Anyone heard of the phrase "Peak Oil"?

Jacey53

In addition to oil for transport and fuel, any diminution of supply will affect the production of plastics that we use in so many areas of our lives.
Plastics were a valuable replacement for metals and woods, which are themselves becoming scarcer or less easy to obtain.
We need to look at effective and cheap methods of recycling, repairing and re-using.
The government is already encouraging us to grow our own food, aware that we are vulnerable to import fluctuations.
The consumer society will need to draw back, which will affect economies across the world.

I think it will demand a rethink of the way we live our lives.

Freddie_Snowbits

frank_begbie wrote: »

Why do you think the USA invaded Iraq?

retrospectively, why did the USA kick the boot into BP, upset over the Lockerbie bomber relase. Not wanting the Libyan Oil perchance?

Sapphire

frank_begbie wrote: »

Totally agree mate. Man just sees things in money terms with no thought of the future.
We think nothing of eating strawberries out of season while conveniently forgetting the cost of transporting them to the shop.
There's so many things that we could do without, but the advertisers convince us our lives would not be worth living if we didn't have the latest mobile phone whatever.

Its going to take some kind of disaster to make people wake up to reality.

It's not just that oil is used in transportation – it's used in so many other things we take for granted in Western society, like drugs, fertilizers, clothing, plastic manufacture, etc. The implications of the loss of such things need a much broader discussion than can be had on an Internet forum.

With the massive Chinese and Indian populations aspiring to our standard of wealth, it won't take long before oil supplies run out. Estimates put it at 20–30 years, but could be sooner.

Generali

Kohoutek wrote: »

I think because the transition from coal to oil happened very gradually over decades but the transition from oil to alternatives will by necessity have to occur over a much shorter timespan to avoid huge economic dislocation hence it will require much more central co-ordination. We weren't running out of cheap coal when we were making the transition to oil, and in fact coal is still a considerable proportion of UK primary energy.

Alternative energy by nature usually requires huge subsidy – coal, oil and gas are extractive industries that require a relatively small investment of capital to harness the the enormous amount of chemical energy contained in fossil fuels. In terms of the return in energy and money on investment, wind and solar are fundamentally worse forms of energy than fossil fuels.

Another reason is that the best way to overcome peak oil, or peak resources is simply by having fewer people – and only government can direct policies on family planning.



There are alternatives, but both your examples are simply replacing one form of finite fossil fuel energy with another. If we were to replace the energy we derive from oil from natural gas and coal (Town Gas), then they we would simply face peak gas and peak coal within a decade or two. In some cases, like the UK, domestic reserves of gas and coal will be already very depleted within a decade at current consumption levels. It stands to reason that gas and coal producers will be using more of their production domestically to replace oil, so I think that there would not be enough available on international markets for the UK to import its energy in any significant amount.

Underground coal gasification is the best hope for the UK if it gets off the ground, because it uses coal that is too deep to be mined which exists in enormous quantities, although it's potentially a very dangerous process (setting fire to coal underground and collecting the gas):

http://www.britishcoalgasification.co.uk/

However in some cases, like the current agricultural model – oil in pesticides and natural gas in fertiliser, not to mention cheap oil for tractors and transportation of fuel – I don't see what the alternatives are. I think the only solution is a more local sustainable form of food production like permaculture.

I always thought Town Gas was made from decomposing rubbish.

Really2

nearlynew wrote: »

And hydrogen is as easy to store as oil is it?

Pressurized tank, there are already hydrogen fuel cell cars out there, no new technology required at all.

Kohoutek wrote: »

Actually the energy density of hydrogen is much lower than petroleum:



From the online version of the Cambridge physicist David McKay's book on sustainable energy.

I did say liquid hydrogen, you were saying there is no energy as portable or energy dense as petrol, it is simply not true. Your example is only based on volume not energy per KG.


Hydrogen, liquid 143 Specific energy (MJ/kg)

Gasoline (Petrol) 46.4 Specific energy (MJ/kg)

Yes you have to use something like electricity to extract it but we can make electricity without coal, oil etc.

nearlynew

Really2 wrote: »

Pressurized tank, there are already hydrogen fuel cell cars out there, no new technology required at all.

So it's not as easy to store as oil/petrol then?

Really2

nearlynew wrote: »

So it's not as easy to store as oil/petrol then?

Depends how you class easy, I would leave neither in a bucket TBH.
Hydrogen is in use in america I believe, LPG is already in use. Storage for that would be almost identical.

Hydrogen cars are not the size of buses or do they explode or even exist in the future, so yes as easy.



Just a different fuel tank, if we had always used hydrogen, you would question how easy petrol is to store.
You can't store hydrogen a petrol tank (but is that really the point) but seeing there are working cars using the tech being sold you have to admit it is virtually as easy and viable.

Really2

to add, liquid hydrogen costs around $5 per KG (A KG is around 1 gallon).

You need to buy 3KG of petrol to get the same energy release, 3kg of petrol is around 1 gallon.

So basically you only need to store 1 gallon of hydrogen per 1gallons of petrol to get the same energy results.

Kohoutek

Really2 wrote: »

to add, liquid hydrogen costs around $5 per KG (A KG is around 1 gallon).

That's only the hydrogen made from fossil fuels.

Here's an article written by an aerospace engineer on why the 'hydrogen economy' doesn't work:

The spokesmen for the hydrogen hoax claim that hydrogen will be manufactured from water via electrolysis. It is certainly possible to make hydrogen this way, but it is very expensive—so much so, that only four percent of all hydrogen currently produced in the United States is produced in this manner. The rest is made by breaking down hydrocarbons, through processes like pyrolysis of natural gas or steam reforming of coal.

Neither type of hydrogen is even remotely economical as fuel. The wholesale cost of commercial grade liquid hydrogen (made the cheap way, from hydrocarbons) shipped to large customers in the United States is about $6 per kilogram. High purity hydrogen made from electrolysis for scientific applications costs considerably more. Dispensed in compressed gas cylinders to retail customers, the current price of commercial grade hydrogen is about $100 per kilogram.

Putting aside the intractable issues of fundamental physics, hydrogen production costs, and distribution show stoppers, let us proceed to discuss the problems associated with the hydrogen cars themselves. In order for hydrogen to be used as fuel in a car, it has to be stored in the car. As at the station, this could be done either in the form of cryogenic liquid hydrogen or as highly compressed gas. In either case, we come up against serious problems caused by the low density of hydrogen. For example, if liquid hydrogen is the form employed, then storing 20 kilograms onboard (equivalent in energy content to 20 gallons of gasoline) would require an insulated cryogenic fuel tank with a volume of some 280 liters (70 gallons). This cryogenic hydrogen would always be boiling away, which would create concerns for those who have to leave their cars parked for any length of time, and which would also turn the atmospheres in underground or otherwise enclosed parking garages into explosive fuel-air mixtures

Compressed hydrogen is just as unworkable as liquid hydrogen. If 5,000 psi compressed hydrogen were employed, the tank would need to be 650 liters (162 gallons), or eight times the size of a gasoline tank containing equal energy. Because it would have to hold high pressure, this huge tank could not be shaped in an irregular form to fit into the vehicle’s empty space in some convenient way. Instead it would have to be a simple shape like a sphere or a domed cylinder, which would make its spatial demands much more difficult to accommodate, and significantly reduce the usable vehicle space within a car of a given size.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax

Really2

Kohoutek wrote: »

That's only the hydrogen made from fossil fuels.

How do you know any proof, electricity does not have to be made by fossil fuels.

Here is a link to the honda FCX http://corporate.honda.com/environment/fuel_cells.aspx?id=fuel_cells_fcx

Kohoutek wrote: »

Compressed hydrogen is just as unworkable as liquid hydrogen. If 5,000 psi compressed hydrogen were employed, the tank would need to be 650 liters (162 gallons), or eight times the size of a gasoline tank containing equal energy

It has a tank of 45.7 gallons, do you think it needs a tank with an area of 370 gallons to store that? It is storing at 5,000psi afterall.