Blight on Wheat... all we need!

We are aware of world food crises, but now it appears that a new (but historically recognised) infection is on its way to kill-off wheat-crops, and that is about all we need. A recent analysis predicts that by 2024, the world population will "peak" at 7.1 billion (from 6.7 billion now) and then decline to around 2.5 billion by 2100. This "new" infliction goes back to the Romans, and is called "black stem rust" because that's what it looks like, and it hit the North American breadbasket in 1954 - eradicating 40% of the nation's wheat crop - and during the cold-war between the US/West and the USSR, both sides of the argument stockpiled stem rust spores as a biological weapon against the other.

The Romans used to pray to a stem rust God, called Robigus, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Norman Borlaug told the New Scientist magazine recently that Ug99, which appeared in Kenya in 2002, is due for a reappearance in consequence of complacency - TB in humans is similarly blamed for its recent resurgence. As is the case with most research, a lack of funding is blamed, and yet when I see what the various research councils are spending their money on - matched against the backdrop of oil-depletion, and the energy-crunch, I do wonder if we have our priorities arse-about-face.

Borlaug came to fame fifty years ago, and at 93, he is focussing on the long-game. He commented that because travel has vastly increased during the past 40 years, there is the concomitant opportunity and likelihood that Ug99 spores might be accidentally spread around the world, rather than erupting in isolated pockets. This is true indeed of all kinds of infection, as one might envisage. He further suggests that the responsible genes might be located undetected in other grains and grasses, for example rice, which is facing a shortage and an accordingly elevated price, with detrimental consequences for half the world's population who depend on it as a staple food.

Borlaug concludes: "We have to rely on fungicides, wheat breeding (to secure invulnerable strains, temporarily at least) and luck!" Yes, we are going to need some of the latter, along with strategic planning to get through the Oil-Dearth Era.

Related Reading.
"Billions at risk from wheat super-blight." By Deborah Mackenzie. http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19425983.700

Oil at $122 and Predicted to Reach $200 - Deja Vu.

Friday, September 01, 2006

$200 a Barrel Forecast for Peak Oil!

Prompted by this morning's news item to the effect that the price of crude oil has risen above $122, my memory latched back to a previous posting of almost two years ago, as noted above. At that time the price was around $70 and the benchmark $100 was a figure that most thought was still a long way off. Accordingly, the estimate of $200 did seem alarmist. I also wrote an article "Hubbert Peak Oil" (Friday, October 26th, 2007) in which I aver that the cost of everything, driven by the underpinning price of oil, will double, and that once peak oil is reached, judging from the $100 figure as pertained at that time, this would correspond to the new magic "ceiling" of $200. Lord Oxburgh made a prediction at around the same time of a $150 barrel, and this now seems inevitable.

Guided mostly by hunch and more roughly by curves of oil production and depletion, I predict that the price of oil will reach $150 by the end of this year (2008) and $200 by the end of 2009, by when the world will be a considerably more fractious place with supply being increasingly stretched to meet rising demand; a tug-of-war contest the latter must ultimately lose.

The latest hike in oil price is blamed on supply troubles in Nigeria and a slow-down in Russia. Arjun Murti, an analyst for Goldman Sachs, noted that while Western nations are discussing the necessity to reduce oil consumption, and that of energy more generally, the excess production that is necessary to cool the oil-market is not evident. He said: "though predicting the ultimate peak in oil prices, as well as the remaining duration of the upcycle, remains a major uncertainty... a multi-year decline in global oil demand is needed in order to create a spare capacity cushion and bring about potentially lower energy commodity prices."

Fair enough, but this is an economist talking while the underlying problem is one of geology. There was only so much oil in the ground to begin with and we are getting through it too quickly. Mr Murti reckoned that the oil price could hit $150 - $200 within 24 months, which is about my prediction too. The OPEC member nations are now producing oil at near full-capacity, the increase in production in Russia is slowing and that from Mexico is in decline. Nonetheless, demand from markets such as China climbs relentlessly.

I suspect that the world production of oil is pretty much at the plateau of maximum output -" peak oil" if you will - and that soon, economics must give-way to geology.

Related Reading.
"Goldman predicts crude prices will 'super-spike' to $200 per barrel." By Stephen Foley:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/goldman-predicts-crude-prices-will-superspike-to-200-per-barrel-822235.html?r=RSS

Correspondence.

I get quite a lot of interesting correspondence about the subjects in this blog of which the letter posted following my reply, next, is a fine example.

Dear David,

many thanks for your interesting and supportive message! The blog is just me thinking out-loud really, and trying to find some solutions to the energy-crunch, but also to recognise the scale of the problem and the relative impact that can be made by e.g. biofuels etc. and the likelihood (or not) of the hydrogen economy etc.

I have also tried to keep optimistic rather than a "Kunstler" scenario where we disappear into the pages of a Thomas Hardy novel or the wild-West as he is an American.

When I talk about a relocalisation of society I am not thinking of this scenario but a focus on local production of food etc. as far as possible to take pressure off transportation which must become a problem with the escalating price of oil and its inevitable scarcity.

I am reading quite an uplifting (if a bit idealistic) book called "The geography of hope" by Chris Turner, which does indeed focus on the "local" and also in the sense of revamping inner-city areas turning problems into positive outcomes.The "clever" Danes get quite a lot of coverage in this, and he focusses on their many ingenious and holistic energy solutions where one process or the waste from it feeds another - there is one lovely example where due to its geometry it is impossible to mow the grass around a power station using machinery... the solution: to graze a flock of sheep there who have no trouble at all getting to the grass!

I think that the sum total of many "solutions" made acting at the community level may go some considerable way to providing sustainable solutions. We can each of us do something and as there are getting on for 7 billion of us, maybe our number, which is thought of as the major source of the problems we face as a human species, might go some way to mitigating the worst aspects of them.

Turner is highly critical of architecture especially the grid-layout of most US cities, which he points-out is divisive, by which I mean in one place there is just accommodation, no shops, no other businesses or other amenities, and a necessity to drive everywhere. He cites European models, e.g Heidelberg (or Caversham where I live, for that matter) where everything is integrated. So we have houses within 5 minutes walk of all else that is required.

In the latter aspect, Kustler and Turner are in agreement, and indeed, in Caversham, beyond the village, are large "developments" with nothing there other than houses and so everyone has to drive down in to the village or into town (Reading) to buy what they need, go to leisure-centres etc. etc.

Thanks very much for your information which I think will make (unattributed or attributed as you wish) a useful article.

Kind regards,

Chris.



On 4 May 2008 at 14:40, wrote:

Dear Mr. Rhodes,

I have been reading quiet a few of your articles and have quite enjoyed them. Some of the stuff is nothing more than rehashed from more than 30-40 years ago. The barrage across the Bristol Channel was on the drawing boards then. I think it got the Bums rush because it wasn't environmentally friendly silting up of Swansea harbour was one of the complaints if I remember correctly. It didn't stop the French though from going along with the Rance barrage which came on stream at about the same time if I remember correctly.

Here are a couple of other things to think about which might be of interest too you. During the oil crisis, I was living in Denmark and the oil shock got the wily Danes doing some heavy thinking. They have always been dependent on imported energy there was some small deposits of Brown coal over near Herning in Jutland, but they were worked out during the 40s and 50s. One of the things they did was to make the production of electricity tie in with the production of hot water to heat towns. Copenhagen has been for decades heated by two electrical generating stations Svanmollen and H.C. Osteds verks. The hot water generated during the production of electricity was pumped through insulated pipes round the city and tapped off to heat building complexes. The Danes also contemplated shipping hot water from Iceland where they have a surplus in the large tankers that were being then mothballed in the Norwegian fjords mooring them by the large coastal town and then pumping around the towns to keep them warm in winter.

What the Danes did do which has benefited them ever since was to set very high building standards with high insulation norms and also set in motion a large government research project in windmill technology of all places in the grounds of their Atomic research centre at Riso near Roskilde. This has continued uninterrupted supported by what ever party was in power and has given the Danes a lead in Alternative energy production. Denmark now accounts for 50% of all installed wind energy around the planet they are opening new factories around the world to take advantage of the boom and there expertise. This unfortunately is causing some complaining by the people around the factories as the transport of the large loads round the clock to the Docks is causing congestion on the the motorways. They now produce 20% of there electricity from wind power. They are very lucky as they can off load any excess onto Germany at one point during a storm several months ago they generated I think 70% of there electricity from wind. Not bad for a country without any resources apart from a stiff breeze.

We the Brits who live on an island made of coal and surrounded by a sea of oil and gas and a government obsessed with the concept that the market knows best, have to import most of our coal from Australia and fair amount of our oil from the middle east.

It doesn't take much or cost much to have an energy plan for self sufficiency. The trouble is that it usually tend to end up as a political football in Britain. I worked in the mines in northern
England and I watched while Attila the Hen [sic. Margaret Thatcher!] and her minions, who should be in prison as traitors. Wilfully destroy the energy base of the British Isles and don't believe the shit that they tell you that they can open the mines up quickly again. They can't, they can clear the shafts easily enough, but you can bet your life that the roads have filled up with water and most will have closed up under any circumstances. Let me just give you an example which you have certainly not thought about. Lots of coal seams have clay floors. These tend to throw, they well up and bow in the middle you can drive a road through solid ground make it twelve feet tall and in the space of a couple of months it has closed up to six feet by the clay welling up leave it a year and it is completely closed.

I worked on a coal face , we drove it not more than a mile before we had to close it down because the roads kept closing in, we had to abandon most of the equipment. Most of the coal that is left is several miles from the pit bottom and if the road have to made anew this will mainly have to be done by hand as it is difficult to automate. That will make it expensive and slow plus the price of building new infrastructure on the surface will be expensive if not prohibitive. The site of the old pit where I worked and know that there is 40 years of coal left in 3 unworked seams underground was sold off and is now what you call a logistical centre for some large firm, plus several small factories.

I would also like to thank you for your interesting articles. I tend to agree with what you have to say and only disagree in the detail but I think that the real solution to the energy problem will be even more esoteric than even blacklightpower and there are a few that are bobbing about just below the radar at this very moment.


Deep Regards...

David.

Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Fuel Prices and Peak Oil.

Ken Livingstone may have lost the London Mayoral election last night to Boris Johnson by 6% of the votes, but I note a legacy from him in terms of coming-clean about peak oil, which I had not heard any politician do hitherto. This was in a statement made at an environmental hustings earlier in the run-up to the election. When David Strahan from Global Public Media asked him what he would do to protect London from the impact of peak oil he replied: "I don't see this as a threat. I see it as an opportunity... [which] may be the only way that we face-up to having to reduce our energy-consumption".

He continued: "Almost every government on the planet is too cowardly to tell its people how much they should pay for energy, [but when peak oil brings escalating prices] we'll know the real cost of putting oil in the tank of our car, and we will scale down our energy consumption to cope with that".

I couldn't agree more, but a golden-age is unlikely to be the immediate consequence. When peak oil does bite, and I think we are seeing the onset of this now, the price of oil will increase to an unforeseeable level from its current $120 dollars a barrel (some analysts are talking about $200 but it's really unpredictable). However, policies or suggestions of how exactly oil will be replaced in practical terms were not offered by any of the three final Mayoral candidates, other than the usual references to "renewables", e.g wind, solar, hydroelectric and carbon capture (i.e. to make coal-fuelled power cleaner). It should be noted that none of these means address directly Transportation, which is the major end-user of oil.

There was support for Combined Heating and Power (CHP) from all three voices, but exactly how sustainable this is depends on the fuel used. On a smaller scale, these units can be run on wood-chips, but to fuel a city the size of London, natural gas is the more likely source, and there is much speculation about European supplies of gas over the next decade. Recently Ukraine froze when Russia cut its gas-supplies by 50% over money apparently owed, and even acknowledging the much greater efficiency of CHP which can yield substantial economy in both fuel consumption and hence CO2 emissions, such a strategy would be vulnerable to the vagaries of gas provision in the wider context.

Probably it is dangerous to rely too much on any single source of energy. The biggest issue over peak oil in this country and the rest of the world is how to keep transportation running if oil-based fuels become crushingly expensive and indeed in limited supply over the next decade. Even the CEO of Shell recently commented that there would be a gap in supply and demand for oil by 2015, i.e. not later than this, and many estimates are closer to 2011/2012, i.e. in 3 years or so. For a city like London, public transport is vital and Ken's controversial congestion-charges have reduced car-use to some extent. This and the rising cost of fuel is particularly tough on road-haulage, and I note that the dollar price of oil per barrel is almost numerically the same as the cost per pence of diesel per litre, i.e. around $120 and £1.20 respectively.

Providing biofuels on a comparable scale to those distilled from crude oil is not really an option, because there is only so much arable (crop-) land available and if we grew no food at all we could still match less than half the amount of fuel the UK gets through annually. It is a logical consequence then that the number of vehicles on the roads will fall drastically and the likely scenario is a relocalisation of society into communities of reduced population, but the deconvolution of a conurbation the size of London with 8 million or so people living there, is not an obviously manageable process.

Providing electrified transport, eg. trams, as are used extensively and with great efficiency in other European cities - Prague is a good example - might be one solution to keeping London moving, and I suspect such an undertaking ought to begin around now if it is likely to succeed in time to meet the peak oil energy crash - the "Oil Dearth Era", as I have referred to it.

Boris Johnson suggested extracting geothermal energy from the great underground holes moled-out for the cross-rail transport project which could match the output of a typical power station, i.e. around 1 Gigawatt (1,000 Megawatts), but it would not be trivial to use this as a means to run transportation (e.g. to make hydrogen, for which there is no existing infrastructure); however, it might feed electricity into the national grid to power trains both overground and underground and a putative tram-system.

Either way, for London, this is now Mr Johnson's problem while Mr Livingstone writes his memoirs.

Related Reading.
http://globalpublicmedia.com/london_mayor_peak_oil_opportunity

Brazil - The New Saudi?

While the oil-fields off Brazil may hold oil in a quantity only beaten by two larger reservoirs in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, getting it out of the ground may prove extremely difficult. The latest find is called Carioca, in the Santos Basin, 170 miles offshore, and follows the Tupi field, whose reserves are confirmed at 5 - 8 billion barrels. It is thought that Carioca may contain 33 billion barrels of oil and gas, and if this figure is confirmed it will represent the greatest discovery for 32 years. Among much enthusiasm and speculation, it should be noted that 33 billion barrels is about what the world gets through in terms of oil in a year.

Brazil is now the eighth largest consumer of oil in the world, and last year it became self-sufficient in oil production, largely from the state-oil company, Petrobras, exploiting the country's offshore reserves. If these major new reserves can be tapped, then Brazil will become a major oil-exporter since most of its own transportation is run on cheaper ethanol made locally from sugar-cane. It is a big "if", however.

Brazilian expertise in drilling at depths of over 2,000 metres is relatively recent, and to get at Carioca, Tupi and the giant gas-field, Jupiter, it will be necessary to drill down to a combined depth of up to 10,000 meters (6 miles), going through layers of rock and sand, followed by a layer of salt that might be 1.3 miles thick. Under these conditions, the pressure is in excess of 1,000 times atmospheric pressure (almost 8 tonnes per square inch), enough as has been noted, to "crush a pickup truck". The temperatures are high too, at above 260 degrees C (500 degrees Fahrenheit).

In getting the oil out of the reservoirs, engineers will need to cope with the sudden drop in temperature from that hot enough to melt bismuth (used to transport uranium fuel rods) to near freezing-point at the ocean floor, with a likely concomitant and manifold increase in viscosity. The salt-layer under such conditions of pressure and temperature also exhibits some degree of plastic flow, meaning that there is a tendency for holes drilled through it to spontaneously close-up again.

The technological development and investment is presently prohibitive, but with oil at around $120 a barrel and almost certainly set to rise, some think to $200 within a year or so, the incentive increases commensurately.

Related Reading.
[1] "In Brazil, Another Gusher", By Joshua Schneyer: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/apr2008/db20080415_868659.htm?
chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5
[2] "Brazil Oil Trapped by 500-Degree Heat, salt Barrier (Update 2)", By Joe Carroll. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aalWn.eJHGZk&refer=latin_america