Editor's Note:
We've had a lot of great reader feedback over the past few days, and we've decided to launch a special section of our site dedicated to you, the reader. You can check it out here: http://www.angelnexus.com/hub/623. We call it "Discuss Energy and Capital."
You can connect with other Energy & Capital readers, upload photos and videos. . .even start your own blog on our site. We encourage you to give it a try. Our own Chris Nelder started as a reader of Energy & Capital before joining us as a full-time editor. Give it a try!
Now, on to today's article.
One cubic mile of oil would put Manhattan under 150 feet of oil.
It would fill one thousand sports arenas.
It's equal to 1.1 trillion gallons of oil.
And it just happens to be the amount of oil the world consumes each and every year.
Now, I didn't come up with this concept myself. This idea stems from the keynote address at Greentech Innovations, given by Ripudaman Malhotra, Associate Director of the Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory at SRI International.
But the contents of the presentation, and the concept of a CMO, is something I felt was worthy of sharing. I think you'll agree.
So a CMO is equal to 1.1 trillion gallons. But that amount of oil is also equivalent to:
26 billion barrels of oil
6.4 billion tons of hard coal
153 quadrillion BTU and
15.3 trillion kWh of electricity
To put these gargantuan numbers into perspective, one kilowatt hour (kWh) is equal to doing eight solid hours of cardio on a stationary bike. Do that 15.3 trillion times, and that's how much energy the world consumes each year just in oil.
Not all liquids. Not including natural gas. Not with the massive amount of coal.
Just in oil!
Per the IEA's World Energy Outlook last week, annual decline rates will increase in 800 of the world's oil fields from 6.7% today to 8.6% by 2030. Some major fields, like Cantarell, are declining much faster than that.
Certainly our demand isn't decreasing as fast, and oil is finite, so quite literally we're living off an oil inheritance.
Global Energy Consumption: Living Off Our Oil Inheritance
Think of it like this: Oil, along with coal, natural gas, and nuclear, is an inherited resource.
Renewables, including solar, geothermal, wind, and hydroelectric, are considered income sources.
So we've been making constant withdraws from our energy inheritance for years, and will continue to do so, but eventually, that bank is going to run dry.
Renewables, on the other hand, are akin to making deposits. We can use them this year. And again next year. And the year after.
If we consume one cubic mile of oil every year, when taking into account all energy use, we use the equivalent of three cubic miles of oil.
Here's a breakdown of where it all comes from, in terms of cubic miles of oil:
Reduced down to one sentence, 2.63 cubic miles of our total energy use come from exhaustible resources every year. That's 88%, meaning only 12% comes from renewable resources, or income sources.
So we better stop making withdraws and start making deposits, or our inheritance is going to run dry with a lot energy spending yet to do.
If we (the world) continue at our current energy demand growth rate of 2.6%, we'll need another 270 cubic miles oil in total energy by 2050.
Where is all that energy going to come from?
96% Success Rate Since February 2009
Since February 2009, we've closed 48 trades in Pure Asset Trader.
Of those, 46 were winners with only 2 losers. Do the math - that's a winning percentage of about 96%. And every trade - even including the losers - is averaging +40%... meaning Pure Asset Trader is nearly doubling money every 2 trades! Isn't it time you made similar gains?
Fun With Energy Numbers
According to the most recent oil and gas reserve numbers, there are about 46 CMOs of recoverable oil and about 42 CMOs of natural gas. Those 88 CMOs come way short of the necessary 270, and that's if we can recover them fast and cheaply enough.
The next logical option is coal, of which there are 120 CMOs of reserves. But the problem with coal isn't the reserves, it's being able to use them. And with growing limitations on carbon emissions, coupled with long lead times on building coal plants, it doesn't look like coal is going to make up the difference.
To actually get one CMO of energy from coal would required building 2 coal-fired power plants a week for fifty years. That's just for one CMO. We need 270. So coal is out as the savior.
To get one CMO of energy from nuclear power would require building 1 nuclear plant a week for 50 years. We need 270. Nuclear's out, too.
Those are our inheritance sources. What about income sources?
The sun offers 22,000 CMOs of energy per year—more than enough to satisfy our requirements. But, like coal, the problem isn't in the amount available, but in the amount we can actually put to use.
Getting one CMO of energy from solar would require 250,000 roof-top systems to be installed everyday for 50 years, perhaps even more infeasible than the previous options.
What about biomass? Surely we can grow our way out of this mess using alcohol fuels, landfill gas, and wood and crop fuel.
But getting just one CMO of energy from biomass would require 85 times the current one-year production of soybeans. Remember, we need 270 CMOs in a worst case scenario, so biomass potential looks grim as well.
Wind power? One CMO of energy means installing 1,200 turbines a week for 50 years. Ain't gonna happen. And again, that' s for just one CMO.
We're clearly not going to be able to alter the supply side to solve the energy issue. Let's see what the demand side has to offer.
Take compact florescent lights, for example. We can install 100 billion CFLs to reduce energy demand by one CMO. At an average cost of $2.25, we need just $225 billion to get one of the 270 CMOs we need.
The situation is unrelenting, to say the least.
The Way Forward
First of all, we need to start planning in 40 year cycles instead of 4. We've seen how long it takes just to get one CMO of energy from a single resource. Planning needs to commence now, across a variety of technologies, to get us where we need to be by 2050.
But with a decades long energy transition comes a decades long profit opportunity.
Not just in renewables, which will double in use several times over, but also in energy efficiency technologies, smart building materials, innovative ways to use natural gas, and yes, even in new ways to explore and exploit our remaining oil and coal reserves.
As we've seen, there is no one energy savior. Many technologies will be used, and used well. And you can not only reap their energy dividends, but their financial ones as well.
We don't have to make a choice of using and profiting from oil or renewables. The operative word here is and.
That's what Energy & Capital, and our host of sister publications, are here for. . . to help you profit from oil and natural gas and renewables and energy efficiency.
The energy road will be long and arduous, but the path to profits doesn't have to be.
For just one example of how to turn the energy solutions of tomorrow into the energy profits of today, check out this report.
Call it like you see it,
Nick
Subscribe to
Apply "Rule of 72" to 2.6% growth
to get 72/2.6=27.7yrs for world's
3 CMO to double to 6 CMO by yr 2035
Its 55.5yrs to quadruple to 12 CMO
So 270 CMO req"d is a bogus number
Also demand depends on population.
Long before we run out we will increase our DeathRate as our traditional Final Solution to our
excess BirthRate, and no one has
enough intelligence to realize it,
a Fact of History since 1796 when
we discoverd Vitamins & Cowpox.
Biomass generated oil is severely handicapped by seasonal production--just like sugar from sugarcane.
Biomass generated oil is severely handicapped by seasonal production--just like sugar from sugarcane.
Superb.
Should be more widely disseminated.
Our hedonist energy waste is pervasive and tragic !
(1) 100's of millions of lights burn unnecessary during the day and night.
(2) We over heat and over cool our homes, businesses, offices,
schools, churches, etc... (government buildings waste the most).
(3) Recycling is inadequate. Our landfills are busier than ever.
Over packaging is the norm. (Plastics are the ultimate polluter).
(4) Most Americans do not minimize their driving. Road congestion is horrendous.
(5) America's obsession with road construction is the ultimate contradiction.
The only way to eliminate over demand and energy waste is by using the
economic impact of taxing energy. Crude oil needs to be taxed at $200
per barrel(55 gal) and 'offset' by making Federal Income Tax begin at $60k.
Only with a substantial and tangible dollar reward/consequence, will
Americans care to conserve. Until the price of gas is $7 to $8 per gallon,
Americans will not reduce their over consumption and energy waste.
In the mean time, the USA continues its hedonist energy waste and gives away
its economic and political wealth to the Islamic Middle East via OPEC.
Know that the Islamic dominated OPEC cartel is glad to allow
supply and demand market forces to drive energy prices to $8/gallon.
China, India, and other 'developing countries' have just begun to
compete for the world's remaining fossil fuel. If global demand for
energy is not dramatically reduced, World war is inevitable
( geopolitical unrest is directly related to global competition for
energy and natural resources ).
Ford and General Motors are headed for bankruptcy, which will leave
100,000,000 Americans unemployed, ruin our economy, and lead to
anarchy. America can no longer continue to 'do business as usual'.
Ford and GM must quickly transition to the lucrative business of
building solar and wind 'energy producers' for the world's 6.7 BILLION
people reason$. The world cannot continue to support all the
automakers. We are running out of petroleum !
Mass transit must become FREE, SAFE, CLEAN, and CONVENIENT,
thereby rewarding those who reduce their driving.
Global warming continues to increases with our persistent waste and
overuse of fossil fuels.
The incentives necessary to create sustainable and renewable energy supplies
can ONLY occur when we implement the economics of TAXING ENERGY.
volume by the number of cubic miles
of crude petroleum extracted per-
year. If the earth were a fantasized
megabarrel and the amount in cubic
miles extracted annually in perpetuity does not change, id est,
no growth, this megabarrel would
last for over 200 billion years.
Calculate an annual depletion rate
increase of 5% per-year, and this megabarrel would last for less than
a thousand years. If we are delusional, there is no need to be
concerned, our sun has another
5 billions years to go as it depletes its hydrogen core nuclear
reserves at the rate of 450 million
tonnes per second. If we up our medications, we realize that we are
in the fantasized millennium cited
above. What may we conclude as we
cruise down our highways deafened
by the cacophony of our radios and
CDs and distracted by the inanity of
text-messaging. The Bard limned us
well, "...foolishly compound clay."
Man has the God given talent to figure this out. In addition to the numbers not adding up in the article, I read nothing about hydrogen, geothermal or nuclear fusion. We have progressed as a species to imagine, invent, mold, construct, manufacture and utilize the resources available to us. And I am quite confident we will continue to do so unless all innovation and real science is TAXED to a very early grave by those who would adopt backward ideas and crush the growth of human ingenuity.
I am convinced after much study that ten years from today we will be facing global cooling. Then it will be Man has caused this! Never mind eons of data that prove the Earth progresses through these natural phases and will continue to do so. What quantity of green house gases have been released by the last ten thousand volcanic eruptions. I can tell you all tens of thousands of times more green house gases than man has released in his entire history on this wonderful planet. Which happens to be quite a brief history in the global scheme.
So let us innovate into our future and quit dreaming of wealth re-distribution. Nature does not work that way and neither should we.
Nuff said
Would anybody care to comment on the impact of the plastics industry and other by products on oil consumption?
As plastics are being used more and more in most everything will we not be using more oil?
Popular solar and wind energy are useful for small-quantity power generation in select locations. In future energy mixes they may contribute as much as 15% of all electricity generation. But at terawatt levels, immense areas of land or sea would be needed, requiring enormous maintenance operations, spoiling scenic land- or sea-scapes, and destroying local ecosystems - a travesty for all true environmentalists. As scientifically documented in "The Nuclear Imperative - A Critical Look at the Approaching Energy Crisis" (ISBN 1-4020-4930-7), by the year 2050 when petroleum fuels are basically exhausted, only uranium and thorium can affordably sustain global energy needs for millennia, using proven fuel reprocessing and advanced fast reactor technology. A serious in-depth analysis of our future energy shortage by engineers (not by anti-nuclear philosophers and lobbyists) reveals that nuclear power will be essential to rescue our children from a future economic catastrophe. For the USA, 500 additional nuclear reactors are required, built on 9000 acres (@ $1.5 trillion), compared to 1,500,000 windmills with storage batteries on 6,000,000 windy acres (@ $4.5 trillion). Ten times these numbers are needed for the entire world. (Costs are in 2005 dollars; for later years, all costs must be multiplied by the dollar inflation factor).
Because it takes a decade to design, license, and build a reactor, action must be taken immediately to prevent a worldwide depression by 2030 when oil begins to run out. Contrary to false propaganda by anti-nuclear groups, the cost of electricity at terawatt levels is three times less expensive with nuclear than for wind or solar. Solar and wind power generation requires expensive energy storage systems (batteries, etc) when there is no sunshine or wind. Also many miles of access roads for maintenance and repair are needed to keep blades or solar panels clean from bird droppings, dead birds, sand erosion, and storm damage, and to periodically replace electrodes on storage batteries. Aficionados of renewables usually quote peak windmill or solar station capacities, neglecting to multiply their numbers by a factor of four to account for a year-averaged availability of only 25% of peak wind or sunshine. Reactors run continuously all year at 90% capacity. Should a country limit itself to solar and wind energy, it is guaranteed to become impoverished and dependent on portable synfuels imported from other countries (future OPECs -> OSECs), who expanded their nuclear power generation before oil fields were depleted.
Energy consumption for transportation is between 35% and 40% of all energy usage in the world. On the assumption we stop drilling when it costs a gallon of oil to retrieve a gallon, one finds we will run out by 2040/2050, even with exploitation of all the tar-sand fields in the world. There is only so much volume in the 10 km deep surface shell that circumscribes our earth where decayed plants and animals (mixed with lots of sand and river run-off mud) were compressed into oil over a period of 300 million years. We are burning all that up in two centuries. With an increasing world population and with Asia and Africa wanting more of the oil, optimistic estimates show it will all be gone by 2050. While in the next fifteen years, oil and gas may remain major sources of portable chemical energy for aircraft and transport vehicles, beyond 2030 the world can only survive if synthetic fuels are produced on an enormous scale.
Of course nuclear energy extracted from uranium or thorium can not be used directly as a portable fuel to move long-haul transport vehicles (airplanes, trucks, etc). But its heat or turbine-generated electricity can be converted into portable bio-fuels and other synfuels (synthetic fuels) with reasonable efficiency. In bio-fuel production, nuclear electricity can empower farms and the extraction/distillation operations to obtain alcohols or bio-diesels from vegetation. Without input of (nuclear) electricity, bio-fuel farming would be unsustainable since energy needed for cultivation, harvesting, and extraction exceeds the energy stored in combustible plant chemicals. Nuclear-assisted farmed bio-fuels have other limitations however. They can at most replace about 20% of today's petroleum fuels because biofuel farming is limited by available arable land; man also needs to grow food to survive. The other 80% of oil-replacement must come from hydrogen and ammonia synfuels which can empower combustion engines as well as (future) fuel-cells. Hydrogen can be affordably produced by electrolysis (or chemical dissociation) of water into hydrogen and oxygen. But hydrogen has the fundamental problem of being very difficult to compact into a reasonably-sized fuel tank. So ammonia (called "second" hydrogen by some) is now favored, because it can be stored at very moderate pressure in normal-size fuel tanks used today for a comparable driving range. Ammonia is produced by compression of hydrogen with nitrogen (from the air) via the well-developed Haber-Bosch process. This is a less expensive way of storing hydrogen than liquifying it. Ammonia can fuel combustion engines (already commercially available) and solid-oxide fuel-cells (future), and is less dangerous than gasoline in vehicle collisions. Its exhaust is water vapor and nitrogen (air) again from which it was synthesized with nuclear "mother" energy.
Modern nuclear power plants are absolutely safe. Because of the negative "coefficient of reactivity", reactor fuel elements only melt (an explosion is not possible) during a maximum credible accident in which the emergency core cooling system totally fails. This was "experimentally" proven in the Three-Mile-Island (TMI) accident. A negative coefficient of reactivity means that neutron multiplication is automatically stopped when the temperature in the reactor gets too high. The Russian Chernobyl reactor, which took the lives of 57 people, had a positive coefficient of reactivity because it used graphite as moderator. Such a design for nuclear power plants is now prohibited in all countries. Furthermore the Chernobyl reactor had no containment vessel, as is the law in all Western countries and now worldwide. The assertion that perhaps thousands of people could still die from radioactive fallout around Chernobyl is nonsense. Of the 60,000 inhabitants of Pripyat who had been exposed to fallout, about 9,000 will die at an advanced age of cancer because worldwide 15% of all people ultimately die from cancer. To ascribe those 9,000 deaths to Chernobyl's fallout is equally ridiculous as claiming that such a death toll is due to drinking coffee because 15% of all people drink coffee. Security precautions and containment measures for today's nuclear power plants do reckon with the possibility that terrorists might crash a large airplane or bomb on a reactor. Even if aerial obstructions (e.g. balloons) or underground construction can not prevent penetration of the large dome-shaped containment vessel, the reactor core vessel is designed to remain mostly intact. It can further be inundated with neutron-poisoning borated water which suppresses all further uranium fission in case of an accident.
A stale anti-nuclear cry is "what do we do with all the long-lived radioactive nuclear waste". The volume of waste amounts to one aspirin tablet per year per person using nuclear electricity, compared to tons of air pollutants and globe-warming gaseous CO2 emitted by coal or fossil-fuel combustion. Nuclear waste can be easily stored and safely transported, as the US nuclear navy has done for half a century. Contrary to allegations that uranium and plutonium in spent fuel elements pose a problem because of million-year half-lives, they are separated from fission products by reprocessing and burnt as fuel in future fast-breeder reactors. They will not be dumped. This reduces 50 tons of spent fuel per reactor per year to 0.5 tons of fission products (with shorter decay lives), taking centuries instead of decades to fill the Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada. The notion that long radioactive lifetimes are undesirable is also erroneous. The longer the decay lifetime, the less the radiation emitted per gram of radio-isotope. Most elements that make up our bodies (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc) have infinitely long decay lifetimes. All humans are "hot" because everyone has radioactive potassium-40 (K-40; 0.012% abundance) in his body, which continuously emits beta particles with a half-life of one billion years! Man successfully evolved in this environment, and there are even indications that low levels of radiation benefit health (called hormesis). The hue and cry about possible terrorism and "dirty bombs" is also highly exaggerated. By the reasoning of anti-nuclear activists, we should stop flying 707 jets because they can be used as weapons to kill thousands of people.
Energy is man's third most important need after water and food. Those who hinder expansion of nuclear power will be viewed as irresponsible neo-luddites by future generations and must be held accountable. Any further delay of a committed worldwide nuclear energy program will cause certain impoverishment and deaths of many people by 2050. Without large-scale synfuel production by greatly expanded nuclear power, desert cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix will become ghost-towns. Originally the US had planned to have 200 to 300 reactors (@ 1 GWe each) by the year 2000, but instead there are only 104 today. After the Three-Mile-Island (TMI) reactor meltdown in 1979 in the US (with 0 casualties) and Russia's Chernobyl accident in 1986 (with 57 fatalities), public hysteria fanned by fear-mongering antinuclear activists caused cancellations and moratoria on construction of new nuclear plants. While the USA was once the leader, most US businesses with reactor manufacturing know-how closed. Instead France, Russia, Japan, South-Korea, India, and China are now in charge. Zealous anti-nuclear lobbyists and a mal-informed government have created the pending energy crisis. We are entering a war-like energy-deprivation period as serious as WW-II or Al-Qaida. Strong Manhattan-project-like leadership is now needed to reverse the short-sightedness and follies of prior administrations.
Jeff W. Eerkens, Ph.D
Adjunct Research Professor,
Nuclear Science and Engng Institute
University of Missouri, Columbia
articles to friends. The CMO article
was excellent. The comment on
the use of petroleum in plastics ]
was good. This also applies to
Natural Gas which would make another
good article.
The trick is to go into space to collect solar. This isn't a new idea but before this year the cost of getting parts for solar power satellites up there was way too high. That changed with three unrelated presentations at the International Space Development Conference early this year, though it took months for people to combine them.
Pointers to web sites if anyone wants them. hkhenson(at)rogers(dot)com.
Thank the bankers and industrialists, and the people who keep technology on the shelf that they don't want to compete with their other energy investments lik oil. Robber barons like JP Morgan, who asked Tesla at Wardenclyffe, where do I put the meter?" Tesla was floored. He wanted to give the energy away for free. Morgan ruined Tesla's financing and destroyed his reputation so no one else would help him. A nervous breakdown happened to Tesla, the man who invented and developed poly-phase AC power system we use today, and ended his service to mankind. I blame the greedy bankers for holding the human race hostage ad infinitum. Now we reward them with 700 Billion dollars. Hogwash.
Rockie Coppolella
www.authorsden.com/rockie
starman4@bellsouth.net
Thank the bankers and industrialists, and the people who keep technology on the shelf that they don't want to compete with their other energy investments lik oil. Robber barons like JP Morgan, who asked Tesla at Wardenclyffe, where do I put the meter?" Tesla was floored. He wanted to give the energy away for free. Morgan ruined Tesla's financing and destroyed his reputation so no one else would help him. A nervous breakdown happened to Tesla, the man who invented and developed poly-phase AC power system we use today, and ended his service to mankind. I blame the greedy bankers for holding the human race hostage ad infinitum. Now we reward them with 700 Billion dollars. Hogwash.
Rockie Coppolella
Does the 15.3T KWh electricty = 1 CMO assume an efficiency of ~1/3 from the burning of oil in generating the electricity?