Here’s a link to interesting perspective (some might even say FACT) concerning the topic of “peak oil” and the impact it will have on the near future. And yes, the word “railroad” is uttered in the text. It’s a quick read and might I say it’s worth it…
http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary13.html
-j
Something to remember is that much of the ‘peak oil’ concern is not far removed from Chicken Little. There are several target ranges for various kinds of oil stock and refined products at which alternatives become cost-effective, and they are not shockingly ‘out of line’ with where oil prices have gone in the last couple of years, and even more notably in the last few days.
A much more interesting topic is to investigate which companies have been engaging in a very active search to find/acquire key technologies and processes for, as an example, coal gasification, or synthesis of ‘biodiesel’ that can be used effectively as a primary vehicle fuel (e.g. with low sulfur, adequate injection-system lubricosity, etc.)
As a guide, somewhere around the equivalent of about $2.40 per gallon of diesel, you’ll have the economics in place to give you all the fuel supply you want for (compression-ignition or external-combustion) transportation. I wouldn’t place any bets at all on the price skyrocketing, or the supply dwindling, or seeing effective fuel shortfalls as more and more oil goes to China or such places with Ross Perot’s giant sucking sound.
There’s more to this than alarmists trying to promote their punditry or sell their overhyped newsletters (no insult either intended or given to Mr. Kunstler here)
Plain simple fact. Right NOW it is cheaper to use gas/diesel than other alternatives. As pointed out by Overmod though, we are aproaching the threshold where alternatives will be competitive.
Simple fact - if you pay $10 for extraction of $9.99 worth of energy then your economy is doomed…
Current EOEI (energy obtained for energy invested) for oil is about 5. It was about 50 in the 60ties. On some wells EOEI is below 1 - meaning that more energy is spent then obtained. It works thanks to the fact that electricity is cheaper then fossil energy - so still you make $ by doing it.
Hubbard’s crash is very, very real. Just put numbers togather…
More nuts for the squirrel farm!
Seriously, we’ve been subjected to this “the world will end tommorrow” dogma ad nauseum for decades now. The fact is, as market prices for oil climb, alternative markets will thrive. These alternative markets for transport fuels include new discoveries of petroleum, coal derived liquid fuels, and biofuels. Then there is the growing body of evidence that petroleum is of an abiotic origin, meaning there is probably countless barrels deep underground just waiting to be tapped. The Russians adapted this non-biogenic idea into their oil exploration techniques, and they went from being a net improter of oil in the early 20th century to a net exporter of oil today, for the simple fact that they drilled into basement rock considered impossible for holding petroleum by leftist Western geologists. We are just starting to discover this new exploration concept in the U.S.
I notice the website is dedicated to bashing Christians more than taking the time for rational debate. Everyone who claims to have an open mind should take these diatribes with a chunk of salt.
I say “Let the Oil run out!” Perhaps then we’ll get some good ol’ coal fired steamers running again! Hey! Stop laughing! During OPEC there was a threshhold where coal fired steam could be competitve…it almost got there, but not quite.
As a bonus, all the folks with their Excursions, Suburbans, and H2’s will be clamoring for public transport, and I think rail would play a big part of that. Then we wouldn’t have to listen to all the doom and gloom about Amtrak.
Really, and truthfuly, though, I see Ethanol being the big push if oil ever became really scarce. That’d be good, too, since we might keep some of the farm land we’re turning into starter castles and Walmarts at the moment.
Chris
Denver, CO
In 1875 the only commerical petroleum production in the world was in western Pennsylvania - nobody in the world knew if commercial quantaties of oil were located anywhere else.
Also in 1875, “Henry E. Wrigley, the head of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, issued a doomsday warning that the state - and hence the world - production of oil had peaked and would soon experience a preciptious decline, aggrevating fears that had overshadowed the oil industry since its inception”.
I’m not making this up. It’s on page 197 of “Titan” by Ron Chernow. It’s a biography of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Rockefeller once owned about half the Missouri Pacific. That one didn’t do too well for him.)
We’ve been “running out” of oil ever since 1875. And has been stated on this thread, motor fuels can be readily made from other things besides “oil”. It’s just that the economics work out so that it’s cheaper to use oil instead of soybeans right now.
I remember talk of oil running out in the 1950’s when I was in grade school. I thought that I had better buy a case of Three in One oil so I could keep my model trains running.
I’ll try not to get caught up in argument with the global warming is junk science crowd.
Those of you who can remember the 70’s oil embargo’s may remember the expert source for the oil industry was the Lundberg letter which published technical and business analysis about the industry for the oil industry. It was written by Jan Lundberg who has been warning about peak oil for several years now. In a recent article, he explains why it is too late to head of calamity. He thinks in the next decade peak oil will cause a speculative panic. Prices will shoot up so high that oil using industries, trucking for example, can’t afford to operate. The chain reaction that sets off is worse than you can imagine.
It’s worse than you thought.
http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2005/culture-change/lundberg-special1-2005.html
[quote]
QUOTE: Originally posted by greyhounds
“Buy Standard Oil, Buy Standard Oil”. Seems like it would be a very good investment according to this guy from Arcata.
So if I read this right, and you’re a logical, reasonable person, you’ve mortgaged everything you own and put the money into crude oil futures. You’ve also bought a lot of canned goods and have an energy efficient wood stove. If the people of Arcata let you burn wood.
What you’ll do for light may become a problem. Keroseen lamps will, of course, be of no use at all. Whale oil lamps, well let’s not even talk about that. Candles? No, they use tallow and a pig would have to die.
I guess we’ll all have to freeze in the dark.
Seriously, there are very few “cliffs” in the world’s economy. In fact, I can’t think of one. Can you? We’re not going to walk off a cliff. (Anybody remember the Y2K scare. I heard a nut on the radio say the sewers might not work. All city sewers work on gravity. The sky ain’t gonna fall.)
Anybody r
greyhounds: http://www.wolfatthedoor.org.uk/
this guy has put numbers togeather - numbers avalible for anyone who is willing to look for them in the oil industry sources.
I dson’t think he is anti-Christianity, just against a particular group of Christians and his dislike is probably based on lack of knowledge and too many false assumptions. He does go overboard in his analysis. And in one area, I think he doesn’t go far enough. Is Saudi Arabia our friend? Because it sells us cheap oil? Because President Bush says so? In mhy book their ideology that a pertect world (tghie rKingdom) can tolerate only their religion is the impetus behind most (95%+) wolrd terorrism.
History will be the judge of who is right.
I think Peter Huber of Wall Street Journal and Fortune Magazine article fame hit the nail square on the head. The oil problem is that the World has a lot of cheap, easy-to-extract oil, and that oil is mainly located in the Middle East under the control of governments that are not exactly long-term stable and properly part of the modern, Western, “liberal” (in the 19th Century Adam Smith sense) world.
Any time the price of oil gets high enough to move things in the direction of Canadian tar sands, renewed Continental U.S. exploration, hybrid cars, mass transit, coal-burning steam locomotives, solar-thermal or solar-voltaic rooftops, nuclear electric plants, what have you, oil manages to flood the market somehow and put the stop to all of those plans. All of the plans (along with any I haven’t mentioned) are very capital intensive with multi-year paybacks that require solid predictions of the price of oil, and all of these plans carry very high risk premiums.
The “peak oil” thing is the basic resource depletion curve, but part of the peaking of one resource is the substitution of another. US oil peaked and declined in part because of a vastly cheaper foreign substitute – I wonder what US oil production would be in its absence? If Saudi oil peaks, there is enough Candian and other tar sands and the like, and the claim is they can recover at prices that we could deal with with current or slightly better energy efficiency.
As to the abiotic oil theory, I don’t think it matters. The amount of CO2 we have added to the air so far by burning fossil fuels is about 100 parts per million. The oxygen in the air is 21,000 parts per million – Nick Lane argues in his book “Oxygen” that the oxygen is the “fossil gas” residue of the sequestration in the rocks of all of the fossil fuels, although most fossil fuel carbon is in very low-grade sandstones and shales and we are only mining/recovering the very richest deposits as coal, oil, and gas. But we have a long way to go before we bu