Fossil Fuel Production with Supply and Demand Interactions

Steve Mohr has published his Thesis at the University of Newcastle, Australia:
Projection of world fossil fuel production with supply and demand interactions

Abstract

Historically, fossil fuels have been vital for our global energy needs. However climate change is prompting renewed interest in the role of fossil fuel production for our energy needs. In order to appropriately plan for our future energy needs, a new detailed model of fossil fuel supply is required. It is critical to know if fossil fuels will still be able to supply most of our energy requirements and meet the ever increasing energy demand in the future. Answering these questions is critical in order to identify potential periods of energy shortages; so that alternative energy resources can be utilised in a timely way. The aim of this study was to develop a model to predict fossil fuel production for the long term based on historical production data, projected demand, and assumed ultimately recoverable reserves for coal, gas and oil. Climate change is an important issue confronting society, and it is hoped that the work contained in this thesis will aid climate change modeling by focusing attention to realistic fossil fuel production projections. Fossil fuels are currently an essential component in the global economy and the growth of the human population. The fossil fuel production projections from this study suggest that many of the IPCC fossil fuel projections appear overly optimistic. Based on the assumed URR values, it is predicted that global fossil fuel production will peak before 2030. For this reason, it is imperative that appropriate action be taken as early as possible to mitigate the effects of fossil fuel decline, to avoid energy shortages in the near future.

Conclusions (excerpt)

The combined supply and demand model includes the capability that demand and production could be influenced by each other, i.e. if production could not meet demand then future demand for that energy source was reduced. In this study, three options were considered. Firstly, the STATIC option resulted in demand and production acting independently of each other at all times. Secondly, the DYNAMIC option allowed both total demand and total production to change from the STATIC situation when there was a difference between the two. Finally, the INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC option was an extension to the DYNAMIC situation, but treated each fuel source individually when applying the supply and demand interaction, with both demand and production being able to vary.

The model requires estimates of Ultimately Recoverable Resources (URR) for coal, gas and oil. Following a critical review of the literature, included in this study, three cases were adopted. CASE 1 and CASE 3 being lowest and highest recent estimates, respectively, and CASE 2 being author’s best guess based on the information available. The URR values for CASE 2 were, total (60,800 EJ), coal (19,350 EJ), gas (17,680 EJ) and oil (23,780 EJ).

Oil: For CASE 2, peak production year remained almost constant at 2011-12 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, with peak production varying only marginally between 179–188 EJ/y. Similarly, for CASE 1, peak production year was the same at 2005 for all three supply and demand interaction options. For CASE 3, peak production year varied only slightly at 2019, 2011 and 2016 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, respectively. The important outcome was that for all scenarios the maximum peak year was 2019.

Combined fossil fuels: For CASE 2, peak production year remained almost constant at 2016–18 for STATIC, DYNAMIC and INDEPENDENTLY DYNAMIC options, with peak production varying only marginally between 509–525 EJ/y. Similarly, for CASE 1, peak production year was essentially same at 2012–13 for all three supply and demand interaction options. For CASE 3, peak production year varied from 2021 to 2029 across the three supply and demand options. In all scenarios it was found that natural gas offers the biggest future potential, and not coal.

[via Energy Bulletin]

Ocean Energy Institute and Energy Systems

The Ocean Energy Institute, founded in 2007 by Matthew R. Simmons, is a think-tank and venture capital fund addressing the challenges of U.S. offshore renewable energy. OEI approaches energy R&D and investment from a systems point of view; not just generation, but usage, storage and transmission all together as an interdependent set of opportunities and the next driving force of the international economy.

Grand Opening - Ocean Energy Institute Offices

Rockland, Maine (July 20) -- The Ocean Energy Institute will be hosting a VIP celebration today for the grand opening of its new office headquarters.

Energy as a Complete System

OEI's "GUST" model (generation, usage, storage and transmission) proposes how the offshore wind resource can be efficiently tapped into and used, and the electricity intelligently stored and transmitted.

This model addresses two of the biggest challenges to the reliability of wind power: seasonality (the wind blows strongest in the winter, when energy demand is historically lower) - and intermittency (the wind blows less strongly during the daytime, when energy demand is highest).

The System Solution

1. Use the energy in a way that the seasonal match is great (e.g., winter heating)
2. Use the energy for the 90% of the family energy budget that is NOT "electricity"
3. Use the energy in applications where energy storage is easy
4. Construct a North American Supergrid to balance out intermittency
5. Develop NH3 (ammonia) fuel as a way to seasonally shift energy generation vs. use
6. Exploit Smart Grids to dynamically balance generation and demand
7. Stop handcuffing ourselves to a 20 percent renewable "penetration" limit

The "Pickens Plan Plus" a.k.a the Simmons Plan

The Ocean Energy Institute has published an updated version of the original Pickens Plan. The Simmons Plan is outlined in a pdf presentation here.

Book: The Post Carbon Reader

The Post Carbon Reader
Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

Edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch
In the 20th century, cheap and abundant energy brought previously unimaginable advances in health, wealth, and technology, and fed an explosion in population and consumption. But this growth came at an incredible cost. Climate change, peak oil, freshwater depletion, species extinction, and a host of economic and social problems now challenge us as never before. The Post Carbon Reader features articles by some of the world’s most provocative thinkers on the key drivers shaping this new century, from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and systems resilience. This unprecedented collection takes a hard-nosed look at the interconnected threats of our global sustainability quandary—as well as the most promising responses. The Post Carbon Reader is a valuable resource for policymakers, college classrooms, and concerned citizens.

Table of Contents

Preface Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, Editors
Foreword Asher Miller

Part I - Introduction
1. Foundation Concepts

• Richard Heinberg: "Beyond the Limits to Growth"
• Richard Heinberg: "What is Sustainability?"
• Bill Rees, "Thinking 'Resilience'"

Part II - Planet
2. Climate

• Bill McKibben, selection from Eaarth
• Richard Douthwaite, "The international response to climate change "
• Mark Sandler, SIDEBAR: "Cap and Dividend in the U.S."
• David Orr, selection from Down to the Wire

3. Water

• Sandra Postel, "Water: Adapting to a new normal"

4. Biodiversity

• Stephanie Mills, "Peak Nature?"

Part III - Civilization
5. Food

• Michael Bomford, "Energy and the food system"
• Wes Jackson, transcript from 1/25/10 presentation at Univ. of California - Berkeley
• Erika Allen, transcript from 1/24/10 conversation: "Growing community food systems"

6. Population

• Bill Ryerson, "Population: The Multiplier of Everything Else"

7. Culture & behavior

• Peter Whybrow, "Dangerously Addictive"
• Gloria Flora, "Remapping Relationships: Humans in nature"
• Bill Rees, "The Human Nature of Unsustainability"

Part IV - Modern Society
8. Energy

• Daniel Lerch, selection from Post Carbon Cities
• David Hughes, "Hydrocarbons in North America"
• David Fridley, "Nine Challenges of Alternative Energy"
• Tom Whipple, "Peak Oil and the Economy"

9. Economy

• Josh Farley, "Ecological Economics"
• Richard Douthwaite, SIDEBAR: "Money and Energy"
• Michael Shuman, "The Competitiveness of Local Living Economies"

10. Cities, towns, and suburbs

• Warren Karlenzig, "The Death of Sprawl"
• Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, "Smart Decline in Post-Carbon Cities"
• Hillary Brown, "Buildings"
• John Kaufmann "Local Government in a time of Peak Oil and Climate Change"

11. Transportation

• Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, "Post-carbon mobility"

12. Waste

• Bill Sheehan and Helen Spiegelman, "Climate Change, Peak Oil and the End of Waste"

13. Health

• Cindy Parker and Brian Schwartz, "Human Health and Well-Being in an Era of Energy Scarcity and Climate Change"

14. Education

• Zenobia Barlow and Michael Stone, "Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability"
• Nancy Lee Wood, "Community Colleges"

Part V - Next Steps
15. Building resilience

• Chris Martenson, "Personal preparation"
• Rob Hopkins "Transitioning community"

16. Vision for a post-carbon century

• Asher Miller, "What Now? The Path Forward Begins with One Step"

World3 in Modelica: System Dynamics Models

World3 in Modelica: Creating System Dynamics Models in the Modelica Framework

This paper and presentation by F. E. Cellier introduces a new release of the System-Dynamics library of Modelica and shows how it is being used by discussing a fairly large application code: Meadows’ World3 model.

Meadows’ only talked in Limits to Growth about the results obtained with the model. The model itself, originally coded in Dynamo, was described in a separate book.

Meadows’ World3 model has seen two major upgrades since its original inception, one in 1992, i.e. after 20 years, and the second in 2002, i.e., after 30 years. The World3 application code contained in SystemDynamics 2.0 implements the 2002 version of the World3 model. In the code, we offer not only the basic model, but also all 10 scenarios that Meadows and co-workers are talking about in Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.

Future Research

What future additions are in the works? In today’s world of dwindling fossil fuel reserves, it becomes important to track how much energy we are actually using. Whereas classical System Dynamics is designed to track material flows, it does not track energy flows. This is a major drawback of the methodology.

For this reason, a second version of the System Dynamics library has also been released as a sublibrary of BondLib, our bond graph library. In that version, all material flows are represented internally by bond graphs. A bond graph naturally tracks energy flows. Each energy flow, in that version of the library, is represented as the product of a specific enthalpy and a mass flow. Hence we can track material flows and energy flows simultaneously.

When I drive my car from home to work, I am not only spending energy in the form of the gas that my car consumes. Some energy was also spent in producing the car, and more energy will be spent in discarding it at the end of its lifecycle and in recovering those materials from it that can be recycled.

The accumulated energy that accounts for all of those indirect uses of energy is called emergy. The specific enthalpy can be used to encode in the model the specific emergy, i.e., the emergy per unit of mass.

I plan on porting examples of emergy modeling, as described in the publications by Howard Odum, over to the bond graph implementation of the System Dynamics library, but this work has not yet been completed.


Check out the full paper and presentation by Prof. Dr. François E. Cellier here.

Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil

Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth has delivered a very interesting presentation at the Transition Network Conference 2010 in the UK.

Peak Oil and the collapse of global Ponzi finance are a “perfect storm” of converging phenomena that threaten to sink our age of prosperity through wealth destruction, social discontent, and global conflict. Nicole will describe how our current financial system is an unsustainable credit bubble grounded in “Ponzi dynamics,” or the logic of the pyramid scheme. She warns that most people are woefully unprepared to face the consequences of the devastating deflation that is now unfolding.

Check out the following comments about Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil

• My Conference – Shaun Chamberlin on Stoneleigh’s peak oil/finance talk
• Nicole Foss: A Century of Challenges

President Obama on the Oil Spill and Alternative Fuel Sources

Watch the full video or read the full transcript of Remarks by the President to the Nation on the BP Oil Spill.

Lloyds Report - Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business

Chatham House-Lloyd's 360 Risk Insight White Paper
by Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn, June 2010

As the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has amply demonstrated, growing global energy demand and the anticipated restricted availability of some conventional fossil fuels pose an escalating threat to the security of energy supply for global businesses. Sustainable Energy Security: Strategic Risks and Opportunities for Business, produced jointly by Chatham House and Lloyd's, reveals multiple vulnerabilities in our current energy system and urges both business strategists and government policy-makers to take into account a range of encroaching risks and be bold in making plans for a more resilient and low carbon energy future.



This report, jointly produced by Lloyd’s 360 Risk Insight programme and Chatham House, should cause all risk managers to pause. What it outlines, in stark detail, is that we have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility, and how much we will have to pay for it.

Is this any different from the normal volatility of the oil or gas markets? Yes, it is. Today, a number of pressures are combining: constraints on ‘easy to access’ oil; the environmental and political urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions; and a sharp rise in energy demand from the Asian economies, particularly China.

Executive Summary

• Businesses which prepare for and take advantage of the new energy reality will prosper - failure to do so could be catastrophic
• Market dynamics and environmental factors mean business can no longer rely on low cost traditional energy sources
• China and growing Asian economies will play an increasingly important role in global energy security
• We are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike
• Energy infrastructure will become increasingly vulnerable as a result of climate change and operations in harsher environments
• Lack of global regulation on climate change is creating an environment of uncertainty for business, which is damaging investment plans
• To manage increasing energy costs and carbon exposure businesses must reduce fossil fuel consumption
• Business must address energy-related risks to supply chains and the increasing vulnerability of 'just-in-time' models
• Investment in renewable energy and 'intelligent' infrastructure is booming. This revolution presents huge opportunities for new business partnerships

[via Transition Culture]