Guest post by David Archibald
The fate of all carbon is Davy Jones’ locker. Following the post on the imminent decline in world oil production and the effect that would have on agricultural operating costs at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/27/peak-oil-now-for-the-downslope/,
let’s have a look at what total peak fossil fuel production looks like and the effect that will have on climate. It will look something like this:
Figure 1: World Fossil Fuel Production 1800 – 2300
The figure is in millions of barrels of oil and its equivalent in energy content per annum. Peak production is in 2025. Coal production keeps rising until about 2050 but that is more than offset by the declines in oil and natural gas. China has the largest coal reserves on the planet of about one trillion tonnes. The United States is next with about 250 billion tonnes.
Figure 2: Fossil Fuel Production scaled against rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide
There is high quality data on atmospheric carbon dioxide from 1959 from the Mauna Loa observatory. Plotted against the historic fossil fuel production profile, there is a good match fuel burned and what remained in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has a half life in the atmosphere of about five years. It is very rapidly exchanged with the biosphere and the top 100 metres of the ocean. There is almost no exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean below 100 metres. The oceans have fifty times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere and eventually the atmosphere will be in equilibrium with the whole ocean column instead of the top 100 metres. Note the dip in the rate of increase in 1992 associated with the cooling caused by Mt Pinatubo. Similarly, the current solar-driven cooling will be associated with a flatlining of the atmospheric carbon dioxide level as the cooling oceans will absorb more carbon dioxide.
Figure 3: Projected atmospheric carbon dioxide level 1800 – 3300
The oceans turn over every eight hundred years. So at one end of the oceanic conveyor, water in equilibrium with the current atmospheric carbon dioxide level is sinking towards Antarctica and at the other end, water in equilibrium with the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide of about 300 ppm is coming to the surface and immediately taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to become in equilibrium with the current carbon dioxide level. The sum of these two effects is to take 0.25% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and dissolve it in the oceans. If it weren’t for this effect, burning all the rocks we could economically burn would take the atmospheric carbon dioxide level to about 600 ppm. With it, the peak is going to be about 522 ppm in 2130.
From the current level of 390 ppm and with the heating effect of carbon dioxide being 0.1°C per 100 ppm, the consequential increase in atmospheric temperature will can look forward to may be another 0.15°C. This will simply be lost in the noise of the climate system. There is a far greater benefit. The extra 130 ppm-odd from the current level will increase agricultural productivity by 23%. So instead of the world producing 2.2 billion tonnes of grain, the same land area and water will be able to produce a further 500 million tonnes of grain. That increase would be able to sustain about 1,200 million people. Perhaps that is not a sustainable thing because the oceanic turnover will subsequently bury that aerial fertiliser in the deep oceans.
This figure also shows why higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have such a dramatic effect on plant growth. Plants can’t operate against the partial pressure differential between their cells and the atmosphere when the atmospheric content is below 150 ppm of carbon dioxide. During the depths of the glacials during the current ice age, which is three million years long so far, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level got as low at 172 ppm. Life above sea level came within a hair’s breadth of extinction due to lack of carbon dioxide. At the pre-industrial level of about 300 ppm, only 150 ppm was available to plants. At the expected atmospheric concentration of 522 ppm in 2130, that will be a 150% increase in useable carbon dioxide.
Figure 4: Energy Density per Litre
The next question is,”When carbon becomes rare and expensive, what will we be driving?” The future doesn’t look too bleak in that regard. As a fuel, ammonia has about half the energy density of LPG and handles like LPG in terms of the pressures and temperatures of storage. Ammonia is better than having no liquid fuel at all and can be made from nitrogen and hydrogen produced by electrolysis. The cost of electric power determines the production cost. There are credible attempts being made to produce ammonia from wind power. Electrolysis could handle the swings in power output from wind which electric grids are ill-suited to.
Figure 5: Competitive Price Ranges of Nitrogenous Fertiliser Feedstocks
It is said that half the World’s protein consumption comes from synthetically produced ammonia. Until recently, the most competitive feedstock has been natural gas. But with the natural gas price internationally linked to the oil price through the LNG market, it is being displaced by coal as the preferred feedstock. Coal-based urea plants have twice the capex of natural gas-based ones. The oil price that triggers a switch to coal is about $50 per barrel in energy equivalent terms. Above that level, coal is the preferred feedstock up to about $200 per barrel at which point wind energy may be viable and the coal has a high value use as feedstock for liquid fuels.
In the longer term, the cost of nuclear power will be the main determinant of transport and agricultural operating costs.
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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.
Re comments on coal reserves –
Wikipedia has Mongolian reserves at 12 billion tons or over 100 billion elsewhere.
Similarly India either has 60.6 or 267 billion tons (with note that this is second largest reserves).
Canada lists either as 6.5 or 78 billion tons reserves.
I think that we can say that the likely peak could occur in a number of years.
P.S. the earliest reference I can find about “oil will run out very soon” was dated 1862 (3 years after large scale use started), but I believe that there was an even earlier one. Does anyone know of it?
Graeme No.3 says:
November 13, 2011 at 10:15 pm
P.S. the earliest reference I can find about “oil will run out very soon” was dated 1862 (3 years after large scale use started)
The real limiting factor at that time was not running out of oil, but running out of the whiskey barrels they used to store and ship the oil.
@Graeme No.3
I just saw a reference in one of the papers linked from the Weekly Roundup about German coal reserves. Lo and behold, they carefully mention ‘recoverable reserves’. They also sometimes use ‘proven’. Yeah, well, that is the perfect excuse to downrate the available coal. Germany itself (which produces the main surveys) used to have a lot of ‘hard coal’. Now it has nearly none with the stroke of a pen. Amazing. Where did it go?
So the large variations you find are part of the coverup: there is NOTHING to be made by announcing the plentiful availability of coal. Nothing at all.
We will never see oil running out, that will happen in a few thousand years….
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 …
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 …
David, if you had lived in 1701, and was set to predict the future, how many of the following words would you have come up with;
-Transistor
-swept-wing
-compressor
-liquid-rocket
-flat-screen
…..
…..
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 is probably right about China estimated coal reserves being out by an order of magnitude, because everyone’s coal reserves are probably out by an order of magnitude.
The usually quoted 130 years supply at current rate of consumption is coal that it is technically feasible to recover (ie with current technology) at current prices.
In reality there is vastly more coal than that.
And mining is going through an automation revolution. Mines are opening here in Western Australia that have no underground workers at all. Its all done with remotely operated machines.
I estimate there is enough coal to last between 500 and 1,000 years at current consumption rates.
David, you should have used more tea leaves…
And in a few decades we could start using a larger proportion of our carbon in chemical synthesis, I expect.
From Enginer on November 13, 2011 at 5:48 pm:
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.
From comments below Fig. 2:
Two essentially affine functions… How hard is it to get a good match between them by scaling and shifting? Answer: it is trivial.
Moreover, the plot is of rate of change in atmospheric CO2 versus absolute fuel production. According to this reasoning, if we stop increasing fossil fuel production, we will still see rising CO2.
This is really just an exercise in grasping for data to support a preconceived conclusion.
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!
Central Petroleum Ltd has recently found a coal field in a vast almost uninhabited area some 300 kms south east of Alice Springs in central Australia. The field extends for some 400 kms and is very conservatively estimated to hold 300 billion tonnes of coal plus.
Some of the drill intersections went through seams up to 35 metres thick [ 115 feet ]
http://www.centralpetroleum.com.au/
This is just one field with the possibility of more being found and is additional to Australia’s already huge coal deposits in Queensland.
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.
Peak oil production graph looks exactly like the one produced in the 1950’s and every decade since. That was wrong and this will also be wrong I suspect.
The graph showing the connection between fossil fuel burning and atmospheric CO2 ignores the natural producers which provide 97% of this CO2.
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.
The point is not whether the fuel is available, nor whether it can be recovered, the point is….do the governments WANT the fuel ?
In the UK we have an energy secretary who doesn’t like….energy.
We have a PM, and deputy PM, who have family links to renewable energy……
We have large shale gas reserves.
We have native, and vocal and well-connected, environmental groups who have already started trotting-out the “causes earthquakes and pollution and gas out of your taps”.
Taken together I doubt that even if we had several hundred trillion cubic metres of recoverable reserves…any of them will be extracted.
It looks like the governments know the temperature is going to continue to drop.
Not having any fuel means that many will die.
I detect a distinct lack of government interest.
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/
Philip Bradley says:
November 13, 2011 at 11:26 pm
“And mining is going through an automation revolution. Mines are opening here in Western Australia that have no underground workers at all. Its all done with remotely operated machines.”
Thanks for that info Philip. It was about time to come, similar case for nuclear operations & nuclear clean-up teams should bring a revolution there too.
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 …
David Archibald says:
November 13, 2011 at 7:16 pm
I looked at that Battelle pdf. It’s essentially a sales brochure for the full report, which costs 495 British Pounds. And yes, your figure for Chinese coal reserves jibes with that of the sales brochure. But they gave no indication of how they arrived at that figure, and no reason for me to take them seriously. Now let’s play Follow the Money.
It’s in Battelle’s financial interest to inflate their estimate of Chinese coal reserves. Why? Because it puts them in a position to say: If you’re a business person, then ignore Chinese coal at your peril. By the way, you really and truly need to buy our report.
You made the point that the Chinese leadership would be stupid to continue with their ambitious program of coal-fired power plant construction if they didn’t have significantly greater-than-previously-estimated coal reserves. Perhaps so. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that they are in fact stupid. Although Capitalism has made significant inroads in China, they still have a top-down economic decision-making structure. And their policy-makers know even less about economics than Obama. And that is stupid.
Human beings are adaptable. If we run out of oil, coal and gas we’ll just burn something else :).