Is peak oil good news or bad news? Much depends on your perspective. The gloomier prognostications about peak oil – living in a world where oil supplies are limited and expensive – suggest that it will be a bigger problem than climate change, and arrive sooner. On the other hand, if we’re forced to cut back on our usage of oil and gas as fuel for energy and transport, we might have a better chance of stabilising atmospheric carbon dioxide at levels low enough to limit the damage from climate change. The IPCC’s high-end scenarios typically assume that there’s plenty of fossil fuel – coal, oil and gas – to get us to double pre-industrial concentrations and beyond. What happens if the oil runs out?
James Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has been looking at this in a paper (authored with P Kharecha) titled Implications of “peak oil
Without having read the paper, it seems to me that working towards renewables now should be seen as having a double benefit — it reduces CO2 emissions AND will help us to transition to a post-oil world.
The growing clamour for biofuels, however, is something I find pretty disturbing. I heard David Parker mention “second-generation” biofuels in a favourable light. Can he be serious?
Oh! And what about China? Hello?
If peak oil happens soon enough and is severe enough to cause significant emissions reductions in itself, the supply/demand gap for net energy production is likely to be so wide as to make energy intensive sequestration systems nonstarters. Our civilisation survives on energy like you and I survive on food, starving people will do anything to survive in the short term.
So if early peakers are correct, for us to avoid either economic collapse or economic survival without much higher emissions, we need a substantial and cheap noncarbon energy source. Solar, nuclear, geothermal?
I don’t want to argue about peak oil and how severe its impacts will be – that’s for another blog – but I do think that oil and gas scarcity will drive fuel prices up. If that price signal is used to stimulate non-fossil power generation and transport, then we’ll all benefit. That’s what Hansen’s saying, anyway, and I think he’s probably right.
I have a suspicion that solar power is going to be really important. There’s a lot of investment going on. China’s going to double global production of silicon substrate this year, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are pumping money into novel PV manufacturing. More here (Worldwatch Institute report), and Technology Review is a good place to follow the technology.
Nuclear will be used in many countries, but probably not NZ. Geothermal, wind, and tidal/wave energy are also hugely important. I think NZ has a good shot at building a 100% renewable generation system over the next 20 years.
You said:” I don’t want to argue about peak oil and how severe its impacts will be – that’s for another blog – but I do think that oil and gas scarcity will drive fuel prices up. If that price signal is used to stimulate non-fossil power generation and transport, then we’ll all benefit. That’s what Hansen’s saying, anyway, and I think he’s probably right.”
Except, beware unintended consequences. In the current market-driven system, there is not only pressure on food crops for ethanol production, but on ecologically and politically vulnerable tropical forest, destruction of which contributed to 20% of recent carbon emissions, according to the UN. “Legally” and illegally, forests are being burnt and destroyed to make way for lucrative first world crops, especially the cheapest source of bio-fuel, palm oil.
Alternative fuels are increasing carbon emissions.
Two of many links”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20070515-09520800-bc-australia-deforestation.xml
and
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2043727,00.html
Quite agree about biofuels being a double-edged sword. But if we can make liquid fuels from non-food feedstocks and without contributing to deforestation, they will be useful. In NZ, cellulosic ethanol from feedstocks grown on marginal land could play a valuable role (see Royal Society’s Energy 2020 report from last year).
“Without having read the paper, it seems to me that working towards renewables now should be seen as having a double benefit — it reduces CO2 emissions AND will help us to transition to a post-oil world.”
A double-benefit you say???
It reduces CO2 you say???
[snip]
Note: While I encourage debate, I would prefer if it remained polite, and free of profanity. If you can manage that, you’re welcome. – G