Peak Oil

Lex_Diamonds

Apologies if this has been discussed previously, I utilized the search but came up with nothing.

I was just reading the front page of http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ and I have to say it has me sick with worry. (Please read the main page of this site btw!)

What do people think of the peak oil theory, is it something that will affect us a little or a lot? Will it happen soon, or in a hundred years?

RE*AC*TOR

Well its inevitable, look around you, see something plastic... made of oil. Your keyboard is oil, your mouse, the bezel around your monitor etc etc. As a society we use oil for everything, from indivudually wrapped biscuits to plastic bags and biros. I can't really say when it will happen, and I don't know how accurate that website is, but I'd say there's potentially a major crisis within 20 years.

Sleipnir

Well the U.S. have already realised that they need to secure their oil supplies now and are doing so (in Iraq)
As Reactor said, we are totally and completely dependant on petrochemicals for everything we do. Buying an electric car won't do anything (where does the electricity come from?)
Even with current and predicted reserves, once supply begins to drop the price of those reserve barrels with start flying up.

Look at China; by 2010, China will need about 95% of the oil that's coming out of Saudi at the moment.

Yeah, we're screwed basically.

PH01

Peak oil production will be reached by 2014 - 2020, after that it's supply will steadily decrease.

But don't panic the "Oil well's will fill up again"

Hobbes

There is plenty of oil. The problem is a lot of it costs more to get to then what it is worth to sell.

mr_angry

"Are you ready for $7 per gallon gas, $182 per barrel oil, 50 percent yearly inflation, total economic collapse, unending resource wars, and a large-scale reinstitution of the military draft?"

The first two statistics are accurate enough, but the rest is scaremongering. Admittedly the production, storage, and distribution of Hydrogen as a fuel is not yet ready for mainstream use, but it is a perfectly viable alternative to oil, and it will most likely maintain the status quo in the world economy. Experts predict the end of cheap oil as a resource by 2060, giving Hydrogen adequate time to mature as an alternative.

The most effective way to produce hydrogen is to split water molecules. In order to do this, energy must be provided to the system. Sounds like a Catch 22 situation, but the most efficient way to do this is to use photovoltaic arrays to use the sun's energy to do the job. And where's the best place to capture all this useful energy? The Arabian desert. Who is most likely to invest in the arrays themselves? The energy companies.

Status Quo preserved. At least after we've let the oil industry screw us for every last penny they can, of course.

PH01

It's not the quantity that's the problem for the next 30 years it's the price. No more cheap oil. And cheap Gas for the USA anyway.

Imagine paying €4 per litre of petrol?

RE*AC*TOR

Hey what about antimatter? If we can stay clear of those illuminati bastards, that should sort us all out!

Hobbes

Anti-matter does not release that much energy. Nuclear gives better output.

RE*AC*TOR

yes, but look at the potential no waste..

mr_angry

PH01 wrote:

Imagine paying €4 per litre of petrol?

Yes. Imagine walking or cycling to / from work every day! :eek:

Anyway, if you think its going to be bad here, you should spare a thought for the peoples of India and China. Not only are they the fastest growing economies in the world (and China is set to outstrip the USA's demand for oil in the near future), but reports on NewScientist.com and the BBC also suggest that their rapid drives towards urbanisation has put massive pressure on their water supplies and arable land. By all accounts, the ability of these countries to feed their populations is in serious danger, with or without an oil crisis.

Hobbes

mr_angry wrote:

Yes. Imagine walking or cycling to / from work every day! :eek:

Where are you going to get the tires for your bicycle?

Sleipnir

Aragh just keep patching the old ones.
Make all your mates jealous as they rattle to work with sore behinds.

PH01

Hobbes wrote:

Where are you going to get the tires for your bicycle?

Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant...

bonkey

Hobbes wrote:

Anti-matter does not release that much energy. Nuclear gives better output.

Just being picky...thats not quite true.

Anti-matter releases massive amounts of energy. if you calculate "energy-release-per-mass-involved", there is nothing better then a matter/anti-matter reaction.

The problem is that its just not very efficient, given how much energy goes into creating anti-matter. Nuclear power is far, far more efficient.

Indeed, there is no know (or theoretical, I believe) way to make anti-matter for less energy than will be released by it when it is used (and thats before adding in the cost of storage, etc.). This is the ultimate kicker. Even if we could do it cheaply, its still an energy "sink". At best, it could be used as a battery.

Nuclear materials, on the other hand, are energy-positive. We can extract more energy from them then was required to make them, and so they are an energy "source".

jc

Sparks

Unless we locate a natural source of antimatter, of course jc. Trouble is, not only would we have to go rather a bit further than the corner shop (you're really talking about being outside the galaxy), it'd be akward to mine...

Anti-matter, in effect, is going to be a great storage device for energy; just not a great source.

ishmael whale

1 US dollar = .81 euro
7 US dollar = 5.70 euro
http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html

1 US gallon = 3.79 litres
http://www.metric-conversions.org/volume/gallons-to-liters.htm

Therefore
7 dollars per gallon = 5.70 euro for 3.79 litres

Therefore
1 litre = 5.70/3.79 = 1.50 euro

So the price increase he’s talking about is not so very much greater than we’re paying at the pumps here.

To a certain extent that’s the problem. We can actually afford to buy all the oil in the ground and burn it all – but what do we do then?

Clearly as prices increase alternative forms of energy will become more competitive. Depending on how quickly production peaks and drops ( and how soon people swap their SUVs for Nissan Micras), the changeover could be easy or dramatic. I expect lifestyles will change – low fares airlines can hardly be part of the future – but I suspect it will be more a trimming of our opulence rather than a collapse of civilisation.

Sand

So in short oil will become prohibitively expensive inside about 15-20 years? And in 15-20 years science will not have advanced sufficiently to make alternate power sources more efficient - or safer in the case of nuclear power? Despite increasing efforts as oil steadily becomes more expensive?

Tad pessimistic I think.

Memnoch

guys there is a VERY good article in the NEW Scientist this week that highlights how easy it is for us to make use of alternative renewable resources of energy, provided the DRIVE is there to invest in the infrastructure needed.

The techonology is actually already availible to us, its just a question of wanting to use it.

We don't have to be dependent on oil, and the world could easily be shifted to be entirely free of this dependency by 2050. The problem is with governments taking the initiative to tackle this problem before it gets out of hand.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

Hobbes

Also there is a good article in IEEE about nuclear batteries for computer devices. Very impressive and not what people are thinking (very safe). I only have the paper version, not sure where the story would be on the sites.

Moriarty

The new generation of pebble bed fission reactors look good.

Mind you, fusion could be commerically realised within the next 20-30 years - there's a major reactor (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) being built in France or Japan (they haven't decided which yet) and it's reckoned that it'll be the last stage in fusion research before the first commercial reactors come online. ITER is due [strike]~2009[/strike] ~2014.

Raskolnikov

The problem with that article is that author believes that there are no alternatives to using oil and that buyers will pay anything for it, no matter how high the cost becomes. As the cost of oil becomes more prohibitive, the more like buyers are to choose other forms of energy and thus, the more those fuel sources will be researched and developed. The only chance of seeing a Doomsday scenario like in that book was if the oil supply vanished over a period of days/weeks/months.

Hobbes

Found the nuclear battery link.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/sep04/0904nuc.html

bonkey

Ummm...this is beginning to look more like something i should punt over to Green Issues. Anyone disagree?

PH01

bonkey wrote:

Ummm...this is beginning to look more like something i should punt over to Green Issues. Anyone disagree?

I kinda disagree, though that Nuclear Battery thing is freaking me out and getting me excited. We've just gone a wee bit off topic talking about alternative fuels.

The political impact of hugely inflated oil prices cannot be overlooked. It effects almost everything from home heating to the stuff that powers fight jets and tanks.
We just need to get back on topic.

Gurgle

The Atlantic Ocean consists 354,700,000 km³ of water(link) , which slides over and back a couple of times a day. Thats a whole lot of energy which can be used very easily to generate electricity.(Yes, using this energy will slow the earths rotation and speed up the process of the moon escaping but it will give us another couple of billion years to come up with another solution before these effects become a problem.)

Also, geo-thermal heat exchange is getting more & more efficient and will probably be the standard form of home heating in a couple of decades.

These methods, and many more, have not been developed to their full potential and probably won't be until the oil starts to run out.

bonkey

PH01 wrote:

The political impact of hugely inflated oil prices cannot be overlooked.

<pedant>
Oh it can...it just shouldn't be
</pedant>

My point is more that it is being overlooked in this thread....which makes this thread more of a Green Issues one. If people want to talk abut what the alternatives are, and so on...it goes there. If they want to talk about what the govts. can/should do about it...it stays here. So far I'm seeing the former.

We just need to get back on topic.

Yup.
I'm giving it to the end of the day to do so.

jc

Sleipnir

Governments have already started to do things about it.
They're making war in order to secure their own oil supplies.
Wait till Alaska and the Poles are raped.

mr_angry

Well, my point was that if the governments of the world opt for photovoltaic arrays, the chances are that the status quo will remain the same. Saudi Arabia is an ideal place for a large array, as is Saharan Africa (Nigeria), and certain areas of the US.

I don't think we'll see never-ending resource wars and conscription.

Captain Trips

mr_angry wrote:

I don't think we'll see never-ending resource wars and conscription.

Ah but when will the "future" really arrive then.

The more worrying thing is plastic stuff, but you can see changes already. E.g., even a kitchen, maybe 10-20 years ago would be a lot of plastic, now it's lots of wood (fashionable?).

Inside our fuel-cell powered Jaguars we will once again have proper wooden dashboards.

Strange that in some futuristic movies, the technology is metals (e.g., Chronicles of Riddick, Stargate and so on).

A more significant problem is how to store medications from those coatings.........going to be a lot of very sick people if no nebuliser things and so on.

Sleepy

Plastic is a recyclable source.

It's been proven that cars can run on vegetable oil and with a few modifications, alcohol, both renewable sources.

The crisis only exists for shareholders of oil companies and the countries whose economies rely on the exportation/refining of crude oil.

But I doubt there's much of a crisis for the oil companies, I'd hazard a fairly hefty wager that they hold the blueprints for the more advanced forms of alcohol/vegetable oil based engines/generators.

bonkey

Moving to Green Issues...clearly people are more interested in discussing the "Greenness" about this issue then the political ramifications.

jc

Capt'n Midnight

OIL runs out.
or affordable oil runs out.

there is a huge difference. many new oil fields have oppened up as oil became more valuable and technology made extraction cheaper.

the oil sands in Canada would keep the world running for a couple of decades once extraction methods are improved.

you can make oil form coal - we've only 400years left (excluding antartica)
Oil burners (not engines) can run on a mix of powdered coal and an emulsifier and water - you loose 4% of the energy to boil the water - but you can use coal as a liquid

most diesel engines will run on peanut butter oil / rendered animal waste / vegetable oil etc. petrol engines with small modifications can run on methane / ethanol / esters / petrol. I'd be fairly sure they'd run on Hydrogen but fuel cells would give up twice the energy content.

No it's simply a price issue, at present oil is the cheapest fuel and is easy to transport, has general acceptance and is quick to refuel and with transport is quick starting.

Improvments in effiency could be made by using hybrid cars with diesel or stirling engines (petrol is not green by any definition).

Even by getting the Yanks to abandon SUV's would reduce the pressure and price of fuel.

Typedef

It's worth noting at this juncture that Nuclear energy is not some magic energy for free technology.

For a start, Uranium is a finite resource, at current rates of Uranium consumption, the global supply of this source of energy will be gone sometime around 2100 !

So a massive global investment in Nuclear energy would be as a last resort, if an alternative to fossil, wasn't found, by the time oil supply simply doesn't exist to meet energy demands.

A reliance on Nuclear fuel is, in my view, going from the pan into the fire, vis-a-vis sustainability.

I think the only real long term solution, an extraordinarly expensive solution it's worth noting, will be space based solar collectors, beaming energy down to earth via weak microwaves.

There's a NASA study consistent with this very energy paradigm.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23mar_1.htm

Capt'n Midnight

Nuclear power.

It can't be safe and economical. The decomission times are too long and we know environmental leglislation will get tougher so costs at end of life will rise. Also breeder reactors claim to increase the supply of fuel by converting uranium to plutonium. Plutonium is so toxic that early on someone suggested using it as a poison rather than go to all the trouble of making a bomb. This means the amount of radioactivity is greater overall so even more waste.

1947 when the US/UK/Canada decided that there was NO safe dose of radiation, that every additional bit increased risk. Again that date 1947 - before many of your parents were born. That is how safe nuclear power is.

Curbing back on energy requirements would be more than half of the battle - imporving insulation would help. In this country you can get Gold Star houses without thermostats that measure room temperature - if instead there were thermostats in each room... Getting Yanks to ditch SUV's...

Microwaves from space - 50% efficiency but not cheap. You'd really need superguns / space elevator to do properly. and they are as likley as a vaccine for the strain of streptococcus (mucans?) that produces the polysaccarides that plaque on your teeth is made of. Look at extracting the energy here first - heating up the planet is probably not the best idea at the moment.

In the UK they can drill deep holes to hot rock, use explosive to fracture the rock between the pipes. You pump down water and out the other pipes comes hot water or steam !

incrememental heating would help - use solar / waste water heat exchange to pre heat water first rather than use fuel to heat the water in a boiler / imersion.

Loved that bit in futurama - Mobil Dick Whale Oil - a renewable resource !

There are also technologies like salt ponds and different algae produce hydrogen and oil !

Sparks

Microwaves from space - 50% efficiency but not cheap. You'd really need superguns / space elevator to do properly.

Er, no. First off, the economic studies put it as cheaper than most of the ground-based systems. Secondly, the plan was to build the satellites with in situ resources, mostly from lunar sources.

mr_angry

I assume you're talking exclusively about fission here guys, since the by-product of nuclear fusion is one helium nucleus, and a neutron - entirely non-toxic.