Energy Crisis Or Transportation Crisis?

Our favorite graph, which demonstrates that almost all of our petroleum is used for transportation.

Benjamin J. Turon writes an op-ed in the Schenectady Daily Gazette and makes a very good point about how the Kunstlers and Peak Oil Survivalists "forget history and underestimate the technology available to sustain our technological civilization."

Turon points out that oil is used primarily for transport, whereas electricity powers everything else. While his argument is not without problems, (like the need for a lot more electricity generation from all kinds of sources) his main point is crucial- there are lots of alternatives to gasoline if you realize that the problem lies almost entirely with transport.

"First, much of technology is based on electricity, not oil! Computers, telecommunications, lights, industrial machinery, household appliances are electric; electricity can also cook our food and heat our homes. While the power grid needs to be expanded and modernized, North America has abundant energy resources -- including coal, nuclear, hydro, tidal, wind, solar and geothermal -- to keep us in electricity without depending on oil-run power plants."

"There is no substitute for oil [or liquid fuels] in transport" is a canard that is frequently uttered in the media by so-called experts. While true for airplanes, it is demonstratively false for transport on land and sea. Maritime transport is very fuel-efficient and could once again run on coal via steam engines or gas turbines. Ships could also utilize sails or kites to save fuel. Europe, with its excellent system of inland waterways, moves more than 40 percent of its freight by water. Perhaps there is a future for the New York State Barge Canal beyond recreational boating."

"Electric trolley buses and trucks can receive electricity directly from the grid by overhead wires. There are globally 353 cities with electric trolley bus systems, including Boston, Dayton, Seattle and San Francisco. Large cities could electrify major thoroughfares for use by streetcars, transit buses and delivery trucks. Eventually even the interstate highway system could be electrified, saving long-distant trucking."

Some excellent points in the ::Daily Gazette via ::Planetizen

More on Efficiency in TreeHugger
Efficiency is Crucial to a Green Future
Memo to Ben Stein: It's The Efficiency, Stupid

Comments

[Cathexis]

"Transportation" is a broad category, remember. It certainly includes people movement but it also includes materials transportation (e.g., construction equipment), farm equipment, and more. I believe the challenges are addressable -- especially if we can end-run the obstructionists and denialists.

[1rewd1]

Beware the argument based on "ists" ...

[Cathexis]

PS: Remember that our plastics and fertilizer/agriculture industries are based on petro-inputs!

[research]

Last time I checked, organic farmers get about the same yield as petro-farmers, though not as plasticly perfect.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/3918
I usually eat organic anyway.

[NL207]

"Organic production has lower yields."
source: http://kozinets.net/archives/88

"The organic system showed grain and straw yield about 50% lower than the conventional system. Organic grain samples resulted 20% lower in protein content and exhibited poor bread production qualities"
source: http://orgprints.org/9753/

"Organic corn yields across
rotations were 2.8 bushels/acre less than
conventionally grown continuous corn and 22.6
bushels/acre less than conventionally grown corn
in a C-SB rotation."
source: http://www.ag.iastate.edu/farms/05reports/ne/OrganicConventional.pdf

There are a lot more sources out there that say organic methods have lower yields than conventional agriculture besides these.

[NCGigi]

Of course its a transportation crisis, and it is fueled by our "just in time" economy which has removed warehousing and substituted multiple deliveries to cover supply issues. Also, everything we touch is made in China which is importing raw materials from the US to manufacture consumer goods to sell to the US. That's 2 trips across the Pacific for a $1 item. Not to mention the lack of local food options. Now everything is transported thousands of miles for sale; which destroys local suppliers and makes everyone dependent on transportation. Enough. Small is beautiful. Local is great. Think globally, act locally.

[Cathexis]

An excellent point, NCGigi! Perhaps something as simple as rethinking some Business assumptions (e.g., offshoring to utilize/exploit cheap labor) can be a set of tools in dealing with the problem.

[rugbymom]

This may all be true where you are. Where I am, in New England, heating oil is a major use of oil -- something like 75% of homes are heated with it. (It's a regional thing, so often not on the national radar screen.) While in theory electricity would substitute, our electricity currently comes from natural gas, nuclear, and coal, not a palatable alternative. And it would require substantial retrofits of millions of homes. Heating oil = diesel fuel, so the pricing is just like diesel, about 4.79 right now, doubled in the last 18 months. In the long run we clearly need some alternative for heat. In the short run, there are going to be a lot of people freezing this winter.

I notice the graph has a little slim line from "petroleum" to "residential/commercial." I hope this has us oil-heat folks in it.

In the short-to-medium run, I'd vote for massive efforts to capture all the energy that's on the graph as wasted.

[research]

You have ample wind in your area, in fact nearly all cold places do.
See my profile for details and links.

[Twopennygal]

It's interesting what he says about airplanes. Mercedes and Boeing are working to find alternative, non-petroleum fuels for airplanes. It was reported here on Huffington...

[research]

With plenty of sustainable wind and solar electricity, liquid fuels are very easy to synthesize for aircraft use. see my profile.

[MajorKong]

The US Air Force has already tested a 50/50 mix of jet fuel and liquified coal or liquified natural gas.

[worldsforgottenboy]

This article makes a good point about freight transport on waterways. I'm sure there is plenty of freight going up and down the Misissippi, but is there any major East-West waterway in the lower 48?

I've seen cost figures for ocean transport and it is amazingly cheap and energy efficient, this sounds like a project where the government could actually help, by clearing up regulatory hurdles.

[KillTheMessenger]

I doubt a canal can really beat an electric railroad in efficiency. I might be wrong, but the difference is probably tiny and the railroad is a lot easier and faster to build. Not to mention that it can get you across the mountains, whereas a waterway can't, for obvious reasons.

[larry278]

There is the Ohio River which runs slightly southward from Pittsburgh, Pa to Cairo, Il & enters the Mississippi River. Since Cairo is west of Pittsburgh many say the Ohio River flows from the east to the west. There are the Great Lakes on the US-Canada border which can be used to ship things east from Lake Superior to Lake Ontario via Lake Michigan which is called a north -south link between the upper & lower great lakes. There are canals between lakes to take ships from a lower level to a higher level. The Missouri River runs from the west to the east where it empties into the Mississippi a few miles above St Louis, Mo; the Mo goes southward also as it descends from the head of navigation to St Louis. The Mo doesn't carry as many barges as the Ohio does.
Floods play hell with using all 3 rivers for shipping & so does freezing on the upper portions of the MS & the length of most of the Ohio & Mo rivers. Bulky items such as grain & coal are shipped by barge on these rivers. The Ky river feeds coal barges into the Ohio. The TVA & Ten-Tom canals plus the Arkansas rivers use locks to allow barges to use these water ways too.

[leduck]

It’s amazing to me that so many people who believe Peak Oil don’t understand that Hubbert curves apply to almost all mineral resources. I know someone will say, aluminum, iron? Earth’s crust is full of it. Yes, like a lot of things though, unless it’s concentrated, it’s useless. We can’t mine for aluminum in your back yard.

Just like oil, coal production will also follow a bell shaped curve, (NOT NATURAL GAS, but when it depletes, the decline rates can be 15% to 20% a year). In the U.S., 54% of our coal is SubBituminous & lignite and 45% is Bituminous & anthracite. Lignite doesn’t burn as hot as higher grades of coal and is very dirty. Bitumen burns hotter and anthracite burns the hottest and cleanest. Unfortunately, Anthracite is rare. Obviously, anthracite is the most useful and lignite the least useful form of coal. With regard to natural gas, every year we must drill more wells in North America just to maintain flat production.
the point is, we do not have 250 years of coal. We have 250 years of coal at current rates of production, but current rates are always higher from year to year, and not all coal is the same.

[KillTheMessenger]

Leduck, there is nothing to worry about with regard to aluminum and iron. The deposits we have are absolutely enormous, both metals can basically be 100% recycled and, yes, we can mine for both in our back yard if we have to. It would be very expensive to extract them from anything else than concentrated ores, but it isn't impossible.

Oil and coal are a very, very different story, indeed. They can not be recycled and deposits are not very large. They just happen to be very convenient, so we fell into the convenience trap. Now that the walls of that trap are closing in on us, we need to figure out replacements for all carbon based energy sources. And we will, it's essentially a matter of how much we will be inconvenienced. In other words, how much we will have to pay for the same service we got out of oil and coal. I would think the answer is somewhere between 2-5 times more. 2 times would be on the good side, 5 times on the somewhat more painful end of the spectrum. Neither will kill us.

[leduck]

I'm not going to say people know as much about depletion of minerals as oil, or that it’s as big an issue right now. I was merely pointing out the depletion revolves around more then just oil.

depletion of fossil water (ogallala aquifer/palestinian aquifer)
declining ocean catches
depleting topsoil
declining grain production

the world almanac also shows some mineral production in decline. of course, some of that may be because it's cheaper to mine those minerals in other countries, but the point of depleting trace minerals is made.
on a personal note, i'll say one thing..., you keep me on my toes like no one else on huffpo.


http://www.roperld.com/minerals/metalgon.pdf
http://www.roperld.com/science/minerals/MetalMinCrisis.pdf
http://www.roperld.com/science/minerals/minerals.htm

[leduck]

ok -- maybe my examples were bad
i'm not at all worried about aluminum or iron ore production (although I don’t believe we can mine it in my backyard)
i was just trying to show that depletion is not just about oil
in fact, it's not just about fossil fuels
i should have used trace minerals as examples
i know American beryllium production is down (i remember seeing the curve)
how about this: gold, uranium, cadmium, potash, phosphate rock, thallium, selenium, zirconium, gallium, silver, manganese, mercury, platinum, tellurium, lead etc
maybe some should be removed from this list and others added but the point is made

[leduck]

oh yeah....
thermodynamics
you cannot not ever recycle 100% of any metal
that's impossible
some iron and alumine will always be lost to the environment
always
there will always be little sliver or metal dust lost forever

[leduck]

There’s a quote in this piece, (peakists) "forget history and underestimate the technology available to sustain our technological civilization." When I think of history, I go beyond the last few hundred years dominated by burning fossil fuels. I think of the history of easter island, the maya, the fall of Rome and its subsequent population decline, I think of the once, fertile valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and I think of a great pandemic that killed 1/3 of europe in the middle ages. I see a whole history b4 burning things other then trees, civilizations rose and fell. The history of steady progress only goes back a few hundred years.

The problem with the argument, technology will save us is that, while true it takes energy to get energy, and technology can improve our ability to obtain it, technology doesn’t feed on technology, it feeds on fossil fuels. Technology can only go so far, before reaching a point of diminishing returns. The more diffuse energy and minerals get underground, the harder it is to obtain. Eventually it becomes uneconomic and the whole thing winds down. The fossil fuel age will have been a short when compared to the history of civilization. We live on a ball less then 8,000 miles in diameter!
But in the short run, yes, we do need to become electric. We need light rail and to redesign cities around feet, we need sustainability.

[KillTheMessenger]

It takes less than 20% of the energy that a solar panel makes in 25 years to create that solar panel. So is you start out with nothing but one solar panel, you can make approx. four times as many in 25 years of its lifetime. This means you can quadruple solar energy with nothing but itself four times in a century. That's a 256 times rise in a century, or equivalent of 5.7% annual growth. All of the minerals you need to make a solar panel can be found on top of the earth's surface. Basically, the whole thing can me made almost entirely out of sand and aluminum minerals plus a few things like tin, silver and zinc.

And you can probably grow thermal solar technology at a rate of over 10% a year and wind energy might be closer to 20% annual growth.

Of course, we have plentiful energy sources to get started and then bootstrap our way up. The problem with your doomer argument is that it is quantitatively wrong. Once you do the math, things look actually quite rosy. All that is between us and a solution is the will to pay for it.

[leduck]

i like solar
i like wind
i think we can survive peak oil
i'm not sure we can do it with 6 billion people, in fact i doubt it.
but i think we can survive it
i also think it will be a very painful transition
there will be a lot of warfare and a lot of people will die, becuase a lot of people are self centered
but i also believe we have to make do with a lot less, much less
i do not believe that alternative energy will allow us to continue to be so wasteful
i don't believe in the long run we can continue to be a throw-away society
i picture us having to make a painful transition to being like edo japan
we will be recycling everything
the status quo is impossible to sustain and so is our throw away society
it that's doomer, then so be it

[leduck]

also, i will stand by the statement that not all of human history is about human progress
there is a lot of steady state and decline in our past if you go back beyond the discovery of the new world

[NoPCZone]

I seem to remember Ralph Nader talking up a massive investment in energy efficiency and public transit in his 2000 campaign. I don't remember Bush or Gore taking the same stance. Maybe we should all support Nader as a way of forcing Obama and McSame to the right.

[KillTheMessenger]

There is no energy crisis. Neither in transportation nor anywhere else. The only thing there is are wasteful uses of plentiful energy sources. This is especially true in the US and especially in transportation. Once we eliminate the waste, we will wake up in a world that is cleaner and richer than ever.

[RememberTheAlamo]

Well stated

[RTIII]

The title presumes a focus exclusively on oil, though it talks about energy and transportation. It ignores pollution, our greatest problem.

Without new technology, our coal resources are basically useless to us; developing ultra-high-tech - and CHEAP scrubbers for coal combustion exhaust should be sitting equal to a few other issues as a top priority - not above, not below issues such as conservation and efficiency.

The article points out, indirectly, that battery technology is another vital area we should be developing as quickly as possible.

[Cjwirth]

The energy crisis will cripple transportation, and then we are in trouble:

Global oil production is now declining, from 85 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time demand will increase 14%. This is like a 45% drop in 7 years. No one can reverse this trend, nor can we conserve our way out of this catastrophe. Because the demand for oil is so high, it will always be higher than production; thus the depletion rate will continue until all recoverable oil is extracted.

Alternatives will not fill the gap. And alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment.

We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel trucks for maintenance of bridges, cleaning culverts to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables, all from far away. With the highways out, there will be no food coming in from "outside," and without the power grid virtually nothing works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated systems.

This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnalysis.html

Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area, good climate with much rain and good soil?

[CrzyRussell]

But won't wind and solar solve all of our problems?

[KillTheMessenger]

Demand can never increase beyond supply. What will increase is the price for oil until demand just meets supply. Even a 45% drop (which we won't see) can be mitigated with gas-electric hybrids, diesel-electric hybrids and changed transportation habits like ride sharing. It's not the end of the world, just the end of the SUV driving soccer Mom.

60 million barrels a day were the world's oil production in 1980. I remember there were plenty of trucks on the road back then. Why should there be less in 2015? Can somebody explain that to me? Trucks can and will run at any price of transportation fuel because they are used to earn money. Services using trucks will be more expensive, that's all. It's the non-essential transportation that will be cut back. So if I were a Disney entertainment park manager, I would be worried.

As for relocating, I am perfectly fine in my urban environment. In times of high prices for transportation fuels urban areas are far preferable to rural areas because distances are shorter and public transportation is plentiful and cheap.

[RTIII]

There's not a single consumption of energy that can't be done with renewables - not one. At sea, we have sails, on the roads, we have electric, for heavy machinery, we can grow things that provide oils - same for aircraft. With some biotech, we'll learn to do most all these things more easily than today by harnessing microbes to do conversions for us and to more efficiently grow plants for various purposes.

Now, you COULD argue that we would have a heavy collapse during a transition if we're not moving quickly enough. But then, if you say, move faster, you're preaching to the converted.
.