Resources - or the lack of them!

[Gary]

I recently recieved an excellent PDF from Adi, which awoke me to some grim facts. A chat with my daughter revealed that they teach a similar line at school and last this link http://peakoil.com/fortopic2631.html only when to confirm things or does it?.

What am I walking about? Oil, the fabric on which our world is based is running out!

Even in schools our children are taught we have about 60 years of oil left - what then?

What will our petrolium based society do?

If Adi would be so kind as to provide the info he gave me too - I am sure you will find it an interesting read.

Your thoughts?

 

[Pete E]

Gary,

I have seen this discussed a couple of times on some American shooting/hunting forums.

Usually there are a few people who work directly in the industry and they always refute it. They say the claim has been made for years and despite the doom and gloom, the industry keeps proving them wrong. Essentially they are still finding reserves thick and fast and the only real issue is the cost of getting at it and the enviromental risks associated with it.

Many of the big fields in Alaska were predicted to run dry in the 1980's but they are still producing but at a reduced rate. There are fields in the old Soviets 'stans which could make the Arab state production look small while much of South America holds promise which has not been tapped yet.

Short to medium term, the biggest potential problem is China because her economy is literially exploding and she has a huge thirst for oil which is virtually all imported. There are American firms falling over themselves to get contracts to search for oil in China as its a huge area which has not been explored with modern methods.

Regards,

Pete

 

[Gary]

I make you right Pete, China, india and Pakistan they are all growing and drinking oil that is the problem I think, more thirst less oil

 

[Pete E]

Gary,

From what I gather its not going to be a lack of oil as such, but more more a case of at what cost?

We have explored and exploited oil in places like the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, but if you think of how much of the oceans we have not explored its mind boggling. True, much of that ocean floor is beyond our reach at present, but we are drilling to day at depths that far exceed what we could do in the late 1970's..

Then there are places like the Amazon basin or the Artic...theres a good chance there will be huge oil reserves in both places, but what damage will it do to the enviroment to get at it? When will the price be too high? Thats my worry...

Regards,

Pete

 

[Adi007]

I'll compose some more of my thoughts later this week but Gary's right - the more you look into the oil situation the grimmer it seems.

It's a combinations of problems but the main problem seems to be related to how fast we can get the oil out of the ground rather than how much is left (at least for now). Currently the world needs about 28 million barrels of oil a day - to put this into perspective, the recent oil and gas field in the North Sea that was mentioned in the news the other day holds an estimated 500 million barrels of oil - that would satisfy the world's need for 18 days. Even if it yielded 50 billion barrels of oil the world could consume that in 4.5 years.

It's running out folks - and forget all this nonsense that goes with hydrogen fuel cells as being the way forward. If you do the math on those you come to two conclusions;

- There isn't enough precious metals in the world to make anywhere near the number of fuel cells we'd need
- Hydrogen takes a lot of energy to make, more than it give out in fact

 

[Squidders]

then we're into solar, hydro electric and wind turbine... unless we all want to hack down trees and not see the sky for smoke. electricity is the way forward because burning things isn't going anywhere.

Anyone else see the irony of that?

 

[arctic hobo]

If they dig in the arctic they'll have to dig through me first T:
I mean, it's become ridiculous. When we run out of oil, what will happen? :?:
The world will be in chaos. And us bushcrafters will be out in the woods, cooking the day's forage, feeling both sad and slightly superior. :roll:

 

[Moonraker]

It's not just where it comes from Gary, it is also where it ends up i.e. landfill sites where oil based products (plastics, man made fabrics etc) take an age to decompose compared to natural materials which are also easier to recycle.

Currently only about 3.5% of all plastics generated is recycled compared to 34% of paper, 22% of glass and 30% of metals. At this time, plastics recycling only minimally reduces the amount of virgin resources used to make plastics. Recycling papers, glass and metal, materials that are easily recycled more than once, saves far more energy and resources than are saved with plastics recycling.

More than 3.5 million tonnes of plastics are used in the UK each year, making up a further 7% of household rubbish. Nearly all the plastics in use are made from oil and resist any form of biological decomposition. These are non-biodegradable plastics and cause problems in waste incineration since many of them give off poisonous gases when burned. Biodegradable plastics which are made from sugar and other carbohydrates rot away within months of being buried. However, the cost of biodegradable plastics is far greater than that of ordinary plastics since their production is carried out on a small scale.

source:http://www.yptenc.org.uk/docs/factsheets/env_facts/recycling.html

I think most people interested in bushcraft have a good awareness of these problems and the impact on the environment around us and do a lot to reduce the impact of these petroleum based products outdoors. We can also make a difference by choosing natural materials over man-made where possible.

 

[RAPPLEBY2000]

dare i mention it nuclear power? :yikes:

potentially you could make a nuclear powered electric car easily.
just a tad on the dangerous side if you crash it :bu:

one other option steam power? again nuclear power being a incredibly dangerous option.

re- introducing steam could get alot of woodland back for fuel, but the further reapearing problem of polution would be ever present to further diminish the ozone layer.

don't forget gas coal and oil run most the national grid too!

i can immagine rather than try to sort out new vehicles more than likely there will be huge conflicts to get the oil, a bit like, ..erm whats that placxe again....oh yeah iraq!


little bit of politics! ): :roll:

 

[bambodoggy]

I have no idea how true it is but I had my parents over for dinner the other night and they were saying how nice my woodburning stove was and of course my dad pointed out that our heating bills should go down. I said that we hadn't actually used our central heating so far this year and his little eyes lit up as only a man's can at the thought of lower heating bills ):
Anyway the conversation went on to the cost of heating and the various issues with oil and coal and I mentioned wind power and the gist of what they said was this (as I said I don't know how true it is):

"It takes more power to create and maintain a wind farm than the total energy out put from that farm".
At first I though rubbish....how can it, they don't take that much looking after but then my dad went into more detail sighting the metal work involved (right back to mining it in the first place), the power to put them in place, for the reasearch costs and so the list went on. He claims that if you add it all up then it comes to more that the power out put for the entire working life of the wind farm.

Does anybody know if this is true? It sounds odd to me but not entirely untrue and if this is the case then Heck, what a con!!!!

Personally....I'm all in favour of Nuclear power... Nuclear technology is leaps and bounds ahead of the old soviet days of Chernobyl and seems as safe as any other way of getting power (equate one nuclear accident with stripping the earth of coal/oil and then the damage caused burning it) if you look at the whole picture....i.e fair enough one nuclear accident is horrendus but the use of coal/oil is just as bad but in a slower way...in fact it's actually worse because it's happening all the time!
They're working on a new type of neclear power that won't even create the yucky waste so I think it has to be the way forward.

And yes yes yes.....NOT IN MY BACK YARD!!!!!

 

[Lithril]

For powering the country I'm all for renewable sources, we've actually signed a section with npower to push the money we pay into the wind farms instead of powerstations. For transport however the technology is already there to ditch oil already, the problem is though that the major oil suppliers buy any other solution and then don't progress it so we keep buying oil. There is a small country in south america that has found means of coverting diesel engines to run off of coconut oil and most petrol engines will run off of alcohol, very cheap conversion too, ethanol can always be produced.

 

[Adi007]

The problem with nuclear power and the reason we don't each have one in the shed is cost - the cost to build, look after and then dismantle safely a nuclear power station is measured in the billions of pounds and the cost per watt of juice that comes out of them is tiny ... rememebr that in the 1950s the idea was that electricity would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering for the public and it would be free. Well, that was pre privatization and things have changed.

Bio fuels are also good, but calcs I've seen suggest that to run all the cars in the UK of bio fuel you'd need an arable area the size of the UK ...

The real problem of peak oil is that oil, gas and coal has allowed the world to grow a population of humans who are there purely because of this cheap, high energy fuel source ... here's some grim reading:

In personal communications with Prof. Ken Watt of UCDavis, Watt stressed the importance of energy use per person. He also said that he and about 100 other scholars "believe that energy and numbers of births will be the two key variables in determining the character of the future. We now feel the planet and humanity can only coexist as a living system for a long time if the human population gets down to 1/70 to 4/70 of the present level. It is difficult to see how to do that without violence..." 1/70 of the present global population is approximately 100 to 300 million people. That's for the whole planet!

Life-Expectancy of Industrial Civilization - http://www.afgen.com/populat36.html
:shock:

 

[Gary]

And lets not forget all the bye products of oil - plastics, synthetics ect ect all gone - Oil IS NOT JUST ENERGY.

Medicine, food, biulding materials ect ect all are in some way oil or a by product there of dependant - thats what makes it scary.

It is just meant no more cars I'd say so what but it doesnt the fabric of soceity from the Credit card to the corn flake all use oil somewhere along the line!

 

[RAPPLEBY2000]

yay bring back bakerlite!

 

[arctic hobo]

Trouble with nuclear power is that it needs uranium. And uranium is a long way off being the world's most abuntant element, and it too will run out. And it too will cause, like oil does, digging all over the place - except you can't pump out uranium, you have to dig big holes to get it out.

 

[Realgar]

Solar collection drastically effects the surface albedo, wind power strips energy from the atmosphere affecting convection and evaporation patterns, tidal and wave energy harvesting change erosion patterns. They're not pollution free - the pollution just takes a different form. Have any studies been done to determine what their impact might be if used on a large scale?


Nuclear's an ok short term method if we can get round the waste problem, fusion might just save us if the various countries involved in ITER get their heads banged together and stop bickering like children. Personaly I'm all for heavy population control - preferably at the conception end than the Logans run end .
Realgar

 

[dtalbot]

Ghandi said somthing like "it took the resources of half the world to develop Britain, how much would it take to develop India?" and the question we now face is how much to develop most of the world. All our environmental and resource footprints are way too big but we can't complain when the rest of the world aspires to the standands we belive is our right to enjoy!

 

[greg2935]

I know a little about this so ...

Biogas plants (production of electric through anaerobic digestion) takes about 20 years to become profitable, slightly less if you use parasitic heat takeoff.

Wind energy is very finely balanced, the turbines use oil based products anyway, it really depends where you get your materials from, if you buy your steel from the East, it will be cheaper, but environmentally far more expensive. The profit margins are minimal here, and it really depends on who you talk to and where you source your materials.

There are a number of other technologies, all of which require subsidies (read: not commercially viable yet), but all become profitable over long term use, one of the more promising is combined heat and power which is a mixture of technologies to use every bit of power a boiler produces. The basic problem here is that the calorific value of oil is very high, and there are no technologies we have that compare.

Another main problem is that most statistics do not specify the different types of cost, as an example, there is the economic cost, the environmental cost, the human impact cost, longitivity cost. For instance, solar cells could be used in warm countries effectively, energy for nothing you may say, but although people should factor the cost of getting rid of them at end of life, they don't as this is very high, (most solar cells contain large amounts of heavy metals etc but in small quantities around the board: this is very costly to remove). Generally putting the environmental cost into the equations means fossil fuel technologies' costs rise massively, and visa versa for green technologies. We pay the economic cost immediately, the environmental cost later. Good examples of environmental costs are the cost to clean `brown field' sites of heavy metals, this is one reason why builders prefer to build on `green field' sites, and parts of Southampton are still expanding into the countryside when there are parts of St. Marys (in Southampton) that could be redeveloped after being bombed in WWII 60 years ago!!!

Greg

 

[Great Pebble]

Oil... We're not going to run out of in the immediate future.

Sweet, light, easily extractable and affordable crude.... we are.

The "renewable" sources we're talking about at the moment rely quite heavily on oil production themselves, in terms of their component parts. They're also generally inefficient, the increase our demand is keeping pace with, or indeed exceeding the rate at which renewable sources are or can be introduced, finally solar, wind and wave power all have environmental impacts of their own. Different from those posed by carbon sources but our children's children may not thank us for having no place to go that they do not hear the turning of blades or find their view of the stars blocked by PVP panels.

Nuclear... There's the waste problem. Finding uranium may not be that much of a problem if breeder technology can be properly used and controlled.
But the waste issue is still... An issue.

So what's the solution then?

Reduce the one thing that every Government in the world is currently trying to persuade us we shouldn't. Our consumption.

Of the new three R's (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) the most effective is reduce and for some reason it's the least touted.... Ever wonder why?

 

[Great Pebble]

Oh.. Forgot the important bit.

By substantial reduction in global consumption we can reduce our carbon emissions and substantially increase the longevity of current sources of fossil fuels. Preventing further environmental damage through opening new fields of extraction and allowing for R&D time for a truly sustainable energy source for us all.

I reckon that there's something in extracting hydrogen from water but I'm no scientist.

Of course to do any of this you have to break the back of a resolutely consumerist society.

Good Luck.