Ill get my coat!

[biffvernon]

In that case I'll delete this post

(You have to read the next post first or this won't make sense.)

[Bandidoz]

No the point is to delete pointless personal and circular arguments - so-called anti-troll messages is a form of baiting and is just as unpleasant to trawl through when reading a topic.

[JavaScriptDonkey]

Agreed, but unlike RGR, JSD and AIC, most contributors on this forum aren't diametrically opposed to the general concepts of PO and CC as they appear to be.

You mind your tongue.

I am not diametrically opposed to PO. I have on many occasioned stated that it is the only rational outcome on our planet.

I am also not diametrically opposed to CC. I have stated that CC is an absolute fact.

What I do not subscribe to are the various death cults that have attached themselves. I see no reason to assume that a gradual reduction in the RoF of oil will necessarily lead to TEOTAWKI. Similarly I know of no evidence that points that a climate warming of the sort usually predicted would do anything but good for this planet.

There is an ice age on the way whether you like it or not. Being a few degrees warmer before hand might save billions of lives.

Perhaps your problem is that you can't abide people who see the same evidence but come to a different conclusion? Smells like religion to me.

[clv101]

Similarly I know of no evidence that points that a climate warming of the sort usually predicted would do anything but good for this planet.

Not read IPCC's WG 2 report yet?

[kenneal - lagger]

There is an ice age on the way whether you like it or not. Being a few degrees warmer before hand might save billions of lives.

If you're referring to the long term term cycle of ice ages, there are a few thousand years to go yet before that is due and, on present trends of exceeding the worst IPCC predictions, current life on earth could be toast by then.

If you're referring to the Maunder Minimum type event predicted for the next 30 to 40 years, the danger is that as we are doing nothing now, when the cold spell comes, we will continue to do nothing and we will be well on our way to toasting life on earth when it warms again.

Doing nothing is not an option for CC.

The mitigation measures for CC are also virtually the same as those for PO: drastically reducing our use of fossil fuelled energy. Insulating buildings is one of those measures which will drastically reduce our FF use and it will also mitigate the effects of an mini ice age occurring.

A drastic reduction in FF use will also have a very good effect on our Balance of Payments, which is probably our greatest worry nationally at the moment. Our increasing use of imported energy, as North Sea oil and gas deplete, is one of the largest contributors to our increasing financial deficit and one of the easiest to do something about.

[woodpecker]

The whole paid peak oil denier thing is a bit paranoid and borders on real LATOC tinfoil.

If TPTB wanted to stop peak oil information getting out they'd hack every site and denial-of-service the whole lot.

One of my clients has a chunky department known as social media
This department spends its time posting on social media sites, on behalf of the firm's clients: banks, oil companies, airlines etc, and setting a social media strategy for those clients

And every other similar firm has similar departments

This is just one small part of the industry

[RGR]

[quote="the_lyniezian"]

[the_lyniezian]

Pot, kettle, black.

As long as you're happy in your instilled ignorance...

This is part of the problem with this site- too many people engaged in bashing such arguments (and those who make them) instead of debating them in a calm and sensible manner.

Debating nuance inside a known belief system is something else entirely from two people or groups trying to work out an understanding on a particular issue.

For example, inside a peak oil belief system it is accepted that only "easy" oil matters, and then easy oil is defined in a given manner. Venturing outside this particular belief is tantamount to heresy, from the perspective of someone operating inside the belief system.

If, however, two groups are trying to work out an understanding, one side would cite this belief, another would venture that billions of these not-so-easy barrels have been discovered, produced, refined and distributed to consumers who didn't even know they were using such oil. The first group would then consider this fact (and it is a fact), and would offer up a modification to their point of view which allows this sort of not-so-easy oil into their viewpoint. And then the conversation would continue.

The example above is a real one of course. I was once told by a TOD poster that oil isn't oil unless it has a certain density. Above a certain density, it was oil. Below a certain density, it was something else, but certainly not worth counting as oil.

It should be noted that both these compounds, the oil, and something which looks like oil but isn't, could be composed of the same molecules. Buried at the same depths. Drilled and developed the same way. Refined into the same products. Distributed to gasoline pumps across the land the same.

Sort of like counting the water on the planet, and deciding that because oceans have heavier water in them than the local freshwater lake, they shouldn't be counted in the total.

All well and good, but it seems like a poor example, as most peak oil arguments I've read explain the heavier substances (at least when you get yo oil shale, tar sands and other unconventionals, perhaps to a lesser extent the heavier oils) that they're just not as effective or economical due to the reduced EROEI, rather than just dismissing it. (Or perhaps they'll cite the environmental damage caused by extraction?)

I doubt anyone is screaming out "heresy!" over that.

[RGR]

[quote="the_lyniezian"]

[clv101]

All well and good, but it seems like a poor example, as most peak oil arguments I've read explain the heavier substances (at least when you get yo oil shale, tar sands and other unconventionals, perhaps to a lesser extent the heavier oils) that they're just not as effective or economical due to the reduced EROEI, rather than just dismissing it. (Or perhaps they'll cite the environmental damage caused by extraction?)

I doubt anyone is screaming out "heresy!" over that.

In the history of the world, tens of thousands of fields, millions of wells drilled, tens of millions of people who have worked in the industry, since 1859, not a single well/field/project has ever been given the go/ no go decision by any of those tens of millions of people based on EROEI. Not one.

Of course, why would they? All individual projects get the yea or nay on financial grounds. That really goes without saying. EROEI is, of course, rolled into those financial considerations though. The vast majority of oil extracted thus far has required fairly trivial energy input so it's easy to say EROEI has been irrelevant.

That doesn't necessarily follow going forward, fields are abandoned with remaining oil in place. The last fraction just not economically viable. Declining EROEI contributes to that declining economical viability.

So it is fair to ask, why would anyone use it to determine the validity of a oil and gas development project going forward?

Folk decide whether a project will go forward based on whether it will make money. One side of that question is how much the product can be sold for, the other how much it will cost to produce. In working out how much production costs will be, the amount of energy required will be a factor. EROEI is just a proxy for a component of economic viability.

[kenneal - lagger]

While EROEI might not have a affect on whether oil is extracted or not it will have an affect on the amount of oil available from any given resource. People are saying that the Canadian oil sands resource is as big as Saudi Arabia or bigger. This may be true of the physical size of the resource but the useful amount available in Canada is far less than Saudi because of the EROEI.

So much of the available fuel will have to be used in its extraction that the usable size of the Tar Sands will be about a third of what is available. This has an effect on the cost of extraction of the oil and the price required to mine it. When people say we have enough oil to last a hundred years it may not be true. A resource extracted at an EROEI of 100 may last one hundred years but the same size one extracted at an EROEI of 3 will only last three years. As EROEI goes down we have to find more and more of the oil to last the same amount of time as before.

This in turn has a effect on the economy as it makes everything in which oil is used more expensive. It makes a difference over whether to manufacture in the US and Europe or export that manufacturing to China and the Far East. It makes a difference to whether it is economic to use a tractor to produce food or whether to get a person to do it: whether we can build multistorey aquaponic farms to keep the world fed or have to rely on good old soil.

If we use nuclear sourced electricity to produce a convenient transport fuel from inconvenient tar sands we may be producing at an EROEI of less than one but the price will reflect that and the use made of the resultant fuel will reflect on its cost. We produce food at an EROEI of about 0.1 at the moment (Ten calories of oil to produce one calorie of food) but that is because we have cheap oil to subsidise the cost of production. Once oil becomes more expensive as it becomes more scarce because of the lower EROEI we will have to find a less energy intensive way of producing our food again.

That is the importance of EROEI in oil production.

[RGR]

[quote="clv101"]

[UndercoverElephant]

clv101,

It[/(it) ] has stolen your avatar. What are you going to do about it?

[RGR]

[quote="kenneal"]

[clv101]

RGR, there are at least a couple dozen peer reviewed papers on EROEI in the literature. If you really do think the concept is a worthless one, why not do something useful and spend your next couple of week's "PowerSwitch time" writing a short paper explaining exactly why. Energy Policy (Impact Factor: 3.020), Energy (3.565) or definitely Energies (1.130) will publish it.