Without Oil
Sooner or later we're going to run out of cheap oil. There's plenty of disagreement about when that's going to happen. Ingenious humans will do clever battle with oil fields to pull more out; that pattern has already repeated. Still...the US was the world's premiere oil supplier until the 1950s, when the Hubbert Peak was reached. Domestic oil production is significant, but has declined substantially. The energy profit in the US has dwindled substantially.
Oil currently supplies around 85% of the world's energy needs. That's far too high, and we need to be doing something about it. The reason we need to start now is that if we do, we'll be able to soften the blow when oil starts getting more expensive. Estimates on when oil prices will increase substantially range from 2007 to about 2020, which provides us with a rough time frame.
Energy itself is not a problem. Solar energy provides everything we could ever use; its most convenient manifestation is wind. Hydroelectric power is also derived from sunlight (water becomes vapor, is carried by wind to mountains, flows down mountains). Gravity provides tidal forces, which can be used to generate rather incredible amounts of energy.
The price of wind power has dropped dramatically in the last two decades; at the same time, the efficiency of the equipment has risen steadily. We can now seriously consider wind as a legitimate alternative to other sources on a cost basis. We're not quite there yet, but with increases in oil price we won't be that far off. A generator/tower/battery system that can easily power an entire home (or ranch, for that matter) costs about $13,000 these days. When compared to the cost of a house, this is a small cost. On certain power grids, you can even sell excess power back to the utility grid...under those situations the grid acts as your storage device. You push power back into the grid when you have too much. The grid can shift this power to where it's needed. When you don't have enough, you can pull.
Hydroelectric-capable watersheds in the US are largely exploited at this point, but are capable of delivering a pretty large amount of power. We do pay a price in environmental terms for this, but maybe that price is acceptable.
Tidal forces are particularly power, yielding an energy profit of at least 15 to 1 (for each unit of energy expended to collect, you yield back 15). Tidal is capital intensive, but incredibly clean and possesses almost unlimited capacity.
Since I'm Canadian, I'll point out that Canada's hydroelectric watershed is mostly untapped, and is capable of generating far more power than the population could ever use. Likewise, we could turn most of the northern parts of our provinces into giant wind generating farms and nobody would notice. The Bay of Fundy is the world's premiere site for tidal generation; with tides in excess of 50 feet every six hours (due to the Bay's length matching the resonant frequency of global tidal patterns) the amount of energy being generated by the bay on a continous basis could supply all energy we need on the continent, if we could collect and transmit it. So Canada is good. ;)
The thing is, let's say there's effectively no oil. We can create plenty of electricity, though. Farms will need to convert their machinery to use electric engines. In fact, just about everything is going to have to convert to be that way. Suburban sprawl is going to be more of a necessity, because homeowners will want to have their own generators. Each house might end up having two or three large generators, possibly generating around 10 kilowatts or more a day, feeding into a battery bank. This overcapacity can be used to charge up the family vehicles; we can anticipate improvements in battery technology that will greatly extend the range of electric vehicles.
We've seen market corrections at work over the past couple of years. The market corrects very harshly. Can we not use a little foresight here and soften this particular landing? Can we not use our government to guide technology development and infrastructure development in the right direction? If the economy must absorb the shock of increasing oil prices, we need to spread that shock out across the biggest stretch of time possible.
We also have a tremendous opportunity to become world leaders in all of these technologies. The long view depends on it.
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It will be very interesting
It will be very interesting to see how OPEC deals with increasing demand for a diminishing product. Oil doesn't have to literally run out (which is highly unlikely anyway) before it's a problem. It only needs to be scarce enough that it becomes so expensive it's no longer economically viable to extract it. That is, not enough customers are going to buy it at such high prices.
So what happens to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, say, when the only thing they export that is of any utility or interest to the rest of the world goes away? What happens when your biggest customers no longer buy the only thing you have to sell?
High adventure, that's what.
Whoa... The price of hydro on
Whoa... The price of hydro on the environment is not acceptable to this consumer of electricity. If you look at the major dam projects in India and China in the latter part of the 20th century, you'll see that the costs of doing this project go beyond cement and turbines.
1) Usually the dam floods a fertile floodplain and you have less arable land to feed the masses.
2) Often times, the engineers miscalcuate the silting rate in the river and the dam's life is much shorter than originally planned. (the Yangtze/Three Gorges project is notorious for this... It's called the Yellow River b/c there's so much silt in the water!)
3) The native people of the floodplain get displaced to urban environments where they can no longer farm. They have no other skills because they have not needed them and governments generally give them a small cash payout which does not allow people to retool and get jobs (if there are any jobs).
4) Displacing people from their land, at least in places like China and India, can mean losing language and cultural diversity as everyone assimilates to the dominant mono-culture.
5) The amount of money it costs to build these projects is enormous, and often sinks countries into massive debt to the World Bank. I find this unacceptable since debt burdens are usually massive. Without the Depression, the WPA, the BLM and the indomitable Floyd Dominy, the great hydro dams of the US would not have been built. And those dams still produce subsidized electricity for the US West.
6) Solar is awesome, but the US got rid of all their solar power tax breaks under Reagan. When are we going to get those back? There's is almost no way to recoup the cost of solar power conversion on a home in the Mid-Atlantic unless you live in your house for 20+ years. And who does that anymore?
I completely agree that something has to be done. The DOE has done very little to work on renewable non-nuclear energy sources. It's quite a shame.
Oh, on GL's point about oil nations running out of exports. They generally do have a high tech populace that will do alright. I don't think that they need to worry all that much. It's the overseas contract workers who are maids and domestics, manual laborers, construction workers that are going to be SOL in the big picture.
I think your points are valid
I think your points are valid but vary on a per-dam basis:
1. Depends on where the dam is. I don't see much arable land around Hoover dam. And up there in northern Canada where everybody wants to live, it's just mosquitoes, mostly.
2. How long does it take to silt up a dam? This must vary quite a bit.
3. No (or incredibly few) people around the Hudson bay watershed in Northern Canada...nobody to displace, really.
4. Monoculture is happening already, and dams don't have much to do with it. Scrap the internet and television and maybe we have a shot at this one. But we don't.
5. Part of the point of my post is that there isn't going to be a _choice_ about these things. We _are_ going to run out of cheap oil, and we'll need alternate energy sources to maintain some semblance of our culture. The main reason that big projects are as expensive as they are is generally due to corruption. Yes, I am _that_ conspiracy minded.
6. Completely agree. All alternate source energy should come equipped with standard major tax cuts. At a bare minimum we should do a three year decpreciation model that's better than the recently closed above-6000 pound SUV loophole in the tax law.
Sure it varies on a per dam
Sure it varies on a per dam basis, but I was trying to make a general point that hydroelectric power is not innocuous you assert in your initial post, and it's no easy replacement considering just curing the concrete is a process that takes years. (imagine a big bowl of concrete flavored pudding...)
No point in responding to all points (yes, redundant, I know!), but I'll hit a few.
2. It should take at least 50 years, but I think I once heard that it's going to be about 30 for the 3 Gorges because the Yangtze carries so much silt. Hooray for stream table modeling that went really wrong. (Sedimentation is an entire field of fluid dynamics just for stuff like dams)
3. I wasn't talking about first world Canadians there, bub. Just making a general point.
5. Your mission now is to find out the per kilowatt cost of each type of power source. I know it's out there somewhere. Solar is the most expensive, and hydro is one of the cheapest. But then again, are we talking about oil for driving cars or oil for power generation? I think the costs change by usage. I could be wrong.
Oooo. I have a mission. Too
Oooo. I have a mission. Too bad it's not secret. This will have to do.
We aren't going to run out of
We aren't going to run out of oil; or, rather, we aren't going to run out of petroleum.
The Athabascan tar sands, in Alberta of your beloved Maple Leaf Republic, are already marginally profitable. Only a slight rise in oil prices will bring them fully on line. Note that this is one of the basic causes of Mideast tension; the Saudis need to charge more for oil (and Osama says they must), in order to keep their lazy assholes occupied, but are constrained by Red Green's first cousin and his super-size backhoe. Cute, ain't it?
There's enough tar sand for centuries of usage, with the price gradually rising all the time. When it gets to roughly twice what it is now, the oil shales of the Rocky Mountains, primarily in Colorado and Wyoming, come on line. Note that there is also oil shale in Alberta and BC.
Meanwhile rising prices will cause people to be interested in alternative sources of energy, which will be funded by investors looking to make a quick buck off of alternatives for oil. Some of them will succeed. The pain is also likely to induce some loosening on the nuclear front. And if Canada can bring itself to stop gazing into French navels and do something real, the hydro resources of north-eastern Canada will become profitable at a price that allows environmental protection. Electricity is a really good way to ship energy from place to place; if actual fuel is needed, hydro plants can electrolyze water and carbon dioxide, synthesize methane, and ship that to energy users over pipelines at a fat profit.
We will see a trend line of increasing energy prices, with occasional jumps. We won't see a cliff -- we aren't going to "run out of cheap energy" at any point. It will be more like the famous boiling frog analogy, giving plenty of time to adjust if people pay attention.
And they will. It's going to cost them money. The danger is if Governments siphon off the development funds needed for this to happen in order to support "alternative energy" boondoggles.
Regards,
Ric