Will The End Of Oil See The End Of My Town?

[Darth Wong]

It seems to me that all of the criticisms of the hydrogen economy centre around the fact that it won't be as safe, convenient, or cheap as gasoline currently is. Well no shit, but since the gasoline gravy train won't last forever, this is a worthless and quite frankly stupid angle of attack. The question is whether it can be made to work, not whether it's as good as cheap gasoline.

Take the example of farming. In the case of farming, we're talking about multi-million dollar pieces of machinery as it is, and organizations which should be capable of building the necessary facilities and maintaining their vehicles appropriately.

Remember, the problem is not merely the replacement and continued operation of cars. There is an enormous amount of mechanized equipment behind the scenes which needs to keep running if our society is to survive in any recognizable form. The fact that Joe Sixpack can't be trusted to safely maintain a hydrogen-powered car doesn't mean that corporate transport fleets, farm machinery, etc. can't be run that way.

Of course, there is always the possibility that someone will come up with better ways of working with hydrogen, but even if that doesn't happen, it seems like a better alternative than simply preparing to sit in the dark and cry.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Why bother with hydrogen when it's an energy consumer? Why not just go straight to electrical? Aside from the costs of fuel-cells, the technical difficulties with storing hydrogen and the danger behind it, it's really a stupid idea to pump money into something that isn't going to solve squat on any meaningful scale.

I look at the BMW Hydrogen 7 fleet and wonder who's going to pay $118k for a four door saloon which only has that price tage because it uses hydrogen, the fuel-cell stack alone costing around $35k. Platinum is also nowhere near abundant enough to supply the globe with fuel-cell technology, and you're not going to be alone in wanting that metal either, which again leads to resource wars.

I'd rather people backed EVs, which are shown to be workable and have been for over a decade. Quite what sense converting electricity to hydrogen then back to electricity again makes, I don't know. But it's hopelessly inefficient, and that alone makes it a dead end.

[Nova Andromeda]

It seems to me that all of the criticisms of the hydrogen economy centre around the fact that it won't be as safe, ...

-As an engineer perhaps you can speak to this. I haven't seen any real evidence that a hydrogen tank necessarily less safe than a gasoline tank. In fact, I have seen hydrogen tanks punctured and ignited on TV and this resulted in a gas jet until the tank was empty. It never exploded. Gasoline tank ruptures are much worse. In any event, the energy content should be about the same in both cases so even in the worse case senario would a hydrogen tank explosion be worse than a gas tank explosion?

[Darth Wong]

Why bother with hydrogen when it's an energy consumer? Why not just go straight to electrical?

If they can make batteries that work really well, that would be grand. Can they? It's not as if other kinds of batteries don't have their own problems.

Aside from the costs of fuel-cells, the technical difficulties with storing hydrogen and the danger behind it, it's really a stupid idea to pump money into something that isn't going to solve squat on any meaningful scale.

I look at the BMW Hydrogen 7 fleet and wonder who's going to pay $118k for a four door saloon which only has that price tage because it uses hydrogen, the fuel-cell stack alone costing around $35k.

I'd rather people backed EVs, which are shown to be workable and have been for over a decade. Quite what sense converting electricity to hydrogen then back to electricity again makes, I don't know. But it's hopelessly inefficient, and that alone makes it a dead end.

As I said, if they can make batteries work, I'm all for it. It's the basic idea of switching from a hub-and-spoke fuel delivery system to a decentralized onsite renewable-energy gathering and distribution system that I'm keen on, not the particular means of storing electrical energy.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What bloody use are cars, anyway? They're a needless luxury item. Suburbs started developing under the influence of electric interurbans before the Model T even existed. If there's a big interurban car with nice plush velvet seats screaming and crackling under DC power down to the little flag-stop a half mile from your home every twenty minutes, what excuse do you have for not riding it?

Unfortunately the tracks were almost all removed by a collusion with Goodyear, but most of the routes still exist.

If we realized how serious this was, we could close every fast-food restaurant in the country, draft their employees, and use them as manual labour for throwing down ties and spiking rails to 'em and putting up poles for the cantenary. Just rip up the roads and dynamite the fills where they cross the old lines, people driving cars now have to find other ways around them, they shouldn't be driving anymore, anyway. If someone has had the misfortune to buy part of the route and put pavement or homes over it, burn 'em down just like Daley sent in earth-movers in the middle of the night to bulldoze Meigs Field.

Close off one lane in each direction on the freeway in the urban areas and on the beltways, lay ties along 'em and put in the track, hang the cantenary from the lightposts, a proper roadbed can be put in later. Start buying up a bunch of old boxcars, ripping the tops off of them and using the frame for the basis of simple self-propelled electric cars.. Lay in mass orders for the things everywhere. Or put rail wheels on buses for the first step.

Start stringing double-cantenary on all the streets for electric buses where we can't cheaply put to streetcar tracks or revive old routes.

Institute gasoline rationing, ban cars which get a mileage above a certain amount, require a useful purpose permit for trucks, eliminate SUVs entirely.. Hell, we could put rail wheels on the things, and old hook-and-pinion couplers made out of scrap iron, and use 'em as passenger cars initially, towed behind a power car. I've seen MUCH weirder in the realm of improvised railroad, but you used to have Model T's with railroad wheels as improvised inspection vehicles all the bloody time back in the 20's.

St. Petersburg used to have a streetcar system on its RIVERS, which operated when they were frozen--the cantenary hung over the open water in the summer, then when it froze they laid temporary track and ran streetcar service on the rivers themselves. They removed it when the ice started to melt, and repeated the next year. If you can run a streetcar system on that much of a shoe-string, then you can make what I just described work.

Close down all the underground highways and put subways through 'em instead. Start running diesel commuter trains down every rail route into every city, and hang cantenary as soon as is practicable.

Make it illegal to drive a car without at least four adults in it for distances of more than five miles.

THAT is the sort of stuff which would avert this crisis.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

There's a good example of how well you can improvise things if you really need to when it comes to low-intensity railroad operations. That is a model, yes, but it's based on things which actually happened. That is, indeed, a Model T sedan pulling a boxcar.

This is mainly to demonstrate that I'm not being an utter lunatic. If we had to, we really could make a transit system work by ripping the engines out of twenty or thirty Dodge Durangos or Escalades or whatever, attaching metal bars to the ends of each with locking pins to fasten them together (probably from the tow hitches in the back of the SUV, no less!), drop the road wheels and replace with rail wheels, and tow them behind an interurban. There, I've just created a commuter vehicle which can hold more than 200 people comfortably. It'll probably make 50mph safely, too; the only problem is braking, and there should be some way to electrically activate the hydraulic brakes of all the vehicles simultaneously.

And the situation could easily get desperate enough that we're actually going to be doing things like this.

[Starglider]

It seems to me that all of the criticisms of the hydrogen economy centre around the fact that it won't be as safe, convenient, or cheap as gasoline currently is. Well no shit, but since the gasoline gravy train won't last forever, this is a worthless and quite frankly stupid angle of attack. The question is whether it can be made to work, not whether it's as good as cheap gasoline.

Surely the main competitor is batteries and power lines? Battery technology is advancing quite fast at present; it's getting the same kind of research effort that fuel cells are (less government subsidy, but more industry funding because high-efficiency batteries are already a huge revenue generator). If we're prepared to pipe/ship cryogenic hydrogen around, then building a superconducting power grid (with any of several newly developed cheap-to-produce high temperature superconductors) shouldn't be out of the question. If you think hydrogen is the answer, what's your preferred method for hydrogen storage and shipment?

In practice there will almost certainly be a mix of hydrogen, batteries and synthetic hydrocarbons, so I suppose the question is what that mix will look like.

Remember, the problem is not merely the replacement and continued operation of cars. There is an enormous amount of mechanized equipment behind the scenes which needs to keep running if our society is to survive in any recognizable form. The fact that Joe Sixpack can't be trusted to safely maintain a hydrogen-powered car doesn't mean that corporate transport fleets, farm machinery, etc. can't be run that way.

I still expect synthetic hydrocarbons, made with new (relatively) high-efficiency processes for reforming coal, to fill this need in the medium term. Longer term as the prices keep rising and the environmental damage gets unbearable we'll certainly have to go to electric or hydrogen.

[Admiral Valdemar]

If they can make batteries that work really well, that would be grand. Can they? It's not as if other kinds of batteries don't have their own problems.

They may not be as good as gasoline engines, but they could be replaced with new forms of capacitor being looked at now. The best you'll get is Li-ion, which isn't amazing, but it's at least more efficient than hydrogen, without the dangers and costs. For short haul trips within urban environments, you can get EVs today that do well enough. London has plenty of G-Whizz things going around, they look cute and silly, but there's also a push for street based recharge points. A small EV is ideal for the city, which is too bad when you still get SUVs and big saloons going around because people can afford them (now).

For off-road work or agriculture, I expect we could use bio-fuels to an extent where batteries or capacitors cannot offer the energy density required.

As I said, if they can make batteries work, I'm all for it. It's the basic idea of switching from a hub-and-spoke fuel delivery system to a decentralized onsite renewable-energy gathering and distribution system that I'm keen on, not the particular means of storing electrical energy.

If hydrogen is to be done, it will only ever be done for personal use. Though seeing as future power production will likely follow places like Woking in England, with totally decentralised power generation from efficient houses with solar, wind and CHP systems along with biomass combustion, this is doable with electric anyway.

The issues with hydrogen are really more fundamental than simply having to replace our cars today with far more pricier H2 using ones. That there's only enough platinum to make a stack for every car on the road today and that these stacks only last for 12,000 miles is a major hurdle. There simply isn't enough of the precious metal to use for what we need it for, and given the costs that would be needed to make the economy run on hydrogen which ain't exactly easy to shift, store or use, it just adds more black marks.



But this highlights another issue, which is that no single alternative will solve the problem. This is what makes me dislike with great intensity those pushing for ethanol, hydrogen or nuclear solely. Because none of it is feasible, realistically, at replacing all of fossil fuels. Technically doable? Sure, in most cases. To ignore the implementation of these alternatives, though, is to simply work in a fantasy theoretical land where you may as well throw in 100% efficiency too and rational people.

Again, Kunstler:

We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible.

We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.

[Darth Wong]

<snip>

As an aside, I used to work in a Kellogg factory that had a rail line running right into it. The loading docks were still there and everything. But it wasn't used any more, and hadn't been used for decades. Trucks were the rage now, along with "just in time" manufacturing which improves efficiencies but forces people to ship things in smaller bite-size quantities.

[J]

-A very very quick google search said that the U.S. consummes 20 million barrels of oil per year. Considering this, the above, and Mr. Wong's previous calculations it would appear that we could have completely replaced oil with solar and wind for the price of the Iraq war.

Actually it's 20 million barrels a day. Every four seconds, a thousand barrels of oil goes up in smoke in the US. That's about 1300 Olympic sized swimming pools every day, and about a quarter cubic mile every year.

[Darth Wong]

In many ways, I would welcome the end of the Happy Motoring era. But we need to make sure the other stuff (trains, farm tractors, etc) still runs. I spent years taking the bus and subway, and I could do it again. But our society's addiction to gasoline goes far beyond personal cars. Mitigation plans have to look at keeping that stuff running, not keeping Joe Asshole's Hummer H2 running.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

<snip>

As an aside, I used to work in a Kellogg factory that had a rail line running right into it. The loading docks were still there and everything. But it wasn't used any more, and hadn't been used for decades. Trucks were the rage now, along with "just in time" manufacturing which improves efficiencies but forces people to ship things in smaller bite-size quantities.

There's plenty of situations like that, despite the fact that rail transport is 10 to 13 times more efficient than truck transportation for very heavy cargoes, and still quite efficient for lighter and even less-than-truckload cargoes. Barge transportation on canals is even more efficient.

Fortunately most of the routes, even of the track that's been ripped up, are still intact, and they can be replaced. It will be a good job for those people put out of work in the service industry as this takes place. Good crews with picks and sledgehammers and brute strength could lay up to 10 miles of track a day in advancing a railhead, and the roadbeds are still largely intact.

We can restore our railnet by sweat and hard work if necessary, and it'll fall on all the freshly unemployed service industry workers to do it, no doubt.

[Nova Andromeda]

-A very very quick google search said that the U.S. consummes 20 million barrels of oil per year. Considering this, the above, and Mr. Wong's previous calculations it would appear that we could have completely replaced oil with solar and wind for the price of the Iraq war.

Actually it's 20 million barrels a day. Every four seconds, a thousand barrels of oil goes up in smoke in the US. That's about 1300 Olympic sized swimming pools every day, and about a quarter cubic mile every year.

-Oops! That certainly changes the equation doesn't it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Also, if you're some kid and you're worried about your future in this dangerous new world we're entering, from reading this thread?

Let me give you some advice. There's going to be between 60,000 - 200,000 job openings in the railroad industry in the next 10 years. The average age of railroad employees right now is in their 50's. There are plenty of community-college level one-year certificate programmes in Railroad Operations and they'll hire you with very little work experience if you have one of those under your belt. The starting salaries for brakemen and other entry level road positions are in excess of 30,000 USD a year.

Get crackin'.

[Admiral Valdemar]

This will be one of the major psychological hurdles to get over, especially in the US where cheap gas is seen as a birth-right.

Even during the Great Depression, people actually cut back on food to fuel their cars. Gasoline use, despite the price increases over the past couple of months alone, is still going up. The refineries cannot keep up and this summer is looking to be a repeat of 1973 for the US. People have grumbled over $4 gas, but they'll pay for it, because they want to drive to work and continue using their inefficient road hogs. They do not even know how cheap that stuff is. One barrel of oil is 25,000 man hours of energy. You try finding people willing to do that much work for barely $100. A former Saudi king once commented that Coca-Cola is sold at around $80 a barrel, so why should they sell oil for less? When they, the public, cannot buy gas for love nor money, then people may grasp the premise that what their politicians and Big Oil have told them is bullshit. Then the panic sets in, and Wall Street likely goes a bit crazy.

That we have people from all walks, neo-cons to greens, talking about keeping the cars going, hell, keeping the life we live today as it is is absurd. You simply CANNOT continue to have your economy grow, people use more energy and populations expand when your energy source is shrinking and won't be replaced, ever, by a similar, readily available, cheap source. No alternative to fossil fuels exist. As I've stated before, it's like we've squandered a big fat inheritance in the bank and now we're stuck with a McJob's wage to cover future usage. Cutting back on society's excesses is mandatory, else people will die from lack of food, because someone else has a nation using their force to make sure they live the life of the 21st century at the expense of others, though they too will fall eventually.

Why do you think we're in Iraq? Tell me, do you think the USA can ignore the world's largest oil fields despite being the world's largest energy user?

The reason the US moved into Iraq was to form a nice police station in the ME, as it were. They now have a convenient position smack bang in the middle of the one area of the world that will become awfully popular in the near future. If we didn't do it, the Chinese would, as they seem to be doing with Africa now.

A quote comes to mind:

Higgins: It's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?

Joe Turner: Ask them?

Higgins: Not now - then! Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!

The people of today do not understand basic physics is against them. Instead, we have people voting in these fools who think the only way to keep the American Dream running smoothly is to force others to give them their energy dues. It's not "We're running out, so we better invest in alternatives". It's "We're running out, so we better go and grab what's left and keep it for ourselves". No one sees past the immediate future, even if the US did get all the oil, that just means they grow ever more and run out of energy a bit later, making the fall even harder.

I know this all sounds dark, but trying to get friends and family to even talk about this is worse than global warming. People won't even entertain the notion of this catastrophe round the corner, so why would anyone expect them to give up stuff until it's too late?

[Darth Wong]

The thing is, even the people who say we have to do something won't lead the way by example. Even the environmentalists still drive their cars around all over the place; they just drive smaller cars and pat themselves on the back for being environmentally friendly even though we can't really sustain the smaller cars either. They take jet aircraft to go on vacations. They buy the cheapest produce at the grocery store with no concern for how far it was shipped to get here. Etc.

This whole situation is one of the best arguments against the free market and for the command economy that one could possibly envision. Nothing but a strong authoritarian government could ever make people do the things they need to do in order to make this happen.

[Starglider]

I know this all sounds dark, but trying to get friends and family to even talk about this is worse than global warming. People won't even entertain the notion of this catastrophe round the corner, so why would anyone expect them to give up stuff until it's too late?

That goes for all serious threats to the status quo. Peak oil isn't even a major existential risk (in that it isn't going to kill off the whole species) but the same cognitive biases apply. At least most people could understand the basic issues involved if peak oil if they put aside their comfortable delusions and made a serious effort, and once the bubble is shattered people will at least be taking the problem seriously (though many will still deny the reasons behind it and advocate unworkable solutions). The case for a general understanding of a genuine existential risk such as militarised nanotech or self-enhancing artificial general intelligence is several orders of magnitude more hopeless - the science is too complex, esoteric and counter-intuitive and there's little chance of a 'bubble shattering' event occurring in time to make any difference to the outcome.

[SirNitram]

The worst part is, from my position, a feeling of powerlessness. I can see some ways to ease the blow to those around me, but what the hell am I gonna do? Don't have nearly the money nor the alphabet soup after my name to get the funding for the ideas that could be done by one ambitious nutbar. Don't have the clout to get the large-scale public projects started.

Meh, I say. I'll keep taking the train when possible; it's not much, but it's about all I can do.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Quite the thorny issue, eh? Environmentalists will often cite that they are driving a Prius, or other hybrid or even a diesel. While these are less polluting and do use less energy, the increased efficiency does nothing to the energy situation in the end. Jevon's Paradox and the rebound effect mean that higher efficiency actually makes the situation worse by having that saved cash put into consuming more energy, be it buying more food, taking more holidays abroad or whatever.

What you need are taxes on energy usage. You need to force people to curb their carbon footprint, not politely mention that, if they do use less fossil fuels and buy less useless shit they don't need, they may save a fuzzy animal in a far off land from going extinct. If the people proposing massive carbon cutting because they think the planet is cooking itself to death can't be arsed to stop using a car, consuming more than they need or jetting off to give talks, then what chance has Joe Sixpack who doesn't even believe in global warming?

Within a decade, people will be forced to change, and then you'll only hear how they were never told about this and denial kicks in and all sorts of panic reactions that only use up more of an already shrinking resource. It's not as if the gov't of the US, at least, doesn't know this. In fact, Cheney is even counting on economic collapse, according to the way he's investing his hard earned dollars.

I don't doubt that, given time and incentive, this would be a non-issue. Because humans are inherently stupid beasts, we've been led to believe that 200 years of prosperity and endless growth and technology will mean we can do this for eternity. Even if oil wasn't running out, you'd hit one of many other points where Diebold's laws of sustainability kick in, and like bacteria in a petri dish of sugar, you start dying off after overshooting the population size limit.

We had ample time in the '70s, which was then wasted because more oil came on-stream and so everything seemed honkey-dorey for eternity again. Boy, are we in for a shock when economists figure out their whole system is bullshit, the cars won't be going on forever and technology will not solve the problem (a common misconception because technology has solved many issues. It is not, however, an energy source and never will be). Perhaps if people had a decent grounding in the laws of thermodynamics, they'd see what a sham our civilisation has become. Sadly, they shall find out the hard way, starting with that bastion of wastefulness: surburbia.

[J]

Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World is one of the best books I've read about dealing with our inevitable future. It explains the likely scenarios for when oil runs short, and a possible way to work out of the mess if enough people could somehow see the light and work together.

[SirNitram]

Use the great motivator to start it. Money. People will do anything for money. It's one of those things. Economic depression? New Deal to build commuter rail lines and wind turbines and other simple things. Will it get you out of the depression? No, but you'll have the electric and the workforce for when you can. Hell, as I said above, I'd do it now if I had the resources. Drop wind turbines in the valleys that are always windy, and see if you can deploy reasonable speed commuter rails throughout the state. If you can run commuter rail through this fucking set of mountains, you can do it anywhere in the US.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Start worrying about yourself and your families and friends. It's too late to save the world, so really, when the shit hits the fan, the best you can do is hope you've got yourself to a sustainable lifestyle. Be looking at becoming energy independent, with a plot of land for growing your own food if need be. Should the economies of the world collapse, which is very likely, then that pretty much slams the door on creating infrastructure to counter this problem too, at least until society adapts to a whole new world, and by new, I mean pre-18th century style.

I'm trying to start making my village aware of this issue. I know most people will pooh-pooh it, as they seem to global warming (hey, it's rural area, well, okay, the suburbs). But I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't make posters, fliers and so on and maybe give a talk at the village hall. It's hard to swallow, that the world you know is ending and that this isn't the plot to a Hollywood movie. Swallow it they must, else when the real thing comes, people will simply break as they did in great numbers in '29.

That's about all you can do. It's damage control now, not preventive measures, so see this more as assuming the correct position for a crash landing after failing to warn the pilot the engines just fell off.

At least the recent explosion in wanting to be green because of climate change is helping ease the pressure somewhat to the idea of changing lives to live in harmony with the world, even if climate change is not as pressing nor dramatic, for the near future in any case.

[SirNitram]

It's all academic. As I said, I lack the money or clout to do anything. So eh.

[Adrian Laguna]

If you can run commuter rail through this fucking set of mountains, you can do it anywhere in the US.

Is that Amtrak's Cardinal line you're talking about? Because from what I hear, the King of Pork makes sure all Amtrak funding is dependent on that line being up. That is assuming you mean by "can run" in the economic sustainability sense rather than physically building it.

[SirNitram]

If you can run commuter rail through this fucking set of mountains, you can do it anywhere in the US.

Is that Amtrak's Cardinal line you're talking about? Because from what I hear, the King of Pork makes sure all Amtrak funding is dependent on that line being up. That is assuming you mean by "can run" in the economic sustainability sense rather than physically building it.

Cardinal isn't a commuter line. Among other things, it runs on the same rails as the coal trains, and they get priority. Because if they don't, kiss the Eastern Seaboard's power generation bye-bye. You'd need a new set of track. Hell, it'd be better anyways; that line is so broken-down it's sad.

I am talking about ground up work. But as I said: It's academic and pointless to talk about. I'm hardly going to find the clout and money under a bush tomorrow.