Link to the whole story
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ill Reinert, who helped design Toyota Motor Corp.'s Prius hybrid, hovers in a helicopter 1,000 feet over Fort McMurray, Alberta. On this clear November morning, he's craning for a look at one of the world's largest petroleum reserves where there's not an oil well in sight. Instead, in a 2-mile-wide pit below, trucks head to refineries with loads of sand weighing more than Boeing 747s. Yellow flames shoot skyward as 900-degree-Fahrenheit (482-degree- Celsius) heat liquefies any embedded petroleum. Floating scarecrows and propane-powered cannons do their best to chase migrating birds from lethal wastewater ponds. Eventually, nuclear reactors may surround the crater 270 miles (435 kilometers) northeast of Edmonton, Alberta, delivering the power required to wring oil from sand.
"This is what the end of the age of oil means," says Reinert, 60, who plans the vehicles Toyota will make in a quarter century as national manager for advanced technology at the U.S. sales unit in Torrance, California. "The car-based culture, the business-as- usual of building cars and trucks, is going to change dramatically."
PeakOil is You
Bloomberg Markets: the end of the oil age
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Bloomberg Markets: the end of the oil age
by wisconsin_cur » Sun 17 Feb 2008, 21:13:57
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')einert says nobody can say for sure how the separate tailpipe emission, fuel economy and manufacturing regulations promulgated worldwide by multiple levels of government will affect the environment. There's no blueprint for the impact of increasingly scarce oil on a U.S. economy already laboring with a mortgage crisis and a dropping dollar. Add industrialization in China and India, and the number of cars and trucks worldwide may double to 2.1 billion by 2030, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.
"We don't have a past, a history or a database that allows us to explore the simultaneous impact of recessions, disruptions to the energy supply and climate change," says Reinert, who spent six years in the 1980s maintaining solar and wind-powered telephone towers in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. "We don't have the legislative, regulatory, financial or product planning tools."
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he environmental desecration at Fort McMurray and the dangers in petroleum-rich countries such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia show why it's foolish to brush off warnings about an energy-depleted future, says Jan Kreider, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who had Reinert as a graduate student. "We're going to have to have crisis on top of crisis before energy policies change," he says. "Americans have this shock mentality where they do what they want to do for as long as they can and then set up massive programs to fix everything in a few years."
So why do I still feel like a freak when I mention resource depletion in a sermon (it is a friendly crowd to the idea) or to a neighbor or co-worker?
http://www.thenewfederalistpapers.com
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wisconsin_cur - Light Sweet Crude
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Re: Bloomberg Markets: the end of the oil age
by wisconsin_cur » Sun 17 Feb 2008, 21:22:42
more highlights
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')akamura, one of a handful of occupants on the top floor of Toyota's Higashi Fuji Technical Center near Mt. Fuji, says he worries the world's oceans could get so hot that they'll release carbon instead of storing it--with catastrophic consequences for human life. Nakamura takes his own measurements of atmospheric pollution and is scouring the world for alternative fuels. He's targeting hydrogen, electricity or ammonia as replacements for petroleum to ensure that auto, aircraft and ship builders remain viable for another century.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')akamura, one of a handful of occupants on the top floor of Toyota's Higashi Fuji Technical Center near Mt. Fuji, says he worries the world's oceans could get so hot that they'll release carbon instead of storing it--with catastrophic consequences for human life. Nakamura takes his own measurements of atmospheric pollution and is scouring the world for alternative fuels. He's targeting hydrogen, electricity or ammonia as replacements for petroleum to ensure that auto, aircraft and ship builders remain viable for another century.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')einert says that without action, oil may become so expensive that the world would resemble the one in Blade Runner. In the 1982 film, the rich live hundreds of stories high and the poor walk dark, rain-soaked streets. Or the lack of oil may cause the breakdown of social order depicted in the 1979 movie Mad Max. Reinert says Fort McMurray provides a window into such fictional portrayals. He predicts that the clamor for energy security will trump all environmental concerns worldwide. And he forecasts that most alternatives to conventional petroleum, such as oil sands and ethanol, will make climate change and water shortages worse.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the interim, nations will be more dependent on the Middle East, where getting oil is complicated by war, political turmoil and declining output from mature wells. "After a series of incidents in the Persian Gulf, or a low-level nuclear exchange that shuts off oil supplies, you wouldn't have a short-term disruption like Katrina," Reinert says. "You would have a profound one- or two- or three-year period in which economies and governments fail."
This guy is more of a doomer than I am.
http://www.thenewfederalistpapers.com
