Nissan Looking At Roadbed Electrification

They'll just tax it at the pump. They don't need to put out all the fire all the time.

Bret Cahill

'A report from the non-governmental organisation Global Witness =96 famous for its expos=E9 of so-called "blood diamonds" =96 pointed to an impending supply shock that could be so severe that many of the world's poor countries would simply be shut off from the world of energy by sky-high prices.

Two years in the preparation, Global Witness's report, Heads in the Sand, accused governments of ignoring the fact that the world could soon start to run short of oil. This would lead to huge consequences in terms of price shocks and much higher levels of violence around the world than last year's food riots.

"There is a train crash about to happen from an energy point of view. But politicians everywhere seem to have entirely missed the scale of the problem," said the report's author, Simon Taylor.

"We are all addicted to oil but if you look at the mathematics of the problem, they simply don't add up in terms of future supply and demand."

The report went through the latest figures from the oil industry and the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which last year drastically reduced its estimate of the available oil.

The IEA figures showed there could be a gap of 7m barrels a day between supply and demand by 2015. That represents about 8% of the expected world demand by then of 91m barrels a day.

The IEA expects production from existing oilfields to fall by 50% between now and 2020 and warned the world needs to find an additional

64m barrels a day of capacity by 2030 =96 equivalent to six times current Saudi Arabian production.'

There was an ecoloonie on NPR the other day, analysing the carbon footprint of browsing the Internet. He's concerned that clicking on a site may move disk heads somewhere halfway around the world and cause some power station to make more CO2. He figured that intensive web browsing generates about 1.5x the CO2 of the person sitting there clicking his mouse and breathing.

Think of how much more CO2 that person would generate if they got up and walked around or (gasp) ran or (even worse) cooked dinner.

John

They tout all these low power consumption circuits, sleep mode etc., as though that's a drop in the bucket.

Maybe high efficiency is good for battery powered devices but if they think that'll save our fannies from peak oil they are bat crap crazy.

Bret Cahill

Peak oil seems to always be off in the future. Recent discoveries in recovering oil and gas from shale have hugely multiplied likely reserves. And new drilling keeps finding more oil.

Good; I just bought a 3.3 liter V6.

John

Actually it was a couple years ago.

One optimist called it "the long goodbye" but as it stands now we are looking at "a non Hollywood ending."

That'll be the end of the lower Colorado River.

The "proven reserves" are giving out much faster than expected wiping out anything from any new discoveries.

Better than a Hummer.

Bret Cahill

Actually, it seems to have been about a year ago (July 2008, 74.82MBD). Unless oil prices skyrocket, that may well turn out to be the all-time peak.

Er, no. If anything, those discoveries are below what has been assumed by previous long-term predictions.

"Peak oil" doesn't mean "no more oil". It means that production costs are on a permanent upward trend as you have to expend ever increasing effort for a given amount of oil.

Look forward to paying $10/gallon within the vehicle's lifetime.

There's never a gap between supply and demand. There's just a price.

John

Depends on if the current is limited by a resistor and/or cap or by a circuit breaker.

A free marketeer might want to avoid a fuse if it's at all possible. I'm considering such a on/off solution but I'm not really happy about it.

Bret Cahill