What is your opinion of Peak Oil?

[DV8 2XL]

Australia is sitting on the world's largest known reserves of uranium, has no pretensions to become a nuclear weapons state, and has a relatively small population.

 

In case you weren't aware, your Canadian cousins have developed a rather nice reactor technology called CANDU, which is great at making electricity, but poor at making weapons-grade plutonium. It uses natural uranium, so you don't need an enrichment plant, and God knows you have plenty of Outback to bury the waste in.

 

Give AECL a call sometime, I'm sure they can set you up with a good deal, on a dozen or so at reasonable terms.

[bascule]

Shale oil is even worse, and mining currently uses far more energy to extract the oil than you get in the end.

 

I used to live right next to where half of the world's oil shale lies buried underground. Over a trillion tons of it lies under the Colorado/Utah border.

 

The town I grew up in experienced a small boom period when Exxon came in and created thousands of new jobs. They were going to try to mine the oil shale, crush it up and compact it under high temperature in order to extract the oil. This process was quite costly, and in the end Exxon gave up and pulled out of the town in the mid-'80s, leading to a "bust" period where half the stores in the mall were empty and downtown businesses were closing left and right. It was a pretty depressing situation to grow up in.

 

Now Shell is experimentally trying to tap these massive oil shale reserves, not only because higher oil prices have made tapping into the shale more economically feasible, but also because they have new methods for extracting the oil directly from the shale without having to mine it.

 

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html

 

Seebach: Shell's ingenious approach to oil shale is pretty slick

Linda Seebach

September 2, 2005

 

When oil prices last touched record highs - actually, after adjusting for inflation we're not there yet, but given the effects of Hurricane Katrina, we probably will be soon - politicians' response was more hype than hope. Oil shale in Colorado! Tar sands in Alberta! OPEC be damned!

 

Remember the Carter-era Synfuels Corp. debacle? It was a response to the '70s energy shortages, closed down in 1985 after accomplishing essentially nothing at great expense, which is pretty much a description of what usually happens when the government tries to take over something that the private sector can do better. Private actors are, after all, spending their own money.

 

Since 1981, Shell researchers at the company's division of "unconventional resources" have been spending their own money trying to figure out how to get usable energy out of oil shale. Judging by the presentation the Rocky Mountain News heard this week, they think they've got it.

 

Shell's method, which it calls "in situ conversion," is simplicity itself in concept but exquisitely ingenious in execution. Terry O'Connor, a vice president for external and regulatory affairs at Shell Exploration and Production, explained how it's done (and they have done it, in several test projects):

 

Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.

 

Please note, you don't have to go looking for oil fields when you're brewing your own.

 

On one small test plot about 20 feet by 35 feet, on land Shell owns, they started heating the rock in early 2004. "Product" - about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude - began to appear in September 2004. They turned the heaters off about a month ago, after harvesting about 1,500 barrels of oil.

 

While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.

 

Wow.

 

They don't need subsidies; the process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel. The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. The process recovers about 10 times as much oil as mining the rock and crushing and cooking it at the surface, and it's a more desirable grade. Reclamation is easier because the only thing that comes to the surface is the oil you want.

 

And we've hardly gotten to the really ingenious part yet. While the rock is cooking, at about 650 or 750 degrees Fahrenheit, how do you keep the hydrocarbons from contaminating ground water? Why, you build an ice wall around the whole thing. As O'Connor said, it's counterintuitive.

 

But ice is impermeable to water. So around the perimeter of the productive site, you drill lots more shafts, only 8 to 12 feet apart, put in piping, and pump refrigerants through it. The water in the ground around the shafts freezes, and eventually forms a 20- to 30-foot ice barrier around the site.

 

Next you take the water out of the ground inside the ice wall, turn up the heat, and then sit back and harvest the oil until it stops coming in useful quantities. When production drops, it falls off rather quickly.

 

That's an advantage over ordinary wells, which very gradually get less productive as they age.

 

Then you pump the water back in. (Well, not necessarily the same water, which has moved on to other uses.) It's hot down there so the water flashes into steam, picking up loose chemicals in the process. Collect the steam, strip the gunk out of it, repeat until the water comes out clean. Then you can turn off the heaters and the chillers and move on to the next plot (even saving one or two of the sides of the ice wall, if you want to be thrifty about it).

 

Most of the best territory for this astonishing process is on land under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Shell has applied for a research and development lease on 160 acres of BLM land, which could be approved by February. That project would be on a large enough scale so design of a commercial facility could begin.

 

The 2005 energy bill altered some provisions of the 1920 Minerals Leasing Act that were a deterrent to large-scale development, and also laid out a 30-month timetable for establishing federal regulations governing commercial leasing.

 

Shell has been deliberately low-key about their R&D, wanting to avoid the hype, and the disappointment, that surrounded the last oil-shale boom. But O'Connor said the results have been sufficiently encouraging they are gradually getting more open. Starting next week, they will be holding public hearings in northwest Colorado.

 

I'll say it again. Wow.

[joema]

...But peak oil has turned me into a bit of a car hater...

If every car (and truck) on earth vanished, peak (conventional) oil would still happen, just delayed a couple of decades. Worldwide, road vehicles only constitute 37% of oil consumption.

 

Since non-transportation oil consumption increases at about 1.2% per year, in 38 years we'd be consuming just as much as before all the cars vanished. Also during that period, we'd STILL be consuming petroleum at fantastic rates, just somewhat less than before. Oil field peak production capacity would be declining during that period as the remaining supply is sucked dry.

 

There are about 1.1 trillion barrels of conventional oil left, and the world currently consumes 30 billion barrels per year. Even if NO peak happened -- if every oil field could produce at infinite rates -- the supply would be totally exhausted in about 28 years. Getting rid of every car and truck on earth would only extend this to 46 years (accounting for typical annual consumption increase for transportation and non-transportation sectors).

 

So regardless of when we hit peak oil, the conventional oil supply is very finite and will soon be exhausted, regardless of whether cars exist or not.

 

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/FTPROOT/international/edexfiles/mary.ppt

 

We need to invest massively in renewable energy structure and backup structures just to keep the grid running, I don't believe there is time to try and waste infrastructure to redevelop cars.

From a supply standpoint, utility energy is very different from transportation energy. There's enough coal to last for hundreds of years. Oil will be mostly depleted in a few decades, and peak oil will happen much sooner.

 

Reorganize world political structures around a world federal model

As shown above, it wouldn't matter if Ralph Nader was appointed absolute dictator of the entire earth. Even if every car was destroyed overnight, world oil consumption is so high and the supply so limited (even for non-transport usage), it will soon be nearly exhausted.

 

Investigate the lifestyle changes and options that exist for living without oil...

Even if all cars disappeared and everybody traveled on magic carpets, the limited conventional world oil supply will soon be almost exhausted.

 

...which could be achieved in about 50 years through the normal attrition rate of not rebuilding suburban homes

Long before then the oil will mostly be gone. Spending resources restructuring all of society would be better spent solving the transportation energy supply problem.

[joema]

...After peak oil and gas (a decade later) how do we fertilize all these so called "energy crops"?

Non-conventional oil will have to be used. As shown in my previous post, it's too late to try and conserve conventional oil. Nothing meaningful can be done that substantially delays peak oil or ultimate exhaustion of conventional resources.

 

We are currently losing our arable land because of industrial agriculture for FOOD! We weaken the soil until it may as well be cotton wool that we pour chemical fertilizers and pesticides onto. Why on earth would we want to risk the remaining arable land just to create plants?

Dedicating gigantic land tracts to growing energy crops is useless, as it's the achievable yield makes it impossible to provide a major percentage of transportation energy. So you're right, why do this.

 

He points out that growth rates are more like 10g/m/d in field conditions, as distinct from in the lab.

50g/m^2/d have been achieved in practice, not just inside a lab. Yes further research is needed about how to maintain this long term.

 

 

There are a number of difficulties with the use of algae. A major problem is that constant high temperatures facilitate high yields, but large scale energy production would involve large open ponds in deserts, where temperatures fall at night. Siting ponds close to power plants would enable use of warm cooling water.

Yes there are issues to resolve in this area.

 

Using power station CO2 would not affect the impact of that carbon on the atmosphere, because it would end up in the atmosphere after the biodiesel was burnt. This factor alone would seem to disqualify large scale use of algae for the production of liquid fuels.

While biodiesel vehicles would emit CO2, it would still be a huge net decrease, because you're only emitting the power plant CO2, not power plant plus current petroleum vehicle CO2. You're only recycling what the power plants are already emitting and you're eliminating the CO2 from petroleum vehicles.

 

Perhaps the major problem in the production of biodiesel from any source is that it requires the input of methanol or ethanol equivalent to about one quarter of its output weight.

 

According to the UNH research alcohol constitutes only 10% of biodiesel volume. Yes, that's still a lot.

 

to produce only 10% of US energy via ethanol would require 37 times the commercial livestock feed production.

 

Currently the US already produces 3.4 billion gallons of ethanol per year, and a bill was just approved to mandate 8 billion gallons per year by 2012. US gasoline consumption is about 131 billion gallons per year. So from a volume standpoint, that's 6.1% of gasoline production. Accounting for ethanol's lower energy content, it's 4.1% of current gasoline energy consumption.

 

So it doesn't seem totally impossible to provide the needed ethanol.

 

http://www.ksgrains.com/ethanol/useth.html

http://feinstein.senate.gov/05releases/r-ethanol-amndt.htm

 

I'm not saying biodiesel from algae is guaranteed to work (i.e, provide a significant fraction of transportation energy). However I am saying that all other biomass approaches are guaranteed to NOT work, just from an yield/acreage standpoint. At least biodiesel is theoretically capable of the needed yields, which the others are not.

 

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html

http://www.biodieselamerica.org/node/1086

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf (large PDF)

http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/pdf/algae_salton_sea.pdf

http://www.osti.gov/fcvt/deer2002/eberhardt.pdf

[bascule]

Bascule' date='

I wouldn't get too excited. Did you read this bit?[/quote']

 

The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production.

 

In other words, they were heating the rock for 8 or 9 months before they "harvested" about 1,500 barrels of oil.

How much energy does it take to heat rock?

 

Apparently, 28% as much as the energy that can be liberated from the extracted oil.

 

How deep were they heating? What sort of volumes of rock were heated?

 

Got me. The claimed energy inputs of the process are 2/7th of the energy liberated. You get 3.5 times as much as what you put in. Either they're right about this or they're not. It'd be better to question their methodology by finding where they argue for the efficiency of this process, for example see if they have a peer reviewed paper on the output:input ratio, and then question their methodology from that, rather than just throwing up a bunch of hypotheticals.

 

How much natural gas powered the electric gizmo's that heated the rock? When natural gas is in decline in the US, what will they decide to use it for

 

I should mention that all of the oil shale in the Grand Valley is also one of the most abundant sources of natural gas on the continent. There's so much natural gas here, in fact, that they shut down a problematic nuclear plant here (Fort St. Vrain) and replaced it with one that just burns natural gas. We're up to our eyeballs in natural gas over here. If you really want to see something interesting, Google for "Project Rulison". They attempted to liberate large amounts of subterranean natural gas by blowing it open with an atomic bomb. Whoops. Didn't work, the gas was radioactive. Yeah, Americans are crazy.

 

Bascule, why didn't Hirsch just say, "Oh peak oil is nothing DOE... let's just use shale oil... we have so much of it there all neatly stored away for us."

 

Well, this is fairly recent news, and I don't know how much it's been popularized.

 

Did it occur to you that some things are economically viable now that might not be viable in a year or 2 as American gas prices go through the roof? This is why ERoEI / EPR needs to be considered BEFORE peak oil and gas change everything we do. Because cooking rock for 9 months just to get 1,500 barrels sounds like an awfully bad Energy Production Ratio... which WILL show up as bad economics as gas prices go through the roof.

 

Believe me, this oil shale field abuts one of the largest natural gas reserves on the continent. They can quite literally pipe natural gas about one mile away in order to get to the oil shale (the oil shale is in a plateau formation called the "Bookcliffs", and the natural gas is mostly alongside the river that flows through that valley) I've driven past the scant remains of Exxon's Colony Oil Shale Project probably hundreds of times in my life, a byegone remainant of a forgotten era, which is quickly being revitalized as more work goes into harvesting oil shale in the area. All the natural gas they will ever need sits right next to the biggest oil shale field on earth. This process couldn't be more ideal.

 

If it comes down to a contest between thermodynamics and market forces, thermodynamics rules OK Bascule?

 

Well, in the case of the Grand Valley, I guess we really lucked out.

[bascule]

I've read the Hansen et al 2005 paper. My response to it is more or less contained in this post

[joema]

...As we saw with oil growth, a doubling period of consumption can very quickly settle in with quite modest annual rates of growth. So, as consumption rates double roughly every decade with oil, I wonder what the doubling rate with coal is?

You're right, I neglected the compound consumption of coal. Actually according to BP there are only 192 years of coal left worldwide at current global consumption levels. However coal consumption is increasing at 2.5% per year. I don't know the formula for compound spending of a fixed amount, but there's probably less than 80 years left considering the annual consumption increase.

 

...oil shale will not be the "next oil" because of it's price problems, solar to hydrogen will not be a long term option because of it's inherant price problems.

Numerous sources indicate oil shale and tar sands will be economically competitive with conventional petroleum prices of roughly $70 per barrel. Within a decade conventional oil will top $70/bbl permanently. Yes the environmental cost of mining oil shale and tar sands is huge. But so is the environmental cost of burning billions of gallons of gasoline and trillions of tons of coal per year, and we're doing that right now.

 

...We live too far apart... we could live in attractively designed walking distance communities as found in the many European "old city" cores....suburbia sprung up as this oil based lifestyle after WW2

On average, Europe consumes about as much total energy AND oil per GDP as the US. That's despite all the supposed advantages of density, mass transit, etc. See attached PDF. The US consumes a bigger total figure because the economy is so big.

 

It's true urban sprawl is wasteful, but it has already happened. You can't go back in time and prevent it. To rearchitect the fabric of society would take many decades. Long before you were finished, we'd be out of oil, and maybe out of coal. Even if magically overnight you could change the US to be like Europe from an urban planning standpoint, it's unclear that would yield the needed energy savings. It's not doing so in Europe right now.

 

...we need to live without cars, and that is not the end of civilization or law and order...

As mentioned previously, even if all cars on earth vanished, it wouldn't vastly change the energy picture. Conventional oil would still run out fairly soon. And transportation energy use is mostly unrelated to coal consumption, which (as you mentioned) will run out sooner than we think. Maybe 80 years.

 

We can offer land for title transfer schemes.

IMO the long term energy problem is so bad, trying to restructure the urban and transportation landscape is too little, too late. By the time you accomplished anything substantive, conventional oil will be gone. And if Europe is any example, doing so wouldn't save much energy.

 

...We built suburbia, it’s not some God – ordained lifestyle, we can un-build it. Cars simply choke the life and character out of a city

Yes, agreed, but getting rid of the cars won't help the energy problem sufficiently to make it worth while. The math is very simple: all cars only consume 37% of world oil. Plus even extreme measures wouldn't get rid of them all, just reduce that number. With a dictatorial world government you could probably reduce oil consumption to 15-20% of the total, which just isn't good enough.

 

...This problem is truly frightening. This problem is like nothing that I have ever seen in my lifetime...the risks to our economies and our civilization are enormous...

If it weren't for the huge non-conventional oil sources, he'd be right. It would be apocalyptic. But since there are 5 trillion barrels of non-conventional oil, that will simply be mined and burned, of course at a major environmental cost. We'll probably pay double the price per gallon, but it won't run out, nor will modern society vanish.

 

Is that the best path? No, but it's likely what will happen. Plus it's very unlikely even draconian measures unknown to democratic society would make a major difference. At this late stage, the problem isn't politics, it's physics and mathematics. It's like trying to stop a locomotive within a hundred meters. You either begin the effort several km away, or it's too late.

04ecsummit-brown.pdf

[DV8 2XL]

The call to dismantle suburbia has always amused me. Consider what would happen if cheap individual transportation were to vanish. Mass transit would become available, the average subdivision might not be laid out for the best bus routes but people would put up with poor ones. Can't get to the shopping mall? Corner stores will rise again. The obvious truth (to me) is that suburbia would be re-factored in a number of small ways to adapt to the new reality.