End of fossil fuels

Its instructive to view posts on this site from around 2006 etc.

Talk was all about peak oil etc but then new sources of fuel like oil sands , Fracking etc have caused an oversupply, and have a bigger real effect than short term currency moves.

Back then several thought I was wrong to by the powerful petrol 4800 patrol because by now fuel cost would have made it untenable to run.

Today petrol hear is 98.9 - I won't say what the diesel price is !

Reality is that the effective fuel price has dropped and remained down for years.

Same is happening with global warming etcc - many put it down but underlying trend is very real and getting worse.

You have to feel sorry for movie makers though - all those story plots about the bad CIA controlling the Arabs and doing bad things to protect oil supply are looking weak now that USA is a net exporter.

The question goes to the heart of the “peak oil theory” and I’ll leave people to ponder on that – and good luck with that! If you are sitting around a warm camp-fire discussing it the fire will go out before you are likely to get any agreement, either on the theory or when (if ever) it will occur.

My suggestion, buy the car....it will most likely be a rust bucket before you run out of something to power it with...

Cheers, Baz – The Landy

Ron,

I’m not sure how old you are however I heard all this 45 years ago and you could hardly give away a V8. I was at school at the time and didn’t think I’d ever get to drive a petrol car! Seems that there is still plenty around and it interesting who has a big part in the solar industry, BP!
Does anyone remember the Sarich orbital engine? Was bought by the big companies and then shelved. A good documentary to watch is “who killed the electric car”.
I also heard about a German man driving around in a hydrogen car in the 30’s so I am sure the big companies have the technology ready to go as soon as its needed, they’ll just use up the resources we have first.
(I was also told by the turn of the century, 2000, that we won’t get snow in Australia, but I’ll leave that subject alone!)

Cheers Tony

Peak Oil is only one of a constant stream of doom and gloomers .
The first of note was Malthus who in 1803 forecast that the World would run out of food.
Then we had the "Club of Rome"
"Published in 1972 and presented for the first time at the International Students' Committee (ISC) annual Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil." Wikipedia
Oh I forgot then there was "The next Ice Age" by some of the same scientists who are now touting Climate Change.
Then was Y2K.
Then it was "Peak Oil"
Now it is "Climate Change"
It seems that there are a group of humans who cannot abide to be happy. They must wear hair shirts and flay themselves repeatedly in a religious fervor.
The facts that we have not run out of water, and the sea is not rising any faster than 100 years ago seem to be lost on them.
Regards Philip A

Yeh I'm old enough to remember the peak oil paranoya of the 70s an the button car plan of the 80s.
I have some friends that are convinced that they won,t buy another combustion engined car.
Na ..... there is plenty of oil still in the ground, then the coal, not too hard to make fuel from coal.
If there was real effort there are many sources of alternative fuel that would work with the current engine technolgy.
Meantim the fuel prices stay down.
Cheers

Ron
When I was doing my tech course for my trade (motor mechanic) back in the early 1960's I was asked why I chose that trade as there was only enough oil in the world to supply the motor industry for a maximum of 10 to 12 years, and cars would then become extinct. How wrong they were they then.

Last I heard was that there is enough oil reserves for at least the next 20 to 30 years, and they are still finding more. Australia has massive oil reserves under the desert areas, but it is not suitable for the heavy shipping/lubricating/tar etc that the middle eastern oil can produce. As it comes out of the ground it can be used as diesel fuel.

Your next vehicle will be well and truly worn out before we run out of fuel to power it.

Regards
Athol

Fuel from air is technically possible.

Fuel from air.

Some interesting graphs here> http://crudeoilpeak.info/australian-graphs

From memory we have plenty of gas but little petroleum.
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http://www.appea.com.au/media_release/new-oil-province-could-enhance-australias-energy-security/

New oil province could enhance Australia’s energy security

28 April 2016

The development of a new oil province in the Great Australian Bight would deliver significant long-term economic benefits for Australia and South Australia.

APPEA South Australia – Northern Territory Director Matthew Doman said hearings of the Senate Environment and Communications References Committee ‘Inquiry into oil or gas production in the Great Australian Bight’ in Adelaide today were an opportunity to answer questions and address concerns about the industry’s activities.

Mr Doman said the economic case for the safe and sustainable development of a new oil province was clear.

He said finding a major new oil source would help address Australia’s widening trade deficit in a vital commodity.

“About 80 per cent of the oil we use in Australia is imported, costing us around $34 billion a year,” he said.

“Local production has been falling steadily. Australia has less than 10 years of proven domestic crude oil reserves left.

“The Great Australian Bight could be the new oil province that boosts our energy security for decades to come.”

Mr Doman said the oil and gas industry was one of Australia’s highest value-add industries, generating highly-skilled, and high-wage jobs.

“Besides the thousands of people directly employed in upstream exploration and production, the industry employs many more people, directly and indirectly, in downstream processing, engineering and other services,” he said.

Mr Doman said Australia’s regulatory regime had been transformed in the last five years to be truly world class. Its strengths included:

A single, independent regulator with deep expertise in the offshore environment;
An unambiguous focus on rigorous risk assessment, free from political or other influences;
A very conservative approach which requires risks to be reduced to as low as reasonably practicable; and
An objectives-based approach which is more flexible than prescriptive regulation and promotes continuous improvement.
Mr Doman said that if current plans were approved, the industry would spend more than $1 billion on near-term exploration work.

“With proper regulatory oversight, there is no reason a safe, sustainable offshore petroleum industry should not be possible for South Australia, and that residents of the state should not benefit from the investment that will be made and jobs created,” Mr Doman said.

“The industry’s record of safe, sustainable operations offshore in neighbouring Victoria show that similar development could occur in the bight with minimal risk to the environment.”

APPEA’s submission to the Senate Inquiry can be found here.

With the addition of U.S. fracking of shale reserves, and the Canadian tar oil sands reserves, world oil reserves are now calculated to be large enough to last more than 50 years, at current levels of consumption.

The problem is, scientists can only guess at the known reserves, because there is no deadly accurate way of measuring them - they can only make an astute guess.

There is also conjecture that the known oil reserves are being replenished from even deeper in the Earths crust - far deeper than any drilling has ever gone.
In terms of depth of drilling, the deepest oil wells are nothing more than the equivalent of a pin-prick in the crust of the Earth.

What will govern our oil usage is new technology and new scientific developments, in the next few years to come.
It is highly likely that fossil fuels will only make up 15-20% of our energy sources in 20-25 years time.
In the next 15-20 years there will likely be big improvements in batteries and solar power generation, that will relegate fossil fuels to 2nd or 3rd choice, as an energy source.

By 2035, you will most likely be able to buy an electric car that will have the equivalent range of a petrol or diesel car, and be able to be recharged in an hour.

Cheers, Ron.

I'd love an affordable electric 4w4. A motor on every wheel and 300-400km range...park and charge by solar for a few days and move on. Bring it on.

Wow, didnt expect so many replies.... not been on here in a looong time.
And the replies opened by an old friend, Good day to you Robin!

wasnt my intention to open a can of worms, but some great info turned up out of it.

Thanks to you all.

I'm old enough to remember all the previous scares etc, but just there had been some recent recovering of it.
I'm traditionally a diesel bloke, this next vehicle will be a new one and my last one, novated leased before retirement, it had crossed my mind that if reserves ran out or low we can make ethanol, and I drive work holdens that have "85% ethanol max" on fuel cap.
This opened the debate in my mind as which to go, I have 300k on my diesel navara, but still bit unsure ...still I have a year or so to decide.

The company that perfected the industrial diesel - Caterpillar - in 1931 - now have diesel/electric hybrid machines.

When Cat produced the first successful diesel tractor engine, diesel was actually an unknown product and no refinery standard had even been produced for it.
Diesel fuel, up to 1930, was merely the leftovers from refining the lighter fractions of crude, and it varied enormously in quality and grade.
The ASTM D975 standard had to be instituted (during 1931) to ensure a reasonable standard for diesel fuel.

The first diesel/electric drive bulldozer (the D7E) was produced by Cat in 2009, and is regarded as a commercial success.

The Cat D7E

The D7E will not be the last Cat to incorporate electrics into its drivetrain, there will be a lot more electric Cats in the future.
In the early 2000's, Cat invested a lot of money into the advanced development of batteries, in a joint venture with a company called Firefly.
Cat's aim was primarily to develop new improved batteries that only used commonly-available basic elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, silicon, etc.

Their aim was to ensure that they could not be held hostage in their advanced battery production by countries/miners/dictators who controlled the worlds output and reserves of rare-earth minerals and compounds.

The Firefly JV was dissolved, and regarded as a failure, as regards Cat's aim - as it failed to produce a substantially superior battery using only simple elements.
Rare earths and exotic minerals are still used in superior battery construction - however, that may still change.

The areas producing these rare earths and exotic minerals have been found to be more widespread than initially thought.
Cat's concern was that China would hold all the aces as regards the sources of the raw materials for superior batteries.
However, that is no longer the case, the raw materials are readily available in numerous other countries.

The reason the Firefly JV failed was perhaps an aim that was too high - and also because Cat only threw $20-30M into the JV.
It seems that it will take a lot more money, and a lot more research by combined groups, in places such as universities and large companies, where big research teams and sizeable sums of money are available.

Tesla is likely to be the company that will make a major battery breakthrough, because of the massive amounts of money it has available, and the size of the teams it can put together.

Firefly learnt quite a bit from its research with Cat and are now producing the advanced Carbon-Foam battery.
However, Firefly only make one version of its battery - the N70 sized, 12V G31. It's claimed that the G31 has up to 5 times the life of a common lead-acid battery.

The major disadvantages of the Firefly G31 are - it weighs 33kgs - and it retails at US$486.
Thus, Firefly have achieved nothing as regards weight reduction, and cost reduction - the two current "bugbears" of lead acid batteries.

For a major battery advance, for automotive use, there needs to be a massive weight reduction, a major improvement in output, and a vastly improved ability for rapid recharge - along with modest and affordable purchase cost.
I personally feel that super-capacitors will play a big part in any further battery and electric power development - and to that end, the CSIRO-developed super-capacitor battery has great potential.

The CSIRO-developed UltraBattery

The super-capacitors are the needed requirement for major surges in power demands, as happens with rapid acceleration of a vehicle.

The power required to roll along steadily, even at highway speeds, is not huge, and the IC engine wastes a lot of energy running at high RPM at highway speeds, with only a portion of the power being produced at highway speeds, actually being used to drive the vehicle along.
This is the forte of the electric motor, it only produces the power needed as required, and energy losses are extremely low.

Cheers, Ron.

I'm biased towards economy. I hate paying for fuel.
Many here know of my van build late last year, a van with shower and toilet, 2 single beds, awning etc weighing tare 450 kg. Towed with our Hyundai i30 diesel around most of the lap of the Oz coast, 18500 km for less than $1900 in fuel. It worked out at 9.3 L/100km...and 5.3L/100km when not towing..
Yes our van was a bit small in all honesty at 3.3 metres and 1.8 m wide. We are selling it now and will build one 4.3m long by 2.0 m wide. This will be, to us, luxurious. Tare about 700kg with brakes. The i30 can tow about 1300 kg braked.
So, you want to pay less for fuel? Get the MIG welder out (or buy a smaller lighter van)and buy a small diesel.
Tony

When I was at school in the 1960s it was said fuel would run out around the year 2000. They were wrong then as well, lol

The stone age did not end because we ran out of stone.

regards
A