Peak Oil

[Dr. Shane]

Can we assume you are following their example? If they can do it,surely you and your wife should be able to

The problem with that assumption is that one would also have to assume we are living in the same country with the same infrastructure. That would be a faulty assumption.

When I lived in Guadalajara I took the bus all over. The city buses actually have TVs in them with news on them. So when I went to school I could watch the morning news on my way to work.

[bonnie]

Quote:

The problem with that assumption is that one would also have to assume we are living in the same country with the same infrastructure. That would be a faulty assumption.

When I lived in Guadalajara I took the bus all over. The city buses actually have TVs in them with news on them. So when I went to school I could watch the morning news on my way to work.

You are the one that brought this up as an example of public transportation and lifestyle. I made no assumption as to you living in same country. You were the one that drew a comparison and what we could do.

Transportation that is highly improbable here.

I am sure watching the news while riding the bus was nice but we have radio's and TV and the internet for that.

[bonnie]

HEY BONNIE

BIGGER cities that have a good public transportation

system would be not problem but once you get to

smaller towns it is harder with out your own transportation...

when my grandfather had his car and drivers license take

away from him he would walk to get his groceries---walk to

his church but every thing was with in 3 or 4 blocks again

this could not be done now

dgrimm60

And those living in bigger cities have already decided not to have a car or can't.

As soon as you get away from a large metropolitan area you have a transportation problem without a car. Without a stationary place of work you have another problem. My husband could go to 3-4 job sites a day. All four of my sons absolutely could not do their job without a vehicle. Nor could they go anywhere as a family with the small cars.

[Tom Wetmore]

*bump*

[Bravus]

I think the problem is partly that we take our lives as they are right now - that is, heavily developed in the assumption that energy is cheap - and then talk about how inconvenient it would be if energy was expensive, and how it's impossible to change.

But the point of this thread and this discussion is that change is coming, whether we like it or not, and whether we're ready or not. And it will radically reconfigure our cities.

We can keep our urban sprawl if we're willing to invest *massively* in electric public transport, powered by non-fossil-fuel sourced electricity. Otherwise, the suburbs will die and we'll all move to where we *can* walk or get public transport to our jobs.

As I said in the first post, we can change easy or we can change, but life won't be like it is now in 100 years from now. And the sooner we start to make changes, the easier it will be.

If you start budgeting as soon as you lose your job, you will chew through your savings and come to crisis point much more slowly than if you maintain or even increase your cost of living when you lose your job. And maintaining for longer gives you the chance to get a new job or find alternative income streams...

[Bravus]

Well, I guess it's either that or the jobs move out to the people, creating more small towns and reversing urbanisation. In some ways that's an even better outcome.

[GreatLakesGramma]

I will never move into a city. Somebody has to be out in the country growing food for all you city folks. There are still plenty of horses around. Maybe hitching posts will come back into vogue.

[Dr. Shane]

Rise of the Carbon-Neutral City

Quote:

Since at least the 1970s, Canada's third-largest city, Vancouver, has earned accolades from urban planners around the world for a development strategy that has managed the city's population growth while minimizing its impact on the environment, partly by maximizing the efficiency of public transportation. The program was effectively developed before today's green building movement took root. "In some ways, it isn't rocket science," says Worldchanging.com's Steffen, pointing to Vancouver's achievements. "A lot of the time, we simply don't choose to plan smartly," he adds.

[Neil D]

[scene: 35 years hence]

Grandpa: Yeah, youngsters...I remember when we had a thing called AUTOmobiles. That's where you had a motor with seats and wheels and either fiberglass or steel all around you and below you and above you....And you had windows, places that you could see the surrounding area without gettting hit with bugs....

Child1: Wow, Grandpa. Didja have to go to school to learn how to drive that thing?

Grandpa: Nah, we just sortof made it up as we drove along....we called it "experience"...

Child2: How come you had all that metal around you Grandpa?

Grandpa: Why that was so we could protect ourselves in case we got into an accident...and we like big cars so that we could carry things. Yep, We could go miles and miles and miles and see a lot of the countryside then...but we mostly stayed in the citys so that we could buy things and carry them home...

Child2: Wow! You must have had a lot of stuff!

Grandpa: No, no...just the things we needed for our entertainment...Say, ever see a phonograph? They were outdated when I was a boy, but there were a few of them around...Quite a novelty...

Child2: Did they have cars when the phonograph was invented, Grandpa?

Grandpa: Oh, some very simple cars then...But they were heavy with souped up motors....Not like the vehicles we have at all today...

Child1: Yah, but I like my Segway....

Child2: So do I....

Child 1: I get really good voltage...I only use 30 volts to the mile nowdays....

[GreatLakesGramma]

Well, I guess it's either that or the jobs move out to the people, creating more small towns and reversing urbanisation. In some ways that's an even better outcome.

That would definitely get my vote.

[Bravus]

I like your scenario, Neil, but I suspect it might be more like:

"Grandpa, you used to do *what* with oil?!! Don't you know how important that stuff is for making plastics and just about everything else? And you *burned* it!!!"

[Neil D]

I concidered it but rejected it...We'll be making every plastic from soybeans...And nylon will be replaced with hemp clothing....

[GreatLakesGramma]

And nylon will be replaced with hemp clothing....

Much more comfortable!

[Neil D]

WELL make the clothes would be comfortable

but would that mean that marijana would be

legalized????

Industrial hemp is different than marijuana and doesn't have the nearly the same qualities to get you a high....It's like saying that wolves are dogs and dogs are dangerous....and you are getting a pekingese [sp]...

[Dr. Shane]

I guess that is something to keep in mind when pot-smoking wackos say that George Washington grew hemp.

[Bravus]

It's ill-advised drug hysteria that has dramatically reduced the use of hemp, which is a fantastic natural fibre...

[Dr. Shane]

Well, as a recovered pot-head I think I am qualified to say it is ill-advised drug hysteria to smoke pot instead of drinking a beer. As bar as alcohol can be, the health impact of smoking pot is much worse.

[Neil D]

Just not sure what you are trying to say here, Shane, but in the spirit of greening the planet, hemp grown for fiber does NOT have the drug effects that hemp grown for it drug/pot smoking has...The plant is from the same family, but it's a different species. Industrial hemp has many good qualities for economic use, such as paper, clothing, fiberglass work...I read somewheres that by manufacturing with hemp, and producing products such as clothing, paper, that it will take the carbon out of the environment and have either a neutral or negative impact [ie reduce] where as other manufactoring has a POSITIVE impact [ie add] to the carbon emissions...

As to the drug problem that INDUSTRIAL hemp bring to us socially, it's effects are nearly zero as it is quite costly to change it to produce the drug inducing effects that is associated with pot.

[phkrause]

hmm Sounds interesting, maybe i need to look into this a little more closely. ha

pk

[Bravus]

Yeah, that was my point, Shane; I agree, smoking marijuana does no-one any good, and I certainly don't advocate that at all. The point is that if people understand that industrial hemp is something quite different, then it can be easily grown, but it's the aforementioned hysteria that means preventing people from smoking one version of the plant deprives us of all the potential benefits of the other version. Just decisions based on the science and rational judgement is all I'm advocating (as ever ).

[phkrause]

Besides smoking it dgrimm? hahahaha

pk

[phkrause]

You know I'm just kidding, right dgrimm.

pk

[phkrause]

:):):)

pk

[fccool]

Quote:

The sad part is, we have the technological know-how to make the transition relatively painless. All we lack is the political will.

Let me answer that really fast . I think both you and I would agree that nearly all of the technological/industrial revolution of today and yesterday WAS due to the discovery of the engine and proper use of the fuel.

Even today, imagine doing all of the work that oil does for us. To really appreciate it, try pushing your car to and back from work. Now multiply that a couple trillion times over... and that's the work that oil does around the world today.

Technologically, we can't come close to that energy capacity. As much as I love to believe it on some level, the problem with that idea of "relatively painless transition" is the fact that the energy industry is heavily dependent on foccil fuel... to produce the energy for those green cars and etc.

There assessors in Washington which came together and calculated what would be possible... they came up with 25% of "clean" energy usage by 2025. They already figured out that ethanol is not an efficient energy source if you take into account the net value.

Solar and wind are not economically sound alternatives. Hydrogen has safety issues. The only REAL alternative is the one that no one likes... cut down on energy usage, and utilize the available resources... build closer communities, which produce local goods and etc.

[there buster]

From the NY Times:

Quote:

‘Peak Oil’ Is a Waste of Energy

By MICHAEL LYNCH

Published: August 24, 2009

REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and gone).

Like many Malthusian beliefs, peak oil theory has been promoted by a motivated group of scientists and laymen who base their conclusions on poor analyses of data and misinterpretations of technical material. But because the news media and prominent figures like James Schlesinger, a former secretary of energy, and the oilman T. Boone Pickens have taken peak oil seriously, the public is understandably alarmed.

A careful examination of the facts shows that most arguments about peak oil are based on anecdotal information, vague references and ignorance of how the oil industry goes about finding fields and extracting petroleum. And this has been demonstrated over and over again: the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil first claimed in 1989 that the peak had already been reached, and Mr. Schlesinger argued a decade earlier that production was unlikely to ever go much higher.

Mr. Birol isn’t the only one still worrying. One leading proponent of peak oil, the writer Paul Roberts, recently expressed shock to discover that the liquid coming out of the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest known deposit, is around 35 percent water and rising. But this is hardly a concern — the buildup is caused by the Saudis pumping seawater into the field to keep pressure up and make extraction easier. The global average for water in oil field yields is estimated to be as high as 75 percent.

Another critic, a prominent consultant and investor named Matthew Simmons, has raised concerns over oil engineers using “fuzzy logic” to estimate reservoir holdings. But fuzzy logic is a programming method that has been used since I was in graduate school in situations where the factors are hazy and variable — everything from physical science to international relations — and its track record in oil geology has been quite good.

But those are just the latest arguments — for the most part the peak-oil crowd rests its case on three major claims: that the world is discovering only one barrel for every three or four produced; that political instability in oil-producing countries puts us at an unprecedented risk of having the spigots turned off; and that we have already used half of the two trillion barrels of oil that the earth contained.

Let’s take the rate-of-discovery argument first: it is a statement that reflects ignorance of industry terminology. When a new field is found, it is given a size estimate that indicates how much is thought to be recoverable at that point in time. But as years pass, the estimate is almost always revised upward, either because more pockets of oil are found in the field or because new technology makes it possible to extract oil that was previously unreachable. Yet because petroleum geologists don’t report that additional recoverable oil as “newly discovered,” the peak oil advocates tend to ignore it. In truth, the combination of new discoveries and revisions to size estimates of older fields has been keeping pace with production for many years.

A related argument — that the “easy oil” is gone and that extraction can only become more difficult and cost-ineffective — should be recognized as vague and irrelevant. Drillers in Persia a century ago certainly didn’t consider their work easy, and the mechanized, computerized industry of today is a far sight from 19th-century mule-drawn rigs. Hundreds of fields that produce “easy oil” today were once thought technologically unreachable.

The latest acorn in the discovery debate is a recent increase in the overall estimated rate at which production is declining in large oil fields. This is assumed to be the result of the “superstraw” technologies that have become dominant over the past decade, which can drain fields faster than ever. True, because quicker extraction causes the fluid pressure in the field to drop rapidly, the wells become less and less productive over time. But this declining return on individual wells doesn’t necessarily mean that whole fields are being cleaned out. As the Saudis have proved in recent years at Ghawar, additional investment — to find new deposits and drill new wells — can keep a field’s overall production from falling.

When their shaky claims on geology are exposed, the peak-oil advocates tend to argue that today’s geopolitical instability needs to be taken into consideration. But political risk is hardly new: a leading Communist labor organizer in the Baku oil industry in the early 1900s would later be known to the world as Josef Stalin.

When the large supply disruptions of 1973 and 1979 led to skyrocketing prices, nearly all oil experts said the underlying cause was resource scarcity and that prices would go ever higher in the future. The oil companies diversified their investments — Mobil even started buying up department stores! — and President Jimmy Carter pushed for the development of synthetic fuels like shale oil, arguing that markets were too myopic to realize the imminent need for substitutes. All sorts of policy wonks, energy consultants and Nobel-prize-winning economists jumped on the bandwagon to explain that prices would only go up — even though they had never done so historically. Prices instead proceeded to slide for two decades, rather as the tide ignored King Canute.

Just as, in the 1970s, it was the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution, today it is the invasion of Iraq and instability in Venezuela and Nigeria. But the solution, as ever, is for the industry to shift investment into new regions, and that’s what it is doing. Yet peak-oil advocates take advantage of the inevitable delay in bringing this new production on line to claim that global production is on an irreversible decline.

In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of “recoverable” oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price. (That’s the logic that led the Carter administration to create the Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a $3 billion boondoggle that never produced a gallon of useable fuel.)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep looking for other cost-effective, low-pollution energy sources — why not broaden our options? But we can’t let the false threat of disappearing oil lead the government to throw money away on harebrained renewable energy schemes or impose unnecessary and expensive conservation measures on a public already struggling through tough economic times.