Peak Oil Preparations

Raven, it takes more energy to get any resource then we could ever get from it. That's what entropy is. The law of diminishing returns of energy. The more refined the energy, the more energy is thrown out to create it.

What energy production is, is the search for more refined energy, not more energy. We have virtually unlimited supplies of energy. We used burn trees all the time. We could burn timber to power lights. we don't because coal has 4 times the energy per gram of timber. Oil has double coal of extractable energy. Uranium much much more. But harnessing this energy wastes much more then we get through it. Breaking even would be perpetual energy, and if we found it, this discussion would be completly meaningless.

Our oil production will peak, but i hasn't yet. It won't while were still discovering large wells.

We are investing in ethanol, but honestly, the problem is there are too many sources, and agricultural lobbies are competing for each of them. Brazils making ethanol very efficent because their using a very effecient source, sugarcane. The best thing we could do for our energy policy would be to decide on an energy source, without lobbies.

Peak oil isn't a society ending crises at all. it's just a natural continuance of the fact that once we harnessed energy, we would use it up like parasites. It's the same urge that made our chimp like relatives huddle around fire. Hopefully we'll be smart enough to do it in a manner that will be good for us and have less negative enviornmental impacts.

 

Agreed. Obviously the amount of oil is limited, but the amount of oil on the earth based on the reserves of wells tapped right now is a ridiculous figure.

Still, good idea to get away from oil. The oil intrests pump as much oil as they want, and invest as much in exploration as they desire. Competition does exist, but only enough to make sure enough people get enough pie.

Delicious black pie.

 

Ive listened to alex jones say simular and hes wrong , but I imagine that his views will be very popular with americans who want to still drive their hummer .

peak oil makes people less dependent on the grid if you choose to get rid of your car grow your own food recycle rain water get solar or wind power and the masses choose to do the same ....the whole system starts to fall to pieces

the system needs you as a consumer and as a worker it doesnt want millions of people being independant of it .

want a revoultion get people to stop buying anything especially from big companys or not locally produced.

if people start only being interested in their local region you will see the break up of big states

unless oil is being made all the time at a terrific rate we are bound to go over peak production countrys all over the world have peaked its going to happen to the world as a whole

 

Who said anything about Alex Jones, and why do you assume that Americans are obsessed with driving Hummers? I don't drive a Hummer, nor would I want to drive such a ridiculous, unreasonably oversized vehicle.

Contrary to what you said, most people are not going to give up their vehicles (unless they're forced to by the government), grow their own food, or recycle rain water. People have been conditioned to rely on the system, and those who run this system know this and exploit this tendency in people.

People are more dependent on the system than ever, and it's only going to get worse. The threat of impending catastrophe from global warming is intended only to get more people dependent on the system and exercising more control over the public with the passing of more totalitarian laws and regulations.

 

"Raven, it takes more energy to get any resource then we could ever get from it. That's what entropy is. The law of diminishing returns of energy. The more refined the energy, the more energy is thrown out to create it."

oil from traditional oil wells had a return of 50 to one so you used 1 barrel of oil getting fifty barrels of oil , things like oil shale have a return of 1.5 barrels for one barrel used if your very lucky.

in the old days oil was above ground in pools and you just used to go and scoop it up then they drilled shallow wells and collect the oil from them, now contrast that with what they do today

deep ocean drilling or trying to get oil out of earth with a lot of tar in it by using huge amounts of natural gas and water (by the way gas we wont have for long because thats peaking too)

"What energy production is, is the search for more refined energy, not more energy. We have virtually unlimited supplies of energy. We used burn trees all the time. We could burn timber to power lights. we don't because coal has 4 times the energy per gram of timber. Oil has double coal of extractable energy. Uranium much much more. But harnessing this energy wastes much more then we get through it. Breaking even would be perpetual energy, and if we found it, this discussion would be completly meaningless."

well oil when it gave us a 50 to one return of energy invested was as near as we are ever going to come to free energy

"Our oil production will peak, but i hasn't yet. It won't while were still discovering large wells. "

for years we have been discovering a third less oil than we find we havent found a really big field since the 1960s, ghawar the biggest field on earth which they think as just peaked and is watering out was found 80 years ago

if ghawar has peaked saudi has peaked and if saudi has peaked the world has peaked so watch ghawar

"We are investing in ethanol, but honestly, the problem is there are too many sources, and agricultural lobbies are competing for each of them. Brazils making ethanol very efficent because their using a very effecient source, sugarcane. The best thing we could do for our energy policy would be to decide on an energy source, without lobbies."

The problem with ethenol is it wont match the amount of fuel we get from oil unless we devote most of the worlds food producing land to making biofuels also it takes a lot of energy to make biofuels so your in the same position you have with oil shales

"Peak oil isn't a society ending crises at all. it's just a natural continuance of the fact that once we harnessed energy, we would use it up like parasites. It's the same urge that made our chimp like relatives huddle around fire. Hopefully we'll be smart enough to do it in a manner that will be good for us and have less negative enviornmental impacts."

peak oil could well be societys ending crisis if you look at the world population and ask how the hell your going to feed them without pesticides , chemical fertilisers and mechanical agriculture .....also our world system is based on growth and debt thats based on that growth peak oil could well bring down that system .

a lot of people believe we are in for a mass die off to get us back to the population we had before oil

oh and coals shortly going to peak to and uranium if we move to that option , reserves are massively over rated

 

Johnny....You sound as though i have implied a sudden impact on society and i appologise if that is how i sounded, but the way i understand it is that no matter what we do as a civilisation society is going to be affected, For better or for worse? that is an individual opinion, but we will all have to prepare for change in our lifetime. The shock style i use is to grab some attention to the issue.

 

"Peak Oil" is nothing but a handy lie of enviro wackos and greedy oil corporations to price-gouge the consumer. A conspiracy to restrict supply to fatten profits!

If I owned an oil corporation/oil well, I would be producing like crazy, before the prices inevitably fall, once their collusion/conspiracy has been found out, or they force a premature conversion to (inferior MPG) ethanol, driven by revolting customers.

"Don't you believe it." (hollow echoing voice from a Looney Toons cartoon)

In the future we won't have near so much use for oil anyway. Just phasor a rock until it's red hot to stay warm, like they did on Star Trek, or plug in a heater to your nuclear-powered flying car.

 

all well and good having a joke...i smiled when i read that last post! but we should all (as a civilisation) realise that change is indeed on the horizon! that was all my posts are about, i want you all to look into this possibilities! dont just stick to what you think you know!

 

The days of oil for fuel are numbered, but not because of any real "shortage," but because greedy oil companies are raising the ire of consumers who would like to not have to buy their price-gouged products, but more importantly, like most everything people invent, oil is headed for obsolescence. I have even suspected that oil may not be the best lubricant forever, for someday we might get "touchless," oil-less, magnetic bearings? Wouldn't it be nice to have bearings that last, well almost "forever?"

in some sci-fi movie perhaps?: "Yeah, that motor's been whirling for the past 500 years, without ever a rest."

What for would I want gasoline for, in some Jetsons cartoon future, in which my car is powered by "power pellets," which I figure to be nuclear power, because you don't get all that energy to fly 100s of miles an hour, rarely refueling, out of any known chemical reactions.

 

Johnny, I don't see where you get the figure that it ever took a barrel of oil to extract 50. Nor do you source your figures because it's so ludicrous, as is the equation you use that energy equals barrels of oil. As if Oils just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, and they divy it up for new supplies of oil.

Whops, they never figured that out. Your understanding of energy is infantile. I'll just google entropy and link you to the first response it comes up with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROI
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)

When oil is near the surface or under high pressure or of high quality it takes less effort (energy) to extract and refine, consequently the net positive energy you get from it is high. You often see figures of 80:1 or more for the ratio of energy input to enery output for new oil fields, but this rapidly starts to decline as the oil requires more energy to extract and refine as the well starts to empty. For energy sources which are difficult to produce or extract or refine such as oil sands, ethanol from fuel crops etc, you use lots of energy to produce them, consequently the net energy benefit you get from them is far lower. US-produced ethanol has an EROI of about 1.2:1, meaning for every 1 unit of energy expended on the production process you yield 1.2 units of energy in the end product, resulting in a net energy gain of 0.2 (more efficient in the tropics and may become more efficient in time but will not match oil). You can work out EROI over the lifetime of a fuel source, for oil it will be in the order of magnitude of tens to one, no other energy source is that efficient.

It's an efficiency ratio so the figure would be the same if you measured it in BTU, kJ, barrels of oil or billions of gallons of ethanol. Fairly self explanatory really.

 

No shit, I was being kinda sarcastic.

But I don't see this as neccassarily bad. It will force people to be more self sufficient and resourceful. Though most people are to damn lazy and will struggle.

 

in the long term it may make people more self-sufficient but in the short term I can see a lot of anger , our societys have been built on cheap oil if you have a depletion rate of say 8% or 10 % per year which isnt that unusual in fact some rates are much higher we could see the world having half the oil it now has in say 5-7 years after peak.

add to depletion hoarding of oil and things could be even worse , you would have a general economic collapse your currency would become worthless .

now if you look back even to world war two we had a much higher number of the population involved in agriculture and you had the skills to do agriculture without all the chemical imputs .
before machine farming we would have trouble feeding a billion people world wide now we have 6-7 billion not sure what the present number is .

now I personally know I could grow all my own food but that wont matter if society as a whole is starving because all that will happen is people will come and steal my potatoes.

most people can see resource wars happening when oil starts peaking well why are we in Iraq ? I can see such wars getting worse

 

Why do you think they invented all those nifty inventions in Star Trek? Could it remotely be related to the human population growing so huge into the future? Maybe they invented "food replicators," because there is no longer quite enough room to grow enough food to feed all the people, by the old quaint slow agricultural methods. No matter. Why bother, when "copies" or "replicas" of natural food will suffice? More mouths to feed, but also more minds thinking up better ways of doing things. See? The emphasis should always be on freedom and naturally expanding supply, not in stealing people's freedom away. Let and welcome people to multiply. People are already adapting, and it works itself out, because God fully intended for humans to be able to go on multiplying, well at least for the forseeable future or for now, until the Biblical endtimes at least.

Of course the days of oil are numbered, but due to eventual obsolescence, to be replaced by something far better, not the trendy "running out"-of-resources fables.

 

i wish i was lucky enough to be so stupid that i actually believed that STAR TREK is a reliable picture of the future. really, one could choose any of the thousands of mythical futures from the greal vaults of sci-fi to put all hope in.

why not planet of the apes?

"in the future we will have no need for oil because the world will be ruled by funky, upright, talking apes who perform scientific experiments on mute and savage humans. also, there will be no need to worry about anything at all, because the end of the world will occur when a doomsday bomb is detonated by a ...human."

 

:lol:

 

Thank you for pointing these things out!

In my mind, a genuine "peak oil" preparation basically involves living a lifestyle that is not dependent upon the system. One of the big problems with this is that in modern society, it is effectively illegal to live a truly independent lifestyle unless you have a lot of cash for a decent amount of land (a resource that I and many many others simply do not have access to.) where you may practice off-the-grid living with little intrusion. However, our entire socio-economic system, from the ground up, is such that dependence on it is a necessary condition of life. We have a situation where living an environmentally sustainiable lifestyle is running directly at odds with the very base level of how we are required to live in this society.