Poll: What do you know/think about "Peak Oil"

"believe".

 

Read: Heinberg, Richard. (2997). Peak Everything - Waking Up in the Century of Declines. Gabriola Island, BC: Canada: New Society Publishers, $24.95.

A good discussion of technology, agriculture and the arts, natural limits, and the end of one era and the beginning of another. We are entering a major paradigm shift throughout society. The key is that we must all become more efficient.

 

Poll choices too confining, so I chose Other; Explain in post.

Yes, oil is a finite resource, and our current pump-able supply is starting to outstrip demand.

I look at this as a good thing.
Changes will need to be made.
Hopefully those changes will be higher fuel efficiency, alternative fuels, and electric and non-polluting vehicles.

Me personally, I'd love to see the USA go all out on building nuclear power plants and battery vehicles.

 

In addition to reducing population.

 

Nuclear power (fission) is not cost effective. Even with federal subsidies and liability limits, there have been no new plant orders for some time. Nuclear power (fusion) or solar, is highly cost effective, renewable and sustainable, without all the fission problems.

Conservation and efficiency win over "go get more" every time. Another excellent book by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute and the US Department of Defense, (2007).Winning the Oil Endgame. It is all about efficiency.

Reducing human population pressures is a key. However, it is a taboo subject with most politicians and planners.

 

For those needing a crash course in Peak Oil I HIGHLY recommend watching "A Crude Awkening - The Oil Crash"

 

Watched this and thought it was great. Scared the hell out of me though.

 

believe.

 

Next she will start slowly waving her hand up and down in front of your eyes and start chanting, "you are in my powers, you are in my powers, believe, believe, you are in my powers."

 

I think that's rational as long as you are careful. Rough transition was the conclusion of a fairly thoughtful 2005 DOE report that got some currency a couple of weeks ago ("$12/gallon gas"). It's not like there aren't substitutes. But the volumes are so huge (I think I calculated 1 trillion gallons of gas per year in the US) and the lag times for alternative fuels are so long, that if the rate of dropoff after the peak meets even a reasonable scenario, we have a pretty fair risk of physical shortages. The DOE report pretty much concluded that a turbulent market for gasoline was almost certain, given the likely rate of dropoff and the lag time for transition to alternatives.

I learned my lesson with Katrina. My best friend is a schoolteacher living in Virginia's Northern Neck. It's a relatively rural area between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. As he tells it, that peninsula literally ran out of gasoline for better than a week post-Katrina. Supplies were tight, it was a marginal market, (I assume that) the suppliers diverted what they had to the larger and more lucrative markets, the gas pumps ran dry and/or had no electricity to run. You had to drive up the peninsula to get gas. For my friend, that meant a roughly 2.5 hour round trip to Fredericksburg and back if he wanted gas. Which meant that, if you were caught with less than 2.5 hours of gas in the tank, you went begging for some or went without. No electricity and no gas for generators makes for a pretty miserable time in a Virginia climate.

There was thread here maybe three months back where I posted references to some sites discussing proper gasoline storage. You could probably find it with a search. Not rocket science: airtight metal containers, add preservative, keep them cool. Metal jerrycans are an issue due to the CARB requirements, which apply in Northern Virginia. By universal acclaim, the CARB-complaint metal jerrycans all stink for long-term storage. Whereas the old ones were in fact vaportight by design and work well for storage. If you want new non-CARB metal cans it can be quite a search. And everyone agrees that plastic cans are not acceptable for good for long term gasoline storage, but should be used for long-term kerosene storage.

For my part, I've bought a bunch of vaportight metal gerrycans and gasoline preservative, and I'm planning to fill them soon. I've been waiting for a drop in the price of gasoline. Which I think will happen fairly soon. I think. No trees grow to the sky, as investment managers say. Though no sign of that so far.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I think that's rational and I'm moving in the same direction. I think a modest-sized home gasoline storage is prudent, if done properly. I don't even need gasoline on a day-to-day basis, but if there are spot shortages, somebody I know will, that's pretty much guaranteed. Plus, as you say, you get to be a small-time commodities speculator, which is very satisfying when you can shave a few bucks off what you send to Big Oil.

FWIW, I've done the same for food. Not that I think there will be a breakdown of civil order in the US, but ... it's cheap insurance and a bit more commodity speculation. Still working on getting an emergency water supply in place.

 

I think the global warming scare whether true or not, was/is a clever government's way of getting people to think about energy use without the panic of letting us know about peak oil NOW.

 

Seems that the more you know about it, the more concerned you are.

 

I have not read other posts before commenting because I believe that is in the spirit of the poll. I will read the other comments after posting.

2 issues that concern me are oil remaining in the ground for future generations and pollution.

I hear people say things like the USA has huge oil reserves, enough to supply domestic demand for (X) years at current levels of consumption. The problem here is 2 fold, firstly as the reserves are depleted the price goes up due to 2 factors. Firstly the cheapest (easiest) oil to recover is going to be got out first then oil companies will turn to gradually more costly extraction methods to extract the remaining oil, at the same time the resource will become less abundant so the value of each unit will increase.
My question to those who say we have (X) years domestic oil is, then what? What happens when the oil IS all gone? Are you the kind of person who ignores a shrinking bank balance and only act on the problem when there is no money in the bank or do you see that the supply is diminishing and act now to reduce consumption of money and look for alternatives? Personally I like to act when I see a problem emerging to minimise the impact. If I spend too much money I look for ways to cut back or ways to earn more, unfortunately the supply of oil is finite so "earning more" in that case simply speeds us toward the inevitable.

My other concern is pollution, particularly of the atmosphere but also of waterways and the land where oil is extracted from the earth. For the foreseeable future the 6 or so billion people on this earth have no alternative but to live here. There is no other planet to which we have a regular bus service or immigration treaty that the masses can pack up and head to because we have f**ked up this world. The most important things on this planet for living things are the water and air, yet we choose to pump our waste into both. Our oceans have mechanisms to cope with some of the organic waste but not the plastics and oils we put into them but the imbalance we are causing within the composition of our atmosphere with CO2 is almost suicidal as well as homicidal. Not only are we killing future generations of humans, our own children but animals and plants will also suffer. Did I hear someone say I don't think the majority of scientists concerned with the atmosphere are right, I don't believe in global warming or climate change. Good for you but what if they are right? This is like the lotto syndicate I am in at work but the odds are much more in favour of global warming. The reason I am in the syndicate is that it costs me only $2.00 a fortnight which has a minimal affect on my life but in the unlikely event we win $50 million I'm going to feel pretty stupid when everyone in my office retires but me. The cost of changing our consumption is a pittance compared to the cost if we don't and the chance we will crash out as a population are much greater than the chance of winning the lotto..

We are at a crossroad, ahead there is a no through road, the signs are there in plain language for us to read although some can't see well enough to see the end of the road so they don't believe it really is a no through road. We need to take a different road which may be less smooth and a little less comfortable or we will head down that no through road which also narrows as we approach the end so the further we go and the bigger and thirstier our vehicle the harder it will be to turn around.

Lets, as a planet use a different road now.

 

Heard statistics that we have more oil readily available to be drilled in the US that the Saudi's do.

 

Yes Jimmie, that is true. But at what cost?

I know for a *fact* there are some large deposits right here in Manitoba. These deposits will barely break even at current oil prices

I really don't understand folks getting their panties in a knot thinking we're sitting on a bonanza of oil, when in fact it makes Saudi oil look dirt cheap

In theory, the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba have more technically recoverable oil than the entire mid east. So what, doesn't do any good if a barrel of that oil would average over $200

I rather doubt we'll "run out" of oil within my lifetime. However, we *are* running out of the really cheap oil, the oil with very high EROEI

As an example, the "easy" Mid East oil. A barrel is precisely 42 US gallons. The easy Mid East oil was *so* easy to extract you didn't need more than a quart out of that barrel, usually less.

The worst oil, the tar sands, you can expect to use 18-22 gallons out of every barrel, just to go from shale to retorting to syncrude. Are you still "ahead?" Yes, of course. Just at one hell of a higher cost than the cheap oil we are now running out of.

I notice the shale proponents are very conveniently ignoring the fact the pulverized shale must be "washed" to get out the heavy metals, something all shale contains. The heavy metals, especially arsenic and cadmium, will contaminate the catalysts used in the oil refinery process.

Currently, the "best practise" is to pump the toxic sludge into giant retention ponds - actually man made lakes in scale - and hope for it to magically go away

 

We starve, very slowly and painfully

Crude oil is the source of all our plastics, and virtually all of our chemicals. With the exception of potash, which is mined in Saskatchewan, Canada, fertilizers are dervived from crude oil. So are pesticides and herbicides

A lot of the key ingredients in most medicines are also derived from crude oil. Hard to believe we're dumb enough to burn it up by driving cars, isn't it?