Back on-topic. Without easily portable energy (oil) construction costs will skyrocket. How do you run a bulldozed without oil fuel? Coal-fired steam dozers?
And "Breakthrough: Biofuel gasoline at 4000 gallons per acre". Both are breakthroughs, not viable production. I even added a breakthrough of my own. How long ago was solar panels a breakthrough? When did they become competitive with coal? How long ago was windmills a breakthrough? Why do they both still need government subsidies to be viable? Energy based on biofuel will happen, at 100W / foot, there is too much energy in sunlight to ignore. Just not as soon as you think. There are several paradigm shifts that have to happen first. Maybe when "cars" are made with graphene, so it only takes 300lbs to transport a 160lb body, instead of 3000lbs.
The domestic oil scene is pretty interesting. We have about 178,000 oil wells in the US.. and some 70% of them produce less than 50 barrels per day.. so there is not so much efficiency of scale or integrated downstream manufacturing.. like you would find in Yanbu or Jubail. As time goes by that will probably be somewhat self correcting..
I do and the assumptions in his tirade are similar to those made by people who opposed using oil instead of coal, diesel instead of oil, horses instead of cars, and so on. Look at the dumbest assumption: No new technology. Pardon me while I pick up my cell phone take a photo of this and ask it directions to a WTF meeting. I recently rented a van. It got 25MPG on a 2k mile trip. It had built in DVD players, GPS, Sat radio, Sat phone capability, run flat tires...all technology that did not exist a few years ago. He is right about one thing. In the not too distant future fossil fuel based economies will be unsustainable. It means we will all have to change the way we live. It means the 6k pound SUV with one person inside driving down the expressway at 85 MPH will end. Mass transit and energy efficient plug-in hybrids are the future. It means 4-5-6k Sq Ft single family homes will be a vestige of a by-gone day. Smaller energy efficient homes and apartments are the future. The 90 mile 2 hour commute will be gone. No more living in the country and driving your big car to work. More telecommuting will be the norm along with people moving close to their work so they can use mass transit. I'm not trying to take anyone's gas or anyone's Hummer. The marketplace will do that. I'm just trying to make sure that when the market decides that hummer is too expensive to drive that they don't end up living in it.
They want us living in caves, but not them. Al Gore's house in Tennessee: Al Gore's house in California: Al Gore's house in ...don't even know where this one is...maybe it's his first home in Tenn. Who knows....he's said to own 4 homes. What a pig. These people preach to the rest of us but they don't live their own ideals.
It is one thing when market forces make it obsolete. It is another thing (and completely unacceptable) when the government trumps the market.
You're wrong about a number of things there, CIR. You claim: "Wind and Solar only works when Nature cooperates. You simply cannot power NYC on Solar or Wind or a combination of the two because the power sources are unreliable." But that is not true. The wind is always blowing somewhere and in most places inland, it blows stronger at night, and on the coast, it blows stronger in the afternoon. It has been demonstrated in practice that distributed grids of wind energy can overcome most intermittency problems and even more so when they are linked to large scale solar energy plants. The world is moving towards renewables whether you believe in them or not. Scientists who actually know what they're talking about say it is quite doable and affordable and that the transition can, in fact, be good for our economy, as well as the environment, if America gets its act together competitively on developing and selling renewables in the world economy. China is massively subsidizing its solar and wind industries in an attempt to dominate the rapidly developing world market for renewables. America still has a chance to use our intellectual/innovative resources to capture a big share of the market but efforts to support that have been continually blocked and/or sabotaged by the fossil fuel industry dominated Republican rightwing stooges in Congress and the media. Wind Energy: Dealing with Intermittency Challenges Power December 1, 2011 (excerpts) Critical advances in technology have led to new ways of balancing wind power. For example, new advances in turbine technology have allowed wind developers to build projects in more diverse areas, which in turn has diversified generation patterns. In addition, the rapid advancement of storage technologies has led to pilot projects being installed in conjunction with wind farms to demonstrate the benefits storage can bring to the electrical grid. The wind industry has long argued that geographic diversity of wind energy helps to even out variability. This is true within one wind project, where the turbines are spread out over many miles, but even more so when projects are spread over several counties. The best case scenario, now being seen in Texas, occurs when projects are spread out into areas where the wind tends to blow at different times of the day. Utilities can also help balance their portfolios by mixing renewable technologies. Like coastal wind, solar projects generate during the day. Thus, combining solar and wind resources can help balance generation. Advances in storage technologies also provide new tools for grid operators. For example, Duke Energy recently announced a pilot project with Xtreme Power to install a 36-MW battery at one of Dukes existing Texas wind farms. Chamisa Energy has announced plans for a 135-MW compressed air energy storage project to be located in the Texas Panhandle. Chamisa plans to buy electricity generated by wind to charge the project and have the ability to interconnect with either the Electric Reliabilty Council of Texas or the Southwest Power Pool. Other technologies, such as flywheels and a variety of battery-type technologies, are also being developed. Pumped storage hydro, which has been used since the 1970s and 80s to work in conjunction with nuclear plants, is another possibility. Traditional hydro can also be useful, as demonstrated by the New York Independent System Operator, which has partnered with Hydro Quebec to use the latters hydro storage capacity to help balance wind farms being built in New York. ***
Oil will not completely run out, it will simply get A LOT more expensive (driving consumption down). So instead of 1850, think 1920.
As for global warming, you think people will give up cheap fossil fuel energy enabled lifestyle to "save the polar bears"? Nope. Fossil fuel burning continues to rise with no end in sight. The reality is, global warming is something to be accepted and adapted to, not fought, as that is futile. I think we will burn every last drop of oil and every last piece of coal, and then we will be forced to stop simply by the fact that there will not be any more. When this happens, it will be a much greater threat to human civilisation than global warming ever could be. This is where non-fossil alternatives will finally be of great utility.
When one thinks of energy, in general, competition brings down prices. If we had a energy policy that included all of it, wind, solar, oil, coal, nuclear, we could sustain ourselves until the next discovery of a new energy source. You can't exclude any, like some which to do with oil and coal and even nuclear. Has absolutely nothing to do with Polar Bears or climate change, but simple sustainability. The planet will still be here long after humans are gone. I suppose some are still crying over the demise of the T-rex too.
People who claim Peak Oil is a myth, point out that there is new sources in shale oil etc, and new deep drilling sources, therefore there's loads of oil. What they fail to take account of is the cost to produce a barrel is part and parcel of peak oil. i.e. From here on in, it becomes increasingly difficult, expensive and risky to obtain these sources, this is the reason we haven't exploited them to date - we took the low hanging fruit. Of course you could counter by saying that extraction techniques will become cheaper over time and you'd be correct, but I could counter that by saying the same rationale applies to other energy sources.
Of course the irony of this entire thread is that it is made by a guy called "Tax cutter", who supports oil use. US oil companies receive tax credits which other US industries do not receive, meaning the US government receives less revenue than it should, which will be made up by taxing US citizens more heavily. Well done!
First, we harvested oil that pushed itself out of the ground, then we added pumps, then we injected steam to reduce the viscosity of oil too thick to pump, now we are harvesting oil from sand and shale. Refining methods went from separating oil into gasoline, into cracking. These processes have increased yield, keeping the price of fuel low, despite the increase effort required to extract it.
yes, it's always blowing somewhere. I've been to Kansas. However, that doesn't help if the places where it's windy are far from the places where we need the energy. New York City isn't windy enough to get energy from wind power alone. And one thing about the copper wires is that they lose some of the electricity in transmission due to resistance. So it's probably a reasonable solution in the west, where there's a lot of space for wind-farms, but you can't do that in urban areas. Hydro is working in NY mostly because they live on the water. It's not going to work everywhere. I'm not even sure that it would work on all waterways given that some must remain navigable for trade. Hard to run a barge down the Mississippi when you're powering St. Louis with a giant dam. Dams are also not likely to be built in places where endangered species cause a political block to dam. That's another issue created by environmentalism -- one solution is bumping up against another problem. To build all the hydropower plants we need, we'll lose a lot of biodiversity in our rivers, something that environomentalists oppose.
Shallow water: To date, 115 new shallow water well permits have been issued since the implementation of new safety and environmental standards on June 8, 2010. Just 5 of these permits are currently pending; with 10 having been returned to the operator for more information. http://www.bsee.gov/Regulations-and-...l-Permits.aspx Deepwater permits requiring subsea containment: Since an applicant first successfully demonstrated containment capabilities in mid-February 2011, we have approved 314 of these permits for 94 unique wells, with 24 permits pending, and 18 permits returned to the operator with requests for additional information, particularly information regarding containment. Deepwater activities not requiring subsea containment: Since the implementation of new safety and environmental standards, 61 of these permits have been approved, with 2 permits pending, and 1 permit returned to the operator with requests for additional information. These activities include water injection wells and procedures using surface blowout preventers.
Rule of thumb for 746 kV transmission lines: For every 500 miles you transmit electricity, half of the power is lost to inductance and resistance. Birds appreciate this. Electric lines are warm places to perch.
That's the delusion you push but your assumptions are absurd and your conclusions are nonsense. The world has more than enough energy from other sources that are cheaper overall in the long run and better for us in the short run. We don't need to burn fossil fuels for energy and the world will be quickly moving away from their use in the coming years as we increasingly tap the energy available from the sun, the wind, and the ocean tides, waves and currents.
?!? More than enough energy - already in place? Do we have the planes, trains, and automobiles that can use that energy? Do we have the infrastructure to use that energy for transportation? Will we in the next 10 years? At what cost?
Your scenario also posits that humans will file zero new energy patents for the next fifty years. The fact is that as oil runs out, it will become more expensive, and as it becomes more expensive people will switch to alternatives. The other fact is that a whole lot of people have been working on those alternatives for a long time, and will continue to do so. I appreciate your support for thorium, a technology I have long advocated, but energy isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition. There are a lot of technologies out there that will continue to advance. PV prices continue to drop. Just within this last month we saw huge breakthroughs announced on automotive batteries at 3x the energy density of Lithium-ion, but cheaper than lead-acid; and another breakthrough that produces real gasoline from biomass at 4000 gallons per acre. One thing we can (and should) do to accelerate this trend is to tax fossil carbon at a price commensurate with its external cost. That tax can be made revenue-neutral by lowering other taxes to compensate. If the US is the first online with new energy technologies, the world will be beating a path to our door in the 21st century; if not, we'll be buying from China stuff that we could have invented here.
I agree with you up to the last paragraph. Europe has paid far more for gasoline than the US for the last 40 years. Where are the alternatives? Someone on the planet must have seen Europe as a market to exploit, yet nothing. The problem isn't incentive, it is technology. Raise the cost of energy, you slow the economy, slow technical development, delay the development of CO2 neutral fuels.