“We need a wake up call. We need it desperately. We need basically
a new form of energy. I don’t know that there is one.” Matthew Simmons, investment banker, Bush energy advisor
excerpt from: The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg
The five strategies humans have adopted for capturing increasing amount of energy have permitted societies to grow in size, scope, and complexity. However, it is important to note that the ramp of history, rising upward from the simplest Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands to the heights of globalized industrial civilization, has not been a smooth one. Many civilizations have expanded their scope and complexity dramatically, only to dissolve back into simpler forms of social organization.
The ancient Egyptians, Romans, Mayas, Greeks, Minoans, Mesopotamians, Harappans, and Chacoans provide a wealth of material for investigation. Why would a group of people intelligent enough to have built impressive temples, roads, and cities and organizing a far-flung empire suddenly lose the ability to maintain them?
The literature on the subject is voluminous and includes speculation on the causes of collapse ranging from class conflict to mismanagement. Undoubtedly, the best modern research on this subject was done by archaeologist Joseph Tainter, whose book 'The Collapse of Complex Societies' (1988) is now widely recognized as the standard work on the topic. In his book and related essays, Tainter takes an ecological view of society as an energy-processing structure and concludes that complex societies tend to collapse because their strategies for energy capture are subject to the law of diminishing returns.
More complex societies are more costly to maintain than simpler ones.
Western civilization from the Middle Ages to the present illustrates the theory in a somewhat different way as it has recovered and undergone at least two even greater growth surges due to its ability to find and exploit new energy subsidies at critical moments.
The discovery of fossil fuels, the greatest energy subsidy ever known enabled the transformation of civilization itself into a form never before seen:
industrialism.
This does not mean, however, that industrial civilization is immune to the law of diminishing returns. Over time, the amount of energy that must be expended to find and extract each barrel of oil, or to mine each ton of coal, increases.
Tainter ends his book by drawing the following sobering conclusion: “However much we like to think of ourselves as something special in world history, in fact industrial societies are subject to the same principles that caused earlier societies to collapse.”
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ExxonMobil has made a new report on energy trends. Once again they claim that the decline of oil and gas will be enormous the coming years.
"In summary, the limitations of current [renewable] technologies preclude any of them being suitable for meeting a large-enough share of long-term energy supply needs to displace conventional energy sources."
Last fall ExxonMobil commented: “Our industry can certainly be proud of its past achievements. Yet the challenges we will face in the coming years will be every bit as great as those encountered in the past, due in part to ever-increasing global energy use.
For example, we estimate that world oil and gas production from existing fields is declining at an average rate of about 4 to 6 percent a year. To meet projected demand in 2015, the industry will have to add about 100 million oil-equivalent barrels a day of new production.
That’s equal to about 80 percent of today’s production level. In other words, by 2015, we will need to find, develop and produce a volume of new oil and gas that is equal to eight out of every 10 barrels being produced today. In addition, the cost associated with providing this additional oil and gas is expected to be considerably more than what industry is now spending.
Equally daunting is the fact that many of the most promising prospects are far from major markets — some in regions that lack even basic infrastructure. Others are in extreme climates, such as the Arctic, that present extraordinary technical challenges."
ASPO Comments: "We in ASPO (The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas) know that it is harder to find oil then gas, but if we accept that it might be equally easy I can make the following conclusion:
Today we have a daily production of 75 million barrels per day. If we in 2015 need 80 percent of this as new production we must open new oilfields that can give 60 million barrels per day. To understand how impossible this is I like to make a comparison with the top production of 6 million barrels per day in the North Sea. The question is where can we find 10 new regions of the size of the North Sea? Maybe can the production in Iraq with enormous investments increase with 6 million barrels per day.
I think that it would be a miracle if the rest of the countries in the Middle East can increase the production with 6 million barrels per day. That the rest of the world can find over 40 million barrels of new production is just a dream."
My comments: - creating electricity from an energy source is one thing, the loss of petro-chemicals is another. The first part of my article addresses NG and nuclear - not included here.
Everything you touch, any mode of transportation you take, all the food you eat has been provided with the benefit of this most energy-rich fuel source.
Petro-chemical products touch every aspect of our lives - the car we drive (gasoline, interior mouldings, exterior coatings), clothing, stereo and computer housing, paint on the walls of our houses and offices, the plastic packaging used for food, the shampoo bottle in the shower. The list is endless.
Chemicals used for manufacturing processes and fertilizers will become scarce and expensive.
No other fuel source has such a high Energy Return on Energy Invested ratio (EROEI). Our society has been built on this fuel source - one that is finite.
There is no equivalent energy replacement.
Right now, there is a deluge of stories on the wonders of hydrogen. Yet, this is another area of great confusion. Hydrogen is not a primary source of energy.
For a Hydrogen Era to occur you need an abundance of natural gas, or you need to create a great deal of new power plants using coal and nuclear power. As well, all these energy 'sources' require fossil fuels for extraction, construction of buildings and equipment, transportation of materials. EVERYTHING is tied to hydrocarbons.
Fuels cells for automobiles are not as viable as the promoters would like us to think. If by a miracle, these cells were viable and the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks could be retrofitted for fuel cells, where would the energy come from to fill these?
The Ontario Electricity Task Force weakly suggested, "...the use of off-peak power to produce hydrogen for use in fuel cells...” An entire hydrogen energy infrastructure would require investments of large amounts of money and energy.
Most importantly, the process of hydrogen production always uses more energy than the resulting hydrogen will yield. The Second Law of Thermodynamics insures that hydrogen will be a net-energy loser every time since some usable energy is lost whenever it is transformed (from hydrogen to electricity, electricity to hydrogen, etc.).
Where will the petroleum products come from to build and maintain roads? Asphalt incorporates large quantities of oil. Airlines use copious amounts high-grade kerosene refined from oil. Transportation will change dramatically.
Will we continue to build what are really unnecessarily large homes, which we heat in the winter and then cool down in the summer? Is it necessary to keep building these large new big box retail outlets with high ceilings and extensive lighting?
There will be less foreign tourists, as traveling will become expensive. In summer, the weekly trip to the cottage will be costly and best saved for the annual holiday. Gone will be the days of spending the day 'out in the boat'.
Economic activity will decline. Jobs will be lost.
Richard Heinberg writes in The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, "Virtually all of the authors who have contributed to the literature on sustainability tell us that, in order for a transition to a lower-complexity and lower-throughput society to occur without a chaotic collapse, humanity will have to take a systemic approach to
resource management and
population reduction.
It is the scale of the problems that beset us now that is unique. The steep expansion in scale of the human population size and the consumption of resources that has characterized modern societies is almost entirely due to industrialism and the use of fossil fuels. And many of the largest problems we are to likely encounter in this century will be due to the depletion of those fuels."
(The depletion of those fuels and the realization of the consequences has for quite sometime been the driving force behind geo-political events.)
"We must face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature." Jimmy Carter (1976)
THE END OF SUBURBIA: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream
DVD http://www.endofsuburbia.com/
I encourage everyone to view this documentary - a first class Canadian production.
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Mission Accomplished: "On the first day of the campaign, Marine units were ordered to secure 600 Iraqi oil wells and prevent environmental disaster." George Bush, April 3, 2003
"That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day." "Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies..." Dick Cheney, fall 1999, London Institute of Petroleum
