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Non-renewable resources running out is scary and peak oil is fascinating, but with such wildly differing estimates on how long we have it's hard not to be skept

Non-renewable resources running out is scary and peak oil is fascinating, but with such wildly differing estimates on how long we have it's hard not to be skeptical. That being said, we should definitely be planning for the future, and it's great to hear that the UK and Germany are taking giant strides (Germany generates the largest amount of solar energy, for instance).

jacquesm 16y ago
Don't rule out their wind installations either, I'm living within sight of some of the largest windmills they're currently operating, the E82 series, 2MW each, there are thousands of them now in Germany. It's very impressive to stand near them, they're absolutely huge.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  I can do math, so I will rule out wind installations. Windmills are a way to reduce overall fuel consumption but they are not adequate for base power (they are too inefficient and too unpredictable).
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    The wind energy plants in Germany produce a whole lot more energy than the solar energy plants there. The Germans can also do math, and they take in to account the number of sun hours, the acreage used and the latitude they live at. This means that during a fairly large part of the year solar power in Germany is not running at a high efficiency. On the other hand, Germany has a lot of wind, so they use it to good effect. Fully 7% (!) of Germany's energy use comes from wind power, contrasted with only 1% for solar. Best not rule out wind installations when you have a lot of wind and little solar, especially when you can do math ;)
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      7% is better than a poke in the eye, but is it really worth it, wind power is no panacea? The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation. Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances. They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        > 7% is better than a poke in the eye, but is it really worth it, wind power is no panacea? At what percentage would you consider it to be worth it? 20%? 50%? 90%? You have to start somewhere. The Germans have done an absolutely amazing job at re-engineering wind power plants on a utility scale, they've taken the old and unreliable designs and have turned them in to true engineering marvels with maintenance records and uptimes that a datacenter would be proud of. And they've done that in about 20 years time, with now over 20,000 plants installed, they're installing them as fast as they can churn them out. It's absolutely amazing to see this very quiet and concentrated energy revolution taking place, where-ever I go in Germany, if I drive at night I come across at least one, but likely more than just one transport of a new windmill to some site. They're hard to miss, the trucks are 40 meters long... 3 in each convoy with the blades and a nacelle that you could make a fairly comfortable house in. > The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation. Let's assume that we'd at least have enough oil for some transition to another powersource because you won't be building nuclear plants or windmills using labor alone, you need power (and some of it in the form of diesel / gasoline to power trucks and tools). If it would happen really suddenly then we'd be in a boatload of trouble, and there would be an immediate all out war for the control of the next available resource, uranium. What would power that war is anybody's guess. So, nuclear power would be the power source of choice in the short term in that case, followed by an immediate and massive roll out of renewables because once oil and coal are gone they can compete favorably with nuclear on cost, especially when you factor in cleanup and decommissioning as well as waste processing. > Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances. Statistics are your friend here, you can make longer term predictions about the available energy in both solar and wind. By spreading the generation capacity over large enough land masses and by playing nice with your neighbours you can mitigate some of this. But I'll bet at that price-point electricity driven AC is going to be replaced by AWCO(*) pretty soon and the same would go for electric heating in the winter. Conservation efforts would have to be stepped up and there would likely be serious social changes. No more driving to the mall, likely local shops would see a revival and it would get a lot harder to live in rural areas. > They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution. You could make it work if you had a large enough lake to dump your excess in to use as a reserve in times of scarcity. The sun outputs roughly 1KW per square meter of surface area at ground level, if you don't convert it to electricity using solar panels it goes towards heating up the atmosphere causing air currents. That's a very large amount of power, it is available almost every day and it would not take all that much of the earth's surface to give us all the energy we need at present day consumption levels. It's raining soup, we only have forks. But the forks are getting better at catching the soup every year.
    - rstocker99 16y ago
      If you're into this sort of thing and want an engineer friendly breakdown of different approaches for getting off fossil fuels that actually add up I highly recommend, "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air". It lays out a number of alternative plans complete with plenty of math :). The book is available online for free. It can also be purchased at Amazon. http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's written by David MacKay a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge.
acqq 16y ago
Estimate errors are not important -- the certainty that the peak comes however is! Try to think about it, you know how exponents of 2 work: 1 2 (...) 1024 2048 Now note that to move from point n to the point n + 1 you need to use as much as in all points from 1 to n - 1: when you're at point of 1024, to move to the point of 2048 (double) you'll need 1+2+4+8+...+512 + 1 of something. According to http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/colombia/oila.html http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/colombia/oila.html the doubling time of world oil consumption is 30 years (just as little as 2.3% usage growth per year makes that!) That means that during the next 30 years the world needs as much oil as the total oil used from the beginning of the oil use to the 1980(!) Think again about that simple fact! Now if you know that all oil in the Earth formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae, which had settled to a sea or lake bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions, you can imagine that the supply is really limited.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Coal can be converted to oil. At present prices this is not economical. But when the oil price goes up above the point where it is economical suddenly the 'reserves' will have to include all the coal reserves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process That would (iirc, can't find a quick and reasonably reliable source) double the total available oil for the next 50 years or so, and then there are currently uneconomical sources such as tar sands. So, in short, yes, it will run out and fairly soon but not as soon as you might think based on just the oil reserves.
  - acqq 16y ago
    Note that even the doubling the estimated world reserves that you suggest gives the humanity only a few decades more. Where do you get 50 years when the current estimated doubling time of consumption is 30 years? Approximately 40% of the world electricity production uses coal as we speak. It's not that the coal is just waiting to be used instead of oil. Your kids (if you have them) will experience oil problems anyway! Not to mention the effects of all that CO2 in the atmosphere.

jacquesm 16y ago

Don't rule out their wind installations either, I'm living within sight of some of the largest windmills they're currently operating, the E82 series, 2MW each, there are thousands of them now in Germany. It's very impressive to stand near them, they're absolutely huge.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
I can do math, so I will rule out wind installations. Windmills are a way to reduce overall fuel consumption but they are not adequate for base power (they are too inefficient and too unpredictable).
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The wind energy plants in Germany produce a whole lot more energy than the solar energy plants there. The Germans can also do math, and they take in to account the number of sun hours, the acreage used and the latitude they live at. This means that during a fairly large part of the year solar power in Germany is not running at a high efficiency. On the other hand, Germany has a lot of wind, so they use it to good effect. Fully 7% (!) of Germany's energy use comes from wind power, contrasted with only 1% for solar. Best not rule out wind installations when you have a lot of wind and little solar, especially when you can do math ;)
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    7% is better than a poke in the eye, but is it really worth it, wind power is no panacea? The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation. Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances. They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      > 7% is better than a poke in the eye, but is it really worth it, wind power is no panacea? At what percentage would you consider it to be worth it? 20%? 50%? 90%? You have to start somewhere. The Germans have done an absolutely amazing job at re-engineering wind power plants on a utility scale, they've taken the old and unreliable designs and have turned them in to true engineering marvels with maintenance records and uptimes that a datacenter would be proud of. And they've done that in about 20 years time, with now over 20,000 plants installed, they're installing them as fast as they can churn them out. It's absolutely amazing to see this very quiet and concentrated energy revolution taking place, where-ever I go in Germany, if I drive at night I come across at least one, but likely more than just one transport of a new windmill to some site. They're hard to miss, the trucks are 40 meters long... 3 in each convoy with the blades and a nacelle that you could make a fairly comfortable house in. > The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation. Let's assume that we'd at least have enough oil for some transition to another powersource because you won't be building nuclear plants or windmills using labor alone, you need power (and some of it in the form of diesel / gasoline to power trucks and tools). If it would happen really suddenly then we'd be in a boatload of trouble, and there would be an immediate all out war for the control of the next available resource, uranium. What would power that war is anybody's guess. So, nuclear power would be the power source of choice in the short term in that case, followed by an immediate and massive roll out of renewables because once oil and coal are gone they can compete favorably with nuclear on cost, especially when you factor in cleanup and decommissioning as well as waste processing. > Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances. Statistics are your friend here, you can make longer term predictions about the available energy in both solar and wind. By spreading the generation capacity over large enough land masses and by playing nice with your neighbours you can mitigate some of this. But I'll bet at that price-point electricity driven AC is going to be replaced by AWCO(*) pretty soon and the same would go for electric heating in the winter. Conservation efforts would have to be stepped up and there would likely be serious social changes. No more driving to the mall, likely local shops would see a revival and it would get a lot harder to live in rural areas. > They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution. You could make it work if you had a large enough lake to dump your excess in to use as a reserve in times of scarcity. The sun outputs roughly 1KW per square meter of surface area at ground level, if you don't convert it to electricity using solar panels it goes towards heating up the atmosphere causing air currents. That's a very large amount of power, it is available almost every day and it would not take all that much of the earth's surface to give us all the energy we need at present day consumption levels. It's raining soup, we only have forks. But the forks are getting better at catching the soup every year.
  - rstocker99 16y ago
    If you're into this sort of thing and want an engineer friendly breakdown of different approaches for getting off fossil fuels that actually add up I highly recommend, "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air". It lays out a number of alternative plans complete with plenty of math :). The book is available online for free. It can also be purchased at Amazon. http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/ It's written by David MacKay a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge.

acqq 16y ago

Estimate errors are not important -- the certainty that the peak comes however is! Try to think about it, you know how exponents of 2 work: 1 2 (...) 1024 2048 Now note that to move from point n to the point n + 1 you need to use as much as in all points from 1 to n - 1: when you're at point of 1024, to move to the point of 2048 (double) you'll need 1+2+4+8+...+512 + 1 of something. According to http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/colombia/oila.html http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/colombia/oila.html the doubling time of world oil consumption is 30 years (just as little as 2.3% usage growth per year makes that!) That means that during the next 30 years the world needs as much oil as the total oil used from the beginning of the oil use to the 1980(!) Think again about that simple fact! Now if you know that all oil in the Earth formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae, which had settled to a sea or lake bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions, you can imagine that the supply is really limited.

jacquesm 16y ago
Coal can be converted to oil. At present prices this is not economical. But when the oil price goes up above the point where it is economical suddenly the 'reserves' will have to include all the coal reserves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process That would (iirc, can't find a quick and reasonably reliable source) double the total available oil for the next 50 years or so, and then there are currently uneconomical sources such as tar sands. So, in short, yes, it will run out and fairly soon but not as soon as you might think based on just the oil reserves.
- acqq 16y ago
  Note that even the doubling the estimated world reserves that you suggest gives the humanity only a few decades more. Where do you get 50 years when the current estimated doubling time of consumption is 30 years? Approximately 40% of the world electricity production uses coal as we speak. It's not that the coal is just waiting to be used instead of oil. Your kids (if you have them) will experience oil problems anyway! Not to mention the effects of all that CO2 in the atmosphere.