Recently, I made a few posts on Facebook discussing a New York Times article titled “If not now, when”. The piece was another of the endless demands that we end our oil addiction. These sorts of comments seem to become more frequent anytime the price of gas spikes or there is a hint of trouble in the Middle East. Of course the words “End Oil Addiction” are very easy to say but the suggested action is enormously difficult to accomplish. As we observed during the BP disaster, fossil fuel, millions of years of stored solar energy, just spews out of a pipe that has one end in a reservoir and the other where we can watch it. It gushes at a rate of millions of BTU’s per second, 5,800,000 BTU a barrel. There is no known technology that will produce liquid fuel in this volume. Nobody can stand up and say if we build a plant of design Y, that uses feedstock X, we can make an oil substitute for $200 a barrel. This article suggests a gasoline tax, probably because that would discourage consumption and allow some nascent alternative technology an opportunity to compete with oil. The usual alternative is biofuel, something we grow that ultimately uses contemporary solar energy and photosynthesis to produce liquid fuel. Vegetable oil and algae are often suggested.
It is undoubtedly true that thermal depolymerization or other arcane chemistry can be used to make diesel fuel out of almost any organic matter, and you can just press oil out of certain species of algae; the big problem is the photosynthetic capacity of the earth and scale. The USA burns 20 million barrels of oil a day and, at 42 gallons a barrel, that is 840 million gallons. We can estimate the practicality of producing this through photosynthesis by looking at fuel ethanol production in Brazil. In 2007 Brazil cultivated 8.4 million acres to produce 13 million gallons of sugar cane ethanol per day. Corrected for energy content, that is the same as 9.2 million gallons of oil. Sugar cane has a relatively high photosynthetic efficiency and this data suggests that the use of photosynthetic fuel would require 767 million acres to produce that 840 million gallons of crude equivalent. These are alarming numbers when you consider that we have only 470 million acres of arable land under cultivation in the US ! Taking another example, an analysis of a proposed Hawaiian palm oil plantation resulted in an expected yield of 600 gallons of biodiesel per acre per year. An area the size of Arizona, 72,726,400 acres, suitably irrigated and planted with palm oil (considered an efficient biofuel producer), would therefore produce 119.6 million gallons a day. We would need 7 Arizona’s, 509 million acres, to produce our fuel requirement using palm oil biodiesel (and a switch to diesel vehicles). It is clear that we don’t have the water and arable land to grow liquid fuel in fossil replacement quantities.
Getting down to sustaining life, it takes about 1.1 daily gallons of fuel to feed each of the 300 million of us or 330 million gallons a day. Once Saudi Arabia and other old oil fields start to decline and we all switch to solar powered trikes we can live until our share of global production drops to 330 million gallons a day – then we starve. There is no way we go cold turkey on oil regardless of the dreams of pundits and politicans. Oil is food and you can’t kick the food habit.
The fundamental problem is overshoot. We have exceeded the population that can be organically supported without finite supplies of diesel fuel and petroleum derived agricultural chemicals. In the absence of some technological advance we therefore will not be able to end the addiction without population control. At some point we will be like the natives of Easter Island, we will be burning the last few barrels of oil, just as they cut down the last trees, and then, since we have not found alternatives, we will starve. We like to use the word “sustainable” a lot, it makes us sound like we know something, but we are really talking about sustaining human life. A few billion people stop eating without oil. Organic agriculture might feed two billion of us.
Another way of looking at this is found in the fact that population grows exponentially and our vaunted economic system, capitalism, requires exponential growth to function. This requires an exponential growth of energy supply and liquid fuel but we certainly don’t have an exponentially increasing supply of petroleum or arable land. Exponential growth is insidious. Most people have a $15 scientific calculator with an e^x key. I have a TI-36. Consider a thought experiment in which we can support 2 billion bacteria in a 55 gallon drum full of water and nutrients. We put 100 bacteria in the drum and, since bacteria divide fast, lets say growth factor per hour is 1.5. Enter 1.5 on the calculator, press the e^x key (this is the 2nd function of LN), and you get 4.48. Multiply by the 100 bacteria and, after the first hour, you have 448. Hardly any compared to the capacity of the barrel so lets come back in eight hours. Multiply 1.5 X 8 and you get 12, use the e^x key and you get 162755, and that multiplied by the initial 100 is 16.3 million bacteria. This is nothing really because, after all, that drum holds 2 billion so we decide to check again at the 12 hour point. Now we have a problem, that number has grown to 6.5 billion bacteria and we need to scramble to find more drums so we can feed them all. We only need four drums however and there is still plenty of room in the yard. We come back in 24 hours and, damn, there are 4.31 X 10^17th critters and we would need 215 million drums. We can see that at some point after 12 hours we could not keep up with the hourly increment in drums and the incremental requirements of this exponential growth are very difficult to satisfy. While humans don’t reproduce at a 1.5 factor per hour our numbers and energy consumption do grow exponentially, each increment gets harder to service, and we are at the 12 hour point in the model above. We are in overshoot.
Economists like a 3.5% growth rate. If the GDP is 100 units we can use the TI 36 as above to calculate that it will be 201.4 units, or nominally double, in 20 years. This requires about double the energy, about 170 million barrels a day of global oil consumption. Twenty years after that we need 340 million and we can see that, like the bacterial example, we rapidly need an impossible annual increment in oil production as time passes. This is especially alarming when you realize that we don’t even have one doubling in oil production left. A baby born in 1973, during the first oil crisis, rode home from the hospital in a car powered by gasoline. In 2013, 40 years later and after a billion words about “foreign oil”, he drives a car powered by gasoline. It is certain however, that a child born in 2013 will not burn gasoline at the age of 40 and he will face an enormous and brutal transition to some other way of life, if he lives.
Consider that the DOE reports that there are 1.4 trillion barrels of proven reserves in the world. BP recently stated that production will reach 102 million barrels a day or 37.2 billion barrels a year. Divide and you get 37.6 years. Not much time when you consider all we do it write articles, do nothing, and have no apparent solution. Note well that we will not be producing 102 million barrels a day 35 years from now. The oil is in porous rock, not a tank in Cushing, Oklahoma. Oil production peaks, and then inexorably declines. The maximum US production occurred in 1971. In spite of Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, enhanced oil recovery, the Bakken shale and all the rest – the maximum flow rate occurred in 1971. This is a prototype for the earth, we are at maximum now, and production will decline, economies will collapse, and ultimately we will not eat.
I believe that the answer to the original question “If not now, when ?” is “Probably never, but certainly not until we figure out how”. I believe that a few new rules would help.
1) Repeal “Be Fruitful and Multiply” or use a new, under unity, coefficient. The old biblical injunction is no longer operative. The planet will support 2 billion people if we are going to eat and enjoy the per capita energy consumption of an advanced society.
2) Create new, local, and organic agricultural methods. We can’t ship eggs in from 800 miles away and we need to make agriculture much less oil intensive.
3) Stop wasting 65% of the energy in natural gas used for electric generation. Live in a commune or apartment, in the middle of a 40 acre farm, where a natural gas engine generates electricity and the waste heat is used for space heating and hot water. We need 85% efficiency in this process. Incorporate methane from agricultural and farm animal waste in the fuel source for this engine. Solar and wind should also be used if supported by local conditions. We do have a significant endowment of natural gas – so lets not waste it.
4) Electrified railroad tracks should go everywhere. The energy in the 600 gallons per acre per year of biodiesel production discussed above represents a mere 0.3% of insolation. Solar panels don’t need water and get close to 20%. Electric trains therefore rule. Any train, steel wheels on steel track, offers a large improvement in efficiency, a multiple of about 5 over cars and trucks and, due to its diesel electric topology and the fact that it runs on precisely located tracks, also allows third rail use of solar, wind and other renewables.
5) All busses must be electric and free to ride. While the idea of buying say, a Nissan Leaf, and having to recharge every 100 miles may limit acceptance of electric cars – a 50 mile bus route is just great. At a terminal a robotic fork lift replaces the battery, that takes about two minutes, and the bus is ready to repeat the route. Local gasoline taxes fund the bus service and the “free” ride encourages use. An app for your phone tells you where the bus is so you can walk out as it arrives. No waiting. Electric power means the bus runs on any energy source from nuclear to solar to natural gas. No oil is required.
