There
are some very interesting statistics that are not being talked about namely that
world oil production has dropped by 843,000 barrels of oil per day since last
November even though we have the highest oil prices in istory. OPEC production
has dropped 905,000 barrels per day which means that production outside of OPEC
has increased only 62,000 barrels per day. I think that we are nearing the peak
of production very soon. The coming global disaster is racing towards us like
a freight train out of contol. - Lawrence B. Crowell
In
December 2000, OPEC announced it would cut production by at least 1 million barrels
a day by March and did so in meetings in January - March. Price manipulation is
upon us. This decrease does not indicate capacity. - John McCall
By
around 2010 the global production of oil will reach its maximum and begin to decline.
It is then possible, indeed likely that the OPEC ministers are aware of this and
are changing the production and pricing structure to get maximum dollar for a
resource they know is going to play. While I agree that price manipulation is
the forward cause of this, I think it is very likely that behind the scenes is
the knowledge by the oil barons and oil sheiks that oil production is bound to
reach a maximum. - Lawrence B. Crowell, 3 Jun 01
Is
their energy in your future?
by Lawrence
B. Crowell, 28 May 2001
I glanced at your energy site.
Realistically
most of the proposed sources or solutions presented therein are not realistic.
Frankly, beyond oil, gas and coal the only alternatives that can be applied on
a large scale that we have available are nuclear energy and wind energy. The problem
is that I have doubts that wind energy can be massively applied in such a way
as to avoid addressing the nuclear option, even with serious conservation and
efficiency efforts. The problem is that there are only select places in the country
and the world where wind energy pays off. Here are the advantages and disadvantages
of both of these.
Wind energy
is fairly simple in principle and the construction costs for wind farms are more
than conventional fuel burning plants of comparable power (500MW), but not excessively
so. Wind is essentially nonpolluting. Wind has the disadvantages that wind is
not 24/7 reliable and maintenance requirements on wind generators are high.
Nuclear
energy has the advantage that nuclear plants can produce considerably more power
than most nonnuclear plants and operate 24/7 for the most part. The disadvantage
is that a lot of this abundant energy that comes from a nuclear plant must be
accounted for in the large amounts of energy in actinide processing, waste recycling,
and waste management. This is why nuclear energy has an EROEI = 7 to 12 or so
(some say lower) that is considerably lower than oil, which for a good field is
29, and for depleting oil fields in the US it is now down to 10 to 12 (this is
why Bush's "drill our way out of the problem" idea will not work well). Nuclear
energy can never take us back to the good old days of cheap oil.
Here
is my take on wind energy. The density of air is rho = 10^{-3}g/cm^3 = 1kg/m^3,
and this is input into the kinetic energy density from hydrodynamics
k
= (1/2)rho v^2
where v is the
velocity of wind. To get the energy on a unit area of a windmill blade we integrate
the kinetic energy density over the length of a volume of air that is incident
on it. Consider the differential of this length dl = v*dt. So the energy per unit
area is
e = int_0^L (1/2)rho
v^3 dt
And further the power
per unit area is p = de/dt = (1/2)rho v^3
so
for various wind speeds we have
v
p
5m/s (11mph)
125w/m^2
10m/s (22mph)
1000w/m^2
15m/s (33mph)
3375w/m^2
20m/s (44mph)
8000w/m^2
So,
for a wind around 22mph the power incident on a windmill is about equal to the
solar power at normal incident on a solar panel. However, the cost per unit area
of a wind turbine is far smaller than the cost per unit area of a PV.
The
problem with both solar and wind power is that they are not 24/7 sources. Solar
radiation is available only 1/2 the time and then cloud cover can limit that further.
With wind energy wind speeds can vary, and the number of places where winds are
constant are limited, such as coasts and the north central plains. Actually here
in New Mexico winds can be fairly constant for half the year.
I
must also confess that I have become rather pessimistic of late on this issue.
The problem is that politics is not addressing the issue beyond various paliatives,
and that by the time politics gets around to it the situation may simply be beyond
the point of no return.
If
there is no firm policy towards this by 2010, which is where Campbell and Laharerre
estimate global oil and gas production will peak out, then frankly we will be
in a whole lot of trouble. At sometime during the 2020s this situation could start
to spiral out of hand and the economy of the whole world could then rapidly disintegrate.
The last time a global depression hit it must be remembered what sorts of politics
took form, in particular in Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia. And no! your suburbanites
who hold professional or semiprofessional jobs are not overnight going to willingly
become farmworkers on organic farm collectives. The politics of dispare will raise
its ugly head.
So, if by 2010
no energy policy, beyond the sort of palliative garbage offered so far, is in
place my personal advice is to go into survival mode. It would be best to live
far from cities, if you have the resources to do so then the degree that one can
become self sufficient the better. Seeking a job position in the southern hemisphere
of the planet might be also advised.
If
one can not do that, then stock up on inebriates and various libations. You are
going to need them.
Got
Extiction?
- Lawrence B. Crowell, 8 May 01
Here
is the problem. It is the event horizon. In spacetime physics once a geodesic
or path crosses it the particle on that path is no longer accessible to the outside
world. This is sort of the situation with the black hole. The question we have
to ask is where this analogous event horizon exists for us. At some point with
resource depletion and the resulting entropy feedback in ecospasm we may cross
our species event horizon. The problem is that the resource depletion and ecospasm
problem is going to occur, that I am certain of. It is uncertain whether that
is our event horizon, and if it is our species will dieout eventually, but if
it it not then we have certainly entered a region close to the event horizon (the
ergosphere) where we are getting close to the barrier that as Dante put it, "All
those who enters these gates shall never return."
Global
Energy Crisis
by Lawrence B. Crowell,
8 May 2001
The lower estimate on global oil reserves is 1100 billion barrels,
and the high end is about 1500 billion barrels. Now the current world demand is
25 billion barrels per year, which means that in 44 years for low estimate and
60 years for high estimate, and assuming current production were to be continued,
we would hit the bottom.
Yet
the picture is a bit more complicated than this. Estimated oil that existed before
humans began drilling is 2300 to 3000 billion barrels. This means that with the
low estimate that we are close to the half way point in using up planetary oil
reserves. With the high estimate we will hit that midway point around the year
2015. The problem is that the history of oil fields illustrates that once you
hit the half way point that production begins to decline. So the production curve
looks like a roller coaster ramp that goes up, but then begins to roll over as
you approach the 1/2 way point, and then begins to roll over further towards the
drop.
Now, here is what is probably
happening. We have been on the up ramp for a while, with a glitch during the 70s
& 80s (that ironically is a reflection of these problems), but now we are either
approaching the roll over, or we are now already on it. The guys at the top of
the oil industry have these data and BELIEVE ME they know more precisely what
the score is. Datum on real oil reserves are more closely protected than atomic
weaponry secrets. At any rate with the first situation, where we are approaching
the roll over, the oil barons are simply tuning the pricing to get maximum dollar
for a resource that is beginning to run out. In the other scenario, which is actually
more troubling, the oil barons did not quite forsee that we are on the roll over
and are just responding to the overshoot of demand to production that is beginning
to lag behind as it enters the "roll off."
In
either case we are all in a whole lot of trouble frankly. Combine this with the
fact that when oil depletion sets it that global ecospasm is likely to start to
really kick in. The impact on economies is going to be devistating, and the sociological
upheaval that will ensue will likely be chaotic. By the year 2030 I think it likely
that what we know of our current world will be rapidly collapsing into ruins.
Further, this will be proceeded by a massive dieout of the human population. According
to Richard Duncan a post petroleum world can only support a billion people. I
think that this is a bit pessimistic, but without planning that could well obtain.
The last time that a disaster that approached this relative magnitude was during
the black death that reduced the human population by a half.
The
current Bush-Cheney plan of producing a gas or coal plant every year should be
replaced by a wind generator farm every few days (at least). We need to alleviate
the demands on oil and gas as quickly as possible, for these are resources that
are vital for other things such as nitrogen production via the Haber process.
Well them's the numbers and what things appear to be heading towards us in the
future.
Got
Power?
-
Lawrence B. Crowell, 7 May 2001
"It comes down
to the second law of thermodynamics in action. Since the days of Carnot through
Gibbs thermodynamics has been know to physicists. Yet it appears that in the general
public thermodynamics is not well known, and those who run governments and industry
appear completely ignorant or maybe in a few cases in denial of it."
Solar Energy?
-
Lawrence B. Crowell, 4-11-01
A - Or with solar energy we would have to produce 3-4 square
miles of photovoltaic energy surface area per year.
Q
- How many units would that take? It appears this is achievable if we start sometime
soon, or am I screwed up in my math? - Jack Uhrich
A
- The news on solar energy is both bad and good. As for the question on when to
start, the time would be NOW! As for how many units, well the average solar panel
produced today is about 2m^2, which means that a quarter million of them are equal
to one square kilometer. This would then mean that around one million units would
have to be produced a year. If I recall the total number of units produced last
year was around 10,000 or so. There is also wind energy which is pretty accessible
and can probably be scaled up in the near future much more readily than can solar
PV.
There is a bit of good new on solar PVs.
So first off I read the following report on solar cell production. This report
by Siemens indicates that over the lifetime of a solar cell the energy payback
is 9 times the energy input. It takes 3 years for breakeven on silicon, and 2
years on copper indium diselenium thin films. This tends to assume that the lifetime
of a solar cell is at least 20 years.
"The
process energy was derived from actual utility bills and monthly production data.
From October 1998 through March 1999, SSI consumed a total of 20 million kWh of
electricity and about 90,000 therms of natural gas. During this time SSI produced
3.2 kilometers of silicon ingot (about 111 tons of incoming silicon), 8.6 MW of
solar cells (about 5 million cells) and 5.5 MW of modules (the rest are produced
at other facilities around the globe: India, Brazil, Portugal, & Munich). The
crystal growing process is carried out in SSI's Vancouver, Washington facility."
Now,
I think that this report is fairly optimistic. It is the joke in applied physics
that one "assumes a spherical cow." So this report tends to suggest an Energy
Return On Energy Investments (EROI) of around 9, which might turn out to be only
5 or 6.
There have been recent developments
with interfacing biomolecules with solid state systems. In particular this is
the case with DNA. I have thought for some time that it might be possible to do
this with photosynthesis. Chlorophyll is a molecule that consists of two parts.
The first is a hydrophyllic end with a magnesium atom at its center, and the second
part is a hydrophobic tail. When a photon interacts with the molecule the energy
of the photon excites chlorophyll by changing the shape of the tail. Chlorophyll
is surrounded by pheophytin and quinone. The excited chlorophyll induces a charge
on the quinone that in a cell ultimately induces NADP + H to becomes NADPH and
this energy then goes into the production of lactic acid and eventually glucose.
What
I have sometimes thought might be possible is that the chlorophyll-pheophytin-quinone
complex could be impregnated on the surface of a thin film. The photon excited
electron on the quinone might then tunnel into the thin film to generate an electric
potential. This might have a number of advantages, for it would by pass the requirement
of producing silicon wafers that require energy.
I
can't say whether this could ever be made to work, but it strikes me as possible
and potentially a bio-electronic version of a PV that could be produced with much
less energy and expense.
The EROEI for wind
energy is about 6 and based on this report for solar energy we might expect around
the same. Yet ironically this may turn out to be competative with oil in the not
too distant future. The EROEI for a decent oil field is 26:1. The EROEI of oil
of course depends on the source and quality of the oil. I have one reference that
shows the EREI of petroleum in the US dropping from ~20:1 to 10:1 EROEI over the
past 25 years, as 1) the number of dry wells increases, 2) the average depth of
wells increases, 3) the average production from wells decreases, 4) the resource
is extracted from increasingly difficult regions to access such as ANWR, and presumably,
5) the quality of the petroleum extracted decreases. If there is half the EROEI
in oil production from a field the pricing for that oil is likely to be 4 times
that of a field with a large EROEI. This is one of the more disturbing econometrics
of energy. This means that ironically increased attempts at domestic production
of oil may serve to actually drive oil prices up rather than down!
What
ever the case there really is little time for delay. A transition to a post petroleum
future, even if we employed nuclear energy along with everything, is not going
to be easy or cheap. There will likely have to be major socio-economic adjustments
required to work this out.
FYI
by Lawrence B. Crowell, 26
Mar 2001
In order to avoid the drop off in energy, due to oil and gas
production depletion, that will set in during the next decade we will need to
do three of the following:
1)
If we are to go nuclear (non-green solution) we would need to produce 1 nuclear
power plant every three days,
2)
With wind energy we would need to erect 500-1000 windmills a day,
3)
Or with solar energy we would have to produce 3-4 square miles of photovoltaic
energy surface area per year.
Oh
yes and by the way, we need to start NOW! Hmmm, ... prayers anyone?
I glanced at your energy site.
