Gar Lipow wrote: > Hi Jim. Since I don't have time to read it at the moment, does he get > into the issue of net energy?
no > Because one argument is that while oil > has may not peak soon, cheap oil has peaked or will peak soon. > ... Another question is whether > capital costs are higher for unconventional means. Again, not a > critique of the article. He (Leonardo Maugeri, from an Italian oil company) thinks that the era of cheap energy is over, but he also sees it as possible that oil prices can be too low, encouraging waste, just as they can be too high, encouraging such things as the ethanol folly. He doesn't take the down-sides of (say) shale-oil seriously, i.e., the large water requirements and environmental damage. In any event, even though the article was interesting, it misses my point: we have to stop using hydrocarbons. Here's the author and headline: >> From the October 2009 Scientific American Magazine Another Century of Oil? Getting More from Current Reserves Amid warnings of a possible "peak oil," advanced technologies offer ways to extract every last possible drop [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=squeezing-more-oil] By Leonardo Maugeri << The "key concepts" of the article are: >> * Forecasts that global oil production will soon start to decline and >> that most oil will be gone within a few decades may be overly pessimistic. * The author predicts that by 2030, thanks to advanced technologies, wells will be able to extract half of the oil known to be underground, up from the current average of 35 percent. * Together with new discoveries, the increased productivity could make oil last at least another century. << After that, you have to be a subscriber. That's a tragedy, since my memory of the article is really bad even though I read it yesterday. I left it behinds at the doctor's office so that others could read the magazine. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
