Message 22228615
Peak Oil Made Simple
by: pipewelder39 03/03/06 05:43 pm
Msg: 168869 of 168899
Here's an excerpt from a recent post by Ferglit, a long-timer on the BP board and IMO one of the best on any of the energy boards. Internal evidence suggests he works in England as a BP staffer, mid-level at least, concentrating on long-term issues relating to oil supply and climate change. This item is wonderfully lucid in its own right, and goes to the question of what BP really thinks.
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"Energy is not the same as the artificial intelligence or materials science that you use for examples. Energy is described by the laws of thermodynamics. There are no equivalent laws of AI or materials science, because energy is absolutely different in its nature. We can exercise our imaginations, as you describe it, in how we might deliver energy, catch it, use it, convert it – but physics says that we cannot make it. We cannot walk out and just find a substitute. This difference is one that economists never quite grasp.
I’m not aware of the particular breakthrough you cite in biodiesel, but turning biomass into better biodiesel wouldn’t be seen as much of a breakthrough by chemists, for whom chemical re-arrangement is Lego for grown-ups. The real breakthrough would come if we could find a way of making sufficient quantities of biodiesel which yielded usefully more energy than was used to make it, and that's the crux of it: Energy Return on Energy Invested.
You may dislike EROEI concepts but you still have to obey thermodynamics, just as the criminal may dislike the bars but has to live inside them anyway. I agree that some forms of energy have higher economic value than others, and it may pay to convert coal energy into electrical energy at 50% efficiency. However, it does not pay to expend more energy into an energy project than you can get back out. You assert, “Every form of energy production fails the EROEI model”. That simply isn’t true. You said, “The only thing that matters is DRODI (dollar return on dollar invested)”, which is roughly true but disingenuous; whether you measure investment as dollars or calories, no-one will spend 10 dollars or calories to get back 5. DRODI should broadly give the same answer as EROEI if you do your maths right (there are some exceptions in the detail), but for me EROEI clarifies the thinking.
I agree that “…we will never extract all the oil from the earth...” The price will go so high that no-one will buy the last few barrels, and oil will then have run out as far as everyone except economists are concerned. No-one will eat the last Grand Banks cod either, because it would cost a fortune to catch, but that doesn’t mean that cod aren't commercially extinct.
Peak oil is not about blood on the streets. It’s about running out of cheap oil. That may lead to blood on the streets, or it may not, but that’s a different question, nothing to do with maths and geology.
“When oil becomes more expensive it encourages funding of alternatives.” Name three. I accept your points about economizing and greater efficiency, but those are not “alternatives to oil”, they are “alternatives to using oil”. There is no new alternative source of energy out there." |
