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The reasons the industrialized world will never get off fossil fuels until a crash causes an irreversible collapse.

Oil and gas are used for much more than just transportation. For example, natural gas is the primary ingredient in agricultural fertilizers so a portion of all gas is used for that purpose. Some of the energy from wells has to be used to drill new wells, fabricate and transport pumping equipment to new wells, and also to pump the oil out of the ground. Ten percent of the crude oil is used in fact to keep oil flowing. This naturally leads to the concept of ERoI (energy returned on investment). That is, what percentage of the amount of inherent energy available can be used after it is extracted and refined. Throughout much of the 20th century, oil had an ERoI of 100, meaning one barrel of oil had to be expended at the well head for every 100 barrels produced. There were 99 of every 100 barrels available for other uses. Today, the ERoI is approaching 10 for the US and the ERoI number continues to fall. I created a graphic from the data contained in a paper by Hall, Lambert, and Balogh (2014, Energy Policy, 64, 141). The graphic illustrates most of the oil energy pumped from Earth’s crust is actually used for purposes other than as a fuel for cars, trucks, planes, and ships. The drop in ERoI from the 20th to the 21st century, for example, now means 10 of every 100 barrels is used just to extract the oil. Another 10 barrels is used to refine the crude oil into useful products with 17 more being used to create petrochemicals such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and agricultural herbicides and pesticides. When another 5 barrels are consumed in transporting the fuels and byproducts to the points of use, we have already used up 42 of the original 100 barrels pumped at the wellhead. But that’s not the end of the story. Another 37.5 barrels are used to build and maintain roads, to manufacture cars, planes, and other durable goods (refrigerators, large appliances). What is leftover for transportation fuels 20.5 barrels from every 100 barrels.

I am a big fan of renewables. However, those who advocate for renewables (solar PV or wind power) should note there are no silver bullets, no technological fixes to allow society to continue living as we have. The ERoI for solar PV or wind power are ~8-10 and 18, respectively, but reduce to 6 and 10 if battery backups are used. Both power sources are intermittent and all forms of power storage (e.g. batteries, pumped hydro., etc.) collectively are ten-thousand times too small to meet current needs. (Bio-fuels and hydrogen cells have ERoI’s of ~1 so these are of little use.) One way or another, humanity will be forced into a 100% conversion to renewables, but even if we had been building renewables on a massive scale for decades, there still would have been much less energy than available today and it will be intermittent.

The grid itself presents another major technological challenge. Currently, electrical grids lose approximately 40% of the power generated to transmission losses. There will have to be a 4-fold increase in the capacity of the power grid if it’s to handle the increased needs for manufacturing and to replace cars and trucks with electric vehicles. Such an increase in grid capacity would cost $1-2 trillion in the US alone and the consumption of huge amounts of fossil fuels. Then, there is the problem of petrochemicals made from fossil fuels. When fossil fuels become too expensive to extract there will be significant reduction (factors of 2) in food production and there will be very few medicines produced.

All industrialized nations have experienced huge increases in debt relative to GDPs, most have ballooned to 3x GDP with two-thirds of it private debt. These countries including the citizenry are essentially bankrupt, which will become apparent during the next recession. These countries are in no position to make huge investments in the conversion to renewables or to expand their electrical grids. There is no alternative but to crash economically without hope of recovering to our good ol’ glory days.

TheAstroChuck 8 Feb 11
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8 comments

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I would not be so pessimistic. Wind and solar electric generation are advancing at a remarkable rate. Their intermittency is a major weak spot, but electricity storage is also advancing. However, a weak spot in renewable-energy development is synthetic fuels. Checking on enthusiast sites like [cleantechnica.com] reveals lots of articles about wind energy and solar energy and batteries and electric cars, but very few about synfuels. There are a sizable amount of articles about hydrogen, elecrtolysis, and fuel cells, however.

Why only 60%? Where does that number come from?

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Do you mean that people never act, until necessity compels it? I think you may be right! I came to that conclusion many years ago!

0

looks like the peak oil advocates might be proven right before the global warming alarmists.
in any event, for the long term, some major oil corps will probably be good investments.
some analysts claim that the shale oil boom is not economic at current prices & if it were not for artificially low int rates never would have been drilled to this extent.
if IRs ever rose even a little many of the shale oil companies would not be able to pay off the huge debts accumulated.

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I often think that the issue of climate change and fossil fuels is an Achilles Heel issue for humans. We are very good at long term change. We've gone from horse and buggy to the space age in less than 150 years and adapted in ways that our recent ancestors would find incredible. We are also good at responding to short term threats and challenges, the fight against fascism in the 20th Century, even going from barely being able to launch rockets to walking on the moon in a decade. But this issue is the worst possible challenge for us: medium term but catastrophic. Too quick to adapt slowly, and not immediate enough, for skeptics, to rally to the cause and deal with it. Like the people in the church in High Noon, they just want Will to go away, and they'll worry about the noon train when it arrives. Maybe it won't? We know it will, with Frank and his boys ready to shoot the town up.

I fear you are right, Professor. Great post.

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Nice work, thank you.

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Human beings are amazing. With funding and enough top brain power, you never know what can be accomplished. We are amazing primates with big brains, and invent or discover things that were once just imagined.

Climate Change is the biggest danger the human race has ever faced.

We need to put the same kind of effort and money that we do into making and designing weapon systems.

At one time I worked on a classified project, and just to work on the code, we had 800 great engineers, the world's leading experts on phased radar, all working on that one part of the project.

Each B2 bomber costs a $Billion. The most recent upgrade has 1000x the computing power the previous version has.

The Senate gave the military double what they needed to operate. Where does all that other money go for, completely unaccounted for? Research and development of the next generation of military machines.

We need at least a Manhattan Project type of effort to work on finding more solutions to climate change. Our science knowledge doubles every few years.

Since this in an existential threat to humanity, we should treat it like a war against climate change.
It is our only chance because humanity is resisting even The New Green Deal, as if it was too much.
That's the only game in town, and it's supported by 600 environmental groups. And, it addresses
our social problems as well.

Bob4Health

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LENR seems to be getting a foothold but the news media won’t report on it. I think we’ll soon see some big changes.

@TheAstroChuck That’s what I think. Power plants, home and industrial heating, trains, ships, aircraft, cars, all powered by the new fire. It’ll be the end of fossil fuel usage.

It’s very enticing. Maybe we’ll soon be hearing more. Trouble is it’s been brewing for years with lots of promises not realized. But now Rossi is supposedly selling his heat and is advertising for clients. It won’t hurt to hope.

@TheAstroChuck Actually that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what was previously called cold fusion and is now usually referred to as LENR or low energy nuclear reaction. I’ve been following the saga since ‘79. There are a lot of promising new developments.

@TheAstroChuck

I’m not sure. Rossi is claiming a very high COP and he is offering to sell heat from his Ecat devices.Here are some studies that might interest you.

[scholar.google.lt]

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cough nuclear cough

@TheAstroChuck why?

@TheAstroChuck Oh, I understand the massive setup and decommissioning costs. But while it's running, you've got 60 years of baseload power with very low running costs and very low carbon emissions, and it slots in to existing transmission infrastructure.

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