Comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please. Thanks.
127 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 21, 2024”
Hoping for some insights from some of you with technical expertise in the refining process.
EV tech seems to have more theoretical potential to offset light duty fleet demands in the next 10-50 years than it currently does for the D8s or similar heavy equipment on a job site today. Shipping and air travel also seem to lack a clearly viable alternative at the moment.
Two questions:
1. What kind of flexibility due current refineries have to reduce the gasoline fraction of product and substitute with diesel?
2. What kind of flexibility would a brand new refinery have to change the mix of refined products relative to the current global average or some other benchmark?
This topic is probably in the wrong thread and might better be in the petroleum thread
The flexibility of any refinery is determined by two factors:
1. the configuration of the refinery conversion and upgrading processes
2. The type of crude oil that the refinery was designed around.
The crude oil is separated into three core streams. which can be further separated. These are:
1. light distillate- LPG and full range naphtha
2. middle distillate – jet kerosine and diesel/ gas oil
3. heavy distillate aka atmospheric residue – vacuum gas oil and vacuum residue
The production of gasoline is complicated as there are numerous streams but typically:
1. reformate produced from heavy naphtha on a catalytic reformer
2. FCC gasoline produced from vacuum gs oil on a fluid catalytic cracker
3. isomerate produced form light naphtha on an isomeriser
4. alkylate produced form FCC LPG on an alkylation unit.
5. ethanol or other oxygenate if mandated/ required.
Numerous other streams are used in smaller quantities
The middle distillate stream is composed mainly of:
1. straight run jet and diesel form the crude distillation unit
2. hydrocracked jet and diesel from a Hydrocracker
3. FCC light cylce oil – low grade diesel from a FCC
There is NO simple process for converting light distillate to middle distillate.
Light distillate can be cracked in a steam cracker to produce olefines (ethylene. propylen3 , C4’s and pygas).
The light olefines can be oligomerised into heavier molecules but the process is expensive. Some lubricants
are produced by this method.
The other option is to gasify the light distillate into syngas and then use a Fischer Tropsch process to produce
middle distillate. Again this would be exceedingly expensive.
In the west there is little appetite to invest in refineries, as we are supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels.
Recent in investments have been in HVO to produce Bio derived jet and diesel. These plants are struggling as the
feed cost is crippling. Vegetable oils are limited in supply and waste vegetable oils volumes are miniscule.
To date there is little evidence to prove that the current BEV fleet is having any meaningful impact on gasoline
demand, both regionally and globally, except China. BEV uptake is not matching forecasts, and in Europe the switch from diesel to gasoline light vehicles is boosting demand for gasoline
This is a quick and dirty reply and leaves out a lot of detail.
I posted my query in this thread since the guidelines ask for “comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please.” Just trying to honor the letter of this rule.
I’ll ask for a bit more insight if you could offer it. Simple sites like the link below outline some assessment of the average mix of products coming out of a barrel of oil. This link notes 42.7% gasoline and 27.4% diesel. For a brand new refinery starting from scratch, how much flexibility is there in these numbers? Is this something that we can place boundaries on given some of the input variables you cite? In other words, is the gasoline fraction +/-1%, +/-10%, etc?
I have wondered and asked the same question.
Its very hard to find concrete answers on this.
Overall, it seems like there is roughly 10% flexibility in the blend output but it comes at considerable cost.
There seems to be variability also based on what is the specific type (based on location) of crude oil input as well.
If indeed there was a situation where it looked like a long term relative shortage of diesel vs gasoline was developing in a country, some may find it worth switching certain equipment ot gasoline powered motors, or nat gas….
as of 2020- “more than 17,000 refuse and recycling trucks in the United States run on natural gas and about 60% of new collection trucks on order will be powered by the same”
I used “global diesel vs gasoline consumption per capita 2004 – 2023 chart ” for a per capita version. Notice ChatGPT gets the barrels per day number wrong by a factor of 1,000! Even so, I’m impressed…
[click on image for a larger version]
The car buying public has indeed been slow to warm up to the idea of spending an extra ten thousand dollars or more up front on an electric car. I’m an electric vehicle believer myself, but I wouldn’t buy one myself, even if I were in the market, because I want better value for my money.
The opportunity cost of that ten grand up front outweighs the potential savings on fuel and maintenance, and it remains to be seen whether it’s actually cheaper to own an electric car. You may be stuck with outrageous repair bills, or unobtainable parts, and nobody really knows what an older electric car is going to be worth a few years down the road.
If I were in the market for a new car myself, I would be waiting and watching and continue to drive an existing car, expecting to save serious money by postponing buying one. I believe that a typical new car customer won’t buy an electric car until he or she has a friend or neighbor or coworker who owns one. A thousand bucks for a new phone is one thing, thirty or forty thousand and up for a new car that might be a mistake is another thing altogether.
And so far as older cheap electric cars are concerned……. as a practical matter there isn’t any such animal. There isn’t a single one at a car dealership in the two or three small cities near my home.
I’m always willing to admit I might be wrong……. but my money says that over the next few years buyers will get comfortable with electrics, prices will be competitive or close to competitive, and they’ll start selling very well indeed.
Given the current state of world politics, an oil supply shock is a real possibility at any time, and probably more likely than not within the next five to ten years, and depletion never sleeps.
If and when people have to line up to buy gasoline, they’ll be lined up to buy electric cars.
What I’m saying is that electric vehicles are here and ready but they’re a few years early in the minds of the large majority of potential buyers.
But management at all the major manufacturers have jumped in full speed ahead for fear of being behind the curve later on…… and so they’ve glutted the market for the time being.
The US EV cost scenario applies to us and a handful of other countries, such as Canada, who happen to have domestic oil in sufficient quantity at the current time to avoid paying to import petrol….we have relatively cheap fuel for now.
Most other countries are oil importers and the pricing scenario adds up differently for them.
China for example.
Also, in some states like where I live in WA state the price of electricity miles is cheap compared to petrol miles.
Here is a very good state comparison for gas vs electric miles, with reasonable assumptions made about averages. https://www.saveonenergy.com/ev/compare-driving-cost/
It confirms that I live in a state with the highest ev cost advantage/mile, which explains a higher level of ev uptake here-commonplace.
Just compared prices for used 2018 Model 3 vs used 2018 Toyota Camry, the difference in price was about $4000 (Tesla was higher), but Tesla is eligible for a $4000 tax credit (car must be under 25k and income of buyer under 150k for eligibility). I have owned both the Model 3 (2018) and most recently a 2013 Toyota Camry, the Model 3 has been very reliable (about 80 on car).
So not really a 10k difference in cost. For the new vehicle also not a 10k difference after 7500 Fed rebate and some states also offer rebates on top of this (in Maine the total is $8500 in rebates fed and state). The Tesla long range RWD M3 (363 miles of range) is currently 44.5k and after rebate would be 36k, the Toyota Camry XLE Hybrid is about 34.5k, and is not nearly as nice a car as the Model 3, only a 1500 dollar premium for the Tesla. You are correct that many will opt for the Toyota, but I have been buying Toyotas since 1984 as they are very reliable, I have not been disappointed with the reliability of the Tesla and it is much more fun to drive than the Camry or a Prius (most of my Toyotas purchased since 1997 have been either the Camry V6 and Hybrid or Prius).
Eventually the cost of petrol is going to increase and as it does EV cost savings will be significant.
At $3.50 per gallon a car that gets 40 MPG (Camry Hybrid) has a cost of 8.75 cents per mile. My Model 3 has averaged just under 250 Wh per mile over 80k miles which is 4 miles per kWh, where I live at low overnight rates (on TOU service) I pay 16 cents per kWhr so cost per mile is about 4 cents. Over 80k miles that is 4.75 times 80000 divided by 100 or $3800 savings on fuel cost, no oil changes (say $400 savings) so a total of $4200 in savings, deduct the 1500 premium paid for a new Tesla today and the net is $2700 saved over 6 years of ownership vs a Toyota Camry Hybrid driving a much nicer car.
For other nations not putting tariffs on Chinese EVs, the cost of an EV is 15 to 20k, for those nations the Chinese EVs will take over the new light duty vehicle market very quickly.
From end of previous thread, posted by Hickory….
“This is one way that Singapore is planning to navigate the next 30-50 years-
“Australia has approved an ambitious project to export solar power to Singapore via a subsea cable spanning over 4,300 kilometers…The project has an estimated price tag of some $13.5 billion, Reuters reported, and the final investment decision on it is slated for 2027, with electricity set to start flowing along the cable in 2030….The capacity of the project will be a maximum of 6 GW, part of which will be delivered to the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, Darwin, with the rest going to Singapore.”
This is a second attempt at initiating the project, now with government involvement.
Time will tell how it works out.”
Time has already worked this one out….
It did indeed receive approval from the Govt yesterday…
It doesn’t have any money to actually build it. Sun cable was in the hands of administrators at the beginning of last year after running out of cash. It received some more to carry out it’s planning, not the actual building that will take many billions. The actual cost has varied from $12B to $30B depending on who is quoting the costs.
None of the ‘quotes’ are firm actual quotes from companies prepared to build any part of it for the fixed prices.
Nor are there any contracts for the power from Singapore…
The environmental approval received yesterday, was approval to rip up another 12,400 hectares of natural environment to build this plant, which is going to be good for the environment, that’s the rest of the environment, not where it’s being built, nor where all the minerals are extracted from to supply all the materials.
Luckily for the environment, it will never be built, it’s way too expensive for the power provided, unless governments come in and waste billions of dollars subsidising the whole thing…
The “plan” keeps changing, this from renew magazine…
“After nearly a year of studies, Quinbrook now has a better idea of what that might look like – 12 GW of wind, with the solar component reduced from 20 GW to 12 GW, and the storage component also reduced to 32 GWh – thanks in part to the role that wind will play in providing power after the sun goes down.”
Notice there is never any discussion of the economic reality of this ‘plan’, because it simply isn’t going to give a positive economic return, so the actual nitty gritty economics never get discussed.
Reality is simple, if it was providing cheaper electricity than coal and gas, then they would use the electricity locally in something like an Aluminium smelter, and save on the cost of the 4,200 mile undersea cable, and associated energy losses, plus the hugely expensive HVDC substations at each end changing the AC to DC and back again.
Yet no-one is suggesting to build and run an Aluminium smelter off this electricity. The obvious reason is it would produce Aluminium at a much greater cost than the cheap Aluminium smelters being built in Indonesia based on NEW coal fired power.
It’s expensive electricity, which would be MORE expensive if the Aluminium frames of the solar panels, and Aluminium rails they will sit on, were made by Aluminium smelters running on solar and wind instead of cheap coal!!
This sun cable will virtually run straight past the new Aluminium smelters and coal fired power plants being built in Indonesia!!
If we tried to build the solar panels out of Aluminium that came from only renewable production methods, the panels would be more expensive, so less affordable for the world!! We need to build them from cheap fossil fuels to be cheap, but eventually we wont have the fossil fuels, or perhaps not a climate worth living in, by continuing to use the last of the fossil fuels to build more and more cheap renewables…
As I said, time will tell how it works out.
Unlike you, I do not think the story on this is over. Rather its still early stage.
Things are not going to stay in the current condition for all that much longer, and the incentive for both Australia and Singapore to move on this kind of project will grow over time,
as oil depletes and the world gets hotter.
Similarly, the Moroccan project to send energy north to UK and or Germany via undersea HVDC line will likely get done.
Another fact that always seem to be neglected in these issues is the existence “indirect costs” of using coal instead of cleaner forms of energy.
Indirect cost include minor issues like the destruction of the ecosphere.
I’d say many facts. The fact for coal is a lot bigger than the fact for geothermal, wave, wind, and the myriad forms of solar.
A lot of people these days only think of solar as producing electricity. There are a lot of ways to use solar for heating.
None of these methods will support the current or greater human population of the planet at the current per capita use of energy.
Notice that i didn’t mention fission or fusion. However I suspect that neither will ever be worth the cost especially if the risk is included in the evaluation. That one’s a guess, not a fact.
An undersea cable weighs about 1.5 kg /meter. 4,300 km would weigh about 7 million kg, or 7000 tons.
A metric ton of coal is needed to generate 2,200 kWh of electricity. 7000 tons would generate about 15 million kWh. 1 GW is 1 millions kW, so that is 15 GWh.
The cable is rated at 2GW. So it would take 8 hours to transmit the amount of electricity its weight in coal can generate. It’s easy to forget how much coal we burn. So yeah, replacements are big, but without a comparison, throwing around big numbers is meaningless.
Alimbiquated, if you tried to run 2Gw through a cable weighing 1.5kg/m, over 4300km, you would fry it instantly.
My own battery system has 2/0 cable that weighs just under 1kg/m and only runs 200amp at 48VDC over 1.5m.
From someone actually making cable for a project…
“The submarine cables alone weigh around 76 kilograms per metre. The total weight for the submarine cable (plus/minus pole) is therefore around 25,000 tonnes per project – a logistical challenge.” “of which 165 kilometres are submarine cables”
And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive, and the climate will be getting hotter and more volatile, and that people all around the world are going to do all kinds of things to stave off energy poverty. And the biosphere will continue to shrivel up, and all of this will bring great tension upon the people of the world…foreign and domestic.
And yes. Places with energy will sell it to places that don’t have enough- via tankers or under sea electric cables, in the form of grain or compressed nat gas, aluminum or plastic or semiconductor chips. Thats how it goes.
The amount of anecdotal evidence of climate change shows up in fascinating places. Today I had lunch in a local (and famous) brew pub, Russian River Brewing. On the table was an ad for a beer labeled “Fonio” produced by an English company (I think) using an African grain by that name. Apparently RR is collaborating with an international group of beer makers in adapting the industry in sustainable grains such as Fonio which, unlike barley, grows well in poor soils and in severe drought.
I’m not sure how important transportation, HVAC, mnufacturing or, for that matter, civilization is but beer is necessary for humanity to endure.
Remember what Ben Franklin said “Beer is proof that god loves us”. (I forget which god)
Hickory ….
“And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive,”
I mostly agree, which means everything made from them will also get very expensive. When it comes to oil though, I doubt it will get gradually scarce. I expect it to get quickly scarce as we have been dragging future use into the present for decades. We now rely upon highly complex arrangements to access newer sources of the remaining oil, with the easy to get cheap oil rapidly declining, because it’s the most profitable.
At some point we reach an accelerating decline of availability of oil in totality, which assuming market forces still operate, will send the price rocketing so that use is constrained. However this means that everything that still relies upon oil and it’s products gets far more expensive.
All the mining and moving of heavy materials we use in the modern world relies upon oil. All the renewables we are building totally rely upon oil and other fossil fuels for their mining, processing and distribution.
The cost of it all will go up as oil becomes scarcer, those buying the renewables will also have less money to spend on renewables as the cost of everything else in their lives has also gone up, food being a primary example.
Instead of the market, if we use some other mechanism for distribution of oil and oil products, who decides where the oil is needed, how does this work?
While we have an increasing quantity of fossil fuels being delivered to the market, we can greatly expand the mining, processing , distribution and use of solar, wind, Nuclear, batteries, EVs and more transmission lines across the world. It’s all easily possible as we continue to expand our footprint upon the planet, digging up more, from lower grade, deeper deposits, located in more remote locations, with our bigger better oil using machines.
The problems will all this new tech is that it ages quickly. A decade for batteries, maybe 2 for wind turbines, perhaps 3 for solar panels, but how do we build the ‘new’ when the oil is in great decline and the 6 continent supply chain for all the complex widgets that are needed to keep it going starts to break down?
We can’t build a whole lot of local solar panel factories, as this takes more energy than building a relatively few to service the whole world. Likewise for wind turbines, modern fancy battery factories. The materials we need to build fancy recycling facilities that everyone assumes we will have, require a range of different heat sources or chemicals, that come from fossil fuels that we wont have.
How do farms operate, designed upon a fossil fuels supply chain and designed to operate efficiently upon fossil fuels, then distribute food to cities? Building more smaller farms on more local labour, requires increasing quantities of energy to build it all, house the people etc.
The increased complexity using the last of the easy to get oil on building the renewable future, is a recipe for disaster, when the oil flows rapidly fall as we require the increasing level of oil and oil products to build this complexity.
Increased complexity makes our system more fragile. Imagine the places totally relying upon a long under sea HVDC cable, when some undersea volcano or earthquake breaks the cable, and there is no oil available for the repair ship to get out into the ocean to do the repairs.
Civilization relying upon metals was never a possible long term existence. Entropy and dissipation guarantee the fall of any metal based civilization. The ore grades continually get lower requiring an ever increasing energy input to replace the metals lost back to the environment. By needing to continually grow energy use, there is no level of sustainability, it’s grow or bust.
Our continual growth of our civilization is now reaching or passing planetary limits in a range of areas, from CO2 release into the atmosphere, to species extinctions, to ocean acidification, to micro plastics pollution and endocrine disruption across many species. Building more renewables and nuclear and batteries plus whatever else, is just an extension of our fossil fuel existence for a short period while we do more damage until it all collapses due to oil availability eventually declining at an accelerating rate.
I agree it will continue at an accelerating rate until it can’t, then it all falls to pieces very rapidly as different failures throughout the system have outsized effects on other parts of our highly interconnected complex system and feedback loops increase the rate of decline in oil and everything else, leaving billions of people still alive trapped in cities with the food and fuel/energy to cities rapidly declining.
You get no argument from me about more fantastic looking complex breakthroughs and building of bigger more complicated energy producing, and battery storage plants, while our use of fossil fuels continues to increase. How does any of it happen when oil is in rapid decline is the big question, of which no-one has any answers, because there are none.
Medically Reviewed by Smitha Bhandari, MD on February 25, 2024Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors
Effect of a Scarcity Mentality on Your Mental Health
How to Snap Out of Scarcity
Tips for Managing Scarcity Mentality
Have you ever tried to complete a task but been constantly interrupted? The distractions aren’t from the outside, like noisy kids or a demanding boss, in your own mind. It’s something you need and can’t stop thinking about. For example, you’re on a diet, and all you can think about is the food you can’t eat anymore.
A scarcity mindset is when you are so obsessed with a lack of something — usually time or money — that you can’t seem to focus on anything else, no matter how hard you try.
Effect of a Scarcity Mentality on Your Mental Health
Scarcity mentality isn’t something you do on purpose. It’s the background noise your brain makes when you can’t get what you want. But it’ll cost you.
Focusing on something you don’t have can take a toll on your mental health. You can get “tunnel vision” when all you think about is the unmet need.
Scarcity mentality also has other impacts on your brain and can even cause it to work differently.
It lowers your intelligence quotient (IQ). Having a scarcity mentality can lower your IQ by as many as 14 points. It might not seem like much, but it’s enough to move your score from average to outstanding and vice versa. If you have an average IQ, losing 13 or 14 points can make it fall into the deficient category.
It limits your brain function. Scarcity mentality affects your ability to solve problems, hold information, and reason logically. It also affects your brain’s decision-making process. A scarcity mindset limits your ability to plan, focus, and start a project or task. Your brain is too busy thinking about something you don’t have.
It makes impulse control harder. The decision-making part of your brain also controls impulses. When tunnel vision reduces your brain function, you’re more likely to give in to impulses you usually wouldn’t.
When we spend our energy obsessing over one thing, other areas of the brain start to lapse.
What is scarcity for dummies?
The concept of scarcity is one of the most important concepts in economics. If we had the resources to fulfill every desire we had, everybody would have everything they wanted. But life is not like that; we have limited resources, and we must make decisions on how to use those resources.
Hideaway- Agree. Scarcity could happen quickly.
Some people seem to realize that, and others don’t.
That explains why some people, and even countries, seem to take the situation much more seriously than others. China for example.
Hickory ….
“And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive,”
I fully agree, which means everything made from them will also get very expensive. When it comes to oil though, I doubt it will get gradually scarce. I expect it to get quickly scarce as we have been dragging future use into the present for decades. We now rely upon highly complex arrangements to access newer sources of the remaining oil, with the easy to get cheap oil rapidly declining, because it’s the most profitable.
At some point we reach an accelerating decline of availability of oil in totality, which assuming market forces still operate, will send the price rocketing so that use is constrained. However this means that everything that still relies upon oil and it’s products gets far more expensive.
All the mining and moving of heavy materials we use in the modern world relies upon oil. All the renewables we are building totally rely upon oil and other fossil fuels for their mining, processing and distribution.
The cost of it all will go up as oil becomes scarcer, those buying the renewables will also have less money to spend on renewables as the cost of everything else in their lives has also gone up, food being a primary example.
Instead of the market, if we use some other mechanism for distribution of oil and oil products, who decides where the oil is needed, how does this work?
While we have an increasing quantity of fossil fuels being delivered to the market, we can greatly expand the mining, processing , distribution and use of solar, wind, Nuclear, batteries, EVs and more transmission lines across the world. It’s all easily possible as we continue to expand our footprint upon the planet, digging up more, from lower grade, deeper deposits, located in more remote locations, with our bigger better oil using machines.
The problems will all this new tech is that it ages quickly. A decade for batteries, maybe 2 for wind turbines, perhaps 3 for solar panels, but how do we build the ‘new’ when the oil is in great decline and the 6 continent supply chain for all the complex widgets that are needed to keep it going starts to break down?
We can’t build a whole lot of local solar panel factories, as this takes more energy than building a relatively few to service the whole world. Likewise for wind turbines, modern fancy battery factories. The materials we need to build fancy recycling facilities that everyone assumes we will have, require a range of different heat sources or chemicals, that come from fossil fuels that we wont have.
How do farms operate, designed upon a fossil fuels supply chain and designed to operate efficiently upon fossil fuels, then distribute food to cities? Building more smaller farms on more local labour, requires increasing quantities of energy to build it all, house the people etc.
The increased complexity using the last of the easy to get oil on building the renewable future, is a recipe for disaster, when the oil flows rapidly fall as we require the increasing level of oil and oil products to build this complexity.
Increased complexity makes our system more fragile. Imagine the places totally relying upon a long under sea HVDC cable, when some undersea volcano or earthquake breaks the cable, and there is no oil available for the repair ship to get out into the ocean to do the repairs.
Civilization relying upon metals was never a possible long term existence. Entropy and dissipation guarantee the fall of any metal based civilization. The ore grades continually get lower requiring an ever increasing energy input to replace the metals lost back to the environment. By needing to continually grow energy use, there is no level of sustainability, it’s grow or bust.
Our continual growth of our civilization is now reaching or passing planetary limits in a range of areas, from CO2 release into the atmosphere, to species extinctions, to ocean acidification, to micro plastics pollution and endocrine disruption across many species. Building more renewables and nuclear and batteries plus whatever else, is just an extension of our fossil fuel existence for a short period while we do more damage until it all collapses due to oil availability eventually declining at an accelerating rate.
I agree it will continue at an accelerating rate until it can’t, then it all falls to pieces very rapidly as different failures throughout the system have outsized effects on other parts of our highly interconnected complex system and feedback loops increase the rate of decline in oil and everything else, leaving billions of people still alive trapped in cities with the food and fuel/energy to cities rapidly declining.
You get no argument from me about more fantastic looking complex breakthroughs and building of bigger more complicated energy producing, and battery storage plants, while our use of fossil fuels continues to increase. How does any of it happen when oil is in rapid decline is the big question, of which no-one has any answers, because there are none.
The amount of oil consumed in the World (in exajoules) per trillion 2015$ of real GDP produced in the World has fallen linearly from 1985 to 2023. Data from World Bank for real GDP and from Energy Institute for Oil consumed.
Feel free to find the data and post. Note that real GDP is roughly equal to income. The share of global food expenditures as a percentage of global income has been smaller and smaller over time. In 1974 about 87.5 EJ of oil consumption for every billion tonnes of cereals produced in the World, in 2022 it was about 63 EJ per billion tonnes.
GDP is the better measure in my view.
There is huge variability on the share of income spent on food, with wealthy nations spending in the 5% to 20% range and developing nations spending 40% to 60% of income on food.
This makes food a not very good yardstick as a nation that has per capita income that is 10 times another nation is not likely to consume 10 times more food. US per capita income was about 81k in 2023 and India’s per capita income was about 2.5k, fairly sure that US citizens don’t eat 32 times more food per person than the average person in India.
GDP includes a lot of fluff, like entertainment or sports betting for example.
I was pointing towards items that are very closely linked to petrol consumption and that are critical to survival of the 8.2 B…like basic foodstuffs.
If petrol products get more expensive it will certainly show up in food prices around the world, and in food availability.
That might seem manageable to those of us who perceive that we live in a land of plenty, and could afford more payment for food indefinitely, but billions in the world don’t have that cushion, and don’t live in countries with domestic oil production.
Hideaways point that there is possible pending onset of scarcity of oil should not just be shrugged off. It could happen anytime independent of geologic factors. It won’t show up everywhere all at once. There will be ‘canaries in the coal mine’.
Or, it could happen more gradually in the best case scenario.
Hickory,
If there is demand for oil its output will not decrease abruptly, the decline is likely to be gradual.
Shock model with URR of 2950 Gb, note that this URR estimate is quite conservative, USGS estimate is 3500 to 4000 Gb.
Click on chart for larger view.
You’re interpreting that information all wrong. We’re not doing more with less oil. We’re substituting real growth with massive debt growth pretending everything is ok. GDP is worthless measure of economic activity because debt is included in it. Right now the US is creating 1trillion dollars every 100 days and like it or not it’s part of GDP.
However to your point the financial economy has become completely disconnected from the real economy. Debts will never be repaid which means you savings and retirement are toast.
Let me repeat that so Huntington gets it your wealth your stocks your retirement accounts are toast.
Money isn’t a stock it’s a flow and it can’t flow without ever increasing energy growth. It’s 101 never taught in economics because they’re too dumb to understand.
Since when did POB become Comedy Central. I must have missed the memo. Actually, the ignorance at times here is very sad.
“We’re not doing more with less oil”
Bud, you need to retire your 73′ Impala with a 454 and turbo hydramatic that gets 8 MPG.
“GDP is worthless measure of economic activity because debt is included in it”
Debt has been part of the economy for almost ever. For the last 90 years America has been incredibly successful. So much so, that you can’t even imagine negative growth(contraction) and think of it as some kind of collapse. Part of the reason America has been so successful is because of debt. There are many ways debt is a good. Debt can give a poor entrepreneur with a good idea an opportunity to be a successful business person. Debt can give a person with an income an opportunity to purchase a home and pay for it over time of use. Which produces equity over time verses renting. Bottom line debt is a financial means to match assets/resources with future labor and increase productivity. The Permian or energy industry is a good example of this. By the way, debt is repaid and initiated everyday.
“Money isn’t a stock it’s a flow”
What Is Money?
Finance & Development, September 2012, Vol. 49, No. 3
Irena Asmundson and Ceyda Oner
Without it, modern economies could not function
What Is Money?
Money may make the world go around, as the song says. And most people in the world probably have handled money, many of them on a daily basis. But despite its familiarity, probably few people could tell you exactly what money is, or how it works.
In short, money can be anything that can serve as a
• store of value, which means people can save it and use it later—smoothing their purchases over time;
• unit of account, that is, provide a common base for prices; or
• medium of exchange, something that people can use to buy and sell from one another.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about the role of money is to consider what would change if we did not have it.
JT, maybe you can trade your Impala for chariot and improve your MPG, good luck finding someone to give you any money for it. Because it’s technology worthless. Sure, “We’re not doing more with less oil”, Idiot.
We’re not going back
BTW, about 25% of my portfolio is invested in the energy industry and 20% in financiaIs. You can’t think of a transaction you can do with money that doesn’t profit me. Thank you. I have had zero debt for the last 24 years. Paid off the 30 year mortgage in 17 years. Today my home is worth more than 10 times the dollar amount I paid. Life is good.
The 2025 Cadillac Optiq Is A Bold New Baby Luxury SUV With Escalade Vibes
At the World level net liabilities are equal to net assets, debt is only a problem if it is excessive. Generally lenders will only lend if they expect to be repaid and they only get it wrong a small percent of the time, if they are to remain in business.
Hickory,
Chart below used the Human Development Index (HDI) instead of real GDP for the World. Data is only available starting in 1990 for the HDI. The HDI uses a logarithmic scale, if we use a logarithmic scale for World real GDP we get a similar ratio for 1990 and 2022 as the HDI measure. World Oil consumption is in exajoules and note that HDI is a per capita measure.
There is also an inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI) but for that measure we only have data from 2010 to 2022.
“Luckily for the environment, it will never be built, it’s way too expensive for the power provided, unless governments come in and waste billions of dollars subsidising the whole thing…”
I personally believe that the odds are pretty high that the juice delivered by such a cable, assuming it IS built, will be a world class bargain, compared to buying gas or maybe coal to generate the same amount of power a decade or two down the road.
Depletion never sleeps, and history AIN’T OVER. Countries that have oil and gas enough to export some of it will be growing fewer as the years pass, and exporters will become importers. Tankers will stay in port, unless they’re escorted by warships…… maybe even years at a time.
Listen to all of it, it’s only a couple of minutes long.
I can’t copy and paste but from this link, Texas in spite of political animosity to renewables has tripled solar over the last three years, produces more wind juice by a country mile than any other state, etc.
And WHY?
” Because it’s cheaper, faster, and better.”
They’re making decisions to buy the best product in the market place.
I suppose none of the engineers involved in the wind and solar biz in Texas took any thermo courses as undergrads, lol.
Maybe we could collect all of the comments posted by Carnot and company and email copies to all those folks and educate them on this topic and save them all from going bankrupt.
Thanks, I had not heard about this project am I am actually in Lincoln, ME on vacation, strange that. I figured you mistyped ME and meant NE, but read the article and it is indeed Lincoln ME.
I wonder why there is not more publicity/awareness of wet bulb temperature? A wet bulb of 35 C is considered the maximum temperature that a healthy young adult can survive for six hours. A wet bulb of 32 C precludes any significant physical activity while old and frail people are vulnerable at even lower temperatures. Recently there have been wet bulb temperatures in the middle east as high as 33 C.
Attached is a snapshot of North America
Not sure with the professors assessment. So far such a catastrophe isn’t reflected on food prices, except cocoa, and olive oil. Wheat, soy, corn have had record harvest seasons world wide which is reflected on their current prices especially during the recent time of a weak U.S dollar (where you’d expect a higher price based on pure technicals)
Do you think they could be right ? They seem to think the world will end due to climate change (similar to Guy Mcpherson).
I’d like to see scenarios and specific mechanisms on how they think this will occur because they think the breakdown of society will occur in the short-term (around 2030).
‘The world will end’
No, not the world.
But the world is certainly ending for many species, and the web of life is a lot less stable than just about everyone understands. Including at the microscopic soil, lake and ocean life level upon which all ecosystems are based.
Are we on the cusp of the 6th Mass Extinction Event? Maybe, or perhaps much more likely it will just turn out to be a 2nd tier global extinction event. In that case the world certainly survives, but us?- hmmmph.
Most people do not have a clue just how dependent the vast majority of humanity are on a stable climate/fossil fuel enabled agricultural system. Yes, I think that billions of people are at risk from food shortfall. They call it famine. And not just in the second half on the century. Any time.
Is that the end of the world? Yes…for them that can’t get food.
I think most people like to imagine that disruption happens to someone else, over the horizon, under some rock, and that they themselves will be able to just roll on unaffected. That is a delusion…when the chessboard gets scrambled by things like mass migration, supply chain disruption, geopolitical conflict and food shortage the ramifications often spread and magnify in unpredictable ways. Borders can become irrelevant, alliances and networks can become permanently disabled.
I wouldn’t make long term bets on stability.
But don’t trust me on that…I never have been one to see stability as a dominant condition.
Keep in mind that humanity [Homo pyromancer] still can find and burn at least another 1/3rd of the total combustible material available on earth.
It looks like we will attempt to do it all.
The most obvious mechanism for mass mortality is widespread famine. It will likely occur secondary to combined impacts of both climate change and peak oil.
Hay, are you OK ? I mean, your guy dropped out yesterday. Dump doesn’t believe in climate change. You can’t even use Biden as an excuse. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. You could just potato it for 2024.
I vote Green HB, I’ve mentioned it before, several times. I don’t vote Dim, I don’t vote Repug. Try and keep up.
The fact that you seek engagement with me, but can’t seem to remember much of what I say, is a rough indication that you ain’t too bright.
Get a grip; write notes down if you’re memory is bad or you’re drinking; embarrassing.
Survivalist,
I totally get that. But how would it play out is what i am asking, like specifics. If i say, the world as we know it will end around 2030, i have to come up with possible scenarios elaborating on specifics as to what will occur. In this case as a result of climate change.
We are shortly in 2025. As i mentioned we have had record surpluses of staple food production this year. It is hard to imagine that in a measly 5 years all these harvests will completely breakdown in a way there would be mass famines and breakdown of society. I just don’t see such a castrophic scenario playing out.
The people who claim this need to tell us okay, the wheat production will breakdown due to x,y and z. Here is the data. I haven’t seen any of them present any evidence. They come across more as religious apocalyptic cults who have a deep seeded belief that the end of the world is nigh. But these are serious scientists which makes it the more stranger.
Mike in the past when there have been large grain harvest failures its generally been a regional failure, due to bad weather, crop disease and of course war…”civil” and uncivil.
Thats probably what will happen again at some point, and its not an xyz predictable event. The world can only ship so much grain on short notice. There has been a big change over the past century, with much larger populations now dependent on imported grain than in the past.
Sure, the severity of famine can be offset by massive cargo transfers of grain if accomplished with great haste, especially in a peaceful world with lots of spare cargo capacity and fuel.
examples
x- “The Chinese famine of 1928–1930 occurred as widespread drought hit Northwestern and Northern China,…When famine developed, people began to eat everything they could, including bark, grass roots, tree leaves, bran, mud and animals they fed. Human cannibalism also occurred; people exchanged their young children to eat. Many dead bodies had no feet or arms, people even thought that if they did not eat their own children or parents’ bodies, other people would eat their bodies.
Some people died from eating too much mud.”
y- Europe’s Great Famine of 1315–1317 is considered one of the worst population collapses in the continent’s history. Historical records tell of unrelenting rain accompanied by mass crop failure, skyrocketing food prices, and even instances of cannibalism. These written records strongly suggest Europe’s Great Famine was caused by several years of devastating floods that began in 1314
Thanks for taking the effort to give me a detailed response with historical examples. I appreciate that.
The evidence i’d like to see, and maybe they do have this line of evidence and I am ignorant of it. Is how GHGs could lead to destruptions to food chains which may lead to global famines.
There is no doubt there has been famines in the past including the ones you cited, but weather events such as droughts and floods are expected to occur from time to time. Now with the population of the earth and humans occupying more land mass than ever, we’d expect to see a rise in weather events which cause destruction. Also with the internet and the movement of information (also misinformation and disinformation) one might get the wrong idea that there is a large increase in destructive weather events. This is not abnormal.
You see, it is really hard, to me it seems to connect rising GHGs in our atmosphere to a rise in destructive weather events. How can we show this beyond statistics and correlation. And more as a quantified causation.
That is the kind of evidence i want to see in some way. Such and such weather event was caused as a result of a rise in GHG emissions by x amount because of such and such mechanism. Just haven’t seen this yet. Or the wheat belts will completely collapse by x year because the temperatures will get so hot that photosynthesis would stop etc etc.
I mean people could argue to the opposite side as well. Saying statements like CO2 emissions increase crop production because of x mechanism (increased photosynthesis). Which again would be hard to quantify.
If anyone has papers showing this, i’d be more than happy to look at it.
I suspect that the ‘proof’ you are looking for to link global warming with particular crop failures is something that will only be to ones satisfaction by looking back from the distant future at very long accumulated correlation data.
In the meantime we are stuck watching episodic droughts, heat waves and flood events with the realization that combustion is feeding a bonfire of instability. Something like 90% of the combustion related warming has gone into the oceans thus far.
Scientists are trying to hash out attribution, but its a very tough thing to quantify with a high degree of fidelity.
But we do know a lot. If you have seen a corn cob with many empty spots in the rows, these are failures to get fertilized, usually due to hot/dry conditions during the short pollination window. [I did work on a corn breeding project when young, and have Univ degree in Agronomy, so I do have some familiarity with many of the particulars on crops, soil, and weather].
I look at it from the standpoint of risk. Our activities and overall situation is a recipe for high risk of crop and food supply failures. In fact I feel sadly confident to say that it is baked in the cake. No, not everywhere and not all at once.
Multiple Breadbasket Harvest Failure is how it starts. How it plays out varies by region. I’d suggest a couple years of suboptimal harvest would thin out the heard rather severely. Famine, and famine related violence and disease, will provide the necessary conditions for a population bottleneck.
Folk’s brains get downright reptilian after a few days with little to no food. If you’d like to ruin an otherwise fine day, you can start by Googling Images for Russian Famine, or Sudan Famine, if you prefer something more contemporary.
“Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
Thanks Hickory and Survivalist your links and knowledge is invaluable to the discussion.
Survivalist, very interesting and informative links. Most of the climate change related ones tend to be on the long-term predictions of how crop harvests will be impacted as a result of climate change and other factors. Around ~ 2040-2100 simulations.
These guys I was referring to in the original post believe castrophic effects within the next 5 years. Unless some major tipping points and unforseen effects are triggered which will exponentially affect the climate globally, i dont see any of these scenarios predicted playing out in such a short time. Long-term yea possibly.
Iron Mike…I don’t think the specifics of time/location on these risks are at all predictable.
Lack of pollinators seems to be a real problem today. But not for grain crops.
I’ll add two more. The first news article link below includes the following commentary:
“But climate change is, increasingly, becoming the primary driver in many parts of the world.
‘We have 18 countries where 71.9 million people face high-acute food insecurity because of weather extremes,” said Gernot Laganda, who leads climate and disaster risk reduction programs at the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). ‘So a larger number of countries with a larger number of people.’
Most of these countries were in Africa and Latin America. In 2020, that number was 15.7 million in 15 countries, mostly in Africa, Latin American and South Asia.”
And the source report is at the next link. “…in July, FAO and the other major UN food agencies said that roughly 773 million people on the planet are facing acute hunger.” A horrible number.
Yes, it is very important to acknowledge that severe malnutrition and/or starvation is
going on right now, in many ‘small’ pockets.
Local drought, flood, civil war, forced migrations.
How widespread does it have to get before its gets called famine on the news feeds?
All of the ingredients that can lead up to widespread famine lurk on the horizon.
Always have, but the risks increase in an overextended, hot and crowded world.
Global warming in a crowded world makes humanity more like to fight amongst themselves.
Its not just crop failure from bad weather conditions that puts people at risk of starvation, rather the bigger cause is disruption of smooth civil function. Unrest and hunger related to mass migration is one such aspect of this.
There are two rather “hard” facts that point to climate being the likely source of major breakdown in human suffering and insecurity. The first is the limiting temperature of photosynthesis, about 90 degrees F. We are clearly seeing that temperature being occurring more often in important farming regions. It cannot be much longer before important croplands see decline.
The second hard fact is that storms obtain their destructive energy from ambient temperatures. Ocean temperatures, steadily rising, are already causing an increase in the severity of hurricanes.
Yet, I’m always reminded of the quote by Niels Bohr “Prediction is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Tom Murphy continues his videos about “Metastatic Modernity.” They’re short, clear, and informative.
T Hill- refinery flexibility.
As your initial comment is now well up the thread I have started a new comment.
Like vehcicles there is non size fits. Refineries range form basic fuel refineries up to complex high conversion refineries increasing integrated into petrochemical. I will focus on a typical refinery based on crude distillation, vacuum distillation,
Isomeriser, catalytic reformer, fluid catalytic cracker and alkylation unit. Hydro treating for sulphur removal will be deployed where necessary i.e. transport fuels.
When a refinery is designed it has a base line crude oil , and all the product stream are designed around a particular crude oil assay. There are thousands of crude oil types but they can be grouped by API gravity. Within say a 32 API crude there will be some variation in the amounts of light, middle and heavy distillate. Within each distillate group will be differing values of paraffins, naphthenes and aromatics. Crudes are sometimes discussed in terms of the latter i.e. paraffinic, naphthenic and aromatic.
The base line crude oil can be obtained by blending different crudes to make a synthetic blend that matches the base line. The CDU(crude distillation) is normally designed around the the base line crude with some tolerance, say +10% on the hydraulic capacity of the CDU at each draw off; naphtha+LPG, jet, gasoil, and residue. If the base crude is something like Urals, the substitution of Ural with Brent crude would cause iisies. Brent has much more ligt distillate and this would overload the top of the CDU. the net effect would be the CDU could only be operated to the max flow available at the naphtha draw off. The net effect would be the refinery could not operate at its design crude through out.. Likewise if the Urals was replaced with 28 API Arab Heavy the residue draw off of the CDU would be flooded, reducing through put.. A crude rich in middle distillate would overload the jet and gas oil draw offs.
The ability to switch output to more or less gasoline if very limited indeed. The products mix is pretty much fixed at high operating rates. At lower operating rates the product mix could be altered by changing the crude blend , but this can cause issues. Heat integration is finely balanced to reduce fuel consumption and any signifcant changes to the flow rates would impact on the heat balance. Refineries like to operate at >90% of capacity and even higher, because any reduction in throughput hits the bottom line hard. Typical gross margins are around $10 -15 per barrel. Jet tends to have the best margin and some products have negative margins. Operating below design increases OPEX.
In the US the production of gasoline is something like 45-47% of the crude barrel. In Europe it is 20% or even less, because the refinery configuration is biased towards middle distillate production, which means a slightly different crude intake to the US. In the US thee is only minor consumption of naphtha into petrochemicals whereas about 40% of the naphtha goes into petrochemicals in Europe.
Along the Gulf Coast in particular, the large refineries are configured to produce maximum gasoline from conversion of heavy crude atmospheric residues. FCC, Hydrocrackers and Cokers. A lot of this heavy crude came from Venezuela , and also Mexico and other suppliers of heavy crude. It is because of the reifnery configurations that the US exports a lot of LTO and import a a similar of amount of heavy crude. It is a myth that the US is self sufficient because only around 13 million barrels of “crude oil” is actually produced (much of it LTO), and the balance is 6 million barrels of NGL’s much of which is ethane and propane which cannot be processed into gasoline. LTO does not make very good gasoline; it is better as petchem feedstock. Much of it is paraffinic and has a low octane number. C5 and C6 paraffins can be isomerised to mid 80’s RON but C7-C10 paraffins do not make very good feed for reformers. Reformate can be 96-102 RON depending on the feed and severity. All in all it makes sense for the US to export the LTO and import more suitable crude for gasoline production, because upgrading large volumes of LTO would be prohibitively expensive.
What you see in many sources of oil refining data is a simple distillation column depicting gasoline being produced from the top of the CDU. In reality it is anything but the case, as these day with the abolition of lead alkyls for octane boosting has required a lot of additional upgrading of streams to blend into gasoline. Gasoline production is more energy intensive that jet or diesel production.
I think that will do for now. This is an immensely opaque subject and there is not really good simple to follow book that I can recommend. The Colorado School of Mines provides some on-line training modules but even these leave a lot to be desired.
Thank you.
One aspect I’m always keenly aware of, is how much more complex every little detail of our modern world is, compared to the hand wave of “we’ll just do this…….” as is portrayed about the future by so many proponents who lack knowledge in most areas they are discussing.
The hand wave, ….”we’ll just change the output of the refineries”, hopefully just died a natural death, to anyone that can comprehend what you wrote…
Refineries can be reconfigured as needed. Only certain types of refineries can process LTO, for many refineries in the US LTO cannot be utilized efficiently.
tight oil has been produced in quantilty only for about 10 to 15 years, when it is taken off the market, other types of crude will be used to produce the products needed in existing or future refineries.
Carnot, a question, is it possible to build new refineries? Can they be configured in such a way to produce the needed products with the crude grades that are likely to be available?
Dennis, it’s your usual hand wave about a refinery can be reconfigured, without knowledge of the subject.
In a world of falling oil availability, coming soon, which will be totally different to the past of a world of increasing oil availability, who’s going to invest massive sums of money to refining something that might have only a short term future?
As complexity starts to unravel due to falling energy availability once oil production starts to decline rapidly, the costs to ‘reconfigure’ anything massive will skyrocket. The complex materials will not be available as easily as they were, the specialist parts will become harder and harder to obtain as complexity unwinds. It’s feedback loops upon feedback loops as we have less energy.
All your economic thinking of more of this and that, as hand waves, wont apply in a system of less energy. Economics does not include the natural world or complexity in it’s theories.
We have only obtained the complexity we have, because of larger population (market) using larger quantities of energy, which allows for more specialization of everything from occupations to tiny computer chips and parts.
Currently the world is spending more on gathering energy every year, so even though more is used every year a greater proportion is going towards providing the energy, which mean less energy for everything else.
The less energy for everything else can only accelerate in the future. The current ‘plans’ I read from politicians is about relocalization away from the globalization they have been promoting in the past. We can only have relocalization with an unraveling of complexity in the longer term.
You think in terms of ‘subsidies’ being just dollars made up by govt to spend on making something happen, but in reality it is a re-allocation of resources (materials and energy) away from ‘everything else’ to whatever is being subsidised.
In a world of constant growth in materials and energy, we have been able to get away with subsidies for everything as we have had ‘growth’. In a world of less energy the past rules don’t apply. Any subsidy for anything means a whole lot less materials and energy for everything else in the civilization.
In a world where the declining ore grades means more energy needed to just maintain existing production, means a double whammy of less energy, an acceleration to the downside of availability of energy and materials. Everything subsidised, takes even more from the rest of the system that’s already in decline.
Your refinery will not just be ‘reconfigured’, in a declining world, way too expensive in energy and materials for ‘refining’ a product that only has a short term future.
Dennis you keep referring to what’s happening in a growth environment, where there is growth in fossil fuel use overall, growth in the world’s economy overall, growth in CO2 output, growth in species extinctions, and growth in overall pollution.
I agree it’s a non issue of refinery reconfiguration and new built refineries during the growth of everything phase.
It’s when everything starts to shrink instead of grow that the problems of reconfiguring or building ‘new’ really kicks in. Yet we will be stopping the growth and damage either by choice (very unlikely), or by limits to mining of fossil fuels to build everything. We are obviously heading to the latter, because so many people are in denial about any problems with the growth of the human enterprise.
Hideaway,
I agree growth is a problem, my expectation is that human population will peak around 2055 and then gradually decline, as decline in population approaches 1.5% per year economic growth will approach zero. Energy intensity will will also decline as less fossil fuel is used and less mining will be needed as more recycling occurs.
Hideaway,
Also keep in mind that as fewer refineries are needed the choice of which refineries to shut down will depend on the assay of the crude available and the expected future demand for products. The refinery capacity that remains operating will be chosen to optimize for the products needed.
Businesses in the World are continually expanding and/or contracting to meet existing demand which never is static, business try to optimize to maximize profits, this is likely to remain the case in the future. You can call it hand waving if you like, but it is the way the world functions.
Dennis …. “You can call it hand waving if you like, but it is the way the world functions.”
It’s the way the world has functioned for over 200 years while the economy and energy use has grown.
Once we are in decline of energy use, investment dollars for everything will dry up as it’s a different world to “growth”. This will happen because sales of everything will decline as there is less energy to create everything, so prices for ALL consumers on average go up, sales of all companies go down on average, meaning less incentive for ‘growth’ of anything, that obviously can’t happen because of overall shrinkage in the world economy.
It is taking a growing quantity of energy to mine the same quantity of ores of everything now. Ore grade decline is happening much faster than ‘efficiency’ gains, which are also having diminishing returns as we’ve used all the ‘easy’ efficiency gains.
Your faith in everything working normally in a declining energy environment is not born out from the historic record. It’s energy constraints, metal constraints that have decomplexified past civilizations leading them to collapse. There is no evidence that ours will be different.
In fact there is plenty of evidence our collapse will be quicker…
Hideaway,
I expect that as circumstances change, the way the society is organized will change. Perhaps things will play out as you predict, I don’t think we can know in advance what will happen in the future.
Note that you seem to expect fossil fuel energy use per person to increase due to deeper mines and lack of energy resources and your claim that non-fossil fuel energy can only be produced by using more fossil fuel energy. The data suggests that primary fossil fuel energy consumption in GJ per capita being relatively flat from 2007 to 2023. World population is likely to peak in a few decades, more non-fossil fuel energy capacity will be developed and fossil fuel consumption is likely to decrease. Japan for example has seen its primary energy use per capita decrease by about 1.3% per year on average from 2005 to 2023.
Dennis, I’m not sure I understand what you are saying here…..
“Note that you seem to expect fossil fuel energy use per person to increase due to deeper mines and lack of energy resources”…
All ore grades of what we, as in humans, use are declining, and the mines are getting deeper on average plus the hardness index is getting higher. This is a proven fact not anyone’s theory.
When we get to a system of less energy available across the world for humanity to use, we will be unable to mine the same quantity of metals and minerals as we did previously.
It means it takes an increasing amount of energy on average to gain the same quantity of minerals and metals. It is a trend that will not reverse, ever.
Dennis … “your claim that non-fossil fuel energy can only be produced by using more fossil fuel energy”..
That’s how we are building it all, building more aluminium smelters based on coal fired power in Indonesia. Then also using 400kg of coking coal per tonne of aluminium to drive off the oxygen, whether the smelter runs on coal in Indonesia or geothermal in Iceland.
The Silicon wafers in solar panels use coking coal to reach a high enough temperature, then the panels themselves are made of 10% plastics and polymers. All the wires are coated with plastics to insulate them.
New glass factories for making the flat glass in solar panels, are not built to use just electricity at every stage, they use natural gas in the furnace in a continuous process.
No-one anywhere is trying to do any of this any differently. If you want twice as much solar as now exists, then a lot more fossil fuels go into making it.
You keep stating we can do this or that with a hand wave of no details, but we are not doing any of those things you keep suggesting. The cheap way of building all renewables is using fossil fuels, so that is how it’s done.
Once we are in energy decline we wont have the energy nor materials, nor spare investment capital to reconfigure everything, nor to invest in new factories making anything.
Complexity unwinds as energy availability declines. The 6 continent supply chain collapses over time as there is not the energy to transport everything everywhere.
The energy reduction means that we lose ‘some’, (to start with) of the ability to transport as much as the prior year. Feedback loops of important raw materials or finished goods getting from A to B, mean trouble in manufacturing ‘other’ things that are vitally important to other parts of the system, so more aspects of our complexity unwind. The decline in energy continues, with the feedback loops hampering the building of all sorts of different things, making parts and machinery harder to obtain for new and existing projects, which have their own feedback loops re-enforcing the energy (and everything else) decline in availability.
It’s a downward spiral that has affected every civilization prior to ours, with them all collapsing being the common theme.
To think that we will built this that and all sorts of other things as energy decline accelerates, is sheer fantasy land, as the energy and materials to do all this is simply unavailable during the time of less…
We don’t have a few decades to wait for population to peak and gently start declining, within a decade most likely we will be well past peak oil and on the accelerating decline.
Even if we did have decades of oil in particular, we’ll make the planet unlivable for most life if we keep increasing fossil fuel use…
Hideaway,
I guess you have difficulty seeing how one argument you make, increasing energy use per unit of material mined, which I agree has been occurring, has not shown up in increased fossil fuel use per capita. Yes fossil fuel energy is used for mining and many other things as well, the total share of energy use for mining may be small enough that it is not that important a consideration as per capita fossil fuel energy use has been relatively flat. Also note that as the World population approaches peak and as the World becomes wealthier over time per capita energy use may decrease (as it has been doing in Japan since 2005).
Another argument you make is that ramping up wind and solar power rapidly will increase fossil fuel use rather than decrease it, wind and solar power generation per capita has been increasing rapidly for the past decade, but we do not see any increase in fossil fuel use per capita.
So your hand wavy arguments about what is likely to occur in the future does not match up with the energy consumption data.
Hideaway,
You note “No-one anywhere is trying to do any of this any differently.”
Earlier this year, Vaclav Smil released an excellent report on the challenges of an energy transition away from fossil fuels. That report included the following note:
“As for green steel, the first steel plant smelting iron ore with hydrogen produced by
renewably generated electricity is now under construction in northern Sweden”
Smil is certainly no blind cheerleader for success in this type of energy transition, but instead has to be among the world’s foremost experts on the topic. Just sayin’, be careful with statements about absolutes….
The article is behind a paywall, based on the first couple of sentences the article focuses on US refineries. I expect refineries may be built in Asia and the Middle east. In Europe and North America there may be excess capacity (in Italy only about 63% of refinery capacity is utilized for example.) We may see OECD refineries being shut down that are no longer profitable while there will be expansion of non-OECD refineries. Overall World refinery capacity is likely to gradually be reduced over the next 25 years as supply of crude oil falls.
Thank you Carnot.
Can’t say I truly understand all of that as I have very nearly zero chemical engineering knowledge.
However, this did help me understand that there is a very wide range of potential products based on decisions made at the front end of refinery design as well as input stream. So, a new refinery could theoretically be configured to produce a greater fraction of diesel and lower fraction of gasoline with significant dependencies on the input stream.
Thanks for the details. Reaffirms my difficulty at prior attempts to find simple answers on this….its not a simple set of factors. I think the notion that there is maybe 10% wiggle room of refinery configuration and blend output (diesel percentage yield, for example) is somewhere in the ballpark.
And refinery reconfiguration or construction is very expensive— requires a long term outlook of supply of a particular crude blend to justify to expense/loan.
The flexibility is not unlimited for sure. Some crude types are naturally better at producing diesel than others, I have heard. There is a case for not using a lot of money to tweak output streams at the refinery and instead use heavy-duty compressed natural gas (CNG) or designing more petrol engines for less than 450 hp usage. Depends on the investment money required for the refinery upgrade I suppose. Hydrocracking of heavy oils will be neccessary in any scenario; produces a lot of gasoline anyway and other residues. Urals being good for diesel can be a point, but there are light oil crudes less than 40-45 api that can also naturally produce significant amounts of diesel. As you say, there is a buffer in place for diesel in Europe when it comes to demand. That is because there are currently so many efficient older diesel personal cars driving around, when there are obvious alternatives (electric/gasoline propulsion) to replace them.
KD former founder of MCSNet one of the first internet companies.
Gives some helpful advice.
Every computer has a MAC address. (type CMD for dos prompt, then C:\Users>getmac).
It is an address that uniquely identifies your machine GLOBALLY (with some exceptions).
These addresses stay within your local WIFI and are not surfaced to the outside
“Unfortunately in the IPv6 world this is no longer true. SLACC, which is what most IPv6 networks use for local devices, results in a globally-unique address that is specifically tied to your hardware and is visible anywhere on the Internet you connect to!”
Switch to random MAC address settings on your WIFI (instructuions provided and on the internet GOOGLE).
Recently I’ve become aware that there is a fundamental flaw in the philosophy that has driven American culture. That is the assertion that the individual has predominant value over the group.
The ideas that there is a fundamental right to own weapons of such lethality as an AR-15, or that we can have a democracy when one percent of the population owns 80% of the wealth or that medical care is apportioned by one’s ability to pay simply make no sense for a species that evolved as member of a group and is only dominant in the world because of an ability to communicate and work towards a common goal.
Does that thought make me a communist?
Here’s the paradox we’re in and there is no earthly way out.
The global economy has to grow at 2-3% to prevent insolvency. Without that growth debts can’t be repaid with interest and all investment fails.
But the real economy is now restrained by an energy system that can no longer grow and is actually in decline.
So all the money being generated is basically Monopoly money. Worthless pieces of nothing in some database somewhere.
There are not even two choices there is only one which is print your currency into oblivion but there are two options to distribute it.
The first option is to bailout the banks. Save their debt defaults to make it appear that the corpse is still alive. But the effect is the average household is becoming materially poorer because of inflation and high asset prices. The pitchforks eventually come out which we’re seeing all ready in the UK and in the US.
The second option is to put the debt generated money into the the average man’s hands. Basic universal income or whatever. The problem is if that is done there will be hyperinflation because of supply side shortages.
There is of course the psychotic option of price controls but anyone who’s ever been in business will tell you that the moment that happens the real working producers meaning the actual people who produce real things like food will walk away.
Bottom line as Hideaway and Carnot have clearly outlined once energy starts its rapid decline which is very soon things will rapidly fall apart. A great tribulation indeed.
JT, agree with you about price controls. Venezuela is a good example of them not working.
As an aside, Kamala Harris being against price fixing is actually the inverse , fighting price “control” of monopolistic corporate rental landlords for example, see “Justice Department alleges RealPage enabled price-fixing on rents”. Also DoJ vs Agri Stats for monopolistic food companies.
Maybe price controls by government is bad but price controls by corporations is good? /sarc
As population growth slows to zero, global economic growth will slow to 1.5% or so, when human population declines at 1.5% per year economic growth will be about zero.
JT says: The global economy has to grow at 2-3% to prevent insolvency. Without that growth debts can’t be repaid with interest and all investment fails.
Really? That’s a non-sequitur. Sure, it’s easier to repay interest/capital on debts if your income is growing, but also totally possible even if it’s static.
Bottom line as Hideaway and Carnot have clearly outlined once energy starts its rapid decline which is very soon things will rapidly fall apart.
All conjecture. Energy’s decline may never happen. And if oil declines say 3% a year, could we handle that? I think so.
Oil isn’t a good source of energy anyway, which is why it is rarely used to generate electricity. It’s much too expensive. Oil is primarily used to store energy in moving vehicles. It competes with batteries.
Confusing oil and energy is typical for people who have spent their lives in the oil industry which they often refer to as the energy industry.
John Norris ….” Energy’s decline may never happen”
Fantastic, an advocate for never ending growth, which means boiling the oceans in 400 years at current rate of energy growth (averaged over the last 2 centuries).
Guess what, energy degrowth, decline, reduction however you want to call it, is going to happen. When we can no longer obtain oil, gas and coal, we wont be able to make any renewables nor nuclear, because civilization will have unraveled due to the declining complexity that comes with reduced energy use.
Every advocate for continued energy growth is an advocate for more damage to the environment, more pollution, more species extinction, and if you want more renewables/nuclear, then you are also asking for the burning of more fossil fuels to build it, the way it’s actually built!!
While I understand where you come from; I would much rather have a world filled with renewables than face a rapid decline/collaps towards the charcoal based society that was you advocated for a few years ago (if I remember correctly). The electrical based generation and the grid supporting it, is surprisingly stable as long as supply meets demand at all times. Hence the need for backup electricity generation. To disregard the development of wind and solar power overall leads to the suspicion of vested interests corrupting the thought process. The point of scale in high tech manufacturing you are bring up is ofcourse not insignifcant. From having 5+ factories of scale globally in an industry as an example, it can probably go down gradually over several decades to scramble around a few factories. Just to preserve the advantages of scale.
Fantastic, an advocate for never ending growth, which means boiling the oceans in 400 years at current rate of energy growth (averaged over the last 2 centuries).
Speaking of thermodynamics, that remark is based on the idea that the Earth is a closed system and energy comes exclusively from (presumably chemical or nuclear) processes within the system.
The vast majority of the energy in the ecosphere comes from the sun and is balanced by equally enormous radiation into the sky. It’s an open system.
When people talk about energy they usually mean free energy, that is, the energy available in a system to do mechanical work. There is no reason whatsoever to think that making use of more of the huge flux of energy to do mechanical work would heat up the system as a whole.
Any change in the amount of energy in the system is just the energy flowing in minus the energy flowing out, regardless of whether the energy in used to do mechanical work within the system.
It’s trivially true that energy consumption won’t increase forever. It’s hard to imagine using much more primary energy than we already use anyway. What for? Likely candidates include desalination, computation and space flight. But each of those is questionable and it’s hard to come up with any other really big new sources of demand.
The flux of energy in and out of the ecosystem is stupendously large on a human scale. We are buffered from space by the atmosphere, so it’s easy to forget that the sky is insanely cold — only about 3K. The ecosystem loses truly vast amounts of energy day and night to this almost endless void. Every square inch of the planet radiates energy into space 24/7.
The sun (as seen from Earth) is only about one ten thousandth of the area of the sky, but blasts out enough energy to heat the system and balance this loss. The ecosystem can retain heat for short periods. Ultimately its temperature depends on how much heat comes in and goes out, not on what is done with the energy while it is inside the system.
The reason we are seeing global warming now is not that we use too much energy. The reason is that we emit carbon dioxide and other chemicals that slow the loss of heat.
David Higham
Right, assuming the ecosphere is a closed system, and all energy used by humans is produced within the ecosystem, and energy consumption increases at 2.3% per year for 1400 years, the Earth will be hot as the sun. But since none of those assumptions make any sense, the scenario can be ignored.
Alimbiquated,
Have a look at the graph in the “Thermodynamic Limits ” section, and read the caption under it. If the source of energy used by us is not from the solar flow, the temperature at the Earth’s surface will increase. Fossil fuels and nuclear are not from the solar flow.
A great tribulation indeed.
A dominant theme in MAGA/evangelical thinking (and some corners of this blog). But maybe you’ll escape it?
Are you familiar with the Left Behind novels? They sold 80 million copies, outlining the coming apocalypse preceded by Christians being raptured away and avoiding it. Scary that maybe a third of Americans believe it?
Every debt that is added is a call on future energy use regardless of what source of energy is used.
Only way debts can be repaid plus interest is a continuous expansion of the money supply. Keep in mind that as the principal of debts are paid down money is destroyed. Governments can’t pay down debts without destroying the money supply.
Every month as people make mortgage payments the principal portion of the mortgage is destroyed. In a low interest rate environment more money is destroyed each month than in a high interest rate environment.
Which means in a low rate environment to offset the destruction of money a lot more loans need to be made to have an expanding money supply.
In a recession just because interest rates drop to zero doesn’t mean commercial banks will be making more loans to increase the money supply. Banks pullback on lending during a recession.
Energy in contraction means less loans will be made. Which means a contraction of the money supply.
It’s not enough to have options on what sources of energy is used to run the economy. You have to have a growing energy supply regardless of the makeup of that energy supply.
We continue to use less and less energy per unit of real GDP over time. Energy use becomes more efficient as fossil fuel is eliminated from the mix as only about 40% of fossil fuel energy performs useful work on average in today’s economy.
Clearly some economic processes have gradually improved in energy efficiency, such as energy required/mile traveled. This improvement in efficiency has been swamped by total miles traveled however.
I find GDP to be a pretty much ridiculous tool to use for the purpose of this topic since it includes such a high portion of monetary activity that has absolutely nothing to do with human survival in the physical world….things like all advertising political and otherwise, gambling/sports betting, high frequency computerizing trading, fees on financial transactions, licensing fees, video gaming, payments for intellectual property, the purchase and sale of pre-existing real estate, for just some examples. All of these are examples of paper (digital now) money simply sloshing around. Some of these activities may be very important to function of civil societies, however
Money sloshing around is not base production of physically sustaining services and products. Its a distraction to the issue of physical prosperity/survival, a mirage.
In fact, from an energy perspective it is all simply waste…like friction, with all of the unintended heat waste simply going un-utilized.
At some point we will reach a point where less energy production will certainly mean less real world sustaining economic output, regardless of GDP indicators. We might be close on that, certainly on a per capita basis.
” includes such a high portion of monetary activity that has absolutely nothing to do with human survival”
In a free market, it’s humans who decide what they spend their money on. Not spending the money on human survival is a sign of the success of the current economy. GDP is what people spend their money on which they feel is most important to them. If I produced road bikes and said you should only spend your money on a road bikes, you would most likely tell me to F off. I can’t think of a better way to value economic success, than GDP on what people value by what they spend their money on. A warehouse of unsued road bikes or what you think is important is not a viable economy or free market.
I would say “advertising and fees” are part of the cost of a free market and advanced economy.
Hickory,
Find me a better measure and I would use it, yes GDP is imperfect, but I don’t think you fully understand what it is, based on your comment.
Existing home sales are not a part of GDP, only new construction. The Human development index is one possible substitute for GDP, but the data is rather limited.
Hickory,
I looked at Oil using the Human Development Index (which is more akin to the natural log of real GDP per capita) see
I agree real GDP is an imperfect measure, HDI may be better, but note that if we use the natural log of real GDP the results are not significantly different (for 1990 divided by 2022 for Oil consumption per capita divided by the natural log of real GDP per capita the ratio is 1.35 and for similar measure using HDI in place of natural log of real GDP per capita the 1990 to 2022 ratio is 1.31). HDI latest data is 2022 and starts in 1990.
Dennis,
This is due to efficiency as Hickory mentioned, and the decline in birthrates in large oil consuming countries. That’s my hypothesis.
But overall ff consumption is still increasing. As the world population is increasing albeit at a slower pace.
I expect population growth rates will continue to decrease and eventually will become negative (25 to 30 years from now), the same will be true for the use of fossil fuel in my view. Energy use will continue to become more efficient and eventually per capita rates of energy use may become static as we reach the limit of efficiency gains, the absolute level of energy use may decline as population declines. Future rates for all of these are unknown.
Dennis,
I expect the population growth rate will decline too maybe even at a faster rate as it is now. As we reach efficiency peaks and population peaks, i think the economic system will completely breakdown because pensions and 401ks will no longer increase in value as demand for credit ceases. Both on the supply and demand side.
Iron Mike,
Japan would be a possible case study and perhaps Western Europe as well. As population growth approaches zero, it probably makes sense to look at the data on a per capita basis.
HHH,
Totally agree with this. The ever expansion of credit is a must otherwise it all falls apart like a house of cards.
Even in a command economy like in China where they order banks to lend is proving not to work. Their banks are coming up short on loan quotas into the economy.
Likely due to a lack of energy preventing growth in demand for loans.
Their banks can’t meet their quotas. Market rates like their 10 year bond at historically low levels. China’s 10 year yields is below Germany’s 10 year yield. Think about that and what it implies.
Yea looks like investors are anticipating a continuing deflationary spiral in China. I think Xi Ping doesn’t want Chinas economy to rely solely on ever expanding property and infrastructure building. Which is interesting.
I don’t see it as really being XI’s choice. The energy to continue the investment based infrastructure and housing boom doesn’t exist anymore.
They could continue with it but not without cannibalizing some other part of their economy. Like producing less exports so they can have more housing. They don’t need anymore housing. But the problem is the investment based housing and infrastructure keeps lots of people employed.
It keeps lots of people employed not just in China but in all the countries that China has to import materials from.
Jobs and unemployment and how governments deal with them will be interesting. If you give UBI to everyone it will put upward demand on goods and services. But there will less goods and services so you’ll get sky high inflation.
If you don’t give UBI or forever unemployment benefits you’ll have sky high crime and riots.
If wind is cheaper than fossil fuel than why are the rates 4 times higher per kWh and who’s pocketing the difference?
Quite amazing. Just the same in the UK. Sky high electricty costs and wind is supposed to be cheaper. Now our useless new government want to build even more costly wind farms, this time on floating platforms, that make your cost look cheap.
The latest riots in the UK are going to be the new normal.
I’ve always said what can’t be done won’t be done. But unfortunately I’ll have to change that to shouldn’t be done because they’re doing it anyway even though it’s destroying the economy and society.
All of these discussions revolve around the underlying question raised by John up above-
” if oil declines say 3% a year, could we handle that? I think so.”
It depends on what you mean by ‘handle’. If that degree of decline happened for a 10 year period, say 2030 to 2040, I think you’d see major economic collapse, poverty and migrations in certain regions. Too many people and governments are on a hairline survival budget already, even without such a big escalation in the costs of everything. And there would be major upheavals even in countries that didn’t enter a deep depression.
If the decline in oil supply was more gradual, say in the 1-2% range, the severity of the impact becomes more of a tricky story to unfold.
I think it would very very wise for all people , and countries, to act and plan as if oil supply will decline steadily and indefinitely (starting in 1990). For me that includes going full speed ahead on development of non-fossil energy production sources and electrifying as many combustion reliant processes as feasible. And learning to simply use less energy in all aspects of living.
Generally, most people and countries seem to be sleepwalking into this period of oil decline.
I think the supply side of oil (not just oil, but condensates and natural gas in all it’s forms), delays this question being imminent for a bit of time. The “plateau phase”.
I could be going a bit out on a tangent here and present possible scenarios. The plans to adjust for this is probably present on government level a lot of places I would guess. I am a bit concerned about too many cushions being built in the western world now. But it is very difficult to backpedal the energy surplus and say it is not for you. Especially if not working overdrive to work on other solutions first.
Hoping for some insights from some of you with technical expertise in the refining process.
EV tech seems to have more theoretical potential to offset light duty fleet demands in the next 10-50 years than it currently does for the D8s or similar heavy equipment on a job site today. Shipping and air travel also seem to lack a clearly viable alternative at the moment.
Two questions:
1. What kind of flexibility due current refineries have to reduce the gasoline fraction of product and substitute with diesel?
2. What kind of flexibility would a brand new refinery have to change the mix of refined products relative to the current global average or some other benchmark?
This topic is probably in the wrong thread and might better be in the petroleum thread
The flexibility of any refinery is determined by two factors:
1. the configuration of the refinery conversion and upgrading processes
2. The type of crude oil that the refinery was designed around.
The crude oil is separated into three core streams. which can be further separated. These are:
1. light distillate- LPG and full range naphtha
2. middle distillate – jet kerosine and diesel/ gas oil
3. heavy distillate aka atmospheric residue – vacuum gas oil and vacuum residue
The production of gasoline is complicated as there are numerous streams but typically:
1. reformate produced from heavy naphtha on a catalytic reformer
2. FCC gasoline produced from vacuum gs oil on a fluid catalytic cracker
3. isomerate produced form light naphtha on an isomeriser
4. alkylate produced form FCC LPG on an alkylation unit.
5. ethanol or other oxygenate if mandated/ required.
Numerous other streams are used in smaller quantities
The middle distillate stream is composed mainly of:
1. straight run jet and diesel form the crude distillation unit
2. hydrocracked jet and diesel from a Hydrocracker
3. FCC light cylce oil – low grade diesel from a FCC
There is NO simple process for converting light distillate to middle distillate.
Light distillate can be cracked in a steam cracker to produce olefines (ethylene. propylen3 , C4’s and pygas).
The light olefines can be oligomerised into heavier molecules but the process is expensive. Some lubricants
are produced by this method.
The other option is to gasify the light distillate into syngas and then use a Fischer Tropsch process to produce
middle distillate. Again this would be exceedingly expensive.
In the west there is little appetite to invest in refineries, as we are supposed to be moving away from fossil fuels.
Recent in investments have been in HVO to produce Bio derived jet and diesel. These plants are struggling as the
feed cost is crippling. Vegetable oils are limited in supply and waste vegetable oils volumes are miniscule.
To date there is little evidence to prove that the current BEV fleet is having any meaningful impact on gasoline
demand, both regionally and globally, except China. BEV uptake is not matching forecasts, and in Europe the switch from diesel to gasoline light vehicles is boosting demand for gasoline
This is a quick and dirty reply and leaves out a lot of detail.
Thanks Carnot,
I posted my query in this thread since the guidelines ask for “comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please.” Just trying to honor the letter of this rule.
I’ll ask for a bit more insight if you could offer it. Simple sites like the link below outline some assessment of the average mix of products coming out of a barrel of oil. This link notes 42.7% gasoline and 27.4% diesel. For a brand new refinery starting from scratch, how much flexibility is there in these numbers? Is this something that we can place boundaries on given some of the input variables you cite? In other words, is the gasoline fraction +/-1%, +/-10%, etc?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/whats-made-barrel-of-oil/
I have wondered and asked the same question.
Its very hard to find concrete answers on this.
Overall, it seems like there is roughly 10% flexibility in the blend output but it comes at considerable cost.
There seems to be variability also based on what is the specific type (based on location) of crude oil input as well.
If indeed there was a situation where it looked like a long term relative shortage of diesel vs gasoline was developing in a country, some may find it worth switching certain equipment ot gasoline powered motors, or nat gas….
as of 2020- “more than 17,000 refuse and recycling trucks in the United States run on natural gas and about 60% of new collection trucks on order will be powered by the same”
OECD Gasoline consumption in kb/d, data from Energy Institute.
World Gasoline consumption continues to rise
Thanks, Dennis, useful charts.
Just discovered you can use ChatGPT to generate charts. But as it says, “ChatGPT can make mistakes”…
I used “global diesel vs gasoline consumption per capita 2004 – 2023 chart ” for a per capita version. Notice ChatGPT gets the barrels per day number wrong by a factor of 1,000! Even so, I’m impressed…
[click on image for a larger version]
The car buying public has indeed been slow to warm up to the idea of spending an extra ten thousand dollars or more up front on an electric car. I’m an electric vehicle believer myself, but I wouldn’t buy one myself, even if I were in the market, because I want better value for my money.
The opportunity cost of that ten grand up front outweighs the potential savings on fuel and maintenance, and it remains to be seen whether it’s actually cheaper to own an electric car. You may be stuck with outrageous repair bills, or unobtainable parts, and nobody really knows what an older electric car is going to be worth a few years down the road.
If I were in the market for a new car myself, I would be waiting and watching and continue to drive an existing car, expecting to save serious money by postponing buying one. I believe that a typical new car customer won’t buy an electric car until he or she has a friend or neighbor or coworker who owns one. A thousand bucks for a new phone is one thing, thirty or forty thousand and up for a new car that might be a mistake is another thing altogether.
And so far as older cheap electric cars are concerned……. as a practical matter there isn’t any such animal. There isn’t a single one at a car dealership in the two or three small cities near my home.
I’m always willing to admit I might be wrong……. but my money says that over the next few years buyers will get comfortable with electrics, prices will be competitive or close to competitive, and they’ll start selling very well indeed.
Given the current state of world politics, an oil supply shock is a real possibility at any time, and probably more likely than not within the next five to ten years, and depletion never sleeps.
If and when people have to line up to buy gasoline, they’ll be lined up to buy electric cars.
What I’m saying is that electric vehicles are here and ready but they’re a few years early in the minds of the large majority of potential buyers.
But management at all the major manufacturers have jumped in full speed ahead for fear of being behind the curve later on…… and so they’ve glutted the market for the time being.
The US EV cost scenario applies to us and a handful of other countries, such as Canada, who happen to have domestic oil in sufficient quantity at the current time to avoid paying to import petrol….we have relatively cheap fuel for now.
Most other countries are oil importers and the pricing scenario adds up differently for them.
China for example.
Also, in some states like where I live in WA state the price of electricity miles is cheap compared to petrol miles.
Here is a very good state comparison for gas vs electric miles, with reasonable assumptions made about averages.
https://www.saveonenergy.com/ev/compare-driving-cost/
It confirms that I live in a state with the highest ev cost advantage/mile, which explains a higher level of ev uptake here-commonplace.
OFM,
Just compared prices for used 2018 Model 3 vs used 2018 Toyota Camry, the difference in price was about $4000 (Tesla was higher), but Tesla is eligible for a $4000 tax credit (car must be under 25k and income of buyer under 150k for eligibility). I have owned both the Model 3 (2018) and most recently a 2013 Toyota Camry, the Model 3 has been very reliable (about 80 on car).
So not really a 10k difference in cost. For the new vehicle also not a 10k difference after 7500 Fed rebate and some states also offer rebates on top of this (in Maine the total is $8500 in rebates fed and state). The Tesla long range RWD M3 (363 miles of range) is currently 44.5k and after rebate would be 36k, the Toyota Camry XLE Hybrid is about 34.5k, and is not nearly as nice a car as the Model 3, only a 1500 dollar premium for the Tesla. You are correct that many will opt for the Toyota, but I have been buying Toyotas since 1984 as they are very reliable, I have not been disappointed with the reliability of the Tesla and it is much more fun to drive than the Camry or a Prius (most of my Toyotas purchased since 1997 have been either the Camry V6 and Hybrid or Prius).
Eventually the cost of petrol is going to increase and as it does EV cost savings will be significant.
At $3.50 per gallon a car that gets 40 MPG (Camry Hybrid) has a cost of 8.75 cents per mile. My Model 3 has averaged just under 250 Wh per mile over 80k miles which is 4 miles per kWh, where I live at low overnight rates (on TOU service) I pay 16 cents per kWhr so cost per mile is about 4 cents. Over 80k miles that is 4.75 times 80000 divided by 100 or $3800 savings on fuel cost, no oil changes (say $400 savings) so a total of $4200 in savings, deduct the 1500 premium paid for a new Tesla today and the net is $2700 saved over 6 years of ownership vs a Toyota Camry Hybrid driving a much nicer car.
For other nations not putting tariffs on Chinese EVs, the cost of an EV is 15 to 20k, for those nations the Chinese EVs will take over the new light duty vehicle market very quickly.
From end of previous thread, posted by Hickory….
“This is one way that Singapore is planning to navigate the next 30-50 years-
“Australia has approved an ambitious project to export solar power to Singapore via a subsea cable spanning over 4,300 kilometers…The project has an estimated price tag of some $13.5 billion, Reuters reported, and the final investment decision on it is slated for 2027, with electricity set to start flowing along the cable in 2030….The capacity of the project will be a maximum of 6 GW, part of which will be delivered to the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, Darwin, with the rest going to Singapore.”
This is a second attempt at initiating the project, now with government involvement.
Time will tell how it works out.”
Time has already worked this one out….
It did indeed receive approval from the Govt yesterday…
It doesn’t have any money to actually build it. Sun cable was in the hands of administrators at the beginning of last year after running out of cash. It received some more to carry out it’s planning, not the actual building that will take many billions. The actual cost has varied from $12B to $30B depending on who is quoting the costs.
None of the ‘quotes’ are firm actual quotes from companies prepared to build any part of it for the fixed prices.
Nor are there any contracts for the power from Singapore…
The environmental approval received yesterday, was approval to rip up another 12,400 hectares of natural environment to build this plant, which is going to be good for the environment, that’s the rest of the environment, not where it’s being built, nor where all the minerals are extracted from to supply all the materials.
Luckily for the environment, it will never be built, it’s way too expensive for the power provided, unless governments come in and waste billions of dollars subsidising the whole thing…
The “plan” keeps changing, this from renew magazine…
“After nearly a year of studies, Quinbrook now has a better idea of what that might look like – 12 GW of wind, with the solar component reduced from 20 GW to 12 GW, and the storage component also reduced to 32 GWh – thanks in part to the role that wind will play in providing power after the sun goes down.”
https://reneweconomy.com.au/new-sun-cable-takes-shape-with-12gw-of-wind-added-to-worlds-biggest-renewable-project/
Notice there is never any discussion of the economic reality of this ‘plan’, because it simply isn’t going to give a positive economic return, so the actual nitty gritty economics never get discussed.
Reality is simple, if it was providing cheaper electricity than coal and gas, then they would use the electricity locally in something like an Aluminium smelter, and save on the cost of the 4,200 mile undersea cable, and associated energy losses, plus the hugely expensive HVDC substations at each end changing the AC to DC and back again.
Yet no-one is suggesting to build and run an Aluminium smelter off this electricity. The obvious reason is it would produce Aluminium at a much greater cost than the cheap Aluminium smelters being built in Indonesia based on NEW coal fired power.
It’s expensive electricity, which would be MORE expensive if the Aluminium frames of the solar panels, and Aluminium rails they will sit on, were made by Aluminium smelters running on solar and wind instead of cheap coal!!
This sun cable will virtually run straight past the new Aluminium smelters and coal fired power plants being built in Indonesia!!
If we tried to build the solar panels out of Aluminium that came from only renewable production methods, the panels would be more expensive, so less affordable for the world!! We need to build them from cheap fossil fuels to be cheap, but eventually we wont have the fossil fuels, or perhaps not a climate worth living in, by continuing to use the last of the fossil fuels to build more and more cheap renewables…
As I said, time will tell how it works out.
Unlike you, I do not think the story on this is over. Rather its still early stage.
Things are not going to stay in the current condition for all that much longer, and the incentive for both Australia and Singapore to move on this kind of project will grow over time,
as oil depletes and the world gets hotter.
Similarly, the Moroccan project to send energy north to UK and or Germany via undersea HVDC line will likely get done.
Another fact that always seem to be neglected in these issues is the existence “indirect costs” of using coal instead of cleaner forms of energy.
Indirect cost include minor issues like the destruction of the ecosphere.
Both forms of energy cause destruction of the ecosphere in their own direct and indirect way. That is a fact.
I’d say many facts. The fact for coal is a lot bigger than the fact for geothermal, wave, wind, and the myriad forms of solar.
A lot of people these days only think of solar as producing electricity. There are a lot of ways to use solar for heating.
None of these methods will support the current or greater human population of the planet at the current per capita use of energy.
Notice that i didn’t mention fission or fusion. However I suspect that neither will ever be worth the cost especially if the risk is included in the evaluation. That one’s a guess, not a fact.
An undersea cable weighs about 1.5 kg /meter. 4,300 km would weigh about 7 million kg, or 7000 tons.
A metric ton of coal is needed to generate 2,200 kWh of electricity. 7000 tons would generate about 15 million kWh. 1 GW is 1 millions kW, so that is 15 GWh.
The cable is rated at 2GW. So it would take 8 hours to transmit the amount of electricity its weight in coal can generate. It’s easy to forget how much coal we burn. So yeah, replacements are big, but without a comparison, throwing around big numbers is meaningless.
Alimbiquated, if you tried to run 2Gw through a cable weighing 1.5kg/m, over 4300km, you would fry it instantly.
My own battery system has 2/0 cable that weighs just under 1kg/m and only runs 200amp at 48VDC over 1.5m.
From someone actually making cable for a project…
“The submarine cables alone weigh around 76 kilograms per metre. The total weight for the submarine cable (plus/minus pole) is therefore around 25,000 tonnes per project – a logistical challenge.” “of which 165 kilometres are submarine cables”
From here….
https://www.tennet.eu/news/tennet-pushes-ahead-offshore-grid-expansion-first-cable-production-2-gw-grid-connection
OK, so it would take 400 hours, about two and a half weeks..
And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive, and the climate will be getting hotter and more volatile, and that people all around the world are going to do all kinds of things to stave off energy poverty. And the biosphere will continue to shrivel up, and all of this will bring great tension upon the people of the world…foreign and domestic.
And yes. Places with energy will sell it to places that don’t have enough- via tankers or under sea electric cables, in the form of grain or compressed nat gas, aluminum or plastic or semiconductor chips. Thats how it goes.
The amount of anecdotal evidence of climate change shows up in fascinating places. Today I had lunch in a local (and famous) brew pub, Russian River Brewing. On the table was an ad for a beer labeled “Fonio” produced by an English company (I think) using an African grain by that name. Apparently RR is collaborating with an international group of beer makers in adapting the industry in sustainable grains such as Fonio which, unlike barley, grows well in poor soils and in severe drought.
I’m not sure how important transportation, HVAC, mnufacturing or, for that matter, civilization is but beer is necessary for humanity to endure.
Remember what Ben Franklin said “Beer is proof that god loves us”. (I forget which god)
Hickory ….
“And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive,”
I mostly agree, which means everything made from them will also get very expensive. When it comes to oil though, I doubt it will get gradually scarce. I expect it to get quickly scarce as we have been dragging future use into the present for decades. We now rely upon highly complex arrangements to access newer sources of the remaining oil, with the easy to get cheap oil rapidly declining, because it’s the most profitable.
At some point we reach an accelerating decline of availability of oil in totality, which assuming market forces still operate, will send the price rocketing so that use is constrained. However this means that everything that still relies upon oil and it’s products gets far more expensive.
All the mining and moving of heavy materials we use in the modern world relies upon oil. All the renewables we are building totally rely upon oil and other fossil fuels for their mining, processing and distribution.
The cost of it all will go up as oil becomes scarcer, those buying the renewables will also have less money to spend on renewables as the cost of everything else in their lives has also gone up, food being a primary example.
Instead of the market, if we use some other mechanism for distribution of oil and oil products, who decides where the oil is needed, how does this work?
While we have an increasing quantity of fossil fuels being delivered to the market, we can greatly expand the mining, processing , distribution and use of solar, wind, Nuclear, batteries, EVs and more transmission lines across the world. It’s all easily possible as we continue to expand our footprint upon the planet, digging up more, from lower grade, deeper deposits, located in more remote locations, with our bigger better oil using machines.
The problems will all this new tech is that it ages quickly. A decade for batteries, maybe 2 for wind turbines, perhaps 3 for solar panels, but how do we build the ‘new’ when the oil is in great decline and the 6 continent supply chain for all the complex widgets that are needed to keep it going starts to break down?
We can’t build a whole lot of local solar panel factories, as this takes more energy than building a relatively few to service the whole world. Likewise for wind turbines, modern fancy battery factories. The materials we need to build fancy recycling facilities that everyone assumes we will have, require a range of different heat sources or chemicals, that come from fossil fuels that we wont have.
How do farms operate, designed upon a fossil fuels supply chain and designed to operate efficiently upon fossil fuels, then distribute food to cities? Building more smaller farms on more local labour, requires increasing quantities of energy to build it all, house the people etc.
The increased complexity using the last of the easy to get oil on building the renewable future, is a recipe for disaster, when the oil flows rapidly fall as we require the increasing level of oil and oil products to build this complexity.
Increased complexity makes our system more fragile. Imagine the places totally relying upon a long under sea HVDC cable, when some undersea volcano or earthquake breaks the cable, and there is no oil available for the repair ship to get out into the ocean to do the repairs.
Civilization relying upon metals was never a possible long term existence. Entropy and dissipation guarantee the fall of any metal based civilization. The ore grades continually get lower requiring an ever increasing energy input to replace the metals lost back to the environment. By needing to continually grow energy use, there is no level of sustainability, it’s grow or bust.
Our continual growth of our civilization is now reaching or passing planetary limits in a range of areas, from CO2 release into the atmosphere, to species extinctions, to ocean acidification, to micro plastics pollution and endocrine disruption across many species. Building more renewables and nuclear and batteries plus whatever else, is just an extension of our fossil fuel existence for a short period while we do more damage until it all collapses due to oil availability eventually declining at an accelerating rate.
I agree it will continue at an accelerating rate until it can’t, then it all falls to pieces very rapidly as different failures throughout the system have outsized effects on other parts of our highly interconnected complex system and feedback loops increase the rate of decline in oil and everything else, leaving billions of people still alive trapped in cities with the food and fuel/energy to cities rapidly declining.
You get no argument from me about more fantastic looking complex breakthroughs and building of bigger more complicated energy producing, and battery storage plants, while our use of fossil fuels continues to increase. How does any of it happen when oil is in rapid decline is the big question, of which no-one has any answers, because there are none.
What Is Scarcity Mentality?
Medically Reviewed by Smitha Bhandari, MD on February 25, 2024Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors
Effect of a Scarcity Mentality on Your Mental Health
How to Snap Out of Scarcity
Tips for Managing Scarcity Mentality
Have you ever tried to complete a task but been constantly interrupted? The distractions aren’t from the outside, like noisy kids or a demanding boss, in your own mind. It’s something you need and can’t stop thinking about. For example, you’re on a diet, and all you can think about is the food you can’t eat anymore.
A scarcity mindset is when you are so obsessed with a lack of something — usually time or money — that you can’t seem to focus on anything else, no matter how hard you try.
Effect of a Scarcity Mentality on Your Mental Health
Scarcity mentality isn’t something you do on purpose. It’s the background noise your brain makes when you can’t get what you want. But it’ll cost you.
Focusing on something you don’t have can take a toll on your mental health. You can get “tunnel vision” when all you think about is the unmet need.
Scarcity mentality also has other impacts on your brain and can even cause it to work differently.
It lowers your intelligence quotient (IQ). Having a scarcity mentality can lower your IQ by as many as 14 points. It might not seem like much, but it’s enough to move your score from average to outstanding and vice versa. If you have an average IQ, losing 13 or 14 points can make it fall into the deficient category.
It limits your brain function. Scarcity mentality affects your ability to solve problems, hold information, and reason logically. It also affects your brain’s decision-making process. A scarcity mindset limits your ability to plan, focus, and start a project or task. Your brain is too busy thinking about something you don’t have.
It makes impulse control harder. The decision-making part of your brain also controls impulses. When tunnel vision reduces your brain function, you’re more likely to give in to impulses you usually wouldn’t.
When we spend our energy obsessing over one thing, other areas of the brain start to lapse.
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-scarcity-mentality
What is scarcity for dummies?
The concept of scarcity is one of the most important concepts in economics. If we had the resources to fulfill every desire we had, everybody would have everything they wanted. But life is not like that; we have limited resources, and we must make decisions on how to use those resources.
https://teachers.stjohns.k12.fl.us/keefe-t/files/2014/11/Economics-for-Dummies.pdf
Hideaway- Agree. Scarcity could happen quickly.
Some people seem to realize that, and others don’t.
That explains why some people, and even countries, seem to take the situation much more seriously than others. China for example.
For people who do take the possibility seriously- as she says
“Do something!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LijYWkrKBrY
Hickory ….
“And so, it looks like fossil fuels will be getting gradually scarce and thus very expensive,”
I fully agree, which means everything made from them will also get very expensive. When it comes to oil though, I doubt it will get gradually scarce. I expect it to get quickly scarce as we have been dragging future use into the present for decades. We now rely upon highly complex arrangements to access newer sources of the remaining oil, with the easy to get cheap oil rapidly declining, because it’s the most profitable.
At some point we reach an accelerating decline of availability of oil in totality, which assuming market forces still operate, will send the price rocketing so that use is constrained. However this means that everything that still relies upon oil and it’s products gets far more expensive.
All the mining and moving of heavy materials we use in the modern world relies upon oil. All the renewables we are building totally rely upon oil and other fossil fuels for their mining, processing and distribution.
The cost of it all will go up as oil becomes scarcer, those buying the renewables will also have less money to spend on renewables as the cost of everything else in their lives has also gone up, food being a primary example.
Instead of the market, if we use some other mechanism for distribution of oil and oil products, who decides where the oil is needed, how does this work?
While we have an increasing quantity of fossil fuels being delivered to the market, we can greatly expand the mining, processing , distribution and use of solar, wind, Nuclear, batteries, EVs and more transmission lines across the world. It’s all easily possible as we continue to expand our footprint upon the planet, digging up more, from lower grade, deeper deposits, located in more remote locations, with our bigger better oil using machines.
The problems will all this new tech is that it ages quickly. A decade for batteries, maybe 2 for wind turbines, perhaps 3 for solar panels, but how do we build the ‘new’ when the oil is in great decline and the 6 continent supply chain for all the complex widgets that are needed to keep it going starts to break down?
We can’t build a whole lot of local solar panel factories, as this takes more energy than building a relatively few to service the whole world. Likewise for wind turbines, modern fancy battery factories. The materials we need to build fancy recycling facilities that everyone assumes we will have, require a range of different heat sources or chemicals, that come from fossil fuels that we wont have.
How do farms operate, designed upon a fossil fuels supply chain and designed to operate efficiently upon fossil fuels, then distribute food to cities? Building more smaller farms on more local labour, requires increasing quantities of energy to build it all, house the people etc.
The increased complexity using the last of the easy to get oil on building the renewable future, is a recipe for disaster, when the oil flows rapidly fall as we require the increasing level of oil and oil products to build this complexity.
Increased complexity makes our system more fragile. Imagine the places totally relying upon a long under sea HVDC cable, when some undersea volcano or earthquake breaks the cable, and there is no oil available for the repair ship to get out into the ocean to do the repairs.
Civilization relying upon metals was never a possible long term existence. Entropy and dissipation guarantee the fall of any metal based civilization. The ore grades continually get lower requiring an ever increasing energy input to replace the metals lost back to the environment. By needing to continually grow energy use, there is no level of sustainability, it’s grow or bust.
Our continual growth of our civilization is now reaching or passing planetary limits in a range of areas, from CO2 release into the atmosphere, to species extinctions, to ocean acidification, to micro plastics pollution and endocrine disruption across many species. Building more renewables and nuclear and batteries plus whatever else, is just an extension of our fossil fuel existence for a short period while we do more damage until it all collapses due to oil availability eventually declining at an accelerating rate.
I agree it will continue at an accelerating rate until it can’t, then it all falls to pieces very rapidly as different failures throughout the system have outsized effects on other parts of our highly interconnected complex system and feedback loops increase the rate of decline in oil and everything else, leaving billions of people still alive trapped in cities with the food and fuel/energy to cities rapidly declining.
You get no argument from me about more fantastic looking complex breakthroughs and building of bigger more complicated energy producing, and battery storage plants, while our use of fossil fuels continues to increase. How does any of it happen when oil is in rapid decline is the big question, of which no-one has any answers, because there are none.
The amount of oil consumed in the World (in exajoules) per trillion 2015$ of real GDP produced in the World has fallen linearly from 1985 to 2023. Data from World Bank for real GDP and from Energy Institute for Oil consumed.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
From 2018 to 2023 World real GDP grew cumulatively by 12.1% while World oil consumption grew cumulatively by 1.95%. We are doing more with less oil.
GDP is nice, but how about global grain production/unit oil consumed?
Or protein, food calories, or cotton?
Feel free to find the data and post. Note that real GDP is roughly equal to income. The share of global food expenditures as a percentage of global income has been smaller and smaller over time. In 1974 about 87.5 EJ of oil consumption for every billion tonnes of cereals produced in the World, in 2022 it was about 63 EJ per billion tonnes.
GDP is the better measure in my view.
There is huge variability on the share of income spent on food, with wealthy nations spending in the 5% to 20% range and developing nations spending 40% to 60% of income on food.
This makes food a not very good yardstick as a nation that has per capita income that is 10 times another nation is not likely to consume 10 times more food. US per capita income was about 81k in 2023 and India’s per capita income was about 2.5k, fairly sure that US citizens don’t eat 32 times more food per person than the average person in India.
GDP includes a lot of fluff, like entertainment or sports betting for example.
I was pointing towards items that are very closely linked to petrol consumption and that are critical to survival of the 8.2 B…like basic foodstuffs.
If petrol products get more expensive it will certainly show up in food prices around the world, and in food availability.
That might seem manageable to those of us who perceive that we live in a land of plenty, and could afford more payment for food indefinitely, but billions in the world don’t have that cushion, and don’t live in countries with domestic oil production.
Hideaways point that there is possible pending onset of scarcity of oil should not just be shrugged off. It could happen anytime independent of geologic factors. It won’t show up everywhere all at once. There will be ‘canaries in the coal mine’.
Or, it could happen more gradually in the best case scenario.
Hickory,
If there is demand for oil its output will not decrease abruptly, the decline is likely to be gradual.
Shock model with URR of 2950 Gb, note that this URR estimate is quite conservative, USGS estimate is 3500 to 4000 Gb.
Click on chart for larger view.
You’re interpreting that information all wrong. We’re not doing more with less oil. We’re substituting real growth with massive debt growth pretending everything is ok. GDP is worthless measure of economic activity because debt is included in it. Right now the US is creating 1trillion dollars every 100 days and like it or not it’s part of GDP.
However to your point the financial economy has become completely disconnected from the real economy. Debts will never be repaid which means you savings and retirement are toast.
Let me repeat that so Huntington gets it your wealth your stocks your retirement accounts are toast.
Money isn’t a stock it’s a flow and it can’t flow without ever increasing energy growth. It’s 101 never taught in economics because they’re too dumb to understand.
Since when did POB become Comedy Central. I must have missed the memo. Actually, the ignorance at times here is very sad.
“We’re not doing more with less oil”
Bud, you need to retire your 73′ Impala with a 454 and turbo hydramatic that gets 8 MPG.
“GDP is worthless measure of economic activity because debt is included in it”
Debt has been part of the economy for almost ever. For the last 90 years America has been incredibly successful. So much so, that you can’t even imagine negative growth(contraction) and think of it as some kind of collapse. Part of the reason America has been so successful is because of debt. There are many ways debt is a good. Debt can give a poor entrepreneur with a good idea an opportunity to be a successful business person. Debt can give a person with an income an opportunity to purchase a home and pay for it over time of use. Which produces equity over time verses renting. Bottom line debt is a financial means to match assets/resources with future labor and increase productivity. The Permian or energy industry is a good example of this. By the way, debt is repaid and initiated everyday.
“Money isn’t a stock it’s a flow”
What Is Money?
Finance & Development, September 2012, Vol. 49, No. 3
Irena Asmundson and Ceyda Oner
Without it, modern economies could not function
What Is Money?
Money may make the world go around, as the song says. And most people in the world probably have handled money, many of them on a daily basis. But despite its familiarity, probably few people could tell you exactly what money is, or how it works.
In short, money can be anything that can serve as a
• store of value, which means people can save it and use it later—smoothing their purchases over time;
• unit of account, that is, provide a common base for prices; or
• medium of exchange, something that people can use to buy and sell from one another.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about the role of money is to consider what would change if we did not have it.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2012/09/basics.htm
JT, maybe you can trade your Impala for chariot and improve your MPG, good luck finding someone to give you any money for it. Because it’s technology worthless. Sure, “We’re not doing more with less oil”, Idiot.
We’re not going back
BTW, about 25% of my portfolio is invested in the energy industry and 20% in financiaIs. You can’t think of a transaction you can do with money that doesn’t profit me. Thank you. I have had zero debt for the last 24 years. Paid off the 30 year mortgage in 17 years. Today my home is worth more than 10 times the dollar amount I paid. Life is good.
The 2025 Cadillac Optiq Is A Bold New Baby Luxury SUV With Escalade Vibes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqcLTcKCPJM&t=20s
JT,
At the World level net liabilities are equal to net assets, debt is only a problem if it is excessive. Generally lenders will only lend if they expect to be repaid and they only get it wrong a small percent of the time, if they are to remain in business.
Hickory,
Chart below used the Human Development Index (HDI) instead of real GDP for the World. Data is only available starting in 1990 for the HDI. The HDI uses a logarithmic scale, if we use a logarithmic scale for World real GDP we get a similar ratio for 1990 and 2022 as the HDI measure. World Oil consumption is in exajoules and note that HDI is a per capita measure.
There is also an inequality adjusted HDI (IHDI) but for that measure we only have data from 2010 to 2022.
“Luckily for the environment, it will never be built, it’s way too expensive for the power provided, unless governments come in and waste billions of dollars subsidising the whole thing…”
I personally believe that the odds are pretty high that the juice delivered by such a cable, assuming it IS built, will be a world class bargain, compared to buying gas or maybe coal to generate the same amount of power a decade or two down the road.
Depletion never sleeps, and history AIN’T OVER. Countries that have oil and gas enough to export some of it will be growing fewer as the years pass, and exporters will become importers. Tankers will stay in port, unless they’re escorted by warships…… maybe even years at a time.
In the meantime, here’s some real world data involving real world business people in a state dominated by right wing politicians with mostly right wing voters, both the politicians and the voters being mostly supporters of trump type politics.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/tom-steyer-on-energy-transition-u-s-may-miss-an-economic-revolution/vi-AA1otddW?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=ced8d202579442499f4fac7bb339a0b7&ei=441
Listen to all of it, it’s only a couple of minutes long.
I can’t copy and paste but from this link, Texas in spite of political animosity to renewables has tripled solar over the last three years, produces more wind juice by a country mile than any other state, etc.
And WHY?
” Because it’s cheaper, faster, and better.”
They’re making decisions to buy the best product in the market place.
I suppose none of the engineers involved in the wind and solar biz in Texas took any thermo courses as undergrads, lol.
Maybe we could collect all of the comments posted by Carnot and company and email copies to all those folks and educate them on this topic and save them all from going bankrupt.
Commercial scale battery storage project in Lincoln ME:
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/long-duration-energy-storage/form-energy-set-to-build-worlds-biggest-battery-in-maine
And then this:
https://www.kut.org/energy-environment/2024-08-21/heat-ercot-texas-electric-grid-solar-power-batteries
Rgds
Vince
Weekendpeak,
Thanks, I had not heard about this project am I am actually in Lincoln, ME on vacation, strange that. I figured you mistyped ME and meant NE, but read the article and it is indeed Lincoln ME.
I wonder why there is not more publicity/awareness of wet bulb temperature? A wet bulb of 35 C is considered the maximum temperature that a healthy young adult can survive for six hours. A wet bulb of 32 C precludes any significant physical activity while old and frail people are vulnerable at even lower temperatures. Recently there have been wet bulb temperatures in the middle east as high as 33 C.
Attached is a snapshot of North America
https://meteologix.com/ca/observations/north-america/wet-bulb-temperature.html
The ‘climate doomers’ preparing for society to fall apart
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722
Not sure with the professors assessment. So far such a catastrophe isn’t reflected on food prices, except cocoa, and olive oil. Wheat, soy, corn have had record harvest seasons world wide which is reflected on their current prices especially during the recent time of a weak U.S dollar (where you’d expect a higher price based on pure technicals)
“So far”.
Correct.
Do you think they could be right ? They seem to think the world will end due to climate change (similar to Guy Mcpherson).
I’d like to see scenarios and specific mechanisms on how they think this will occur because they think the breakdown of society will occur in the short-term (around 2030).
‘The world will end’
No, not the world.
But the world is certainly ending for many species, and the web of life is a lot less stable than just about everyone understands. Including at the microscopic soil, lake and ocean life level upon which all ecosystems are based.
Are we on the cusp of the 6th Mass Extinction Event? Maybe, or perhaps much more likely it will just turn out to be a 2nd tier global extinction event. In that case the world certainly survives, but us?- hmmmph.
Most people do not have a clue just how dependent the vast majority of humanity are on a stable climate/fossil fuel enabled agricultural system. Yes, I think that billions of people are at risk from food shortfall. They call it famine. And not just in the second half on the century. Any time.
Is that the end of the world? Yes…for them that can’t get food.
I think most people like to imagine that disruption happens to someone else, over the horizon, under some rock, and that they themselves will be able to just roll on unaffected. That is a delusion…when the chessboard gets scrambled by things like mass migration, supply chain disruption, geopolitical conflict and food shortage the ramifications often spread and magnify in unpredictable ways. Borders can become irrelevant, alliances and networks can become permanently disabled.
I wouldn’t make long term bets on stability.
But don’t trust me on that…I never have been one to see stability as a dominant condition.
Keep in mind that humanity [Homo pyromancer] still can find and burn at least another 1/3rd of the total combustible material available on earth.
It looks like we will attempt to do it all.
The most obvious mechanism for mass mortality is widespread famine. It will likely occur secondary to combined impacts of both climate change and peak oil.
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/highlights-state-climate-2023
Hay, are you OK ? I mean, your guy dropped out yesterday. Dump doesn’t believe in climate change. You can’t even use Biden as an excuse. I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. You could just potato it for 2024.
HB,
Or you could do like Australia, sell our coal and gas to China and Japan, and pretend we are doing something grand for climate change.
Oh wait seems like the U.S is also doing this:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-thermal-coal-exports-hit-5-year-highs-top-5-billion-2023-2024-02-01/
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports-of-coal
Apparently if it burns overseas it doesn’t count!
I vote Green HB, I’ve mentioned it before, several times. I don’t vote Dim, I don’t vote Repug. Try and keep up.
The fact that you seek engagement with me, but can’t seem to remember much of what I say, is a rough indication that you ain’t too bright.
Get a grip; write notes down if you’re memory is bad or you’re drinking; embarrassing.
Survivalist,
I totally get that. But how would it play out is what i am asking, like specifics. If i say, the world as we know it will end around 2030, i have to come up with possible scenarios elaborating on specifics as to what will occur. In this case as a result of climate change.
We are shortly in 2025. As i mentioned we have had record surpluses of staple food production this year. It is hard to imagine that in a measly 5 years all these harvests will completely breakdown in a way there would be mass famines and breakdown of society. I just don’t see such a castrophic scenario playing out.
The people who claim this need to tell us okay, the wheat production will breakdown due to x,y and z. Here is the data. I haven’t seen any of them present any evidence. They come across more as religious apocalyptic cults who have a deep seeded belief that the end of the world is nigh. But these are serious scientists which makes it the more stranger.
Mike in the past when there have been large grain harvest failures its generally been a regional failure, due to bad weather, crop disease and of course war…”civil” and uncivil.
Thats probably what will happen again at some point, and its not an xyz predictable event. The world can only ship so much grain on short notice. There has been a big change over the past century, with much larger populations now dependent on imported grain than in the past.
Sure, the severity of famine can be offset by massive cargo transfers of grain if accomplished with great haste, especially in a peaceful world with lots of spare cargo capacity and fuel.
x-drought
y- flooding
z- fungal
aa- international disruptions to civil society…this is how Lloyds see this-
https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-insights/futureset/futureset-insights/systemic-risk-scenarios/extreme-weather-leading-to-food-and-water-shortage/economic-impact
examples
x- “The Chinese famine of 1928–1930 occurred as widespread drought hit Northwestern and Northern China,…When famine developed, people began to eat everything they could, including bark, grass roots, tree leaves, bran, mud and animals they fed. Human cannibalism also occurred; people exchanged their young children to eat. Many dead bodies had no feet or arms, people even thought that if they did not eat their own children or parents’ bodies, other people would eat their bodies.
Some people died from eating too much mud.”
y- Europe’s Great Famine of 1315–1317 is considered one of the worst population collapses in the continent’s history. Historical records tell of unrelenting rain accompanied by mass crop failure, skyrocketing food prices, and even instances of cannibalism. These written records strongly suggest Europe’s Great Famine was caused by several years of devastating floods that began in 1314
z- https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/plpath-gen-7
aa- Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Hickory,
Thanks for taking the effort to give me a detailed response with historical examples. I appreciate that.
The evidence i’d like to see, and maybe they do have this line of evidence and I am ignorant of it. Is how GHGs could lead to destruptions to food chains which may lead to global famines.
There is no doubt there has been famines in the past including the ones you cited, but weather events such as droughts and floods are expected to occur from time to time. Now with the population of the earth and humans occupying more land mass than ever, we’d expect to see a rise in weather events which cause destruction. Also with the internet and the movement of information (also misinformation and disinformation) one might get the wrong idea that there is a large increase in destructive weather events. This is not abnormal.
You see, it is really hard, to me it seems to connect rising GHGs in our atmosphere to a rise in destructive weather events. How can we show this beyond statistics and correlation. And more as a quantified causation.
That is the kind of evidence i want to see in some way. Such and such weather event was caused as a result of a rise in GHG emissions by x amount because of such and such mechanism. Just haven’t seen this yet. Or the wheat belts will completely collapse by x year because the temperatures will get so hot that photosynthesis would stop etc etc.
I mean people could argue to the opposite side as well. Saying statements like CO2 emissions increase crop production because of x mechanism (increased photosynthesis). Which again would be hard to quantify.
If anyone has papers showing this, i’d be more than happy to look at it.
I suspect that the ‘proof’ you are looking for to link global warming with particular crop failures is something that will only be to ones satisfaction by looking back from the distant future at very long accumulated correlation data.
In the meantime we are stuck watching episodic droughts, heat waves and flood events with the realization that combustion is feeding a bonfire of instability. Something like 90% of the combustion related warming has gone into the oceans thus far.
Scientists are trying to hash out attribution, but its a very tough thing to quantify with a high degree of fidelity.
But we do know a lot. If you have seen a corn cob with many empty spots in the rows, these are failures to get fertilized, usually due to hot/dry conditions during the short pollination window. [I did work on a corn breeding project when young, and have Univ degree in Agronomy, so I do have some familiarity with many of the particulars on crops, soil, and weather].
I look at it from the standpoint of risk. Our activities and overall situation is a recipe for high risk of crop and food supply failures. In fact I feel sadly confident to say that it is baked in the cake. No, not everywhere and not all at once.
If anyone is interested in ‘what grows where’ there is a great website from the US Dept of Agriculture that allows you to select specific countries and specific crops to see where they are grown, as well as all sorts of good current global crop weather data, with great detail. Here are a few sample pages to wet your whistle
https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/cropexplorer/cropview/commodityView.aspx?cropid=0440000
https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/rssiws/al/global_cropprod.aspx
https://ipad.fas.usda.gov/Default.aspx
Multiple Breadbasket Harvest Failure is how it starts. How it plays out varies by region. I’d suggest a couple years of suboptimal harvest would thin out the heard rather severely. Famine, and famine related violence and disease, will provide the necessary conditions for a population bottleneck.
Folk’s brains get downright reptilian after a few days with little to no food. If you’d like to ruin an otherwise fine day, you can start by Googling Images for Russian Famine, or Sudan Famine, if you prefer something more contemporary.
“Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
https://youtu.be/YToMoNPwTFc?t=45m36s
Researchers: We’ve Underestimated The Risk of Simultaneous Crop Failures Worldwide
https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-weve-underestimated-the-risk-of-simultaneous-crop-failures-worldwide
Evidence for and projection of multi-breadbasket failure caused by climate change
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1877343522000690
Will the world’s breadbaskets become less reliable?
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/will-the-worlds-breadbaskets-become-less-reliable
Changing risks of simultaneous global breadbasket failure
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0600-z
The Risks of Multiple Breadbasket Failures in the 21st Century: A Science Research Agenda
https://www.bu.edu/pardee/the-risks-of-multiple-breadbasket-failures-in-the-21st-century-a-science-research-agenda/
Hunger stone
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
I keep about 3 years worth of food preps on hand. One of the dudes in my mutual aid network bought a commercial freeze dryer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid
Thanks Hickory and Survivalist your links and knowledge is invaluable to the discussion.
Survivalist, very interesting and informative links. Most of the climate change related ones tend to be on the long-term predictions of how crop harvests will be impacted as a result of climate change and other factors. Around ~ 2040-2100 simulations.
These guys I was referring to in the original post believe castrophic effects within the next 5 years. Unless some major tipping points and unforseen effects are triggered which will exponentially affect the climate globally, i dont see any of these scenarios predicted playing out in such a short time. Long-term yea possibly.
Iron Mike…I don’t think the specifics of time/location on these risks are at all predictable.
Lack of pollinators seems to be a real problem today. But not for grain crops.
https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/news/global-food-production-is-being-limited-by-a-lack-of-pollinators-390232
@Survivalist
Thanks for all of the good citations.
I’ll add two more. The first news article link below includes the following commentary:
“But climate change is, increasingly, becoming the primary driver in many parts of the world.
‘We have 18 countries where 71.9 million people face high-acute food insecurity because of weather extremes,” said Gernot Laganda, who leads climate and disaster risk reduction programs at the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). ‘So a larger number of countries with a larger number of people.’
Most of these countries were in Africa and Latin America. In 2020, that number was 15.7 million in 15 countries, mostly in Africa, Latin American and South Asia.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26082024/global-hunger-levels-remain-advocates-call-for-change/
And the source report is at the next link. “…in July, FAO and the other major UN food agencies said that roughly 773 million people on the planet are facing acute hunger.” A horrible number.
https://www.fsinplatform.org/report/global-report-food-crises-2024/
Yes, it is very important to acknowledge that severe malnutrition and/or starvation is
going on right now, in many ‘small’ pockets.
Local drought, flood, civil war, forced migrations.
How widespread does it have to get before its gets called famine on the news feeds?
All of the ingredients that can lead up to widespread famine lurk on the horizon.
Always have, but the risks increase in an overextended, hot and crowded world.
Global warming in a crowded world makes humanity more like to fight amongst themselves.
Its not just crop failure from bad weather conditions that puts people at risk of starvation, rather the bigger cause is disruption of smooth civil function. Unrest and hunger related to mass migration is one such aspect of this.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0907998106
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/06/climate-change-cause-armed-conflict
https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/human-security
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4439154/
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-031816-044232
There are two rather “hard” facts that point to climate being the likely source of major breakdown in human suffering and insecurity. The first is the limiting temperature of photosynthesis, about 90 degrees F. We are clearly seeing that temperature being occurring more often in important farming regions. It cannot be much longer before important croplands see decline.
The second hard fact is that storms obtain their destructive energy from ambient temperatures. Ocean temperatures, steadily rising, are already causing an increase in the severity of hurricanes.
Yet, I’m always reminded of the quote by Niels Bohr “Prediction is difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”
Tom Murphy continues his videos about “Metastatic Modernity.” They’re short, clear, and informative.
Get ready for a big change:
https://youtube.com/@tommurphy2694?si=NebEBECN5hv6CCsU
T Hill- refinery flexibility.
As your initial comment is now well up the thread I have started a new comment.
Like vehcicles there is non size fits. Refineries range form basic fuel refineries up to complex high conversion refineries increasing integrated into petrochemical. I will focus on a typical refinery based on crude distillation, vacuum distillation,
Isomeriser, catalytic reformer, fluid catalytic cracker and alkylation unit. Hydro treating for sulphur removal will be deployed where necessary i.e. transport fuels.
When a refinery is designed it has a base line crude oil , and all the product stream are designed around a particular crude oil assay. There are thousands of crude oil types but they can be grouped by API gravity. Within say a 32 API crude there will be some variation in the amounts of light, middle and heavy distillate. Within each distillate group will be differing values of paraffins, naphthenes and aromatics. Crudes are sometimes discussed in terms of the latter i.e. paraffinic, naphthenic and aromatic.
The base line crude oil can be obtained by blending different crudes to make a synthetic blend that matches the base line. The CDU(crude distillation) is normally designed around the the base line crude with some tolerance, say +10% on the hydraulic capacity of the CDU at each draw off; naphtha+LPG, jet, gasoil, and residue. If the base crude is something like Urals, the substitution of Ural with Brent crude would cause iisies. Brent has much more ligt distillate and this would overload the top of the CDU. the net effect would be the CDU could only be operated to the max flow available at the naphtha draw off. The net effect would be the refinery could not operate at its design crude through out.. Likewise if the Urals was replaced with 28 API Arab Heavy the residue draw off of the CDU would be flooded, reducing through put.. A crude rich in middle distillate would overload the jet and gas oil draw offs.
The ability to switch output to more or less gasoline if very limited indeed. The products mix is pretty much fixed at high operating rates. At lower operating rates the product mix could be altered by changing the crude blend , but this can cause issues. Heat integration is finely balanced to reduce fuel consumption and any signifcant changes to the flow rates would impact on the heat balance. Refineries like to operate at >90% of capacity and even higher, because any reduction in throughput hits the bottom line hard. Typical gross margins are around $10 -15 per barrel. Jet tends to have the best margin and some products have negative margins. Operating below design increases OPEX.
In the US the production of gasoline is something like 45-47% of the crude barrel. In Europe it is 20% or even less, because the refinery configuration is biased towards middle distillate production, which means a slightly different crude intake to the US. In the US thee is only minor consumption of naphtha into petrochemicals whereas about 40% of the naphtha goes into petrochemicals in Europe.
Along the Gulf Coast in particular, the large refineries are configured to produce maximum gasoline from conversion of heavy crude atmospheric residues. FCC, Hydrocrackers and Cokers. A lot of this heavy crude came from Venezuela , and also Mexico and other suppliers of heavy crude. It is because of the reifnery configurations that the US exports a lot of LTO and import a a similar of amount of heavy crude. It is a myth that the US is self sufficient because only around 13 million barrels of “crude oil” is actually produced (much of it LTO), and the balance is 6 million barrels of NGL’s much of which is ethane and propane which cannot be processed into gasoline. LTO does not make very good gasoline; it is better as petchem feedstock. Much of it is paraffinic and has a low octane number. C5 and C6 paraffins can be isomerised to mid 80’s RON but C7-C10 paraffins do not make very good feed for reformers. Reformate can be 96-102 RON depending on the feed and severity. All in all it makes sense for the US to export the LTO and import more suitable crude for gasoline production, because upgrading large volumes of LTO would be prohibitively expensive.
What you see in many sources of oil refining data is a simple distillation column depicting gasoline being produced from the top of the CDU. In reality it is anything but the case, as these day with the abolition of lead alkyls for octane boosting has required a lot of additional upgrading of streams to blend into gasoline. Gasoline production is more energy intensive that jet or diesel production.
I think that will do for now. This is an immensely opaque subject and there is not really good simple to follow book that I can recommend. The Colorado School of Mines provides some on-line training modules but even these leave a lot to be desired.
Thank you.
One aspect I’m always keenly aware of, is how much more complex every little detail of our modern world is, compared to the hand wave of “we’ll just do this…….” as is portrayed about the future by so many proponents who lack knowledge in most areas they are discussing.
The hand wave, ….”we’ll just change the output of the refineries”, hopefully just died a natural death, to anyone that can comprehend what you wrote…
Hideaway,
Refineries can be reconfigured as needed. Only certain types of refineries can process LTO, for many refineries in the US LTO cannot be utilized efficiently.
tight oil has been produced in quantilty only for about 10 to 15 years, when it is taken off the market, other types of crude will be used to produce the products needed in existing or future refineries.
Carnot, a question, is it possible to build new refineries? Can they be configured in such a way to produce the needed products with the crude grades that are likely to be available?
Dennis, it’s your usual hand wave about a refinery can be reconfigured, without knowledge of the subject.
In a world of falling oil availability, coming soon, which will be totally different to the past of a world of increasing oil availability, who’s going to invest massive sums of money to refining something that might have only a short term future?
As complexity starts to unravel due to falling energy availability once oil production starts to decline rapidly, the costs to ‘reconfigure’ anything massive will skyrocket. The complex materials will not be available as easily as they were, the specialist parts will become harder and harder to obtain as complexity unwinds. It’s feedback loops upon feedback loops as we have less energy.
All your economic thinking of more of this and that, as hand waves, wont apply in a system of less energy. Economics does not include the natural world or complexity in it’s theories.
We have only obtained the complexity we have, because of larger population (market) using larger quantities of energy, which allows for more specialization of everything from occupations to tiny computer chips and parts.
Currently the world is spending more on gathering energy every year, so even though more is used every year a greater proportion is going towards providing the energy, which mean less energy for everything else.
The less energy for everything else can only accelerate in the future. The current ‘plans’ I read from politicians is about relocalization away from the globalization they have been promoting in the past. We can only have relocalization with an unraveling of complexity in the longer term.
You think in terms of ‘subsidies’ being just dollars made up by govt to spend on making something happen, but in reality it is a re-allocation of resources (materials and energy) away from ‘everything else’ to whatever is being subsidised.
In a world of constant growth in materials and energy, we have been able to get away with subsidies for everything as we have had ‘growth’. In a world of less energy the past rules don’t apply. Any subsidy for anything means a whole lot less materials and energy for everything else in the civilization.
In a world where the declining ore grades means more energy needed to just maintain existing production, means a double whammy of less energy, an acceleration to the downside of availability of energy and materials. Everything subsidised, takes even more from the rest of the system that’s already in decline.
Your refinery will not just be ‘reconfigured’, in a declining world, way too expensive in energy and materials for ‘refining’ a product that only has a short term future.
Hideaway,
Refineries get reconfigured and built over time. Much of the new refinery capacity built will be in the Middle East, Asia Pacific and Africa.
See for example
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/oil-and-gas/our-insights/global-energy-perspective-2023-refining-outlook
About 4.5 Mb/d of new refinery projects to be completed between 2024 to 2027 have been announced according to the Jan 2024 publication by Mckinsey.
I am not an expert, perhaps Carnot can comment on whether this information seems accurate.
Does Carnot think there will be no new refineries buit in the future worldwide?
Dennis you keep referring to what’s happening in a growth environment, where there is growth in fossil fuel use overall, growth in the world’s economy overall, growth in CO2 output, growth in species extinctions, and growth in overall pollution.
I agree it’s a non issue of refinery reconfiguration and new built refineries during the growth of everything phase.
It’s when everything starts to shrink instead of grow that the problems of reconfiguring or building ‘new’ really kicks in. Yet we will be stopping the growth and damage either by choice (very unlikely), or by limits to mining of fossil fuels to build everything. We are obviously heading to the latter, because so many people are in denial about any problems with the growth of the human enterprise.
Hideaway,
I agree growth is a problem, my expectation is that human population will peak around 2055 and then gradually decline, as decline in population approaches 1.5% per year economic growth will approach zero. Energy intensity will will also decline as less fossil fuel is used and less mining will be needed as more recycling occurs.
Hideaway,
Also keep in mind that as fewer refineries are needed the choice of which refineries to shut down will depend on the assay of the crude available and the expected future demand for products. The refinery capacity that remains operating will be chosen to optimize for the products needed.
Businesses in the World are continually expanding and/or contracting to meet existing demand which never is static, business try to optimize to maximize profits, this is likely to remain the case in the future. You can call it hand waving if you like, but it is the way the world functions.
Dennis …. “You can call it hand waving if you like, but it is the way the world functions.”
It’s the way the world has functioned for over 200 years while the economy and energy use has grown.
Once we are in decline of energy use, investment dollars for everything will dry up as it’s a different world to “growth”. This will happen because sales of everything will decline as there is less energy to create everything, so prices for ALL consumers on average go up, sales of all companies go down on average, meaning less incentive for ‘growth’ of anything, that obviously can’t happen because of overall shrinkage in the world economy.
It is taking a growing quantity of energy to mine the same quantity of ores of everything now. Ore grade decline is happening much faster than ‘efficiency’ gains, which are also having diminishing returns as we’ve used all the ‘easy’ efficiency gains.
Your faith in everything working normally in a declining energy environment is not born out from the historic record. It’s energy constraints, metal constraints that have decomplexified past civilizations leading them to collapse. There is no evidence that ours will be different.
In fact there is plenty of evidence our collapse will be quicker…
Hideaway,
I expect that as circumstances change, the way the society is organized will change. Perhaps things will play out as you predict, I don’t think we can know in advance what will happen in the future.
Note that you seem to expect fossil fuel energy use per person to increase due to deeper mines and lack of energy resources and your claim that non-fossil fuel energy can only be produced by using more fossil fuel energy. The data suggests that primary fossil fuel energy consumption in GJ per capita being relatively flat from 2007 to 2023. World population is likely to peak in a few decades, more non-fossil fuel energy capacity will be developed and fossil fuel consumption is likely to decrease. Japan for example has seen its primary energy use per capita decrease by about 1.3% per year on average from 2005 to 2023.
Dennis, I’m not sure I understand what you are saying here…..
“Note that you seem to expect fossil fuel energy use per person to increase due to deeper mines and lack of energy resources”…
All ore grades of what we, as in humans, use are declining, and the mines are getting deeper on average plus the hardness index is getting higher. This is a proven fact not anyone’s theory.
When we get to a system of less energy available across the world for humanity to use, we will be unable to mine the same quantity of metals and minerals as we did previously.
It means it takes an increasing amount of energy on average to gain the same quantity of minerals and metals. It is a trend that will not reverse, ever.
Dennis … “your claim that non-fossil fuel energy can only be produced by using more fossil fuel energy”..
That’s how we are building it all, building more aluminium smelters based on coal fired power in Indonesia. Then also using 400kg of coking coal per tonne of aluminium to drive off the oxygen, whether the smelter runs on coal in Indonesia or geothermal in Iceland.
The Silicon wafers in solar panels use coking coal to reach a high enough temperature, then the panels themselves are made of 10% plastics and polymers. All the wires are coated with plastics to insulate them.
New glass factories for making the flat glass in solar panels, are not built to use just electricity at every stage, they use natural gas in the furnace in a continuous process.
No-one anywhere is trying to do any of this any differently. If you want twice as much solar as now exists, then a lot more fossil fuels go into making it.
You keep stating we can do this or that with a hand wave of no details, but we are not doing any of those things you keep suggesting. The cheap way of building all renewables is using fossil fuels, so that is how it’s done.
Once we are in energy decline we wont have the energy nor materials, nor spare investment capital to reconfigure everything, nor to invest in new factories making anything.
Complexity unwinds as energy availability declines. The 6 continent supply chain collapses over time as there is not the energy to transport everything everywhere.
The energy reduction means that we lose ‘some’, (to start with) of the ability to transport as much as the prior year. Feedback loops of important raw materials or finished goods getting from A to B, mean trouble in manufacturing ‘other’ things that are vitally important to other parts of the system, so more aspects of our complexity unwind. The decline in energy continues, with the feedback loops hampering the building of all sorts of different things, making parts and machinery harder to obtain for new and existing projects, which have their own feedback loops re-enforcing the energy (and everything else) decline in availability.
It’s a downward spiral that has affected every civilization prior to ours, with them all collapsing being the common theme.
To think that we will built this that and all sorts of other things as energy decline accelerates, is sheer fantasy land, as the energy and materials to do all this is simply unavailable during the time of less…
We don’t have a few decades to wait for population to peak and gently start declining, within a decade most likely we will be well past peak oil and on the accelerating decline.
Even if we did have decades of oil in particular, we’ll make the planet unlivable for most life if we keep increasing fossil fuel use…
Hideaway,
I guess you have difficulty seeing how one argument you make, increasing energy use per unit of material mined, which I agree has been occurring, has not shown up in increased fossil fuel use per capita. Yes fossil fuel energy is used for mining and many other things as well, the total share of energy use for mining may be small enough that it is not that important a consideration as per capita fossil fuel energy use has been relatively flat. Also note that as the World population approaches peak and as the World becomes wealthier over time per capita energy use may decrease (as it has been doing in Japan since 2005).
Another argument you make is that ramping up wind and solar power rapidly will increase fossil fuel use rather than decrease it, wind and solar power generation per capita has been increasing rapidly for the past decade, but we do not see any increase in fossil fuel use per capita.
So your hand wavy arguments about what is likely to occur in the future does not match up with the energy consumption data.
Hideaway,
You note “No-one anywhere is trying to do any of this any differently.”
Earlier this year, Vaclav Smil released an excellent report on the challenges of an energy transition away from fossil fuels. That report included the following note:
“As for green steel, the first steel plant smelting iron ore with hydrogen produced by
renewably generated electricity is now under construction in northern Sweden”
https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HALFWAY.pdf
Smil is certainly no blind cheerleader for success in this type of energy transition, but instead has to be among the world’s foremost experts on the topic. Just sayin’, be careful with statements about absolutes….
https://www.barrons.com/articles/oil-stocks-energy-refinery-build-94d641d5
Some history on this.
Hickory,
The article is behind a paywall, based on the first couple of sentences the article focuses on US refineries. I expect refineries may be built in Asia and the Middle east. In Europe and North America there may be excess capacity (in Italy only about 63% of refinery capacity is utilized for example.) We may see OECD refineries being shut down that are no longer profitable while there will be expansion of non-OECD refineries. Overall World refinery capacity is likely to gradually be reduced over the next 25 years as supply of crude oil falls.
Thank you Carnot.
Can’t say I truly understand all of that as I have very nearly zero chemical engineering knowledge.
However, this did help me understand that there is a very wide range of potential products based on decisions made at the front end of refinery design as well as input stream. So, a new refinery could theoretically be configured to produce a greater fraction of diesel and lower fraction of gasoline with significant dependencies on the input stream.
Thanks for the details. Reaffirms my difficulty at prior attempts to find simple answers on this….its not a simple set of factors. I think the notion that there is maybe 10% wiggle room of refinery configuration and blend output (diesel percentage yield, for example) is somewhere in the ballpark.
And refinery reconfiguration or construction is very expensive— requires a long term outlook of supply of a particular crude blend to justify to expense/loan.
Carnot,
The flexibility is not unlimited for sure. Some crude types are naturally better at producing diesel than others, I have heard. There is a case for not using a lot of money to tweak output streams at the refinery and instead use heavy-duty compressed natural gas (CNG) or designing more petrol engines for less than 450 hp usage. Depends on the investment money required for the refinery upgrade I suppose. Hydrocracking of heavy oils will be neccessary in any scenario; produces a lot of gasoline anyway and other residues. Urals being good for diesel can be a point, but there are light oil crudes less than 40-45 api that can also naturally produce significant amounts of diesel. As you say, there is a buffer in place for diesel in Europe when it comes to demand. That is because there are currently so many efficient older diesel personal cars driving around, when there are obvious alternatives (electric/gasoline propulsion) to replace them.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=251894
KD former founder of MCSNet one of the first internet companies.
Gives some helpful advice.
Every computer has a MAC address. (type CMD for dos prompt, then C:\Users>getmac).
It is an address that uniquely identifies your machine GLOBALLY (with some exceptions).
These addresses stay within your local WIFI and are not surfaced to the outside
“Unfortunately in the IPv6 world this is no longer true. SLACC, which is what most IPv6 networks use for local devices, results in a globally-unique address that is specifically tied to your hardware and is visible anywhere on the Internet you connect to!”
Switch to random MAC address settings on your WIFI (instructuions provided and on the internet GOOGLE).
https://www.networkworld.com/article/965192/what-is-ipv6-and-why-aren-t-we-there-yet.html
“A Trump judge ruled there’s a Second Amendment right to own machine guns—-”
More pleasure for the small penis friends who get off on big guns.
Recently I’ve become aware that there is a fundamental flaw in the philosophy that has driven American culture. That is the assertion that the individual has predominant value over the group.
The ideas that there is a fundamental right to own weapons of such lethality as an AR-15, or that we can have a democracy when one percent of the population owns 80% of the wealth or that medical care is apportioned by one’s ability to pay simply make no sense for a species that evolved as member of a group and is only dominant in the world because of an ability to communicate and work towards a common goal.
Does that thought make me a communist?
Here’s the paradox we’re in and there is no earthly way out.
The global economy has to grow at 2-3% to prevent insolvency. Without that growth debts can’t be repaid with interest and all investment fails.
But the real economy is now restrained by an energy system that can no longer grow and is actually in decline.
So all the money being generated is basically Monopoly money. Worthless pieces of nothing in some database somewhere.
There are not even two choices there is only one which is print your currency into oblivion but there are two options to distribute it.
The first option is to bailout the banks. Save their debt defaults to make it appear that the corpse is still alive. But the effect is the average household is becoming materially poorer because of inflation and high asset prices. The pitchforks eventually come out which we’re seeing all ready in the UK and in the US.
The second option is to put the debt generated money into the the average man’s hands. Basic universal income or whatever. The problem is if that is done there will be hyperinflation because of supply side shortages.
There is of course the psychotic option of price controls but anyone who’s ever been in business will tell you that the moment that happens the real working producers meaning the actual people who produce real things like food will walk away.
Bottom line as Hideaway and Carnot have clearly outlined once energy starts its rapid decline which is very soon things will rapidly fall apart. A great tribulation indeed.
JT, agree with you about price controls. Venezuela is a good example of them not working.
As an aside, Kamala Harris being against price fixing is actually the inverse , fighting price “control” of monopolistic corporate rental landlords for example, see “Justice Department alleges RealPage enabled price-fixing on rents”. Also DoJ vs Agri Stats for monopolistic food companies.
Maybe price controls by government is bad but price controls by corporations is good? /sarc
As population growth slows to zero, global economic growth will slow to 1.5% or so, when human population declines at 1.5% per year economic growth will be about zero.
JT says:
The global economy has to grow at 2-3% to prevent insolvency. Without that growth debts can’t be repaid with interest and all investment fails.
Really? That’s a non-sequitur. Sure, it’s easier to repay interest/capital on debts if your income is growing, but also totally possible even if it’s static.
Bottom line as Hideaway and Carnot have clearly outlined once energy starts its rapid decline which is very soon things will rapidly fall apart.
All conjecture. Energy’s decline may never happen. And if oil declines say 3% a year, could we handle that? I think so.
Oil isn’t a good source of energy anyway, which is why it is rarely used to generate electricity. It’s much too expensive. Oil is primarily used to store energy in moving vehicles. It competes with batteries.
Confusing oil and energy is typical for people who have spent their lives in the oil industry which they often refer to as the energy industry.
“Oil isn’t a good source of energy anyway”
Just taken over the transportation world. What’s better? The Sun yes, but can’t be liquified yet by human technology.
Unfortunately our Father in the Heavens booby trapped it.
Let us grow our population large, made it finite and disguised that it is destroying the climate.
John Norris ….” Energy’s decline may never happen”
Fantastic, an advocate for never ending growth, which means boiling the oceans in 400 years at current rate of energy growth (averaged over the last 2 centuries).
Guess what, energy degrowth, decline, reduction however you want to call it, is going to happen. When we can no longer obtain oil, gas and coal, we wont be able to make any renewables nor nuclear, because civilization will have unraveled due to the declining complexity that comes with reduced energy use.
Every advocate for continued energy growth is an advocate for more damage to the environment, more pollution, more species extinction, and if you want more renewables/nuclear, then you are also asking for the burning of more fossil fuels to build it, the way it’s actually built!!
Hideaway,
While I understand where you come from; I would much rather have a world filled with renewables than face a rapid decline/collaps towards the charcoal based society that was you advocated for a few years ago (if I remember correctly). The electrical based generation and the grid supporting it, is surprisingly stable as long as supply meets demand at all times. Hence the need for backup electricity generation. To disregard the development of wind and solar power overall leads to the suspicion of vested interests corrupting the thought process. The point of scale in high tech manufacturing you are bring up is ofcourse not insignifcant. From having 5+ factories of scale globally in an industry as an example, it can probably go down gradually over several decades to scramble around a few factories. Just to preserve the advantages of scale.
Fantastic, an advocate for never ending growth, which means boiling the oceans in 400 years at current rate of energy growth (averaged over the last 2 centuries).
Speaking of thermodynamics, that remark is based on the idea that the Earth is a closed system and energy comes exclusively from (presumably chemical or nuclear) processes within the system.
The vast majority of the energy in the ecosphere comes from the sun and is balanced by equally enormous radiation into the sky. It’s an open system.
When people talk about energy they usually mean free energy, that is, the energy available in a system to do mechanical work. There is no reason whatsoever to think that making use of more of the huge flux of energy to do mechanical work would heat up the system as a whole.
Any change in the amount of energy in the system is just the energy flowing in minus the energy flowing out, regardless of whether the energy in used to do mechanical work within the system.
It’s trivially true that energy consumption won’t increase forever. It’s hard to imagine using much more primary energy than we already use anyway. What for? Likely candidates include desalination, computation and space flight. But each of those is questionable and it’s hard to come up with any other really big new sources of demand.
The flux of energy in and out of the ecosystem is stupendously large on a human scale. We are buffered from space by the atmosphere, so it’s easy to forget that the sky is insanely cold — only about 3K. The ecosystem loses truly vast amounts of energy day and night to this almost endless void. Every square inch of the planet radiates energy into space 24/7.
The sun (as seen from Earth) is only about one ten thousandth of the area of the sky, but blasts out enough energy to heat the system and balance this loss. The ecosystem can retain heat for short periods. Ultimately its temperature depends on how much heat comes in and goes out, not on what is done with the energy while it is inside the system.
The reason we are seeing global warming now is not that we use too much energy. The reason is that we emit carbon dioxide and other chemicals that slow the loss of heat.
Some reading for you. We’re increasing CO2, CH4, but we’re also releasing heat from the combustion of fossil fuels , and the use of nuclear fission.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/
David Higham
Right, assuming the ecosphere is a closed system, and all energy used by humans is produced within the ecosystem, and energy consumption increases at 2.3% per year for 1400 years, the Earth will be hot as the sun. But since none of those assumptions make any sense, the scenario can be ignored.
Alimbiquated,
Have a look at the graph in the “Thermodynamic Limits ” section, and read the caption under it. If the source of energy used by us is not from the solar flow, the temperature at the Earth’s surface will increase. Fossil fuels and nuclear are not from the solar flow.
A great tribulation indeed.
A dominant theme in MAGA/evangelical thinking (and some corners of this blog). But maybe you’ll escape it?
Are you familiar with the Left Behind novels? They sold 80 million copies, outlining the coming apocalypse preceded by Christians being raptured away and avoiding it. Scary that maybe a third of Americans believe it?
OK, no more comments from me today 🙂
That’s merely a cheap shot.
Every debt that is added is a call on future energy use regardless of what source of energy is used.
Only way debts can be repaid plus interest is a continuous expansion of the money supply. Keep in mind that as the principal of debts are paid down money is destroyed. Governments can’t pay down debts without destroying the money supply.
Every month as people make mortgage payments the principal portion of the mortgage is destroyed. In a low interest rate environment more money is destroyed each month than in a high interest rate environment.
Which means in a low rate environment to offset the destruction of money a lot more loans need to be made to have an expanding money supply.
In a recession just because interest rates drop to zero doesn’t mean commercial banks will be making more loans to increase the money supply. Banks pullback on lending during a recession.
Energy in contraction means less loans will be made. Which means a contraction of the money supply.
It’s not enough to have options on what sources of energy is used to run the economy. You have to have a growing energy supply regardless of the makeup of that energy supply.
Thank you HHH
I’m glad someone can cut through the economic illiteracy here.
“You have to have a growing energy supply regardless of the makeup of that energy supply.”
China seems to understand that basic point very well.
We continue to use less and less energy per unit of real GDP over time. Energy use becomes more efficient as fossil fuel is eliminated from the mix as only about 40% of fossil fuel energy performs useful work on average in today’s economy.
World fossil fuel consumption in exajoules per trillion 2015$ real GDP
Clearly some economic processes have gradually improved in energy efficiency, such as energy required/mile traveled. This improvement in efficiency has been swamped by total miles traveled however.
I find GDP to be a pretty much ridiculous tool to use for the purpose of this topic since it includes such a high portion of monetary activity that has absolutely nothing to do with human survival in the physical world….things like all advertising political and otherwise, gambling/sports betting, high frequency computerizing trading, fees on financial transactions, licensing fees, video gaming, payments for intellectual property, the purchase and sale of pre-existing real estate, for just some examples. All of these are examples of paper (digital now) money simply sloshing around. Some of these activities may be very important to function of civil societies, however
Money sloshing around is not base production of physically sustaining services and products. Its a distraction to the issue of physical prosperity/survival, a mirage.
In fact, from an energy perspective it is all simply waste…like friction, with all of the unintended heat waste simply going un-utilized.
At some point we will reach a point where less energy production will certainly mean less real world sustaining economic output, regardless of GDP indicators. We might be close on that, certainly on a per capita basis.
” includes such a high portion of monetary activity that has absolutely nothing to do with human survival”
In a free market, it’s humans who decide what they spend their money on. Not spending the money on human survival is a sign of the success of the current economy. GDP is what people spend their money on which they feel is most important to them. If I produced road bikes and said you should only spend your money on a road bikes, you would most likely tell me to F off. I can’t think of a better way to value economic success, than GDP on what people value by what they spend their money on. A warehouse of unsued road bikes or what you think is important is not a viable economy or free market.
I would say “advertising and fees” are part of the cost of a free market and advanced economy.
Hickory,
Find me a better measure and I would use it, yes GDP is imperfect, but I don’t think you fully understand what it is, based on your comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product
Existing home sales are not a part of GDP, only new construction. The Human development index is one possible substitute for GDP, but the data is rather limited.
Hickory,
I looked at Oil using the Human Development Index (which is more akin to the natural log of real GDP per capita) see
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-21-2024/#comment-780489
I agree real GDP is an imperfect measure, HDI may be better, but note that if we use the natural log of real GDP the results are not significantly different (for 1990 divided by 2022 for Oil consumption per capita divided by the natural log of real GDP per capita the ratio is 1.35 and for similar measure using HDI in place of natural log of real GDP per capita the 1990 to 2022 ratio is 1.31). HDI latest data is 2022 and starts in 1990.
Dennis,
This is due to efficiency as Hickory mentioned, and the decline in birthrates in large oil consuming countries. That’s my hypothesis.
But overall ff consumption is still increasing. As the world population is increasing albeit at a slower pace.
Iron Mike,
I expect population growth rates will continue to decrease and eventually will become negative (25 to 30 years from now), the same will be true for the use of fossil fuel in my view. Energy use will continue to become more efficient and eventually per capita rates of energy use may become static as we reach the limit of efficiency gains, the absolute level of energy use may decline as population declines. Future rates for all of these are unknown.
Dennis,
I expect the population growth rate will decline too maybe even at a faster rate as it is now. As we reach efficiency peaks and population peaks, i think the economic system will completely breakdown because pensions and 401ks will no longer increase in value as demand for credit ceases. Both on the supply and demand side.
Iron Mike,
Japan would be a possible case study and perhaps Western Europe as well. As population growth approaches zero, it probably makes sense to look at the data on a per capita basis.
HHH,
Totally agree with this. The ever expansion of credit is a must otherwise it all falls apart like a house of cards.
Even in a command economy like in China where they order banks to lend is proving not to work. Their banks are coming up short on loan quotas into the economy.
Likely due to a lack of energy preventing growth in demand for loans.
Their banks can’t meet their quotas. Market rates like their 10 year bond at historically low levels. China’s 10 year yields is below Germany’s 10 year yield. Think about that and what it implies.
HHH,
Yea looks like investors are anticipating a continuing deflationary spiral in China. I think Xi Ping doesn’t want Chinas economy to rely solely on ever expanding property and infrastructure building. Which is interesting.
I don’t see it as really being XI’s choice. The energy to continue the investment based infrastructure and housing boom doesn’t exist anymore.
They could continue with it but not without cannibalizing some other part of their economy. Like producing less exports so they can have more housing. They don’t need anymore housing. But the problem is the investment based housing and infrastructure keeps lots of people employed.
It keeps lots of people employed not just in China but in all the countries that China has to import materials from.
Jobs and unemployment and how governments deal with them will be interesting. If you give UBI to everyone it will put upward demand on goods and services. But there will less goods and services so you’ll get sky high inflation.
If you don’t give UBI or forever unemployment benefits you’ll have sky high crime and riots.
If wind is cheaper than fossil fuel than why are the rates 4 times higher per kWh and who’s pocketing the difference?
https://mishtalk.com/economics/new-york-to-pay-155-per-megawatt-hour-for-wind-current-rate-is-36-per-mwh/
Oh it’s just the break even rate🤦♂️
JT
Quite amazing. Just the same in the UK. Sky high electricty costs and wind is supposed to be cheaper. Now our useless new government want to build even more costly wind farms, this time on floating platforms, that make your cost look cheap.
Carnot
It’s certainly no laughing matter.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/25-of-Brits-Consider-Turning-Off-the-Heat-in-Winter.html
The latest riots in the UK are going to be the new normal.
I’ve always said what can’t be done won’t be done. But unfortunately I’ll have to change that to shouldn’t be done because they’re doing it anyway even though it’s destroying the economy and society.
Probably good advice—-
https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/IMG_9348-1536×1152.jpeg
Here’s a video about offshore wind and some of the problems contributing to the current problems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuwNBtKpjhQ
All of these discussions revolve around the underlying question raised by John up above-
” if oil declines say 3% a year, could we handle that? I think so.”
It depends on what you mean by ‘handle’. If that degree of decline happened for a 10 year period, say 2030 to 2040, I think you’d see major economic collapse, poverty and migrations in certain regions. Too many people and governments are on a hairline survival budget already, even without such a big escalation in the costs of everything. And there would be major upheavals even in countries that didn’t enter a deep depression.
If the decline in oil supply was more gradual, say in the 1-2% range, the severity of the impact becomes more of a tricky story to unfold.
I think it would very very wise for all people , and countries, to act and plan as if oil supply will decline steadily and indefinitely (starting in 1990). For me that includes going full speed ahead on development of non-fossil energy production sources and electrifying as many combustion reliant processes as feasible. And learning to simply use less energy in all aspects of living.
Generally, most people and countries seem to be sleepwalking into this period of oil decline.
Hickory,
I think the supply side of oil (not just oil, but condensates and natural gas in all it’s forms), delays this question being imminent for a bit of time. The “plateau phase”.
I could be going a bit out on a tangent here and present possible scenarios. The plans to adjust for this is probably present on government level a lot of places I would guess. I am a bit concerned about too many cushions being built in the western world now. But it is very difficult to backpedal the energy surplus and say it is not for you. Especially if not working overdrive to work on other solutions first.
‘In the Kremlin’s pocket’: Ex-Trump NatSec advisor says world leaders thought he was a ‘chump’
https://www.alternet.org/trump-advisor-kremlin/
Lets not put down chumps by comparing them to Trump
New posts are up
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-august-2024/
and
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-august-28-2024/