How Long Will the Oil Age Last?

Popular Science ^ | August 2004 | Kevin Kelleher

[SunkenCiv]

Chief among the pessimists is the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, a group of European scientists who estimate that maximum oil production around the globe will peak in 2008 as demand rises from developing economies such as China... Others believe, like Maugeri, that the number of glasses is virtually limitless. John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute, argues that peak oil- production estimates are so far off that for all practical purposes we might as well act as if oil will flow forever. "Ever since oil was first harvested in the 1800s, people have said we'd run out of the stuff," Felmy says. In the 1880s a Standard Oil executive sold off shares in the company out of fear that its reserves were close to drying up. The Club of Rome, a nonprofit global think tank, said in the 1970s that we'd hit peak oil in 2003. It didn't happen.

[SunkenCiv]

Also, the second report to the Club of Rome gave the various limits to nukes. That's why the Left dumped on the nukes -- well, that and the fact that the so-called peaceful atom was made possible by federal spending on our defense. Fission creates wastes that can't be gotten rid of, and have to be stored so long that it strains credibility (at best) that containers can be built which last long enough. And forget about shooting the wastes into the Sun or whatever -- payloads to orbit cost $10000 a pound.

There's a German-developed system (also fled to South Africa, due to leftist agitation to rid Germany of all nuclear power) called pebble-bed that has been looked at in Japan and the US. It's inherently safer, and (oddly enough) the plants designed thus far have about 10 per cent of the capacity of a conventional nuclear power plant. That reduces economy of scale, and pushes up the price of electricity in theory, but then the disposal problem gets shifted in large part to the pre-use fuel processing plants. The US advocates want to build the plants without domes -- I think that is foolish on both political and technical grounds.

[SunnySide]

Okay scrap Plan A: dinosaur poop as fuel -- How bout Plan B: Place a thousand flamenco dancers over some open land and have them stomp out some oil. Hows that for processing?

[MARTIAL MONK]

The Europeans are always saying that we are going to run out of something or other. What we are actually in danger of running out of are Europeans. We will never actually run out, but as the population declines and benefits go up they will become more and more expensive to maintain. Unless someones invents a synthetic European the economy will collapse.

Eventually it will get so bad that sometime in the future when most of them rush to holiday in the south of France there won't be enough of them to counterbalance the southward shift and the earth will shift 180% on it's latitudinal axis. This will cause a magnetic shift so that when they think they are going home they are actually going south. There won't be anyone left to answer the phone when we call to warn them so they will all freeze in the Antarctic. Over time they will all decay into carbon based energy forms and Otto will have saved the auto.

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, take it easy, Cowboy. :') Everything we eat, wear, write on, etc, is made possible by liquid-fueled transportation. The field gets plowed, planted, treated, and harvested using diesel or gasoline. The crop gets to where it's going using those fuels. Same goes for processing the crops, transporting them to market, and getting the consumers to the markets and back home. Agriculture is the foundation stone of all civilization and other settled living, and hydrocarbons are the foundation stone of US agriculture. 400 years ago the 13 colonies were essentially 99+ per cent agrarian. We are now maybe 2 per cent agrarian.

[RightWhale]

We can cut our energy use by 1/3 just by moving heavy industry that uses the most power into space. We travel far too much--half our wealth is in our rusting cars and potholed roads. We could do a lot better if our planners were awake.

[SunkenCiv]

Wha'? Y'mean, this?

Anything into Oil
by Brad Lemley

Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

...what about this?

Going Nuts For A Hydrogen-fuelled Future
February 2000

Looking for the fuel of the future? There's one in every bite. Turkey, the world's biggest producer of hazelnuts, burns 250,000 tonnes of the shells every year as waste. If, instead, it burnt them in a controlled environment with restricted oxygen, it could extract 6000 tonnes of hydrogen - enough to allow a thousand prototype hydrogen-fuelled BMWs to travel 32,500 kilometres each.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Running a car is a transient process and you've got to have a pretty big fuel cell to power it, something on the order of 50kw as opposed to a 5kw cell to power a house, for instance."

BS ALERT!!! BS ALERT!!

Not true. The fuel cell only needs to be big enough to provide power sufficient to provide maximum estimated desired continuous speed. "Transient processes" (passing acceleration) will be handled by a BATTERY, which will be charged by the fuel cell during periods when the car is running at less than maximum cruise speed.

[neutrino]

It appears that many posters believe that plenty of oil is available. Yet I note that West Texas Intermediate has advanced in price, as of July 27th, to $41.84 per barrel, an increase of 38.5% over the price one year ago. Source is The Economist, July 31st edition, Commodity Price Index.

I note also that the Vanguard Energy Fund has a 10 year compound growth rate of 13.5% per annum. You can see the numbers here.

So I suppose that those who purchase oil and oil stocks are silly little people who haven't a clue what they're about. (/sarcasm)

[SunkenCiv]

Not to quibble much, but old Jack Bruce was covering that tune, which was first recorded by the Mississippi Sheiks. [and then everybody sez "oh, them."] ;')

[SunkenCiv]

:')

[Wonder Warthog]

"That concept made it into the computer game "Sim City", but obviously one wonders what kind of long term heating of the atmosphere would result."

None (directly). The wavelength chosen for transmission will be one to which the atmosphere is transparent. Now, indirectly, ALL of the energy will ultimately show up as heat in the atmosphere. Thermodynamics, y'know.

[SunkenCiv]

I agree. Once the equipment (and personnel, where needed) is up there, it's just a matter of extruding so-called lifting bodies for the unmanned trip to the ground. IOW, we'd not be beaten by the high payload cost to orbit, because whatever needed to be built for the whole process could be built using something much smaller that could be sent into space at the beginning of the process.

Of course, there would be fewer jobs on Earth... but since there won't be any oil everyone will be toiling in the fields anyway. ;')

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[RightWhale]

old Jack Bruce

Old. Listen to that! He is just maturing!

[RightWhale]

Yeah, I think you got the idea.

[editor-surveyor]

"The oil age will last until replaced by the Fusion Age."

There is a laboratory in Palo Alto, California, with some badly bent steel columns that illustrate that we are actually past the "fusion" age, but don't really know yet what it is that has been found.

[TexasCowboy]

I'm not upset, and you're not catching my drift.

There are at least a hundred thousand products made from oil which we use everyday of our lives without realizing it.
Getting our cars from the garage to work would be the least of our worries.

Without oil we have no clothes to wear, no food to eat and our homes become the caves of the earliest homo sapiens, without heat or air conditioning.
We could peddle bicycles to work, but when the tires went flat, we'd walk - in shoes until they wore out.
Everything we do in our everyday lives depends on oil.

[SunkenCiv]

Stop it right now. You've fallen under the influence of the French. [joke in bad taste alert!]

[explanation of joke in bad taste alert] Yes, everyone, I know flamenco is from Spain (I've seen Pepe Romero perform, that "Guitar Summit" he toured with, along with Leo Kottke; got an older title from the tourist trap after the show; the tune "Garrotin" sounds like the source for "Groovy Kind of Love"). I was making reference to the term "grape stompers". ;')

[SunkenCiv]

Eventually it will get so bad that sometime in the future when most of them rush to holiday in the south of France there won't be enough of them to counterbalance the southward shift and the earth will shift 180% on it's latitudinal axis.

I'm just glad I ran out of cola a little while before reading that. ;')

[SunkenCiv]

By harvesting the waste heat alone, we can forego building power plants, and of course reduce our use of coal (which remains #1 as our electricity source). The reason it won't be done, however, is so opponents of the strategy (present company not referred to) can push their photovoltaic agenda.

[paleocon patriarch]

It doesn't matter what the "Price" in fiat money is for a barrel of oil. When the energy cost to extract a barrel of oil approaches a barrel of oil, the oil "bidness" becomes a zero sum game and we crash. This applies to synfuels, biofuels, tar sands, oil shale, and the deepwater reserves off the Faulklands, estimated to be 30 time the size of the Saudi reserves in deep rough south Atlantic water.

Seizing that area in the middle east the size of Indiana that contains 80% of the "Artesian oil" is a matter of life and death.