Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There’s a discussion over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog, about peak oil. I find the whole madness surrounding peak oil to be one more example of our human love for warnings of future disaster. Few people want to hear that tomorrow will be OK, that things will work out. Instead, most folks want to hear some terrible story about what tomorrow holds, whether it’s peak oil or climate meltdown or the coming ice age. Go figure.
Figure 1. Conventional oil leaking out of the ground near McKittrick, CA.
One part of the discussion of peak oil that has always bothered me is the division of oil into “conventional oil” and “unconventional oil”. Here’s why I think that division makes no sense with regards to peak oil.
I’ve lived through much of the whole peak oil deal, which near as I can tell has turned into a half-century-long goat roping contest. During the earlier years, people were shouting that the oil would run out, that the top would be very soon now, we’d hit the peak and by gosh, at that point things would turn ugly. Of course, that still hasn’t happened, so the peak oilers were left with the question pondered by failed doomcasters throughout history, viz:
How the heck do I explain the cratering of my position and still maintain some shred of my reputation?
For the peak oil folks, salvation came in the form of “unconventional oil”. Now, we’re assured, oil is still running out, so they were right all along … You see, they say, King Hubbert was right, we’re running out of conventional oil, but as it runs out it is being seamlessly replaced by “unconventional oil”, so we still have oil even though we’re running out of oil. Got it?
The strange part is, when you open a barrel of unconventional oil to see what conventions were broken in its creation, you find it is indistinguishable from conventional oil.
What is unconventional oil? Well, we could start by considering the conventions regarding oil. For literally billions of years the convention was that oil was found in small pools and seeps like you see in Figure 1. Indeed, the discovery of oil in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, the site of the first US oil well, came about because oil had been seeping out there for untold centuries, and had been known and utilized by the Early Asian Immigrants in the area before the later arrival of the melanin-deficient crowd.
So conventional oil, by ancient hallowed convention handed down through the millennia, is found in tar pits and oil seeps on the surface. Which means that people being so rash as to drill for oil, by definition, would be pumping up “unconventional oil” … but of course, life is not that simple.
As a result, “conventional oil” is not from the conventional method of dipping it up in a bucket from a seep, but by the decidedly unconventional and at that time unheard of method of drilling a hole in the earth to get it to come out …
Things went along just fine like that for years. Then “secondary recovery” methods started to come into use. These were a variety of physical and chemical methods used to squeeze more oil out of existing fields, including fracturing the rock to allow the oil to come out more easily.
Now, about this time, the whole “peak oil” story started to go south, because no matter how much peak oilers howled there was more oil discovered every year. Every year the proved reserves just kept growing. And that process has continued to this very day, with more proved reserves than ever. How were the peak oilers to explain it? Hey, “unconventional oil” to the rescue!
For example, thinner oils were “conventional”, but thicker, more tarry deposits, despite having been utilized by humans for centuries, were “unconventional” oil, so they weren’t counted regarding the peak.
The real laugher, however, the place where you can see the gears stripping, involves the “conventions” about fracturing the rocks to allow more oil to come out, what we call “fracking”. The fracturing technology was developed about forty years ago, and has been used ever since, mostly for secondary recovery. And for all those decades the oil coming from the fractured rocks has been “conventional oil”. But now people have learned to drill wells horizontally and fracture them … and now suddenly after forty years of fracturing the rock, which gave “conventional oil” when it was done from vertical wells, fracking now only delivers “unconventional oil” simply because the drill hole goes horizontally instead of vertically … does this make any sense to anyone?
The classification of oil from fracking as “unconventional oil” shows clearly the ludicrous nature of the dividing line when we are discussing peak oil. Regarding the putative peak, why is oil from a horizontal well “unconventional” and oil from a vertical well “conventional”? It is all gotten by technology, and none of it is any more “unconventional” than the drilling of the first oil well, a most unconventional act …
Calling oil from horizontal wells “unconventional” is crucial for the peak oil folks, however, because if the oil from fracking were classified as conventional oil, the “peak oil” claims and the “peak gas” claims would sink of their own weight …
Look, folks, the ugly truth is that the world is awash with fossil fuels. To start with, The largest single concentration of fossil energy on the planet is the Powder River coal formation in the Northern US. The world has several hundred years worth of coal. The Canadians have huge amounts of oil … of course it too is called “unconventional” oil, because it alone is enough to blow the “peak oil” claims out of the water. Plus now we have the “tight oil”, oil in the rocks that is, of course, unconventional.
Then we have the discovery of the shale gas resources all around the planet. Even Israel finally has some domestic energy resources. How unconventional is that? Australia just announced a huge find. China has massive gas resources. A preliminary assessment says including shale gas we have enough gas for the next couple of hundred years.
And finally, we have the wild card, the methane hydrates, the “ice that burns”. Estimates of the amount of these are all over the map, but all of them share one feature—they are very, very large, on the order of quadrillions of cubic feet. This is rivals the size of the global natural gas resource …
Finally, most of these forms of fossil fuels occur in combination and can be converted into one another. Coal, for example, can be converted to a liquid fuel, or to a gas.
Now, because there never was anyone hollering about “peak coal”, there’s no such thing as “unconventional coal”, despite huge changes in mining technology. Coal mining has changed as much or more than drilling for oil … so why isn’t there “unconventional coal”?
But in that case, since all of the coal on the planet seems to be “conventional” coal, if we convert coal to oil, are we making “conventional oil” or “unconventional oil”? Presumably it would matter whether we converted coal to oil horizontally or vertically …
In summary, once you get past the nonsense of “conventional” and “unconventional”, there’s enough coal and gas for a couple hundred years, and enough oil for a hundred years, just with what we know about now, and that’s not even counting methane hydrates. Which is why I pay no more attention to the peak oil alarmists than I do to the climate alarmists. One group claims we have too much oil and we’re gonna burn it all, the other group claims we’ll soon have too little oil to burn, and I treat those two impostors just the same.
Was the division between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil devised to cover up the failure of the peak oilers? No way. The distinction is useful in a variety of ways for analyzing the world of oil sources. I think that the concept was simply appropriated by the peak oilers because it was very useful to them, since it totally obscured the failure of their peak oil predictions. To me, oil is oil is oil, and if you claim the world will run out of oil, you can’t later say that you have redefined things, and that the oil that proves your prediction wrong is some other special kind of oil that doesn’t count as oil but walks like oil and quacks like oil …
w.
… Oh, yeah, the weather report. Late night again, two AM. The wind has changed and is blowing from the southwest, landcasting the fog and the smells of the ocean. The characteristic sea smells of iodine and dimethyl sulfide in the fog draw my thoughts back, back to the many mornings I spent getting out of bed here on the hill at 4 am and going down to the harbor, rigging the boat and setting out in the dark to have the commercial fishing gear in the water for the dawn salmon bite. Sliding out of Bodega harbor in the half-light with my gorgeous ex-fiancee and my good friend, once again motoring between the rock jetties at the harbor entrance, going out to discuss matters of life and death with the ocean. I love the ocean because it doesn’t give a damn about a man’s position and his power and his pretenses. Knowledge and experience mean nothing to the ocean. After a life at sea, if I put one foot wrong, I get just as wet as the landlubber falling off the dock … I take pleasure in that ultimate equality and justice of the ocean. I know that even if it is a California ocean it would kill me without first asking me to share my feelings, so leaving the safety of the harbor is always sobering moment …
… sneaking out between Bodega Rock and Bodega Head itself, the little shallow passage the fishermen call “between the rock and the hard place”, where once my heart almost stopped with fear, or at least it started with fear, but other emotions got involved. The channel there is shallow, the sport fishing boat “Mary Jane” was capsized in 1986 with the loss of nine souls by a sneaker wave, “full fathom five thy fishermen lie, of their bones are coral made” …
So when I heard a wave break right behind our little fishing boat one afternoon as we were coming in between the rock and the hard place, my first thought was that we were about to join the folks from the Mary Jane.
We spun around, and aaaah, dear heavens, it wasn’t a breaking wave at all, although a wave was breaking, instead it was my old friend Missus Fishbreath breaking the surface just behind the boat, and breaking my heart with the slow-moving stillness of her majestic beauty, a great gray whale dancing her way three thousand miles from the tropics to Alaska. As we turned and gaped, we were looking her right in the eye, and then she rolled our way and opened her blowhole so close to the boat we could almost look down it, it was as big as a dinner plate, we were close, close enough to count the barnacles clinging to her hull, she was the very picture of natural wildness and glorious beauty and unimaginable power, my heart leapt to see it … and she blew out a great cloud of gagging mist, a noxious enveloping adherent miasma reeking of the million vanished piscatorial souls of her most recent month’s meals, a clogging, thick effluvium that enveloped the boat and then drifted away to leeward as the lovely lady disappeared beneath the waves …
… leaving me in the strangest condition imaginable, with the boat wandering off course, my jaw hanging down to my umbilicus, a pulse rate well into the triple digits, adrenalin-shocked, awed beyond words, smelling like the dumpster behind a cheap fish restaurant, blasted by the natural beauty I had just witnessed, and uncertain whether I was going to vomit or not, but tending toward the former.
I’m not jonesing to visit that particular emotional place again, once was enough for any man. And on a cold night like tonight, I’m glad I’m not rolling out at four am. I fished the Bering Sea as well, and these days I’m just as happy to see the bergy bits and watch the Bering ice on the “Deadliest Catch” TV show from the safety of my couch … but ah, dear friends, mostly I’ve just moved my ocean madness to warmer waters, and I wouldn’t have missed it for rubies and pearls …
Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics of dancers,
The exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone’s throw out, between the rocks and the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing each other
Following the cliff for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient and
cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey harbor. A flight of pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler; all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the equally
Earnest elements of nature.
Robinson Jeffers saw it … when you read those lists of famous last words, nobody ever says “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”. Don’t mail the envelope in, push the envelope, the journey will end long before any of us wish it to. Live your most impossiblessed dreams, my friends, because any other kind is just a dream. Chance the widdershins steps of the tarantella, lift the ancient curses and look under them for old coins and lost loves and dust bunnies with a vest and a gold pocketwatch, opt for an immediate increase in the uncertainty levels, stay away from the world of adrenalin deficit spending, hold your dearest warm under your heart while you dare the icy seas of life, for the night is assuredly coming …
My very best wishes to all, I’m off to sleep.
TimTheToolMan says:
February 3, 2013 at 4:15 am
I think the problem with some of the discussion here is when the phrase “peak oil” is used most people take that to mean we’re running out and either we will have to pay a lot more for oil or get used to having less of it. Discussions about “peak oil” are often used to support claims we are sliding toward the world of “Soylent Green” and a time of global deprivation and general misery.
But as may have pointed out, history is full of examples where human ingenuity has found ways around resource limitations, and most likely we will continue to do so.
So if by “peak oil” you mean there will come a time when we can’t extract, convert or otherwise produce more oil, I have to disagree. The distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil is meaningless to a consumer if both can be used for all the same purposes. If instead you mean there will come a time when we don’t need to produce more oil, then we are in complete accord. At some point better (cheaper, more abundant) resources will be found for all the purposes we now use oil. I won’t even venture to suggest when that might be, but unless civilization is destroyed by asteroids, general nuclear war, alien invasion op a plague of lawyers, that day will certainly come. And it will come without the need of a single government department to foster, shepherd or mandate it; economic fundamentals will bring it about when the time is right.
The world’s iron production from Roman times was constrained by “peak charcoal”: It took about half an acre of 25 year old trees to produce a ton of iron (See here .) That means you have to devote 12.5 acres of managed forest to sustain the production of one ton of iron annually. Then in the 18th century England began using coal to produce coke and iron production took off (the Chinese were using it for that purpose much earlier). Iron became more plentiful and cheaper and the forests were left alone. “Peak charcoal” came and passed and aside from woodcutters nobody suffered. Instead abundant and affordable iron enabled the industrial revolution and everyone benefited.
In the mid 19th century we reached “peak whales”. Our ability to hunt whales exceeded their reproduction rate and they were headed for extinction. People were doomed to darkness (no whale oil) and ladies were doomed to shapelessness (no whalebone for corsets). Petroleum products replaced whale oil at a lower cost and other materials were used for corsets, before ladies stopped wearing them altogether. Civilization did not suffer; while it was a disaster for the whaling industry, the whales got to survive, people got more fuel for lamps and stoves, and ladies got to breathe more, which most people account as progress.
So TTTM you are technically correct: at some point oil production will decline. But I don’t believe civilization as a whole will suffer as a result but rather whatever replaces oil will most likely confer benefits on everyone.
“If you have enough power, you can make synthetic oil out of practically anything, coal, gas, plant and animal matter (soylent green brand oil), even carbon bearing asteroids (there is carbon out there, lots of it). ”
Yes, you can. But 1) is negative ERoEI and 2) you cant make it fast enough to meet demand in the volumes required.
Here’s an example of ERoEI misappropriations. Corn based ethanol to add to gasoline. It’s taking food away from people, and drives up the price of food.
Peak coal has been mentioned: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726391.800-coal-bleak-outlook-for-the-black-stuff.html
“I did not mean that in 2035 the production would be increasing by 33% each year. The confusion seems to be that I said, and I quote, “33% more oil … than is produced and marketed today”, and you thought I meant 33% more oil than each previous year. I neither said nor meant that.”
I was not clear at all. So lets evaluate what you did mean. 33% more than today in 30 years. That is based on past increases. Does not mean future increases will continue. That 33% includes those huge unknowns of yet to find. Overly optimistic.
I have done a lot of reading on this myself. I see things much different, almost opposite to you. Peak oil wont be a world wide cliff. It wont affect all countries the same. Quite the contrary. High indebted countries who import oil will be hit the hardest (The US loses some billion dollars per day of wealth to import oil). There just wont be the wealth needed to buy on the open market, compete with China or India. Too much government money goes to interest payments, and because of that, too much taxation will curb people’s ability to buy fuel. The EU is an excellent example of this already happening, especially Greece (heating fuel is so expensive people are chopping down all the trees they can to keep warm).
Other countries who have reached peak production, and require that income, will also be in serious trouble. Egypt’s unrest can be directly linked to their peaking of oil production. That money was used to buy food and keep food prices down. Food prices there are increasing, and to top it off, Egypt will soon be importing oil. Not only do they not have oil revenue to buy food, soon they have to buy oil on the open market.
Mexico will be in the same boat soon. Indonesia too.
So don’t expect peak oil to be some kind of cliff. It wont. Watch what happens in oil producing countries that are now in terminal decline. Prices for energy and food will increase, civil unrest will escalate. It’s already happening. And will have world wide ramifications.
So don’t expect peak oil to be some kind of cliff. It wont. Watch what happens in oil producing countries that are now in terminal decline. Prices for energy and food will increase, civil unrest will escalate. It’s already happening. And will have world wide ramifications.
Nobody on the Peak Oil side of the argument is calling for a cliff. All that they are saying is that once a certain point is reached the total amount of oil produced will start to go down each year. Now there are some complicating issues because we do not really mean oil but the products that the oil produces and those are impacted by the type of oil that is produced. (Contrary to what was said above, not all barrels are created equal because different grades produce different amounts of transport fuels and other end products.) The fact is that the data is still on the side of those that argue for Peal Oil. As Matthew Simmons pointed out a few years back, the date of the peak would be easy to see if all of the field by field data were made available. But because there is no transparency the estimates have to be changed every time new data is released. Sadly, that means that we will only see the Peak once it is in the rear view mirror.
Alan Watt, CD (Certified Denialist), Level 7 says:
February 3, 2013 at 3:46 pm
Huh? I don’t mean that, I don’t think anyone does.
Peak oil production means just what it says. It refers to the year when the maximum amount of oil hits the market.
w.
“The distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” oil is meaningless to a consumer if both can be used for all the same purposes. ”
Not when the price at the pump is high because unconventional oil costs more to extract. For example, the Alberta oil sands costs at least $80 per barrel to extract. Compare that to convention sources which are less than $20 (few of them around today). Even the Bakken requires nearly $80 per barrel to extract.
The higher the price for energy as a percent of people’s disposable income, and that leaves less money for other things, which means fewer people buying fewer goods in stores. That means recession. It’s no co-incidence that the 2008 crash coincided with $148 oil.
“But are we certain that the geological processes involved in creating oil have stopped?”
Yes, as far as we are concerned. We dont have millions of years we can wait for new deposits to form. The notion of abiogenic oil was debunked years ago. It doesnt happen.
TimTheToolMan says:
February 3, 2013 at 4:15 am
Couldn’t agree more, Tim. My guess is some variant of artificial photosynthesis, but there’s lots of contenders.
Agreed.
Two points about that. First, I brought up algae simply to show that oil production is only limited by human imagination. I’m not touting it.
Second, Exxon has kicked in up to $660 million dollars in a joint venture with Craig Ventner, who basically invented modern gene sequencing. Their aim is genetically altered algae that are able to produce oil at economical costs. So while you may not be thinking of ponds of algae … Exxon is betting big money that it may work. Time will tell, I couldn’t say, but we can’t dismiss it at this point.
My regards to you,
w.
Colin Campbell in 1996 wrote in Scientific American an article titled “The End of Cheap Oil” At the time the marginal cost of a barrel of oil was around $10. Now it’s close to $90. He called it right. Now we must drill thousands of feet deep under water or use “fracking” all of which are very expensive. Since the easy oil is gone ,since we’re searching in unlikely places for hard to get expensive oil, and since the depletion rate of present fields is around 5%/year (= a new Saudi Arabia needed every few years, ) I should say peak oil is definitely getting closer. Peak oil is a reasonable scenario.
Willis: “It is a geological fact that oil deposits deplete and follow a flow rate bell curve.
Ummm … kinda true at a constant price, not at all true at a highly variable price like we’ve seen in the last couple decades.”
Really. How come these then:
Norway:
http://www.norway.cn/NR/rdonlyres/BE29CE7E80B845EABA7832B199DF356D/49868/productionncs2.gif
Hibernia:
http://www.cnlopb.nl.ca/news/images/d2000_01_en_fig6.gif
Mexico:
http://www.energyinsights.net/cgi-script/csArticles/uploads/4690/oil-production-mexico.gif
Egypt:
http://www.crudeoilpeak.com/wp-content/gallery/net-importers/eia_egypt_oil_production_consumption_1980_2009.jpg
US we all understand peaked in the 1970’s. I could post more if you like.
So I’d like to know how a higher price for oil will make an oil field produce more? Higher price hasnt booted those fields above.
Fracing refers to “hydraulic” fracing, not Torpedoes. The first hydraulic fracing took place in 1947, not 1865. Torpedoes were just nitro explosives that were detonated across the production zone. They were effective because as a result of the detonation, some of the near wellbore damage was bypassed. These Torpedoes were never referred to as fracing until the greens decided to confuse the issue.
Some of the first hydraulic fracture programs used oil as the carrying medium and walnut hulls as the proppant. As the depths got deeper the proppant got harder. Fresh water is now the preferred carrying medium.
jrwakefield:
At February 3, 2013 at 3:47 pm you assert
NO!
I have lost count of the times I have refuted that nonsense in this thread.
Read my post at February 2, 2013 at 2:57 pm.
Richard
OIl men have been “fracking” for more than a hundred years. They drop a stick of boom down the hole when the well runs dry and they get more oil. Its nearly as old as drilling.
“Second, Exxon has kicked in up to $660 billion dollars in a joint venture with Craig Ventner, who basically invented modern gene sequencing. Their aim is genetically altered algae that are able to produce oil at economical costs. ”
You dont do this unless you are desperate for more oil. I dont see these as signs of encouragement, I see them as signs of panic. When your starving for food, you’ll eat just about anything.
As the saying goes, I’ll believe it when I see it full scale production serving our energy demand.
Sugar Loaf Field Brazil: 12bb. The world consumes 30B per year. So it’s puny.
http://www.economist.com/node/13348824
Lula field Brazil 8BB, even punier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lula_oil_field
Brazil consumes a billion barrels per year. Do the math. Those two fields MIGHT supply Brazil for 20 years. No exporting. That’s assuming they can be extracted fast enough. Which is a huge no. Small fields have small output.
If those are top 10 super fields, we are in serious trouble.
Willis: “Second, Exxon has kicked in up to $660 billion dollars in a joint venture with Craig Ventner, who basically invented modern gene sequencing.”
Source please…only reference I found was for $600 MILLION (up to). Quite a difference…
Exxon’s typical “Investments” in a year are around $22B, so “up to” $600M, over some period of time longer than a single year, is really not so big in Exxon terms.
[Thanks, fixed. No, they’re not spending two thirds of a trillion … -w.]
Willis: “So your claim that all of the huge oil fields are in “terminal decline” is simply not true.”
It is true. Those deposits are not oil. Most certainly the Alberta field isnt. It’s bitumen. Has to be cooked and injected with natural gas to make oil. All the CONVENTIONAL oil fields are in terminal decline, the graph you posted shows that clearly.
Unconventional sources will be constrained by price (every time a country goes into recession, the price of oil drops below the economic threshold). High oil prices send countries into recession.
ERoEI causes the Energy Trap to take foothold.
Shale deposits (oil and NG) suffer from the Red Queen Phenomenon. Because depletion rates are so fast (wells follow a decay curve, not a bell curve) then you have to dill ever more wells faster and faster just to keep production flat. At current market prices for NG not one fracking company is making money.
Again, you are claiming peak oil doesnt exist because we have X amount still in the ground. As you have noted, it’s about flow rates. Do these deposits have the ability to make up the flow rate loss from dying fields? The answer is likely a no.
As soon as supply drops below demand, someone does without the oil they need, regardless of what’s in the ground. And even if you do extract it fast enough, can an unstable economy, top heavy with ever increasing government and personal debt, be able to afford to buy it?
Re Synthetic oil: “NO!
I have lost count of the times I have refuted that nonsense in this thread.
Read my post at February 2, 2013 at 2:57 pm.”
South Africa is doing it. Making oil from coal and NG. They produce 160,000 bpd. The country consumes 553,000. If it was so viable an option I would have thought they would be able to supply all their demand from synthetic. Something is limiting them.
It turns out to be classic Energy Trap. Coal and NG are vital to other energy needs of the country.
http://www.eia.gov/cabs/South_Africa/pdf.pdf Hence they cannot allocate more coal to make synthetic oil because that would take coal away from other needed requirements — The Energy Trap.
Yes, it’s $600 million.
http://gigaom.com/2009/07/14/algaes-big-break-exxon-craig-venter-launch-600m-algae-fuel-effort/
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-18/for-algae-fuel-2013-could-be-a-make-or-break-year
Sure are anti-human people around,and suckers.
Walter Shawlee the junior is very sharp technically, and ran a successful aircraft electronics business for years.
But he wrote a long article on peak oil, that Avionics News magazine published
I was here and I read most of these comments. Thanks. I laughed, I cried, I
spat crumbs on my keyboard.
Vince Causey says:
February 3, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Thanks, Vince. Let me add two important caveats.
1. In the real world, dollars input per dollar value of energy recovered is the important measurement, not energy input per unit of energy recovered. If the first works, if it makes money to extract the energy resource, the EROEI doesn’t matter … and if the first doesn’t work, if it doesn’t make money, nobody cares about the lovely ERoEI. As a result, the EROEI is mostly of academic interest.
In addition, the two of them (eroei and money returned) are usually closely aligned, because typically you have to purchase the energy you are inputting to get the energy out. Finally, it is much easier and more accurate to measure dollars in/out rather than energy in/out, which is a more nebulous number. For all those reasons, the real question is “is it economical”, not what the energy balance might be.
2. In any case, EROEI is a fundamentally a function of human ingenuity, not a function of the world.
You constantly say things like X has an EROEI of so much, Y has an EROEI of so much. The missing word in that is “currently”.
Currently, it’s not economical to extract uranium from seawater. You’ve got to filter far too much water, the energy to run the pumps alone is way larger than the energy you get from the uranium. The EROEI is negative, and quite badly negative. (Usually we don’t measure it that way, instead we say it’s not economical. That’s easier to measure, which is partly why it is used.)
However, the Japanese have been doing experiments using genetically altered marine sponges, which filter huge quantities of seawater, to extract uranium from seawater … if that can be done economically, what does that do to the uranium resource?
More to the current point, consider the EROEI of marine sponges filtering uranium. Suppose it takes a year for the sponge to gather a microgram of uranium, with energy content X. In the effort of filtering the uranium from the water, the sponge may well expend energy equal to 10X or even 100X … so in fact the EROEI is wildly negative.
Would that negative EROEI mean that the process should be abandoned? By no means. We’re not paying the sponges to expend all of that energy, so why should we care how much energy they expend in filtering uranium? All we care is, does the process make money? If so, who cares that we’re not paying the sponges minimum wage?
This illustrates my second point. What is the EROEI of extracting uranium from seawater? Depends on how you go about it … which means that EROEI is fundamentally a function of humans and not of the world.
This is why EROEI doesn’t get much traction in the real world. Its close cousin, whether the process is economical, is much more important. I’m not saying EROEI isn’t a valid measure for certain analyses, just that for practical purposes economics is more important.
My regards to you.
w.
Willis writes “Their aim is genetically altered algae that are able to produce oil at economical costs.”
Algae doesnt pass my viable sniff test. Making a few assumptions, lets say it takes an olympic pool sized pool to create a barrel of oil from the algae and it takes a week to get there. Thats about 50 barrels per year per olympic sized pool.
To get to say 1M barrels or about 300M barrels per year which is only about 1% of our current usage would take 300M/50*(50m*25m) m2 = 7500 sq kms. Alter the figures as you like but I doubt its viable in any meaningful way.
The Australian government gave the coal industry $100M to research carbon capture and storage. Australia loves its coal…that doesn’t mean its viable but many people will think it must be because of the size of the investment. That one will probably end up as a massive PR exercise more than producing anything earth changing with respect to CCS and it’ll probably be worth it given the amount of coal export we make.
jrwakefield says:
February 3, 2013 at 4:15 pm
So go register your complaints about the numbers to the IEA, it’s not my graph. I told you why I posted it, I didn’t make it up, it’s their numbers.
All I said was that according to the chart the peak oiler cited we haven’t reached peak even by 2030. You can take that for what it’s worth, IEA made the chart, the peak oiler cited it. You can claim it’s optimistic, pessimistic, I don’t care. Nothing to do with me.
w.
Curt Lampkin says:
February 3, 2013 at 4:38 pm
If by “marginal cost of a barrel” you mean the extraction cost, it’s nowhere near $90/bbl. If not, what cost are you referring to?
w.