Yeah, that may happen, but not overnight. Technology improves, and more efficient ways of doing things start to be introduced into the methods of digging up oil. Back in the 70's and 80's, finding oil was about guessing where the biggest well was, and drilling in that general vicinity and hope you get something. It was like hitting an elephant with a shotgun in a room while blindfolded. Nowadays, we have computer generated maps and charts to go with the exploration. Everything is more precise. It's now like having a champion archer hit a bullseye at 20 feet. The oil wells are smaller, but we now can drill those pretty accurately. Still, a 'small' well is about 5 miles x 5 miles x 5 miles in size. They can go even smaller than that if they want, but the money's just not there. If technology had stayed the same since the 70's and 80's, and we could only dig up the massive oil wells, we'd have a huge energy crisis and probably be paying $1000+ per barrel of oil now. Also consider that newer methods for extracting oil are being invented, such as squeezing it out of shale and tar sands, as well as tech related to helping conserve oil, such as windmills, hydro, and even hybrid or electric cars, and hopefully this means we can dig out more oil, as well as use less of it. Peak oil only benefits OPEC and puts more political power into their hands, and most people think they have enough clout already.
If I was OPEC, I would be pushing the concept of peak oil hard. Why? It allows prices to be raised without an actual strain on supply.
The purity of the oil is a big, big deal. Technology has improved in the past 20 years, but its not cheap to extract from the tar sands just yet. On the other hand, it is cheap for the Iraqis to extract their oil and refine it. Or, cheapER at least.
For starters, I'm still not convinced that burning fossil fuels is harmless to our enviornment. Second, as populations grow and economic and political relationships change, the cost of extracting oil from anywhere, especially the abundant sources, will grow. What do they say about putting all of one's eggs into one basket? For these reasons, I strongly feel that energy diversification and alternative energy technologies should be our ultimate goal. I know that given the density of the energy contained in a barrel of oil coupled with the low cost of extracting that barrel will make it the energy of choice in the near future, but hopefully, 50 years from now this won't be the case.
Hydrogen is not cheap to produce. You have to electrolyze water to make it, a process that consumes more energy than the hydrogen will produce when it's burned. Hydrogen is a good store of energy, but you'll need some renewable source of energy (or some as-yet-undiscovered catalyst) to make it, otherwise you lose more than you gain. If the supply of a non-renewable resource is good for 100 years or more and cheap, it makes no sense to replace it with a more expensive alternative even if the alternative is "renewable." The argument that a resource is finite is not sufficient to justify precluding its use. There are no infinite resources.
The concept of peak oil is misunderstood, IMO. The measuring stick is always within a given area, i.e. the United States. But taking this logic into account, there is peak everything, from water, to wood, and any other finite resource. There are always other areas to explore, including the depths of the ocean. We aren't near finished using the oil up on land, and there is literally 2/3rds more area to extract oil from. It's also a give and take among OPEC. If prices go high, and stay there, they make money hand over fist for awhile, but guess what? People start digging the oil sands. They start digging shale. The start building platforms in the middle of the ocean and taking oil from there. They start inventing more and better ways to extract oil from other sources, and car companies start inventing new ways to reduce oil consumption. That is a really bad thing if said country depends on oil to keep their people from starving and rioting. If oil is $80 a barrel, alternative sites like the Alberta Tar Sands become too costly to pursue. $100 and thereabouts is around the point people start looking for other sources. OPEC's best interests is to keep oil prices high, but no so high as to reach a tipping point where people start looking to other sources.
I'm not so much concerned with the idea of running out of oil as the idea of being so dependent on a region that's essentially our enemy. China as a trade partner is fine -- they don't want to kill us, just run the show economically. The middle east is working on destorying us, so honestly it's like hiring a guy who wants to rape your daughter to work in the garden -- sure he'll do it, but you really have no one to blame but yourself when he does what he said he was going to do. Same with the middle east -- they say over an over "we want you dead" so we hire them to send us energy. We're both funding (via petrodollars) and fighting terror at the same time. That makes no sense what so ever. If I had an oil company, I'd make sure that the people I traded with had no connection to terrorism. It would cost more, but you know that no money spent on my oil is going back to the Jihad. Peak oil will happen someday, just not yet. And for my money, I think cars should be run on biodiesel, because it doesn't require re-inventing the car. If you replaced the fuel with hydrogen or something, that means everyone must buy a brand new car -- people just can't afford to buy a brand new car just because the intelligensia pushes it. Biodiesel only requires a $100 or so part. It's expensive, but much less than buying a new car.
You're sorta lumping everyone together there as "enemy." Most of the states in the Middle East that supply oil are definitely NOT our enemy. And dependency is a two way street: without our oil dollars, they have no economies. I'm not sure China wants to run the show so much as benefit to the maximum extent possible from the show. Not really. Al-Qaida, the Taliban, a lot of radical Islamists? Sure. But we're not on any collision course with any country except, perhaps, Iran. And their own people are beginning to subvert that government. When you lump every aspect of the Middle East into "the enemy," of course it makes no sense. But the dollars we send aren't going to people who are the enemy except to the extent that they go to the economies of entire nations. I think that's done now. What company is going to invest in oil infrastructure if the likelihood is that terrorists will destroy it? Yes, on the automobile side that's an easy conversion. But changing the economy to produce enough bio-diesel for millions of vehicles to run on is a bit of a tall order.
Take a look at the once-called "oil companies" and how they've been diversifying and calling themselves "energy companies" in recent years. The transition's being made. As for hydrogen technology, before their faith in overseas banks fucked up their economy, Iceland was well on its way to all-hydrogen cars. When you're sitting on top of thermal vents so hot and consistent you can grow bananas and pineapples above the Arctic Circle, it's cheap and easy to make hydrogen cells.
90% PR, 10% CYA. I'll believe they're diversified when a significant amount of their profits come from somewhere other than petroleum. They have a small population, and a large amount of geothermal energy, so running their cars on hydrogen might be economically feasible. If every nation had huge thermal vents, then we'd probably all use that as our source of energy...
They could implement the technology tomorrow. But they'd rather wait until the consumer is desperate enough to buy at their prices. Sure. Which is why there is no one-size-fits-all. You customize the technology to local needs. There's no reason, for example, that the entire State of California can't run on a combination of solar/wind, with maybe a little tidal technology thrown in to cover the June Gloom.
The Saudis know that and they are smart. They said back when oil had fallen to $40 a barrel that they believe $80 a barrel was a good price and that it would get back there and stay for a while. They are going to ease it up, but they know better than to run it up to $120 or more again for a while. If they do we continue seeking out alternative energy at a faster rate again. All those oil field projects that got put on hold because the price fell will reopen, but this time the infrastructure is already in place and we can hit the ground running.
What technology? Even if they had some new technology ready to roll, my car still runs on gasoline. So do millions of others. All of the oil companies' capital is for extracting, transporting, and refining oil. That's what they do. That's how they make money. You can't flip a switch at the refinery and start pouring out hydrogen instead of gasoline. It just doesn't work that way. Any new system of energy is going to take years of development and billions of dollars in investment to produce on a scale anywhere near where oil is today. Doubtful. You're going to need a lot of solar panels to generate that much electricity. And solar panels ain't cheap. Wind power is good but inconsistent. Using those methods means storing electricity for night/non-windy periods, and that is difficult/expensive to do as well.
It isn't. I'm still not sure what effect it is having on global warming, but it has plenty of other effects that are not good. And it may be that there is an effect on global warming, too; from what I'm seeing, the jury is still out. Good reasons. And I can add another one: Geopolitical realities mean it would be much better not to be dependent on foreign powers that vary from "moderately friendly" to "downright unfriendly" for the survival of our very lifestyle. If we could get all the oil we needed from our own production and from Canada, that would be different, but the economics of the situation at present mean we can't. If we had alternative energy production, it might be possible to reach that goal, though.
I think that any company with a cheaper and more efficient source of energy to sell and doesn't is totally working towards their own detriment. There are alternate sources of energy available, but none of them give you the amount of energy per dollar as oil. The day that changes is the day that we get a different primary source of energy. My problem is that knowing that processes become more efficient as they develop, no one is working on more efficient ways to deliver alternative energy because oil is so abundant. This is putting all of your eggs into the same basket.
I'm just listening to the CFOs on the quarterly reports. I guess by you they have their heads up their asses as well. Or maybe they're just lying to their investors. There's probably a Trinity of reasons why they'd do that. No, it really isn't. They've been diversifying for over a decade. Some are a little slower on the uptake than others (ExxonMobil is more interested in M&A than R&D), but read the investor materials or listen to the quarterly reporting from BP and Shell, et al. Hell, even their public websites will give you an inkling to the pipeline. They can't figure out a way to patent sunshine, but they're working on everything else. They've also been partnering with the automakers to find alternatives to gasoline, and I'm not just talking corn-based ethanol. The financial crisis has fucked that up, at least temporarily, but a smart investor would have been taking a hard look at hydrogen fuel technology being manufactured in countries where it was cheap to do so. You're an investor. Follow the money. You're thinking of those clunky panels people put on their houses in the 70s. That tech has also been streamlined, and guess who's investing heavily in it? That's right, the "oil" companies. (Calling them "oil companies" is so 80s. They're marketing themselves as energy companies now.) Know anything about tidal tech? Plenty of ocean out there. Again, when you say "alternative energy" to the average person, they're thinking "Oh, damn hippies putting solar panels on their roofs and running the VW van on used cooking oil." That's not what we're talking about here. It's funny how many of you guys are "Go, nukes!" despite its complications, but you can't work up the same enthusiasm for a combined constellation of methodologies that would do the same thing without freaking out the NIMBYs. Again, depends on which energy company you're talking about. They've all got the tech working at the R&D level. It's what they do with it next that's the variable. They don't really want to be innovative; they want to see what the other kids are doing first. There's a continuum of conservative thinking, with ExxonMobil at the tight end of the sphincter, and others like BP and Shell willing to say, Okay, how can we maximize this? Do we want to be the first kid on the block to put this development out there? Hmm, how's the political situation in Nigeria? Getting volatile again? Maybe it's time for us to roll out the "friendly GREEN energy company" mythology again. No one wants to be the first one to offer something cheaply, because then the kid across the street will come out with the "New, Improved and Much Better than the Other Guy's" product...at a "premium" cost. And don't you want to spend more money than your neighbor in order to have a "premium" product? Lemmings.
Working on something and delivering it on a mass scale are two different things. And, as I said, even if THEY were capable of bringing some new form of energy to the market tomorrow, virtually all of the vehicles owned by the public would be incompatible with it...it would take years for any significant changeover to happen. Yes, but I'm a scientist, too. And I contemplate the physics and the economics involved. Hydrogen would be a wonderful fuel--if it occurred in huge amounts naturally. As it is, we have to make it somehow, usually from electrolysis of water. This consumes more energy than the resulting hydrogen will produce. Hydrogen will only be a fuel for automobiles when someone comes up with a MASSIVE system of renewable energy plants to make it. I work in the electronics business. I've seen--many times--the gulf between the claim of a company announcing they have a small prototype working in a lab somewhere and the reality of delivering it to the market. I read about a technology that will allow companies to "print" solar cells cheaply. Supposedly, we'll cover everything with these printed cells and get lots of solar for free. Great. But where is it? I read the first article years ago. And how will that help me power my car? Know anything about environmentalist groups? Let's see how far this goes when someone tries to build a REAL plant (not a prototype or a pilot project, but a for-real, large-scale plant that can deliver a lot of electricity). I haven't seen anything in real, honest-to-God production that makes me thing otherwise. The government is even subsidizing installation of these old, expensive solar panels on people's houses right now. Thousands of dollars of panels to save hundreds in electricity... Nuclear works and it's scalable. It's proven to be an effective generator of electricity. Other countries have shown they can generate virtually all of their electricity with it.
I wonder if the people addicted to whale oil said the same thing about filthy ol' petroleum back in the day? You set up those plants in places like Iceland, and you ship the hydrogen cells worldwide. Hell, right now shipping a kiwifruit from New Zealand to the States costs more in fuel than the kiwifruit is worth, but it's being done. Kiwifruit =/= hydrogen cells. Tough equation. It's not the technology that's holding them up. It's the bean counters saying "No, no, no, not yet. Wait until oil goes over $100 a barrel and people are panicking." And that's where your marketing people could do some real good, by sweet-talking Greenpeace, et al. before they implement this stuff. Somebody point out to the folks running the Greenpeace boats just how much fuel they'd be burning to try to blockade the deep-water plants Way Out There, and how much better it is to use the nice ocean that Mother Nature gave us instead of dirty old oil. But nobody thinks of being proactive. Maybe things are slower up north, but I've seen the technology down here. Couple of my neighbors run their a/c year-round and are selling electricity back to SoCal Ed. If it can be done on a small, individual scale... Okay, three words: Spent fuel rods. Honest question: What do you do with them, and how long can you keep doing it? Now, I'm not saying I'm agin it, though Azure, et al. like to pretend I am. I'm simply saying, Here we go again. One size fits all. Nukes are the answer to everything. Are they, really?
As long as the new product did what the old one did cheaper and easier, I suspect they didn't care. That prospect does not seem to be on offer here: the "new" systems are all more expensive. Maybe. Provided places like Iceland (1) have enough capacity and (2) are willing to sustain all the infrastructure necessary. There's an important way that hydrogen is not like kiwifruit: it's extremely volatile. It isn't about panic. It's about making sense. There are many sources of oil that are plentiful but very capital and labor intensive to exploit. Oil from these methods may cost $80/barrel to supply. If the market price for oil is, say, $75/barrel, this oil--though plentiful--is worthless. If it costs the oil company $80/barrel to supply it, but they only recoup $75/barrel when they sell it, each barrel is a LOSS of $5. How many investors do you see signing up for that? It's simple, really: oil is cheap. Even now, it's cheap. While oil is still on the market, no one is going to introduce new energy systems that are MORE EXPENSIVE. Why would they? No one who has a choice would buy them. Any new system has to be competitive with oil on price, otherwise NO ONE will adopt it who has a choice. My experience suggests that Greenpeace and the like are fairly absolutist in their opposition to power generation, almost to the point of being Luddites. But even without the environmental groups, you'll still have citizens' groups that will oppose it: look at the people in Massachusetts who opposed offshore windpower even though the windmills would not be visible from shore. The day a wave generation plant opens, is the day you'll start seeing environmental reports that will push the idea that taking energy out of the tides does harm to the ecosystem near the shore. Count on it. ...it means nothing. These things are subsidized. Heavily. They could never make it on their own economic merits. I suppose we could all get a subsidy, but, of course, we're paying the taxes that fund the subsidy and, if we factored those into account, we'd see it's a losing game... The U.S. spent 30 years and billions of dollars preparing Yucca Mountain--in one of the most desolate, remote places of the country--to store these and the current administration killed it. That effectively ended the prospects for nuclear power in this country. No. Even in nuke-heavy France, there is a portion of their electricity generated by non-nuclear sources. And until there are large numbers of electric cars, nukes can't effectively power vehicles. But they can be a very large part of an overall system of supply and they don't require any new development. They even attach very nicely to the existing electric grid. We need a variety of sources, many options for supply. Then they can be operated as conditions--and economics--warrant. This cannot be planned in advance; no one knows what the price of energy will be for all of the methods in 20 years. (Which is why California is absolutely stupid: the state government has locked-in the proportion supplied by various methods in 2020. They can't possibly know what the prices will be then. Stupid.)
How about this: solar cells that produce energy, that is used to electrolyze water, that is then used to produce hydrogen?
Probably take an ASSLOAD of solar cells to produce a comparatively-miniscule amount of hydrogen, but that's just my guess.
Or how about this: A country with unlimited thermal and hydroelectric energy sources can make hydrogen cells dirt cheap and sell them to the rest of the world.
