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Energy
Discussions about energy providing systems
Finally, in 2010 IEA admits crude Peak Oil happened in 2006 – How does the future of energy look like?
Dec 3rd
Peak Oil is the moment when humanity has pretty much produced and consumed half of its oil. This oil that we’ve burned happened to be the most clean, most cheap, most easy to find, and most easy to extract on the planet. Peak Oil doesn’t mean we’re running out of oil, it just means we’ve consumed the better half of it and we’re going to have to adapt to a life not so dependent on abundant and pristine oil. We have to look for it off-shore at hard to reach depths, in countries with not so friendly or totalitarian regimes, and even so the amount of oil we will extract will not meet our infinite growth economic paradigm.
So what if cheap and pristine oil runs out? There are alternatives, right? Russia and Iran are considered the top holders of natural gas resources in the world with more than 70 trillion cubic meters of reserves. We have Shale Gas, Shale Oil, Tar Sands, Biomass, Coal-to-Liquids, Solar Energy, Wind Turbines, Hydropower, Nuclear Power. But can these keep the pace with our ever increasing demands?
First we need to understand that the way society, industry, and pretty much all of humanity works right now is by means of burning fossil fuels. Our societal architecture stays on its feet only because of oil, gas, and coal. If these energy sources would vanish so would our society’s infrastructure. But couldn’t we just switch to other energy sources as we please? The Hirsch Report, or Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, was a investigation specially created for the US Department of Energy and concluded that decisive actions of changing infrastructure need to be made decades before the Peak Oil moment in order to adequately overcome the transition period. The Hirsch Report states : “Any transition of liquid fueled, end-use equipment following oil peaking will be time consuming. The depreciated value of existing U.S. transportation capital stock is nearly $2 trillion and would normally require 25 – 30 years to replace. At that rate, significantly more energy efficient equipment will only be slowly phased into the marketplace as new capital stock gradually replaces existing stock. Oil peaking will likely accelerate replacement rates, but the transition will still require decades and cost trillions of dollars.”
In order to better understand the problems we are facing we need to get the grips with the concept of ERoEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) or EROI (Energy Return On Investment). This index represents the ratio between the energy obtained from the process of energy production that is ready to be made available for human consumption and the energy invested in order to produce it. So for example if one company exploits an oil field that has an ERoEI of 15:1 this means that it needs to burn 1 unit of energy in order to produce 15 units; so the net energy of an ERoEI index of 15:1 is 14. It makes pretty much sense that an ERoEI of 1:1 or less would be a total waste of time because any investment in a process that produces less energy than you put in would generally not make any sense.
The ERoEI index of Oil and Natural Gas back in the 1930s easily exceeded the value of 100:1, while in the 1970s the value leveled at about 30:1. This was of course due to the fact that the fields were big, easy to find, not at a great depth, and with easily recoverable resources. Once we’ve peaked oil discoveries back in the 1960s the value of the ERoEI started to decline at such a rate that today’s oil fields are producing energy at an estimated ERoEI index of 5-15:1.
So, when Peak Oil happens we will have consumed the oil with the largest ERoEI index. What remains is the poorer quality oil with the ERoEI below the value of 10:1 because more energy is needed in order to find, extract, and refine it.
With these numbers in mind, we need to maintain a careful attitude when we compare ERoEIs of conventional oil and gas with the ERoEIs of alternative energy producing systems. For example, even if hydropower has an estimated ERoEI of over 100:1 this won’t make much difference in the long run because its current contribution to the global energy output is only 2.2%; massive investments need to be made, and a vast array environmental and geological constraints need to be overcome, if we want to increase the number of hydropower facilities; this remains valid for nuclear energy also. Other energy sources like wind turbines, solar panels, fuels derived from biomass have very low ERoEI levels compared to today’s fossil fuels’ potency and energy density.
So, our future energy sources can’t produce the net energy needed to sustain the paradigmatic infinite growth society which has now started to receive nudges from mother nature. Is this empirical, or am i just being inattentive to the optimists’ way too buoyant attitude? Look at the graph! 80% of global energy is fossil fuels! Once fossil fuels become hard to exploit because of their lower ERoEI how are we going to feed the infinite growth society which has its functional architecture specifically designed to be fueled only by easy to get, cheap, clean, abundant, and high ERoEI energy? The alternatives, experts say, can’t provide this energy! So, maybe a major shift in the architecture of society is needed.
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Peak Consumption – Or how to mac your way out of plenitude right into scarcity
Oct 23rd
What are the main sets of behaviors which our modern brains are genetically and environmentally wired for? One attentive thinker might curiously ask in what kind of environment do these people (i.e. us) live in order to take a non-shallow attempt at dividing and conquering the issue in question. Some sets of behaviors that yielded some 100.000 years ago in the societies of hunter gatherers tribes from the plains of Africa might be completely untraceable in today’s culture and society.
The fact of the matter is that cultures evolved just like human beings evolved, from so simple beginnings where only people and a small set of tools and rules were needed in order to survive, to societies so perplexing in complexity that no one could knowingly give himself the task of trying to understand how the whole system works and hope to succeed; the days of polymaths are long day gone. Leaving aside my humble intellectual modesty, all systems, no matter how complex they are, are driven and manage to govern themselves by some simple sets of rules. I doubt anyone can deny that this simple axiom is abided by all complex systems which are to be found in the universe we live in.
It just so seems that ancient societies, hunter gatherers tribes, were foremost driven by their most visceral desire also present, though belly-fulled, in every human being living today: the will to survive. The lack of food and resources cemented this basic rule at the base of all the systematization, socialization, and culture development that bedeviled their ancient societal evolution.
But, unlike the days past gone, here we are on this planet, almost 7 billion defiant consumers making a living in the biggest tribe that had ever existed. Survival, although a serious issue in a lot of poor countries, is hardly a prime time audience maker in today’s modern society. If the primal, reptilian, hardcore urge to survive has supposedly long been handled by modern science and technology knack and by the plethora of resources available and ready to be exploited anytime, anywhere, what is the main rule that governs our contemporaries’ dynamic?
Whatever the rule is, it surely makes the wealthy wealthier, and the poor poorer, not by conspiracy but by design. Leaving this minor detail aside, the system managed to produce wonders of technology that could easily be classified as magic, and, antithetically, is responsible for some of the most futilitarian environmental stories ever written in human history. So, if environmental safety may not be one of our main concerns as we burn fossil fuels with the utmost stolidity and without any consideration to their increasing scarcity, if basic personal survival is of no concern either because, as we’ve explained, this issue is almost already solved by society’s specialization of farming and the food system indulged by the vast amounts of petroleum, then what’s the main artificer that drives all of our daily struggle?
Because oil took the burden of daily individual food production out of the prime time of modernistic living, then maybe this meant that our desires had to follow exactly the same rule that each and every other evanescent product of nature follows: they had to evolve, not because the must have started to evolve, but just because oil industry opened up a new landscape, a new set of adaptation opportunities that were never possible before. So, unlike daily survival imposed and restricted by scarcity, daily consumption tendered and given plenty of rope by today’s plenitude of resources is the new main rule by which we engage in our everyday life.
The consumption of objects increases our social status and thus satisfies some of our most primeval urges, the will to socialize, to be liked, respected, feared; all these have effect because they offer us a sense of security and well being. Does a Ferrari and a private plane make a man more sexy? We’ll, you’ll just have to look at the women he’s taking to dinner and you’d probably find out that, obviously, he’s very sexy. And that’s available to women also. How many of us didn’t we hear about the rich old lady having fun with young model Kens? It’s all about the status, that’s why it’s all about consumption now days.
There’s no conspiracy here, there’s no design of society by some evil controlling entity in order to make us consume more, it’s just that our vulnerability to consumption due to behavior that is triggered abnormally by false flags that used to be of necessity thousands and million of years ago makes us unknowingly build the consumption based autonomous system that we live in. And because we’re living in the world of the selfish gene everyone will try to make a living; this is the reason for the distribution of wealth which we see today. Our society is like a flock of birds, never governed by anyone, but driven as a whole by each and every constitutive element; it’s built by each and everyone of us, it was never built for us.
I’ll also make the bold assumption that consumption is the single prime rule by which our today’s society powers itself. That’s why global warming is here, that’s why peak oil is waiting around the corner, that’s why environmental issues have long stopped to be minor problems, and that is why maybe sometime in the future we’ll have to hark back to the survival rule again.
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Infinite growth on a planet with finite resources – The ins and outs of the “smart society” that failed to forbear its ever increasing demand for energy
Oct 5th
If someone were to ask me to name a few things in the world that just keep expanding at an ever increasing rate and would do so forever i would suddenly find myself in bogged down state. Besides the ever expanding Universe and the ever increasing demand for energy, i can hardly and promptly sprout any ideas about anything else.
The reason I’m about to give you for all the disconcerted actions of society (regarding its asinine and irrational usage of natural resources and energy) as a whole might carry the face of defeat and cynicism, but, on a carefully and non-superficial analysis, it should surely blemish the rosy colloured tableau of life with its well deserved abjective miseries. Here we are on this once beautiful planet, and, as the smartest and the most advanced of societies we couldn’t balk our perverse drive for energy/growth in order to prevent the already predicative Global Warming Situation and the right-around-the-corner cul de sac of Cheap Oil Shortage. How the hell couldn’t this set of smart people manage to organize themselves and prevent this already unsafe and perilous state of affairs?
The main reason has its most basal roots hardly ingrained in our biological heritage. The Selfish Replicators, our genes, have programmed our bodies so to maximize their number of copies in the present day gene pool which is comprised of the cells found in the bodies of all humans. Sets of genes wage war with each other through the tool of sex, and the ones that are most successful at it multiply their numbers in the gene pool at the expense of the not so lucky or well adapted ones. Successful genes are selfish genes; selfish genes are genes that manage to program the behavior of their carrier robots, us humans, in such a way as to blindly achieve their unplanned selfish purpose: copy, copy, copy (for more enlightening check out our review of The Selfish Gene). Cynically, all of this is achieved by the “selfish” genes mechanistically and unconsciously, for the only rules they obey are the rules of simplicity (physics’ laws).
Now, if each and every one individual would abstain from its selfish actions in such a way that the whole group would benefit from it (i.e. everyone in the group has its secured piece of pie, and is protected from treachery by others), then we’d have a perfect system. Hard to achieve though, and not encountered in any biological system: Group Selectionism is a fable. This system will fail just because selfish individuals, driven by their selfish genes, will cast aside their medium sized chunk of pie in order to get a bigger slice at the expense of the others. All politics, state diplomacy, corporate dynamics, free trade, and all other complex systems inter-relationships, are all self-regulated by the behavior of their most constitutive elements, the People. They can’t be regulated for the whole benefit of humanity, because there will always be some caviler ready to rip some extra juice at the expense of the other unwary, gullible, and well sensed humans.
So, why should corporations give a damn about future environmental issues when a big jug-load of money is just waiting around the corner? Let my family live the high life, and let the others have a hitch in their giddy-up and handle the long row to hoe themselves. And this is exactly what we experience: corporations blithely seeking high profits in disregard of any environmental and social issues, politicians lying to their voters using their infinite-growth paradigmatic discourses, banks inflating their customers’ debt with mysterious commissions, countries invading other countries for oil indemnity, and military industrial complexes making a living out of building weapons for the so-called “war on terror” which, surprisingly, killed less than 10.000 people in the United States. What about the massacre done by cigarette corporations annually? The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco related – 435,000 deaths only in the United States! Does 10.000 vs 400.000 ring a bell? Are you at daggers drawn now?
To all the people that say: “Well, what would you do without corporations, banks, and politicians? You wouldn’t have your Karaoke DVD Player, your smartphone, the internet, pharmaceuticals, and all the other good stuff!” my answer is: “Couldn’t we have all this sweet juice without the party poppers?“. Without military corporations, junk food, high-frequency-trading profit-making without producing anything useful, cigarettes killing millions of people without anyone taking any significant action against it, and a hell lot of other useless crap, not to forget coke and its diabetic inducing magic formula.
With all this hogwash there also comes non-prudent energy consumption. I’m a very big fan of Physics, and one of the most important universal law I’ve learned about from this subject is that you can’t create energy out of nothing at the macro level. For all this 100 year boom there must surely be a gloom; consuming all this energy without any respect and humility towards the millions of years of time necessary to render it capable of growing 7 billion people in such a short time must, out of necessity, be charged by nature’s finite resources ruling; all this trouble because in a world with selfish “tribes” of common interests, selfish individuals, and selfish genes, the epilogue must be comprised of Global Warming and almost nobody willing to take the first significant steps in order to cut down gas emissions, and also of Peak Oil and almost nobody willing to switch of their big trucks for a smaller and more environment friendly car, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
This I think is the main reason for the predicament we find ourselves right now. The following video by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett takes on a different approach. Instead of selfishness, he argues that stupidity and ignorance are the principal reasons for the observed facts. Friend or Foe? You be the judge!
