It's not just on the oil front that this massive Chinese growth is going to pose global problems. I recently saw a programme about the vast amount of coal they mine and use for all sorts of industrial and commercial purposes. Apparently it's cheap (hence further assisting their rapid economic growth), readiy available (open cast), incredibly noxious and China's virtually built on the stuff :(
China and India are no longer oblivious to/ protected from the western world and they're only aspiring to what we take for granted. When the west cries 'foul' they'll simply remind us that we weren't too worried about such things during and since our industrial revolution and they'll have a good point.
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Article below nicked from internet....doesn't include 'Tar Sands' etc.
Most data suggest that the world's recoverable reserve of conventional oil, both discovered and yet-to-be discovered, totals 1.8 trillion barrels, a best estimate of half the world's ultimate reserve is 900 billion barrels. As more than 800 billion barrels have already been produced, it appears that less than 100 billion barrels remain before the midpoint of reserve depletion will be reached.
With the world's annual consumption rate at 25 billion barrels, this reserve midpoint is less than five years away. Suddenly, the glass the world has long considered to be almost full is found to be half empty.
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There are alternative fuels available, it just needs the incentive to use them. Biodiesel...alcohol...oil from coal...electricity(by nuclear generation). The oil companies will not want to relinquish their stanglehold while they have the means.
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Easy answer,get the farmers growing veggie oil,get the Yanks to run diesel engines,on veggie oil,hey presto,wheres the problem?
Best of all can tell the OPEC wasters where they can stick their oil.
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Many thanks, everyone. This is becoming a useful and thought provoking thread. About a month ago a bloke I met was telling me about his project in Thailand. Starting with his own houses, he plans to convert an entire Thai village to 12 volt electricity generated from solar panels. I hadn't realised that most 240 volt supply is transformed down to 12 volts in appliances like TVs, VCRs, etc. anyway. And just about everything in a house apart from electric fires (which Thais never need) can be run from a 12 volt supply. He's going to heat water with solar water panels too. So as long as the people from the power companies don't get to him he's going to be doing this Thai village a lot of good and the rest of the World could maybe learn a few lessons from him.
HJ
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he plans to convert an entire Thai village to 12 volt electricity generated from solar panels
...the rest of the World could maybe learn a few lessons from him.
HJ, do I need new glasses or are you turning into a greenie? ;-)
[big grin]
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For many appliances these days, even 12V is more than is necessary. CRT TVs and Monitors do use a very high voltage but the current is so low that it's almost as efficient to generate this from a low DC voltage as from a higher AC voltage. Really, the only reason for high-ish AC voltages in household mains is to keep the current low and therefore conductor size small. Don't forget that a fairly standard PC will draw a minimum of 250W which is around an amp at 240V AC but over 20A at 12V DC so you're going to need some fairly hefty wires to distribute that lot.
Electric fires *can* be run from 12V but as you can probably deduce from the above, will require a *lot* of current - well in to the hundreds of amps.
Still, good for this chap. I must admit I'm considering setting up a small solar array, probably to power things in the garden at first but if things work out, who knows - lights and things at least and you can buy step-up transformers fairly cheaply to power your AC kit...
As for the Chinese and their oil, the ideal situation here would have been for the more advanced economies like us to have got beyond our dependence on oil and be able to feed the technology down to developing nations. However, we've all become so fixated on the stuff with very little real development going in to alternatives that we are stuck.
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LOL, in the Philippines (same climate as TH)a number of similar ventures are in place. Lo, along comes local electric company and says we're losing money because of these bright ideas of yours so we want you to pay Pesos ******** a month to make up for our losses otherwise some of our cohorts will show up and show you the error of your ways.
Just shows you simply cannot apply Western standards to Asian mindsets yet the West continually does and continually ends up getting surprised -"why can't they be more like us etc etc..".
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There are websites dedicated to dwindling oil supplies such as www.oilcrisis.com/
The Hubbert peak is the point at where oil production has plateaued, and can only fall as a well starts to empty, named after Dr. M.King Hubbert who correctly predicted in 1970 that US oil production would peak, and world oil production would peak in 1995. This date is now thought to be 2009 unless vast amounts of new reserves are discovered (as is possible).
Chinese demand is thought to rise 14.5% this year, and 8% next year, while their oil reserves stand at approximately 30 billion barrels.
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I wonder if the (eminently sensible IMO) Chinese govt. policy of limiting family size will kick in at some stage and restrict the predicted consumption growth to some extent?
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There are alternatives but they cannot, and will not, produce sufficient energy to maintain our (western) economies at their present state of development. The existing alternatives will not produce energy as cheaply as fossil fuels can at present. There is no alternative that compares with the energy potential of oil & gas. That's why we are now reliant on them.
The public confidence in the amount of power available from renewable fuels is misplaced. BP have painted their petrol stations green and stuck windmills on some of them. The Ford plant at Dagenham has sprouted a prominent windmill to demonstrate Ford's commitment to renewable energy. Utter, utter cobblers.
Economies will contract, cities will be less viable, agricultural production will fall. It was known a generation ago, at least.
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The technology exists now. We don't need to depend on oil for transport but as soon as we switch to environmentally friendly substitutes eg biodiesel and bioethanol then the reason to tax them heavily disappears. This is why successive governments haven't really bothered to encourage their use as they'll lose 46 billion a year. Bioethanol/ethanol is a perfect petrol substitute, the down side is that it eats aways some types of fuel line but in a 20-80 ethanol/petrol mix then it is perfectly ok. You can also make butanol from sewage, this mixes with petrol more easily and I don't think it eats at fuel lines so much. We don't have a shortage of this kind of raw material. We could encourage the population to eat more fruit and veg to get crap produced more quickly :-)
If we reduce transport use too much then our economy falls on its backside and we enter recession. If we enter recession there won't be enough money to pay for the research to find other oil subsitutes. Fuel cell cars are well on their way and there is plenty of research into turning sea water into viable energy sources. Global downturn is not what we want at all.
teabelly
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Two sides to this:
1 - Why shouldn't the Chinese, or any other nation for that matter, be allowed to enjoy the levels of consumer affluence and consumption that we in the West have done?
2 - But now the technology exists, at a price, for China and others to do this in a much more energy efficient way. The world has a responsibility to encourage this. Somewhere on the net I read that local byelaws still forbid the use of diesel-engined private cars in Beijing!
There is no alternative propulsion system on the horizon that is capable of replacing internal combustion engines. Pure electric power is still hampered by battery technology and fuel cell cars are very heavy, cost a fortune to produce and their techno-gubbins takes up a huge amount of the usable space within the car.
Oil is going to become scarce in the not too distant future.
Biodiesel looks to be promising as it is a sustainable source, it's compatible with current technology and it's carbon neutral. I think Toyota Prius type hybrid technology, if allied to a modern diesel instead of the Prius's petrol engine, and running on biodiesel,would go a long way towards sustainable, eco-friendly motoring.
Cheers, Sofa Spud
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A follow up:
I wonder if we'll soon see the first diesel-only car brand. If so which one? My guess would be Peugeot or VW (not the entire VW group, the actual VW range).
Cheers, SS
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Biodiesel looks to be promising as it is a sustainable source
[snip]
Not really. Producing biofuel on a significant scale would a lot of very damaging effects:
* it would require the use of a lot of land currently used for food production, when the world doesn't have much excess food-production capacity
* expanding lnad usage would goble up valuable wildernesses, such as the Amazonian rainforests -- without which we wil have huge climate problesm
* yet more intensive agriculture means yet more water, and water is a dangerously scarce resource in much of the world -- there have already been wars fought over it
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If China is sat on such a huge pile of coal, could it not be possible that it is also sat on a huge lake of undiscovered oil. The two often go together and it's a big place.
Who would have thought of the tiny UK being an oil producer not all that many years ago.
Martin
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As an enthusiastic biodiesel user, I have to partly agree with NoWheels - there isn't enough agricultural land available to provide the biodiesel which would replace current levels of fossil fuel use. However, within the EU there is certainly scope for using set-aside land to grow fuel crops. From a more global perspective, I am slightly encouraged by the concept of producing biodiesel from algae, which thrive in high CO2 conditions and could be produced in high-rise facilities using salt water, thus drastically increasing output per hectare and minimising the need to use drinkable water. Here's a link if you're interested: www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
The site includes the following paragraph:
"One of the important concerns about wide scale development of biodiesel is if it would displace croplands currently used for food crops. With algae, that concern is completely eliminated, as algae grows ideally in either hot desert climates or off of waste streams. NREL's research focused on the development of algae farms in desert regions, using shallow salt water pools for growing the algae. Another nice benefit of using algae as a food stock (sic) is that in addition to using considerably less water than traditional oilseed crops, algae also grows best in salt water, so farms could be built near the ocean with no need to desalinate the seawater as it is used to fill the ponds."
Now, having said all that, I've made the point before that there is no magic bullet - biodiesel is not the single answer to our current and future energy requirements, nor is methane, nor is ethanol, nor is solar power, nor is wave power, nor is wind power, etc. However, a combination of these together with a high level of energy efficiency and conservation could still enable us to live a lifestyle relatively similar to what we have now. What I can tell you is that hydrogen is a non-starter - it takes more energy to produce hydrogen than you get from burning it. Even if you use renewable energy to produce the hydrogen, you'd still be better off using the same renewable energy to produce electricity instead.
--
andymc
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would require the use of a lot of land currently used for food production, when the world doesn't have much excess food-production capacity
Don't agree - we waste far too much land producing food for CATTLE - much of the rainforest 'slash & burn' was carried out to grow animal feed.
Stop eating animals, use the land for more sensible human food production & also biofuel.
We could reduce the amount of road journeys (motor link) to slaughter (make sure the animals don't read that word with the first letter missing, they wouldn't appreciate it) houses.The big supermarkets dictate HUGE journeys back & forth, for packing & preparing their products. It's certainly not farm to store to table.Not if it's traveled 700 miles first. & it's not too fresh, either.
VB
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we waste far too much land producing food for CATTLE - much of the rainforest 'slash & burn' was carried out to grow animal feed.
true, but a lot of people don't seem very keen on vegetarianism*.
It'd make an interesting backroom poll: would you prefer to
a) do without fuel for your car
b) become a vegetarian so that more land is available to grow biofuel
c) be poked in the eye with a sharp stick
* Including me: I'm a reformed vegetarian. Saw the error of my ways :)
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I'm not keen on food & eating, generally. Can't quite see why some people see it as a pleasent way to spend some of their time - going (driving) to a gathering, where others also start stuffing dead animals OR vegetables down their throats.
Some even 'enjoy a drink', whether they happen to be thirsty or not.
& people think I'm weird!!
VB
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& people think I'm weird!! VB
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Very likely, but you're not alone.
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I wouldn't do without fuel as I have petrol cars. I'll make my own bioethanol and use that instead; thus the dreaded vegetarianism can be avoided :-)
Cattle can be useful though. They can eat the grass and we can scoop their poop and turn that into fuel, as well as eating the producer. I think that is a far more joined up way of doing things. Same with chickens and pigs. All their poo has to go somewhere so we may aswell use it for fertiliser and fuel.
I must admit looking around supermarkets at where all the food comes from it does seem rather daft having beans all the way from Kenya when we can grow beans here. There is nothing stopping us from using greenhouses with a little added heating to make sure everything grows year round as we now expect. It has to be more fuel efficent than transporting them half way across the world.
teabelly
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Biodiesel looks to be promising as it is a sustainable source
We all grow oil seed rape, or something similar. We extract the oil, we convert it into biodiesel, we all live happily ever after.
Intensive agriculture is dependent on the use of pesticides and fertilzers, which are derived from petrochemicals. I anticipate a problem with this plan.
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