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The end of cheap oil will mean human extinction.

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Seems a bit extreme, but he has a point.

Edited to add the url manually. Can't somebody fix that button?

http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature5.cfm?REF=222

[ 10 May 2005: Message edited by: Cougyr ]

EMBARGOED BOOK CLAIMS SAUDI OIL INFRASTRUCTURE RIGGED FOR CATASTROPHIC SELF-DESTRUCTION

Its Gerald Posner, so obviously we have to take this with a big grain of salt. But what if he's right? Is this plausible?

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According to a new book exclusively obtained by the Huffington Post, Saudi Arabia has crafted a plan to protect itself from a possible invasion or internal attack. It includes the use of a series of explosives, including radioactive “dirty bombs,” that would cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades.

Bestselling author Gerald Posner lays out this “doomsday scenario” in his forthcoming “Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection” (Random House).

posner_cover.jpgAccording to the book, which will be released to the public on May 17, based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.

To make certain that the damaged facilities cannot be rebuilt, the Saudis have deployed crude Radioactive Dispersal Devices (RDDs) throughout the Kingdom. Built covertly over several years, these dirty bombs are in place at -- among other locations -- all eight of the Kingdom’s refineries, sections of the world’s largest oil field at Ghawar, and at three of the ten indispensable processing towers at the largest-ever processing complex at Abqaiq.

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It will mean a very large reorganization of our economies, and a nasty bit of dislocation as things shift around. There will still be oil for many of the things we use it for (like plastic), we just won't have as much of it.

The end of the Oil Era will also result in either lack of food or food that is so expensive that only a few will be able to afford it. The author says that people will have to reorganize on a community basis to grow their own food and become more self-sufficient.

Here is Alberta we're investing billions to get tarsand production up in 20 years from around a million barrels a day up to 3 million. I'd guess, however, that since the world is going to collapse and mankind will become 'extinct' that all the investment is just a silly waste of time.

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Originally posted by fossilnut:
There's probably also books coming out next month on alien abduction and the latest scientific evidence on the Sasquatch.

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If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.

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Wouldn't it make more sense to invest all those millions in renewable, non-polluting resources like sun, wind, geothermal power instead of wasting time, energy, and money on short term gain? Mind you, a few will become very wealthy, and the rest of us will still be energy serfs and the earth will get more polluted. What's the point?

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Originally posted by fossilnut:

Here is Alberta we're investing billions to get tarsand production up in 20 years from around a million barrels a day up to 3 million. I'd guess, however, that since the world is going to collapse and mankind will become 'extinct' that all the investment is just a silly waste of time.

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Well worth doing; the price will be sky-high so I'm sure that despite the expense of extraction y'all will be making a mint. Or at least the CEOs and major stockholders will.

But 3 million barrels, even if it's totally achievable, will not make up for the reduction in world supply combined with the increases in world demand. Some bad craziness gonna happen.

Without being pollyannaish I would like to point out a couple of pieces of good technological news on the energy front.

The first is the availability of bright white leds. Cuts the energy cost of light by a factor of 1,000. In terms of electricity usage, that knocks about 30% off the demand.

The second is a successful experiment to produce hydrogen using electricity and (I think) bacteria, something organic anyway. Claims to reduce the voltage required for electrolysis by a factor of 6. Assuming constant resistance (a good bet, think) that means the power requirement goes down by a factor of 36 (6 squared). I can imagine solar powered steam generators (sunlight is a kilowatt per square metre) chonking out hydrogen in the Arabian desert and using existing tranport infrastructure to ship it around. Still need to pound out the storage and transport problems.

However, this will not be enough. We are going to have to change our ways. However, there is also some good news on this front (not enough though).

There was a reference in the other thread to doom and gloom scenarios in the 70's that didn't transpire. I am not sure exactly what the reference was. I suspect in part to "The Limits to Growth". Most attacks on that work miss the point. The Standard Model in that work was what the authors saw as happening at the time. They did not expect that everything would continue to happen in that way.

They were right, things changed.

In their sensitivity analyses of the modeling system, they concluded that the critical issue was unlimited exponential population growth.

Good news. That is no longer happening. Current projections peak around 2050 (as I recall).

Even the old Grope & Flail is running a week-long series of articles on (peak) oil - and to my surprise, they're not all titled "Don't Worry. The Market Will Solve Everything".

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Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from investing your time and money into your alternative resources.

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Uh huh. And I'm sure the the Provincial and Federal Governments will be only too happy to kick in the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars in grants, loan guarantees, and subsidies to make it all go, just like they did for Suncor and Syncrude, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Husky, Petro-Can, Talisman, BP, etc, etc, etc.

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Even the old Grope & Flail is running a week-long series of articles on (peak) oil - and to my surprise, they're not all titled "Don't Worry. The Market Will Solve Everything".

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I'm glad you mentioned this series of articles. I think they should be read. They are not sugar coating the current state of the industry.

At the same time, they are trying to be 'balanced' so they include quotes from a variety of sources without commenting on the validity of those sources.

My favourite was in the first article, a quote from Peter Huber, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institue:

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In the meantime, Mr. Huber says, wasting energy should be a virtue, not a vice, because the faster we use it up, the better we get at finding new supplies, and the less our economy depends on energy.

"Energy begets more energy; tomorrow's supply is determined by todays' demand," Mr. Huber and Mr. Mills conclude in "The Bottomless Well."

"The more energy we seize and use, the more adept we become at finding and seizing more."

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Pogo
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I agree that it won't be the end of civilization. It will radically alter our habits. Within a short period of time we will have to readjust our consumer behaviour as energy choices will become a bigger determinant of our disposable incomes.

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What disposable incomes are you referring to? One of the first effects of oil peak will be massive unemployment. That will get worse as oil supplies shrink.

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A number of companies make little or no allowance for transportation. Those that do often guess at the costs.

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Nowadays the trucks that transport goods around the country are wired into central computerized systems that track everything the truck does every minute of every day. Costs are calculated to the thousandth of a penny. I don't know where you get the idea that transport costs are guesses.

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As logistics become more central to an organizations bottom line we will see less use of transportation. Much of the globalization we have seen will be reversed as businesses track down local suppliers who can avoid the freight costs. Small local plants. It won't be all bad.

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And these small local plants will spring up out of what? The material to build the plant will still require transport, as will the materials processed in the plant.

One of the reasons for a few central plants is they are much more efficient users of resources than many smaller plants spread out.

In any case, each little town is not going to have a television factory, bathtub factory, car factory, foundries, steel plants, plastics factories, etc., etc., etc.

If you really want to know what a society that uses little oil looks like, look at those societies which currently use very little oil:

Cameroon, Ghana, Congo, Bangladesh, Sudan, Chad...those are real world examples of little oil use.

[ 25 May 2005: Message edited by: maestro ]

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Pogo:
I agree that it won't be the end of civilization. It will radically alter our habits. Within a short period of time we will have to readjust our consumer behaviour as energy choices will become a bigger determinant of our disposable incomes.

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Actually It may very well end civilization which is not a bad thing at all. Certainly there will be people who make sure civilization stays down. And economics. And concepts like the 'consumer' as well as economics in general may well become obsolete.

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There's also the impending ecological collapse which will be a double whammy for the civil order of the world.

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I sometimes wonder if oil will run out before global warming is irreversible.

The military dudes will roam the earth in search of gasoline like those evil guys in a Mad "bad Mel" Max movie.

Worst case, the planet can carry about 1B people without any technology at all. However, oil or no oil, we have learned a lot in the last couple of hundred years. We will be able to use that knowledge.

First, oil isn't just going to disappear once we hit peak. Ther's going to be a long slow slide as production ceases to match demand. The stuff will become much more expensive. Drastic changes are to be expected in how we use it. The days of hopping in one's car and blithely hitting the road will be gone, eventually. Large-scale, mechanized agriculture dependent on hydrocarbon inputs will decline. Etc., etc. .. but it's *not* going to happen overnight.

On the electrical side, the increasing cost of oil will create intense pressure to switch to nuclear electrical generation and coal-fired plants. There is still *lots* of coal. Ugh.

Humans aren't going to go extinct. We'll still have some form of a technology-based society. There will be trade. Hell, decades before oil was discovred, my ancestors were roaming the globe in clipper ships, with tea and silks from China, salt fish from the Maritimes, china from England, and rum and molasses from the Caribbean in their holds. (Of course, in the process, they cut down all the large trees that could build that sort of ship ...)

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Originally posted by arborman:
Worst case, the planet can carry about 1B people without any technology at all.

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Originally posted by Vigilante:
I think a permacultural society is possible with a pop of 1 Billion.

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Just google 'Biodiesel'. If we are really desperate I think diesel engines can run on just cooking oil.

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The Associated Press looks at peak oil

But wait! The Grope and Flail says NON! to panic.

And they give nine reasons not to!

[ 28 May 2005: Message edited by: Américain Égalitaire ]

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And they give nine reasons not to!

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At long last, ladies and gentlemen, the mainstream media have discovered peak oil. Therefore, we can now talk about the subject without being labeled as tinfoil hatters:

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Your right, it does seem to support your point of view. What it doesn't seem to do lend any creadence to any of the specific claims made in this or any other peak oil threads. It does not say for example that we will have to arm ourselves to protect our food supply or that Pax Americana.

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OK, counter the points the the guy made.

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Here are the points, and comment:

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1. The end of the world is always a day away. Geologist M.King Hubbert was correct in 1956 when he predicted U.S. oil production would peak in the 1970s. He was wrong about world oil production, however, which in 1969 he said would peak in 2000. Five years later, his followers are still guessing, using a malleable range of 2005 to 2036.

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As others, including Mathew Simmons, energy adviser to the Bush administration have suggested, we may have already reached peak.

The problem is there is enough normal up and down 'noise' that you don't know whether you've hit peak until some years after.

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2. There is no shortage. U.S. inventories of crude oil are higher than they've been in six years and imports are flowing ashore. Prices of oil futures contracts suggest "that supplies are more than merely adequate, they are enormous." Dennis Gartman, trader and will-known newsletter writer, said this week.

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AS we will see, oil futures contracts are more expensive as they get further into the future. That means oil traders believe the price will get higher further on.

As to the 'shortage'. The strategic reserve of the US is about 600 million barrels which sounds like a lot. However, at current consumption rates, it's about a one month supply.

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3.We're finding oil - without even really trying. Low oil prices through the 1990s discouraged oil exploration, yet global reserves rose 12 per cent from 1993-2003. The planet, at the start of 2004, had proved reserves of 1.15 trillion barrels, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the industry's numbers bible. If exploration was halted, the world still has enough oil for four decades at current consumption rates.

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This is just nonsense. Last year in Alberta there were almost 20,000 wells drilled (natural gas and oil). It's not just flowing up from the ground.

And look at that will ya, a whole 40 year supply.

Humans have a recorded history of ten thousand years. Does anyone think the oil supply, with or without exploration, will last that long?

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4.Oil sands. BP only recognizes a small portion of Alberta's recoverable oil sands crude. If BP used the same number as the Alberta government and the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world's proved reserves would jump another 14 per cent.

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And if frogs had wings, they could fly instead of flop. In question 3, he referred to the BP book as the industry 'bible'. The reason it's the industry bible is because it is the most reliable source. Besides, this says nothing about the energy input required to extract all that lovely oil soaked sand. They're already using between 800 million and 1 billion cubic feet of natural gas every day to get that stuff.

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5.The present is not always the future. The end of cheap oil is predicated on demand soaring well past supply over the next two decades. But world demand has a tendency to ease up when supply is tight and prices are high. It happened in the 1970s and it's happening again. The Chinese, among others, are pulling back. Oil's only poked above $50 in just the past six months or so and already demand is being hit. It's hard to see how oil could average $50 for the rest of the decade, as industry types predict, without killing demand - and sinking prices.

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It might kill US demand, but there is still India and China, growing like mad. Even as their growth slows, their demand for oil is going to increase.

And just to give you and idea, if the people of China and India used oil at the same rate as the US does, they would require 156 million barrels/day. Current world supply is about 81 million barrels/day.

As you can see, even if they used oil at only a quarter the rate of the US, they would still be using half of the current world supply daily.

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6.The media often get it backwards. In early 1999, The Economist predicted oil, then around $10 a barrel, would "soon" be at $5. By December, it was $25 and The Economist had a piece that month entitled, "We woz wrong." In October, 2002, the New Yorker cover illustration showed a stock market chart plunging ever lower - published the same month the bear market ended. This year, there's been no shortage of "end of cheap oil" declarations in headlines everywhere. In an Economist survey of oil in April, it was noted, "The time when we could count on cheap oil...is clearly ending."

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In that the next 'reason' is the same as the last, I'll comment below.

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7.Question the consensus. When a huge majority of "experts" come to the same conclusion, it pays to be wary. "We've called much of the 'new era,' 'new paradigm'-typed clichés from [Wall] Street to be 'concept buying,' which really is no more than a form of group think," Merrill Lynch analyst John Herrlin said this month.

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These are not arguments. This is just someone saying people have been wrong. That's true, people have been wrong. Are they wrong this time? There is nothing in these reasons to suggest that.

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8.Spare production capacity is on the rise. One of the great fears of the past year is the lack of excess capacity, which really is a gauge of the world's ability to handle a supply shock. OPEC spare capacity is back to two million barrels a day (up from one million last year) and is at the same level it was at through much of the mid-1990s - when oil was around $20.

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This is a bit disingenuous. Spare capacity has shrunk a lot since the eighties, when it amounted to 30% of use. Now it's about 1.5 - 2%. A slight variation is not going to mean much. But the huge decrease in spare capacity over the last 25 years does.

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9.A Spanish dance bodes well. The prices of oil futures contracts are in "contango," meaning that oil purchased this month is cheaper than a contract for oil later this year. Oil bulls believe that means prices will sty high. But when the market went contango in 1998 and 2001, the actual situation presaged price weakness, according to Strategic Energy and Economic Research Inc.

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This is in direct contradiction to reason 2, wherein he quoted someone as saying

"Prices of oil futures contracts suggest "that supplies are more than merely adequate, they are enormous."

If oil futures contracts are suggesting supplies are huge, why are the oil bulls saying different.

Difference is, they're talking with money, the guy quoted was talking with his mouth.

[ 30 May 2005: Message edited by: maestro ]

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed a Fisking.

(edit for spelling)

[ 30 May 2005: Message edited by: Igor the Miserable ]

Of ancillary interest is the intent of articles such as the one appearing in the Grope. Without trying to get too much into "conspiracy theories" which have come under discussion in babble, there seems to be a concerted effort in the media to at least muddy the waters on peak oil so as not to draw too much concern in the markets among smaller investors. I think the major players are aware of what's going on.

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Originally posted by Igor the Miserable:
Thanks maestro.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed a Fisking.

(edit for spelling)

[ 30 May 2005: Message edited by: Igor the Miserable ]

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Fisking is different from flaming, with which it is sometimes confused. Though a fisking may contain a substantial amount of derision or scorn or even profanity, it is never solely a stream of mere verbal abuse.

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Well, I hope this fisking wasn't too tedious...CMOT did ask for a rebuttal of the nine points.

[ 30 May 2005: Message edited by: maestro ]

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I really don't think they understand the concept of a finite supply. In their world, there is always more. That's what growth means.

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How 'bout:

When a right-wing war n' torture mongering idiot intersperses a cogent leftist analysis with a series of asinine, irrelevant, and incomprehensible observations, supposedly offered as some sort of critique of the analysis being defaced.

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Originally posted by maestro:
I believe that capitalism is the problem. Within a capitalist system, there can be no prior restraint. That includes the restraint of finiteness of resources.

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We aren't the first people to cause the extinction of another species.

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True enough. We have the example of Easter Island, where the folks cut down all the trees to help make statutes.

In the end they destroyed their livelyhood, and their environment.

Perhaps we could say the capitalism is a continuation of that fine human tradition. It's also true that capitalism is much more efficient at ridding us of resources.

A little note on Fisking. I would much prefer to call it a Twaining, after Mark Twain, one of the greatest American writers. He did a piece on Deerslayer that had me rolling on the floor.

It was slightly different in that he examined Fenimore Cooper's writing and showed how Cooper broke the twenty rules of fiction.

It really is one of the best pieces of writing done by Twain, and worthwhile reading for anyone. Unfortunately I don't have the damn book in front of me, but I think the piece was called 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences.'

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Originally posted by maestro:
True enough. We have the example of Easter Island, where the folks cut down all the trees to help make statutes.

In the end they destroyed their livelyhood, and their environment.

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[smartass]Well, all those laws needed lots of paper to print them on.[/smartass]

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