What if we never run out of oil? (2013)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Yes, but it does not follow: "Effectively, energy supplies are infinite."
This is such a massive failure of basic logic that I really do not think anything more needs to be said. Yet I will say it. The fact that a given energy source requires more energy to produce than it can yield does not make it an infinite source! Nor does a source which can yield a positive flow but does not present a better return on capital than other existing sources off an infinite supply. Just because it will never be used does not mean it is infinite!
The very next statement is "Sweeping claims like these make Jean Laherrère’s teeth hurt."
1) Increase efficiency. Jevon's paradox makes this a fail, if you make consumption more efficient then you effectively make it less expensive and so people do it more.
2) Impose prohibitions or taxes on petroleum consumption, or incentives for alternative energy consumption. This also fails because oil is a global commodity. If you inhibit its consumption in one country, the global price goes down which causes consumption to increase in other countries where the taxes or subsidies don't exist and offsets the bulk of the benefit. The only way this one works is if you can do it on a global scale and prevent anyone from cheating, which you can't.
3) Subsidize research into alternative energy production methods that would be cost competitive with oil on their own merits. Once brought to market, these methods would be more economically attractive than petroleum consumption world-wide and bring about a significant global reduction in petroleum consumption. This is the only one that actually works, and it has the added benefit of reducing energy costs.
Will that really be a big factor in petroleum use? My driving is not dictated by the cost of Petrol (not yet anyway). I am not going to start driving twice as much if my car suddenly only uses 50% as much fuel.
Plenty of people might buy a large hybrid SUV if its fuel consumption was closer to that of a conventional compact car. Fuel cost goes into the calculation of whether to drive instead of taking the train, or carpool, or how much you're willing to pay in rent to live closer to where you work (or to mass transit), or how much you're willing to sacrifice in fuel to get home sooner, or whether to take a road trip, etc. etc.
It's also not all about cars. Coal and petroleum are used to generate electricity and heat homes. Make it cheaper to move the thermostat five degrees in the direction of comfortable and people will.
I'm not sure I'd call this a "fail"; U.S. domestic energy usage per capita has actually fallen slightly since 1990, despite a massive explosion of new electronics and personal devices. (The EU has experienced a 1% per capita growth in energy consumption over the same period.)
People are certainly doing it more, but -- so far -- the recent emphasis on increased efficiency has been keeping this demand from translating into an increased demand for energy.
If improving efficiency alone can entirely halt growing demands for energy, then that's half the battle right there in reducing consumption.
Mind you efficiency is still great because it allows us to derive more benefit for the same price (or the same level of resources), but it does nothing for climate change.
The 2007-2008 financial crisis and subsequent economic recession were specifically mentioned as factors in the reduction of energy demand in the U.S. (and EU, if I remember right), but growth in energy demand had already started to decline before then.
The University of Michigan in 2007 started trying to follow the average MPG of cars sold in the U.S.; although I'm not familiar with their methodology, they've found a 4.5 MPG increase from 2007 to 2013, from 20.8 MPG to 24.6, for all cars, light trucks, minivans, SUVs, etc.
So, people would have to be driving significantly more now for those gains in efficiency to not contribute to reduced oil consumption, and driving significantly more doesn't really work well with an economic recession.
Have a look at the chart at http://www.investingdaily.com/13503/oil-demand-emerging-mark...: U.S. per capita oil consumption has been flat since about the 80s, a trend that transcends economic recessions and political conflicts.
I see no evidence at all for "Jevon's Paradox". Everything I can find about it suggests that it's a good-sounding economic theory that hasn't yet been comprehensively checked against available statistics.
And what about the rising cost of electricity?
> I see no evidence at all for "Jevon's Paradox".
Jevon's Paradox is a straight forward corollary of supply and demand. If you make the cost per mile go down, all else equal, the "demand for" miles driven will go up, which will erode if not exceed the savings from higher efficiency. The last decade is not representative because the "all else equal" bit is totally off: Gas prices have doubled from ~$1.80 in 2004 to ~$3.60 today and we've had a global financial crisis that suppresses demand for everything.
See, this is why I prefer to argue from data in policy discussions.
The cost of electricity has been flat or declining since 1990.
I used the data from http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.cfm, specifically http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/avgprice_annual.xl.... I found that the EIA publishes prices in nominal amounts, i.e., not adjusted for inflation. So, I used the inflation calculator at http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, and then I plotted electricity prices from 1990 to 2012. That chart is at https://infogr.am/electricity-prices-are-flat. The yellow line is the raw data from the EIA: the average retail price, in cents per kilowatt-hour, of electricity for all regions and markets. The red line is the inflation-adjusted retail price in cents of the same. (Interesting aside: at a glance, it looks like it's almost entirely the unregulated service providers which are skewing the price of electricity upward.)
> Jevon's Paradox is a straight forward corollary of supply and demand.
A corollary is not data! This is exactly why arguing from ideology is bad: you found something that sounds good, and you believed it, and you never checked to see if it was true.
I insist that you find some data to support your argument, because so far, every single bit of data I can find suggests that Jevon's Paradox is complete bunk.
(aside: "annoyed" is my username there not because of this discussion, but because of the annoying way that infogr.am handles account setup.)
edit: after thinking about it a bit, I think residential electricity usage for lighting should be a great test case for Jevon's Paradox. Although residential lighting is only responsible for something like 1% of domestic electricity usage, there has still been a remarkable change in the efficiency of residential lighting since 1970. If Jevon's Paradox is true, we should see a flat or increased demand for residential electricity for lighting over the same period; if it is not true, as I suspect, we should see an overall decreased demand for electricity for residential lighting. That is: if you're right, then more efficient bulbs should mean that people are leaving the lights on more often or are adding more lighting to their homes, roughly in proportion to the increase in efficiency.
I chose residential lighting because the annual costs are relatively low, compared to heating and cooling (so trends should be resistant to changes in the economy), because bulb efficiency has changed quite a lot over the last several decades, and because more efficient bulbs have been accessible to people in most economic tiers.
Unfortunately, although I can find current data on residential electricity usage for lighting, I haven't been able to find any historic figures.
See, this is the problem with data. "Lies, damn lies and statistics." The period from 1990 to 2000 can't help you because electrical consumption significantly increased over that period.[1] From 2000 to 2012 you take an upward sloping graph and try to flatten it by adjusting for inflation. The problem is, it still shows an inflation-adjusted increase of ~10% from 2000 to 2012, and over the same period the inflation-adjusted median income was on the decline.[2] And that's before you account for the loss of personal wealth resulting from the dotcom bust, 9/11, the housing market crash and the consequent lack of credit availability. And even then, all you can say is that electrical consumption failed to increase significantly. There is no reduction over time, the number of MWh generated even increased slightly.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/state/ [2] http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php
> after thinking about it a bit, I think residential electricity usage for lighting should be a great test case for Jevon's Paradox.
> Unfortunately, although I can find current data on residential electricity usage for lighting, I haven't been able to find any historic figures.
Test cases are meaningless anyway. It's a mathematical equation. You can test the degree of the effect, but all you're really testing is the price elasticity of demand in a particular market. It won't be the same number for light bulbs as for air conditioners or for transportation.
At some point (IMO already reached) this becomes just "Research". Properly directed R&D pays for itself many times over.
>...into alternative energy production...
And utilisation! Electric cars FTW!!
The "problem" with research is that the costs are centralized while the benefits are diffuse. There is no way for a private entity to capture 100% of the social benefit of an invention, which means that solely private research will inherently be funded at a level below the optimal level for its social utility.
There are also some things that are so expensive to research that private capital is not willing to take the risk that they don't pan out. Making hot fusion commercially viable for power generation is the holy grail of energy research, but you can't exactly do it in your garage.
So getting past the strawperson replies about how nothing is infinite, fuel x is not oil or limiting factors....
It is interesting. For years naysayers have gone on about peak oil, yet the opposite might be true, technology might be able to rip fossil fuels out of the earth faster than we can use them for hundreds of years.
The fact fracking was only possible due to increased computing power and is now changing local industry due to energy actually getting cheaper shows to me we are in an era of incredibly complex and quick changes.
No amount of technical advances will defeat thermodynamics.
(We might not want to blithely sail into the perfectly-well-known future of energy unprepared... but... there's a crapload of money to be made providing energy to people, one hardly need create subsidies to make the transition happen if that's how the economics are going to line up, when there's billions or even trillions to be made by being the ones to get it right.)
Actually, it reminds of a housemate I once had who often ate other people's food. He would respond "Well, you can help yourselves to the food in my cupboard"... which was, in total, one lemon and a quarter-kilo of flour.
You walk into the store that sells things. You go up to the meat counter, and you say, "I want a kilo of meat." They weigh out your kilo of meat, and give you a receipt that says, "Meat: 1 kilo". You then go to another counter, where you pay the clerk for that particular receipt - it is then marked as 'paid' (or you get another one, I forget.) You then go back to the meat counter, and you give them the "I paid for this" receipt, and then receive your kilo of meat.
So, at best, you've got two inefficient checkout clerks! And at worst, you pay for meat and then there is no meat.
It's not like we actually need that land to grow food on or anything.
Sure, the sun is finite too. But the idea here is to speak in terms of human experience, not literal truths
I think that would be enough time to figure out fusion. Or put wind and solar everywhere.
But we seem to be stuck, paralysed in our fight to solve everything with impossible requirements.
Fight AGW, NO nuclear, and keep the standard of living (or even increase it). All at the same time.
Personally, I would rather relax the second requirement.
The sun's energy will out last us all, millions of times over. Plants have it figured out. We should ask them.
Plus what happens when we are ready to leave Earth? Surely we'll need a way to feed off of the stars then anyway, so why not start now.
Just because the supply is finite, doesn't automatically mean we will exhaust it.
A quick search about "sand shortage" will show you.
Also, we should really avoid the worst effects. Even the middling effects are pretty awful.
Take panels that have 20% efficiency, and assume they can absorb for 6 hours a day, for 70% of the year (255 days). You can generate 368 kW/year. To generate the total 143851 TWh, you'd need about 3.91e11 m^2 of area. That sounds a lot, but it's only a square of land 625 km per side, or about 90% of the area of California. Note that this is of course a very hand-wavey order of magnitude estimate.
The problem isn't the abundence of energy sources, it's the collection, retainment, transmission and generation reliability of it (those factors overlap - generation reliability can be offset by better transmission and vice versa).
We don't really have to go looking far for energy sources, we just really struggle to harness them with current technology.
I'm optimistic about renewables. Photovoltaic solar is already cheaper than retail power and competitive with wholesale in many markets. The issue now is grid storage. Battery tech is currently improving at around 7% a year, so I think we'll see electric cars go mainstream in the next 5 years and decreasing reliance on centralized power generation shortly afterwards.
While I'm sure that once we start tapping into these resources environmental groups will subject us to an endless haranguing about the "Clathrate gun hypothesis", it will merely serve as further evidence that many (not all, but many) environmentalists are narrative first, science fourth or fifth.
In contrast, also from the WP article,
"A study from 2010 concluded with the possibility for a trigger of abrupt climate warming based on metastable methane clathrates in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) region"
and
"In 2008 the United States Department of Energy National Laboratory system[28] and the United States Geological Survey's Climate Change Science Program both identified potential clathrate destabilization in the Arctic as one of four most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change"
The most sobering part is that given a deep enough interruption in humankind, it's possible we'd never recover since the hydrocarbon frontier is in ultradeep, clathrates, and shale and none of those would be possible without a bootstrapping from easier hydrocarbon sources (which have been long since exhausted)
To sketch it out, though: easy oil has been found, there are widely available charts on the count/size of new discoveries by decade. Newer sources like clathrates, subsalt, and bitumen are exceedingly difficult to extract (ie, lower net energy production). In particular, shale depletion is extremely rapid per well, and there is some question as to how net-energy positive/economically viable it is. Clathrate reserve estimates have dropped _dramatically_ over time.
As to why I think it could result in a permanent reversal in civilization: transportation is key to modern life. Low energy requirements per capita in urban settings are only possible by mass transportation of goods and services. Petroleum is the overwhelming transportation fuel. Plastics and high-density agriculture are fundamental to modern life, and both are dependent on natural gas (PE feedstock or Haber process).
The world generally has 3-6 months of inventory or less of oil, less of gas. A supply crisis would not have good effects. Some people point to the US supplies of coal and the Fischer Tropsch process, but that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/28210_... is a useful chart. There's another for global usage that I can't find right now, but shouldn't be hard if you look for it. You might also look at the fracking depletion curves in various shale plays (they differ based on reservoir characteristics).
You may also note from that chart that a huge percentage of energy is wastage from transmission loss, which makes the tragedy of postponing a widescale (Manhattan project level) deployment of solar PV even more depressing.
edit: random, somewhat informative article on shale fracking: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/u-dot-s-dot-...
First of all, I agree that civilization is wholly dependant on petroleum, and that's probably not going to change much even in the next 30 to 50 years. If we are unable to find new sources of petroleum and/or migrate to another energy source there will be a collapse and likely the vast majority of humanity will die off. That probably would be the death kneel of civilization.
Now it looks like part of your argument is that shale oil and fracking is not going to produce nearly the amount of petroleum as is forecasted. That businessweek article gives some good information I didn't know about, so good source on that. However, it looks like there is still debate around how much oil is recoverable from shale deposits. Sounds like the debates of peak oil from the past decades with one side optimistic and the other side pessimistic. I'm not a geologist, and only time will really tell who is right. But I think there is a good chance that technology will continue to improve and oil prices will rise enough to make recovery of more oil possible.
Now you also say that Clathrate reserve estimates have continually dropped over time. In the OP article it says,
>Estimates of the global supply of methane hydrate range from the equivalent of 100 times more than America’s current annual energy consumption to 3 million times more.
It sounds like no one has a very firm grasp of how much Clathrate is available. But even if we take the low estimate given, that's a substantial amount. It would likely be enough to fulfil global energy needs for a couple decades. Unless you have good proof that Clathrate reserves are overestimated or that it's unlikely we can viably tap those sources, I'm going to say that you haven't refuted anything in the original article.
You said the OP article was terrifyingly stupid, but all I see as a rebuttal is that shale oil reserves are debatably not as large as we think. Or are you trying to say that our energy consumption and reliance on petroleum is at such a high and rising level that even sustaining our current production isn't enough? To that I would argue that hopefully alternative energy sources will free up enough petroleum from electricity production to keep us above water so to speak.
Let me leave you with some thoughts:
1. One random mistake in the article is the characterization of bitumen production in Alberta. He describes in situ, but a larger portion is still open pit.
2. One thing the author is correct about is judging energy by EROIE. What do you suppose is the EROIE of clathrate methane production? It either requires heating or CO2 substitution. What is the value of using more than one bboe to produce a single bboe?
3. "I would argue that hopefully alternative energy sources will free up enough petroleum from electricity production" - as is clear from the chart I posted, of the 34.7 quadrillion BTUs of petroleum consumed by the US, 0.22 goes towards the production of electricity. That is true across the world except in some very oil rich countries, very isolated countries, or very poor countries.
You could respond by dropping the know-it-all attitude. Look I'm not an expert and I'm probably wrong on some things. That's why I'm trying to gather info from a bunch of sources on this, and also why I'm not taking everything you say at face value. But even if your facts are correct you aren't going to go around convincing people by being an arrogant prick and calling articles you disagree with stupid. Get the fuck over yourself, you aren't a god damn child and your ego doesn't exist on the internet. If you don't feel like discussing these things with me then don't. Why do I want to continue this discussion? Because I'm learning from it. Clearly you already know everything though, so I guess if you don't want to say anything more just stop.
1. Ok, but does that change the points he put forth much? Isn't the EROEI of either method still economically viable?
2. If the EROEI of clathrate methane was little to negative, then why are the Japanese throwing so much money at it? There must be some potential at economic viability for it. I didn't see anything in my 2 second google search that gave a good overview of it's economic potential, but if you have a source that gives a better picture on the EROEI then by all means I'll take a look.
3. Yes I noticed the graph, but I was kind of assuming that a lot of transportation in the next couple decades will move from petroleum to electricity. Perhaps that's somewhat of a stretch, but I think we are already trending in that direction somewhat. I'm willing to admit I'm probably overly optimistic about this though.
edit: Also, if you'd managed to ask in a less snide way or even asked something specific, I'd have given a substantive response.
Anyway, you did drop a bunch of claims with nothing backing them up in your first post. Am I supposed to google myself a comprehensive knowledge of our energy crisis to argue against some random person on the internet just because they say they have knowledge about it?
You basically retorted a fairly well developed article with "I'm an expert and this is stupid. There's a good possibility a lot of us will die in the next 50 years because our use of fossil fuels is way higher than our supply. I'm not going to actually list any of my expert knowledge though..."
I see in a post above you gave a good response, so thanks for that. But I don't see why you feel my response was unwarranted. Just because you say you know a bit about a subject doesn't mean people on the internet have to take your word for it. Perhaps you read my comment a bit harsher than I wanted, but that is a hefty article and an even heftier subject matter to brush off with the half a paragraph you originally typed.
I assume you're referring to this line:
> Petroleum is a grab-bag term for all nonsolid hydrocarbon resources—oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on—that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source—ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate.
This does rely on the common-use definition of petroleum = hydrocarbons (loosely incorporating refined outputs as well) and not the technical definition of petroleum = crude. But that usage can be found all over academic and industry writing as well; sometimes it is shorthand for something like "petroleum-based products". A few examples:
-- "Petroleum is a complex mixture of organic liquids called crude oil and natural gas, which occurs naturally in the ground and was formed millions of years ago." -- Australian Institute of Petroleum, http://www.aip.com.au/industry/fact_refine.htm
-- "Petroleum - A generic name for hydrocarbons, including crude oil, natural gas liquids, natural gas and their products." -- Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, http://oil-gas.state.co.us/cogis_help/glossary.htm
-- "petroleum n: a substance occurring naturally in the earth in solid, liquid, or gaseous state and composed mainly of mixtures of chemical compounds of carbon and hydrogen, with or without other nonmetallic elements such as sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. In some cases, especially in the measurement of oil and gas, petroleum refers only to oil—a liquid hydrocarbon—and does not include natural gas or gas liquids such as propane and butane." -- U.S. Occupational Health & Safety Administration, https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/oilandgas/glossary_of_terms...
Either way, dismissing the entirety of a sophisticated, well-researched article in a respected publication because you disagree with the way one term is used is pretty glib.