http://science.reddit.com/info/5zgvr/comments/

thanks.

Got into a little debate with a representative of the Sierra Club over this particular issue. The subject of his presentation was climate change but he did but up that EIA chart on future production rising to 130 MMbbl/d 20 years down the road. He dismissed peak oil as a non-issue because of subtitutes like ethanol, CTL, GTL, shale, etc. I said coal ain't oil, coal ain't oil, pavement ain't oil, and corn squeezins ain't oil.

http://biopact.com/2007/09/experts-brazil-victim-of-its-own.html

Friday, September 21, 2007
Experts: Brazil victim of its own biofuels success, as ethanol price collapses

As consumers across the world feel the pinch when filling up their tanks with expensive gasoline, in Brazil experts are worried that ethanol is becoming too cheap too quickly. Record low sugar and ethanol prices are the result of overproduction....

The alternatives are expensive because the US taxes them with a 54 cents/gallon tariff. The EU is equally foolish.

So the rise in oil prices will continue until it has cancelled out the trade barrier of 54c/gallon. Then Brazilian (and world) ethanol production will ramp up to meet the shortfall in oil.

However it does seem a little foolish to jeapoardise the US economy, and so the world economy, just to protect some thousands of farmers in the American corn belt.

Expecting markets to work when you deliberately rig them so they can't is just plain silly.

I've noticed that CERA and others with a vested interest in preserving faith in the status quo have been conflating oil actually pumped out of the ground with all manner of 'other liquids', the obvious purpose of which is to mask the leveling off or, arguably, the actual decline of conventional oil production.

This is a highly transparent and dishonest attempt to prop up the notion that 'things ain't all that bad'. As with all such exercises, people will eventually see through the smoke and come to the angry realization that, indeed, things ARE all that bad.

The longer we pretend that things are OK, the worse it's going to get.

One thing that has struck me over the past few years is how the price level that people say will allow for a real boost in these technologies seems to always be $10 from current oil prices. It used to be $25/bl a few years back, it was then put at 40-50$/bl, and now people say that $75 will allow them to come online.

Partly its a falling dollar, but the other part is that they can come online now, it just takes years and people allways chase the biggest profit they have the most experience in. Sasol is making huge profits off of its CTL and GTL infrastructure and off of contracts for building CTL and GTL infrastructure in places like China and Dubai. As the price continues to stabilize above $50/bl long term, more players will enter the unconventional oil market. The asian financial crisis wasn't that long ago and no one wants to be caught pissing in the wind when the tide changes. If another real recession hits and fails to sink the price of oil, that'll convince everyone.

It all hinges, then, on whether new substitutes can be found for oil

which could be re-written as:

It all hinges, then, on whether new substitutes can be found for energy

and when you revert to the first law:

In any process, the total energy of the universe remains constant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics#First_law

you realise how ignorant this whole debate about liquid substitution really is.

keep at it Jerome.

OPEC is holding back production this hour, not pumping at full capacity. Technologies to produce heavy oils may be improving. If gasoline prices really hit hard, then more will be invested in vehicles that get 40-60 mpg's, scooters, and public transport. Currently many consumers are in heavy, low fuel efficiency vehicles accustomed to cheap gasoline and have not been reformed into energy conscious drivers. One would suppose the population might stop expanding at such rates if indeed this potential gasoline shortage restricts food production, processing, and distribution. Switching to CNG vehicles was occuring rapidly in China where they have been operating buses, cabs, and private vehicles on natural gas. Some of their cars can be driven with either natural gas or gasoline in the same engine. In China the economy is growing quickly while using much less fuel per capita than in the U.S. and Europe. The supplies of gasoline are low. Oil inventories are yet sufficient. Refinery expansions might solve refining problems, but cannot solve oil supply bottlenecks, delays, and the depletion of mature fields.

Thanks, Jerome. I've been griping about CERA et al purposefully trying to muddy the debate by calling sustances oil, that aren't oil. I guess I'm a little old fashioned but for me to consider a substance oil it has to cme out of the ground and be a liquid at 70 degrees farenheight. All liquids is a measure of substances that can substitute for oil, but it isn't crude or even crude plus condensate.

The main utility of oil is that it can be pumped and therefore has a much greater utility because of the savings in labor than coal or sands or shale. Its not that you can use it in a refinery. So lets not confuse thingh by alling synthetic oil, oil. Anytime we let them get away with this lie we have conceded a large part of our argument for no advantage. Bob Ebersole

When people are saying "energy", they really mean "energy" as a shorthand for "free energy", the energy available to do work. Free energy is *not* conserved. References to the first law are not significant in this discussion.

George

*Now that you mention it, once upon a time I did make life miserable for generations of chemistry students by teaching chemical thermodynamics.

Apologies if this has been done before but I was looking idly at the graph of the three liquids production curves. The supplies look curiously stable to me over the last three years with none of frequent sharp drops of previous decades. Total Liquids has been in the same 1.5 mbpd range over this time.

I was wondering whether there is an underlying reason for this stability (were the sharp drops in the past always deliberate production cuts to support prices?) or whether alternatively it might mean that there are serious implications for any future supply shocks that disrupt the status quo?

Frederik Pohl, "Gateway"

I don't know if you've ever worked in the food mines, but you've probably heard about them. There isn't any great joy there. I started, half-time and half-pay, at twelve. By the time I was sixteen I had my father's rating: charge driller-good pay, hard work.

But what can you do with the pay? It isn't enough for Full Medical. It isn't enough even to get you out of the mines, only enough to be a sort of local success story. You work six hours on and ten hours off. Eight hours' sleep and you're on again, with your clothes stinking of shale all the time. You can't smoke, except in sealed rooms. The oil fog settles everywhere. The girls are as smelly and slick and frazzled as you are.

So we all did the same things, we worked and chased each other's women and played the lottery. And we drank a lot, the cheap, powerful liquor that was made not ten miles away. Sometimes it was labeled Scotch and sometimes vodka or bourbon, but it all came off the same slime-still columns.

-------------------

You don't go outdoors very much. There's no reason. There are a couple of little parks, carefully tended, planted, replanted; Rock Park even has hedges and a lawn. I bet you never saw a lawn that had to be washed, scrubbed (with detergent!), and air-dried every week, or it would die. So we mostly leave the parks to the kids.

Apart from the parks, there is only the surface of Wyoming, and as far as you can see it looks like the surface of the Moon. Nothing green anywhere. Nothing alive. no birds, no squirrels, no pets. A few sludgy, squidgy creeks that for some reason are always bright ochre-red under the oil. They tell us that we're lucky at that, because our part of Wyoming was shaft-mined. In Colorado, where they strip-mined, things were even worse.

I always found that hard to believe, and still do, but I've never gone to look.

And apart from everything else, there's the smell and sight and sound of the work. The sunsets orangey-brown through the haze. The constant smell. All day and all night there's the roar of the extractor furnaces, heating and grinding the marlstone to get the kerogen out of it, and the rumble of the long-line conveyors, dragging the spent shale away to pile it somewhere.

See, you have to heat the rock to extract the oil. When you heat it it expands, like popcorn. So there's no place to put it. You can't squeeze it back into the shaft you've taken it out of; there's too much of it. If you dig out a mountain of shale and extract the oil, the popped shale that's left is enough to make two mountains. So that's what you do. You build new mountains.

-------------------

Funny. In the old days oil used to bubble right out of the ground! And all people thought to do with it was stick it in their automobiles and burn it up.

Perhaps "liquids" could also include the rainbow-hued water which has at some time been in contact with the hydrocarbon-y strata in an old field.

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}

The problem is not energy or liquid fuels. The problem is that stupidity rules the earth with an iron fist. We will do things the stupid way, because all the stupid decisions will be made for us in a downward spiral of stupidity until we all land in a cesspool of stupidity down at the bottom of an infinite stupidity well. [/rant]

I'm trying to make sense of the array of proposed alternatives to petroleum and NG, including the "other liquids". What I'd like to see is a good comparison table that lays out the salient characteristics of petroleum and the "pretenders". Here's a strawman to give the feel of what I'd like to have available (with just the left column filled in for a few sources):

By the headings, I mean:

• EROEI: use some semi-reasonable measure here – doesn’t have to be great, as long as it works for comparing sources.
• Environmental Costs: not a number, but an enumeration – at least at first, want to show the characteristics of the source.
• Social Costs: ditto
• Initial Investment: for a source that isn’t already in production (or that needs to be ramped up significantly to be a major contributor)
• Time to break even: for the same source, the time from first coming on line until it’s repaid its investment cost. I intend this and the previous column to be useful in separating currently useful alternatives from those whose promise is further down the line.

Don’t take the actual columns too seriously – I’m far from an expert; the point is to have a multi-dimensional display that captures the most important considerations in evaluating whether, when, and to what extent, some mix of sources might be able to replace what we’re losing.

I’m guessing that one use of such a display will be to make clear just how counterproductive lumping all “liquids” together really is. I’d also hope it would also be useful to help guide a rational transition policy. We need to know what’s best to focus on in each stage of descent.)

Question about propane:

If I understand all of this correctly, propane is one of the products that comes from this broader "liquids" feedstock.

My question is this: If there are people looking at these "liquids" as a future source of automotive fuels, does this not put the demand for automotive fuels and the demand for propane on a collision course?

(I use propane for residential heating, cooking, and water heating, and in fact use a lot more propane than gasoline. I would not be at all happy at the prospect of seeing my propane supplies curtailed just so that SUVs can keep their tanks filled.)