If you follow energy matters, you might have heard about the new shale gas extraction methods.

Allegedly the near cornucopia of free energy, the new methods, asides from using extremely toxic liquid materials to fracture the rock formations to let the gas slip out to the well bore, for extraction, have been promoted by people like T. Boone Pickens as the source for future US energy needs in the transport sector. The latter by switching the truck/heavy equipment fleet to natural gas power.

This is supposed to be a good idea because it’s supposedly a 100 year’s supply. As usual, sadly, with such rosy predictions, the real numbers, when re-examined in the light of non-delusional, somewhat sane, thinking, simply do not hold up.

A current theoildrum.com posting highlights this issue.

Arthur Berman talks about Shale Gas

If you investigate the origin of this supposed 100-year supply of natural gas…where does this come from? If you go back to the Potential Gas Committee’s [PGC] report, which is where I believe it comes from, and if you look at the magnitude of the technically recoverable resource they describe and you divide it by annual US consumption, you come up with 90 years, not 100. Some would say that’s splitting hairs, yet 10% is 10%. But if you go on and you actually read the report, they say that the probable number-I think they call it the P-2 number-is closer to 450 Tcf as opposed to roughly 1800 Tcf. What they’re saying is that if you pin this thing down where there have actually been some wells drilled that have actually produced some gas, the technically recoverable resource is closer to 450. And if you divide that by three, which is the component that is shale gas, you get about 150 Tcf and that’s about 7 year’s worth of US supply from shale. I happen to think that that’s a pretty darn realistic estimate. And remember that that’s a resource number, not a reserve number; it has nothing to do with commercial extractability. So the gross resource from shale is probably about 7 years worth of supply.

As with pretty much every other finite energy source, when you apply modern consumption levels plus the realities of extraction, the totals come out much lower than the energy optimists would have you believe.

Coal, and probably uranium, supplies reflect a very similar gulf between predictions from cornucopians and the actual numbers, including predicted consumption growth rates over time.

The group (Energy Watch Group uranium study – PDF)contends that worldwide rankings mean little, then, when one considers that only Canada has a significant amount of ore above 1 percent–up to about 20 percent of the country’s total reserves. In Australia, on the other hand, some 90 percent of uranium has a grade of less than 0.06 percent. Much of Kazakhstan’s ore is less than 0.1 percent.

The world uses 67,000 tons of mined uranium a year. At current usage, this is equal to about seventy years of supply.
Council on Foreign Relations – Global Uranium Supply and Demand – January 14, 2010

Pay very especial attention to the phrase ‘At current usage’. That is the essence of almost all cornucopian predictions. As oil / gas supplies begin their imminent decline globally, the world will reach to existing sources of energy, mainly coal and uranium, for its electrical production. Actually, forget the future tense, that’s happening now, all over. China, India, along with most of the rest of the world.

So make that 70 years drop down to less than 20 or 30. Really people should start to pay attention to the arithmetic of growth (transcript of the Professor Al Bartlett video talk on the problems of all growth based population/resource consumption patterns), it’s not very hard to understand.

And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the question of exactly how clean will an ongoing decline in global energy resources actually be, in terms of production and economic realities. Dmitri Orlov. has been pushing this point consistently, see for example his recent posting, Thinking in Straight Lines.

One particularly significant example of this thinking is the belief in Peak Oil, generally expressed as the idea that global oil production already has or will soon reach an all-time peak, and will then gradually decrease over a time span of several decades. Oil depletion is being modeled as a linear function of oil production: a few percent a year, holding more or less steady from one year to the next.

But that article isn’t good for little quote snippets, read the whole thing is my advice, what he’s saying is fairly serious, and isn’t being discussed nearly as much as it should be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 13:20 and is filed under Our World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.