Category: Economics

Matters of money

Open thread: additive manufacturing

I was surprised to see that I don’t seem to have ever put up a post about 3D printing, despite the variety of ways in which it’s interesting.

The Economist has recently printed a few articles:

I’ve done a little 3D printing myself, making one of Bathsheba’s free designs at the Toronto Reference Library. It would be great to be able to print in something more durable than the biodegradable plastic they offer.

Financing oil production

There is, however, a considerable campaign to be undertaken before we reach a post-carbon world, especially in the United States. A larger lesson from Carbon Democracy is that such democratic struggles depend not on future designs but upon identifying in current socio-technical systems their points of vulnerability. This postscript has traced the peculiar vulnerability of oil companies dependent on flows of equity investment that must increase as rapidly as the costs of producing oil are rising. Yet those rising costs reflect a world in which cheap, conventional oil is more and more scarce and the technical expense and environmental costs of producing unconventional oil are escalating. These risks and costs reveal a world at odds with the optimistic scenarios on which accelerating flows of equity depend. Meanwhile, capital that long ago began losing interest in organising — and thus becoming vulnerable to — large-scale productive labour, tried the easier route of organising lives around the making and servicing of debt. The problems of peak oil hastened the collapse of the debt machine. The recent US energy boom offers only a temporary and equally vulnerable diversion.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 267

Domestic consumption and oil exports

Saudi Arabia currently uses as much as one-fifth of its daily oil production to power the twenty-seven desalination plants it needs to produce domestic water, and almost as much again on other domestic consumption. Unless the government finds a way to slow the growth in this use of oil, which reduces the proportion available for export, Saudi Arabia’s exports are set for rapid decline. (Brazil discovered the largest new oil field found in the Western hemisphere in more than thirty years in 2007, any may prove to have the world’s seventh largest reserves; but due to rising domestic consumption, the country will never become an exporter.) Iran faces similar problems and more: with decline rates of 13 per cent in the six supergiant fields that hold most of its reserves, rising domestic consumption, and sanctions imposed by the US and European Union that prevent the use of enhanced extraction technologies, the country’s oil production now faces long term decline.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 262

An insurmountable rate of oilfield depletion?

Facing an annual decline rate of 4 or even 4.5 per cent, the world must discover and bring online the equivalent of a new Saudi Arabia — or one could equally say, a new United States, complete with the shale boom — every four years, or perhaps every three, in order merely to maintain current rates of production.

The rate of decline reflects the depletion of major oil regions like the North Sea and the North Slope of Alaska, and the decreasing flow from countries that were once among the world’s largest producers such as Indonesia and Mexico. But it also reflects the difficulty in increasing production in countries that were supposed to account for much of the future growth in the supply of conventional oil, in particular the three large producers of the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 261-2

Fracking and peak oil

The sudden abundance of oil in the United States in fact reflects a global scarcity. The shale boom bas been used to dismiss evidence of peak oil; in fact, the boom is its latest symptom. The era of easily accessible, cheaply produced, and ever increasing supplies of conventional oil that shaped the politics of the twentieth century is passing away. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest corporation, publishes an annual scenario, The Outlook for Energy, which lays out a picture each year of expanding populations, growing consumption, and the continually increasing demand for energy on which its own share value depends. But even ExxonMobil now acknowledges, toward the end of the 2013 report, that the supply of conventional oil has reached a peak and will gradually decline. [p. 38] The peak reflects the fact that oil firms have already pumped from the ground roughly half the world’s recoverable stores of conventional oil, and will produce the remainder at slower rates and with increasing difficulty.

Humankind has now consumed about two trillion barrels of oil since the rise of the modern petroleum industry in the 1860s. It is worth repeating that burning the first trillion took about 130 years, but we went through the second trillion in only twenty-two years. Estimates differ on how soon the peak in the supply of unconventional oil or other fossil fuels will arrive. But under any scenario, the rate of their depletion is astonishing.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 259-60

Saudi Arabia and the political economy of oil

The fact that oil money helped develop the power of the muwahhidun in Arabia after 1930 and made possible the resurgence of Islamic political movements in the 1970s has often been noted. But it is equally important to understand that, by the same token, it was an Islamic movement that made possible the profits of the oil industry. The political economy of oil did not happen, in some incidental way, to relied on a government in Saudi Arabia that owed its own power to the force of an Islamic political movement. Given the features of the political economy of oil – the enormous rents available, the difficulty in securing those rents due to the overabundance of supply, the pivotal role of Saudi Arabia in maintaining scarcity, the collapse of older colonial methods of imposing anti-market corporate control of the Saudi oilfields – oil profits depended on working with those forces that could guarantee the political control of Arabia: the House of Saud in alliance with the muwahhidun. The latter were not incidental, but became an internal element in the political economy of oil. ‘Jihad’ was not simply a local force antithetical to the development of ‘McWorld’; McWorld, it turns out, was really McJihad, a necessary combination of social logics and forces.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso; London. 2013. p. 213 (italics in original)

Mitchell on “Carbon Democracy”

A surprising oversight in Timothy Mitchell’s generally-insightful Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is how he gives relatively little consideration to static versus mobile forms of fossil fuel consumption. He strongly emphasizes the production and transportation logistics of coal versus oil, but gives little consideration to special needs for fuels with high energy density (and sometimes low freezing points) in transport applications from cars and trucks to aircraft and rockets. People sometimes assume that oil demand and electricity production are more related than they really are, especially in jurisdictions where oil is mostly used as transport fuel and for heating (both areas where little electricity is generally used).

At a minimum, I think it’s important to give some special consideration to the needs of the aerospace and aviation industries, especially when pondering biofuel alternatives. Also, we need to try to project things like the deployment rate of electric ground vehicles in various applications, when trying to project how the forms of energy production and use in the future affect politics and low-carbon policy choices.

China continuing with coal

A characteristic of climate change policies around the world is a disjuncture between targets states adopt and the policies they implement. States pledge to keep warming below 1.5-2.0 ˚C, but then make all sorts of choices which are fundamentally at odds with that trajectory: not pricing carbon, building new high-carbon infrastructure, and generally failing to act with seriousness and urgency.

A New York Times story demonstrates how bad the disjoint in Chinese policy is. They note: “Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal” and “The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord”. Most of the proposed construction is outside China:

Shanghai Electric Group, one of the country’s largest electrical equipment makers, has announced plans to build coal power plants in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran with a total capacity of 6,285 megawatts — almost 10 times the 660 megawatts of coal power it has planned in China.

At a time when the disastrous climate plans of Trump and the U.S. Republicans are making people hope that Chinese leadership can fill the gap, China’s unwillingness to abandon coal is a major reason why today’s policies are still leading toward global climate catastrophe.

A new format for the Olympics?

So many recent Olympic games have had a questionable legacy and, since the world as a whole needs to be undertaking a massive effort to function more sustainably, it seems like the itinerant period in Olympic history might be appropriately brought to an end.

It’s lunacy to build Olympic-level athletic facilities over and over again, particularly since many of them (like ski jumps and bobsled tracks) cannot be safely used by anyone outside a tiny handful of world class athletes.

Instead, it seems much more sensible to adopt one of two approaches: the establishment of permanent homes for the summer and winter Olympics in suitable locations where the facilities already exist, or the dispersal of the Olympics with events to happen in different places around the world which already have facilities in place. Either approach would eliminate the role of the Olympics as a national prestige project, but that’s arguably where most of the problems come from, from massive spending on security and facilities to corruption.