Oil and Gas - The Next Meltdown?

I like how many people here point to other countries
for sources of oil. Are we going to yet another war to compete with growing populations like China and India?

The electric economy is a fantasy. Its not going to happen. The natural resources to replace the automobile fleet does not exist. The natural resources to create enough batteries for us to keep on 'happy motoring' dose not exist. The natural resources to generate the electricity to charge the batteries dose not exist. Solar, wind? Gimmie a break! They will never contribute more than a drop in the bucket compared to oil energy.

I agree -- we're not going to replace the fossil fuels with electricity not at the scale we're using energy now. Only after we powerdown to a very significant extent.

I disagree. There is no shortage of renewable energy, the problem is that we really don't have an especially efficient way of capturing it. For example, imagine the potential of fusion for electricity generation. Matt Simmons is involved in a wind project which he envisions replacing home heating oil AND creating liquid ammonia, which he says can replace motor gasoline.

We both have named limitations for renewables right NOW: scaling them up to the level needed (since they are much less efficient than fossil fuels), capturing, storing, distributing, creating infrastructures for all of these, and modifying or building new equipment to use them. Thinkers like Michael Klare suggest that renewables can do what we need on a far more efficient usage scale, but we lack the investment, etc. in time to make a smooth transition.

I agree with you here. But we still need to work on it. Bad times are coming if we don't get a good replacement to the oil we are going to lose to peak oil.

Absolutely we need to keep working on it. But serious peak oil scholars like Richard Heinberg & Michael Klare don't see any way we can fully replace the energy-density of oil. Looks pretty clear we can't keep up these consumption levels...not just of oil, but many other resources. Ocean fisheries~ Fresh water~ Topsoil~

We have lots of free electricity, so long as it's at night. The generators take a long time to come up to speed and so if we charge our cars at night, we won't need to add capacity or upgrade the grid for decades. Obviously battery material and the diesel machines that mine it are a problem... Yes, soil depletion, fish depletion, copper... It goes on and on, and mining them is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. People don't understand how important FF really are.

We have quite a bit of excess electricity generation capacity at night. Electricity usage drops greatly at night but they can't lower the generation at night because it takes days to bring the generators up to speed. We could add millions of cars to the grid as long as it's at night. Cities are a huge problem for electric cars because so few people have a garage or even an available spot outside of their house. The batteries might be a problem. Simmons says we can use ammonia instead of gasoline

Matt is an optimistic realist. He sees a lot of challenges in the future of fossil fuels -- and as an Energy Investment Banker, he knows his stuff. He has done the research (and wrote Twilight in the Desert). But he's also working to create renewable alternatives, like a wind power project off the coast of Maine.