OT: Diy while you can - more on Peak Oil

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

[The Natural Philosopher]

Cant disagree with most of it.

End of civilisation as we know it..

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember The Natural Philosopher saying something like:

Some peculiarity of the .pdf encoder at his end, iwt. Seems to be 'if' and variations.

Slow decline, but time to adapt. Of course, that won't happen very well or in an organised fashion and we'll still breed like rabbits.

[John MacLeod]

I hadn't noticed that the denizens of the western world were breeding like rabbits -- the birthrate in most of the western world is well below replacement level. No idea, of course, to whom the "we" might refer -- or whether it simply refers to any lapine tendencies of Grimly Curmudgeon :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

and die like rabbits..

[The Natural Philosopher]

so we import immigrants who breed like rabbits.

No idea, of course, to whom the "we" might

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember John MacLeod saying something like:

Worldwide, but you knew that.

Of course, some have a head start in the rabbity tendencies.

[The Medway Handyman]

We are doomed Captain Mainwaring, doomed!

[Adam Aglionby]

Victorians peak coal wonder what peak nuclear looks like, or mebbe don`t ;-)

Cheers Adam

[Nightjar]

reserves are fixed. That was a reasonable assumption in the 1950s, when the real price of oil had been declining for decades. It is not a reasonable assumption in a world of high oil prices, where the costs of alternative sources, difficult sources and improved recovery methods become justified.

Current predictions of oil reserves are also based upon the P90 figure - the amount of oil that there is a 90% probability will be recovered. Again, that is a reasonable figure to use for an individual well. However, globally, oil sources, as might be expected, produce around the P50 figure, using which at least trebles the amount of recoverable oil reserves.

While geological oil reserves will, one day, run out, we will have found alternatives long before that happens. Some already exist, but simply cost more than traditional oil sources.

Colin Bignell

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Nightjar saying something like:

Yeah, right. Thanks for the lecture.

[Nightjar]

Always pleased to correct the green myths.

Colin Bignell

[The Natural Philosopher]

Romans certainly worried about peak corn...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Wromng. It just increases the price of oil, to the point where in fact it takes more energy to extract than you get out of it, at which prices its a hugely expensive chemical feedstock, but no longer a fuel.

Oil will never run out, just become useless as a cheap form of energy. Probably in 10-25 years,.

Peak oil isn't anything to do with running out, either, it merely marks the point at which global production starts to reduce.

Actually, we haven't found any alternatives for many things.

[The Natural Philosopher]

with other oilmen myths.

[John MacLeod]

Wouldn't deny it :-). But then I'm not a "gloom and doom" merchant as far as the world's population level is concerned.

[Steve Firth]

If you had thought about it, you wouldn't have posted that tripe.

If the price of oil rises then yes the cost of extraction rises, but the cost of extraction remains the same proportion of the value of oil extracted. Changing the price of oil does not, and cannot change the amount of energy required to extract that oil.

[jgharston]

economy, in particular between exponential economic growth and the availability of cheap fossil fuels"

Ah, so exponential economic growth creates availability of cheap fossil fuels.

Methinks he has that the wrong way round.

JGH

[Spamlet]

Victorians peak coal wonder what peak nuclear looks like, or mebbe don`t ;-)

Cheers Adam

As with now, all of them didn't but some of them did.

Interestingly John Lawes, some of whose experiments at Rothamsted Agricultural Research Station are still running 50 years later, was one of the first to warn about possible dangers of releasing CO2 into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. As a 'father of the fertiliser industry' he was also a key player in enabling the unsustainable population growth that has further accelerated the fossil fuel use he was concerned about; and his descendants at Rothamsted are still trying to 'feed the world' even now...

[Roger Chapman]

I don't think that interpretation was intended. OK so it would have been simpler to have maintained the same order in the second part of the sentence as the first but the sentence itself refers to "the inherent link", not cause and effect. If you get the exponential economic growth (the effect) it will have been driven by cheap fossil fuels (the cause) and if you have cheap fossil fuels you will get exponential economic growth.