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Global financial system implosion begins

ferrelhadley said:
There are two widely used measure of oil, all liquids and C&C. The first includes syncrude, bio-ethanol and coal-to-liquid (SASOL). All liquids come at about 88 million bpd. The C&C figure is just crude oil and lease condisate. C&C is about 73 million bpd. The depletion figures are only for crude fields so do not apply to a large part of the all liquids figure.
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More helpfully, there are two types of oil: the stuff you can afford, and trashes the planet at a moderate rate; and the stuff you can't afford, and trashes the planet/peoples food supplies at a horrendous rate. The rate of decline of the former, subtracted from the rate of increase of the supply rate necessary to keep the show on the road, defines the demand schedule (rate and pace) of whatever mix of science projects and planet killers you have in mind. That's your non-negotiable forcing function.

For any science project (9-tonnes-of-undisposable-slurry-per-barrel of tar sand oil, sunbeams and summer breeze convertors, corn-on-the-cob digesters, etc.) pick an energy metric for it and divide your demand schedule by it. Multiply that by representative multiples for material, energy, land and money inputs for that particular science project (making sure your energy boundary function encloses the entire supy chain). That tells you how many planets you need to replace 80 million barrels a day of hydrocarbon. Quick answer - multiples, for any science project you care to mention. Imagine it takes 30 years to build that capacity - wrong answer - demand has doubled in that period.
 
As far as I can understand it, you're hypothesis here is based on 3 key factors:-
  1. Rapid depletion of oil production rates starting now, and not appreciably offset by either new fields (or additional capacity at existing fields) currently being developed being brought on line, or still to be discovered oil fields or any none conventional sources of oil replacement.
  2. Global energy demand continuing to increase at it's historic rate of increase, and economic growth being pretty much coupled to increasing energy supply.
  3. Any growth rate in renewables development resulting in more energy consumption during this period of growth than is actually being produced by the renewables already installed, so actually making the situation worse not better.
FWIW, while I think I understand the arguement you're making, and agree that if all 3 points were correct then we'd be screwed, I don't agree on point 1 that we're at that point yet, and on points 2 & 3, while this could be true under some scenerios, it's far from a given.

My arguement on these points is that:-
1 - Already covered, I think you paint an overly pessimistic picture of the situation, but time will tell on this one.

2 - Given our current level of wastefullnesss with energy, it should be entirely possible to decouple economic growth from growth of energy supply to remove the need for any actual increase in energy supply. Further to this, as access to energy becomes a more significant barrier to economic growth and the price of energy rises then this will cause demand destruction as companies look to cut their energy costs to stay competitive, and those that aren't able to do so lose market share to those that are etc. (or joe public starts to really change their energy consumption habits as the cost of energy rises and stays risen)

3 - On renewables deployment / scalability, yes this is true for early stages of rapid growth / longer energy payback, but as the growth rate drops off, and the energy payback times reduce the situation changes and the energy contribution from renewables becomes increasingly positive and remains that way. So yes, renewables require an initial investment of energy as they scale up rapidly, but this will be paid back many times over down the line.

There is a question mark over whether this scaling up can be done to a big enough extent while there is sufficient fossil fuel based energy still available for renewables to be able to start to make a significant contribution once the decline properly kicks in, but IMO the less time we spend wondering about the what if's and getting on with it, the more chance there is of us actually reaching a reasonable level of renewables output in time. It would be really useful mind if someone could manage to hammer this idea home to the fucking politicians who're mostly stuck with their heads in the sand on this issue.
 
whether we can do all this and prevent the worst excesses of climate change...... well now that's a whole other question, and one that really looked a shitload more realistic a proposition in the mid 90's than it does now after 2 decades of sweet fuck all from the UK government at least.
 
Bob_the_lost said:
If you've got the connection to the grid then you'd have to be in a situation where you can store and use the electricity for less than you can sell it to the grid and then buy back later. Given you're generating at peak time (daylight) that just doesn't happen. Add in the costs for the battery, the losses and the maintenance and it quickly makes a significant loss. The only time this form of "electrical arbitage" makes money is with the hydro plant in Wales that gets re-filled at night. You'd be doing it in reverse with solar.
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If you're using battery storage for light duty work (as i have already said), then the additional cost of a couple of batteries and an inverter is not that great when you consider the costs of a full-scale PV installation on your roof.If you intend to go completely 'off-grid' with your domestic power arrangements then obviously the additional cost of storage will be eywateringly expensive.

The idea is that you run said light duty items off inverter power supplied from the battery storage all the time and the surplus energy goes into the grid -this is not difficult to do with a charge regulator. Considering the lifespan of a decent set of batteries is approximately the same as the PV panels themselves, the additional cost of the batteries and inverter over the 20-25 year lifespan of the panels becomes less daunting than first appears. Add wind into the equation and you're covered for most eventualities (except for still, cloudy weather which we ofc do get from time to time). The electricity you store is never sold to, or bought back from, the grid; it's only your surplus that is sold to the grid just like with a purely grid-tied system.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by losses here... If you are referring to losses of power in the system as it generates, stores and then inverts the power from DC to AC then tbh losses are a fact of life for any form of power generation -whether it's a 3Kw PV installation on your roof or a multi-megawatt steam turbine generator at the local gas fired power station, losses and inefficiencies are inherent and unavoidable.

As far as maintenance is concerned, if you know what your'e doing, liquid-cell batteries are pretty low-maintenance tbf whereas dry and gel-cell batteries are maintenance-free (trouble with the latter examples is that if you damage them by running them flat, you have no hope of doing any sort of restorative work on them as they are sealed units). Even if you don't know what you are doing with liquid-cell battery maintenance, a short course in the subject ought to bring you up to speed. As far as the rest of the electrical equipment is concerned, maintenance for that would have to be done by whoever you were going to get in to maintain it in the first place -unless ofc you were qualified or capable of doing the job yourself.

If you are referring to a financial loss then, to be frank, renewables don't come cheap and if you are going to make the most of this significant financial outlay, then having the means to store power at home as well as pumping it into the grid makes sense. After all, assuming this upscaling goes apace and a significant proportion of our energy comes from renewables, what would be done if the renewables were generating a surplus? Yes, you can short wind turbines so they don't turn in the wind but, to be flippant a second, you can't attenuate the sun. If you are generating a surplus and it cannot be made use of, then it ought to be stored up.

I suppose what i'm trying to say is that if you are going into this purely as a means of making money and not securing a reliable source of electrical power, then you are going into it with a pretty blinkered viewpoint. They way things cost at the moment, if you can afford a PV installation to your home, then it makes sense to have some form of domestic storage as well -especially when you factor in the predicted outages that may occur over the next couple of decades as the fossil fuel supply sputters and falters due to demand outstripping supply.

E2A: Just realised after looking around on one of those sites you linked above that i am describing a grid fallback system... :oops::D
 
Bob_the_lost said:
Source or is this just bullshit?

This says bullshit: http://www.ecotopia.com/apollo2/pvepbtoz.htm
As does this: http://zeroemissionproject.com/blog...gy-to-be-manufactured-than-what-they-generate
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the point I think he's trying to make is that if the expansion of the industry is above a certain point relative to the energy payback time of each system installed, then during this period solar power in total will be a net energy consumer.

This almost certainly is the situation at the moment as the industry is expanding extremely rapidly, and the energy payback time is relatively high eg taking the figures in that report it's currently around 3.5-4 years. Later in the development cycle however, the rate of increase in the size of the industry is certain to drop, and energy costs per unit intalled should also drop significantly - eg to the 2 years or so anticipated in that report, so the picture will change dramatically and PV should become a huge net energy contributor.

I believe Falcon is focussing on the current situation and ignoring the long term situation whereby PV (and other renewables) should become huge net contributors of energy. He amplifies this by his opinion that oil has already peaked and is going to decline rapidly from now, which would make upfront energy investments with long term paybacks far more problematic.
 
Falcon said:
Thanks. I'll ponder the novel application of the term "scalable" to a technology that consumes more energy the more you deploy it.
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Thats an odd way of putting it.

Surely it is normal enough that if you make, transport & fit more solar panels, the total amount of energy used will be greater than if you had made less of them. But thats hardly the whole story, for you also get more energy from the panels.

So I assume that you are either implying that solar panels do not give back more energy over their lifetime than is used to make, ship & fit them. Or perhaps you are suggesting that as more panels are made, the manufacturing energy used per panel goes up instead of down? Not sure why that would be the case.

It is possible to imagine panels failing to give back as much energy over their lifetime as was used to create them. But from what I know so far, this is most likely to apply if you situate the panel in a location where its not getting enough sun for enough hours per day, or if the lifetime of the panel (and loss of efficiency over lifetime) does not match the manufacturers claims, of if you think that sums showing more energy coming from panel over its life compared to energy used during manufacture etc are bogus. In theory this is possible but I haven't seen any data to make me sure of anything on this front, if you have then please share.
 
Also consider the current UK gas fracking stuff, which despite its risks & the rather 'imaginative' huge estimated reserve numbers being thrown around at the moment, still has the potential to change the energy picture for the uk in the short-medium term. It doesn't save us from the wider implications of the energy picture, but its the sort of thing I have in mind when I talk of wiggle room. The present low/no growth economic woe itself can also be seen as something that buys a little time, hardly desirable but the sort of thing that can and will be used to at least manage the collapse to a certain extent.

As I indicated before when questioning you about depletion rates, I don't really see how you can paint a picture of rapid year-on-year decline as already having begun. Its certainly true that the wiggle-room that 'unconventional liquids' and suchlike are providing these days is limited, but so far it has compensated for other declines & lack of much spare capacity. This will not go on forever, but it should certainly be factored into estimates of decline.

Likewise points about the cost of some of these alternatives are important, for even without decline in supply, higher prices for such forms of energy have large economic implications.But you do seem rather keen to take these concepts to the extreme in order to provide a very dramatic and immediate sense of the crisis, rather than the rather long and wobbly affair we are seeing unfold, really quite slowly, this century.

Hell even if we had a really strong and accurate sense of the decline timescale, I don't think we can predict at exactly which point the economy as we know it will succumb to these pressures. Its clearly already in trouble, but events are also being shaped by other factors, the response by both leadership and the masses to the first phases of economic woe can have quite the impact on how all of this plays out.
 
and today rumours are......US Investment bank in serious trouble...major French bank looking for Middle East soverign fund investment to stay afloat...
 
I believe that BoA / ML are pretty weak but TBH , its fuckin chaos out there at the minute so I wouldnt put money any anyone being clean at the minute
 
not-bono-ever said:
and today rumours are......US Investment bank in serious trouble...major French bank looking for Middle East soverign fund investment to stay afloat...
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As a matter of interest, how do Middle East soveriegn fund investments square propping up banks with Islamic view of commercial money lending?
 
more to the point, how does the Islamic practice of commercial money lending square with the Islamic view of commercial money lending

it doesn't
 
Just spotted this item in IEEE Spectrum:
Wind, Water, and Solar Power for the World

Getting in our way today is the fact that energy markets, institutions, and government policies support the production and use of fossil fuels. The world needs new policies to ensure that WWS systems develop quickly and broadly.
...
The obstacles to this transformation are primarily social and political, not technical or economic. If we continue to make decisions based on interest-group politics and muddle through with nuclear power, ”clean” coal, offshore oil production, and biofuels, then our energy system will continue to threaten the health and well-being of everyone on the planet. But with sensible broad-based policies and social changes, it indeed is possible to convert 25 percent of the current energy system to WWS in 10 to 15 years, 85 percent in 20 to 30 years, and 100 percent by 2050.
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Just a matter of willpower then...?

:confused:
 
not willpower but there's something in that: -


as Hegel says
Hegel said:
The very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended
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And Marx too
Marx said:
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation
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Sorry chaps, too much going on to keep up with on an iPad. Cutting and pasting is a nightmare. There was some commentary that the underlying depletion rate being less than 7% because of "new fields". This is to fail to distinguish between the type of oil that we currently use, and new types of oil. They stand in relation to each other as beer does to prune juice - both brown fluids, but with radically different properties including cost, environmental impact and net energy. We differentiate between the two in order to accurately assess the magnitude of the task of replacing the former. Speaking as a former oil industry spin merchant, the oil industry is delighted when you confuse the two (and describe new additions that are too small to register on a historical graph of exploration additions as "significant"), and present the production of the latter as extension of the former. 7% for conventional oil depletion is what we use (out of ear shot of the analysts, of course) in the industry.

Some chat about the net energy properties of solar. We get oil by sticking a straw in the ground and sucking - the planet has done all the energy intensive work of creating the fluid for us. We have to do all the energy heavy lifting in any other energy technology, using power fom the process itself to supply what wwe got for free with oil. Solar (and indeed all putative oil replacement technologies) is a product of industrial manufacturing processes. Industrial manufacturing processes are (1) astonishingly energy intensive and (2) almost entirely hidden. Show me a study that suggests that a solar cell returns more energy in its productive working life, and I will show you a study that has simply ignored an enormous segment of the cell's supply chain. To scale a device which, at small scale, returns less energy than was invested in its manufacture is to create a system which loses much more energy than was invested in its manufacture.

What is missing from your analysis is some basic top down quantity surveying- the sort we do all the time in the industry to work out whether a field will need 100 wells or a thousand, or a platform will need 10,000 tonnes of steel or 100,000. Many of you are doing simplistic bottom up estimation of the "ooh it works in this toy application in Genrmany, let's just do lots more of it" without (a) really understanding what's happening at the input end of the toy or (b) understanding the pace and magnitude of the annual capacity additions necessary to maintain energy availability or (c) working back to primary land, material, energy and capital input schedules. Without it, any sensible conversation is more or less impossible.

Sorry to be such a misery guts, but this subject attracts the most astonishing amount of Pollyanna tripe.
 
Well I agree with that theory, just need some actual numbers to back it up. Are you just assuming that solar cells require more energy than they will give back, or have you seen numbers that backup your stance? I certainly expect there are some real issues on this front, but Im hungry for actual numbers. Energy requirements of industrial manufacturing processes are obscured somewhat and there are no lack of people who don't want to know because it will spoil the sums, but these processes are not a complete mystery that we have no way of unlocking, it desont take that much imagination & probing to spot the areas that need a closer look.

As for different sorts of oil etc, of course the varying costs, environmental impacts, energy returns etc are very important. But again you make it sound like the unconventional liquids, or the heavier more sulphurous oils are complete rubbish, when in fact in many cases they still make a meaningful contribution, you can't just ignore them completely in order to maintain a simple tale of 7% decline rate woe. Few here are suggesting that we are going to magic our way back to an era of cheap and readily available light, sweet crudes. All we are doing is challenging the idea that a very clear sense of the next decade can be obtained from a simple 7% figure. And even if this were so, when exactly are you suggesting the timer started on these decline rates of yours? Because around 2003-4 lots more people seemed to start getting aware of peak oil, and looking at some of the numbers caused some to start thinking that the peak was due there and then, and I think some were actually expecting to see us going rapidly down the other side not long after. Using that logic we would already have experienced far more significant decline than has actually been the case, so fair to say they jumped the gun? To me the actual picture has been considerably more convoluted, we saw quite a bit of evidence that we were hitting a ceiling, and have been bumping along an uneven plateau for some years now, but we haven't been hurtling downwards in the clear way that, for example, north sea oil output has been for many a year. This is why I press you on this matter, if you think you have a clear sense of timescales then please put it into the context of recent years - under your version of events, how would you describe the picture between 2005 and today for example. I get the sense that you may think that any plateau has been bogus, propped up by unrealities, whereas I consider the plateau to be more genuine, albeit not sustainable, and not without its implications due to rising cost of obtaining this energy.
 
Falcon said:
Show me a study that suggests that a solar cell returns more energy in its productive working life, and I will show you a study that has simply ignored an enormous segment of the cell's supply chain. To scale a device which, at small scale, returns less energy than was invested in its manufacture is to create a system which loses much more energy than was invested in its manufacture.
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Did that, read the links or stfu troll. You haven't got anything to suggest otherwise so i'm going to call this as someone talking out their arse based on assumptions.
 
Interesting take on the debt crisis in a new publication from Richard Douthwaite.

Money has no value unless it can be exchanged for goods and services but these cannot be supplied without the use of some form of energy. Consequently, if less energy is available in future, the existing stock of money can either lose its value gradually through inflation or, if inflation is resisted, be drastically reduced by the collapse of the banking system that created it. Many over-indebted countries face this choice at present — they cannot preserve both their banking systems and their currency’s value. To prevent this conflict in future, money needs to be issued in new, non-debt ways.
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http://fleeingvesuvius.org/index.php/2011/08/04/the-supply-of-money-in-an-energy-scarce-world/
 
Falcon said:
Show me a study that suggests that a solar cell returns more energy in its productive working life, and I will show you a study that has simply ignored an enormous segment of the cell's supply chain.
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I'd be interested if you could show us a study that backed up your claims instead.
 
free spirit said:
I run a business doing precisely what I talk about, and we along with pretty much every other company in the country doing the same thing are having to expand rapidly to meet the demand from the private capital wishing to invest in renewable energy installations in this country.

Pension funds in this country had a little over £2 trillion of assets under management in 2009 [source]. While you're right that pension funds rely on profits from these investments to pay current and future liabilities, it's wrong to suggest the pensions are valueless, or that there's nothing within these funds available to be invested in renewables if it were to be an attractive long term investment.

Also, we are not under conditions of energy contraction, not yet anyway.
[source]
If we invest rapidly in renewable energy projects and related infrastructure now then there's no particular reason why we need be for a long time to come - or at least not in such a way as to prevent economic growth providing that we're also investing in energy saving technologies to increase the GDP to energy ratio. It's far from a direct relationship between energy growth and GDP growth, illustrated by these figures showing that in 1990 every $1million GDP took 279.6 toe, vs 171.7 toe in 2005 [source]
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A bit of "money fetishism" here I fear. "Money" is merely an expression of human relationships - you can't eat it or otherwise use it to sustain life. If you (or more likely a banker) has lets say £2 billion in your bank account, this just means you have certificategiving you the right to acquire current assets and future human labour to this "value". That money has apparently acquirwed a "life" of its own is what "Capitalism" is all about. There is a better way to run the world - Deocratic Socialism. It would still employ "money" as an allocation tool, but without it having an alienated power over humanity.
 
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