Energy Experts weigh in

[greenman3610]

I just watched the documentary, "The End of Suburbia".
It's a study of the peak oil dilemma.

Here's my issue:
It seems to me that both sides of the issue
made the same error in the energy crunch of the
70s, underestimating the flexibility of the
economy and the elasticity of demand in light
of price pressure.
Right wingers said the economy couldnt possibly
grow without doubling electricity consumption
every 10 years, and we'd collapse.

Greens said we had to switch to solar, or
oil would go to xx per barrel and we'd collapse.

In fact, price increases drove large changes in
uses due to conservation, and stimulated
new exploration, that helped the economy
dodge the bullet for a generation.


If the price of oil rises to a certain level,--
at what point does it become economically to open
up the Athabascan tar sands and/or tap undersea methane
hydrates - neither of which is desirable in my mind, in view of the
carbon and environmental impact.
OR are there technological barriers to these that I am
not aware of.

OR, does a high price of gas have a tipping
point that pushes us into a "plug-in hybrid"
auto / alternative fuel / conservation paradigm. I know there's a big lag
time to replace the existing stock of
cars, but government might step in
and buy a lot of these cars to replace
the existing public and private fleets.

I may be moderating a showing of this film next month,
so I'm doing some thinking about it.

[ThomWV]

1. Hydrates

Without going into the other stuff let me just make this one comment about methane hydrates. Its not only located off shore. Its also located up under the permafrost - where it can essentially be stripmined. Think of it, strip mined natural gas who's liberation has as its byproduct fresh water. How are environmental concerns going to deal with that on the day it becomes recognized? Oh, and there is more of it under the permafrost than there is out past the shelf, even in the Bermuda basin or gulf.

[stellanoir]

2. Look

oil is a lubricant for the tectonic plates. Consider for a moment the difference in viscosity.

If we don't stop mining oil we'll have to double our Richters scacle.

end transmission

[greenman3610]

5. really?

I thought rock became more viscous under
that kind of pressure.
Had not heard the oil theory before.

[stellanoir]

6. Yup

have had it confirmed by many a geophysist. I was talkin" about the varying viscosity between water and oil recently. You can't extract one and replace it with the other forever. Ya know they don't mix goes the old expression. And I've known of it since I was a kid.

So go figure

[amandabeech]

3. The tar sands are being developed now,

but it takes a tremendous amount of energy, now provided by precious natural gas, to force the tar, called "bitumen", out of the ground and to process it into something that can be used in refineries to make synthetic gasoline, diesel and other valuable products. Thus the net energy or energy returned on energy invested is quite low, which is reflected in high financial cost as well. Also, the amount of bitumen that can be produced at one time is relatively limited and the environmental issues are huge.

The "new" area of interest is shale oil in the Green River area of Colorado. Extracting and refining shale is also extremely energy intensive and environmentally destructive. During the last oil shock in the '70s, the big oil companies were trying to make a go of shale oil, but quit without a lot of success when the price of oil declined in the '80s. Now, Shell is trying a new extractive process involving cooking the shale in situ with in ground electric heaters. Needless to say, the electrical generation needed is humongous and comes mostly from coal at present, although Shell believes that the process will be self-sustaining once the project really gets going.

"End of Suburbia" has been discussed over in the Energy and Environment Forum, along with other similar works.

You might want to browse there for answers to some of your questions and to see others' comments.

[JohnyCanuck]

4. EROEI

If the price of oil rises to a certain level,-- at what point does it become economically to open up the Athabascan tar sands and/or tap undersea methane hydrates - neither of which is desirable in my mind, in view of the carbon and environmental impact. OR are there technological barriers to these that I am not aware of.

My understanding is that right now the tar sands are economically viable as the cost to produce the tar sands oil is lower than the current world price for oil.

However for the long term, it's more than the dollars and cents you have to take into account.

Read up about EROEI - energy returned on energy invested, basically a comparison of how much energy you get back from the oil you extracted compared to the amount of energy you invest in extracting the oil in the first place. For conventional land based oil wells where production has not peaked, the EROEI is as much as 100 to 1, i.e. you invest the energy of 1 barrel of oil to find and develop the well and get back 100 barrels' worth of energy to use to find and develop more oil as well as to burn as you wish fueling jet airplanes, trucks, cars, power plants etc.

As oil gets harder to find and oil exploration and recovery takes place in more inhospitable and isolated locations the EROEI decreases.

Today I've seen figures indicating the overall average of EROEI for all oil is around an EROEI of 10 to 1 (vs something like 50 to 1 in the mid 20th century). The EROEI of tar sands oil is generally acknowledged to be about 1.5 to 1 which is extremely low compared to oil from traditional oil sources (not to mention the costs of the attendant pollution and the use of valuable water and increasingly scarce natural gas resources in the extraction process). What are the implications of a low EROEI? For one thing developing tar sands oil is viable today because it is being subsidized in a way by the vast amounts of energy our economies are still getting from relatively high EROEI traditional oil sources. After peak and those sources start to dry up and diminish the picture is likely to change.

energy economics and fossil fuels—
how long do we have?

a briefing document

<snip>

When an energy source that has an EROEI ratio of 4:1 is replaced with another, alternative, energy source which has an EROEI ratio of 2:1, twice as much gross energy has to be produced in order to reap the same net quantity of resulting usable energy.

This can be worse than it looks. Consider that I inherited one barrel of oil, and the EROEI was 4:1. I could use my one barrel and end up with four barrels. Now consider that the EROEI was 2:1, and I still wanted four barrels. Well, I can use my one barrel to extract two barrels, then I have to use those two barrels to extract the four barrels that I want. Thus with an EROEI of 2:1, it has cost me three barrels to gain four; whereas with an EROEI of 4:1, it only cost me one barrel.

This means that when a society moves to using energy sources that have lower EROEIs, the actual amount of energy available to use (for manufacturing, transport, heating etc.) inevitably will diminish.

http://www.abelard.org/briefings/energy-economics.asp#eroei

More information also available on another site here:
http://www.eroei.com/the_chain/economics.html