Eiiieee! As a proud Drake alum (2 degrees in music), I'm appalled. Generally, the faculty are wonderful teachers and OK researchers (It's a teaching institution).
But this article is gross hackery. And given the Ph.D. requirements to be a tenure track prof at Drake, I suspect MISTER Hossein-Zadeh is but a lowly adjunct, who might not be rehired if the econ department gets a whiff of this hackery.
I would be curious as to where he did/is doing his graduate work (MA/Ph.D.). Hackery can cost a scholar if they're trying to work with a well-established prof (ie their dissertation advisor/program mentor).
Here's some "peak oil theory":
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008...siness/
opec.php
and here's some more:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008...siness/
opec.php
If george bush is batshit-crazy enough to drop one JDAM on Iran, the results will be discussed in more important places than the Groves of Academia.
In fact, with oil at a new record today of $147 ppb, I would say that WITHOUT an attack on Iran, the "discussion" is already in process of moving to the venue of the voting booth.
Which is an excellent place for it.
:o)
Woops...here's the second one:
http://www.daily.pk/world/worldn...s-
airspace.html
Evan, every thing you stated was factualy correct, and intelectualy dishonest...yes by goign by strict definitions hwe was dead wrong on peak oil, the problem is those tryign to use peak oil as a hammer onyl go by strict definitions when it suits them....what Ismael seems to be addressign is the mass of doomsday the sky is fallign bullshit thrust on us under the umbreal of peak oil...yes ground oil may have reached its peak, but taht dsont' mean the end of life on earth, that dosnt' even mean the end of oil consumption....that is what hes talkign about...if we want to stick with strick peak oil defintuions fine...but then you dont' get to tie peak oil into the end of life as we know it....if you want to do the latter then I must be allowed to bring teh reasons why life wont end into teh equation. (alge, e Coli, turky bits, pig waste produced light crude. alternatve energy repalcing a portion of use, riseign efficancy lowering amount used.) the big argument v biomass was allways that it wasn't econamicly fesable to devlop...its $80 a barrle to turn turkys into oil, ~$50 to turn E.Coli Pee into oil, ~$90 for pig shit...I guess its fessable now huh.
moonglum, Peak Oil is about oil in the ground, not oil substitutes from other places. And the doomers are familiar with the apparent alternatives that various companies are developing -- they do not, however, believe that they can't scale or that they have terminal EROI or environmental issues. And if they are right, the backside of peak oil will kill industrial civilization dead.
The more optimistic peak oil believers, like me, believe that some combination of the alternatives under study will have acceptable EROI, scalability, and environmental impacts to replace oil, but that the fact that we've waited this long to start in ernest is going to make the transition very rough. With current levels of R&D funding, none of the alternatives you listed is closer than a decade from deployment on a scale that will move the energy markets, and much farther out before they have a prayer of replacing the majority of the approximately 27 million barrels of oil the US uses every day. Manhattan Project funding levels could pull that in, and we might just get that, but it is going to hurt like hell.
Evan, the objection to tar sands as a significant contributor to world oil supplies goes much deeper. Processing of tar sands uses enormous amounts of both natural gas, which is nearing its own peak, and potable water. Both of those resources contrain the growth of tar sands oil flow to less than double the current production, and natural gas is nearing it's own peak. And that completely ignores the huge environmental costs of extracting it.
It is funny how people refuse to believe in peak oil. One can argue about whether world production will peak in 2 years, 10 years, 100 years, but it must peak. There is by definition a finite amount of oil. A large amount, but finite. Demand is increasing, geometrically (exponentially). Even a low demand growth of 2%/year means a doubling of demand every 35 years. Can't continue for ever.
Thanks, Evan, for making the GNB more relevant. Whether or not Peak Oil theory is correct or not, and whether or not the Zadeh refutation is valid, oil and gasoline prices indicate that we are in very big trouble right now, and many other economic indicators that can now be read about, today and every day, on the front pages of the major news outlets, show that a serious collapse of the previous 60 year expansion is underway.
I realize that GNB is not primarily an economics blog and I get that elsewhere. BUT, It's The Economy, Stupid. As great a disaster and crime as Iraq is, the current state of the US economic decline is a greater disaster and crime, perpetrated by many of the same bumbling pols and government financial bozos. Quickly, the November elections are going to become strictly about desperate financial straights and nothing else.
Whoever is elected will be in charge of keeping everyone calm and managing a phenomenally vast collapse.
I wouldn't want the job at any salary.
cwt peak ground oil will happen...but it wil nt oend civilazation as we know it..hell it wont even end oil use. You can go live in a cave if you want to. but your wet dream of all of us going back to caves isn't goign to happen.
Mr. Hossein-Zadeh wasn't criticising peak oil in its strict definition, he was criticising the doom and gloomists who ahve expanede the end of ground oil into some post apocaliptic fantisy world where we all get to paly mad max. I find the switchign back and forth between definitions dishonest...don't criticise him for fairly attackign the expanded definition by switchign the term around Peirce tried to pull the same bullshit on me...if "peak" is purly about pullign oil from the ground then lets discuess that....expanding and contracting the discuession to fit your needs, to "win" your argument may make you feel good, but it is ratehr dishonest.
Moonglum, I don't know where the anger comes from, I wasn't actually addressing my comment at you. I do not desire to live in a cave, nor do I expect that that is where the world is heading. More like a return to the 1930s, but with cell-phones and internet.
Counterpunch and its editor-in-chief Cockburn really do represent that segment of the Left that remains stubbornly stuck in the 1930's mentality of the "Old Left". As another example, Cockburn is a global-warming denier.
thank you evan. one of the folks i read on a regular basis is james howard kunstler. he's been a clarion voice on peak oil, and has written a fine book on the subject The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. it's one of the few works i've read that takes a look at all the impacts. over and over kunstler reminds us that there is simply a lot about it that we don't know. he's pretty merciless about those who have a blind faith in the wonderfullness of technology coming down like the sugarplum fairy to save our happy motoring lives. he stresses instead that investments in the infrastructure of the rail system should be a prime focus.
the thing is that nobody really knows. that's why research and study are so vitally important. everybody needs to be fact checked ruthlessly.
thanks for this one.
*sigh*
The preferred spelling of element #16 is "sulfur", or, if you must, "sulphur".
No "e"s, please.
Failure to believe in peak oil requires magical thinking. It requires one to either believe that a) oil supplies are (effectively) infinite or b) oil is being replaced by geological processes at a rate equal to or greater than the rate at which it is being used. While one may dispute the timing of the peak, all available evidence points to the peak being either at hand or coming in the very near future -- the price jump is evidence that oil markets are finally picking up on that. The peak oil deniers have resorted to risible lies to cover up that evidence, of which the Hossein-Zadah piece contains a great number -- even more than Evan pointed out. Anyone who thinks of the Alberta tar sands as capable of supporting our crude oil habit is either a) a liar, b) so grievously misinformed that their opinions on the subject are worthless, or c) too fucking stupid to have an opinion worth considering.
Technological civilization as we have known it is a creature of relatively cheap energy, and most of that cheap energy has come from oil. That much is a plain fact, and the end of cheap oil, which is what peak oil represents, is a crushing blow to that civilization. None of the alternatives under current consideration are ready to scale to anything like the production level required. And it's also not clear that any of them have an EROI capable of supporting industrial civilization.
moonglum: those costs of production you quoted are meaningless, and you ought to know it. They are predicated on an economy that primarily runs on oil. The figure of merit that matters is EROI, not nominal cost of production per barrel.
grrr, Haloscan ate my last comment
moonglum, those costs of production you quote are meaningless in this context, because they implicitly assume an oil-based energy economy. The number that counts is EROI.
Gah, I hate haloscan.
And one more thing that I missed the first time through:
Reserve numbers from OPEC members such as Venezuela, are, without notable exception, utterly fraudulent. They are not auditted in any way, and the OPEC quota allocation system gives all players significant incentive to inflate the numbers. So, whaddya know, they do.
Interesting stuff. Thanks.
Thanks for the spelling catch, Mfti.
Pierce Nichols a number of the methods (alge, e coli/yeast) look have EROI near or better then ground oil...infact the E Coli./yeast method is cabon negative as well...and that tech scales easily...sure we will fell some pain, hell our ecoanmy is headign towards a depresion regardless...but 5-10 years we walk out even better...some other source of energy may be primary but oil will never go away.
moonglum: No-one has any idea whether the technology will scale well, because no-one has done it. And the required scaling is so utterly massive that it's very difficult to predict with confidence how it will turn out ahead of time. The current published claims about EROI come entirely from those working on and promoting the technology; there hasn't been any published independent audit of their numbers. In the real world, accurate determinations of EROI are both difficult and EROI numbers are vulnerable to gross manipulation; absent good independent verification, I am not prepared to trust those numbers.
I think there's a fair chance it will work, but nattering on about how it's going to solve our problems with energy supplies in a decade is irresponsible at best.
And one more thing -- the Olduvai Gorge crowd are a very small subset of the peak oil community. Evan isn't being even slightly disingenous by excluding them from the discussion.
I have the solution: ABIOTIC OIL!!!
We can has oil 4-evr!
ceabaird: even if the abiotic oil thing is true, it's only tangentially relevant to peak oil theory. It turns out that *ANY* resource that is being used faster than it's being regenerated will experience a Hubbert peak. That includes ones that under different usage scenarios are renewable, including lumber, top soil, and the like.
An interesting related matter to reflect on is the rate at which new crude oil is being generated in the crust. It is extraordinarily unlikely to be zero; major geological processes very rarely stop completely. It could be very low -- algae, which the current consensus hold are the original fossil origin of oil, have been around for a couple of billion years.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh attacks Peak Oil by attacking worries about its consequences, none of which have anything to do with whether Peak Oil is true.
Public: Oh noes! The sun's going dim! We'll freeze!
IHZ: There are plenty of other ways to keep warm. Therefore, the sun is not going dim.
Public: W00t! We're saved!
Is there a name for this particular type of bad-faith logical fallacy?
bjacques: I believe that it's a beautiful example of a strawman.
You're welcome. 
I wonder where we'd be now if we'd continued the energy-conservation and new-source initiatives begun in the Carter Administration.
Of course, conservation is for wimps. Real manly men murder brown people and steal their petroleum. [snark]
Pierce Nichols gotta call BS on the no one knowing if yeast/ecoli will scale...I am right now useing that method to take 5 gallons of mash into 5 gallons of beer...budwiser dose this on a massive scale....we have allready scaled up this tech, it works very well and we ave been doing it for thousands of years.
bjacques: I disagree I see the conversation along these lines
1: "PEAK OIL, worlds going to end cause of all these bad things that come with it."
2: "the worlds not going to end, you see all of these factors mitigate the end of ground oil and make it irrelivant"
1: "no fair, we are talking about PEAK OIL, unless you show that ground oil wont end, the world is over, you dont get to mention anything but ground oil"
the argument changes to fit the neeeds of the chicken little...
moonglum: Different process entirely, actually, unless you are thinking of straight ethanol... and then the rest of us can giggle at you behind our hands. The best ethanol system in the world, Brazil's sugarcane-base system, has a claimed EROI of 8... and a good case can be made that that claim is high by a factor of at least two. In any case, it's too low to support industrial civilization even if you take it at face value... and sugarcane is restricted to the tropics and subtropics and needs a hell of a lot of water to grow.
There is no silver-bullet. Get used to it.
And one more thing, that applies to most sorts of industrial biotech: the technically and energetically hard part of the process generally isn't growing the bugs -- it's separating the product from the growth medium that is usually difficult and energy intensive. Consider ethanol -- fermentation stops at an ethanol concentration of ~15%; in order to separate it out from the aqueous growth solution requires evaporating approximately 5.7 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol extracted.
Pierce Nichols yuo are behind the tiems a bit...GM ecoli, takes mash turns it into light crude + water...jsut have to seperate out the water...jsut liek makeing whiskey...the tech scales we have scaled it for years.
moonglum: Actually, I am familiar with it -- I'm just heartily suspicious of claims about efficiency and scalability of technology whose baseline lab-level functionality hasn't even been independently verified yet. And repeat after me: There are no silver bullets. Anyone claiming to have one is either lying or delusional.
Pierce: the scalability and efficncy are allready proven...the only question left is if they actualy have the bugs made that produce the proper type of usefull waste.
moonglum: You have no certain knowledge about the scalability and large-scale efficiency until you have tried it with the particular microorganism(s) strain(s) and the particular product you are trying to separate. Many microorganisms are persnickety about their growth environment -- conventional lab culture techniques are capable of growing approximately 1% of all microorganisms that can be detected through genetic techniques; industrial culture techniques are substantially less effective.
And processes that are easy on the lab bench can be shockingly difficult to scale. There are many possible reasons for this, but they generally fall into limits imposed by time, the square-cube law, or what are, relatively speaking, small inputs that become significant on industrial scales.
And then there's the matter of the required feedstock -- what it's made of, what the opportunity cost of producing it is, and whether your bugs are vigorous enough under production conditions to overwhelm any intruders.
One reasonable example, and on point, is the production of acetone and butanol through the ABE (acetone-butanol-ethanol) process. This process uses a microorganism, known as the Weizmann organism (after its discoverer, Chaim Weizmann) to make the named products from starchy or cellulosic feedstock. It's really quite easy to perform on the bench, and once upon a time was the dominant method of producing acetone and butanol. However, it doesn't scale particularly well, and has, in the past fifty years, fallen out of industrial use because it can't beat straight petrochemical synthesis of acetone or butanol on cost. The organism is relatively slow growing under production conditions, doesn't tolerate competition from interlopers well, and experiences product inhibition at such low concentrations that substantial energy is required in order to separate the products from the broth.
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