New one about Peak Oil

Dymanic said:
Thinking only in terms of what's "cheaper" is missing something important: at some point, the reason for not using oil power to pull oil out of the ground isn't that it costs too much money; it's that you end up with less oil than you started out with (or roughly the same amount -- or more, but not enough to make it worth the effort).
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Which is exactly what you don't use oil power to pull oil out of the ground. You use, for example, electrical power generated from non-oil sources, such as nukes or wind power. You criticized that for being inefficient -- and it is, in terms of joules expended per joule of oil obtained -- but it's a highly efficient way of converting stationary joules of on-grid energy into mobile, energy-dense joules of oil-based fuel.

The same way that it's inefficient to build batteries in pure energy terms, but they're quite economic to build in terms of what they are used for.



That's a nice example. The same surely applies to many other things; harvesters, ore trucks, you name it.
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No. Harvesters can typically be run on grid power, since they don't need to run for weeks on end; put large batteries in them, recharge overnight, and take them out to the fields in the morning. You could even have hot-spare batteries; put in a four-hour battery for the morning shift, change batteries over the lunch break, and then recharge both sets overnight. That's not an option with containerships.

Ditto ore trucks. Over a fixed route, you can simply use trams and run wires; over a more variable route, just use batteries.

We may even be able to get enough energy density in batteries for planes (or at least regional planes), since most plane flights don't exceed a few hours.


But how we will manage to sustain our economy once we are past the point where we are able to do that.
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There's your answer. The number of things that actually need to run on petroleum fuel is rather small; we can put most of our uses on the grid (or take them off the grid for a few hours as needed using batteries). Not as efficient as oil power, but if oil power is prohibitively expensive, it's probably cheaper to buy a few gigawatts at $10/MW and waste half of it, then to buy half as many gigawatts at $25/MW which is what oil might well cost by then. If you're not running a container ship, that is.
 
BenBurch said:
Coal works FINE in ships, actually.
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Not really, no. Not enough energy density. There's a reason Churchill switched the entire Royal Navy over to oil.

If you're willing to cut range and performance back down to the sort of performance Sherlock Holmes was familiar with, you could use coal. But that will make transpacific container shipping only a memory.
 
Absolutely major changes have happened in steam power plants since then.

They can be substantially automated, are much more efficient, and absolutely can achieve the fastest schedules.

Range is simply a matter of having a large enough bunker; You just factor that into the design. Ships have that luxury where, for example, a railroad locomotive does not.

Even so there are small engineering efforts afoot to design a fully modern steam locomotive.

EDIT: This is one of my fascinations as an engineer, and has been for about 45 years...
 
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drkitten said:
Not really, no. Not enough energy density. There's a reason Churchill switched the entire Royal Navy over to oil.

If you're willing to cut range and performance back down to the sort of performance Sherlock Holmes was familiar with, you could use coal. But that will make transpacific container shipping only a memory.
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A 100.000 ton containership have around 10.000 ton of marine heavy fuel oil onboard for a 2-3 month roundtrip. It could be replaced with coal, not as high energy detensity, or efficiency as oil, you can after all hardly use it on a slow diesel engine.
Still, it would be possible if you were willing to pay the price, and/or to reduce the march speed of 24-25 knots.
The last knots are pretty expensive.
 
Toke said:
A 100.000 ton containership have around 10.000 ton of marine heavy fuel oil onboard for a 2-3 month roundtrip. It could be replaced with coal, not as high energy detensity, or efficiency as oil, you can after all hardly use it on a slow diesel engine.
Still, it would be possible if you were willing to pay the price, and/or to reduce the march speed of 24-25 knots.
The last knots are pretty expensive.
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Hadn't considered a coal burning diesel, but yeah, you can do that. Having seen one, I have my concerns of cylinder wear at sea.

You can also make a MHD plant and drive a gas turbine or a rankine-cycle steam plant as a bottoming cycle, and have an all-electric drive system that gives you design flexibility.
 
The older oilfired turbine vessel had plenty of horsepower but used someting like twice the oil of todays diesels.
The simplest would be coal fired turbine vessels with either bigger "bunker tanks" or more regular refuelings.
 
corplinx said:
I believe both of those gentlemen spent on alternatives. It even increased under Bush2 as strange as that seems. However, we cannot predict innovation. The cons to most forms of personal transport alternative powering are well known.

Along with alternative energy development, we needed comprehensive plans to take care of supply pricing stability to ride things out until we're all driving Chevy Volts and Fiskers. This part was tried for and shot down with arguements like "this won't even work for years". Guess what, its years later. We're the grasshoppers and not the ants.
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We needed billions. And no, I don't blame Bush II. By him, it really was too late to avoid a big hiccup.

We really, really, need the technologies we're researching today to be ready today. We need to be building the manufacturing plants about now to be supplanting the demand.

We don't have it.
 
BenBurch said:
And what happens to production costs when natural gas gets scarce (as it will before oil does?)

There has been off and on talk about replacing natural gas with nuclear for a few years now.
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There has been off and on talk about replacing natural gas with nuclear for a few years now.

BenBurch said:
And $40/bbl COST is really unattractive when there are still wells that can produce for a fraction of that.
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As long as you can make a profit on your own sales it really doesn’t matter if competitors make more per unit. At $40 per barrel there is officially 170 billion barrels or recoverable oil in the Canadian oil sands, but that’s based on a much lower recovery rate then they are getting in practice so the real number is likely 2-3 times that. At $100+ or $200+ oil this will be even higher. The return on energy is in the range of 6X-10X compared to 10X-20X for conventional oil and 0.8X-2X for oil shale.
 
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MHD magnetohydrodynamics?

The M-class (of maersk ships) had a very large exhaust boiler driving a steamturbine/generator to reclaim some of the energy from the main engine.
The new E-class have a similiar system, plus the equilient of electronic injection on the main engine to save fuel.
 
drkitten said:
The number of things that actually need to run on petroleum fuel is rather small; we can put most of our uses on the grid (or take them off the grid for a few hours as needed using batteries).
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The problem of course being that we don't presently have the grid to support it -- or the solar panels (nuke plants, whatever), or the batteries, or the motors, or the manufacturing capacity to produce those things in the quantities we'd need to make even a significant dent in our need for petroleum. Whether it's container ships or harvesters or oil trucks or commuter cars, nearly all of them presently need to run on petroleum fuel simply because that's what we're set up for.

Getting set up for heavy reliance on alternative energy sources will require tremendous investments not only in money, but in energy. We know this. Petroleum fuel is still affordable enough to permit us to begin making that conversion using that as our primary energy source, but it isn't going to stay that way forever, and there are good reasons to predict that the transition from reasonably affordable to hellishly expensive may take place rather suddenly, and may not be very far in the future. We know this.

If that happens -- and if we wait until that point is reached -- the problem takes on a self-perpetuating nature that makes it much, much more difficult to solve, because the main thing we'll need in order to make the available energy workable and affordable will be the very one we'll be lacking: affordable energy.

So what are we doing? How are we planning to invest the last of our affordable petroleum? We're going to invest it in even more expensive and inefficient sources of petroleum, like tar sands, and oil shales, and deep water drilling. We are eating the seed corn.
 
corplinx said:
He really seems to be asleep at the wheel on oil production.
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At this point more production will never bring oil prices down as higher prices are an absolute requirement to justify the ever increasing investment needed to keep production up. Enough production to bring prices down will dry up the required investment as would forcing prices down with price controls. The only way to keep these costs from going up is to replace oil with a less expensive alternative.


Those banking on republican election promises of increased production are barking up the wrong tree. Half the oil wells ever drilled have been drilled in the US, it’s the most explored place on earth, and how much oil is very well documented. The “new production” touted by the republicans in the last election amounted to opening another 20 billion barrels to possible production, that’s less then 3 years of US consumption.

Having the rest of the globe as well explored as the US is, however is sure to bring in a lot more oil as long as prices rise enough to spur investment.
 
Dymanic said:
Getting set up for heavy reliance on alternative energy sources will require tremendous investments not only in money, but in energy. We know this. Petroleum fuel is still affordable enough to permit us to begin making that conversion using that as our primary energy source, but it isn't going to stay that way forever, and there are good reasons to predict that the transition from reasonably affordable to hellishly expensive may take place rather suddenly, and may not be very far in the future. We know this.
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Once oil prices clime high enough this will largely take care of itself as investment shifts from new oil development to other energy systems. The real question is when this cutover point occurs, and TBH left to it’s own devices this looks to be quite a ways out yet.
 
lomiller said:
Once oil prices clime high enough this will largely take care of itself as investment shifts from new oil development to other energy systems.
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That might work out pretty well for those with sufficient means to make those investments and still have enough to hold out during the difficult transition period, but it could be mighty tough on those who don't.
 
lomiller said:
Half the oil wells ever drilled have been drilled in the US, it’s the most explored place on earth, and how much oil is very well documented. The “new production” touted by the republicans in the last election amounted to opening another 20 billion barrels to possible production, that’s less then 3 years of US consumption.
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On no, its the copy and paste from the anti-supply manifesto. I heard it 10 years ago too.
 
lomiller said:
Once oil prices clime high enough this will largely take care of itself as investment shifts from new oil development to other energy systems. The real question is when this cutover point occurs, and TBH left to it’s own devices this looks to be quite a ways out yet.
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A bus full of economists drives off a cliff into a deep mountain valley, but they are not afraid.

Why?

Because they are CERTAIN that the sudden huge demand for parachutes will be met by the invisible hand of the marketplace.
 
BenBurch said:
A bus full of economists drives off a cliff into a deep mountain valley, but they are not afraid.

Why?

Because they are CERTAIN that the sudden huge demand for parachutes will be met by the invisible hand of the marketplace.
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Joke? I like jokes!

A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with nothing to eat. A can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Lets smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first." The economist says, "Lets assume that we have a can-opener..."
 
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