There are no dilithium crystals..

One of the main arguments I hear against worrying so much about peak oil is that we will find or develop technological solutions to make up for our current dependency on oil. My niece has not been the only person to tell me she wanted to hear about solutions, not problems. And I can certainly empathize. In addition to having faith in humanity's ability to innovate, especially in a pinch, I'm also one of those people who gets really annoyed at the person in the staff meeting who bitches about what's not working without suggesting ways for improvement.

And my nephew responded to my initial email with quite a long, thoughful review of many alternatives that should not only give us hope, but whose existence really should set aside one's concern about peak oil.

But there's this "little problem" with pretty much every solution proposed. NONE of them will come close, in the right amount of time, to serving as an alternative for our dependency on oil.

At the Peak Oil & Community Solutions conference Sept 23-25, Steve Andrews (one of the people creating the new ASPO-USA), suggested these questions to ask of any alternatives:

• How much transportation can be supplied by the alternative fuel? [70% of US oil consumption goes to transportation.]
  
• What is the projected timetable for the arrival of the supply? Will it be available when we need it?
  
• What is the NET ENERGY contribution of any new option? (i.e., what is the benefit of the energy MINUS the cost of getting at it?)
  
• What are the political, economic, environmental and technological barriers to the alternative fuel's arrival in the speculated quantities?
  

With these questions in mind, here's what Andrews had to say about the most popularly suggested alternatives:

• "Unconventional oils" (Canadian tar sands, Venezuelan heavy oil, Colorado shale) require enormous amounts of high quality energy to get the oil out, and will only slow but not reverse the rate of decline after oil peaks. (Great quote attributed to Randy Udall: "Why would a person feed their dog steak in order to eat Alpo?")
  
• While increasing vehicle efficiency is a "slam-dunk mitigating action," replacing the existing auto fleet (235 million in the U.S. alone) would be excrutiatingly slow. Currently hybrid cars in the U.S. make up for only 0.1% (that's one-tenth of one percent) of US cars. While hybrid sales may increase 1% this year, it's not fast enough.
  
• Ethanol from corn has too low of an energy-return-on-energy-investment (1:1.35 to 1:1.6). Switchgrass and other cellulose-based biofuels offers a substantially higher return, but even these would only provide X-thousand barrels/day at full tilt. (The U.S. uses 21 MILLION barrels per day.)
  
• Coal is the ultimate climate-change bad actor, and while more plentiful than oil, is non-renewable.
  
• Nuclear's lethal byproducts last many thousands of years. [And while not discussed at this conference, I've also heard that some insanely high # of new plants would need to be built per year in order to compensate for our current energy use.]
  
• Wind and solar are renewable, although intermittent (on nature's schedule, not ours); they work well today, but utility companies are kicking and screaming down this path; change is slow.
  
• Hydrogen (an energy carrier, not a fuel itself) has a negative return on investment and enormous technical barriers to make it a viable alternative by 2020.
  

In light of these considerations, you can see how it's difficult to be gung ho about alternative sources of energy...