[Peakoil] James Kunstler puts the oil numbers in perspective

Tue Apr 5 01:42:51 UTC 2011

I've been dipping into Bjorn Lomborg's Sceptical Environmentalist, which
offers optimistic projections on just about all environmental matters.

Does anyone have a plausible critique of his position, especially in the
intervening years, which have shown food security and energy security to
be pressing issues?

Karin

> Bright and early every Monday morning, James Kunstler published his
> bulletin - basically a weekly report on US progress into The Long
> Emergency. Hope you all drop in to see it occasionally:
>
> http://kunstler.com/blog/
>
> This week he includes a few critical numbers on oil reserves, petroleum
> usage and also looks at the tar sands of Canada and the shale oil in the
> US in terms of their EROEI. But Kunstler is always good at putting the
> numbers into social, political and historical context.
>
> Read on!
> -----------------------------
> Keith Thomas
> www.evfit.com
> -----------------------------
> Blowing Green Smoke
>
> By James Howard Kunstler, on April 4, 2011
>
> "We also have Secretary Steven Chu, my Energy Secretary. Where is Steven?
> There he is over there." - President Obama at Georgetown U last week
>
>
>
>       Blame Steven Chu, then, because when it comes to America's energy
> predicament, the president has been woefully misinformed. Mr. Obama
> pawned off a roster of notions and proposals already product-tested
> in the public meme-o-sphere. Almost everyone of these ideas is
> inconsistent with reality, based on faulty premises, or represents
> some kind of magical thinking. What they have in common is that
> they're ideas the public wants to hear, whether they are truthful or
> not, because we don't want to change the way we live.
>
>      The central idea in Mr. Obama's speech is that we will reduce our oil
> imports by one-third in a decade. This is a gross distortion of
> reality.  The truth is that our oil imports will be reduced
> automatically, whether we like it or not. The process is already
> underway. The nations that export oil to us are using much more of
> their own oil even while their supplies have passed peak production
> and entered depletion. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and
> Mexico have some of the highest population growth-rates in the world.
> They sell gasoline to their own people for less than a dollar a
> gallon. At the same time China and India are driving more cars and
> importing a lot more of the world's declining supply. (China has
> perhaps the equivalent of a four-year supply of its own oil in the
> ground, and India has next-to-zero oil of its own).
>
>      One meme circulating around the Web these days is that the USA has
> the equivalent of "three Saudi Arabias" in the shale oil fields of
> North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. That is not true. A lot
> of this magical thinking focuses on the Bakken fields of Dakota.
> We're currently producing less than 400,000 barrels a day out of
> Bakken and the projected maximum ten years from now is around
> 800,000. We use 20 million barrels a day in the US running suburbia,
> Wal Mart, and the US military. By the way, Bakken shale oil requires
> extensive rock fracturing operations - "fracking" - which means a lot
> of horizontal drilling, which means a lot of steel pipe. It is not
> just a matter of sticking a steel straw in the ground like we did in
> Texas in 1932.
>
>     Note: much of the shale "oil" in other western states is not actually
> oil. It is kerogen, an organic precursor to oil, in effect organic
> polymers that have not been subjected to enough heat and pressure to
> turn into oil. If you want to turn it into oil, you have to cook it -
> which takes energy! That's after the mining operation to scoop it out
> of the ground. That takes energy too. Or, you can send machinery into
> the ground and cook it in place. That takes energy, too. We are not
> going to get oil out of there anytime soon - and perhaps never.
>
>      The "drill drill drill" gang is under the impression that North
> America has vast unexplored regions where oil is just begging to be
> discovered. This is not true. The New York Times reported after
> Obama's speech - in a disgracefully dumb story by Clifford Krauss -
> that the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Coast contain 3.8
> billion barrels of oil. Really? Hello! The US uses over 7 billion
> barrels of oil every year. Does the Arctic National Wildlife refuge
> contain between 4 and 11 billion barrels (US gov estimate)?  Great,
> that averages out to about a year or so of US supply. And I'm not
> even against drilling there, only against the idea that it represents
> a meaningful "solution" to our problem.
>
>      Meanwhile, the old standby Alaskan oil fields at Prudhoe Bay are
> depleting so remorselessly that there may not be enough flow in a
> year or so to move the oil through the famous pipeline.
>
>      How about Canada's tar sands? Well, first of all, they belong to
> Canada, not us, unless we want to change that - and that could be
> politically messy. The tar sands will never produce more than 3
> million barrels a day. The operations are already too huge, costly,
> and damaging to the northern watershed. Canada is our number one
> source of imported oil, but China would also like to buy Canadian
> oil. Are we planning to invoke the Monroe Doctrine to prevent Canada
> from selling its oil to parties outside the Western Hemisphere? That
> could be messy, too.
>
>      Mr. Obama returned to the popular theme of bio-fuels. Our initial
> venture into this area was the ethanol fiasco which, predictably,
> took more energy to make than it produced, and had disastrous effects
> (still does) on corn commodity prices - in effect stealing from the
> food supply in order to drive to the Wal Mart. The next venture will
> apparently be in algae. We'll discover (once again) that what works
> as a science project doesn't scale to run millions of cars.
>
>      Mr. Obama told the nation that we have a 100 year supply of natural
> gas. (The moronic Larry Kudlow of CNBC told his audience it was 300
> years). Neither of them knows what he is talking about (and evidently
> Energy Secretary Chu doesn't either). So far, proven reserves of
> shale gas amount to about a 4 to 6 year US supply at current rates,
> and total natural gas reserves - including conventional gas, the kind
> that doesn't require fracking - amounts to about a 12 year supply.
> The idea that we are going to ramp up an entire natural gas fueling
> system for America's tractor-trailer trucks is an absurdity.
>
>      Ditto the notion that we are going to electrify the US auto fleet.
>
>      Here's something to chew on: we run about 250 million cars in the
> USA. Let's say we ramped up an electric vehicle fleet of 10 million
> cars - which, by the way, is a purely hypothetical and wildly
> optimistic number. Do you think it might be a political problem if 10
> million lucky Americans get to drive electric cars while everybody
> else either pays through the nose for gasoline, or can't even afford
> to own a car anymore?
>
>      There are a few things you can state categorically about the US
> energy predicament and the national conversation we're having about
> it - including the leaders of that conversation in government,
> business, and the media. One is that we are blowing a lot of green
> smoke up our collective ass. None of these schemes is going to work
> as advertised. The disappointment over them will be massive and
> probably lead to awful political consequences.
>
>      Another is that we are ignoring the most obvious intelligent
> responses to this predicament, namely, shifting our focus to walkable
> communities and public transit, especially rebuilding the American
> passenger railroad system - without which, I assure you, we will be
> most regrettably screwed ten years from now. Mr. Obama had one
> throwaway line in his speech about public transit and nothing
> whatever about walkable neighborhoods.
>
>      The reason for this obvious idiocy is that it's all about the cars.
> That's all we care about in the USA, the cars. We can't get over the
> cars. We can't talk about anything except how we'll find magical new
> ways to run all the cars. This is a very tragic sort of stupidity and
> if we don't change our thinking about it, from the highest level on
> down, history is going to treat us very cruelly.
>
>      A special shout-out here to The New York Times, whose abysmal
> reporting on these issues, once again, is due to their reliance on a
> single source: the IHS-CERA group, Cambridge Energy Research
> Associates, the paid public relations auxiliary of the oil industry,
> led by that mendacious sack of shit Daniel Yergin, whore-in-chief.
>
>
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