The brilliant ecologist Charles A.S. Hall gave an ASPO-Webinar recently about 'Peak Oil, Declining EROI and the New Energy-Economic Reaility'. The simplified version of Hall's argument should be easy to understand:
Wealthcreation (and it's proxy GDP) is based on energy resources
The growth rate of even wealthiest nations is declining:
Oil is becoming thin on the ground:
Due to increased drilling the EROI of oil production is going down:
This also increases oil prices:
Thus a larger chunk of money AND energy is going into energy production:
....leaving less money & energy for the rest of the economy:
This creates a new world, where the old economic models and policies do not work:
That's it. What else do you need to know? How will you react. This is an ongoing process. You are in it. You can make a choice as to how you will adapt to the new world. It starts with an attitude and education.
If you want to see the whole presentation along with Hall's voice, you can watch the Webinar on Vimeo or if you want the analytical version, you should read Hall's book 'Energy and the Wealth of Nations'.
An excellent 20 minute talk from William Rees at the Institute of New Economic Thinking conference on how Economics is completely wrong modelling human ecological production.
If you don't understand it, watch it twice. It's really that important.
And if you're an economist and refuse to believe it, pick up some of the following for your reading list.
Oh, why is this on an energy blog? Because economy drives energy usage and energy resources are a crucial part of our ecology. It's all connected. Thinking within the constraints of old academic domains will not lead to one really understanding the big picture.
From the everl-abundant and constantly-giving source that is TED:
Tim Jackson 'Economic Reality Check'
"So we're caught in a kind of trap. It's a dilemma, a dilemma of growth. We can't live with it; we can't live without it. Trash the system or crash the planet. It's a tough choice."
This should be a last wake up call to even those who don't get the fact that energy will be our multi-decade challenge - peak oil or no peak oil. We need energy miracles to combat the challenges of population growth, poverty reduction, CO2 emissions and dirty energy:
He also reminds us that the combined total battery capacity of the whole world (including your ipods and cell phones + those batteries inside all Priuses) would hold:
10 minutes. Even if we'd get an order of 10 times improvement in batteries (100 minutes) and replaced them all, it still isn't enough. We need an order of 100-200 preferably. That's a tall order, ask any battery researchers.
Then Mr Gates moves onto nuclear power - not the usual type reactors, but what he calls a travelling wave reactor.
Nothing too ground-breaking about it - it's a variation of the old breeder ideas: burn all the fuel, not just the first 1% of it. We should really have had these 60 years ago, but better late than never. It's mostly an engineering challenge to get it working, no fundamental physics issues involved.
He also breaks down the population growth, economic growth (service demand), energy efficiency (energy/service unit) and greenhouse gas emission reduction efficiency (emissions/energy unit) into a useful simple high level equation:
Watch the whole video to get a better idea.
What Gates did not mention, and I'm sure he gets, but is too tough cookie to throw at the over-optimistic TED crowd is this.
Electricity counts for c. 14% of total world energy demand. The rest is pretty much all fossil fuels and wood burning.
Of that 86% of rest, almost third is liquid fuels, which is what the world runs on. The world runs on trade. The trade runs on wheels, ships, trains and planes. And they almost exclusively run on oil.
Now, the real equation that Gates should be looking at is this:
Total Energy utility = EROEI x Scaling Factor x 1/Price x 1/Infra x Emissions/Joule x ROI/time x availability/geography x Liquid Fuel Replace Factor x 1/Ecosystem depletion
Whatever energy systems we build, it needs to give out more energy than what it consumers - and do it rapidly. Unlike most nuclear plants that start returning net energy after 10+ years (starting from construction).
It also needs to be able to be scaled to a Exajoule scale. Biofuels, tar sands need not apply. It also cannot be a flux or a flow, because there just isn't enough storage capacity.
It needs to be relatively cheap to invest, require very little new infrastructure to build and emit very little emissions per joule generated over total lifecycle (including all the new infra, investments, etc).
Then it needs to generate economic payback rapidly, much more than new oil fields, or tar sands, or wind. It needs to beat all those, to take over the minds of energy investors. Remember, investors do not care if the investment destroys the environment or if it's an EROI loser - all they care is about Return On Investments. So any newcomer must beat oldtimers on that equation as well.
On top of this, it needs to be widely and generally available all over the world: in rich countries and in poor countries - south and north - east and west. Otherwise, esp. if it's fuel based - it'll just be the new spice to replace the old spice and wars will be fought over it. Wars are mostly net energy losers, huge greenhouse gas emitters and certainly do not reduce overall poverty.
Then last, but not least, it needs to be able to replace liquid fuels - without speeding up the ecosystem depletion and reducing the carrying capacity. Now, that is a really tough challenge. In this test, all current biofuels in production fail and so do unconventionals. Electricity is not liquid. The infrastructure change needs are huge.
Any way one looks at this equation, the challenge is not easy. And Bill's travelling reactors don't solve even 1/4th of the equation.
Yet, all engineering challenges are hard initially - and very systemic - sometimes wicked. Regardless of these, they do get solved, even if only in part.
Sometimes in part is better than nothing. The ideas presented in the video are certainly more worthwhile than building old dumb-style reactors.
Here's hoping the equation (or it's variation) gets solved and in time - as the challenge on the other side is reduction and potential powerdown. And that, would be a real challenge for poverty reduction and the current population levels.
IEA and EIA - perhaps along with BP - may get the most media exposure for their energy outlooks, but one company dares to show some of the more inconvenient estimates in it's outlook. That company is ExxonMobil. It goes without saying that they have a vested interest in things happening as they lay it out, so one is advised to approach their Outlook for Energy - A View to 2030 with caution.
With that said, here's a short sampling of their scenarios with some comments.
So much for that hybrid & plug-in electric car revolution...
Commercial trucking taking the biggest chunk of oil demand growth
Renewables growing the fastest, but still being dwarfed by the fossils...
Fossils dominating even in electricity generation
Fairly optimistic assumption on efficiency growth...
Yet not overly optimistic on CO2 emission cuts.
Of course, the whole point of these scenarios is to make us think and also reflect our own assumptions of the world and energy. The backing of all this in the outlook is : "Don't worry, there's plenty of oil, gas and coal - where it all came from" as well as "we may not stop greenhouse gas emissions, but at least we'll be ever so more efficient in our economic growth".
Remove just one piece in this puzzle - constant growth of supply flow of oil - and the whole assumption falls apart.
It'll be an interesting next 20 years, that's for sure.
Richard "VirginAir" Branson's recent competition announcement for successful atmospheric carbon capture & storage technology that scales has peppered the discussion again on geo-atmospheric engineering.
This is not the first time these things have been discussed. Some serious climatologist have already suggested that we should consider "dirtying" the atmosphere to ensure that global dimming continues to protect us from further warming of the climate.
So, drastic times call for drastic measures, eh?
Perhaps, but even drastic measures must obey the laws of physics.
Big technological atmospheric geo-engineering attempts have a high likelihood of being not only misguided, but producing the reverse of the desired result.
Let's use the Branson's competition as an example.
What is required to capture C02 from atmosphere and lessen it's impact on global warming?
Extracting CO2 from air takes a non-trivial amount of energy (at scales we are talking about)
Binding this CO2 into a liquid/solid that is environmentally harmless requires some energy (for 1&2 - if it was highly reactive and not inert, it wouldn't stay in the atmosphere, would it?)
Moving this resulting matter into a place where it can be stored and poses no risk of re-release of CO2, is still available for normal earth carbon cycle (i.e. isn't hermeneutically sealed for thousands of years) and is environmentally safe requires A LOT of energy.
1+2+3=lot of energy requirements.
Where does this energy come from?
What is the most abundant, economical & infrastructure ready fuel we have after oil & gas?
Coal.
Which in turn releases CO2 (carbon capture & sequestration is pure "on paper" technology, no plants exist for it).
Somebody has to do the calculations, but if the laws of thermodynamics still apply, this may not be a winning proposition overall. Not in terms of energy use or in terms of CO2 bound.
Now, about "passive" systems - these are more interesting, but...
First of all, passive is a misnomer.
All systems require energy to do their work.
Passive here probably means: a free no man-made external power supply (that must be re-filled) is included.
Second, no energy in earth eco-system if by definition "free". Earth has several mass-energy cycles that keep it in equilibrium. As a thought game, if one were to remove all the energy from winds for example, what do you think would happen to the earth wind/cloud/rain atmospheric cycle? It would cease to exist. And so would life on earth.
So beware of anybody bearing gifts of energy with titles like "free" or "clean" or "harmless" slapped onto them.
Still, educated people say that passive CO2 systems are possible, although the energy calculations they base they thinking on is clearly limited to the chemical bond level only.
This is a classic case of defining the system boundary in an EROI (or here CO2) calculation.
Somebody has to build these systems, somebody has to install them, somebody has to service them and the output (e.g. calcium carbonate) must be moved and stored.
All this requires huge amounts of energy that in turn must be produced (currently using C02 releasing technologies).
So is there another solution out of the dilemma?
Can we fix bad CO2 polluting technologies before we actually come up with a clearly C02 binding (better than C02 neutral) energy technology that scales to world wide production FAST, and not in 50 years?
I think the last bastion of research lies in the field of bio-engineering of bacteria, plankton and enzymes. And biologist know this.
The only way any living system may operate in near equilibrium state is when the feces & trash of some species become the primary fuel of other species, which in turn produce fuel for the first (or third) species.
Currently we are fairly far off from this kind of equilibrium. We are producing way too much CO2 (at an increasing pace) and there is not enough living organisms to scale to meet that output and use it up.
Another way of looking at the C02 emission problem is that we have a massive energy cycle non-equilibrium. The resulting C02 is not being bound and used by other energy binding/releasing mechanisms.
Can we manufacture such a beast at massive scale AND not risk the likelihood of tipping the non-equilibrium towards the reverse trend (too little CO2)?
Or... should we seriously consider alternative approaches to all these first order law defying exercises and concentrate on the processes of allostasis on the global human scale?
If I were Branson, I'd seriously consider hiring a group of guys to do a full value-stream mapping of the whole energy use in the air traffic business and figure way to use X0% less fuel, fly X0% less, use a less carbon intensive alternative for kerosene and capture the C02 out of the fuel used.
That's where I'd put my $25 mil to begin with.
But that wouldn't buy Branson publicity, give him an image of a "nice environmental guy" in the minds of the masses and let everybody think that "this problem is now practically solved, and markets will take care of it."
And most importantly: according to corporate speech, it's not the job of profit making entities to fix the climate. Companies are "beyond morality" and only exist to make profit at maximum levels, by offsetting some of their expenses as externalities to others.
Remember, it's energy that matters, not capital. You can't burn money, if you are short on energy. Or actually you can burn paper notes, but you can't run an economy on them. Way too low energy density, bad EROEI and non-renewable.
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