Toyota picks Mississippi for new plant

Toyota Motor Corp.'s Highlander sport utility vehicle should start rolling off the assembly line at a new, $1.3 billion plant in northeast Mississippi by 2010, company and state officials said Tuesday.
Toyota disclosed the site for its eighth vehicle assembly plant in North America, saying it will be built on a 1,700-acre site at Blue Springs, about 10 miles northwest of Tupelo. It also considered sites in neighboring states Arkansas and Tennessee.
The Mississippi plant will manufacture 150,000 Highlanders a year. It also will create 2,000 badly needed jobs in an area with an economy that has slowed because of losses in furniture

[Link: Houston Chronicle]

So Toyota expects surging SUV demand in the U.S. by 2010. I guess I would have to question that projection. There are always many ways to look at the future of course. If you are a big auto manufacture, however, they must all be through rose-colored glasses. There aren't many good post-peak oil scenarios out there for auto manufacturers.

In depth - Study sees harmful hunt for extra oil

A report from Wood Mackenzie, the Edinburgh-based consultancy, calculates that the world holds 3,600bn barrels of unconventional oil and gas that need a lot of energy to extract.

So far only 8 per cent of that has begun to be developed, because the world has relied on easier sources of oil and gas.

Only 15 per cent of the 3,600bn is heavy and extra-heavy oil, with the rest being even more challenging.

[Link: FT.com]

The concept of ERoEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) is thrown around a lot in discussions of energy depletion and Peak Oil. Most of us think of it as a measure of the difficulty of obtaining the oil but its real importance might be its relationship to reserves. Think about it for a second. If a barrel of very difficult to extract oil has an ERoEI of 1.0 (ie it takes the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil to extract it) it really doesn't exist. There is no reason to go after it. In other words you can't really count that barrel as part of our energy reserves if we count the barrel we will use to get it out. Taking that a little further, we really should degrade all reserve estimates by the ratio of ERoEI of the oil in reserve. If oil is twice as hard to get out, it should only count as half as much oil when we add up our reserves. I am going to have to think about this some more but if I am right the world's oil reserves have just gone down a lot.

Running out of oil may not be the issue at all

Watson said other above-ground risks include higher costs of finding oil that could chill production and the lack of enough engineers and other professionals to replace the industry's aging work force.

"Above-ground peak oil will trump below-ground peak oil every time," Watson said.

[link: Chron.com - Houston Chronicle]

The shorter version of this article is "there is plenty of oil, we just won't be able to get at it so Peak Oil is a myth." I guess I am just dense but I don't remember anywhere that the phenomenon of oil depletion is only related to physical reserves or that it will occur without any difficulty. That is what peak oil is for Heaven's sake. It is like picking fruit on a tree. The first half of the harvest is no problem then you realize that those beauties up in the top or over the neighbors fence are going to be a lot more trouble than they are worth. That is when you leave them there and move on to the next tree. Unless, of course, there are no more trees. At that point if you want more fruit you are going to pay the price. At some point even that last branch may not be worth the effort and the birds are going to get the benefit. Those "above-ground" peak oil problems that he is complaining about are part and parcel of the peak oil problem.

Matt Simmons (Bloomberg): Peak Oil Now, Oil Perhaps to $300

Watch an interview of Matt Simmons on the Bloomberg Report. This is the interview where he predicts $300/barrel oil and declares peak oil is here.

A battle over biofuels

"To see where corn production can go, it is helpful to see how far it has come. In 1945, U.S. farmers harvested about 40 bushels of grain per acre. Today, thanks to elite hybrids, new technologies and growers' management practices, the U.S. average is 160 bushels per acre. Many growers consistently produce 250 bushels, up to a record of 400-plus bushels."

[Link: DesMoinesRegister.com]

It is interesting that nowhere in this article did the author discuss net-energy or try to estimate how much of the increased yields that he does mention are derived from the application of petroleum derived (natural gas) nitrogen fertilizers. I am not an expert on crop yields, I probably couldn't even be considered a knowledgeable layman, but I am pretty sure that a lot of the reason we are continually pulling really high yields from the same land is because we are able to artificially ignore soil replenishment and pest resistance by using hydrocarbon based fertilizers and insecticides. I suspect, as misleading as it is, that these dependencies are hidden in his phrase "management practices." We are going to have to do much more than add technology to our farming practices to increase yields. We are also going to have to find a way to replace the petrochemical fertilizers and insecticides that we rely on now. It would be very interesting to hear about the yields without any petrochemical help.

The Olduvai Theory: Terminal Decline Imminent

Richard Duncan has released an update to his Oldavai Theory and it is much like the others. He has looked at recent data and it doesn't really change anything. In a previous post I explained my recent epiphany regarding the essence of his idea which is that the collapse of per capita energy availability (which can be considered a measure of civilization's prosperity) is not dependent on a collapse of oil production itself but merely a reduction in the rate of increase in oil production. Since this is something that is already clearly happening we are almost certainly in the throws of an impending descent. Read his report, we all have a need to know.

Mr. Duncan has released his report in the form of a Report.pdf, Figure1.pdf and Figure2.pdf

(You will need to have javascript enabled to view these files.)

Global-Warming Report Gets U.S. Emphasis

[Link: WSJ.com]

The IPCC report predicts sea levels will rise by between one to two feet over the next 100 years. Mr. Delworth said there remains "much more uncertainty" over how much accelerated melting of glaciers might add to that.

A second area of continuing uncertainty has to do with the impact of clouds on climate change. Warming the ocean sends more water vapor into the air, and the resulting clouds accelerate global warming by trapping more of the sun's heat in the atmosphere and further warm the ocean. Jim Butler, deputy director of NOAA's global monitoring division, called this "a very scary feedback mechanism."

I must admit that I am surprised by what I am reading in this article. I have always thought that the rising water level was mostly the effect of adding melted ice and increased rainfall into the oceans. Increases due to the expansion of the water at higher temperatures seemed like it ought to be a secondary effect. Well...it seems that the reality of the situation is just the opposite. The UN report only considered expansion due to heating in the 1 to 2 foot increase in sea levels from Global Warming. The melting ice and effects of increased cloud cover weren't included because of the uncertainty.

I guess you do learn something every day. Today I learned to not trust your intuition when the phenomena you are considering is as complex as planetary physics. Tomorrow, I suspect we will learn that the seas are going to rise a lot more than we have been told so far.

Scientists blame global warming for rising hurricane intensity

Link: MiamiHerald.com | 02/01/2007

"That means the world's scientists are 90 to 99 percent certain that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible.
Worse, the study reportedly describes global warming as a runaway climatological train that already is racing down the track and will ``continue for centuries . . . even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilized."

You know it really takes a lot to get people off of the mark nowadays. When I was a youngster, and the G.I.s were in charge, if a reasonable number of experts decided there was a serious problem looming on the horizon, well, then something would be done. It wasn't necessary for the train to cut your car in half before you might think about moving the car or getting out of it. When you were sitting on the track and heard a whistle, even if you couldn't see anything yet, you started getting your butt in gear.

I don't really know when that changed. It probably began picking up steam back in the Nixon days, when the Republicans and Conservatives started belittling the experts and educated people in general, claiming their book learning was somehow inferior to the "wisdom" of the common man. It certainly has been strengthened by the claim of the common man's press that the best way to extract knowledge about a subject is to listen to "experts" from the fringy, opposite ends of the subject's spectrum beat each other up with half truths and innuendos. True knowledge has no place in these discussions. The holders of true knowledge are aware of these extremes and try to filter them out of the mass of information in the center that actually holds the truth. The first thing a scientist does when he analyzes statistical data is to throw out the extreme data points, recognizing them for the oddballs that they probably are. We need to somehow get back to a point where we can react to reasonable concern when it shows it head and not argue about it until the whole monster crawls out of the hole.

We should have been on top of this 20 years ago and we might have had a chance to actually do something about it other than survive.