1. Please describe what *Climate Change* means to you.

The average course or condition of the weather at a particular place over a period of many years as exhibited in absolute extremes, means, and frequencies of given departures from these means, of temperature, wind velocity, precipitation, and other weather elements. (Sources 1, 2)

2. Please describe what *Greenhouse Effect* means to you.

An increase in the equilibrium temperature of the atmosphere caused by the addition of gases or aerosols which inhibit the outward flow of infrared radiation. (Sources 1, 2)

3. Please describe what *Ozone Problems* means to you.

(1a) Elevated concentrations of tropospheric ozone caused by the photochemical reaction of oxides of nitrogen and reactive organic compounds released by industrial society; (1b) human health effects resulting from this elevated concentration; (2a) depleted concentrations of stratospheric ozone resulting from long-lived catalysts released to the atmosphere by industrial society; (2b) increase in cataracts and skin cancer due to increased UV radiation reaching the earth’s surface because of depressed concentrations of stratospheric ozone. (Sources 1, 2)

4. Approximately how many millions of barrels of oil does the U.S. consume every day?

About 20-21 million barrels of oil.

5. Approximately what was the cost of a barrel of oil in the past week (end of August, early September 2008)?

Approximately $110. Yearly high was $146 in July. (Sources 1, 2)

6. The U.S. is a major exporter of oil around the world.

False! The U.S. produces some oil, but it is not a major supplier of oil to the rest of the world. Plus, the U.S. imports about 70% of the oil we consume. (Source)

7. Who were the top 2 exporters of oil around the world in 2007?

Saudia Arabia and Russia. (Source)

8. How does the “supply and demand” problem affect gas prices?

“Supply and demand” is an economic model for describing how the price of an item is affected by market variables. The market variables are supply: how much of the item is available; and demand: how much the consumer wants to buy it. With lots of supply, prices can be very low; companies don’t need to charge a lot for the item in order to make a profit. With lots of demand, prices may be very high because there is a lot of competition, a lot of desire, for that item. (A gross oversimplification.)

In our current situation, we have only a fixed amount of oil produced every month and every year—there are only so many drilling sites and only so much refining capacity. This means that our supply is relatively fixed. However, worldwide demand is increasing every year and this results in higher gas prices. Basically: more countries are trying to buy more gas for themselves from this fixed stock pile of available oil. It’s like an auction. With one item up for sale and 10 bidders who want it, the final cost of that item will be higher than if only 1 or 2 bidders wanted it.

Why Does Gas Cost $4+ per Gallon?

What’s in a barrel?

What’s in a price?

Price Range

Sticker Shock

Major Global Trade Routes

U.S. Oil Production vs. Consumption

U.S. Oil Imports

Top Importers and Exporters

…a decade ago…conditions looked radically different. Regular unleaded gas was less than a dollar a gallon. Oil was little more than $10 a barrel. And the Economist magazine, predicting prices could soon be half that, ran a cover story with the headline: “Drowning in Oil.”

I can’t believe the Economist actually printed an article called “Drowning in Oil“! Plus, they stated that:

The world is awash with the stuff, and it is likely to remain so.

To their credit, they questioned whether this “is good news, is it not?” observing that “cheap oil could cause instability as well as poverty.” They also suggested that: “It would be progress, too, to get away from the notion that oil is scarce—an assumption that led to two decades of energy-policy mistakes, such as subsidising coal and nuclear power.” Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, but how was it not apparent that oil would become scarce? Afterall, they cite official sources such as the Energy Information Administration‘s “Weekly Petroleum Reports.” Did the EIA not have good forecasting techniques then? Or were their data not suggestive of a looming shortfall?

The old Economist article is short and worth reading if only to see the way we talked about oil back in 1999. Thankfully, the conclude with caution (“it is unwise to assume that [oil abundance] will endure for ever”); still, the final paragraphs are worth reprinting here if only to see the sort of language they used. This was only 10 years ago—you can’t help but wonder what language we will use to talk about oil 10 years from now. Or were reporters swayed then (as now) by people’s general sentiment?

Of course, any such shock would be different today. Economies depend less on oil than they did. The development of markets to trade oil and oil futures means that price signals are relayed faster and more efficiently. Oil-producing capacity outside OPEC could be brought back on stream should oil prices ever blip up again. Yet any interruption to oil supplies would be hugely damaging to the world economy. That is why, even as prices fall, governments of consuming countries should be guarding against the dangers of oil dependence.

One way of doing this is to keep researching into alternatives to the petrol-powered internal combustion engine, such as fuel-cell systems, which can derive hydrogen from natural gas. Another is to curb consumption through higher petrol taxes. The country best able to make a difference is America, which consumes a quarter of the world’s oil, almost all of it for transport. American petrol taxes are so low that they do not even take account of environmental costs such as pollution. There is no better time to perform the politically awkward feat of raising taxes than when oil prices are low and the money can be quickly handed back in lower taxes elsewhere.

Yet even this would serve only to mitigate the future risks. By all means, welcome the return of normality to oil markets and the end of OPEC’s power. But just as oil’s scarcity seemed a fact of life in the 1970s, its abundant flow might be too easily taken for granted today. Normality could last a while; but it is unwise to assume that it will endure for ever.

-from the Economist, Drowning in oil; March 4, 1999

We’re interested in seeing what correlation (if any) exists between people’s online social network (size) and real life, actual social connections. The survey asks a few short questions for people to answer, trying to stay as specific as possible to reduce speculation and estimating on network/connection sizes…although this is somewhat inevitable. We also restricted the survey to a few “social network” sites (based on my friends’ suggestions, my instincts, and our desire to keep the survey within a certain scope). So, if you use Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or Flickr as a social network or even as a dominant platform for communicating and sharing information with others, please consider filling out my short survey!

Any feedback is more than welcome!

Energy policy has technical components, but it is timely, interesting, and relevant to lots of people right now. In order to come up with the right set of questions, Pete and I have been doing a bit of investigation on the latest energy policy/global warming info. I really wrote this out for myself to keep track of what I’ve already covered; and you’ll see that much of this stuff is pretty basic. But perhaps someone will find this interesting or useful.

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World oil production peaked in 2005. US oil production peaked in 1970 and has declined by more than 40% since then. Today, we’re getting only ~5 million barrels of oil per day from US land, compared to Saudi Arabia’s 8.7 million daily barrels (their 2007 average).

But, the US consumes 20-21 million barrels of oil per day. This is about 25% of world’s oil production, which was 73 million barrels per day in 2007. In fact, you can see the downward trend since 2005 in the plot below. Personally, the upward trend from 2002 to 2005 is even more crazy! Whatever were we (as a world, as a country) doing? I wonder if this is more from policy decisions, or changing behaviors that increased demand? Maybe a combo.

Yearly oil production (daily, worldwide) against 10-year average (red line)

Pickens says that 70% of US oil gets imported from “foreign nations,” and the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) reports that 20% comes from the Middle East. I’m not sure exactly which foreign nations Pickens was including with this quote, but after downloading the raw numbers of oil production by all the world’s countries from the Energy Information Administration (US Dept of Energy group), I learned that many more countries are producing than I was expecting. Their report includes 37 nations plus a category of “other.” Some of these countries (Sudan, Gabon, Syria, Denmark, Australia) produce less than 1/2 million barrels per day.

Since all 37 countries were too many to plot, I took the grand yearly average across all countries for the past 10 years, and plotted only countries whose 10-year average exceeded that grand average. If that’s too confusing: these are basically the top producing countries (stacked in alphabetical order).

Oil production distribution for top countries

Even though the US is still (currently) well above average in production (2007 average was 1.9 million barrels per day), the US only has only 2% of the world’s oil reserves and our resources are quickly declining. I wish I had more numbers on these other countries’ reserves (to plot next to their current production)…Instead, I see that Russia’s production (dark green above) has actually increased in the past few years along with Saudi Arabia’s (purple above). Additionally worldwide, we (as a world!) have very little excess oil reserve at the end of the day (production nearly exactly equals consumption), with a margin of ~2 million barrels (source: NRDC).

As one more way of looking at this data, below I plotted oil production distribution from groups of countries like OPEC and the Persian Gulf next to the US, UK, Canada, Mexico, Russia, etc. If you’re a stickler for data, you’re going to hate me because you can obviously see that total production here is greater than worldwide production (just ignore this; it’s because some countries are counted twice for being a part of OPEC and existing in the Persian Gulf.) Instead, you get a very real sense of what big contributors the Persian Gulf and the OPEC countries are collectively. The US is the tiny orange line.

Oil production distribution from select groups

40% of oil used in the US is by passenger vehicles (=8 million barrels per day), 24% by industry, 12% by commercial and freight trucks, 7% by aircraft, and 6% in residential and commercial buildings (source: NRDC). I was, perhaps naively, surprised that such a large percentage came from passenger vehicles! I would have thought industry or food transportation would account for more. Additionally, most of our electricity comes from coal-based and nonrenewable fossil fuels (less than 5% from solar, wind, and geothermal).

Gas prices are going up because demand is going up (but the supply isn’t, or possibly can’t). One of the reasons demand in the US is going up is because our vehicles are not very efficient…and we like to drive a lot. In fact, fuel economy basically peaked ~1987 and has been going down ever since (largely due to the SUV’s popularity and outdated manufacturing standards). However, we were incentivized to become more fuel efficient in the 1980s because the war between Iraq and Iran removed large amounts of oil from circulation. Gas prices in 1981 were ~$3.00/gallon (in today’s dollars). And the US response then was to try to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, which materialized as better fuel economy. (Read: it’s possible!) Which brought oil prices down (somewhat unfortunately), because that provided just the right environment for our practices and expectations today.

Another reason demand is going up, is because demand in China is growing even faster than US demand (their demand is growing at ~10% per year). Private car sales have been increasing at 15-20% per year in China and car prices are coming down. However, CSM Worldwide is predicting a slower rate of growth in the coming years (source)…but still, all the cars that *have* been sold will still be on the road! Gas subsidies in China (and in 45 other countries, esp. Asia and the Middle East) mean cheaper costs for individuals, which lead to expectations for a certain way of life…Apparently analysts disagree over what will happen to prices worldwide even if these countries lift their subsidies. Since a number of countries are reducing subsidies now, including China, or considering reducing them in the coming months (source), we’ll have to see what happens, but the concern is that people’s expectations and way of life won’t drastically change their behavior.

Whether we continue to cycle up and down in the cost/demand of oil may depend on how much oil reserves are left. The last estimate on oil reserves I can remember was something like 60 years (which I probably shouldn’t even put in here because it’s probably inaccurate, because it almost surely will vary depending on a number of factors). Some are arguing for drilling off the US coast and under the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, to recover an estimated 16 billion barrels of oil. But there are a number of problems with drilling domestically aside from environmental disruption. Our refinery capacity could not process all the oil we recover**. This oil will join the world’s oil supply–and not come immediately to Americans anyway! (And if China’s, or Asia’s, demand is greater than ours, they will get a larger proportion of it!) Plus, the estimated amount of oil that would be profitable (after refining, shipping, etc.) is only 3.2 billion barrels. If somehow the US got all that oil, that would only last us for 6 months! (source: NRDC)

**Even though refinery capacity influences the cost of gas, refinery owners make a better profit when capacity is tight–meaning, they are not incentivized to build more refineries! So even if we got more could produce more oil, prices wouldn’t necessarily go down. BTW, refinery costs come to about 15% of what we pay at the pump: or 60 cents per $4.00 gallon of gas.

If we raised vehicle fuel economy to 40 mpg, we could reduce passenger vehicle oil demand by ~30% by 2020 (then would be ~4 million barrels per day). Last year, average fuel economy was 20 mpg (about the same as a 1908 Model T!). Seriously? We must be able to better than that!

Alright, I’m going to end this post by listing the various alternate energy sources that I’ve become aware of. Next, I’d like to collect the pros and cons of each of these sources, so feel free to help me on that!

• solar thermal power plants
• wind power
• geo-thermic
• nuclear
• ethanol
• natural gas
• hydro

I’m very open to learning more about this stuff. Correct me if you find errors or inconsistencies or would like to add something. Also, I have thing for raw data over opinion, although this post certainly has my opinion in it, too. I’ll write again as I dig up more stuff.

I’ve driven 8125 miles since January 2007 with an (all-time) average of 31.6 MPG. I had been manually calculating the MPG after each refueling, so this seems reasonable, although there is a lot of variability depending on whether I drive on the freeway or city streets. My all-time best MPG was 40.41 on Dec 14, 2007; and all-time worst was 23.38 on Sept 19, 2007.

My car had been driven 6 miles when I purchased it. Since then, the mileage has been increasing somewhat steadily. However, the graph feels a little deceptive because I when I’m in San Diego, I almost never drive. The bulk of my miles has come from driving from the Bay Area to San Diego 4-5 times, plus a few day trips here and there. But based on my driving habits, mymilemarker.com projects my mileage and gas costs a year from now (which is interesting, because when I only had a few entries in there, it estimated that my costs would be $17,000). My estimates after all my data were entered were 13,876 miles in the next year and $642.37 in gas costs. Of course, if gas prices continue to increase, my gas costs may be much higher…but may not drive as much. We’ll see!

Exactly one year ago on June 15, 2007, I spent $3.20 per gallon for gas (and had only 1359 miles). The cheapest gas I bought was $2.52 (very first fueling ever), and the most expensive was $4.89 (just a few days ago in San Diego, right before driving to San Francisco). Maybe these numbers are just numbers, but in the context of a vehicle that I own and take care of and in light of the increasing gas prices, it’s pretty neat to be able to track these things and reflect on them later. Plus, mymilemarker.com has a very neat, simple interface—especially their iPhone site (which makes a lot of sense, since you’ll likely be creating new entries when you’re at the gas station refueling).

Bottom line: I really like mymilemarker.com for keeping a database of numbers I was already taking note of, but also for plotting and calculating global statistics. Check it out!