Peak oil – Mar 27

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Many more articles are availa through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Hudson man giving a ‘peak’ at oil’s future
Dan McDonald, The MetroWest Daily News (Mass.)
The end is near and Dick Lawrence wants state lawmakers to take note.

Far from a grim prophet foretelling an impending doomsday, Lawrence, a 57-year-old cycling enthusiast from Hudson, deals in a different kind of soothsaying: petroleum production.

To rouse awareness and educate local lawmakers about the economic ramifications of reaching peak production oil status – and the subsequent downward spiral of such production – Lawrence, along with politicians and economic experts, is meeting with legislators at the State House on Monday.

Lawrence hopes at least one legislator will work to form a Peak Oil and Gas Caucus in the Legislature. The caucus would start planning for peak oil mitigation in the event oil production reaches an apex and starts an inevitable decline.

… The solution is complex. Bezdek and Lawrence hope legislators will start thinking of ways to encourage measures like smart growth and higher emissions standards for vehicles. People should start to wean themselves off petroleum dependency, particularly regarding transportation, whether private or public.

Bezdek encouraged the use of biomass fuel, oil shale and “anything else we can think of.”

The development of nuclear energy, wind power, geothermal energy, as well as soy and algae-based diesel sources, should continue to be encouraged, said Lawrence.

However, it is unlikely any one energy source would prove to be as dense and portable as oil, said Lawrence. Bezdek pointed out that airplanes have no viable alternative fuel option to petroleum.

“There’s no silver bullet, but there are many shotgun pellets,” said Bezdek. “Part of solving the problem is being aware it exists.”
(26 March 2008)

Peak oil “Civil Defense Manual” for BC
Original: Plan Well or Perish
Rex Weyler, TheTyee.ca

Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense Manual for Cultural Survival
Richard Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan
Old City Foundation Press (2007)

In the post-peak-oil world, says Richard Balfour, highways crawling across farmland represent insanity. We should be building light rail transport, now, and designing neighbourhoods linked to the farmland that sustains them.

Balfour is an architect, strategic planner, director of the Metro Vancouver Planning Coalition, and a member of the Vancouver Peak Oil Executive, a group of citizens attempting to warn politicians about the challenges ahead.

Balfour points out that B.C. produces about 48 per cent of the food we consume. That’s manageable when oil is cheap and we can ship food from the tropics. “Our food from Mexico,” says Balfour “is running out of gas.”

Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan have written a “Civil Defense Manual” for Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, not a defense against terrorists but against our own consumption habits and illusions about economic survival. “We are already in the post-peak-oil era,” says Balfour, “the rising price of liquid fuel will change everything. We must now learn to relocalize our economy or suffer the unpleasant consequences.”

So how does a progressive city like Vancouver prepare for a fuel-starved future? Not, according to Balfour, by repeating the planning mistakes of the oil era. “The top planners do not even have the end of cheap energy, global warming, or mass migration on their radar,” says Balfour. “We cannot keep on making the same silly mistakes of the last hundred years and that includes most current planning and engineering in our urban environments.”
(27 March 2008)

Peak oil? Consider it solved
Joseph Romm, Salon
It won’t be easy but we can fix our oil and climate problems at the same time.
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For more than a decade, a fierce debate about peak oil has been raging between those who think a peak in global oil production is at hand and those who think the world is not close to running out of oil. The debate is moot for two reasons.

First, the growing threat of global warming requires deep reductions in national and global oil consumption starting now, peak or no peak.

Second, relying on unconventional oil like tar sands and liquid coal to make up a supply shortage, as the oilmen say we must, would be climate catastrophe. More supply is not the answer to either our oil or our climate problem — reducing consumption of oil is. And right now we have two feasible solutions: greatly increase our vehicle fuel economy and find alternative fuel sources that are abundant, low-carbon and affordable.

… This massive, unsustainable consumption has more than peak oil doomsayers like James Kunstler worried. In January, Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive officer of Royal Dutch/Shell, e-mailed his staff that the world will peak in conventional oil and gas within the decade. He wrote: “Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.” It used to be unheard of for oil executives to talk about limits to oil production. Now it happens all the time.

… The problem is graver than it appears for one simple reason: Replacing oil in the transportation sector requires strong government action two decades before a peak because of the time needed to replace vehicles and fuel infrastructure. That was the conclusion of a major study funded by the Department of Energy in 2005 — yes, the Bush DOE — on “Peaking of World Oil Production.” The report notes: “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.”

… To preserve the livability of the planet, we must cut liquid fossil fuel use more than 50 percent by 2050. That is a central reason that more supply is not the solution to peak oil. That is why it is crucial we don’t adopt the strategy that most in the oil industry prefer for dealing with the peak in conventional oil — ramping up unconventional oil. Most of the major forms of unconventional oil will make global warming worse — and some would make a climate catastrophe inevitable

… Clearly we now have only two realistic strategies: increase our vehicle fuel economy and develop affordable alternative fuel sources that are low in carbon. In 2050, the planet may well have 2 billion cars on the road or more, three times the current number.

…Since we’re being optimistic, let’s assume we can get fuel economy standards for cars and SUVs of 60 miles per gallon by 2030. We would still need more than half of vehicle fuel to be zero carbon. And for that only one alternative fuel is even remotely plausible — carbon-free electricity. Plug-in hybrids and electric cars are the cars of the future, especially as a climate solution. What’s more, with plug-ins and electric cars on the roads, oil peakers like Kunstler — who has claimed that when the oil runs dry, suburbia “will become untenable” and “we will have to say farewell to easy motoring” — can relax.
(28 March 2008)
Joseph Romm is a frequent poster at Gristmill.

-BA

Michigan Peak Oil Conference Speaker Deadline March 31
Local Future
The deadline for presentation proposals for the “International Conference on Peak Oil & Climate Change: Paths to Sustainability” is March 31. Presentations are needed for both break out seminars and main stage topics.

Featured peak oil speakers include Richard Heinberg, Dr. David Goodstein, Megan Quinn Bachman, Julian Darley, Stephanie Mills and Pat Murphy. Energy Bulletin contributors including Sharon Astyk and Kurt Cobb will be providing tailored presentations. Fifty break out seminars focus on transportation, food security, environment, renewable energy, community action, etc.

The conference begins in the on Friday, May 30 and runs through Sunday, June 1, 2008. The location is the Calvin College Fine Arts Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The event is hosted by educator Aaron Wissner and his Local Future nonprofit organization. Wissner was featured in January on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for his peak oil education and preparation efforts. The Post Carbon Institute is a primary conference sponsor.

Call for presentations details, the application form, attendee registration, and additional conference information are available at the conference web site: www.peakoilconference.org
(27 March 2008)