Petroleum and the future of civilization

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Al_Masetti said:
These statements add up to what I said … that massive coercive governments carrying out these policies would be needed to achieve the dismal picture being painted.
drpmjhess;3051224:
Coercion is your idea, not mine; I find the idea abhorrent. What you haven’t understood is that if we are to avoid possible coercion in the future by tyrannical governments, we should start planning now, in the ways I have suggested. Noting that people who live far from public transportation will see the value of their houses drop relative to those who are served by public transit has nothing to do with suggesting building concentration camps along railway corridors (your bizarre interpretation).

To date you have not offered a single cogent reply to Doug50’s massive documentation of that fact that no one has come up with a magic bullet to find substitutes at scale for the thousand barrels of oil the world consumes every second. The argument of my research group is that if we wish to rescue the project of civilization for the long term - the next ten thousand years – we need to confront the fact that there is only about a century of uranium and a few centuries of coal. If you seriously believe the planet can support an indefinitely growing human population, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate how that can be sustained in terms of energy consumption.
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Al_Masetti said:
According to “the radio”, there is yet another gignormous new Brazilian oil discovery.

Like … they’re finding a new oil field every month.

Kowa-bonga!

So, … what does that tell us about how smart we are and how much we know about what’s going on “down there” in the “oil-strata land”???
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Brazil is no secret. For example, Here’s a quote from a 1998 article "Oil Shock!": Offshore drilling, which was still new in the 1970’s and early 1980’s was, and still is, widely touted as a big part of the solution to ensuring permanently comfortable oil supplies. Yet, as L.F Ivanhoe recently noted, “All of the global deepwater discoveries beyond the continental shelves during the past 30 years, mostly in the North Sea and off Brazil, would provide only one year’s total global production of oil at 1996’s rate.”

But all these intense efforts - and interim solutions to find more oil obscured a harsh reality: only a mere handful of major new fields have been found since 1980. (A major field is defined as one yielding 100 million barrels or more). Figure 19: World Oil Discovery Rate, 1912 - 1992 illustrates this alarming situation.

You’d be better off focusing on Russia Publicly traded companies like to hype reserve. It boost their stock values. Remember the Jack II well Chevron anounced a year ago. The media hyped that one.

Guys like you, Al, and you’re nowhere near alone, like to look at reseves and estimated reserve growth but then ignore or don’t understand well/field depletion rates. To use a radical example, you could have two seperate fields each with 1 million barrels potential of oil. One field’s oil is low gravity oil, say a specific gavity of 16 (a very thick viscus crude) while the other fields SP is 40. I could add porosity, permiability, and bottom hole pressue differences too if I wanted to but the point is: all other things being equal these two million barrel fields aren’t even close to being equal. A low gavity well could produce for years and years but the amount of oil you get from it on a daily bases will be a lot less than an equally high gavity well.

The similar thing is true about where the fields are that you have to go and get oil. Deepwater fields take on the order of 10 years to develope.

Here’s a report from the Internation Energy Agency Global Strategic Energy Challenges. Scroll down to page 14 where you see in Red “Replacement to Maintain Capacity”. What are they saying? In order to meet the expected demand by 2030 of 188 million barrels per day from the current 85-86 million, the oil industry needs to find on the order of 200 million barrels per day from now to then. Why the simingly mathamatical difference (118-86= 43)? Oil depletion per well/field has to be made up for.

Notice the red line for US oil production and how it caused the second peak (but lower than the first bump). That’s when Prudo Bay came online. http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/us-production.jpeg Alaskan oil did not stop the US slide to where we are now. Since its true that world has been using more oil every year then it discovers in new reserves while at the same time everyother county in the world wants to use more oil too, a person has to be very optomistic about future supplies coming online to meet desired demands.
 
Neil_Anthony said:
I wouldn’t assume that suburbia will be the worst place to be once things start going downhill. Sure, if you have a job in the city it will be hard to get to it without fuel for your car. But how long will anyone still have a job? The economy will disappear, and at least the suburbanites will be able to turn their big lawns into gardens. They’ll be able to grow enough food to survive for a while, as the city people start killing each other for food.
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Commuting by internet will be much more popular…we’re doing that right now.
 
drpmjhess said:
Al Masetti;3077952:
These statements add up to what I said … that massive coercive governments carrying out these policies would be needed to achieve the dismal picture being painted.

Coercion is your idea, not mine; I find the idea abhorrent. What you haven’t understood is that if we are to avoid possible coercion in the future by tyrannical governments, we should start planning now, in the ways I have suggested. Noting that people who live far from public transportation will see the value of their houses drop relative to those who are served by public transit has nothing to do with suggesting building concentration camps along railway corridors (your bizarre interpretation).

To date you have not offered a single cogent reply to Doug50’s massive documentation of that fact that no one has come up with a magic bullet to find substitutes at scale for the thousand barrels of oil the world consumes every second. The argument of my research group is that if we wish to rescue the project of civilization for the long term - the next ten thousand years – we need to confront the fact that there is only about a century of uranium and a few centuries of coal. If you seriously believe the planet can support an indefinitely growing human population, it is incumbent upon you to demonstrate how that can be sustained in terms of energy consumption.
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[drpmjhess, You have your posting and my posting all mushed together. Can you go back and redo your post … or something … or learn how to use the quote feature properly? ]

Sorry, I thought I had offered a single congent “plan” / reply for the future of energy / petroleum.
  1. Expand the use of nuclear power for electrical generation. Start by issuing each existing nuclear plant four new licenses. Expand our 20% of electricity generated by nukes to 80% (to match France).
  2. Remove all the political / permitting constraints on drilling in Alaska and off-shore, as well as the more subtle constraints imposed by the individual states (such as simply not issuing gas drilling permits).
  3. Reopen the coal deposits in the Western states that were closed at the request of the Riady family (because the coal competed with their coal mines / deposits in Indonesia).
  4. Remove the import tariff on imported ethanol.
All of these can be done with four strokes of the pen.

I can’t see ten thousand years into the future. And neither can anyone else. That would be twice the time horizon as looking back to the beginning of the Old Testament.

A hundred years ago, no one could have anticipated the use of jet airplanes, electronic computers, television, or miracle drugs.

Diseases that routinely took people a hundred years ago, are virtually unknown today.

Go back a hundred years and project to today … the internet.

Can’t do it.

Can’t project out into the future more than a year or two.

Technology is growing by leaps and bounds. New stuff coming out all the time.

[How to you propose to make all those changes in a short time without coercion?]
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Al_Masetti said:
People in Cuba get “care packages” from outside.

People in North Korea die.
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Begs an obvious question to me, Al. When global oil peaks (and if there’s no ready substitutes) who is going to send the world care pachages? In a round about way you make the point Petrus is making.
 
Doug50 said:
Begs an obvious question to me, Al. When global oil peaks (and if there’s no ready substitutes) who is going to send the world care pachages? In a round about way you make the point Petrus is making.
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There seems to be some admiration for Cuba for finding a way to “make it” on their own. The fact is that Cuba is NOT making it on their own.

Cuba CAN make a lot of use of solar using inexpensive solar collectors. But folks in Boston might have a problem using solar in winter.
 
Al_Masetti said:
We have hundreds of years of coal available. We have potentially nearly a thousand years of geopressurized methane available. [We have so much methane that it freely bubbles to the surface in the ocean.] We have an unlimited supply of nuclear energy.
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You need to quality the “We have hundreds of years of coal” to include at current usage. I know I pointed this out in an earlier post. You are, like most everyone else, ignore exponential growth in usage.
Exponential Growth " An example of what exponential growth means in resources can be seen with US coal reserves. Coal is the US’s most abundant fossil fuel. In 1991 the US Department of Energy reported that at **current rate of use **US coal reserves could last almost 500 years. But the caveat here is current rate of use. Between 1971 and 1991 the use of coal grew 2.86%. With this rate of growth US coal could last about 94 years if we could use it all, but more likely 72 years of coal would be recoverable (Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis).

Lack of understanding of how long coal could last comes from people’s lack of knowledge of exponential growth. In 1978, Time Magazine reported that there is “enough coal to meet the country’s energy needs for centuries, no matter how much energy consumption may grow” (Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis). This is clearly untrue. If we look just at the amount of electrical energy the country uses and its historical growth over the last 40 years, we see that coal could meet that need for just 36 years. Remember, coal is our most abundant fossil fuel. This utter lack of understanding of the results of exponential growth isn’t limited to Time – it’s pervasive in our government, media, and general public.

One reason for this is that exponential growth moves so fast. It seems we should not worry with 500 years of coal left, but we need to know how fast use will grow. Exponential growth is deceptive. The ramifications of exponential growth can be better understood if you understand doubling time.

The amount of time it takes for the amount of something that is growing exponentially to double can be approximated by dividing 70 by the rate of growth…Doubling time is important because it’s easier to conceptualize than a percentage.
 
Al_Masetti said:
“voluntary population limitation” … “cities rebuilt so that people can live close to their places of work” … “bicycle paths and sidewalks” … “massive effort to reduce the consumption of oil” …“public transportation …”

…

You’ve been consistent.
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Who are you replying to here, me or Petrus? I’m always consistent, Al. As I said earlier I can be turned into an energy optomists quite easily. All you have to do is put forth the data that cournter argues the energy demand predicitons. I’m actually hopeful that the ammonia thing (although I don’t know enough about it yet) will do a better job of filling a gasoline shortage gap.
 
Al_Masetti said:
There seems to be some admiration for Cuba for finding a way to “make it” on their own. The fact is that Cuba is NOT making it on their own.

Cuba CAN make a lot of use of solar using inexpensive solar collectors. But folks in Boston might have a problem using solar in winter.
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I have no admiration for Cuba
 
AND ANOTHER THING!!!

😉

In a word. One word.

Tesla.

Tesla is an example of technological genius.

A lot of Tesla’s work is still not understood or appreciated even today. [His laboratory burned down. All his papers were lost.]

It is my contention that there are LOTS of Tesla’s out there.

Of course, (to put a Catholic perspective on things), if we abort our young people, then we run the risk of killing a lot of geniuses before they ever get a chance to show us what they can do.
 
Don’t worry you guys. We’ve got enough expensive oil in the tar sands up here in Canada to fill the supply gap, but at an expensive enough price to force peopel to start switching to some other source. That’ll give people time to adjust.
 
Visit google and look up this guy … a true genius … who died a cold lonely death in Greenland, continuing to collect data.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

The answer to “Petroleum and the future of civilization” is in the work of true geniuses … men and women who discover new things.

A government whiz-bang spent a huge amount of money trying to build an airplane. He failed. The actual inventors of the airplane turned out to be two eccentric bicycle shop owners from Dayton Ohio. The research they did in aerodynamics has been refined over the years, but never superceded.

It only takes a few geniuses to advance civilization. But they can be snuffed out by an abortionist’s suction tube.

We may have already killed the inventor of fusion power.

No telling.
 
From the standpoint of the oil industry obviously and I’ll talk a little later on about gas, but obviously for over a hundred years we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you’ve got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It’s like making one hundred per cent interest discovery in another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months or finding two Hibernias a year. energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=559&PHPENERGYBULL=d433b13f399076859ca077ab855f914e

For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?

Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990’s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world’s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn’t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990’s. - **** Cheney’s speech at the Institute of Petroleum Autumn lunch, 1999
 
Al_Masetti said:
Visit google and look up this guy … a true genius … who died a cold lonely death in Greenland, continuing to collect data.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

The answer to “Petroleum and the future of civilization” is in the work of true geniuses … men and women who discover new things.

A government whiz-bang spent a huge amount of money trying to build an airplane. He failed. The actual inventors of the airplane turned out to be two eccentric bicycle shop owners from Dayton Ohio. The research they did in aerodynamics has been refined over the years, but never superceded.

It only takes a few geniuses to advance civilization. But they can be snuffed out by an abortionist’s suction tube.

We may have already killed the inventor of fusion power.

No telling.
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Think bigger, Al. With nanotechnology maybe it’ll be possible to build a tether to space to harvest electricty from the magnetic field similar to the space shuttle experiment: findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1511/is_n1_v18/ai_18974464
 
Neil_Anthony said:
Don’t worry you guys. We’ve got enough expensive oil in the tar sands up here in Canada to fill the supply gap, but at an expensive enough price to force peopel to start switching to some other source. That’ll give people time to adjust.
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Sorry, Neil. The tar sands have a lot of syncrude but the logistics of mining it and meeting any global supply gap won’t be there. It’s hoped that the suply will be about 5 million barrels by 2030 from the current 1 million. energybulletin.net/7331.html
 
Others have suggested large tax-free prizes for the first person to invent a successful hydrogen engine/power system.

But we could as easily put up other huge prizes for … fusion power … for beaming power from collectors in space down to the Earth’s surface.

But these are plebian ideas.

The Wright Brothers, Sikorski, Marconi, Tesla, Wegener, Kildall … we need more geniuses to invent more and more useful things.
 
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