Peak Oil v Peak Carbon v Giant Carbonised Insects

More on how the rug rats of today are going to live as adults, dodging the gnashing jaws of carbonised giant insects:  is it just me or is the oil peak being pushed out further and further?

Over the last few months, and despite limited interest in the industry (other than to shut it down), there seem to be a plethora of new oil deposits found / exploited.  Big ones.  Some media refer to them as giant fields.  If this observation is correct, then Peak Oil is a thing of the past and we are definitely all going to be gobbled. 

As an aside, with so many giant carbonised insects – such as the meter long centipede referred to in an earlier blog – we will also have a new source of food /protein to feed the masses tipped to hit 10 billion in my [old already] lifetime. 

But back to the new oil sources.  Some months ago I read about BP (and others) making a large find off the northern coast of the UK.  Or was it the end of last year?

Anyway another has been announced only last month.  UPI reports “British energy company Premier Oil announced that it made an oil discovery in the Catcher area of the country's territorial waters of the North Sea.”

And remember a few months ago the announcement of the large oil deposit find off the coast of Ireland;  poor ol’ Ireland that has lost its wealth, its income, and a whole generation to austerity??  Exploration company Providence Resources announced the find off the coast of Cork.  The find was referred to as “major”.  The article went on to say ”The coastal Basins surrounding Ireland have long been known to harbour valuable natural resources. It’s estimated that they could produce 10 billion barrels of oil and an unquantifiable amount of gas. In the past, exploration has been held back by a lack of technology and low oil prices.”

As probably more of a political statement, Kurdistan has started shipping oil to Turkey.  Whilst in east Africa, “Tullow Oil, a London-based explorer with the most licences in Africa, said it planned to accelerate drilling in Kenya after making the East African (Kenya) state’s first discovery earlier this year.  Tullow forecast Kenya has the potential to exceed Uganda, where with Total and CNOOC it plans to invest more than $10bn to unlock an estimated 2,5-billion barrels of oil. $4 per barrel.”

But wait, there’s more.

The Norwegian oil firm DNO International said it is ramping up oil production in Iraq as it confirmed an oil discovery in the country's resource-rich Tawke field and has resumed drilling operations in Yemen. DNO, which explores and produces oil and gas in Iraq and Yemen and plans to expand activities in North Africa and the Middle East

And more.

“Online PR News – 05-July-2012 –PierMax Energy Exploration is pleased to announce that, it has made a significant oil discovery in current onshore Kurdistan oil exploration project.”

And so it goes on and on.

And to crown my paranoia about never reaching Peak Oil (which has been forecast to be occurring around now) and thus never reigning in the carbon problem, I read George Monbiot recent article False Summit (meaning oil summit or ‘peak’).  The great eco campaigner. 

His first sentence is “We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.”  And ends with “But right now I’m not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.”

In between those two emotionally charged sentences, is a great article, and as usual well researched.  Citing various article, he asserts that the recent sustained high price of oil has triggered to new oil resource boom.  That indeed, it is not so much how much oil, but at what price. With US$2.6 trillion spent over this three year period in exploration etc (end 2012).  Some of it extracted using fracking, the environmentally fraught polluter.

Yeah gads!!

So back on the research car and this was found.  Published in 2006, so it overlooks the recent massive investment in oil production and discoveries;  by the way, all of which are found and delivered from very difficult methods / places (fracking, deep sea). These five key points are believed at that time to be irrefutable and the basis of Peak Oil. 

1. The biggest oilfields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago, either side of the Second World War.

2. The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965.

3. There were a few more big discovery years in the 1970s, but there have been none since then.

4. The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago.

5. Since then there has been an overall decline.

So anything written since then to confirm this thesis?  Well in May this year, there is a long post on oil and the industry on scepticblog.org by a reasonably senior academic geologist.  It is extremely lengthy, however sufficiently erudite and simplistic (for this oil idiot) for it to be recommended to all.  These are just a few extracts of interest: 

Academic geologists are nearly 50% women now, and they are distributed across all age classes. Oil geologists, by contrast, are nearly all old white guys in their 60s or older, with a lot of young men (and a few women) just recently hired in the business. The entire generation that would now be in their 40s and 50s is missing because of the attrition during the oil busts of the late 80s-90s. [I just thought this was interesting].

As the Time magazine article pointed out, now they’re spending most of their time and money on increasingly risky and expensive operations like fracking, pumping water in old fields to push out the last drops of oil, or mining oil sands with all their environmental costs. The biggest push is in offshore oil platforms—and the 2010 Gulf oil disaster (along with previous oil disasters on platforms around the world) shows just how risky it is to drill so far offshore.

So what about the world discovery rate? That answer has been known for a long time. World discovery rate peaked in 1965, and has been steeply declining ever since, even though more and more exploration is conducted in the farthest reaches of the globe in the past 47 years. The “peak oil” effect has probably already occurred, and we are likely on the slow downward decline in discoveries of cheap, easy-to-pump oil.

……in recent years most of the estimates place the total volume of ultimately recoverable oil in the range of 1.8 to 2.6 trillion barrels, with most estimates around 2.0 trillion barrels.

The booming economies of China and India, along with some other developing nations, are greatly exceeding any increased production due to new discoveries. The numbers are truly staggering. From only 50,000 barrels/day in 1980, world consumption is now almost 100,000 barrels/day. As oil executive Peter Tertzakian pointed out in his book title, we’re nearing the once-unimaginable consumption rate of a thousand barrels a second! Even as the U.S. finds more oil in unconventional places, we cannot keep our domestic prices down because demand outside the U.S. is driving the world price upwards.

So by my calc that is ~55,000 years of oil supply at today's consumption levels if we use the 2 trillion estimate with current consumption at 100k barrels per day.  At that level we are toast!! Something doesn't seem to be adding up here.  Then we look at the next argument, of 1,000 per second.  That equals about 86 million barrels per day; being 60,000 per minute;  3.6 million barrels per hour; etc.   So I think he meant 1,000,000 not 100,000.  Which brings the ~55,000 back to ~55 years of supply at today's consumption level.  Phew!!

There is also the fact that the peak of discovery of major oil fields occurred 47 years ago, and there have been no giant oil fields found in a long time, and most of the world’s older oil fields are nearing their ends.

An acre of corn consumes 80 gallons of oil in the form of pesticides, fertilizers, and fuel for the tractors.  Without [oil], our food supply would collapse, and the world would be looking at a global famine. The end of cheap oil will force everyone to re-examine agricultural practices, since you can’t make most pesticides or fertilizers out of coal. 

And thus cannot replace lost oil with biofuel. 

So rug rats.  There are your choices:  eaten by giant carbonised insects or die of starvation.  Blame the old white guys in the oil industry. 

However, I believe that we can confirm that peak oil has definately come and gone.  So that is hopeful.  Right?

Fat or Fuel?

In some cases the above title is a tautology of course.  But here we are going to do a small mea culpa.

In this blog I discussed the recent news that the USA was experiencing a bumper crop in corn this season, and how this is then fed to cattle in feed lots, and then people eat this meat, which has a higher fat content, and then we all get fatter.  Further that the cattle feed lots are a dastardly environment for the cattle in any event.  Bad for people, bad for the environment, and bad for sustainability.

Well all true, but less so than I thought.

Bloomberg has published a very interesting chart that suggests a couple of interesting things for Peak Food and Peak Oil. (And thanks for bringing it to my attention)

The heading is that ethanol is now eating more corn than cows in the USA.  It then goes on to suggest that this is because herd numbers have dropped.  The chart shows that corn for cattle vs ethanol is now negative apparently for the first time with the share of the corn crop used for ethanol at 40%;  (note other uses would be for feed lots, direct consumption and building future capacity).

Apparently farmers are turning to cheaper sources of feed (oh no!!) because of the price of corn (which has now dropped from all time highs); at the same time that fuel consumption is rising, and oil prices are not falling (for the first time ever in a recession).  It is also occurring as the price of meat is at an all time high (futures on feeder cattle).  So maybe feed lots are selling into this boom and thus reducing herd numbers.

Interestingly I was speaking to a farmer a couple of weeks ago, and then a stock agent, and they believed that high cattle prices are here to stay based on international demand and limited resources for production. 

Does this confirm the issues raised in Peak Food, Peak Oil, and indeed Bumper Corn Crop?  The competition for food from the fuel industry; the unsustainability of feed lots; the hunt for water and the hunt for ever more unsustainable ways to meet resource depletion covered in many of these blogs.

I think it does.  My blog on everybody getting fatter from the bumper corn crop this year is directionally wrong, however give me some license on the fact that the corn is actually going into ethanol rather than feed.  I can feel a blog on ethanol versus fuel for carbon purposes coming on.

Eating meat and carbon answered

Some people favour grass fed cattle, and some favour grain fed.  The flavours outcomes of the meat are quite distinct, with the latter considered more tender after cooking due to the increased fat distributed throughout the flesh.

Of course the meat production chain has different issues attached to it as well.  Cattle feed lots are the main source of meat production in the USA, and increasingly elsewhere.  However if you have ever watched Food Inc you will know that feed lots appear to be grossly inappropriate for the welfare of the animals.  And, also become potential for ghettos of e-coli multiplication.

Intuitively it would seem that feed lots would also be producing greater methane and other gases, or carbon equivalents.  Think of all the production of grains, then the transporting of that feed to the lot, and then the carbon generated by all that compared to a bunch of cows on a paddock eating grass.  

But this study says that feed lots actually produces “lower GHG emissions than grass fed production”  claiming “the additional effort in producing and transporting feeds is effectively offset by the increased efficiency of meat production in feedlots.”  

This seems nigh on impossible.  Then, speaking with a cattleman last evening I was told of a product called Rumensin.  It is a supplementary feed that increases energy for each mouthful of feed in cattle, by changing the microbal population in the rumen of cattle.  This then increases the efficiency of meat production.

That is, this enables cattle to get larger on the same amount of feed.  Great for cattle ranchers, because for the same feed resource, they earn more [assuming that the price per kilo remains constant].  And this Rumensin can be fed to grazing or lot fed cattle, and also dairy cattle [so as to produce greater milk quantity for the same amount of feed].

Interestingly, it also claims that the product “reduces the production of waste gasses, carbon dioxide and methane”.  Hmmm!!

Unfortunately, if accidently ingested by horses it appears that it is fatal.

There is also a sheep version which was tested by the Australia Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. They have strict limits on ingestion of this product by sheep that produce milk (nil) and 7 days limits pre-slaughter for export meats.  It appears that 1 day limits apply for the local market, but the paper does show limited acceptance by most continents of any tainting whatsoever.

And another piece of research says that “eating red meat three times a week results in between 164kg* to 258kg**of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions a year - vastly different to figures quoted that claim up to 1.5 tonnes.”

So I guess the take on this is that eating the meat from cattle has a much lower production of carbon equivalents than previously thought.  So eat up, the effect on the climate is lower than we thought.  But I will be ordering the grass fed organic version.  

Bumper corn crop equals more overweight

The blog I wrote on peak food looked at a number of issues, and suggested that maybe we had reached peak food some time ago.  This was based on a billion people hungry, and more on the way.  

Have you watched the movie Food Inc?  One of the issues about which I learnt in the movie is the overwhelming number of cattle feed lots that produce the meat for America.  A vast majority of them use corn as the main feed.  The biological structure of cows is not intended to be fed grains, and especially corn, which is high in sugars.  E-Coli has been linked to these feed lot animals as a direct consequence.

Cattle are intended to forage in grassland, or grazing lands.  That is how their bodies have evolved.  

There are other problems such as corn fed to the cattle may have chemical residue from production.  Or who can forget the widespread BSE [mad cows disease] from other non forage feed.  Ruminants (that is, cows or cattle) are less likely to experience digestive problems (e.g. acidosis and enterotoxemia) if they are consuming high forage diets rather than grains.

Rumen acidosis is also called grain poisoning, and can cause death or at least as a subclinical condition causing lost productivity [growth of meat for sale to you the consumer] and unhealthy cattle.  Enterotoxemia in cattle is also known as pulpy kidney, and occurs with excessive grain and insufficient forage.  The flow of food through the intestine [eq.] slows down or the bacteria living in the intestine multiplies and produces more toxins than the animals antibodies can cope with.  The outcome of this awful problem is often death with 24 hours.

Of course, for both these problems, there is a preventative measure:  vaccinations.  As it says in Food Inc, I recall [from many years ago]:  first we create the problems by feeding ruminant animals the wrong food, then rather than going back to the correct food for their biological structure, we invest in ever more ways to prevent the problems created by us in the first place.  This then, again, leads to more problems. 

As this United States Department of Agriculture reports, the cow cannot directly utilise most feed components, even simple sugars.  It relies on rumen microbes to convert feed.  And each cow has its own population of rumen bacteria. Good old trusty Wikipedia gives a good and detailed description of the process here.

Some feed lots “finish” the cattle on corn.  Actually it is not uncommon for many animals to be fed grains for fattening purposes.  Or during severe droughts, when there is no other fodder available. However, one of the consequences is that there is marbling of the fat throughout the beast.  This, it  is suggested, makes for a better tasting steak, for example, as the fat softens and moistens the meat during cooking.

It also adds unnecessary fat to the diet, a diet that the First Lady is trying to change. As the Food Inc story unfolds it makes clear that one in two Hispanics will have diabetes within a few decades, and one in three caucasian Amercians, from poor diets.  Lean meat, without the fat marbling,  is far superior in terms of protein benefits and health.

But it is difficult to argue against the meat industry, as Oprah Winfrey will tell you.  Is America the only country in the world where a company / association can sue for defamation?  

Just as we keep drilling and mining unsustainable sources of fossil fuel, so we are seeking and producing unsustainable sources of protein.  Unsustainable at both ends of the value chain, at production and at the consumption end.

Bloomberg is not the only news outlet that I read, but it is often interesting.  This article on a record corn crop to feed cows, reminded me of the problems we have and the links between food, water, oil, and carbon.  That record corn crop would be better placed being used for ethanol to replace oil.  Let the cows roam free and improve everybody’s health.