peak fossil fuels by 2017

ZQrn

Oh boy, I remember the 'pessimistic' estimates in 1995 still being 2050, and that was near then. The pessimists are always more realistic it seems.

I also read the other day that IPv4 is expected to be saturated in 2010, that's also quite near.

apeiron

Is this a rational summary of his findings?

Again, making the energy/economy link, we are really saying that unless we can find some other energy source, world GDP will peak in 2017 and smoothly decline for ever after. And this transition point looms in seven years on middle-ground assumptions.

The actual range of his worst and best case scenarios for peak fossil fuels is suprisingly narrow - 2012 to 2029.

mheslep

I'm only attempting above to cite Mohr not make deductions (so far). As far as I can tell those are roughly the empirical numbers for case 3 out to the point of depletion/ collapse in production, not a peak (Mohr's figure attached below) I thought near depletion was what you had in mind when you said:
by which I assumed you meant at least a large fraction, if not most, of the existing secondary power plants had to be replaced. Such a case would not come about from a mild transition to post peak production, but only from a collapse in production.

We? At least in the US, energy consumption per capita peaked back in the late seventies yet GDP has managed to increase substantially (per the World Bank):
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=...ion+per+capita
It may be that energy production and GDP is more closely correlated in developing countries like China, which strikes me as intuitive, but I doubt the correlation holds very tightly in developed countries (i.e. how many yachts can one water ski behind?).

Yes. Note that per Mohr 2100 production is still ~450 EJ/y in case 3.

Given one EJ/yr is produced by ~32 GW(e) plants/reactors running at 100% capacity factor, the 131 EJ/yr energy deficit by 2100 would covered by building 45 GW(e) 100% capacity factor non-fossil replacement units (nuclear/solar/wind/geothermal/efficiency improvements/etc.) per year, worldwide, for ninety years. For comparison, China alone has been adding new electric capacity at a rate of ~62 GW(e) per year (fossil and other)
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/China/im...c_by_type2.gif

apeiron

Case 2 is Mohr's best guess choice, case 3 is the optimistic outlier. So long as you are clear about the difference. And again, what is striking is that all three cases are quite narrowly grouped.

On the meaning of a peak, of course I understand that we are roughly saying half gone, so half still left. But we are also saying all the cheap, high EROEI, is gone, now we are left with the expensive low EROEI. Which has obvious direct consequences for economics and politics.

I realise no-one really wants to believe the situation can be as dire as these kinds of studies suggest. So it would cheer me up if you actually had convincing arguments about why there is no reason to worry.

I had a chance to chat with one of your undersecretaries for energy earlier this year. She was quite optimistic about how the US would cope. She cited the figures for how much wind is just waiting to be harnessed in the mid-west. She said Obama's 20 year goals to shift to alternatives would be achieved in 10, because the need was so urgent. It was all very "can do". Yet I still went away feeling I had heard nothing of substance. There was no sense of concrete detail that would actually make any of this happen.

In fact I was reading a study the other week that argued real average wealth in the US has stagnated since the 1970s. And the curves matched oil consumption. I'll try to find it again.

Generally, the correlation is good in the research I've read. And it makes sense that energy is the basis of wealth. A more efficient economy would extract more work from the same amount of energy of course. But this is well understood from basic ecology. And ecological economists are the ones to be listening to these days.

On China, energy consumption has soared in line with GDP as the China miracle has recently been driven by infrastructure - construction.

Unfortunately, all the signs are that what they have been mostly building is a property bubble - whole cities of empty apartment blocks funded by crazy finance.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogsp...s-housing.html

The miracle may shortly prove to be a mirage. Although people are saying the saving grace for China is that it still holds so many US dollars and keeping the dollar artificially high will have proved a good insurance policy.

A crazy age, don't you agree?

mheslep

I'm interested in discussing a model such as Mohr's based on the actual results he obtains and crunching more numbers to see where that might take us (as I did above). However, I don't see the utility in pursuing arbitrary characterizations about what is or is not 'dire' without some kind of verifiable context. By contrast, and for instance, above I attempted to place Mohr's fossil fuel energy deficit as of 2100 in context by showing the feasibility of replacing it. After all, this is a science & engineering forum and I hope to pursue those lines.

I don't see utility in grouping critiques in with some kind of conjured group who are imagined as refusing to 'believe' in the latest Malthusian predictions, or about hand waiving away energy policy proposals without examination as containing nothing of value. Also, the continued reliance on blogs as a point-maker, while sometimes interesting when identified as such, is not useful to build a discussion on firm ground, as one can quickly find blog 'evidence' from no less than tenured professors showing how on 911 it was actually US officials that directed aircraft into the WTC.

I imagine that can only refer to some income inequality discussion, a digression I'd not like to pursue here, as there's no question gross US economic output has seen substantial growth since the 1970s. The data, in real terms, is readily available: US GDP has more than tripled since 1970.

apeiron

Which still does not explain why your analysis is focused on case 3 rather than case 2, except as a personal prejudice.

You have not provided a reason why his best guess middle path is in fact less likely than his most optimistic one.

But yes, it would certainly be interesting to follow up his study with an estimate of the actual gap for his various scenarios, and thus the number of nuclear reactors, wind turbines, or whatever would be needed to fill it.

Office_Shredder

Tripled since 1970... inflation has done far more than that

http://nowandfutures.com/inflation_long_term.html

mheslep

Correct I haven't; I picked one. Mohr provided three cases from a model, a non-peer reviewed model (so far); I'm inclined to pick #3 for the moment.

Well I tried to give it a go above. One EJ/yr requires 32 GW, at 100% capacity factor for electric generation. That translates roughly to (worldwide) any of the following (all electrical cases):
o 31 AP1100 nuclear reactors running at the US average 93% capacity factor (or 15 of the common two reactor plants)
o 32 of the one year increases in Texas wind capacity seen in 2007-2008 (2.76 GW peak) at 37% capacity factor ( or 32 * 1850 1.5 MW wind turbines)
o A 3.5% increase in US electrical generation or usage efficiency, or both. (assuming a 900GW(e) average US electrical load)

Again, all of those provide one EJ/year, with Mohr predicting a ~131 EJ/yr deficit by 2100. So the rate of deficit is about 1.5 EJ/year.

apeiron

This wasn't the study I was looking at, but it is a meta analysis of the energy/GDP correlation of 88 countries.

And here is some data on US stagnation for the ordinary Joe.

CRGreathouse

Wow, that sounds pretty good.

apeiron

OK, cherry-picking the outlier, we still have a story where fossil fuel energy falls off the cliff circa 2020, plummeting ~100 EJ/yr. So it is not a gentle linear decline rate out to 2100 but an energy plunge from 2020 to 2050 (co-inciding with peak population of course).

And then things level out a bit for the next 50 years - based on the one huge compensating factor of shale oil.

So your optimism rests on the US being willing to dig up its backyard when the time comes? Is this what you are saying?

apeiron

It's truly impressive.

You get a thousand people in the room and show them this really big luscious cake and cut it into six peices. You pick out one person in the room and say hey, you look really deserving. Here, have two slices all to yourself. Enjoy! Then you take a third slice and say well this is going to have to be shared by the next 900 of you. Way to go! Outstanding.

Jack21222

This is a very important point which isn't being made enough. We very well may be looking at 9 billion people on the planet by 2050 according to a UN Prediction. Plus, world per capita GDP will continue to rise as it always has, and more GDP generally means more energy.

While production levels off and starts to decline, even in the most optimistic scenarios, energy usage will continue to go up.

CRGreathouse

Does that bother you? I figure my deserts are limited to a fair share of the 6000 BC cake, which is vastly smaller. That my percent share is small means little to me, given the size of the cake.

Office_Shredder

People work hard to make their country and their society better. People go to war and fight and die trying to preserve their country. If you ask a soldier from WWII if he fought so that everyone in America could have a standard of living comparable to 6000BC, and a select few could be super wealthy and own the country, he would say no. If you ask Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin if they did what they did to found this country so that a select few could hoard all the wealth in this country, of course they would say no.

To say that your baseline is living in a cave and hunting animals for dinner is to ignore the fact that hundreds of years of work has been done by people to raise and maintain society as a whole to a better standard of living. If someone then found a way to destroy that and send everyone except for themselves back to the stone age, it should bother you immensely.

russ_watters

That's tripled after inflation. It says so right on the side bar of the graph that all the numbers are adjusted for parity with the 2005 dollar value.

russ_watters

Then later, you go back to them with a much bigger cake and give them a much bigger piece than they had before. Since their stomach hasn't grown with the growing cake, they find themselves well satiated by their bigger piece of cake.

I don't believe that when the rubber meets the road, people's view of their economic situation is based primarily on envy. While that view has a lot of traction on internet forums and maybe even in front of a bar and other places where people like to complain/vent, if your boss called you into his office and gave you a 15.9% raise, your first thought will not be "gee, I wonder what the other guys got", but will rather be "gee, I wonder what I can buy with this".

A person's actual living conditions are based on what they themselves earn, not what someone else earns. If Bill Gates's net worth suddenly doubles over the next year due to a recovery by the stock market, my ability to afford my mortgage will not disappear.