I must begin this article with an apology to all my readers. In life I never use profanity; I feel that there are better ways for one to express one-self than resorting to baseless language. I reluctantly chose this title because it is the only word that conveys the potential seriousness of the current situation that I am attempting to define. It is also the only word that conveys the sense of urgency that we as a civilization must take in our very immediate future.
I have commented in several other articles that environmental catastrophe is the number one threat to our lives on this planet. And closely related to the environment is how we get energy: What we consume to maintain our lifestyle directly effects our environment. Since America is the biggest consumer of energy (for now) the energy policy that it sets is extremely significant, in fact crucial. I believe that in the very immediate future we will be unable to produce the level of energy needed to sustain our lifestyle. I believe that this scenario will manifest itself in DECADES. Not a century, not a generation, but DECADES. The severity of the problem is heightened because any solution that we devise will take 20 years to implement. If we start trying to solve this problem when these consequences begin to occur, then it is already too late. We have to anticipate this crisis point by 20 years to even have a chance at making this work. So, if we are, for example, 20 years away from crisis, and the solution needs 20 years to implement, then we have to start implementing it RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW!!!!! Not next election cycle, not after the economy stabilized, not after we get out of Iraq, RIGHT FREAKIN’ NOW!!!! This article is an attempt to define the contributing factors that I believe will lead to this crisis.
Future Energy Profile
The biggest challenge we face is not a matter of sustaining our current energy profile, but what this profile will look like in the very near future. Fifty years ago there were few countries outside of the United States and Europe with a middle class that consumed a significant amount of resources. That picture is changing very very rapidly. Although America still consumes a lot more energy than anyone else (more than the next 3 biggest economies COMBINED) there are several other countries undergoing considerable growth and therefore using much more energy than they have before.
China is experiencing a major industrial revolution. Before the recession, China’s economy was on a pace to double every 14 years. As an economy grows, it uses more and more energy. China is building more and more by the day. However, as mechanized as China is becoming, half of the population is still living by the impoverished standards of the 1900s. So, what happens when those millions of people in villages begin driving cars, using computers, and begin running air conditioners?
India, though not growing as fast as China, is still growing quickly. The number of people moving into the middle class – and therefore consuming more energy – is growing rapidly. The number of people living “like Americans” is rising.
I believe that everyone on some level is engaged in this rat race. Even Developing Nations with traditional agrarian economies are consuming more and more energy. The era when America used nearly all of the energy while the rest of the world stood by and watched it happen has ended. To illustrate my point, consider China again: 1/3 of age eligible drivers in China’s cities have drivers license but no car. They believe that they will own a car in the future; but as of now, they lack the wealth and resources to own one. What happens when those millions of people start consuming resources at the same level that Americans are?
Add to this profile the sheer numbers associated with population growth. What happens when there are another 1 or 2 BILLION people on this planet? Even if these new arrivals consume minimal energy, it is still very significant. What happens when people in underdeveloped areas move to a city to find a better way of life? The migration of people from rural areas to large cities adds to the current energy profile.
The actual numbers are staggering. Luis Giusti (former president of Venezuela State Oil Company) estimates that we as a planet currently use the energy equivalent of 80 million barrels of oil per day. At the rate we are growing, we will be using 120 barrels of oil per day by 2030. THAT IS TWENTY YEARS AWAY. We as a planet have to find a source of NEW energy equal to half the energy we are already producing. Wade Adams (Director of Nano Technology Research, Rice University) believes that we will need 14 terawatts of energy (220 million barrels of oil/day) by 2050. In just 40 years, we will be using twice the amount of energy that we are currently using. Please note that although energy consumption is being measured in barrels of oil, this does not necessarily mean that is how much oil we are using. However you measure it, we are going to need a lot of new energy. We cannot wait 20 years to start to develop a 7 terawatt energy source.
Peak Oil
The United States uses 25% of the world’s oil yet has 2% of the world’s oil reserves. I believe we are running out of oil and that Saudi Arabia and OPEC have been lying to us about how much oil they are producing. Since this argument seems ridiculous to most people I will not even make it today; I will save my peak oil discussion for another time. However, I will say that I believe that as we go forward, the extraction, production, and refining of oil will become harder and more expensive.
All of the oil on this planet has already been made. Oil is not like corn that you can grow every year. It took millions of years and a lot of dead dinosaurs and biomaterial that was heated and compressed by geology. All of the oil we have already used and are ever going to use has ALREADY BEEN CREATED. The challenge now is how do we find what is left and refine it. The fact that we are trying to drill for oil 5 miles under the ocean floor means that we have already used up a lot of the “easy oil” that shoots out of the ground like in the “Beverly Hillbillies.” You may laugh, but just 50 years ago America was the biggest oil producer in the world and there were several places in Texas where oil just shot up in the air. When I see oil companies trying to mine oil from tar SAND, that tells me they have run out of easy to access oil. Why would an oil company waste energy to try to get oil out of tar sand? Because that is the only oil left to discover!!! The former president of Shell Oil made a prediction that by 2015, easy to access oil will be unable to keep up with demand.
There are several people who suggest that if we use the untapped oil resources of the United States, we could get out of this problem. They say there are places like ANWAR in Alaska and the west coast where we could find some oil. I believe that the oil we may find there would be only a drop in the bucket. Consider the recent Gulf spill. If you assume that 100,000 barrels a day (that is the biggest estimate to date) have been spilling into the gulf for 60 days, that is 6 million barrels spilled. According to an estimate made in 2007, the United States uses 21 MILLION BARRELS a day. So, all of that mess in the Gulf, all that disaster in the marshes of Louisiana, all of the dying pelicans and tar-balled beaches is equal to the amount of oil the United States uses in 8 HOURS. We use three times as much oil PER DAY as all the mess that is in the Gulf. That is how much NEW oil we will have to find and produce to support our CURRENT energy profile.
Atmospheric CO2
And now I will address global warming and climate change. I will give opponents of clean energy the benefit of the doubt and pretend that the data on climate change is inconclusive. However, we should consider this: Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere between 50 and 200 years, depending on who you listen to. If we stopped using all CO2 right now, we would still have a ton of it in the atmosphere. Living organisms also create CO2, which ends up in the atmosphere.
Most scientists think that a CO2 measurement of 550 parts per million (ppm) in the Earth’s atmosphere will lead to a 3 degree temperature change, and that such a temperature change is fairly significant. Currently, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is estimated at 440 ppm, and we are adding 2.5 ppm per year. This means that at our current rate of CO2 production, we hit the magic number in 44 years. That is assuming that we maintain our current level of CO2 production. But we all know that if we proceed on the course we are on now, the amount of fossil fuels we are using is going to rise. How fast they rise and by how much is the question. Add to this number the fact that every forest we cut down to make more room for people reduces our ability to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Every tree we cut down exacerbates the problem because as we all know from 7th grade science, trees use CO2 and produce oxygen.
There are some who think that the 550 ppm = 3 degrees idea that I have quoted is debatable. And, there are also some who do not believe that 3 degrees is significant. There is also a debate as to how much of this CO2 is naturally occurring and how much is do to man using fossil fuels. As I said, I am not going to argue the merits of climate change in this article. But I will say that as the population of the world uses more carbon based fuel, we will be producing more CO2. That CO2 will stay in the atmosphere for years and add to the total amount of CO2 already present in the atmosphere. That part is not debatable.
Possible solutions
Several technologies have been proposed as solutions to our energy crisis. Here are a few of the popular ones. I do not believe that any one of these can replace what we get from fossil fuels.
Natural Gas
NATURAL GAS IS NOT CLEAN. It is less “dirty” than gasoline, but is by no means a clean fuel. The plus side is that this country has an abundance of natural gas that could be extracted relatively cheaply. Although I do not believe natural gas is an adequate energy solution, I do believe (and T Boone Pickens agrees with me) that natural gas could be useful in bridging the gap to whatever we end up transitioning. We also have to ask the question “how much natural gas infrastructure do we want to build for something that is probably a temporary solution?”
Biomass
Most experts think that fuels from biomass could not be scaled up adequately to play a major part in energy production. Sugar-based ethanol is better than corn-based ethanol, but even this has significant challenges. One problem that opponents present is that to grow fuel, we will have to give up the space needed to grow food. This can be overcome somewhat by using switch grass and things that are the unusable parts of food crops themselves. The problem with this is that we have to use a lot of energy to make this clean fuel. Also, biomass is not dense enough to even come close to replacing fossil fuels. The best estimates realistically predict that even with a major scaling up of our biofuel capabilities, it would still be less than 10% of our energy profile.
Hydrogen
I do not believe that hydrogen power on a large scale is feasible in the short term. Ideally, it could be very clean. The problem with hydrogen is a matter of production. What are the ramifications of mass producing and storing hydrogen safely? We would have to create an entire hydrogen production infrastructure just to produce the hydrogen. I don’t think this endeavor is worthless, but we must be realistic about how hydrogen may help us get out of the mess we are in. There will be some rich people in some areas that can drive hydrogen cars, but this is not going to help us in the next 50 years, and definitely not in the next 20 years.
Nuclear
I have always argued that nuclear has gotten a bad rap. Additionally, we have let one accident that happened 30 years ago keep us from using a valuable technology. In the recent political discussion, more and more people have begun to push for nuclear power. But, there are some draw backs.
First, nuclear energy is the most expensive technology. The initial start up cost is enormous. Second, it takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant. David Goodstein of Cal Tech estimates that if we are going to use nuclear to replace fossil fuels, we would need to build 10,000 nuclear plants worldwide. If we did manage to build 10,000 plants in the next 10 years, we would use up all of our uranium in 50 years. Of course this is an extreme example, but when we couple the size of the problem with the cost of nuclear power, we have to be really optimistic if we think nuclear power is the way out of this.
The plus side of nuclear is that once we manage to get a nuclear plant built, the maintenance costs are very do-able. It also produces no carbon. The radio active waste of course is a huge problem, but I do not believe it is unsolvable. There are even some technologies that can make fuel rods out of some of the waste products.
I think that we should be using more nuclear power. I think it has role to play in our energy solution, just not the primary role. I think it can be used to significantly augment our energy production, but it should not be the backbone of our energy strategy.
Wind
This biggest draw back of wind power is that it is not a very dense energy source. The amount of energy we get per unit is not remarkable. The amount of time that wind is not blowing also creates a problem of reliability. Having said this, there are still some advantages to wind power. Wind power is one of the cheapest and fastest to build. The modularity of wind power is also a big advantage. We don’t have to wait 10 years for the whole wind farm to be built. We can start producing energy as soon as you put up the first few turbines. Wind turbines do produce completely clean energy, but there are environmental concerns. Most notably, birds fly into the spinning turbines, but there are experiments with sonar to find a solution to this setback.
Clean Coal
On the surface this may seem like a worth while endeavor. We have a lot of coal. We use a lot of coal. If we could use it cleanly, we could go quite far in solving our energy problems. The problem is how much money are we going to spend trying to get this to work?
We have very limited resources and it seems to me that there are more technologies that are further developed that can help us in the short term. Also, clean coal does not help to clean up the detrimental mining aspect of coal. Blowing a top off of a mountain to get coal is still not helping us in the long term. It may be easier to invest in a new alternative than to try to make a dirty old technology better. I compare clean coal to owning a really old, really beat up car. We can spend money to replace the engine and the transmission and the other components of the car, but eventually it is going to be better and cheaper to just buy a new car (a hybrid car of course).
Solar
I believe solar power can play the biggest part in solving our problems. The photovoltaic cell was invented in 1920!!! The solar panel is not some fringe piece of technology that we are not sure whether it will work, IT FREAKIN WORKS!!!! 20,000 times the amount of solar energy that we need hits this planet every day. Even if solar panels are only 10% efficient, that is still extremely significant. In addition to that, the United States has vast areas of flat land that get a lot of sun. The American southwest is PERFECT for solar power. Not to mention we have a significant part of the African continent that is dessert.
Estimates indicate that we would need an area the size of California to harvest all of the solar energy we would need to meet this country’s energy needs. If we add up all the solar capacity today, it roughly takes up the size of Connecticut. Increasing this capacity is not impossible, but it will require a HUGE undertaking and a huge political and financial commitment. [If I were president of the universe I would just move everyone out of Arizona, make it one big solar panel, and then hook a bunch of wires into it. EXTENSION CORDS AND DUCK TAPE!!!]
The energy produced by solar power is completely clean but realize that anytime you build on a pristine environment there are ecological consequences. I think these factors can be minimized. Of course, like most of the experts, I believe that it is going to take more than just one technology to get out of this mess.
In spite of the grim scenario I have outlined, I still believe we can fix this problem. If we were in this situation 50 years ago, or even 15 years ago, I do not believe we would be technologically advanced enough to handle this. I think the world we live in affords us the ability to fix our problems. The thing that makes me pessimistic is the political will necessary to get this done. I think we are FUCKED because we lack the ability politically to do what is necessary. Maybe it is a failing of American democracy that we can only achieve incremental change. It is a good thing when the radical elements of our government don’t dictate policy, but in this case it may work against us. The solution to this problem maybe too radical to be implemented by our current government.
In my next article, I am going to propose a solution to how I think America can fix its energy problem. I have to warn you that the solution I purpose will not be pretty. This problem is not going to be fixed by NBC putting a green logo on the bottom of the TV screen. It is not going to be fixed by a bunch of people wearing tie-dye on Earth Day. It is going to be a painful solution that will require everyone in our society to make changes. It will require complete social, economic, and political upheaval. All of us will be very inconvenienced. People will loose their jobs. People will go out of businesses. Companies will go bankrupt. The economy will slow down at least in the short term. In the long term, there will be new opportunities created and although our percent of the pie may be smaller, the pie itself will be much, much bigger. Most importantly, we will make a society that can carry us through the 21st century and beyond.
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