Given the cost of gasoline at the pump, it’s easy to dislike the oil industry. Many people do. Consequently, I’m often asked, ‘How can you work for an oil company? They’re only concerned about one thing - profits. You bastard.‘ I added the last bit, but that’s often how it goes. My justification goes something like this. It’s a choice which has allowed me to,
- live in a country where 99% of the electricity is generated by hydro. As a result, my family’s CO2-equivalent footprint has shrunk by about 3,000kg per year.
- work for a company that puts safety first (their license to operate is dependent on it). As a reservoir geophysicist I do things like predict pressures in the subsurface to ensure safe well-drilling operations.
- work with environmentally conscious colleagues. Believe it or not, my experience (in Norway) is that, on average, my colleagues are a lot more environmentally aware than they would be in North America.
- promote my environmental concerns from within the industry. I personally feel that this can be effective activism.
- understand that the problem does not lie (fully) with the oil industry. It lies also with the consumer (including those who often complain about the industry). Sure, oil companies make shitloads of money but, as far as Return-on-Investment goes, they only see about 8%. This is several times less than many IT companies (Google, for example).
Like it or not, we will, as a global population, extract every last drop of accessible oil from the subsurface. We’re a society of consumers who feel that we need stuff to make ourselves feel happy. And all that stuff requires lots of energy to make, move, use, and destroy. A fundamental awakening and change to the way that we think and act is clearly required, but, I think that it needs to be fast and scary. A quick, major collapse of the capitalist system would,
- Hopefully wake us up. We need a clean slate to work from if we’re going to build a renewable energy economy.
- Hurt a lot of people but, would hopefully allow us to find a simpler, more energy-independant way of life.
Cool! It
My fear is that, if we awaken gradually (which I believe we’re doing) to the threat of environmental collapse and peak oil, we will just keep doing ‘business as usual’ and be caught unprepared. Sure we’ll be aware of the problems, but we’ll likely procrastinate until it’s too late. We’ll excuse ourselves by saying that we’re waiting for ‘xxxx technology to be developed.’ For example, why do we not see more electric cars (or a plugin Prius for that matter) on the road? We’re waiting for the next generation battery. To me this is a pretty weak argument when I see the success of companies like Kewet and Think. They may be funny looking, but they use existing technology and they’re available now (sort of).
Changing to sustainable (energy-wise) economy will require massive amounts of energy and will not be cheap. We’re running on a finite supply of hydrocarbons which is dwindling at a rapidly increasing rate. But how much of the remainder is required to make the switch? If we make the simplistic, hand-wavy assumption that we could switch to 100% wind power (equivalent) then,
- the energy to construct and operate the windmills for 20 years is equivalent to about 8,100MWh (~4,800 barrels of oil equivalent) per 3MWh wind generator while produced energy is equivalent to about 39MW (23 barrels of oil) per day.
- the planet currently consumes something on the order of 120,000TWh energy per year from fossil fuels. This means that we would need to produce the equivalent of 8,400,000 3MW windmills to supply all of our energy. This would require 40,200,000,000 barrels of oil equivalent energy which is equal to about 470 days at our current production rate of 85 million barrels of oil per day.
- but we can’t put all of our production into renewable development. Spare capacity globally is somewhere on the order of a few million barrels of oil per day. If it were, optimistically, 5 million barrels per day and we could devote it entirely to our production of more than 8 million ‘windmills’ then it will take us about 8,036 days (22 years) of hydrocarbon production.
So what does this mean? It means that, if we don’t act now, we could be screwed. The reason that I say this is that, as the increasing demand for energy in developing nations erodes our spare production capacity, less energy will be available to devote to the production of renewable energy sources. More reserves are, of course, being found but it’s not clear whether we can keep up with the rate of increase in demand. And, even if we knew where all of the remaining trillion barrels of easyish oil (oil shales and sands left out) were hidden and we were setup with facilities to produce from all of them, we would still have less than 35 years of producable oil at 85 million barrels per day. Whew! We still have time to produce all of those ‘windmills.’ But wait, what if global energy consumption increases to the 98 million barrels per day in 2015 predicted by the EIA? Then we’re down to 27 years. That’s a bit scarier but, in theory, we could still do it. There is, however, an additional problem. All that I’ve accounted for above is the ability to supply power to an electrical grid. We also need to look at the energy that is going to be required to convert our existing hydrocarbon-driven transportation sector to (renewably-sourced) electricity. Which, since we’re talking about 625 million vehicles, isn’t going to be easy. But now my head hurts. Time for bed.
Notes:
- Windmill/turbine could be replaced by ’solar panel’, ‘hydro dam’, etc. and the assumptions would still be valid. In a ‘hand-wavy’ sense…
- 1 barrel of oil has the equivalent energy of about 1700kWh
- 1 3MW wind turbine from Vestas generates about 284,600MWh over the course of 20 years or about 14,230MWh per year
- The above turbine generates about 35x more energy over its lifetime than was required to make it
- About 15% of the global energy supply could be considered to come from a ‘green’ source
- ~10^12 barrels of oil equivalent remain to be discovered/produced
- These arguments are very simplistic. Once we’ve reached plateau production (maybe we already have), global production will only decrease thereby making it more difficult to find the spare capacity that we need.
- I was never ‘good’ at math
A while ago I discovered that my bike computer / heart rate monitor was behaving strangely. I mistakenly thought that it was interfering with my Suunto wrist watch heart monitor. I was wrong. The problem is that Sigma bike computers appear to not be shielded very well. Every time that I turned on my headlight, the computer would go off. Sigma has graciously offered to send me a replacement but, I thought that I would first try to fix the problem. The solution: wrap the headlight in Al foil. Quick, easy, and very stylish. Now if only I could find my pocket protector.