Our Oil Supply

[Grumpy]

I ran across this article while looking for information on the current status of the worlds oil supply vs demand.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

It appears that we are now at teh "peak" of the bell curve and supply is currently meeting demand.  By 2020, the curve has dropped sharply.  Prices will rise several hundred percent.

Reading on, petrochemicals are key components in many products and productin of just about everything is heavily dependent on oil for the energy required for production.

Interesting quotes:

The key is this: in order for there to be an increase in the amount of economic activity taking place, there must be an increase in the amount of net-energy (i.e. the net-number of BTUs) available to fuel those activities. As no alternative source or combination of sources comes even remotely close to the energy density of oil (125,000 BTUs per gallon, the equivalent of 150-500 hours of human labor), a decline or even plateau in the supply of oil carries such overwhelming consequences for the financial system.

What all of this means, in short, is that the aftermath of Peak Oil will extend far beyond how much you will pay for gas. To illustrate: in a July 2006 special report published by the Chicago Tribune, Pullitzer Prize winning journalist Paul Salopek described the consequences of Peak Oil as follows:

. . . the consequences would be unimaginable. Permanent fuel shortages would tip the world into a generations-long economic depression. Millions would lose their jobs as industry implodes. Farm tractors would be idled for lack of fuel, triggering massive famines. Energy wars would flare. And carless suburbanites would trudge to their nearest big box stores, not to buy Chinese made clothing transported cheaply across the globe, but to scavenge glass and copper wire from abandoned buildings.

Skimming throught the article to the end, the picture is bleak even if you take it with a few grains of salt and permit that the author took a few artistic liberties.  To sit idle and not even think about it could prove to be far more disastrous than over-reacting.

More than ever, we need a practical alternative source of energy.  Solar and wind are not enough.  Bio-fuels are not either.

[Grumpy]

we use a lot of oil and coal to produce our electricity:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table2_1_a.html

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table2_6_b.html

[Grumpy]

I watched part of "Prophets of Doom" last night and the evidince for future shortages of cheap energy and water were very convincing.

[thx1138]

The peak oil discussion has been going on since at least the 1960's and none of their predictions have come true yet. That is largely due to not being able to predict new technologies along the way. The U.S. has enormous undeveloped reserves and the current administration just took a large portion of the land where those reserves may be recovered off the market.

I ran into an interesting article in Tesla Said, compiled by John Ratzlaff. It is a phenomenal collection of magazine articles and lectures given by Tesla. It is a PDf document and all of the articles are images from publications so it is not text searchable since all of the articles are in graphics. Search for it on the net. It's one of the many things I have yet to get around to - OCRing all the articles.

At any rate there is one article from the Philadelphia - North American, May18, 1902, titled "STARTLING PREDICTION OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING SCIENTIST IN AN ARTICLE WRITTEN FOR THE SUNDAY NORTH AMERICAN" that is relevant to this thread. The topic is peak coal. They were worrying about running out of coal which is what was used at the time to power trains and ships and industry. Airplanes didn't exist yet and automobiles were just in the prototyping stages. Interestingly, the solutions they suggested in the article were wind, solar, biofuels and conservation. Sound familiar? Thomas Edison said not to worry about it because the Amazon forests could provide 50,000 years of energy from burning their wood.

One man, however, got it correct. He said that man's ingenuity would solve the problem. So we are still burning coal today and haven't run out. To a large extent that is probably due to transitioning to petroleum based fuels. And petroleum based fuels have provided the time to develop nuclear technology although weaponization presents a problem. But so did oil - it is what enabled mechanized warfare. That mechanized warfare, not the consumer, is at the root of the strength of oil. The largest single consumer of petroleum products in the U.S. is the military. Almost everything they use requires petroleum products for fuel excluding the few nuclear powered ships and some prototypes that use renewable energy sources. Every country in the world has the same setup. A military is useless in today's world without mobility and mobility means a mobile fuel and no mobile fuel source packs quite the punch that oil based fuels do on a weight/volume/power basis. The man who got it right was Rear Admiral R. B. Bradford, chief of the Bureau of Equipment, at Washington and he got it right in 1902 before mechanized warfare began.

I have OCR'd and attached the article.

Personally, I'm hoping the discovery of the Higgs boson will lead to harnessing gravity to produce electricity without the power plant needing to be located on a river. That would leave the rest of the oil produced for creating the mind boggling array of products which are derived from it. Almost everything one touches today is derived in some manner from an oil byproduct. There is a show on TV currently about all the products derived from oil and it is literally everything from A to Z. I think it is one of the "Modern Marvels" shows. It's very informative. Here's just a few off the top of my head: aspirin, lipstick and most cosmetics, almost all plastics, shingles, road materials, etc, etc, etc. The list goes on and on and on.

So, in response to your earlier post about peak oil, I would take it, not with a few grains of salt, but with a whole block of salt. BTW, there's a good "Modern Marvels" show on salt also.

[thx1138]

I just saw this article this morning. They are working toward a form of nuclear power that sin't capable of being weaponized and it consumes plutonium rather than creating it which would help clean up the nuclear wastes now being stored. Once again, man's ingenuity.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/160131-thorium-nuclear-reactor-trial-begins-could-provide-cleaner-safer-almost-waste-free-energy

[Grumpy]

article on "fracking" and groundwater contamination.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=groundwater-contamination-may-end-the-gas-fracking-boom