Commenters bemoaning US running out of resources sooner or ruining the environment by increasing usage should note that US oil demand has essentially peaked[1] and will likely drop in the coming years due to a variety of factors including demographics and the increasing viability of alternative energy sources (solar power + Tesla et. al.) In this context, the US gas/oil energy boom is a wonderful thing, a last hurrah of cheap energy to supply the economy before the alternatives are finally ready to compete. Furthermore, it's not even bad for the environment in the short term; thanks largely to the natural gas boom replacing the even dirtier coal, US CO2 emissions are at their lowest in 20 years[2] I admit I'm probably a little too optimistic (Edit: fracking may be less than "wonderful"), but even correcting for my bias I strongly suspect it's not nearly as bad as many seem to think.
There's some uncertainty about whether shale-gas is actually better than coal, due to the substantial (but poorly measured) "fugitive gas" losses direct to the atmosphere in gas recovery. This paper estimates that replacing coal with shale-gas leads to about 20% worse greenhouse-gas impact: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/greeninc/Howarth20...
This paper is actually the start of a very interesting academic brawl. I've reviewed that paper by Howarth and found it lacking in many ways. Howarth is included in a trio of academics from Cornell University that have become popular in the media for denouncing the increasing use of natural gas, and even suggest that coal is cleaner on a short time scale. Since this initial paper was published there has been a flurry of responses from another academic at Cornell, named Lawrence Cathles. Cathles is also the only geologist in the group, Howarth is a prof of ecology and Ingraffea is a structural engineer. This article sums up the history between Cathles and Howarth. [2]
So far Cathles has written at this point two or three papers in response to Howarth's original paper, and one of the later ones is a bit of a scientific smackdown.[1] It concludes that the estimates of fugitive gas emissions are very high and other assumptions are made that badly shift the conclusions against natural gas. The response papers by Cathles are very fun to read and I think they provide a great introduction to the current climate science on natural gas.
From a public health perspective, unless fracking can be tied to water table contamination in a systemic way (as opposed to in the occasional accidental way) its going to be head and shoulders above Coal, both in the extraction, the processing, and the burning categories.
That "shrinking industrial sector" without a shrinking consumption probably means that other countries, in particular China, burn oil/gas/nuclear to produce stuff for the USA.
A honest "are the US using less oil" evaluation should include that energy, just like ecological footprint calculations include imports of materials.
What's more likely? That we'll convince people to cut their energy consumption in half, or convince people to purchase higher efficiency equipment and slowly move over to cleaner forms of energy as they become available? What's needed in the climate debate is a healthy dose of pragmatism.
What do you do when "pragmatism" doesn't produce the results you need?
Maybe convincing people to cut their energy consumption in half isn't in the cards. At the same time, maybe that is what is needed. The universe doesn't have to cooperate to give us pragmatic solutions.
If the "impossible" solution is required, and the "pragmatic" solution isn't sufficient... why should climate scientists advocate for the latter over the former?
Why wouldn't pragmatism produce the results needed? Moving over to Nuclear Power would, without a doubt, solve the climate crisis. Granted, it would introduce other challenges, but we're talking about the lesser of two evils here.
Well, for one thing, the "impossible" comes with large error bars and thus is difficult to trust, even those trained in the sciences (or, perhaps, ESPECIALLY for those trained in the sciences). At least the pragmatic buys time, if nothing else.
I have a minority view: Climate change is now in a positive feedback loop (thawing tundra, forests burning, ocean acidification) and ceasing human activity won't stop it.
I believe we need to proactively remove atmospheric CO2. Retool our economy and industrial might for that job.
To do that, we need a strong economy.
I'm not saying more, cheaper fossil fuels is a good thing. I just think we should play the cards we're dealt (to ourselves).
I have often wondered if the CO2 is really the most dangerous ecological experiment we are applying to this planet at this point in history. It is, after all, a plant nutrient that eventually goes away over time. 3.5 billion years ago this planet was covered with methane and O2 was a trace poison to most existing life, until plant forms devoured the carbon and farted out O2 we all love. We are doing many kinds of "terraforming" on a planet wide scale, and CO2 is but one example.
But to effectively retool our economy requires a non-CO2 source of abundant power. I am not sure that nuclear as we know it now would fit the bill, because of the various construction and infrastructure costs. Using less is probably more practical then re-inventing nuclear power (iteratively improving nuclear power would still have value).
I wouldn't say that oil demand has peaked from looking at that graph. I'd say it took a big hit right around the time of the 2008 financial crash and is recovering along with the rest of the economy, or perhaps lagging somewhat.
There's definitely a hit from the financial crash, but there's also been no increase since that drop for four straight years, during which the economy has presumably been recovering, albeit slowly; I suspect the decrease in retiring Boomers driving, decrease in new teenagers driving, increase in fuel efficiency, increase in non-driving entertainment like social networks, etc are all outweighing the hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created since then. The huge growth in electric vehicles in the last 2-3 years[1] is probably to small to have an impact on that graph now, but give it a few more...
Sorry, but as much as I want them to succeed too, the "alternative" energies just do not have the capacity to replace the "traditional" fuels. The problem with America is that we have a problem with glut and self-destructive greed, which is why all of our "green" efforts are nothing but window-dressing, facade, and self-delusion while be destroy and consume our way into disaster. There is never any real sacrifice or pain (which comes from withdrawing from pernicious and bad things that feel so good in the short term), especially in things that would actually make a difference.
Sorry, I am not into sacrifice and pain. Please continue developing energy technologies so that I can live in a house with lights and running water, and have a car that can get me and my family around.
It would be nice if there were at least more options for people who actually want to forgo some energy usage to do so. Back when I lived in the U.S., I had to have a car and drive everywhere, because everything was laid out in such a car-oriented manner, and the transit was so bad. I didn't find it enjoyable or convenient, more of a kind of pain. I would've happily taken some of my energy consumption off the road, if there had been a decent alternative, but it was expected that I would burn this gas daily whether I wanted to or not, if I wanted a job anyway.
Yes, that's kind of how it is here. Unless you live in the handful of cities that have really stellar public transportation, you are a hardcore motorist.
may I ask whom you think is taking the lead in this area? Surely some country must meet this criteria?
What kind of sacrifice or pain? What steps have you done that constitute sacrifice and pain as part of your contribution? Yeah, being trite here, but I rarely find those professing a need for others to give up rarely do so themselves, they have endless levels of justification, usually starting with how smart they are.
Not using a car (not even having one, if it matters), conserving, recycling, buying new stuff minding that it'll eventually end up in the landfill. That kind of thing.
If you live on a farm or in the mountains, it's hard to go without a car. But living in a modern city in a first world country, there's rarely an excuse.
EDIT: also, consider stopping eating so much meat, because it's not sustainable either.
So the US produces 11 mbpd (million barrels per day) of liquids (oil, gas2liquids, ethanol, biodiesel). However it consumes about 19 mpbd [0]. Unfortunately this is just a bleep because more expensive prices have made fracking (a 30 - 20 year old technology) economical, but the typical decline rates of these fields are extremely high (produces loads the first year, dies out very very quickly thereafter) [1]. In the longer view (5 - 10 yrs) it's a bump in a long,unstoppable and ever more expensive decline [2].
No, it's about the economy. Any alternative energy is going to have to be a drop-in replacement for current energy sources or it will be a complete non-starter (without heavy subsidies). Maybe we should consider finding this drop-in replacement our next moonshot? Or just embrace nuclear power and be done with it.
If things are that bad, big movements on water and energy markets will influence each other (because you can use energy to purify or desalinate water).
I don't think this is something that can be won, really, other than in a politics and power influence sense. Not to take analogies to where they oversimplify things, but this is similar to M.A.D.; we share the damage we do, locally, then globally. For us, the shortcut to energy production is in the industry already in place (with its centuries-old history and political power). Until that shifts, we'll keep going the same direction and worry about long term when we have to.
Solar energy production is still in its infancy when you compare it to fossil fuels production, in China or anywhere else. I suspect the high output of actual solar panels are more (or just as much) a symptom of market than environmental concerns.
I wonder what prevents the use of "salt water" for fracking? We have an abundant supply of that resource; maybe prevents the oceans from rising too! (I am joking)
Based on a quick read of [1], it seems that using saline water is more expensive because of the preparation that is needed, so for now, it is easier to start with fresh water and add additives.
Also seems the consideration is about saline aquifers and not ocean water. I suspect the cost of transporting ocean water is the issue leading to this consideration.
If we want to limit climate change to +2°C, we must leave 80% of hydrocarbons into the ground. This option is not showing in the prices of energy companies. It's just not going to happen.
The good news is that so far climate models have all been dramatically wrong in their predictions of global mean temperature, and that all of them have erred on the high side. It's striking how little knowledge climate activists have of relevant evidence.
It will be bloody and violent and probably the single largest amount of human suffering from a single event in the short history of our civilization.
While it is an oversimplified game, Fate of the World can help show how increasing temperatures puts more energy into global systems resulting in intense storms, droughts, flooding, wildfires, famines, etc, and how that destabilizes regions leading to less effective ability to implement anti-warming policy.
On the bright side, forecasters that rely on computer models of massive systems often end up making horribly inaccurate predictions. For example, we usually get tomorrow's weather wrong.
But it costs more to produce here. Most oil wells in Texas for example are now fairly low volume and require a lot of expense to pump. The Saudi wells are so high volume they spend almost nothing to get the oil out. Also the Saudis generally control the output to keep the price high. If they wanted to they could flood the world with oil.
Gas is a different story but currently the price is pretty low compared to oil.
The Saudi wells are so high volume they spend almost nothing to get the oil out. Also the Saudis generally control the output to keep the price high. If they wanted to they could flood the world with oil.
This has long been the comforting conventional wisdom, but there have been contrarians. One wrote a book-length argument:
The argument is more-or-less that the Saudis have in fact been struggling just to keep output more-or-less flat. Their ability to open the taps to control prices is a thing of the past. They've made massive capital investments in the field operations, yet despite very high prices and an opportunity to make staggering profits, their output has only changed modestly and has never hit the peaks they've promised in the past (12 million bbl/day, I believe was what they claimed they could do; 7-8 million bbl/day is about all they've ever done lately).
Great. So now the US'll just run out relatively sooner than they would have done compared with those guys. WTG short-term thinking with finite resources.
Humans are idiots.
The problem isn't running out of oil. The problem is increased production incentivizing increased usage which drives us over the edge of an irreversible climate catastrofuck.
All the oil is getting extracted out of the ground and (at utilization time) getting pumped into the air. It's the exact opposite of what we need to be doing now.
Agreed. slower use f these things and encouraging alternative energies earlier (while understanding population control) would have kept this less of a clusterfkc. However, humans != long-term political planning.
A hundred years is an eternity in terms of current technological advancement. We only learned the universe is accelerating its expansion in 1997. Think about that next time you think a 100 year supply is tiny.
It does not work that way. The finite Easy Oil is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The price point just trends upwards after the relatively easy material is successfully mined/drilled -- there is plenty more, it is just harder and harder to get to.
There is a small amount of oil that can be pumped at less than $10 per barrel. There is a moderate amount of oil that can be pumped at $20 per barrel, and that will disappear in the foreseeable future. At $50 per barrel, there is a lot of fossil fuel material. At $100 per barrel, there is vastly more. At $200 per barrel, we do not know because no one will care until the 23rd century, but the problem will probably be the environmental damage, not the availability.
Even in five years their will be amazing technological advances, but the question was 100 years. Goal post moving aside, I would be highly surprised if in 100 years energy is not mostly a solved problem. But doom is more dramatic and sells more advertising.
Optimism is great, but we need to plan for the worst, too. The environmental costs for fracking could be unbelievably bad.
Fresh water's one of those resources that's going to become dangerously scarce if we don't manage it properly, and fracking, like oil sands, uses staggeringly large amounts of it. Maybe there's 100 years worth of gas down there, but can we pump water loaded with who knows what chemicals (proprietary mixture, of course) down there for a hundred years to get it out?
Plus, what's a 100 year supply at today's consumption rate could quickly become a 50 year supply if consumption doubles, or 25 years if consumption quadruples. Why would consumption jump so much? What if cars started running on liquified natural gas instead of gasoline? What if power plants switched from nuclear to gas? What if the population grows another 20-30% in the next 25 years?
It's never actually a 100 year supply. Exponential growth will shrink it faster than you think.
This should really be "US now produces more oil and gas than Russia OR Saudi Arabia" as the US does not produce more than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.
Can we end oil subsidies yet? Or have the oil companies not made enough trillions of dollars in profit since they started receiving subsidies a century ago?
I'm all for subsidies to accelerate an emerging market or technology, especially if it's "the future", but for 5-10 years at most, until it becomes mature enough to handle itself. Subsidizing highly profitable companies for a century is beyond stupid, because it also means those companies can be a lot more wasteful, knowing the taxpayers will cover the difference.
I'd ask for an end to Middle East oil-wars, too, but that seems even less likely to happen, so I'll happily take the ending of subsidies for now.
Oil subsidies are the only reason the US is an energy production leader, not unlike how corn subsidies are the only reason corn-based ethanol is competitive.
Ending subsidies cannot be done -- it needs to be accomplished as a side-effect of ending political interference. The oil lobby and corn lobby are very powerful.
what's the point of being a production leader? Shouldn't it be left to the free market? The Oil bias is in a sense, hampering innovation in efficiency in oil-consuming machines, notwithstanding effects on other energy sources.
Remember, the great efficiency drive in automobiles started after the Middle East Oil crisis in 1979, if I'm not wrong...
Thank you for making this point. The economically literate see "price controls" and think "oh no, that is inefficient wrt price! This has been proven." But the point of price control isn't prices, it's control.
I'm wondering if this was a strategy on the part of Nixon, Ford & Carter -- make US oil more expensive so that we leave it in the ground and use everyone else's oil, and when that's gone we still have our reserves to draw on.
Are you sure the majority of it would be for export?
A big driver of exports is simply the fact that lots of places don't have refinery capacity. People in such places are willing to pay more than people in the U.S., with its relative abundance of refineries.
The rest of the 'not consuming our own content' is just a logistics thing, the cheapest oil is generally used, not the oil that crosses the least borders.
>>>> A big driver of exports is simply the fact that lots of places don't have refinery capacity.
I've been harping on this for years. You can produce billions of gallons of oil, but if you can't refine it, it's a loss leader and a big reason why our gas continues to hover around $4.
If we owned the whole cycle from drilling, production, refinement and consumption, it would be huge. Cutting out the refining middle man would save us billions and dramatically reduce the price per gallon. It's just simple supply and demand.
The last refinery was built in 2008. Before that, in 1998. The majority of refineries were built in the 1970's - go figure, when oil was suddenly abundant and post OPEC embargo, very, very cheap.
For instance, Iran, one of the largest oil producing countries in the world, has to import refined gasoline, diesel, &c., because they lack refinery capacity. This in turn leads to enormous expenditures on subsidies to keep consumers and businesses running. One of the drivers for their nuclear program (setting aside the geopolitics of the bomb) is to reduce the cost of domestic energy production.
The U.S. consumes 8 or 9 million barrels of gasoline per day and imports a net of about 300,000 a day. So there is quite some domestic refinery production there.
Also, what's cheaper than using a currency which you have control over (read: ability to inflate; if one is in the camp that the conglomerate of national/international banks that own shares in the Federal Reserve act in unitarity with the USG) compared to most other countries, to import natural resources? One could call it free (if one doesn't factor the human beings on the other side of the equation...) Sure it can't last forever... but individuals don't last forever either.
Because the US consumes even more? The US is by far the biggest consumer. Saudi Arabia and Russia have quite small populations too, but the US is just very energy intensive.
[1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WR... [2] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012...