OIL: The End Will Be Sooner Than You Think
When John D. Rockefeller Sr. went into the oil business, there were about 2 trillion barrels of petroleum under our feet.
"Peak discovery" of oil fields in the US was in the mid 1930s. Peak production in the US (where 1/2 of the oil had been pumped) was in the mid-1960s. We have surpassed global peak oil production as well. One trillion barrels (1/2) is gone. Of the remaining 1 trillion barrels, only some is recoverable.
There are several very, large reserves of pumpable oil remaining--in the Middle East, Nigeria, South America, and elsewhere. These reserves are only a share but a substantial one of the remaining 1 trillion barrels; but oil consumption is huge and rising. The world uses at least 33 billion barrels of oil a year. It's quite conceivable that in 20 years, after 660 billion more barrels of oil have been used up, we will be close to the end of economically recoverable oil. For many wells, half of the energy per barrel produced goes into it's extraction.
The end of affordable and plentiful oil is an existential threat. It's a practical certainty. There is no substitute for 33 billion barrels of oil every year. Oil is involved with virtually every aspect o modern life in a critical way: transportation, plastics, fabrics, raw chemicals, pharmaceuticals, heating, lubrication, etc. There are other energy-producing technologies, like solar, but there is no equivalent to the multiple utility of petroleum. Without it we are totally screwed.
QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN THE OIL RUNS OUT?
[Some information is from Forbes Magazine. Some information is from The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. Forbes and Kunstler provide information which is generally consistent with not-optimistic assessments of oil reserves I have read in other sources.]
"Peak discovery" of oil fields in the US was in the mid 1930s. Peak production in the US (where 1/2 of the oil had been pumped) was in the mid-1960s. We have surpassed global peak oil production as well. One trillion barrels (1/2) is gone. Of the remaining 1 trillion barrels, only some is recoverable.
There are several very, large reserves of pumpable oil remaining--in the Middle East, Nigeria, South America, and elsewhere. These reserves are only a share but a substantial one of the remaining 1 trillion barrels; but oil consumption is huge and rising. The world uses at least 33 billion barrels of oil a year. It's quite conceivable that in 20 years, after 660 billion more barrels of oil have been used up, we will be close to the end of economically recoverable oil. For many wells, half of the energy per barrel produced goes into it's extraction.
The end of affordable and plentiful oil is an existential threat. It's a practical certainty. There is no substitute for 33 billion barrels of oil every year. Oil is involved with virtually every aspect o modern life in a critical way: transportation, plastics, fabrics, raw chemicals, pharmaceuticals, heating, lubrication, etc. There are other energy-producing technologies, like solar, but there is no equivalent to the multiple utility of petroleum. Without it we are totally screwed.
QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN WHEN THE OIL RUNS OUT?
[Some information is from Forbes Magazine. Some information is from The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. Forbes and Kunstler provide information which is generally consistent with not-optimistic assessments of oil reserves I have read in other sources.]
Comments (94)
I guess it will be something like when older industries became obsolete and abandoned. When we run out of oil some industries and places will be abandoned, because they depend too much on oil, whereas new places and industries may run on other energy sources, which will probably thrive in the absence of oil. Perhaps some of the major oil companies will manage to convert to solar power companies even?
Oil can be replaced. If nothing else, we have a giant ball of energy in the sky that won't run out for billions of years. And you never know with cold fusion. The breakthrough might still happen.
I think adapting to the resulting climate change from burning so much oil will be more problematic than running out of it. We'll have a different energy economy in a few decades, but we'll have to adapt to the results of a warmer climate. Let's hope it's not severe enough to dry out the Amazon, or melt Antarctica.
A rule of thumb is that major new technology takes 40 or 50 years to be established. For instance, from the beginning to full deployment, solar will likely take 50 years -- including building necessary transmission lines, developing and deploying battery installations (of some kind), developing solar/thermal as well as solar/electric, etc. Same for wind. Full deployment is not 50 years from today, but 50 years from when we started which is like 10-15 years ago.
Kunstler points out how very very very dependent the world is on oil. Electricity isn't the main thing that oil provides. It's conveniently packaged, highly potent, shelf-stable energy. The car runs on oil, but it is also lubricated with oil, it's upholstery and carpet is made from oil, the paint and rust proofing is made from oil, the tires are largely made from oil. The plastic dashboard and door covers are made from oil.
A good share of clothing is made from oil (i.e. polyester), as is carpeting, indoor/outdoor paint, plastic bags, plastic packaging, plastic containers, plastic furniture.
Going back to natural fiber (wool, linen, cotton, leathers and feathers) is possible, but doing so would require a tremendous agricultural and manufacturing shift.
Oil companies are already interested in renewable energy and non-petroleum industries.
The thing about diminishing oil is that it might not be all that gradual, and by and large there are no other substances that readily replace oil as chemical feedstock. Oil doesn't just provide energy.
What is the cost-benefit of thermal depolymerization? How much energy input (heat and pressure) does it take to get so much energy output? If oil disappeared, my guess is that the feedstock would be pretty much plant based, and that the end product would be somewhat different.
James Howard Kunstler for sure thinks there will be an agonizing reappraisal.
The beauty of the process is that it takes the waste products that we are drowning in and breaks them down into their base ingredients. The system has been shown to operate entirely on the natural gas it extracts from the waste materials. Other by-products are metals, light and heavy oils, fertilizers, etc. We simply need to feed it our waste. I cannot show that it will solve all of the oil problem but I am confident we will see the process as a major player in the transition.
Right now oil and it's products, like gasoline, performs the job of both being the source of energy and also being the battery which stores it. A tank of gasoline is like a very cheap and very powerful and very portable battery that holds it's charge for a very long time. In the past this was far an away the easiest and most efficient mechanism for getting shit done and is largely responsible for the last 100 years of human success. If the reality of our dependence on this doesn't change before oil becomes too costly, our quality of life will be the thing that changes.
Solar panels are looking to become the new source of most of our electricity, and right now the cost of solar energy is actually starting to approach levels similar to that of coal...
The recent advancement in batteries and electric cars made by Tesla are pretty impressive. If we can make batteries that are stronger than tanks of gas ever could have been, and electric motors that don't cost too much or break down too easily, then it's entirely possible that we will see fully electric farming/construction/demolition vehicles.
Regarding the vast periphery of products which come from oil, I wonder how much quantity is required to fill our needs in that regard? Chemicals for medicines for instance would not theoretically be required in vast quantities, and with cheaper and usable electric based methods for material processing of various kinds, replacement materials could become more economical for use in the host of products we could come to rely on.
It's my hope that the transition away from oil will indeed happen quickly, spurred by market innovation which might finally make sustainable energy sources, electric batteries, and electric machinery, more economically efficient an option. If not then we will become somehow impoverished as we run out of the substance which is currently fueling our lifestyle.
BUT, the problem is not running out of oil, it is the need to reduce carbon emissions. We're literally baking the planet - that is what is scary. Runaway climate change, along with resource depletion and unchecked population growth, will do us in long before we 'run out of oil'.
Of course, renewables could come on stream faster than expected. But the world is doing a poor job in paving the way for a smooth transition. Hence Fortress America. Steve Bannon has been openly rubbing his hands about the inevitability of the destruction from which the US will arise great once again.
There's always hemp ;)
Like we're already doing, we'll switch to alternative fuel sources, like natural gas and renewables.
True, but replacements are on the way, and will look more and more attractive to investors as oil-based products become more expensive. Bioplastics are one example; one can use vegetative matter, among other things, to create plastic and other petroleum products.
Also, it's not a question of when we switch to alternate sources, but a question of how long the switch will take. We have already begun the process of transferring to other energy sources. It is at least possible that the cheapness of oil over the past year or two has been partially caused by the proliferation of alternative energy.
The Tupi (now Lula) field has 8 billion barrels -- about 3 months worth of global demand.
The US passed it's peak production years ago; that means the best quality, cheapest-to-produce oil has been sucked out o the ground and used up. "Peak" doesn't mean "the last", so sure, we have more to pump and we can pump more. But the return on investment, or EROEI (energy return on energy invested that Apokrisis mentioned) is much less favorable, and it will continue to get more unfavorable. Also, the more we pump now, the sooner we we reach the 1:1 ratio, where it takes as much energy to get the oil out as there is in the oil.
A good share of the Bakken field in North Dakota is shut down now, because the price producers get for crude right now isn't high enough to support the cost of fracking.
What's true for the US is true for the world: The world has passed peak production. Even Saudi Arabia has to squeeze to get oil out of one of its huge fields. It pumps sea water in to squeeze out more oil, but it also brings up a lot of that sea water with it. (That isn't to say S.A. is about to run out of oil next week.)
This is true.
The "proliferation of alternate energy" is a good thing but I don't think this accounts for cheap oil right now. All the oil that is offered is getting bought; prices are not high. Why? Because the biggest oil produces don't want to cut back--thus making prices rise, and destabilize the industrial economies that buy their oil. Plus, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, UAE, et al can not afford either a reduction in income or an unstable world economy. The population of the middle east oil producers grew enormously with the income of oil income. Even some of the non-producers grew as a result. The oil regimes need to keep the cash flowing in their oil economies OR face possible regime change in an uprising of the people.
Besides, wind and solar supply electricity. Oil isn't used much for electrical production in most situations. Where oil is used is in diesel powered generation plants which run only when absolutely necessary to take up slack on the grid. Most of the time those plants are sitting idle.
Also look at the upside. Without fuel to run their war machines belligerent states would be automatically restrained. We could be looking at the end of war and all its consequences.
We could make some real progress in global warming and climate change.
Best of all it will expose human ''cilivization'' for what it really is - underserving of the adjectives ''progressive'', ''clever'', ''fantastic'', ''sustainable'', etc.
We don't use diesel by and large for energy production in electrical grids, but it is the best form and source for energy for large machines (portability included). At some point diesel could become so expensive that entirely electric based alternatives (which have yet to be designed as far as i know) will have to become the replacement.
It is incomprehensible to me, it really is, why your (or my) government, and our industrial leaders can not grasp ANYTHING about climate warming, alternate energy, peak oil, or anything else. I mean, sometimes I can't see any angle in their opposition that would benefit them. Like with ObamaCare -- what makes people froth at the mouth over it?
Carbon taxes, for instances, affect all industries equally (presumably). No competitor is getting an advantage because everybody pays the tax. Usually businesses accept that kind of economy-wide tax. It's an equitable scheme directed toward a sensible end (reducing the severity of global warming).
Freight trains, for instance, can run on electricity. You know those long trains pulled by 6 engines...? The 6 are needed only to get the mile long train moving up to speed. Once a mile long train is moving, it only takes 1 diesel locomotive to keep it moving (barring a climb through the mountains, say).
I don't know if electrified trains make sense to move coal from Wyoming to Atlanta, for instance (assuming Atlanta couldn't find any other way to generate electricity by non-hydrocarbon methods).
Also, I wouldn't count on a lack of oil bringing an end to war. People did just fine fighting wars before the first bucket of oil was poured into a barrel.
We can fuel our city cranes and snowplows at exorbitant cost because they are necessary, but things like mining for metal will decline while market prices rise.
I feel the same! Climate change, you would think, would be a natural for a conservative. After all, it is all about conservation. I think the explanation lies in the fact that the politics and the science are simply too hard for a democratic system to handle. Australia had a review, by an economist called Garnaut, leading up to the carbon tax, which said it was a diabollically difficult policy problem - those exact words. It has brought down the careers of several leaders in this country, and terrified the rest into saying nothing about it.
But the real damage was done here by a couple of hard-right politicians, who coined the idea that the carbon tax was a 'Great Big New Tax on Everything'. Scared the bejesus out of the electorate. The same guy popped up yesterday saying that emissions trading targets should be abolished.
Meanwhile, our current PM used to be a real climate change warrior - and now he's talking about 'clean coal' and mocking the Opposition for overselling the benefits of renewable.
It would be funny if it wasn't terrible.
What does Australia makes its living from? Coal and minerals. Who owns the media. Coal billionaires like Gina Rhineheart. Who owns the politicians? The same.
Same in the US. Trump will be tolerated until the right laws have been passed that favour established big money interests. After that, people can impeach him if they want to.
Forget about hot fusion, cold fusion is making a comeback.
As for the topic. We have an ocean full of deuterium and hydrogen... We have thorium in plenty. We have technology coming up with actual transmutation of elements all while releasing abundant energy in the process (a complex one but workable). Then there's the sun.
People also seem to forget that we also have a nuclear fission reactor beneath our feet that is limitless in energy production via geothermal means, all while sequestering carbon emissions by storing excess carbon capture from nearby coal plants to store underground until the stuff turns into limestone. Speaking of which, if you look up the LCOE of geothermal as compared to other renewables, then geothermal will almost always have an absolute advantage over any other renewable source, and it also beats non-renewables too like coal, gas, and nuclear. Hell, Yellowstone could potentially power the entire US if we wanted to, providing some serious non-stop power without carbon emissions and other positive externalities like promoting public awareness on the impending disaster of a Yellowstone eruption. Anyone?
It's really a lack of funding and current lobbying and governmental ineptitude really holding us back. India and China are ahead in terms of planning for a cleaner future; but, I don't believe that much in social planning unless you can wipe out a population and start from anew. Tesla, Panasonic, graphene batteries, and supercapacitors, better energy storage, less transmission waste for energy intensive industries, more localized energy production for homes and less energy intensive utility, seem to be the future. There's also natural gas as mentioned, which if things go sour then current vehicles can be retrofitted with LPG gas as they do in Europe and elsewhere.
I believe MAD will keep us all safe, as long as North Korea's leader is satisfied and nobody sells him a sub capable of getting to our shores undetected.
Besides, Earth is beautiful. Where are you gonna go on vacation on Mars? Musk's idea is that people will all become movie addicts and spend all their leisure time enjoying Henry Fonda films.
I can already see Musk's idea of becoming 'King of Mars' and proclaiming, 'We're going to have capitalism on steroids here with a lot of socialism!'
I'm obviously joking, but I certainly don't want to be the first on Mars.
But, who's going to do all the work?
Unfortunately no but I'm an optimist and the future is so full of possibilities.
Quoting Bitter Crank
At least war won't be that destructive and also without petroleum-politics there'll be less reasons to go to war in the first place.
Sorry, natural gas passed it's peak of production too.
You may not want to be the first person on Mars, but somebody has to go there to investigate geothermal energy on the Red Planet. You have an interest in that. It will be a lonely dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
I believe shale methane hasn't reached peak yet. And last I recall there is something like 200 years worth for the US to run off in the country alone. Also, shale oil/gas is a US innovation that hasn't yet taken hold of the rest of the world due to limiting the tech to the US to benefit initially from it the most last I recall.
Lastly, there's I think a thousand years worth of methane clathrate in the Mexican ocean and along the California coast laying on the seafloor. Once, prices are right you can expect that to be exploited soon enough.
If someone reads about it, there's a bunch of methane being released in Siberia and the Artic along with unknown estimates from the Antartic. I suppose Greenland might have large deposits too, but I'm talking out of my ass about Greenland.
God save the Netherlands.
Global warming is thawing the permafrosted organic matter in the arctic areas of Canada and Eurasia. As it thaws, it rots producing methane. Whatever organic matter is under the ice in Antarctica won't be thawing in the near or intermediate future
All fossil fuel has to be extractible at an energy cost substantially less than the energy produced, or it is not worth doing by any measurement. After the end of the fairly short Age of Fossil Fuel there will be a lot of oil and gas still in the ground because it can only be extracted by putting more energy into the extraction than is gotten out of it. That doesn't make any kind of sense, and it won't be done.
The same goes for all other energy projects: The output has to substantially exceed the input. Hydrogen, for example, isn't freely available on earth. It has to be pried out of its preferred molecular forms. That takes substantial energy. Hydrogen, once obtained, is expensive to move, expensive to store, and is far more dangerous than methane. It's also corrosive (because it interacts with other elements) which is a problem for moving, storing, and using it.
Did you notice the story a couple of years back on the mysterious Siberian craters? These are thought to be 'methane burps'. The earth bursts a pimple.
This bacterium was "intelligent", and there was a general awareness that the puddle of oil it was gobbling was rapidly draining, and would soon be exhausted. This didn't matter though, for bacteria is bacteria, and the population continued gobbling uncontrollably, in a way that any individual bacterium was completely helpless to halt. If anything this "intelligence" made the problem worse, vast collective cleverness was put to the task of extracting and using this puddle as quickly as possible, and the colony was rapidly reorganized so that it was utterly dependent on its puddle to survive.
A certain complacency developed among many of the bacteria, and they told themselves "We'll think of something when the puddle runs out. We always have before." After all, the bacteria had done startlingly clever things since finding the puddle. What they didn't realize was that all their ingenuity was essentially finding new ways to use the puddle. Without it they couldn't really do that much. And that the puddle was their food, without it they had very little to eat.
Unsurprisingly, things went badly.
For instance, world-wide nuclear generating plants can not be fabricated, transported, and built without oil. Neither can world-wide solar and wind technology. Life as we know it doesn't work without cheap oil and gas.
There will be a Big Die OFF (BDO). The BDO will leave survivors who will have to be very clever to find ways to operate using low and lower-tech methods. They who can grow potatoes will live better than they who know not how a potato grows. They who have an old wood stove, a big tree, and an axe to grind will survive winter better than they living in the all-electric high rise.
As your fable concluded,
Quoting hypericin
You said it!
The unfortunate problem here is that oil extraction and consumption is primarily required for military use and domination of sources and production is essentially an economic and strategic commodity, hence why I have zero optimism. It is clear that the situation in the Middle East and the dynamics of regional politics - United States vs. Russia and China - really amount to the rivalry for oil as a military asset since provisions would enable both the economic advantage but also machine power. China realised the importance of this while observing the Gulf War and as their military strength and space technology increases, so does the need for oil; renewable energy is a technology the military has no time for.
In addition, methods of oil extraction is having too great an impact on the environment that I hardly think we have the time to really wait for renewable energy to be implemented. Deforestation and construction of technology to extract oil along with the toxic chemicals and emissions polluting the air and water that it is clearly damaging the environment and wildlife - as well as people - that the ecosphere will not survive if we continue. This, capped with a whole lot of other issues reinforced by capitalism, the existential crises we face seems to be duly ignored by the rubbish of the entertainment industry.
Right. I don't see the pentagon running big windmills and biomass plants to keep the aircraft carriers going.
Kunstler (among others) is very pessimistic-to-downright dismissive of renewable and alternate energy schemes. He doesn't claim that solar panels or windmills don't work, of course. They do. But they are dependent on affordable and readily available oil for their manufacture, transportation, and installation--as is so much else.
Synthetic oil can be manufactured from coal; biomass will produce gas and oil. What they won't and can't do is produce petroleum replacement in the quantity that 7 billion people require, and there isn't enough coal and biomes.
So what will we all be doing in the future?
What we will all be doing is trying to grow food. Farming is our future because without oil (tractors, combines, all the heavy duty equipment) we'll all be out hoeing what crops we can grow on whatever land we can find. What happened to all the land? It will still be there -- just that most people don't live on the land anymore. Most people live in cities, and it will take time to redistribute remaining populations.
Remaining populations? There will, of necessity be a "population decline" shall we say? A big die off. Oil gave us the carrying capacity for 7 billion. No oil, no 7 billion.
Australia would be well-placed to utilize nuclear energy, as we have abundant plutonium and a very large stable landmass with little siesmic activity. However aside from political opposition, which would be hysterical and practically universal, the lead time in gaining expertise and actually building a plant would be more than 20 years and possibly as long as 40.
As I said, oil is far more than mere economics, it is international politics and the source of political power. Add capitalism to the algorithm; McDonalds needs beef, skip the supply-chain process and you have deforestation to agriculture cows that produce more greenhouse emissions than cars. You have multinational corporations, skip the absence of environmental management and international restrictions, you have massive environmental degradation in the Niger Delta or Texaco killing people, animals, the environment in Ecuador. Nuclear power and radioactive waste that gets buried for...ever? Nuclear bombs in the pacific?
Can a human body survive with fats, without water? Drain them, you kill the person. Earth, the ecosystem works like a living organism and there is only so much it will take.
Are you sure we even have a future?
And just how did you get all that plutonium, and what is Australia planning to do with it? Or maybe you have abundant uranium?
I hope we have some sort of future, but... No, not sure.
Plus, tearing up land to get at coal, and extracting and processing coal is very dirty; it produces a lot of very bad crap.
Kunstler goes off the deep end, I think, in his predictions about disease and horrific global pandemics. Unless some mad scientist/evil political cabal decided to bring back small pox, or engineered a really devastating influenza virus (worse than the 1918 version), I don't see a disease-related MDO.
But starvation is still a real and present danger, not tomorrow or next week -- but we have had crop failures on a national scale in the recent past -- fortunately compensated by good crops elsewhere (like in Australia and Argentina when the USA or Russian wheat fields did poorly). Insects, unseasonable rain, drought, hot weather, late or early frost, wheat rust, corn smut, etc. are all potential threats to a particular harvest.
Water is, indeed, a highly problematic element in our future.
Some things I consider likely:
There will be an increase in distributed energy production - a strong growth in solar cells for private individuals to try and meet their personal needs. Commuting will become expensive, so I suspect working from home will become more economically viable and therefore implemented by companies, possibly through more extensive use of VR.
3D-printing will further support the possibility to decentralize economic activity so I suspect an uptake there too.
Any technology that might come up that can be "dropped" into the existing oil infrastructure will be more successful than battery-powered cars. Biofuels or even CO2 capture and conversion to methanol/ethanol would be a life-safer. These ideas work in the laboratory but might not necessarily be economically viable at industrial scales. Not a certainty then but a possibility.
Nuclear power will become a necessity for many countries to support their way of life. Nuclear fission would be great if we can get it to work.
Rising prices will mean less holidays, less meat, lowering your heating, less new clothes; basically less of everything, as your income will not rise as quickly as energy prices (and therefore most every product) will. Your physical world will shrink as travelling will become prohibitively expensive, but with a bit of luck our devices will be efficient enough to stay connected.
My advice is to invest in local producers of products with a long life-cycle, with a low energy use for production.
Nuclear fission works quite well.
So long as you consider massive subsidies and destruction of primary forest habitats "commercially viable", which it certainly is if you are in receipt of the handouts.
Oh, and if you don't care about the increase in CO2 over simply burning coal.
Yup, my mistake.
Quoting tom
Not in the manner you describe. The idea behind biofuels is to use biomass and catalytically convert it to fuels. the biomass is quickly replanted and regrown and therefore "captures" the CO2 released from burning the biofuels. In essence, nothing more than speeding up the process by which fossil fuels are created naturally. CO2 capture and catalytic conversion to methanol/ethanol is the same principle.
Shale oil is not a US innovation. It predates the US by a couple of hundred years. ;)
I described the facts behind biofuels - increased CO2, forest and habitat destruction, subsidies, but forgot to mention the inevitable increase in food prices. What you describe is the fantasy.
e.g. The UK is the biggest importer of wood pellets in the world. Forests are destroyed in US, the wood chipped and kiln dried, made into pellets, shipped to UK and burned at Drax. All at extreme financial and environmental cost, and at increased CO2 emissions. Trees cannot grow that fast!
The UK also has vast stores of hydrocarbons that could be fracked - hundreds of years worth, but Scotland prefers to import US fracked gas.
Hah, I get the point. American exceptionalism at its best. Seems like the solution will have to be found from the same source of the problem, capitalism, and consumerism (as long as owning a green vehicle is a statement of status and being cool). Tesla seems to be dragging the competition in that direction, and hats off to him.
I understand you're skeptical but the issues you raise are a consequence of the subsidies.
What I describe is hardly a fantasy and there is an the economic rationale that underpins the reason research was started in this direction. Bagasse, a waste product of cane sugar production, would be an excellent source for biofuels for instance but only if the refinery would be established very near to the source.
This is the main constraint for any biofuels plant; the net benefit of the energy won through catalytic processes and the energy cost of getting the base material to the plant reduces quickly over longer distances. These plants by necessity have to remain relatively small but the technology of catalytic cracking is robust, low temperature (low risk, easy to operate) and simple to maintain (regular decoking). It will be economically viable and be environmentally sound but not at the scale of current oil production; at maximum 10% but more probably at most 2-3%.
An interesting failure in this respect is Kior.
There are various technologies that can provide energy and/or liquid fuel: coal made into gasoline; biomass made into gas or liquid; nuclear; solar; wind; hydro; etc. The problem with all of these is that can not provide the huge output of chemicals and energy at a price or in volume that petroleum has provided. The world uses 96 million barrels of petroleum per day. That's 4 billion gallons. I don't see any sustainable alternate energy source that can do that. The world also uses huge amounts of natural gas every day.
What the alternates (aside from nuclear energy) can do is provide methane for limited use, and modest output of energy. These outputs will be lifesavers for small areas that have these systems in place when oil becomes too expensive to use for fuel. Turning animal waste, garbage, plant waste, etc. into methane for cooking can be done quite easily, but in fairly limited quantities. Solar and wind would make a major difference to a small population with no other source of electrical energy. For very large populations, solar and wind probably won't produce enough.
Using alternative fuels for 7 billion people (and rising) is a non-starter.
The whole modern world economy is a result of inexpensive oil, and there is nothing that can "fill its shoes".
There certainly isn't, but don't discount the worlds fastest growing source of energy, which nearly matches oil in terms of energy production - coal.
Natural gas, is also keeping up with oil in terms of growth rate.
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/11/949/2754271/Greenhouse-Gas-Emissions-from-Reservoir-Water
“The new study confirms that reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas,” said Kate Horner, Executive Director of International Rivers, adding that hydropower dams “can no longer be considered a clean and green source of electricity.”
Apparently there's an alternative nuclear technology based on thorium (I think it is) which is said to be a lot less polluting. But, it's never going to get up in Australia, the politics are against it.
that kind of expression plays right into the hands of petro-chemical industry scare-mongering.
Today's news from Australia - 'Disastrous': Australia's carbon emissions jump as coal-fired power ramps up
During the brief period of time that the ill-fated Australian Carbon Emissions scheme worked, emissions really did fall. The scheme was torpedoed for purely political reasons, with the above effects, and now there is talk about 'clean coal' and 'carbon capture and storage', which according to many of the commentators, is far from ready for production.
In short, we're going backwards.
There will be a reckoning and it will likely not be pretty, given humanity's propensity to 'party on' until the fact that something is wrong can no longer be ignored.
No one knows when that reckoning will be, how precipitous it will be, or what exact form it will take. No one knows the future, in other words, as much as our insecurities might cause us to wish we did. My advice would be to "be alert, but not alarmed", and remain relaxed, otherwise incipient neuroses may become actualized.
An acre of solar panels probably absorbs and stores more light and heat than an acre of rain-forest. We will never dent the environment this way (would take too many panels) in the foreseeable future, but if we did, it would probably have a net cooling effect.
Wind turbines slow the movement of air that was set into motion by mostly atmospheric pressure changes (which comes from heat). If we covered the entire world in windmills I don't know what the effect would actually be. The weather might be made calmer, but it might become more erratic as well if slowing the air allows it to absorb more heat energy from the sun. (but again we will never have enough turbines to see such a global effect).
Hydro-electricity is quite "clean". Every time precipitation happens the sun is lifts an extraordinary amount of water, and there's no input/output cost to that system if we happen to make some of it turn a turbine on it's way back down to earth. That energy would have been wasted anyway. Big Dams can fuck up local ecosystems, but if done right they can create new ones too.
Nuclear energy is filthy. It's "renewable" because it lasts a long time but it's not "clean" at all. We actually sometimes use the word "dirty" (the very opposite of "clean") to describe the inevitable waste products from using uranium as a fuel source. It leads to waste-dumps, wastelands, radiation sickness, and cancer. Only waste-dumps are a guarantee, but we've already lost the latter three dice-rolls more than once.
If nuclear fusion works we could be laughing all the way to the bank of limitless energy. There is no waste in fusion so far as I know. In fact we might actually be able to use it to destroy our existing waste. This is not something we can bet the future of humanity on yet, so it's on the social back-burner while the nerds do us a [s]solid[/s] plasma favor by figuring out if it will work.
Of all the "green" technologies, nuclear is really only considered as much because of... Well....:
The point is that "clean" and "renewable" are buzzwords implying that anything that avoids burning fossil fuels is inherently and unquestionably less damaging to the environment. I am not convinced that we know this to be a fact at this moment in history. For one thing, no form of energy is literally renewable; it is different energy that we capture over time from the sun, wind, waves, etc.; not the same energy over and over.
This is really the only point that I wanted to make. We do not (yet) know the global effects of widespread implementation of various "alternative" energy sources. We just assume that since they do not involve burning fossil fuels, they are automatically better/cleaner.
I think 'avoiding burning fossil fuels' should unquestionably be a major policy goal. Solar and wind power are certainly less polluting, the only real issue being their suitability for base-load power, that is, providing power when the sun is down and the wind isn't blowing.
As to the meaning of 'renewable' - solar energy is in principle unlimited and produces no by-products. In fact, all fossil fuels are, is captured and stored solar energy, but utilising it in that form releases many by-products, of which CO2 and methane are two (along with soot and other particulate matter).
I worry about anything that is characterized as "unquestionable," especially in the realm of public policy. But I also drive a hybrid vehicle, and believe that we should be good stewards of the planet - after all, so far it is the only one we have.
But it is unquestionable, it's beyond doubt. The whole problem in this area is that various interests have created the FUD factor - fear, uncertainty and doubt - just so as to get everyone thinking 'hey, maybe the switch from carbon fuels isn't such a good thing'. And I think that's what is being reflected in the debate. As far I'm concerned the time for debate is settled, it is action that is required.
I mean, the 'climate change' news at the moment is really staggeringly awful. Here in Australia, large areas of the Great Barrier Reef are under threat, directly from changes in sea temperature. The Antarctic and Artic polar ice caps are grossly effected by rises in sea temperature. 2016 was the hottest year on record. What is it going to take?
The whole idea that renewable energy is a kind of 'green conspiracy' that is a 'threat to the world economic order' is what I would call a vicious meme. It is unfortunate that many of the green parties in the Western democracy are unreasonably leftist in their policy views - I have actually handed out How to Vote cards for the Australian Greens in the past, but I never will again, for that reason. But the fact of 'climate emergency' ought to be beyond debate, the fact that it has become politicized is one of the very worst things that has happened.
True. So do hills, mountains, tall buildings, and big trees. "A turbine's 116-ft blades atop a 212-ft tower for a total height of 328 feet sweep a vertical airspace of just under an acre. The air above 328 feet (all the way up for miles) is sublimely indifferent to windmills, even if there were 1 million of them.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It's "clean" in terms of carbon dioxide (though it isn't 100% pure on that front either.
Nuclear energy could be better (safer) IF we standardized parts (the way the French have).
Nuclear power would be safer if we took the dangers more seriously. The design of the Fukushima nuclear plants put the storage pool for very radioactive and thermally hot fuel rods on an upper floor of the plant. The same design is used in many other nuclear plants. The nuclear reactors themselves are not in a melt-proof bottle. When things go wrong with a nuclear reactor, things can get very bad very fast.
Nuclear power would be safer if we buried the waste very deeply in very long term storage. Can we build long term storage? Sure we can, but "the perfectly safe" storage cavern is impeding the progress of the extremely safe storage cavern (like Yucca Mountain). So instead of burial, we have it piling up on the grounds of nuclear plants. Not good, Kemosabe.
No method of sequestering nuclear waste will last forever, but then, highly radioactive isotopes don't last forever, either. Most of them last a lot longer than we can plan for, however. Who knows what shape human culture will be in 200 years from now? 2000? 20,000? However we put it there, it has to stay stable without further attention for what...25000 years, give or take a few millennia or two.
Boil the greens until tender.
Driving a hybrid is better than driving a gas guzzling highway behemoth, for sure. But... the model of halo you get for driving a hybrid vehicle is made out of cheap yellow plastic. It never glows--even in bright light--and you have to hold it over your head yourself.
Even while driving? Seems dangerous. :D
I am not looking for a pat on the back; just saying that I am not blithely neglecting the kinds of concerns being expressed here.
Indeed. In theory though you could have a trillion super-massive windmills (theory) and actually start to see some negative environmental ramifications resulting from altered wind patterns. The pool of wind energy is so massive and replenishes itself so easily that it would take human construction far beyond any scale yet seen to even begin to dent it. There is no direct environmental impact from a spinning prop in the sky or from the electricity we get out of it, and so basically wind energy is 100% clean.
Quoting Bitter Crank I'm not against nuclear energy in principle, I just need to be convinced that the dice rolls have sufficiently minimized risks. Nuclear energy is clean in terms of greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels, but we've already had two major meltdowns (Fukushima and Chernobyl) so it seems like we're trading accelerated climate change over the long run for an increase in localized irradiation events. France might be ready for nuclear power but the rest of the global political idiot class so incentivized to build Nuclear power plants seems to be a bit less prepared...