Peak Oil v. Global Warming

[Androsphinx]

Maybe there's something obvious which I've missed, but aren't the two, or at least their most extreme manifestations, mutually exclusive? That is to say that Global Warming predicts a steep rise in global temperatures, caused mainly by increased energy consumption, and Peak Oil assumes the reverse - that global energy consumption will plateau, decline and then crash.

While I appreciate that:
1) there is a school of thought that much of global warming is inevitable based on what has been done up to now, and even radical measures to reduce demand will do no good, and
2) much of the future increase in energy demand/production will come from Chindia, which is both more reliant on coal and better placed for the remaining cheap oil supplies,

won't the rapid decline in energy consumption not mitigate the worst of Global Warming. Or, inversely, might successfully implemented anti-GW policies (insulating homes, restrictions on air travel, etc) not help mitigate the worst of Peak Oil?

[Admiral Valdemar]

This is an oft cited argument by the more learned greenies out there who seem to think that the end of the oil age will mean fast paced research and adoption of clean technologies. It won't.

There are plenty of other fossil fuels out there, namely coal which even in the most pessimistic scenarios, we have a few decades of. The switch to syngas on a massive scale would be a logical step rather than completely redo the whole industrial infrastructure. The energy needed to make electric cars, electric rail, CHP housing and renewable energy farms would be astronomical, so eking out a little more from good ol' carbon is more likely.

While I don't see the UN IPCC report going as extreme as some fear thanks to cuts in general output, I don't see it slowing that much either, bar some nations being unable to acquire fossil fuels thanks to being priced out or shifting all their product to richer importer nations.

Besides, we may already have enough momentum in the carbon feedback loop to actually go beyond the 500 PPM point-of-no-return and then it doesn't matter where our energy comes from.

[Androsphinx]

Ok, but if the current prediction for GW is something in the order of 2-4C in the next 100 years, or thereabouts (I know, 1.1-6.4, and assuming that the carbon feedback PONR is a little way off yet), won't PO in the next twenty years, and maybe Peal Coal 50 years after that significantly affect the output of CO2 and assorted nasties?

I wasn't saying that PO will led to "green" solutions, rather that the decline in global consumption will slow the increase in CO2 levels and rate of warming.

[Covenant]

The problem is that these systems work on much longer timeframes than people do. It's like a very heavy, very large pendulum. If what we're doing is actually having the effect it seems to, then we've shoved the pendulum really hard--and it's going to take us a while to detect the length of the swing from where we're standing. It also means that it won't just stop on a dime when you stop feeding it, which is the real problem. The warming isn't a 1:1 ratio with our impact, afterall. A little human impact means a minor increase in heat that will continue for X years, decades, centuries, whatever. So while the science of the situation is still confusing and mired in a treasonous amount of misinformation, even the most generous version of your scenario will have us all suffering greatly as a result.

Remember, we don't need very much warming. It doesn't take more than a handful of degrees to cause permanent fuckup damage to systems as large as ours. So even if the 'rate' of warming slows, we don't need it to go fast in order to kill us all in horrible ways. Right now we're in damage control mode, but we have so much oil and carbon supplies out there that by the time cost and consumption decline due to the market volume we'll already be royally fucked.

[Darth Wong]

I wasn't saying that PO will led to "green" solutions, rather that the decline in global consumption will slow the increase in CO2 levels and rate of warming.

If we don't find real solutions, people will just burn progressively less and less efficient fuels, thus causing progressively worsening pollultion and environmental destruction until our civilization goes the way of all great past civilizations and suffers a severe contraction as a result of resource mismanagement.

[Sikon]

[...]

You make a good point in regard to the more extreme predictions of each.

Still, however, having a less extreme degree of peak oil effects at the same time as increasing global warming would not be contradictory.

In 2005, there was 463 quadrillion Btu of world energy consumption in total. Excluding the carbon-neutral portion of 65 quadrillion Btu that was from nuclear energy and renewables, that leaves 398 quadrillion Btu of fossil-fuel energy consumption contributing to global warming.

Of that 400 quadrillion Btu, 171 quadrillion Btu were from oil, but the majority was still from other fossil fuels, especially coal. Besides, realistically, oil consumption will not instantly end overnight but rather decline over a long period of time, like the graphs in my post in this thread. If mankind's oil consumption decreases over time after peak oil while other fossil fuels continue being used, there can be a lot of CO2 emissions.

As discussed in an earlier thread, the carbon dioxide emissions contributing to global warming so far have corresponded to a 0.55 trillion ton net atmospheric CO2 increase in the 20th century. In comparison, total (economically) recoverable reserves of coal worldwide are estimated at 998 billion tons of coal. The figure isn't really exact to three significant figures, but an approximate estimate is good enough for this discussion. Since each gram of carbon burned becomes 3.7 grams of CO2, remaining coal alone could be enough for several trillion tons of future CO2 emissions, far more than 20th century emissions. In other words, one is talking about a lot of the carbon that once was in the atmosphere many millions of years ago potentially being returned, so temperatures could rise substantially until mankind resorted to geoengineering.

There's also possible effects from methane hydrates, like this illustrates:

In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed its most detailed assessment of U.S. gas hydrate resources. The USGS study estimated the in-place gas resource within the gas hydrate of the United States ranges from 112,000 trillion cubic feet to 676,000 trillion cubic feet, with a mean value of 320,000 trillion cubic feet of gas. Subsequent refinements of the data in 1997 using information from the Ocean Drilling Program have suggested that the mean should be adjusted slightly downward, to around 200,000 trillion cubic feet -- still larger by several orders of magnitude than previously thought and dwarfing the estimated 1,400 trillion cubic feet of conventional recoverable gas resources and reserves in the United States.

Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrate approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,500 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently proven gas reserves.

from here

Of course, it's not necessarily the case that methane hydrates will be burned in the future, and the economics of recovering them compared to other fuels is uncertain. Obviously, I hope that there is a switch to nuclear and renewable energy instead. But one can see the potential for a lot of
CO2 emissions, at least as a possibility.

Of course, if future oil prices increase up to towards fossil-fuel gasoline eventually becoming unaffordable, that could lead towards a mitigating effect on CO2 emissions, if there was more substitution with nuclear and renewable energy.

There are energetically and environmentally attractive alternatives to regular vehicles. As a random example, the Tesla Roadster electric vehicle travels ~ 200+ miles on just 53 kilowatt-hours of electricity stored in its batteries. Charging batteries isn't 100% efficiency but it's very efficient.

Someone driving such a car 20 miles a day would use merely around 160 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month to recharge his electric vehicle. For perspective, U.S. electricity consumption today is 3100 kilowatt-hours per month per household in total.

The Tesla Roadster uses less than $0.02 of electricity per mile driven.

It may superficially seem surprising that relatively so little energy is involved in having electric vehicles, but the average gasoline vehicle on the road today is very inefficient.

While internal combustion engines may have up to around 20% to 25% efficiency for the ratio of mechanical power at the driveshaft to the thermal power of fuel burned, there are other factors that increase overall inefficiency much more than that alone. For example, there's the basic inefficiency of having a multi-thousand pound vehicle transporting a 100-kg person; there's the effect of aerodynamic differences like those between the average vehicle and this 70 mpg car; and there's other factors. The average U.S. passenger car on the road today has 22 mpg fuel efficiency, which is rather low (though even that is an improvement over 16 mpg average in 1980).

If I recall correctly, a study estimated that only 2% of the thermal energy of the gasoline ends up in the kinetic energy of the driver for the average current gasoline vehicle, after accounting for all losses; I don't have a reference to prove that here, but one can see the general idea from the earlier figures alone.

Of course, the problem with electric vehicles is that they haven't had a combination of range, speed, and price sufficient to compete against regular vehicles in the marketplace. They are environmentally attractive but not selling much in the marketplace yet.

Tesla Motors is currently charging $98000 base price each for orders for next year (2008). However, there is starting to be an expanding spectrum of electric vehicles. Lower performance EVs can be less expensive, such as $54000 for a short-range electric bus or several thousand dollars each for some electric motorcycles respectively.

Tesla Motors claims they will reduce their vehicle cost to $50,000 or less each with more production, benefiting from economies of scale.

It will be interesting to see if that occurs, to see if still more future progress occurs, and to see if prices eventually reach levels competitive enough for large sales.

[Admiral Valdemar]

We could have had practical EVs over a decade a go. The technology is not the problem. It's the image and the corporate greed of the fossil fuel guzzlers.

People need to change, because without that, all of the fancy toys we've had for years that could save us a good deal of grief are for naught.

[Androsphinx]

You make a good point in regard to the more extreme predictions of each.

Still, however, having a less extreme degree of peak oil effects at the same time as increasing global warming would not be contradictory.

OK, that's a given. But that was my point: if one takes the worst-end predictions of PO - societal collapse, mass starvation, an end to almost all long-distance personal transportation und so witer, won't the resultant reduction in energy demands not slow Global Warming? Say, at the extreme end of things, Olduvai "theory" - whoever was left wouldn't need to worry about rising sea levels?

[Alyrium Denryle]

You make a good point in regard to the more extreme predictions of each.

Still, however, having a less extreme degree of peak oil effects at the same time as increasing global warming would not be contradictory.

OK, that's a given. But that was my point: if one takes the worst-end predictions of PO - societal collapse, mass starvation, an end to almost all long-distance personal transportation und so witer, won't the resultant reduction in energy demands not slow Global Warming? Say, at the extreme end of things, Olduvai "theory" - whoever was left wouldn't need to worry about rising sea levels?

No, because the economics will force us to use other less efficient hydrocarbons

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

You make a good point in regard to the more extreme predictions of each.

Still, however, having a less extreme degree of peak oil effects at the same time as increasing global warming would not be contradictory.

OK, that's a given. But that was my point: if one takes the worst-end predictions of PO - societal collapse, mass starvation, an end to almost all long-distance personal transportation und so witer, won't the resultant reduction in energy demands not slow Global Warming? Say, at the extreme end of things, Olduvai "theory" - whoever was left wouldn't need to worry about rising sea levels?

The absolute worst-case Peak Oil scenario also happens to be the absolute worst-case scenario for loading the atmosphere with GHGs. As the extreme PO scenario tends to have the implication that we go out kicking and screaming. That most efforts at securing new energy resources involve taking conventional fossil-fuel based resources from people with smaller armies or fewer nuclear weapons than you . . . and subsequently less effort spent in trying to build sustainable alternative to fossil-fuels.

And even an active effort at averting the worst effects of PO would involve massive infrastructure reshaping and construction that would end up dumping a whole lot of GHGs into the atmosphere, because all the construction equipment and factories and such are driven off of non-renewable fossil-fuel energy sources..

All of the above ignores the points made in other posts that the planet's climate is an enormous, fiendishly complicated system with a great deal of inertia. We've given it quite the enormous shove, and even if all machines magically stopped working overnight, the spear-weilding primitives who came afterwards are very likely still going to have to contend with rising sea levels and changing climates.