Petroleum and the future of civilization

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Doug50:

I have been reading about peak oil for the last 3 years so this not new information. Like Al as stated people using the free market will change their habits and inventors/companies looking to make a buck will come up different ways to conserve enery or substitute. This is all general economics which unfortunately not taught in public schools.

“Intervention by governments will be required, because the economic and social implications of oil peaking would otherwise be chaotic. The experiences of the 1970s and 1980s offer important guides as to government actions that are desirable and those that are undesirable, but the process will not be easy”

This the purpose of all this fear mongering. Only government will be able to save us from our stupid ways. This ties in perfect with the global warming hoax.
 
Hello, Doug50.
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  Thank you for bringing me into the conversation.  I have to say, I'm a hopeless optimist when it comes to this issue.  I will admit that I did not think of all the other materials, like plastic, that come from petroleum, but I still think a subtitute can be found.  Maybe we could find a way to make glass cheaper and safer.  Some plastic items could be made of glass.  

  You say that petroleum started this world and the economy and all that.  That may be true.  But petroleum doesn't have to continue to sustain it, I don't think.  We as people can build on what petroleum has created.  We certainly don't want to be in a world unprepared and running scared when the oil does run out, which it will.  I'd like to see a world where when it's announced on the radio that all the oil is gone, I'm driving to work in my hydrogen car with a cup of coffee heated on my stove run by solar or perhaps natural gas supplemented by a hydroelectric power plant across town and think to myself, "Oh, what a shame."  Work will run its electricity off of the same sources as my home.  Maybe I'm a little over-optimistic about just how much alternative power can do, but that's why it's critical that we do the research NOW before it's to late, so we can find ways to maximize the potential of these exciting new sources of power.
Tracy
 
Tracyms1974 said:
I have to say, I’m a hopeless optimist when it comes to this issue. I will admit that I did not think of all the other materials, like plastic, that come from petroleum, but I still think a subtitute can be found. Maybe we could find a way to make glass cheaper and safer. Some plastic items could be made of glass. Tracy
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Tracy, I appreciate your optimism – we need people like you. I tend to be more of a realist, and in my darkest nights a pessimist. But I’m a professor and teacher, so I force myself to be optimistic. I just gave two talks at my sons’ Catholic school today on a Catholic response to the end of affordable oil. I didn’t sugarcoat the reality, but I tried to give them as much reason to hope as possible. In case you’re interested and have time, I’ve pasted in for you some of the websites I ask my students to read over. The first three are sobering, the fourth shows the rapidity of human population growth in real time, and the fifth offers the positive experience of trying to give some answers.
Prayerfully yours,
Petrus

Books:

James Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. Atlantic Monthly Press 2005. ISBN: 0871138883. Kunstler paints a very bleak picture of agricultural failure and migration and discusses the best places to live. He hopes that a “dazed and crippled America” will regroup around walkable, human-scale towns; that organic local economies of small farmers and tradesmen will replace an alienating corporate globalism; and that our heedless, childish culture of consumerism will be forced to grow up.

More hopeful is Richard Heinberg’s Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-0865715981. Heinberg suggests how we might make the transition from The Age of Excess to the Era of Modesty with grace and satisfaction, while preserving the best of our collective achievements.

Websites:

Association for the Study of Peak Oil: peakoil.net/

LATOC – Life after the Oil Crash: lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

Oilcrash.com: oilcrash.com/index.htm

Worldometers – world statistics in real time: worldometers.info/

Solar Living Institute: solarliving.org/display.asp?catid=49
 
Beofuse said:
This the purpose of all this fear mongering. Only government will be able to save us from our stupid ways. This ties in perfect with the global warming hoax.
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Global warming is not a hoax – it is reality. And peak oil discusison is not fear mongering – it is awakening people to reality.
 
Also a hundred years ago, steam powered railroad trains were routinely going a hundred miles per hour.
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Coal and wood can be converted to gaseous or liquid fuels.
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These processes have all been used before. And they can be used again.
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i agree that we have alternatives, but our lifestyles will be drastically altered. i don’t think our globalized society will fare well without cheap oil. i suppose where we differ is that you believe that the free market will save us and allow us to adapt. i believe that are headed for difficult times. i guess we’ll see.

i think that our hedonistic culture of death in the united states deserves a chastisement from God so that we turn back to him. maybe this oil crisis will be it.
 
There are two scenarios being painted: one is really bleak and we need to reduce population immediately to prevent the whole of society from facing catastrophic and sudden die-off.

The other scenario is to work to find substitutes.

The first seems to me to manifest a failure of imagination, as in: “I cannot envision anything coming up the line that can substitute for petroleum; therefore since I cannot think of anything to do, then no one else can either and therefore all is lost.”

The second is: “Hmmmm. What if we can find a thousand methods, each of which will substitute for a small amount of petroleum.”

For example, one “commodity” that is in surplus at the moment is wood chips. Can’t get rid of them. The best we have been able to come up with is composting to make mulch for gardeners.

Well, how about designing a furnace that will burn them efficiently with no pollution, no ash and no shoveling of the wood chips [materials handling] (eliminating hernias, back problems and heart attacks). And the heat from combustion would be used to heat water or air for heating or somehow produce electricity directly.

OR, we already know that we don’t know a lot about enzymes. So, can we invent an enzyme that we can add to a stew of wood chips and water that would produce alcohol, which we could use for either process (making other chemicals) or using the alcohol to fuel our cars and heating systems and home electrical plants?

All of the above with no government subsidies and with small enough scale that every home owner could have one in their yard.

OR, devise a really cheap way to cobble up batteries and etc so that we could convert our hybrid cars [Prius, etc] into a plug-in hybrid. A cheap plug-in hybrid would allow local trips to be really inexpensive. Almost totally free. Just plug in the car at night or between trips with a discount rate from the electric company because of their need to keep their base-load power generators working full-time and get 50 miles of driving practically free each day.

There are tons of new inventions coming on-line every day. People do think up new and better ways of doing things and sell them without subsidies. Some allow the individual to improve their lives (such as corn-burning furnaces) and some require large amounts of capital (such as liquifying “waste” natural gas in Algeria and shipping it by boat to the United State).

But, anyone can study enough biology to learn about enzymes and fiddle with the stuff in their basement or garage.

Everybody is going full speed to invent the newest computer program (and they are wonderful), but there is a fertile area for developing a petroleum substitute by using enzymes and waste wood chips.
 
drpmjhess said:
Global warming is not a hoax – it is reality. And peak oil discusison is not fear mongering – it is awakening people to reality.
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How many of the books such as “Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” have you personally read?

Have you visited www.climatechangedebate.org ?

These books (and there are many of them) and Web sites (there are many of them also) contain some very effective arguments that AGW is, indeed, not happening.

Have you read Bjorn Lomborg’s books (or seen his lecture on BookTV)?

Merely stating something doesn’t mean that it is true.

Anyone seriously interested in the topic (other than as a pure debate) needs to read the arguments posed by the other side. Especially since there are a LOT of arguments posed by the other side.

If we are not interested in the arguments posed by the other side, then what does that say about us?
 
You know, I love to read Popular Science. PS sells dreams of an optomistic future. Problem is I’m also a realist and am driven by data and graphs. I see the data the pessimists are putting forth to support their argument but for the optomists I see no data based argument. They preach reserve growth and undiscoverd oil yet to be found. I don’t think the SEC would let Exxon book any reserves assets as undiscovered oil.

Dee Dee and myself are oil industry people. Since he’s government I’m assuming he is in some way assoicated with the Texas Railroad Commision. I, OTOH, as an independent producer sell oil for a living. The higher the price of oil the more money I make. These high oil prices are great for my personal bank account. The petroleum business has always been a boom and bust business where individuals have cried wolf about oil depletion only to find offshore deposits like the North Sea. But just because that was true in the past it doesn’t make it true in the future.

If you follow this debate you hear about Hubert’s Bell Curve. I, personally, have never experienced this classic bellshaped curve on any lease I’ve brought in. Rather, all the production had its peak scued heavily to the left side of the curve. I can invision that if you add a number of leases together over an extended time period the curve would scue to the right to form the classic bellshape curve. IOW early on I’ve seen just how fast a lease can exponetially deplete which got me wondering how that might affect global production. I understand what Dr Robert Hirsch meant he said depletion after peak oil could be dramatic. pubs.usgs.gov/of/2000/of00-320/of00-320.pdf

To reiterate my possition: I am open to any argument contrary to the pessimits’ arguments but you’ll have to base that argument upon solid economcally reserve data. Just because there is billion of barrels of oilshale in Colorado doesn’t mean it’s economically usable. It seems to me that with all the oil left in conventional fields after plugging it’d make more sense to try and recover that…but I see no new technology to recover it economically.

For example: Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroluem Review, started out arguing against the peak oilers until he did his Oilfields Megaprojects Report. He now see an oil crunch by 2012.
 
Doug50 said:
Yep but what to do if they refuse to wake up? You listed the Long
Emergency. Here’s a video interview with the author
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1424393539128480922
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I can’t help it if they refuse to wake up. I have an otherwise rational cousin in New Jersey who became completely convinced about global warming being a hoax after reading a book by Michale Crichton, a fiction writer. Never mind that 95% of climate experts know that anthropogenic global warming is fact. But look how much press the anti-evolutionists get in this country, even though 100,000 working biologists know it to be true. Sleepers are hard to awaken.

Petrus
 
Hi Doug50,

Popular Science sells dreams? That is a false statemet, so why did you make it? Call up that company that is making solar energy available at 30 cents a watt right now. I suggest you also contact Popular Science and tell them that they are selling dreams.

Please do not try to frighten people by ignoring, dismissing or mischaracterizing factual information.

God bless,
Ed
 
If there is so much absolute certainty, then someone must have by now calculated exactly and precisely when the end is going to happen.

So, what is the date when the end is going to happen?
 
Al_Masetti said:
If there is so much absolute certainty, then someone must have by now calculated exactly and precisely when the end is going to happen. So, what is the date when the end is going to happen?
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To ask for a date and suggest an “end” misunderstands the point. That there will be a global peak in oil production is a certainty; when it will happen is uncertain. Kunstler suggests that rather than a sharp peak we will enter into a “bumpy plateau” for a few years, during which gasoline prices will continue to rise, airlines will add fuel surcharges to ticket prices, heating oil bills will rise, nations and their militaries will jockey for position to defend their share in oil-rich states, etc.

Some believe we will reach peak in 2012, others think we passed it in 2005. We will not know for perhaps a decade afterward when we reached the peak of oil production, but it will be unmistakable in the rear view mirror. The point is to being getting ready for it now, not argue over when it will happen. After the peak it will be increasingly costly to build the infrastructure for alternative energy generation, high speed rail to replace airlines, etc. Do it now or regret it forever!

Petrus
 
Al_Masetti said:
If there is so much absolute certainty, then someone must have by now calculated exactly and precisely when the end is going to happen.

So, what is the date when the end is going to happen?
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To make that detemination you need full transparency within all producer nation…OPEC and esp. Saudi Arabia considers it’s reserves secrete. It’s argued that OPEC is lying about their actual reserves. Notice how they jumped their reported reserves and how those stated reseves have not depleted since that jump wolf.readinglitho.co.uk/chartpages/r/r7resjump.html

Simmons used society of petorleum engineers reports on Saudi reserves estimates that were in place before the fields were nationalized.
financialsense.com/Experts/2007/Simmons.html

If you are going to descredit my postings you should at least view/listen/watch the links I using to support my arguments.

Here’s another audio links by an insider financialsense.com/Experts/2006/Tertzakian.html
 
The Club of Rome was ABSOLUTELY certain that oil was shortly going to run out. And they issued the report entitled “The Limits to Growth”.

Their logic was PERFECT.

Complete flop.
 
Al_Masetti said:
Complete flop.
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Not at all – take a petroleum geology course! Oil is not abiotically produced, but rather is a product of the evolutionary and geological history of the earth. The Club of Rome unwisely gave an exact date, but they were quite right to warn that oil is finite.

If we had heeded them then and begun to control our spiraling population growth, we might not be in this predicament now, or at least we would have bought ourselves a couple of generations of breathing space to reinvent agriculture and put in place the infrastructure for a comprehensive electric rail transportation grid, and for petroleum-dependent tidal, wind, solar, and geothermal power generation systems.

But we didn’t, and here we are, with the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melting, sea levels rising, energy supplies dwindling, the population approaching seven billion, and seventeen million children dying each year from malnutrition and starvation.

Petrus
 
questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html

The link above is a discussion of the R-U theory on a possible alternate way that petroleum is produced deep within the Earth.

Planet Earth is an amazing creation.

“Almost infinite” in size … 7000 miles in diameter … thin crust and a molten core in the thousands of degrees. [How did the planet get so hot??? Hmmmm??]

How deep have we explored so far? Barely pin-pricks on the surface.

The continents are drifting. In fact, the theory of continental drift was not accepted until relatively recently.

Spinning at about 1000 mph (at the equator).

Bombarded by meteorites … and yet the breathable atmosphere, only about six miles, thick remains.

Having an ozone layer that is only molecules “thick” but is thicker at the poles than at the equator, and that varies with the seasons.

Protected against cosmic radiation and solar radiation by the magnetosphere. And by the interaction of the magnetic poles that cause “magnetic funnels” at the poles.

Punished by volcanic eruptions. Maybe 2000 surface volcanoes and maybe 20,000 or more sub-ocean volcanoes (and maga seeps).

An amazing planet.

We are only now discovering some of the treasues that the Earth has … on the bottom of the oceans.

Vastly underestimated, in my opinion.

Read and study enough about the Earth and you start to really marvel at God’s Creativity and Inventiveness.
 
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