Peak Oil... again

Lazarus Plus said:
I am kind of curious about this, so maybe someone can fill me in: Coal can be converted to oil, right? Like they did in WWII? How inefficent is that process? Because I think there is massive amounts of coal still left, far more than oil. At least, I think so.
It's possible to convert coal into oil in the so-called Fischer-Tropsch process. Germany indeed implemented this process on an industrial scale to produce petroleum during the oil shortage of WWII. It is still used, though sparsely.

While the process is economically feasible, it generates huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Using it on a global scale for a prolonged amount of time would have catastrophic environmental effects and the contribution to the global warming would quickly render the Earth uninhabitable.
 
Lazarus Plus said:
I am kind of curious about this, so maybe someone can fill me in: Coal can be converted to oil, right? Like they did in WWII? How inefficent is that process? Because I think there is massive amounts of coal still left, far more than oil. At least, I think so.

Luckily, an IM to a friend of mine in the Department of Energy (DoE) gave me a quick reference of this.

Pretty much everything you need to know about the subject, and more. :shock:

In short, about how the oil companies have been fucking us all along, much like the tobacco companies, and making it so that only legislature and funding they approve of will survive.

n March 1953 when the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee opened its budget hearings, its first official act was to kill funds for the Louisiana, MO, synthetic fuel plants. The cost of synthetic fuels was too high for the government to bear, the Committee stated. Estes Kefauver, then out of Congress but later elected to the U.S. Senate, claimed that the nation's oil companies had been behind the Committee's action because they did not want the competition from coal. A short time later, the Committee voted to cease funding for all the programs authorized under the Synthetic Fuels Act.

And frankly, the entire article is quite informative.

As for carbon dioxide, now mind you this is from Greenpeace's site yet I doubt they would cook that fact (will see if I can find another report to verify or question this estimation), but it has a few notable things about how the oil companies react.

State Oil?

Also, Ratty, I don't think they use that process anymore, the Karrick Process is said to be a bit more efficient and clean, but still a fucking mess compared to conventional oil, and burns comparatively like ass.
 
Continuing on the subject, this is another rather good article that provides an... illuminating analysis of the various processes for synthesizing oil and (natural) gas.

The processes described there have the potential to solve our problems in the medium term. However ignoring the ever-present quality issues that Rosh pointed out, they still aren't anything even remotely resembling a silver bullet. As I'll make an attempt to show.

The market cost of oil per barrel (above $70 at the moment) have risen far above the $30-35 per barrel extracted mark needed for coal liquefaction to become a viable process. People tend to forget that WW2 Germany ran much of it's war machine on locally produced coal-oil (in excess of 50% of their fuel was generated from this process, as said in Rosh's article). It wasn't until the Allies began focusing bombing campaigns upon synthesizing and industrial facilities that the Nazis began losing ground, and in the end the war. But that's another topic entirely- the point is that if a 1940s-era wartime economy could rely so heavily upon locally produced coal-oil and gas, it's reasonable to say that large swaths of the world could do the same today. Yet once you hit that point, the ever-present problem of pollution and it's far-reaching effects arises- as Ratty said, the process is far more polluting than any extraction methods used today- even greater than the effects of industrial pollution, in some cases.

South Africa and China are investing heavily in the technology, but not in research on how to decrease the pollution generated. In SA's case it's because they're largely ignorant of the effects... in the case of the PRC, it's because they simply don't give two shits.

Oil shale is also rather interesting. The current estimate of worldwide oil shale reserves varies between 1.2 and 1.6 TRILLION barrels of extractable oil, with 800 billion to 1.2 triillion of that in the United States alone. The strip mining and "in-situ" processes are capable of 70-80% efficiency of extraction, meaning that the amount of actual oil capable of being derived would be in the range of 850 billion to 1.3 trillion barrels. That's on par with the current estimates of remaining worldwide oil reserves, put at around 1 trillion barrels. However as with coal-oil, the cost of extraction is a problem. Seeing as it ranges anywhere from $25-30 per barrel, along with the fact that the process is estimated to be up to four times as polluting as "normal" oil extraction methods, there's quite a bit of reluctance among oil producers to invest heavily in the process. The profit margins aren't high enough, and the effects of wide-scale production on the earth's climate would potentially be catastrophic, the same as with coal-oil.

Tar sands are the third part of the triumvirate. The current estimate of extractable oil from them ranges between 2.5 and 3 trillion barrels, with a proven ability to attain 60-70% efficiency in extraction- the problem is that next to noone is actually investing in its development. So the massive amounts of oil in tar sand will likely remain an unobtainable dream for the forseeable future.

In the end, peak-oil isn't going to (directly) come from oil fields running dry, it's going to come from the lack of active development of our already-existing ability to exploit alternatives like oil shale, coal-oil and tar sand. It typically takes around 50 years for the wide-spread acceptance of new power generation techniques, but the signs are all seeming to point to us having nowhere near that long to wait.
 
So it seems like mother nature is going to have to take another one for the team, come the time that politicians look seriously at our coal reserves again.

Oh dear.
 
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