UB2020 is a plan to expand UB significantly by 2020 - whether or not NY State has the money. A major part of it is to junk the ~ $500 million or more recently invested in converting the Main St campus to the Medical/Health Sciences campus, and move that downtown - necessitating a whole new set of buildings to be constructed. And instead of being adjacent to the Veterans Administration Hospital, the downtown UB set-up would be located next to Buffalo General/Roswell Park hospitals. This would move the Health Science faculty to near where many of the UB medical professors work for a real living (Kalieda), since them taking the train from Kaleida to the Main St Campus just doesn't cut it any more. UB2020 is also being marketed as a major boost to new business and the regional economy (a replacement for lost GM jobs?), even though the Bioinformatics part of it (designer drug synthesis/discovery - nifty and fabulously profitable drugs designed/modeled via supercomputers) has been a declining business for over a decade (the Pharma Business/R&D peaked in 1999). And even though the job and economic multipliers for those real wealth increasing industrial jobs are significantly higher than for (mostly) government and/or debt (student loans) paid for academic jobs, no matter. Of course, all those new downtown campus buildings would be tax exempt, and most of the highly paid faculty would still live in the 'burbs, taking the Kensington Expressway or I-190 in and out of work. Most of the lowly paid faculty (adjunct, grad student stipends, TA's)... well they will be scattered about, more or less like they already are - a $5000/yr job is not going to buy a house, after all. New downtown student housing is apt to have a fortress like appearance, if they even move into that area. As for existing residents...can you say diaspora? Needless to say, there is no thought in this plan (which also hides/contains a significant expansion on the Amherst Reservation) about what happens when the availability of oil is curtailed due to high prices that arise from a process called "demand destruction", similar to but more intense than the recent 2007-2008 episode.
And so, off to the races...
Introduction
The State University of New York at Buffalo has many smart people working for it (mostly as faculty); but once the gaze is placed upon their management and administration, the words "clever" and "short term" and "political" are probably better descriptors. The upper management also posses certain cultural "blind spots", tends to be somewhat Republican, fairly wealthy (do they have any impoverished friends...not likely....) and tend self-segregate with others of their economic and/or academic level (similar to the behavior of business and governmental elites). Many appear to be admirers of Friedmanite economics, sub-urban superiority as well as the slice of society that benefits from such a philosophy (it's more than just economics....). You will find numerous adherents to the idea that manufacturing is not too relevant in our country anymore (at least, to the sub-urban upper class world), financialization (the Anglo Disease) does produce real and lasting values, the "service economy" rules and that economics does not have to have any relation to the physical limits of the planet (such as net energy available for people, resource limits, population limits, etc). Perhaps the exception to this is the recent realization that Global Climate Change is being done by humans, via combustion of fossil fuels, because our atmosphere and our oceans only have a limited storage capacity, at least on a short term (= century) basis.
In any case, UB may be an educational opportunity in more ways than one. Sure, it can deliver a very decent college degree at a decent price, especially compared to such bastions of the Ivory Tower as Harvard and Yale. But the public can also get an education in cultural, economic and social class bias of UB management (which actually gets money allocated by NY State to lobby...NY State for more money as well as other perks and pet projects !). Of course, this is not just a UB phenomena; UB management seems quite typical in such behavior, especially with regards to a concept called "The Iron Triangle" - an entity composed of oil companies/countries/organizations, automobiles plus auto industry plus suburbia, and the media, all cemented together with massive quantities of cheap credit. After all, in the suburbs cars are needed to move people around, cars need gasoline to move around, and oil is needed for the trucks required to get things to malls/stores/supermarkets. Oil projects, oil distribution, automotive manufacture and sales, and sub-urbia are all expensive undertakings, and require massive chunks of long term, low interest credit to be affordable on a mass basis. Those houses are costly, need lots of "stuff" to fill them up, and tend to be less energy efficient than city living, where mass transit is possible, and McMansions in cities tend to cost a lot more due to the (usually) higher cost of land. In many ways, it seems as if humans are expected to service the cars, not the other way around, and that cars are the dominant intelligent species.... If oil becomes too expensive or just plain not available and the massive quantity of debt (for houses, cars, roads, other stuff as well as for the central power plants and continuous oil and natural gas exploration and production) can't be serviced, well, c'est la vie. Party's over, and we either evolve to something else, or devolve into a world that makes Mad Max movies look like playtime for toddlers.
At present, there are very few classes and seminars, if any, in the SUNY system, and especially at SUNYAB, dealing with Peak Oil, and related Peak Natural Gas (together as "Peak Hydrocarbons", = PH). And while the geology, finance and engineering can seem really ultra-geeky (yes, it can involve lots of math - for example, check out the "Mobjectivist" site), the most important insights on PH may be how this affects our society on numerous levels. And a big part of the cures for what ails us may involve changes in our behavior rather than more efficient drilling, or ways to design and build more nukes or coal to liquids plants. Fixing our PH problem is not just for the so-called "pro's" - it will affect us all, and it needs to be thought about, discussed and debated by us all, too. And guess who brought us to the present situation - the "pro's". Besides, since UB has pretty much blown this opportunity, dropped the ball, waffled big time, let the horse escape from the barn, etc with regards to PH, somebody else is going to have to deal with this issue. After all, better to deal with it than be dealt with....
Discussion
There is a lot of lip service to preventing the average temperature of the ecosphere from spiking, melting icesheets, raising ocean levels, bringing the tropics to the mid-latitudes, etc by almost all academics, and by the managements of academic institutions. But maybe it is time that they take another look at the way the U.S. is powered up. After all, we are a society designed to be powered up largely by oil....take away the oil, and the mass movement of people and things would be not likely to happen. You need oil to mine coal, extract natural gas, mine uranium or install wind turbines. No oil = no coal...it's pretty basic. Furthermore, no oil, no significant automotive transport is possible, so workers can't get to work, can't earn money to buy stuff (also delivered, and often made with oil and oil products), can't buy food, and more importantly, can't pay off all the debt they incurred buying that car and house and maybe the college degree(s), too. Oil is extensively involved with how food is made these days; though we could remove most or all of the hydrocarbons from farming, this will require investments and efforts (like making ammonia without fossil fuels, and running farm equipment with renewable energy/renewable fuels). Even mate selection (for the day or for life) often has a automotive component to it. Basing a society on oil (and especially suburbia.....) but forgetting to secure adequate supplies of this oil is a FUBAR of immense proportions. Since oil combustion is responsible for about 45% of all U.S. CO2 pollution, minimizing CO2 pollution would also seem to incorporate minimizing oil consumption....and hence "oil addiction". Odds are, you can never get to the initial per capita CO2 pollution suggestion (COP-15) of 2 tons per year per person without dealing with the oil issue.
Last year, UB gave out a presentation on it energy usages, and how the current management/administration were going to try and be more Global Warming savvy, and lessen the load of CO2 pollution put out by UB. However, when asked what they were going to do about the consequences of Peak Oil slamming down on New York State/UB, the moderator did a fine imitation of "Does not compute!!!!!!!!" and then it was on to the next warm and fuzzy message massaging about dealing with Global Climate Change. Maybe even a big shiny PV array on the Amherst Reservation (evidently the one on the roof of Science and Engineering Library which cost over $560,000 of NYSERDA dollars at 74 kw peak capacity/~ 8 kw average capacity did not do the trick) would send a message. I thought that they must be kidding, but sure enough, NYPA was lined up as the Sugar Daddy for a $7.5 million system (1.1 MW peak capacity, ~ 150 kw average delivered capacity). Translated, you could get more power on average out of a 200 hp biodiesel powered diesel gen-set, but evidently there is no usable message in that....
Unfortunately, there are lots of messages in the big PV array, including the "renewables are too expensive", "it's UB 2020, so money doesn't matter" to "it's NYPA money, and that is free" messages (where did that NYPA money come from, and wouldn't it be better spent helping to fend off bankruptcy for New York State?), in addition to the "wow, what nifty a Research and Development project". What R & D, indeed.....
Well, no doubt about it, at current rates, the world is in for a heap of self-induced trouble due to too much CO2 pollutant (CO2 from fossil fuel combustion added at a rate to the atmosphere faster than the rate at which it can be absorbed) caused by us humans, or at least a small percentage of us humans. But, there is a big caveat...you have to economically survive to the next decade before there is a serious worry about whether the 2020 Greenhouse Gas pollution targets (such as they are; based on the COP15 meeting/"Copenhagen Accord", they aren't much for the U.S.) and especially for CO2 pollution, can be met. Without a viable economy, there won't be enough fossil fuel burning to worry about.... see "We have Been Warned" and "3 Fraud Probes Target Goldman, AIG.." for some background reading on that topic. A society based on oil that gets cut off of oil will not be mass producing much CO2 pollutant as a by-product of energy production - certainly not at the current levels. And it won't be pretty....
In fact, since the peak of U.S. oil consumption (crude plus refined products) in early 2008 of 21.5 million barrels/day (mbd), our consumption has now dropped to 18.5 mbd, a drop of 14%. From a CO2 pollution (and also, balance of payments), this is great news. Each bbl of oil (say, at an average of 295 lbs/42 gallon bbl), when burned, puts forth about 925 lbs/CO2. That's a decrease of 506 megatons CO2/yr (21.5 mbd = 3600 megatons/yr) associated with a 14% consumption drop - great news, right? And at $75/bbl, that 3 mbd drop in consumption saves $82 billion/yr from disappearing overseas, and usually to some pretty despicable and corrupt governments, as well as some often equally morally wretched corporations. But, corporations aren't in the morality business, by and large, they are in the money making business, and pretty much "whatever it takes" plus "lowest common denominator" is the current operating mode. Unfortunately, this drop in consumption came about via impoverishing tens of millions of Americans, throwing another 7 million out of work, scaring the beans out of many of those "still lucky enough to have a job", and transferring a massive chunk of money (via more debt) from the lower and middle economic classes to (mostly) the top 1% and above (see Goldman Sachs article/link). Welcome to The Great Recession of 2008-2010. If we keep this up, the U.S. may match Europe in the race to do less CO2 pollution by 2020 (they propose a 20% reduction based on 1995 levels). So that India and China can more than make up for that, of course....
Peak What?
First off, a definition of Peak Oil is needed. This is what happens when the rate of crude oil and related materials production (natural gas condensates, tar sands derived crudes, heavy crude upgraded, etc) cannot be increased for any significant length of time; instead, after the peak, production rates will begin to drop. It turns out that every oil field has some maximum rate at which it can be tapped; if it is pushed too hard the field will be "damaged" and the production rate will drop drastically, as will the quantity of oil that can be extracted versus what would have been the case if it were not damaged. It's what happens when worldwide exponential increases in oil consumption butts head with a finite crude oil supply. The resulting pattern of oil production over time takes the form of that cup shaped graph known as the Hubbert Curve (also known as the Logistic Equation) that has the maximum production rate occurring when about half of the finite resource that can be extracted has been extracted. This pattern also applies to many other minerals, and is also useful in modeling populations limited by land and/or food. It's what happens "when an immovable object gets struck by an unstoppable force".
The increasing oil consumption rate occurs by increasing the per capita consumption, and/or by increasing the number of people who consume oil products. And the result will be a "hockey stick" type of graph where oil price is plotted as a function of time - it cruises along at a flat(constant) price for a while and then, to quote Emeril Lagasse, "BAM!" - it rises steeply. Once supply cannot keep up with demand on a worldwide basis, it's musical chairs in the form of a bidding war - only those who can pay the drastically rising prices get the oil, and those who cannot pay get to be the collateral damage caused by this "demand destruction". Oil is an amazingly useful form of stored energy, and lots of ways have been developed to use this energy. Of the many ways to use oil, transportation seems to be the one that cannot easily be replaced by any other energy source (electricity can be made renewably or with coal and natural gas, heat can be made using electricity, coal and natural gas). The U.S. has led the way in developing ways to employ oil, and we now have a society based on relatively cheap oil to transport goods and people.
So, the consequence of Peak Oil is not the cessation of all or even much of any oil production - large amounts will still be produced. Instead, it will be an exponentially increasing real price of oil (that is, taking inflation into account, much of which will be caused by rising oil prices). Those with usable currency will get oil, and those without will learn to do with a lot less oil, or none. And societies based on the use of oil but who don't produce enough to supply that oil will get a lot poorer really fast, as well as lowering their oil consumption in a hurry. It will also involve an enormous transfer of income and wealth from oil consuming countries that still have some wealth to oil producing countries that have enough to export. Since most oil exporting countries are afflicted with "the oil resource curse", they will need to transfer some of that oil income to other countries who make food and/or manufactured items that allow the oil to be used in so many ways (cars, military forces, air conditioners, etc). This probably will not be a steady process, but instead somewhat jagged in time; boom times culminating in oil price spikes, followed by recessions/depressions where economic demand collapses (also collapsing the demand for oil, and hence the price for oil). Repeat, until the net oil consuming countries are either too broke, or else they wise up and cease using the stuff, or at least as much of the stuff. Right now we have had essentially constant oil supply rates despite significant price rises in the last 6 years, and the trends are for less oil production in the near future, flat if we are very lucky. But once the oil is gone, it won't come back, and as oil fields get depleted, they produce less, and when more is extracted than discovered over the last 40 years...well, you don't need to be a brain surgeon to figure out the trend...
Now, some would propose substituting oil with natural gas (where possible), or manufacturing gasoline and diesel form natural gas (currently done in a few cases), but this has the effect of raising the demand for natural gas, which soon spikes the natural gas price to the thermal equal of oil. And besides, the easy gas has pretty much been tapped in North America...it's now getting quite expensive to develop "tight shale" gas. And making a few hundred thousand new wells at $10 million per well...that only sounds good if you are "in the gas bidness". 100,000 wells at $10 million each mean a $1 trillion investment in something that will be used up in less than 5 years (the average useful life of each tight shale gas well) over, say, the next decade. Talk about running fast just to stay in place..... As for coal, it's the same story. To produce 7.3 bbls of oil per ton of coal means 1 million tons of coal per day to make 7.3 million bbls/day of oil, or about 36% of current U.S. coal consumption (about 1 billion tons/yr). Coal to oil plants are incredibly expensive - a unit making ~ 80,000 bbls/day would cost $9 billion for the investment (2006, pg 15). To make 8 million bbls/day of coal based oil/gasoline/diesel would mean an additional ~ $1 trillion in investment (assumes stashing the CO2 trash from the coal to liquids facility) - again, in the next decade. And there is the problem of all that CO2 coming from the burning of that synfuel, as well as where to put the CO2 trash from the synfuels manufacture. The increase in coal usage would send the price of coal upwards significantly, further trashing the economics of this facility. Furthermore, all these facilities would need to be financially guaranteed/backed up by the U.S. government - too risky for private industry alone. They would need at least $90/bbl crude oil pricing, and that is probably an optimistic target; should oil countries decide to run these businesses into the unprofitable zone (they would be competitors), all they need to do is lower the price of oil slightly.....Anyway, there are lots of problems with the gas to liquids (GTL) or coal to liquids (CTL) approaches.
Of course, all the investment in gas wells (the "tight shale" variety) and those coal to liquids facilities would add up to about $2 trillion, and that investment would compete with a similar sized effort needed to replace the coal, old nuke and gas fired electricity generators into (largely wind based) units - that would also be around $2.5 trillion. Odds are, there are only so many trillions of dollars left in the U.S. for real investments - especially in a one decade period.
Anyway, that brings back the idea of why all that gasoline would be needed in the first place. It's the Achilles heel of UB and the management's seemingly slavish adherence to the dictates of the Iron Triangle. UB's Amherst zone is essentially only accessible by car or the infamous "Blue Bird" buses that connect the Main St campus (with bus, train and walking access) to the Amherst zone. According to the very detailed 2004 UB Green Climate Action Report (24 MB download), electricity purchases (in 2004) averaged 24 MW while the estimated miles traveled to and from the campuses was 141 million miles and that used 6.4 million gallons of gasoline/diesel (~ 32,000 students, faculty and staff) - rides to and from UB for starting and ending semesters + spring break not included. This car transport averaged 4370 miles per person per year. Extrapolating to the 2009 year (~ 28,000 students/same staff and faculty vs. 24,000 full-time students in 2004) when 30 MW of electricity was the average electricity used would mean that 159 million miles were driven by ~ 36,000 people, using about 7.2 million gallons of fuel at 22.1 mpg (national average). At current prices, people pay about $20 million per year at $2.80/gallon to commute to and from UB. At $4.50/gallon (top pricing in 2008), UB employees and students were collectively forking over gas money at a rate of $32 million/yr.
So, let's extrapolate to the next price spike (2011-2012), when demand for oil products again comes close to the maximum world supply rate (and when speculators also add to the price spike). Prices will go to near $6/gallon for a while until these high prices precipitate another recession, at least in the U.S. (part of the price rise may be due to devaluation of the dollar versus more stable currencies, like the Euro or Yuan). Gasoline/diesel expenditures for the daily trip to the Res would rise to near $43 million/year, and average nearly $1186 per person per year. While this will hardly bother the extremely well compensated Marsha Henderson ($298K/yr) or Harvey Stenger ($273K/yr), this will put a hurt on many students and adjunct faculty. But the real damage will be to the NY State budget, which will crater as the effects of such a oil price wave move throughout the economy. In order to pay the higher costs for fuel (and this money will ALL be exported out of the state) when most NY residents are experiencing a net fall in their real income (only those above the 90% income bracket will be coming out ahead), less money has to be spent on "other". This is what sparks off severe recessions, and this may also initiate other economic disasters as financial weaknesses are revealed and made worse. And recessions mean lower tax revenues, and the inevitable cuts to programs (widows and orphans get tossed before sacrificing the SUNY system football teams, I bet).
But look on the bright side; the oil price spike in 2014-2015 probably will be even worse than the 2007-2008 one (less oil left to extract, more megafields in declining production rates) .....so don't worry too much about the 2011-2012 one, coming soon. Given current world oil consumption rates (see Hubbert Curve link) of about 83 mbd (or about 30 billion bbls/yr), about 3% of the remaining not-too-exotic crude oil reserves (about 1 trillion bbls out of the starting 2.2 trillion of readily accessible oil originally in place are still left) are being consumed each year. However, it is the RATE at which it can be extracted at some given price that determines how much oil will be produced each year - and that will soon start declining. The kicker is the marginal price of oil (price of the most expensive to produce/sell oil) that determines what the world oil price is going to be as long as supply capacity exceeds demand. However, once the demand rate exceeds supply, then the pricing mode changes to "whatever you can get" for the price. Many people think that the cost to produce most oil is what matters, but that is largely irrelevant in today's oil market. For example, most Saudi Arabian oil costs less than $5 to $10/bbl to produce, and they are one of the largest producers in the world. Many of Exxon-Mobil's domestic oil is obtained at $10/bbl or less from fully paid off oil fields - but it gets priced at the world price. Most oil extracted probably COSTS around $20/bbl to produce - it comes from wells discovered and drilled at least a decade ago. And at present, the crude oil made in the Canadian tar sands is among the most expensive, and it tends to set the world marginal oil price. Should synfuels from coal/pet coke go large scale, these will set the marginal oil price at an even higher level.
Those massive economic blows from oil price spikes followed by the collapse in high cost oil production when prices crash will actually have a devastating impact on renewable energy development in the U.S. The new oil price rises act like a tax, except that the government gets no money from this tax - the money gets either sent overseas, or diverted to major oil corporations. Given the increasingly slim prospects for big oil discoveries, the corporates might just "cash out" with the oil price spike bonanza monies rather than toast it on futile exploration efforts. The result is less money available to invest in renewable energy sources, despite the ever more apparent need to do so. Maybe the countries rolling in oil money might decide to corner the market on wind turbines, and own most of the ones installed in the U.S...... maybe. Maybe not - they may have their own troubles to deal with.
In conclusion, an alternative to car travel to and from the Amherst Reservation is needed. One 21st century approach would be an electric powered mass transit line between the Main Street Campus and the Amherst one. And maybe even other train lines connecting these lines. Or maybe UB should bail on the campus without a 21st century people transportation system, and concentrate its efforts on places with a train line. Just admit that locating a campus in the wetlands of Amherst was a mistake, and move on.
However, neither approach seems likely. There is just no push behind the UB management/administration to connect with the rest of Buffalo - and probably the same goes for the majority of sub-urbanites in Amherst/Williamsville/Clarence. After all, most of the money given to UB and/or collected via tuition gets directed to those 3 wealthy 'burbs (via salaries, businesses, and the location of the residences of the owners of those businesses); less than 15% left in the region even passes through the City of Buffalo. UB is the sub-urban goldmine, not that of the City of Buffalo, though crumbs are better than nothing. And if a con-job like the "bioinformatics" scam can be perpetuated by a concoction of UB management and desperate state of NY politicians who really did not know much about this, only the dream of it...well, getting NY State to motivate on a train line between campuses should be child's play. Except when the motivation does not exist. Anyway, while we are in an oil price valley at a mere $75/bbl, this would seem like a great time to build a train line...even if some of the road lanes between the campuses get converting to light rail. Not everyone would use the train, but lots of people (students, employees) would. And it would also allow any UB development benefits to be spread out more fairly in this region - probably along the rail line. New student housing on the Res could be avoided, and vacant/underused housing and properties along Main Street could get a shot in the arm. And of course, less oil would need to be imported, because less oil would be burned transporting people to and from UB's Amherst Res.
And for those disappointed in the apparent lack of a good result out of Copenhagen, well, Peak Oil and Peak Methane may provide some solace. See http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51097 for a summary of how resource depletion and higher prices will lower CO2 pollution rates to a much greater extent than cap and trade as well as other exotic schemes. Or some parting words from James Hansen on COP-15, or from a European Peak Oil perspective here.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51013DB
Posts
