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Page added on March 19, 2015
The Peak Oil Crisis: The Mother of All Black Swans
Even Saudi Arabia’s oil minister is starting to talk about the advent of a “black swan.” These are defined as completely unexpected developments which cause lots of unexpected change. I believe we are going to be seeing a major black swan event in the not too distant future.
It should be clear to everyone that the earth’s climate is becoming so laden with carbon emissions that civilization as we know it on this planet is unlikely to make it through the next few centuries. Fortunately, however, the combustion of carbon-based fuels will be slowly on its way down as most of the oil that is left is becoming too costly to extract, and in the case of coal, is killing too many people from unhealthy air. Even the Chinese seem to have gotten the message and are cutting back on coal burning as fast as they can without collapsing their economy and getting the government overthrown. However, running out of cheap oil, killing ourselves off from dirty air, or devastating climate change induced weather events are not black swans as these developments are already well anticipated. What is desperately needed is a way for the world to stop burning carbon as quickly as possible without creating economic turmoil. There just may be an answer.
Coming down the road are a pair of technologies that will produce nearly unlimited amounts of cheap, pollution-free energy, and have the potential to change life-as-we-know-it.
I am talking about the twin technologies of cold fusion and hydrinos, each of which, when widely deployed, will constitute a revolution in the history of mankind fully equivalent to the discovery of fire, the wheel, the agricultural revolution, or the industrial revolution. Both of these technologies are based on turning the hydrogen found in water into virtually unlimited amounts of energy at very low cost and without any harmful pollution. Recent developments suggest that either or both of these technologies could become available for commercial applications in the next few years. In recent years, new technologies such as cell phones have spread across the globe in a few decades.
So where are these technologies and when can we expect to hear and read about them in the mainstream media, especially if they are getting close to becoming commercial products? The answer to this is simple. Both these technologies are based on science that is beyond that generally accepted by scientific community, especially those who have never looked into the results of the experiments. While those few scientists who have tested and are familiar with the details of these technologies tell us that they are for real, the bulk are waiting for irrefutable proof that they actually produce large amounts of cheap energy before they are willing to accept that our knowledge of nature may not be as complete as we like to think and that some scientific theories may be wrong.
The hydrino theory holds that there exists in nature a stable, compact form of hydrogen which does not absorb or emit light, making it very hard to detect. Under the proper conditions, normal hydrogen atoms such as those found in water can be transformed into hydrinos accompanied by a massive release of energy. This theory is the brainchild of one man, Randall Mills of BlackLight Power in New Jersey, who has been working on the development of the theory and a practical way to release energy for nearly 30 years. The reason the theory has received little attention is that it appears to violate fundamental principles of atomic science which would have to be rethought if it fact there is such a thing as a hydrino.
Last summer Mills reported in a fascinating video on his website, blacklightpower.com, that he has recently made significant breakthroughs in developing the technology. Last month he reported that all of the subsystems of his prototype “SunCell” now are working and that the first prototype of a commercial device is now being integrated. He also says that a business relationship for distribution of commercial products is being established. If the prototype devices work as advertised and can be tested by independent laboratories, the arguments over the existence of a hydrino should end fairly quickly unless some other explanation can be found. If the subsystems work as claimed, I would be surprised if we did not see the first prototype in operation before the end of the year.
The second of our black swan technologies is our old friend “cold fusion,” which now goes by several other names, largely to assuage the feelings of those scientists who claim there can be no such thing as cold fusion. There now is no question that the nuclear reactions are for real and that commercial quantities of heat can be produced under proper conditions by heating hydrogen in the presence of nickel and other elements. As far as we know, the Italian entrepreneur Andrea Rossi still seems to be the furthest ahead in the race to build and market commercial-scale devices although numerous people around the world are producing heat from laboratory scale devices.
Unlike Mill’s hydrino device, cold fusion is far more difficult to control and many experiments are producing so much heat that they melt down their test apparatuses. Only Rossi, who is now working from a US company, Industrial Heat, down in North Carolina, says he has developed the techniques to keep a commercially viable heat generating device under control. For several months now he has had a commercial sized 1-megawatt prototype device, which has been installed in a factory at an unrevealed location in the U.S., undergoing a year’s acceptance test. If this test is successful, and we won’t know until early next year, Industrial Heat will at some point likely begin publicizing and marketing commercial cold fusion devices.
If either of these endeavors meets their developers’ expectations, we should be seeing the biggest black swan in centuries land in our midst fairly soon.
24 Comments on "The Peak Oil Crisis: The Mother of All Black Swans"
MSN Fanboy on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 4:29 am
wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
theultravixens on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 4:31 am
Oh good grief. Hydrinos and cold fusion? Why don’t we just harness the power from the rainbows coming out of a unicorns backside too, while we’re at it.
Why on earth Tom feels the need to destroy his credibility like this I have no idea.
forbin on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 5:00 am
” For several months now he has had a commercial sized 1-megawatt prototype device, which has been installed in a factory at an unrevealed location in the U.S., undergoing a year’s acceptance test.
If this test is successful……”
point out to that I’m wrong but ….
if the project was working wouldn’t it be succesful after a few weeks or days even ?
After all
“..many experiments are producing so much heat that they melt down their test apparatuses..”
Can we have citations on that or web links?
Forbin
J-Gav on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 5:04 am
Vixens – Yeah, Tom’s been pretty upbeat about cold fusion for some time now, hasn’t he?
Not sayin’ it’ll never work at all, just that, even then, the scale-up and roll-out costs would be prohibitive.
rockman on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 6:33 am
IMHO it doesn’t matter if the science behind these ideas is solid or a load of crap. It doesn’t matter if they are running a successful test site or not. It doesn’t matter if blah blah blah.
What matters today: are there commercial applications of either technology functioning today? That answer is simple: no. When that does happen it would certain warrant a detailed discussion. Until then the only energy created by the concepts are key strokes discussing the possibilities.
Davy on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 6:58 am
First question these technologies and others have been talked about for some time now. The length and duration of talk show you the likelihood of success. You can picture it as the square of the distance like an outdoor fire on a cold winter night. You can also divide all cornucopian talk by pie to get a more accurate understanding of the scalability of the technology. Then divide the scale ability claims again by pie for financial reasons of ROI. One more time you need pie and that is the scaling per time per BAU time needs of growth. There may be more need for pie but that should suffice for now.
Folks all bull shit aside we are at across the board limits to a system in diminishing returns because of our triad of foundational support food, water, and energy at limits and diminishing return. All this is made worse by 80MIL a year increase in population with a population already in overshoot territory. This overpopulation is currently disturbing the global BAU sophisticated network of JIT distribution and production. Resource supplies are stressing. Development is hitting a wall of opportunities and limits to Mega city size. One example is the new capital in Egypt. Sounds to me like another pyramid scheme.
We are at a global BAU systematic dead end because of limits of growth, diminishing returns of technology, and unreasonable time frame to fix this. All this points to scalability. Scalability is not possible when population is rising and entropic decay is preventing maintenance of an existing BAU. Depletion is running at an ever increasing rate of our foundational commodity oil. The financial system is at limits of debt and repressed interest rate. Real rates are going negative with deflation but is that good? No.
Basically system are not static they have movement and like physical system they have inertia. In our case this inertia is propelling BAU forward making growth appearances normal enough. At some point as the negative impulses slow and begin to slow down BAU from acceleration to deceleration it will fail and drop like a bullet to the ground with catastrophic effects. Can any of you picture a BAU with an economic picture of negative 10% growth? How long will that last without ugly? What about oil supplies dropping by a like amount. OOH, food is a good one with a population every year of 80MIL more people. Let’s have food drop 10%.
These type negative impulses and a multiple of Black swans known and unknown also possible and you get an inertial that will be slowing BAU. This inertia may be battled against by technology and financial hat tricks. When such a large system begins to move in a deceleration direction there is little that can prevent that movement.
We are done folks because that movement is close at hand. We are surely at the Peak Everything point with aggregate real growth going or already in negative territory. Scratch off Chinese ghost cities as growth. This deceleration may be a bumpy slow or an increasing fast process but it appears a given.
In such situations adaptation and mitigation of uncontrollable events is a must. There is no controlling the chaos of descent only adaptation and mitigation. Economic abandonment within a human nature based system is not promising. This is not a Swiss watch that can be mechanically fixed. This is truly a time bomb of huge proportions waiting to boil over in a mess or in the case of a turkey fryer a big friggen fire. These technological fixes even if possible will never scale and never reverse the inertia of a descending BAU. Not possible per physics. That is a bold statement that I can’t prove but physics (Nature) is on my side not the BAUtopians.
jimmy on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 7:22 am
Tom Whipple is an idiot for peddling this drivel
shortonoil on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 8:03 am
Is this the Holy Grail of energy? It would be unwise to dismiss it completely out of hand. We know that in the “bizarro” world of Quantum Mechanics things happen that defy common sense. But that is hardly the point!
We are reaching the end of the oil age, and in the process we have overpopulated the planet, destroyed a great deal of its ecology, and a high percentage of its life forms. How much longer Mother Earth can put up with “homo stupitus”, and our rampant breeding tendencies is probably soon to be discovered. The oil age is ending because the energy balance equations indicate that we will soon have used most of the oil that allow them to balance. The greatest portion of that energy goes into the processing of the raw crude. If given an unlimited amount of energy, with which to do that processing, 4000 Gb of additional oil will become available!
Because we have an oil based civilization, and there is now somewhere in the area of $88 trillion invested in oil dependent infrastructure, that 4000 Gb will be used if it becomes possible to use it. The impact that would have on the planet can hardly be estimated! In all likely hood we would turn the world into a depleted, burned out third rock orbiting some minor sun in one of the galactic arms. Our species has not matured sufficiently enough to be given access to such power.
Let’s just hope that Tom is on (no more)than a Unicorn hunt!
http://www.thehillsgroup.org
penury on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 8:31 am
I can only repeat what I have been saying for the past eight years. Call me when that have something which can be used commercially. There are not enough available resources in the world to be able to adapt to any of these dream solutions.
joe on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 9:31 am
Irrespective of peak oil, even with a massive input from tar sands everywhere this can only replace lost export from growing domestic use and less oil in the ground in Saudi, Russia etc. Saying supply is not an issue is okay only if demand remains the same. This could be the case, if global population does not grow and industry gets more efficient. The net effect will be greater demand as efficiency causes growth, therefore more demand. Simply spreading the industrial revolution around the world while the west uses electrical cars is not going to solve anything.
viewcrafters on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 9:57 am
Like Matt Simons said start building rail roads and prepare to close the auto companies down.
Viewcrafters
Davy on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 9:58 am
Viewer, what kind of railroads? Fast or slow?
Pops on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 10:21 am
Wow is right. Tom Whipple is a great reporter of straight ahead PO news, this seems really out of character.
BobInget on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 10:43 am
Ex CIA Whipple suddenly stopped reporting
on Mideast and North African excitements.
I haven’t:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/19/aden-presidential-palace-bombed_n_6901722.html
The Saudis had planned to build a Chinese Wall along the thousand mile border with Yemen. Now, it appears, it’s too late.
BobInget on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 10:49 am
Even anti-science US congress should be able to pass bipartisan legislation reversing the laws of thermodynamics.
I’ve been told ‘big oil and coal’ ordered our lawmakers not to ‘go there’.
NorseMariner on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 10:56 am
Stopped reading as soon as I saw “cold fusion”. This is the same fantasy-based thinking as “solar freakin’ roadways” and “thorium cars”. What about the constraints of engineering, economics and science you ask? Who cares, just take a puff from the hopium pipe.
Apneaman on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 11:02 am
How would any of these technologies stop the 3 dozen or so self reinforcing feedback loops we have triggered by our inability to control our current suite of technologies?
How would any of these technologies cause us to change our rapacious behavior?
The first thing people would do with free/cheap energy is – MORE – mining, logging, fishing, farming etc. IOW increase complexity.
JuanP on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 1:10 pm
I skipped this one. I don’t think having more energy available will solve humanity’s multiple long term predicaments. And while I don’t think I will live to see any of this in my lifetime, I would welcome it with open arms if it bought BAU some more time, regardless of the long term consequences. My guess is most people would
IOW, I agree with Short that this would be more a curse than a blessing for humanity by allowing us to ultimately cause even more damage, and I agree with Rock that I will pay attention to this stuff after they build and sell commercial ones.
Perk Earl on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 1:44 pm
We had a client that claimed to have the money to do a really enormous project, so we perked up, put together a proposal and it won approval. Trouble was nothing ever came together to fund any of the project. Not even any rough plans, so it can be concluded that it was nothing more than a fantasy.
This taught us that one of the secrets to life is to figure out what is real and what is not. To do that one must require conclusive proof – if it is not forthcoming then it is a fantasy. Since there is no conclusive proof of either of these ideas put forth in this article, it’s a fantasy.
That doesn’t mean they cannot potentially prove it as commercially viable, it just means for now it is a fantasy with a lot of hopium.
dave thompson on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 3:05 pm
Energy to do work will not matter when human animal habitat is lost to the current, out of control infinite growth paradigm.
Beery on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 3:06 pm
Unfortunately, Tom Whipple is a complete raving nutter who happens to become lucid when he’s talking about peak oil. I just try to avoid him when he starts rambling on other subjects. He’s kind of like John Michael Greer, who is fine as long as he doesn’t get into politics or history.
yoananda on Thu, 19th Mar 2015 4:13 pm
Even if cold fusion is not a fantasy, this generation is doomed, because, a new industrial infrastructure need at least 50yr to be build up.
Don’t expect anything else for the near future.
But, for the next generations too come, if there is an alternative, it will make all the difference between, going back to the middle age (with some huge population loss in the process), and, keep BAU.
numbersman on Fri, 20th Mar 2015 3:18 am
Scary thought: Has the Peak Oil scenario I have structured much of my life and thinking around being developed and shaped by people who cant detect obvious swindlers and charlatans?
yoananda on Fri, 20th Mar 2015 7:16 am
@numbersman
Cold Fusion has barely nothing to do with oil …
Not the same field of study. We can be good in oil, and know nothing about nuclear physics.
BTW, there is another factor to take in account. There have been some buzz around cold fusion recently in some “serious” newspaper, including NASA.
one example :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2013/05/20/finally-independent-testing-of-rossis-e-cat-cold-fusion-device-maybe-the-world-will-change-after-all/
So, don’t be too severe 😉