Idiot Physicist implicitly says You are Doomed without even the foggiest awareness of its inevitability. What a retard this guy is. I guess he doesn't understand SL's Economic Law of the 21st Century:
SL: "In the absence of oil, the intrinsic monetary worth of solar electricity converges toward $0"
Idiot Physicist: "As fossil fuels become depleted,
there are basically only two choices: Either we do without energy (which doesn’t seem desirable), or we find renewable energy sources."
What a gufus. Doesn't understand that Proper Crude oil != Electricity. Its not a technical transportation problem, its a lack of hard currency necessary for human survival. Just another imbeccile who believes 8+ billion worthless shitheads will get rich learning useless physics in bankrupt universities.
There is only one choice: Total Collapse.Physicist is a failed profession. What can it provide beyond a junk e-gizmo tiny screen computer and a solar panel while living under a bridge chasing after rabbits.
Solar Electricity is utterly useless in a monstrous fossil fuel configuration. The idiot actually thinks humans will CHANGE as if they have any choice in the matter...HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
"The cost of warfare...blah blah"
What a dipshit. He's sort of like Cog who hasn't figured out that 30 recon drones that cost >200M that easily get shot down by $30K missiles means fancy hardware warfare is a money pit that can no longer be financed at all.
"Breeder reactors...blah blah"
They don't even work. This guys dumber than BW.
"We can predict with high confidence that something big will happen to overall energy usage in the next 75 years or less..."
75 years? HAHAHAHA. Something big will happen in the next 5 years. Its called:
Empty the Ammunition BoxesNews in 2025: "5000 Cities are claimed to be on fire. No video evidence available. Doomerism. Ignore. Disregard"
McDonalds in 2025: "Would you like some pathogen laden lettuce with your Fried Ants"
DOOMED.
http://www.av8n.com/physics/fossil-resources.htmTimescale for Depletion of Fossil Energy Resources
Based on current projections, within something like 75 years, the world will have used up
all the world’s extractable coal,
all the world’s extractable oil,
all the world’s extractable natural gas, and
all the world’s extractable uranium-235.
For details on how this was calculated, see reference 1.
We should not expect a sudden transition from great abundance to complete exhaustion of these resources. Various more-gradual scenarios are more plausible, as discussed below. However, the straight-line analysis presented in reference 1 remains useful, because (among other things) it sets the timescale on which
something big must happen.
There are various possible outcomes, all of which depend on the interplay of various factors:
Causative factor A: Depletion of the super-low-priced sources raises the market price.
Causative factor B: One could imagine taxation in anticipation of future shortages, so as to raise the market price.
Causative factor C: The cost of warfare to secure otherwise “cheap” oil raises the real cost. If we take the cost of the recent wars, divided by the amount of oil imports, it imputes a modest increase in the price per gallon. This is not large enough to greatly alter usage patterns. On the other hand,
It is large enough to be noticeable. A trillion dollars is nothing to sneeze at.
The next war might be more expensive.
The Iraq war has significantly reduced Iraq’s oil production, contributing to upward pressure on prices. Various embargoes and sanctions also tend to push prices up.
Wars contribute to instability throughout the region. The overthrow of governments in somewhat-friendly producing nations could greatly disrupt supplies.
Producing nations that are presently somewhat friendly might come to disagree with US military policy, and could reduce production or even organize a boycott. This has happened before: There was a boycott in 1967 and a more-effective boycott in 1973.
Any combination of factors (A,B,C) promote the following results (1,2,3,4):
The most wasteful uses become unaffordable.
Other uses continue at the higher price. For example, oil is a feedstock for some chemical processes leading to “priceless” products. The priceless uses of fossil resources will continue the longest.
If you really have a priceless application for oil, you can find renewable sources: corn, sunflower, whatever. Chemical processes can be adapted to use less-than-ideal feedstocks. The price goes up, but the priceless uses continue.
Non-oil sources of power that are currently uncompetitive (e.g. solar power plants) become commercially viable.
We should also consider the following:
Causative factor D: The cost of solar power plants falls due to the march of technology. It should fall relatively quickly compared to the more-mature fossil-fuel power technology. This further promotes result #4. And high-volume deployment should accelerate the march of technology, creating a positive-feedback loop.
2 Estimated versus Proven Reserves
For a discussion of the various types of estimates, see reference 2. The main types are
proven reserves
probable reserves
possible reserves
Scientific calculations should be done using the best available data. When it comes to estimating the amount of oil on earth, the “proven reserves” are not the best data.
Also, the reserves at the “current” time is not the most sensible way to approach the problem, because that will change as a function of time due to consumption if nothing else. Instead, it makes more sense to ask how much oil was on earth at a fixed epoch, e.g. 1950 or 1980. Call this the endowment at the specified epoch.
One would expect the proven reserves to increase over time, as more “proof” becomes available. But this does not mean the endowment is increasing.
There is absolutely no reason to think any significant amount of oil is being created.So the sensible approach is to establish a best estimate of the endowment. This estimate will be a probability distribution, with some width around a central value. There is no reason to expect the central value to change significantly as a function of time. As more evidence accumulates over time, the width of the probability distribution should decrease, and the central value will undergo a small random walk, but the central value should not exhibit any systematic drift. (If the central value does drift, it means you’ve been using unsound estimation procedures. You should be embarrassed. Go back to square one and re-do everything using sound estimation methods, so this problem never recurs.)
oil-stats-lo
Figure 1: Oil Statistics, Low Scenario
oil-stats-hi
Figure 2: Oil Statistics, High Scenario
We can use figure 1 and figure 2 to get an idea of what might be going on. We do the analysis twice, because of the uncertainty in the endowment. For a summary of reported estimates, see reference 3. Quite a few authors favor a figure of about 2000 Gb (for the year 1980), although some estimates run as high as 3000 Gb or slightly higher. It is not entirely clear whether the disagreements stem from different interpretations of the same raw data (for instance, different decisions as to whether to include oil that is extremely hard to recover) or simply uncertainty in the raw data.
In these figures, the abscissa is time, starting in 1980 and running through 2055. The ordinate is gigabarrels of oil.
The magenta curve hugging the bottom of the graph is the annual production rate. This uses data from reference 4 up to 2002, and then extrapolates assuming a 2% annual growth rate until the resource is exhausted.
The red curve from lower left to upper right is the total amount of oil produced since 1980. It is calculated by integrating the magenta curve.
The smooth curve from upper left to lower right is the best estimate of oil remaining in the world. It is calculated by starting with an estimate of the endowment in 1980 and subtracting the amount produced since then.
The black curve that is relatively horizontal near the middle of the graph represents the “proven” reserves. This uses data from reference 4 up to 2002, and then extrapolates using a rather arbitrary slope of +5 Gb per year. However, the “proven” reserves cannot possibly exceed the actual reserves, so some time soon, the “proven” reserves must start decreasing. This happens around 2015 in the low scenario, but not until 2035 in the high scenario.
A huge jump in these “proven” reserves occurred in the late 1980s. This jump was not due to the creation of new oil molecules, nor even the discovery of hitherto-unexplored oil fields; instead it was a paperwork exercise carried out for political reasons. During a period of slack demand, OPEC members wanted to increase their claimed reserves in order to argue for larger OPEC production quotas.
Finally, the yellow curve illustrates the fallacy of using the “proven” reserves as an estimate of actual reserves. The yellow curve is a lame estimate of the amount of oil existing in 1980, prepared by taking the “proven” reserves at time t and adding the amount of oil produced between 1980 and time t. The fact that this estimate changes as a function of t is proof that it is bogus. The actual endowment of oil molecules existing in 1980 is a constant.
In the “low scenario” as described in figure 1, in 1980 the earth had 2000 Gb of oil, of which only 1/3rd was classified as “proven” reserves. In 2003, the world had 1530 Gb of oil, of which 2/3rds was classified as “proven” reserves.
Despite the recent history of increases in “proven” reserves, it would be quite foolish to attempt to extrapolate such increases beyond the short-term future. Actual reserves are going down, even if “proven” reserves are going up in the short term. Proven reserves can never exceed 100% of actual reserves.
This section has analyzed the “proven” reserves of oil in some detail, partly because the oil industry seems so suffer the most from the “proven” reserves fallacy ... but similar thoughts apply to the total energy endowment. Coal will last longer than oil, but not a lot longer.
And as discussed in section 1, we do not actually expect current trends to continue until reserves crash to zero; we expect people to wise up and change their behavior before then.
We can predict with high confidence that something big will happen to overall energy usage in the next 75 years or less, and something big will happen to oil usage in the next 40 to 50 years or less. We cannot predict exactly what will happen, because the details depend on choices that have yet to be made.
3 Renewable Energy
As fossil fuels become depleted, there are basically only two choices: Either we do without energy (which doesn’t seem desirable), or we find renewable energy sources.
3.1 Solar Power Plants
3.1.1 Photovoltaic
The “obvious” way to make electricity from sunlight is to use photovoltaic cells.
To make the US energy-sufficient, you would need to take an area half the size of Nevada and cover it with solar cells. This is a lot, but it’s not completely unreasonable. There are already huge areas devoted to food production; there’s no reason why we can’t devote a huge area to energy production.
3.1.2 Steam Engines
Another option is to use solar-powered steam engines. This may seem low-tech, but it works better than you might have guessed. Pilot plants have been built.
A typical plant takes an indirect approach: Rather than using sunlight to produce steam directly, the sunlight is used to heat some molten salt, and then the hot salt is used to produce steam. This has the big advantage of allowing you to transport the energy across space and time.
You don’t want to put the entire steam engine up on a tower at the focal point of the solar collector.
You don’t want to transport steam across any appreciable distance, because it has a relatively low energy density, and is therefore vulnerable to many kinds of energy loss.
You can store energy in the form of hot molten salt in a large tank. This is important, because at any given location, the sun doesn’t shine all day every day. See section 3.2.
If you believe my calculation based on US DOE numbers, the turbine approach compares favorably with the photovoltaic approach. The capital cost is lower, and it uses significantly less real estate. Indeed it is very nearly competitive with present-day wholesale electricity prices. But the DOE numbers may be misleading, because they don’t take into account the waste heat issues; there isn’t a lot of cooling water available in Nevada.
I don’t know how this will work out long-term. Steam-turbine technology is reasonably mature, so the costs should be fairly stable. Semiconductor technology is still progressing, so there is some hope that costs will come down quite a bit over time.
3.2 Storage and Load Balancing
Electrical power is notoriously perishable. If you think it’s hard to sell day-old bread, try selling yesterday’s theater tickets, or yesterday’s electrical generation capacity. The existing electrical distribution infrastructure cannot store even one second’s worth of electrical energy.
It is expensive to store energy, but not impossible. One well known way is to used pumped hydropower; during times of excess supply water is pumped uphill using electrically-powered pumps, and then during times of excess demand the water is used to drive turbines and generators to reconvert the energy to electrical form. This is sometimes called secondary hydropower, in the same sense that a storage battery is called a secondary battery.
Sunlight is generally not available at night. This is a problem, because energy demand during the night is not zero. Therefore any system using photovoltaics would need unprecedented amounts of energy storage.
This is a serious problem, but perhaps not quite as serious as it might seem, because nocturnal energy demand can be reduced by cultural changes:
Don’t manufacture aluminum at night. This is a nontrivial restriction, because it decreases the productivity of the plant, and decreases the return on capital investment.
The same goes for other energy-intensive industrial processes. In particular, if you are going to use hydrogen as a fuel, don’t manufacture it at night.
Minimize transportation at night. (Transportation is a very significant part of the total energy budget.)
Et cetera.
At some point you have to consider putting solar collectors in orbit, but this is still a long way from being feasible; see reference 5.
Solar power is not the only type of power to suffer from fluctuating availability. Wind power varies from minute to minute and from season to season, and primary hydropower is also somewhat seasonal.
3.3 Minor Contributions
Wind power is renewable, but there’s not enough of it to make much of a difference.
Hydropower is renewable, but there’s not enough of it to make much of a difference, except locally in a few places. Also, it involves nontrivial environmental costs:
It floods large areas.
It disrupts the natural flow of water, causing problems for fish, aquatic plants, et cetera.
There’s not enough geothermal power to make much of a difference, except for low-grade heating. Electrical generation is practically nil, even in the most exceptional locations in Iceland.
Nuclear power depends on non-renewable supplies of uranium, and there’s not enough of that to make much of a difference ... unless you’re going to build breeder reactors, and right now almost nobody is desperate enough to tolerate that, because of the proliferation issues.
Outcast_Searcher is a fraud.