Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Mainstream media is waking up that despite billions invested in renewable energy, oil and coal use are surging.
Forget About Peak Oil – We Haven’t Even Reached Peak Coal Yet
David Blackmon
Senior Contributor Energy
Aug 2, 2021,09:18am EDTDespite all the heavy dissemination of narratives and talking points about a “climate emergency” and the “energy transition” during 2021, the ongoing economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic proves that the world still heavily relies on fossil fuels to provide its constantly growing energy needs. Indeed, as the pushers of Peak Oil demand theory try in vain to revive their own always-wrong narrative, it now appears that the world has yet to even meet the peak of demand for the least environmentally friendly fuel of all, coal.
This is especially true in China, India and much of Asia, where thousands of coal-fired power plants have seen record usage levels in the face of a major heat wave this summer. Bloomberg reported last week that China’s enormous demand for coal this summer has caused commodity prices to spike to the highest level seen in 2 months, briefly climbing above 900 yuan/ton (roughly $139.31 at current exchange rates) on Friday.
The global futures price for coal set a new record high in May as supplies ran low. Australian coal – China’s main international supplier – hit $150 per ton in July, the highest level seen since 2008. The demand is so high in China that it has even led to implementation of electricity rationing in some parts of the country as supplies run short.
…
This spike in coal demand and usage is far from limited to Asia. The Wall Street Journal reported in early July that coal-fired power usage was also spiking in European countries like Germany and France, both of which spent years loudly boasting of their plans to eliminate coal from their energy profiles.
…
In the meantime, the United States has been able to cut its own carbon emissions to levels not achieved since the early 1990s mainly by replacing retiring coal-fired power plants with power provided by natural gas. Thanks to the Shale revolution, which is enabled by hydraulic fracturing – “fracking” – the U.S. possesses such enormously abundant supplies of natural gas that it has been able to develop a robust business sector for the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The country now ranks among the three top exporters of LNG, along with Qatar and Australia.
…
Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2021/08/02/forget-about-peak-oilwe-havent-even-reached-peak-coal-yet/
Just to add to the fun, talking about peak oil and peak coal as if they are different targets is fundamentally wrong.
As the NAZIs proved in WW2, when they lost access to good oil fields, you can run an economy on coal liquefaction technologies, well proven technologies for converting coal into oil.
The only holdup is liquefied coal is more expensive than conventional oil, it doesn’t become economical until oil prices exceed $100 ($145 / barrel according to one estimate I saw). Though China runs a significant volume of coal liquefaction plants, those plants are likely more for high value added chemical synthesis than fuel oil.
The threat of cheaper coal liquefaction technologies is likely the real reason OPEC tries to keep oil prices low. OPEC are terrified of “demand destruction”, the possibility that high oil prices will stimulate a switchover to EVs, or more investment in developing non-OPEC oil resources, but they are also concerned it will stimulate research into cutting the cost of coal liquefaction. A coal liquefaction research breakthrough could permanently cap OPEC’s conventional oil at an uncomfortably low price.
So the reality is, there is zero chance we shall see peak oil supply in our lifetime, or even our grandchildren’s lifetime, not only because there are vast reserves of oil, but because there are centuries worth of coal reserves just sitting in the ground waiting to be mined. We shall all have a plentiful supply of oil at an affordable price, for as long as we need it.
Peak oil … Hmmm.
We used to have the stone age which we left a long time ago. Did that mean we had peak stone? Nope. We use way more stone now than we even imagined using during the stone age.
Our ever improving technology means that, while we may not rely on petroleum the same way we used to, our consumption of petroleum may actually increase.
Oddly enough, the biggest problem with the stone age was a definitely limited access to suitable quantities of the best conchoidially fracturing stone for knapping, like obsidian, chert and flint. One didn’t just bend over and pick up any stone to make knives, axes and arrow heads. A source of obsidian might be many, many miles away from where it was used. It was a trade item and a real technology driven industry.
Rory, a sharp point you have there….
For instance … Mount Edziza in British Columbia was known throughout Western North America as the best source of obsidian and traded as far north as Alaska. This trade can be traced, and verified by the chemical signature of the obsidian, to a specific volcano.
I’d love to be able to see that mountain … a neolithic fortune in natural glass.
In Europe they used flint, there is still plenty available, they’ve build complete churches out if it in Britain.
They built my house out of flint. I repair it by collecting flints from all around.
You mean that Britain has not yet hit “peak flint”? I am aghast.
Yes there is plenty of flint in certain locations. Other locations have none. It’s the quality and distribution that matters. There were flint mines that appeared to have supplied quite large areas. You seem to have missed my point.
I wonder how long it took mankind to realize that stones couldn’t be pounded into bowls.
Yabut … pounding isn’t the only tool at your disposal. Among other techniques, there is abrasion for instance.
And it didn’t take a federal mandate to get people to switch to practices that actually work.
Grinding surfaces does work with certain stone, but it does take rather a long time, while knapping can produce an extremely sharp tool in minutes. The thing is, they didn’t confine themselves to a single technology … chipping and grinding, cleaving, pounding, flaking, knapping and flame finishing. It was an industry using many different tools and varieties of stone.
There are a number of stone cups and bowls that have been made throughout the ages. As a species we can be truly inventive when faced with a challenge.
Does about an hour seem too long to you? That’s what I’d guess.
Civilization collapses had nothing to do with running out of energy resources. Plagues, volcanoes, fanatical prophet, all come to mind – nothing about running out of wood or dung. However, the Romans had rudimentary wind power before the big crash, maybe there’s a connection…
Is that you Griff?
Actually one view is that all civilisation collapses were due to resource limitations in conjunction with other factors.
Whether the resource limitations came about because of climate change or simply expanding beyond sustainable limits.
I’m kind of glad that we don’t use Roman numerals for everyday life.
Venezuela could come back.
Unfortunately, in many respects, Biden policies, such as moratoriums on tenant eviction, are the same kind of socialistic meddling that got Venezuela into trouble.
Russia could also come back. I’m not aware that Afghanistan was ever a major producer. However being a war zone for the last 20 years might have something to do with their drop in production.
Venezuela, Russia and Afghanistan haven’t hit peak oil.
There drops in production are due to economic and political problems.
The world is not as simple as you need to believe.
It really is fascinating how you keep going back and forth between the US is about to hit peak oil, and the claim that we hit it years ago. Can’t you keep your delusions straight?
Every one of those collapses was do to one form of peak resource or other?
So none of the collapses were due to droughts?
None of the collapses were due to invasions?
For example the Minoan civilization was destroyed by a tsunami when a volcano on the island now known as Santorini exploded.
There are many reasons why a civilization might collapse.
Your problem is that you are only willing to accept answers that fit into your narrow world view.
It was your claim that all civilizations that collapsed, did so due to resource limitations.
So are you abandoning that claim too, or are you just trying to change the subject again?
The Germans are at it again.
syn fuel from any organic material fresh or fossil process heat molten salt reactor to avoid having to waste some of it to drive the process
“The wind power will produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, which will then be filtered to form synthetic methanol. ”
Filtered?
The Green Nazis will freak if they knew it evolves processing the h2 will coal to make the synthetic methanol.
But hey, if the Green Shirts have a tax gun to your head, what can you do? Anyways, makes infinite more sense to convert so-called green hydrogen into methanol or better yet octane than trying to use dangerous ammonia as a way to make storing and transporting h2 viable.
Don’t mention the war. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it.
H/T Basil Fawlty
At least they’re not inviting deniers to step into some solar oven.
I can’t think of a better word than nonsense … utter, unmitigated nonsense. You’ve spent far too much time consulting with your fundamental orifice. Your prognostications are worse than the most brain dead AGW true believer’s drivel. Loydo seems rational by comparison.
(Personal attack is snipped) SUNMOD
That at least is probably true. Renewables are alrady if not dead, starting to smell that way.
As of June 2021 the British Geological Survey ‘Map of Global Lithium Mines, deposits and occurences’ lists 86 sites world wide.
http://www.lithiumfuture.org/map.html
Moreover,” Areas in theUK, Portugal and Germany show great potential for lithium sourcing from brines and hardrock sources”
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00325-9
I think you’re just making all this up as you go.
I guess you don’t know… lithium’s ability to store is at roughly 85 – 90% of it’s theoretical maximum. So it may well have peaked. Another small problem… currently lithium reserves are far to small… to supply enough for just the USA!
In an attempt to help you understand the climate scam a bit better… I submit two links you need to follow!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2021/08/02/forget-about-peak-oilwe-havent-even-reached-peak-coal-yet/
Also:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyotas-chief-says-electric-vehicles-are-overhyped-11608196665 Elon Musk agrees with Alko Toyoda!
But that’s exactly what you were saying … utter, unsupported drivel. You’re delusional … and I think you know it.
Do you write your own signs or do you have them made for you?
THE END OF THE WORLD IS NIGH
You assume too much. You also assume that your way is the only way that matters and ignore/patronize any that don’t agree with you. Like many of the climate enthusiasts you have got a monomaniacal obsession with something you read or heard someone say years ago and it has dominated your thinking. Let it go – it’s wrong, abysmally wrong and very bad for you.
You use the term ‘peak oil’ which is painfully wrong and short sighted. As others have pointed out, there are bountiful reserves still waiting to be tapped. At the very, very worst we may have seen ‘peak cheap oil’ and we may be about to enter the era of ‘slightly less cheap oil’ as reserves which have been seen as uneconomical to date become more exploitable as time goes by.
There are none so blind as those who refuse to see, or those whose deafness results from their refusing to hear.
Then the willingly deaf and dumb seek to share their lack of wisdom even as others reject their nonsense.
Oddly, unloved, unlikeable, massively forsaken, the trollop bot keeps digging it’s hole deeper emptying all knowledge.
It’s clear to anyone who has worked in petroleum exploration that the cheapest and easiest to find oil has been discovered. Exploration is constantly being pushed into more extreme and expensive areas using technologies unimagined only a few short decades ago. When the price of oil rises sufficiently, more environmentally hostile areas will be developed. I also think that new, cheaper and more efficient methods of horizontal drilling and fracking will be developed. We can’t assume the way we do things now is the way it will continue forever. I foresee a longer, slower decline in production than you do with the caveat that new developments can’t proceed with a crash in prices every 10 years or so.
“It’s clear to anyone who has worked in petroleum exploration that the cheapest and easiest to find oil has been discovered.”
Yeah, most of it probably has been.
But some places have never been explored.
And most of the larger discoveries still have most of the oil sitting right where they found it.
There are unlimited sources of methane in our solar system.
Once the price is high enough, someone will find a way to mine it and bring methane to Earth.
Well said.
How you are wrong has been explained to you over and over again. You just reject any explanation that doesn’t fit into what you are so desperate to believe.
He does not understand that a centralised global economy, bent on destroying infrastructure, production and manufacturing, free trade and free markets, sooner or later ends up producing an utopia of “peak everything” and rationing policies.
The very means of an effective centralized global
control – command on all aspects of people’s life and social behaviour.
cheers
What’s obvious to you, is less so to those with functioning frontal cortexes.
How many times do the refutations need to be repeated.
What else have the voices in your head been telling you?
Since there are other explanations that make much more sense, we don’t need to assume peak anything.
What the heck is “failaids”?
What the heck is a failaid? If you are going to make up words, at least give us a definition of them.
Since millions are dying from hunger, it should be possible for you to document them.
Well I did. At some length, but perhaps you are a TL:DR; who prefers faith to hard thinking?
Nonsense doesn’t require a serious response.
NEWSFLASH:
This is a conversation on an internet blog.
Not a word of it matters.
And the only way that matters to you, is to confirm your delusions.
You assume the Eastern GoM (Florida’s west coast) will never be opened up to development. Bad assumption.
I prefer ‘balderdash’
Perfect, thanks. Clearly I was at a loss for words.
No, that’s a bit too far. And too fast.
Peak oil and peak coal has never been about suddenly digging or pumping the last drop, it’s always been about cost of extraction in dollars and in terms of energy used, rising above some alternative.
The way I see it playing out is a steady rise in fossil fuel cost towards $200 a barrel over a decade, along with a realization that windmills and solar panels simply don’t cut the mustard, and a grass roots demand for sensible policies, a Republican government, and a dash for nuclear power.
I follow nuclear power closely, and I think they know this – plans for mass produced small reactors that can be manufactured on production lines and shipped as complete units to the sites are ongoing from at least three consortia . They don’t get the publicity because they are boring – there is no new technology, just production engineering of what already is known to work well, to get the costs down and ease the regulatory burden.
As energy costs rise, of course, the cost of renewable energy will rise – it’s already 3-5 times more than conventional, and people will simply realise on cost grounds alone, that it’s a dog’s breakfast.
That solves the electricity generation conundrum – if the West had invested what it has invested in renewables, in nuclear power, and had played as fast and loose with regulatory and planning overrides (2/3rd the cost of nuclear power is meeting onerous planning and unnecessary safety regulations ) as it has with renewables – we would be awash with electricity at 5-10c a unit.
It also solves the chemical feedstock conundrum. If coal and gas get too expensive there are other ways of constructing carbon based compounds from other carbon souces – biomass, waste or otherwise, and in the limit carbon dioxide itself, if we have cheap electricity.
All of this can be safely left to the market, as we have the replacement technology waiting for when its needed.
The only conundrum left is off grid power. BEVs will probably dominate in intra-urban scenarios where it’s all stop start and charge points are easily installed but for longer distances something else is needed. There may be a 2:1 improvment in BEV battery capacity and charge times, making maybe 400 mile range a possibility, but the chemistry simply stops there. There is also a worry about lithium availability – and there is no real alternative to lithium in the same energy density area.
I can only see a few alternatives:
Now I am absolutely not a ‘believer in man made climate change’ but I am a believer in limited resources. In my country – the UK – peak coal came and went, not because we had ‘run out’ but because it was simply uncompetitive to do deep mining of small seams when the USA could simply strip mine huge areas and sell it to us. We never really had any oil until the North Sea fields were opened, and they have also peaked, and are in decline unless we frack, and that is also expensive.
Also, distances are smaller in Europe, and BEVS make (a little) more sense here.
So my position is realtively simple. I don’t believe in man made climate change as a serious issue, I do believe that fossil fuel resources are limited and will at some point peak and go into decline. For economic as much as physical limit reasons.
I further believe we have almost all the technologies available to enable civilisation to continue, just not exactly as it has since I was born in 1950, when steam trains and diesel buses were how you travelled, and you walked to the corner shop for food. The automobile absolutely transformed our lives as did electricity and centrally heated houses.
Lockdown is a glimpse of the future. I suspect that companies will realise that actually a proportion of people prefer to work from home, and ‘spend more time with their families’ and a significant amount of work can be performed at home, while online shopping can replace a huge amount of travel to and from e.g. the supermarket.
I can’t answer for the USA, but in the UK commuting consumes enormous amounts of time and fuel, and if its not necessary, why do it?
Cheap oil meant we all had cars. Expensive oil and lack of lithium means we all stay at home more.
Just as towns in the Industrial Revolution grew up where the raw materials and energy were, and died when those industries did, to become mere dormitories (Detroit?), so too the use of internet and effective delivery systems may well replace the ‘market town’ as the place to ‘buy stuff’. Whichever way it goes I cannot see transport getting cheaper. But exactly how that affects things, is speculation really, at this point.
What we are seeing – beyond all the political blatherskite – is post industrial society in a slow transition from fossil fuel to ultimately nuclear power.
What will help is electronics and the Internet.
What hinders is the unavailability of any real alternative to oil as a primary source of portable energy., and people on all sides of the argument who haven’t recognised what is going on “Save our High Streets” – why? Their time has gone. “The office is a social venue as well” so go to a bar or local gym and meet your neigbours instead. “We must transition to renewables” Why? They are expensive and useless and use too much fossil fuel to construct. “Peak oil and peak coal isnt going to happen” It will – not in my limited lifetime perhaps but in a few decades. Whether you believe it will or not.
The main stumbling block is (as usual) the people who want to keep it all just like it was. The Socialists ‘we must preserve our mining communities, we must preserve our high streets, people have a right to a private car that will do 600 miles and only take a minute to refuel, we must preserve our supermarkets” and so on. And politicians who are doing very nicely, thank you, out of the status quo. Nobody at the top of the current dung heap has any interest in any change at all.
Nevertheless, paraphrasing Churchill, even the elite can be relied upon to do the right thing – after they have exhausted every other alternative.
I am an engineer. I know what will work and I know what will not, because I have spent time using my education to explore the alternatives. No one has any respect for expert knowledge any more, so there is no point in exhausting myself any further trying to convince people of the underlying facts of life: As an employer I watched employees making mistakes, but always failed to convince them of it, and upset them in the process. Only once they had realised they had made a mistake would a little ‘how are you doing? Oh, not so good? Well you might try nuclear power instead’ have any effect..
People do not act on facts if they can help it, they act on what they believe and worse, what they want to believe. Nevertheless the facts cannot in the end be denied. And I am sorry to say that while this site is streets ahead of the main stream media, there are just as many ‘believers’ here substiting knee jerk responses based on pre judgment as a substitute for diligently examining the facts and the arguments.
We are moving with many a stop start and false turning, away from a mobile society based on fossil fuel to a more stay at home one based on nuclear power and the Internet.
Not for any other reason than, ultimately, we simply have no alternative. Other than a Green reversion to less than a billion global population and a hunter gatherer lifestyle…
I think that is a very pessimistic view of the future. Ultimately if we have sufficient cheap energy – nuclear or otherwise, everyone will be able to live a better life than we already do (in the west). But I do agree that regulation and a few blind alleys will delay that progress.
I see where there are several American projects going on that will try to build Solar Power Satellites in orbit in the next few years, to demonstrate the feasibility.
And the Chicoms are saying their 2030 Solar Power demonstration powerplant in orbit has been delayed to 2035.
Americans might beat them to it yet.
Great post.
Exactly right re: opportunity cost of wasting money on unreliables instead of investing in nuclear. If we had invested in nuclear, we would not have wasted fossil fuels on the life cycle process of building wind and solar, and as you stated, we would be awash in inexpensive electricity. While it may not take an engineer to understand the lunacy of thinking we can replace fossil fuels with weather dependent and unreliable energy sources, there are sadly too many engineers who think it possible and are helping to push the narrative.
Leo, I always appreciate your thoughtful, well-informed comments.
And let me add, my perpetual question to griff does not apply, (1950-2025)—may you live 100 years in good health!
I’m a PhD nuclear engineer and I also believe that nuclear must be a growing component of the energy mix – that unreliable “renewables” cannot replace fossil fuels without grid-scale long duration backup which simply does not exist and cannot exist with present technology. Wind and solar will be a fraction, but we need baseline and peaking power which cannot be provided by them. The only thing I take issue with is the enthusiasm for small, modular nuclear reactors as they’re several times more costly per kW-hr than full-scale Gen IV reactors that are completely safe.
Building nuclear is slow, it’ll take many decades to build the plants and the rest of the infrastructure to make the switch away from fossil fuels. Fortunately, we have the time. There’s no climate emergency and we have 50 to 150 years of gas and oil left, and even more coal.
I believe the main reason it will take so long to build the nuclear future which Leo S envisions, is that more than one generation must pass so that the generational fear of nuclear energy slowly evaporates and a rational response can be formulated.
I disagree with the “many decades to build the plants” statement.
Step 1A: Require LOSER PAYS for all envirowacko lawsuits challenging the siting and construction of nuclear generation facilities with a minimum bond of 100% of the projected construction cost of the facility. Plaintiff’s attorneys are responsible for 100% of court costs and defendant attorneys’ fees in losing cases.
Step 1B: Provide the same review and approval process for nuclear that has been applied to wind and solar.
Step 2A: Build modern efficient ironworks to forge the reactor vessels, valves and piping for the new Small Modular Reactors.
Step 2B: Construct manufacturing facilities for pumps, motors, generators, etc. necessary for the construction of the associated power plants.
Step 2C: Build assembly line for production of the reactor cores, pumps, etc.
Step 2D: Simultaneously begin site preparation and construction for generation facilities including cooling towers, containment structures, generator houses, etc.”
Step 3: As soon, as the first production line is completed, within the first year, begin delivery of materials and start the process of building all required motors, pumps, generators and reactor pressure vessels.
Step 4: Within 2 years of plan startup, deliver the pumps, piping, motors, generators and reactor vessels to the prepared sites.
Once production has started, simplify, and increase efficiency to the production level required. The US produced more than 50 aircraft carriers, 2700 liberty ships, over 500 Victory ships, 23,000 tanks, almost 300,000 aircraft, Not to mention all the artillery pieces, naval ships such as destroyers, landing craft, cruisers, etc., artillery pieces, trucks, guns, bombs, ammunition, clothing, tents, etc., etc. In roughly 4 years.
Once the number per year required is determined based on the total demand and the number of years to desired completion, then the number of manufacturing facilities to build the required can be planned for.
I would say that all necessary base load generation could be on line within 10 years. There are numerous previous coal power plant sites that have been destroyed since Obama and Reid began shutting down coal production. All of those sites have water supply, train tracks and power distribution systems available for re-use, or reinstallation if demolished. Start there for siting, with federal regulations specifying they are “inherently suitable” for nuclear siting, then move on to find other sites as necessary.
Personally, if I could have my way, I would shut down NY Central Park and build all electrical generation necessary of NYC there. Those NY liberals have been screwing with the rural flyover states for years, payback is a bitch.
BTW, why build a new ironworks for reactor vessels? Because the US can’t even produce the reactor vessels for our Nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines. They are produced in Toronto, Canada. What a joke the US government is.
And finally, the SMR built will be operated with highly enriched uranium like the naval vessel reactors such that refueling would not be necessary for 25 years, thus eliminating most of the problems with current designs requiring taking them offline for refueling every couple of years.
Drake, I pretty thoroughly agree with your assessment that much greater speed is possible. The WWII production statistics you cite should be viewed in light of a population that was 133 million vs 330 million today. Also, the French partially achieved the same goal in under a decade in the 70s, in response to the first oil shock.
But back in the real world, steps 1A and 1B are not politically feasible under current conditions.
Thanks for the reply.
I agree with your take on political feasibility at this time. However, if the Republican party can replace sufficient numbers of RINO Senators and Representatives, retake the majority, and gain the presidency by 2025, following the Democrat model they could pass a “reconciliation” bill including all the “profit” from FEDERAL OWNED nuclear generation facilities which would allow passage with 50 + 1 vote in the Senate including all regulation for the nuclear generation installation to raise funds for the government to “balance” the budget.
The manufacturing facilities would be private. After the generation facilities were built, they would be sold at a profit, and for profit utilities could run them, getting the inevitable escalation of operating expenses of a government operation under economic constraints of FREE ENTERPRISE. The system would have multiple operators able to serve the same grid sections to allow for competition in efficiency of operations.
I would, however, have the US Army Corps of Engineers be responsible for refueling of the reactors when the time came. Fuel reprocessing would be done under military security at a federal site.
Other “problems” to solve in that first reconciliation bill?
Student loan debt, to be paid down by a special tax on all private college and university endowments. Think Harvard and Yale, etc. Also a special additional tax on all universities total salaries for “educators” and ‘administrators”. and a special tax (50%?) on the price of textbooks, to be paid by the university requiring the students to purchase such books. And subsequent removal of “student loan” programs and guarantees of any type.
Sale of all federal mortgage programs, fanny mae, freddie mac.
Elimination of federal flood insurance, or insurance of any kind.
Elimination of all farm subsidies.
Elimination of all auto and energy subsidies.
A requirement that all sources of “energy” list on their price at retail outlets and on any utility bill the total federal, state and/or local tax burden, including any excess cost of subsidies for any portion of the bill. Of course, the definition of these subsidies would need to be specified.
Ex. The cost of BU power for unreliable generation, wind and solar.
The cost of additional infrastructure to connect widespread wind and solar to the grid.
The cost to dispatchable facilities to keep their equipment ready to pick up the slack when unreliable become unreliable.
The added cost of maintenance and repair for such standby power sources.
The cost of a new 100% tax on power crossing any grid boundary to support an adjacent grid that has an excess (defined as over 5%) of unreliable power generation.
Let the ratepayers know what unreliables actually cost.
Drake,
As a libertarian, much of that sounds good to me in theory, but practically speaking there’s less prospect of it getting enacted than just focusing on a nuclear crash program. I’m with meab on that.
If a Republican sweep is at all possible, it is not going to happen without quite a few squishy RINOs in the mix. There’s also basically no prospect of turning public opinion around to an explicitly skeptical majority view on climate change being nothing to be concerned about.
At this point I would think that the best compromise would be convincing a bare majority of the public that a nuclear program coupled with abundant domestic supplies of natural gas using CCUS and “blue” oil is the best way to “address CO2 emissions” without destroying jobs. It might then be possible to do in a bipartisan way and get 60 votes in the Senate, as well as a durable policy consensus.
If we could ever do it honestly where most Republicans explicitly state that they don’t think it’s necessary to go beyond the nuclear deployments, but they are accepting the CO2 sequestration aspects as a compromise to save jobs, that would be preferable to the cowardly John McCain-style approach of accepting the premises of the alarmists.
As much as I would like to see this done purely in the private sector, it seems like a public-private partnership in which the military provide security would be a prudent compromise in order to facilitate the use of HEU without terrorist proliferation concerns. The Navy is in the best position to lead this program, I would say.
Politics is the art of the possible, and perfect is the enemy of the good.
1st of all, none of that is going to happen anytime soon. Having all that stuff happen is about as likely as seeing all Climate Alarmists admit that there’s no evidence of any climate catastrophe.
2nd, what about the poor economics of SMRs did you not understand? They’re simply not competitive with advanced full-scale nuclear reactors for producing cheap power. A dozen are being designed, but very few are being built, and one single design would have to be built by the many 100s to become competitive. That’s why there is essentially zero investment happening in large scale SMR factories – there is just a tiny market because they’re so uneconomic.
https://wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/872-873/smr-economics-overview
3rd, HEU is a nuclear proliferation problem. The US built many HEU research reactors under Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program around the world. When it was realized that the HEU could be diverted to make nuclear weapons, the US had to retrieve all that HEU (at great cost) and likely will never make that mistake again. I worked on the program that retrieved the HEU for several years and played a critical role in designing, developing, and building the measurement devices that made sure that we got all of the HEU back and none of it had been diverted.
4th, there are advanced reactor designs that can be fueled online. Heck, the CANDU reactor uses natural uranium and can be fueled online and the Canadians have had those operating for 60 years. (They are safeguarded to address Plutonium proliferation).
Your post illustrates why we can’t afford to have daydreamers who are unwilling to do 5 minutes of research and unwilling to use their elementary school arithmetic skills design our national power systems.
I see you’ve made no progress toward achieving the competency level of a fifth grader. You can start by actually looking stuff up.
Fascinating how anything that refutes your delusions, is “obviously fake”.
What a fantastic comment, total agreement with you. The alarmists are insane, but some of the skeptics here go too far the other way, perpetrating worst case scenarios no less unreasonable than RCP8.5.
There is no climate crisis
Yes we will transition from fossil fuels when they run out
The issue is the insane trying to force it to happen in a decade will severely degrade society.
They know they don’t have a real scientific case otherwise they wouldn’t be turning to arguments of racism.
This guy seems to believe that we will wake up one morning and every oil well on the planet will have completely run dry.
Haven’t you read about the huge new finds in the Gulf over the last few years?
What you know, and what really is, have no intersection.
So the voices in your head are still telling you that everyone secretly agrees with you?
PS: Given up on trying to explain reality to someone who has no connection with reality, is not the same thing as agreeing with you.
Replying to yourself multiple times is a major kooksign.
I think a better word would be lies.
Never attribute to malice what is reasonably explained by stupidity.
Stupidity is too nice, try mind numbing ignorance.
The Gulf of Mexico has vast amounts of oil.
Macondo spewed a gigantic amount for months with no sign of slowing down, and was then capped off.
It is still down there, with God only knows how much more.
Another thing to keep in mind is, we have never tapped oil source rocks.
We only tap reservoirs.
Every one of them will refill, and it is only a matter of time.
It may be faster than anyone thinks.
On top of all of that…proven reserves have little to do with how much oil is under the ground.
Or even how much oil is in the ground that is recoverable using currently available technology.
Most places have not even begun to allow fracking.
Here is what I have always known: At some point of need, any resource will be used, and after that, more will be found.
Last year, oil got down to the low low price of cheaper than free.
Yeah, it is almost all used up!
It is only deliberate production limits that keep prices propped up.
Gas is cheaper than milk.
Cheaper than bottled water not including all the taxes.
I am not sure which is more pathetic, liars or fools.
“Assuming a more realistic cliff decline since there’s no discoveries, obesity is cured in a year and every year after that reduces life expectancy 50%. This is based on the life expectancy-calories-oil correlation.”
Yeah…no.
It is based on you have your head jammed up your bungholio.
One thing is for sure, it is 100% detached from reality.
There is no discoveries because of the moratoriums put on place after Macondo.
They drilled into some rocks that are so pressurized with such vast amounts of oil and gas, it blew the rig to smithereens.
And gushed with no let up for months.
And that was just one little hole, in one single place, in a vast sea.
Which is tiny compared to the other vast seas.
Every drop of oil ever pumped from the ground is a volume smaller than a single decent sized mountain.
And the world is covered in billions of years worth of sedimentary rock, a significant fraction of which is organic material.
Yeah, we are running out.
And what was that crap about enhanced recovery being worthless?
Injecting carbon to get carbon?
Heavy oil useless?
Because the small amount produced in Canada is not enough to make everyone a zillionaire overnight?
Venezuela has seen peak of their oil?
I am trying to imagine if it is possible that anyone with the mental capacity to type, could actually believe a single word of that malarkey?
If a country had no oil in quantity, like China and Japan, but had lots of coal or equivalent energy resources in nuclear, say, how expensive could it be, in btu or KW oil equivalent, to be equivalent to oil, but taking into account balance of payments, and of course the added benefit to the economy of the jobs in those non-oil energy sources? How would one balance the benefits of cheap imported oil or LPG to the general economy, versus the benefits of home grown energy?
For instance here in Canada, while I am no bleeding heart socialist or protectionist, I would OK with paying more at the pump knowing that it went to my fellow Canucks in the Alberta oil patch or oil sands, rather than paying for a carbon tax that ends up get flushed down the toilet of government expenditures and for foreign oil that props up dictators.
You already answered the problem, the capitalist world as a whole has been moving steadily against protectionism and have setup agreements and organizations against it. The moment you try imposing such a scheme you will face retaliation from most other countries and setup a mini trade war. Europe wanting to put in a tax on countries not meeting emission targets has already been warned what happens next.
You can do it but don’t moan about the pain inflicted on you in trade.
Dumb replies like this one? Why have you not supported anything you have written? Not one piece of evidence, no links to supporting sites, no facts or solid proofs have been offered in support of your writing which, it has to be said, come across as the written form of verbal diarrhoea. You have nothing – your work is delusional and so utterly wrong that it simply cannot be supported except by your inane ramblings.
Must be griff.
Griff doesn’t know that many words.
Whatever money is spent on products from other countries must eventually return to your country when those others buy stuff from you.
Think about it, what is someone from Mexico going to do with a bunch of Canadian dollars? They can’t buy stuff in Mexico with them, they can’t buy stuff in the US with them. The only place in the world where they can spend Canadian dollars, is in Canada.
Yes, they can trade those Canadian dollars with someone else for pesos. However they person they traded with now faces the same dilemma that they faced. That is, the can only “spend” those Canadian dollars in Canada.
Eventually those Canadian dollars have to return to Canada.
The US has been getting around this problem for decades by running a constant budget deficit. Those who hold US dollars don’t have to buy US goods, they can instead buy US T-bills.
The only dumb reply I see is yours.
Point 1 – what the hell are you talking about!? Alberta was Saudi North with lots of great paying jobs until the bottom fell out due to natural gas fracking and opec having a fire sale to fight natural gas. The greenies will have a sh!t in their pants when we start using nukes, wind or solar to get the oil out of the oil sands carbon free.
The cost of Alberta’s tar sands oil is largely a political artifice of pipeline restrictions and limited markets. Open up those non-technical, artificial barriers, throw out the Socialist politicians, and the price falls below $100/bbl.
What about Capitalists and Communists? Will they survive?
You’re not paying attention Kaiser. We all start dying next year, commies an capitalist alike. Even if you see oil and gas flowing to markets, it’s “worthless”. Don’t keep trusting your lying eyes.
Oilsands are profitable at much lower than $100 a barrel.
Not as profitable as they would like but none are shutting down
Ingraham is more than a little nuts
Socialists are going to die.
Capitalism was never profitable.
BTW, if you are impressed by that argument, no wonder you have bought into every conspiracy on the planet.
Paying out dividends is proof that the company is losing money.
Sheesh.
South Australia just recently discovered enough oil for the whole of Australia for a century. This is not an isolated incident. Much of the world has not been searched because its just not worth it, the price of oil is so low.
The only reason fuel itself is so expensive is massive amounts of tax.
Here in Colorado, the bulk of our refined fuels and lubes are from Alberta syncrude refined in Commerce City and the remainder from local fracked oil. Much of our electricity is generated from local fracked natural gas as is virtually all of our heating.
You really do have a limited view of what’s possible.
Probably the result of spending all of your life in big cities.
It’s clear the economic gain is not restricted to just Alberta but is spreading out to the rest of Canada. It’s clear that other factors are at work here than your limited understanding can comprehend.
What is the transfer of payments from Alberta to the central government then to Quebec?
Albert does the work, the leftist in control of the federal government spends the money.
It’s just one non sequitur after another with you.
Mark you need to understand Canada’s Equalization Payment’s.
It’s a complicated equation which allows the Fed. Gov. to take one provinces budget surplus and give it to another province. Currently Quebec is balancing it’s budget due to receiving Alberta oil revenue.
Out here in the real world (a great place, you might want to visit it some time)
economic prosperity depends on a lot more than just the amount of oil being pumped.
Said by the guy who thinks falling prices indicate that supply is running out.
You are utterly delusional.
We’ve found that your collapsium plated ego is impervious to any data that doesn’t fit your agenda.
It takes more energy extracted from coal to build a wind turbine than that wind turbine can ever produce.
The monuments to failed climate science are an enormous blessing to the extractive industries. There has never been such high demand for the raw materials and energy needed to convert them into the dazzling array of spinning and shiny monuments.
Shear joy for the extractive industries and the profits created by high demand. Is it any wonder there is wide industry support for so-called green energy.
There’s a good reason why the fossil fuel sector is investing so heavily in the so called “renewables”. The subsidy mining is rich pickings. When they’re done producing they’re just left standing … monuments to flagrant stupidity.
I know I going to regret asking the resident loon, but how would peak oil be bad for wind? High fuel prices would make wind look good even without subsidies and the Greenies would have to put up with the turbines being made with coal power.
We’re all doomed.
Don’t panic.
“So long, and thanks for all the fish!”
OK. I’ve found this amusing but enough is enough.
Civilization is not collapsing. This can be proved.
1) If it was on the point of collapse then a severe shock would break it.
2) The biggest shock possible is a nuclear war but that has been the case for 70 years and society has not imploded. Not even the futures market.
3) The next biggest shock would be a global pandemic with a drop in demand for transport energy. We just had that. And oil has not been mothballed. Energy price did not permanently decline. Society did not fall into anarchy.
4) No rise in oil price would restrict movement more than Covid. And industry has adapted to Covid. So your entire argument collapses.
The reason you have been mocked so is that you are obviously very wrong.
Your premise is based on the idea that return in investment in energy terms is too low to exploit most new fields. But if we needed to we would develop a technology to overcome that. We coped with Covid when we needed to.
The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is that there is no shortage of oil and so no such pressures..
You really can’t beat a nice coal fire.
You twit. EOR is not useless. Just impractical and uneconomical at times of plentiful cheap oil. Your two comments are patently at odds with each other – we cannot be in a situation of having passed peak oil without EOR becoming useful and economical. If you persist in saying EOR is useless then this invalidates your assertion that we have reached peak oil.
I love the way that leftists always assume that they are so much smarter than everyone else.
Take for example ingraham’s absolute faith in his belief that EOR doesn’t work.
The mere fact that companies all over the world keep using it, is just proof that those companies don’t know as much as ingraham.
There steadfast ignorance is often only exceeded by their pessimistic can’t do attitude.
EOR does work when the circumstances are in its favour. Obviously Ingraham’s criteria involve it producing a profit all of the time without exceptions.
You seem to believe that the innaccurate statement regarding carbon and carbon actually means something to anyone other than yourself.
That’s a really weird position. Defending the use of EOR is the same as defending wind and solar?
What color is the sky in your world?
So the CO2 pumped into the ground stays in the ground.
For some reason you seem to be convinced that this is a problem.
Because civilization is collapsing and wind is over.
The left is doing its utmost to make your statement come true.
You must really hate mankind, then again, you are a city dweller.
Wind investment is collapsing
Or in plain English, the subsidies are drying up.
Ingraham is a lot like the alarmists. Everything is proof that oil is running out.
Venezuela’s oil output drops. Proof that Venezuela is running out of oil. Let’s completely ignore the economic collapse that socialism has brought to that country.
In this case, a drop in wind investment is proof that wind investors have noticed that oil is running out.
A long time ago, I stayed in a beautiful Hilton hotel in Caracas with fresh fruits and seafood that would be the envy of any in the world. The government ended up confiscating it along with other hotels. Some people can’t comprehend why investors pulled out of the hotel industry there.
Marxism pillages wealth and destroys incentives to create more. That’s the short story of the oil industry in Venezuela too.
Wind investment is collapsing?????
Where? What country?
So massive increases in building is the equivalent of collapsing.
Riiiiight
They are decommissioning the ones that have worn out.
They are however building new ones as fast as they can.
Enhanced that for you.
There is no “peak oil” now or in the foreseeable future.
As for the “wind industry,” it was not ever economically viable to begin with, and exists only due to government mandates and subsidies. Think of the “wind industry” as economically stillborn.
FIrst you claim that EOR doesn’t work, now you claim that all increase is because of EOR. Sheesh, you can’t even keep your own delusions straight.
Of course most of the increase is due to new discoveries, but who cares about reality.
In economic terms, supply side is busting loose. Fracking shale tech to release tight oil and gas, a tech perfected in the US in first deacade of 21st Century, will eventually unleash vast amounts of petroleum and gas around the world. The Green-Red Socialists just can’t accept that their control of energy is slipping away.
Once again, ingraham demonstrates that his mind can’t handle more than one variable at a time.
This time he proclaims that gasoline usage is the sole determinant of living standards.
In my personal experience, I see a huge jump in the standard of living. My father grew up on a farm and for part of that time didn’t have an indoor bathroom or electricity.
I and my siblings grew up in a 1000 sq ft house with one bathroom and a single garage. Now, we all live in our own homes with double the size and amenities. I live in a 4000 sq ft home with a three car garage, three bed rooms and three baths, which suits my wife and I and last child that is off to college most of the time.
One of my children, already owns a home and has two rental properties. The cost of gasoline is not even a blip in our standard of living, though I personally enjoyed its price last year.
Hell, in the US, even the so called “poor” have cell phones and flat screen TVs. They order take out food regularly and their kids have $300 running shoes.
So what? They still have places to live.
In what passes for your mind, choosing to live in an apartment rather than a home that you own, proves that you are living in poverty?
As you prove daily.
True, but totally irrelevant to the subject at hand.
Now forced into spamming your graphs?
There will be Socialists as long as there are stupid, weak minded people to swallow the BS promulgated by the it’s sociopathic preachers! As Einstein said, and you have been demonstrating, human ignorance is truly boundless!
Not sure if you are a bot, an idiot or a professional disruptor trying to weaken the sceptic debate before COP26.
My bet is the latter. We all remember how WattsUpWithThat overwhelmed Copenhagen with Climategate. After the pandemic the climate business can’t afford another blow.
Anyway – in answer to your post, we Socialists are all going to die. And so will everyone else, eventually. But not before your credibility does.
Elsewhere he claims that all countries are Marxist now. I guess that means we are all going to die.
“We shall all have a plentiful supply of oil at an affordable price, for as long as we need it.”
While this may be potentially true, the affordable part is easily destroyed by the sanity challenged in the west. A majority part of the voting public of all these countries seems to be part of that group.
Carbon credits and carbon taxes are a political artifice. Oil, natural gas, and coal have not seen peak production by far.
The most of the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Gulf of Carpentaria, the East Gulf of Mexico, Brazil’s off shore fields are still largely untouched, unexplored, and awaiting development of vast reserves in each one.
Learn the difference between proven and potential reserves, then hang your head in shame.
Trouble with you, Ingrown, is you have obviously never challenged yourself to learn. You should set a stretch goal for yourself to achieve the competence level of a fifth grader.
The Oil is just playing Hide and Don’t Peak
Funny thing is, we are using oil faster than ever, and yet we have more supply than ever.
Does not matter how you measure it…barrels, years worth…
We have a 150 year history of being just about to run out, and yet we are using more and have more than ever.
Which makes every word you have said here a giant steaming pile of bullshit.
This guy actually thinks that the fact that proven reserves have hovered around a 30 year supply since the 50’s, is proof that we have passed peak oil.
Nor is Venezuela finished by any stretch.
Venezuela’s problem is their history of poor equipment maintenance. i.e., after foreign installations were nationalized.
If this does not happen, will you promise to shut up and go away?
I detest doom-mongers. I’ve been warned about peak coal, oil, food, and now CO2 for all of my life. Nothing bad about these has actually happened.
Oh get a grip. Gotta love these idiots with the hair shirts, and the ashes, and all the doom and gloom – it’s all about the rest of us dying in the apocalypse, isn’t it? I’m sure your psychological disorders are very important but please don’t inflict them on the rest of us. If you have unfocused guilt or rage, delusions or a severe disconnect from reality – please go elsewhere for your care in the community, I and others on this site don’t care.
Mark, i have read some of your points. I think you are wrong as you are focusing on the wrong metrics. The GDP or ‘final value’ of oil or coal etc. is not a valid indicator of exploitable resources. Further, ending your comments by making completely illogical and unsubstantiated claims of mass death doesn’t help people to take the earlier substance of your comment seriously.
He is so desperate to believe that he is right, that he mines all the statistics he can find, in order to find anything that he can convince himself supports his beliefs.
Earlier today he informed us that the drop in oil production in Venezuela is proof that Venezuela has passed peak oil.
No other explanations needed, or wanted.
He reminds me of the people who quote mine the Bible (out of context and from multiple books at once) to predict all sorts dire end of the world outcomes. Then they claim; “but it’s all right there in the Bible”.
In other words, you can’t respond, but your ego won’t let you admit it.
They know you then?
Yesterday he was telling us that Ehrlich was absolutely correct, he had just made a few minor math errors.
Well in my case that is almost cerainly true.
Yesterday you were announcing that the Gulf had peaked years ago.
It took less than 24 hours to abandon that prediction.
And you are exempt from this “prediction”?
Your “prediction” changes faster than your underwear. First it was everyone dead by 2025. Then it was I don’t know for sure. Then suddenly it was next year. Now it’s 20 years. Even fusion groupies are more rational and consistent.
How old are you Mark? You’re making the same naive errors that Ehrlich made in the late 1960s. I’m guessing that was about 30 years before your time. Occasionally us old farts know stuff. Not because we’re so clever, but we saw it happen.
“So the reality is, there is zero chance we shall see peak oil supply in our lifetime, or even our grandchildren’s lifetime, not only because there are vast reserves of oil, but because there are centuries worth of coal reserves just sitting in the ground waiting to be mined. We shall all have a plentiful supply of oil at an affordable price, for as long as we need it.”
…and they all lived happily ever after.
Yes. Yes, they did.
Except for the idiot Malthusians who could not handle the realization that they had been wrong about everything all of their miserable lives.
If your “living standard” requires a car and a house, maybe. Personally I am very happy that I live in a city flat, with all my daily needs within ten minutes walk, including access to public transport to move me to other parts of the city or the country when I want it. I can even order my victuals and daily needs online and have them delivered to my doorstep! What a hell on earth it was in comparison, living in the countryside in the middle of nowhere as a youngster, doing stupid menial work in the garden and around the family house day-in day-out to help keeping things in order, and having to drive yourself (or, as long as you didn’t have a driver’s licence, be totally dependent on others) every time you needed even the most banal things like a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes, or end a parcel to somebody, or spend an evening at the movies. My living standard has never been better than after successfully leaving this colossal ongoing waste of time and effort of tending to much more space than I require for myself an the things I possess and having to buy, maintain, and drive a car, while now I am finally able to concentrate on what is important to me. Not having to worry much either that my eyesight and my strength may gradually fail over the years to come, as I don’t have to drive and I don’t have to care for a whole house and surrounding ground.
Once again, ingraham mines the statistics until he finds some obscure number that shows what he wants to see, then he declares that this number is the only one that matters and that any who says differently is just producing obviously fake data.
Mark, if you had any life experience before Pokemon was invented, you’d realize just how absurd it is to compare living standards of the 1950s to today. I’d reference Alice Kramden’s “modern kitchen” but you’d have to google it.
Just think of the smartphones, laptops, and WiFi standards enjoyed by kings and presidents in the 50s. All the streaming video and music. Yeah those were luxurious times alright. And what about cars? No froofy electric window lifts, remote door locks, or Bluetooth handsfree speakers with voice recognition. Sensible people back then were so content with their luxuries that they just wanted to drive and not be distracted I suppose. Why, they didn’t even need seatbelts, things were so good.
The television was a few inches diagonally behind a magnifying lens, flickering bluish monochrome. Very artsy and sophisticated. Nothing like the absurd 85-inch flatscreens we see today.
A few people had air conditioning but most realized that it was wealthier to enjoy the stifling humidity of July. If you can’t enjoy sitting in a pool of your own sweat, what can you enjoy?
Now you really have me in a nostalgic mood. How miserable we have become.
…and they all lived happily ever after
They had food, heating and transport
How was your insect burger?
Aren’t you the one who said Man hasn’t landed on the moon?
You and Ghalfrunt should live together in your deceit.
In Loydo’s world, there are no happy endings. That’s probably why he became a socialist in the first place.
A trip to Thailand could end that.
What, Loydo exploit the downtrodden workers? Behave like one of the privileged bosses? Course he would!
Seriously?
‘This is especially true in China, India and much of Asia..’
It is only true in China, to a decreasing extent in India and for now in Indonesia.
Vietnam, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia and S Korea and Pakistan have all cut future coal projects. In fact, the coal power pipeline in South and Southeast Asia’s four major emerging economies may have dropped by as much as 62GW in 2020. That leaves just 25GW under development, an 80% decline from just five years ago.
Coal power ‘spiking’ in Germany? Well they aren’t building any more (no EU nation now has any future coal plant in the pipeline as the last handful near end of construction). They accepted the bids for the first of the closedowns under the all shut by 2038 plan…
Exactly how much is it spiking by and for how long?
This includes German electricity production by type first half 2021
Germany’s energy consumption and power mix in charts | Clean Energy Wire
Perhaps you need to get out of your depressive state and learn to enjoy life?
Go for a drive…
Also in Russia?
“Russian oil giant announces start of vast Arctic project”
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-russian-oil-giant-vast-arctic.html
“Investing 10,000 billion roubles ($111 billion) including 2airports and 15 “industry towns”
“estimated reserves of 5 billion tonnes of oil”
“some experts believe around a quarter of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves could be located in the \arctic region”
But you don’t understand, those new fields only contain a few table spoons of oil. If you don’t believe him, he’s got charts to prove it.
This guy is beyond parody. And he’s the only one who doesn’t realize it.
You’ve been shown this is not true many a time by me providing a link to every coal fired power station in the world yet you choose to ignore the facts.
Your behaviour is akin to conspiracy theorists.
In griff’s world, if a company drops the number of coal plants they are planning to build from 600 to 599, that’s proof that the country is in the process of ending all support for coal.
I wonder if griff’s world is somehow connect to ingraham’s world? Lord knows, neither of their worlds are connected to this one.
Especially in China, several small plants are closed while a bigger more efficient and greater total capacity plant takes their place.
The sad thing is that you don’t see just how contradictory your claim is.
If the oil industry has peaked and we are going to run out of oil in 14 years, then there is no need for the liberals to shut down the oil industry.
Ah yes, I forgot that you define conservative and liberal based on whether they buy into the peak oil fantasy or not.
Mark Ingraham,
You are really not in the place to discuss Peak Oil. Conservatives are ideologically predispossed to reject Peak Oil, the same as liberals are predispossed to reject that climate change is mostly natural. You should go to places like Peakoilbarrel. I was banned at that place for defending that climate change was mostly natural, by the way.
Peak Oil took place in late 2018. That peak will not be surpassed. There is enough oil to extract more, but it will not happen. The reasons are multiple. The economic burden of extracting oil has been increasing over time. Fracking of LTO is a very old technique, but it is a lot more costly, so much that since the economy could not afford it, that oil has been extracted uneconomically through debt expansion only after conventional oil could not grow by much since 2005.
A large part of the oil used has been extracted from a limited number of giant oil fields that are very old and over-exploited. Discoveries have been far less than exploitation for many decades. Due to the law of diminishing returns, the easy oil has been extracted. The hard oil is a lot more costly. It doesn’t matter how much of it there is. The economy has been progressively more based in debt from the 1980s. We have reached a point were gigantic stimuli from Central Banks is required on a regular basis, and the amount needed to prevent a catastrophic failure of the economy keeps increasing.
We are facing an affordability crisis. As time goes by inequality grows and social unrest grows. Most people are less capable of buying stuff. Some countries enter the chaotic situation that precedes a failed state. The so-called Arab Spring was just a prelude triggered by the simultaneous rise in oil and food prices after the Great Financial Crisis. Venezuela and Lebannon are approaching their critical points with their population drastically impoverished. A much more expensive oil is required to surpass the 2018 Peak Oil, but the global economy cannot bear the price required without entering into a global crisis. Meanwhile the low price of oil is destroying production and producing a lack of capital expense by oil companies that will result in lower production in the years to follow. Meanwhile depletion and decline never rest and make the goal of surpassing the peak more and more difficult over time. Coal to liquids is not the answer because is too expensive to run the economy on it. German economy during WWII was a war economy. War economies leave countries tremendously impoverished as the economic output is in great measure destroyed, so the Germans didn’t care how expensive it was, as the alternative was surrendering for lack of oil.
No doubt the coronavirus will be blamed, but Peak Oil took place in 2018, and Peak Car in 2017. The coronavirus has just been a catalyzer, accelerating the process. Peak coal took place in 2013 but, unlike Peak Oil, the peak coal in 2013 could be surpassed in the future. Coal extraction is still affordable to our economy.
I don’t need to argue Peak Oil with anybody. As with the Pause in warming, it is in the data. Month after month, year after year Peak Oil is being confirmed and the peak is farther in the past. Do you believed it will be different in the future? I am glad for you because you are happier now, but you are going to wait a long time for something that is not going to happen. Meanwhile the global economy will not be able to grow much except through increasing debt, because we have failed to find an alternative to oil. And we all know how increasing debt ends even if we don’t want to think about it.
I recommend “The collapse of complex societies” by Joseph Tainter, the best study on why societies collapse. They collapse when the “energy subsidy” used to build complexity is reduced, forcing a reduction in complexity. You can watch a video of an interview with him here:
“ Meanwhile the global economy will not be able to grow much except through increasing debt, because we have failed to find an alternative to oil.”
Why can’t an economy grow without increasing debt?
Everything in the Universe is energy and matter. Economists don’t understand the economy because they think in terms of money, and money is a human abstraction. The economy is a proxy for energy. This is because the economy has as inputs matter (resources), energy, labor, capital and knowledge. Knowledge, capital and labor allow the use of energy to transform the matter into products. To grow, an economy needs to sell more products, so it needs to increase energy, matter and capital. Knowledge can increase labor productivity so labor doesn’t need to increase. And it also needs to increase the client base which can be done by globalization and demographic growth.
Every civilization has collapsed (simplified) due to a reduction of its economy inputs. For example a reduction in the availability of slaves (energy), decrease in grain due to climate change (energy), exhaustion of gold from America (capital). The difference is that this time our civilization and economy is global.
Our economy has a constrain in energy (look at oil consumption per capita) and matter, that make resources increasingly costlier, and with the reduction in demographic growth is also hit with a demand growth problem. To a certain extent capital can solve the problem temporarily by allowing the uneconomical production of oil (LTO), the extraction of minerals from poor ore, or improving the ability of clients to buy products (remember the NINJA loans). That capital is obtained from debt.
World oil consumption per capita. Oil is a special form of energy that is not easy to substitute, as it is the main energy used for transportation. It is the blood of our economy.
Lack of growth started to affect the developped world in the 1970-80s after the oil crisis followed by the oil glut that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. That’s when the energy constrain appeared. The solution was to increase the debt. It worked, but the solution requires more and more debt for a lesser effect on the economy as time passes, which lead us to the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
As a junkie, our economy is now hooked to debt. It requires increasing amounts of debt for decreasing economic growth.
It really is fascinating how those who support peak oil are incapable of accepting any data that doesn’t fit into their world view.
See also: climate skeptics?
It is the warmist/alarmists who are the ones who have an irrational dependency on emission scenarios of the future as their basis for climate doom prophecies.
Climate REALISTS are skeptical of the claims because they are often unverifiable or not testable thus junk science is what you peddle.
I’m still waiting for you to produce data griff. Just screaming over and over again that every weather system is unprecedented doesn’t cut it.
Not even close to being true.
Really, conservative and liberal is defined solely on whether people agree with your peculiar insanity?
BTW, I don’t know a single conservative who buys into the peak oil nonsense.
So-called “peak oil” is at least 30 years away… over the economic horizon… it plays no part in today’s price structure.
No, sir, it hasn’t. And there are plenty of reserves. Your argument failed in about 2005 or so.
So-called “peak oil” is so yesterday. It is based on a false premise: oil is derived from ancient algae.
Oil is derived from geo-physical, chemical processes where hydrogen & carbon combine due to chemical affinity in the presence of catalysts.
Often referred to as the abiotic oil theory.
You remove oil from consideration that is difficult,but not worthless.
And fail to consider new discoveries and improved technology.
The Club of Rome was wrong and so are you.
c
If oil is primarily abiotic, why have the only sites where oil has been found, been those places predicted by the biotic oil theory?
Every place where they have looked for abiotic oil, they have come up dry.
Mark, oil has been found in geologic settings where geologists who wrote the description in their report that the oil appeared to emanate from fissures in the bedrock (off of Oman).
Mark, unfortunately, you are told fallacies by those that support the party line in the oil industry. The Canada oil sands sit in gravel which in turn sit on crystalline bedrock there is no sediment. The oil rose into the gravel from fissures in the bedrock then the lighter hydrocarbons evaporated leaving heavy oil in the gravel.
There is not a physical environment for algae to “cook” under pressure into oil.
Mark, sediments under cap rock act as reservoirs for oil that rose out of fissures in the bedrock. In this sense, the theories overlap.
For the sake of argument oil production was higher and then reduced before covid hit. But that was due to political-economy considerations, not physical capacity limits. As is well known many counties do not produce at physical capacity limits because of agreements to maintain price levels (Opec+ as an example).
Generally, the world oil industry only pumps what is needed in the near term and not much more.
Generally, demand dictates supply.
The premise of peak oil has been around for 30 years or so, and it was always imminent, “just around the corner” just like AGW doom and it never happened.
Sir, you’re just like Linus in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin… waiting… waiting… and it never appears…meanwhile you missed the party.
Don’t put down barley. Without it we wouldn’t have beer.
Either you are banned, or you are not. Which is it.
You seem to take being ridiculed as being the equivalent to banning.
This analysis, as i read it, makes a mistake that Malthusians make, that stuff is limited because of what we know is there now, also how many people there will be using it, hence at what level of economic development hence energy use per capita.
The predicted flat line population after global development, of perhaps11B people in developed economies, will use a lot more energy in gross global terms, so we can expect extraction rates to soar, much if that from newly discovered/exploited deposits, as technology develops to make that possible, but also to be depleted much faster in the future.
It will be interesting to see, for our successors, how exploitation stands up to 11 Billion people in developed economies, before demand starts to fall, as birth rates drop below 2 per woman. etc.
Nothing stays the same.
But, we have the banker in nuclear. We can exploit abundant, clean, energetic nuclear binding energy indefinitely, using the molecular binding energy of fossil fuel that got us to this stage to manufacture the nuclear plants. With this we can always manufacture synthetics like liquid fuel for uses it is best for by actually making hydrocarbons, e.g. by adding energy to CO2 and H20 and recycling it into fuel. Methanol IC engines? We have the ability to transition to energy provided by nuclear electrical power, nuclear steam turbine power for shipping, hydrocarbon synthesis for where electricity or steam are not viable alternatives, like air travel and long haul/remote surface transport, where energy intense primary energy must be transported within the vehicle and used at the point and time of demand.
Here’s a bit of old news regarding developments in tech which could supply part of our future energy supply needs:-
“On 19 March 2013, Japan became the first-ever country to announce successful continuous-flow production of methane gas from a solid methane hydrate layer located under the seabed in ultra-deep waters, establishing the technical feasibility of this novel natural resource and of its novel extraction technology…”
Link to article here:-
https://www.biicl.org/projects/offshore-methane-hydrates-in-japan-prospects-challenges-and-the-law
I am old enough to remember the Club of Rome drivel of the early 1970’s. Who, pray tell are you basing this batch of drivel on?
Believers in Peak Oil are as resistant to reality as followers of evangelical preachers who keep naming a date for the apocalypse, having it pass, and still insist they were right.
Mark, heavy oil is just fine, refineries use catalytic cracking to convert heavy oil into lighter distillates.
EOR just works – otherwise why do it?
My point about coal liquefaction stands. If oil completely ran out, we could run automobiles on liquefied coal.
Seriously none of what you are saying about peak oil stacks up.
Just to go into a little more detail Eric, I’m not sure if you are classifying synfuels as being part of liquefaction products, but coal gasification would allow the production of syngas and from this very clean transportation fuels, chemicals and even synthetic natural gas for heating and electricity generation.
Direct coal liquefaction tends to produce “dirty” products that are loaded with sulfur, nitrogen and other unwanted components. WWII Germans didn’t have to meet EPA fuel specifications, which are needed to allow the use of catalytic converter technologies for reducing vehicle emissions. In my opinion, the syngas route is more technically capable of meeting modern fuel specs.
As an aside, in Mark ingraham’s Mad Max world, I’m pretty sure that I could mine enough local coal from exposed seams to make enough diesel for my own transportation needs. It would be very messy though. I would use direct liquefaction as it’s a relatively simple, but dirty, process.
Scissor,
Before you start mining and processing the coal for diesel, maybe we should see if we can get Marking raham to attend the Humongous School of Anger Management! That would be in addition to the other college courses he apparently slept through! Constant anger and vitriol can be SO exhausting!
Ingraham reminds me of BugOilBoob. BoB informs us that fracking always loses money, and the only reason why companies all over the world continue to use it is because they aren’t as smart as he is.
Yeah, only in government can one do stupid uneconomic things and waste money virtually forever.
Decades ago, when I worked for an oil company (rhymes with Hell), fracking was a common practice even back then. The combination of fracking and horizontal drilling was the technical advance that really opened things up, so to speak.
Hmmm, you don’t suppose that big oily boob has a new sockpuppet? This Ingraham persona popped up out of nowhere and curiously has a lot of comments that start out +1 and then go deeply negative.
EOR certainly works and is now looking more attractive when it uses industrial CO2 which the companies can be paid to sequester. That can make the oil carbon-negative – “Blue Oil” as it’s called. One to watch.
Is there anything you know that is actually true?
Have you told the oil and gas companies!
Are you talking about the bitumin content? It’s not useless, it just costs more to refine.
living standards
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equalization_payments_in_Canada
Your math is wrong. Canada is 3rd on the list of known oil reserves, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. That would = at least 120%. Wiki shows about 10% of world reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil_reserves
For the math, his claim was that all heavy oil in the world is useless, and that heavy oil comprises 40% of reserves.
To attempt to justify the claim that heavy oil is useless, he pointed out that as an example that Canada’s “Living Standards” are about the same as they were 20 years ago, even though total oil production has doubled due to extraction of heavy oil. This attempt ignores some glaring facts:
1) Canada’s upward trend of production due to heavy oil started before the year 2000 and the “Living Standard” rose with it until the crash in 2008, and hasn’t really recovered.
2) “Living Standards” rating goes down if there’s more rich people, even if the poor and middle class are doing better. A more proper metric is the Canadian Index of Wealth (CIW), which has seen a 10% growth since 2000.
https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/reports/2016-canadian-index-wellbeing-national-report/living-standards
3) Oil accounts for 10% of Canada’s GDP, so if all the new oil was conventional crude, it couldn’t be expected to raise the CIW more than 10% by doubling.
Whether the comment was just poorly researched or intentionally deceptive, the world may never know.
Comparing the world before 1900, to today. After 1900 we created various modes of transportation, a medical industry, and electronics and communications systems. Before the healthier and wealthier countries totally jump off the “subsidizing cliff” for electricity from breezes and sunshine, it’s time to look back at the last couple of centuries and see what lifestyle changes they are about to give up, while the developing countries control emissions.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/08/07/comparing-the-world-before-1900-to-today/
1) If heavy oils are useless, then how have we been using it for decades?
I love the way your simple mind works. You have a habit of taking very complex issues, and then throwing away everything that doesn’t fit into what you want to believe. Living standards are determined by thousands of things, not merely how much oil is being produced. In the case of Canada, you can blame most of the problems with standard of living on government taxes and regulations. Some day, just maybe, you will learn the difference between proven reserves, reserves and potential reserves. However I doubt it, because to gain that knowledge will require you to give up your precious fantasies, and I doubt you are mature enough to do that.
2) Companies all over the world are investing their own money on EOR, yet you alone know that these activities are useless. Sheehs Kregger-Dunning in action.
I see you are still holding onto the delusion that oil companies always run every well flat out all the time, and the only possible reason for a drop in production is that the well is running dry,
Yesterday you declared that uncategorically, the Gulf had peaked years ago. Now you are telling us that it will positively, definitely, without a doubt, peak in the next few years.
What’s the matter, are your delusions starting to run together?
In what passes for your mind, the economic problems going on in Venezuela, not to mention the absolute incompetence of those now running the oil infrastructure has nothing to do with the drop in Venezuela’s oil output. No, it has to be that their wells are all running dry.
I see that you are stupid enough to believe that the oil being shipped from WTI hasn’t been cleaned up first. Nobody pays to ship condensate.
Malthus was always wrong, as are many here today. Economics is a polynomial equation with n variables.
Energy extraction is a function of demand, cost, labor AND technology. The latter – just as the prior three – may have orders of magnitude impact, depending upon availability/utilization of each. Fracking is low cost, has low labor intensity, is a direct result of technology improvements (increased efficiencies) and effectively turns on/off with demand far more efficiently than large deposit exploitation.
If the folks in California could frack, their energy woes would rapidly dissipate. If the fields in Venezuela could produce and if the people had a voice in property ownership (rather than the State), they would be living far better. If the small reactor technology expands quickly, Peak Oil, et al, will wander further down the road into the future.
The green grumps currently ruling the political world have the advantage of ‘low cost’ with the surfeit of subsidies for manufacture, deployment and utilization of their obscene bird macerators.
Let’s use an extended metaphor. When you retire, most people in my profession advise taking no more than 4% annually from a portfolio. This is Malthusian. It assumes a constant demand (your monthly expenses never change) at a higher price (inflation/taxes), for more and more effort (your health, or lack thereof). This also ignores technology – which reduces ‘extraction cost’ (my fee, which drops annually).
We do not spend in our 80’s what we spent in our 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, unless it is on healthcare, particularly the ‘last year’.
Virtually every client has more today than when they retired, live quite comfortably and have the blessings of good health.
So too do most economies, for similar reasons.
The cost, labor, demand and technology constantly change. The solution to a polynomial equation has n variables, not simply one.
Add in the mysterious ‘unknown unknowns’ and a simple faith in humanity.
We can just as easily reward ourselves and our species as destroy ourselves. Neither the planet, Gaia nor God care a whit…
If we climb the helix of health/wealth, we improve ourselves, our family and our culture. If we descend Dante’s steps into hell, so be it.
Remember Pogo? “We have met the enemy and he is us!”
Amazon.com: John Graves: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle.
Good analysis. Central planners be damned.
Growth did not fall. What happened was that resource availability expanded faster than population growth, something Malthus said was impossible.
That’s no math error.
When the real world doesn’t suit your fancy, just make up stuff.
Your understanding of economics is so close to zero, that I doubt even modern instruments could detect the difference.
There is no such thing as state capitalism. That’s socialism trying to pass itself off as something else.
Communism and market simply don’t go together and trying to argue they do proves that either you don’t understand either, or are lying.
Isn’t that the truth. Excellent analysis. Short shortsightedness is the bogyman in the picture,
Usually when people spout so much gibberish loaded with so many abbreviations and secret buzzwords, it’s because they are trying to sound impressive and hide how little they know.
As long as the earth is active there will be oil because it is made naturally in the earth. Not from dinosaurs and trees.
But not fast enough, and not in big volumes.
It is replenished daily. The depositories are not always convenient .
If that is true, why are the only places where oil is being found, are in those areas where oil would be expected if oil was biotic in origin?
No, that is not correct. Oil is found in areas directly above faults, fractures, and cracks of the earth. Oil has been found in Canada (the oil sands) where there is no basis to believe algae could “cook” into heavy oil.
Utility companies are already switching from coal to natural gas. (Eastern US coal is dirty containing sulfur, mercury, hydrocarbons, and lots of ash; which has to be cleaned up when burned. Natural gas burns clean. It is time to develop “in the ground” conversion of this dirty coal to natural gas. Clean up the gas and ship it by pipeline. In the mean time we already have plenty of natural gas that we can share with the rest of the world. Also, natural gas is a renewable. Some sewage treatment plants have been using it for years, and some industries are using landfill gas in their processes.
“The only holdup is liquefied coal is more expensive than conventional oil, it doesn’t become economical until oil prices exceed $100 ($145 / barrel according to one estimate I saw).”
SASOL, long the world leader in this technology, first wrote that the process was break-even at $28 a bbl. I think $100 is a bit generous.
There is supposedly a new process developed in China that is more direct that the SASOL process, but there are big advantages to the original, one being that any hydrocarbon product can be made – like polypropylene which is in high demand.
In Alberta they have started this type of upgrading which could conceivably use any suitable input material, solid or liquid.
Thanks for the update Paul Ehrlich. As a world population we should have never lived to see all those planes fall out of the sky after Y2K flipped us into the apocalypse.
Keep on stirring that vat of fear Mark “Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and caldron bubble…”
There’s a very simple reason for that, one that is apparently too complex for your mind to comprehend.
It’s basic economics. Spending money finding more reserves, when you already have 30 years worth of reserves in the bank makes no sense.
If you would take a look at all the data, you will find oil reserves have been pretty constant for as far back as they have been keeping records.
Either we have been on the verge of peak oil for the last 100 years, or you don’t know what you are talking about.
I see you are still incapable of dealing with the heart of any argument.
Who makes this kind of crap up? And who really believes it? The USGS was in part created to survey and forecast oil reserves. Since it’s inception it has warned that we’re going to run out of oil soon several times. Every deadline for peak oil they ever forecast has been wrong!
On the other hand, you are convinced that you are winning the debate here.
Sometimes all you need to win a debate, is to show that the other sides data doesn’t show what the other side claims.
Debates can also be won with logic, especially since yours have none.
Hey ingraham, were you the man on the grassy knoll?
Maybe his grandfather. That’s got to be at least 40 years before he was born.
Well, finally an otherwise blindered mainstream news organ has awakened to reality on the ground. We will not be curbing CO2 emissions this century, period.
Every government knows this, will not speak about it, but they are negotiating fruitlessly with Asian and African countries who are determined to emerge from poverty, and understand the only viable route for this is through abundant FF energy. Kerry and Biden have both let slip that if this isn’t stopped, there is no point to cutting their own CO2 emissions!
If this isn’t enough, governments have come to realize that the hardest nut to crack is decarbonizing transport – ocean, air and highway. This is the reason they vigorously tackled what was thought to be the easy one, the electric grid!
Numerous tech issues have stalled the electrical grid transformation, most notably in the most advanced users (Germany, Texas, California …). There is no way to transform the the transport sector to electric in less than 70 yrs, even when, before 2030, they all agree to accept nuclear to replace ruinables. Adequate technology for electric vehicles hasn’t been developed yet and the most ambitious nuclear construction plan required would take us into the next century. Economically, cooler heads will go with natural gas and coal, with a retirement plan to replace them gradually with nuclear.
Tried reading the whole string
Mr Ingraham has defeated me
So I’ll make him honorary Griff
I’ve come to conclusion that ingraham isn’t serious. Nobody could be so stupid on so many subjects. He’s just some gadfly who gets pleasure out of seeing how much consternation he can raise.
And add the comment that the alberta oilsands are just fine, the only issues they face are political eco insanity.
No matter the price of oil, we just keep pumping the same amount with incremental increases
We will ALWAYS need heavy oil, just has too many uses for it.
At current rates of extraction we have 400 years supply minimum
If we had used nuclear/electric to extract it from the beginning instead of burning gas we would all be further ahead.
I hope Jane Fonda lives long enough to figure out just how badly she has damaged the earths environment and humanity
It would be fitting for her epitaph.
80% of what is left in the oilsands to be recovered is in situ, thermally extracted.
Burning large volumes of natural gas to create steam for this purpose.
There is no better shovel ready application for small modular reactors than these inSitu projects, creating steam to directly inject in the ground.
Or at most, use the steam to generate electricity and then use that electricity to heat the pay zone.
Instantly eliminate 80% of the CO2 footprint of the oilsands which then has the added benefit of exploding limitless climate scientologists heads.
Easy
The uranium comes from the shield in Saskatchewan a short hop away
Endless power endless oil, for our purposes today
And watch out for PEAK URANIUM in the next couple million years…..maybe more with uranium mining on the moon and Mars.
And Peak Natural Gas is hundreds of years in the future.
From his comments I have become convinced that this Ingraham guy is not posting in good faith.
I spent 35 years in the oil and gas business and I have no idea what you are talking about. I assume by heavy oil in Canada you mean tar sands. While it is expensive and low margin oil it is not useless. Plus it adds significant high paying jobs and taxes. EOR in the middle east is still in its infancy but I was involved in several large EOR projects in the region. Injecting natural gas with zero market/low value to enhance oil recovery or CO2 for enhanced oil recovery and carbon sequestration is again not useless. In the fields I worked, we increase oil recovery from the low teens to 50% through a combination of water injection and miscible gas injection, adding billions in recoverable reserves. All while eliminating the flaring of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Hardly useless. Every basin the world eventually reaches peak oil and the GOM has seemed to be there 3 times during my career, then technology (and price) changed things. First it was 3D seismic, then it was horizontal/directional drilling and then it was deep water drilling technology. And things continue to evolve and expand what is possible to exploit. As far as Venezuela, it has declined because of socialist political policies imposed by the Venezuelan government not lack of reserves. PDVSA has been gutted of technical skills and starved of investment plus many US companies have scaled back or left altogether which further reduces investment and ultimately production.
Is liquified coal less polluting than oil/gasoline? Or do the emission from creating liquified coal negate any reduced emissions from burning it?
No no no. Global oil reserves aren’t calculated on how much oil is in the earth, but on how much can be economically acquired. If the price goes up because of high demand or scarcity, there is more oil available to pump.
Why would you inefficiently convert the coal into oil only to further refine it and finally put it through a combustion engine with maybe 30% efficiency on a good day.
Better to burn it efficiently in a high efficiency generator and use the electricity in EVs and/or electric trams/trains for transport.
Falsehoods and sophistry utterly fail to prove or even claim peak oil has ever occurred.
Saudi Arabia, Al Rub Akali
Peak coal will occur closer to 2321. Xi Jinping declared China would not buy anymore Australian coal. Then the CCP’s chief-clown discovered China needs Australian coal supplied to survive, far more than we need to trade with the CCP’s version of China. Same occurred with WA lobsters. As it turned out the Chinese people like our lobsters a lot more than they like Xi Jinping’s unrealistic bloviating diktat, so the Chinese importers just used the usual blackmarket anti-sanction busting approaches and kept importing live Australian lobsters anyway.
But now the ultra-idiot heading up the CCP now realizes China must have Australian resources to survive … so you can guess what his next incredibly dumb move will be.
The problem with the CCP is they don’t understand the limits of their power, and that their authority completely ends outside the Chinese mainland’s 12 nautical mile maritime littoral border limit and internationally recognized EEZ limit.
One day China will have a real government, with no ‘great firewall’ promoting such magnificent CCP ignorance of how the world around them actually works.
I highly recommend this book
The moral case for fossil fuels
It beautifully debunks the peak oil myth and how fossil fuels will not be replaced for a very long time, maybe not for several hundred years as it is cheap, plentiful and reliable.