World Without Oil

The Bakken formation is estimated to have 500 billion barrels that when extracted will equal Saudi Arabia. There was more oil shale found deeper too. Sarah was right...'drill baby drill.'

 

You have explained nothing. Which is why I have asked questions. If you can't answer the simplest of questions on your own topic, which you claim to be very well read on, you certainly can't blame me for your lack of preparation.

Answer a single question, make a single point, and I'll stop snipping your incessant repeating of claims without evidence, or yet another subject change to avoid answering simple questions.

 

You've asked retarded, rhetorical questions that provide two false, ridiculous choices that no one alluded to but you. Forgive me if I'm unwilling to follow you down your rabbit hole of logic fail. Meanwhile, I've asked direct, verifiable questions that you've run from time and time again.

Whatever you do, avoid pretending that I'm the unprepared one between you and I. You have no idea what you're talking about, on almost every aspect covered thus far.

LOL. You can snipe all you like. I don't much care, as you've really become sorta white noise at this point. But the evidence is not only presented, but bashes you over the head each time in it's obviousness.

We are at the peak of world oil production, high prices are here to stay, and the global markets are at the breaking point as a result of those high prices. Period, end of story. What do you dispute about those assertions? What are you confused about? Do I need to hold you by the hand through every minor step of this equation?

You seem to be learning as you go along, while attempting to shield yourself by portraying an aura of arrogance and intelligence. But as evidenced by your complete inability to acknowledge net energy (EROEI) as an important factor in this debate shows you have no idea what you're even talking about.

Internet chain-letter Fail. Get in line, there's a plethora of cornucopians here unable to vet their long-debunked talking point claims. You better bring a more responsible effort to the table on this issue. I've seen all the ploys dozens of times by you people, and Bakken most certainly is among the biggest of your joke claims.

http://www.factcheck.org/2009/03/us-offshore-oil-reserves/

Continental Resources Inc., the independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company that holds the largest acreage positions and is the most active operator in the Bakken, has estimated that the total could be closer to 24 billion barrels. That’s roughly five times the estimate produced by the USGS in 2008 — much larger, to be sure, but still nowhere near the 503 billion claim.

The official estimate, contained in the USGS press release from last year, was a substantially smaller estimate of technically recoverable oil: 3 billion to 4.3 billion barrels.​

Laughable. Ah well, 6,000 days of new oil, or 36 days of new oil, what's the difference? Sounds better to just pull figures out of our sphincter and go with it, right? Good news keeps capitalism alive.

 

Fine. Feel free to provide the point you are trying to make rather than worrying about what I might think about it. Two sentences? Surely if you have a point, you can make it succinctly?

Apparently I have no idea what YOU are talking about. I am beginning to suspect that this is because you have no point.

For lack of much else, I will take this as your point.

My response is we have been at the peak of world oil production before, and you have provided no evidence that this one won't be replaced by yet another. High real crude prices are about the same today as they were back in the late-70's, and during the American Civil War. Fact. Those prices didn't stay at that level to "to stay", what basis are you using which presumes that this time will be any different than those times?

And my 401K and stock funds have been doing quite well with markets "at the breaking point", so if the ramp up in the DJIA since March of 2009 is a market "at the breaking point", please sir, can I have some more?

See how easy that was? Now feel free to refute either the logic or the facts I have just referenced, and for the love of God do try and think for yourself rather than calling up some uTube video. What are you, 12? Do you know what a footnote is? Peer reviewed research? Science journals?

You might consider it laughable, but when a premiere research organization publishes something, I'm betting they know enough about the topic for the quality of the work to be characterized as something other than "laughable".

 

There will always be someone somewhere - to clump them together as "environmental whackos" is disingenuous

 

Once Jiggs Casey and Peak Prophet can get through arguing over...whatever they are arguing about...maybe they will tell us what their latter day oil-free world will look like.

Nobody says the transition will be pretty. I'd expect a 75% depopulation of the world. Without mechanized agriculture and efficient transportation, large swaths of the world will get real hungry real quick.

All the more reason for the US to keep and maintain its nuclear weapons inventory. That way we assure that all the dying is done by somebody else.

Like I said, I visualize a post-oil world to look a lot like it did in 1875. Maybe some nuclear power (if we can get over Fukushima hysteria), but basically a coal-fired railroad and steamboat/steamship society.

You have any refinements on that?

 

I am a man of many bicycles myself. Hubbert (a religious prophet from yesteryear) was quite happy with a nuclear future, and I would have to say that his resource calculations to power that type of future, in combination with the current political agenda related to CO2 emissions, makes it still a quite likely scenario.

Fortunately, lack of crude oil doesn't mean lack of mechanized anything. In 1937 the Soviets were using electric plows near hydroelectric facilities. Certainly now that we have begun the electrification of transport, we can do better than whatever a 1937 Soviet electric plow looked like.

 

...and if your farm is not near a hydroelectric plant?

Using the USSR - which could not feed itself - as a paragon of agricultural excellence is laughable on its face.

I see nothing in the way of evidence of any current efforts at electrified transport. Some hopeless battery commuter cars - that's it.

 

Thank you!!! Finally another voice of sanity on this rather idiotic thread that is based on unreal and rather insane assumptions. I've told ol' TC many times that there are a multitude of clean renewable energy sources that will not only replace oil and make the world a better place but will be a heck of lot cheaper too, once the infrastructure is in place. A 'world without oil' will be a cleaner prosperous world, not his oil corp propaganda/fantasy world of primitive pre-industrial life. I've pointed people to a thread I started on the Future of Transportation that details some of the advances in battery technology that are currently going into production and that will soon have most intelligent people driving electric vehicles that cost about the same as a regular car, charge up in under ten minutes and travel for 3 or 4 hundred miles on a charge. These same kind of next-generation batteries will also allow for the efficient storage of solar and wind power for later use.

 

So world is running out of oil, and your solution is to depopulate the rest of the world by irradiating 75% of the world with nuclear weapons? How about just keeping your own house in order, and finding alternative ways of sustainable living?

 

Well, slant-eyed pirate.

Considering that batteries = vaporware, what are your magical "alternative ways?"

 

Well, considering that your biased and very mistaken opinions about the batteries that are now coming into production, are themselves little more than 'vapor', it is not surprising that you ignore the evidence and cling to your myths.

From the thread: The Future of Transportation

 

Because, until we are true believers, we can't talk about (the lack of) alternatives.

 

The ultimate replacement for oil, is oil.

Even though China has a lot of electric cars (charged by coal fired plants - couch), they are building plants using on a process the South Africa's developed to convert coal to oil, at yields 1.3 barrels per ton (cough).

Why, infrastructure.

Yet, you expect the rest of the world to scrap all their existing cars, and invest in huge solar arrays with storage batteries, just to charge their electric cars.

You keep hyping the batteries from Germany:

What are they made of?
How expensive is it to recycle them?
How much energy is required to build them?
What is their life span, their charge and discharge efficiency, the self discharge rate?
How long doies it take to recharge them? (batteries charged too fast overheat and leak or explode)
What is required to protect them in an accident?
How safe are damaged batteries to transport?
Does leakage condem your home as a toxic waste site?​

You expect the world to embrace your vision of the future. Very unlikely.


Oil is the transportation fuel of choice because of the energy density, the ease of transport, the ease of use in a car / plane.

Whatever the source, oil can be distilled and cracked into fuel. It can be put into the existing infrastructure, run in the existing cars. The gas tank can be re-charged in under 3 minutes.

I stipulate a "viable" solution. Being oil is the solution, I focus on CO2 neutral sources.

 

Then I would recommend using electricity generated another way. There are many.

Good thing I implied no such excellence upon that political organization. But thank you for reinforcing the point I was trying to make...if a bunch of incompetent country bumpkins would make electrically powered farm machinery more than half a century ago, if we wanted to, or were required to do so in the US, it would be a snap.

"That's it" is a comment which could be attributed to buggy whip manufacturers so long ago, as the first autos rolled past their shops. From such small beginnings...etc etc.

The Chevy Volt is quite an excellent automobile, and makes commuting to work without using much in the way of crude based fuels not only viable, but for some of us, a quite nice reality.

 

When the alternative is a vacation in the gulag, you'll say anything.

USSR - lol.
Electric farm tractors - lol
Viable battery vehicles - yeah. Golf carts.

 

Have you driven a Volt? Certainly it isn't a golf cart, and anything which has the ability to allow 75% of Americans to run their daily commuting without using gasoline is definitely a good thing.

 

Not really. We can already see it in production figures. After all, peak oil relates to production, not supplies.

Breakthroughs are not required for wind or solar, or the attendant energy storage. Just economic investment and political will. The technologies are mature enough to work, it's just expensive to take that route. Leading edge technologies always cost a lot until they're put into widespread use. If nothing else, we can convert the electricity into hydrogen and store it that way. It's inefficient, but it is workable if there's no other option.

Well, if we're going to make up some contrived situation, let's also posit that the first thorium breeder reactors created a proliferation problem which results in terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons. They then nuke Tel Aviv. The political will to pursue nuclear technologies evaporates.

Let's further assume that by 2040, global climate change really starts to put the hammer on agriculture in the developed world; desertification runs rampant and aquifers in the traditional bread baskets run dry trying to deal with the dryer weather.

Because, you know, you can always make up a scenario that leads to a certain conclusion...

I think it's far more likely that we would be engaged in a wide-scale and serious effort to renovate homes and commercial buildings to provide proper insulation and passive heating/cooling. While there will always be some demand for electrical heating and cooling, this would substantially diminish the need for active climate control. It's not like most buildings in this country are built with passive climate control in mind. There's tons of room for improvement there. Proper insulation works both ways--you don't need to heat as much or cool as much.

Why not? If energy is expensive, fashion is bound to change. Clothing intended for cooler weather inside would probably become the norm in areas where that's a problem.

Or just use electric heaters rather than heat pumps. That's not the only method of electrical heating.

There's not enough coal to manage this for more than a few decades.

As soon as your scenario involves using coal-to-liquid fuels, it's immediately going to remove coal as an option for electrical generation, and quickly remove coal as a viable option for much of anything.

If we're assuming nuclear is an option, it's pretty clear that seagoing vessels would simply be converted to nuclear vessels. There's a good enough safety record there. Possibly river vessels too, though I would suggest to you that it would be more likely that the rivers and canals would be electrified from the shore.

Obviously cities would become more attractive as energy gets more expensive.

Nuclear tractors would always be an option, albeit one that people today would probably consider rather strange. They would probably need to be owned collectively and maintained collectively--possibly by county or state level organizations. Farmers would probably have to lease field time from a nuclear tractor operator, or something along those lines. It sounds like a joke, but if you need a lot of power it's a possibility. Certain types of nuclear reactors can be made fairly portable.

Then again, they could just electrify the fields. It's not like industrial farming is afraid of significant infrastructure investment in a field, as demonstrated by irrigation.

It perhaps wouldn't be as bad as you think. There are organizational answers to agriculture in a low-energy world. We organize agriculture in the way we do today mainly because energy is relatively cheap. If it were not, there are alternative models to explore. Including high-density urban farming and such.

"enviro-wackos" don't wish for a world without oil, environmentalists point out that it won't be around forever.

 

You laugh, but electric motors are up to the task. It's simply a matter of supplying the power, and there are options for doing it. There's not much interest mainly because it would cost more than diesel. If we're really facing an energy crisis, however, the options are there.

 

All forms of electrical generation require substantial maintenance. You think nuclear plants don't get shut down for extensive maintenance?

 

correct me if I'm wrong, but Electricity is generated thru burning of coal, right? Or is it Natural Gas...

Either way , fossil fuels are still necessary for powering today's cities.

 

Someone posted:
"...serious effort to renovate homes and commercial buildings to provide proper insulation..."

Taxcutter says:
People have been doing that since the 1970s. Almost every home standing in 1973 has been renovated at least once. You'd have to look to find an uninsulated home in the Midwest. I insulated my home when i renovated it in the 1990s. No more scope for improvement there.



Someone posted:
"There are organizational answers to agriculture in a low-energy world."

Taxcutter says:
Yup. the answer is more people and more labor cost in the ag sector.



Someone posted:
"Obviously cities would become more attractive as energy gets more expensive.


Taxcutter says:
As long as brownfields regs stay in place they won't. Also, cities are already high-crime areas. Putting more potential victims into a compressed space will only exacerbate that.



Someone says:
"...it's pretty clear that seagoing vessels would simply be converted to nuclear vessels."

Taxcutter says:
You'll have to smack down all the Fukushima hysterics pretty hard.



Someone says:
"...your scenario involves using coal-to-liquid fuels, it's immediately going to remove coal as an option for electrical generation, and quickly remove coal as a viable option for much of anything."

Taxcutter says:
Fischer-Tropsch works on anything carbonaceous, including dried sewage sludge. There is no doubt that long-haul transportation can take up direct electrification. that all old tech. The short-range door-to-door work involves use of portable energy. Batteries aren't getting it done. Youhave to have liquid fuel or at most CNG for short-range work.


Someone posted:
"Or just use electric heaters rather than heat pumps. That's not the only method of electrical heating."

Taxcutter posted:
Resistance heat to supplement heat pumps? They've been doing that since heat pumps were first marketed. Direct resistance heat is the most inefficient way to use electricity.


Someone posted:
"...let's also posit that the first thorium breeder reactors created a proliferation problem which results in terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons."

Taxcutter says:
The reason nobody put much effort into thorium nuclear power is that the fission of U-233 is not energetic enough to make a practical bomb. The fission of U-233 is about a quarter as energetic as the fission of U-235 and a tenth of that from the fission of Pu-239. Thorium (like uranium and plutonium) is a bear to enrich. One of its advantages for utility work is that it has a fairly low critical mass and is easier to get a low-grade reaction (useful for generating steam) without much enrichment. I'm all for thorium nuclear power but we have immense obstacles in a sclerotic regulatory structure and mindless Fukushima hysteria.


Someone posted:
"...by 2040, global climate change really starts to put the hammer on agriculture in the developed world; desertification runs rampant and aquifers in the traditional bread baskets run dry trying to deal with the dryer weather."

Taxcutter says:
Only committed Warmers believe that.



Someone posted:
"You think nuclear plants don't get shut down for extensive maintenance?"

Taxcutter posted:
About every fifteen months or so, mostly for refueling. Nuke plants are not going broke on maintenance costs. Wind and solar plants are.

 

When you plug in your Volt you are using fossil fuel. The materials it is made of are petroleum products. As technology progresses, the need to physically commute will become less important and folks will want cars that can travel 500 to 600 miles without a re-fuel or re-charge. Whether it be electric, alcohol, hydrogen, natural gas or some other type fuel remains to be seen.

 

Sure. Well, except for the electricity being generated during the day from the solar panels anyway. But lets ignore the panels on the garage roof (or the windfarms over the hill), what is wrong with using fossil fuels?

The supposition here isn't that we run out of fossil fuels tomorrow, only oil. Oil is great stuff, and has the advantage of being made from tar sands, keorgen, natural gas, coal, hydrates, etc etc.

Petroleum products are great stuff, I'll admit it. But my Volt does a solid 300+ miles on a full battery and full gasoline tank, so you get the best of both worlds! No use of crude based fuels while doing all my commuting (where the , and still having the range to span the country on a roadtrip using plentiful and available on every street corner gasoline. If the gasoline goes away and we are all stuck with E85 or something similar, that is pretty good as well.

 

And where does your electricity come from?