Tidal energy can only be generated in a few, remote places.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 170) [Bozman]
On the shores of oceans, tides rise and fall predictably day by day. This rising and falling of the tides is a potential source of energy. In a few places, estuaries have been dammed so that water can be let in as the tide rises, and then let out via electricity-generating turbines as the tide falls. For an area with 25foot tides, Odum calculated an EROEI of 15 ? which is the highest net-energy yield for any source he studied. However, this net benefit is substantially reduced when the loss of estuarine fisheries is taken into account. Tidal energy is renewable, clean, and efficient. Unfortunately, there are fewer than two dozen optimal sites for tidal power in the world, and most of those are in remote areas like northwest Russia or Nova Scotia.
ExxonMobil’s report overlooks the faulty assumptions that its data is based on.
Roger Bentley, Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading and Godfrey Boyel, Energy and Environment Research Unit of the Open University, October 29th, ‘7
(Global oil production: forecasts and methodologies, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2008, volume 35) [Bozman]
ExxonMobil annually updates its World Economic and Energy Outlook.(13) We do not know how the company does its modelling, but it recently placed an advertisement (March 2006) headed: `Peak Oil? Contrary to the theory, oil production shows no sign of a peak'. This cites improvements in extraction technology, and says: ``Because of such technology gains, estimates of how much recoverable oil remains have consistently increased over time'' (Exxon's italics). This statement reflects either an overlooking of the fact that the USGS 2000 survey included reserve growth whereas prior surveys did not, or a poor understanding of the size of technology-driven change in 1P or 2P reserve data. If the latter is the case, the company needs to look at recent IHS Energy analysis of reserve growth in their 2P database, see Bentley (2006). Misunderstanding the real effect of technology gain on the world's reserves probably indicates a lack of oil peak modelling expertise within the company. The company would be advised to look in detail at the increasing number of countries going past peak, and develop a model that captures the underlying processes.
AT: World Energy Council Report
The World Energy Council knows nothing about oil-their report proves.
Roger Bentley, Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading and Godfrey Boyel, Energy and Environment Research Unit of the Open University, October 29th, ‘7
(Global oil production: forecasts and methodologies, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2008, volume 35) [Bozman]
A study from the World Energy Council(11) used oil resource data from the Inter- national Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to show that no peak would occur at least before 2030. Unfortunately, IIASA have no great petroleum resources expertise. For example, a list of global reserves and resources they produced did not differentiate between proved and 2P reserves, nor did they comment on the very poor data in the former. In this respect IIASA are, however, informed no more poorly on this issue than many other recognised bodies in the field.
AT: World Energy Outlook Reports
1. Insert IEA Indicts
2. The world energy outlook reports are based on faulty data and make serious technical errors.
Roger Bentley, Department of Cybernetics of the University of Reading and Godfrey Boyel, Energy and Environment Research Unit of the Open University, October 29th, ‘7
(Global oil production: forecasts and methodologies, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2008, volume 35) [Bozman]
The IEA's World Energy Outlook 2000 (IEA, 2000) used the USGS 2000 assessment of a mean 3345 Gb oil `ultimate', where this included NGLs and reserve growth. This number assumes large reserve gains from the future application of technology, even though the USGS figure was based on the notion, one that the USGS themselves raised as unresolved, of whether past `reserve growth' in the US could be extrapolated to other parts of the world. [C Masters, leader of the USGS team for the previous two surveys, had decided against including a large allocation for reserve growth outside the US; see Bentley (2006) for additional discussion on this issue.] Furthermore, the IEA stated that the USGS data were `authoritative', omitting to point out that these data are assessments of yet-to-find, and do not address the issue of the rate at which this oil can be discovered and produced. On the basis of these data the IEA said that adequate reserves existed for global production to meet demand up to their forecast horizon of 2020. It is entirely possible that in this calculation the IEA forgot the principle of resource-limited production peaking which they recognised in 1998, and naively compared the total volume of reserves and yet-to-find with the amount of oil required to meet production up to 2020. In this and subsequent World Energy Outlooks other serious technical errors by the IEA have included confusing proved 1P reserves with 2P reserves; and identifying very large technology-driven reserve growth in the North Sea, where this was based on changes in the 1P data, as opposed to the relatively modest quantities of 2P growth that actually occurred.
***Impacts***
5 Billion Dead
Oil is key to sustaining the world’s carrying capacity-peak oil will kill 5 billion.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, ‘5
(The Party's Over : Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, p. 33) [Bozman]
The third danger of the drawdown strategy is one that is discussed less frequently than either pollution or global warming, though its ultimate implications for humankind may be even more dire. This is our increasing dependency on energy resources that are depleting within historically narrow time frames. There are now somewhere between two and five billion humans alive who probably would not exist but for fossil fuels. Thus if the availability of these fuels were to decline significantly without our having found effective replacements to maintain all their life-sustaining benefits, then the global human carrying capacity would plummet ? perhaps even below its pre-industrial levels. When the flow of fuels begins to diminish, everyone might actually be worse off than they would have been had those fuels never been discovered because our pre-industrial survival skills will have been lost and there will be an intense competition for food and water among members of the now-unsupportable population (Chapter 5 provides a closer look at the likely consequences of the anticipated petroleum depletion.).
Chemical Industry Module
A. Peak oil will collapse the petroleum based chemical industry.
Frederic Leder, Analyst at Esso Research and Engineering & Judith Shapiro, President of Strategic Enterprises, August, ‘8
(Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 8, p. 2840-2842, Science Direct) [Bozman]
You would expect that the prospect of such a serious shortage of oil within a decade would be enough to get the US president and Congress to start contingency planning. The transportation sector alone, which accounts for 75% of total US petroleum consumption, would be the hardest hit. Next in line would be the chemical industry, which is petroleum-based. The immobilization of these two sectors alone is probably enough to send the US economy into a protracted recession. Consumers would also be hard hit as ever higher oil prices affect the cost of food as well as transportation, perhaps requiring the rationing of gasoline as was done during World War II.
B. A thriving chemical industry is necessary to avoid multiple scenarios for extinction.
Chemical and Engineering News, December 6th, ‘99 (Vol 77 No 49)
The pace of change in today's world is truly incomprehensible. Science is advancing on all fronts, particularly chemistry and biology working together as they never have before to understand life in general and human beings in particular at a breathtaking pace. Technology ranging from computers and the Internet to medical devices to genetic engineering to nanotechnology is transforming our world and our existence in it. It is, in fact, a fool's mission to predict where science and technology will take us in the coming decade, let alone the coming century. We can say with finality only this: We don't know. We do know, however, that we face enormous challenges, we 6 billion humans who now inhabit Earth. In its 1998 revision of world population estimates and projections, the United Nations anticipates a world population in 2050 of 7.3 billion to 10.7 billion, with a "medium-fertility projection," considered the most likely, indicating a world population of 8.9 billion people in 2050. According to the UN, fertility now stands at 2.7 births per woman, down from 5 births per woman in the early 1950s. And fertility rates are declining in all regions of the world. That's good news But people are living a lot longer. That is certainly good news for the individuals who are living longer, but it also poses challenges for health care and social services the world over. The 1998 UN report estimates for the first time the number of octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians living today and projected for 2050. The numbers are startling. In 1998, 66 million people were aged 80 or older, about one of every 100 persons. That number is expected to increase sixfold by 2050 to reach 370 million people, or one in every 24 persons. By 2050, more than 2.2 million people will be 100 years old or older! Here is the fundamental challenge we face: The world's growing and aging population must be fed and clothed and housed and transported in ways that do not perpetuate the environmental devastation wrought by the first waves of industrialization of the 19th and 20th centuries. As we increase our output of goods and services, as we increase our consumption of energy, as we meet the imperative of raising the standard of living for the poorest among us, we must learn to carry out our economic activities sustainably. There are optimists out there, C&EN readers among them, who believe that the history of civilization is a long string of technological triumphs of humans over the limits of nature. In this view, the idea of a "carrying capacity" for Earth—a limit to the number of humans Earth's resources can support—is a fiction because technological advances will continuously obviate previously perceived limits. This view has historical merit. Dire predictions made in the 1960s about the exhaustion of resources ranging from petroleum to chromium to fresh water by the end of the 1980s or 1990s have proven utterly wrong. While I do not count myself as one of the technological pessimists who see technology as a mixed blessing at best and an unmitigated evil at worst, I do not count myself among the technological optimists either. There are environmental challenges of transcendent complexity that I fear may overcome us and our Earth before technological progress can come to our rescue. Global climate change, the accelerating destruction of terrestrial and oceanic habitats, the catastrophic loss of species across the plant and animal kingdoms—these are problems that are not obviously amenable to straightforward technological solutions. But I know this, too: Science and technology have brought us to where we are, and only science and technology, coupled with innovative social and economic thinking, can take us to where we need to be in the coming millennium. Chemists, chemistry, and the chemical industry—what we at C&EN call the chemical enterprise—will play central roles in addressing these challenges. The first section of this Special Report is a series called "Millennial Musings" in which a wide variety of representatives from the chemical enterprise share their thoughts about the future of our science and industry. The five essays that follow explore the contributions the chemical enterprise is making right now to ensure that we will successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. The essays do not attempt to predict the future. Taken as a whole, they do not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of the efforts of our science and our industry to tackle the challenges I've outlined above. Rather, they paint, in broad brush strokes, a portrait of scientists, engineers, and business managers struggling to make a vital contribution to humanity's future. The first essay, by Senior Editor Marc S. Reisch, is a case study of the chemical industry's ongoing transformation to sustainable production.
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