Their mission is to develop, innovate and disseminate sustainable technologies to the poor all over the world. The techniques they've developed are very "customer centric" in that they develop solutions that make sense based on the needs and abilities and infrastructure available to the communities they work with. This project is the work of Job Ebenezer, and as he is from South India his focus is to help communities in those places. A prime example of their approach is the repurposing of bicycles as machines. He's developed a simple method to quickly convert a bicycle from transportation to providing human power to drive a large range of machines so long as the the machine can take input from a belt- or chain-driven pulley.
A dual purpose bicycle is one that can be used for both transportation and power production. This modified bicycle can be used by people in low socio-economic status to operate a rice thresher, peanut sheller, corn sheller, circular saw, woodworking lathe and other implements that require 1/2 hp or less. By adding value to their product and services, the poor can earn more money and achieve sustainability.
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Republished from http://www.ecoshock.org/2008/08/peak-oil-and-media.html -- a panel discussion about Peak Oil and its coverage in the Media. What we can do. Vancouverpeakoil.org presents a panel of 5 journalists: Rex Weyler, Barbara Jaffe, Charlie Smith, Sara Robinson and Alex Smith. How to organize, use media, bypass the mainstream.
It is production that has peaked. It doesn't matter if there are trillions of barrels of oil left, what matters is to get that oil and bring it to market. There are only a couple rigs capable of drilling oil in the Arctic and it costs $1billion apiece to build new oil rigs. Somehow tapping Arctic oil would require building new rigs, new oil pipelines, etc, and is there money to do all the required investment? Or even is new oil something we want to invest in, given the negative environmental impact.
Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is another factor.. The peak net EROI occurred 30 years ago. Deposits like the tar sands have an EROI of 1:1 meaning you extract the same energy from the tar sands that you put in. It's not profitable by any measure yet they're committing ecological catastrophes in the name of mining it. And it requires government subsidy to even get what little profit there is.
Price isn't determined, any more, by the old style price/demand equations. Price isn't being set by the world market. Instead it is access. The Iraq war is being fought to establish access. The term is "off-take deals" referring to special deals like "We'll give you $n billion and take everything in sight". The Chinese especially are doing this, rather than doing war. Resources controlled by off-take deals never get to market and the price is not the market price but whatever was negotiated in the deal.
The strength of empires has been determined repeatedly by the energy resources. The most recent was England whose strength came from their coal deposits. When their coal became eclipsed by American coal, they were eclipsed, and again when Americans discovered oil, that doubly eclipsed the British Empire.
We're talking about a finite resource and the math isn't very simple. A great analogy was made to what happens if you repeatedly take food out of a refrigerator. Eventually you run out and go to the store to buy more. In this case the refrigerator is the oil deposits, but there is no store to go to.
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Rebroadcast from ifyoulovethisplanet.org:- Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at Beyond Nuclear and former director of the Reactor Watchdog Project at Nuclear Information and Resource Service, illuminates the operation, disrepair and vulnerability of U.S. nuclear power plants. This episode also includes an excerpt from the 1983 Oscar-winning documentary, If You Love This Planet, which features Dr. Caldicott giving a lecture about the risks and consequences of nuclear war.
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Rebroadcast from ifyoulovethisplanet.org:- David Lochbaum, Director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, about the public health dangers of the 104 aging nuclear power plants in the United States. Hear about near-melt-downs, how terrorists could easily crash planes into the planes or sabotage them from the inside, and how the Nuclear Regulatory Commission fails to ensure community safety. Also includes a short excerpt of a lecture by Dr. Caldicott about the Nuclear Age from If You Love This Planet (1983 Academy Award-winning documentary) with narration from U.S. nuclear propaganda films.
This is the first in a series of broadcasts from Dr. Helen Caldicott. As they say, it is imperative that this show reach a large audience, not just in the U.S. but worldwide.
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This is a very deeply interesting documentary about oil, oil supplies, the peak oil phenomenon, and the coming looming disasters which await us. The documentary is not "balanced" in that they gave no voice to the other points of view, but I suppose they think those other points of view are so far out of truth to not be worth addressing.
It starts with some assertions of truth: Oil is the Blood of the Dinosaurs, Oil is the Bloodstream of the Global Economy, Oil is the Blood of the Earth
Our arrangements of using Oil is making ourselves dependent on unstable regimes in nasty parts of the world. This isn't covered in the documentary, but I wonder how much of that instability is due to geopolitical machinations launched by the U.S. to secure the supply of oil. In any case it's obvious from the daily news that the middle east is unstable, and this is where our oil is coming from.
Assertion: It's important (to some) to keep us dependent on oil for as long as possible.
It would be in the business interests of the oil companies to keep the world dependent on oil. Clearly if the world continued its dependence on oil, the world will continue to ship money to the oil companies.
Most people have no inkling of the problem we're facing. The looming crisis includes unemployment, bankruptcy, starvation.. all this is the normal behavior of a collapsed society.
Assertion by Colin Campbell: The bulk of the worlds oil was formed in two periods of extreme global warming, 90 million years ago, and 150 million years ago.
If this is correct it makes oil a one time resource which will "never" be recreated on this planet. I'm a little surprised and will need to double check this assertion by Dr. Campbell. I always thought there was a continuing process of creating new oil, it's just that the planet takes a long time to do the process.
The work value of oil is phenomenal. Scientists can equate units of human labor to the energy, and the energy content of $1 worth of oil contains the energy equivalent to 25,000 hours of human labor. In other words the drive to my job, 10 miles, uses energy equivalent to 40,000 hours of human labor. But I know from personal experience I can ride a bicycle for that same distance, it takes me 45 minutes to ride, so there's a huge wastage of energy (40,000 hours of human labor to drive my car versus the 45 minutes of human labor it takes me to ride my bicycle).
Assertion: "Oil is our God" and that whatever religion we profess to, what we really worship is oil. Eh? What do they mean by "worship"?
70% of oil is used for transportation fuel
98% of transportation energy comes from oil
Constructing products like cars or computers or food, all these things by modern production methods require more weight in oil to produce the thingy than the thingy itself weighs. In Agriculture, for example, it's widespread to use petroleum based fertilizer. Oil makes plastics, insecticides, cosmetics and more.
"They're not making a lot of dinosaurs any more"
"Oil is a magnet for war. Oil starts wars." This speaker goes on to claim the conflict in Darfur is really about oil. There are oil supplies in southern Sudan, recently found. The Sudanese government (based in the north) wants to control the oil, and are therefore ethnically cleansing southern Sudan so the northern Sudanese can control the oil.
However this "Oil starts all wars" is a strange short-sighted statement. What about the wars which begun before Oil was discovered and brought into use by humans? There were many wars fought before the age of Oil, and clearly those wars were not fought over oil resources. However it's ominous that she claims World War I was really about oil (??Was it??). Many events in World War II were affected clearly by oil supplies, especially the German attack into Russia so that Germany could gain control of the Baku oil fields.
The first war purely about Oil was the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This was absolutely and fundamentally about a dispute over an oil field.
In the more recent U.S. stupid illegal invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military did not secure the WMD areas. Supposedly the war was to control WMD's, so why didn't they secure Iraq's military depots? By not securing Iraq's depots the arms and other military supplies in there instead were looted and were made available to the insurgents, who have been blowing up U.S. troops ever since. Anyway, instead of securing the WMD depots the U.S. military secured the oil fields. Instead of securing the museums in Baghdad, the museums which contained the original records of human civilization, the museums which contained the cuniform tablets that are the earliest form of writing, instead of securing the museums which were looted, the U.S. military secured the oil ministry.
We're "Always just a drill bit aqway from a major new discovery" but it's been a very long time since the last significant discovery.
Extracting oil from tar sands and other heavy deposits, it's technically possible however it requires more energy to do so than you get from the resulting oil. The Fischer-Tropsch process was invented by German scientists before World War II and is how the Germans were able to fuel their war machine while not having a supply of oil. They converted coal into oil using this process.
Use of this process is only feasible as a last resort, because it's so expensive to do.
"Sustainable peak supply" -- what does this phrase mean?
They assert that oil allowed world human population to explode. At time of christ, 300mil, by 1700's it'd doubled to 600mil. But as soon as oil was discovered the population exploded to the 6billion it is now. They're saying population increase came as a direct result of better energy supplies. Maybe so, but weren't there other effects? Better medicine? Also better food supplies, though better food is due to better oil supply.
Richard M. Nixon: If our energy resources are sensibly developed they can provide for us for centuries to come
There's a belief many have had that oil is limitless and will always be cheap. Businesses have written into their assumptions that oil will continue being supplied as it is today. Again most people are clueless as to what's about to happen.
A 30-40-50 mile commute only makes sense when there's cheap oil. In the U.S. we've reconstructed the cities to make for 30+ mile commutes, with people driving everywhere, the cities are organized for the convenience of drivers, and there is resulting very little mass transit. This is short sighted thinking which led us to suburbanize U.S. cities under the belief that there would always be cheap oil and gas.
The U.S. evolved our cities for cars. The end of cheap oil means we'll have to rebuild our cities from scratch to a denser style. Perhaps.
e.g. riding bicycle's would be the kind of adaptation people will have to make. But most people are unwilling to ride bicycles for any serious amount of riding.
There are two options: a) militarize the taking of oil by force, b) prepare properly for the coming end of cheap oil
Technology can come to the rescue. Natural resources can be exhausted, but human ingenuity is inexhaustible.
Projections of current trends in energy demand say the human population will require 14 terawatts of energy in 2050. This is tremendous. It would require thousands of new nuclear plants (for example) and by doing this with nuclear power would mean the uranium supplies would reach their peak uranium production very quickly.
Living in the style to which we have become accustomed is not sustainable. It is going to create for us a crisis. How will we get through this?
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum production is reached. The peak oil occurs at every level, for each oil field, for each country, and for the global production. After the peak oil point is reached, the rate of production enters its terminal decline. If global consumption is not mitigated before the peak, an energy crisis may develop because the availability of conventional oil will drop and prices will rise, perhaps dramatically. M. King Hubbert first used the theory in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. His model, now called Hubbert peak theory, has since been used to predict the peak petroleum production of many other countries, and has also proved useful in other limited-resource production-domains. According to the Hubbert model, the production rate of a limited resource will follow a roughly symmetrical bell-shaped curve based on the limits of exploitability and market pressures.
The same pattern happens for other limited resources. There will be a copper peak, a coal peak, a natural gas peak, a fish peak, etc. In each case there is an increasing demand for a resource, and a fixed maximum capacity to deliver that demand, and once the capacity is reached it damages the resource such that it can no longer produce as it did before.
Oil is the most critical resource for our societies existence and it is with oil that this Peak Resource phenomenon was discovered.
Oil is the key to transportation. Current transportation technologies generally require liquid fuels, and society has chosen that the only way to get liquid fuels is to use fossil oil. The direct result of tight oil supplies will be expensive transportation, and that will contribute to several secondary results to be covered later.
The ever-increasing demand for oil partly occurs as a natural byproduct of rising population. Each person who exists is responsible for consuming resources, so of course the more people there are the more resources which are used. Another cause is a shift from manual technologies like bicycles or horse drawn carts to mechanized technologies like cars and trucks. Some countries, especially India and China, are industrializing and are causing an increased rate of demand. As countries industrialize the amount of resources consumed per person raises as well.
An interview with the authors of Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil they suggest the U.S. might become so desperate for oil they would invade Canada to get its oil. Maybe the NAFTA is at least partly due to the need to have ready access to Canadian oil.
"The likely outcome of not dealing with this issue is not an environmental catastrophe. It's an economic and social catastrophe that may leave us unable to deal with the environmental catastrophe," Richard Gilbert said in an interview. The effects brought by oil in our society are so critical and fundamental to how we live, that without cheap oil we face starvation, riots, collapsed economies, more wars, and more.
The gushers are gone - "It's the end of the Beverly Hillbillies oil. The kind of oil that you stick a hole in the ground, and it starts squirting a gusher out under its own power." - All the big discoveries have already been made. There are two peaks in oil supply, the first peak is the peak in the rate of discovery of oil, and the second peak is the peak of oil production. The peak of the discovery rate has to precede the peak of production, and the peak of oil discovery is long past.
There's more in this article but we're focused on understanding peak oil here.
As Dr. Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, said in testimony to Congress in January 2007: "The world is facing twin energy-related threats: that of not having adequate and secure supplies of energy at affordable prices and that of environmental harm caused by its use. " Not only is the supply threatened, the use of fossil fuels is threatening us all from environmental harm. The burning of fossil fuels releases poisons which directly cause a wide range of diseases. The burning of fossil fuels release greenhouse gasses which are directly causing climate change to be worse. Purchasing fossil fuels results in large capital flows into the Middle East.
"Oil supply is increasingly dominated by a small number of major producers, most of them in the Middle East" which then connects to a variety of global geopolitical manipulations. The oil industry needs to do massive investment in developing oil fields and infrastructure, a total of $4.3 trillion dollars between 2005-2030. However it is uncertain whether the key Middle East countries will actually do so, and it's possible they will deliberately keep investment lower than predicted. Why should they increase production when keeping production low keeps the price high? Or it's possible that a credit crunch might prevent producers from expanding capacity due to a lack of money to pay for the investments.
The U.S. imports more energy than the next 2 highest importers. Most of U.S. imports come from shaky or unfriendly suppliers. Many of the key suppliers are 1-2 months travel time away. There are many scenarios in which "energy" (a.k.a. oil) supplies to the U.S. can be disrupted. One of these unfriendly suppliers could turn downright nasty and cut off oil to the U.S. Or storms could wreck shipping facilities, refinery facilities. Or a war with Iran could block the mouth of the Persian Gulf, preventing shipment of oil from the Middle East.
In other words we have to be smart enough to realize the game is changing. That we can no longer continue life in the style to which we have become accustomed. We have to change our ways.
There are approximately two thoughts to how the peak oil phenomena plays out. The "sharp peak" model says production reaches a peak and rapidly declines. Nobody who has studied this carefully says we will "run out", instead the debate is in how quick is the decline. There are those who think production will, instead, "plateau" for a long time for one reason or another.
The world energy crisis is upon us. Dwindling supply and rising demand leads to a simple economics lesson, rising cost. The old equation was cheap energy lead to untold wealth. The new equation is gonna lead to a totally different world power structure.
Surviving and thriving after Peak Oil will require using the resources currently invested in the military. How we use the remaining half of the oil determines the future of human civilization: Will we use the remaining oil to make solar panels and relocalize food production, or will we use it to build more military equipment to control the oil as it runs out?
It's midsummer and it's hot out. I've had a few articles recently about keeping cool in the summer without spending a lot of energy, e.g. without running an air conditioner. But, what about keeping warm in the winter?
Winter? Isn't that months away? Well, yeah, but the same principle holds true as I've been discussing about keeping cool without air conditioners. Our ancestors didn't have central heating nor central air conditioning. Our ancestors did not have fossil fuels easily available. Our ancestors didn't have the over abundance of energy that we enjoy today. How did they survive? How did they make it through cold winters and hot summers? That's worth studying and seeing what can be applied today.
The Furnace-free House in Vermont is a three-way conversation between Donella (Dana) Meadows (the client), Marc Rosenbaum, PE (the ecological design/energy consultant), and Amory Lovins (world famous energy expert). It began when Amory told Donella that it was possible to build a passive solar home in the Vermont climate which required no heating system or back-up heat. They discussed it, and the discussion is presented on that page.
The Scoot Coupe is an interesting vehicle that's a cross between a car and a scooter. A lot of the underlying parts seem to be from scooters, such as the handlebars and the 49cc gas motor. However it's a three-wheeler, giving it more stability than a scooter, and seats two people side by side. The best part is it gets over 60 miles/gallon. As a three-wheeler it will register as a motorcycle, but will not require a motorcycle license (at least this is the case in California).
Asia is turning to plants for fuel There is a growing surge of interest in Asia to develop crops and infrastructure to supply plant based oil to the biodiesel industry. This is potentially very good, as it turns oil from a fossil fuel to a renewable fuel. But, as I've covered before on this site, the picture isn't all rosy.
e.g. "One criticism of biofuels is that if you want to go from 2 percent to 20 percent, you would have to direct so much of that agriculture from food to fuel that there would be real competition between the two," By diverting cropland from growing food to growing oil, it threatens food supplies. Well, it will threaten food supplies "later" when the biofuel production becomes significant enough.
Some fuel options are hard to find discusses the biofuel of choice in the U.S. -- Ethanol. Ethanol is more compatible with the majority of vehicles in the U.S. since it's more like gasoline. Ethanol is also produced from the politically connected corn industry.
Consider this article: Energy refugee fleeing $100-a-barrel oil .. "Around the time of the first oil shock in 1973, columnist Art Buchwald penned a satirical column about what life without cheap oil would be like in the 1990s. One day, a father and son go out for their first drive in weeks because fuel costs $8.50 a gallon. 'I feel like a steak,' says the father to his son. And the boy asks, 'Dad, what's a steak?' ... To many Americans, the approaching petroleum calamity remains invisible, but not to my pal John P. Like so many others, he rolled into Arizona from the Midwest a few decades ago bent on fleeing an assortment of ecological and environmental abuses in favor of adventure, clean air, cheap energy and abundant water.... 'You might say that I was an environmental refugee,' the steely-eyed, onetime congressional candidate and former big-time river guide said as he sipped some simple black coffee on the outskirts of Sedona not far from his hideaway in Rim Rock.... 'I always figured that I'd stay here until the managed-care guys came to take me away.'... But my pal has changed his mind. 'See that price?' he said, pointing to a gas station sign advertising fuel for $2.50 a gallon. 'There have been warnings galore, but we've to fix the energy levees, so to speak. That's the last time you'll see it that low; denial about our oil addiction trumps any 12-step program. We are out of here because here in the red rocks and in so many other places, inconvenient facts about energy and water are taboo; oil is headed for $100-a-barrel oil, just the least shock will do it: a tanker blown in the Persian Gulf, a refinery sabotaged.'..." And with that he's planning to move to Idaho to escape the coming fuel catastrophe.
This kind of story just reminds me of one thing. Survivalists. In the 1990's they were escaping the y2k problem. Earlier they were escaping nuclear war. Today there's scares about bird flu, terrorists, peak oil, etc.
Now, I'm very interested in this peak oil scenario. This scenario certainly looks very realistic and I am very concerned about when will it happen.
But ... let's consider the psychological/emotional/spiritual component to this.
What we have is a scary story. People like John P quoted above are taking the fear in that story, and living that fear as if its true, taking drastic actions out of fear.
Ask yourself, if you are having fear, if you are in so much fear you're terrified of the future, how does that affect the range of actions you can take? Doesn't this trigger the fight or flight reflex, causing it to become a survival issue? And, sure enough, there is a lot of evidence with the peak oil scenario that make it look like the survival of our society is at stake.
One of the things that is true about fear is it limits your vision. Your limited vision can see fewer possible solutions.
For example John P is missing out on all sorts of solutions being developed in the world. Instead he's escaping to Idaho expecting the world he knows to collapse into bloodshed. No doubt he's going to stockpile food and guns and be prepared to be killing anybody who wants to take his survival, represented by the food and guns, away from him.
But what about the development of biofuels, of better solar energy systems, better wind energy systems, more reliable nuclear systems, vehicles available from the car companies that can burn non-fossil fuels, and more. He's not seeing them, because the fear doesn't allow it.
If you find yourself in fear, what can you do? There's a range of possibilities.
For example if you're unaware of your fear, you have little ability to navigate out of the fear. Instead it's more likely you'll take rash actions based on the limited vision your fear allows you to have.
The key is to learn to be aware when you are in fear, and to recognize the effects to yourself that come from being in fear.
Next, having the awareness of the fear and the effects is when you can choose differently. What I recommend is a prayer I've learned from Ron Roth: Peace to my thoughts, peace to my emotions, peace to my body, peace to the world. You can also meditate upon the divine presence such as repeating to yourself, and embodying, "come holy spirit, divine holy spirit".
Those practices are not the only ones which will help you come out of fear. They are what I do for myself.
Another thing I've learned is there are many problems, such as the peak oil issue, where my conscious mind, my ego, has no clue how to solve the problem. However, the divine mind does know the answer. The divine, or if you prefer the name 'God', created this universe and surely must have an idea or two of how we in this culture at this time on this planet can resolve the problems facing us.
I don't know what that answer is, but I do know that whatever it is has to happen through us. For 'God' to act in the world 'we' must take actions, because we are God's agents in the world.
What this leads to is an idea. Taking the prayer concept I described above, here's how you might apply it to a world situation like the peak oil scenario, the Iraq war, the impending war in Iran, etc.
First spend some time meditating upon the divine as I described above. Then shift to a prayer like "come holy spirit, peace to the people of Iraq, peace to the soldiers in Iraq, peace to the countries surrounding Iraq, peace to the leaders in Iraq, ...". It helps to visualize inside yourself peace flooding through Iraq.
Now, I should point out that true peace is not the cessation of war. I think of true peace as it is exemplified by forests. A forest has a life of its own which manifests and protects the systemic organization that is the forest. Stuff happens in forests, there are animals hunting for meals, they sometimes kill one another, there are ant colonies having wars with each other, etc. All that stuff is going on, but whatever it is the life of the forest is completely intertwined with all that stuff that's going on. Anything that happens is swallowed by the life force of the forest.
Which was a long way of saying, you can pray for something but let go of attachment to a specific result. Your ego mind may have brilliantly come up with the supposedly perfect solution, but God may have a completely different idea. As the old saying goes, if you want to hear God laugh tell her your plans.
In the State of the Union speech, GW Bush mentioned Ethanol as a resource "we" should develop. There's been a big scramble towards Ethanol since. Ethanol has some interesting characteristics, in that it's a liquid fuel that's very compatible with gasoline. Unlike biodiesel, ethanol can be readily burned in a gasoline engine and, in fact, ethanol is widely used today in the U.S. Just watch for a sticker on the pump saying "This gasoline may contain ethanol".
Brazil leading effort to boost ethanol use discusses ethanol production and use in Brazil. During the 1970's the "military dictators" then ruling the country pushed for ethanol production and mandated its use in vehicles. That has turned into a golden spot in the Brazillian economy, and they use ethanol rather than gasoline in nearly half of domestic passenger fuel demand.
Brazil has an interesting advantage with all those sugar canes, in that it's sugar which produces alcohol.
This means the U.S. can't directly replicate what they're doing, we don't have domestic sugar cane production to any great degree. Further, when you mention Ethanol, the corn farmers in Iowa get dollar signs in their eyes, and the corn producer lobbiests have been controlling debate around ethanol.
But I want to gather up some details from the article, so here goes.
The article focuses on one plant that works "around the clock" that is distilling 92,500 gallons of ethanol daily that is trucked away for immediate sale at the pumps. But it can only do this during the sugar cane season, apparently (March to November). This means to cover the period outside that season they'll need fuel storage facilities.
This at the end seems to be a critical point:
In Sao Tome, the cooperative that owns the ethanol distillery is betting on its best profits since it bought the operation in 1993. Cocamar's production cost is $1.10 per gallon, and wholesalers are buying the fuel for $2.68 - up from $1.44 last year.
About the only thing that could hurt Brazil's ethanol industry now would be an almost unimaginable plunge in international crude oil prices, currently trading above $60 per barrel, said Almir Hawthorne, the distillery's industrial manager.
"Oil could drop to $35 or $40 per barrel, and ethanol producers would still make money."
They're making $1.24 per gallon more profit than last year, due entirely it would seem to the high price for oil. If oil prices did drop again it's clear their threshold for gaining a profit is around $40 per barrel. But I wonder if, at that price, they'll make enough profit to get the excitement that's circling around them.
That's been the sticker for most of the alternative fuels, whether their price per unit is less than the price for fossil fuel.
It seems every time the price for oil goes high, the makers of alternatives are in the limelight. Today that's ethanol (of several kinds), fuel cells, biodiesel, wind turbines, etc. Unfortunately when the price of oil drops again, the alternatives become less attractive.
This is simple economics, with the market (in its short sighted decision making) going to the source with the least cost. Another factoid in the article is that Brazil invested years of subsidies in its ethanol production industry. It's paying off now, and in the future Brazil will remain fueled even when the peak oil phenomena hits and oil is no longer available.
The point to that is in the energy industry it takes a very long time to develop alternatives. Brazil is an example, where it took years before their ethanol industry was self sustaining.
If the U.S. decisioning is based largely on the short sighted approach of "oh, the market will take care of it", well, I think the market moves too quickly for the development of new energy resources.
When they say "the market will take care of it" the scenario is that oil supply becomes tight, and the oil price rises, and then people start scrambling for alternatives that are cheaper. And, we're seeing this effect going on today. But when the real oil peak hits the supply is supposed to drop off very rapidly from the peak. That should cause a rapid rise in prices which would trigger the market to search for alternatives. But if it's going to take years to develop the alternatives, and in the meantime oil supply drops precipitously, "we" won't have those years.
I believe the current high oil prices are not the true oil peak, but instead based on the war(s) brewing in the Persian Gulf. Especially with the war we are threatening against Iran.
The current high oil price is making for an interesting training ground, inspiring the people go through the steps of finding an alternative to burning fossil fuels. Last year people were dumping their SUV's and motorcycles were becoming popular. This year they may be looking for ethanol.
I suppose if the oil prices stay high long enough, like they are now, the makers of the alternatives will have a long enough window to establish themselves. Here's hoping.
Malaysia is going for biodiesel production in a big way. They are building many palm oil plantations and building biodiesel production plants. I have previous coverage here, here, and here.
One issue with Malaysia's plans is they're cutting down their rain forest to build these palm plantations. That, in turn, means new threats to rare species and a reduction of biodiversity. In other words, in the process of solving one environmental problem (environmental degradation from burning fossil fuel) they're creating a different environmental problem (reduced biodiversity).
WWF and palm oil industry join forces covers work by the World Wildlife Foundation to do something in cooperation with the palm oil industry. Through their Forest Conversion Initiative and the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA) signed two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) to develop Better Management Practices for the Malaysian oil palm industry to safeguard high conservation value forests (HCVF) in the country.
This sounds nice ... if some action is going to cause an environmental problem, it's nice there's an environmental protection organization they can partner with to mitigate the problem.
But ... in my mind is another thought. I wonder if this partnership is meant to whitewash the problem? Is this partnership only meant to give the appearance of solving the problem? Or is this partnership taking actions which are truly useful?
Supposedly the report discusses details of Kuwait's claimed oil reserves. Kuwait's reported oil reserves are 99 billion barrels. Kuwait has been an oil exporter since 1946, and has a massive oil field. However it's clear the reserves have been overstated.
The PIW report is based upon data circulating within the top echelons of the Kuwait Oil Co. (KOC). KOC is the upstream arm of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. KOC has primary responsibility for conducting exploration, drilling and production from Kuwait's oil fields. The PIW report claims that Kuwait's remaining proven and nonproven oil reserves total about 48 billion barrels, or 51 billion fewer barrels than previously advertised.
That 51 billion fewer barrels of reserves represent 5% of stated world reserves. Especially troubling is I've read several articles claiming that many oil producing countries have been overstating their reserves as well. What isn't overstated is the world consumption, especially the growing consumption levels in India and China resulting from their economic expansion.
How did this come about? Well, it's not a simple matter of bravado (e.g. the stereotypical men boasting about the size of X or Y or oil fields). In this case it is about distinguishing between "proven," "probable" and "possible" reserves.
Kuwait (and others?) have stated their reserves as the sum of all three. Well, I don't know about you, but "possible" reserves doesn't sound very promising. Especially when you consider most oil wells turn up dry, even on a good day.
As I said, the oil consumption rate is known (and growing). What isn't so clear are the actual reserves. One thing that's clear is the Hubbert model which predicts the peak oil phenomenon. It's not that an oil field produces fine until one day it just fizzles to a stop. Instead it produces fine until the peak occurs, after which it's a constant struggle to get oil out.
This means the world oil situation will appear fine, but with more and more oil fields tilting to the "struggle" phase as each individual oil field peaks.
That, in a nutshell, is the peak oil phenomenon. The last several years of oil use will be characterised by a struggle to retrieve oil, and therefore the actual oil "production" will inexorably decline.
In the face of America stupidly continuing the glut of oil use and gas guzzling way of life, along with India and China rapidly expanding their oil use, this will not be pretty to watch.
I should warn you the author of the article I've linked to -- well -- he works for a financial investment company. They purport to having some investment ideas related to the scenario they describe. While I agree with the scenario, there may be some tilting of the rhetoric on their part.
Here's the context: "The USDA requires facilities that process the 100 million pigs, 35 million cattle, 1.6 billion turkeys, and 8 billion chickens slaughtered each year to use large volumes of clean water to continuously rinse the meats as they are cut and packaged." The formerly clean water is separated from the "protein" and other animal material, that leaves a "concentrated sludge, which is called Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) sludge. The poultry industry alone generates in excess of 2.5 billion pounds—more than 63,000 tanker loads—per year of DAF sludge."
The technosanity question would be what to do with that sludge? It's interesting to wonder what was formerly done with it. Was it just dumped into the wastewater system? Was it turned into any other product such as fertilizer or animal food?
The article discusses a proposed use for this sludge, being developed by Veridium Corporation and Mean Green BioFuels.
