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2005-04-14
I just read the most fascinating and disturbing article called The Long Emergency, published in Rolling Stone. It discusses the inevitable end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era and it's not pleasant. It appears this year, 2005, may be the world's global oil-production peak. From here on out it's all downhill. Says the author, James Howard Kunstler: "The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left. That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is much more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality and located mostly in places where the people hate us. A substantial amount of it will never be extracted." OK, then, we'll just switch over to hydrogen, right? Not so fast says, Kunstler: "The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas. The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also numerous severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas, especially in storage and transport. Very depressing article. The world, especially America, is in for a rough ride over the next few decades.
1:56 PM
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