Below is a slide presentation given by David Archibald in Melbourne on February 5th. He’s asked me to repeat it here for the benefit of all. I’m happy to do so. He covers climate issues, oil and coal, plus Thorium reactors in this presentation of 110 slides.
He also touches on his upcoming book, which we’ll have more on later. In the meantime, his current book is still available here
Slides below, be patient while they load. There is a wealth of information here. A PDF is also available. – Anthony
Archibald NCC 5th February 2010 (PDF file 6.2 MB)
Most of the discussion of “Peak Oil” is just flatulence. Given the huge fields of oil/gas bearing shale worldwide, and the rapidly evolving technology of extraction, energy concerns are really non-existent. The world will happily pay $40-70/bbl for oil, and $4-$5/mmf for natural gas. At these prices there are simply too many sources of oil and gas around for “Peak Oil” to be reached quickly.
Watch the price of land rigs, not the price of deep water rigs. When the land rig price starts heading up, you know that people are frenetically drilling. In particular, try to find a horizontal drilling rig today. Check the rigs on the ground in Texas, the Americal Petroleum Institute keeps track as do sites like the Rigzone.
Coal to liquid is going to be a rough market, if oil stays below $70/bbl and gas <$6/mmf. Oil is currently $14+ over, but gas is almost $2 under. Gas will stay there, check for the total amount of gas flared at wellsites worldwide and you'll see why. The cost of LNG is basically the cost of the transport, the gas is actually free.
To bring the thread back to CAGW, we will put additional CO2 in the atmosphere, but not enough to come anywhere close to modifying the climate. We will change land use, we will change vegetation types, and we will blacktop and pour concrete over a minuscule fraction of our planet, and this will change at least the microclimate in those areas. This will not stop the world from revolving, nor the galaxies from spinning, nor the universe from doing what it pleases. Gaianetics not withstanding.
Dr Archibald,
The price of steam coal FOB Newcastle, Australia is currently $120/tonne.
According to the slides 1 tonne of coal = 2.2 barrels of oil.
$120/2.2 = $54 for the cost of the coal for 1 barrel of oil.
How then can coal to liquids then be profitable at a price of $60/barrel?
Not to be difficult, but the $60/barrel CTL numbers I’ve seen are based on using $12/ton Wyoming coal, not $120/tonne Australian coal.
The solar people use ‘sun at the equator’ numbers, the wind people use wind based on the windiest place on earth and the coal people use the price of coal in Wyoming.
As they say in Real Estate, location,location,location.
Could we raise the level of the level of the discussion to the point of discussing real costs in real locations rather then theoretical costs in ‘optimum’ locations.
The solar cycle is actually progressing faster than the predictions show. Check the fourth column (which ends in Avg) of this site. DO NOT use the last column, as the values produce a curve that is too shallow on any time in the last 9.5 months or so (the last column is very similar to a 19-month smoothing of the values, and does not include the future values that are needed to properly compute it for those months). I’m thinking maximum is around March 2012 (+/- 9 months), with a smoothed max around 30 (+/- 10).
We live in interesting times.
There is a presentation by Howard Hayden, “A Conspectus on US Energy” [May 2, 2009, American Physical Society Meeting in Denver, CO.] which is a good companion piece to Archibald’s.
http://www.energyadvocate.com/aps.com
Hayden concentrates on the physics of solar and wind energy and how utterly dilute they are. He has a couple outstanding photos. One is a conventional 500 MW powerplant, right next to a 10 MW solar-thermal powerplant. The solar plant is larger. Slide 28: Solar II, Mojave Desert
Another picture is Ranco Seco, 900 MW nuclear (retired in June 1989) and a Solar PV array on a bigger footprint in the foreground that delivers peak 2 MW.
Archibald’s presentation is good, but neglects the economic, dependibility and land use folly of renewable green energy power sources.
jrwakefield says:
February 12, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Can someone elaborate on the empty cities in China as an indication of war(?).
This seems to be something of a non sequitur or similar throw away line in the text/presentation. Here is something to follow up on though. Last year these cities were reported to be a means for folks with money to invest in a manner that fit with the low interest rate building and the low return on other investments open to them. The growing affluence of a growing population means housing has been expected to be a high return investment. People are paying to have houses built in these new cities without any expectation of living in them. Somewhat like the boom in Las Vegas and the buy and flip purchaser. The idea that this is in someone’s war plan is about as useful as my middle school teachers having us hide under our desks when the Soviets were about to bomb the US.
I agree with those who say ‘peak oil’ is definitely not here, and it never will be. Indeed, the existence of the Fischer-Tropsch process that Archibald’s mentions is among the reasons why the notion of ‘peak oil’ is an urban myth. Those reasons are both practical and economic.
For all practical purposes any commodity can be assumed to be an infinite resource.
Humans did not run out of flint, antler bone, bronze, iron ….
And this practical reality is a result of a basic fact of unavoidable economic reality.
When a commodity is abundant it is cheap so nobody seeks an alternative. But readily available sources of a commodity may start to exhaust. And as the commodity becomes scarcer it becomes more expensive (in time, money and effort) to obtain, so people look for alternatives. The alternatives may be new methods to access previously unobtainable sources of the commodity, or they may be something which can be used instea of that commodity. And the found alternatives often prove to have advantages.
The ‘oil-from-coal’ processes (including the Fischer-Tropsch process) are merely an alternative source of crude oil. And if they were a cheaper source of crude oil then natural crude oil then they would displace the natural sources.
Importantly, natural crude oil supplies will not significantly deplete for the foreseeable future. Oil reserves were at about 40 years throughout the last century and will remain at about 40 years throughout this century. This is because oil companies have a planning horizon of ~40 years. Therefore, an oil company does not pay anybody to look for more oil when it has ~40 years of reserves it, but if its reserves fall below ~40 years then an oil company pays people to look for more oil.
There would be great difficulty in finding undetected oil fields if they were rare but, to date, oil has always been found when people have searched for it.
The price fluctuations for crude oil are results of political and market effects: they do not derive from the onset of the exhaustion of crude oil.
And, as Archibald says, there are synthetic alternatives to natural crude oil.
Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa made synthetic crude oil (syncrude) from coal when they lacked oil supplies because they were embargoed. But they used the old Fischer-Tropsch process.
Since 1994 it has been possible to produce syncrude from coal at competitive cost to natural crude oil by use of the novel Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process. I was involved in its development when working as the Senior Materials Scientist at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment, CRE (and UNESCO commissioned a paper on it from me). CRE was owned by UK government and the LSE process became the sole property of UK government when CRE was shut by UK government in 1995 as part of the closure of the UK coal industry.
We proved the LSE technology (both technically and economically) with a demonstration plant at Point of Ayr, North Wales.
UK Government owns the LSE process and gains much income from Brent crude. And Brent crude is valuable because it provides a good blend with Saudi crude (i.e. the cheapest crude).
Crude oil is separated into saleable parts (e.g. petroleum and benzene) by distillation in a refinery. The separated parts must be market products that match market demand (e.g. getting an amount of petroleum must also provide an appropriate amount of benzene: too little benzene and the benzene market is under-supplied, but too much benzene and the excess has disposal costs). However, crude oils from different sources contain different amounts of their component parts. So, a refinery takes different crude oils and mixes them to form a blend that has parts which match market demand. It then separates the parts. Saudi crude and Brent crude form a good blend when mixed in the approximate ratio 2:1. Hence, Brent crude has high value as a blend with cheap Saudi crude.
The surprising economics of LSE syncrude derive from two facts:
(a) The LSE process can be tuned to provide a product with parts that match (varying) market demand and thus eliminates expensive blending.
And
(b) An oil refinery has high disposal cost for sulphur-rich refinery ‘bottoms’ but the LSE process can consume the ‘bottoms’ and so eliminates this cost.
Hence, LSE product is competitive with natural crude when the LSE product is 14% more expensive than natural crude.
The LSE process can use any coal (even lignite) as its feedstock, but UK has negligible coal production. However, use of the LSE process would collapse the price of Brent crude. So, it is in the economic interest of UK government to keep important details of the LSE process as a state secret.
But two important facts remain.
1. The existence of the LSE process constrains the maximum oil price: if oil became too expensive then it would pay the UK to start producing LSE syncrude instead of Brent crude with resulting drop of crude oil cost.
2. There is sufficient coal for at least 300 years (probably 1000 years) so oil production will not ‘peak’ from supply exhaustion for at least 300 years even if natural crude oil supplies were to exhaust.
And nobody can know what fuel will be needed 300 years in the future. Hay as feed for horses was the major fuel 300 years ago, but hay is not considered to be a significant fuel today.
Conclusion:
The idea of ‘peak oil’ is bunkum.
Richard
Moderators:
Please check to see if you can find the post I have just provided. It has vanished. And I do nt know why because it contained no links. Perhaps it was too long?
Thanking you in anticipation.
Richard
harrywr2 says:
February 12, 2011 at 4:05 pm
“The solar people use ‘sun at the equator’ numbers,”
If you want really high sunshine hours, nothing except LEO tops the Andes.
okie333 says:
February 12, 2011 at 4:09 pm
The solar cycle is actually progressing faster than the predictions show.
The polar fields have been changing of late. There are several points to make here:
1) because of the large pixel size [1/11 of the solar diameter] the polar fields measured at WSO will be seen to reverse about a year before they actually do. See paragraph [7] of http://www.leif.org/research/Cycle%2024%20Smallest%20100%20years.pdf
2) the polar fields in the two polar caps are not strongly correlated, one can change a year or more before the other one.
3) the reversal is not a slow, regular progression, but proceeds in random jerks or ‘surges’ of opposite polarity moving towards the poles. On average there are about five such surges.
4) the total polar flux is small, only a one thousandth of the sunspot flux [over the cycle].
5) the past few months have seen a very powerful surge of positive polarity towards the north pole [but none so far towards the south]. Because the polar fields were already weak, this surge has completely cancelled the north polar fields, even to the point that the polar coronal hole that normally lives there has virtually disappeared. You can see that here: http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/beacon/beacon_secchi.shtml
6) since we expect more surges in the year(s) to come it thus seems possible that the north polar fields might build to be stronger than they have been at this last minimum, thus presaging a large cycle 25. We don’t know this for sure, of course, but it seems very possible to me. This is somewhat unexpected, so, yes, these are interesting times
This is an EXCELLENT summary, and taken from an Australian point of view, too (Go OZ!) so I am very pleased with this, but I note two “flies in the ointment” – the spelling on two of the slides are a little off. For example, “Arctic” is spelt “Artic” is the slide about the “Artic” sea ice.
Also, the abbreviations are a bit confusing for us beginners, and do need to be explained a bit better.
These are two small points, but otherwise an EXCELLENT presentation.
GREAT slides; definitely a ”save-local”.
Doesn’t change value, but curious:
Were these slides really presented 5 Feb 2010 as stated, and NOT 2011 ??
Very good summary.
Regards coal economics for displacing petroleum via Fischer-Tropsch, dead on target.
Peak oil timing? Not that sure, but coal provides backup.
Insanity of displacing coal with natural gas? Dead on target. Natural gas is far too valuable as transport fuel and for industrial and agricultural chemical production (methanol & ammonia) to be thrown away for electrical production.
Kforestcat
It would be nice if the mods could ‘cut the deck’ of these slides, making a post for the slides that directly counter the AGW argument, and a separate post for the peak oil and thorium arguments. This would make it easier to refer to Archibald’s argument on AGW, which doesn’t automatically imply the thorium advocacy.
Then, it would be fun to challenge the group of Carbon Cultists who claim to be eager to communicate and debate. The dare: Take each one of the slides in the argument and show us, with real data and real logic, why it’s wrong.
I agree with Amino and Roger, Peak Oil is never going to happen. How come no one talks about Peak Copper, Peak Gold, Peak Iron, Peak Stones, we have been mining these for far longer than oil.
I have a copy of an article titled “The Fuel Situation” from Scientific American in October 1956 that predicts “peak oil” (within a few years from 1956) and predicts that the world will run out of oil by the 1970s.
And the US did peak in 1970. What’s the big difference between then and now?
— the grandady superfields found then are all in terminal decline today: Ghawar, Cantarell, North Sea, Indonesia.
— No new fields today have been found in comparable size to those found in 1970
— we didn’t have to rely on any nonconventional sources like the tar sands and deep offshore in the 1970’s because then we were not desparate for oil.
— the entire planet has been searched, there isn’t anything left to find
— we use 3 times as much oil today that we did then.
— ERoEI was 100:1 then. Today it is 25:1 and falling.
Importantly, natural crude oil supplies will not significantly deplete for the foreseeable future. Oil reserves were at about 40 years throughout the last century and will remain at about 40 years throughout this century. This is because oil companies have a planning horizon of ~40 years. Therefore, an oil company does not pay anybody to look for more oil when it has ~40 years of reserves it, but if its reserves fall below ~40 years then an oil company pays people to look for more oil.
That is just false. The largest oil fields are all in tertiary recovery and are in terminal decline. The UK now has to import oil for the first time since oil was found in the North Sea. Mexico will soon not be able to export any oil once Cantarell is exhausted (down to 400K/day from 2.3m/day). Oil fields found today are small, rare, and extremely difficult to extract (low ERoEI).
There would be great difficulty in finding undetected oil fields if they were rare but, to date, oil has always been found when people have searched for it.
That is also false. More than half the locations suspected to have oil in Saudi Arabia were dry. That’s one example. Read Twighlight in th Desert, Simmons explains this in detail.
Today finding an oil field is a very rare event since the entire planet has been searched. Anything left to find will be small and very difficult to extract.
At these prices there are simply too many sources of oil and gas around for “Peak Oil” to be reached quickly
Just remember that our petroleum consumption grows at 3% per year, that’s a 25-30 year doubling period. That means in as little as 25 years we will need to extract double of every FF we do today.
I agree with Amino and Roger, Peak Oil is never going to happen. How come no one talks about Peak Copper, Peak Gold, Peak Iron, Peak Stones, we have been mining these for far longer than oil.
There is. Google them. We have peaked in copper, gold, uranium and other important metals. Understand that the core commodity is the limiting factor of all society, for without oil we don’t grow food, we don’t mine other essential materials.
“Peak oil” is just a scare phrase. As drilling necessarily must be at greater depths, the cost of extraction will rise. But the earth still has plenty of oil.
The real problem is government, which needs to get out of the way. The free market will then provide plenty of supply, as it always does when left alone to work its magic.
Right now Cuba is negotiating with China to allow drilling only sixty miles from Florida. Cuba won’t even have to drill. It will get a cut of the oil produced by China. We dither while hostile countries suck up oil off our coast – countries that have little in the way of pollution protection. If a blowout happens on a Chinese deep water well, is President
UrkelObama going to force them to clean it up?The “peak oil” scare has been going on since oil was first discovered. But it has always been a false alarm.
OIL RESERVES:
– 1885, U.S. Geological Survey: “Little or no chance for oil in California.”
- 1891, U.S. Geological Survey: “Little or no chance for oil in Kansas and Texas”
- 1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines: Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, at most a 10-year supply remaining.
– 1939, Department of the Interior: Oil reserves in the United States to be exhausted in 13 years.
– 1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division: Oil reserves in the United States to be exhausted in 13 years. Reserves:
– 1.3 Trillion barrels of ‘proven’ oil reserves exist worldwide (EIA)
- 1.8 to 6 Trillion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Oil-Shale Reserves (DOE)
- 986 Billion barrels of oil are estimated using Coal-to-liquids (CTL) conversion of U.S. Coal Reserves (DOE) - 173 to 315 Billion (1.7-2.5 Trillion potential) barrels of oil are estimated in the Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada (Alberta Department of Energy)
- 100 Billion barrels of heavy oil are estimated in the U.S. (DOE)
- 90 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the Arctic (USGS)
- 89 Billion barrels of immobile oil are estimated recoverable using CO2 injection in the U.S. (DOE)
– 86 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (MMS)
- 60 to 80 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in U.S. Tar Sands (DOE)
– 32 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in ANWR, NPRA and the Central North Slope in Alaska (USGS)
- 31.4 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the East Greenland Rift Basins Province (USGS)
– 7.3 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the West Greenland–East Canada Province (USGS)
- 4.3 Billion (167 Billion potential) barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana (USGS)
– 3.65 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Devonian-Mississippian Bakken Formation (USGS)
- 1.6 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Eastern Great Basin Province (USGS)
- 1.3 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Permian Basin Province (USGS)
– 1.1 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Powder River Basin Province (USGS)
- 990 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Portion of the Michigan Basin (USGS)
– 393 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. San Joaquin Basin Province of California (USGS)
– 214 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Illinois Basin (USGS)
– 172 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Yukon Flats of East-Central Alaska (USGS)
- 131 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Southwestern Wyoming Province (USGS)
– 109 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Montana Thrust Belt Province (USGS)
– 104 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Denver Basin Province (USGS)
- 98.5 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Bend Arch-Fort Worth Basin Province (USGS)
- 94 Million barrels of oil are estimated in the U.S. Hanna, Laramie, Shirley Basins Province (USGS) For Comparison:
– 260 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in Saudi Arabia (EIA)
- 80 Billion barrels of oil are estimated in Venezuela (EIA)
Great in the Climate part.
Not good in the Energy side.
The chinesse empty cities is an exageration
http://www.quora.com/Are-Chinas-empty-cities-a-result-of-Sustainable-Development-policies/answer/Bill-Bishop
others hypothesize that petroleum is not a ‘fossil’ fuel but is generated through natural processes deep in the mantle of the earth.
Discredited
http://static.scribd.com/docs/j79lhbgbjbqrb.pdf
jrwakefield says:
February 12, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Today finding an oil field is a very rare event since the entire planet has been searched. Anything left to find will be small and very difficult to extrac
=============================================
You mean like the oil field that was just discovered in the Caribbean?
….or the massive oil field just discovered off Brazil?
@ur momisugly jrwakefield on February 12, 2011 at 6:02 pm re why US oil production peaked: cheaper oil was found overseas. It became far more advantageous for the US to import foreign oil rather than drill and produce it domestically. There was no shortage, it did not run out, there was no Peak Oil causation.
Re not finding any more oil: of course not, not at $80 per barrel for world price. Many untapped oil deposits are known, and have been for many decades.
You stated “finding an oil field is a very rare event since the entire planet has been searched.”
I disagree on this point. One may consider the Earth’s crust to be like a stack of pancakes, and our drilling to date has been much like sticking a fork into the top pancake. There are many, many layers yet to explore. Where drilling is accessible, price alone has prevented such drilling. Where drilling is off-limits due to political reasons, no price is high enough. Many, if not most, areas of the globe have never been explored, especially those areas under the seas.
Many more areas with known oil deposits have never had modern extraction technology applied, thus there is a huge amount of oil yet to be extracted.
Smokey says:
February 12, 2011 at 6:21 pm
Right now Cuba is negotiating with China to allow drilling only sixty miles from Florida.
=======================================
Smokey, that’s 30 miles from Florida. In the straights between Key West and Cuba.
Isn’t that stupid??
We can’t drill off the coast of Florida but they can.
and if anything happens, because of our embargo with Cuba, we can’t even fix it.
The fear of the Horizon spill reaching Florida, and we still can’t drill off the coast of Florida.
There’s plenty of oil, only it’s where we can’t drill…………..
I’ve been personally promised for 4 decades now that oil is running out soon.
“Peak Oil” is just the other side of the CAGW medal. If the supply is not dwindling try to muffle the exhaust. Thats why they dreamed up the “climate catastrophe”.
By the way it looks bad for “Peak Oil” again: New drilling method opens vast oil fields in US http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-10/new-drilling-method-opens-vast-oil-fields-in-us.html?nstrack=sid:5038680|met:100|cat:675991|order:1
And this method is cheap and available too.