What if

Here's a terrifying dramatization (just shown again) on Discovery Science, What If: The Oil Runs Out.

Slowly a consensus has emerged. Oil, the lifeblood of modern societies, is going to peak then decline irreversibly. Oil will be used for decades to come, but the era of surplus, conventional oil is ending, and we are not prepared.

Mathew Simmons' first words are:

If we have a shortage, it's a lights out event.

Also narrating are: Paul Domjan , Neil McMahon, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein, and Andrew Curry of the Henley Centre Consultancy. Get the bittorent here.

Blending drama and documentary, the IF series returns with a film investigating a scenario many experts fear will come true.

When the cheap oil we depend on starts to run out, we may not be able to take anything for granted any more.

Drama
It is 2016 and the world is in crisis.

Global supplies of oil cannot keep up with soaring demand and the price of petrol is going through the roof.

The oil companies are in a desperate race to find any remaining oil reserves but what happens if there is no more out there?

Combining expert interviews with a fictional story line, the drama-documentary examines how our lives will change as the price of fuel starts to spiral out of control.

The film interweaves the story of Jess, an exploration geologist working for an international oil company, with the impact of the fuel crisis on her parents back home in Minneapolis.

Instability in the Middle East has caused an "oil shock" and the price of crude is rising day by day.

At the start of the film it is around $85 (£45) a barrel - in spring 2006 it is about $65 (£34) - but by the end of the drama the price has climbed to $160 (£85).

As the story unfolds, expert interviewees - including Paul Domjan, Former Energy Security Adviser at the US Dept of Defence, oil analyst Matt Simmons and the legendary former Saudi Arabian Minister of Oil, Sheikh Yamani - explain how the crisis will have an effect on every part of our lives.

We will not just be paying a lot more - £2.35 per litre or $5.88 per US gallon - to fill up our cars, we will be charged much higher prices for food, heating and light.

Long distance travel will become increasingly expensive and we will even think carefully before using the car for what we used to regard as routine trips to the shops.

Recession

As the economy goes into recession, Jess's parents find their world collapsing around them.

Also on Discovery, Clean Fuels.

From Newsweek: The New Coal Car. The article makes the claim:

With the world's largest coal reserves, the United States has enough coal to power the country for another century at least.

However, such claims are based on current usage levels, not the ones that would be required for complete replacement of oil usage.

grasping at straws

Over $100 million has been spent on Proposition 87 on California's ballot, a large sum. Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been featured in ads favoring the cause. One such ad states:

Imagine if we can stop being dependent on foreign oil. Brazil did it.
They made a simple change to their cars. Switched to ethanol, grown from their own crops.
If Brazil could do it, so could California.

Mr. Clinton promulgates similar themes with his Global Initiative, a recent meeting of which was critiqued thusly in TNR.

How true are the above claims? I've looked at them before, in Brazil and ethanol and ethanol, the panacea. Recently, Robert Rapier, at The Oil Drum, points out:

Brazil’s energy independence miracle was 10% ethanol and 90% domestic crude oil production.

This is astonishing and at such great odds with the basic pro-87 premise, especially when one considers that:

• Brazilian ethanol is also subsidized by government
• Enriching the well-connected
  
• Sugar cane grown in a tropical clime captures much more solar energy than anything in California and
  
• The environmental destruction is great
  

Tad Patzek of U.C. Berkeley also seriously doubts the pro-87 hype. Mr. Patzek took part in an ezine discussion about ethanol about which he comments:

My 1-hour working meeting with Mr. Khosla was *not* a debate. We both tried to establish points of mutual agreement and disagreement. While certainly there was agreement on several key issues, there was also significant, one might say fundamental, disagreement on biofuels. I find the biofuel focus of Proposition 87 to be inconsistent with the very survival of life diversity and key ecosystems on the Earth and, consequently, I do not favor Proposition 87.

Scientific American this year devotes its September special focus issue, as with part of last, to Energy's Future - Beyond Carbon. Again the emphasis is on global warming rather than fossil fuel depletion. Daniel M. Kammen (a Berkeley professor like Mr. Patzek) is author of the article, The Rise of Renewable Energy, in which he writes:

When all the inputs and outputs were correctly factored in, we found that ethanol has a positive net energy...

Mr. Patzek would strongly dispute that contention and others by Mr. Kammen.

Update (06-11-09): California Proposition 87 was defeated 55% to 45%. Also, from an analyst local to my area, Ethanol experiment goes off track.

Update (07-1-2): Scientific American publishes article Is Ethanol for the Long Haul?
summarized thus. The author, Matthew L. Wald, is a reporter for the N.Y. Times; puzzlingly, his scientific credentials are not listed in Sciam. Here's another article of his on the subject.

media

Tv
CBS: Greener Horizons
BBC: Fueling the Future, Education
PBS: EXTREME OIL

Press
NY Times: The Energy Challenge
Chicago Tribune: Oil:A Travelogue of Addiction

Radio
NPR: Paying at the Pump

Videos, etc
See my earlier post, Materials on energy

what elephant?

Banksy's L.A. living room

myopia writ large

One month does not a civilization make. What part of the word 'finite' do the pundits not understand? Here's more cornucopia from Newsweek. Mr. Maugeri writes:

Suddenly the alarmists who foresaw an imminent era of oil scarcity are silent

Not me.

As this bleak scenario gained acceptance, it became easy to assume that the price of oil would defy the laws of gravity and break the barrier of $100 per barrel.

Appealing to the laws of physics, now that's a first.

But a bit farther out, between roughly 2010 and 2012, there is a good chance that supply trends will overtake demand, raising spare production capacity to a range between 7 to 10 percent of demand.

Methinks we've heard that before. Higher prices lead to more investment lead to more oil, nevermind geology. Mr. Maugeri concludes with more gobbledygook:

..., contrary to all the scare scenarios, ... China's oil-consumption growth has the potential to ease substantially, while in most industrial countries consumption growth is approaching zero and may start to drop.

and

One thing is certain: if prices should drop significantly before the investments now underway reach the point of no return, they could come to a screeching halt, precipitating another price spike.

Newsweek also presents an article on Big Oil's malaise, two factors being:

the maturing of old reserves and more and more risky exploration projects

Left unspecified are which reserves have matured and how significant a role they play in the global oil picture. Could those include the venerable Saudi fields?

a tank of gas, a world of trouble

See the Chicago Tribune's investigative report, Oil: a Travelogue of Addiction .

on Discovery Channel

aired this weekend: Addicted To Oil: Thomas L. Friedman Reporting
Mr. Friedman points out that cars use up most of the oil we import. He emphasizes foreign oil dependency as the immediate problem, as it fosters tyrannies, especially those who would do us harm.

He interviews Amory Lovins, who argues that further efficiencies can help us wean ourselves from dependency, while ethanol from switchgrass can do the rest. Another person argues that wind energy can provide us with one-half of the electricity we use. These arguments are highly questionable.

See also Thomas Friedman on Charlie Rose and the Year earlier discussion with Thomas Friedman on subject


coming up July 16 on the Discovery Channel:
Global Warming: What You Need to Know, with Tom Brokaw

More doomsaying

Under the title, Fly Now - Stay Later, the quarterly glossy magazine 111, printed in Palm Springs, California, includes this reprinted interview with 'doomsaying' author James Howard Kunstler. See an excerpt from his book, The Long Emergency.
Also from that Environment Advocacy Ezine, Grist, is an article on biofuels, The Scheme of the Crop.

Running Out, a Myth?

from John Stossel's web page:

MYTH: We are running out of oil
TRUTH: Not so fast!
"It's going to be a catastrophe!"
When they're not complaining about the price of gas, doomsayers would have us believe that we are burning oil at an "unsustainable" rate.

How can anyone honestly argue otherwise? In this video interview with Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well, Mr. Stossel asks the right questions such as: Isn't oil finite? Somehow, the answers are unconvincing.

Mr. Stossel goes on to argue:

If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book The Bottomless Well that those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.

As usual, everyone gets sidetracked by the present (cheap fuel) dollar cost to extract oil, but doesn't figure the actual energy cost to capture further energy, whether tar sands, ethanol or solar.

In another 20/20 piece, Mr. Stossel counts down to two more of his myths related to oil:
MYTH #2-- Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America and
MYTH #1-- Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place.
In that last, he alludes to The Tragedy of the Commons. See my blog entry on this.

Here's how one reviewer characterizes Mr. Stossel's Myths book:

From Publishers Weekly
ABC News correspondent Stossel mines his 20/20 segments for often engaging, frequently tendentious challenges to conventional wisdom, presenting a series of "myths" and then deploying an investigative journalism shovel to unearth "truth." This results in snappy debunkings of alarmism, ...The author's complacent glosses on overpopulation and global warming ("we can build dykes and move back from the coasts") are especially glib and one-sided.

ethanol, the panacea?

on a TV near you
NBC: Dateline NBC but see this MSNBC piece .
CBS 60 minutes but see other CBS piece
ABC: World News Tonight and this
CNN: Presents segment on ethanol in We Were Warned (for more info)

But see the Wikipedia piece on fuel ethanol, and its external links, such as the 2004 scholarly article by Tad Patzek and Pimentel's research. Patzek writes:

In this paper, I will describe in some detail the unfavorable thermodynamics of the industrial production of ethanol from one particular food crop, corn. I will use the Second Law of thermodynamics to track what is happening to us as mere years pass, and the precious resources the sun and the earth have been making and storing for millions of years are being squandered in front of our eyes.

The focus of Patzek's article is corn, but he does briefly compare the net energy of corn to switchgrasses and sugarcane. For more on sugarcane, see this other Wikipedia article.

As heard on NPR

Today, Morning Edition presented a piece with Matthew Simmons* and Daniel Yergin, pessimist vs. optimist. On listening to it, who do you think is the realist? This piece is part of NPR's series, The Future of Fuel.

See the earlier series on Boston NPR, pre State of the Union 2006, Addicted to Oil. Thomas L. Friedman is featured in the first of the 4 shows. He mentions a project with Discovery Channel. [His film premiered at Silverdocs Film Festival and broadcast on Discovery Channel on June 24, 2006.]

*Simmons who was featured on CNN Presents, We Were Warned, suggests here that global oil consumption is analogous to a car running out of gas.

drip drip drip

by Christo Komarnitski, Sofia, Bulgaria
Cartoons from the Bulgarian newspaper "Sega" -- Visit Christo's site
as seen on Cagle's Cartoons

Mainlining

In her Newsweek column this week, The Price of Our Addiction, Jane Bryant Quinn speaks bluntly about the downslope (of peak oil). The column begins:

For years to come, we'll be paying for our oil in both treasure and blood, as we fight and parley to keep ever-tighter supplies flowing our way.
The U.S. lives in an energy trap. We fell into it gladly, dug it deeper and sit fat and happy, with blinders on. We're fed daily meals of imported oil, from countries we pay in IOUs and think we can push around.

and concludes:

Unfortunately, we're investing in war, not in crash projects to develop new energy sources. Maybe there's time to spare. But some events, like true civil war and collapse in Iraq, could change everything in a day. We're running a faith-based energy policy—still addicted to oil. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong big.

This comes from a writer known for her careful and sober counsel. See also her later piece, What We Need Is Policy.

CBS News continues to ask the hard questions about ethanol . CNN reprises its Frank Sesno report, We Were Warned.

Brazil and ethanol

N.Y. Times article (reg. req'd) With Big Boost From Sugar Cane, Brazil Is Satisfying Its Fuel Needs includes the perhaps self-serving:

For each unit of energy expended to turn cane into ethanol, 8.3 times as much energy is created, compared with a maximum of 1.3 times for corn, according to scientists at the Center for Sugarcane Technology here and other Brazilian research institutes.

As I stated before regarding another article, the N.Y. Times claims that Brazil is oil-independent because of its development of ethanol; that begs the question of how much energy was needed to produce the ethanol and other concerns. Further as another article points out:

Gasoline with or without MTBE can be shipped in large quantities through an extensive network of pipelines. But ethanol, which tends to corrode pipelines, must be transported on trucks, trains and barges in relatively small batches to storage terminals where it is then blended with gasoline.

The oil is going, the oil is going!

That's the apropos title for this Salon article on peak oil.

The author, Katharine Mieszkowski, is thorough in her assessment with dozens of links to the Peak Oil canon. She tries to end the piece optimistically, but it sounds like delusion in place of denial.

I have two pet peeves with politicians (or even pundits) mouthing off about energy, as in this article. One is the use of the word 'spike', suggesting a temporary rise in real energy prices. The other is the reference to a dependence on 'foreign' oil; it's oil, period.

Another question that warrants investigation is: how do Peak Oil alarmists (of whom admittedly I'm one) view the Global Warming alarmists? I would say scoffingly. Though related as I've pointed out before, the one threat is much greater than the other.

On the subject of global warming, C-span's BookTV presented a panel of authors on the subject from the March 25-26 Virginia Festival of the Book, including:

Tim Flannery, "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth"

Elizabeth Kolbert, "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change"

William Ruddiman, "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate"

At the end of the Q&A, a lady asked how would peak oil (and depletion) affect global warming. The answer was to the point, but cut short. Hello? Can't you see that Sword of Damocles?

CNN wonders

The preview asks: What if our addiction to oil becomes a world wide crisis? It could happen. A chilling all new CNN Presents: We Were Warned: Tommorrow's Oil Crisis. The program looks at:
Interviews with James Wolsey and Matthew Simmons
World oil consumption, including that of China
Gulf of Mexico production
Alberta tar sands
Ethanol, especially that made in Brazil
Interview with GM VP on American car production

In his interview. Matthew Simmons is asked 'what is the worst case scenario?' His answer: 'You don't want to go there', but when pressed, goes on to suggest a series of energy wars between neighbors, cities, states, etc.

On the web page, one video link titled 'Long War of the 24th century' contains a (not so slight) misprint; that should read '21st century'.
Note: archived videos on CNN require subscription. The whole hour-long program does not appear to be available yet from CNN.

G.W. take 6

From his 2006 State of the Union address

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.

The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly 10 billion dollars to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources – and we are on the threshold of incredible advances. So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative – a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas. To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy.

We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen. We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, and stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment … move beyond a petroleum-based economy … and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.

and

America needs more than a temporary expansion

and

I propose to double the Federal commitment to the most critical basic research programs in the physical sciences over the next ten years. This funding will support the work of America’s most creative minds as they explore promising areas such as ..., ... and alternative energy sources.

Be assured (the cornucopia) or beware the precipice (Cassandra)? President Bush, in a followup, takes to the road.

John Dickerson of Slate writes:

Bush put his case in a very Bushian way, presenting it as a pain-free alternative to the awful status quo. Only the corn stalk will suffer as we remake a huge sector of the economy and convert to clean, politically innocent fuel sources. None of us have to trade in our SUV's, drive less, or turn down the thermostat. The president says that in six years cars using the new ethanol will be competitive with gas-burning ones. By 2025, he pledges, America can reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern oil by 75 percent. His aides argue that technology makes this all possible. It sounds too good to be true, and almost certainly is.

The New York Times editorializes:

Last night's remarks were woefully insufficient. The country's future economic and national security will depend on whether Americans can control their enormous appetite for fossil fuels. This is not a matter to be lumped in a laundry list of other initiatives during a once-a-year speech to Congress. It is the key to everything else.

The Times claims that Brazil is oil-independent because of its development of ethanol; that claim begs the question of how much energy was needed to produce that ethanol and other concerns. Further, the Times worries about global warming. This is a distraction from the main point. What happens when our economic security is compromised? Will people die? How and how many?

The New Republic looks at (subscription req'd) the administration's position on Peak Oil:

In its analysis of Bush's State of the Union adress, Deutsche Bank's North American branch reaches a similar conclusion. Bush, the analysis says, "should talk about making a dependence on oil, as opposed to Middle Eastern oil, a thing of the past. ... We should lessen our demand and conserve what is left. By inference that will reduce dependence on the Middle East. There is one simple way of doing this, and that is to raise gasoline taxes in the U.S."

But it is very doubtful that the Bush administration will do what the energy experts and bankers advise. The political costs are too great.

Charlie Rose on PBS interviewed the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. (transcript). The first 20 minutes of the one hour program has to do with oil addiction. Prince Turki Al-Faisal believes that the market will 'of course' take care of things once the oil starts running out. For more from the camel's mouth (no offense intended), here's an interview with 'the Greenspan of energy', Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi.

Since cartoons are on everyone's mind these days and for a lighter side to crude, see this.

Oil sands salvation

There's a lot of oil in that there taiga. But it's hard to get out.

Regarding yesterday's CBS 60 minutes piece on the The Oil Sands Of Alberta see the following analysis: Tar baby: Oil sands and peak oil.

connecting the dots

In an editorial, the NY Times looked at our vulnerability to natural gas embargos and nuclear proliferation, concluding:

Clearly, becoming less dependent on foreign sources should be among the West's - and most especially America's - most urgent priorities. But not in the way that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney seem to prefer, which is to try to drill our way out of dependency - an utterly impossible task for a country that uses one-fourth of the world's oil while possessing only 3 percent of its reserves, and whose once-abundant supplies of natural gas are now severely stressed. A much better answer would be a national commitment to more efficient vehicles and to the rapid deployment of new energy sources like biofuels.

So the solution somehow lies in efficiency and in biofuels. Why doesn't the paper of record further investigate that supposed solution? The questions are very simple.

1. With finite supplies of fossil fuels (the earth is round, Mr. Friedman), how much time does efficiency buy us before we seriously feel the inevitable oil shortages?
2. Can we produce enough biofuel to replace oil? As we've seen before, there are major problems with biofuels as a solution. It took hundreds of thousands of years to transform solar energy into fossil fuels through geologic processes. Do we really expect to compress that into a real time replacement of our fossil fuel consumption? As John Mac used to say, Get Serious.

This week there was an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia costing the lives of 12 hard-working men. Did anyone tie that to our dependence on fossil fuels?

to a watchdog

The PBS series, NOW with David Brancaccio, aired a piece on global warming this week; in it, one climatologist, Dr. Alley, says:

It’s not the end of humanity; it's not the end of civilization.

My feedback to NOW:

There are some of us who believe that oil depletion could quickly lead to the end of humanity and the end of civilization. Please go beyond your look at influence-peddling by the oil industry to the subject of Peak Oil. One person who has been trying to get the public's attention on this is Congressman Barlett (R-Maryland): http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/531 .

One compelling analysis is the too-real Olduvai Theory by Richard Duncan.

For a view from abroad, see this BBC piece, a Crisis for Humanity?