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Peak Oil Perspective

physics.ucsd.edu

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Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#71

Post by toomuchtodo »

jofer wrote: post #54
matthudson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumer vehicles are definitely getting there, at least for high income and/or high net-worth people. And while that is a relief, it is still very troubling to think about the implications for our transportation infrastructure as a whole (where consumer vehicles represent a minority fraction.) How will we power our ocean freighters, our freight trains, our 18-wheelers, and our high capacity airplanes without high en…

Exactly. A huge portion of the global economy is currently based on cheap transport of goods. What happens when transport is no longer cheap?

We adapt.

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#72

Post by gshubert17 »

fleitz wrote: post #67
gshubert17 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Hydrocarbons, then. Natural gas and petroleum have similar geologic and economic characteristics.

I hate to break it to you but pretty much everything is a hydrocarbon. Natural gas and petroleum are about as similar as the hydrocarbons of corn and cherries.

Does natural gas exploration and exploitation have peak phenomena similar to petroleum? And does coal have its own reserves and peak phenomena?

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas are three large categories of energy hydrocarbons. If gas is cheap relative to oil or coal, then at the margin, some users will shift to gas. Prices of energy hydrocarbons will be correlated, over the long term.

Then, as coal, oil, and gas are all depleted (with their own separate peaks, perhaps), their prices will increase. Foods like corn which have many dependencies on low-priced energy (farm equipment, fertilizer, drying, and transport), will come under increasing upward price pressure.

Corn is used in perhaps a quarter of food SKUs in American grocery stores, so won't a lot of food prices go up as energy prices go up, as a consequence of peak oil (or coal or gas)?

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#73

Post by mark-r »

rayiner wrote: post #29
randomdata wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I would say that peak oil is about exactly the points you raised, and has nothing to do with running out of oil. The "peak" refers to the point where oil becomes so expensive that demand wanes and production starts to decline.

"Peak" in peak oil, at least as I understand it, refers to "peak rate of extraction." Or at least that's what Wikipedia says. Re: "peak price" -- the punchline is that demand is almost inelastic!

Unfortunately it's not inelastic, we saw this in 2008. As prices go up the economy tanks, as the economy goes down demand goes down.

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#74

Post by continuations »

fleitz wrote: post #44
rybosome wrote: post #18

> The risk is asymmetric: starting a crash program toward replacement of finite fossil fuels too early has great up-sides and marginal downsides (opportunity cost); but failure to act has enormous downside for marginal upside. - See more at: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/peak-oil-perspec... This is a more intelligent way of stating something I've been saying for years. I always explain my position on pe…

Agreed, which is why we should all believe in God, since although the possibility that he exists is slim to none, the risk of him actually existing is quite great to non-believers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager

But which god though? Pick the wrong one and you're still classified as a non-believer.

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#75

Post by olalonde »

Sorry for the naive question but what is oil used for? Isn't most of it used for transportation? If so, isn't the problem a bit overblown given that we have electric vehicles?

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#77

Post by ohazi »

olalonde wrote: post #75

Sorry for the naive question but what is oil used for? Isn't most of it used for transportation? If so, isn't the problem a bit overblown given that we have electric vehicles?

Transportation of physical goods everywhere on the planet, not just transportation of your butt between work and home every weekday.

We have electric cars. We don't have (useful) electric trucks, or ships, or passenger or cargo aircraft.

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#78

Post by crusso »

devx wrote: post #3

The faster the oil/gas price increases, the more attractive electric cars become. Unfortunately, it could also mean US will never cut oil subsidies, unless they do it now, before the perceptible decline starts. Hopefully, governments will at least resist the urge to increase oil subsidies to keep the prices the same. Instead they should be looking at building electric car infrastructure in their countries, faster, so…

Whenever I hear of "oil subsidies", I follow up -- looking for what is meant.

It usually turns out that the subsidies are for small players prospecting, not the "big oil". Alternatively, there are subsidies for all businesses that oil companies take advantage of. Oil companies are less subsidized than solar companies, from what I've been able to see.

If you have other information sources, then I'd love to see them.

I wish we would lose the spin and just talk facts on these subjects.

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#79

Post by busoni »

harshreality wrote: post #41
jofer wrote: post #4

As a geologist in the oil industry, this is one of the few articles I've seen on peak oil that absolutely nails the salient points. (And even gets the geology correct.) To quote: "Most simply, peak oil is about rates, not amounts." Yes, there are a lot of unconventional resources. They're just a lot harder, more expensive, and most importantly in this context, slower to produce. On the upshot for me, and the downshot…

"Most simply, peak oil is about rates, not amounts." See also, Arithmetic, Population, and Energy , wherein Dr. Albert Bartlett comments on the inability of most people to reason about concrete examples of exponential growth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vII-GxsrR2c

Thanks for mentioning Al Bartlett here. This video is very relevant to this post and worth watching. Al Bartlett is a brilliant man and does a wonderful job explaining the profound implications of misunderstanding exponential growth. Here is another link to his videos: http://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populatio...

Re: Peak Oil Perspective

#80

Post by glenra »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #9
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Note this is from 2011 (pre fracking) so it misses quite a bit. And it doesn't plot home prices post mortgage crisis. Generally the whole 'peak oil' thing is of interest perhaps to people trading oil driller stocks (or not) but I have yet to see any way to apply any of the insights into something remotely interesting or predictive.

You're kidding, I'm sure. The end of the Oil Interval is the most interesting, possibly the ONLY interesting historical event that will take place in our lifetimes.

> The end of the Oil Interval is the most interesting, possibly the ONLY interesting historical event that will take place in our lifetimes.

That seems like a bizarre thing to believe. When humanity switched from wood to coal for heating, or from coal to oil, were either of those an identifiable "historical event"? If we switch from oil to other fuels in our lifetimes, this will happen so gradually that nobody will notice when it happens. Any more than we noticed as "an interesting historical event" the moment that everybody got an email address, or started using google, or bought a smartphone.

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