03 « March « 2014 « Olduvaiblog: Musings on the coming collapse

In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.

The modern city has been shaped by the availability of cheap oil and resources, and plentiful credit. Massive resource and energy flows have been used to build skyscrapers, heat and cool buildings, move and treat water, feed people, and move them and their goods around.

This expansion of cities involved the stupendous use of energy. Tom Murphy, a physics professor, calculates that U.S. energy use since 1650, including wood, biomass, fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, etc, has grown at a steady 2.9 percent. Those 360 years of more-or-less steady growth help explain why most governments and industries assume that this growth trend will continue as it has for centuries.

But will it? 10,000 years ago, a hunter-gatherer needed about 5,000 kcal per day to get by. A New Yorker today, once all the systems, networks and gadgets of modern life are factored in, needs about 300,000 kilocalories a day That’s a difference in energy needed for survival, between simple and complex lives, of 60 times – and rising. Does that sound like a resilient trend?

If you have a job, and live in a city, the signals of change be hard to see. City centers bustle, restaurants are full, and shop windows sparkle. But, like ghost images on the television, other realities impinge: Eerily empty railway stations; new-built malls that never open; well-dressed people at soup kitchens. These small signs are evidence of a system under extreme stress.

The world is not in danger of running completely out of oil. A lot of oil and gas remain in the ground and under the sea. But those reserves cannot drive growth with the same gusto as before. Today’s thermo-industrial economy grew using oil that, if it did not literally gush out of the ground, was easily extracted using oil-powered machines. In 1930, for the investment of one barrel of oil in extraction efforts, 100 barrels of surplus or net energy were obtained for economic use. Since then, that happy ratio has declined ten-fold or more.

The calamitous decline in net energy is one reason renewables are not the solution. Green energy strategies suffer from an existential flaw: They take ‘global energy needs’ as a given, calculate the quantity of renewable energy sources needed to meet them – and then ignore the fact that it takes energy to obtain energy. In Spain, for example, the Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROI) of their huge solar photovoltaic intallations is a very low 2.45 despite that country’s ideal sunny climate.

Our capacity to think clearly about energy is further handicapped by driving blind. In most economic activities, the energy that you can measure – such as the electricity used by buildings, or in an industrial process – is only one part of the picture. A new technique called Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) estimates the many energy uses, that businesses rely on, that are hidden. Phil Henshaw, who developed SEA, describes as “dark energy” the four fifths of actual energy useage that conventional metrics fail to count.

Eighty percent at five percent

When pressed, technical experts I have spoken to tell me that for our world to be ‘sustainable’ it needs to endure a ‘factor 20 reduction’ in its energy and resource metabolism – to five percent of present levels. At first I believed, doomily, that Factor 20 was beyond reach. Then, by looking outside the industrial world’s tent, I realised that for eighty per cent of the world’s population, five per cent energy is their lived reality today – and it does not always correspond to a worse life.

Take as an example, healthcare. In Cuba, where food, petrol and oil have been scarce for of 50 years as a consequence of economic blockades, its citizens achieve the same level of health for only five per cent of the health care expenditure of Americans. In Cuba’s five percent system, health and wellbeing are the properties of social ecosystems in which relationships between people in a real-world local context are mutually supportive. Advanced medical treatments are beyond most people’s reach – but they do not suffer worse health outcomes.

Another example of five per cent systems that sustain life is food. In the industrial world, the ratio of energy inputs to the food system, relative to calories ingested, is 12:1. In cities, up to 40 percent of their ecological impact can be attributed to their food and water systems – the transportation, packaging, storage, preparation and disposal of the things we eat and drink .

In poor communities, where food is grown and eaten on the spot, the ratio is closer to 1:1.

My favourite five percent example – a recent one – concerns urban freight. In modern cities, enormous amounts of energy are wasted shipping objects from place to place. An example from The Netherlands: Of the 1,900 vans and trucks that enter the city of Breda (pop: 320,000) each day, less than ten percent of the cargo being delivered really needs to be delivered in a van or truck; 40 percent of van-based deliveries involve just one package. An EU-funded project called CycleLogistics calculates that 50 percent of all parcels delivered in EU cities could be delivered by cargo bike.

According to ExtraEnergy’s tests over several years, an average pedelec uses an average of 1kWh per 100km in electricity. Once all system costs are included, a cargo cycle can be up to 98 percent cheaper per km than four-wheeled, motorised alternatives. Some e-bikers reckon that electric bikes can have a smaller environmental footprint even than pedal-only bicycles when the energy costs of the food needed to power the rider are added.

Ousted Ukraine President Yanukovich Has Asked Putin To Use Military Force In Ukraine | Zero Hedge

March 3, 2014 7:29 pm / Leave a comment

Ousted Ukraine President Yanukovich Has Asked Putin To Use Military Force In Ukraine | Zero Hedge.

The headlines are getting hot and heavy now. Just out from Bloomberg:

UKRAINE CRISIS ‘BREEDING VERY SERIOUS RISKS FOR RUSSIA’:CHURKIN
RADICAL EXTREMISTS TRYING TO TAKE CONTROL IN UKRAINE: CHURKIN

And Reuters with the punchline from Reuters:

RUSSIAN U.N. ENVOY CHURKIN SAYS UKRAINE’S OUSTED PRESIDENT YANUKOVICH HAS SENT LETTER TO PUTIN ASKING HIM TO USE RUSSIAN MILITARY FORCE IN UKRAINE

What will Putin do if he still believes, as he has said, Yanukl to be the proper president of the Ukraine?

Ousted Ukraine President Yanukovich Has Asked Putin To Use Military Force In Ukraine | Zero Hedge

March 3, 2014 7:29 pm / Leave a comment

Ousted Ukraine President Yanukovich Has Asked Putin To Use Military Force In Ukraine | Zero Hedge.

The headlines are getting hot and heavy now. Just out from Bloomberg:

UKRAINE CRISIS ‘BREEDING VERY SERIOUS RISKS FOR RUSSIA’:CHURKIN
RADICAL EXTREMISTS TRYING TO TAKE CONTROL IN UKRAINE: CHURKIN

And Reuters with the punchline from Reuters:

RUSSIAN U.N. ENVOY CHURKIN SAYS UKRAINE’S OUSTED PRESIDENT YANUKOVICH HAS SENT LETTER TO PUTIN ASKING HIM TO USE RUSSIAN MILITARY FORCE IN UKRAINE

What will Putin do if he still believes, as he has said, Yanukl to be the proper president of the Ukraine?

Checking In On Peak Oil – Chapelboro.com

March 3, 2014 7:26 pm / Leave a comment

Checking In On Peak Oil – Chapelboro.com.

By Jeff DannerJeff has worked in both the chemical and biotech industries and is the veteran of thousands of science debates at cocktail parties and holiday dinners across the nation. In his Common Science blog, Jeff aims to make technological and scientific concepts accessible to all.

Posted March 3, 2014 at 9:23 am

In last week’s column, The Case of the Missing Propane, I explained how the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale oil deposits since 2008 has led to a 30% increase in the production of crude petroleum in the United States. While that statistic makes for snappy headlines, it is not particularly meaningful to the overall world oil supply or the phenomenon known as Peak Oil.

If you are not familiar with Peak Oil, I published a column in June of 2011 called Peak Oil in Five Paragraphs or Less. Here are the key points:

• Peak Oil refers to the time at which we reach the global maximum rate of oil production, which is followed by decades of declining rates of production.
• Due to oil’s pivotal role as a transportation fuel and (as I explained in Everything Comes from Oil) the key raw material for most consumer goods, the global economy can only grow if oil supply continues to grow.
• In order to keep producing more and more oil, you must keep discovering more and more and more. This is not possible. Eventually you are exhausting oil fields at a rate faster than the new ones can be discovered.
• The global peak for conventional oil sources occurred in approximately 2005, requiring us to turn to unconventional sources such as shale oil and oil sands. These sources are expensive to exploit and will not last for very long.
• The economic disruptions cause by the impending oil supply constraints will be very challenging for the global community.

The graph below was the key feature of Peak Oil in Five Paragraphs or Less. This graph is pivotal to understanding both the history and economics of the last century as well as the challenges coming in the next; everyone should be familiar with it. Its peaks and valleys tell stories as varied and interesting as the growth of suburbia in the U.S. and the role of Saudi Arabia in the post World War II era. But I never see this graph in the papers. It’s not hard to understand. As you can see from the bars, the peak year for global oil discovery occurred in 1965, the year before I was born, and has been generally declining ever since. Due to extraordinary efforts by the oil companies, the rate of production has yet to start declining, but as those old fields continue to be exhausted, it will.

Beginning in 2007, you see a small, but temporary, increase in “discoveries” which corresponds to shale oils such as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. I put discoveries in quotations because shale oil deposits have been known about for decades but were simply not counted as petroleum reserves due to their low quality. The oil sands in Alberta, for which the Keystone XL pipeline is intended, fall into this same low-grade category.

Before I show you some additional graphs (I love graphs), we need a brief aside on definitions and sources. The data I use below is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and is, therefore, reliable for past data. Different sources define “oil” differently, which can cause confusion. Some, such as this column, restrict the definition of oil to crude petroleum – think gushers from old movies. Other sources add in liquids that are collected during natural gas refining – we discussed those last week – as well as biofuels, resulting in larger totals.

The graph below shows U.S. crude petroleum production in millions of barrels a day since 1980. From 1980 through 2008, there was a steady decline from 9 million to 5 million barrels a day. In 2008, fracking of shale oil began in earnest, which has increased U.S. petroleum production from a low of 5 million to 6.6 million barrels a day, an increase of 30%.

Extracting petroleum from shale formations is an expensive business. After you go through all the effort and expense to drill downward and then horizontally, and break up the rock below with high pressure fluids (fracking), the production from the well falls off by an average of 65% during the first year. Therefore, in order to keep production going, you’ve got to keep drilling and drilling and drilling. In 2011, 16,000 fracking wells were drilled in the U.S. In 2012, it was 19,000.

While doing the research for this column, I decided to have a look at the Bakken Shale Field formation, which spans the North Dakota-Montana border just south of Canada, on Google Earth. I could not get a nice looking picture for you, but it is somewhat fascinating to see. If you use the satellite map feature, follow the existing rural roads, then look for secondary dirt roads which lead to dirt rectangles. Each rectangle will contain a well with a pump on top, four tanks for collecting the oil, and some other equipment. You generally will not find any people or vehicles, because these units run automatically. As you pan around, you can find them by the hundreds.

The increase in petroleum production in the U.S. has not provided any meaningful relief from high gasoline prices, which remain steadfastly above $3.00 per gallon. There are two main reasons for this: petroleum is a global commodity (more on that below) and fracking is an expensive technique. Consider that in 2004, oil sold for about $40 per barrel. The break-even price for a barrel of oil produced from fracking is $80.

The graph below shows world crude petroleum production along with the same data I showed for the U.S. in the previous graph. As you can see, petroleum production in the U.S. is only a small fraction of the global total. Therefore, the 30% increase in U.S. production has only increased the global supply by two percent. A two percent increase in global supply, especially an expensive supply, is not sufficient to result in a reduction in U.S. fuel prices.

So where does this leave us? Overall global supply of petroleum is being maintained near 76 million barrels a day based on the extraordinary efforts to extract unconventional oils. Sometime between now and 2025, the supply will begin to decline and cause social and economic dislocations. As we continue to exploit the unconventional sources during this time, carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will grow from 400 to 450 parts per million, causing even more dramatic changes in our weather patterns and challenging our ability produce enough food for eight billion people. Dealing with these parallel challenges will be the defining features of the 21 century.

Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER

March 3, 2014 3:45 pm / Leave a comment

Let’s You and Him Fight | KUNSTLER.

So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.

The phones at the White House and the congressional offices ought to be ringing off the hook with angry US citizens objecting to the posturing of our elected officials. There ought to be crowds with bobbing placards in Farragut Square reminding the occupant of 1400 Pennsylvania Avenue how ridiculous this makes us look.

The saber-rattlers at The New York Times were sounding like the promoters of a World Wrestling Federation stunt Monday morning when they said in a Page One story:

“The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin?”

Are they out of their chicken-hawk minds over there? It sounds like a ploy out of the old Eric Berne playbook: Let’s You and Him Fight. What the USA and its European factotums ought to do is mind their own business and stop issuing idle threats. They set the scene for the Ukrainian melt-down by trying to tilt the government their way, financing a pro-Euroland revolt, only to see their sponsored proxy dissidents give way to a claque of armed neo-Nazis, whose first official act was to outlaw the use of the Russian language in a country with millions of long-established Russian-speakers. This is apart, of course, from the fact Ukraine had been until very recently a province of Russia’s former Soviet empire.

Secretary of State John Kerry — a haircut in search of a brain — is winging to Kiev tomorrow to pretend that the USA has a direct interest in what happens there. Since US behavior is so patently hypocritical, it raises the pretty basic question: what are our motives? I don’t think they amount to anything more than international grandstanding — based on the delusion that we have the power and the right to control everything on the planet, which is based, in turn, on our current mood of extreme insecurity as our own ongoing spate of bad choices sets the table for a banquet of consequences.

America can’t even manage its own affairs. We ignore our own gathering energy crisis, telling ourselves the fairy tale that shale oil will allow us to keep driving to WalMart forever. We paper over all of our financial degeneracy and wink at financial criminals. Our infrastructure is falling apart. We’re constructing an edifice of surveillance and social control that would make the late Dr. Joseph Goebbels turn green in his grave with envy while we squander our dwindling political capital on stupid gender confusion battles.

The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia, to discourage neo-Nazi activity in their back-yard, and most of all to try to stabilize a region that has little history and experience with independence. They also have to contend with the bankruptcy of Ukraine, which may be the principal cause of its current crack-up. Ukraine is deep in hock to Russia, but also to a network of Western banks, and it remains to be seen whether the failure of these linked obligations will lead to contagion throughout the global financial system. It only takes one additional falling snowflake to push a snow-field into criticality.

Welcome to the era of failed states. We’ve already seen plenty of action around the world and we’re going to see more as resource and capital scarcities drive down standards of living and lower the trust horizon. The world is not going in the direction that Tom Friedman and the globalists thought. Anything organized at the giant scale is now in trouble, nation-states in particular. The USA is not immune to this trend, whatever we imagine about ourselves for now.