What happens after the oil is gone?

Running out of oil is essentially a non-issue at this point. Even if we ran out of cheap oil, there's always more expensive oil to dig and pump out. And, new reserves are constantly being found - look at Iran's monster of a find a few months ago.The amount of reserves that are not economically recoverable at current times dwarf those that are. It's an issue of cost. If fuel costs rise enough, even ethanol will become cheaper than oil (not to mention, ethanol is getting cheaper). It's all about how expensive global energy costs will be.Finally, when you start replacing oil for energy generation with fixed power methods (wind, hydro, nuclear, etc which are slowly becoming cheaper), that moves oil from such uses into uses such as transportation, petrochemicals, etc.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

Very little oil takes more energy to pump than it contains. Most oil that is not economically recoverable is just that: it costs too much to produce. That doesn't mean it takes more energy than it produces (and even if it did, that's not necessarily a show stopper, because there are differences between a moble source of fuel such as oil and a fixed source such as nuclear)Any increase in energy costs as a whole reduces production. The more energy costs increase, the more production decreases. Of course this strain's the world's capacity - but that's more of an issue pertaining to overpopulation than fuel. Going up to ethanol prices and shifting land-based energy toward renewable is hardly a show stopper for planet Earth. It just is a temporary setback in human development until efficiency gains recouperate the loss.

quote:

---

Current predictions are for an oil production peak somewhere around 2010, with optimistic estimates closer to 2020

---

Yes, the peak of oil production and the end of the reserves has always been 10-20 years away. They've been giving that distance from the current date since the 1960s. It keeps going back, just as Moore's Law just won't die.

quote:

---

Right now most other "clean" alternatives, if we use them all, would only produce about 30% of the energy needs of our economy.

---

If ethanol was the fuel replacement, the oil companies would switch to producing ethanol en masse. If it was biofuel, they'd use that. Whatever it turned out to be, they'd switch to producing it - and they'd produce *lots* of it.Again, there's plenty of options. Right now, oil is just the cheapest. If oil runs low, other options will be the cheapest. There are more options for creating power than you can shake a stick at - the problem is, in the present day, they just can't beat low-priced oil.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

quote:

---

The problem with that scenario, at least right now, is that how do you think the hydrogen is "produced"? Thats right, oil powered electricity. Without the oil to produce the electricity, there is no production of hydrogen.

---

Actually, it's even worse than that: we strip the hydrogen from the oil itself And our byproduct? CO2! The people who think hydrogen is "free power" don't know what they're talking about. On planet Earth, most hydrogen is locked up in water. It's at an energy state that it wants to be at. To get the hydrogen off of water, you have to put a lot of energy in - more energy than you get back by burning the hydrogen back to the water from whence it came. The only way we can get hydrogen for "free" en masse is from oil.Hydrogen is not an energy source - it is an energy storage method. Oil is an energy source. So are many other things. But hydrogen is not one of them.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

quote:

---

Of course an increase in energy costs reduces production. That was the point I was making. The problem with switching to ethanol is over-population. It isn't a viable alternative. Population even if everyone begins to have just one child per family will still continue to grow for a period of time, and THAT ain't happening. We can't feed the population we have now, much less one that relies on ethanol as a fuel alternative which would reduce available food.

---

Actually, we can feed the population we have now. If our only priority was feeding as many people as possible, we could feed hundreds of billions. However, it isn't, and we don't. 1 ton of grain feeds 2,250 people per day. The world produces about 1,900,000,000 tons of grain per year. That's enough to feed 11 billion people for a year if we weren't wasteful - on grain alone. Most of the farmland in the world is horridly underutilized - methods for farming don't approach the scales of efficiency that we see in the US. Furthermore, as one can see in the middle east, desert can be reclaimed to farmland. Even tundra can be reclaimed for farmland. The only issue is: what are our priorities as a people? Are they driving SUVs, living in urban palaces, jetting off to Cancun for vacation, and launching a new military invasion every 5 years, or are they feeding the world?

quote:

---

And my question still remains whether you "push-back" the oil peak or not.

---

Actually, I've addressed your concern: There are more ways to generate power than you can shake a stick at (in fact, if we really wanted to, we could generate power from shaking sticks ). The issue is cost. And the higher the cost, the lower world production. But it's never going to be some huge calamity; even with ethanol prices (about twice as much as we currently pay for oil for the same amount of energy if I recall correctly, although it's been falling fairly quickly), the world will still get by just fine.

quote:

---

The answer they give is to increase gas power plants, keep fuel standards the same or lower, increase SUV's.

---

Then don't vote Republican.

quote:

---

How long before we can increase the efficiency of the alternatives? Economically I just don't see it happening with alternatives right now. They just are not environmentally/economically viable.

---

If you follow tech news, there's been some great progress. Just ignoring efficiency increases on the usage end (such as hybrid vehicles, which while still a niche market, are becoming more and more popular, and will continue to as oil prices rise - Saturn is even making a hybrid SUV!), there have been some great advances on solar (new alloy solar cells that capture almost a third of sunlight for high-cost ones, and new cheap silicon cells for mass use that produce as much power as you used to have to use expensive alloy cells for); wind (turbines that can withstand storms better so that you can design them to capture more wind; when build, they should start rivalling fossil fuels for efficiency in places); nuclear (we're getting a lot closer to fusion power, which is pretty much endless energy without the extensive nuclear waste); hydroelectric (now people are looking into harvesting energy from oceanic conveyors; also, the first tidal power plants have been built); and even new exotic methods of generating power, such as a solar chimney which not only produces power, but acts as a greenhouse as well.

quote:

---

You may say that, ooh but we have plenty of options, but I am not sure that you have actually looked at the data.

---

I've actually followed this quite closely. For some background, my father is a vice president of Motiva (an oil company), and I myself used to be the coordinator for Iowans For Peace (so I'm of course incredibly concerned about the US's dependency on foreign oil). I have background on both sides of the issue, and as such, have researched fairly extensively.It's all about what our priorities are going to be. And it's going to be quite a while before oil prices overtake current ethanol prices - in fact, it's far more likely that ethanol prices will *fall* to oil prices than the other way around.P.S. - you may be interested in this, it's been fairly widely reported about: Thermal Depolymerization Process (it first made its fame from an article in Nature). I've done my research on it (I've actually made calls to some of the companies who are using it), and it seems to be quite legitimate. Turn most organic waste streams into oil - nice, eh?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 11-13-2003]

Ah, some intelligence and hard data in the debate. Let's begin.

quote:

---

Here's a very revealing chart that shows that consumption has, indeed, exceeded 1900 million tons, but production topped out at 1880 million tons in 1997. We have run a deficit for four years straight...

​

Consumption grows every year, but increasing production seems out of our reach at the moment. Could this be because 60 years of petrochemical fertilizers have boosted yields far beyond the long-term carrying capacity of the soil?

---

That's a very short-term and seemingly insignificant decline; I doubt it would show up with any sort of statistical significance. We need a lot more data before we can show that we're actually in any sort of chronic deficit as opposed to yearly fluctuations. Grain has 3,500 calories per kilo, so 1 metric ton provides 3,500,000 calories and an english ton has about 2,800,000 calories. With 11 billion people, that would put about 1300 calories per person from grain alone; a sustinence level just from current grain production. The main issue is waste (such as feeding cattle, a very inefficient use of calories). This assumes no growth, something I find very doubtful.

quote:

---

If oil is peaking, then cheap fertilizers will be a thing of the past. Food production will undoubtedly fall drastically if the poorer nations are unable to afford fertilizer. Look at the agricultural record of North Korea and Cuba when they lost access to ammonia fertilizers produced by fossil fuels.

---

How much did U.S. agricultural products rise in price in the 1970s during the embargo? I don't recall the exact numbers, but it wasn't devastating - certainly nothing to hold a great deal of fear over.Also, it all depends on the cost of energy as a whole, which will be determined by how much alternative energy sources advance during the time period; they have a (reasonably) long time, and have been advancing at a very fast rate.

quote:

---

One could reasonably argue that modern agriculture is a convoluted and inefficient way to convert fossil fuel calories into sugars, fats and proteins. Declining oil production equals declining food production. Hubbert's bell curve of oil will be followed quickly by a population bell curve.

---

According to here, farm energy use in the US is about 1% of the US's total energy use - a pretty trival amount. Fertilizer and transportation are another 1.9% - still rather small. Again, most of our energy and industrial production goes into "wasteful" luxuries.

quote:

---

Your point about reclaiming farmland from deserts and tundra:
Both require large amounts of energy, mostly the high quality forms of petroleum, and desert agriculture requires water.

---

It depends. As I showed, at least in the US most of our energy, by far, has nothing to do with agriculture. So again, it's all about priorities. Desert ag. has been managing pretty well in places that have used it (israel and the occupied terrotories, for example). There's always options such as desalinization as well, yet another technology that has been making great advancements.

quote:

---

Water shortages will soon return much of the Americal Midwest back to steppe and desert. The Ogallala aquifer is nearly tapped out. Same story in China and India. Those fossil water reserves require large amounts of fossil fuels to pump them to the surface, too.

---

Concerning Ogallala, punish Texas Texas has tons of other sources of freshwater, and yet overuses Ogallala severely. Also, Texas mostly uses it for cotton, a less essential food product (and very water intensive) (we're back to the
priorities issue). States like Nebraska actually recharge Ogallala more than they use it. Also, I don't think Ogallala qualifies as a "fossil water reserve", as it does get recharged (albeit not as fast as some states use it); Saudi Arabia's water, however, is - it's water trapped between a layer of rock, from prehistoric times.I don't know enough about China and India's water use, although I think few would dispute the term "overpopulated" to describe those countries

quote:

---

I have yet to see a serious study of ethanol that finds the net energy out to be greater than the energy inputs required to produce it.

---

That's a common, and long disproven myth - sorry. It's based on very outdated, and often incorrect information. Here's a list of references:Renewable Industries Canada (RICanada) for a richer and cleaner Canada
http://www.cleanfuelsdc.org/issues/newUSDA_studies.htm
Stromvergleich umsonst - Kostenloser Stromanbieter Vergleich
Preliminary Evaluation of the Potential  of Ethanol Production from Sugarcane
USDA ERS - Error PageIn the US, ethanol is currently produces about 24% more energy than we put into it - and we use rather inefficient methods compared to what is possible ( we could get upwards of 70% more if needed, using current tech alone - and that's from corn ethanol, not cellulose ethanol, which is even better).Even if it *did* take more energy to make than it produces, there's another advantage: ethanol can be produced from converting a non-mobile source of energy (such as burning agricultural waste - dried corn plants, for example) to a mobile source (ethanol). You can't put corn husks in your gas tank, but you can burn them to heat a vat for cooking up ethanol or for running a steam-powered grinder. The agricultural waste's energy would otherwise be fed to bacteria, instead of being productive for humanity.

quote:

---

All the other renewable, alternative energy sources have the same probelm - negative or only marginally positive Energy Return On Energy Invested.

---

Not even remotely true. They produce more expensive energy because of the cost of building the generation system, but not more energy - not even remotely close. Nuclear produces thousands of times more energy than is required to mine, ship, and separate the uranium isotopes. Hydroelectric pretty much ran the Northwest's entire power grid for a while after Grand Coulee Dam was built (it's kind of silly to think that a plant that produces 825 megawatts, and has run for over 60 years, would take more energy to build than it produces). Even solar cells, due to how thin modern silicon cells are, are rather cheap (and there's cheaper methods on the horizon, such as solar furnaces).

quote:

---

There is no other widely available energy source that can match Cheap Oil and Cheap Gas (meaning the easy stuff we have already pumped first) for its EROEI (50 or more).

---

Corrections:1) "That can match it for price"
and
2) "That can Currently match it for price"

quote:

---

Our econony and culture are built on exponential growth. The fuel of that growth is exponentially increasing amounts of plentiful, cheap energy. If the production of the remaining oil, gas, nuclear and renewable sources cannot maintain that exponential rate of increase, as they have in the past, then the economy will just stop growing, or even decline.

---

That is true. Economic strength is directly tied to energy cost. But very little of our economy goes to producing food, and we often spend a lot of our food towards feeding meat.

quote:

---

That's the bad news, but I agree there is hope from technological advances for improving the EROEI of renewables and ramping up their deployment. But is there any movement in that direction?

---

Movement will come when it's cheaper than oil - i.e., when its price drops, or oil's rises. We need to look at efficiencies.

quote:

---

Shouldn't we have a Manhatten Project effort already underway to be ready for the Cheap Oil rollover and decline?

---

Yes. But we won't get it from Bush. Did you see their recent energy policy? It's a disgrace BTW, read about solar chimneys. Neat idea, eh? They don't mention it, but they also double as greenhouses. There are so many great projects being worked on right now, it's hard to be pessimistic... they've got tidal power working in places, there's the amazing solar cell advances that are in the labs right now (and some are going into production), there's been great progress on fusion, there's the Thermal Depolymerization Process, there's wind turbines whose blades bend in the wind (allowing for much lighter and cheaper turbines), biofuels are dropping in price, there's oceanic conveyor power on the horizon.... Once we get cheap access to space, there's even more options that become good. That's why I don't see any major problem.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 11-15-2003]

quote:

---

Your idea of "insignificant decline" must be different from mine. The world has used up more than half of its grain reserves in the last few years of poor harvests. When/if the remaining reserves run out in a few years, will that be enough data to demonstrate a serious problem?

---

Your data on the world's grain reserves? You showed a graph of consumption vs. production, showing a minor dip in the past couple years.

quote:

---

quote:

---

How much did U.S. agricultural products rise in price in the 1970s during the embargo? I don't recall the exact numbers, but it wasn't devastating - certainly nothing to hold a great deal of fear over.

---

​

This is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The oil embargo did not reduce oil consumption in the US. Per capita oil consumption actually increased during the decade.

---

Oil prices remained high after the embargo until the mid 1980s; this led to world oil consumption falling from 41 million barrels per day in 1979 to less than 34 million barrels per day in 1985. I'd call that a decrease. ("The Politics and Limitations of Economic Leverage", Robert D. Hormats)

quote:

---

As did food production. Everything is easier when you apply more cheap energy to a problem. With declining energy consumption, food production will fall. North Korea is the prime example.

---

North Korea is a prime example of a horribly run economy where all of the resources are dedicated to the military. If you look at the world as a whole during the Arab oil embargo, production did fine.

quote:

---

Topsoil is eroding faster than it is created by weathering. Farmland is lost to development. The nutrient levels of the soil are falling faster than synthetic fertilizers can replace them.

---

I'll agree to the first part. I haven't seen anything remotely conclusive about the second part.

quote:

---

Water tables are falling worldwide, soil salinity is rising.

---

That's completely regional. In certain levels, water is falling, in others it's rising. There is a concern when places (such as Saudi Arabia) overuse a relatively non-renewable resource, but in the US, our water is renewable.

quote:

---

We are now totally dependent on fertilizers produced by non-renewable fossil fuels.It is true that agriculture directly consumes only a small amount of petroleum, but the embodied energy in all the inputs and infrastructure is considerable.

---

I included those inputs in my last post; it's still a tiny percentage. It's not at threat at all.

quote:

---

it is no wonder global grain harvests are smaller every year.

---

Only in the last few years. It's a statistically irrelevant fluctuation - you'll need at least 5-10 more years to have any sort of relevancy.

quote:

---

Yields per acre have increased, as knowledge and technology increase, but the total number of acres inevitably declines, as soil erosion, development, water shortages, and salinization remove farmland from production every year.

---

Not true - you're not factoring in new acreage that comes into usage due to better farming methods and technologies.

quote:

---

Your data about ethanol proves my point exactly. Ethanol produces marginally more energy than is required to produce it, when measured by some people. Measured by others, it does not break even.

---

"Measured by others" - you mean by people who incorrectly use out of date information. My father works in the oil industry, directly competes with ethanol, and hates the government-mandated ethanol subsidies - and still admits that they produce well more energy than goes into them. In short, if you're willing to use incorrect, horribly out of date information, then be my guest in continuing to state that it has less energy than goes into making it.

quote:

---

From your links, the study that showed the worst energy return (Pimental) was the only one to include the energy costs of the steel for the tractors, concrete, and other infrastructural elements. So the positive return of 25% ignores some of the total energy costs.

---

They're also using current, inefficient ethanol production tech. Which is advancing very quickly. By the way, Pimental is an *oppnent* of ethanol.

quote:

---

But lets use the 125% return figure. How much corn would we need to grow to replace our current oil imports?

---

Your calculations are completely incorrect.1) You don't burn ethanol to produce ethanol. You burn agricultural waste - energy that would get wasted anyway (ok, in some places they burn other non-mobile sources such as coal, but rarely ever do you have oil or gas-fired ethanol plants, and I've never heard of an ethanol-burning ethanol plant. Also, some use energy from decomposition - such as methane from manure). As a general rule, though, you get near 100% of the energy yield from the ethanol at the plant end, and only have the costs of production/maintinence of farm equipment and fertilizer.2) Ethanol conversion ratios are also rising. The USDA has a lab process which converts the outer fibrous layer of corn as well to raise rates to 2.8; in Wisconsin, a test bed is underway that uses whey (a waste product of cheese making) in with the corn to increase yield to 3.3 gallons per bushel. In early experimentation are processes that turn all kinds of agricultural waste itself into ethanol.This means that there's an *actual* yield of 6 to 6 1/2 million barrels of ethanol per day. The US averaged 10.6 million barrels of oil per day in 2001. Gasoline has 114100 BTUs per gallon; ethanol has about 80,000 for the same mass (which takes up a larger volume, but mass is what is critical here). Thus, the US is importing about 2.25 times more energy than its corn (alone - ignoring all other renewables source) is worth. However, about 70 of US corn right now goes to livestock feed (as does over 50% of all of our grain). So, right now, if we were to cut our consumption of meat for more efficient food energy sources, we could cut our oil imports by a quarter to a third - with *current* technology levels (which are continually advancing).As I've mentioned several times, the world isn't at threat - only our current priorities.

quote:

---

That is only part of the total energy required. When you include the other energy costs, it is positive by only a factor of 5 or 10 - much worse than oil.

---

Nuclear power is far cheaper than oil. The cost of enrichment is only about 6% of the generation costs, and most of our enrichment is done with outdated gasseous diffusion equipment (even Russia uses more modern equipment than us). The main limitations with nuclear power are people's resistance to using it. Mining uranium? We actually almost get more of it as a byproduct of phosphate mining (used in fertilizers!) than we use. And even fission power is advancing well. Probably the biggest hindrance to that is the fact that we actually have is ample *surplus capacity* in the US and much of the rest of the industrialized world when it comes to nuclear power, due to overspeculation in the 1970s.

quote:

---

Photovoltaics, wind, tidal, etc... all have much lower energy returns compared to oil.

---

Correct (although, again, they're advancing incredibly fast). Again, it's a matter of priorities.

quote:

---

That means our future energy economy will be much different than it is today. If we don't get to work investing our current plentiful oil into the low-return renewable sources, we will also have a much bleaker future. Less energy means less food means less people. Fewer people will be achieved by means of war, famine, and pestilence.

---

No. Less energy means less SUVs and less Gulfstream 4's. We'll only get war, famine, and pestilence during a time of reduced energy if Republicans control all branches of our government. It's really about priorities. I think you strongly underestimate the rate of advancement in technology - the very tech that has allowed us to get this far, and keeps increasing by leaps and bounds. I suggest you read up on recent advancements in the fields that I mentioned before we discuss this further - need links?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."