Re: After peak oil: Will America survive?
- From: "zzbunker@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <zzbunker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2007 10:00:20 -0000
On Jul 24, 8:20 am, Penny Farthing <pfarth...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.newstarget.com/z021942.html
Originally published July 21 2007
After peak oil: Will America survive?
by Mike Adams
(NewsTarget) As public awareness about peak oil continues to grow, and even
the big oil companies like Exxon Mobil Corp. are now starting to admit that
the future supply of oil looks troublesome (see this Boston Globe article),
there's an increasing focus on renewable energy solutions. But most
members of
the public still don't understand energy very well, and they generally
have no
idea whether alternative energy sources like solar, wind or CSP (see below)
can replace oil. Many people are concerned about a potential collapse of
modern society due to the end of cheap oil. So to help answer some of these
questions, I've put together a set of uncensored, science-based answers
about
oil, renewable energy and the future of modern civilization. This is offered
in a Q&A format.
Question: Will oil really run out in the near future?
Oil will never run out.
The US energy idiots who drive Chinese 18 wheeler rock n' roll
bestros on US highways
will continue, The people who ride Gulf Sreams jets to work, will
contnue riding them.
The LA morons who commute 2 hours to work in origami shops, will
continue commuting,
unti Mexico forecloses on the place.
Of course it will. Even the recent conclusions reached by an Exxon Mobil
about
the future of global oil supplies are wildly optimistic and based on numbers
that industry experts speaking off the record say are significant
exaggerations of supply made for political reasons. Oil is running out,
period, and we may already be past peak oil. From here forward, oil is only
going to get increasingly scarce and more expensive. Demand for oil will
soon
significantly outstrip supply. The growth of China's consumption, combined
with America's unprecedented thirst for energy means that from here forward,
it's a bidding war over increasingly scarce supplies.
Can alternative forms of energy replace oil?
Yes and no. "Yes" because there's plenty of energy all around us that can
replace oil. There's enough solar energy hitting the land in the state of
Arizona, for example, to meet the entire energy needs of the United States.
Likewise, there's enough wind power in Southern Wyoming to power the whole
country, too. But this power is untapped. This is the "No" part of the
answer:
All the energy in the world is useless to you if you can't harness it.
Without
wind turbines, the wind in Wyoming is useless to us. Without solar
panels, the
Arizona desert is likewise useless to us as an energy source. Actually
harnessing these alternative, renewable energy sources would require many
billions of dollars in infrastructure spending, and right now, nobody in
Washington seems to have the foresight to plan for a world without oil.
There
is currently very little investment in developing renewable energy sources.
Thus, the United States may find itself energy starved in the near
future even
though it is surrounded by abundant (unharnessed) energy!
What's the most promising alternative energy technology?
Few people know about this one, but based on my research, it's the most
promising: Concentrated Solar Power, which requires no solar panels at
all. It
works by concentrating sunlight onto a small pipe using cheap parabolic
reflectors. The pipe contains a liquid that's heated to very high
temperatures
by the sun and drives a steam boiler that rotates a turbine to generate
electricity (much like nuclear power plants, but without the nuclear waste).
It's cheap, low-tech, and far more affordable than solar power. Plus, it can
be built in practically any desert, so it doesn't take up valuable land. As
another bonus, when CSP operations are built near the ocean, they can
desalinate ocean water as a side effect, providing fresh water for
irrigation
to grow food. This is the only renewable energy technology I know of
that can
produce cheap energy, fresh water and crop irrigation all at the same time.
Plus, it has no emissions, no toxic chemicals, no nuclear waste and very
little environmental impact.
CSP is, in my opinion, the single most promising technology for renewable
energy. Isn't it interesting that almost nobody is talking about it? The
best
solutions, as usual, are routinely ignored.
What happens when the oil runs out?
That depends on whether the nation is prepared to operate without combustion
engines. If the people have mostly switched over to electric vehicles, then
operating an economy without oil isn't difficult. Sure, other forms of
transportation still need oil, but the greatest consumption of oil is
found in
automobiles.
If the end of oil catches a nation unprepared, then things become quite
chaotic. No oil means no more transportation and farming, and that's really
all you need to know. No farming (or greatly diminished farming capacity)
means no food. The United States, I submit, is about three meals away from
mass social unrest. When the average American finds himself without food for
three meals in a row, the ensuing chaos (riots, etc.) will make the United
States a rather inhospitable place to be. Martial Law will immediately be
declared, and the country will become a police state starvation camp.
This can
all be avoided, by the way, by shifting America away from an oil-based
economy. If transportation is based on electricity rather than oil, none of
these dire predictions need come true.
Why aren't our national leaders doing anything about this?
Because they are either idiots or crooks. I'm not sure whether they're
clever
enough to be considered crooks, so I'm sticking with idiots. The utter
lack of
vision and leadership found in the White House and Congress has been nothing
short of astonishing. As far as the current president goes, Bush seems more
interested in destroying other nations than saving America.
Can't we be saved by growing ethanol as a replacement for oil?
Put bluntly, the idea of growing ethanol to replace oil is one of the most
short-sighted, politically-motivated and outright stupid ideas that has ever
been proposed. This is true for two simple reasons: 1) The more corn you
grow
for fuel, the less corn you have for food, which means that growing enough
corn to replace the oil we presently import would result in mass starvation,
and 2) It takes almost as much oil energy to grow corn than you get from the
resulting ethanol.
In other words, if you want to base your combustion-engine economy on
ethanol,
what you have to do is take over mass acreage of corn croplands, power
all the
farm equipment with oil, convert petroleum to the fertilizers and pesticides
needed for use on the corn, then spend even more energy on processing,
transportation and delivery of the ethanol. So you end up with a nation in a
food shortage (corn is the based food ingredient in the vast majority of
food
products) that's still dependant on fossil fuel oil. So you'd still end up
with an oil crisis, but with starvation as an added side effect. There's no
faster way to destroy the food supply than to promote the widespread growing
of corn for ethanol.
Ethanol, it could be said, is a highly inefficient way to convert oil and
sunlight into fuel. You'd be far better off with CSP, which converts
sunlight
into electricity at much greater efficiency (about 40%).
But what about the massive tar sands in Canada? Can't we get oil from there?
Sure we can, at great expense and with enormous environmental destruction.
Extracting oil from tar sands is a very expensive process. It takes sifting
through two tons of sand to get one barrel of oil, and it costs about 300%
more to refine tar sand oil than the light crude oil coming out of the
ground
in Saudi Arabia. As stated by Richard Heinberg in The End of the Oil Age:
"Oil sands are likewise reputed to be potential substitutes for conventional
oil. The Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta contain an estimated 870
billion to 1.3 trillion barrels of oil -- an amount equal to or greater than
all of the conventional oil extracted to date. Currently, Syncrude (a
consortium of companies) and Suncor (a division of Sun Oil Company) operate
oil sands plants in Alberta. Syncrude now produces over 200,000 barrels
of oil
a day. The extraction process involves using hot-water flotation to remove a
thin coating of oil from grains of sand, then adding naphtha to the
resulting
tar-like material to thin it so that it can be pumped. Currently, two
tons of
sand must be mined in order to yield one barrel of oil. As with oil
shale, the
net-energy figures for oil sands are discouraging. Geologist Walter
Youngquist
notes "it takes the equivalent of two out of each three barrels of oil
recovered to pay for all the energy and other costs involved in getting the
oil from the oil sands.
"The primary method used to process oil sands yields an oily wastewater. For
each barrel of oil recovered, 2.5 barrels of liquid waste are pumped
into huge
ponds. In the Syncrude pond, 14 miles in circumference, 20 feet of murky
water
floats on a 130-foot-thick slurry of sand, silt, clay, and unrecovered oil.
Residents of northern Alberta have engaged in activist campaigns to
close down
the oil sands plants because of devastating environmental problems,
including
displacement of native people, destruction of boreal forests, livestock
deaths, and an increase in miscarriages.
"Replacing conventional crude with oil sands to meet the world's energy
appetite would require about 700 additional plants the size of the existing
Syncrude plant. Together, they would generate a waste pond the size of Lake
Ontario. While oil sands represent a potential energy asset for Canada, they
cannot make up for the inevitable decline in the global production of
conventional oil."
This who promote the "heavy oil" tar sands as some sort of magic-bullet
solution to the world's oil shortage are not thinking clearly. Sure, it
might
contribute several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day to the supply
right
now, and it could even be ramped up to perhaps a couple of million
barrels per
day, but this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the 88 million
barrels
per day in global oil demand expected by 2008. The tar sands cannot replace
Saudi oil, and Saudi oil is starting to run dry.
If this oil problem is so ...
read more »
.
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- After peak oil: Will America survive?
- From: Penny Farthing
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