Technology created an energy revolution over the past decade — just not the one we expected. By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae — or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn't shine or the wind didn't blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers. Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age. But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning. Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away. New imaging technologies let drillers find oil and gas trapped miles underground and undersea. Oil rigs "walk" from one drill site to the next. And engineers in Houston use remote-controlled equipment to drill for gas in Pennsylvania. The result is an abundance that has put the United States on track to become the world's largest producer of oil and gas in a few years. As domestic production as soared, oil imports have fallen to a 17-year low, the U.S. government reported Thursday. And the gushers aren't limited to Texas, North Dakota and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Overseas, enormous reserves have been found in East and West Africa, Australia, South America and the Mediterranean. "Suddenly, out of nowhere, the world seems to be awash in hydrocarbons," says Michael Greenstone, an environmental economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The consequences are enormous. A looming energy crisis has turned into a boom. These additional fossil fuels may pose a more acute threat to the earth's climate. And for renewable energy sources, the sunny forecast of last decade has turned overcast...
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1 comment:
This article shows a lack of facts and remarkably poor reasoning.
To clarify, here's the energy problem:
1) Oil supply isn't the same thing as energy supply. It takes energy to get energy from oil. The energy that's left is "Net energy" and has been getting smaller since the first wells were drilled.
3) If you have to do *anything* special to a well like fracking, drilling in deep water, anything at all, it takes MORE energy to get the stuff out and yields LESS net energy. There are no exceptions to the rule.
3) We'll never run out of oil. We'll run out of oil that's cheap enough to afford and gives us enough net energy to do some useful work.
So yes, we've got oil and natural gas for a while. 40-50 years at current consumption rates of 30 billion barrels a year, but as we move through that 40-50 year period, *energy* from gas and oil is just going to get more and more expensive, and by unit, will yield less and less NET energy.
So, peak oil or not. It doesn't matter. The only viable substitute we have now to produce energy at that scale is nuclear power combined with better battery technology, an then only if we use thorium reactors like the Chinese and Indians are starting to do. Oil is finished before the century is out, fracking and horizontal drilling notwithstanding.
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