5 ms·

What about energy? It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s. I'm

by api 15y ago

What about energy? It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s. I'm on the fence on this issue, but there are many very intelligent and knowledgeable people who are predicting a kind of anti-singularity: in the 21st century, fossil fuel depletion will send us way back, perhaps even de-industrialize most societies. Is our civilization simply a machine that is transferring the order (low entropy state) in fossil fuels into order within itself (technology and economic complexity), and when those fossil fuels run out will this ordering process cease? The lack of major breakthroughs in energy in the past 50 years is pretty dramatic. Nuclear looked like an energy panacea once, but it's turned out to be clunky and hard to scale. Solar panels and wind turbines are interesting, but the problem with those is that we basically can't store energy. Energy storage is either super-expensive per kilowatt-hour and not scalable (e.g. Li-Ion batteries) or very inefficient (e.g. water electrolysis to hydrogen). Without a breakthrough on the order of cheap ultra-capacitors or fusion, I'm afraid we'll be seeing peak everything pretty soon, including technological complexity. The thing is: all the technologies of the "singularity" are energy consumers. Where are the producers? What is going to power the singularity? Then there's another area that makes me horribly pessimistic: politics. Most of our societies are degenerating to banana republic levels of corruption. Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing in this area: ride the fossil fuel crash into the ground in an orgy of war and despotism.

lupatus 15y ago
Note: I made a similar comment a few days ago. It seems that you might be slightly misinformed about energy. Since the 1950s, there have been a number of advancements in energy production. Some examples are efficient shale oil extraction, tar sands oil extraction, horizontal drilling, deep water drilling, and high Arctic drilling. As The Futurist discusses in depth[1], annual world oil consumption has been hovering around 32 billion barrels since about 1982. That means oil consumption, at $100/barrel, is $3.2 trillion, or 5% of nominal world GDP. My take away from that is technology has made the oil supply a non-issue. And, it will continue not being a problem for the foreseeable future. It is not a hard resource limit. Also, check out the the research going into liquid fluoride thorium fusion. It seems to have potential as a way to do cheap, safe, "easy" nuclear fusion. Personally, I think that the problem is human willpower and chicken-little attitudes. To increase my technology optimism, I read nextbigfuture.com. Nearly daily, I see an article posted there that makes me go, "Holy crap! We can do that now??!" [1] http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyrany.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...
- api 15y ago
  I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc. The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested. Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil, we are out of oil as an energy source. This could occur after only ~5% of the Earth's hydrocarbons have been extracted. EROEI for oil has been steadily declining. The first oil drilled was, of course, the easiest to get. Drop a well and it spurts out. Almost all of that is gone outside a few supergiant fields, and those are or will soon be entering decline. Heavy oil, shale oil, and tar sands require a lot of energy to extract and process... far more than "light sweet crude." All fossil fuels follow the same pattern. Coal and gas have not peaked yet, but they will... almost certainly in the next 50 years. Oil probably peaked in 2005, though it won't be possible to say for sure except ~25 years in retrospect. I'm also aware of the thorium cycle, etc., but I am skeptical of the ability of such things to scale fast enough. Keep in mind that to maintain growth new energy technologies will have to scale faster than the fossil fuel EROEI decline curve. I personally do not believe in the "doomer" scenario. However, I do think this: I think the first half of the 21st century will be dominated economically and technologically by the energy transition. The story of this era will be a mad rush to do everything we can to increase efficiency and build out new resources simply to tread water against the fossil fuel decline. And of course our political class will make it worse by doing the absolute dumbest possible things: subsidizing oil prices to prevent price signals from working, going to war over dwindling oil reserves, interfering in the market for new alternatives, restricting new alternatives, NIMBYism against renewable and nuclear energy, etc.
  - lupatus 15y ago
    I totally get EROEI. In fact, I used to be the canned beans buying type. But, after years of thought, I realized that the EROEI has a fatal flaw. It completely discounts humanity's ability to discover creative efficiency improvements. The EROEI calculations are done with today's technology, and do not include future improvements. For example, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where the oil industry started back in the 1800s. Capped oil wells abounded in the woods, because at some point in the past, it stopped being efficient to drill them with 1800s drilling technology. Today, old high school friends are making bank reopening those wells and even drilling new ones with modern techniques. The political problem is an interesting one, and I have opinions on it. But I hesitate to air them here because they are unconventional. The haters would probably drop my karma back down to -20.
pasbesoin 15y ago
Solve the amount of raw collection (speaking of "next generation" energy technologies), and some leakage in the storage and delivery becomes acceptable. It remains a problem that you can peck at, over time. For the U.S., I see a/the primary crisis that is addressable as being energy. And solving it would, directly and indirectly, re-invigorate our economy and provide an entire sector not just of jobs but of careers / career growth. And education. That the current Administration didn't jump into this aggressively, has been of enormous disappointment to me. That would be some leadership. Chart the course (course corrections allowed), and advocate -- including with that bully pulpit -- to make it so. Given that we don't have such leadership (which would be unusual, admittedly), it will have to be bottom up. I just hope that's enough.
schiffern 15y ago
I brought up the exact same objection when Kurzweil spoke at my college. He pointed out that the installed cost-per-watt and total installed capacity of PV exhibits an exponential trend over the ~30 years of available data. He extrapolated that within 20 years, 100% of the world's energy could be provided by photovoltaic panels.
mahyarm 15y ago
China is starting a +1 billion dollar project to create a liquid thorium fission reactor (not fusion). The amount of thorium in the world is greater than the amount of copper, tin and some other metals, the amount of usable uranium is around the level of platinum. A working thorium reactor was created in the 1960s, and once china makes a few and show the world its a repeatable process, investors and banks world wide will be willing to invest in these reactors. http://thoriumremix.com/2011/ http://thoriumremix.com/2011/
- pjscott 15y ago
  Incidentally, you can blend thorium with uranium for use in conventional reactors, and with some cleverness in the fuel handling, pebble bed reactors can run on thorium. It doesn't require big breakthroughs; they're just nice, is all.
lukifer 15y ago
Kurzweil's formula is based on recursive intelligence: getting smarter lets you improve the rate at which you get smarter, ad infinitum. Though this can sometimes improve energy technology, intelligence ultimately depends on energy, of which there is a finite usable amount. Though I'm optimistic about new nuclear technologies, I'm forced to agree that absent an unforeseen break-though in fusion, "zero-point", etc., Kurzweil's model is agnostic when it comes to extracting useful energy, and therefore could have an expiration date. It's worth noting, however, that we'll never completely run out of energy, so long as Sol keeps burning. Can we sustain anything remotely resembling civilization based only on solar energy and its indirect organic by-products? Well, that's obviously debatable. > Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing Never doubt the self-interest of the powerful. Some may be short-sighted enough to eat their seed and burn resources in resource wars, but I think we're more likely to devolve into feudalism, where the masses eke out their existence serving the needs of those who control the remaining resources. On the other hand, if any kind of information infrastructure remains when the oil runs out, we also have the possibility of new emergent, de-centralized social structures constructed out of necessity. (Imagine, for instance, a mesh network of hand-crank-powered cell phones which virally alert clusters of villages to band together to defend against marauders.) Either way, I can't help but feel that our lifetimes are the perfect fulfillment of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."
temphn 15y ago
Overall good line of thought, but a few other things are worth considering. It is vastly underappreciated just how much the EPA has retarded energy development in the US. The retroactive revocation of permits for the mountaintop coal project, the Keystone XL imbroglio, and the hasty ban on offshore drilling are just a few examples. (Not many know that Deepwater Horizon was out that far because of regulations forbidding drilling closer to the shore). These areas are inherently dirty and dangerous. It's always easy to do Monday morning quarterbacking, but little recognition of the fact that infrequent domestic oil spills may be preferable to endless foreign oil wars. Resource extraction in general is demonized by the EPA just as much as the pharmaceutical industry is by the FDA. It is hard to regulate an industry which is respected by the public, because they will get some benefit of the doubt. But if they can be turned into polluters and poisoners, it is easy to justify ever greater state power over the sector. Computers and the internet are in the exact opposite space: highly respected and almost entirely unregulated. So it's hard for many here to see what the fedguv means (they make App Store approval look like a walk in the park). But once you're on the insides of those sectors, you start to realize that what is holding back oil in the West (and nuclear power, and drugs, and all non CS sectors) are human factors, not physical ones. That is simultaneous harder and easier to deal with than a genuine scarcity of energy.
- 3am 15y ago
  How much oil is in off the East Coast passive margin? 20 bboe (which is twice the best estimates of MMS)? That would make it on par with the North Slope in Alaska, an elephant field. That's 3 years or less of US consumption, or about 7 months of global consumption. BFD. And that comment about the Deepwater Horizon not being able to drill closer to the shore... that's eyepopping. The shallow-water GoM in the Mississippi Delta has been drilled for decades. I don't want to use an inappropriate tone for HN, but you should really take stock of how you've been misinformed so badly and seek to educate yourself.
  - temphn 15y ago
    And that comment about the Deepwater Horizon not being able to drill closer to the shore... that's eyepopping. The shallow-water GoM in the Mississippi Delta has been drilled for decades. Shallow water drilling has been disincentivized in favor of deep water drilling for several years in part because of tourism and NIMBYism concerns. People do not want to see drills from the shore. This is well known in the sector. You can find articles on the topic before 2010 by using archive search in Google News. http://www.stpns.net/view_article.html?articleId=10841083261061130 http://www.stpns.net/view_article.html?articleId=10841083261... July 13, 2006 Through financial incentives, the House bill encourages states to allow offshore drilling. For drilling within 12 miles of their coastlines, the states collect 75% of all royalties. They get 50% of all royalties for drilling up to 100 miles offshore. Louisiana, whose lawmakers authored the bill, stands to collect an additional $50 billion over the next 30 years. South Carolina, with no offshore drilling in its history, has no idea of the potential payoff. The South Carolina concern appears to be more turf protection by the tourism lobby, and that includes Gov. Mark Sanford. South Carolina's $10 billion tourism industry could be threatened, according to Sanford, *even though the state could restrict offshore drilling to a distance more than 100 miles out*. The federal authority is demarcated at 200 miles out, and beyond that is open international waters. Notice: tourism concerns (and NIMBY issues, not mentioned in this piece) are cited as a reason to move drilling further offshore, in part by giving financial incentives (50% rather than 75% of royalties) for locating drills out of sight. Note also that Louisiana's lawmakers authored the bill. You can dig in more if you wish, but there were a variety of reasons why lawmakers preferred drilling further away from shores. And Republicans were just as culpable: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,166334,00.html http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,166334,00.htm... July 3, 2001 "Floridians have spoken loud and clear, and their voices have been heard by President Bush," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Monday after Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced the administration would ask Congress to let oil companies drill on about 1.5 million more acres in the Gulf of Mexico. That's just a quarter of the roughly 6 million acres that the Clinton administration first proposed opening for leasing in 1997 and that the Bush/Cheney energy plan had earmarked for drilling. Speaking from his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Gov. Bush called the scaled-back proposal a victory for "Florida's fight to protect our coastline" and told Bush the words he's going to be hearing a lot for the next few years: not in my back yard. "Any lease sales that do occur in the 181 area" — a patch of energy-rich ground in the derrick-free eastern part of the gulf — "will occur off the coast of Alabama, not Florida," he said. The newly proposed area extends to 100 miles south of Mobile and gets no closer than about 200 miles west of Tampa. That's actually OK with the folks in Alabama — they already have plenty of drilling platforms out there, as does most of the Gulf coastline stretching west to Texas. And now it's OK with the folks — the Republicans, anyway — in Florida, who are worried about their white sandy beaches and the mammoth tourism industry that grows on them. The compromise was made (and somehow you don't expect Norton to be overruled later in the week) to appease the state GOPers whom Bush offended late last month when he came to Florida to strike an environmental pose at the Everglades National Park with a bunch of Democrats. ... The plan allows Ari Fleischer to say the president's new plan is "environmentally sensitive and balanced" (although that's what they said about the old plan). It allows Jeb Bush, up for a tough re-election in 2002, to imagine that his brother's winning the presidency was actually a good thing for him politically. Operative phrase: "gets no closer than about 200 miles west of Tampa". A series of bills and regulations like this, some of them simply interpretations, led to an overall incentive to locate platforms further and further away from the coasts, in uncharted waters. Now, one can claim that tourism was a legitimate reason for these rules. Perhaps. But one must also concede that regulation was a nontrivial factor in forcing these platforms away from the shore.
brfox 15y ago
I don't think energy production needs to change very much. One dimension of computing improvement over the past N years is that cpus are getting faster per unit of energy. So, it takes less and less energy for more and more powerful computers. Remember that our brains only need a couple thousand kcals per day.
cavedave 15y ago
"Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. While in the earlier part of this decade prices flattened for a few years, the sharp decline" http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm... 'The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. In fact, given that retail electricity prices are currently rising by a few percent per year, prices will probably cross earlier, around 2018 for the country as a whole, and as early as 2015 for the sunniest parts of America.' If solar is at a 7% annual decline is that not a very rapid advancement?
6ren 15y ago
Hydroelectric power stations run backwards to store energy (electrical->potential). Energy usage of computers is also decreasing, as in mobile devices. There's also anticipated uptake of ARM processors in server farms, because energy usage is a major cost. The advances include advances in energy usage. We have many options for sources of power; our current choices are mostly preferences. You're right that energy tech has not advanced at Moore-like rates (nothing but silicon does), but it has matched the accelerating demand for it. When it fails to, we'll see serious research into other power sources. (Cheap energy is a curse.)
Troll_Whisperer 15y ago
>What about energy? >It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s. This is demonstrably false. Solar power generation, for example, has been enjoyinging the same kind of Moore's Law exponential price/power over the past 15 years that computer processing power has. This is hardly surprising due to the fact that silicon wafer solar panels often use the same semi-conductor suppliers that computer hardware manufacturers do. Newer thin-film solar panels represent a jump in paradigm that promises even greater price performance. I could have brought up similar points about the progress of wind-power, bio-fuel, or a number of other fields. Energy has anything but stagnated since the 1950s. tldr: Stay off the peak oil scaremongering sites. They'll blind you.
- borism 15y ago
  Newer thin-film solar panels represent a jump in paradigm isn't this what Allen said in his critique? scientific achievement doesn't just grow exponentially - there are those "jumps in paradigm" that move us forward, but they're relatively rare and unpredictable.
  - Troll_Whisperer 15y ago
    As Kurzweil pointed out, Allen hadn't even read his book. In it Kurzweil provides copious volumes of data to support his claim that the overall trend is still exponential. As one paradigm starts to run out of steam, there is greater and greater research pressure to find the next. Much as vacuum tubes improved exponentially until nearing their limit upon which transistors and then later ICs took over, the same has been happening with energy. For the past 400 years human energy consumption per person has been growing at a relatively smooth exponential curve, despite changes from wood-burning to coal to whale oil to petroleum. Even a cursory unbiased study on the subject will show that. Interestingly, for nearly the entire time, malthusian doomsday prophets have enjoyed more popularity than more rigorous analysts.
- gaius 15y ago
  OK, but this is not "real" until you have end-to-end solar, as in starting from sand and ending up with installed solar panels, with every step along the way solar-powered, no fossil fuels, not even in the truck to deliver them to the end user. Because what we do have right now is end-to-end fossil. The main use of fossil fuels now should be bootstrapping the next level, not everyday use.
bfrs 15y ago
The energy problem was solved by Freeman Dyson et. al. in the 50s at Los Alamos [1]. Here are his paraphrased proposals: Kardashev Level I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) Dyson fusion engines. He's not talking about unviable Tokamak designs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak), but something much simpler. Basically use H-bombs (which are the only tried and tested fusion technology) to drive a large internal combustion engine. The energy released by each explosion is stored by using it to lift water back into hydraulic dams. Kardashev Level II Dyson rings and shells (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_shell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_shell). Kardashev Level III "Lather, rinse and repeat" with Dyson shells. [1] Just as all problems in computer science were solved (in principle) at Xerox PARC in the 70s, all energy problems were solved (in principle) at Los Alamos in the 50s.

by api 15y ago

lupatus 15y ago

Note: I made a similar comment a few days ago. It seems that you might be slightly misinformed about energy. Since the 1950s, there have been a number of advancements in energy production. Some examples are efficient shale oil extraction, tar sands oil extraction, horizontal drilling, deep water drilling, and high Arctic drilling. As The Futurist discusses in depth[1], annual world oil consumption has been hovering around 32 billion barrels since about 1982. That means oil consumption, at $100/barrel, is $3.2 trillion, or 5% of nominal world GDP. My take away from that is technology has made the oil supply a non-issue. And, it will continue not being a problem for the foreseeable future. It is not a hard resource limit. Also, check out the the research going into liquid fluoride thorium fusion. It seems to have potential as a way to do cheap, safe, "easy" nuclear fusion. Personally, I think that the problem is human willpower and chicken-little attitudes. To increase my technology optimism, I read nextbigfuture.com. Nearly daily, I see an article posted there that makes me go, "Holy crap! We can do that now??!" [1] http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyrany.html http://www.singularity2050.com/2011/07/the-end-of-petrotyran...

api 15y ago
I'm aware of oil drilling improvements, shale gas, etc. The problem is that this technical complexity takes energy. To really understand the "peakist" argument, you have to understand the concept of EROEI: Energy Return On Energy Invested. Peak oil, for example, is not about running out of oil. There could still be tons of oil around. It's about EROEI reaching near 1:1. When it costs the energy content of a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil, we are out of oil as an energy source. This could occur after only ~5% of the Earth's hydrocarbons have been extracted. EROEI for oil has been steadily declining. The first oil drilled was, of course, the easiest to get. Drop a well and it spurts out. Almost all of that is gone outside a few supergiant fields, and those are or will soon be entering decline. Heavy oil, shale oil, and tar sands require a lot of energy to extract and process... far more than "light sweet crude." All fossil fuels follow the same pattern. Coal and gas have not peaked yet, but they will... almost certainly in the next 50 years. Oil probably peaked in 2005, though it won't be possible to say for sure except ~25 years in retrospect. I'm also aware of the thorium cycle, etc., but I am skeptical of the ability of such things to scale fast enough. Keep in mind that to maintain growth new energy technologies will have to scale faster than the fossil fuel EROEI decline curve. I personally do not believe in the "doomer" scenario. However, I do think this: I think the first half of the 21st century will be dominated economically and technologically by the energy transition. The story of this era will be a mad rush to do everything we can to increase efficiency and build out new resources simply to tread water against the fossil fuel decline. And of course our political class will make it worse by doing the absolute dumbest possible things: subsidizing oil prices to prevent price signals from working, going to war over dwindling oil reserves, interfering in the market for new alternatives, restricting new alternatives, NIMBYism against renewable and nuclear energy, etc.
- lupatus 15y ago
  I totally get EROEI. In fact, I used to be the canned beans buying type. But, after years of thought, I realized that the EROEI has a fatal flaw. It completely discounts humanity's ability to discover creative efficiency improvements. The EROEI calculations are done with today's technology, and do not include future improvements. For example, I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where the oil industry started back in the 1800s. Capped oil wells abounded in the woods, because at some point in the past, it stopped being efficient to drill them with 1800s drilling technology. Today, old high school friends are making bank reopening those wells and even drilling new ones with modern techniques. The political problem is an interesting one, and I have opinions on it. But I hesitate to air them here because they are unconventional. The haters would probably drop my karma back down to -20.

pasbesoin 15y ago

Solve the amount of raw collection (speaking of "next generation" energy technologies), and some leakage in the storage and delivery becomes acceptable. It remains a problem that you can peck at, over time. For the U.S., I see a/the primary crisis that is addressable as being energy. And solving it would, directly and indirectly, re-invigorate our economy and provide an entire sector not just of jobs but of careers / career growth. And education. That the current Administration didn't jump into this aggressively, has been of enormous disappointment to me. That would be some leadership. Chart the course (course corrections allowed), and advocate -- including with that bully pulpit -- to make it so. Given that we don't have such leadership (which would be unusual, admittedly), it will have to be bottom up. I just hope that's enough.

schiffern 15y ago

I brought up the exact same objection when Kurzweil spoke at my college. He pointed out that the installed cost-per-watt and total installed capacity of PV exhibits an exponential trend over the ~30 years of available data. He extrapolated that within 20 years, 100% of the world's energy could be provided by photovoltaic panels.

mahyarm 15y ago

China is starting a +1 billion dollar project to create a liquid thorium fission reactor (not fusion). The amount of thorium in the world is greater than the amount of copper, tin and some other metals, the amount of usable uranium is around the level of platinum. A working thorium reactor was created in the 1960s, and once china makes a few and show the world its a repeatable process, investors and banks world wide will be willing to invest in these reactors. http://thoriumremix.com/2011/ http://thoriumremix.com/2011/

pjscott 15y ago
Incidentally, you can blend thorium with uranium for use in conventional reactors, and with some cleverness in the fuel handling, pebble bed reactors can run on thorium. It doesn't require big breakthroughs; they're just nice, is all.

lukifer 15y ago

Kurzweil's formula is based on recursive intelligence: getting smarter lets you improve the rate at which you get smarter, ad infinitum. Though this can sometimes improve energy technology, intelligence ultimately depends on energy, of which there is a finite usable amount. Though I'm optimistic about new nuclear technologies, I'm forced to agree that absent an unforeseen break-though in fusion, "zero-point", etc., Kurzweil's model is agnostic when it comes to extracting useful energy, and therefore could have an expiration date. It's worth noting, however, that we'll never completely run out of energy, so long as Sol keeps burning. Can we sustain anything remotely resembling civilization based only on solar energy and its indirect organic by-products? Well, that's obviously debatable. > Even if the energy problem is technically solvable, it seems to me that our political systems may be set up to do the absolute worst possible thing Never doubt the self-interest of the powerful. Some may be short-sighted enough to eat their seed and burn resources in resource wars, but I think we're more likely to devolve into feudalism, where the masses eke out their existence serving the needs of those who control the remaining resources. On the other hand, if any kind of information infrastructure remains when the oil runs out, we also have the possibility of new emergent, de-centralized social structures constructed out of necessity. (Imagine, for instance, a mesh network of hand-crank-powered cell phones which virally alert clusters of villages to band together to defend against marauders.) Either way, I can't help but feel that our lifetimes are the perfect fulfillment of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

temphn 15y ago

Overall good line of thought, but a few other things are worth considering. It is vastly underappreciated just how much the EPA has retarded energy development in the US. The retroactive revocation of permits for the mountaintop coal project, the Keystone XL imbroglio, and the hasty ban on offshore drilling are just a few examples. (Not many know that Deepwater Horizon was out that far because of regulations forbidding drilling closer to the shore). These areas are inherently dirty and dangerous. It's always easy to do Monday morning quarterbacking, but little recognition of the fact that infrequent domestic oil spills may be preferable to endless foreign oil wars. Resource extraction in general is demonized by the EPA just as much as the pharmaceutical industry is by the FDA. It is hard to regulate an industry which is respected by the public, because they will get some benefit of the doubt. But if they can be turned into polluters and poisoners, it is easy to justify ever greater state power over the sector. Computers and the internet are in the exact opposite space: highly respected and almost entirely unregulated. So it's hard for many here to see what the fedguv means (they make App Store approval look like a walk in the park). But once you're on the insides of those sectors, you start to realize that what is holding back oil in the West (and nuclear power, and drugs, and all non CS sectors) are human factors, not physical ones. That is simultaneous harder and easier to deal with than a genuine scarcity of energy.

3am 15y ago
How much oil is in off the East Coast passive margin? 20 bboe (which is twice the best estimates of MMS)? That would make it on par with the North Slope in Alaska, an elephant field. That's 3 years or less of US consumption, or about 7 months of global consumption. BFD. And that comment about the Deepwater Horizon not being able to drill closer to the shore... that's eyepopping. The shallow-water GoM in the Mississippi Delta has been drilled for decades. I don't want to use an inappropriate tone for HN, but you should really take stock of how you've been misinformed so badly and seek to educate yourself.
- temphn 15y ago
  And that comment about the Deepwater Horizon not being able to drill closer to the shore... that's eyepopping. The shallow-water GoM in the Mississippi Delta has been drilled for decades. Shallow water drilling has been disincentivized in favor of deep water drilling for several years in part because of tourism and NIMBYism concerns. People do not want to see drills from the shore. This is well known in the sector. You can find articles on the topic before 2010 by using archive search in Google News. http://www.stpns.net/view_article.html?articleId=10841083261061130 http://www.stpns.net/view_article.html?articleId=10841083261... July 13, 2006 Through financial incentives, the House bill encourages states to allow offshore drilling. For drilling within 12 miles of their coastlines, the states collect 75% of all royalties. They get 50% of all royalties for drilling up to 100 miles offshore. Louisiana, whose lawmakers authored the bill, stands to collect an additional $50 billion over the next 30 years. South Carolina, with no offshore drilling in its history, has no idea of the potential payoff. The South Carolina concern appears to be more turf protection by the tourism lobby, and that includes Gov. Mark Sanford. South Carolina's $10 billion tourism industry could be threatened, according to Sanford, *even though the state could restrict offshore drilling to a distance more than 100 miles out*. The federal authority is demarcated at 200 miles out, and beyond that is open international waters. Notice: tourism concerns (and NIMBY issues, not mentioned in this piece) are cited as a reason to move drilling further offshore, in part by giving financial incentives (50% rather than 75% of royalties) for locating drills out of sight. Note also that Louisiana's lawmakers authored the bill. You can dig in more if you wish, but there were a variety of reasons why lawmakers preferred drilling further away from shores. And Republicans were just as culpable: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,166334,00.html http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,166334,00.htm... July 3, 2001 "Floridians have spoken loud and clear, and their voices have been heard by President Bush," Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said Monday after Interior Secretary Gale Norton announced the administration would ask Congress to let oil companies drill on about 1.5 million more acres in the Gulf of Mexico. That's just a quarter of the roughly 6 million acres that the Clinton administration first proposed opening for leasing in 1997 and that the Bush/Cheney energy plan had earmarked for drilling. Speaking from his parents' home in Kennebunkport, Gov. Bush called the scaled-back proposal a victory for "Florida's fight to protect our coastline" and told Bush the words he's going to be hearing a lot for the next few years: not in my back yard. "Any lease sales that do occur in the 181 area" — a patch of energy-rich ground in the derrick-free eastern part of the gulf — "will occur off the coast of Alabama, not Florida," he said. The newly proposed area extends to 100 miles south of Mobile and gets no closer than about 200 miles west of Tampa. That's actually OK with the folks in Alabama — they already have plenty of drilling platforms out there, as does most of the Gulf coastline stretching west to Texas. And now it's OK with the folks — the Republicans, anyway — in Florida, who are worried about their white sandy beaches and the mammoth tourism industry that grows on them. The compromise was made (and somehow you don't expect Norton to be overruled later in the week) to appease the state GOPers whom Bush offended late last month when he came to Florida to strike an environmental pose at the Everglades National Park with a bunch of Democrats. ... The plan allows Ari Fleischer to say the president's new plan is "environmentally sensitive and balanced" (although that's what they said about the old plan). It allows Jeb Bush, up for a tough re-election in 2002, to imagine that his brother's winning the presidency was actually a good thing for him politically. Operative phrase: "gets no closer than about 200 miles west of Tampa". A series of bills and regulations like this, some of them simply interpretations, led to an overall incentive to locate platforms further and further away from the coasts, in uncharted waters. Now, one can claim that tourism was a legitimate reason for these rules. Perhaps. But one must also concede that regulation was a nontrivial factor in forcing these platforms away from the shore.

brfox 15y ago

I don't think energy production needs to change very much. One dimension of computing improvement over the past N years is that cpus are getting faster per unit of energy. So, it takes less and less energy for more and more powerful computers. Remember that our brains only need a couple thousand kcals per day.

cavedave 15y ago

"Averaged over 30 years, the trend is for an annual 7 percent reduction in the dollars per watt of solar photovoltaic cells. While in the earlier part of this decade prices flattened for a few years, the sharp decline" http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/03/16/sm... 'The cost of solar, in the average location in the U.S., will cross the current average retail electricity price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour in around 2020, or 9 years from now. In fact, given that retail electricity prices are currently rising by a few percent per year, prices will probably cross earlier, around 2018 for the country as a whole, and as early as 2015 for the sunniest parts of America.' If solar is at a 7% annual decline is that not a very rapid advancement?

6ren 15y ago

Hydroelectric power stations run backwards to store energy (electrical->potential). Energy usage of computers is also decreasing, as in mobile devices. There's also anticipated uptake of ARM processors in server farms, because energy usage is a major cost. The advances include advances in energy usage. We have many options for sources of power; our current choices are mostly preferences. You're right that energy tech has not advanced at Moore-like rates (nothing but silicon does), but it has matched the accelerating demand for it. When it fails to, we'll see serious research into other power sources. (Cheap energy is a curse.)

Troll_Whisperer 15y ago

>What about energy? >It's true that if you look at most areas of technology they are advancing rapidly. Except energy. Energy has stagnated since the 1950s. This is demonstrably false. Solar power generation, for example, has been enjoyinging the same kind of Moore's Law exponential price/power over the past 15 years that computer processing power has. This is hardly surprising due to the fact that silicon wafer solar panels often use the same semi-conductor suppliers that computer hardware manufacturers do. Newer thin-film solar panels represent a jump in paradigm that promises even greater price performance. I could have brought up similar points about the progress of wind-power, bio-fuel, or a number of other fields. Energy has anything but stagnated since the 1950s. tldr: Stay off the peak oil scaremongering sites. They'll blind you.

borism 15y ago
Newer thin-film solar panels represent a jump in paradigm isn't this what Allen said in his critique? scientific achievement doesn't just grow exponentially - there are those "jumps in paradigm" that move us forward, but they're relatively rare and unpredictable.
- Troll_Whisperer 15y ago
  As Kurzweil pointed out, Allen hadn't even read his book. In it Kurzweil provides copious volumes of data to support his claim that the overall trend is still exponential. As one paradigm starts to run out of steam, there is greater and greater research pressure to find the next. Much as vacuum tubes improved exponentially until nearing their limit upon which transistors and then later ICs took over, the same has been happening with energy. For the past 400 years human energy consumption per person has been growing at a relatively smooth exponential curve, despite changes from wood-burning to coal to whale oil to petroleum. Even a cursory unbiased study on the subject will show that. Interestingly, for nearly the entire time, malthusian doomsday prophets have enjoyed more popularity than more rigorous analysts.
gaius 15y ago
OK, but this is not "real" until you have end-to-end solar, as in starting from sand and ending up with installed solar panels, with every step along the way solar-powered, no fossil fuels, not even in the truck to deliver them to the end user. Because what we do have right now is end-to-end fossil. The main use of fossil fuels now should be bootstrapping the next level, not everyday use.

bfrs 15y ago

The energy problem was solved by Freeman Dyson et. al. in the 50s at Los Alamos [1]. Here are his paraphrased proposals: Kardashev Level I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale) Dyson fusion engines. He's not talking about unviable Tokamak designs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak), but something much simpler. Basically use H-bombs (which are the only tried and tested fusion technology) to drive a large internal combustion engine. The energy released by each explosion is stored by using it to lift water back into hydraulic dams. Kardashev Level II Dyson rings and shells (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_shell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_shell). Kardashev Level III "Lather, rinse and repeat" with Dyson shells. [1] Just as all problems in computer science were solved (in principle) at Xerox PARC in the 70s, all energy problems were solved (in principle) at Los Alamos in the 50s.