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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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what kind of sailboat (the old Commodore asks?)
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rectorsquid
climber
Lake Tahoe
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After 2 days of thinking about it I can't find a problem with his logic.
After 2 days? It seemed pretty obvious after about 2 minutes.
Our bottle is getting pretty full. It's not logic, it's math. Math is simpler.
Dave
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rectorsquid
climber
Lake Tahoe
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But then the dinosaurs might have been worried about the size of their bottle too. It's not a problem for them now, is it.
Dave
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Big Mike
Trad climber
BC
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It does seem dismal. Our dependance on fossil fuels must end. This is promising though; http://www.newenergytechnologiesinc.com/technology/solarwindow,
I saw a video awhile back that was talking about a guy who had invented a film like this to reflect the sunlight in the warmer months and then allow it to enter when winter came. They were directed to go down the hall and talk to the people working on wireless charging solutions.
These guys were harvesting energy from the ir field of light which means that if you combined the two technologies you could have windows that feed off both the solar and ir spectrum. You could even make a paint with the right molecular structure and it would act like an IR panel and power anything!
I wish I could find that video again..
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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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All we know is things are going to change in a big way, not for the better, and relatively fast.
Our economic system is based on growth and this growth will stop hence the system will collapse.
The world will not end, there will be fewer of us living at a lower standard.
Shale gas, shale oil,wind and solar will not save us, just give us a little more time until the inevitable.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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just crazy conspiracy theories
keep your attention focused on politics, celebrities, sex and violence, internet news, TV, movies, and sports
put all your faith in your church and government and big corporations
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Base & Ed have a good handle on this. (Happy BD, Ed!)
Interesting book, "The End of Growth" recently came out re the effect of ever more expensive oil on economic growth. Didn't seem to entirely address the effects of more gas due to fracking, but fracking can be its own nightmare.
I'd be interested in hearing some of our competent scientists comment on the book, "Limits to Growth, 30 Year Update" and its two predecessors.
However you look at it, it appears that our economic "progress" and consumption is outstripping our capability to innovate, and our path is not sustainable. I'm sorry for my kids.
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paganmonkeyboy
climber
mars...it's near nevada...
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perhaps humans will be a little more involved in the next extinction event than we care to think ?
how will the rapid warming of the globe when we scream past the tipping points offset the rapid rise in energy costs ? less heating needed, maybe more land becomes realistically farm-able...in the far north and south, of course...mostly north...til we look like mars, i suppose...
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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This is where gov't really has a role.
The private sector will not do it.
I say, slap a $.30/gal tax on ea gallon of gas/diesel, which goes directly to research on producing alternative sources of gas/d.
There WILL be a price point where it will be economical to produce these things, and the more advanced the research, the lower the price point will be.
This WILL respond to research dollars. It can also be seen as a national security protective action.
By the way, Biodiesel IS already available, and it seem competitive. I buy it when I can, the problem is that there is only one place in Los Angeles where I can buy it, and it is somewhat out of the way.
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WBraun
climber
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The future is pain.
Pain creates change.
By it's true nature the living entity is ever blissful.
When that bliss is checked it seeks to restore it .......
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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OK. I'm in a motel 6 in virginia and I just watched the entire video. Towards the end, stopped it repeatably and wrote down much of the summary.
While I have always been quite aware of this with regards to oil....that we would consume the last 10 per cent in about the same amount of time that we produced the first 90 per cent, but this lecture puts it in an extremely elegant and utterly simple mathematical terms.
That is probably the best hour I have spent in years. If you don't watch it, you are an idiot. It is absolutely non political and absolutely simple. Anyone can easily understand it and if you don't watch it, your basis of knowledge just went down about 75%. It is that true.
Wait until you have the time, then sit down and watch it. All it is is a one hour college lecture applying simple math to our resource usage.
I'm going to send it to everyone I know in the oil business.
Contrats for finding and posting that. My dad has been on to this for a while, and he will appreciate it, because his work was in applied math and computer science. He was a college professor.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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OK. I know the Bakken and Eagle Ford (and most of the other plays) quite well. I also know how the bulk of the oil is found. So post your questions, and if I don't know them, I will look them up in the literature.
The big modern plays are all in reservoir rocks with extremely low permeability. You could try to produce it in a vertical, but it wasn't economic.
Now you drill horizontal wells with stage fracks. This means you drill down, 500 feet above the pay zone you start a 90 degree turn, and if your geologist is any good, you will land flat in your zone. Casing is then set all of the way to the landing point.
Then you drill a mile horizontally, because the typical drilling and spacing unit is 640 acres, a square mile. This is changing and now we are seeing 10,000 foot laterals as regulations modernize.
So if the zone is 50 feet thick and 8000 feet deep, on a vertical well you will have 50 feet of zone in the wellbore. On a horizontal, the entire lateral is pay rock exposed the the wellbore.
On a vertical well, you can put a frack on it and maybe drain ten acres in these types of ultra low permeability rocks. On a horizontal, they selectively perforate the production liner, which is run over the lateral and then cemented along its full length. Again, you may perforate the lateral in ten shot clusters for five feet along the lateral, at different differences. Now as many as 30 clusters along a lateral. You then go in and frack each hundred foot stage one at a time. There is a method to do this that only takes a few days. To frac more than one zone in the old days took at least a week.
So you see, they thoroughly frac the rock along its full length, and injection pressures and rates of injection control the frack for maximum results. All that a frack does is artificially induce fractures in the target rock, with the aim to maximize the amount of rock that is heavily fractured. These zones have super low permeability. Although they are quite porous, and your typical shale may have 30-40% pore space, the low permeability is cause by the tiny grain size of a shale, which is basically a mudstone. The pore throats are typically way too small for an oil molecule to move through. It may take a year for a methane molecule to migrate to one of these induced fractures, so the fracks are designed for maximum fracture density to a distance of a couple of hundred feet or even less sometimes, from the wellbore.
Low permeability zones usually act the same way as they decline. Depending on the petrophysics of each area in the play, these wells come in screaming at very high rates. The downside is that the decline curves are steeply hyperbolic, meaning that the initial decline may be 50% or more in the first year, 40% in the second, and so on. This means that although they make a lot, they make the bulk of it in the first two or three years, by which time they are down to producing at a low level, which then flattens out to a very modest annual decline rate. So unlike the video, the hyperbolic decline, by definition, is not steady.
So while the Eagle Ford and the Bakken can make a lot of money, if you don't pay out in the first year or two, you will never pay out, because after 2 or 3 years you are too deep into that hyperbolic decline.
The significance is obvious. These plays make a lot of oil and gas, but within 5 years, their production is no longer statistically significant. They may be profitable to produce for 30 more years, but barely, and at small quantities.
The behaviour of each well can be incorporated to the fields at large, and the bump in the national production decline that has been provided by the Bakken is small and will be short lived. The idea of 20 billion bbls of recovery is totally false. It might be 2 or 3, which in the scheme of things is not that good, nor all that economic, given the high cost of the wells.
I can provide decline plots, but i can't export the declines as .jpg's. I can do it in .pdf files for you, but not as simple pictures.
I have every well in the entire mid-continent and the rocky mountain states already downloaded into my laptop right now. I can click on individual wells and see everything about them. I also have economic analysis software that does incorporate the log functions of each decline curve.
Anyway, if you want to understand world oil reserves and where they are, these wells don't amount to a fart. By far, the majority of the World's oil is found in the giant and supergiant fields, which tend to have really obvious geology and were found by the end of the sixties with the discovery of Prudhoe Bay. The U.S. has reserves of 190 billion bbls, more than those of any country in the world other than Saudi Arabia. Our problem is that we have already used almost all of it.
I can make a sound case that the ultra high growth of the United States was directly tied to our massive oil fields. Now look at them.
Prudhoe Bay is on secondary recovery, a waterflood, and is almost done. The East Texas Field, or "Black Giant," is basically done, although it won us WWII. Yes, here and there are still good discoveries, but none of them have exceeded the 11 billion bbl mark since Alpine, west of Prudhoe Bay.
All of the Saudi Fields were discovered decades ago. They were found by western companies who were then kicked out as each nation nationalized their oil industries. Saudi Aramco is always highering, but they haven't found a big field in decades. All of their oil is tied up in a small number of supergiant fields.
It takes thousands of smaller fields to add up to one supergiant, and that is what we are now doing, finding smaller fields that wouldn't even be economic if high oil prices fell.
If you want to understand this, read "Hubbert's Peak," "The Prize," and keep up on what is going on in the industry. There are still billion bbl fields to find in the deepwater gulf and arctic Alaska, but these are areas that nobody even considered in the old days, simply because the technology and expense is truely massive.
I know a fair amount of the distribution of oil reserves, so I'll try to help with the discussion.
This thread is very important and needs a better name to get more people involved with it.
That lecture was unreal, though. Nobody in the oil business thinks that way. It is all short term thinking.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Did you pay attention? He discussed the same thing as you, where somebody said that Copper could be made from other metals. It was incorrect, but that was the attitude.
Our entire culture is tied up in oil. Look around you at everything that was made with it, shipped with it, and is powered by it. If it is electronic, it has a good chance of being powered by coal.
From what I know, I think you are being irrationally optimistic. Just to straighten it out, describe how we will move beyond oil and a warming planet. You don't have to believe in AGW. The planet IS warming, and the population within ten feet of sea level is quite large.
Also there is the matter of feeding everyone.
It might not mean extinction, but it will be a big change from business as usual.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Ken M.
I was for a HUGE gasoline tax twenty years ago. Even then it was becoming obvious that the resource was running out and we weren't conserving because gas was cheap. No way will we switch to alternatives until they are cheaper and better than oil. Which is nigh impossible. A gallon of gasoline is incredibly energy dense. It is amazing stuff.
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WBraun
climber
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Magnetic energy will be the deal.
There's other stuff too but not yet ready for this age.
They're still too stupid and don't deserve it yet.
Mankind only gets what it deserves not what some lab coats think they can come up with on their own .......
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okie
Trad climber
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The water resource is on a similar disturbing trajectory.
Glad I've always known how to f$ck without making kids...
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Big Mike
Trad climber
BC
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Even if we do figure out the energy crisis we have to implement population control Or we'll end up with more humans than planet.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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The water resource is on a similar disturbing trajectory.
Most sensible post on this thread so far.
We could learn to live without oil. A lot tougher to live without water.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Another troubling aspect of fossil fuel use is the fact that dry natural gas is used to produce ammonia, which is used to make fertilizer for crops. World agriculture is totally dependent on these nitrogen fertilizers.
A set of numbers and links appear below.
The consumption of dry natural gas has been growing slightly in the US since 1980. The growth of reserves of dry natural gas have not been growing at the same rate over that time period. However since 2005 the growth of reserves has increased significantly while the consumption has increased also but at a much lower rate.
At the current rate of consumption, the total reserves today would be used up in 13 years.
The rate of increase of reserves is greater than consumption which will extend that lifetime somewhat, depending on the length of time this condition persists.
Fertilizer would then be made using other fossil fuels, at a greater cost. Or natural gas would be imported into the US (or fertilizer).
edit Either no one caught the mistake I made or no one felt to challenge it... the Excel tables for US consumption and reservers have the "Date" in the strange units Microsoft uses to encode the format "mm/dd/yy" and so that very low rates I had previously where growth in those units... much less than a year. After inserting a column with the corresponding year (I could also have used the function YEAR(date) to extract the year) the numbers actually look more reasonable.)
This does change the conclusion on the US use, and on the recent natural gas activity. Also, the use of "wet" and "dry" natural gas, "wet" has other hydrocarbons (like propane) while "dry" is mostly methane (which is the ingredient used to produce ammonia and thus the rest of the fertilizers) extracting the methane would be another step...
Efficiencies gained in the use of different processes make a big difference in the cost margins, but do not substantially effect the cost of the end product, at least the energy cost, though small changes could extend the lifetime of this resource, if the majority is burned up for its energy there is nothing left for fertilizer at whatever the efficiency.
"The United States is the world's third largest nitrogen producer and currently has the capacity to produce 12.5 million material tons of ammonia, which is used as a fertilizer, as a building block for other nitrogen products and for industrial uses."
http://www.tfi.org/statistics/statistics-faqs
"Natural gas plays a critical role in the production of fertilizers that serve as the soil ‘food’ that plants – from corn and wheat to pumpkins and apples – need to produce a healthy and bountiful crop. The cost of natural gas - the basic building block for nitrogen fertilizers - accounts for about 70 to 90 percent of the production costs for nitrogen fertilizer."
http://www.tfi.org/issues/energy
"Nitrogen fertilizers are often made using the Haber-Bosch process (invented about 1915) which uses natural gas (CH4+) for the hydrogen and nitrogen gas (N2) from the air at an elevated temperature and pressure in the presence of a catalyst to form ammonia (NH3) as the end product. This ammonia is used as a feedstock for other nitrogen fertilizers, such as anhydrous ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) and urea (CO(NH2)2). These concentrated products may be diluted with water to form a concentrated liquid fertilizer (e.g. UAN). Deposits of potassium nitrate (NaNO3) (saltpeter) are also found the Atacama desert in Chile and was one of the original (1830) nitrogen rich inorganic fertilizers used. It is still mined for fertilizer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer
The nitrogenous fertilizer production is a very energy intensive industry, producing a variety of fertilizers and other nitrogen-compounds. Ammonia is the most important intermediate chemical compound, used as basis for almost all products. Fuel use is estimated at 268 PJ (excluding feedstocks) while 368 PJ natural gas is used as feedstock. Electricity consumption is estimated at 14 PJ. We estimate the energy intensity of ammonia manufacture at 39.3 GJ/tonne (including feedstocks, HHV) and 140 kWh/tonne, resulting in a specific primary energy consumption of 40.9 GJ/tonne (HHV), equivalent to 37.1 GJ/tonne (LHV). Excluding natural gas use for feedstocks the primary energy consumption is estimated at 16.7 GJ/tonne (LHV).
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/business/industry/industrial_LBNL-44314.pdf
(reference to "dry" natural gas)
US natural gas annual consumption, 2011: 24 trillion cubic feet
US natural gas reserves, 2010: 304.6 trillion cubic feed
13 years = 305/24
us natural gas consumption growth since 1980: 1.1%
us natural gas reserves growth since 1980: 0.7%
us natural gas consumption growth since 1998: 0.4%
us natural gas reserves growth since 1998: 4.7%
us natural gas consumption growth since 2005: 1.7%
us natural gas reserves growth since 2005: 8.0%
World natural gas annual consumption, 2011: 114 trillion cubic feet
World natural gas reserves, 2011: 6,675 trillion cubic feet
59 years = 6675/114
world consumption growth since 1980: 2.6%
world reserve annual growth since 1980: 3.1%
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