The Global Warming, Fossile Fuels and Peak Oil

[The Duchess of Zeon]

It's been touted as economically viable in the near future since 1946. The fact is, the Law of Receding Horizons, as it were, dictates that it will never attain the profitability that crude oil has today. And even if it did, you're looking at maybe 3-5 mbpd in another decade or two, tops. That's not even half of what the US uses today daily.

I'm not talking about turning it into oil, Valdemar, I'm talking about throwing it into a furnace and burning it like coal, which has been done on an industrial scale in Estonia, for instance.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'm not talking about turning it into oil, Valdemar, I'm talking about throwing it into a furnace and burning it like coal, which has been done on an industrial scale in Estonia, for instance.

That still requires the massive amount of energy needed in extraction and purifying it, which is where the costs come from. I also don't see how we can compare Estonia, of all places, to the US. Much like Brazil with bio-fuels, the US is simply a whole different beast and short of destroying a whole state, you'd never get enough out to be totally reliant on only that resource. If it was viable, it'd have been done by now.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That still requires the massive amount of energy needed in extraction and purifying it, which is where the costs come from. I also don't see how we can compare Estonia, of all places, to the US. Much like Brazil with bio-fuels, the US is simply a whole different beast and short of destroying a whole state, you'd never get enough out to be totally reliant on only that resource. If it was viable, it'd have been done by now.

In an emergency situation, destroying a whole state may be perfectly feasable.

Understand that I don't think this is a good result; I think it may be an inevitable result, as we let the problem get so serious that we must engage in exceptionally severe measures to preserve industrial society. If some of those measures include strip-mining half of Wyoming, they will be done, because our society must survive; it will just make things rather ugly.

If we started implementing geothermal and tidal and wave power and nuclear power in large amounts right now and littering the land with windmills and solar cells, if we started stringing cantenary over our railroads tomorrow and stopped building roads and started building interubans and subways and light rail and digging canals and repairing old ones, we would probably not need to touch the oil shale. We would scrape by on coal and conservationism.

But we're not going to do that, so it's entirely possible we'll have to sanction, as you put it, "destroying an entire state" to glean just enough energy resources to keep us limping along for a bit longer until we can finish correcting our own mad foolishness in not starting corrective programmes now rather than later when we all feel the desperate crunch.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I have to say, I see more a desperate price bidding war and then physical grabbing of reserves if a more hawkish administration prevails in the future. The idea of going after foreign deposits is already in practice, exhibit A being Iraq. Though given the way this is turning out, it may serve as a warning and deter others from trying the same thing in the future. Then I would presume they'd look to the heavy oils sorely lacking in production capacity right now.

Of course, this assumes ethanol is killed along with cellulosic ethanol, which is affecting food prices today and pouring money down the drain that could be used for strategies that will actually achieve both sustainable energy production and energy security.