk and presented, among other things, maps showing trillions of barrels – worldwide – of bitumen, tar sands and heavy oil. Afterwards he smugly said, “WELL, I guess there are no supporters of PEAK OIL in this room!”

With respect to oil production RATE (which is what Peak Oil is all about), he may as well have been showing a map of coal resources.

What he didn’t explain was the fact that Canada, despite having huge tar sands RESERVES of 188 billion barrels (or call it a trillion barrels, it really doesn’t matter), is currently producing oil from those tar sands at a RATE of about 1.1 million barrels per day. And this after a Herculean effort and tens of billions of dollars invested!

The Canadian tar sands producers have a roadmap for increasing the production RATE from those huge RESERVES to a total of ... 3 million barrels per day, by 2015! That’s an increase of only another 1.9 million barrels per day, but over 7 years, and with additional tens of billions of dollars injected!

So, that huge amount of RESERVES is limited in RATE because it is of the poorest QUALITY.

To put this in perspective and show why it is important - why Peak Oil is important - take a look at the second largest field in the world, Cantarell, in Mexico. In early 2006, PEMEX announced that Cantarell Field was about to go into decline, for the first time ever. In fact, they projected that this field that produced 2 million barrels per day of Mexico’s total 3.4 million barrels per day (end of 2005) would be down to between 1.5 and 0.5 million barrels per day by the end of 2008! Now, at the end of 2007, it is already down to 1.3 – 1.5 million barrel per day! So, if it finishes 2008 at 800,000 barrels per day, that is a loss of 1.2 million barrels per day, over just 2 years.

Compare this with the Canadian tar sands production increase of only 1.9 million barrels per day over 7 years - after a huge incremental effort. Factor in the depletion going on in most every field around the world – and you have an idea of the problem at hand, and a better understanding of Peak Oil. Among other things, huge RESERVES of poor QUALITY oil are not going to be able to provide the RATE of production necessary to stem the declines from the giant high QUALITY fields that are now old in AGE, much less continue to increase our total RATE.

In summary, Peak Oil is about RATE. And RATE is dependent on the SIZE, AGE and QUALITY of the RESERVES.

[papabear]

http://www.energybulletin.net/39592.html

Cornucopians and their magical thinking

by Kurt Cobb

We are all subject to bouts of magical thinking. The classic and most widespread form of this is to confuse correlation with causation. One can see it in daily life: Objects such as rabbits' feet, special stones, and certain "lucky" pieces of clothing are presumed to be the cause of whatever good fortune comes to the holder or wearer.

One can see it in commentary on financial markets: Presidential election years in the United States are bullish for the stock market as if for some arcane and indecipherable reason, presidential elections cause the stock market to go up.

Another form is the belief that the mind can affect the physical world. If we wish for something hard enough (as opposed to taking concrete steps to achieve it), it will happen.

And, so it is with the cornucopian thinker. He (or she) explains that most accepted measures of human well-being have been rising since 1800. But so has population. Ergo, population increases simply cannot result in human misery in the future. The correlation--a rise in living standards while population increased--means that rising populations cause beneficial things to happen to most human beings. (Never mind that fossil fuel usage was increasing exponentially during most of this period. And, never mind that the cornucopian only considers human well-being, especially the ability of humans to extract their needs from nature in the short run. Never is the long-term health of the ecosphere on which all humans depend seriously considered.)

Another bedrock of cornucopian magical thinking is that substitutes will always be available for any resource that becomes scarce. As you will see below, our ability to think is supposed to allow us always to find substitutes. A favorite example is the use of fiber optic cable in place of copper as copper ores have declined in quality. Even now the high price of oil is creating increased demand for coal and renewal energy sources. Substitution has and does occur, but it is hard to see what substitutes there might be for potable water or a climate suitable for human habitation. Perhaps we will desalinate the oceans and geoengineer the climate. But, that would take huge amounts of energy and, when it comes to climate, we would need a precise knowledge about the climate effects of any proposed geoengineering fix so as not to create the wrong kind of climate.

As for energy, even the world's foremost cornucopian thinker, Julian Simon, admitted that energy is the "master resource" upon which the extraction and refining of all other resources depend. For Simon it is the sum total of all the efforts of an increasing population which will bring us solutions to any energy shortages. "Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or air," Simon said in a now-famous Wired magazine interview. He went on to say that "[m]inds matter economically as much as or more than hands or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be so, or we would be an extinct species."

Now this is not exactly the belief that if you think about something it will happen, but it comes awfully close. It is the passivity that such ideas engender that move this kind of thinking over the line into magical thinking. We are led to believe that all of our environmental and resource problems can be left to technical experts who will surely solve them without much disruption to our lives. What Simon is implying is that if we think hard enough, human ingenuity will always find a way to overcome supposed limits on the human species. (Notice also that he says above that people "create" rather than extract resources which one should put down to just plain confusion about how the natural world works.) And, just so people would get his point, he stated the following in another article:

We have in our hands now--actually, in our libraries--the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. Most amazing is that most of this specific body of knowledge was developed within just the past two centuries or so, though it rests, of course, on basic knowledge that had accumulated for millennia.

Not only are people capable of great ingenuity when faced with great challenges, but they have already imagined and written down all the solutions to all the challenges to basic survival that we will face as a species for the next 7 billion years. Now, that might be properly classed as wishful thinking, perhaps the greatest piece of wishful thinking of all time. (Again one wonders about the oversight that in the past two centuries fossil fuel consumption has had a lot to do with giving people the time and power to discover and elaborate the basic knowledge to which Simon alludes--even if it now appears that that knowledge will not solve all of our future problems.)

Perhaps just as important as being able to spot cornucopian magical thinking is understanding the motive behind it. Simon elucidated his agenda and that of many other cornucopians in the following sentences from the article just cited above:

The extent to which the political-social-economic system provides personal freedom from government coercion is a crucial element in the economics of resources and population. Skilled persons require an appropriate social and economic framework that provides incentives for working hard and taking risks, enabling their talents to flower and come to fruition. The key elements of such a framework are economic liberty, respect for property, and fair and sensible rules of the market that are enforced equally for all.

What Simon--who was a professor of business administration, not a scientist--most feared was that concerns about the environment and about human population growth would lead to government intervention in the economy and society. That would undermine the free-market capitalism which he so stridently believed is the best form of social organization. (It is no accident that the piece quoted above was written for the free-market, libertarian-minded Cato Institute.)

But perhaps even more basic than this is Simon's admission in the preface to his book, The Ultimate Resource, that he once believed that population and resource problems were worrisome and urgent. His research into the matter, however, reversed his views. And, this research had an important side effect. It helped to lift him out of long depression (which he claims had nothing to do with his previous views on population and resources), a depression that never again returned. He wrote:

And I believe that if others fully recognize the extraordinarily positive trends that have continued until now, and that can reasonably be expected to continue into the future, it may brighten their outlooks, too.

That is the one thing about which Julian Simon is dead on. Magical thinking like his can often lift our spirits and make us think anything is possible, that is, until reality intrudes and leads to painful and sometimes catastrophic results.

[papabear]

http://environment.newscientist.com/articl...says-study.html

US drought 'man-made' says study
Jim Giles, New Scientist
The water shortages gripping the western US are the result of global warming, not natural variations in climate, according to a bleak study by hydrologists. The results suggest that water disputes will plague the region in the future and damage economic growth unless action is taken now, warn researchers.

About 60% of the changes seen in river flow in the western US are due to warming caused by humans, their study suggests.

Key indicators have hinted at looming water problems for many years. More rain and less snow has been falling in mountain ranges such as the Rockies, for example. River levels, which depend on melting snow from the mountains during the spring and summer, have fallen as a result.

...Hopes that the drought is temporary have been dashed by the analysis, prompting leading researchers to intensify their calls for policy change.

Peter Gleick, a water policy expert at the Pacific Institute, an independent think tank based on Oakland, California, says that water use in his state could be reduced by a fifth by 2030, even if the population and economy continue to grow.

Many sectors need to change to achieve that goal. Agriculture would have to shift towards drip irrigation, in which small amounts of water are focused on individual plants, rather than whole areas being sprayed. Home owners would also have to adopt toilets and washing machines that use less water, he says.
(31 January 2008)