Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> > As you say, we've passed peak oil. The transition would be a
> > whole lot less
> > gruesome if we started to adjust now rather than when gasoline cost $10 a
> > gallon, but they pretend that we can just keep drilling.
> 
> I don't know who said that in this thread, but they were mistaken

Just because there is yet one more article to the contrary, it does not 
follow that the poster of the above is mistaken.  The article offered leaves 
out 
several important considerations.  For example, and I'm not predisposed to 
look 
these up right now, but the gist is:   In the heyday of oil it took 5% of the 
energy in the oil to recover it.  We are already now past 25%.  It takes a 
quarter of the energy in the oil we are taking out of the ground just to get 
it 
out of the ground and available for use.  All the blather about how much is 
in 
reserve and likely to be in reserve igonres that we are on a descending curve 
of how much energy it takes to get the oil.  Peak oil takes into account that 
we are rapidly headed for the time when it would take 100% of the energy in 
oil to mine it out of the ground.  Wouldn't matter how much there was, you're 
losing ground to get it.

As the article mentions, there's an unfounded optimism that we will somehow 
figure a way to get the oil without expending that much energy doing so.  The 
peaking of worldwide oil production is a real phenomenon, the hope that in 
the 
near future some technology will exist to extract oil with little or no 
energy 
is wishful thinking.

This is a bit like the treads on such things a solar energy.  There is just 
so much energy in a square foot of sunlight.  All the advanced technology in 
the world will not put more energy in there.  If you have solar cells that 
operate at 20% efficiency now, even if you managed to make an alchemists 
panel that 
was 100% efficient, you would only get 5 times the electricity.  Tales of 
experiments with panels that would be 1000 times as efficient are pure 
science 
fiction, you can't get more energy than there is.

Also like that are the tales everyone has heard about someone who invented a 
carburator that gets 200 miles to the gallon but the greedy oil companies 
bought up the rights and killed the project.  A well tuned car now can 
operate at 
60% efficiency and some up to 75% efficiency.  It wouldn't matter what kind 
of 
carburator you had on the car, there isn't enough energy in the gas to get 
more than another third to half as much mileage.

Peak Oil takes into account such stark realities as these as they relate to 
oil reserves.  If you developed a technology capable of recovering shale oil 
and sand oil and other irrecoverable sources, why would you need the oil in 
the 
first place.  Just use that as yet unknown energy source instead of it.

Petroleum is a unique phenomenon in human history, not just one step in an 
undending progression of energy availability.  Its like is not on the horizon 
and the high gas prices, heating fuel prices are powerful testimony to the 
onset 
of peak oil.  Unless of course one hides one's head and says, "It's all 
Bush's fault, yeah, that's the ticket!"