Preparing for Peak Oil

[TithonusSyndrome]

There's one thing about Peak Oil that scares me more than anything... Why the hell isn't this being discussed in public or the media more? Seriously, there's War on Terror, Global Warming (although that is another big issue), but Peak Oil? Nope. It's only the most likely end to society as we know it, so it doesn't matter? It boggles the mind. Is this "Big Oil" doing their thing or what?

I've often wondered if Peak Oil is being addressed haphazardly via Global Warming; rather than come out and just say that they've spend all the oil, certain nations slightly more savvy than say, America are emphasizing the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions as a roundabout way of dealing with Peak Oil without alarming anyone.

[McNum]

There's one thing about Peak Oil that scares me more than anything... Why the hell isn't this being discussed in public or the media more? Seriously, there's War on Terror, Global Warming (although that is another big issue), but Peak Oil? Nope. It's only the most likely end to society as we know it, so it doesn't matter? It boggles the mind. Is this "Big Oil" doing their thing or what?

I've often wondered if Peak Oil is being addressed haphazardly via Global Warming; rather than come out and just say that they've spend all the oil, certain nations slightly more savvy than say, America are emphasizing the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions as a roundabout way of dealing with Peak Oil without alarming anyone.

The issues are similar, but not the same, I think. However I have noticed that some oil use reducing measures have been taken here in Denmark under the guise of reducing pollution. For instance last week we had an immediate law changing tax on cars. Now SUVs have more than doubled in price, while lightweights with good fuel economy have fallen slightly. I bet that would be a hard sell in the US. Intersting that is was an immediate law, too. Is this due to environmental isseus? Or is it preparation for the peak? Maybe both?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Combating climate change will help in dealing with energy consumption right now, but not to the extent Peak Oil needs. The Carbon Twins, as they're called, are both the biggest threats ever to face humanity. Only we're focusing. finally, on climate change after decades of debate and floundering over the issue, when really, PO is the more immediate threat that might kickstart habits that accelerate AGW.

[Sikon]

And you need an awful lot of oil to make a nuke plant.

A typical nuclear power plant requires very little energy to build versus energy generation per decade, e.g. <= 4 petajoules versus 300 petajoules, as shown before.

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.

Fuel/energy usage in agriculture is a mere ~ 1.7% of total U.S. energy consumption, as shown before; whatever problems there may be with peak oil troubles, fuel enough for agriculture will exist. As for the cost of building several hundred reactors, a proper program would correspond to $20 per month per household or less for a 20-year conversion, as shown before. Even the particular figure isn't as important as that it isn't a hundred times greater or something unaffordable.

[...]

The current situation of only a few millionths of U.S. GDP being spent in a manner relevant to nuclear power expansion will tend to continue for some time. But, as discussed before, peak oil troubles are precisely what could eventually give the public extreme motivation to switch away from fossil fuels, utterly changing the preceding situation. For example, such means that the U.S. could spend vastly more than the current $1.8 billion out of $13000 billion GDP on obtaining uranium, which makes fluctuations in today's uranium prices of little real relevance in the big picture. A lot tends to be workable if there is enough motivation and if there is more search for solutions than complaints about problems. For example, mass-producing the same standardized reactor design repeatedly would vastly reduce average engineering work per reactor compared to historically U.S. reactors being more individually designed.

In anycase, this is a liquid fuels crisis which nuclear doesn't solve.

Peak oil, global warming, and even troubles like those involved with U.S. Middle Eastern involvement indirectly all have to do with dependence on fossil fuels.

Build a nuclear power plant generating electricity, and it doesn't directly create any gasoline. Well, nuclear reactors could power carbon-neutral gasoline synthesis inexpensively enough through the techniques discussed before, without the scalability limits on maximum possible production that tend to apply more to biofuels, but such being done is not expected for the near-term foreseeable future since the public's focus will tend to be instead on synthetic gasoline from coal, natural gas to liquids, biofuels, etc.

Even for just a nuclear power plant generating electricity, it frees up coal that would otherwise be used to generate the electricity. That coal may be used for synthetic gasoline like the past of Germany in WWII. Although such likely will be done a lot during peak oil, one added motivation for nuclear power plants, it isn't really a good technique, with the coal emitting pollution and still running out eventually, albeit later than oil.

What the public is likely to eventually realize through peak oil troubles is that there must be a full switch away from all fossil fuel dependence.

They all run out sooner or later, while contributing to global warming. Such 100% conversion away from fossil fuels requires not only replacing liquid fuels but also replacing electricity generation. And nuclear power is the most inexpensive method for suitable electricity generation, really such that it should be classified as a renewable with millions of years of fuel allowing it to last practically forever.

Besides, electricity can be used to substitute for a lot of liquid fuel usage.



Normally, this would happen over a long period of time. As one illustration, a likely scenario for the distant future is an electrically-powered automated transportation system. For example, enter a private vehicle, which is like a small room with an armchair plus a desk, TV/internet screen, or VR port. Tap the destination on an electronic map display, then be occupied in productive or recreational activities during automated transport at speeds like hundreds of m/s. Electrified rails provide easy suitability for automation, which is relatively simple when the vehicle automatically follows the track by being mechanically forced to do so. Such can be the same principle as a train but more pleasant with individual vehicles having zero wait for arrival and having no other occupants unless by choice. But let's get back to the near-term rather than the hypothetical far future.

Conversion to primarily electrical transportation can happen fast if really necessary.

For an illustration, pretend for a moment that there was as extreme of a peak oil scenario as some people like Admiral Valdemar expect.

You're not getting EV or hydrogen replacing all ICEs within an appreciable timeframe now.

While absolutely all ICEs being replaced wouldn't happen, let's continue the above "extreme scenario" illustration:



There are electric motorcycles ranging in price between as little as $999 or less and a few thousand dollars. (Actually, some are called scooters or motor-driven bikes, but they look like motorcycles, so let's not worry about semantics). A number of inexpensive electric motorcycles exist that transport people at 25 to 70 mph with a range of 20 to 100 miles, depending on the particular type (40 to 110 kph speed, with 30 to 160 kilometers range). Many can be recharged in 1 to 5 hours, at home, at work, or both. For perspective, most people today spend the bulk of their driving time at under 50 mph, often at 30 mph or less in city traffic. Very few people have a commute more than several tens of miles.

One illustration of power requirements is a 340-lb electric motorcycle that has 24-volt, 104 amp-hour batteries. Even if someone had trips amounting to 64 km per day (23000 kilometers a year), there still is only around 3.1 kilowatt-hours of outlet power consumption per day.

24 volts * 104 amp-hours = 2500 volt-amp-hours = 2500 watt-hours = 2.5 kilowatt-hours, corresponding at ~ 80% recharge efficiency to ~ 3.1 kilowatt-hours. Actually, delivered power of a battery can be significantly less than its rated amp-hour capacity, varying with factors like discharge rate, but that is irrelevant for the upper limit here.

Another electric motorcycle uses even less, merely 2 kWh per charge. They all use relatively minor amounts.

Average total U.S. electrical generation per household is about 102 kilowatt-hours per day, as implied elsewhere, about 50 times greater than the preceding electric motorcycle's consumption per daily charge.

So, various electric motorcycles with reasonable performance cost $1000 to $5000 per person, require a very small amount of electricity, provide fast commute over a distance up to several tens of miles, and can function in rural and suburban areas lacking much public transportation infrastructure.

The cost figure is mentioned particularly because it affects conversion time. If something cost $200,000 per person, it would be multiples of the average person's annual income and take a long time to convert if ever.

But consider if something costs $1000, a small portion of what the average person makes in a year, let alone a decade. Then, conversion can be quick, if the scenario is extreme enough to make conversion seem worthwhile.


Of course, it is quite possible to have a more expensive electric vehicle. Indeed, in a scenario involving much use of electric vehicles, often those with the money might do the future equivalent of buying a Tesla Roadster, an electric car of today that costs $100000, travels up to 250 miles before recharging with $2.50 worth of electricity, goes up to 135 mph, and so on. Its cost is estimated to drop to $50,000 with more production in the future.


While there's also public transport, presumably it is clear enough that the same general idea as with electric motorcycles would apply, that neither capital cost nor electricity demands are very great for needs. For example, if an electric bus with a purchase price of $54000 makes a couple dozen short trips per day while carrying up to 29 passengers each time, with its 180-km range, its cost is effectively shared between the several hundred people transported daily.

So the preceding electric bus has an effective cost proportionally like $100 per person. Of course, there is more total expense involved, but one can see the general idea.

While one could discuss more transportation, the overall situation is apparent enough by now.

The preceding is just an illustration for a hypothetical scenario with very extreme peak oil effects.

Although people could inexpensively convert to riding electric motorcycles, electric buses, and so on, many people are going to prefer to have regular vehicles with hydrocarbon fuel. After all, fuel can be produced in substantial quantities even with agricultural waste and biofuel techniques, as illustrated in other threads here and here.

Public preferences will likely tend to keep liquid fuels more of a focus for the foreseeable future. But that would be precisely through the peak oil situation not being super extreme.

While the peak oil aftermath could be worse than the Great Depression, depending upon many uncertainties, it will probably not be rapid doomsday, not so fast that looking for solutions can't help.

Some think peak oil effects started in 2005/2006. If so, it is starting very gradually. Whether that is the case or whether peak oil might be a number of years or up to multiple decades away is a complicated issue and one not to be answered here.

Either way, peak oil may be not flashy sudden doom but a gradual trend where people get used to $4 per gallon gas, then perhaps years later $6/gallon gas, then $9/gallon, $12/gallon, and so on until alternative fuel fully enters the picture.

Some artificial factors may meanwhile cause sharper spikes and more disruption, a little analogous to the super-rapid 50% drop in U.S. oil imports of the post oil crisis period 3 decades ago (illustrated before) that was due to politics. But the general idea is apparent.



While the above graph was posted before, it is here to make a different point, an observation quite apparent if one examines it carefully.

The graph includes a number of countries that had local peak oil in the past, like the U.S. (peak ~ 1971), the U.K. (peak 1999), Norway (peak 2001), and so on. Looking at the graph, observe how those and various other major countries had oil decline after the peak. The rate of decline was some fraction lost in the first decade, some in the next, and so on.

Observe the lack of large, sharp drop-offs.

Of course, there can be a sharper drop-off. For example, although not shown on this graph, Iraq's oil production must have had quite a quick drop-off due to the war. But the overall trend is apparent.

As a note to clarify something about the graph, this is not a graph of all major oil producing nations. Rather, although it includes many of the major oil producers, it focuses on those that have peaked or almost peaked. For example, it doesn't include such major oil-exporting countries as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and the UAE. Total historical world oil production up to now is different if those countries are included. But this is an useful graph for showing historical local peak-oil events.

[...]

The bulk of mankind is dirt-poor and conserves an enormous amount (through miniscule income making that automatic), including around a quarter or more having no electricity and thus not directly consuming any electricity. My point was in regard to the illustrated technical possibility of producing the energy, food, etc. that would be involved in them obtaining a high standard of living.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Agriculture uses a lot more than many think. And the die-off is not going to be the same as the Third World. Instead, you'll see material possessions start to disappear as more and more people find it harder to buy, or rather "consume", the products made today that keep the economy afloat. These effects will be economic. There will be less medical care to cover for people, so mortality rates increase. Funds going toward drugs or better sanitation, for instance, may not exist as the country struggles to build nuclear plants, renewable fields of solar cells and wind turbines and also create an EV fleet of vehicles. The Great Depression didn't have people running out of oil to run tractors either, but people still didn't know where their next meal was coming from because economics dictates how this all pans out. If the economy falters, you're not building your nuclear plants or getting brand new factories for EV cars anytime soon, no matter what you want. You'd have to institute a dictatorship style regime which will meet all kinds of great resistance, again, the psychology alone will be a major hurdle. We also have far less farmers, far more people, less top soil and water along with more of what arable land is still around being devoted to ethanol production and the energy problem won't be temporary, so any comparison with the past is irrelevent. More people will also want to move to the US from Mexico and further south (already causing strains on energy today) which means you've got to cope with an influx of refugees, or else somehow make the border airtight.

To do any of what you propose to convert to electrical vehicles will literally kill the economy and take decades to do. There is no study out there that comes close to saying "yes" on the issue of nuclear, solar or hydro etc. at replacing fossil fuels. While I do like the idea of the EV scooter (I've often looked at getting one since finding out about them last year) and the Tesla Roadster, they are nowhere near ready to replace even a fraction of the transportation today and neither is public transport. You're going to need what oil you still get to power the trucks, because without that HGV fleet your food yield means squat. The UK has already shown anarchy can happen even with more than enough food, again, it's analogous to the peaks in oil and uranium or anything else. It's not how big the bucket is, it's how big the leak is.

If you're looking at a 10% or more decline, which is well within the confines of reality, you're looking at less than a decade before you're using half of your available liquid energy. If you want to make an electric fleet you're going to use energy. The monetary costs of scooters, buses and trams mean nothing. It's the energy cost which you're going to be ploughing into building those nuke plants and keeping agriculture up to spec, unless you convert to CTL, in which case say hello to even lower grain yields than today within another decade or two as AGW takes its toll. The US is looking at freshwater issues as it is and global food production per capita is at its lowest in recent history despite massive population increases.

What we lack is time. No initiative can give us that now and no crash programme that doesn't kill the economy will bring anything like the resources on-stream that would be needed. A lower standard of living means higher mortality means die-off. It won't be Darfur, but that's besides the point (incidentally, a lot of the Third World exists only because of aid from richer nations and the IMF debt they accumulate. Like Cuba, people think they're living quite well, but remove all external factor and the legs are pulled from beneath these already precarious models. India, for instance, has many problems with their organic farming methods and require mechanisation and heavy subsidies to stave off starvation to even more people). It's that simple.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

In fairness, we will be able to gain some resources for the first world precisely by halting our donations to the third world and other sorts of things which are quite sizeable.

We can also expect that the worst case scenario will never quite be reached. New technology is expanding our oil drilling capacity; big oil is spending a lot of money on that.

The problem is that this is going to buy us very, very little time, indeed, as the new methods simply don't produce remotely enough to refill the bucket. As an analogy, it's like if you broke a hole in the side of a pool with an axe and then proceed to turn on a garden hose to try and refill it.

There will be a quantifiable reduction in the time required for the pool to drain, but we're talking about months, and we need decades.

Valdemar's statements therefore may be inaccurate for this summer, but if they're inaccurate for this summer they'll be accurate for next summer, essentially.

[Darth Wong]

Well, the idea of maintaining our current standard of living is obviously a fantasy, but our current standard of living is obscene. Hell, it's obscene even compared to when I was a child. I'm old enough to remember when it was a common sight to see people wheeling those collapsible grocery dollies to the grocery store rather than driving, whereas nowadays it's a rare sight indeed. When I went to university, it was only the rich kids who had cars; now all of them do. Elbow and knee patches weren't an eclectic fashion choice when I was a kid; they were necessary because families tried to keep using clothes after they'd worn out. And that's not even that long ago, for fuck's sake. Two-car families were unusual, never mind the three and even four-car families you see today. High schools didn't have vending machines in them, and not because of health-minded lobbying from parents' groups but because so few high-school kids had enough money to make vending machines a worthwhile investment.

It would make a huge difference in our fuel consumption if we simply started living the way we did when I was 8 years old. But I suspect that for a lot of people, the idea of doing so is akin to apocalypse. They can't conceive of a period when necessity was a real factor in daily decisions.

[Admiral Valdemar]

In fairness, we will be able to gain some resources for the first world precisely by halting our donations to the third world and other sorts of things which are quite sizeable.

We can also expect that the worst case scenario will never quite be reached. New technology is expanding our oil drilling capacity; big oil is spending a lot of money on that.

Yes, the added food to our inventories will help, but given other factors, it won't be enough in the future. Sooner or later growth will have to end and conservation begin on a massive scale. That's simply fact. A paradigm shift that big has not been seen before like this, so how the world deals with this eventuality will be interesting. Since we're more concerned with grabbing what's left (Iraq) rather than conserve or switch, it's 1-0 to the cynics so far.

In anycase, technology, as I've stated, actually makes things worse in respect. The faster you suck up the last drops of oil, the less time you have to transition to the new ideal. If we went about conserving today, we'd maybe lessen the bumps expected. Since we're growing still, this is simply not going to happen.

Additionally, actions speak louder than words. While enhanced recovery may be getting applied to every well now to get stuff out ever faster at the expense of the last few percentage points of reserve left, no extra refinement capacity or tankers are on order. Someone doesn't see them economical, now ask yourself why when Exxon's CEO says we've got enough black stuff for the next century or more.

The problem is that this is going to buy us very, very little time, indeed, as the new methods simply don't produce remotely enough to refill the bucket. As an analogy, it's like if you broke a hole in the side of a pool with an axe and then proceed to turn on a garden hose to try and refill it.

There will be a quantifiable reduction in the time required for the pool to drain, but we're talking about months, and we need decades.

Valdemar's statements therefore may be inaccurate for this summer, but if they're inaccurate for this summer they'll be accurate for next summer, essentially.

For gasoline, this summer may be the first true impact of PO, though by above-ground factors rather than immediate geological ones. Next year, it may be the same for crude. Maybe not, but I'm not seeing the gasoline issue disappearing now without serious action and gasoline is the biggest part of oil.

Well, the idea of maintaining our current standard of living is obviously a fantasy, but our current standard of living is obscene. Hell, it's obscene even compared to when I was a child. I'm old enough to remember when it was a common sight to see people wheeling those collapsible grocery dollies to the grocery store rather than driving, whereas nowadays it's a rare sight indeed. When I went to university, it was only the rich kids who had cars; now all of them do. Elbow and knee patches weren't an eclectic fashion choice when I was a kid; they were necessary because families tried to keep using clothes after they'd worn out. And that's not even that long ago, for fuck's sake. Two-car families were unusual, never mind the three and even four-car families you see today. High schools didn't have vending machines in them, and not because of health-minded lobbying from parents' groups but because so few high-school kids had enough money to make vending machines a worthwhile investment.

It would make a huge difference in our fuel consumption if we simply started living the way we did when I was 8 years old. But I suspect that for a lot of people, the idea of doing so is akin to apocalypse. They can't conceive of a period when necessity was a real factor in daily decisions.

Since everyone is now a "consumer" and not a person, the goal in life is to consume as much, if not more, than the next guy. More things make you happier. If a hundred new gizmos, clothes or pieces of furniture make you a hundred times happy, then imagine the size of the grin Billy Gates has. No one is going to voluntarily give up this lie of a culture, not without a fight. That's why the papers in the States are full of editorials and vox pop comments attacking the greedy oil companies and damn Johnny foreigner for making Americans pay more for gas. How dare they do that. Bush has even used this rallying call to get even more backing for the dead-end ethanol, as if the 20% corn production accounting for nearly 3% gas production is going to make the US energy independent. A lie that is going to sink the economy and then the farming industry with it.

Going by the model many predict will happen, people will cut back on leisure and luxury while keeping their tanks full. Tourism and technology or visits to the cinema (2006 was the worst year for Hollywood in history, IIRC) will go long before we have to cut down on fuel. When it gets to that stage, we'll already be seeing huge changes in living standards simply because they won't be as high. That will mean effects for health, so though we won't be starving like the poor bastards in Darfur, it doesn't mean, relatively, we'll be any better. Look at the medical problems in the US today then imagine what a depression will do to that. No good harping on about keeping the hospitals full of food and drugs if no one can afford it, and the US isn't going to become a charity overnight, not when people still don't have a damn clue as to what is causing this predicament in the first place. Launch inquiries into Big Oil or tax them as much as you want. Won't change jack, bub.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The funny thing is, my violent distaste for mass consumer culture was ridiculed in a thread here a while back as being virtually fascist (I browsed the thread, basically catching up on "people who are not here anymore") as I proposed the regimentation of society to deal with and put an end to our addiction to mass consumption at the cost of genuine happiness. The strange thing is that now the lot of you are coming around to the realization that even if this is unideal, it is necessary--virtually at the same time that conservative website banned me (HPCA) for making the same statements.

Traditionalist, monarchist-based conservatism like my own is the future of the Right in western civilization, because our basic ideal view of society is an integral whole closely tied to the soil where stability is vastly preferred over continuous growth and consumption. My politics will, out of necessity if nothing else, become the actual face of the right wing in modern countries as Peak Oil and Global Warming come to pass.

[Stark]

Well we all knew that was coming.

I have to agree with Mike's observations on living standards, even in my shorter perspective. As a child, multiple-car households were rare (and the second car was usually very much a 'second car') and much consumer electronics etc was seen as an expensive luxury. Perhaps Mike and I have both simply climbed the socioeconomic ladder since then, but I think these trends continue back into the 50's and 60's.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well we all knew that was coming. ;)

I have to agree with Mike's observations on living standards, even in my shorter perspective. As a child, multiple-car households were rare (and the second car was usually very much a 'second car') and much consumer electronics etc was seen as an expensive luxury. Perhaps Mike and I have both simply climbed the socioeconomic ladder since then, but I think these trends continue back into the 50's and 60's.

Perhaps you did, but, seriously, for all that I ultimately support a system which modern capitalist society has made out to be the dark ages, I'm wonderfully intense in my efforts to turn it into something genuinely liveable.

Right now some of my efforts are in locating a suitable site for a post-collapse (clarification: peak oil and global warming) university, based around a limited faculty committed to education as an ideal, rather than profits, with a mix of practical application studies and full university level courses, pruning out a lot of the modern specializations in favour of a few full general education courses, on an extreme small level--a couple hundred students at most. Such a facility would also own several useful area businesses and receive funding through them, rather than through tuition, which would be nonexistant and replaced with work time on area farms and so on, while providing medical assistance to the surrounding community and specialist services which otherwise might end up not existing.

[Stark]

That seems a fascinating mix of paranoia and idealism. I don't know what universities are like in the US, but in AU they have recently been lowering standards in many courses, in some cases becoming almost 'technical school' level, and 'marketing' courses instead of teaching solid disciplines. I imagine the smaller universities might have higher standards? From my experiences in Brisbane, I can't really see any of the universities here becoming the centre of modern technology in an agrarian society.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Heh, y'know, I can only look on in disbelief when I see the likes of CNN and bloggers take chunks out of Russia for giving what oil they can produce to nations that aren't the US. The US needs that oil, else two car families may only be able to afford one large, luxury sedan's operational costs. It's not like the oil would be better used keeping the starved and freezing peasants of Russia going.

Those fucking commies, I'll bet they had something to do with KSA losing output too.

That seems a fascinating mix of paranoia and idealism. I don't know what universities are like in the US, but in AU they have recently been lowering standards in many courses, in some cases becoming almost 'technical school' level, and 'marketing' courses instead of teaching solid disciplines. I imagine the smaller universities might have higher standards? From my experiences in Brisbane, I can't really see any of the universities here becoming the centre of modern technology in an agrarian society.

I can't wait to see those Mickey Mouse degree holders try and eat money. Because marketing and salesmen are really going to prosper in an age of zero growth.

[Stark]

By 'marketing' courses I meant creating courses with very specific, 'trendy' or 'appealing' focuses instead of general courses and simpler, less in-depth coursework, thus 'marketing' them to potential students who perhaps wouldn't sign up to intimidating courses like 'maths' or 'science' but to whom 'game development' sounds easy and fun. Not business degrees. The calibre of students I encountered in my postgrad course was utterly laughable, and standards in general seemed to be much higher when I originally studied back in the late 90s.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I think we should just cut to the chase and start eating the people who are too dumb to understand basic thermodynamics.

Let's eat the US gov't for starters. Plenty of meat there. Then the other 99% of the planet.

[Enforcer Talen]

Hey now, the fat people are ours. We've been breeding the fat farms for decades just in case of such a world ending event.

Admittedly, we were preparing for nuclear winter, but global warming is a good enough reason to break out the silverware.

[Admiral Valdemar]

No one gives a shit about global warming killing the planet. They sure as hell ain't going to shift over what is so obviously price gouging making cheap gas disappear. I'd say the fat is leaking into the brain case.

[brianeyci]

Well it's a good talking point. A left-wing politician can go, the oil companies are gouging the consumer. They can point to record oil company profits, and say that the excuse oil companies make razor-thin profit margins at the snack bar is silly. Hard to beat that kind of argument, that isn't really a lie more than it leaves out certain facts.

[Darth Wong]

Well it's a good talking point. A left-wing politician can go, the oil companies are gouging the consumer. They can point to record oil company profits, and say that the excuse oil companies make razor-thin profit margins at the snack bar is silly. Hard to beat that kind of argument, that isn't really a lie more than it leaves out certain facts.

People are fucking lazy cocksuckers. Go look at any crowded parking lot. How many assholes park in the fire lane or the handicapped spots, or just make up a parking spot on the end of a line of cars because they're so fucking lazy that they can't walk from the far end of the parking lot, despite having two good legs?

These are the people who will demand that the government subsidize gasoline and go to war to secure more supplies in the name of their personal convenience.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

Hey now, the fat people are ours. We've been breeding the fat farms for decades just in case of such a world ending event.

Oh man, don't give me ideas. I live in Wisconsin, just walking down the street, I see enough fat to feed a family of five for four full months. Hey, alliteration!

People are fucking lazy cocksuckers. Go look at any crowded parking lot. How many assholes park in the fire lane or the handicapped spots, or just make up a parking spot on the end of a line of cars because they're so fucking lazy that they can't walk from the far end of the parking lot, despite having two good legs?

I've been thinking about that a lot. Working in the service industry, you get a lot of contact with said lazy cocksuckers, and my opinion of them has gone anywhere but up. I'd say that this society as a whole deserves to crash obscenely...but the fact that they would end up dragging down the few people who break from the apathetic norm with them is infuriating.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

On a probably related note, there's an interesting article demonstrating similarities between what's happening with our economy and stock market currentely, and what happened with the Nikkei back in the late 1980s. We may soon find ourselves entering our own version of the Japanese "lost decade" in preparation for a more extreme collapse to follow it, because there will be no energy available to fuel a recovery and in fact the energy even to sustain a melted down US economy will be fast vanishing.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Actually, many analysts see a disturbing trend forming that appeared around the few years leading up to the '29 crash. I'm thinking the housing bubble going in the US will be the first major hit. Look at Spain, for instance, and notice how foreign property development is sliding compared to just the other year. Already Britons are cutting back on luxury spending on a villa by the Costa Del Sol. Like I predicted, such things will be the first to be hit along with tourism and aerospace before we cut back on petrol use. There's just so many things a Westerner can get rid of from their disposable income expenditure until necessities are hit.

[K. A. Pital]

There's just so many things a Westerner can get rid of from their disposable income expenditure until necessities are hit.

Easterners! Let us double our efforts on nuclear primacy and massively cut oil production! Remember, the only thing that stops our nuclear-powered xerxesian hordes from total domination are some 300 oil supercorpo... spartans, I meant to say.

[Alferd Packer]

It's not all doom and gloom. 60 million gallons of biodiesel annually is an impressive capacity, even if it's not being fully utilized right now.

Most encouraging is that they're experimenting with the algae method of production, as stated on page 2 of that article and what we were talking about in the other thread on the subject. While the capacity will be initially lower than processing soybean oil, if they can get it working and demonstrate that it's economically viable, then it's a small matter to set up algae ponds elsewhere to ship the raw algae oil to this facility. Hell, you'd only need 12,000 acres of ponds at 5000 gallons of annual output to run this facility at its maximum.

I'm going to write my Congresspeople and my crippled idiot of a governor to encourage their support of this facility in any way possible.

[Admiral Valdemar]

It's not all doom and gloom. 60 million gallons of biodiesel annually is an impressive capacity, even if it's not being fully utilized right now.

Most encouraging is that they're experimenting with the algae method of production, as stated on page 2 of that article and what we were talking about in the other thread on the subject. While the capacity will be initially lower than processing soybean oil, if they can get it working and demonstrate that it's economically viable, then it's a small matter to set up algae ponds elsewhere to ship the raw algae oil to this facility. Hell, you'd only need 12,000 acres of ponds at 5000 gallons of annual output to run this facility at its maximum.

I'm going to write my Congresspeople and my crippled idiot of a governor to encourage their support of this facility in any way possible.

Before you expend any precious energy on that letter:

An in-depth look at biofuels from algae
Over the past few years, several companies have issued press releases about technologies they have developed to produce biofuels from algae. The claims in these stories are that algae yield 'enormous' amounts of biomass that can be turned into liquid fuels at low cost. Most of the projects involve the use of closed photobioreactors, in which the micro-organisms are grown in a controlled manner by feeding them CO2 and nutrients. Sadly, after decades of development, none of those projects have ever demonstrated the technology on a large scale, let alone over long periods of time. This is why it is time to have a look at the possible reasons as to why algae biofuels are being talked about, but don't seem to get off the ground.

http://biopact.com/2007/01/in-depth-loo ... algae.html

Emphasis mine.

The DOE report on the technology didn't sound promising either:

They suggest that the potential production of microalgae-derived biodiesel may represent more than 10% of U.S. transportation fuels, although full resource exploitation would be significantly constrained in practice.

The reduction of CO2 emissions often touted is also bullshit. If you use a powerstation's CO2 output to feed the algal blooms, you're just moving it back into the atmosphere again anyway when burning that biomass later.