Worthwhile Canadian-content Peak Oil/Gas/Coal article

[c9]

(Courtesy of The Walrus -- a magazine I regularly find to be worth my time.)

First, what's Peak Oil?

Oil will not just "run out" because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we're talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole.

Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up.

In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.

So why do we need to worry? Well, very few people are willing to honestly discuss how much oil, gas and coal are left.

The energy industry depends on everybody believing their product is going to be around for a long time (otherwise we would switch to other products), so they have an incentive to inflate their reserve estimates. Governments depend on everybody being stable, quiet, and well-behaved taxpayers, so they have an incentive to soften bad news. Additionally, they have to win elections, so they have an incentive to focus on the short-term.

But worst of all is us. We don't like hard problems, we don't like change, and we don't like the idea of not having STUFF. And everything -- EVERYTHING -- around us is made out of or with oil/gas/coal. Plastic. Electrical power. Cars. Roads. Subways. Planes. Food. Phones.

Canada is quite bad too. We like to pretend we're pretty special, but we're not. We're the 36th-most-populated country, but we use oil like we're #9.

The next three excerpts are from the actual article I'm finally getting around to recommending, An Inconvenient Talk:

[In 2008 the International Energy Association released] the latest edition of its annual World Energy Outlook, which predicts a global oil production peak or plateau by 2030. In a video that appears online soon after, the Guardian’s George Monbiot requests a more precise figure from the IEA’s chief economist, Fatih Birol. The official estimate, he confesses, is 2020. Monbiot also inquires as to the motivation for the IEA’s sudden about-face, and Birol explains dryly that previous studies were “mainly an assumption.” That is, the 2008 version was the first in which the IEA actually examined hard data, wellhead by wellhead, from the world’s 800 largest oil fields. Monbiot asks, with understandable incredulity, how it was that such a survey hadn’t been conducted previously. Birol’s response: “In fact, nobody has done that research.”

But what about Canada's tar or oil sands? (More on the name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands)

The historical Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) for conventional oil is 100:1. This refers to the kind of crude that gushes up in the opening credits of The Beverly Hillbillies, the kind that first flowed out of the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia when it was tapped in 1948. Invest a barrel’s worth of energy drilling and refining in a spot like Ghawar, then and forever the largest single crude oil deposit on the planet, and you used to get 100 barrels of energy-dense, easily transported fuel in return. These days, conventional EROEI for such places is closer to 25:1.

The EROEI on more recent “new conventional” deposits, which Dave cites mostly by their discovery and extraction methods (“deepwater oil, horizontal wells, 3-D seismic”) is also around 25:1. In Alberta’s tar sands, the surface-mined bitumen comes to market at an EROEI of 6:1. “In situ” bitumen — sludge buried too far under the boreal forest floor to excavate, which comprises the lion’s share of the most breathless estimates of Canada’s energy superpower–scale oil production — rings in at 3:1. Corn ethanol, that darling of America’s farm states, is somewhere between 1.3:1 and 0.75:1. Shale oil, another unconventional source held by its boosters to be capable of indefinitely extending the age of oil, has never been converted into fuel at a net energy profit, at least as far as Dave has been able to ascertain.

A barrel of oil is pretty cheap these days, all things considered. But what if, sort-of-hypothetically-and-sort-of-not, what if we had no way to generate energy except ourselves?

As he drives, Dave indulges in a little academic exercise. He’s comfortable with numbers, quick with calculations. A barrel of oil, he tells you, contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules. Put your average healthy Albertan on a treadmill and wire it to a generator, and in an hour the guy could produce about 100 watts of energy. That’s 360,000 joules. Pay the guy the provincial minimum wage, give him breaks and weekends and statutory holidays off, and it would take 8.6 years for him to produce one barrel of oil equivalent (boe, the standard unit of measure in hydrocarbon circles). And you’d owe him $138,363 in wages. That, Dave tells you, is what a barrel of oil is worth.

Worth the read. http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.06-energy-an-inconvenient-talk/

Comments

[zanate.livejournal.com]

The example of the guy on a bike is really interesting. (I recall one scifi post-oil dystopia book where a guy needed to send a message by radio, and then had to "pay" for it by riding a stationary bike to recharge the batteries.)

It's not an accurate gauge, but I'm not sure whether the "true value" is better or worse. See, humans don't produce energy. That minimum wage doesn't account for the food required to fuel the human, and how much that food would cost if produced and distributed without the energy input of oil.

And really, food production is just a way of capturing solar energy and converting it into a form that our bodies can use.

So the minimum-wage-for-eight-years number? Not useful, even for giving an accurate depiction of scale.

What is more useful is looking at the amount of solar radiation falling on the surface of our planet, multiplied by an "ideal maximum" conversion factor from current (or future) solar technology, and then divided by the fraction of the planet we could realistically devote to solar capture before we enshadow everything and kill all life.

And then compare that to our current energy use.

So in absence of fossil fuel, to make up the shortfall we (a) need other fuel sources in situ that we can convert to energy (i.e. nukular), or (b) need to expand the amount of surface area we can use to capture solar radiation (orbital arrays for capture, and microwave transmission for delivery.) Or (c), all of the above.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Oh agreed, it's not a useful figure so much as an interesting calculation.

Could we ask that infinite number of monkeys to stop typing for a few minutes and assist maybe?

[zanate.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we could attach piezoelectric generators to the monkeys typewriter keys and solve all of our energy problems for ever.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Hopefully it won't take too long to attach the generators to the keys. How many keys would there be on an infinite number of typewriters? Many?

[zanate.livejournal.com]

There's all that infinite infrastructure to think about, too. Like all the tiny little wires, accumulators, high-capacity conduit, load balancers, and all of it monkey-proof.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I was a little ticked at the Walrus when the editors decided to pull my part of the story from this article:
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.03-technology-human-resources-recaptcha-alex-hutchinson/

:-(