Home » Posts tagged 'post carbon institute' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: post carbon institute

Introduction

The next few decades will see a profound and all-encompassing energy transformation throughout the world. Whereas society now derives the great majority of its energy from fossil fuels, by the end of the century we will depend primarily on renewable sources like solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal power.

Two irresistible forces will drive this historic transition.

The first is the necessity of avoiding catastrophic climate change. In December 2015, 196 nations unanimously agreed to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures.[1] While some of this reduction could technically be achieved by carbon capture and storage from coal power plants, carbon sequestration in soils and forests, and other “negative emissions” technologies and efforts, the great majority of it will require dramatic cuts in fossil fuel consumption.

The second force driving a post-carbon energy shift is the ongoing depletion of the world’s oil, coal, and natural gas resources. Even if we do nothing to avoid climate change, our current energy regime remains unsustainable. Though Earth’s crust still holds enormous quantities of fossil fuels, economically useful portions of this resource base are much smaller, and the fossil fuel industry has typically targeted the highest-quality, easiest-to-access resources first.

All fossil fuel producers face the problem of declining resource quality, but the problem is most apparent in the petroleum sector. During the decade from 2005 to 2015, the oil industry’s costs of production rose by over 10 percent per year because the world’s cheap, conventional oil reserves—the “low-hanging fruit”—are now dwindling (fig. I.1). While new extraction technologies make lower-quality resources accessible (like tar sands and tight oil from fracking), these technologies require higher levels of investment and usually entail heightened environmental risks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Personal Appreciation of M. King Hubbert

April 18, 2016

A Personal Appreciation of M. King Hubbert

A recent vacation afforded me the opportunity to read The Oracle of Oil, Mason Inman’s excellent new biography of Marion King Hubbert. I strongly recommend it. But, rather than writing a standard book review (which might cover much of the same ground as this one by Frank Kaminski), I’m inspired instead simply to offer a few words in appreciation of Hubbert himself.

Born in Texas in 1903, Hubbert earned his Ph.D. in geology at University of Chicago, then taught at Columbia University. He later worked at Shell’s research laboratory and for the U.S. Geological Survey, and occasionally lectured at Stanford and UC Berkeley. His contributions to geophysics included a mathematical demonstration that rock in the Earth’s crust, because it is under great pressure over large areas, behaves in some ways more like a liquid than a solid. He earned every relevant scientific award short of a Nobel prize, and won lasting fame as the father of “peak oil”—the theory (by now more of an observation) that oil production in any large area will inevitably start from zero, reach one or more high points, and decline back toward zero. (Here is a brief video clipof Hubbert in 1976 explaining the very basics of peak oil).

For years I’ve had a photographic portrait of Hubbert, given to me by his nephew, hanging just above my computer in my home office. I described Hubbert’s best-known accomplishments—his mathematical modeling of oil depletion and his successful forecast of a decline in U.S. petroleum production beginning around 1970—in my 2003 book The Party’s Over, and I have spent most of the last couple of decades reading, writing, and speaking publicly about oil depletion and its consequences, so I could fairly be described as a longstanding Hubbert devotee. After devouring Inman’s meticulously researched and entertainingly written biography, I feel even more indebted to the great man than before.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Too Much Water to Waste?

April 11, 2016

Too Much Water to Waste?

Does California have too much water? Seriously. Because our actions are sending peculiar messages. Even the State Water Board has backed off on conservation targets for some water agencies.

It’s true, rains have replenished much of Northern California’s reservoirs and Governor Brown’s mandated 25% water restrictions made a serious dent in our water binge. A whopping 1.1 million acre-feet of water was saved, or rather, not wasted, thanks to these restrictions. And that water savings came with other benefits: If that 1.1 million acre-feet of water had been produced in a desalination plant instead, 5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity would have been consumed—enough for over 800,000 California households for a full year.

Our savings was not inconsequential, but the truth is, we could have squandered even less without much hardship or inconvenience. I learned this directly when, after ripping out the lawn, I cut my water use by 75%. But throughout last summer, the majority of my neighbors—and perhaps yours—were still pouring water on their lush green lawns, ignoring restrictions, and not suffering any consequences except for an occasional warning.
Meanwhile, water agencies were complaining that their budgets were being severely pinched as a result of lower water sales. Many have temporarily weathered the cuts by drawing down reserves but others have been forced to raise rates.

Last summer, the small Yorba Linda Water District in southern California was facing a $9 million budget shortfall and so they raised rates in this conservative upscale Orange County community (home of the Richard Nixon Library) by $25 per month. Residents were so outraged that they gathered twice as many signatures as needed to repeal the hike. Legal wrangling has ensued.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We Need to Electrify As Much Transportation As We Can”

April 4, 2016

“We Need to Electrify As Much Transportation As We Can”

Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, says a truly green transportation system would stop relying on cars and discusses the Tesla Model 3 as a mass-market electric vehicle

Transcript

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.Folks are lining up to reserve electric car automaker Tesla’s Model 3. It’s considered to be one of the first electric cars for the mass market at an expected price tag of 35 thousand dollars. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, will be unveiling the vehicle on Thursday evening, so we can’t show you what it will actually look like. But in this segment we wanted to get beyond the consumerism and ask, will this be a game changer for the automobile industry in America and the environment?Now joining us to help us answer that question is Richard Heinberg. He’s a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. Thanks so much for joining us, Richard.

RICHARD HEINBERG: It’s a pleasure, Jessica.

DESVARIEUX: So, Richard, why has it taken so long for an affordable electric car to sort of come to the market? I’m reminded of the 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which really highlights how we essentially went from having electric cars on California roads in the ’90s to then, eventually, shredding and destroying those very same vehicles years later. So my question to you, Richard, is, who killed the electric car?

HEINBERG: Well, the bosses at the Detroit automakers decided back in the 1990s that there wouldn’t be a mass market for the electric car because of the short range of the vehicles. They thought consumers wouldn’t buy a car if it didn’t have a two to three hundred mile range, and the batteries at that time were not capable of delivering that kind of range.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US: A Nation In Dire Need of Energy and Climate Policy

February 19, 2016

The US: A Nation In Dire Need of Energy and Climate Policy

A new Harvard University study finds that world methane emissions have recently spiked, and that the US appears to be the site of most of the increase. Natural gas fracking is the apparent culprit. This finding should be (though I wouldn’t bet on it) the final nail in the coffin of the “natural gas as bridge fuel to a clean energy future” argument.

The Obama administration has fixated on replacing coal with natural gas for electricity generation as a major pathway to meeting Paris COP 21 commitments for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Its strategy required the EPA to begin regulating CO2 as a pollutant (as the centerpiece of the “Clean Power Plan” or CPP). But industry fought the regulation all the way to the Supreme Court, which did something quite rare. It stepped in to block federal regulations going into effect until a lower court made a ruling, even though the lower court itself had denied a similar request. Now, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia (who sided with the “conservative” majority halting implementation of the regulation), there appears to be the possibility for an eventual reprieve of CPP.

But what’s the point? If natural gas from fracking harms the climate about as much as coal (higher methane emissions on one hand versus higher CO2 emissions on the other), then the entire strategy is revealed as ill-conceived and useless.

What is really needed is a national plan for a systemic energy transition, including policies, goals, and funding. Such a plan would break out the economy sector by sector, exploiting ways of radically reducing energy consumption over all while replacing oil, coal, and natural gas with renewable resources like solar, wind, biomass, hydro, and geothermal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Report: Eagle Ford Shale Has Peaked, Lifting of Oil Export Ban Could Drain Field More Quickly

December 18, 2015

Report: Eagle Ford Shale Has Peaked, Lifting of Oil Export Ban Could Drain Field More Quickly

Titled “Eagle Ford Reality Check: The Nation’s Top Tight Oil Play After More Than a Year of Low Oil Prices,” the report is the latest in a series of long reports on the overhyped future of oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in the U.S. by Post Carbon Institute Fellow David Hughes. Hughes formerly worked for 32 years with the Geological Survey of Canada as a scientist and research manager before coming to Post Carbon.

It also comes just two months after Post Carbon’s October release of a similarly titled report on North Dakota’s Bakken Shalebasin, the second biggest shale oil field in the U.S. behind the Eagle Ford.

“In Eagle Ford Reality Check, David Hughes…looks at how production in the Eagle Ford has changed after a year of low oil prices,” a summary of the report explains. “Oil production in the Eagle Ford is now falling after more than a year of low oil prices. The glory days of the Eagle Ford are behind it, at the ripe old age of six years.”

Many of the same themes and concepts, for those familiar with Post Carbon’s previous “shale bubble” updates, reappear in this report. Those include the drilling treadmill, drilling sweet spots, and U.S. government and industry drilling productivity assessments (the seeds and intelligence upon which energy policymaking is made) vs. independent drilling productivity assessments.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Renewable Energy After COP21: Nine issues for climate leaders to think about on the journey home

December 15, 2015

Renewable Energy After COP21: Nine issues for climate leaders to think about on the journey home

Download as PDF

COP21 in Paris is over. Now it’s back to the hard work of fighting for, and implementing, the energy transition.
We all know that the transition away from fossil fuels is key to maintaining a livable planet. Several organizations have formulated proposals for transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy; some of those proposals focus on the national level, some the state level, while a few look at the global challenge. David Fridley (staff scientist of the energy analysis program at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory) and I have been working for the past few months to analyze and assess many of those proposals, and to dig deeper into energy transition issues—particularly how our use of energy will need to adapt in a ~100 percent renewable future. We have a book in the works, titled Our Renewable Future, that examines the adjustments society will have to make in the transition to new energy sources. We started this project with some general understanding of the likely constraints and opportunities in this transition; nevertheless, researching and writing Our Renewable Future has been a journey of discovery. Along the way, we identified not only technical issues requiring more attention, but also important implications for advocacy and policy. What follows is a short summary—tailored mostly to the United States—of what we’ve learned, along with some recommendations.

1. We really need a plan; no, lots of them

Germany has arguably accomplished more toward the transition than any other nation largely because it has a plan—the Energiewende. This plan targets a 60 percent reduction in all fossil fuel use (not just in the electricity sector) by 2050, achieving a 50 percent cut in overall energy use through efficiency in power generation (fossil fueled power plants entail huge losses), buildings, and transport.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Can We Have Our Climate and Eat It Too?

December 9, 2015

Can We Have Our Climate and Eat It Too?

As much as world leaders would like to focus attention on their economies, terrorism, or winning the next election, the heat is rising. Each new release of data on melting glaciers and extreme weather seems more dire than the last, and each governmental COP meeting organized to come up with an agreement on what to do about the climate crisis is freighted with more hopes and fears.

Because it is so urgent, climate change is leading to divisions within and among societies. There is of course a divide between those who take climate science seriously and those who don’t (here in the United States, the latter are so politically powerful as to have effectively blocked, for now, the possibility of a legally binding global emissions pact). Then there is the division between wealthy nations, such as the US and UK (that are responsible for the bulk of historic carbon emissions, and that therefore should rightly reduce fossil fuel consumption more rapidly—though they don’t want to) and poorer nations like India (that bear little responsibility for existing surplus atmospheric carbon, and that would like to be able to burn more coal for the time being so as to grow their economies).

Yet another rift is developing between the military and the rest of society: military emissions are not counted in official UN climate statistics due to lobbying by the United States, yet that country’s military establishment is the single largest sub-national consumer of fossil fuels on the planet; further, it is difficult to imagine how the US government could afford to subsidize the transition to carbon-free electricity, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation without tapping into its trillion dollar-per-year military and intelligence budget.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What are the essential elements for successfully building community resilience?

November 18, 2015

What are the essential elements for successfully building community resilience?

Introducing Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience, PCI’s new report which describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably.

It’s all too easy to look at the news these days and find an instant reminder of how vulnerable, and in some cases broken, our communities are—whether the risks they face are due to terrorism, natural disasters, economic struggles, dilapidated infrastructure, or a dozen other disruptive forces. I could quickly provide some examples, torn from this week’s headlines, but if you’re reading this a month, a year, or decade from now it’s likely the task will be just as easy.

This is partly true, of course, because vulnerability has always been part of human communities. But in this age of global interconnectedness, those vulnerabilities are not only more complex and systemic, they’re chronic.

Since Post Carbon Institute’s formation a little over a decade ago, we’ve seen interest in building community resilience skyrocket—from the early days of the grassroots relocalization and Transition movements, in response to concerns about climate change and peak oil, to the more recent initiatives of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United Nations to prepare cities for acute disasters.

In particular, interest in building climate resilience has grown exponentially since Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. Northeast in 2012, and as the need for climate adaptation, not just mitigation, has become more and more evident.

Having ourselves promoted community resilience for years, we’ve been pleased to see the concept of resilience being embraced by a diverse collection of grassroots groups, government agencies, politicians, and philanthropists. But we’re also eager to ensure that community resilience building isn’t simply adopted an aspirational goal divorced of concrete strategies, or as a strategy to “bounce back” from one specific set of disruptions to a normal state that no longer exists.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Richard Heinberg: After the Burn

October 7, 2015

Richard Heinberg: After the Burn

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

After a two-century-long burning bender, the globe is in for a heck of a hangover. Our guest this week on Sea Change Radio is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and author of a dozen books about growth, peak oil, and energy issues. His latest book is called Afterburn, a collection of essays that center on the impending consequences of what he terms “The Great Burning” – our chronic habit of fossil-fuel binging. Heinberg and host Alex Wise talk about what it will take to truly transition off of fossil fuels, including the need for bold leadership and radically different policies. He explains why the GDP is a flawed metric for success, and talks about why we should move away from the outdated Gross Domestic Product, and toward the Global Happiness Index as a better metric of national well-being.

Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future

September 24, 2015

Wisdom: Re-Tuning for a Sustainable Future

Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules that often forbade to do what his instincts demanded…Man is not born wise, rational and good, but has to be taught to become so. Man became intelligent because there was tradition (habits) between instinct and reason…

Friedrich Hayek
The Fatal Conceit, 1988

Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials.

Robert Kennedy
Speech, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

Below is a slightly adapted excerpt from The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived by Peter C. Whybrow, MD.

It is abundantly clear that humanity must shift its modern view of progress and relationship with nature if we are to have any hope of living sustainably on this planet. But in completing the jigsaw essential to reimagining progress, and regaining balance within the natural ecology, it is necessary to understand the roles that biological and cultural evolution play. In our social evolution as a species, biology and culture run on parallel tracks, but they do so at different speeds. Thus biology, quickly and disruptively, can be outpaced by cultural change. As I have detailed in The Well-Tuned Brain, a significant number of the challenges that we face in the developed world are rooted in this mismatch.

To better grasp how this puzzle comes together, I take you back to a primary source of knowledge about evolution. In the Pacific Ocean, straddling the Equator approximately 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador is found the Galápagos archipelago. This remote collection of volcanic islands, as Charles Darwin described them when he traveled there, is “a little world within itself.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tight Oil Reality Check

September 22, 2015

Tight Oil Reality Check

Much of the cost-benefit debate over fracking has come down to the perception of just how much domestic oil and gas it can produce and at what cost. To answer this question, policymakers, the media, and the general public have typically turned to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), which every year publishes its Annual Energy Outlook (AEO).

In Drilling Deeper, PCI Fellow David Hughes took a hard look at the EIA’s AEO2014 and found that its projections for future production and prices suffered from a worrisome level of optimism.

In July 2015, Post Carbon Institute published Shale Gas Reality Check, which found that in 2015 the EIA is more optimistic than ever about the prospects for shale gas, despite substantive reasons for caution.

This month we turn our eyes to the EIA’s latest projections for tight oil.

Key Conclusions

The EIA’s 2015 Annual Energy Outlook is even more optimistic about tight oil than the AEO2014, which we showed in Drilling Deeper suffered from a great deal of questionable optimism. The AEO2015 reference case projection of total tight oil production through 2040 has increased by 6.5 billion barrels, or 15%, compared to AEO2014.

The EIA assumes West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil prices will remain low and not exceed $100/barrel until 2031.

At the same time, the EIA assumes that overall U.S. oil production will experience a very gradual decline following a peak in 2020.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cap Fossil Fuel Production Now!

September 9, 2015

Cap Fossil Fuel Production Now!

Climate scientists are in broad agreement that there are enough fossil fuels in the Earth’s crust that, if they were all burned, the result would be dramatically rising sea levels, extreme weather, plummeting food production, dying seas, and a mass extinction of species (possibly including our own). Therefore the only sane response to global warming is toleave most of those fuels in the ground.

But there are actually other reasons as well to cap fossil fuel production.

Back in 2007 I wrote a book called The Oil Depletion Protocol.* It argued for a policy idea that had previously been put forward by petroleum geologist Colin Campbell; the essential thrust of the idea is to put a gradually lowered cap on global petroleum production. The book didn’t discuss climate change much; indeed, its subtitle was, “A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse.” I argued that such a Protocol would actually be good for oil producers (as well as everyone else), in that it would provide stable prices and thus a more predictable market environment in which to operate.

The book mostly failed to connect with policy makers (a few cities endorsed the Protocol, but no nations), or oil companies (not a single one responded positively), or book buyers (even though it carried some glowing endorsements from politicians, environmentalists, and an oil industry insider).

Here we are eight years later and the oil industry is in a carefully disguised panic. No company wants to admit that its future is bleak, but the signs are unmistakable. Undisciplined production and volatile prices—two of the problems the Protocol was intended to address—have overturned the balance sheets of producers large and small. Conventional crude oil extraction rates stalled out a decade ago due to the depletion of legacy giant oilfields; that initially sent prices skyrocketing, and the global economy stuttered to a near-standstill (yes, other causes contributed to the slowdown, including too much debt).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: post carbon institute

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Introducing Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience, PCI’s new report which describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably.

Key Conclusions

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Post navigation

Latest Posts