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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
by 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 agoI 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.
- api 15y agoI am in neither the doomer nor the pollyanna camp on this, as I said. Keep in mind that EROEI includes not only the energy cost of operating technology but also the energy cost of developing it. Every engineer who worked on that fracking technology? Every car trip they made to/from the office, etc., all has to be included in the energy investment required to get that shale gas out of the ground.
- lupatus 15y agoYup, I totally get EROEI. But, it ignores possible efficiency improvements when it makes it's future projections. What do they say in the finance world? Something like "past performance is not an indicator of future returns." What if in 5-10 years those engineers ride to work in self-driving robo-cars that are all electric, using cheap and powerful graphene-based super capacitors as batteries. They will have time during the commute to daydream about "wild" ways to make the fraking technology itself more efficient. And the all electric robo-cars are charged up from a cheap, efficient liquid fluoride-thorium reactor generator station. Or maybe the they are just daydreaming about an upcoming vacation to outer space while riding in luxury two-stage zepplins[1]. Oh, and the engineer is healthy and performing at peak mental and physical performance nearly continuously because he/she eats a ketogenic diet[2] centered around high-latitude reindeer herding products[3]. There are a lot of ways the world can be better. [1]http://www.jpaerospace.com/ http://www.jpaerospace.com/ [2]http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/ http://www.ketogenic-diet-resource.com/ [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomen_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomen_Company
- WeWin 15y agoEfficiency actually increases energy use, as per Jevon's paradox, which goes hand in hand with the technological cornucopia argument that the energy issue will be solved by better technology. Unfortunately the EROEI numbers reflect quite the contrary - where once oil bubbled up from the ground under its own pressure netting 200x EROEI, we're now griming are way through oil sands which net 5-6x EROEI, or sinking 2 mile long pipes into the ocean. This is why Kurzweil argument fails - technology has a tendency to expand and soak up as much energy as possible, all the salad shooters in the world aren't going to bring back $2 oil, in any form.
- piguy314 15y agoWhat a lot of peakist don't understand is that the most important attribute of hydrocarbons is energy density not energy efficiency. If we expend more energy extracting hydrocarbons for jet fuel for instance than we get from burning it that's fine as long as 1) the extra energy we expends comes from an abundant and cheap source like future PV solar and 2) those hydrocarbons are used in an economically useful fashion like air travel. Peakists seem to fall prey to the belief that the earth is a closed system, instead of an open system powered by the sun.