I agree. You said, despite the new IEA report, that cheap oil is/will decline at 2% a year. I don’t know where that came from, but it doesn’t matter even if true. What is important is the overall decline rates of @9% in old fields and 6.7 overall. How in the world can oil declining in availability not be important? How does that not impact prices and economic development?

Please note that in the recessions in @ ‘73 and @ ‘79 GDP and oil production fell by the same percentage. Is this coincidence? I think not. What we are likely to see is an exacerbation of the energy problem due to reduced development of oil production because of financial issues. Thus, when the economy attempts a rebound, the energy won’t be there to support it.

A simple way of looking at it is this: Approximately 1 to 1.2 Trillion recoverable barrels left of crude. Over the next 12 years we will likely use between 200B and 300B barrels. That puts us squarely into the 50 to 60% depletion range, and nowhere to go but down. (This is optimistic, actually, as replacing 4 KSA’s is a joke and decline should be even sharper.)

That is, 2008 is likely to be the peak of a plateau that started four years ago, and we will almost certainly never go above that. Sans major developments in renewables/alternatives, we are in deep doo-doo.

Without the energy development requires, it can’t happen.

Cheers

Someone feel free to correct my thinking, I’m way out of my knowledge base. That said…

Seems like we’ve got about 24 gigwatts of installed wind turbines. And they’re producing about 2% of our power.

We’re installing about 6 gigs this year (2008). Hard to believe that we couldn’t install 4x as much if we decided to. Crank it up and bring another 2% per year on line.

We get about 50% of our electricity from coal. 50%/2% says that we could get coal free by 2033. Now add in some thermal solar, geothermal, PV, negawatts….

I just don’t get it when people say “no way by 2030″.

I doubt that the current economic downturn will have much, if any, effect on battery development. Manufacturers now have the smell of the grain bag in their nose and they’re not likely to be deterred from speeding toward the finish line. There’s a lot of money to be made in battery sales in years to come.

Mass purchase of PHEVs/BEVs could be a good thing. Apparently one of the reasons that battery packs are so expensive is an economy of scale problem. It’s like lots of other new technologies, if we can get production levels up we often can bring retail prices down.

Having the government buy up large fleets might not be the optimal place to put these new machines. We might want to give thought to how much they will be driven. It might make more sense to get them into the hands of people who drive a lot of miles. Not into the parking space of someone who drives three miles per day. Decreasing oil demand benefits us all when we pull up to the pump.

What do you think of the CalCars idea to mass order EVs and PHEVs – now the utilities are getting in on the idea – like switching production lines for WWII:

http://gas2.org/ 2008/ 12/ 15/ utilities-discuss-huge-electric-vehicle-orders/

And could they be signalling for help from inside the prisoncamp as they see the end is nigh for the Bush administration?

Yet I was staggered to see just that – a reference to the peak having been surpassed deep within a pdf the DOE put out last month: footnote 8:

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/ industry/ distributedenergy/ pdfs/ chp_report_12-08.pdf

“Constraints on Traditional Energy Supply

In the United States, domestic oil production peaked in 1972 and natural gas production peaked in 1973.7 Globally, oil production may be approaching its peak today.[8]

[8] Hubbert’s Peak:
The Impending World Oil Shortage (New Edition)
Kenneth S. Deffeyes
Both domestic and foreign oil are becoming more expensive to obtain, as quality (sour crudes) lessens and supplies become more difficult to extract.

While domestic coal is relatively plentiful, environmental concerns limit its use. Moreover, the cost of building traditional coal-fired power plants has been escalating, driven by pollution control requirements, high construction levels globally, tightness in the equipment and engineering markets, and high prices for raw materials.

Overall, capital costs for coal power plants have risen 78 percent since 2000.[10] General Electric gives estimates of $2,000–$3,000 per kW for new conventional coal-fired plants, and Duke Energy is proposing to spend $1.83 billion to build an 800-MW plant in North Carolina, or $2,300/kW.[11] At $2,500 per kW installed, the delivered price of electricity to consumers would be roughly 10 to 12 cents per kWh, more than 60 percent above current average industrial electricity prices.[12]
“

We would be better served by using a price/time curve. It’s not that oil is going to “disappear”, that we’re going to fall off of some “oil cliff” and perish. There’s bazillions of gallons of oil in the ground, it is just going to get more expensive to extract it.

(Expensive in terms of money, EROEI, pollution,….)

The really cheap oil was scooped up from the surface long ago. Then we pumped up the shallow well stuff. Now we’re going deeper and out to sea. And we’re starting to harvest some from the next most expensive sources such as tar sands.

What we should be looking at is the fact that oil is poised to get pricey in the near future. There’s likely to be an up sweep in the line as we return to $100+ barrels.

Will we zoom right up to $200 barrels? I doubt it.

We’ve already demonstrated to ourselves that there is a price where demand decay sets in. And a price where alternative power sources/transportation systems come to market.

Remember, the estimated decline in “cheap” oil is estimated be 2% or less per year. That says that we need to move no more than 2% of our transportation away from current practices in order to keep demand balanced with supply.

2% – short term – more public transportation, car pooling, curtailing unnecessary trips, sleeping in the office, etc.

Nissan says that they will start mass producing a 100 mile range all electric car in 2010. We’re already producing extra night time electricity from our wind farms. By bringing more PHEVs and BEVs to market and continuing to build wind generation to meet peak needs we can stay ahead of the 2% decline in $100 oil.

Please find some other place to publish your sermonettes.

Buy some advertising space and quit stealing it.

If you please, your assistance is requested.

Seven days ago the “AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population” submitted an idea for how we think the Obama Administration could change America. It’s called “Ideas for Change in America.”

I’ve submitted an idea and wanted to see if you could vote for AND COMMENT on it. The title is: “Accepting human limits and Earth’s limitations”. You can read, vote for and comment on the idea by clicking on the following link:

http://www.change.org/ ideas/ view/ accepting_human_limits_and_earths_limitations

Fourteen votes are been received so far. That is about 2 votes per day. If you agree, then vote. If you disagree, please comment. Of course, should you wish to vote AND COMMENT, please feel free to do so.

The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, and more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration.

Thanks for any assistance you choose to provide.

Sincerely yours,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176