On Sunday, October 24, 2004, at 12:02 PM, John Foster wrote:
Unless the primary energy to create hydrogen comes from geothermal energy.
Iceland is phasing out completely all their diesel buses. They are
installing hydrogen cells. The source of the energy to do this is more than
abundan in Iceland, geothermal.
Geothermal energy would be awesome, especially on the scale of Iceland but it is limited elsewhere. There is talk of drilling into the mantle and pumping artesian water to generate steam which is fine by me but it's an untested proposal. The energy return on energy invested with crop ethanols is apparently negative or possibly break even but you can't eat ethanol. For it to become anything other than a niche player in energy you'd have to convert vast tracts of agricultural land to its production. Likewise solar and wind are niche energy sources. The alternatives to oil, gas and coal apparently don't come close to the cheap abundance we've enjoyed with hydrocarbons.
It looks like the only viable alternative to belching gigantic amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is nuclear power, and various environmentalists led by Lovelock in Britain are calling for this now as we may be fast approaching the 'tipping point' in atmospheric CO2 levels leading to runaway global warming. We'll have to divert large portions of our national wealth towards this transition and become extremely frugal in our use of electricity if a hydrogen economy is going to get started. It will also have to be an internationally coordinated transition as China amongst many others is looking to develop its vast coal reserves for electricity generation which would most probably result in a greenhouse disaster.
You mentioned Canada's Alberta tar sands, another huge environmental disaster and an indication of how tight oil supply is globally when non-conventional tar based oil becomes profitable on such a large scale. Apparently Canada also supplies about 15% of US natural gas, but that already represents 50% of Canadian production and your gas fields are declining. As light sweet crude oil extraction starts declining, and it seems to have reached its peak this year, our monolithic global economy will move towards dirtier and more expensive oil found in smaller and smaller fields in ecologically and/or politically difficult regions, as well as towards more natural gas much of which is already in decline around the world, and the disaster of increased coal burning.
I personally think peak oil can't come soon enough as we need to move on from the age of oil to something else as soon as possible. Unfortunately peak oil also means the collapse of the developed world's national wealth as its economies go into decline and its militaries and industry are given over to war in order to secure the energy they need to keep 'business as usual' going for as long as possible. We seem to be heading for a gigantic train wreck, the crash of modern industrial civilisation, and the world's sole super power is leading the charge with neoconservative extremists preaching the benefits of sustained, global total war.
The juggernaut we call modernity seems to have a life of its own, its momentum is driving the US towards a suicidal war and the rest of us are being dragged along for the ride. For the US to just stop and turn their economy around to a non-war non-oil base would mean the collapse of the US dollar and their suburban way of life. What political leader is going to gain power on the promise they will bankrupt their society in order to lead the world by example towards a radically different and more frugal way of life? Geopolitics is already dragging us into open conflict and the energy disaster will happen anyway but it seems deliberately uninformed voters will vote to maintain their own delusional consensus reality at all costs.
The empty political promise of salvation, as in Hitler's time, is leading us all into a nightmare of self-delusion, lies, murder and our own accelerated destruction on a planetary scale. For me, this energy problem is very much a problem concerning the essence of technology. There are no political leaders capable of responding to it as they are all subjected to the play of global power in the relations between nations and their constituencies. Just as Heidegger predicted, fascism, communism and democracy are all technologically subjugated to the same will to order.
Cheers,
Malcolm
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