Oil etc.

• Nothing really matches oil for power, versatility, transportability, or ease of storage… plus it has been cheap and plentiful (p31)... As energy supplies decline, the complexity of human enterprise will also decline in all fields, and the most technologically complex systems will be the ones most subject to dysfunction and collapse – including national and state governments. Complex systems based on far-flung resource supply chains and long range transport will be especially vulnerable. Producing food will become a problem of supreme urgency (Kunstler, p239).

A few decades ago, the average oil recovery rate from reservoirs was 20 percent. That is to say about a fifth of the oil known to be sitting in a particular field could be got out, before it all became unmanageably costly and difficult. Now, thanks to remarkable advances in technology, this has risen to about 35 percent today. But despite this improvement, two-thirds of the oil known to exist in reservoirs is still abandoned as uneconomic, leaving room for tomorrow’s discoveries or innovations to lift recovery rates… This is why cheerful ‘heretics’ of the oil world, like Professor Peter Odell of Rotterdam’s Erasmus University, point out that the world is ‘running into oil’ rather than ‘out of it’ (p81)... People always underestimate the pace at which new technology can bring production costs crashing down. They underestimated its impact in the North Sea, in the Gulf of Mexico and in a dozen other locations (p86)... Almost all the problems lie not in the resources themselves in the ground but in the formidable and ever-growing risks and costs of  safeguarding them, in transporting them to market and to the points of distribution and consumption, and doing so continuously, efficiently and reasonably cheaply (Howell and Nakhle, p92). This book does not refer to ERoEI (Energy Returned over Energy Invested). In 1928, the ratio was 28 to 1, but by the mid eighties, it had fallen to to 2 to 1. This means that it requires the energy of a barrel of oil to get two barrels of oil out of the ground. See Heinberg, 2005, p107-108 and Kunstler p107-108. While the oil optimists appeared confident, their forecasts, when examined closely, predicted only that the global peak [of oil extraction] will come a few years later than is forecast by the pessimists – perhaps by 2030 or 2035, instead of the pessimists’ 2004 to 2016 range (Heinberg, 2004, p33).

• Why the [petroleum] plateau [at  peak oil rather than a sharp peak]? Oil production is constrained by economic conditions (in an economic downturn, demand for oil falls off), as well as by political events such as wars and revolutions. In addition, the shape of the production curve is modified by the increasing availability of unconventional petroleum sources (including heavy oil, natural gas plant liquids, and tar sands), as well as new extraction technologies. The combined effect of all these factors is to cushion the peak and lengthen the decline curve (Heinberg, 2004, p35).

• LNG tankers, which must keep their liquefied resource at -260 degrees Fahrenheit (-160C) are expensive to build - as are gas offloading terminals… (Heinberg, 2004, p50) The UK has two terminals, and could receive up to a third of its gas by this means; click here (see half way down the page).

• For longer distance travel, to ease that peripatetic itch we all seem to have, we could use sailing ships again. I am not thinking of those magnificent wooden, four-masted vessels, whose operation required dozens of sailors. I imagine a high-tech automated sailing vessel, like a modern aircraft, that would travel a planned path chosen and updated to maximise the thrust of the wind (Lovelock, 2007, p170-171).

• If we burn all reserves of oil, gas and coal, there is a substantial chance that we will initiate the runaway greenhouse. If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale, I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty (Hansen, p236). On Venus, the surface temperature is sufficient to melt lead, and the pressure is 90 times that on earth (p 225).