Oil running out, says The Guardian

Yoda

This article by George Monbiot is so bleak it's almost funny.

mike65

I 'm old enough to remember when the oil was going to run out the first time - about 2000AD! (mid you they were talking about the paperless office and how no-one would be reading newspapers in the 21st century back then!) More seriously the supply of easily recoverable crude will gradually slow but with a bit of wit I suspect the global economy wont collapse any time soon...

Mike.

Capt'n Midnight

Couldn't be bothered reading the article.

as mike65 says the oil will run out in about 25 years time , well that's what they keep teling us....

The is a lot of oil out there and barring new finds, the oil that is economically extractable at todays price using todays technology will run out in about 25 years time. As extraction and refining techniques improve and the price of oil goes up previously unprofitable sources become economically attractive.

The big sources of oil are Coal / Shale / Oil or Tar Sands - especially in Canada they have huge amounts of the stuff - allthough at present it is uneconomic..

Fuel Alternatives
Diesel - bio-diesel (at present this is a scam - since one litre of real diesel is used to produce each one of bio stuff...) - or coal products.
Petrol - hydrogen / methane / methanol / ethanol
Fuel Oil - back in the 70's oil fired burners in scandanavia were being run on a slurry of coal powder in water - it needed a special emulisifer to work - but it could be pumped in to the boilers and only about 4% of the energy was used to boil away the water (no it would not work in an internal combustion engine)

Typedef

I've heard the predictions of extracting other fossil fuels from substances like coal. Coal is extremely dirty, much more so then oil and burning enough coal to fuel the economy would poison the atmosphere no end. Think of the smog rules imposed on Dublin City, due to the burning of coal in the late 80s and the insuing ban on burning this fuel in the City Centre. Morever, coal has a nasty habit of causing acid rain, so we really want to avoid becoming even more dependant on that stuff.

Most if not all people agree that by the year 2100, there will simply be no oil left, which can be extracted.

http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003EsM

The only realistic alternatives are.

Microwave based space stations.
Wholesale use of Nuclear technology.
If the technology has advanced enough.
Hydrogen fuel technology (not a battery, but an energy generation device) see link.

http://www.myhydrogencar.com/technology.html


Nuclear technology is however, not going to happen, due to the public's aversion (principally) and the hazardous waste generated from it.

South Africa (a nation which does not recognise that unprotected sex contributes to the spread of HIV (and has one of the highest infeciton rates, in the world)), is the only country in the world (bar North Korea and Iran) (to my knowledge anyway) who is constructing a Nuclear facility. (Iran and North Korea's plants are for military purposes 'anyway').

So essentially the future is either large space or moon based Solar energy collectors which beam Microwave power to earth, (cold fusion if possible) or Hydrogen Fuel Cell technology.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so when the fossil fuel depletion crisis begins to bite, significant resources will be applied to overcome the end of civilisation due to lack of electricty.... probably.

Typedef

Oh and before you say it.

Yes the hydrogen has to come from somewhere.

Ergo Nuclear or Solar energy is used to seperate the hydrogen from the H2O (which is a least a closed, renewable and clean system).

Implying the only long term socially acceptable solution is orbital or moon based Solar production stations, using Microwaves to supply the earth with electricty.

The Sun is, after all, not going to burn itself out, in the lifetime of human civilisation.

Capt'n Midnight

Ah the good old microwaves... 10% of the Sun's energy gets converted to electricity by photovoltics and 50% of gets to the earth surface and at least 15% of that has to be wasted in transmission losses 'cos the recievers have to be in unpopulated areas...

Hydrogen can also be produced by some organisms..

Yoda

Originally posted by Typedef
The Sun is, after all, not going to burn itself out, in the lifetime of human civilisation.

We may last a long time, but by that time we ought to have evolved into something else. Please the gods.

Capt'n Midnight

bad news - our galaxy will collide with Andromonda before the sun becomes a red-giant

Yoda

That's rather unsubstantiated.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.npaci.edu/envision/v16.1/hernquist.html
Dubinski said. "We can measure Andromeda's velocity toward us, and we know where the Milky Way is headed. There are still uncertainties in the trajectories because we can't directly measure Andromeda's motion tangential to our line of sight, but our model used reasonable values for the encounter parameters and the amount of dark matter. .... The two galaxies sideswipe, fling some material into intergalactic space in vast arcs, then coalesce into a single larger galaxy surrounded by an extended halo. The two galactic cores merge, but meanwhile tens of billions of stars are ejected into the intergalactic void. :eek:


http://www.virtualstar.fsbusiness.co.uk/andromeda.htm
To simulate the predicted collision with any confidence, reasonable parameter values must be used. Although the galaxy parameters are fairly well defined, the orbital parameters are not. Only the present day radial velocity is known; the minimum separation and orientation of the two galaxies at closest approach are unknown. This could be resolved by measuring the transverse (proper) motion of M31, but this is too small to measure with current techniques.

Typedef

Relax.

The laws of entropy say that even though the universe may expand 'forever', it will soon come to the point, where all the available energy has been 'converted' and thus no more available energy for conversion is available.

At which point the species will most likely freeze/starve to death.

Capt'n Midnight

Don't forget about black hole radiation...

Black holes have a temperature and will slowly leak energy, - they evaproate down to a point where the outer extremeties will be out side the schwartzchild radius - then lots of real photons etc. will be able to escape and you will get an explosion.

So LONG after all the stars have burned out and the interstellar matter has reached a high uniform temperature there will still be the occasion bright flare from the odd black hole....