Posts Tagged ‘Peak Oil’
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
I was fortunate enough to test-drive the Nissan Leaf this week, and thought I would post some first impressions.
The car itself is very comfortable, and for anyone used to a Prius (or any automatic), it drives exactly like a normal car. The car is comfortable, acceleration is quite quick, and overall the car performs perfectly for city driving – my test drive was relatively short and was city based, but I am sure it would perform perfectly for mid-range journeys as well.
The range is stated to be 160km – certainly more than enough for the daily commute in a city. The car comes with Sat-Nav built in, and the available range is highlighted on the map. Obviously depending on how the car is driven, this range can change, but this is all reflected on the map in real time so you can see clearly what affect different driving styles have on your range. The car also has an eco-drive mode which reduces the rate of acceleration and hence increases the range.
The manufacturers claim that the battery will be able to maintain an 80% charge after 5 years of usage, and 70% after 10 years. This would reduce the range to 128km and 112km respectively.
The car has several nice power management features – it can be set to only charge between certain hours, so you can arrive home, plug it in and it will only start charging during the hours that you choose. You can also set it to switch on the air conditioning at a set time as well, so the car can be heated up in the morning before you reach it – as this is done from the mains it will not reduce your range for the day. The car can also communicate via a smart phone app so all these features can be controlled remotely, allowing you to check if the car is charged from anywhere you have an internet connection.
The charge time is about 8 hours from a domestic charge point, and 25 minutes from a fast charge point. There are plans for 30 of these fast charge points around the country – for details of their locations, see the ESB’s PDF here.
Overall, first impressions were very good, and I can see electric cars becoming mainstream over the next decade.
I would have some reservations about having one as my primary car, due mainly to thinking if it would be possible drive from my home in Dublin to the family farm in Wexford after owning the car for 7-10 years without having to stop and recharge.
However, for any households who based in or near a city, and who currently have two cars, I can not think of any reason not to get one if you were replacing one of the gas-guzzlers anyway. The last census in 2006 indicated that of the 1,462,296 households in the state 1,173,519 (80.25% of total households) had at least one car, and 609,270 had 2 or more cars (that’s 41.67% of total households, or 51.9% of households with a car) , so there is a large potential market for electric vehicles.
The Leaf will be available in Ireland from February 2011, and will cost €29,995 after a government grant of €5,000. With running costs of approximately 1c/kilometre, anyone doing a significant amount of urban driving should seriously consider one, particularly if it was to replace a second car that was being upgraded anyway.
Tags: carbon, CO2, Electric Cars, electricity, Peak Oil
Posted in Energy, Peak Oil, Sustainability | 3 Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
We’re now beginning to see government agencies put figures on the oil supply deficit in coming years.
The US Department of Energy information agency say that current data points to a supply deficit of 5 million barrels a day by 2015, rising to 20 million barrels a day in 2020. This estimate, calculated in April 2009 after the economic crash in western countries, is based on slowly rising global demand, largely on foot of increased consumption in China and India.
But rather than translating into queues at petrol pumps, the deficit is expected to prompt price increases over time as demand runs ahead of supply.
Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency advises that “we have to leave oil before oil leaves us”. Signs of that remain thin on the ground, the car park of Leinster House being a case in point.
And the ill-fated attempt to drill for oil one mile below the ocean surface off the coast of Louisiana is testament to the complexity, even desperation, brought on by peak oil. It’s not easy to manage oil exploration 1,500 metres underwater where divers can only operate locked inside submarines.
What’s more, gaining a picture of just how much oil is escaping every day in the gulf is very difficult. In a ‘worse-case’ scenario, the spill could rise to 100,000 barrels a day, according to BP. The current estimate is 60,000 barrels a day, according to the US government. Let’s take the lower figure.
Some 60,000 barrels converts to 9.6 million litres. What would that be in terms of Irish dairy production, for example? To produce 9.6m litres of milk a day would take a staggering 420,000 cows. Or put it another way, the standard home delivery oil truck carries 20,000. Now picture 480 of these trucks circled on the beaches of a small island spilling their contents into the sea every day.
Tags: barrels per day leaked, BP oil spill, deepwater horizon, Peak Oil
Posted in Global Warming | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 28th, 2010
Wednesday night last saw an interesting session to kick off several days of the 15th Convergence Sustainable Living Festival, organised by Cultivate.
The two-hour session was entitled: ‘Planning our retreat from fossil fuels: exploring the ramifications of Peak Oil’ and featured a panel of three speakers, David Korowicz of Feasta (and author earlier this year of the jaw-dropping report, ‘Tipping Point‘), Richard O’Rourke, director of the Irish branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) and Green Minister of State, Ciaran Cuffe. (more…)
Tags: Ciaran Cuffe, Cultivate, Davie Philip, Energy, Feasta, Korowicz, Peak Oil
Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil, Sustainability | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Even when you don’t agree with him, Monbiot remains essential reading. Whether you regard the Dark Mountain Project as a bunch of dystopian doomers, or simply realists probably depends on how you feel about peak oil (in the shorter term) and (in the medium term) just exactly what might happen when we do indeed succeed in doubling concentrations of atmospheric CO2 from their pre-industrial levels and usher in, as predicted, a brave new climatic order for the next few millennia… (more…)
Tags: Energy, Monbiot, Oil, palm oil, Peak Oil, Sustainability
Posted in Global Warming, Peak Oil, Sustainability, biodiversity | No Comments »
Sunday, April 11th, 2010
The debate on climate change faces a number of inherent handicaps. Human nature is perhaps the most important. At our best, we deal reasonably well with the present and the immediate future. If next Christmas seems remote, our abilities to grasp what the environment might look like ten or fifty years hence are severely limited. A limitation that is reinforced by our relative powerlessness – the “I’m happy to recycle but what about the Chinese coal-fired power stations?” argument.
A second handicap comes from the not insignificant resources some invest in promoting climate change denial. The most understandable of these come from businesses with a clear commercial interest in delaying, diluting, or derailing regulatory attempts.
Then come the (usually wealthy) benefactors who are ideologically opposed to any form of market regulation. This groups funds many of the more strident US think tanks and a range of other lobby groups whose job it is to rubbish climate change claims and scientific arguments. (more…)
Tags: Climategate, CRU, denial, Energy, Peak Oil
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Peak Oil, Sustainability, climate sceptics | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
HERE’S A conundrum: restarting global economic growth will, by definition, push up energy costs. Rising energy costs will in turn choke off that economic recovery, leading to a fall in energy prices. Try to restart growth again, and the brick wall of energy costs magically reappears. Repeat ad infinitum.
It is hard to overstate the extent to which our daily lives are subsidised by cheap, plentiful oil. Every 24 hours, Ireland burns around 200,000 barrels. That’s the daily equivalent of the muscle power of 2.4 million men, each working for a full year.
Our entire way of life depends on abundant, inexpensive oil. This era is now drawing to a close. Five years ago, the Hirsch report published by the US department of energy concluded that the world has “never faced a problem” as difficult as peak oil, adding that: “without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary”. Oil peaking will be, it warned, “abrupt and revolutionary”. (more…)
Tags: Energy, Feasta, Forfas, Hirsch, Korowicz, Peak Oil
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Ireland focus, Peak Oil, Sustainability | No Comments »
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Bill Gates is for many the Dr Evil of the corporate world. His Microsoft behemoth has had a stranglehold on the world’s personal computer market for the last two decades, and wrung hundreds of billions out of users in the process. All of which makes Mr Gates ridiculously rich.
So rich in fact that his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is now possibly the world’s largest private charity. It recently pledged a staggering $10 billion to help develop and deliver vaccines for children in the so-called developing world. However, Mr Gates may have had something of an epiphany recently, in terms of his understanding of where the real threats lie. (more…)
Tags: climate, collapse, Energy, nuclear, Nuclear Power, Peak Oil, Sustainability
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Nuclear Power, Sustainability | 7 Comments »
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Currently, hydropower provides 6% of the USA’s electrical power, and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal combined provide 3%.
Dismantled nuclear weapons provide 10%.
The ‘Megatons to Megawatts’ programme was instituted in the 1990s as a means to secure the weapons that both the US and Russsia had agreed to dismantle as a result of arms reduction treaties. What was initially seen as a massive security issue has been transformed into a cheap and plentiful supply of fissile material, and also led to huge financial savings from not having to secure and maintain the warheads themselves, along with their associated delivery systems. The scheme has been very successful – material from Russia’s ex-weapons currently provides 45% of the fuel in US reactors, with former American weapons providing a further 5%. (more…)
Tags: electricity, Energy, nuclear, Peak Oil
Posted in Nuclear Power, Peak Oil | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Take a minute or two to study the chart below. It is just issued by the International Energy Agency, an industry-centric organisation not prone to engaging in eco-alarmism. But this is alarming, truly shocking in fact.
The dark blue chart area is the one to watch. This is the real, live oil, the stuff civilisation runs on. Today, it provides around 70 of the 82 million or so of oil-equivalent barrels we burn each day. (more…)
Tags: carbon, climate change, emissions, Energy, global warming, nuclear, Peak Oil
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Ireland focus, Nuclear Power, Peak Oil, Sustainability | 31 Comments »
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
Nothing says vulgarity or hubris quite like a Hummer. Clocking in at an average of 13 miles per gallon (21.7 litres per 100km), they are no longer the biggest monstrosity on the roads these days, if you really want to give the planet the finger, you can’t top the élan of a Hummer
Shock then to learn that General Motors in the US has announced it is planning to offload its Hummer business. Petrol prices approaching $4 a barrel have seen sales of the tank-like range of SUVs take a nosedive. GM is scaling back production of SUVs by canning four of its big vehicle plants. (more…)
Tags: CO2, Hummer, Peak Oil, petrol, SUV
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Peak Oil, Sustainability | 2 Comments »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Ireland, it appears, is at last starting to get serious about tackling our huge energy requirements, and the dagger that our massive dependence on imports of oil and gas in particular holds to our collective throat.
We are reckoned in the energy stakes to be among the OECD’s most import-dependent countries. This, with Peak Oil somewhere on the horizon and with ultra-volatile supply chains putting us totally at the mercy of the Middle East for oil and Russia for gas, is not where a modern economy or society wants to be. (more…)
Tags: climate change, CO2, Coal, Eamon Ryan, ESB, Ireland, Moneypoint, Peak Oil
Posted in Energy, Global Warming, Ireland focus, Nuclear Power, Sustainability | 3 Comments »
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
The year 1900 is little more than two generations ago. It’s the year before my maternal grandmother was born. At that time, she was one of some 1.6 billion people then alive on the earth.
A hundred years, two World Wars and countless other setbacks later, and global population is edging towards seven billion. That’s more than a quadrupling of the planet’s population in a single century. There has never been a (human) population explosion like it in the history of the world, and there never will be again. (more…)
Tags: climate change, collapse, Dr Richard Duncan, Olduvai, Peak Oil
Posted in Global Warming, Habitat/species loss, Peak Oil, Sustainability | 6 Comments »
