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First time poster so i'm not very well versed in the formalities here just to let you guys know.
Will try to be as direct as possible.
Main statement, Im of the coviction that modern civilization is doomed to collapse. Because of energy constaints, namely the energy return on investment (EROI) of: peak oil and renewable energies. Further more the energy density of oil alternatives is not dense enough to accomodate the modern standard of living.
Here a couple pieces of information that support my viewpoint: Number 1: "EROI of different fuels and the implications for society (2014)" research paper by Charles A.S Hall and others. Number 2: The article "renewables-ko-by-eroi" on the website energytransition.org. Number 3: "Energy, EROI and quality of life (2014)" by Jessica G. Lambert and others.
A couple of assumtions i made are that high EROI is needed for modern living. In case of big EROI losses there will be a massive increase in civil unrest. There is enough coal in the ground to supply our energy needs. However this is not very applicable in cars nor is it good for the envirmoment, which in turn will cause civilisation collape in the longhaul.
Some previous discussion points:
Nuclear, Nuclear is very good on the small scale. However there is not enough uranium to support longterm global reliance on nuclear energy. If the entire world would switch to nuclear energy today, the known uranium supply will be depleted within 5 years. See the article: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy need" on phys.org.
New Oil, while we are still finding new oil deposits, the discovery rate of the new oil depositst follows a downward trend. (the line has the same figure like a normal-distribution) Some pieces that support this statement, See 1: The USGS forecast. See 2: "Ecology in Times of Scarcity" by John W Day and others. See 3: the article "The Growing gap" on planetforlive.com. Also the new discoveries are very often in locations that are diffuclt to access. Think of very deep sea or antartica, et cetera. This ensures the Energy cost getting this oil will be high, so it is coupled with a high EROI.
It would be very nice to hear some counter viewpoints! Because looking at the future and seeking a bleak one is not nice.
If i forgot anything please let me know!
All the best,
William
I used to hold more or less the same position as you and am probably still much closer than the median user here, so hopefully I can provide some helpful insight. As far as fossil fuel supplies go, the EROI argument holds in the long run, but the supplies of unconventional oil are quite large and have only been exploited on a large scale in North America as far as I know. This means that absent some other energy revolution, American shale oil and gas production may collapse in the near future, but that would only make us dependent on supplies from places like Australia, again postponing collapse. Other petroleum-derived chemicals can be produced biologically through genetically-modified bacteria and yeast. This is not currently economically viable, but it will be if prices rise high enough and is sustainable in the long-term, particularly if we use things like food waste and sewage as the raw material.
There is a possible solution to both the intermittent nature of wind and solar power and some of the concerns over the implementation of nuclear power, and that is molten salt batteries. The basic idea is that you have a tank that you heat up when you have spare power and can run a steam turbine with when you don't (salt stays liquid under a much higher range of temperatures than water, which is one reason it was selected). What does nuclear have to do with this? Well, if your molten salt battery needs a boost, why not spike in some enriched uranium-derived salts? Even better, a liquid expands as it heats up, so rather than melting down like a solid fuel rod, your salt will naturally move the uranium apart as it reacts, killing the process before things get too hot. As far as supplies of uranium and other radioactive isotopes go, we can use breeder and thorium reactors to extend the timeline until we either find a better power source or start digging it out of the moon and asteroids.
Will any of these solutions be implemented? I have no idea. I still believe in some modified form of John Michael Greer's Long Descent, but I think that sociological factors are as much to blame as physical ones, that there will be no apocalyptic collapse (the Romans didn't go to sleep one night in Augustus's city of marble and wake up in the Dark Ages the next morning; many hardly noticed the change as it happened), and that such a decline will only pave the way for future civilizations to emerge, whatever be their form. Hell, even if the worst-case climate change scenario occurs, all of our descendants living at the poles will be standing on a completely unexploited bounty of natural resources, minerals, and fossil fuels that no one has touched because they are currently under miles of ice, and will be able to start again from there.
Lastly, I think there's something more to this topic besides the engineering aspects that is worth engaging with, and that's the question of whether technological progress and human flourishing are at all aligned. Western culture and its linear concept of progress over time is an anomaly in human history, and as far as I'm concerned the jury is still out on whether the whole experiment was a good idea. Most of us here I presume having been raised in this particular worldview, and perhaps an even more extreme version of it in the Rationalist sphere, even contemplating the idea that we might never get to colonize space or achieve immortality is a punch to the gut (or amputation of destiny, if you will). Talk to someone who grew up in basically any other culture about these issues though (to get someone truly non-westernized, they will probably have to be both elderly and illiterate), and they just shrug and get on with their lives, even in the face of societal collapse. The wheel of time spins on and the universe doesn't owe us anything. Time will tell who has the healthier attitude.
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I will try find a source for this later on, I know it’s from the International energy Association.
In any case, the number of years left is always calculated from proven oilfields (already drilled) or from oilfields that have a 90% chance of being productive. That’s where they get the 40 years.
However 30 years ago I was told that there was 30 years left. So what happened? What happened was this - there’s a second column of known oil reserves, which are either not economically viable right now, or have less than 90% chance of being productive. These are not included in the number of years of production left because they are not certain.
Of course the chances are still pretty good and when technology changes the potential output in second column moves to the first column. There are 200 years of reserves left in this column relative to present demand.
There’s also a third column which is for reserves are not economically or technically viable right now. There’s a few hundred years of reserves there, relative to present demand.
It won’t be needed.
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Conventional reactors are garbage compared to breeder reactors. Breeders increase efficiency about 50x over conventional light water reactors, getting U-238 and turning it into plutonium that can be burnt for more power. The technology is very simple, it was developed in the 1960s but abandoned since uranium was cheap and common. U-238 is around 50 times more common than U-235. There's also thorium. 'Economically justified' is another issue, uranium is pretty cheap right now since fuel only makes up 10% or so of nuclear energy costs. We could raise the cost of uranium x5 and be fine. We could also develop seawater extraction or explore for more uranium. There's little incentive to develop these technologies or explore since uranium is so cheap.
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The others have covered most points. But here's a few more:
Modern civilization doesn't need to sustain the current status-quo eternally. Nuclear Fusion has been 5 years away for a good century, but it is reasonable to expect it to get there within the next century. Nuclear fusion is infinite energy. So, we only need to survive for 100 years. Piece of cake.
The young are increasingly anti-car, and many cities are slowly but surely, moving away from the 60s-highway-maximalist approach to living. The nature of capitalistic lobbying and collective delusion might make it difficult to uproot cars from our lives. But, it is NOT civilization ending. Car "free" cities ARE a future that is qualitatively better than what we currently have in North-America.
If the scare quotes are intentional, then it is worth pointing out that low-car-use cities are the present, not the future. Above a metro area population of about a million, the city where most people don't drive most of the time is the default in Continental Europe and first-world Asia.
I have been to Seoul and I do not believe it is a "low-car-use" city. If you think it is I think your measuring stick is broken.
Wikipedia gives a 23% modal share for car commuting in Seoul. That is precisely what I mean by "low car use"
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Not scare quotes at all. I meant to point towards exactly what you pointed out in your comment. That car-free cities are only nominally car-free. Car-free just means low-car, which is both an achievable and desirable future.
Wish I would've thought of this one first :\
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That's what they told me last century. It might just be that practical nuclear fusion isn't possible on a small enough scale to be useful. (that is, you need something as big as a star to make it useful)
Nuclear fusion hasn't been 5 years away for a good century. The traditional wording of the joke is "nuclear fusion is 20 (sometimes 30) years away and always will be". It was indeed the case that the engineers' timetable for useful fusion power coming out of the big government-funded fusion projects was 20-30 years from 1952 (when the first H-bomb was tested) to 2014-5 (when Tokamak and Helion tested their first prototypes).
As of today, there are three private-sector fusion startups (Tokamak, Helion and Commonwealth) with SMART plans to build a useful fusion power plant within 10 years. This is different, and exciting.
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The outside view is sufficient to dispose of this line of thought. Those arguments have been made since the dawn of man. Your predecessors were all wrong, so why would you be right? What’s changed? A theory that fails at predicting the past cannot pretend to predict the future.
EROI has been dropping for a long time, the energy sources are always further away and require more capital, yet gdp per capita has grown steadily. How do you now go from EROI dropping to collapse?
That’s just the meat. In detail, doomers arguments are very weak. One common trick is to extrapolate what it would take to make a single source 100% of energy consumption, and dismiss that as obviously impossible (although I’d dispute even that, it’s a failure of imagination, basically ‘wow that’s a big number, I can’t comprehend it’), as you have done with nuclear and coal.
Uranium proven reserves are based on current consumption, they increase with demand like the others. And compared to gas and oil, they’re generally accepted to last longer at current consumption. And so what if coal cannot power planes? You need to prove that not only is every single alternative nonviable, but all of them combined. So don’t just prove each can’t do 100%, you need each of them at less than 1%.
The need to defeat all those reasonable alternative leaves doomers with scattershot, limited and muddled arguments. "Hydro can't scale. Solar has low EROI and uses rare metals. Wind creates too much blade waste. Nuclear may run out at some point if massively utilized, etc" . And if as you admit, coal can power humanity, but global warming will do us in, what good was the EROI argument?
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I think your formalities look fine. I appreciate the clear thesis and the provision of sources. Thought I would have liked direct links to articles on sites like phys.org or energiewende. At least when using a phone, it is not easy to navigate their whole site.
Now, for the argument.
Dr. Hall suggests an EROI of 10-15 is needed for modern quality of life, but this hinges on assumptions about efficiency. Does adding healthcare really take us from 10:1 to 12:1? Does it have to, or can we reduce bloat without reducing quality of life?
I am not convinced that renewable EROI is so low. Estimating the EROI for any source is contentious, and I would like to see newer attempts. A casual search is dominated by articles following the Scientific American feature in 2013, and if the issue is significant, I’d expect it to have gotten more attention over time. The “renewables KO’d?” article specifically argues against a paper, claiming that it was biased by the nuclear lobby, and that European renewable EROI is higher than suggested.
Nuclear presents an interesting problem. While the current known deposits are limited, it is a problem of demand more than supply. As the usage of uranium increased, the amount of uranium which is worth exploiting would also increase. According to this site there is significant opportunity to expand production and find new deposits. New technology will also improve efficiency and longevity. Compare the incentives which drive our oil and gas production curves—they should all apply to uranium too.
In summary, I believe there is significant growth potential in a nuclear+renewable combination. Current EROI measures have large error bars and depend on assumptions about technology and society which may or may not hold. Each of these factors helps to mitigate the effect on civilization.
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It's more like 10,000 years. The 5 year thing is how much is currently mined and stockpiled in warehouses. You might as well say civilization can't continue because we only have so many months of oil and coal already extracted, in warehouses. This article is hilariously bad. Furthermore, current technology would allow us to get significantly more energy from uranium, however poor regulations (to fight nuclear proliferation) prevent us from doing that. Check out breeder reactors. Beyond that, we can use a lot more than just uranium.
But that's even what the article says next:
To your next point, yes, (traditional) peak oil was true and we have resorted to non-traditional methods to continue extracting it, which require huge energy commitments. Notably, frack wells quickly lose most of their production - instead of a decades long curve, they're barely producing after 2-3 years.
Beyond this, we do have other forms of energy production. Solar and wind are effective. As currently implemented, we have a lot of problems (re: the grid, stupid placement etc.) but they're both eroi positive - especially if you put solar panels in the desert (eroi of 20, unbuffered) instead of on people's rooves to make them feel good. Nuclear has an eroi above 70, generally speaking, over 2x coal's.
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When you say 'doomed' is where I'm lost. Can you expand on what you mean? There's an entire discipline of science that studies the allocation of resources given constraints- economics. The usual exogenous hand-waving response to your concern would be that technology will advance, whatever that means, or barring that energy prices will increase and probably lead to less consumption. Controlling for inflation are current prices for gas at the pump even close to their historical highs? Certain cut backs seems overdue and necessary; in the era of zoom why is business travel an expense that can be written off of taxes? If you believe in this impending doom how have you acted? If you started to hoard crude oil today do you actually think you would be able to do so profitably? In short I see the future being different maybe drastically so, but doom seems a stretch too far given the world I perceive around me.
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Has peak oil come about yet? Its like 20 years overdue at this point. There is only so many times you can claim a doomsday scenario is approaching before people start to doubt it.
I have a very loose loose understanding of all this stuff, because experts on "peak oil" have consistently been able to talk circles around me for two decades, and yet have also been consistently wrong. This makes me unwilling to wade into their scientific papers.
These are my loose understandings:
We don't really need to discover new oil fields. There are large known reserves of marginal and harder to harvest fields of oil. Same situation as fracking two decades ago. Until the price of oil goes up enough, no technology will be developed to harvest these fields. As long as no technology is developed to harvest these fields they will appear to have a negative EROI.
Solar, Tidal, and Hydro could cover a huge chunk of energy needs. But they are expensive relative to oil, so why bother? Especially if the price will get undercut as soon as new oil extraction tech comes along. Governments and massive corporations can afford to invest in these energy options as a hedge against the price of oil.
We have a moonshot option in the form of fusion energy. Its moving along at a snails pace, but decent chance of getting it before 2050.
Thorium reactors are also a mostly underutilized form of nuclear energy. Also doesn't really have the same fuel limitations as other nuclear options. Same problem as everything else though, why bother when oil is so cheap?
Most of the hate directed towards oil is due to climate concerns. Scientists that work in this field either don't care about these concerns and go make bank in the private oil sector, and never write many papers or communicate with the public. The scientists that do care about climate a bunch stay in academia and think tanks and write all the papers. Fundamental imbalance in the field. Same thing happens in other academic fields, Economics is littered with unemployable Marxist cranks, while the pro-free-market types can go make bank on wall street.
Energy density of hydrocarbons means they will still be used for a long time. Especially in things like jet fuel. But hydrocarbons can be synthesized. It is expensive to synthesize at current energy prices. If price of oil goes up that changes.
Prices have adjusted in the past, new technologies have come about as oil prices increased. The shift will be gradual if it ever needs to actually happen. There will be no collapse of civilization from a lack of oil.
The scientists/activists that hate oil for climate change reasons would LOVE for the economy to collapse from oil related problems. And they strive to make it happen by making oil as expensive as possible to extract, and trying to tax and regulate us back into the stone age.
TL;DR: Oil is still too cheap for any meaningful change to happen in the energy sector. Certainly not change on the level of 'civilization collapse'.
Yes, in 2019.
This is only a half tongue-in-cheek response. I haven't been able to find exact numbers for 2022. Though I did find this, suggesting the 2019 peak is still unsurpassed.
Thats peak demand not peak (potential) extraction. 2019 was pre covid. In fact we might well have hit peak oil demand - with renewables taking over more and more.
Edit: the IEA says we hit peak gasoline demand in 2019, not all oil.
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I'm having trouble finding a good chart with recent data, this one ending
2000shows the pattern I want to discuss: oil usage per capita was on an exponential increase until 1970 and then flattened out (with a downstep in the late 1970s). As this chart is per-capita, it does not mean oil usage has flattened out, only that it's rising no faster than the population. Either 4.5 barrels per year is the optimal amount of oil per person to be using and there just isn't much to be gained by using more. Or, more likely, the availability of oil/energy is limiting our economy/wealth as a society.This is definitely weaker than the peak oil claim. And, optimistically, the fact that we are ramping up renewables may be taken as evidence that the economy is able to adjust to oil slowly running out, and that oil is running out slower than the pessimists predicted.
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ISTR that hydro is pretty tapped out, in the First World. It's such a great energy source in so many ways that we quickly put up dams everywhere that made sense, and so least in North America and Europe we started running out of places that made sense 50 years ago. It's still growing strong in the developing world, though, which takes a little pressure off the growing demand for power there.
Tidal isn't tapped out, but it has a relatively low cap.
Solar could cover a huge chunk of energy needs if only it could be paired with cheap energy storage and transmission. Fission and coal are practically meant for base load, but solar gets at least twice as expensive if you have to rely on it in less sunny places and less sunny times. I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of battery chemistry breakthrough handle the "less sunny times" part of that, though. We've been optimizing high power and low density for years, but "big heavy cheap batteries" are now becoming a design target for just this reason.
Boring old uranium nuclear won't be hitting fuel limitations for centuries. Thorium might have other advantages, but the big disadvantages of nuclear right now are "would-be plant operators don't trust the government and public to not quintuple the price with regulatory costs" and "the government and public don't trust would-be plant operators to maintain safety and handle waste with any lower regulatory costs". Thorium doesn't really help there, and fusion will only be a little help.
Yes, nuclear power really is the silver bullet solution to energy insufficiency. So far we're largely keeping that bullet chambered, but start enormous electricity price increases or widespread shortages, and you'll see how quickly opinion turns.
Right now new nuclear plants take several years to complete. Opinion might turn quickly but that doesn't turn the lights back on quickly.
Hopefully mass production of microreactors will change this situation before the change becomes necessary.
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There are also the issues with inertial response that might mean that we want to keep some traditional non-neglible baseload around even if batteries got cheap and possible to scale.
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There’s wrong and then there’s wrong. The strong form of Peak Oil, where we wake up one day and can’t get anything out of the ground, has failed to materialize. The weak form is more a claim that we are on the cusp of a downward trend, which I think is much more defensible.
Tech advancements like fracking complicate the issue. Half of US oil is fracked. In the counterfactual where fracking isn’t possible, how much of that supply is developed? How much higher are prices?
I expect future tech to be harder than fracking. I don’t expect demand to decrease. Therefore, supply won’t keep up with demand. The weak theory is still on the table.
You are wrong on demand. It’s probably peaked or close to it.
Wait, why?
I see @cjet79's comment that it did, in fact drop during COVID. But all the growth factors are still present: increasing population, industrialization and electrification of developing countries, macro-scale shipping. How many countries haven't reached China's level of industry?
Yes.I misread something in the IEA report - gasoline demand has peaked not oil, although the rate of increased demand is slowing there.
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Well there are also two reasons why peak oil might happen. One is a demand side drop the other is a supply side drop. 2020 saw the first decline in oil production, but it was obviously a demand side drop.
And eventually oil production will drop off if some better energy technology replaces it.
So the weak version of peak oil is guaranteed to happen. But the reason why it happens matters a lot. And I think an eventual supply side drop is far less likely than an eventual demand side drop.
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