The Oil Drum

There's an entire industry of analysts trying to keep track of global trade. You might try http://www.globalmaritimehub.com/ , for example. I used to follow http://www.theoildrum.com/ which focused on oil and the broader trade of energy. On the other hand there are various indexes for collapsing complex trade results into single numbers like the Baltic Dry index. This is definitely a question which is amenable to losing yourself in searches.

I think you've got a point, but then I'm old too. I found reading Arthur C. Clarke's 'Profiles of the Future' early on, and Yergin's 'The Prize' later on to be valuable in reasoning about energy, and found 'The Oil Drum' [1] fascinating during its run. But I know I'm an energy dilettante... what resources would you recommend for understanding history, the present, and our future needs? [1] http://www.theoildrum.com/

RIP http://www.theoildrum.com/ everyone should go read at least one article from that site. doesn't matter which one.

Huge mischaracterization to call The Oil Drum a "peak oil website" It was one of the most thought, informative, evidence-based, and civil sites about fossil fuels. The reason the site closed also had nothing to do with "peak oil" "A discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles." http://www.theoildrum.com/node/10059

I'd recommend The Oil Drum - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7706#comments_top There seem to be a small group of people who want to play the contrarian game and claim that people are overreacting to the potentially huge damage the contamination (as opposed to radiation) that Fukushima is going to result in. It's easy to be holed up safe in Oxford and claim radiation is not an issue. Why doesn't this gentleman volunteer to assist at the plants if he thinks radiation is no danger at all.

I would think that regions that have the most mobile phone users per square mile and that are the closest to major Internet hubs would have the best rates. So to me, it would make sense for 3G data to be more expensive in rural Alaska than in Queens, NY. Then again, it might have more to do with taxation and government subsidies, as is the case with the huge difference in the pricing of gasoline worldwide. In The Netherlands, you can expect to pay $7.52 for a gallon of gasoline, while in Venezuela it costs only $0.19. http://www.theoildrum.com/files/GasPrices.png

But what if they don't actually want anything? What if demand is actually being satiated, and all those dollars are just worthless fiat paper that doesn't actually mean anything? http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5309 That article talks about some more complex ideas related to demand limits to growth, but there's also a really obvious demand limit to growth: humans have fewer children when they get wealthy... often to the point of dropping below replacement level. Nothing limits demand like demographic collapse. Economics, being a "science" that does not believe in thermodynamics, believes both potential supply and potential demand to be infinite. In reality in a finite world both must be finite.

The congressional testimony has good diagrams, and The Oil Drum has reproduced a lot of them, amidst good discussion. (Of course, other missing information has contributed to the multitude of plausible-sounding theories about what is actually going on.) http://www.theoildrum.com/

The reason that deep drilling is done is not because there is an abiogenic origin for that oil. There has never been evidence of oil wells replenishing themselves in human time scales. Instead, oil production from any given well always follows a relatively predictable depletion profile. The real reason for deep drilling is that the alternative easier sources are either already mostly gone or more expensive/slower to extract. There is still plenty of "difficult" oil left. Unfortunately there are signs that most of it is not economic to extract at prices which the global economy can support. I think this is what caused the current recession and volatile oil prices, and it is only going to get worse. See also http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6517

Not necessarily. If it's half, it may be worthwhile on an energy basis in a narrowly defined sense. But there are far-reaching secondary energy costs beyond this explicit accounting. How do you account for the fuel burned in the jetski that your combine operator uses in his free time, or the cost of forging the steel that went into his combine blades? We live in a global economy and in this sort of analysis, there are probably hidden emissions not noted in the study that make 2:1 EROI insufficient. There are non-EROI issues as well. What happens if we devote all our land to biofuel production? People starve. What happens if we devote all our land to 10:1 biofuel production and it doesn't cover 1% of current demand? We have crops with higher Energy Return on Investment, just none (so far) that are economical to produce in Iowa in order to win the Iowa caucus. Brazillian sugarcane ethanol is perhaps 5:1. Daytime, immediate-use solar is something like 30:1. Less when you factor in batteries. Wind turbines around 20:1. Hydropower is maybe 100:1. Oil varies enormously. Used to be, sweet light Saudi crude from the Ghawar field might break 100:1. Most fields globally more like 10:1-20:1. Alberta heavy oil sands are something like 5:1. If you dip all the way down into ultraheavy kerogen fuels, solid at room temperature and demanding lots of processing, there are certainly deposits that are less than…

Not that I advocate drilling in California, or increasing the amount of fossil carbon dumped into the atmosphere, but I'm not entirely convinced that oil prices will only go up. This has helped me in understanding a fundamental paradox of orthodox economics and the environmental movement, in particular the Simon-Ehrlich wager. I'm beginning to suspect Simon might have won regardless. He did in the time scale initially agreed on: a wager for the price of five metals in 1990, made in 1980. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager) Energy is fundamental to the economy. It is very fundamental. If a future in which California decides it is expedient to extract the oil under its lands and waters is one in which there's been widespread economic disruption, it's possible that the total decrease in economic output would lower the price of oil. As a practical matter, oil prices above $85/barrel have been identified as recessionary (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7246). It's currently at $95.61 for WTI, $104.01 for Brent (http://www.oil-price.net/). An early reference to the connection between energy (specifically oil) and economic ability was Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of the nuclear navy) in 1957. Profoundly insightful, and forshadowing much of what came to be associated with the ecology and counterculture movements: http://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predicting-peak-… Peak oil will happen, it's merely a question of when it will…

> I don't foresee either an energy or a climate crisis. There is a hard limit on how expensive energy gets because at some point you can turn totally renewable energy into a fuel of some sort, ideally taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to do it. It's not cost effective now because energy is so cheap. But like I said: there's a limit to how expensive it can get. I used to agree with you until I read this terribly thought-provoking article[1]. Now I'm not as sure. It was published by the Oil Drum, a blog I subscribe to for oil industry news, so the article doesn't have a hidden agenda. The key insight I gleaned from it was the concept of the energy cost of energy sources. I used to think that even if wind power wasn't as efficient as oil now, eventually oil prices would rise and wind would become a viable alternative. However, what the article showed was that wind power itself uses oil in the manufacturing of the materials, shipping and construction of the wind mills, etc. You can think of the concept of the energy return on energy invested. And as the supply of oil dwindles and costs rise, that EROEI will change. Oil at its start had an EROEI of 100:1, which means you could get a hundred barrels of oil for the cost of using one. Now it's at 20. Wind energy has an EROEI of about 20 over the lifetime of the equipment, but unfortunately costs a lot of energy up front, and only recoups that energy over time. So the two issues the article raises is that as the cost of oil…

I think using biofuels is highly likely to be a net detriment to help climate change unless your fuels are synthesized in very specific conditions. Most likely outcome is marginal changes in emissions and large increase in starvation. http://theoildrum.com/node/3495

This is interesting for replacing small wind turbines, which often break before they recovered their embodied energy[1], but I have a hard time seeing this technology replace large scale commercial wind turbines. Kite based wind power has been talked about for years, but somehow it fails to materialize. I assume cost and safety concerns play a role. [1]http://theoildrum.com/node/6954

Yep [1] [2] [3] [1] http://theoildrum.com/node/8615 [2] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/ [3] https://www.declineoftheempire.com/2012/01/wealth-and-energy-consumpti… And this one as a bonus :-) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

There are in fact concerns about the amount of nuclear fuel available. See for example: https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1421 and in more length: http://theoildrum.com/files/O_118_Michael_Dittmar.pdf The author also notes that, as of today, nuclear energy contributes only a very small part of the delivered energy mix.

Real-world tests of small wind turbines in Netherlands and the UK http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6954

Google gives me zillions of hits on "cost of windfarm is transporting the blades". The first I looked at is http://windpower.sandia.gov/other/031428.pdf, which computes costs of transport in the 6-7% range. The second I opened is http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/61063.pdf. From a quick glance, it has transport costs at around 10% of capital costs. Of course, transport prices can go up a lot by increasing transport distance or by changing location. Tops of mountains or densely populated areas may be way more expensive. I do not rule out that transport costs in some cases are way higher, but I don't think it is generaLily true. And that Jerome de Paris text may be on http://www.theoildrum.com/user/Jerome%20a%20Paris.

If oil were the primary fuel for electricity generation, you'd have a solid point. Assuming that we were to compare it to natural gas, for which you may have used oil as a proxy, this provides some substantiation to your claim: - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/1863 But the calculations here don't reflect that peak power generation doesn't reflect peak demand. So, we've looking at adding in battery's costs too. At the end of the day, if a greedy capitalist can make a bigger buck (with or without government subsidies) with wind than they can with coal or natural gas, they will. Given that the efforts to bring new capacity on-line fluctuate (dramatically!) with the comings and goings of government subsidies, my guess is that they aren't quite the competitive economic wonder, at this point, that they are touted to be. YMMV.

The link is somewhat old, but this should help you learn more http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379 (and understand that "thousands of years on fission with current technology" is pretty far from the truth)

It can be measured; here's a page listing the energy efficiency of various foods: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6252. It appears it would depend on what we were giving up; if we replace meat with direct energy, we could save around 95%, for instance, but if we replaced grain with electricity we'd save much less, as grain is already fairly efficient.

Here's a good article[1] on why US oil consumption has declined in recent years. Basically: Improved vehicle MPG, flat/decreasing VMT [2], decreasing non-highway use of distillate [3], improved industrial efficiency, and a shrinking industrial sector. [1] - http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9811 [2] - Vehicle Miles Traveled [3] - http://www.eia.gov/oog/info/twip/twiparch/2013/130227/twipprint.html

"Norwegian crude oil production peaked in 2001 and as of 2012 it has declined about 50% from the peak. This fact has been overshadowed by the oil price growth in recent years." http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9166

Here's an even harsher assessment of plant-derived ethanols from Dr. Tad Patzek, chairman of the Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin: Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol. (As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )

I find this hard to believe. Compare http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9584

Your claim about 20 years required to return the energy to produce a solar panel is false. Googling a bit after "energy returned on energy invested" (EROI) indicates that there aren't really any reliable ways to measure this number. Wikipedia quotes 1.5 for the US, which seems ridiculously low. This study (http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf) from 2011 indicates an average EROI for solar panels of 6.5, and this does not take into consideration that this number appears to be rapidly increasing for newer and cheaper panels. See article from the Oil Drum at (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3910). A conservative EROI of 6.5 would indicate that it takes about 4.5 years to earn back the energy to produce a panel, assuming static energy output and panel lifetime of 30 years. In short, the data I can find indicates that you are wrong.

Those are mostly oil tankers. Since 20% of the world's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz [1], the Iranians threat of closing that passage has petroleum prices recently. More analysis at The Oil Drum [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz [2] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8956

Existing storage technologies are insufficient to replace fossil fuels by multiple orders of magnitude. Here's a nice summary: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8405 The bottom line: storage will need some serious R&D to find a secret sauce using fuel cells or nanotech or something.

There is a lot of interesting analysis regarding possible responses to declining oil production. If you respond to a 3% decline in production by building infrastructure to produce energy by other means, you only deepen the energy deficit because that infrastructure takes energy to build. Check out this article: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8526 You might right though. Sperm whale oil is still used to lubricate satellites.