(no subject)

[danaeris]

An interesting post on Treehugger on the concept of Peak Oil -- that is, the supposedly impending energy crisis.

I found the article informative. It had the semblance of being unbiased. I would definitely recommend reading it.

Comments

[thebitterguy]

It's on Treehugger.com. That pretty much just says 'bias' right there.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

As much as that is the obvious assumption, I didn't find that so. Did you actually read the article?

[thebitterguy]

Not yet, I'm busy this week.

But all I said was that a site called Treehugger.com sounds like it'll be just as biased as, say, techcentralstation.

Sorry if you feel otherwise.

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

I didn't see anything in there that was glaringly wrong. It's a short article though and so they weren't able to dig into some of the other factors to take into account.

I'll see if I can find the link to this other article I came across, but one of the factors they left out was that there is, technically, a lot more oil out there than we factor for, but that's because it's either in forms that are too expensive to exploit (oil shale (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale)), or the oil is so high in sulpher that it's significantly more expensive to refine (sour (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Classification)).

As prices for oil either stabalize above $50 a barrel or increase further, there is significantly more pressure to start making use of sources such as oil shale and lower quality oils.

If a peak oil forecast does not take this into account, it's pretty much bogus. The days of cheap oil are over, but I don't see us running out in our lifetime.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

just google hubbard peak.

World new oil discoveries ended a while back. We are near the top of the peak, that means there will be die offs in production.

[dicedork.livejournal.com]

Peak oil is a terrifying concept. However the truth of the matter is that gas prices are likely to increase gradually enough that the investments in other technologies will become profitable compared to the trouble of extracting them and what the market will bare. There may be some lean years because of lack of planning, but it doesn't seem like we're looking at the collapse of western civ quite yet.

[kaidevis.livejournal.com]

Nice article, one of the clearer ones I've seen; thanks for the link :-)

[admiralthrawn.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely impressed that they had comments on the precision and accuracy of the possible numbers, rather than trying to quote some particular study as gospel. They are certainly correct that at some point oil production will peak (there's a finite amount of the stuff out there, and we're using it pretty quickly), and that there will be societal changes as the oil gets increasingly rare and expensive as production declines. They're probably even correct that the peak will be relatively soon, though as they said, the numbers are remarkably fuzzy. But (and this is personal opinion here) I think they are underestimating the ability of economies to adjust, especially to changes that come over the course of years to decades. There is nothing fundamentally unique about oil; it's somewhat better than the alternatives as an energy source (because it is cheap) and transport method (because it has a very high recoverable energy per unit mass), but for heating, you can transition to natural gas (also finite, but there appears to be more of it); for cars you can transition to ethanol or biodiesel (see the example of brazil, though it is heavily subsidized there); for electrical power we have solar and wind approaching the cost of oil... Aircraft are the only application I can think of where a small difference in energy density is a real killer. And if the oil is running out over the course of a decade, bear in mind that cars, power plants, and the like get replaced anyway -- over the next decade you can expect a third of all electrical power plants will be replaced (they average something like a 30-year lifespan), so replacing a third of the oil-fired ones with something else has a minimal cost if we start now; similarly over the next decade you can expect well over half of the cars on the road to get replaced, so if there is a big push to go to ethanol-cars or efficient hybrids or whatever, you can do it with relatively little pain by just pushing the tech in new cars.

So, yeah, if oil production dropped by a third next year, society would crash and burn. If it dropped by 50% over the course of a decade, we'd make some investments in alternatives, spend some money and put up with some annoyances, and get on with our lives... And with oil prices having been high for the last year, we're already seeing some small changes and investments happening.

Of course, here in wonderful liberal environmentalist massachusetts, the government is doing everything in its power to stop wind-power from taking off, blocking mass transit projects, and generally screwing up the environment at every turn, so maybe I should go back to my usual cynical-bastard self and assume we'll all fail to do anything til its too late -- you certainly can't count on republicans to deal, and apparently it was too much to assume the democrats would deal either.