World Without Oil

be loads of dead eagles, dead birds. Doesn't anyone CARE about all the dead birds? Thought you lefties LOVED the wildlife.

 

Still no answer from livefree on his/her vision of an oil-free world.

 

Well now, you are just full of ignorant myths, aren't you?

a) A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions – carried out by US Forest Service

Source: Click here for the document

Key Findings:

- For every 10,000 birds killed by human activities including fatalities by collisions with man made structures, less than one death is caused by a wind turbine.

- Green house gas emissions pose the most significant long-term threat to birds.

- American house cat poses a much greater threat to birds than wind turbines. Housecats are estimated to kill 10.6% birds each year in the U.S. compared to less than 0.01% birds that die from a collision with turbines.

***

The Effects of Wind Turbines on Birds and Bats in Northeast Wisconsin – carried out by the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. There two year study involved a 31 turbine wind farm.

Source: Click here for the document

Key Findings:

- While bird collisions do occur (with commercial wind turbines) the impacts on global populations appears to be relatively minor, especially in comparison with other human-related causes of mortality

“Previous studies suggest that the frequency of avian collisions with wind turbines is low, and the impact of wind power on bird populations today is negligible. Our study provides little evidence to refute this claim.”

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Avian Monitoring and Risk Assessment at Tehachapi Pass and San Gorgonio Pass Wind Resource Areas, California - carried by The National Wind Coordinating Committee

Source: Click here for the document

Key Findings:

-A 1986 study found that 69 million birds flew though the San Gorgonio Pass during the spring and fall migrations. During both migrating seasons, 38 dead birds were found during that typical year, representing only 0.00006% of the migrating population.

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Audubon Society Stands Up In Support For Wind Power - John Flicker, President of the National Audubon Society, wrote this column in the November-December 2006 installment of the organization’s magazine. The National Audubon Society mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds and other wildlife for the benefit of humanity.

Source: Click here for the document

Key Findings:

- “When you look at a wind turbine, you can find the bird carcasses and count them. With a coal-fired power plant, you can't count the carcasses, but it's going to kill a lot more birds.”

- "As the threats of global warming loom ever larger, alternative energy sources like wind power are essential,"

 

I would expect petroleum to continue to be used for making plastics and other products but it will no longer be burned. Instead the world will use the abundant, endless, practically free, non-polluting energy that is all around us. It is quite possible to make the transition in energy economies. Here's a scientific study on just how we can do that.

A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables
Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here's how
Scientific American
By Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi
October 26, 2009

 

Are you claiming that none of these things could have been created without petroleum?

Nonsense, they could have been made with a wide range of different hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbon molecule is an extraordinarily easy molecule to produce in nature and in the lab. The only reason the majority of it is used and produced from petroleum is because of its abundance, thus making it the cheapest.

This discussion is utterly pointless to continue from this angle as oil exists ,has always existed and eventually, given enough time, return and re-fill the reservoirs that we are now pumping it out of.

I think the real discussion about the use of Oil, specifically for Energy, isn't the environmental impact, but the immense power it grants to those who control it. The CEO's of our biggest oil company's have almost complete control over you, our economy and military. All of us depend on them for absolutely everything. That's a hell of a lot of power to hand over to a few un-elected individuals. Meanwhile, our visible leaders are caught up in 'whos the most Christian' debates leaving those who are really in control living large and anonymous until something else comes along to dethrone them. Enter, Green Energy. But history has shown, people do not give up power easily, especially from those who have actively pursued and acquired it.

 

You need only look at the American of William McKinley's day to se what things would (optimally) look like without oil.

Here's a thought.
If there were no oil, Iran and Saudi Arabia (and indeed most of the Moslem world) would go back to being the dusty, fly-blown backwaters they had been for the millenia before.

 

How much oil is used to produce electricity?

How much electricity is used for transportation? Hydrogen is difficult to store, batteries and capacitors are too big, and too heavy.

Oil is the fuel of choice for transportation because of it's energy density. Nothing else comes close.

CO2 neutral transportation fuel must be an oil made from atmospheric CO2. The only way we can do that today is with plants, and none, not even algae, provide the yields suitable as an alternative.

 

What concerns me is the diminution of agricultural efficiency as oil leaves the scene.

A tractor or combine with a really, really long extension cord?

Maybe in dry country a coal-fired steam combine, but then crops don't grow well in dry country.

Things could get hungry...

 

In the US almost no electricity is produced from the combustion of refined petroleum products. Maybe in some remote villages in Alaska and parts of Hawaii.

We could electrify our railroads and even the Interstates. Coal-fired ships could fill the gap, but aircraft would be in a world of hurt.

 

That's an extraordinarily idiotic projection since it rest on the absurdly wrong assumption that there are no alternative sources of energy available. I just posted a good study on how we can power the entire planet from renewable sources.

This thread and just about everything you post seems to have come straight from the fossil fuel industry propaganda pushers. All your pro-oil, anti-renewable screeds are, basically, just fact-free corporate insanity and they all get refuted by actual evidence.

LOL....so history is not your strong suit either, it seems. At a time in Europe called 'the dark ages' when our ancestors were literally barbarians, the Islamic world was in the middle of a cultural and scientific renaissance.

History of Islam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Three centuries after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the Arab Caliphates extended from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Central Asia in the east. The subsequent empires of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ghaznavids, Seljuqs, Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans were among the influential and distinguished powers in the world. The Islamic civilization gave rise to many centers of culture and science and produced notable scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, doctors, nurses and philosophers during the Golden Age of Islam. Technology flourished; there was investment in economic infrastructure, such as irrigation systems and canals; and the importance of reading the Qur'an produced a comparatively high level of literacy in the general populace.

During the Islamic Golden Age (c. 750 CE - c. 1258 CE) philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations. Scientific and intellectual achievements blossomed in the Golden age.

In the later Middle Ages, destructive Mongol invasions from the East, and the loss of population in the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centre of the Islamic world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire was able to conquer most Arabic-speaking areas, creating an Islamic world power again, although one that was unable to master the challenges of the Early Modern period.

 

?!? - No oil alternatives!!!!

Maybe you missed it because I didn't use large, colored, bolded type.

What killed the golden age of Islam was the move into dogma. Science, and it's innovations, were replaced by "the Book". A thriving population walked eyes open into poverty.

History is repeating itself.

 

It wouldn't make any difference what you use since you are simply and ridiculously wrong.

Your understanding of history is what is dogmatic and really skewed. While some aspects of their religion probably played some part in the decline of Islamic civilization, ignoring the repeated Mongol invasions and the devastating effects of the Plague on populations is extremely idiotic and narrow minded. Estimates are that over a third of the population of that area of the world died in the initial outbreak of the Black Death.

"History repeating itself" and "a thriving population walking eyes open into poverty" might be good descriptions of those Americans who've been duped by the fossil fuel industry into denying AGW and thinking that fossil fuels are our only viable choices, so that we continue to waste our nation's wealth on foreign oil when we are surrounded by free energy resources just waiting to be tapped. All because of these idiotic rightwingnut dogmas about renewable energy being somehow "liberal".

 

In reality, most of the electricity produced in the US comes from the combustion of the three main fossil fuels, coal, natural gas and oil. What is your point in trying to limit the discussion to just "refined petroleum products"?

And BTW, what planet do you live on anyway?

Electricity in the United States
US Energy Information Administration
Fossil Fuels Generate Most U.S. Power

Coal is the most common fuel for generating electricity in the United States. In 2010, 45% of the Country's nearly 4 trillion kilowatthours of electricity used coal as its source of energy.

Natural gas, in addition to being burned to heat water for steam, can also be burned to produce hot combustion gases that pass directly through a turbine, spinning the turbine's blades to generate electricity. Gas turbines are commonly used when electricity utility usage is in high demand. In 2010, 24% of the Nation's electricity was fueled by natural gas.

Petroleum can be burned to produce hot combustion gases to turn a turbine or to make steam to turn a turbine. Residual fuel oil, a product refined from crude oil, is often the petroleum product used in electric plants that use petroleum to make steam. Petroleum was used to generate just over 1% of all electricity in the United States in 2010.

 

This thread is about the world without oil.

Electricity from oil makes up only 1%. Oils prime use for energy is transportation, and home heating.

http://www.powerscorecard.org/tech_detail.cfm?resource_id=8

The CO2 from transportation is just about equal to the CO2 from coal for electricity. The solutions above reduce CO2 production by a little over half.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html

There is no viable alternative for transportation fuels because only oil has the necessary energy density.

Really, what is the alternative?



What would the world be like without transportation? What happens to the food supply, to the economy, to the standard of living for people already living on the edge?

 

A few of you seem convinced that mankind wouldn't have advanced without the use of oil, or that we (humans) couldnt have built the modern society we now enjoy without it.

This broad assumption is based on the observance that since everything around us is made possible by hydrocarbons then therefore, we couldn't have done it without it. To quote a know it all teenager "only a idiot couldn't see that." Well, yes, everything around us is reliant upon the use of Fossil fuels, but its not because oil is this magic liquid that was generously bestowed upon us God. No, its because we built our economy around it, and to continue to beat a dead horse, its simply due of the sheer abundance of it.

Could we have continued to advance as a species without Oil? If you say no, then you are seriously underestimating human ingenuity. As far as we know the Universe is made up of two things, Energy (this includes matter and particles) and empty space, that's it. So is oil the only we could extract usable energy from the cosmos efficiently? I highly doubt that, and if fossil fuels wasn't so (*)(*)(*)(*) easy to burn, I truly believe we would have found a better way by now and we would have continued to build and grow as a species. Why haven't we found a better way yet? You can go the ole' oil suppression conspiracy theory route, or the more likely scenario is that we don't feel the need rush it because we already have fossil fuels. Don't forget that wood was the first source of thermodynamic energy used and hydroelectric was the first source of large scale electricity production in this country.

 

OK...

Yeah, no problem there...

I agree...

Nope, totally wrong...this is where you go off the rails and fall for the propaganda...

I'll assume, just for the fun of it, that you seriously want to know the answer and are open minded enough to hear it without pro-oil dogma getting in the way. I first thought I'd give you a quick rundown here but the more I considered it, the more it seemed like this is a topic in its own right that deserved to be considered and debated in more detail later and somewhere other than on the end of lame, 'straw-man' thread like this one. So, look for your answer in a new thread on this forum. I'm sure you'll recognize it. It may take a little while to put together but it will be there sometime soon.

 

Clearly a world without oil is entirely possible. After all, the world got by without petroleum for any purpose up til about a hundred sixty years ago.

The question is: “What would a world without oil look like?”

While there are some modern refinements, such as nuclear power and compact emissions controls, a world without oil looks a lot like the world looked in 1875. Dirtier, poorer, and hungrier than today’s world.

Without oil and natural gas, the world would have to brush off Fukushima/Chernobyl/Three Mile Island hysteria and comprehensively embrace nuclear power (including uranium and thorium cycles and fusion if it can ever be made practical) and develop every usable hydroelectric site available and face the fact you’ll have to put up with a fair amount of coal smoke. Maybe not what we saw in Chester Arthur's day, but a lot more than we see in 2012 America.

Even as such, you may be looking at a 75% depopulation of the world over a period of a few decades. The wars fought over energy, water and food resource will make the World Wars of the 20th century like like practice. Those wars will be unquestionably nuclear.

 

Your waffling is it's own strawman.

You are avoiding the answer, because there is none. I know, I've been working the issue for years.

Batteries are good for short range, long recharge times, are heavy, have a short life span, and are expensive to replace - they don't work for aircraft.

Capacitors are worse than batteries in all ways except their lifespan can be longer. The only breakthrough that may change this is graphene.

Flywheels? A 200lb flywheel spinning at 10,000RPM stores 500HP min, combined with a CVT, a far better hybrid system than batteries. But, it requires oil, because a 35HP turbo diesel provides the average power, and keeps the flywheel at RPM to climb long hills, merge on the freeway, etc.

Compressed air?
Fuel cells?
Direct solar power?
Coal to liquid fuel?
Hydrogen?

As far as alternative sources for oil, the best plant currently being used is the oil palm - at about 600 gallons per year per acre - less than 0.3% efficent use of sunlight. Lots of talk about algae, and it is our best hope (30,000 gallons per year per acre equals the 14% efficiency of solar cells) - but, no breakthroughs.

Look at the sources of alternative energy that contribute significant power, solar and wind. How many centuries have wind power been in development? Have there been any breakthroughs in the last 50 years in efficiency?

Solar has shown more improvement recently, but how many decades ago was the first solar panel developed? There are lots of lab experiments that increase the efficiency - but solar power provides about 100W per square foot at seal level, on a clear day between 10AM and 3PM. 1HP is 750W. Even with 100% efficient solar panels, the best the area of a Honda Civic can capture is enough sunlight for 11.3HP. Todays panels are about 15% - 3/4HP.

Either provide your magic answer to transportation fuel, or admit it doesn't exist.

 

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. One week of cold snowy conditions in NYC would wipe out most Solar battery stores, so then what? Wind power could be interrupted by calm weather conditions. Either system WILL lead to brownouts if not blackouts yearly. It's not just a question of MWH price, but the reliability of said systems. A city based on a power source that has significant power interruptions will more than likely be a depressed city. You can't run a server farm for IT companies with brownouts, you certainly can't run a factory in such a city, financial services require up-to-second information which cannot happen if internet connections are not reliable. Maybe you can do some cute little amish crafts, but not much else because most modern services and industries REQUIRE 100% uptime.

As for hydro, it's dependant on being close to a river, and being able to do an end-run around all the regulations that prevent building dams on rivers at reasonable cost. So I guess if you want a job, you'll look for a river.

Nuclear -- it might be a good alternative if it were actually allowed in the US. As I mentioned, we haven't been allowed to build new nuclear plants since the mid-1970's, and even then, the regulatory hoops make it hard to come up with the money to build a plant. Plus, you've got generations of Americans brainwashed into thinking that nuclear is deadly and dangerous and going to make them glow in the dark. Nuclear is probably a lost cause at this point.

What does that leave us OTHER than fossil fuels to power a first world nation?

 

The First U.S. Nuclear Power Plant Licensed in Three Decades

 

... and No KY for Gays.

 

How many years after submittal of the application for the Vogtle plants elapsed before they got these permits?

34 years between plants is an unconscionably long time.

 

I am not sure what the issues were. And the 34 years included 3 Republican Presidents, Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2. But, note, it was under President Obama's term that the permits were approved.

 

One plant in 34 years isn't going to change a thing. I'm sticking with oil and coal, because when we need power, they have a chance of working.

 

One effect of regulatory malfeasance (making it nearly impossible to permit new power plants) is that it has forced companies to figure out how to keep old equipment running nearly forever.

In the first half of the 20th century the service life of a coal-fired boiler was reckoned at thirty years. Today, there are some seventy-year old boiler out there operating. In today's regulatory environment, they are irreplaceable.

US power companies have become like Cuban auto mechanics. Bereft of any hope of new stuff, they manage to keep the old stuff working.