Comments not related to oil or natural gas production in this thread please, thanks.
161 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, April 19, 2024”
For the last few days the discussion here has been mostly about whether a renewable or green economy is or is not possible.
Pretty much everybody has made their argument.
As I see it, meaning the big picture, hardly anybody is cutting thru the fog to get down to the REAL question, as I see it.
This question is not about absolutes, not about Nick’s pink eyeglasses versus Carnot’s pessimism. It’s about the ACTUAL choices we have available to us, and which of these choices we make.
Now to be perfectly blunt about it, anybody who is proposing to simply dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels in the very short term has his head up his ass so far he will never see daylight……. because there’s simply NO WAY WHATSOEVER any body anywhere in any position of power is going to make the decision to do so. Doing it is simply totally out of the question, as a practical matter, politically, militarily, economically, environmentally, or by any other metric. AIN’T gonna happen, forget it.
( Environmentally sounds really good…….. but what this would actually mean is that a substantial portion of humanity would literally starve near term, if we were to quit using fertilizers, pesticides, diesel powered machinery, etc. You can take this to the bank. Anybody who knows shit from apple butter about agriculture knows it’s true without even giving it a second thought. )
Starvation isn’t on the table, as a DELIBERATE option.
However…………. Starvation is a very real CONSEQUENCE of current policies and practices, and as a realist, I expect to see starvation on the grand scale, assuming I live to be REALLY old, near a hundred or so.
The best I can say about people starving by the millions in places where the birth rate remains high, and economic development remains low, is that such countries aren’t likely to start and win aggressive wars, except maybe on the local scale. Indonesia and the poorer countries in Africa aren’t going to pose a serious problem to countries such as the USA, etc, either as military enemies or by sending a plague of tens of millions of migrants our way.
Too much blue water, period.
( I’m not taking either side, pro or con, on immigration at this particular time. I’m just pointing out reality, as I see it. People in such places are at very high risk of dying hard in place as the result of overshoot. Lots of them ARE going to die as the result of overshoot, in general terms, including climate troubles, water troubles, natural resource depletion troubles, etc. )
Once upon a time, I was a hard core doomer, and I’m perfectly ready to agree that there’s a very real possibility the entire world economy may go to hell, and crash and burn, as the end result of overshoot.
But I do not believe such a crash and burn end of our modern industrial life style is INEVITABLE for the entire human race.
The population IS going to fall, partly due to falling birth rates, partly due to people dying hard because the Horsemen are abroad. I just can’t see any reason at all not to accept this assumption as rock solid.
But I don’t see any reason to accept Carnot’s and others argument that we’re for all practical purposes FUCKED, that it’s OVER…….. because they don’t offer any solution at all, NOTHING, other than to say whatever we do in the way of promoting renewables is going to make the built in crash EVEN WORSE.
I say bullshit to that. They could possibly be right that the crash will happen quicker, and it could possibly be somewhat worse, but SO FUCKING WHAT?
I believe in doing whatever we can to preserve our one and only home planet’s biosphere to the extent we can.
I do NOT believe it matters so much as the proverbial ” take a fuck at a rolling donut” expression, in terms of simply WORSHIPING nature. Mother Nature is the biggest and most unimaginably horrible BITCH. She routinely serves up asteroids, super volcanoes and biblical level plagues. She keeps score, but impartially, totally dispassionately, in the fossil record, that’s IT as far as SHE”s concerned.
In the end, species are very much like individuals, species consist of populations of individuals…… with new species consisting of the offspring of existing species….. which sooner or later go extinct.
Mammals replaced dinosa urs, in other words. A few hundred million years from now, it’s rather likely, probably dead certain, that do matter what we naked apes do or do not do, this planet will be teeming with life…….. half or more of it utterly strange to us.
So…… what we really ought to be talking about is what we CAN do, in realistic terms. We can’t just wish away our population problem. We can’t just wish away our current day fossil fuel based industrial economy. We can’t go green on the grand scale anytime soon…. and it could be that Carnot and company are correct that we will NEVER be able to do so.
So…… the real question is what we CAN do, as a practical matter. We can only do what’s possible within the boundaries or context of politics and economics. We can only do what’s possible within the boundaries of physical laws, within the context of existing finite supplies of oil, gas, metal ores, soils, water, etc.
I’ve got some things I’ve got to do right now.
Later today I’ll be back to post some thoughts on what we can do, for reasons seldom given due consideration by anybody here in this forum, excepting yours truly…………… on why I think Carnot and his friends are quite possibly wrong, for some reasons they haven’t given due consideration, etc.
A global carbon tax as such isn’t going to happen. You’re dead on, as usual.
On the other hand, depletion never sleeps, and given time, rising prices will have the same effect on fossil fuel consumption as a carbon tax but unfortunately to a far lesser extent. China and India will continue to burn coal, no question, but lots of countries will do what they can to reduce their coal consumption so as to keep the money at home, to minimize the risk to their national security, etc.
And I’m personally convinced that even if we were to give up fossil fuels immediately, the climate crisis is already baked in, and will be playing out not only over coming decades but over coming centuries. Staying on our current path can only make it worse……. but how much worse, I can’t say.
ONE thing I’m dead sure of is that there’s a zero possibility that we’ll collectively quit using fossil fuels, period. The consequences of actually doing so would be so dire, so catastrophic, as to be beyond description. Suffice it to say that the teenage granddaughters of members of this forum selling themselves on street corners for food would be one of the minor or trivial consequences.
But a possible transition to a long term sustainable way of life based on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and ( gulp!) austerity isn’t necessarily a global question.
I personally believe the likeliest odds of the coming global population crash involve hundreds of millions of people dying hard due to war, famine, disease,exposure, etc. in addition to declining birth rates.
A lot people will die at militarized borders manned by soldiers not only ordered to shoot to kill, but eager to do so.
Times are very likely, possibly SURE to be really tough for just about everybody, including the large majority of people in countries such as the USA, western European countries, etc.
Economic contraction brought on by climate issues, natural resource depletion issues, opportunistic aggressive wars, etc, can be safely assumed as given . People inside any more fortunate country who are already dealing with tough times themselves aren’t going to welcome any significant number of migrants from collapsing countries, never mind migrants by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, by the millions.
I can’t argue that any particular country won’t simply implode once the shit is well and truly in the fan, descending into a Somalia like hell hole, every man for himself or for his local warlord, every man’s primary problem being his own and his family’s day to day survival.
I’m at least a semi civilized sort myself.
But if I’m looking DIRECTLY at starving children brought to me in hopes of my feeding them, I wouldn’t hesitate to go find some food for them, once my own supply is about gone.
I would go armed.
The trade off is simple. Somebody dies if necessary, in order that children live. Hillbilly farmers, Scotch Irish German mountain hillbillies by descent, are used to stomping our own snakes.
We don’t pick delicately at a ribeye while bemoaning the cruelty, the hideous lack of humanity, of people who murder Bambi for fun or food or both, lol.
I raised that ribeye in captivity, and killed the donor with my own hands, not just figuratively, but literally, at least a dozen times over the last half century. Bambi at least knew freedom, until she found herself in the cross hairs of my rifle scope. She at least died without the trauma of being forcibly separated from her own babies, forcibly loaded on truck, for a terrifying ride to a terrifying place smelling of the blood of countless other cows……
Damned few parents would do otherwise, once that’s their last option, although very few of us will actually say so in public.
Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that hardly anybody at all is REALLY taking any of this discussion seriously, that it’s all a game to them, that they don’t actually believe THEY THEMSELVES will ever be dealing with rationed food, rationed fuel, rationed electricity, car jackings in THEIR neighborhood…….. bombs landing in their own neighborhood.
To be honest, I’m not taking it very seriously myself…….mostly because I think the odds are close to one hundred percent I’ll be dead of old age before the shit is REALLY in the fan here in my own neighborhood in my own country.
A critical point I’m trying to make in this rant is that I’m not wearing pink eye glasses and blinders…… which were part of the bridle and bit hardware we put on the last family mule back when I was a kid. The blinders literally kept the mule from seeing anything at all, except what we WANTED it to see……… directly ahead.
There’s at least a POSSIBILITY that the pink eye glasses faction will have the last laugh, a couple of generations, or a century down the road, once the flames have died down and the smoke is mostly settled. There may and in my opinion will likely be some pockets of people living a more or less modern lifestyle in some places because they ( their society, their government ) came to understand the score, and went proactive in time to preserve what they could of what they have now….. a working electrical grid, working water and sewer, food and shelter, at least basic medical care, at least a moderately safe environment in day to day terms, law enforcement good enough that it will be safe to be on the street rather than cowering behind locked doors, etc.
Our most likely collective best hope is that we’re lucky enough to have government, or governments, that function as well as our own and allies functioned back in WWII……. governments that realistically evaluated the big picture, and did what was NECESSARY to maintain and preserve their own people, their own way of life…… going to war.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that there’s at least a fair possibility of some of us , maybe some entire countries, squeaking thru the coming bottleneck or crash more or less whole, in basic terms of food and shelter, personal safety, at least basic medical care, etc.
Maybe we’ll have to give up beef and pork, maybe even chicken, as dietary staples here in the USA. The climate might get so bad that even putting tens of millions of us back on the farm, working mostly by hand using little or nothing in the way of fossil fuels, manufactured and shipped fertilizers, pesticides, etc, won’t be enough for all of us to live on beans and bread.
Well, in that case……. whatever we’ve done, or failed to do, in terms of going green, won’t matter at all. The end game would still be the same,trying to go green, or continuing on the fossil fuel route until we hit a Seneca Cliff of one sort or another,climate, resource, political, economic….. with a combination of any and all being the most likely.
The media across the board are quite fond of presenting us with a steady stream of more or less miraculous solutions to our problems….. electric cars, fake meat, fusion power, geothermal all over the place, etc, etc. The renewables naysayers are right in that the large majority of these miracle solutions will never come to pass.
BUT a few of them WILL become realities. I can’t say which. But some of them are already well proven, and lack only a serious effort at implementation. Among these are super energy efficient appliances and housing. There’s NOTHING AT ALL, other than our current day habits/ desires preventing us from driving really small electric cars that go a hundred miles or less on a charge…… except for the dug in bankers and industries selling us three ton oil burners because that’s where the money is for THEM.
And at least a FEW of these supposed miracles that are not already present day unimplemented realities will BE realities in coming years.
Genetically engineered grains and veggies are probably dangerous in terms of our own health, and potentially capable of bringing on some serious to catastrophic environmental damages. But compared to starving without them, due to a lack of conventional fertilizers, pesticides, etc………
We’re going to go the genetic engineering route. We’re going to go the doubling up route. We’re going to be cooking at home, starting with flour and meal, fresh or dried beans, cabbage, onions, maybe some meat or fish. There won’t be much trash coming out of the kitchen, nor much in the way of like new clothing to donate to the Good Will store.
I remember seeing video of emergency food rations being distributed by the old USSR government….. those rations consisting of hundred pound ( our size here in the USA at least) bags of grain, mesh bags of potatoes and cabbages, etc….. unloaded from trucks on sidewalks . The old time commies running the USSR deliberately starved millions of people……… but they also made such emergency aid available to millions more, depending on prevailing circumstances.
Things could get to this point here in the USA, or in Western Europe. Things could get even worse.
But if we put our minds to it, and our backs and our money into it, we can generate enough renewable electricity to run our essential industries.
So WHAT if aluminum costs twice as much because it’s produced using wind and solar power? We can DEAL with double the price……… if we use aluminum for truly important purposes, such as renewable energy infrastructure, or really light weight trucks, meaning a ton of tons of extra freight delivered over the life of the truck…. because saving a ton of dead weight means another ton of cargo, every trip.
Lowering the speed limit to thirty mph means safely lowering the dead weight of the truck quite a bit in relation to the gross weight…… because the wheels, suspension, brakes, engine or batteries, etc, can all be quite a bit lighter….. and in a shrinking economy, there will be fewer trucks, and running them slower will be a feasible partial solution to shortages of fuel and materials.
We can get by ok without aluminum beer cans.
I’ve driven “half ton” pickups tens of thousands of miles over the last fifty years loaded to triple their supposed safe working load…… without any problems. simply by taking it easy, keeping the speed down to half the usual every day speed of traffic.
There’s nothing REAL, other than habit and dug in special interests, preventing us from doubling up in existing housing, so that public transportation will work, in the future, where it just won’t work for now, due to insufficient population density. There’s nothing real preventing us from running businesses so that show up and departure times for employees are scheduled so as to ENABLE ride sharing…….. nothing other than revocable laws to prevent van owners from legally transporting a car load of people to go grocery shopping or to work.
There’s nothing other than revocable laws and regulations preventing people from living in tight knit villages of the sort still common in some places in Europe, and even a few places here in the USA, whereby housing and various small businesses are all within walking distance. Beer and bread can be made in such places at a minor fraction of the expense of making them in industrial facilities many miles away, packaging them, shipping them to stores, customers driving to the stores to get them……… compared to walking or biking a block or two to pick them up freshly made, and very likely much better quality. Some enterprising local kid will be very glad to drop off fresh bread, etc, just like newspapers.
I’m not saying such measures will be adequate to turn the corner on the bottleneck. What I am saying is that there are countless ways to conserve on materials and energy. There are countless ways to cut back on damage to the environment .
If we once come to collectively understand the stakes, which are literally life and death for today’s little kids, and act appropriately, at least some little kids have a fair to good shot at a civilized, dignified, reasonably happy life. That life isn’t likely to include using two or three ton trucks to fetch beer, or flying to the snow to go skiing or to the winter sun to go sunbathing….. but it will be infinitely better than crash and burn.
Giving up is not an option.
Preachers in Baptist churches have a lot to say about the wide broad smooth high road to hell.
The fossil fuel road, if we stay on it, leads straight to hell, straight, wide, smooth and easy…….. DOWNHILL at that.
The ONLY possible realistic way to get off of it, given our human nature, is to make every possible effort to go green.
Some of us in some places have a realistic shot at success.
It’s ok to believe, or at least hope, that we will get a few lucky breaks here and there along the way.
There will be new kinds of batteries, cheaper to build, longer lasting, more easily recycled.There will be new ways to build houses, ways that use less scarce materials, houses that use less energy. There can be a return to old style communities where people live and work together, locally, rather than depending mostly on trade with people hundreds or thousands of miles away.We can eat down the food pyramid, and be the healthier for doing so.
If we can’t cure cancer, we can learn how to avoid it most or nearly all the time. Hell’s Bells, we already know how to avoid it.
There may be modular mass produced nuclear reactors that are safe enough to be deployed on the grand scale……. if Old Man Business As Usual manages to stay on his feet another decade or two or three.
People who are otherwise without work and without hope may find that they can live with older people in exchange for room and board, so that such old folks can stay home in familiar circumstances rather than spending their last days in a nursing home far from any remaining friends and family.
I know of a few people personally who are already in the process of making such arrangements. So far among cases I know about this is between people known to each other for quite some time as friends, relatives, or employees/ employers .
But that can and will change, as times get tougher and more and more people are in a spot where this sort of thing is their best and possibly their only good option..
There might be a plague, deliberately created in a laboratory some where, that spreads like wildfire and renders most or all of us sterile, male or female, or women sterile after having a single child.
Novelist’s plots can and do give us a foretaste of times to come. Philosophers and pundits have things to say that at first sound outrageous…… but later seem to simply point out the inevitable…….
“As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H L Mecken
Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality in more than a few cases. I have a crystal ball that works like a charm in countless ways…… even to the point that it’s been made flat and thin so that it fits in my pocket so I can easily keep it with me almost anytime, almost any place.
So……… as a practical matter, we can’t go green on the grand scale anytime soon for reasons I don’t need to go into at this minute.
And as a practical matter, viewed from the other side of the question, we can’t give up fossil fuels….maybe until they’re depleted to the point we can’t extract and use them, or until the ecology, climate and economy collapse to the point fossil fuels are irrelevant. Hunter gatherers and primitive farmers use only trivial amounts of fossil fuels, if they use any at all.
What we can do, as a practical matter, is to support any policies and industries that appear to slow down or possibly even arrest and reverse the hard crash seen as baked in by countless well informed people.
Carnot and his friends have made their argument that there simply isn’t enough in the way of materials and time to go green…… in essence, that it’s literally impossible to go green on the grand scale.
They may be right. I was going to go into reasons they may be wrong, but something else has popped up, and I’ll have to leave it for later.
I completely agree as usual with almost all of your comments. To set the table straight I have a line of thought that a softish landing would have been possible with 1/5 less fossil fuel usage globally as of right now. And just to make it rime; that would mean that from 1970’s and onwards the global fossil fuel usage would have had to have been flat. Right or wrong on that issue, the question is more how to manage the downslope of energy usage going forward for whatever reason. It is not going to help to pour more concrete into new areas used for farming or otherwise prime forest – that is for sure (not neccessary to always repeat the whole climate issue, but also point out related issues from other angles imo). And it is not especially impressive to argue for short time profits given by the capitalist machine, when we all know it is imperfect when it comes to allocation of resources.
Interested in your further line of thought as always.
I don’t think that article was about using thorium to convert coal to liquid fuel. It was about using breeder reactors to generate more NUCLEAR fuel. Thorium is an element that can be converted (“bred”) into a fissionable nuclear fuel. The article was advocating the construction of fast breeder reactors to increase the amount of energy that could be generated using nuclear reactors. The author was also advocating some fuel processing strategies to isolate and make safer some of the nasty fission byproducts inherent in the nuclear fuel cycle. Coal wasn’t mentioned at all.
I worked on both Thorium based reactors and on fast breeders in the 1970s. I left the industry in 1979 because it seemed that the problems inherent in nuclear power generation; safety, cost, environmental simpy weren’t solvable. I don’t exactly study the industry any more but nothing I have seen has convinced me that it really is a smart way to go. I see the same tired agruments today that I did forty years ago.
Specifically about fast breeders: Working on conventional reactors we had to write enormous documents called Preliminary and Final Safety Analysis Reports (PSAR and FSAR) before construction was even started. These documents, each, spanned about four feet on a book shelf covering every conceiveable failure; melt down, reactivity release, fire, theft (of nuclear material), on and on.
Something new was added when we worked on fast breeders: We started describing a regime of accidents where the primary classification of the accident was kilotons of TNT. Think about that.
“Would I prefer that we head toward Thorium-based fuel? Yep. Why? Because it is in coal and a high-temperature reactor (e.g. LFTR), using thorium as a fuel, brings both the capacity to generate electricity and turn the coal into synfuel which solves two problems at once because the cause of lung cancer from coal use comes from the thorium that naturally occurs within the coal and it is trivially able to be separated out as it is both metallic and much heavier than the carbon.”
Sometimes even the most optimistic pro solar puff pieces get it wrong in terms of the sustainability of solar power.
This article says the owners expect this giant solar farm to last thirty five years.
But barring stupid decisions made today, such as not making sure any leases involved can’t be renewed, when the thirty five years are up…….. the grid interconnections, the rights of way, any related infrastructure such as an on site maintenance shop, security fencing, probably nearly all of the necessary electrical cables, some or all of the panel mounting hardware, depending on what it’s made of, and how well, any necessary grading of the land, any necessary roads, etc…….. will all still be there.
The odds are high the panels themselves will be replaced with better ones, at a good profit, within ten to fifteen years, because new ones then will produce more juice per panel, and very likely also be cheaper to purchase as well, in terms of constant money.
Maybe I don’t have a clue, but as far as I can see, there’s really no reason at all to suppose a well sited, properly maintained solar farm won’t be about as good or better than new, a few decades down the road.. just as a well designed well maintained highway can be as good as new, or better, a generation down the road.
This is not to say that it won’t cost quite a bit to maintain such a solar farm……… but rather that keeping it up and running like new shouldn’t cost more than a rather minor fraction of starting from scratch new construction.
The “can’t be done” guys don’t seem to consider that engineers have been proving their grandfathers wrong about lots of things ever since the Industrial Revolution, lol.
Now consider that we lose some aluminum every time we recycle it.
Well, there are ways to up the recycling rate to pretty close to one hundred percent… for by instance mandating that aluminum be used only when it’s critical to our long term sustainability. Soda and beer cans aren’t at all necessary, not when the shit is in the fan. People have been brewing and drinking their beer right in the neighborhood for at least a couple of thousand years.
Somebody said a while back that Tesla cars don’t last. Maybe they don’t.
But I’ve been operating vehicles and machinery for over half a century that’s built to last. Commercial trucks quite commonly last a million miles, or even more.
But once it’s NECESSARY to build cars that DO last, and that can be built using as little metal, plastic, wire, battery cells, etc, as possible. ……… well then, it’s going to be possible to mandate that cars can ONLY be built to last a very long time using the minimum possible amount of materials.
You would have to be technically illiterate to argue otherwise………. but it’s very easy to argue that we will continue to build cars the way we do now, indefinitely, until the economy crashes and burns.
Nation states don’t work this way, not once the leaders understand that it’s do or die time, in terms of austerity and hard core economic planning. One or two models of cars and light trucks are ENOUGH, and will BE enough, under a wartime like planned economy. A coat of plain old enamel paint of the sort used on farm machinery forty years ago will last that long…… it’s lasted that long on my older farm equipment.
All the modern features deemed “essential” can be left off. My friends in uniform get by ok without either heaters or air conditioning when deployed in combat zones. My Daddy didn’t own an air conditioned car until he was seventy years old. He didn’t own a truck with even an ordinary old AM radio until the seventies.
The NAME of the game we can all agree on……. it’s contraction, austerity, hardship in countless respects. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that industrial civilization is doomed, that it’s all over in that respect.
There’s reason to believe that before this century is out most of us, maybe even three quarters or even more of us, will be dead of exposure, disease, starvation, and or violence ranging from local massacres to modern day hot war. Maybe there won’t be more than a few million of us scattered in various small pockets of survivors. Maybe there won’t be anybody left at all, but in my personal opinion the odds are pretty good there will be a few hundred million of us still around, and that’s enough to get the wheels turning again, in many if not all respects. Computer chips and solar panels might be impossible with so few people…… but the knowledge necessary to make them won’t be lost.
A few million people in an area with ample water power can recreate the industries that existed a century, or two or three centuries back. That’s not something to look forward to, but compared to going back to hunting and gathering or primitive agriculture, it’s not so bad, lol.
There are no guarantees of course. But on the other hand……… what possibly benefit is there to simply giving up, and continuing on our present day path of consumption to the nth power, until we hit a Seneca Cliff scenario?
Building out as much as we can in the way of renewable infrastructure isn’t going to result in any more destruction of what’s left of the natural world than otherwise.
It’s VERY hard for me to understand how anybody with an open mind could argue otherwise. Building an aluminum smelter in a pristine landscape will result in the destruction of that landscape SOONER, I’ll readily grant that point.
But not building it doesn’t mean we won’t destroy that same landscape, as surely as the sun comes up, by continuing on our present day path, another decade or two later.
I’m no engineer, no siree, but I’ve been watching engineers doing what their predecessors considered impossible my entire life.
Suppose we were to spend just HALF of what we spend on the MIC on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, recycling?
Those of us who survive can and will learn how to get by using a fourth or even less of our current per capita energy consumption.
Today’s three thousand and up square foot Mc Mansions occupied by only one or two people can accommodate a dozen or more people, once we have little or no choice in this matter. Lots of people live in such crowded conditions today.
I’ve got an electric clothes dryer, and I use it .
But I helped Momma hang our clothes out to dry growing up. I was out of college and wearing a coat and tie before there was an electric dryer in the house.
The price of one new car, which is of questionable value at best, is enough to upgrade a typical tract house so that the people living in it use as little as a quarter as much electricity for heating, cooling, lights, refrigeration, etc.
My basic point in this rant is that arguing that going green means keeping things the same is at best unintentionally misleading, and at the worst….. deliberately so.
Arguing that going green means providing eight or ten billion people with a current day western lifestyle approaches hilarious…… given that the people making that argument typically also argue that economic and ecological collapse are inevitable…….. meaning the population is going to crash.
OFM, there are so many flaws in your arguments about the future, for example….
“A few million people in an area with ample water power can recreate the industries that existed a century, or two or three centuries back.”
All those industries relied upon raw materials turning up by the boatload from foreign lands. What do you think will be exported as inputs for these ‘industries’ being set up near water power??
“The “can’t be done” guys don’t seem to consider that engineers have been proving their grandfathers wrong about lots of things ever since the Industrial Revolution, lol.”
What’s common about the entire period since the beginning of the industrial revolution?? Growing fossil fuel use, increasing energy availability. It’s a fool’s errand to consider the same rules apply on the downslope of energy availability. Who is going to be able to teach all the engineers in a world of falling energy availability?? Even schools and primary education are a product of fossil fuels, why wouldn’t this entire system of education break down when people are desperate for their next meal??
“The NAME of the game we can all agree on……. it’s contraction, austerity, hardship in countless respects.”
When oil availability decreases year after year, who misses out?? Once feedback loops kick in accelerating the decline, then whoever had oil products this year will have way less next year, and less again the year after. When farms on average can’t plow fields or harvest crops, nor deliver them to cities or even large towns, do you really think the children in these towns and cities are going to bother going to school??
Do you think anyone is going to be bothered setting up a local aluminium recycling plant, when they have no food??
In one breath you agree times are going to be really tough as everything declines, but then assume other parts of the system can operate normally, without considering how they are effected by the great contraction. Who’s going to bother paying any attention to what a government says if the people don’t have food?
I’m certain lots of the things you have suggested above will be tried on the downslope, all with the promise of a better future than the alternative, but when the food stops getting to people in the cities, as farmers have less fuel, less fertilizer, less pesticides and herbicides to work with year after year, it will all fall to pieces as people become more desperate.
It’s not just the decline that makes things worse, it’s the feedback loops operating in a highly complex system that fail completely one after another, most seemingly invisible as they don’t seem to use a lot of oil, but might rely upon sales of some product to others that do rely on oil.
Imagine Sri Lanka right now if there was no IMF to come to their aide with funds so they could continue buying from the world market. Such organizations will be useless on the real downslope of energy availability.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were correct that some form of civilization could continue after we get off the oil and other fossil fuel addiction, but the downslope of supply, particularly of oil will be so savage that nothing of the modern world will last after a couple of decades of the decline, and probably no animals that could be used for even basic agriculture.
Hideaway
That’s the problem that many miss. We tend to underestimate how complex our system has become and how specialized we’ve become. This requires a robust transportation system. Technology has enabled this trend to greater heights because of productivity gains. But it has ended we’re already seeing a reversal as growth has ended critical mass is being lost which will end affordability. ( masquerading as inflation) If population declines the knowledge base goes with it. We already have a vacuum of critical knowledge such as farming and livestock husbandry. Don’t think the last two generations of video game players will be able to quickly adapt, they will use the knowledge they have acquired for real guns.
A pattern that we see emerging and repeating is failed institutions consolidated and government subsidized. This happened in banking in 2008 and will be attempted soon with energy systems and we could argue already has with the green initiatives that are failing. And we are seeing oil majors consolidating now. Worst yet the legacy cost of the pollution from mining fracking and nuclear waste hasn’t been dealt with when times were good and certainly won’t be when times are bad. Without a stable electric grid our temporary remediation efforts will fail spectacularly making many areas uninhabitable. How many will be employed managing spent fuel cooling ponds when they need to grow rice.
Everyone wants to think this time is different but it’s not it’s just bigger. Rome was never rebuilt its ruins are still ruins. It was also an energy based system of conquest consolidating stored resources from developed civilizations. Once it had conquered the known world it ceased to exist. There is no stable state the system grows or declines and this system can no longer grow.
Much of the growth in the system is due to population growth, population will peak and decline and in theory could eventually reach a steady state once World population falls to some optimum level (maybe 1 billion, perhaps less). Material needs are not unlimited and much of the existing material can be recycled, particularly if goods were designed to be recycled. Assuming things will remain as they are now has historically been a very poor assumption, the only thing that remains constant is that things never remain as they are, the system is not fixed an assumption that it is fixed is fatally flawed.
Oil consumption per capita will decrease, but important uses such as farming and mining will continue.
For World C plus C output and using Population projections of Lutz et al (SSP1) which peak between 2050 and 2055 at about 8.65 billion and also my Shock Model from 2024 to 2050, I get the following for World C plus C per capita (barrels per person per year). Average decline in per capita consumption of C plus C about 2% annually from 2030 to 2050.
I’ll start off with a sincere thank you for all of your contributions here Dennis. Much appreciated.
Your simple combination of a population projection with your oil shock model is useful. Could you provide a bit more detail for the Lutz citation you’re using here?
Thanks for these graphs, Dennis. The problem is that those graphs make it look like humans can easily survive and grow like we have over the last 40 years on declining rates of oil production.
However in that period of less oil per capita, we have had substitution, like oil heaters in homes and commercial premises being substituted by gas heating, lowering oil use per capita. Plus we have had huge easily made efficiency gains, common autos that use to get 10mpg now get 30mpg, likewise for trucks, shipping, aircraft, tractors, mining equipment etc.
The problem is we have used all the easy efficiency gains, right when we are running into a period of much higher oil use in the oil industry itself, leaving less for the resto f civilization.
Those graphs take one aspect, reduction in use per capita in isolation of everything else, yet we live in a complete system. Mining dump trucks that were 40t trucks in the 60’s are now often over 400 tonnes, and way more efficient in use of diesel, yet we cannot replicate those gains of efficiency in the next 40 years. We can’t go to 4,000t dump trucks because of physical limits on metals and rubber tyres. We are reaching metal fatigue limits at 400t.
We have much lower mined grades of every type of base metal than we had decades ago, right at the time we need lots more of these metals to build the ‘transition’. This transition can only happen with increased diesel use to provide the metals. Where does the increase in diesel use for mining come from in a world where overall oil production is shrinking, which is coming ‘soon’?
Which existing use of diesel misses out?
What happens when the following year after peak there is 2Mbbls/d less again, and the year after that when there is another 3Mbbls/d reduction in oil flow?
Do we ban farmers from using tractors so that mining has enough diesel to supply the metals for the transition?
Perhaps we ban all shipping so important spare parts don’t get from one side of the world to the other..
Then the next year when we are short another 4M bbls/d who misses out that year?
It’s a complete system we have, that operates in a vastly complex connected way and the graphs that show how we have been using less oil per capita, just obfuscate the reality of our situation.
The reality is we have been using more oil and more fossil fuels overall on average for over 2 centuries, yet only managed to drag 15% of humanity to a modern western civilization. When this rate of energy use falls, as it must due to both depletion and climate reasons, our modern civilization is going to rapidly unwind, with a massive human overpopulation, to the detriment of the remaining natural world.
Hideaway- “The problem is we have used all the easy efficiency gains”
Not really…still lots of work to do on that front around the world.
And, if prices were twice as high as they are now I can guarantee that people would learn to live with less consumption/waste.
Not saying these thing kind of changes are easy or cheap, but will be necessity.
And yes…highly disruptive.
Hickory,
Not really…still lots of work to do on that front around the world.
Yes. The average US passenger vehicle gets about 23 MPG. That could be doubled pretty easily, by design, and then doubled again by increasing average occupancy from 1.2 people to 2.4.
Carpooling. The horror.
The reality is we have been using more oil and more fossil fuels overall on average for over 2 centuries, yet only managed to drag 15% of humanity to a modern western civilization
That fact alone should make any thinking person here blanch about the future.
Yes, the West will get its “green” auto fleet, and fuck-all to everyone else.
Hideaway,
If there is scarcity oil price will rise to the point that demand and supply will match, oil will be used where it is needed most. Refineries will be reconfigured to maximize diesel fuel and minimize gasoline production as demand for gasoline wanes.
Hideaway,
Your comment focused on oil so I looked at oil for that reason. We are not at the end of efficiency gains, gasoline demand can be reduced as the World transpitions to hybrids, plugin hybrids and BEV. The World consumed about 24 Mb/d of gasoline in 2022, this use can be reduced, also a significant number of light duty vehicles in Europe use diesel fuel so there can be some reduction of diesel use (though most Worldwide is likely used for long haul trucking) much of this could be replaced with electrified rail with short haul trucking done with BEV heavy duty trucks used for rail terminal to final destination.
There is likely to be enough fuel for mining and agriculture as these are higher priority uses, as costs of goods supplied by mines increases recycled materials will become more competitive and the recycling rate is likely to increase.
The system is both complex and constantly adjusting to facts on the ground, I don’t think anyone can foresee precisely how things will play out.
My guess is the system is more resilient at the World level than you believe, but I could be wrong.
Data I used is below (population in thousands), a copy paste to a spreadsheet should work.
SSP1 World 2015 7382999.7
SSP1 World 2020 7731644.5
SSP1 World 2025 8003146.2
SSP1 World 2030 8212740.9
SSP1 World 2035 8379464.1
SSP1 World 2040 8511535.6
SSP1 World 2045 8605906.4
SSP1 World 2050 8654320
SSP1 World 2055 8652771.7
SSP1 World 2060 8605820.7
SSP1 World 2065 8522102.1
SSP1 World 2070 8409523.3
SSP1 World 2075 8271470.7
SSP1 World 2080 8107773.5
SSP1 World 2085 7918121
SSP1 World 2090 7704786.7
SSP1 World 2095 7473329.4
SSP1 World 2100 7229151.3
Lutz at al 2017 Population SSP1 scenario. Click on chart for larger chart, population in billions.
Fossil fuel use per capita. the big increase from 2001 to 2008 was mostly a rapid increase in Chinese energy use. The Chinese share of primary energy use increased from 12% to 19% of the World’s energy use and coal use share by China increased from 31% to 46% of World’s coal consumption from 2001 to 2008. China’s per capita primary energy use increased from 35 to 70 GJ per capita from 2001 to 2008.
Thill,
Sorry for misspelling your name in previous comment.
Good information all around Dennis, thank you for sharing!
Hey Dennis
In one of your comments you suggested that “much of this could be replaced with electrified rail”. I am by no means a rail expert, but thought I might share a few observations on this one relating to physical infrastructure within the US. I’m avoiding the energy part of this argument.
There were a series of consolidations of rail and abandonment of lines in the 20th century for a range of reasons. This resulted in lines where track was pulled up but the general alignment and initial earthwork remains. There are other places where track remains with low utilization by short lines. Lastly, there are corridors where multiple tracks may have been present at one time, with an existing reduction in track without a corresponding reduction in the width of the available corridor. Available or fairly easily re-developable right-of-way would seem to provide an opportunity to increase rail capacity to take more of the freight or passenger volume currently on rubber tires or wings. In addition, it seems like railroads have some strong legal property rights that they have inherited from a type of 1st presence operation.
On the other side of the coin, it is not clear to me that the current incentive structure for railroads results in the types of investments necessary to adequately maintain long lived civil infrastructure assets. Think bridges for example. Also, many of these assets or corridors were built well before the current modern understanding of risk and engineering. Many current design approaches rely on probabilistic methods aimed at creating consistent odds of failure. I’ve seen a lot of steep slopes beneath rail lines that have to be pretty meta-stable. My point here relates to the costs and vulnerabilities that may not be immediately obvious.
Thank you again for all great information you share here!
Much of the growth in the system is due to population growth, population will peak and decline and in theory could eventually reach a steady state once World population falls to some optimum level (maybe 1 billion, perhaps less).
Dennis, do you really think that the population can decline peacefully to that level? If so, how many centuries do you think that will take?
It can happen in a couple hundred years. Depends on future choices families make about family size.
do you really think that the population can decline peacefully to that level?
Just look at Japan: their population is starting to decline sharply, and there’s no sign of violence.
Their fertility level is 62% of replacement. That means that in very roughly one generation their population will decline 38% about every generation, or about every 25 years, like this:
Year Population
0 100.0
25 68.0
50 46.2
75 31.4
100 21.4
125 14.5
150 9.9
So, at about 135 years you’re at about 12.5%, or 1/8 of the original population.
Nick G, Japan has had population decline in an era of increasing fossil fuel use world wide, and of course in isolation it looks easy to do without violence.
Now picture how Japan will get along in a world of falling energy use, where they can’t import their every whim of food as countries everywhere struggle with less fuel for tractors, heavy transport and shipping.
You just don’t get it that there is a vast difference from increasing fossil fuel use, which we’ve had for 200 years, especially oil more recently, and declining energy availability during the decline. A world where the easy to get, cheap oil declines first leaving the more energy expensive oil so the decline will be rapid, as more oil is used to get access to the last remaining oil..
Hi Ron,
Dennis constrains himself, for good reasons of his own, to hard numbers arguments.
Some body just said upthread someplace that Rome was never rebuilt, that the ruins are the end of the story.
Well, as it so happens, the Italian people are among the foremost of the world’s engineers… having for instance designed and manufactured the machinery Tesla uses to manufacture unitized electric cars, made by casting giant parts, rather than welding together hundreds of smaller parts.
Now about the population declining to a billion or less……. Dennis talk much when it comes to the Four Horsemen.
I’ve spent a truly substantial part of my life trying to understand the BIG PICTURE as best I can, meaning I’ve read as many history books as anybody, other than actual historians, lol. I know the abc’s of biology, geography, math, geology, agriculture, and human nature. ETC
Now maybe I’m entirely wrong, but from my perspective, the odds are VERY high the world wide population is going to decline substantially within the next few decades. There are dozens of realistic scenarios that could result in the population falling to one billion or less before this century is out.
Most of these scenarios involve violence on the grand scale, up to and including a flat out NBC WWIII……. which could leave the population well under a billion, within a matter of the next few days, months, or years.
The climate is going nuts, and hundreds of millions of people are going to die hard as a consequence.
More are going to die because they can’t afford to import such necessities as fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, food even if their local climate is still viable.
Wars are already ongoing, and will imo inevitably be spreading like weeds over the coming decades…… meaning more people dead well into the millions in lots of places.
If you ask Dennis in so many words what he thinks about what I have to say, my guess is that he’ll say he hopes I’m wrong…… but that he understands that I MIGHT be right.
OFM,
Hard to know how things will play out. When I think back say 40 or 50 years, I could not have foreseen the technological progress we have made in the past half century, lots of bad stuff may occur, and lots of technological progress may also occur. It is possible we reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid catastrophe (this is unclear at this point), population will fall due to reduced family size, even without wars or a climate crisis, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear can be ramped up to replace fossil fuel.
Sure none of this might happen, in which case the doomer scenario is baked in. My belief is that with good policy the doomer scenario can either be avoided entirely or at least mitigated, but the fact is that nobody knows the future, as they say it has not been written.
Recycling is not magic and has mostly been a greenwashing exercise in the same accounting trickery as the gifting money to charity each time to tally up at McDonald’s. Ignoring that most metals that can be recycled and are very easy, relative to other manmade materials, simply are not anywhere near 90%, this isn’t going to get anyone very far.
There is a global shortage of scrap iron/steel, for instance, which has been one of the many criticisms for the UK shutting down virgin iron works and going to the “greener” electric arc furnaces that can only work on non-pig iron hand me downs.
This is a roundabout way of saying that there is nothing sustainable about modern industrial society. Oil running out, or getting pricey, is just one of the more immediate concerns. Finance eating itself (TRPF sucks for capital) and loss of working age population along with increasing precarity of such workers and lack of good health due to pollution will help unwind a lot of this soft landing planning.
Look what COVID did to the American workforce, among other nations. Imagining as if the USA could manage with an actual big crisis over a longer period with far more moving parts when a simple virus control exercise knocked everyone for six (despite the hilarious MSM puff pieces about everything being okay actually) just makes me facepalm.
Speaking of COVID, one wonders whether it will be possible to sustain the practice of modern, mainstream, western medicine in an environment of declining resources and decreasing complexity? If we can no longer manufacture solar panels and EVs, how are we going to be able to run the high tech labs and research centres that produce new (patentable) drugs? It strikes me as a little odd that people who like to crow about declining energy intensity and decreased complexity of our civilization seem just fine with ever more complex medical technology and dependence on an industry (Big Pharma) that is more than likely unsustainable in the picture of the future they like to paint.
Just look at the current craze over Ozempic, a drug developed to treat type 2 diabetes. The active ingredient has a side effect of suppressing appetites resulting in weight loss in many of the people that take the weekly injection that helps lower blood sugar by helping the pancreas make more insulin. The drug has recently been praised as a weight loss medication by Oprah Winfrey who has struggled for years with her weight.
The doctors I’m listening to these days are asserting that type 2 diabetes is more often than not preventable as well as reversible through a regimen of proper diet and exercise. The western food industry is producing food that is a pharma executives wet dream and is largely responsible for the epidemic of obesity in the west and increasingly across the world. When I go to the supermarket I see a lot of food that is primarily carbohydrates (starches and sugar), salt, oils, protein (eggs, meats and beans) and dairy products. In other words all the stuff that modern agriculture produces in abundance. The fresh produce (fruits and vegetables) takes up probably ten percent or less of the floor space in the supermarket. Fast food is designed to be addictive and isn’t particularly nutritious. One problem is that the most nutritious food is the most perishable, probably the reason why it ain’t cheap, so people ending up eating food that is convenient and affordable but, likely to lead to long term, chronic, non communicable health problems. Throw in a lack of outdoor activity and good sunshine (vitamin D) and you have a petri dish of under performing immune systems just waiting for some pathogen or the other to take hold.
So rather than focus on the root causes of the epidemic of obesity and ill health the world is tending (being led) to turn to the pharmaceutical industry to come up with solutions to problems of our own making. I guess this is a great time to be in the business of food and drugs.
“The Stanford report found that recycling batteries used 79% less energy and resulted in 55% fewer CO2 emissions compared to traditional refining. Additional savings come from keeping the recycling supply chain local compared to the globe-circling refining process for freshly extracted minerals. Closing the loop brings the total CO2 savings to 80%.”
Rgds
A few other problems: Dams (concrete) have a design life of about a 50 to 100 years, but many of their components only last 20 to 50 years. They could silt up before this limit. The increased volatility of drought and flood cycle could easily mean a couple of consecutive bad years during which the site would have to be abandoned. Three or four degrees of warming will mean most areas become too climatically unstable to allow reliable agriculture. Once we get to three degrees there is probably no stopping before full hot house conditions arrive. Any stable area will be quickly be overrun by psychopaths. In fifty years we’ve wiped out 70% of wildlife, similar proportions of insects, marine life, plants, and that is accelerating. We haven’t lost too many species yet but that is likely to change soon; it is extreme hubris to think any humans are going to survive without the ecological services from other species that we coevolved with.
It is generally accepted that if you can get past five years old life as a hunter-gatherer and occasional gardener is much preferable to one trying to exist on a marginal subsistence farm and maybe to that of a modern, cubicle bound, smart phone obsessed, debt slave.
No…….. the industries that formed the base of the industrial economy a century, two centuries, or three centuries back did NOT generally depend on imports from the far corners of the world.
The English did depend on the American colonies for timber for warships, and we depended on them, early on, for HARDWARE for ships……… but we pretty much had everything we needed for ship building available domestically, excepting sail making materials… and we could produce hemp domestically as well.
We pretty much had everything we needed, in general terms, to run a war time economy here in the USA, excepting rubber… and it wasn’t long before we learned how to make good rubber for tires.
You guys who say it can’t be done are simply failing to consider that when it HAS to be done, it will get done. I own a few machines that run just fine that don’t have a single computer chip of any sort at all.
They GET THE JOB DONE.
I’m NOT talking about business as usual….. but rather about what is possible once resources of all sorts are ever scarcer, and ever more expensive, to the point that in the end, they’re simply unavailable.
I can only conclude that people who think ” it can’t be done” have never devoted as much as the time needed to read a couple of serious books about how war time economies actually work.
If the materials usually used to manufacture automobiles are needed for guns….. automobile production ceases.
Right now it’s true that the USA is utterly dependent on having a hundred million or more personal automobiles. In a fucking SURVIVAL situation, with the government, democratic, autocratic, Stalinist, or whatever, trucks run doing ESSENTIAL work.
Delivering potato chips, or frozen pizza, or beer, or cosmetics, is not essential work. The people working in industries dealing in such goods will be on welfare……. or put to work at other jobs deemed ESSENTIAL to survival. If a house or apartment building burns, it won’t be replaced….. the people living there will double up someplace.
Surgeons won’t be doing butt tucks and face lifts. Lawyers won’t be getting rich from divorce settlements. Plumbers will be working but hairdressers won’t…… except maybe from home in exchange for food or other favors.
And while there may or will inevitable come a time when it’s no longer possible to do so, powerful countries with ample military assets will simply TAKE what they MUST have from countries that are unable or unwilling to export such essentials.
It’s accepted wisdom that a country such as the USA can’t win against a local people determined to protect themselves….. and this is pretty much true….. assuming we Yankees ( or Russians or whoever) play by “civilized” rules.
But once the name of the game is survival at any cost….. well now….. it’s not at all impossible, or even hard, to just ” kill’m all and let God sort’m out.”
There weren’t any computer chips used in the electrical grid in the early fifties, nor in the water and sewer grids serving local cities.
In a fucking SURVIVAL situation, we won’t be needing copper for new houses. We’ll be living in existing housing, period, assuming……. we’re among the living.
And in any case….. anybody who thinks giving up on going green and sustainable is going to result in the preservation of any remaining pristine portions of the environment simply has his head up his ass so far he’ll never see daylight, period. I beg pardon for being so blunt, but you’re all just plain wearing your own pink eyeglasses, wearing your own blinders, when you argue that giving up on renewables means SAVING the environment.
You don’t HAVE a plan or a solution of any fucking sort…. other than to somehow assume staying on the broad smooth fossil fuel highway to hell will somehow magically lead us to SOME PLACE OTHER THAN HELL.
Anything you presume can be done to help without working on going green can be done IN CONJUNCTION with going green.
I’m NOT in favor of destroying what should be a national park to build aluminum smelters running on coal.
Repeating that argument has nothing to do with actually going green…… it’s bullshit, it’s a straw man argument about capitalism versus ( informed and reasonable ) socialism.
BUT…….. whether those aluminum smelters are built there, or not…… that land will inevitably be “raped and pillaged” if we stay on the fossil fuel highway. The ONLY reasonable scenario to the contrary involves the collapse of the industrial economy, and the population, BEFORE we get around to ripping it up and using the land for grazing cattle, or raising corn or soybeans or whatever.
Well……. in that case……. the anti renewable argument consists mostly of moral posturing, preening one’s superior moral superiority.
Mother Nature is entirely incapable of giving a flying fuck, and no matter what we do, or don’t do, She’ll continue to do HER thing, without planning, without thought, without making any sort of decisions……. because She’s not sentient, She doesn’t work that way at all.
In an eyeblink, on HER time scale or frame, a few thousand years, maybe a million years, after we’re altogether GONE, extinct, this planet will be teeming with life again……. even if we go flat out chemical, nuclear and biological with WWIII.
SHE won’t give a fuck about the KINDS of life present here in the future…….. So……. other than worshiping Her…….. why should we…… because after all, we’re not going to be here ANYWAY, unless we DO go green and sustainable.
This is not about forever……. it’s about NOW, and about what we DO or don’t do, over the next few decades, the next few generations.
We’re not going to RUN OUT of oil or gas or coal or water or any other resource in any ultimate sense anytime soon. That’s a bullshit argument, in reality. The real question is what we will DO with whatever oil, gas, coal, water, aluminum, topsoil, etc still available …….. but at ever increasing cost and ever decreasing availability, on our current path.
It’s very common for anti renewable talking heads to point out that there’ll be ” forty million tons of useless old turbine blades laying around ” in a decade or two. What such talking heads never mention is that the amount of equally useless coal ash produced by burning enough coal to make an equivalent amount of electricity is even bigger.
And incidentally…… those blades CAN be recycled. They’re not worth much if anything at the moment, due to the limited supply and the cost of transporting them to far away recycling facilities.
But as the supply grows, the value paradoxically grows as well……… because recycling them depends on having volume enough to scale up the job.
Now before anybody has a chance to remind me to take my meds, I’m going to take them immediately after hitting the post comment button, lol.
Two hundred or so years ago USA industry and trade was based on slaves going to the Caribbean and Americas; cotton, sugar and other commodities going to UK and Europe; and various manufactured goods going to West Africa and some onto the Americas with more slaves. The US depended very much on imports – primarily of slaves, effectively cheap energy, who were then expected to “get the job done”.
Commerce was indeed dependent on the slave trade. Industry was largely in the north, non-slave, states. That was true from the 1700’s until pretty much the middle of the 20th century when the “southern strategy” used the cheap labor in the southern states to break the unions.
Do you REALLY believe that as the population grew, that there wouldn’t have been PLENTY of people to do the work done by slaves?
I know half a dozen or so people personally who are doing the work formerly done by slaves, even today. I’m still doing a good bit of it myself, for instance cutting, splitting,transporting and burning wood to stay warm in the winter. My grand parents spent the majority of their days doing pretty much the same farm work as was done by slaves, the only real difference being that they had I C E tractors and trucks. I knew my great grand parents, from my own child hood days. They didn’t have much of anything slaves didn’t have, materially, but they obviously did have MORE of such things, and better quality, from food to shelter to clothing to medical care, etc……. and they did have something absolutely priceless in addition…… their own personal freedom.
Some of my cousins still get their drinking water from the same spring my maternal grandmother got hers as a child and young mother.. toting it uphill a bucket at a time…… but since about the time I was born, she and my grandfather were finally able to afford an electric pump, wire, and pipe to avoid that chore forevermore. ( Some others of the family had gravity powered running water a generation or two prior to that.)
It wasn’t very long at all before we were manufacturing such items, other than luxury items, locally, as were needed ….. it didn’t take very long, in historical terms, to build foundries to make our own cannons, make our own steel, etc.
We were about as fast or faster than any other country to build good locomotives in significant numbers, etc.
It was NICE for rich people to have table China, silk for clothing, etc…… but not at all NECESSARY to the functioning of the local economy.
Trade on the grand scale obviously contributes enormously to overall prosperity for just about everybody.
But it’s not by any means always necessary to the functioning of a local or regional economy, at the usual scale, given time for the economy to adapt.
A country such as England, with millions of ancient old houses that are just about impossible to heat except by burning huge amounts of coal, can change it’s ways, and any new housing built can be built to be energy efficient.
The worst of the old but obviously durable old housing can be abandoned, or repurposed, or upgraded, over time…… so that the annual energy need per capita can be expected to decline quite substantially…..
Now consider this savings in addition to a declining population, a declining living standard due to necessary austerity measures, changes in lifestyle due to austerity, etc, and maybe the need for gas for heating homes declines to pretty close to zero, eventually…… Let’s not forget the English had an empire before they had gas heat in their houses.
I’m not arguing about maintaining anything approaching the status quo. I’m arguing that industrial civilization and the benefits thereof can at least in theory continue to exist once we are forced by circumstances ( depletion, war, cultural and economic collapse, environmental collapse, etc) to give up the use of fossil fuels on the grand scale.
There’s a little road side museum not too far from my home dedicated to the display of a couple of the very earliest successful so called ” reapers” used to harvest grain using horse power rather than human muscle power.
The man who built these machines didn’t have very much to work with…… a forge, hand tools, and steel or wrought iron also produced within the same general part of the country.
We don’t actually have to have more than maybe one truck out of every ten we have today to maintain a workable industrial economy. I’m no commie sympathizer, but consider the number of trucks on the roads in a country such as Russia……. take away the trucks and cars devoted to military tasks, and there wouldn’t be a traffic jam anywhere in the entire country, except maybe around Moscow, lol…… the highways would be virtually deserted……. but they do still have an industrial economy…. and most of the people do have electricity, most of them get their food from stores, clothing from stores, etc.
Of course they keep it running by selling oil and gas….. as the Chinese (used to ) keep theirs humming by selling ( mostly ) manufactured junk to Americans. But I can’t see any REAL reason why the Chinese can’t sell their own junk to their own workers…. exporting only enough to pay for necessary imported raw materials.
Now in case they CAN’T import essential raw materials…… can’t substitute other materials……. well, their economy will inevitably either collapse or shrink to the point it can persist .
Collapse is pretty much baked in, for a huge portion of the human race.
I differ with Carnot and company in arguing that collapse need not be the universal fate of humanity. I argue that some of us in some places have a fair to decent shot at successfully transitioning to a sustainable economy based on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, changes in our lifestyles, reduced expectations, etc.
Furthermore the very same professional people who argue it can’t be done seldom have a word to say about new technologies that will help us get the job done. I can’t say what these technologies will be…….. but it’s just about dead sure there will be some coming into commercial production over the coming years.
Some of them will be new, some will be refinements of existing technologies.
We can cut the amount of energy needed to produce domestic hot water by as much as ninety to even one hundred percent by using solar domestic hot water systems… and such a system designed for a single family home can save several times as much energy over it’s lifetime as was needed to manufacture and install it, and the materials used to build it can be recycled. If it’s actually BUILT to last, nearly all of it should easily last up to a century, maybe even longer. Glass lasts, water pipes filled with a non corrosive antifreeze solution last, steel with baked on paint lasts, or can be repainted, etc. Copper or black painted absorption tubing lasts circulating non corrosive water.
Only the heat exchanger and maybe a cheap little pump will NEED attention on a routine basis, maybe once a decade or so.
In reality, it costs only a trivial extra amount in terms of labor and material to super insulate a refrigerator. You know what they say about building a new house…….. when you take EVERYTHING into consideration, it costs maybe five to ten percent more to go with brick………. but you get a house that won’t ever need new siding, or a new paint job…… plus brick is termite proof too. That extra ten percent pays huge dividends over the years, assuming the job is done right.
I’m not saying brick will always be available…….. but hopefully we won’t be dealing with a sudden collapse. The economy will most likely shrink in fits and spurts over time, quite possibly over two or three generations, maybe even longer.
There’s time to adapt, time to go proactive in some respects. There’s probably time enough to pull it off, at least for some people in some places.
Consider medical care. The nearest two hospitals to my home do just about any sort of routine surgery up to but not including heart transplants and such.
Maybe in forty years, they’ll only be doing routine surgery of the sort common forty or fifty years, or a hundred years ago, assuming they’re still in operation. So today’s young man won’t be getting a new knee locally……. and maybe no new knee any place at all.
That’s a personal disaster for him…….. but for local society, it’s a trivial problem, in terms of the big picture. We’ll probably be having three quarters FEWER amputations due to diabetes…….. because we’ll be eating less junk food, getting more exercise. There’s usually a bright spot or two in any black cloud, if you look for it.
Nothing succeeds like success itself……. because success builds or enhances confidence, will power, determination, teamwork.
And if in the end…… we lose, there’s no successful transition…… what have we ACTUALLY lost, other than the work put into the effort?
If we DON’T succeed, we stand to lose just about everything ANYWAY.
We can backslide to a pre industrial era economy just as easily having tried the green route as having ignored it.
Crash, Collapse, decline, Seneca Cliff. We all wonder about these things. A 2% decline per year in population. What would that really look like. 2 more people die out of a hundred in excess of the birth rate. That would reduce world population by 50% in 35 years. Food shortages, medicine shortages, violence. Hmm what would a 2% decline feel like. Is that a decline, a crash or a collapse?
I think we face a decade +/- of can kicking based on oil and gas forecasts. I think it will be basically stagflation. Growth in some sectors, contraction in others. In the US there are a lot of discretionary things that can be sacrificed (unwillingly). It is always the poor and the aged living at the margins that will suffer first and the most. More people will slide down the economic ladder at all income levels. After 2040, Well who knows. Might start getting grim. Forecasts are best done by examining a wide range of possibilities, clearly stating your assumptions and assigning probabilities. Even then they will likely be wrong. Trying to guess the timing or getting down to a level of meaningful regional granularity is a fools errand. Having said that, there are things that you can do to position ones self to be more self reliant and if you are to early to the parade, well you are not so bad off by being more self reliant anyhow.
China reports EV share in new car market exceed 50% in the first 2 weeks of April, 2024.
In 2020, China set a goal for EV shale in new car market to exceed 50% in 2035.
“What happens in the next few months could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift…” – Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It’s looking more like a “fundamental shift” every day, with simple curve fitting showing a change from 0.3 degrees per decade to about one degree per decade over the last two years. The UK used to be known as wet and dreary (actually a bit misguidedly, at least away from the west coast) but with our weather systems now coming at us having passed over Atlantic waters that are five degrees warmer we’re into a new pluvial and deluvial phase.
I mentioned Daniel Dennett’s death in the oil thread, which should have been posted here.
On the issue of “free will,” I agree much more with Robert Sapolsky than with Dennett, but, man, I love the guy! I saw him give a talk at the Portland Public Library in Maine many years ago and had him sign my copy of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” This video is just mind-blowing, about memes, religion . . . and ants!
Thanks for posting about Dennett Mike. I have read much of his work. I once owned a copy of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but I lost it in all the moving around I have done. But I got most of his work from YouTube. Dennett was a strong materialist. I would even say he was a dogmatic materialist as materialism was the driving force in most of his arguments. Of course, he believed that consciousness was an emergent property of the brain, as all materialists do. But he went a bit further; he believed consciousness was an illusion. However, as a dualist, I disagreed with him on most things.
But it cannot be denied he was a great philosopher and will be missed.
Up above Nick pointed out that Japan was starting to decline in population, and that it has been peaceful thus far.
Well, consider that the fairly homogeneous culture of Japan imports about 94% of its primary energy consumption, almost 100% in the form of fossil fuel. Many believe that fossil fuel importation will become a much more unreliable activity over the next few decades. I do.
Last time Japan was short on energy supply and other raw materials they set out on an extremely aggressive military campaign. It didn’t go well for anyone.
I’m not predicting a repeat of that episode, but other versions will occur between and within various countries.
I wish that global population decline would be a smooth and gradual process.
But it won’t.
Just look at what happening in the middle east in places like Syria, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan through the lens of overpopulation to get an early glimpse of the troubles we should expect.
These places, like most places in the world, are grossly overextended when it comes to the local supply of water, energy, and/or food. If you add in the instability of hotter/dryer conditions and higher energy prices with the resultant inflation of food costs, you have the recipe for severe strife.
Anywhere.
The main point is that population can decline due to lower rates of fertility, this demographic transiltion has occurred already in nations whose combined populations are over 50% of the World total, most nations are making rapid progress in reducing total fertility ratio (average number of live births per woman over their lives).
There my be adequate energy supply particularly if the World builds out solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear power. This would be best as it would tend to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time better access for girls and women to higher education would tend to rapidly reduce fertility rates while also building human capital. Less people and less fossil fuel consumption might give humanity a shot, but it will by no means be an easy task.
Dennis, This bit is where your argument falls apart…
“There my be adequate energy supply particularly if the World builds out solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear power.”
We are doing this by increasing fossil fuel use, to the detriment of the environment. We need lots more minerals, meaning new mines to supply those minerals. these mines are of increasingly lower grades of ores, requiring more energy to extract the minerals. The mines on average are in more remote locations, meaning destroying more natural habitat in the area of the mines and the roads leading to them.
It’s all built using fossil fuels, diesel mainly.
Recycling that you promote is not possible for the first generation of all this new equipment we need for the transition, that is simply not happening!! We are using more coal now than ever before on a world wide basis, the only metric that counts. Individual countries like Australia are claiming to be going green by importing machines, pipes, cable, electronics, appliances, cars and every other modern convenience made with diesel, gas and coal from elsewhere, mainly China.
The buildout needs to be multiples of what’s happened so far and the technology improvements we have only came with increased complexity of the overall system. How many factories around the world are involved in making a smart phone, how many different processes to make all the separate parts?
Dennis C “Possible that fossil fuel will be available for those who can pay for it”.
Again with the handwave assumption. Today’s fossil fuel extraction is a highly complex process, relying upon machinery, consumables and parts from around the world. It’s not a simple drill a hole 100 feet deep and oil gushes to the surface anymore. Once we get into steep decline of production, the complexity of civilization unwinds and the machinery, expertise, consumables and parts all become much more scarce, leading to reductions across the board. It’s just another feedback loop that makes the decline happen much faster than most people think possible..
All your concepts about the future, make the assumption of ongoing complexity, more technology and growth, which is exactly what made this mess of overshoot we are in, including ecosystem damage.
We will not be causing less ecosystem damage by destroying rainforest trying to go green, nor will be be burning less fossil fuels to go green, the new Indonesian Aluminium smelters planned to burn coal to do so, is testament to this.
Less energy, and there will be less, once oil production starts falling rapidly and the problems crop up all over the place at the same time, multiplying the speed of simplification of the overall system. If drillers can’t get the parts or the experts to operate the drills, then drilling doesn’t happen.
I agree the system is complex, your handwavy assumption is that the complex system unravels very quickly as oil output decreases. That is your key assumption, but it remains unproven. About half of the increase in World Primary Energy Consumption Growth over the 2011 to 2022 period came from non fossil fuel sources (Statistical Review of World Energy). Fossil fuel energy consumption grew at 0.75% per year over this period while non fossil fuel energy consumption grew at 4.1% per year, total primary energy consumption grew at 1.3% per year over this period. Oil consumption grew at about 7% per year from 1933 to 1973 and was demand constrained over this period. If we assume depletion of fossil fuel leads to increased fossil fuel prices in the future we could see non-fossil fuel consumption growth gradually accelerate to 7% per year.
In the scenario below I assume primary energy consumption continues to grow at 1.3% per year (it may actually be less as population growth slows and greater use of electricity and renewables leads to lower heat losses than in 2022). I also assume non-fossil fuel energy consumption growth accelerates (4%, 4.5%, …, 6.5%, 7%) by half a percent over several years, reaching 7% per year in 2029 and then remaining at that growth rate until 2050.
Dennis. “That is your key assumption, but it remains unproven”.
Of course it remains unproven, but is certainly the logical approach. We have had 200 + years of increasing fossil fuel use and during that time have achieved immense technological gains, where machines were built that do the work of hundreds of people and animals.
At sometime soon we are going to have a reversal of this trend of fossil fuel use, with oil being the main fossil fuel used. It will be oil that has contracting production once we pass the peak.
The illogical assumption is that all the technology gains we have had, only because of increasing fossil fuel use, will continue as fossil fuels use contracts, starting with oil. In fact oil production contraction will also contract coal and gas production as they both rely upon modern diesel machines for their extraction.
Likewise for the mining, processing, manufacturing and deployment of every other form of energy production. They all rely upon cheap oil and fossil fuels to build.
You talk of electrifying rail and using it instead of diesel trucks, plus a lot more recycling of everything, yet where is it all? Do you expect it to all be built once oil contraction starts in earnest?
What energy is going to be used to build these new ways of doing things in a world of contracting energy?? Who misses out?? The energy has to be taken off other users of energy in a world of falling energy production.
These ‘other’ users will already be under pressure from the overall energy contraction, so will have already cut their energy use to the bone assuming we are using market forces. The following year, even more contraction, before we allocate energy to build new recycling facilities and machinery, more train lines and train carriages, stations etc.
In other words you are expecting MORE building, MORE machinery, MORE processes, all done in a world of an accelerating decline in availability of energy.
Dennis your key assumption of lots more building of ‘new things’ in a world of declining energy, is just as unproven as my assumptions. My assumption is that we wouldn’t have had our modern technological world without fossil fuels, and we wont have it without fossil fuels. Our peak of technology will coincide with the peak in fossil fuel use..
Also an underlying reality check.. Despite 2 centuries of increasing fossil fuel use and the damage it’s done to the climate and ecosystems everywhere, we have only managed to bring approximately 15% of all humanity into the modern technological civilization that those with the ability to read this post enjoy. Falling fossil fuel production will increase scarcity of energy for even these lucky 15%, with higher prices reducing the percentage of humanity that can afford energy use like today.
The complexity we have with modern civilization is only possible because of the huge numbers involved. A reduced population of participants means a simplification of complexity. This you can learn from Joe Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies”.
Dennis every time you state, “We’ll do this……” when oil production is in major contraction, means a major build out of ‘something’ and probably a lot of different ‘somethings’. You never ever bother to work out how much new materials or energy it will take, nor where any of it comes from.
Even the simplest aspects, like better insulation for homes, retrofitting all existing homes, putting in double or triple glazing in windows, thick insulation in cavity spaces, means a vast increase in materials to do that, meaning more mines of some type, more processing, more manufacturing, more distribution.
Recycling more, sounds easy, when that’s the only mention of it, providing you don’t think of all the new building needed for it (specially designed), the machinery in these plants the trucking of all the inputs, the new trucks themselves, the energy the plant runs on, the consumables it uses. In other words a vast new industry needs building mostly from the ground up, in a world of declining energy availability.
Because so many people refuse to look at the overall problem of our modern complex civilization, and expect the ‘solution’ to be build MORE (nuclear, solar, wind, EVs, triple glazed windows, fertilizer from recycling human waste in cities etc, etc , or whatever), it’s simply not going to work and guarantees collapse of our civilization in the process of trying.
I fully expect lots of people pointing out MORE solar, wind, EVs etc next year, when we have used MORE fossil fuels to build them. Every year we just build a higher base of energy use, based mostly on fossil fuels.
Total growth of non fossil fuels energy since 2008 is about 4,500Twh, while fossil fuel growth has been around 18,500Twh during the same period. It doesn’t matter how you divide the numbers, in the world I live in 18,500Twh is always higher than 4,500Twh, if you divide by 1 or by 8B, the result is still the same. Perhaps you should check your source of information Dennis, or their methodology, unless you claim Our World in Data energy numbers are wrong. Their sources of information are..
Energy Institute and V. Smil
The per capita numbers come out differently. Using Our World in Data (which may calculate the average thermal efficiency of fossil fuels differently than my source) from 2013 to 2022 about half of the increase in energy consumption came from non-fossil fuel with the rate of growth at 2.8% per year vs fossil fuel growth at 072% per year over those 10 years. Wind and solar combined grew at about 16% per year over those 10 years.
The fact is that non-fossil fuel use has been expanding and will gradually repace fossil fuel use over time as it has been doing for the past 20 years. All of the increase in non-fossil fuel energy consumption from 2018 to 2022 was from wind and solar power, a roughly 16% annual rate of increase over that 4 year period (about the same rate has been maintained for a decade).
Chart from Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
Scenario below assumes wind and solar grow at 15.7% per year from 2023 to 2030 and thereafter the annual rate of increase falls by 1% per year until reaching 7% annual growth which is then sustained until 2050. Other non-fossil fuel energy consumption is assumed to remain constant from 2023 to 2050 and Total energy consumption is assumed to continue to grow at a 1.18% annual rate from 2023 to 2050 (this was the rate from 2013 to 2022).
Dennis, the problem is those numbers use the substitution method, which multiplies actual non-fossil fuel output by a factor of 2.5. It’s a standard case of GIGO to try and change reality.
This substitution method assumes all coal gas and oil are effectively burned for electricity, and electricity is the only use of fossil fuels. That’s what it effectively shows and how it’s used.
I’ve seen this garbage turn up all over the place in discussions of energy production.
I wrote a post on this over at un-denial. https://un-denial.com/2024/01/21/by-hideaway-energy-and-electricity/
If they really wanted to be realistic, they would have reduced the coal, gas and oil used for electricity production by the average efficiency factor, and left renewables at actual output. However, this method would show just how small renewables are in total energy used, even after allowing for the inefficiencies of burning coal and gas for electricity.
Also both hydro and nuclear energy production are multiplied by the same 2.5 times, when the electricity from both these sources is far more valuable because of the consistency of continuous production compared to the intermittency issue with renewables.
All non electricity energy consumption comes to ~105,600Twh in 2022, with electricity consumption another 28,600Twh. Of the electricity supply solar and wind contributed just 3,408Twh. Multiply that number by your 15.7% growth rate takes renewable electricity up to ~10,900Twh by 2030, still only 10% of all energy use. (Of course no-one ever bothers to take off old solar/wind that’s retired, it’s assumed all new installations are add ons).
Plus of course it misses out all the important products made from fossil fuels, with no allowance for the horrible inefficiencies of trying to turn renewable electricity into ‘products’.
Hideaway,
Not sure we have a Worldwide average efficiency factor, probably about half of fossil fuel primary energy becomes waste heat, I have guessed at 30% efficiency for oil use, 35% for coal used in power plants and 90% efficiency for all other uses of coal, for natural gas I assume 45% average efficiency for electric power plants and 90% efficiency in furnaces or boilers (in heating uses). By this measure non-fossil fuel energy accounts for about 15% of total exergy and useful heat use in the World in 2022. Non-fossil fuel output will continue to grow and it will start to displace fossil fuel use as the World attempts to reduce carbon emissions.
Hideaway,
When we account for waste heat and look at exergy plus useful heat, the total is about 80,375 TWh for the World (includes electricity output). Non-fossil electricity output is about 11488 TWh, about 15% of 80375 total and only 3427 TWh of output is from wind and solar (4.3% of total). This could grow to 47% of total exergy plus useful heat by 2050 and perhaps a higher proportion as heat pumps replace boilers and furnaces and reduce natural gas use for heating of buildings and water and as steel making moves to less carbon intensive processes. There will be enough fossil fuel to use as a material input where substitutes do not exist, less will be burned and more will be available for non-combustion uses.
There will be enough fossil fuel to use as a material input where substitutes do not exist,
Have you identified what that might include? I think you’re agreeing to a premise that doesn’t make sense. There really aren’t any FF applications where substitutes don’t exist. At minimum, synthetic replacements (H2, syn-diesel, methanol, ammonia, etc) can be used for any FF input, produced with non-FF energy.
Dennis, your numbers were multiplied by 2.5 to account for the overall efficiency of fossil fuels being 40%. That’s what you used!!
So don’t come back to the discussion stating you don’t know what the efficiency is, when the numbers YOU used already had it built in!!
None of what you wrote changed the simple fact that fossil fuel use has increased by ~18,500Twh since 2008 and by you latest set of numbers TOTAL energy output from solar and wind are only 3,427Twh.
This CLEARLY means that fossil fuel use since 2008 has increased by around 6 times the TOTAL supplied by solar and wind!!
It doesn’t matter if you divide both numbers by 8 billion to get the per capita rate or whatever other games you want to play with the numbers, the growth in fossil fuel use has vastly outpaced solar and wind output, yet you want to twist the numbers by stating otherwise. I’m talking the raw numbers which is what’s assumed in your original comment where you didn’t qualify it at all.
Your claim was, and I quote “From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”.
It’s a patently false statement, and I understand that multiplying the actual output of electricity from non fossil fuel sources by 2.5 confused you, because most sources these days, don’t highlight this sleight of hand at all.
What I’m disappointed at is your attempt to justify the incorrect numbers and your own statements of obfuscation, instead of just acknowledging you made an error by not realising the numbers were incorrect.
Nick G, ” There really aren’t any FF applications where substitutes don’t exist.”
Except there are no substitutes at anywhere near the quantity that’s needed, and to produce them is hugely energy expensive.
How about you put some numbers and details to your comments instead of the usual hand wave, “we can do” ….. ?
The Haru Oni plant has a process efficiency of currently 1.68% in making fossil fuels from renewable wind, in the best location for wind in the world. So we would expect lower efficiency from places with lower wind capacity factors.
Plus of course they are not doing the carbon capture part of the supply, they buy in their CO2.
What they have proven is that the actual process is so inefficient that it can never be economically viable. which means the world will not have the products we use from fossil fuels once they have been exhausted, meaning no insulation for copper wires that make up the ‘renewable future’.
Hideaway,
We have an estimate for all fossil fuel efficiency and it is variable over time after 2000, in 2022 it was 40.7% in the Statistical Review of World Energy, however we do not have a specific estimate for coal power and natural gas power and you are correct that much of the energy use is not for electricity production.
So I used a 35% assumption for coal power and 45% for natural gas (oil used for electricity production is insignificant we could use 38% perhaps), I used electricity output and the assumptions above to estimate the coal and natural gas energy used in the electric power sector and then assumed the rest of coal and natural gas was used for useful heat at 90% thermal efficiency, oil was assumed to mostly be used in internal combustion engines at an average efficiency of 30%. This was an attempt to estimate the total exergy and useful heat consumed by society.
In fact we don’t have good averages for these for the World. See Approximate conversion factor tab of Statistical Review of World Energy (SRWE) to see their estimates over time for all fossil fuel. From 1965 to 2000 the estimate was 36% and then increases from 36% to 40% from 2000 to 2017, from 2018 to 2050 the efficency factor is assumed to increase linearly from 40% to 45%( see methodology tab of SRWE spreadsheet).
Note that population increased from 7 billion in 2011 to about 8 billion in 2022 while fossil fuel energy incresed from 448 to 494 EJ, so fossil fuel per capita decreased from
65 GJ in 2011 to 62 GJ in 2022. Non-fossil fuel consumption was 72.1 EJ in 2011 and 110 EJ in 2022 and non-fossil fuel consumption per capita increased from 10.2GJ in 2011 to 13.8 GJ in 2022. The per capita calculations have a changing numerator and denominator so the results are different.
Dennis, once again, you made a statement without any qualification whatsoever, the statement was totally incorrect..
“From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”
It’s simply not true, why do you have so much difficulty in admitting you made a mistake?
Dennis ” The per capita calculations have a changing numerator and denominator so the results are different.”
You must be using math from a different universe form me, because you use the same numerator and denominator for both calculations, and 18,500TWh is always going to be larger than ~4,500Twh.
It’s simple, you made an incorrect statement, admit you were wrong and move on. How is this so difficult??
If you want to start taking thermal efficiencies or whatever into consideration, that is a different conversation, but start from the efficiencies of turning electricity into ‘product’, which is what we will have to do sometime in the future without fossil fuels. There is no long term if that is not possible and we are rapidly proving it’s not economically possible on a scale that allows for the complexity of civilization as we know it.
The demographic transition requires a society to reach a higher level of complexity. IE: structured educational systems, health care, old age income security, etc. A single western person who has gone through this transition uses 40 to 50 times the resources of a person from a undeveloped region of the world. The demographic transition saving the planet from over population is a tragic myth. In order to reduce birth rate we must rape the planet first. When you look at statistics through the lens of a single factor and do not connect it to the whole, your analysis, your ability to see the whole and understand the trends falls apart. We live in an ecosystem called the biosphere. Ecosystem productivity is governed by flows, energy and material, reserves and sinks, the structure of the ecosystem (trophic levels, webs, etc) must also be considered. And of course there is the issue of scale. Overshoot is not simply a matter of total population. It is a function of population X per capita resource consumption. Please consider the basic laws of ecology. We are in overshoot because we have a population that is consuming more resources than the planet can sustainably supply. We have to a) reduce consumption per capita. b) reduce population. It really is that simple.
If the green energy transition will require a very high degree of recycling of materials, please show me the comprehensive set of regulations and policies in the US requiring cars, solar panels, batteries, wind turbine blades, etc that are designed for recycling in the future. From the perspective of recycling green energy products, the future is embedded in todays policies and regulations. Time, lags, delays, feedback, think in ecological terms.
I agree reducing population is just part of a larger puzzle.
About half of the World has made the demographic transition. I agree the amount of damage to the environment needs to be reduced, it seems both things need to be done, reduce consumption per capita and reduce population, I am not suggesting population reduction alone solves all problems, better education, reduction in fossil fuel use, and less wasteful consumption are just pieces of a a complex problem.
I would note that many focus on oil flow as the single problem that will be the downfall of civilization, others focus on climate change, both are big problems and there are soil, water, and pollution problems, and many others.
From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel, it has risen at an average rate of 2.47% per year over that period. It may be that future expansion of non-fossil fuel energy could offset decreasing fossil fuel energy, the faster this occurs the better.
Yes, in some regions and countries this is a pretty significant deployment.
In others very little.
Maybe population decline from lower fertility will happen in sync with energy supply decline,
on a long term graph.
But in many places I just dont’ think it will be in sync…enough to allow stability.
I think it is highly likely that there will be big population losses that will accelerate the underlying trend in lower fertility.
Possible that fossil fuel will be available for those who can pay for it, as has always been the case. The poor will have the same disadvantages they have always had, as nations develop this may become less of a problem particularly for those nations that focus on education as India, South Korea and many other nations have done. Good government policy can help reduce suffering. This does not mean that governments will make good choices, but it remains a possibility for citizens to choose good leaders when they are given the ability to choose.
When the World level of non-fossil fuel use increases, it leaves more fossil fuel for those who have not yet installed non-fossil fuel energy. Over time non fossil fuel use may fall in to a cost level that makes fossil fuel use seem prohibitively expensive. This may take some time.
Dennis, “From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”
That’s just plain wrong. From Our World in Data, fossil fuel use since 2008 to 2022 has gone up by 18,883Twh while increase in Hydro and Total solar and wind is only 4,734Twh (nuclear has actually fallen in this period but I didn’t subtract that amount). Whether it’s world total or per capita makes no difference whatsoever, fossil fuel use has grown a lot more than renewables during the same period. Plus a decent percentage of the fossil fuel increase is in products, something that is not supplied by solar, wind, hydro or nuclear, yet they ALL use lots of ‘product’ from fossil fuels, like plastics, polymers etc..
Last time Japan was short on energy supply and other raw materials they set out on an extremely aggressive military campaign.
I took a quick look at the history, and it does look like that was one of their reasons. OTOH, Japan’s post-WWII mercantile strategy has been far more successful in achieving prosperity and a trade surplus despite a high level of commodity imports.
It would be interesting to look at their current energy strategy.
A lot of people, here on TOD and elsewhere, seem to have lost faith in the ability of civilization to run properly. Why is that? Kevin Drum has a suggestion:
“Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don’t. Oh, they have tabloids and conservative newspapers and so forth, but nothing like Fox News, which makes its living by spreading outrage over the way the country is run.
The power of Fox News is truly spectacular. Outrage sells, and the fact that one of the two major parties amplifies Fox uncritically means it has a surprisingly large influence in setting the agenda for the mainstream media too.
The truth is that US institutions mostly operate about as well as they ever have. But Fox pushes outrage over Dr. Fauci and trust in the CDC plummets. They push outrage over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and trust in elections plummets. They go all in on CRT and DEI and trust in schools plummets. They push climate denialism and trust in science plummets. They insist that the rest of the news media are liberal pawns and trust in the very institution that explains reality plummets.
Has there ever been an institution like Fox News that works so relentlessly from within to destroy faith in a country by its citizens? It’s a real-life version of what conservatives thought the Communist Party was in the ’50s. And we all just let it happen.”
Nick G …………………”A lot of people, here on TOD and elsewhere, seem to have lost faith in the ability of civilization to run properly.”
Civilization runs on excess energy, we don’t get energy from civilization. Civilization takes energy from the natural world. Most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, they are clearly damaging the climate, but we also have the problem of scarcity of these energy sources, particularly oil coming soon.
All renewables, nuclear and hydro energy comes from builds with fossil fuels. We can’t, nor are we trying to, make any of them from anything other than fossil fuels.
Without the energy inputs, civilization collapses. Once energy availability starts falling, mostly from oil production reductions, it will cascade throughout our civilization, breaking complex systems all over the place. We saw a minor example of this in 2008 when oil price went to $147/bbl, which broke many important aspects of our civilization temporarily. We were able to recover because fossil fuel use grew again after a small hiatus. In 2008 oil production didn’t fall, it just didn’t rise.
Now imagine 2008 again, but instead of oil price falling, it stays high because production is falling, then price rises again, with further falls in production. Many parts of the economy cease functioning because businesses go bust. They put off employees because of financial reasons, yet these reasons are caused by lack of cheap oil. The problems will cascade around the world as everyone is in the same boat, less energy available. Perhaps you should read J. Tainter Collapse of Complex Societies.
BTW, I never watch Fox, it’s garbage most of the time…
Civilization runs on excess energy, we don’t get energy from civilization.
Civilization runs primarily on information. Energy is used to inform objects in the traditional sense of the word — giving them form. In the end, that is just adding information.
Transportation plays some role, but considering how wasteful most of it is , not the huge role it is sometimes assigned. Yeah, you can import T shirts from Asia for a few cents a piece, but that doesn’t mean you have too. And of course, transportation is just putting things where they “should” be, which is adding information.
We are now experiencing increased ephemeralization, the ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”. This has been disguised by rapid size increase of certain vanity products like vehicles and houses, but in a pinch that could be easily reversed. It’s Jevon’s paradox — efficiency cuts prices and falling prices increase demand. But if the price goes back up, demand falls again.
This trend is extremely obvious to anyone in the computer industry. But it has spread beyond that. Kids have gone from dreaming of a muscle car a few decades ago to dreaming of a new portable device. Meanwhile just about the only energy use projected to significantly grow in coming decades is server farms, which engage in nearly pure information processing.
Civilization runs on energy not information. Information is a byproduct of having lots of energy.
A simple example, assume your city has not energy inputs starting tomorrow. That means, no electricity, no food, no oil or transportation, no gas for heating. How long do you really think this part of civilization will last with no energy?? How will lots of ‘information’ help the situation if there is no energy flowing into this part of civilization??
How did you even come at the thought that civilization runs on information instead of energy??
HIDEAWAY How did you even come at the thought that civilization runs on information instead of energy??
This idea occurred to me after I read a book called “The Touchstone of Life” by Werner Loewenstein. It’s about cell biology, not economics, but it makes the same argument about life.
For example, what if you wanted to burn sugar? You could take a cigarette lighter filled with fossil butane and heat up the sugar till it burns. But that option isn’t available to cells. Instead they use a cocktail of carefully designed enzymes that make oxidation happen in solution and capture the released energy.
How do these fancy molecules “know” what exact form they need to take and when they need to be where? The cell “informs” them. As a cellular system grows it has to give form to (inform as Loewenstein puts it) a growing number of subsystems so that they can work properly. it takes a bunch a small molecules and build huge (compared to a single atom) complex molecular machines out of them.
The type of information a cell contains is not limited to the DNA. The various salt levels, the count and exact structure of different macromolecules, and many other things have to be kept just right for the cell to work. Somehow the cell has to “know” what the correct level is, know whether it is at that level, and know how to fix the problem if it isn’t.
All this information processing requires energy, of course. The cell burns sugar to get this energy to do its data processing. The results of this data processing is more complex molecular systems. It’s a loop that life uses to collect more and more information. The key isn’t the energy, it’s the added information the energy allows to be processed.
Consider some of mankind’s earliest tools. What is the difference between a rock and a hand axe? The answer is the exact shape of the rock. When our ancestors shaped rocks into hand axes, they were informing the rock, adding information to it, in Loewenstein’s sense of the word. This required some effort, but mostly it was skilled workmanship that made the difference. Chimpanzees have powerful arms and use rocks too sometimes, but lack the ability to form them precisely.
Manufacturing isn’t just about adding energy to materials. It is adding information by taking raw materials and creating something very specific that performs a predefined function. When you manufacture something you don’t just dump energy on it. You use energy to create a specific form. This form is what is important, not the energy you put into it.
How much energy you use depends on the design of the manufacturing process. That amount of energy can be reduced by improving the design of the process. It is the same sort of loop. We create tools that give us enhanced abilities, and use them to create even more advanced tools.
This is also what lead Buckminster Fuller to the idea of ephemeralization, ever faster efficiency improvements. Not everyone will buy into that, but it is worth thinking about.
Yes, human ingenuity and intellectual capital is the key.
We *don’t* have a declining energy resource base. We are surrounded by an abundance of affordable energy: it’s only a question of our ingenuity in taking advantage of it. For instance, current human energy consumption is very roughly 12 terawatts. Well, the sun bathes the earth in 125,000 terawatts of continuous, very high quality energy!
The English in Roman times were surrounded by coal. Why didn’t they use it? It took time to apply ingenuity to develop the tech to take advantage of it. In the same way, we’re surrounded by wind, solar and nuclear power. They are already scalable, affordable, high energy-ROI, etc., etc. As we continue to innovate, their cost is declining quickly – they’re already affordable, and well on their way to being truly cheap, in a way that fossil fuels never truly were.
“Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. ”
That is silly.
I lost trust in government as a youngster when I found out the major lies behind the Viet Nam war narrative, and so many other things after that. Most countries have their own versions of government malfeasance.
Trust is a human perception thing. I don’t know how else to find out about human perception than to ask people.
————————-
More:
“On Twitter a couple of days ago Nate Silver pointed out that confidence in the press has plummeted. This is true, but I added that confidence in everything has plummeted. The press wasn’t any kind of outlier.
The drop in confidence is due almost entirely to Republicans, and the partisan gap started right around 2000—precisely when Fox News started to build an audience—and accelerated in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president. This is no coincidence.
So it’s not quite right to say that “Americans” have lost confidence…Only Republicans have.”
…in Biden, yes! In progessive, far-left liberalism and how this political idealism upholds the rule of law, our nation’s Constitution and simple decency towards other people on the planet, for instance, the Israelis, or the poor in Alabama who can barely make ends meet but you believe will be better off in EV’s… in conservative-minded hope for the future regarding getting ahead in life, the right way, the honorable way, and personal success by actually working vs. your beloved socialism?
You are fucking ‘A’ right Republicans have lost confidence. Totally.
We’ll be far more “confident” in our future when folks like you slink off to live under flat rocks.
You long ago left the world of reality, Niki; you must now be commening on antioilbarrel.com by way of Pluto. You are intentionally devisive, antagonistic, yet to be very clear, hold no moral or intellectual highground over anybody I know. Not even my Lab, who I am more than certain has a much higher understanding of reality than you do.
Good luck out there.
Exhibit A.
This is part of a dedicated campaign that the Russians have been running since the 90s. Of course it isn’t just the Russians. The very rich have carried out similar campaigns on a national and international level as well.
The idea is to create doubt about all institutions because doubt increases apathy. Don’t vote because elections don’t matter. Believe conspiracy theories because all media lie. Make no effort to improve things because everything is bad.
The consequence is a breakdown of civil society, which opens the door to dictatorship.
The doomerism we see here is part of this campaign. Whether the doomers know it or not, they are assets in a concerted campaign to undermine any resistance to the status quo. That’s where all these wacky theories about renewables come from. The fact that renewables are much better for ecology, the fact that they are already extremely successful can be dismissed by offering up “alternate facts” and casting doubt on any real numbers.
It is in fact what post modernism and deconstructionism predicted decades ago.
“You long ago left the world of reality, Niki;”
“Every Accusation is a Confession
Many call it projection, and the best operational description is from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, “Always accuse your enemies of your own sins.” This is compulsive behavior with maga-republicans, and sometimes they let on more than they should.
So what are they confessing?
Many of them know a great deal about using manipulated voting machines to steer an election. In accusing Democrats of this, are they trying to tell us something?
They also seem very acquainted with pedophilia, and this is one of their most persistent accusations. Though, with them it seems more than just incidental acquaintance.
They constantly complain about grooming, in which they seem to be experts. Their concept of education indicates that for them there is benign grooming, which they prefer no one to notice.
“They stole the election from our guy.” The irony here is not only that this statement reveals what they would do, but also what they tried to do and failed.
“She is a racist.” Who? Aw, come on now. Who is, really?
“Fat, phony, and whiny.” Our esteemed former leader used these terms to characterize Ron DeSantis recently, and I am shaking my head. Compare what you know about these two men, view some photographs, and then tell me which one is described.
Do we need more? The tactic is obvious, and I expect to see more of it as it becomes clear that they have almost nothing else left in their bag of tricks. Hollow accusations and revenge are all there is for their agenda these days.”
//The very rich have carried out similar campaigns on a national and international level as well.
The idea is to create doubt about all institutions because doubt increases apathy.//
Why would the rich carry out campaigns against the very institutions which they control ?
How the hell does doubt increase apathy ?
Doubt and skepticism is part of a healthy society. A society without doubt is a dictatorship.
So basically according to you people should not doubt governments and institutions because its a plot initiated by the rich or russians (which itself sounds like a conspiracy theory).
So essentially your ideal society is 1984.
I don’t know if you are trolling or not but do you actually believe the garbage you have written there ?
Trump is going to get in again and the Dems are going to be dumbstruck yet again as to how this could happen.
It’ll be very funny to watch, though.
Kleiber,
If I was a German or European, I would be careful what I wish for, it may come true. Trump 2.0 is likely to be much worse than the first time around. It will be pretty dark comedy if you are correct, maybe your a right wing type, in which case you’d be happy.
IRON MIKE —
Why would the rich carry out campaigns against the very institutions which they control ?
You obviously already doubt this, but ultimately control of the country is through popular vote. The fact that you question this already answer the second question, since you probably think voting is a waste of time.
How the hell does doubt increase apathy ?
Lack of faith in democratic institutions leads to declining participation.
Dennis, Biden is currently prosecuting two wars in the periphery of Europe and is happy to start things with China.
Guess how many wars Trump enabled.
I’ll take idiot narcissist Trump over Genocide Joe and his inability to keep American hegemony together. It’s actually amazing how fast Biden’s term has shrunk US influence globally AND help dismantle Europe’s industry.
But sure, Trump is the big threat.
Kleiber,
Oh so you’re of the opinion that Putin should be able to run amok as Trump would prefer? So give us your thoughts on the Israel/Gaza war and how Bibi/Biden are handling it incorrectly?
Trump is an isolationist so not really a big proponent of US World influence.
Hey the Hungarians and Putin will be happy if Trump is elected, I wouldn’t be if I were a Ukrainian, German, or French citizen.
Dennis:
Oh so you’re of the opinion that Putin should be able to run amok as Trump would prefer? So give us your thoughts on the Israel/Gaza war and how Bibi/Biden are handling it incorrectly?
No, I’m not. Nationalist revanchism is a shit thing no matter who does it, but it doesn’t change that prolonging war means more death and misery. Exchanging soil for lives is the dumb warmonger take, not mine.
Pointing out Trump is going to win is also an observation, not an endorsement anymore than stating Labour are going to trash the Tories in the UK (both parties are abhorrent). Putin wouldn’t be running amok had things been handled better in the past. I seem to recall it was US NGO and CIA interference in Ukraine that caused the downfall of a gov’t that led to a shift that the Russian speaking east was not happy with. Russia has had ten years of Ukraine dismissing the Minsk accords and shelling civilians whilst funding far right neo-Nazi groups. A thing the US State Dept. and FBI were investigating up until 2022 when, mysteriously, we suddenly forgot about the corrupt European nation’s training of literal fascists. That’s your gov’ts take on Ukraine pre-invasion. Now they’re less fussed because they get to kick a geopolitical rival in the face, not because they give one solitary shit about Ukraine. The actions of how they’ve supported Ukraine (badly) should be a pretty good indicator as to how much they care. They did, after all, give a load of second hand tanks and tell them to charge into minefields either because NATO is full of idiots, or they are just apathetic to throwing more Ukrainian men into the meat-grinder of the Russian defences. The thing that you can’t use manoeuvre warfare against as has been known since Napoleon was on the throne.
There was a window, corroborated by Ukrainian and Russian negotiators, where a peace could have been drawn in March of 2022 to go back to what Feb 2022 was like after Putin massively misjudged the regime changing drive to Kyiv. Guess what? Boris Johnson told Ukraine to fight to the last man because we got their backs. How’s that working out so far?
As for Israel, last I checked the UN was investigating genocide by the IDF which Biden is so against, he’s only giving Israel a few billion more in arms instead of the usual tens of billions. This has led to the Red Sea becoming verboten for Western, Israel backing nations and mutliple other nations telling America to fuck off, as has happened to the likes of Niger and other former French colonies that are sick of imperialism with a new coat of paint.
Bibi should be tried in The Hague. Trump’s biggest crime is he’s an idiot who cares only about whatever the last person he talked to thinks of him and didn’t see a problem with COVID wiping out a million or more Americans. It’s less embarrassing for America to have a fool in the office for another four years than a guy who is okay with carpet bombing civilians and making BRICS move away from the US and enable a multi-polar world that will NOT end with the American people being happy.
You guys are speedrunning the collapse of empire faster than the UK did. It’s honestly quite impressive.
Kleiber,
Last time I looked we do not live in a perfect World. I don’t make US policy, nor do I know the details of everything that has occurred in Ukraine, though you summary of events sounds very suspect (a little like Russian propaganda).
The only thing that would be worse than Biden would be Trump, and it will be bad for Europe. Do you think that Trump would not have supported Israel just as forcefully as Biden has? I think the no strings attached support of Israel by the US is a big mistake and that the Israelis have done a very poor job in Gaza, the civilian casualties have been terrible.
Dennis,
I think there’s a strong argument that the Trump administration encouraged both Russia and Israel in their current actions.
Dennis, how can anything be worse than what is happening to Europe now?
Have you checked Germany lately? Their economy is free falling, and they’re the “good” economy of the EU.
If Trump is to surpass what Biden has caused Europe to go through currently, I can only guess it involves nuking all the capitals. Half heartedly funding a war in Ukraine whilst the Euros empty what few weapon stocks they have, while also engaging the Houthis ineffectually causing mass supply issues through the Red Sea is decimating this part of the world.
America, please stop doing the world favours and go back to isolationism. Trump FTW.
Kleiber wrote: Do please tell me again about Putin propaganda, person who thinks all Germans are as clueless as Americans it seems.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Tell you again? I never told you the first time. I will read no more of your stupid shit because you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. You sound just like a babbling fool.
.
Ron:
I have no idea what you are talking about. Tell you again? I never told you the first time. I will read no more of your stupid shit because you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. You sound just like a babbling fool.
You mean the points directed at Alimbiquated? You didn’t say that stuff he said that I was responding to? Wow, almost like those points were for the person I directed them at, not you.
You didn’t even address the points actually for you, so you were already done reading my posts it seems.
Kleiber wrote: If Trump is to surpass what Biden has caused Europe to go through currently, …
Biden is responsible for Europe’s economy. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s all Biden’s fault. Only a Trumpite could possibly be that stupid.
Gee, who blew up Nordstream, half arsed helping Ukraine thus prolonging energy issues, and then provoked the Houthis and enabled a genocide in Gaza collapsing trade lines into Europe?
Makes ya think.
lol at liberal brain thinking it’s Biden or Trump. Unfortunately, your dumb nation can only field reanimated corpses or clowns for position of POTUS. I choose neither. Got enough with Rashi Sanook, as Biden called him whilst sundowning.
EDIT: Also, check out the USA economic numbers coming out today. The USA is stagflating and wanting to go into a trade war with the largest economy on the planet (that’s China, by the way).
Biden is doing in four years what the Soviets never could, lol.
Kleiber,
Anyone who blames the USA on what the Houthis are doing to shipping in the Red Sea has to be the biggest idiot on earth. The US did not provoke the Houthis. That is just stupid, stupid, stupid! They started firing on ships trying to get to the Suez Canal. The US is trying to restore the traffic. No one but a blooming idiot would blame the US for the Houthis trying to sink ships trying to pass.
Anyone surprised by a guy with a German sounding nick spouting unabashed Putin propaganda would be amused by what happened in German parliament today.
Basically all parties made speeches about the AfD’s long known but recently spotlighted connections to the Russian and Chinese regimes, while the AfD claimed they were all Nazis for pointing it out.
Kleiber means nuthatch in German and it is time to close the hatch on this nut.
Ron, you’re a useful idiot with zero conception of anything prior to 7 October, like most liberals.
Oh hey, they also supported Azov, you know those guys valiantly hitting back at Russia. The neo-Nazis that the State Dept. and FBI were investigating after Anders Breivik thought to do a little shooting. Funny, you don’t hear much about all these Nazis camps that were a thing after February 2022. Wonder why that is.
By the way, I’m British. So, lol at that big brain assessment.
I seem to recall the German coalition gov’t being terribly corrupt regarding energy, you know, the same people who were, shock horror, buying Putin’s gas!
Physician, heal thyself.
Keep in mind all wars are resource wars. There is no other reason. Vietnam WW1, WW2 etc. it’s always about who has free access to your stuff. We are now in an unprecedented situation of no growth combined with depletion. And all of a suddenly everyone is going to get along. Please!!! It’s more likely you’ll be fighting locally for whatever is left.
I just read Tim Watkins book Breakdown and he’s spot on that the banking system can not survive peak energy. The next shock will be far worse than 2008 and will break the central bank systems. Green initiatives are quickly going away because they are and have been a waste of time and resources.
Construction Slump-Led Recession? This seems very peak-oil-esque…
JT – This (“far worse than 2008”) was the exact response I got yesterday when I asked someone in commercial real estate construction/development industry about how business was…they painted a very bleak picture and think that a significant reckoning is underway that will make 2008 look like a very small bump in the road… some/many headlines seem to confirm this outlook:
05-Apr-2024
“The price of Fly Ash in Europe’s largest economy experienced a decline at the end of the first quarter of the year. This decline can be attributed to subdued demand for Fly Ash from the downstream construction sector”
“The number of bankruptcies in Sweden increased by 14% in September from a year earlier, weighed down by a slump in the construction,…”
“Property sales and housing starts have collapsed, and Beijing may not be able to prop up construction much longer before it crashes by half.”
“A pair of Iowa developers has filed for bankruptcy in federal court, leaving uncertain the future of homes and properties in three states…”
“From San Diego to Seattle, developers are building far fewer apartments in 2023.”
Kengo
Yes all the indicators are there. The only thing propping up the market right now is fear. And that translates to money printing. EVs are failing, solar is failing, wind is failing, commercial real estate is failing, it’s all connected to economic stagnation or contraction. And all of it is caused by energy degrowth. Just look at the state of our infrastructure we can’t even maintain what we have!!! I’m sorry it’s a head in the sand belief that everything is our will be ok. Or that the energy transition is actually working.
One criticism I would have is that he starts out pointing out that climate change is only part (maybe a minor part) of the issues facing us but then spends the majority of the talk (or at least around half) talking about it and doesn’t really cover water shortages, soil erosion, pollution, ocean acidification, nitrogen/phosphorous cycles etc. (has a bit on biodiversity loss but mostly climate and energy).
It has been an interesting week with the discussions about over-population and OFM going into great details and dropping my name into the conversation multiple times mainly as a doomer, which I am not. I am a realist. I am not quite sure what OFM’s main point is in that his vision of the future appears to be one of a much reduced global population and a rather more simple life to what we in the west have become accustomed too.
All this new way of living does not quite stack up though as he has a view that much of the infrastructure can be repaired ad infinitum. Some yes but others I doubt it.
The have been many past civilization collapses in the past. Inca, Egypt, Romans. England avoided a collapse, mined form reserves close to the surface in the 15th Century by switching to coal. By 1700 all the easy coal was gone and deeper coal was the only option. Th invention of the steam engine allowed deeper coal to be extracted. During the same period many Europeans sought refuge in other lands: North America, Africa and India with varying success.
There has been much discussion and belief that the global population will peak and then decline. This assumption is based upon a limited number of industrialized countries (and China) but I doubt if this holds for the other 5 billion or so who do not live like us in the west. Look towards, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, The ME countries and you will see a completely different picture. Before the war Gaza had population growth rate of 3% per annum: doubling every 23 years.
Then there is the matter of future fossil fuels resources, which were to actually boost unreliable energy supply we will need in order to build out the infrastructure. As you know I, and many others have doubts. Not only are the oil resources becoming more energy intensive to extract, but so are the essential minerals that will be required for the great unreliable expansion.
Dennis has gone to great length analysing the potential remaining oil reserves and forecasting when oil demand will peak. He desperately wants to believe that BEV’s will massively reduce gasoline consumption, but to date there is scant evidence of any decline. In Europe the decline in new diesel car sales has offset any decline in gasoline consumption, exactly as i predicted. In the EU EV’s are not growing anywhere like what is required to make a difference and the BEV boom is a more than a little subdued. Dennis also seems to believe that the IEA, OPEC and EIA data is accurate.Apparently JODI is no good. In my opinion all have flaws. Look at the OPEC members. Do you really think they are honest. What about Russia or China. Even the US data is flaky.What about the oil that is stolen – yest ti happens. Then thee is the back blending of NGL’s to boost volumes. I do not trust any of the data, not even the BP data, because there is no way of auditing it. Indeed there is famous EIA 700 kbd correction saga.
Then there are the predictions on LTO. I am quite interested in what Sheng Wu writes. He has some interesting views on the several basins but in general there are few people who really have a handle on much of the LTO resources. These resources are far from homogenous and have many faults which can communicate with other benches. Thy are not like a sugar cube.
Going back to the population decline there is a lot of hopium being sniffed about a managed deadline in population before the oil and gas and everything else declines. Much arm waving and flag flying about breakthrough technologies that never quite live up to the hype.
The transformation to wind and solar has not produced cheap affordable energy- far form it. It will only get more expensive as more capacity it added to the grid and yet more under utilized assets are bolted onto the power grid to make it stable.
Meanwhile to make the transformation we are going to have to mine ever more minerals, most produced by diesel power and fossil fueled thermal energy. Does anyone know the Siemens process for silicon production. Have a look. You might also like to look at the doping agents to make the PV wafer semi conductors.
Then there is the recycle case. I am all for it but very few products are built with recycling in mind. With the best will in the world there i no way that anything can be 100% recycled.You might like to look at a Tesla. The last user is going to be landed with a massive disposal charge.
Last but no least I would comment on the future of oil refineries and e-fuels. Few people have any idea how gasoline and disel is produced. The idea that they are simply distilled is anything but the reality.Gasoline in particular has many different components made on different units form different feedstocks That is why LTO is mainly exported as despite what some believe it is not suited to large scale processing in most complex refineries.
The same applies to a lesser extent to diesel. Reconfiguration of a refinery to produce a different product mix is not possible without huge investments.Making more diesel and less gasoline would require the build out of expensive hydrocracking capacity. Converting light distillate (naphtha) to diesel is not feasible. For those reasons there is little prospect of a substantial increase in the diesel supply within the existing refineries.
The idea that e-fuels will be produced in volume is wishful thinking at best. There are a number of technologies but so far none are economically viable. Though some shipping has converted to LNG, there is no realistic prospect that this will supplant the diesel engine especially as shipping is expected the increase substantially up to 2050. I remain sceptical as to how much but a doubling of shipping traffic is forecasted, which will pressure a lot of ports. The first issue will be the decline in the discretionary use of fossil fuels- also known as rationing. That will impact all manner of things, just like rationing during WW2. Good-bye aviation and cruise ships
As a species we are approaching a watershed. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet by many times. It is not sustainable. Any decline will be painful. Those industrialized countries will bear most of the pain initially as a drop in living standards and later with a full collapse of society and the rule of law as we currently know it. The loss of knowledge will be huge, whether in books or on computer drives. Much of the infrastructure will collapse over time due to lack of maintenance and know-how. The lifestyle OFM predicts is not unreasonable but it will not be a life for the masses. A Mad Max scenario might well happen.
Put bluntly I do not think we have the time or the resources to pull off the Great Escape.
Thanks, fully agree. We are not doomers, we are realists, because the numbers show clearly we are not headed for a bright green future.
Only by obscuring and deflecting the real numbers, plus ignoring lots of important aspects is it possible to show numbers with a bright green future, providing material limits are ignored.
Even then, all ‘bright green futurists’ assume only 15% of humanity partakes in this future, which really highlights how deep we are in overshoot for me.
Over many years it would seem feasible to upgrade existing refinery capacity to maximize middle distillate output, obviously there are technological limitations.
I am not sure of your background but I believe you are an academic. No problem with that but from experience academia has an unrealistic idea of the world of refining. Refining is a low margin business; the money is typically made upstream. Refining is a volume business; margins are typically < $10 per barrel. Some products have negative margins.
A new build hydrocracker would cost upwards of $2 billion for a 60 kbd (3.2 million tonnes/annum) unit. In a diesel once through mode the unit might produce around 1.5 million tonnes of diesel and jet fuel. The other products would include HC naphtha and unconverted oil (UCO) . The hydrogen consumption would be of the order of 230 SCUF per barrel (1360 nM3/M3) i.e. a lot. A hydrogen production unit would also be required, either by gasification, POX or SMR.
In other words lots of money. A very simple calculation
Investment $2 billion
Payout 10 years
Cost per annum $200 million
On feed flow = $200/3.2 = $ 62.50/mt ($9.2/bbl)
On positive products 1.5 million tonnes(jet and diesel)
200/1.5 = $166/ mt ($24.41 per bbl)
This ecxludes the cost of money. No refiner would invest in a project like this especially as the outlook is for for high cost of carbon ( in the west) and a so called net zero target for emissions.
This is the sugar coated candy version.
In other words the refiners will keep their hands in their long pockets. So would I.
Perhaps correct, if there is a shortage of diesel, the price may rise enough that some of those investments are made, though peak oil will lead to excess refining capacity, so what is more likely is that refineries that are already set up to produce a higher proportion of middle distillates (as is the case in much of Europe) will remain open and refineries set up to produce more gasoline may shut down due to lack of profits. The cost of any carbon tax will be passed on to consumers or may be paid at point of use, it will simply be seen by the refiner as a lack of demand.
Dennis
As soon as we say “the price may rise enough” we’re in classic economics territory which is completely false. Affordability is the driver of all markets. The system is built one way based on inexpensive inputs. Ford never would’ve sold one car if the gasoline wasn’t practically free. It was a byproduct at the time. Our present way of life is what it is because it was the only way we could get to this point. We might call it the maximum power principle. But we could also just say we’re all opportunists . We made the most of what we had(I emphasize HAD) now we’re on the slide down.
As a prediction the Baltimore Key Bridge will never be rebuilt. There isn’t 7 years left. And food will be more important.
JT, so true and a mistake economics often makes. They look at shortages in isolation, Diesel being in shortage the price rises to reach equilibrium with supply, no problems. But it always assumes the rest of the system stays static, which is wrong in reality.
If the diesel price rises, so do all EVs, solar, wind batteries, food, etc, probably with a varying time lag. However in economics, the assumptions being higher prices will make more diesel appear because of the profit motive, even if ‘we’ as in the world are in severe or accelerating oil production decline.
The second assumption of economics, then states substitution comes into play, Nick G’s argument of gasoline (or something else). Yet all farmers in the west use diesel tractors. Putting gasoline in them wont work, so they will all go out and buy new gasoline tractors.
Nope, sorry they will only do that if they can attain much higher prices for the food they send to cities. Unless the food price goes much higher, food production will fall, and while this might send prices higher, creating the profit margin farmers need, it creates a starvation problem in cities.
To write up a continuous systematic approach of the different feedback loops that a simple ‘much higher diesel’ prices will cause, would take a book to explain all the intricacies and effects.
All the economics theory appears to work in a ‘growing’ economy. All the feedback loops work well as there is always ‘MORE’ of everything plus plenty of substitutes if there is a brief shortage in one aspect. Money is all it takes to build a world of MORE, everything.
It’s worked well for 200 years and many generations of MORE. There has always been MORE commodities by just going further afield using more diesel to dig up more earth and gain the necessary commodity using larger more efficient machines. It’s all been based upon cheap plentiful dense energy, fossil fuels.
Economics completely breaks down in a world of less dense energy. The green world envisaged by Dennis, Nick, Alimbiquated, Island Boy and others on these threads, totally relies upon cheap dense fossil fuels to build it. none of it is made or built without cheap dense fossil fuels.
Let’s assume Dennis gets his massive rise in diesel price, but no other commodity has a similar rise. Many mines will quickly shut down as they are no longer profitable. Food to cities rapidly reduces as farmers change from crops with heavy use of diesel to grazing, or something else (left fallow, only grazed in spring and summer etc.) so grain crops availability falls sharply over a year or so.
Green groups everywhere have bought into the ‘bright green future lie’ by believing economics as a true representation of the overall system. It seems none of them understand the reality of mining or the exploration that has to happen first..
I would love just one of the promoters of green energy to explain how we will do exploration in remote locations without diesel or any other liquid fuel, include the exploration drilling of many thousands of metres into virgin ground without any guarantee of finding anything. That’s how it happens now. At some point the ‘bright green future’ relies on NO fossil fuel use at all, so how does this exploration for the minerals needed for the bright green future happen??
Every single handwave of we’ll do ‘this’, from the cornucopian brigade should be totally dismissed unless they show some real world numbers of how each and every hand wave can happen. Of course actually working out numbers leads to the dark side of reality. I’ll bet they prefer to stay in denial instead, and keep hand waving about the future…
DHL Freight introducing fully electric tractor-trailers from Mercedes-Benz Trucks
24 April 2024
At the beginning of April, DHL Freight put its first fully electric tractor-trailers from Mercedes-Benz Trucks into service. Effective immediately, the eActros 300 vehicles are being deployed for delivery and distribution transport at the Koblenz and Hagen sites. The truck stationed in Hagen makes transport more sustainable on round trips between the DHL branch and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Kassel, a Daimler Truck location.
EPA launches nearly $1B Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles Grant Program
24 April 2024
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the nearly $1-billion Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles Grant Program to fund the replacement of certain polluting heavy-duty vehicles with zero-emission vehicles. Funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA will award competitive grants for projects that will reduce climate and air pollution from heavy-duty vehicles, support good-paying jobs and improve air quality for communities across the country, particularly those overburdened by air pollution.
You wish. Why are refineries closing in Europe whwn the EU is a net diesel importer. The refineries see zero benefit in investing in new equipment unless ther is a rapid payout. That is the way it is and always will be.
There is an exception. Unreliables have no limits on their profligacy to spend other peoples money. End users continue to subsidise unreilables and in the process impoverish those who are least able to pay.
Dennis, on carbon tax. Currently all taxes are carbon taxes as that is the main form of creating an excess that allows every person or industry to pay taxes.
A new carbon tax will just put the price of everything up, including all solar and wind new builds. If your argument is that solar, wind and batteries need more subsidies paid for by the new carbon tax, then it’s just further proof that the energy we get from them is nowhere near as cheap as the energy from fossil fuels. This has massive other consequences.
I’m puzzled by this emphasis on diesel. Sure, it’s a little denser and it can burn at a slightly higher temperature for slightly greater efficiency. But gasoline was used for trucks before diesel, and it would work just fine with retrofit or new-build gasoline engines.
Most heavy duty equipment uses diesel, just the fact of the matter. Most gasoline use is for lighter duty service. Also the greater efficiency of diesel means lower carbon enssions per unit of work performed. In addition there is a huge cost to retrofitting the heavy duty fleet with gasoline engines and all of the emissions associated with such a retrofit.
Perhaps it is not a big problem, I think in a light duty vehicle you might be right, but for high torque applications, you might not be correct, there may be a good reason that most heavy duty trucks and equipment (for mining and agriculture) are powered by diesel. My hope is that much of this equipment can be replaced by electric powered equipment in the future, but I expect it may be a decades long transition.
Nick G
Your ignorance on the subject of thermodynamics has no limits. Maybe you should look at the Otto and Diesel cycle and then you might not embarrass yourself. It is all about compression ratios and diesel is combusted in excess air that REDUCES peak temperatures. Gasoline engines operate at near stoichiometric fuel air mixtures, resulting in higher combustion temperatures.
By virtue of the induction method of gasoline engines- fuel and air is pre-mixed – the Otto cycle efficiency is limited by autoignition parameters.
The Diesel cycle is inherently less effiicient, on a like for like basis, than the Otto cycle because the combustion is at constant pressure, unlike the Otto cycle which is at constant volume.
New gasoline technology such as the Mazda Sky Active X is a lean burn gasoline engine that achieves near diesel fuel efficiency.
If you had taken the time to understand the difference between diesel fuel and gasoline you would know the difference in density. Comparing volumetric fuel consumptions is a fool’s game. Gasoline has a density for about 0.75 vs diesel at 0.84 The calorific value of both is about 43-44 MJ/kg before the blending of ethanol or FAME, both of which reduce fuel efficiency.
You might look into the the matter of thermodynamic efficiency which a function of peak temperature and the exhaust temperature. This gives an indication of the exergy.
I still await you masterclass on entropy, but I guess I will have to wait a rather long time.
Nick G, you have obviously never been near a modern remote mine site.
Carnot thanks again for a dose of reality.
More, for medium and small diesel vehicles:
“Fleet managers can defend the purchase of gasoline Class 3-6 vehicles by:
Comparing acquisition costs with diesel vehicles
Showing that diesel fuel’s higher cost per gallon negates its slight advantage in fuel economy
Calculating accurate resale value of both types of vehicles
Knowing how long vehicles are kept in service and their applications.
A lot has happened to engine technology in 15 years, so it’s time to re-evaluate the data. What’s the call on the diesel vs. gas cars, vans, and trucks debate? Has the tide turned, or does emotion, chutzpah, and the virile attraction of “more power” still drive the diesel decision?”
Perhaps electric motors are indeed the sensible way to provide high torque, in the same way that trains use electric motors combined with on-board generators.
Nick G, “Fleet managers can defend the purchase of gasoline Class 3-6 vehicles by…”
Where do the minerals come from to build all these new gasoline vehicles?? Please follow your analogy right through the supply chain, instead of just the hand wave of assuming it’s just a matter of ‘price’.
Right now all the minerals needed to build the new gasoline fleet comes from diesel mining equipment, which will suffer from the lack of diesel. There isn’t any gasoline large scale mining equipment (see Carnot reply up thread). Could it be designed and built, over the next decade or 2, possibly, but who would bother in a world of falling oil availability??
Sea surface temperature hit a new all time high and has been rising for the last few days almost as fast as ever before when it is supposed to be falling, and with El Nino abating should be falling quickly. The earth energy equation is very much out of balance and seems to be getting more so. This amount of energy is going to power some very destructive cyclones and hurricanes.
George, the answer the usual suspects will come up with is to build solar and wind turbines at a faster rate, which of course burns more coal, oil and gas for this increase in production. What could possibly go wrong??
How is it so hard to understand that doing more of the same, probably means more of the same for climate, ecosystems, ocean life, life of mammals and insects etc. Then in 3-5 years time when everything is worse, the answer will be to increase the rate of destruction even more, sorry, I mean build more renewables….
I get the impression you are arguing mostly against people who have a background in classical economics. I admire your perseverance and find your replies highly informative; I don’t have anything like the breadth or detail of knowledge that you have and gave up very quickly. It seems to me to be like trying to argue with christian apologists, actually worse because christians understand that their arguments ultimately come down to faith, whereas classical economists mistakenly (and risibly) continue to believe their discipline is a science. (Steve Keen, at least when he remembers to take a breath between sentences, does the best job of demolishing most of the fallacies they come up with.)
Before someone brings up the topic of synthetic fuels to solve all the problems, I’ll go first with the example of Haru Oni plant on the Southern tip of South America, a combined effort of Porche, Siemens Energy, Exxon, Enel Green Power and others.
Commercial operation was declared in March 2023, in November 2023 they sent their first commercial shipment of 24,600 million barrels of syn fuel…
Er sorry, it was 24,600 bbls/d of syn fuel..
Nope sorry, it was 24,600 bbls of syn fuel..
Nope, sorry again it was 24,600 LITRES of syn fuel, that’s a grand total of 154.7 barrels worth..
This $US78 Million plant, in the best location in the world for renewable energy, with a 70% wind capacity factor, operating a Siemens 3.4Mw turbine managed to produce only around 1/3rd of what was promoted in the literature before production, which by itself was a lousy return.
The plant is producing around 100 LITRES per day, or 36,500/yr at current rate. Let’s put this in perspective. In every photo of the plant there is somewhere between 15-60 vehicles. Assuming there are lots there on open days, promotions etc, let’s ignore most and assume the 10-15 around the main office are those of the plant operators, and I’ll use the lowest number of 10 per shift.
As the plant is running 24/7, that would be 3 shifts/day, 365 days a year. The nearest town for accommodation of these people is 35km away, so a 70km return trip. This would be a total of 70km X 365d X 10 cars X 3 shifts or
766,500km.
Assuming the vehicles driven get an average fuel consumption of 7l/100km, then the fuel used by the workers would be 53,655 litres, or greater than the plant is producing.
This plant is just a very bad joke, a bad joke on humanity. Everything about the plant was scaled precisely in the planning phase, with the energy from the wind turbine running a 1.2Mw Electrolyser and the other processes, so none of the energy was wasted. Because there are so many different processes, all with their own inefficiencies and heat losses, of course the output is low. The footprint of this ‘demonstration plant’ is around 3.5ha (8.5 acres), so it is actual industrial size. Will going larger increase efficiency? It might, but is only a ‘might’ and only at this location of 70% capacity factor. Other locations with lower wind or solar capacity factors are likely to be more inefficient, with more on/off cycles.
The overall process efficiency is easy to calculate. A 3.4Mw wind turbine X 70% CF = 20,848Mwh/yr input.
Synfuel produced 36,500ltr/yr X 8.5Kwh/ltr = 310,250Kwh or 310.25Mwh output.
How big a joke is this?? Input 20,848Mwh, output 310Mwh or a process efficiency of 1.488%. Let’s round it UP to 1.5% for anyone that want to dispute energy content of synthetic fuel or whatever..
Of course this is just the process efficiency, it does not take into account of the energy used by all the operating and maintenance of the plant over it’s life, not a single Kwh of all the energy inputs of building the plant and all the equipment and shipping the lot across the world.
Before considering any O&M costs across the projects life (about 20 years at best) the cost per LITRE is around $US106.50. If we added all O&M costs of around $US2.5M/yr we’d add another ~$US68.50’ltr, or a total of cost of roughly $US175/litre.
Even if the process was 10 times as efficient, it’s still $US17.50/litre!!!
Assume we have to make ‘products’ in the future from this synthetic fuel and not from fossil fuels because we depleted the lot, or they are just uneconomic to mine. The amount we would need is around 14,620Twh worth a year. This number based on all metallurgical coal plus around 10Mbbls/d from oil and gas sources currently used. This allows for no growth in the system, so bad luck to the 85% of humanity that currently misses out on modernity. (Who is going to tell them?)
14,620Twh/1.5% efficiency would mean we need 974,666Twh of electrical energy to gain enough synthetic fuels. BTW, the Haru Oni plant doesn’t do carbon capture from atmosphere, that is another process still needed. They buy their CO2 from a brewery. It just means the efficiency is even lower when this is also included. In other words it needs to get way more than 10 times current energy efficiency AFTER adding the energy inputs from the process of carbon capture.
The electrical energy needed is around 35 times current world electricity production, just to make the raw product needed for polymers, plastics, nitrogen fertilizer, explosives, asphalt etc that a modern civilization uses.
It isn’t going to happen because it’s a physical impossibility of happening.
The world needs a different plan. The current trajectory is not going to work…
Valero Energy Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
6:24 am ET April 25, 2024 (BusinessWire) Print
Renewable Diesel The Renewable Diesel segment, which consists of the Diamond Green Diesel joint venture (DGD), reported $190 million of operating income for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $205 million for the first quarter of 2023. Segment sales volumes averaged 3.7 million gallons per day in the first quarter of 2024, which was 741 thousand gallons per day higher than the first quarter of 2023. The higher sales volumes were due to the impact of additional volumes from the DGD Port Arthur plant, which started up in the fourth quarter of 2022 and was in the process of ramping up production rates in the first quarter of 2023. Operating income in the first quarter of 2024 was lower than the first quarter of 2023 due to lower renewable diesel margin.
Ethanol The Ethanol segment reported $10 million of operating income for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $39 million for the first quarter of 2023. Adjusted operating income was $39 million for the first quarter of 2024. Ethanol production volumes averaged 4.5 million gallons per day in the first quarter of 2024, which was 283 thousand gallons per day higher than the first quarter of 2023.
Diamond Green diesel, from their website…………….. “At our 1.2 billion-gallon-per-year renewable diesel plants, we process recycled animal fats, used cooking oil and inedible corn oil into renewable diesel fuel.”
Not quite turning electricity into products. What products are made from this ‘green diesel’? What will be their source of used cooking oil and animal tallow when there is no longer fossil fuel made fertilizer available, nor ordinary diesel available to collect the supplies for the plant?
I am not sure of your point with this post. Hideaway was referring to e-fuels and your response was about ethanol and renewable diesel, neither of which are e-fuels and to date both products are produced mainly from foodstuffs ( the rich robbing the poor to power their cars). In the case of ethanol it is usually maize, sugar cane, sugar beet or wheat.
In the case renewable diesel it is generally soya bean oil, canola or palm oils. Other feedstocks include animal fats (tallow), other vegetable oils or used cooking oil. The global production of renewable diesel is limited by the supply of vegetable oils which amounts (for all types) about 210 million tonnes per year. The vegetable oil is hydrogenated in a hydrotreater and produces a true drop in replacement, to fossil diesel and can be processed into jet fuel. Biodiesel is on the decline and uses the same feedstocks as renewable diesel but produces an inferior quality product
Ethanol continues to be blended into gasoline but is far from ideal. It requires vast inputs of foodstuffs and all the incidental farming inputs and has a dire EROEI.
Both products are not sustaianble and are blended into fuels by mandates. They are not economic.
The much vaunted cellulosic ethanol route has so far failed to materialise after more than 100 years of subsidies, pilot plants, and procrastination by parties with vested interests. I was once subjected to a presentation by a clown from BP about ethanol from Miscanthus. It did not take me long to demolish his arguments and six months later BP pulled the plug. I have lost track of all the bankrupt cellulosic ethanol would be producers.
As ever time will tell. The killer for renewable diesel, and e-fuels will be the cost of hydrogen.
Again despite all the claims the likelihood of cheap hydrogen from electricty is akin to finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Zero
Converting Martinez to Renewable Fuels Facility
Project: Converting Martinez Refinery into a renewable fuels facility
Location: Martinez, California
Fuels: Renewable diesel and other renewable fuels
Capacity: Approximately 730 million gallons per year
Timeline: Production expected to come online in 2022 and ramp up to full capacity in 2023
The Advantages of Neste MY Renewable DieselTM (HVO or R99 diesel)
Neste MY Renewable Diesel significantly reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all diesel powered equipment. It’s not a fossil diesel. It’s not a biodiesel. Neste MY Renewable Diesel is a high quality, TOP TIER ™ certified biofuel made from 100% sustainably sourced renewable raw materials that do not release new carbon into the atmosphere. By choosing Neste MY Renewable Diesel, companies can use their existing diesel equipment and start to reduce their GHG emissions by up to 75%, today. The fuel is a hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) that is fully compatible with all diesel engines and current diesel fuel distribution infrastructure.
Marathon Petroleum Corp. on Oct. 31 reported that the renewable diesel joint venture at its Martinez refinery in California is expected to be operating at its full 730 MMgy capacity by the end of the year.
Is your plan is to turn the world’s food supply, provided by fossil fuel supplied fertilizers and tractors into fuel?
What about the products needed from fossil fuels, you are trying to counter my post about products, things like plastics, fertilizers, explosives, polymers, asphalt, paints, herbicides and pesticides, chemicals required in mining for separating metals from waste etc?
Why don’t you address the actual issue??
How is it difficult to understand that these businesses you point to wont have any raw product to work with when there is no fertilizer or tractor fuel, no bunker fuel for sea transport, no diesel for heavy truck transport??
Do you notice neither company bothers to state how much ordinary fossil diesel they use in collection of the waste cooking oils and tallows?
Hutchinson also noted that the 240 tonne electric haul truck prototype, dubbed the Road Runner, has completed the first phase of its testing with the battery power system, which included laps around the testing track, ramp tests and hill starts while fully loaded.
The company will now move on to trial another prototype, dubbed Europa, before putting an electric haul truck into actual operations.
“It’s a major milestone for bridging the gap between zero emission power systems and the diesel fleet, and proving that decarbonisation is really possible,” Hutchinson says. “We are very excited and very happy with what the team has done.”
Fortescue intends to reach “real zero” in its mining operations by 2030, which means burning no fossil fuels in transport, operations and its power supply at its mine sites. It expects this will save more than 700 million litres of diesel a year.
We have an Australian on this blog telling us that what an Australian company is doing cannot be done.
Global PV capacity grew to 1.6 TW in 2023, up from 1.2 TW in 2022, according to the IEA-PVPS Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2024.
The analysts said that up to 446 GW of new PV systems were commissioned last year, largely driven by rapid growth in China, alongside an estimated 150 GW of modules in inventories throughout the world.
“After several years of tension on material and transport costs, module prices plummeted in a massively over-supplied market, maintaining the competitivity of PV even as electricity prices decreased after historical peaks in 2022,” said the IEA-PVPS.
The fastest energy change in history is still underway. In 2023, solar photovoltaics and wind comprised about 80% of global net generation capacity additions. Four times as much new solar and wind electricity generation capacity was installed in 2023 as compared with everything else combined (gas, coal, hydro, nuclear and others). This constitutes compelling market-based evidence that solar and wind are the best options for new generation capacity.
Global net capacity additions 2016-23
Cumulative global solar installed capacity passed 1.4 TW, and cumulative production reached 1.7 TW, which is more than tenfold larger than ten years ago, and it is doubling every 3 years. New solar capacity is being installed faster than anything else in history.
Total installed solar capacity surpassed total nuclear installed capacity in 2017; it surpassed wind in 2022, and hydropower last year, and should surpass fossil gas in 2024. At current growth rates of 20% per annum, solar will pass coal in 2025 to become the largest component of global generation capacity. Current growth rates also suggest that solar will reach 9 TW in 2031, and there will be more solar generation capacity than everything else combined.
The rapid and sustained growth of solar and wind generation capacity points to their future dominance of energy generation because the ever-increasing growth in global electricity demand growth is effectively being met by solar and wind, not fossil or nuclear energy. This growth in electricity demand is caused by rising affluence, rising population, and “electrification of everything.”
More than one in five cars sold around the globe in 2024 are expected to be electric, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), with yearly EV sales set to reach 17 million.
The latest edition of the IEA’s annual Global EV Outlook published on Tuesday shows that, despite near-term challenges across some markets, particularly in the US, the planet’s electric fleet continues growing – led, unsurprisingly, by China, where almost one in 3 cars on the roads by 2030 are set to be electric.
Headlines repeatedly cast doubt on the continued strength of EV growth, with tight margins, volatile battery metal prices, increasing inflation around the globe, and the phase-out of purchase incentives in some countries all highlighted as proof that the pace of growth will slow.
The evidence displayed by the IEA suggests another story, with electric car sales growing by around 25 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, compared to the first quarter of 2023, in line with the year-on-year growth seen in the same period in 2022.
Importantly, while growth is in line with previous years, the IEA points out that growth in 2024 is spread across a larger base, with the number of EVs sold around the globe in the first three months of 2024 “roughly equivalent” to the number of EVs sold in the whole of 2020.
Further, by year’s end, the IEA predicts that the market share of EVs could reach up to 45 per cent in China, 25 per cent in Europe, and over 11 per cent in the United States, “underpinned by competition among manufacturers, falling battery and car prices, and ongoing policy support.”
History has been made over the period April 1-14, sales of new energy vehicles (NEV) exceeded half of all car sales in China. New energy vehicles is a Chinese umbrella term encompassing a number of types but in reality means largely pure electric vehicles and PHEVs.
Figures from the Passenger Association show that retail sales during the period were 516,000 down 11% year-on-year and down 3% month-on-month, which are not the greatest of figures. However, of these 260,000 were NEVs which is an increase of 32% YOY and 2% MOM. This makes the NEV share of sales 50.39%.
Previously the Economist Intelligence Unit predicted that NEVs wouldn’t make up over half of sales until 2028. And the Chinese Federation of Passenger Cars only predicts a 40% penetration rates for 2024. Based on that prediction sales would be in the region of 12 million this year.
Obviously this is just the result for two weeks of the year but there are indications that this result will extend for the year as well. Last month Wang Chuanfu, CEO of BYD, predicted that the result would be achieved within the next three months.
For readers in the US, take note. This is what is happening in the largest, most important market for cars in the world! Readers in Europe may already be aware of the wide choice of cars coming out of China.
With NEVs, the term China uses for EVs and PHEVs, now accounting for over half of all car sales batteries are becoming increasingly important. While not as sexy as the latest car launches what powers them is equally newswothy and battery giant CATL got in on the action with its new Shenxing Plus battery. Using cheaper more stable lithium iron phosphate it achieves 4C charging and can add 600 kilometers in as little as 10 minutes.
Key statistic for the Shenxing Plus is the energy density of 205 Wh/kg. Car companies have tended to use lithium iron phosphate batteries (LFP) for cheaper vehicles for two reasons firstly the batteries cost less and secondly they are safer. Where they could not compete with NCM chemistry batteries was for energy density. This meant that to give longer range while keeping battery weight down more expensive NCM was the only option despite (LFP) being supposedly safer. An energy density of 205 Wh/kg is comparable to many NCM batteries.
The web site carnewschina.com may prove to be an eye opener for many readers of this site.
Islandboy, of course all these things are possible as we are still going up the fossil fuel use ladder, going to record high uses in 2023. More coal being burnt in places like Indonesia to bring all the nickel and aluminium necessary for the bright green future.
I never saw your answer to the question of whether the Indonesian company Adaro should have used coal (the plan) to build their new Aluminium smelter or destroyed hundreds of km2 of pristine rainforest and river systems to provide all the Aluminium needed for solar panel frames, and EV car bodies, with solar and pumped hydro energy (which costs 8 times as much as coal for the solar panels alone!!). All done with cheap Indonesian labor and Indonesian bauxite and coal to provide cheap Aluminium.
Which was your choice again, or was it diversion to somewhere else??
Not one of those pieces change the fact that fossil fuel use has gone up by over 18,500Twh since 2008 and solar and wind combined total only 3,427Twh.
No fossil fuels have been ‘saved’ on a world wide scale by all the ‘green’ building. It’s all just in addition. It’s very noticeable that you didn’t tackle the questions I asked, just bombarded the forum with green fluff that looks good to those that know nothing about the situation.
A 797F Caterpillar dump truck has around a 4000 litre fuel tank and uses around 240 litres/hr working hard. It has a payload of 363 tonnes and an efficiency of around 50%, meaning it has a work index of 1.2Mwh/hr and can go a full 12hour shift without refueling.
How does the 1.4Mwh battery pack in the new Fortescue fleet of one stack up?
How long does it run between charges? You seem to know so much about this, so please answer this one simple question, at least…
Hideaway.
Rather than building that Indonesian Aluminum production facility, we should instead divert all of the Aluminum used in the global aircraft building industry and high rise building construction to more appropriate uses. We already have more than enough of both of these things. Before too long the population will be declining anyway.
I suppose you would argue that we don’t need more energy…just let things taper off. No more solar panels production, halt to all nuclear plant construction, shutdown all oil drilling rigs and pipeline development, no more vehicles or drones to roll off the assembly line.
I think that is an idea worth considering. Especially the coal production. Sorry Australia, India, China, and USA, et al. Sorry BHP and Boeing. Sorry to all the people who were planning to live on the wages.
Of course, we don’t get to make these decisions. I’m glad that you don’t, and I’m thankful that I don’t have to.
It is quite obvious to me that nothing is going to change your opinion on the ongoing energy transition. Part of the reason for posting this stuff is to troll you but, the main reason is to point out to other folks that are more open minded what is actually happening out there in the real world. I am not going to waste my time finding out stuff that you want to know. If you want the answers go do the research yourself. Ultimately time will tell what really makes sense but, I don’t think Andrew Forest is going to risk his business on something that has no chance of working. Fortescue’s rival Rio Tinto has said that electric mining trucks wont be up to the task for another decade. Time will tell which one of these companies is right and the stakes are high.
A couple of observations on your treatise on the Haru Oni plant. It highlights just how brilliant battery EV technology is. More than 77% of the electrical energy generated by any energy source is actually used to move the vehicle so using the same electricity to make synthetic fuels and then get 30% out of the energy in that fuel as useful work seems a bit silly even if the electricity to fuel process was 100% efficient. The second observation is that manufacturing processes are often improved once the initial process has been tried. I have been involved in light manufacturing and it is amazing how many improvements can be made between manufacturing the first item and the second. Who knows how much the efficiency of the process can be improved. Some people are also looking at this from the angle of what can be done with the abundant cheap electricity that is going to be available when grids across the globe transition to much higher levels of renewable energy, solar in particular. If it is not used to do anything useful it will be lost forever so maybe the thinking is that even a very inefficient use is better than just throwing it away.
You guys seem very hung up on thermodynamics but, PV modules are NOT heat engines. It is something completely different at work when light strikes a solar cell and produces electricity. There is no heat involved in the production of that electricity and in fact the colder the cell the more power it can supply for a given amount of light. LEDs are another technology that work on a completely different basis to incandescent lamps. The light produced is not a byproduct of heat so LEDs provide on average five times the amount of illumination for a given amount of power. Electromagnetism is also very impressive in terms of how much energy is converted into motion in electric motors. There is no heat in the production of motion from electric current. The heat that is produced in an electric motor is due to the electrical resistance of the wires and reduces the output. Electric motor efficiencies are typically in the range from the low 70s to the low 90s in percentage.
Electricity guys like me used to have to depend on the thermodynamics guys to fine tune the heat engines that were used to produce electricity. That is less and less the case as more and more electricity is being produced without the use of heat engines.
Islandboy, as I’ve said previously, I first learned about ‘Limits to Growth’ in a university course I did 49 years ago, and I’ve been looking at/for solutions ever since. Going back 6-10 years ago I was a huge advocate for the ‘bright green future’ based on solar in particular, for exactly the reasons you highlight, plus ‘no moving parts’, that should greatly enhance lifetime of operation, plus minimise maintenance.
I tried to get the numbers to work on providing power to a remote mine site, where the cost of supplying diesel is extraordinarily high. I couldn’t get the cost to work, including when I again halved the cost of solar panels, before adding batteries for the lull periods. Adding batteries to the system, at greatly reduced prices to what then existed, also did not bring the operating cost down to anything like that of just trucking diesel.
This was also ALL before the cost of money was included, which is a very real cost to pay. Adding interest onto the capital cost of building vast tracks of solar in a desert, to power a mine, made the operation completely non viable by an order of magnitude, compared to costs for the same mine using trucked in diesel.
Adding a little solar to offset some of the daytime running costs of the generators, certainly does make a lot of sense, especially when all sort of grants were available to do this, plus it allows the mines to look greener for their ESG requirements, win win.
Mines operate continuously, and need to do so because of the processing of the ores into concentrates. It is a process with various different sub processes, each happening in a continuous fashion, with chemicals to separate minerals from the gangue at various stages in very precise amounts. It doesn’t and can’t work in a stop start mode of intermittency. Most people have no clue of how something like a copper mine operates and assume the minerals just separate out of ore by magic.
I also became very aware of the damage done to the surrounding environment of even putting in a small solar farm at a mine site. It was in a desert area, so plenty of sun, but the dozers just flatten everything to make a nice large flat area to install the panels and prevent any shading from the spindly vegetation that did exist in the area, plus crush every lizard and other lifeform throughout the area of the ‘green solar installation’.
The other important aspect of your ‘bright green future’ is that it’s all made using fossil fuels at every stage of operation, from the mining through processing, manufacture and deployment. No-one is trying to do any of the steps via just electricity from solar and wind, unless they get giant subsidies from the government. It’s not cheaper power at all, because if it was, businesses would do it voluntarily, no subsidies needed.
Then there is the EROEI, which is nowhere near what most research papers, written by people in favor of green renewables claim it is. They can produce the research showing a goodly EROEI by excluding gobs of energy actually used throughout the system that is totally necessary for the mining, processing, manufacturing, transport and deployment of renewables.
They always leave out the energy cost of making all the machinery involved, the roads and bridges used in transport, the energy in providing the educated labor at every step of the process, plus the factory buildings and all the services to the factories. We know fossil fuels can provide all these things, simply because they exist, we built all this with fossil fuels over the last 200 years, including our education systems to educate the vast army of people involved in all the steps. None of this is counted in EROEI research papers, none!!
Why isn’t it counted?
It’s all energy used and all suffers from entropy, so has to be replaced over time. How much of the physical structure is being rebuilt by renewables, which we have had for decades?? None!! We are still playing games with a bit of steel produced by hydrogen, pretending we can ramp it up to include all steel production, with no-one bothering to do the macro numbers on it all. We have theoretical ways of producing concrete, then transport it in diesel trucks, pretending to be green.
Instead, what’s happening in the world, are plants like the Adaro Indonesian smelters are being built to provide cheap Aluminium for EV car panels and solar panel frames. We then call the new panels green energy, when the making of them involves burning more fossil fuels. Even if we tried to make all the new Aluminium smelters from solar panels and batteries, the cost of the Aluminium would be way higher. Likewise for every other part!!
The Adaro example being a perfect illustration of this. Just the solar installation to cover the same output as the planned coal fired power plant, would cost $US16B, plus devastate hundreds of km2 of pristine rainforest, even before we considered backup for the night power and intermittency during the day. The cost of the smelter AND coal fired power plant is $US2B.
The Aluminium cost would be too high for markets if it was built from solar and whatever backup, the interest costs alone would be massive. In our ‘economic rational’ world, it’s a non starter because of cost to build this plant with solar. How does this reality gel with your belief that solar is ‘cheaper’?
Solar and wind are only cheaper in reports like Lazard’s LCOE research, if we make a whole lot of assumptions, and not ‘market forces’. Yet we promote ‘market forces’ as being the be all and end all of production of everything.
The world wholesale price of energy has been around $US40/Mwh on average over the last 10 years. If ‘new’ energy costs around $US40/Mwh to produce, then there is no profit or excess energy for the rest of civilization. We have built the energy provision system, with energy that cost us $US2-5/Mwh!! Again I’ve written a paragraph in what would take a long essay to show, or a book to do full justice to prove, with associated research. We still get and use a lot of $US2/Mwh energy, from oil, gas and coal, but it is also getting more expensive on average.
Do you think a solar, wind and battery world wide system can get down to a cost of $US2/Mwh for both energy AND raw products combined in todays dollars?? If it’s not possible, then future modern civilization is not possible either after fossil fuels leave us. Collapse is going to happen anyway as fossil fuels get to expensive to extract.
If society as a whole can’t have an honest conversation about the energy inputs into building renewables, what hope do we have??
Our system is extremely complex, with layer over layer of complexity. Taking any one aspect in isolation, changing it and expecting the rest of the system to operate ‘normally’ is an extremely naive assumption, because it’s not how the system works, yet this is exactly the approach of every EROEI research paper.
Imagine every aspect of renewable production could only be built with a green renewable energy sources in the future, from now on. How much would the solar panels, the copper wiring and the batteries cost?? The answer is clearly multiples of today.
Then fast forward to the next generation built by the expensive ‘newer’ renewables. Remember to allow for even more remote lower grades of copper ore in this thought experiment. Try to build the next generation with the expensive newer energy.. It doesn’t work, nor can it work, yet this is the lie that keeps going on in our society. It’s a denial of the benefits of cheap fossil fuels, relative to other sources of diffuse energy.
All that’s happened is we have added all renewable energy on top of fossil fuel energy, increasing humanities total energy use. Faster deployment of renewables means more coal mines in Indonesia to produce the Aluminium and Nickel and other commodities, destroying more of the climate because of increased emissions, and more rainforest destruction, by both CO2 and other chemicals released by burning coal.
How can you not look at the raw numbers and see this for what it is?? Since 2008 fossil fuel use has increased by 18,500Twh while the increase in solar and wind electricity has been 3,176Twh.
Imagine instead, fossil fuel use had fallen by 18,500Twh, because of simple unavailability, we had passed peak possible production.
The world would be in serious recession or depression and only a fraction of that new solar and wind would have been built, because there would be a lack of investment dollars and the cost of energy to do it would be through the roof..
Lastly, without the products provided by fossil fuels we have no future modern civilization and with the exception of metallurgical coal, most of these other products come from a fraction of every barrel of oil and million cuft of gas.
We have to extract the lot to get the correct fraction. This is why the ‘hand wave’ of we can still get some fossil fuels for products doesn’t work, because those that suggest it never bother to explain how we can just mine the fractions we need and disregard the rest. In the real world, that’s not how it works at all. Without extracting the ‘whole’, it’s uneconomic to extract a small part, so simply wont happen.
I would love for the bright green future to work, keeping most of the natural world in a more pristine environment than currently, which means rewilding vast tracks of land.
However the numbers clearly show it’s not possible for the large human population we actually have, to go down this route without destroying the climate and most ecosystems in our mad rush to mine the resources needed. Nor is it possible to maintain any modernity with a vastly reduced population of ‘consumers’, for complexity reasons that Prof. Joseph Tainter has already clearly written about, so I wont go into.
The path we are heading on, building more renewables and nuclear in an attempt to continue modern civilization, it means burning more fossil fuels to build , until we reach peak FF use, while we destroy more of the natural world and gain a higher level to fall from. This gives great consumer goods and services for those alive today, that are a part of the modern civilization, at the expense of future generations, probably starting with our children.
Falling from a higher level means more suffering in the world, from both humans perspective and the natural world. Instead of deliberately trying to degrow and lower population, to every living lifeforms overall long term benefit, we have decided to lie to ourselves and create more suffering when the collapse happens, so we can enjoy modernity a bit longer.
I’ve spent decades researching all this, there is no way out now, we are in a vast overshoot predicament, and denial of the bad future, seems to be the choice of humanity…
Energy Efficiency is Critical for a Sustainable Future
Energy efficiency is often overlooked in favor of ramping up renewable energy capacity.
Energy waste is a major problem, with around three-quarters of global energy wasted due to inefficient systems and behaviors.
Improving energy efficiency and reducing energy waste can cut carbon emissions, save money, and alleviate the burden on green energy production.
1. Electrify wherever possible
By transitioning from a fossil energy system to a fully electrified one, we can cut up to 40% of final energy consumption. Electrification is itself a form of energy efficiency, as most electric technologies have a lower rate of energy loss while performing the same function as a fossil-driven equivalent.
2. Implement flexibility solutions
Reinventing energy efficiency is not only about using less energy but also using the energy at the right time. By maximizing the potential of demand-side flexibility, the EU and UK can annually save 40 million tons of CO2 emissions and reduce the electricity generation from natural gas by 106 TWh, or about one-fifth of the EU’s natural gas consumption for electricity generation in 2022. Adding to this the annual societal cost savings amounts to €10.5 billion by 2030. Similarly, households can save on average 7% on their electricity bills.
3. Use hydrogen wisely
Powering our future energy system with renewables will require a rapid scale-up of hydrogen. However, hydrogen conversion requires incredible amounts of energy; by 2050, hydrogen production will require more than half the total electricity demand today. High-efficiency technologies for electrolysis will be essential to ensure energy security and stability as well as to lower energy demand for hydrogen.
4. Integrate sectors
By strategically integrating sectors and deploying excess heat, we can ultimately lower demand on energy production and maximize efficiency. By 2030, up to 53% of the global energy input will be wasted as excess heat. However, this heat can be captured and reused to power machinery, as well as heat buildings and water through deeper sector integration.
I keep hearing interviews where pioneers in the fields of AI and other digital/compute based industries brush off the energy requirement challenges of these sectors ‘since there will be fusion power abundance’.
I acknowledge that I will likely be a permanent naysayer on this possibility based on a lifetime of the viability being always 30 years in the future, if ever.
Is there anyone around here with actual up to date knowledge on fusion R&D that can tell us that actual viable deployment is likely, or even possible, in the next 30 years? Or is it all still firmly in the bucket of wishful or magical thinking?
Objectives—This report presents
provisional 2023 data on U.S. births.
Births are shown by age and race and
Hispanic origin of mother. Data on
cesarean delivery and preterm births are
also presented.
Methods—Data are based on more
than 99% of all 2023 birth records
received and processed by the National
Center for Health Statistics as of January
25, 2024. Comparisons are made with
final 2022 data and earlier years.
Results—The provisional number of
births for the United States in 2023 was
3,591,328, down 2% from 2022. The
general fertility rate was 54.4 births per
1,000 females ages 15–44, down 3%
from 2022. The total fertility rate was
1,616.5 births per 1,000 women in 2023,
a decline of 2% from 2022. Birth rates
declined for females in age groups 15–19
through 35–39 and were unchanged for
females ages 10–14 and for women ages
40–44 and 45–49 in 2023. The birth
rate for teenagers ages 15–19 declined
by 3% in 2023 to 13.2 births per 1,000
females; the rate for younger teenagers
(ages 15–17) was unchanged, and the
rate for older teenagers (ages 18–19)
declined 3%. The cesarean delivery rate
rose to 32.4% in 2023, from 32.1 in 2022;
the low-risk cesarean delivery rate also
increased to 26.6% from 26.3%. The
preterm birth rate was 10.41% in 2023,
essentially unchanged from the rate of
10.38% in 2022.
For the last few days the discussion here has been mostly about whether a renewable or green economy is or is not possible.
Pretty much everybody has made their argument.
As I see it, meaning the big picture, hardly anybody is cutting thru the fog to get down to the REAL question, as I see it.
This question is not about absolutes, not about Nick’s pink eyeglasses versus Carnot’s pessimism. It’s about the ACTUAL choices we have available to us, and which of these choices we make.
Now to be perfectly blunt about it, anybody who is proposing to simply dramatically reduce the use of fossil fuels in the very short term has his head up his ass so far he will never see daylight……. because there’s simply NO WAY WHATSOEVER any body anywhere in any position of power is going to make the decision to do so. Doing it is simply totally out of the question, as a practical matter, politically, militarily, economically, environmentally, or by any other metric. AIN’T gonna happen, forget it.
( Environmentally sounds really good…….. but what this would actually mean is that a substantial portion of humanity would literally starve near term, if we were to quit using fertilizers, pesticides, diesel powered machinery, etc. You can take this to the bank. Anybody who knows shit from apple butter about agriculture knows it’s true without even giving it a second thought. )
Starvation isn’t on the table, as a DELIBERATE option.
However…………. Starvation is a very real CONSEQUENCE of current policies and practices, and as a realist, I expect to see starvation on the grand scale, assuming I live to be REALLY old, near a hundred or so.
The best I can say about people starving by the millions in places where the birth rate remains high, and economic development remains low, is that such countries aren’t likely to start and win aggressive wars, except maybe on the local scale. Indonesia and the poorer countries in Africa aren’t going to pose a serious problem to countries such as the USA, etc, either as military enemies or by sending a plague of tens of millions of migrants our way.
Too much blue water, period.
( I’m not taking either side, pro or con, on immigration at this particular time. I’m just pointing out reality, as I see it. People in such places are at very high risk of dying hard in place as the result of overshoot. Lots of them ARE going to die as the result of overshoot, in general terms, including climate troubles, water troubles, natural resource depletion troubles, etc. )
Once upon a time, I was a hard core doomer, and I’m perfectly ready to agree that there’s a very real possibility the entire world economy may go to hell, and crash and burn, as the end result of overshoot.
But I do not believe such a crash and burn end of our modern industrial life style is INEVITABLE for the entire human race.
The population IS going to fall, partly due to falling birth rates, partly due to people dying hard because the Horsemen are abroad. I just can’t see any reason at all not to accept this assumption as rock solid.
But I don’t see any reason to accept Carnot’s and others argument that we’re for all practical purposes FUCKED, that it’s OVER…….. because they don’t offer any solution at all, NOTHING, other than to say whatever we do in the way of promoting renewables is going to make the built in crash EVEN WORSE.
I say bullshit to that. They could possibly be right that the crash will happen quicker, and it could possibly be somewhat worse, but SO FUCKING WHAT?
I believe in doing whatever we can to preserve our one and only home planet’s biosphere to the extent we can.
I do NOT believe it matters so much as the proverbial ” take a fuck at a rolling donut” expression, in terms of simply WORSHIPING nature. Mother Nature is the biggest and most unimaginably horrible BITCH. She routinely serves up asteroids, super volcanoes and biblical level plagues. She keeps score, but impartially, totally dispassionately, in the fossil record, that’s IT as far as SHE”s concerned.
In the end, species are very much like individuals, species consist of populations of individuals…… with new species consisting of the offspring of existing species….. which sooner or later go extinct.
Mammals replaced dinosa urs, in other words. A few hundred million years from now, it’s rather likely, probably dead certain, that do matter what we naked apes do or do not do, this planet will be teeming with life…….. half or more of it utterly strange to us.
So…… what we really ought to be talking about is what we CAN do, in realistic terms. We can’t just wish away our population problem. We can’t just wish away our current day fossil fuel based industrial economy. We can’t go green on the grand scale anytime soon…. and it could be that Carnot and company are correct that we will NEVER be able to do so.
So…… the real question is what we CAN do, as a practical matter. We can only do what’s possible within the boundaries or context of politics and economics. We can only do what’s possible within the boundaries of physical laws, within the context of existing finite supplies of oil, gas, metal ores, soils, water, etc.
I’ve got some things I’ve got to do right now.
Later today I’ll be back to post some thoughts on what we can do, for reasons seldom given due consideration by anybody here in this forum, excepting yours truly…………… on why I think Carnot and his friends are quite possibly wrong, for some reasons they haven’t given due consideration, etc.
Thank you OFM…a sane and pragmatic voice on these issues is a tonic to savor.
I mentioned a global carbon tax as a management tool earlier, knowing full well that its a useful mechanism that is just never going to happen.
Hi Hickory,
A global carbon tax as such isn’t going to happen. You’re dead on, as usual.
On the other hand, depletion never sleeps, and given time, rising prices will have the same effect on fossil fuel consumption as a carbon tax but unfortunately to a far lesser extent. China and India will continue to burn coal, no question, but lots of countries will do what they can to reduce their coal consumption so as to keep the money at home, to minimize the risk to their national security, etc.
And I’m personally convinced that even if we were to give up fossil fuels immediately, the climate crisis is already baked in, and will be playing out not only over coming decades but over coming centuries. Staying on our current path can only make it worse……. but how much worse, I can’t say.
ONE thing I’m dead sure of is that there’s a zero possibility that we’ll collectively quit using fossil fuels, period. The consequences of actually doing so would be so dire, so catastrophic, as to be beyond description. Suffice it to say that the teenage granddaughters of members of this forum selling themselves on street corners for food would be one of the minor or trivial consequences.
But a possible transition to a long term sustainable way of life based on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and ( gulp!) austerity isn’t necessarily a global question.
I personally believe the likeliest odds of the coming global population crash involve hundreds of millions of people dying hard due to war, famine, disease,exposure, etc. in addition to declining birth rates.
A lot people will die at militarized borders manned by soldiers not only ordered to shoot to kill, but eager to do so.
Times are very likely, possibly SURE to be really tough for just about everybody, including the large majority of people in countries such as the USA, western European countries, etc.
Economic contraction brought on by climate issues, natural resource depletion issues, opportunistic aggressive wars, etc, can be safely assumed as given . People inside any more fortunate country who are already dealing with tough times themselves aren’t going to welcome any significant number of migrants from collapsing countries, never mind migrants by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, by the millions.
I can’t argue that any particular country won’t simply implode once the shit is well and truly in the fan, descending into a Somalia like hell hole, every man for himself or for his local warlord, every man’s primary problem being his own and his family’s day to day survival.
I’m at least a semi civilized sort myself.
But if I’m looking DIRECTLY at starving children brought to me in hopes of my feeding them, I wouldn’t hesitate to go find some food for them, once my own supply is about gone.
I would go armed.
The trade off is simple. Somebody dies if necessary, in order that children live. Hillbilly farmers, Scotch Irish German mountain hillbillies by descent, are used to stomping our own snakes.
We don’t pick delicately at a ribeye while bemoaning the cruelty, the hideous lack of humanity, of people who murder Bambi for fun or food or both, lol.
I raised that ribeye in captivity, and killed the donor with my own hands, not just figuratively, but literally, at least a dozen times over the last half century. Bambi at least knew freedom, until she found herself in the cross hairs of my rifle scope. She at least died without the trauma of being forcibly separated from her own babies, forcibly loaded on truck, for a terrifying ride to a terrifying place smelling of the blood of countless other cows……
Damned few parents would do otherwise, once that’s their last option, although very few of us will actually say so in public.
Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that hardly anybody at all is REALLY taking any of this discussion seriously, that it’s all a game to them, that they don’t actually believe THEY THEMSELVES will ever be dealing with rationed food, rationed fuel, rationed electricity, car jackings in THEIR neighborhood…….. bombs landing in their own neighborhood.
To be honest, I’m not taking it very seriously myself…….mostly because I think the odds are close to one hundred percent I’ll be dead of old age before the shit is REALLY in the fan here in my own neighborhood in my own country.
A critical point I’m trying to make in this rant is that I’m not wearing pink eye glasses and blinders…… which were part of the bridle and bit hardware we put on the last family mule back when I was a kid. The blinders literally kept the mule from seeing anything at all, except what we WANTED it to see……… directly ahead.
There’s at least a POSSIBILITY that the pink eye glasses faction will have the last laugh, a couple of generations, or a century down the road, once the flames have died down and the smoke is mostly settled. There may and in my opinion will likely be some pockets of people living a more or less modern lifestyle in some places because they ( their society, their government ) came to understand the score, and went proactive in time to preserve what they could of what they have now….. a working electrical grid, working water and sewer, food and shelter, at least basic medical care, at least a moderately safe environment in day to day terms, law enforcement good enough that it will be safe to be on the street rather than cowering behind locked doors, etc.
Our most likely collective best hope is that we’re lucky enough to have government, or governments, that function as well as our own and allies functioned back in WWII……. governments that realistically evaluated the big picture, and did what was NECESSARY to maintain and preserve their own people, their own way of life…… going to war.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that there’s at least a fair possibility of some of us , maybe some entire countries, squeaking thru the coming bottleneck or crash more or less whole, in basic terms of food and shelter, personal safety, at least basic medical care, etc.
Maybe we’ll have to give up beef and pork, maybe even chicken, as dietary staples here in the USA. The climate might get so bad that even putting tens of millions of us back on the farm, working mostly by hand using little or nothing in the way of fossil fuels, manufactured and shipped fertilizers, pesticides, etc, won’t be enough for all of us to live on beans and bread.
Well, in that case……. whatever we’ve done, or failed to do, in terms of going green, won’t matter at all. The end game would still be the same,trying to go green, or continuing on the fossil fuel route until we hit a Seneca Cliff of one sort or another,climate, resource, political, economic….. with a combination of any and all being the most likely.
The media across the board are quite fond of presenting us with a steady stream of more or less miraculous solutions to our problems….. electric cars, fake meat, fusion power, geothermal all over the place, etc, etc. The renewables naysayers are right in that the large majority of these miracle solutions will never come to pass.
BUT a few of them WILL become realities. I can’t say which. But some of them are already well proven, and lack only a serious effort at implementation. Among these are super energy efficient appliances and housing. There’s NOTHING AT ALL, other than our current day habits/ desires preventing us from driving really small electric cars that go a hundred miles or less on a charge…… except for the dug in bankers and industries selling us three ton oil burners because that’s where the money is for THEM.
And at least a FEW of these supposed miracles that are not already present day unimplemented realities will BE realities in coming years.
Genetically engineered grains and veggies are probably dangerous in terms of our own health, and potentially capable of bringing on some serious to catastrophic environmental damages. But compared to starving without them, due to a lack of conventional fertilizers, pesticides, etc………
We’re going to go the genetic engineering route. We’re going to go the doubling up route. We’re going to be cooking at home, starting with flour and meal, fresh or dried beans, cabbage, onions, maybe some meat or fish. There won’t be much trash coming out of the kitchen, nor much in the way of like new clothing to donate to the Good Will store.
I remember seeing video of emergency food rations being distributed by the old USSR government….. those rations consisting of hundred pound ( our size here in the USA at least) bags of grain, mesh bags of potatoes and cabbages, etc….. unloaded from trucks on sidewalks . The old time commies running the USSR deliberately starved millions of people……… but they also made such emergency aid available to millions more, depending on prevailing circumstances.
Things could get to this point here in the USA, or in Western Europe. Things could get even worse.
But if we put our minds to it, and our backs and our money into it, we can generate enough renewable electricity to run our essential industries.
So WHAT if aluminum costs twice as much because it’s produced using wind and solar power? We can DEAL with double the price……… if we use aluminum for truly important purposes, such as renewable energy infrastructure, or really light weight trucks, meaning a ton of tons of extra freight delivered over the life of the truck…. because saving a ton of dead weight means another ton of cargo, every trip.
Lowering the speed limit to thirty mph means safely lowering the dead weight of the truck quite a bit in relation to the gross weight…… because the wheels, suspension, brakes, engine or batteries, etc, can all be quite a bit lighter….. and in a shrinking economy, there will be fewer trucks, and running them slower will be a feasible partial solution to shortages of fuel and materials.
We can get by ok without aluminum beer cans.
I’ve driven “half ton” pickups tens of thousands of miles over the last fifty years loaded to triple their supposed safe working load…… without any problems. simply by taking it easy, keeping the speed down to half the usual every day speed of traffic.
There’s nothing REAL, other than habit and dug in special interests, preventing us from doubling up in existing housing, so that public transportation will work, in the future, where it just won’t work for now, due to insufficient population density. There’s nothing real preventing us from running businesses so that show up and departure times for employees are scheduled so as to ENABLE ride sharing…….. nothing other than revocable laws to prevent van owners from legally transporting a car load of people to go grocery shopping or to work.
There’s nothing other than revocable laws and regulations preventing people from living in tight knit villages of the sort still common in some places in Europe, and even a few places here in the USA, whereby housing and various small businesses are all within walking distance. Beer and bread can be made in such places at a minor fraction of the expense of making them in industrial facilities many miles away, packaging them, shipping them to stores, customers driving to the stores to get them……… compared to walking or biking a block or two to pick them up freshly made, and very likely much better quality. Some enterprising local kid will be very glad to drop off fresh bread, etc, just like newspapers.
I’m not saying such measures will be adequate to turn the corner on the bottleneck. What I am saying is that there are countless ways to conserve on materials and energy. There are countless ways to cut back on damage to the environment .
If we once come to collectively understand the stakes, which are literally life and death for today’s little kids, and act appropriately, at least some little kids have a fair to good shot at a civilized, dignified, reasonably happy life. That life isn’t likely to include using two or three ton trucks to fetch beer, or flying to the snow to go skiing or to the winter sun to go sunbathing….. but it will be infinitely better than crash and burn.
Giving up is not an option.
Preachers in Baptist churches have a lot to say about the wide broad smooth high road to hell.
The fossil fuel road, if we stay on it, leads straight to hell, straight, wide, smooth and easy…….. DOWNHILL at that.
The ONLY possible realistic way to get off of it, given our human nature, is to make every possible effort to go green.
Some of us in some places have a realistic shot at success.
It’s ok to believe, or at least hope, that we will get a few lucky breaks here and there along the way.
There will be new kinds of batteries, cheaper to build, longer lasting, more easily recycled.There will be new ways to build houses, ways that use less scarce materials, houses that use less energy. There can be a return to old style communities where people live and work together, locally, rather than depending mostly on trade with people hundreds or thousands of miles away.We can eat down the food pyramid, and be the healthier for doing so.
If we can’t cure cancer, we can learn how to avoid it most or nearly all the time. Hell’s Bells, we already know how to avoid it.
There may be modular mass produced nuclear reactors that are safe enough to be deployed on the grand scale……. if Old Man Business As Usual manages to stay on his feet another decade or two or three.
People who are otherwise without work and without hope may find that they can live with older people in exchange for room and board, so that such old folks can stay home in familiar circumstances rather than spending their last days in a nursing home far from any remaining friends and family.
I know of a few people personally who are already in the process of making such arrangements. So far among cases I know about this is between people known to each other for quite some time as friends, relatives, or employees/ employers .
But that can and will change, as times get tougher and more and more people are in a spot where this sort of thing is their best and possibly their only good option..
There might be a plague, deliberately created in a laboratory some where, that spreads like wildfire and renders most or all of us sterile, male or female, or women sterile after having a single child.
Novelist’s plots can and do give us a foretaste of times to come. Philosophers and pundits have things to say that at first sound outrageous…… but later seem to simply point out the inevitable…….
“As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H L Mecken
Yesterday’s science fiction is today’s reality in more than a few cases. I have a crystal ball that works like a charm in countless ways…… even to the point that it’s been made flat and thin so that it fits in my pocket so I can easily keep it with me almost anytime, almost any place.
So……… as a practical matter, we can’t go green on the grand scale anytime soon for reasons I don’t need to go into at this minute.
And as a practical matter, viewed from the other side of the question, we can’t give up fossil fuels….maybe until they’re depleted to the point we can’t extract and use them, or until the ecology, climate and economy collapse to the point fossil fuels are irrelevant. Hunter gatherers and primitive farmers use only trivial amounts of fossil fuels, if they use any at all.
What we can do, as a practical matter, is to support any policies and industries that appear to slow down or possibly even arrest and reverse the hard crash seen as baked in by countless well informed people.
Carnot and his friends have made their argument that there simply isn’t enough in the way of materials and time to go green…… in essence, that it’s literally impossible to go green on the grand scale.
They may be right. I was going to go into reasons they may be wrong, but something else has popped up, and I’ll have to leave it for later.
OFM
I completely agree as usual with almost all of your comments. To set the table straight I have a line of thought that a softish landing would have been possible with 1/5 less fossil fuel usage globally as of right now. And just to make it rime; that would mean that from 1970’s and onwards the global fossil fuel usage would have had to have been flat. Right or wrong on that issue, the question is more how to manage the downslope of energy usage going forward for whatever reason. It is not going to help to pour more concrete into new areas used for farming or otherwise prime forest – that is for sure (not neccessary to always repeat the whole climate issue, but also point out related issues from other angles imo). And it is not especially impressive to argue for short time profits given by the capitalist machine, when we all know it is imperfect when it comes to allocation of resources.
Interested in your further line of thought as always.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=251127
Karl Denninger (one of the founders of Tea Party in USA and one of the first internet service providers..MCSNet).
Thorium based CTL – the thorium is in the coal (which is what causes lung cancer to coal miners);
kill 2 birds with 1 stone = liquid fuels and electricity.
Not good for climate change…but IMO we are F*** on that anyway barring a GEO-engineering miracle.
I don’t think that article was about using thorium to convert coal to liquid fuel. It was about using breeder reactors to generate more NUCLEAR fuel. Thorium is an element that can be converted (“bred”) into a fissionable nuclear fuel. The article was advocating the construction of fast breeder reactors to increase the amount of energy that could be generated using nuclear reactors. The author was also advocating some fuel processing strategies to isolate and make safer some of the nasty fission byproducts inherent in the nuclear fuel cycle. Coal wasn’t mentioned at all.
I worked on both Thorium based reactors and on fast breeders in the 1970s. I left the industry in 1979 because it seemed that the problems inherent in nuclear power generation; safety, cost, environmental simpy weren’t solvable. I don’t exactly study the industry any more but nothing I have seen has convinced me that it really is a smart way to go. I see the same tired agruments today that I did forty years ago.
Specifically about fast breeders: Working on conventional reactors we had to write enormous documents called Preliminary and Final Safety Analysis Reports (PSAR and FSAR) before construction was even started. These documents, each, spanned about four feet on a book shelf covering every conceiveable failure; melt down, reactivity release, fire, theft (of nuclear material), on and on.
Something new was added when we worked on fast breeders: We started describing a regime of accidents where the primary classification of the accident was kilotons of TNT. Think about that.
Karl’s energy plan for USA is Throium and CTL.
“Would I prefer that we head toward Thorium-based fuel? Yep. Why? Because it is in coal and a high-temperature reactor (e.g. LFTR), using thorium as a fuel, brings both the capacity to generate electricity and turn the coal into synfuel which solves two problems at once because the cause of lung cancer from coal use comes from the thorium that naturally occurs within the coal and it is trivially able to be separated out as it is both metallic and much heavier than the carbon.”
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=183373
Time to change the subject for a minute.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/oak-run-solar-project-agrivoltaics-ohio/
Sometimes even the most optimistic pro solar puff pieces get it wrong in terms of the sustainability of solar power.
This article says the owners expect this giant solar farm to last thirty five years.
But barring stupid decisions made today, such as not making sure any leases involved can’t be renewed, when the thirty five years are up…….. the grid interconnections, the rights of way, any related infrastructure such as an on site maintenance shop, security fencing, probably nearly all of the necessary electrical cables, some or all of the panel mounting hardware, depending on what it’s made of, and how well, any necessary grading of the land, any necessary roads, etc…….. will all still be there.
The odds are high the panels themselves will be replaced with better ones, at a good profit, within ten to fifteen years, because new ones then will produce more juice per panel, and very likely also be cheaper to purchase as well, in terms of constant money.
Maybe I don’t have a clue, but as far as I can see, there’s really no reason at all to suppose a well sited, properly maintained solar farm won’t be about as good or better than new, a few decades down the road.. just as a well designed well maintained highway can be as good as new, or better, a generation down the road.
This is not to say that it won’t cost quite a bit to maintain such a solar farm……… but rather that keeping it up and running like new shouldn’t cost more than a rather minor fraction of starting from scratch new construction.
The “can’t be done” guys don’t seem to consider that engineers have been proving their grandfathers wrong about lots of things ever since the Industrial Revolution, lol.
Now consider that we lose some aluminum every time we recycle it.
Well, there are ways to up the recycling rate to pretty close to one hundred percent… for by instance mandating that aluminum be used only when it’s critical to our long term sustainability. Soda and beer cans aren’t at all necessary, not when the shit is in the fan. People have been brewing and drinking their beer right in the neighborhood for at least a couple of thousand years.
Somebody said a while back that Tesla cars don’t last. Maybe they don’t.
But I’ve been operating vehicles and machinery for over half a century that’s built to last. Commercial trucks quite commonly last a million miles, or even more.
But once it’s NECESSARY to build cars that DO last, and that can be built using as little metal, plastic, wire, battery cells, etc, as possible. ……… well then, it’s going to be possible to mandate that cars can ONLY be built to last a very long time using the minimum possible amount of materials.
You would have to be technically illiterate to argue otherwise………. but it’s very easy to argue that we will continue to build cars the way we do now, indefinitely, until the economy crashes and burns.
Nation states don’t work this way, not once the leaders understand that it’s do or die time, in terms of austerity and hard core economic planning. One or two models of cars and light trucks are ENOUGH, and will BE enough, under a wartime like planned economy. A coat of plain old enamel paint of the sort used on farm machinery forty years ago will last that long…… it’s lasted that long on my older farm equipment.
All the modern features deemed “essential” can be left off. My friends in uniform get by ok without either heaters or air conditioning when deployed in combat zones. My Daddy didn’t own an air conditioned car until he was seventy years old. He didn’t own a truck with even an ordinary old AM radio until the seventies.
The NAME of the game we can all agree on……. it’s contraction, austerity, hardship in countless respects. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that industrial civilization is doomed, that it’s all over in that respect.
There’s reason to believe that before this century is out most of us, maybe even three quarters or even more of us, will be dead of exposure, disease, starvation, and or violence ranging from local massacres to modern day hot war. Maybe there won’t be more than a few million of us scattered in various small pockets of survivors. Maybe there won’t be anybody left at all, but in my personal opinion the odds are pretty good there will be a few hundred million of us still around, and that’s enough to get the wheels turning again, in many if not all respects. Computer chips and solar panels might be impossible with so few people…… but the knowledge necessary to make them won’t be lost.
A few million people in an area with ample water power can recreate the industries that existed a century, or two or three centuries back. That’s not something to look forward to, but compared to going back to hunting and gathering or primitive agriculture, it’s not so bad, lol.
There are no guarantees of course. But on the other hand……… what possibly benefit is there to simply giving up, and continuing on our present day path of consumption to the nth power, until we hit a Seneca Cliff scenario?
Building out as much as we can in the way of renewable infrastructure isn’t going to result in any more destruction of what’s left of the natural world than otherwise.
It’s VERY hard for me to understand how anybody with an open mind could argue otherwise. Building an aluminum smelter in a pristine landscape will result in the destruction of that landscape SOONER, I’ll readily grant that point.
But not building it doesn’t mean we won’t destroy that same landscape, as surely as the sun comes up, by continuing on our present day path, another decade or two later.
I’m no engineer, no siree, but I’ve been watching engineers doing what their predecessors considered impossible my entire life.
Suppose we were to spend just HALF of what we spend on the MIC on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, recycling?
Those of us who survive can and will learn how to get by using a fourth or even less of our current per capita energy consumption.
Today’s three thousand and up square foot Mc Mansions occupied by only one or two people can accommodate a dozen or more people, once we have little or no choice in this matter. Lots of people live in such crowded conditions today.
I’ve got an electric clothes dryer, and I use it .
But I helped Momma hang our clothes out to dry growing up. I was out of college and wearing a coat and tie before there was an electric dryer in the house.
The price of one new car, which is of questionable value at best, is enough to upgrade a typical tract house so that the people living in it use as little as a quarter as much electricity for heating, cooling, lights, refrigeration, etc.
My basic point in this rant is that arguing that going green means keeping things the same is at best unintentionally misleading, and at the worst….. deliberately so.
Arguing that going green means providing eight or ten billion people with a current day western lifestyle approaches hilarious…… given that the people making that argument typically also argue that economic and ecological collapse are inevitable…….. meaning the population is going to crash.
OFM, there are so many flaws in your arguments about the future, for example….
“A few million people in an area with ample water power can recreate the industries that existed a century, or two or three centuries back.”
All those industries relied upon raw materials turning up by the boatload from foreign lands. What do you think will be exported as inputs for these ‘industries’ being set up near water power??
“The “can’t be done” guys don’t seem to consider that engineers have been proving their grandfathers wrong about lots of things ever since the Industrial Revolution, lol.”
What’s common about the entire period since the beginning of the industrial revolution?? Growing fossil fuel use, increasing energy availability. It’s a fool’s errand to consider the same rules apply on the downslope of energy availability. Who is going to be able to teach all the engineers in a world of falling energy availability?? Even schools and primary education are a product of fossil fuels, why wouldn’t this entire system of education break down when people are desperate for their next meal??
“The NAME of the game we can all agree on……. it’s contraction, austerity, hardship in countless respects.”
When oil availability decreases year after year, who misses out?? Once feedback loops kick in accelerating the decline, then whoever had oil products this year will have way less next year, and less again the year after. When farms on average can’t plow fields or harvest crops, nor deliver them to cities or even large towns, do you really think the children in these towns and cities are going to bother going to school??
Do you think anyone is going to be bothered setting up a local aluminium recycling plant, when they have no food??
In one breath you agree times are going to be really tough as everything declines, but then assume other parts of the system can operate normally, without considering how they are effected by the great contraction. Who’s going to bother paying any attention to what a government says if the people don’t have food?
I’m certain lots of the things you have suggested above will be tried on the downslope, all with the promise of a better future than the alternative, but when the food stops getting to people in the cities, as farmers have less fuel, less fertilizer, less pesticides and herbicides to work with year after year, it will all fall to pieces as people become more desperate.
It’s not just the decline that makes things worse, it’s the feedback loops operating in a highly complex system that fail completely one after another, most seemingly invisible as they don’t seem to use a lot of oil, but might rely upon sales of some product to others that do rely on oil.
Imagine Sri Lanka right now if there was no IMF to come to their aide with funds so they could continue buying from the world market. Such organizations will be useless on the real downslope of energy availability.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish you were correct that some form of civilization could continue after we get off the oil and other fossil fuel addiction, but the downslope of supply, particularly of oil will be so savage that nothing of the modern world will last after a couple of decades of the decline, and probably no animals that could be used for even basic agriculture.
Hideaway
That’s the problem that many miss. We tend to underestimate how complex our system has become and how specialized we’ve become. This requires a robust transportation system. Technology has enabled this trend to greater heights because of productivity gains. But it has ended we’re already seeing a reversal as growth has ended critical mass is being lost which will end affordability. ( masquerading as inflation) If population declines the knowledge base goes with it. We already have a vacuum of critical knowledge such as farming and livestock husbandry. Don’t think the last two generations of video game players will be able to quickly adapt, they will use the knowledge they have acquired for real guns.
A pattern that we see emerging and repeating is failed institutions consolidated and government subsidized. This happened in banking in 2008 and will be attempted soon with energy systems and we could argue already has with the green initiatives that are failing. And we are seeing oil majors consolidating now. Worst yet the legacy cost of the pollution from mining fracking and nuclear waste hasn’t been dealt with when times were good and certainly won’t be when times are bad. Without a stable electric grid our temporary remediation efforts will fail spectacularly making many areas uninhabitable. How many will be employed managing spent fuel cooling ponds when they need to grow rice.
Everyone wants to think this time is different but it’s not it’s just bigger. Rome was never rebuilt its ruins are still ruins. It was also an energy based system of conquest consolidating stored resources from developed civilizations. Once it had conquered the known world it ceased to exist. There is no stable state the system grows or declines and this system can no longer grow.
Much of the growth in the system is due to population growth, population will peak and decline and in theory could eventually reach a steady state once World population falls to some optimum level (maybe 1 billion, perhaps less). Material needs are not unlimited and much of the existing material can be recycled, particularly if goods were designed to be recycled. Assuming things will remain as they are now has historically been a very poor assumption, the only thing that remains constant is that things never remain as they are, the system is not fixed an assumption that it is fixed is fatally flawed.
Oil consumption per capita will decrease, but important uses such as farming and mining will continue.
Oil consumption per capita from Statistical Review of World Energy
For World C plus C output and using Population projections of Lutz et al (SSP1) which peak between 2050 and 2055 at about 8.65 billion and also my Shock Model from 2024 to 2050, I get the following for World C plus C per capita (barrels per person per year). Average decline in per capita consumption of C plus C about 2% annually from 2030 to 2050.
I’ll start off with a sincere thank you for all of your contributions here Dennis. Much appreciated.
Your simple combination of a population projection with your oil shock model is useful. Could you provide a bit more detail for the Lutz citation you’re using here?
Thanks for these graphs, Dennis. The problem is that those graphs make it look like humans can easily survive and grow like we have over the last 40 years on declining rates of oil production.
However in that period of less oil per capita, we have had substitution, like oil heaters in homes and commercial premises being substituted by gas heating, lowering oil use per capita. Plus we have had huge easily made efficiency gains, common autos that use to get 10mpg now get 30mpg, likewise for trucks, shipping, aircraft, tractors, mining equipment etc.
The problem is we have used all the easy efficiency gains, right when we are running into a period of much higher oil use in the oil industry itself, leaving less for the resto f civilization.
Those graphs take one aspect, reduction in use per capita in isolation of everything else, yet we live in a complete system. Mining dump trucks that were 40t trucks in the 60’s are now often over 400 tonnes, and way more efficient in use of diesel, yet we cannot replicate those gains of efficiency in the next 40 years. We can’t go to 4,000t dump trucks because of physical limits on metals and rubber tyres. We are reaching metal fatigue limits at 400t.
We have much lower mined grades of every type of base metal than we had decades ago, right at the time we need lots more of these metals to build the ‘transition’. This transition can only happen with increased diesel use to provide the metals. Where does the increase in diesel use for mining come from in a world where overall oil production is shrinking, which is coming ‘soon’?
Which existing use of diesel misses out?
What happens when the following year after peak there is 2Mbbls/d less again, and the year after that when there is another 3Mbbls/d reduction in oil flow?
Do we ban farmers from using tractors so that mining has enough diesel to supply the metals for the transition?
Perhaps we ban all shipping so important spare parts don’t get from one side of the world to the other..
Then the next year when we are short another 4M bbls/d who misses out that year?
It’s a complete system we have, that operates in a vastly complex connected way and the graphs that show how we have been using less oil per capita, just obfuscate the reality of our situation.
The reality is we have been using more oil and more fossil fuels overall on average for over 2 centuries, yet only managed to drag 15% of humanity to a modern western civilization. When this rate of energy use falls, as it must due to both depletion and climate reasons, our modern civilization is going to rapidly unwind, with a massive human overpopulation, to the detriment of the remaining natural world.
Hideaway- “The problem is we have used all the easy efficiency gains”
Not really…still lots of work to do on that front around the world.
And, if prices were twice as high as they are now I can guarantee that people would learn to live with less consumption/waste.
Not saying these thing kind of changes are easy or cheap, but will be necessity.
And yes…highly disruptive.
Hickory,
Not really…still lots of work to do on that front around the world.
Yes. The average US passenger vehicle gets about 23 MPG. That could be doubled pretty easily, by design, and then doubled again by increasing average occupancy from 1.2 people to 2.4.
Carpooling. The horror.
The reality is we have been using more oil and more fossil fuels overall on average for over 2 centuries, yet only managed to drag 15% of humanity to a modern western civilization
That fact alone should make any thinking person here blanch about the future.
Yes, the West will get its “green” auto fleet, and fuck-all to everyone else.
Hideaway,
If there is scarcity oil price will rise to the point that demand and supply will match, oil will be used where it is needed most. Refineries will be reconfigured to maximize diesel fuel and minimize gasoline production as demand for gasoline wanes.
Hideaway,
Your comment focused on oil so I looked at oil for that reason. We are not at the end of efficiency gains, gasoline demand can be reduced as the World transpitions to hybrids, plugin hybrids and BEV. The World consumed about 24 Mb/d of gasoline in 2022, this use can be reduced, also a significant number of light duty vehicles in Europe use diesel fuel so there can be some reduction of diesel use (though most Worldwide is likely used for long haul trucking) much of this could be replaced with electrified rail with short haul trucking done with BEV heavy duty trucks used for rail terminal to final destination.
There is likely to be enough fuel for mining and agriculture as these are higher priority uses, as costs of goods supplied by mines increases recycled materials will become more competitive and the recycling rate is likely to increase.
The system is both complex and constantly adjusting to facts on the ground, I don’t think anyone can foresee precisely how things will play out.
My guess is the system is more resilient at the World level than you believe, but I could be wrong.
Thrill,
See
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378014001095#tbl0020
or Chapter 11 of report below.
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/e1853ba8-4444-11e8-a9f4-01aa75ed71a1/language-en
Data I used is below (population in thousands), a copy paste to a spreadsheet should work.
SSP1 World 2015 7382999.7
SSP1 World 2020 7731644.5
SSP1 World 2025 8003146.2
SSP1 World 2030 8212740.9
SSP1 World 2035 8379464.1
SSP1 World 2040 8511535.6
SSP1 World 2045 8605906.4
SSP1 World 2050 8654320
SSP1 World 2055 8652771.7
SSP1 World 2060 8605820.7
SSP1 World 2065 8522102.1
SSP1 World 2070 8409523.3
SSP1 World 2075 8271470.7
SSP1 World 2080 8107773.5
SSP1 World 2085 7918121
SSP1 World 2090 7704786.7
SSP1 World 2095 7473329.4
SSP1 World 2100 7229151.3
Lutz at al 2017 Population SSP1 scenario. Click on chart for larger chart, population in billions.
Fossil fuel use per capita. the big increase from 2001 to 2008 was mostly a rapid increase in Chinese energy use. The Chinese share of primary energy use increased from 12% to 19% of the World’s energy use and coal use share by China increased from 31% to 46% of World’s coal consumption from 2001 to 2008. China’s per capita primary energy use increased from 35 to 70 GJ per capita from 2001 to 2008.
Thill,
Sorry for misspelling your name in previous comment.
Found this
https://dataexplorer.wittgensteincentre.org/wcde-v2/
Good information all around Dennis, thank you for sharing!
Hey Dennis
In one of your comments you suggested that “much of this could be replaced with electrified rail”. I am by no means a rail expert, but thought I might share a few observations on this one relating to physical infrastructure within the US. I’m avoiding the energy part of this argument.
There were a series of consolidations of rail and abandonment of lines in the 20th century for a range of reasons. This resulted in lines where track was pulled up but the general alignment and initial earthwork remains. There are other places where track remains with low utilization by short lines. Lastly, there are corridors where multiple tracks may have been present at one time, with an existing reduction in track without a corresponding reduction in the width of the available corridor. Available or fairly easily re-developable right-of-way would seem to provide an opportunity to increase rail capacity to take more of the freight or passenger volume currently on rubber tires or wings. In addition, it seems like railroads have some strong legal property rights that they have inherited from a type of 1st presence operation.
On the other side of the coin, it is not clear to me that the current incentive structure for railroads results in the types of investments necessary to adequately maintain long lived civil infrastructure assets. Think bridges for example. Also, many of these assets or corridors were built well before the current modern understanding of risk and engineering. Many current design approaches rely on probabilistic methods aimed at creating consistent odds of failure. I’ve seen a lot of steep slopes beneath rail lines that have to be pretty meta-stable. My point here relates to the costs and vulnerabilities that may not be immediately obvious.
Thank you again for all great information you share here!
Much of the growth in the system is due to population growth, population will peak and decline and in theory could eventually reach a steady state once World population falls to some optimum level (maybe 1 billion, perhaps less).
Dennis, do you really think that the population can decline peacefully to that level? If so, how many centuries do you think that will take?
Ron,
It can happen in a couple hundred years. Depends on future choices families make about family size.
do you really think that the population can decline peacefully to that level?
Just look at Japan: their population is starting to decline sharply, and there’s no sign of violence.
Their fertility level is 62% of replacement. That means that in very roughly one generation their population will decline 38% about every generation, or about every 25 years, like this:
Year Population
0 100.0
25 68.0
50 46.2
75 31.4
100 21.4
125 14.5
150 9.9
So, at about 135 years you’re at about 12.5%, or 1/8 of the original population.
Nick G, Japan has had population decline in an era of increasing fossil fuel use world wide, and of course in isolation it looks easy to do without violence.
Now picture how Japan will get along in a world of falling energy use, where they can’t import their every whim of food as countries everywhere struggle with less fuel for tractors, heavy transport and shipping.
You just don’t get it that there is a vast difference from increasing fossil fuel use, which we’ve had for 200 years, especially oil more recently, and declining energy availability during the decline. A world where the easy to get, cheap oil declines first leaving the more energy expensive oil so the decline will be rapid, as more oil is used to get access to the last remaining oil..
Hi Ron,
Dennis constrains himself, for good reasons of his own, to hard numbers arguments.
Some body just said upthread someplace that Rome was never rebuilt, that the ruins are the end of the story.
Well, as it so happens, the Italian people are among the foremost of the world’s engineers… having for instance designed and manufactured the machinery Tesla uses to manufacture unitized electric cars, made by casting giant parts, rather than welding together hundreds of smaller parts.
Now about the population declining to a billion or less……. Dennis talk much when it comes to the Four Horsemen.
I’ve spent a truly substantial part of my life trying to understand the BIG PICTURE as best I can, meaning I’ve read as many history books as anybody, other than actual historians, lol. I know the abc’s of biology, geography, math, geology, agriculture, and human nature. ETC
Now maybe I’m entirely wrong, but from my perspective, the odds are VERY high the world wide population is going to decline substantially within the next few decades. There are dozens of realistic scenarios that could result in the population falling to one billion or less before this century is out.
Most of these scenarios involve violence on the grand scale, up to and including a flat out NBC WWIII……. which could leave the population well under a billion, within a matter of the next few days, months, or years.
The climate is going nuts, and hundreds of millions of people are going to die hard as a consequence.
More are going to die because they can’t afford to import such necessities as fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, food even if their local climate is still viable.
Wars are already ongoing, and will imo inevitably be spreading like weeds over the coming decades…… meaning more people dead well into the millions in lots of places.
If you ask Dennis in so many words what he thinks about what I have to say, my guess is that he’ll say he hopes I’m wrong…… but that he understands that I MIGHT be right.
OFM,
Hard to know how things will play out. When I think back say 40 or 50 years, I could not have foreseen the technological progress we have made in the past half century, lots of bad stuff may occur, and lots of technological progress may also occur. It is possible we reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid catastrophe (this is unclear at this point), population will fall due to reduced family size, even without wars or a climate crisis, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and nuclear can be ramped up to replace fossil fuel.
Sure none of this might happen, in which case the doomer scenario is baked in. My belief is that with good policy the doomer scenario can either be avoided entirely or at least mitigated, but the fact is that nobody knows the future, as they say it has not been written.
Recycling is not magic and has mostly been a greenwashing exercise in the same accounting trickery as the gifting money to charity each time to tally up at McDonald’s. Ignoring that most metals that can be recycled and are very easy, relative to other manmade materials, simply are not anywhere near 90%, this isn’t going to get anyone very far.
There is a global shortage of scrap iron/steel, for instance, which has been one of the many criticisms for the UK shutting down virgin iron works and going to the “greener” electric arc furnaces that can only work on non-pig iron hand me downs.
This is a roundabout way of saying that there is nothing sustainable about modern industrial society. Oil running out, or getting pricey, is just one of the more immediate concerns. Finance eating itself (TRPF sucks for capital) and loss of working age population along with increasing precarity of such workers and lack of good health due to pollution will help unwind a lot of this soft landing planning.
Look what COVID did to the American workforce, among other nations. Imagining as if the USA could manage with an actual big crisis over a longer period with far more moving parts when a simple virus control exercise knocked everyone for six (despite the hilarious MSM puff pieces about everything being okay actually) just makes me facepalm.
Speaking of COVID, one wonders whether it will be possible to sustain the practice of modern, mainstream, western medicine in an environment of declining resources and decreasing complexity? If we can no longer manufacture solar panels and EVs, how are we going to be able to run the high tech labs and research centres that produce new (patentable) drugs? It strikes me as a little odd that people who like to crow about declining energy intensity and decreased complexity of our civilization seem just fine with ever more complex medical technology and dependence on an industry (Big Pharma) that is more than likely unsustainable in the picture of the future they like to paint.
Just look at the current craze over Ozempic, a drug developed to treat type 2 diabetes. The active ingredient has a side effect of suppressing appetites resulting in weight loss in many of the people that take the weekly injection that helps lower blood sugar by helping the pancreas make more insulin. The drug has recently been praised as a weight loss medication by Oprah Winfrey who has struggled for years with her weight.
The doctors I’m listening to these days are asserting that type 2 diabetes is more often than not preventable as well as reversible through a regimen of proper diet and exercise. The western food industry is producing food that is a pharma executives wet dream and is largely responsible for the epidemic of obesity in the west and increasingly across the world. When I go to the supermarket I see a lot of food that is primarily carbohydrates (starches and sugar), salt, oils, protein (eggs, meats and beans) and dairy products. In other words all the stuff that modern agriculture produces in abundance. The fresh produce (fruits and vegetables) takes up probably ten percent or less of the floor space in the supermarket. Fast food is designed to be addictive and isn’t particularly nutritious. One problem is that the most nutritious food is the most perishable, probably the reason why it ain’t cheap, so people ending up eating food that is convenient and affordable but, likely to lead to long term, chronic, non communicable health problems. Throw in a lack of outdoor activity and good sunshine (vitamin D) and you have a petri dish of under performing immune systems just waiting for some pathogen or the other to take hold.
So rather than focus on the root causes of the epidemic of obesity and ill health the world is tending (being led) to turn to the pharmaceutical industry to come up with solutions to problems of our own making. I guess this is a great time to be in the business of food and drugs.
Expect more stories like this:
Why are we so ill? The working-age health crisis https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68849843
From personal experience, I cannot recall a time in near two decades of work where people have been off so often as now.
BB article on recycling:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-24/battery-recycling-shatters-the-myth-of-ev-battery-waste?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxNDA1MzU4NSwiZXhwIjoxNzE0NjU4Mzg1LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTQ0dDQzREV0xVNjgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJFQjMzQUE3MEVBN0Q0QjdFOUJEMjRENjc4OTY3NjRDQyJ9.z9KoipE3GDUY_lHMysQDCjxgrWXatqfNud0KOZ2EBmU
“The Stanford report found that recycling batteries used 79% less energy and resulted in 55% fewer CO2 emissions compared to traditional refining. Additional savings come from keeping the recycling supply chain local compared to the globe-circling refining process for freshly extracted minerals. Closing the loop brings the total CO2 savings to 80%.”
Rgds
A few other problems: Dams (concrete) have a design life of about a 50 to 100 years, but many of their components only last 20 to 50 years. They could silt up before this limit. The increased volatility of drought and flood cycle could easily mean a couple of consecutive bad years during which the site would have to be abandoned. Three or four degrees of warming will mean most areas become too climatically unstable to allow reliable agriculture. Once we get to three degrees there is probably no stopping before full hot house conditions arrive. Any stable area will be quickly be overrun by psychopaths. In fifty years we’ve wiped out 70% of wildlife, similar proportions of insects, marine life, plants, and that is accelerating. We haven’t lost too many species yet but that is likely to change soon; it is extreme hubris to think any humans are going to survive without the ecological services from other species that we coevolved with.
It is generally accepted that if you can get past five years old life as a hunter-gatherer and occasional gardener is much preferable to one trying to exist on a marginal subsistence farm and maybe to that of a modern, cubicle bound, smart phone obsessed, debt slave.
No…….. the industries that formed the base of the industrial economy a century, two centuries, or three centuries back did NOT generally depend on imports from the far corners of the world.
The English did depend on the American colonies for timber for warships, and we depended on them, early on, for HARDWARE for ships……… but we pretty much had everything we needed for ship building available domestically, excepting sail making materials… and we could produce hemp domestically as well.
We pretty much had everything we needed, in general terms, to run a war time economy here in the USA, excepting rubber… and it wasn’t long before we learned how to make good rubber for tires.
You guys who say it can’t be done are simply failing to consider that when it HAS to be done, it will get done. I own a few machines that run just fine that don’t have a single computer chip of any sort at all.
They GET THE JOB DONE.
I’m NOT talking about business as usual….. but rather about what is possible once resources of all sorts are ever scarcer, and ever more expensive, to the point that in the end, they’re simply unavailable.
I can only conclude that people who think ” it can’t be done” have never devoted as much as the time needed to read a couple of serious books about how war time economies actually work.
If the materials usually used to manufacture automobiles are needed for guns….. automobile production ceases.
Right now it’s true that the USA is utterly dependent on having a hundred million or more personal automobiles. In a fucking SURVIVAL situation, with the government, democratic, autocratic, Stalinist, or whatever, trucks run doing ESSENTIAL work.
Delivering potato chips, or frozen pizza, or beer, or cosmetics, is not essential work. The people working in industries dealing in such goods will be on welfare……. or put to work at other jobs deemed ESSENTIAL to survival. If a house or apartment building burns, it won’t be replaced….. the people living there will double up someplace.
Surgeons won’t be doing butt tucks and face lifts. Lawyers won’t be getting rich from divorce settlements. Plumbers will be working but hairdressers won’t…… except maybe from home in exchange for food or other favors.
And while there may or will inevitable come a time when it’s no longer possible to do so, powerful countries with ample military assets will simply TAKE what they MUST have from countries that are unable or unwilling to export such essentials.
It’s accepted wisdom that a country such as the USA can’t win against a local people determined to protect themselves….. and this is pretty much true….. assuming we Yankees ( or Russians or whoever) play by “civilized” rules.
But once the name of the game is survival at any cost….. well now….. it’s not at all impossible, or even hard, to just ” kill’m all and let God sort’m out.”
There weren’t any computer chips used in the electrical grid in the early fifties, nor in the water and sewer grids serving local cities.
In a fucking SURVIVAL situation, we won’t be needing copper for new houses. We’ll be living in existing housing, period, assuming……. we’re among the living.
And in any case….. anybody who thinks giving up on going green and sustainable is going to result in the preservation of any remaining pristine portions of the environment simply has his head up his ass so far he’ll never see daylight, period. I beg pardon for being so blunt, but you’re all just plain wearing your own pink eyeglasses, wearing your own blinders, when you argue that giving up on renewables means SAVING the environment.
You don’t HAVE a plan or a solution of any fucking sort…. other than to somehow assume staying on the broad smooth fossil fuel highway to hell will somehow magically lead us to SOME PLACE OTHER THAN HELL.
Anything you presume can be done to help without working on going green can be done IN CONJUNCTION with going green.
I’m NOT in favor of destroying what should be a national park to build aluminum smelters running on coal.
Repeating that argument has nothing to do with actually going green…… it’s bullshit, it’s a straw man argument about capitalism versus ( informed and reasonable ) socialism.
BUT…….. whether those aluminum smelters are built there, or not…… that land will inevitably be “raped and pillaged” if we stay on the fossil fuel highway. The ONLY reasonable scenario to the contrary involves the collapse of the industrial economy, and the population, BEFORE we get around to ripping it up and using the land for grazing cattle, or raising corn or soybeans or whatever.
Well……. in that case……. the anti renewable argument consists mostly of moral posturing, preening one’s superior moral superiority.
Mother Nature is entirely incapable of giving a flying fuck, and no matter what we do, or don’t do, She’ll continue to do HER thing, without planning, without thought, without making any sort of decisions……. because She’s not sentient, She doesn’t work that way at all.
In an eyeblink, on HER time scale or frame, a few thousand years, maybe a million years, after we’re altogether GONE, extinct, this planet will be teeming with life again……. even if we go flat out chemical, nuclear and biological with WWIII.
SHE won’t give a fuck about the KINDS of life present here in the future…….. So……. other than worshiping Her…….. why should we…… because after all, we’re not going to be here ANYWAY, unless we DO go green and sustainable.
This is not about forever……. it’s about NOW, and about what we DO or don’t do, over the next few decades, the next few generations.
We’re not going to RUN OUT of oil or gas or coal or water or any other resource in any ultimate sense anytime soon. That’s a bullshit argument, in reality. The real question is what we will DO with whatever oil, gas, coal, water, aluminum, topsoil, etc still available …….. but at ever increasing cost and ever decreasing availability, on our current path.
It’s very common for anti renewable talking heads to point out that there’ll be ” forty million tons of useless old turbine blades laying around ” in a decade or two. What such talking heads never mention is that the amount of equally useless coal ash produced by burning enough coal to make an equivalent amount of electricity is even bigger.
And incidentally…… those blades CAN be recycled. They’re not worth much if anything at the moment, due to the limited supply and the cost of transporting them to far away recycling facilities.
But as the supply grows, the value paradoxically grows as well……… because recycling them depends on having volume enough to scale up the job.
Now before anybody has a chance to remind me to take my meds, I’m going to take them immediately after hitting the post comment button, lol.
Two hundred or so years ago USA industry and trade was based on slaves going to the Caribbean and Americas; cotton, sugar and other commodities going to UK and Europe; and various manufactured goods going to West Africa and some onto the Americas with more slaves. The US depended very much on imports – primarily of slaves, effectively cheap energy, who were then expected to “get the job done”.
Commerce was indeed dependent on the slave trade. Industry was largely in the north, non-slave, states. That was true from the 1700’s until pretty much the middle of the 20th century when the “southern strategy” used the cheap labor in the southern states to break the unions.
Do you REALLY believe that as the population grew, that there wouldn’t have been PLENTY of people to do the work done by slaves?
I know half a dozen or so people personally who are doing the work formerly done by slaves, even today. I’m still doing a good bit of it myself, for instance cutting, splitting,transporting and burning wood to stay warm in the winter. My grand parents spent the majority of their days doing pretty much the same farm work as was done by slaves, the only real difference being that they had I C E tractors and trucks. I knew my great grand parents, from my own child hood days. They didn’t have much of anything slaves didn’t have, materially, but they obviously did have MORE of such things, and better quality, from food to shelter to clothing to medical care, etc……. and they did have something absolutely priceless in addition…… their own personal freedom.
Some of my cousins still get their drinking water from the same spring my maternal grandmother got hers as a child and young mother.. toting it uphill a bucket at a time…… but since about the time I was born, she and my grandfather were finally able to afford an electric pump, wire, and pipe to avoid that chore forevermore. ( Some others of the family had gravity powered running water a generation or two prior to that.)
It wasn’t very long at all before we were manufacturing such items, other than luxury items, locally, as were needed ….. it didn’t take very long, in historical terms, to build foundries to make our own cannons, make our own steel, etc.
We were about as fast or faster than any other country to build good locomotives in significant numbers, etc.
It was NICE for rich people to have table China, silk for clothing, etc…… but not at all NECESSARY to the functioning of the local economy.
Trade on the grand scale obviously contributes enormously to overall prosperity for just about everybody.
But it’s not by any means always necessary to the functioning of a local or regional economy, at the usual scale, given time for the economy to adapt.
A country such as England, with millions of ancient old houses that are just about impossible to heat except by burning huge amounts of coal, can change it’s ways, and any new housing built can be built to be energy efficient.
The worst of the old but obviously durable old housing can be abandoned, or repurposed, or upgraded, over time…… so that the annual energy need per capita can be expected to decline quite substantially…..
Now consider this savings in addition to a declining population, a declining living standard due to necessary austerity measures, changes in lifestyle due to austerity, etc, and maybe the need for gas for heating homes declines to pretty close to zero, eventually…… Let’s not forget the English had an empire before they had gas heat in their houses.
I’m not arguing about maintaining anything approaching the status quo. I’m arguing that industrial civilization and the benefits thereof can at least in theory continue to exist once we are forced by circumstances ( depletion, war, cultural and economic collapse, environmental collapse, etc) to give up the use of fossil fuels on the grand scale.
There’s a little road side museum not too far from my home dedicated to the display of a couple of the very earliest successful so called ” reapers” used to harvest grain using horse power rather than human muscle power.
The man who built these machines didn’t have very much to work with…… a forge, hand tools, and steel or wrought iron also produced within the same general part of the country.
We don’t actually have to have more than maybe one truck out of every ten we have today to maintain a workable industrial economy. I’m no commie sympathizer, but consider the number of trucks on the roads in a country such as Russia……. take away the trucks and cars devoted to military tasks, and there wouldn’t be a traffic jam anywhere in the entire country, except maybe around Moscow, lol…… the highways would be virtually deserted……. but they do still have an industrial economy…. and most of the people do have electricity, most of them get their food from stores, clothing from stores, etc.
Of course they keep it running by selling oil and gas….. as the Chinese (used to ) keep theirs humming by selling ( mostly ) manufactured junk to Americans. But I can’t see any REAL reason why the Chinese can’t sell their own junk to their own workers…. exporting only enough to pay for necessary imported raw materials.
Now in case they CAN’T import essential raw materials…… can’t substitute other materials……. well, their economy will inevitably either collapse or shrink to the point it can persist .
Collapse is pretty much baked in, for a huge portion of the human race.
I differ with Carnot and company in arguing that collapse need not be the universal fate of humanity. I argue that some of us in some places have a fair to decent shot at successfully transitioning to a sustainable economy based on renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, changes in our lifestyles, reduced expectations, etc.
Furthermore the very same professional people who argue it can’t be done seldom have a word to say about new technologies that will help us get the job done. I can’t say what these technologies will be…….. but it’s just about dead sure there will be some coming into commercial production over the coming years.
Some of them will be new, some will be refinements of existing technologies.
We can cut the amount of energy needed to produce domestic hot water by as much as ninety to even one hundred percent by using solar domestic hot water systems… and such a system designed for a single family home can save several times as much energy over it’s lifetime as was needed to manufacture and install it, and the materials used to build it can be recycled. If it’s actually BUILT to last, nearly all of it should easily last up to a century, maybe even longer. Glass lasts, water pipes filled with a non corrosive antifreeze solution last, steel with baked on paint lasts, or can be repainted, etc. Copper or black painted absorption tubing lasts circulating non corrosive water.
Only the heat exchanger and maybe a cheap little pump will NEED attention on a routine basis, maybe once a decade or so.
In reality, it costs only a trivial extra amount in terms of labor and material to super insulate a refrigerator. You know what they say about building a new house…….. when you take EVERYTHING into consideration, it costs maybe five to ten percent more to go with brick………. but you get a house that won’t ever need new siding, or a new paint job…… plus brick is termite proof too. That extra ten percent pays huge dividends over the years, assuming the job is done right.
I’m not saying brick will always be available…….. but hopefully we won’t be dealing with a sudden collapse. The economy will most likely shrink in fits and spurts over time, quite possibly over two or three generations, maybe even longer.
There’s time to adapt, time to go proactive in some respects. There’s probably time enough to pull it off, at least for some people in some places.
Consider medical care. The nearest two hospitals to my home do just about any sort of routine surgery up to but not including heart transplants and such.
Maybe in forty years, they’ll only be doing routine surgery of the sort common forty or fifty years, or a hundred years ago, assuming they’re still in operation. So today’s young man won’t be getting a new knee locally……. and maybe no new knee any place at all.
That’s a personal disaster for him…….. but for local society, it’s a trivial problem, in terms of the big picture. We’ll probably be having three quarters FEWER amputations due to diabetes…….. because we’ll be eating less junk food, getting more exercise. There’s usually a bright spot or two in any black cloud, if you look for it.
Nothing succeeds like success itself……. because success builds or enhances confidence, will power, determination, teamwork.
And if in the end…… we lose, there’s no successful transition…… what have we ACTUALLY lost, other than the work put into the effort?
If we DON’T succeed, we stand to lose just about everything ANYWAY.
We can backslide to a pre industrial era economy just as easily having tried the green route as having ignored it.
An astonishingly good idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZct-itCwPE
Incredible Process Of Making Pressure Cooker From Soda Canes Recycling (YouTube)
Not sure what they use to heat their furnace in the first four minutes or so of the video but, it ain’t renewable!
Here’s another example (I watch them at 2x speed, one of the “settings” in YouTube). Looks like they’re using some sort of gas as the fuel.
Amazing Aluminum Recycling Process and Tour of a Bars Making Factory
So the question is, why hasn’t technology like the stuff in the two videos linked below been used to provide the process heat to recycle aluminum?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4vea9vCWbY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAkWiQSwfwM
It’s a rhetorical question really, it’s easier and more convenient to just burn some fuel or the other,
Crash, Collapse, decline, Seneca Cliff. We all wonder about these things. A 2% decline per year in population. What would that really look like. 2 more people die out of a hundred in excess of the birth rate. That would reduce world population by 50% in 35 years. Food shortages, medicine shortages, violence. Hmm what would a 2% decline feel like. Is that a decline, a crash or a collapse?
I think we face a decade +/- of can kicking based on oil and gas forecasts. I think it will be basically stagflation. Growth in some sectors, contraction in others. In the US there are a lot of discretionary things that can be sacrificed (unwillingly). It is always the poor and the aged living at the margins that will suffer first and the most. More people will slide down the economic ladder at all income levels. After 2040, Well who knows. Might start getting grim. Forecasts are best done by examining a wide range of possibilities, clearly stating your assumptions and assigning probabilities. Even then they will likely be wrong. Trying to guess the timing or getting down to a level of meaningful regional granularity is a fools errand. Having said that, there are things that you can do to position ones self to be more self reliant and if you are to early to the parade, well you are not so bad off by being more self reliant anyhow.
China reports EV share in new car market exceed 50% in the first 2 weeks of April, 2024.
In 2020, China set a goal for EV shale in new car market to exceed 50% in 2035.
“His long, black robes dangled from beneath his right hand as he waved it down, like a man addressing his dog.”
Lets not degrade dogs by comparing them to Trump
“What happens in the next few months could indicate whether Earth’s climate has undergone a fundamental shift…” – Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. It’s looking more like a “fundamental shift” every day, with simple curve fitting showing a change from 0.3 degrees per decade to about one degree per decade over the last two years. The UK used to be known as wet and dreary (actually a bit misguidedly, at least away from the west coast) but with our weather systems now coming at us having passed over Atlantic waters that are five degrees warmer we’re into a new pluvial and deluvial phase.
I mentioned Daniel Dennett’s death in the oil thread, which should have been posted here.
On the issue of “free will,” I agree much more with Robert Sapolsky than with Dennett, but, man, I love the guy! I saw him give a talk at the Portland Public Library in Maine many years ago and had him sign my copy of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” This video is just mind-blowing, about memes, religion . . . and ants!
https://youtu.be/KzGjEkp772s?si=45iPLD-888tzpjBf
Thanks for posting about Dennett Mike. I have read much of his work. I once owned a copy of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, but I lost it in all the moving around I have done. But I got most of his work from YouTube. Dennett was a strong materialist. I would even say he was a dogmatic materialist as materialism was the driving force in most of his arguments. Of course, he believed that consciousness was an emergent property of the brain, as all materialists do. But he went a bit further; he believed consciousness was an illusion. However, as a dualist, I disagreed with him on most things.
But it cannot be denied he was a great philosopher and will be missed.
Up above Nick pointed out that Japan was starting to decline in population, and that it has been peaceful thus far.
Well, consider that the fairly homogeneous culture of Japan imports about 94% of its primary energy consumption, almost 100% in the form of fossil fuel. Many believe that fossil fuel importation will become a much more unreliable activity over the next few decades. I do.
Last time Japan was short on energy supply and other raw materials they set out on an extremely aggressive military campaign. It didn’t go well for anyone.
I’m not predicting a repeat of that episode, but other versions will occur between and within various countries.
I wish that global population decline would be a smooth and gradual process.
But it won’t.
Just look at what happening in the middle east in places like Syria, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Yemen, and Sudan through the lens of overpopulation to get an early glimpse of the troubles we should expect.
These places, like most places in the world, are grossly overextended when it comes to the local supply of water, energy, and/or food. If you add in the instability of hotter/dryer conditions and higher energy prices with the resultant inflation of food costs, you have the recipe for severe strife.
Anywhere.
Hickory,
The main point is that population can decline due to lower rates of fertility, this demographic transiltion has occurred already in nations whose combined populations are over 50% of the World total, most nations are making rapid progress in reducing total fertility ratio (average number of live births per woman over their lives).
There my be adequate energy supply particularly if the World builds out solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear power. This would be best as it would tend to reduce carbon emissions. At the same time better access for girls and women to higher education would tend to rapidly reduce fertility rates while also building human capital. Less people and less fossil fuel consumption might give humanity a shot, but it will by no means be an easy task.
Dennis, This bit is where your argument falls apart…
“There my be adequate energy supply particularly if the World builds out solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear power.”
We are doing this by increasing fossil fuel use, to the detriment of the environment. We need lots more minerals, meaning new mines to supply those minerals. these mines are of increasingly lower grades of ores, requiring more energy to extract the minerals. The mines on average are in more remote locations, meaning destroying more natural habitat in the area of the mines and the roads leading to them.
It’s all built using fossil fuels, diesel mainly.
Recycling that you promote is not possible for the first generation of all this new equipment we need for the transition, that is simply not happening!! We are using more coal now than ever before on a world wide basis, the only metric that counts. Individual countries like Australia are claiming to be going green by importing machines, pipes, cable, electronics, appliances, cars and every other modern convenience made with diesel, gas and coal from elsewhere, mainly China.
The buildout needs to be multiples of what’s happened so far and the technology improvements we have only came with increased complexity of the overall system. How many factories around the world are involved in making a smart phone, how many different processes to make all the separate parts?
Dennis C “Possible that fossil fuel will be available for those who can pay for it”.
Again with the handwave assumption. Today’s fossil fuel extraction is a highly complex process, relying upon machinery, consumables and parts from around the world. It’s not a simple drill a hole 100 feet deep and oil gushes to the surface anymore. Once we get into steep decline of production, the complexity of civilization unwinds and the machinery, expertise, consumables and parts all become much more scarce, leading to reductions across the board. It’s just another feedback loop that makes the decline happen much faster than most people think possible..
All your concepts about the future, make the assumption of ongoing complexity, more technology and growth, which is exactly what made this mess of overshoot we are in, including ecosystem damage.
We will not be causing less ecosystem damage by destroying rainforest trying to go green, nor will be be burning less fossil fuels to go green, the new Indonesian Aluminium smelters planned to burn coal to do so, is testament to this.
Less energy, and there will be less, once oil production starts falling rapidly and the problems crop up all over the place at the same time, multiplying the speed of simplification of the overall system. If drillers can’t get the parts or the experts to operate the drills, then drilling doesn’t happen.
Hideaway,
I agree the system is complex, your handwavy assumption is that the complex system unravels very quickly as oil output decreases. That is your key assumption, but it remains unproven. About half of the increase in World Primary Energy Consumption Growth over the 2011 to 2022 period came from non fossil fuel sources (Statistical Review of World Energy). Fossil fuel energy consumption grew at 0.75% per year over this period while non fossil fuel energy consumption grew at 4.1% per year, total primary energy consumption grew at 1.3% per year over this period. Oil consumption grew at about 7% per year from 1933 to 1973 and was demand constrained over this period. If we assume depletion of fossil fuel leads to increased fossil fuel prices in the future we could see non-fossil fuel consumption growth gradually accelerate to 7% per year.
In the scenario below I assume primary energy consumption continues to grow at 1.3% per year (it may actually be less as population growth slows and greater use of electricity and renewables leads to lower heat losses than in 2022). I also assume non-fossil fuel energy consumption growth accelerates (4%, 4.5%, …, 6.5%, 7%) by half a percent over several years, reaching 7% per year in 2029 and then remaining at that growth rate until 2050.
Dennis. “That is your key assumption, but it remains unproven”.
Of course it remains unproven, but is certainly the logical approach. We have had 200 + years of increasing fossil fuel use and during that time have achieved immense technological gains, where machines were built that do the work of hundreds of people and animals.
At sometime soon we are going to have a reversal of this trend of fossil fuel use, with oil being the main fossil fuel used. It will be oil that has contracting production once we pass the peak.
The illogical assumption is that all the technology gains we have had, only because of increasing fossil fuel use, will continue as fossil fuels use contracts, starting with oil. In fact oil production contraction will also contract coal and gas production as they both rely upon modern diesel machines for their extraction.
Likewise for the mining, processing, manufacturing and deployment of every other form of energy production. They all rely upon cheap oil and fossil fuels to build.
You talk of electrifying rail and using it instead of diesel trucks, plus a lot more recycling of everything, yet where is it all? Do you expect it to all be built once oil contraction starts in earnest?
What energy is going to be used to build these new ways of doing things in a world of contracting energy?? Who misses out?? The energy has to be taken off other users of energy in a world of falling energy production.
These ‘other’ users will already be under pressure from the overall energy contraction, so will have already cut their energy use to the bone assuming we are using market forces. The following year, even more contraction, before we allocate energy to build new recycling facilities and machinery, more train lines and train carriages, stations etc.
In other words you are expecting MORE building, MORE machinery, MORE processes, all done in a world of an accelerating decline in availability of energy.
Dennis your key assumption of lots more building of ‘new things’ in a world of declining energy, is just as unproven as my assumptions. My assumption is that we wouldn’t have had our modern technological world without fossil fuels, and we wont have it without fossil fuels. Our peak of technology will coincide with the peak in fossil fuel use..
Also an underlying reality check.. Despite 2 centuries of increasing fossil fuel use and the damage it’s done to the climate and ecosystems everywhere, we have only managed to bring approximately 15% of all humanity into the modern technological civilization that those with the ability to read this post enjoy. Falling fossil fuel production will increase scarcity of energy for even these lucky 15%, with higher prices reducing the percentage of humanity that can afford energy use like today.
The complexity we have with modern civilization is only possible because of the huge numbers involved. A reduced population of participants means a simplification of complexity. This you can learn from Joe Tainter’s “Collapse of Complex Societies”.
Dennis every time you state, “We’ll do this……” when oil production is in major contraction, means a major build out of ‘something’ and probably a lot of different ‘somethings’. You never ever bother to work out how much new materials or energy it will take, nor where any of it comes from.
Even the simplest aspects, like better insulation for homes, retrofitting all existing homes, putting in double or triple glazing in windows, thick insulation in cavity spaces, means a vast increase in materials to do that, meaning more mines of some type, more processing, more manufacturing, more distribution.
Recycling more, sounds easy, when that’s the only mention of it, providing you don’t think of all the new building needed for it (specially designed), the machinery in these plants the trucking of all the inputs, the new trucks themselves, the energy the plant runs on, the consumables it uses. In other words a vast new industry needs building mostly from the ground up, in a world of declining energy availability.
Because so many people refuse to look at the overall problem of our modern complex civilization, and expect the ‘solution’ to be build MORE (nuclear, solar, wind, EVs, triple glazed windows, fertilizer from recycling human waste in cities etc, etc , or whatever), it’s simply not going to work and guarantees collapse of our civilization in the process of trying.
I fully expect lots of people pointing out MORE solar, wind, EVs etc next year, when we have used MORE fossil fuels to build them. Every year we just build a higher base of energy use, based mostly on fossil fuels.
Total growth of non fossil fuels energy since 2008 is about 4,500Twh, while fossil fuel growth has been around 18,500Twh during the same period. It doesn’t matter how you divide the numbers, in the world I live in 18,500Twh is always higher than 4,500Twh, if you divide by 1 or by 8B, the result is still the same. Perhaps you should check your source of information Dennis, or their methodology, unless you claim Our World in Data energy numbers are wrong. Their sources of information are..
Energy Institute and V. Smil
Hideaway,
The per capita numbers come out differently. Using Our World in Data (which may calculate the average thermal efficiency of fossil fuels differently than my source) from 2013 to 2022 about half of the increase in energy consumption came from non-fossil fuel with the rate of growth at 2.8% per year vs fossil fuel growth at 072% per year over those 10 years. Wind and solar combined grew at about 16% per year over those 10 years.
My source is at link below
https://www.energyinst.org/__data/assets/excel_doc/0007/1055545/EI-stats-review-all-data.xlsx
The fact is that non-fossil fuel use has been expanding and will gradually repace fossil fuel use over time as it has been doing for the past 20 years. All of the increase in non-fossil fuel energy consumption from 2018 to 2022 was from wind and solar power, a roughly 16% annual rate of increase over that 4 year period (about the same rate has been maintained for a decade).
Chart from Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy.
Scenario below assumes wind and solar grow at 15.7% per year from 2023 to 2030 and thereafter the annual rate of increase falls by 1% per year until reaching 7% annual growth which is then sustained until 2050. Other non-fossil fuel energy consumption is assumed to remain constant from 2023 to 2050 and Total energy consumption is assumed to continue to grow at a 1.18% annual rate from 2023 to 2050 (this was the rate from 2013 to 2022).
Dennis, the problem is those numbers use the substitution method, which multiplies actual non-fossil fuel output by a factor of 2.5. It’s a standard case of GIGO to try and change reality.
This substitution method assumes all coal gas and oil are effectively burned for electricity, and electricity is the only use of fossil fuels. That’s what it effectively shows and how it’s used.
I’ve seen this garbage turn up all over the place in discussions of energy production.
I wrote a post on this over at un-denial.
https://un-denial.com/2024/01/21/by-hideaway-energy-and-electricity/
If they really wanted to be realistic, they would have reduced the coal, gas and oil used for electricity production by the average efficiency factor, and left renewables at actual output. However, this method would show just how small renewables are in total energy used, even after allowing for the inefficiencies of burning coal and gas for electricity.
Also both hydro and nuclear energy production are multiplied by the same 2.5 times, when the electricity from both these sources is far more valuable because of the consistency of continuous production compared to the intermittency issue with renewables.
All non electricity energy consumption comes to ~105,600Twh in 2022, with electricity consumption another 28,600Twh. Of the electricity supply solar and wind contributed just 3,408Twh. Multiply that number by your 15.7% growth rate takes renewable electricity up to ~10,900Twh by 2030, still only 10% of all energy use. (Of course no-one ever bothers to take off old solar/wind that’s retired, it’s assumed all new installations are add ons).
Plus of course it misses out all the important products made from fossil fuels, with no allowance for the horrible inefficiencies of trying to turn renewable electricity into ‘products’.
Hideaway,
Not sure we have a Worldwide average efficiency factor, probably about half of fossil fuel primary energy becomes waste heat, I have guessed at 30% efficiency for oil use, 35% for coal used in power plants and 90% efficiency for all other uses of coal, for natural gas I assume 45% average efficiency for electric power plants and 90% efficiency in furnaces or boilers (in heating uses). By this measure non-fossil fuel energy accounts for about 15% of total exergy and useful heat use in the World in 2022. Non-fossil fuel output will continue to grow and it will start to displace fossil fuel use as the World attempts to reduce carbon emissions.
Hideaway,
When we account for waste heat and look at exergy plus useful heat, the total is about 80,375 TWh for the World (includes electricity output). Non-fossil electricity output is about 11488 TWh, about 15% of 80375 total and only 3427 TWh of output is from wind and solar (4.3% of total). This could grow to 47% of total exergy plus useful heat by 2050 and perhaps a higher proportion as heat pumps replace boilers and furnaces and reduce natural gas use for heating of buildings and water and as steel making moves to less carbon intensive processes. There will be enough fossil fuel to use as a material input where substitutes do not exist, less will be burned and more will be available for non-combustion uses.
There will be enough fossil fuel to use as a material input where substitutes do not exist,
Have you identified what that might include? I think you’re agreeing to a premise that doesn’t make sense. There really aren’t any FF applications where substitutes don’t exist. At minimum, synthetic replacements (H2, syn-diesel, methanol, ammonia, etc) can be used for any FF input, produced with non-FF energy.
Dennis, your numbers were multiplied by 2.5 to account for the overall efficiency of fossil fuels being 40%. That’s what you used!!
So don’t come back to the discussion stating you don’t know what the efficiency is, when the numbers YOU used already had it built in!!
None of what you wrote changed the simple fact that fossil fuel use has increased by ~18,500Twh since 2008 and by you latest set of numbers TOTAL energy output from solar and wind are only 3,427Twh.
This CLEARLY means that fossil fuel use since 2008 has increased by around 6 times the TOTAL supplied by solar and wind!!
It doesn’t matter if you divide both numbers by 8 billion to get the per capita rate or whatever other games you want to play with the numbers, the growth in fossil fuel use has vastly outpaced solar and wind output, yet you want to twist the numbers by stating otherwise. I’m talking the raw numbers which is what’s assumed in your original comment where you didn’t qualify it at all.
Your claim was, and I quote “From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”.
It’s a patently false statement, and I understand that multiplying the actual output of electricity from non fossil fuel sources by 2.5 confused you, because most sources these days, don’t highlight this sleight of hand at all.
What I’m disappointed at is your attempt to justify the incorrect numbers and your own statements of obfuscation, instead of just acknowledging you made an error by not realising the numbers were incorrect.
Nick G, ” There really aren’t any FF applications where substitutes don’t exist.”
Except there are no substitutes at anywhere near the quantity that’s needed, and to produce them is hugely energy expensive.
How about you put some numbers and details to your comments instead of the usual hand wave, “we can do” ….. ?
The Haru Oni plant has a process efficiency of currently 1.68% in making fossil fuels from renewable wind, in the best location for wind in the world. So we would expect lower efficiency from places with lower wind capacity factors.
Plus of course they are not doing the carbon capture part of the supply, they buy in their CO2.
What they have proven is that the actual process is so inefficient that it can never be economically viable. which means the world will not have the products we use from fossil fuels once they have been exhausted, meaning no insulation for copper wires that make up the ‘renewable future’.
Hideaway,
We have an estimate for all fossil fuel efficiency and it is variable over time after 2000, in 2022 it was 40.7% in the Statistical Review of World Energy, however we do not have a specific estimate for coal power and natural gas power and you are correct that much of the energy use is not for electricity production.
So I used a 35% assumption for coal power and 45% for natural gas (oil used for electricity production is insignificant we could use 38% perhaps), I used electricity output and the assumptions above to estimate the coal and natural gas energy used in the electric power sector and then assumed the rest of coal and natural gas was used for useful heat at 90% thermal efficiency, oil was assumed to mostly be used in internal combustion engines at an average efficiency of 30%. This was an attempt to estimate the total exergy and useful heat consumed by society.
In fact we don’t have good averages for these for the World. See Approximate conversion factor tab of Statistical Review of World Energy (SRWE) to see their estimates over time for all fossil fuel. From 1965 to 2000 the estimate was 36% and then increases from 36% to 40% from 2000 to 2017, from 2018 to 2050 the efficency factor is assumed to increase linearly from 40% to 45%( see methodology tab of SRWE spreadsheet).
Note that population increased from 7 billion in 2011 to about 8 billion in 2022 while fossil fuel energy incresed from 448 to 494 EJ, so fossil fuel per capita decreased from
65 GJ in 2011 to 62 GJ in 2022. Non-fossil fuel consumption was 72.1 EJ in 2011 and 110 EJ in 2022 and non-fossil fuel consumption per capita increased from 10.2GJ in 2011 to 13.8 GJ in 2022. The per capita calculations have a changing numerator and denominator so the results are different.
Dennis, once again, you made a statement without any qualification whatsoever, the statement was totally incorrect..
“From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”
It’s simply not true, why do you have so much difficulty in admitting you made a mistake?
Dennis ” The per capita calculations have a changing numerator and denominator so the results are different.”
You must be using math from a different universe form me, because you use the same numerator and denominator for both calculations, and 18,500TWh is always going to be larger than ~4,500Twh.
It’s simple, you made an incorrect statement, admit you were wrong and move on. How is this so difficult??
If you want to start taking thermal efficiencies or whatever into consideration, that is a different conversation, but start from the efficiencies of turning electricity into ‘product’, which is what we will have to do sometime in the future without fossil fuels. There is no long term if that is not possible and we are rapidly proving it’s not economically possible on a scale that allows for the complexity of civilization as we know it.
The demographic transition requires a society to reach a higher level of complexity. IE: structured educational systems, health care, old age income security, etc. A single western person who has gone through this transition uses 40 to 50 times the resources of a person from a undeveloped region of the world. The demographic transition saving the planet from over population is a tragic myth. In order to reduce birth rate we must rape the planet first. When you look at statistics through the lens of a single factor and do not connect it to the whole, your analysis, your ability to see the whole and understand the trends falls apart. We live in an ecosystem called the biosphere. Ecosystem productivity is governed by flows, energy and material, reserves and sinks, the structure of the ecosystem (trophic levels, webs, etc) must also be considered. And of course there is the issue of scale. Overshoot is not simply a matter of total population. It is a function of population X per capita resource consumption. Please consider the basic laws of ecology. We are in overshoot because we have a population that is consuming more resources than the planet can sustainably supply. We have to a) reduce consumption per capita. b) reduce population. It really is that simple.
If the green energy transition will require a very high degree of recycling of materials, please show me the comprehensive set of regulations and policies in the US requiring cars, solar panels, batteries, wind turbine blades, etc that are designed for recycling in the future. From the perspective of recycling green energy products, the future is embedded in todays policies and regulations. Time, lags, delays, feedback, think in ecological terms.
Tom,
I agree reducing population is just part of a larger puzzle.
About half of the World has made the demographic transition. I agree the amount of damage to the environment needs to be reduced, it seems both things need to be done, reduce consumption per capita and reduce population, I am not suggesting population reduction alone solves all problems, better education, reduction in fossil fuel use, and less wasteful consumption are just pieces of a a complex problem.
I would note that many focus on oil flow as the single problem that will be the downfall of civilization, others focus on climate change, both are big problems and there are soil, water, and pollution problems, and many others.
Hickory,
From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel, it has risen at an average rate of 2.47% per year over that period. It may be that future expansion of non-fossil fuel energy could offset decreasing fossil fuel energy, the faster this occurs the better.
Yes, in some regions and countries this is a pretty significant deployment.
In others very little.
Maybe population decline from lower fertility will happen in sync with energy supply decline,
on a long term graph.
But in many places I just dont’ think it will be in sync…enough to allow stability.
I think it is highly likely that there will be big population losses that will accelerate the underlying trend in lower fertility.
Hickory,
Possible that fossil fuel will be available for those who can pay for it, as has always been the case. The poor will have the same disadvantages they have always had, as nations develop this may become less of a problem particularly for those nations that focus on education as India, South Korea and many other nations have done. Good government policy can help reduce suffering. This does not mean that governments will make good choices, but it remains a possibility for citizens to choose good leaders when they are given the ability to choose.
When the World level of non-fossil fuel use increases, it leaves more fossil fuel for those who have not yet installed non-fossil fuel energy. Over time non fossil fuel use may fall in to a cost level that makes fossil fuel use seem prohibitively expensive. This may take some time.
HICKORY —
Yes, in some regions and countries this is a pretty significant deployment.
In others very little.
It’s normal for new technology to enter the market patchily.
Dennis, “From 2008 to 2022 all of the increase in World Energy Consumption per capita has come from non-fossil fuel”
That’s just plain wrong. From Our World in Data, fossil fuel use since 2008 to 2022 has gone up by 18,883Twh while increase in Hydro and Total solar and wind is only 4,734Twh (nuclear has actually fallen in this period but I didn’t subtract that amount). Whether it’s world total or per capita makes no difference whatsoever, fossil fuel use has grown a lot more than renewables during the same period. Plus a decent percentage of the fossil fuel increase is in products, something that is not supplied by solar, wind, hydro or nuclear, yet they ALL use lots of ‘product’ from fossil fuels, like plastics, polymers etc..
Hideaway,
Data from Statistical Review of World Energy
Last time Japan was short on energy supply and other raw materials they set out on an extremely aggressive military campaign.
I took a quick look at the history, and it does look like that was one of their reasons. OTOH, Japan’s post-WWII mercantile strategy has been far more successful in achieving prosperity and a trade surplus despite a high level of commodity imports.
It would be interesting to look at their current energy strategy.
A lot of people, here on TOD and elsewhere, seem to have lost faith in the ability of civilization to run properly. Why is that? Kevin Drum has a suggestion:
“Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. Why? Because we have Fox News and the others don’t. Oh, they have tabloids and conservative newspapers and so forth, but nothing like Fox News, which makes its living by spreading outrage over the way the country is run.
The power of Fox News is truly spectacular. Outrage sells, and the fact that one of the two major parties amplifies Fox uncritically means it has a surprisingly large influence in setting the agenda for the mainstream media too.
The truth is that US institutions mostly operate about as well as they ever have. But Fox pushes outrage over Dr. Fauci and trust in the CDC plummets. They push outrage over Donald Trump’s loss in 2020 and trust in elections plummets. They go all in on CRT and DEI and trust in schools plummets. They push climate denialism and trust in science plummets. They insist that the rest of the news media are liberal pawns and trust in the very institution that explains reality plummets.
Has there ever been an institution like Fox News that works so relentlessly from within to destroy faith in a country by its citizens? It’s a real-life version of what conservatives thought the Communist Party was in the ’50s. And we all just let it happen.”
https://jabberwocking.com/fox-news-has-destroyed-american-confidence-in-itself/
Nick G …………………”A lot of people, here on TOD and elsewhere, seem to have lost faith in the ability of civilization to run properly.”
Civilization runs on excess energy, we don’t get energy from civilization. Civilization takes energy from the natural world. Most of our energy comes from fossil fuels, they are clearly damaging the climate, but we also have the problem of scarcity of these energy sources, particularly oil coming soon.
All renewables, nuclear and hydro energy comes from builds with fossil fuels. We can’t, nor are we trying to, make any of them from anything other than fossil fuels.
Without the energy inputs, civilization collapses. Once energy availability starts falling, mostly from oil production reductions, it will cascade throughout our civilization, breaking complex systems all over the place. We saw a minor example of this in 2008 when oil price went to $147/bbl, which broke many important aspects of our civilization temporarily. We were able to recover because fossil fuel use grew again after a small hiatus. In 2008 oil production didn’t fall, it just didn’t rise.
Now imagine 2008 again, but instead of oil price falling, it stays high because production is falling, then price rises again, with further falls in production. Many parts of the economy cease functioning because businesses go bust. They put off employees because of financial reasons, yet these reasons are caused by lack of cheap oil. The problems will cascade around the world as everyone is in the same boat, less energy available. Perhaps you should read J. Tainter Collapse of Complex Societies.
BTW, I never watch Fox, it’s garbage most of the time…
Civilization runs on excess energy, we don’t get energy from civilization.
Civilization runs primarily on information. Energy is used to inform objects in the traditional sense of the word — giving them form. In the end, that is just adding information.
Transportation plays some role, but considering how wasteful most of it is , not the huge role it is sometimes assigned. Yeah, you can import T shirts from Asia for a few cents a piece, but that doesn’t mean you have too. And of course, transportation is just putting things where they “should” be, which is adding information.
We are now experiencing increased ephemeralization, the ability to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing”. This has been disguised by rapid size increase of certain vanity products like vehicles and houses, but in a pinch that could be easily reversed. It’s Jevon’s paradox — efficiency cuts prices and falling prices increase demand. But if the price goes back up, demand falls again.
This trend is extremely obvious to anyone in the computer industry. But it has spread beyond that. Kids have gone from dreaming of a muscle car a few decades ago to dreaming of a new portable device. Meanwhile just about the only energy use projected to significantly grow in coming decades is server farms, which engage in nearly pure information processing.
Zuckerberg on the energy limits of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-o5YbNfmh0&ab_channel=DwarkeshPatel
Civilization runs on energy not information. Information is a byproduct of having lots of energy.
A simple example, assume your city has not energy inputs starting tomorrow. That means, no electricity, no food, no oil or transportation, no gas for heating. How long do you really think this part of civilization will last with no energy?? How will lots of ‘information’ help the situation if there is no energy flowing into this part of civilization??
How did you even come at the thought that civilization runs on information instead of energy??
HIDEAWAY
How did you even come at the thought that civilization runs on information instead of energy??
This idea occurred to me after I read a book called “The Touchstone of Life” by Werner Loewenstein. It’s about cell biology, not economics, but it makes the same argument about life.
For example, what if you wanted to burn sugar? You could take a cigarette lighter filled with fossil butane and heat up the sugar till it burns. But that option isn’t available to cells. Instead they use a cocktail of carefully designed enzymes that make oxidation happen in solution and capture the released energy.
How do these fancy molecules “know” what exact form they need to take and when they need to be where? The cell “informs” them. As a cellular system grows it has to give form to (inform as Loewenstein puts it) a growing number of subsystems so that they can work properly. it takes a bunch a small molecules and build huge (compared to a single atom) complex molecular machines out of them.
The type of information a cell contains is not limited to the DNA. The various salt levels, the count and exact structure of different macromolecules, and many other things have to be kept just right for the cell to work. Somehow the cell has to “know” what the correct level is, know whether it is at that level, and know how to fix the problem if it isn’t.
All this information processing requires energy, of course. The cell burns sugar to get this energy to do its data processing. The results of this data processing is more complex molecular systems. It’s a loop that life uses to collect more and more information. The key isn’t the energy, it’s the added information the energy allows to be processed.
Consider some of mankind’s earliest tools. What is the difference between a rock and a hand axe? The answer is the exact shape of the rock. When our ancestors shaped rocks into hand axes, they were informing the rock, adding information to it, in Loewenstein’s sense of the word. This required some effort, but mostly it was skilled workmanship that made the difference. Chimpanzees have powerful arms and use rocks too sometimes, but lack the ability to form them precisely.
Manufacturing isn’t just about adding energy to materials. It is adding information by taking raw materials and creating something very specific that performs a predefined function. When you manufacture something you don’t just dump energy on it. You use energy to create a specific form. This form is what is important, not the energy you put into it.
How much energy you use depends on the design of the manufacturing process. That amount of energy can be reduced by improving the design of the process. It is the same sort of loop. We create tools that give us enhanced abilities, and use them to create even more advanced tools.
This is also what lead Buckminster Fuller to the idea of ephemeralization, ever faster efficiency improvements. Not everyone will buy into that, but it is worth thinking about.
Yes, human ingenuity and intellectual capital is the key.
We *don’t* have a declining energy resource base. We are surrounded by an abundance of affordable energy: it’s only a question of our ingenuity in taking advantage of it. For instance, current human energy consumption is very roughly 12 terawatts. Well, the sun bathes the earth in 125,000 terawatts of continuous, very high quality energy!
The English in Roman times were surrounded by coal. Why didn’t they use it? It took time to apply ingenuity to develop the tech to take advantage of it. In the same way, we’re surrounded by wind, solar and nuclear power. They are already scalable, affordable, high energy-ROI, etc., etc. As we continue to innovate, their cost is declining quickly – they’re already affordable, and well on their way to being truly cheap, in a way that fossil fuels never truly were.
“Collapse of trust in government is a purely American phenomenon. ”
That is silly.
I lost trust in government as a youngster when I found out the major lies behind the Viet Nam war narrative, and so many other things after that. Most countries have their own versions of government malfeasance.
Well, you might want to read the article.
So according to Gallup, Italians must really be happy with the most right-wing government since ww2.
By the way Nick G, i wouldn’t consider polls as “evidence”. Closer to conjecture and hearsay. But hey that’s just me.
wouldn’t consider polls as “evidence”
Trust is a human perception thing. I don’t know how else to find out about human perception than to ask people.
————————-
More:
“On Twitter a couple of days ago Nate Silver pointed out that confidence in the press has plummeted. This is true, but I added that confidence in everything has plummeted. The press wasn’t any kind of outlier.
The drop in confidence is due almost entirely to Republicans, and the partisan gap started right around 2000—precisely when Fox News started to build an audience—and accelerated in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president. This is no coincidence.
So it’s not quite right to say that “Americans” have lost confidence…Only Republicans have.”
https://jabberwocking.com/has-confidence-in-the-press-plummeted/
…in Biden, yes! In progessive, far-left liberalism and how this political idealism upholds the rule of law, our nation’s Constitution and simple decency towards other people on the planet, for instance, the Israelis, or the poor in Alabama who can barely make ends meet but you believe will be better off in EV’s… in conservative-minded hope for the future regarding getting ahead in life, the right way, the honorable way, and personal success by actually working vs. your beloved socialism?
You are fucking ‘A’ right Republicans have lost confidence. Totally.
We’ll be far more “confident” in our future when folks like you slink off to live under flat rocks.
You long ago left the world of reality, Niki; you must now be commening on antioilbarrel.com by way of Pluto. You are intentionally devisive, antagonistic, yet to be very clear, hold no moral or intellectual highground over anybody I know. Not even my Lab, who I am more than certain has a much higher understanding of reality than you do.
Good luck out there.
Exhibit A.
This is part of a dedicated campaign that the Russians have been running since the 90s. Of course it isn’t just the Russians. The very rich have carried out similar campaigns on a national and international level as well.
The idea is to create doubt about all institutions because doubt increases apathy. Don’t vote because elections don’t matter. Believe conspiracy theories because all media lie. Make no effort to improve things because everything is bad.
The consequence is a breakdown of civil society, which opens the door to dictatorship.
The doomerism we see here is part of this campaign. Whether the doomers know it or not, they are assets in a concerted campaign to undermine any resistance to the status quo. That’s where all these wacky theories about renewables come from. The fact that renewables are much better for ecology, the fact that they are already extremely successful can be dismissed by offering up “alternate facts” and casting doubt on any real numbers.
It is in fact what post modernism and deconstructionism predicted decades ago.
“You long ago left the world of reality, Niki;”
“Every Accusation is a Confession
Many call it projection, and the best operational description is from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, “Always accuse your enemies of your own sins.” This is compulsive behavior with maga-republicans, and sometimes they let on more than they should.
So what are they confessing?
Many of them know a great deal about using manipulated voting machines to steer an election. In accusing Democrats of this, are they trying to tell us something?
They also seem very acquainted with pedophilia, and this is one of their most persistent accusations. Though, with them it seems more than just incidental acquaintance.
They constantly complain about grooming, in which they seem to be experts. Their concept of education indicates that for them there is benign grooming, which they prefer no one to notice.
“They stole the election from our guy.” The irony here is not only that this statement reveals what they would do, but also what they tried to do and failed.
“She is a racist.” Who? Aw, come on now. Who is, really?
“Fat, phony, and whiny.” Our esteemed former leader used these terms to characterize Ron DeSantis recently, and I am shaking my head. Compare what you know about these two men, view some photographs, and then tell me which one is described.
Do we need more? The tactic is obvious, and I expect to see more of it as it becomes clear that they have almost nothing else left in their bag of tricks. Hollow accusations and revenge are all there is for their agenda these days.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/5/2126238/-Every-Accusation-is-a-Confession
Alimbiquated,
//The very rich have carried out similar campaigns on a national and international level as well.
The idea is to create doubt about all institutions because doubt increases apathy.//
Why would the rich carry out campaigns against the very institutions which they control ?
How the hell does doubt increase apathy ?
Doubt and skepticism is part of a healthy society. A society without doubt is a dictatorship.
So basically according to you people should not doubt governments and institutions because its a plot initiated by the rich or russians (which itself sounds like a conspiracy theory).
So essentially your ideal society is 1984.
I don’t know if you are trolling or not but do you actually believe the garbage you have written there ?
Trump is going to get in again and the Dems are going to be dumbstruck yet again as to how this could happen.
It’ll be very funny to watch, though.
Kleiber,
If I was a German or European, I would be careful what I wish for, it may come true. Trump 2.0 is likely to be much worse than the first time around. It will be pretty dark comedy if you are correct, maybe your a right wing type, in which case you’d be happy.
IRON MIKE —
Why would the rich carry out campaigns against the very institutions which they control ?
You obviously already doubt this, but ultimately control of the country is through popular vote. The fact that you question this already answer the second question, since you probably think voting is a waste of time.
How the hell does doubt increase apathy ?
Lack of faith in democratic institutions leads to declining participation.
Dennis, Biden is currently prosecuting two wars in the periphery of Europe and is happy to start things with China.
Guess how many wars Trump enabled.
I’ll take idiot narcissist Trump over Genocide Joe and his inability to keep American hegemony together. It’s actually amazing how fast Biden’s term has shrunk US influence globally AND help dismantle Europe’s industry.
But sure, Trump is the big threat.
Kleiber,
Oh so you’re of the opinion that Putin should be able to run amok as Trump would prefer? So give us your thoughts on the Israel/Gaza war and how Bibi/Biden are handling it incorrectly?
Trump is an isolationist so not really a big proponent of US World influence.
Hey the Hungarians and Putin will be happy if Trump is elected, I wouldn’t be if I were a Ukrainian, German, or French citizen.
Dennis:
Oh so you’re of the opinion that Putin should be able to run amok as Trump would prefer? So give us your thoughts on the Israel/Gaza war and how Bibi/Biden are handling it incorrectly?
No, I’m not. Nationalist revanchism is a shit thing no matter who does it, but it doesn’t change that prolonging war means more death and misery. Exchanging soil for lives is the dumb warmonger take, not mine.
Pointing out Trump is going to win is also an observation, not an endorsement anymore than stating Labour are going to trash the Tories in the UK (both parties are abhorrent). Putin wouldn’t be running amok had things been handled better in the past. I seem to recall it was US NGO and CIA interference in Ukraine that caused the downfall of a gov’t that led to a shift that the Russian speaking east was not happy with. Russia has had ten years of Ukraine dismissing the Minsk accords and shelling civilians whilst funding far right neo-Nazi groups. A thing the US State Dept. and FBI were investigating up until 2022 when, mysteriously, we suddenly forgot about the corrupt European nation’s training of literal fascists. That’s your gov’ts take on Ukraine pre-invasion. Now they’re less fussed because they get to kick a geopolitical rival in the face, not because they give one solitary shit about Ukraine. The actions of how they’ve supported Ukraine (badly) should be a pretty good indicator as to how much they care. They did, after all, give a load of second hand tanks and tell them to charge into minefields either because NATO is full of idiots, or they are just apathetic to throwing more Ukrainian men into the meat-grinder of the Russian defences. The thing that you can’t use manoeuvre warfare against as has been known since Napoleon was on the throne.
There was a window, corroborated by Ukrainian and Russian negotiators, where a peace could have been drawn in March of 2022 to go back to what Feb 2022 was like after Putin massively misjudged the regime changing drive to Kyiv. Guess what? Boris Johnson told Ukraine to fight to the last man because we got their backs. How’s that working out so far?
As for Israel, last I checked the UN was investigating genocide by the IDF which Biden is so against, he’s only giving Israel a few billion more in arms instead of the usual tens of billions. This has led to the Red Sea becoming verboten for Western, Israel backing nations and mutliple other nations telling America to fuck off, as has happened to the likes of Niger and other former French colonies that are sick of imperialism with a new coat of paint.
Bibi should be tried in The Hague. Trump’s biggest crime is he’s an idiot who cares only about whatever the last person he talked to thinks of him and didn’t see a problem with COVID wiping out a million or more Americans. It’s less embarrassing for America to have a fool in the office for another four years than a guy who is okay with carpet bombing civilians and making BRICS move away from the US and enable a multi-polar world that will NOT end with the American people being happy.
You guys are speedrunning the collapse of empire faster than the UK did. It’s honestly quite impressive.
Kleiber,
Last time I looked we do not live in a perfect World. I don’t make US policy, nor do I know the details of everything that has occurred in Ukraine, though you summary of events sounds very suspect (a little like Russian propaganda).
The only thing that would be worse than Biden would be Trump, and it will be bad for Europe. Do you think that Trump would not have supported Israel just as forcefully as Biden has? I think the no strings attached support of Israel by the US is a big mistake and that the Israelis have done a very poor job in Gaza, the civilian casualties have been terrible.
Dennis,
I think there’s a strong argument that the Trump administration encouraged both Russia and Israel in their current actions.
Dennis, how can anything be worse than what is happening to Europe now?
Have you checked Germany lately? Their economy is free falling, and they’re the “good” economy of the EU.
If Trump is to surpass what Biden has caused Europe to go through currently, I can only guess it involves nuking all the capitals. Half heartedly funding a war in Ukraine whilst the Euros empty what few weapon stocks they have, while also engaging the Houthis ineffectually causing mass supply issues through the Red Sea is decimating this part of the world.
America, please stop doing the world favours and go back to isolationism. Trump FTW.
Kleiber wrote:
Do please tell me again about Putin propaganda, person who thinks all Germans are as clueless as Americans it seems.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Tell you again? I never told you the first time. I will read no more of your stupid shit because you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. You sound just like a babbling fool.
.
Ron:
I have no idea what you are talking about. Tell you again? I never told you the first time. I will read no more of your stupid shit because you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. You sound just like a babbling fool.
You mean the points directed at Alimbiquated? You didn’t say that stuff he said that I was responding to? Wow, almost like those points were for the person I directed them at, not you.
You didn’t even address the points actually for you, so you were already done reading my posts it seems.
Kleiber wrote: If Trump is to surpass what Biden has caused Europe to go through currently, …
Biden is responsible for Europe’s economy. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It’s all Biden’s fault. Only a Trumpite could possibly be that stupid.
Gee, who blew up Nordstream, half arsed helping Ukraine thus prolonging energy issues, and then provoked the Houthis and enabled a genocide in Gaza collapsing trade lines into Europe?
Makes ya think.
lol at liberal brain thinking it’s Biden or Trump. Unfortunately, your dumb nation can only field reanimated corpses or clowns for position of POTUS. I choose neither. Got enough with Rashi Sanook, as Biden called him whilst sundowning.
EDIT: Also, check out the USA economic numbers coming out today. The USA is stagflating and wanting to go into a trade war with the largest economy on the planet (that’s China, by the way).
Biden is doing in four years what the Soviets never could, lol.
Kleiber,
Anyone who blames the USA on what the Houthis are doing to shipping in the Red Sea has to be the biggest idiot on earth. The US did not provoke the Houthis. That is just stupid, stupid, stupid! They started firing on ships trying to get to the Suez Canal. The US is trying to restore the traffic. No one but a blooming idiot would blame the US for the Houthis trying to sink ships trying to pass.
Anyone surprised by a guy with a German sounding nick spouting unabashed Putin propaganda would be amused by what happened in German parliament today.
Basically all parties made speeches about the AfD’s long known but recently spotlighted connections to the Russian and Chinese regimes, while the AfD claimed they were all Nazis for pointing it out.
Kleiber means nuthatch in German and it is time to close the hatch on this nut.
Ron, you’re a useful idiot with zero conception of anything prior to 7 October, like most liberals.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/03/yemen-airstrikes-saudi-arabia-mbs-us
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
Maybe read history sometime. Y’know, about how America systematically enables war crimes.
Hey, Alim, remember when the good guy West gave standing ovations to Waffen SS war heroes? I do.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/canada-speaker-apologizes-ukraine-nazi-veteran-honored-rcna117125
Do please tell me again about Putin propaganda, person who thinks all Germans are as clueless as Americans it seems.
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-far-right-split-by-russia-ukraine-war/a-61283065
Oh hey, they also supported Azov, you know those guys valiantly hitting back at Russia. The neo-Nazis that the State Dept. and FBI were investigating after Anders Breivik thought to do a little shooting. Funny, you don’t hear much about all these Nazis camps that were a thing after February 2022. Wonder why that is.
By the way, I’m British. So, lol at that big brain assessment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber's_law
I seem to recall the German coalition gov’t being terribly corrupt regarding energy, you know, the same people who were, shock horror, buying Putin’s gas!
Physician, heal thyself.
Keep in mind all wars are resource wars. There is no other reason. Vietnam WW1, WW2 etc. it’s always about who has free access to your stuff. We are now in an unprecedented situation of no growth combined with depletion. And all of a suddenly everyone is going to get along. Please!!! It’s more likely you’ll be fighting locally for whatever is left.
I just read Tim Watkins book Breakdown and he’s spot on that the banking system can not survive peak energy. The next shock will be far worse than 2008 and will break the central bank systems. Green initiatives are quickly going away because they are and have been a waste of time and resources.
breakdown:%20The%20economic%20impact%20of%20peak%20oil%20https%3A//a.co/d/9JHxv97
It’s an uncomfortable read but unavoidable reality.
Construction Slump-Led Recession? This seems very peak-oil-esque…
JT – This (“far worse than 2008”) was the exact response I got yesterday when I asked someone in commercial real estate construction/development industry about how business was…they painted a very bleak picture and think that a significant reckoning is underway that will make 2008 look like a very small bump in the road… some/many headlines seem to confirm this outlook:
05-Apr-2024
“The price of Fly Ash in Europe’s largest economy experienced a decline at the end of the first quarter of the year. This decline can be attributed to subdued demand for Fly Ash from the downstream construction sector”
“The number of bankruptcies in Sweden increased by 14% in September from a year earlier, weighed down by a slump in the construction,…”
“Property sales and housing starts have collapsed, and Beijing may not be able to prop up construction much longer before it crashes by half.”
“A pair of Iowa developers has filed for bankruptcy in federal court, leaving uncertain the future of homes and properties in three states…”
“From San Diego to Seattle, developers are building far fewer apartments in 2023.”
Kengo
Yes all the indicators are there. The only thing propping up the market right now is fear. And that translates to money printing. EVs are failing, solar is failing, wind is failing, commercial real estate is failing, it’s all connected to economic stagnation or contraction. And all of it is caused by energy degrowth. Just look at the state of our infrastructure we can’t even maintain what we have!!! I’m sorry it’s a head in the sand belief that everything is our will be ok. Or that the energy transition is actually working.
First wildfires in Canada starting up and may threaten Fort McMurray and oil sand production.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Evacuation-Warning-Issued-as-Wildfire-Nears-Oil-Sands-Hub-in-Canada.html
Plenty of zombie fires never went away and will be sources for fires as the season progresses.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/reel/video/p0hfv6km/what-are-zombie-fires-and-why-they-pose-a-risk-for-canada
Large areas in Alberta and eastern BC look to be pretty exposed to more fires.
https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/maps/fw?type=fwi
Art Berman presentation on the human predicament.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQm2wt7-kPU
One criticism I would have is that he starts out pointing out that climate change is only part (maybe a minor part) of the issues facing us but then spends the majority of the talk (or at least around half) talking about it and doesn’t really cover water shortages, soil erosion, pollution, ocean acidification, nitrogen/phosphorous cycles etc. (has a bit on biodiversity loss but mostly climate and energy).
It has been an interesting week with the discussions about over-population and OFM going into great details and dropping my name into the conversation multiple times mainly as a doomer, which I am not. I am a realist. I am not quite sure what OFM’s main point is in that his vision of the future appears to be one of a much reduced global population and a rather more simple life to what we in the west have become accustomed too.
All this new way of living does not quite stack up though as he has a view that much of the infrastructure can be repaired ad infinitum. Some yes but others I doubt it.
The have been many past civilization collapses in the past. Inca, Egypt, Romans. England avoided a collapse, mined form reserves close to the surface in the 15th Century by switching to coal. By 1700 all the easy coal was gone and deeper coal was the only option. Th invention of the steam engine allowed deeper coal to be extracted. During the same period many Europeans sought refuge in other lands: North America, Africa and India with varying success.
There has been much discussion and belief that the global population will peak and then decline. This assumption is based upon a limited number of industrialized countries (and China) but I doubt if this holds for the other 5 billion or so who do not live like us in the west. Look towards, Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, The ME countries and you will see a completely different picture. Before the war Gaza had population growth rate of 3% per annum: doubling every 23 years.
Then there is the matter of future fossil fuels resources, which were to actually boost unreliable energy supply we will need in order to build out the infrastructure. As you know I, and many others have doubts. Not only are the oil resources becoming more energy intensive to extract, but so are the essential minerals that will be required for the great unreliable expansion.
Dennis has gone to great length analysing the potential remaining oil reserves and forecasting when oil demand will peak. He desperately wants to believe that BEV’s will massively reduce gasoline consumption, but to date there is scant evidence of any decline. In Europe the decline in new diesel car sales has offset any decline in gasoline consumption, exactly as i predicted. In the EU EV’s are not growing anywhere like what is required to make a difference and the BEV boom is a more than a little subdued. Dennis also seems to believe that the IEA, OPEC and EIA data is accurate.Apparently JODI is no good. In my opinion all have flaws. Look at the OPEC members. Do you really think they are honest. What about Russia or China. Even the US data is flaky.What about the oil that is stolen – yest ti happens. Then thee is the back blending of NGL’s to boost volumes. I do not trust any of the data, not even the BP data, because there is no way of auditing it. Indeed there is famous EIA 700 kbd correction saga.
Then there are the predictions on LTO. I am quite interested in what Sheng Wu writes. He has some interesting views on the several basins but in general there are few people who really have a handle on much of the LTO resources. These resources are far from homogenous and have many faults which can communicate with other benches. Thy are not like a sugar cube.
Going back to the population decline there is a lot of hopium being sniffed about a managed deadline in population before the oil and gas and everything else declines. Much arm waving and flag flying about breakthrough technologies that never quite live up to the hype.
The transformation to wind and solar has not produced cheap affordable energy- far form it. It will only get more expensive as more capacity it added to the grid and yet more under utilized assets are bolted onto the power grid to make it stable.
Meanwhile to make the transformation we are going to have to mine ever more minerals, most produced by diesel power and fossil fueled thermal energy. Does anyone know the Siemens process for silicon production. Have a look. You might also like to look at the doping agents to make the PV wafer semi conductors.
Then there is the recycle case. I am all for it but very few products are built with recycling in mind. With the best will in the world there i no way that anything can be 100% recycled.You might like to look at a Tesla. The last user is going to be landed with a massive disposal charge.
Last but no least I would comment on the future of oil refineries and e-fuels. Few people have any idea how gasoline and disel is produced. The idea that they are simply distilled is anything but the reality.Gasoline in particular has many different components made on different units form different feedstocks That is why LTO is mainly exported as despite what some believe it is not suited to large scale processing in most complex refineries.
The same applies to a lesser extent to diesel. Reconfiguration of a refinery to produce a different product mix is not possible without huge investments.Making more diesel and less gasoline would require the build out of expensive hydrocracking capacity. Converting light distillate (naphtha) to diesel is not feasible. For those reasons there is little prospect of a substantial increase in the diesel supply within the existing refineries.
The idea that e-fuels will be produced in volume is wishful thinking at best. There are a number of technologies but so far none are economically viable. Though some shipping has converted to LNG, there is no realistic prospect that this will supplant the diesel engine especially as shipping is expected the increase substantially up to 2050. I remain sceptical as to how much but a doubling of shipping traffic is forecasted, which will pressure a lot of ports. The first issue will be the decline in the discretionary use of fossil fuels- also known as rationing. That will impact all manner of things, just like rationing during WW2. Good-bye aviation and cruise ships
As a species we are approaching a watershed. We have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet by many times. It is not sustainable. Any decline will be painful. Those industrialized countries will bear most of the pain initially as a drop in living standards and later with a full collapse of society and the rule of law as we currently know it. The loss of knowledge will be huge, whether in books or on computer drives. Much of the infrastructure will collapse over time due to lack of maintenance and know-how. The lifestyle OFM predicts is not unreasonable but it will not be a life for the masses. A Mad Max scenario might well happen.
Put bluntly I do not think we have the time or the resources to pull off the Great Escape.
Thanks, fully agree. We are not doomers, we are realists, because the numbers show clearly we are not headed for a bright green future.
Only by obscuring and deflecting the real numbers, plus ignoring lots of important aspects is it possible to show numbers with a bright green future, providing material limits are ignored.
Even then, all ‘bright green futurists’ assume only 15% of humanity partakes in this future, which really highlights how deep we are in overshoot for me.
Hideaway,
Most people think their personal point of view is most realistic. I also consider my scenarios realistic but they are different from yours.
Malthus also considered his views to be realistic.
Carnot,
Over many years it would seem feasible to upgrade existing refinery capacity to maximize middle distillate output, obviously there are technological limitations.
Dear Dennis,
I am not sure of your background but I believe you are an academic. No problem with that but from experience academia has an unrealistic idea of the world of refining. Refining is a low margin business; the money is typically made upstream. Refining is a volume business; margins are typically < $10 per barrel. Some products have negative margins.
A new build hydrocracker would cost upwards of $2 billion for a 60 kbd (3.2 million tonnes/annum) unit. In a diesel once through mode the unit might produce around 1.5 million tonnes of diesel and jet fuel. The other products would include HC naphtha and unconverted oil (UCO) . The hydrogen consumption would be of the order of 230 SCUF per barrel (1360 nM3/M3) i.e. a lot. A hydrogen production unit would also be required, either by gasification, POX or SMR.
In other words lots of money. A very simple calculation
Investment $2 billion
Payout 10 years
Cost per annum $200 million
On feed flow = $200/3.2 = $ 62.50/mt ($9.2/bbl)
On positive products 1.5 million tonnes(jet and diesel)
200/1.5 = $166/ mt ($24.41 per bbl)
This ecxludes the cost of money. No refiner would invest in a project like this especially as the outlook is for for high cost of carbon ( in the west) and a so called net zero target for emissions.
This is the sugar coated candy version.
In other words the refiners will keep their hands in their long pockets. So would I.
I do not need to go further.
Carnot,
Perhaps correct, if there is a shortage of diesel, the price may rise enough that some of those investments are made, though peak oil will lead to excess refining capacity, so what is more likely is that refineries that are already set up to produce a higher proportion of middle distillates (as is the case in much of Europe) will remain open and refineries set up to produce more gasoline may shut down due to lack of profits. The cost of any carbon tax will be passed on to consumers or may be paid at point of use, it will simply be seen by the refiner as a lack of demand.
Dennis
As soon as we say “the price may rise enough” we’re in classic economics territory which is completely false. Affordability is the driver of all markets. The system is built one way based on inexpensive inputs. Ford never would’ve sold one car if the gasoline wasn’t practically free. It was a byproduct at the time. Our present way of life is what it is because it was the only way we could get to this point. We might call it the maximum power principle. But we could also just say we’re all opportunists . We made the most of what we had(I emphasize HAD) now we’re on the slide down.
As a prediction the Baltimore Key Bridge will never be rebuilt. There isn’t 7 years left. And food will be more important.
JT, so true and a mistake economics often makes. They look at shortages in isolation, Diesel being in shortage the price rises to reach equilibrium with supply, no problems. But it always assumes the rest of the system stays static, which is wrong in reality.
If the diesel price rises, so do all EVs, solar, wind batteries, food, etc, probably with a varying time lag. However in economics, the assumptions being higher prices will make more diesel appear because of the profit motive, even if ‘we’ as in the world are in severe or accelerating oil production decline.
The second assumption of economics, then states substitution comes into play, Nick G’s argument of gasoline (or something else). Yet all farmers in the west use diesel tractors. Putting gasoline in them wont work, so they will all go out and buy new gasoline tractors.
Nope, sorry they will only do that if they can attain much higher prices for the food they send to cities. Unless the food price goes much higher, food production will fall, and while this might send prices higher, creating the profit margin farmers need, it creates a starvation problem in cities.
To write up a continuous systematic approach of the different feedback loops that a simple ‘much higher diesel’ prices will cause, would take a book to explain all the intricacies and effects.
All the economics theory appears to work in a ‘growing’ economy. All the feedback loops work well as there is always ‘MORE’ of everything plus plenty of substitutes if there is a brief shortage in one aspect. Money is all it takes to build a world of MORE, everything.
It’s worked well for 200 years and many generations of MORE. There has always been MORE commodities by just going further afield using more diesel to dig up more earth and gain the necessary commodity using larger more efficient machines. It’s all been based upon cheap plentiful dense energy, fossil fuels.
Economics completely breaks down in a world of less dense energy. The green world envisaged by Dennis, Nick, Alimbiquated, Island Boy and others on these threads, totally relies upon cheap dense fossil fuels to build it. none of it is made or built without cheap dense fossil fuels.
Let’s assume Dennis gets his massive rise in diesel price, but no other commodity has a similar rise. Many mines will quickly shut down as they are no longer profitable. Food to cities rapidly reduces as farmers change from crops with heavy use of diesel to grazing, or something else (left fallow, only grazed in spring and summer etc.) so grain crops availability falls sharply over a year or so.
Green groups everywhere have bought into the ‘bright green future lie’ by believing economics as a true representation of the overall system. It seems none of them understand the reality of mining or the exploration that has to happen first..
I would love just one of the promoters of green energy to explain how we will do exploration in remote locations without diesel or any other liquid fuel, include the exploration drilling of many thousands of metres into virgin ground without any guarantee of finding anything. That’s how it happens now. At some point the ‘bright green future’ relies on NO fossil fuel use at all, so how does this exploration for the minerals needed for the bright green future happen??
Every single handwave of we’ll do ‘this’, from the cornucopian brigade should be totally dismissed unless they show some real world numbers of how each and every hand wave can happen. Of course actually working out numbers leads to the dark side of reality. I’ll bet they prefer to stay in denial instead, and keep hand waving about the future…
DHL Freight introducing fully electric tractor-trailers from Mercedes-Benz Trucks
24 April 2024
At the beginning of April, DHL Freight put its first fully electric tractor-trailers from Mercedes-Benz Trucks into service. Effective immediately, the eActros 300 vehicles are being deployed for delivery and distribution transport at the Koblenz and Hagen sites. The truck stationed in Hagen makes transport more sustainable on round trips between the DHL branch and the Mercedes-Benz plant in Kassel, a Daimler Truck location.
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2024/04/20240424-dhl.html
EPA launches nearly $1B Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles Grant Program
24 April 2024
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the nearly $1-billion Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicles Grant Program to fund the replacement of certain polluting heavy-duty vehicles with zero-emission vehicles. Funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, EPA will award competitive grants for projects that will reduce climate and air pollution from heavy-duty vehicles, support good-paying jobs and improve air quality for communities across the country, particularly those overburdened by air pollution.
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2024/04/20240424-epa.html
Dennis
You wish. Why are refineries closing in Europe whwn the EU is a net diesel importer. The refineries see zero benefit in investing in new equipment unless ther is a rapid payout. That is the way it is and always will be.
There is an exception. Unreliables have no limits on their profligacy to spend other peoples money. End users continue to subsidise unreilables and in the process impoverish those who are least able to pay.
Dennis, on carbon tax. Currently all taxes are carbon taxes as that is the main form of creating an excess that allows every person or industry to pay taxes.
A new carbon tax will just put the price of everything up, including all solar and wind new builds. If your argument is that solar, wind and batteries need more subsidies paid for by the new carbon tax, then it’s just further proof that the energy we get from them is nowhere near as cheap as the energy from fossil fuels. This has massive other consequences.
Dennis,
I’m puzzled by this emphasis on diesel. Sure, it’s a little denser and it can burn at a slightly higher temperature for slightly greater efficiency. But gasoline was used for trucks before diesel, and it would work just fine with retrofit or new-build gasoline engines.
Nick G,
Most heavy duty equipment uses diesel, just the fact of the matter. Most gasoline use is for lighter duty service. Also the greater efficiency of diesel means lower carbon enssions per unit of work performed. In addition there is a huge cost to retrofitting the heavy duty fleet with gasoline engines and all of the emissions associated with such a retrofit.
Most gasoline use is for lighter duty service.
Of course. That doesn’t mean that can’t change.
the greater efficiency of diesel means lower carbon enssions per unit of work performed.
Only slightly. The greater density of diesel means greater carbon content, so the majority of the advantage of diesel is illusory.
there is a huge cost to retrofitting the heavy duty fleet with gasoline engines and all of the emissions associated with such a retrofit.
First, you don’t have to retrofit all diesel, just a portion to rebalance between diesel and gasoline.
2nd, much of the change can be in new trucks.
3rd, the people who are arguing that diesel will strangle civilization aren’t, by and large, worried about emissions.
Everybody makes such a fuss about diesel vs gasoline that I thought I must be missing something, but I don’t think so…
NickG,
Perhaps it is not a big problem, I think in a light duty vehicle you might be right, but for high torque applications, you might not be correct, there may be a good reason that most heavy duty trucks and equipment (for mining and agriculture) are powered by diesel. My hope is that much of this equipment can be replaced by electric powered equipment in the future, but I expect it may be a decades long transition.
Nick G
Your ignorance on the subject of thermodynamics has no limits. Maybe you should look at the Otto and Diesel cycle and then you might not embarrass yourself. It is all about compression ratios and diesel is combusted in excess air that REDUCES peak temperatures. Gasoline engines operate at near stoichiometric fuel air mixtures, resulting in higher combustion temperatures.
By virtue of the induction method of gasoline engines- fuel and air is pre-mixed – the Otto cycle efficiency is limited by autoignition parameters.
The Diesel cycle is inherently less effiicient, on a like for like basis, than the Otto cycle because the combustion is at constant pressure, unlike the Otto cycle which is at constant volume.
New gasoline technology such as the Mazda Sky Active X is a lean burn gasoline engine that achieves near diesel fuel efficiency.
If you had taken the time to understand the difference between diesel fuel and gasoline you would know the difference in density. Comparing volumetric fuel consumptions is a fool’s game. Gasoline has a density for about 0.75 vs diesel at 0.84 The calorific value of both is about 43-44 MJ/kg before the blending of ethanol or FAME, both of which reduce fuel efficiency.
You might look into the the matter of thermodynamic efficiency which a function of peak temperature and the exhaust temperature. This gives an indication of the exergy.
I still await you masterclass on entropy, but I guess I will have to wait a rather long time.
Nick G, you have obviously never been near a modern remote mine site.
Carnot thanks again for a dose of reality.
More, for medium and small diesel vehicles:
“Fleet managers can defend the purchase of gasoline Class 3-6 vehicles by:
Comparing acquisition costs with diesel vehicles
Showing that diesel fuel’s higher cost per gallon negates its slight advantage in fuel economy
Calculating accurate resale value of both types of vehicles
Knowing how long vehicles are kept in service and their applications.
A lot has happened to engine technology in 15 years, so it’s time to re-evaluate the data. What’s the call on the diesel vs. gas cars, vans, and trucks debate? Has the tide turned, or does emotion, chutzpah, and the virile attraction of “more power” still drive the diesel decision?”
https://www.government-fleet.com/156355/gas-vs-diesel-the-bad-investment-only-fleet-managers-know-about
Dennis,
Perhaps electric motors are indeed the sensible way to provide high torque, in the same way that trains use electric motors combined with on-board generators.
Nick G, “Fleet managers can defend the purchase of gasoline Class 3-6 vehicles by…”
Where do the minerals come from to build all these new gasoline vehicles?? Please follow your analogy right through the supply chain, instead of just the hand wave of assuming it’s just a matter of ‘price’.
Right now all the minerals needed to build the new gasoline fleet comes from diesel mining equipment, which will suffer from the lack of diesel. There isn’t any gasoline large scale mining equipment (see Carnot reply up thread). Could it be designed and built, over the next decade or 2, possibly, but who would bother in a world of falling oil availability??
Get used to it. Innovation in mobility isn’t over. Examples of adaption to a smaller world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64SPKmLR0YA
More of these or golf carts with cities and rural areas being restructured to have only these kinds of vehicle.
None of this heavier and faster EV monster truck stuff to prop up failing car industries.
Sea surface temperature hit a new all time high and has been rising for the last few days almost as fast as ever before when it is supposed to be falling, and with El Nino abating should be falling quickly. The earth energy equation is very much out of balance and seems to be getting more so. This amount of energy is going to power some very destructive cyclones and hurricanes.
George, the answer the usual suspects will come up with is to build solar and wind turbines at a faster rate, which of course burns more coal, oil and gas for this increase in production. What could possibly go wrong??
How is it so hard to understand that doing more of the same, probably means more of the same for climate, ecosystems, ocean life, life of mammals and insects etc. Then in 3-5 years time when everything is worse, the answer will be to increase the rate of destruction even more, sorry, I mean build more renewables….
I get the impression you are arguing mostly against people who have a background in classical economics. I admire your perseverance and find your replies highly informative; I don’t have anything like the breadth or detail of knowledge that you have and gave up very quickly. It seems to me to be like trying to argue with christian apologists, actually worse because christians understand that their arguments ultimately come down to faith, whereas classical economists mistakenly (and risibly) continue to believe their discipline is a science. (Steve Keen, at least when he remembers to take a breath between sentences, does the best job of demolishing most of the fallacies they come up with.)
I find my blood pressure is healthier when not arguing with neoliberals. Definitely recommend.
Before someone brings up the topic of synthetic fuels to solve all the problems, I’ll go first with the example of Haru Oni plant on the Southern tip of South America, a combined effort of Porche, Siemens Energy, Exxon, Enel Green Power and others.
Commercial operation was declared in March 2023, in November 2023 they sent their first commercial shipment of 24,600 million barrels of syn fuel…
Er sorry, it was 24,600 bbls/d of syn fuel..
Nope sorry, it was 24,600 bbls of syn fuel..
Nope, sorry again it was 24,600 LITRES of syn fuel, that’s a grand total of 154.7 barrels worth..
This $US78 Million plant, in the best location in the world for renewable energy, with a 70% wind capacity factor, operating a Siemens 3.4Mw turbine managed to produce only around 1/3rd of what was promoted in the literature before production, which by itself was a lousy return.
The plant is producing around 100 LITRES per day, or 36,500/yr at current rate. Let’s put this in perspective. In every photo of the plant there is somewhere between 15-60 vehicles. Assuming there are lots there on open days, promotions etc, let’s ignore most and assume the 10-15 around the main office are those of the plant operators, and I’ll use the lowest number of 10 per shift.
As the plant is running 24/7, that would be 3 shifts/day, 365 days a year. The nearest town for accommodation of these people is 35km away, so a 70km return trip. This would be a total of 70km X 365d X 10 cars X 3 shifts or
766,500km.
Assuming the vehicles driven get an average fuel consumption of 7l/100km, then the fuel used by the workers would be 53,655 litres, or greater than the plant is producing.
This plant is just a very bad joke, a bad joke on humanity. Everything about the plant was scaled precisely in the planning phase, with the energy from the wind turbine running a 1.2Mw Electrolyser and the other processes, so none of the energy was wasted. Because there are so many different processes, all with their own inefficiencies and heat losses, of course the output is low. The footprint of this ‘demonstration plant’ is around 3.5ha (8.5 acres), so it is actual industrial size. Will going larger increase efficiency? It might, but is only a ‘might’ and only at this location of 70% capacity factor. Other locations with lower wind or solar capacity factors are likely to be more inefficient, with more on/off cycles.
The overall process efficiency is easy to calculate. A 3.4Mw wind turbine X 70% CF = 20,848Mwh/yr input.
Synfuel produced 36,500ltr/yr X 8.5Kwh/ltr = 310,250Kwh or 310.25Mwh output.
How big a joke is this?? Input 20,848Mwh, output 310Mwh or a process efficiency of 1.488%. Let’s round it UP to 1.5% for anyone that want to dispute energy content of synthetic fuel or whatever..
Of course this is just the process efficiency, it does not take into account of the energy used by all the operating and maintenance of the plant over it’s life, not a single Kwh of all the energy inputs of building the plant and all the equipment and shipping the lot across the world.
Before considering any O&M costs across the projects life (about 20 years at best) the cost per LITRE is around $US106.50. If we added all O&M costs of around $US2.5M/yr we’d add another ~$US68.50’ltr, or a total of cost of roughly $US175/litre.
Even if the process was 10 times as efficient, it’s still $US17.50/litre!!!
Assume we have to make ‘products’ in the future from this synthetic fuel and not from fossil fuels because we depleted the lot, or they are just uneconomic to mine. The amount we would need is around 14,620Twh worth a year. This number based on all metallurgical coal plus around 10Mbbls/d from oil and gas sources currently used. This allows for no growth in the system, so bad luck to the 85% of humanity that currently misses out on modernity. (Who is going to tell them?)
14,620Twh/1.5% efficiency would mean we need 974,666Twh of electrical energy to gain enough synthetic fuels. BTW, the Haru Oni plant doesn’t do carbon capture from atmosphere, that is another process still needed. They buy their CO2 from a brewery. It just means the efficiency is even lower when this is also included. In other words it needs to get way more than 10 times current energy efficiency AFTER adding the energy inputs from the process of carbon capture.
The electrical energy needed is around 35 times current world electricity production, just to make the raw product needed for polymers, plastics, nitrogen fertilizer, explosives, asphalt etc that a modern civilization uses.
It isn’t going to happen because it’s a physical impossibility of happening.
The world needs a different plan. The current trajectory is not going to work…
Valero Energy Reports First Quarter 2024 Results
6:24 am ET April 25, 2024 (BusinessWire) Print
Renewable Diesel The Renewable Diesel segment, which consists of the Diamond Green Diesel joint venture (DGD), reported $190 million of operating income for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $205 million for the first quarter of 2023. Segment sales volumes averaged 3.7 million gallons per day in the first quarter of 2024, which was 741 thousand gallons per day higher than the first quarter of 2023. The higher sales volumes were due to the impact of additional volumes from the DGD Port Arthur plant, which started up in the fourth quarter of 2022 and was in the process of ramping up production rates in the first quarter of 2023. Operating income in the first quarter of 2024 was lower than the first quarter of 2023 due to lower renewable diesel margin.
Ethanol The Ethanol segment reported $10 million of operating income for the first quarter of 2024, compared to $39 million for the first quarter of 2023. Adjusted operating income was $39 million for the first quarter of 2024. Ethanol production volumes averaged 4.5 million gallons per day in the first quarter of 2024, which was 283 thousand gallons per day higher than the first quarter of 2023.
Diamond Green diesel, from their website…………….. “At our 1.2 billion-gallon-per-year renewable diesel plants, we process recycled animal fats, used cooking oil and inedible corn oil into renewable diesel fuel.”
Not quite turning electricity into products. What products are made from this ‘green diesel’? What will be their source of used cooking oil and animal tallow when there is no longer fossil fuel made fertilizer available, nor ordinary diesel available to collect the supplies for the plant?
I am not sure of your point with this post. Hideaway was referring to e-fuels and your response was about ethanol and renewable diesel, neither of which are e-fuels and to date both products are produced mainly from foodstuffs ( the rich robbing the poor to power their cars). In the case of ethanol it is usually maize, sugar cane, sugar beet or wheat.
In the case renewable diesel it is generally soya bean oil, canola or palm oils. Other feedstocks include animal fats (tallow), other vegetable oils or used cooking oil. The global production of renewable diesel is limited by the supply of vegetable oils which amounts (for all types) about 210 million tonnes per year. The vegetable oil is hydrogenated in a hydrotreater and produces a true drop in replacement, to fossil diesel and can be processed into jet fuel. Biodiesel is on the decline and uses the same feedstocks as renewable diesel but produces an inferior quality product
Ethanol continues to be blended into gasoline but is far from ideal. It requires vast inputs of foodstuffs and all the incidental farming inputs and has a dire EROEI.
Both products are not sustaianble and are blended into fuels by mandates. They are not economic.
The much vaunted cellulosic ethanol route has so far failed to materialise after more than 100 years of subsidies, pilot plants, and procrastination by parties with vested interests. I was once subjected to a presentation by a clown from BP about ethanol from Miscanthus. It did not take me long to demolish his arguments and six months later BP pulled the plug. I have lost track of all the bankrupt cellulosic ethanol would be producers.
As ever time will tell. The killer for renewable diesel, and e-fuels will be the cost of hydrogen.
Again despite all the claims the likelihood of cheap hydrogen from electricty is akin to finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Zero
Converting Martinez to Renewable Fuels Facility
Project: Converting Martinez Refinery into a renewable fuels facility
Location: Martinez, California
Fuels: Renewable diesel and other renewable fuels
Capacity: Approximately 730 million gallons per year
Timeline: Production expected to come online in 2022 and ramp up to full capacity in 2023
https://www.marathonmartinezrenewables.com/Portfolio/
The Advantages of Neste MY Renewable DieselTM (HVO or R99 diesel)
Neste MY Renewable Diesel significantly reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from all diesel powered equipment. It’s not a fossil diesel. It’s not a biodiesel. Neste MY Renewable Diesel is a high quality, TOP TIER ™ certified biofuel made from 100% sustainably sourced renewable raw materials that do not release new carbon into the atmosphere. By choosing Neste MY Renewable Diesel, companies can use their existing diesel equipment and start to reduce their GHG emissions by up to 75%, today. The fuel is a hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) that is fully compatible with all diesel engines and current diesel fuel distribution infrastructure.
https://www.neste.us/neste-my-renewable-diesel/product-information
OCTOBER 31, 2023
BY ERIN VOEGELE
Marathon Petroleum Corp. on Oct. 31 reported that the renewable diesel joint venture at its Martinez refinery in California is expected to be operating at its full 730 MMgy capacity by the end of the year.
https://biomassmagazine.com/articles/marathon-martinez-biorefinery-to-reach-full-production-in-2023
Is your plan is to turn the world’s food supply, provided by fossil fuel supplied fertilizers and tractors into fuel?
What about the products needed from fossil fuels, you are trying to counter my post about products, things like plastics, fertilizers, explosives, polymers, asphalt, paints, herbicides and pesticides, chemicals required in mining for separating metals from waste etc?
Why don’t you address the actual issue??
How is it difficult to understand that these businesses you point to wont have any raw product to work with when there is no fertilizer or tractor fuel, no bunker fuel for sea transport, no diesel for heavy truck transport??
Do you notice neither company bothers to state how much ordinary fossil diesel they use in collection of the waste cooking oils and tallows?
Fortescue to eliminate 95 million litres of diesel with electric excavators, to update electric haul truck
We have an Australian on this blog telling us that what an Australian company is doing cannot be done.
Global PV capacity hit 1.6 TW in 2023, says IEA-PVPS
The fastest energy change in history still underway
Global EV sales to top 17 million in 2024, most of them in China
China’s EV sales now over 50%
For readers in the US, take note. This is what is happening in the largest, most important market for cars in the world! Readers in Europe may already be aware of the wide choice of cars coming out of China.
CATL announces Shenxing Plus battery – 600 km in 10 minutes
The web site carnewschina.com may prove to be an eye opener for many readers of this site.
Islandboy, of course all these things are possible as we are still going up the fossil fuel use ladder, going to record high uses in 2023. More coal being burnt in places like Indonesia to bring all the nickel and aluminium necessary for the bright green future.
I never saw your answer to the question of whether the Indonesian company Adaro should have used coal (the plan) to build their new Aluminium smelter or destroyed hundreds of km2 of pristine rainforest and river systems to provide all the Aluminium needed for solar panel frames, and EV car bodies, with solar and pumped hydro energy (which costs 8 times as much as coal for the solar panels alone!!). All done with cheap Indonesian labor and Indonesian bauxite and coal to provide cheap Aluminium.
Which was your choice again, or was it diversion to somewhere else??
Not one of those pieces change the fact that fossil fuel use has gone up by over 18,500Twh since 2008 and solar and wind combined total only 3,427Twh.
No fossil fuels have been ‘saved’ on a world wide scale by all the ‘green’ building. It’s all just in addition. It’s very noticeable that you didn’t tackle the questions I asked, just bombarded the forum with green fluff that looks good to those that know nothing about the situation.
A 797F Caterpillar dump truck has around a 4000 litre fuel tank and uses around 240 litres/hr working hard. It has a payload of 363 tonnes and an efficiency of around 50%, meaning it has a work index of 1.2Mwh/hr and can go a full 12hour shift without refueling.
How does the 1.4Mwh battery pack in the new Fortescue fleet of one stack up?
How long does it run between charges? You seem to know so much about this, so please answer this one simple question, at least…
Hideaway.
Rather than building that Indonesian Aluminum production facility, we should instead divert all of the Aluminum used in the global aircraft building industry and high rise building construction to more appropriate uses. We already have more than enough of both of these things. Before too long the population will be declining anyway.
I suppose you would argue that we don’t need more energy…just let things taper off. No more solar panels production, halt to all nuclear plant construction, shutdown all oil drilling rigs and pipeline development, no more vehicles or drones to roll off the assembly line.
I think that is an idea worth considering. Especially the coal production. Sorry Australia, India, China, and USA, et al. Sorry BHP and Boeing. Sorry to all the people who were planning to live on the wages.
Of course, we don’t get to make these decisions. I’m glad that you don’t, and I’m thankful that I don’t have to.
It is quite obvious to me that nothing is going to change your opinion on the ongoing energy transition. Part of the reason for posting this stuff is to troll you but, the main reason is to point out to other folks that are more open minded what is actually happening out there in the real world. I am not going to waste my time finding out stuff that you want to know. If you want the answers go do the research yourself. Ultimately time will tell what really makes sense but, I don’t think Andrew Forest is going to risk his business on something that has no chance of working. Fortescue’s rival Rio Tinto has said that electric mining trucks wont be up to the task for another decade. Time will tell which one of these companies is right and the stakes are high.
A couple of observations on your treatise on the Haru Oni plant. It highlights just how brilliant battery EV technology is. More than 77% of the electrical energy generated by any energy source is actually used to move the vehicle so using the same electricity to make synthetic fuels and then get 30% out of the energy in that fuel as useful work seems a bit silly even if the electricity to fuel process was 100% efficient. The second observation is that manufacturing processes are often improved once the initial process has been tried. I have been involved in light manufacturing and it is amazing how many improvements can be made between manufacturing the first item and the second. Who knows how much the efficiency of the process can be improved. Some people are also looking at this from the angle of what can be done with the abundant cheap electricity that is going to be available when grids across the globe transition to much higher levels of renewable energy, solar in particular. If it is not used to do anything useful it will be lost forever so maybe the thinking is that even a very inefficient use is better than just throwing it away.
You guys seem very hung up on thermodynamics but, PV modules are NOT heat engines. It is something completely different at work when light strikes a solar cell and produces electricity. There is no heat involved in the production of that electricity and in fact the colder the cell the more power it can supply for a given amount of light. LEDs are another technology that work on a completely different basis to incandescent lamps. The light produced is not a byproduct of heat so LEDs provide on average five times the amount of illumination for a given amount of power. Electromagnetism is also very impressive in terms of how much energy is converted into motion in electric motors. There is no heat in the production of motion from electric current. The heat that is produced in an electric motor is due to the electrical resistance of the wires and reduces the output. Electric motor efficiencies are typically in the range from the low 70s to the low 90s in percentage.
Electricity guys like me used to have to depend on the thermodynamics guys to fine tune the heat engines that were used to produce electricity. That is less and less the case as more and more electricity is being produced without the use of heat engines.
Islandboy, as I’ve said previously, I first learned about ‘Limits to Growth’ in a university course I did 49 years ago, and I’ve been looking at/for solutions ever since. Going back 6-10 years ago I was a huge advocate for the ‘bright green future’ based on solar in particular, for exactly the reasons you highlight, plus ‘no moving parts’, that should greatly enhance lifetime of operation, plus minimise maintenance.
I tried to get the numbers to work on providing power to a remote mine site, where the cost of supplying diesel is extraordinarily high. I couldn’t get the cost to work, including when I again halved the cost of solar panels, before adding batteries for the lull periods. Adding batteries to the system, at greatly reduced prices to what then existed, also did not bring the operating cost down to anything like that of just trucking diesel.
This was also ALL before the cost of money was included, which is a very real cost to pay. Adding interest onto the capital cost of building vast tracks of solar in a desert, to power a mine, made the operation completely non viable by an order of magnitude, compared to costs for the same mine using trucked in diesel.
Adding a little solar to offset some of the daytime running costs of the generators, certainly does make a lot of sense, especially when all sort of grants were available to do this, plus it allows the mines to look greener for their ESG requirements, win win.
Mines operate continuously, and need to do so because of the processing of the ores into concentrates. It is a process with various different sub processes, each happening in a continuous fashion, with chemicals to separate minerals from the gangue at various stages in very precise amounts. It doesn’t and can’t work in a stop start mode of intermittency. Most people have no clue of how something like a copper mine operates and assume the minerals just separate out of ore by magic.
I also became very aware of the damage done to the surrounding environment of even putting in a small solar farm at a mine site. It was in a desert area, so plenty of sun, but the dozers just flatten everything to make a nice large flat area to install the panels and prevent any shading from the spindly vegetation that did exist in the area, plus crush every lizard and other lifeform throughout the area of the ‘green solar installation’.
The other important aspect of your ‘bright green future’ is that it’s all made using fossil fuels at every stage of operation, from the mining through processing, manufacture and deployment. No-one is trying to do any of the steps via just electricity from solar and wind, unless they get giant subsidies from the government. It’s not cheaper power at all, because if it was, businesses would do it voluntarily, no subsidies needed.
Then there is the EROEI, which is nowhere near what most research papers, written by people in favor of green renewables claim it is. They can produce the research showing a goodly EROEI by excluding gobs of energy actually used throughout the system that is totally necessary for the mining, processing, manufacturing, transport and deployment of renewables.
They always leave out the energy cost of making all the machinery involved, the roads and bridges used in transport, the energy in providing the educated labor at every step of the process, plus the factory buildings and all the services to the factories. We know fossil fuels can provide all these things, simply because they exist, we built all this with fossil fuels over the last 200 years, including our education systems to educate the vast army of people involved in all the steps. None of this is counted in EROEI research papers, none!!
Why isn’t it counted?
It’s all energy used and all suffers from entropy, so has to be replaced over time. How much of the physical structure is being rebuilt by renewables, which we have had for decades?? None!! We are still playing games with a bit of steel produced by hydrogen, pretending we can ramp it up to include all steel production, with no-one bothering to do the macro numbers on it all. We have theoretical ways of producing concrete, then transport it in diesel trucks, pretending to be green.
Instead, what’s happening in the world, are plants like the Adaro Indonesian smelters are being built to provide cheap Aluminium for EV car panels and solar panel frames. We then call the new panels green energy, when the making of them involves burning more fossil fuels. Even if we tried to make all the new Aluminium smelters from solar panels and batteries, the cost of the Aluminium would be way higher. Likewise for every other part!!
The Adaro example being a perfect illustration of this. Just the solar installation to cover the same output as the planned coal fired power plant, would cost $US16B, plus devastate hundreds of km2 of pristine rainforest, even before we considered backup for the night power and intermittency during the day. The cost of the smelter AND coal fired power plant is $US2B.
The Aluminium cost would be too high for markets if it was built from solar and whatever backup, the interest costs alone would be massive. In our ‘economic rational’ world, it’s a non starter because of cost to build this plant with solar. How does this reality gel with your belief that solar is ‘cheaper’?
Solar and wind are only cheaper in reports like Lazard’s LCOE research, if we make a whole lot of assumptions, and not ‘market forces’. Yet we promote ‘market forces’ as being the be all and end all of production of everything.
The world wholesale price of energy has been around $US40/Mwh on average over the last 10 years. If ‘new’ energy costs around $US40/Mwh to produce, then there is no profit or excess energy for the rest of civilization. We have built the energy provision system, with energy that cost us $US2-5/Mwh!! Again I’ve written a paragraph in what would take a long essay to show, or a book to do full justice to prove, with associated research. We still get and use a lot of $US2/Mwh energy, from oil, gas and coal, but it is also getting more expensive on average.
Do you think a solar, wind and battery world wide system can get down to a cost of $US2/Mwh for both energy AND raw products combined in todays dollars?? If it’s not possible, then future modern civilization is not possible either after fossil fuels leave us. Collapse is going to happen anyway as fossil fuels get to expensive to extract.
If society as a whole can’t have an honest conversation about the energy inputs into building renewables, what hope do we have??
Our system is extremely complex, with layer over layer of complexity. Taking any one aspect in isolation, changing it and expecting the rest of the system to operate ‘normally’ is an extremely naive assumption, because it’s not how the system works, yet this is exactly the approach of every EROEI research paper.
Imagine every aspect of renewable production could only be built with a green renewable energy sources in the future, from now on. How much would the solar panels, the copper wiring and the batteries cost?? The answer is clearly multiples of today.
Then fast forward to the next generation built by the expensive ‘newer’ renewables. Remember to allow for even more remote lower grades of copper ore in this thought experiment. Try to build the next generation with the expensive newer energy.. It doesn’t work, nor can it work, yet this is the lie that keeps going on in our society. It’s a denial of the benefits of cheap fossil fuels, relative to other sources of diffuse energy.
All that’s happened is we have added all renewable energy on top of fossil fuel energy, increasing humanities total energy use. Faster deployment of renewables means more coal mines in Indonesia to produce the Aluminium and Nickel and other commodities, destroying more of the climate because of increased emissions, and more rainforest destruction, by both CO2 and other chemicals released by burning coal.
How can you not look at the raw numbers and see this for what it is?? Since 2008 fossil fuel use has increased by 18,500Twh while the increase in solar and wind electricity has been 3,176Twh.
Imagine instead, fossil fuel use had fallen by 18,500Twh, because of simple unavailability, we had passed peak possible production.
The world would be in serious recession or depression and only a fraction of that new solar and wind would have been built, because there would be a lack of investment dollars and the cost of energy to do it would be through the roof..
Lastly, without the products provided by fossil fuels we have no future modern civilization and with the exception of metallurgical coal, most of these other products come from a fraction of every barrel of oil and million cuft of gas.
We have to extract the lot to get the correct fraction. This is why the ‘hand wave’ of we can still get some fossil fuels for products doesn’t work, because those that suggest it never bother to explain how we can just mine the fractions we need and disregard the rest. In the real world, that’s not how it works at all. Without extracting the ‘whole’, it’s uneconomic to extract a small part, so simply wont happen.
I would love for the bright green future to work, keeping most of the natural world in a more pristine environment than currently, which means rewilding vast tracks of land.
However the numbers clearly show it’s not possible for the large human population we actually have, to go down this route without destroying the climate and most ecosystems in our mad rush to mine the resources needed. Nor is it possible to maintain any modernity with a vastly reduced population of ‘consumers’, for complexity reasons that Prof. Joseph Tainter has already clearly written about, so I wont go into.
The path we are heading on, building more renewables and nuclear in an attempt to continue modern civilization, it means burning more fossil fuels to build , until we reach peak FF use, while we destroy more of the natural world and gain a higher level to fall from. This gives great consumer goods and services for those alive today, that are a part of the modern civilization, at the expense of future generations, probably starting with our children.
Falling from a higher level means more suffering in the world, from both humans perspective and the natural world. Instead of deliberately trying to degrow and lower population, to every living lifeforms overall long term benefit, we have decided to lie to ourselves and create more suffering when the collapse happens, so we can enjoy modernity a bit longer.
I’ve spent decades researching all this, there is no way out now, we are in a vast overshoot predicament, and denial of the bad future, seems to be the choice of humanity…
Energy Efficiency is Critical for a Sustainable Future
Energy efficiency is often overlooked in favor of ramping up renewable energy capacity.
Energy waste is a major problem, with around three-quarters of global energy wasted due to inefficient systems and behaviors.
Improving energy efficiency and reducing energy waste can cut carbon emissions, save money, and alleviate the burden on green energy production.
1. Electrify wherever possible
By transitioning from a fossil energy system to a fully electrified one, we can cut up to 40% of final energy consumption. Electrification is itself a form of energy efficiency, as most electric technologies have a lower rate of energy loss while performing the same function as a fossil-driven equivalent.
2. Implement flexibility solutions
Reinventing energy efficiency is not only about using less energy but also using the energy at the right time. By maximizing the potential of demand-side flexibility, the EU and UK can annually save 40 million tons of CO2 emissions and reduce the electricity generation from natural gas by 106 TWh, or about one-fifth of the EU’s natural gas consumption for electricity generation in 2022. Adding to this the annual societal cost savings amounts to €10.5 billion by 2030. Similarly, households can save on average 7% on their electricity bills.
3. Use hydrogen wisely
Powering our future energy system with renewables will require a rapid scale-up of hydrogen. However, hydrogen conversion requires incredible amounts of energy; by 2050, hydrogen production will require more than half the total electricity demand today. High-efficiency technologies for electrolysis will be essential to ensure energy security and stability as well as to lower energy demand for hydrogen.
4. Integrate sectors
By strategically integrating sectors and deploying excess heat, we can ultimately lower demand on energy production and maximize efficiency. By 2030, up to 53% of the global energy input will be wasted as excess heat. However, this heat can be captured and reused to power machinery, as well as heat buildings and water through deeper sector integration.
https://www.whyenergyefficiency.com/solutions/allsolutions/energy-efficiency-2-0-engineering-the-future-energy-system?utm_source=pressrelease&utm_medium=generic&utm_campaign=cf_energyefficiency2.0
Interesting piece on moon and sun’s gravitational effects on Bay of Fundy tides as well as QBO and AMO by Paul Pukite.
https://geoenergymath.com/2024/04/19/bay-of-fundy-subbands/
I keep hearing interviews where pioneers in the fields of AI and other digital/compute based industries brush off the energy requirement challenges of these sectors ‘since there will be fusion power abundance’.
I acknowledge that I will likely be a permanent naysayer on this possibility based on a lifetime of the viability being always 30 years in the future, if ever.
Is there anyone around here with actual up to date knowledge on fusion R&D that can tell us that actual viable deployment is likely, or even possible, in the next 30 years? Or is it all still firmly in the bucket of wishful or magical thinking?
Seems like the fusion power pipedream continues…most likely there will be other/better options…maybe build some more nuclear plants?
Korea 21 Gw
US 12 Gw
France 11 Gw
Ukraine 9 Gw
Japan 8 Gw
Russia 7 Gw
Canada 6.4 Gw
Sweden 5 Gw
China 3.4 Gw
Here’s something to illuminate the debate about diesel: only about 1/4 of US diesel consumption is long-haul trucking:
https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10308
Edit: I just noticed an error. Can anyone tell what it is?
Objectives—This report presents
provisional 2023 data on U.S. births.
Births are shown by age and race and
Hispanic origin of mother. Data on
cesarean delivery and preterm births are
also presented.
Methods—Data are based on more
than 99% of all 2023 birth records
received and processed by the National
Center for Health Statistics as of January
25, 2024. Comparisons are made with
final 2022 data and earlier years.
Results—The provisional number of
births for the United States in 2023 was
3,591,328, down 2% from 2022. The
general fertility rate was 54.4 births per
1,000 females ages 15–44, down 3%
from 2022. The total fertility rate was
1,616.5 births per 1,000 women in 2023,
a decline of 2% from 2022. Birth rates
declined for females in age groups 15–19
through 35–39 and were unchanged for
females ages 10–14 and for women ages
40–44 and 45–49 in 2023. The birth
rate for teenagers ages 15–19 declined
by 3% in 2023 to 13.2 births per 1,000
females; the rate for younger teenagers
(ages 15–17) was unchanged, and the
rate for older teenagers (ages 18–19)
declined 3%. The cesarean delivery rate
rose to 32.4% in 2023, from 32.1 in 2022;
the low-risk cesarean delivery rate also
increased to 26.6% from 26.3%. The
preterm birth rate was 10.41% in 2023,
essentially unchanged from the rate of
10.38% in 2022.
New posts are up
https://peakoilbarrel.com/opec-update-april-26-2024/
and
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-26-2024/