Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Peak oil refers to the midpoint of conventional hydrocarbon production.

As conventional oil becomes less available & more expensive, our world will extract and consume ever increasing amounts of non-conventional oil, like sands, shale, coal etc...

Because these non-conventional oil resources contain much greater amounts of dangerous compounds than conventional oil, as our use of these non-conventional expands, so will the pollution caused by their use.

Think we are trashing the environment now?

Just wait till we are plowing our way through the dregs of the hydrocarbon family.

It might be an interesting exercise to chart potential pollution effects based on this idea.

Just how much more carbon, benzene, sulfur etc... will be released as we transition to the crappy stuff?

A lot...

Just doing the calculations for hydrogen, just to run transport in the UK...Warwick university reckoned we needed 100,000 wind turbines....we would need to erect about 10 per day, everyday, including Christmas day for 27 years to achieve that target. Not going to happen..In a poll yesterday, 80% of people did not want nuclear power stations anywhere near them and we live in a small country, you would need 100 anyway, so over 33 would need be erected every ten years and they aint cheap.

As one government minister said recently, ‘It’s difficult to build a mile of anything at the moment’. The growing population and this way of life is putting huge pressures on land, infrastructure, water supply as it is.

So we're left with coal and biofuels. Both would be an ecological disaster if not managed properly. China alone has 544 coal fired power stations planned...some pollution..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/n ... 330469.stm

Biofuels need immense amounts of water and could lead to deforestation, desertification and competition for food sources.

"we would need to erect about 10 PER DAY, everyday, including Christmas day for 27 years"


These are the sort of stats that put things into perspecive, and that many people on here love to hand-wave away. And that doesn't even go into fossil fuel usage in construction and maintanance.

The Warrick study was talking about powering cars with hydrogen.

Leaving out the fact that hydrogen is the smallest element on earth and leaks are a huge problem. What about ventilating all those parking garages in case some ones car is leaking hydrogen.

And who would want to live next to a large scale hydrogen storage facility. Talk about a easy target for a terrorist.

There is no friggin way hydrogen is going to work on the large scale in the immediate future the technology is not there.

Even if you could build the infrastructure.

It took us a 150 years to perfect the distribution of crude Oil and all the infrastructure that goes with it. 150 years of building and construction and infrastructure and technology.

Ladies and gentlemen congratulations we have succeeded in building the largest tower of Babel ever.

Why should convert the electricity to hydrogen? We could use it much more efficiently running electric powered trains or buses.

Any solutions that seeks to enable us to continue using the private automobile is going to lead to disaster.

Yes, in the early 70's I spent a lot of effort advocating the move to alternative and renewable energies for that main reason. It wasn't a matter of how much oil, coal, and gas we had, we couldn't continue to burn them in the atmosphere.

Peak oil may play a close second to global warming and environmental degradation as we scramble to keep the oil fires burning.

I know this sounds a bit silly, but this all brings to mind the Dr Suess story about the Lorax. While I doubt it will ever get to the point of being as bad as that eco disaster, I think that as panic for oil sets in many constraints on the production and use of Hyrdocarbon based fuels will be tossed aside. I think it will be the cause of conflict, especially in this country and abroad.

Even today there are many countries which do a really poor job on the environmental side of things. It won't be getting better in my view.

MonteQuest wrote:Yes, in the early 70's I spent a lot of effort advocating the move to alternative and renewable energies for that main reason. It wasn't a matter of how much oil, coal, and gas we had, we couldn't continue to burn them in the atmosphere.

Peak oil may play a close second to global warming and environmental degradation as we scramble to keep the oil fires burning.

But Monte! When this atmosphere gets polluted, consumers will demand a better one. The rising cost of oxygen will force The Market to create an alternative in order to meet the demand. Stop with this Peak Air bullsh*t!

Just doing the calculations for hydrogen, just to run transport in the UK...Warwick university reckoned we needed 100,000 wind turbines....we would need to erect about 10 per day, everyday, including Christmas day for 27 years to achieve that target. Not going to happen..In a poll yesterday, 80% of people did not want nuclear power stations anywhere near them and we live in a small country, you would need 100 anyway, so over 33 would need be erected every ten years and they aint cheap.

You can read that study here: http://www.oswald.co.uk/ocl/windaccountancy04.pdf

They fucked up really bad there. They assume that oil is utilised with 100% efficiency when its less than 20% in reality. They take tonnes of oil used and multiply it by two to account for an assumed 50% well-to-wheel efficiency in hydrogen use while forgetting to take into account the ~80% tank to wheel oil energy loss. The real number should be more like 30,000 wind turbines...still alot.

Yeah, it did cross my mind.

As you say they took the current use and just converted it straight over, without taking into account the well-to-wheel figures. I still quote the 100,000 turbines for two reasons:

1 Road and air traffic is rising very fast. Air traffic has nearly doubled in the last 15 years. When the crunch comes more capacity will be needed.

2. UK nuclear power stations are being decommissioned. Plus as many UK peakers know, gas is a major issue for home heat and electricity

So we're still going to have to build that sort of number of turbines/nukes in any case IMHO.

As some stage I'll sit down and do an exhaustive analysis of hydrogen requirements, with references, taking into account off peak generation as well.

Don't forget the $$ costs of financing the hydrogen economy. If we have to spend trillions of dollars every year to replace fossil fuels, it will suck the capital markets dry over time. The economy will grind to a halt if one sector becomes such a drain.

Nuke plants, wind tubines, solar...

All of it is great, but it won't be as cheap or easy as the current system. Otherwise, duh, we'd all have hydrogen cars by now. I'm sure efficiency can be improved somewhat, but it will never replace the current system completely. If the average guy in America/Europe can't afford a car, it's game over for industrial civilization. When we hit the restart button, we'd better come up with a different way of transporting ourselves around.

But Monte! When this atmosphere gets polluted, consumers will demand a better one.

Fear not. The free market and technology will create alternatives to an atmosphere.

EastBay

Indeed, Michael Jackson is living proof

You do not need numbers to see and ingest the increased poisons this administration has allowed to be released into all facets of the biome. Bush fucktard has released 18%+ more chemicals into the earth and WE each YEAR since 2000. Any one who backs bush or all the cretans before him are enemies and should be treated as such. But in our feel good, stupidity is looked up to society we will love the scum cuz hes one of the "guys". Hello, Bush is an elite and a eastern liberal. A king. He will do anything for the fat cats and big business. bloated hang guts are not noted for their high level of intelligence. Ya think? But look her up youll find the increased emmissions brought on us.
The beginning of the "end" has already begun. Ride your bike and do your transportation on legs and youll smell and see more than the drones who are glued to his/her machines. Ive already gotten mercury poisioning. The smog is already growing only to be worse soon enough. standing water bodies are the most vulnerable. The oceans deep waters are poisioned. Get used to it, sorry.
dioxins("o just leave them in the ground they wont hurt you"), heavy metals, and pharmacueticals are the big culprits now. wider variety soon to come.

one can not forget the buried treasures that are beginning to leak now. How about the pentanes, hexanes, etcc. All those wonderful ag and industrial chemicals that were banned and then all the folks who owned em buried them up in the hollers. Dont forget them bad boys. those metal barrels rust and disintegrate. Remember rust? Goodbye.

As most of you know, I've been heavily involved in the environment, how our use of energy affects it and how we are destroying nature, for many years, on both a high-level professional basis and one of personal conviction. I'm quite aware that many of you do not agree with my views and we must agree to differ. I've been attempting for some time to gel my views into something fairly concrete and the result of this can be found in My Credo along with a linked discussion forum. Please feel free to look at this document and, if you feel like it, comment.

Cant say I agree with most of it. I'm probably one of the few on this board that think that climate change is essentially a non-issue thats been hyped into some preventable slow-motion catastrophe, where I think its neither preventable or a catastrophe. Given that I'd be howling against the whirlwind here, I'm not going to take up the issue further.

But that aside my biggest criticism is your boosting of MOX fuels. I used to like them but the problem with MOX fuel is that it doesnt really save you that much on fuel and produces far more low level waste given the most common practice for MOX processing is a variant of PUREX which produces loads of medium level waste and a giant mess to clean up (a la sellafield) which I suppose is fine if you want cover for doing plutonium extraction for your weapons program. We've got so much uranium and so much empty space that we might as well just burn it in once through reactors as an ordinary once through cycle or burn the wastes in molten salt incinerator reactors, and not do half-hearted steps that exacerbate the situtation.

Really I expect that solar will be cheap enough to compete directly with nuclear long before we have to worry about uranium pricing or waste location to justify any breeder reactor regime.

In the face of the choices all of civilization makes, there is only one we must give up in order to maintain it. The choice for unending growth. Civilization may well continue past this bump in the road, but it won't be at this level of population or technology. Not that the population won't be regenerated, nor that technology won't be re-invented, but if we want to grow, we must accept that periods of civilizational growth (population) will be followed by periods of decline (population reduction).

Do you believe that civilization will grow unendingly?

This thread seems like the logical place to me to put this Youtube link, it is about 16 minutes long to watch and covers Peak Oil from a Economist POV. Not the Uberdoomer the end is nie!!! type I usually see so I found refreshingly different from most of what I have seen in video format on Peak Oil and its implications.

VIDEO