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What's lost in your analysis is that oil extraction is becoming increasingly expensive. Magic tech isn't making it cheaper; it's making it viable at all. Consi
by beat 8y ago
What's lost in your analysis is that oil extraction is becoming increasingly expensive. Magic tech isn't making it cheaper; it's making it viable at all.
Consider EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). This is how much energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil from the ground, whether by pumping or by melting in the case of tar sands and shale. In the 1950s, EROEI was about 100 - the energy of a barrel of oil could extract about a hundred barrels. The Canadian tar sands have EROEI of about 3.5. They weren't profitable until oil became expensive enough to make it worthwhile.
Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably. Some of those "trillions of barrels" you talk about are in that camp. They don't count as reserves, because they're useless.
Meanwhile, oil is going to keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to extract. Offshore deep-water drilling, tar sands, stuff like that, it's incredibly hard and often environmentally dangerous/destructive. And renewables get cheaper and cheaper, as there's a lot more room for improvement in technology and manufacturing scale.
Eventually - and I don't think that point is far away - it will be impossible to produce fossil fuels cheaper than the cost of solar/wind.
- bryanlarsen 8y agoMy "analysis" was purely one sided; I left it to others to argue the other side because I knew they could do it better than me. And lo, here you are. Thanks. > Eventually - and I don't think that point is far away - it will be impossible to produce fossil fuels cheaper than the cost of solar/wind. I hope and believe that you're right. But I don't think it will be because the price of oil is going up, but because the price of alternatives is going down. > Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably EROEI is not a constant, it changes with technology too. And we'll still need oil for plastic, so it's theoretically possible that we'll use alternative energy to heat the tar to extract the oil to use it in plastic. But woe is us if we ever get to that state. We'll have burnt so much oil that we'll be well past the climate change tipping point.
- sgt101 8y agoI think that even past 1 there's a value in a portable energy store.
- beat 8y agoOn the other hand, there's nothing magical about petroleum that can't be synthesized, given enough energy (electricity from solar/wind works), and simple water/CO2/etc to provide the building blocks for long-chain hydrocarbons. It's even more straightforward to start from cellulose or plant sugars. I agree that for things like aircraft, there's unlikely to ever be an electrical substitute for the energy density of organic fuel. But that could be done entirely from renewables if needed.
- i_am_proteus 8y ago>Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably. This is not strictly true: First, non-fuel use accounts for 5-10% of oil use. Second: As long as oil offers higher-density (fuel energy, thrust-to-weight, &c.) mobile power generation than alternatives, it can be profitable. Id est: if it's cheaper to extract and refine a barrel of oil (perhaps with renewables) than to produce the equivalent biofuel, the oil could be produced profitably.
- beat 8y agoEh. If it takes two barrels of oil to extract one barrel of oil, where do you get the energy for extraction? Then you're using solar/wind/nuclear to pump oil. At some point, it's cheaper to just synthesize.
- i_am_proteus 8y agoMaybe. Cf. every mineral that's mined. Energy expended to extract a resource.
- beat 8y agoNot the same. You don't use up the iron you mine in the mining process. That's what EROEI < 1 is, unless you get the energy input from some other source. And since anything that's in petroleum can be synthesized from simple molecules like water and CO2, given enough energy...
- dredmorbius 8y agoAircraft and shipping require hydrocarbon-level fuel energy densities by mass and/or volume. There are no, or exceedingly few, substitutes. Petroleum consumption will, can, and has proceeded well beyond EROEI 1:1 parity within such uses -- see Germany's WW2 Fischer-Tropsch process. The correct measure here is total economic return. Fuel synthesis is negative EROEI.
- osullivj 8y agoBrent crude, from the UK North Sea fields, is much lighter than Iraqi or Saudi crude. I'm guessing Norwegian crude is similar. Light crude is too "good" for fuel use; I believe it's used for plastics.
- coldtea 8y ago>Once EROEI dips below 1, price is negative. It becomes impossible to extract the oil profitably. Actually even 1 or 2 wouldn't make much sense. It was close to what people had in medieval times without oil (1.5 energy or something close, from animals, mills, fire, etc).