I wasn’t going to write another post this weekend…. we are trying to get our property ready for Sustainable House Day which starts next weekend, and I shouldn’t be at this keyboard, again….. However, this very interesting piece of news just landed in my newsfeed, and it got me thinking, again…..
It all started with this week’s announcement that QANTAS lost almost 3 billion dollars this last financial year. Then Virgin Australia (a smaller airline) lost 388 million dollars. I’m not exactly surprised. The last two times I flew to Tasmania, it cost about $400 return, or half what I remember paying 20 years ago when oil was only $10 a barrel!
Then Malaysian Airlines, which admittedly has had its fair share of bad luck, has just announced it will cut 30 per cent of its workforce, trim routes and replace its CEO as part of a restructuring that will cost $2.03 billion…..
And if that wasn’t enough, along comes this other piece of news:
The lowest seasonal supply of jet fuel on record is pushing prices higher and leading to voluntary restrictions in the New York region as the nation’s busiest air hub prepares for a holiday rush.
Spot jet fuel in New York Harbor, the trading center for the U.S. East Coast, jumped to 22.5 cents a gallon above diesel futures this week, the biggest premium in three years. Stockpiles in the region fell to 8.83 million barrels last week, the lowest for this time of year since at least 1990, government data show. Airlines received an industrywide request yesterday to limit the fuel they take from John F. Kennedy International airport.
How could this be happening, you may ask, as the US is producing more oil than it ever has in at least a decade? Well my dear reader, if you actually think about it, to produce all that oil, a fair bit of which is low ERoEI shale oil, you have to use a lot of that other stuff, the high ERoEI oil still coming out of conventional oil wells.
What they do you see, is that they add up the production of the good stuff with the production of the awful stuff, and a really good number comes out of the spreadsheet. Trouble is, that total is NOT nett energy…. There is actually way less REAL energy available to put in those planes than the numbers tell you. So the people who leave comments on this blog saying ERoEI is irrelevant, here is proof that it is!
Peak aviation may well be with us already. And I expect the cost of fuel and flying and driving may well be on the cusp of a sudden price rise, as Peak ALL liquid fuels is due to occur sometime around the end of this year, +/- 3 months. If you look at that error number….. it may have started right now!
Damn the Matrix 