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Preface. When I first published this post in February of 2022, I said that peak world oil production might have arrived, but it takes 5 years in the rear-view mirror to call it. Now peak “crude oil including lease condensate oil” is officially here! Production was less in November 2023 than the peak of global oil production in November 2018. See for yourself at the U.S. Energy Information Administration site here.

You can ignore all the other liquids, they do not make diesel fuel for heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships that do the actual work of civilization. Mainly the other categories are good for plastics, which we have more than enough of. Or ethanol for gasoline, but you’d destroy a diesel engine if you added this to extend diesel fuel. I suspect these categories were added to keep people from panicking like they did in the oil crises of 1973 and 1979. Why would they panic? There is a very tight correlation between fossil production, GDP, and population.

Unconventional shale oil was responsible for over 90% of the increased production above the 2008 plateau with a little help from Canadian tar sands.

Seven of the eight U.S. shale basins are past peak, with only the Permian producing the majority of fracked oil. And it may peak in 2024 (Geiger 2022). Or not, some scientists think the USA shale oil production could be on a plateau until 2040. But at any rate, when shale oil and gas decline, will be a hell of a rollercoaster ride down, since shale oil declines 80% over 3 years. And already 81% of all the other oil production is declining at 8.5% a year, offset by 4.5% enhanced oil recovery.

As the energy crisis in Europe deepens, there could be a sudden mad rush of capital to explore, drill, and produce more oil which would keep the plateau going a bit longer.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Off-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel

February 4, 2024

Off-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel

Preface. Move over semi-trucks. You are not the most important truck in the world, even though I gave you the starring role in “When Trucks Stop Running”. What really matters are the trucks that grow our fuel: Food.

And mining trucks to get materials to make trucks, logging for fuel and infrastructure, tanks to fight wars (ugh!) and many others.

This post is mainly about off-road trucks, which are as essential for civilization as the trucks hauling goods over roads. This post is also about how amazing diesel and diesel engines are. Off-road trucks and equipment present an even larger challenge than on-road trucks to electrification because they are often far from the grid. Though anything other than a drop-in fuel faces the same problem: a completely new distribution system would be required for hydrogen and other alternatives.

Retrofitting off-road trucks with some other kind of propulsion than diesel is also hard since each kind of truck or equipment is custom made for a specific purpose, they aren’t mass-produced like cars. This makes it hard to transfer technology because it costs a great deal more to custom-build and modify.

Whatever energy source is used to move 40 ton trucks uphill has to be quite powerful, and with diesel second only to uranium in energy density, the alternative may only exist in another universe with different physical laws.

***

DTF. June 2003. Diesel-Powered Machines and Equipment: Essential Uses, Economic Importance and Environmental Performance. Diesel Technology Forum.

Excerpts:

The diesel engine is the backbone of the global economy because it is the most efficient internal combustion engine – producing more power and using less fuel than other engines.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

China is destroying itself

January 2, 2023

China is destroying itself

Preface. China has been destroying itself for many decades now. In Mao’s “great leap forward” about 35 to 50 million are estimated to have died from starvation from 1958 on, as you’ll read in my book review of” Shapiro J (2001) Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China in this post. China continues to destroy itself by leveling mountains for more flat land, eroding topsoil, creating land and air pollution, destroying forests and more (Li 2014).

Other nations are wreaking environmental damage on themselves as well for the Almighty Dollar, but China is the “winner”. No other nation can compete. China controls about 63% of rare earth rare metals, and 90% of the supply chain, from extraction, processing separation, and refining, to manufactured goods. If new mines were built in other nations to lessen dependence, it would take about 15 years to construct one, and most of the production would probably be sold to China for processing and assembly into parts for products made in china (GAO 2010; AI 2019; Hui 2020).

But why compete? Let China monopolize the second most polluting industry on earth. Mining spews out acid rain, wastewater, and heavy metals onto land, water, and air (PEBI 2016). One-fifth of China’s arable land is polluted from mining and industry (BBC 2014). Mining the materials needed for renewable energy potentially affects 50 million square kilometers, 37% of Earth’s land (minus Antarctica), with a third of this land overlapping key biodiversity areas, wilderness, or protected areas. If mined, that would drive biodiversity loss, harm (rain) forests, and poison ecosystems (Kleijn et al. 2011; Hickel 2019; Sonter et al. 2020).

Renewable energy is anything but clean and green. And quite a Pyrrhic victory for China!

***

Li, P., et al. June 5, 2014. Accelerate research on land creation. China’s campaign to bulldoze mountains to build cities needs expertise to avert geoengineering problems. Nature 510: 29-31.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Nuclear Waste Disposal and Peak Oil

January 2, 2023

Nuclear Waste Disposal and Peak Oil

Preface. One the greatest tragedies of energy decline will be the nuclear waste left to harm thousands of future generation for hundreds of thousands of years. We owe it to them to clean up our mess while we still have the fossil fuels to do it. If we do nothing, 263,000 tons of nuclear waste will poison the world. Both of my books explain why transportation and manufacturing can’t run on electricity, so let’s hope new nuclear plants are not built to cope with the energy crisis. The waste from existing plants is bad enough.

Though there probably isn’t time to build more of them if world peak oil production was in 2018. Though there is a tremendous push to build them (just listen to podcast Power Hungry for example).

Below are several articles about disposal of nuclear waste. Also see these related posts on nuclear waste. Especially “A Nuclear spent fuel fire at Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania could force 18 million people to evacuate” and Nuclear waste will harm future generations for hundreds of thousands of years, a book review of “Too Hot to Touch: The Problem of High-Level Nuclear Waste”.

Finland will be the first nation in the world to store nuclear waste if all goes well starting in 2024 at 430 meters (1410 feet) deep. There are 2300 tons of waste to be stored. Other countries will have a hard time copying Finland, since their success was due to their high trust in institutions, community engagement, a lack of state-level power centers blocking the waste site from their area, and a balance of power between industry and stakeholders (El-Showk 2022).

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Dust Bowl 2.0 – they’re coming back!

December 21, 2022

Dust Bowl 2.0 – they’re coming back!

Preface. Two forms of soil erosion may bring back the Great Depression Dustbowls. The first is that Great Plains grasslands have been replaced with corn crops to grow ethanol, which have increased the amount of dust 100% over the past 20 years. The second is the destruction of biocrusts (also known as cryptobiotic soils). These are a thin glue containing a thriving community of fungi, lichen, moss, cyanobacteria, and other microbes that cover 12% of Earth’s surface and provide essential nutrients for plants and retain moisture.

It’s destruction by livestock, farming and climate change releases 700 million tons of dust a year, though wherever the dust lands may get a brief boost of fertilization. As climate change, livestock, and farm machinery break the delicate biocrust, dust storms are increasing and will only grow greater as 3 billion more people arrive by 2050, with up to 40% of these valuable crusts disappearing by 2085. Enormous amounts of land will be required to feed them all, much of it marginal land vulnerable to dust storms.

Dust also melts glaciers and snow faster than before, depriving millions of people water to drink and grow crops with.

A warming planet will make dust storms more intense in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and increase the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes.

More dust in the air will worsen air quality and public health from disease like Valley Fever, meningitis, Kawasaki, and increase lung and heart disease.

It isn’t known for sure how dust affects climate change, so it isn’t modeled. It could go either way. Dust is the largest aerosol by mass, and both absorbs and scatters sunlight to alternately warm or cool the planet, though a recent study found that large dust causes warming and is more plentiful than fine dust, which cools, perhaps tipping dust towards warming the climate even more.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Peak oil, food & the “King of Chemicals” sulfuric acid

December 2, 2022

Peak oil, food & the “King of Chemicals” sulfuric acid

Preface. I first learned of sulfur’s existence when my grandmother told me how she loved going to tent revivals on the edge of town where it was common for preachers to get converts by burning sulfur to make the fire and brimstone damnation of Hell seem real (during the 3rd Great Awakening).

***

Sulfuric acid is called the “king of chemicals” because it is the most widely used chemical on earth. Over 260 million metric tons were produced in 2021 for lead acid batteries, detergent, rayon, paper, iron and steel pickling, glass, cement, adhesives, sugar refining, fireworks, rubber vulcanization, explosives, pesticides, drugs, plastics, pigments, water treatment, and 30,000 other products.

Sulfuric acid is also essential for electric vehicles, batteries, solar, wind turbines, semiconductors and other green technology, because sulfuric acid is how you get lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and some rare earth metals by dissolving the rock around them.

But over half is used for the most important product of all, dissolving phosphate out of rocks to make phosphate fertilizer, which can increase crop production by 50%, to grow our fuel: food. And not only that, but to make the universal energy currency of all life on earth, Adenosine tri-phosphate (ATP) which powers all cells. Plus, all living creatures are part phosphate, it’s in our DNA, RNA, cell membranes, bones, and teeth.

Yet sulfuric acid shortages loom in the future, even though sulfur is the fifth most common element in the world! So how on earth could there ever be a sulfur shortage?

It may be common, but deposits large enough to exploit are extremely rare, mostly near volcanoes. Most sulfur or sulfates are combined with copper, iron, lead, zinc, barium, calcium (aka gypsum), magnesium, and sodium.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Most plastic isn’t recycled, burns in fires at recycling centers

November 21, 2022

Most plastic isn’t recycled, burns in fires at recycling centers

Preface. Plastics are just one of 500,000 products made out of oil and gas, but very important to just about every aspect of society, from making vehicles lighter so go further using less energy, to clothes, food storage, bags, toothbrushes, buckets, garbage bins, toys, carpets, fleece, plastic lumber, chairs, bottles and more.

The reason fossil fuels are used to make half a million products is that they are mostly just carbon and hydrogen: Natural gas 20% C 80% H, petroleum 84% C 12% H, and coal 84% C 5% H.

If you wanted to make plastics from something “greener” and more sustainable, what on earth is both abundant and chock-a-block with carbon and hydrogen that can replace fossil fuels? Let us start with abundant. The world is mostly made of soil, air, water, and plants. Dirt will not work, it’s 47% oxygen, 28% silicon, 8% aluminum, 5% iron, 3.6% calcium, 3% sodium, 3% potassium, and 2% magnesium. Air is nitrogen and oxygen. Water is hydrogen and oxygen, but no carbon.

That leaves biomass — plants such as trees, crops, and grasses, which has both carbon and hydrogen. But there’s a whole lot of other crap that would have to be removed at great energy and monetary expense since there’s also O, N, Ca, K, Si, Mg, Al, S, Fe, P, Cl, Na, Mn, Ti. Biomass carbon varies quite a bit, from 35–65% of the dry weight, and hydrogen roughly 6%.

But it also takes a lot of energy to use biomass instead of oil and gas, which flows through pipelines cheaply. Biomass has to be cut, transported, cut or mashed into tiny pieces, and conveyed to a plastics factory before it composts or spontaneously combusts. And it’s expensive to remove some or all of the non carbon and hydrogen elements out.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Hydrogen hopium: Storage

October 29, 2022

Hydrogen hopium: Storage

Source: Russel Rhodes (2011) Explosive Lessons in Hydrogen Safety. https://appel.nasa.gov/2011/02/02/explosive-lessons-in-hydrogen-safety/

Preface.

Preface. What is hopium? Irrational or unwarranted optimism. An addiction to false hopes. A metaphorical substance that causes people to believe in a false hope (H + opium). And Hopium makes fuel cell hydrogen cars! What could be more suitable for today’s post.

No container can contain hydrogen for long. Use it or lose it. Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements, the smallest of them all, and will boil off and escape no matter how many gaskets and valves there are on a container and at every pipeline junction.

Hydrogen can’t be distributed with existing natural gas pipelines or service stations because hydrogen leaks as well as corrodes metal. According to former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (2020), hydrogen seeps into metal and embrittles it, a material problem that has not been solved for decades and may never be solved. Meanwhile, hydrogen is stored in expensive austenitic stainless-steel containers and pipelines that delay corrosion, which must be carefully maintained and monitored, since embrittlement can result in catastrophic explosions with loss of property and life.

Yes indeed, hydrogen is explosive which makes it difficult to use (Heinberg and Fridley 2016, Friedmann et al. 2019). If hydrogen escapes it can explode or catch fire ten times more easily than gasoline, set off with just a spark of static electricity. For example, due to a faulty valve, a Norwegian hydrogen station explosion was so strong that two nearby people inside their cars went to the hospital after their airbags were triggered. Around the same time, a chemical explosion in a hydrogen facility in Santa Clara, California resulted in a cautionary shutdown of all hydrogen stations in the San Francisco Bay Area (Siddiqui 2020)…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”

October 19, 2022

Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”

Preface. Thank goodness for world peak oil production in 2018. And peak coal in 2013. Since oil is that master resource that makes every product and activity possible, including oil itself and coal and natural gas, peak oil means peak everything. Oil, specifically the 25% of a barrel that’s diesel, is used by nearly all heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships. Petroleum and natural gas are the for 500,000 products. And fossils are essential for products needing high heat in their manufacture, like cement, steel, iron, glass, ceramics, microchips, bricks and more — there are no electric or hydrogen substitutes and with peak oil in 2018, no time to invent them.

So I would argue we don’t have enough fossil fuels left to reach the hothouse world Ward proposes. You might reply that tipping points have been or will be reached, methane from permafrost, the amazon rainforest turns into grass and so on.

Sure, but there are negative feedback loops. Diatoms evolved about 100 million years ago and consumed so much CO2 they created the polar icecaps for the first time. They are doing very well with the increased CO2, dying, and sinking to the ocean floor in even greater numbers. Nor are methane hydrates likely to ever be exploited or released all at once. And see these posts about why we may not be driven extinct by climate change and at worst reach low-medium IPCC projections. And CO2 rates in the Permian and other extinctions were as high as today’s, so it’s not true that what’s happening now is unprecedented, and lasted for 10,000 to 20,000 years of volcanic pulses from deep in the earth, boiling their way to the surface via coal, natural gas and oil deposits…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Peak lithium makes transportation & electricity storage pointless

August 4, 2022

Peak lithium makes transportation & electricity storage pointless

Preface. The lithium batteries in cars need electricity to recharge, but the electric grid can’t stay up with just wind and solar, that’s why natural gas is the energy storage today. Nor do pumped hydro or compressed air energy storage scale up. And battery storage doesn’t either.

Barnhart (2013) found that the only utility-scale battery for which there were enough materials on earth to store 12 hours of electricity production were Sodium sulfur (NaS) yet the main batteries being developed for both utility-scale electricity storage and automobiles is lithium. To provide enough energy storage for just 1 day of electricity generation in the United states, li-ion batteries would cost $11.9 trillion dollars, take up 345 square miles, weigh 74 million tons, and need replacement after 15 years (DOE/EPRI 2013). Multiply that by 28 since at least four weeks of energy storage are needed to cope with the seasonality of wind and solar. That doesn’t leave much if any lithium for cars. Vazquez (2010) also points out that lithium does not grow on trees, and the amount needed for utility-scale storage is likely to deplete known resources (Vazquez 2010).

And what’s the point of electrifying cars? That only replaces gasoline. But it is diesel that’s needed, peak diesel is the real existential crisis, since large trucks, locomotives, and ships burn diesel. Without this transportation civilization ends within a week. I explain this in greater detail in my book “When Trains Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation“. The main reason trucks can’t run on batteries is that they weigh too much in long haul, tractors, harvesters, bulldozers, fire, logging, mining and myriad other essential heavy duty trucks doing the actual work of civilization. Plus over 80% of U.S. cities have no rail or ports and depend on trucks alone.

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

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

May 5, 2022

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

Preface. Clearly for their conclusion to make sense you’ll need to read the book and see the evidence for yourself. Since they challenge just about all of the ideas currently in fashion, you can find some pretty damning reviews of their book, but do not believe them, the several I’ve read entirely misstate what was actually written, the old straw man fallacy of inventing something that they didn’t say and shooting it down. And their attitude is not at all “we’re right, you’re wrong”, no, quite the opposite. They’re hoping to stir up fruitful avenues of inquiry, different and more meaningful ways of looking at the past, and my hope is that rather than try to invent a steady state / degrowth economy, that ecologists will team up with experts in anthropology and archeology to discuss the best sustainable ways of life from the past, how to avoid authoritarian kings, brutal agricultural societies, and more.

Here is part of their summary, and at greater length below (though they are constantly summarizing arguments throughout the book, another reason you need to actually read it).

“In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others?

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

Corn for ethanol & soy for biodiesel tremendously destructive

April 19, 2022

Corn for ethanol & soy for biodiesel tremendously destructive

The Green Gold Rush to make biodiesel has begun in earnest in California. It would not be profitable without subsidies from LCFS credits, federal RIN D5 credits, and Blenders Tax Credits at $3.32 a gallon, which is enough to cover production costs, according to Van der Wal, biofuel advisor at Stratas Advisors in Singapore.

He said “It’s a mind-boggling amount of money, you will make a lot of money as long as all these subsidies come in.” Without this money, biodiesel is an energy sink, with very low EROI.

Biodiesel competitors already in the market have already locked up much of the tallow, cooking oil, and other resources Marathon and Phillips hope to use (Bloomberg 2021). And California doesn’t grow many soybeans because of water shortages, so importing soy will increase CO2 via transportation emissions here and the CO2 from tractors and trucks in other countries or the U.S.

Corn and soybeans are very destructive to the environment, eroding more topsoil, causing more pollution, global warming, acidification, eutrophication of water, water treatment costs, fish kills, and biodiversity loss than most other crops (Powers 2005, Troeh and Thompson 2005, Zattara and Aizen2019).

Food versus fuel. Over 40% of the corn crop becomes fuel, not food at a time when 43 million Americans need help with food stamps (USDA 2020) and the high unemployment rate from Covid-19 could drive the need for food aid up to over 54 million people (Lee 2020).

Too many pesticides. Corn and soy are especially destructive because they need a lot of pesticides. Of all pesticide use on crops, corn’s share is 39.5% and soybeans 22% (Mclaughlin and Walsh 1998, Padgitt et al. 2000, Pimentel 2003, Patzek 2004, Fernandez-Cornejo et al. 2014). I don’t want to say they have a drinking problem, but shall we say they have a “dependency problem.”…

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

Implications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical infrastructure safety

April 4, 2022

Implications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical infrastructure safety

Preface. The talk of electric vehicles saving the world from greenhouse gases is nonsense, a red herring to distract everyone from what’s really at stake, and from the material requirements to build them with rare earth and other scarce minerals, and the immense amount of fossil energy required to make them in mining, smelting, manufacture and transport of thousands of parts, and so on. But just focusing on greenhouse gases is a very sneaky way to ignore myriad obstacles.

Cars are just 14% of emissions, and EV only replace gasoline, not the diesel essential for heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships, the kerosene for airplanes, the lubricants essential for all motors, including EV, or the road asphalt EV and diesel trucks move on. EV are less than 1% of cars and always will be, they are too expensive for all but the richest 5% who also have garages and want one and live in places where heat and cold won’t reduce performance and battery life.

A National Laboratory scientist on Chinese gasoline, refining, and petroleum products:

Over the years I have taken the opportunity to ask oil companies about how they would deal with a demand slate stripped of it gasoline fraction, given that that is about the only fraction being targeted by electrification. Chevron’s answer was fairly simple: “It’s our profit center so we’d probably close the refinery” (thus no oil products). Two years in a row I asked the same question to Exxon during some briefings, and both times they said they were “looking into it” and would get back to me (but they never did)…

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

Food shortages as the energy crisis grows and supply chains break?

April 4, 2022

Food shortages as the energy crisis grows and supply chains break?

Preface. This is a long preface followed by two articles about how supply chains and complex tractors may be affected by energy shortages and consequent supply chain failures in the future.Which we’re already seeing as massive numbers of ships sit offshore waiting to be unloaded, and a shortage of truckers to deliver goods when they do arrive.

Supply chain failures will only get worse, affecting food supply and making the prediction of 3 billion more people by 2050 unlikely. We are running out of time to replace fossil fuels with something else that is unknown and definitely not commercial for transportation, manufacturing and other essential services and products. Even the electric grid needs natural gas to stay up, no matter how many wind turbines or solar panels are built (Friedemann 2016).

The reason time is running out is that global conventional oil, where 90% of our petroleum comes from, peaked in 2008 (EIA 2018 page 45), and world oil production of both conventional and unconventional oil in 2018 (EIA 2020).

In the unlikely event you don’t know why this is scary, consider that we are alive today thanks to heavy-duty transportation, which runs almost exclusively on diesel, four billion of us are alive due to finite natural gas derived fertilizer, 500,000 products are made out of fossil fuels, and much of our essential manufacturing (cement, steel, metals, ceramics, glass, microchips) depend on the high heat of fossil fuels. There is not much time to come up with processes to electrify or use hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, which don’t exist yet, let alone rebuild trillions of dollars of infrastructure and a new unknown energy distribution system, triple the electric grid transmission system, and replace hundreds of millions of vehicles and equipment to run on “something else” (Friedemann 2021).

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

Limits to Growth: Natural gas fertilizer that feeds 4 billion of us

April 4, 2022

Limits to Growth: Natural gas fertilizer that feeds 4 billion of us

Preface. In chapter 4 of my book “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy“, I explain how it came to be that fertilizer is made out of natural gas, using the energy of natural gas, and why it allows at least 4 billion of us to be alive. Yet natural gas is finite. And now there are shortages due to high prices. In the U.S. Congress voted to allow natural gas to be exported several years ago, partly to help Europeans not become dependent on Russian gas and fall into their sphere of influence. But now it’s costing farmers all over the world so much many will go out of business. In the U.S., especially small farmers who don’t get subsidies like the huge farms do.

High Natural gas prices in the news:

2022 Rising price of fertilizer is forcing NC farmers out of the business. North Carolina farmers say the cost of fertilizer has tripled over the past two years and is threatening to drive smaller farms out of the business entirely. The spike in cost has left family farms looking for ways to stay afloat while still producing enough food. As one of the most essential tools in agriculture, fertilizer makes up 15% of all farming costs in the U.S., according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. But since September 2020, the cost of fertilizer nationwide has spiked up to 300% as demand for its primary ingredients like ammonia and liquid nitrogen has soared. One farmer said that “Now everybody’s going to chicken litter, and we can’t even find the chicken litter now to do for our farm.”

***

2021 This Chemical Is in Short Supply, and the Whole World Feels It. New York Times.

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

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Source: Russel Rhodes (2011) Explosive Lessons in Hydrogen Safety. https://appel.nasa.gov/2011/02/02/explosive-lessons-in-hydrogen-safety/

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