Mideast Turmoil and the Push For Clean Energy 314
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Adam Werbach writes that in July 2008 oil prices reached $147 a barrel and suddenly energy prices and alternative energy was on everyone's agenda but soon oil prices fell as the economy faltered and people moved on to the more immediate concerns of keeping their jobs and businesses alive. Now with the possibility looming of $200 a barrel oil, the US has a robust field of clean energy technologies that are slowly coming online, from thinfilm solar to fuel cells to cellulosic ethanol — unlike 2008, when it seemed like we were starting our innovation engine from a cold start. 'In the last three years, as oil prices have softened, we've seen stumbles as companies like Applied Materials pulled back from the clean energy space because of operational and market conditions,' writes Werbach. '2012 will be a rich year for equity capitalizations, giving energy entrepreneurs the capital they need to build infrastructure. Even with the draconian austerity measures that are coming into effect across the country, this is a second opportunity for energy innovation.'"
Nothing new here (Score:5, Interesting)
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In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing suboptimal solutions with all their pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to adopt something else. Unfortunately, the second type is the majority, even if it is completely obvious that the dependency of the West on the Middle East is one of its largest weaknesses. I wonder how many slaps does it take for some people to wake up from their deep oily sleep. So what's the problem? You just spelled out the optimal solution. It doesn't take six billion people to innovate a replacement for petroleum-based transportation so there's proper division of labor. And society isn't going to do better than to stick with what works, until something comes along that works better (which incidentally hasn't happened yet with transportation).
Finally, what's wrong with giving good business to the Middle East? It helps everyone.
It just seems to me that you haven't really compared the status quo to the alternatives. It's the traditional conceit to assume that because the present scheme has flaws, then some alternative is better. My view is that the flaws and benefits of the alternatives to our fossil fuel burning haven't been seriously evaluated.
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In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing suboptimal solutions with all their pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to adopt something else. Unfortunately, the second type is the majority, even if it is completely obvious that the dependency of the West on the Middle East is one of its largest weaknesses. I wonder how many slaps does it take for some people to wake up from their deep oily sleep.
So what's the problem? You just spelled out the optimal solution. It doesn't take six billion people to innovate a replacement for petroleum-based transportation so there's proper division of labor. And society isn't going to do better than to stick with what works, until something comes along that works better (which incidentally hasn't happened yet with transportation).
Finally, what's wrong with giving good business to the
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, what's wrong with giving good business to the Middle East? It helps everyone.
That is a very naive view of trade. Take for example the plight of the citizens of Nauru. Although different in scale, it parallels the situation we have in the Middle East.
The Republic of Nauru is a small island nation in the Pacific which had an economy that was based almost solely on phosphate mining which was plentiful once, but not any more. In the beginning, most of the money generate from this industry went to the Australian interests who were exploiting the mines, then gradually the islanders wised up and negotiated a better deal. This money was saved up in a trust fund, but ultimately corruption set in and the trust fund lost most of its value. At the same time, mining had stopped on the island as the phosphate ran out. Now the unemployment rate is near 90% the government failed in implementing reforms to encourage a diverse economy and the establishment of alternative industries.
Trade is not always good, and in some case (such as what's happening in the middle east), it is very exploitive to the people of the lands on which we are sucking the resources from. Many times, it only benefits a few at the top and the money never trickles down to the working population. That frequently causes political instability as the leaders has the resources from the mineral or oil wealth to establish an authoritarian regime. It often causes over-dependency on the export of the natural resources within the state. Once the resources are depleted, what results is a failed state.
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That is a very naive view of trade. Take for example the plight of the citizens of Nauru. Although different in scale, it parallels the situation we have in the Middle East.
That changed in the 70s. The Middle East has taken charge of its resources and its destiny. I won't take the blame for any resulting failed states. My view is that the revolutions of 2010-2011 will mark a historical turning point for the Middle East. Oil revenue will have contributed indirectly to this state of affairs.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil is not the only example. Manufacturing and outsourcing is another. If only 20% of the Asian manufacturers of integrated circuit/assembly lines decided to close tomorrow for whatever reason, the implications for the US and the rest of the electronic consumer's world would be at least worrying and at most catastrophic for the market.
I believe this is a general trend of globalization, which is mainly driven by us, because we want the cheapest and then someone has to produce that cheapest product by pushing outsourcing to the point where we rely on few places. Personally, if I knew that a product is REALLY only made in the US/UK/Europe etc, I would buy it, even if it was more expensive. Not because I dislike Asia or whatever distant part of the world, but because I want with my behavior to enforce resilience, the very opposite of absolute reliance.
Do you really think that the world has resilience today in terms of energy?
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Do you really think that the world has resilience today in terms of energy?
Yes. There are lots of sources for chemical energy that we do not use because of cost. That is being fixed... Painfully. Also, there are many sources of oil not being used because of cost and political will. As the cost goes up, that political will has to change. And this is just chemical energy, which is still the best source for transportation. Electrical energy is really only held back by political will. There are safe, low polluting reactors now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor#Futur [wikipedia.org]
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In our world there are innovators and there are also people that will vow to re-use existing suboptimal solutions with all their pros and cons until it is absolutely necessary to adopt something else.
The headline of this story illustrates your point perfectly. High oil prices should push us to seek other, less expensive sources of energy. But the current administration is fixated on solar and wind. They can't see past those suboptimal "clean" sources to the other alternatives available to us (*cough* nuclear *cough*).
.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Gasoline 8.03 dollars / gallon where I live. (Score:2)
Petrol not so cheap these days...
Here in the UK, my local petrol (gasoline) station petrol costs 1.30 a litre, that's 8.03 US dollars / US gallon
(3.79 litres to a US gallon, 1.63 dollars to the GB pound).
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Petrol not so cheap these days...
Here in the UK, my local petrol (gasoline) station petrol costs 1.30 a litre, that's 8.03 US dollars / US gallon
(3.79 litres to a US gallon, 1.63 dollars to the GB pound).
My wife and I commute to work, it costs £57 on the train for the 2 of us in peak, or £13 in petrol.
It only makes sense to get the train if only one of us goes in, and only then if it's off peak (£18)
Overpriced trains are madness (Score:3)
I know, it's madness. I guess it depends on your model / philosophy of how a country should be run. Current ConDem government seems to follow the Tory line that trains should be run at a profit, they are a business. Compare to many of our European neighbours who see trains as part of the public infrastructure and to be subsidised as such.
Can't pull any figures out the hat but we definitely pay way more than a lot of other European countries for our train services. Myself, I think in the long run you're bett
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I know, it's madness. I guess it depends on your model / philosophy of how a country should be run. Current ConDem government seems to follow the Tory line that trains should be run at a profit, they are a business.
Prices were extreme before the last election. There are massive discounts for season tickets, but these aren't great if you work a mixture of peak and off peak, or only do a few days a week. The current train fare structure encourages 9-5 m-f working.
I live in a railway town and they'd love it if the government announced we need hundreds of new railway carriages built here, need to open up some mothballed steelworks and start turning out new rail lines, get loads of construction workers building improved bridges and tracks etc.
Building infrastructure is a great way out of a recession, as long as you can afford to borrow to build it (the last government screwed that one up by borrowing to pay for non-infrastructural projects when we were in a boom). That infrastructure could be rail,
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You don't seem to understand that if you don't pay for it yourself, they subsidies will cost you 50% more at least, as you not only have to pay the taxes to run the train, but for the bureaucrats who distribute the subsidy and prevent fraud. Not to mention the fraud itself.
Multiply that times tens of thousands of subsidies, and you wonder why western economies are all floundering?
You do realise the trucking industry in the U.S. is subsidised by a mostly free interstate highway system?
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No.. not really.
The trucking system pays a hefty fuel tax for the use of those interstate roads. A single driver truck will average about 3000 miles a week over 50 weeks. That truck will pay close to $14,000 a year in IFTA (fuel taxes). This is not counting registration fees, permits, state surety bonds, or anything else associated with it. When you consider team drivers that will average about 5500-6000 miles per week, that number jumps quite a bit (over 20k).
and yes, I used conservative mileage estimates
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USA total gas taxes.$66b/year.
Cites
Average gas tax 48.1 cents/gallon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax [wikipedia.org]
Total gas used: 137,916,660,000 gallons/year http://americanfuels.blogspot.com/2010/04/2009-gasoline-consumption.html [blogspot.com]
Like I said don't let facts bother you.
Re:Overpriced trains are madness (Score:4, Interesting)
In addition, trucks cause quicker roadway deterioration.
On the other side of the coin, passenger traffic tends to be clustered on limited routes during short periods of the day. So passenger traffic causes cities to build over capacity to support traffic flow for 4-5 hours of the day. For example, a local loop interstate has 4-6 lanes (each direction) to handle rush hour in the morning and evenings. Even so, it is quite common for a 6 mile stretch to be bumper to bumper for close to 2 hours in the evening. Outside of the morning and evening commutes, 2 lanes in each direction would be sufficient. That carries over to ramps and interchanges as well. Most of the interchanges around town are being rebuilt to increase rush hour capacity, not because of wear.
Re:Nothing new here (Score:4, Interesting)
the electric engine is superior the the ICE in every way.
The engine itself may be but the complete power system including the energy store isn't. With an ICE a cheap and lightweight fuel tank can take you you hundreds of miles. With an electric the batteries are expensive, bulky, heavy and still give a far worse range then a conventional fuel tank.
For example lets compare the lotus elise and the tesla roadster (I think this is a reasonable comparison as the roadster is basically an electric elise).
pros of the roadster:
a bit faster in the straight (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
cheaper to run
pros of the elise:
corners a bit better (according to top gear, if you have better sources that contradict this please post them)
longer range
far lower pricetag (according to wikipedia an elise is arround £30K while a roadster is arround £90K).
There are other cheaper electric cars but I dunno which non-electrics they are most comparable to so it's difficult to see how much more expensive they are. I'm sure I also heared somewhere that they were being sold at a loss to help the manufacturers gain experiance with electric technology for when it does become affordable.
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Re:Nothing new here (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly : currently moving away from oil is prevented, not by of evil corporations conspiring against meddling kids, not (much) by middle eastern theocratic lunatic dictators, not even by the American version of same.
It's prevented by actual, honest-to-God, technical issues.
One thing you never hear greens suggest is ... fixing the problems. It's just so much easier to declare a problem solved and accuse everyone of conspiracies. To depict yourself the victim of whatever is the unpopular enemy "du jour" (is it still BP these days ?). As to whether it gets anyone anywhere ... But where's the fun for "green" parties saying the obvious : we're waiting for decent (= cheap + efficient) energy storage technology. Let's please not waste money or resources on actually becoming green until we ... know HOW. No, not even on co2 reduction (because we won't get it down until we have an actual alternative. Moving co2 production to china does exactly zilch for the environment, except paying for Al Gore's army of cronies and fleet of 30 gallons-a-mile cars)
But wasting taxpayer's money on fool's errands, which then proceed to fail, and then blame the, oh, local bank that demands it's dividends. Or a president. Or congress. Or an oil company that fucked up an installation. Or ... that's like fighting the man, man ! That's so cool.
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The oil markets are global. A demand and supply of oil in any one country will affect the spot price of oil around the world.
Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is the west still concentrating on solar and wind power while the Chinese are already into Thorium reactors?
The US oil companies can stall all they want while they squeeze as much profit as they can out of fossil fuels.. but the Chinese aren't going to wait around.
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, forgot to include this:
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, of the British Telegraph daily, suggests that "Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium," and could put "an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years."[14]
The Thorium Energy Alliance (TEA), an educational advocacy organization, emphasizes that "there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of it is due to residual fear of any kind of nuclear energy and chronic NIMBYism. Everybody wants cheap energy but no one wants a power plant anywhere near their home. Most people have no idea when thorium is or of its benefits over traditional nuclear energy. This runs into a basic human fear of change. Oil has worked for America for a hundred years and Americans have grown emotionally attached to their gas guzzlers and have rewarded oil companies with the kind of wealth and political influence that make them a force in Washington.
Add a fundamental lack of will and rampant political cowardice and you have a formula for Chinese domination of the "green" industries of the future.
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
> Everybody wants cheap energy
Wrong: people want, for example, warm houses. Whether that comes from pumping energy in, or insulating it to prevent energy leaving it is irrelevance. You can invest in energy saving, and not need cheap energy.
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Saving energy is only going to delay the problem and won't help much in addressing the root of it. Unless energy saving can reduce expenditure to zero or close to it - and it can't - we still need to find a long-term solution when (not if) oil runs out.
Don't get me wrong, energy saving is a good thing and should always be considered if economical or practical. But while the other half of energy research should be directed at new (shale gas), renewable (sun, wind, water, biomass) or long-term (nuclear) prima
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Nuclear produces waste. We don't want proliferation of nuclear material and despite our best efforts like anything will never be 100% safe. Remember we need to produce energy in less stable and well maintained parts of the world, not just Europe and the US.
On the other hand solar thermal energy production (using mirrors to reflect light onto a water tank and then using the steam to drive turbines) produces no waste and you can build a lot of what you need from recycled material too. In the event of an accid
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
You SAY that solar thermal doesn't produce a lot of waste, but you have clearly never been to a smelting operation, nor have you considered the energy input it takes to produce the hundreds of thousands of miles of tubing and mirrors that would have to be purpose made for such plants, or the environmental effect they would have on the NOT lifeless deserts you people want to destroy with them.
Further, you can't use WATER to store the energy--you can barely store heat in water. How are you planning to heat water to a boil using the energy stored in water? If you want it to produce energy overnight you have to use molten sodium. There's an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen. You are talking about distributing little pockets of 10,000 degree heat all around the place, rathe than having a few,centralized, large, easily controlled pockets of 3,000 degree heat that won't melt much more than ice, certainly not steel and concrete.
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I don't understand how a person can fail to tell the difference between 10,000 square miles of thermal solar and ten thousand nuclear plants that cove
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No, they want cheap energy.
I'm not opposed to energy conservation, far from it; but reducing energy dependence isn't eliminating energy dependence. A very efficient home will still have nontrivial energy use (including externalities such as the energy to produce and transport the goods that maintain that efficient home), and it's folly to focus exclusively on either supply or demand when there's so much that can be done on both sides.
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Firstly I confess to never having heard of Thorium as a nuclear fuel.
But if your best references are a *business* reporter for a right-wing, reactionary newspaper, a business advocacy group, and a Wikipedia page that includes a quote from an engineer: "meaning one that will produce and consume about the same amounts of fuel," then you have not convinced me, for one !!
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heh. I'm unsuccessfully scratching my head trying to remember the book, but it was classic science fiction of the good ol' space opera variety. The adolescent hero's adventure was all about striking it rich by finding huge thorium deposits on Mercury. Written in the 1950s.
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, Thorium was the natural choice for nuclear energy; Uranium was chosen instead so that we could build bombs.
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I keep hearing this bullshit over and over, as if peopel just cut and paste it from some random website.
Thorium is a rubbish choice for several reasons:
Firstly, while it is possible to build a thermal breeder reactor using thorium, you would have to really push the the neutron economy, and thus the doubling time would be very long. As a consequence of the very long doubling time, the initial
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Using a rare isotope of Uranium in a thermal reactor while wasting 99% of the energy, and leaving behind a huge mess was the rubbish choice.
U235 is at 0.7% and you can make natural U critical, it not that rare. Th is *NOT* a fuel, its fertile, you need neutrons to turn Th232 into Pa233 which then turn into U233 which is far *rarer* than U235. Also you can make a bomb from U233, in fact they *did*. Pa233 has a high neutron cross section and if not separated will form Pa234. Pa234 decays into U234 which is a horrible gamma emitter. The waste from *both* cycles is roughly the *same* for all practical planing purposes. Stable fast reactors reactor
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With minimal processing we'd have thousands of tons of thorium pure enough to use in reactors.
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Just stick it in a shipping container in an industrial estate somewhere. It'll be fine.
That's the nice thing about modern reactor designs. You could stand on top of it beating on it with a sledgehammer, and the worst that would happen is you might slip and twist your ankle.
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Further, no truck bomb is going to be able to breach an underground facility, which is generally what I have seen being called for, especially with the micronuclear reactors designed by Hitachi, which are designed to provide power to 1000 households for 50 years with no maintenance, and are so cheap that you could literally throw them away when you are done (they only cost a few million each,
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Why is the west still concentrating on solar and wind power while the Chinese are already into Thorium reactors?
I imagine because the payback is obvious. Thorium is a long way from becoming a profitable technology. I imagine fusion research is also killing funding into thorium. After all, if you have a working fusion reactor then why deal with any sort of fission power?
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wood gas (Score:2)
We can make as much hydrocarbons as we want, if we have biomass (firewood).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process [wikipedia.org]
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Steven Chu is trying to get small, prefabbed modular nuclear reactors going:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0330/Nuclear-power-Obama-team-touts-mini-nukes-to-fight-global-warming [csmonitor.com]
The problem with Thorium reactors is that they are not ready yet. Yes they sound good but they are years away.
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What's the big deal about using non-renewable fuels? Some day we are probably going to need an energy source as dense as nuclear fuel for space colonization. If we set ourselves up to use nuclear on a widespread basis for simple stuff like heating our homes and transport, we'll run out of it. If I've learned anything in life from playing computer games, it's that the surest fire way to have to require a restart from the beginning is to
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Why is the west still concentrating on solar and wind power while the Chinese are already into Thorium reactors?>
Eh?! China is concentrating on biofuel, solar and, especially, wind power(*), just like the West. It also research molten salt reactors [wikipedia.org] (aka thorium reactors), just like many countries in the West. In the West, a lot of countries spend a lot of government money on research and experiments with different kinds of power sources, including better ways to utilise nuclear power. Heck! I live in Sweden where we are, since 1983, slowly replacing all nuclear power with other sources of energy, and even inside Swede
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1. The solution isn't more energy usage. The solution is less energy usage, period.
Less energy usage...forget that.
Mass interstellar travel, holodecks and replicators all require large amounts of energy. The rest of you can live like 20th century Hutterites, but I'll take technological advancement any day. We need to continue moving ahead on the Kardashev scale until we have holodeck porn... after that we can stop learning for all I care.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thorium Reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
1. The solution isn't more energy usage. The solution is less energy usage, period.
Energy is cheap and there really isn't that much to be gained from energy conservation. Else we would be doing it already.
2. This is because USA still stupidly has an unregulated economy that does whatever it wants.
There are two obvious errors. First, the US economy is far from unregulated. Second, what is left that needs to be regulated? Virtually everything that people claim needs to be regulated is already regulated.
Sane countries, like China, let The Smart People plan their economic growth in accordance with scientific principles. [chinalawblog.com]
Do you know what the purpose of a "five year plan" is? Emergency toilet paper. The people implementing the plan don't have a clue. They can't make serious decisions. Second, do you know what's far better than "scientific principles" for running an economy? Markets.
Third, "scientific principles" are a case of the "appeal to authority" fallacy. Please recall that macroeconomics is unusually resistant to scientific principles precisely because of the remarkable difficulty of falsifying any hypotheses about it.
Just imagine if USA had similar policies, and could actually implement them. Ownership of General Motors to advance state economic policies was a good start, but needs to expand to more sectors of the US economy. Letting the market decide is, frankly, irresponsible and a proven recipe for disaster, time and time again. Just look at history.
The US merely had to let GM go through bankruptcy court. No action required. The Obama administration screwed that up by rescuing it at the expense of everyone but the unions, and mocking the laws of the land.
It'll be a long time before I buy another GM or Chrysler (or for that matter any banking product from one of the "too big to fail" banks) product and I know that's going to be the case for a lot of other people too. We don't like thieves.
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Energy is cheap and there really isn't that much to be gained from energy conservation. Else we would be doing it already.
That is a stupid thing to say. There IS a great deal to be gained, but those who stand to gain it are not those who are in power. Also, Energy is most certainly not cheap, but many of the costs can be pushed off onto all the citizens of the planet instead of having to pay them solely by oneself.
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There IS a great deal to be gained, but those who stand to gain it are not those who are in power.
How are you forced to use more energy? You can always pay more to live closer and use less energy in your activities.
Also, Energy is most certainly not cheap, but many of the costs can be pushed off onto all the citizens of the planet instead of having to pay them solely by oneself.
In the case of petroleum for transportation, I strongly doubt this is the situation outside of some oil producing countries which heavily subsidize their oil consumption. Most places have consumption taxes which tend to offset or even exceed their subsidies.
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Somalia.....
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The main reason for ships to move through the "pirate zone" is to conserve/save fuel. With nuclear power the incentive to do so is reduced a lot, so they could move through the sea outside of the "pirate range" (i.e. the max distance the pirate vessels move relative to their land bases in order to make it back in the case of failure).
Domestic oil is an alternative (Score:2, Interesting)
The cheapest and most obvious alternative to mideast oil is domestic oil. We have lots of it. It's being produced in North Dakota in increasing quantities. It's available under the Alaskan wasteland. It pollutes the Santa Barbara beaches from natural oil seeps -- pollution that would be prevented by oil drilling. And it's available in vast quantities in the Gulf of Mexico.
And in Canada, the oil from tar sands will be available to use in mass quantities. But environmentalists are trying to prevent the c
Re:Domestic oil is an alternative (Score:5, Informative)
America has plenty of shale oil, which is more expensive to produce than the oil in the tar sands of Alberta, which is more expensive to produce than the oil in the Middle East. Environmentalism has nothing to do with failure to develop North American oilfields; the cost of a barrel of oil simply isn't high enough to start thoroughly exploiting local deposits.
Oil has to be around $70/barrel for the tar sands to be worthwhile, and no one knows the floor price to make shale oil extraction profitable because that's a field of engineering only now being developed. As for the Gulf of Mexico, the reason BP was drilling 5,000 feet down was because all the shallow fields have been sucked dry.
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... and no one knows the floor price to make shale oil extraction profitable because that's a field of engineering only now being developed.
Say what? Shale oil extraction has been around since the 10th century, lots of development went on in the 1980s
. Kiviter process facilities have been operated continuously in Estonia since the 1920s [wikipedia.org]
It's obviously cheap enough as some people have been doing it for nearly a century.
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The main problem with shale oil is that its EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) is only about 3, i.e. to produce one barrel of oil you need the energy equivalent of 1/3rd barrel. And that's with the easily extracted stuff. Once the EROEI gets close to one it doesn't matter how much you have and what the oil price is.
http://theoildrum.com/ [theoildrum.com] is *the* resource for this kind of info.
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Bullshit. EROEI isn't everything, or even the dominant factor in extraction.
EROEI > 1 makes perfect sense when you think about it. Petroleum is even more useful as a chemical feedstock than it is as a fuel, and even as a fuel, petroleum products are portable and convenient in a way unmatched by any alternative. We'll see extraction continue far past EROEI > 1, with the excess made up by nuclear, wind, solar, and so on.
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And it's available in vast quantities in the Gulf of Mexico.
No shit, Sherlock [wikipedia.org].
All you need is a rowboat and a bucket.
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Plenty of oil is the wrong term when you have a limited resource and constant growth of demand.
Watch this video [youtube.com], it's insightful.
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TL;DW - got a transcript?
If it's that important they should write it down instead of making a boring video.
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Oil prices have, in recent times, gone up high enough to make even oil shale profitable. But there is no guarantee they will stay that high. Why would any company spend hundreds of millions to build a pro
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US oil consumption: ~22 million bbl/day.
Proven US oil reserves (including Alaska, Gulf of Mexico and the continental shelves): ~21 billion bbl.
You call that lots?
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The problem is not the QUANTITY of oil, it's the RATE at which you can extract it.
The biggest supplier to the USA of oil is Canada, not the Middle East. But consider this: Canada's proven reserves are 1.7 trillion barrels of oil if I recall correctly. By comparison, Mexico's Cantarell field was only 0.1% of the size of Canada's tar sands reserves. However, after two decades of development, Canada's entire tar sands reserves can barely produce at the rate of Cantarell - a field 0.1% of the size - at its peak
What do you mean by 'Clean' (Score:2)
Most of the 'clean' energy projects are not for replacing oil (as a transport fuel) but are for replacing fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in electricity production.
Until we get a big breakthrough in battery technology we are not going to be able to run our cars on wind and solar power.
Re:What do you mean by 'Clean' (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the 'clean' energy projects are not for replacing oil (as a transport fuel) but are for replacing fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in electricity production.
Until we get a big breakthrough in battery technology we are not going to be able to run our cars on wind and solar power.
Transportation only accounts for 27% of US energy consumption. You can still make a large impact even if you left cars to run on fossil fuels.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:VQZGOdC8BrMJ:www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/ConsI.pdf+automobiles+percentage+energy&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiuc1DbXndHxR3juwumi8zfv8PraBjI9Q6rRJddCRo2TVVM2d6ar8e-9lofdg138GPS-jCQAA5o0F6wbGk4kC51MYiOK_-rw0y7XWluvhzo-JBVPyZpTJAxeMZYQaAvcMJE3eha&sig=AHIEtbTo2UW2PHXen6_KMZpEnGeuEAj4vQ [google.com]
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True but of the 3 types of fossil fuels petroleum, the one most used for transportation, is the one that's going to be in short supply soonest.
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But when the price of oil skyrockets, the price of coal hardly moves - at least as far as the contracts the power companies have with the coal producers
So its not an incentive to switch from coal to wind etc
Basic economics (Score:3)
As a product becomes more expensive, developing alternative means of production becomes more profitable. For example, extracting oil from the shale in Alberta (Canada) is more expensive than the bare costs of extracting it from wells in the middle east. If political risks make middle-eastern oil more expensive, it will now be profitable to extract oil in Alberta. But oil prices could also come down if the political situation becomes more stable, so it's difficult to tell if the investment in alternatives is worth it. It depends on the ability of the market to deal with the volatility coming from the political instability (if it can, then the fluctuations in prices don't mean much in the long run).
If you view the product more generally (energy) then again more expensive oil would make alternative energy solutions more profitable. For example, shifting from gasoline-powered to electric-powered cars tends to reduce the volatility in the cost of driving the car, since electricity can be produced by many means.
What I don't see is why the so-called "clean" alternatives to oil would be cheaper than the "non-clean" ones. Given the terrible experience with wind power in Spain and Germany, the disaster that corn-based ethanol is in the US etc, it is simply not believable that such technologies would be cheaper than, say, natural gas.
Then there's fusion reactors, a proven clean energy source that seems to always be left out of the discussion. At current oil prices building nuclear reactors should be more profitable, but given the possibility that oil prices will eventually come down, I don't think short-term savings will be enough to counter the public's irrational fears of nuclear reactors.
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Corn-based ethanol was an idiotic idea from the start, born only of lobbying by the corn industry so farmers wouldn't have to actually change their crops. Corn is and always has been a terrible source for ethanol. The problem is it is politically impossible in the US to stop subsidizing inefficient farming practices, despite most farms being owned by mega-corps anyway.
I don't know what you're getting about wind power in Spain and Germany though. Their biggest problem is that they can't let it grow to be too
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I suspect that for ANY field being used to grow corn ethanol ANYWHERE in the US, you could find something else to grow on that same field that produces better biofuel outcomes.
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You probably mean fission, unless you know something we don't [wikipedia.org]. Or are you talking about the biggest power source within eight light minutes of us [wikipedia.org]?
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All the economics doesn't change one fact: There will be Peak X for any nonrenewable resource X at some point. The question is not if but when.
Shale oil can keep us going for a decade or two, at high cost, but it's the last chance to get off fossil fuels. By the time shale oil hits its peak, peak coal will also be imminent - in 20 to 30 years. If the economy is still running on fossil fuels by then it will collapse. Even without that worst case scenario we will be hit by crude price peaks repeatedly - proba
The Kings Fault (Score:3)
Now the Saudis production is slowing down the fields are going dry.
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All OPEC countries inflated their reserves because their market share was allocated proportionally.
In 2008 Saudi Arabia couldn't increase production any more although the price was at a record high and Bush begged them for more.
Right now it looks very questionable if they can really increase their production to pick up Libya's shortfall. Nobody measures how much they export so they can tell us anything. The crude oil price will tell us in the end.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7550 [theoildrum.com]
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I put on my tin foil hat and robes. (Score:3)
If the wave of manufactured democracy has any foundation from the US government, bravo sirs. We have been trying to artificial create democracy in the middle east for quite some time. Right before Obama is beginning the Afghan pull out, democracy not only appears, but thrives. Massive propaganda success? Maybe. Who cares. Mission accomplished. I, for one, hope that the strain on oil continues. I'm in CA atm and we're up to $4.10 for regular but the long term goal is that this forces us to reconsider alternatives: serious alternatives, seriously.
It is only when gas gets so ridiculously high that average citizens actually change their behavior that we as a nation can change. It forces us. And, as previous posters have noted, this will not solve the entire energy problem but it will allow for an ecosystem to grow in society where you can have a broad range of thoughts: robber barons, genuine captains of industry, small fixes, big fixes, fixes for cars, fixes for electricity. It allows for what Don Campbell called an 'experimenting society'. Rather, a society where everyone can (through science) solve the woes of humanity. Building that kind of society is the first step but it isn't the last.
Thrives? Where exactly? (Score:3)
The rebellions in the Middle East have shaken things up but no lasting changes have yet been made. Figure heads can easily be replaced by the next dictator.
Things are happening but to say Democracy is thriving... lets wait for the first free and open elections to be held at least eh? Some of us old stick in the muds think that they are a fairly important element of democracy. Silly I know but humor us.
When not only a government has been fairly elected but ALSO one freely elected government has been freely a
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Might want to see who gets elected as well. A huge problem is that there are very few established poltical organizations in those countries and the ones that do exist we wouldn't really like to see in power.
But whether we like it or not, the established and well known organizations are likely to end up in control. It won't be like Iran but it will almost certainly be like Gaza where Hamas was elected in a supposedly free and fair election.
If people want to vote in a new dictator, who are we to stop them?
The problem is FAR more complex (Score:2)
It isn't about electric cars. It isn't about the middle east.
It is about infrastructure, long term planning, economy, the status quo and vested interests.
Oil is not just oil. Not all oil is equal for one. One of the problem with Libya is that its oil is very clean (low sulfur) and can be easily turned into petrol. Other oils especially those from the US are very poor. They are dirty and take a lot of processing to turn in to petrol.
But petrol is not all. We could survive without petrol far easier then we co
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Pencils ARE made from biomass, they are made from wood and carbon. Terrible example!
In any case, the amount of oil we use for plastics is dwarfed (probably by orders of magnitude) compared to what we burn. Plastic is also very reusable, unlike fuel that is burned.
In any case, to make plastic, fundamentally you need hydrocarbons. If you have energy you can make hydrocarbons. Carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are incredibly abundant; have a big enough source of energy and you can make any hydrocarbon you want. It's
A coupe things (Score:2)
First, doesn't the US import most of its oil from South America? Maybe I'm remembering outdated information, but I could have sworn that was true..
Second, aren't oil prices sort of artificially controlled by OPEC? I mean, if the Middle East wanted prices to go down, they could just produce more oil. So it seems like they're trying to get to that sweet sport where prices are high enough that they make lots of money, but low enough that it seems
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Venezuela is the #3 or 4 source usually, that's the only significant South American source. The other top suppliers to the US are Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Nigeria.
Prices are no longer controlled by OPEC but by the market. Close to half the supply comes from non-OPEC countries so they can't dictate prices. All they dictate is production rates for their members and the members generally don't obey them.
Oil is too cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Not too expensive. It's too cheap!
You will not see any investment in alternative energies or more efficient engines as long as it's cheaper to just use more oil. Do you think people would care about getting 10 or 30 miles to the gallon if we still had the gas prices of the 70s? Especially if that 10 mpg car would cost quite a bit more since more R&D is necessary? Efficiency is never free, someone has to come up with a way to save fuel.
And as much as it will hurt, only with higher prices for gas other, more expensive, forms of energy will become popular. Electric and H2 cars will instantly be a hit when gas prices double.
And also, let's not forget that local production becomes quite a bit more interesting if the transport of crap from China gets more expensive...
Re:Oil is too cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
Price volatility is the problem. Right now the price is high but after the next recession when the price drops again many new projects will be canceled again because they're not profitable. Exactly that happened in 2009.
There needs to be a tax that props up the price to some minimum level.
Re:Oil is too cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
It's hardly a recession that creates cheap oil. If oil is cheap in a recession, it only means that there's enough stockpiled that oil sellers can open the flow when they need money.
50% more energy from existing power plants... (Score:2)
Sort of tangential, but Sandia has made tremendous progress on thermal-electric conversion efficiency. Using supercritical carbon dioxide in the Brayton cycle [nextbigfuture.com], efficiency is 40-50% better than with the conventional steam cycle. As an added bonus, the system is thirty(!) times smaller, and will be correspondingly cheaper. The technology is applicable to existing coal, natural gas, nuclear, and even solar thermal plants.
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Now where can I buy these new technologies at? My wallet's at the ready. No really, I'm serious. Just give me a website and a price list with your available products. Guys? Hello?
I guess there's more (easier) money in R&D than there is in retail sales.
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The turmoil will come to other places first: When the oil countries reduce their oil exports because they need it for domestic energy.
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will do their best to cut funding for promising projects and make laws to kill the ones that are left over.
If these projects can't stand on their own merits without requiring a ton of public funding, then they aren't "promising".
Why any sane rational person would ever vote Republican is beyond me.
Currently, US voters are to a considerable degree worried about the level of spending at the federal and state levels. When Democrats, such as Bill Clinton were serious about cutting spending, they got considerable support. Currently, the only serious impetus to cutting spending is among the Republicans. If that were to change, then the Democrats would get more support.
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If these projects can't stand on their own merits without requiring a ton of public funding, then they aren't "promising".
You mean 'if these projects can't compete with all of the direct and indirect subsidy that the oil industry receives'.
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You mean 'if these projects can't compete with all of the direct and indirect subsidy that the oil industry receives'.
IMHO while in absolute size, oil industry probably receives more, as a fraction of revenue, renewables and nuclear get more.
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Currently, US voters are to a considerable degree worried about the level of spending at the federal and state levels.
Currently, Americans are, first and foremost, worried about jobs and the economy. (I don't think 'US voters' differ from that, but haven't seen a poll of just them.)
Then they're worried about spending.
Currently, the only serious impetus to cutting spending is among the Republicans.
Yeah, those serious Republicans, yammering constantly about cutting...social security? Which doesn't have
You have a left wing part in the USA? (Score:2)
I didn't realise you have a left wing party of any substance in the USA, similar to socialist or labour parties in Europe. I thought your mapping was Democrat = centre-right and Republican= conservative right. For example, mainstream right wing parties in Europe are in favour of public education, and public health care like I think the Obama administration has just fought for.
Maybe we have a differing terminology, what would you describe as a left wing party, a centre party, and a right wing party? Do you h
That isn't what happens (Score:2)
What happens is :
repeat
the central bank prints money
the oil price peaks
this drives inflation up past the point people can bear
this causes a recession
the oil price falls
until (civilisation collapses or replacement energy found)