An article in today's FT (page 9) "Big Oil warns of coming energy crunch"
By Carola Hoyos in London" says:



The full article is for subscribers only but cites ExxonMobil's Outlook for Energy 2030 (non Opec peak in 5 years), Chevron's advertising campaign, Total, Shell, BP.....lots of evidence which adds up to "Houston, we have a problem". On the same page in the FT is an article titled

Simulation shows US held over a barrel by oil supply interruption

.


Exciting times, thank goodness we can do with natural gas everything (apart from fuel planes) we can do with oil and there's loads of it about. Once oil is >$100/bbl it will spur a bit of action, natural gas buys some time to build windmills and nuclear power stations and insultae the loft etc

World natural gas production will probably peak at around 150 tcf . It is not as abundant as we all think. Production will peak within 10 years of oil peaking.

And does that "10 years of oil peaking" take into account the increased demand placed on gas after oil has peaked? No one knows what's going to happen in the 10 years after oil peaks so what demand predictions are used to say that gas has 10 years until peak after oil as peaked?

In my calculations yes. Natural Gas production will most likely grow by at least 7% per year to compensate for peaking oil production so gas could peak even sooner than than 10 years after the oil peak. I was being optimistic. Once oil peaks the world will quickly reach peaks in coal and gas production

Ten years is enough time to build a nuke, and we have six on the drawing boards going through permitting right now. If all of those get built, assuming an average 800 MW each, that's 4.8 GW.

It's also double the time needed to build a windfarm and at present the big ones appear to be stalled by NIMBYs. I don't recall the stats for those at the moment because there isn't a "standard size" but assume another 500 - 600 MW total.

Someone needs to go to the houses of those NIMBYs and pull their main circuit breakers just to give 'em a taste of life w/o non-fossil fuels.

So now we have about 5-1/2 GW lined up. How much natural gas can that replace? That is, how many years of post-peak-gas doe it buy us?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7921287/

Two plants, not six, and the licenses haven't been applied for yet.

Of course nukes and windmills won't power the auto and air fleet, unless we switch to electric cars. Do you have any idea how much electricity it would require to power the entire US auto fleet with electricity? I don't, but I know it's a lot. More than 4 new nuke plants and windmills will be able to cover. While we're building those nuke plants we need to be getting into rail bigtime. We might be able to power electric trains.

Those plants are to meet expected new electrical demand, not provide excess to replace any fossil fuel decline.



I think you will find that most of those NIMBYS would rather have quality of life than quantity. Perhaps someone needs to go the houses of those demanding more "taste of life" and pull their energy consuming plugs. Nukes are unsustainable and leave a legacy of contamination for the future to deal with. We should not go there, regardless of the consequences. Life will go on without nukes.

A GE Frame 7 FA combined cycle power plant produces about 290 Mw using inlet air cooling and duct burners. It burns about 2000 kscfh of natural gas fuel.

Two of these make about 600 Mw (rounding off) burn 4000 kscfh, or about 4000 MMBTU/hr. So a 6 Gw Nuke plant would replace 40,000 MMBTU of natural gas, per hour

Of course, getting the gas from the hole to plant also uses gas, so there would be additional savings there too.

Lng is not going to be able to keep up with the current decline of NG in North America.

We are in decline as far as a natural gas production goes and so is the North sea and Britain. Mexico is a net NG importer now.

Nuclear and everything else is going to be needed to offset the current decline. The human race is going to have to through everything including the kitchen sink at the problem of declining energy of all kinds.

Environmental concerns are going to largely vanish like a fart in the wind if there is a serious heating oil shortage in the North East combine that with a NG decline and you have the makings of a crisis that will destroy lives and the whole economy.

We could easily be fighting to stay warm. People are going to install wood burners mark my word. It is going to get very bad very quickly.Gas decline

Probably a few weeks, maybe a couple months at the most.

I do not consider a terrorist attack on a major oil installation to be a big deal when looking at the "long term" scenario. In this case long term means 100 years. Even if the Ras Tanura oil refinery in SA got completely blown up that would only cause a temporary shortage until the refinery got fixed. But PO will cause a permanent oil shortage.

So why should a terrorist blow himself up to cause a temporary oil shortage when he can just simply sit down and relax and wait for a couple years to let nature enforce a permanent oil shortage on the world.

The amount of power needed to power the the entire US auto fleet I read in a Popular Science article was 17 Terawatts or 17000 Gigawatts. To make that much power we would need to build 10 new nuclear power plants every month for 20 years.

Understanding this fundamental truth means becoming a doomer.

That power generation scenario seems a little excessive, not every car would be charging at the same time, and most cars would likely be charging at night, off-peak. Oh well, I think it would be incredibly desirable to massively scale down car use, especially in the U.S., regardless of peak oil

I don't know if the numbers are right, but it doesn't really matter what time of day the cars would be charging. Lets assume that everyone could charge at once and the plants could handle it. What difference would it make if the plants needed 17k gigawatts all at once, or over a 24 hour period? It likely consumes the same amount of fuel, roughly. So if you're using uranium, you either need a whole bunch at once or a slow steady feed all the time.

I agree that it would be incredibly desirable to scale down car use. If there was a train that went past my job I would love to ride it. How nice it woud be to spend my commute reading a book or taking a nap.