China’s oil production to peak in 2015 - report:
China’s crude oil production will peak at about 190 mln tons by 2015, according to a report by the China News Service.
The report cited Pang Xiongqi, professor at the China University of Petroleum, who also said that the country’s natural gas production would peak at 120 bln cubic meters by 2035.
China faces even more serious energy supply challenges once the peak has been passed, Pang said, and will be forced to spend more of its foreign currency reserves on increasingly expensive crude imports.
Dwindling oil production could also lead to a further increase in the consumption of coal, putting more pressure on the environment, Pang said.
Barring a major and sudden change in China’s policies and infrastructure over the next 8 years, how much more “interesting” do you think a peak in that country’s domestic oil production would make the world oil market?
Nations, States, Provinces Announce Carbon Markets Partnership Targeting Global Warming:
A coalition of European countries, US states, Canadian provinces, New Zealand and Norway have formed the International Carbon Action Partnership to fight global warming.
ICAP will provide an international forum in which governments and public authorities adopting mandatory greenhouse gas emissions cap and trade systems will share experiences and best practices on the design of emissions trading schemes. This cooperation will ensure that the programs are more compatible and are able to work together as the foundation of a global carbon market to boost demand for low-carbon products and services, promote innovation, and allow cost effective reductions so as to allow swift and ambitious global reductions in global warming emissions.
The international and interregional agreement was signed today by US and Canadian members of the Western Climate Initiative (Arizona, British Columbia, California, Manitoba, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington); northeastern US members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York); and European members including the United Kingdom, Germany, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and the European Commission. New Zealand and Norway joined on behalf of their emissions trading programs.
Perhaps it’s my economics training kicking in again, but I can’t help but see the lost opportunity cost of the US federal government (not to mention Canada’s–what’s up with that?) being completely absent from this effort.
A few days before she was to appear before a Senate committee on the public health implications of global warming, Dr. Julie Gerberding submitted her written testimony for White House review.
As director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Gerberding has considerable expertise. Sending her comments to the Office of Management and Budget was considered so perfunctory that her office simultaneously shared the document with public health groups.
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We have learned at great cost over the past seven years that aligning documents with administration policy is not the same as aligning them with reality. Sometimes that has meant “editing” the science in reports and testimony. Sometimes it has involved trying to muzzle world-renowned scientists, such as NASA climate expert James Hansen. And sometimes, as with the war in Iraq, the administration’s efforts to mold truth to match its policies have led to tragedy.A Bush official once bragged to a reporter that the administration had the power to create its own reality. That boast has been proved wrong time and again over the last seven years. The ham-handed attempt to stifle Dr. Gerberding is just the latest example.
More on the recent CDC testimony mess. Highly recommended, but only if you can spare the blood pressure points.
Blog I just discovered: The Clean Slate Report
Singapore To Build World’s Largest Solar Energy Plant:
The world’s largest manufacturing plant for making solar energy products will be built in Singapore, it will be the first such plant in Southeast Asia.
The plant is expected to start production of wafers, cells and modules used to generate solar power by 2010. It will be built by leading Norwegian solar energy firm Renewable Energy Corp (REC) in the Tuas View area with space set aside for supporting industries.
The plant will be able to produce products that can generate up to 1.5 gigawatts (Gw) of energy annually. That is enough to power several million households at any one time.
Excuse my techie econo-talk, but that’s one big-ass PV plant, and I’d bet a whole lot more like it are comin’.
James Lovelock: Reducing emissions could speed global warming:
A rapid cutback in greenhouse gas emissions could speed up global warming, the veteran environmental maverick James Lovelock will warn in a lecture today.
Prof Lovelock, inventor of the Gaia theory that the planet behaves like a single organism, says this is because current global warming is offset by global dimming - the 2-3ºC of cooling cause by industrial pollution, known to scientists as aerosol particles, in the atmosphere.
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According to Professor Lovelock’s gloomy analysis, the IPCC’s climate models fail to take account of the Earth as a living system where life in the oceans and land takes an active part in regulating the climate.He will argue that when a model includes the whole Earth system it shows that: “When the carbon dioxide in the air exceeds 500 parts per million the global temperature suddenly rises 6ºC and becomes stable again despite further increases or decreases of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
“This contrasts with the IPCC models that predict that temperature rises and falls smoothly with increasing or decreasing carbon dioxide.”
First, I never know what to make of Lovelock. I see a lot of statements from him like this, yet I never hear about where they come from. Is there some large, sophisticated model he’s working from, or is it instinct and reasoning? This isn’t meant to be a harsh criticism of Lovelock, just an observation that if the same things were said by someone named Smith most people would either ignore him completely or demand a lot more proof than we do from Lovelock.
Second, am I the only one who remembers that in those first days after 9/11 we saw a noticeable warming in the US because of the lack of airline traffic (and there sunlight-reflecting contrails)? Clearly there is something to this notion of stuff we put into the air both heating (greenhouse effect) and cooling (albedo effect) the environment. How they balance out is way above my pay grade, though.
Third, can we finally agree that we have been and still are performing an immense exercise in geo-engineering, regardless of whether it was intentional or even if we recognized it as such before now?
Related: Gee-Whiz Geoengineering
Worth pondering: PEAK OIL AND THE FERMI PARADOX, By Mike Byron, Ph.D.
And that reminds me of one of the most interesting quotes I’ve ever encountered:
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.
Of Men and Galaxies, 1964
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October 29th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
On China, the interesting thing is that they are demonstrably capable of sudden change in policies and infrastructure. We just hope they change in the right ways.
On the Fermi Paradox, the question is whether a tech-society is possible in the long term, using “long” energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal). Worth considering, but none of us knows the final efficiency or productivity for those fields.
October 29th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
The surest sign that intelligence hasn’t progressed far on this planet in the past is that the fossil fuels and metals are still there. You need the intermediary energy supply. It is not possible to go from campfires to solar panels without an industrial revolution. In the long term (the longest of terms really) the Universe itself is finite. Even in an expanding Universe it is space itself that is growing, not the amount of stuff. Even if we colonize the solar system (which we should — the universe is a dangerous place, as long as all our eggs our in one basket there is simply no such thing as sustainability.) there are upper limits to what you can do in any system. The ultimate goal of any intelligent species must be self imposed population stabilization based on an accounting of its resource base. This happens naturally to ‘unintelligent’ animals. There is no rational reason we can’t accomplish it.
October 29th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Fred Hoyle’s answer to the Fermi Paradox has never made much sense to me. A few objections:
1) If the human species had “failed to make a go of it” by blowing itself up, say, following the Cuban Missile Crisis (or any of the dozens of close calls around then), we would have left plenty of oil, gas, etc in the ground for future intelligences (I don’t think we would have sterilized the earth). Presumably lots of ET intelligences have gone this route.
2) Suppose we do fry ourselves in a hellish greenhouse, but don’t sterilize the earth. Although the metallic ores won’t be in the ground, they will be in, say, New York City. I’d bet those buildings won’t move around much more in the next 100 million years than dinosaur bones did. So they’ll be there, waiting for our successors to pick up.
3) Don’t forget that humanity managed to map the world,harness wind power, discover calculus and the laws of motion without coal or oil. I agree that w/o fossil fuels it would have taken us a lot longer to build, say, New York. But I think its very difficult to claim that lack of fossil fuels would have stopped our progress dead in its tracks. (For example, relativity– including E=mc^2– could have been discovered pretty much any time after Newton– no fossil fuels were required.)
4) Also, don’t forget that oil could well reappear on geologic time scales. How long will it take all that Colorado Shale to be baked into light, sweet crude?
Actually, there is an Earth-specific argument that Hoyle is right– from James Lovelock, as it happens. Lovelock has pointed out that the sun is getting hotter, and the “habitable zone” is moving steadily further from the sun. As this has happened, the Greenhouse effect has steadily weakened, so our temperature stays the same. (As he puts it, Gaia has dropped its concentration.) Currently, the Earth is close to the edge of the habitable zone, and there is much less atmosphereic CO2 than there used to be. But the CO2 concentration can not drop below zero. Once the habitable zone moves beyond earth’s orbit, Gaia (the Earth) will die. Unfortunately, this is likely to happen soon (I forget whether its tens or hundreds of millions of years)– probably too soon for another intelligent species to evolve here.
ch1
October 30th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
About six months ago I remember a discussion about the price of gas relative to the price of oil, at that time a rising gasoline price (due to capacity constraints–we were told) seemed to be ‘bootstrapping’ the price of crude higher. Now it seems that the price of crude is rising swiftly and gas is holding steady. Does this just mean that crude is trading on things other than fundamentals? Or is that too simplistic?
October 30th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Regarding the Fermi’s paradox: Even with all the fossil fuels gone, there’ll be a lot of hydrogen around. Putting that hydrogen to good space-travel use certainly isn’t totally impossible for us humans, and some more intelligent species might do even better, using some energy source unknown to us.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Chapter1 - mostly agree. All but the cheap and dirty fossil fuels would still exist, much of the metals already refined and capable of being recycled. Other forms of energy are abundant enough and without those abundant quick and dirty fuels might we have put much more, much earlier into developing wind, hydro, wave, tidal, solar and biofuels? Large scale smelting may have been limited, (greater deforestation for charcoal having it’s own serious consequences)but perhaps there’d have been stronger economic incentives to make stuff to last, to reuse, to recycle rather than the wasteful, throw away consumerism we’ve grown up with and consider to be normal? Coming up against limits to growth might well be a precursor to growing up as a society.
Matti, given how difficult and expensive controlled fusion is (no usable power supplied so far and none expected for decades) I think you’re overly optimistic about turning Hydrogen into energy. The real cheap and dirty forms of fusion (ie bombs) may be easier but rely on fission to set off, and fissionable ores here on Earth tend to occur as a result of geo/hydrothermal processes. Not sure how easy they would be to find in the absence of Earth like planets. And I’m not sure that kind of technology has a place anywhere except in space.
With all the fossil fuels gone the clear abundance of solar and wind would be stark - solar thermal being the relatively simple starting point.
Personally I think we’ll see mass produced low cost Photovoltaics (and improved energy storage) decades ahead of a working fusion reactor.
October 31st, 2007 at 11:58 am
disdaniel: While I’m always hesitant to explain the working of the band of psychotic money’s on PCP that seemingly control the spot oil market, I think you got the first part of the situation right. As far as I can tell, we did see gasoline pulling up the price of crude, largely because traders have a comfort level of what the spread between those two prices “should” be. (A journalist at a major business new service told me this in e-mail, and it makes at least as much sense as anything else I’ve seen on the topic.)
As for the current situation, and the recently near-zero spread between the wholesale price of gasoline and the price of oil (see that hand graph at http://www.fuelgaugereport.com/), which has now opened up a bit, I’m stumped. The price of gasoline can move as quickly as that of oil, so I don’t see why at a time of frighteningly low gasoline stockpiles in the US we should have seen such a small spread between these prices before it opened up a little. I realize that the demand for gasoline falls off considerably this time of year in the US, but that doesn’t feel like a sufficient explanation to me.