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Poate v-ati prins deja ca apogeul resurselor energetice neregenerabile nu e un scenariu de genul "virusul anului 2000" sau "cometa care loveste pamântul"
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Va rog sa va opriti o clipa, sa deschideti alt browser si sa cautati pe Google (sau orice altceva) cuvintele "Peak Oil" - Apogeul petrolului. Veti descoperii cu uimire ca vorbim de lucruri de netagaduit, stiinta si statistica. Veti descoperii ca oamenii cei mai ingrijorati (as zice chiar terifiati) sunt unii din cei mai respectati si experimentati geologisti, ingineri petrolisti, fizicieni si bancheri din lume. Pe unii din ei ii gasiti in expertii. Asta nu e gasca obisnuita din serialul "Sfârsitul lumii". Cei pe care nu-i veti descoperii acolo se numesc Dick Cheney si George Bush. Desi apartin acelei liste.
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Pe deasupra daca cititi stirile (nu cele de la TV) veti descoperii ca predictiile celor mai pesimisti dintre cei care discuta despre asta se adeveresc cu o rata alarmanta.
If we want nevertheless to maintain a little humanity to the life on Earth in the years after 2010, we must, as the geologist, Colin Campbell, suggests, invite the United Nations to agree today to an agreement, based on the objectives of allowing the poor countries to still import a little oil; preventing profiteering from the oil shortage; providing incen-tives for energy saving; and stimulating renewable energies.
To achieve these goals, the universal agreement will have to implement the following measures. Each State shall regulate the imports and exports of oil; no oil exporting country shall produce more oil than its annual Depletion Rate, such to be scientifically calculated; and each importing State shall reduce its oil imports to match World Depletion Rate
This necessary recognition of physical economic limits will confront the theories of classical economics and the in particular the policies of the United States, whose successive governments have never accepted any question regard-ing the viability of the “American way of life”.
All American military interventions since the first oil crisis of 1973-1974 can be attributed to the fear an inter-ruption in the supply of cheap oil. Furthermore it was the peak of American oil production in 1970, which made it possible for OPEC to take control. It led to this first shock, coinciding with the Yom Kuppur war. The West then tried to regain control, not by energy saving but by bringing in new oil fields of Alaska and the North Sea. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 triggered the second oil crisis, returning power to OPEC, while the Western economies paid for their oil dependence by moving into recession over the following years.
A casual meeting with a member of the International Energy Agency revealed that it is at work on the next Energy Outlook, and is desperate to find a way to show that peak oil cannot arise before 2030. A fore-taste of this was also publicly presented in the workshop of the Swiss Federal Energy Office (see Item 334). In short, the stratagem is to take the USGS Mean Undiscovered and Mean Reserve Growth combined with Reserve to Production Ratio to demonstrate that there is enough to support growth to 2030, the convenient end of the study period. It evades the implication that production would have to fall like a stone in 2031 to respect even those numbers. The EIA did much the same with its earlier scenarios by assuming a 2% growth to a midpoint peak followed by a 10% decline, that succeeded in delaying peak to 2037, notwith-standing that a global 10% decline offends the physics of the reservoir.
The significance of this casual encounter is the recognition that the IEA studies derive not from ignorance or incompetence, but deliberately policy, based on the fear that any realistic assessment would cause panic, as the member governments are not remotely prepared. A similar reading has also been reported by a for-mer member of the UK Department of Trade and Industry, who says that the peak and decline of the North Sea is accepted internally, but the Minister finds it politically expedient to ignore the issue. The government is already in enough difficulty over its Middle East policy and immigration issues without drawing attention to the desperate energy crisis that stares it in the face.
Conclusion
Today, oil provides 40% of traded energy, and energy not money drives the economy. Production is set to start declining within about ten years. Since Hydrocarbon Man will be virtually extinct by the end of the Century, it might be a good idea to start planning how to use less and bring in such substitutes as can be found. Given the importance of the subject, it is surprising that more serious work is not done to resolve the matter. The obstacles are primarily political, tolerating ambiguous definitions and lax reporting practices, as there are no particular technical challenges in estimating the size of an oilfield or in assessing the potential for new discovery.
Energy/Culture Transition
In a growth based economy such as ours, a 1-5% shortfall in oil supply will cause a recession. A 5-10% shortfall will cause a second Great Depression. The effects of a shortfall greater than 10-15% are almost too horrible to imagine.
what we can call the Energy/Cultural Transition (E/CT) can be seen as the dominant challenge of our times. The main characteristic of the E/CT is an inevitable and irreversible change
One measure which has been proposed as a physical representation of natural resource availability is the quantity of energy used to make an additional unit of a resource available to society
One of the most important aspects of energy is its "quality". Different kinds of fuel have different qualities. For example, coal contains more energy per pound than wood, which makes coal more efficient to store and transport than wood. Oil has a higher energy content per unit weight and burns at a higher temperature than coal; it is easier to transport, and can be used in internal combustion engines. A diesel locomotive uses only one-fifth the energy of a coal-powered steam engine to pull the same train. Oil's many advantages provide 1.3 to 2.45 times more economic value per kilocalorie than coal.
Oil is the most important form of energy we use, making up about 38 percent of the world energy supply. No other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractablility, transportability, versatility and cost. These are the qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source in the industrialized world in the middle of this century, and these qualities are as relevant today as they were then:
If one considers the last one hundred years of the U.S. experience, fuel use and economic output are highly correlated. An important measure of fuel efficiency is the ratio of energy use to the gross national product, E/GNP. The E/GNP ratio has fallen by about 42% since 1929. We find that the improvement in energy efficiency is due principally to three factors: (1) shifts to higher quality fuels such as petroleum and primary electricity; (2) shifts in energy use between households and other sectors; and (3) higher fuel prices. Energy quality is by far the dominant factor.
Once we pass the peak, oil production will decline by 1.5-3% per year. Oil demand, however, will continue to increase by 1.5-3% per year. This means that one year post-peak, we will experience a 3-6% shortfall in oil supply.
I'm sorry to say that describing Peak Oil in this fashion is not an exaggeration. As a March 2004 editorial in the L.A. Times explained:
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We won't "run out of oil"; a vast amount will still be flowing - just not quickly enough to satisfy demand. And as any economists can tell you, when supply falls behind demand, bad things happen.
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During the 1979 Iranian revolution, the last time oil production fell off significantly, world oil prices hit the modern equivalent of $80 a barrel. And that, keep in mind, was a temporary decline. If world oil production were to truly peak and begin a permanent decline, the effect would be staggering: Prices would not come back down. Any part of the global economy dependent on cheap energy - which is to say, pretty much everything these days - would be changed forever.
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And that's the good news. The term "peak" tends to suggest a nice, neat curve. But in the real world, the landing will not be soft. As we hit the peak, soaring prices -$70, $80, even $100 a barrel - will encourage oil companies and oil states to scour the planet for oil. For a time, they will succeed, finding enough crude to keep production flat, thus stretching out the peak into a kind of plateau and perhaps temporarily easing fears. But in reality, this manic, post-peak production will deplete remaining reserves all the more quickly, thus ensuring that the eventual decline is far steeper and more sudden. As one US government geologist put it to me recently, "the edge of a plateau looks like a cliff."
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As production falls off this cliff, prices won't simply increase; they will fly. If our oil dependence hasn't lessened drastically by then, the global economy is likely to slip into a recession so severe that the Great Depression will look like a dress rehearsal. Oil will cease to be viable as a fuel. Political reaction will be desperate. Competition for remaining oil supplies would intensify, potentially leading to a new kind of political conflict: energy wars.
None of the alternatives to oil can even come close to delivering net energy the way oil can.
With all due respect to any environmentalists reading this, your dreams of a society powered by renewable energy are based more in myth and fantasy than science and reality. It is physically and economically impossible for renewable energy to replace oil.
Oil has had an Energy Profit Ratio as high as 60 to 1. This means it takes one unit of energy to produce 60 units
None of the alternatives have EPR's that even approach that of oil. Some of the alternatives, such as Hydrogen and Biodiesal, are energy losers - they require more energy to produce than they carry.
Furthermore, almost every advocate of alternative energy fails to realize two absolutely key points:
1. It takes a tremendous amount of oil to build alternatives to oil such as solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. The construction of an average solar panel system, for instance, consumes about as much energy as the construction of a brand new SUV.
2. It would take even more oil to retrofit our multi-billion dollar, fossil fuel based infrastructure to run on these alternative sources of energy.
Even in the best-case scenario, we will have to accept a drastically reduced
standard of living. None of the alternatives can supply us with enough energy
to maintain even a modest fraction of our current consumption levels. To
survive, we will have to radically change the way we get our food, the way
we get to work, what we do for work, the homes we live in, how we plan our
families and what we do for recreation. Put simply, a transition to these
alternatives will require a complete overhaul of every aspect of modern
industrial society. Unfortunately, industrial societies such as ours do
not undertake radical changes voluntarily.