Energy, why can't we just ask Saudi Arabia & the US to open the taps more?

[lll3333]

I appreciate there's transport costs but SA is full of oil, what's stopping them upping their supply?

Has anyone seen the pictures of the Russians burning all the gas off from Nordstream 1 the pipeline that supplies us & Europe with gas? It stinks of I'm not playing & I'm taking my ball home as well.

Effectively, the era of cheap energy is over. Your bills will never be as cheap as they were in the 2000s, because even with renewables, the costs of implementing them to replace fossil fuels will be enormous, and the fossil fuels will still be needed to build them.

This.

Be grateful that Boris Johnson is agreeing to Nuclear.

This thread is fascinating. Thanks for the really detailed posts.

Have you read Thomas Gold’s Deep Hot Biosphere?
as far as I’m aware the abiotic oil theory has never actually been categorically disproven but admit I probably haven’t made an extensive effort to find out as it’s a nice pipe dream to keep alive.

Off out for the day but I will check back later

@OooPourUsACupLove

Fuel cells are expensive and the infrastructure needed to convert to a hydrogen economy would need to be built out. Hydrogen isn’t an energy source either, but a carrier, and a horribly inefficient one at that. Converging wind and solar energy to electric then using that to crack water (which is also in short supply as we need fresh clean water) to then make hydrogen to then be converted back to water giving us electricity will never be efficient. Even Toyota, the biggest promoters of the tech, are now moving to battery EVs.

There may be a case for using hydrogen as an energy storage medium in situ for wind farms etc. instead of chemical batteries.

@Nat6999

Russia can’t really sell it to anyone since we have sanctions in place and they can’t store it given how much they’re producing. The Americans were doing the same thing with fracked gas as they didn’t have a market for it and weren’t able to use it. So they flared it off as a side effect of getting the oil.

@MissPoldark

A theory lives or dies on being proven. We do not need to prove a negative, and no one has ever come up with evidence for abiotic oil. It was the brain droppings of some people who seemingly thought the Earth had a gooey core or oil just waiting to be tapped, or that it was mere coincidence that the areas with the most fossilised plant matter also happened to be where the hydrocarbon fuels were.

Even if it were true, it’s plainly obvious that the replenishment rate won’t help as no oil or gas field has been depleted only to then fill up again and open for business.

The trouble with nuclear (apart from radioactive waste that is dangerous for hundreds/thousands of years), is that you have to pour an awful lot of concrete to build a nuclear power station, plus all the steel etc. Concrete and steel takes huge amounts of energy (mostly oil) to produce. It is debateable whether the power station will ever produce more energy than it took to build.

An a nuclear power station will only produce electricity, it won't produce liquid fuels to power vehicles.

And it never pays for itself - is there a single nuclear power station in the world has been built and run entirely without government subsidy? Governments will subsidise nuclear power to get the materials for nuclear weapons.

Plus, a nuclear power station takes a decade or more to build, so it won't help us now, even if it was going to help in the future (which I don't think it will).

The trouble with nuclear (apart from radioactive waste that is dangerous for hundreds/thousands of years),

Depends. Quite aside from the Thorium cycle, there are fast neutron reactors which could eliminate existing stocks of waste material

An a nuclear power station will only produce electricity, it won't produce liquid fuels to power vehicles.

aren't we all supposed to be sailing into an electric vehicle future anyway ?

Plus, a nuclear power station takes a decade or more to build, so it won't help us now, even if it was going to help in the future (which I don't think it will).

Maybe we should have started a decade ago ?

That said, if you remember that your government is quite prepared to see you die as long as they get to live, you won't be far wrong in understanding the modern - or indeed the ancient - world. This is why the trick is to never keep the same people in power.

Still we are where we are. Interesting times indeed.

An a nuclear power station will only produce electricity, it won't produce liquid fuels to power vehicles.
aren't we all supposed to be sailing into an electric vehicle future anyway ?

But electric cars take fossil fuels to manufacture and fossil fuels to mine the rare minerals for the batteries.

I’m finding this thread very interesting!

I read about semiconductors being used for clean energy? I don’t know much about this, but does it help in anyway?

The rare minerals aren't that rare. Just in the "wrong" place.

And if you have enough electricity, you can make energy in whatever form you like. Including hydrocarbons where needed.

The problems facing our country, and the world at the moment are 80% political, and 20% environmental. People need to make their peace with that coz it ain't changing. I've spent 50 plus years swimming against a tide, and I'm tired. Collectively the world over our species has acted like a child told not to play with matches. Well now the house is on fire, there's no adults to come to the rescue. Believe in a God or Gods if you like. It might take your mind of things.

This is not a fascinating/interesting thread. This is a terrifying thread.

We are living in interesting times.

Yes it is very scary.
The best thing to do is accept the fact that the future won't be like you expected. Your life, and your children's lives, won't be what you hoped for.
But that doesn't mean they won't have fulfilling and meaningful lives. They just won't be as materially wealthy and you or they thought.

Nuclear power pays for itself in energy output, and especially low carbon energy at that. France and most Western nations made nuke plants well under a decade in timescale from breaking earth to first atoms split. The reason they cost so much now is because of the market dynamics we have which focus on the cheapness (lol) of natural gas. You can throw up a lot of CCGT power plants for better profits than nukes.

And yes, nuclear was chosen to help proliferation of weapons grade materials for the military, but you can also easily choose different isotopes to get around this, as it was mentioned before about thorium. Regardless, there will always be state involvement because of how dangerous such powerplants can be.

Modular reactors would be a better bet. Faster to build, easily dispatched to towns or even villages to power their needs and fully self-contained. Waste is really a solved issue and for the peanut gallery that hates anything nuclear related. Greenpeace and The Green Party really have done pretty terrible harm to the cause, though it's not like TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima didn't help solidify that fear in the public.

Fission exists right here, right now. It is pretty much the only energy source that can give us any shot at managing the decline of industrial civilisation without it going full Mad Max.

@Liebig

I loved your post up until the comment on fusion.

It's always 10 years away.

@Liebig

My apologies. I misread fission for fusion.

This may be of interest. What do shrimp and deuterium have to do with one another?

Not that it will save us from anything now, but it's a more promising approach to the tokamak designs we've been trying to get work for decades now.

Much like being self sufficient from renewables ...

One thing we urgently need to do is reorient our economies - not just in the West but across the globe - away from the idea that assets, particularly housing, are worth storing huge amounts of unproductive “wealth” up in.

Permanently higher energy costs would not be so much of a problem if we had kept housing costs at a historically normal level, and instead of selling houses to each other at ever increasing prices, had used some of our capital to facilitate better transfer to different energy sources.

We had a golden opportunity in the early 2000s to use the long boom cash and globalisation dividends to invest in new energy technologies and human skills and wellbeing, and instead we ploughed all our excess money into unproductive land/housing assets, now valued at many times more than they are really worth, many people with mortgages tying up large parts of income for years into the future. We could not have been more stupid.

Just think of where we could have been of instead of running up a massive housing bubble and then spending fifteen years trying to prop it up, we had instead kept the housing market at historically normal levels, and collectively invested that money into education, healthcare, manufacturing, energy technology, transitioning to more sustainable homes, consumption patterns and lifestyles. All it would have taken was to have some actual leadership and knowledge about these things in central banking and government. It’s not like many many economists, scientists and forecasters haven’t been telling us what is coming for twenty to thirty years now.

Shame that colossal greed and stupidity — from the derivatives market all the way down to ordinary people copying Homes Under the Hammer — ruled the day instead, as we’ll never get that chance back again, AND there is going to be a coming economic shock that is going to be very bad indeed, including a housing market collapse. (Who’s going to be buying U.K. houses at five times their historical median value when the energy bills to run them are astronomical, especially with all those patio heaters, inflatable hot tubs, bifold doors leaking energy and marble flooring everywhere?)

Fantastic and informative thread thanks all.

Some impressive posts on here - do I detect a BP/Shell employee or two?

Anyway, we've known the current situation has been coming for years, it just took the war in Ukraine to make it happen - along with numerous other factors such as stratospheric demand (historically speaking).

Expect major changes in the next 5 years - many involving much less carbon-based fuels.

We'll have to eke out any renewable output and use it sparingly to keep hospitals etc running. I would expect to see private vehicles almost dissappear eventually, as available oil is focused on rapid mass transit systems that use such fuels more efficiently - and agriculture of course. EVs are mainly just a stop-gap, and I'd expect something like an 80% switch of road freight to rail. Nuclear? Difficult to see it not having a role for baseload and with all those intermittent renewable energy sources.

A return to more traditional forms of agriculture and organic is already being considered in many areas - by no means a bad thing but with slightly lower yields.

People seem ill-prepared for such changes, but we will have to grasp the nettle. People could easily have their heating off 50% of the time, and the number of schools and offices l see with the lights on with sunny weather outside is simply astonishing. Natural daylight is perfectly adequate most of the time.

All empires fall.

All.

@Usou I only follow this stuff as a personal hobby. I work in science otherwise and just grasp the ecological overshoot we’re in now. It’s hard to be the Cassandra of the family and saying you expected these events sooner or later and always being hand waved away as if talking total tosh.

I will say your post is on point, though I might add that Sri Lanka tried the organic farming route and, well, let’s just say it didn’t go so well. It really needs to be implemented perfectly to not drastically reduce yields in many areas. The Ukraine situation has led to cutting of yields already because of lack of ammonia and the drought isn’t helping either.

Additionally, I question the social cohesion of our populations and gov’t’s ability to cope when TSHTF, so to speak. We already have strikes with people also demanding to be able to continue consuming as they are, and we just cannot fathom an economy that doesn’t grow, to say nothing of contract. This is the total paradigm change that no one in 250 years of industrial civilisation has expected or wanted to come about.

To sit comfortably within “sustainable” (really, nothing with our present civ is such) means of energy production would take a massive drop in consumption and certain standards people have gotten used to. We see in other threads people reacting pretty badly to being told to turn the thermostat down or fly less or downsize the house and car. People can accept that for a crisis of a limited duration, such as a world war or the artificial energy crises of the ‘70s. But what of a permanent state of affairs?

Interesting. I’ve learned from this thread:

1. fracking has never yet been profitable
2. nuclear isn’t profitable either (?)
3. ’the death of progress’ is no longer something only being spoken about by radical XR types.

I’m always trying to translate thoughts about the impending fall of our civilisation into practical personal and domestic decisions but not sure any of it will make a jot of difference