Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:
The answer to this one is simple. The auto industries took back all their EV's when the leases expired and crushed them down in the middle of the night as soon as it looked like California's Zero Emission Mandate would get shot down. It had nothing whatsoever to do with any flaws of electric vehicles.
I never said it had anything to do with flaws, I was implying it was everything to do with politics, as you just proved for me.
The "easy" uranium will last a century with modern breeder reactors, more than long enough for any kinks with the seawater method to sort itself out, and unlike shale oil, it actually is still economical to get uranium that way.
Breeders are also not in widespread use, are not the most fantastic of economic success stories and help in proliferation again (no one is going to invest in thorium until uranium disappears, which won't be anytime soon). You've got the political problem of allowing nuclear breeder reactors to prosper. There are also no large scale extraction sites for seawater uranium and until it is proven on such a scale assuming the price or uranium goes up past the '70s highs, then there's no reason to factor it in to short term solutions.
Large public works projects are a staple of depressions. It does, of course, depend on how steep the back side of the slope is, like I said.
And you need an awful lot of oil to make a nuke plant. This isn't like building a small dam or anything and it's not like Joe Bloggs out of work from GM is going to suddenly start helping to build your several hundred or so AP1000 plants. Expertise is a limiting factor too, and that's in short supply also.
It happens if it's made to happen. If it's not made to happen, then it doesn't happen. There's no magic law of economics that says an industry can't grow 30, 300, or 3 thousand % per year if there's a desperate need for it.
No, the laws going against us are purely physics related. If there's not enough energy to make these solar fields, then they won't get made. To even contemplate renewable making up any decent proportion of US electrical output, you should have started decades ago.
All the mechanization is not going to disappear, it will just be cut back as oil gets more expensive. It will dip during the crunch time and come back as nuclear replaces oil. Global warming in conjuction with peak oil will be a bitch, but it doesn't look like the worst of peak oil is set to coincide with the worst of global warming. Instead, it seems they'll hit about 10-20 years apart from each other.
How will nuclear replace oil? This is a liquid fuels crisis and nuclear is not oil. Nuclear could make hydrogen or DME, but only by wasting the majority of the energy you're getting. And mechanisation getting cut back is the issue, not it vanishing altogether. You're going to need to fuel your agriculture side of things as well as building several hundred brand new nuclear plants. That means your economy just died.
In any case, it is likely that millions will die as a direct result of peak oil, perhaps tens of millions, and many more will be hungry and malnourished. But agriculture will not be hit so hard as to cause a loss of large fractions of the globe's population. All the oil would have to practically vanish overnight for that to happen, and no respected expert predicts the backside of the slope will be that steep.
You're missing the exponential function here. Humans aren't going to to stop breeding overnight either and the modest drop-offs in oil with the modest increase in population is going to get bigger and bigger every year.
The first world agriculture industries could lose half their production rate and still be able to feed the world. As food prices go up, production increases to match. The idea that first world nations would need to hoard the food or there wouldn't be enough to go around is simply ridiculous.
And what of your transport? The UK nearly ran out of fuel after a week or two of blockades that cleaned the supermarkets out of food. No distribution system is as good as no food, just go to Africa and let them know that we have bountiful yields of the stuff, they'll not listen. The world is based around a precarious just-in-time delivery method. And if the food cannot make it to the people, then it is useless. The fact that MI5 even have planning scenarios based on this from terrorist attacks, to say nothing of a global energy crisis, is telling.
The primary reason why nuclear never took off is because of the shennanigans of the Department of Energy, and also because old nuclear technology was nowhere near as safe or as good as what we have today.
And this is all going to change for the near future is it? We've seen plenty of private firms screw over the people for a buck. The last thing you want is the likes of another Enron running a major project like this.
There is no shortage to the number of areas that would be cut back before projects to restore energy production would be cut. Same goes for food production, for that matter.
But no one is investing in such plants because of the risk. When the insurance firms collapse, no one will want to risk anything. That leaves the gov't trying to fund all of these nuclear plants, and since the US is wasting its time with ethanol and coal, I don't see how it's remotely plausible to get them to replace fossil fuel output with nuclear in any reasonable timeframe when factoring real-world problems, not just technical ones. The US is already seeing
limits to their nuclear renaissance as is, which will only be exacerbated by future ramping up of construction for such sites from elsewhere.
Now, don't see this as me dismissing nuclear out of hand. Because I'm not. It most certainly is going to be bigger in the future and only a fool would deny that even with the lacklustre investment in it for the time being. What I'm saying is that to replace all fossil fuels with nuclear before major troubles hit, as they are doing in the developing world now, is simply not possible. No report out there sees that happening without prior capital investment and construction well underway by now. The sheer number of reactors needed would be in the thousands. That runs into problems with storage of waste, locations for reactors to be properly utilised and the fact that you'll be building one and decommissioning one every day for the rest of our expansion into nuclear, even with reactors living 60 years or so (most only have 40 year lifespans today which can be extended somewhat). If you can foresee that many reactors appearing in a couple of decades, then I applaud your optimism. Me, I don't see that happening when it's obvious more are trying to consume every last drop of oil, cubic metre of gas and tonne of coal whilst maybe funding the odd solar or bio-fuel project.
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Sikon wrote:
The process already obtained $210/kg, already more than good enough, as discussed in detail
before. It isn't in large-scale production because and only because currently getting uranium from mines is more economical. Change the price of the competition, and uranium from seawater enters production.
If prices keep going up, that should happen in the future. Right now, though, everyone is grabbing what uranium can be extracted from the mines today which the WNA sees as leading to a massive bottleneck soon enough. Then you will see if seawater extraction catches on or people get cold feet and move to other areas of energy.
As usual, you talk about nuclear fuel like chemical fuel, despite the orders of magnitude difference in energy content per unit mass that causes reduced sensitivity of total generation cost to fuel expense, as discussed
before. Gasoline is a lot different from uranium. Gasoline is a lot of the expense of vehicle operation, but raw, unenriched uranium is a tiny portion of total nuclear generation expense, with uranium price having limited overall effect.
Increase the price of gasoline by a factor of 10, and that is unaffordable. Increase the price of uranium by a factor of 10, and the earlier detailed
discussion illustrated how that would change total economics by about a tenth with non-breeder reactors or affect breeder reactors by a fraction of 1%. And uranium from seawater already obtained 5.5 times current cost, while being projected to drop to 3.3 times as much.
I said no such thing about the price or the nebulous EROEI of uranium. I'm pointing to a simple bottleneck that is causing the same problems for uranium that is now happening with refined oil products. There are NO seawater extraction plans on the table even given the massive increase in price for uranium over the last two years and the warnings of mining issues. Even breeder reactors are not on the cards given designs like the AP1000 are being looked at instead. It's all very well saying we could do this or that, but I don't see any of that happening and we're already way too late here.
In anycase, this is a liquid fuels crisis which nuclear doesn't solve. You're not getting EV or hydrogen replacing all ICEs within an appreciable timeframe now. That time has long past, I'm afraid.
It is technically quite possible for all of mankind's current and future population to have survival and prosperity, in aspects ranging from energy to food production, as illustrated in detail
here. In practice, poor decision-making and sociopolitical factors will likely lead to substantial peak oil troubles despite them being technically avoidable. But if there is eventually more effort looking for solutions than just looking for problems and dismissing solutions, then the future situation could be more like the bottom than the top of this graph (description
elsewhere):
True enough, in a perfect world this wouldn't be an issue. We have the technology, we know how to conserve and all about carrying capacity of ecological niches. What gets in the way is our humanity which is just making things worse with short-sighted planning now. The "undulating plataeu" we're on now is going to eventually disappear and when we finally start seeing demand outstrip supply by a fair margin, it's anybody's guess how the markets will react. To initiate any of what we're talking about today on a good enough scale still requires our economic model survive, otherwise a massive transition will have to take place to, maybe, a barter system or a command economy. Whatever does arise will take time to come about, likely not long after the populations of the First World make things much worse with resource hoarding and general panic responses.
Non-OPEC production is likely to decline anywhere from 3.4 to 4% given current analysis. If OPEC starts running into similar issues, which the likes of KSA could easily foresee given the strain on their super-giants and giants and with efforts to bring other fields on-stream quick enough running into financial and personnel difficulties, you could be looking at a far steeper curve. If that curve rises dramatically, you have a far harder time doing anything on any real scale (uranium prices are one thing, but given steel and concrete are putting many largescale industrial plans on hold or outright cancellation, you can't just look at one or two commodities. Again, uranium extraction may be cheap for energy, but you also have to add on other energy expenditure costs too that require that oil). A 15% decline, for instance, would see you lose half of your production capacity in just 4.6 years, or in other words, the world producing only 42.5 mbpd from the current 85 mbpd. That rate may not be hit, but really, it doesn't matter, because before a geological limit is applied that matches such a high figure like 15% (keeping in mind some areas of the world have seen nearly 30% decline in oil output such as Forties and Cantarell), you'll run into socio-political barriers such as attacks on resources, mercantilism and the simple cessation of exporting oil because of growing demand in the producers' countries. They don't need to actually run out to really make the downward slope steep, they just need to value their people more than ours. And they do.
Let's look at the five main reasons that will act as positive feedback loops on the rate of decline in oil production and exporting.
As Jeff Vail has highlighted, the
attacks on
resource investments have been going on for a few years now and the reasononing for these attacks can be anything from political to simple economic gain. The troubles in Nigeria and Ethiopia are causing no small amount of pain for the oil companies stationed there, Nigeria losing
600 kbpd in production thanks to the tense political atmosphere there, not helped by the recent elections either. The very same thing is happening in Iraq also and the recent KSA foiling of a supposed al-Qaeda attack on their major fields is evidence of the same ideological
modus operandi for factions opposing the House of Saud.
For the mercantilism aspect of things, we have
China building ever bigger SPR tanks and shifting oil into them to give at least a month or two worth of supply should disruption happen on the global market.
Japan has also signed an agreement with Abu Dhabi on securing oil contracts for the future, with some plans for a larger storage capacity being floated. The US has tried to expand their SPR too, but I've already mentioned they've never reached their new target limit and are putting off buying more oil until prices ease somewhat. The US has no shortage of light, sweet and heavy, sour now anyway, so it is not of immediate concern. Similar plans for growth of storage sites have also
stirred some in the UK to act on the ever more dependent on foreign supply threat to national security.
Then the final three parts fall into place. Export-land and nationalism along with privateering. The former essntially kills the global trade of fossil fuels as internal demand for more energy and higher population growth make it prudent to serve those in your own nation first, rather than sell off your energy on the global market. This is already looking to be a problem in Iran and may manifest in several other former swing-producers too. The KSA has already made it clear they will not be upping production and intend to invest money back into their economy for coping with a post-carbon world. Nationalism is something that is right now causing the Kurds to oppose the US oil bill in Iraq and Nigeria and South America are experiencing similar pains too. The chaos caused by energy privateers will be more than enough to destroy any meagre gains in producion from new projects planned, given the vast majority of fossil fuels now exist in far less stable areas of the world.
Keep in mind, decline rates would increase naturally anyway as more and more effort is put into sucking more oil out, so I don't see how the Hubbert bell curve really fits given the geological decline rate doesn't dictate final output in the least. The model of Hubbert Linearisation may be good at predicting URR with fields already past peak and where we can see their decline rates, but for accounting for above-ground factors it's next to useless. A geological decline rate may be 1 to 2.5% from most expert opinions, which is possible to deal with assuming good organisation and a decent plan of action rather than carry on regardless. But that won't be the final decline rate, because it could easily go up to 20% and higher simply because those producing the oil no longer have the export capacity to supply you with it. Mexico is going to be dealing with zero net exports soon, which the US will have to find elsewhere. This will occur with other exporters, that much is certain.
