RSSBiodiesel and peaking oil production
Mar 13
A city in Colorado has this year switched 25% of it’s bus fleet to Biodiesel. Aside from Biodiesel being good as a renewable fuel, they’ve also seen up to a 31% decrease in emissions. If they deem the results of this test “positive” they will switch their entire fleet next year. Cheers and good luck. The article is here.
That same website has a bunch of other good information on it too. I ran into this article that looked rather important:
SAIC Report for DOE: Mitigating the Effects of Peak Oil
The report doesn’t give date forecasts, but is good in that it looks at what will happen when we get there, and what some of the warning signs will be. It’s scary to think how close we are, and the recent price shocks are one of the warning signs.
I did find something interesting in the report, though, in this paragraph:
“Improved fuel efficiency in the world’s transportation sector will be a critical element in the long-term reduction of liquid fuel consumption, however, the scale of effort required will inherently take time and be very expensive. For example, the U.S. has a fleet of over 200 million automobiles, vans, pick-ups, and SUVs. Replacement of just half with higher efficiency models will require at least 15 years at a cost of over two trillion dollars for the U.S. alone.”
The highlighted sentence gives me the creeps. I can just see naive people all over saying “well if it’s going to cost that much we just won’t do it.” What these people don’t realize is that we don’t have a choice. Whether or not you believe in the reduction in use of fossil fuels to stem global warming, I hope there really aren’t people out there who still believe we aren’t running out of oil, and very quickly.
The math is very straightforward. Oil discovery peaked way back in 1962 and has fallen very quickly since then, except for one small blip. This isn’t the opinion of some hippy-lefty scientists. The oil companies are living this reality. Take this in conjunction with demand, which is increasing very quickly worldwide as the population grows and huge countries like China and India become industrialized. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is a problem.
This site, Life After the Oil Crash, is a bit extreme in it’s message for my tastes, but it has all the data. Look at the chart of oil discovery and production. They do bring up some interesting points and interpretations of what the oil companies are planning for the future. For instance, oil consumption in the US is still increasing, the current refineries are at capacity, but no new refineries have been built since the 1970s. Do the oil companies believe they’re not going to need that much capacity because the supply of crude is dropping? Or do they hope to cap supply of gas to drive prices up? I don’t know, but either way it’s not good for our wallets.
Mar 15, 2005 @ 10:20:07
Neil, Neil, Neil.
People have been saying that oil is running out for over one hundred years. Their calculations are simple: Add up all available oil and divide by the consumption per year to get the number of years of consumption left.
The flaw in that calculation is the assumption that the “available” amount is a constant. But every decade we find a new innovation that allows us access new stores of oil considered unreachable a few years earlier. There was a time before offshore oil rigs when only oil on land was considered “available”. The oil industry innovated and gained access to those sources, and demand naturally increased to take up the slack. Again the calculations said oil was running out, but only because the available oil excluded oil reserves under permafrost or deeper than 6 miles. Advances in drilling quickly broke down those barriers too. And with further advances in oil extraction, Canada will be able to access the 2.5 trillion barrels sitting in the Alberta oil sands.
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/102spring2002_Web_projects/M.Sexton/
Oil is not running out. I wish it was. I fear that we will not work hard enough to solve the global warming problem without a more tangible threat like a oil shortage looming.
Mar 15, 2005 @ 13:50:28
Dan, you’re forgetting that the amount of “new oil” being discovered has dropped drastically over the last 40 years, to a level that’s bascially nothing compared to the pre-1970s.
I agree the advances may improve the efficiency to extract oil from tar sands, like Canada has, but it’s still fundamentally more expensive than drilling. Even at sea, most of the cost is a one-time thing – you build the platform. Once you begin getting oil up the pipes, the costs are relatively low compared to the labour-intensive extraction involved in tar sands.
The end result is that even optimistically the price at the pump would go up at least several dollars per gallon. At this point some of the other renewable alternative methods begin to look very attractive.