Some 'fag packet' blogging calculations:

A 2% oil decline rate would be approx (85 x 2% =) 1.7 million bbl/day at first (but would reduce as the years went by)

A rough calculation shows that this quantity of oil is approx equal to 1500 GigaWatts of Energy lost/year [needs checking!]. Assuming world demand growth slows to a crawl after PO a chunk of this is likely to be rapid build out of coal and nuclear plants (at a rate of say 200 x 4GW/year = 800GW -sounds unlikely to me but 'needs must'!).

The remaining 700GW could be met by building 700 x 1000MW thin film PV plants PER YEAR globally.

We can scale the above numbers down if we add wind, OTEC, etc into the mix. The main issue of course is that the impending oil shortage is essentially a liquid transport fuel scarcity problem not just electricity. So the lights stay on but none of us can get to work!

Basically we are going to have massive demand destruction / conservation / efficiency drives and massively scale up production of 'other energy generating sources' during a period of accute economic hardship.

The US looks to be most badly hit the longer it delays but is also the country most capable of doing something about it...

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References:
Oil usage by country: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption
International Energy Outlook 2006: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html

Yes, Niko, as far as Australia is concerned it will be a liquid fuels
problem only. Electricity generation will not be greatly effected as
I would expect to government to give the coal miners a priority diesal
allocation also railways and local food transport. We have substantial
gas supply, but we should cease export of natural gas as we will need
it as a transition transport fuel.

I don't know but almost certainly most petrol consumption is private.
Therefore public transport will need significant expansion. As time
goes by the demand on public transport will get greater.

The NSW Government has not mothballed all those buses for fun.

The US uses a lot of gas and some oil for electricity generation so
the effect on them will be much greater as they are facing peak gas.

Our gas will give us extra time to change our whole energy system.
To me it seems inevitable that all energy will have to be electrical
as most of the so called alternatives such as ethanol are a dead end.
Geo and solar thermal electricty appear to be the only permanent
supply whether distributed generation or large Geo and Thermal solar.

Don't forget to watch the ABC science unit basically announcing the beginning of the end of the oil age. "Crude" screens 8:30 Thursday 24th May. Be there!

On another subject, what are the chances of us signing the "Oil Depletion Protocol"? It won't happen before the crisis hits — but just imagine a few years of pain... maybe we'll be ready by then?

As Jeremy Leggett says on page 228 of "Half Gone",

"The result would be impressive: modest prices that even poor countries could afford, minimal energy needs met, and profiteering avoided. Best of all, consumers everywhere could be educated and prepared to face the reality of a changing world."

Citizens and businesses are issued with an oil quota or allowance for the year — tracked through a card system at the point of purchase. You pay for the oil as normal, and every time you buy your oil as well as handing over your credit card you hand over your oil card. That day’s purchase is deducted from your oil quota. If you are frugal with your allowance, then you can sell your surplus oil quotas on a new oil trading market. If you can live locally on a bike, then you are laughing — and can sell your entire year's quota. If you need more oil than your quota, as well as buying your own oil you would then have to top up your oil quota. You'd buy someone else's right to extra oil, AND then have to also buy the oil itself.

It would be a fantastic way to spread the word — it's time to wean off the stuff. Then the next year everyone is issued with another year's allowance, slightly less than the first year (in line with the world depletion rate.)

Well Eclipse Now;
We already have a card in the planning.
It is called the Access card. You buy you petrol wave your access
card at the m/c and it deducts your ration. Then you can visit the
doctor and use it there. Go to Centrelink and do your business there.

I notice Iran has a petrol ration card you insert into the pump.
Probably be the best way otherwise people would fill up and then
have their card knocked back.

Iran sits on the 2nd largest reserves in the world and they have fuel rationing. Smacks of mismanagment to me. They have also implimented a crash gasoline-to-gas vehicle conversion program in order to reduce the threat from sanctions due to their nuclear shinanigans. If the UN wants to wrap them on the knuckles we are running out of time.

Regarding the ODP -it smacks to me of too liberal and difficult a market mechanism to ever be succesfully implimented. In addition taxation already provides a form of throttle mechanism likely to be superceeded by higher prices for the base product.

If we over produce on the electricity side we can use the surplus power to generate liquid products -ammonia might be a solution for jet fuel for example (hydrogen being too bulky). Cryo-planes based on hydrogen have already been proposed but an ammonia plane might also work. The ammonia would be 'cracked' b4 being used as fuel.

If we overproduced sea grown algea we could compress it and sink it to the bottom of the ocean effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is a mega-project for the next generation perhaps.

Regards, Nick.

Here’s a bit of blue sky prose for you:

“It was clear as early as the first decade of the 21st Century that humanity had a serious problem brewing, vast tracts of land where becoming uninhabitable, water and food shortages showing and worst of all the fuels that had enabled Earths steady state carrying capacity to be so greatly exceeded where showing signs of imminent peaking. The next two decades bought home the scale of the problem and at some points it looked touch and go whether we would make it. Almost half a Billion people died during the ‘Green Restructuring’ era…

Now, in 2050, thousands of floating city-sized structures, or Enerugi-Kujira, drift like giant grazing whale pods across the warm Oceans of the planet. Surrounding each are vast mats of bio-engineered algae stretching like the tentacles of some oversized Man O’War for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, visible from space the tropical Oceans are becoming a beautiful banded patch quilt of blue and green. The deep-seawater upwelling from the Gigawatt OTEC plants provide rich nutrients for the fish, lobster, clams and other high protein food produced in such quantities it’s hard to imagine we once struggled to feed our own numbers. From time to time transport barges pull alongside the lumbering giant, offloading the lithium, aluminium, gold and other metals extracted from the sea. It’s liquid tanks fill up with Ammonia, Ethanol and Hydrogen to feed the once more growing global economy. The whole 6 million ton super-structure has been mostly created from sea resources: magnesium skeleton with ground shell ‘sea-cement’.

It’s taken the best part of 40 years to get where we are, but now GEC, the Global Economic Council, have decided that –at the cost of many Trillions of ECUs- we will reduce planetary CO2 and start on sound ecological footing ‘The Great Expansion” to Worlds beyond our own…
“

-Enerugi-Kujira #3678, Diary date 2150.12.12 : Further reading: www.otecnews.org