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DeclineInOil
"If the Environmentalists Would Get Out
of the Way, Can't We Just Drill in ANWR?"
While some folks desperately cling to the belief that oil is a renewable resource, others hold on to the equally delusional idea that tapping the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve will solve, or at least delay, this crisis. While drilling for oil in ANWR will certainly make a lot of money for the companies doing the drilling, it won't do much to help the overall situation for three reasons:
1. According of the Department of Energy, drilling in ANWR
will only lower oil prices by less than fifty cents;
2. ANWR contains 10 billion barrels of oil - or about the
amount the US consumes in a little more than a year.
3. As with all oil projects, ANWR will take about 10 years to
come online. Once it does, its production will peak at
875,000 barrels per day - but not till the year 2025. By
then the US is projected to need a whopping 35 million
barrels per day while the world is projected to need 120
million barrels per day.
"Won't the Market and the Laws of
Supply and Demand Address This?"
Not enough to prevent an economic meltdown.
As economist Andrew Mckillop explains in a recent article entitled, "Why Oil Prices Are Barreling Up," oil is nowhere near as "elastic" as most commodities:
One of the biggest problems facing the IEA, the EIA and a
host of analysts and "experts" who claim that "high prices
cut demand" either directly or by dampening economic
growth is that this does not happen in the real world.
Since early 1999, oil prices have risen about 350%. Oil
demand growth in 2004 at nearly 4% was the highest in 25
years. These are simple facts that clearly conflict with
received notions about "price elasticity". World oil demand,
for a host of easily-described reasons, tends to be bolstered
by "high" oil and gas prices until and unless "extreme" prices
are attained.
As mentioned previously, this is exactly what happened during the oil shocks of the 1970s - shortfalls in supply as little as 5% drove the price of oil up near 400%. Demand did not fall until the world was mired in the most severe economic slowdown since the Great Depression.
While many analysts claim the market will take care of this for us, they forget that neoclassic economic theory is besieged by several fundamental flaws that will prevent the market from appropriately reacting to Peak Oil until it is too late. To illustrate, as of April 2005, a barrel of oil costs about $55. The amount of energy contained in that barrel of oil would cost between $100-$250* dollars to derive from alternative sources of energy. Thus, the market won't signal energy companies to begin aggressively pursuing alternative sources of energy until oil reaches the $100-$250 mark.
*This does not even account for the amount of money it would take to locate and refine the raw materials necessary for a large scale conversion, the construction and deployment of the alternatives, and finally the retrofitting of the world's $45 trillion dollar infrastructure to run on these alternative sources.
Once they do begin aggressively pursuing these alternatives, there will be a 25-to-50 year lag time between the initial heavy-duty research into these alternatives and their wide-scale industrial implementation.
However, in order to finance an aggressive implementation of alternative energies, we need a tremendous amount of investment capital - in addition to affordable energy and raw materials - that we absolutely will not have once oil prices are permanently lodged in the $200 per barrel neighborhood.
While we need 25-to-50 years to retrofit our economy to run on alternative sources of energy, we may only get 25-to-50 days once oil production peaks.
Within a few months of global oil production hitting its peak, it will become impossible to dismiss the decline in supply as a merely transitory event. Once this occurs, you can expect traders on Wall Street to quickly bid the price up to, and possibly over, the $200 per barrel range as they realize the world is now in an era of permanent oil scarcity.
With oil at or above $200 per barrel, gas prices will reach $10 per gallon inside of a few weeks. This will cause a rapid breakdown of trucking industries and transportation networks. Importation and distribution of food, medicine, and consumer goods will grind to a halt.
As Jan Lundberg, founder of the Lundberg Survey, aka "the bible of the oil industry" recently pointed out:
The scenario I foresee is that market-based panic will,
within a few days, drive prices up skyward. And as supplies
can no longer slake daily world demand of over 80 million
barrels a day, the market will become paralyzed at prices
too high for the wheels of commerce and even daily living in
"advanced" societies. There may be an event that appears
to trigger this final energy crash, but the overall cause will
be the huge consumption on a finite planet.
The trucks will no longer pull into Wal-Mart. Or Safeway or
other food stores. The freighters bringing packaged techno
-toys and whatnot from China will have no fuel. There will be
fuel in many places, but hoarding and uncertainty will trigger
outages, violence and chaos. For only a short time will the
police and military be able to maintain order, if at all.
The collapse will be hastened by the fact that the US national debt will become completely unsustainable once the price of oil gets into the $100 range. Once this mark is passed, the nations of the world will have no choice but to pull their investments out of the US while simultaneously switching from the dollar to the euro as the reserve currency for oil transactions. Along with the breakdown of domestic transportation networks, the global financial shift away from the dollar will wholly shatter the US economy.
If you're wondering why the mainstream media is not covering an issue of this magnitude 24/7, now you know. Once the seriousness of situation is generally acknowledged, a panic will spread on the markets and bring down the entire house of cards even if production hasn't actually peaked.
In summary, we are a prisoner of our own dilemma:
1. Right now, we have no economically scalable
alternatives to oil. (Emphasis placed on economic
scalability, not technical viability.)
2. We won't get motivated to aggressively pursue
economically scalable alternatives until oil prices are
sky high;
3. Once oil prices are sky-high, our economy will be
shattered, and we won't be able to finance an
aggressive switch-over to whatever modest
alternatives are available to us.
4. An aggressive conservation program will bring down
the price of oil, thereby removing the incentive to
pursue alternatives until it is too late.
5. The raw materials (silicon, copper, platinum) necessary
for many sources of alternative energy are already in
short supply. Any attempt to secure enough of these
resources to power a large scale transition to
alternative energies is likely to be met with firece
competition, if not outright warfare, with China.
"What About All the Various Alternatives
to Oil? Can't We Find Replacements?"
Politicians and economists insist that there are alternatives to oil and that we can "invent our way out of this."
Physicists and geologists tell us an entirely different story.
The politicians and economists are selling us 30-year old economic and political fantasies, while the physicists and geologists are telling us scientific and mathematical truth. Rather than accept the high-tech myths proposed by the politicians and economists, its time for you to start asking critical questions about the so called "alternatives to oil" and facing some hard truths about energy.
While there are many technologically viable alternatives to oil, there are none (or combination thereof) that can supply us with anywhere near the amount of net-energy required by our modern monetary system and industrial infrastructure.
People tend to think of alternatives to oil as somehow independent from oil. In reality, the alternatives to oil are more accurately described as "derivatives of oil." It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and adapt current infrastructure to run on them.
Each of the alternatives is besieged by numerous fundamental physical shortcomings that have, thus far, received little attention:
"What About Green Alternatives like
Solar, Wind, Wave, and Geothermal?"
Solar and wind power suffer from four fundamental physical shortcomings that prevent them from ever being able to replace more than a tiny fraction of the energy we get from oil: lack of energy density, inappropriateness as transportation fuels, energy intermittency, and inability to scale.
I. Lack of Energy Density/Inability to Scale:
Few people realize how much energy is concentrated in even a small amount of oil or gas. A barrel of oil contains the energy-equivalent of almost 25,000 hours of human labor. A single gallon of gasoline contains the energy-equivalent of 500 hours of human labor. Most people are stunned to find this out, even after confirming the accuracy of the numbers for themselves, but it makes sense when you think about it. It only takes one gallon of gasoline to propel a three ton SUV 10 miles in 10 minutes. How long would it take you to push a three ton SUV 10 miles?
Most people drastically overstimate the density and scalability of solar, wind, and other renewables. Some examples should help illustrate the limited capacity of these energy sources as compared to fossil fuels:
1. According to author Paul Driessen, it would take all of
California's 13,000 wind turbines to generate as much
electricity as a single 555-megawatt natural gas fired
power plant.
2. According to the European Wind Energy Association's
Wind Force 12 report issued in May of 2004, the
United States has 6,361 megawatts of installed wind
energy. This means that if every wind turbine in the
United States was spinning at peak capacity, all at the
exact same time, their combined electrical output
would equal that of six coal fired power plants. Since
3. wind turbines typically operate at about 30% of their
rated capacity, the combined output of every wind
turbine in the US is actually equal to less than two
coal fired power plants.
4. To replace the amount of energy produced by a single
offshore drilling platform that pumps only 12,000
barrels of oil per day we would need to build 706 Vesta
"V82" wind turbines.
5. The numbers for solar are ever poorer. For instance,
on 191 of his book The End of Oil: author Paul Roberts writes:
" . . . if you add up all the solar photovoltaic cells now
running worldwide (2004), the combined output -
around 2,000 megawatts - barely rivals the output of
two coal-fired power plants."
6. Robert's calculation assumes the solar cells are
operating at 100% of their capacity. In the real world,
the average solar cell operates at about 20% of its
rated capacity. This means that the combined output
of all the solar cells in the world is equal to less than
40% of the output of a single coal fired power plant.
7. According to ExxonMobil, the amount of energy
distributed by a single gas station in a single day is
equivalent to the amount of energy that would be
produced by four Manhattan sized city blocks of solar
equipment.
8. With 17,000 gas stations just in the United States,
you don't need to be a mathematician to realize that
solar power is incapable of meeting our urgent need for
a energy source that - like oil - is dense,
affordable, and transportable.
9. According to Dr. David Goodstien, professor of physics
at Cal Tech University, it would take close to 220,000
square kilometers of solar panels to power the global
economy via solar power. This may sound like a
marginally manageable number until you realize that
the total acreage covered by solar panels in the entire
world right now is a paltry 10 square kilometers.
10. According a recent MSNBC article entitled, "Solar
Power City Offers 20 Years of Lessons:"
By industry estimates, up to 20,000 solar electricity
units and 100,000 heaters have been installed in the
United States — diminutive numbers compared to the
country’s 70 million single-family houses.
This means that even if the number of American
households equipped with solar electricity is increased
by a factor of 100, less than two million American
households will be equipped with solar electric
11. systems. Assuming we are even capable of scaling the
use of household solar electric systems by that huge a
factor, we must ask ourselves two questions:
A. What do the other 68 million households do?
AA. What about the millions of companies, nations,
and industries around the world on which we in
the industrialized world are dependent?
B. Since it is oil, not electricity, that is our primary
transportation fuel (providing the base for over
90% of all transportation fuel) what good will
this do us when it comes to keeping our global
network of cars,trucks, airplanes, and boats
going?
II. Energy Intermittancy:
Unlike an oil pump, which can pump all day and all night under most weather conditions, or coal fired/natural gas fired power plants which can also operate 24/7, wind turbines and solar cells
only produce energy at certain times or under certain conditions. This may not be that big of a deal if you simply want to power your household appliances or a small scale, decentralized economy, but if you want to run an industrial economy that relies on airports, airplanes, 18-wheel trucks, millions of miles of highways, huge skyscrapers, 24/7 availability of fuel, etc., an intermittent source of energy will not suffice.
Consequently, in order to produce energy during times when the wind is no blowing or the sun is not shining, large scale solar/wind farms must be backed up by things like . . . oil pumps or natural gas/coal fired powered plants.
III. Inappropriateness as Transportation Fuels:
Approximately 2/3 of our oil supply is used for transportation. Over ninety percent of our transportation fuel comes from petroleum fuels (gasoline, diesel, jet-fuel). Thus, even if you ignore the challenges cataglouged above, there is still the problem of how to use the electricity generated by the solar cells or wind turbines to run fleets of food delivery trucks, oceanliners, airplanes, etc. . .
Unfortunately, solar and wind cannot be used as industrial-scale transportation fuels unless they are used to crack hydr*gen from water via electrolysis. Hydr*gen produced via electrolysis is great for small scale, village level, and/or experimental projects. However, in order to power a significant portion of the global industrial economy on it, we would need the following:
1. Hundreds of trillions of dollars to construct fleets of
hydr*gen powered cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes;
2. Hundreds, if not thousands, of oil-powered factories to
accomplish number one;
3. The construction of a ridiculously expensive global
refueling and maintenance network for number one;
4. Mind-boggingly huge amounts of platinum, silver, and
copper, and other raw materials that have already
entered permanent states of scarcity
IV. Painfully Low Starting Point:
Finally, most people new to this issue drastically overestimate the amount of energy we will be able to realistically derive from these sources inside of the next 5-25 years. If the examples in Part I didn't convince you that solar and wind are incapable of replacing oil and gas on more than a small scale/supplemental level, consider the following, easily verifiable facts:
In 2003, the US consumed 98 quadrillion BTU's of energy. A whopping .171 quadrillion came from solar and wind combined. Do the math (.171/98) and you will see that a total of less then one-sixth of one percent of our energy appetite was satisfied with solar and wind combined. Thus, just to derive a paltry 2-3 percent of our current energy needs from solar and wind, we would need to double the percentage of our energy supply derived from solar/wind, then double it again, then double it again, and then double it yet again.
Unfortunately, the odds of us upscaling our use of solar and wind to the point where they provide even just 2-3 percent of our total energy supply are about the same as the odds of Michael Moore and Dick Cheney teaming up to win a 5K relay race. Despite jaw-dropping levels of growth in these industries, coupled with practically miraculous drops in price per kilowatt hour (95% drop in two decades), along with increased interest from the public in alternative energies, the percentage of our total energy supply derived from solar and wind is projected to grow by only 10 percent per year.
Since we are starting with only one-sixth of one percent of our energy coming from solar and wind, a growth rate of 10 percent per year isn't going to do much to soften a national economic meltdown. Twenty-five years from now, we will be lucky if solar and wind account for one percent of our total energy supply.
While other alternative energy sources, such as wave and geothermal power, are fantastic sources of energy in and of themselves, they are incapable of replacing more than a fraction of our petroleum usage for the same reasons as solar and wind: they are nowhere near as energy dense as petroleum and they are inappropriate as transportation fuels. In addition, they are also limited by geography - wave power is only technically viable in coastal locations. Only a handful of nations, such as Iceland, have access to enough geothermal power to make up for much of their petroleum consumption.
This is by no means reason not to invest in these alternatives. We simply have to be realistic about what they can and can't do. On a household or village scale, they are certainly worthy investments. But to hope/expect they are going to power more than a small fraction of our forty-five trillion dollar per year (and growing) global industrial economy is woefully unrealistic.
On a related note, even if solar, wind, and other green alternatives could replace oil, we still wouldn't escape the evil clutches of so called "Big Oil." The biggest maker of solar panels is British Petroleum with Shell not too far behind. Similarly, the second biggest maker of wind turbines is General Electric, who obtained their wind turbine business from that stalwart of corporate social responsibility, Enron. As these examples illustrate, the notion that "Big Oil is scared of the immerging renewable energy market!" is silly. "Big Oil" already owns the renewable energy market.
"What About the Hydr*gen Economy?"
Hydr*gen isn't the answer either. As of 2003, the average hydr*gen fuel cell costs close to $1,000,000. Unlike other alternatives, hydr*gen fuel cells have shown little sign of coming down in price.
Even if the cost is lowered by 98%, placing the price at $20,000 per cell, hydr*gen or hydr*gen fuel cells will never power more than a handful of cars due to the following reasons:
I. Worldwide Shortage of Platinum
A single hydr*gen fuel cell requires 20 grams of platinum. If the cells are mass-produced, it may be possible to get the platinum requirement down to 10 grams per cell. The world has 7.7 billion grams of proven platinum reserves. There are approximately 700 million internal combustion engines on the road. Ten grams of platinum per fuel cell x 700 million fuel cells = 7 billion grams of platinum, or practically every gram of platinum in the earth.
Unfortunately, as a recent article in EV World points out, the average fuel cell lasts only 200 hours. Two hundred hours translates into just 12,000 miles, or about one year’s worth of driving at 60 miles per hour. This means all 700 million fuel cells (with 10 grams of platinum in each one) would have to be replaced every single year.
Thus replacing the 700 million oil-powered vehicles on the road with fuel cell-powered vehicles, for only 1 year, would require us to mine every single ounce of platinum currently in the earth and divert all of it for fuel cell construction only.
Doing so is absolutely impossible as platinum is astonishingly energy intensive (expensive) to mine, is already in short supply, and is indispensable to thousands of crucial industrial processes.
Even if this wasn't the case, the fuel cell solution would last less than one year. As with oil, platinum production would peak long before the supply is exhausted.
What will we do, when less than 6 months into the "Hydr*gen Economy," we hit Peak Platinum? Perhaps Michael Moore will produce a movie documenting the connection between the President’s family and foreign platinum companies while following the plight of a mother whose son died in the latest platinum war?
If the hydr*gen economy was anything other than a total red herring, such issues would eventually arise as 80 percent of the world’s proven platinum reserves are located in that bastion of geopolitical stability, South Africa.
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Putin wird sich sicher über Beratung ihrerseits freuen, nehme ich an. Ich finde sie können der russischen REgierung wichtige infomationen aus dem amerikanischen Internet, auf das die russische Regierung schon aus ideoligischen Gründen nicht zugreift, vorenthalten. 
) Ich meine jedoch, dass es genuegend andere gibt, die nicht Tag um Tag aus den informiertesten Quellen auf dem laufenden gehalten werden.
Vielleicht solltest Du Dich doch der Mühe unterziehen alles zu lesen. Zwar wird es in Deutschland auch naechstes Jahr noch Oel geben, aber die Preise an der Tankstelle werden die 2,50 Euro je Liter ueberschreiten, d.h. ueber 168 US$ je barrel. Dies wiederum bedeutet, dass die USA an eine Grenze stossen, bei der ihre Wirtschaft zusammenbricht.
Die Bush-Junta provoziert ein derartiges Vorgehen.
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