A scary strategic problem - no oil

[exabedtech]

Yes, i'm very much in favour of Canada being an energy superpower.  I'd just like us to take some of that oil revenue and put it into research to find that next big thing.  Why should we limit ourselves to oil?  We have the financial and intellectual means to do so much more. 
Solar may have had a breakthrough at MIT this year...

An an electrical contractor i'd love to see everything running on electricity and have that power generated in a de-centralized manner.  Solar allows for this, but its in its infancy and the current technology makes no economic sense. 

Imagine a grid that it virtually impossible to take down since every 10th house is part of the generating capacity.  Things like EMP and solar storms would be so much easier to recover from.

There was a time when steam powered cars made more sense than gas power, so yes, things can and do change.  I'd like to see Canada position itself as a leader in that change.  There may not be another country on earth better positioned to do so.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Solar power satellites.

 

[GAP]

Solar power satellites.

Not until they learn how to tighten the beams down to the earth. Right now we'd probably fry every second Canada Goose migrating south.......maybe only turn them on on Thankgiving day morning.....

 

[a_majoor]

The continuing analysis of the new energy future by Walter Russel Mead. New wealth can and will cause changes in foreign policy that should be to the long term benefit to America and her allies:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/07/18/energy-revolution-3-the-new-american-century/

Energy Revolution 3: The New American Century
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Get ready for an American century: that appears to be the main consequence of the energy revolution that is now causing economic and political experts to tear up their old forecasts all over the world. The new American century won’t be a repeat of the last one, but in some very important ways the world now looks more likely to continue in the direction of global liberal capitalism that the US—like Britain before us—has seen as its geopolitical goal for many years.

Energy was critical to the geopolitics of the 20th century; energy shortages shaped some of the strategic decisions that led both Germany and Japan to defeat in World War II, and the struggle over the energy-rich Middle East played an important role in the Cold War. The assumption that the world was at or near “peak oil” has been a driving force behind predictions that the 21st century would be an era of U.S.-China competition as China’s desperate quest for more energy resources led it to push an aggressive global energy policy that would conflict with vital U.S. interests. The assumption that there were few major discoveries left to be made also led many to forecast that the Middle East and especially the Gulf region would continue to be a major fulcrum in global affairs; indeed, countries like Saudi Arabia, with the ability to increase production to meet the thirst of an oil-starved world, would become more important than ever as the geopolitics of oil scarcity took hold.

But as I’ve been writing recently, none of that looks true anymore. Advances in extraction technology have changed our understanding of the world’s energy future. As I wrote in my last post, the U.S. and Canada each may have more energy potential than the entire Middle East. China also has significant resources. So do Israel and Brazil.

It is too soon to tell just how much of this potential can be unlocked, but for several years now it has begun to look as if much more of these unconventional resources will be available much sooner than thought, and serious people now argue that the US could pass Saudi Arabia to become the world’s leading oil producer by 2020.

Even if some of the new sources prove difficult to extract at a reasonable economic and environmental price, the amount of available energy out there may be even greater than we now think. Because the extraction technology is new, and because it is still developing, much of the world has not been surveyed for these unconventional deposits. Both on land and under the sea, there is a lot of territory still to explore.

It’s going to take time for us to develop a clear picture of what the new energy future looks like, but there is more than enough information already available to start thinking through some of the important consequences of the new energy situation for 21st century politics and policy. In the first of these energy posts I identified some geopolitical losers; in the second I took a look at the domestic implications of the new energy situation for the United States. In this post I’ll sketch out some initial thoughts about how the new energy picture—if it isn’t a mirage—will affect American foreign policy.

The effects won’t be trivial. Changes this profound in the energy outlook imply major changes in world politics and given the unique global role of the United States and the global scale of its interests, those changes matter hugely for American foreign policy. Much of the punditry of the last ten years is looking suddenly obsolete; a number of writers are going to hope that some of the books and articles they’ve recently published will be quickly forgotten. They shouldn’t worry; the public is quick to forget, and most prophets of decline and Malthusian struggle will have little trouble in reinventing themselves as analysts of abundance.

The U.S. may not be the biggest geopolitical winner in the new dispensation; that title may go to Israel if it’s energy potential proves out. If Israel’s potential as an energy superpower is actually realized, the Jewish state will be like a pudgy orphan girl who inherits a billion dollar trust fund and suddenly tranforms from social pariah to belle of the ball. Not only will it replace or supplement Arab countries as a principle source of oil and gas for Europe, it will see the weight of its most serious enemies in world politics decline as the Gulf becomes only one of a number of energy-rich regions.
But on the bigger stage of world politics, it’s the United States that benefits most from the energy revolution. To begin with, the core objective of the United States—a reasonably stable, orderly and liberal global system—is a lot easier to achieve in an era of energy abundance than in one of tough resource competition. Oil is a lubricant, and the more the world has, the more smoothly things are likely to run. A world in which jealous, competing states are trying to elbow each other aside to access the last few remaining pools of oil is a much nastier place than one in which the whole oil question is a lot more laid back.

Abundant energy will also promote global economic growth, an effect that strengthens and stabilizes the world system. It is easier for countries to cooperate when their economies are doing well. There is less nationalist pressure inside countries driving political leaders to take confrontational stands, and it is easier to negotiate win-win solutions and build functioning international institutions when all parties are relatively optimistic about their prospects.

On the whole, a world of energy abundance should be particularly good for U.S.-China relations. If both China and the United States have large energy reserves at home, and if new discoveries globally are making energy more abundant, there is less chance that China and the U.S. will compete for political influence in places like the Middle East. More energy security at home may also lessen the political pressure inside China to build up its naval forces.

Oil may calm the troubled waters around China’s shores. The maritime disputes now causing trouble from Korea and Japan to Malaysia and the Philippines will be easier to manage if the potential undersea energy resources are seen as less vital to national economic security. Nationalist passion will still drive tough stands on the maritime issues, but nationalism is a much stronger force when powerful economic arguments share the agenda of radical nationalist groups. If the South China Sea issue is seen as both a question of national pride and, because of perceived energy supply issues, a vital national interest, Chinese policy will be much tougher than if it is simply a question of pride.

Depending on the size of China’s unconventional domestic reserves (and some analysts think the country could have something like the equivalent of double Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves), China will feel marginally less constrained by Washington’s global naval supremacy. As it now stands, in any serious clash with China, the U.S. could bring Beijing to its knees with a naval blockade. With much larger domestic energy production, China would be less vulnerable to this threat. This could translate into a greater willingness to take a hard line on international issues.

On the other hand, China is unlikely to gain complete energy independence, and in any case it will still need access to the global system for trade and investment. Indeed, assuming that the new energy abundance promotes global economic prosperity, access to the global market will become more attractive for China and its deepening economic independence with world markets would make China less willing to risk cutting off its maritime connections to the rest of the world.

The energy revolution is likely to have profound implications for American policy in the Middle East. American public opinion, already deeply depressed about the prospects for constructive change in the region and deeply weary of war, is likely to welcome any chance to think less about a part of the world in which U.S. initiatives rarely seem to go well. The Gulf in particular will, however, continue to be important to countries like India, China and Japan as well as to Europe. Over time, as the world’s energy picture becomes less Middle East-centric, the U.S. is likely to explore the possibility of becoming more of a balancer, less of a hegemon in the region. It will still be a goal of U.S. policy to prevent any single other power from being able to dominate the region and interrupting the oil flow, but the U.S. will likely look to achieve that more through agreements and power balancing than through overwhelming military superiority by land, sea and air. This will not happen all at once, and may not happen at all if initial U.S. attempts to disengage lead to greater threats, but both public and elite opinion would much rather reduce than increase the U.S. presence in this part of the world, and if the changing world energy picture makes that easier to do, the U.S. will take the opportunity to step back.

India, Russia, Turkey, China, Japan, Israel, Iran and the European powers will all have interests in the Middle East. If the U.S. goal is to manage and limit competition among these players and other local governments, the multiplicity of interests and powers involved in the region could make that a complex but not altogether impossible task. The future of this region remains hard to predict, but the U.S. may well find that its key interests in the Middle East can be achieved with much less sweat in the next fifty years than in the last thirty.

The one exception is likely to be U.S. support for Israel. Israel’s security does not require U.S. ground troops or even naval forces, but U.S. public opinion will likely continue want Israel to be safe. Arms sales, aid and cooperation can be expected to continue, though if Israel’s own potential energy resources come online, Israel may have more friends, more money and fewer and weaker enemies than it now has.

Globally, America’s ambition is not and never has been to be an active, busy hegemon. At its core, America is a lazy power. The world order America wants is liberal, capitalist, predominantly democratic and broadly accepted by the major powers. It wants to prevent the domination of either end of Eurasia by a single power and it doesn’t want any part of the world to close itself off for purposes of investment and trade, but otherwise it is open to a wide range of political and security arrangements.

An American century is one in which the world is moving towards this kind of configuration. The 21st century already appeared to be heading America’s way—less because the U.S. has the will or the power to impose its designs on the world than because American objectives match up reasonably well with the vital interests of most of the world’s important powers. The new energy picture supports that kind of outcome in three ways.
The American economy will gain important advantages that will ease the transition to a post-blue social model and promote social cohesion and public confidence in our economic model.

Energy abundance will promote global economic growth, increasing global acceptance of liberal capitalism as living standards rise.
The new geopolitics of oil will weaken hostile countries, strengthen friendly ones, and promote U.S.-China cooperation.
From all these points of view, the new energy picture is almost completely positive. Oil makes everything better. But the environmental question remains. Will an era of hydrocarbon abundance lead to an environmental catastrophe? Many greens are already warning that exactly this will happen. In the next and concluding post in this energy series, I’ll look at those issues.

 

[a_majoor]

Part 4 of Walter Russel Mead's look at a hydrocarbon rich future, Teh Progressive left has been left hanging by the upending the assumptions like "peak oil" and "Climate Cnange". The simplistic models of Progressiveism are unworkable in all times and places for a far more fundimental reason termed by F.A, Hyack as the Local Knowledge problem. The Earth is by far the most complex interrelated system humankind has access to, so any sort of assumption that there is "superior knowledge" of how complex systems work is just hubris. The hydrocarbon explosion is just the latest and probably the largest and most visible example to date:

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/07/28/the-energy-revolution-4-hot-planet/

The Energy Revolution 4: Hot Planet?
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.

On the whole, this news is about as good as it gets: trillions of dollars of valuable resources are now available to power the US economy, cut our trade deficit and reduce our vulnerability to Middle East instability. Hundreds of thousands of well paid blue collar jobs are going to reduce income inequality and help rebuild a stable middle class. Many of the resources are exactly where we would want them: in hard hit Rust Belt states.

World peace is also looking more possible: the great powers aren’t going to be elbowing each other as they fight to control the last few dribs and drabs of oil. Nasty dictatorships and backward-facing petro-states aren’t going to be able blackmail the world as easily.

But there is one group (other than the Russians and the Gulf Arabs and the Iranians) that isn’t sharing in the general joy: the greens. For them, the spectacle of a looming world energy crisis was good news. It justified huge subsidies for solar and wind power (and thereby guaranteed huge fortunes for clever green-oriented investors). Greens outdid themselves year after year with gloom and doom forecasts about the coming oil crunch. They hoped that public dislike of the Middle East and the costs of our involvement there could be converted into public support for expensive green energy policies here at home: “energy independence” was one of the few arguments they had that resonated widely among average voters.

Back in those salad days of green arrogance, there was plenty of scoffing at the ‘peak oil deniers’ and shortage skeptics who disagreed with what greens told us all was settled, Malthusian science. “Reality based” green thinkers sighed and rolled their eyes at the illusions of those benighted techno-enthusiasts who said that unconventional sources like shale oil and gas and the oil sands of Canada would one day become available.
Environmentalists, you see, are science based, unlike those clueless, Gaia-defying technophiles with their infantile faith in the power of human creativity. Greens, with their awesome powers of Gaia-assisted intuition, know what the future holds.

But those glory days are over now, and the smarter environmentalists are bowing to the inevitable. George Monbiot, whose cries of woe and pain in the Guardian newspaper have served as the Greek chorus at each stage of the precipitous decline of the global green movement, gave voice to green grief at the prospect of a wealthy and prosperous century to come: “We were wrong,” he wrote on July 2,”about peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all.” Monbiot now gets the politics as well:

There is enough oil in the ground to deep-fry the lot of us, and no obvious means to prevail upon governments and industry to leave it in the ground. Twenty years of efforts to prevent climate breakdown through moral persuasion have failed, with the collapse of the multilateral process at Rio de Janeiro last month. The world’s most powerful nation is again becoming an oil state, and if the political transformation of its northern neighbour [a reference to Canada] is anything to go by, the results will not be pretty.

In other words, a newly oil rich United States is going to fight even harder against global green carbon policies, and the new discoveries will tilt the American political system even farther in the direction of capitalist oil companies.

Capitalism is not, Monbiot is forced to admit, a fragile system that will easily be replaced. Bolstered by huge supplies of oil, it is here to stay. Industrial civilization is, as far as he can now see, unstoppable. Gaia, that treacherous slut, has made so much oil and gas that her faithful acolytes today cannot protect her from the consequences of her own folly.

Welcome to the New Green Doom: an overabundance of oil and gas is going to release so much greenhouse gas that the world is going to fry. The exploitation of the oil sands in Alberta, warn leading environmentalists, is a tipping point. William McKibben put it this way in an interview with Wired magazine in the fall of 2011:

I think if we go whole-hog in the tar sands, we’re out of luck. Especially since that would doubtless mean we’re going whole-hog at all the other unconventional energy sources we can think of: Deepwater drilling, fracking every rock on the face of the Earth, and so forth.
Here’s why the tar sands are important: It’s a decision point about whether, now that we’re running out of the easy stuff, we’re going to go after the hard stuff. The Saudi Arabian liquor store is running out of bottles. Do we sober up, or do we find another liquor store, full of really crappy booze, to break into?

A year later, despite the success of environmentalists like McKibben at persuading the Obama administration to block a pipeline intended to ship this oil to refineries in the US, it’s clear (as it was crystal clear all along to anyone with eyes to see) that the world has every intention of making use of the “crappy liquor.”

Again, for people who base their claim to world leadership on their superior understanding of the dynamics of complex systems, greens prove over and over again that they are surprisingly naive and crude in their ability to model and to shape the behavior of the political and economic systems they seek to control. If their understanding of the future of the earth’s climate is anything like as wish-driven, fact-averse and intellectually crude as their approach to international affairs, democratic politics and the energy market, the greens are in trouble indeed.  And as I’ve written in the past, the contrast between green claims to understand climate and to be able to manage the largest and most complex set of policy changes ever undertaken, and the evident incompetence of greens at managing small (Solyndra) and large (Kyoto, EU cap and trade, global climate treaty) political projects today has more to do with climate skepticism than greens have yet understood. Many people aren’t rejecting science; they are rejecting green claims of policy competence. In doing so, they are entirely justified by the record.

Nevertheless, the future of the environment is not nearly as dim as greens think. Despairing environmentalists like McKibben and Monbiot are as wrong about what the new era of abundance means as green energy analysts were about how much oil the planet had.
The problem is the original sin of much environmental thought: Malthusianism. If greens weren’t so addicted to Malthusian horror narratives they would be able to see that the new era of abundance is going to make this a cleaner planet faster than if the new gas and oil had never been found.

Let’s be honest. It has long been clear to students of history, and has more recently begun to dawn on many environmentalists, that all that happy-clappy carbon treaty stuff was a pipe dream and that nothing like that is going to happen.  A humanity that hasn’t been able to ban the bomb despite the clear and present dangers that nuclear weapons pose isn’t going to ban or even seriously restrict the internal combustion engine and the generator.

The political efforts of the green movement to limit greenhouse gasses have had very little effect so far, and it is highly unlikely that they will have more success in the future. The green movement has been more of a group hug than a curve bending exercise, and that is unlikely to change. If the climate curve bends, it will bend the way the population curve did: as the result of lots of small human decisions driven by short term interest calculations rather than as the result of a grand global plan.

The shale boom hasn’t turned green success into green failure. It’s prevented green failure from turning into something much worse.  Monbiot understands this better than McKibben; there was never any real doubt that we’d keep going to the liquor store. If we hadn’t found ways to use all this oil and gas, we wouldn’t have embraced the economics of less. True, as oil and gas prices rose, there would be more room for wind and solar power, but the real winner of an oil and gas shortage is… coal. To use McKibben’s metaphor, there is a much dirtier liquor store just down the road from the shale emporium, and it’s one we’ve been patronizing for centuries. The US and China have oodles of coal, and rather than walk to work from our cold and dark houses all winter, we’d use it. Furthermore, when and if the oil runs out, the technology exists to get liquid fuel out of coal. It isn’t cheap and it isn’t clean, but it works.

The newly bright oil and gas future means that we aren’t entering a new Age of Coal. For this, every green on the planet should give thanks.

The second reason why greens should give thanks for shale is that environmentalism is a luxury good. People must survive and they will survive by any means necessary. But they would much rather thrive than merely survive, and if they can arrange matters better, they will. A poor society near the edge of survival will dump the industrial waste in the river without a second thought. It will burn coal and choke in the resulting smog if it has nothing else to burn.

Politics in an age of survival is ugly and practical. It has to be. The best leader is the one who can cut out all the fluff and the folderol and keep you alive through the winter. During the Battle of Leningrad, people burned priceless antiques to stay alive for just one more night.

An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people. Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people won’t fold their hands and meditate on the ineffable wonders of Gaia and her mystic web of life as they pass peacefully away. Nor will they vote George Monbiot and Bill McKibben into power. They will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them.

But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed. We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure. A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them. As China gets richer, the Chinese want cleaner air, cleaner water, purer food — and they are ready and able to pay for them. A Brazil whose economic future is secure can afford to treasure and conserve its rain forests. A Central America where the people are doing all right is more willing and able to preserve its biodiversity. And a world in which people know where their next meal is coming from is a world that can and will take thought for things like the sustainability of the fisheries and the protection of the coral reefs.

A world that is more relaxed about the security of its energy sources is going to be able to do more about improving the quality of those sources and about managing the impact of its energy consumption on the global commons. A rich, energy secure world is going to spend more money developing solar power and wind power and other sustainable sources than a poor, hardscrabble one.

When human beings think their basic problems are solved, they start looking for more elegant solutions. Once Americans had an industrial and modern economy, we started wanting to clean up the rivers and the air. Once people aren’t worried about getting enough calories every day to survive, they start wanting healthier food more elegantly prepared.

A world of abundant shale oil and gas is a world that will start imposing more environmental regulations on shale and gas producers. A prosperous world will set money aside for research and development for new technologies that conserve energy or find it in cleaner surroundings. A prosperous world facing climate change will be able to ameliorate the consequences and take thought for the future in ways that a world overwhelmed by energy insecurity and gripped in a permanent economic crisis of scarcity simply can’t and won’t do.

Greens should also be glad that the new energy is where it is. For Monbiot and for many others, Gaia’s decision to put so much oil into the United States and Canada seems like her biggest indiscretion of all. Certainly, a United States of America that has, in the Biblical phrase, renewed its youth like an eagle with a large infusion of fresh petro-wealth is going to be even less eager than formerly to sign onto various pie-in-the-sky green carbon treaties.

But think how much worse things would be if the new reserves lay in dictatorial kleptocracies. How willing and able would various Central Asia states have been to regulate extraction and limit the damage? How would Nigeria have handled vast new reserves whose extraction required substantially more invasive methods?

Instead, the new sources are concentrated in places where environmentalists have more say in policy making and where, for all the shortcomings and limits, governments are less corruptible, more publicly accountable and in fact more competent to develop and enforce effective energy regulations. This won’t satisfy McKibben and Monbiot (nothing that could actually happen would satisfy either of these gentlemen), but it is a lot better than what we could be facing.

Additionally, if there are two countries in the world that should worry carbon-focused greens more than any other, they are the United States and China. The two largest, hungriest economies in the world are also home to enormous coal reserves. But based on what we now know, the US and China are among the biggest beneficiaries of the new cornucopia. Gaia put the oil and the gas where, from a carbon point of view, it will do the most good. In a world of energy shortages and insecurity, both the US and China would have gone flat out for coal. Now, that is much less likely.

And there’s one more reason why greens should thank Gaia for shale. Wind and solar aren’t ready for prime time now, but by the time the new sources start to run low, humanity will have mastered many more technologies that can used to provide energy and to conserve it. It’s likely that Age of Shale hasn’t just postponed the return of coal: because of this extra time, there likely will never be another age in which coal is the dominant industrial fuel. It’s virtually certain that the total lifetime carbon footprint of the human race is going to be smaller with the new oil and gas sources than it would have been without them.

Neither the world’s energy problems nor its climate issues are going away any time soon. Paradise is not beckoning just a few easy steps away. But the new availability of these energy sources is on balance a positive thing for environmentalists as much as for anyone else.
Perhaps, and I know this is a heretical thought, but perhaps Gaia is smarter than the greens.

 

[a_majoor]

Unintended consequences from the biofuel mandate. Canada has no need to be part of this under any circumstances, but as usual perverse incentives (crony capitalism and electoral politics) displaces common sense:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/08/15/peter-foster-biofuel-policy-on-thin-ice/

Peter Foster: Biofuel policy on thin ice
Peter Foster | Aug 15, 2012 10:50 AM ET
More from Peter Foster

Washington’s biofuel mandate is hurting poor people right now

The New Yorker is — mostly — a wonderful magazine. Although its left liberal leanings are hardly a secret, its cover illustrations are usually whimsical rather than political. The cover of its latest issue, however, portrays Santa Claus sitting on a tiny ice floe at the North Pole. Cute, but fraught with catastrophic implication (This past Christmas, the Suzuki foundation had a child-scaring fund-raising campaign based on the claim that Santa’s workshop was sinking).

In fact, the climate scare du jour relates not to the Arctic but to this summer’s extreme heat and drought in the U.S. Midwest, which is the worst since the mid-1950s and on a par with the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. However, while providing rich fodder for bloviation by the usual suspects, current weather is in no way outside the normal range, as three skeptical experts, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Princeton’s William Happer, and American Geophysical Society fellow Roger W. Cohen, point out in a letter to The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday. How, they note, do you explain the greater heatwaves of the 1930s?

Which brings us back to The New Yorker. Last month, the magazine’s leading proponent of draconian climate policy, Elizabeth Kolbert, penned a piece titled “The Big Heat,” in which she suggested the drought was, at last, bringing home the reality of potential climate catastrophe to those redneck numbskulls and deranged conservatives recently more concerned with “Obama’s birth certificate.” She bemoaned, however, that neither the president, nor his electoral opponent, Mitt Romney, seemed eager to bring up global warming. “And so,” she concluded, “while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious.”

Related
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Strangely, however, (I’m being ironic) Ms. Kolbert, while mentioning corn, failed to note the factor that is turning a weather-related problem into a global food crisis, a factor that is very much related to taking action on climate change: cornbased ethanol. What is greatly exacerbating the impact of the heat wave on food prices is Washington’s biofuel mandate, under which 40% of the corn crop winds up being turned into ethanol under a program of forced consumption. The policy — like every climate policy hatched to date — while claiming to help the poor of the future, has been captured by special interests, and is hurting poor people right now.

Biofuels policy in the U.S. — which was in fact installed in a big way under president George W. Bush — is also linked to “energy security.” When U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was recently trying to defend the biofuels policy, the words “climate change” didn’t crop up. Instead he peddled the nose-stretching claim that gasoline might be up to US$1.30 a gallon cheaper as a result of the policy. And look at all the jobs created (if, that is, you used single-entry bookkeeping, which ignores the costs).

Canada, too, retains a biofuels policy that is even less defensible, because of the lack of any security rationale. The inevitably boondogglish nature of the policy, which also forces ethanol into gasoline, has recently made the news because of a proposed new ethanol facility in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s Oshawa riding. NDP transport critic Olivia Chow has complained that the project was approved by a harbour commission stacked with Mr. Flaherty’s political cronies. Certainly, if ethanol is designed to win the farm vote (which it is), the plot seems to be a bit lost in Oshawa, where votes may well be lost because of stout local opposition to the plant. Still, the Canadian policy is not causing the major global disruptions to which U.S. policy has already contributed. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of corn, soybeans and wheat, thus the impact of the drought on food prices has been greatly exacerbated by the biofuels mandate. When even the UN and environmental NGOs have jumped off the ethanol bandwagon, the fact that biofuel mandates refuse to die suggests how nakedly this is about electoral politics.

The policy — like every climate policy hatched to date — while claiming to help the poor of the future, has been captured by special interestsThe UN has recently been joined in its demands that Washington dump its biofuel policies by major food manufacturers. The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food giants Kraft and Kellogg, is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to reduce the biofuel requirement. Ken Powell, the chief executive of General Mills, has also spoken out against the policy, as has Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food producer.

Predictably, the protests have been met with diversionary bafflegab from Beltway ethanol lobbyists, in particular Matt Hartwig of the Renewable Fuels Association. He said that a waiver of the mandate “will not make it rain.” But this unwittingly draws attention to the fact that the biofuels mandate was indeed part of a policy whose rationale and effectiveness were all too similar to those of a rain dance, but way more costly. It has particularly hit the poorest, who spend much more of their income on food, and rarely, if ever, get presents from Santa.

 

[a_majoor]

From the WSJ, new ways to boost the production of the oil sands. If the price can be brought down below @ $65/bbl, then the oil sands can remain competative against conventional drilling, fracking and shale oil (and we should be getting a break at the pumps):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443570904577544860568722418.html

The Hunt to Unlock Oil Sands In Canada, Radiowaves and Heating Coils Are Among Efforts Used to Extract Sticky Petroleum From Rock
Article By EDWARD WELSCH

ALBERTA, Canada—Ten years ago, new oil field technologies unlocked vast crude supplies from western Canada's oil-sands deposits, propelling America's northern neighbor to the top echelon of the world's petroleum repositories.

Oil companies in Canada are experimenting with technologies that could unlock even more reserves from what is some of the world's heaviest and stickiest petroleum. Edward Welsch reports on digits. Photo: Harris Corp.
Now oil companies here are experimenting with technologies that could unlock even more reserves from what is some of the world's heaviest and stickiest petroleum. The new technologies could also drive down the cost of producing oil in Canada.

One consortium aims to get oil flowing to the surface by sending radio waves from huge antennae pushed through wells deep underground—adopting technology first developed for the U.S. government to eavesdrop on underground bunkers.

Another company is working on inserting electrical heating coils into wells to melt the oil, while other firms are tinkering with petroleum-based solvents they hope to pump into wells to get more oil out.

All the experimentation is aimed at improving a standard method of oil-sands extraction: so-called steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAGD.

(That is pronounced "Sag-Dee" in industry parlance.) That technology is itself a recent breakthrough—essentially injecting superheated steam into wells to heat deposits of sticky bitumen, a form of petroleum, making it liquid enough to be pumped to the surface.

The technology was commercialized in Canada's northern Alberta province early last decade, and helped enable oil companies to tap deeper oil-sands reserves. For decades, most oil-sands development had more in common with strip mining than conventional oil drilling. Companies dig up a mix of bitumen and quartz sand and wash the sludge down with hot water to extract the bitumen.

SAGD quintupled the amount of bitumen that may be possible to recover in Canada, and helped lift Canada's overall recoverable oil reserves to No. 3 in the world, behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

But those reserves are only a 10th of the 1.7 trillion barrels of bitumen found in Canada. Alberta's Energy Resources Conservation Board estimates there are also more than 400 billion barrels of bitumen trapped in carbonate rock formations in Alberta, mostly in a large formation called the Grosmont that stretches across the center of the province.

"If we postulated that 25% of that can be recovered, Canada could move to No. 1" in world oil reserves, said Glen Schmidt, chief executive of privately owned Calgary energy-technology company Laricina Energy Ltd.

Laricina is one of several companies including Royal Dutch Shell RDSB.LN +0.21%PLC, Athabasca Oil Corp. ATH.T -0.38%and Husky Energy Inc. HSE.T +0.59%that are adapting SAGD technology to rock formations like the Grosmont and trying out new enhancements to cut the use of fresh water and energy, which will bring down the overall cost and greenhouse gas emissions of operations there. While SAGD doesn't gobble up as much surface area as conventional oil-sands mining, it still uses lots of energy and water. That makes it expensive and carries a big greenhouse-gas footprint.

Basic SAGD technology uses two horizontal wells drilled parallel to each other, one above the other. Natural gas is used to boil water into steam, which is injected underground into the top well. The steam heats and softens the bitumen, separating it from the sand, causing it to drip down to the bottom well, which sucks it back up.

Laricina is part of a consortium including large Canadian energy companies Suncor Energy Inc. SU +0.96%and Nexen Inc. NXY +0.27%that is testing replacing the steam with an antenna, developed by Melbourne, Fla., telecommunications-equipment manufacturer Harris Corp. HRS +0.28%After being fed down a well, the antenna blasts out heat, warming the bitumen.

Nexen announced Monday that Chinese international energy company Cnooc Ltd. plans to acquire it for $15.1 billion.

Mr. Schmidt said early tests show the technology could cut energy use by 40%. It also removes the high upfront costs of water treatment and steam generation facilities. That could cut the cost the cost of SAGD production, which is currently around $55 to $65 a barrel for most projects.

"If we eliminate steam, we eliminate potentially 60% of the cost of a facility, which is huge," he said. The technology could be ready as soon as 2019.

The antenna project got started back in 2008, when Harris was working on technology aimed at improving underground listening capabilities for the U.S. government.

As part of its research, Harris executives sought out oil field experts experienced in horizontal drilling techniques.

"We were trying to gain access to underground facilities, underground locations, so we had to bring in people who had specialties in horizontal drilling," Wes Covell, a Harris vice president, said. He declined to be more specific about what he said was a classified project.

Harris executives had an epiphany when the drilling experts mentioned the Canadian oil industry's problem of getting energy-efficient heat to travel down horizontal wells into the bitumen reservoirs deep underground.

Harris and other antenna designers try to reduce electromagnetic heat as much as possible to improve the efficiency of a radio antenna for communication. Harris "realized that we can take our antennae and instead of using them for communications, we can use them as a source of electromagnetic energy that generates heat," Mr. Covell said.

Athabasca Oil, another big Canadian oil producer, is testing a similar electric-heating technology to unlock bitumen from carbonate rock. The company inserts electric coils, made of the same material as heating elements on a stovetop, into wells. If tests are successful, Athabasca plans to start a commercial project for its technology by 2018.

Laricina and several other companies are also testing adding light hydrocarbon solvents to steam in SAGD wells to boost output. The solvent dilutes bitumen, making it easier to flow.

Cenovus Energy Inc. CVE +0.94%is working on a solvent project that could be rolled out commercially in 2017.

Jason Abbate, head of production engineering at one of Cenovus' projects, said solvent technology could increase oil production rates by up to 25% and cut the amount of steam and natural gas use by up to 30%. It could also improve the percentage of oil that producers can capture from bitumen deposits.

"If you can get 80% to 90% of that rather than the regular 70% with SAGD, there's a big economic benefit for us," Mr. Abbate said.

Write to Edward Welsch at edward.welsch@dowjones.com


Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443570904577544860568722418.html#ixzz23oAwYOHw

 

[GAP]

OPEC has Probably Deceived Us About the Size of its Oil Reserves
By Kurt Cobb | Mon, 10 September 2012
Article Link

Has OPEC misled us about the size of its oil reserves? The short answer is probably. The long answer is that currently, there is no way to know for sure.

The next question we should ask is: Does it matter? The answer is most definitely yes. OPEC, short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, currently claims that its 12 members hold 81.3% of the world's oil reserves. And, with few exceptions the world believes them. Trouble is these reserves "are not verified by independent auditors," according to a study (PDF) done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. OPEC reserves are simply self-reported by each country. Essentially, OPEC's members are asking us to take their word for it. But should we?

It ought to give us pause that the reserve numbers OPEC countries release are used in major reports produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA); the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), a consortium of 28 of the world's oil importing nations; oil giant BP which annually publishes the widely cited BP Statistical Review of World Energy; and myriad other organizations. Reports from the two agencies cited above and BP are frequently consulted by governments, industry, banks and investors around the world for policy formulation, long-term planning, and lending and investment decisions. Yet these groups seem blissfully unaware of the caveats surrounding the numbers in those reports and by extension surrounding more than 80 percent of the world's oil reserves.

Keep in mind as we go along that the sometimes astronomical numbers thrown around for world oil reserves by the uninformed or by those who intend to mislead us either have no basis in fact or actually refer to "resources." Resources are only an estimate of oil thought to be in the ground based on rather sketchy evidence. And, most of that oil will never be recoverable. Reserves, however, are what can be produced at today's prices from known fields using existing technology. It turns out that reserves are only a tiny fraction of so-called resources.

Now here's the caveat from the International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook 2010:

Definitions of reserves and resources, and the methodologies for estimating them, vary considerably around the world, leading to confusion and inconsistencies. In addition, there is often a lack of transparency in the way reserves are reported: many national oil companies in both OPEC and non-OPEC countries do not use external auditors of reserves and do not publish detailed results.

"National oil companies" refers to government-owned companies which typically control all oil development within a country.

The BP Statistical Review of World Energy for 2012 provides this explanatory note under a table listing oil reserves by country:

The estimates in this table have been compiled using a combination of primary official sources, third-party data from the OPEC Secretariat, World Oil, Oil & Gas Journal and an independent estimate of Russian and Chinese reserves based on information in the public domain. Canadian oil sands 'under active development' are an official estimate. Venezuelan Orinoco Belt reserves are based on the OPEC Secretariat and government announcements.

The key words are "OPEC Secretariat" which refers to the OPEC staff located in an office in Vienna. That office is where BP presumably gets its information about OPEC reserves. The EIA lists the OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin put out by--you guessed it--the OPEC Secretariat. Alas, the Annual Statistical Bulletin tells us under the heading "Questions on data" that "[a]lthough comments are welcome, OPEC regrets that it is unable to answer all enquiries concerning the data in the ASB." In other words, trust us. So, information about OPEC reserves comes either from the OPEC offices in Vienna or from member countries. Some analysts may adjust those figures based on the few shreds of evidence that are available outside of official government pronouncements. But, in reality, there are almost no hard facts when it comes to OPEC reserves.

Strangely, many of these countries say that a detailed audit of their fields by independent observers is out of the question because oil reserves are a state secret. And, yet those countries report their reserves to OPEC which publishes them for all to see. So, are oil reserves in many OPEC countries a state secret or not? Apparently, what's secret is the field-by-field data that would tell us whether the reserves claimed by these countries are actually there. Are there reasons to believe that if we saw this data it would contradict the official overall number provided by some countries? In a word, yes.

First, OPEC allocates production levels among its members. It does this to control the flow of oil to world markets and thus to manipulate the price. OPEC bases production quotas for its members in part on the size of each member's reserves. When this policy was first established in the 1980s, reported reserves for several OPEC members jumped between roughly 40 and 200 percent within one year--not always the same year--as each country jockeyed for a higher production quota.

Not every country participated in the free-for-all. But the countries with the largest exports participated with a vengeance. There was no drilling program in any of these countries that could have explained such jumps in reserves.
More on link

 

[cupper]

The case of Energy Independence vs Energy Security. It's one of the better discussions I've seen on the subject, and provides an excellent explanation of how boosting domestic production will not have as significant an effect on oil and gasoline prices as some think it will.

Energy Independence For U.S.? Try Energy Security

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/25/163573768/energy-independence-for-u-s-try-energy-security

Gone from this year's presidential campaign are most mentions of climate change, environmental pollution, or green jobs. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential nominee, prefers to call attention instead to the country's continuing dependence on foreign energy sources.

"I will set a national goal of North American energy independence by the year 2020," Romney declared in August.

The line is now a standard part of Romney's stump speech, and he repeated it in his first two debates with President Obama.

With that promise, Romney joins a long line of U.S. leaders who have preached the virtues of energy independence. Few, however, have explained precisely what this goal means.

A Global Market

In truth, it would be virtually impossible for any country to be totally independent where energy is concerned. Not only would it have to produce all its own oil; it would also have to be independent of the global economy.

Like sugar, wheat, gold and other commodities, oil is also bought and sold on a global market. All the oil produced in the world becomes part of the global oil supply; all the oil used comes out of that supply. The global oil price depends on the supply/demand relation, and the price is essentially the same for all countries.

Energy analyst Amy Jaffe likens players in the global oil market to swimmers in a swimming pool.

"If you're in the deep end or the shallow end and somebody takes water out of the pool, it affects both swimmers equally," Jaffe says. "[It's the] same thing if we start pouring water in. You're not pouring the water into just the deep end or just the shallow end."

With oil, all countries are affected when the total supply is down relative to demand; the price goes up. When the supply is boosted and there is plenty of oil for everyone, the global price goes down.

With respect to price, therefore, there is no such thing as energy independence. Even if the U.S. were producing as much oil as it was consuming, a halt in production by Iran or Saudi Arabia would still drive up the oil price in the U.S.

Energy Security

But there is another way to think about energy independence. If a country produces as much oil as it uses, it is less vulnerable to some foreign country shutting the tap. Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California, Davis, says this is the big reason governments want to reduce their dependence on foreign oil producers.

"If someone is going to cut off your supply, because they don't like your foreign policy or they want to keep you from attacking a country, this is a dangerous thing," Jaffe says.

But is "energy independence" the proper term to describe the national goal?

"I prefer the term 'energy security,' " says Roger Altman, who served as deputy Treasury secretary under President Clinton.

"What that means," Altman says, "is, 'Let's get to the point where the amount we import from rogue or potentially rogue nations who might be hostile to us is down to a point where, if suddenly that supply was interrupted or shut off, we go right on.' "

The U.S. learned the importance of "energy security" in 1973, when Arab countries imposed an oil boycott on the United States to protest its military support for Israel in its war against Egypt and Syria. Americans were soon waiting in long lines at gas stations.

In response to the Arab oil boycott, President Nixon set a new national goal in his 1974 State of the Union speech.

"At the end of this decade, in the year 1980," Nixon proposed, "the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes and to keep our transportation moving."

A Glimmer Of Hope

The fact that we are still talking about this goal nearly 40 years later shows how hard it is to achieve. But there is reason now to believe that energy security may finally be within reach. Energy production in the U.S. is booming, thanks in large part to new techniques for extracting oil and gas from hard-to-reach deposits.

According to the latest estimates from the U.S. government's Energy Information Administration, U.S. production of oil and other liquid petroleum products could soon overtake production from Saudi Arabia, the world's No. 1 oil producer. Oil imports, meanwhile, are declining.

U.S. energy demand remains high, however, and it is likely to be years before the United States has an energy supply entirely its own.

Even in that case, however, the U.S. could significantly boost its energy security, because new production throughout the Western Hemisphere would leave the country less vulnerable to a shutoff from the Middle East or elsewhere.

"It doesn't mean we would never import another barrel of oil outside the Western Hemisphere," says Altman, who is now the chairman of Evercore Partners, an investment banking firm. "What it means is that most of our oil imports would come from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and so forth, and whatever happened in the Middle East would have no severe downside for our economic stability."

This is progress. It's hard to imagine how a conflict with Brazil or Mexico, much less with Canada, could jeopardize the U.S. energy supply.

Increased energy security on the supply side, however, does not mean energy independence on the economic side. A smaller share of the oil we use in the U.S. comes from foreign sources today than was the case a decade ago. But an increase in the world oil price has left U.S. consumers paying more at the gas pump and reminded them of their continued dependence on market events beyond White House control.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting and humerous look at why solar energy is doomed as anything other than a niche energy source. The key here is surface area; since solar energy is converted at fairly low efficiencies using current or foreseeable technologies you need enourmous amounts of surface area to generate useful amounts of energy. Anyone who doubts that should look at a picture of the ISS; even with virtually uninterrupted sunlight the solar array is by far the largest part of the station. On Earth we have clouds, the Day/Night cycle and the atmosphere to diffuse sunlight, so the situation is much worse:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/17/

If cows could photosynthesize, how much less food would they need?

—Anonymous

In a way, they already do. A field of grass sits there all day soaking up energy from the sun and storing it chemically. A grazing animal can then come along and absorb weeks of accumulated energy in a matter of minutes.

A Jersey cow presents in the neighborhood of nearly two square meters of usable space to the sun if it stands right. (Cows would have to be trained to stand optimally, but we might not have too far to go; research suggests they already align themselves north-south <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/08/22/0803650105>.

Chlorophyll photosynthesis extracts 3%-6% of the total energy from sunlight. If we figure on any given day the cow gets the equivalent of about six hours of peak sunlight, it works out to less than two million joules of usable energy each day.

Is that a lot? Well, a 450-kilogram cow just wandering around in a field might eat about 10 kilograms of dry matter a day, extracting on the order of 50 million joules of metabolic energy. So photosynthesis could only make up about 4% of the required intake—saving only a few handfuls of grain.

If we could equip cows with solar panels, which can be several times more energy-efficient than photosynthesis, we could improve that number—but not by much.

The basic problem facing cows is the same one facing solar cars—they're too small. If you saw the world's cattle population in silhouette, they'd have an overall cross-sectional area of about two thousand square kilometers. This means that if they were migrating through the air over Rhode Island (biology is not my strong suit), they'd blot out the sun over barely half the state. They'd only catch enough sunlight to produce a daily average of about 40 gigawatts of power (two megayodas <http://what-if.xkcd.com/3/>).

By contrast, about 3% of the world's surface area is cultivated, which means that (given rough estimates of geographic distribution of farmland) our crops easily intercept over a thousand times more sunlight than our cattle—which is why grazing is a good strategy.

I'd like to conclude with this quote, which I found in the Cedara Agricultural Development Institute's Applied Ruminant Nutrition for Dairy Cows:

Cows on a typical dairy ration can produce 80 to 100 litres of saliva per day.

This has nothing to do with photosynthesis, but I wanted to share anyway.

A car covers an area of roughly 2m X 5m (more looking at the way some people park), so there is a bit more surface area available for solar panels, but not really that much more, and driving a car uses much more energy than a cow.

 

[kevincanada]

The only abundant source we have is nuclear for the future.  The problem is storage.  Prototype cars can be plugged into your garage now, which is good  they just don't get the mileage between recharges and take to long to recharge.  4 hours at 220volt and 20 hours at 110volt.  Perhaps if batteries could be charge at around 2000 volts, it maybe feasible, you could even take a  road trip as it would be mere minutes to recharge a battery.

Providing that doesn't fry the battery, then safety and infrastructure needs to be established,  With voltage being so high in order to charge a batter fast I wouldn't be surprised if it is illegal for non-electricians to work with it which creates new problems.  Plus household fuse panels cannot handle that many volts or can the wiring,  new panels and and high voltage lines would need to be installed to charge it fast.

Sadly this is the most practical method we have to date.

Of course there is other ways to power a car, you could even forgo the battery and do it like in the days of Nikola Tesla and beam it through the air from the hydro pole and have the battery as backup as if it is a Star Trek movie. (remote control anyone?)  again it boils down to safety and being practical.

In short, it can work.  Just how painful will the adjustment be to the new way of doing business is the question.

 

[a_majoor]

Quick history lesson here: Electric cars actually outnumbered all other types early in the last century (Steam has issues and early IC engines were dangerous and unreliable), but the sticking point was the electrical infrastructure simply could not be expanded at anywhere near the rate needed to support electric cars.

Flash forward to the 21rst century and lo and behold, the electrical infrastructure simply cannot handle a large number of electric cars. Kevin has pointed out some of the issues, since batteries are low energy density devices, it takes a lot of batteries to get any significant range from an electric car and the infrastructure to charge them would be difficult and expensive to install. Not only would houses have to be rewired to take high voltage chargers (and several houses wired to do so in the US have caught fire as a result), but the entire grid needs to be redone to provide reliable high voltage to the house. All that energy running through wires in your neighbourhood migh cause issues as well with things like wi-fi and radio signals, among other things.

As well, moving metal uses a great deal of energy, so the base load capabilities need to be boosted considerably (and we are not talking windmill farms). Somewhere upthread I remember posting an article which pointed out a solar panel capable of charging a car battery would need to be something like 3X the size of the typical suburban house roof. And this is for the one way trip to work...you can translate this to tthe number of coal or nuclear plants that would be needed to do this as a baseline (and then imagine the uproar the Greens and NlIMBY's would raise if you seriously proposed to build them).

For the immediate future, we will be seeing an increase in oil sands, and post 2016, tight oil, oil shale and fracked oil and petrolium liquids coming on the market produced here in North America.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This report, reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail, suggests that North America will be a net exporter of oil:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/energy-and-resources/north-america-to-be-net-exporter-of-oil-by-2030-iea-predicts/article5188639/

North America to be net exporter of oil by 2030, IEA predicts

SHAWN MCCARTHY
OTTAWA — The Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Nov. 12 2012

North America will become a net oil exporter by 2030, as booming unconventional production and tougher mileage standards for vehicles squeeze out offshore imports, the International Energy Agency forecast today.

The United States is expected to become the largest crude producer in the world by 2020, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia, due to soaring production in tight-oil fields like North Dakota’s Bakken and Texas’s Eagle Ford, the Paris-based energy agency said in its annual forecast of energy-market trends.

The U.S. will see its crude production peak at 11.1-million barrels per day by 2020, up from 8.1-million currently. But production will not be sustained, given the U.S. has only the world’s eleventh-largest pool of reserves. The reservoirs of light, tight crude are difficult to extract and require intensive drilling and vast amounts of water to maintain production.

But coupled with continued growth in the oil sands, North American will provide a supply bounty that was not anticipated just a few years ago. The IEA expects Canadian production to grow from 3.5-million barrels per day to 4.9-million in 2020, and 6.3-million in 2035, fuelled largely by growth in the oil sands.

“North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world, yet the potential also exists for a similarly transformative shift in global energy efficiency,” the agency’s executive director Maria van der Hoeven said in a release.

She said that improvements in energy efficiency are “just as important” as growth in supply in meeting the world’s energy needs at a reasonable costs adding that, by 2035, the world could achieve economically-viable energy savings equivalent to nearly a fifth of current demand.

In oil markets, the U.S. is expected to reduce its imports from 10-million barrels per day currently to about 4-million barrels per day within 10 years. With U.S. gains and growing supplies from Canada’s oil sands, North American is forecast to eliminate the need for imported oil by 2030, a trend that does not existing in other crude importing regions.

“This accelerates the switch in direction of international oil trade towards Asia, putting a focus on the security of the strategic routes that bring Middle East oil to Asian markets,” the IEA said.

Despite the improvement in North America’s energy security, the analysts warn there is “no immunity” from global forces in the oil and broader energy markets. Americans and Canadians will continue to be impacted by a rising world price for crude, which will climb to $125 (U.S.) a barrel (in 2011 dollars) by 2035. By that year, demand is expected to grow 99.7-million barrels per day, from 87.4-million last year, with China alone accounting for 50 per cent of the increase.

The U.S. won’t hold its pre-eminence in production for long. By the middle of the next decade, Saudi Arabia will reclaim its traditional position as the world’s largest producer, while Iraq is expected to climb to number two within 20 years.

The largest increases in production outside of the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries are expected to occur in Brazil, Canada, Kazakhstan and the United States.

So it may a short-lived stay "on top" but it is indicative of the fact that science generally negates Malthusian predictions.

 

[kevincanada]

I question that article,  USA hasn't been able to sustain itself in the terms of oil since probably the 1930's. She presently consumes 20million barrels per day, and only produces around a 3rd of that.  Even by the terms used in the article that math doesn't add up.

Canada on the other hand yeah, the pipe lines are being installed for exporting.  Most of it will likely go to the USA, and any extra from there gets exported.  I'm basing that on a national defense point of view.  With the constant fighting and trade routes being regularly threatened in the Mid East.  I would suspect it is in both countries interest to keep the oil mostly domestic (canada, usa, britian) the main/major allies and sell surplus only to non NATO countries.

 

[a_majoor]

Since oil is a fungable commodity, global events will impact on global prices (even if full bore fracking, shale oil extraction and oil sand production were to fully satisfy North American demand). Most people don't realize that the US presence in the Middle
East isn't to secure oil for US domestic production (much of the imported oil comes from Mexico, Canada and Venezuela), but to ensure that there is no interruption to important US clients like Japan, or trading partners like China (and to a lesser extent India). The war in Libya was mainly to secure British and French oil interests there and ensure the flow of oil to the Europeans.

Restrictions in oil production due to war, political events or natural disasters throttle supply, while demand remains fairly constant, hence the price of US gasoline and diesel will increase when Iran cannot sell oil to India due to the embargo. Russia also enjoys a huge surge in export earnings for oil and gas when alternate supplies are restricted, hence some apparently counterproductive Russian actions really serve to fill the Kremlin coffers.

WRT where we sell our oil, producers will go to wherever they can get the highest price at the lowest cost to them, hence the interest in pipelines running to Prince Rupert or to the East Coast, since the US Administration is making a political decision to restrict oil supply and close off market access.

 

[a_majoor]

Steam is an important industrial "fluid". Here is an interesting way to rapidly raise steam even in ice cold water without huge energy inputs. Being able to run a boiler with low inputs could be a big bonus in distributed energy sources, either off grid or to suppliment grid energy:

http://news.rice.edu/2012/11/19/rice-unveils-super-efficient-solar-energy-technology-2/

Rice unveils super-efficient solar-energy technology
Jade Boyd– November 19, 2012
Posted in: Current News

‘Solar steam’ so effective it can make steam from icy cold water
Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new “solar steam” method from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water.

Details of the solar steam method were published online today in ACS Nano. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency around 15 percent. However, the inventors of solar steam said they expect the first uses of the new technology will not be for electricity generation but rather for sanitation and water purification in developing countries.

Rice University graduate student Oara Neumann, left, and scientist Naomi Halas are co-authors of new research on a highly efficient method of turning sunlight into heat. They expect their technology to have an initial impact as an ultra-small-scale system to treat human waste in developing nations without sewer systems or electricity. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

“This is about a lot more than electricity,” said LANP Director Naomi Halas, the lead scientist on the project. “With this technology, we are beginning to think about solar thermal power in a completely different way.”

The efficiency of solar steam is due to the light-capturing nanoparticles that convert sunlight into heat. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. Halas said the solar steam’s overall energy efficiency can probably be increased as the technology is refined.

“We’re going from heating water on the macro scale to heating it at the nanoscale,” Halas said. “Our particles are very small — even smaller than a wavelength of light — which means they have an extremely small surface area to dissipate heat. This intense heating allows us to generate steam locally, right at the surface of the particle, and the idea of generating steam locally is really counterintuitive.”

To show just how counterintuitive, Rice graduate student Oara Neumann videotaped a solar steam demonstration in which a test tube of water containing light-activated nanoparticles was submerged into a bath of ice water. Using a lens to concentrate sunlight onto the near-freezing mixture in the tube, Neumann showed she could create steam from nearly frozen water.

Steam is one of the world’s most-used industrial fluids. About 90 percent of electricity is produced from steam, and steam is also used to sterilize medical waste and surgical instruments, to prepare food and to purify water.

The solar steam device developed at Rice University has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent, far surpassing that of photovoltaic solar panels. It may first be used in sanitation and water-purification applications in the developing world. Photo by Jeff Fitlow
Most industrial steam is produced in large boilers, and Halas said solar steam’s efficiency could allow steam to become economical on a much smaller scale.

People in developing countries will be among the first to see the benefits of solar steam. Rice engineering undergraduates have already created a solar steam-powered autoclave that’s capable of sterilizing medical and dental instruments at clinics that lack electricity. Halas also won a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create an ultra-small-scale system for treating human waste in areas without sewer systems or electricity.

“Solar steam is remarkable because of its efficiency,” said Neumann, the lead co-author on the paper. “It does not require acres of mirrors or solar panels. In fact, the footprint can be very small. For example, the light window in our demonstration autoclave was just a few square centimeters.”

Another potential use could be in powering hybrid air-conditioning and heating systems that run off of sunlight during the day and electricity at night. Halas, Neumann and colleagues have also conducted distillation experiments and found that solar steam is about two-and-a-half times more efficient than existing distillation columns.

Halas, the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of physics, professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of the world’s most-cited chemists. Her lab specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.

For the cancer treatment technology and many other applications, Halas’ team chooses particles that interact with just a few wavelengths of light. For the solar steam project, Halas and Neumann set out to design a particle that would interact with the widest possible spectrum of sunlight energy. Their new nanoparticles are activated by both visible sunlight and shorter wavelengths that humans cannot see.

“We’re not changing any of the laws of thermodynamics,” Halas said. “We’re just boiling water in a radically different way.”

Paper co-authors include Jared Day, graduate student; Alexander Urban, postdoctoral researcher; Surbhi Lal, research scientist and LANP executive director; and Peter Nordlander, professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering. The research was supported by the Welch Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I'm not sure that there is a typo, but it would seem that if the purpose was to harness solar energy the particles should be able to intercept visible light and longer wave lengths that humans cannot see. Much of the Sun's energy production comes as infrared light, which is why I think this is a typo.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I question that article,  USA hasn't been able to sustain itself in the terms of oil since probably the 1930's. She presently consumes 20million barrels per day, and only produces around a 3rd of that.  Even by the terms used in the article that math doesn't add up.

Canada on the other hand yeah, the pipe lines are being installed for exporting.  Most of it will likely go to the USA, and any extra from there gets exported.  I'm basing that on a national defense point of view.  With the constant fighting and trade routes being regularly threatened in the Mid East.  I would suspect it is in both countries interest to keep the oil mostly domestic (canada, usa, britian) the main/major allies and sell surplus only to non NATO countries.

Here is the IEA report, it seems to add up for most people.

 

[cupper]

I question that article,  USA hasn't been able to sustain itself in the terms of oil since probably the 1930's. She presently consumes 20million barrels per day, and only produces around a 3rd of that.  Even by the terms used in the article that math doesn't add up.

Canada on the other hand yeah, the pipe lines are being installed for exporting.  Most of it will likely go to the USA, and any extra from there gets exported.  I'm basing that on a national defense point of view.  With the constant fighting and trade routes being regularly threatened in the Mid East.  I would suspect it is in both countries interest to keep the oil mostly domestic (canada, usa, britian) the main/major allies and sell surplus only to non NATO countries.

You need to review the data from the US Energy Information Administration. They have detailed breakdowns of consumption, import /export volumes, and more.

They current data on imports shows that the US is currently importing 10 to 11 million barrel equivalents of petroleum products per day, while consuming 19 to 20 million. Add to that they are exporting just under 3 million. The data includes all petroleum products both crude oil and refined products.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_wkly_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_w.htm

http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/

http://www.eia.gov/

It is also interesting to note that the US is currently a net exporter of petroleum products and has been over the past year or so. Partly due to the decreased domestic demand as a result of the economic conditions, the milder than normal winter of 2011 / 2012, and policies leaning towards reduced oil consumption (higher fuel efficiencies in automobiles, investment in alternate energy sources, drop in natural gas prices).

 

[kevincanada]

Oh they been mass producing the shale reserves.  I had no idea they started moving on that.  I recall it being problematic a few years back.  It makes sense that the USA can increase their production levels now.  That's cool.

 

[a_majoor]

While rebuilding everyone's houses might be a bit problematic, these sorts of principles could be incorporated into public buildings, offices and so on reasonably quickly, and into new home construction as well:

http://www.ryerson.ca/news/media/General_Public/20121203_rn_richman.html

RYERSON UNIVERSITY RESEARCH EXPLORES FEASIBILITY OF “HOUSE WITHIN A HOUSE” DESIGN
New findings suggest that changes to home construction design could result in 80% energy savings
December 03, 2012

Ryerson professor Russell Richman (left) with his research partners Ekaterina Tzekova and Kim Pressnail, in front of the Toronto home that will be retrofitted with their nested thermal envelope design this winter.

As temperatures fall this winter, heating costs will inevitably rise. In response, Canadians will pull out their slippers, light the hearth and vigilantly monitor their thermostats, but what more can be done? According to collaborative research led by Ryerson University, a simple change in the way we live in our homes, and the introduction of a heat pump, could save up to 80% on energy consumption.

Russell Richman, a professor in the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University, is the co-principal investigator of an on-going research project that explores the practicality of Nested Thermal Envelope Design, a home construction design that employs zonal heating.  Space heating is the largest single contributor to residential energy use in Canada at 60% of the total. Minimizing envelope heat losses is one approach to reducing this percentage. Thanks to a construction research grant including $200,000 and $100,000 cash contributions from the Ontario Power Authority's Technology and Development Fund and the University of Toronto, the nested thermal envelope design will soon be implemented in a home in downtown Toronto.

“In the winter, you could get savings by living in a smaller space, period,” says Richman. “But you can’t just heat one room, because there is no insulation between one room and the outside or other rooms. To do it really well, you need to insulate the room and then insulate the whole house. As we explain it, zonal heating is just a house within a house, or a box within a box.”

The nested thermal envelope design has two key components.  First, the home must be divided into two different zones; the perimeter and the core. The core is the home’s main living area, for example, the kitchen, the living room and bedrooms. The perimeter is those less often used rooms, such as a formal dining room, sunrooms and secondary bathrooms. Secondly, the home must have a small heating unit that cycles heat from the perimeter into the core during the winter season. The heat pump funnels heat lost to the perimeter back into the core of the home, before it escapes the perimeter and is lost to the exterior of the home.

To take full advantage of the design, the home’s core must be set at a reasonable temperature, for example 21 degrees, while the perimeter stays at 5 degrees. It is important to note that living in the core of the home is only necessary during the colder months, when the desire to save money on heating costs is at its height and when the disparity between indoor and outdoor temperatures is greatest.

This nested thermal envelope design was originally conceived by Richman and his colleague, University of Toronto professor Kim Pressnail, following a discussion between the pair on the heat loss they were experiencing in their own homes. After considering the practicality of simply living in fewer rooms, the researchers experimented with the practice of living in a smaller space while also recycling heat from within their homes. Along with Ph.D. candidate Ekaterina Tzekova, also from the University of Toronto, the team has been evaluating variations on nested thermal envelope designs since 2007.

After drafting the original design, the research team tested it using a building energy simulation program, called EnergyPlus.  Calculations revealed up to 80% in energy savings.

This winter, the researchers are moving into the next stage of the project. The nested thermal envelope design will be implemented into a home in downtown Toronto.  The team will elect test subjects to live in the home, beginning with a student and, later on, the home will become a residence for visiting professors. The research team will track behaviour patterns and get feedback from the occupants themselves.

“The question is, is it worth the additional effort of installing a heat pump? The pump needs to be servicing a lot of energy in order to validate this design,” says Richman.  “There are so many research questions to be answered with the house. It’s always exciting to take theoretical research and turn it into practice.”

Richman and his colleagues hope to collect data from the home and its inhabitants over the next five years, after which time they will continue their research with a custom built home.

The group’s preliminary findings were published in the November 2012 issue of Energy and Buildings.

Ryerson University is Canada's leader in innovative, career-oriented education and a university clearly on the move. With a mission to serve societal need, and a long-standing commitment to engaging its community, Ryerson offers more than 100 undergraduate and graduate programs. Distinctly urban, culturally diverse and inclusive, the university is home to more than 28,000 students, including 2,300 master's and PhD students, nearly 2,700 faculty and staff, and 140,000 alumni worldwide. Research at Ryerson is on a trajectory of success and growth: externally funded research has doubled in the past five years. The G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education is Canada's leading provider of university-based adult education. For more information, visit www.ryerson.ca.

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