State of the Blog, Q1 2010

Latest Male Employment Improving

35.5mpg by 2016

News today:

WASHINGTON — The federal government issued final rules establishing the first greenhouse gas emissions standards for automobiles and light trucks on Thursday, ending a 30-year battle between regulators and automakers.

The U.S. issued new rules that sets emissions and mileage standards for automobiles and light trucks. The new rules, jointly written by the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, set emissions and mileage standards that will translate to a fleet average of 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016, nearly a 40 percent improvement over today’s fuel economy.

Awesome! This is the single most important and practical step that the US can take to dealing with tight oil supplies.

A Few Thoughts on Yesterday's Announcement

Oil Production Recovery is Coming From Everywhere

US Coast to be Opened for Oil Exploration

Checking in on Russian Production

Demining needed in Iraq, oil giants say

UPI reports today:

MOSCOW, March 29 (UPI) -- Gazprom Neft leads a consortium of investors in Iraq calling on the government to clear mines from the Badra oil field near the Iranian border.

Iraqi authorities report there are more than 27 million pieces of unexploded ordnance in Iraq from the war with Iran in the 1980s. The largest number of mine fields is near Badra in Wasit province.

Gazprom Neft said demining of the region was required to retrieve oil in the border region, Russia's state-run news agency RIA Novosti reports.

Reserves near Badra are estimated at around 2 billion barrels of oil and the project should cost around $2 billion, the report added.

Thinking about a Chinese Crash

It seems worth referencing this discussion of Citigroup's Chief Economist Willem Buiter's opinions about a possible Chinese bubble.

Although we still seem to be in the early stages of an asset boom, bubble and bust sequence in the property and land markets, and perhaps just in the recovery stage for the stock market, it is nevertheless likely in our view that China will experience such a sequence, starting in the residential real estate market. From there it is likely to spread to the commercial real estate sector and to the stock market also. Predicting the timing of the bubble phase (when asset price movements decouple completely from fundamentals) and of the bursting of the bubble (when the fundamentals exact their revenge) is not a science – probably not even an art, but more something akin to witchcraft. Our best guess is that a significant bubble may still be one or two years away, and the bust probably at least three years.

That sounds possible - usually, whenever talk about a bubble starts amongst a minority, it's at least a few years before the top (eg consider Alan Greenspan's famous "Irrational Exuberance" comment in Dec 1996, at least three years before the tech bubble burst).

Uncertain Coloration of Chinese Flags

China's Red Flags

Peak Canadian Wood?

Checking in on Iraqi Stability

The Net Energy of Pre-Industrial Agriculture

Following on from yesterday's discussion, I want to make a point that seems like it must have been made before, but I cannot quickly find a good discussion of it.  That is that the net energy of pre-industrial agriculture, taken as a whole energy-gathering system, must have been low, with EROEI probably on the order of 1.1-1.6 depending on place and time.

Archdruids and Net Energy

This week's Archdruid Essay is an improvement on the ones I discussed last week, but although he's retreated a little onto higher and more defensible ground, I still think his position has some poorly defended salients that he should abandon.  In particular, I think he's still too hung up on energy concentration, and is still trying to argue that there's something physically difficult or impossible about transitioning to a renewable powered civilization.  In my view, there's nothing physically impossible about that (though I'm perfectly willing to concede that the total cultural inertia of western civilization is enormous and that worries me a lot).  The Archdruid makes two main arguments in his post, and in this post I'm going to take on the first of them (hopefully coming back to the other at some point in the future when time and interest allows).

Mountain Pine Beetle Epidemic Extent

Forest Die-Offs

Agriboard

I'm pretty interested in this general question of agricultural residue management for carbon capture.  As far as I'm able to determine there are three possibilities of varying degrees of "greenness":

• Turn the residues into cellulosic ethanol
• Biochar (briefly mentioned the other day)
• Turn the residues into building materials

The most famous possibility amongst the last is straw bale construction, but I wanted to briefly mention another version of this which strikes me as having more potential to scale industrially - there's a company called Agriboard in Texas that turns straw into a kind of Structural Insulated Panel used for green buildings.  There's a company in England, Stramit, that's been around a lot longer and does something similar.

At the moment, there's an interesting series on the first house in California being built with Agriboard by the architect, Michael Cobb (from which the picture at right is drawn).

Latest Saudi Arabian Oil Production Statistics

Iraqi Oil Production Increased in February

Latest Global Oil Production Statistics

Limits on the Thermodynamic Potential of Archdruids

I often read John Michael Greer, the Archdruid. He's a smart and thoughtful guy who worries about some of the same things I worry about, though he tends to have decided they are all hopeless, whereas I tend to see society as having a lot more options than he perceives.  He has read very widely and often comes up with interesting historical analogies that hadn't occurred to me, so he's well worth the spot in my reader.

Where he tends to go horribly wrong, and why I think his overall take on the subject is too negative, is when he tries to talk about physics. In a recent series of three posts:

• Energy Follows It's Bliss
• An Exergy Crisis
• Barbarism and Good Brandy

He has been trying to argue that there are fundamental physical barriers to society surviving the transition away from fossil fuels, and getting horribly snarled up.

Now, I am not a working physicist, but I may well be the nearest thing that will admit to reading the Archdruid - I trained in Physics, have a PhD in the subject, and then went into Computer Science.  But the points at issue are pretty elementary here, so let me try to straighten the Archdruid out, and at least place something in the record for anyone that might be confused by his arguments.

In short, there are no fundamental physical barriers to a non-fossil-fuel based economy - the main problems are social, economic, and practical, not issues of physical law.

Saudi Arabian Rig Counts

How to Demonstrate the Value of Climate

All you get this morning are some inconclusive musings.

My gut feel is that people care quite a bit about local climate, and in particular that at least some people have at times relocated based on climate.  Whether it's people living in New York leaving for Florida or California, or the British retiring to Spain and France, it's clear that people move for this reason.

It's likely that this has an effect on house prices, and my guess is that the size of the effect is not trivial and could potentially be used to measure how much people care about an equable climate.  However, it's obviously not straightforward at all to disentangle the effect from all the other effects on house prices - strength of the local economy, qualities of the housing stock, zoning restrictions preventing easy expansion of the housing market, etc, etc.

The Scalability of Biochar

Visualization of approximate amount of wood that would have to be charred and buried annually to offset carbon emissions of one United States resident.  (Picture credit)

Iraqi Elections

Pretty dramatic stuff.  The NYT:

BAGHDAD — Defying a sustained barrage of mortars and rockets in Baghdad and other cities, Iraqis went to the polls in strength on Sunday to choose a new Parliament meant to outlast the American military presence here.

“Iraqis are not afraid of bombs anymore,” said Maliq Bedawi, 45, defiantly waving his finger, stained with purple ink, to indicate he had voted, as he stood near the rubble of an apartment building in Baghdad hit by a huge rocket in the deadliest attack of the day.

Insurgents here vowed to disrupt the election, and the concerted wave of attacks — as many as 100 thunderous blasts in the capital alone starting just before the polls opened — did frighten voters away, but only initially.

The shrugging response of voters could signal a fundamental weakening of the insurgency’s potency. At least 38 people were killed in Baghdad. But by day’s end, turnout was higher than expected, and certainly higher than in the last parliamentary election in 2005, marred by a similar level of violence.

and

After the polls closed at 5 p.m., party leaders said two coalitions seemed to have fared best: the one led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who has campaigned for a second time on improved security in Iraq, and another led by the former interim leader, Ayad Allawi, who has promised to overcome Iraq’s sectarian divides.

As expected, neither coalition appeared to have secured an outright majority in the new 325-member Parliament, and so it was unclear whether Mr. Maliki had succeeded in winning another four years in office.

That sets the stage for a period of turmoil — months, not weeks, politicians here predict — as the winning coalition tries to cobble together enough votes to elect a prime minister.

Should be an interesting process to watch...

Weather Worms

This evening, I was going through the citations of my (and collaborators') 2004 paper The Top Speed of Flash Worms which pointed out that there were designs for Internet worms that could infect almost all vulnerable computers in a second or two, depending on your exact assumptions.  This is something that seems pretty obvious in hindsight, but hadn't been noticed before, or at least not in public.

I was going through the citations kind of generally looking for interesting updates on what else you could do as a result of being able to do that.  There were a number of somewhat interesting papers of the "Here's how to go even faster" variety, but one crazy-ass paper by Szabo et al at the University of Calgary caught my attention with the concept of a "Weather Worm":

We introduce the idea of weather worms, worms that can automat-
ically identify abnormal events and their location, and target computers
at that physical location. Such worms could be used to take advantage
of poorly-defended computers in a disaster zone, and could even amplify
the effects of a physical terrorist attack.

They then spend 14 or 15 pages examining the engineering challenges of building such a computer worm that would sit around not doing much except reading online news sites until it automatically identified that a disastrous event was occurring, then figured out where the event was happening physically, mapped that to a set of Internet addresses, and then headed over to pile onto the unlucky victims of the disaster by infecting their computers too.

I must admit that I'm not really quite sure what the motivation would be for the author of such a worm - general nihilism presumably, but then that might be better served by just attacking everywhere at once right away, and not just the unlucky denizens of future iterations of New Orleans.

Still, if anyone were ever motivated to write and release this kind of thing, I guess the fact that ongoing climate change means that extreme snowstorms, droughts, floods, category five hurricanes, etc, will all get more common will give the weather worms plenty to do.

The Just-In-Time Economy

Hacking the Power Grid

This is old hat in the computer security community, but I thought many of the readers of this blog might appreciate it. The really cool part starts at about 1:20 where they show video of an official government experiment in which they physically destroyed a 27 ton diesel generator just by hacking the network control interface.

Hacking and physically damaging a material fraction of the power grid would, I think, be pretty much the end of civilized life in the target country for a long time.  It's not easy to do - it requires a lot of specialized knowledge and skills - but it almost certainly is possible and there are specialized offensive cyber-attack units in various countries that are tasked with knowing how to do this kind of stuff (there have been persistent rumors that the Chinese were involved in the North East power grid outage of 2003, but it's never been confirmed and might well be speculation).

February Male Employment

Threats to Civilization: Runaway Toyota Edition

Haradh Well Count

In a rare treat today, JoulesBurn has a new post up at Satellite o'er the Desert in which he makes a pretty persuasive case that Saudi Aramco has drilled an additional 20 or so wells over the total they originally planned in Haradh III (the southernmost tip of Ghawar, the world's largest oilfield).  This suggests they might have been having some production challenges there which had to be addressed with additional drilling.

Not a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but Joule's pieces are always delightful treats of careful detective work.

Chinese Leverage vs US Leverage

Iraqi Oil: Thamir al-Ghadhban Interview

Ruba Husari at Iraq Oil Forum emails to point out that she has a new interview up with Thamir al-Ghadhban, former Iraqi Minister of Oil and Chairman of the Advisory Commission at the Prime Minister’s office. Indeed, it's a completely fascinating read for those following the Al-Shahristani plan, and its likely impact on peak oil timing.  The most significant news to me was that the signature bonuses from the new contracts went to fund a 20% budget deficit and not to help pay for the major new infrastructure the government needs to develop in order to export all the oil the IOCs have committed to produce.  I guess Iraqi budget deficits in the next few years are a risk factor to this plan that I need to understand better.

Definitely read the whole thing, but here are some of the best bits (according to me):

The US in a High Emissions Scenario

Number of days annually over 100^oF in the recent past, and under high emissions in 2080-2099 according to p90 of Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States

East Coast Snowstorms Predicted By Climate Change

I am currently ploughing through Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which is a comprehensive 188 page report from June 2009, and produced by a set of government agencies in the US, headed up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, looking at the likely impacts of climate change on the U.S.  I'm kind of going through it in a spirit of "How bad is this going to be?" if we make fairly pessimistic assumptions of very high emissions in future, which certainly seem warranted at the moment.  More on that later.

However, I note that climate sceptics have been doing a great deal of crowing lately about how the heavy snowstorms on the East Coast prove global warming must be wrong (eg see here or here).  And so it was interesting to come across this prediction from p38 (written last summer, recall).

Emissions Compared to IPCC Scenarios

Future of Chinese Carbon Emissions

Prosperity Without Growth

I recently came across a report, Prosperity Without Growth by the United Kingdom Sustainable Development Commission, which I didn't know about before, but according to the web page:

The Sustainable Development Commission is the Government's independent adviser on sustainable development, reporting to the Prime Minister, the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales and the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Through advocacy, advice and appraisal, we help put sustainable development at the heart of Government policy.
On 1 February 2009, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) became an executive non-departmental body (Executive NDPB).
The SDC is registered with Companies House as a Company Limited by Guarantee, and registered with the Cabinet Office as an Executive NDPB. It is wholly owned by Government.
As a separate legal entity the SDC will:
reinforce its remit as the UK Government’s sustainable development watchdog and advisor;
have more freedom to make decisions over staffing and finances;
continue to have a close working relationship with the UK Government and the Devolved Administrations.

Progress in Furniture from Ancient Egypt

February US Consumer Confidence

Popular Sunni political party to boycott Iraqi elections

According to the WaPo on Sunday:

BAGHDAD -- A popular Sunni party announced Saturday that it will boycott Iraq's parliamentary elections next month, but it stopped short of urging supporters not to vote.

The decision by the National Dialogue Front to pull out of the March 7 elections could cement views here that Shiite religious parties have rigged the vote against secular and Sunni candidates.

Saleh al-Mutlak, who leads the party, was among about 500 candidates disqualified from the elections because of their alleged ties to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. A panel of judges signed off on most of the disqualifications. But before the appeals process, all but 171 were replaced by their parties or withdrew. Only 25 prevailed upon appeal.

"It's a bad environment for the election," said Haider al-Mullah, a spokesman for the National Dialogue Front, which has 11 seats in parliament. "They are preventing good leaders like Doctor al-Mutlak from running."

The disqualifications have caused widespread fear that the elections will be deemed illegitimate.

China and Comparative Advantage

In response to my rant about China the other day, commenter James (along with a few others) suggested that the problem was that I didn't understand enough economics, and helpfully assigned some remedial reading on the benefits of free trade, and in particular on Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage.

For example, he suggested the essay by Paul Krugman from 1996 entitled Ricardo's Difficult Idea, which I duly read, along with various other suggested references.  Other references will have to wait, but I'd like to take the opportunity of this morning to outline why the conventional theory of international trade, as exemplified in Krugman's essay (but which I originally learned in high school), doesn't reassure me much at all.

I'll begin with some caveats: I've read Paul Krugman for many years, he's obviously a genius, as well as a brave and decent human being.  This essay is from 1996, and doesn't represent his recent thinking on China (which in my opinion still has blind spots but is more nuanced).  So I'm more using the essay above because it's a very accessibly written meditation on the case for the conventional economic wisdom of the benefits of international trade.  Further, I'm not attacking international trade in general, or globalization in general, or suggesting protectionist policies as a specific response.  At this point, I'm simply trying to make a specific case about some dangers to the United States of what is happening in China (probably to other western countries too, but I haven't had the chance to think about that much in depth yet).  So in this post, I want to highlight what the conventional assumptions of the Ricardian model are, and point out that, empirically, they are materially violated here.  End Caveats.

China: The Mother of All Black Swans?

Commenter Manolo pointed to this presentation from Vitaliy Katsenelson on the possibility of an over-inflated China crashing. I haven't been able to come to a conclusion on how seriously to take this risk, but this seems a good summary of the case for it.

China - The Mother of All Black Swans - By Vitaliy Katsenelson

The Scale of the Deficit with China

Composition of US Employment

Chinese Labor Costs, Tea Partiers as True Believers

Source: Lett and Banister, China's Manufacturing Employment and Compensation Costs: 2002-2006, Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review, April 2009.

Specter of Sectarian Violence in Iraq

The Washington Post has a piece on possible resurgence of sectarian violence in Iraq:

It was only one killing, but it unleashed the demons of a bitter and perhaps unfinished past.

The victim was a Sunni man in the mostly Shiite neighborhood of Hurriyah, in northwest Baghdad. The death and the aftermath were reminiscent of the prelude to the sectarian war, which began in late 2005 with a smattering of killings and threats and culminated with 100 bodies a day being dumped in the streets of the capital. With the imminent departure of American forces and fierce competition for power ahead of general elections on March 7, many here say sectarian strife is reigniting.

But this time, there will be no outsider acting as a buffer between the warring sects. U.S. military officials acknowledge that as Iraq regains sovereignty, their influence is waning. A senior U.S. military official who has spent years in Iraq said he fears that as the drawdown begins, American forces are leaving behind many of the same conditions that preceded the sectarian war.

"All we're doing is setting the clock back to 2005," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a stark assessment. "The militias are fully armed, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is trying to move back from the west. These are the conditions now, and we're sitting back looking at PowerPoint slides and whitewashing."

I'm not fully persuaded by the evidence presented in the piece, but it's definitely worth a read. Needless to say, a return to pre-surge levels of violence would make success of the al-Shahristani plan much less likely, which in turn will make global oil supply problems far more severe in the medium term. There's a lot at stake.

More Iraq blogging here.

Dynamics of US Unemployment

Latest Iraqi Oil Production Statistics (to Jan 2010)

Global Oil Production Statistics (to Jan 2010)

Sustainability and Global Seafood

Gone Kayaking

My wife and I are headed up to Tomales Bay with kayaks and camping gear for the long weekend.

No further blogging until Tuesday morning.  Have a great weekend everyone.  Will try to add a few photos to this post when I get back.

In the meantime, there's an actual post below.

Update: A few snaps below the break.

The Scale of Alternative Liquids

Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People

The New York Times Dot Earth blog last night pointed out that Science magazine (one of the two premier publication forums for academic science) has removed the paywall from a review by Godfray et al (a set of British biologists and development studies specialists) titled Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People. This is a subject near to my heart, and I somehow missed it when it first came out online last month (I subscribe to Science but am inconsistent about reading it when it comes out - I mainly have a subscription so I can always go and search the archives and read any Science papers on some subject that I'm pursuing).  So I enthusiastically headed over to read it. It turns out the current issue of Science is devoted to food security, so I'll probably be blogging about it a lot.

The point of a scientific review is to provide a survey of some field of inquiry, with references to the important papers.  The best reviews provide the reader with a real synthesis of what the state of knowledge is currently, as well as an indication of where the frontiers of research currently lie - what things are most in need of further study (but where there is some hope of actually making progress).  The target reader of reviews is generally considered to be non-specialist scientists who need to understand the field, or graduate students just coming up to speed.  Actively working specialists in the field being reviewed are assumed to be up to speed on the literature and to already have their own perspective (though it can certainly be helpful to understand how someone else views the big picture).

Chinese Steel Production

Figures are from the World Steel Association.  I've been making this chart for the last couple of hours, and the longer I've gone on, the more my heart sinks.  One way or another, it's hard to see how this set of trends can end well.

Nigerian Oil Production: Analog for Iraq?

Indian Tribe Appeals to James Cameron for Help

Oil Companies May Book Iraq Reserves

There's a very interesting story leading the new Iraq Oil Report. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall (though you can get a three week free trial). However, the story is interesting enough I'm going to mention it anyway. The gist is that the major oil companies with contracts in Iraq are planning to book the reserves:

Avatar and the Unabomber

I had said I would do a book review each weekend. However, I'm going to violate the pattern from the very beginning by starting with a movie review instead. But all is not lost: in explaining what I think about Avatar, I'm also going to have to work in discussion of half a dozen books that were formative in developing my worldview, and which are currently sitting in a pile on my desk, pulled off the shelf for the purpose.  However, this essay ended up going so long that I'm splitting it into a series which will probably run from now to sometime around Oscar night (March 7th).

Avatar, if you've been living under a rock, is the blockbuster movie written, directed, and produced by James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator, Aliens...) and released last month, which is now the highest grossing movie of all time (taking in $2.1 billion as of this writing - admittedly these comparisons are not adjusted for inflation, which is tricky to do right because of the 3-D).  It's becoming one of those must see events in which people are compelled to go a second and third time to take their friends, and just to see the movie again.

Here I'm going to assume the reader has seen the movie and I will try to analyze the strength of the feelings most of us have had to it - love it or hate it.  If you haven't seen it yet, just go do it, ok?  It's an amazing experience, and you're not going to be altogether culturally literate in future if you haven't seen it.

Mexican Oil Consumption

Crosschecking US Oil Demand Statistics

Dec 2009 Iraq Stability Report is Still Missing

The US Department of Defense is mandated to produce quarterly reports on the stability of Iraq to congress.  The reports are a very useful compendium of all kinds of data about the stability of the country.  According to the schedule of recent years, the last report would have been in Dec 2009.  It's now February 2010, and we are still stuck reading the September 2009 report (see the above screenshot which I just made now).  That's a very long quarter!

Where is the Dec 2009 report?  Inquiring minds would like to read it please.

Update: Gotta love Google. Within twenty minutes of posting this, it's the number four result on a Google search for "iraq stability report". Quite right too.

Saudi Aramco: Peak Oil is Nonsense (but we are at peak)

I'm a bit behind the curve in commenting on this, but did anyone else find this hilarious:

Khalid Al-Falih: The nonsense of peak oil is now hopefully behind us. Sees no difficulty in getting above 100mb/d. Saudi Arabia has 1/3 of its capacity (4mb/d) idled at the moment. Will attempt to continue its role as price stabiliser (although idling capacity is v. expensive). Brought 2mb/d capacity onstream last year.

Incremental barrels of onshore Saudi oil capacity now cost 6-7 times what they used to in 2000. Projects take 7-10 years to come on stream. Will make investment to maintain capacity, scoffs at IEA former predictions of 25mb/d Saudi oil, but will stay at about its current level. Has long list of projects to offset its decline in current fields.

Very confident that technological improvements will facilitate increased production.

Very pissed off at rhetoric about 'moving away from oil' or misleading notions of 'energy independence'. Energy security should be addressed through the framework of energy interdependence. Fossil fuels predominant for decades to come. Focus on efficiency, renewable deployment will be very slow.

So "nonsense of peak oil" but Saudi Arabia's oil production capacity "will stay at about its current level". What does he think we should call it when a country can't/won't raise it's oil production capacity any higher?  And if Saudi Arabia can't/won't raise it's capacity, who does he think has more oil than them?

This tends to confirm my impression that the peak oil question is now mainly about Iraq.

OPEC MOMR: Oil Demand Recovery Mainly in OECD

Rumaila to increase by 110kbd in July or August

The WSJ reported yesterday:

Crude oil production from the giant Rumaila oil field in southern Iraq is expected to increase by 110,000 barrels a day either in July or August, a senior Iraqi oil official said Monday.

Rumaila, Iraq's largest producing oil field, is currently producing an average of 1.07 million barrels a day, Abdul Mahdy al-Ameedi, director-general of the Iraqi Oil Ministry's Petroleum Contracts and Licensing Directorate, told Dow Jones Newswires

BP PLC (BP) and China National Petroleum Corp., known as CNPC, signed a 20-year technical service contract in November last year to develop the field, which holds oil reserves of 17 billion barrels.

"According to the plan submitted by the contractors, oil production from the field will increase by 10% in July or August, which means an additional 110,000 barrels a day," Ameedi said.

That would be a modest start, but a start...

Also, the deal for West Qurna Phase II is final.

Biofuels and Farm Prices

Iraqi Production Flat in December

Biofuels: the Biggest Supply Response to the 2000s Oil Shock

Real annual average oil price according to BP (top graph), and estimates of volumetric production/capacity for various oil alternatives (bottom).  1975-2008/9.  Note that these are total volumetric estimates: about half of tar sands production is sold as bitumen, not synfuel, and the energy density of the biofuel stream is only about 70% or so of that of crude oil.