BBC: Is the world's oil running out fast?

[gold_bug]

BBC: Is the world's oil running out fast?

BBC Business - Monday, 7 June, 2004
By Adam Porter
at the Peak Oil conference in Berlin

The adherents of the peak oil theory warn the decline of world oil output will force oil prices higher for good, and that the knock on effects could be catastrophic.

"In my opinion, unfortunately, there will be no linear change," says Iran's Ali Bakhtiari. "There will only be sudden explosive change."

"The people who will be least affected will be the super poor, who already have no access to energy, and the super rich who do not care if oil is $100 a barrel."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3777413.stm

[Warpy]

1. Cheery bugger

The main change is that things that look expensive now with a long payback period will start to look less expensive as the payback period shortens. I'm talking about things like PVC roofing, solar water heaters, better hybrid cars, and the like.

The intelligent people with the funds or the ability to borrow will convert sooner rather than later. The dummies will be stuck in the dark.

[jonnyo]

2. If it ends with a rapid bang you'll find metro areas cut off

from food, clean water, sewer, etc. rather suddently with millions of people jammed in the same area and potentially panicking or becoming desparate. Not a good formula.

[phantom power]

5. probably not that rapid, but not good

If we enter into an economic regime where oil prices rise steadily, it will cause steady inflation, since pretty much everything good and service we consume requires oil at one or more points in production or distribution.

A world-wide recession, probably accompanied by political instability as nations start to compete with increasing nastiness for oil.

The whole world will gradually become "third-world". Unless we manage to transition to some other kind of sustainable energy cycle.

[kalian]

3. On cue....here it is.....

"Oil is far too cheap at the moment," says Mr Simmons.

"The figure I'd use is around $182 a barrel. We need to price oil realistically to control its demand. That is because global production is peaking."

[papau]

4. I though peak date was extented to 2020 from the 2006 and other

earlier dates that have been suggested.

But I have not seen the work papers that produce these dates. I recall my first peak oil article that I read was suggesting a date in the future - in the mid 1950's - and that proved incorrect.

But I suspect this is an idea whose time has finally arrived!

:-)

[mike_c]

7. IIRC the paper you're remembering was written by M. Hubbert...

...in 1956, and it predicted the peak in U.S. oil production in the early 1970's. U.S. crude production peaked in 1970 and has declined ever since. Hubbert was right.

Hope this reply isn't redundant-- I was interrupted by a long phone call in the middle....

[papau]

9. Sounds correct - the review of the Hubbert paper in 56 referenced

prior peak oil predictions as I recall - hence the comment about a peak in the 50's being discussed.

I had totally forgotten that the paper was not world peak - it was just US peak.

But it was a National Security "tax" debate around that time where peak was a reason to give the oil companies a either a greater break - or to continue some old break - I forget which.

[NNadir]

6. From where I sit, an increase in the price of oil is a good thing.

There will be short-term immediate and even severe pain, but the fact is that we are in very dire need of a new energy infrastructure, and the reason is not directly economic so much as it is profoundly environmental.

If oil were to rise to $200/barrel, oil would be forced to compete with it's alternatives. In turn, nothing would so drive energy innovation as the promise of high economic rewards.

Of course there is a huge risk side to this happy horseshit scenario, and it's spelled C-O-A-L. People imagine that coal is cheap, but it is not; coal is what me must struggle against. In fact, $200/barrel oil would make coal liquification strategies very attractive in many circles, especially the head-in-the-sand crowd that has made it possible for disgusting filth to have usurped the United States Government. In the 1970's, the last time that oil prices were expected to run away, exactly this scenario was advanced by no less than Jimmy Carter, and let's face it, Jimmy Carter was a wholly different moral animal than Dick Cheney.

Because I am for the immediate and rapid expansion of nuclear power, which I regard as the least risky energy option, I frequently find myself bad-mouthing some forms of solar energy, including biomass and PV energy. However, I need to remind myself in very emphatic terms that both PV and biomass are enormously lower in environmental risk than is coal. Neither are nearly as good as nuclear, but neither are anywhere near as bad as coal and oil. Certainly nothing can help these PV and biomass strategies grow in popularity quite so much rising energy prices. On risk minimization bases, both biomass and PV energy are almost infinitely superior to fossil fuels, both oil and coal.

Oil depletion is a good thing, but only if oil is replaced by something other than coal.

[Massacure]

8. Don't forget we also have to shift without another great depression

If peak oil comes to quickly, the economy will go down the toilet. It would be best to avoid this if at all possible.

Btw, other than cost, what makes PV so much better than nuclear? If every house had a PV panel, it would greatly cut down on nuclear energy needed. That makes less nuclear waste to deal with.

[NNadir]

10. Did you mean to make the reverse argument?

I assume that you're arguing the reverse of what you actually have written, that is, you wanted to write "What makes nuclear so much better than nuclear..." I make the inference because of your last sentence.

I cover this subject over and over and over again, and the answer doesn't really change.

The difference between PV and solar is economic cost (direct costs) and external costs. Nuclear power is cheaper in direct terms by a factor of four or five, which is why the world is building 31 nuclear plants today and no body (without a subsidy) is installing equivalent PV capacity. Because the sun refuses to shine at night, it is necessary to create storage systems with PV, and these systems, further add to the costs.

Because solar systems require a huge amount of mass per watt generated relative to nuclear, the environmental cost (metals mined and refined) energy invested in manufacture, hazardous chemicals used, makes the external cost of solar energy higher than nuclear. This also extends to the area of "waste" (for instance cadmium mine tailings, sulfates from the roasting cadmium ores) of solar energy. Since more mass must be processed for these purposes, the waste is corresponding more difficult to contain.

I do recognize that people often appeal to so called "nuclear wastes" as an argument against nuclear power because, as is frequently alleged "there is no solution for nuclear waste." At this point in the conversation I ask the question: "Can you name a form of energy for which "waste" problems have been solved?" No one ever gives a satisfactory answer to this question, which is another way of saying "nuclear waste is worse than other worst because it is spelled with a N, a U, a C, an L, an E, an A and an R.

I have frequently bumped up a thread (of my own creation) on this site entitled "The External Cost of Energy: What You Pay With Your Flesh," that is built around an elaborate EU study showing that the environmental cost of the wastes associated with all other forms of energy (other than wind) are much higher than the costs of nuclear waste. There were recent Finnish and Swiss studies that came to the same surprising (to some) conclusion.

I sometimes ask people to show a case of a person who has been killed by the storage of commercial "nuclear waste." No one ever takes me up on this challenge. I would love to hear of such an incident, although I am likely to point out that millions of people are killed each year (largely unmourned) by air pollution. So what I am really asking for is a demonstration of deaths from nuclear waste, which produces very little air pollution, with deaths from other forms of energy which produce do significant air pollution. (Please note: The greenhouse gas costs of building nuclear plants are significantly smaller gram per watt than the costs of manufacturing PV cells.)

Sometimes in this argument, I also point out that what is defined as "nuclear waste," is only usually regarded as "waste" in the United States. In most other places, the so called "waste" is actually recognized for what it is, an enormous resource. In a recent thread for instance, I noted that Japan plans to market the Ruthenium, Rhodium and Palladium obtained from it's so called "nuclear waste," and collect hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. (The world supply of Rhodium found in ores is dwarfed by the supply of Rhodium in so called "nuclear waste.") I note too that 97% of what is in so called "nuclear waste" is pretty much the same Uranium that came out of the ground. This material is recyclable and contains vast amounts of energy.

However, all this said, I believe we have a responsibility to embrace as many solar energy systems as are economically and environmentally feasible. First, all are preferable to oil and coal. Second, nuclear fission resources are not infinite. They will last only for a few millenia. Therefore it is selfish and morally indifferent to simply consume these resources because they are there and immediately convenient, as previous generations have done with oil. It is true that we will have to pay a higher environmental cost for the use of most forms of solar energy than we would if we limited ourselves to nuclear fission. But it is completely self serving to insist that future generations, our decedents, our children pay these costs because we are unwilling to pay them ourselves. Someone will have to pay the burden, and we should share it among all generations.
If we use solar energy, we can conceivably make nuclear resources available for tens of thousands of years, rather than the two or three thousand years they would last if we simply fulfilled all of our energy needs with nuclear energy.

In this sense I agree with you.

[Massacure]

11. I think I probably expressed my opinion wrong.

I didn't say that PV could completely replace fosil fuels or nuclear power, but I do think that incorporating them into houses can greatly decrease the load of nuclear we need.

A nuclear power plant takes how long to build? 10-15 years after licensing and construction, correct? I think we can make great strides in PV in that time.

I'm not all that familiar with the manufacturing process of solar panels. However, I think efficiency and cost will come down in the comming years. I also think the manufacturing can be made more environmentally friendly.

Some nuclear waste can be recycled, that is true. However, there is some of it that cannot. We can reduce on this stuff that cannot be recycled using PV.

I think there should be a combination of them. Anyways, that is just my opinion on things. I guess we will just have to see how things work out.

[phantom power]

12. keep fighting the good fight

your posts remind me of Larry Niven's prophetic defense of nuclear power in the 70s, when it began acquiring such a bad rap.

[NNadir]

13. I'm interested to know who Larry Niven was.

I must admit to being a relatively late convert to the commercial use of nuclear energy.

I'd really have to say that I was have to say that I was almost certainly one of the people against whom Niven (if I understand what you say) had to defend against.

I switched sides after Chernobyl, which had far less dire consequences than I (and I'm sure most people) thought it would. As tragic as it was, Chernobyl certainly demystified the worst case, and in a paradoxical way, made the case nuclear power stronger than it was before. We lost credibility by overstating the risks.

[phantom power]

14. He's best known as a (hard) science fiction writer

He wrote Lucifer's Hammer, Ringworld, Integral Trees, and dozens of others, plus a long list of short stories.

Anyway, he was also a physicist by training. He was an advocate of nuclear power, even during the "three-mile-island" era when it was at it's most demonized. His arguments were pretty similar to yours.

He wrote some serious essays on the subject, but he also worked it into one of his novels "Inferno" (coauthored with Jerry Pournelle). There's a scene with an anti-nuke demonstrator who is serving sentence in Hell (Dante's hell, with the nine circles) for protesting nuclear power, thereby depriving people of clean energy.

[NNadir]

15. Thanx for the explanation. I'd be in Hell myself on those grounds,

since at the time of the Three Mile Island debacle, I was pretty much anti-nuclear myself. I was active in the opposition to Shoreham on Long Island, which became the poster child for the (self-referent on the part of protesters) argument that nuclear power was not economical. That plant, which tried to retrofit itself during construction repeatedly to satisfy the demand that it be impossible for the loss of life of a single grasshopper as a result of its operations, never produced commercial power. After billions of dollars of construction costs, it was sold to the state for $1 and dismantled. As the result of the efforts of people like me, I'm sure thousands of Long Islanders subsequently died from air pollution.

I probably should serve time, if not in Hell, then in purgatory for my sins, except that I have clearly repented and have seen the light (Thousands of Megawatts of light) and therefore might hope to one day join in the Grace of the holy angels of Uranium and Thorium. However, if I indulge in any more religious metaphors, being an atheist, I am going to heave the holy cookies.

[pauliedangerously]

16. Don't forget about the other solar power:

Parabolic reflectors used to generate steam, which runs turbine generators.

I like your points about nuclear power, which, whether people like it or not, will become more widely used.

[pauliedangerously]

17. Faster by the day