LifeItself

Where are you going, Great Britain? The ongoing vigorous discussion of Brexit seems to be vacuous on both sides of the argument, because it misses the most important physical realities of staying alive in Great Britain, not merely of who gets to stay there. The British Isles consist of some 6000 specs of land with the total area of 315,000 square kilometers (the area of Poland or Arizona). They are inhabited by over 70 million people (roughly twice the population of Poland and over ten times the population of Arizona). My own calculations of Great Britain’s carrying capacity pointed more towards 3 million people, who could be sustained by the local environment. This means that to stay alive the Brits must be a part of a global community; otherwise they will perish. And that’s that. Let me rephrase now: The United Kingdom is a small, overpopulated and rather insignificant country, which thought otherwise and consequently made a rather suicidal choice that would expose its terri...

In Part I of this post, I discussed production of gas from the four largest shale plays in the U.S. Ordered by production levels, these are the Marcellus, Barnett, Haynesville and Fayetteville shales. In my mind it is quite unlikely that much new drilling will occur in Fayetteville and Haynesville.  There will be some drilling in the Barnett and plenty in Marcellus, but significantly less than to date. Based on my calculations, I concluded that these plays may deliver between 3 and 7 years of U.S. gas consumption in 2015, a far cry from the 100-year gas supply postulated by many experts.  Consistently with this view, for at least three years I have argued that the large-scale oil and gas exports from the U.S. may not be good . Here I consider the two largest oil plays in the U.S.: the Eagle Ford and Bakken shales.  Eagle Ford is also a significant gas and condensate producer.  At their respective production peaks, these two shales together produced about 3 millio...

My Dear Western Friends, Many of you have read my previous letter , dated May 4, 2015, and responded by email. Thank you. I think we still have a little problem: Your replies have been much too U.S.-centric.  Unfortunately,  the world today is far too interlinked, in good part because of the U.S. policies over the last 35 years, and all problems are global.  Please parse the last sentence again and try to understand that you can no longer get away with being over there and ignoring what is happening here and everywhere else.  The cheap clothing and industrial products you buy in the U.S. come at a very high price to all other parts of the world.  High price means environmental and social deterioration. Since hardly anyone cares about the environment until they can't breath, have no water to drink, food to eat, drown in floods or mudslides; or alternatively fall sick with cancer, Ebola, cholera, AIDS or Hepatitis, let's focus on the social deterioration an...

To my relief, Dr. Paul Krugman has published yet another sermon, When Prophecy Fails .  For months, I have been fascinated by Dr. Krugman's blithe, unwavering insistence on the superiority of his arguments over those of differently clueless economists.  Today, I decided to compose my reply. Back in the old days, in Poland, I often listened to a lovely satirical radio program on an FM station with a short range and not much attention from censors.  Among others, each week brought an installment of a philosophical discourse, entitled "On the Superiority of Easter over Christmas." The author, Jan Tadeusz Stanisławski, a self-proclaimed Professor of Applied Presumptology, would explain in short, exquisitely absurd monologs the utter stupidity of the various pseudo-scientific arguments about economics and society. This episode, " Greed for Gold ," is as good as any.  It ends with the following summary: Why are we talking about gold, someone might ask? They also a...

In the summer of 1858, Edwin Drake punched 33 ft of cast iron pipe into the earth to prevent near surface water from collapsing the hole. He then lowered drilling equipment into the cased hole and used a steam engine to drill a successful, 69 ft deep well. On August 27th, shallow oil flowed almost to the surface and was recovered with a sump pump. Within 10 years more than 5,500 wells had been drilled, and 1,200 were producing oil. Edwin Drake made absolutely no money on developing modern drilling technology and died a poor man. The North American oil industry four years after Drake's well. The Phillips well is on the right, and the Woodford well on the left. Located in the middle of Oil Creek Valley (note the river at the right of the photograph), these two wells showed the early promise of the Oil Regions. The Phillips well was the most productive ever drilled to date, flowing initially at 4,000 barrels per day in October 1861. The ...

For most people the Big Recession of 2009 has never ended.  It has not ended as well for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, museums, policemen, firefighters, municipalities, counties, states, and so on. This recession has not ended, yet we see inflation in every aspect of the lives of ordinary people: fuels, food (even the food-like edible substances that masquerade as food in the U.S.), and clothing.  Click on the image to see the original size There is a reason why food and fuels are excluded from the government measure of "core" inflation, which then becomes a game of controlling how fast we print and price new money relative to how fast we improve productivity.  Over the last several decades, the Federal Reserve has become quite good in playing that control game, and the rest seemed OK.  But not this time. So what is different now? Why do the Left and the Right offer such dramatically different solutions to the same p...

Given the noisy propaganda about the positive impact of renewables, or "clean energy,"  or "green energy" on global emissions of carbon dioxide, one expects there would be some.  Unfortunately, there is none as far as I can tell.  In fact, the situation is even more hopeless than I feared in my darkest dreams. Here is the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), plotted originally by P.F. Henshaw, and replotted a little differently by me. You can click on the plots to see them in high resolution. Above you see a semi-logarithmic plot of the normalized Global Gross Domestic Product (GDP),  Rate of use of energy in the world (Energy),  Rate of global carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and  Dollars of income generated per unit of energy expanded globally per year ($/Btu).   All values are relative to those in 1971, and all curves start from 1. All trends are exponential, so they plot as approximately straight lines on the semi-logarith...

On January 10, 2011 - 11:49am, the Oildrum posted an article by  Luis de Sousa  Peak Coal: the Olduvai perspective . It is an interesting article and we appreciate the author's arguments against the peak of global rate of coal production.  However, here are a few facts on the ground recorded by Greg Croft and me: Last year, China imported 150/690=22% of all seaborne steam coal traded worldwide in 2010, and projections are that China will try to import more this year.  China also has firm plans of of limiting energy use and shutting down 2,000 coal-intensive industrial facilities.  In short, it seems that China's coal production has peaked.  China produces roughly 1/2 of world's coal. The Oildrum article does not seem to address the ever-increasing mine depths that will ultimately curtail and stop coal production from these mines. Mozambique is going to become the second biggest exporter of metallurgical coal, which is not the same as the second ...