The End of the European Project?

This era of Globalisation has reached its peak – like other periods before this time.
Efforts should be about rebuilding national structures & utilities dismantled since 1987 while maintaining trade connections to achieve maximum output.
I.e. we can no longer domestically manufacture most capital goods – but the core cannot sustain their technological capital base by just developing their domestic infrastructure.
A classic example of this is Alstom Trams – the French are installing trams in their towns less then half the size of Cork which has obvious very large scale wastage costs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxT6RwoyWJ8

Wider European demand from Larger peripheral Euro towns should work to increase their exports and maintain a larger more efficient industrial ecosystem.

But if you scale up this model any further huge energy losses will occur making the project even more impractical then it is already.

We are not the US – the Histories of both Continents are very different , replicating the American experiment will lead to a greater disaster.

@EIS
Show me the BTUs
This is not about ideology.
Ideology is a method of capture.
Why does musings about energy have to be “Green”
Energy both its cultivation and capture is what has driven civilisation and indeed hunter gatherers since the beginning.
I am not a Maltusian – unlike Richard Toll I believe.
I believe in real capital appreciation ,not taking capital from the future and spending it today.
I like Top Gear as much as the next guy but recognize it as just a bit of fun.
You cannot have petrol heads without petrol.

@EIS
That is a much more capital intensive process that indeed should be have been done yesterday.
But the economics of Nuclear is radically different.
The high capital cost means much less consumer durables will not be made – see houses , cars , computers ,fridges. etc etc.
When you build Nuclear you must spend real money and not credit – this creates a energy glut (too much electricity and not enough wealth to utilise this energy)
PS underneath the Limestone Castlemaine probally has thee mother load of Uranium resourses.
Anyway a Nuclear economy is radically different from a Petro economy – we might not be able to make the transition.

Provisional data 2010
Road freight : 733 KTOE
Private car : 2021 KTOE
Public passenger : 204 KTOE
Rail : 44 KTOE
Domestic aviation : 34 KTOE

Residential oil use : 1174 KTOE

REVISED DATA : 2010
Road freight : 733 KTOE
Private car :1899 KTOE
Public passenger :187KTOE
Rail : 44 KTOE
Domestic Aviation : 14 Ktoe

Residential oil use :1267 KTOE

ENERGY BALANCE 2007

Road freight : 1296 KTOE
Private car : 2160 KTOE
Public passenger :188 KTOE
Rail : 47 KTOE
Domestic aviation : 42 KTOE

Residential oil use : 1127 KTOE

Notice the huge drop in road freight caused by a collapse in commerce yet we continue to pay nearly equal amounts if you look at our national accounts.

Our Infrastructure is now a energy sink – not fit for purpose unless China collapses in on itself.

Right so Brian, when is this “lights out” of yours end of the world stuff going to happen?

I really don’t understand why it is so vital that integration “goes on forever”. Carried to its logical conclusion, integration means we’d all end up as clones living in homogeneous pods.

We had a great EU back in 2000. It wasn’t perfect, but it ticked along and generally made life better for everyone. Now we have the Euro and as has been elsewhere described, we’re living in a hotel California which we can check out of but never actually leave.

The EU has become a prison for nation states. This must be rolled back.

@ EIS: 2020 – 2025 time range. Warning: Long explanation!

This is not my prediction. But I am accepting it, as I trust the source (Jeffrey Brown), a consulting oil engineer in Texas. I am offering no personal warranty.

The situation (according to Brown) is that Total Global Production has ‘flatlined’ since 2005. Now, before I go any further with this, some VIP caveats.

The data for global production of Liquid Hydrocarbon Fuels [LHF] can only be proxied from actual shipments. The producers are a lying bunch of sphintures when it comes to actual production values. Worse, the financial virus critters have infected the LHF market (both spot and forward) so the actual posted prices are a most unreliable indicator of real supply-demand. Speculation is a factor, but the nature and extent of this is shrouded in a fog of disinformation. Bad scene.

So. What you need to locate is the aggregate amount of LHF consumed domestically by the major producers (there are 33 of these): they’r the Nett Exporters. Rem: these critters are outright liers. There are a small number of major producers (11, I think) who are deficient in LHF, and who are Nett LHF Importers. In total there are 160 LHF Importers (give or take a couple).

OK. We can quesstimate the Total Global Production [TGP] of LHF production (using the domestic producer consumption, plus known shipment values). Not ideal, there are errors an omissions, but it has to suffice for the moment. BP publishes some production and export stats, and these are generally regared as reliable. Analysis of the data shows that TGP has virtually flatlined since 2005 – its up a tad, but not a statistically signifcant amount. What is exported is known as the Global Nett Export [GNE], of LHF.

The next step is to isolate China and India (Chindia) and combine them into a single, mass importer. That leaves 158 (Irl being one). Deduct from GNE the quantity that Chindia is importing (its increasing exponentially) and you get the value that matters to us – the Available Nett Exports [ANE] for the rest of us consuming critters. This latter value is declining – exponentially! If things continue as-usual. Chindia will take ALL GNE by 2025! And the 158 will be singing ‘Dixi’. Now I do not think this will occur, but you get a sense of the LHF supply predicament we are facing into.

Some shills witter on about ‘alternatives’, ‘green technologies’, ‘renewables’ (re-usable is the proper term), ‘wave power’ and such like guff. What they totally fail to mention is our mandatory need for a significant (its guesstimated at 15%) of our energy resource as LHF. Its mandatory! If we do not have this amount available, all electricity generation will decline, decay and die! Electricity is v-good for large semi-mobile machinery, but a tad useless up the side of a Connemara mountain. Or seven miles east of Courtown Harbour. I credit the shills with stupidity, not malice.

Nuke would be good (for baseload electricity). But its politically radioactive!

That’s the ‘good’ news, I’ll leave the ‘bad’ news for a ‘bad’ news day.

Please do not hestiate to come back to me for answers or clarification. I’ll do my best. The ‘lights’ will not literally, ‘go out’. But they could well be dimmed! And RyanAir will be a museum exhibit! 🙂

Cheers,

Brian

Just as Ireland’s rise especially post 1987 was a very artifical event – so is our present contraction – but it must be seen in a wider context.
The Imperium is dying either because of Grave policey errors or deliberate malthusian decisions taken in the late 60s which began to bear fruit in the 80s , we ate this tempory credit harvest and are now slowly decaying.
Seen from the centre the Brain must cut off circulation to its extremities so that it can sustain itself just a little bit longer.
The fact that our surpluses are merely feeding consumption in the financial sector & not capital growth even in the core is proof the body is decaying.

Europe’s rise in energy import dependency over the years is clinical proof of entropy.
Europe is full of Surgeons now – there only cure is to cut off the leg , the hand , everything & anything but don’t listen to the bloody pathologist.

@Brian
Caught that NCC Don Quixote thingy – tilting at off shore windmills now………….
Going back to late Medieval technology with a maritime twist when the Edwardian infrastructure is starring at them in the face……….
God help us & save us.

The 1950s /1970s American Graffiti culture has infected Europe’s Brain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIPERoioshY

The bike thing isn’t great. No point in keeping cycling just so you don’t fall off. Sooner or later you have to stop – else there’s no point in getting on the bike.
If you fall off a bike – you pick yourself up and you can get back on the bike or you can walk.
So – for Europe – the best option is to bring the bike to a gentle stop, get off it and look around. Then we have the option of deciding whether we want to stay where we are, get back on the bike or just start walking.

For all its Treaties – Europe has no values. There is no ten commandments – no magna carta – nothing for the ordinary person to get their teeth into. And to get really silly about this a Union without values is like a bike without a headlight – it’s bound to crash once it gets dark

@ Eureka

Europe has no values

To put it mildly, this is a dumb statement.

There is no Utopia but Europe is a beacon to the rest of the world in respect of the rights of its citizens, including women, racial minorities and gay people.

At a practical level, why is an EU directive deadline necessary to get clean water in Ireland?

Uniquely, each successive enlargement has taken in poorer countries than existing ones including Ireland.

@ jmg

Regarding Asmussen, he would say that wouldn’t he!

On the Parliament, this should cheer you up.

http://tinyurl.com/6s8q45n

PS
Missed the biofuel component in private car use – which was a surprisingly large 92KTOE
Most of which appears to be imported biodiesel now ?
All liquid fuel biofuel production seems to be a marginal activity at best anyhow.
Irish times April 2011
“FOUR BIODIESEL plants which could be processing 60 million litres of renewable fuel for the Irish economy have been “mothballed” because of cheap imports of biofuels from outside the EU, the National Bioenergy Conference was told yesterday”

But perhaps ethanol derived from sugarbeet is best for Ireland given the natural crop rotation cycle in some south & east farms.

@DOCM,

What I think we are seeing is a slow recognition that it is impossible to sustain optical illusions and to suspend disbelief indefinitely and an equally slow acceptance that the informed consent of citizens is required to secure some resolution of the current mess. The EU’s Grand Panjandrums are reluctant to allow too much reality to intrude too quickly on the Euro project, which is probably the grandest optical illusion of them all. Too many cosseted narrow, but influential, sectional economic interest have their snouts in the trough. But it can’t be kept at bay for ever.

And the requirement to secure increased democratic legitimacy is proving equally fraught, because the Grand Panjandrums had previously ridden roughshod over this requirement when they were constructing their optical illusions. And now that their consent is required, voters are keen to impose some punishment for the cavalier way they had been treated previously. It will be messy and populist, nationalistic and, sadly, xenophobic elements will be mollified or confronted.

But better this than the optical illusion and a continuation of this phoney war.

@EIS: Lost track of the thread!

Those eco critters will get the shortest shrift of their lives when the city folks realize that the choice is between one hot dinner or none.

I won’t dent you enthusiasm. But someone who will, is Albert Bartlett. He is not impressed by the lack of human understanding of the exponential function. And everywhere you look in the energy-ecocomic nexus its exponential this, and exponential that. Bad lads are exponentials. Think: briar up fundament.

Fusion is fine – on Sol. Here on Terra? Big energy gobbler. Your right (to a beautiful, naive degree) about energy. Anyways, I am whinging about the decline of a mandatory primary, finite source, Liquid Hydrocarcbon Fuels. They have no chemical substitute – none! Neither NG or coal come even close. And it is highly irresponsible of any commentor to give out the impression to the non-scientific public that, “We will be all OK with NG”. That’s what turkeys think until they experience their necks being stretched. Kinda late then.

You, and anyone else who may be anyway concerned about our energy security, must understand this immutable fact: Liquid Hydrocarbon Fuels are chemically unique. They possess the most amazing chemical and physical attributes. If you attempted to rank them (out of 10), in terms of their economic utility, alongside solid hydrocarbon fuels (anthracite, coal), lignite) and gaseous fuels (LPG and NG): gaseous = 3 solid = 5 liquids = 20! They’re that good. So, with NG coming out of every available orifice – we need x5 – at least, to compensate. That’s a lot of gas. Reprise exponents here. And do we have the NG infrastructure in place? Er? No!

Absent a reliable, easily accessible, relatively low cost source of LHF – our economies will shudder to a crawl. We can make some LHFs from coal and gas – for a while. Tha’ts just robbing P to pay P. But some, like aviation kerosene are fiendishly hard to synthesise chemically. Even if we had Fusion coming out our ears (it supplies electricity) we cannot maintain our economic activity without a mandatory, minimum supply of LHF. It is technologically impossible. I am not making this up. Nor am I a Doomster. Think of me as the chemical equivalent of Morgan Kelly.

We’ll be back at this long before 2022.

Brian.

EIS

Your ppint seems to be that tech will solve the problem .

That is just a variation on the Irish notion of “world class”.

@EIS
Did you watch that Death Race 2000 ? (It must be watched in German)

Notice the empty pristine roads…………nobody had a car because all the energy in society went into maintaining the asphalt.
Because they had no real income people could not move about & enjoy themselves.
So they got a kick out of others get run over.
You accused me of trending towards fascistic tendencies ….perhaps
But Autobahns were a strange fusion of American corporate culture & German nationalism.
To continue to burn such vast amounts of oil armies must project themselves into Sunny climes.
The US does not pay for its oil directly , indeed it does not pay much at all.
The Military expenditure on expeditionary war is not counted in the price.
There is a thing called the US $ and since 1922 the world has been paying a Imperial tax towards it upkeep.
The US externalises its costs baby via a reserve currency that it can magically print.

@seafóid

Stone age didnt end because we ran out of stones,

Hydrocarbon age will end with us moving to other technologies (that are already available for most part, but kept down by politics)

Necessity is the mother of all invention, tho mind you we Irish are not particularly inventive, then again large sections of society are protected from reality that most of the worlds population faces everyday by extortionately taxing a class of PRSI serfs and borrowing large amounts of money.

@seafoid

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf
“In 2008 dollars, the cumulative cost of the Manhattan project over 5 fiscal years was
approximately $22 billion; of the Apollo program over 14 fiscal years, approximately $98 billion;
of post-oil shock energy R&D efforts over 35 fiscal years, $118 billion. A measure of the nation’s
commitments to the programs is their relative shares of the federal outlays during the years of
peak funding: for the Manhattan program, the peak year funding was 1% of federal outlays; for
the Apollo program, 2.2%; and for energy technology R&D programs, 0.5%. Another measure of
the commitment is their relative shares of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) during the
peak years of funding: for the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the peak year funding
reached 0.4% of GDP, and for the energy technology R&D programs, 0.1%.”

The US spent few % of its yearly GDP on important projects such as developing atomic weapons (resulting many spin off such such as energy generation and other technologies such as computing), sending people to the moon and developing alternative energies

We on the other hand spend what % of our GDP on banks?
http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2012/01/13/bank-recapitalisation-the-running-total-so-far/
And continue to waste how many billions every year on our little Socialist experiment that would have made the Soviets blush?

tl:dr while Ireland might be buggered due to decisions taken by clueless politicians with wide reaching consequences, i put alot of faith in US, Europe and China to lead the world via use of new and existing technologies out of sheer necessity into a better place for all of us.

test

@EIS
If “they” were actually dealing with the problem in a rational scientific manner rather then subsidy farming & going all Don Quixote I would not be so negative.

But there are substantial costs in this which would effect consumption patterns dramatically or possibly cause extreme turmoil.

For instance capital has been sunk into our roads , our petrol stations , the location of our houses , the nature of our work which is now globalised & sitting on a precarious supply chain……….. pretty much everything – its very hard to turn a ship that big around.

The 3 biggest problems energy wise in Ireland are
1. A private car road based transport system system
2. A electricity sector which uses NG as its base load.
3 Oil central heating in a large amount of our houses.

Its easy enough to change number. 3 with a bit of will & some capital but no.2 is very hard to do today given that the infrastructure is so new and has had no time to repay for itself.
And No 1 is the hardest of all as oil use in Transport is very inelastic.

But if even if every oil Home spent 3 / 5 thousand on a wood gas stove that would heat the entire house & provide hot water that would create a consumption shock in the economy as capital spending would subtract from day to day consumption – especially if the appliances were imported.

But still number 3 can be done easily with a bit of will – we can subtract 1mtoe from our heating needs and perhaps another 1Mtoe from personnel transport with extreme effort.
Unless you get total collapse – starvation then does the work for you – but thats not very nice.

@EIS: I caught that extra-terrrestrial post. Energy flows from region of high density (Sol) to area of low density (Terra). Its not the total energy we receive, its the density of that energy at surface. On Terra it is very low. You need a very sophisticated biochemical process (Photosynthesis) to ‘encourage’ that low density energy to flow uphill, to synthesise carbohydrate. But its hydrocarbons we need! They are biochemically speaking, three times further up that energy hill.

Please slow down and start to get your head around this predicament wrt LHF depletion. You will if you try.

Brian.

I think this is the real end… LOL

http://www.endoftheeuro.com/