Climate Change and Infrastructure

Posted on July 26, 2012 by

Matthew Wald. 25 July 2012. Weather Extremes Leave Parts of U.S. Grid Buckling. New York Times.

From highways in Texas to nuclear power plants in Illinois, the concrete, steel and sophisticated engineering that undergird the nation’s infrastructure are being taxed to worrisome degrees by heat, drought and vicious storms.

Airports: a jet got stuck in asphalt softened by 100-degree temperatures

Culverts: 2,000 culvets were damanged by Hurricane Irene in Vermont

Electric power: down all the time now that extreme weather has become common due to climate change, storms from the June 29 “derecho” storm alone left 4.3 million customer without electricity

Levees: Billions are being spent on New Orleans levees

Nuclear Power Plants: Chicago needed special permission to keep a plant running since the pond it uses to cool with had gone above mandated limits, another plant had to shut down because the water used had gone down so much the intake pipe was high and dry

Rail: heat derailed a train by stretching a track so much that it kinked

Roads: In east texas, heat and drought SHRUNK rich clay soils beneath roadbeads, causing them to crack horrendously.  Northeast & Midwest: high heat causes highways to EXPAND and POP UP, creating jarring, potentially hazardous speed bumps.

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Drought and the Food Supply

Posted on July 26, 2012 by

Lesk, C. January 7, 2016. Influence of extreme weather disasters on global crop production. Nature.  

Drought and extreme heat events slashed cereal harvests in recent decades by 9% to 10% on average in affected countries with the greatest impact in North America, Europe, and Australasia.
The impact from droughts grew larger in the period from 1985 to 2007.

“We have always known that extreme weather causes crop production losses,” said senior author Navin Ramankutty, professor of global food security and sustainability at UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability. “But until now we did not know exactly how much global production was lost to such extreme weather events, and how they varied by different regions of the world.”

Production levels in the more technically advanced agricultural systems of North America, Europe, and Australasia dropped by an average of 19.9% because of droughts – roughly double the global average.

“Across the breadbaskets of North America, for example, the crops and methods of farming are very uniform across huge areas, so if a drought hits in a way that is damaging to those crops, they will all suffer,” says first author Corey Lesk, a recent graduate of McGill’s Department of Geography. “By contrast, in much of the developing world, the cropping systems are a patchwork of small fields with diverse crops. If a drought hits, some of those crops may be damaged, but others may survive.

Annie Lowrey. 25 Jul 2012. Severe Drought Seen as Driving Cost of Food Up.  New York Times.

Scorching heat and the worst drought in nearly a half-century are threatening to send food prices up, spooking consumers and leading to worries about global food costs.

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Natural Gas — How Much is Left in the USA?

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Although there’s been a fracking boom for shale gas in America, many are skeptical.   We need local gas since it’s very expensive to import from overseas sources like Qatar, and we’re competing with other nations for delivery, which drives the price up even further.

But North American gas can be stranded since it is very expensive to build pipelines to — at least 1 million dollars per mile, so vast pools in Alaska are likely to remain untapped.  Gas to liquid conversion in Alaska is so energy-intensive that that’s not viable either.

And don’t forget that all of our millions of miles of energy pipelines and other infrastructure are rusting, cracking, and increasing metal fatigue.  Greg Tosi at the Nace Advocate, a group promoting awareness of corrosion control, said “Without energy infrastructure, nothing moves and America stops working. The nation’s energy supply lines are as critical as America’s highway and bridge network. Corrosion is a leading reason for the deteriorating condition of America’s critical network of electrical power, pipelines, water systems, bridges, roads, and hazardous materials facilities. It is far too expensive to rebuild all of these critical infrastructure assets. We must preserve and extend the useful life of our national infrastructure. To solve America’s infrastructure problems, corrosion must be addressed”.

Then there’s the Liebig’s Law of the Minimum affecting natural gas extraction, as Robert Magyar’s points out in his excellent July 19, 2012 article Near drought conditions impacting Marcellus shale gas drilling

Record breaking drought in the USA that is likely to grow worse is affecting our ability to extract shale gas, which consumes a huge amount of water:

“Fracking a well” according to Chesapeake Energy, requires 4.5 million gallons per well. Fracking may occur more than once on a well, so a shale gas “pad site” might have 10 horizontal fracking well veins or bores. So just one site might consume over 45 million million gallons of clean water to crack open the shale and release the natural gas trapped inside. Given how the shale gas industry hides the details of its operations, the water use per fracked well might be much higher than what’s publicly state.

Ecological price  

This is never taken into consideration by economists, because it would slow down the looting by private individuals of a resource that belongs to all of us (that’s why oil and natural gas are nationalized in 90% of the world’s countries, we’re way too stupid to do that here thanks to 1% propaganda and control of the political and economic system).  Magyar points out that everyone’s focused on polluted drinking water and ignoring the clean water used to frack, the millions of gallons of energy burned by trucks to get to and from the fracking sites, and the cost to get rid of the toxic water produced.

The costs of fracking are so much higher than the price of natural gas that this can’t keep going much longer

“A number of oil and gas industry experts estimate extraction costs as well above $4.00 per million British thermal units (MBTU) of produced shale gas in a market today only willing to pay $2.87 MBTU. Some in the industry believe extraction costs are exceeding $6.00 MBTU, more than double the price the market is paying today. Recently the CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson complained, “We are losing our shirt.” when talking about the cost to extract the shale gas to what the market is willing to pay for it.”

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Liebig’s Law Of the Minimum

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Liebig’s Law of the Minimum originally applied to plants, which require 21 nutrients — if any of them are missing the plant won’t grow to it’s full potential, or not be able to grow at all.  It’s similar to the old aphorism “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”.  World-wide, agriculture depends on natural gas based fertilizers 5.5 billion people are alive now because they’ve quintupled agricultural production.

Yet in most of the world, we’re running on empty with natural gas, despite the much touted shale gas revolution.

Shale gas production is down due to drought, because producing natural gas this way requires enormous amounts of water, 45 to 50 million sof gallons per site to crack open the shale and release the trapped natural gas.  Since the shale industry is so secretive, it could be even more than that amount of water.

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History of Drought in America since 1899 – Worst ever now

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

The dust bowls of the 1950s were worse than the famous dust bowls of the Great Depression.  The conditions for a new dust bowl are happening again, only this time we’ve cut down the trees so that 27 ton tractors can plow for miles before having to turn around — there are few trees to block the dust from flying or being washed away in storms.  You need six inches of topsoil to grow food, and Iowa has gone from an average of 18 inches to 9 inches over the past century — this used to take civilizations 1,500 years to accomplish, but we’ve done it in record time.

We’ve also drained the Ogallala aquifer (174,000 square miles, one of the world’s largest) so much, that it’s too expensive to pump to the surface in many areas.  Which has led to millions of acres of farm land being abandoned.  This is all land that that could start to blow away and overlay good, prime farmland further East.

John Eligon. 19 Jul 2012. Widespread Drought is Likely to Worsen. New York Times.

The drought that has settled over more than half of the continental United States this summer is the most widespread in more than half a century. And it is likely to grow worse.

The latest outlook released by the National Weather Service on Thursday forecasts increasingly dry conditions over much of the nation’s breadbasket, a development that could lead to higher food prices and shipping costs as well as reduced revenues in areas that count on summer tourism.

NYT image “Drought’s Footprint” source National Climactic Data Center, national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Extinction has Nearly Happened Before: The Human Bottleneck

Posted on July 21, 2012 by

Sam Kean. 19 Jul 2012.  Blogging the Human Genome Entry 10: The chromosomal evidence that mankind nearly went extinct.  Slate.com

Take your pick for the cause of our near-extinction—ice ages, plagues, Indonesian gigavolcanoes. But humans have far less genetic diversity than most other species, and the most reasonable explanation for this is a genetic bottleneck: a severe reduction in the population of humans in the past, perhaps multiple times. One study suggested that our population, worldwide, might have dropped as low as 40 adults. (The world record for fitting people in a phone booth is 25.) That’s an outlandishly pessimistic guess even among disaster scientists, but it’s common to find estimates of a few thousand adults, below what some minor league baseball teams draw. Consider that these humans might not have been united in one place, but scattered into small, isolated pockets around Africa, and things look even shakier for our future. Had the Endangered Species Act existed way back when, human beings might have been the equivalent of pandas and condors.

Read more about the human bottleneck here: Wikipedia. Population Bottleneck.

My comment:

Analysis of our genome has revealed we probably went through a time when we were reduced to a population between 40 and 15,000.  If we reach such low numbers again from all of the factors in Collapse and some or all of the 9 boundaries being crossed, and other potential extinction events and damage to the ecosystem, it could be harder to survive this time around.

However bleak the world was during the last bottleneck, it wasn’t too hot, poisoned by chemicals, and didn’t have acidic oceans killing off life on the bottom of the food chain.  There’s some speculation that the survivors lived along the ocean and were able to survive by eating shellfish and seafood.  That won’t work this time around because shellfish are the first to go in acidic oceans (they can’t make shells), and we’ve consumed a lot of the world’s fish to the point that we’re eating the sardines and anchovies that fish depend on to survive, further weakening their wild populations.

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Methane’s potential for another major extinction event

Posted on July 17, 2012 by

June 22, 2016. As Alaska warms, methane emissions appear stable, study finds. phys.org.

Excerpts:

One reason no increase has been seen may be that “Bacteria that produce methane and bacteria that consume methane will both become more active as temperatures get warmer,” said Steven Wofsy of Harvard University and co-author of the study. “Our study suggests that over the past 30 years, these processes have balanced out in the study area.”

Analysis of nearly three decades of air samples from Alaska’s North Slope shows little change in long-term methane emissions despite significant Arctic warming over that time period, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

In the new study, researchers from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder, NOAA, NASA and other university partners examined 29 years of continuous, precision measurements of atmospheric methane and other gases from the NOAA Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, which is part of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network.

Reg Morrison. 18 Mar 2012. The Climate Debate Is global warming real? Here’s a fresh look at an old argument.   http://regmorrison.edublogs.org

You should go to the link above, it’s got great PHOTOS and a whole lot more information.

EVOLUTION’S SHOTGUN  Few are aware that the moderate climate we enjoy is largely a by-product of four billion years of bacterial activity. Even more poorly understood is the fact that one particular group of bacteria played a fundamental role in the evolution of life on Earth, and continues to do so. These are the principle producers of the crucial greenhouse gas, methane (CH4). They are among the world’s oldest life-forms, and without the injection of their heat-retentive waste gas into the young planet’s primitive atmosphere, Earth may have remained relatively lifeless. In considering the role played by these methane generators (methanogens) we need to be aware of methane’s greenhouse potential. Its four hydrogen atoms make it a reactive gas with a relatively short life, and it is commonly said to be some 20–23 times more heat-absorbent than carbon dioxide. But this figure only refers to its average potency over a time span of 100 years. Rarely mentioned, however, is the fact that during methane’s first decade in the atmosphere it has more than 70 times the potency of CO2, and during its first five years it has at least 100 times the greenhouse impact of CO2. Also neglected is the fact that vast quantities of methane are imprisoned in innumerable icy cages all around the world—in frozen tundra bogs and on the semi-frozen seabeds that fringe most of the world’s continental land masses. Commonly known as hydrates, these icy gas reservoirs alone hold some 3,000 times the volume of CH4 in the atmosphere. In an evolutionary sense this vast stockpile of potent bacterial gas represents one of evolution’s most effective culling mechanisms. There is strong evidence to suggest that eruptions of methane from this vast reservoir have contributed to massive extinction events several times in the past. It now appears that the sharp rise in the average global temperature over the past 30 years has once again begun to destabilise these hydrates, allowing this potent bacterial gas to escape into the seas and into the atmosphere.

METHANE RELEASE  The massive reserves of bacterial methane that become trapped in marine and tundra ices for long periods of geological time may well represent the ultimate climate-control mechanism for the whole planet. There is good geological and biological evidence to suggest that there have been three or four occasions in the past when eruptions of methane into the atmosphere have sent global temperatures soaring upwards. On each of these occasions the geological and fossil record indicates an increase in atmospheric CO2 and a slow temperature rise, followed by an abrupt warming that can only be accounted for by a massive release of methane. Ominously, each of these methane eruptions also coincides with a mass extinction of life.

Humans are releasing methane too. Methane CO2+CH4 = Climate Chaos.  General waste (landfill), Coal & Gas mining, Flood Irrigation, Cattle &  Sheep

HYDRATES  Many marine hydrates are locked in place by the icy abyssal currents that are generated by the sinking of cold, dense saltwater in polar regions. These abyssal currents gradually girdle the planet before surfacing and returning to their polar birthplace. This global circulation system is known as the thermohaline current. So long as these cold abyssal currents continue to flow, the world’s sea-floor hydrates generally remain frozen and stable. But whenever rising temperatures thaw the polar icecaps to any significant degree, the boyant melt-water pools on the surface, inhibiting the driving mechanism that runs the world’s thermohaline circulation system. This allows wind-driven fingers of warm surface water to reach down to the sea floor and release the methane from its icy cage. The last time this appears to have happened was about 55 million years ago, when according to the geological record, a discharge of 1,200–2,500 gigatons of methane caused a temperature spike of 8°– 10°C in polar regions and brought lush redwood forest to northern Greenland. Such polar warmth generated a deep-ocean temperature rise of 5–7°C in high latitudes, and appears to have switched off the the world’s thermohaline circulation starving the inert abyssal waters of oxygen. The carbon-loaded acidified seas caused a mass extinction of marine foraminifera. The temperature spike that occurred at this time appears to have been vastly greater and more abrupt than could possibly have been generated by the gradual rise in atmospheric CO2 that preceded it.1 The global temperature has risen almost 30 times faster than this during the past 30 years.

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Hirsch predicts Oil Shocks by 2017, panic, and stock market crash

Posted on July 13, 2012 by

I believe oil shocks could lead to a FAST CRASH

Robert L. Hirsch was the author of the first US government report on peak oil in 2005, which recommended taking action to mitigate Peak Oil at least 20 years before oil peaked.  World-wide conventional oil production peaked in 2005, the year of the report.  Here we are 9 years later and nothing’s been done. Perhaps shale oil and gas have delayed the day of reckoning a few years though.

I don’t think the mitigation measures proposed by Hirsch would have worked because of peak coal, EROEI of tar sands, etc., but there are other actions we could have taken, such as beefing up organic agriculture departments at universities and funding scholarships, infrastructure improvements, and so on.

Hirsch has written that the tragedies the Peak Oil community is concerned about will begin when transportation fuel declines since 98% of transportation depends on oil: tractors, trucks, railroads, airplanes, cars, etc.

The author’s prediction of oil shocks coming within the next 4 years could bring on a FAST CRASH given what they predict will happen based on the 1973 & 1979 oil shocks:

  • A sudden awakening and rapidly spreading panic, disorientation, significant emotional shock, and insecurity
  • Stock markets crash as fear and panic rush people to sell to minimize their losses, and continue to sell as global depression sets in
  • Immediate fuel shortages as people and businesses top off their gasoline, long gasoline lines, continuing shortages
  • A rapid onset of recession that will get worse every year for at least 10 years because it will take at least that long to try to ramp up tar sands, enhanced oil recovery, and the other mitigation measures Hirsch proposes (which won’t do much good if the decline rate is over 4%, other experts believe it will be double that or more)
  • Large increases in fuel prices due to much higher oil prices for gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, jet fuel.
  • Prices could go up 100-300% if there are no price controls.
  • Layoffs, increasing unemployment, service cancellations
  • Difficult commuting due to high gasoline prices & growing shortages
  • Declining real estate prices in areas far from work or public/mass transit.  Vacation & entertainment areas hit hard.
  • Increasing inflation due to much higher oil prices & shortages (I disagree, deflation first — prices can go up in a deflation for scarce essential items, then who knows what…perhaps inflation once all the debts are wrung out of the system.)
  • Declining world trade
  • Chaos and social unrest
  • Gas station closings
  • Public anger, impatience, confusion, desperation
  • Government confusion, unpreparedness & deadlock
  • Rationing by industry/government
  • Fuel theft and hoarding
  • Scapegoating and blaming, a public hunt for “the guilty”. Likely oil companies will be among those seen as being to blame
  • Localization.  California trucks won’t be bringing fresh fruit to the rest of the nation, it will have be grown locally and seasonally across the nation

I think oil shocks will be spun as financial crashes, until they can’t be denied

The German government commissioned a Peak Oil study that stated awareness of peak oil would bring on world-wide market crashes and other dire consequences.

Depressions brought on by financial crashes can also lead to social unrest and further stock market and bank unwinding. But a financial crash at least appears to be “fixable”.  If the public had an awareness of peak oil, that’s the End Of The World As We Know It and would not only exacerbate the financial crash but create greater social unrest, panic, and confusion.

High oil prices accounted for 11 of the past 12 recessions.  High oil prices brought on the 2008 crash as well.  Due to deflationary oil prices (people assumed if Peak Oil were real the prices would have gone up even more), fraudulent banking and Wall Street shenanigans, and hype that shale oil and natural gas would make us energy independent, people stopped worrying. Membership in Transition fell off, many peak oil groups stopped meeting, and the end of theoildrum further calmed nearly some of the very few people who were paying attention.

What I wonder is how much longer can awareness be delayed?  Yergin can always be trotted out with happy talk about the several centuries of oil we haven’t bothered to get yet in the arctic, tar sands, Brazil, deep ocean, and so on.

The system is so fragile now that very little is needed to push it over the edge even without an oil shock.  Another Euro crisis, an earthquake in Los Angeles or Tokyo, bank failures, revolution in Saudi Arabia, China’s real estate bubble popping, terrorists setting off a dirty bomb in New York City, a pandemic like the 1918 flu would do it and dozens of other possible scenarios.

What I can’t work out is if it would ever be in the interest of the wealthy or government to crash the system ahead of an oil shock to drive demand down even further to keep Business As Usual going for the wealthy and upper middle class.  We know from the 2008 crash that demand for oil was greatly reduced as people cut back on personal and business trips, unemployed people stopped driving to work, telecommuting has increased, businesses failed, and more jobs were off-shored. Hirsch says that a drop in demand will not delay the onset of decline, so that wouldn’t work for long.

But awareness has to come at some point.  Rationing would do it, though then  the Chinese or some other enemy would be blamed for buying up most of the oil (and ability to take out our electric grid and other infrastructure with cyberattacks).   So when Hirsch predicts an oil shock by 2017, I wonder if he thinks that even a 3-4% decline can’t be hidden from the public?  I think anything and everything will be tried to avoid a general public awareness.

If there’s an oil shock and it can’t be hidden, then it will be like a switch flipped, within a few months times get really hard (they already are many places, people in cities aren’t aware of how much suffering is going on), and then for decades it just keeps going down hill.

If the depletion rate is over 3 or 4%, that will be a disaster 

If the depletion rate is less than 1%, the problems are manageable.  If it’s over 3-4% it will be a catastrophe (Klare says it’s 9%).  The decline isn’t only geological, the rates are worsened by bad oil field management, inadequate investment, poor and selfish governments.  Also, as populations grow in oil producing nations, more and more is consumed by the citizens, leaving less oil to export.  Nations may also want to slow down exports so their only source of revenue lasts for future generations.

No matter what, decline will result in:

  • A decline in living standards
  • Severe political difficulties
  • Obsolescence of Capital Equipment (I think this means that if there’s no oil to run factories, tractors, trucks, cars, forklifts, etc., then just about anything with a combustion engines suddenly becomes obsolete)

The world relies on just 13 giant fields for 25% of its oil.  16 of the 20 largest giants are past peak production and in decline.  15 nations produce 75% of the oil that 200 other nations consume.  This is not a stable situation for either price or security.

The crash of 2008 also stopped hundreds of billions of dollars being invested in oil drilling and exploration, which will create a future oil shock as current investments run dry.

But so far the price of oil doesn’t reflect how valuable it is, prices are more driven by the value of the dollar, what’s going on int he Middle East, economic outlook, weather, inventories, etc.

How we’ve come so close to the precipice without preparation

  1. Ignorance of energy basics is widespread. Since energy has been reliably available and inexpensive, most people have spent time and effort on other things
  2. Incompetence for all the reasons it exists
  3. Intellectual rigidity. People are so tied to history and their training they don’t see other technologies require different thinking
  4. Short-term thinking so attention is only paid to immediate concerns
  5. Self-interest, often connected to a person’s job. If realities were publicly understood then a company or environmental organization might suffer, so self-interest leads to less than full disclosure and smoke screen lobbying
  6. Conspiracy among people and organizations to protect their common turf, which leads to all of them working to obscure inconvenient truths.
  7. Powerful, articulate people and organizations deny there’s a problem, or if there is, it won’t happen for decades.  Don’t worry they say, or we’ll handle whatever happens. Who can blame people for embracing their optimisitc point of view, and worries have declined once oil prices went down a bit and remained stable since early 2009.
  8. It’s not obvious that a civilization changing problem is at hand to decision makers or the public
  9. There are too many other problems — the recession, unemployment, foreclosures, and more
  10. Decision makers want clarity, a clear path before taking action. When oil prices dropped, it was back again to “don’t worry”
  11. The situation is unprecedented: The world has never faced a problem like the decline in world oil production (slide 25).
  12. also see Why do political and economic leaders deny Peak Oil and Climate Change?

No action will be taken until the public is aware and can’t deny it

By then it will be too late to avoid serious consequences.  Here are some scenarios of how public awareness might happen:

  • Oil prices shoot to high prices after the recession and oil shortages occur.  Recovery would stop and another recession would hit.  At some threshold enough people will be hurting financially enough that they will recognize “peak oil” is here.
  • A political leader outside the USA announces the problem. If this happened, there’d be a plan to deal with it announced as well.  This would create a sudden and panic that would spread around the world. If this happened the “U.S. Government would be caught with its pants down” and appear to be unprepared.
  • The President of the United States announces the problem. Very unlikely “because recent Administrations have known about the issue and denied it”.  It’s also unlikely because all of the “solutions” would be fossil fuel based (see my summary of the Hirsch 2005 DOE Peak Oil study).

Coping

Rationing has many issues. The prices of goods and services, national economic growth, there will be losers and winners, lobbyists will try to get favors for their clients, how to prevent fraud, and so on (pp 86 & 87.  Also see my summary of the 1980 oil rationing plan.

Upgrade heavy oil so vehicles can use it. Transportation uses 75% of all the oil refined, the other heavy 25% is used in power plant boilers, the petrochemical industry, home heating oil, etc.  If we can upgrade the heavy, non-transportation fuel so we can use it in trucks and other vehicles, that would help.

Increased CAFE standards.  The problem is that after every recession from high oil prices, fewer vehicles are produced because fewer people can afford them. So whatever increase in mileage there is will be offset by lower vehicle sales (Hirsch’s 2005 peak oil study expected a much higher contribution from higher efficiency vehicles).  The median lifetime of vehicles is autos 13, light trucks 14, heavy trucks 18, aircraft 22.  To replace them would cost trillions of dollars that the American public doesn’t have and that the U.S. government can’t afford to subsidize.

Heavy Oil & Tar Sands: Because of high viscosity these don’t flow out of the ground like the sweet oil we’ve mostly used up. Heavy oil and tar sands are very expensive to because they have lots of impurities that need to be removed. It’s not easy to ramp up the Canadian tar sands because there’s limited natural gas, the climate is extremely hostile, and requires enormous amounts of water.

Coal-to-liquids.  You can see what he says on pages 122-123.  Many of these plants would be built outside of the USA.  Given that we’re at peak coal now or soon, and this process is very energy intensive with few experts in the world to help build them, I don’t see how this could be a big contributor.

Enhanced Oil Recovery:  Wow, the way this would be done is that the United States would collect CO2, refrigerate, ship, and inject int in wells in the Middle East. This would be very expensive!  We’d have to build new tankers and drill new wells in the old fields, and many oil fields are not suitable for this technique.  You wouldn’t see any effect for 5 years, and 10 years out this would only increase production by 3%.

Alternative energy.  A non-starter, our existing vehicle fleet runs on oil.  Hirsch is one of the very few well-known energy experts who understands why wind, solar, and so on can not replace fossil fuels, which is so refreshing.  He discusses the reasons why in the book, which you can also read about in the energy category of this website.  He focuses on liquid fuels that can be used in existing combustion engines because even if we could electrify our transportation system, we don’t have the time to do it.  We don’t even have time to turn over our existing fleet of inefficient gas-guzzling vehicles for more efficient ones, plus very few Americans can afford to buy a new car now.

Other transportation fuels will not work

Methane Hydrates. Hirsch has the best explanation yet of why these haven’t been exploited yet despite decades of trying.  It’s so easy to get oil and natural gas (methane) out because they’re trapped under rock. Drill down, suck it up, and put it in a pipeline. But methane hydrates are like delicate Christmas ornaments, ice globes with methane inside that when shattered, release the methane which floats to the surface and escapes into the atmosphere. Methane is fifty times more global warming than carbon dioxide.

Natural Gas.  Fueling stations are scarce.  To build them you’d need to greatly expand the existing pipeline distribution systems. No one is going to buy a natural gas car if there aren’t fueling stations to fill up at.  Hirsch also questions whether there’ll be enough natural gas left in the future to justify such a huge infrastructure investment.   LNG has issues as well.  Bill Powers in his book “Cold, Hungry and in the Dark: Exploding the Natural Gas Supply Myth” provides a lot of evidence that Natural gas will also peak by 2017, if not sooner, and so many others have written about this that I rarely update my post “Shale Oil and Gas will not Save Us“.

Biofuels.  I don’t know of a paper that better explains all of the reasons why biofuels won’t work than my article “Peak Soil“. Hirsch mentions just a few of the dozens of reasons, such as too much fuel is burned in tractors and trucks planting, harvesting, and delivering the plants to the biorefinery — more fuel than the plant can produce.  Existing trucks and autos can’t burn more than 10% ethanol.  Many scientists have shown that ethanol has a negative EROI — more energy is required to produce it than you get back.

Algae to fuel.  This is the least likely of all for several dozen reasons. Hirsch’s main reason is that “A great deal of energy — usually liquid fuel energy — is required to harvest the heavy, water-soaked algae and to remove the water.”

Discussion of Mitigation Measures Above

If oil declined at 2%, and you implemented all of these measures, you could keep production flat for over a decade.  But a 4% decline is a disaster (Hirsch chooses not to mention that there is a more likely 8-9.7% decline rate, given actual decline rates of giant fields. I know he knows this because it’s been discussed at ASPO meetings he’s attended and many publications.  Perhaps because it means the fall of civilization, and there are no mitigation’s to prevent this fate at this late date).

Obstacles to Implementing these Measures

Governments have to rapidly permit these facilities, prevent legal challenges, provide incentives to industry to act quickly, and protect industries from financial risks.  After Quantitative Easing, the government is $16 Trillion in debt and the Chinese are grumbling about a new currency not based on the U.S. dollar.  The government doesn’t have the money to finance a Manhattan project anymore.  They blew their wad bailing out a corrupt financial system that hasn’t been reformed at all since the 2008 crash.

Industry doesn’t have the money to do this either, nor the infrastructure, engineers, or capacity to launch a Manhattan project overnight because we outsourced manufacturing to China and elsewhere, and other nations aren’t going to be in a position to help other countries — or want to.

Government will not move quickly enough.  It takes a while to understand the options and switch governmental priorities.  Hirsch doesn’t mention the main reason: Congress has been brought to a standstill by the Tea Party, Limbaugh ditto-heads, and other extreme right and left-wing ideologues.

Since all of these fossil-fuel based “solutions” will worsen climate change, there will be a lot of opposition from environmental groups.  Though I wonder how much opposition there will be when people are cold, hungry, and in the dark…

What the authors say you might do

I’m only going to mention a few of them:

  1. Buy a high mileage automobile early.  I agree — in the 1979 oil shock there were 6 month waiting lists for high mileage cars, and their prices went up quite a bit too
  2. Invest in rental properties near mass transit
  3. Don’t buy very large houses, they’re going to be harder to sell in the future
  4. Avoid buying stocks in companies that depend on consumer spending (I assume he means superfluous things, not food and other essentials).
  5. Short sales in the stock market
  6. Hold cash and other short-term financial instruments
  7. Buy stocks in countries that produce oil

 

 

slide 5: A drop in demand is not going to delay the onset of decline

slide 12: oil production determines GDP — not vice versa. so 2012 to 2015 both GDP and oil production will decline.

slide 17: Who will be hurt the most: the biggest oil importers (descending order): USA, Japan, China, South Korea, Germany, France, Italy, U.K.  Who will be hurt the least?  The biggest oil exporters (descending order): Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Canada, Mexico, U.A.E., Kuwait, Norway, Venezuela

slide 18: wars and oil producers withholding oil are possible

slide 21: we believe that “Peak Oil” will burst into the public consciousness as a SHOCK.

It will be the same as 1973 & 1979, but it will last much, much longer.

I strongly disagree with Hirsch that we’ll find a way to electrify a lot of our technologies.

Miscellaneous

Original 7 sisters (access to 85% of world oil) : The 4 sisters now. Access to 8% of world oil (and a bit of another 12%)

  • Standard Oil of NJ and NY: ExxonMobil (3% of total world oil production)
  • Royal Dutch shell : Shell
  • Anglo-Persian Oil : BP
  • Standard Oil of California, Gulf Oil, Texaco : Chevron

The current Big 7:

  1. Saudi Aramco
  2. Gazprom (Russia)
  3. CNPC (China)
  4. NIOC (Iran)
  5. PDVSA (Venezuela)
  6. Petrobras (Brazil)
  7. Petronas (Malaysia)

In 2008, 136 million cars consumed 25% of all U.S. liquid fuels. Light trucks 20%, heavy trucks, 13%, and Aircraft 7%.

References

The sources for this article are the July 10, 2012 slide show “Peak Oil Guru Robert Hirsch Gives A Dire Outlook For The Future” and his book “The Impending World Energy Mess. What it is and what it means to YOU!” written in 2010 with co-authors Roger H. Bezdek & Robert Wendling (forward by Dr. James R. Schlesinger, 1st U.S. Secretary of Energy).

Robert L. Hirsch is a former senior energy program adviser for Science Applications International Corporation and is a Senior Energy Advisor at MISI and a consultant in energy, technology, and management. Hirsch has served on numerous advisory committees related to energy development, and he is the principal author of the report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, which was written for the United States Department of Energy.

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Don’t worry, be happy, there’s plenty of oil, natural gas, & coal left

Posted on July 9, 2012 by

These posts and links rebut the studies of cornucopians like Magueri and Daniel Yergin at CERA, who say there’s lots of oil left.

Richard Kerr. 10 Aug 2012. Are World Oil’s Prospects Not Declining All That Fast? Science vol 337 p633.

Magueri’s “upbeat message depends on more than confidence in that fancy—and expensive—new technology. Overall, output from the world’s producing oil fields is always declining.”

Other scientists have found that the “decline rate of all currently producing fields is at least 4% per year,” twice Maugeri’s estimate. 

“A decline rate of 4% per year would mean that new production equal to that of Saudi Arabia—currently about 9 million barrels per day—would have to be added every 3 years just to maintain production at current levels”. 

And it gets worse: once the giant fields discovered decades ago go into steep decline, the rate could go even higher, and smaller fields or offshore oil won’t be able to make up for it.  

“Maugeri has made some very optimistic assumptions about global average decline rates, failed to provide adequate justification for them and misrepresented the estimates made by others,” Sorrell and Christophe McGlade of University College London wrote in a 6 July online posting (http://scim.ag/Oilcomments).

Another damning statistic: “non-OPEC crude production has been flat since 2003.”

Jeffery J. Brown. 19 Jul 2012.  Maugeri on peak oil. Econbrowser.

Stephen Sorrell. 10 July 2012. Response to Leonardo Maugeri’s Decline Rate Assumptions in “Oil: The Next Revolution”.

Kurt Cobb. 8 July 2012.  How changing the definition of oil has deceived both policymakers and the public. Resource Insights.

Everyone knows that world oil production has been running between 88 and 89 million barrels per day (mbpd) this year because government, industry and media sources tell us so. As it turns out, what everyone knows is wrong.

It’s wrong not because the range quoted above can’t be found in official sources. It’s wrong because the numbers include things which are not oil such as natural gas plant liquids and biofuels. If you strip these other things out, then world oil production has been running around 75 mbpd this year. The main thing you need to know about the worldwide rate of production of crude oil alone is that it has been stuck between 71 and 75 mbpd since 2005 (calculated on a monthly basis). And, that has already had huge negative effects on the world economy and world society through high energy prices that are partly responsible for our current economic stagnation.

But because natural gas plant liquids production has been growing rather rapidly due to recent intensive drilling for natural gas and because those liquids are misleadingly lumped in with oil supplies, people have been mistakenly given the impression that world oil production continues to grow. Not true! What’s growing is a category called “total liquids” which encompasses oil, natural gas plant liquids, biofuels and some other minor fuels. Total liquids are growing only because of large gains in natural gas plant liquids and minor gains in biofuels. And, this is why it is so important to understand what natural gas plant liquids are.

19 Nov 2012. Tad Patzek. Peak, What Peak? theoildrum

6 July 2012. Olivier Rech. Peak Oil Reloaded. Energy Funds Advisors.

5 July 2012. Richard Heinberg. End of Growth Update: Blowing in the Wind. Post Carbon Institute.

James Howard Kunstler. 19 Sep 2011. The Rainmakers. Kunstler is always the most fun to read, here’s an excerpt from this column:

“This much can be stated categorically about the USA these days: the more distressed our economy gets, the more delusional thinking you will encounter. People want to assign the cause of their misery to this or that (socialism, abortion, Jews, the New World Order). People want to believe that their world is a safe place with bright prospects (climate change is a myth, we have a hundred years of shale oil). The realm of oil is especially ripe for misunderstanding, since we depend on the stuff so desperately, and the world’s geology is complex indeed, and then you have to bring math and money into the picture. But it’s another thing when professional propagandists take the stage and attempt to systematically mislead the public.

Such is the case with two ersatz bombshells zinging across the web-waves this past week, fired off by two of the foremost professional liars on the scene. The first comes from the oil industry’s leading prostitute, Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), … the main public relations shop for the oil industry. Its mission is to blow smoke up America’s ass in order to keep investment dollars flowing into oil companies because oil companies prefer to use other people’s money to perform their risky operations. They make a lot of money themselves, and accumulate it diligently, but they are not so foolish as to squander it on dry holes and adventures in alchemy.

So, last week Daniel Yergin came out with a blast in the Wall Street Journal affecting to debunk peak oil. His own theory is much like Irving Fisher’s economic theory set out October 21, 1929 that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”  Three days later, the markets crashed and the Great Depression commenced. Yergin says we’ve hit a permanent plateau for oil production. He is pimping for a bonanza in shale oil, tar sands, and other innovative ventures in picking “fruit” that is not hanging so low anymore.

He says: “Meeting future demand will require innovation, investment and the development of more challenging resources. A major reason for continuing growth in petroleum supplies is that oil previously regarded as inaccessible or uneconomical is now part of the mix, such as the “presalt” resources off the coast of Brazil, the vast oil sands of Canada, and the oil locked in shale and other rocks in the U.S.”

Spoken like a true PR whore. Translation: give us money. Calling all investors. Give your dollars to the folks working the Bakken play, or Eagle Ford down in Texas. These shale plays represent oil that is trapped in “tight,” low-permeability rock that has to undergo fracturing operations (“fracking”) before you can drain it out. It costs a lot more to get oil this way than by sticking a pipe in the ground and running a pump-jack to get it out the old-fashioned way. There are more than a few dirty secrets about the shale oil plays, but the biggest one is that you have to throw a huge amount of capital and steel at it to keep it running as an ongoing enterprise, and that money – other people’s money – will be in shockingly short supply in the years head.
Those troubles distant rumblings you hear in places like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain – that’s the sound of the world’s money whooshing into a black hole, which is what happens when debts are not repaid. Something very similar is happening in the USA, where all the unresolved mega-borrowing of the past thirty years is whirling down the drain, never to be seen again, and a craven corporate oligarchy (there, I said it) is working tirelessly to hoard the last remaining vestiges of money before it either deflates across that event horizon, or inflates away to nothing by digital multiplication. In either case the result is the same: you’re broke.

 

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Tad Patzek: Our complex civilization will cease to exist 20-30 years from now

Posted on July 9, 2012 by

Tad Patzek. 9 July 2012. What to do?

Without the high energy density, fungible fuels flowing at high rates through our complex civilization, our society will cease to exist within 20-30 years from today.

A Public Agenda survey in 2009 found

  • Nearly 4 in 10 Americans (39%) couldn’t name a fossil fuel.
  • Nearly half couldn’t name a renewable energy source.
  • More than half of the public (56%) says incorrectly that nuclear energy contributes to global warming.
  • About one-third of the public (31%) thinks solar energy contributes to global warming.

While the survey is a few years old, I am skeptical that public knowledge has improved all that much. Since my blog is dedicated to the issues of energy, society and ecology, I’ll only state that this particular ignorance is deadly for a society that makes no efforts to diversify itself away from personal automobiles and to densify its cities.

I am still waiting for a multitude of IPOs of manufacturing companies, oil companies, mineral mining companies, mass transit companies, computer hardware companies, organic farming companies, healthy food companies, solar water heater companies, or cheap drug companies; anything that would make me believe that there is a way to cure my beloved but confused country from the self-inflicted wounds.  These companies do not have to be big and should serve their local communities.

Dr. Tad Patzek is chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.   Patzek works on the thermodynamics and ecology of human survival and energy supply schemes for humanity. He has participated in the global debate on energy supply schemes by giving hundreds of press interviews and appearing on the BBC, PBS, CBS, CNBC, ABC, NPR, etc., and giving invited lectures around the world.

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