In the wake of Cicero's "Greater Expectations" observations from his new home in semi-rural New England, I thought I'd throw this out.
Environment & Energy Publishing has a video of a panel at the Sustainable Energy Forum 2006, Professor Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton University, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett [R-MD], author Richard Heinberg and other panelists discuss arguments made by peak oil (Armed Liberal explains | Trent thinks the Saudis may have hit it) skeptics, and point to growing evidence that world production is nearing its apex.
They had a number of good arguments, but by far their weakest moment was when they dismissed points re: Canada's Tar Sands and the USA's oil shales as "changing the definition."
Canada's tar sands are estimated to have 175 billion barrels of proven reserves (all of Saudi Arabia = 260 billion barrels). Not only do we produce oil from them, but when we're done some companies run the "waste" through processes that extract valuable minerals (including titanium). Technology that we began playing with in the 1970s has matured, and the cost of extraction has dropped even as oil prices have soared. Needless to say, there's a huge economic and employment boom going on in Alberta right now.
The US Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves estimates there are some 1.6 trillion barrels of oil contained in oil shales around the world, with 60–70% of reserves (1.0–1.2 trillion barrels) in the United States. How many of those convert to proven reserves is worth asking John Atkinson, but it's not a small number. These oil shale deposits are about where our tar sands were about 20 years ago in terms of development & technology, which means we can expect extraction costs that already make sense now to drop over time.
Throw in natural gas reserves in the USA that can't be judged "proven" because lerge swathes have been declared off-limits for drilling and seismic surveys don't count, and North America's future may be brighter than some believe. Note that while oil is a global market, natural gas is decidedly local because of the risks and infrastructure associated with its liquid form.
To have these possibilities just brushed off did not impress.
At the same time, the trends in global demand are real. Likewise, there are solid indicators from the energy companies themselves and overall discovery figures that point to an oil production peak as a real possibility. The point about oil that is unextractable due to political instability in places like Nigeria is also a valid point, though I suspect the Chinese have a solution or two that the panelists haven't considered.
The implications of "peak oil" are huge - which is precisely why each side must grapple with the other side's strongest arguments.
- The production of syncrude from bitumen has huge CO2 emissions, and sequestration appears to be on nobody's list of expenses.
- Alberta is already near the limits of the water supply from the Athabasca river, and expansion of mining operations may not be feasible no matter how high the price goes. This problem increases if the local natural gas supplies give out and processing must be sustained by burning bitumen itself.
We'd be much better off concentrating on batteries. PHEV's can reduce liquid fuel consumption by about 80% through a combination of greater efficiency and substitution with grid electricity. If you don't need a carbonaceous fuel in the car, you can deal with CO2 (if any) elsewhere and you have no issues with combustion emissions of any sort.There are at least five technologies either on the market, being sampled or in the lab (Firefly Energy's carbon-foam lead-acid cell, A123Systems' Li-ion cell, EEStor's ultracap, zinc-air batteries, aluminum batteries) which could substitute for 80% of motor-fuel needs if they got cheap enough. If we set out a big enough pot of money for the first company to deliver it cheap enough, we'd get a surge of development.
Thanks for bringing the issue of energy and oil back to the top. I really think that this one issue, even in isolation (ignoring for now culture clashes with Islam as well as Immigration issues), can be the unravelling of any leader or political party, or even nation.
Beyond what Engineer-Poet mentioned about the tar sands... the so called oil-shale is even a more remote as salvation. As far as I can tell (and there is lots of information out there on the web) there are some tough issues with US shale deposits, not the least of which is water, or the lack of it. Search the web and get some real estimates of possible returns, and what is necessary to make them possible.
It is really desirable to think there are easy solutions, but I maintain that if there were indeed easy solutions they would have been done by now. We are now at the point where tougher (but still readily doable) decisions have to be made, e.g.: buying a smaller homer, buy an older house closer to work, walk instead of using a car, etc.
I'm not really against drilling in ANWR, off California or Florida, etc but don't be deceived - what estimates of oil that exist in these locations (that I can find) don't come anywhere near what is needed to make the US a non-importer, especially if you take the long picture into acount, such as the life of your grandchildren.
The problem with the "Peak Oil" movement currently is that it is nearly hostage to very much a fringe crowd: ultra-malthusians, maoists, anarchists, left-libertarians and the like. Basically, people who think of themselves as quite a bit smarter than the average person, and are hoping peak oil will kill off the masses.
Yes, there are a few mainstream well known characters: Simmons, Bartlett, etc. that will be listened to by a larger crowd. But many of the grass roots (and web active) are fringe. Also, there are a few characters that are quite brusque but their heart seems to be in the right place (e.g., Kuntsler).
My hope is that a more common sense, middle of the road, every-man's approach to "peak oil" will emerge - one that is not ridden with conspiracy-complexes and gold hoarding.
I'm overly skeptical of the peak oil zealots. And with the rate of money being pumped into Canada (1.2 billion just this week from Shell on the blackrock group) I highly doubt any company would sink that kind of coin into something that wouldn't allow them to recoup the cost.
Production from oil sands is continuing to blossom: 150k a day isn't bad.I think the key point is that the tar sands (and other sources, like "depleted" wells) only become economical when the cost of oil rises. At $2/gallon gas, most of them are better off left in the ground. At $4/gallon gas, more of them are worth extracting.
So the most sound policy would probably be an oil/gas tax that guaranteed a stable price floor, so that capital investment in these alternative sources would rise. Of course, that's politically impossible, so instead we get nonsense like the $100 rebate.
As to engineer-poet's point about batteries, the thing to remember is that even if technical issues (weight, capacity) improve, they won't charge themselves. So if you want to substitute for any significant fraction of liquid auto fuel consuption, you also need to talk about how you're going to generate the electricity to charge them. Coal? Natural gas? Nuclear? All have downsides, and have substantial political opposition. You also have to consider the NIMBY difficulties of building new power generation plants almost anywhere. It's tough for me to really see this as a viable option in the mid-term.
#3 Gabriel
Yes, 150kbbl/day sounds nice. It happens to be around 10 minutes of US consumption alone...
That is the problem with all these 'solutions' that people toss out so easily - the 'solutions' as presently offered are woefully inadequate.
Recommend you check out the best case numbers from Shell, once they reach their targets . Compare that to the decline in production that the rest of North America is undergoing. How long do you plan on living in North America? 1 year, 5 years, 30 years?
I'm not dissing every possible little solution, just pointing out that even if you sum all the small gains from various alternate oil contributions together you still end up with having to cut consumption.
We have to live life, dare I say, more conservatively?
I really don't think anyone (at least anyone with any form of intellectual honesty) is saying that Shale/Sand oil reserves are going to replace outside oil, but they can help offset increasing demand and the total reliance upon outside oil sources. Still this 150k bbl a day represents only one company and one field. I'm not ready to write off these efforts.
Lets face it, alternative energy has hit just as many if not more hurdles than drilling in ANWR or retrieving oil from shale. The Kennedys have blocked every attempt at wind farming in Nantucket Sound. Wind farms are under assault by "environmental" groups and PETA over raptor kills, and also by the NIMBY's who cry about their size. Solar shows a lot of promise with the Stirling Engine, but even that project is running into roadblocks by environmentalists and legislators both.
Hmm... I think the oil sands have a great deal more potential than people realize. 60 Minutes (I know, a dirty word for some) did a story on it back in January. I couldn't find the link and the text itself was WAY to long to paste here, but here's a quick summary (note, the information provided is all according to 60 Minutes, so go ahead and take it with a grain of salt):
You don’t have any risk."
As all us Peak Oil Zealots know the real question is net energy. The energy requirements to get liquid fuel from oily sand are tremendous, so the energy available for human use is Much,Much less than the 175 Billion Barrels reserves because the natural gas or other energy source required to cook it out of the sands must be subtracted from available energy.
Since the input energy requirements for oil sands processing are so high, they may become less economical as the price of other energy sources increase or at least become just as expensive with $4 gallon gas as with $2 gallon gas.
Conservation and efficiency already make tremendous economic sense and will almost certainly continue to offer better returns than most other alternatives.
Insulation in your attic pays much better returns than anything on the bond market.
Tom makes good points here... but the sheer size of those pots of black gold means that one shouldn't underestimate the possibility of innovations that shift the energy equation for recovery. The Peak Oil folks can't discount those possibilities, just as their opponents can't discount the ongoing exploration finds vs. consumption trends.
Gotta take on your opponents' strongest arguments, and all.
And for the rest of us, that insulation is a damn good idea. I once knew a Childrens Aid worker who lived in Ottawa, the world's second-coldest national capital (Moscow is #3). He had the place so well built and insulated that his heating bills nearly zero, and his air conditioning bills were low. If you didn't know that, you might not have noticed much out of the ordinary about the house. What he saved then was impressive. Now...
ep has the perfect solution to our energy problems.
"if they got cheap enough"
Ain't it the truth.
More on peak oil, part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Doug let me see if I get this:
Oil sands cost $2 a gallon to produce and deliver to market (for the sake of argument). So taxing gasoline at $1 a gallon (for the sake of argument) will encourage more supplies?
If you can prove this you will be up for a Nobel.
I don't see the use in all the hand wringing.
Supply and demand meet at a price.
Economies based on market principles will adjust. Those not so based will also adjust. Less efficiently.
By definition, markets will "handle" peak oil as supply and demand match at some equilibrium price. BUT arriving at that equilibrium will result in much disruption and some suffering.
Since competitive markets are such good tools for technological evolution, the first priority in the US should be to remove the market distortions which encourage dependence on imports with the associated trade deficits and balance of payments problems.
For example, a tractor trailer pays around $8000 a year in gas taxes while causing road damage estimated around $100,000/yr (since road wear is roughly proportional to weight cubed). This subsidy from the public coffers results in much freight travelling by subsidized road rather than fully costed rail. Rail freight uses 1/2 to 1/3 of the energy that trucking does, so eliminating the subsidy to trucking would save much energy.
Similarly, state and local roads are largely funded by property tax and income tax. As a bike commuter for the last 25 years I have been subsidizing automobile drivers, with those driving the largest vehicles receiving the largest subsidy because of the strong dependence of road wear on weight.
The list of subsidies and incentives for oil consumption goes on forever, but we should start shortening it.
Joe,
As an engineer with 20+ years of product development experience I would never discount the possibility of technical evolution drastically reducing the energy and economic costs of oil sands processing. However the basic physics of removing a highly dispersed film of oil on subsurface sand makes that possibility slim.
For me, the environmental impacts of water consumption, massive habitat destruction , huge carbon emmissions, etc. make oil sands one of the least attractive options.
Interesting statistic Tom, do you have a reference for it?
Tom--"a tractor trailer pays around $8000 a year in gas taxes while causing road damage estimated around $100,000/yr "...do you have a link for that? The "cubed" relationship with weight isn't obvious to me.
Two years ago, I calculated that solar PV was roughly as expensive as gasoline (edit the URL to get around the filter evasion). That was assuming $2.20 gallon. It's definitely cheaper today; the problem is, our cars can't use external electricity for motive power. That requires a design decision.
Joe: If we had paid serious attention to this problem twenty or even ten years ago, our problem today would be a yawner. Fortunately, there are some people making the stuff that can save our asses. We just have to use it.
Tom: Try 1/10, not 1/4.
Tom V,
Talk to the Buddha about suffering.
All change involves suffering. You can't prevent change.
===============================We have intermodal trucking Tom. If it made more sense to use rail there would be more rail shipping, or barges.
What you are not taking into account is the value of inventory. Carrying costs. In an era of just in time manufacturing to reduce inventory it may pay to spend more on faster more dependable shipping.
It always starts out "if we could do just this one thing....." Trouble is - you can't do just one thing.
Tom,
I would like to see more evidence re: truck road costs. The subsidy seems high to me.
I do understand that the main cost of roads is the trucking load and it goes up with the fourth power of the load per wheel and linearly with the number of equally loaded wheels.
ep,
Actually we were paying attention 27 years ago.
It just takes a while to develop stuff.
I got my hands on my first personal computer in April of '75. Two years later I was designing boards for them. Why not right away? Well things take time.
Heck, I did my first solar cell experiment in '62. You think they wouldn't have liked to introduced a 30% efficient cell that costs about $0.10 per watt? And can be produced in a low cost factory? What was holding them back? They didn't know how.
Guess what? We still don't know how. We are getting closer.
BTW the Romans could have figured all this out had they devoted effort to it. Why didn't they? Lack of foresight.
ep,
No one is holding this stuff back. It is just that no one has figured how to do what you want at sufficient profit to make it happen.
Our asses don't need some heroic saving.
Prices will fix the problem if we don't get impatient with the typical industrial/development lags.
If we are serious we have to let it hurt until the system corrects.
Any attempt to reduce the hurt lengthens the pain.
I must admit I wrote those numbers from memory of an Office Of Technology Paper I read (in print), but googling a bit shows that I underestimated road wear impact from heavy vehicle, wear is between 3rd and 4th power of axle weight...
UK Design Manual
A 40 tonne, 5 axle lorry causes over 10,000 times more damage to road surfaces than an average car. - Design Manual for Roads and Bridges, Highways Agency, 1994
Between 3rd and 4th Power of Axle Weight
A vehicle’s roadway costs are affected by three general factors:4
1. Strength. Roadway wear increases exponentially with axle weight (between the third and
fourth power), so heavy vehicles impose much greater maintenance and repair costs than
lighter vehicles. A heavy truck imposes roadway costs equal to hundreds or thousands of
light vehicles, depending on weight and road type. Studded tires also significantly
increase road repair costs.
2. Space. Larger and faster vehicles require more road space. As speeds increase so does
the “shy distance” required between vehicles and other objects, so higher speed traffic
requires wider lanes, greater road capacity and more clearance. Road space requirements
are measured in “passenger car equivalents,” or PCEs. A large truck or bus typically
imposes 2-5 PCEs, and more when ascending a steep incline.
3. Design. Faster traffic requires higher roadway design speeds and impose greater risk,
which increases safety requirements such as barriers and clear space.
The incremental costs of building stronger pavements, wider roads and higher design
speeds can be assigned to vehicles according to their weight, size and speed. The
incremental costs of increasing roadway capacity should generally only be assigned to
peak-period trips that contribute to congestion. Some roadway costs, such as planning,
law enforcement and lighting costs are not clearly related to a particular vehicle attribute,
and any remaining costs are considered common costs that can be prorated based on other
costs or allocated based on mileage.
Roadway expenditures not funded through user fees can be considered an external cost
since people pay regardless of how much they use roads. Some automobile industry
advocates claim that motor vehicle user taxes exceed roadway expenditures,5 but their
analysis violates cost allocation principles by excluding local roadway expenditures and
including general taxes, rather than just special user fees.6
Table 5.6-3 summarizes U.S. roadway user fees and expenditures by level of government.
This indicates that user fees fund only about 63% of total roadway costs. General taxes
spent on roads average about 1.8¢ per vehicle mile. Vehicle user fees would need to
increase by 59% to fully fund roadway costs.
If you go to FHWA Costs Report
you can see that a 5 axle 80,000 lb registered weight has an estimated underpayment per year of $$591,000. Clearly there is some imprecision in these numbers, but heavy trucks are VERY far from paying there own way, so everybody else has to pay for them, skewing those vital market signals.
I assume you are refering to table 9. The $591,971 is total for all vehicles in that class. The per vehicle underpayment is only $561. The link only covers Federal when in fact the State share is significantly larger (see Table IV-11).
"If it made more sense to use rail there would be more rail shipping, or barges"...rail shipping of freight has been growing rapidly, and some lines are becoming quite congested. Shippers are starting to get highly pissed, and even to talk about re-regulation of the industry.
It's true that rail will probably never be a strong competitor to trucking for just-in-time deliveries with a distance of, say, 300 miles, but there's still considerable room for growth in share relative to trucking, and I hope the congestion issues get fixed before the opportunity is missed.
Before WWII, most DHW in Florida was heated by the sun. What's the excuse for not having near-complete penetration of this venerable technology across the entire south and southwest? When I was in Texas I did not see a single solar water heater. Not even one. What's e.g. Gov. Engler's veto of improved building insulation standards? Progress? "The market" will "fix" the problem by bankrupting consumers and driving them out of the market, if that's what it takes. Foresight and investment in efficiency could achieve the same economies with far less dislocation. The problem is that "the market" can't see beyond its own nose; people continued to buy big SUV's (assets with 10+ year lifespans) until last year, when the future price of oil was likely to make them uneconomic within 2. In the case of residences, we should be aiming policy at the conditions up to the next major renovation. I make that 20-30 years. A house which maintains livable conditions despite power and fuel outages is future-proof; a house which loses its plumbing when either the power or the gas goes out in winter is a disaster waiting to happen.
You mean, like starting the investment BEFORE the pain would otherwise hit?
Sometimes I wonder if you're a person or a parody generator.