From American University via Eurekalert, professor Matthew Nisbet demonstrates that the impact of peak petroleum on public health may be a way to unite conservatives and liberals in an effort to move away from fossil fuels and towards alternative forms of energy.
Peak Oil & Public Health: Political Common Ground?
WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 8, 2011)—Peak petroleum—the point at which the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production begins to decline—is a hot topic in scientific and energy circles. When will it occur? What will the impact be? While geologists and economists debate the specifics, American University School of Communication professor Matthew Nisbet believes peak petroleum and the associated risks to public health may provide an opportunity to bring conservatives and liberals together in the move toward alternative forms of energy.
“Somewhat surprisingly, conservatives are more likely to associate a major spike in oil prices with a strong threat to public health,” said Nisbet—an expert in the field of climate and energy communication. “This could present a gateway to engagement with conservatives on energy policy.”
In a forthcoming peer-reviewed study at the American Journal of Public Health, Nisbet and his co-authors find that 76% of people in a recent survey believe oil prices are either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to triple in the next five years. A dramatic spike in oil prices is a commonly recognized outcome of peak petroleum.
Even more telling is that 69% of respondents believe a sharp rise in oil prices would be either “very harmful” (44%) or “somewhat harmful” (25%) to the health of Americans. According to the survey, strong conservatives were the most sensitive to these possible risks, with 53% believing that a spike in oil prices would be “very harmful” to human health. Similarly, in a separate analysis of the data, those who were strongly “dismissive” of climate change (52%) were the most likely of any subgroup to associate a sharp spike in oil prices with a negative impact on public health.
According to Nisbet and his co-authors, this creates a challenge and an opportunity for the environmental and public health communities. Peak oil and energy prices are often talked about in terms of economic and environmental impact, but rarely as a public health concern. Nisbet argues that his findings show reason to reframe the debate.
“These findings suggest that a broad cross-section of Americans may be ready to engage in dialogue about ways to manage the health risks that experts associate with peak petroleum,” said Nisbet. “Peak petroleum may not currently be a part of the public health portfolio, but we need to start the planning process.”
The study was co-authored with Edward Maibach of George Mason University and Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 11th Hour, and Surdna Foundation.
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Let’s not forget all of the technologies the oil companies keep coming up with to get more oil out of fields long thought to be depleted. As prices rise, more oil comes on the market. That’s the way the world works. When oil was $20/barrel, it wasn’t economic to drill for it in deep waters. With oil pushing $100/barrel, it is. Huge new fields that weren’t economical, become economical, and more oil enters the market.
Peak oil is about as true as AGW. More and more oil supplies are discovered every year and every year we hear, “We have enough oil to last another 40 years.” I’ve been hearing that of over 50 years. There is no shortage of oil and no reason to move away from it other than outright stupidity.
Jimmy Cater already used this BS … Chief “big Jimmy” said the world would not have one drop left by the year 2000. Missed it by that much.
Hey eco-nuts, is this all you got?
Peak oil will happen someday, not anyday soon, but it will happen someday. However it is not something to worry about. As oil supplies fail to meet demand, price will gradually increase. Let me emphasis this, prices will gradually increase. The idea that prices are going to triple in 5 years or less is beyond absurd.
That gradual increase in price will cause three things to happen.
1) Consumers will find ways to use less oil. They will do this on their own, there is no need for a govt program, there is no need for various do-gooders to start prodding them.
2) Producers will find new ways to produce more oil. Either by exploiting resources that were uneconomical at lower prices, or by finding new ways to get more oil out of existing fields. Producers will do this on their own because that is how they make money. They don’t need govt programs or various do-gooders to prod them into doing it.
3) New sources of energy will be developed. Once again, the producers can and will do this on their own.
Most of the Peak Oil types are convinced that the market and individuals can’t be trusted to make the proper decisions, so they invent a looming catastrophe, and sell it as an excuse to use the power of govt to force individual consumers and producers to start doing now, those things the activists are convinced are in our best interests. It doesn’t matter what we think is in our best interest, the activists, as usual, are convinced that since they are so much smarter than anyone else, they and they alone know what the proper course of action is. And if they have to use deception and coercion to get the rest of us to go along with them. No biggie, they are after all, doing it in our best interests.
We don’t need coal to oil. We will create a new form of energy before Alberta(174 billion bbl) and Green River(286 to 1,525 billion bbl) deplete.
The Orinoco Oil Belt got upgraded to over 500 billion barrels of oil in place as median recently. We could probably drag out 50% more than that at $120+ a barrel – especially as government will allow technology to triumph there.
Of course, Rossi devices will enhance production and lower costs 😉
“The abiotic theory, in which oil is produced in the earth’s mantle from basic constituent elements seems far more plausible. And it has been replicated in lab conditions.
Another thing that puzzles me is the sheer volume of organic matter that would have been required to produce say a years worth of oil – 1 cubic mile is what we are using each year. How many cubic miles of matter are required to produce 1 cubic mile of crude, and is it reasonable to assume that this much organic material was available when the oil fields were originally laid down?”
Abiotic oil debunked: http://static.scribd.com/docs/j79lhbgbjbqrb.pdf
Answer to your question, yes, and then some. They took millions of years of organic material being deposited. The big super giant fields can be traced to just a small window of geological time of great biotic development. Cantarell is the exception, the current thinking is it was formed into oil from the energy of the impact, and pooled in structures afterwards.
Most organic deposits laid down have been depleted on their own, some have over cooked (went too deep), some completely cooked away. Example is the Alberta Tar Sands. It used to be a high quality conventional field, but the rise of the Rockies mobilized it to the current location, during which it lost all of the small molecular organic compounds leaving mostly bitumen. Most conventional oil fields can only pool if there is an impenetrable rock cap, otherwise it justs seeps to the surface.
strawbale says:
August 9, 2011 at 9:52 am
“Lol, like you all know how much oil is left.
You lot have NO idea and yet you make such off the cuff remarks. Just to go against the greeny pinko socialist doo gooders.
The AGW alarmists annoy me as much as anyone but the quality of comments here makes me realize its often a case of a flip side of the same coin.
Doesn’t present a good example if us “sceptics” cannot raise the level of debate.”
Hope this satisfies you.
German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Raw Materials
Bundesanstalt fuer Geowissenschaften und Rohstoffe
http://www.bgr.bund.de/cln_160/nn_331084/DE/Themen/Energie/Produkte/energiekurzstudie__2009.html
(points to this PDF:)
http://www.bgr.bund.de/cln_160/nn_331084/DE/Themen/Energie/Downloads/Energiestudie-Kurzstudie2010,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/Energiestudie-Kurzstudie2010.pdf
Resources (Coal, Oil, Gas, Thorium, Uranium) for 1,500 years are known. Within one year, resources amounting to 40,000 EJ were discovered – yearly usage is 457 EJ. Who cares how much of that is oil; turn coal or gas to oil if you need to, or synthesize it using nuclear power. We mostly need it for transportation, and even there, gas plays a bigger role each year.
We’ve been on an undulating plateau (real oil – crude + condensate) since 2005. We will begin to drop off of the plateau somewhere around the end of 2012, or early 2013, most likely.
Declining oil Will cause poverty, and poverty IS “unhealthy.”
So, yeah, I guess Peak Oil is a “health” issue.
Oh, and when you’re talking “the price of oil,” you have to talk “Brent Crude.” WTI is now just a little backwater index based on a puddle of bottlenecked crude in a small place called “Cushing, Ok.”
Even Louisiana Light sells for about $15.00/bbl more than WTI.
“The Orinoco Oil Belt got upgraded to over 500 billion barrels of oil in place as median recently. We could probably drag out 50% more than that at $120+ a barrel – especially as government will allow technology to triumph there.”
You are assuming they will sell that oil to the US, as opposed to China. Who will have the economic ability to pay for that oil, which has to be processed like the tar sands.
Good book: Ethical Oil by Ezra Levant.
Re: German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Raw Materials
See also from Germany:
German military study warns of a potentially drastic oil crisis
http://energybulletin.net/stories/2010-09-01/german-military-study-warns-potentially-drastic-oil-crisis
Oh, and BTW, the report i linked to contains numbers for reserves and resources. A resource becomes a reserve when it becomes economical to exploit it. Obviously, a price rise automatically turns the next best resource into a reserve.
“More and more oil supplies are discovered every year and every year we hear,… ”
All tiny fields. That “big” discovery off brazil? 30 billion barrels. One year of world consumption. We are currently consuming some 5 barrels for every one we find today. It’s in that list of reports I posted earlier.
Les Johnson says: …… much. And thanks.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why people look for things to be afraid of. People! The doomsayers have been whining about running out of oil my entire life! And all we do is pump more. Here’s a news flash! Malthus and our modern day Malthus, Paul Ehrlich were wrong. Sure, there is a finite amount of resources here on earth. But there is an infinite amount of possible ways we can utilize them…….. and re-utilize. Turns out, technologies change! I know, its weird. We learn how to get more, and use better the resources we have……. strange but true. For those worried about us not developing new technologies fast enough, we will. Right now, most of the innovation seems to be directed at inanity. Our private sector funding seems to go to cool things like IPods and the like, while the public sector seems to be researching fictional bogey men. Even if we continue down these roads, remember necessity is the mother of invention. If it ever gets to a point where we need to change…….. we will. Get a grip, take a deep breath and enjoy the modern conveniences that enrich all of our lives. Quit feeling guilty about it and quit trying to make others feel guilty. Its a fruitless venture.
Peace
I KNEW it!
The CO2 levels in the atmosphere _must_ have been absolutely hellish (or: “off the charts” to tone it down a bit)!
(WHERE ELSE would the HUGE quantities of elemental carbon have been sourced? The oceans?)
/only partly sarc
.
“Let’s not forget all of the technologies the oil companies keep coming up with to get more oil out of fields long thought to be depleted. As prices rise, more oil comes on the market. That’s the way the world works. When oil was $20/barrel, it wasn’t economic to drill for it in deep waters. With oil pushing $100/barrel, it is. Huge new fields that weren’t economical, become economical, and more oil enters the market.”
Examples please, specific fields. Cantarell is in terminal decline, Alaska is in terminal decline, North Sea, Texas terminal decline. They have all had these technologies applied and are all depleting, rapidly. Cantarell went from 2.3mb/day to 450,000b/day in just a few years. They applied nitrogen injection to boost production, which it did, but that just means the depletion side of the curve happens faster. The area under a production curve from any field must add up to what is physically extractable. Extract it faster, the depletion side falls off faster. Ghawar injects millions of barrels of sea water around the periphery of the deposit to keep pressure up. Their production wells produce more sea water than oil. Some Russian fields are producing 95% water, only 5% oil. That’s when a field is about to die.
I’ve read somewhere that each time oil hits 100USD/barrel (adjusted for inflation, today’s dollar) it triggers a recession.
Seems to fit. (Using the oil price as a leading indicator could have predictive skill and convinces me more than most of the usual economics babble)
This is WTI in EUR (so divide by 1.4); (Brent trades for 20% more)
http://www.comdirect.de/inf/indizes/detail/chart_kd.html?timeSpan=5Y&ID_NOTATION=8328001#timeSpan=SE&e&
This would indicate that industrial nations are limited by oil availability (again, the source of the oil doesn’t matter; might be synthetic or algae oil or Jatropa or whatever). We could avoid booms and busts by running our economies just so fast that the oil price sticks at the 100$ limit 😉
EROEI is even less credible than Peak Oil. I don’t spend energy to fill my tank. I don’t give energy back to the gas & electric companies in exchange for them being nice enough to heat and light my home. My company doesn’t drill for oil & gas to make energy.
I spend money to fill my tank. My company drills wells for oil & gas to make money. My gas & electric bills are paid for with money. My pay check, ExxonMobil & Shell credit card statements and checks to the gas & electric companies aren’t denominated in joules, kilowatts or btu – They are denominated in $.
I don’t give a rat’s [censored] if 1 barrel of algal lipids requires less energy to produce than 1 barrel of crude oil… Because the barrel of algal lipids costs $800 and can’t be produced in sufficient quantities to be waiting for me at the Exxon or Shell station when I need it.
If oil companies (or any businesses) used EROEI to guide their investment decisions, they would go out of business (unless the gov’t was footing the bill).
It would cost more than $6 trillion to replace the nation’s current coal and natural gas power plants with solar power plants… Which would leave you with no capital to expand generation capacity and 6-8 hours of electricity per day.
Conventional energy sources are not scarce; they are cheap and abundant. Govt interference in their production & distribution and currency manipulation make them more expensive and less available to consumers than they otherwise would be.
Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2011
Table 1. Estimated Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources, 2016
Almost every solar power project (and most wind power projects) is being funded by US taxpayer-guaranteed loans. These aren’t R&D programs. They are building power-plants that cannot ever be economically viable. Taxpayers are bearing almost all of the risk in these projects and being hamstrung with long-term guaranteed above-market prices for the electricity generated by these “limes” (green lemons).
EROEI aficionados will say, “But once the plant is paid for, the energy will be free! So the long-term cost is cheaper.” But, there is no breakeven point…
Levelized Cost Over Time
The DOE $/MWh numbers are based on a 30-yr plant lifetime. Solar PV has a HUGE up-front cost and the annual fixed operating & maintenance costs are also pretty high.
According to the DOE numbers, solar PV will take more than 100 years to catch up to advanced coal with carbon capture and storage. It never catches up to conventional coal or conventional natural gas with carbon capture and storage.
Wind at least has a shot to catch up with fossil fuels, if the plant lasts more than 30 years.
“In the last few years there have been 3 or 4 huge finds that have not yet been brought to production. ”
Names please so we can see what “huge” means.
Yes it is criminal that the US can’t “drill baby drill”. It will have to change at some point, once the Marxist in the White house is gone. But again, it’s not what’s in the ground, but how fast it can be extracted. The US has between 30 to 50BB off shore. At 7BB per year consumption, do the math. There is not much there. Yes, they will last a long time, and that’s only because they have to allow the fields to liberate their oil slowly to get the most out of them. And that means low flow rates. Not enough to offset depletion in the rest of the country.
Oil is a globally traded commodity. It doesn’t matter who they sell it to.
Richard Wakefield says:
August 9, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Excuse me? I am assuming no such thing. If they sell it to… Switzerland… it will relieve pressure elsewhere. It is a global commodity after all.
Your choice of reading marks you out.
Spot on.
To quote a member of our 3840 kHz Group: “The cure for high prices is – high prices.”
(IOW make it profitable enough for alternatives and they will be developed).
Meanwhile, the ‘machine’ known as Richard Wakefield grinds on, irrespective of over-riding and governing economic factors (and human ingenuity) that ‘push’ companies and individuals to come up with solutions in the form of technical advancements in all areas including (but not limited to) oil discovery, drilling and extraction …
.
crosspatch says:
August 9, 2011 at 11:33 am
“At some point we do have to plan to minimize our oil for use as fuel. This is because oil will become too important for other things such as plastic and paint. Imagine if we were unable to produce plastics, pigments, synthetic fibers, etc. Oil will at some point become too valuable to simply burn up. At that point old landfills will become plastic mines.”
No. If it becomes scarce enough you can synthesize it. And you can always cultivate some Escherischia Brownii, an algae that concentrates oil droplets nearly identical to Diesel if you absolutely must for your paint production. The algae oil is not very good as an energy source because it’s surrounded by a lot of water so it’s difficult to get without squandering a lot of energy for drying, but if you only need it for your paint, you could probably extract it easily, or use sun flower oil… there are many sources of oil for these purposes.
“Using the EIA website, and looking at reserves vs consumption, the US has about 260 years of coal.”
The EIA often over estimates reserves. But that aside, how may doubling periods of growth are in 260 years? 260 years of CURRENT consumption, which is growing at some 1-2% per year. That’s a 35 year doubling period which means there are 8 doublings in there. That means that amount of coal cannot last that many doubling periods.
Now are we actually going to go through 8 doublings of coal consumption in the next 260 years? Not likely. We can’t even predict what will happen in the next 30 years.
This also does not take into account that the good quality of anthrocite coal is in terminal decline in the US. The remaing coal is of poorer quality, lower in energy, and harder to mine which squeezes ERoEI.
They never give up their fetish. Stupid and ideological.
“Excuse me? I am assuming no such thing. If they sell it to… Switzerland… it will relieve pressure elsewhere. It is a global commodity after all.”
“Oil is a globally traded commodity. It doesn’t matter who they sell it to.”
There is no way Venezuela will decide not to sell it to the US, not keep it for themselves, not sell it to only China?
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-18/china-lends-venezuela-20-billion-secures-oil-supply-update1-.html
It’s only a global commodity IF they decide to sell it globally. Canada does not put the tar sands oil on the open global market, we sell it to the US and our own consumption. More oil producing countries are consuming more of their own oil, that means less on the open market.