[Pil-pc-oceania] Peak oil: critique and commentary on biofueld

[Terry Leahy]

Dear Permaculture Oceania,  

My feeling is that the person who wrote this has not really read the very thorough refutations of these common viewpoints.  For example, the oil sands of Canada cannot really be mined for oil except at a prohibitive cost.  It is not that "oil" as such will shortly run out - the problem is that the cost of oil will escalate through the roof causing all sorts of other knock on effects on economies.  I particularly like Heinberg's detailed analysis of these issues in "The Party's Over, Oil War and the Fate of Industrial Societies".  In terms of the likely effects a useful book is "Eating Oil" which compares the way a crisis of this kind was handled in North Korea and in Cuba.  

Terry

>>> RussGrayson <info at pacific-edge.info> Thursday, 8 May 2008 11:08 am >>>
SOURCE: The Independent (UK)

Scraping the barrel

The predictions of the 'peak oil' doomsday cult have been wrong in the past
- and they're wrong again now

Derek Brower

March 7, 2008 1:00 PM

There are good reasons why the world should wean itself from oil - but the
doomsday cult of peak oil isn't one of them.

The theory has been around for as long as people have been extracting oil.
It has been getting its predictions of the end wrong, repeatedly, for just
as long. It's hard to keep track, but the latest forecasts say we'll reach
the peak as early as 2010. Kenneth Deffeyes, the Princeton professor who is
a doyen of the movement, even says it happened in 2005.

Just because the predictions have been wrong before doesn't mean they'll be
wrong next time. And there is a grain of truth to peak oil theory. Oil is a
finite reserve, so the more we extract, the closer we come to exhausting the
resource.

The theory's proponents - a rag-bag of geologists, green activists,
Malthusians, and people who yearn for a return to some pre-industrial idyll
- are making noise again now because the price of oil is so high and western
nations are struggling to increase their production and replace their
reserves.

But those are spurious connections. Oil might be pricey by historical
measures, but it isn't by others. Compare, for example, the cost of a barrel
of crude with a barrel of coca-cola: $100 vs $204. Speculation, refinery
bottlenecks, the fall of the dollar, geopolitics, and rising costs of steel
and other materials used by companies to produce oil are driving the price.
Relentless demand from Asia is one of the few fundamentals that are playing
a role. Opec said after its meeting this week that the oil markets are
"well-supplied" - and the group has a point. In the US, crude stocks are
above five-year averages.

Worries about a peak in oil production, however, are not moving the oil
markets. I doubt Jeremy Leggett thinks they are, but
his article yesterday implicitly linked the peak oil theory with high oil
prices. It also claimed that a growing number of oil executives, like Total
boss Christophe de Margerie, now support the theory.

Not really. What worries executives like de Margerie isn't a geological
peak. Industry studies show remaining reserves to be literally trillions of
barrels greater than the figures offered by the peak oil theorists. They're
worried about getting access to the good stuff. Increasingly, it lies in
countries that don't much like western companies. De Margerie and other
executives are simply doing what they always do: putting pressure on
producer countries to open up. They are worried about politics, not geology.
As the Texan bumper sticker says: "Why is our oil under their sand?"

Meanwhile, expect the oil industry's cycle to repeat itself. The last time
the price broke record highs, in the early 1980s, the world went into
recession and the big western economies slashed their dependence on oil. The
result was an oil price slump that lasted 15 years and created a mirage of
abundance.

The market is doing its job again. Demand for oil is already starting to
come off. And high prices are encouraging more exploration for oil. Brazil
recently discovered a large new field and the majors are flocking to the one
big oil player where they are still truly welcome: the Canadian oil sands,
whose reserves are second only to Saudi Arabia's. And there are rumours that
Indonesia has found a truly enormous new offshore reserve. Alternative
energy is becoming more viable and governments are backing it like never
before.

All of that makes Opec worried - as it should be. Oil is on the way out. It
will be a long, gradual process and not the crash as some of the hysterical
scare stories of the peak oil movement suggest. Convincing peak oilers of
this is impossible, of course, because their theory is dogmatic: a circular
ideology backed up by stats from other believers. And many of them don't
brook much criticism of the methodology. But if oil production never rises
to the 115m barrels a day the International Energy Agency says we'll need by
2030, it won't be because we don't have it.

...................

SOURCE: The Independent

Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel

Even capitalists now admit the oil crisis is real. But their solutions
border on lunacy as they avoid the obvious answer

This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 12 2008 on p27 of
the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:09 on February 12
2008.

Now they might start sitting up. They wouldn't listen to the
environmentalists or even the geologists. Can governments ignore the
capitalists? A report published last week by Citibank, and so far unremarked
on by the media, proposes "genuine difficulties" in increasing the
production of crude oil, "particularly after 2012". Though 175 big drilling
projects will start in the next four years, "the fear remains that most of
this supply will be offset by high levels of decline". The oil industry has
scoffed at the notion that oil supplies might peak, but "recent evidence of
failed production growth would tend to shift the burden of proof on to the
producers", as they have been unable to respond to the massive rise in
prices. "Total global liquid hydrocarbon production has essentially
flatlined since mid 2005 at just north of 85m barrels per day."

The issue is complicated, as ever, by the refusal of the Opec cartel to
raise production. What has changed, Citibank says, is that the non-Opec
countries can no longer answer the price signal. Does this mean that oil
production in these nations has already peaked? If so, what do our
governments intend to do?

Nine months ago, I asked the British government to send me its assessments
of global oil supply. The results astonished me: there weren't any. Instead
it relied exclusively on one external source: a book published by the
International Energy Agency. The omission became stranger still when I read
this book and discovered that it was a crude polemic, dismissing those who
questioned future oil supplies as "doomsayers" without providing robust
evidence to support its conclusions. Though the members of Opec have a
powerful interest in exaggerating their reserves in order to boost their
quotas, the IEA relied on their own assessments of future supply.

Last week I tried again, and I received the same response: "The government
agrees with IEA analysis that global oil (and gas) reserves are sufficient
to sustain economic growth for the foreseeable future." Perhaps it hasn't
noticed that the IEA is now backtracking. The Financial Times says the
agency "has admitted that it has been paying insufficient attention to
supply bottlenecks as evidence mounts that oil is being discovered more
slowly than once expected ... natural decline rates for discovered fields
are a closely guarded secret in the oil industry, and the IEA is concerned
that the data it currently holds is not accurate." What if the data turns
out to be wrong? What if Opec's stated reserves are a pack of lies? What
contingency plans has the government made? Answer comes there none.

The European commission, by contrast, does have a plan, and it's a disaster.
It recognises that "the oil dependence of the transport sector ... is one of
the most serious problems of insecurity in energy supply that the EU faces".
Partly in order to diversify fuel supplies, partly to cut greenhouse gas
emissions, it has ordered the member states to ensure that by 2020 10% of
the petroleum our cars burn must be replaced with biofuels. This won't solve
peak oil, but it might at least put it into perspective by causing an even
bigger problem.

To be fair to the commission, it has now acknowledged that biofuels are not
a green panacea. Its draft directive rules that they shouldn't be produced
by destroying primary forest, ancient grasslands or wetlands, as this could
cause a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Nor should any biodiverse
ecosystem be damaged to grow biofuels.

It sounds good, but there are three problems. If biofuels can't be produced
in virgin habitats, they must be confined to existing agricultural land,
which means that every time we fill up the car we snatch food from people's
mouths. This, in turn, raises the price of food, which encourages farmers to
destroy pristine habitats - primary forests, ancient grasslands, wetlands
and the rest - in order to grow it. We can congratulate ourselves on
remaining morally pure, but the impacts are the same. There is no way out of
this: on a finite planet with tight food supplies, you either compete with
the hungry or clear new land.

The third problem is that the commission's methodology has just been blown
apart by two new papers. Published in Science magazine, they calculate the
total carbon costs of biofuel production. When land clearance (caused either
directly or by the displacement of food crops) is taken into account, all
the major biofuels cause a massive increase in emissions.

Even the most productive source - sugar cane grown in the scrubby savannahs
of central Brazil - creates a carbon debt which takes 17 years to repay. As
the major carbon reductions must be made now, the net effect of this crop is
to exacerbate climate change. The worst source - palm oil displacing
tropical rainforest growing in peat - invokes a carbon debt of some 840
years. Even when you produce ethanol from maize grown on "rested" arable
land (which in the EU is called set-aside and in the United States is called
conservation reserve), it takes 48 years to repay the carbon debt. The facts
have changed. Will the policy follow?

Many people believe there's a way of avoiding these problems: by making
biofuels not from the crops themselves but from crop wastes - if transport
fuel can be manufactured from straw or grass or wood chips, there are no
implications for land use, and no danger of spreading hunger. Until recently
I believed this myself.

Unfortunately most agricultural "waste" is nothing of the kind. It is the
organic material that maintains the soil's structure, nutrients and store of
carbon. A paper commissioned by the US government proposes that, to help
meet its biofuel targets, 75% of annual crop residues should be harvested.
According to a letter published in Science last year, removing crop residues
can increase the rate of soil erosion a hundredfold. Our addiction to the
car, in other words, could lead to peak soil as well as peak oil.

Removing crop wastes means replacing the nutrients they contain with
fertiliser, which causes further greenhouse gas emissions. A recent paper by
the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen suggests that emissions of nitrous oxide (a
greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful than CO2) from nitrogen fertilisers
wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce, even before you take the
changes in land use into account.

Growing special second-generation crops, such as trees or switchgrass,
doesn't solve the problem either: like other energy crops, they displace
both food production and carbon emissions. Growing switchgrass, one of the
new papers in Science shows, creates a carbon debt of 52 years. Some people
propose making second-generation fuels from grass harvested in natural
meadows or from municipal waste, but it's hard enough to produce them from
single feedstocks; far harder to manufacture them from a mixture. Apart from
used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel.

All these convoluted solutions are designed to avoid a simpler one: reducing
the consumption of transport fuel. But that requires the use of a different
commodity. Global supplies of political courage appear, unfortunately, to
have peaked some time ago.

monbiot.com

      This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 12 2008 on
p27 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:09 on
February 12 2008.




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