Rail It Is, Late And Over Budget
Hello, friends. I hope you are all doing well.
There you go again, Chris, separating the men from the boys with another stellar presentation. (Whenever I try to do that, I always find myself on the side with the boys.)
That’s exactly right. They seem to want to keep us stirred up and turned against each other like rats in a cage. As we hit peak oil, they are hitting us with Weapons of Mass Distraction left, right, and center.
In the lamestream media there still seems to be a lot of cornucopian happy talk regarding “Peak Oil Demand.” In my simple and unsophisticated mind, I’m thinking peak oil demand is not only a hoax and a myth but also fake news. Here’s why. Oil production is what it is, and then it is rationed by price. Imagine if oil was free and all oil products such as gasoline, diesel, and all oil-based products were extremely cheap just to cover the processing costs. In that case, I imagine that global demand would be over 500 million barrels per day (mbd) rather than the current 100 mbd. People would be knocking themselves out participating in all manner of wild animal behavior. Here’s another scenario. A few months ago, there was a gas tanker truck that got in an accident in Hatti. Rather than running away, poor people grabbed their buckets and containers and ran to the truck to try to procure a little bit of the fuel. Tragically, the fuel caught on fire and over 60 people were killed (Lemaire et al.,2021). So, when people are poor, cold, and hungry, they will risk their lives for a gallon of gasoline. Therefore, in my thinking this peak demand fairy tale should be put to rest. As long as the global economy can afford to pay over the break-even point of the most expensive oil produced, oil will be produced pretty much as quickly as anyone can drag it out of the ground. So, the only thing that really lowers oil demand is demand destruction when people just can’t afford to buy oil products. Then there’s always this little complication of Energy Returned on Energy Invested which is also plummeting as Chris discusses. So, at the end of the day we will be compelled to leave a lot of tasty hydrocarbons in the ground.
Also, this idea that we can seamlessly swap out electric vehicles for gasoline cars has holes in it big enough you could drive a freight train through it. I can give your four deal-breaking reasons without even breaking a sweat. Here we go, I’m going in – lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper. That’s four reasons, boom, just like that. For God’s sake, we just don’t have enough of these and many other metals and minerals necessary for everyone to continue happy motoring in private cars. (I suspect the Bigs are not ignorant of these facts but are rather just lying sackapoos.) Furthermore, we still need vulgar amount of fossil fuels to increase production of these metals and minerals by the envisioned orders of magnitude. Also, Art Berman has talked about this. He pointed out that when you refine oil, you get what you get. You can’t choose if you want more gasoline or diesel or whatever grade of the tasty, refined products. So, Art asked, “what are you going to do with the gasoline that you no longer need? Are you just going to flare it?” Furthermore, only around 20% of total global energy consumption is in the form of electricity, so the vast majority of stuff runs on liquids, coal, or natural gas. Therefore, all electrical infrastructure would need to be rebuilt and reconfigured if the world was going to go predominantly electric. Furthermore, around 40% of people around the planet don’t even have clean cooking fuels, so natural gas, or coal fired electricity is likely the quickest and cheapest way to get them squared around. There is lots of sunshine in India and Africa, but they are building hundreds of coal-fired power plants. That’s how the renewable transition is working out for us. (It’s not.)
So, making a short story long, as I tend to do, I’m seeing the future of transportation falling into the domain of bikes and trains rather than cars and planes. You get a lot of bang for your buck with trains regarding energy consumption. Therefore, in my simplistic (simpleton) view, it seems like wisdom would say, if wisdom could speak, we should be using the quickly depleting fossil fuel resources to lay rail all over hell’s half-acre. Many people envision a future that looks more like the Jetsons whereas I’m seeing a future more like the Flintstones. They are talking a big game about driverless vehicles. I’m thinking more realistically we could have driverless trains. That seems potentially doable. Also, and this is big, trains and trolleys can run on electricity, so you can knock yourself out with green solutions, and the trains and trolleys can run with it. (Now, there is a little complication with electricity that few people talk about. You need a base load of constant power, and you need “peaker plants” to ramp up for the times of the day when energy usage spikes. Coal and natural gas are fantastic for both base load and peaking. Wind and solar are good for neither, so they have to be integrated into the grid mix above base load and below peak. God damnit! I hate that. The devil is always in the details, but that’s a good topic for a verbose narrative on another day.)
So, the bottom line is that we are wasting precious time and energy pursuing electric cars. I’m telling you straight that the whole endeavor will fall flat on its face with chronic shortages and supply disruptions. (Lead balloons are made of this kind of nonsense.) Global industrial civilization is collapsing under its own weight. There are many problems. My suggestion for a partial solution to help a little would be to lay rail early and often as if we knew what we were doing. All aboard!
Many thanks, friends. All the best.
Reference
Lemaire, S., Belizaire, J., Martin, Y. (2021, December 14). Haiti Mourns Victims of Gas Truck
Explosion. VOA News. Retrieved from Haiti Mourns Victims of Gas Truck Explosion (voanews.com)