Bentley & Zittel on Limits to Global Energy Flows

At the recent ASPO 2013 conference, Roger Bentley and Werner Zittel gave a joint presentation on the limits to global energy flows mainly from oil, gas and coal.

Their findings are nothing new to those who have followed the PO debate for the past years, but bare repeating:

• Global conventional oil peak is now (will continue for some years)
• Global natural gas peak in c. 10-15 years
• Global (hard) coal peak perhaps within a few years
• Alternatives have much lower energy densities and returns
• Prices will keep going up, may go down in the short term (due to economic hiccups)
• Move to alternatives will put a stress in form of a  growth slowdown to the economy
• Official & Industry sources (IEA, EIA, BP, OPEC) have been systematically wrong in their oil production estimates
• We have plenty of reserves under ground, but we can't get to them fast
• If we consume everything, we will create a lot of environmental risks & damage

And oh yes, official policy is still mostly in denial about all this in most countries. Apparently people believed the fracking fairy tales and the future of 1:1 substitution of oil with natural gas (over night). 

Ah well.

Fossil Fuels in 338 Seconds

Do you want a really quick introduction to fossil fuels, energy use, economics, ecological issues and global warming?

Here it is - 200 years of past and guesses about the next 100 years:



Well worth watching.

MyWorld 2050 - GIGO in action

The UK Propaganda Department of Energy and Climate change has released their energy policy toy, called MyWorld 2050.

The idea is to let people play around with energy supply, like fossil fuels, nuclear and alternatives, and then match this with the demand coming from industry, housing, heating, transport and travel.

The goal: get to 80% CO2 reductions by 2050.

You can try the model yourself at the MyWorld 2050 web site.

Now, some issues that the model behind the game doesn't lay bare:

• There is extremely low probability that oil will flow at 50% of current levels in 2050. There just are not enough resources, drill holes, tankers and manpower.
  
• Not using fossil oil creates a liquid fuel problem, which the model suggests one fix with biofuels. The problem is that the model assumes we can burn the rest of the developing world's (who have all the money, btw) food for fuel. And the model further assumes this will reduce CO2 emissions and be net energy positive. The premises behind that logic are faulty.
  
• Clean coal and gas power are supposed to give a 15 point CO2 cut. Eh, where exactly do we have clean coal? And oh, the North Sea gas is mostly in decline by 2025 (remember the model is originally for UK).
  
• Hydrogen cell powered cars. Sigh, that's like selling second order financial derivatives on a lollipop you have already eaten. Most sane thinkers thought we we past that already.

What the system does underline, is that it is impossible to not to have a liquid fuels problem, unless one goes all out on biofuels overseas in developing nations. What the system doesn't tell is that there is no arable land left to do this, unless we take it from food production or burn down the rainforests.

And all this is done with extremely low demand scenario, where people will be living in 16C temperature homes and travelling very little privately, doing mostly car sharing and public transport.

Good luck selling that scenario to the ignorant masses at large.

The more technically minded can download the 2050 Pathways Excel spreadsheet (Office 2010 format, thank you DECC idiots) that reveals some of the thinking behind the model.

The Real Energy Outlook

IEA and EIA - perhaps along with BP - may get the most media exposure for their energy outlooks, but one company dares to show some of the more inconvenient estimates in it's outlook. That company is ExxonMobil. It goes without saying that they have a vested interest in things happening as they lay it out, so one is advised to approach their Outlook for Energy - A View to 2030 with caution.

With that said, here's a short sampling of their scenarios with some comments.

So much for that hybrid & plug-in electric car revolution...

Commercial trucking taking the biggest chunk of oil demand growth

Renewables growing the fastest, but still being dwarfed by the fossils...

Fossils dominating even in electricity generation

Fairly optimistic assumption on efficiency growth...

Yet not overly optimistic on CO2 emission cuts.

Of course, the whole point of these scenarios is to make us think and also reflect our own assumptions of the world and energy. The backing of all this in the outlook is : "Don't worry, there's plenty of oil, gas and coal - where it all came from" as well as "we may not stop greenhouse gas emissions, but at least we'll be ever so more efficient in our economic growth".

Remove just one piece in this puzzle - constant growth of supply flow of oil - and the whole assumption falls apart.

It'll be an interesting next 20 years, that's for sure.

World Energy Outlook 2009

The yearly report from the OECD energy watchdog International Energy Agency is out. It is called World Energy Outlook.

Here are some key points of interest from the exec summary (full report still under scrutiny):

Coal use expected to grow enormously - oil & gas as well

Problem is - we don't know where the oil & gas are!

Sine financial crisis investments in finding & developing oil are shrinking

So we will use LOTS more coal resulting in LOTS more CO2

So the only option is to go on a huge efficiency binge

So, if you are an investor and something like the above comes to pass (unlikely, but possible), keep on piling on oil till roughly 2015 as we'll get our next oil crunch by then, unless the economy goes south again. After 2015, start piling up on efficiency plays and lots more on coal. Biofuels will be a crutch, but will probably fail royally sometime before 2020-2025 due to thermodynamic stupidity.

More when the final report is out and fully analysed.

Shell on Peak Oil, Coal and Climate Change

If you've been waiting for the cheer leading OilCos to save the day by yet again denying peak oil and saying we can battle climate change cheaply and effectively - well now is the time to stop reading.

Shell just put out their yearly scenarios up to year 2050. The estimates, while both critical and optimistic on the surface, are neither.

First, they now admit that the world oil production will peak in 2020 (somewhat optimistic I might add). Quite a change from three years ago, when they said that all people talking about peak were idiots.

However, by some odd magic oil production remains on plateau up to 2040 in their scenarios. No other geologists, oil analyst or oil company is able to manage such munging of data, even if they have tried. Well EIA has succeeded in that, but they have good track record of not being very accurate.

Shell's 20 year plateau would require us finding about hundred new Saudi Arabias worth of oil by 2040. That is not just possible - regardless of what type of weed one is smoking.

Alternatively it would require that the non-conventional oil sources, which in the optimistic EIA/IEA scenarios scale to 6-7 Mb/d by 2030 would need to be wrong on the downside by a factor of 10. Yes, estimates have been wrong before, but physical infrastructures and energy engineering mega projects don't build themselves overnight. They take an average of 10-25 years to complete.

Even if it somehow magically those figures would come to light, the environmental devastation and CO2 emissions from unconventionals production would be something the world has never experienced before. I doubt that is the future anybody wants. GHG emissions might be the least of our worries in such a scenario, due to groundwater destruction, climate pollution, electricity scarcity and utter devastation of environment in huge areas in North and South America.

So, either people at Shell are smoking some heavy-duty ganja or they are trying to pretty up the truth in order to retain our sanity. You take your pick from those two. Of course, it is possible they actually believe the data they published, but that remains a fairly improbable assessment.

As for coal, their assessment is more sober, but not a pretty sight in regards to global warming:

"Limiting GHG concentrations to 450 ppm CO2-equivalent is expected to limit temperature rises to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. This would be extremely challenging to achieve, requiring an explosive pace of industrial transformation going beyond even the aggressive developments outlined in the Blueprints scenario. It would require global GHG emissions to peak before 2015, a zero-emission power sector by 2050 and a near zero-emission transport sector in the same time period"

That assessment is indeed a challenge, considering their view of the global energy mix to 2050:

Coal will dominate and keep growing up to and including 2050

I say we give Nobel prize for physics, peace and everything else for the person who comes up with a time machine, invents working commercial CCS ten years ago and gets it installed in every single coal plant in the world retroactively. The situation is almost that dire.

It is worth noting that at the same time EIA is assuming in their Annual Energy Outlook 208 coal use to go up by c. 1.7% per annum. That would mean the world would hit 560ppm for CO2 already in 2030 from coal emissions alone - unless we magically capture and store that CO2. With the same growth rate the figure would be 785 ppm by 2050 + emission from everything else, like oil, natural gas, biofuels, meat production, etc.

I'm not sure if 350ppm or 450ppm is the absolute safe limit, but I'm fairly sure that even by most optimistic geological records way back a few millennia 1000+ ppm is not a safe level anymore.

Now, there are kernels of truth in the scenarios as always with Shell (they know the scenario methods very well), like this final assessment:

"Neither of the scenarios is comfortable, which is to be expected given the hard truths we are facing. While both portray successful economic development and the globalisation that accompanies this, both also have branching points that could potentially lead towards escalating geopolitical chaos."

Replace the word 'could' with words 'will most likely' and you the situation staring us in the face. Every big multi-nation war has started at the end of a commodity cycle, with nations competing for access to precious primary resources, like energy. Tell me this time it's going to be different, when we are looking at immediate decline in oil and a possible decline in the next 15-20 years of natural gas.

In the end, this quote from the presentation is quite sanguine:

"If historians now see the turn of the 19th century as the dawn of the industrial revolution, I hope they will see the turn of the 21st century as the dawn of the energy revolution." - Rob Routs, Executive Director Downstream, Shell

Revolution it surely will be, but not the one like we are reading in the papers. It'll be something completely different - something probably none of us can yet imagine.