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Saturday December 24, 2005

Five years

Once in a while, I take a break from the usual issues on this blog and look back in time. Today is one of those times. It's Christmas Eve 2005. While the local consumers are no doubt doing their very best to continue to support the economy, crowding Orchard Road and struggling for bargains and taxis and reaching for their wallets a hundred thousand times over in a heroic last-ditch effort to complete Christmas shopping, I am at home enjoying the peace and quiet in a suburban apartment at the north-east corner of the country, almost about as far from the ongoing city-side consumer orgy as you can get and still remain on the mainland.

It's been five years since Biow and I moved into this HDB 5-room flat in Sengkang. The Sengkang MRT station was still a hole in the ground. The Compass Point Mall was, roughly speaking, part of that same hole in the ground. The bus interchange consisted of a few buses parked along the roadside and a makeshift office run out of a converted cargo container.

There was a large sign posted on the side of the workers' quarters where the Compass Heights condo was to be built. The sign said something to the effect of "MRT - 25 minutes to city", and there was a large arrow pointing due south in the direction of the same city area where the shopping spree is presumably going on right now. "That's nice. We can take MRT to Orchard Road and Raffles Place", I remember saying to Biow. We were walking to our new home from the temporary bus interchange. It was late at night, and with few residents and fewer facilities, it was dark, but the future seemed bright. We had started working not too long ago, got married, and plonked down what little cash and CPF we had towards the downpayment of our new home. The NASDAQ, tech, and telco boom was going on, though we were only dimly aware of it at the time. I had just joined a dotcom company and that was how I knew there was supposed to be a boom going on. Everybody seemed to be happy, and so were we. I did get a 30% pay jump, didn't I? What could go wrong?

There was plenty, in hindsight, going wrong. The NASDAQ had already peaked at 5048.62 on 10 March 2000. We didn't know that. The dotcom company that I had just joined was going to start to lose millions of dollars on a complex, overdue project and a later botched spinoff attempt, but we didn't know that either. The Singapore housing bubble had already burst back in 1996/1997 and was continuing to leak, but the only kind of bubble we knew back then involved soapy solution and water. The oil price was beginning its long upward climb from $10 per barrel but then, I had no idea that a barrel was a unit of measurement.

Did I know anything at all back then? I knew how to write programs in Java, Pascal, and, if really pressed for it - C, C++ and assembly. I knew how to get my program to talk to an Oracle database. That much I knew. I could set up a working network from a bunch of PC's, network cards and assorted pieces of LAN cable. I could take apart a computer, put it back again, build one from individual component parts, and diagnose with some degree of accuracy what had gone wrong with a PC that failed to boot. That, I could do.

But even though there was plenty lurking beneath the surface of our civilization, and even though we were not aware of most if not nearly all of it, society, and time, moved on. We decided that 2-hour commutes to/from work and home were much too long, so we got a car. I didn't know what sort of car it was (VTEC, CVT, MMT, D15B, Vti were foreign labels), I just wanted a Honda Civic - with automatic transmission. Biow then moved to work in the same dotcom company as I did. Cool, we could car-pool.

Our friends, former classmates and colleagues got married too, and went on to get their own homes as well. Most of them got into condos, many of them into "executive condominiums", a class supposedly in between plain-Jane HDB and the more expensive "true" condos. Some of them started families. In time, we did too.

That was when it hit us. My, the money sure disappeared pretty quickly, didn't it. Weren't we able to save quite a hefty chunk of our salary earlier on? What is this "debt" thing? The loans are quite the culprit, aren't they? Housing loan, car loan, renovation loan, hire purchase payments. Is there anything we can do about it? Weren't 10-20% salary increments supposed to help out? What happened to that big project that was supposed to bring in the big money? Why the vague grumblings from those who dabbled in the stock markets?

So I thought, maybe I should find out more about this world, and how it works. So I went onto the internet and started to do some research. And one of the results of all that research done since then is this blog, and the one before it. The continuing stories of peak oil, resource depletion, climate change, globalization, the race to the bottom, outsourcing, technological and societal complexity, I chronicle them as I see them. All of this is more for my own reference, actually. But then this is the web - readers are welcome, lurkers too.

Who knows what stories the next five years will bring up? What will be the story of our lives, our society, our civilization? Will we reach a technological singularity (however unlikely), or hit the limits to growth first? (rather more likely). We'll see.

In the meantime, Merry Christmas 2005, and a Happy New Year 2006 (in advance).

(2005-12-24 23:55:37 SGT) [Musings] Permalink Comments [3]

Natural gas powers Qatar boom

peakoil.com -> iht.com :

In a shift drawing historical comparisons to the takeoff of Saudi Arabia's oil industry several decades ago, Qatar has moved swiftly in recent years to develop its huge offshore natural gas reserves - once dismissed as practically worthless because of the difficulty of transporting gas to distant markets. These moves have allowed Qatar to leap ahead of Russia and Iran, the only countries with larger reserves of natural gas, seizing new opportunities to export the fuel to markets in North America, Southern Europe and the Far East.

Andrew Brown, Royal Dutch Shell's country manager in Qatar, said that greater natural gas and oil production should result in overall daily energy production equivalent to about five million barrels of oil a day by 2012, nearly half the daily oil output of Saudi Arabia. "Over the next five years," Brown said, "Qatar is going to see an energy boom as significant as any other in the past."

It has been just a decade since the emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, overthrew his father in a bloodless coup, strengthened ties with the United States and bet on an offshore natural gas reserve of 900 trillion cubic feet, or 25 trillion cubic meters, shared with Iran - the world's largest pure-natural gas reserve, which is called the North Field. The North Field was discovered by Royal Dutch/Shell in 1971 and considered useless because of the difficulties then in transporting natural gas. Political conditions stabilized and technology then helped unlock what some geologists here describe as the second-largest petroleum deposit in the world after the legendary Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia.

(2005-12-24 23:41:40 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Chip Industry Wastes Energy & Money : Vendors

peakoil.com -> informationweek.com :

The global semiconductor industry could save itself nearly $500 million per year in energy costs — or enough electricity to power a small city — and do something for the planet at the same time, according to the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative.

ISMI is an alliance of leading international chip companies that for the past eight years has sought to reduce the semiconductor industry's energy consumption. The group said that if the entire chip industry would incorporate all of its energy reduction best practices, the total annual savings would amount to 4.8 billion kilowatt hours per year, which amounts to an estimated $480 million, or enough power for 177,000 homes.

ISMI's proposed energy-conversion measures are: cleanroom airflow reduction reducing ultrapure water consumption and changing to higher-efficiency electrical motors. "Energy reduction is a rich source of cost savings for chip makers, but it often gets lost amid other concerns over fab productivity and equipment issues," ISMI Director Scott Kramer said in a statement. "Only a few fabs in the world accurately measure their energy consumption, and so progress is usually hard to measure in most factories."

(2005-12-24 23:07:25 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Friday December 23, 2005

The struggle against ourselves

Speech by George Monbiot :
energybulletin.net -> monbiot.com :

I want to take a moment to remind you of where we have come from. For the first three million years of human history, we lived according to circumstance. Our lives were ruled by the happenstances of ecology. We existed, as all animals do, in fear of hunger, predation, weather and disease ... then we discovered fossil fuels, and everything changed. No longer were we constrained by the need to live on ambient energy; we could support ourselves by means of the sunlight stored over the preceding 350 million years. The new sources of energy permitted the economy to grow ... fossil fuels allowed both industry and cities to expand ...

Fossil fuels helped us fight wars of a horror never contemplated before, but they also reduced the need for war. For the first time in human history, indeed for the first time in biological history, there was a surplus of available energy. We could keep body and soul together without having to fight someone else for the energy we needed. Agricultural productivity rose 10 or 20 fold. Economic productivity rose 100 fold. Most of us could live as no one had ever lived before ...

I don't have to remind you of the two forces which are converging on our lives. We are faced with an impending shortage of the source of energy which is hardest to replace - liquid fossil fuels. And we are faced with the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel burning which has permitted us to be standing here now. The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill ...

See also :

1. The Climax of Humanity

(2005-12-23 22:53:44 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Thursday December 22, 2005

Congress supports coal-to-liquid fuels

peakoil.com -> biz.yahoo.com :

An important coal-related amendment was included in legislation during the final days of the 109th Congress' first session, which ends imminently. Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia offered an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill which requires that a study be done on the benefits of converting coal to liquid fuels by the Department of Defense.

The Byrd amendment is a clear demonstration that the United States Government is continuing to seek alternative sources of fuel, and that the Low-Rank Coal-Water Fuel coal conversion process of Silverado Green Fuel Inc. will be a vital part of the solution to the current energy needs.

Following passage of the first Energy bill this past July, the House continued its strong support for the development of Low-Rank Coal-Water Fuel with the passage of "Energy II" which included the definition of a refinery as "...a facility designed and operated to receive, load, unload, store, transport, process and refine coal by any chemical or physical process, including liquefaction, in order to produce ...liquid fuel as its primary output..."

- So, when is Peak Coal arriving?

(2005-12-22 23:23:20 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

Digging for Black Gold

peakoil.com -> usnews.com :

While Americans have been transfixed by the spectacular rise in oil and natural gas prices and the fat profits of the oil giants, coal has quietly risen to prices not seen for nearly three decades. For miners who weathered massive layoffs and coal companies that long sat on losses as large as their vast stockpiles of mined coal, this could mean a sustained industry boom. For everybody else, particularly electricity-hungry consumers, the rise in coal prices could mean even higher energy prices on the horizon.

The price of coal for "spot," or immediate use, has doubled since 2002. Long-term contract prices are also on the rise. That means big profits for companies such as Peabody Energy Corp., which reported a 141% increase in third-quarter earnings. But their costs are also on the rise as they have had to dig farther into veins and grapple with transportation shortfalls. "The easiest, most technologically available, and best-quality coal is gone," says Brenda Pierce, U.S. Geological Survey energy program coordinator.

(2005-12-22 23:15:43 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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