A friend suggested to me recently that all the concern about global warming is driving increasing acceptance of uranium as an energy source. So is this a case of one scary campaign trumping another?
Of course many who campaigned against uranium are now campaigning against global warming.
Yep the reality is energy density and energy return ratio. When it takes more energy to get the fuel than is derived from it in work, then the party is over (and that's leaving the CO2 issue to one side).
Does anyone have any numbers on the supertanker fleet in recent years. They should be increasing rapidly if there's going to be stacks of demand that can be supplied....
phil - all the alternatives that you mentioned use energy to refine. Where does this energy come from? The Energy Returned on Energy Invested of the Canadian Tar Sands is 5.2. That is that the energy of the oil refined is only 5.2 times the energy that has to be put in to mine and refine the oil sands. This energy is in the form of natural gas that has to be used for other purposes. Also the most optimistic output is 5 million barrels per day.
Unless you have been ignoring the other posts on this blog coal to liquids release CO2. Rather than strip mining the entire Earth for oil and oil substitues doesn't it make more sense to change - or are we so fossilised in our thinking and habits that the change from oil is so difficult.
Perhaps we will perish like one of the major species from the past that was also unable to adapt to change unlike the small animals that replaced them.
Phil - have you done the numbers or do you just believe that ... have you checked the other fuel sources for size and practicality (except coal to oil)....
Re: future oil/transport fuel supplies.....enger rog and co...very interesting discussion about resouces. It should be understood that the amount of any given resource varies with price....and at anything over $50 a barrel all manner of alternatives to "easy" oil kick in. These include gas to liquids, coal to oil, tar sands, venezuelen heavy crude, and oil shale.....plenty enough to last until we can use genetically tweaked up algae in ponds to do it all instead.
Unfortunately we wont run out of oil, even given the demand surge expected from 3b people joining the industrial world over the next 30 yrs.
Thus, anyone hoping that a shortage of oil might help renewables become competitive is just being a bit wishful. And anyway, the current high prices do not reflect supply and demand fundamentals..the market has severely overshot. When the yanks have a hurricane or whatever, the price goes up....but anyone in the world can order, and get, a tankerload of the stuff anytime...there is no shortage. Its a case of irrational market exuberance/nervousness and it will all come down in a thud inside twelve months...back to $40 maybe....someprice where the not-so-easy oil people can still make a quid.... phil sawyer
rog - how, pray tell, is the reliance on oil going to stop??????? Are we going to stop eating for instance?
BTW I just rode my bike home from the train station as I do just about every day.
From:
The Yergin Puzzle
August 1, 2005
We begin this ominous month with the curious case of Daniel Yergin, who won the Pulitizer for his 1992 epic history of the oil industry, The Prize, later turned into a PBS megadocumentary. Since his big score, Yergin has set up a public relations firm called Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) which, in the spirit of the PR profession, seems to have become the main disinformation organ for its clients, the major oil companies.
In a piece published in yesterday's Washington Post, Yergin takes the position that there is no problem with the global oil supply. Over the next five years, he says, both OPEC and non-OPEC producers will come up with an extra 16 million barrels a day, taking the world from its current 85 m/b/d to 101 m/b/d in 2010. This will happen, he says, because of "new technology" used to exploit unconventional sources of oil such as tar sands, ultra-deep-water developments, and natural gas liquids.
More than a few elements of Yergin's pitch are shifty. The slyest one is that he does not mention that unconventional oil tends to be very uncheap, and since it is cheap oil that enables America's "non-negotiable" easy motoring way of life, and the debt-fueled suburban sprawl-building economy that has evolved to serve it, there may indeed be a problem further along in the pipeline, so to speak.
Yergin also leaves out the fact that most (and perhaps all) of the world's major conventional oil fields are past peak and now depleting at between three and twenty percent a year -- and, ironically, as in the case of the North Sea, the more advanced the drilling technology, the more efficiently the oil is recovered, the greater the rate of depletion.
The big question mark, of course, is Saudi Arabia, which until recently was believed to be years short of peak. A new analysis by Matthew Simmons, chief investment banker to the US drilling industry, and author of the just-published Twilight in the Desert, concludes that Saudi Arabia is peaking now. Simmons adds that the Saudi's 30-year-old super-giant Ghawar oil field (from which SA gets more than half its crude) has been structurally degraded by aggressive over-production and by the practice of injecting sea water into the geological strata in order to keep the pressure up in the wells.
Saudi oil reserve figures have been guarded as "state secrets" since they nationalized their industry in the 1970s, so nobody, including Mr. Yergin, knows for sure what is left under the desert. But we do know what is coming out of the Kingdom in its tankers, and despite repeated promises to increase production in order to goose down prices over the past year, the Saudis have failed to do so. This we know.
Among the other things Yergin's rosy analysis leaves out is that oil is inequitably distributed among the nations of the world. It is a generally accepted fact that roughly two thirds of the remaining oil lies under the Middle East, and another substantial fraction is in Central Asia. That is to say, it belongs either to people who hate us, or to landlocked countries on the farthest side of the globe (next door to China). Another significant pool (though past peak) belongs to Venezuela, run by Mr. Hugo Chavez, who remains irked by American attempts to overthrow his regime and have him bumped off. These facts ought to give pause to the confident.
The conclusion that a reasonable person might draw is that the West, and America in particular, is liable to have trouble getting its mitts on all the oil it needs, and that the industrial nations altogether are headed straight into a fateful geopolitical scramble for whatever's out there. That's exactly why we are in Iraq, by the way. It is our central forward base to secure Middle East oil supplies. And it also why we have embarked on the somewhat crazy and dubious project of setting up bases in several former Soviet republics. (Kyrgystan has just asked us to pack up and leave.) A great game is underway and the patriotic steroids that America has been taking since 9/11 are no guarantee that we will end up the winners.
Along these geopolitical lines, we note today the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Fahd had been disabled by a stroke for years, and the Kingdom has been effectively ruled during this time by his half-brother Prince Abdullah, who now becomes king. Abdullah himself is 82 years old, and whatever his abilities have been, he would not now seem destined for a long reign. What follows Abdullah --with Arabian oil entering its arc of depletion, and the kingdom's oil welfare disbursments shrinking among an exploding population, including a large number of unemployed, futureless, non-royal angry young Arabian men occupied in the study of a militant wahhabism -- may be a very turbulent chapter in the history of that region.
These are the things that Daniel Yergin's public relations escort service to the oil industry doesn't want to talk about.
*is the Oil supply finite?*
The reliance for oil will run out before the supply of oil.
You guys worry too much, you should get away from your computers for a while, go for a bike ride down to the station, catch a train even.
Leave the supply of commodities for the markets to sort out.
rog - however one gaping flaw that no link duel can address is the simple question - is the Oil supply finite?
The commonsense answer, that you have appealed to me to apply, to this question is that all resources are finite and oil is one of them.
Hubbert with his 'flawed' model correctly predicted the peak in America's oil production, a fact that your link author conveniently left out. Also Hubbert was one of the originators of modern oil geology and much of the present field in based on original work by him. He is not some uneducated person cooking the books.
If the authors of this 'study' had read what peak is about then they would have realised that they have actually stated the peak oil problem. 2 trillion barrels of oil is remaining out of a original estimated amount of about 4 trillion barrels. Peak oil is not about how much remaining oil there is but the fact that we are now on the second half of the available oil. We have extracted the easy oil and all that is remaining is the hard to extract oil, the heavy sour oil and the tar sands. This is Peak Oil in a nutshell so your link actually states Peak Oil without acknowledging it.
Now your first link
"As skills improve, output from many producing regions will be much greater than anticipated. The share of "unconventional oil" -- Canadian oil sands, ultra-deep-water developments, "natural gas liquids" -- will rise from 10 percent of total capacity in 1990 to 30 percent by 2010. The "unconventional" will cease being frontier and will instead become "conventional." Over the next few years, new facilities will be transforming what are inaccessible natural gas reserves in different parts of the world into a quality, diesel-like fuel."
Now how about some assumptions here. Unconventional reserves require large amounts of energy to extract. So much so the EROEI is marginal. Natural gas is used to heat the sticky muck that they extract and heat the enormous quantity of water needed to wash and process the tar. Where does the Natural Gas come from?????? Natural Gas is a finite resource as well.
All the modern technology etc is presently not finding enough oil to replace the oil we are using and the fields that are going into decline. URR is growing however depletion and demand are growing faster - Peak Oil
Well Yergin would say that wouldn't he - he wrote The Prize.
Daniel Yergin is best known for The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, a number-one bestseller that won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1992. The book was adapted into a PBS mini-series seen by more than 20 million viewers. Yergin was awarded the 1997 United States Energy Award for "lifelong achievements in energy and the promotion of international understanding."
Yergin is the chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates.
We're talking BIG establishment position here guys ... what do you think they'd say ... need more than that Rog. He is an industry stooge.
Rog - we'll drag you - 0-100 Googles ??
Really is we can google each other to death here. So how do we get some more definitive ??
Whether you're an optimist or not - do you at least acknowledge the USA has peaked ??
Why have no new supertankers been built in last few years ?? Surely they'll be needed for carrying all that new demand ?
Some other stuff on hydrogen issues:
As the car industry puts billions of dollars into developing so-called
clean hydrogen- powered vehicles, The Financial Times reports that "the
new fuel comes with its own built-in commodity crisis."
"Today's experimental hydrogen fuel cells use so much platinum that
there is not enough of the precious metal to replace all the world's
petrol engines." "With the current type of technology we know already
that platinum supplies will not be sufficient," says Kazuo Okamoto,
Toyota's new head of research and development. "At the current 60
grams or so of platinum in each fuel cell," writes The Financial Times,
"the world's 780 million cars and trucks would use 46,800 tons of the
metal, just below the 47,570 tons estimated to be still in the ground"
"If fuel cells power 80 per cent of cars by 2050, miners will be unable
to extract platinum fast enough." Furthermore, a London Department of
Transport study found that there are "significant environmental impacts
associated with platinum mining and refining."
From New Scientist
IT WAS never going to be that easy. Cars and power plants running on hydrogen have been touted as the answer to all our environmental problems, from global warming to pollution and smog. But a more problematic vision of hydrogen is now emerging, in which spiralling leakage rates contribute to ozone depletion and even to global warming. If we are to avoid these downsides we had better start planning now.
That's the warning from researchers modelling the effects of hydrogen in the atmosphere, such as Tracy Tromp and John Eiler from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In June, they pointed out that leaked hydrogen could end up in the stratosphere. There it could react with hydroxyl (OH) radicals to form water vapour, helping to form colder and longer-lasting clouds over the poles. This, they argued, would provide a reaction site for halogens such as chlorine to deplete stratospheric ozone, delaying the repair of the ozone layer (Science, vol 300, p 1740).
Now other scientists are warning of other potentially damaging effects. At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco next month, Larry Horowitz of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and his colleagues will report that leaked hydrogen could increase the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Again, the main problem is destruction of OH radicals, but this time in the troposphere (see Graphic). OH is an environmental scrubber, reacting with and removing all manner of pollutants, including the potent greenhouse gas methane. Lower levels of OH would allow methane to stick around in the atmosphere longer.
Most experts agree that these processes could happen. The big question is how how serious their effect will be, and that depends on how much hydrogen leaks into the atmosphere. At present, about 80 million tonnes of hydrogen goes into the atmosphere every year (see "Hydrogen emissions"). Some of that is natural and some is man-made, with 15 million tonnes coming from industrial uses and the burning of fossil fuels. Tromp and her colleagues caused a stir with their estimate that 10 to 20 per cent of all hydrogen for use in fuel cells would leak. On that basis, converting the world's 1994 fleet of automobiles to hydrogen would increase industrial emissions to between 60 and 120 million tonnes per year. They based their conclusion on earlier work by others which showed that around 10 per cent of liquid hydrogen transported in Germany is lost through leaks.