Re: SC33

http://www.raisethehammer.org/blog.asp?id=438

Energy Instability Ahead

..........Petroleum: Global daily production will reach an all-time peak (if it hasn't already - for the past two years it's been stalled around 84 million barrels a day) and enter a permanent decline. Ironically, high-tech efforts to increase yields in mature oilfields actually result in steeper production declines once they pass the peak.

Natural Gas: It has already peaked in North America (and the global peak is not as far off as you'd like), and only our past two unseasonably warm winters have obscured just how precarious this fuel is.

It heats buildings, generates electricity, and extracts petroleum from the Alberta Tar Sands. The first two uses cannot respond flexibly to supply constraints or price hikes, at least in the short term, and the third use is responsible for the only growth area in Canadian petroleum production. The alternative, building a nuclear power plant to heat the water used to tease oil out of the tar sands, is more than a decade away and comes with its own problems (see next bullet).

Uranium: Plagued by safety issues across its entire lifecycle, from mining and extraction through refining and fission to waste storage, nuclear power would be more trouble than it's worth even if it wasn't also doomed to run out.

In fact, when you add up the total cost of producing it, including the vast government subsidies and exceptions, the huge technical overhead, and so on, nuclear power may actually consume more energy than it produces. It's like owning a horse so you can thresh hay so you can feed your horse - only radioactive.

Coal: It's true that coal is highly abundant and could meet many of our energy needs. However, coal is extremely dirty, producing radioactive dust, soot, carbon dioxide through its production cycle. More coal power will be terrible for air quality but devastating for climate change, more than cancelling the meager improvements promised under the Kyoto Accord. A hundred coal-fired power plants are in development in the United States alone; China and India each plan hundreds more.

Some combination of new technologies may be able to produce cleaner coal-fired power, but at the expense of lower net energy output (this is why the Bush Administration exempted coal-fired power generators from adding emission controls when they upgrade). In any case, it will be interesting to see how the public's demand for power collides with the visibly escalating reality of climate change and air pollution over the next few decades.

Biofuel: It's basically a non-starter for any mass deployment. Biofuels produce a marginal net energy return at best, and early production is already threatening forests and competing with food production. In any case, we currently consume over 400 times as much energy as the planet's biosphere produces each year, so even if we comandeered 100 percent of the earth's plants to biofuels production, we would end up with less than one four hundredth of what we currently get out of fossil fuels..............