Out With The Old, In With The New
The end of one year and the beginning of another. Traditionally a time to take stock of what recently happened and what we expect of the future. Be advised: Not all is well with the world. But good news lurks toward the end of this report. You want some good cheer, get there.I’ll start by once again reminding you of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and of Tom Whipple. Why? Because the two seem to have melded into one during the year, and much of what I know comes from ASPO and Tom.

I’m going to sound like I think peak oil has arrived. Has it? I dunno, but I don’t think it matters. I agree with William of Okham who observed, about a thousand years ago that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one; if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, sounds like a duck it’s probably a duck. What’s scary about peak oil is what happens to the price of oil. The price of oil rose by 57 percent during 2007. Somebody observed that oil rose from $1.80 a barrel 1973 to $100 a barrel today. What you’d expect in a peak oil situation. Look’s like a duck to me.

The history of ASPO goes back to petroleum geologist Marion King Hubbert, long departed, who in the mid ‘50s declared the U.S. would experience the phenomenon of peak oil on or about 1970. He was derided for his views but continued to insist that was the case. His opponents said we haven’t even looked for all the oil there might be in this country, how could he know that? Hubbert didn’t need to know. His perception was based on the behavior of species, not on resource inventories. Turned out the biological factor trumped the physical. Since Hubbert, against all seeming odds, was proven correct, many scientists began to wonder if worldwide petroleum production would follow Hubbert’s predicted curve. Hubbert himself predicated a peak in world petroleum production shortly after the turn of the century.

For decades scientists have wrestled with the problem. Tom Whipple is a journalist who picked up on peak oil and began to write on that subject. He’s good at what he does, awfully good at it in my view. I suspect it was Tom who began the electronic clipping service on energy matters, www.energybulletin.net, which surveys the world press and notes matters of interest. I am heavily dependent upon that source for my information. Recently EB and ASPO seem to have merged. Every Monday ASPO produces a report on the petroleum supply situation; the report is authored by Tom Whipple and appears on EB. Whipple continues to write for the Falls River, VA News-Press. Tom’s year’s end reports in the News-Press are what I invite you to look up in EB and consider.

The Future
On 11/1/07 he considered the future, confessing that anything said was mere conjecture, saying: “I am frequently asked, “What is going to happen to us?” and the honest answer of course is we really don’t know in any detail. The world has never been to peak oil before and there are so many factors that will affect a world in oil depletion, it is difficult, or better yet nigh impossible, to paint a picture of what life will be like 10 or 20 years from now.” He goes on for several more paragraphs, and I assure you it makes stimulating reading.

On 12/23/07 Tom came in with a piece entitled “The peak oil crisis: storm of the century.” In that piece he looked at the combination of peak oil and the economic mess left from the collapse of the housing bubble in this country, noting for instance that lending institutions are supporting an 11 trillion dollar debt load with 1.1 trillion in assets. Same doggone thing that happened in 1929. Pile a shortage of fuel on the probable consequences of that. Then throw in the rapidly growing problems caused by climate change, problems with food and water supplies (aggravated by the rush toward biofuels, another peak oil event), and the combination of forces is fearful indeed. The British Journal ‘The Economist’ noted a one third increase in the food price index during 2007. Biofuel output is expected to be five times greater in 2008. I do recommend a reading of that article, but not just before bed. We face awesome challenges in the months and years ahead; the question is, are we bright enough to deal with what’s going to happen or what will become of us?

How’ bout another warning of hard times ahead? Perhaps you remember Richard Heinberg, the professor from northern California, teaching something like human ecology and traveling about – he was in Eugene not long ago. He has composed a splendid academic paper which appeared in full on EB on 12/3/07. Heinberg is largely concerned about food supplies and his warnings are very serious indeed.

The Good News Section
Good news is surfacing – things aren’t all bad, not by any means. Congress took important steps forward with the 2007 energy bill – not the giant steps that some hoped for (this president will not hesitate to veto and that’s a definite and for the time being inevitable limitation). The bill increased the requirement for fuel mileage standards, insisting that SUVs join the party. As far as I’m concerned the barn door is locked a bit late – by the time CAFÉ is fully implemented I doubt you’ll see SUVs available in whatever auto lots are still around.I haven’t seen the actual bill. It’s over seven hundred pages long and nobody yet has offered it to me. Just haven’t looked hard enough I guess, but I’d probably rather see the committee reports that were published before passage of the act. That’s where intentions are revealed. But I know, thanks to ASPO’s last Monday report, that there is provision for an electrically powered transportation system. That was my biggest fear – that liquid fuel supplies would disappear and there would be no way to restock grocery stores, never mind how farmers are going to operate. All we needed now was for the full promise of the photovoltaic cell to be realized, to bring a new and far better way of supplying energy to keep us alive. We already had the cell, but the price of a silicon PV panel is daunting, and would probably not be adopted to a necessary degree.

SOUND TRUMPETS! THE CAVALRY HAS ARRIVED1 WE ARE SAVED!
The following is reproduced in full:

Solar energy ‘revolution’ brings green power closer
John Vidal, The Guardian
Published on 4 Jan 2008 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 4 Jan 2008.

The holy grail of renewable energy came a step closer yesterday as thousands of mass-produced wafer-thin solar cells printed on aluminium film rolled off a production line in California, heralding what British scientists called “a revolution” in generating electricity.

The solar panels produced by a Silicon Valley start-up company, Nanosolar, are radically different from the kind that European consumers are increasingly buying to generate power from their own roofs. Printed like a newspaper directly on to aluminium foil, they are flexible, light and, if you believe the company, expected to make it as cheap to produce electricity from sunlight as from coal.

The Guardian is a good paper, probably better than anything we have in this country (That’s the Manchester Guardian – from England). According to their article, and there’s reason to believe them, the answer to the peak oil problem is at hand, and at the same time a way to sharply decrease our greenhouse gas emissions. We can scratch coal-fired power plants, we needn’t transform coal into liquid fuel for a double assault on our living space.

To realize the benefits we must trust our legislators and administrators to get a brand new transportation system set up very, very soon. Private electrical vehicles are practical, but with sharp limitations having to do with the problem of range. A battery operated vehicle operator must choose between range and speed. Go fast and you won’t go far. Go slow and you’ll go farther, but light rail would have been much quicker. It almost always is, even now. With bullet train speeds such as the French have established, a coast to coast trip in a single day is feasible, while eliminating the airline limitations on passenger space. Portland to Seattle during a Super Bowl commercial break? Why not?

My residual concern has to do with the acceptance of the new order of things. The predominant problem is the custom of relying on liquid fuel. Backing away from that system will cause serious disruptions which may be unacceptable to a lot of people, including many of the wealthiest and most powerful among us. The death of the internal combustion engine will be accompanied by what Alexander the Great called funeral games. Things could get pretty wild. The guys making a lot of noise in the back of the bar may become peeved and won’t take it anymore.Unhappily, most of our neighbors are likely to be taken by surprise. The popular media continues to ignore what is happening (in the U.S. That’s why all the media quotes in this article come from England. Those matters are ignored by the media in the U.S.). Those dependent upon the telly for their thinking will be given little time to understand and adjust to the reality of peak oil. There’s really no help for that. They’ll have to adjust as best they can.

We must depend upon our legislators and administrators to take care of things for us. We’d best be careful whom we elect in November. Then we’d best pay attention to what they do and call them to their duty as necessary.

The Rest Of The Story
A closely related issue – you want off the power grid and to be independent. Quick, easy, cheap and light solar panels are in the immediate offing, but what about after dark. What do you do for telly in the night? Or to warm the house on grim January days and long January nights? The other half of energy independence will rely on batteries. Happily, R&D on those things is also progressing at a frantic pace.

Try this for size, appearing on EB on Dec. 17th: “Toshiba announced plans to start selling rechargeable batteries next year. Describing its new Super Charge ion Battery, or SciB, as a “Breakthrough rechargeable battery”, the company says it can be fully recharged in five minutes and has a lifespan of more than 10 years if completely run down and recharged once a day.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:44 am and is filed under Energy Future, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.