[LadyRuby]

Speaking of Hirsch, one thing to keep in mind is that this guy isn't just a flake that the DOE made a huge mistake in hiring. This is a guy who they hired for the mitigation report and who they have since hired onto another follow-up contract (see the end of the congressional testimony to see his DOE contract information). So he is still working for the DOE.

Hirsch seems to me like a guy of real integrity to me, and frankly I give the DOE credit for not muzzling him.

Here's some more Hirsch stuff (probably been posted before...):

Congressional Testimony on Peak Oil by Hirsch Dec 2005

Summary:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he era of plentiful, low-cost petroleum is approaching an end. A recent analysis for the DOE focused on what might be done to mitigate the peaking of world oil production. It became abundantly clear that effective mitigation will be dependent on the implementation of mega-projects and mega-changes at the maximum possible rate. A scenario analysis was performed, based on crash program implementation worldwide – the fastest humanly possible. The timing of oil peaking was left open because of the considerable differences of opinion among experts. The results were startling: Unless a mitigation crash program is started 20 years before peaking occurs, the economic consequences will be dire.

Oil peaking represents a liquid fuels problem, because motor vehicles, aircraft, trucks, and ships have no ready alternative to liquid fuels, certainly not for the existing capital stock, which has lifetimes measured on a decade scale.

The world has never confronted a problem like peak oil. Since it is uncertain when peaking will occur, the challenge for decision-makers is vexing. Mustering support for an approaching, invisible disaster is much more difficult than for one that is obvious. We would like to believe that the optimists are right about peak oil being a distant problem, but the risks of error are beyond imagination.

[crapattack]

I've heard Hirsh interviewed and he's a very careful and conservative person with a whole hell of a lot of credentials. He was appauled by the information he and his staff was accumulating when he was researching the report. When writing the report he says they consistently took the most conservative position possible and were still horrified by their conclusions.

[SoothSayer]

I skimmed the report a while back ... but today I also read the Hirsch presentation to the US Govt in Dec 2005.

This is the fragment that startled me:

"It is by no means obvious how world oil peaking will occur, but if it follows the patterns displayed by these regions and countries, the world will have less than a year warning."

LESS THAN A YEAR WARNING???????

This sort of fast awareness - even if in reality it has no short term effects - could well cause a huge flurry of media attention and related economic disturbances and (unpleasant) government activity.

Until now I have assumed that the "doomers" with their food stockpiles etc were being very silly ... but now I am not so sure.

We may not in reality need to deal with the effects of Peak Oil for a decade or so ... but startled & worried populations could cause an unpleasant panic "spike" which could impact our day-to-day lives for a month or two.

[Revi]

I don't know if we've peaked, but the price of oil doesn't want to stay in the $60 range anymore. It is over $67 today and it'll probably be testing the highs set last year soon, if it keeps going up. I think we are in the first year of oil prices hurting the middle class. We have instituted serious mitigation already in my household, but we'll have to do more to keep up with this run up in price. Why isn't everybody doing something now?

[Revi]

Oil is over $67 today. Time to do some mitigation. We have started in our household. Here's what we have done:

http://www.msad54.org/sahs/appliedarts/ ... /index.htm

[UIUCstudent01]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ReserveGrowthRulz', 'H')irsch also wrote a very similar report in 1987. Very similar.

[MonteQuest]

lorenzo's "Hirsch report is totally bogus on biofuels" can be found in the Energy Forum.

MQ

[kokoda]

So we need 20 years to mitigate the problems that will be caused when oil peaks.

In other words if oil has already peaked ... we are screwed.

It occurs to me that there are a lot of potential solutions to the peak oil problem ... but there is a general lack of leadership from world governments when it comes to implementing these solutions.

[Revi]

There are a lot of things that we could be doing. This country lacks the will to do them, however. How can you convince people to conserve when they don't even know what for? Most people haven't got a clue where this oil stuff comes from, or that it's even running low.

Imagine you are at an all you can eat buffet. The folks running the thing come out and tell you that you should take less so that those at the back of the line can have some. You've already paid. Are you going to conserve for them, or are you going to get your money's worth?

They aren't going to let on that there's anything the matter until they are safely away from the mess that will ensue when everybody finds out how little is left of the buffet. It would be nice if our local governments could do something, but as for our national government, fugeddaboudit!

[shakespear1]

This is a rosy picture according to Harper's Index for July 2006

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'Volume of new reserves added by major oil companies in 2005, expressed as a percentage of oil pumped that year: 51[Sanford C. Bernstein Limited (London)]

Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing corn ethanol to the amount yielded when it is burned in gasoline: 1:1[Alexander Farrell, University of California, Berkeley]

Ratio of the amount of energy used in producing gasoline itself to the amount yielded when it is burned: 6:5')

Stats

[ballad]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')If we have peaked we'll be using Hirsh's mitigation plan. The plan for immediate peaking. I read the report and I think it involves rationing gasoline and making a lot of fuel from coal.

[Navono]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DriveElectric', 'I') read the entire PDF. Very interesting. It should be required reading for everyone. It logically raises the issue and addresses the limitations of solutions and especially the difficultly of the transportation liquid fuel issues.

Quite often it is lost in the debate that the main impact (in the initial decade) of Peak Oil is on transportation liquid fuels (gasoline/diesel). There is really no threat to food supplies or electricity in the near term. They make up a fraction of total oil consumption.

The use of oil for transportation is the issue for the first decade of Peak Oil.

I think that study made this point quite effectively.

[jdmartin]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Navono', '
')Have you ever visited a large farm? Without diesel fuel, fertilizer, and other petroleum based products the local grocery store isn't going to have much on it's shelves, even if there is fuel for transportation.

On that note, the ethanol and biodiesel ideas in the end consume the same amount of biomass to fill one gas tank as a human being eats in a year...

The only real survival option will be local and communal. It's far too late to attempt to replace cheap energy and waste it like we are accustomed to. I say this after spending the last 17 years of my life full and part-time employed by the oilfield/refining sectors in Alberta, Canada. Currently I am working at the construction of the Petro-Canada RCP 1.1 project in Strathcona county, which is on the east side of Edmonton. RCP stands for Refinery Conversion Project, which is the addition of a coker and crude-vac train (a heavy oil upgrader) next to the oil refinery. When it is complete the refinery will switch over to bitumen feedstock from Syncrude's oil sands mining operation at Ft. McMurray and will produce 150,000 bbl/day of sweet synthetic crude. The price tag on this conversion project will be close to 3 billion Canadian by the time it is finished. This tells me that it is getting much harder and more expensive to get conventional crude out of the earth in western Canada as the refinery has existed and processed regular sweet crude for almost 50 years... There was no Sulphur Recovery Unit on site before, but since oil sands contain H2S a large one is being built there as well.

I'm a steamfitter by trade, and although I bring it up from time to time, few of my peers care to think about it... personally being in the midst of a large petrochemical complex day to day reminds me continuously how foolishly we have wasted such an incredible resource... The flares are always lit, and the engines are always running.

[Navono]

Thanks very much for the welcome. I first became aware that Peak Oil was close when I saw Mike Ruppert's Truth and Lies of 9/11. Since then I have taken to viewing the practices, policies, and general attitudes of my industry in a new light. A lot of the lunacy I have witnessed makes perfect sense to me now that I realize just how much paper petroleum there is. Within an hour's drive of my home town there are hundreds of old slow producing oil wells and a couple of small refineries. However, within the same distance there are thousands and thousands of gas wells, and 50 or so significant plants and batteries perparing their output for export. I am 37, and when I was 18 I worked my first gas plant turnaround. The plant in question was at the time owned by Mobil. I was surprised when I discovered that the original process and sulphur trains there were older than I was. I returned there for another maintenance turnaround a couple years ago and was amazed at how much of the plant had been mothballed/demolished and that the only significant new construction on the site that had happened in almost 20 years was a new sulphur recovery unit. Operations staff I knew at the site informed me that the local gas field had not only dropped off in productive capacity significantly, but also that it had grown far more sour over the years, hence the new SRU. This same story is being repeated at every one of those old plants despite the continued drilling of new and advanced wells into the old reservoirs. The product is still there, but it gets harder and harder to produce as time goes on. If you look at a map of oil and gas wells in Alberta there are a lot... but if you also include the ones that have been abandoned the map gets pretty full all of the sudden. Most of the capital expense of the Alberta oilfields happened in the 60's and 70's. Then Trudeau's National Energy Program killed almost all investment in the province's oil industry until the mid-90's. Since that time the investment has been huge, but not in the old fields. New sources of petroleum here in Alberta are expensive and very destructive environmentally. More proof that the lifespan of fields that are usually greedilly overproduced is generally shorter than originally hoped for at the time of their discovery. When I was a child of 5, Alberta celebrated its' 75th Anniversary and we all believed there was enough natural gas in Alberta to take care of our needs for hundreds of years. However, rapid expansion and low royalty exports to the US and rest of Canada has the industry scrambling to maintain current production levels. Regular gasoline here is $99.9 cents per liter right now, which works out to roughly $3.75 per US gallon. With exchange factored in that comes out to $3.24 US per US gallon. On one hand it upsets me that gasoline I buy less than one mile from the refinery I work in costs more at times than it does in other places, but, I get paid well to fit the pipes, so I really shouldn't complain... this project is good for a year, right here in town, and the next one is 20 minutes away and will likely take 3-4 years to build. Shell plans to more than double their Scotford upgrader complex at an estimated cost of 18 billion Canadian. The Albian sands mine that supplies the bitumen for the upgrader will of course also be enlarged to suit the needs of the downstream production. I doubt I will be unemployed anytime soon...

That is, until I have enough coin to disappear with a sailboat, seeds, and a plan.

[Battle_Scarred_Galactico]

The only real survival option will be local and communal. It's far too late to attempt to replace cheap energy and waste it like we are accustomed to. I say this after spending the last 17 years of my life full and part-time employed by the oilfield/refining sectors in Alberta, Canada.


What a great quote, its' brilliant to see someone who actually has real world experience with oil come here and tell it like it is.

Welcome.

[manu]

Yes gurmeet you will be the last jackass to be trading when it all comes down.

[MD]

wow...look at all the spam hiding in here...now you see it..now you don't.

[funzone36]

These are some of the best things I found:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F'). Transition Conclusions
Any transition of liquid fueled, end-use equipment following oil peaking will be
time consuming. The depreciated value of existing U.S. transportation capital
stock is nearly $2 trillion and would normally require 25 – 30 years to replace. At
that rate, significantly more energy efficient equipment will only be slowly phased
into the marketplace as new capital stock gradually replaces existing stock. Oil
peaking will likely accelerate replacement rates, but the transition will still require
decades and cost trillions of dollars.

[skiptamali]

Apologies if I'm re-posting what someone has already hit, but given the thought to govt projection and energy analysts' words of late, thought you guys would like this article from RiverWired:
"Robert Hirsch, a "senior energy advisor," gave this dire warning on CNBC last week. He based his prediction on an interview given by Charles T. Maxwell in February. Maxwell, who is apparently known as "The Dean of Oil Analysts," said the crisis will start sometime between 2010 and 2015 and will last for at least ten years."

Annnnnnd then this fun one from Business & Media Institute.
My personal favorite prgh:
“[Maxwell] expects an oil-induced financial crisis to start somewhere in the 2010 to 2015 timeframe,” Energytechstocks.com reported. “He said that, unlike the recession the U.S. appears to be in today, ‘This will not be six months of hell and then we come out of it.’ Rather, Maxwell expects this financial crisis to last at least 10 or 12 years, as the world goes through a prolonged period of price-induced rationing (eg, oil up to $300 a barrel and U.S. pump prices up to $15 a gallon).”

Soooooooo... great. Who wants to grow garden veggies and tend the chickens with me while I prepare for armageddon?
Seriously, this could be one of the more extreme projections, but I don't think it's totally illegit. My head is spinning just thinking about the restructuring that could be done to lessen famine and other poverty-related catastrophes in the next few years. Is anyone else sniffing out a very big, very dark chain of reactions?