The Dark Green future is upon us - a bit of oil, a bit of renewables, somehow we muddle through. Sounds like I'll have to postpone my plans to start a road-warrior clan. Again.

No sh*t.

Sheikh Yamani said years ago that just as the Stone Age did not end for want of stone, so the Oil Age would not end for want of oil.

Kind of obvious, except to those who seem incapable of realising that things change, technology develops, and so on. The kind of people who warned in Victorian times that London would soon be submerged in a moutain of horse crap. The kind of people who today think we depend on oil, when in fact we merely depend on energy.

EG

It's possible the day of "peak oil" has arrived ? but not in the way everyone expected. Instead of peak oil, we're looking at a peak in demand for oil.

so what you are saying is that market forces are at work here. Subtle changes in behavour among individuals are changing the case for oil.

No campaigning, no high voltage pblicity stunts, none of that was necessary (apart from being entertaining of course).

And lets not forget no dictatorship is necessary, as demanded by a few of your fellow campaigners.

Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

Are all those folk in China, India and elsewhere just going to decide to do without? Or are you suggesting they won't be able to afford oil? If so, which are the cheaper alternatives they are going to be able to access?

Oil's demise - you must be having us on, surely. OIl is the cheapest protein man will ever have at his disposal. There is no substitute for oil.

Funny how the marketeers are smug about the idea that demand for oil will fall of its own accord once people can no longer afford to heat their houses.

Refusing to invest in renewables and other forms of alternative energy because we still got plenty of oil is a little like the family who live on the capital inherited from a dead relative, and absolutely refuse to get a job or look for another source of income until they have spent every cent.

Sadly, this appears to be very characteristic of homo sapiens.

@gerardarduiane

Are all those folk in China, India and elsewhere just going to decide to do without?

possibly he means the oil intensity of a first world lifestyle is falling. You know with the internets and stuff like that

There is no substitute for oil.

For large scale electricity generation and probalby most land transport, nuclear generated electricity.

For marine transport, modern sail or nuclear.

For air transport - that's tricky, but nuclear is theoretically possible although I admit unlikely. Possibly sharp reductions in long distance air travel and use of diesel-powered propeller aircraft for short flights.

To the extent liquid hydrocarbons are needed, they can be synthesised from coal or natural gas.

GM crops may well in time reduce the need for fertiliser, a major consumer of crude oil.

There are many not so difficult (but usually more expensive) substitutes for most common plastics.

There are actually quite a few substitutes. Oil just happens to be cheap to extract, simple to ship and relatively safe to store as well as being realtively straightforward to chemically process into desired products.

The real answer is very large amounts of very cheap electricity.

EG

Being almost 70, I remember well, way back in around 1958
my school geography master (an excellent Catholic priest belonging
to an obscure Belgian order) saying - the Athabasca Tar Sands
are where almost inexhaustable oil supplies are - if only we could extract
them economically.
The easy-to-extract hydrocarbon fest is clearly coming to an end.
Renewables are clearly the future - and burning oil reserves, rather
than using them as a feed stock for petro-chemicals, will hopefully
start to be seen as being an obscenity.

But how do we make these greener technologies without oil or other fossil derivatives? How do we forge metal? I thought the metal had to be red-hot.

Every microchip, every, nut and bolt, every solar panel, every electric car requires metalworking. How can we do this without fossil fuel? Or do we go back to using wood? That's fine for helmets and swords but what about the car industry and mobile phones, and computer chips, and more mobile phones and ipads?

fatfreddiescat

If you pass a hefty electrical current through a lump of metal, it gets hot.

It is not uncommon in steel processing to electrically heat (up to red hot) steel bar to render it suitable for mechanical working.

EG

John Sauven

The oil age won't end tomorrow, but the idea that it will go on for ever ? with its attendant catastrophes and tragedies ? is seriously in question.

However, John, demand for drilling hydrocarbons will be prolonged unnecessarily by Greenpeace's preferred anti-nuclear pro-gas strategy.

World fossil fuel mix is roughly equivalent to burning gasoline: C8H18. This is ~1/3 each of oil, coal and natural gas. World has produced between 1/3 and 1/6 of all "conventional oil." While sale price is ~80/bbl, actual production cost is less than ~$35/barrel. Equalvaent amont of natural gas is greater, with the delivered cost of LNG eqivalent to ~30/barrel. Coal is even cheaper. Prices above these are essentially a tax paid to whoever controls the land the oil is under.
Converting oil, gas, or coal takes ~0.1 kg-Fe/W to build the power plants, boats, pipelines, wells, coal haulers. "Renewable energy" takes about 1.0 kg-Fe/W, so conversion equipment, with energy storage, costs 10 times as much as fossel fuel conversion equipment.
Absent significant political disruption, none of the above will change before CO2 doubles. Just switching from coal to natural gas requires a carbon "tax" ~1000 USD/tonne-carbon. Only two possiblilities exist: everbody goes back to eating potatos and walking or build 50 TWe nukes.
While existing atomic piles are more expensive than existing coal plants, the cost difference is mitigated by atomic power being less subject to fuel supply disruption. Atomic piles can go 2 years without refueling versus ~1 month for all other sources of energy.
The last large round of USA power plant construction, before the "dash to gas" was mine-mouth coal plants and atomic piles. This was apparently to avoid fuel supply disruptions. The subsequent switch to CCGT ~1990 did not work out so well. When the El Paso pipeline blew up in 2000 and it did not rain in the North West, somebody's lights were going to go out. The plan that would have worked was abandoned for political reasons.

" At between $65 and $90 a barrel, the room for long-term profitability appears slender. With the global economy remaining in a fragile state and oil prices rallying, it's important to ask whether the economy can withstand further price increases..."

Depends on who is running economies.

I know it's not like me, but there is a lot I agree with here. Maybe not the peak-in-demand argument, etc, but certainly that the way to decrease our production of CO2 is to be found in clean energies.

Yes, that's a nice way of putting EG's "No sh*t!" :)

But the mere fact that lobbyists like Sauvern are talking in terms of solutions is surely a very good sign.

Celtiberico
The very history of homo sapiens is one of remarkable adaptation. Personally, I'm betting (and definitely hoping!) on this continuing.

On oil prices, do bear in mind that the actual cost of extracting crude oil varies from about $5 (Saudi) to $15 (the harder Russian fields) a barrel. The rest is the effect of having a cartel rather than a free market in oil, government taxes and royalties.

EG

NeverMindTheBollocks

But the mere fact that lobbyists like Sauvern are talking in terms of solutions is surely a very good sign

Quite possibly because they see the AGW bandwagon lying all forlorn in the road, sans wheels. Some of the brighter ones have doubtless figured out that endless opposition to pretty much anything is getting anywhere and they perhaps need to be a little more constructive.

EG

A classic liberal non sequitur: something is wrong in the world so a good thing should follow. Preferably something I can sound big about or make money from.

China's demand for oil means $80 a barrel and the recovery therefore kills the recovery.

Smells like war to me.

endless opposition to pretty much anything is getting anywhere

Should of course be NOT getting anywhere

EG

It's possible the day of "peak oil" has arrived ? but not in the way everyone expected. Instead of peak oil, we're looking at a peak in demand for oil.

Absolute nonsense! There will be no "peak in demand" for oil.
Are the Chinese and Indians suddenly start to give up their new found cars and motorbikes?

A couple of quotes from the articles,

China, the world?s second-biggest energy user, may increase fuel consumption by 5 percent in the second quarter this year

Sales(India) in the fiscal year ended March 31 climbed 25% to 1.53 million cars from 1.22 million in the previous year

How ill they feed the planets bloated population? Without all those fertilisers (created using the chemical compounds and the energy from crude Oil?)
Without the mechanical tractors?

Oil is getting much, much harder to drill for. The end of easy oil is upon us. Human beings will still use it, want and need it.
All that will happen is that the price will increase.
"Biofuels" will take food from the mouths of the poor so that greedy idiots in the West can continue to run around in ridiculous 4x4 "status" cars.

but the idea that it will go on for ever ? with its attendant catastrophes and tragedies ? is seriously in question.

It WILL continue. There is NO other energy source that has the chemical stored energy capacity of Oil, the ability to supply plastics and the myriad of chemicals that are sourced from crude Oil.
There is no other energy source where you drill a hole (OK, in some cases a very expensive hole!) and millions of years worth of "free" energy pours out.
No other energy source has the ability to do this.
In EVERY other energy source the energy has to be physically generated not just drilled for.

I have no doubt that human beings will attempt to get every last drop of oil out of the ground. They are already drilling and producing Oil successfully from 3000m below the sea.

As for,

adopting cutting-edge hybrid technology

And with what will you replace the fossil fuels that allow the toxic materials (for the batteries) to be mined out of the ground?
Where will the "magical" energy come from to power these cars???

pushing vehicle electrification,

Once again, where will the energy come from? Electricity is just form of Energy. It has to be generated....
Don't even think about mentioning Hydrogen. It is merely an expensive, explosive form of battery that is extremely expensive to store.

I really don't think most people, (including, amazingly Greenpeace) have any idea what is going to be unleashed on the planet when peak Oil starts taking effect....

By the way, I am all for cutting energy use but for Greenpeace to hope that "Peak in demand" will solve it, they really have no idea.

The future is always uncertain, but it seems likely that demand for oil will fall in line with the now likely continuous never-ending reductions in supply, due to basic economics, but what will this mean for transport in particular, that depends 99% on oil.

Although we should see land and sea based public transport convert over to electric power in the next decade, private automobiles are almost certainly finished as a form of mass transit.

At present there have not even been water-tight studies on what we would need to power our current fleet of cars, it will be somewhere between 10 and 100 extra nuclear power stations, and building them could take 30 years, way beyond the end of cheap oil.

@celtiberico

Refusing to invest in renewables and other forms of alternative energy because we still got plenty of oil is a little like the family who live on the capital inherited from a dead relative, and absolutely refuse to get a job or look for another source of income until they have spent every cent.

you assume there is a magic bullet there which we are willfully ignoring.

there is plenty of investment in "renewables" and green technology, but they do take a long time to develop and no alternative is as promising a source of enery as oil is right now. So your analogy is not really correct.

Nothing is easy . The best "renewable" may be hydroelectric power but try getting a dam built these days wihout Greenpeace going a*****t

as the oil price went over $90, consumers "began to change their behaviour" and that there was significant "elasticity of demand above $100 a barrel". In other words, if it costs too much, we can't ? and won't ? buy it.

Someone will buy it. In my lifetime I expect to see any product relying on oil to become fantastically expensive and exclusive.

There are alternatives to oil but the money men have to be convinced they can make more money from them.

I will be among the first to drive an electric car. That is our future.

BrownOutNow

There will be no "peak in demand" for oil.
Are the Chinese and Indians suddenly start to give up their new found cars and motorbikes?

Not suddenly, but they will, and those they keep will be electric. See the second comment in this thread in re people who don't see that technology changes.

Without all those fertilisers (created using the chemical compounds and the energy from crude Oil?)

Use ersatz crude from coal or natural gas, use GM crops which don't need so much fertiliser, move more people to cities to increase available farmland, irrigate desert to do same, etc., etc., etc.

Without the mechanical tractors?

Tractors could be electrically powered. They could be steam powered, which is not as hopeless as many think these days. In some areas horses or oxen might be enough. Again, GM crops may reduce the need for mechanisation of farming.

There is NO other energy source that has the chemical stored energy capacity of Oil, the ability to supply plastics and the myriad of chemicals that are sourced from crude Oil.

Oil is in a convenient form that suits many purposes. It is perfectly true that there is as yet no SINGLE substitute for it. There are, however, many different alternatives depending on application.

I have no doubt that human beings will attempt to get every last drop of oil out of the ground. They are already drilling and producing Oil successfully from 3000m below the sea

When it's cheaper to get the same end-use amount of energy from another source, oil will be abandoned.

Once again, where will the energy come from? Electricity is just form of Energy. It has to be generated....

Nuclear.

EG

We'll never have the same lifestyle without oil. But people like this piece writer are still hoping we won't have to give up our iPhones, and it will only be a little inconvenience!

euangrey: But what source is going to be used to generate the electricity that's going to power the cars, tractors, etc? Will we go all-nuclear/solar/wind power?

The other thing is that oil isn't just used as a fuel but as a basic content in things like plastics - it's about far more than trains and boats and planes (and cars and lorries and tractors, etc).

euangray

Did you know than nuclear power (that is, the plutonium and uranium) has it's own peak?

Peak uranium arrives at about 2040. Here is one report:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379

Oh and, try drilling for plutonium and uranium without oil!

At the VERY least, peak oil will make all this all prohibitively impractical. There are no easy alternatives, oil is/was essentially free energy. Virtually every alternative thrown out so far fails to compensate for oil's peak (genetically engineered algae bio-oil, the "hydrogen economy", electric cars, nuclear power, oil shale etc.) - even all together. To believe that something to save us will arrive in the future is akin to religious "faith"! Stop clinging to your lifestyle, it's not our birthright.

Euangray

Nuclear eh?

Look at the market predictions for market demand and actual supply of Uranium..
It aint pretty....
Uranium is also a mineral along with the rare metals that go into producing the Toyota Pious.

The human race is living crazily beyond it's means. There is no sustainability at all in the way we live our lives.
Things are going to change and much sooner than you think......
Have a read here.....
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

davidwayneosedach

ah yes, buy an electric car and save the world (well, your little world anyway)!

except, oops, we need oil to: create the car in the manufacturing plant, transport the car to you, and (oh yes) generate the electricity!

Clunie

But what source is going to be used to generate the electricity that's going to power the cars, tractors, etc?

Look at it this way: it would only take about 4 new nuclear reactors (1.6GW EPRs) to generate enough electricity to power the 25million cars in use in the UK. Swap a few hundred tonnes of uranium for all the petroleum used by cars in the UK per year. It is not that hard to conceive of. And as a bonus you avoid thousands of pollution deaths per year.

and while i'm feeling talky... !

to version1

there is a finite number of locations for building hydroelectric dams in the world. we're using nearly all of them now! (and unfortunately for oil lovers, Greenpeace may have a point: dams have a bad influence on the environment!) aaaand... try building a hydroelectric dam without oil and trucks and cranes etc.!

i can't believe how many times people here throw up alternatives to oil, that rely on oil themselves!

ColinG: I appreciate that - all for alternative energy sources myself. I do wonder where all the uranium's going to come from for these nuclear power stations, not just in the UK but worldwide - it's another finite resource, after all - and what we're going to do with the waste though.

A wholesale tax on oil that stabilises the price at a constant - whether it be $60, 70. It eliminates volatility and tells companies they have a viable business if they can produce cheaper energy.

ColinG

Look at it this way: it would only take about 4 new nuclear reactors (1.6GW EPRs) to generate enough electricity to power the 25million cars in use in the UK.

You should read this: 24 Years Later, The Consequences of Chernobyl

"...some 985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident. That?s between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow."

how long until we reach peak Uranium?

there can't be an unlimited supply of fissile materials?

Uranium is not that uncommon and in any case every very low grade ores are useable.

From Wikipedia on the subject:

Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[8][13] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[8] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[8] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[10]).

Modern nuclear reactors (i.e. not the 1950s style PWRs) can burn a range of fuels, including uranium but also the more common thorium and they can use high-level nuclear waste as fuel.

Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume. They are usually found where states need to produce plutonium for weapons (uranium is not very good for making bombs).

In reality, there is no shortage of nuclear fuel for the forseeable future. Likely by the time we do get short of the stuff, we'll have developed a better alternative anyway. As observed above, things change and technology advances.

Forecasts of "peak uranium" are on the assumption that only currently known deposits would be worked. Global demand for uranium isn't all that high, so few prospectors go out looking for the stuff. Increase demand by a shift to nuclear power, and people will look for and find new deposits and new methods of extracting it.

On peak anything, remember that the world has been within 10 years of running out of oil since 1914. We're still using it.

EG

Theeightyonekid

Oh and, try drilling for plutonium and uranium without oil!

Drilling for plutonium?!

Plutonium doesn't occur in nature beyond trace amounts. We make it all in reactors.

And we already have enough plutonium and depleted uranium in the waste at sellfield to produce all our electricity for centuries. Main reason we don't is because natural uranium is relatively cheap and plentiful. Given that uranium is extractable from seawater at affordable prices there is no forseeable end to the supply. At current rates it could supply all our energy for millions, if not billions of years.

Mining uranium could be done with any energy source. Some Australian mines could use geothermal because there is a lot of geothermal heat near uranium deposits (due to the heat from radioactive decay).

But even assuming we use oil for mining, the point is that every unit of energy that goes into nuclear power (including mining) produces about 50 times as much energy output. So at the very least it is possible to make fossil energy last much longer. This same point goes for wind or hydro incidentally.

All we need to do is prioritise what the oil is use for, instead of squandering it in machines that could be powered by electricity.

edwardrice

...some 985,000 people died of cancer caused by the Chernobyl accident. That?s between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004.

Well, I'm afraid that even at the risk of moderation I am going to call baldercrap on that one.

I followed the link. Your Mr Grossman appears to be a rather obssessive conspiracy theorist. The number of casualties is probably two and possibly three orders of magnitude out.

The number of people *known* to have died as direct result of Chernobyl is at worst in the very low hundreds.

EG

"It's possible the day of "peak oil" has arrived ? but not in the way everyone expected. Instead of peak oil, we're looking at a peak in demand for oil. "

Jeebus. *That's* how you're going to spin it? That the economists were right all along? That when oil gets more expensive then people will use less of it?

You know, like people have been shouting at you will happen for the past few decades?

Dang, I wish I could have a job like that.

"I've been wrong for decades but it's still a disaster so send money now"?

I'll give you one thing, you've cojones of steel to try it.

TimWorstall

You know, like people have been shouting at you will happen for the past few decades?

Exactly. A thousand times exactly.

EG

theeightyonekid:
hate to be a scold and a pedant but plutonium does not exist in nature, as a transuranic element it cannot be mined, it can only be manufactured in a nuclear reactor os some sort. And EG beat me to it: rumours of the demise of nuclear fuel are not just exaggerated, they are ludicrous.

In any case, well before we reach physical peak oil, economic incentives will force a switch. Doomsday through scarcity scenarios, ever since Malthus, have been an abject failure for over two centuries. They are all based on crude extrapolations that do not take into account techhological change and responses to incentives.

And speaking of Malthus, don't get me started on the population obsessives who always crop up in such threads. You want to control population? Make sure people get prosperous. It's alerady happening, folks. Fpr the same reasons that I don't think oil demand will never exceed 105 million barrels a day, I think that human population will stabilise at under 9 billion by 2050. With a lot of luck (93 is not such an impossible age to attain any more) I'll have a chuckle about it, and maybe even win some money if anyone is willing to wager it.

that should be

Fr the same reasons that I think oil demand will never exceed 105 million barrels a day

euangray

Mr Grossman appears to be a rather obssessive conspiracy theorist.

The article is about a book -

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment " by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is authored by three noted scientists: Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

"The book is solidly based?on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports?some 5,000 in all."

ColinG

Yes I do know that. Simply put, plutonium comes from uranium. And uranium is predicted to peak at around 2040.

And we already have enough plutonium and depleted uranium in the waste at sellfield to produce all our electricity for centuries

Where does it say that?! Please don't pull numbers out of thin air - where is the source?

Last time I checked it was thought we have about 40 years supply left. Here's a nice website of info (with links to sources):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_depletion#Primary_sources

But even assuming we use oil for mining, the point is that every unit of energy that goes into nuclear power (including mining) produces about 50 times as much energy output.

The point is you can't dig for uranium with uranium! I'm not saying it's impossible; but it's not economically feasible. It ALL hinges on oil. Would it be patronising of me to list every use of oil? (It's a very very long list.)

yobro

Yes I do know that. I should have phrased better. But I have just made a reply (see above): plutonium, simply put, comes from uranium. In my original post I put a link saying it is believed to peak in 2040, and above I have put a link showing it is believed we only have about 40 years of power from uranium!