Posted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 7:39 am Post subject: Re: US Dept of Energy Report: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTIO
This is a rosy picture according to Harper's Index for July 2006
Code:
Volume of new reserves added by major oil companies in 2005, expressed as a percentage of oil pumped that year: 51[Sanford C. Bernstein Limited (London)]
Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing corn ethanol to the amount yielded when it is burned in gasoline: 1:1[Alexander Farrell, University of California, Berkeley]
Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing gasoline itself to the amount yielded when it is burned: 6:5
Stats _________________ Men argue, nature acts !
Voltaire
"...In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation."
Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 2:24 pm Post subject: Re: US Dept of Energy Report: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTIO
Quote:
If we have peaked we'll be using Hirsh's mitigation plan. The plan for immediate peaking. I read the report and I think it involves rationing gasoline and making a lot of fuel from coal.
The Hirsh report references synthetic gasoline extracted out of coal on several occasions.
I read the entire PDF. Very interesting. It should be required reading for everyone. It logically raises the issue and addresses the limitations of solutions and especially the difficultly of the transportation liquid fuel issues.
Quite often it is lost in the debate that the main impact (in the initial decade) of Peak Oil is on transportation liquid fuels (gasoline/diesel). There is really no threat to food supplies or electricity in the near term. They make up a fraction of total oil consumption.
The use of oil for transportation is the issue for the first decade of Peak Oil.
I think that study made this point quite effectively.
Have you ever visited a large farm? Without diesel fuel, fertilizer, and other petroleum based products the local grocery store isn't going to have much on it's shelves, even if there is fuel for transportation.
On that note, the ethanol and biodiesel ideas in the end consume the same amount of biomass to fill one gas tank as a human being eats in a year...
The only real survival option will be local and communal. It's far too late to attempt to replace cheap energy and waste it like we are accustomed to. I say this after spending the last 17 years of my life full and part-time employed by the oilfield/refining sectors in Alberta, Canada. Currently I am working at the construction of the Petro-Canada RCP 1.1 project in Strathcona county, which is on the east side of Edmonton. RCP stands for Refinery Conversion Project, which is the addition of a coker and crude-vac train (a heavy oil upgrader) next to the oil refinery. When it is complete the refinery will switch over to bitumen feedstock from Syncrude's oil sands mining operation at Ft. McMurray and will produce 150,000 bbl/day of sweet synthetic crude. The price tag on this conversion project will be close to 3 billion Canadian by the time it is finished. This tells me that it is getting much harder and more expensive to get conventional crude out of the earth in western Canada as the refinery has existed and processed regular sweet crude for almost 50 years... There was no Sulphur Recovery Unit on site before, but since oil sands contain H2S a large one is being built there as well.
I'm a steamfitter by trade, and although I bring it up from time to time, few of my peers care to think about it... personally being in the midst of a large petrochemical complex day to day reminds me continuously how foolishly we have wasted such an incredible resource... The flares are always lit, and the engines are always running.
Joined: May 19, 2005 Posts: 692 Location: Merry Ol' USA
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 9:40 am Post subject:
Navono wrote:
Have you ever visited a large farm? Without diesel fuel, fertilizer, and other petroleum based products the local grocery store isn't going to have much on it's shelves, even if there is fuel for transportation.
On that note, the ethanol and biodiesel ideas in the end consume the same amount of biomass to fill one gas tank as a human being eats in a year...
The only real survival option will be local and communal. It's far too late to attempt to replace cheap energy and waste it like we are accustomed to. I say this after spending the last 17 years of my life full and part-time employed by the oilfield/refining sectors in Alberta, Canada. Currently I am working at the construction of the Petro-Canada RCP 1.1 project in Strathcona county, which is on the east side of Edmonton. RCP stands for Refinery Conversion Project, which is the addition of a coker and crude-vac train (a heavy oil upgrader) next to the oil refinery. When it is complete the refinery will switch over to bitumen feedstock from Syncrude's oil sands mining operation at Ft. McMurray and will produce 150,000 bbl/day of sweet synthetic crude. The price tag on this conversion project will be close to 3 billion Canadian by the time it is finished. This tells me that it is getting much harder and more expensive to get conventional crude out of the earth in western Canada as the refinery has existed and processed regular sweet crude for almost 50 years... There was no Sulphur Recovery Unit on site before, but since oil sands contain H2S a large one is being built there as well.
I'm a steamfitter by trade, and although I bring it up from time to time, few of my peers care to think about it... personally being in the midst of a large petrochemical complex day to day reminds me continuously how foolishly we have wasted such an incredible resource... The flares are always lit, and the engines are always running.
Thanks for the post, and welcome to the forum. I wish there were a lot more "insiders" posting on the forum, because it brings a much needed trenches viewpoint to Peak Oil. All of us armchair energy speculators can research and read, but it's usually the guys on the front line that can tell you whether the war is going good or not. _________________ After fueling up their cars, Twyman says they bowed their heads and asked God for cheaper gas.There was no immediate answer, but he says other motorists joined in and the service station owner didn't run them off.
Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:28 pm Post subject: Re: US Dept of Energy Report: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTIO
Thanks very much for the welcome. I first became aware that Peak Oil was close when I saw Mike Ruppert's Truth and Lies of 9/11. Since then I have taken to viewing the practices, policies, and general attitudes of my industry in a new light. A lot of the lunacy I have witnessed makes perfect sense to me now that I realize just how much paper petroleum there is. Within an hour's drive of my home town there are hundreds of old slow producing oil wells and a couple of small refineries. However, within the same distance there are thousands and thousands of gas wells, and 50 or so significant plants and batteries perparing their output for export. I am 37, and when I was 18 I worked my first gas plant turnaround. The plant in question was at the time owned by Mobil. I was surprised when I discovered that the original process and sulphur trains there were older than I was. I returned there for another maintenance turnaround a couple years ago and was amazed at how much of the plant had been mothballed/demolished and that the only significant new construction on the site that had happened in almost 20 years was a new sulphur recovery unit. Operations staff I knew at the site informed me that the local gas field had not only dropped off in productive capacity significantly, but also that it had grown far more sour over the years, hence the new SRU. This same story is being repeated at every one of those old plants despite the continued drilling of new and advanced wells into the old reservoirs. The product is still there, but it gets harder and harder to produce as time goes on. If you look at a map of oil and gas wells in Alberta there are a lot... but if you also include the ones that have been abandoned the map gets pretty full all of the sudden. Most of the capital expense of the Alberta oilfields happened in the 60's and 70's. Then Trudeau's National Energy Program killed almost all investment in the province's oil industry until the mid-90's. Since that time the investment has been huge, but not in the old fields. New sources of petroleum here in Alberta are expensive and very destructive environmentally. More proof that the lifespan of fields that are usually greedilly overproduced is generally shorter than originally hoped for at the time of their discovery. When I was a child of 5, Alberta celebrated its' 75th Anniversary and we all believed there was enough natural gas in Alberta to take care of our needs for hundreds of years. However, rapid expansion and low royalty exports to the US and rest of Canada has the industry scrambling to maintain current production levels. Regular gasoline here is $99.9 cents per liter right now, which works out to roughly $3.75 per US gallon. With exchange factored in that comes out to $3.24 US per US gallon. On one hand it upsets me that gasoline I buy less than one mile from the refinery I work in costs more at times than it does in other places, but, I get paid well to fit the pipes, so I really shouldn't complain... this project is good for a year, right here in town, and the next one is 20 minutes away and will likely take 3-4 years to build. Shell plans to more than double their Scotford upgrader complex at an estimated cost of 18 billion Canadian. The Albian sands mine that supplies the bitumen for the upgrader will of course also be enlarged to suit the needs of the downstream production. I doubt I will be unemployed anytime soon...
That is, until I have enough coin to disappear with a sailboat, seeds, and a plan.
Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 2:40 am Post subject: Re: US Dept of Energy Report: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTIO
The only real survival option will be local and communal. It's far too late to attempt to replace cheap energy and waste it like we are accustomed to. I say this after spending the last 17 years of my life full and part-time employed by the oilfield/refining sectors in Alberta, Canada.
What a great quote, its' brilliant to see someone who actually has real world experience with oil come here and tell it like it is.
Welcome. _________________ "Men in general are quick to believe that which they wish to be true." - Julius Caesar
Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 8:17 pm Post subject: Re: US Dept of Energy Report: PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTIO
These are some of the best things I found:
Quote:
F. Transition Conclusions
Any transition of liquid fueled, end-use equipment following oil peaking will be
time consuming. The depreciated value of existing U.S. transportation capital
stock is nearly $2 trillion and would normally require 25 – 30 years to replace. At
that rate, significantly more energy efficient equipment will only be slowly phased
into the marketplace as new capital stock gradually replaces existing stock. Oil
peaking will likely accelerate replacement rates, but the transition will still require
decades and cost trillions of dollars.
A larger number of train routes could be outfitted for electric trains, but such a
transition would likely be slow, because of the need to build additional electric
power plants, transmission lines, and electric train cars. Since existing diesel
locomotives use electric drive, their retrofit might be feasible. However, since
diesel fuel use in trains is only roughly 0.3 MM bpd,95 electrification of trains
would not have a major impact on U.S liquid fuel consumption.
Finally:
Quote:
It is extremely difficult, expensive, and time consuming to construct any type of
major energy-related facility in the U.S. today. Even assuming the expenditure of
substantial time and money, it is not certain that many proposed facilities will
ever be constructed. The construction of transmission lines, interim and
permanent nuclear waste disposal facilities, electric generation plants, waste
incinerators, oil refineries, LNG terminals, waste recycling facilities,
petrochemical plants, etc. is increasingly problematic.
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