Thermodynamics, Energy, Food: What The Fanboys Neet To Know

Hello Tom’s Hardware members,

This is my first post here and I hope I am able to contribute some insight and information to this forum. I have a PC and server background though I no longer earn anything like a living in regards to computers. My profession for the greater part of my life has been in construction and contracting. For a six year period I had a small computer business and mostly operated through word of mouth. During that time I was able to make a decent amount of money by catering to customer’s needs and issues on a personal level and to this day I have retained most of those relationships.

These days my computer use and overall interest in the subject has dropped considerably. For me the attacks of 9-11 and the subsequent related events seem to have shifted my priorities to issues that have greater ramifications in my life. The AMD vs. Intel war has for the most part vanished from my mind and been replaced with actual war, resource wars, privacy invasions, financial strain, cost of doing business and most importantly energy depletion.

Here I hope to show why the Intel vs. AMD war is, on the part of us consumers, simply escapism. I hope to point out that computers add to the problem of resource depletion and pollution of all types. I would like to examine the relationship we have with our electronic devices and the corporate giants that make them possible. I would also like to make the point that no matter how fast PCs become they are still just novelty items that magically, steal vast amounts of time from our lives.

There is no doubt in my mind that the escape is on. If I spend more than a few hours a week on a computer when my profession, that I count on lies in something other than computers, I run the risk of loosing work, damaging relationships and becoming depressed. If I spend large sums of money on hardware, software, games and the energy to operate the works I have essentially added a black hole to my home that sucks money, time, friends and vast amounts of energy away from me. If I use my PC to further my business goals then it becomes a tool. That being said computers can also damage the bottom line in any business.

The computer as a time saver and paper saver tool concept seems to have done the opposite. Step inside any office and see how productive computers have actually become. Notice how many reams of paper and toner businesses go through. Notice how many shredders are used and you will see that real office waste has in some cases has exceeded 2500% (I will use the accounting office as an example) compared to years ago when the #2 pencil and then word processors did the job. Go into any office and glance at what is on any given monitor at any given time and you will be amazed at how many times you see MS Solitaire in use rather than actual work being done.

Those that work in large corporate offices have difficulty accomplishing much of anything when their networks go down. When you check your stock options from the office or your latest EBay bid the efficiency of the workplace goes down for several reasons. The first factor is time since there are only eight hours available to accomplish business. The second is employee concentration since a down turn in my portfolio may affect my ability to focus on the work at hand. I may make data entry errors as thoughts of financial ruin fill my mind. There are numerous studies that prove this point though they are not necessary since common sense tells you that this is true.

To define the resources that I referred to previously I will briefly step away from computers and illustrate what recourses actually are and how they relate to thermodynamics. Maybe a better way to say that would be, “I will attempt to show you how thermodynamics limits everything that any organism may attempt.” I must than define thermodynamics since its laws are tied inexorably to all resources.

Thermodynamics as defined by Wikipedia is:

Thermodynamics has four laws (as shown again on Wikipedia):

In a simplified format the major points can be explained this way:

A third way to express thermodynamics is this way:

Now I can move to resources. A general definition of resources is a supply of something that can be used or drawn from. A more complex definition would be that a resource would be the machines, workers, money, land, raw materials, and other things that a country can use to produce goods and services and to make its economy grow. Resources may be renewable or nonrenewable. Countries must use their resources wisely to ensure long term prosperity. These are broad definitions yet are most useful when showing how they are the most important issues for the entire population of our current industrialized planet.
Just by being alive and all that life entails we consume resources in all sorts of ways. A good explanation of this would be food consumption. Since food is a resource that is available in lesser or greater amounts to a portion of us it can be said that the chain starts with the sun that provides photons and heat that plants use to scrub CO2 an produce O2 from water. The raw materials that make up a given plant can are available in a closed system that is the Earth. The main materials are carbon, water and nitrogen. I’m sure then that the dependency of all life forms on photosynthesis and plants need not be expressed here as the chain of life is quite apparent. If you do not see the connection, then read no further as the rest of this will be over your head.

For computers to exist certain inputs are necessary. The basic input is not silicon as you might suspect. The fact is that raw materials used to make all of the components and the machines that make components all depend on oil. The fact is that your motherboard most likely was imported to your desktop from Taiwan on a cargo ship and arrived to your abode in the back of a shipper’s truck. Those that were in a real rush paid extra for an aircraft so almost instant gratification could be had. I have a system too, so like all of you I have a stake in the conundrum that is unfolding.

Oil is a resource that can not be replaced. Even if the Earth were able to replenish consumed reserves of oil we humans have as of December of 2005 have out stepped supply with greater demand. This moment in history is playing out by a cast of actors who fail to see how thermodynamic laws spell at a minimum, the demise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. That is a bold statement on my part yet I am prepared to debate it thoroughly and vigorously. The point that demand of resources grew larger than supply, is now known as Peak-Oil. There are extremely simple ways that you can determine if we have reached the point where 50% of all known and unknown oil supplies have been reached.

You can get in your car and drive to any gas station and look at the current price for a gallon of gas. You will see that pending minor fluxuations the average price of gas is trending up, sometimes at great leaps. Another way would be to open any utility bill in your snail mail box and compare the rate to any previous bill from the same utility. That number is growing. Another simple test is to read the paper, watch the news or find current events on your computer pertaining to oil or war and see how oil and war have become one in the same.

Yes there are other energy inputs such as solar, wind, wave and biomass. The use of coal is on the rise again along with constructing new nuclear power plants. Each will play a role in an attempt to offset the growing deficiencies in our oil and natural gas supply. In the interest of keeping this as brief as possible I will shift to the wonders of nuclear fission and alternative fuel like ethanol. I can talk about all of the possible sources of energy yet I could do that some other time or upon a debate.

Uranium is found in mines these days (along with most other things). There was a point of time that rich veins were struck yet since the pursuit of Uranium has grown since the 1930’s and both reactors and weapons systems require massive amounts of it this natural element has depleted in availability. Mines must now be deeper and more expensive. Their yields are dependant upon oil. Mines do not for the majority use electricity to operate. Millions of cubic yards of earth need to be moved daily and the lion share of potential ore brought to the surface is moved on large trucks. The mines use diesel and gas powered generators and the location of the mines often dictates if bringing in electric power for lighter functions is possible. Most of the time a generator is built on sight to provide input energy to the system if coal, oil or NG is available.

Once ore is found it is processed and that first process is stone crushing. Mind you, that all of the equipment brought to bear takes energy to operate and all that much more to create and we still have no usable uranium in the story. After stone crushing are many more steps. Different ores need to be separated from the stone and each other. There are washing steps, more crushing steps and chemical steps all to wind up with a rather small amount of still un-processed uranium. Now the ore is transported on rail, barge or truck to another plant that specializes in refining uranium ore.

The ore is not useable, nor pure enough to be used in a reactor yet. Numerous machines are brought to bear to be left with only uranium. The rest is waste and that gets added to the other waste from production runs and the spent waste created from running reactors. After all the work they wind up with fuel pellets. These need to be shipped to generators and typically operate for about a year. The typical reactor has many tones of uranium in one of its vessels. After the reaction period is completed the rods are removed for cooling and go to reprocessing.

This is more work and quite dangerous. Energy, equipment and time are used to separate depleted uranium and plutonium (there are many others) from still useable uranium 235 & 233. Pu or plutonium goes into weapons manufacturing like ICBMs and depleted uranium goes into DU penetrators (used to slice through armor) along with aircraft tail section counter weights. The rest is waste with different lengths of decay. As an example Pu has a 24,000 year ½ life.

When you add up the energy used to make fuel rods available with the total amount of energy used to build and manufacture a reactor, support systems, input energy (oil), land acquisition, staff, transport and anything else found in those systems you wind up with a number called in energy units (w). This number can then be added to (x) that is derived from the costs in energy units of maintaining an ever growing supply of waste that has to be managed for up to 24000 years and even longer than that considering that the ½ life of U235 is 4.5 billion years. In uranium’s unrefined state is not concentrated and for the most part locked away below ground. Once refined its concentrations are incompatible with all life.

When (w) and (x) are added the result is (y) energy units. Energy units in this case are expressed as calories of energy. Any and all energies are expressible in caloric form, since this is in keeping with thermodynamics. The amount of calories of energy or work produced from the time a reactor is commissioned to the day it is decommissioned is expressed as (z). If (z) is greater than (y) or if the amount of output exceeds the input then the difference between the two would be called the energy returned on energy invested or the EROEI.

The laws of thermodynamics make it clear that the result (z) can never be greater than or equal to (y) since you can never break even or even come close to breaking even. So a simple way to look at nuclear EROEI would be to see if any nuclear plant ever was able to turn a profit since you and I would not be able to find actual raw numbers to plug into (w) or (x). I have looked at studies and have some of the numbers yet to get an accurate EROEI on nuclear is impossible since all of the necessary records are not available.

A colossal number that I deliberately skipped comes from accidents and releases like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. These have a caloric value as well and would increase value (y) if you were able to even obtain that magic number. The magic number here has to be quite large since the effects of major accidents, for example Chernobyl are ongoing. The full effects have no precedence since there have been no other industrialized cultures like ours. The basic summary being that for all of the effort (energy) put into nuclear energy the reward is a negative EROEI. Simply put we succeeded at depleting oil energy even further than if we simply burned the oil to make electricity.

I know of no reactors that ever turned a profit and later on the waste issue will need to be addressed in a world with that much less energy. This is pale in the face of the ongoing accident that Chernobyl is. Off topic but still to the point even 20 years later Chernobyl can at any time explode again as it will always be unstable. The G7 has decided to throw 4 billion Euros at it in hopes that the reactor can be officially cleaned up. That has never been done before on Earth. So in response to oil prices many new reactors are being ramped up and none have a positive EROEI.

Now I will shift to an alternative fuel that we are to believe may be the cure to oil addiction. Here I am talking about ethanol. Ethanol is a blend of alcohol and gasoline. So directly from that we discover that gasoline is still in the picture but to it we will add alcohol. The idea is to break foreign import dependence and still be able to keep our cars, computers and any other consumer goods. On the surface this is appealing. We grow corn that is a green thing to do and process it (fermentation) and we can burn the result. Now we can consider the details in transitioning an entire economy to corn fuel.

Here I will just put a link and you can bring yourself up to speed on the EROEI of ethanol.

http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm

About 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) of cropland per person is required to provide a diverse diet similar to that desired by the average American and European. At this very moment the available amount of hectares is 8,566,763,295 and falling. The global human population at this moment is 6,506,675,605 and climbing. If I multiply .5 by the current population the total is 3,253,337,802.5 of hectares needed by the human population. Now I subtract needed hectares from the available hectares and the result is 5,313,425,492.5. We however are not done with the math. It happens that we share the planet with farm, wild and domesticated animals. The dietary needs of a dairy cow or bull are averaged at 2.7 hectares per cow. At this present moment on the earth are 2,000,323,910 head of cow requiring 2.7 hectares worth of feed per year that require 5,400,874,557. Now I have a math problem since the hectares needed by just the cows have exceeded the 5,313,425,492.5 balance of available hectares. Yes the numbers are averages but the remaining animals eat too. Horses, goats, pigs, sheep, deer and all the rest consume the same natural recourses like grasses, oats, water and space and there impact has not been factored in.

We have found another negative EROEI yet the supermarket still has my hotdogs and my stomach is so full I can’t eat another thing. The main reason we don’t all starve is oil and natural gas. The main ingredient in farming is nitrogen. Farms would fail to meet demand if not for fertilizer. If we stop using man-made fertilizer and reduce pesticides crop yields will dwindle then fail. As it stands fields that would be rotated are not since the demand is so high for food.

If you read the link you would see that (X) hectares of corn would be needed per car and given the number of cars in the US alone it becomes clear that it would be impossible to grow fuel and grow food. Since the process of farming anything then moving it all around is negative EROEI beyond a reasonable carrying capacity it is hard to imagine that ethanol would do any more than become a net energy looser. Top soil erosion would go off the charts and we would need more fuel to make up the difference in the lost BTUs from transitioning. You have to burn more alcohol to get the same amount of work derived from burning one gallon of gas.

Relating this to our computers seems sort of moot. Once I realized that thermodynamics is applied to everything like gravity and that once you hit the top all you can do is go down. As it stands computers are part of the problem and like it or not have already become expensive again. Intel will give us Conroe and at the same time start laying-off employees. AMD will give us a new K8 and as the cost of doing business increases due to lack of cheap recourses the bottom line will be higher. Microsoft has put off Vista yet again and 64bit XP is still lagging behind in support.

Look at the PSU’s people are purchasing these days to enable SLI and untold amounts of devices running with wattages like 650 or even 1000. On top of that add any other peripherals you can think of like monitors, cameras, light shows, cooling systems and all the rest and now add inflation and fuel prices and things are going to get beyond our wallets.

The AMD/Intel war is in a way by design. “Mine is bigger than your’s” and “mine is faster then your’s” will keep you missing the bigger picture that both like it or not have a negative EROEI. When your goal is to play Oblivion for 600 hours (in a row) on your 7900 GS SLI with your 4 Raptors, consider your utility bill or your dad’s utility bill. I at best can type 90 WPM and even a P1 can turn that around with no problem. Instead of more efficiency computers in general cost more to own then ever. That does not include purchase prices. They simply have more components that require more power to get the job done.

When we have brownouts no one knows what to do with them selves since we are talking about electric devices. I do know that these devices are not edible and don’t work with out a power source. With the looks of things in the mid-east soon there will be more never ending war and even greater energy costs. It is good that the Great Depression was called what it was so that we can have the ability to own what we are soon to have: Depressing Depression w/ Starvation, War, Disease and Conroe’s that have no Power. Another possibility (shudder at the thought) is that we skip depression and go with extinction.

For a while I thought about building a system based on energy efficiency then I realized that while mobile processors could help a bit there wasn’t much else except turning it off. My wife and I sat down in the kitchen and discussed the electric bill a while back and since I am not made of money I decided to power everything down and use my PC for brief periods only. The last sin running in the house is the refrigerator and there is no solution for that. It will be a long, hot and frightening summer.

I only got a little way through it before I had to stop. I will come back to it.

Congrates on the >4k word post BTW.

My head hurts :x! I'm not a big fan of reading!

You want to build an energy effecient rig? That's all I could remember.

I couldn't be bothered to read the whole post.
I had to do enough studying in College about Physics, Mechanics, Thermodynamics, Chemistry, etc.

I saved money by using a notebook computer. They use a lot less power. And today's notebooks are provide all the computing power I need.

I don't know what drove you to make this, but bravo, son, bravo. I can't think of any possible solution to our pollution and oil use. Ideas anyone?

Thermodynamics has four laws (as shown again on Wikipedia):

In a simplified format the major points can be explained this way:

A third way to express thermodynamics is this way:

Now I can move to resources. A general definition of resources is a supply of something that can be used or drawn from. A more complex definition would be that a resource would be the machines, workers, money, land, raw materials, and other things that a country can use to produce goods and services and to make its economy grow. Resources may be renewable or nonrenewable. Countries must use their resources wisely to ensure long term prosperity. These are broad definitions yet are most useful when showing how they are the most important issues for the entire population of our current industrialized planet.
Just by being alive and all that life entails we consume resources in all sorts of ways. A good explanation of this would be food consumption. Since food is a resource that is available in lesser or greater amounts to a portion of us it can be said that the chain starts with the sun that provides photons and heat that plants use to scrub CO2 an produce O2 from water. The raw materials that make up a given plant can are available in a closed system that is the Earth. The main materials are carbon, water and nitrogen. I’m sure then that the dependency of all life forms on photosynthesis and plants need not be expressed here as the chain of life is quite apparent. If you do not see the connection, then read no further as the rest of this will be over your head.

For computers to exist certain inputs are necessary. The basic input is not silicon as you might suspect. The fact is that raw materials used to make all of the components and the machines that make components all depend on oil. The fact is that your motherboard most likely was imported to your desktop from Taiwan on a cargo ship and arrived to your abode in the back of a shipper’s truck. Those that were in a real rush paid extra for an aircraft so almost instant gratification could be had. I have a system too, so like all of you I have a stake in the conundrum that is unfolding.

Oil is a resource that can not be replaced. Even if the Earth were able to replenish consumed reserves of oil we humans have as of December of 2005 have out stepped supply with greater demand. This moment in history is playing out by a cast of actors who fail to see how thermodynamic laws spell at a minimum, the demise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. That is a bold statement on my part yet I am prepared to debate it thoroughly and vigorously. The point that demand of resources grew larger than supply, is now known as Peak-Oil. There are extremely simple ways that you can determine if we have reached the point where 50% of all known and unknown oil supplies have been reached.

You can get in your car and drive to any gas station and look at the current price for a gallon of gas. You will see that pending minor fluxuations the average price of gas is trending up, sometimes at great leaps. Another way would be to open any utility bill in your snail mail box and compare the rate to any previous bill from the same utility. That number is growing. Another simple test is to read the paper, watch the news or find current events on your computer pertaining to oil or war and see how oil and war have become one in the same.

Yes there are other energy inputs such as solar, wind, wave and biomass. The use of coal is on the rise again along with constructing new nuclear power plants. Each will play a role in an attempt to offset the growing deficiencies in our oil and natural gas supply. In the interest of keeping this as brief as possible I will shift to the wonders of nuclear fission and alternative fuel like ethanol. I can talk about all of the possible sources of energy yet I could do that some other time or upon a debate.

Uranium is found in mines these days (along with most other things). There was a point of time that rich veins were struck yet since the pursuit of Uranium has grown since the 1930’s and both reactors and weapons systems require massive amounts of it this natural element has depleted in availability. Mines must now be deeper and more expensive. Their yields are dependant upon oil. Mines do not for the majority use electricity to operate. Millions of cubic yards of earth need to be moved daily and the lion share of potential ore brought to the surface is moved on large trucks. The mines use diesel and gas powered generators and the location of the mines often dictates if bringing in electric power for lighter functions is possible. Most of the time a generator is built on sight to provide input energy to the system if coal, oil or NG is available.

Once ore is found it is processed and that first process is stone crushing. Mind you, that all of the equipment brought to bear takes energy to operate and all that much more to create and we still have no usable uranium in the story. After stone crushing are many more steps. Different ores need to be separated from the stone and each other. There are washing steps, more crushing steps and chemical steps all to wind up with a rather small amount of still un-processed uranium. Now the ore is transported on rail, barge or truck to another plant that specializes in refining uranium ore.

The ore is not useable, nor pure enough to be used in a reactor yet. Numerous machines are brought to bear to be left with only uranium. The rest is waste and that gets added to the other waste from production runs and the spent waste created from running reactors. After all the work they wind up with fuel pellets. These need to be shipped to generators and typically operate for about a year. The typical reactor has many tones of uranium in one of its vessels. After the reaction period is completed the rods are removed for cooling and go to reprocessing.

This is more work and quite dangerous. Energy, equipment and time are used to separate depleted uranium and plutonium (there are many others) from still useable uranium 235 & 233. Pu or plutonium goes into weapons manufacturing like ICBMs and depleted uranium goes into DU penetrators (used to slice through armor) along with aircraft tail section counter weights. The rest is waste with different lengths of decay. As an example Pu has a 24,000 year ½ life.

When you add up the energy used to make fuel rods available with the total amount of energy used to build and manufacture a reactor, support systems, input energy (oil), land acquisition, staff, transport and anything else found in those systems you wind up with a number called in energy units (w). This number can then be added to (x) that is derived from the costs in energy units of maintaining an ever growing supply of waste that has to be managed for up to 24000 years and even longer than that considering that the ½ life of U235 is 4.5 billion years. In uranium’s unrefined state is not concentrated and for the most part locked away below ground. Once refined its concentrations are incompatible with all life.

When (w) and (x) are added the result is (y) energy units. Energy units in this case are expressed as calories of energy. Any and all energies are expressible in caloric form, since this is in keeping with thermodynamics. The amount of calories of energy or work produced from the time a reactor is commissioned to the day it is decommissioned is expressed as (z). If (z) is greater than (y) or if the amount of output exceeds the input then the difference between the two would be called the energy returned on energy invested or the EROEI.

The laws of thermodynamics make it clear that the result (z) can never be greater than or equal to (y) since you can never break even or even come close to breaking even. So a simple way to look at nuclear EROEI would be to see if any nuclear plant ever was able to turn a profit since you and I would not be able to find actual raw numbers to plug into (w) or (x). I have looked at studies and have some of the numbers yet to get an accurate EROEI on nuclear is impossible since all of the necessary records are not available.

A colossal number that I deliberately skipped comes from accidents and releases like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. These have a caloric value as well and would increase value (y) if you were able to even obtain that magic number. The magic number here has to be quite large since the effects of major accidents, for example Chernobyl are ongoing. The full effects have no precedence since there have been no other industrialized cultures like ours. The basic summary being that for all of the effort (energy) put into nuclear energy the reward is a negative EROEI. Simply put we succeeded at depleting oil energy even further than if we simply burned the oil to make electricity.

I know of no reactors that ever turned a profit and later on the waste issue will need to be addressed in a world with that much less energy. This is pale in the face of the ongoing accident that Chernobyl is. Off topic but still to the point even 20 years later Chernobyl can at any time explode again as it will always be unstable. The G7 has decided to throw 4 billion Euros at it in hopes that the reactor can be officially cleaned up. That has never been done before on Earth. So in response to oil prices many new reactors are being ramped up and none have a positive EROEI.

Now I will shift to an alternative fuel that we are to believe may be the cure to oil addiction. Here I am talking about ethanol. Ethanol is a blend of alcohol and gasoline. So directly from that we discover that gasoline is still in the picture but to it we will add alcohol. The idea is to break foreign import dependence and still be able to keep our cars, computers and any other consumer goods. On the surface this is appealing. We grow corn that is a green thing to do and process it (fermentation) and we can burn the result. Now we can consider the details in transitioning an entire economy to corn fuel.

Here I will just put a link and you can bring yourself up to speed on the EROEI of ethanol.

http://healthandenergy.com/ethanol.htm

About 0.5 hectares (1.2 acres) of cropland per person is required to provide a diverse diet similar to that desired by the average American and European. At this very moment the available amount of hectares is 8,566,763,295 and falling. The global human population at this moment is 6,506,675,605 and climbing. If I multiply .5 by the current population the total is 3,253,337,802.5 of hectares needed by the human population. Now I subtract needed hectares from the available hectares and the result is 5,313,425,492.5. We however are not done with the math. It happens that we share the planet with farm, wild and domesticated animals. The dietary needs of a dairy cow or bull are averaged at 2.7 hectares per cow. At this present moment on the earth are 2,000,323,910 head of cow requiring 2.7 hectares worth of feed per year that require 5,400,874,557. Now I have a math problem since the hectares needed by just the cows have exceeded the 5,313,425,492.5 balance of available hectares. Yes the numbers are averages but the remaining animals eat too. Horses, goats, pigs, sheep, deer and all the rest consume the same natural recourses like grasses, oats, water and space and there impact has not been factored in.

We have found another negative EROEI yet the supermarket still has my hotdogs and my stomach is so full I can’t eat another thing. The main reason we don’t all starve is oil and natural gas. The main ingredient in farming is nitrogen. Farms would fail to meet demand if not for fertilizer. If we stop using man-made fertilizer and reduce pesticides crop yields will dwindle then fail. As it stands fields that would be rotated are not since the demand is so high for food.

If you read the link you would see that (X) hectares of corn would be needed per car and given the number of cars in the US alone it becomes clear that it would be impossible to grow fuel and grow food. Since the process of farming anything then moving it all around is negative EROEI beyond a reasonable carrying capacity it is hard to imagine that ethanol would do any more than become a net energy looser. Top soil erosion would go off the charts and we would need more fuel to make up the difference in the lost BTUs from transitioning. You have to burn more alcohol to get the same amount of work derived from burning one gallon of gas.

Relating this to our computers seems sort of moot. Once I realized that thermodynamics is applied to everything like gravity and that once you hit the top all you can do is go down. As it stands computers are part of the problem and like it or not have already become expensive again. Intel will give us Conroe and at the same time start laying-off employees. AMD will give us a new K8 and as the cost of doing business increases due to lack of cheap recourses the bottom line will be higher. Microsoft has put off Vista yet again and 64bit XP is still lagging behind in support.

Look at the PSU’s people are purchasing these days to enable SLI and untold amounts of devices running with wattages like 650 or even 1000. On top of that add any other peripherals you can think of like monitors, cameras, light shows, cooling systems and all the rest and now add inflation and fuel prices and things are going to get beyond our wallets.

The AMD/Intel war is in a way by design. “Mine is bigger than your’s” and “mine is faster then your’s” will keep you missing the bigger picture that both like it or not have a negative EROEI. When your goal is to play Oblivion for 600 hours (in a row) on your 7900 GS SLI with your 4 Raptors, consider your utility bill or your dad’s utility bill. I at best can type 90 WPM and even a P1 can turn that around with no problem. Instead of more efficiency computers in general cost more to own then ever. That does not include purchase prices. They simply have more components that require more power to get the job done.

When we have brownouts no one knows what to do with them selves since we are talking about electric devices. I do know that these devices are not edible and don’t work with out a power source. With the looks of things in the mid-east soon there will be more never ending war and even greater energy costs. It is good that the Great Depression was called what it was so that we can have the ability to own what we are soon to have: Depressing Depression w/ Starvation, War, Disease and Conroe’s that have no Power. Another possibility (shudder at the thought) is that we skip depression and go with extinction.

For a while I thought about building a system based on energy efficiency then I realized that while mobile processors could help a bit there wasn’t much else except turning it off. My wife and I sat down in the kitchen and discussed the electric bill a while back and since I am not made of money I decided to power everything down and use my PC for brief periods only. The last sin running in the house is the refrigerator and there is no solution for that. It will be a long, hot and frightening summer.NO!

Thanks for you assessment of the post in question. I had no idea that is was over 4K words long so I apologize for length. I chose to only briefly talk about peak-oil and what that means. Years ago a man Dr. M. King Hubbert, who was a geophysicist came up with a way to predict the life of an oil well. His formula worked so well that almost to the day he was able to predict the United States oil production peak in 1971 (the oil shortage).

As our depletion started the solution was to import OPEC oil. Now the Hubbert's Peak model has been applied to the entire world and the resulting decline in production globally is at or near 8% per year. Flux is expected. Many believe the planet hit peak in the year 2000 though all agree that as more time passes you will view the peak from the downside as the statistics have more time to develop. Currently the US imports 60% of all oil and NG.

The idea is that once the demand is greater then the supply society falls along the down slope as it rose on the upslope. There is not one thing done today that is not related to oil. The fact that 6.5 billion people exist is testimony to the power of cheap energy. So, some feel that reaching the peak will simply result in some inconveniences and added expense. Others believe that we will adapt by the use of alternatives. With out oil or with expensive oil the cost of food will rise with the cost of oil.

Odds are what you eat has covered great distances and was frozen or refrigerated so these transportation costs are added to the price you pay. Crops were grown on fields that were cleared, planted and cultivated with diesel powered equipment so, as production costs rise so does the price you pay. Fertilizer and pesticides are considered to be petro-chemicals. Commercial fertilizers are made from ammonia, which is made from natural gas that is falling faster than oil is. Fertilizer alone has doubled in price from this time 2 years ago. Petroleum based insecticides have followed fertilizer and doubled in price in the same time period. Most packaging these days is plastic based and that again is petro-chemicals. Packaging manufactures have had a tremendous rise in costs since they use energy and petro-chemicals to make plastic and those costs are on the rise. In the end you will have to pay more for what you purchase.

As for computers they require vast sums of input energy to build. The construction of the average desktop computer consumes ten times its weight in fossil fuels. Odds are you have DSL or cable otherwise you would not be here. Internet costs are on the rise since fiber, copper and plastics have gone up due to there dependence on oil. ISP expenses have increased from the service side too since there truck and vans cost more to operate. The amount of draw from your PC has increased and at the same time so has the cost of electricity. So since all of these depend on oil and that oil will continue to increase in price so will the cost of ownership.

If a new cheap energy was found then the process of establishing the infrastructure to support it for the masses would take upwards of 20 years to implement. As I said in my article there is actual energy like electricity and that could come from many things. Fuel is potential energy to make electricity. So fuel is an input to transform energy in the form of work. Hydroelectric power is considered renewable since the motion of water spins turbines that allow electrons in the copper to slow. The water comes from melting glaciers atop mountains and evaporation reforms the glaciers and a cycle is created. Oil is burned and converted directly into motion as in a truck or car or burned to spin turbines like in hydroelectric.

Hydroelectric power is fantastic but will never be able to replace oil. There are only so many mountains and so many rivers. On there downside the dams cause eco damage, displacement, loss of forests and farmable land. Salmon get killed at the dam and will not spawn if they can not swim upstream. The worst problem is that all the major dams are producing less power each year due to decreases in the water flow. Current studies link the decrease to global warming as the cycles that normally form ice on mountains are being interrupted.

Beyond hydro there are a few solutions like solar, wind and wave power generation. The windmills do work when there is wind. As it stands there are no available methods to store the potential. Each windmill requires materials that are obtained from the availability of fossil fuels. Solar has the same problems. Wave generation seems doable and as long as there are waves they work. Wave has the same situation as wind and solar though and if the waves become too great the devices will be destroyed. So in a hurricane losses would be expected. Geo thermal is location specific and has some potential.

So then we are down to three things, nuclear, coal and wood. All three of those are in use now. Coal is dirty and one idea is to process it to make oil. The EROEI is 2:1 but in thinking it through strip, track and deep mining all do massive damage to the earth. Vast deforestation and erosion would take its toll. Since 2 coal units generate 1 oil unit it would unlikely for the process to sustain itself. Tar sands have similar issues though we are using tar sands now and the oil recovered only makes up .8 percent of our daily consumption.

Those that have been working on fusion have said that they are 25 to 30 years away from a functional fusion reactor. They also said the same thing 30 years ago. So as it stands if you look at the numbers. Oil is and has been depleting since the first drop was used. There are current and developing recourses wars. Oil supplies are not meeting demands. While alternatives are being developed they can only account for a small fraction of the energy needed by the world.

So pending divine intervention we will see massive inflation and shortages at first. The treasury will be forced to print even more money and the layoffs and business closures will follow. Abroad all sorts of wars will start and at home the possibility of more attacks will rise. If all of this snowballs we will see WW3. I hope not but as you replied all civilizations have failed yet ours has nukes.I THOUGHT I SAID NO!

Leave the noob alone!

Not entirely true.

1) hypothesis that some (or even, all) oil is abiotic linked to hypothesis that oil is formed from magma.

2) hypothesis oil is continually forming (i.e. the process from which oil formed "originally", continues) and that oil is formed more rapidly than is commonly assumed.

3) reality that oil production is nowhere near PPF (PPF: the amount that could be produced given all available resources are used.)

4) synthetic crude (from pig manure, even)
There has been speculation that oil is not fossil fuel at all. Those that believe this say that oil flows up from some unknown process or reaction deeper within the earth. It collects in pockets and those are the wells that we drill. Some articles suggest that if we drill even deeper that we will find untold amounts of oil. Those that have determined that geologists have gotten it wrong have labeled oil as abiotic in nature.

Now, a dose of reality. The following graph shows the production (ability to get the oil from the well) rates of all the current major wells:

As a matter of fact one single well in the world called Ghawar is responsible for 10% of the entire global oil production. As it happens this well is also the oldest. There are plenty of graphs available and the summary of all of the data points refutes the claim that oil is abiotic.

To drill in a little further on abiotic oil dreams (pardon the drill pun) we can look at production rates, reserves, prices, difficulty of recovery, quality of oil (sweet or sour) and depletion rates. Instead of looking at all of that we can point to some riveting facts.
The last major oil field, Cantarell, off Mexico's shore, was discovered in 1976. Here are details about this well:

Here is the production picture:
This means that no major discoveries have been made in 30 years and counting while at the same time the major wells we rely on are for the most part all in decline.

We can make several conclusions based on this observation and the decline of the lower 48 in the US. Well decline rates hold to a curve and after a peak they all decline (taper off) in production. All new wells are significantly smaller since 1976. The world consumes more oil then it can pump (here people will blame refining capacity). If oil were abiotic this would be global phenomena rather then area specific. Since 1971 the lower 48 has been in permanent decline. There have been no wells in the lower 48 that have filled up again or been restarted.

Even if oil were abiotic it has not manifested in any wells by the observation of decline rates. Putting that another way; K, oil is abiotic so lets wait for a few million years and then the crude will flow again! If oil comes from the top or bottom, it is irrelevant since the well decline rates support Hubbert's Peak. According to peak oil once you hit the top shortly after you will have less and less oil and no GDP. You get recessions, inflation and depression at a minimum. So please if oil is as you believe "abiotic" do us all a big favor and show me its location so I can have a friend from BP have a look at it. My bet is that you can't!!

Here I can move to your fourth item of, "Oil from biomass." Since thermodynamics is the limiting factor the idea that converting methane to oil has an acceptable EROEI (pardon the pun) pig s**t. Biomass is in use today and is factored in with the first picture I posted in this reply. The output from biomass is methane gas. Any crap can be fermented and the result will be methane. On the surface this would be a good thing except for these facts.

Farm animals and all other animals except for humans are competing for the same space, water and food. As I said in the first post of this thread we currently use fertilizer made from ammonia that is made from NG. We would first need to replace the nitrogen that is depleted from the soil from I guess all of the corn we intend to grow for ethanol. So for that we would need manure. We could use human manure yet the risk of disease (black plague for instance) would rise. As it stands we no longer have enough food so you see starvation in parts of the world. As we export food for oil, we also give away our topsoil. In reality the food/water problem is more critical then the oil problem.

The fact is while there may be solutions we no longer have the luxury of time. Most alternatives have a negative EROEI or do not scale well for 350 million people in the US. One of the replies on this thread asked us all what we should do. Since no one will respond to that question I will. It is clear that in the US the government has moved to "the gun under the table" technique. As a result is willing to steal resources to save us from becoming a 3rd world country.

It is also abundantly clear that in this posturing the words "nuclear bunker buster" and "the nuclear option is still on the table" to me ring out the loudest. When a country that has already dropped 2 bombs on Japan is talking about "Turning the desert into a sheet of glass" when we have not even been attacked by Iran we are at a cliff. I think we are seeing all of the lines being drawn and the word civil is being removed from civilization. Our first priority should be eliminating or own nuclear arsenal to prevent Nuclear WW3. That would be a positive example and role to set for the world. You might have less of everything but will sleep better knowing that while the world is falling apart you at least didn't morally corrupt yourself.

I think the +/- 300 billion thrown at Iraq was better thrown at efficiency at home and scientific pursuit of cheap clean energy. Taking the Iraq's or Iranian's oil in reality is not going to help all that much. So we have lost control of our lives and our government is redistributing wealth to the rich. They see the bigger picture that the depression to come will not be short or pretty. Maybe the poor or almost poor who are vast in numbers should go old school and grab some tar and feathers and realize that we are all simply slaves who get credits to buy crap we don't need that means nothing w/out OIL!

Basically, it's a nice article, but the connection to PCs is tentative at best, and a lot of it reads like going into deep scientific detail to prove what everybody already knows. We have less oil than we used to. Using so much of it isn't good for the environment. We should be looking harder for alternatives. Other than a few new words I don't feel like I've learnt anything from reading it.

I believe you should write a book.....if I wanted to read something that looooonnnnggg, I'd pick up a book.

who said I was joking?

I'm serious....you should write a book. You are obviously very long-winded.

(I didn't read most of your post)

But oil will never ever again be 20 dollars a barrel...that is wishful thinking.

LOL, you did a good job on it.

http://economics.about.com/cs/macr [...] of_oil.htm

Just something i stumbled across.....he makes some good points

Alpha Magnum, the end isn't as near as you think it is. Go ahead and use your air conditioner and computer this summer. If you try to save your money for the time that things get really bad it'll probably be worthless anyway.

Back about twenty years ago there were people preparing for WWIII. They were called survivalists. The survivalists thought that it was better to prepare for the inevitable war/degradation of society than to die because of it. Unlike them, it sounds like you are planning to suffer it out till it does you in.

Hope you wake up on the right side of the bed tomorrow.

Why in the hell are you quoting at me? i didn't say anything about anything involving anything you quoted.


You're arguing with nobody, you're an idiot, and your points are laughable. Lets try not to that MmmmmKaaaay?

Despite your best intentions, that diatribe of yours was ridiculously long.

Nothing personal, but my time is too precious and my patience too thin to even bother with such a lengthy piece; particularly from a fresh-faced newb.

Otherwise, welcome.

Dude, you totally missed me... I smacked you almost 24 hours ago... Do you think I have nothing better to do than stand next to you for 24 hours?

OK, I don't have anything better to do, but that's not the point...

MMMmmm Heidi Klummmmmmmmmmmmm.....

Sorry, had I known it was that important, I would not have woke you.