Report from ASPO: Dark clouds, no silver linings

The details differ, but the broad message is consistent. Saudi oil production has peaked, according to some; others see a peak in the future, but a peak nonetheless. Jeffrey Brown, an independent geologist, was particularly bleak on Thursday, showing how exports from the world's biggest exporters, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, are going to run up against a combination of increasing domestic demand at home and declining or flat production, and shipments to other countries are going to fall, if they haven't already.

David Hughes of the Canadian Geological Survey, echoed Matt Simmons, peak oil's best known proselytizer and the day's luncheon speaker, in saying that there will be a coming conflict between the world's desire to cut carbon emissions against sustainability of energy supplies, and that the latter will win out. He called it "the elephant that is going to be sitting on our chest."

The mainstream media is not covering the issue, thundered a few other speakers, and the world's leaders need to wake up the general public to the growing problem. (The Barrel was surprised, in an era of now $90 oil, that media attendance seemed to be minimal.)

And so on. That's the overriding message, but here are a few specific items:

--If there was one sort of optimistic, smiley-face place to be, it was outside the main hall, where a plug-in hybrid was on display. It was organized by Plug-in Partners, which is under the direction of the city of Austin, Texas.

Jamie Mitchell, who stood next to the converted Prius taking questions, is realistic about the car. None are made by any auto manufacturers, and if you spend the money to have your hybrid made into a plug-in, your warranty is yanked. The cost to convert the vehicle on display was more than $14,000.

But there's still something so futuristic about that plug running out of the left rear bumper. The car can go 30 miles before the engine needs to be activated, and when it draws power from the electric grid, it's as if you're buying gasoline at 75 cts/gallon.

Where plug-in hybrids are particularly intriguing is not in what they are doing when moving, but what they might do sitting still. As Mitchell noted, and others have pointed out, if the electric grid has excess input, say, for example, during a windy night when windmills are feeding lots of electricity into transmission lines, that electricity can be going to recharge plug-ins. But say that fully charged car doesn't leave the owner's driveway the next day, and it's 97 degrees F, and there's humidity to match. Electricity demand soars. Mitchell said if the car is plugged into the grid, power can be drawn from the battery back on to the grid to meet peak demand, so it's almost as if the batteries become a way of storing wind or solar power.

--David Pimentel of Cornell has long been academia’s leading critic of ethanol, but he has company. Dr. Kyriacos Zygourakis, a professor of chemical & biomolecular engineering at Rice, delivered his verdict on biofuels. His key points:
1) The only way you can consider ethanol to be a net energy provider is if you count the energy provided by the distillers' grain, which is essentially the corn with all the starches taken out of it. (It becomes animal feedstock). He noted that giving an energy credit to distillers' grain is not widely accepted as proper
2) If that is done, the improvement in energy yield is about 20%.
3) Moving some ethanol plants to coal-burning for cheaper energy costs is a step backward environmentally, and the greenhouse gas improvement created by ethanol is already mostly non-existent.
4) Cellulosic ethanol might have an energy yield exceeding a factor of eight. But he said there is disagreement about whether the burning of some of the crop to provide energy for the process is going to provide the energy that some analysts predict it will.
5) He was largely positive about biodiesel, because it can be produced and consumed on a local level, e.g., a farmer converts part of his soybean output directly into diesel to run his facilities.
6) Both biodiesel and ethanol are going to take up huge amounts of land to have any sort of significant dent in petroleum consumption. Pimentel has made this point previously, and ironically, was quoted Wednesday in a Wall Street Journal editorial. (Subscription only, so no link).

--Several speakers touched on a familiar topic, that even if the world wants to consume more coal, or build more nuclear plants, or put up more windmills, the rate at which that is going to need to occur is staggering. This was an extreme case, but Scott Pugh, a retired Navy captain, said in order to run all vehicles on hydrogen or nuclear fuel, and assuming we use nuclear power to extract the hydrogen, the world would need to build 10 plants per year for 100 years. Similar analogies by the speakers also provided a torrent of what appeared to be utterly unreachable infrastructure needs.

All in all, a terrific conference. But don't attend unless you've taken your Prozac.