Home » Posts tagged 'peak fossil fuels'

Tag Archives: peak fossil fuels

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

November 30, 2022

Science Snippets: Peak Fossil Fuels

 

Latest peer-reviewed journal article appears in the prestigious Elsevier series of journals:

McPherson, Guy R., Beril Sirmack, and Ricardo Vinuesa. March 2022. Environmental thresholds for mass-extinction events. Results in Engineering (2022), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2022.100342.

Full text:

When the head of the conservative International Energy Agency admits we are in the midst of the “first truly global energy crisis,” then you know we’re in serious trouble. According to the chief of the International Energy Agency—the IEA—that’s the current situation. The story was published by Reuters on 25 October 2022.

Let’s turn back the clock a bit. According to the IEA, the extraction of conventional oil for the world peaked in 2006. Conventional oil refers to crude plus condensate, and it’s the relatively easy oil to extract and refine. The tough stuff comes next, which is why we have been rabidly pursuing shale and other petrochemicals that have a low energy return on investment, often called EROI. It comes as no surprise that 16 years after the conservative IEA concluded we had passed the peak of crude-plus-condensate, the most important element in the history of industrial civilization, we have similarly, and in a much worse state, passed the peak of all oil. All, as in the whole shebang.

According to the headline of a story published on January 15th, 2021 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Fossil fuel production expected to increase through 2022 but remain below 2019 peak.” Of course, the US EIA is referring to extraction, not production. It’s not as if humans are producing oil. Oil is not ice cream, after all. Even though we do not produce oil, we’re doing a great job sucking it out of the bowels of the planet and turning it into gasoline, diesel, and other energy-rich materials that make our lives easier..

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Peak Fossil Fuels: overview of world peak oil, peak coal, & peak natural gas

February 4, 2022

Peak Fossil Fuels: overview of world peak oil, peak coal, & peak natural gas

Source: World gas peaks in 2040 roughly. Delannoy L et al (2021) Assessing Global Long-Term EROI of Gas: A Net-Energy Perspective on the Energy Transition. Energies.  https://doi.org/10.3390/en14165112

Preface. Below are overviews of peak oil, coal, and natural gas, each followed by additional reading material from my book “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, which explains why we are unlikely to be able to electrify transportation, or run trucks on anything else besides diesel, and why the electric grid will come down for good when there’s no natural gas to balance wind and solar as well as provide peak power.

And my book Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy explains why the manufacturing of cement, steel, smelting of metals, glass, microchips, ceramics and more requires the high heat of fossil fuels to reach up to 3200 F, which can’t be electrified, run on hydrogen or anything else (see chapter 9). Worse yet, even if there were an existing commercial solution, which there isn’t, we are out of time to replace fossil fuels, since oil, the master resource that makes all others possible, probably peaked in 2008 at 69.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) (IEA 2018 p45), or in 2018 (EIA 2020).

The good news is that the worst IPCC projections are less likely to be reached  (see chapter 33 of Life After Fossil Fuels).  And as oil declines exponentially faster, perhaps from now onward, CO2 will decline: About 50% of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and 30% more within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years (GAO (2014) CLIMATE CHANGE: Energy Infrastructure Risks and Adaptation Efforts GAO-14-74. United States Government Accountability Office).

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

Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change

May 25, 2020

Nuclear waste will last a lot longer than climate change

Preface.   One of the most tragic aspects of peak oil is that it is very unlikely once energy descent begins that oil will be expended to clean up our nuclear mess.  Or before descent either.  Anyone who survives peak fossil fuels and after that, rising sea levels and extreme weather from climate change, will still be faced with nuclear waste as a deadly pollutant and potential weapon. 

According to Archer (2008): “… there are components of nuclear material that have a long lifetime, such as the isotopes plutonium 239 (24,000 year half-life), thorium 230 (80,000 years), and iodine 129 (15.7 million years). Ideally, these substances must be stored and isolated from reaching ground water until they decay, but the lifetimes are so immense that it is hard to believe or to prove that this can be done”.

Below are summaries of two articles on nuclear waste.

***

Ro, C. 2019. The Staggering Timescales Of Nuclear Waste Disposal. Forbes.

This most potent form of nuclear waste needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. These are still such unimaginably vast lengths of time that regulatory authorities decide on them, in part, based on how long ice ages are expected to last.

Strategies remain worryingly short-term, on a nuclear timescale. Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor no. 4, for instance, was encased in July 2019 in a massive steel “sarcophagus” that will only last 100 years. Not only will containers like this one fall short of the timescales needed for sufficient storage, but no country has allotted enough funds to cover nuclear waste disposal. In France and the US, according to the recently published World Nuclear Waste Report, the funding allocation only covers a third of the estimated costs. And the cost estimates that do exist rarely extend beyond several decades.

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

Parliamentary group warns that global fossil fuels could peak in less than 10 years

April 20, 2016

Parliamentary group warns that global fossil fuels could peak in less than 10 years

British MPs launch landmark report on impending environmental ‘limits’ to economic growth

A report commissioned on behalf of a cross-party group of British MPs authored by a former UK government advisor, the first of its kind, says that industrial civilisation is currently on track to experience “an eventual collapse of production and living standards” in the next few decades if business-as-usual continues.

The report published by the new All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Limits to Growth, which launched in the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, reviews the scientific merits of a controversial 1972 model by a team of MIT scientists, which forecasted a possible collapse of civilisation due to resource depletion.

The report launch at the House of Commons was addressed by Anders Wijkman, co-chair of the Club of Rome, which originally commissioned the MIT study.

At the time, the MIT team’s findings had been widely criticised in the media for being alarmist. To this day, it is often believed that the ‘limits to growth’ forecasts were dramatically wrong.

But the new report by the APPG on Limits to Growth, whose members consist of Conservative, Labour, Green and Scottish National Party members of parliament, reviews the scientific literature and finds that the original model remains surprisingly robust.

Authored by Professor Tim Jackson of the University of Surrey, who was Economics Commissioner on the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission, and former Carbon Brief policy analyst Robin Webster, the report concludes that:

“There is unsettling evidence that society is tracking the ‘standard run’ of the original study — which leads ultimately to collapse. Detailed and recent analyses suggest that production peaks for some key resources may only be decades away.”

The 1972 team used their system dynamics model of the consumption of key planetary resources to explore a range of different scenarios.

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress