Jeff Rubin: Oil and the End of Globalization

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7095

by pif • 14 years ago

43 45 14 years ago

tocomment2• 14 years ago

Isn't his argument contradicted by cheap natural gas? I would think energy is energy, why is the oil form of energy so important?

I do wonder why we're not switching from oil to natural gas a lot faster though.

VMG• 14 years ago

That's what this article says: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/90818--jeff-rubin-ge...

It also says:

> Two hundred and twenty five bucks. In April 2008, Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, predicted a barrel of oil would cost $225 by 2012. With oil at $118, it was a controversial call.

pingswept• 14 years ago

For reference, oil is at $113 per barrel today (August 9, 2012).

blindhippo2• 14 years ago

Trouble with natural gas... people are almost as terrified of frac'ing, and shale gas as they are of the evil "tar sands". That said, the rest of the world is investing heavily in Canadian natural gas - it's one of the primary motivators behind the current national debate (in Canada) over pipelines out of Alberta.

Can a large cargo ship be run using only liquid natural gas? Can we power generators using just natural gas?

I'm very curious about the limits of natural gas as a power source.

debacle• 14 years ago

The only real limit is compression. Many public service vehicles locally are switching over to natural gas.

grammaton7• 14 years ago

One limit as far as production is concerned is the availability of water. Natural gas production in the United States has declined over the last several months due to drought triggered water shortages. As it turns out showing up and proposing to dump a large amount of the local water supply down a hole in the ground in the middle of the drought is not finding many takers.

patio11• 14 years ago

I do wonder why we're not switching from oil to natural gas a lot faster though.

Short version: The market works.

Slightly less short version: You would switch to natural gas if natural gas achieved the same goals at oil at enough of a lower cost to make it worth the switching costs. Part of the cost of oil is based on people's projections of the price of oil in the future; if one expects oil to be much more dear in the future than it is now, one should either buy oil and consume it now or buy oil and sell it later. Buying oil today drives up the price of oiil.

One plausible reason one could think that oil would be more expensive in the future is if one thinks demand will outstrip supply. If one believes the future will hold an acceptable substitute for oil, one will be less likely to believe that future demand will exceed supply, and as a result one will believe the future price for oil will decline relative to today. This causes one to sell oil, propagating the price fall in the oil-demand-has-fallen future into the oil-demand-has-not-fallen-yet today. Which, at the margin, slightly delays "the future."

Or, to put it another way: the credible announcement that we're ten years away from totally solving fossil fuels would cause the present price of all of them to crater.

grammaton7• 14 years ago

"why is the oil form of energy so important"

Because it meets several requirements for an economy of global scale, not the least of which are extremely high energy density and ease of transport.

"I do wonder why we're not switching from oil to natural gas a lot faster though."

A combination of market forces and the fact that our entire infrastructure is geared towards petroleum - not the sort of thing you can replace with any ease or quickness.

euroclydon• 14 years ago

I don't know about his assertion that suburban sprawl will revert to farm land. That would be quite the undertaking. I've had a garden in my front yard since 2008. I've learned a lot over four years about how to grow vegetables. I would hope that we could take the common areas in these sprawling suburban neighborhoods and convert much of it into community run gardens, chicken coops and pig farms. That would make much more sense to me.

Also,

>What is peak oil going to do to population carrying capacity?

>I've heard mass food production is very dependent on synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas. How long before peak natural gas affects food production capacity?

>How big of a mess will the grid become when we have a bunch of electric cars on the roads?

>Without a substitute for oil-powered automobiles, just how much higher will the unemployment rate go, and how much civil unrest will that cause?

maxerickson3• 14 years ago

Given that agricultural land use in the U.S. is ~50% and urban areas are around 3% or 4%, some big disruption would probably result in far more abandonment than it would conversion.

anovikov• 14 years ago

Energy density per unit of weight of natural gas is in fact about 15% higher than the gasoline. The problem is compression, but not a big problem really, just about any car can be switched to use natural gas aftermarket, with some loss of engine power, but improvement in engine life span btw.

Overally, i feel these concerns of 'peakers' are nonsense, the free market will help switching for other sources of energy, and science and technology already brought us to the point where it is possible, it's all about scaling now.

chimi• 14 years ago

Are the physical capacities of space and time capable of getting us to scale in these technologies? Only so much energy comes from the sun per square foot. Batteries can only store so much of that. There are only so many tons of required metals on the planet to create all the infrastructure, solar panels and electric motors we will need?

I don't know yet for sure if it's possible to maintain our current quality of life given the resources we have at our earthly disposal.

Retric3• 14 years ago

The long term solution to electric cars is electrified highways not better battery's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Irisbus_Cristalis_ETB18_C1... Also, we use ~474 exajoules of energy per year, the sun provides ~3,850,000 exajules. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_energy Collecting 1% of that energy could easily support a western style lifestyle for 10 billion people.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

We require multiple worlds of resources for the human population to live at what we presently deem a good quality of life. For some reason we assume this means collapsing our living standards down to the third world. More reasonable, I believe, is acknowledging that there are an infinite supply of worlds.

pif4• 14 years ago

> the free market will help switching for other sources of energy

The question is: which ones?

grammaton7• 14 years ago

Indeed. The only one that has a mild prayer is nuclear, and even that has a number of serious problems.

einhverfr2• 14 years ago

I see peak oil differently. Peak oil/energy really is meaningless as an absolute. The only thing that really can matter is peak supply relative to demand, because this is what forces prices up and market changes. Oil hit this peak decades ago and is continuing to crunch slowly. Coal is likely to hit this peak soon, primarily because the cost of extraction is going up compared to yields. This means relative shrinking in supply regardless of what is in the ground.

What this means to me is that energy prices, which have been supply constrained since the mid-1970's are going to continue to go up by fits and starts, and occasionally go down but it's a ratchet overall. This does have huge ramifications all across the economy. It won't be a drastic end like many of the peakers predict but a very slow crunch.

In other words, the current economic troubles will continue by fits and starts more or less since they have since oil stopped being a demand-constrained commodity. I think you can trace most of the economic problems in recent decades to instability and supply constraints regarding energy. This has also helped fraud along, as in the case of Enron.

The more we can do without oil, the more we can do. But energy return on investment is an important problem to solve and it isn't clear we have sufficient solutions available.

grammaton7• 14 years ago

Your definition of Peak Oil is not the accepted definition. Peak Oil literally refers to the production curve of a single - or set of - oil fields, and the point at which their production is maximized, and then declines sharply thereafter. Supply and demand are secondary considerations until demand destruction is so far gone that no one wants oil anymore. Until then, the questions are, have we arrived at the peak yet, and if so, how fast do we end up falling down the decline curve?

grammaton7• 14 years ago

From BP Oil:

"World proved natural gas reserves at end-2011 were sufficient to meet 63.6 years of production"

That's at current rates. If we were to switch to an exclusively natural gas infrastructure, this number would of course drop sharply. Natural gas is an appealing alternative, but there just isn't enough of it. And before anyone whips out the old "they'll just find more" canard - not really. The primary reserves of natural gas we're tapping now have been known about for a long, long time, and there are few new discoveries in the pipeline. A similar situation exists with Petroleum.

JumpCrisscross2• 14 years ago

"Only half a decade ago it looked as though the world might have only 50 or 60 years-worth of gas. Now shale and other unconventional as well as new conventional gas finds have increased that period to 200 years or more, by some estimates."

http://www.economist.com/node/21558432

hythloday• 14 years ago

It's worth pointing out that a "reserve" is fuel that is economic to extract. Even without technology improving, a simple hike in the price of fuel raises the reserves of it.

mdasen• 14 years ago

I think one of the issues with the thesis that oil prices will lead to a drop in globalization is that it's actually quite fuel-efficient to ship goods. Grabbing fast stats from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportati...), we see that it takes 246kJ to transport 1 tonne (2,204.6 pounds) 1km by freight rail in the United States. By contrast, a car carrying a single person takes 3,594kJ to transport that person 1km. Also, I think ocean-borne freight is even more favorable than rail, but I would assume that we would also have the option of creating nuclear-powered ocean-borne freight transportation given that we do this today for military vessels.

Freight has the advantage that it often doesn't care if it arrives 6 hours late or has to wait around a bunch. That means that we can hit maximal loads nicely. Businesses also tend to pre-plan (at least the ones that do well) so that they can take advantages of the efficiencies offered by going slower.

Passenger transportation just isn't as efficient and would seem to be under a greater squeeze. Even if you go by Amtrak's rail service, to transport a tonne of humans (assuming the average North American body weight of 80.7kg) would use 80x as much fuel as transporting a tonne of freight.

Getting back to freight, a lot of the world's goods are transported by freight truck over land. Freight trucks use 2,426kJ per tonne-kilometer. So, something coming from China over water to the Western US would use considerably less fuel than something from New York trying to get to the Western US. It's under 8,000mi from China to SF and (as the crow flys) 2,500mi from New York to SF. If water-borne transit is 10x more efficient, goods from China still have a fuel advantage over freight truck.

If anything, we'd see the end of freight trucks before we saw the end of globalization. Something coming from China to the Western US and then onto New York by rail would likely use less fuel than something coming from the Western US to New York by fright truck.

I guess I just see freight trucking and passenger trips ending considerably sooner than the water-borne and rail transit that would enable globalization to continue.

grammaton7• 14 years ago

"I think one of the issues with the thesis that oil prices will lead to a drop in globalization is that it's actually quite fuel-efficient to ship goods."

Manufacturing them, on the other hand....

DrJ• 14 years ago

That would be a moot point, unless we are considering cost to setup the manufacturing infrastructure. Someone is going to have to make it.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

... will have to be done in places with relatively cheap energy if oil runs out. Solar in deserts, geothermal in Iceland, hydroelectric in many places.

mindslight• 14 years ago

Taking your idea further, we'd expect mass shipping to continue as manufacturing will be much cheaper in countries that aren't so hamstrung about nuclear energy.

chojeen• 14 years ago

"Also, I think ocean-borne freight is even more favorable than rail, but I would assume that we would also have the option of creating nuclear-powered ocean-borne freight transportation given that we do this today for military vessels."

I sincerely doubt that the US government would permit nuclear-powered civilian vessels to be constructed at all, much less allow them to travel freely in international waters.

astrodust• 14 years ago

Well, the NS Savannah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS_Savannah) was a nuclear powered civilian vessel, the first and perhaps last of its kind.

There are also a number of nuclear-powered icebreakers but most of these are non-military Russian vessels that are used for civilian tours of the arctic.

maxerickson3• 14 years ago

Given a desperate enough energy situation, it would be simple enough to operate a government or quasi-government fleet of such ships.

pif4• 14 years ago

> Something coming from China to the Western US and then onto New York by rail would likely use less fuel than something coming from the Western US to New York by fright truck.

Fine, but it still would use more fuel than something coming from, as an example, Philadelphia to new York! If the fuel is going to be scarcer and scarcer, than we will be forced to switch back to a proximity-based economy.

Roboprog2• 14 years ago

Which is cheaper: from LA to NY via rail, or NY to LA via rail? Oh, I forgot to include a trip to/from China in the problem.

I also forgot to include the truck (frightening or otherwise) :-)

Roboprog2• 14 years ago

Wow, it feels like I stumbled on James Kunstler's site today: http://www.kunstler.com/index.php

The way I see it, we really only have two choices: nuclear (fusion) power; or "A World Made by Hand".

Solar doesn't provide much energy density. (unless you can build a Dyson sphere or a "Ringworld" and convert huge amounts of solar radiation for transport)

Methane has more energy per KG than oil, but much less per cubic meter. (in addition to low density, you need a strong/heavy tank to put it in). And it's a fairly finite fossil fuel.

Uranium and the like are also a somewhat finite fossil fuels (even if from extinct supernovas, rather than ferns and dinosaurs).

Hydrogen (fusion) on the other hand, pretty much defines the useful lifetime of the universe. That's how I define "sustainability".

pif4• 14 years ago

> Hydrogen (fusion) on the other hand, pretty much defines the useful lifetime of the universe. That's how I define "sustainability".

That's true! That's true and funny! Hydrogen fusion does define the "useful" lifetime of the universe (ie: the interval before the entire universe becomes mainly full of cold heavy metals), but the stars are going to be burning for a few more billion years because fusion is an "unlikely" process. Yes! The solar system is still as we know it, with the planets well separated from the Sun and not yet conglomerated into a big red giant, for the same reason for which we are struggling to get fusion in our labs: because that's difficult! You need enormous temperatures to convince hydrogen atoms to come together and mix their nuclei, and so you get a lot of problems in controlling the overall process.

Sure, we can try with cold fusion, but unfortunately we have not yet got a useful result. But we can insist. Actually, I think we must insist! I can't imagine a better source of energy than cold fusion, if we ever get there. Yes, we must definitely insist!

Jeff Rubin: Oil and the End of Globalization

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