NN said:
The largest Oil Shale deposits:
1. Morocco - 12.3 billion metric tons
2. Thailand - 18.7 billion metric tons
3. Sweden - 50 billion metric tons
4. Israel - 15.4 billion metric tons
5. Jordan - 40 billion metric tons
6. United States - 3.3 trillion metric tons
(A total of 2.6 trillion barrels worldwide are extractable)
So far, no one has found an economic (or, for that matter, workable) process by which to extract oil from oil shale. Shell was planning to try it in Colorado, but it appears they've recently pulled out. The moment someone actually produces, say, a million barrels of oil per day from a shale deposit, I'll be a believer. But until then, if you look into what it actually takes to process shale keragen into oil, it doesn't look like it will ever be feasible on a large scale.
NN said:
The largest Oil Sand deposits:
1. Canada - 175 billion barrels
2. United States - 32 billion barrels
3. Venezuela - 236 billion barrels
Canada is producing about a million barrels per day right now. The US and Venezuela are not producing oil sands in any appreciable qty currently.
Canada expects to get to 10 million barrels per day, as a maximum, by 2025.
However, given that the process of mining the tar sands uses natural gas, and natural gas has already peaked in North America, I doubt we'll be getting much more from tar sands.
NN said:
1. Bolivia
2. Brazil
3. Algeria
4. Angola
5. Chad
6. Nigeria
7. Iran
8. Iraq
9. Kuwait
10. UAE
11. Azerbaijan
12. Kazakhstan
13. Russia
Bolivia, Brazil, Angola, Chad, Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan are not, even put together, enough to make a drop in the bucket. The stories you hear about the Caspian sea region nations being able to increase production are often misleading. Caspian basin oil is very high in sulfur, and there are few refineries capable of processing it. Anyway, it turns out that there's probably no more than around 50 billion barrels in the region, so it's not the gold mine Reagan and his buddies thought it would be.
As for the others:
Iran--no one actually knows if they can increase output. They say they can, but so far have not done so. Most of the news coming out of the Iranian oil sector is really quite pessimistic. See:
Report: Iran oil profits could dry up by 2015 - CNN.com
Now, this is an interesting case of scotoma. The price of oil in Dubai is within a few cents of the London and NYMEX prices. So if their revenues are dropping, it means either their exports are dropping or the costs of extraction are rising. Either way, it suggests that Iranian oil production is in decline.
Iraq--could potentially be the big one (that's why we're over there). But we don't know for sure--there's supposed to be a lot of undiscovered oil in Iraq, but of course, since it is undiscovered, no one knows where or whether it really exists. We will see; but either way, I seriously doubt they're going to be increasing production by more than a million barrels per day, even at the outside.
Kuwait--no way are they going to increase production. One of the big underreported stories of 2005-2006 was the state of the Kuwaiti oil industry. Two things are huge red flags:
1) It came out in late 2005 that their reserves may really be about half what they've been saying their reserves were. See:
Photo Slideshow | Reuters.com
This is interesting for reasons that go well beyond Kuwait's borders. In the mid 1980's, OPEC changed it's quota rules for member nations so that the amount of oil they were allowed to pump depended on their stated reserves. Within a year, all the OPEC nations but one had increased their stated reserves by huge amounts. But there wasn't any reason for it as far as most non-OPEC geologists could tell. There hadn't been a lot of new exploration or anything. So the suspicion was that those barrels were fake. This story lends some credence to that position.
2) Burgan is in decline. See:
The Oil Drum | The Top Twenty Fields: Are They in Decline?
Burgan is the second largest field in the world in terms of reserves, third largest (at its peak) in terms of production. The Kuwaitis have no fields remotely like Burgan. They don't have any way to make up the shortfall.
UAE--pumping full out last I heard.
Russia--maybe, maybe not. You have to be careful when reading stories about Russia being able to increase production. A lot of Russian scientists at one time had some pretty weird ideas about where oil comes from. A few of them are still around and they still get funding. None of their projects ever work out, but it still might be feasible for them to increase production somewhat.
This is not important, however, as Putin has stated that he will be progressively removing Russian oil from the worldwide market, in order to keep more for Russia.
NN said:
Again, it's not as if there isn't enough oil to build the reactors. In anycase, it's a matter of priorities. The United States has one of the lowest fuel efficiency requirements in the world. We could start by making our nation more fuel efficient.
I absolutely agree. The question, though, is whether it's likely we will do that. I think it's very unlikely, and the time to make changes is almost up. At a certain point, there will not be enough oil to keep everyone fed and build reactors, and then we will be making some very hard choices indeed.
NN said:
The Journal Of Fusion Energy estimated in 2005 that there are enough land based Lithium deposits to last us between 300-500 years so I don't see the problelm.
2 points:
1) It might last that long
at present rates of consumption. If we're going to be replacing our fleet of automobiles with the electric cars you've suggested, consumption will increase many-fold. Those 3 to 5 centuries might become 3 to 5 years.
2) This really isn't the point, though. Production of any mineral resource follows a curve--and there's a maximum amount that can be produced per unit of time, and a maximum amount that can be produced for any given period of time. I posted numbers to show that production is never likely to exceed 100,000 tons per annum, while we would need
at an absolute bare minimum six million tons per annum, and demand would be perhaps 60 million tons per annum. So I think it's very unlikely we'll be driving cars that run on lithium ion batteries, unless the amount of lithium needed is substantially reduced.
Now, I did take a SWAG at the amount of lithium in one of the battery packs. IIRC, it was 25% of 990 pounds. We can test whether I'm being reasonable by looking at it another way--let's assume that the figures I posted are pessimistic about production rates by a factor of 3--that, indeed, production will be able to get to 300,000 tons per year. What percent of the total weight of the battery pack would need to be lithium to make that production level enough?
So, 500 million cars on the road. Let's assume that we can get by with one tenth that total--50 million cars (in fact, we couldn't without causing a die-off, but I'm trying to be particularly generous).
So, 300,000 tons spread over 50 million cars is 12 pounds of lithium per car. For a battery that weighs 990 pounds, that's just slightly more than 1% of the total weight in lithium. Plausible? I really don't think so.
And if we go with the actual likely figures (let's say we can get by with half the cars and production could rise to 150,000 tons per year), that's
150,000 tons spread over 250 million cars--that's one tenth of a percent of the weight being lithium. Completely implausible.
NN said:
No one ever said that the switch would be easy but the doom and gloom scenario you and certain scientists are painting is simply unrealistic.
No, I'm being entirely reasonable. Societies have collapsed in the past, with calamitous consequences. It's arrogant to believe that ours is any different, and is likely to escape that pattern. It just might, but it's not unrealistic to believe that it won't.
NN said:
Yeah if you're going to do it at the last minute.
You see anyone rushing to change infrastructure and build a bunch of nuclear reactors?