Peak Oil

[Andi_HB]

The Oil-Price will only get up.
The "Production" turn to the right - the requirement is going up.

http://www.oljekrisa.no/images/verde...on%20alder.jpg

[jasong]

Makes me wonder if there will be peak Lithium as well?

Not sure if Lithium should be capitalized. I'm more likely to encounter the word as a medication reference than as just an element, which might explain the capitilization.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by jasong

Makes me wonder if there will be peak Lithium as well?

Not sure if Lithium should be capitalized. I'm more likely to encounter the word as a medication reference than as just an element, which might explain the capitilization.

Don't see why there shouldn't be, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Li has been a mass item of commerce for such a short time that new easily exploitable reserves are likely not to be hard to find, IMO.

My concern is more about the medium-term availability of helium. Until we start mining the gas giants He is very much a non-renewable resource. Most every other commercially useful element is either easily recyclable from waste products or easily generated from easily available precursors. The latter includes stuff like Pu (made from U) and Am (made from Pu). Once He escapes captivity it very rapidly makes its way to the upper atmosphere and then the solar wind. Extracting it from the former is uneconomic at present. By the time we can extract it economically from there or the solar wind we should find it even easier just to ship it in from Jupiter or Saturn.

[Dubslow]

Originally Posted by xilman

Don't see why there shouldn't be, but I don't see it happening any time soon. Li has been a mass item of commerce for such a short time that new easily exploitable reserves are likely not to be hard to find, IMO.

My concern is more about the medium-term availability of helium. Until we start mining the gas giants He is very much a non-renewable resource. Most every other commercially useful element is either easily recyclable from waste products or easily generated from easily available precursors. The latter includes stuff like Pu (made from U) and Am (made from Pu). Once He escapes captivity it very rapidly makes its way to the upper atmosphere and then the solar wind. Extracting it from the former is uneconomic at present. By the time we can extract it economically from there or the solar wind we should find it even easier just to ship it in from Jupiter or Saturn.

Supposedly the moon is incredibly rich in He-3.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Supposedly the moon is incredibly rich in He-3.

Supposedly is the right word.

A minute fraction of the solar wind is made of He-3. A minute fraction of the solar wind adheres to lunar rock. Helium is not particularly sticky, especially when compared with the majority of the solar wind which is hydrogen

On the order of 10% of Jupiter and Saturn by mass is He. A minute fraction of that is He-3. A minute fraction of ~30 earth masses is of the order of a hell of a lot.

Go figure.

IMO, until mining of the gas giants gets under way it is likely to be more economic to breed He-3 from Li down here on earth than it will to mine it from the lunar regolith. I'd be very happy to be proved wrong.

[jasong]

Originally Posted by xilman

IMO, until mining of the gas giants gets under way it is likely to be more economic to breed He-3 from Li down here on earth than it will to mine it from the lunar regolith. I'd be very happy to be proved wrong.

It's possible to make helium? I wonder how expensive it would have to get for present methods of making helium to be a good idea.

What if we took hydrogen and caused it to rotate in a circle around what needs to be cooled? I know that works on a hot day, but I never studied the particulars. I suppose evaporation would have to be involved somehow.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by jasong

It's possible to make helium? I wonder how expensive it would have to get for present methods of making helium to be a good idea.

It's possible to make an isotope of any element from any isotope of any element. Only under rather unusual circumstances is it cost-effective to do so.

How do you think we get helium-3 right now? A standard industrial process is first to irradiate lithium with neutrons, producing He-4 and tritium. The tritium is then stored in the form of lithium tritide and as the isotope decays (with a 12.3 year half-life) the gaseous He-3 produced is pumped off.

A small amount of tritium is also produced in D₂O moderated fission reactors and another minor source of He-3 is as a contaminant in He-4 gas wells.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by xilman

How do you think we get helium-3 right now? A standard industrial process is first to irradiate lithium with neutrons, producing He-4 and tritium. The tritium is then stored in the form of lithium tritide and as the isotope decays (with a 12.3 year half-life) the gaseous He-3 produced is pumped off.

I was going to ask about the economics of scaling this up to use helium-3 for fusion, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3 already has the numbers to pop that balloon.

. . .

Despite the many proposals, the limited advantages helium-3 provides for controlled fusion, the complex infrastructure required for lunar extraction, and the relatively modest cost of terrestrial production make it unlikely that extraterrestrial mining of helium-3 will ever be practical.

. . .

http://www.he3fusion.com/ appears to be over-optimistic.

What a shame.

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Yes, we've seen the oil crunch coming, for decades. I'm on record about it.

I haven't heard much about peak oil recently. Any noteworthy news?

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by wblipp

I haven't heard much about peak oil recently. Any noteworthy news?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/...ice-right.html

The production-cost-per-barrel angle is the one most relevant to Peak Oil, but the dramatic slowing of demand growth is also interesting - concomitant price collapses in the past 6-12 months in commodities like iron and copper appear to confirm the long-awaited beginning of the end of the monstrous China property/credit bubble. (Goalseeked official Chinese statements re. GDP growth and such notwithstanding.)

[Uncwilly]

We have arrived (well like the Voyager probes arriving at the edge of the solar system):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/shell-says-its-oil-production-has-begun-a-long-term-decline