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Deffeyes sticks with Thanksging 2005 prediction
Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: the View From Hubbert’s Peak
Why is this Thanksgiving different from all other Thanksgivings? It’s the peak of world oil production. We should have given thanks for the automobile, airplane, diesel trains and ships, two-lane blacktop, warm houses, plastics, fibers, and a huge range of petrochemicals. Your Thanksgiving dinner was produced with fertilizers, tractor fuel, pesticides, and transportation provided by oil and natural gas.
…What can we do? I have three categories: actions that we can take immediately, methods whose engineering is already done, and futuristic dreams.
Immediate: A 55 mph speed limit (they’ll hate me in Montana), teach the kids to turn out the lights when they leave a room, open the house windows for cooling or heating when the weather is not extreme.
Engineered: Nuclear power, high-efficiency diesel automobiles, wind turbines, coal gasification (with the carbon dioxide sold for enhancing oil recovery).
Dreams: Hydrogen fuel cells, alcohol from corn, solar cells. Don’t pin your hopes on a Manhattan Project or an Apollo program.
The “oil peak” side of the debate is gaining momentum, but we have a long way to go.
…I see no reason to retract my Thanksgiving, 2005 prediction.
(28 November 2005)
We must cut demand to have any hope of solving the energy crisis
George Monbiot, The Guardian
Neither the nuclear evangelists nor the renewables enthusiasts can take comfort from my calculations
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In one respect, Simon Jenkins is right. “Nobody,” he complained in the Guardian last week, while laying out his case for nuclear power, “agrees about figures.” As a result, “energy policy is like Victorian medicine, at the mercy of quack remedies and snake-oil salesmen”. There is a reason for this. As far as I can discover, reliable figures for the total volume of electricity that renewable power could supply do not yet exist. So anyone can claim anything, and anyone does. The enthusiasts for renewables insist that the entire economy – lights, heating, cars and planes – can be powered from hydrogen produced by wind. The nuclear evangelists maintain, in Jenkins’ words, that “even if every beauty spot in Britain were coated in windmills, their contribution to the Kyoto target would be minuscule”. All of us are groping around in the dark.
So, though this is not a scientific journal and though I am not qualified to do it, I am going to attempt a rough first draft, which I hope will be challenged .
…So the choice then comes down to this: we make up the shortfall either with nuclear power, as Jenkins suggests, or with gas or coal accompanied by carbon burial (pumping the carbon dioxide into salt aquifers or old gas fields). The first option means uranium mining, nuclear waste and the threat of proliferation and terrorism. The second means insecurity (gas) or opencast mining and air pollution (coal) and a risk (though probably quite small) of carbon seepage.
Neither option looks pretty. I fear I have succeeded not only in writing the densest column the Guardian has ever published, but also in demonstrating that this problem is harder to solve than I had hoped. Is there someone out there who can prove me wrong?
(29 November 2005)
Two energy surveys I’m aware of:
- Nathan Lewis (Caltech).
Lewis’s web page on his energy presentation. See links at bottom of page for transcript of an old version of his talk, and the three options for the current version (Caltech Streaming Theater). Thorough and very dense. - Ted Trainer (U of NSW, Australia) Can solar sources meet Australia’s electricity and liquid fuel demand? (A more complete treatment is in his online book “Renewable Energy: Limits and Potential. (search Trainer’s website for the title).
Many other surveys must exist. -BA
US Senate committee hearing on peak oil
Global Public Media
Audio and transcripts from Senator Lugar, Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and R. James Woolsey.
1. Senator Richard G. Lugar Opening Remarks
2. James R. Schlesinger Testimony
3. R. James Woolsey Testimony Intro
4. Question and Answer Session
(28 November 2005)
Ending the end of oil
Matthew Maier, Business 2.0
…Oil prices are hovering at about $60 a barrel and aren’t likely to go down much in the short term. The high prices are catalyzing experiments with new methods that promise a revolution in the energy business. Some are old approaches that have been given new economic life; others rely on massive computing power that simply wasn’t available before. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey estimate that the energy sources and technologies we discuss on the following pages could produce 4 trillion barrels of oil — more than all the world’s proven petroleum reserves right now. The end of oil will surely come someday, but if these approaches pay off, it won’t come nearly as soon as some people fear.
(28 November 2005)
A survey of new energy sources and technologies.
Peak oil and pensions
Roland Watson, New Era Investor
…the main reason for the unfolding [pensions] crisis will be Peak Oil and not Baby Boomers. As Peak Oil passes and we enter the new era of global energy depletion, the world economy will as a matter of course enter a multi-decade decline, this is a cast-iron certainty. This will only halt and reverse when new, alternative sources of energy eventually offset the equivalent energy decline from depleting oil and gas reserves. That time between Peak Oil and Energy Balance will be a long one and by then the pension landscape will have taken on a totally different topology.
The fact of the matter is that government and private pensions both depend on economic growth.
(28 November 2005)
Season’s greetings
James Howard Kunstler, Clusterf*ck Nation
Observers are already writing off 2005 as if it had shown us everything it has to show. I think the holiday frenzy will be as instructive as the hurricanes of late summer.
A mild late-autumn combined with extra imports of European oil and refined fuels, and withdrawals from our own strategic reserve, have held the gasoline prices down here in the US. But the northeast got a four-day cold blast over Thanksgiving, along with a substantial snowfall, and the furnaces are now cranking away, even as the WalMart shoppers commenced their first mad tramplings of the season.
Natural gas, methane, which powers half the home furnaces in America, is a separate story from oil, of course. We can’t import it like oil because it requires special pressurized tanker ships and dedicated port facilities — of which there are currently only two in America — and getting it here by those means even if the facilities were in place would be very un-cheap. We are way past all-time peak natural gas production in the US, meanwhile, and desperately making up for it by importing all we can from Canada, which is compelled to sell us as much as we demand under the NAFTA rules…
(28 November 2005)
