This much is certain: no initiative put in place starting today can have a substantial effect on the peak production year. No Caspian Sea exploration, no drilling in the South China Sea, no SUV replacements, no renewable energy projects can be brought on at a sufficient rate to avoid a bidding war for the remaining oil. At least, let's hope that the war is waged with cash instead of with nuclear weapons. So when does world oil production peak and then start downward? That's the big enchilada. You can use the spacing between the recent production dots and see that four or five more dots will carry us to the plus sign that marks the midpoint. Once we draw that straight line through the year 2000 dot, the logistic curve is fully defined. The mathematical peak falls at the year 2004.7; call it 2005. However, I'm not betting the farm that the actual year is 2005 and not 2003 or 2006. The top of the mathematical distribution is smoothly curved, and there is a fair amount of jitter in the year-to-year production. Remember, the center of the best-fit U.S. curve was 1975 and the actual single peak year was 1970. There is nothing plausible that could postpone the peak until 2009. Get used to it.
—Kenneth S. Deffeyes; Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage; p. 149,157-8.
This page will include my findings, thoughts and writings on the topic of energy. It will also include stuff from my earlier blog posts on peak oil.
Peak Oil, in short, is both a Theory and a Fact much like how Evolution is both a Theory and a Fact. Read my Finite Mango Tree Analogy to understand the basics of peak oil. Or go check out the excellent peak oil primer on The Energy Bulletin.
This page, instead of narrowly focusing on peak-oil or even just oil, will try and provide references that will explain the importance of energy in our day to day lives… or should I say, the importance of energy for life itself?
Check out this very simply and beautifully explained lecture video, Thermodynamics: The Fundamentals of Energy by Prof.S.Banerjee of IIT Kharagpur.
All life forms use energy to reduce Entropy. Plants take solar energy and use it to find the Negentropy that they need for sustenance and growth. Animals find the stored Negentropy in plants to find energy for their sustenance and growth. This also includes using a part of that energy to find more Energy. The lecture video referenced above outlines this process using an industrial analogy which is not very different from what goes on in our bodies! You can check out my detailed article under the topic ”Life and Energy”.
Life forms use energy in effective ways to go about their purposes. I was quite impressed by the Optimal_Foraging_Theory, Dynamic_Energy_Budget, etc.,. These theories help us understand not only the importance of energy to living things but also how Entropy is a sucker and needs energy to keep Entropy at bay!
Even societies do the same. They find energy to
… and You, my dear reader, I bet, are already helping Society in one or many of the above mentioned areas. If you aren't you probably are planning to (haven't you been thinking about a nice college education?).
However, you might contribute there are some basic needs of yours which surely have come to depend on Oil. But then, today, any need is a Commodity so let's just talk about the various commodities you need today, right?
Today, food is produced in mechanised, automated farms. The wikipedia page on Industrial_agriculture briefs the condition of this method of food production and its effects on our society. Besides all of that, the industrial style of food production requires heavy use of fossil fuels - both as Fertilizers as well as Energy throughout the production and distribution life-cycle. To top it all, globalised food production has come to rely on cheap transportation for making almost all kinds of foods available to the affluent societies of the world.
Our society has evolved into a highly complex form of organisation where this automation has displaced people from worrying about food production thus enabling them to focus on other things. And focus we do! In using energy in newer and creative ways - never to stop to think about our place in the universe and never to question human nature! 1)
The increased food production has allowed us to surpass a natural resource limit we once faced in the 1950s. But instead, the “Stewards” of that generation chose to heavily rely on Petroleum to fix food scarcity at that time. In the process, soil quality has continued to degrade thus making food production impossible without the use of more fertilizers.
So unless we eat Algae like they eat in Asimov's Sci-Fi worlds, you're likely to not be able to get the food you're able to enjoy today once the world oil production peaks.
Well fed people want to do something and today that something is called “Work”. People travel to work, they earn, they buy stuff which is also transported in one way or the other. There is a whole Industry called the “Tourism” industry that caters to the needs of people who have no specific purposes to travel just about everywhere they wish to. In terms of just how much energy society needs today, take a look at World energy resources and consumption - most of it is for transport needs and most of it
I don't see a very bright future for the Airlines industry. Equally sad is America's state of affairs: The suburbs are built for cars to roam around and not people; and Just In Time economic models both of which need
There are a bunch of great movies explaining peak oil, peak food, permaculture and a bunch of other related things. Check out my Documentaries section.
That's 42.8% more energy density! Think about the cleanliness of coal as an alternative and how much more sheer volume of coal would we need to replace oil? The only way coal can replace oil as a transportation energy would be to run coal fired power plants and an electric car based infrastructure to keep 'business as usual' going. What massive infrastructural investments would be needed? What about the sheer need for metals and resources in building those electric vehicles? Compare the very very weak energy density of other alternatives such as wind, solar, hydro, etc., and how much EROEI pay off these alternative sources can yield. Also consider the environmental impact of these alternatives. Can you build an electric airplane, really?
Its a humongous challenge for the current civilization to migrate to other alternatives and would require war-time efforts… or do nothing and spark off resource wars
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