4 ms·

Wait, when did we stop being concerned about peak oil and why?

jes5199 3y ago
combination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…
      - shiftpgdn 3y ago
        Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Right but talk to most people and they’ve bought into this myth that renewables will help get us off fossil fuels while failing to consider the problem systemically. It’s like talking to a wall. We need to build an insane amount of nuclear reactors to get rid of fossil fuels from grid production but also to power secondary things like plastics manufacturing, carbon recapture etc. We need to be soaking up excess nuclear capacity. Excess solar is a joke because ultimately it has to recharge expensive batteries first whereas nuclear has a lot of excess night time and day time energy.
        matthewdgreen 3y ago
        At present rates we’re likely to end up with an order of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity, with that availability showing up as an equivalent number in cost. Any novel industrial process that relies on using huge amounts of energy will use the cheapest source of energy if at all possible, meaning that it will be engineered to deal with cheap but intermittent power sources. Unless there is some fundamental physical reason that it can’t work that way.
        adrianN 3y ago
        Nobody is even planning to build an insane of amount of nuclear, but we keep deploying more renewables every year.
      - adrianN 3y ago
        I bet a lot of that 16% is fertilizer.
  - Alpha3031 3y ago
    Petrochemical use is currently what, about 20% of total crude oil use? Yeah we'll probably need to start at least trying to tackle that soon even if the CO2 in the atmosphere thing is more urgent, but there's no pressing need to be a viable plan for 100% reduction now if we won't even think about using it for probably a decade at least. We've got the time to move forward one small step at a time and then verify each step so it isn't like plastic recycling ("Oh yeah we'll totally do it" *dumps in lower income country*) and measurable goals on shorter timeframes (say, 30% reduction by 2030) are much more achievable and effective than a vague long term goal of not using any more oil ever, not even a little bit. There's no shame in picking the low hanging fruit first.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Plastics have many substitution options outside of the narrow range where it's the best choice. I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.
    - dabber 3y ago
      > I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser. Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.
      - ggm 3y ago
        Gas, including ethylene from oil production, is used heavily in pharma, plastics and fertiliser production. If oil becomes uneconomic to produce, the supply of drugs, explosives, plastic and fertiliser is at risk, at the very least of price shocks. Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important. The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.
        dabber 3y ago
        Now I follow. Thanks for the clear and patient reply!
  - vivekd 3y ago
    Plastic is only cheap because it's a byproduct of oil. It'll stop being as cheap and plentiful if we stop producing oil and we'll naturally move to cheaper substitutes Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon
chrisco255 3y ago
Because there's hundreds of years of known supply even at current consumption and we already have viable alternatives.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Really? Name one that is safe to handle, easy to convert, and has even 1/2 the energy density.
  - jes5199 3y ago
    I’m convinced that “density” is not a helpful metric here. There’s plenty of diffuse energy, and it’s advantageous to collect it near where it’s used, rather than make big pipes and ship it around
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a greedy “rich get richer” solution that also doesn’t actually solve the carbon problem because other people need electricity too.
      - ggm 3y ago
        Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install. As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build. But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power. Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.

combination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t

vlovich123 3y ago
I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.
- adrianN 3y ago
  Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…
    - shiftpgdn 3y ago
      Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        Right but talk to most people and they’ve bought into this myth that renewables will help get us off fossil fuels while failing to consider the problem systemically. It’s like talking to a wall. We need to build an insane amount of nuclear reactors to get rid of fossil fuels from grid production but also to power secondary things like plastics manufacturing, carbon recapture etc. We need to be soaking up excess nuclear capacity. Excess solar is a joke because ultimately it has to recharge expensive batteries first whereas nuclear has a lot of excess night time and day time energy.
        matthewdgreen 3y ago
        At present rates we’re likely to end up with an order of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity, with that availability showing up as an equivalent number in cost. Any novel industrial process that relies on using huge amounts of energy will use the cheapest source of energy if at all possible, meaning that it will be engineered to deal with cheap but intermittent power sources. Unless there is some fundamental physical reason that it can’t work that way.
        adrianN 3y ago
        Nobody is even planning to build an insane of amount of nuclear, but we keep deploying more renewables every year.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      I bet a lot of that 16% is fertilizer.
- Alpha3031 3y ago
  Petrochemical use is currently what, about 20% of total crude oil use? Yeah we'll probably need to start at least trying to tackle that soon even if the CO2 in the atmosphere thing is more urgent, but there's no pressing need to be a viable plan for 100% reduction now if we won't even think about using it for probably a decade at least. We've got the time to move forward one small step at a time and then verify each step so it isn't like plastic recycling ("Oh yeah we'll totally do it" *dumps in lower income country*) and measurable goals on shorter timeframes (say, 30% reduction by 2030) are much more achievable and effective than a vague long term goal of not using any more oil ever, not even a little bit. There's no shame in picking the low hanging fruit first.
- ggm 3y ago
  Plastics have many substitution options outside of the narrow range where it's the best choice. I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.
  - dabber 3y ago
    > I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser. Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.
    - ggm 3y ago
      Gas, including ethylene from oil production, is used heavily in pharma, plastics and fertiliser production. If oil becomes uneconomic to produce, the supply of drugs, explosives, plastic and fertiliser is at risk, at the very least of price shocks. Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important. The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.
      - dabber 3y ago
        Now I follow. Thanks for the clear and patient reply!
- vivekd 3y ago
  Plastic is only cheap because it's a byproduct of oil. It'll stop being as cheap and plentiful if we stop producing oil and we'll naturally move to cheaper substitutes Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon

chrisco255 3y ago

Because there's hundreds of years of known supply even at current consumption and we already have viable alternatives.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
Really? Name one that is safe to handle, easy to convert, and has even 1/2 the energy density.
- jes5199 3y ago
  I’m convinced that “density” is not a helpful metric here. There’s plenty of diffuse energy, and it’s advantageous to collect it near where it’s used, rather than make big pipes and ship it around
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a greedy “rich get richer” solution that also doesn’t actually solve the carbon problem because other people need electricity too.
    - ggm 3y ago
      Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install. As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build. But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power. Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.