Diminishing returns:
Hukki's 1962 conjecture is that the energy consumption of grinding an ore (to extract its target metal) increases as the particle size diminishes.
We used the richest and easiest ores first. The particles left are much smaller.
And today in the world of digital comminution…
“ChatGPT-3 cost $50 million, ChatGPT-4 cost $500 million and ChatGPT-5, costing $5 billion, was delayed and when released wasn’t noticeably better than the last version.”
…Yesterday, I learned via Nate Hagens of the inverted Exter pyramid, a conceptualisation of how when financial crises coalesce, capital flows down diminishing tiers of commodities in search of greater security.
…However, the financial system views itself as the whole system. But it’s not.
All of it, and the energy and material flows it facilitates, sits atop a functioning ecosystem.
And when that destabilises (which is modernity’s current project), “the pyramid doesn’t just wobble, it implodes.”
…Nate goes on to dissect the latest oil and gas report from the IEA and it’s another story of diminishing returns.
It’s well worth a watch. I’ll post some extracts of its story of extraction here
…First up, the picture of where oil and gas has been.
At the base here in the darker blue is the essentially flat rate of production of what has historically been considered conventional onshore oil.
To that we have added shallow water oil in light blue and deepwater oil in darker green. All of this is ‘conventional oil’ with the highest BTU content per barrel. It’s just that some of it is harder and therefore more expensive to get.
…But because demand for oil has grown that has not been enough to meet our expectations of growing GDP, so we have sought other sources.
In light green are natural gas liquids and above that the dark orange of tight oil, which have about half the BTU content of the dark blue stuff.
The bar chart on the right shows how the volume of production of these different grades has changed over the last two decades
…The trouble is that the innovations of this century, tight oil and shale gas, have very high rates at which the productivity of their fields decline.
That said, there is a lot to be found and it’s my understanding that AI is helping to offset the declines by improving the hit rate of new wells and how much can be squeezed out of them. (In case you were wondering what the military industrial complex regards as AI’s most important utility!)
@urlyman Here's an alt-text description of the image:
The image is a stacked area chart titled "Oil production by type and average annual change, 2000-2024" with two sections: a graph showing global oil production from 2000-2024 and a bar graph illustrating the average annual change in oil production across different time periods. The production graph displays several colored areas stacked on top of each other, representing different oil types: Onshore conventional crude, Shallow water conventional crude, Deepwater conventional crude, Tight oil, Natural gas liquids, and Other. The y-axis is labeled "mb/d" (presumably million barrels per day) and ranges from 0 to 100, while the x-axis represents years from 2000 to 2024.
The average annual change graph shows bars of varying lengths for the periods 2000-05, 2005-10, 2010-15, 2015-19, and 2019-24, each stacked with different colored segments corresponding to the same oil types as the production graph. The stacked areas in the production graph show that Onshore conventional crude consistently accounts for the largest portion of production. The "Other" category shows relatively small and fluctuating production levels.
The legend at the bottom explicitly labels the colors for each oil type. Below the charts, there is a note stating: "Note: Other includes coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, kerogen oil and additives." The copyright information "IEA. CC BY 4.0." is also printed in the lower right corner.
"mb/d"
"Oil production by type and average annual change, 2000-2024"
"Note: Other includes coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, kerogen oil and additives."
"IEA. CC BY 4.0."
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:27b
🌱 Energy used: 0.274 Wh
@urlyman Here's an alt-text description of the image:
This is a stacked bar chart titled "Oil production by type and average change, 2000-2024". The y-axis is labeled "mb/d" (millions of barrels per day) ranging from 0 to 100, and the x-axis represents years from 2000 to 2024. The chart displays oil production broken down into several categories represented by different colors: Onshore conventional crude (blue), Natural gas liquids (dark blue), Shallow water conventional (green), Deepwater conventional crude (teal), Tight oil (red), and Extra-heavy oil and bitumen (purple). "Other" is also included in the legend, which notes it includes coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, and additives. A red arrow points to 2024. The text verbatim reads: "Note: Other includes coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, and additives."
Provided by @altbot, generated privately and locally using Gemma3:27b
🌱 Energy used: 0.149 Wh
