Debunking the debunker

I was taking a short break from Peak Oil by reading stuff people are putting up on the other side of the fence. One of the most popular has to be Peak Oil Debunked (peakoildebunked.blogspot.com) by JD. At the time of this writing, JD has some 309 breathtaking (read: long) articles. While I’m still going through some of JD’s claims, here’s a sample of the kind of rebuttal that he’s coming up with:

Consider GTL. Shell is investing $5 billion in a GTL facility in Qatar which will produce 140,000bbl/d of diesel when it is completed in 2011. A barrel of crude, on the average, is 20% diesel. So, in terms of diesel, the Shell GTL plant will be the equivalent of an ordinary crude source producing about 700,000bbl/d. That’s quite large — roughly the same as the oil production of an entire country like Egypt, Australia, India etc. For reference those countries have current oil reserves of about 4 Gb. So, from the standpoint of the diesel market, we could say that the Shell plant is the equivalent of the discovery of an oil field about 4Gb in size. Assuming the entire $20 billion of scheduled investment goes through, GTL in Qatar will be the equivalent of a 15Gb super-giant oil field discovery. That would definitely put a big out-of-trend spike on Cambell’s curve.

So, as you can see, a 140,000b/d diesel GTL setup is 1) inflated 5x too 700,000b/d of crude (which the plant will not produce), 2) compared without reference to the production rates of some countries, 3) pulled a fictitious relationship to some reserve number – 4Gb, 4) inflated the original investment by Shell by 400% and finally, derive a totally out-of-whacked 15Gb super-giant oil field comparison to the original GTL plant.

I think there’s a real use to PeakOilDebunked, and that is, the next time I come across an objection to Peak Oil, I’ll look it up there and if I find it, it’s a debunkable debunk.

 

PM Lee on Oil

I was watching Singapore’s National Day Rally Speech by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong yesterday evening where he mentioned oil as one of two examples (the other being terrorism) which will derail Singapore from its economic growth projections:

It’s because of the uncertainties in the Middle East, that is why today oil is $70+ a barrel, and in Singapore, electricity is expensive and bus fares have to go up. It’s not that there’s not enough oil, it’s the fear, the uncertainty, the risks that’s keeping the oil prices high and hurting us. But if something goes wrong in the Middle East, and there is a flare up, oil prices will not stay at $70, it may go to $120, it may double to $150. I think it will have a very big impact on us. It will have a big impact on the whole world, create a global recession. We have to be psychologically prepared for that.

The PM then mentioned how the government will help the poor pull through these difficult times. Next, he talked about how the economy will be affected:

But, as a economy as a whole, if this happens and there is a oil crisis, a oil shock, then we will have to work together and pull through. As we’ve pulled through after the Asian Crisis, as we’ve pulled through after 9-11. Working together, cutting costs, showing that we are different. And, making the adjustments we have to make, to make ourselves competitive again.

On the whole, I am very glad that the oil crisis has been singled out by our Prime Minister in his speech. It means the government has taken notice. Hopefully, we will see the following from our government:

• Establishing a terms of reference for oil crisis – what exactly is the kind of oil crisis that we are preparing for.
• Engaging energy consultants (e.g. Dr Samsam Bakhtiari, Dr Colin Campbell)
• Rollout a national educational campaign on the oil crisis
• Implement green/sustainability/relocalisation programmes
• Etc…

 

Australia on the move

The Australian Senate (Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee) recently published it’s hearing (transcript here) on Australia’s future oil supply and alternative transport fuels. Present to address the hearing is Dr Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, former senior advisor to the National Iranian Oil Company in Tehran. Here are some notable snippets:

The decline of global oil production seems now irreversible. It is bound to occur over a number of transitions, the first of which I have called transition 1, which has just begun in 2006. Transition 1 has a very benign gradient of decline, and it will take months before one notices it at all. But transition 2 will be far steeper, and each successive transition will show more pronounced declining gradients. My WOCAP model has predicted that over the next 14 years present global production of 81 million barrels per day will decrease by roughly 32 per cent, down to around 55 million barrels per day by the year 2020 … Preparation should be carried out on individual, familial, societal and national levels as soon as possible. Every preparative step taken today will prove far cheaper than any step taken tomorrow.

And a further note on LNG:

Fortunately, Australia has an enormous amount of gas, and I believe this is going to become very handy because the peak for gas will be between 100 and 105 TCF global production in
2008-09 … The price of LNG is going to go sky high because everybody will want LNG—in America, Mexico and Canada, which are in full decline; in all the South-East Asian countries and especially in China

And more on the volatility of LNG prices:

I can tell you that, with gas prices in the US being around $6 per barrel, you have LNG spot sales today of $12 per barrel—and we are in a normal situation. So, wait for the panic and you will have prices of $25 or $30 per barrel, and maybe much more than that. For one week in March this year the British did not have enough gas and the price of gas shot up to $258 per barrel oil equivalent. At first I thought I had made a mistake of one decimal place, but then I realised it was not $25.8—it was $258.

 

Apocalypse Now?

I guess I’m not the only one concerned that the Peak Oil message gets misunderstood as one propounded by an apocalyptic cult. Just this afternoon, an old friend lamented “how the world is coming to an end” after my sharing of Peak Oil with him.

I guess many of us (peakoilers) never got to the part of the sharing where the world becomes a better place to live in when humans start to work with nature rather than against it. Here are some points I want to make about the side most PO newbies tend to miss:

1. Peak Oil does not mean we run out of oil. It means we literally used up half the world’s endowment of oil and from thereon, production of oil will fall year on year, no matter how hard you try to get better at extracting oil.
2. Peak Oil does not kick us back to prehistoric lifestyles. We do have to live a lifestyle that is more sustainable. Living sustainably simply means we take less than we give back to nature. PO will also mean our economy has to be more localised, meaning your chicken might come from Lim Chu Kang instead of Brazil.
3. Peak Oil means you simply travel less using fossil-fuel driven modes of transport. With oil prices going nowhere but up, more drivers are going to trade in their cars and use public transport instead. And given that public transport rates aren’t staying put either, more will start looking for jobs within walking/cycling distances from their homes.
4. Peak Oil means there will be a comeback of agriculture. Today, Singapore imports >95% of its food from abroad. Higher oil prices mean these imports will cost more to ship. At the same time, because PO is a global phenomenon, net food exporters might be reconfiguring their own agriculture to be more self-sustainable. This means the price of food itself will rise too. At some point, it’s going to make sense again to grow our own food right here in Singapore.
5. Peak Oil means less waste. Remember how your mom always cringes at you when you throw stuff out? She didn’t live her life that long ago, right? In fact, she probably learn all that attitude during the last oil crisis in the late 1970s.

I hope this clears up some of the apocalyptical images (Mad Max) that you might have of a post-peak-oil world, always look on the brighter side of change because that’s where you’d find hope and strength to see through the change.

 

Dear Mr Deputy Prime Minister

In a recent National Day dinner event, our Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Wong Kan Seng, said that:

… the recent upsurge in the Middle East … can cause oil and energy prices to rise further, thereby affecting transport and electricity charges. But complaining and asking for subsidies is not the answer. Instead, Singapore must continue to grow the economy and earn more to defray rising costs. (source: ChannelNewsAsia.com)

While this could draw criticisms at so many levels, I just want to ask these questions:

• Could a power generation system less dependent on fossil fuels mitigate the electricity price increases?
• Would EMA postpone/cancel its plan to make Singapore households contestable customers, it’s original motivation being to liberalise the market is to give consumers’ access to more competitive rates?
• How is the man on the street going to understand how the Middle East crisis is different this time round because the world’s surplus of oil production has dropped from 10’s of millions of barrels to a measly 500,000 barrels a day now?

 

Screening Report

We held a screening of CommunitySolution.org’s “How Cuba Survived Peak Oil” yesterday 4 August 2006. A total of 6 people turned up and like typical Singaporeans, we were fashionably late but it’s good since the rest had some time to share with one another their personal Peak Oil experiences.

Well, to me, the most interesting part of the evening was the post-show discussion (this is not saying the film wasn’t good but since it was the fourth time I’ve seen it, I was more intrigued by how people was taken by it). It turned out most of our visitors have already been exposed to Peak Oil, usually via a friend’s email forward, but not doing anything about it.

It’s a very common phenomenon in Singapore, and it’s what Kevin Danaher (globalexchange.org) calls “powerlessness”. On this subject, I’d like to recommend that you listen to Kevin’s interview with the LifeBoat radio show here (get part 1, where talks about powerlessness). Personally, I was very inspired by Kevin’s speech and perhaps as a result, now thinks that I can effect changes in our government’s policies on energy and sustainable living in Singapore.

Back to powerlessness in Singapore. Not wanting to go into a discourse on our political system here, Singaporeans by-and-large has gotten used to having the government dish out solutions to their lives. Try and imagine a place where citizens’ involvement in policy-making started out as a government policy. As the years passed and with every successful policy, our people got, and rightfully so, comfortable with the idea that the government is omniscient and will always take care of them.

Against this background, I’d like to put across that the powerlessness Singaporeans feel about Peak Oil is rooted in 1) the ‘confidence’ that our government already knows about it and has some plans to address it, and 2) that if the government doesn’t have solution, and they’re so ’smart’, who else could have come up with a solution?

Well, personally, I don’t know if the government already knows about Peak Oil or that they already have a plan for it. This is something that we can find out together. I bet you’d want to know how Singapore can continue to run when oil hits $100, $150 or $200 a barrel.

I’ll leave you with this, it’s Yeats’ The Second Coming which I first came across last night in Oliver Stone’s Nixon:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I’m neither religious nor apocalyptical, but Yeats’ verses, written in 1920, somehow clinged on me for a while.

 

Government action in response to Peak Oil

First, in my favourite U.S. city,

On July 28th, at 2PM, the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission will be holding the first of several hearings on the issue of peak oil, at City Hall. The public is invited to attend as San Francisco—the first city in the country to pass a peak oil resolution—launches an effort to develop a plan of response. Indeed, citizen participation is critical, since the future of our city will be determined by our collective effort to face and respond to peak oil

Next, Portland City Council created a Peak Oil Task Force to develop recommendations on appropriate responses to Peak Oil. So far, they’ve produced some background material (94-page pdf).

 

Peak Oil getting airtime on Airways

This July’s issue of Airways featured a lead article on Peak Oil by Alex Kuhlman titled Peak Oil – and the Collapse of Commercial Aviation? – A sound, startling, and sobering analysis of the most pivotal challenge facing our modern industrial society, and the dire prognosis for air transport.

It’s a pity Airways is still traditional magazine with nary a decent website or online comments by readers.

 

Making Singapore ‘Cool’

I was doing my research on solar power installation companies when I chanced upon Yawning Bread’s May 2005 article. In the article, the author compares the state of temperature control in Singapore to “as if we didn’t have a municipal sewerage system, and each family tipped his waste into the street and common areas“. His solution then, is to construct huge, boxy structures cladded in thin-film solar cells which in turn generates the electricity that powers the airconditioning inside. The actual size of such a structure will cover an area of 15-20 hectares, “the size of Suntec City combined with the Conrad Hotel, the Millenia Walk, Millenia Tower.”

 

80% of American New Home Buyers Want Solar

From Treehugger.com:

… more Americans are choosing to buy green power when it’s available comes news that 80% of US residents would also like to see home builders offer solar power as an option for new houses, according to a survey by Japan’s Sharp Electric Company (the world’s largest producer of solar cells).

This trend is totally predictable due to increased awareness by Americans about their over-reliance on foreign oil to generate power and perhaps, even the increased frequency of blackouts all over the country.

My bet is that while the Solar Power option checkbox has yet to be printed in your new homes or HDB upgrade brochures, why don’t you chip in by filling up a similar survey for Singaporeans. If the results reflect the same trends, maybe local property developers might want to consider offering Solar Power options in their new developments.

Take me to the survey »