ANYTHING INTO OIL: RAPIER EXPLAINS WHY NOT

Another excellent analysis from The Wizard of R-Squared -- but i thought he wasn't going to post at The Oil Drum anymore because he was angry at the teeming mob? What a loss Rapier's brilliant work would be! The discussion yesterday about what to ask Red Cavaney was apparently a LOT more enlightening than the actual meeting.

TDP: The Next Big Thing
Robert Rapier, April 11, 2007 (The Oil Drum)

WHO
Robert Rapier is one of the resident geniuses at a website called “The Oil Drum” and if you really want to understand “Peak Oil” and the science and economics of contemporary energy, you need to be conversant with the folks at this site.

WHAT
Rapier uses Thermal Depolymerization, a “hyped” 2003 concept promising to provide abundant cheap energy from waste, now defunct, to demonstrate why questions about alternatives to the cheap oil we are now in the last stages of using up are not going to be cheap. Rapier particularly cites similar problems with hopes for the Canadian “tar sands” which some predict will replace dwindling oil supplies.

WHEN
Thermal Depolymerization is an old idea but a 2003 Discover Magazine piece (“Anything Into Oil” by Brian Appel) obtained wide circulation and convinced a lot of optimists there was a way to heat turkey waste and other garbage without an energy deficit, thereby offering a way around the 400 prehistoric years of geologic percolation currently required for each American year’s oil supply.

WHERE
The turkey farm was in Missouri. The Oil Drum is linked above. The Canadian tar sands are in Alberta. Oil is peaking world-wide.

WHY
Rapier on Thermal Depolymerization: “Well, it's been 3 to 5 years, and things have not worked out as planned. Costs were much, much higher than forecast. Unforeseen complications appeared. Small technical problems turned out to be big technical problems after the process was scaled up…This is the same mistake that proponents of tar sands, GTL, oil shale, cellulosic ethanol, and many others have run into. They believe that oil prices will rise, and yet their costs will magically remain where they were. In fact, what happens is that as oil prices rise, all the costs associated with these various projects rise. That’s why oil shale has been imminent for 100 years. That’s why ExxonMobil is scrapping GTL plans. And that’s why tar sands costs have skyrocketed. A poster has referred to this trend as The Law of Receding Horizons.”

QUOTES
- On Thermal Depolymerization in 2003: "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world."
- On Thermal Depolymerization in 2003: "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director.
- “Discover ran an updated article in 2006 in which Appel admitted ‘We have made mistakes. We were too aggressive in our earlier projections.’ The hype just ultimately did not match the reality. And while TDP may make some small contribution to our energy needs, it isn't going to make any measurable dent in our fossil fuel usage.
But at least we have cellulosic ethanol, which I have heard really is ‘the next big thing.’”