Enviormental report paints a bleak picture

[Shinova]

None of the things you described are petroleum substitutes. Sorry.

You mean this?

Link

[Darth Wong]

None of the things you described are petroleum substitutes. Sorry.

You mean this?

Link

A startup company looking for venture capital, making bold promises. Wow, I guess all our problems are solved.

[Ryan Thunder]

When humanity is cancer, all life gets washed away...

Every time I read one of these things, I keep thinking the only solution seems to be a bioweapon that sterilises a good portion of the world. Too many people needing too many resources, having too many babies, and a moral duty to feed as many as we can rather than condemning people to death through starvation. It seems then, to cut down the needy, rather than killing actual needy people or attempting to sustain the unsustainable, removing the needy that don't exist yet is preferable.

Oryx and Crake, anybody?

There's gotta be something better than that...

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

None of the things you described are petroleum substitutes. Sorry.

You mean this?

Link

If you took more than thirty seconds to read the thread, you'd find that this falls under the "Pie in the Sky" technologies thing. Not to mention it's being touted by a small biotech startup looking for capital, as has been mentioned already. There's a lot of claims and a lot of promises, but there's not yet enough hard data to see how well the idea will scale from the lab bench.

Not to mention there is still the slight problem of adapting those bacteria to produce petroleum for cellulose . . . the same problem bio-ethanol is facing right now.

[Illuminatus Primus]

None of the things you described are petroleum substitutes. Sorry.

You mean this?

Link

Go to school; get a job; get an internship. Cruising tech enthusiast websites isn't a proper introduction into how shit gets done in the real world.

[Shinova]

Go to school; get a job; get an internship. Cruising tech enthusiast websites isn't a proper introduction into how shit gets done in the real world.

lol, I'm not that young.

[Guardsman Bass]

Shale's not completely unusable in a pinch, but it is environmentally bad to produce, and costly as hell. You'd probably only want to use it on the major car fleets of companies and the government until you could make a switch to running them on hydrogen and/or electric, and that's only if you have next to no other sources of oil, and are desperate.

[hongi]

That's why I'll never donate a single penny to all those charities showing the starving kids in Africa and such. It's just compounding the problem, they don't have the resources to feed their current population, so why are we feeding their kids who will then turn around and pump out several more who need to be fed?

So you wouldn't donate to medical institutions that are developing vaccines against malaria, or health organisations that buy insecticide-pregnant nets? After all, medicine will only help these people live longer.

If you don't want to aleviate the immediate suffering of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, you can donate to economic and medical institutions that help these people get a more stable foundation.

There's something extremely disturbing about not donating because you don't want those people to have babies.

[Androsphinx]

That's why I'll never donate a single penny to all those charities showing the starving kids in Africa and such. It's just compounding the problem, they don't have the resources to feed their current population, so why are we feeding their kids who will then turn around and pump out several more who need to be fed?

Why don't you donate to a charity which promotes use of contraception, sustainable use of the environment and basic health and education? It's curious how your high-minded principles happen to agree so readily with your own self-interest.

[Edi]

Go to school; get a job; get an internship. Cruising tech enthusiast websites isn't a proper introduction into how shit gets done in the real world.

lol, I'm not that young.

Lol, then you don't have even that much of an excuse to be so pig-ignorant. Especially given how long you have been a member here and how prevalent these topics have been.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Shale's not completely unusable in a pinch, but it is environmentally bad to produce, and costly as hell. You'd probably only want to use it on the major car fleets of companies and the government until you could make a switch to running them on hydrogen and/or electric, and that's only if you have next to no other sources of oil, and are desperate.

Its quite probably not net energy gain, and definitely has a MUCH worse EROEI than crude oil.

[Aaron]

Looks like I better put some more into the kids RESP and ramp up the encouragement for them to go to university or get a trade so their not stuck when this comes to a head. I'll be dead or dying by the time this all comes to pass but there's no reason why my kids can't be in a good position.

[Guardsman Bass]

Shale's not completely unusable in a pinch, but it is environmentally bad to produce, and costly as hell. You'd probably only want to use it on the major car fleets of companies and the government until you could make a switch to running them on hydrogen and/or electric, and that's only if you have next to no other sources of oil, and are desperate.

Its quite probably not net energy gain, and definitely has a MUCH worse EROEI than crude oil.

I know that, but it's not the point. Unless you are using more oil than you get out of the shale in the process of creating it, then even with a negligable or negative EROEI, you are still getting energy in a form you can use in car engines for fuel. Kind of like how hydrogen is really an energy carrier, since you don't get positive EROEI out of the production and use of hydrogen. Hence my point about it being usable "in a pinch."

[Illuminatus Primus]

Yeah, and refining 90% of the oil out of it just to burn to get the other 10% that THEN goes into refining is supposed to be incrementally cost-effective compared to gasoline? You'll never be able to run our economy and transportation and urban sprawl off returns like that. Not to mention the horrific environmental damage.

What is the obsession with maintaining our current lifestyles and car culture? Wouldn't it just be easier to go back to denser small towns and cities like Europe, and depend largely on rail?

[Guardsman Bass]

Yeah, and refining 90% of the oil out of it just to burn to get the other 10% that THEN goes into refining is supposed to be incrementally cost-effective compared to gasoline? You'll never be able to run our economy and transportation and urban sprawl off returns like that. Not to mention the horrific environmental damage.

What is the obsession with maintaining our current lifestyles and car culture? Wouldn't it just be easier to go back to denser small towns and cities like Europe, and depend largely on rail?

Don't strawman me; I specifically mentioned that it would be a source fuel that you could use if you had to, but that it was horrifically expensive. The key point is "if you have to" - hence why I also mentioned that it could be used in a pinch to maintain the large car fleets of organizations like some of the large businesses and the government, particularly since, while not exactly the most desirable of fuel, it could at least be used without a major revamping on your refueling infrastructure.

Shale's not completely unusable in a pinch, but it is environmentally bad to produce, and costly as hell. You'd probably only want to use it on the major car fleets of companies and the government until you could make a switch to running them on hydrogen and/or electric, and that's only if you have next to no other sources of oil, and are desperate.

[Sikon]

There has been prior discussion of some energy return figures in another thread, specific figures with references.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Conceded. My bad.

[Guardsman Bass]

It's fine. Besides, shale oil is rather nasty stuff; the only real advantage it has over, say, hydrogen as an energy carrier (aside from the fact that you might be able to eke a slightly positive or at least relatively neutral EROEI out of it) is that you can use it without having to reconfigure all of your trucks and tractors to an entirely new engine (at least, until the shale runs out).

[Shinova]

Lol, then you don't have even that much of an excuse to be so pig-ignorant. Especially given how long you have been a member here and how prevalent these topics have been.

It was a simple question I posed, which was to explain in short why blahblah, because I don't read every thread in N&P and SLM and I don't spend every other hour on SDN or concentrate so much on it and rack up huge 5-digit postcounts like many of you guys do. And criticizing someone's ignorance is hardly a constructive way to enlighten them and bring them over to your side. Maybe it works here on this internet message board, but it certainly doesn't work in real life, and for people who are so informed on climate change and the future of the human race I'm so glad you guys aren't the ones in the position to or with the will to actually try to do something about it rather than pointing fingers at the ignorant and holding them in contempt.

[Illuminatus Primus]

[translation=Bitchspeak-to-English]Wahhh! You're a bunch of Internet dorks! Don't attack me for asserting claims I hadn't researched! People let people be dumb in the real world because they need them for work and friends and stuff, you guys must have no friends or jobs![/translation]

Shut the fuck up, bitch. I have a girlfriend, I'm actually applying for DOE internships, I actually have real world friends, I'm working on my degree, and doing advocacy and outreach on my campus. Just because YOU are an Internet dipshit who thinks they can crawl on here and use popular stupidity to justify making unsupported claims, isn't our problem.

[Admiral Valdemar]

When oil was $3 per barrel, many people said that if oil ever reached $8 per barrel, Green River oil shale would have its revenge on Spindletop and shut down the oil industry.

Energy of the future. Always will be.

[Guardsman Bass]

Is that figure adjusted for inflation in terms of modern dollars? Saying that "well, back when oil was X they said it would be usable if it hit Y, and it has hit Y since then" doesn't mean a thing otherwise.

Also, keep in mind that some American oil companies, at least according to Daniel Yergin's book The Prize, were making serious monetary investments into shale oil at the height of the oil prices of the early 1980s, until prices collapsed and they called a halt to that immediately. It's not just an idle dream. I'm not claiming it's going to be competitive with sweet crude anytime soon, but I do think that if you get in a situation where you absolutely have to keep some gas-powered machinery running, and you don't have sweet crude, then it's there.

[Sikon]

Oil price history (always much more than $3 in today's dollars):

In case of the off-situ method, the oil shale is/can be mined either by traditional underground mining or surface mining from the ground and then transported to a processing facility. At the facility, the shale is heated to 450–500 °C (750-950°F) and enriched with hydrogen (via introduction of superheated steam). The resulting oil is then separated from the waste material.[...]

During the oil crisis of the 1970s, people thought that oil supplies were peaking, expected oil prices to be around seventy dollars a barrel for some time to come, and invested huge amounts of money in refining oil shale — money that they lost. Because of the astronomical sums that were lost last time around there is considerable reluctance to invest in oil shale this time around. Investors are waiting to see if oil prices really will remain this high (in August 2006: US$75 a barrel). Prices are rising because of increased demand in rapidly developing countries, particularly China. Will high prices stimulate the discovery of more oil, as happened in the seventies, or will alternatives to drilling for oil have to be developed? Investors, burnt badly in the 1980s for their enthusiasm of the seventies, are in no hurry to develop oil shale.[...]

A critical measure of the viability of oil shale is the ratio of energy used to produce the oil, compared to the energy returned (Energy Returned on Energy Invested - EROEI). Oil shale typically has a very low EROEI: Royal Dutch Shell reported a figure of about 3:1. That is, energy equivalent to one barrel of oil was used for every three gained, on its recent in-situ development (which uses electric heating of the shale up to 500 degrees fahrenheit (260 °C) while it is still in the ground, while also creating a frost shield around the mining site), Mahogany Research Project. This compares to a figure of typically 5:1 for conventional oil extraction.

EROEI may be less important if alternate energy sources are used to fund the process. Coal was the primary power source used by the Shell pilot project.

China is challenged severely by high oil prices. The Chinese government has sponsored a project to extract oil from shale.[...]

Even if nuclear energy was used for the heating, oil shale would still be rather environmentally unfriendly overall, but it is of note as potentially seeing greater use in the future.

However, currently nearly all non-conventional oil and oil-equivalents comes from other sources, including natural gas liquids (NGL), condensates, oil sands (which are different from oil shale), coal to liquids (CTL), and biofuels; a graph in this thread illustrates.

[Darth Wong]

Also, keep in mind that some American oil companies, at least according to Daniel Yergin's book The Prize, were making serious monetary investments into shale oil at the height of the oil prices of the early 1980s, until prices collapsed and they called a halt to that immediately. It's not just an idle dream. I'm not claiming it's going to be competitive with sweet crude anytime soon, but I do think that if you get in a situation where you absolutely have to keep some gas-powered machinery running, and you don't have sweet crude, then it's there.

The problem is not that we can't find a way to keep critical machines working. It's that the economic damage will be severe. There are plenty of countries in the world today where life is so shitty that we in the First World would consider it a nightmarish existence. Why is it so hard to believe that our civilized society might crumble under stress? It arguably already has, in certain lawless areas of urban Detroit for example. And that's with plentiful cheap oil.