The rules say ignore this, but hello world, how are you? So today we were going to talk about something really cool, and I think you'll enjoy it. Let's get started.
For the second part of this course, we’re going to talk about fossil fuels. That’s the goal today. If there's one thing you should remember from last time's course, it's this slide.
So, very quickly, in 15 seconds: the world in which we live, 7 or 8 billion homo industrialis -- we owe it to fossil fuels (for the most part). They have made it possible to supply a growing fleet of machines, which has thus created an increasing production, which has given us what is usually called “our standard of living”. You know that in the French media, newspaper headlines sometimes do not reflect this reality.
And I don't think there is a single person in this room, despite your young age (compared to me anyway), who hasn't heard -- or read more accurately -- that France is an "all-nuclear" country. Is there anyone in this room who has never heard that in the press? Yes?
One? You don't read newspapers very often! When you look at the debates on energy in the French press, you have a focal point of the debate called nuclear energy.
So, in general, quite quickly, it focuses on that. You have here a graph that was made by the excellent society in which I work, and in which we looked at what primary energy -- and therefore what energy from the environment -- the machines that make our lives so sweet in the country were supplied. Depending on where the machines are located, the column does not have the same name.
The column on the far left, “Industry”, is for machines that are found in industries. These are the ones that are used to make some of the objects we use: only some. In the “Transport” column, these are machines used to move people or goods.
The “Tertiary” and “Residential” columns are machines that are in buildings. So typically the energy consumption of the radiators of the “Ecole des Mines”, the video projector of the “Ecole des Mines” and the kitchen of the “Ecole des Mines”. All this is in the tertiary sector.
And finally, if the machine is in a field, it is in “Agriculture”. The ordinate is in billions of Kilowatt hours -- in Terawatt hours -- and it is final energy. It is therefore energy that passes through a meter before supplying a machine.
It is energy that is generally paid by the final consumer, not always, but is paid by the final consumer. What I am doing now: I’m encircling the totality of what in France comes from fossil fuels in the supply of the machinery that structures the country's activity. You can quite easily see on this graph -- even without talking about figures very precisely -- that most of the so-called “final” energy -- the energy that passes a meter of the final consumer, whether it is a particular consumer or a “business” consumer -- consists of a vector that has been manufactured from fossil fuels.
This vector can be: liquid fuels; it can be: electricity made with gas, heat made with gas, etc. In France, liquid fuels and final gas -- which are used directly for heating or other industrial uses -- are the main sources of our fossil fuels. We use a little coal, not a lot: that's 10% of our CO2.
But it's even less than that in terms of energy. And the electricity that comes from nuclear power, I put it -- purposely, of course, because I like to tease -- in light green here. For example, in the residential sector -- so where people live -- wood and nuclear electricity represent energy supplies of the same magnitude.
So the main part, in France as elsewhere, of the energy that feeds the exoskeleton we have created is fossil fuels. When we think about CO2, we will see that we cannot think exactly like that, because electricity generation is done with Carnot machines. So you have a lot of losses in the system.
But of the final energy, it's very fossil. And in these fossil fuels, you see that what dominates in France -- as in all the countries in the so-called OECD zone, i. e.
the countries that were formerly industrialized, to put it simply -- is oil. So the energy that dominates the energy supply of OECD countries -- the United States, Canada, Mexico, most of Europe, South Korea, Australia, Japan, etc. -- is oil.
So we're going to start by talking about oil. Oil, of course, once it has been brought out of the ground, it is not used as it is. Virtually no machine, except tanks, can use crude oil.
So we're going to refine it. It means that it is passed through a large alembic -- a little less interesting than the one that gives you brandy -- and we will distil this oil and make fractions of it that are made up of molecules that are not of the same length in terms of the carbon chain. We will separate the carbon chains between short and long chains.
Here you have the decomposition of a barrel of oil on arrival -- I want to say: at the refinery outlet -- in which you have products that are light: naphtha and LPG. Naphtha is the basis of petro chemistry. Petro chemistry is organic chemistry.
So all the organic chemistry we have on Earth is based on gas or oil. You have gasoline; you have diesel; you have fuel oil, which are exactly the same products. You have kerosene; you have the bitumen with which we cover the roads; you have waxes and oils.
And you have petroleum coke. Petroleum coke is the solid residue that is left at the end of the distillation process and, by the way, is used to supply the energy for the distillation column. It is recycled on site, except for a few diverse and varied industrial uses.
That is essentially what we do with a barrel of oil. If we look at how the world's consumption of distilled products is evolving, this is what it looks like: at the very top, you have gasoline and aviation gasoline: most of that thing is gasoline. Underneath, you have diesel and heating oil.
And what you have essentially is diesel fuel. Below you have fuel oil -- formerly known as heavy fuel oil -- that is used in the merchant navy, in industry, and in power generation. Here you have everything else.
So naphtha, waxes, oils, bitumen, petroleum coke, etc. You can see that worldwide, the consumption of each of these products is increasing. If you look at Europe, you can see that it is a little different.
I told you last time that Europe has already been under supply stress with regard to its oil since 2005. It can no longer keep up with the global trend (for reasons that I have mentioned a little bit, we will come back to this today) and you can see that most of what Europe consumes, as far as refined products are concerned, is diesel and fuel oil. This is not unique to France: there has been an increasing trend in the consumption of diesel, fuel oil and kerosene.
Aviation kerosene is also in there. If you look at the world as a whole, as far as refined products are concerned, you see that what is important to note is that it is road transport. .
. Yes? ***Audience intervention*** You have both the output of fuel in power generation and the output of fuel in industry: it has been replaced by gas.
These are the two main shifts. In addition, refineries have been gradually adapted. Because basically, in a refinery, you put in a given package of carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms, and all you're going to do in the refinery is rearrange them in a different way.
But thanks to this dear Lavoisier, all the carbon that you do not find in light products, so you will find it in heavy products. So if you organize what is called your “refinery cutting” -- that is, the way products are decomposed by the refinery -- by giving an advantage to lighter products than heavy fuel oil (because you want to increase the share of gasoline and diesel), at that moment, you will also correlatively increase the share of bitumen, waxes and oils that you don't necessarily know what to do with. You always have an arbitration going on.
(There’s always a choice to make) And one of the reasons why, in France, diesel was given a tax advantage is that there was a time in France when we consumed “too much gasoline” compared to what the refineries could produce. So, at that time, we tried to promote diesel, in order to rebalance the situation -- especially after the oil shocks, when fuel oil quickly came out of the heating of homes. We said to ourselves: “Now we have a lot of fuel on our hands, we don't know what to do with it, so we're going to try to get it consumed by cars”.
It was not at all a conspiracy by the manufacturers because they wanted fine particles everywhere, it was just a rebalancing of refinery outputs. Tomorrow morning, if we say that we ban diesel -- by the way, we end up with 30% of the refinery cut on our hands that we don't know what to do with -- you can't put it into the heater (since we want to take the fuel out of the heater for climate reasons). You don't put it into the industry for the same reason.
I'm not saying we should stay the way we are: I'm just saying it's something to take into account, to keep in mind. A refinery is not something that can be set up from one day to the next. Once you have built your refinery to have a given decomposition into bitumen, etc.
-- In fact, there are trays in a distillation column that are physical trays, at given heights in the distillation column. So you don't disconnect the thing and put it back ten meters down and say, “I'm going to change the splitting of my refinery”. You need to do a lot of work to do this kind of thing.
So I was saying: most of the refined products are used for transport today in the world. And in particular for road transport. I said it last time, but I’ll repeat it again: 98% of global transport is done with oil.
Electricity is marginal. Gas is marginal. It is really oil that dominates widely in transport.
Which also means one thing: oil is in essence -- sorry for the bad pun -- the energy of globalization. There can be no globalization without oil. And symmetrically, for there to be globalization, we need oil.
This is now a decomposition of oil consumption by area. What you see is that US consumption has been reasonably constant for a long time; and that it has long been -- in that decomposition -- the largest oil consumer in the world. Even today, the United States still consumes almost a fifth of the world's oil.
This is still a lot for a country that does not make up a fifth of the world's population, but rather 5%. Then you have various areas -- you will obviously notice the rise of China in recent times. In addition to oil, we also use gas.
Here you have the decomposition of the destination of the gas used in the world. This is “in the world”. Remember that basically you have three big packages: electricity, industry, heating, to put it simply.
In France, heating dominates by far. 60% of the gas we consumed is used for heating. But basically, in the world, once again, it's electricity, industry, heating.
Finally, coal is consumed worldwide. And here you have a decomposition of coal consumption by country since 1965. So, you see, there's a big bump: it's China's industrial boom.
But before it, I would like to point out that Korea's industrial expansion has been done in exactly the same way. South Korea has multiplied its CO2 emissions by 27 – you heard it: 27 -- between 1965 and today. So here you have exactly the same process that happened for China, which was insignificant in coal consumption in 1965 and now uses half of it in the world.
So, what's the use of coal? I said it last time; I tried to find more recent figures; but I couldn't. Anyway, I know they're still pretty big packages.
Most of the coal used in the world is used for power generation! Basically: two thirds. And in the remaining third, you have a half -- roughly -- that is used to produce steel, which is metallurgical coal.
So these energies are not equal in terms of their geographical influence. I haven't planned a slide for that, but the only global energy we have -- and for physical reasons -- is oil. Oil is the only energy for which you have more than two thirds of the world's production that crosses a border between the country of production and the country of consumption.
The reason for this is that oil is very dense per unit volume. It is the densest of all fossil fuels per unit volume. You have 10 kilowatt-hours in a liter: other energies don't do that.
In a liter of gas at room temperature and pressure, you have a thousand times less energy (roughly), and in a liter of coal, you have 3 to 4 times less energy (or 2 times: it depends on the quality of the coal). And on the other hand, it is liquid, so it can be transferred, so it can be transported and stored extremely easily with very, very low energy losses in the supply chain. As far as gas is concerned, you have only 30% of the gas produced in the world that crosses a border between the countries of production and the countries of consumption.
And in there, you have only 10% of the world's gas production that passes in the form of liquefied gas, liquefied natural gas. However, liquefied natural gas -- which is transported in LNG carriers (which are types of large refrigerators on the water: those places where it is compressed and especially cold so that the methane is liquid) -- is the only form of transport that is arbitrable on demand, like oil. That is, for oil: you have my Swiss trader, Vitol, who says: "Hello?
The boat that goes to such a place? How much do they buy your cargo from you in Antwerp? No, no, I'll buy it from you for an additional penny a barrel if you go to Rotterdam or if you go to New Orleans.
Here you go! you're going to change course. ” You can do that with oil.
It is done anyway: paper oil, the multiple of exchanges compared to physical oil, I think it is a factor of 100 This is another way of saying that a shipment is negotiated dozens of times between its point of departure and its point of arrival. Whereas, as far as gas is concerned -- for gas by pipeline -- you can't do that. Once you have put the pipeline between Russia and Germany, you have only one producer: Russia, and only one consumer: Germany.
You can't have a trader at the end of his phone saying, "Oh well, it would be much better to put the pipe in Iran and put the end of the pipe in Spain. ” You can't do something like that. So international gas exchanges by pipeline are exchanges that are very rigid (since you have 1 producer and 1 consumer on the other side).
And, by the way, that is why, historically, the price of gas has been set at the price of oil. Because gas was a substitute for oil. And we had to be absolutely sure, both on the producer and consumer sides, that we would not want to stop consuming gas based on what the price of oil was.
So we said to ourselves: “The best way is for both of them to be worth the same thing, so we can be rest assured. ” And that's the way gas contracts have been set up around the world. That is why gas is (almost everywhere now, with a few exceptions) indexed to the price of oil.
Coal other than metallurgical coal -- which is expensive because it is used to make steel and you have only a few mines that know how to make metallurgical coal in the world (i. e. very high carbon coal that will then be used to make coke) -- well, apart from metallurgical coal, you have only 10% of the coal extracted from a mine in the world that passes a border between the country of production and the country of consumption.
So remember that when we go from oil to coal to gas, we go from an energy that is global in nature to an energy that is domestic in nature. This is also the reason why in countries that do not directly consume coal -- which is the case in France -- people tend to forget their place among others. Because, once again, what happens in one country is reasonably independent of what happens in other countries, with regard to coal.
What you see here, for example, is while China is exploding in terms of coal consumption, you have other areas in the world that are also increasing, but you have some that are decreasing. And if I take the rest of the world as a whole, you see, there's not a big, big difference between here and there. So I’ll say it again, coal consumption is a domestic matter.
Gas consumption is a regional matter, if I schematize it. Oil consumption is a global matter. So, in France, we consume fossil fuels.
That is already the consumption of oil in the country. So, what you see is that oil consumption increased very sharply until the famous oil shocks I told you about last time – and, which I remind you, are the mark of the halt in the growth of the quantity of oil consumed by OECD countries. That's what oil shocks are all about.
So it's not just a price change: it's an instant change in volume that has been extremely pivotal on what happened next in the economy. What you see is that at the time of the oil shocks, you have a large part of the oil consumed by the industry -- that answers the question that was asked earlier -- a part by transportation, a large part in heating -- residential and tertiary -- and you have always had a small part in agriculture -- important for farmers' productivity, but marginal for overall consumption. So don't pay attention to what's happening there on the switch between residential and tertiary.
My hypothesis is that it is either an error or a statistical artifact: that is, there is a category of buildings that must have moved from one category to another. Look at the overall volume of what is consumed in buildings and you see that it was much more important at the time of the oil shocks than it is today, when it was replaced by gas and electricity. What you see is that most of the oil consumed in France today goes into transport.
By the way, this is also where the end consumer is willing to pay the highest price. This is not completely surprising, I would like to say, in terms of arbitration. If you are a seller of refined products, that's what you're going to try to do: sell it where the consumer is willing to pay more.
Yes? ***Audience intervention*** You didn't listen to what I said, did you. I just said, “Don't pay attention to that: it's probably a statistical artifact or an error.
” I don't know, I’ll have to have a look. However, what I do know is that the total of the two is the total amount of what is consumed in buildings. And that's representative.
It's a statistics file I retrieved from the ministry's website. And so I'll have to write to whoever it is to find out what it means. On the other hand, I am totally confident in the overall trend for all buildings.
Because it is clear that it was replaced by electricity and gas in many cases. As far as gas is concerned: this is how gas is used in France. So, what you see is that the first consumption item for gas used in France is heating.
You have a small piece of it that goes into electricity, but basically half of the small part is at the top. And then, at the very bottom, you also have a part of it that goes into the industry. So make a note of something interesting.
I already spoke to you about it the last time quickly, but I will say it again: since the North Sea reached its peak of production, in 2005, you can see that gas consumption in France has stopped growing, and that it is generally decreasing for the Buildings and Industry sector. The moment the North Sea reaches its peak, North Sea gas accounts for 60% of Europe's supply. Today, it is still 50%, and we will see in a short while that when Norway passes its peak -- because it is not yet the case -- probably the supply to the North Sea will drop another big step down the stairs.
In addition, the Russians are being boycotted because of the misery they are causing to I don't know who; so if they put new fields into production that are equidistant from the Chinese and Europeans, in your opinion, they will sell the gas to whom? It's not entirely certain that they'll sell it to us. So let us not rely too much on the Russians for gas imports.
Where else can we get gas? We can have liquefied gas. We have to build liquefaction trains, it's very long, and in the case of liquefied gas, for the moment, as the ship travels everywhere, we're in competition with the countries that pay the highest prices.
Who pays the most in the world for liquefied gas? Asians, in the broad sense, and the Japanese in particular. So if I'm a Qatari and I'm doing a gas liquefaction train, it's better to get along with the Japanese than with the Europeans, since the Japanese pay about twice as much.
All this to say, therefore, that it is not completely certain that we have plenty of gas in Europe. And regardless of any climate problem, all the people who say to themselves: “We'll replace anything -- coal, nuclear -- with gas”, we have to be sure that we have gas. Nowadays, I have never seen an electricity scenario where coal and/or nuclear power is replaced by gas -- again, regardless of any carbon considerations -- coupled with the possible availability of gas in Europe in this context.
But that's still a question to ask. You will tell me a second thing: “Let's just do some shale gas here. Why don't we do some shale gas at home?
” There are several reasons why we don't do shale gas here. You may know -- and if not, I'll tell you something -- that in the United States, the state does not own the basement. In all the other countries of the world, either because they are not democracies, in which case the State owns everything, or even when we are in democracies (and there is a sharing between what is in the public good, what is in the community, and what is in you), the State owns the subsoil.
So if at home, in your grandmother's garden, you discover gold 200 meters deep, bad news: it's not yours. What a shame! So it's better not to go looking for it because otherwise you're in trouble with the gold mine.
It's not great and you don't have the benefits. You are expropriated, so you have no interest in searching the bottom of your garden for gold or not, at a depth of 200 meters. In the United States, the subsoil, with no depth limit, belongs to the owner of the soil.
As a result, no mining concessions have to be requested from the State, whereas in France, the regime is very simple. First of all, someone has to come and get the gold for you, because you don't do that with your flashlight. So that means we have to grant an exploration permit.
Then, if the person exploring finds something, they have to be granted an operating permit, and since they're going to have to go through your body because it's not your home at a depth of 200 meters, basically you're expropriated. So an authorization to operate in France equals an expropriation. It's a long time, you're obviously going to fight in court, because your grandmother's garden still has sentimental value!
In the United States, no. Your grandmother said to the local drillers: “Come and make a hole in my garden, and if you find oil, we'll share the result. ” That's how it works.
The state has absolutely no say. It’s the most punctured country in the world. You now have 1.
7 million oil and gas wells in operation in the United States. 1. 7 million.
They make 100,000 holes a year, like Gainsbourg's song: “I make holes. ” (French singer) Finally, geology lends itself to this. Turns out they really do have a bedrock with gas in it.
Last but not least, when you make a hole somewhere, in most of the United States, all you bother is prairie dogs or cows. You're not bothering anyone. It is an unpopulated country, the United States.
I mean, in all the vastness of Texas and so on. So you can make tracks to transport trucks and evacuate the oil you found. So now we're going to take up the case in France.
One well equals one expropriation; it is densely populated; if you find oil you have to make a track to evacuate the oil you have found with trucks; you obviously have 452 residents that you will bother by doing this -- if you don't have residents it is because you are in a mountainous area and therefore it will cost you a lot of money to make the tracks, etc. In short! So people who think that the shale gas is going to be an Eldorado in European countries, in my opinion, I bet all my savings against them that it will never be the case.
Maybe we can get out of it. If we get out of it, the order of magnitude of what comes out, that's it. So the probability that it is something that will fundamentally change the orders of magnitude in Europe is, in my view, almost nil.
Yes? ***audience question*** It seems to me it's 10 meters. I don't want to say anything stupid, but it seems to me.
***Auditorial intervention*** 2 meters? Are you sure about that? Because the roots of an oak tree go deeper anyway.
It's not much anyway. We could start betting, but I'm not sure about two. I mean, it's that kind of thing.
I was telling you about the gas. This is the production of gas, by country, in the North Sea. ***Audience question*** So, gas in the sea, of course: under the sea.
Yes, like oil: offshore. The North Sea is essentially offshore. ***Audience question*** Because in France, you are not under the sea.
In French Guiana, for example -- if you read the press a little bit -- Total explored for oil, found oil, and there was a whole controversy in which Hulot complained a little bit about whether or not to exploit that oil off French Guiana. So, of course we're looking in the sea too. So, then, for oil and gas to be found, I repeat, you must be in a sedimentary zone.
If you are in a volcanic area, for example, it doesn't work well. All right? However, Martinique and Guadeloupe, unless I am mistaken, is volcanic.
So the probability that you will find a lot of oil there is not very high. That's it, so it depends on what you have in overseas possession. You have a lot of oil and gas in the Gulf of Gabon (the Gulf that is west of West Africa).
And now you have offshore explorations. So you make operating platforms, and, as I said earlier, since you don't have pipelines floating on the sea surface, offshore gas operations necessarily produce liquefied gas for you to extract by LNG carriers. And the beast costs 10 billion pieces (not the LNG carrier, but the platform).
So this is the production of the North Sea. You can see that the only country that has not reached its peak is Norway. And Norway's peak is expected in 2020 -- more or less something.
Here you have a funny story -- that I would have told you if we had time -- about the end of gas extraction in the Netherlands. Decompression -- I'll tell you in 15 seconds anyway -- decompression of underground gas fields -- which are on land in the Netherlands -- creates micro-fractures and micro-earthquakes in increasing quantities. And so the Dutch government deliberately decided to reduce gas extraction from its fields by a factor of ten to avoid increasing subsidence.
With, of course, the residents above are not very happy. So here you have Norway's gas production as it is simulated by a number of people. Then you have the coal!
***Audience intervention*** We will talk about it when it comes to renewable energies. Then you have some coal left! So, I tell you again and again, coal is domestic energy and coal is essentially used to produce electricity.
By the way, one of the reasons why China puts so much emphasis on the electric car is not just because China -- with its coal-fired power generation -- makes huge gains on CO2, not even on fine particles -- although they are emitted elsewhere. But the advantage is that it already has the advantage of moving from imported oil to domestic coal. So even before being a CO2 subject, it is a subject of energy sovereignty, among other subjects.
It is also a subject of industrial renewal. So here you have coal and there you have the proven reserves -- therefore as declared -- of coal of the top ten reserve holders in the world. So, it should be noted that these ten countries have more than nine tenths of the world's coal.
So coal is eventually well distributed by continent, but it is extremely poorly distributed by country. So, as we will see during climate courses, coal is the energy that emits the most CO2 per kilowatt-hour and that, moreover, it is the fossil resource whose remaining quantities that can be extracted at “any price” is the most important, we will say now -- I will say it again next time -- that the world's climate future is in the hands of these ten countries in particular. Because it is they who decide whether or not to use their coal in their own country.
Since, once again, coal is an energy that can be used at home. So the quantity of coal in these countries and the use they will make of it is one of the major determinants of what will happen with regard to climate. So you see that the first three reserve holders are the two lifelong enemy brothers: Russia and the United States -- with China in the middle.
And once you have Australia and India, you still have about 70 to 75% of the world's coal. After that, you have two types of coal. In dark brown, you have what is called “hard coal” in English -- or “coal” and “anthracite” in French (or steam coal, to be exact) -- which are high carbon content coals and are old coals.
So these are coals that have gone (generally) underground, that are exploited in underground galleries, and that have gone through their pyrolysis process. So they are rich in carbon, poor in ash and poor in volatile elements. When coal is young, it is the exact opposite.
It is rich in non-combustible elements, rich in water and close to the surface. And at that moment it's called? ***Audience response*** So peat is really very, very young coal.
But if not, it's called German coal, right? Lignite, exactly. And this coal is not mined in galleries but in open-pit mines.
And so, for those of you who want to -- and even those who don't want to because it's interesting to look at -- take a look at Google Maps and go look at what the German brown coal mines look like -- from space. It makes you big holes anyway, big spots: a big thing of 5 km by 5 km. And the Hambach open-pit mine -- if memory serves me correctly -- is one of the lowest open-pit mines in the world.
It's almost 300 meters below sea level and it's also in there that you have the biggest coal excavator in the world -- something that's, I don't know: 100, 150 meters high, 200 meters long: something absolutely monstrous. So, coal, remember that it is these countries that have the most coal quantity. And if I now end this presentation by aggregating coal, oil and gas: that is what the world's reserves look like.
So what you see is that in the world's reserves, coal dominates. You see that the biggest oil companies in the world -- Venezuela is really very special, because as I said, it's a big bathtub but with a very small tap -- if I take Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia is a garden dwarf next to the coal owned by the Americans. So it just so happens that for the past ten years we have been witnessing something very amusing in the United States.
The United States is in the process of reducing the amount of coal it uses. Do you know why? ***Audience response*** Not at all!
It's not because they want to save it for later. Because of the gas. What happened in the United States was that the explosion of mother rock gas mining -- “shale gas” -- cut gas prices by a factor of three.
As a result, gas-fired power plants have become more competitive than coal-fired power plants. And so operators switch from coal to gas. And, just a few days ago, a little information appeared, saying that, under the Trump presidency, there were fifty coal-fired power plants that had closed in the United States -- much more than under the equivalent Obama presidency.
What showed, by the way, two things -- but we will come back to this in the following courts -- is that the determinants of action are not necessarily only in the presidential speech. In fact, they are everywhere except in the presidential speech, in the short term, in general. It's life, it's like that.
And 2: that you have to be careful what happens on the surface of the waves, because sometimes there are things happening underneath that are much more decisive. So in the United States, the really decisive factor was the collapse of gas prices and therefore the switch from coal to gas in power generation. So, once I finished this, this is what, put together (in a project we led at the Shift a few years ago), we thought that we could have the maximum supply, over time, if we only take geology as our only constraint.
In other words, I say to myself: “I don't come to the next class, nor to the next class; I don't care about the climate; all that matters is how much I can get out of the basement and my Rolle theorem; the rest I don't care. ” And so, I will look at the upper limit of my supply with my geological constraints alone. So the answer is: you have something that looks like this, on the graph I'm showing you.
In other words, the magic of exponentials. . .
. Remember that joke about exponentials? We've probably already told you this joke: you have a pond in which water lilies double in size every day, do you know it?
You don't know her? You have a pond. .
. ***Audience comment*** They're chattering. You have a pond in which water lilies double in size every day.
And it took thirty days for the water lilies to occupy half the surface of the pond. How much time is left before they occupy the entire surface? Answer: One day.
The magic of exponentials means that, even if you move the extractable resources of these fossil fuels a little upwards, you do not shift the peak by 45 years + 37 additional. All right? The magic of exponentials means that the peak occurs within a few decades, at most, depending on the very, very favorable assumptions you could make about the total amount of extractable resources -- about the ultimate reserves.
So what I'm telling you is that by the time you pass from life to death -- if your life expectancy is 80 years or so at birth -- then it's quite likely that you'll live -- whatever the cause -- the peak of world production of oil, gas and probably coal. And I'm going to finish -- introducing the next time course -- by saying that, in addition, if you care about the climate, it's desirable that it happens tomorrow morning. In other words, the climate constraint -- if we want to respect the famous 2 degrees that you have all heard about now -- is harder than the geological constraint on the amount of fossil fuels that we have the right to take out of the ground and use.
Nevertheless, this sweep vehicle still exists and therefore there are no CO2 emissions that could grow indefinitely. And so the whole course I gave you today, it's about where the broom wagon is if you don't care about the weather. Basically, that's the idea.
Well, see you next time.
