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Q&A session with Ken Verosub and Jeremy Gilbert immediately following the presentations they gave and which were broadcast in immediately prior Technosanity Podcast episodes.
Technosanity #17: QA session with Ken Verosub, Jeremy Gilbert
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A presentation at ASPO-USA 2008 by Mr. Jeremy J Gilbert, Managing Director, Barrelmore Ltd Jeremy Gilbert. Jeremy is the recently retired Chief Petroleum Engineer from British Petroleum (BP) where he was responsible for the company's worldwide petroleum engineering performance and associated research and development program. He joined BP in 1964.
His topic is a general overview of Peak Oil, specifically focusing on why it is time for America to wake up to Peak Oil. There have been a series of wake up calls, but has much changed?
While America has slept on: 2001: Discovery rates continue decades-long fall; Calculations suggest reserves can’t meet demand projections; Some recognition of political, investment risk in developing resources. 2008: No improvement in resource situation; New, more accurate, calculations of supply define earlier and clearer peak; Political will to increase supply clearly absent; prices not stimulating investment to increase supply
There are three problems: Geology, Investment, Policy of main producers. These, taken together, make the future of oil very difficult
Why are there still political leaders like Newt Gingrich or Henry Kissinger continuing to say there is no problem.
It's not a problem which higher oil prices will fully solve. According to these leaders or to most economists it is a simple problem of supply and demand. Higher demand will cause a higher price and it will do two things, incentivize customers to cut back, and incentivize energy producing countries to look for more oil or to use alternative methods. But this ignores a deeply serious problem, that in oil field after oil field it has been observed that oil production reaches a peak at the midway point, and then inevitably goes into a production decline. No amount of money will change the issue that the planet cannot provide more oil.
Technosanity #16: Peak Oil Global Overview, An American Wake Up Call
"We have to leave oil before oil leaves us." 'Petroapocalypse Now' is a story about cheap oil and the biggest party humanity has ever known.
We have built our world around the car & the airplane. Has enabled 'us' to colonize the entire planet. These cars and planes etc would be useless lumps of metal w/o oil. Cheap oil has put the burden of work onto machines and broke barriers of space and time.
It's not that we're running out, it's that the rate at which we extract oil will begin to decline. Doesn't matter what money resources etc we throw at the problem, it is inevitable we'll see a decline in oil availability.
Officialdom dismisses the peak oil theory. Such as OPEC. "The world has more than 140 years of supply".
Widely used data source is BP's annual review. Over 1 trillion barrels reserves. Recently there are huge doubts. In some parts of the world the estimates are thought accurate, in other countries the estimates are highly suspect. Such as Saudi Arabia. The fudged estimates could have to do with quotas etc and perhaps their claims are inflated.
That is the tone of this documentary. That we have an impending crisis, the huge party humanity has enjoyed that's been fueled by cheap oil, that party is about to end. Soon. It is time for everyone to wake up and realize what's about to happen and to plan accordingly.
Thirty years ago Pres. Carter warned of this, before him M. Hubbert King warned of this, and it doesn't take rocket science to realize this problem was going to happen one day or another.
It is not that we are running out of oil. The problem is the speed at which oil can be produced is slowing and some say that soon oil
production will soon peak and then decline. If this is true it could mean even higher oil prices and serious problems for the world economy.
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Petroleum 101
Mr. Ken Verosub, Geology Professor, University of California, Davis
http://www.aspo-usa.com/aspousa4/ConfirmedSpeakers.cfm?bid=522
slides: http://www.aspo-usa.org/aspousa4/proceedings/Verosub_Ken_Petro_101_ASPOUSA2008.pdf
Specialist in paleomagnetism of sediments, the history of the geomagnetic field. He presents an introductory lecture in Petroleum Geology giving an overview of how geology & biology came together to create the gift of oil.
For the planet to create oil requires that a quantity of dead sea organisms get trapped beneath a sandy "reservoir rock" by a solid "cap rock". The decay of those sea organisms becomes oil. It takes special conditions to do this and geologists have pretty much mapped out the planet for these resources.
A salt dome is one common trap for oil to form in. And it's the easiest to find. Salt domes produce localized gravity or magnetic deviations and in some cases you can simply fly over them and see them.
Generally geologists study the subsurface conditions using "Reflector Seismology". The modern technique uses a 'thumper truck' which bang the ground real hard, and then "geophones" are used to pick up reflected sound. The pattern of reflections tells them a lot about subsurface conditions. A similar method is used at sea, with a ship towing geophones through the water.
They're able to gather 2-D and 3-D pictures of subsurface conditions which make for interesting maps of what had previously been mountain ranges, coastal planes, ocean floors, etc.
The history of an individual well is a play in three acts. Act one is the initial discovery, drilling, and development of the oil field. Act 2 is a long plateau of extracting oil. Act three is a diminishment with an inevitable decline in oil extraction.
The model behind peak oil comes from taking the production curves of a group of oil fields .. and summing them together. For example take all the fields in a given region or country, sum their production curves, and it comes close to a bell curve. M. King Hubbert put this model together.
Hubbert's prediction for U.S. oil production was made in 1956. He had the distinction of being very close to the actual results.
Discoveries lead production. Because it takes 10 or more years to develop an oil field into production, the rate of discoveries is a predictor for future oil availability. The rate of oil discoveries peaked in the early 1960's and new oil field discoveries has been in a decline ever since. If there are little or no new oil field discoveries then ultimately oil production has to decline as the existing fields peter out.
Newt Gingrich's "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less" plan is shown as an example of poppycock solutions being pushed.
Finding or getting to the new oil is not easy or cheap. Offshore oil rigs cost over $1 billion apiece.
Finding big fields is unlikely. Oil company geologists have been all over the planet and their continual quest for new oil still hasn't reversed the decline in oil discoveries.
Even if new fields were to be drilled it takes 10-20 or more years to bring a field online. If we enter a decline in oil production soon, then new fields will only help in 2020 or further into the future.
The U.S. has 20 billion bbl of oil reserves. Total U.S. daily consumption in 2005 was 20.7 million per day, and we import 11.7 per day. That's approx 7 years of supply.
Major crisis due in 2015ish perhaps. 2008+7=2015. The U.S. oil production is going to be declining and the ratio of imports to usage will simply be ever-increasing. As the ratio becomes higher it makes the U.S. economy weaker and weaker, and the U.S. ever more desparate for oil.
But this guys presentation is only one set of figures. The USGS and others have different projections of future oil. They're claiming a peak further out into the future than ASPO projections say.
Another aspect is it isn't just a U.S. problem. Other countries are in on this. In particular the former-3rd-world countries which are industrializing mainly China and India are increasing their ratio of energy use. Globalization of production makes for higher transportation costs, and higher fuel usage. From that viewpoint also, in about 7 years demand for oil will exceed maximum total oil production.
What happens then?
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Peter Wells.. Neftex Petroleum Consultants, Ltd
bio: http://www.aspo-usa.org/aspousa4/ConfirmedSpeakers.cfm?bid=510
slides: http://www.aspo-usa.org/aspousa4/proceedings/Wells_Peter_OPEC_ASPOUSA2008.pdf
Oil geologist and other work in the oil industry in the Middle East, former Soviet Union, West Aftrica, etc. Currently working as a consultant with one contract being Toyota. Toyota had studied and internalized Peak Oil long ago, and 6 yrs later developed the Prius.
OPEC countries are the major oil producers. They produce 43% of world oil, and this is growing. They have a dilemna about investing in more production capacity. They are being asked to make more investment but they did so in the 1980's only to see demand dry up. They are reluctant to make more investments which will sit idle.
Venezuela & Iran & Iraq are a bloc of OPEC which want high prices. Many countries, especially middle east, see their oil as a National Heritage which they can leave to their grand-children. If they use it all up doing production at the highest rate possible then their National Heritage will be gone. Hence the middle east countries are likely to limit oil production for this reason.
OPEC exploration success peaked 40 years ago. In general there has been little success with oil exploration for a very very very long time (40 years). The argument is there are no major oil fields left to find.
He showed several charts of all the liquid fuels. The "liquids model" includes all forms of liquid fuels, including liquified natural gas, biofuels, tar sands, etc. Everything but crude oil is a miniscule slice compared to what crude oil supplies. For these other sources to replace crude oil is a huge leap to accomplish.
There was a price floor of $20/bbl which is the amount Saudi Arabia required to run their country. In 2002 the oil prices began to rise. Around that time the 'spare capacity' started peaking (production infrastructure was running full bore). This year more investment in Saudi Arabia infrastructure meant there's now more capacity and the price began to drop.
"Spare Capacity" is the amount of production capacity your infrastructure can do at maximum above what the current production rate is. That is, it's the amount that production can be increased. Too much spare capacity and prices are low, whereas too little spare capacity leads to high oil prices and demand destruction. "Demand destruction" means people being priced out of the market and looking for alternatives.
Components of future crude oil production:- 1 trillion barrels claimed in IHS databases, 445 billion barrels in Tar Sands, unknown further amounts from future exploration and enhanced oil recovery
The USGS has estimates which indicate there are future large discoveries to be made. A big question about the future of oil is the amount of future oil field discoveries. Will there be few discoveries or large discoveries? If there are large discoveries then the oil peak is pushed into the future, but if there are few discoveries then the oil peak is closer at hand.
His organization believes the USGS is incorrect and that there will be few new discoveries and no large new discoveries.
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.
The Recurring Myth of Peak Oil is a longish article by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH which goes at length to claim "Peak Oil" is a hoax. He has some interesting arguments, which I don't buy, and want to analyse a bit. He is a Professor of Economics at Drake Univ., has written books, and from a brief yahoogling seems to have written several articles discussing energy shortages and oil wars and other oil issues.
On the face of it Peak Oil does sound very reasonable as he says. Given that there is a fixed amount of fossil oil available, continued usage will result in a time coming when you run out. The observation goes further in that the usage cannot stay constant and then abruptly end, but that as a field gets older it reaches a point where production levels from that field begin to decline. Thus it gets harder and harder to retrieve the remaining oil as the field is more depleted.
Due to the length of the following summary, here are a few salient points
Have environmentalists used peak oil as a lever "to promote more vigorous conservation and more energetic pursuit of alternative fuels"? I've seen it said dozens of times that global warming activists and peak oil activists are at odds with each other even though they're talking about two sides of the same coin. A global warming activist can easily look at the peak oil issue and the take-away is the peak oil message damages the global warming message because peak oil says we're going to run out of oil so it doesn't matter what we do to mitigate global warming because having run out of oil will remove the influence causing global warming. Hurm.. to my eye both issues are reasons to decrease fossil oil use and in particular the global warming influences are a slow moving process which will take decades to run out.
He says.. "Because of its simple logic and facile appeal, Peak Oil has also led many ordinary citizens, burdened by high fuel bills during periods of energy crisis, to support unrestrained or expanded drilling." So, has that been Peak Oil or has it been political manipulation by oil companies and the politicians? The Peak Oil issues are barely known to the public, so how can Peak Oil be leading public opinion? What's happened instead is we have politicians chanting Drill baby Drill in their rallies. I suspect the oil companies are behind this as they have an agenda to increase access to oil reserves so that down the road they can perform more business.
Yes high oil prices have caught the attention of the people. I've noted on several prior postings growing adoption of alternate transportation such as scooters. It's leading them to accepting follies like more oil drilling. Folly? Opening a new oil field takes 20 or more years to accomplish, therefore this is not a short term solution to the short term problem with high oil prices, yet the politico's chanting Drill baby Drill are presenting it as a short term solution. Also the fields in question are small and will quickly peter out, making them a small contribution to the cause of oil use. Finally the use of fossil oil itself has been a bit of a folly in that it's lead humanity to huge environmental degradation on a global scale.
He quotes.. "As much as 60% of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds." .. As he noted further on in the article all the prior periods of high oil prices were due to a manipulation of the market. Either the oil companies themselves manipulated the market or famously in the mid-1970's OPEC manipulated the market. Obviously oil producers make more profit if the price for oil is high. Just as obviously it gives them incentive to manipulate the market and not all manipulations will be as blatant as the OPEC oil embargos of the mid-1970's.
The quote comes from here: [3] F. William Engdahl, “Perhaps 60% of Today’s Oil Price Is Pure Speculation,” financialsense.com (2 May 2008), http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/0502.html ... financialsense.com appears to be an online news channel about finance and investment.
But saying that short term price fluctuations are the cause of manipulators does nothing to undermine Peak Oil. It instead makes one wonder if the Peak Oil message may be a victim of crying "Wolf!" too many times. If, as he claims, every time oil prices are high there is a concurrent rise in peak oil discussion it would be easy to connect the Peak Oil message to the prior market manipulations.
For example a subtle form of market manipulation is to not invest in building more oil drilling & transportation & refining infrastructure. To increase the production of oil the oil companies obviously must build more equipment to do so. But if an oil company were to build more equipment, increase the supply of oil on the market, it will cause a price decrease. Supply/Demand economics says if supplies increase then prices should drop, so why should the oil companies participate in increasing supply? Well, they do know that if the price goes too high it causes the customers to look for alternatives. The oil companies then have a dance they can play in manipulating the oil price through the supply they provide dancing in an oil price range between "too cheap" (not making enough profit) and "too expensive" (customers turned off and looking for alternatives).
He says.. "Not only millions...have taken the bait and fallen right into this trap by arguing that recent U.S. wars of choice are driven primarily by oil and other “scarce” resources. More broadly, they argue that most wars of the future, like the recent and/or present ones, will be driven by conflicts over natural resources, especially energy and water—hence, for example, the title of Michael T. Klare’s popular book, Resource Wars ..." and he goes on to connect this with Thomas R. Malthus’s theory of “scarcity” and “overpopulation.”
The Peak Oil thesis is not new, and it's not rocket science either. It's pretty obvious, with a fixed source of supply, continual use will result in running out. In the section of his article headed Peak Oil Thesis Is Not New: Geology vs. Geopolitics he again argues that the peak oil theory is false because of the past market manipulations. To paraphrase a phrase investment analysts are required to say, past manipulations are not an indication that future real shortages are a fiction.
He says .. "One of the major defects of Peak Oil is its facile extrapolation or transition from micro to macro level, that is, an unwarranted generalization or extention of what is true in the case of an existing oil well or oil field to the entire world oil production." What he means is the leap of logic conducted by Peak Oil proponents. "It is true that every operating or producing oil well or field increases in production rate until it reaches a maximum or peak flow rate, after which the rate of production enters a terminal decline." The Peak Oil proponents then go on to say if you sum up the production rates of all oil fields everywhere it will form a similar peak oil graph. This leap of logic seems to be a very reasonable step to make, but he is positioning this as a defect in reasoning.
He goes immediately from that point to again discussing Malthus's theories. "The Peak Oil debate boils down, essentially, to natural versus social limits, or naturally-determined versus socially-determined limits." Yes, it does boil down to that. Tellingly one of the major modern proponents of Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, the author of Peak Everything, makes exactly this argument. That the physical world we live on has a fixed amount of all sorts of resources and the same obvious truth applies to all of them. Given that there's a fixed amount of oil or copper or gallium or iron etc, continued use will one day inevitably lead to reaching a situation of running out.
"Although not identical, the Peak Oil theory is similar to the Malthusian theory in that it too is based on natural, innate, or fixed and immutable limits. There are, of course, limits to everything—energy, food, water, population. But those limits are not absolute or pre-determined, as implied by the Peak Oil thesis. They are perhaps more social than natural limits. " ... hmm...?
"More Oil Found than Used Up...those forecasts turned out wrong because oil reserves, including proven or cost-efficient reserves, have continued to grow, and more oil wells or fields have been brought under utilization than those peaked and declined..." This is where he starts to explain how the proponents of Peak Oil are making a flawed leap of logic. That oil discoveries prove the global scale peak oil model to be wrong.
I was at the recent USA conference for the Association for Study of Peak Oil, and will soon be posting the materials I collected there. Several presenters showed alternate oil availability charts of future production levels based on different assumptions of future oil discoveries. As a group they seemed to believe that no further large oil fields would be found, and that all new discoveries would be minor sized oil fields. Every chart they showed simply gave a different year for the peak of fossil oil production. Assuming no more oil field discoveries, we've already passed the peak of fossil oil production, but give us a few more discoveries and we've still passed the peak of fossil oil production, but there is a secondary peak in 2040.
I suppose one can argue these Peak Oil proponents are making a faith based prediction that no new large discoveries will be made. The people making these statements were generally having decades of experience in the oil industry, well respected Geologists etc, with lots of data behind them, and in particular one chart they showed was that the peak of oil discoveries happened 40 years ago. No large oil field has been found for over 40 years, and this gives a lot of credence to the claim that no more large fossil oil discoveries will be made.
"The United States holds significant oil shale resources underlying a total area of 16,000 square miles. This represents the largest known concentration of oil shale in the world and holds an estimated 1.5 trillion barrels of oil with 800 billion recoverable barrels—enough to meet U.S. demand for oil at current levels for 110 years....In western North Dakota there is a formation known as the Bakken Shale. The formation extends into Montana and Canada. Geologists have estimated the area holds hundreds of billions of barrels of oil...." Sigh... what he doesn't say is the Energy Return on Investment for processing oil shale, tar sands, and other poor quality oil deposits, is very low. If you're spending 1 unit of "energy" to retrieve 1 unit of oil from these oily rocks, then why are you bothering with them? It's a net loss to process oil shales and other deposits to turn them into oil.
Oh, but, wait, "Examining nukes to replace oil" is about a rising call from the Bush Administration to restart the American Nuclear Power industry. Pres. Bush said at the time, three years ago, that we need more nuclear power to balance our energy needs. The flaw in the reasoning is that nuclear reactors make heat and electricity, not oil, but on the other hand processing oil shales or tar sands do require heat (and perhaps electricity) making a nuclear plant a convenient source of the energy to process oil shales. It would change the EROI because of not using fossil fuel to process other fossil fuel into oil, it would be using nuclear power to process fossil fuel into oil. But the flaw in this line of technology development is that Uranium is in a fixed quantity situation, and there is a peak to Uranium production looming in the future.
An interesting point is this quote "in 1944 a special expert mission estimated Persian Gulf reserves at 16 billion proved and 5 billion probable. By 1975, those same fields had produced 42 billion barrels and had 74 billion remaining. In 1984, geologists estimated a five percent probability of another 199 billion barrels remaining to be added in the Gulf region. In five years those reserves had already been added" ([8] M.A. Adelman, The Genie out of the Bottle: World Oil since 1970, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); cited in Bill Kovarik, “The Oil Reserve Fallacy: Proven reserves are not a measure of future supply,” http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/oil/) ... In other words, the claim is that the past estimates of reserves have proven to be false, there's little reason to expect current reserves estimates to be any better, and further the Peak Oil theory is based on the estimates of reserves.
That's an interesting point. It still doesn't undermine the base proposition, that given a fixed amount of oil and a continued use of it that we will eventually come to a situation of running out. What it changes is the estimate of how big that fixed amount of oil is. All a discovery of more oil does is to push out into the future the day when the oil peak occurs. That is the estimate of the time when the peak occurs is based on the estimate of oil reserves, and obviously if the known reserves increase then the model will produce a different date for the occurrence of the peak. It does not change the inevitability of the peak occurring, just the date at which it will happen.
The role of technology is positioned as another flaw in Peak Oil... "A major flaw of Peak Oil ... is that it discounts the fact that energy-saving technologies have drastically improved ... not only the efficiency of oil production but also of oil consumption." But to the extent he is claiming Peak Oil advocates ignore technological improvements he is flat wrong. At the ASPO meeting I just attended most of the presenters did discuss technology improvements and the possibilities they present. However what they generally pointed out is that in the long run the technological improvements don't make any difference.
Again, given a fixed amount of oil available, continued use of the oil means we inevitably reach a situation of running out of oil. All technological improvements do, if they themselves actually do anything, is to decrease the rate of growth in oil use, and to push out into the future the day when the oil runs out. Technology doesn't undermine the base proposition of peak oil.
I do find it troublesome that Peak Oil advocates say there is a 1:1 ratio of population to fuel and energy demand. Sure when population increases there will be an increase in economic activity, an increase in buildings and housing, and an increase in total activity by society, so therefore the fuel and energy requirements by society will increase. What matters in this is whether technology improvements can implement enough fuel and energy savings to offset the increased demand coming from an ever-increasing population.
Perhaps oil industry technology improvements can increase the number of oil field discoveries and the rate of recovery of oil from oil fields. This will act to increase the total amount of oil available to humanity. However it still does not undermine the base proposition of Peak Oil. Instead as said so many times before, improved technology only pushes the peak further into the future.
For alternative sources of energy he says "Peak Oil is also subject to criticism because it pays insufficient attention to substitutes or alternative sources of energy, both actual and potential. These include solar, wind, non-food bio-fuel, and nuclear energies. They also include natural gas. " Again he is flatly wrong. At the ASPO conference all the charts of oil use included unconventional liquid fuels of all kinds. "Unconventional" means liquid fuels other than fossil oil including biomass, liquified natural gas, oil shales, etc.
The thing which struck me is the ratio between conventional and unconventional liquid fuels. This ratio is on the order of 98% fossil oil to all other forms. I should point out here that the Peak Oil advocates are focusing on liquid fuels and that liquid fuels have a specific role that's incompatible with electricity. Liquid fuels are overwhelmingly used for transportation and electricity is overwhelmingly used for everything else. Coal is also widely used but is incompatible with use in current transportation technology. 150 years ago coal was used in transportation and thankfully we left those days long behind us.
If the unconventional liquid fuel technology can be developed to provide a decent EROI (Energy Return on Investment) perhaps they could change the peak oil base proposition. As it is use of oil shales and other poor quality oil resources is folly because the EROI is so completely bad. Again most of the unconventional liquid fuels fall into this model of having a fixed amount on the planet, and if we enter into a pattern of continued use of these unconventional liquid fuels we will eventually run out. The base proposition of Peak Oil is by repeated use of a fixed size resource eventually the resource will be exhausted. At best the unconventional liquid fuels simply expand the amount of liquid oil available to humanity and pushes the day of exhausting oil supplies into the future.
Where the base proposition can be changed is if an alternate fuel is developed which does not depend on extracting fuel from a fixed size resource. Over and over in this analysis I've returned to the phrase "fixed size resource". The total quantity is fixed of fossil oil, fossil natural gas, fossil coal, uranium, methane hydrates, etc. To the best of our knowledge the planet does not make more of any of these resources. Of course the estimates of the total quantity are just estimates, as said above, but continued use of any of those resources will eventually exhaust them.
Biomass derived liquid fuels are in a special case. The planet grows new biomass all the time and is constantly renewing itself. It's feasible that biomass derived liquid fuels could be a very game changing solution to the peak oil problem, simply because biomass is not a fixed size resource.
However there is a huge problem here ... it is that ratio of fossil fuels to unconventional liquid fuels. For any of the alternative fuel technologies to replace the use of fossil fuels means for an immensely huge increase in infrastructure and businesses and processing and transporting equipment and infrastructure for the purpose of supplying unconventional liquid fuels to the public.
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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.
Technosanity #12: Peak Oil and the Media (from Radio Ecoshock)
WeCanSolveIt.org has sent out an alert regarding the following advertisement they want to run on television. They talk about the ads running during and after the election debates like so: ABC had Chevron. CBS had Exxon. CNN had the coal lobby. But you know what happened last week? ABC refused to run our Repower America ad -- the ad that takes on this same oil and coal lobby. Of course their allegation is ABC is in the pocket of big fossil fuel power interests, and that the presence of the given advertisements next to the program airing the debates indicates which industry paid for the debates. Maybe.
Repower America is an initiative by wecansolveit.org to push for increased use of renewable energy versus the nonrenewable fuels such as oil, coal, nuclear, etc. I agree with the goal but I find the argument presented here to be suspicious. They've conveniently sent me the script for the advertisement:-
The solution to our climate crisis seems simple.Repower America with wind and solar.
End our dependence on foreign oil. A stronger economy.
So why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy?
Because big oil spends hundreds of millions of dollars to block clean energy.
Lobbyists, ads, even scandals.
All to increase their profits, while America suffers.
Breaking big oil's lock on our government ...
Now that's change.
We're the American people and we approve this message.
Oh, great, someone else pretending to speak for me. Anyway... in the middle is this question why are we still stuck with dirty and expensive energy and they suggest it has to do with laws, pushed by lobbyists, that blocked clean energy.
Does it? This is largely true, and no doubt I've got a posting or two on this site complaining about this. But there's another part to this, because the laws aren't the whole of the story. Another part of the story is the technology and economics. The big fossil fuel industry is in this position because they have the infrastructure to deliver huge quantities of "energy". The renewable energy industry hasn't scaled up to this level of energy delivery, partly due to technology limitations, partly due to the economics due to the relative cost of different technologies.
There's more to the story than legal rules and politics. They have a petition drive going at: http://www.wecansolveit.org/page/s/ABC
