the concept of "peak Oil " is blarney

[cfg83]

jamesqf -

Originally Posted by jamesqf

But of course. This is just basic economics: say a US solar panel maker can profitably make & sell at $2/watt, while a Chinese company can make them at $1/watt. Is the Chinese company going to sell them in the US for $1/watt, or for $1.95/watt?

Egg-zactly, shadow pricing. This is still a big debate with the US Solar Industry, aka whether to source from US or Chinese manufacturers. As usual, the decision is being made for us :

More solar woes: SolarWorld shuts California plant, cuts workforce | SmartPlanet

Maybe some of the closing of the price gap has been a recent tariff :

U.S. Slaps High Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels

CarloSW2

[Frank Lee]

Ha- just looked at the link. I haven't known mwebb to post up claptrap before.

It reminds me of when ANWR was going to be the solution to all our problems. Simple math said "Nah Ah". Where have all the "ANWAR" buffoons gone?

[IamIan]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

With renewable energy, you don't really need to be concerned with efficiency

I like efficiency.
Some people like sports, guns, cars, the color blue, etc ... I like RE and Energy Efficiency ... even if I had a free surplus of RE , I'd still like Energy Efficiency.
But that's just me.

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

The next generation of renewable energy systems can be built using renewable energy from the current generation. So, as long as the sun and the earth exist, we can have energy in abundance.

If Stephen Burt the CFO of G24 Innovations LTD is to be believed in his interview on Fully Charged ... their company is already doing just that ... the wind turbine at their factory produces more RE than they use ... they only use about 20% of the RE output of the wind turbine to power the factory production.... the rest is surplus.

[NeilBlanchard]

Well, sure I like efficiency, too -- why waste energy if you know how to do it with less? That's why I'm building the CarBEN EV5, after all. We need efficient cars if we are going to make practical EV's.

But "guilt-free" A/C sounds good to me!

[sid]

Everyone seems to be missing the point. It is irrelevant if we have discovered and used up half of the world's oil supply or 0.0001 % of the world's supply. The truth is we have discovered and used up almost all of the cheap and easily extracted oil. All future oil will be harder to find, harder to extract, and probably have a greater risk of a more significant environmental impact. And, as a consequence, it will cost more, a lot more.

Cost is not strictly in terms of money. A big criticism of many alternative fuels is that it takes as much or more energy to obtain them as you get from the fuel. Oil is approaching that point, also. At the start of the oil age, the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil was spent for every 200 barrels of end fuel. The latest numbers I've seen says that presently the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil will only get us about 15 to 20 barrels of usable fuel. The usable end fuel obtained for each energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is even lower, much lower, with some of the newer methods, such as tar sands, oil shale, and fracking.

And energy cost of fuel is just one of the costs. We are also using much more water, which is becoming a very valuable commodity, to extract and process each unit of fuel. We are also using more of other chemicals, some rare.

This isn't just an inflation issue. At the start of the oil age, we would just drill about 70 to 100 feet into the ground and the oil would gush out of the ground under its own pressure. Now we have to go a couple hundred miles offshore, run a drill bit into the ocean floor a mile or more below us, and then drill a couple of miles into this ocean floor to get at this oil. Or we have to shovel and transport millions of tons of dirt to a facility which processes this dirt with lots of water, chemicals, and energy to force the oil out of this dirt, and then do something with the dirt that remains after the process. Or we have to pump lots of water and chemicals under high pressure, which takes lots of energy, into the rock beneath us to break up the rock to allow access to the oil still trapped within the rock. No one can claim that the then and now costs are comparable.

I agree we will never run out of oil, at least not until the sun expands into a red giant and boils all the volatile substances, including us, off of the planet. Oil will just keep getting more and more expensive until it is no longer practical to use as a fuel. And that point where the cost is no longer acceptable is closer than most of us think.

I also feel that we will probably never find an alternative fuel that is as cheap and versatile as oil was in the last century. Oil will just keep rising in cost until other fuels start to appear more practical. We will also change our lifestyles accordingly, and we will probably feel then that we have made a lot of progress and question why anyone would have even considered using such a primitive concept as private internal combustion vehicles in the first place.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Where have all the "ANWAR" buffoons gone?

Still here, they've just turned into Canadian tar sands pipeline buffoons.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by sid

The truth is we have discovered and used up almost all of the cheap and easily extracted oil. All future oil will be harder to find, harder to extract, and probably have a greater risk of a more significant environmental impact. And, as a consequence, it will cost more, a lot more.

Even beyond that, a lot of those "discoveries", like the Bakken formation in North Dakota abd the Marcellus Shale* in the northeast, have in fact been known for decades. It just wasn't profitable to extract the oil & gas when it cost maybe $80/bbl to get it out of the ground, and oil from the Middle East was selling at $25/bbl.

*I grew up there, and most everybody had stories of people whose water wells put out a little gas.

[NeilBlanchard]

Only renewable energy will last as long as the earth and the sun -- about another 5 Billion years.

We humans who alive today have decided (I guess) that WE are the ones who can use up the oil as quickly as possible. We know the supply of oil is finite, because the earth is finite. It took millions and millions and millions of years to form, and we are using it in a couple of centuries.

All that stored carbon is being released back into the atmosphere -- we will need to stop burning fossil fuels if we want to survive another thousand years, let alone a million. We cannot burn it all... That would be morally wrong.

[jalmir]

Originally Posted by sid

Everyone seems to be missing the point. It is irrelevant if we have discovered and used up half of the world's oil supply or 0.0001 % of the world's supply. The truth is we have discovered and used up almost all of the cheap and easily extracted oil. All future oil will be harder to find, harder to extract, and probably have a greater risk of a more significant environmental impact. And, as a consequence, it will cost more, a lot more.

Cost is not strictly in terms of money. A big criticism of many alternative fuels is that it takes as much or more energy to obtain them as you get from the fuel. Oil is approaching that point, also. At the start of the oil age, the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil was spent for every 200 barrels of end fuel. The latest numbers I've seen says that presently the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil will only get us about 15 to 20 barrels of usable fuel. The usable end fuel obtained for each energy equivalent of one barrel of oil is even lower, much lower, with some of the newer methods, such as tar sands, oil shale, and fracking.

And energy cost of fuel is just one of the costs. We are also using much more water, which is becoming a very valuable commodity, to extract and process each unit of fuel. We are also using more of other chemicals, some rare.

This isn't just an inflation issue. At the start of the oil age, we would just drill about 70 to 100 feet into the ground and the oil would gush out of the ground under its own pressure. Now we have to go a couple hundred miles offshore, run a drill bit into the ocean floor a mile or more below us, and then drill a couple of miles into this ocean floor to get at this oil. Or we have to shovel and transport millions of tons of dirt to a facility which processes this dirt with lots of water, chemicals, and energy to force the oil out of this dirt, and then do something with the dirt that remains after the process. Or we have to pump lots of water and chemicals under high pressure, which takes lots of energy, into the rock beneath us to break up the rock to allow access to the oil still trapped within the rock. No one can claim that the then and now costs are comparable.

I agree we will never run out of oil, at least not until the sun expands into a red giant and boils all the volatile substances, including us, off of the planet. Oil will just keep getting more and more expensive until it is no longer practical to use as a fuel. And that point where the cost is no longer acceptable is closer than most of us think.

I also feel that we will probably never find an alternative fuel that is as cheap and versatile as oil was in the last century. Oil will just keep rising in cost until other fuels start to appear more practical. We will also change our lifestyles accordingly, and we will probably feel then that we have made a lot of progress and question why anyone would have even considered using such a primitive concept as private internal combustion vehicles in the first place.

Thank you ... this is the first intelligent and well argued post since this thread started!

[redyaris]

Which begs the question. Are we an intelligent species or not? because this pattern of exploitation to the point of exhaustion is very frequent in our history.