Richard Ha writes:

This is a very interesting podcast by Robert Rapier, who spoke at the recent Association of the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conference.

He talks about a request for him to rank the top 50 renewable energy companies. By the time he reached the fifth one, it was looking iffy and by the time he reached the tenth company, he did not expect the rest to survive 10 more years.

It really is tough to do what Mother Nature did for free and to be competitive, cost-wise. Some have Mother Nature’s oil embedded in the process and so the break-even point of the renewable oil recedes into the horizon.

Some fail because of bad assumptions – like that the feedstock will be available for a cheap price. Only if the farmer makes money will the farmer grow feedstock.

Scale is a significant issue, too. The process is like cooking turkeys. It’s one thing when one is cooking just one turkey in a bench scale experiment. It is quite another when one is cooking 100 turkeys per hour in a large oven. How do you make sure the turkeys in the middle are not raw and the ones on the edge are not burnt to a crisp?

What can we make of the fact that oil is $100 per barrel and yet we are in a recession? One would expect oil prices to decline in a recession. Could we be in an endless recession?

And what about the difference in the oil consumption of different countries? Will they be in a permanent recession? China uses only two barrels of oil per person per year while the U.S. uses 26 barrels of oil per person per year.

They can grow their economy at $100 per barrel oil, and we are barely keeping our heads above water at the same price? Hmmm.

Let’s move to geothermal now!