Tag: peakoil

Revenge Of The Negabarrels

So in an oil market that sputters at $60 a barrel, faints at $40, and vanishes at $20, what do negabarrels cost to produce? In 2004, Winning the Oil Endgame detailed how negabarrels costing $17 in today’s $ could save half of US oil. In 2011, our Reinventing Fire synthesis updated how saving all US oil by 2050, with far greater mobility, could cost $20 per barrel saved in US transport or $14 just in autos. Today’s efficient autos can save a barrel for less than $7. That will fall below 0 in a few more years as superior electric cars match or beat gasoline cars on sticker price alone.

Seeing The End Of Oil

The end of petroleum is in sight. The reason is simple: the black goo that powered and built the 20th century is now losing economically to other technologies. Petroleum is facing competition at both ends of the barrel, from low value, high volume commodities such as fuel, up through high value, low volume chemicals. Electric vehicles and renewable energy will be the most visible threats to commodity transportation fuel demand in the short term, gradually outcompeting petroleum via both energy efficiency and capital efficiency. Biotechnology will then deliver the coup de grace, first by displacing high value petrochemicals with products that have lower energy and CO2 costs, and then by delivering new CO2 negative biochemicals and biomaterials that cannot be manufactured easily or economically, if at all, from petrochemical feedstocks.

2021-11-22: Here’s one approach:

Biologists have devised a way to engineer yeast to produce itaconic acid—a valuable commodity chemical—using data integration and supercomputing power as a guide. Yeasts and other microbes are commonly used to produce useful chemicals. While it is easy to get them to produce some chemicals in high yields, like ethanol, other chemicals may provide more of a challenge. Kumar hopes that this system of combining machine learning with metabolic modeling and multiomics datasets will help overcome these production challenges. “Though we still need more testing on this model, there is an amazing potential to expand this computationally guided bioengineering to other systems. This strategy could open up a new era in biosystem design for the production of eco-friendly chemicals.”

Beyond Oil Feedstocks

you’d need electrochemical efficiencies of at least 60% and electricity available at 4 cents/kilowatt-hr or better to make these ideas profitable (with the usual 30-year-amortization assumption about the plants themselves). How close are we? Many of the processes are currently in the 40-50% efficiency range, and need further scale-up work: within sight, but not there yet. And renewable electricity costs vary a great deal by region. The best cases are getting down around that figure, though, and continuing to improve. 1 feature of electrochemical synthesis is that it would (as mentioned in the excerpt above) provide a use for the mismatched local excess electrical production that can happen with renewables – it’s storage of energy in chemical bonds as opposed to batteries, flywheels, or what have you. But on the other hand, running a chemical plant 24/7 is by far the most economical way to set things up, so the best solution would be coupling with some steadier source of electricity as well.

Cheap oil has consequences

cheap oil, while great for crushing odious regimes, does cause some collateral damage.

The sense that falling oil is bad for stocks is mostly a matter of timing and conspicuousness. The bad parts of the oil plunge are hitting now: the credit downgrades, the defaults, the investment cutbacks, the layoffs of roughnecks. They’re making news and rattling people’s confidence. Eventually, the money freed up by cheap oil will leak into other parts of the economy.

Fossil fuel lawsuits

The fossil-fuel industry—which, for 2 centuries, underwrote our civilization and then became its greatest threat—has started to take serious hits. Today, President Obama rejected the Keystone Pipeline, becoming the first world leader to turn down a major project on climate grounds. 18 hours earlier, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued subpoenas to Exxon, the richest and most profitable energy company in history, after substantial evidence emerged that it had deceived the world about climate change.

Hidden Effects of Cheap Oil

Nowhere are the second-order consequences of cratering oil prices more varied, important, and unpredictable than in the Middle East. “ISIS is not as flush as it once was. It has cut spending on fuel and bread subsidies, while increasingly shaking down locals for cash. Fighters themselves may be feeling the squeeze, too.” The militant group’s revenue from selling oil had dropped to $300k per day, down from $2m a day in 2014. “I don’t think [the oil-revenue decline] will lead to [the Islamic State’s] collapse. … But it might accelerate their implosion”. Iran, meanwhile, has entered into negotiations with world powers over its nuclear program for a variety of reasons. But the fact that Iran is one of the world’s hardest-hit oil producers is surely one of them.