Master of one trade, not jack of all...

maybe, just maybe, the folks who did the study happen to be experts in oil. Their research specifically excludes all fuels that aren't based directly on oil.

From the article:

“Of course, other technologies could also diversify the supply of transportation energy such as advanced, environmentally friendly biofuels, hydrogen; or partially or fully electric vehicles utilizing low carbon electricity (possibly including fossil fuels plus CCS, renevables, and nuclear power.”

So, Rafael, you can safely add agricultural, hydrogen, and nuclear pork-seeking lobbies to the list of fund-providers.

People publishing those studies should be obligated to state, very clearly in the preface, who financed it directly or indirectly.

In academic journals it's customary to state acknowledgments at the end. And so it is in this article as well, where the authors acknowledge support by the "Climate Decision Making Center" (some organization funded by the NSF and CMU) and the "Energy Foundation" , whose homepage at least immediately doesn't scream oil-industry-shill at you. Perhaps a more thorough investigation would show otherwise, I don't know.

...appropriate policies, tradeoffs between these risks are likely to be made so as to allow increased environmental disruption in return for increased economic and energy security.

I'm sorry, but those Berkeley researchers are just not seeing the Big Picture here. Everyone gets their own mini-nuclear reactor, cheap power, problem sol-ved.

Next we need to work on some "Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz" for the Oceans.

As the second author of this paper (A. Brandt), and daily GCC reader, I am surprised to see that the discussion of our research has focused on our funding sources. As noted by J.J., we state that we received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation through Carnegie Mellon Universitiy as well as minor funding from the Energy Foundation. The CDMC seeks to understand how to make decisions about climate mitigation in spite of the deep uncertainty that exists regarding the costs of mitigating emissions and the potential damages from climate change.

I would hope that upon reading the article, others do not conclude that we are attempting to make conventional oil "look good." We chose to focus on the resources that we focused on for two reasons: first, they are directly usable substitutes for conventional oil without changing automotive or fuel distribution technologies; and second, we had to narrow the scope of the analysis to make it a tractable project. The primary author (A. Farrell) has recently published research on ethanol in Science that is on the whole favorable to ethanol as a petroleum substitute.

The real point of the paper, in fact, was to illustrate that we are in danger of ignoring the "tangled" nature of this problem. If we focus only on the enery security or economic nature of the problem, as many tend to do, we will likley end up ignoring the entangled environemental impacts of these substitutes. Rather than trying to make conventional oil look good we were trying to show that if we look holistically at the fossil-based resouces that are being promoted for energy security (e.g. oil shale or CTL), they in fact have large environmental tradeoffs.

I really don't know why so many of you guys are so cheesed about this paper.

Kneejerk antiestablishmentarianism.

I find this article very useful. It compiles into one readily understandable picture estimations of fossil reserves to produce liquid fuel, cost of their exploration, their EROI and consequently energy intensity and CO2 emissions of potential exploration. All numbers correlate well with all I have read on the subject.

Now, one could use this data to predict oil prices, potential technologies to substitute for anticipated oil shortages (including biofuels and electric vehicles), plan for carbon sequestration or for personal bombshelter up in the mountains. Whatever your desire. The fact that the article does not predict immediate doom from ice caps avalanche or nuclear war over last drop of oil does not make it biased.

I'm just glad somebody spoke up. I read the article, I read the study and then I read the comments and wondered 'did these people read the same thing I did?'
"Kneejerk antiestablishmentarianism" is right! I've heard of reading between the lines but those guys were writing a novel between the lines, and it was a work of fiction.

Roger,

That is, of course, the next logical step for this type of research. The pathways between primary fuel (be it fossil or photon) and the final energy carrier are numerous and increasing in number. Such an analysis would allow us to compare different ways to get energy into an automobile, such as CTL vs. coal fired electricity with CCS into a battery, or CNG vs. GTLs, or solar electricity vs. solar hydrogen. That would also allow the comparison of biofuels, which are not comparable on the same "resource-spectrum" diagram as the other fuels.

I think the image of "jumping from the frying pan and into the fire" is a relevant one here, and it captures the point of the article well.

I'm surprised that anyone researching this subject would be surprised at running into strong skepticism and suspicion.

Considering the history, including the recent history, of oil companies actions, and the natural tendency of bigger animals to eat smaller animals, this type of skepticism should be both expected and appreciated.

Nationally for US, crude oil used to get ~15-1 EROEI, a generation ago. Now, with fields aging, and offshore sources becoming predominate, it is more like 11-1. This is roughly a 44% increase in energy intensity, for the oil industry. This primarily comes in the form of electricity, heavy diesel fuel, and natural gas/petroleum gas. As we continue to reach for ever more remote locations, and wring more from depleted reserves, we will spend more to get it.
__Even the Saudis will see this as Ghawar runs out of oil in the easily produced portion of the field, leaving more difficult and costlier parts left to exploit. The ~$5/barrel it currently takes to produce the crude, may go to ~$10/barrel, perhaps even $15. Depending on what figures you use, there will be a plunge 2010-2015, as production crashes from 5MMbbl/day->1MMbbl/day, or 1MMbl/day reduction per decade starting 2010. For Saudi production in general, the peak will likely arrive by the middle of next decade, with a dropoff in output by 2025.
__Unless ther is an ace to be pulled out of Lybia, and oil shale, and extra heavy crude, and tar sands, and CTL, and GTL, and oil extraction technology we could see peak oil by 2020.

To make matters ever more exciting The Globe & Mail publishes a lengthy article today on "Carbon Dioxide Isn't the Villain It is Made Out to Be."

Let's just keep playing the disinformation game to avoid the hard work!

www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061207.wcomment1207/BNStory/National/home