Not Oil-Power but Horse-Power.

"The Independent" newspaper reports that least 70 towns in France have adopted horse-drawn carriages as a substitute for vehicles powered by petroleum-derived fuel. The move is part of an effort to reduce CO2 emissions. Now, horses do emit CO2, but only as derived from renewable carbon-fuels, oats and hay. The carriage is called the "hippoville", and is fitted with disc-brakes, signal-lamps and removable seats. As far as cost is concerned, a starting price (so to speak) is around £8,000 (11,000 Euro), which is about the price of 160 barrels of crude oil. I note this morning, incidentally, that the price of North Sea, Brent crude has fallen by $3 dollars to $93 per barrel, as a result of the promise by OPEC to increase its production by 500,000 barrels a day. One wonders, with record amounts of water being pumped out of the giant Ghawar field (the world's biggest producer of crude oil) how feasible this is, amid speculation that its production has already peaked.

As has been pointed-out, the hippoville is not a pollution-free vehicle, since a 1,000 pound horse produces about 50 pounds of dung every day along with six to ten gallons of urine, and which if soaked-up by bedding (straw) would provide another 50 pounds daily. Extrapolating, over a year, such a horse will produce about ten tonnes of dung and an equivalent amount of urine/straw. Now when I was a child, it was a common sight to see people going behind a horse, picking-up its dung to put on their gardens. Rhubarb was particularly favoured for this treatment, as became the subject of a number of British lavatorial jokes; such is our sense of humour. So, the horse exhaust-products could be put to good use in agriculture.

It is worth recalling that before the motor car became popular, there was speculation that the projected future number of horses would leave city-folk waste-deep in dung and it was noted the considerable effort of New York City in disposing of some 12,000 horse carcasses per year. I presume they were rendered-down to make glue and for other purposes. I walked past an expensive restaurant in Thun in Switzerland, some time ago, and noted with surprise that "pferderfleisch"was on the menu, "horse meat", and so this might prove another advantage to the horse, at least in some countries, though I doubt it over here, in this nation of animal-lovers.

Quite seriously, I fully expect to witness a come-back for the horse, amid the society of local farms and small communities that I envisage we will return too, from whence we came before the age of cheap-oil. As Thomas Hardy described in his novels, e.g. The Mayor of Casterbridge (his alias for Dorchester, in the south-west of England), such an agrarian lifestyle was extremely hard, especially if you were poor. He describes the journeyman farm labourers who walked 20 miles a day in search of work, and worked for a few pennies a day until that work was done, and then on to whatever next they could find. There was no welfare state then, and if a labourer was ill, or injured in this terribly dangerous profession, he simply got no money.

I do not envisage this extreme, but an emphasis on home-production - local farms and breeding horses and other animals is more realistic than the "hydrogen economy" for instance, or other technical fixes that will not be introduced in time, or if at all, to save us from the imminent energy-crunch, particularly in terms of transportation. If this nation and others must become as near self-sufficient as possible to survive, the horse will become an essential ingredient of the "energy mix" we often hear about.


Related Reading.
(1) "The horse: Is this the secret weapon to beat global warming?" By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor for The Independent. http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/
(2) http://www.horsekeeping.com/horse_management/manure_management.htm

New Brazilian Oil-Field - "Tupi".

An oil field named Tupi, located off Brazil in the Campos Basin, has increased the accounted reserves of hydrocarbons for that country by 50%, which in a period of escalating oil prices, looks fantastic. Tupi is thought to contain between 5 and 8 billion barrels of what is termed "intermediate gravity oil" [see definitions at end of article], since it is accorded an API (American Petroleum Institute) "gravity" of 28 "degrees". If the API gravity of an oil is less than 10, it is heavier than water and sinks; if it is above 10, it is lighter than water and floats on top of it. The API gravity may be related to the specific gravity (relative density) of the oil by the formula:

API gravity = 141.5/(specific gravity - 131.5).

By rearranging this, the specific gravity (SG) may be deduced as:

SG = 141.5/(API gravity + 131.5).

Hence, the Tupi oil has an SG of: 141.5/(28 +131.5) = 0.887 kg/m^3


However, the case of Tupi is complex, and recovering the oil is going to be a considerable task. The oil lies under a layer of salt, which lies under a layer of rock, which lies under great depths of sea. Probably the rock (pre-salt layer) lies under 2 - 3 kilometres of water, and is itself maybe 2 kilometres thick. The salt layer is gauged-in at around another 2 km in thickness, and having got through all that, there lies the reservoir of oil, and probably gas too, since oil cooked at such depths (and according temperatures) in all likelihood has produced gas.The company working on the TUPI project, Petrobras, is currently exploring for oil and gas in waterline-to-reservoir depths of 5 km, and is the world leader in offshore hydrocarbon exploration.

The salt-layer itself poses some particular challenges. Drilling through salt has been done before, but at Tupi the salt-layer is of an unprecedented thickness for drilling and the depths involved are greater than have been tackled before. To get some idea of the pressure, we can note that the pressure of water increases by about one atmosphere for every 10 metres depth. For solid crustal material, it is nearer three atmospheres for each 10 metres of descent (and an average of 4.5 atm./10 metres at much greater depths). Hence, if the sea layer is 3 km, that imposes 300 atm., below which is 2 km of rock, i.e. 3 x 200 = 600 atm, and then the salt itself, which yields another 600 atm. say, a grand total of 1500 atm. pressure (around 1.5 x 10^8 Pascals or 0.15 Gigapascals, GPa).

The salt is also heated by geothermal energy (from the interior of the Earth), and under these combined conditions of pressure and heat it behaves less like a solid and more like a jelly, with properties of flow, and so a hole may be drilled through it but it then closes. At the Coordination of Post-Doctoral Engineering Programmes (COOPE) hosted at the Fedreal University of Rio de Janiro, there are three high-pressure chambers that permit the simulation of the conditions at depths of 6000 metres, and where drilling equipment is tested.

Another problem is that when oil is pumped-up from the reservoir, it is hot (100 degrees C) and fluid, but at the sea floor temperatures are only around 2 degrees C. where the oil becomes "thick" and this can block the flow of oil to the surface. It is possible to get around this by heating the pipes, but this all adds to the costs of recovering the oil. The weight of the very long, 7 km, pipes can also impose mechanical stress on the steel they are made of and one suggestion is to use titanium instead, but this is a far more expensive material, adding further to the final bill.

On a final note, even at the predicted production from Tupi of 400 kb/d by 2015, this amounts to just 0.4/80 x 100 = 0.5% of the 80 million barrels a day of oil that the world currently uses, and who knows what it will cost per barrel to produce. Either way, as it becomes necessary to drill in increasingly difficult places to get it, oil will become a very expensive commodity, and perhaps other forms of "oil", e.g. as produced from Coal to Liquids (CTL) plants, now considered expensive, or Biomass to Liquids (BTL), thought to be operational technology by 2020, may become economically viable. Either way, the age of cheap oil is well and truly over.

Related Reading.
(1) "Tupi, the new kid in town", By Luis de Sousa: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3269
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/API_gravity

[In general, oils with an API gravity of 40 to 45 have the highest market price and those with values outside this range sell for less. Above an API gravity of 45, the molecular chains become shorter and are less valuable to a refinery. Crude oil classified as light, medium or heavy, on the following basis:

Light crude oil has an API gravity of above 31.1 °.

Medium oil has an API gravity in the range 22.3 ° and 31.1 °.

Heavy oil has an API gravity less than 22.3.

In contrast, the US Geological Society uses slightly different definitions, but put simply, bitumen sinks in fresh water, while oil floats.

Oil which will not flow at normal temperatures is defined as bitumen for which the API gravity is normally less than 10 °. Bitumen derived from the oil sands deposits in the area of Alberta in Canada, has an API gravity of around 8 °. It is 'upgraded' to an API gravity of 31 ° to 33 ° by dilution and the upgraded oil is known as synthetic crude].

England's Green and Pleasant Land.

So were written the words of "Jerusalem" by William Blake, the final stanza of which goes:

"I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land."

It is sung by strong men at rugby football matches, with tears in their eyes, but it could be taken as an environmental anthem. However, while Britain is still a green land, that could all change as future events take their course. Fields of biofuel crops could take the place of pastures of grazing animals, while enormous acres of same-cultivated crops cover space between identical urban landscapes, villages as we know them, no longer in existence. A report from Natural England entitled "Tracking Change in the Character of the Urban Landscape," has concluded at 40% of the nation's landscapes are deteriorating from their traditional vistas.

There is public antipathy toward farmers, as they are often perceived: taking hefty EU subsidies while creating mountains of potatoes and butter that nourish no one; polluting rivers and streams; cutting-away the hedgerows to make enormous fields to grow more crops for more profit, while killing wild animals and birds. The list could go on. It is truth, however, that a mere 60% of our food is produced within the nation's borders. It is clear too that food prices will soar, but this is no fault of the farmers - inevitably oil prices will make the production of food and its transportation more expensive and so the produce itself, whether grown at home or imported from elsewhere. Food production has in fact fallen by around 1% per year for the past 15 years.

Farmers have been "hit" by BSE, swine-fever, foot-and-mouth disease, to name a few tragedies, while bird-flu constantly threatens further calamity. The suicide rate among farmers is the highest of any occupation, and it is also a truth that few other industries are forced to sell their production at less than cost-price. Public transport in the countryside is generally lamentable and so even the rural "poor" need to be multi-car families, to access basic services such as schools, the doctor, the bank and buying food. Those in this position will suffer greatly as prices, especially of fuel, rise.

To accord with the desired nearly 6% of Europe's fuel demand to be provided in the form of biofuels by 2010, some 3 million tonnes of wheat from a total of 15 million tonnes would be required in the UK, thus removing it from the food market, and eliminating any such surplus for export. The economic success of China means that its population will most likely move from a diet based on rice to one based on grain, and that will put pressure on world markets, possibly to a doubling in grain consumption within 40 years. To produce more food means either planting crops that give greater yields per care or cultivating more land.

The EU has reduced the amount of "set-aside" land from 8% in 2006-2007 to zero in 2007-2008, but since this land is much less productive it will not yield another 8% of crops - it tends to be stony, the headlands, fens and that in forests. There will be major changes make to the countryside, including moving animals to uncropable hill-land, in an effort to cram as much crop production wherever they can be grown. GM (genetically modified" crops are also thought might be necessary as they give higher yields, although the debate over GM has not yet been resolved.

Supporters of nuclear power claim that its preponderance will reduce the amount of land needed to produce biofuels, by which I presume they mean that nuclear can be used to produce hydrogen, and that instead can be a source of transportation energy. I have my doubts about this, on any significant scale, but nuclear power can certainly help us to keep the lights on. All in all I read the signs here as a call to maximise national self-sufficiency certainly in food, while the problem of providing transportation fuel remains, as oil becomes increasingly expensive and in short supply.


Related Reading.
"Goodbye beautiful Britain," Sunday Times Online, August 26th, 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article232876.ece/print

An ex-Peak Oil Believer Speaks!

I have referred to the essence of the latest upwelling on the subject of Peak Oil in previous postings, which is underpinned by the mostly Russian idea that petroleum (oil) is produced by chemical processes within the earth and is not a product of decomposition of dead animals and plants as a result of being cooked within the near surface strata of the planet over millennia. There are two books written on the subject, which expand upon the notion that either by bacterial action on iron oxides or the hydrolysis of metal carbides at some kilometers depth, hydrocarbons are produced. I discussed the elements of both in a recent posting, "Vast Oil and Life in the Deep Earth," which I also posted as one of my regular monthly columns at scitizen.com, respectively in respect of "The Deep Hot Biosphere" by Thomas Gold and "Jagged Environment" by Chris James. This is known as the "abiogenic theory."

Now, F. William Engdahl has countermanded his stance that oil is about to run-out, and believes that the biogenic theory of oil production, favoured the the West, is untenable. I think there is a good point being made here, that for the latter hypothesis to be true, to form the massive Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, dead dinosaurs etc. would have needed to be trapped to a total volume of 19 miles cubed, at depths maybe 4,000 - 6,000 feet below the Earth's surface, and elsewhere at offshore locations such as the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, in rock formations. There are various theories about the events that might have occurred at the Earth's surface (we don't really know what has happened or still does at its greater depths), but it is possible that the pervasion of life and its separation following the break-up of Pangea, tectonic motion or pole shifting (that is the literal slipping of the Earth's crust over the semi-fluid asthenosphere; a terrifying scenario to put it mildly!) might have left its remains thus... but nobody really knows.

However, there may well be many different sources of petroleum. Hydrocarbons may represent an "energy minimum" into which more complex molecules can be "cooked", and there may indeed be unimaginable trillions of tonnes of "oil" lying under our feet. Some may come from animal/plant detritus, and other, presumably deeper volumes from geochemical processes. But this changes nothing about the crisis (in transportation fuel especially) that faces the world. If such reserves do exist, how accessible are they, and in what amount can they be reasonably extracted?

My understanding is that "deep-drilling" is necessary to access these sources, irrespective of their origin, and so there are limits to how fast we can pull petroleum from the earth to match the 30 billion annual barrels that we currently demand from her. It is a simple question of supply and demand, and we are demanding an inexorable amount of oil. Russia is apparently drilling deep wells around the Caspian coast, with alleged success, and yet I can find no confirmation of this. Either Russia will become the world's greatest producer of petroleum and hence the major world superpower, transcending the United States, or it will suffer the fate of all industrialised societies, which will necessarily relocalise into smaller communities in an effort to survive. In any case, the preponderance of cheap oil is over, and ergo the modern world and our customarily associated lifestyles upon it. There will always be oil, in all likelihood, but it's going to cost.


Related Reading.
(1) "The Deep Hot Biosphere", by Thomas Gold, ISBN: 0-387-95253-5, Copernicus Books, 2001. (Available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk).
(2) "Jagged Environment", by Chris James, ISBN: 0-954-00940-1, JEpublications, 2001. (Available from Amazon.co.uk but not Amazon.com...). Or from http://www.jaggedenvironment.com
(3) "Confessions of an "ex"- Peak Oil Believer," By F. William Engdahl: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/print/Peak%20Oil.htm
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

Chinese Takeaway.

China has been accused of "eating the world", as the jaws of the dragon consume more and more resources to feed a relentless appetite for growth, which is anticipated at a sanguine 10% for the year 2008. Indeed, the slack from slowing western economies is being taken-up by the expansion of Chinese industrialisation and commerce. The IMF has reckoned that around half of the world's economic growth will, in this year, be provided by the BRIC's (Brazil, Russia, India and China), and now India is adding more growth to the world economy than the United States, Japan and the EU altogether, while China rises above all nations. Indeed, without China, the world economy would probably be in recession by now.

China's demand for oil, copper, zinc, nickel and all other basic resources is forcing their prices increasingly upward, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) has predicted that the thirst for oil by China and India will quadruple by 2030. Whether this will really happen, given the lack of available crude oil way before then, it seems there will be a "crunch" in supply by 2015. Significantly, 2015 is the upper limit predicted by the Norwegian Statoil for the emergence of the "peak" in oil production, which they forecast could hit as soon as 2010. More likely the peak is already with us, as some analysts think, and the output of oil is being maintained artificially by enhanced recovery methods; hence, beyond the peak, oil supplies will drain rapidly, and it is not obvious to me how any increase in oil production is then possible, let alone a quadrupling in consumption by the Chinese or Indian industrial leviathans.

Meanwhile, China has asked for a 30% increase in its imports of crude oil from Saudi Arabia, and plans also to increase its imports of oil from Iran, having built two new oil refineries to increase the nation's fuel capacity. It is expected that imports of Saudi crude will increase from 460,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 600,000 barrels next year. The two new refineries can handle 240,000 bpd (Fujian on the south east coast) and 200,000 bpd in Shandong province, both of which are scheduled for completion next year. Apparently, China is unperturbed by the US sabre-rattling over the Iranian uranium enrichment programme, and wants to increase oil imports from the country above the 17% enhancement rise during the first nine months of 2007.

When such information about the burgeoning Chinese Economy is quoted, it is usually done so in the spirit of culpability toward its nation. However, it is the West that drives growth, in buying manufactured goods from China, much cheaper than we could make them ourselves. Western Culture is the counter-trade of this imported booty, in terms of quite understandable aspirations toward a "western lifestyle", which in reality even the West can no longer afford to maintain, or not for much longer, against the backdrop of rising oil prices. Therefore, outlets of McDonalds, Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) have appeared in the Chinese novo riche east. The traditional rice-diet is being superceded by a meat-rich diet, and imports of pork, beef and milk, which used to be in short supply in China are soaring.

In an effort to assuage memories of an austere socialist past, and mass starvation at times, China is now a net importer of food. As I wrote in "Can we Feed the World?", even if all of us (in the East and the West) adopted a pre-Green Revolution diet, which was largely vegetarian since meat production is more intensive in terms of the amount of land required per person to survive upon, only about 3 billion might be maintained as a total global population, or less than half the current number of 6.5 billion, in the absence of synthetic pesticides and artificially manufactured fertilizers.

To call this scale of events economic "growth" is illusory, since it reflects the plundering of the earth's resources under the false premise that we can continue to consume more and more, essentially forever and without limit, in terms of oil, food and energy. The reality is an artificially enhanced population with relentlessly voracious tastes, and a finally greater die-off in its numbers if world resources, and that includes its population too, are not managed to the aim of a sustainable balance between what might be supplied and what might reasonably be demanded from the capacity of the earth. The weight of demand has swung way down, and our chances of pulling-out of the nose-dive we are into, diminish increasingly in this protracted state of addicted denial. We need to trammel-in "growth" according to a definite worldwide plan. The governments of the world must decide on how to sustain its populations, and the available natural wealth must be apportioned to do so.


Related Reading.
(1) "How China is Eating the World," By Sean O'Grady, The Independent, November 9th, 2007. http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article3143288.ece
(2) "China seeks 30% increase in Saudi oil imports," Reuters, Friday November 9 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle/print?id=7063791