3 Cats Stalking

Disturbing Ratios From Turiel

I recently read a retranslation of Antonio Turiel's post in “The Oil Crash” (if you read Italian) as offered at “Cassandra's legacy” reviewing the International Energy Agency (IEA) 2012 World Energy Outlook published in November of last year. I commented back in early January on the same thought thread.

Turiel points out that IEA's optimistic projection that world energy production will increase 15% by 2035 as measured by the accumulative volume of all the oil products produced is seriously flawed, both in basic assumptions and in analysis.

In his article Turiel adjusts the IEA data with more realistic production estimates, and then converts the production volumes to energy flow equivalents and accounts for the effect of EROEI to project net equivalent energy production. He projects that the world net equivalent energy product will fall 40% by 2035.

That difference can be catastrophic.

Turiel identifies three significant problems with the IEA report:

1. the IEA projection is for volume rather than equivalent energy flows (for example, energy content of an equivalent natural gas volume is less than that of light, sweet crude).

2. the IEA is overly optimistic about the production potential for current fields and most of the newer petroleum sources (in some cases the IEA discounts current experience).

3. the IEA does not take into account the energy it costs to obtain the energy that will be delivered to the final consumers (the factor called EROEI).

It is useful to look at the various ratios used in this analysis. As the article states, one can use different numbers to understand the effects of various conditions. Back in my early years, we called this sensitivity analysis.

1. Use a ratio of 0.7 to convert volumes of non-conventional oil (all of them) to the energy equivalent of crude oil. This accounts for the relative energy density of the different products.

2. Refining improvements mean that energy from some other source like natural gas is used to extract more energy from crude. At the very best, thermodynamics would not allow any real refining improvements to show up in future energy equivalent production – in fact, the net energy available would be less than the sum of the parts being combined to make the “improvement.”

3. An EROEI of 20 for current crude oil production matches data available for our current world. This means the net energy from current crude oil is only 95% of its measured production.

4. An EROEI of 5 is a good figure for crude oil we have found but are not producing for some reason. This means the net energy available from a “field-yet-to-be-developed” will be only 80% of its measured production.

5. The cost of exploration for new oil is climbing exponentially, so an EROEI of 3 should apply to a “field-yet-to-be-found.” This means the net energy from such crude oil is only 66% of its measured production.

6. Turiel assumes an average EROEI of 2 for non-conventional petroleum, including shale oil and gas and oil shale as well as bio-fuels (some known to have EROEIs less than 1). Only 50% of the gross energy from these sources can be used as net energy.

7. The IEA report is based on an assumed production decline of 3.3% for crude oil wells currently in production. Other industry experts say this figure is nearer to 5%, and the data should be adjusted accordingly.

8. Turiel reduces IEA's estimated volume of petroleum from current wells that are not being exploited by 50%. He reduces the volume from reservoirs yet to be discovered by 25%.

9. Turiel says only one third of natural gas liquids can be used as petroleum substitues, allowing them to be used as fuel for present cars. I do not understand just how this will affect the overall picture, but the effect seems small.

10. The volumetric production from shale oil is reduced by 50%.

The IEA projected that 22 years from now, in 2035, world oil production will approach 100 Mb/d, up from their 2011 figure of 87 Mb/d.

After applying the adjustments listed above, Turiel concludes that in 2011 the world energy flow measured in “energy equivalent” barrels to customers amounted to only about 69 Mb/d, not the volumetric 87 MB/d stated in the report.

Looking into the near future, he concludes the terminal decline of net energy is already upon us. In the next 22 years, the net production of energy equivalents will fall by nearly 45% to around 40 Mb/d. This is a far different picture from the IEA's estimate of a volumetric increase of energy products of 15%.

So, where do we stand? Do we really believe the IEA that we are looking at an increasing energy supply to match the increasing population of the earth, or are we looking at the eminent decline in the availability of energy?

To me, the answer is obvious. I agree when Turiel says the world will not recognize that net energy from petroleum is falling until they see a real fall in the actual volume.

By then, it is too late.

Finally, he says, “Petroleum will continue to be available for many decades but always in lesser quantities and in the end it will become a luxury good. Our epoch of accelerated economic development based on inexpensive petroleum is already over.”

So what to do, what to do?

sam

End of Growth

Several excellent blog articles in recent weeks have danced around a subject that I have long thought could be the real problem facing our world.

Upcoming changes in our physical world will happen so quickly, important parts of our society will be unable to conform to the new environment, and parts of the structure of civilization will simply crumble. Our opportunity to prepare and adapt is rapidly fading into the past.

First, let me give credit to the articles the helped me along in my thoughts. I offer these as recommended reading.

Crash_Watcher began a multi-part series of blogs starting last September on “Predicting Global and Regional Petroleum Consumption Trends.” As his series developed, he gave a clear picture of the results of Jeff Brown's Export Land Model in real-life. Timelines for when regions would run out of petroleum they could afford are becoming tighter and tighter.

Gail Tverberg has two articles at ourfiniteworld.com that are recommended: “Ten Reasons Why High Oil Prices are a Problem” and “How High Oil Prices Lead to Recession.” Her analyses indicate why the rising trend in oil prices point to an inevitable lack of other resources in the future.

The economist.com blog offers a summary of a report from Tullett Predon that indicates that declining EROEI in new fossil fuel developments “could bomb societies back into a pre-industrial age.”

Today's world of humankind is like a large ant nest with an interlocking system of interaction between its various parts. While civilization is very versatile and adaptive, some of its larger societal structures are based upon long-term consistent trends in the physical world.

For instance, people in the USA depends upon the automobile to transport them to wherever they want to go. They also have a long-standing habit of debt-based consumerism – take what they want when they want it and simply charge it to the card.

In the past, whenever some significant change came along, civilization adapted, and most of the adaptions we think about were to “someone's good.” The Renaissance was an adaption to a new flood of knowledge into Europe. The Industrial Age was an adaption to learning how to control and use mechanical power from coal. The Automobile Age was an adaption to plentiful supplies of liquid fossil fuels.

Adaptations over the past 200 years have mostly resulted in growth of our society, and now our economy is based upon an adaption to Growth as a continuing trend. The promise of America has been that we will always grow to something bigger and better and bigger and better and ...

Today, too many indicators point to a situation where a new trend is developing: the availability of cheap fossil fuel will become less and less in the near future, maybe within the next two or five years. Fuel will be available, but at an ever higher price that continues to climb. The alternative is a great depression where the price of fuel is still too high, no matter how low it might be, because money is worthless. Either way, our way of life is toast.

The articles I referenced are not from economists. They are from people whose rational analysis I respect, and they are consistent in their warning that the new downward trend we are seeing in the cost of liquid fuels will result in an end to the growth that has fueled our economy throughout my lifetime and that of all my peers. We have ridden the roller-coaster to the top of the track. Now we will all put our hands into the air and ride it down, but we do not know what we will find at the bottom.

So why do I bother telling this story. (TPTB) The Powers That Be do not want this story told. (MSM) Main Stream Media does not want to talk about it. (.gov) Our government (both parties) does not want to admit that there is a problem. And even my sons tell me I must be wrong, though my daughter is working at learning sustainability.

I believe there will be some parts of civilization that will survive and learn to live in the world that follows ours. I just want those people to begin training now. It will not be an easy ride.

 

sam

My "Was A Time When" Blog

A year ago I published a new novel "Was A Time When" that tells of one possible scenario for our civilization, especially on the West Coast. I have started a blog at http://prudentrver.typepad.com/wasatimewhen/ to address issues raised in the book, and I invite you to visit and comment.

For example, one issue I offer is a very specific time-line of predictions for the coming century. Already, some are wrong, but others are still to be determined. Suggestions of how these might change are most welcome.

The book has received five Honorable Mentions at five of the six competitions I have entered (no word yet on the sixth), so I feel good about its literary success, but it has not received viral comments from social media. Somehow, I think today's generations do not want to hear what life might be like in the not to distant future.

One critic of the book says the genetic changes in the human genome I describe in the book could not happen so quickly, and my response is that we have so little time left to adjust, the changes must happen if anyone is to survive.

Another critic says I conveniently arranged natural disasters to happen to fit my plot. Such is the power of an author, but my story is consistent with the probabilities of such natural disasters occuring within our lifetimes. In fact, Superstorm Sandy pre-empted my story of Hurricane Gracie striking the mouth of the Hudson River.

So, it is for the reader to determine if they accept my story line. It is one possibility, and there are many others, but not many of them are really that much better for the next 85 years than my scenario.

sam

How about natural disasters?

I originally started 3 Cats Stalking to focus on things over which we humans had some control, but my first venture into the world of hurts was my book series on earthquakes (see the79scenario.com). I am still very interested in natural catastrophes.

This interest was heightened when a reviewer commented on my new book Was A Time When and said I allowed natural disasters to conveniently occur at times to enhance my story. Some people just don't understand that most of nature does not give a damn about when things happen, except when human beings start messing with the environment, like increasing the earth's temperature and changing the frequency and probability of big storms.

But I digress. I am concerned about our society's tendency to underestimate risk, and our surprise when something comes along to say things could be worse than we thought. Case in point below.

A friend alerted me to a piece on LA's NBC channel 4 about expected earthquakes on the San Andraeus Fault here in California. I watched, and the news reports were at best confusing and maybe misleading. Let me try to clarify.

This fault marks the boundary between the North American continental plate and the Pacific continental plate. Fractures along this fault are the primary drivers for all the minor and major earthquakes along the California coast. Most of the big earthquakes in the California recorded history have been the result of slipping along this fault or its children.

For the geo-caching or map-attracted RVers among us, this boundary runs from the Salton Sea  through Indio through Palmdale through Gorman at Tejon Pass through Carrizo Plain National Monument west of Bakersfield to near Chalome on CA46 (road from Kettleman City on I-5 to Paso Robles) through Parkfield through San Benito TTN through San Juan Bautista to alongside the I-280 above Silicon Valley out to sea near Daly City (does not go under San Francisco) through Drake's Bay in Marin County through downtown Olema (epicenter of the 1906 earthquake) down the middle of Tomales Bay out to sea then up through Manchester Beach State Park and finally up to the area around the Sinkyone State Park where it merges with other faults out in the Pacific Ocean. I am sure many of you have driven near or over parts of this fracture in the earth's crust.

The area of interest in the news piece is the stretch south of Parkfield down to near Palmdale. This 160 mile section of the fault has historically shown a "steady" creep without producing any large events. Seismologists concluded that this section would prevent a large fracture starting in the south from traveling to the north, or vice versa. Therefore, if LA gets wiped, SF can come down and rescue us. Or if SF gets wiped, LA can go up and help them.

A scientific review of the giant fracture near Fukishima, Japan, where a similar creep zone was supposed to protect north from south and south from north has now indicated that the protection does not always work. It is possible for a fracture to continue through the creep zone, meaning both north and south get wiped. If that should happen, then there is no one left to help the neighbors. In other words, the calculated risk of a catastrophic event (based on what we have learned from the past) has just gone up by an appreciable amount.

Take a look at the article "Statewide Quake in California May Be Possible After All" by Erin Brown for a more detailed analysis.

What this means for my friends in southern California is that there could be a situation where all of California is stricken with a gigantic earthquake, not just southern California. It is less probable than just north or south being stricken, but it is there. I have told them that instructions are still the same: keep your earthquake kit handy and be prepared.

Sam Penny

Is the Fourth Cat Real or a Figment of Our Imagination?

I originally thought our future would be determined by physical matters: resources, climate, and population. But along came a fourth cat: economics. I am not sure if that cat really matters or is even subject to reality - economics sometimes appears to be a figment of people's imagination. As an analogy, when sentenced to death, the Cheshire Cat of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland baffles everyone by having made its head appear without its body, sparking a massive argument between the executioner and the King and Queen of Hearts about whether something that does not have a body can indeed be beheaded. There may indeed not be a solution to this 4-cat question of physics. sam (with tongue in cheek)

More Holes in the IEA World Energy Outlook 2012

Last November 12, 2012, the International Energy Agency released its 2012 edition of the World Energy
Outlook. and generated a cacophony of statements ranging from "how great it is" to "forecast unrealistically high" and many opinions in between.

A key conclusion of the report was that "Oil Production" would approach 100 million barrels per day in 2035, the United States would be the world's largest oil producer by around 2020, and North America will become a net oil exporter by around 2030. Those who claim we have no resource problems offered the report as proof of their claim.

A number of well-respected analysts and bloggers commenting through TheOilDrum and in other venues have disagreed with the conclusions of the IEA report on different, often technical, grounds and expressed concerns with some of the basic assumptions used to build the report.

The article "What future for petroleum?" by Marco Pagani in Cassandra's Legacy offers one of the most clear and concise analyses of the WEO study. First, the key measure is "net energy," and not
volumetric production. This reduces the 2035 comparison to today to about 70 million barrels per day (equivalent). The peak of about 74 million barrels per day (equivalent) is still before us, in 2015.

Second, the estimates used in the study for the rate of production decline in existing wells and in the newer tight shale oil and gas plays are significantly overly optimistic. As Thomas Hedges points out in his article "The Natural Gas Bubble" at Truthdig.com, reserves from existing wells are declining at up to 70 percent per year, and current data shows that natural gas production is essentially unreliable. Production declines in shale oil show a similar precipitous drop.

Using more believable decline rate for shale sources, Pagani shows a graph that predicts only 40 million barrels per day (equivalent) in 2035, and the peak was 65 million barrels per day (equivalent) in 2005.

As Pagani says, "What to say? From 100 million barrels, we arrive to about 40; if we make preparations for this future, perhaps we'll be able to face it, but if we keep the rosy colored glasses of IEA, we might well be running towards catastrophe."

BTW, 2035 is only 22 years away. sam

Out of Hibernation

I last posted the middle of last year. I have been hibernating, aka to hide, hole up, immure, lie torpid, sleep, vegetate, winter. Probably, since the season does not fit, vegetate works best. Though my feelings about the world are best expressed with hide. Sometimes things just get depressing.

My wife and I took a trip starting in July of last year. We drove in our RV bhrough Las Vegas for one of the hottest nights going, visited Alice's aging brother in Salt Lake, stopped in Cheyenne for a week to wait for cooler weather in Kansas, caved in an drove on to spend a week visiting Alice's aging sister near Newton Kansas, drove to Memphis to see how well those folks are doing at preparing for an earthquake, and then drove to near St. Louis to see our son and family. Need I say the weather was hot and humid at the beginning of August. And we saw the drought in the midwest up close -- it was/is horrendous. Lie torpid covers my hibernation for that period of time.

We headed back by going north into Wisconsin. A severe sunburn taught me to read the medical info on prescriptions -- makes you photosensitive and sun do not mix well. We remained warm as we traveled across North Dakota, Montana, and into Washington, but things settled down a bit as we visited our great-granddaughter near Tacoma.

Then we went to the Oregon coast and thought we were going to freeze our butts off. When you acclimate to the 100s, the 60s are cold. We meandered our way back south and returned to southern California in October. Another 6,000 miles on the old RV.

By that time the election campaigns were well on their way, and I let my my mind become immured (means to confine or imprison) by all the crap going on over TV. It was another form of hibernation. What was obvious to me was that none of the candidates would talk about the true state of our world and the problems facing it.

Then to cap it all off, the end of November my laptop crashed, totally, and I lost the last 14 months of bits and bytes. I lost what work I had been doing on a couple of books. I lost all my emails. I dropped back into hibernation and tried to remember what I had been doing for those months. Obviously, one of the things I had not been doing was backing up my laptop. Live/Die and learn.

Fast forward to January, I am coming out of hibernation. I am cleaning up my websites and blogs. I will be commenting on the continuing trends in the state of our world. My hibernation did not improve things.

So Be It.  sam

Same-ol' Same-ol' Wishful Dreams

Dr. David Knight, an Honorary Research Associate at Oxford University, expressed his views in a talk entitled "Climate Change and Peak Oil: two sides of the same coin? to the local Winchester Action on Climate Change (WinACC) the beginning of this month. His presentation offers a good summary of the Peak Oil story but little about Climate Change.

Dr Knight says, "The main purpose of this talk is to consider three possible visions or scenarios concerning Peak Oil and Climate Change:" the "Green Future" which he and WinACC support, the "Runaway Climate Change" favored by the "hugely powerful energy corporations," and the "Peak Oil Catastrophe" envisioned by many ecological economists and some energy analysts. He discounts the "Nuclear Option" as too unlikely to consider.

I do find his conclusion of tying the powerful energy corporations with runaway climate change interesting. In time he may be proved correct in his analysis of the cause and effect.

He says that his talk mainly focuses on peak oil because most people know less about it than climate change. I leave it to you to read his description of Peak Oil -- it repeats what most of my followers already know. He does list actions for the government to take to mitigate the problem and recommends a number of changes to legislation and fiscal policy. Then he recommends what the individuals can do: raise awareness, act together, work for change, and walk the talk.

While I recommend his essay for the information review, I am disappointed in the conclusions. He says, "The Green Future scenario involving rapid transition to a near zero carbon economy is infinitely preferable to either of the other two and may just be achievable if a sufficient fraction of the world’s population works for it."

I suppose the experience of writing my book "Was a Time When" has put me into the Peak Oil Catastrophe category. I think the interactions within Peak Oil exacerbatedby Climate Change and the Population Overshoot will surely result in a catastrophe of the worst sort. I wish I could be more optimistic, but what I hear in this piece is wishful dreams.

sam

 

A Path to Cultural Psychosis

In my book, "Was a Time When," I detail a story in which American society collapses from within, its citizens making poor choices and denying the inevitable, until it is reduced to a tribal society where the have-nots are parasites living on the fruits of the haves. I project that one result will be a war of "ethnic-cleansing" forty years from now where the haves attempt to wipe out the have-nots who are plaguing them.

While my mind could piece together a scenario where future events and circumstances could lead to such a situation, I could not get my head around how mankind would allow this to really happen. And yet our history is clouded with the likes of Hitler and Stalin who led a significant portion of the population of their countries into decadent societies that would destroy the groups they blamed for their problems. Could there be such a path for our society?

Dimitri Orlov has an excellent discussion of cultural neuroses and psychoses that offers a framework for how this can happen in his essay "Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder: Neurosis or Psychosis?" One of his conclusions points out America's current state and what could be.

"Americans should feel lucky to be ruled by sociopaths; being ruled by a psychotic is much worse. Psychotic societies select for leaders such as Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot; the effect is a society that is effectively decapitated. A political body can continue to function, for a time, with its head amputated. Its army and bureaucracy intact, it gallops around as a headless horseman, driven to destroy by primitive, atavistic impulses. The tremendous power of subconscious phantasies harnessed in the service of state power by a psychotic leader infects all of surrounding reality even while the state apparatus remains perfectly rational: law and order in the service of stark raving madness."

This means a path does exist that can lead from where we are now to a future we would abhor.

I recommend reading Orlov's essay. The existance of such a path to the future is not encouraging.

sam

A New Term for Me: Population Justice

PeakOil.com today published a summary and link to the transcript of a very interesting discussion entitled Population Control or Population Justice? The successes and failures of attempts at "population control" are considered, and "population justice" is offered as a better alternative to address the population overshoot problem of the earth. The term population justice is a new one for me, but after reading the transcript I better understand the proposal as the way for the future.