ISSUES....
Inside,
confidential, off the record
Dark
clouds, no silver linings
Report from ASPO: Dark clouds, no silver linings
It is difficult to walk out of the peak oil meeting here in Houston
and not feel miserable.
Yes, there
are some attendees who might be considered a bit offbeat, ex-hippie
types who see their long-held dreams of "the end
of oil" nearing reality.
But the majority of the 500+ attendees at the US meeting of the
Association for the Study of Peak Oil are not in that category.
They are geologists, economists, professors, consultants, economists.
And no matter who steps up to the podium to make a presentation,
the forecast is grim.
The details differ, but the broad message is consistent. Saudi
oil production has peaked, according to some; others see a peak
in the future, but a peak nonetheless. Jeffrey Brown, an independent
geologist, was particularly bleak on Thursday, showing how exports
from the world's biggest exporters, including Saudi Arabia and
Russia, are going to run up against a combination of increasing
domestic demand at home and declining or flat production, and shipments
to other countries are going to fall, if they haven't already.
David Hughes
of the Canadian Geological Survey, echoed Matt Simmons, peak
oil's best known proselytizer and the day's luncheon speaker,
in saying that there will be a coming conflict between the world's
desire to cut carbon emissions against sustainability of energy
supplies, and that the latter will win out. He called it "the
elephant that is going to be sitting on our chest."
The mainstream media is not covering the issue, thundered a few
other speakers, and the world's leaders need to wake up the general
public to the growing problem. (The Barrel was surprised, in an
era of now $90 oil, that media attendance seemed to be minimal.)
And so on. That's the overriding message, but here are a few specific
items:
--If there was one sort of optimistic, smiley-face place to be,
it was outside the main hall, where a plug-in hybrid was on display.
It was organized by Plug-in Partners, which is under the direction
of the city of Austin, Texas.
Jamie Mitchell, who stood next to the converted Prius taking questions,
is realistic about the car. None are made by any auto manufacturers,
and if you spend the money to have your hybrid made into a plug-in,
your warranty is yanked. The cost to convert the vehicle on display
was more than $14,000.
But there's still something so futuristic about that plug running
out of the left rear bumper. The car can go 30 miles before the
engine needs to be activated, and when it draws power from the
electric grid, it's as if you're buying gasoline at 75 cts/gallon.
Where plug-in hybrids are particularly intriguing is not in what
they are doing when moving, but what they might do sitting still.
As Mitchell noted, and others have pointed out, if the electric
grid has excess input, say, for example, during a windy night when
windmills are feeding lots of electricity into transmission lines,
that electricity can be going to recharge plug-ins. But say that
fully charged car doesn't leave the owner's driveway the next day,
and it's 97 degrees F, and there's humidity to match. Electricity
demand soars. Mitchell said if the car is plugged into the grid,
power can be drawn from the battery back on to the grid to meet
peak demand, so it's almost as if the batteries become a way of
storing wind or solar power.
--David Pimentel
of Cornell has long been academias leading critic of ethanol,
but he has company. Dr. Kyriacos Zygourakis, a professor
of chemical & biomolecular engineering at Rice, delivered his
verdict on biofuels. His key points:
1) The only way you can consider ethanol to be a net energy provider
is if you count the energy provided by the distillers' grain, which
is essentially the corn with all the starches taken out of it.
(It becomes animal feedstock). He noted that giving an energy credit
to distillers' grain is not widely accepted as proper
2) If that is done, the improvement in energy yield is about 20%.
3) Moving some ethanol plants to coal-burning for cheaper energy
costs is a step backward environmentally, and the greenhouse gas
improvement created by ethanol is already mostly non-existent.
4) Cellulosic ethanol might have an energy yield exceeding a factor
of eight. But he said there is disagreement about whether the burning
of some of the crop to provide energy for the process is going
to provide the energy that some analysts predict it will.
5) He was largely positive about biodiesel, because it can be produced
and consumed on a local level, e.g., a farmer converts part of
his soybean output directly into diesel to run his facilities.
6) Both biodiesel and ethanol are going to take up huge amounts
of land to have any sort of significant dent in petroleum consumption.
Pimentel has made this point previously, and ironically, was quoted
Wednesday in a Wall Street Journal editorial. (Subscription only,
so no link).
--Several speakers touched on a familiar topic, that even if the
world wants to consume more coal, or build more nuclear plants,
or put up more windmills, the rate at which that is going to need
to occur is staggering. This was an extreme case, but Scott Pugh,
a retired Navy captain, said in order to run all vehicles on hydrogen
or nuclear fuel, and assuming we use nuclear power to extract the
hydrogen, the world would need to build 10 plants per year for
100 years. Similar analogies by the speakers also provided a torrent
of what appeared to be utterly unreachable infrastructure needs.
All in all, a terrific conference. But don't attend unless you've
taken your Prozac.
-
John Kingston / Plstts web blog/October 18, 2007
Petroleumworld
10 24 07
ISSUES....
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