Book reviews from the Christmas Vacation

 I have had lots of time to read during this vacation. After all this a Wyoming winter complete with snow , elk and moose and temps bumping 30 below. If you haven't discovered Neil Bascomb, it's time. This is my third Bascomb book this vacation and it is a dandy. my review follows:

Jan 03, 2019

If you weren't a Neil Bascomb fan before reading this book, you will be afterward. This is my third Bascomb book in the last 2 weeks and it is vintage Bascomb: detailed meticulous research, novel quality character building, excellent diagrams and photos and riveting suspenseful plot timelines . He even includes the passport photo of Eichmann under his assumed name. Neil Bascomb's historical non fiction books read more like action novels and this book is no exception. It is the story of one of history's most evil murderers, Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi chosen to carryout the Final Solution to rid Germany and Europe of all the Jews. It is a story of deception, cruelty and enslavement and extermination of almost 6 million Jews by Hitler's Third Reich under the aegis and authority of Exterminator in Chief, Colonel Adolph Eichmann. The book follows the secretive henchman from his humble beginnings to organizing the "Final Solution" to his clever escapes after the war finally to his ugly bunker shaped concrete house in the small town of San Fernando south of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's a story of: you can run but you can't hide, and the book chronicles the efforts of a variety of Nazi hunters tracking down the worst of the worst, many of whom landed in friendly despotic and protective South American countries at the end of the war with the aid of organizations like the Vatican and the Catholic Church..
Eichmann might have died in obscurity in Argentina like many other prominent Nazis . He was secretive and fiendishly clever covering his tracks but he had a son, Nick Eichmann, who shared his dad's anti Semitic views and couldn't keep his mouth shut. He briefly dated a young Argentine woman named Sylvia Hermann and had bragged about his father who had an important job in Nazi Germany. Nick Eichmann gloried in the annihilation of the Jews. This disturbed Sylvia whose own father was half Jewish. Amazingly and inexplicably, after Adolf brought his family to join him in Argentina, he allowed them to keep the Eichmann name even though he had changed his name to Ricardo Klement. This proved his undoing. The story progresses with the Israeli Mossad pursuing leads and dead ends until they finally located Ricardo Klement in a hovel on a barren plot without electricity or running water. The bulk of the story is how a small group of Jews and Israelis mounted a difficult and dangerous kidnapping of Eichmann behind enemy lines in Nazi friendly Argentina. The kidnapping succeeded and Eichmann was tried , convicted and hanged in Israel and the agents responsible disappeared into woodwork for decades, keeping their secret. Near the end of their lives the details emerged and Bascomb and his helpers have done a masterful job uncovering those details. The book is full of surprising anecdotes. For example the El Al flight to retrieve Eichmann descended out of the clouds on approach to the Buenos Aires Airport and almost crashed into a hill because the navigator was using feet as was the rest of the aviation world but Argentina was still using meters. There are many such stories adding suspense to the capture and Bascomb does a good job weaving them into his narrative. If there is anything lacking in the narrative I think it was the failure of Neil Bascomb to explain even briefly the basis for the extermination of all non Aryans, He dealt solely with the Jewish Holocaust and doesn't mention that millions of other" untermenschen"(inferior peoples) in Germany and occupied countries had their own Holocaust. This included homosexuals, gypsies, mentally and physically disabled, Slavs, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Romanians Poles, blacks and many others who didn't meet their racially perfect criteria and were also slaughtered. But on the other hand it is hard to imagine a super secret Gypsy intelligence operation with the resources and operational skills powerful enough to track down mass killers all over the world to match the Mossad. I would like to mention that as a child I vividly remember this capture of Eichmann and it was the entire spectacle that brought home to me and the world the evil wrought by the Nazis extermination of the untermenschen now known as the Holocaust. 

Here is my review of The Winter Fortress, a masterpiece of sabotage.....
 
Neil Bascomb has done it again with The Winter Fortress, a superbly researched tale of the epic attack and escape of a group of Norwegian saboteurs upon the Vermork hydro electric facility in central Norway during WW2. As a bit of a war buff I had stumbled upon The Escape Artists written by Bascomb telling the tale of a great escape by a group of RAF fliers from a german prison in WW1. I was hooked on Neil Bascomb after that and hoped this book would be its equal. It was even better because this sabotage was world shaking in its importance. Vermork's significance lay in its generation of "heavy water", Deuterium, one of the isotopes of water which at the time was one of the paths to building a nuclear bomb. Nazi Germany was following down that path in a frantic attempt to build one to win the war. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) in England , the new Intelligence organization, was well aware of Germany's research program and mounted a sustained effort to stop this program at all costs. This included training native Norwegian in the dark arts of sabotage, evasion and escape and launching preemptive strikes on Vermork from the air which failed miserably and drove the Germans to make it an impregnable fortress. Neil Bascomb turns the sabotage attempt by a courageous band of Norwegians into a riveting Mission Impossible tale. Bascomb does a marvelous job with character development of the saboteurs and the German scientists and provides detailed historical background of this period of the war in occupied Norway. Bascomb's trademark detailed maps and photos lend verisimilitude to the epic raid and escape. At the time the Allies did not know how close the Germans were to completion of their atomic bomb and the heavy water method of concentrating the uranium isotopes was not the method chosen by the American scientists over the pond at the Manhattan Project who were trying another method of centrifuge concentration. As it happened the Deuterium path was too slow and expensive to yield a valuable bomb for Germany in time to win the war but this was not known at the time and stopping the German Atomic Bomb program was of the highest priority. The author takes the reader on a wild at times almost cinematic ride as the courageous Norwegians launch their impossible task. This was my second Bascomb book and I am binge reading all of Bascomb's books in our wonderful Wyoming library. I urge you to do the same.

And here is a brief review of Neil Bascomb tale of a great escape near the end of WW 1....

 Neil Bascomb has written a gripping account of the escape of a daring band of mostly RAF fliers from Holzminden prison in Germany near the end of WW1. Bascomb  buiilds up to the escape by lending background to how the war started and stalled out, what military aviation was like in those early days and he delves deep into the personal characteristics and personalities of the principals involved. The actual escape is a page turner. Bascomb does a superb job  of  research and the pictures and maps and diagrams presented are a great help to appreciate the magnitude of their feat. I finished the book within a day of the 100th anniversary of the end of WW 1.

­­

Saving the planet: hard facts and simple solutions(contains a pre xmas rant)

Now that the UN Climate Conference COP 24 in Poland has wrapped up we all know what we need to do. The only way to reduce emissions of CO2 and save the planet is to stop using fossil energy and switch to renewable energy. Exactly what would we have to do? I mean, what specific steps? I read the other day that 100 globalized companies are responsible for 70% of industrial emissions The article did not mention who they are but I would assume they are the power companies, mining companies, shipping and transportation companies and manufacturing companies needing vast amounts of carbon based fuel like for concrete and sheet rock. It would seem that they should reduce their emissions since the impact would be far greater than asking us serfs to reduce our carbon footprint by riding our bikes to our cubicles. Surely they could stop making so much electricity, mining and refining and moving stuff around.  To see where we can cut CO2 emissions we need to know the sector energy consumption (EIA 2015):Warning:contains some irony and sarcasm which may not be suitable for all viewers):

Industrial 33%,Transportation 29%,Residential 20%, commercial 18%.

Over 50% of industrial energy  is for chemicals(22%),petroleum refining(16%), metals, ferrous and non ferrous(14%). Concrete and building materials particularly gypsum are each about 10%. In order to cut the industrial sector we will have to de-industrialize the country:mining and refining less, reducing chemical production.  Easy enough.

Transportation  energy: gasoline uses 61%, diesel 21%(seems low!), and av fuel 12%.  This seems obvious: we will drive less, fly less and ship less. The way to reduce energy here is stop commuting to work        and school and shopping centers in gas guzzling suvs and pickup trucks and take public transportation.No more flying vacations to Cabo. Un fortunately our suburban lifestyle of sprawling housing, shopping and work sites mandates the private automobile. Outside of a few large cities on the East Coast, mass transportation doesn’t exist. J. Kunstler describes the American suburban experiment as the “greatest misallocation of resources in world history.” The easy solution here is to leave that vinyl and sheetrock shitbox in the burbs and move to a walkable city and find a new job where the kids can bike to school and play in the park. Get a mortgage from George Bailey at the Building and loan and fire up your American dream. What’s not to like? If you got a wife like Donna Reed you’re practically there. A guardian angel will come in handy, so find one.

Residential: Most of the energy use here is heating/AC  and lighting,  appliances and electronics. To cut energy use here we need smaller insulated houses with solar water heating and energy efficient appliances.  Move out of those slab sided McMansions and into  smaller houses.  Maybe move into a tiny house. I have personal experience with this suggestion. I built a super insulated 300 sq ft tiny house for $22,000  which consumes almost no energy even in a Wyoming climate. It has the additional advantage of becoming an escape module from toothless meth snorting zombies if the SHTF.  I could tow it to Manitoba behind the Cummins and live among peace loving unarmed taciturn Canadians. This energy sector offers the easiest opportunity to cut energy use which is almost entirely electricity based. Unplug from the grid and nail   up a few solar panels.Net Zero, brother. Of course there is the issue of taxes and water and sewer……..

Commercial: as expected most energy use here is electricity supplied  heat/AC and lighting.  Once the suburbs wither away so will the big box stores and nail salons and office parks. We will be able to get what we need from Amazon drones flown to Bailey Park landing inside of our white picket fences.

Permit me to now get a bit serious. If we really want to hit the 80% emission reduction of the Paris Accords by 2033  there is only one simple way:price Carbon use. If you want to reduce the use, you have to tax it. This the easiest quickest and best way and would require every person and business to share in the burden. It would mean a tax on fuel,coal and gas, implemented in stages. There would be no breaks for farmers, fishermen , truckers or the military. No subsidies, no exemptions. For this to work it would have to be applied equally world wide to keep the playing field level. A minimal goal would be to consume the same amount of energy per capita as Europe.Americans use twice what Europeans use. We could and should tax  transport fuel  in the US the way most of the world does. The taxes collected could go to programs to mitigate the consequence of de energizing the society. Canadians and Europeans pay $5-7/gallon for fuel and so should Americans. There is virtually no tax on Av Fuel. A $5/gallon tax wouldn’t faze your average Gulstream owner. This simple step would start undoing the damage caused to the planet and the country by virtually free fuel. Oil is a finite precious resource which should be priced like one. Would this one simple step reduce economic growth and GDP? Almost certainly. Increasing economic growth  increases energy use and  increases emissions of world warming gasses. The notion that we can make a wholesale switch to a renewable solar and wind energy economy is a fool’s errand which I have covered in the past and will in the future. It is not affordable, scalable, feasible or sensible.It is something for nothing. It sounds too good to be true and it is. The proponents of this move to a green sustainable economy promise we can continue our way of life by only changing our energy mix. It is patent nonsense. Cheap fossil energy is the reason we have had an industrial revolution and rampant consumerism.  Expensive and depleting  fossil energy will ultimate close that chapter. Fossil energy has taken the work out of men’s hands and off the backs of animals and given that work to machines. Fossil fuel industrial agriculture machines grow food virtually untouched by human hands and has allowed exponential increases in world population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet.The Green Revolution brought about by modified grains, natural  gas fertilizers,  herbicides and pesticides  doubled wheat production from 1950 to 1960. It was no accident that world population also doubled in the last half of the 20^th century. If you grow it they will eat………. and breed. There is no technological or political solution to halt fossil energy depletion. There are only intelligent responses which seem few and rarely voiced. For example we should set aside reserves of fossil fuels for our descendants. Save some for our children. What a unique idea!  We Americans love to blame other people for our problems:politicians, greedy isolated elites, corporate robber barons. We never think to look in the mirror. We have met the enemy and he is us. We have built an unsustainable oil dependent industrial civilization which is starting to collapse. Cheap oil never gets the blame for materialistic consumerism, loss of middle  and working class jobs and inequality resulting in massive migration from rural regions to the slums of Rio, Lagos and Mumbai. Isn’t cheap oil  partially responsible for the fentanyl, oxycodone and meth epidemic killing 40000 a year in flyover country? If machines, robots and automation, and offshoring rendered you dispensable, redundant and deplorable, what might you do? But from the media: a deafening silence except for mawkish sentimental segments of courageous waves of “refugees” pouring out of Central America and Africa who were created by cheap oil. We created them and now we own them? “ Huddled masses yearning to breathe free. We are a nation of immigrants”……… Intelligent, thoughtful reporting of what is happening to our industrial civilization is nonexistent. Most of us know in our gut that our society has jumped the rails but from the big players in the media only event and data reporting, trivial infotainment,human interest pabulum  and fatuous  drivel at times perilously close to propaganda. What’s a poor schmuck to do? An intelligent response is to just stop playing their game, listening to their sermons and voting in the lesser of two evils, buying their stuff, reading their propaganda, eating their garbage and watching their media. Reduce your needs, use your muscles to grow things, fix things, and reuse things. Think about trying to live like your grandmother and start thinking about feathering your nest and finding skills of self reliance and voluntary simplicity.  Get out of debt and get off your butt and make contingency plans. If you have useful skills, pass them on to your children and friends. The current model isn’t working and is beyond repair and redemption and it is time to think about what a new civilization will look like. Do I think that my suggestions to turn things around to save the planet have a snowball’s chance in hell of happening? No. Sorry. Gotta go. My sheep cows and pigs are bawling and need care.

                                COP 24.......A waste of time?

It has been a long time since my last post. This statement reminds me of the old Catholic confession days:”It’s been __days since my last confession”…..
I offer no excuses because a Marine never makes excuses, paraphrasing what  colonel pappy used to say. My “explanation” is that we have been very busy here on our sprawling Rendezvous Mountain Farm trying to grow fodder, irrigate, harvest hay, feed the livestock and keep the elk and moose from destroying our fences. But the current state of affairs in the world does demand a brief return to blogsville, perhaps a post on the Year in Review or some such. Indeed it has been a helluva year for the planet. I’m sorry to report that it has been all bad. Those of you who want happyspeak putting lipstick on one of my Kunekune pigs had best now move your mouse to the “X” and surf elsewhere.
What kind of year has our planetary goddess  Gaea endured? Well, she (Gaea) is hotter than ever and more turbulent. She is too wet in some places and too dry in others.  She is losing insect and animal and bird species at a rate not seen since some of the great species extinctions of the past 500 million years. The insect extinctions have been helped along by the likes of the globalized chemical companies from the vaporous shell of IG Farben and its bastard children:  Bayer, Heochst, BASF and of course now “roundup ready”  Monsanto and Dow. No surprise that this year the Monsanto slut has climbed into bed with Bayer in Germany.  You might recall that it was IG Farben’s brats that brought you those great Nazi products so beloved by goose steppers as Zyclon B which they piped into summer camp showers in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Amazingly these chemical assassins live on, pumping out herbicides and pesticides wiping out species after species under the umbrella of industrial agriculture making money hand over fist. So if a few bees die, what of it? It’s business.
And the markets have been  volatile of late, now in “correction” territory.  Calling them markets is a misnomer. There is no market and I don’t mean just the stock and bond and housing markets. There hasn’t been any market in a decade because the various central banks have killed them. The US markets are dead because the Fed  killed price discovery  with misguided purchases of bank garbage and QE . There is no way to know what anything is worth and if you can’t accurately price what an asset is worth, you have no market. Throw in stock and bond trading based upon algorithms which dominate 70-90% of stock trades and what do you get? No market. The Fed printed trillions of money and gave it to the criminal banksters to “save” the economy(aka:the banks) who then gave the nearly free money to the global corporations and foreign banks bailing them out at the expense of middle classes in the developed world who became poorer.  It's a Zero sum game and as a result the wealthier got wealthier at the expense of the 99% who loaded up on debt to sit in stalled traffic with their financed  400 hp Cummins crew cabs and  SUVs . This printed money sloshed everywhere as corporations and countries and citizens gorged on this cheap debt(money). Where is this all headed? What happens when your dope peddler cuts you off? Right. You guessed it. Does this mean the end of growth?  We can only hope so for the sake of our dear third rock from the sun. The “growth” meme will be hard to kill because economic growth is the Siamese Twin with  energy growth. You can’t have one without the other. And energy growth means more emissions. CO2 emissions went up 1.3% in 1016 and 1.6% in 2017 and 2018 looks to bump up as well. So what is  poor Gaea  to do? The enviro lefties say we can have our cake and cram it down our pie hole too! All we have to do is swap all those stinky coal plants burning Wyoming coal for windmills and solar farms. We can still have growth but it will be clean growth using “Clean” energy instead of dirty energy. And it’s not just our dewy eyed environmentalists mouthing this nonsense. Over there in Katowice, Poland, representatives to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP 24 from a few hundred countries have tried to nail down an agreement to monitor emissions and somehow try to implement the limited targets of the Paris Accord.  The conference didn’t fool a 15 year old Swedish girl who grabbed the mic:https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/17/teen-tells-climate-negotiators-they-arent-mature-enough.html    The problem is that the COP 24 targets were feeble and enforcement nonexistent not to mention that President  Trump pulled out of the previous Paris Accords ages ago. I am not denigrating these well meaning people who think they can save the world by trying to implement sustainable economic strategies switching to “renewable” energy sources. The fact is: we CAN’T. Their assumption is: we CAN. All the world has to do is stop using fossil fuel energy and embark upon a crash program of getting our “renewable” energy from windmills and solar farms. tides etc. Where there is a will, there is a way says COP24. Si se puede. No puedo. To understand why I am shouting No Puedo you need only look at the breakdown of world energy consumption by source in 2015; (from BP):oil 33%, coal 30%,NG 24%,hydro 7%, nuke 4% and others 2%.” Others” includes renewables like ethanol, biomass,wind and solar, geothermal and tides.. Renewables and hydro total about 9%. Hydro is nearly maxed out worldwide. Other organizations like the EIA and the IEA give  renewables 12-13% .  No matter who you source, solar and wind renewables were a tiny fraction in 2015 . They have increased slightly in the past few years but they remain  minute.  In fact in some countries the energy contribution of wind and solar has not played out as hoped despite generous subsidies. The PV boom in Spain resulted in impressive nameplate capacity far above delivered real world capacity. IN Germany the first gen windmills are being torn down and shipped to the third world as the subsidies expire. And here is my considered opinion: they will always be a tiny fraction of the primary energy output and can never replace fossil fuels not the least because they are constructed assembled and transported  using fossil fuels. Renewables only make electricity.  Renewables cannot substitute for oil no matter what Elon Musk tells you. Renewables can’t move plastic salad spinners from China to Walmart!   I do pity the poor reader trying to sort out  all the conflicting opinions in the media concerning a switch to renewable energy.
There is general consensus in the scientific community that global climate change is largely man caused. CO2 emissions is a form of pollution just like the plastics flowing into our oceans. The problem I see with these conferences presented by the scientific community is that they assume that educating the public about the causes and implications of climate change will lead the public to conclude that something needs to be done and that they will get on board.  These writers and speakers tiptoe around what exactly needs to be done to bring down emissions. What needs to be done to bring down emissions is to EMIT LESS! That means using less energy from fossil fuels but as I have pointed out, fossil fuels represent roughly 87% of all primary energy sources. The world has been using less coal of late but more NG has replaced it so emissions have even grown. Those politicians and corporate bigwigs in positions of power know the direct correlation of energy to economic growth and a sudden decrease in energy use will decrease economic growth and generate a recession. Their power  and wealth is dependent upon economic growth. That is why they have fought the idea of using less energy. The greatest polluters are the Industrialized countries. That is where any meaningful reductions of CO2 would have to occur. What’s the chance of that happening? What say you, Donald? The COP24 conference recommended that the wealthy industrialized countries would need to help the newly industrializing ones preferably by encouraging them to adopt renewable energy sources and helping them pay for the adoption. Gaea will not be saved by well meaning pie in the sky ideas like these strategies.  Even if some of these ideas could be implemented,  the amount of energy switching is just too little to make a difference. The World Energy Outlook for 2018 is just out and it acknowledges that emissions are continuing to rise and will continue to rise up to 2040. The Paris accords mention reducing emissions by 80% by 2033 and 100% by 2060. What is the chance of that happening especially in view of steady INCREASE in emissions for the past 3 years?!!! This is devastating news for Goddess Gaea. In a future blogs I would like to show scenarios of what it would be like if we actually had to meet the CO2 reductions of the Paris Accords . At some point this century the world will almost certainly make drastic reductions in emissions of CO2. Can we do it voluntarily or will it be forced upon us?

I have a new post which is best viewed at my word press website           https://www.rendezvousmountainfarm.com/rip-the-oil-age/.
 I decided to post it in its entirety which came to 14 printed pages(egad!), way too long for a blog post I know. It is also a first draft and will need editing but I wanted to do a post which was a wrap up of my previous overly detailed  and long winded posts. My goal was try to integrate it into a comprehensive document of oil depletion analysis and how we here in Jackson might cope with these changes soon to be upon us. I intend to cover those coping strategies  and possible changes in greater detail in future posts, time permitting, but I wanted to get it out there now albeit in crude form. I will certainly make modifications in the future. I should say I pounded it out in one sitting, and it shows!

Mewin Kampf:Struggles of an energy analyst

I thought this might be a good time to post about the difficulties of analyzing the state and trajectory of world energy, specifically with regard to the world's primary energy sources.
Early on in my education I discovered  an exasperating inconsistency  of units from different authors and different databases rendering meaningful conclusions exceedingly difficult.
In my research on fossil energy I decided early on to try to understand it in terms of WORK.  Work has many meanings so stay with me on this and I will try to stay with myself because it is confusing. I consider energy and work to be the key to understanding how the world functions, how civilizations and populations rise and fall and from the point and emphasis of this blog, how wealth is generated fostering the rise of the world's industrial civilization.
       Before the rise of the industrial age plenty of work got done but the bulk of it was in a world made by hand as J. Kunstler notes and by our draft animals. Wind energy came in helping to pump water and grind grains but the world had to wait until the coal mines opened up in Newcastle England. As the mines deepened, getting water out became a real problem and the steam engine was invented burning coal to run water pumps. Oops, better get back on track........ Energy is defined via work. It takes energy to do work. Work is performed when energy acts upon an object moving it a certain distance or an object is displaced as physicists say. The unit of energy  which I want to hoist up and emphasize is the JOULE. It is the most easy to understand unit of energy and by far the most versatile because it relates easily  to all the various sorts of energy. The joule is equal to the energy done by applying a force of 1 NEWTON for one metre. A newton is 1 kg moved 1 meter/sec squared. Usefully the joule is also defined as the power exerted by one watt for one second. It can also be defined in terms of electricity by the amount of heat dissipated with an electrical current one one amp passing through a 1 ohm resistance. I'll stop now but the joule can be defined many more  ways but I prefer the 1 watt/sec definition because it serve the needs of my blog best from an energy standpoint since oil energy and electricity are the dominant ways we get work done in our industrial society. The Joule is a small unit of energy but its versatility can be enhanced by various prefixes using scientific notation. Prefixes such as kilo-, mega, giga- etc can be stuck on to the lowly joule to render it more palatable.
Now we get to the system of units and it's the various systems of units that kicks off the confusion. You have the British Imperial/US system and the International(SI) system. The Joule belongs to the SI system. The British/ US system is of course quantities like the pound, the foot, the gallon, the mile etc. The International(SI) system is metric system based. I try in my blogs to stay with the SI system but when it is not used by prominent authors and energy and governmental organizations chaos and confusion reigns. So get used to it. I try to convert units to Joules wherever I can to simplify understanding. The joule was first proposed by  the Englishman James Prescott Joule(1818-1889).
James brewed beer and practiced physics and is intimately tied to the first and second laws of thermodynamics which I have discussed in past posts as laws which might be far better at predicting oil field depletion than the more economic and geological methodologies. The first and second laws are fundamental to understanding the energy of fossil fuels, the efficiency with which they are consumed and the work available to be done by those fuels after the energy from those fuels is fed back into society.
When I consult the various databases dealing with fossil fuels trying to tease out clues on resource and reserve levels, annual discoveries, cumulative consumption, I run head on into reckless use of units of energy making apples to apples comparisons exceedingly difficult. For example I have been trying for many days to find out how much oil has been discovered annually since the turn of this century and how the new discoveries have added to world reserves. I have tried to convert this oil to a reserve I would like to invent. Let's call it world energy reserves. The IEA and EIA, the 2 well known energy organizations express these quantities in a variety of ways. They are fond of  awful units such as MTOE(metric tons of oil equivalent), TOE(tons of oil equivalent) and of course barrels, a volume measurement. Worse, they also lump together all the hydrocarbons coming out of the ground with the term "all liquids.".  And of course they use a whole variety of other terms familiar to readers of energy blogs, like conventional oil and unconventional oil. These organizations and the international oil companies and some governments and independent analysts also issue databases using a mishmash of units and it is hard to escape the conclusion that in many cases their use of units serves the biases and desires of their masters. Obfuscation may be necessary because the truth might be unsettling. For example, when you include the "all liquids" as the metric for world oil supply, it gives the appearance of increasing abundance of crude oil while formerly 20 years ago oil statistics were just conventional crude oil. The reason this distinction is important is that crude oil used for transportation comes almost exclusively from a crude of certain purity and viscosity and energy content and it is this crude, conventional crude API 30-45 viscosity, which is refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel most economically and efficiently. This variety of crude constitutes presently only about 40% of world crude output and it as a fraction is declining. Light Sweet Texas oil, Brent oil are two names for these varieties. These are premium grades and set the world price. All the other varieties are less valuable, less useful as transport fuels and lower cost. As I have stated in previous blogs these other hydrocarbons  have some utility but not as primary transportation substrates and they have far lower energy content.  One of the categories, "Refinery gains" is sheer deception. And guess what. If you take out these bogus varieties the world hit PEAK OIL in 2006 and output of conventional crude has been "undulating" around 70-72 mbpd despite massive exploratory efforts by the major oil companies for the past 15 years. By definition that is PEAK OIL. One of the problems with that term is that you only know it was PEAK in retrospect. You have to see it in the rear view mirror. It is only years later when you can see that indeed that is when you hit a production peak and haven't exceeded it since. The government and economists  in the media would like you to keep living in your american dream world of sprawl and waste and happy motoring and energy independence so you don't notice that we hit peak world oil over 10 years ago as was predicted my Marion King Hubbert  at an oil conference in San Antonio in 1956. The fact is that despite oil prices near $100 in the first and second decade of this century very little in the way of new oil was found, far below world annual consumption and $100 oil let  expensive fracking technology produce a thin volatile almost explosive oil and cheap natural gas melt the tar in Alberta's sands. The oil industry was making pitifully little money and using a whale of a lot of energy to get these inferior grades of oil. If you can't find oil you can't add it to your proved reserves and if your reserves don't grow you can't produce oil in the future. It is like a bank account. If you have fixed money in savings you can only draw on it so long. If you don't add to your savings(from new discoveries!) by injecting more cash or investing  wisely to augment your capital, a day of reckoning will eventually arrive and the money will be gone. As I have stated in previous blogs it is taking more money and more energy and more oil to produce our oil and the point is not far off where all the oil's energy will be feeding into the petroleum producing system leaving less and less energy and less and less oil to do work every year for us in society. Bradford Hill and his team of mining engineers at the Hills Group think that day will arrive in the next decade.
I have stated in past blogs that energy use per capita is one of the best correlations to societal growth and prosperity and it has been  for the past 150 years. That metric has been falling steadily for decades. Oil is just one of the primary energy sources that is included in that statistic but arguably it is the most important. Oil energy has allowed increased efficiency and productivity gains all across the workforce leveraging the work done by people using tools and technology running on energy, relying on energy. Energy per capita increasing correlates well with GDP increasing since WW2. Wages  increased as well  as a percent of GDP............until about 1970. Oil production increased steadily as well.............until about 1970. That is why this graph showing wages as percent of GDP posted by Charles Hugh Smith in his blog caught my eye:
   Ok, correlation is not causation but a graph like this has to give you pause.

NEW BLOG ADDRESS

I am moving from my old wordpress.com site to a self hosted wordpress.org site which will be at  rendezvousmountainfarm.com. The old posts will be archived there from the old  cal48koho.wordpress.com blog. I will retain my blogger site: cal48koho.blogspot.com. In addition to occasional blog posts I will include  the amazing goings on at our little farm. Not much going on now except we are getting hammered by a winter of nonstop snow. The moose are eating our sheep hay despite my best efforts to keep them out and foxes are climbing to the top of our roofs almost every night. They found they can shelter under the 4' overhangs of the upper roofs. No need for ladders to get on the roofs any more. Just walk up from the ground. The house and greenhouses are getting very dark and gloomy with snow covering the doors and windows. If there was a winter to  acquire SAD, this would have to be it.

The End of Oil Part 7

The End of Oil Part 7

In this post I will attempt to explain in more detail the methodology of the Hills Group  in their 65 page paper issued as a second version in March 2015 entitled “Depletion: A Determination for the world’s petroleum reserve An exergy analysis employing the Etp model.

Fair warning: the interpretation and explanations are mine and mine alone and they may be inaccurate, wrong or confusing. I come from a scientific background and took advanced chemistry, physics, biology and calculus level math but I struggled to understand portions of this paper and had to refresh long forgotten concepts in thermodynamics. If I am uncertain of my understanding I will so state.

I will give the abstract to their report……..

ABSTRACT:

Petroleum is a primary energy source; its other uses have only minor commercial value. It therefore follows that to be an energy source petroleum must be capable of providing sufficient energy to support its own production system (extraction, processing and distribution). Thus, the total specific (per unit) energy needed to complete the process cannot exceed its own specific exergy. Entropy production (a Second Law mandate) in the petroleum production system (PPS) requires that a point will to be reached when the production energy required to drive the process forward becomes equal to its specific exergy. It can be shown that this breakeven point for petroleum production occurs when the cumulative production curve approaches its top abscissa. This point represents the maximum theoretical volume of petroleum that can ever be extracted for use as an energy source. The total production energy (ETP) is therefore a function of the cumulative production function (CPF) and the entropy production of the PPS. The entropy production of the PPS is derived through the solution of the Entropy Rate Balance Equation for Control Volumes. The ETP function generated is an accurate predictor of historic and future petroleum prices, production, and the depletion status of the world's petroleum reserve.

M King Hubbert who first predicted depletion of the world’s reserve made a prescient statement and is taken from a new book “The Oracle of Oil(2016):

“ So long as oil is used as a source of energy, when the energy cost of recovering a barrel of oil becomes greater than the energy content of the oil, production will cease no matter what the monetary price.”

  I will attempt to simplify the key methods used by Hill et al and use a few definitions as possible.

   I have previously stated in an earlier blog some of the world Resource estimates which are not  reserve estimates. A reserve is a known quantity that can be economically extracted. A resource  is an estimate based on educated guesses, proximity to active producing fields, perhaps preliminary seismography fields, similar geology and so forth. Both resource and reserve terms have many sub headings which I will not go into here. The USGS in 2000 gave a world resource base of 4300 Gigabarrels(4.3 trillion barrels.)  The world to date (2016) has consumed 1.29 trillion barrels. The Hills group decided at the outset that they could use only verifiable data sets and not company or country figures and they chose world production of conventional oil starting in 1900 through 2009 which was obtained from the EIA along with the price history. They attempted to analyze then entire production process such as extraction, processing and distribution. It is not stated in the paper how this was achieved or obtained and what factors were included or omitted. Nevertheless they determined as best as possible how much energy was used per year and called it Etp, total production energy.. Obviously this figure had to be less than the specific Gross Exergy which is given by the unburned virgin energy of a specific variety of crude API 30-45 deg. Which is 140,000 btu/gal. They call this quantity exergy, not energy which I believe is incorrect. Exergy is energy available to do work and no work is available to be performed until oil is burned . After it is burned 29% is given off as waste heat which generally (but not always) is lost as exergy, which leaves 99,400 btu/gal as your exergy, your quantity to do work.
    They then modeled oil production in three control volumes which by definition are open systems allowing mass and energy to be transferred. These control volumes differ from some types of thermodynamic analysis which is structured using isolated or closed systems. This open system is assumed to closely represent an oil reservoir/well head environment. I am unable to reproduce their sketch but it shows a simple diagram with at the bottom the black oil reservoir with a drill pipe passing through the ground to the well head exiting in the Environment, that is reservoir, well head and the environment as three control volumes. The next section shows the calculation of Etp(Total production energy) using a daunting equation which again does not reproduce accurately for me. If I can reproduce these pictures and equations later I will include them in this blog. They are available to view on pages 6 and 7 in their paper. The group then endeavor to simplify using the Entropy Rate Balance Equation for control volumes which seems straight  forward enough as they calculate the entropy production in the Petroleum production system  and in the end they show their calculated value for btu/gallon per 1 billion barrels for premium API 35.7 crude. They determine the flow rate out of an oil reservoir calculating the rate of crude flow and water mass flow which they say is the cumulative distribution function of the production data set. The resulting production function is displayed  as a logistic curve.   A logistic curve is the familiar sigmoid or s shaped curve which is a nifty type of exponential curve combining the standard exponential increasing at an increasing rate curve combined with with a bonded exponential so called. 

   

The result is a nice s- shaped curve which describes biological systems like population growth and finite resources of certain types.. The logistic curve is the shape of the Etp curve of the Hills Group. Hubbert’s curve(remember Hubbert’s curve?

Hubbert’s curve

is the so called first derivative of Hill’s cumulative production/Time curve.

    

 Hubbert's curve is a Gaussian or bell shaped curve depiction of oil depletion derived from  entirely different ways of predicting oil field depletion than BH Hills work employing thermodynamics but the results are strikingly similar, particularly the above grey curve which is the NET Hubbert curve.  Both curves show in plain sight as plain as the nose on your face that we may be reaching  a crucial point that M King Hubbert said in a quote I listed in an earlier blog. When all  the oil energy used to extract, process and distribute  oil is being consumed by the petroleum industry then it is game, set, match for society as none of that energy is being returned to society as energy or as wealth. Our industrial society is entirely dependent upon that received energy and  matter to advance an energy dependent technology and maintenance of its complex institutions and remove that crutch, that support and all growth and expansion of societal growth and wealth will cease. If you follow Hills curve to when that point will occur, you will see the year as 2031. No one, No One! is  acknowledging or mentioning this possibility although there have been plenty of hints within and without the Oil Industry for many decades. Here a a few quotes gleaned from books I have on hand and the net: "We've embarked on the beginning of the last days of the age of oil"----Mike Bowlin, CEO ARCO, 1999.

"By early in the 21st century, the era of pumping black gold out of the ground to fuel industrial societies will be coming to an end"---Paul Ehrlich(1974)

    

 Is BH Hill's model of oil depletion correct and is it really possible that the end of oil  could be happening as soon as 13 or 14 years hence? I don't know but I cannot find any substantive flaw in his work.  If oil exergy cannot support its extraction then it's my guess that other energy sources will need to be utilized as subsidy but what can we use ? Coal or gas  energy? Electricity?

    Coal and gas are poor substitutes for petroleum and electricity of course is not an energy source anyway. It is just a convenient carrier of energy, which would have to be supplied from gas or coal or nuclear and none of those sources can  compete with oil's utility to make things move! Remove oil and most motion of goods in trade, in transportation will grind to a halt. Will every car and truck and plane stop flying in 2031? Of course not. Hill's work is directed at field and reservoir depletion and at extraction, production and distribution of the so called marginal barrel, the next barrel. There will still be oil in those legacy fields being drawn to the surface and distributed but in ever diminishing amounts. If society could wake up and go on a crash program to conserve what oil exergy remains to smooth out the transition to a carbon constrained future, we could find as a society a way to safely ride the backside of Hubbert's curve and stretch out what is left but I see no reason to be optimistic that  the United states with 5 % of the world's population who consume 25% of the world's oil is showing any inclination to even consider changing its energy wasteful lifestyle  of suburban sprawl and happy motoring. The leaders of the new administration are embarking on a clueless pursuit of trying to recapture a period in US history that was fostered by almost unlimited cheap fossil energy to make America great again? The clock is running down on the oil age and whether it happens as soon as 2031 or a decade or so later, is irrelevant. This fossil energy that has provided vast wealth, enormous exponential population growth, exponential food production, easy cheap mobility and wasteful extravagance and complexity is starting to run down but our business model at least in the US and developed economies with its dependence upon oil energy is kaput or soon to be. We will simply have to switch to non oil energy sources and use far less energy to boot, and  very soon if BH Hill is right.