With the recent Macondo-Deep Water Horizon disaster in the Gulf, the world has finally caught on, despite all the naysaying from the punditocracy, that the world's oil supplies are not exactly flush. Point of fact, if they were, there'd be no need for thousands upon thousands of deep sea oil drilling ventures, putting even more of that ecology at risk from future spills.
Oil inventories are running lower, as are the easier to drill land sites of old, because of increasing demand. This means the only way to get more oil now is by risky deep sea floor drilling, which risks more incidents like the BP spill, or reverting to shale oil - which isn't very efficient- delivering less oil per gallon drilled than the oil energy needed to drill it!
Oil used to have an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) as high as 30. It only took one barrel of oil to extract 30 barrels of oil. This was such a fantastic ratio that oil was practically free energy. Some oil wells had EROEI ratios close to 100. Now, it has fallen to around 16, and is still falling - a sure sign we are fast approaching peak. (See also further info at: http://www.dieoff.org/).
The world currently consumes about 82.5 million barrels of oil per day. The US consumes about 20 million of these, of which approximately 12.5 million are used for transportation. More critical, is the food component derived from oil that's hardly mentioned except by the inner circle cognoscenti. To be blunt, oil = food, given that it provides the primary bulk of fertilizer to support the "green" revolution - or what's left of it. Take away the oil fertilizers, and famine follows. On a mass, global multi -billions level scale.
According to current stats, global oil demand is expected to grow 2-3% per year, and the population by 1.5% per year. In this case:
-dQ/ dt ~ {rate of demand on Q per year + rate of population growth translated into a yearly demand on Q)
where the LHS represents the depletion rate of available oil resources, and the RHS gives the “sinks” that deplete them. Note the 1st term assumes only the pure economic, e.g. GDP-“growth” demands for increase, not population). In concrete terms, if 300 billion barrels (dQ) of relatively cheap oil remain after next year, and (as of 2012), and 28 billion barrels of year are consumed per year, and the combined term on the RHS increases this by 4.5% per year – what do you get? Well, T-R-O-U-B-L-E!
The planet was endowed with ~ 3,000 billion barrels of oil – of which we’ve consumed 1,500 billion barrels. 300 billion barrels of relatively cheap oil remains (assuming increased deep sea floor drilling), after which 500 billion barrels of “break-even” oil remains (costs as much to access as it delivers), after which 700 billion barrels of very expensive oil remains (costs much more to reach it than it deliver in energy). At the heart of these considerations is the net energy eqn. (cf. Physics Today, Weisz, July 2004, p. 51)
Q (net) = Q (PR) – [Q (op) + E/T]
In effect, for break-even oil one would find Q(net) = 0
Thus, there is no net gain in energy given the quantity that must be used to obtain it.
For the last 700 billion barrels, Q(net) = negative quantity = -Q since the rate of energy production (Q (PR) ) must be debited by the energy consumed for its operation Q(op), and the energy E invested during its “lifetime” T.
Thus its Q(PR) will be small in relation to the bracketed quantity.Thus, the problem in a nutshell is not “running out of oil’ but running out of CHEAP oil. Consumers around the world will get their first hint that Peak Oil is really around the corner when (in the U.S.) gas hits near $8-10 a gallon, and food costs jump accordingly (because of the increased fertilizer costs, plus the cost to transport food to various destinations, supermarkets etc). When the initial shock hits it won't be pretty, and will make the current austerity riots in Europe look like a walk in the park.
So - the $64 question is: can adequate alternative energy sources fill in most of the gaps, say when the last break -even oil is exhausted and only the very expensive to drill form remains? It’s all very well to speculate and ruminate that future energy needs will be met, but the question remains: HOW? When one does the math, and in particular pays attention to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the ‘net energy equation’, this isn't simple by any means. Nowhere near as simple as building 20 million wind turbines (see photo) or laying down 400,000 acres of solar cells.
Where will energy come from to support an industrial-energy intense and consumptive civilization? You can’t just say “new sources” and leave it at that. What new sources? Where? As Jay Hanson (www.dieoff.org) pointedly notes:
“The fact that our society can‘t survive on alternative energy should come as no surprise, because only an idiot would believe that windmills and solar panels can run bulldozers, elevators, steel mills, glass factories, electric heat, air conditioning, aircraft, automobiles, etc., AND still have enough energy left over to support a corrupt political system, armies, etc. Envision a world where freezing, starving people burn everything combustible -- everything from forests (releasing CO2; destroying topsoil and species); to garbage dumps (releasing dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals); to people (by waging nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional war); and you have seen the future. “
But how correct is he?
One needs to process that different kinds of energy resources have fundamentally different "qualities". For example, a BTU of oil (oil before it is burnt) is fundamentally different than a BTU of coal. Oil has a higher energy content per unit weight and burns at a higher temperature than coal; it is easier to transport, and can be used in internal combustion engines. A diesel locomotive wastes only one-fifth the energy of a coal-powered steam engine to pull the same train. Oil's many advantages provide 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per kilocalorie than coal.
This means you need that factor increase in coal to equal a similar amount of oil, to get the same work done.
Ditto with solar. Unlike energy derived from fossil fuels, energy derived from solar power is diffuse and also extremely intermittent: it varies constantly with weather or day/night. If a large city wants to derive a significant portion of its electricity from solar power, it must build fossil-fuel-fired or nuclear-powered electricity plants to provide backup for the times when solar energy is not available.Solar power has a capacity of about 20 percent. This means that if a utility wants to install 100 megawatts of solar power, they need to install 500 megawatts of solar panels. This makes solar power a prohibitively expensive and pragmatically poor replacement for the cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy our economy depends on, especially if one intends to use it operate missile factories.
Worse, calculations show that solar cells currently consume twice as much sej as they produce, so they're no bargain. Worse, an entirely solar civilization would most likely have to exist at the power output and potential (relative to electric grid capacity) of about one half where we are now. Plus, the collector area would have to expand to around that of the states of Colorado and Nevada combined.
H.T. Odum's solar "eMergy" (eMbodied energy) measures all of the energy (adjusted for quality) that goes into the production of a product. Odum's calculations show that the only forms of alternative energy that can survive the exhaustion of fossil fuels are muscle, burning biomass (wood, animal dung, or peat), hydroelectric, geothermal in volcanic areas, and some wind electrical generation. Nuclear power could be viable if one could overcome the shortage of fuel. No other alternatives (e.g., solar voltaic) produce a large enough net sej to be sustainable. In short, there is no way out.
Further, Matt Savinar (Life After the Oil Crash) has shown that NONE of the alter-sources usually cited: from methane hydrates, from coal, from geothermal hot dry rock technology, from natural gas, from oil shales and tar sands, from secondary recovery of existing oil fields, and so on- will do squat to totally replace the energy now being consumed for our entire infrastructure, from powering a military-industrial complex with umpteen bombers, and now missile defense, plus more tanks for occupations and wars, not to mention sustaining growth in industries, new computers, maintaining the electrical power grid and building new nuclear reactors.
According to The Physicist's Desk Reference (Table C, p. 187, Energy Generation by Type)the most energy-intense uses (aggressive consumption category, I) for all forms of solar, geothermal and wind are projected to total only 6 exajoules by next year. This compares to 24 EJ for oil, 16 for coal, 9 for natural gas and 6 for nuclear. Thus, ALL the usual "green" alternatives" are projected to barely add up to what nuclear will deliver on its own.
Meanwhile, exacerbating the problem of finding and implementing adequate fuel -energy sources is the continually increasing population. Global energy consumption rose from barely 21 EJ in 1900, to 318 EJ in 1988, to close to 400 EJ today. Solar, geothermal + wind by the end of this year, will therefore have contributed only:
(6/ 400) x 100% = 1.5% of the total global demand
But this is exactly the rate of increase in global population per year! In other words, the added total alternative energy benefit is exactly lost because we added an extra percentage of humans to consume the benefit! In effect, our energy predicament is like a rat spinning its toy wheels in a cage and getting no where.
The stage is set to add 50% MORE humans by 2050, topping off at 9 billion, which will necessitate - if we still plan to retain solar in the mix - converting an area the size of Europe to solar panel arrays. In addition, to feed all those hungry mouths, we will need to add an agricultural area the size of the whole continent of South America - especially given how the eating habits of Chinese and Indians have now altered to become more "American" (e.g. much more meat, like steaks, etc. - which reauire vastly more water and resources to produce)
The bottom line here isn't very pretty. It reads like this: Alternative energy sources - no matter how many are incorporated - will provide only a very marginal benefit unless:
a) humans majorly reduce their birth rates around the world, and
b) Our concentrated energy use society is rendered much more de-localized and diffused so that it can better adapt to the diffuse and lower quality capacity of alternative energy sources.
I suspect neither of these will occur, meaning that as Peak Oil intrudes into our civilization, we will see the "die off" (reducing the global population from a peak of 9 billion to 4 billion) that many have predicted and everyone fears.
As the late Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and others have reminded:
"If we humans don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us."
Oil inventories are running lower, as are the easier to drill land sites of old, because of increasing demand. This means the only way to get more oil now is by risky deep sea floor drilling, which risks more incidents like the BP spill, or reverting to shale oil - which isn't very efficient- delivering less oil per gallon drilled than the oil energy needed to drill it!
Oil used to have an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) as high as 30. It only took one barrel of oil to extract 30 barrels of oil. This was such a fantastic ratio that oil was practically free energy. Some oil wells had EROEI ratios close to 100. Now, it has fallen to around 16, and is still falling - a sure sign we are fast approaching peak. (See also further info at: http://www.dieoff.org/).
The world currently consumes about 82.5 million barrels of oil per day. The US consumes about 20 million of these, of which approximately 12.5 million are used for transportation. More critical, is the food component derived from oil that's hardly mentioned except by the inner circle cognoscenti. To be blunt, oil = food, given that it provides the primary bulk of fertilizer to support the "green" revolution - or what's left of it. Take away the oil fertilizers, and famine follows. On a mass, global multi -billions level scale.
According to current stats, global oil demand is expected to grow 2-3% per year, and the population by 1.5% per year. In this case:
-dQ/ dt ~ {rate of demand on Q per year + rate of population growth translated into a yearly demand on Q)
where the LHS represents the depletion rate of available oil resources, and the RHS gives the “sinks” that deplete them. Note the 1st term assumes only the pure economic, e.g. GDP-“growth” demands for increase, not population). In concrete terms, if 300 billion barrels (dQ) of relatively cheap oil remain after next year, and (as of 2012), and 28 billion barrels of year are consumed per year, and the combined term on the RHS increases this by 4.5% per year – what do you get? Well, T-R-O-U-B-L-E!
The planet was endowed with ~ 3,000 billion barrels of oil – of which we’ve consumed 1,500 billion barrels. 300 billion barrels of relatively cheap oil remains (assuming increased deep sea floor drilling), after which 500 billion barrels of “break-even” oil remains (costs as much to access as it delivers), after which 700 billion barrels of very expensive oil remains (costs much more to reach it than it deliver in energy). At the heart of these considerations is the net energy eqn. (cf. Physics Today, Weisz, July 2004, p. 51)
Q (net) = Q (PR) – [Q (op) + E/T]
In effect, for break-even oil one would find Q(net) = 0
Thus, there is no net gain in energy given the quantity that must be used to obtain it.
For the last 700 billion barrels, Q(net) = negative quantity = -Q since the rate of energy production (Q (PR) ) must be debited by the energy consumed for its operation Q(op), and the energy E invested during its “lifetime” T.
Thus its Q(PR) will be small in relation to the bracketed quantity.Thus, the problem in a nutshell is not “running out of oil’ but running out of CHEAP oil. Consumers around the world will get their first hint that Peak Oil is really around the corner when (in the U.S.) gas hits near $8-10 a gallon, and food costs jump accordingly (because of the increased fertilizer costs, plus the cost to transport food to various destinations, supermarkets etc). When the initial shock hits it won't be pretty, and will make the current austerity riots in Europe look like a walk in the park.
So - the $64 question is: can adequate alternative energy sources fill in most of the gaps, say when the last break -even oil is exhausted and only the very expensive to drill form remains? It’s all very well to speculate and ruminate that future energy needs will be met, but the question remains: HOW? When one does the math, and in particular pays attention to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the ‘net energy equation’, this isn't simple by any means. Nowhere near as simple as building 20 million wind turbines (see photo) or laying down 400,000 acres of solar cells.
Where will energy come from to support an industrial-energy intense and consumptive civilization? You can’t just say “new sources” and leave it at that. What new sources? Where? As Jay Hanson (www.dieoff.org) pointedly notes:
“The fact that our society can‘t survive on alternative energy should come as no surprise, because only an idiot would believe that windmills and solar panels can run bulldozers, elevators, steel mills, glass factories, electric heat, air conditioning, aircraft, automobiles, etc., AND still have enough energy left over to support a corrupt political system, armies, etc. Envision a world where freezing, starving people burn everything combustible -- everything from forests (releasing CO2; destroying topsoil and species); to garbage dumps (releasing dioxins, PCBs, and heavy metals); to people (by waging nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional war); and you have seen the future. “
But how correct is he?
One needs to process that different kinds of energy resources have fundamentally different "qualities". For example, a BTU of oil (oil before it is burnt) is fundamentally different than a BTU of coal. Oil has a higher energy content per unit weight and burns at a higher temperature than coal; it is easier to transport, and can be used in internal combustion engines. A diesel locomotive wastes only one-fifth the energy of a coal-powered steam engine to pull the same train. Oil's many advantages provide 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per kilocalorie than coal.
This means you need that factor increase in coal to equal a similar amount of oil, to get the same work done.
Ditto with solar. Unlike energy derived from fossil fuels, energy derived from solar power is diffuse and also extremely intermittent: it varies constantly with weather or day/night. If a large city wants to derive a significant portion of its electricity from solar power, it must build fossil-fuel-fired or nuclear-powered electricity plants to provide backup for the times when solar energy is not available.Solar power has a capacity of about 20 percent. This means that if a utility wants to install 100 megawatts of solar power, they need to install 500 megawatts of solar panels. This makes solar power a prohibitively expensive and pragmatically poor replacement for the cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy our economy depends on, especially if one intends to use it operate missile factories.
Worse, calculations show that solar cells currently consume twice as much sej as they produce, so they're no bargain. Worse, an entirely solar civilization would most likely have to exist at the power output and potential (relative to electric grid capacity) of about one half where we are now. Plus, the collector area would have to expand to around that of the states of Colorado and Nevada combined.
H.T. Odum's solar "eMergy" (eMbodied energy) measures all of the energy (adjusted for quality) that goes into the production of a product. Odum's calculations show that the only forms of alternative energy that can survive the exhaustion of fossil fuels are muscle, burning biomass (wood, animal dung, or peat), hydroelectric, geothermal in volcanic areas, and some wind electrical generation. Nuclear power could be viable if one could overcome the shortage of fuel. No other alternatives (e.g., solar voltaic) produce a large enough net sej to be sustainable. In short, there is no way out.
Further, Matt Savinar (Life After the Oil Crash) has shown that NONE of the alter-sources usually cited: from methane hydrates, from coal, from geothermal hot dry rock technology, from natural gas, from oil shales and tar sands, from secondary recovery of existing oil fields, and so on- will do squat to totally replace the energy now being consumed for our entire infrastructure, from powering a military-industrial complex with umpteen bombers, and now missile defense, plus more tanks for occupations and wars, not to mention sustaining growth in industries, new computers, maintaining the electrical power grid and building new nuclear reactors.
According to The Physicist's Desk Reference (Table C, p. 187, Energy Generation by Type)the most energy-intense uses (aggressive consumption category, I) for all forms of solar, geothermal and wind are projected to total only 6 exajoules by next year. This compares to 24 EJ for oil, 16 for coal, 9 for natural gas and 6 for nuclear. Thus, ALL the usual "green" alternatives" are projected to barely add up to what nuclear will deliver on its own.
Meanwhile, exacerbating the problem of finding and implementing adequate fuel -energy sources is the continually increasing population. Global energy consumption rose from barely 21 EJ in 1900, to 318 EJ in 1988, to close to 400 EJ today. Solar, geothermal + wind by the end of this year, will therefore have contributed only:
(6/ 400) x 100% = 1.5% of the total global demand
But this is exactly the rate of increase in global population per year! In other words, the added total alternative energy benefit is exactly lost because we added an extra percentage of humans to consume the benefit! In effect, our energy predicament is like a rat spinning its toy wheels in a cage and getting no where.
The stage is set to add 50% MORE humans by 2050, topping off at 9 billion, which will necessitate - if we still plan to retain solar in the mix - converting an area the size of Europe to solar panel arrays. In addition, to feed all those hungry mouths, we will need to add an agricultural area the size of the whole continent of South America - especially given how the eating habits of Chinese and Indians have now altered to become more "American" (e.g. much more meat, like steaks, etc. - which reauire vastly more water and resources to produce)
The bottom line here isn't very pretty. It reads like this: Alternative energy sources - no matter how many are incorporated - will provide only a very marginal benefit unless:
a) humans majorly reduce their birth rates around the world, and
b) Our concentrated energy use society is rendered much more de-localized and diffused so that it can better adapt to the diffuse and lower quality capacity of alternative energy sources.
I suspect neither of these will occur, meaning that as Peak Oil intrudes into our civilization, we will see the "die off" (reducing the global population from a peak of 9 billion to 4 billion) that many have predicted and everyone fears.
As the late Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and others have reminded:
"If we humans don't reduce our numbers, nature will do it for us."
No comments:
Post a Comment