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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'>From:</span></b><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"'> extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Adrian Tymes<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] Whatever happened to peak oil by 2020?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div><div><p class=MsoNormal>On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 5:07 AM, Eugen Leitl <<a href="mailto:eugen@leitl.org" target="_blank">eugen@leitl.org</a>> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>>>…</span>One does not simply synthesize gasoline</boromir> Particularly,<br>if you want to fill a large gap almost overnight.<span style='color:#1F497D'> Eugen</span><br><br><span style='color:#1F497D'>>…</span>Look into costs and time and material and energy input<br>for a plant, then multiply by the number required.<o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:#1F497D'>>…</span>Would you happen to have a convenient source for said costs<br>and time? A quick search didn't find any, but I may have used<br>the wrong terms.<span style='color:#1F497D'> Adrian</span><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>I found this paper from the journal Hydrocarbon Processing. It is a bit scattershot and surface-y, but has some interesting cost data in there:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><a href="http://www.kbr.com/Newsroom/Publications/Articles/Consider-Coal-Gasification-for-Liquid-Fuels-Production.pdf">http://www.kbr.com/Newsroom/Publications/Articles/Consider-Coal-Gasification-for-Liquid-Fuels-Production.pdf</a><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>I am watching a football stadium being built a couple miles from my yurt for the 49ers. If we can build a structure of that magnitude in a couple years (the stadium, not my yurt), then we can build Fischer-Tropsch plants in a similar timespan. Yes I know that line of reasoning is as loose as a bucket of bolts, but I do fail to understand why anything like this would necessarily take a long time to do, assuming we get the hell on it now, when conventional energy is cheap and abundant.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>I will buy into part of Eugen’s reasoning, the part that would wipe the Alfred E Newman grin off of even my own optimistic face: if we wait too long to start, then there isn’t enough energy to build the energy conversion facilities. The results will be horrifying. But I would suggest we do a lot of stuff that is extravagantly wasteful now, such as football stadiums. Then as energy becomes more scarce, we let those go first. This calls attention to shortages, perhaps far enough ahead of the crisis to avert catastrophe. For instance, in a coming age of shortage, the audience for football becomes small enough that the enterprise fails to break even. Then we have the stadium as a source of raw materials: we can take it apart and recycle the steel rather than mine iron ore for instance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1F497D'>spike<o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>