A frank analysis of Canada’s energy destiny ( Whitehorse Star Comment )
What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.
What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.
It would involve examination of details, yes, but while holding other strands of thought and questioning in reach.
The public education mandate of news outlets, media, academia and government agencies has much degraded to a pushing of information bits. The offered illusions of instantly making complete sense actually stop the public from even getting going and asking questions to build comprehension.
The energy economy and climate survival outlook is not looking good based on problem-solving resources that become narrower and narrower.
A lot of the pushed information does not speak a language that interacts with the need for people and their heritage to know something out of themselves, from their experience, so they are not stuck with spoon-fed messages.
Walter Benjamin writes in The Storyteller (1936): “Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement [which he thinks is wrong] is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’ ” and
“With the [First] World War, a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer in communicable experience?”
1914 Western civilization succumbed to a universe of destruction that choked it in rivers of blood under a “storm of steel” (Ernst Juenger).
And yet the failure of hyper-nationalism and militarism might come to pale against an even deadlier surprise looming now, running out of energy.
It could or would mean scores of people freezing, starving and dying in their homes while other folks or the supplies they need don’t reach workplaces anymore.
A key requirement for an industrial society is and will be affordable transportation. A few short years of fracking for oil and gas (U.S. government Energy Information Agency) fumes are a dead end and a waste, also in this regard.
That’s partly because expensive transportation, logging, mining and farming equipment standards turn over slowly, only in decades.
The remote and vast Yukon’s energy security for long shipping lifelines is super-vulnerable.
Overdue kick starters to electrify those equipment infrastructures matter at any rate of their implementation, as e-technology is here to stay.
Typically, fossil fuel-based power or drive trains cannot compete outside of wasteful monopoly and subsidy regimes. Bringing down the cost of doing business is relevant.
That’s because electric motors produce roughly a sevenfold gas mileage or other physical work advantage over combustion engines from an equivalent energy amount and expense.
Equally to August 1914, catastrophe threatens to be more speedy than any remedy could be, while its causes are hidden by years of denial and jingoism and then cannot be undone.
Current and chronic energy starvation will harden. It will become acute not from a lack of drilling for oil and gas but from drilling too much.
For those who do not understand industrial energy systems, it may sound counterintuitive at first. Herein lies the problem, and in misleading propaganda, of course, by armies of pundits from the CBC to the Sun Media Corp.
The low-hanging fruit, the affordable fossil fuel, the productive conventional resources started to really fatigue a generation ago when oil and gas production peaked in its usable outcome.
The understanding of affordable energy as the low-hanging fruit is important in King Hubbert’s 1956 landmark publication Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.
And it was refined by Charles Hall as the net energy outcome of energy production.
It also means the analysis of a crude oil production peak is valid today, calculated and timed by the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert to occur around 2000.
Since then, oil use in the world economy, minus in the oil extraction itself, declines.
Consequently, oil and especially diesel shortages happen the world over, even in Alberta, 2008; supply and affordability fall short of growing structural demand.
Demand destruction and recession see-saw or alternate with price spikes, shortages and price volatility triggered by economic up jitters.
Even though the International Energy Agency (IEA) had consistently predicted global crude oil production to exceed 90 million barrels per day before 2010, production plateaued since 2005, and, to this day, never reached those 90 million.
Partly in response to the widespread shale reserve swindle, the IEA has introduced a new term – “proven-plus-probable oil reserves” – of which they locate 80 per cent in the Middle East (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).
“The Middle East, the only large source of low-cost oil, remains at the centre of the longer-term oil outlook” (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).
Except for the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, through half a century, no new elephant field has come in sight or on line. An all-important one per cent of fields produce over half of the world’s oil.
Most of the oil and gas industry efficiencies and affordability came from these giants; without them, there would probably be very little oil and gas industry at all.
Peak oil is alive and well in a Robert L. Hirsch (long-time U.S. government energy advisor) co-authored 2009 study, picked up by the Christian Science Monitor.
It predicts that creeping and also a steep decline of some time-pressurized and water-injected fields will transition into abrupt exhaustion and failure.
“As the world’s giant fields continue to age and more start to decline, we can therefore expect the annual decline in their rate of production to worsen. ” (Christian Science Monitor online, April 12, 2013 “The decline of the world’s major oil fields”.)
As we shall see, tarsands and shales are a subsidy and financial game with no useful energy production, but still, their gross output is counted as part of the world’s stagnating total oil output.
All of this follows a global reserve discovery peak, also correctly predicted by Hubbert, for 1960.
It is the same year Tommy Douglas advocates for a constitutional Bill of Rights, Marshall McLuhan begins (re) writing Understanding Media, Elvis Presley appears in the movie G.I. Blues and J.F.K. is elected U.S. President, all of it a very long time ago. Too long and too complete of a decline for oil exploration to recover from.
Before that time, significant more new oil and gas was found than was used. Then, less and less was found, and, especially significantly, not a single new super field anymore, except for the said Tengiz Field in 1979.
The opening up of significant new oil and gas prospects collapsed a very long time ago. The petrochemical manufacturing resource has been stolen from a near and far future. Energy has alternative sources, not manufacturing.
Bitumen from tarsands as well as fracking for unconventional shale oil and gas cause some fuss in perception, not useful energy or resource production.
Fracking and tar mining of entire regions of Canada into a resemblance of First World War battlefields even beats those infernal guns in the poisoning of water and air, and, like then, takes away a lot of lives, treasure and energy.
There is confusing frack hype until we deflate it by bringing into the equation Prof. Charles Hall of State University of New York, who specializes in energy economics and ecology.
The energy that can be used, versus the one that is produced, Hall defines as net energy.
Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant. The second and final part of his commentary will be published Wednesday.
Find out in part two what net energy does re. jobs, economy and climate. Andrew Nikiforuk’s stories in The Tyee might be useful further reading; “Ailing Shale Gas Returns Force a Drilling Treadmill” (June 27).
By Peter Becker
What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.
What makes the energy issue hard to grasp is the need for understanding its complexity, not as a fancy but at minimum.
It would involve examination of details, yes, but while holding other strands of thought and questioning in reach.
The public education mandate of news outlets, media, academia and government agencies has much degraded to a pushing of information bits. The offered illusions of instantly making complete sense actually stop the public from even getting going and asking questions to build comprehension.
The energy economy and climate survival outlook is not looking good based on problem-solving resources that become narrower and narrower.
A lot of the pushed information does not speak a language that interacts with the need for people and their heritage to know something out of themselves, from their experience, so they are not stuck with spoon-fed messages.
Walter Benjamin writes in The Storyteller (1936): “Information, however, lays claim to prompt verifiability. The prime requirement [which he thinks is wrong] is that it appear ‘understandable in itself’ ” and
“With the [First] World War, a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer in communicable experience?”
1914 Western civilization succumbed to a universe of destruction that choked it in rivers of blood under a “storm of steel” (Ernst Juenger).
And yet the failure of hyper-nationalism and militarism might come to pale against an even deadlier surprise looming now, running out of energy.
It could or would mean scores of people freezing, starving and dying in their homes while other folks or the supplies they need don’t reach workplaces anymore.
A key requirement for an industrial society is and will be affordable transportation. A few short years of fracking for oil and gas (U.S. government Energy Information Agency) fumes are a dead end and a waste, also in this regard.
That’s partly because expensive transportation, logging, mining and farming equipment standards turn over slowly, only in decades.
The remote and vast Yukon’s energy security for long shipping lifelines is super-vulnerable.
Overdue kick starters to electrify those equipment infrastructures matter at any rate of their implementation, as e-technology is here to stay.
Typically, fossil fuel-based power or drive trains cannot compete outside of wasteful monopoly and subsidy regimes. Bringing down the cost of doing business is relevant.
That’s because electric motors produce roughly a sevenfold gas mileage or other physical work advantage over combustion engines from an equivalent energy amount and expense.
Equally to August 1914, catastrophe threatens to be more speedy than any remedy could be, while its causes are hidden by years of denial and jingoism and then cannot be undone.
Current and chronic energy starvation will harden. It will become acute not from a lack of drilling for oil and gas but from drilling too much.
For those who do not understand industrial energy systems, it may sound counterintuitive at first. Herein lies the problem, and in misleading propaganda, of course, by armies of pundits from the CBC to the Sun Media Corp.
The low-hanging fruit, the affordable fossil fuel, the productive conventional resources started to really fatigue a generation ago when oil and gas production peaked in its usable outcome.
The understanding of affordable energy as the low-hanging fruit is important in King Hubbert’s 1956 landmark publication Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.
And it was refined by Charles Hall as the net energy outcome of energy production.
It also means the analysis of a crude oil production peak is valid today, calculated and timed by the petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert to occur around 2000.
Since then, oil use in the world economy, minus in the oil extraction itself, declines.
Consequently, oil and especially diesel shortages happen the world over, even in Alberta, 2008; supply and affordability fall short of growing structural demand.
Demand destruction and recession see-saw or alternate with price spikes, shortages and price volatility triggered by economic up jitters.
Even though the International Energy Agency (IEA) had consistently predicted global crude oil production to exceed 90 million barrels per day before 2010, production plateaued since 2005, and, to this day, never reached those 90 million.
Partly in response to the widespread shale reserve swindle, the IEA has introduced a new term – “proven-plus-probable oil reserves” – of which they locate 80 per cent in the Middle East (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).
“The Middle East, the only large source of low-cost oil, remains at the centre of the longer-term oil outlook” (World Energy Outlook, IEA, 2013).
Except for the Tengiz oil field in Kazakhstan, through half a century, no new elephant field has come in sight or on line. An all-important one per cent of fields produce over half of the world’s oil.
Most of the oil and gas industry efficiencies and affordability came from these giants; without them, there would probably be very little oil and gas industry at all.
Peak oil is alive and well in a Robert L. Hirsch (long-time U.S. government energy advisor) co-authored 2009 study, picked up by the Christian Science Monitor.
It predicts that creeping and also a steep decline of some time-pressurized and water-injected fields will transition into abrupt exhaustion and failure.
“As the world’s giant fields continue to age and more start to decline, we can therefore expect the annual decline in their rate of production to worsen. ” (Christian Science Monitor online, April 12, 2013 “The decline of the world’s major oil fields”.)
As we shall see, tarsands and shales are a subsidy and financial game with no useful energy production, but still, their gross output is counted as part of the world’s stagnating total oil output.
All of this follows a global reserve discovery peak, also correctly predicted by Hubbert, for 1960.
It is the same year Tommy Douglas advocates for a constitutional Bill of Rights, Marshall McLuhan begins (re) writing Understanding Media, Elvis Presley appears in the movie G.I. Blues and J.F.K. is elected U.S. President, all of it a very long time ago. Too long and too complete of a decline for oil exploration to recover from.
Before that time, significant more new oil and gas was found than was used. Then, less and less was found, and, especially significantly, not a single new super field anymore, except for the said Tengiz Field in 1979.
The opening up of significant new oil and gas prospects collapsed a very long time ago. The petrochemical manufacturing resource has been stolen from a near and far future. Energy has alternative sources, not manufacturing.
Bitumen from tarsands as well as fracking for unconventional shale oil and gas cause some fuss in perception, not useful energy or resource production.
Fracking and tar mining of entire regions of Canada into a resemblance of First World War battlefields even beats those infernal guns in the poisoning of water and air, and, like then, takes away a lot of lives, treasure and energy.
There is confusing frack hype until we deflate it by bringing into the equation Prof. Charles Hall of State University of New York, who specializes in energy economics and ecology.
The energy that can be used, versus the one that is produced, Hall defines as net energy.
Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant. The second and final part of his commentary will be published Wednesday.
Find out in part two what net energy does re. jobs, economy and climate. Andrew Nikiforuk’s stories in The Tyee might be useful further reading; “Ailing Shale Gas Returns Force a Drilling Treadmill” (June 27).
By Peter Becker
Part 2: Our nation is swiftly becoming an energy loser ( Whitehorse Star Comment )
The first part of this two-part commentary was published Tuesday.
The first part of this two-part commentary was published Tuesday.
Details of “net energy” are being discussed or criticized.
However, the principle of a need for a significant enough surplus is hard to refute. Ignoring the dimension probably is dumber than a mouse or any being could afford to be.
Industrial energy production is only affordable or economically viable if for one unit of energy invested in the process, say for one oil barrel of energy equivalents (electricity, natural gas and renewables used also count), there are a minimum of 10 to 15 units return or surplus.
Economists who work in the field refer to net energy also as net energy gain, energy surplus, energy balance (between input and output) or EROI (energy return on energy invested).
Most counter-arguments are poorly thought out and merely variations that under-build the fundamentals – such as financial accounting would be more relevant than net energy, when profitability actually follows the structural energy price and surplus.
Among the examples is Canada, which is quickly becoming an energy loser as it shifts into low-quality unconventional oil and gas extraction, as increasingly expensive make-work, not real jobs.
No amount of creative accounting can take away the bleeding caused by those production costs that are in the ballpark of a long-term global affordability threshold for oil.
And there is no room for profits and royalties.
We know the cycle: when the crude price does go up, it is soon followed by demand destruction with its price dip.
China, Denmark and Germany, even Ontario, Manitoba and Gamesa Corp. in Spain build economic strength, especially with high EROI figures of wind power that is somewhere between 40, 60, perhaps already reaching as high as 80.
Norway’s wealth, as once Alberta’s, was accumulated from conventional crude oil with 20-30 EROI, but the country has now decided to pull back from frack and tarsands investments, all out in favour of renewables.
The distinction between conventional and unconventional is not 100 per cent but perhaps can be judged 99 per cent of the time.
It becomes meaningful and clear along the EROI scale, which is further backed up by conventional reservoir characteristics in the geology, vs. unconventional tight conditions.
Even the latest intensity increases in earth-shattering fracking force (break the bank, all right) break out no more than five per cent – eight per cent of oil and gas locked in the shale rock porosity.
The net energy equation can be compared to useful net income or net revenue vs. income before deductions, which does not buy anything.
If, for example, hourly net wages go down from $30 to 30 cents, it is bad news, and barely affords an unheated cardboard box as a home.
The B.C., Alberta and federal governments are building debt in this way by subsidizing fracking and tarsands toward the economic ruin of generations.
Hall explains that since about 2000, the amount of energy society and economy are provided with from combined conventional and unconventional drilling, including tar sands, is shrinking firmly.
It also means more and more affirmation that the late King Hubbert is right on track with his emblematic peak oil analysis.
Precision of net energy accounting, like all accounting, has a natural wiggle room, but the health and honesty of the figures are vital for survival.
Recently, the Texas government’s Railroad Commission reviewed data submitted by the Texas shale gas producers to the IEA and found they were overstated by 60 per cent. It is unheard of.
In 2009, the Yukon government suppressed the Mt. Sumanik wind power study IR YCS-YEC-1-1 because it showed wind to be competitive.
The study demonstrates wind can produce energy at half the cost of the Mayo B hydro extension and with better base load reliability.
Mt. Sumanik has a shorter interconnection distance to the large power consumption of Whitehorse and to the large Aishihik Lake hydro reservoir, which absorbs and converts wind energy into switchable hydro power.
Old and new renewable energy can work well together in Yukon to meet a growing demand. Wind in Yukon has a record and expectation for a 10 per cent annual variation over hydro, with 30 per cent.
Mid-range and long-range anticipation, in the face of the climate crisis, for wind is also more stable than for hydro reservoir levels.
According to a cross-section of world industry data, conventional oil and gas is down from about a 100 EROI of historical gushers, that built industrial strength and wealth, to a current net energy surplus of about 20, 25 at best (Qatar, Russia, Iran and Norway).
Energy surplus figures for tarsands mining, coalbed and shale fracking are somewhere between two and five, up to six at best; tarsands steam extraction as well as LNG from frack gas data indicate an energy production of around zero net energy units.
All future and half of current tarsands resources that are to be extracted are deep and therefore accessed and only accessible by the bridge to nowhere steam extraction method.
One begins to understand rising indications that potential investors for B.C. LNG terminals, as well as Keystone, Kinder Morgan expansion and Northern Gateway pipelines are running for the hills.
These pipelines and most LNG terminals will never go ahead, but it helps the speculators to cite First Nation and environmental resistance so they can hide economic failure.
Canada and the U.S. have been “over-fracked and over-drilled” (Matthias Bichsel, project and technology director at Shell, who stopped money losing frack investments) to a degree that fortunately other resources like gold, rare earth metals or bauxite are not exhausted.
Obviously, the general political process and especially academic conversation have frozen up in their facilitation of an oil energy fiction.
First Nations (and general public) throughout Canada are increasingly subjected to consultations that are illegal fraud because they have predetermined outcomes.
The judges of many court decisions who have said so are not “activist judges” because they can still read what a dictionary says about “consultation”.
Another massive failure lies in the un-Canadian lack of true diversity that is expressed by the co-opting of environmental and political opposition into some sort of a petrostate conformism or streamlining.
There is discontent with the destruction ravaged on Canadian lands as a prelude to the coming energy starvation. But too few are able to speak up clearly.
The slogan “Put a Price on Carbon” has become the mantra that insults people’s intelligence by getting them to march in lockstep and lull their awareness, and it is not an accident.
It is a left and right wing problem; environmental and conservative ignorance meets neoliberal and neoconservative cynicism.
It works in terms of implemented policy but also as a talking point that either way counteracts energy security and low or no emission strategies.
“Put a Price on Carbon” was introduced as the oil industry’s fighting word against renewable energy reform that was initiated or inspired by Jimmy Carter following the 1973 oil crunch.
The carbon price idea is to think globally and defer action locally, to present a green washed image that locks up policy within fossil fuel concepts and seeks to restrict renewable energy to cosmetics in three ways.
- The lie of cheap oil, when fuel expenses really are at and beyond pain thresholds, serves the fiction that carbon taxes and offsets would supposedly nudge people’s GHG behaviour, in a sort of a shopping aisle scenario.
It works nowhere because in reality, filling the heating oil tank in a rental home or driving to work for many is not a luxury choice they would abstain from.
Even more so, not when competitive zero emission infrastructures are artificially suppressed by the elites.
Some confused minds even think allowing independent power producers (IPPs) of renewable energy means privatization, when it is the strategy of big oil affiliates to privatize public utilities.
The Yukon Energy Corp. was attacked in this way 2009, but employees and the Yukon public fought privatization off successfully.
Grid Feed Tariffs, or Feed in Tariffs by which IPPs can sell renewable energy back to the grid, have been adopted in Yukon, on suggestion by the author.
FITs and renewable energy IPPs bring an energy market and democratic trends back, and are a mark of successful industrial countries, not carbon taxing or cap and trade.
- “Put a Price on Carbon” says, Big Oil is a market player, and thereby hides it is a militaristically minded cartel. Renewable energy is the currency in a market for growing public utilities and private entities.
Close to 100 per cent of renewable energy industries are incentivized by infrastructure leadership, like building electric truck fast charge station nets, and recognizing energy pricing, not carbon pricing.
Part of the carbon pricing diversion from a practical market is the emission offset speculation which, by design, not by accident, acts beyond community reach for a practical accountability.
The Pacific Carbon Trust uses carbon tax money to fund northern B.C. gas fracking operations (all is revenue neutral, of course, adding a revenue and public benefit zero twist to the carbon tax).
Rainforest clear-cutting is often carbon offset financed in similar ways; one famous example is the European Union biodiesel scheme in Indonesia.
- It is well studied and documented that GHG trends and individual energy choices almost completely follow mostly regional and national infrastructure planning, and not the other way around, as “Put a Price on Carbon” falsely suggests.
“Put a Price on Carbon” is a sneaky back door entry of imposing new Margaret Thatcher-style flat taxes on people.
This exploits the climate crisis and diverts from understanding it properly, which prevents effective door-opening to renewable energy in North America and especially Canada more than anywhere else.
The big lie of carbon pricing is, supposedly the economy in general causes climate change, and not fossil fuel monopolies.
In conclusion, from David Suzuki to Exxon Mobile to Barack Obama, none of the carbon price promoters present evidence or serious review on the concept.
However, on the survival issue, they do park their autonomy and responsibility as citizens, similar to the jingoistic leaders sliding into the First World War.
And those with independent analysis on carbon pricing, taxing and offset trading, like the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation and the late renewable energy pioneer, Hermann Scheer, are clear, “Put a Price on Carbon” is oil propaganda, and it is wrong.
Even limited cataclysms, such as 9/11 or the 1970 FLQ crisis, have a nasty habit of producing national front and War Measures Act-style scenarios that are better considered proactively and cautiously than naively left out of sight.
And yet Canada might have a slim chance to recover its wits in time.
Chucking the neoliberal make-belief of “Put a Price on Carbon” could be the icebreaker to clear the way.
Peter Becker is a Whitehorse energy consultant.
By Peter Becker
