Peak Oil

The net result of misplaced blame

2008-05-20T20:04:07-07:00

Popular culture appears to be slowly jumping on the green bandwagon, even as the necessity of personal sacrifice becomes unavoidably apparent. And I find myself in constant position of explaining the deeper implications to simple things. Such as, Just the other day I was talking with my youngest brother, who is seventeen years my junior.

The topic was biodiesel, and he was quick to explain to me that I shouldn't be considering biodiesel because using it is causing starvation in other countries. But, it's not really US citizens using biodiesel that is causing food shortages in particular. It's market pressure from many different angles that is making food increasingly expensive that is causing food shortages in other countries.

Buying a gallon of gasoline for $4.00 is doing just as much as buying a gallon of biodiesel made from corn in pushing up the cost of food in Egypt(for example). A willingness, or the force of social addiction, to pay such high prices for portable energy, has a ripple effect on the very foundations of the food market. Four dollar a gallon gas means the petroleum used for fertilizers that are the true power behind modern agriculture gets more expensive, so farmers have to raise the prices to cover their overhead. And what is worse is that there is a market ripple delay...

For the price of food this year is based mainly on the cost of petroleum based fertilizers last year, and however much the cost of fertilizer was speculated to rise this year. And by all accounts, most markets did not correctly predict the rapid rise in the price of petroleum this year. So the while the grain prices this year are high, they may not be high enough to compensate the farmers for higher fertilizer prices for next years crop. So unless the current spike in prices rapidly reverses itself, many farmers across the globe will have to raise their prices even higher next year to cover the additional cost. That's not even counting further speculation of even higher prices, based on the failures to predict this years petroleum prices.

So just about anything you're willing to pay more for that depends on oil will further push the market into an exaggerated climb that will starve the poor of the world who can no longer afford the petroleum based staple food crops. Biodiesel does not deserve anymore attention for this problem than bottled water, gasoline, sneakers, SUV's, anything plastic or any other thing that depends on gasoline for it's production (which is just about everything in the United States and much of the world).

These are the first market fluctuations of “peak oil”, it can and most likely will get worse. Don't shift the blame to possible solutions, accept that our societies addiction to petroleum is the problem.

This is not about saving gas money.

2008-05-15T11:11:08-07:00

So it seems that I've had more and more conversations with people while biking around northern VA that start out like this, “So your biking around to save gas money?”

To which I usually answer something pretty consistent with, “No, not really. While it does save money by not using gas to get around, I haven't ditched my car, which is necessary to save a lot of money by bicycling. I bike mainly because it seems to be a better use of my body, has less of an impact on the environment than driving. And in the back of my mind I'm really very worried that a worst case 'peak oil' scenario would leave me unprepared to support my family if I didn't do this regularly.”

Surprisingly, I often get quite nods as it begins to sink in that the rising gas prices are really the very tip of the “peak oil” iceberg. I've been expecting the typical Virginian conservative response, “You fucking hippie!”, or some variation there of. And actually that silently thoughtful and slightly worried kind of reaction just makes me more worried. It's easy to predict “doom and gloom” scenarios and tell people about them, it is quite a different thing when people start to quietly agree with you.

But I should be clear on this, my strategy is to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. Hopefully “peak oil” will pass and life will change slowly enough that civilization is able to adjust easily. Hopefully the only thing I'll be able to say in 10 years is that bicycle commuting made me a greener, more fit and independent person. I am really hoping that some of the worst implications of a nation unprepared for “peak oil” will not come to pass. In 10 years I don't want to talk about how my bicycle commuting prepared me to help my family make it through a tough international or domestic crisis.

How ignorance of basic science and economics will create a bleak future.

2008-05-13T06:12:55-07:00

So while reading the comments on one of the more creative online videos that talks about peak oil, I was struck by the preponderance of replies that seem to state absolutely magical beliefs in what science can do. Such as...

“There's enough oil under the north slope of alaska to supply the US for the next 200 years. Not only that, but old wells can be re-explored and often are found to have re-filled.” -deaglek

Ok, so deaglek may not have even a simple grasp of mathematics but most people should be able to follow this simple number crunch. Here's the facts, the total proven crude oil reserves, in the ground, in the lower 48 states and Alaska are about 20 billion barrels of crude. The US consumes about 20 million barrels a day, multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you find that we consume about 7.3 billion barrels of crude a year. So, in less than 3 years we would consume all of the available oil in the US, that includes the Alaskan north slope.

I really don't know why deaglek also thinks oil fields also refill themselves magically, you can just look at all the abandoned Texas and Pennsylvania oil fields to see that isn't true. But this view isn't even uncommon, just read some more comments and you'll see.

“... I guess you didn't sit in on energy investment conferences, major in Chemistry, or Economics.

There is no "set" amount of oil, we could extract petroleum from your clothes, desk, etc if we needed to. Also, oil companies are paying single digits per barrel to explore, and low double digits to extract TODAY.

The very chemical nature of petroleum ensures there is no peak.”-gfreeman556

Yes, apparently someone who has implied majoring in chemistry has no idea about the laws of thermodynamics. Understanding EROEI, that the energy needed to transform plastics and like materials back to petroleum has a negative return is a concept absolutely terminally important to understanding the chemistry of energy production, to not understand it is to have no understanding of the science involved.

Or one of my favorites:

“A combination of electric vehicles, nuclear power plants and oil shale extraction will get us through this upcoming crisis with barely a bruise.” -soctennis8

“Barely a bruise”?!? Anyone who thinks that oil shale extraction will cause barely a bruise has no grasp of money or the technology around retrieving and refining oil shale. It's not pools of semi-fluid liquid, it's rock, and it takes three tons heated to 700 degrees Fahrenheit combined with about three barrels of water to produce one barrel of crude which is marginally suitable for refining into other products. Not to mention the tons of hazardous(carcinogenic and poisonous) waste and greenhouse gas byproducts. Some oil companies have stated that this will translate into $60/barrel crude, but nobody else in the mining or chemistry industry seems to agree with these numbers. And more significantly, no oil company is actually producing anything beyond prototype levels of this product right now. And with oil costing over $100 dollars a barrel, you would think that market pressure would push this resource into immediate use, but somehow it's not. So the realistic oil shale price is probably closer to the median price of coal (between $14 & $105) which makes it about $60 a ton, so at the very least the oil shale petroleum would seem to start out at $180 just for the raw rock to make a barrel of crude. This is not counting the cost of heating, hydrolyzing and cleanup to make the product safe to refine into consumer products. The price of a barrel of oil will have to rise to well over $180 before oil shale will begin to be competitive, and I don't think any reasonable people would consider $180+ crude prices to be “barely a bruise” to anyone but the wealthy.

And while I happen to agree that nuclear power plants provide an ever more plausible stop gap technology for some of our needs, if they ever have to fill in a considerable amount of the transportation industry energy needs we will quickly go through all known reserves on the planet which is approximately 35 million tons or the equivalent energy of 31,751,465,900,000 barrels of oil (31 trillion). And the same market curve that is responsible for the “peak oil” crisis effects uranium as well. So long before the supplies run out the prices of nuclear energy will rise with the decreasing supply. Also our infrastructure would need to be dramatically altered to support things like all electric transportation which is a cost that has to be included. If you consider the $20-30,000 shop cost of converting a single vehicle to electric, the enormous cost of re-purposing so much infrastructure and personal property to run on all electric power, at least for the first generation that has to make the change, this is not at all a minor transition.

There where many more comments like this, most of them dismissive and outright derisive, but being so very much based on a very, very flawed understanding of the science and economics behind “peak oil”. Any solution we create to “peak oil” needs to solve the problems associated with “peak oil”, such as being 100% renewable, so there is no future peak to burden our progeny with. But unless the general population is taught the concepts of basic science and economics needed to understand the problem, we go back to people latching on to mythical explanations and blindly shifting the blame around.

This is really a fundamental problem of education, specifically public education, but also it should be something that the rising tide of home schooled kids need to understand too. Failure to understand these basic concepts will lead to bad public decisions that will lead to bleak future indeed.