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VK2AAB > FUEL 22.02.12 13:33l 121 Lines 6952 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 5296_VK2AAB
Read: DK3UZ GUEST
Subj: Energy Debates Need Honesty
Path: DB0FHN<DB0MRW<DB0ERF<OK0NAG<OK0PPL<DB0RES<ON0AR<UA6ADV<GB7CIP<VK2AAB
Sent: 120221/2311Z @:VK2AAB.#SYD.NSW.AUS.OC #:5296 [SYDNEY] $:5296_VK2AAB
From: VK2AAB@VK2AAB.#SYD.NSW.AUS.OC
To : FUEL@WW
The author is not a politician, or an oil field expert but just a thinker.
We need a few more of these.
Barry VK2AAB
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Energy Debates Need Imagination, Public Interest and Honesty
By Sam Powrie
I maybe be drawing too long a bow with this allusion (I was initially trained
as in anthropology), but readers may recall that cargo cults sprang up in the
Pacific during and immediately after WW2 when technologically naive communities
experienced a rapid influx of industrial goods, including cans of petrol and
kero, often dropped from the air or unloaded from planes and ships.
This amazing influx of refined goods, technologies and highly energetic fuels
set up all sorts of new and often unmanageable forces in the communities
concerned. People could suddenly eat more, work less, indulge themselves,
engage in new behaviors, break down taboos and so on, frequently with no idea
(or even concept) as to where these new materials came from, who supplied them,
at what cost, who or what made them etc. They were essentially a manifestation
of magical power.
As a result the 'big men' - those at the apex of traditional Pacific societies
saw an opportunity. Anxious to retain their influence (and probably also keen
to maintain some cultural continuity) such individuals used the magical
qualities of these goods as well as their emergence from the sky or from over
the horizon to build a sense of dependency and supplicant status amongst their
communities. You get the picture?
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Whole systems of belief and 'worship' grew up around the hope and prospect of a
continued flow of these 'high energy' materials and commodities. All of it
naturally focused on consumption, resource largesse and maintenance of the new
status quo (the new 'horn of plenty') with little thought to possible future
realities, apart from the need to stay connected to the magic. The central
message from those at the heart of these cults was 'if you want more, then you
need to believe in what I say and pray harder!' Sound familiar?
This is the sort of culture that I reckon most of use have been born into and
inherited. An ignorant, energy-centric consumption-based cult of hope and blind
acceptance of the horn of plenty. It doesnt really matter whether the tenets of
your faith in the future involve oil, gas, uranium or unobtanium or whether you
even think about such issues at all the principle remains the same. A blind (or
at best incoherent) belief that technology and economics the twin vehicles
supplying us with the symbols of our wealth will continue to bring new stuff
from over the horizon for ever.
This is how I think most of us necessarily view our current fuels of choice -
oil and gas. Most of us simply cannot directly experience or even conceive of
where these substances come from, how they are formed or 'made', what the
spatial or time scales and quantities involved are, the significance of their
rates of production, consumption and decline and the significance of key
relativities such as Energy Return on Investment (EROI) and their place in the
production equation. Oil reservoirs are just too remote from our familiar
biosphere and the temporal and quantitative scales of their formation and use
are just too large and complex. As is the significance of their inevitable
depletion for things we take for granted.
We often focus on what it may take to create new energy paradigms so called
renewable or nuclear futures but what about asking what it might take for us to
simply keep the foundations of our current societies intact? Do we ever ask
ourselves such questions? How we ensure the simple maintenance of our vast and
complex society, our built infrastructure, our technology, our institutions of
learning, production, government and trade and our way of life just never seems
to enter our heads. Maybe its all just too, too complex to appreciate. In
theory that is. Like most things, it is all likely to become much clearer in
practice if things start to unravel a bit!
The scale of thought involved also seems to make it very difficult for many of
us to appreciate what a proper analysis of peak oil and gas requires in terms
of imagination, adherence to the public interest and intellectual honesty.
Which is probably why, when faced with factual arguments, so many detractors of
any Peak Oil (PO) discussion descend into negative personal comment. It's pure
defensive reaction against something they simply can't stand to think about!
So I reckon that the PO argument - to the extent that any 'argument' is still
worth having at this late stage of the game - needs to be conducted
differently. We need to start with Hubberts depletion curve. The price
mechanism (the 'pray harder' bit) does indeed need to be acknowledged as a
'magical' force able to change the shape of the curve, flattening it out and
creating the current six-year old production plateau. But it surely must have
its limits.
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Peak Oil is a geological and engineering reality not just a matter of
economics. Its' about the realities of production, not the elastic definition
of what is and is not an economically defined reserve. At what point does
production become inelastic? Those calling for attention to oil depletion need
to more adequately explain both the factual limits of this capacity to change
the shape of the depletion curve and what this shape-changing may or may not
mean for the total area under the curve (which represents what can actually be
produced!)
In other words, I just want to see a more logical argument and discussion. Can
it, for instance, be logically argued that the price mechanism will make the
total oil-in-ground resource accessible and increase the quantity we can
convert from 'resource' status to producible 'reserves'? Can this occur
indefinitely?
Or does the production equation operate within definable limits? Does the price
mechanism simply allow us to use what is producible at a faster rate without
actually increasing reserves as such? What are those limits? Are they
determined by engineering or geological issues or by affordability - or by
both? What are the real facts that govern 'affordability - in both financial
and energetic terms. At what energy return does the oil industry give up and
invest in fish farming and bicycles instead?
And finally, what are likely to be the geopolitical and oil-to-market realities
in an oil constrained world? The 'free market', taken as a given by believers
in the invisible hand, seems likely to turn out to be just another fizzer, an
expression of the 'cargo cult magic' that I reckon will evaporate at the first
real sniff of a market shortage. At what point (for instance) will the Saudis
tell us free marketeers to all 'get fracked' and turn instead to regional
trading alliances with neighbors who have more water and maybe some nuclear
power to spare?
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