New one about Peak Oil

Dymanic said:
Regardless of where you think it may have come from, do you dispute that on a factual basis?
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Yes. The anti-supply people throw out things like "we could only live off that oil for 3 years". Its practically a strawman argument. Oil is a market. In their fantasy land, if we can't live solely off a new well, its not worth digging. We have to ignore all the other oil in the world to justify their position.

Its horse puckey. Also, the price of oil futures is fickle! There is a bad story out of Niger and the price goes up. The fact that you increase production is what we call Good News (tm). It is a factor in driving the price of oil futures down.

The anti-supply arguements usually have 2 major fallacies:
1. The "that will only last us X years as our only supply" fallacy. To make this even dumber, they usually the lowest lowball estimate of the amount of oil as well supplied by some activist group.
2. They forget that the oil futures market is a dumb as rocks! It swings 5 dollars on farts from Nigeria. To stabilize the futures price of oil, you have to allay the fears of the people trading them.
 
corplinx said:
On no, its the copy and paste from the anti-supply manifesto. I heard it 10 years ago too.
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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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Back to back one person accuses me of giving the free market to much credit and another accuses me of giving it to little!:D
 
tomwaits said:
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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:D

I studied economics at University of Chicago. (I was an Objectivist/Libertarian then.)

And as a result, economist jokes are always hilarious.
 
lomiller said:
Back to back one person accuses me of giving the free market to much credit and another accuses me of giving it to little!:D
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I think you aren't giving the "dumb market" enough credit. That being the fickle commodities traders.
 
lomiller said:
There has been off and on talk about replacing natural gas with nuclear for a few years now.



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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I would like to see where you found the numbers on energy return for oil sands and shale as well. Right now, oil shale isn't economically feasible and only a few strata produce oil due to the advent of angle drilling.

Oil sands return on energy invested in only about 1.5 or so...and that doesn't include the cleanup requried.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text/1

glenn
 
corplinx said:
The anti-supply arguements usually have 2 major fallacies:
1. The "that will only last us X years as our only supply" fallacy. To make this even dumber, they usually the lowest lowball estimate of the amount of oil as well supplied by some activist group.
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A reasonable objection. And from the other side of the gulf separating the two camps are often heard very ambitious estimates of the size of various reserves, with little or no consideration given to the amount of effort (and, again, the amount of energy) required to actually extract those resources.

Maybe we can agree that:
1) It's not enough that the raw resource exists; it must also be possible to extract and process it with a reasonable net gain in energy.
2) In order to make a significant impact on supply, it's not enough that the resource can be extracted and processed at a net gain; it must also be possible to do so at a sufficient rate.

The latter because peak oil is really about the rate of extraction; it represents the point at which the amount being extracted within a given period of time reaches its maximum -- you can continue to extract oil indefinitely after that point, you'll just never again be able to extract it as fast.
 
Hindmost said:
I would like to see where you found the numbers on energy return for oil sands and shale as well. Right now, oil shale isn't economically feasible and only a few strata produce oil due to the advent of angle drilling.

Oil sands return on energy invested in only about 1.5 or so...and that doesn't include the cleanup requried.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/03/canadian-oil-sands/kunzig-text/1

glenn
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I can’t recall now where some of those figures came from. I do recall that the one for oil shale represents different deposits, ~3 for green river and the less then 1 for places in the Bakkan.

Apparently oil sands current observed ROEI is in the 5-6 range, some estimates seem to suggest better for oil shale, but that seems unlikely since it requires a lot more energy to process. Possibly some of these estimates are based on burning part of the resource itself to supply the energy needed to process the rest.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3839

This would work for oil sands as well, and has proposed. In that case bitumen would be upgraded to natural gas instead of light crude and the replace the natural gas used in the heating process when the bitumen is upgraded or extracted. This is probably where the upper range I gave for oil sands comes from, but I couldn’t find
 
drkitten said:
No. Harvesters can typically be run on grid power, since they don't need to run for weeks on end;
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You must not live in the American plains. The "way of the future" is the big automatic combine fleets, all controlled by computers via GPS, running 24/7 (with some drying needed for night). If there are any operators, and there often is only one on these operations, he eats lunch in the cab - no stopping ever.

I suppose you could bring batteries to these on the move, but the weight to energy ratio has to be solved. That's not much problem for a 30 hp tractor you use to muck out the loafing shed, but out in a 10,000 acre field it matters.

There is ongoing work on this. I think the University of Michigan has some ideas, but so far... My best guess is that you'll need diesels for at least a decade.
 
Holler Hoojer said:
You must not live in the American plains. The "way of the future" is the big automatic combine fleets, all controlled by computers via GPS, running 24/7 (with some drying needed for night). If there are any operators, and there often is only one on these operations, he eats lunch in the cab - no stopping ever.
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I see. And how do you fuel these fleets of diesels?

If you're suggesting that they return to their hangars to refuel, we change the batteries there.
If you're suggesting that mobile tenders bring the fuel to them in the fields, the mobile tenders can bring batteries instead.
If you're suggesting that Scotty simply teleports the fuel into their tanks as needed, he can use the transporter to send batteries instead.

And if you're suggesting that these combine fleets carry the several thousand-gallon fuel drums they need to operate through the entire harvest season and only need to be fueled every September, I'm afraid I'd want to see pictures.
 
drkitten said:
I see. And how do you fuel these fleets of diesels?

If you're suggesting that they return to their hangars to refuel, we change the batteries there.
If you're suggesting that mobile tenders bring the fuel to them in the fields, the mobile tenders can bring batteries instead.
If you're suggesting that Scotty simply teleports the fuel into their tanks as needed, he can use the transporter to send batteries instead.

And if you're suggesting that these combine fleets carry the several thousand-gallon fuel drums they need to operate through the entire harvest season and only need to be fueled every September, I'm afraid I'd want to see pictures.
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Scotty indeed!:p Did I suggest dilithium crystals?

You make a good point about the refueling. Tankers must come to the field and there is the refueling explosion hazard which always exists around grain dust. The safety rule is to remove the combine from the active area and allow it to cool 15 minutes. That might happen.

Typically, you might expect a combine to have about a 300 gallon tank and to use 1-2 gallons per acre (If you use hectares, sorry), so if my math is any good, that means refueling maybe every 12 to 30 hours (I'd have to recheck that before being even a little bit certain).

I share the ideal that we can move to electric, but these monsters are now running about 500 hp engines, and the battery size and weight is just not yet suitable. Perhaps the new lithium ions??? I'd suggest LNG if I were trying to find an alternative to diesel.

Agriculture remains the problem in greening the world. There's all that fertilizer, all that machinery, irrigation pumps, what have you. The problem is that almost any reduction in production screws the poorer nations big-time. Mexico becomes the "canary in the coal mine" for the US - when Mexico starves, our corn flakes box reduces size.
 
lomiller said:
I can’t recall now where some of those figures came from. I do recall that the one for oil shale represents different deposits, ~3 for green river and the less then 1 for places in the Bakkan.

Apparently oil sands current observed ROEI is in the 5-6 range, some estimates seem to suggest better for oil shale, but that seems unlikely since it requires a lot more energy to process. Possibly some of these estimates are based on burning part of the resource itself to supply the energy needed to process the rest.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3839

This would work for oil sands as well, and has proposed. In that case bitumen would be upgraded to natural gas instead of light crude and the replace the natural gas used in the heating process when the bitumen is upgraded or extracted. This is probably where the upper range I gave for oil sands comes from, but I couldn’t find
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I think the 5-6 range is optimistic--the sites never give enough information on the calcs. The table on the oil drum site has a few studies listed in the table and the range is from 1.5 to about 5. Probably somewhere in between would be reasonable.

glenn
 
JihadJane said:
Where is the energy coming from for all these batteries?
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Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, fusion, antimatter, magic pixies,.... take your pick.

Personally, my favorite is to tap into the hot air from ignorant Web forum posters.
 
Hindmost said:
I think the 5-6 range is optimistic--the sites never give enough information on the calcs.
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The 5-6 number is based on the province wide values for natural gas and fuel being used in oil sands production. Clearly a lot of energy going into oil sands, but equally clearly it’s nowhere near the ~1.5 million barrels per day the oil sands are producing.
 
drkitten said:
Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, fusion, antimatter, magic pixies,.... take your pick.
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None of those (with the possible exception of the pixies) can be materialized out of thin air. They involve an investment in energy, and you don't begin to see a return on that until you've paid off the energy debt aquired during the manufacturing process.

The problem is that investment wants to take the shortest path to the money. It won't make a large scale shift toward alternative technologies as long as oil remains viable as the primary source of energy. But when investment does make that shift, the energy demand will increase. We'll still need the same amount of energy to get through a day -- to run the combines, cargo ships, city buses, etc -- but we'll also be wanting to pour zillijoules of energy into solar panels and windmills and whatnot. The result will be what is called: Energy Cannibalism.

Instead of investing now in a future that we might just have a shot at, we are continuing to invest in a future that doesn't exist. That anyone could seriously consider tar sands and oil shales as anything but one more extension on an already overdue debt is evidence of just how feeble our grasp on the problem really is.
 
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