As an example of some of the problems that come along with peak oil, here's a very recent article from the Wall Street Journal about the corn based ethanol industry...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119621238761706021.html

"The government of Quebec, which has offered loan guarantees for corn ethanol plants, recently decided not to initiate any new ones. Instead it will turn its attention to so-called cellulosic ethanol, which would be made from switchgrass, wood chips or other plant matter. It concluded that "the environmental costs of corn ethanol are higher than expected," says a spokesman for the province's minister of natural resources."

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"Little over a year ago, ethanol was winning the hearts and wallets of both Main Street and Wall Street, with promises of greater U.S. energy independence, fewer greenhouse gases and help for the farm economy. Today, the corn-based biofuel is under siege.

In the span of one growing season, ethanol has gone from panacea to pariah in the eyes of some. The critics, which include industries hurt when the price of corn rises, blame ethanol for pushing up food prices, question its environmental bona fides and dispute how much it really helps reduce the need for oil.

A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that biofuels "offer a cure [for oil dependence] that is worse than the disease." A National Academy of Sciences study said corn-based ethanol could strain water supplies. The American Lung Association expressed concern about a form of air pollution from burning ethanol in gasoline. Political cartoonists have taken to skewering the fuel for raising the price of food to the world's poor.

Last month, an outside expert advising the United Nations on the "right to food" labeled the use of food crops to make biofuels "a crime against humanity," although the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization later disowned the remark as "regrettable."

The fortunes of many U.S. farmers, farm towns and ethanol companies are tied to corn-based ethanol, of which America is the largest producer. Ethanol is also a cornerstone of President Bush's push to reduce dependence on foreign oil. But the once-booming business has gone in the dumps, with profits squeezed, plans for new plants shelved in certain cases, and stock prices hovering near 52-week lows."

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The point I'm trying to get over with this article is that it's going to be incredibly tough to come up with an alternative to fossil carbon fuels, because fossil carbon, especially oil, is incredibly cheap. That is, we don't have to work very hard to get a lot of energy from oil. It's very concentrated and very convienient, in it's raw form. There's nothing else on Earth like it.

For the good grades of oil, we can get 100 times the energy out of each barrel of oil that we put in. People have described this as being like a "magic box" - we stick one dollar worth of energy into the box, and 100 dollars of energy comes out - and it does this over and over again.

To contrast this with corn ethanol - it has about a 1 to 1 energy ratio - with it's "magic box", you put in a dollar, and you get out a dollar. Not a very powerful magic box. Oh yeah, and the ethanol magic box dirties the water, and takes food out of the mouths of the poor.

Cellulosic ethanol will be better, supposedly, - it's "magic box" gives us 2 dollars for every dollar we feed in - but we haven't really tried it on anything but very small scales. We just don't know how well it will work. We can't be sure it will ever work at full scale. W need to test it at full scale as fast as we possibly can.

Now, I'm not saying we should abandon corn ethanol, and here's why - we desperately need the practical knowledge we can only get by running years of full scale tests.

We need the know-how and the knowledge of possible technologies, so that we can cope with the coming years of ever more expensive energy.

Bill, I don't know how long you've been reading Voices, but we did an entire issue dedicated to peak oil probably a year and a half or two years ago. might want to scan through the archives. technology tells us more now, but there might be some goodies in there that'll interest you.

also, you might want to read Greg Palast on peak oil, which he thinks is a sham dreamt up by the oil companies and nurtured since the 1950s I believe. he says at the right price there's plenty of oil. of course, right now it's all sitting under hugo chavez's commie butt and nobody around here wants to hear about THAT, but it's there. just tougher to pull out of the ground than the arab stuff. 

Left of Centre http://thorsteinveblen.blogspot.com

Bill, thanks for drawing my attention to these articles. I do not follow the issue as closely as I probability should. That said, I'd like to share my thoughts on how to respond to the impending crisis and get your feedback.

I think we need a short, a medium, and a long term response. The short term response is energy conservation. Had we continued along the path of conservation following the oil shocks of the 1970's we would be in much better shape today than we are. Raising CAFE standards is a start.

The medium and long term responses both require that we find alternative energy sources. In the medium term, a conversion to other carbon based fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel is the most feasible approach. However, any carbon based fuel will still pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and therefore will not help in dealing with the other problem we face:climate change.

The long run response should focus on developing a fuel such as hydrogen. The problem here is that the energy balance is currently unfavorable, but one might hope that short and medium term responses will buy us enough time to find practical long term solution.

What are your thoughts?

People tend to think that "peak oil" means no more oil, or the oil is running out, but it doesn't mean that at all. Technically, it means the oil is half gone.

Which sounds pretty good, right? Half gone. Is the glass half full, or half empty? We've had a hundred years of oil age, maybe as much as a hundred fifty if we start counting from the first oil well, and the kerosene lantern. So, we should have about a hundred years more - hey, let the grandchildren worry about it, we'll all be long dead by the end of the oil age.

Except, the situation is nowhere near that simple. We've built an extremely complex civilization in the last hundred years, based on oil, and complex systems can behave in unpredictable ways. Sometimes thay are unpredictably rugged - but sometimes, they are unpredictably fragile.

One of the key things that has to be understood about peak oil is this - We burn the best oil first. We've been taking the best kinds of oil, called the "light sweet crudes" out of the fields for a hundred years. Half of the oil is left, but, it's the worst half.

This is why the Iraqi oil is so important - it's the last known remaining superfield of light sweet crude, and it's oil that is cheap and easy to get, and close to the ocean, so it's easy to ship. This is why we are occupying Iraq - that oil is a unique treasure, there is literally nothing, NOTHING, else like it that we know of on the planet earth. A virgin superfield of light sweet crude.

Why is it so important to understand the critical point that half the oil is left, but it's the worst half? Because the worse the oil is, the more expensive it is to get, to refine, and to use. Oh, and by the way - the more carbon dioxide and pollutants are generated in refining it and using it.

There's plenty of oil, but it's going to be getting more and more expensive from now on, and it might get way more expensive faster than we expect.

Just like the price of a barrel of oil has tripled in ther last 5 years. Faster than we expected.

Greg Palast is right that Peak Oil was used and will be used to manipulate us and to make companies insane amounts of profit, to lead us into war after war, to turn our society into something we can barely recognize.

For example, I think that people don't protest against the Iraq war, because they believe that getting a grip on middle east oil is more important than Iraqi lives or American reputation.

But Palast is wrong about it being solely a political invention, just like so many people are wrong at claiming global climate change is a political invention. Peak oil is a geological inevitability.

Production is falling. Every month since June 2006 we've pumped a little less oil. Market theory says, if prices rise, oil that was previously too expensive to pump should be pumped to meet rising prices. If prices rise, more oil will be pumped from smaller wells to meet the demand.

But that's not happening. Production continues to fall. Which is exactly what you'd expect to see if the oil peak has already happened.

Hi veblen,

Ha ha, I sure am using the word "but" a lot these days.

Carbon dioxide is the big giant wild card in the energy equation, something that we can fairly reasonably predict is going to come back to hurt us very badly in the future, but far enough in the future that the temptation to let the future worry about it will be close to irresistable.

People won't be thinking about carbon dioxide if the houses start being too expensive to heat, if the drive to work starts taking up bigger and bigger portions of the paycheck, if prices for everything rise and rise and rise - or rather, they won't have the luxury of worrying about carbon dioxide.

I suspect we are going to burn every last ounce of accessible fossil carbon in the next century and a half, and that no force on earth can stop it, until it's either all gone, or we humans have died back.

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Anyway, back to the "but" part - I agree, conservation is our great hope, and conservation technology and innovation should be priority number one.

But, it's not just conservation - the oil age is a liquid chemical fuel age, and we need to transform into an electricity age.

It's not that electricity is "better" - it's not really. But, all of the alternatives to oil that work on the mass scale we need produce electrocity, and require electricity. Wind power, solar power, nuclear power, geothermal power, tide power, and on and on - all produce electricity.

Hydrogen, for example. It's a popular model of the energy economy of the future. But hydrogen isn't a energy source - it's an energy supply. To make it at scale, we would start with electricity, massive amounts of electricity. First we have to make the electricity, then we make the hydrogen that gets pumped into a tank in the car, and drives a fuel cell.

You mention biofuels, and we will be making and using all kinds of biofuels. They are close to carbon nuetral, if you make them with an energy source other than fossil carbon - which brings in electricity again. But, their energy balance is lousy, it's a hard and expensive way to get energy in a usable form, on a mass scale, and none of the people who have done the math on running a society like ours on biofuels believes it's possible.

Sooner or later, we will be transitioning to an electricity economy. It will be a very different type of civilization, and in a lot of ways it might be a lot nicer than the oil civilization.

My interest is that we should be doing this faster than we are. The great disadvantage of the modern way of life is that it depends on constant growth, and that growth is fueled with oil. We have faith that we can grow ourselves out of every problem. But, we haven't faced a limit on our energy supply for 150 years. This could hurt us far worse than we are prepared to handle.

Like you said, if we had concentrated on investing in the future like we started to in the seventies, we'd be sitting pretty, but instead, we put all our money into the oil lifestyle.

Left of Centre http://thorsteinveblen.blogspot.com

Bill, thanks for sharing your thoughts. The idea that electricity is our energy future leaves an unanswered question:What fuel do we use to generate the electricity? As I see it there is a choice between current mature technologies, technologies which currently aren't scalable to the size required to serve all our energy needs, and finally pie in the sky technology.

Current Mature Technology There is a choice between coal and nuclear generated electricity. Coal has the same problems as oil. It is carbon based and there are limited amounts. Nuclear energy has its own problems. There is, as of yet, no good way to dispose of the waste and there is the problem of nuclear proliferation.

Current Immature Technology Here the choice is between solar and wind powered. To serve our need with these technologies will require large patch of land with either solar panels or wind turbines. The problems here are ascthetic and potentially environmental.

Pie in the Sky Nuclear fusion, at least on paper, would solve all of our energy needs. It is clean and we have a near infinite source of hydrogen which is required to power the reactors. Unfortunately, after forty years of research we are only marginally closer to exploiting the process.

Any energy source will have both up and down sides. Choosing how to go is a matter of balancing the costs and benefits. Do you have any particular ideas on how electricity could be generated?

In related matter, have you seen the research out of Purdue on the use of an aluminum gallium alloy as a catalyst to producing hydrogen from water? It seems like a very promising technology, but it will still require electricity for the production of aluminum.

You've obviously got a pretty good grasp of the various options available to us, barring some major new scientific and technological breakthru.

Unfortunately, the possibilities available to us that can really work are pretty limited, and fairly unpleasant.

This is what is going to happen - we're going to burn the coal, all of it, even the dirtiest lignite. And we're going to be building fission generators everywhere there is water to cool them.

Yes, it's terrible. But when these crappy houses that we build are broiling in the summer and freezing in the winter, when prices on everything double and quadruple and double again, the people are going to freak out, and we are going to burn coal and use nukes. It's a cruel and inescapable inevitability.

I hope we're going to be able to soften this harsh scenario with the best new solar, solar-thermal, wind, and similar technologies. But every day we wait in investing money and time in perfecting these technologies means that their future development will be slower, so we won't be able to put them in place fast enough to meet the needs of a population that will be continuously growing.

It's the technology slowdown that scares me the most. I've been watching solar technology for years, for example - it's still nearly as expensive today as it's been for many years, and the basic technology hasn't improved for 30 years. Just when we most need innovation and experimentation, it slows down.

So, the obvious objections are - what about carbon dioxide with the coal? What about all the acids and pollutants? What about the dangerous wastes produced by nukes, and the risks from accidents and terrorists?

The risks are horrible, but they will still do it, and I personally can't see a force that can stop it.

We can build better coal furnaces, for example the fluidized bed types of furnaces, to burn the coal more efficiently and capture more of the pollutants - but we are moving very slowly and not building many (if any) large new plants with the technology, because more testing is needed.

And everybody and their brother is talking about CCS (carbon capture and storage, which used to be called "carbon sequestration") - but nobody knows if it will work, or what it's dangers might be. Again, we haven't been doing the testing, we don't have the know-how and experience to be sure it can be made to work.

I would just be so pleased if I turned out to be wrong, and we didn't end up burning every last pound of coal we can mine, and didn't end up doing a crash building program of fission generators and eventually breeder generators. But, when I look at how we've managed our energy supplies so far, always choosing the cheap and dirty over the expensive and efficient and sometimes inconvienient, I have to believe that the first stages of the new electricity economy will be coal, and then nuclear, powered.

But, maybe this time the american people, and the people of the world, will behave differently.

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That aluminum and gallium thing looks interesting. But, one sees dozens of announcements like this every year, year after year, and most of them lead to nothing, or "disappear into the vaults". I can see several problems - availability of gallium, what to do with the aluminum oxide waste from inside the converter, etc. But, we need to be doing vastly more research and testing and at-scale manufacturing experiments on all kinds of new technologies, so that we have a better chance of finding the major breakthru we really, really need.

This has been a good discussion and I'd like to give kudos to you all for being astute observers and bringing in some things that I have read in some fine, if terrifying books. I'd suggest to all to read America Theocracy by Kevin Phillips who worked for Nixon and sees big religion, big credit, and big oil as the troika that will drag the U.S. into its fall.

Next, there are two entries in John Brockman's recently compiled What is Your Dangerous Idea? Jeremy Bernstein, a physicist and science writer, wrote that he thinks it's dangerous that people believe that they understand plutonium:

"Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously spontaneously in the presence of water vapor, and if you inhale miniscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the 'pits' that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one sure how stable this alloy is. These pits, in the thousands are now decades old. What is dangerous is the idea that they have retained their integrity and can be safely stored into the indefinite future."

Additionally, Paul C. Davies writes in the same book, "The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost." He says, "Human nature being what it is,people will go on burning [oil] until it starts running out and simple economics puts the breaks on. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will just go on rising...
"What we lack is political will. People pay lip service to environmental responsibility, but they are rarely prepared to put their money where their mouth is."

How true I think both of those things are. Nuclear energy is potentially clean except for the enormous risks that we are faced with by plutonium in the very long term and, as noted earlier, the risk of weapon proliferation. I also think that we lack the political will to follow through with some of the massive changes we will need to undertake. Our diets are really going to have to change and this has been known for a long time...since Francis Moore Lappe's first publication of Diet for a Small Planet.

Left of Centre http://thorsteinveblen.blogspot.com

You paint a very dismal picture of the future. I share your cynicism concerining  our will to action on most long range problems, but surely there must be something that we can do politically to deal this problem.

A dismal future, you say? By your and my standards perhaps, but not by the standards of the majority of americans in our consumer society.

I imagine a lot of people find it fairly comforting to think that if the oil supply does indeed drop dramatically in the next 20 years, that they'll be able to keep their suburban homes and way of life just by using - what is it that the ads say - "plentiful, clean burning coal".

And the worst effects of the coal-electric economy won't be felt for another 30 years, past the middle of the century. That's almost forever in consumer years.

I'm filled with all kinds of thoughts on how alternative paths into the future might work. Will the "information economy" and high speed global communications exert an influence or uncover a solution that's better than coal/nuclear? I hope so. Will the scientists discover some heretofore unknown principle or technology that generates either new liquid fuels or new sources of electricty? Wow, that would be fantastic!

Will global warming drive the ice off the arctic ocean, uncovering vast new super-superfields of light sweet crude, delaying the oil peak for another generation or two, until long after you and I are safely dead? We might get that lucky, and avoid having to think about the inevitable post-oil future.

Will capitalism come up with a business solution just in the nick of time, while making trillions of dollars of profit and employing millions of new middle class workers in the process? I believe that's what the majority of americans expect.

Clearly I've become jaded by the past thirty years of americans ignoring the problem. And seriously jaded by the last 7 years of american hysteria and "the war that wasn't a war".

I guess I wouldn't be writing about this stuff if I didn't still have some hopes that people might start asking our leaders to start seriously planning for the future.

Do you have any thoughts on what can be done?

Hi peter, yep, plutonium is crazy deadly stuff.

But, the facts are the facts - there isn't all that much fissionable uranium. You'll hear different estimates, but it basically all boils down to, if we want to keep anything like our current standard of living, we are going to go plutonium.

And, presumably, build a militant, security obsessed society to keep watch on all citizens all the time, so that nobody can use the plutonium as a weapon. Except for the governments, who will have embarassing riches of plutonium.

I used to think magnetohydrodynamics was going to be the energy source of the future. But you literally never even hear about it anymore, it's as if it's mention has become taboo. 

Since I believe a plutonium economy requires and guarantees a planetary police state, I sure don't want to see it.

I hate the plutonium future. I'm just saying it looks inevitable.

You can't get people to breed less - they see themselves as being locked in a breeding war. Breeding is patriotic, just like driving the biggest suv you could afford was patriotic.

Look at our own culture now - it's obsessed with babies and mothers.

There are alternatives to a plutonium economy, but they are all purely theoretical right now. Plutonium breeder reactors aren't theoretical. "Shock Doctrine" will be used to force their use, because they will require a police state, and the people in charge think we need a police state to keep the troublemakers (that would be you and me) in line.