Peak oil, peak coal, green house gasses

Its usually a combination of propane and butane. It typically comes from oil wells and is also called natural gas liquids.

When we get natural gas at our homes it mainly methane. That's the stuff they are flaring in the mid west, and fracking for all over the country. Its illegal to flare natural gas in texas unless its for safety reasons. They need to get similar laws on the mid western oil fields.

 

flaring is typically burning the natural gas from an oil well. They have been fracking since the 40s, but it has nothing to do with the flaring. Its better than letting the gasses escape, and needs to be done sometimes for safety. Right now though they are doing it for speed. It takes time to build pipes to take the natural gas out of the wells, and many states don't have laws requiring it. Extremely wasteful, but helps with the profits this quarter, even while hurting them years from now.

Agree with you 100% there.

Now hold on a second with knocking flex fuel vehicles. We should have them, as they have the ability to change fuels over. Flex fuel should also include methanol, which it did before the corn lobby started working on it. Ethanol does not need to come from corn, and in bumper crop years there is no reason not to use some for ethanol. It is rather crazy to plant so much corn, and have food prices go up in tough years like this one, because it is being mandated for fuel not food.

 

Say you have a 300 yeaer supply at current rate, and you increasee consumption for 20 years to 20% more than you were doing, then you decline slowly to a rate of 80% for 40 years, then 60% for 20 years, then slowly wind down for the next 50 to 20% of what you were starting at. Do you some how use it all up quickly? Do you fall off a cliff? Or can you continue to produce for a very long time?

Numbers do matter. What are your numbers that say we are going to fall off a cliff.

 

You did at the beginning of the discussion, I'm glad we are on the same page vis a vis the cliff. A limited resource can be used at a low level of consumption for a long time. I asked you to show your numbers, because you seem to be arguing that the world would need to go to zero oil use soon. The numbers for unconventional oil reserves are the important ones. I assume we are working off the same page on conventional reserves. It is not a bad theory to assume that oil will get so expensive or better substitutes - wind, sun, into better batteries - algea and switch grass into bio fuels that we drop consumption. Certainly it is possible to have a low level, say 10%-20% of what we use now, for hundreds of years before substitutes drop it to near nothing. I certainly was not saying that we can use a large percentage of the oil being used now for thousands of years. Was that your point?

US oil consumption is decreasing right now. I expect that to continue. China and India will rise to a level then decline.

The US economy can not afford to keep oil consumption at these levels, given estimates of what prices would do if we continue on this path.

I don't think energy use will decline much in the US, but the sources are changing and continue to change. In North America today that means less oil and coal, more methane and wind. Since methane can be produced in sustainable ways in the future, this is a move to sustainability. Coal substitution is all about costs including environmental ones, and nothing about a scarce resource. Germany seems determined to drop energy use, and it will be interesting to see if they can do it.

 

I'm with you there. Given the land use questions, the fertilizers, water, pesticide, it doesn't do much. I don't think surplus cheese was more than a government milk subsidy scam. Let's not force corn into everything.

No one controls the weather though, nothing wrong with taking surplus crops and doing the most good with them. I don't think corn syrup is the most good. In the founding of our republic people made whiskey, but the government no longer likes that idea, so fuel is as good as anything.

Exactly. Lets make the fleet flexible enough to burn E25 or M25, then we can switch to the best fuel for the time. Estimates are it would cost less than $100/car. M25 is less expensive today. There is no reason to require ethanol on a bad corn year. M25, gets about 14% of its power from methanol. It reduces oil usage chiefly by substituting natural gas and biogas from garbage, without affecting crops.

 

Its the worst corn crop since the late 80s and worst drought since the late 50s. That is interesting for a couple of reasons. The first is a good one, much worse weather but higher yields. That dovetails nicely into our peak discussion. In the '70s, I think that was the time, people were talking about peak corn and other malthusian positions that would cause catastrophic starvation. What happened to that peak? Technology in the green revolution. The other thing is a repeat of some very bad drought conditions, we have grown complacent as to the natural cycles. Yes these are changing, but the 50s were not a good climate time. The late 50s had the combination of horrible Chinese agriculture policy with bad weather to have a huge famine where an estimate of 15 millions starved to death.

That should breed both some hope and fear. Bad government policy in the face of climate change can be catastrophic. It would be truly horrendous if to save us from the ghg, governments made people starve, so that we can farm for fuel. Brazil at least has a much better EROEI with their ethanol crop, and the government suspends food diversions in bad crop years. We can hope crops with better EROEI get used in the US in the future. These are fast growing woody plants like switch grass, and fast growing fatty crops like algae.

We did have some foolishness that came up in the past. There was a plan to tax "windfall profits" at a high rate and use the money to pay for synthetic fuels from coal and for a solar bank. Now the stupidity of this plan had many problems. The easy one to consider today, is environmental, which was talked about even back then in 1980. When you convert coal to gasoline, you create even more ghg than even just burning it to make electricity, and that gasoline is quite expensive. I guess if you are running out fast, you say screw the environment, but this plan was to transfer tens of billions of dollars to the coal lobby from oil companies and consumers. Better would be to have flex fuel vehicles that could burn methanol which can be created from renewable sources as well as from natural gas or coal. Flex fuel vehicles allow easy liquid fuels to be burned. But, back then the fear was running out of natural gas too, so it was prohibited from being used in base load power plants. Somehow in the '90s the ethanol lobby got very strong, and methanol is not part of vehicle flex fuel systems, even though it is likely the least expensive liquid fuel today and may be in the future.

 

I was talking about food yields being higher after the green revolution. That is one reason droughts cause less starvation than they did in the past. Another reason is better, but still not good government policies. Peak food that was to have most of the world starving by now was grossly exagerated.

If you read my posts, you will notice I am against government policies for a large contribution of corn for fuel. I take it from your question you agree with that opinion.