As we possibly hit peak oil this year, we should start thinking about that question.
Will the modern civilisation devolve and we’ll see the start of a new dark age, relatively at least?
Will we find a new exploitable primary energy source?
What will happen when the shortages start? Will we see oil/gas wars between the western society and its rivals, maybe even nuclear proxy wars?
Future looks gloomy right now, new oil deposits are out there but its high time that our collective science concentrated on an alternative to oil for fuel at least. Mind you some people are making a lot of money out of oil so its not going to happen soon I dont think.
“Peak oil” is one of those myths like “the population bomb”.
Given that the new Khasak field being set up by Shell, Agip, etc has, on its own, enough oil to last many hundreds of years, it’s not going to run out very soon.
Fast forward a few hundred years to when alternatives become economically viable, they will come online. Who will be in the forefront? The current oil/energy companies.
Right, now where’s my nuclear powered car then?
Absolutely correct, my dear Mr. Man of Stoat. However, it seems that already created severe societal damage, shaped by different, basically economic rationales, will be remunerated thanks to some truly scientifically devoted, and community-conscious personalities:
http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr52.html
Right, now where’s my nuclear powered car then?
In the archive of the Ford Motor Company, as well as within the chancery of the Ministry for Medium-Scale Mechanical Constructions of the former USSR. American variant is already presented on-line. Please, just follow this link:
http://www.seriouswheels.com/def/Ford-Nucleon-Concept-Car.htm
But those other bold wonders of unrestrained poetry of mechanical engineering are still capped in some… pretty hidden places. 
Yes, and no.
Peak oil seems to be presented now as some sort of disaster point. It’s not. It’s just the point where oil production peaks.
That’s a consequence of geological, geo-political and local issues.
There’s a lot of oil on the planet. Some of it’s not readily accessible yet, at least to the world at large, e.g. central Asian oilfields, which coincidentally have some bearing on the invasion of Afghanistan on some interpretations.
If 2007 is peak oil, we’ll have gradually dwindling supplies and at some stage there won’t be enough for our wants, even needs. That ain’t gonna happen the year after peak oil.
Getting panties in a twist over the peak oil year, which can only be determined retrospectively, is like trying to work out which year is peak life year for a human - 15, 25, 35 45???
Rising Sun explained what Peak Oil means, maybe I should’ve done it.
It’s of course not an immediate point of disaster, but we have an increasing demand and soon a dwindling production. So it’s like New Years Eve a good point to look back and forward and think a little.
And another point I’d like to add is that it’s not just about what we put in our cars, that seems to be a common misconception. The fuel is just a tiny proportion of what we need oil for. The real kicker is our electric energy. And there could be a potentially unlimited amount of oil in khazakstan, the problem is how quick we can get it out of the ground and if we still have a positive energy bilance in doing so (which is the limit to the “technological improvement theory”).
If the oil production drops from 200 million barrels a day to say 20 million barrels from this single source, we’re in the shit already, even if this 20 million barrels would be there for millenia.
But there comes a time when one’s had enough New Year’s Eve’s, the liver’s less able to handle the fun, and it’s harder to get out of bed.
Forget all the deeper issues about oil.
Just focus on your motor car.
What proportion of local commerce and industry, just in your suburb never mind Detroit etc, relies upon these things? Petrol station. Mechanic. Panel beater. Auto electrician. Air con mechanic and regasser. Tyres. Brakes. Clutches. Auto parts. Tow trucks. Car insurance. Businesses that supply all of the foregoing, like auto paint, bake ovens, hydraulic hoists, mechanics’ tools, computer chips, computer testers, printers, office suppliers. And those that supply the businesses that supply the businesses. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Leaving aside the fact that we won’t be able to get around like we do now, what sort of impact would it have in your area if everything related to motor cars shut down over the next two years?
About twenty to fifty per cent of the local economy, I’d say.
Add in the difficulties in getting around, what happens to the supermarket and hardware warehouse etc that you go to now that you won’t when you have to walk?
1920’s stores, or nothing?
RS, given that most goods are transported by road, I would wager that the percentage of the economy as a whole is much much higher.
In discussing all this “peak oil” stuff, remember that a large proportion of the world’s output is currently essentially rationed by the OPEC countries to keep the price high. if it weren’t for this cartel, oil production would be much higher and oil prices would be much lower.
Agreed.
I stuck to the local effect because people can always understand it.
And it’s simple, like me.
At larger levels, we get into road transport as you said, but also fuel for ships and planes, not to mention fuel used in countless production exercises and support for those exercises.
I’d hazard a guess that there’s as much, probably more, oil used in getting a litre of petrol into our car than we actually put in.
In discussing all this “peak oil” stuff, remember that a large proportion of the world’s output is currently essentially rationed by the OPEC countries to keep the price high. if it weren’t for this cartel, oil production would be much higher and oil prices would be much lower.
Definitely.
And if we relate some of those countries to activities that are useful to a harmonious and productive world, do any come up as being a waste of space?
And what relationship is there between such countries like, say, Saudi Arabia and other problems in the world like, say, radical Wahabbism?
The best thing the West could do is come up with an alternative energy source ASAP, but that’s a bit awkward given the reliance upon oil of all sorts of Western corporations.
Why does the name Halliburton spring to mind?
Limiting production just moves the turning point for a certain oilfield a few years back and it actually results in a lower production maximum. You only get a flatter hubbard curve.
They maybe could produce 20 mio barrel a day now and do only 15, but the result is that in a few years they can potentially produce 17 million (which will then be the all time max) instead of 13 Million if they went to full production now. In the same time the other oil fields run full production however and their drop will be significant.
So you are right to an extend. Opec manipulates the price now and they’ll get a good portion of money out of it in the future, but the underlying problem cannot be compensated by this behaviour.
RS, Halliburton et al will be at the forefront of economically viable alternatives when they indeed become economically viable. This is because there will be lots of money to be made, and they already have the infrastructure.
Frankly, we have better things to do with oil than burn it (plastics, pharmaceuticals etc), but while it remains relatively cheap and plentiful it will remain the fuel of choice. And given that the enviros object so vehemently to nuclear power, it will remain the fuel of choice for the foreseeable future unless governments turn round and say “screw you environmentalists, we are building more nuclear again”.
Given that bio fuels are turning out to be a complete and utter con (I had high hopes, particularly if Africa could get its sh1t together and grow fuel crops, but it appears that it’s the developed second world countries who seem to be chopping down lots of rainforest for it who seem to be in the forefront, as well as first world countries turning existing agricultural/fallow land over to it, but in any case the energy balance seems to not add up), “renewables” such as wind are a complete waste of time (unpredictable, unreliable, expensive, requires conventional backup, and grotesquely subsidised by the taxpayer, and produce 4/5 of bugger all energy), hydrogen is still produced by steam reformation of methane, and fusion has been “10 years away” for the last 30 or years, the only option for the mid-term is to build new generation pebble bed reactors.
Oh, and a quick message to anyone who wants a hydrogen economy but objects to nuclear power: I want some of what you have been smoking…
The one reason why alot of “alternative” sources are not exploited properly is because the oil companies pretty much cancel them out.
A solar powered power station was pretty much sh1t canned when the Bush pulled all of the tax breaks on it, as it became uneconomical. Despite the fact that it had allowed an almost Tripleing of the efficiency for solar cells.
It is high time that the cost to the planet, ie fossil fuel burning, was factored in to the financial cost of things. Then we may see a return to local businessses supplying local needs, better. In place of some huge globabl corperation that sees its client base as its servant not the other way around.
Here here 1000 yd stare…
Although traces of the fundamental elusiveness of human-made predictions may possibly be traced into The Year of Our Lord 1125, when William of Malmesbury favorably compared economic perspectives of the kingdom by means of evaluation of the number and productivity of the vineyards of England with those of France, the concept of peak oil and subsequently induced societal change definitely represents an overworked expression, that repetitively pronounces the doomsday perspective of the humankind.
Even though in the past there have been warnings that we are running out of oil or that it is becoming extremely scarce, perhaps never before in the human history projections of energy supply were not so depressing. Excellent historiography about this issue you will be able to find here:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47276
And here:
http://www.energyseer.com/NewPessimism.pdf
However, one fundamental question - is there actually any rational basis for such an apocalyptic outlook? – was almost totally neglected. And the answer is – no, not at all, honorable ladies and gentlemen. The only thing that surely will be changed is our confidence in the present model of livelihood and human economy, our confidence into deeply embedded tenets of economical faith that the gold collars finally will justly suffocate the blue and the white ones.
Simplifying assumptions generally help people to understand a presumed common set of rules, controls and motivations guiding human economical behavior. General assumption, for example, is that people are economically rational; that is, given the right information at heir disposal, they make positional, production or purchasing decisions in light of a perception of what is most cost-effective and advantageous. From the standpoint of producers or sellers of goods or services, it is assumed that each of them is intent upon maximalization of profit. To reach that objective each of them is completely free to consider a host of production and marketing costs and political, competitive, and other limiting factors, but the ultimate goal of pure profit seeking remains clear. Finally, we assume that in commercial economies the best measure of correctness of economic decision is afforded by the market mechanism. The Holly Grail of the system – General equilibrium is marked by the price at which supply equals demand, satisfying the needs of consumers and the profit motivation of suppliers.
The only problem, honorable ladies and gentlemen, is that all previously mentioned postulates are only partially accurate. You don’t believe this? No problem, we have a plethora of sufficiently convincible real-life cases.
Route 837 connects the four United States Steel plants stretched out along the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. In the late 1960s 50.000 workers labored in those mills and route 837 was completely choked with the car traffic and steel hauler trucks. Railroad investments were generally abandoned, due to high construction and operating costs and supposed economic drain caused by underutilization, although the general patterns of energy utilization have indicated that railroads are more energy-effective, essentially nonpolluting, adapted to steady flow of single commodities between two points, and with known possibility of railroad routes and nodes to provide intervening development opportunities. Lower terminal costs, and individualized service of the highway carriers were more appreciated, although energy efficiency of the transportation was notoriously low.
By 1979, however, fires were going out in the furnaces of the aging mills as steel imports from Asia and Europe flowed unchecked into domestic markets, due to inherent requirement of American corporations to financially capitalize their international investments, mainly profitable due to so called spatially fixed costs of production (read: very cheap labor supply) in artificially de-regulated markets. By the mid 1980s, with employment in the steel plants of the Mon Valley well bellow 5000, the relatively freshly built highway was only lightly traveled and only occasionally did anyone turn at the traffic lights into the closed and deserted mills.
Abandoned US Steel mill – Monongahela River
At the same time traffic was building along many highways in the northeastern part of the country. Four-lane Route 1 was clogged with traffic along the 42 kilometers of the “Princeton Corridor” in central New Jersey, as that stretched off-road in the 1980s had more office space, research laboratories, hotels, conference centers and residential subdivisions planned and under construction than anywhere else between Washington DC and Boston. Further to the south, around Washington itself, traffic grew heavy again along the Capital Beltway in Virginia, where vast office building complexes and commercial centers were converting fertile rural land to urban uses. And east of NY City traffic jams were truly monumental around Stamford, Connecticut in Fairfield County, as it became a leading corporate headquarters town with 150.000 daily in-commuters, with an average fuel consumption of 17l/100 km, as anticipated by EPA exploration (VW Golf Diesel drivers, please – don’t cry!).:roll:
By the early 1990s, traffic in the Fairfield County had thinned as corporate takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and corporate reorganizations compounded by a lengthy recession reduced the number and size of companies and their need for both employees and office space. Vacancies exceeded 25% among the office buildings and research parks that had been so enthusiastically built during the 1980s, and vacant “corporate campuses” lined stretches of formerly clogged highways. But simultaneously traffic was building elsewhere in the country as over half a million Americans during the late 1980s and early 1990s gained their new technology related jobs in a series of widely spaced, emerging high-tech hot-spots clustered around new destinations.
It is obvious that projections of energy supply and demand are difficult at best, because the technical, economic, political and societal assumptions that underlie such projections are constantly changing. It is clear, however, that we must continue to research, develop and evaluate potential energy resources to ensure sufficient energy to maintain our society, and we do have some really workable, completely rationally-based alternatives to the peak oil doomsday perspective.
The use of geothermal energy – natural heat from the Earth’s interior – is an exciting application of human knowledge and developed technology. The idea of harnessing the earth’s internal heat is not new – geothermal power was developed in Italy (Lardarello) in 1904 and is now used to generate electricity – indeed, as correctly observed by honorable Mr. Drake, the most important profile of energy – at numerous sites around the world (Iceland), and a few in the western United States and Hawaii. At many other sites of the world geothermal energy is not hot enough to produce electrical power, but it definitely could be used to heat buildings, or for different industrial purposes. True – existing geothermal facilities utilize only a small portion of the total energy that might eventually be tapped from the Earth’s reservoir of internal heat, but the very geothermal resource is abundant. If only 1 % of the geothermal energy in the upper 10 km of the Earth’s crust could be captured, this would amount to 500 times the total global oil and gas resource.
Peak oil problem? Well, not really – basically we are facing the peak of the economic intelligence and human collaborative will. :roll:
Actually, a lot of the enviros are beginning to break ranks and back nuclear power development, both in the States and Europe. Mainly, because the technology and safety aspects have improved to the extent that things seem more feasible and building new plants will become cheaper and cheaper while coal and oil fired power plants will continue to spew filthy smoke…
I’d like to add, hearing a very good discussion of this subject on overnight radio in the US (formerly hosted by Art Bell) where a pretty succinct definition of “peak oil” was simply that the cost and benefits aspect of production was nearing its peak; meaning that there was still plenty of untapped oil fields, but the technology was such that they were not economically viable for large scale extracting and thus it was getting to be more and more expensive to squeeze out the last drops…
we’ve seen the future and the future is ethanol (corn oil)
Nukes are pretty good for power. There are plans in Britain, if it ever happens, to have a couple of Nukes pumping out power for the hydrocells, and the rest will come from wind, solar, tidal, etc.
The idea being if the renewables can’t provide power then the Nukes can be turned over to the grid. Most of the problems with nukes are when you try to turn them up or down to meet demand. So a constant load makes them more efficient and safer. The old heat stacks should be torn down and the cooling water sent around local areas, for heating. There is a power station in the UK which heats a farmers greenhouses (for free) as a means of cooling off.
Houses also need to built properly, to avoid the over use of resources. Many houses in the World are designed around the ease of building rather than the benefit of the occupant.
Power consumption should be brought down too. Also has anyone seen how much methane just ONE family of 4 will produce from their own poo?
Do you search the ideal source of energy?
DO not forget guyes the eny source of energy EXCEPT the Sunny finally warm up of Eaths atmosphere.
So i think that neither metan nor oil , nor even the Uran or Hydrogen do not let us to creat the really ecologically safe source of energy.
So we ALREADY have the brillian, ecological and enought cheap kind of energy - we need just to develop the methods to use it.
Our dear friend Librarian has already introduce you the Other Excellent Natural ecological way to produce the hit energy- geothermal. Howeve the obviouse lack of this way is the fact this excellent way could be used ONLY few places in the Eath ( mostly in the areas of volcanos) i.e. we have to transform the electrical energy developed in such places to the Great distance.Another porblem of such places is very hight danger of the level of seismic activity.
In the territory of Russia - i know just the one place , convenient for the geothermal sources- Kuril ilsands, Kamchatka and Sahalin. I’ve read about the experiments to use the geothermal station that was used for heating the buildings and producing the electrical energy.
But another matter is Sun 
We have it ewerywhere ( well practically in 90% of the Eath land). Besides there were the great land of the Eath near the equator where the Sun transmit the over 1 kWatt enegry per the square metter.
I mean the deserts of Africa , Asia and Australia.
The one of the great experimantal resaulf of using the solar energy was reached in the New Maxico in 1978
the NSTTF. Where the 220 mirrows 6x6 metters each focuced the sunshine to the 1.5 metter spot on the 60 metter tower via the special computer focusing system.
This station was used for the Military and technological reseaches not for the producing the energy.
However the other excellent exapmle of of the Solar Stations is the now buiding record 154 MEGAWatts Australians SES in Victoria.The cost of the project 57 million dollars.
The contemporary silicon solar battaries could enought effectively produce the sun energy into the electrical one( from 25- untill 60%)
So as you could see the World energetic problem is not so hard as it try to inspire to us the Oil-oligarh who prefere to spend a 250 billions of dollars EVERY YEAR for the war in the Iraq (i.e for the war for oil) then to
develop the new effective and safe ways to realize the energy;)