The Three Chinas and World Energy Demand

Nice analysis.
Unfortunately, it seems that the “fighting and scheming” is what those running the AGW scam want.
No doubt the fighting and scheming will become global and reduce the population.
Win-Win, if you’re one of the anti-human AGW brigade.

Anthony – Why the very limited growth in natural gas to 2030 and decline from then on? Don’t think this is realistic. New unconventional gas resources (shale gas, tight gas, CSG) would have the capacity to fill practically all the renewables wedge through to at least 2060. Suspect that Lynn Orr’s analysis may be heavily reliant on pre-2000 resource estimates which do not take this into account.

Pretty reasonable chart. Did you know, Portugal gets 45% of its Electricity from Renewables?
If you break it down into small areas you will see that the task isn’t nearly as daunting as it seems when you’re dealing in thousands of “quads.”

Interesting take. If energy is as strongly linked with the betterment of livelihood as you suggest, then we need massive amounts of additional energy. Even if your Danish model is adopted, the least of all evils is probably to acquire as much as possible of this additional capacity from nuclear energy. Biofuels take up too much good land, and there are presently limitations to some of the other alternative options. As for oil and gas, conventional supplies are the least destructive, but they may be approaching their peak. If you put humans on a geological timescale, the rate at which we are using those resources is frightening… technology to the rescue fast, please. Most of us won’t stop reproducing (what’s more fulfilling than children) and most of us won’t change our behaviours until we’re in deep trouble, because what is best for the individual is energy consumption, even if what is best for humanity is conservation. Tragedy of the commons guaranteed!

The only report of which I am aware that looks at this half-way logically is:-
http://www.raeng.org.uk/news/publications/list/reports/Generating_the_future_report.pdf
Note that this is the projection of the generation needs for a developed economy (the UK) up to 2050. And their base case assumption is the rather fanciful one of energy consumption being capped at current levels.
Just check out what new energy infrastructure they say is needed if we are to strive to 80% CO2 reduction by 2050!
I should point out that these aren’t a bunch of nasty deniers funded by BigOil. They are a bunch of highly qualified energy engineers who are also AGW alarmists (and who are heavily in the pay of Nuclear, BigWind and the rest.
But the sums are probably appropriate and they have the probably got the ‘right answers’ (even though that is the right answers to the wrong questions).
This is presented as the “solution” to the UK’s energy problems (although it brushes away the fact that BigWind just doesn’t work). Just imagine what are the implications of similar policies in Africa!
Tom Fuller’s article is spot on. Or as Dr. Roy Spencer points out, the war against global warming is actually a war on the poor.

“we are condemning billions of people to needlessly live a wretched existence that they would avoid if they could”
No, we are not.
Please read my finger: ‘da poor’ do not have a blank check on my existence or determine my choices of what to do with my resources.
However, those who attempt to use an argument based on ‘the white man’s burden’ or ‘my brother’s keeper’ to influence my sentiments are sorely deserving of a proper non-PC explanation of stfu.

Please forgo the pathetic urge to wring drama from your back of the envelope calculations.
Scaremongering is as fashionable and group emoting is socially fulfilling for some, but tent-show is tent-show. And this is low rent tent-show.
When come back, bring pie.

I think the analysis is correct, but any prediction of timing a supply crunch will be extremely difficult as accurate numbers are impossible to get. I wonder about the numbers from The U.S. Department of Energy and the United Nations, experience shows their numbers usually present a fluffy picture regarding energy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7500669/Oil-reserves-exaggerated-by-one-third.html
The graph presented above for example has crude peaking around 2020, with a long tail off. This is grossly underestimated IMO, and takes no account of “net peak oil” see http://netenergy.theoildrum.com/node/5500
I suspect the wind/solar/renewable/nuclear projections probably don’t take account of the embedded energy required to manufacture/bring them on line in the first place, or the lower EROEI from harder to extract resources, which will bring the nice long sloping curve down – to a more abrupt cliff edge, certainly much steeper than the graph suggests.
Is there a link to the original research presented in the graph?
Regardless, I’m not convinced this has any major implications for our climate directly, tho increased poverty will no doubt assist further environmental degradation and pollution as it seems to now, as will resource extraction at the limits of technology.

The projection is overly simplistic – the extra billion people by 2030 will be too poor to buy much energy, whatever its source – and renewables are far too expensive for them. China’s growth is about 30% China Inc. – a branch of the US, EU and other sources of corporate finance making western goods cheaper so that western growth can putter along – but the whole global economy is unstable, and one factor is the oil-price to which all other energy sources are related one way or another.
Certainly demand in China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and Russia will increase – they can afford it, and they will consume their natural environment in the process – but the poor will be left out, just as they have been for the last 30 years – with 2 billion still without adequate clean water and sanitation. I would argue their best future is to turn away from the western mode of consumption and strengthen their indigenous ways, securing a stable ecology and community and protecting themselves from ‘development’ – length of life and dollar spending power is no indication of the quality of that life, and my travel in the ‘Third World’ quickly showed me just how vital and happy people could be in very limited material circumstances (and thats not to deny a great number are desperate and destitute – often because of the social disruption of war, corrupt government and displacement due to the global demand for commodities).

Not demand, but supply, availlability and pricing will define the future energy-consumption of mankind in the future.
The Third World can demand energy as much as it may – buf when there simply is none they can lay their hands on, or if the purchasing prices for said energy far exceed the Third World’s availlable income, there’s no ways in heaven they will ever rise their energy consumption to western-lifestyle levels – let alone, to US-lifestyle-levels.
So keeping the Third World poor is paramount to ascertain the First, Western World the future availlability of sufficient and affordable energy.
And that’s what western politicians were and still are all about, when dealing with the Third World.
It only remains to be seen, how emerging countries and people like those of China and India will react to that in the future.
I predict future energy wars looming in a not-too-distant future – the first of which are actually fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, already.

So, I messed up with the link. Here it is in a form that stupid can do.
http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/rare-scribbling/locusts/low-carbon-plot/

Correction:
In 1945 few people could forsee the agricultural revolution.

evanmjones says:
August 13, 2010 at 2:41 am
Did you know, Portugal gets 45% of its Electricity from Renewables?
Which is why they are the poster-boy on how to self immolate one’s economy to no material gain.
—-
please explain how that ‘immolation’ works … in relation to renewables?

Sir,
There is a limiting factor that you must take into account and that is Peak Oil and Gas.
And of course, coal.
Rgds.
Mike Core
[REPLY – Peak Oil: Peek and ye shall find. ~ Evan]

Sir,
There is a limiting factor that you must take into account and that is Early Peak Oil and Gas.
And of course, coal.
Rgds.
Mike Core

Sorry, Evan, I’m with the Grey Monk on this. I have yet to see any evidence that the planet can support such numbers of people in the style to which we in the west have become accustomed. The much-derided Tommy Malthus pointed out the big problem centuries ago, as did the Club of Rome in their modelling exercise. It is simply that the amount of food that can be produced depends on the land area that can be used and the technology used to produce it and hence increases arithmetically (if you work twice as hard you can double it, then work twice as hard again to quadruple it, etc.). Population, on the other hand, increases geometrically, i.e. the numbers born depend on the numbers breeding, and so will inevitably outpace resources unless fecundity is reduced.
Interestingly, there seems much evidence at the moment that fecundity does in fact reduce with increasing wealth and particularly with educating women. Unfortunately, cultural norms vary slowly and in huge areas of the world women are not educated and, since the lead time is about 30 years (which is also the doubling time of the current human population), it cannot alone prevent an increase.
I hope few here would advocate any sort of ‘Final Solution’ to this, because it’s really not needed. The more humans there are, the more population pressure forces them in to sub-optimal areas where they are vulnerable to our randomly varying environment. For example, millions of people are currently suffering because they live on the slopes of rapidly-eroding newly-raised mountains and the rainfall this year is higher than average (as it is half the time). Hence the floods and rockslides which are quite normal for those conditions are killing the thousands forced to live in the valley bottoms instead of the higher ground. Similarly, many people live in areas where rainfall is normally very low (but variable). In the good years/decades there is enough food and so they, like any other lifeform, invest in breeding so there will be more ‘selfish genes’ to ensure that in the bad times at least some of their descendants might survive. In addition to such entirely predictable hazards there are the rarer volcanic eruptions and meteorite strikes which will hit at random no matter where you have ‘chosen’ to live. Such is life.
The other thing to consider is biological warfare. No, I don’t mean chucking dead horses over the walls, but the incessant fighting between micro-organisms and hosts. In the last 50 years, man has dramatically increased the death rate against pathogens with a huge variety of chemicals. However, this application of selection pressure merely means that pathogens evolve to deal with the problem and since their generation times can be as little as 20 minutes, we are going to lose in the long run. Already bacteria immune to virtually everything we can throw at them are appearing, and we now have huge numbers of people with virtually no natural immunity. I don’t think the human population will reach those levels.

We are already in a world where we are having food riots. If there is are early frosts in the grain producing regions of Canada and the mid-West together with the fires in Russia there could easily be a food shortage now. So far the world has managed to keep just ahead of the demand curve for food but only just and only because of the benign warm climate of the last 40 years. Had the weather remained cool Paul Ehrlich would have probably been right.
All the current pointers are for the weather to start going cooler. This will both increase demand for energy and reduce the amount of available food, as grow lines move equatorwards.
We are looking at the increasing probability of a cold world with no oil and insufficient food.

That is an oddly labeled chart. It SAYS “World Energy Demand – Long-term Energy Sources,” yet it nothing on it is about DEMAND. It is all about energy SOURCES.
I think it need to be re-labeled.

pointman says:
August 13, 2010 at 2:56 am
For those who may not have seen it, a partial translation of a book which gives China’s view on CAGW and therefore energy. They’ll be doing their own thing on the energy front as will the developing world. It’s their only way out of poverty.
http://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/the-dragons-dissent/
_____________
The book seems speculative. But you are certainly right on
“doing their own thing on the energy front”
1/ In the short term they will use any energy to sustain economic growth
and development. They will aggressively outcompete other nations for oil,
mines and land ownership abroad.
2/ They are well aware of the air pollution detoriation related to coal burning
3/ They have stated a target of 500 gigawatts of renewable-energy capacity
by 2020 — nearly one third of the nation’s projected power capacity
for that year.
4/ Last year they invested nearly half of total global renewables investments,
for instance they have about 40% of global photovoltaics production
5/ Already experiencing severe water shortage in the plains of NW China,
I am convinced that they take AGW seriously.
The impications for USA, you can figure out yourselves

evanmjones August 13, 2010 at 3:46 am
Matt Ridley illustrates your point beautifully about 6 mins into this piece.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/8/7/matt-ridley-at-ted.html
Pointman

Some points to consider: A universal “One Child Policy” would still require 5 generations (100+yrs) t0 return the population to present levels.
A growing population requires a growing food supply, but also requires a growing living space, mutually exclusive solutions. Modern, hi tech food production requires hi energy input, not easily accomplished by renewable energy converted to battery power. A modern combine does the work of 80 men working manually.
One gallon of oil provides the energy to pump 100 gallons from a well. One gallon of oil provides the energy to squeeze only 4 gallons out of oil shale.
If the entire US corn crop were turned to EtOH for fuel each year, it would conserve about 2% of the world’s demand for automotive fuel. Keeping our tires properly inflated will save us about 5%.

evanmjones says:
August 13, 2010 at 3:46 am
please explain how that ‘immolation’ works … in relation to renewables?
Simple cost-benefit. The cost simply does not justify the amount of energy produced. The economic results are inevitable.
——–
Uniot costs for renewables are going down. For fossils they will
presumably rise. Renewables are subsidized, but so are, perversely,
fossils.

Some points:
1. Peak Oil theory is not a scientific fact.
2. Petroleum is buried biomass is not a scientific fact.
3. Plate Tectonics is not a scientific fact.
4. The Big Bang is not a scientific fact.
5. AGW is not a scientific fact.
These are, instead, technically sophisticated “Beliefs” based on an intellectually based consensus that is otherwise known as “peer review”. It isn’t science by any stretch of the imagination.

In the 80s, when computer storage was expensive, a forward-looking individual wrote an article, head-lined “What if mass storage were free?” and came up with many enlightening ideas. Laughable those days, almost reality 30 years later.
I am convinced that there is a similarity with energy:
1. Technical progress will make energy generation cheaper and less damaging for the environment.
2. Having abundance of cheap energy available anywhere will make human life much more enjoyable.
Let’s get ready for such a future, instead of turning the wheel of progress backwards, as the doomsayers do.

This analysis seems to be pretty much the same, in terms of depth & sophistication, as Paul Ehrlich used to develop his warnings about the “Population Bomb” that never happened.
Thing is, as societies populate the citizens tend to have fewer children on average. There’s a whole bunch of factors that interplay. Those apply to this analysis & None of them have been included. For a benchmark check out the late Dr. Michael Crichton’s official website — he addresses this at some length, noting his observation that when alarmists, like Ehrlich with his warnings of population overgrowth, sound thier alarms the solution to the problem is usually well underway. Crichton uses a specific example from the population expolosion fear — presenting data illustrating how population birth & growth rates had been in decline for some years prior to Ehrlich’s warnings; in many countries these fell to below population maintenance levels.
For this grossly superficial analysis to have any merit, such things need to be addressed…but from what’s presented it appears such things haven’t even been identified, much less considered.
This is just like the global warming models that reach sensationalistic conclusions, but cannot predict or explain unexpected trends parodyed here — but at least much of what they don’t incorporate in thier models is unknown, or largely unknown/highly uncertain.
Its ironic this blog would perpetuate the same sort of oversimplified analytical logical error… I expect more/better from here.

“evanmjones says:
August 13, 2010 at 2:36 am
I find the Gray Monk’s post appalling. The planet can easily support the six billion it has, and many more besides. Perhaps four times as many. Even more. In affluence and with little pressure on natural systems.”
Totally agree. We are nowhere near the limit. For example Greater London [nice place to live] isn’t that overcrowded and you could fit all the worlds population in 600 Londons – and you could get them in England with plenty of room to spare AND nobody else anywhere on the planet. Not exactly Bladerunner high rise overcrowded just yet.
cheers David
[REPLY – Yup. And you can even go further than that. London today with 7.5 million inhabitants is incomparably less crowded than London when it had 1 million inhabitants. ~ Evan]

I’m not sure the author has taken into account the startling demographic problems that are about hit most if not all G20 nations. Europe (including Russia), as well as Japan, China, and most of North America will have an inverted population pyramid. That is, these nations will see thier largest population concentrations amongst the eldery. The fertility numbers are quite stark. Many nations have fertility rates that are near 1.1/female (Japan, Russia, Italy, Greece, and Spain come to mind). China continues to have fertility rates below 1.5/female, and North America isn’t much better (the US varies between 1.8 and 2.0). Africa contnues to be plagued by war and AIDS. Nations like Indonesia and some South American nations have healthy birthrates. But, thier population growth cannot compensate for the falls seen in the rest of the globe.
This does not bode well, for most of the world’s wealth is tied to aging populations. To make matters worse, the nations with the fastest rates of aging also have the most generous entitlement programs. For the next 30 years, these nations will be drawing down thier stored wealth, as well as redistributing it to care for thier aging populations. This means less wealth creation. In the US alone, the amount of unfunded liabilities is staggering. Through 2080 it stands at over $70 trillion. The total assets in the US is around $49 trillion.
I do not see our demand for energy increasing over the next 50 years. It will probably peak this decade before it begins to slowly but surely decrease. The kind of growth the world saw between 1983 and 2007 cannot be duplicated for the simple fact that there will not be enough younger people with the incomes needed to sustain it.

great analysis.
one little typo.
when you said, “They will want what they perceive as a modern lifestyle–in America that amounts to 327 billion btus per person per year in energy consumption”
you meant 327 million btu per capita, right?
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec1_13.pdf

The issue of Demographics get raised quite a bit here. And also peak oil. Here’s a book that argues that the current U.S. economic situation is caused by demographics – that of a population that is entering retirement. It also looks that the history of oil crisis’ – for that last 200 years.
http://www.longwavepress.com/Baby_Boomers_Generation_X_SCv1a.pdf

“Everything has it’s time, and everything dies.” (h/t to Dr. Who 😉 ) In any case, the issue will be resolved sometime around Dec. 2012, according to various prognosticators. 😉

If you believe this article then you may as well believe on the Hockey stick, they are the same, both based on few decades.

cedarhill says:
August 13, 2010 at 3:32 am
The simple takeaway is energy is life. . .

Exactly. The key to the future development of civilization, not just of the currently-underdeveloped world, but to the future of mankind as we expand out into the solar system (and one day, to the stars), is cheap, abundant energy.
This is why the neo-Luddites and environmental goons who are actively attempting to restrict world energy production as the solution to the entirely factitious problem of ‘global warming’ are so dangerous. They would have humanity stop in its tracks, condemning those of us in the West to a bleak future of Soviet-style spare gray apartments, and the rest of the world to mud huts, malnutrition, and disease.
That the governments of the West, apparently in their zeal for taxes and control and ideological purity, have fallen prey to this madness beggars belief. They are heading in entirely the wrong direction, which should be to encourage at every step the development of cheap (I mean virtually free) energy in unlimited quantities, all over the world. Anything less is traitorous to the human race.
/Mr Lynn

OK, I’ll try to remain civil here, but it’s tough. All who agree with Grey Monk (and those who wonder why they are treated with the “start with yourself” type of reply) need to understand some simple facts. If you really believe that the Earth is overpopulated and that is causing others to suffer, there really is only one logical solution. Do we really have that much of a shortage of ability to take problems and arguments to there logical conclulsions? Seriously.
As for those who think that we cannot support that many people on this planet, I will START to see your side of the story when we stop paying farmers not to produce food in large sections of there fields every year to keep prices from dropping too far. We have plenty of room for people to live and for food production. Every year technology helps us produce more in less area. The only solution that is needed is to continue improving as we have and let the rest of the world in on it as well – a kind of twist on the old “work smarter, not harder” adage.
All that being said, I hope we do find some form of renewable/alternate/clean/non-polluting fuel source that will allow all people to have every advantage they can get. But not at any cost and not under the misguided notion that humans are some parasite on the host planet Earth. We are animals like any other animal. We take advantage of what’s available like any other animal. That is the natural way. Eventually there will be a point when we cannot continue to proceed on this expansion of human population, but we are far from it now. Nature will put us in our place when that time comes. It always does.
Let me try this analogy: In nature, when a prey species is over hunted by a predator, the population of the prey species drops (duh!). Then, it is harder for the predators to live on the fewer prey animals (again, duh!). The predators die off in some numbers and the prey animals have a better chance of living until the predator’s population increases again (third duh!). There is a virtually identical pattern for herbivores and the plants they live on.
The same is true for humans, but we have the advantage of technology. We need energy for technology. The cheaper and more abundant the supply of energy, the quicker and more widespread the increase in technology. The quicker and more widespread the increase in technology, the more likely we are to increase our overall population as well as our quality of life. Keep energy cheap and effective and it’s a win/win for humanity and nature. Right now “fossil” fuels (though I believe that to be a misnomer) are the best we have. We need to encourage their use and not tax them into inefficiency.
OK, now I must get down off my soapbox and get back to work…

yeah yeah
and 50 years ago the projections were that the population would be double what it really is and we would be out of food.
“This conversation is not really about global warming at all. But it is certainly relevant to discussions of our planet’s future climate.”
I guess it all falls in line, if you believe one bull hockey, you might as well believe it all.

guidoLaMoto August 13, 2010 at 4:00 am
There’s a social dimension to ‘one-child’ policies. Human beings don’t like being told how many children they can have and despite social approbium and punitive taxes, continue to have as many children as they want. In China, there has come into existance a class of ‘undeclared’ extra children now growning towards adulthood. Since they’re ‘off the books’, they’re obliged to survive by either sweatshop labour, criminality or prostitution.
The official estimate of the numbers is 200 million but I suspect that’s way off the true number. These people will have children of their own. I wish the poor wretches luck and fervently hope all population ‘controllers’ burn in Hell.
Pointman

I disagree with the population projections…. As countries modernize women have less babies. There are many reasons for this, but mostly it is lifestyle brought about by empowerment of women in society through laws, technology like the pill, longer life spans, etc.
I suspect that in the coming years developed countries will stifle unchecked immigration and hold the governments of dysfunctional emigrant countries to account…. The world will become a democratic place. This is the future challenge… Not energy policy.
The market place will decide energy policy…. not governments.

Three words:
“Location, Location, Location..”
Whoops, that’s real estate.
For energy it’s, NUCLEAR, NUCLEAR, not UN-CLEAR, but NUCLEAR!

How many times have we heard about the population bomb? Earth is a big place and humans are but a tiny speck. A thought experiment done several years ago, which still holds today, is that every person in the world (with a 2009 estimate of 6.79 billion) would fit in an area the size of Jacksonville, Florida (757.7 mi^2), giving each person roughly 3 ft^2.
People are myopic, seeing only what is around today. If just before the advent of the automobile you told someone in New York City what the population would be in 50 or 100 years, one of their biggest concerns would have been what to do with all of the horse manure. There will be advances in the future and we cannot yet know their impact. (Of course, as long as governments insist on driving policy things will stagnate, but that is another topic for another ‘blog.)

Evan – ‘Peek and ye shall find’
That’s the problem Evan.
I have been peeking for oil for nigh on 30 years…..
Big problems coming down the pike 🙁
Rgds
Mike

Many great comments precede mine, and I concur about the imaginary limit forecasts regarding population and food not taking technology into consideration. On the other hand we can’t see what innovations will come down the pike. Further, I wish I had references for this, from reading 30 years ago or so, about stressed populations of humans stopping/reducing reproduction. We also cannot foresee what epidemics will occur, aside from intentional anthropogenic diseases, we are making many common bugs resistant to treatment. Also, reproduction has already dropped below replacement in the societies that have plenty, and have fewer people and more food production than was supposed 30 years ago. With many modern societies advocating, or at least allowing, non-reproductive sex, that in itself will reduce populations. It is hard to predict an outcome when the rules of the game and even the playing field are in constant flux.

One point regarding the chart at the beginning of your post:
The tar sands production over time looks way too low. Tar sands comprise an energy source as large or larger than oil. There are three ways to harvest tar sands energy:
1) Open pit mining followed by industrial upgrade and water filtration.
2) Down well steam injection, producing upgraded product flowing from the well.
3) Down well air injection, in ground combustion and well catalysts combing to create upgraded oil in ground.
Large scale commercial operations are only currently running for method #1. Methods #2 and #3 are currently in field prototype phase moving toward commercial production. If these advanced methods are commercially viable, they will exceed conventional oil production by the mid 2020’s.

In terms of which energy model developing countries will adopt consider the development of telecommunications in developing countries. The lack of legacy infrastructure has resulted in generations of technology which are still in use in developed countries being skipped and the latest technology being adopted and provided by private companies not governments. I would suggest the same might happen with energy. Putting a solar cell on a roof connected to an LED does not require any government involvement, does not require the massive infrastructure which took developed countries decades to build in the same way a mobile/cell phone can be provided by a private company with far less infrastructure than land lines whose infrastructure took decades to build in developed countries often with heavy government involvement.

To read so many positive comments on the nature and future of humankind brings about a great upwelling of pride and optimism in my heart.
It seems to me that the skeptics are indeed optimistic lovers of humanity while the warmistas are just pessimists who have no faith in the ability of we humans to contunue and constantly evolve.
Thank you all.

Layne Blanchard’s comments have it right. We should focus on removing barriers to energy production and technological innovation and prices will deliver the appropriate signals. That’s one of the many benefits of a free market. Long-term planning is carried out on a distributed basis across every market participants sphere of influence. Unfortunately, our impulse is to believe that our own understanding and ability to influence behaviors and outcomes will deliver superior results. This is called “hubris” and is part of our nature. It should be the goal of any political system to avoid cementing hubris into law. It only makes the eventual outcome worse and more abrupt.

There appear to be some assumptions in the OP that don’t reflect reality well nor the march of technological progress.
The poor lead short brutish lives? Hardly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
The short brutish lives are overwhelmingly in Africa. Largely due to being war ravaged with corrupt governments, high tolls from HIV & malaria, subsistence farming, lack of adequate sanitation, and so forth.
For the rest of the world life expectancy at birth ranges from 70 to 80. Where life expectancy at birth is 70 years that’s not short or brutish by any stretch of the imagination.
The United States is far from the leader of the longevity pack at #38 yet it has almost the highest per capita income and energy consumption. Leading a healthy lifestyle and being born of parents with long lives is what makes the big difference. Per capita income and energy consumption has little to do with it in comparison. Lifestyle is largely a matter of culture (nurture) and while we can’t choose our parents that isn’t a matter of energy or economics but rather of genetics (nature).
Rate of natural increase (birth rate – death rate) rate decelerates as average life span goes up. Many nations are now below 1%, a few are below 0%, and the trend is almost exclusively downward as seen in the list below by country comparing 1990-1995 average RNI country with the period 2005-2010.
http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/indicators/138.html
So longevity we find is not very much a matter of energy consumption or per capita income.
How about happiness – satisfaction with life and sense of well being? Get ready for another shock. That doesn’t follow per capita wealth, energy consumption, or even longevity. It’s all about culture. Hard as it is to believe for westerners and the wealthy all over – you can be dirt poor and still be very likely to be happy and in love with life. See the list below of 96 nations listed by reported sense of well being for more than a few shockers for those of you who think happiness is related to longevity, per capita income, and energy consumption.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/newsmedia/pr111725/pr111725.pdf
With those things cleared up the OP author seems to presume there are no breakthrough technologies on the way that will solve many if not most of the sustainability issues now and in the foreseeable future. What most everyone misses is the exponentially advancing field of genetic engineering and artificial genomes. We are literally on the cusp of designing and harnessing simple single celled organisms with wholly artificial genomes. The engineering and medical opportunities that flow from that make today’s farming, energy generation, medicine, and manufacturing look stone age in comparison.
The earth gets a tremendous amount of solar energy and we harvest very little of it in raw energy or the carbon and water cycles it drives. Through genetic engineering we can harvest so much of it that it puts fossil fuel in perspective. That perspective is that fossil fuel was a mere stepping stone on the way to the way to the next transformative technology that makes it obsolete – a rather short chapter in the book of man.
Biotechnology and bioengineering will soon be more transformative than anything that preceded it including fire, metallurgy, agriculture, money, mass production, fuel oil, electricity, antibiotics, mass transit, electronics, computers, and communications. It’s huge and its near. I’ve been keeping a very close eye on it for 23 years. The progress has been tremendous and it’s now advancing like Moore’s Law for semi-conductors. Actually the computer and information revolution was prerequisite and was predicted over 40 years ago in the 1960’s in Project Xanadu. I got involved with that in the late 1970’s and spent the following 25 years as an engineer closely associated with Intel and Microsoft R&D inventing and improving the techonology and accumulating shares of stock like a good capitalist. Can I pick some winners or what?
As an engineer with a perfect track record at predicting transformative technologies I’m here to tell you that the engineering opportunties for practical application engendered by biotechnology and bioengineering exceed every transformative technology that came before it. A world of great material abundance is close at hand. The question is whether it will increase the happiness quotient. That’s not so clear. Humans appear to be equally capable of being miserable in lap of luxury or its opposite celebrating the dawning of every day with only the barest necessities.

People have been very harsh with the Gray Monk. Do I think that we are over-populated for the currently available resources? No. Do I think that we are overpopulated on a sustainability basis? Maybe!?
I’ll admit that I have no idea what the sustainable population of the earth is, but I think that a blind reliance on technology allowing continued growth in agricultural yield rates is somewhat arrogant. Mainly because it’s not always clear what caused the growth in land productivity. How much is new plant species? How much is fossil fuel based fertilizers? How much is fossil fuel based pesticides? How much is improved irrigation? How much is mechanization? How much is a synergistic affect from all the above combined? etc…
Even if we can answer the above questions (and I’m sure there are some people that have some of these answers), the next question you have to ask is which of these technology affects are sustainable? New plant species presumably are, provided that their main advantage is not better uptake and conversion of fossil-fuel based fertilizers. Fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides are not in the long run, though that long run may be on the order hundreds of years from now. Mechanization is possibly sustainable. Irrigation is another qestionable one. There is a maximum rate that an aquifer can be drawn down by every year without “drying it up”. Population growth taxes the amount of irrigation that can be done out of an aquifer.
I admit that Gray Monk’s post was harsh in tone, but at the end of the day it is possible that the current world’s current population is unsupportable when you take away the unsustainable technologies allowing for the type of food productivity we have today. I don’t condone genocide, and would never make a “list”. But I will allow for the possibility that we are living beyond the long term sustainability point of this planet.

What is the biggest “hide the decline” in data analysis? It’s not about world surface temperature, but China’s TFR (total fertility rate).
Since 1990, China’s TFR went down below 2.0 owing to the state’s birth-control and the economic reform. In 2000, according to the fifth population census, TFR is only 1.22. But the birth-control ministry abandoned this number; they claim a “real” number of 1.8, and use it as constants for the twenty years (1990-2010).
So not to many people know the fact that the aging and implosion of China’s population will occur much earlier than expected; and China cannot keep the current growth for ten years, just due to aging population and lack of young labors.
This problem has already been addressed in demographic studies in the recent years. In 2009 the US Census changed the forecast:
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/international_population/cb09-191.html
As for the cause and effect of China’s birth control, UCLA’s Profs. Feng Wang and Susan Greenhalgh have numerous excellent works. China’s birth control policy warns us why people should be extremely cautious about the climate policies.
Susan Greenhalgh:
Just one child: science and policy in Deng’s China
http://books.google.com/books?id=MjLdqh9lMgcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Feng Wang et al.:
BELOW-REPLACEMENT FERTILITY AND CHILDBEARING INTENTION IN JIANGSU PROVINCE, CHINA
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a917991668

evanmjones says:
August 13, 2010 at 8:05 am
“Since Carter sounded the alarm, we have multiplied out potential reserves many times. And there’s virtually unlimited secondary supply, and I haven’t even touched on how we’ve tied our own hands.”
Amen! The tying of our own hands because of greenie whining is the only thing that humans are to blame for in matters of energy and climate. I’m not saying there is no pollution going on or that we should stop true environmental problems (like the abundance of kindling if the forests or big industries dumping tons of nasty chemicals into a river), but let’s use the fuel we know we can get to for as long as we can and find new solutions over the course of however many decades or centuries we have until they run out. Let’s add new refineries to lower the price of gas and therefore the price of transportation and therefore the overall cost of everything! By the time we run out of the misnomered fossil fuels, maybe fusion will be a reality and then we can all jsut worry about where we will store the highly toxic and radioactive plasma by-products (yes, that a joke).

Oil (oleum) from rock (petra) is a scientific and reproducible fact:
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/17/10976.full
Lakes of methane on Titan is a scientific fact.
“Underground oceans of the stuff” on Earth is a scientific fact:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_15/b3727001.htm
Replenishing wells in the Gulf of Mexico is a scientific fact:
http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf124/sf124p10.htm
And I have an estimated 500 year supply of peak coal in my backyard:
http://www.google.com/webhp#hl=en&safe=off&q=victoria+coal+500+years

Thomas Fuller,
Thank you. Your post is a stimulus to look beyond the veil of the current energy paradigm.
For a world future where there are predominately free capitalist economies, there is no problem to be solved for future energy supply of any amount or on any timeline/schedule. It is what they (capitalists) do and do profitably.
For a world future where there are predominately government-controlled-economies, there is no solution to the problem of our future energy situation. This is because the basis of those governments control (existence) requires there to be problem. This scenario is the high tax burdened government dominated (less free) one.
As for mixed economies, well you start our getting mixed results that degenerate (because of for example an incomplete solving of the energy problem) into fully government controlled economies. In my view the “mixed economy” approach is the worst because it tends to lend credibility to the government control of the economy at the expense of the free capitalist part. But the capitalist part is the only one doing productive and effecient work.
Thank you for listening to my version of “economics in one lessen”. My apologies to Henry Hazlitt for using his terminology.
John

This very issue has been spoken of at great length and since the inception of the excellent site http://www.masterresource.org/. Welcome to the economic realities of energy resource management where greenies fear to tread.

Tom Fuller says:
“I very much would like to see bio-engineered organisms that eat CO2 …”
I’m not exactly sure what your position is on AGW or how Peak Oil fits into your scheme of things in this website, but to add my 2 cents worth –
First I find pollution disgusting and the less we pollute the better it would be. Fossil fuels pollute, but are there better alternates? Plants eat CO2 to grow, so what would be the purpose of creating organisms that eat CO2 to compete with plants? Will these new organisms fit into our environment or will they come back to haunt us? How nano-materials interact with our environment is a big unknown. Again, in 50 years will we be hearing about pending environmental disasters caused by nano technologies? How would making our roads slipperier solve any problems but cause more accidents? It seems like every new generation has a crusade against some form of new technology put in place by an older generation.
Second, Malthus has been wrong for the last 200 years. Believe it or not, population growth has given us the markets to drive our economic expansion and innovations. Without it, the West would still be in the medieval ages. As baby boomers retire and the population of the West declines, we will see more economic deterioration in the years ahead.
This brings me to the last point. Global warming? Peak Oil? This is nothing that the West has to worry about because if we are at Peak Oil, then the problems of AGW, if there is one, will be resolved without our help. But more importantly, the continued economic deterioration of the West will make Global Warming and Peak Oil non-issues in the year ahead.

I agree generally with the idea but it should be tailored back a bit by technological change that will improve efficiencies in generation/waste heat recovery and there reduced unit consumption in transportation, etc. This is a given. Add the effect of comparatively muich higher energy costs and there will be lifestyle changes – not driving your car 4 blocks to the store, city planning that takes into consideration thrifting on energy. I hope I can make it to 2030 to collect my prize but I would go with the Denmark (1200 quads) model for the world, minus tech improvements – 25% or 900 quads – the UN and DOE may not be that far off.

Reading “The Rational Optimist” by Matt Ridley would be beneficial for most of the posters in this thread. Especially for all of you who buy into the Malthusian/Ehrlichian nonsense. Two people who, I might had, have been shown to be wrong on almost all accounts. Using biofuels and other land intensive energy solutions is the exact opposite way to keep mankind on an upward trajectory with respect to standard of living. Intensification and specialization will provide benefits that we haven’t even thought of yet. Retreating into some sort of mythical self sufficient hunter gatherer noble savage ethos will, in fact, push most of us into poverty.
Additionally, I have to give props to Layne Blanchard for a very good post.

The “problem” is crude oil reached its “Peak Flow Rate” in 2005.
Those that study “depletion” statistics from existing fields, and New projects scheduled, and, not yet sanctioned, are pretty unanimous that it’s pretty much downhill, from here. The DOD, in its “Joint Operations Environment” Report predicts serious shortfalls by 2015.
Athabasca Tar Sands? That is one dirty operation. And Expensive. Even with $75.00 oil there’s not much expansion planned up there. And, just wait till one of those earthen dams breaks.
2012, folks. Today, the world is producing about 73 million barrels/day of crude + Condensate. In 2012 that drops to about 71 million barrels/day. I suggest a fuel efficient FFV.

What y’all wanta bet that the Malthusians in the audience are also CAGWers? The self-debasing hatred of mankind motivates a lot of the “True Believers.”
Personally, if they’re going to pick on mankind, the also need to shutdown the chimps and other animals using tools. If they don’t, the next cycle will have all the same “problems” we do. /sarc

There was an interesting story awhile back in the area of anthropology on the demise of the human population of the South Pacific’s Easter Island. Population growth exploding and resources shrinking till… POOF!… all the people were gone and the island was bare. The Earth is an island in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t care who or what is roaming around, there’s only so much, when that’s gone –and there ain’t no more– it’s over, and the Earth gradually recovers, and something else is the Big Cheese –maybe.
Unless someone comes up with a warp drive and a few other fancyful inventions in the next 20 years, the story will go in a very well rehearsed way. Someone will get a bright idea. They will start a war. The war will expand rapidly. It will be called World War III –or something like that. It will go on for a few long years, maybe even longer than that. Carpet bombing with nucs, using chem-bio weapons galore, eventually someone will win and likely billions will have died of war, disease, starvation, exposure, or what not. Then peace will once again rule the stars and the little speck of dust in the middle of nowhere.
When politicians and scientists fail, scientists and generals rule.

nandheeswaran jothi says:
August 13, 2010 at 6:00 am
great analysis.
one little typo.
when you said, “They will want what they perceive as a modern lifestyle–in America that amounts to 327 billion btus per person per year in energy consumption”
you meant 327 million btu per capita, right?
———————-
the numbers do seem to be off by factor 1000 don’t they.

The Grey Monk reminds me of why I’ve always thought of environmentalists as little Hitler’s. They believe there are too many of us and it is their plan to do something about it.

There is no ‘promised land’ of renewable energy. So called renewable energy is the same energy humans were using for thousands of years before fossil fuels allowed them to escape an existence of terrible poverty. Did the sun start shining brighter? Did the wind start blowing harder and with the reliability of a clock? No? Then what makes anyone think those things can power our modern civilization now?
The graph shows nuclear and coal energy in decline after 2020. This is laughable. The planet has centuries worth of easily accessible, cheap coal. This is what the developing world will turn to without reservation. They don’t care about western environmental theories, they want to have decent lives. And nuclear is the only truly long term (billion year), environmentally friendly energy source which can power our civilization. As a race nuclear is our future if we want to have a future that’s any better than the poor saps who came before us, living off the sun and wind, and working 12 hour days just to have enough food to stay alive until 30-35.
We have failed the developing world. We fail them with our nonsense about green energy and global warming. We should be fully developing nuclear power for electricity, and coal for vehicle fuels. (We’re a good 10-20 years away from affordable, usable EVs. After that it will take another 20-30 years to turn over the existing auto fleet. So we need liquid auto fuels that can run in existing engines for at least 30 and probably 50 more years.) Our goal should be to make energy as cheap and widely available as possible. Anything less is sentencing the entire human race to a harsher existence.

DT says:
August 13, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Nice one!

No, Kevin, I was referring to photovoltaics. I just threw the solar hw in there to reference that I have a small amount of experience contracting the installation of panels.
Kevin, I’ve found that these things are easier when I break them down into “bite-sized” pieces. Let’s take my county. It’s about average size, I guess (the average U.S. county is approx 1,100 Sq Mi. IIRC.) We have some pretty fair farmland, and a lot of land in bushes, and weeds. Also, quite a bit in grass on which you’ll see a couple of cows, or a horsie (a little “tax” deal going on there, I believe.) I’d guess we have between 1/3 and 1/2 in rowcrops.
Anyway, we easily have 300 – 400 sq miles in brush, scrub pine, and bushes, and another 200 sq miles in casual grazing. This is probably kind of a typical county in the South. So, would it be a big thing to convert 20% of that marginal-to-unused land to switchgrass, or hybrid poplar, or somesuch? Nah. You’d probably have to be paying attention to even notice.
What you Would notice would be a lot of E85 pumps selling homegrown fuel for $1.75 – $1.85/gal. If you had one of the newer TDI engines such as is coming out in the new Buick Regal, and were getting the same mileage on ethanol, as on gasoline you would notice that you had more money in your pocket at the end of the day. And, there would be more “business” going on in your county because you weren’t sending all that money, and troops, to the Mideast.
Poet, the world’s largest ethanol producer, figures their “Cobs to Ethanol” Plant, Project Liberty, will produce ethanol from cobs for about $2.00 W/O Subsidies. Genera Energy is looking in the same range for their switchgrass facility in Vonore, Tn. Inbicon is already using wheat straw in Denmark for about $2.35/gal.
Switchgrass is for real. It was the breakthrough in “enzymes” that did it. As someone said, earlier, Biotechnology is turning into a monster. What I’m outlining will produce about 20 Million Gallons of ethanol/yr/county. A big coproduct is the approx. 80,000 btus of lignin that you get per gallon of ethanol “After” you’ve powered your process with it.
That’s 9 Trillion, 600 Billion BTUs to be turned into electricity. Per County.
Of course, I haven’t addressed the landfill over in the next county, yet. Fiberight can Produce a whole bunch of ethanol from the paper, etc. that was going into that.
This isn’t any big deal, Kevin. The breakthrough in enzymes took care of that. From here on out it’s just “who wants to do it.”

Don, I don’t know the details. All I know is, “gasification” is looking very iffy. You’re dealing with a Lot of Heat, and, sometimes, processes that deal with a Lot of Heat don’t “scale” they way they’re expected.
Poet, Genera, Fiberight, and Inbicon are all producing “semi” commercial quantities of cellulosic ethanol. Genera said something to the effect that “they” wouldn’t scale all the way up until Jan 1, 2011. Something about the “tax” treatment regarding cellulosic ethanol. Genera is a partnership between the Univ of Tenn, and Dupont-Danisco. They are taking a very deliberate approach to building up the supply chain of feedstock, studying how to store it, and, in general working on the “logistics” of the operation. Poet has been “collecting cobs” for a couple of years, now, and, also, are studying different storage/collection processes. They are, also, waiting, and hoping for a sizable loan guarantee from the government (their “project Liberty” is by far the largest, most ambitious of all the current schemes. Fiberight will be first to market with “true” commercial quantities, probably early in 2011 (although, Inbicon could almost be considered “commercial” now.)
Novozymes, and Dupont-Danisco are, already, committed to enzyme prices that I quoted. This has all caught the “gasification” boys by surprise, and they’re squalling like banshees; but it won’t do’em any good. The race has been run, and the “enzymists” won.

Tom Fuller says:
August 13, 2010 at 10:14 am
Unlike Mr. Springer, I don’t see the exponential growth here that I would like. It grew very rapidly for a decade, but it seems to have stalled–due in my mind to obstacles in our current intellectual property management systems.

It’s still growing exponentially. A good benchmark to watch is the cost of human genome sequencing. In 2000 it was $100 million. Today it’s a little over $10,000. The Archon X Prize is $10,000,000 to the first company that can do it for $1000.
Another good metric to watch is the growth rate of genomic databases such as Ensembl.
http://uswest.ensembl.org/index.html
Of particular note is the Venter Institute’s progress with artificial genomes. They’ve assembled a complete function minimal genome (about 120 thousand base pairs IIRC) and transplanted it into an evacuated bacterial shell which then came to life and grew out into a colony. They did it with mail-order DNA snippets.
The time and cost of doing things like this is plummeting. As the cost drops the rate of progress accelerates commensurately.
Venter’s first big practical goal is an artifical organism which can convert ligineous biomass (read agricultural waste) directly into biofuel. The current process is not economically feasible and so only high value feedstocks such as corn or beets are utilized and even then it’s still not economically viable without subsidies.
I can’t imagine Venter is more than 20 years away from that goal. There’s really very little invention required. All the functionality needed exists in nature right now. It’s just a matter of cutting and pasting the right genes into an artificial genome. The trick is to get the cost of creating and testing artificial genomes low enough and fast enough that the tried and true method of trial & error can be employed in the quest for specific functionality.
I very much would like to see bio-engineered organisms that eat CO2 and provide energy in return on a large scale, and nano-coatings that reduce friction for roads, tires, train-tracks and wheels, aircraft fuselages, ad infinitum.
But spending ever more money on ever more expensive offshore wind farms in my mind is a vanity purchase and is not advancing the cause.

Mr Lynn says:
August 13, 2010 at 2:37 pm
Mr. Springer is almost certainly right. Though the potential dangers of our being able to create new kinds of living organisms from scratch are great (think biological warfare), so are the potential benefits. My first inkling of this came from the pen of the superb SF writer Jack Vance, in a novel called The Houses of Iszm (1964), wherein the technicians of Iszm had created a monopoly on houses of their invention grown from seed. We are not so far away from that now.

My emphasis above.
Yeah, that’s the rub. When the cost and tools required to create an artificial organism drop to the point where individuals can whip one out in a spare bedroom things are going to get real interesting to say the least.
I presume you’ve read “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler (1986). I read it in 1987 and my thoughts on the progression of technology have never been the same. At that point in time I was working with Intel and AutoDesk developing high performance CAD/CAM graphics hardware for IBM-compatible desktops. AutoDesk was the focus point for Project Xanadu at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu#History

Verity Jones says:
August 14, 2010 at 4:33 am
Ethanol is not the future – it is too energy intensive. It will have a role and in some places it will remain important for local energy and production, but overall it is likely to be a milestone on the way to better fuels.
The rub here is the transportation fleet is ready for it with so many E85 capable motors already on the road.
The parasitic energy requirement for ethanol production is high – ~60% IIRC (yes this can be provided from the lignin byproduct). Add in the energy requirement in farming the biomass and transporting it and the net energy production is limited compared to other processes (gasification, biogas). There are effiencies to be gained and improvements in technology but even if we get to ambient temperature fermentation or enzymatic conversion, the big energy requirement is always going to be the phase separation of ethanol and water. In addition, there is still a lot of waste from the process to be dealt with – lignin. Burn or gasify it? yes, although you need heat to dry it first or waste energy burning water. Turn it into biogas? Not in its native state – it needs preprocessing of which I believe the research is still in its infancy.
I built an experimental setup for producing fuel grade ethanol. With cane sugar as the only feedstock and a strain of yeast that can turn water/sugar into clear 24% ethanol mix in five days and an insulated electrically heated boiler I can turn out fuel grade ethanol for about $4/liter. The greatest cost is in the feedstock as I used cane sugar from the grocers at $0.35/lb. If I were to use molasses purchased in 55 gallon drums, which is a great feedstock, I can get that down to $4 per gallon including the delivered cost of electricity to drive the distillation.
But that’s not the most cost efficient method of distillation I found. Last fall I built a room-temperature distillation apparatus that uses a vacuum chamber in an ice bath. I didn’t calculate the energy efficiency but it was minimal even without insulation. Basically only the latent heat of ethanol vaporization needed to be added to the boiler to maintain a temperature of 25C. The vacuum only has to be established at the beginning so no vacuum pump needs to be kept running. Ideally the whole setup could function virtually cost-free by running it in the winter somewhere where it’s cold outside. A low temperature solar concentrator on a clear winter day is adequate to heat the boiler and the condenser can simply be a length of pipe exposed to the cold air.
That said, I’m not at all sure that a GM yeast can’t be fashioned that can survive considerably more than 24% alcohol concentration. The strain I used was just a result of normal breeding techiniques. Other fungi carry suites of enzymes (mushroom mycelia in particular) that can break down lignin and cellulose into carbohydrates albeit rather slowly and with some substantial effort needed to maintain the environment. Again I don’t see why GM mycelia can’t be fashioned to break down ligineous biomass without much hassle.
That said it’s vegetable oil that has more intrigued. I happen to have some Chinese Tallow tress growing on my property. They are a prodigious water-loving invasive species here that grow like giant weeds near the lake shore. I recently discovered these are the third-most productive plant for producing biodiesel after algae and oil palm. Through genetic engineering it seems quite feasible to construct a green plant that fills coconut-like pods with pure vegetable oil ready to pour into the fuel tank of any diesel engine. These could simply grow as a vast mat close to the ground like watermelons. In fact once biotechnology really gets wound up you can simply grow your pipes and tanks and eliminate just about all the labor and manufacturing.
“The bottom line is that ethanol does not have the energy density of oil so the per bbl net energy yield on the process is not in the same league.”
Likewise, gasoline contains 20% fewer BTUs per gallon than vegetable oil. Not sure what the point is. The differences don’t put alcohol, gasoline, and diesel into different leagues. They all play in the same ballpark and the distribution infrastructure is the same and extant.
“Gasification is interesting because it is efficient at a useable scale. In fact for biomass scale is everything as you need an increasingly large effective transport radius as you scale up and small scale is better; if it is economic and the technology is efficient at small scale – that is the way to go. Ethanol is not there.”
Actually I came very close last year to building a gassifier last year. On two acres of mostly wooded land I figure I collect and burn about 10 tons a year of deadwood. Currently I get off my butt about 3 times a year and spend a couple of days collecting a few tons into a big pile and setting a torch to it on high ground. The ashes are so minimal I usually just let normal rainfall wash it downslope where it fertilizes the very trees from whence it came. Once I did a huge amount of burning on the lakeshore and left the ash pile there. Then a small flood came along which put the ash pile under a foot or two of water. The algae bloom over that ashpile was a sight to behold.
Anyhow, I hate wasting perfectly good wood but there’s only so much I can burn in my fireplace and what’s generated from landscape maintenance is mostly smaller branches and mostly still green. A good intense fire burns the green stuff (oak leaves and juniper needles) just fine but it’s unsuitable for a fireplace. Anything combustable (cardboard and paper) from manufactured products goes into my fireplace as well. A gasifier looked like it might be productive although I’m not about to foul and eventually ruing any of my gasoline engines with it. What I considered was tanking it in propane bottles and using it in place of propane which appears to be feasible without modifying any of my propane-burning appliances of which I have half a dozen including a mosquito-magnet which burns propane to produce CO2 which in turn attacts mosquitos into the suction trap. I might still look further into that at some point in time. I could probably produce way more than I need and sell the excess into the market for propane BBQ grills and get a premium for it because it’s carbon-neutral.

Don Shaw says:
August 14, 2010 at 8:38 am
Dave,
Maybe you can explain to me how it makes sense to bypass the filtering system our atmosphere provides against too much solar heat getting to our planet allowing it to maintain a relatively constant temperature. All energy ends up as heat. All extra energy you bring in heats the planet up. Of course a portion is re-radiated to space but not all. Could this would be worse than the impact CO2 apparently has in reducing the amount of IR the earth gives off to outer space.
BTW the solar panels on earth do the same thing, they reduce the amout of IR that would otherwise sent off to space.

Energy can not be created or destroyed. Any amount of heat we siphon off from from surface insolation, unless it is stored forever in chemical bond energy (we produce fuel but don’t use it), ends up being radiated out to space. We simply collect it at high density, use the temperature gradient to extract mechanical energy, which then becomes mechanical waste heat and resumes its march back out into space in a more diffused form. Insolation collected in orbit is a different story. The collectors don’t shadow the earth so whatever we collect and send downward is additional to what the earth normally receives. The saving grace is that humanity’s energy consumption now and into the foreseeable future are insignificant compared to the total amount of insolation on the surface.

Richard S Courtney says:
August 14, 2010 at 9:18 am
“[…] History shows that predicting major technological changes is probably not possible. If it were possible then major corporations would all be working to win the race for them. But the race is usually won by people whom most others think are cranks until they win. ”
You’re talking about disruptive technologies. There’s actually pretty good experience about such disruptions. The web was one, for instance. Usually you see a clean exponential growth curve in the number of installations until market saturation makes it level off. Ray Kurzweil analyzed a lot of those.

I was one of those few who predicted home computers before the Apple II. The year was 1977.
Arggh…Why do people say this sort of stuff on the internet? Is it meaningful in any sense? Is it verifiable? Oh, btw, I predicted that in a forum where people are basically anonymous and held to no verifiable standards they will say anything. Sheesh.

Very nice, Mike. I love a “factually” based argument.
Verity, the new 2.0L TDI engine pushes that 3,600 lb Buick Regal around to the tune of 140 MPH, and gets, essentially, the Same Mileage on E85 as on gasoline. This is just the first of many engines on the way that can utilize ethanol’s ridiculously high (114) Octane Rating. BTW, The XPrize Winner was an E85 fueled car.)
BTW, you may not be aware of this, but there are only a handful of “Corn” ethanol plants left to come online. From here on out it will be All Cellulosic, and those will be powered by waste biomass (lignin from cobs, switchgrass, etc.)
In fact, within a decade, I’d say most “corn” ethanol plants will be powered by cobs, or biogas derived from cobs.
Things are changing fast.

About fusion;
Dave S. is correct to state that materials able to withstand fusion are not going to happen. This, IMO, rules out what I call the “meso-fusion” (human-scale) regime. Stellar mega-fusion and micro-fusion remain. Until we become a Type II civilization, able to harness the full output of our star, mega-fusion is not accessible (as a direct tool; I’m not talking about converting radiant energy to electricity). But micro-fusion, now ….
There is a firm, LPP, Inc., which is working with a process called Focus Fusion. Containment is magnetic, within a sub-microscopic “plasmoid” generated by kinking a magnetic filament in plasma just so. It is completing its preliminary D-D calibration runs and tweaks not, and will be moving into the final proton-Boron11 regime within a couple of months. This is a waste-free, non-neutron-emitting fusion. It claims to have solved (in theory and simulation) the X-ray cooling problem by tuning the High Magnetic Field Effect some had predicted so that electron heating is minimized.
It won’t be free, but the planned “product” is a 5MW generator installed in about the housing size of a home garage, with capital per-watt costs and output pricing at source per kwh both around 1/20 of current best N.A. retail, or maybe 1/50 of European prices. It is easily adapted to distributed generation, and could end up bypassing most of the current grid, if necessary.
Timeline around 3-5 years to come up with a proven licensable design, to be made openly available at reasonable prices to all manufacturers wanting to produce and distribute it, world-wide.

DT says:
August 13, 2010 at 5:55 pm
______
You misread the graph. Coal and nuclear are not declining on it. Their use is the WIDTH of their bands. The downslope you see is all from the green ‘conventional oil’ band.

Actually, Verity, it’s 0.43 in to 1.0 out according to the latest figures in a dry-grind ethanol plant.
Of more interest to most people is the $1.79/gal at the pump ($2.20 w/o subsidies – or foreign wars.)

Roger Sowell says:
August 14, 2010 at 8:57
40 years ago, Tokomak reactors were the “in” thing, using a magnetic pinch bottle and hydrogen plasma. How many billions have been wasted on that technology?
The LLP technology sounds interesting, but they cannot overcome the fundamental problems of 1 and 2.

50 years ago there was the Stellatron in fashion and as an undergratuate in physics I was tempted towards that direction, since also a greek had invented it. Fortunately it was too applied for my physics tastes; it finally disappeared from the scene.
The Tokamak has not disappeared and the impossibilities you are stating have not been convincingly calculated, because about 17billion $ are programmed for the completion of the ITER international collaboration to build an industrial prototype that will produce megawats.
Considering the billions spent on the war machines and imperial clout and the billions spent on so called climate research, the price is low and late, in my opinion.

Anna v, re Tokamak.
I would love to see such a machine finally work, but as an engineer I am too much of a realist to believe those two fundamental problems I described will be overcome. Those problems are not something original to me, rather they were explained to me and other freshmen at University of Texas in Austin, as we toured their Tokamak system in September of 1972.
Can you describe the current approach? Is there some super-material of which we are unaware? Or will the fusion reaction simply be located a great distance from any solid matter? Will the bottle have inlets and outlets? Or will this be a batch reaction with multiple batches brought into the heating zone, one at a time?
Note that throwing money at a research project is certainly no guarantee, and also no reassurance that there will ultimately be a viable technology. In fact, most such research returns zero. I would love to be proven wrong on this one, but it seems to be a very expensive bunch of metal and electricity at which investors throw their money.

Jaye says:
August 14, 2010 at 12:27 pm
“Arggh…Why do people say this sort of stuff on the internet?”
In my case because it’s true.
“Is it meaningful in any sense?”
I qualified it well enough. One prediction, one success. Not much of a track record but take it for what it’s worth.
“Is it verifiable?”
Possibly. Pepperdine University probably has a record somewhere of me attending the class mentioned 33 years ago and while unlikely the professor might have kept my term paper in a box somewhere.
“Oh, btw, I predicted that in a forum where people are basically anonymous and held to no verifiable standards they will say anything.”
Unlike you, I’m not anonymous.
“Sheesh.”
Indeed.

@Brian H
I don’t like to be harsh but Lawrenceville Plasma Physics is a garage shop run by a non-scientist crank (undergraduate degree in physics) named Eric Lerner. As recently as 2007 he was the sole employee.
Don’t get me wrong. Many times in history the unexpected breakthrough comes from a crank. The problem is that for every crank with something real, exciting, and promising there are a thousand of them trying to sell the proverbial bottle of snake-oil.
Lerner is promising something approximating a perpetural motion machine. That should send up a red flag wherever and whenever you see it. I won’t discount it but I wouldn’t invest real money or hope in it either. Seeing, in this case, is believing.

Dave;
There are numerous others involved, now, including PhD physicists. Get current. Here’s an excerpt from a comment by one of the principals to a question I posed recently about whether the “pinches” (plasmoid collapses) were hot enough for pB11 fusion, or whether the extrapolations from current results was consistent with being able to get to that stage on schedule:
“Brian, without going into details or complicated formulas, the pinches are not “hot” enough yet, but the extrapolations are there. However, pB11 is a completely different animal than deuterium.
…
the results we have gotten are very encouraging, and we’re only getting started. We’re at the cutting edge of this research. With the upgraded switches, we should have vastly improved performance by having all capacitors discharge, with better synchronization, at higher voltages. We’ve barely started to test the effects of the angular momentum coil or the magnetic field effect, so we really can’t say just how much those will ultimately improve the results. We’re also getting all the diagnostic instruments installed and the noise eliminated, so we can better see what’s going on,
…
I’m very optimistic that by late September, we’ll have some newsworthy results. When all the pieces come together at the right time and place, that’s when things get interesting. ”
Just to elaborate a bit, the timelines currently call for “scientific break-even” to occur late 2010 or early 2011. So you and we won’t have long to wait.
As for your equating of p + B11 –> 3xHe4 + energy with “perpetual motion”, that’s just bad-tempered ignorance.

While we’re talking about fusion, there is also the POPS approach; trying to improve Bussard-style fusors by using a Periodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere.
http://www.lanl.gov/p/rh_pp_park.shtml
Looks like a promising idea IMHO.

/comedy mode
The technology for harnessing fusion already exists — standard electrical generation, IC-engines, and off-the-shelf fusion bombs! Just construct a single cylinder, 2-cycle IC engine a few miles wide & deep. The inlet is just big enough to drop standard multistage fusion bombs into the top, and run the exhaust pipe up above the atmosphere. Connect the piston rod to a geared-up giant alternator that runs at a reasonable rotation rate. Size the bombs so the fireballs won’t melt the cylinder walls or piston top. When the piston is near top-dead-center, bombs are “dropped” into the cylinder & detonated, pushing the piston down. The exhaust cycle pushes the radioactive debris out into space & the next bomb injected. Repeat. A giant 2-cycle chain-saw engine/alternator powered by nukes.
/comedy mode off
Seriously, I don’t see practical fusion power coming around for quite some time — centuries. It’s just so difficult to contain & control a miniature sun. Controlled fission is simple by comparison.

Dave Springer says:
August 15, 2010 at 6:10 am
You appear to not understand. Self aggrandizement in an anonymous media (you post a name but that is basically meaningless, I could add my last name or I could post under another name that would be hard to verify) as some sort of “proof” of something is extremely hollow. It is an anecdotal, unverifiable claim…frankly you should be embarrassed.

Dave Springer says:
August 14, 2010 at 7:33 am
I presume you’ve read “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler (1986). I read it in 1987 and my thoughts on the progression of technology have never been the same. . .

Haven’t read it, but will take a look.

Dave Springer says:
August 14, 2010 at 8:12 am
. . . Another technology I’ve been watching closely is called a space elevator. We need about one more order of magnitude improvement in carbon nano-tube technology to make it practical to run a cable from the ground to orbit. An order of magnitude may sound like a lot but it really isn’t as improvements of that order have come rapidly in recent years. If a space elevator becomes a reality (which is one heck of a lot safer bet than practical fusion reactors) the cost of lifting mass to orbit drops by a factor of 100 or more. It then becomes practical to build vast solar energy collectors in orbit where the sun shines 24 hours a day at much higher intensity than ground level and there’s no weather to deal with – the collectors can be paper thin and never get dirty or damaged. The energy can then be transmitted to virtually anywhere on the earth’s surface via focused microwaves to small footprint rectenna farms on the surface which solves one of the biggest hurdles in alternative energy – how to distribute the energy from point of production to point of use. . .

The Space Elevator (first envisioned by the late Arthur C. Clarke) is indeed an exciting prospect, though you may underestimate the difficulty of contstructing and maintaining one. Solar power from satellites makes eminent sense, but as you say, depend entirely on reducing to cost of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO). A long ramp or mass-driver situated west-to-east at a high altitude (say, in the Himalyas) might be a way of overcoming the cost of chemical rockets to get to LEO (might have been proposed by Heinlein).
This from a notice from the Space Studies Institute (originally at Princeton, now at NASA-Ames) about their 14th Conference on Space Manufacturing and Space Settlement (October 30-31, 2010):

Rational Solar Power
Development May Depend on Funding for Deep Space Propulsion
Satellite solar power still appears to be the best candidate to generate large economic returns from space development . . . SSI believes that the cost of transportation to low Earth orbit will be low enough within a decade to make power satellites available for spot power to remote locations. . .

And that’s without a Space Elevator or mass driver. Looks like the engineering problems for solar-power satellites will be discussed at the Conference. For those who might not know, the SSI was founded by Gerard K. O’Neill, whose 1976 work, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, was an inspiration for many of us, who are today frustrated by the slow pace of progress of manned space-flight.
/Mr Lynn

@Mr.. Lynn
Space elevator concept has been around for over 100 years. There are numerous engineering challenges in building one. I didn’t mean to imply there weren’t. There are fewer engineering challenges IMO in a space elevator program today than there were challenges to landing a man on the moon when Kennedy announced that program 1961. In adjusted dollars a space elevator will probably cost less too. The Japs think they can do it for under $10 billion – a mere bag of shells. The only caveat is the tether. Carbon nanotubes have the required strength to weight ratio and at this point it’s reduced to a manufacturing issue. The discovery phase is in the past.
I still think biotech is going to be the big winner however. In that we have not only the promise of cheap abundant hydrocarbon fuels in a form compatible with current infrastructure but it also holds the promise of a revolution in how we manufacture things – manufacturing will become far more energy efficient. A great many things can be manufactured from local materials so instead of mining, refining, and shipping everything stuff will be constructed on site using local materials by what are essentially trillions upon trillions of microscopic self-reproducing programmable robots. Now -that- is a transformative technology and it is drawing near. The discovery phase of that too is over and nothing but engineering challenges remain and they’re falling fast. The best metric to watch is the price of whole human genome sequencing which has fallen from $100,000,000 ten years ago to $10,000 today. The rapidity of that advance is enough to make Gordon Moore blush as it’s a lot faster than Moore’s Law for semi-conductors where the price/performance ratio halves every 18 months. In another few years Venter is going to be able to have bio-engineers building custom bacterial genomes on an engineering workstation in the morning and be testing them for efficacy in the afternoon. It takes a team of people months and millions of dollars to do that now. The cost will fall as the procedures are refined and automated just like the cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen by 4 orders of magnitude in a scant 10 years. I’ve never seen a science advance so rapidly and I’ve personally witnessed the progression from vacuum tube computers that required a megawatt of power and a small office building, millions of dollars and a team of people just to operate it, reduced down to something that costs less than a penny and is nearly invisible to the naked eye. Biotech is advancing much faster which is no small wonder because unlike microprocessors biotechnology has been extant on this planet for billions of years – our challenge was one of building the tools needed to reverse engineer a technology that was given to us on a silver platter.

Roger Sowell says:
August 15, 2010 at 1:04 pm
Re beaming power from space to Earth ground-level; there are serious legal and political problems even if the technical problems are solved.
Who would want to have an energy beam in orbit? It does not take much to transform that energy beam into a space-based weapon. Change direction and the microwave frequency to that of water (e.g. a microwave oven) and people and animals explode.

You appear to be channeling the protests of the environmentalist whackos 40 years ago over nuclear power plants. I hope they don’t win again because when they win we all lose.

Let me help you with that google scholar search, Jaye…
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS290US290&ie=UTF-8&q=david+springer+%22dell+usa%22