I recently found this site,

The webpage I found

,and I think this is BIG,BIG,BIG problem that needs some anwers verry soon!!!

I know it is not Astronomy (Astronautisc) site, but if this is truth (and it looks like it is) , than there will be no point to go to the Moon or anywhere before we clear this energy (civilisation) isue...

Please somebody tell me this isn't the truth because I'm realy scared!!!

I would realy like to see man on the Moon,Mars or anywhere...

Toma...

It's extremeist propaganda, nothign else.

Doug

Have you actualy read it?
Over the past 2 weeks I checked these numbers (quantities of oil,uranium,coal,natural gas etc.) and they are just as writen, later I have checked consumption rates and gues what...THEY MATCH!!!

I'm trying to be serious here , and ask for anybody is there something wrong with "predictions" author of that site sugests will be horrible...

Why do you think that its "extremeist propaganda" ??? huh.gif
There is nothing extremistic said there...No call for overthrowing of governments or anything like it...no call for protests , riots or anything alike...

I'd disagree somewhat. The page Toma cited certainly layered extremist speculation on top of the facts, but there still is an underlying truth. What is (essentially) undisputed is that there is a finite amount of oil, gas, coal, etc. The first of these to get noticably scarce is oil. Exactly how the curve of oil production will go is hotly disputed. Low numbers come from people like Princeton's Deffeyes and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). These estimates say within the next five years oil production will peak, after which there will be a slow decline in the amount of oil available each year. Higher estimates come from assuming OPEC countries have larger reserves, or guessing that with higher oil prices people will quickly develop hard-to-use resources like tar sands and oil shales. These high estimates put a peak of oil production out to 2030-2050 or even later.

As we've seen already this year, when oil (or refinery) capacity gets tight, any little thing can cause prices to jump through the roof. This is what we can expect, essentially from now until one of three things happens. (1) the economies of big consumer countries go into recession enough to curb demand for oil (2) oil prices force enough people to switch to alternative fuels to lessen demand (3) oil prices get high enough and technology advances rapidly enough for alternative sources of oil can take up the slack.

Let me throw in a graph produced by the ASPO using ExxonMobil data.

You can see that discovery of conventional oil sources peaked already, decades ago.
The technology to replace that conventional oil with other sources doesn't yet exist, and it will have to appear mighty rapidly to fill the breach.

This really is an issue we are going to have to face -- us, not our grandchildren.

Peak oil has been a discussion for years and years and years - and the facts have been massaged time and again to scare monger.

Yes - we need to move from an oil based economy to something else ( hydrogen, ideally ) and we need to start doing it seriously..now.

But is it a problem in the next 5 yeras, 10 years, 20 years. No.

Doug

If you want to get really frightened refer to:

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/ghawar.htm

The era of cheap oil is almost over. We human beings have been phenomenally stupid. We've based our whole world economy upon the assumption of cheap petroleum.

Hello!! Petroleum is a fossil! There is only a finite amount of it in the ground.

People like to make soothing noises about Canadian tar sands, Australian shale and American coal. However the cost of extraction and processing is much greater for these other energy resources. The world is about to undergo a radical change.

It is a problem our generation must solve in order to survive...(as civilisation...).

Maybe THERMONUCLEAR FUSION ???

Click to view attachment

Change yes but I wouldn't say radical. The global economy has been steadily reducing its critical dependance on oil since the early 1970's. The fact that the current major hikes in Oil price have not triggerred any measurable economic effect yet let alone an economic shock proves that.

The economic viability of potential resources like the Athabasca Oil sands, large scale use of Coal as a petroleum source, organic Petroleuml\Diesel substitutes will take a sustained oil price over $75-150 per barrel to bring on line. Technology per se isn't the problem, we could make use of them now (or within a few years without developing any new technologies) they just cost much more than Oil. None of them are sustainable _long_ term solutions but they are more than enough to sustain a healthy global economy in the medium term (100 years with global growth in line a long term 3-5% per annum).

Personally I'm much more worried about global warming and other polluting side effects of any organic fuel based energy economy, not in an "Oh my god - we're all going to die\starve\drown" sort of way but because we have measurably changed the atmosphere, continue to do so with abandon but we do not understand the effects of those changes on our extremely complex hydro\atmosphere.

The way I see it, these two statements are at odds. It is a problem in the next 5,10,20 years precisely because we need to make serious moves away from oil now. Anything that requires serious changes in how we go about our lives and business is a problem. A surmountable problem, hopefully, but a problem nevertheless.

Personally, I wouldn't bet so much on hydrogen. The reason we use fossil fuels is there are these great deposits with the energy already there in a concentrated form. Hydrogen doesn't come that way -- its only potential is for transporting energy from a power plant (nuclear? coal?) to a consuming engine or fuel cell. And as an energy transporter, it isn't so great. It tends to explode, and the hypothetical nano-tech answers to that problem are still science fiction. It requires entirely new systems to handle.

In the next 5,10,20 years we need to use technology that is at least in prototype production today. Things like flex-fuel vehicles that burn 85% ethanol/15% gasoline, or biodiesel trucks, or electric cars and their hybrids. These alternatives are available today, and within a decade could easily replace 10% of the fuel used per vehicle.

...and there is this little problem with human population....

" World population, currently 6.5 billion, is growing by another 76 million people per year. According to the UN the world will add another 2.6 billion people by 2050. Rapid population growth has placed incredible stress on Earth's resources. Global demand for water has tripled since the 1950s, but the supply of fresh drinking water has been declining because of over-pumping and contamination. Half a billion people live in water-stressed or water-scarce countries, and by 2025 that number will grow to three billion. In the last 50 years, cropland has been reduced by 13% and pasture by 4%. June , 2005 U.N."

World population reached:

1 billion in 1804,
2 billion in 1927 (123 years later)
3 billion in 1960 (33 years)
4 billion in 1974 (13 years)
5 billion in 1987 (12 years)
6 billion in 1999 (12 years)
7 billion in 2013 (14 years - projected)
8 billion in 2028 (15 years - projected)
10.7 (high) or 8.9 (middle) or 7.3 (low) billion projected for 2050


In 1 second: 5 babies are born
2 people die
increase of 3 humans every second.

In the same second, 1.5 acres of rainforest get cut down.

This is 250,000 people per each day. Every four days a new Dallas or Detroit is added to the earth.

You should say radical...

35% of all the industry &
95% of all transportation are fueled by CRUDE OIL PRODUCTS ( gasoline , diesel , kerosine , etc. )

As I was saying.......problem is BIG.....

Actually producing fuel and petrochemicals on a large scale without crude oil does not require any new technology. It can be done fairly easily from coal. The Germans did it 1933-45 and the South Africans during the Apartheid years, it's just more expensive than using oil.
Coal deposits incidentally are several orders of magnitude larger than oil reserves.

Who was it that called Coal "The Once and Future King"?

tty

"No new technology" - that's true...but consider this:

Click to view attachment

By the way one of the reasons that Germany lost WW2 was its lack of oil....

Solutions to the pending energy problem are many.

First of all, we must drastically reduce our dependency toward polluting or non-renewable energies: nuclear fission, oil, coal, which will arise accute problems or will be exhausted one day or another.

Only remain renewable energies and nuclear fusion.

Renewable energies will be available forever, but each in limited quantities
-large hydropower plants destroys landscapes and ecosystems
-photovoltaic energy still needs researches for better efficiency and lower price
-mill wind are now spreading fast, but the resource is limited.
-solar heat is working at an individual level
-Geothermic energy is limited to certain places
-Deep layers geothermy is an exhaustible resource, unless we do:
-storage of solar heat in underground layers (helio-geothermic) is feasible at reasonable costs
-Aerothermic plants are feasible (huge towers creating a kind of cyclone in, to move a wind mill)
-thermodynamic solar plants for producing electricity is feasible, but expensive
-huge oceanic floating platforms to bear large energy plants
-An original idea is to decompose water with solar heat, to produce hydrogen. The process uses a chemical cycle at 950°C and is patented by the french CEA.
-A speculative idea is to recover the energy of thunder and cyclones with huge electrostatic machines.
-In some countries like China there was worthy efforts to abandon traditionnal fireplaces for stoves consuming much less firewood.
-vegetal oil. Is already used as a paliative or additive. With my opinion, i is not a good solution, as oil is only a very small fraction of the total biomass, and these cultivation will require place, chemicals, etc... and will also remain expensive. So I think that true bio fuels should start only from cellulosis, which is by far the most abundant biomass and very easy to produce.
-In a general way saving energy is often much more easy and cheap than to produce it. (insulating houses, double-flux aircfaft engines, Atkinson cycle car engines...) So we may see a decrease of the energy consumption of developped countries (USA, Europe).

Transition energies are many, and they have the advantage of providing a smooth technical/economic transition toward pure renewable energy. Even oil industry has its dear interests untouched!
-stop burning the methane fraction of oil into oil wells.
-cracking of methane gaz or sour gaz (hydrogen sulfide) to produce hydrogen.
-reinject the CO2 fraction (or carbon fraction of the previous) into exhausted oil deposits. For once this idea is not from environmentalists, but from oil industry. It is now tested in Algeria.



Nuclear fusion is often presented as the absolute solution for free, non-polluting and inexhaustible source of energy. I must somewhat temperate this idyllic vision: machines like Iter are extremely expensive, and they produce much more neutrons than fission plants. So the whole thing will quickly turn into a gigantic heap of radioactive iron scrap, tens of years before tokamaks produce their first commercial kilowatts. And it could be the cheapest way for mass production of military plutonium.
But there are many nuclear fusion reactions which produce only some X-rays (brehmstrallung), with hydrogen, helium3, lithium hydride. There are also very interesting experiments going on with IEC tubes, a fascinating concept which allows to make fusion reactions on a kitchen table, with just a vacuum pump and a high voltage supply gathered from an old TV. (Please do not try!!)(and do not confuse with "cold fusion")
Shall we see one day cars powered by small fusion cells? More realistically I see fusion plants, large like former fission plants, or smarter to fit more isolated places. Anyway we have to first learn to save energy, otherwise the demand will be so huge that it will heat the planet without greenhouse effect.


But I think that the real domain of fusion energy will be... unmanned spaceflight(.com, a skilful way to recenter on topic ) where fusion engines could power space probes and spaceships, allowing a complete freedom of moving into the solar system without any need of dangerous RTGs (dangerous to manufacture, even if not to use) and much more powefull. Beyond, it will allow for interstellar spaceships. Remember the Daedalus project, which was meaned to send a probe to the Barnard star in 50 years. More realistically, even if we need thousands of years it is better than impossible.

Some points worth investigating in that, in particular the energy profit ratio which is a neat idea but I'm always suspicious of simple ratios with no backup references. In any case the point I was making was that we have upwards of 100 years of fossil fuels available using current technology while sustaining current growth. Neither aspect is invalidated by anything referenced so far.

TTY's comments on the South African Oil from Coal industry is particularly relevant - when a society is forced to find an alternative to oil it can. The economics of it aren't necessarily great but they were able to do it without too much pain when oil was in the $10 a barrel range. Their petrochemical from coal industry is still going - they no longer produce much fuel because of the economics of the industry - plastics and waxes are much more profitable per ton (2.5-3x) than than fuel.

The hypermalthusian population crisis you described earlier has been debunked repeatedly ever since Malthus first made the assertions. A good contemporary summary of opinion and research on it is covered in Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. The argument he repeats (and backs up pretty well in most cases) is that while it has been and can be an issue for individual societies it's highly unlikely to be a global issue for a number of reasons, some not very pleasant to be sure but mostly because richer economies reproduce less. There's plenty to dispute about Collapse but it's a thought provoking read and has plenty of references to aid further personal research.

We will run out of fossil fuels but the time scale will be on the order of 100-200 years if we don't find alternatives, not 5-20 years. Economies will change and adjust, there may be regional crises (most likely in oil producing states when they run out of their current reserrves) but it will not be global catastrophe that happens overnight.

If (and it's still an "if" in my book, albeit an increasingly likely "if") Global Warming is actually happening then the side effects of fossil fuel use could be a catastrophe. Unlike finding alternatives to oil as an energy resource finding a solution for Global Warming if it does turn out to be a crisis is not something that we currently have any solutions for. That is a much better reason to abandon oil (and other fossil fuel energy resources) than any concerns about them running out.

The population crisis is a much more complex problem than the energy crisis, and its solution are rather social, philosophical, spiritual than technical. So I just have an overview of it.

We have still a food production to feed 13 billion people (FAO) but the increasing population pressure is destroying the last preserved natural space at a great pace. And if all the Chineses, Indians, Africans... were consuming and polluting like the US all the time scales would be divided by ten (for oil exhaustion, greenhouse effect, mining exhaustion...) and hazards multiplied by ten. Some specialists even state that we are already too numerous.

Very fortunately it happens that when a under-developped country is gaining development, the population growth is quenched, for reasons which are yet not completelly understood, but likely linked to availability of birth control, education, a more satisfying life... This indicates the solutions (fighting poverty is the best way to avoid surpopulation). Religious fanaticism and sexist prejudices often make things more difficult, but organized religions often showed helpful and even dynamic in the process of introducing health and birth control. At last wars (especially slow but long lasting civilian wars) hamper any development, whatever conception we have of it.

A last word is that sci-fi writers and prospective reflexion often describe the colonization of other planets as the only solution for surpopulation and pollution of Earth. With my opinion it is a very bad reason (especially if we cannot send actual colonists, but only seed ships). We have to first learn to manage properly our planet, otherwise we shall be unable to manage several.

There are things in the works, waiting in the wings until the time is "right"... i.e., when gasoline in the U.S. gets to $5-$8/gal, or it become unprofitable. (its $2.60-$3.10 now, depending on where you live).

First, I'm sure that the U.S. farmers will promote gasohol (a mixture of gasoline and alcohol) .... what with corn being grown for the alcohol. Here in the U.S., each gas (petrol) station usually has three grades... regular, mid, and premium. I can see one of those tanks/pumps going to gasohol once the pure gas price gets to a certain level, and people have some mechanic tinker with their engines' carborators to accept gasohol. That started happening in the U.S. in the 1970's during the oil embargo days here, but when that resolved itself then gasohol went away.

I just saw last week on the local news here in FL, a company that ordered and had gotten delivery of a fleet of 15 vans that run on H2 (hydrogen). Yes, its an environmental statement and publicity stunt, as each vehicle cost over $200k. And they need the H2 delivered and stored at the company. But, I'm sure if this oil crisis described in the previous posts develops, this is something that will cause a quantum leap change within a decade.

Gas stations will start having hydrogen strorage tanks. Cars will start being mass produced to use it.... etc. Just remember.. the free market in the U.S. moves to where the money is. If its in gasohol-powered cars, or hydrogen cars... that will happen in less time than you think. Right now, the big thing here is hybrid-gas-electric cars, with 60 miles/gallon.. They are starting to catch on. I'm sure, in 20 or 30 years, when this gasoline crunch really hits hard... these other things (gasohol, then hydrogen) will move in to take up the slack.

In global terms, we're in a die-off crisis comparable to the greatest impacts or volcanic events of the past (remember, they often took hundreds of thousands of years to work out, though 'phase change' shifts might be far quicker). The species extinctions of which we are aware over the just the past 500 years of reasonably well recorded human history are enormous, and the narrowing of genetic diversity in a whole range of surviving organisms is also huge. The Earth may or may not be a self-regulating organism, but there's no doubt that many buffers have been removed and that things are unlikely to become more stable - anyone noticed the news regarding the polar ice this week?

We absolutely have to diversify the human environment into space, and to bring space-based resources down to Earth in order to ensure our survival as a species - we have outpaced our local planetary resource.

Unmanned scientific exploration is only a prequel to exploitation of resources, allied, one would hope, with sensible local management of Biosphere 1 - the Earth.

It's a given that there are plenty of alternative energy sources. The problem is the developed world's economy is predicated upon CHEAP energy sources. For example, a major American city like Los Angeles is economically viable because people can afford to commute over 40 miles a day. Los Angeles achieved most of its growth when gasoline was around 20 cents/gallon. I doubt that Los Angeles as it is presently laid out could retain its economic viability if gasoline went to $8/gal. Now repeat that same story for the San Francsico Bay Area, Seattle, New York, etc. and you can see the United States is in serious trouble. All of our major cities will have to be redefined as energy costs go up. Add to this dilemma that globalization is also based upon cheap energy. For example, if the cost of bunker oil goes up by an order of magnitude, would it be cost effective to ship merchanidise from China to Europe and America? The airline industry in America is currently being ravaged by the high cost of kerosene, e.g. Delta and Northwestern are filing for bankruptcy. The airline industry is very sensitive to fuel cost. As energy costs go up, different industrial sectors will go bankrupt in order of their sensitivity to energy costs. This is a "boiling frog" scenario as our whole economy gets knocked off sector-by-sector by rising energy costs until we're back to a 19th century technology riding on steam trains (which can burn wood) and sail boats.

Er... ...could it be that the current paradigm is just wrong, and that we're spending our descendent's inheritance(s) on trucking kipple from A to B?

I disagree, there are no viable energy sources for transport use in the way we use petroleum today. Hydrogen is a pipe-dream. If only a very small % of it leacks into the atmosphere from large scale use it will destroy the ozone layer faster than CFCs. To replace petroleum with alcohol would require more food than we produce. Get used to public transport or walking 'cause thats what we'll be doing when petroleum starts to run out

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,59220,00.html

Well I'm a little bit biased (okay a lot biased) since I work here but I would have to say that nuclear fusion really IS the absolute ultimate in future energy sources. As you no doubt know, the fuel is inexhaustable. The problem of neutron activation of the device is really quite surmountable in terms of engineering, (vanadium alloys, shielding, etc) and I don't think it will really be a long term problem. I would caution you perhaps temper your enthusiasm about some of the other nonequilibrium methods of attaining fusion power such as IEC and . These have unfortunately been virtually eliminated as possible sources of power in this Phd thesis. The potential of fusion to solve so many problems is just staggaring. Water shortage? Desalination is easy with large amounts of power. Chemical pollution? High temperature incneration. Radioactive pollution? Use the fusion reaction as an actinide burner. Plastics and rubber manufacturing still needs oil you say? Nope, use simple small molecules (CO2, water) to make methane/methanol and build up from there. In fact, practically everything can be reduced to a few plentiful natural resources (iron ore, etc.), information (science, engineering) and energy. Fusion power coupled with a "hydrogen economy" can provide the vast supplies of energy necessary to do whatever we want!

So how many working fusion power stations do we have after 50 years of research and countless hundreds of billons of dollars? I have no confidence that fusion power stations will every be built.

We have, as the rhetorical question suggests, exactly ZERO fusion power plants working today . However it is illogical to extrapolate from this fact to the conclusion that we will never have them. If one were to go back to the year 1902 and ask how many heavier than air aircraft have successfully lifted a person into the sky you would also get a resounding answer of zero! The progress in thermonuclear fusion in the laboratory throughout the past 50 years is nothing short of fantastic. Fusion temperatures and yields have increased over 15 orders of magnitude by some measures. It will happen sooner or later either as a result of either forced necessity (ie. we run out of oil) or desire (we want more human spaceflight), hopefully sooner.

It is also foolish to rely on technology that may produce nothing as the answer to our energy crisis. We should be spending $ on proven systems like solar cell to reduce cost. If every new house built had 1/3 of its roof area covered in solar cell it would be energy self sufficient. True we would still need a grid to move power from areas of excess to areas of deficiency and to provide a base load at night.

Here's another idea. How could the power consumption of most modern countries be cut by 25%?

1. Ban the incandescent light globe (15% saving)
2. Switch off electronic appliances rather than go on standby (10% saving)

I'm all for conservation and solar photovoltaic power but I think we should recognize that even best case scenarios put maximum savings for widespread conservation at something like ~30% while the total energy consumption of the US for instance has increased by over 200% in the last 50 years alone. Couple this with the fact that energy consumption and GDP/standard of living correlate so perfectly and we have to face the fact that the future will require immensely vast quantities of energy beyond that (imho) which can be supplied through, for instance, solar power and conservation.

Strange correlation when UK and Neatherlands can maintain the same standard of living on 1/3 the per capita energy consumption as Canada and 1/2 of that of the USA

So where do you suugest this is going to come from?

right, the graph I pointed to is of energy consumption vs. standard of living, which tends to level off at a certain point. NOT energy vs GDP. Here is an example of that.





I'd have to say that it looks to me like fusion is the only long term source of such huge energies. The fuel in inexhaustable, there is no possibilty of catastrophic failure, it is environmentally friendly, the the temperatures it runs at are extremely high and therefore carnot efficiencies can be very high, the power production is very energy dense and all nations have ready access to the fuel!

This graph shows the same. European contries and Japan can have same GNP as USA for 1/2 the energy consumption. As for Fusion, you can bet your family jewels on it but I will wait till there are better odds.

With solar power we dont need to increase efficiency only lower cost of production. Cheap solar cell at 8% efficiency are better than expensive ones at 25%
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/biztech/10/02/solar.cells.reut/

Yeah but where ARE the cheap solar cells anyway?!! I keep hearing about organic semiconductor solar cell breakthroughs, nanoantenna solar cells, InGaN wide bandgap solar cells, multijunction amorphous solar cells, thin film paint solar cells, infrared solar cells, it just goes on and on and on but where ARE they?!! There's just nothing that ever makes it commercially; it doesn't make me very hopeful. I have the same gripe about OLEDs, all the IP is either tied up in a few companies that just sit on it or the companies wait around for perfection in thier devices until they release a product, by which time they've burned their venture captial and have disappeared. Just release SOMETHING and people will buy it for the novelty if nothing else.

In my opinion, diffuse usage of rennovable energy sources is ultimately a political and economical issue, not technolological.
We have so many examples of mature and feasible tecnologies that could be massively implemented by now, the only reason we don't is the "presumed" lower cost of fossil sources. I simply DON'T THRUST to these cost figures, because they do not account for increasing oil-related wars and pollution costs!
My hopes for a better energy politic are small, because economic interests for oil extraction and distribution are too big. As an example, in many countries (Italy in particular) tax on fuel prices are one of the major financial entries for government, so they don't really encourage diffusion of alternatives (like electric/hybrid cars or even simply bycicles/public transport...). This is easy here, where there is also cultural gap respect to nord-european countries on these arguments (probably the gap will shrink in the next decades).
Anyway, the BIG risk is that, due to mentioned politic/economic interests, we will still delay use alternative sources until worldwide economical/political/ambiental situation will be really dramatic and, probably, irreversible.
I really hope to be wrong, but all indicators are in this direction!

Dilo , you said that right...!!!

nice to find a sponsor, Toma!

It seems like we're making the same mistakes as some ancient civilizations. They'd develop elaborate cities with a few innovations - some had running water with a large reservoir, and some kind of sewage system. But they'd ultimately collapse when the local resources like farmland or woodland were wiped out. They consumed like the resources would simply last forever, failing to see too that as population increases, demand on the already finite supplies will increase.

Now, in ancient cities, they couldn't just ask the neighboring city-state for a few thousand tons of food - they couldn't send a fleet of trucks there to get it either. In that case, a civilization depeletes its environment, and the citizens would either leave, or start to die off due to famine and disease.

In our case, the entire planet is becoming that civilization. Ain't nowhere to run to now. Can't just jump ship and get off the planet. I fear that we're doing the same thing - using resources like they'll never stop, and being totally dependent on that supply. I'll admit it, I am too. I was born into American society and grew up on it; I didn't really learn any other way of doing things.

I do like how it was pointed out that the Netherlands use considerably less energy than the US, but their per-capita GDP is still high. They don't have the vast natural resources that the US has, so they had to develop efficient ways of using what they had. I'm not much of a traveller, though I will say, the thought of visiting there is alluring.

Once I'm out of college, I should like to get some solar panels, and possibly build a wind-power generator. Efficient appliances are out there; they simply aren't marketed well enough. Efficiency just isn't cool - big, powerful and loud is.

Wind is a good clean net energy source but photovoltaic solar panels just don't work out as good energy converters unless you can get about 10 years with 5+ hours of peak sun for 365 days of the year. Thermal solar power (or just plain old water heating) is a good energy saver but photovoltaics are still just too costly in terms of the energy used to make them.

Now imagine to join photovoltaic and thermal solar power (co-generation)... I'm almost sure we can reach 50% total efficiency with relatively low cost, but nobody seems to have explored it!

Actually Dilo it looks like I might be wrong see here. The energy payback time seems to have dropped quite a lot - it's down to 3-4 years at the moment not 10. That's based on a 12% cell getting 1700kwH/m2 per annum which is apparently 95% of the US average. I think I'll check that number just to be sure but the source looks good.

Since PV cells should last 20-30 years then if those numbers are accurate then they do have some potential.

Interesting figures and site, helvick.
We shoul seriously consider domestic energy production by now!...

Anyway, about PV+thermal cogeneration, I was wrong because someone seems to have considered it! They call it a "hybrid photovoltaic/thermal system":
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/produc...eryId=1&start=0
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/produc...osti_id=7151726
http://it.wrs.yahoo.com/;_ylt=AjKaZwtcytph...l%2520system%27
http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/final_projec...00-02-045f.html
In the last link, dated 3 years ago, they report a potential payback of less than 5 years...

Solar cells actually do return more power than it took to build them. One page on the matter.

"This is of course a very difficult statistic to calculate, but according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, a study has been done to answer the question. The study found that single-crystal panels reach the energy payback point in 5-10 years, polycrystalline panels in 3-5 years, and amorphous silicon panels in 0.5-2 years. Be advised that because the question is so vague, there is a large margin of error for these figures! We just discovered a recent, very detailed study about solar panel energy payback time in the January 2001 issue of Home Power magazine. This study, by Karl Knapp, PhD, and Teresa Jester, finds payback time for a standard module to be about 3.3 years, and 1.8 years on a thin-film panel."

Yeah, it does rely on them lasting for a few years, but after that, it's all profit, so to speak.
Just think of how much time and energy went into producing the oil in your gas tank that's gone in a matter of days or weeks. Heck, even after it was formed, then MORE energy went into pumping it out and refining it.

One of my hobbies is collecting ancient coins. Since I don't have much money, I have to content myself with the more oddball coins, e.g. I can't afford a sesterce with Nero's or Claudius' portrait so I have to be happy with Antoninus Pius and Trajan. A positive side effect of collecting ancient coins is exposure to some of the more obscure aspects of ancient history. The city-state of Cyrene was one of the more wealthier cities of the ancient world. Their economy was based almost entirely upon export of the silphium plant (it was used for birth control in the ancient world). The silphium plant was so important to Cyrene's economy that almost all of their coins had the silphium plant pictured on their reverse, refer to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Cities/Cyrene.html

Siliphium was over exploited into extinction by the people of Cyrene. After Silphium's extinction, Cyrene's economy was ruined and the city slowly depopulated until is was abandoned.

This sort of story was repeated many times in the ancient world. For example the famous city of Ephesus was a major commerical port. However the harbor of Ephesus silted up due to poor agricultural methods along rivers upstream from the harbor. After the harbor silted up, the city of Ephesus was abandoned.

We should not assume that we are more intelligent than the people of Cyrene and Ephesus. We are not immune from making similar errors.

This chart is deceiving in that it takes the total amount of electricity produced and divides by the population. It does not account for the amount of production and services that are produced. For example, the US has 5% of the population but produces 25% of the world's GNP. Of course the per capita electrical output is going to be higher there than in other countries.

This chart makes it look like every American / Canadian is leaving every light on at home (and washer, dryer, toaster) when they leave, in other words being very inefficient. The truth is the US and Canada rank near the top in the world in productivity (i.e. requiring less amount of input for the amount of output).

That is not say that conservation and more efficient methods should not be pursued, there is still much opportunity there, but looking at ths chart will not help.

As an example, according to the book: The Economist, Pocket World in Figures 2002 Edition
Energy efficiency, Most efficient GDP per kg of energy, 1998, $
1 Albania 10.3
2 Morocco 10.2
3 Uruguay 9.9
4 Costa Rica 9.5
5 Bangladesh 8.9
6 Hong Kong 8.5
7 Sri Lanka 8.0
8 Colombia 7.9
9 Peru 7.8
10 Dominican Republic 7.5
...
Least efficient GDP per kg of energy, 1998, $
1 Tanzania 1.1
Trinidad & Tobago
Uzbekistan
4 Nigeria 1.2
Turkmenistan
Ukraine
Zambia
8 Azeraijan 1.5
9 Russia 1.7
10 Congo-Brazzaville 1.8
Kazakhstan
United Arab Emirats

But the largest consumption per head, kg coal equivalent, 1997
1 Qatar 44,155
2 UAE 21,203
3 Bahrain 19,488
4 Kuwait 13,446
5 EUA 11,493
6 Canada 11,191
7 Brunei 11,144
8 Luxembourg 10,914
9 Singapore 10,324
10 Trinidad & Tobago 9,920
11 Norway 7,886
12 Australia 7,873
13 Netherland 7,588
14 Iceland 7,497
15 Finland 7,390
16 Belgium 7,191
17 Sweden 6,491
18 Saudi Arabia 6,358
19 Netherlands Antilles 5,918
20 New Zeland 5,914
21 Germany 5,692
22 Russia 5,636
23 Czech Rep. 5,529
24 France 5,507
25 Estonia 5,452
26 UK 5,446
27 Japan 5,189
29 Venezuela 4,873
29 Ireland 4,694
30 Denmark 4,653

In conclusion:
The energy utilization according to the GDP per kg of energy is the indication of how well the energy is invested and utilized. The other indictor, about the largest consumption per head, is an indicator of energy dependence. The most countries which are dependent of energy are from oil producer from the Middle East. It seems like they are utilizing much energy to extract water from the sea to inject water into the oil field to pump up the oil pressure in order to extract the remain of oil.

Rodolfo

That is bull!!! It is only true if the GDP is not wasted on Marketing Consultants, Dog shampoo, Interior designers and Breast enhancements. We should build a spaceship and send them off to colonise another planet just like in the Hitchhikers Guide. A lot of the GDP and hence energy consumption in developed Western societies is an indulgent waste. The plastic wrappers that wrap your individual choc bar before it goes into the cardboard wrapper before it goes into the cardboard box are all part of this GDP. Even Lawyers are part of the GDP

Personally, I've always felt that, er, 'enhancements' are a necessity rather than a luxury. I could be wrong. OUCH!

Bob Shaw (Ouch! OUCH! O U C H !)

Bob, admire the mind. You dont need 'enhancements'

So is there any hope or not???

I gues Agent Smith (The Matrix) was right...



But we don't have enough time to spread to new areas...

---How can this be posible----
---Politicians should be addresing this isue...but they are not...WHY???

because WE vote for guies whom only skill is to make nice speeches. Apologize, it is not their fault.

Some more bad news!!!

Climate warning as Siberia melts

Is there anybody who thinks there is way out of these "Peak Oil" , "Global warming" , "Polution" problems???

Is there any hope????