I'm a Patriot, and a Traitor

I'm a Patriot, and I love my country....

But I'm also a Traitor to my country's cause of maintaining unequal control of global resources as described on page 188 of TPIO (Richard Heinberg's The Party is Over).

My definition of politics is:

The intentional inequitable allocation of finite resources.

It is probably more accurate to call it a mis-allocation.

We live in a world of more than 7 billion humans where the Bottom Billion live on less than one dollar a day and the Bottom Two Billion don't have access to clean water.

This insane global inequity is fueled by oil and controlled by politics. It's just that simple.

Peak Oil is going to change all that.

No more BAU (Business As Usual).

Although my analysis indicates that it is less likely that we will experience an out-of-control "collapse," we are definitely now experiencing what is described as Energy Descent and Energy Collapse remains a constant threat. (I'm a One-Four-SixtyFive-Thirty).

As the PeakOil fueled BAU world unwinds, human awareness will shift towards sustainable living and relocalization of food production which will tend to disarm the politically powerful and empower the disenfranchised.

The WorldWideWeb is already spreading the basic ideas of sustainability faster than the PowersThatBe can control them. My intention is to be part of that solution, part of the wave that shifts the inequality back to our human compatriots.

So, I am a Traitor. A traitor to the cause of BAU. This is not heroic or really very interesting. It is really just a matter of education, understanding, awareness and acceptance. BAU is done anyway, whether I am a traitor to it or not. I'm just fortunate to have evolved as a human and been educated as a geologist and tuned-in to the fundamentals of resource depletion rather than suffering the fate of my fellow "Patriots" that were taught to "Pledge Allegiance to the Economy."

Soon, very soon, the celebrity-worship ModernMediaCircus will be unable to hide the truth of Peak Oil Energy Descent.

Unfortunately, the US government doesn't have a PLAN. That's because they don't have the courage to get realistic about the problem.

Instead, the ModernMediaMachine continues to serve up a menu of tasty tidbits in the form of soundbites attempting to rationalize why President Obama's escalation of a war should be rewarded with a Nobel Peace Prize and Tiger Woods' lying, cheating and thieving should be rewarded by continued reverence and undeserved "respect" for privacy. Don't be fooled. The Party is Over.

The cool thing is you don't have to make a choice between being a Patriot, and continuing your allegiance to a fundamentally flawed economic system and the government that protects it, and being a traitor to that system.

The reality is that in the new world after Peak Oil, a traitor can express their commitment and fervor by positive action in the form of investing in new world systems of sustainability.

There is nothing to "fight about." No bullshit "war on drugs" or "fight against cancer" or other phony nonsense. The old system is imploding on itself no matter what your politics and what your allegiances might be.

We don't need to round up all the Traitors and throw them in an internment camp. As a matter of fact, that is exactly what the government doesn't want to do. We need to keep people out there struggling for solutions and learning how to rewire everything to run sustainably. This is a good thing.

So maybe for the first time in history, one can be a traitor, and a patriot both.

Listen to my friend Jackson Brown sing about it, and don't forget to raise your Peak Oil Freak Flag high, HIGH!

Blinkenlights on the Peak Oil Machine

ACHTUNG!

ALLES WIRSCHAFTSWISSENSCHAFLER (ECONOMISTCHEN) TURISTEN UND NONTECNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS.

DAS PEAKOILMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.

IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.

ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.


In other words, if you are not a Geologist or OilHand and you've never done any mud logging or thrown the spinning chain, DON'T TRY TO FUCK WITH SHIT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND.

Just sit back an enjoy watching the BlinkenLights on the global Peak Oil Machine economy as the world slides down the Peak Oil Crash Depletion Curve.

Thank you for your attention. Auf widersehen.

Hey Mr. Economist, the war is over!

Remember those Japanese soldiers who were left behind to fight on little islands in the Pacific after World War 2 ended?

This is a picture of Lt. Onoda who was one of them and remained convinced for 29 years after the war ended that the world he used to know still existed. You can check out this fascinating true story about the Lt.

Just imagine meeting Lt. Onoda and trying to explain to him that things have changed a little and now in fact, men have "walked on the moon."

Ha, ha, ha, ha! You can almost here Lt. Onoda laughing. "No way! Men walking on the moon! Nonsense," he would say.

Funny thing is, this is pretty much the attitude I observe with Wall-Streeters, Bankers, CEOs, Biz School Grads, Government Officials and just about everybody else, including all those "educated" types that went to "Haaa-vaaad" and Yale and LSE or whatever.

Guess what guys? The joke is on you. The war ended a long time ago. Didn't you get that memo? Didn't you notice all the leaflets dropping from the sky?

It's incredibly strange that all these otherwise intelligent people have continued to ignore the signs. You know, little things like the fact that US oil production peaked way back in January 1971.

Hey! Guess what?

1971 was 29 years ago!

Just like Lt. Onoda hiding in the jungle for 29 years, these same masters of the universe have continued to "believe" in the myth of infinite cheap oil and GROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH.

It almost sounds like some kind of cheer, doesn't it? Or scarier still, some kind of chant. Imagine a whole stadium full of economists chanting together, "GROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH." Although I always enjoy it when they do "the wave." (otherwise known as the Wall Street Journal; nothing but entertainment) ;-)

Economic growth, as we know it in the late 20th century and early 21st, was completely dependent upon the exponential rise in the availability of cheap oil for transporation fuels and food production and everything else. End of story.

The Global Crisis is caused by the change in the vector of oil production. Simple.

But economists and the ModernMediaMachine remain convinced that the war is still on!

Maybe we should drop some leaflets down on them in the jungle and tell them the war is over and to come on out and get with the solutions to Peak Oil?

"Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"?

The "Growing Liquids Supply Challenge"? Hmmm....

Doesn't that sound like it could be Peak Oil?

Check out the graph above from page 12 of the "One Year Later" September 17th 2008 update to the 2007 "Hard Truths" report issued by the National Petroleum Council, an oil industry organization.

Go ahead, click on it. I dare you.

It's interesting how this oil industry group avoids the term "Peak Oil" at all costs. They don't want to call it Peak Oil. They want to sanitize it and call it a "growing liquids supply challenge."

Well, too bad. I'm going to call it what Hubbert called it, Peak Oil.

Peak Oil, Peak Oil, Peak Oil. There, we got that straight.

But, check out the graph. Do you notice anything scary about it?

See that prominent gray band starting from the left at about eighty-something million barrels of oil PER DAY? Then, going DOWN to the right, the gray band is prominently labeled "4-7% Production Decline."

Production decline, starting in 2007, and going DOWN all the way to the end of the projected period in the year 2030.

That means Peak Oil. Plain and simple. And, this data is mostly from 2006 and 2007 and was updated in 2008.

Peak Oil is HERE! Even the oil industry is showing this.

But, it gets worse. Notice the UPPER gray band? That range shows the projected DEMAND curve according to the 2008 International Energy Outlook.

Look how bad it gets. In just 2015, a mere 6 years from now, the projected shortfall in "liquids" is 30 to 45 MILLION BARRELS PER DAY!

By 2030 it is even worse, catastrophic! The projected shortfall, to keep up with the projected demand of about 110 MMBOPD is 70 to 100 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL PER DAY!

That is just outright ridiculous!

No way is the world all of a sudden going to find and produce an extra 70 to 100 MMBOPD in 2030 when we can't even keep producing eighty something per day in 2008!

No way!

Notice up at the top of the graph, it says clearly, "Increasing Demand and Natural Production Decline Create Growing Need For Significant  New Production Capacity"

That might be the understatement of the century.

This is why the Global Economic Crisis is about to get a lot more interesting.

Are you living sustainably, with your own private energy supply?

Houston, We've Got A Problem!

Buzz, buzz, buzz. Twitter, twitter, buzz.

Can you hear all the noise out there?

And not just the ModernMediaMachine.

It's on Twitter, it's on MySpace, it's on Facebook, on text messages.

Houston, we've got a problem!

But, is all the buzz, buzzing about the real problem? It's NOT just the economy, I can assure you.

Did you see "Apollo 13"? Classic.

Did you catch the part in the story line where the crew was scheduled to do a live broadcast while flying towards the satellite of a small, water covered planet, third out from it's sun?

And, the ModernizingMediaMachine of the time decided that watching real live human beings flying from the tiny home planet where they evolved to an entirely different celestial object was just not interesting enough for "ratings" to rate being broadcast?

Amazing!

What does that remind you of? All those Demon Derivatives weren't too interesting until they started to crash the global economy huh? Or sub-prime mortgages, or greedy bankers or sleeping politicians.

And, do you remember the part where they were buzz, buzzing, trying to figure out how to get the astronauts home again safely and finally, at one point, one of the engineers explains that the only thing that matters is ENERGY!

ENERGY!

That's all that matters. If you don't have any energy, nothing else on the spacecraft is going to work or make a difference at all.

Hmmmm.......

Is this sounding familiar?

Every day I talk to people about Peak Oil and for even the nicest, most intelligent ones, their eyes just seem to glaze over with the whole subject.

Pick a subject, any subject. Paris Hilton, pro basketball, the Academy Awards, whatever.

Anything is better than actually discussing our emergency situation with our spacecraft.

Make no mistake about it, the Good Ship Blue Marble is in trouble!

Ask yourself, if you are reading this, and therefore at some level you "care" about Peak Oil and our energy emergency, how many people did you tell about the problem today? What about yesterday?

Make a list. I dare you. How many people do you know that can even explain what Peak Oil is?

Global Warming is warm and fuzzy now. Lots of people are freaking out over that.

But hardly anyone seems to have the slightest concern that our main source of energy is crashing and we don't have a replacement ready.

Ever since I first learned about Peak Oil in 1981 I've watched with amazement while the people around me just kept burning, and burning and burning. And, I can assure you that nobody, I mean nobody wanted to hear about Peak Oil. I learned to only discuss that "strange" subject with other "earth scientists." Nobody likes a party pooper do they?

It makes you wonder if we will end up as "lucky" as Apollo 13 and make it home again?

Peak Oil Risk

Initially, the risk of Peak Oil was ridiculed.

Currently, the risk is being ignored.

Soon, the risk of Peak Oil will be considered self-evident.

Historically, when people look back on the history of energy, they will wonder how so many people could have been so stupid and failed to take action.

Risk is Relative

Have you ever heard somebody say, "Well, Einstein said 'it's all relative,' right?"

Wrong!

That's not what Einstein said.

This is a common misconception of laypersons who don't bother to do their homework.

Mr. Einstein helped us to understand that there is no such thing (existent) as "space," or "time".

The way the universe actually works is by a concept called SpaceTime.

Both together at the same time.

There is no such thing as space. There is no such thing as time.

Space and Time are merely elements of SpaceTime.

The Relativity that Mr. Einstein was talking about is limited to the relativity of space to time. Nothing else.

So, no, it is NOT all relative.

This is just one simple example of a LACK OF AWARENESS OF REALITY.

Most people I talk to about SpaceTime lack the awareness that their "belief" about space and time is an incorrect mental picture of reality.

Peak Oil is real. 

But Peak Oil is misunderstood by most people also.

They lack an AWARENESS of Peak Oil. That is what this blog is all about. Raising awareness. So we can work together to find a solution to our energy emergency.

How serious is Peak Oil?

What are the risks?

Well, let's explore the risks of Peak Oil RELATIVE to other serious threats.

I will attempt to put Peak Oil in perspective and raise our awareness by constructing a list of threats. These are realities that pose a serious risk to both human civilization and life on Planet Ocean (Planet Earth is an ignorant term I refuse to use).

I'm pretty well qualified to judge risk based on my lifetime of experience as an extreme sports athlete, an investor and also my experience as an Airline Captain. My ability to rationally evaluate risk might be explained by comparing the difference between flying my hangglider close to a thunderstorm (an acceptable personal risk, given adequate flying skill) and operating a transport category airliner with a whole load of passengers onboard who depend on my judgment for their lives.

Let me put it to you another way.

Answer this question: What is Safety?

Tick, tock, tick tock. Did you instantly spit out your answer?

Most people I ask this question have a very difficult time coming up with anything coherent and organized.

Their egos tell them that they are their own "expert" and they say things like, "I know what safety is. I just KNOW."

This is the mark of a layperson, or as we call them in the world of hanggliding, a "Pear Person" or "Whuffo." This is a person who does not have a clue how to rationally evaluate risk and achieve safety. And, they probably shouldn't be interfacing with dangerous machines like lawnmowers or hanggliders or helicopters.

The answer is: Safety, is the optimal minimization of risk.

Optimal. This is the most important concept. Not all risk can be systematically, operationally or economically eliminated. The goal of safety in any activity with risk is to optimize the minimization of risk.

The basic questions in evaluating the risk associated with a particular event are 1) What is the worst it could get? 2) How likely is the event to occur? Check out this analysis that puts Peak Oil into perspective with other extreme risks that humans face today.

I would argue that the risks of Peak Oil are extreme and humans are definitely not doing enough to optimize the minimization of risks associated with Peak Oil.

Very simply: This means we are NOT SAFE from the risks of Peak Oil.

1) GRB (Gamma Ray Burst). A GRB is an exotic cosmological event that could destroy our entire planet and everything on it. Astronomers and Physicists are just beginning to study this phenomenon but we do know that the risk of a GRB is extreme because of the vast amounts of destructive energy that would be released. It is probably not worth staying awake at night worrying about a GRB event but the risk is there nonetheless. Everybody dies.

2) Asteroid Collision with Planet Ocean. You don't have to be a genius to understand that there is an extreme risk of destruction from an Asteroid. The only question is whether the impact would be a "PK" (planet killer; killing off most of the macroscopic life but leaving at least some microscopic life) or an ELE (Extinction Level Event; driving many species to extinction). Again, this one might not be worth staying up at night, but the risk is extreme and ignoring the possibility of an asteroid impact is just fooling yourself by failing to construct a correct mental picture of reality. Just look up at the moon on any night and you can get a good sense of the reality of an asteroid impact. I've been to the meteor crater in Arizona and picked up meteor fragments and held them in my hand, so you can't tell me the risk is not real. I've been to Russia and seen trees knocked over and looked at meteor fragments there too. An asteroid impact could happen at any time, and if it does, it will likely be severe. The severity varies from a few hundred or few thousand to Everybody dies.

3) Skynet. No, just kidding. Even though the Terminator movies were great, there is a zero likelihood that "machines" are going to take over the world and hunt down the humans. I just throw this one in there to give perspective to those who don't "believe" in Peak Oil. If they are wrong about Peak Oil, which they are, it is about as stupid as letting the machines take over the world. If Skynet were real, it would fit into the list about here.

4) Volcanic Winter. I put this one on the list because we (geologists) know for sure the risk is real and could threaten life on the planet at any time. Tambora stratovolcano erupted in 1815 and caused the "year without a summer" in 1816. This is no joke. There is nothing keeping another similar eruption from causing another year without a summer or a couple of years without a summer due to the volcanic ash. The difference between now and then is that now there are about 6.7 Billion people on the planet that are far more susceptible to the impact from a volcanic winter and the destruction of food production. Hundreds of millions of people could die from a volcanic winter. Maybe a billion.

5) Nuclear Winter. This would be similar to Volcanic Winter but with the added fun of radiation poisoning and large-scale permanent impact to life. I only rate nuclear winter below Volcanic Winter because current politics appear to be stable enough to decrease the likelihood of a full-scale Russia-USA conflict even if India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran decide to light em up. Volcanic winter is just a lot more likely.

6) Peak Oil. This is the first event in the list that we can control to any degree at all. The far side extreme of Peak Oil is that the collapse of oil production could cause a global die off. Some estimates are that the globe can only naturally support about 1.5 Billion people. So there is a risk that in about a 10 or 20 year period about 5 billion people could die off. Others have made suggestions that the globe could support as much as 8 billion people. I consider both scenarios unlikely. The actual consequences of Peak Oil will be somewhere in between. But we could easily see several hundred million people die off. Maybe on the scale of 5 to 8 World War IIs (50m), which would mean about 250 million deaths at a minimum.

Deaths attributable to Peak Oil are hard to measure at this point in time even though they are already occurring. Global famine and poverty are already widespread and even though the best understanding involves accounting for the effects of politics, Peak Oil is already hugely impacting the development of human civilization. China, for example has been hamstrung and could have grown at a much higher rate and so could most of Africa if adequate cheap energy had been available in the last several decades.

Peak Oil exposes the world to the risk of a catastrophic collapse in oil production that would fuel war, famine, poverty, disease and economic collapse. The scale of the number of deaths could easily be in the hundreds of millions of people. That is why it is critical to develop an AWARENESS of the risks associated with Peak Oil.

7) Death of the Ocean. We live on a water planet. Nothing really matters as much as the ocean. The problem is that we may have killed the ocean already. Nobody knows. Nobody can say with any degree of certainty whether we have already caused a critical impact with pollution and overfishing. Dr. Sylvia Earle is trying to help us figure out how bad it is. The ocean contains thousands of interlocking networks of non-linear dynamic systems that may be pushed into permanent collapse by unintended effects and unseen consequences. We are playing with a dangerous toy that we do not understand. The problem is that the vast majority of people live largely unconnected to the ocean in their consciousness. But the impact of humans is already known to be extreme. Not just bad, but catastrophic. There are large "dead zones" all over the ocean and recent evidence shows extreme impact from humans in about 95 to 98% of the ocean. The "death" of the ocean could easily kill off all the humans and make the planet uninhabitable for most macroscopic life. Hundreds of millions to billions of people could die. The big problem is that we need energy to fix our human-generated ocean-killing activities. Peak Oil impacts our ability to fix the ocean.

8) Global Warming. We know from the geologic record that the planet has gone through many large swings in chemical conditions including changes in the amount of carbon dioxide and temperature variations. The first question is whether there is any existent as a "climate." There may not be. Weather is understood to be the natural day to day and hour to hour variations. Climate is understood to be the long term trends. But the problem is that humans live such a short time and have a very brief record of competent analysis to work with. Despite the apparent correlation between man-made "greenhouse gases" and warming of the globe or "climate change," the fact remains that nobody "knows" for sure. In fact, it is not just possible but likely that the "trends" we see on the short term as a "climate" may actually be just periods of stability in an otherwise continuously naturally fluctuating non-linear dynamic system of instability at every point in time. Global Warming is serious because the risk is potentially large. Things like large changes in sea level could cause the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and a huge impact to food production and economic pressures. This is the same situation as playing with the ocean. We don't know what we are doing. But it is apparent that man made activities have the potential to have a huge impact and so they must be carefully considered.

The problem is that Peak Oil trumps global warming. The reason is that we are not going to have enough cheap energy to rebuild vast areas of many countries to change our lifestyles to decrease the impact of humans on climate change. But global warming is a media darling and people are stupid enough to continue to drive SUVs down to Wal-Mart to buy plasma TVs so they can watch programs about drowning polar bears.

So, even if global warming is "true," meaning that man's activities are causing it, Peak Oil means that we won't have enough energy to change the ridiculous machine that we built that is causing all the greenhouse gas emissions.

9) Global Economic Collapse. I actually wrote up this list about 2 years ago when I saw the real estate bubble blowing up around the world. Now that the bubble has popped and  the economic collapse is actually happening. And nobody knows how big and deep it will get. Peak Oil will probably cause an even more extreme Global Economic Crisis that what we are seeing in 2008-2009. Just wait until people figure out that all those companies selling stocks to uninformed investors have not accounted for the future lack of cheap energy. Oil is ridiculously cheap right now and could easily go up to $300 per barrel or higher. When it gets really expensive, the world's miltary organizations will just take it away from private use and save it for oppression and control.

10) Rise of a Dictator. Adolph Hitler? Joseph Stalin? The appearance of some new character that could turbo-charge himself with the world wide web and go global is a scary thought but a real risk.

11) Global Pandemic. The H5N1 virus is constantly mutating and drifting. Avian influenza may mutate and become capable of crossing into human populations. The 1918 event killed about 50 million. Many experts have written that they think a similar event today could kill 100 Million or more. It's a good thing that Larry Brilliant and Google are working on an "early warning system" for us.

12) Bio-Terror Event/ Dirty Bomb. Humans are amazingly destructive. Just look at how good we are getting at killing the ocean. Religious ignorance of all kinds is fueling a whole spectrum of dangerous world-views that could lead to a significant event where hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. There might be a suitcase bomb driving down the freeway next to you today for all we know.

13) 8.5 or 9.0 Metropolitan Earthquake. The big one. We haven't really had an extreme event since the human population got so big and so concentrated. Even though China had a large event in 2008, a much bigger one could easily happen any day. Several hundred thousand to perhaps a million could die.

14) Tsunami. The Indonesia event killed about 230 thousand people a few years ago. We could see a bigger one any day. Maybe a million?

15) Food-Water Wars. These type of events are getting more and more likely. For the most part these will probably remain regional and isolated and small in scale.

16) Magnetic Pole Reversal. Here's a potential disaster you don't think about every day. I'm amazed that Hollywood hasn't come up with a disaster flick based on this concept. The rock record seems to indicate that we are overdue for a pole-reversal event. Nobody really knows what would happen and what the consequences would be for life and technology.

So, there you go. Peak Oil is really serious. Right up there with other big risks. We need to start working together to prevent the collapse of oil production from hurting lots of people.

Ever wonder who the most dangerous person in the world is? The answer is, the one who kills you. This usually means the person who you were not AWARE  would kill you, or you probably would have done something about it.

Peak Oil is the dragon that is sneaking up on us. Hopefully awareness of the risk will grow.

Then maybe we can work on minimizing the risks and achieving a more rational degree of safety from the risks of Peak Oil.

Listening? Or waiting to talk?

Buzz, buzz, buzz....buzz, buzz, buzz.....

This is the sound of your brain.....on yourself.

At least that's what I tell myself sometimes.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you find yourself drifting in a conversation?

You want to be polite, of course, but your mind just starts to drift....

"Excuse me, what did you say again?"

Be honest. Sound familiar?

Been there, done that?

Were you really listening? Or just waiting to talk?

I notice this behavior sometimes when I talk to people about Peak Oil.

"Ever wonder where that go-go juice comes from," I casually remark while standing watching a fellow motorist pump their gas?

"Nope." At least that's what most people say.

"Well, have you ever heard about 'Peak Oil'....," and off I go, into "the schpeel," you know, about the Peak.

I always amuse myself by guesstimating how long it will be before somebody's eyes will glaze over in disinterest or whether they will suddenly interrupt with their own "real life drama" that lets me know they were WAITING TO TALK the whole time, and not really listening at all.

And there you have it.

So, one has to ask themself at some point, "Am I listening?" Or just waiting to talk.

That's the thing about AWARENESS. How can a person develop awareness when they spend most of the time just waiting to talk?

Hey, how about the propaganda they threw into last Sunday's "60 Minutes?" Poetic? Or what?

So, they are "bullish" on oil, huh? Hmmm. That's not the "bull-word" I was thinking of.....

Check it out...at CBS News

And then, when you get done smoking the Saudi Whacky Tobacky....check out the latest word from Matt Simmons....

I suggest you pay attention to the part where he talks about growing food locally!

Ethanol fantasy

Be still now! For you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof! - Rumi, Sufi Philosopher

The US is living an ethanol fantasy. The leadership is drunk. The lobbyists brought the kool-aid to the party. Watch out! They might knock us off the roof.

I guess somebody wiser than I will have to explain how such a ridiculous situation has evolved. I can only shake my head and wonder.

Politics is closely associated with the concept of awareness. Usually in an inverse way. Success in politics seems to be inversely proportional to public awareness of facts and issues.  Obfuscation is an effective political tool. "Spin" is the mark of the master politician. Awareness is not the objective of politics. Perhaps that explains the descent into darkness.

I believe most people will do the right thing once they become aware of a particular problem. That was the whole idea in writing a blog about awareness.

The ethanol fantasy might be summarized by explaining that somehow over the 27 years since oil production peaked in the United States the politicians that control the government have failed to come up with a plan to replace cheap energy from oil. 27 years! Instead they have now decided that ethanol will be the leading replacement. This is not a well thought out plan.

A May 16, 2008 article in Forbes.com explored the ethanol fantasy issue.

http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/05/15/ethanol-logistics-energy-biz-logistics-cx_wp_0516ethanol.html

Shhh! Keep your voice down. The Chinese might be listening. Or maybe foreign investors concerned with the viability of the US economy and security of their investments in the US.

The ethanol fantasy presents a whole bunch of interesting impossibilities.

My favorite is the EROEI analysis. Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Yep. You're right. It works very similar to mutual funds that promise fantastic returns but conveniently forget to mention that they don't have any responsibility to report their actual expenses that decrease your returns. EROEI is a hot topic these days. Many scientists have now questioned whether the energy you get out of a "technology" like ethanol (meaning corn ethanol, ethanol produced from corn, corn subsidized by the US government) is more than the energy you put into it! Probably not.

Hmmm. Maybe it would have been a good idea to figure that out BEFORE the commitment to ethanol?

EROEI is one thing. Of course there is the opportunity cost also. Every dollar and every hour spent going down the road of a false technology is an opportunity lost to go down the right road. Whatever that may be.

But the one ethanol issue that just amazes me is the simplest.

ETHANOL CAN'T BE DISTRIBUTED BY PIPELINE! It is too chemically corrosive.

Now, if you ask me, I would say that understanding the chemistry of ethanol and therefore the challenge of building an effective distribution network is pretty important. It is just painfully obvious. For me, this is just another great example how having a working knowledge in chemistry can help a person grasp the reality of an important issue.

ETHANOL WON'T WORK! Why? It will not be possible to build a distribution network that is scaled up big enough to meet the need for replacement of the current huge volumes of oil and gas that are distributed by pipelines. No way.

In case you didn't catch it, a large part of the rail system in the US is already plugged up with coal for electricity production to keep the lights on and freight to keep the consumer economy chugging along. I urge you to take notice of the interesting point in the Forbes article that explains how rail-tankers to carry ethanol aren't being manufactured fast enough.

That leaves shipping by barges and trucks. Barges sound good. They hold a lot and move it relatively cheaply. But the ethanol needs to get from the midwest where they grow it to the coasts where the bulk of the population resides. Barges aren't going to work for that. So much for barges.

That leaves trucks. Truckers. The unsung heroes of the US economy. The people who get all those products to market to support the consumer economy. Well, guess what? Those truckers aren't making it. They can't make a living. I will come back to the plight of truckers in a later blog but for now, trust me, trucking the ethanol will not work for a whole bunch of reasons. For example. Ethanol being transported in a truck is a hazardous material. It is really, really dangerous. So you have to hire drivers that are sort of "above average" meaning they went through the extra expense for the HAZMAT training and they have a near perfect driving record to be insurable driving such a dangerous load. Not to mention the fact that the new TSA rules can delay a driver's HAZMAT certification for 6 months or more.

There just aren't enough drivers that good. Many companies have a turnover rate over 100%! Every day drivers get in backing accidents and other silly things they should have avoided. You don't want drivers with poor skills or a poor attitude driving a bomb filled with ethanol around the country. Since 9/11 most large cities have now designated special HAZMAT routes to prevent the boogieman terrorists from driving ethanol bombs through tunnels and over bridges and through downtowns. The level of responsibility when driving a HAZMAT cargo is more like the responsibility of an airline captain. I know because I have done both. But the money doesn't exist to pay people who have the skill and competency of a professional pilot to drive a truck. That's a problem with the ethanol business model.

One issue is whether we really want our soccer-moms in mini vans driving along next to thousands and thousands of new ethanol-delivering truck-bombs. Another issue is the fact that we now know that all that corn being diverted to make ethanol is causing huge impacts on food for people who don't have any other options. This is unethical. People in the US have not adjusted their use of oil to align with the reality that oil is peaking and we are now facing a mid-term crisis until we rearrange our energy production. Part of the lack of awareness comes from the fact that Wall Street is focused on the short term. Quarterly reports. Annual statements. Even if modern day CEO's have real time computerized dashboard widgets to give them an instrument panel on the the daily operations. Everything is just too short-term focused. Ethanol as a policy to replace cheap transportation energy is just a flawed concept.

We are just getting warmed up today. More to come on the ethanol in the near future.

By the way. Please subscribe to this blog by using the subscription tool in the right margin. Thanks. Until we meet again...

Matthew Simmons video-2007

Still not sure if global oil production is "peaking?"

Check out this video of Matthew Simmons, world-respected oil industry investment banker and expert on Peak Oil.

This was from last year. 2007. When oil was $65.00 per barrel.

Did you catch the number there? Yes, that was $300.00 per barrel.

On May 13, 2008 oil was trading for $127.00 per barrel already.

I am advising my clients that we will hit $200.00 by the end of 2008 if not sooner.

That would probably equate to somewhere around $6.29 a gallon for gasoline, maybe more for diesel.

Have you developed a strategy for living in a world of higher energy costs?

Many of my clients are already working hard on various lifestyle changes and investment strategies to adapt to Peak Oil.

More to come....

Discovering Mr. Hubbert

It was a dark, and lonely night. At my college in Colorado. I was tired from skiing all day and studying for mid-terms on the chairlift between runs. I spent some time finishing up my cheat sheets for the Chemistry, Physics and Geology exams. I always found that once you go to the trouble to make a cheat sheet you don't need to use it but some of my professors allowed us to use just one 3 by 5 card. Some people wrote their entire semester of notes in little hieroglyphics and I used to amuse myself watching them flip their little cards over and over squinting to read all the stuff they should have studied instead of partying. I had better results doing constant smaller efforts like the chairlift speed study sessions. I got up and wandered around the library in my usual habit of surprising myself by picking up random technical journals and periodicals outside my area of expertise. Every time I would shake my head in disbelief to think of the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria. What a shame. What a crime. I pinged around a bit and found myself orbiting about the science journals section like I was reconstructing the Lorentz Attractor. I stopped and reached out and grabbed a journal and cracked it open to a random page. There on the page was a simple graph. Up and down. Quantity versus Time. Ordinate and Abscissa. Interesting. I sat down and skimmed it over. The subject was Oil Production in the United States. I glanced back at the first page. Hubbert. Hubbert? Hey, wasn't that the guy that my first geology professor back in Junior College talked about. I remember they were buddies at Shell Oil or something? It was plain to see. The "Peak" of the graph was centered on the tick mark labeled 1970. Wow. Here it was 1981 already! Is this for real? Did Oil Production in the United States really Peak in 1970? I yanked down a pile of other journals from the oil biz and just skimmed and skimmed for a while. I wasn't really too familiar with production statistics. I had only punched the holes, drilled the wells. Production stats seemed like an engineer head trip, not really a geological focus like my studies in Petroleum Geochemistry. But after a while I got some numbers and sure enough, you could plainly see that production had dropped way off and then rebounded after Prudhoe Bay. Wow. What a trip! I was sort of motivated. It seemed that my country really needed me to help go find some more oil and gas out there in the world somewhere. It seemed strange to realize that everybody I knew was charging ahead doing more and more. Using more oil, burning more gas. No wonder we had the couple of years of oil boom in Colorado and Utah and other states. That was why they were always bitching at us to drill the wells faster and move the rig to the next hole as soon as possible. We were sliding down the backside of the curve. But it didn't really make sense. If this was true, which it obviously was, why didn't we have the gas rationing again? Didn't the government understand we were headed for trouble? When I think back on it now in 2008, I guess I just blindly assumed that "educated" people like me would charge out there and discover some huge new fields. I had my suspicions where those fields might be and tried to anticipate which companies would be hiring for work out there. The continental shelfs. The jungle and desert areas that were previously too remote and difficult to do some decent seismic profiling and wildcat wells. It's curious to reflect upon my intuition after 27 more years of participating in the most oil-wasteful society on Planet Ocean. I can think of all the millions of miles I have traveled in jets, helicopters, speedboats, jetskiis, motocross bikes, snowmobiles, ATVs. I must have one of the biggest oil-footprints ever! Amazing! And now in 2008, there is no place left to go to keep up with the demand. Is it Peaking today? No one "knows" for sure but intelligent people are already trying to look for the signs of the World Peak even while understanding that we totally missed the US Peak back in January 1971. Tune in next time for some more Peak Oil concepts and maybe even some talking heads or government propaganda!

My first lesson in Peak Oil awareness

Awareness. Consciousness, recognition, realization; understanding, grasp, appreciation, knowledge, insight; familiarity, formal cognizance.

Awareness of a problem is a precondition to creating a solution.

Do you like stories? I do! There's nothing like a good story to help us learn something new. I hope you like this one.

There I was. Circa, 1980. Standing at a gas station in Newport Beach, California. I was just minding my own business filling up the tank of my 4 wheel drive truck. And all of a sudden, in squeals a little black Porsche 911 that skidded to a stop utilizing a miraculous ad-hoc gas pump collision avoidance technique. Out pops a beautiful blond woman in designer clothes and dripping with jewelry. A trophy wife. It was obvious.

She proceeded to circle the vehicle looking high and low for the gas filler port. After about the 4th orbit she found it and realized she had pulled up on the wrong side of the island, again. Oh well, no matter :-) She popped back in behind the wheel and fired up that little black toy and proceeded to screech around to the other side of the pump island. Can you see it coming?

That's right! She jumped out again and it took her about 30 seconds before she became AWARE that she had recreated the same challenge of having the filler on the far side of the vehicle from the pump.

At this point, I discontinued my fueling operations to take advantage of my ringside seat.

The third time, she got it right, but back on the original side of the pump island and not without some spectacular circling maneuvers as she worked out in real time the spatial realities of re-positioning her lil rocket ship.

She jumped out again, and this time she actually made eye contact with me and immediately scowled. She gave me a look like I was an offensive insect and I smiled and she ignored me.

I watched her wrestle with the gas nozzle and hose, remember the old ones without the vapor-recovery system? She got the fuel filler door open and managed to pry the cap loose. So far, so good. But then, trouble. She tried to squeeze the nozzle actuator once she managed to get it in the hole, but it clicked off time and time again.

Being the consummate gentleman that my mother always hoped for me to be, I idled over and politely offered my assistance.

"Can I help you with that Ma'am?" She started with the "crush the insect" look again but changed course and put on her best "Daddy, can I have another diamond bracelet" look instead and smiled at me as she gave me one of her regularly practiced cleavage shots.

I proceeded to pump the gas for her and politely avoided any small talk so she wouldn't actually have to speak to me.  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed her sizing me up.

"What in the world happened to you," she asked quizzically?

I was still dressed in my roughneck coveralls and I was covered with, oil!

Oil! The black stuff that they use to make gasoline for little black Porsches! I had just driven all night from a well we were drilling in Utah and I was still filthy from a flow test we had done that drenched everybody on the drilling floor before we got it shut in and avoided the imminent explosion that roughnecks affectionately refer to as "midnight death." I was so excited to go surfing in Mexico on my days off that I hadn't even bothered to wash up.

I told Miss Porsche that I worked drilling oil wells. For just an instant, I saw a little flicker of RECOGNITION, and maybe even APPRECIATION cross her countenance.....but then it was gone.

She said to me, "Oh, I see!" And I could easily tell that she did not.

It was that moment that gave me a powerful INSIGHT into understanding my fellow man, or Porsche-Babe, as the case may be.

I UNDERSTOOD that the vast majority of people in this world will never have the slightest clue where oil comes from and what it takes to go get it so others can live their lives.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rock on! And why shouldn't people be able to enjoy their lives free of concern for things industrial, things of a petroleum nature?

After all, we don't live in tribes anymore. Modern society insulates the beautiful people from the dirty, grimy world of physical labor as in drilling wells for black gold.

I never forgot that lesson. I helps me even now to understand how people can be so blind to the Peak Oil problem.

I learned that my realizations are not your realizations. Everybody has to be responsible for their own awareness.

I am looking forward to sharing my expertise as this exploration into AWARENESS moves forward.