German Military Study Warns of Drastic Oil Crisis
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
One of them is from the City of San Francisco who had a task force installed to look into the Peak Oil&Gas www.sfenvironment.org/downloads/library/peakoil_final_report.pdf It is pretty dark report when you read through the paper. One of the statements “events will unfold so badly that unemployment, hunger, and crime are prevalent, and the basic structure of society is unable to function”. But there are some interesting and specific recommendations like "City government could push much harder to promote small businesses” or "develop southeast waterfront" and rail projects. Although I am not sure if anything will happen. But it seems some politician and planers are looking at these scenarios.
I think it's far more likely that Spiegel is misrepresenting the context of the study. The German military, in particular, has a reputation for making contingency plans for everything. It seems to me far more credible that the purpose of the study is rather "in the unlikely event that 'peak oil' is reached soon AND this leads to 'total collapse of the markets', the German Army should respond with actions A, B and C".
Discovering such a plan would then have no more significance than finding out, say, about a study of the defensive measures required if Germany is invaded by the Czech Republic.
The competency of any military assessing world petroleum reserves and consumption is enormous! Petroleum is the achillies heel of an army. Petroleum is probably the single most valuable commodity for maintaining any army's fighting posture in this day and age. With maybe water and food being a close second.
But remember, petroleum must be continuously and logistically transported to troops fighting on the ground or in the air. You can't just locally procure a sustainable petroleum source for an army on the move.
I might be splitting hairs here, but it is a well known fact that a tremendous amount of CIA employees are geologists, economists, and market analysts.
Realistically, while the CIA's job is to supply the nation's President and governmental agencies with intelligence, the end result of a lot of work the CIA does is for the US Military. And you can bet a ton of work is done around the Petroleum supply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Naval_Intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Intelligence_Agency
As far as questioning their competency, I don't even understand what you mean. They have engineers, information, and resources... i'm sure the competent enough to put things together and draw possible conclusions. The oil/commidity trade is very very tied to governments, military embargoes, etc.
For a small idea of how politically charged oil is, one example is the pipeline between Iran and Israel - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Israel_pipeline
Oil and the price of it is incredibly important to governments.
Army's spend an incredible amount of time looking at the long term effects of the oil supply chain.
That being said, we should definitely be planning for the future, and it's great to hear that the UK and Germany are taking giant strides (Germany generates the largest amount of solar energy, for instance).
Try to think about it, you know how exponents of 2 work:
1
2
(...)
1024
2048
Now note that to move from point n to the point n + 1 you need to use as much as in all points from 1 to n - 1: when you're at point of 1024, to move to the point of 2048 (double) you'll need 1+2+4+8+...+512 + 1 of something.
According to
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/colombia/oila.html
the doubling time of world oil consumption is 30 years (just as little as 2.3% usage growth per year makes that!) That means that during the next 30 years the world needs as much oil as the total oil used from the beginning of the oil use to the 1980(!) Think again about that simple fact!
Now if you know that all oil in the Earth formed from the preserved remains of prehistoric zooplankton and algae, which had settled to a sea or lake bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions, you can imagine that the supply is really limited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
That would (iirc, can't find a quick and reasonably reliable source) double the total available oil for the next 50 years or so, and then there are currently uneconomical sources such as tar sands.
So, in short, yes, it will run out and fairly soon but not as soon as you might think based on just the oil reserves.
Approximately 40% of the world electricity production uses coal as we speak. It's not that the coal is just waiting to be used instead of oil.
Your kids (if you have them) will experience oil problems anyway! Not to mention the effects of all that CO2 in the atmosphere.
Yep.
> Where do you get 50 years when the current estimated doubling time of consumption is 30 years?
From the combined effect of coal to oil conversion (for transportation), increased reliance on alternative energy, a rising oil price eventually causing both reduced consumption and at the same time making currently un-economical sources economical.
> Approximately 40% of the world electricity production uses coal as we speak.
That's correct.
> It's not that the coal is just waiting to be used instead of oil.
That's true as well, but we do have more and more alternative sources for energy production other than coal. That it's only 40% is actually quite amazing. Natural gas is another big source of electricity, nuclear is another.
> Your kids (if you have them) will experience oil problems anyway!
I do, and most likely.
> Not to mention the effects of all that CO2 in the atmosphere.
The magnitude of those effects is still up for debate. I'm very much concerned about the dent the whole CO2 story got from the scandal around the leaked climate documents.
The people around me that were 'mildly skeptical' are now in the 'no way' camp and those that believed the facts as they were presented up to then are now openly skeptical.
There are still many people who are convinced the CO2 emissions are bad and that the greenhouse effect is going to have an impact on their lives but there definitely has been a sea-change in attitude.
I think it's pretty likely that sometime in the next few decades we'll have a replacement for oil. It may very well be technology that hasn't been discovered yet. But I see no reason to think that we'll just use up all the oil and have no alternatives.
We won't come up with some magic replacement for oil, unless ITER is successful, and we manage to adapt the fusion principle to a scale small enough for transportation use, but that's not something I would bet on at this stage.
More likely we'll see incremental change together with market forces reshape our society in a way that we can currently not predict.
My best guess would be more nuclear (pebble bed?), more solar, more wind, more oil from weird places and much more conservation efforts driven by prices that you can (probably) not imagine today.
In Europe a Gallon of gasoline sells for ~$6 today, imagine what would happen to the US if it had a gas prices that high.
If there is less oil produced prices will rise and less will be consumed. There are many alternatives, but today oil is just cheap enough for many uses.
Natural gas is one alternative, that can be used instead of oil to fuel cars and for heating. There is plenty of that around. If the price of oil rises a lot more than natural gas, more people will run cars on natural gas.
Electrical cars and wood gas are other technologies that have been around for a long time, but just aren't quite as practical. But if oil becomes a lot more expensive, the alternatives will start to look better in comparison.
It's very impressive to stand near them, they're absolutely huge.
Windmills are a way to reduce overall fuel consumption but they are not adequate for base power (they are too inefficient and too unpredictable).
The Germans can also do math, and they take in to account the number of sun hours, the acreage used and the latitude they live at. This means that during a fairly large part of the year solar power in Germany is not running at a high efficiency.
On the other hand, Germany has a lot of wind, so they use it to good effect. Fully 7% (!) of Germany's energy use comes from wind power, contrasted with only 1% for solar.
Best not rule out wind installations when you have a lot of wind and little solar, especially when you can do math ;)
The book is available online for free. It can also be purchased at Amazon. http://www.withouthotair.com/
It's written by David MacKay a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge.
At what percentage would you consider it to be worth it? 20%? 50%? 90%? You have to start somewhere. The Germans have done an absolutely amazing job at re-engineering wind power plants on a utility scale, they've taken the old and unreliable designs and have turned them in to true engineering marvels with maintenance records and uptimes that a datacenter would be proud of.
And they've done that in about 20 years time, with now over 20,000 plants installed, they're installing them as fast as they can churn them out. It's absolutely amazing to see this very quiet and concentrated energy revolution taking place, where-ever I go in Germany, if I drive at night I come across at least one, but likely more than just one transport of a new windmill to some site. They're hard to miss, the trucks are 40 meters long... 3 in each convoy with the blades and a nacelle that you could make a fairly comfortable house in.
> The point I was making is that if some evil wizard suddenly eliminated all of the hydrocarbon reserves from Earth no country in the world would choose wind (or solar) for providing base power generation.
Let's assume that we'd at least have enough oil for some transition to another powersource because you won't be building nuclear plants or windmills using labor alone, you need power (and some of it in the form of diesel / gasoline to power trucks and tools).
If it would happen really suddenly then we'd be in a boatload of trouble, and there would be an immediate all out war for the control of the next available resource, uranium. What would power that war is anybody's guess.
So, nuclear power would be the power source of choice in the short term in that case, followed by an immediate and massive roll out of renewables because once oil and coal are gone they can compete favorably with nuclear on cost, especially when you factor in cleanup and decommissioning as well as waste processing.
> Both have the same problem that you can't just press a button and get more power when you need it, you are dependent on circumstances.
Statistics are your friend here, you can make longer term predictions about the available energy in both solar and wind. By spreading the generation capacity over large enough land masses and by playing nice with your neighbours you can mitigate some of this.
But I'll bet at that price-point electricity driven AC is going to be replaced by AWCO(*) pretty soon and the same would go for electric heating in the winter.
Conservation efforts would have to be stepped up and there would likely be serious social changes. No more driving to the mall, likely local shops would see a revival and it would get a lot harder to live in rural areas.
> They can help ease the load on the rest of your power generation infrastructure, but at best it's only a partial solution.
You could make it work if you had a large enough lake to dump your excess in to use as a reserve in times of scarcity.
The sun outputs roughly 1KW per square meter of surface area at ground level, if you don't convert it to electricity using solar panels it goes towards heating up the atmosphere causing air currents. That's a very large amount of power, it is available almost every day and it would not take all that much of the earth's surface to give us all the energy we need at present day consumption levels.
It's raining soup, we only have forks. But the forks are getting better at catching the soup every year.
1. many militaries do studies like this. contingency planning. they consider it part of their overall mission of defending their country and interests
2. as the supply of cheaper oil shrinks relative to demand, price increases and then more expensive-to-deliver oil becomes marketable (like from shale/sands, or synthetics). and alternate energies become more attractive and economically feasible (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, nuclear, etc.) and people increasingly try to use less oil. all of this adds up.
3. nobody can predict the future with certainty, and the accuracy and reliability tends to go down the farther into the future one tries to evaluate
The primary reason alternative fuels haven't caught on yet is because they're not cost effective. As oil becomes a rarer commodity and it's price goes up, a replacement for the fuel supply will gradually emerge as being cost effective.
But really, every (good) military worries about this, and has researched the possibility. Hence the US military's research into battery powered humvees.
Talks about peak oil in part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3y7UlHdhAU