No, we probably won't just suddenly run out of oil. Let's be clear, here, that fertilizer production's main feedstock is natural gas currently, and where oil or coal becomes a feedstock, it only does so by producing natural gas from one or the other. It's this added step that makes the process so much more expensive. To my knowledge, it's only ever been done on a small scale. I'm not aware of any monetary estimates for trying to scale it up, but the dollar value would have to be pretty large.

Anyway, you seem to be assuming that we'll be able to proceed along a more or less analog curve, when the truth is that we'd be riding roughshod over bumpy downhill terrain. We'd have to take up the slack in step-wise fashion, and this will cause some serious hardship.

But the bigger problem is the ongoing added expense, not only of producing natural gas from coal, but also of transporting the fertilizer via the use of oil. This will cause fertilizer to become more expensive. Farmers are already complaining about the cost of fertilizer. They currently can't withstand another increase.



You also seem to think that we can just exchange one for the other without so much as a hitch. This isn't correct. We can make diesel and gasoline from coal, for instance, but it's quite expensive to do so. It's so expensive, in fact, that even with oil in the $60.00 a barrel range, no one is trying to do it on any kind of large scale.



It might. But I prefer not to rely so much on faith in falling prices. Any time I have done so, I've usually been disappointed.



Because Natural Gas is becoming more and more difficult to move around the planet. It's not like oil; it takes specialized equipment to liquify it, and equipment elsewhere to unliquify it. The infrastructure doesn't exist, and probably can't be built in time to avert some serious problems.



I've no idea. I'm betting that it's fairly soon, for reasons already rehearsed.



Again, no idea. Outside of a certain range, why is it relevant?



Can you provide some reason to believe that it won't?

Many of you are not going to like what I have to say about the New Age movment and the shamans.

As far as I can tell, the above poster (two posts away) is not a member of the new age movement though. I thought I'd warn you anyway.

FYI, I'm an Anglo from a Norman, English, Prussian and German-Swiss background and to my knowledge, I have no Native or African blood in my family. However, it is highly probable I have ancestors with those backgrounds. I've been mistaken for an American Indian on the internet. If you were to meet me in person, you'd never mistake me for anything other than an Anglo.

In Indian country, those new age shamans are known as "plastic shamans". This is because they are frauds and are not part of the native communities.

For example, Tom Brown who claims to have learned from an Apache elder named "Stalking Wolf" is widely known in Indian country as a fraud. Yes, he's a good tracker and the information regarding surivial in the woods are sound. However, the spiritual information is fake. If you ask Apaches about Stalking Wolf, they will tell you that they've never heard of Stalking Wolf.

Some natives have sold out their own communities by selling spirituality and have been banished from their own nations as a result of their actions.

As for the Hopi, they have a web page on those frauds including Roy Steevenez aka Roy Little Sun.
Here's the url: http://www.hopi.nsn.us/view_article.asp?id=20&cat=1.

If you don't believe me, do a google on plastic shamans. Here are some links:

http://users.pandora.be/gohiyuhi/nafps/ ... /art34.htm

http://www.hopi.nsn.us/view_article.asp?id=20&cat=1

http://users.pandora.be/gohiyuhi/nafps/

http://www.hanksville.org/sand/intellect/newage.html

If you must pay to pray, it's most likely a fraud.

I think that we must look to our own ancestors' pre christain spirititual traditions instead of other tribes for answers. Yes, we have lost the way and we need to change our ways but looking to new age shamans will not be our salvation.

There are no easy answers to our situation. I know that I have much to learn. I used to be part of the New Age movement but learned about the plastic shamans when I decided to do a google on American Indians and the new age movment.

I wanted to know what their take was on the New Age movment. It was quite a shock when I learned about this stuff.

As for coping with Oilpeak, I have no easy answers for any of you. It will require building up a community with real traditions and learning how to live within our own environment and above all, learning to live with the fact that we are not apart from nature.

Our survival and self sufficiency can not be done on an individualistic basis. It has to be done on a community based system. Our consumerist culture has been very anti community.

Our communties will need to be far more respectful of other people's traditons and lifestyles. That will require a lot of hard work and will take decades and even centuries.

I expect I'll get called a racist or worse and I'll end up eating flames as a result.

rogerhb ur alright, man.
Umm just a couple words again for most on this thread. If u meet me out there and u continue to usurp and own and to FORCE others into your percieved "we know whats best for all the children" walk the other way. Do not come near me or my loved ones and friends. Go bye bye. You obviously are demented and in a fantasy world. I will defend no matter what. Go do your pitiful experiments elsewhere and go pander your BuyProducts elsewhere. Im livin like the Sardinians.
And Ludi is right i aint had no problem growin crops. Only infinite growthers breaking their backs to meet the HUMAN Biomass dilemma have REAL problems. No arguments. go blow yourselves up or live in your offices or whatever your cannibalistic vices require. Me no want nothing to do with your sage advices and plastic utopias.

I certainly don't find anything racist about your post...you're speaking the truth if you have to pay to pray, chances are it's a fraud.

I concur on your other points as well...no matter what happens with Peak Oil, our anti-community and consumerist way of life will have to come to an end...it just sucks that the transition to a new way of living (one that is sustainable) will probably take longer than the amount of time I have left on this planet, and there will surely be a lot of missteps and mistakes made along the way which will make things worse than they need to be. I have made it a practice to always question those with the "answers"...including my own

However it plays out, I'm just bracing for plenty of excitment on the other side of peak.

The choice before us is to live like Sardinians, or like sardines.

Just remember to pronounce "New Age" correctly - tighter with no pause. Like so.. "newage" (rhymes with sewage)

-G

LOL. Thanks. I luv laughing. Thats what I am afraid of. well actually we are already living like sardines in a can in much of the world. They must not have perfected the withdrawal method.
These jabrones have no problem living like roiling masses of flesh.
pile em up, maty
drinkin our own piss and shit eating each others flesh. Oh in wafer form of course. The holy bread of the future.
Dont these "fathers know bests" understand how these diseases and viruses spread and become critical?
Each breathing each others breath and sharing body fluids.
Piles o flesh. The new pub down the block.

Thanks for your post. I reviewed the source that I quoted and tried to make sure it was authentic. I couldn't verify this so I actually sent an e-mail to the official Hopi website you indicated requesting the authenticity of that quote. The website reference at the bottom of the Hopi saying I posted did indeed have quite strong New Age overtones. I should have maybe done some due deligence before submitting this verifying its authenticity. I will follow up once I know more.

A general comment though is that I remain finely tuned to diverse voices out in our collective culture that focus on sustainability and these are not always scientific in origin. I have posted references on christian fundamentalists, buddhists, real estate agents etc. who are confronting the reality of the need for sustainability and a new approach to our relationship with our environment. IF we are going to get the masses to embrace change the discussion has to be expanded beyond the scientific community and the discussion has to broaden to be framed in the context of these different groups.

There is also something confirming about the convergence of this subject across a broad spectrum of our culture that is slowly emerging and there is a place where hard physical science, theology, sociology, economics, politics (conservative/progressive) find a meeting point and dissolve established polarities.

Seeing the issue of the cultural transformation required in the future to acheive sustainability from many different angles is healthy.

I have a gut reaction against the word "New", such as "New Age", "New Labour", "New World Order", "New Improved Flavour" etc.

How about doing things the old way for a change? By that I mean the very old.....

60% of China's fertilizer production is currently based on coal.
http://www.fertilizer.org/ifa/statistic ... serves.asp

Also, see:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/11 ... ves_o.html

Indeed. Although I'm strongly biased toward secular solutions, I realize not everyone is going to see things the same way as I do. I consider myself first and foremost Secular Humanist but I'm also aware that others will have different take on things. Hence the need to frame things in the context of different groups but it can not be based in fraud though. That's a recipe for diaster.

JD,

Thanks for the links. Here are my comments:

Regarding the DOE energy report:

The first thing I noticed about this report (it was not the one I was thinking of) is that it's chock full of diagrams without much explanation where the figures they represent come from. It seems to amount to little more than a complex picture book with some quasi-relevant footnotes. But I've little doubt that it compiles real statistics, and not imaginary numbers.

So, on page 3, there is a diagram that shows that petroleum makes up 40.13 % of our total energy supply considering all production and imports. Fossil fuels including natural gas and coal make up 85%. But the diagram measures energy in Quads, with no regard for economic issues. Since that's ultimately what this thread is about, and ultimately the real measure of the impact of peak oil, I suggest that we look at it from that angle.

Consider this: if it came out that oil really did just all of a sudden run out (I'm not suggesting that it will-this is just a thought experiment), would it matter to most people how many BTU's they could generate via the electricity flowing into their homes? Or, more precisely, would the fact that the BTU's they produce by driving their cars were not as significant a contributor to the overall total as were the BTU's they used in heating their homes? Of course, people want to heat their homes when it's cold, but if no one was able to drive to work or to the store, continued potential to run an electric heater would be little compensation, and would do little to avoid meltdown.

With that in mind, the graph on page 70 that shows we spend more money per mBTU on electricity. But this is rather less interesting than the one on page 74, which shows that we spend far and away more money on petroleum than any other energy source.

The question seems to be one of supervenience. Ulimately, it appears to me that oil is supervenient on other energy sources. Without diesel or gasoline, how are we to ship coal to the generators or fertilizer factories, or maintain our miles and miles of pipeline? Clearly, we'd have ways to do so, but it's going to cost us big time bucks to convert. We'll literally have to change our whole infrastructure.

Will we be able to afford it? I doubt it.

There are plenty of other interesting and what should be disturbing indicators in that report. For instance, on page 76, note that the transportation sector uses vastly more energy than any other sector, and that in turn means than more gasoline, kerosine, and diesel is purchased than anything else, even though per BTU right now, electricity is more expensive. That in itself indicates that a complete switch to electricity, even if it could be done, would be quite costly to maintain.

Note that on page 78, the value of imported petroleum products is at an all-time high.

On page 84, buried among other lines on various graphs, it appears that U.S. Uranium production has crashed.

On the same page, Coal production has also apparently crashed.

On page 90, foreign-partnered production seems to be flat if not in slight decline.

Strangely, Uranium production on the same page in the U.S. is up over the last few years; I'm not sure if this is meant to indicate that foreign companies are mining our Uranium, or that we're mining Uranium elsewhere. Also on the same page, foreign production of coal is soaring.

On page 107, there's an initially encouraging table that shows that we've doubled our rate of successful well drilling, but couple that with the data on page 104 that shows we're substantially reducing the number of exploratory wells, and it lends credence to the notion that the U.S. is fully explored. And in light of that, our success rate (44%) suddenly doesn't seem so high.

On page 110, costs per well and costs per foot are soaring steeply.

on page 206, note that surface mining of Coal is also soaring, though who's doing it in light of the graph on page 86 is left to mystery, while underground mining is flat. Looked at along with the data on 214 that shows the greatly increased productivity of surface coal mining, and the data on page 116 that shows that relatively little coal is available on the surface, and finally the information on page 226 that 50% of our electrical power is generated by Coal currently, and we might infer that the price of electricity will be going up as surface supplies dwindle.

And there are plenty of other disturbing trends that you don't have to look long and hard for by any means.

Regarding the link on Chinese fertilizer production:

I usually discount China when looking at these sorts of subjects just because it's very difficult to find good data by third party sources. But for discussion purposes, I will assume that commonly available information, including the report you cited, is correct. The fact that 60% of the fertilizer produced in China is made of coal doesn't necessarily tell us whether they've got a few large factories, or a bunch of small factories. In fact, it appears to be mostly the latter. They have relatively few factories that are producing large amounts of fertilizer, and of that total, few indeed do so from coal. See:

http://www.usembassy-china.org.cn/sandt/mu3chfrt.htm

http://www.fadinap.org/China/IFDCchina.PDF

Reading between the lines on especially the second report doesn't paint so rosy a picture--coal production is subsidized heavily by government (only smaller plants are privately owned), and prices are fixed. I'm not able to find a firm figure for the cost per ton of nitrogen fertilizer produced in China, but it appears to be around $198.00 per ton domestically (at the fixed price--see http://www.cpcia.org/articleview.asp?id=62), and about $230.00 per ton via export, which probably still doesn't come close to representing what a western company would charge for the same product, as profit margins for chinese companies are fixed pretty low.

By my calculations, adjusted for nitrogen by weight, this would cause an equivalent price of $410.00 per ton, whereas at regular margins, domestic anyhydrous ammonia fertilizer is $207.00 per ton. Figure back in a regular margin, and you'll see that Carbamide production is considerably more expensive than Anhydrous ammonia. For figures on % nitrogen in different fertilizers, see:

http://www.chemicalland21.com/arokorhi/ ... c/UREA.htm

Some other links of interest:

http://english.sohu.com/20050426/n225341710.shtml

http://en.ce.cn/Industries/Energy&Minin ... 8189.shtml

http://www.globalinsight.com/Perspectiv ... il1609.htm

In any event, my original remark was meant to compass anhydrous ammonia, though I grant that I should have specified as much.

So I guess my counter point would be a specific example of my general criticism of optimist arguments. You picked one or two fairly insignificant and qualified statements that I made and provided documentation against them. At the same time, you failed to respond to any of the main points; almost as if, had we been discussing the Cold War, you expected to win the debate by focussing on some obscure event in the late 1950's or something.

Of course, it is possible to produce enough nitrogen fertilizer from coal and maintain agricultural outputs for some time. Of course, it is also possible to play Russian Roulette a hundred thousand times and not shoot yourself. But as a doomer, I ask what is the most likely outcome, not what is possible. This is not enough, of course; I also find myself thinking, once I've arrived at what I think likely, what could be done with that as the starting point. But it's a two step process, the first must be completed before the second, and only by completing both is there any hope for improvement.

It's to do with the fact that Americans are incapable of using the word toilet. In the UK it's called "toilet humour" and usually installed at about age two.

If you go to the UK and ask to directions you may end up in the bathroom with no toilet.

Cow manure is good fertizlizer.

They didn't have the crop yields and the population those yields sustain 100 years ago, either. Take oil out of the picture, and our current population level is unsustainable, period.