Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 351 Editor's Choice: 43
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Another Example Of How People Just Don't Get It
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Oil had nothing to do with the First Industrial Revolution (1800-1870), so without oil we'd at least be living at a mid-nineteenth century standard.
Don't know if I can agree with this statement. We've built an extensive, oil-dependent infrastructure since the 1800's - far flung suburbs, exurbs, Wal*Mart rolling a million semis around the country, oil and gas-based fertilizers, etc. Without cheap oil, that infrastructure's gonna fall down and go boom.
While oil and petroderivatives do provide the best quantum package of energy by volume, as you say, the secret is in finding another package.
There is no other package anywhere near as cheap as oil, and certainly nothing that can be utilized in our existing infrastructure. There's no technological solution to this problem. Technology <> energy. Technology - especially deploying new technology to replace our existing infrastructure - consumes energy. And that's gonna be the problem, because there won't be any energy to use for massive deployments of alternative technologies.
hydro, wind and solar power can generate the power required to keep transport and communications going.
Those sources provide only a fraction of the energy that's consumed for transportation alone, and deploying them is going to become increasingly expensive as oil prices climb. We've yet to develop any means of storing electrical power that's anywhere near as efficient for off-grid use as gasoline. The most promising technologies are still vastly more expensive to implement and vastly less efficient to operate, and would require the replacement of our entire inventory of transportation equipment even if they did work. It's not happening anytime in the next 20 years, and we're gonna hit peak oil long before that (we've probably hit it already).
Our best realistic hope in the nearterm may be the conversion of coal into gasoline, which actually works, but is hideously expensive. It'll help put an upper cap on the price of a gallon of gas somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 - $7 a gallon, pre-tax. But we'll burn through our remaining coal reserves in just a decade or two as a result, and at those fuel prices the economy is likely to be plunged into a permanent depression. Still, it may give us enough time for alternative technologies to be developed and deployed, or for the infrastructure to be retooled away from the automobile.
If you want to look at an example of what happens to a country when it can't get - or can't afford - the transportation energy it needs look at the former Soviet Union. They hit peak oil a few years before their collapse, going from an exporter to an importer, something they didn't have the economy to support. We're actually in worse shape than them, since we're even more oil dependent and this time it's not a matter of us not having the cash to buy oil on the world market - there's not gonna be enough oil on the world market to come close to satisfying the natural demand of our infrastructure.
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Fantasy vs. Reality
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So why do you rule out the possibility that we will NEVER find an alternative?
I don't rule it out, but it seems highly unlikely we'll be able to find any alternative to oil, at least in the time alloted to us. Just because you want something really bad doesn't mean you're gonna get it. As they used to say in the Marines, wish in one hand and shit in the other - see which one fills up first.
Oil is an incredible energy source. For starters it's a liquid, and in many places throughout the world for the past 100 years all you had to do was stick a straw in the ground and suck it out. It's easy to ship, and can be refined into a number of products. Its energy density is incredible, especially once refined, and we've developed complex, though now low cost methods to refine it over the past century.
What makes oil unique is that it's both an energy source and an energy carrier (or easily converted into a carrier, like gasoline). There's absolutely nothing else out there on the horizon that would function as a direct replacement for oil. Everything else - from the hydrogen hype to advanced batteries and capacitors - isn't a source but merely a carrier. As such you're talking about replacing oil, which can be cheaply sucked out of the ground and performs both functions easily and in a way our entire infrastructure is adapted to, with alternatives that do neither.
Forget hydrogen. Its energy density is pretty sad, it's hard to transport because its molecules are so small it leaks out of most pipes and containers, and right now the biggest source is hydrogen cracked from natural gas, which we're also rapidly running out of.
Batteries are incredibly costly to manufacture and still come nowhere close to storing energy at densities which rival gasoline. And they aren't a fuel source themselves, just an expensive "gas tank" that wears out over time. You still need to charge them. Where are we going to get the electricity to do that from? You'd need to build hundreds of nuclear reactors just here in the US, hundreds of coal fired power plants or deploy trillions of dollars worth of solar cells, wind turbines and tidal generators to begin to generate the kind of electricity it would take to replace gasoline and other refined oil products, even assuming you had inexpensive batteries or other devices to store that energy for portable use.
We're obviously lacking either at the moment, and the task of rebuilding our oil-based infrastructure to function without oil is unimaginably complicated and expensive. It would probably be cheaper to bulldoze suburbia and move everyone back into the cities, where at least they could be serviced by electric rail - although here in the US we'd have to rebuild that network, since we allowed the oil, car and tire companies to gut it during the '50s. More trillions we don't have.