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Chris Nelder talks peak oil at the UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering Dept. (video)
Chris Nelder, Dept of Engineering, University of California – Berkeley
I had the privilege of presenting my slide deck and lecture on the future of energy today to students and faculty of the University of California Nuclear Engineering Department and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, which was simulcast to the University of Tokyo. Thanks to all the great technology they have available, my lecture was videotaped and has already been uploaded to the Web. You can watch it here: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/Chris-Nelder-Video (The sound is rough at the beginning, but once I start the presentation it clears up, although it is a bit overmodulated.)
I’d like to thank Dr. Kai Vetter for and Department Chair Dr. Jasmina Vujic for inviting me to speak at their Fall Colloquium series, and making me welcome. It was an honor and a pleasure to speak to such a technically adept audience, and they were very nice to me despite my moderate and less-informed outlook on nuclear energy.
(8 December 2008)
Chris’s actual talk begins a few minutes into the video. The actual video is here. -BA
End of oil could worsen warming, study finds
Discovery via MSNBC
That’d happen if petroleum is replaced by coal, which has more carbon
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As humanity wrings ever more fossil fuels from our planet, the question of when the taps will start to run dry — when “peak oil” will occur — looms ever closer on the horizon.
Some say a decade, maybe two. Some say it’s already passed. No one is sure.
Whatever the answer, new research has come to the ominous conclusion that slackening oil and gas supplies could actually accelerate the pace of global warming.
If it seems counter-intuitive, consider that generating a kilowatt hour of energy by burning oil pumps 274 grams of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Natural gas is cleaner, accounting for 202 grams. But coal is by far the worst polluter …
… As the oil and gas begin to dry up, coal could move in to fill the demand for energy, Pushker Kharecha of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University explained. And unless the carbon it emits is captured and sequestered underground, it will saturate the atmosphere, pushing temperatures ever higher and worsening a host of global environmental problems.
In a series of calculations, Kharecha and co-author James Hansen, also of Goddard, suggest that major climate damage could be avoided even if oil and gas production continue unabated, and are allowed to peter out as reserves dwindle.
(10 December 2008)
Oil and OPEC: Can the Cartel Possibly Cut Production Enough?
Keith Johnson, Envrionmental Capital, Wall Street Journal
Just how daunting is OPEC’s challenge to rein in falling oil prices? Beyond its control, if economist and oil-market analyst Philip Verleger is right.
Mr. Verleger, a former Carter administration official, academic, and energy-industry consultant, says OPEC can forget about tiny production cuts of 1 or 2 million barrels when it meets later this month in Algeria. The cartel needs to wipe out at least 7 million barrels per day of oil production to bring oil markets close to balance, he says, according to Platt’s The Barrel.
And that’s not likely to happen, which spells even more happy times for oil bears, Mr. Verleger says: “Since cuts of such magnitude are out of the question, one should expect prices to come under further downward pressure.”
His thesis? Global demand for oil has cratered much, much more than the spreadsheets used by groups like OPEC and the International Energy Agency.
(9 December 2008)
