Peak Oil in Alaska

[jd]

I'd rather have neighbors that think in terms of what they can do, not what the government can do. Chain saws are nice, if noisey. I prefer a good one person crosscut in any case. The fact you can put a handle on each end of it is just gravy. Remember, down here in the 48 food is hauled by truck. If oil even hiccups, the whole place will look a lot like LA in the riots.
JD

[Ted Clayton]

Alaskaman -

I'm new here, and I'm not (yet) Alaskan, but I'm not new to energy, or the alternatives.

Sparkplug engines like alcohol just fine, and back-woods folks proved it could be made high-test, under primitive conditions, for about 200 years before (and through!) Prohibition (in spite of everything the Fed could throw at them ). There is no need to ditch the chainsaw, just 'cause the Oil Patch is wilting. [Yes, 2-cycles have a couple extra wrinkles.]

Henry Ford's first Model Ts were alcohol. Henry wanted to corner the alcohol industry, thinking he would make a killing. Folks in The Land of the Logger 'juice' their chainsaws for competition (Ah - the aroma! ;D) ... same at the Indianapolis 500, and with old-time fighter-planes.

"Gasification" of coal and wood is how we got gas for lights & cooking & heating, before we discovered petroleum & gas-wells. The original internal-combustion engines ran on this "producer-gas", because it was the fuel that was widely available & affordable back then. [All of the historic "Gas-Light" and "Gas-Town" districts used this local-made gas fuel.] Gas was a favored fuel for stationary engines, into the early 20th Century.

Producer-gas yields varying proportions of hydrogen gas, carbon monoxide (a good fuel-gas), a bit of methane, and of course CO² and H²O. This remains the primary basis of industrial hydrogen gas production (they 'strip' the carbonates with a recyclable solvent).

First during WWI, but much more seriously in WWII, people put wood-gasifiers on their vehicles, and powered them like some use propane etc. today. In the millions. [Wood-gasifiers for cars were also continuously commercially available up until WWII, (several brands) for those in parts of the world that did not have petrol-supplies.]

FEMA put out a gasifier-book: "Construction of a Simplified Wood Gas Generator for Fueling Internal Combustion Engines in a Petroleum Emergency". It's on the web: www.gengas.nu/byggbes/index.shtml.

See this page for good gasifier-info, and the above book-link (in single-file PDF, too): www.colostate.edu/programs/cowood/New_site/Useful_links/Links/Wood-gasifiers.htm

I have other top-drawer and technical gasifier links, if anyone wants to really dig into it.

Peak Oil will not affect all energy & fuel types & applications equally. Stuff like barges going up the Yukon to deliver the winter's supply of stove-oil to villages could become a crisis. Stuff like keeping a snowmobile coughing along so you don't have to pitch firewood a half a mile through the brush, people will figure out on their own, share, and get a kick out of doing it. *It's already happened*. [Read up some, and practice on the old snowmobile. ]

The initial threat from Peak Oil is probably economic. Then it will become (really) high prices, and sporadic shortages. After decline has gradually settled in (over the next severalish years), we are projected to lose 2-3% of total production capacity per year. It will be what has been dubbed "The Long Emergency" (Kunstler).

Ruin the fun in the bush? Not likely: on the contrary, pundits agree, the higher-developed parts of the world (like the Lower-48) will see harsher changes and meaner/nastier conditions than more 'casual' areas ... like rural/remote Alaska.

Ted Clayton

[Freeholdfarm]

This was from a post on TB2K. (The poster is in Australia.) Interesting that Peak Oil is finally hitting the mainstream news.

Kathleen

www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?t=203513

Watching the ABC national news tonight here in Oz, got to the finance section.
This news program goes country-wide during prime-time at 7pm, with an audience of about 2 million (About 10% of Australia's population)

First off the finance guy says, "I studied economics, so I love doom and gloom."

Then he has a nice little talk about a presentation give by Dr. Bakhtiari in Sydney today about peak oil.

Lovely little bullet points in the background as he repeats all the info:
- Oil to reach USD100 barrel in the short term
- Major OPEC and Non-OPEC fields running out faster than expected.
- Middle east oil reserves grossly inflated.
- Peak oil production reached this year.

Then switches to a full-screen chart of oil production , with the current rise in production from 1m barrels a day in 1859 to 81 million barrels/day in 2006.
The chart then extrapolates to the "expected official" figures - 118million barrels a day by 2020. Presenter says Dr. Bakhtiari disagrees citing probable production of only 55 million barrels/day in 2020 - showing his version on the graph, with an ominous note that China - in it's drive for industrialisation "will pay anything for it".

He then cheerily switches over to the stock indices without missing a beat.

This is the first bit of peak-oil news I've seen on the Teev like this, and for some reason the way it was all so casually mentioned seems disturbing to me. "Oh yes, probably be at half the current output in 15 years and god knows what price, but don't worry about that, let's go check the stock market. Go back to sleep, sheeple. Buy your consumer goods."

[Ted Clayton]

The TB2K report is a good window on the 'weirdness factor' of the whole peak-oil subject, Kathleen.

Here we are, mid-July '06, crude is creeping up to $80, and nothing real dramatic has happened lately. With another 'event' (Hurricane Rigeater, etc), we should see another couple-few 10-spots thrown on top of the 80. Gas will then be $5 and climbing ('nationally'). That's a near-term possibility.

People who like it in the country, or the Alaska bush, aren't very likely to take oil-troubles as a sign to reexamine their basic life-choices/preferences. Bad economic conditions will pull the financial rug out from under some, force them to go wherever they can get a job, etc. Those who can, will stay put.

In the '60s, Hippies disgorged from the cities, and swamped many rural areas - went 'back to the land'. Alaska got a lot of them. 'Back to the land movements' happen from time to time. Today, though, land most everywhere is spendy. Even if city-folk in large numbers suddenly get excited about goin' country, relatively few will be able to afford it. (Even at 'relatively few', a 'movement'-event will put a striking number of (new, green) people ... in your neck of the woods.)

Unless, of course, the housing market tanks, speculators dump, the economy unravels and the stock market dries up (which is approximately what seems likely..). That might make land cheap (and much more available), but it would also whittle down the ranks of those who could take advantage of it (or take any other kind of control..).

In the Post-Pipeline Crash of the early '80s, Alaska is said to have lost between 1/4 and 1/3 of it's population. A big chunk of those would have been living in Anchorage etc. Still, it chewed some into the countryside, too.

Most very remote and far-north areas have steadily lost population and local economic base, in recent decades. Alaska is an exception to a broad trend. It's not really an accident or mystery: the Fed has endeavored to beef up the 'presence' in Alaska for a long time - and it has oil, of course. But speaking of Peak Oil, Prudhoe Bay headed south 'way back in '88. Gas fields? Possible, but brief. New oil? Not impressively, not even 1002.

But if the economy hits the skids and Alaska losses half it's population, both the Fed and the State are likely to take action to hold the line. They will want to do something(s) to a.) encourage/help those who are still there, to stay, and b.) entice folks to come north and fill in the ranks.

The Fed has a clear historic interest in maintaining Alaska as a credible outpost of America. Oil-trouble could lead to the need for 'positive' actions to keep it that way.

Ted Clayton

[Freeholdfarm]

Was just re-reading this thread, and thought of a couple of comments.

First of all, in order to live without oil products, including chainsaws for cutting firewood, homes would need to be built differently. I recently read something about how Eskimo peoples used to construct their homes -- they weren't very big, for one thing, about twelve feet square, with a few sleeping nooks off the main room (or storage nooks). And they were covered with four to six feet of dirt! They were heated with fat-lamps, usually three or four of them, and cooking was also done over the lamps. No firewood required. I've read about the Arctic explorers going into an Eskimo house and sweating, between body heat and the lamps. In areas where firewood is available, it would be possible to make the house a bit bigger, and maybe put a little less dirt on it. Then you could build a small masonry stove, or a rocket stove, in the middle (with a chimney, to keep smoke out) and burn twigs and branches -- no chainsaw needed. There wouldn't be any windows -- if you needed sunshine, you would have to bundle up and go outdoors. The doorways were the below-floor-level tunnels we associate with the snow igloo, wide enough to provide some cool-to-cold storage.

I think that with goats and sheep, and some poultry (geese and ducks are hardiest in extreme cold weather), Alaska could comfortably support a larger population than used to live there in 'aboriginal' times, before the 'white' man came. Choose sheep breeds that like to browse and forage, with eating habits similar to those of goats.

Goats: milk and other dairy products; meat; hides; sinew, bones and other by-products; packing and other light draft work; some fiber (most goats will produce cashmere in some quantity); tallow

Sheep: wool for clothing and felt; meat; possibly milk; tallow; sheepskins, sinew, bones, and other by-products

Geese and ducks: eggs; meat; down; bones and other by-products; good-quality cooking fat (much preferable to the tallow from sheep and goats!); feathers for fletching arrows

We had friends in Tok who kept three goats, two does and a buck. The does lived with their chickens in an underground barn; the buck had an earth-bermed shelter above ground, with a sod roof. They collected large amounts of weeds and branches during the summer, and dried them to provide winter feed for the goats. The chickens were eating commercial chicken feed, but if you can raise barley, and supplement with meat scraps from hunting, and surplus milk or spoiled cheese, you could keep a few chickens or ducks through the winter easily enough. Add some potatoes (cooked), rutabagas, carrots, and beets from the root cellar for all the animals. Geese can eat fine leafy hay, too. It takes about one ton of dry feed to keep a goat through the year, although if they can forage part of the time, you won't have to make this much hay. Cutting that much feed by hand is doable by almost anyone.

I think surviving in Alaska without cheap oil and it's byproducts will be very doable, with some foresight and planning and preparedness.

Kathleen