What happens after the oil is gone?

Hey Rej,There are some really gloomy doomsdayers out there, and there are some "don't worry, everything will be fine" optimists, too. I'm pretty much in the middle, although I sometimes swing back and forth.You seem to be more on the optimistic side. Would you be willing to defend your positions? I'll swing over to the doom-n-gloom view for a while.First, your point about world grain production:

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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.

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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...
http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update27_data.htmConsumption 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?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.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.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.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.Ethanol:
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. All the other renewable, alternative energy sources have the same probelm - negative or only marginally positive Energy Return On Energy Invested. 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).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'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?
Not yet - solar contributes 1% of 6% of the total US energy budget. That's 0.0006
Any policy statements from the federal government? Shouldn't we have a Manhatten Project effort already underway to be ready for the Cheap Oil rollover and decline?[This message has been edited by AdminAsgara, 11-25-2003]

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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. 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.Energy is not the only non-renewable resource involved in food production. 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. Lower levels of organic matter in the soil increase erosion further. Water tables are falling worldwide, soil salinity is rising.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. When the cost of all the agricultural inputs goes up, and the amount of fertilizer required to just to maintain yeilds also increases, due to the other factors mentioned above, it is no wonder global grain harvests are smaller every year. 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.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. 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.But lets use the 125% return figure. How much corn would we need to grow to replace our current oil imports?Assumed corn yield = 122 bu/ac
Ethanol conversion = 2.53 gal/bu
Area currently planted in corn = 80 million acres
Total possible net ethanol yield on today's crop = 322,000 barrels per day (if it was all converted to ethanol)
Total oil imports = about 10 million barrels/dayTo replace our oil imports would require planting 30 times more acres in corn. Such an amount of additional/idle farmland simply does not exist - it is more than the total arable land in the US. Even putting all the marginal farmland into corn production would tip the net energy balance strongly into the negative - yields are, by definition, lower on marginal land.Just to produce the huge amount of additional farm equipment needed to farm 2400 million acres of corn would require a huge investment in energy. Where would we find the farmers?Nuclear:

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Nuclear produces thousands of times more energy than is required to mine, ship, and separate the uranium isotopes.

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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.The same is true of the other non-fossil energy sources, except hydro-electric. That one has the only really good energy return, but is not going to increase enough to make a difference. Photovoltaics, wind, tidal, etc... all have much lower energy returns compared to oil. 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.Loss of topsoil, lack of water for irrigation, and/or increasing salinity has historically been the downfall of every major civilization so far. We are next. The difference this time around is that petroleum has allowed us to vastly overshoot the natural carrying capacity of the Earth. When the oil runs low, we will fall all that much harder, having ballooned up to about 5 billion more than the planet can support.