The Fate of All Carbon

With China currently designing and planning on building 50 Thorium nuclear reactors, I have to wonder why that isn’t in the mix shown.

As I have said before, petroleum and even coal are much too valuable as raw materials to waste them by combustion.
If (God willing) Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat really works, as I understand the L.E.N.R. principle, burning crude oil derivatives for thermal energy will a thing of the past.
If it really is degasified nano-nickel and a few promoters reducing the Coulomb barrier, then larger units are obviously possible. It’s just a matter of simple heat transfer to avoid the nickel melting.and thus reducing the reaction area.
Even the thorium molten salt reactors will be enormously non-competitive with nickel-hydrogen.

Finally, nuclear energy gets mentioned at the end. We don’t need to wait until 2050 to use it. People will be dying unless we maintain high per capita energy use. We should be using more than 2 or 3% of the fuel in a reactor load. The nuclear fuel is far too valuable to stash underground as a radioactive mess. We need to build integral fast reactors. Burn closer to 100% of the fuel and much of the waste. Several problems solved. Consider moving to LH2 fuel produced using nuclear power. With excess inexpensive energy, many currently impossible things become practical.

“Peak production is in 2025.”
Ah, that is a projection and with all projections the future isn’t written in stone so therefore the above statement is not accurate to write with “is in” as if it is so.
Something like “Peak production is projected to be in 2025 based on ___ projection” and fill in the source of the projection. Thanks.

“…with the heating effect of carbon dioxide being 0.1°C per 100 ppm…”
The relationship is not linear.
John M Reynolds

It will look something like this:

Because We Say So®

On the other hand: the Russians have a very plausible theory that “fossil fuels” are, in fact, the end product of the decomposition and subsequent reformation of carbonates deep in the earth’s crust under the influence of high pressure and clay catalysis.
Having worked on synfuel production, and having analyzed the gunk that plugs the catalysts, I can verify that the Fischer-Tropsch process produces a product that is indistinguishable from “fossil fuels”.
That being the case, and with the abundance of carbon sources in the crust, it would seem that it will be a very long time before we run out of “fossil fuels”.
Also, it is a “natural” process. (Had to slip that one in; couldn’t resist.)

“Peak production is in 2025.”
The ignorance and stupidty of this statement is unbelievable.
What are hydrocarbon fuels made from?
What is the most common, and third (or is it fourth) most common element in the universe?
All our descendents need is an industrial process and energy to combine them in a way that locks up liquid chemical energy.
There is and will never be a “peak”.

5 years ago the idea of vast quantities of shale gas were laughed at (The Oil Drum is still laughing and looking like idiots). It turns out shale oil isn’t that rare either.
“Geologists have known about the oil in Niobrara for about 80 years. But no one ever thought it could be recovered economically… until now.”
http://oilshalegas.com/niobrarashale.html
There are many fields that were “uneconomical” with old technology that will be revisited.

I looked at the first graph and said to myself this is crap so didn’t read any further, I had just finished reading the prospects for shale gas for New Zealand and given the shale gas situation around the world well i ask you …….

David Archibald says:
November 13, 2011 at 7:16 pm
I first got interested in China’s coal reserves when I plotted up their production profile against the view that their reserves were of the order of 120 billion tonnes. Now that their annual production is 3,000 million tonnes per annum, the new power plants they were building were going to run out of coal before they wore out. Could the Chinese be so idiotic?
David,
The report you are quoting was created in 2005 with the newest information in its references as of 2003. Infact, that report is primarly based on information from the 2000 window of 11 years ago. In it, China was the worlds largest swing exporter of coal. However, if you read Bloomberg in 2011, China is arguably the largest importer of coal today.
“China’s July coal imports climbed 36 percent to 17.53 million metric tons from a year earlier, sxcoal.com, a Shanxi-based industry portal, said on its website, citing Chinese customs data.
That exceeded the customs bureau’s record of 17.34 million tons in December and 13.73 million tons in June. The official customs data is due to be released Aug. 22. ”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-17/china-s-coal-imports-rise-36-on-power-demand-sxcoal-says-1-.html
Can you hazard a guess as to why China is ramping up its imports of coal when they have these massive undocumented reserves you are creatively quoting.
I look forward to your reply,
Jack H Barnes

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 13, 2011 at 7:53 pm

janama says:
November 13, 2011 at 7:44 pm
In a study of cyclic behaviour of the Sun, Russian scientists now predict 100 years of cooling. IceAgeNow reports that these are not just any scientists.
This ‘study’ is very poor and ignores recent work on solar activity. It is ‘coolist’ alarmism.

Not surprising. The only valid alarm we should listen to is the one that gets us up for work in the morning. The rest are pretty much fictitious and a waste of time.

If ancient co2 levels were as high as 5000 to 7000 ppm, One would assume that not only did the oceans cope (and perhaps convert that co2 into oil) but perhaps the plant world overate. With current co2 levels at only 400 ppm, it’s humanity’s responsibilty set as much carbon free as possible. Heck, it may be our raisin d’être in the biosphere.

I’m not going to debate all this but I strongly suspect your numbers are light. The curves are flatter on the down slope. Other energy sources such as Uranium, Theorem, gas hydrates and so on are not properly accounted for. I would also remind that concepts such peak anything are way more complex then most published models suggest. I am old enough to remember all but BS that came from the doom and gloom produced by the “Club of Rome”. Except for population I don’t think many of their predictions ever came close to the mark. Models that are static and deal with well know static things are very good, we all know that and use them all the time. Models that deal with dynamic things are not worth the electrons to send them around. That we also know from experience. This kind of thing is valuable do not misunderstand me. We all need to keep a very skeptical eye or both open when dealing with these things that all.

This report, and it’s COMENTS, illustrate the two problems we have with
present-day governments.
1…number 1… Going after the cheapest energy for Homo sapiens.
We must always, always, do this. Spending excessive tax payer money
for green energy sources is foolish. Let the market do this.
2…number 2… Keeping atmospheric CO2 as high above 170ppm as possible.
We must always, always, do this. Continued recognition, or maybe a start, of
this must go on. We need to chop down AR5 to the correct size. We cannot
let the UN and governments all around to keep this hoax in the forefront.
How do this?

Some additions to clarify:
Present-day governments are totally tied to the UN’s IPCC. So we need to cut
its influence to zero.
The idea of a “carbon footprint” is totally foolish. Carbon is great, CO2 that is, is
in the atmosphere. We are continuously told it’s not. WRONG..! How educate
the elite, how the masses?

@Jack
>Can you hazard a guess as to why China is ramping up its imports of coal when they have these massive undocumented reserves you are creatively quoting.
++++++++++
For the same reason the US chooses to import its oil: to use up what is advertised as a fixed supply of known dimension so your domestic supply will be the only resource left.
China is buying coal from Mongolia for $12 per ton at the border. Why dig at home??

Follow up post to above….
Video of the company’s founder and inventor here:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/video-batteries-made-of-salt-water-last-10x-longer/10976

Good grief! You put up a graph showing us to be near peak natural gas production???!!!
It is just starting. Heck, the focus in shale production now is on wet gas, for the liquids. Oil companies are going to be swimming in gas as a by-product. And that is just the US. There is an entire planet of gas charged shale to be produced.

We will never see oil running out, that will happen in a few thousand years….

Just above the comments (now at 49 with the time at 10:37 PST) I am treated to a thumbnail-link to an ad – something about cows better than condos! This is likely not seen by everyone as it appears to be from Washington (WA) dairyfarmers [ youtube.com/wadairyfarmers ]
The photo is of two cows – farting? I think. Peak gas implications, I suppose but why else would it mysteriously appear between the post and comments. The insertion seems to be by “AdChoices” and perhaps their algorithms have had some difficulty (Prof. David A. does use the word “feedstock”) making sense of the material. Somewhat like trying to insert an ad into the text of a Friday night bull-session where too much beer has been consumed. Not that I would know; just saying …

The costs of nuclear reactors are mainly artificial. They (those costs) have been created for no other reason than to increase the cost of building them to provide a disincentive for doing so. A nuclear reactor could be extremely cost effective. If you have to conventional power plants and a reprocessing plant at the same facility, you never need to move dangerous nuclear material in or out after the initial fuel load. From that point forward you can power the reactor with natural uranium using the reprocessing breeder to create fuel. The amount of waste is greatly reduced and decays to background radiation levels in a few centuries. The problem of spent fuel disappears.
We could be a lot smarter about nuclear power. If it was so much more expensive than other forms of energy, we wouldn’t use them on ships and submarines. If we cut the “lawfare”, nuclear power gets much more cost effective.

David, you should have used more tea leaves…

From Enginer on November 13, 2011 at 5:48 pm:

If (God willing) Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat really works, as I understand the L.E.N.R. principle, burning crude oil derivatives for thermal energy will a thing of the past.

This inspired me to look for a recent report about the October 28 test. I found this skeptical Nov 8 PhysOrg-dot-com piece:
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-rossi-e-cat-customers.html
As reported, the still-unknown potential US customer (were they described as “potential” originally?) was impressed enough to accept delivery. Of a shipping container loaded with individual devices with many more mounted on the container roof? That’s acceptable?
Rossi has also said on his blog that he’s since sold “more than two” devices to also-unrevealed customers. Wow, all these people buying these unregulated gamma radiation-generating nuclear devices. Guess if you want one you better buy it now, stay anonymous, and hide it away, before those meddling public safety officials take notice and confiscate all of them.
The comments started interesting, and devolved into many posts by a few staunch defenders. Some even claimed this was old work, long ago demonstrated, and even that other “free energy” devices that were attributed as producing “hydrinos” (as with Blacklight Power) were actually doing what Rossi has replicated.
A company named “Steorn” was given as an example of similar fraud. BTW, the Wikipedia entry is not kind to them. Devices were produced for public demonstration, didn’t work. There popped up a defender who claimed to have seen several proofs of Over Unity (more energy out than in). Another comment mentioned Steorn was now making water heaters, just like Rossi is doing.
Strangely enough, the very next day over at that last WUWT Rossi post, eight days after the last comment with the post now forgotten, someone posted a comment with a link to the Steorn water heater info. It’s extra curious as nowhere else in the post and comments was Steorn ever mentioned. Was some company sprinkling references to “the competing technology” wherever on the internet there was mention of Rossi?
With defenders of Rossi like this, placing him in such “illustrious company” as that, you would be well advised to be much more skeptical of Rossi and his E-cat device.

kwik says:
November 13, 2011 at 11:02 pm
“-flat-screen”
Ha! It may seem one of the more trivial on the list, but we were just talking the other day about how just a few decades ago, The Jetsons were depicted as having screens everywhere, but they were still big bulky CRTs!

You havent factored in oil shale, tar sands, and shale gas. These will affect the shape of the graphs.
I agree that the whole c02 thing isnt anything to worry about.
Good article, but there might be quite a bit more carbon than your graphs show.

Sorry,
All this peaky stuff is nonsense. It was nonsense 300 years ago, it was still nonsense 50 years ago, it is nonsense today. The same old charts peddled by Malthus, then Lovelock, now Archibald.

CO2 increase each year doesn’t match human emissions each year very well and I think matching the CO2 increse to human fossil fuel production is mainly wrong.
The only match you can make is that both has increased, year to year variability can not be explained and the divergence between CO2 increse and the accellerated increse in human emissions since 2000.
If you match CO2 increase to global temperature you get a much better match, i.e. higher temperature causes more CO2 to be added to the atmosphere. To me it seems that the temperature is the main(not only) driver causing the CO2 increase, not the human emissions. The uptick in the end from human CO2 emissions aren’t vissible in the increase of CO2 each year. It just keeps following the global temperature rather well.
Just as global temperature has stabilized since about 1998, the CO2 is not increasing at an accelerated rate and is hovering about 2ppm/year allthough the human emissions are incresing faster and faster.
How does nature know how to compensate for our emissions if it is not the temperature that is the main driver of the increase?
This diagram that I made a few years ago is not up to date but is still valid if you compare the latest years of CO2 increase at Mauna Loa with global temperature, it keeps following it. No accellerated increse in sight yet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22768673@N05/2416664379/in/photostream/

The oil projection is too optimistic.
The depletion of oil will start not later than 2015. That will induce a crisis that will make CO2 emission go down (like 2008 or worst). After crisis will continue one after the other until all economy will collapse due to too high oil prices.
Transports depends from oil. It will start by airplanes that will be grounded and after truck companies will stop one after the other. After that all industry without transports will collapse and people will die without food.
All developed countries are in face of a strong challenge, and government does nothing to prepare on that. Just hope that no civil war will start.
The countries that depends more by transports (like USA, Australia, Japan and Europe) will be the hardest hit…. so CO2 will decrease … but who will care about CO2 during this huge crisis times …

Human beings are adaptable. If we run out of oil, coal and gas we’ll just burn something else :).

The most straightforward explanation of the interplay between reserves/resources/economics in relation to extracted raw materials that I’ve read is here http://remittanceman.blogspot.com/2008/02/mineral-reserves-and-resources-what.html?zx=9c8b9d29fe2e6a54 .
It’s nearly 4 years old, but that makes no difference.
Iignore the scary content warning, the blogger couldn’t be bothered to get it taken down and wore it as a badge of honour (honor).
Although it applies to minerals (he’s a mining engineer), as RM states in respect of oil etc.:
“The oilies have slightly different rules and definitions but the basic principle is the same.
Put as simply as I can, a Resource exists, a Reserve is the bit you can exploit to some advantage.”

RE: Enginer says: (November 13, 2011 at 5:48 pm)
“Even the thorium molten salt reactors will be enormously non-competitive with nickel-hydrogen.”
I have not heard of nickel-hydrogen before. I believe the primary message of these “Peak Oil” alerts is that we had better start looking for a future cheap energy source sooner rather than later. That applies even if most of the earlier estimates have tended to be premature.
Kirk Sorensen has been telling the Green Earth people that his molten fluoride salt thorium reactors can make energy so cheap that his manufactured transportation fuels will put the petroleum and coal industries out of business. He is also telling them that all ‘fossil-fuel’ power plants release far more radioactivity in the form of radon gas than that allowed from any nuclear power plant. (It appears they were dubious of his claims and some seem to prefer dependence on limited expensive wind and solar power to minimize human impacts on the planet.)
Here is a two-hour condensed compendium of LIFTR promotional videos. It begins with a short, five-minute, introductory summary. I am *not qualified* to say if this is a viable project or just a way for governments to waste money; the concept, however, does sound very interesting and potentially practical.
LFTR in 5 Minutes – THORIUM REMIX 2011
544 likes, 5 dislikes; 24,924 Views; 1:59:59 (2 Hrs)
Uploaded by gordonmcdowell on Oct 4, 2011
“Thorium is readily available & can be turned into energy without generating transuranic wastes. Thorium’s capacity as nuclear fuel was discovered during WW II, but ignored because it was unsuitable for making bombs. A liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is the optimal approach for harvesting energy from Thorium, and has the potential to solve today’s energy/climate crisis. LFTR is a type of Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (Th-MSR). This video summarizes over 6 hours worth of thorium talks given by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium technologists.
“THORIUM REMIX 2011 starts with a 5 minute TL;WL summary, to hold you over until you find your Ritalin.”

It costs money to look for fossil fuels. It cost more money to determine proven reserve.
The parties that pay such costs are also interested in mining it sometime within a decade or two.
We might run out of fossil fuels- some point. I don’t when.
But if this post were to be correct or vaguely correct.
What would mean if we for some reason didn’t develop future technology that provide the same or better benefits we are currently enjoying by using fossil fuels.
Would we revert to using human muscle to work done fossil fuels- would we, could we return to how used to do thing several centuries ago?
How much is to worth not to do this. How much is worth not to return to time where slavery
is a norm? How much is it worth not live always live in a finite existence.
It seems to only real and final answer is we have leave this planet.
We could do this now, or could done this decade ago. And it’s hard to imagine it not
happening at some point in our future.
Now it it would enormously challenging to go to different star system. And at this point it’s hard to imagine that could vaguely worth the effort. It may be worth the effort 1000 years from now.
But our solar system could provide near infinite resource- all resources human could need.
The hardest part of using our solar system is getting to Low Earth Orbit. Something we done for decades. Our Moon is the gateway to this solar system. There lots minable water and that water can make into rocket fuel. The Moon is a lifeless vacuum. Which good news.
If humans were sane, one shouldn’t need an environment impact report to do anything on the Moon. The is good place to store nuclear waste. And also a good place to operate nuclear reactors [shouldn’t need much much in terms seismic studies, etc or even a containment shield. And if reactor melts down- you lose a reactor- with not much other consequences. If in settlement, yeah it’s a problem.
In terms of solar energy- the moon at least twice the solar energy density anywhere on the Moon compared best places on earth. And vacuum something created on earth in order to make ultrapure silicone needed for PV panels. There is no earth type weathering. There is a good view.
Some lucky fools are going to get very rich doing business on the Moon- and no doubt some fortunes will be lost. The moon will be an exciting frontier, and as gets more cilvilized it we be one of the jumping off point to the rest of the solar system. The moon is a gaint port- it’s Hong Kong.
And really all requires is passing some laws, it’s not a technological problem, it’s more a risk, one biggest risk is legal issues.
And general for US it’s somewhere that there a lot potential for national economic growth- say within a couple decade it could adding say 2% to US economic growth.

More on Thorium Nuclear, probably our best bet at least short term if it does not get NIMBYed.
American Chemical Society: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8746sci2.html
World Nuclear Organization: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/default.aspx?id=448&terms=thorium
Physics.org: http://www.physorg.com/news145561984.html
Journal of Energy Security: http://www.ensec.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=187:thorium-as-a-secure-nuclear-fuel-alternative&catid=94:0409content&Itemid=342
Hyperion Power Generation Inc. a private company commercializing intellectual property developed by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory Website: http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/about/
Fuji mini reactor: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/minifuji-thorium-reactor-group-talks-to.html
Thorium reactors in transportation: http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/minifuji-thorium-reactor-group-talks-to.html

Beryllium-uranium fuel research shows promise
04 February 2011
Nuclear fuel containing beryllium oxide as well as uranium oxide has been shown to be longer lasting, more efficient and safer than conventional nuclear fuels, an ongoing research project claims…

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF-Beryllium-uranium_fuel_research_shows_promise-0402118.html

The most important part of this post is rarely mentioned, and it should be often and repeatedly mentioned by everyone against the political restructure of the world by the green coalition. Is this you Gates?? “””The extra 130 ppm-odd from the current level will increase agricultural productivity by 23%”””
YES, the benefits of CO2 are KNOWN, and continue to increase at more then a linear rate, while the potential, maybe, always fails to manifest harm, DECREASES at logarithmic rate.
AAs far as “peak oil”, well peak and you will find it. The operating and known reserves always go 30 to 50 years. Why?; well because companies do not look further then that as there is no economic incentive. Nuclear, coal to liquid, shale etc, all will be available.

Leif … do you have a reference to support your statement that there was a shortage of barrels in the 1860’S? This site suggests that there was not! http://sites.google.com/site/petroleumhistoryresources/Home/42-gallon-oil-barrel

China has the largest coal reserves on the planet of about one trillion tonnes.
The Chinese have 114 billion tons of ‘exploitable’ coal reserves.
http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/wR5MezrJ2SJ6NfFl5sb5Jg/10_china_pankexi.pdf
Vastly smaller then the 250 million tons of ‘exploitable’ reserves in the US.
Coal has 3 categories –
Economically recoverable
Exploitable
Reserves
The average American or Australian coal miner produces in excess of 12,000 tons per year. The average Chinese coal miner produces less then 600 tons per year. If Chinese coal miners got paid something resembling a ‘decent wage’ the amount of economically recoverable coal in China would be zero.

Before the first commercial thorium fueled nuclear power plant pays for itself harvest of solar energy will be cheap enough to make nuclear power too expensive to compete. The key is synthetic biology. Green plants have been harvesting sunlight and producing combustable hydrocarbons for billions of years. Green algae thrive using water that’s not otherwise usable for human consumption or agriculture i.e. municipal wastewater, brackish water, and sea water. We’ve barely taken the first baby steps in synthetic biology and several firms already have patents on genetically modified algae that can produce 20,000+ gallons/acre/year of liquid fuels competitive with oil at $30/bbl. Just 10% of area of the Texas panhandle used for this purpose can satisfy current energy needs of the entire United States. The Texas panhandle isn’t used for much of anything other than oil wells, windmills, and a few cattle. There is one person living there per 150 acres.
We’ve barely scratched the surface in what’s possible in synthetic biology. Once it is mature the cost of harvesting sunlight and transforming it into hydrocarbon fuels will fall to pennies per barrel equivalent. It’s only a matter of time and it won’t be much longer. Progress in synthetic biology is taking place at the same rate it happened with semiconductors.
No one is going to risk billions of dollars building nuclear power plants which will very likely never turn a profit because something else is in the pipeline which will render them unable to sell electricity at a profit. There’s a reason why all the energy we need isn’t being produced by nuclear power plants. They are expensive and cannot compete with gas or coal on a level playing field. Thorium reactors are even more expensive. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. In trade for enhanced operating safety, less hazardous waste to dispose of, and difficulty in using them to produce weapons grade radioisotopes, comes a higher construction and operating cost.
L.E.N.R. would be lovely but as of this moment it’s considered not theoretically possible and in that regard it holds no promise whatsoever. The so called e-cat is almost certainly no more than a confidence scheme (a.k.a. “a con job”).
.

Gail Combs says:
November 14, 2011 at 4:45 am
Nice collection of hyperbolic web sites but you might want to at least check the year when the stuff was written.
For instance the physorg link to the Hyperion portable nuclear reactors was dated 2008 and talked about orders for 20 units from some eastern european country and license review in 2009 by US nuclear regulatory agency.
Since then the 2008 design was scrapped, a new design was produced in 2009, and there isn’t so much as an experimental prototype been built yet or a gram of fuel produced at the end of 2011.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Power_Generation
Don’t you think owe readers here just a tiny bit of due diligence? Just because you can post this kind of crap and waste people’s time doesn’t mean you should. It’s not exactly evil but it’s selfish and ignorant. Clean up your act.

davidgmills:
The first rule of batteries: There are liars, there are damn liars and then there are battery chemists.
Having said the above, a cheap battery that lasts 5000 cycles is impressive. The energy density seems unremarkable. The web site gave 30 Wh/l. I assume that reads 30 Watt hours per liter. That’s not much different than a lead-acid battery.
If the battery is cheap enough, even if its developers don’t achieve all their targeted values, it will find a market.

@spector
Thanks for posting up that video. It’s probably the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long while. How is it that we can spend half a trillion dollars demonising the way we do things now and on alternatives that will never reach our needs, yet we can’t spend a few billion on something that will advance humankind immeasurably?
How have we allowed the misanthropes to get such a level of power over us?

Jay Curtis says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:14 am
“The point is not whether the fuel is available, nor whether it can be recovered, the point is….do the governments WANT the fuel ?”
Everyone misses the point in these discussions about peak oil. You’re right about availability and recoverability. There can be veritable oceans of oil and lots of clever new ways to extract it. However, it takes energy to get energy. The point is summed up in this question, “How much energy does it take to extract the oil?” Once it takes as much energy to extract a barrel of oil from the ground as the oil can deliver, then you’re done. You might as well sell the energy you control or put it into some other enterprise rather than putting it into extraction.
Of course, long before you reach energy parity pumping out an oil field, the energy expense of transporting and refining the petroleum will match the energy delivered. Its about energy in – energy out, and all of your profits are tied to the energy expense.
Hubbert predicted that the US would reach peak in the ’70s and switch from being a net exporter of oil to being a net importer of oil. It happened exactly as he predicted. As the US goes, so goes the rest of the world.

(emphasis mine)
Once it costs more to extract a barrel of oil than what people are willing to pay, then you’re done. Otherwise oil-based fuels such a gasoline, diesel and jet fuel will continue to be used because they are wonderful formats for storing energy. These fuels are energy-packed and are easily transported.
At least Hubbert got one thing–the US because a net importer of oil in the 1970’s–right.

Bruce says:
November 13, 2011 at 10:52 pm
David Archibald: “Shale gas and shale oil wells have vicious decline rates – down to 15% of the initial flow by year three.”
But they can be refracked. Or new wells drills nearby. You are trying to confuse people. Shale Gas is not the same as drilling into a big trapped pocket of gas. You are drilling into shale, you frack it. Production flows. When it stops flowing you frack nearby. Over and over again. The wells are costing so little compared to production …
——
Not entirely correct.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8212

jrwakefield says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:04 am
I have scanned through the comments, and those who dispute peak oil are still making the same mistakes we covered the last few times this has come up. It doesn’t matter what’s in the ground, be it shale oil, shale gas, oil sands, kerogen, or deep ocean deposits. It doesn’t even matter if oil is abiotic (which has been well refuted http://static.scribd.com/docs/j79lhbgbjbqrb.pdf).
Peak oil has always been about production rates. That is, flow rates. What counts is how fast one can extract the oil. New fields, these unconvensional deposits, cannot flow at the rates we saw with convensional sources. Older fields are declining faster than new fields are coming on line. For example, the Cantarell field at its peak produced some 2.2mb/day in 2004. Today, just 0.45mb/day and falling fast.
By comparison, the Alberta Oil Sands is producing 1.5m/day. The most that is expected to be produced is 3mb/day in 15 years (Canada consumes 3mb/day, the US 20mb/day). By then, other older fields will be even further in decline, like Ghawar. The limiting factor for the oil sands is, ironically, another fossil fuel — natural gas. It is needed in vast quantities to cap the ends of the hydrocarbon chains as the synthetic oil is produced from the bitumen. Right now, the oil sands production consumes THREE TIMES the amount of NG that ALL of Canadian homes consume. This means the bulk of shale gas production will be consumed by the oil sands to boost production to the 3mb/day.
So, please, all those who ridcule peak oil, please take note. We are not refering to geological peak. Peak oil is about flow rates. In spite of the new process, new production from unconvensional sources, flow rates will decline. These unconvensional sources will only mean that that slow production will last longer. Provided, that is, there is sufficient credit in the ecomony to build that production. The future of available credit is in doubt.

I won’t disagree regarding your definition of peak oil. It’s the imminence and implications of peak oil that are incorrect.

Hi Leif … your quote refers to a shortage of barrels at the advent of drilling. Graham No. 3 was referring to the date 1862 … the reference you gave also states: “Production in western Pennsylvania rose rapidly—from about 450000 barrels in 1860 to 3 million barrels in 1862. The market could not develop quickly enough to match the swelling volume of oil. Prices which had been $10 a barrel in January 1861, fell to 50 cents by June and by the end of 1861 were down to 10 cents.”

paulhan says:
November 14, 2011 at 8:25 am
@spector
Thanks for posting up that video. It’s probably the saddest thing I’ve seen in a long while….
How have we allowed the misanthropes to get such a level of power over us?
___________________________________
Very easy. Those who will climb over dead bodies, those without a conscience have a major advantage over the honest, especially if they also have intelligence, money and charisma.

“Well, you have to think……what made it drop from the thousands….to limiting for plant growth”
From what I have read, that would be the Himalayas.

Re: Fig 4
Can we please have the energy density compared by mass instead of volume ???
Also, as a rule of thumb with regard to efficiency (and costs), it is always better to start with a highly concentrated source of energy (IE Nuclear) raher than trying to collect a lot of diffuse energy and concentrate it. (wind, ethanol, solar, etc).

Jay Curtis says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:14 am
“Hubbert predicted that the US would reach peak in the ’70s and switch from being a net exporter of oil to being a net importer of oil. It happened exactly as he predicted.”
Sort of a combination of the Texas Sharpshooter’s Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy. Out of all the prognostications available, some had to be right, or nearly so. But, it is not necessarily predictive of future performance.

How acidic will this much carbon make the oceans?

G. Karst says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:36 am
jrwakefield says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:04 am
These unconvensional sources will only mean that that slow production will last longer.
Isn’t that exactly the goal of developing unconventional sources?
——
Unlike the anti-oil people I feel we need to exploit as much of the black gold we can. The problems we will face as a civilization will be two fold. Dwindling resources, and not just because of declining supply for geological reasons, but also declining supply to importing countries because of geopolitical reasons. Oil producing countries are also seeing an increase in their own consumption of their own oil. All it has to take is for one or more of these exporting nations to decide they will keep what is in the ground for their own future, and that means less available for importing countries, which means less flow on the global stage. It could also be used as a weapon. Imagine a mid-east country changing regimes (popular today) being run by radical extremists who decide to cut the west off as a means of crushing them economically.
The second big problem with unconvensional sources will be credit. If we go into a prolonged economic credit crisis, lasting decades, like the 1930’s, there won’t be the capital needed to produce from these non-convensional sources.
Oil won’t go to $200 a barrel, because below that triggers recessions, which drops demand, and lowers the price.
So peak oil, the rate of flow, has a number of factors affecting it. High consumption Importing nations, like the US and the EU/UK are suseptable more than anyone.
The US needs to take a leadership role, not possible with this administration, and move to LFTR as fast as they can. Or should the US import that technology from China too?
Important caviet. I make no pronouncements on what the future will be. Then there is Iran, the nuclear wild card.

Leif Svalgaard says:
November 14, 2011 at 11:03 am
Jon says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:42 am
your quote refers to a shortage of barrels at the advent of drilling.
So? Shortages come and go. At the point I was referring to, the number of barrels was a limiting factor, at other times it is political factors, at other times something else. When was there actually a shortage of oil? rather than other factors being the real limitation at any one time.
————
1) 1970’s US. before then the US exported oil, then became an importer due entirely to decline from producing fields, which has NEVER recovered from including with the introduction of new technology. The oil crisis of the 1970’s was due to a mere 5% loss of flow vs demand. Example, the once hyped Hibernia field off Newfoundland, claimed to make the east coast of Canada oil self-sufficient is now in terminal decline since 2004 http://www.cnlopb.nl.ca/pdfs/graph_hib.pdf
2) The collapse of the USSR is thought to be linked to their loss of flow rates during that period. Technology was the problem, they didn’t have it. Now they have recovered, but appears to have now peaked in total production in Russia.

jrwakefield says:
November 14, 2011 at 1:05 pm
“Example, the once hyped Hibernia field off Newfoundland, claimed to make the east coast of Canada oil self-sufficient is now in terminal decline since 2004”
Yes, of course, individual oil fields become depleted after years of exploitation. That is beside the point. New exploration opens up new fields. Since the 1970’s, we have A) by law, put a large portion of unexplored regions out of reach and B) been able to get oil cheaper from elsewhere. It does not mean we do not have the resources, any more than the fact that most of our consumer electronics come from Asia means we have forgotten how to build electronic hardware. It just means it is currently cheaper and more accessible from elsewhere.

“gbaikie, what nuclear waste? The vast bulk of it, all of the U238 and the various plutonium transuranics are all just new fuel waiting to be reprocessed. Why would we ever throw away all that useful, high energy density fuel? Dumping it on the moon is the most useless and most hazardous thing we can do with it.”
If it’s valuable who is buying it?
Maybe it would worth more on the moon and they out bid any future earth buyers.
It the moment it seems reactor fuel is fairly cheap, and therefore it’s common for parties to consider it cheaper to store nuclear waste.
If the govt permitted certain qualified companies to be able take all nuclear waste. Because they were not going to store them anywhere on Earth but would have an easily veritable system that ensued all nuclear material was actually transported to the Moon. Would such a company have a market. In other words whatever the price [because it requires a market to determine a price of anything] and what I talking about creating a market where none exists. Are there parties that are more interested in not storing their nuclear waste? Would such a service be useful- would it lower their costs.

By his own claims, Rossi’s E-Cat produces low-pressure steam and hot water. Not useless, but not suitable for driving steam turbines (or super-critical CO2 turbines either), so it’s not going to be an electrical power producer.
We were all ready to start re-processing our “spent” nuclear fuel (SNF), when Pres. Carter shut down the facility with an executive order. Some nonsense about “setting an example”. Which no one else followed, surprise, surprise. Politics has blocked the waste repository (which the feds are obligated to provide) for decades, blocking it is part of the anti-nukes strategy for killing nuclear power. At this point, the best way to “dispose” of SNF is to use it up in molten salt reactors, do it on site so there is no transportation issue.
The polywell and Deep Focus Fusion projects are still going, so far, neither have his any show stoppers.

Can some adress this simply. I am a beer brewer and the last thing I do is carbonate the beer. To get the same CO2 density in beer at 60F requires 23.1 PSI of CO2 and at 70F requires 28.8 PSI of CO2. 1 thing is quite obvious from this simple fact. CO2 changes will always follow climate change as the ocean releases way more CO2 than people. The ocean is the driver of CO2 levels.

Leif … you say “so?” The fact is, you were incorrect … in 1862, the limiting factor was not a shortage of whiskey barrels.

“The oceans turn over every eight hundred years.”
Does that mean that it takes eight hundred years for water to move from the surface of the ocean to the bottom, and vice versa, or that every eight hundred years the oceans leap up into the air and flip over like a wet pancake?
If the latter, we’re doomed.

It’s about time we had some polls at WUWT. Who here believes PO_isNow? Anyone independantly discovered the PO_isNow cult, got involved, and then found it to be a fraud?
I read about peakoil_is_now back in 2006. It’s compelling. Once your a peaker, you get very involved in it’s material, like you’re in a cult. You have to dig quite deep to find that it’s a fraud, designed to play on the same society is about to collapse and it’s our fault mentality as AGW is.
By 2008 I’d seen that peakoil is still a way off, and we aren’t as mortally dependant of fossil fuels as peakers will say ( nulcear power saves us, with its thousands of years worth of reserves ) but trying tell the others in the peak oil cult was impossible. x-peakers see peakers as a religious sect, just like AGWers.
And like the AGW religion, PO_isNow is quietly propped up by big businesses who’re in positions to gain from rumours of scarce fossil fuels.
I hope David will come round to seeing PO_isNow for the fraud it is. But a the mo his graphs have peak oil around 2010, which is wrong. I’ve been monitoring PO_isNow for long enough to have seen similar graphs, all have PO about the time when the graph was produced. There’s been graphs like this from the PO_isNow lot for decades.
The simularity with AGWer graphs with the global temp flying off at around the time the graph was produced is no coincidence. They are both results from ‘world ends tomorrow’ cults.

‘Peak oil’ is a myth.
When theorized by Hubbert in 1956, peak oil was valid. It is valid today. It will be valid for decades to come, because new discoveries are keeping up with increasing demand. Will it be valid next millenium? Who knows, and who cares!

According to one estimate, (T. Boon Pickens) we are now extracting oil from the Earth at a rate of 85 million barrels a day. If we go back in time, say 85 million years–just before the end of the Cretaceous period, the Earth only needs to be able to produce about one barrel of biotic or abiotic oil a day since then to give us the supply that we are now depleting in a single year, or produce 100 barrels a day to give us a 100 year supply.
Given the geologic ages that the Earth has had to build up the supply that we are now rapidly depleting, there is no reason to expect that this resource is being renewed, whether it is biotic or abiotic, at the rate we need to use it. As far as I know, there is no reason to think that we might one day discover a vast underground ocean of petroleum. The only real inexhaustible source of energy of which I have been made aware of is thorium nuclear.

Austin says:
November 14, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Another Peak Oil post. Sigh.
Production curves are totally tied to the technological pattern under use. This is the flawed assumption.
You could make the same type of curve for a man’s ability to produce food. Until he gets a cow. Or a tractor. Or moves to better farmland. Or gets new seed.
This whole thing reminds me of the “in five years half our landfills will be closed.” fallacy.
———
Completely bad analogy. Oil production is not just technology. Geology plays the primary role. Oil is not a pool in a void in the rocks. The rock is the matrix the oil is in, like a sponge. The ability to extract oil depends on the porosity of the rock, the viscosity of the oil, the pressure of underlying water table, depth, disolved gases, disolved metals, and other factors. Each oil deposit has a fixed amount of oil in it. Technology only allows for a little more to be removed. This happened at Cantarell, nitrogen injection boosted production. But all that does is mean the drop off of the depletion rate is steeper than if no technology was used. Hence the 15% decline at Cantarel now.
Do you dispute that oil fields go into terminal decline?

Charles S. Opalek, PE says:
November 14, 2011 at 4:15 pm
‘Peak oil’ is a myth.
When theorized by Hubbert in 1956, peak oil was valid. It is valid today. It will be valid for decades to come, because new discoveries are keeping up with increasing demand. Will it be valid next millenium? Who knows, and who cares!
———-
Discoveries are not even close to keeping up. We consume some 5 barrels for every 2 found today. http://planetforlife.com/oilcrisis/oilsituation.html

RE: Resourceguy: (November 14, 2011 at 8:03 pm)
“Spector, your concerns about rapidly depleting oil that took millions of years to produce is a common mistake given the fact that it has been four since we learned how to economically produce oil from the source rocks instead of chasing where oil moved with high-risk drilling for lucrative reservoirs in trap locations. “
I am unaware of any such method depending on what you mean by ‘source rocks.’ In a response to a question about using his reactors to assist in the harvesting of the oil sands, Kirk Sorenson appears to be claiming, in effect, that energy from his LFTR reactors will be so cheap (add grains of salt) that he will be able manufacture transportation energy storage fluids such as methanol, dimethyl ether, and ammonia at less cost than today’s equivalent refined products derived from petroleum pumped directly out of the ground.

Leif .. by 1862 villages of barrel makers had sprung up in oil producing regions making barrels specifically for oil production. The shortage of whiskey barrels refers to Drake’s first attempts to sell oil in the late 1850’s.
“Drake had the good fortune of locating his well in a shallow oil belt, and one with Penn Grade crude that could be refined with the limited technology available at the time. A pitcher pump, like those found at kitchen sinks, brought up the oil in the Drake Well and splashed it into a washtub, before it was transferred to whiskey barrels. The initial production of 10 to 35 barrels a day nearly doubled the world’s output of oil. Many new cooperage businesses sprang up around Titusville when the supply of barrels ran out. Within days of Drake’s success, Kier was buying the oil and was paying 60 cents per gallon delivered. Another Pittsburgh refiner, W. Mackeown, also made a deal to buy Drake Well oil. By the end of 1859, the two refiners had purchased over $8800 of oil from the well. Seneca Oil Company had paid $5000 for the 100 acres of land where it was sited.”

Resourceguy says:
November 14, 2011 at 7:42 pm
Re: jrwakefield you link to an oil drum posted article questioning the economics of shale gas plays that is itself not representative of the universe of evidence to the contrary. In fact the only impediment to shale gas at present is the collapse in prices caused by what?…..,,yes shale gas discoveries and ramping of production. This overshoot of production in resource markets is a common characteristic of the sector and occurs in many commodities and markets. In the liquids market the sector is turning quickly toward shale plays here there and everywhere and it will ramp even faster than the overshoot of natural gas because of the value difference and reduced drilling tech costs compared to the natural gas case that included refinement of the techniques as they went. That refinement process on drilling time and reduced support equipment is far enough along now to move faster than the natural gas case. Take heart that you are not alone in being out of date, even the presentations of CEOs from conventional oil drillers are being revamped while they play catchup on land positions!
====
You miss the point of the article. Shale gas has high depletion rates, this is seen around the world. The main reason for the fall of prices for NG is the recession, less NG being consumed, lowers the price. The glut is not just because there is more supply, but also less demand. It won’t last as convensional sources of NG continue to deplete.
You are still making the same mistake. Peak oil is not about what’s in the ground, but how fast it can be extracted. Oil shale will not have the same flow rates as convensional fields, hence will not be able to conpensate for depletion from those aging fields, and the ERoEI will be much lower from shale oil. The Alberat Oil Sands has an ERoEI of a mere 6:1. An oil field is not considered energy profitable (besides monitary) below 4:1.

Here be the proved reserves (notice the year on year increases – especially 2003)
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=57&aid=6&cid=ww,&syid=1980&eyid=2011&unit=BB
Here the consumption (World total is bottom line)
http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/iedindex3.cfm?tid=5&pid=5&aid=2&cid=regions&syid=1980&eyid=2010&unit=TBPD
Note some fluctuation around the mean over the last couple of years. Still well below projections made years ago 😉
3 trillion tons of coal off Norway. Mongolia/China. Orinoco. Alice Springs. All game changers with more to come if history show us anything. A paradigm shift is under way even if environmentalists (and eschatologists) deny it and fight to prevent it.

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
Peabody coal…..shipping to China
Powder River Basin coal has a high water content and an associated low BTU/lb content. 8,500 BTU’s/lb compared to 13,000 BTU’s/lb for Central Appalachian or Australian coal. It is also 1,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Coal Freight rates run at about 3 cents/ton mile.
The ocean freight rates from the west coast of the US to China are an addition $35/ton.
http://www.coalspot.com/news-detail.php?nid=1243
So to get $15/ton coal from Wyoming to China we have to add $30/ton for the rail transportation and another $35/ton for the boat for a grand total of $80/ton.
$80 for 17 MMBtu(8,500 x 2000) = $4.70/MMBtu.
The proposed coal port was going to have a capacity between 5 million and 50 million tons per year depending on who you chose to believe. China consumes in excess of 3 Billion tons per year.
1 million BTU’s produces 102 KWh (1,000,000/3412 * 35% efficiency)
So 1,000 Megawatt coal fired plant requires 9,800 Million Btu’s per hour, it’s hourly fuel cost using imported Wyoming coal would be $4.70 * 9,800 = $46,000/hour. There are 8,760 hours in a year. for an annual fuel bill of $402 million.
A Westinghouse AP1000 nuclear reactor built in China costs about $3 billion. The fuel cost for a nuclear power plant for a year costs about $40 million.
There is a reason the Chinese have ‘shovel in the ground’ on 26 nuclear reactors with another 25 planned. They are pretty handy when it comes to ‘doing the math’.
There is also a reason why they don’t have shovel in the ground on 500 nuclear reactors. They don’t currently have the professional expertise to safely manage more then what they are currently constructing.
They just contracted with ‘Exelon Nuclear’, one of the largest US Nuclear Plant operators for assistance in training.
http://www.power-eng.com/news/2011/11/1541202075/exelon-nuclear-partners-signs-contract-with-cnnc-nuclear-power-company-ltd.html
The only people that believe the Chinese will be importing ‘massive quantities’ of US Coal are the investers in Peabody Coal and Climate Change advocates. Every-time Climate Change advocates blather on about how much coal Peabody Coal is going to export to China various investors end up thinking how much money that Peabody Coal will make.
Peabody coal will make money exporting coal to China…until the Chinese get their act together on their nuclear build-out. If you believe the Chinese will take 20 years then invest in Peabody Coal. If you believe the Chinese will get their act together in the next 5 years Peabody Coal is a poor investment.

RE: Jon: (November 15, 2011 at 6:10 am)
“Leif .. by 1862 villages of barrel makers had sprung up in oil producing regions making barrels specifically for oil production. The shortage of whiskey barrels refers to Drake’s first attempts to sell oil in the late 1850′s.”
And Sir Francis Drake has been credited with contributing to the doom of the Spanish Armada by destroying their stock of barrel staves in an action off the Cape of St. Vincent, May 21 — June 18, in 1587.
“If, when the Armada finally sailed, its water butts proved to be leaky and foul, if much food spoiled because of green barrel staves and ill-made casks, the smoke which hung over Sagres was to blame.”
The Armada
Garrett Mattingly

So then at least one elephant is in the living room.
We cannot afford to be wasting 1/3 rd of all this energy by engaging
in fatuous “carbon sequestration schemes”. In fact any such schemes
could be said to be Criminally irresponsible. Not only do they waste
1/3 rd or this finite source of fuel, but they also would contribe to
the “zero hour” of below 150 ppm of carbon dioxide coming sooner.
Such advocates of sequestration schemes ought to be tried in a
Court of Law for Crimes against Humanity, as well as Fraud.
Advocates like Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University for instance.
BooHoo, weeps “professor” Hazeldine, the dirty British Government
have closed down my pet CCS Project at Longannet in Scotland…..
“the British government has set back the development of one
of the most promising weapons in the war on climate change.”
See just one of the websites of this apologist for Carbon Witchcraft ….
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/research/sccs/
I saw some reports on the UKIP Scotland web-blog
about the so called “professor” Haszeldine, and they
were none too complimentary.
Longannet Carbon Capture & Storage Debacle
http://ukipscotland.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/longannet-carbon-capture-storage-debacle/
Longannet carbon capture scheme scrapped !
http://ukipscotland.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/longannet-carbon-capture-scheme-scrapped/
Seems like not every political Party in Scotland believes the Lies & Deceit.
More from Lord Monckton at the Fraudulent Climate Website also
please do click the link at the name Axel above, once you looked
at the ukipscotland blog stories.

Spector: The portion of the schematic you linked covering future oil production is seven, going on eight years old. It is out of date and proved to be false. Production over that time span (2004 to 2011) slowly has risen (although not by much).
Also the person who prepared that forecast is Collin Campbell, a well known “peak” oil promotor.

RE: David Archibald: (November 16, 2011 at 1:41 pm)
“On top of that, not reprocessing the waste from those reactors is like living in cities before the invention of sewage. We are just sitting in our own filth.”
Kirk Sorensen says his proposed continuously cycling Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors will consume almost all of their dangerous transuranic wastes. (plutonium, etc.) He says existing stocks of transuranic wastes can also be merged into the LFTR reaction pot and destroyed.
Sorensen distinguishes between three types of reaction products: short-lived products that are very radioactive but are gone in a short time; moderate-lived products, like plutonium, that can remain dangerous for a million years or more; and long-lived products that only emit radiation at background levels.
As far as I know, thorium is the only potential energy source that is *known* to be so abundant that it might sustain and support our current energy use beyond the projected life of the planet.
I think his two-hour promotional video compilation above (November 14, 2011 at 3:20 am) is both educational and entertaining.

Myth: The World is Running Out of Oil (Peak Oil) (Video)
Oil: Never Cry Wolf—Why the Petroleum Age Is Far from over (PDF)
(Science, Volume 304, Number 5674, pp. 1114-1115, May 2004)
– Leonardo Maugeri
“A new tide of oil doomsters is once again heralding the end of the Oil Era. The so-called Hubbert model, which they use, considers geology a faith more than a dynamic science influenced by many factors. Hydrocarbon reserves are finite–of this there is no doubt. And yet, contrary to the Hubbertians’ claims, no one knows just how finite they are. More than geology, technology and economics dominate the evolution of reserves. The problem with the oil doomsters’ thesis, according to the policy forum by Maugeri, is that geology is not destiny, but rather only a part of a much more complex picture that does not indicate the world is running out of oil.”
Peak Oil and other threatening peaks—Chimeras without substance (PDF)
(Energy Policy, Volume 38, Issue 11, pp. 6566-6569, November 2010)
– Marian Radetzki
“The Peak Oil movement has widely spread its message about an impending peak in global oil production, caused by an inadequate resource base. On closer scrutiny, the underlying analysis is inconsistent, void of a theoretical foundation and without support in empirical observations. Global oil resources are huge and expanding, and pose no threat to continuing output growth within an extended time horizon. In contrast, temporary or prolonged supply crunches are indeed plausible, even likely, on account of growing resource nationalism denying access to efficient exploitation of the existing resource wealth.”

Spector says:
November 17, 2011 at 5:25 am
“we should be spending a small part of our treasure to develop a more sustainable alternative energy source”
But it isn’t “our treasure” though is it. Whatever the rights and wrongs of what you surmise, there is no communal “treasure”. All “money” represents work and somebodies effort, and people cannot simply be taxed in order to fulfil the aspirations of some few who pontificate on things that “should be” or “ought to be” done. If and when oil and gas and coal, and whatever else become too expensive for the market, then the market will move on to something else. When these fuels become too expensive in terms of effort to extract, their extraction will decline. They will probably never all be extracted to to exhaustion, and so will never in fact run out as such.
Many other fuels have yet to be exploited and others have yet to be discovered. Meantime, Oil, Gas, and Coal are convenient and relatively inexpensive, and so they shall continue to be used, whatever the various pontificators, green advocates, or anyone else says about that. When a person discovers a less expensive or less arduous to extract fuel source then humans will naturally start to use that instead. Many would argue that such sources already exist, but are being withheld deliberately because of vested interests. This is not something that anyone alive on the planet today needs to worry about though, or even anybody will need to worry about for at least 500, or perhaps 1000 years. Remember that just 100 years ago people still travelled about mostly on horses and until the 19th century, there wasn’t even any practical use for electric power.
Have faith in the ingenuity of the combined inventiveness of billions of Human Brains.

Just to be fair, here is a reference to an article I just found that is highly critical of Jeff Rubin. He seems to have a regular column in The Globe and Mail, “a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto,” and is featured in a number of You Tube ‘Peak Oil’ presentations:
THE NATIONAL POST
FULL COMMENT
Dan Gardner: Jeff Rubin is a guru you shouldn’t listen to
Dan Gardner Dec 15, 2010 – 8:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Dec 14, 2010 5:59 PM ET
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/12/15/dan-gardner-jeff-rubin-is-a-guru-you-shouldnt-listen-to/
“Dan Gardner is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.”
According to the Wikipedia, “The National Post is a Canadian English-language national newspaper based in Don Mills, a district of Toronto. The paper is owned by Postmedia Network Inc.”

Scrolling down to the fuscia coloured chart @ http://trendlines.ca/free/climatechange/#co2 one can see my ongoing study of the fossil fuel contribution to co2 emissions varies somewhat from David Archibald: 411ppm in 2025
Promoters of the myth of imminent Peak Oil (McPeaksters) have made the same tired annual declarations since 1989 and like a broken clock, some time they can say with glee they were right all along! Geologic Peak would normally occur @ 105 Mbd, but current deterioration of growth rates in consumption make it rather clear this will be truncated (100 Mbd). PEAK Demand will be induced by crude prices surpassing $208 in 2029.
The forcing for PEAK Demand is triple digit oil prices but ridiculous predictions of $225 by next year by neophytes like Jeff Rubin are outrageous. Along with James Hamilton and Steven Kopits, Jeff Rubin belongs to a fringe element that do not understand the concept of demand destruction wrt petroleum prices nor its price components. Hence their failure to foresee the 2008 episode was a mere spike and why there was no world Recession when oil rose above $86/barrel last year.
http://www.trendlines.ca/free/peakoil