The Fallacy of Reversibility. A sizeable faction of the people who think peak oil is important, and happening soon enough to care about, think it has big implications for agriculture. And most of them agree on what those implications are: as a society, we are going to have to give up the big combine harvesters, the thunderous power of 275 horsepower tractors, and instead we will have to return to small-scale, hand-labor organic production. Rather than having 2-5% of the working population involved in agriculture, as in most western societies at present, most people will need to be involved in growing food. This is part of the agenda of the relocalization movement, which itself is a recent reincarnation of a long-standing movement for localism. This argument has never really made sense to me, but my recent explorations of food prices and biofuels have sharpened up my conviction that the thinking behind this position is mistaken.
Relocalization Quotes Let me start with a quote from Jim Kunstler: Raking hay by hand.
The post-oil energy economies of the futu. At this summit the 27 nations of the European Union and our Mediterranean neighbours pledge ourselves to take action to promote our mutual prosperity, security, liberty and democracy.We must now leave behind the old wasteful, oil dependent ways of yesterday and embrace the new cleaner and sustainable energy future of tomorrow. The increases in oil and food prices we have seen over recent months are causing hardship to families and businesses in Britain and throughout Europe. They threaten economic instability and their production is environmentally not sustainable.The years of cheap energy and careless pollution are behind us.
We need a new strategy. Past total dependence on oil must give way to a clean energy future.I have called for a better dialogue between oil producers and consumers and a more transparent market, and for measures to increase investment in oil production and refining. I will give Gordon Brown 7 out of 10 for this effort. There are certain key omissions as well. The Auto Efficiency Wedge. In this piece, I wanted to take up a more precise consideration of how much auto efficiency improvements might contribute to solving what I called the terrible trio of energy dependence on unstable regimes, global warming, and the peaking or plateauing of liquid fuel supply.
My examples are all US, but I think the lessons mostly carry over (if a little less urgently) to other developed countries. I'll be reasoning mainly by looking at what we did in the 1970s, which was the last time we faced severe energy constraints that bled through into requiring a demand side response. To begin with, let's refresh our memories about the history of oil prices, which tells the story of the oil shocks quite well.
Real oil prices, annual average, 1945-2005, expressed in 2004 dollars. Click to enlarge. In this graph, like most in this piece, I've adopted the convention of coloring 1973-1978 in blue. 1973 was the Arab oil embargo: the first oil shock. Let's review the summary data. Three things stand out. A Net Energy Parable: Why is ERoEI Important? For most living things, energy is calories. Over eons, natural selection has optimized the most efficient methods for energy capture, transformation, and consumption.( Lotka) Cheetahs that repeatedly expend more energy chasing a gazelle than they receive from eating it will not incrementally survive to produce offspring. But humans, in a very brief evolutionary time span, have puzzled out how to unlock the hydrocarbon bonds in fossil fuels, freeing up vastly more energy that can be directly eaten.
The vast majority of our per capita energy production is spent on non-nutritive exosomatic consumption. We have gradually, with rapidity at times, advanced modern human civilization to a global scale, with liquid fuel in jets, trucks, and automobiles providing the glue that links people and products together. To harness and consume energy requires some type of energy investment. Energy Output / Energy Input Net energy is typically given as per unit of energy invested.
EROI = Net Energy + 1. The Ultimate Fight?: The Singularity v. Resource. -The Singularity or "The Law of Accelerating Returns", a concept most attributed to Ray Kurzweil. Other corollarial concepts to this idea include Moore's Law and The Quickening. -And in the other corner, resource depletion/peak oil/net energy and the consequences/limits of exponential growth (population, pollution, and the like).
I had been thinking about this idea for a while, mentioned it to my colleagues, etc. Then I saw this piece by John Tierney entitled "Malthus v. the Singularity" at the NYT a couple of weeks ago, which has kept it on my mind. My questions for you and some other ideas are under the fold. Sustainable Energy Forum 2006 Peak Oil and the Environment. Should EROEI be the most important criterion our. How widely is EROEI-analysis currently used? EROEI is understood by some of those campaigning on environmental issues, mostly those who focus on fossil fuel depletion issues.
The concept of EROEI has been defined by Cleveland, Costanza, Hall & Kaufmann, (1984)3 and Odum (1996)4. However, within society’s key decision-making mainstream – financial markets, governments, parliamentarians and those advising them within the civil service and policy-making and lobbying bodies – there is little evidence that the concept and significance of EROEI is grasped or accepted. Instead they appraise different energy investment options applying financial, political and environmental criteria.
In addition, the decision-making mainstream has conducted energy policy on a predict-andprovide basis: “energy needs” must be met (BERR, White Paper, “Meeting the Energy Challenge”, May 2007)8. Measuring EROEI – system boundaries Energy returned Where should the “energy returned” system boundary be drawn? References. US Peak Oil Adaptation: Prognosis in a Credit Cru. In this post I want to start exploring a hypothesis that is worrying me a lot. Specifically, the possibility that the emerging financial/credit crisis could cause a near-term collapse in demand for energy, energy prices, and investment in energy infrastructure.
That in turn could lead to an even poorer failure to adapt to peak oil than we have seen so far, resulting in great difficulties once the economy begins to recover from its credit problems. I'm not claiming to have conclusive evidence for this hypothesis, I am not sure of its truth myself, and this post will only be a beginning of exploring the issues. Let's first review the situation to date. I began worrying that we might be essentially at peak oil already back in November 2005. A couple more years of data have not changed the picture much: Average daily total liquid production, by month, from EIA (green) and IEA (plum), together with 13 month centered moving averages of each line, recursed once (LHS). Oops. Inflationary Collapses, or The NPV of Grandchildr. I should say at the outset: yes I know this is a gross oversimplification of the tradeoffs present in real forestry.
But bear with me - let's just take this premise and see what your accountant would recommend. He or she would probably perform what's called a net present value calculation to determine what was economically rational. The idea is as follows. Somehow we'd like to compare the value of getting a one time payment of $X with an infinite stream of smaller $kX dollar payments from now into the indefinite future. Clearly we'd like to somehow add up the benefits of all the future payments into a single number that we can compare to $X (the sum we'd net if we just clearcut the forest). It might seem that this sum will be infinite if the forest lasts forever, but it isn't so. Which interest rate should we use? You might also think that perhaps wood will get more valuable in future, more so than the general rise in prices embodied in the inflation rate. Age structure of US forests. From the Editor's Desk: Peak Oil, Heretical.
Section One-Heretical Thought and Social Trust One of the pieces that brought me down this journey of thought is this podcast of Leif Utne (of the Utne Reader and worldchanging fame) interviewing Jerry Michalski (a technology consultant, writer, and futurist); in the interview, they talk about two of my favorite subjects: heretical thinking and the development of social trust and norms. I bring you all a few quotes from Michalski's interview (and you should listen to the entire (I think inspiring and positive) eleven minutes...it's quite worth your time, and it will probably help you understand where I am heading with this post): "There is one incredibly strong pattern [about heretics] [...], their critiques of society [...] say that the current systems and institutions in our society are designed to not trust us.
" "If you begin to design systems that have in their core a basis of trust, you begin to see wonderful things show up. " "What if we trusted you? " Answering the Comfortable Questions about Energy. Posted by Heading Out on June 27, 2008 - 10:00am Tags: commodities, depletion rate, flow rate, oil, peak oil, saudi arabia, speculators [list all tags] I was reminded of this skit as I watched a ”panel of experts” on the PBS News Hour with a couple of energy analysts talking about petroleum economics, and the cause of the current price rise.
Their reasons (one blaming it in part on the Federal Reserve decision to cut interest rates) related to their areas of expertise and knowledge in the Commodities Markets. It is a common failing. Experts will try and explain events or seek to control events, based on their what they know and are comfortable with discussing (where it is light), rather than necessarily going to the root cause of the problem (where the ring was dropped). In the current debate about why the price of oil is going up and what can be done about it, the current cause is often cited as being due to “speculators who play the market out of selfish interests.” Peak Oil Media: "Humans > Yeast?", M. The Oil Drum: Canada | Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008) Posted by Sam Foucher on July 5, 2008 - 9:23pm in The Oil Drum: Canada Tags: megaprojects, original, supply, wikipedia [list all tags] Possible future supply capacity scenario for crude oil and NGL based on the Wikipedia Oil Megaproject database.
The resource base post-2002 decline rate is a linearly increasing rate from 0% to 4.5% between 2003 and 2008 then constant at 4.5% afterward. The decline rate for each annual addition is 4.5% after first year. Below is the evolution of the new supply additions since the beginning of the project compiled by year of first oil: We can clearly see the initial 2008 and 2009 peaks wearing out with time due mainly to delays.
Now the situation does not look so good: Possible new gross and net new supply additions compiled by year of first oil. Below is a possible scenario for future supply assuming a 4.5% decline rate. Possible future supply scenario for crude oil and NGL based on the Wikipedia Oil Megaproject database. Related stories: Ten Fundamental Principles of Net Energy. Introduction Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of the energy extracted or delivered by a process to the energy used directly and indirectly in that process.
A common related term is energy surplus, which is the gross amount of energy extracted or delivered, minus the energy used directly and indirectly in that process. EROI is a dimensionless number, while energy surplus refers to an actual physical quantity of energy. Suppose an energy delivery system delivers 10 joules of energy, but in the process consumes 2 joules. EROI is a tool of net energy analysis, a methodology that seeks to compare the amount of energy delivered to society by a technology to the total energy required to find, extract, process, deliver, and otherwise upgrade that energy to a socially useful form. The principles 1. The efficiency and effectiveness of energy capture is a central organizing principle in ecology. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. This statement is true for two reasons. 9. 10.
Further reading. Asking one of the less comfortable questions abou. Posted by Heading Out on July 10, 2008 - 10:00am Tags: cantarell, decline rate, north sea, original, schlumberger, yibal [list all tags] Ken Deffeyes, who did so much to bring this current situation to our attention with his writing and books, who has said that he is no longer a prophet, but has become a historian.
His remark implies that the much of the debate over peak oil is perhaps over. And there I would disagree with him, because I remain critically concerned, as Euan is, that the world does not really understand the size of the problem that is approaching, and the speed of that arrival. Further the information that controls the shape of the production curve, post peak is usually derived relating to the pattern of the peak in the United States. To anticipate that the world curve will look the same, overlooks the critical difference that, at the present time, there is no satisfactory alternative fuel to satisfy demand. What is a Human Being Worth (in Terms of. Lester addresses U.S. governors on energy future, Driving the European GDP. This post is part of a series on the economic response to oil shocks, which I'm doing to gain a deeper insight into likely post-oil-peak economic occurrences. It began with a discussion of the stability of the mix of consumer spending , moved on to consider the productivity and efficiency of transportation , dived more deeply into what the US economy did to become less oil intensive , and then looked at behavioral driving responses to oil shocks .
Readers with long memories will also realize the significance of these issues to my decline-rate based model of what might happen to the US economy post peak. I wanted to explore in more depth this graph: Is there really a strong causal link between real GDP and vehicle miles driven, as one can't help but wondering staring at the graph, or is it just a fluke?
The next thing to get out of the way is whether the situation seems to be repeated elsewhere in the world. Next we turn to the UK. Interesting!