Peak Skills: The Real "Peak" Crisis is Demographic

“It’s a demographic timebomb,” says Christopher Smillie, a senior advisor of the Canadian Building Trades, which represents more than 550,000 skilled tradespeople in 15 trades across the country. ...“Everybody wants their daughter to go be a doctor and not a millwright or a welder,” says Mr. Smillie.... _FP

Very low birthrates in the advanced industrial countries is leading to a critical shortage in necessary manpower skills. This shortage of skilled manpower has already slowed production across several industrial sectors on national and regional scales. On a global scale, the problem is likely to get much worse, as wealthier and more advanced regions "siphon off" skilled workers from third world and emerging markets.

From 2010 to 2018, construction employment is forecast to rise by 180,000 jobs. Added to these demands are replacements for retirements of 189,000, and the loss of 26,000 workers due to mortality, Mr. Smillie told a standing committee on human resources earlier in the year.

“There are 169,000 new entrants from the Canadian population to meet these needs, leaving a recruiting effort to find 200,000 new construction workers from other industries and outside Canada. If this isn’t a call to action for the committee I’m not sure what is.”

Faced with inadequate training in schools, the Canadian Building Trades spends about $100-million a year on training young recruits. That’s in addition to the millions of dollars construction companies spend on training domestic supply. _FP

The problem is not just in Canada, and it is not just in construction. The shortage of skilled manpower affects all aspects of the technological leading edge of industrial and post-industrial nations.

Modern educational systems are poorly adapted to supply this gaping shortage of skilled workers and technologists.

One of the most ironic aspects of this emerging clusterf*ck is that Germany's educational system is one of the best adapted to fill this need -- and yet the government of Germany has chosen a path of energy starvation which is driving its industries overseas! Ironic is much too weak a term to describe how Germany's government is working at cross-purposes to the needs of its people and its economy.

Wise parents will encourage their children to learn and master a wide range of practical skills, in addition to the normal academic core. This will make them more adaptable than their competition. It will also open their minds to potential innovations which might make them wealthy, as entrepreneurs.

India's Power Grid? Let's Cut the Crap and get Real!

It is no mystery to most people who follow the news that India suffered two massive power outages last week. But what is less well understood, is that large parts of India's population suffers power outages on a regular basis.

India's power generation infrastructure is woefully undersized and inadequate for the growing customer base. Government regulation of the power industry makes it very difficult for producers to operate profitably. And getting anything done in India -- in terms of new infrastructure or power generation -- involves navigating a treacherous obstacle course through the many inevitably corrupt levels of India's governments.

Here more on the dark reality:

...power failures are a daily occurrence for [most] of the population—or at least the two-thirds of India's 1.2-billion inhabitants who actually have any electricity supply. But they are not for India's elite. For the latter, power guarantees power. The bureaucrats in charge of Delhi's grids switch off the supply to hospitals before they plunge the homes of top politicians into darkness. But this time the lights did go off. And so the residents of the most upmarket parts of the city—so confident of their power supplies that they do not have generators—had to sit in the fetid monsoon temperatures of 35 degrees like everyone else.

The north Indian power failure, possibly the biggest in the history of mankind, affected an estimated 700-million people. It was a global news story. It revealed the parlous state of Indian infrastructure and provided a dramatic example of how public institutions have failed to keep pace with economic growth. And it also revealed quite to what degree the conclusion, so deeply rooted in the West, that India is not only "shining" but will only get progressively shinier, is complacent in the extreme.

...it is increasingly difficult to reconcile the optimism surrounding India with the reality. In a recent book surveying the developing world, analyst and investment banker Ruchir Sharma says that India has, at best, only a 50% chance of becoming what he calls "a break-out nation". A reversal of recent fortunes is also a possibility, he argues. Other countries have suffered decline after a period of rapid growth. But this thought barely appears to have occurred to Western policymakers. Few stop to interrogate the narrative of inevitable, inexorable Indian success. Take, for example, the famous Indian "middle class". If defined in Western terms, as people with salaried jobs, a car, the odd overseas holiday and an apartment or even house, then Indians fitting this category cannot number more than a couple of percent of the population at best. A local definition, given to me by a young man in a cheap restaurant, are those who can afford a cup of coffee. The cappuccino-sippers are infinitesimally few, albeit more numerous every year.

...if other countries can live with a few slow periods, India cannot. Stasis is not an option. Hundreds of millions of young people will be pouring on to the labour market in coming years. They will need to find homes and healthcare as well as jobs. Most have been only partially educated in substandard establishments.

They suffer a grave lack of skills. More than a third will have been malnourished when infants. Horrific gender imbalances due to the pre-or post-natal killing of girls will mean a serious shortage of partners for young males.

Driving through the poor, if improving state of Bihar, on a late summer evening a year ago, the sight in every town I passed through, of large numbers of young men, some evidently drunk, out on the streets in the gathering dusk, brought home quite how easily India's "demographic dividend" could turn out to be the opposite. In worst-case scenarios, the consequence of a combination of tens of millions of people with unrealistically high aspirations, deteriorating prospects of improvement and a consistently mediocre standard of living will be high levels of social unrest. _Mail&Guardian (*irony alert!)

* The "irony alert" refers to the source for this story, South African newspaper Mail & Guardian. South Africa is certainly in no position to lecture India about corruption, a youth population with "a grave lack of skills," or power outages.

Of course the problem of a lack of skills is not unique to the third world or to emerging nations. The grand educational experiment in social justice and equality (government schools and the push for all school children to eventually go to university) for much of the developed world, has eliminated much of the general competencies for most graduates (and dropouts).

So even the developed world suffers a shortage of competent workers, while it hires PhDs to drive taxis and to mop floors.

And the power grid and infrastructure that modern green rulers of the developed world yearn for: smart grids powered by big wind and big solar? Such a system would be an eternal nightmare for grid managers and industrial customers -- to say nothing of the average power consumer.

India has a very difficult road ahead. But even the developed world is digging a deep energy hole and competency hole for itself.

The best advice for western voters, come the next local and national elections, may be to pull out the long knives (metaphorically speaking). The privileged political, media, and academic classes may not understand the dire nature of modern decline until they are forced to see many heads roll (metaphorically speaking), over and over again.

More: Details behind India's dramatic grid collapse

Skilled Manpower Shortage Hurting Multiple Sectors of Industry Globally

From the US to Canada to Australia etc., multiple sectors of industry including transportation, manufacturing, energy, and mining, are being hurt and curtailed by the shortage of skilled workers.

This recent Zerohedge article looks at the looming problem within the oil production sector.

A separate study by the Petroleum Human Resources Council estimates about 39,000 workers will be needed in Canada alone to replace those who are expected to retire before 2020 just to maintain the status quo. The industry could need as many as 130,000 new hires by the end of the decade with more bullish oil and gas prices.

Already at least one analyst firm is scaling back its drilling activity forecast for 2012, in part because there aren't enough workers who can drill big, complicated wells. For now, NES Global Talent sees a depletion of skilled workers in oil and gas fields in the United States, Great Britain and Australia, three of the busiest oil and gas regions, will become a major problem.

Schlumberger, the largest oilfield services company in the world, sees significant negative effect from peak oil labor manifesting by 2015, a short three years from now, with increasing inexperienced oil professionals, and that the talent problem will only get worse.

For now, most forecasts expect crude prices would remain high in 2012, mostly due to the Iran tension. Meanwhile, OPEC just revised its 2012 world oil demand outlook slightly upwards citing a stable US economy and the shutdown of nuclear plants in Japan. So if the IMF prediction comes true, it seems the peak oil labor could be just enough to tip the scale for doubling in oil price scenario a lot sooner than year 2022.

The future will not be easy. _Zerohedge

Erratic government policies contribute significantly to the problem. When governments such as Japan and Germany arbitrarily decide to shut down a large industry such as nuclear power, what do they expect the skilled workers in that industry to do? And when later, these governments come running back with their tail between their legs, struggling to re-start the vital industry that they had earlier abandoned -- where will they find the skilled workers?

Arbitrary regulations and faux environmental policies in the coal, oil & gas, transportation, manufacturing, and mining sectors exact a similar cost from the future.

Finally, sky-high deficit spending along with high taxation make it difficult for young people to start families and raise children, while maintaining the quality of living to which they had grown accustomed in their own childhood. Governments are kicking the can of debt generations down the road, charging a demographic toll from future youth and adults which will not only exacerbate the skilled worker shortage, but will create an overall population shortage among all those who are not dependent upon welfare payments and government benefits.

This is the true peak, which actually represents multiple demographic peaks that are beginning to prove worrisome.

Welcome to the Idiocracy.

Putting Peak Oil to Rest

Humans are naturally attracted to doom and catastrophe stories. Predictions of doom and apocalypse come and fail routinely. But one perennially failed prediction of doom that never quite goes away, is Peak Oil DOOM! More from fool.com:

One of the problems with peak oil predictions is that they have so little imagination. They don't consider the impact of new drilling techniques that open new oil fields to massive amounts of production. A decade ago, shale drilling wasn't a well-known technique outside of the industry, much less a major contributor to our oil production. Today, Kodiak Oil & Gas (NYSE: KOG ) , Continental Resources, and Whiting Petroleum have turned the desolate North Dakota prairie into an energy bonanza by unlocking shale oil there.

Offshore drilling has also grown by leaps and bounds. Drillers like SeaDrill (NYSE: SDRL ) , Transocean (NYSE: RIG ) , and Noble are building ultra-deepwater rigs as fast as they can to unlock new fields off the coasts of Brazil, Angola, and other parts of the world that were once out of our reach.

Then there are Canadian oil sands, which hold the second-largest oil reserves in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. These developments alone unlocked enough oil to delay peak oil for a few more years at least.

Evidence that these innovations have turned peak oil on its head is undeniable. According to Bentek Energy, North American oil production will top a 40-year-old peak by 2016. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that by 2020, U.S. oil production alone will grow another 20% to 6.7 million barrels per day. Even OPEC's surplus oil production capacity is expected to increase from 2.55 million barrels per day in 2011 to 3.92 million barrels per day by the end of 2013.

It's hard to see how oil production could fall in the short term. And longer-term peak oil theorists have even more problems on their hands. _Fool.com

Total US recoverable natural gas resources (includes conventional, unconventional in lower 48, Alaska and offshore) totals 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet according to the Institute for Energy Research:

• Enough natural gas to meet US electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand for generation levels
• Enough natural gas to fuel homes heated by natural gas in the United States for 857 years
• More natural gas than Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan combined.

The US has Three Times the Proven Reserves of Saudi Arabia in Shale Oil. Global oil shale resources exceed 10 trillion barrels. More than 1.8 trillion barrels of oil are trapped in shale in Federal lands in the western United States in the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, of which 800 billion is considered recoverable–three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. The INTEK assessment for EIA found 23.9 billion barrels of technically recoverable shale oil resources in the onshore Lower 48 States. The Southern California Monterey/Santos play is the largest shale oil formation estimated to hold 15.4 billion barrels or 64 percent of the total shale oil resources followed by Bakken and Eagle Ford with approximately 3.6 billion barrels and 3.4 billion barrels of oil, respectively.

New Jobs Creation is driven by Low Cost Energy. A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers for the National Association of Manufacturers says low cost domestic natural gas will save $11 billion per year in US manufacturing costs over the next ten years and create more than a million new jobs. This new low cost energy reality is expected to increase disposable income by $2,000 per year per household in the United States. The growth in domestic natural gas production from unconventional sources (shale gas) has decoupled domestic North American gas prices from world oil and LNG prices, reversed the once expected US dependence on imported LNG, and driven down prices to near record low levels from long term reliable domestic energy supply.

New Jobs Creation Leads to Growing Worries over Skills Shortages and Fierce Competition for Talent.Just as the shale growth phenomenon takes off, the market face a looming new reality that more than 10,000 baby boomers per day will begin retiring in the US alone. The same fate or worse affects other global markets. The good news is the demand for experience, skills and technology expertise among workers in the oil and gas industry means that many will be coaxed into working longer or auctioning off their expertise to refill their retirement accounts left shattered by the great global recession. The demand for replacement skills is expected to swell the ranks of engineering, technology developers, science, math and software training programs and universities to meet that need. But the bigger need will be welders, plumbers, electricians, skilled machinists and other crafts to install and operate the equipment and support the technology deployment around the world. _GWPF

So you see from the above that the real peak problem is peak manpower skills. The growing shortages of trained, skilled workers is the greatest limitation that an abundant future faces.

Peak Manpower -- The Other Threat Besides Political Peak Oil

The need for more skilled energy workers has become acute around the world. In many countries, severe energy shortages are forcing the temporary shutdowns of important industries -- adding further economic hardship to an ongoing global recession. Here is what they are saying about Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, where recent government policies have thrown energy industries topsy-turvy:

More than half of energy and utilities firms in Germany, Austria and Switzerland see an urgent need in specialist talent, according to energy and utilities consultancy firm Baringa.

Germany’s recent phase-out of nuclear technology, the transition to renewables, and growing demand for mobile workforces and energy-efficient construction are seen as key new requirements and challenges in the area.

...Partner at Baringa, Maik Neubauer says: “An amazing 69% of the companies surveyed have not yet aligned their HR planning and strategic development with the new requirements of the energy market. This is a cause for concern, especially if the business risks posed by not being able to recruit the right people at the right time are being underestimated.” _Recruiter

The ill-advised move to shut down reliable nuclear power plants in favour of expensive and unreliable big wind eneryg, is a mistake that will haunt these nations for decades -- at least until they take strong steps to reverse their poor moves.

In the North Sea area, a shortage of skilled oil workers is hampering development of rich new oil & gas finds.

ASEVERE shortage of skilled engineers could threaten to hinder the predicted North Sea boom. Industry commentators are reporting the oil market is set for a bumper growth period following the discovery of lucrative new fields.

...A recent survey claimed that more than half of the firms consulted said attracting the appropriate skilled staff presented them with their toughest challenge. But with a lack of the right personnel existing within the industry, just how are they meant to meet the future demand? _PressandJournal

In Australia, industries are questioning whether women can be trained to fill the shortage of skilled workers in the mining sector, which is particularly active. Unfortunately, these industries are likely to discover that the introduction of women into a male-dominant workplace brings a whole new set of problems, dangers, and liabilities to the company and to fellow-workers alike. Jobs are a cost -- and a potential liability to a company -- after all.

In nations with extremely low birth rates and rapidly ageing societies, sending more young women into potentially dangerous workplaces is not the brightest idea that anyone has had.

"There's a tremendous shortage of skilled workers," said Craig Giffi, a vice chairman of the consulting firm Deloitte. A recent survey it did found that 83% of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers to hire.

Pay levels provide evidence. While hourly wages in the broad category of maintenance and repair workers rose 6.4% from 2007 to 2010, increases were 10% in the subcategory of heavy-vehicle mechanics and 15% for specialists in electrical repairs on commercial and industrial equipment. The implication is that employers were competing for a limited pool of qualified workers.
The Deloitte study found that 74% of manufacturers said a shortage of skilled production workers had a "significant negative impact" on either their productivity or expansion plans. _WSJ_FoxNews

The shortage of skilled workers extends virtually around the globe.

More than half of U.S. employers report having a hard time finding people to fill some of their most critical positions. Quite a few countries around the world are experiencing the same problem, according to a global survey by international employment agency, ManpowerGroup.

... According to this year’s ManpowerGroup survey of 39 countries, 34 percent of employers worldwide say they have trouble finding qualified workers. While 52% percent of U.S. employers have the same problem filling critical positions, Japan, India and Brazil have the most difficult time.

...The hardest jobs to fill are technicians, skilled trades, sales representatives that require highly technical knowledge.

Jatan Shah, Chief Technology Office of QSC Audio says his company has been expanding and hiring. But he says finding the right worker for positions from engineers to plant workers has been a challenge. “It takes anywhere from three months to a year to fill certain positions.
_VOANews

New Zealand is hiring -- and has to travel overseas to find qualified workers in many areas.

University graduates in a wide range of subjects, simply lack practical skills for the modern workplace. Industries must invest a great deal of money in training new hires, and it is not clear that the aggravation of training and the risk of lawsuits by female and minority employees will ever be compensated by productivity -- particularly from graduates of women's studies, ethnic studies, or third world underwater matriarchal basketweaving cultural studies.

The "feminisation" -- or dumbing down -- of many formerly rigorous university studies programs has left employers doubtful of the quality of new college graduates.

Even India finds that its industries must spend a great deal of money training fresh hires driectly out of school:

Most Indian IT firms also have to invest significant amount in training freshers to get them job ready.

At Infosys for one, freshers go through an average of 3-6 months of training before becoming billable....Companies invest heavily on training and upgrading talent. _TOI

So, the problem is seen in both the high paying skilled blue collar sectors, and in the technical college educated sectors. And employers are feeling the pain, and having to cut back on established lines as well as cancelling other projects which they could have embarked upon -- if only they had the skilled workers.

This shortage of skills -- a human capital shortage, really -- is adding a negative impact to the already dire situations of western nations coming from unwise policies of debt, demography, bureaucratic overreach, and energy starvation.

In the energy industries, manpower shortages can lead to the shutdowns of important industries, with further degradation of an already degraded economic climate.

In the US, the Obama administration is pursuing a policy of intentional energy starvation, with all of its toxic fallout on the economy. In other parts of the world, the problem is likely to be only incidental to generally unwise governmental policies.

Regardless, government is one of the ways in which a society can be starved of energy -- in the form of political peak oil, or political peak energy. Peak manpower skills, and manpower skills shortages are the other significant way. Both problems are ongoing in the midst of general problems of debt and demographic decay.

Parts of this article were cross-posted from Al Fin blog.

The Nonsense of EROEI: Opiate for the Masses?

Peak oil doomers wallow in the confusion of EROEI as if it were an addictive drug. The simplistic concept feeds into a new generation of doom predictions, despite the abysmal failure of peak oil predictions over the last 150 + years. When will they learn?

The quote below looks at EROEI calculations in regard to the growing of wheat, demonstrating that EROEI in food production has never been of particular concern. The author extends the argument to the relative irrelevance of EROEI for other, less important concerns.

...the reason that ERoEI doesn’t mean very much is that we’re not, an any kind of human scale, limited by the availbility of energy. The Sun simply pumps in so much energy that total energy availability simply isn’t a binding constraint upon us. What we’re interested in is usable energy and we’re quite happy to waste total energy in order to get usable. As in the growing wheat example, there’s 35 times more energy going into the system than energy we get out of it and yet we’re all just entirely delighted with said system. _Forbes

What most EROEI enthusiasts fail to comprehend is that unless the government prevents entrepreneurs from seizing opportunities, in a market economy the pricing (and potential pricing) of technologies and resources dictates where the action will go.

The reason that so many peak oil predictions of the past have gone so badly wrong, is that doomsayers (and lawyers & bureaucrats) focus on the negative at the expense of the potential positive. Entrepreneurs in the private sector tend to do the opposite, for reasons of opportunistic greed and ambition -- or merely for the sake of wanting to support a family in comfortable and secure style. If the balance of power within a nation shifts to the legal and bureaucratic sectors -- typically government regulators and private & public litigators -- opportunities for entrepreneurs tend to dry up. Public sector growth tends to choke off private sector activity -- despite the fact that a prospering private sector grows government revenues far beyond what a choked off private sector could do.

This antagonism between the negativity and limited vision of the public sector, environmental sector, litigation sector, political activism sector, tenured academic sector, labour union sector, doomer sector etc. VS. the imaginative entrepreneurial private sector, defines the future of any given society. If negativism and limited imagination wins the day, the economy contracts and opportunity disappears.

This is what happened in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Chavez' Venezuela, Ortega's Nicaragua, etc etc.

The problem with EROEI addicts is that doom is powerfully salient to the human brain. When doom is entrenched, it is almost impossible for any other idea to gain traction. And yet, the history of doomsday predictions should still give pause to doomers and would-be doomers.

Here is where Al Fin energy analysts show their doomer side: Peak manpower within the developed world is a far greater problem looming on the horizon than EROEI, peak oil doom, carbon hysteria doom, overpopulation doom, resource scarcity doom, pollution doom, or any other form of doom which is able to make it into print these days. Peak manpower is a reflection of the demographic contraction within the populations of the world that have the potential to raise and educate persons who can plan, build, and maintain the new technologies which will be necessary to move from a combustion energy economy to the post-combustion economy.

It is not the shortage of materials, equipment, energy, water, phosphates, or any other mere material that is the threat. It is instead the shortage of human capital, human ingenuity, human optimism combined with human competence. Because without that human capital, we could be floating in oil and still be mired in an energy crisis, in real terms.

But addicted people tend not to think constructively, in realistic terms. And EROEI is nothing if not an addiction for doomers.

Peak Human Resourcefulness vs. Peak Manpower Skills

It was not until the late 1990s that the oilsands finally began to prove themselves as a large-scale commercial resource, facilitated by a crucial tax reform and lessrigid government intervention, and by major advances in technology.

The mining process was modernized, expanded in scale, and made more flexible. Fixed conveyer belts were replaced with huge trucks with the biggest tires in the world, and with giant shovels that gather up oilsands and carry them to upgraders that separate out the bitumen. Refining processes then upgrade the bitumen into higher-quality synthetic crude oil, akin to light, sweet crude oil, which can be processed in a conventional refinery into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and all the other normal products. _CalgaryHerald

There has always been a shortage of human ingenuity. In situations where human societies are short on inventiveness and competent tech and trade skills, the fate of that society is usually quite dire. When people talk about "peak oil" or "peak resources," they do not usually understand that what they are talking about is peak ingenuity along with peak manpower skills. Many times in history, the difference between the total collapse of a society and the prospering of the same society, is a simple innovation combined with sufficient manpower skills to take advantage of the innovation.

Consider this question in the light of Canadian oil sands:

...a breakthrough introduced an alternative way of producing oilsands - not with mining but rather in situ (Latin for "in place"); that is, with the crucial link in the production chain done in place - underground. This was very significant for many reasons, including the fact that 80 per cent of the oilsands resource is too deep for surface mining.

The in situ process uses natural gas to create superhot steam that is injected to heat the bitumen underground. The resulting liquid - a combination of bitumen and hot water - is fluid enough to flow into a well and to the surface. The best-known process is SAGD - for steam-assisted gravity drainage, and pronounced as "sag-dee." It has been described by oilsands historian Paul Chastko as "the single most important development in oilsands technology" in a half century.

Altogether, since 1997, over $120 billion of investment has flowed into Alberta's oilsands, now defined as a "mega-resource."

Oilsands production more than doubled from 600,000 barrels per day in 2000 to almost 1.5 million barrels per day in 2010. By 2020 it could double again to 3 mbd - an output that would be higher than the current oil production of either Venezuela or Kuwait. Adding in its conventional output, Canada could reach almost 4 mbd by 2020. _CalgaryHerald

Canadian oilsands do not solve the world's problems of energy scarcity. But they do temporarily abate the problem for certain parts of the world. And the impact of Canadian oilsands on global oil prices -- once high-throughput pipelines to the coast are built -- will grow significantly.

The technologies for producing oilsands continue to evolve, and increasing ingenuity is being applied to shrinking the environmental footprint and reducing the CO2 emissions in the production process. As the industry grows in scale, it will require wider collaboration on the R& D challenges not only among companies and the province of Alberta but also with Canada's federal government.

Yet the very scale of the resource, and its reliability, puts a premium on its continued evolution of this particular industry. Oilsands are, after all, an enormous resource. For the 175 billion barrels of recoverable oilsands is only 10 percent of the estimated 1.8 trillion barrels of oilsands "in place." The development of the other 90 per cent requires further technological progress. _CalgaryHerald

It usually seems as if human innovators are "running in place," running as fast as they can just to keep from falling behind. Thomas Malthus put his finger on one key issue -- human societies without appreciable ingenuity or manpower skills will out-reproduce the ability of the land to support them. But Julian Simon presents the flip side of the coin -- for societies that possess innovators and skilled manpower.

Miracle of Oil from Sand by Ronald Bailey, in Reason Magazine

There is never an end to scarcity, because there is never an end to human desire and ambition -- which are essentially limitless.

Lefty-Luddites of the green dieoff.orgy persuasion, want to do away with humans -- or 90% of them at least -- in order to do away with "scarcity." By eliminating most human beings, you are eliminating most human desire and ambition, or so they think. But that is not really how it works. Perhaps they will find out the hard way.

Or perhaps pockets of civilisation will learn how to instill innovativeness and competencies into their offspring, so that the dieoff dreams of the greens will never come to reality. Competent innovating societies that were wise, would look to the possibilities that exist in the universe at large.

Earth is a fine birthplace and cradle. It should be preserved in good condition over the indefinite future. In the meantime, the ultimate future for creatures that are resourceful and competent, is the larger universe.

Supplying the Needs of Big Energy: Alberta Black Shale Project

The size of this property is mind-boggling. To put it into perspective, the Alberta Black Shale Project is almost the size of Rhode Island.


It's so big, in fact, that it can supply America's nuclear industry, military technologies, electric car market, and renewable energy sectors forever! _EnergyandCapital

Big energy has many requirements in order to prosper. One of the most important needs of big energy, is metals and mineral ores. Energy projects require vast amounts of steel and other metals such as nickel, copper, silver, molybdenum, vandium, etc. Nuclear energy will consume huge quantities of uranium and thorium. And a wide range of energy projects will require rare earth minerals. And now, just in time, we are hearing about a vast mineral deposit in Alberta that could produce energy-vital minerals for hundreds of years.

The Alberta Black Shale Project is a massive polymetallic formation (1,050 square miles) that contains molybdenum, nickel, uranium, vanadium, zinc, copper, cobalt, silver, gold, and an array of rare earths including lithium. It’s a huge and valuable formation.

And it has the potential to be a complete game changer — so much so that the Canadian media is calling it “the mine of the future,” saying the “mineral wealth is virtually limitless.”

And who can blame them?

Recent results from a winter drill program suggest 1.4 to 1.5 billion pounds of polymetallic mineralization consisting of 1.1 billion pounds of rare earth elements worth an estimated $206 billion. _EnergyandCapital

There should be little doubt about the vastness of Earth's mineral and energy complement. The true limitations to the grand human venture are the limits to human innovation, resourcefulness, and wisdom.

Unfortunately, the current governments of the most advanced nations of Earth are embroiled in petty arguments of political correctness, and corrupt power grabbing. Very few are concerned about increasing human cognitive abilities, innovativeness, inventiveness, and vision. All human societies will suffer for this short-sightedness.

Titanium, Uranium, Diamonds, rare earths, and a wide range of industrial ores -- plus vast coal deposts -- are sitting in Alberta's rock.

If dieoff.orgiast greens thought think the oil sands projects are an insult to mother Gaia, what will they think of the Alberta Black Shale Project? Unfortunately for these faux environmentalists, their credibility has been self-decimated by their opportunistic flogging of the pseudoscience of carbon hysteria. The backlash from that grand crusade of "crying wolf" is apt to be painful to them, ultimately.

Peak Oil Confronts Peak Idiocracy: What to Do?

Offshore Oil InstallationsPolitical restrictions on international oil drilling by OPEC, Russia, and other national oil companies and dictatorships is driving international companies to drill in more extreme environments. Extreme offshore drilling is likely to increase for this reason, and because that is where most of the new giant oil fields are likely to be found. Such a movement into an extreme environment is becoming more difficult as the world confronts "peak manpower" -- which is the inevitable mirror image of "peak Idiocracy."

Due to differential birthrates and other global demographic change, the global average population IQ is dropping from near 90, ever closer to 85, then toward 80. In order to competently operate a high-tech infrastructure, a population needs to have an average IQ of 90 or above -- due to the nature of the IQ distribution, and the demands of high-tech jobs on a human brain. Energy operations -- particularly in extreme environments -- require competency and a minimal intelligence in order to avoid disaster. Many of the richest seafloor oil fields lie offshore of countries with some of the lowest average IQs, globally. Shipping in outside workers is the obvious answer, but there is a limit to the number of competent workers who are in the training pipeline, again due to global demographics (and horrendous political decisions).

Evolution of Offshore PlatformsOffshore rigs have gotten better over the years, but they still require extensive human manning and oversight. In difficult operations, disaster is only a breath of inattention away. The oil industry has therefore been developing robotic seafloor drilling equipment which can move much of the danger far away from rig workers. Such equipment can also reduce the numbers of highly trained, highly intelligent technicians to oversee operations.

Robotic Seafloor Oil Drilling InstallationNew robotic rigs will be used for both exploratory and production purposes. Here is more information about an exploratory seafloor robot:

This new exploration rig is unlike any other. The design allows it to be operated on the ocean floor, uninhabited, enabling safer exploration of ultra-deep water and arctic regions that are both difficult and sometimes impossible to access with traditional rigs.

Seabed Rig AS has designed intelligent robots, controlled using software provided by Cambridge, Massachusetts firm Energid Technologies Corporation.

"The software was originally developed for NASA and the National Science Foundation for controlling complex robotic systems," says Neil Tardella, COO of Energid. "We are leveraging this software to build the most intelligent rig of its kind."

With an automated rig, workers are kept from immediate harm, and human error place a much less critical role in its operation -- the source of several major incidents in the past. "Robots do not get tired and make mistakes," says Roald Valen, Robotics and Control System Manager at Seabed Rig. "They do not get hurt."

For safety, the Seabed rig employs a patented encapsulated and pressure compensated design, giving an environmentally friendly solution with zero discharge to the sea. "Our aim is to make the rig both safer and more effective than any exploration rig currently in use," says Kenneth Mikalsen, CTO of Seabed Rig. _GreyGoose

Similar rigs will be used for mining of minerals and mining of oil&gas. The aim is to move the danger away from workers, while at the same time eventually reducing the necessary numbers of top level technicians -- using increasingly autonomous robots supervised by increasingly centralised and multi-tasking remote technical overseers.

It is imperative to remove oil operations far away from African populations -- where insurgencies, corruption, and dangerous petty thievery associated with pipelines and wells can leave tens of thousands of people dead every year, costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to oil company operations.

Placing operations thousands of metres under the sea -- with supervisory facilities away from insurgencies and corrupt officials -- can save lives and money. Finding better ways to route pipelines away from populated areas -- and other areas accessible to local populations -- will require careful planning and design.

French oil giant Total has already three subsea gas/liquid separation units off the coast of Angola under 800 metres of water.

The subsea production system for Pazflor’s three Miocene reservoirs includes three subsea separation units. Each one consists of four retrievable packages: a gas-liquid separator; two hybrid pumps to boost the liquids; and a manifold to distribute the effluents to the separator and pumps. Purpose-designed for Pazflor, the hybrid pumps are another first. They combine multiphase stages, compatible with the presence of gas in the liquid, and a centrifugal stage, to improve efficiency.

Fabrication of the SSUs, completed in 2010, entailed nearly 350,000 man-hours of work.

Both systems—the standard production loop for light oil and the new subsea separation technology—will be connected to a single Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel. _GCC

The Idiocracy is coming, but the global demand for energy will continue to be high as long as high tech infrastructure in global cities and industrial nations can be maintained. This places world energy companies in a squeeze, of sorts, as qualified workers become scarce at a faster rate than demand for product falls off.

Corrupt national governments will continue to institute restrictive taxes, regulations, and ultimately nationalisation -- as the situation on the streets becomes worse.

This is not peak oil, as conventionally understood. The reserves are still there, but the competent manpower required to access the reserves is shrinking away for political and demographic reasons. There will concomitantly be a shortage of advanced materials required to access extreme resources, likewise due to peak manpower and poor national planning. Political peak oil.

It is never too early to plan for dealing with the fallout from bad government and a slipshod sociological transition. Never underestimate the stupidity of your leadership. You are responsible for yourself and your family, no matter what they tell you.

Myth of the Oil Crisis

Ari at Peak Oil Debunked has written a review of a recent book by Robin Mills, "Myth of the Oil Crisis." It looks like a good addition to the library of oil realism along with works by Leonardo Maugeri and Daniel Yergin. Read on:

Mills' book's greatest strength is its ability to deconstruct the most frightening of the peak prophecies and show how they are either incorrect, or at the very least, misguided. He is thorough in demonstrating, through both data, and clear, well-sourced arguments, how the extreme pessimists of the energy commentary community are generally incorrect in their arguments and assumptions. He even demonstrates how Hubbert, commonly hailed as a sort of “peak oil prophet” (words mine), was hardly as accurate as he is shown to be. In fact, Mills scrutinizes Hubbert in the fourth chapter, entitled “Half-Full or Half-Empty?”

...Another strength of Mills' book is the credence he pays toward economic factors. He shows, throughout the book, that economic factors play a significant role in energy production. One of the often ignored (or derided) factors in energy is the capital needed to keep it running smoothly. The Geologists see geography as the ultimate factor in deciding energy availability, but they are far too willing to ignore the fact that even assuming you have a powerful physical limitation in place, you cannot drill oil if you lack rigs and manpower. Unfortunately, we live in a world today where the physical and human capital needed to run the oil industry has become significantly scarcer than in decades past-- this is largely a consequence of the previous decades of incredibly cheap oil. These same low prices drove OPEC to reduce production as well, which allowed oil commentators (Simmons, for example) to say that Saudi Arabia is in a state of decline. Unfortunately for Simmons, KSA was merely responding rationally to low prices by reducing production. The reader will see a lot of this kind of debunking throughout the book. For some, it will be interesting to see the shriller voices of energy commentary dismantled. _POD

Go to POD and read the entire review. It is likely to make you curious enough to pick up the book and look it over, the next time you are in the book store or a good library.

Doom-seekers tend to gravitate around "peak oil" and "climate catastrophe" scenarios, as a matter of nihilist chic. But pretending to believe in a catastrophic fantasy does nothing to help anyone, and solves no problems in the real world. It is a way of getting cheap kicks.

Everything runs down eventually. Wise people learn to bridge between fading technologies and technologies of the future. Scarcity only becomes acute and punishing when not taken into account ahead of time. For all the excitement at TOD and other peak oil sites, there seems precious little planning and preparation for bridging the old and new technologies. Mainly fantasies of doom.

Forget Peak Oil: The Problem is Peak Manpower

The most serious shortage facing the developed world is the shortage of skilled and talented workforce participants.

While Zay looks for executives and top-level managers, the entire energy industry – from welders, tank builders, and roughnecks to petroleum engineers, nuclear engineers, and technicians – is strapped for talent. And the problems are likely to get substantially worse before they get better. Nor is the labor shortage limited to the U.S. and the hydrocarbon sector. Rather, it is worldwide, and being felt in industries ranging from coal mining to nuclear power. The reasons for the labor crunch are many: an aging workforce, lagging student interest in engineering, a lack of interest in blue-collar jobs like welding, and perhaps most important, the strong commodity prices that have led to a boom in energy projects of all types.

...The dearth of skilled workers can be seen by looking at the Gulf Coast. “There is a shortage of several thousand skilled laborers for the offshore industry,” says Bill French, a three-decade veteran of the oil industry and an executive search director for the recruiting firm World Wide Worker. French says that the entire coast is feeling the pinch. All of the offshore industries need welders, not just those who cater to the energy sector. “Welders are making twice as much as they were five years ago,” says French. “It’s like a merry go-round, with workers going across the street for 50 more cents [an hour]…everybody needs welders.”

Michael Harter, chairman of the Tulsa Welding School, the nation’s largest, says demand for his students has never been greater. “I have three to ten job opportunities for every student that leaves us,” he said. Demand is so great that Harter has nearly doubled the size of his classes. Five years ago, the school, which begins a new class every three weeks, would have 60 students. Now, those classes may have 100. And Harter doesn’t see demand slowing down any time soon. “There are so many welders who are already between 55 and 65 and who are retiring. They are retiring as fast or faster than new welders are coming into the job pool.”

The situations for blue-collar workers is matched by that for white-collar professionals. For instance, engineers are in short supply in the North Sea, where Robert Rapier works for one of the supermajors. Rapier, who writes the R-Squared Energy Blog and requested anonymity for his company, says the demand for engineers is “insatiable,” and that he has “posted jobs that literally go unfilled. Supply and demand is out of balance, so the supply side – the manpower – can command high premiums. We have started recruiting a lot in Iran and India.”

Source

Skilled manpower shortages are indeed worldwide, from Hong Kong, to India, to Canada, to large sections of the US.

We already have an active bidding war for top talent in the energy sector. This competition for skilled workers will grow more heated, as experienced workers leave the workforce through retirement.