[futuretrip]

Good News! We are not running out as fast as many would have you to believe. I thought that we had just a few years till the "depressions and rations" hit home. No, just higher prices - Proof:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/0484(2004).pdf
this is a 2 hundred some page report. I researched previous years consumption and found that this report is accurate on their growth rate prediction of 54% between '01 and '25 (about 1.7 % for global quads).
My conclusion is thus:
97 years of oil, 60 years of natural gas and 212 years of coal. Now this is at current rates of usage. We should double such in 41 years. So even at the doubled rate, we still have close to fifty years of oil! ( I don't know the math to figure exactly but with exponential growth, say, 50 years from NOW). As for uranium, an MIT study states that there is enough for 1,000 1 gigawatt plants for 50 years (non recycled) which by itself is ONLY approximate to the total electric usage of (current) USA.
Conclusion: Start worrying about how our children will SOLVE the problem. My solution (idea) is in building about half a million 1.6 Mw wind turbines over a 25 year timescale to power 100% of (USA) homes and plenty of excess for electric cars, storage, ect. but by then, there will still be oil for another generation!

[marek]

The EIA reports are flawed, since they are based on USGS projections which 7 years into the study have overestimated discovery by over a half. Fifty years of oil? This is based on R/P ratios rather than a bell-shaped production pattern. The more new technology there is, the faster the depletion. Compare the U.S. which peaked in 1970 with old extraction technology to the North Sea (the UK declined by 12% this year) or Australia (a 17% decline) that have been exploited with more modern equipment. The faster you pump, the quicker the crash.

[futuretrip]

Didn't know about the flaws in those because I used USGS too. I agree with you that the effects will be felt sooner than (I) thought because the chinese market may be overlooked and even they say electricity usage will double by 2025. Does anyone know of a good storage system for wind generated electricity?

[JoeW]

i don't understand how anyone can read about the subject of peak oil and then say that it's wrong because of the ratio of current reserves to current production.
it is exactly this type of linear thinking that leads the uninformed to believe that there is no problem, or at least no near-term problem.
the problem is not in the amount of oil, but the rate of extraction. no one is claiming that we are about to run out of oil, although many a journalist gets this wrong. every expert agrees that at some point, on one magical day, there will be a peak in the # of barrels produced.
again, i will repeat since you didn't get it the first few times, since you are already on this site. it is NOT about the AMOUNT. it is about the RATE of EXTRACTION.
if you are a math guy, that would be like graphing production (P) versus time (t) and dP/dt going to ZERO and then turning NEGATIVE, after many years of dP/dt being POSITIVE and the world experiencing a general trend of POSITIVE economic growth.
If you still can't figure it out, perhaps someone else can try to help.

[futuretrip]

I was simply stating that the problem is more like decades, not of mere years! And (as stated) Our children will have to figure it out ( if my idea of wind) or present solutions does not suffice. Linear thinking excludes the exponential - which can be a good thing in moderation!

[Keith_McClary]

Good News! We are not running out as fast as many would have you to believe. I thought that we had just a few years till the "depressions and rations" hit home. No, just higher prices - Proof:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/0484(2004).pdf
this is a 2 hundred some page report. I researched previous years consumption and found that this report is accurate on their growth rate prediction of 54% between '01 and '25 (about 1.7 % for global quads).
My conclusion is thus:
97 years of oil, 60 years of natural gas and 212 years of coal.

These optimistic studies always include a proviso (p.38 of this .pdf) that the oil producing counties must scrap their state owned oil companies, fire their employees, and sell the resources to the international oil companies who can bring in technology, capital and foreign workers to pump oil quickly and keep prices low.
Do you think Saudi, Venezuala, Iraq, Mexico, Kuwait, UAE will do this? Why should they? Their nationalistic policies are popular and also serve the interests of the ruling classes. How are you going to persuade them that what in good for the consuming countries is good for them?

[BabyPeanut]

Does anyone know of a good storage system for wind generated electricity?

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/041216/165165_1.html

http://www.sandia.gov/ess/About/selected-projects.html

http://peakoil.com/fortopic4431.html

http://www.vrbpower.com/installations.html

http://www.vanadiumbattery.com/

http://www.ferret.com.au/articles/87/0c01e487.asp

http://www.dier.tas.gov.au/publications ... ps/energy/

click me (link too wide)

[Ludi]

Our children will have to figure it out

I'm utterly speechless at the disgusting selfishness of such a statement.

Anyone with an attitude like that should be disowned by their children.

I am completely repulsed.

[Golgo13]

That's been environmental policy for over a century now.

"I'll be dead by then. Not my problem".

[MonteQuest]

Conclusion: Start worrying about how our children will SOLVE the problem. My solution (idea) is in building about half a million 1.6 Mw wind turbines over a 25 year timescale to power 100% of (USA) homes and plenty of excess for electric cars, storage, ect. but by then, there will still be oil for another generation!

Welcome to peakoil.com. From your post, I can see that you need to do more reading here than posting for a while. I suggest you start with my thread, the Big Picture on the Peak oil forum. You have missed the mark by a barn's width. Expect your feet to be held to the fire.
MQ

[aahala]

Conclusion: Start worrying about how our children will SOLVE the problem. My solution (idea) is in building about half a million 1.6 Mw wind turbines over a 25 year timescale to power 100% of (USA) homes and plenty of excess for electric cars, storage, ect. but by then, there will still be oil for another generation!

Such a system might possibly equal current home electrical usage, but
there won't be "plenty of excess."

A wind turbine rating is the amount that can be produced under ideal conditions. The actual amount produced, if well placed, is about a third--nothing is produced if the wind isn't blowing within the "speed window" and what is produced while in the window is not always the maximum.

There would also be leakage in power transmission and shortage. Large scale use of wind power will require shortage, because the wind isn't constant and neither is demand.

There is a point--no one really knows where it is--that various resource t limitations will take place. Also, as we take more and more power from a natural process like wind, the probably of changing the wind patterns will increasingly likely result in climate changes.

I definately favor much larger implimatation of wind power, but it's a treatment not a solution. IMO, there really are no "solutions" per se.

[BlisteredWhippet]

Quote from

"Generally, the nations of the industrialized world can be
characterized as mature energy consumers with comparatively
slow population growth. Gains in energy efficiency
and movement away from energy-intensive
manufacturing to service industries result in the lower
growth in energy consumption.
"
(http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/pdf/0484(2004).pdf) From "Highlights", pg. 13

Is this the rosy future you're anticipating?

What they're basically saying is that future growth will be flat; and that we'll all be employed in the service sector. The world will need 50 percent more energy by 2055, and this will come from long-term energy production gains across the board. Yet, this growth has been flat of late. Even the "historic" data is "estimated".

How exactly are we going to keep energy demand from outpacing previous gains? The invisible hand of the market, perhaps? The only way I can see this happening is if the price of Oil goes up- along with inflation, making energy less accessible on a cost-basis. In other words, we're becoming less affluent relative to the rest of the world, and relative to past standards.

Throw away your college degree- you're looking at employment in service-industry jobs. As I don't think college enrollment is down, thats more people looking for the same slice of a shrinking pie.

Of course, I'm not an economist or someone necessarily inclined to study G.W.Bush's cheat sheets prepared by people who only have to be worried about their jobs for the next 4 years. Likewise, the administration will hardly be held accountable for policies enacted outside the scope of the administration's current term (social security, budget deficits, policy in general). The near-religious cult that functions as an advisory to this nation's highest office are living in a completely abstracted dream world where the books are cooked, God has the president's ear, and policy is decidedly not forward-looking.

The real plan is global enonomic domination by non-governmental (read: non-democratic) organizations and corporations, the weakening of provincial governments, and a complete transfer of policymaking control to corporate interest (to complete the job of dismantling barriers to special-interest access to public policy begun by corporatism, SIGs, lobbyists, and campaign funding).

Corporations are firmly in the driver's seat, kids. It would be in their best interest not to get anyone thinking about the problems of tomorrow, today. We might just set about changing things. The last thing they want is us using their data against them.

To that end, "projections" are fiction; they're based on flawed data and methodology. Anyone who doesn't sing the corporate tune gets canned in this administration, as we have seen.

Matt Simmons on forecasting:

" Why is oil depletion so hard to grasp? Well the definition by itself is hard. Many would hear the term depletion and assume it meant that we ran out, and we obviously never ran out of oil. Depletion data was sketchy at best. Its amazing how hard it is to actually dig out statistics for, even on a field by field basis, what the net decline is. And the elusive data that you can find is not real depletion but it's actually the net decline after lots of additional drilling and money is spent to take a natural decline rate that would have been far more drastic if you flattened out. And finally no one really likes to discuss it much because it should generally mean bad news.

Forecasting next year's decline still remains an art form. I don't think anyone has ever been very good at predicting bad news."

" And it's also interesting when I think back on this that the technology to gauge resources, absent of seismic, is still effectively 100 years old. We have no better technology today to know how much resources are there before seismic is done than we had 100 years ago. And even after a few of them test their research you still leave many questions and so it's based on opinions. "

from http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/212#11