Peak Oil

[Urwumpe]

I'm not sure I know what you mean. It's true that hydrocarbon markets are more sophisticated now than they were in the 1970s but, as far as I can see, the "speculative" action of futures traders is in fact accurately signaling the real price of oil and gas production. In fact, those "speculators" are doing us a big favor by delivering the bad news from the future while we still have a chance to do something about it. That is supposed to be the function of a futures contract, and it seems to me that it's working perfectly.

The bad news of the future in this case means, the companies and speculators make large profits by selling oil at higher prices as they should be current demand and supply. The mechanism of futures is meant as tool for controlling the markets more carefully and smooth the price developments, but when you speculate without reason (like what is happening now, when a camel farts to loud in the Arabian desert, the oil price raises by 0.1$), you earn more money as you deserve, as you make short term gains because of possible (not guaranteed) long term effects by relying on the inertia of the market - the demand does not drop instantly - when you push the prices high fast, the demand will react bvy dropping slowly, but steady - and overreact when you push to far.

(See my signature on what a famous economist thought about using long term effects as base for political and economic reasoning)

I call this a good way to make a market fail, as speculation will lead to an economic crash - the rate of speculation shortens the time between two crashes. And when our politicians then interfere in the market by supporting their favorite oil companies, like they still do in the Sub prime crisis, though advised to be cautious, the self-healing of the market will not take place and the market really fail or the delayed self-healing cause more damage to other fields of the economy.

 

[GregBurch]

We don't disagree about principles, but do disagree about the detail of where we are on the graphs. There certainly are irrational bubbles -- I still whence at the fortune I lost in the dotcom bust.

I happen to think that the futures market is accurately reflecting both uncertainty about the political and social situation in the major oil-producing regions, and the long-term balance of supply and demand, within the limits of what can be known (which are wide -- probably something like 30% of the current price).

As for the influence of oil companies on the political process, I agree with you there. Our august political class is as short-sighted, corrupt and venal as it has ever been.

 

[Woo482]

why don't we just use hydrogen fuel for cars ? it does not damage the environment it just gives of water vapor.

 

[Urwumpe]

I happen to think that the futures market is accurately reflecting both uncertainty about the political and social situation in the major oil-producing regions, and the long-term balance of supply and demand, within the limits of what can be known (which are wide -- probably something like 30% of the current price).

I think they are not accurate, but I am not an economist. my personal illustration of what I feel is wrong looks like that:

You drive on a highway at comfortable 120 km/h. on the top of your map or navigation system, you see that you need to make a slow 90° turn in about 10 km.

Now, the oil price speculators reaction would be instantly pulling the car around by 90°, because the future predicts that your car needs to travel in this direction. of course, he will this way leave the road and crash the car - just like his personal economy, unless he instantly jumps to the next car after sending his own car off course (which all good speculators do. They ruin one economy and go on with ruining the next, IMHO).

The normal and sane reaction would be following the road and use only as much control on the car as needed to stay on the track - not leave the road by over-control as well as not leaving the road and crashing the car by lack of control.

 

[Cairan]

Hydrogen

To produce hydrogen in commercial quantities, you either crack it out of natural gas or electrolyse water. If the point is to move away from fossil fuels, then you have to go the electrical way...

When you go with electrolysis as a mean of producing it, then the electricity generation must not be with natural gas, coal or any other fossil fuel, as it also perverts the objective of not using fossil sources...

That leaves nuclear, solar, wind or hydro power as the only sources of electrical energy to generate hydrogen.

Now consider that the primary energy use is about as much for transportation than what is consummed in all other fields, and you will come to the startling conclusion that for humanity to switch to hydrogen as an energy carrier, we would need to double, if not triple, electrical output. On such a large scale, nuclear and solar are pretty much the only options.

Also consider that hydrogen, even in it's liquid form, is a lot less energy dense than gasoline or kerosene... You get a lot less energy per liter of the stuff, so the drivable range of cars goes down. Add on top of that the fact that there is basically ZERO infrastructure to distribute compressed or liquid hydrogen at every corner, like it is with gas stations, and we have the answer as to why we just can't switch overnight to H2.

Sad, but this should have been done 15 years ago by our leaders...

 

[Woo482]

ok how about pedal cars ? we should distribute them all over the world (yes thats right even to the penguins in the antarctic)

 

[GregBurch]

why don't we just use hydrogen fuel for cars ? it does not damage the environment it just gives of water vapor.

Simple: Hydrogen is very hard to store and ship. Creating a hydrogen infrastructure for the world is a project of enormous and prohibitively expensive proportions.

Electricity, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. We have an existing infrastructure for the distribution of electricity all the way to the end user, technology for storing it is making rapid progress, and the technology to generate it cleanly and cheaply and without dependence on religious maniacs stuck in the 7th century exists. The only thing keeping us from doing this is STUPIDITY.

 

[Urwumpe]

Also, nuclear fission is also not the long term solution - the amount of Uranium in the world is pretty low, and we already wasted a lot of good Uranium for military purposes. In some years the supply of easy Uranium will also drop - and then?

 

[Woo482]

how about nuclear powered cars ? or would that start killing every one
EDIT1:I thought there was loads of uranium on the moon ?

 

[GregBurch]

I think they are not accurate, but I am not an economist. my personal illustration of what I feel is wrong looks like that:

You drive on a highway at comfortable 120 km/h. on the top of your map or navigation system, you see that you need to make a slow 90° turn in about 10 km.

Now, the oil price speculators reaction would be instantly pulling the car around by 90°, because the future predicts that your car needs to travel in this direction. of course, he will this way leave the road and crash the car - just like his personal economy, unless he instantly jumps to the next car after sending his own car off course (which all good speculators do. They ruin one economy and go on with ruining the next, IMHO).

The normal and sane reaction would be following the road and use only as much control on the car as needed to stay on the track - not leave the road by over-control as well as not leaving the road and crashing the car by lack of control.

Hmmm, sounds to me like you should be selling everything you can and selling oil futures short.

 

[GregBurch]

Also, nuclear fission is also not the long term solution - the amount of Uranium in the world is pretty low, and we already wasted a lot of good Uranium for military purposes. In some years the supply of easy Uranium will also drop - and then?

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/348/new-age-nuclear?page=0,2

 

[Cairan]

Yeah there's about 4 times more Th around than U... And nuclear fuel would be a very good reason to wander around to gather it in near Earth objects as it is compact enough to make it economical....

Now just imagine the Greenpeace protests when we tell them we'll have a couple of tons of Uranium and Thorium enter our atmosphere in flimsy containers :rofl:.

Isn't it ironic that environmental interest groups actually might have hindered our switch away from fossil fuels?

 

[GregBurch]

Yeah there's about 4 times more Th around than U... And nuclear fuel would be a very good reason to wander around to gather it in near Earth objects as it is compact enough to make it economical....

Now just imagine the Greenpeace protests when we tell them we'll have a couple of tons of Uranium and Thorium enter our atmosphere in flimsy containers :rofl:.

Isn't it ironic that environmental interest groups actually might have hindered our switch away from fossil fuels?

B I N G O

Greenpeace's real agenda is anti-capitalism and anti-human. The radical environmental movement's rejection of nuclear power and genetic engineering is the clearest revelation of this. They won't be happy until we're all living in the Middle Ages again.

 

[Urwumpe]

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH:

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/print/348/new-age-nuclear?page=0%2C2

OK, Uranium and Thorium. :lol:

Where Thorium is much more abundant as Uranium (two to three times), if I remember correctly, as Uranium decays slowly into Thorium. Still, no infinite resource.

That is the problem - we either need to hop from resource to resource as fast as they deplete or find a cycle which allows us to use as much of a resource as it gets produced.

On Greenpeace: They are not as bad as they are often put, but like all organizations, they have a problem with making themselves no longer needed. Also they became dangerously lazy - The prototype nuclear waste storage in my region, Asse II, is showing all kinds of dangerous behavior since 1989 and it took the general public and our "concerned" government until this summer, to find out that not only the operating organization is not up to the task to manage this nuclear waste storage in a responsible way, but also that all safety calculations done since 1967 based on this type of nuclear waste storage are plain wrong and done mostly by assumptions than observations and calculations.

Where is Greenpeace when you need it? Also, just as reminder - the current ecological minister of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, comes from this region. He suddenly acts surprised on the state of the "experimental" nuclear waste dump (only 150,000 barrels of waste) and demands a detailled investigation of the real state of the storage.

The mayor of the tiny town close to Asse did more for revealing the real state of the nuclear waste storage as Greenpeace and the Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety together. Though he was one of the guys with the lowest amount of power in the matter.

Great isn't it?

 

[Cairan]

That is the problem - we either need to hop from resource to resource as fast as they deplete or find a cycle which allows us to use as much of a resource as it gets produced.

That's our predicament right now: we stayed so long in one spot that the rug is running under our feet and we have to do leaps to stay away from the cliff.

I'd rather have our down south neighbors go nuclear all the way instead of going with coal... Coal is very bad as far as CO2 emissions and acid rains go... I don't care what America's Power and other groups say about coal, it just makes no sense to burn it all up the same way we went with fuel.

As for Greenpeace, well, the Green stands for money, not trees... It has become, like many other organised groups, a self-sufficient money gathering and career oportunity venue for people to give to when they want to feel good and work for when they want to have an "impact"... These guys have become pros at generating media coverage for fundraising purposes, the hell with good common sense.

 

[GregBurch]

OK, Uranium and Thorium. :lol:

Where Thorium is much more abundant as Uranium (two to three times), if I remember correctly, as Uranium decays slowly into Thorium. Still, no infinite resource.

That is the problem - we either need to hop from resource to resource as fast as they deplete or find a cycle which allows us to use as much of a resource as it gets produced.

Man, you're going to think I'm a real jerk, since I seem to be picking on you so much .... but I disagree strongly with this. Thorium reactors can more than power our civilization with a very nice rate of progress for the whole planet for decades. By the time we start running short of thorium, the technology to implement widespread and very effective distributed solar power generation will have caught up with requirements.

 

[Urwumpe]

Man, you're going to think I'm a real jerk, since I seem to be picking on you so much .... but I disagree strongly with this. Thorium reactors can more than power our civilization with a very nice rate of progress for the whole planet for decades. By the time we start running short of thorium, the technology to implement widespread and very effective distributed solar power generation will have caught up with requirements.

Well, don't worry about that.

Well, I think that we also had lots of time for getting rid of the oil, as well as many warning shots... do we ever learn? :dry:

Also, the amount of thorium is maybe large, but still limited. I don't know the mass of Thorium required for replacing oil by Thorium in our energy consumption, but I think the few million tons of Thorium could be lost faster as we can find alternatives.

PS: By now reading more about it, as I did not know about Thorium reactors at all before, I must say, I like the concept. Maybe this type of reactor would be a good way to find a way out of the way out from nuclear power generation in Germany. The main problem which would still have to be solved is the nuclear waste - which is a critical problem.

 

[simonpro]

ok well heres the problem. the dems dont want us to drill in ALL of the major oceans including Alaska which they made drilling those place illegal!?. why. because they are afraid that it will damage the environment. ENVIRONMENT!? please we have our own priorities than worry about that, like keeping us alive. some guy is going to make this legal. hopefully this will really cheapen the prices

1) Alaska is a piece of land, not an ocean.
2) You cannot be serious. How the heck do you need petroleum to survive? We managed to survive for thousands of years without the stuff. How? We didn't f*cking drive everywhere. I could survive quite easily without petroleum. I get my power from a nuclear powerstation, my food is all locally grown, I don't drive places on a daily basis.
The only things I can think of that would have to change are the numbe rof plastic things in my life, but I could survive just fine without plastic.
You do not, and never will, need oil to survive. You just need it to make your life simpler and more comfortable. Please don't confuse comfort with survival, it really doesn't look too good.
As someone else said, there's plenty of people in the world who really are trying to just survive. You're not one of them.

 

[GregBurch]

PS: By now reading more about it, as I did not know about Thorium reactors at all before, I must say, I like the concept. Maybe this type of reactor would be a good way to find a way out of the way out from nuclear power generation in Germany. The main problem which would still have to be solved is the nuclear waste - which is a critical problem.

And we have to ask ourselves how someone like you -- far, far above the average voter in terms of knowledge of technology -- was utterly ignorant of this technology. It's not an accident. It's the result of the lobotomy that the Green Left has performed on our civilization over the last 40 years.

GB, THHotA

 

[Urwumpe]

And we have to ask ourselves how someone like you -- far, far above the average voter in terms of knowledge of technology -- was utterly ignorant of this technology. It's not an accident. It's the result of the lobotomy that the Green Left has performed on our civilization over the last 40 years.

I think the main problem is, that even the nuclear supporters are not capable of selling it... like they wrote in the article, many aspects and problems are still not solved, as it requires a completely new reactor design.

It is not the instant quick solution demanded, nor is it sure, if they could come up with a economic Thorium reactor design before nuclear fusion becomes economic.

Another great aspect I see - it is nearly impossible to use Thorium as nuclear weapon fuel, it can only be used as booster and neutron absorber. Maybe a good "low cost" solution for developing countries, as Thorium reactor would require less complex technology as nuclear fusion.

The question for me is not, why I did not know about it. I can't know it all (now). The question for me is currently more, why it is also not presented as possible alternative to the current plans of our nuclear power companies to just build modernized PWRs.