Why world leaders are terrified of water shortages

Posted on June 28, 2018 by

Preface. The article blow shows how water crisis in Yemen and Syria led to civil war, mass migration, roadblocks by angry citizens, water riots, increased dengue fever as people hard water, and 1 million refugees fleeing to Europe.  Egypt also has extreme water scarcity, with nearly twice the population of Yemen and Syria combined.

About 75% of China’s remaining coal reserves are in water scarce regions that use 80 to 99% of their water for agriculture now.  I question whether China will be able to shift water use to water intensive coal mining, coal generation of electricity, coal to chemicals, and eventually coal to liquids as governments become desperate to replace declining oil with a drop-in fuel.  If China tries to develop their last coal reserves this will lead to civil war, chaos, mass migrations, riots, and so on, as it has in the Middle East.  And where would the water come, from since already aquifers are being drained that won’t refill for tens of thousands of years.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Halverson, N. 2016. Why world leaders are terrified of water shortages. Mother Jones.

Secret conversations between American diplomats show how a growing water crisis in the Middle East destabilized the region, helping spark civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and how those water shortages are spreading to the United States.

Classified US cables, made public years ago by WikiLeaks, reviewed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.

Many of the cables read like diary entries from an apocalyptic sci-fi novel.

“Water shortages have led desperate people to take desperate measures with equally desperate consequences,” according to a 2009 cable sent by US Ambassador Stephen Seche in Yemen as water riots erupted across the country.

On September 22 of that year, Seche sent a stark message to the US State Department in Washington relaying the details of a conversation with Yemen’s minister of water, who “described Yemen’s water shortage as the ‘biggest threat to social stability in the near future.’ He noted that 70% of unofficial roadblocks were set up citizens angry about  water shortages, which are increasingly a cause of violent conflict.”  He noted that 14 of the country’s 16 aquifers had run dry.

The classified 2009 cable by Ambassador Stephen Seche states “Water remains a socially threatening, yet politically sensitive subject in Yemen; government action has stagnated as water resources continue to decline. The lack of regulation of drilling rigs and the cultivation of qat are largely responsible for the continuing decline of water resources. The lack of water has resulted in water riots in the governorates of Aden, Lahj, and Abyan. Water scarcity has health consequences and has been linked to a dengue fever outbreak, as people hoard water in Taiz”.  He predicted that conflict between urban and rural areas over water would lead to violence.

Less than two years later, rural tribesmen fought their way into Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and seized two buildings: the headquarters of the ruling General People’s Congress and the main offices of the water utility. The president was forced to resign, and a new government was formed. But water issues continued to amplify long-simmering tensions between various religious groups and tribesmen, which eventually led to a full-fledged civil war.

Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, found similar classified US cables sent from Syria. Those cables also describe how water scarcity destabilized the country and helped spark a war that has sent more than 1 million refugees fleeing into Europe.

In 2008 a Syrian cable asked the UNFAO for seed and technical assistance to 15,000 small-holding farmers in northeast Syria in an effort to preserve the social and economic fabric of this rural, agricultural community.  If UNFAO efforts fail, Yehia predicts mass migration from the northeast, which could act as a multiplier on social and economic pressures already at play and undermine stability Syria.  Syria Representative Abdullah bin Yehia briefed econoff and USDA Regional Minister-Counselor for Agriculture on what he terms the “perfect storm,” a confluence of drought conditions with other economic and social pressures that Yehia believes could undermine stability in Syria. Without direct FAO assistance, Yehia predicts that most of these 15,000 small-holding farmers would be forced to depart Al Hasakah province to seek work in larger cities in western Syria (Damascus and Aleppo, primarily). Approximately 100,000 dependents — women, children and the elderly or infirm — would be left behind to live in poverty, he said.  Children would be likely to be pulled from school, he warned, in order to seek a source of income for families left behind.  In addition, the migration of 15,000 unskilled laborers would add to the social and economic pressures presently at play in major Syrian cities.  A system already burdened by a large Iraqi refugee population may not be able to absorb another influx of displaced persons, Yehia explained, particularly at this time of rising costs, growing dissatisfaction of the middle class, and a perceived weakening of the social fabric and security structures that Syrians have come to expect and – in some cases – rely on.

The classified diplomatic cables, made public years ago by WikiLeaks, now are providing fresh perspective on how water shortages have helped push Syria and Yemen into civil war, and prompted the king of neighboring Saudi Arabia to direct his country’s food companies to scour the globe for farmland. Since then, concerns about the world’s freshwater supplies have only accelerated.

It’s not just government officials who are worried. In 2009, US Embassy officers visited Nestlé’s headquarters in Switzerland, where company executives, who run the world’s largest food company and are dependent on freshwater to grow ingredients, provided a grim outlook of the coming years. An embassy official cabled Washington with the subject line, “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.

“Nestle thinks one-third of the world’s population will be affected by fresh water scarcity by 2025, with the situation only becoming more dire thereafter and potentially catastrophic by 2050,” according to a March 24, 2009, cable. “Problems will be severest in the Middle East, northern India, northern China, and the western United States.”

At the time of that meeting, government officials from Syria and Yemen already had started warning US officials that their countries were slipping into chaos as a result of water scarcity.

The water-fueled conflicts in the Middle East paint a dark picture of a future that many governments now worry could spread around the world as freshwater supplies become increasingly scarce. The CIA, the State Department, and similar agencies in other countries are monitoring the situation.

In the past, global grain shortages have led to rapidly increasing food prices, which analysts have attributed to sparking the Arab Spring revolution in several countries, and in 2008 pushed about 150 million people into poverty, according to the World Bank.

Water scarcity increasingly is driven by three major factors: Global warming is forecast to create more severe droughts around the world. Meat consumption, which requires significantly more water than a vegetarian or low-meat diet, is spiking as a growing middle class in countries such as China and India can afford to eat more pork, chicken, and beef. And the world’s population continues to grow, with an expected 2 billion more stomachs to feed by 2050.

The most troubling signs of the looming threat first appeared in the Middle East, where wells started running dry nearly 15 years ago. Having drained down their own water supplies, food companies from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere began searching overseas.

In Saudi Arabia, the push to scour the globe for water came from the top. King Abdullah decreed that grains such as wheat and hay would need to be imported to conserve what was left of the country’s groundwater. All wheat production in Saudi Arabia will cease this year, and other water-intensive crops such as hay are being phased out, too, the king ruled.

A classified US cable from Saudi Arabia in 2008 shows that King Abdullah directed Saudi food companies to search overseas for farmland with access to freshwater and promised to subsidize their operations. The head of the US Embassy in Riyadh concluded that the king’s goal was “maintaining political stability in the Kingdom.”

In a 2014 speech, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said food and water scarcity are contributing to the “most diverse array of threats and challenges as I’ve seen in my 50-plus years in the intel business. “As time goes on, we’ll be confronting issues I call ‘basics’ resources—food, water, energy, and disease—more and more as an intelligence community,” he said.

These problems are not just happening overseas, but already are leading to heated political issues in the United States. In the western part of the country, which Nestlé forecast will suffer severe long-term shortages, tensions are heating up as Middle Eastern companies arrive to tap dwindling water supplies in California and Arizona.

Almarai, which is Saudi Arabia’s largest dairy company and has publicly said it’s following the king’s directive, began pumping up billions of gallons of water in the Arizona desert in 2014 to grow hay that it exports back to the Middle East. Analysts refer to this as exporting “virtual water.” It is more cost effective to use the Arizona water to irrigate land in America and ship the hay to Saudi Arabia than it is to fill a fleet of oil tankers with the water.

Arizonans living near Almarai’s hay operation say their groundwater is dropping fast as the Saudis and other foreign companies increase production. They are now worried their domestic wells might suffer the same fate as those in Syria and Yemen.  In January, more than 300 people packed into a community center in rural La Paz County to listen to the head of the state’s water department discuss how long their desert aquifer would last.

Five sheriff’s deputies stood guard at the event to ensure the meeting remained civil—the Arizona Department of Water Resources had requested extra law enforcement, according to county Supervisor Holly Irwin.  “Water can be a very angry issue,” she said. “With people’s wells drying up, it becomes very personal.

Thomas Buschatzke, Arizona’s water director, defended the Saudi farm, saying it provides jobs and increases tax revenue. He added that “Arizona is part of the global economy; our agricultural industry generates billions of dollars annually to our state’s economy.”

But state officials admit they don’t know how long the area’s water will last, given the increased water pumping, and announced plans to study it.

After the meeting, the state approved another two new wells for the Saudi company, each capable of pumping more than 1 billion gallons of water a year.

Back in Yemen in 2009, US Ambassador Seche described how as aquifers were drained, and groundwater levels dropped lower, rich landowners drilled deeper and deeper wells. But everyday citizens did not have the money to dig deeper, and as their wells ran dry, they were forced to leave their land and livelihoods behind.

“The effects of water scarcity will leave the rich and powerful largely unaffected,” Seche wrote in the classified 2009 cable. “These examples illustrate how the rich always have a creative way of getting water, which not only is unavailable to the poor, but also cuts into the unreplenishable resources.”

2008 Saudia Arabia cable

One of the unintended consequences of the dramatic increase in oil prices has been huge inflation in basic commodities, including grain. Food security continues to be a concern in Saudi Arabia, especially with regard to lower and middle income population, and foreign workers.  The Saudi Arabian government (SAG) is seeking alternative sources for grain importation, particularly investing in agricultural initiatives in third-world and developing countries in return for reduced prices on grains.  The SAG also hopes to use these investments to help create sustainable development and jobs in less-developed countries.  Rising costs of food have caused considerable concern among lower income groups, both Saudis and guest workers.  If inflation continues unabated, it could undermine political stability in the Kingdom.  End summary.

On July 27, Econoff met with Taha Alshareef, Assistant Director General for Foreign Trade,  and Ahmed Al Sadhan, General Manager of the National Office for Industrial Strategies, at the Ministry of Commerce.  In this meeting, Al Sadhan stated the need for Saudi Arabia to seek alternative grain sources in response to rising global food prices. Saudi Arabia has 1.76% arabale land, and water scarcity makes it impossible to sustain the current levels of grain production in the Kingdom.

Saudi concern over food security is not new. Historically, all grains have been imported into Saudi Arabia, apart from wheat, which was grown in the Qassim region using fossil water from the aquifer.  In the 1980s and 90s, the government employed massive subsidies, the result of which Saudi Arabia was even briefly a wheat exporter until water depletion drove them to import all grains.

Al Sadhan said the SAG is currently in its sixth week of feasibility studies of investing in farms in third-world and developing countries, whereby Saudi rials would pay the operating costs of the farms and provide management; in exchange for local land, labor, and a portion of the grain produced (particularly wheat and rice).  He also said the countries in which the farms operated could use the remainder of the grain produced to ameliorate their own rising food costs.  Alshareef noted that private Saudi companies have had success with similar ventures in the past.

Al Sadhan said this initiative comes directly from King Abdullah, as part of his effort to make KSA  a “good world citizen” and implement his view that “rich countries have an obligation to help less wealthy nations.”  However, he stressed a desire to maintain a low profile on the feasibility study, for fear that target countries might inflate the cost of farm-land in anticipation of investment. Al Sadhan specifically mentioned Sudan and India as potential target countries.  He also suggested the possibility of future collaboration with the U.S. farming industry.

SAG interest in these investments appears genuine for the primary purpose of addressing the fundamental food security issue, though the driver behind this new initiative is the sudden price inflation of basic commodities.  Rapid rise of oil prices has caused sudden price inflation, but because of variants in income distribution, there is the risk of civil unrest if food prices become too high, particularly from the lower and middle class Saudis, as well as the foreign worker population.

Food price inflation could pose a direct threat to the social contract between the House of Saud and the bulk of the population.  Therefore these programs seem aimed less directly at the economy and more at the goal of maintaining political stability in the Kingdom.  Although keen to keep these projects quiet during the initial fact-finding stages, it seems highly probable that upon announcement, the SAG will accentuate the public relations angle of sustainable development and job development in less-developed countries.

2009 Yemen cable (rest of it here)

… small riots take place nearly every day in neighborhoods in the Old City of Sana’a because of lack of water, and he predicted that the capital could run out of water as soon as next year. One of the major causes of Yemen’s dwindling water supply is the lack of water governance. Hundreds of privately owned, unregulated rigs are used to drill private wells deep into the earth in search of water. The owners of these drills are “running wild, drilling holes everywhere.  We need to control these private rigs.”  A major obstacle to doing so is that fact that the rig owners are powerful individuals – army officers, sheikhs, members of the president’s family, and certain government ministers – who are “untouchable” by the law.  Another major cause is agriculture.  Up to 85 percent of water is used for agriculture, and half of that is for growing the narcotic drug qat.

O one “very easy way to make water use more efficient” is to lift diesel subsidies.  Cheap diesel is leading to the water crisis because, on the one hand, “many farms would no longer be sustainable if their owners were paying the right price for diesel,” and on the other, it fuels the private rigs that are running rampant across the country.

This story was originally published by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting  

Further reading

Posted in Caused by Scarce Resources, Drought & Collapse, Mass migrations, Middle East, Social Uprising, Starvation, Water | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Renewable EROI must include storage, low capacity factor, wide boundaries

Posted on June 25, 2018 by

[ Trainer argues that when you consider how the capacity factor of wind and solar are to fossil plants, seasonality of wind and solar the number of facilities is quite large to deal with the intermittency problem.  Therefore the storage (hydropower, batteries, biomass, etc) must be included in the EROI calculation, the renewable system can’t operate without them.  Plus the capacity factors of wind and solar are getting lower, because the best sites have already been built on, so the future capacity factor will be less, not equal or more than today’s.  The lifetime of 25-30 years is questionable, plus the erosion of their performance over time usually isn’t included (i.e. dust impairing solar panels).  Trainer makes a case that boundaries need to be as wide as possible, including the EROI of the workers, transmission, and so on.  Prieto, Hall and others have pointed this out too.  In summary, Trainer makes a good argument that the EROI values for wind and solar are far lower than commonly assumed, and that what would be more effective is reduction in demand, De-growth.  He writes that “a core claim of The Simpler Way project (2017) is that a sustainable and just society based on 100% renewable energy supply is desirable and could be easily achieved, but only if there is a radical transition to new settlement patterns, economies, political systems, and most difficult of all, new values and non-affluent conceptions of the good life”.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Trainer, Ted. August 14, 2017. The overlooked significance of the EROI for renewable energy supply systems.   $$$ awaiting publication

Abstract. Until recently it has not been possible to estimate the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for 100% renewable energy supply systems, because simulations of the amount of capacity required have not been available.  This study takes the finding of a simulation for Australian electricity, along with commonly quoted EROI values for the technologies assumed, and derives a conclusion for total system EROI.  The EROI values for individual renewable technologies do not provide a reliable guide to this value because of the large amount of redundant plant that must be on hand to enable whole systems to meet demand reliably despite intermittency. Problems and uncertainties regarding commonly assumed EROI values for renewables are discussed and it is argued that in future more defensible values are likely to indicate lower system values than this study arrives at.  The general finding is that 100% renewable supply systems could have values that are too low to sustain energy intensive societies.

Introduction.

Although considerable attention has been given to the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for individual renewable technologies, especially for PV, there does not appear to have been any attempt to estimate the significance of this factor for whole renewable systems. This is somewhat remarkable as the impact can be expected to be significant because in order to deal with intermittency whole renewable systems have to involve a large amount of differing types of renewable plant that remains idle much of the time.  Whereas 1.2 GW of coal-fired generating plant is capable of meeting a constant 1 GW demand (taking into account a 0.8 capacity factor), various studies have found that for a 100% renewable system to do this would require enough plant to generate 4 – 6 GW.  This much greater amount of generating equipment would involve a greater embodied energy cost of construction.

No generally valid conclusion on system embodied energy cost can be arrived at.  Any finding would depend on the particular mix of renewable technologies involved in a specified system, and this mix would be determined by the climatic conditions characteristic of the region.  It has not been possible to carry out meaningful studies of whole system embodied energy costs until recently, because simulations providing estimates of renewable technology mixes have only recently been attempted.  These estimate the amounts of various technologies that seem to be required to meet demand reliably, and therefore they enable estimation of the associated total system capacities and embodied energy costs.

Method.

The following discussion explores the significance of embodied energy costs for a 100% renewable electricity supply for Australia.  It is based on the mix and quantities of various renewable technologies found by Lenzen et al (2015) to be capable of meeting 2010 demand reliably at minimum cost.  The approach has been to take estimates of the embodied energy costs of each of the technologies involved in the simulation, to multiply theses by the quantities of each that were found to be needed, to derive a total cost, and to consider its significance.

In principle this approach is relatively straight forward but it is complicated by uncertainties to do with the embodied energy concept and the estimation of EROI values. Some of these will be discussed later, along with their probably significant implications for calculating system EROI. However at this point it is important to say that it is not appropriate to approach the question of system EROI by using estimates of “buffered” EROIs for each renewable technology.  Some studies have attempted to deal with the effect of intermittency on a technology’s EROI by estimating the effect of including the plant needed to enable energy supply from it taking into account its intermittency.  For instance Weissbach et al. (2013) do this assuming that the lowest back-up cost option for this purpose, i.e., pumped hydro storage. The effects found are large; the wind EROI value falls from 16 to 3.9.

However, these values are of little or no use when it comes to estimating the EROI of a whole supply system.  These systems are designed so that technologies can complement and substitute for each other as much as possible. If wind input falls for a period it might not be necessary to draw on any “buffering” capacity specifically provided for wind if solar or some other input happens to be high in that period. Thus it is not that in a whole system each component technology would need to come equipped with its own “buffering” capacity capable of allowing it to go on contributing despite no availability of its particular energy source. The way the problem is tackled in the main simulations is simply to provide one or a few back-up sources capable of topping up combined input from all components when necessary. System EROI can therefore be estimated using the “un-buffered” EROI values for each component along with that of the backup system.

Results.

This study begins by taking commonly stated EROI values for the main renewable technologies(…see Table 1), and derives a system EROI for a particular combination of these. As noted, some difficulties with these values will be considered later. The values to be used are close to those Hall (2017) gives in his review of the energy return field.

What capacities might be needed?

The following analysis will be based on the findings of the simulation of a 100% electricity supply carried out by Lenzen et al. (2015.) Though secondary to their main findings, they consider a case which “…might come close to what would be implemented in the real world.” Their Table 2 gives the capacities of various renewable technologies that would be needed to meet demand in this scenario. These add to 162 GW, about 7 times average Australian demand. Others arrive at significant multiples; for instance in their earlier simulation of Australian supply Elliston, Diesendorf and MacGill (2012) arrive at a multiple of 3.3, and Hart and Jacobson (2011) arrive at 4.3.

The use of biomass for energy supply is controversial, including questions to do with quantities available.  Lenzen et al. note that if no biomass is to be used in the Australian situation total renewable capacity would have to be in far greater, in the region of 320 GW, 14 times average demand. However it is likely that use of “Turkey Nest” pumped hydro storage would be the best option. Substituting this for the contribution biomass makes in this case would not alter total system capacity needed.

Table1 below makes transparent the simple derivation of an overall system EROI given the quantities set out by Lenzen et al. for the scenario they describe.

Table 1: Derivation of a system embodied energy estimate.

*    Uncertain: Lenzen et al. assume 15 hour storage.

**   Uncertain: Plant lifetime assumed to equal coal-fired plant.

These figures indicate that the embodied energy of the whole system corresponds to a constant flow of approximately 3.42 GW, or 26 TWh/y. Lenzen et al. report total system output at 287 TWh/y for the case being considered, corresponding to a constant flow of 32.7 GW. The EROI for energy generated would therefore be c. 32.7/3.41 = 9.6.

 

However this is not the most appropriate measure; what matters most is the energy cost in relation to the amount of energy needed and thus delivered for use. Lenzen et al. find that the system must spill 61 TWh/y, meaning that the ER value that is of most concern relates to the c. 220TWh/y the system would deliver for use. Thus the EROI of a system capable of meeting the average demand of c. 220 TWh/y or 25.1 GW would be 25.1/3.42 = 7.3. This means that in order to meet demand the amount of additional electricity that must be generated to cover embodied energy costs would be an amount more or less equal to 3.42/25.1 = 14% of demand.

This analysis does not include the energy cost of the extensive transmission system that the Lenzen et al., simulation found would be required to connect remote generating areas and demand sites across the nation.

There are reasons for suspecting that actual EROI values for the specific renewable technologies would be significantly lower than those used in column 1 of Table1 above.

Complications regarding capacity factors.

Debates over the EROI of renewables has focused almost exclusively on the denominator in the ratio, leaving concerns about the numerator almost largely unexamined. Central among these are the actual generating conditions and therefore capacity factors to assume. The convention is to assume capacity factors achieved in favourable conditions.

Table 2 in Lenzen et al. shows that except for PV the capacity factors achieved by the major renewables wind and CSP in the locations they occupy in the cost-minimizing solution are much lower than is commonly assumed. For instance the figure for wind is 0.18 whereas the usually quoted figure is 0.33 – 0.4, and for CSP it is only 0.26 despite the 15 hour storage assumed which should enable approximately three times that value in ideal conditions.  This is because 100% renewable scenarios have to involve a mix of renewables and locations that will minimize overall system production cost while achieving the reliability standard all through the year. The resulting pattern requires many of the renewable components to be located at less than ideal sites.  The task is to ensure that enough renewables are in sites that can contribute to meeting demand all through the year and during periods when all renewable input is low and at times when wind for instance is only at significant strength in a few locations.

This is the downside of common claim that “…the wind is always blowing somewhere.”  It is, but if a system is designed to maintain input by locating many farms in many locations to ensure that enough are where wind is blowing at any time, then it is likely that there will be times when a few farms are providing the input and the rest are more or less idle.  This means the capacity factor of the wind sector within a 100% renewable system will be much lower than normally assumed 0.33 – 0.4.

Thus the energy contributed by the wind sector in the Lenzen et al. case would be only around 0.18/0.33 = 55% of the amount that would be contributed had all the farms been located in the favourable conditions assumed for normal EROI estimation, and therefore the EROI of turbines in this “real-world” situation is likely to be in the region of 10, not the usually assumed18.

It is important to recognize that wind farms installed to date have probably not been significantly affected by this factor.  They have been located at the best available sites for wind performance, not in the regions that will enable them to contribute to maintaining system output in difficult times even though these might not be ideal for wind. Despite this it is somewhat sobering to find that the world average capacity factor has been reported at 0.15. (Damn the Matrix, 2017.) This suggests that large scale development of wind energy in future will see movement to less ideal sites and thus an even lower value.

Another issue involved in the numerator of the EROI ratio concerns the lifetime assumed for renewable devices.  These assumptions must be tentative as it will take time to provide confident data. For wind turbines and PV modules the assumption is often 25 to 30 years but some believe it is less than 20 years. (Damn the Matrix, 2017.) The decline in PV module output with age also affects life time output, (…although it is usually included in estimates of their “performance factor”.)

It is appropriate to compare the above renewable system value with that for existing fossil-fueled systems.  About 90+% of the present Australian electricity supply system is made up of fossil-fuelled generators, and most of the rest is hydro.  If an EROI of 40 is assumed for both, then the total system EROI would be about 40. Therefore the value for the renewable system arrived at above is less than one-fifth of this.

These issues to do with capacity factors also add to the case against the value of estimating “buffered” values for renewable technologies. They show that the EROI of a renewable technology depends primarily on what its role in a particular system is, especially on where it is located and the extent to which it is called upon to maintain system performance in conditions that are less than ideal for it. In Europe where there might be no solar contribution for long periods in winter, along with calm conditions providing little wind, capacity factors for very large wind or solar sectors spread over less than ideal sites would probably be quite low.

In addition renewable systems must spill energy (even with hydrogen or PHS storage; see Trainer 2017b) and the effect of this cannot be estimated from preconceived “buffered” values for each component technology.

To summarise, when interpreting standard EROI values it needs to be kept in mind that these assume output in good conditions, but output in the locations and conditions in which various technologies must be placed in order to play their role in a renewable system may well be around half as high.

The significance of CSP efficiency on system EROI.

In the above case taken from Lenzen et al. CSP is called upon to make a major contribution, providing 59% of energy generated.  It’s role is especially significant In their Fig. 5 illustration of how the system arrived at would get through the worst five days in the year.  This task required about 1,680 GWh, 61 % of supply, to come from CSP plus biomass storage, and (from inspection of the plot) CSP made up just over half of this of this, averaging c. 15.6 GW and rising to 19.4 GW for a time. It is therefore important to consider reasons for suspecting that this very significant contribution would have required far more capacity than the simulation found to be necessary.

In view of the complexity of the modeling task it made sense for the simulation not to take into account embodied energy costs or to delve into the unsettled issue of the efficiency of CSP in poor conditions. Trainer (2017b) explored the efficiency question and found that the effect evident in data from various studies was likely to be large; in fact it could mean that to get through difficult periods in winter would require three or more times as much CSP capacity as the simulation found to be necessary.

If this is correct it would show that meeting demand would require significant upward revision of the amount of renewables the approach Lenzen et al. estimated to be sufficient, and this would markedly reduce the 7.3 system EROI value derived above.

How sound are the EROI values used above?

There are reasons for thinking that the EROI values assumed above and set out in Table 1 are much too high, i.e., favourable to renewables. Unfortunately there has been relatively little study of EROI values for renewable plant apart from PV and even in that case there is intense debate.  The EROI field in general is unsettled and difficult to interpret, especially in view of differing definitions and items included in embodied energy tallies.

The main issue has been the “boundaries” that should be set when deciding which energy costs to include.  For instance in addition to the energy used in the factory making PV panels energy is used “upstream” to make the refineries etc. providing the aluminum. Should the energy used to make the bulldozers that mined the alumina that eventually went into module frames be included?  Should the worker’s clothes, and the energy used in their travel to the factory be included?

In addition there are many “downstream” energy costs and losses, including losses in transmission and in inverters, breakdowns, dust on panels, poor maintenance and alignment etc.  Prieto and Hall (2013) demonstrate the marked effect of drawing relatively wide boundaries. In their study of the Spanish PV system they list many factors that detract from the useful energy delivered by the system and when several but not all of these are taken into account they find that the system EROI is not the commonly claimed 8 – 14 but around 2.4.

It can be argued that there should be no dispute or confusion regarding the concept or definition of EROI or where to draw boundaries. The core question is, what is the total amount of net energy a technology can deliver, and therefore all factors detracting from this should be taken into account, meaning that in principle no boundaries should be set.  They only become relevant and important in the practical task of getting actual measures. At some point it will be too inconvenient or impossible to estimate energy used far “upstream”, or what the fraction of energy used at some point (e.g., in producing the bulldozer) should be accounted to module production. (The fact that had the worker not been producing PV modules the energy cost of his clothes or tools or lunches would still have been paid if he had been working on something else, is irrelevant; these were costs of module production.) In other words, at some point in the path upstream an inevitable “truncation” in the chain of cost factors taken into account will occur, and the sum of those cut out of consideration could be significant. (For steel production Lenzen and Dey (2000) estimate that 50% of actual costs might not be included.)

It would seem therefore that total system EROI studies should follow the Prieto and Hall approach to the Spanish PV system, attempting to use the widest possible boundaries.  Many of the (relatively few) pronouncements on wind and CSP values are either clearly not based on wide boundaries (at times only the embodied energy of construction materials is included) or no information is given on factors included. The fact that when Prieto and Hall attempted to take into account (almost) all possible costs and losses in a whole system and arrived at an EROI value less that one-third the commonly stated value for PV modules suggests that when similarly inclusive studies are carried out for wind or CSP farms values reported will be significantly lower than those in column 2 of Table 1 above.

Conclusions and policy implications.

This has been a tentative first exploration of what seems to have been a neglected issue and its main value might be in indicating the kind of analysis that needs to be carried out more thoroughly.  Nevertheless its findings add difficulties to the quest for 100% renewable supply.

Hall, Balough and Murphy (2009) are among those who have considered the minimum EROI for an energy supply system that would enable rich world societies to maintain their present levels of economic and cultural activity. Although quite speculative at this point in time, the estimates ventured tend to be around 7 -10.

The total system EROI for rich societies is presently estimated by people like Hall (2017) to be in the region of 18, which means that if 18 units of energy are produced a net 17 are available for use.  If a renewable supply involved a fall of EROI to 7.3 then the amount of net energy available for use per unit produced would be only 6.3/17 = 37% of the present amount. This suggests that the critical level would be well above 7.

Trainer (2017a) outlines a case that 100% renewable supply of all energy, including the 80% that is not presently in the form of electricity, would be unaffordable. That case was based on the dollar costs associated with the Lenzen et al. study which did not take into account any embodied energy costs. Taking them into account appears from above to increase the amount that needs to be generated by 3.42/25.1 = 14%. This in turn suggests that the 20c/kWh production cost Lenzen et al. arrive at would rise to 23 c/kWh. Trainer (2017c) lists 10 factors operating on production cost that the study did not deal with (e.g., added cost for remote area construction, a higher cost now for imported components…) and when the four that could be quantified were taken into account production cost was multiplied by 2.3.  This indicates a production cost of 52.4 c/kWh when embodied energy costs are included, and adding distribution and related costs might bring the retail price to 74 c/kWh, around three times the price at the time the study was carried out.

Electricity makes up only 20% of total energy demand, but to provide the other 80% from renewable sources would involve more than scaling up production by four, given the need to convert electricity to other energy forms and the energy inefficiency of doing this. It would also involve embodied energy costs for conversion equipment, such for hydrogen production, pumping and storage. If the embodied energy costs of 100% renewable systems are in the region of those arrived at above then including these would add significantly to the weight of the case that 100% renewable energy supply is unaffordable.

These issues set formidable policy problems and choices. This study and that of Trainer (2017a) add to the grounds for thinking that 100% electricity supply for Australia would be at least severely economically disruptive and that 100% total energy supply would not be affordable. If so it would seem that the energy problems being encountered can only be solved on the supply side by an extremely large commitment to fourth generation breeder reactors. The alternative, on the demand side, is De-growth. A core claim of The Simpler Way project (2017) is that a sustainable and just society based on 100% renewable energy supply is desirable and could be easily achieved, but only if there is a radical transition to new settlement patterns, economies, political systems, and most difficult of all, new values and non-affluent conceptions of the good life.

REFERENCES

Damn the Matrix, (2017), Questions about EROI at researchgate.net 2015-2017l, 29th May. https://damnthematrix.wordpress.com/2017/05/

Elliston B., Diesendorf, M., and I. MacGillll, (2012). “Simulations of scenarios with 100% renewable electricity in the Australian National Electricity Market”, Energy Policy, 45, 606 – 613.

Hall, C. A. S., (2017), Energy Return on Energy Investment, Dordrecht, Springer.

Hall, C. A. S., S. Balogh, S. and D. J. R. Murphy, (2009), “What is the minimum EROI that a sustainable society must have?”, Energies, 2, 25–47.

Hart, E. K., and M. Z. Jacobson, (2011), “A Monte Carlo approach to generator portfolio planning and carbon emissions assessments of systems with large penetrations of variable renewables”, Renewable Energy, 36, 2278 – 2286.

Lenzen, M., and C. Dey, (2000), “Truncation error in embodied energy analyse of basic iron and steel products”, Energy, 25, 577 – 585.

Lenzen, M., B. McBain, T. Trainer, S. Jutte, O. Rey-Lescure, and J. Huang, (2016), “Simulating low-carbon electricity supply for Australia”, Applied Energy, 179, Oct., 553 – 564.

The Simpler Way Project, (2017), thesimplerway.info/

Trainer, T., (2017), “Can renewables meet total Australian energy demand: A  “disaggregated” approach”, Energy Policy,109, 539-544.

Trainer, T.,  (2017) “Some difficulties in storing renewable energy”, Energy Policy, (In press.)

Weißbach, D., G. Ruprecht, A. Huke, K. Czerski, S. Gottlieb, A. Hussein,

(2013), “Energy intensities, EROIs (energy returned on invested),

and energy payback times of electricity generating power plants”, Energy, 52, 210-221.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Solar, Solar EROI, Wind, Wind EROI | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Biodiversity loss has gone beyond the planetary boundaries

Posted on June 22, 2018 by

Source: Tanja Folnovic, June 23, 2015 “Loss of Biodiversity”. http://blog.agrivi.com/post/loss-of-biodiversity

Preface. The survival of homo sapiens depends on the ecosystem that supports us, so a loss of biodiversity is a threat to our survival and ultimately can lead to extinction.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Newbold, T., et al. July 15, 2016. Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Science (253):288-291

For 58.1% of the world’s land surface, which is home to 71.4% of the global population, the level of biodiversity loss is substantial enough to question the ability of ecosystems to support human societies. The loss is due to changes in land use and puts levels of biodiversity beyond the ‘safe limit’ recently proposed by the planetary boundaries — an international framework that defines a safe operating space for humanity.

“This is the first time we’ve quantified the effect of habitat loss on biodiversity globally in such detail and we’ve found that across most of the world biodiversity loss is no longer within the safe limit suggested by ecologists” explained lead researcher, Dr Tim Newbold from UCL and previously at UNEP-WCMC.

The team found that grasslands, savannas and shrub lands were most affected by biodiversity loss, followed closely by many of the world’s forests and woodlands. The ability of biodiversity to support key ecosystem functions where plants and animals can grow and nutrients are recycled is becoming increasingly uncertain.

Levels of biodiversity loss are so high that if left unchecked, they could prevent long-term sustainable development.

“It’s worrying that land use has already pushed biodiversity below the level proposed as a safe limit,” said Professor Andy Purvis of the Natural History Museum, London, who also worked on the study. “Decision-makers worry a lot about economic recessions, but an ecological recession could have even worse consequences — and the biodiversity damage we’ve had means we’re at risk of that happening. Until and unless we can bring biodiversity back up, we’re playing ecological roulette.”

The team used data from hundreds of scientists across the globe to analyze 2.38 million records for 39,123 species at 18,659 sites to estimate how biodiversity in every square kilometer land has changed since before humans modified the habitat.

They found that biodiversity hot spots — those that have seen habitat loss in the past but have a lot of species only found in that area — are threatened, showing high levels of biodiversity decline.

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Homer-Dixon predicts 20 to 30% chance of Trump causing financial crisis, war, civil violence, and authoritarianism over next 5 years

Posted on June 19, 2018 by

[ Homer-Dixon wrote an article over a year ago for the Toronto Globe and Mail titled “Crisis analysis, how much damage can Trump do? (A lot). How’d his prediction turn out?

Within this article is a link showing 4 major risks during the Trump administration and the odds of their occurring within the next 5 years (here):  

  • Severe Financial crisis: 25%. Financial, demand, and unemployment shocks significantly exceeding those experienced in the Great Recession (i.e., global GDP declining at 2% per year for at least one year.
  • Severe civil violence: 25%. Active engagement of paramilitary groups supporting Trump; widespread organized violence between Trump supporters and opponents; significant violence between law enforcement and protesters; violent attacks by militant Trump supporters on loci of opposition to Trump policies, such as media outlets, judges, and prominent individuals; bombings; assassinations of elected officials.
  • Severe Authoritarianism: 30%. Declaration of state of emergency; federalization of the National Guard; suspension of key civil liberties; state-directed prosecution and imprisonment of journalists, academics, civil-society leaders, and political opponents; mass arrests; registration of members of identified enemy groups.
  • Severe intensity war: 20%. War between US and one or more great powers involving massed ground, air, and/or naval forces, and conventional or cruise missiles; large casualties; direct attacks on one or both homelands; any conflict with substantial risk of escalation to nuclear use.

The odds of moderate levels of these events are much higher:

  • Moderate Financial crisis: 40%. Financial, demand, and unemployment shocks not significantly exceeding in magnitude those accompanying the 2008-09 Great Recession (2009 global GDP growth rate: -1.7%)
  • Moderate civil violence: 60%. Sporadic but organized violent political demonstrations, protests, strikes and riots, with some direct violent confrontations between Trump supporters and opponents; some police shootings and attacks on police associated with these events
  • Moderate Authoritarianism: 60%. Use of federal resources to intimidate and constrain journalists, judges, and Trump opponents, limit voting rights, and limit electronic communication; substantially increased application of force to track, seize, and deport immigrants; criminalization of protest; purging from civil service of opposition elements; refusal of federal authorities to abide by court rulings
  • Moderate intensity war: 60%. Contained regional conflict between US and intermediate or great powers

And of course, there are many events out of Trump’s control listed in the category “Fast Crash” of energyskeptic that could also hasten these events.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Homer-Dixon, Thomas. 2017-3-19. Crisis analysis: How much damage can Trump do? (A lot). Toronto Globe and Mail.

“Okay, here’s what happened,” wrote an American friend after the U.S. election. “Someone threw a switch, and now we’re living in an alternative universe.”

The big problem with alternative universes is that we don’t know how they work. The assumptions, intuitions and rules of thumb we’ve previously used to anticipate events, and guide our navigation, suddenly don’t apply. So we face an exploding range of possible futures, including many that once seemed crazy.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s psychological characteristics make such uncertainty acute. It’s clear, for instance, that Mr. Trump’s lying is less a calculated political strategy than a reflection of his deep inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. He creates a make-believe world for himself and surrounds himself with people who, to advance their narrow ends, help him sustain that world. When Mr. Trump appears to be lying, he’s simply reporting what he sees in his own alternative world, where fantasy and reality mush together.

As Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted on March 6, 2017: “We must accept possibility that POTUS does not know fact from fiction, right from wrong. That wild claims are not strategic, but worse.”

The entirely predictable chaos of the new administration’s first weeks has many liberals fantasizing that Mr. Trump will be removed from office before his term finishes. But we’ve seen enough of him to know he’s unlikely to leave willingly through any legitimate and lawful political mechanism, like impeachment. Instead, if Mr. Trump feels cornered, he’ll declare that his enemies are conspiring against him and call his supporters – many of whom are heavily armed – to come to his aid.

It’s also possible that Mr. Trump will find his groove, allowing things to settle down. Yet his performance so far suggests his administration will instead lurch from crisis to crisis. To make some sense of these outcomes, I’ve charted the most likely crisis types. Drawing on analysis by a wide range of scholars, I’ve also estimated the probabilities of each type at one, two, and five years into a Trump administration (the latter timeline assumes that Trump is re-elected in 2020).

There are four principal types, I’d argue: financial crisis, civil violence, authoritarianism, and war. Each crisis type then has various possible levels of intensity. “Moderate” authoritarianism could involve, for instance, use of federal resources to intimidate or constrain journalists and judges; substantially increased application of force to track, detain and deport immigrants; and criminalization of protest. Mr. Trump, or in the case of criminalization of protest, his acolytes at the state level are already checking some of these boxes, so I estimate the probability of this degree of authoritarianism in the administration’s first year to be 70%. “Severe” authoritarianism would involve actions like a declaration of a state of emergency, federalization of the National Guard, or suspension of key civil liberties. This outcome is much less likely; even after five years, I don’t think it’s higher than 30%.

A “moderate” war crisis, by my definition, would include any regional conflict between the United States and an intermediate power like Iran, or a great power like China, say in the South China Sea. “Severe” war would involve use of massed military force against a great power like Russia. The category would also include any conflict, for instance, with North Korea, that carries a substantial risk of nuclear escalation. In part, because of Mr. Trump’s expressed hostility towards Iran and China, and his tendency to see all international relations in zero-sum terms, I estimate the five-year probability of a “moderate” war crisis to be high, at 60%.

The four crisis types are likely to be causally linked. In particular, civil violence or war could create conditions that Mr. Trump might use to justify an authoritarian crackdown. Financial crisis could also be a consequence of war. The administration’s decision-making incompetence increases the risk of financial crisis, civil violence, and war. For instance, Mr. Trump’s team of advisers contains little high-level economic expertise, so his administration could be out of its depth should serious trouble develop in financial systems overseas, say in China or Europe.

The specific probabilities that one plugs into this model are not entirely speculative. Experts can argue about the details, but they’re largely in agreement that, for instance, the risk of nuclear war has jumped, which is why The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently moved the minute-hand of its doomsday clock closer to midnight.

Yet the specific probabilities are less important than the overall analytical exercise of categorizing the types of crisis Mr. Trump might create and the causal pathways that might lead to them. It helps us see possible futures more clearly. In Mr. Trump’s alternative universe, we need all the help we can get.

Thomas Homer-Dixon is the CIGI chair of global systems in the Balsillie School of International Affairs, University of Waterloo. He is well-known within the fields of ecology, international risk, and biophysical economics.

Posted in Crash Coming Soon, Scientists, Social Disorder, War | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Energy from cow flatulence

Posted on June 16, 2018 by

[ Other “energy alternatives” in the Far Out category of menu item Energy include escaping to Mars, liposuction fat, whirlwinds, playground power, garbage, tornadoes, and turning seawater into fuel.   

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Alexander, K. September 29, 2016. Climate fight targeting cows may reshape California dairies. San Francisco Chronicle.

Legislation signed this month by Gov. Jerry Brown requires California’s dairy industry to answer for its contribution to global warming by making a 40% cut in methane emissions in coming years. The gas, which heats the atmosphere 20 times faster than carbon dioxide, comes from the butts and burps of bovines.

One U.N. report blames livestock for 14.5% of the planet’s heat-trapping gases, as much as planes, trains and automobiles combined. So far livestock have escaped climate regulations.

The challenge of cutting methane could reshape the 1,500 dairy farms that dot California — only about a dozen of which own methane digesters. Farmers say the new law, and the money and equipment needed to comply with it, could deal some in the industry a fatal blow as they already struggle with low milk prices, rising labor costs and drought.

Adding to the pressure, many environmentalists are pushing to tighten the crackdown on methane. The legislation, they say, didn’t demand deep enough cuts — and could lead to unforeseen problems like pollution from methane digesters, which work by isolating cow manure in airtight chambers where the waste breaks down and releases methane gas for power or fuel, cost several hundred thousand dollars and require considerable upkeep. Many of the digesters in California have stopped working.

A more proven way to limit emissions is to get dairy cows out of their crowded stalls and into the pasture. This allows the manure to decompose naturally and spew less methane into the atmosphere. The practice, though, is criticized as time-consuming and land-intensive.

The digester at Giacomini’s ranch, which is smaller than some that are used on larger dairy farms in the Central Valley, was recently retrofitted with a new engine so that it runs more cleanly and efficiently.  He paid about $100,000 for the upgrade on top of the $600,000 outlay for the system. Grants helped him cover nearly two-thirds of the initial cost, and Giacomini says he couldn’t have afforded the equipment without them.

The digester runs 24 hours a day. It collects runoff from cow stalls in a 2-acre drainage basin, where methane from manure is captured under a huge tarp and piped to a generator. About 70 kilowatts of electricity are produced, enough to power all the facilities on the ranch except the administrative building. In the evening there’s surplus power to sell back to the grid.

 

Posted in Far Out | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

U.S. Industrial farming destroys future food production for centuries

Posted on June 13, 2018 by

Preface. Below are excerpts from a devastating critique of current farming practices by the National research council who show the myriad ways that industrial farming is harming the land and future food production.

Continue reading →

Posted in Air, Biodiversity Loss, Groundwater, Limits To Growth, Peak Food, Pesticides, Planetary Boundaries, Soil, Water Pollution | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Challenges & opportunities for alternative transportation fuels and vehicles. U.S. House hearing, 2011

Posted on June 10, 2018 by

Preface. Congress is aware that an energy crisis looms, though they seldom acknowledge or deal with it.  Here are a few excerpts from this U.S. House hearing (2011) The American energy initiative part 6: Challenges & opportunities for alternative transportation fuels and vehicles.

Continue reading →

Posted in Alternative Energy, U.S. Congress Energy Policy, U.S. Congress Transportation | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Challenges & opportunities for alternative transportation fuels and vehicles. U.S. House hearing, 2011

Richard Heinberg: Systemic change driven by moral awakening is our only hope

Posted on June 6, 2018 by

[ Although this was written over a year ago on August 14, 2017 by Richard Heinberg on Ecowatch, it’s as true today as it was then, and worth republishing since people forget what they’ve read in the past

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Our core ecological problem is not climate change. It is overshoot, of which global warming is a symptom. Overshoot is a systemic issue. Over the past century-and-a-half, enormous amounts of cheap energy from fossil fuels enabled the rapid growth of resource extraction, manufacturing and consumption; and these in turn led to population increase, pollution and loss of natural habitat and hence biodiversity.

The human system expanded dramatically, overshooting Earth’s long-term carrying capacity for humans while upsetting the ecological systems we depend on for our survival. Until we understand and address this systemic imbalance, symptomatic treatment (doing what we can to reverse pollution dilemmas like climate change, trying to save threatened species and hoping to feed a burgeoning population with genetically modified crops) will constitute an endlessly frustrating round of stopgap measures that are ultimately destined to fail.

The ecology movement in the 1970s benefited from a strong infusion of systems thinking, which was in vogue at the time (ecology—the study of the relationships between organisms and their environments—is an inherently systemic discipline, as opposed to studies like chemistry that focus on reducing complex phenomena to their components). As a result, many of the best environmental writers of the era framed the modern human predicament in terms that revealed the deep linkages between environmental symptoms and the way human society operates. Limits to Growth (1972), an outgrowth of the systems research of Jay Forrester, investigated the interactions between population growth, industrial production, food production, resource depletion and pollution. Overshoot (1982), by William Catton, named our systemic problem and described its origins and development in a style any literate person could appreciate. Many more excellent books from the era could be cited.

However, in recent decades, as climate change has come to dominate environmental concerns, there has been a significant shift in the discussion. Today, most environmental reporting is focused laser-like on climate change, and systemic links between it and other worsening ecological dilemmas (such as overpopulation, species extinctions, water and air pollution, and loss of topsoil and fresh water) are seldom highlighted. It’s not that climate change isn’t a big deal. As a symptom, it’s a real doozy. There’s never been anything quite like it, and climate scientists and climate-response advocacy groups are right to ring the loudest of alarm bells. But our failure to see climate change in context may be our undoing.

Why have environmental writers and advocacy organizations succumbed to tunnel vision? Perhaps it’s simply that they assume systems thinking is beyond the capacity of policy makers. It’s true: If climate scientists were to approach world leaders with the message, “We have to change everything, including our entire economic system—and fast,” they might be shown the door rather rudely. A more acceptable message is, “We have identified a serious pollution problem, for which there are technical solutions.” Perhaps many of the scientists who did recognize the systemic nature of our ecological crisis concluded that if we can successfully address this one make-or-break environmental crisis, we’ll be able to buy time to deal with others waiting in the wings (overpopulation, species extinctions, resource depletion and on and on).

If climate change can be framed as an isolated problem for which there is a technological solution, the minds of economists and policy makers can continue to graze in familiar pastures. Technology—in this case, solar, wind and nuclear power generators, as well as batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and, if all else fails, solar radiation management via atmospheric aerosols—centers our thinking on subjects like financial investment and industrial production. Discussion participants don’t have to develop the ability to think systemically, nor do they need to understand the Earth system and how human systems fit into it. All they need trouble themselves with is the prospect of shifting some investments, setting tasks for engineers and managing the resulting industrial-economic transformation so as to ensure that new jobs in green industries compensate for jobs lost in coal mines.

The strategy of buying time with a techno-fix presumes either that we will be able to institute systemic change at some unspecified point in the future even though we can’t do it just now (a weak argument on its face), or that climate change and all of our other symptomatic crises will in fact be amenable to technological fixes. The latter thought-path is again a comfortable one for managers and investors. After all, everybody loves technology. It already does nearly everything for us. During the last century it solved a host of problems: it cured diseases, expanded food production, sped up transportation and provided us with information and entertainment in quantities and varieties no one could previously have imagined. Why shouldn’t it be able to solve climate change and all the rest of our problems?

Of course, ignoring the systemic nature of our dilemma just means that as soon as we get one symptom corralled, another is likely to break loose. But, crucially, is climate change, taken as an isolated problem, fully treatable with technology? Color me doubtful. I say this having spent many months poring over the relevant data with David Fridley of the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Our resulting book, Our Renewable Future, concluded that nuclear power is too expensive and risky; meanwhile, solar and wind power both suffer from intermittency, which (once these sources begin to provide a large percentage of total electrical power) will require a combination of three strategies on a grand scale: energy storage, redundant production capacity and demand adaptation. At the same time, we in industrial nations will have to adapt most of our current energy usage (which occurs in industrial processes, building heating and transportation) to electricity. Altogether, the energy transition promises to be an enormous undertaking, unprecedented in its requirements for investment and substitution. When David and I stepped back to assess the enormity of the task, we could see no way to maintain current quantities of global energy production during the transition, much less to increase energy supplies so as to power ongoing economic growth. The biggest transitional hurdle is scale: the world uses an enormous amount of energy currently; only if that quantity can be reduced significantly, especially in industrial nations, could we imagine a credible pathway toward a post-carbon future.

Downsizing the world’s energy supplies would, effectively, also downsize industrial processes of resource extraction, manufacturing, transportation, and waste management. That’s a systemic intervention, of exactly the kind called for by the ecologists of the 1970s who coined the mantra, “Reduce, reuse and recycle.” It gets to the heart of the overshoot dilemma—as does population stabilization and reduction, another necessary strategy. But it’s also a notion to which technocrats, industrialists, and investors are virulently allergic.

The ecological argument is, at its core, a moral one—as I explain in more detail in a just-released manifesto replete with sidebars and graphics (“There’s No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss”). Any systems thinker who understands overshoot and prescribes powerdown as a treatment is effectively engaging in an intervention with an addictive behavior. Society is addicted to growth, and that’s having terrible consequences for the planet and, increasingly, for us as well. We have to change our collective and individual behavior and give up something we depend on—power over our environment. We must restrain ourselves, like an alcoholic foreswearing booze. That requires honesty and soul-searching.

In its early years the environmental movement made that moral argument, and it worked up to a point. Concern over rapid population growth led to family planning efforts around the world. Concern over biodiversity declines led to habitat protection. Concern over air and water pollution led to a slew of regulations. These efforts weren’t sufficient, but they showed that framing our systemic problem in moral terms could get at least some traction.

Why didn’t the environmental movement fully succeed? Some theorists now calling themselves “bright greens” or “eco-modernists” have abandoned the moral fight altogether. Their justification for doing so is that people want a vision of the future that’s cheery and that doesn’t require sacrifice. Now, they say, only a technological fix offers any hope. The essential point of this essay (and my manifesto) is simply that, even if the moral argument fails, a techno-fix won’t work either. A gargantuan investment in technology (whether next-generation nuclear power or solar radiation geo-engineering) is being billed as our last hope. But in reality it’s no hope at all.

The reason for the failure thus far of the environmental movement wasn’t that it appealed to humanity’s moral sentiments—that was in fact the movement’s great strength. The effort fell short because it wasn’t able to alter industrial society’s central organizing principle, which is also its fatal flaw: its dogged pursuit of growth at all cost. Now we’re at the point where we must finally either succeed in overcoming growthism or face the failure not just of the environmental movement, but of civilization itself.

The good news is that systemic change is fractal in nature: it implies, indeed it requires, action at every level of society. We can start with our own individual choices and behavior; we can work within our communities. We needn’t wait for a cathartic global or national sea change. And even if our efforts cannot “save” consumerist industrial civilization, they could still succeed in planting the seeds of a regenerative human culture worthy of survival.

There’s more good news: Once we humans choose to restrain our numbers and our rates of consumption, technology can assist our efforts. Machines can help us monitor our progress, and there are relatively simple technologies that can help deliver needed services with less energy usage and environmental damage. Some ways of deploying technology could even help us clean up the atmosphere and restore ecosystems.

But machines can’t make the key choices that will set us on a sustainable path. Systemic change driven by moral awakening: it’s not just our last hope; it’s the only real hope we’ve ever had.

Posted in Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Overpopulation, Overshoot, Population, Richard Heinberg | Tagged , , , | 14 Comments

Mass migration: Africa

Posted on June 4, 2018 by

Sengupta, S. 2016-12-15. Heat, Hunger and War Force Africans Onto a ‘Road on Fire’. New York Times.

AGADEZ, Niger — The world dismisses them as economic migrants. The law treats them as criminals who show up at a nation’s borders uninvited. Prayers alone protect them on the journey across the merciless Sahara.

But peel back the layers of their stories and you find a complex bundle of trouble and want that prompts the men and boys of West Africa to leave home, endure beatings and bribes, board a smuggler’s pickup truck and try to make a living far, far away.

They do it because the rains have become so fickle, the days measurably hotter, the droughts more frequent and more fierce, making it impossible to grow enough food on their land. Some go to the cities first, only to find jobs are scarce. Some come from countries ruled by dictators, like Gambia, whose longtime ruler recently refused to accept the results of an election he lost. Others come from countries crawling with jihadists, like Mali.

In Agadez, a fabled gateway town of sand and hustle through which hundreds of thousands exit the Sahel on their way abroad, I met dozens of them. One was Bori Bokoum, 21, from a village in the Mopti region of Mali. Fighters for Al Qaeda clash with government forces in the area, one of many reasons making a living had become much harder than in his father’s time.

One bad harvest followed another, he said. Not enough rice and millet could be eked out of the soil. So, as a teenager, he ventured out to sell watches in the nearest market town for a while, then worked on a farm in neighboring Ivory Coast, saving up for this journey. Libya was his destination, then maybe across the Mediterranean Sea, to Italy.

“To try my luck,” was how Mr. Bokoum put it. “I know it’s difficult. But everyone goes. I also have to try.”

This journey has become a rite of passage for West Africans of his generation. The slow burn of climate change makes subsistence farming, already risky business in a hot, arid region, even more of a gamble. Pressures on land and water fuel clashes, big and small. Insurgencies simmer across the region, prompting United States counterterrorism forces to keep watch from a base on the outskirts of Agadez.

This year, more than 311,000 people have passed through Agadez on their way to either Algeria or Libya, and some onward to Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration. The largest numbers are from Niger and its West African neighbors, including Mr. Bokoum’s home, Mali.

Scholars of migration count people like Mr. Bokoum among the millions who could be displaced around the world in coming decades as rising seas, widening deserts and erratic weather threaten traditional livelihoods. For the men who pour through Agadez, these hardships are tangled up with intense economic, political and demographic pressures.

“Climate change on its own doesn’t force people to move but it amplifies pre-existing vulnerabilities,” said Jane McAdam, an Australian law professor who studies the trend. They move when they can no longer imagine a future living off their land — or as she said, “when life becomes increasingly intolerable.

But many of these people fall through the cracks of international law. The United Nations 1951 refugee convention applies only to those fleeing war and persecution, and even that treaty’s obligation to offer protection is increasingly flouted by many countries wary of foreigners.

In such a political climate, policy makers point out, the chances of expanding the law to include those displaced by environmental degradation are slim to none. It explains why the more than 100 countries that have ratified the Paris climate agreement this year acknowledged that environmental changes would spur the movement of people, but kicked the can down the road on what to do about them.

A Barren Outlook

Many migrants pass through Agadez from the villages around Zinder, a city roughly situated between the mouth of the Sahara and Niger’s border with Nigeria. Until 1926, Zinder was Niger’s capital. Then it ran low on water.

Early one gray-yellow morning, I set off from Zinder for a village called Chana, the home of one of the migrants I had met, Habibou Idi. Rows upon rows of millet grew on both sides of the two-lane national highway, punctuated occasionally by a spindly acacia. About an hour outside the city, some boys were raking the soil, yanking out weeds.

An older man sitting to the side said that back when he was a boy, the millet stood so high that you could hardly see workers in the fields. Midway through the growing season, it now barely reaches their knees.

An hour farther out of the city, we veered off the paved road and across a barren, rutted field.

In Chana, there was a steady thud of women pounding beans with wooden pestles. The beans grew along the ground, in the shade of the millet. They were the only crop ready for harvest. And so the people of Chana ate beans, morning and night: beans pounded, boiled, flavored with salt.

As Mr. Idi, 33, led me through his fields, he recalled hearing stories of what Chana looked like before a great drought swept across the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s. The village was encircled by trees, he was told.

Back then, like most villagers, his father had a cow and plenty of sheep. Their droppings fertilized the land. Today, Mr. Idi said, not a single cow is left in Chana. They were sold to buy food.

Mr. Idi complained that the rains are now hard to predict. Sometimes they come in May, and he rushes out to plant his millet and beans, only to find the clouds closing up and his crops withering. Even when a good rain comes, it just floods. Most of the trees are gone, they were cut for firewood.

Living off the land is no longer an option, so unlike his father or grandfather before him, Mr. Idi has spent the last several years working across the border in Nigeria — hauling goods, watering gardens, whatever he could find.

This summer, for the first time, he boarded a bus to Agadez, and then a truck across the dunes to Algeria. There, he mostly begged.

He lasted only a few months.

The Algerian authorities rounded up hundreds of Nigeriens and deposited them back in Agadez.

That is where I met him, in a line for the bus back to Chana. Sand filled the breast pocket of his tunic. He was bringing home a blanket, a collection of secondhand clothes and 50,000 CFAs (the local currency, pronounced SAY-fas), worth about $100.

That did not last long, either. Mr. Idi arrived home to find that his family had taken out a loan of nearly the same amount in his absence. They had sold four of their five goats, too. There were many mouths to feed: his wife, their four children, plus his late brother’s seven.

Hotter Hots and Unpredictable Rains

Sub-Saharan Africa is in the throes of a population boom, which means that people have to grow more food precisely at a time when climate change is making it all the more difficult. Fertility rates remain higher than in other parts of the world, and Niger has the highest in the entire world: Women bear more than seven children on average.

Once every three years, according to scientists from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, or FEWS Net, Niger faces food insecurity, or a lack of adequate food to eat. Hunger here is among the worst in the world: About 45 percent of Niger’s children under 5 suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Meanwhile, in what is already one of the hottest places on Earth, it has gotten steadily hotter: by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1975, Fews Net has found. Other places in the world are warming faster, for sure. But this is the Sahel, where daytime highs often soar well above 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) and growing food in sandy, inhospitable soil is already difficult.

Niger’s neighbors share many of those woes. In Mali, temperatures have gone up by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1975. Summer rains have increased, but are not at the levels they were before the drought.

In Chad, temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius in the same period, according to FEWS Net. The group, which is financed with United States assistance, has warned that cereal production could drop by 30 percent per capita by 2025.

Chad is where FEWS Net’s chief representative for the Sahel, a meteorologist named Alkhalil Adoum, was born in 1957. As a boy, he loved running through the blinding rains of summer, when you couldn’t even see what was ahead of you. He knew a good rain would fill the savanna with wild fruit, and the first green shoots of sorghum would taste as sweet as sugar cane. His family’s cows, once they ate new grass, would give more milk.

“You love the first rains,” Mr. Adoum said. “You know, as a kid, there’s better times ahead.

Those rains don’t come anymore, he said.

There are conflicting scientific models about the effects of climate change on precipitation: some say much of sub-Saharan Africa will be wetter; others drier. The main points of agreement is that the rainy season will be more unpredictable and more intense. On top of that, the hottest parts of the continent will get hotter.

Extreme heat can have grievous consequences on food and disease, the World Food Program found in a survey of scientific studies. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes thrive in it. Pests are more likely to attack crops. Corn and wheat yields decline.

A study, published in December by the International Monitoring Displacement Center, found that in 2015 alone, sudden-onset disaster displaced 1.1 million people in Africa from one part of their country to another.

And then there is the competition over water. Already, it sets off clashes between farmers and herders, often hardened by ethnic divisions. A growing body of research suggests that local droughts, especially in poor, vulnerable countries, heighten the risk of civil conflict.

Risk analysts, including at the London-based firm Verisk Maplecroft, conclude that climate change amplifies the risks of civil unrest across the entire midsection of sub-Saharan Africa, from Mali in the west to Ethiopia in the East.

A grisly example lies in full display just a few hours by road from Mr. Idi’s village. In the southeastern corner of the country, where Niger meets Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon, more than 270,000 people huddle for safety from the Boko Haram insurgency. Altogether, across the Lake Chad Basin, 2.4 million people have fled their homes, according to the United Nations.

A City of Dreams

Agadez is a city of mud-brick compounds with high walls and blazing bright metal doors. For centuries, it was filled with traders and nomads. In recent decades, it was a tourist magnet, until ethnic rebellions and then jihadist violence drove people away.

Today, migration is the main industry. Drivers, smugglers, money changers, sex workers, police officers — everyone lives off the men on the move. It is a city of dreams, both budding and broken. It is where the journey across the desert begins for so many young West African men, and it is where the journey ends, when they fail.

The smugglers’ den where I found Mr. Bokoum, the 21-year-old from Mali, was a set of two adjoining courtyards, with two concrete-floored rooms. Upside-down jerrycans served as stools, plastic mats as sofas.

He had been in Agadez for three months, waiting for his mother to send him money. It can cost 350,000 CFAs — about $600 — to get from Agadez to the Libyan border, on the back of a pickup truck.

The smugglers had also started out as migrants, and most of them worked for a while in Libya. Now, they make money off other men’s journeys. None would hint at how much.

Mohamed Diallo, a Senegalese manager of the compound, blamed Western countries for spewing carbon into the atmosphere, and he was skeptical of their leaders’ promises to curb emissions.

“The big powers are polluting and creating problems for us,” he said. He was appalled that Africans trying to go to Europe were treated like criminals, when Europeans in Africa were treated like kings.

Mr. Diallo’s compound, like others in Agadez, has a weekly rhythm.

He instructs those seeking to make the journey to Libya to be inside by Sunday night. Monday morning, he treats them to a feast before the long haul. He roasts a sheep, plays some music, turns on the ceiling fans for a couple of hours.

Just after sundown, a white Toyota pickup pulls up. Monday night is when Nigerien soldiers change shifts, heading out of Agadez and into a desert outpost. The Toyotas follow, stopping briefly at the police checkpoint at the edge of the city before speeding into the dunes. Those who fall off the trucks are left behind.

The journey to the Libyan border, 250 miles in all, takes three days. No one knows how many die along the way.

Those who venture a journey across the Mediterranean take a deadly gamble, too. Among the more than 4,700 people who have died trying to cross the Central Mediterranean so far in 2016, the vast majority cannot be identified. Of those who can, Africans make up the largest share.

“The migrant road,” Mr. Diallo said, “is a road on fire.”

‘I Will Be a Burden to Them’ Those who make it to Libya do not necessarily make it inside Libya. It is a lawless country where some migrants get thrown behind bars — and some, according to human rights groups, are raped and tortured by militias demanding money. Some run out of money, or heart, to continue the journey to Europe.

On the way back, they usually knock on the gates of the International Organization for Migration’s transit center at the edge of Agadez.

There were about 400 boys and men there the week I visited. They lounged on thin rose-print mattresses. They played cards and scrolled through their phones, calling home if they had any credit left. A few attended a class on how to start a business; others rested in the medical ward.

The mix of shame and boredom hung so heavy you could practically smell it. One young man walked around with an open wound on his elbow; he vaguely said he was injured in a brawl in Libya.

When the heat of the day broke, they roused themselves and played soccer.

The migrants from the countryside all had similar stories. Their fathers had never left the land — they all felt they had to. The harvest was not enough; their families had no tractors, just lazy donkeys. Work in nearby towns brought in a fraction of what they figured they could make abroad.

The lure of abroad, Algeria or Libya or beyond, was strong. Facebook posts from friends and neighbors made it seem like a cakewalk.

Ibrahim Diarra said that fickle rains made it too hard to grow peanuts and corn on the family farm in the Tambacounda region of Senegal. He watched the young men of his village leave, each pulled by the stories of those who went before. Then he followed.

Mr. Diarra made his way through Qaeda-riddled northern Mali, then worked construction for six months in Mauritania, before pushing on to Tamanrasset, in Algeria. If he could just get to Morocco, he had heard, he could climb over a fence and be in Spain.

“They told me it’s very easy,” he said.

It wasn’t. He lasted two months in Algeria. Then, he went back to Agadez and asked the migration organization for a bus ticket home. So far this year, 100,000 people have made the same reverse journey.

On a Thursday — departure night for those whose emigration dreams are dashed — bittersweet chaos erupted in the courtyard as two large buses pulled up.

The manager of the transit center, Azaoua Mahamen, sat on the porch with his laptop open, scrolling through the names of those who had been cleared to go home. Migrants need identity papers, and government permission. If they are children, Mr. Mahamen has to make sure they have a family to go back to; a few don’t.

Dozens of young men crowded around him, their eyes like headlights in the dark.

They shouted their names. They waved their identity cards, wrapped in plastic. One group complained that only Guineans were getting out that night. The Ivory Coast contingent started cheering when one of their compatriots was called.

Mr. Diarra listened for his name, though he wasn’t looking forward to facing his parents empty-handed.

“I’m supposed to support my family,” he explained. “Now I have no clothes, nothing. I will be a burden to them.

His father, especially, would be upset. “He’ll ask me how my friends got to Europe and I came back,” he said, shaking his head.

He said he would try the journey again. It would take him a few months to cobble together the money.

Posted in Drought & Collapse, Extreme Weather, Mass migrations | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Royal Society on peak oil and how much oil is left

Posted on June 1, 2018 by

[ This is a great introduction to the whole topic of oil, reserves, resources, and so on. It’s very long so I’ve only excerpted bits of it and reworded some of it.  I can’t say there’s anything new in here that’s not already in energyskeptic posts, but this article pulls it all together at one of the top scientific institutions in the world.  Yes, it’s from 2013, but I like publishing older articles long after to see how good their vision of the future was.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Miller, R.G., Sorrell, S. R. 2 December 2013. The future of oil supply. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences.

 

Figure 2.

Figure 2. Classification of hydrocarbon liquids.

The core issue for future supply is the extent and the rate of depletion of conventional oil, since this currently provides around 95% of global all-liquids supply. Options for mitigating this depletion include:

  • substituting conventional oil with non-conventional oil;
  • substituting all-oil with other non-conventional liquids (gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids and biofuels); and
  • reducing demand for all-liquids (e.g. through improving end-use efficiency, substituting non-liquid energy carriers such as gas or electricity or reducing demand for the relevant energy services).

Both the extent and rate of depletion and the feasibility and cost of different mitigation options are the subject of intense debate.

Oil production: Global production of all-liquids averaged 85.7 million barrels per day (mb per day) in 2011, or 31.2 billion barrels per year (Gb per year). Global cumulative production amounted to approximately 1248 Gb, with half of this occurring since 1988.  Crude oil production is heavily concentrated in a small number of countries and a small number of giant fields, with approximately 100 fields producing one half of global supply, 25 producing one quarter and a single field (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) producing approximately 7%. Most of these giant fields are relatively old, many are well past their peak of production, most of the rest seem likely to enter decline within the next decade or so and few new giant fields are expected to be found. Future global production is therefore heavily dependent on the future prospects of the giant fields.

PEAK OIL: Crude oil production grew at approximately 1.5% per year between 1995 and 2005, but then plateaued with more recent increases in liquids supply largely deriving from NGLs, oil sands and tight oil (my comment: but most of our oil is conventional and significantly cheaper and energy efficient than NGLs, oil sands, and tight oil).  On a per capita basis, annual all-oil production peaked at 5.5 barrels in 1979 and has remained around 4.5 barrels since the mid-1980s. Annual consumption averages approximately 2.5 barrels per person in non-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (82% of the global population) and approximately 14 barrels per person in the OECD, with the USA an outlier at 25 barrels per person.

It’s the size of the tap, not the tank that matters

it is essential to recognize that large quantities of resources within the Earth’s crust provide no guarantee that these can be produced at particular rates and/or at reasonable cost. There are huge variations both within and between resource types in terms of size of accumulation, depth, accessibility, chemical composition, energy content, extraction cost, net energy yield (i.e. the energy obtained from the resource minus the energy required to find, extract and process it), local and global environmental impacts and, most importantly, the feasible rate of extraction—to say nothing of the geopolitics of access. Higher quality resources tend to be found and developed first, and as production shifts down the ‘resource pyramid’, increasing reliance must be placed upon less accessible, poorer quality and more expensive resources that have a progressively lower net energy yield and are increasingly difficult to produce at high rates. Compare, for example, the monetary and energy investment required to produce 100 kb per day from the giant oil fields of the Middle East to that required to achieve comparable rates of production from deep-water oil fields, subarctic resources or the Canadian oil sands. To quote a widely used phrase in this context, it is not so much the size of the tank that matters but the size of the tap.

This is not simply an issue of the steeply rising production costs of poorer quality resources because technical and net energy constraints may make some resources inaccessible and some production rates unachievable regardless of cost. Kerogen oil is especially constrained in rate and net energy terms and may never become economic to produce, yet it accounts for 19% of the IEA estimate of remaining recoverable resources. Hence, a critical evaluation of future supply prospects must go beyond appraisals of aggregate resource size and examine the technical, economic and political feasibility of accessing different resources at different rates over different periods of time.

The production of conventional oil must eventually decline to almost zero, because it is a finite resource.

Decline rates

From a sample of 77 post-peak UK fields, we estimate an average decline rate of approximately 12.5% per year, so the average rate of decline from post-peak fields is a critical determinant of  future oil supply. Recent studies of globally representative samples of post-peak crude oil fields find a production-weighted average decline rate of at least 6.5% per year. This is lower than the average decline rate, since larger fields tend to decline more slowly.

Offshore fields decline faster than onshore fields and that newer fields decline faster than older fields. If smaller, younger and offshore fields account for an increasing share of future global production, the average decline rate for conventional oil fields will increase prior to the peak. Greater reliance upon tight oil resources produced using hydraulic fracturing will exacerbate any rising trend in global average decline rates, since these wells have no plateau and decline extremely fast—for example, by 90% or more in the first 5 years.

The production cycle for tight oil resources is driven by a different set of mechanisms since this resource is located in continuous formations rather than discrete fields. Nevertheless, the outcome is similar to that for conventional oil. With exceptionally high decline rates for individual wells, regional tight oil production can only be maintained through the continuous drilling of closely spaced wells. But tight oil plays are heterogeneous, with much higher well productivity in the ‘sweet spots’ than elsewhere. So when the sweet spots become exhausted, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain regional production. Based upon these considerations, Hughes suggests that aggregate US tight oil production is likely to peak around 2.5 mb per day (compared to total US oil production of 6.9 mb per day in 2008) and is likely to decline very rapidly after 2017.

Based upon these considerations, the IEA anticipates crude oil production from existing fields falling from 68.5 mb per day in 2011 to only 26 mb per day in 2035, but hopes for 65.4 due to undiscovered oil fields and additional production from unconventional oil, with no peak before 2035.

This IEA estimate has received much criticism from scientists.  For example, Höök et al. argue that production from existing fields could decline more quickly than the IEA assumes, while Aleklett et al.argue that the projections rely upon implausible assumptions about the rate at which fallow and undiscovered fields can be developed and produced. Both studies imply more rapid decline of global crude oil production and hence more difficulty in maintaining aggregate global liquids supply. Furthermore, the IEA projection assumes adequate investment, no geopolitical interruptions and prices that do not significantly constrain global economic growth.

Far more important than predicting the exact date of global peak is how will we cope after it happens.  But although mitigation can be achieved through fuel substitution and demand reduction but both will prove challenging owing to the scale of investment required and the associated lead times. For example, a 2008 report for the US Department of Energy argued that large-scale mitigation programmes need to be initiated at least 20 years before a global peak if serious shortfalls in liquid fuels supply are to be avoided. While this report overlooked key options such as electric vehicles and tight oil, it also assumed a relatively modest rate of post-peak crude oil decline (2% per year) and ignored the environmental consequences of expanding the supply of non-conventional resources. Avoiding these would necessarily restrict the range of available options.

NGLS can’t fill in for crude oil: 33% less energy and only 33% can be made into transportation fuel

Many sources anticipate large-scale substitution of NGLs for crude production over the next two decades, owing to expanding gas supply (including shale gas) and/or increases in the average NGL content of that gas. While the IEA states that the latter is expected to remain constant, its projections imply a doubling. But even assuming production grows as anticipated, NGLs cannot fully substitute for crude oil since they contain about a third less energy per unit volume and only about one-third of that volume can be blended into transport fuels. NGLs can substitute for crude oil as a petrochemical feedstock and may partially compensate for increased heavy oil within the refinery input mix, but at some point a rising volume of NGLs will be unable to adequately make up for reduced crude supply.

Oil sands already make an important contribution to global liquids supply and most forecasts anticipate a significant expansion over the next 20 years. But according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers [68], the Canadian oil sands will deliver only 5 mb per day by 2030, which represents less than 6% of the IEA projection of all-liquids production by that date. Similarly, Söderbergh et al. [69] conclude that a ‘crash programme’ to develop the oil sands could only deliver a comparable amount. Also, this resource is significantly more energy- and carbon-intensive than conventional oil, and surface mining has massive impacts on local and regional environments.

Murphy examines the importance of the energy return on investment(EROI) for liquid fuels production and the implications of declining EROI for the global economy. From a review of the rather limited literature on this topic, Murphy concludes that: the EROI for global oil and gas production is roughly 15 and declining while that for the USA is 11 and declining; the EROI for unconventional oil and biofuels is generally less than 10; there is a negative exponential relationship between oil prices and aggregate EROI which may become nonlinear as the latter falls below 10; and the minimum oil price needed to increase oil supply is consistent with that which has historically triggered economic recessions. Murphy concludes that the declining EROI of liquid fuels will make it increasingly difficult to sustain global economic growth.

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