Perhaps he also factored in a slowing of the growth of and then decline in world population, more efficient engines and fuel generatin from nanotechnology, better drilling technology, etc. These linear extrapolators always lack the imagination required to give humans credit for adaptation. A pox on their charts!

Of course the Northeast will maintain social cohesion. New Yorkers would never express their frustrations through violence.

When the price is right, new and truly major reserves will be discovered and accessed in areas presently off-limits due to political instability.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Duell and others were trying to keep congress from cutting the patent office funding. It was those others who felt everything was already invented.

See the Skeptical Inquirer's article on this Patent Office Legend at "http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_27/ai_100755224" among the many sites that debunk this.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Duell and others were trying to keep congress from cutting the patent office funding. It was those others who felt everything was already invented.

See Skeptical Inquirer article on Patent Office Legend among the many sites that debunk this.

Kunstler can be a pessimistic curmudgeon, and I certainly think he gives too short shrift to cultural adaptation and technological evolution.

If Kunstler is overly apocalyptic, both the GOP and the Dems are asleep at the wheel on energy. The most oil-dependent nation is following policies (tax breaks for huge SUVs, massive investment in new roads, auto-dependent design of almost all new development) which guarantee even greater future dependency. Economics will never trump physics and the US has already exploited over 80% of its petroleum endowment. As oil prices inevitably rise when finite world oil supplies face escalating demand, the US will become a debtor nation (in both budget deficits and trade deficits) as the national wealth bleeds away. Meanwhile, nations with intelligent policies of efficiency and renewable energy production will have major competitive advantage.

Invading the nation with the second largest oil reserves on the planet has only served to increase oil prices. The US is cuddling up to dictators in countries with oil (West Africa, the Stans,etc.) but "blowback" will take its' usual course (as it did in Iran, Afghanistan,etc.). Today's friendly dictator becomes tomorrow's angry radical regime, aligned with some new "Axis of Evil".

We do not need "linear extrapolation" to the future, we can simply look at the trade deficits in the papers right now and calculate what fraction is due directly and indirectly to oil imports. No economist I have seen believes that US trade deficits can be sustained for the long term. Cash cannot flow in one direction for too long before balancing factors such as currency depreciation and economic slowdowns in the debtor nation intervene.

Every delay in adapting the US economy to the new energy realities only reduces the resources that will be available for the inevitable transition.

The inevitable refrain is that "Markets will fix it". True, markets will eventually encourage conservation, substitution, and some new production. The fact that oil companies are investing their cash in dividends, acquisitions, share buybacks rather than new drilling and exploration in the US gives "market feedback" that the captains of industry do not believe production investments would have sufficient return. If markets are all-knowing, then they are telling us that conservation is currently a better investment than production.

Market-based technology development and demand destruction are the best hopes in this situation and if the US government would stop offering perverse incentives for waste and consumption, many technologies now in their infancy could be implemented.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Duell and others were trying to keep congress from cutting the patent office funding. It was those others who felt everything was already invented.

Do a web search on Charles Duell and you'll get many hits debunking this. An article by the Skeptical Inquirer is particulary good, but I keep getting errors pasting in the link.

PacRim Jim is dead on correct. Kunstler can theorize all he wants but he is so far from the mark it hardly merits discussion. However, our readers deserve better information.

I'm sure that there will be a global peak on cheap, easy to pump oil. We can argue about when it will be (I'd bet it will be 50 years in the future) but lets move on to what happens when we get there. Since we know that demand is rising and supply will, under this scenario, not be keeping up we can conclude that the price of oil will rise. Ok, given.

Now if oil is expensive, then all sorts of other energy supplies starts to make economic sense. Here's a small list: Nuclear, Coal, Tar Sands, Methane Hydrates, non-conventional oil, Solar, Wind, tidal, and hey, even plain conservation. Hybrid cars for example, are a bit too expensive compared to regular gas cars right now, but if Oil/gas were more expensive they would pay for themselves. They appear to be 20 to 30% more efficient then equivilent gas cars ... you do the math.

So when cheap oil "runs out" then it will become "not so cheap oil" and we will turn to the other sources in a gradual, economic progression. Sorry, no crisis here; you can all drive your SUV home now.

I too am troubled that our so called intellectuals are so ignorant of the invalidity of past dooms-day predictions (and the REASONS that they were wrong). It is not like Malthus is a big secret or anything....

What is really amusing these days is that population looks to be headed to a peak. So far from "using up" the resources, future trends are going to be /over capacity/. (Not in energy, mind you).

I predict that the next trend in Henny Penny theories will be about the depopulation bomb and its terrible effects like labor shortages.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Duell and others were trying to keep congress from cutting the patent office funding. It was those others who felt everything was already invented.

Do a web search on Charles Duell and you will get many hits debunking this. An article by the Skeptical Inquirer is particulary good, but I keep getting errors pasting in the link here so I added it as the URL for this post.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Do a web search on Charles Duell and you will get many hits debunking this. An article by the Skeptical Inquirer is particulary good, but I keep getting errors pasting in the link here so I added it as the URL for this post.

"When the price is right, new and truly major reserves will be discovered and accessed in areas presently off-limits due to political instability."

This is very true, but price moves until supply and demand match. Depletion in producing regions, and increasing demand in China/India/etc will be in a race with discovery/production. Most knowledgeable observors believe the new price equilibrium will be much higher than in previous years, resulting in major economic disadvantage to the US, as the most oil dependent nation.

Will increasing prices serve to reduce or increase political instability? Excepting UK/Norway, oil has not tended to bring political stability/freedom/democracy to producing states. As China and India become stronger world powers, will competion for energy resources lead to more or less political instability? My guess is that the geopolitics of oil leads to more instability, not less.

The story about Charles Duell is an urban legend. I remember a teacher twenty years ago telling it to us, and then debunking it. Do a web search on Charles Duell and you will get many hits debunking this. An article by the Skeptical Inquirer is particulary good.

freddo411,
How "gradual" the transition away from "cheap oil" to "not-so-cheap oil" is depends on the aforementioned geopolitics.

One large explosion in Saudi Arabia's major refining/transhipment facilities could end "cheap oil" instantly, perhaps never to return. In this scenario, the US would be caught with its' economic pants around its' ankles, and the resale value of SUVs and exurbia would plummet very quickly. The market would "adapt" to the situation by impoverishing millions of Americans, while simultaneously enriching owners/investors in energy-efficient technologies and property.

I agree that a "cheap oil peak" will occur and I acknowledge that the date of such a peak is not predictable since it depends on so many unknown and uncontrolled variables. Price fluctuations alone have serious economic consequences, even if the increase is not permanent.

Malthus: We will all die of starvation. Till someone figured out fertilizers, genetics, and alternate crops.

Club of Rome: We are going to run out of all metals and energy in twenty years. Till someone figured out induced polarization, gravity gradients and alternate energy sources.

Kunstler: The sky is falling. Till someone figures out methane hydrate, heavy oil, thin seam coal and on and on.

The probability is that we will have evolved ourselves into an entirely different species before we run out of fuels. Think of the entire earth as a series of carbon oxidation/reduction cycles powered by the sun. Some are more efficient than others, oil versus wood would be a simple example. Yes we will have changes of fuel sources from time to time, but it will be on the average so slow that little change will be apparent in one lifetime.

Mr. Kunstler has entirely to much time on his hands and has let his mind wander into the land of the Boojums. Besides that is the way he makes his living so he can have the Caddy, beach house and a mistress or two.

Hmm, interesting question. I will try to craft something better than my usual blovia. I herewith set aside some time to focus and do that. GAHD, dialup is a VASTE uff mein TIME!

Solid commentary from other folks above; there is in history a pretty impressive pattern of bell curves nestling adjacent (and adjuvant) to one another, no matter what. The trick is to look laterally into the need, not moan about the decline. Most of these historic examples are for things like raw materials and goods. I am not sure if anyone has done a decent series of curves dealing with the transition from draft animals to coal/steam, or steam to oil/electricity--maybe the estimable Neal Stephenson has.

There was a Hubbert peak for magnetite and hematite--good iron ore--too. We still make things out of iron; and we choose better materials than iron. Energy is different, of course, but how much so?

Don Lancaster turned me onto the notion of thinking of a day's pay, or a week's or a month's, as how many gallons of 87 octane gasoline it buys; and then remembering that gasoline is very high density energy storage, but that electricity is the highest quality energy.

And it's still a crime (economically, environmentally) to turn one into the other and back again.

Tech geeks had a joke that made the rounds a while back. "How did God manage to create the world in six days?" "Easy--he didn't have an installed base."

The heralded "hydrogen economy" is a clear view mistaken for a short distance to a tall mountaintop, and it is probably the wrong mountain; I say: better to build good nukes (as China is doing), then be creative in making things that work with regular gas tanks and pipelines, and diligent about dealing with the radwaste. It's nasty? Not as nasty as the life of a 1750 collier, or a peasant in 1300. Believe that the waste is nasty, and treat it with respect, like a loaded gun. Make the storage scary looking. Fire the guards when they get bored. Lather, rinse, repeat. We can do this. We kind of have to.

So let's say, short term (and by that I mean starting right now, ramping up for five years, for at least 15 years of this), that the bullet is bit, that the belt is tightened.

Fuel will be a premium item in this scenario; The vintage catchphrase "is this trip necessary?" is now back in vogue.

So more people will grow fresher food that isn't shipped as far? Maybe so. That doesn't inherently imply there will be a rising tide of broken-backed, toothless grub-muckers. They could even be healthier than me--hell, I might even get healthier than I am now. Remember the "service economy?" Maybe a synthesis technopeasantry will be viable. The big tradeoff is a resurgence of the old "what's in season?" awareness my mom used to need to have; we're not talking kwashiorkor or ricketts here.

A sheaf of approaches is called for. One good thing about real free markets is that they allow for the emergence of a sheaf of strategies that central planning doesn't. Prices are signals, etc., yadda yadda.

It astounds me that, (today), gasoline can get all the way to the corner store at a total cost of something like one quart of gasoline expended per gallon delivered. That's total cost, working backward from the truck that delivered it to the Quik-E-Martians all the way to helo-ing the crew of roughnecks out to the oil rig.

Astounding. And that 1:4 is a ratio unlikely to change for the worse as long as the infrastructure can be maintained in decent shape, even if sweet crude oil hits $200/bbl. Let's see the hydrogen economy deliver that ratio. I don't see it yet.

Deeper than that are the "water wars" that might be coming in parts of the world.

"Brother, we are heading for the hundred-dollar hamburger--for the barter-only hamburger. [But] [t]his is only a nuisance... as long as there is plenty of hamburger." --Robert A. Heinlein

Without water, no hamburger; never mind those inconvenient Sunday cattle drives through Manhattan, as the Pennsylvanians vie with the Long Islanders to wrangle them dogies to their Central Park abbatoir destiny--a bit like Tyler's vision in Fight Club, only we're still the cowboys, we're not the Indians drying jerky on abandoned freeways.

Beef can deliver itself. Move to the Great Lakes, bunkie!

Conspiracy theories that never tire of generically stating that 'its all hype, and there are profit-motivated forces that have it all under wraps, just waiting to rape society at the most inopportune moment' are poppycock.

Hubbert's Peak is plain and simple mathematics, nothing more, nothing less. Its application accurately modelled the Gold Rush Era of California from 1849 onward. It accurately on a local scale models the flow of oil from the most mature oil fields of Texas, Louisiana, California and even Alaska. It has predicted the output of copper in this country, has predicted the rise and fall of phosphate fertilizers in Caribbean archipelagos, has worked amazingly well to model potential hydropower exploitation and other such systems.

But the more salient point that Cicero has posited is that Kunstler is posing a bleak future based on the knee-jerk connect-the-dots consequences of a vastly more expensive petroenergy resource on American and Western civilisation. There are no fat oil cats out there just 'waiting in the wings' to pop a colossal new oil field, or hundred of them, to be sure. There will be new oil discoveries, of course. And there will be a lot of hype about their size, their potential to save the world and other such hogwash. But truth is hard: most of the world's known reserves are beginning to decline in production, except for a very few.

Some, such as Canada's (and did you know Venuzuela's?) vast tracts of tarry-oil-soaked gravels haven't been tapped in any meaninful quantity. And if one is to believe the geologists and petrologists ... there's an AWEFUL lot of coal down there. Which can be gassified by late 19th century methods into both gaseous and liquid fuels comparable to what we are using today. [The Germans in the 1920's and 1930's developed very good coal-conversion processes, due to their being cut off from middle-eastern and Russian oil ... by their enemies.]

But.

Even these resources are subject to eventual depletion. It takes 175,000 oil wells in America to pump only 5.7 million barrels/day. See DeptOfEnergy:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html

Allow me to quote for convenience:

U.S. crude oil production, which declined following the oil price collapse of late 1985/early 1986, leveled off in the mid-1990s, and began falling again following the sharp decline in oil prices of late 1997/early 1998. During 2003, the United States produced around 7.8 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of oil, of which 5.7 million bbl/d was crude oil, and the rest natural gas liquids and other liquids. U.S. total oil production in 2003 declined sharply (around 2.8 million bbl/d, or 26%) from the 10.6 million bbl/d averaged in 1985. U.S. crude production, which averaged 5.4 million bbl/d during the first ten months of 2004, is now at 50-year lows.

The United States contains over 500,000 producing oil wells, the vast majority of which are considered "marginal" or "stripper" wells, generally producing only a few barrels per day of oil. During 2003, top oil producing areas included the Gulf of Mexico (1.6 million bbl/d), Texas onshore (1.1 million bbl/d), Alaska's North Slope (949,000 bbl/d), California (683,000 bbl/d), Louisiana onshore (244,000 bbl/d), Oklahoma (178,000 bbl/d), and Wyoming (143,000 bbl/d).

Lower-48 States oil production in 2004 is estimated to have decreased by 130,000 bbl/d, to 4.58 million barrels per day, in 2004, with an increase of 190,000 bbl/d expected in 2005. Generally speaking, Lower-48 onshore production, particularly in Texas, has fallen in recent years, while offshore (mainly Gulf of Mexico) production is rising. For 2004, prior to Hurricane Ivan in mid-September, Gulf of Mexico oil production had been expected to increase both from new fields that came online in late 2003 as well as from start-ups at the southern Green Canyon deepwater area in late 2004. By late 2005, the Mars, Mad Dog, Ursa, Thunder Horse and Nakika Federal Offshore fields are expected to account for about 12% of Lower-48 oil production.

The point though is that oil production is inexorably in decline in America. Yes, there is an "economic component" - when the price per barrel is driven too low, it simply makes no sense to pump it out of the ground for more money than the product is worth. And contrarily.

______________________

Moving to Cicero's implied Question

What really is going to happen? Petrological discoveries, drilling and extraction advances, profitable exploitation market dynamics, novel near-line sources, chemical conversion methods ... will serve to keep fuels in production for quite awhile. Yet, the "economic crunch" will likely be felt first, and develop into a full-blown 'world-wide energy Flu', which due to Hubbert's predictive curve, won't "go away". Energy will become truely expensive, which in turn will drop (or fairly share) demand to match supply.

Today, in America gasoline is running $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon. In Europe, it is between €0.90 to €1.15 a litre. With exchange rates being what they are, that figures to $4.75 to $5.50 a gallon. Well, they do have higher taxes on fuels.

As China's, India's, Pakistan's, Iran's, Afrika's, Central and South America's demand inexorably increases (and with the first two, not just inexorably, but alarmingly) ... the demand is going to push crude prices into uncharted territory. Today the BBL goes for $50 in round numbers. It wasn't even $20 two years ago. It may be a blip, but I will go on an limb and expect that crude will rise to $100 to $200 a barrel in the next 20 years. Permanently.

The net of that will be that it will cost $8.00 to $12.00 a gallon in today's dollars for motor fuel. What will that give rise to?

As Cicero points out, zero-commute and only-when-absolutely-necessary transportation (and public trans) will become the norm. Hydrogen -- even if ultimately provided by the unstoppable sun -- won't come fast enough, and be a big enough factor to really change this future. It will mitigate it, but not really avoid it.

Missed though were the "echos of the 1970's" analysis. For the OPEC orchestrated Oil Crisis of 1973 was seminal in changing American transportation (and other energy related) dynamics for nearly a decade. The Oil Shock sent deep reverberations through all levels of society. Suddenly it wasn't hip to buy a big ol Ford GTO with a 7.5 liter engine and a 3 ton frame. 12 MPG. Toyota, Datsun, Honda ... they were in the ascendent as in no other era. Cars that literally felt like motorized aluminum beer cans, and got 35 to 40 miles per gallon, were the rage. And they kind of stayed that way until the SUV era.

But with inflation, the increased earnings of the average Joe, the relative stability of gas prices at the pump from 1980 through 2000, the "real cost" of gas became cheaper than at any time since the price wars of the late 1950's and 1960's. Relative to one's wage, $1.19 a gallon (the 1995 average) was like $0.15 a gallon in 1960. Cheap.

As the real price of fuel rises, so will the 'economy become king' mentality enter back into the marketplace. People will consider buying the hybrids more. They will consider the advantages of small, compact, light-weight, and energy-miserly vehicles. They'll drive them less, take fewer useless 15 mile trips down Ventura Blvd to buy a loaf of Artisan Bread and half gallon of Organic Clover milk. Hey kids, get on that scooter and go get a gallon of milk and a loaf of Wonder, would ya? And stop bellyaching about it. Gasoline (rubber, asbestos, carbon-dioxide, carcinogens) zero, Aerobic Exercise, one.

I look back on my childhood, and realize there is nothing particularly special about it that is incompatible with the world of today. Mother walked to stores, and patronized those that were close. We had but one car, and it was enough. Dad walked to work, or when the weather was inclement, mom drove him. He would get a ride home from one of the other teachers. We boys had bikes that actually had to have their worn-down tires replaced not infrequently. They were used, well used. There was no question that to get to the library was done by pedal-power, and that only the rich-brats would be driven to school in the morning. I was a skinny kid that read a lot, ran a lot, rode my bike a lot, got skinned up a lot, and kind of looked forward to taking the walk to the "corner store" to pick up some milk for breakfast.

My friend today has taken the energy-bull by the horns. He lives across the Bay from San Francisco, but uses his bike and the local ferry to commute to work, unless its actually snowing or worse. [It never snows in the Bay Area.] Berkeley has put in hundreds of miles (no exaggeration) of bike paths, lanes, special road adornments. They're everywhere, and they're in good company.

But we can't in the end do 'utterly without' use of the road fuels. Trucks bring vegies to market by truck, they move things around, they get stuff from ships to distribution centers, to stores, to me. Trains and ships are just about at the acme of their efficiency, and can't really be improved upon much. Or used less. If anything, the'll come into greater demand and use as people depend on them more for cheapened transportation, as well as product delivery.

The mouldering coal industry is going to get a big kick in the pants, at the same time. At $5.00 a gallon (American, no change in taxes, constant 2000 dollars), it becomes quite attractive to invest the billions necessary to sprout a German styled coal-gassification plant. Or a turkey-guts to diesel biofuel plant. Or to grow a bazillion acres of bio-hemp to make wood alcohol. Or to begin to plant the vast tracts of the arid southwest with water-miserly 'petrol bushes'.

As the price of all 'therm-neutral' fuels (price-equalized by the potential-energy per 'therm' unit) rises, consumers will think twice before dismissing having a wood-pellet furnace, or voting down a municipal refuse-recovery project to ferment all the city garbage into natural gas. Economics will drive the change, even if the ultimate cost is that we're paying a higher fraction of our economy to fuel supply and demand.

A thousand square miles of photovoltaic (solar cell) power is estimated to be the 100% replacement quantity required if somehow it all could be transformed into hydrogen, and all other hydrocarbon sources had become rarities. [It makes a lot more sense to extract it from natural gas and coal when they are moderately plentiful.]

Technologists will discover ways to store vastly more hydrogen, more safely, and more quickly for portable (vehicular) use as demand for the technology rises. Aluminum will replace iron, composites will replace aluminum, plastic panels will replace silver siding. Oil will gradually become less and less used for fuel, and will become a feed-chemical for the "rest of industry" which it today powers. They'll always be plenty for that, and supposing otherwise, the quantities we need can be raised as pecialized plants.

Places such as the Southwest, virtually awash in sunlight, will be transformed into the ultimate energy-efficient oases. R-values will go up rapidly to the point were entire houses will be as efficient as Frigidare Deep Freezers. One model house at the University of New Mexico requires only 1 kilowatt-hour a day for its lighting, cooling, winter-heating and 'thermal budget'. It can be done.

The South isn't going to revert to Bayou Lawless Barbary. It has a more difficult time with heat, due to humidity ... but ultimately, will be able to seriously conserve when required. The sustained high price of fuels will be what drives the equation. People will find having a gasoline-tank lock is useful though. [American cars only got those in the 1970's when roving bands of teen-agers would siphon dry any vehicle they thought they could get away with.]

Telecommuting? Sure. But nothing realy replaces the human-interaction component at work. Workplaces might not be 'centered' in large megopolis centers though: apart from wandering the streets of San Francisco at lunch time to secure an overpriced sammy, virtually NO one is utilizing the close proximity of buildings to 'do business'. That which happens in the hallowed halls of 333 Bush street, 20th through 33rd floor (a large Law firm), can happen just as effectively in San Leandro, Concord, Walnut Creek, Oakland, or in essence, in any of the 'bedroom communities' fo the Bay Area. And so too does this microcosm reflect on the large economic and social mechanism for resolution: highly concentrated cities will begin to evaporate. Or, people will begin to MOVE INTO THEM ... so as to defy the constraints of long commutes.

Will "small-town America" see a renaissance? I think not. Small-town America suffers from being too far from anything except the farmlands that surroud them to be efficient in any 'global community' sense. If I'm spelling DOOM with a capital D, then understand that isn't all bad either.

The size of 'small-town America' has always been governed by the needs and requirements of the localized economy and the profitability of the agricultural, industrial, craft and derivative enterprise therein. Yet today, a single farmer and NO hired hands (for the day) can plough 250+ acres, can mow 500+ acres of alfalfa, and so on. The number of people necessary to run a farm has been dramatically decreasing with modern industrial application of technology and processes to the land. The small towns that in turn are complimentary in providing services, venues, churches, hospitals, accounting, drayage and supplies to the farming community in turn needs not to be anywhere near the size once required. So, small-town America is in the decline.

It will stabilize though, as the attractiveness of living in tiny, globally-connected, brilliantly inexpensive near-retirement communities becomes known to a few 'reverse pioneers'. Downtown Marysville Kansas (today almost a ghost-town due to 'flight'), will perk back up a bit maybe. But Pawnee City 40 miles away will simply evaporate, being too small, too close to other more significant - if also small - towns. Today, somewhat surprisingly, one can travel south on old Highway 101 (California's first great North-South freeway), and find a lot of ghost-towns only a minute or two off the highway supposedly "caused" by the negative impact of the freeway on their parasitic through-traffic economies of older days.

Rail is going to see a decided recovery - but it is going to be a slow development due to infrastructural decay issues.

For instance, in the fine old berg of Alameda we had "streetcar" rails running up and down all the main streets of town, dating back to the 1900-1940's. There had been rails, wooden sidewalks, gravel, cement walkways and lots of track. The 'industrial' side of town had a LOT of well used track; we had a cannery, a bunch of maritime boatwrights and other semi-heavy [requiring rail] businesses. They've all evaporated due to truck, due to growing old and being more valuable as condominium pads, being victims of 'out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new' urban planning. The rail has been pulled up, it is gone.

How does pervasive rail come back? Well, it takes awhile, and it clearly wouldn't be built up on the same theory of operation. But there are good uses for it, especially if made more efficient through the tactical deployment of short-haul trucking depots.

Anyway, I've ranted long enough.

The world will evolve past Hubbert's Peak, and well beyond into the land of renewable, ecology-neutral energy systems.

GoatGuy

What I don't understand is the opinion that the future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US.

Many countires, like Japan and South Korea, for example depend on US consumption to hold up their economies. Even with their touted "higher" energy efficiencies, I'm not so sure that they could weather a true energy crisis any better then the US. Who are they going to sell their widgets to?

More simply stated perhaps....
We can do without our luxuries easier than they can do without there necessities.

What about the oil producing countries, like Saudi Arabia? They will still likely have oil, but what are they going to feed their people of the global economy collapses? They can't eat oil or dollars. Who's going to be growing and shipping them food?

The deeper point is that the world economy is very complicated and very interconnected and most of these "analyses" don't seem to appreciate that.

"What I don't understand is the opinion that the future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US."

The future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US because the US disproportionately consumes petroleum (~25% of world supply). Certainly none of us here is smart enough to disentangle the web of consequences, intended and unintended, from the end of cheap oil but soon enough, pretty much everybody will be doing their best effort to understand and adapt, imperfect as our efforts will be.

My personal efforts to conserve energy have already had major economic effect. While my co-workers buy a new SUV every 3 years, I ride my bicycle and put the extra ~7K a year into rental property investments. I own 3 rental properties free and clear, while my co-workers have car payments and Visa bills. Those who direct their resources into productive areas rather than waste and consumption have always benefited.
My house was remodeled for passive solar and energy efficiency about 15 years ago, offering a much better rate of return than any CD or stock purchase.

Evolution says "adapt or die". SUV/suburbia is an evolutionary dead end, an economic "dead man walking".

One solution to diminishing energy resources is world war. If the emerging economies of China and India were laid waste with nuclear fire, demand for oil would drop precipitously.

Tom, You really didn't answer my question. Sure the US use 25% of the world's petroleum, it also is 30% of the world economy. Others will fell the pain too.

The SUV maybe dead. The jury is still out on suburbs. That's a LOT of infrastucture to just throw away. There will be some form of personal transportion, much less dependent on oil. You can count on that.

There we be no quick change to some urban utopia. The prices are already sky high to live in cities. Those prices will only go higher should those areas become even more desirable.

Congrats on your capitalist pursuits! How many rental properties must you have before you reach the "evil" capitalist category? ;-)

lurker
You beat me to it. My sentiments exactly.

"What I don't understand is the opinion that the future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US."

Could it be we are the bad folks so we deserve a fate more harsh than others? Not sure but I have often wondered the same thing.

Tom
Where do you get the information to support such claims?

"The most oil-dependent nation is following policies (tax breaks for huge SUVs, massive investment in new roads, auto-dependent design of almost all new development) which guarantee even greater future dependency."

Please tell me where I get a tax break for owning an SUV and I'll amend my returns for those years.

Here is a link to the Energy Information Administration that I posted in a previous thread. I know it's a government site so the skepticism will be proportional to one's beliefs. I would think that one's skepticism would be fraught with the same amount of vigor and scrutiny as any information that goes against it.

With all the pessimistic outlooks though maybe it's time for me to start raising horses and do things the old fashioned way.

Please tell me where I get a tax break for owning an SUV and I'll amend my returns for those years.

"Evil Capitalist" has to do with the quality of operation, not the quantity.
One can be "evil" at any scale of capitalist endeavour (or the converse).
Recognizing the practical limits of markets and supporting a reasonable division between the public and private spheres does not stop me from participating in markets. Probably no one on the planet, even in North Korea, can avoid market interactions. To paraphrase (and lazily misquote) Amory Lovins, "Markets make a good servant, a poor master, and a terrible religion".
Markets perform excellently in many (most?) areas, but no place on Earth has completely "free" markets. Markets are always defined and limited by government action (whether the "government" is a Mob boss or a bureaucrat) and some areas of life are always defined as outside the market.
Market failures are obvious to any objective observer (cod fishery collapse, passenger pigeon extinction, 20,000 dead at Bhopal,etc.,etc.) as are government failures.
Sorry if I gave a dead serious response to a joking question, but it is one conservatives friends often ask...

US infrastructure and economy are designed and built around oil consumption to a greater degree than other countries, so the transition away from cheap oil should be bigger and more difficult. I would be very happy to be proved wrong. The tech skills and dynamism of the US economy could be a huge advantage in the transition if they were unleashed by modifying the current tax/regulatory incentive structure.
As I mentioned in other posts, modifying building/zoning codes away from mandated car-dependence could do much to make more dense urban development much more affordable. Each mandated car parking space adds about ~25% to the cost of an urban housing unit, and most municipalities require 2 parking spaces per unit. So just removing the parking mandate could reduce urban housing costs by up to 50%,etc.,etc.

Tax Break For Large SUVs

Note the minimum 6,000 lbs weight standard...

The notion that we're going to face an "energy crisis" of such dimensions as to cause the United States to fragment into lawless, ungovernable territories ought to be ludicrous on its face.

We have more than adequate sources of energy supplies - nuclear, clean coal, oil shale, "uneconomic" oil reserves, etc. What we lack are sources that are cheaper than the oil prices that obtained from roughly 1985-2000. If economic actors become convinced that oil prices are going to increase substantially over the next 10 years, many of these sources of supply will be brought into production. Moreover, the substitution will not happen evenly across the economy. Some activities (electricity generation) can readily substitute for oil. Others (plastics) would find substitution extremely difficult. And some (transportation) fall somewhere in between.

No doubt, this kind of change in our energy input will have far reaching economic and social consequences - the change from coal to oil in the early 20th century certainly did. But it will take decades for those trends to play out, and the end result is likely to be a higher tech, more energy efficient economy than we started with, not some devolution to a neo-agrarian America.

What I don't understand is the opinion that the future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US.

lots of other nations will suffer as well, but the combined high standard of living for Americans combined with our extreme dependence upon the profiglate use of oil to sustain that standard of living means that Americas standard of living will take a disproportionate hit.

The real problem, as I see it, is that the American economic sucess story is based on constantly expanding markets --- yet in order for new markets to develop, they will need access to a larger share of a petroleum product pool that isn't getting bigger any time soon.

That being said, I don't see an economic apocalypse coming about because of Hubbard's Peak, because US economic fundamentals are so twisted right now that the apocalypse will come much sooner. In other words, the eventual recovery from the next Great Depression will include adaptation to the reality of the limitations of petroleum production potential. We

Tom Volckhausen wrote on April 20, 2005 07:12 PM

One large explosion in Saudi Arabia's major refining/transhipment facilities could end "cheap oil" instantly, perhaps never to return. In this scenario, the US would be caught with its' economic pants around its' ankles, and the resale value of SUVs and exurbia would plummet very quickly. The market would "adapt" to the situation by impoverishing millions of Americans, while simultaneously enriching owners/investors in energy-efficient technologies and property.

Price fluctuations alone have serious economic consequences, even if the increase is not permanent.

Ah, yes, my rosy scenario for the oil peak didn't really acknowledge the pain that would come from a rapid, cold-turkey oil supply cut off. True. It would suck, the economy would suffer big time, etc. etc. Thank god for the USMC, the strategic oil reserve and a US President willing to use them. (And no, it is not very moral to steal our oil. Luckily we don't have to do that now, and hopefully we won't ever have to)

Aside from a political causal agent disrupting the oil markets, I don't see the oil peak producing anything but a more gradual change.

Should we have some insurance against a sudden oil supply cut off? Yes. I haven't worked the numbers but I suspect that the strategic reserve isn't quite sufficient.

Tom / luker

Like you I noticed it was to be written off as a business expense however there is more to the story At any rate the point is not everyone can write off an SUV.

"The tax provision's original intent back in the 1970s was to enable small farmers and self-employed workers to buy a truck or van without having to fork over the luxury car tax that was then in effect and has since expired. At the time, it made perfect sense to qualify the vehicles by weight because no luxury cars exceeded the 6,000-pound gross vehicle weight threshold."

Not to worry though the laws are being changed. What's worse is how dare any business man buy an SUV and use it for business purposes. We all know that small farmers and self employed workers could never afford such luxuries and would only buy the worst gas guzzlers of all pick up trucks, tractors, etc. (pick your favorite). We all know they need special tax provisions to remain viable in business.

While we are on the subject of taxes. Try doing a search at the IRS using alternative fuel or alternative energy as the criteria.

BTW - Tom good luck with your rental properties from the sweat and effort you put into attaining them you deserve the rewards of your labor. Do they qualify for low income housing?

Loss of Saudi oil production is not far-fetched. IMO it is LIKELY within about ten years, though it will be temporary (4-6 years from loss to restoration of pre-collapse production).

As of December 2003, only 3% of its Saudi-born population were gainfully employed according to official statistics of the Saudi Labor Ministry. Instead they have about 5-6 million foreign workers do almost everything. This was due to the Saud clan discouraging local labor force participation as a means of political control - they wanted as many of their people as possible to be dependent on the Saud clan aka regime.

So the Saud population consists of useless, untrained parasites with no work ethic or skills, let alone those necessary to maintain a civil infrastructure in one of the world's most unforgiving environments. Here is a scenario for Saudi collapse which I posted months ago here:

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/005495.php#c111

Saudi Collapse Sequence

When the Saud regime collapses, the ensuing sequence of events will probably look like this:

1) Oil prices will immediately go through the roof - $80-$100/barrel even if production remains steady.

2) Several million foreign workers there (IMO less than half the total) will leave in the six months following. So will almost all of the Saud clan with money. A fair number of the latter will go to Kuwait.

3) The first replacement regime should last at least six months. Then things will get really confusing.

4) Once the regime of the week club starts meeting, most of the remaining foreign workers will leave.

5) Then the whole economy will tank as the foreign workers are essential. And the Saud labor force, such as it is, lacks the skills to operate the civil or oil extraction/export infrastructure.

6) At which point the tidal wave of refugees will start. This will happen sooner if there is widespread disorder or violence. These refugees will flood over the Persian Gulf states, which will likely collapse too but more slowly (unless we take those over, which might happen) and possibly Kuwait.

7) Several million people will die in what is now called Saudi Arabia in the 2-5 years following termination of the Saud regime. Several times that number of the locally born will flee to other countries. Not to mention something like 5-8 million foreign workers, i.e., the locally & foreign born population of Saudi Arabia will collapse from about 24-26 million today to something between 10-12 million in the 2-5 years following termination of the Saud regime.

8) The world's economy will suffer horribly from an oil shock (@ $100/barrel) of at least several years duration.

My concern is that oil will get too expensive too fast and alternatives will be insufficiently developed. Since demand for oil in the United States is fairly inelastic--it's not easy for most people to just take public transportation, for instance--we'll feel some pain. I don't see oil sands, for instance, getting up to snuff in time. Hydrogren sounds like a boondoggle at present, since it would be produced by natural gas or coal. Nukes I have no problem with but they aren't cost-competitive right now.

USMC,
Sure farming is an activity which I am happy to give a tax advantage to, but the papers here had stories from car dealers who were encouraging doctors, lawyers, and dentists to buy Excursions and Hummers to qualify for the tax break. Anecdotal I know, but not really an activity that I think should be tax advantaged.

Our rental properties are not low-income, but the tenants tend to be students or young working adults, just like I was when I was a renter. College towns have a very consistent rental market.

Tom
Lest someone take me as an advocate for taxes personally I don't want to give anyone a tax advantage. I'd rather the tax structure and restrictive laws concerning our energy policies as well as many others be removed and let the market work it's magic.

Tom
Location has a lot to do with your rental properties and being near higher institutions of learning has its' benefits. I wonder though if you would be opposed to the educational facility adding enough dorms to house the students and forcing them to stay there on the premise of energy efficiency.

praktike said: "Hydrogren sounds like a boondoggle at present, since it would be produced by natural gas or coal."

I'm sympathetic to the hydrogen-is-a-boondoggle argument, given the increasing number of references to it in political speeches about energy. See also: ethanol.

But there is some merit to it, or at least that's how it seems after doing some reading on the subject. Gasoline is an energy source, but it's also a portable energy storage medium. That is, you can fill up your tank and drive for 300 miles, at the "cost" of only the weight of the gasoline. It's also easy for an oil company to truck gasoline to stations everywhere, so that you can buy it whenever you need it.

Hydrogen is not an energy source in the sense that gas is - we can't mine hydrogen, we have to manufacture it using electricity from (as praktike said) some other source. On the other hand, a hydrogen fuel cell is very transportable, easy to recharge, etc., so it could play a role similar to gas in transportation. It's also clean, so unlike an internal combustion engine, it lets you concentrate your pollution (and your remediation thereof) at power plants rather than in millions of individual vehicles.

But all that does presuppose that we have good sources of energy to make the electricity in the first place. So the more fundamental questions for a "hydrogen economy" are the ones we're discussing in this thread - what energy sources can be substituted for oil at what price points. Personally, I'd bet that nuclear can substitute at close-to-current price levels (my evidence - the large percentage of French and Japanese nuclear energy, and China's plans to build dozens of reactors). Extrapolating trend lines, it looks like solar will be price competitive within a decade, but I don't know if it will scale to the quantity of power consumed in an industrialized economy.

USMC,
Now that you mention it, Colorado University did just build some new student housing (pleasant and pretty efficient too) which has had an impact on the rental market, but I did not and would not bother opposing it. Any investor is exposed to private and/or public competitors and I try to win on price/performance.

Kuntsler and the rest of the Club of Rome types are a major reason that few intelligent people take environmentalists seriously anymore. We should have all starved to death in the 70s and 80s according to Kuntsler's brothers in arms back in the late 60s, early 70s. Environmentalist propagandists thrive on apocalyptic language, it's the only language they understand.

Having lived in New England, the upper midwest, the Pacific Northwest, the southwest, and the southeast, I must admit that no particular region of the US has a monopoly on resourceful people or on fools. Whatever the oil markets throw at the population of the US, I suspect that most parts of the country with the exception of the larger inner cities, will survive fairly well.

From my recent travels, my opinions about Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa are not so sanguine.

Commenters,

The main point of the essay was to highlight the unfortunate reality of people like Kunstler: The man's brilliant, and academic, and has many salient points about suburbia and our evolving into a wasteful culture. I grok what he's saying.

Cheap oil from abroad made us what we are, combined with our ingenuity using all the nice energy it gave us. But if the Hubbert curve is correct, we built a world upon a mirage.

What bugs me about people like Kunstler is that, yet again, here's another bright guy with a sharp eye concluding that the only way to fix things is to revert back to farming and undo the last 60 to 100 years. I call people like him 'reversionists', since they want to revert back to verdant days. Whenever that was.

Rats. I was hoping that part of Kunstler's brilliance might be a positive view on what we are, and how to take it to the next level. Maybe I'm just stuck on attitude. Suburbia as we know it might need to adjust in the face of energy concerns. But it needn't be done to promote some kind of pseudo-socialist agrarian utopia. Kunstler loses his audience by veering off into the self-hatred camp. Everything I read of his made me think that his most ardent hope is that all the bleakness he foresees actually comes true, so he can say 'I told you so' and have his theories proved. Having Valley Girls dropping like flies must give him some very pleasant dreams.

I don't know how to build off of his facts and figures. Reading Kunstler only advises me to by my casket before the rush.

Doug,

It is necessary to differentiate production of energy in a useable form from distribution of energy in a useable form. And to differentiate both from mitigation of the adverse environmental effects of either (production/distribution).

The maximum possible conversion of the heat energy in fossil fuel into useable energy seems to be about 70-80%, and slightly lower for doing so on a really large scale - say about 65-70%. This also seems to be true for conversion of the heat energy produced by nuclear fission into useable energy.

Here's an example of both, using the magnetohydrodynamic process (MHD). Electricity is produced by movement of an electrically conductive substance through a magnetic field, with the electricity produced being drawn off by a means not germane here.

Almost all electric power plants today produce electricity by rotating an iron bar in a magnetic field. Hydroelectric plants drop water a great distance (conversion of gravitational energy) to drive turbines which rotate the iron bars. Fossil fuel plants of all sorts generally burn the fuel to generate heat which is used to turn water into steam, and the steam is used to drive turbines which rotate the iron bars.

Relatively recently produced gas turbine plants burn natural gas at high temperatures which use the resulting hot gases to drive turbines. Then the cooled gas is used to heat water into steam to drive traditional steam turbines. This makes such plants relatively more efficient than steam turbine plants in conversion of fossil fuel energy into useable electric power.

Both traditional steam-turbine only and dual gas/steam turbine plants can improve their efficiency somewhat by adding a final stage - heat exchangers - to convert a bit more heat energy into electricity.

MHD plants put a first stage on top of all this. All necessary experimentation was done 35+ years ago. They first burn the fuel so high it forms a plasma (a gas heated to a temperature so high most electrons are stripped from the gas atoms, creating a soup of mostly nuclei and free electrons) and squirt the by then electrically conductive plasma through a magnetic field. This process has an added advantage in that undesirable pollutants can be drawn off by magnetic separators into commericially saleable quantities of pure industrial elements such as sulphur, carbon, etc.

Then the plasma cools into a very hot gas which is used to drive a gas turbine, and then used to heat water for steam turbines, and finally passed through a heat exchanger.

Conversion of the heat energy in fossil fuel into useable energy is done most efficiently, in terms of financial expense, energy efficiency, and reduction of undesirable pollutants, at really big power plants.

Gasoline is so attractive as a vehicle fuel because it offers the best currently available tradeoffs, in terms of financial expense, of both distribution and conversion of fossil fuel heat energy into motive power. Its major drawbacks are that gasoline engines are a relatively inefficient means of energy conversion and also quite polluting. Ease of distillation and distribution are the most attractive features of gasoline as a vehicle fuel.

I have some knowledge concerning nuclear (fission) power plants. It is possible to build those in a relatively safe and, in terms of construction & operating expense relative to electrical output, cost-effective manner. France has proven this. America is unable to do so solely for domestic political reasons.

The major drawback to fission power plants is the cost of decommissioning them after their useable life, and in particular of safely storing the highly radioactive fuel waste they generate. Storage costs for the far less potent radioactive waste created by irradiation of inert materials (chiefly the cladding of the fuel canisters/pellets, but also things like the control rods and even the containment shell structural concrete & rebar) is not insignificant, but minor compared to storage of the highly radioactive fuel waste.

The true costs of fission power, per unit of electricity generated, has not been effectively estimated given the many unknowns in the long-term storage costs, but it is certain that those costs, properly amortized, far, far exceed the amortized construction and life-time operating expense of the plants.

IMO fisson power plants are presented as financially feasible only by ignoring their post-closure expenses.

IMO the hydrogen fuel concept is mostly if not entirely a means of distributing energy produced elsewhere, and secondarily a means of converting its stored energy into motive power in an energy-efficient and almost completely non-polluting fashion. There was a real expert who disputed this in a WOC thread within the past year. He contended that the hydrogen fuel concept was also a means of generating energy ab initio, but I gathered that his opinion was based on technology which was commercially unproven.

Cicero

"I don't know how to build off of his facts and figures. Reading Kunstler only advises me to by my casket before the rush."

I guess what I find most disturbing is that the doom and gloom he foresees will hit suburbia the hardest and harshest. I've read several comments that seem to agree with that analysis.

IMO it is the other way around. Those closest to the resources necessary for survival will fair much better. Those consolidated and farther from those resources will fair worse.

Personally I don't foresee the decline to the point man will be rubbing two sticks together to make a fire. This however seems to fall inline with bleakest of moments that Kunstler would have us believe. Further more Kunstler would have us believe that we will suffer the worst because we have the most to loose. Not only that but others on the earth will fair better because they are taking alternative approaches to the energy crisis and are well beyond our current ability to deal with it. Personally I think that is a bunch of hogwash as well.

The question of will we be reduced to man or horse power in the literal sense of creating energy for our needs (although a valid one) I believe is lacking in his analysis. As the horse once turned the stones of mills, will man be forced to use physical rotary power to operate his radio? Very doubtful if you ask me.

USMC, Kunstler and his ilk seem to have a grudge against suburbia based less on the wastelessness of energy so much as a class bias against the kind of people who live in suburbia. Many of us are just so tacky!

Why do people live in suburbia?

It's what they can afford, and it's what they want. People are not forced there at gunpoint, they want to live there. In Southern California only the most distant suburbs are affordable, unless you want the crime/gang ridden hell holes of South Central. Gentrification in places like gritty Echo Park and Chinatown are a reality, even Downtown is seeing this happen as people are hungry for anything affordable and put up with the crime, feces, urine, homeless, etc. [Downtown LA is home to the Central Jail and numerous Skid Row related government departments and charities]

Unless suddenly God starts manufacturing a whole lotta open land near downtowns, I don't see families deciding to rent at high prices for not much and trading in their own houses. It's true that it's hard to be tragically hip with a mortgage and backyard, but that's the American Dream for a lot of people.

IMO it is the other way around. Those closest to the resources necessary for survival will fair much better. Those consolidated and farther from those resources will fair worse.

But is a suburban home really self sustaining? Certainly, someone who lives in the classic "Levittown" model with its detached houses on quarter acres lots will not be able to sustain themselves. The McMansions being built on five acre lots might provide enough food for an average family....but that's about it. How will these people earn money to buy other necessities, with gasoline so difficult to come by for private automobiles that can get them to and from a job?

In reality, if there is some kind of economic apocalypse, the most likely eventuality will be that those who don't own their McMansions free and clear will lose them in the initial stages, and these homes will eventually be taken over by squatters as the institutions that held the mortgages go bankrupt, and property reverts to the government entity that backed them in the first place. That's why I don't think that Kunstler's seemingly absurdist scenario is that far from a reasonable projection of the future.

The nice part of living in an urban environment is that you will be able to walk to the bread lines and soup kitchens.... :)

There are many ways that people could adpat to sharp increases in fuel prices. These adaptations may well by all that is necessary to bridge over to some technological (new personal transportation or fuel technologies) or infrastructure (mass transit?) solutions.

Let's assume that the average number of passengers in a car for comuting to work is very close to 1. If we could get that average to 2, that DOUBLES efficiency. Getting to 3 would triple it.

You could start with simple car pools. From there it's easy to visualize a self organizing hub/spoke network of car pools to get people everywhere they need to go. The Web would make coordinating this very easy. Cell phones and GPS would make it easy to to divert to pick up others while in route.

In most average suburbs, it should be pretty easy to get the average number of passengers close to 4. That's quadrupled efficiency with almost ZERO extra infraustructure. People smarter than me are going to come uo with even better ideas. Count on it. Cars are expensive; BUT, they are very flexible. So are Americans.

Eventually, alternatives for personal transportation will imerge. I have 100% confidence in this because there is NO way that Americans are going to walk away from the trillions upon trillions of dollars of infrastructure that are the suburbs. It is not going to happen.

Glad to see relatively little debate on the reality of the oil-production-peak phenomenon that the book Hubbert's Peak describes. Its author is a geologist and describes the underlying physical reality pretty clearly. Worth reading if you're skeptical.

Cicero's right in that Kuntsler's grimly gleeful apocolypse doesn't necessarily follow from Hubbert's premise. The extent to which it does will largely depend on what "we" as a society do in the meantime, and how we handle the price increases in energy as they come.

I admit that I'd feel better if the political leadership of either party gave more than the most cursory attention to such ideas as those discussed on this thread, before retreating to pre-cast ideologies and their attendant cliches.

I read "somewhere" that the off-the-grid electricity at $0.10/kwh used to charge an electric car's batteries works out on a per-mile basis to the equivalent of gasoline at $0.50/gallon. An interesting fact (factoid?) to contemplate. If true, it suggests that there are efficiencies in central electrical generation and transmission that could play a large role in lessoning dependence on gasoline that will be very expensive (by today's $2.50/gal standards).

p.lukasiak: Certainly, someone who lives in the classic "Levittown" model with its detached houses on quarter acres lots will not be able to sustain themselves. The McMansions being built on five acre lots might provide enough food for an average family....but that's about it. How will these people earn money to buy other necessities, with gasoline so difficult to come by for private automobiles that can get them to and from a job?

Do you really see this as a credible prediction of the future? How much would gas prices have to increase to prevent a substantial number of people from being able to afford to drive to work? For comparison, petrol sells in France for more than $5/gal, approximately 100% more than the current US price. One notes that this has not brought economic collapse in the EU, and people are still going to work. So how much of an increase would we need to start this nightmare scenario of suburbanites farming their properties rather than driving to work? 4x? 10x?

It's clear that at some price point, people will substitute other energy/transportation options or adopt radical efficiency measures, such as the 4x carpooling that lurker mentions. For more plausible rates of increase in the price of gasoline, we'll probably see changes in marginal behavior - preferences for slightly more efficient cars, homes slightly closer to work, more frequent use of public transit, etc.

Our market economy is quite a bit more resilient than doomsday theorists like Kunstler (and apparently p.lukasiak) believe. Think about how Los Angeles adapted to the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Despite the loss of significant stretches of interstate highway (i.e. a dramatic overnight increase in the time & cost of commuting), LA remained functional. People & businesses adapted. Nobody starved. A surprising number of people discovered that they could telecommute to their jobs.

Tom Holsinger: The major drawback to fission power plants is the cost of decommissioning them after their useable life, and in particular of safely storing the highly radioactive fuel waste they generate. Storage costs for the far less potent radioactive waste created by irradiation of inert materials (chiefly the cladding of the fuel canisters/pellets, but also things like the control rods and even the containment shell structural concrete & rebar) is not insignificant, but minor compared to storage of the highly radioactive fuel waste.

The true costs of fission power, per unit of electricity generated, has not been effectively estimated given the many unknowns in the long-term storage costs, but it is certain that those costs, properly amortized, far, far exceed the amortized construction and life-time operating expense of the plants.

Interesting post on the mechanics of power production. I suspect you know a lot more about about it than I do. It sounds like we basically agree about the relevance of hydrogen to future energy needs.

Like you, I've never seen a really compelling full-life-cycle cost analysis of a fission plant. But my intuition runs counter to yours as to the likely costs of decomissioning and storing radioactive waste. It's clear that this is a huge political issue, but I'm not sure why it's a big technical issue. Nuclear waste is very compact. One gram of uranium fuel is approximately equal to 20 tons of coal. So we're dealing with miniscule amounts of waste compared to other industrial processes. Likewise nuclear reactors are not very large structures. At NEI, they estimate a few hundred tons waste per year at current US levels.

Even granting that radioactive material is unique in some ways (you don't have to pay for armed guards when you transport the waste from most industrial processes!), it doesn't like a particularly expensive proposition to transport this small quantity of material to a remote location, put it at the bottom of a deep hole, and guard the hole. I don't agree (as the Yucca Mountain court appeals argued) that we need to design nuclear waste storage that's guaranteed to last > 10000 years.

As I said, the issues here seem to be political not technological. If oil quadruples in price, it's going to become much easier to solve those political obstacles.

"Trains and ships are just about at the acme of their efficiency, and can't really be improved upon much"...even if this were true, there would still be significant energy efficiencies possible through shifts among transportation modes (I'm talking about freight here, not passengers) To the extent that fuel becomes more expensive, the relative efficiency advantage of train over truck becomes more compelling. This is also true for barge over truck, and even for barge over train.

Doug,

There are significant differences between amortization tables for a 20 year period and a 2000 year period. Likewise politics gets involved when capital is allocated for long periods. The major driving force for putative energy deregulation in the period 1998-2001 was the desire to free up the capital invested in publically regulated utilities for investment in the higher return technobubble market.

The thousand year plus period required for high-level radioactive waste from fission power plants to safely decay titanically magnifies the political risk to the capital invested in storing the waste. Risk is risk whatever its cause. Here, however, the normal response to capital risk - requiring a higher rate of return, i.e., increasing the price of electricity generated by fission power plants, is not available. Fission power is economically viable only by hiding its long-term costs and risks.

And note my opinion about construction cost and operational safety - our domestic politics dramatically and quite unnecessarily jacks up the former and impairs the latter. That applies in spades to decommissioning expense and safe, economical, storage of high level radioactive waste. Those sure as hell are insuperable barriers in the U.S. due to our weird politics, though they might not be in France or Japan.

p.luk

"How will these people earn money to buy other necessities, with gasoline so difficult to come by for private automobiles that can get them to and from a job?"

The same way those in cities will earn theirs. You seem to believe that city dwellers will be immune as well as the rich. If anything the scenario Kunstler paints will be truly of a non-discriminatory nature. The affliction will be against all. The financial, economic and class boundaries will disappear in the blink of an eye. As for the jobs you speak of; if they were so prominent in the cities everyone would be employed would they not? Seems to me that is a utopia that has not occurred in any city that I am aware of.

"In reality, if there is some kind of economic apocalypse, the most likely eventuality will be that those who don't own their McMansions free and clear will lose them in the initial stages, and these homes will eventually be taken over by squatters as the institutions that held the mortgages go bankrupt, and property reverts to the government entity that backed them in the first place."

And the reversion of such property will help the rightful owners in what manner? And state ownership of said property will help the populace in what manner?

"The nice part of living in an urban environment is that you will be able to walk to the bread lines and soup kitchens."

It is presumptuous to think that there will be bread lines and soup kitchens in the cities if the harshest times befall us all as Kunstler believes. Surly the supplies would dwindle much quicker and people would be standing in line for nothing at all. It is also presumptuous to think that these people would have any jobs worth saving given Kunstler's position.

All of what you propose is based on the assumption that those items of necessity would be readily available in cities. They will all magically appear on the shelves and maintain status quo. What would be the first to go and what would replace it. Milk, bread, and your precious soup all gone.

Do you really see this as a credible prediction of the future? How much would gas prices have to increase to prevent a substantial number of people from being able to afford to drive to work? For comparison, petrol sells in France for more than $5/gal, approximately 100% more than the current US price.

you will note that my comments referred to the scarcity of gasoline ("hard to come by") rather than its price. It would be foolish to believe that "the market" would be permitted to determine who had access to limited gasoline supplies in the event of a shortage --- the far more sensible assumption is that rationing would take place.

The same way those in cities will earn theirs. You seem to believe that city dwellers will be immune as well as the rich. If anything the scenario Kunstler paints will be truly of a non-discriminatory nature. The affliction will be against all.

I don't see cities being immune, but in an oil shortage situation, where the efficient use of oil resources would (rationally, at least) take precedence in public policy decisions over the right of people to self-indulgently waste resources solely because they have the means to, urban areas will have a distinct advantage.

And the reversion of such property will help the rightful owners in what manner? And state ownership of said property will help the populace in what manner?

the "rightful owners" will the government, as more and more of the owners who are up to the neck in debt find themselves unable to pay the mortgage and lose their properties to the banks, and the banks start going bankrupt because the asset value of these homes will decline as the market for them shrinks. (Need I remind you of the Savings and Loan Scandal, which was brought about in large part by a similar decline in the value of business properties?)

Note I'm not saying that "state ownership" is a favorable thing, I'm saying that its not unlikely to happen if there is an "economic apocalypse" (regardless of whether its brought about by oil shortages or not.)

It is presumptuous to think that there will be bread lines and soup kitchens in the cities if the harshest times befall us all as Kunstler believes. Surly the supplies would dwindle much quicker and people would be standing in line for nothing at all.

Surely not, if the alternative is the complete breakdown of civil authority, which would be the inevitable result of having masses of people starving in urban areas.

ALthough Kuntsler's vision appears extremely pessimistic, it assumes that the government will intervene appropriately. The alternative --- to allow laissez faire market forces to rule --- would result in a future that bears a far greater resemblance to the post-apocalyptic dystopia envisioned in films like Mad Max.....

p.luk

"ALthough Kuntsler's vision appears extremely pessimistic, it assumes that the government will intervene appropriately."

Ahh - big brother knows best? So much so that the civil obedience will require the use of scarce resources at the peril of cities. I see it now tanks, jeeps and humvees filling our streets or better yet roaming the country side to make sure those less desirables suffer even more than the desired.

What I don't understand is the opinion that the future petroleum crisis will fall disproportionately on the US.

Petroleum is much more taxed in the EU and Japan. It is something like 70% in the UK. So even a 5 fold increase in crude prices wouldn't double the pump price. It would hurt but it still makes economic sense to do your job. In the US on the other hand petroleum is mildly taxed so a 5 fold increase would more than double petroleum prices and thus would hurt much more.

ps. If you said that the last 3 years had in lowest increase in petrole prices in the UK for the last 15 years i wouldn't say you were right. But i wouldn't say you were wrong either. I don't think anybody would say that about US prices

Doug:  The world is literally awash in energy; the problem is capturing and converting it in a cost-effective way.  Annual energy consumption of the USA (primary energy from all sources) is roughly 100 quads, but something like 500 quads of sunlight falls on our roofs, roads and other impervious area.  There is also ~1 terawatt of wind energy potential across the country, and that's just ground-based.  Can we make effective use of this?  Maybe not... but it's certainly there.

Tom Holsinger is very confused about the workings of generators, greatly overstates the potential of MHD, and generally needs to study more.

p.lukasiak asks about productivity of 5-acre lots.  It's really no secret; the roof of a McMansion can hold enough PV panels to charge the family's plug-in hybrids for all their local driving.  The real problem is the houses themselves; they are going to need some expen$ive retrofits for additional insulation and much better control of sun in both summer and winter.  This would have been much cheaper to do when they were built; our failure to implement strong energy standards for new construction back in the 1980's is about to hit us with a vengeance.

Getting back to Kunstler... he's wrong about a bunch of things.  South Africa's coal-to-liquids industry is a going concern.  The US has lots of coal, and one of the "clean coal" initiatives of the Bush administration is to promote gasifying (rather than straight powdered-coal combustion) powerplants.  Gasification has huge potential as a bridge, because the product syngas can not only be burned to make electricity, it can be used as a substitute for natural gas or used for methanol synthesis.

IGCC plants were hitting 40% thermal efficiency some years ago.  At least one DOE analyst was projecting 50% efficiency by last year (on what basis, I don't know).  If we can even get to 45%, that's 135% of the electric output on the same input of coal we have now; the difference should be about what we need to power a 5-year crop of plug-in hybrid vehicles.  And that's without mining even one extra pound of coal.

Air-conditioning in the south is bound to be a problem, but you can generate cooling with heat (it's called "absorption cycles") and the south has gobs of sun.  I see roofs full of little steerable mirrors blasting heat onto pylon-mounted receivers, flashing monochlorobenzene to vapor at 200 C to spin small turbines; the condensing vapor at 105 C will boil ammonia-water solutions to supply the cooling for the building and freeze water to ice for the overnight hours.  There's your daytime juice and 24-hour climate control without a drop of oil or dependence on coal.

Transport may be different, but seriously:  how hard is it going to be to electrify the nation's rail lines and run things that way?  When you can stick your 40-foot refrigerated container full of produce on a flatcar, plug it into the 220 VAC converter that's powered by the overhead wire that runs the train, and send it from California or Florida to Chicago, are we really going to miss the long-haul trucks?

This problem is going to be both easier and more difficult to deal with than many people expect.  More difficult, because so many habits of mind are going to have to change; easier, because so much of the actual doing consists of taking proven solutions from elsewhere and elsewhen and pressing them into service.

Technology will change, but society will change first. Look at Iowa's empty towns with empty local stores that once served the farms nearby. The farms are still there, but when transportation got faster (thus cheaper) the stores were bypassed with a drive to cheaper products farther away. With fuel becoming a factor, the little stores will become more efficient again.

Maybe fuel prices will populate the landscape with many small villages (distribution centers) rather than a few big ones, spreading cost evenly over large areas, making America more independent (because impact of external economic forces will have to compete with revitalized local production).

Maybe fuel problems will repopulate the farm belt. Oh no! That means more red state population!

G.M.

EP..."one of the "clean coal" initiatives of the Bush administration is to promote gasifying (rather than straight powdered-coal combustion) powerplants"...tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe that powdered-coal cannot be used directly in a combined-cycle plant because the coal particles would erode the gas turbine blades, whereas gasified coal should work just fine in such plants. And the combined-cycle plants (gas+steam turbines) offer better efficiency than straight steam (or straight gas), so all other things being equal, gasified coal comes out ahead.

My point about MHD all along has been to refute the Doomies. The world has @ a 500-year supply of coal at projected rates of increase in energy use, and MHD makes all of the coal available.

In the short run there will be multiple periods of "peak" oil due to variables in things like increased production (my first post about titanic new producing fields in areas presently off limits due to political instability when oil prices rise high enough), decreased production (collapse of the Saud regime), increased demand (stable growth in China), decreased demand (political instability in China), increased efficiency in use of energy due to higher prices, etc.

The price of oil won't just rise. It will go down as well as up, there will be long periods of stability, etc. The overall trend will be upwards.

The Doomies are plain silly in the short run. And when they shift to the long run, coal-fired MHD plants will be there.

The chief advantage of MHD over combined cycle plants using gasified coal is that MHD can use really low-quality & highly polluting coal - what makes that economical is that the pollutants can be drawn off by magnetic separators and a fair amount sold in commerical quantities. The chief disadvantage to using low-quality coal is transportation expense - it is incredibly bulky per BTU relative to petroleum-based fuel.

An efficient combined cycle plant (gas turbines first, then steam turbines, then heat exchangers) can hit 45% efficiency in converting heat to electricity and maybe 50%. MHD can get to 55% easily now, and maybe to 60-65%, depending on the fuel quality. I.e., it is about 1/5 more efficient in converting heat energy to electricity than combined cycle plants.

I went over this with the chief counsel for Pacific Gas & Electric in 1975-76. He said that the transportation advantages of natural gas made that the fuel of choice for new power plants in California for at least the next 40-50 years. And that the only 20% higher relative efficiency of MHD plants relative to combined cycle plants was nowhere near enough to justify the capital risk in use of a new technology.

It's really no secret; the roof of a McMansion can hold enough PV panels to charge the family's plug-in hybrids for all their local driving.

this assumes that when the crisis hits, there will be an abundance of both solar panels and hybrid cars available on the market. That's quite an unrealistic assumption at this point in time....

the real question is how long would it take for the American economy to produce a sufficient supply of solar panels and hybrid cars --- and whether it makes more sense now to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by investing heavily in the means to reduce that dependence, or whether we should wait until the crisis hits, and hope that the "free market" will magically produce what we need.

________________________

Ahh - big brother knows best?

in relative terms, yes. Depending on free markets to address the problems created by the failure of free markets to prepare for a predictable crisis doesn't make a great deal of sense. Markets may be efficient in the long-term, but are too inflexible to deal with a crisis.

As a not-so-poetic engineer I would have to agree that the Engineer-Poet's vision is completely feasible from a technical point of view. Once we get into the politics and economics of the situation the glass gets a little cloudier. My personal expectation is closer to the E-Ps than Kunstler, including many small adaptations muddling through, with plenty of loss, waste, and failure along the way (kind of like human history so far).

My opinion is that the US is unlikely to massively ramp up coal consumption just as the effects of climate change become undeniable to even the most die-hard head-in-the-sand anti-science zealots.

I personally question the ethics of one human generation burdening the next 50 generations with lethal waste when so many practical alternatives exist. Whatever my own opinion, I fully expect the US to go on a nuke building frenzy when the energy costs start to bite. As mentioned before, I do not believe this nuclear investment will be the best use of capital, but I expect the political power of the corporations involved will put them first at the trough (kind of like the current energy bill, which shovels tax breaks to the oil companies just when they are swimming in windfall profits, with barely a nod to efficiency or renewables {not too many campaign contributions there}).

CS Monitor Inevitable Oil Peak Draws Near

Tom V.,

In what way do you disagree that MHD provides an environmentally benign way of burning coal to generate electricity? Might it be that you ignored the subject as (a) inconvenient, (b) inconceivable, © immoral, (d) fattening or (e) all of the above?

Dave Foster:  High-temperature gasifiers work with powdered coal, but they partially burn it with water/steam to make a fuel gas; this gas is filtered of particles and ash and cleaned of sulfur etc. before going to the gas turbines.  For an example see this; for more fact sheets, look here.

I think that the next 20 years of utility generation is going to be coal to electricity, motor fuels and perhaps chemicals.  It appears that this is already operating at commercial scale:  see this.

Tom Holsinger:  I believe you are conflating coal-fired MHD power production (which is no longer being pursued AFAIK) and fusion-powered element separation (which is a long way off).  If you have any documentation that such technologies are coming in the near term, I want to see it (there is no hint of MHD among the DOE topical reports); if there is no such documentation, bringing it up makes you look like a crank.

this assumes that when the crisis hits, there will be an abundance of both solar panels and hybrid cars available on the market.

the real question is ... whether it makes more sense now to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by investing heavily in the means to reduce that dependence, or whether we should wait until the crisis hits...

Tom Volckhausen:  We don't need to increase coal consumption to boost the energy yield, and if we repower existing plants with IGCC approximately half of the carbon can be captured in the gas cleanup process.  This carbon, as liquid CO2, can be injected into old oilfields to dissolve otherwise unrecoverable oil and bring it up.  This yields a triple threat:  greater output through higher efficiency, reduced CO2 emissions and recovery of stranded oil.

"in relative terms, yes. Depending on free markets to address the problems created by the failure of free markets to prepare for a predictable crisis doesn't make a great deal of sense. Markets may be efficient in the long-term, but are too inflexible to deal with a crisis."

Given the doom and gloom the free markets will deal with a crisis. They are not as dumb as some would have us believe. After all the crisis Kusntler refers to does not discriminate.

Lots of good stuff here, folks.

One thought recurs consistently in thinking about this:

We have tons of sand, vast tracts of utterly bleak and nearly cloudless desert, billions of industrious asians, and a desparate need for an environmentally benign (if not beneficial) solution to the Energy Problem.

The chief limitation of building photovoltaics has been ... labor and its derivatives. Not some underlying intrinsic scarcity of materials, not a difficulty of fabrication, not a 'taxation' of having to pay usurous royalties to 99 year patent-holders.

Simple vacuums, an almost complete freedom from worries about clean-rooms, contamination, nasty chemicals ... defines how an efficient PV factory can be done. I believe really the cost is both directly and indirectly derivative off of the "cost of labor". And there we have our Asian neighbors, the teeming horde that is apparantly lusting to make whatever the hell we want them to make, being good industrialists and all.

The world is quite literally 'full of sand', and therefore full of silicon. Its one resource that we can be SURE will never, ever run out. Without exaggeration - "not in a billion years". Same goes for sunlight.

The only real fly in the ointment is that the deserts (and the electricity thereby) is far from the centers of civilisation that need the product. And, it isn't something that travels all that well over wires (though not badly). One supposes that in-situ hydrogen electrolysis (generation) would solve the issue, it being quite a bit easier to pipe at near-zero loss than the electrons themselves. And if we are to believe it, the hydrogen-fuel-cell is going to be THE gating technology that moves us away from conventional energy into the next era.

The other sides of the equation are harder to appreciate and deal with.

Hundreds-of-millions to billions of portable fuel-cells, motors, controllers need manufacturing. Hundreds of thousands of distributed electrolytic power plants need constructing. Coal-and-oil fueled industries need to be re-engineered.

But in the end, even these are amenable to the "Chinese solution" - getting solid if but a bit crude equipment manufactured by the robots of Asia. Or, the robots [true] of Japan. Or the robots [future] of America and so on.

The "robot angle" is the ultimate solution to most of the issues presented. Able in the future to do arbitrarily complex tasks at rates and reliability far greater than humans can muster, "paid" by a 220 volt power line and a few milliliters of oil ... the robotic angle will cheapen 'yet again' th