Going ungently

The Peak Oil Theory does not say that we're running out of oil. The theory says that we are running out of *cheap* oil. Most people don't know that when oil wells have "run dry" in the traditional sense, about 60% of the oil is still underground. And we know how to get it out, it'

Well, we know who's holding the Chicken Little Chair over at Georgetown.

The U.S. dollar is weakening, but it's hardly crashing. The fact that it's going through a steady decline is evidence of our system's relative transparency. We're not being surprised one day by some minister announcing a sudden devaluation, as happens in a lot of other countries.

As for oil, the conventional stuff is running low, but there's still a lot of oil in the earth, in shale and tar sands. There's actually more there than there is in conventional reserves. It hasn't been exploited up to now because it was uneconomical. When the conventional oil runs low enough, these sources will be tapped, and--more importantly--engineering, volume and R&D will be focused on them bringing their relative costs down. In the meantime, more non-oil energy sources, like nuclear, wind and solar, can be brought in.

The biggest factor driving inequality these days, though, is immigration, particularly illegal immigration. You import tens of millions of unskilled campesinos into a high-tech society and inequality it inevitable, with all its ill effects.

As for growing things and cleaning meat and fixing stuff, they have books out there. It's not impossible to master most of those tasks. Some of the more high-tech stuff--like automotive emissions repair--may require technicians, but your general house maintenance can be learned. You won't be a master, but you'll be sufficient.

So an impoverished life is a more virtuous one? The life Dr. Deneen describes seems like sheer hell on earth. Nothing virtuous about the masses toiling away while select elite prosper. I agree with Derek, I believe in the creativity of people - we may be in for some bumpy spots but I think we will be fine.

And here in the Northwest we have had a cold and wet (even for us) October. (Until now. 75 yeterday in Portland.) And the southern hemisphere is just coming out of one of the coldest winters on record. The weather is always weird someplace, and climate has been both cooler and warmer than it is at present. There are many good reasons to wean ourselves from oil, but the hobgoblin of climate change is not one of them.

Peak Oil is here...

Don't tell me there are substitutes for conventional oil until you can give me some sources.

We are going to have to power down and make due with less...

My sources?
The Hirsch Report - (SAIC's congressionally chartered report)
The Army Corp of Engineers Peak Oil report
US-GAO's report on oil uncertainty
CFRs report on energy security

I could list plenty more sources but those of you in denial won't take the time to read any of them anyway so why should I bother.

Those who are interested in learning more.. check out http://www.theoildrum.com

Here's one liberal who thinks Rod's a lot closer to the truth on this one -- and it's a future plenty of progessives foresee as well. You might check out Morris Berman's "The Twilight of American Culture" as an example, in which he offers what he calls The Monastic Option to preserve the best of our civilization.

Really, this goes beyond political labels. Whatever amount of oil remains, it's still finite & it's going to run out sooner or later. People ARE going to have to lead more scaled-back lives in the future ... and a future that concentrates more on the inward than on outward trappings isn't entirely to be feared, I think, however hard it may be. What IS to be feared is the possibility of more authoritarian rule -- "for our own good" -- which could easily come from either side of the political & cultural aisle, from those who see only opportunity for greater wealth, power, control.

Rod, I'm old enough to remember hippie friends saying much the same thing some 40+ years ago ...

Technologies for extracting shale oil are evolving as we speak:

On-site experiments to heat and extract the kerogen are starting on 160-acre tracks leased by the Bureau of Land Management. The 10-year research development & demonstration leases are intended "to test and demonstrate what are considered state of the art methods of recovering shale oil," BLM spokeswoman Heather Feeney said. They can be converted to commercial leases for oil shale after demonstrating commercial production capacity and a BLM review.

Shell is probably the leader in the field, said Jeremy Boak, project manager for the Colorado Energy Research Institute at the Colorado School of Mines. Shell expects to extract from 3.5 to 5 barrels for each barrel of energy used, Boak said, by heating the rocks underground for three or four years, after which the oil seeps through cracks so it can be pumped out. It's relatively efficient, he explained, because it partially refines the kerogen underground and brings it to the surface as fuels requiring little processing: naphtha, diesel and kerosene.

Chevron has partnered with the Los Alamos National Laboratory to recover oil from shale formations in Colorado's Piceance Basin. Fine explained that it will use explosives underground to fractionate the shale, then inject a critical fuel, which creates a hot gas and allows extraction. The need for water and on-site production will have a heavy impact on the environment, however.

Raytheon, known for numerous military technologies, has developed the use of radio frequency, or RF, technology with contributions from partner Critical Fluids Technologies.

John Cogliandro, program manager for Raytheon's oil from shale technologies program, said the new technology is powerful and environmentally responsible. Since it doesn't use steam or heat the actual rock, there's no residue that might enter groundwater supplies, he said.

(From UPI, 7/20/2007)

The point about cheap oil, as I understand it, is that oil will become too valuable to be used as a fuel. That will push some economies in the direction of increasing reliance on coal. I've heard that there are some technologies that have produced clean-burning coal, but a great deal of it is not clean.

This is not about hysteria, about "the sky falling." I appreciate human ingenuity, but there are also things we can't control, and it is hubris, of the kind spoken of in Genesis (or by Professor Pangloss in "Candide") to believe that "all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds, and all will turn out well."

Alicia,

Let me see if I got this straight. Those of us who look at human history and see continual technical progress with hiccoughs are being hubristic to think much the same will happen with this hiccough, but you, who are using your 50-year lifespan as a metric for a climate billions of years old, are not?

Derek,

Yes, of course it is wrong to consider only our own personal experience of climate change. But anectdotal evidence has some value, nevertheless. I believe that climate change is a genuine problem, and that shrinking glaciers, drowning polar bears, stronger storms, more devastating fires and droughts might actually be related to human activity. But, I also understand that climate is complex, and things may happen related to the weather that seem counterintuitive.

As far as faith in technology is concerned, I have great respect for scientific discovery and technological developments. However, I would just add that it would be a shame if technology solved the problem of climate change a few decades too late for millions of people and untold animal species. The idea that "all will work out for the best" seems like complete wishful thinking.

...and it's a future plenty of progressives foresee as well.

Yeah, the same crowd that rendered nuclear power, the only real alternative to fossil fuels, uneconomical through litigation.

I don't see how the oil based economy can continue and I agree with Deneen that the future of this country and the world, is pretty grim compared to the bloated expections of comfort and convenience of the last 50 years. I think we should have gotten rid of oil as an energy source back in the 70's when we had our first run ins with the Arabs, [i.e. the '73 oil embargo]. I well remember waiting in ungodly long lines at the gas stations[ in some cases well over an hour] to fill the tank. There were many people who were developing alternative energy sources in the difficult days of the 70's, like engines that got much higher mileage, and bio fuels etc... Many of these inventions were bought out by the oil companies. So, in essence we have been lackies and slaves to the oil industry.

We can't expect our good fortune to last forever. Our current lifestyle is an anomaly in world history. I'm not aware of any other cilization that had our level of comfort and ease. [Perhaps the Roman nobilities excesses in the waning days of their empire are the only parallels that remotely fit our era].

Oil addiction is really bad for us politically and security wise because it puts us at the mercy of the arabs and catastrophic middle eastern wars.

And I have noticed a huge cultural shift since the 70's. Back then, people cut back immediately on travel and took to car pooling readily. That has not happened in our current mess> Why? Essentially we are spoiled rotten. This addiction to comfort and convenience will make the unavoidable transition to a more restricted life-style dangerous and possibly violent. People just don't have the discipline, simple life skills and knowledge to readily adapt to a harder life. If we have to go through a 1930's type depression [and I think that will come with the eventual 10$ plus a gallon gas] it will destroy our country because we no longer have the basic survival skills and knowledge people had back then. And I think they had greater spiritual resources to draw upon as well. We are lacking in all these things and it will be extremely difficult.

As far as climate change, I don't think we can control it. We could not control the midaeval warming period [much warmer than today]. We could not control the global cooling that took place from 1940- 1979. In fact there was some panic that an ice age was upon us when I was in high school in the 70's. But we do need to go into rehab for oil addiction.

To have a negative outlook has been intellectually in vogue for many years, but one should remember that the prophets of doom have been more wrong about the future over the last fifty years than anybody else. The American economy has a dynamism that allows it to roll with the punches.

In 1979, everybody was predicting the death of the dollar. Then, Paul Volcker was appointed the head of the Federal Reserve. He tightened credit, which deepened the existing recession, but caused the dollar to take off in value. That's all it took to save the dollar, and that's all it would take now. Volcker's pretty old now, but why not bring him back to fix this mess.

The biggest negative in the economy is the bloated expense of the Iraq fiasco. If we get that over with, the economy will strengthen. We have a trillion barrels of oil tied up in oil shale. If we use hybrid cars and develop that resource we can retain a prosperous society. My negativity is more focused on the cultural aspects of the society. Liberal regimes could kill the economic dynamism of the U.S., as they have in Europe.

Bill:

Why the cheap shot at women for their (perceived, not actual, BTW) lack of housekeeping?

Isn't Rod's point that both men and women need to (re)learn a lot of these skills?

When i retired from school teaching I took up weaving as a hobby. I'm no master weaver, but it sure is fun. And I've made many a useful thing for my little life. Recently my grandnephews, 9 and 7, thanked me at my 70th birthday party for having taught them the basics of weaving on simple little frame looms. And they, Caucasian children, are already fluent in Mandarin thanks to their expensive private schooling. My point is instruct your kids at both ends of the education spectrum in the high intellectual stuff and the "low down" crafts and skills. Survival in their adulthood may well lie in their bending both ends together while the dullards without imagination in the center destroy themselves in fruitless rebellion against the creative and imaginative survivors.

Several points:

1) For all of known human history (since the first tools primates made over a million years ago) our technology and standard of living has been going up. Now, that's a million years of increasing wealth. Even in our "dark ages," humans have at least maintained the economy. Only isolated areas, and only due to human-created problems, has there ever been exceptions to steady economic growth. It is a bold person indeed (read: Dreher and Deneen) who thinks peak oil will cause economic decline, not just the slowing of growth.

2) Peak oil is real and mainstream knowledge in the oil industry. Bakhitari (Iran oil exec) estimates we are at peak, Goodstein (Cal Tech) says 2010, DOE estimates 2016. We haven't had a "super giant" discovery since 1960, and we have serious high-tech oil exploration. All the big pools of oil have been found (duh, they are big and can't hide); we are currently picking away at the little guys and have a good idea of what is out there. Meanwhile, every day of economic growth creates more and more demand for oil. We are going to peak, and very soon if not currently peaking.

3) Peak oil is not an "energy crisis." It is a liquid fuel shortage. We have plenty of other energy - coal, nukes, etc. And it is not going to "run out," it will just get so expensive nobody will use it. Our current transportation fleet will most likely outlast the fuel itself (heck, we are still using WWII vehicles, and the engines today are even better).

4) Give up the "tar sand" fantasy. What makes oil so great is that it is cheap. The tar sands are so expensive to extract and process it will be cheaper to use coal and Sterling engines. It's all about energy-in versus energy-out, and oil is like free energy. It's unique. Tar sands suck. We will have plenty of tar-sand-gas, it will just be $30/gal.

5) Give up the "biofuel" fantasy. Oil currenty has like an 100:1 energy in/out ratio. Ethanol is like 1.34:1. It's a joke.

6) If there is a "crisis" due to peak oil, it will be caused not by running out of fuel, but by people and governments freaking out about the lifestyle change of less consumption. Here is where I can agree with Dreher/Deneen - it's anybody's guess how people will respond to weaning from liquid fuels. It will take a lifestyle change. No big deal - unless people or policy screw it up.

7) Just because we don't have oil does not mean we can't continue to grow our economy. We had solid economic growth for all of recorded history, and oil was first drilled around the Civil War. Sure, oil allowed double-digit economic growth, and more expensive energy will slow economic growth, but it won't make it shrink, like so many people think. The only way this will happen is if people riot or war (see #6).

8) Putting your money outside the US does nothing to help regarding peak oil. We have lots of coal, a good climate, and good human capital compared to other countries. Peak oil will really hurt China and Japan, and Europe has a human capital problem. I don't see anybody doing better than the US.

This is why I've been trying to direct some of this Global Warming talk on the left into 'running out of oil' talk. I think global warming is real, it is a large danger, and it's possibly entirely moot. Why?

Because we'll run out of cheap oil first. (Although the recent arctic melting worries me.) Presto, no more global warming, unless we're lunatics and start burning coal. (Which is certainly possible.)

We need to cut back on energy. We need to build mass transit now, we need to envision a society with no gasoline cars. Whether that society has mass transit, or electric cars, or, (and if I understand this whole 'crunchy' thing, this is what you guys are talking about) basically no shipping.

And everyone should be away that people are only half the problem, both energy and transportation-wise. Without shipping, half the country starves to death. Without energy, no one can make anything and the economy collapses.

So I look at all the personal energy-saving measures with a somewhat cynical eye. It's the businesses that need to change, first. I could live with super-expensive gas, I couldn't live with super-expensive food because gas is super-expensive.

And, yes, it's possible we can just continue blithely forward and 'the market will fix things', but cars and mass transit and power plants and all that crap? That takes years to build. When, exactly, are we going to start? When gas hits four dollars a gallon? Five? Ten? Thirty?

I don't know, I'd rather not have to tell my grandkids about the middle of my life, from 2015-2020, when the cost of everything shot sky-high and caused an economic collapse because we were too damn stupid to do anything about the obvious slow disappearance of oil reserves, so when it happened we had to go into emergency mode.

The free market solving all our problems? Eventually, maybe. But the market is slow. The lag time can be deadly in the short term.

Oh, and Derek Copold? I am this close to physically assaulting the next environmentalist that says we need to use 'clean energy' but that nuclear is not an option. We've had thirty years to come up with other energy sources, and we have nothing that's close to usable. Eventually, sure, solar and geothermal and hydroelectric, whatever. Power your house off it, whatever.

But, right now, nuclear is all we have that can actually provide anywhere near the current needs of this country. We need to build it now, so we can stop using oil and delay the oil problem for a few more years while we figure out what to do for transportation.

Random comments:

1) Petroleum isn't a sine qua non of mass automobile usage. Consider (for instance) electric cars, with plug-in hybrids as a transition technology. Part of me wonders whether these "Peak oil = demise of car culture" predictions don't contain a bit of wish fulfillment.

2) Dan - the problem with biodiesel (and other biofuels) is that they require too much land. Even using the most efficient biodiesel producers (oil palms), the modest goal of replacing current American gasoline consumption would still require doubling our current harvested acreage. The acreage required to replace US fossil fuel imports, let alone fossil fuel consumption, is even higher. See here for details:

http://gravitron5.blogspot.com/2007/06/random-thoughts-on-environmentalism.html

Even with conservation, an expanding population & economy will eventually necessitate higher energy consumption. And every acre used for biofuels is an acre no longer used for food production.

3) Elite diversification out of dollar assets is not necessarily a sign of the apocalypse. The dollar has been overvalued for years now - just look at the US current-account deficit - but China & other Asian economies have been propping it up via currency manipulations in order to artificially-cheapen their exports. Given this background, diversification out of dollar assets is a rational economic move (for those able to do so). The ultimate cause of all this may still be the outsourcing of (portions of) our industrial base (and the consequent trade deficits); but to view Cheney's (and other elites') investment moves as indicative of "a declining economic future for the US" is, IMHO, oversimplifying a bit.

It seems to me that AL Gore and his supporters blame everyone for the supposed climate change except themselves. How much energy and fuel are Gore and his faithful burning going to global warming conferences????? More than most of us willuse in a life time. Gore and the Fear industry are making tons of green on this issue while instilling terror into my kids.

First of all, Gore often flies commercial air. And he is not an average citizen, he has a secret service detail.

Secondly, the main use of energy in this country is not personal. It is industrial and shipping, that is the most important thing to deal with, and the second is producing low-energy things. Like cars that get 40 MPG instead of 15, and electrical stuff that uses a third of the energy and correctly insulated houses.

An oft quoted statistic is that one cross-country flight on a GulfStream uses as much fuel as one Hummer driven for a year, which sound damning until you realize that, hopefully, Al Gore has stopped at least a hundred people buying Hummers, which would mean he could keep one in the air constantly and come out ahead.

These personal attacks on Gore are just getting pathetic, especially when, um, no one even mentioned him. At all. Search the page for 'Al Gore'. So basically you had to drag him in here so you had someone to ad hominem attack.

Hell, we're not even talking about climate change. We're talking about running out of oil. So you've dragged in someone completely unrelated to the topic at hand, just to take a shot at to prove that, although the left has been entirely correct about everything, they might have some hypocrites on their side, which I guess makes it just as bad as the right denying any of this for a decade and a half.

You are correct about the insanity of the environmentalists being an anti-nuclear lobby also, but I'm not giving you any credit for that because you then went postal on Al Gore, who is not anti-nuclear. (He's not pro-nuclear enough, but that's not the same thing. He's not running around fighting the plants, he just wrongly thinks we could do this without them.)

consider the power grid infrastructure required to charge all those exotic batteries

PHEV boosters typically assume that charging would occur during off-peak hours, using generating capacity that currently sits idle during such times. As such, much of the "power grid infrastructure" already exists. See here:

http://www.pnl.gov/energy/eed/etd/pdfs/phev_feasibility_analysis_combined.pdf

Money quote: "For the United States as a whole, 84% of U.S. cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) could be supported by the existing infrastructure, although the local percentages vary by region. Using the light duty vehicle fleet (LDV) classification, that includes cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans, the technical potential is 73%. This has a gasoline displacement potential of 6.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 52% of the nation’s oil imports."

What we don't have, we could build; but given the numbers involved, this would seem to fall into the realm of "gradual upgrades", as opposed to "wholesale makeover".

Even if you had complete concensus today on nuclear power and nuclear waste disposal, you wouldn't have new plants on line for decades

Don't know where you're getting "decades"; Japan & France manage to build reactors in 5 & 6 years, respectively:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1601&page=34

Since I don't recall a TMI or Chernobyl occurring in either of these countries, it would appear that such a breakneck pace of construction is not entirely incompatible with safety concerns.

I personally would rather see a big push for mass transit.

I'm not opposed to mass transit; with higher energy prices, we might well see a lot more people using it. Given the inertia of the "car culture", however, it appears (to me, at least) that trying to change that culture would be more difficult than finding (near-)oil-free means of powering automobiles.

Note also that mass transit still requires energy; buses & trains aren't perpetual motion machines. No coal, nuclear, oil...where do you plan on getting that energy from?

Note also that mass transit still requires energy; buses & trains aren't perpetual motion machines. No coal, nuclear, oil...where do you plan on getting that energy from?

Hmmm...the same place you get the energy to manufacture and power the fleet of PHEVs? I should say that I think mass transit as a mode of thinking would be a better use of scarce or dwindling energy supplies than one-for-one swapping of our internal combustion fleet for an electric or hybrid fleet.

I'm not sure why you say "no coal, nuclear..." etc. but lots of coal and nuclear power will be required to design, market and particularly manufacture this new fleet of PHEVs. Regardless, I'm sure that PHEVs will play a big role in the future of transportation one way or the other.

Whether we are really able to maintain this "easy motoring" culture,as Kunslter puts it, with PHEVs is another question.

DavidTC,

We agree on most everything except the relative ease of creating light rail routes on the one hand and developing plug-in hybrids on the other.

I've been involved in getting a light rail line going and it takes at least as long as a power plant. Even with "free electricity" if people don't live close enough to make it work, it won't remove many people from the highways. Also, energy is one of the smallest costs for a rail transit system. Personal costs for running and maintaining the system are high. Without enough cash in the fare box, public transit systems tend to bleed tax revenue.

On the other hand, people are already converting their Priuses to be plug-ins and the GM Volt is a decent prototype. Both can be recharged from a regular 110V line using overnight surplus power. The only real holdup is the availability of large enough Lithium batteries. This is just a matter of a year or 3. If we make the simple move of installing smart meters (already widely available), we can push consumption into the evening and nighttime by charging less for off-peak consumption. This is a freebee and demands very little change in lifestyle.

Also, it limits the dependence on the inefficient, government transit agencies that make the costs of mass transit so high.

SiliconValleySteve
We agree on most everything except the relative ease of creating light rail routes on the one hand and developing plug-in hybrids on the other.

Fair enough. I'm a bit biased because I'm living in Georgia, a state with nowhere near enough mass transit. Every morning, millions of people funnel down three highways into Atlanta, and every evening they funnel out. Putting light rail on those highways with parking decks, you've hugely cut gas usage. (Especially as we get about a fifth of our power from nuclear and hydroelectric plants.) Note that a good percentage of these drivers stop at the nearest light rail station and take it the rest of the way...the problem is that they're making a 80 mile trip and mass transit covers the last 20.

However, just because there's an obvious underdevelopment here doesn't mean that's the solution elsewhere. I'm looking at a nail and calling for a hammer, but that doesn't mean everyone faces a nail.

Of course, what should actually happen is both. Mass transit where it makes sense, and people drive to that mass transit.

Personal costs for running and maintaining the system are high. Without enough cash in the fare box, public transit systems tend to bleed tax revenue.

So do roads. Roads only pay their own way because oil is so cheap we can impose huge taxes on it and cars. That will soon stop being possible.

And I agree with your 'smart meter' comment, and I'd actually like to see it go one step further. Why not have intelligent power, where something can say 'At some point during the night, I will need X kilowatt hours.' and actually get it when it's the absolute cheapest?

Obviously, it couldn't be perfect, the system can't know the future, but it's pretty easy to send data down power lines. Updating the cost of power minute-by-minute, and estimating future demand, might let us cut required production capacity another 5% on top of the 'charging your car at night'.

Your history is wrong, Larry. LA transit was bought by Cloverleaf Industries, just before they tried to abscond with Toon Town.

;-D