Guest post by Thomas Fuller
I have been broadly correct about two important things in my career as an analyst. (I wasn’t the only one and I wasn’t the first–just far enough ahead of the curve to make a difference.)
The two things were the demographic decline of much of Europe and the rapid adoption of the internet following the release of the world wide web. I was not studying or researching either topic at the time–the two phenomena leapt out of other research I was conducting and were obviously more important than what I was doing at the time, so I dropped what I was doing and started looking at them exclusively.
So now it’s time to try for the trifecta. (No, I really don’t care about that at all–but this is the third Capital Letter Issue that has jumped out at me, so what the hey…)
Inadequate projections of latent demand for energy are leading to poor decisions now and are muddying the debate about both climate change and energy policy for the rest of the century.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the United Nations both project global consumption of energy at 680 and 703 quads respectively by the period 2030-2035 (a ‘quad’ is one quadrillion btus, roughly the energy you could liberate from 36 million tons of coal).
However, consumption trends, if extended, are far higher–they could reach 2,100 quads by 2030, if adequate energy was available consistently and at decent prices. This is because of the confluence of several important demographic trends.
The overall population is rising–it will be about 8.1 billion in 2030, the equivalent of adding another China to the planet. The comparison is fairly apt, as most of these new humans will be born into societies that look like China does now, or like China did 15 or 20 years ago.
These new humans will be stepping onto the energy ladder and consuming vastly higher quantities of energy than did their parents–if it’s available. They will be moving from farms with no electricity into slums with a minimum of electricity–but shortly thereafter, development and globalization will start them on the road to refrigeration, television, washer/dryers, computers, motor scooters, cars, ad infinitum.
These new humans will be joined by yet another virtual China–existing people who benefit from the same processes of development and globalization and jump on the energy ladder with both feet and both hands.
Obviously, many of both type will actually be in China. But even more will be in places like Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, large swathes of Africa and the rest of the developing world.
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. In Denmark, it’s a much more modest 161 billion btus. But in either case, latent demand for energy will far exceed the 700 quads currently projected by the DOE and the UN.
Assume 7 billion people will be on the energy ladder (changing from wood and animal dung on their way to coal, petroleum, natural gas, nuclear and hopefully arriving some day soon at the promised land of renewable energy). This means there are 1 billion people we have failed. (And I don’t want to ignore them–I just want to present believable numbers for this exercise.)
If those 7 billion consume energy as Americans do it comes to 2,289 quads. (The total will obviously be less, as they won’t all be near the top of the ladder by 2030). If they adopt a Danish model and develop towards that (efficient use of combined heat and power, high taxes on gas, generally high prices for energy, conscious drive to conserve), global energy demand will be 1,127 quads.
Although I would wish that people new to the modern world would automatically choose the far better Danish model, I predict that they will opt for the easier, softer American model and their energy needs will skyrocket.
However, in either case, we will need far more energy than is currently predicted. If they do not get it, they will not fully participate in what the modern world has to offer–education, good healthcare, clean air and water. Nor will they participate in the modern economy, further enriching the rich world with purchases of video games and expensive perfumes. We all will lose, although the losses of the poor will be heartbreaking.
It may well be that the DOE and the UN have correctly identified what governments are willing to build and provide in the way of new energy–but if they are correct, we are condemning billions of people to needlessly live a wretched existence that they would avoid if they could. Because using energy is not just a sign of success at development, or a reward for doing it right or a ‘welcome to the club’–it is often the key mechanism that enables development.
The poor–the two new Chinas–will fight and scheme to get the energy they need. They will burn coal, oil, whatever is available to escape the life sentence of the poor–lives that are nasty, brutish and short.
This conversation is not really about global warming at all. But it is certainly relevant to discussions of our planet’s future climate. China has doubled its energy consumption since 2000. There are two new ‘Chinas’ eager to do exactly the same, mimicking our behaviour of the last two centuries and following the original China’s current example.
The sources and quantities of energy we make available to the world will determine what our planet will look like in the medium term.
There’s no getting around that.
Thomas Fuller http://www.redbubble.com/people/hfuller
the climate problem from an engineers perspective by Burt Rutan
http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.pdf
/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.
@ur momisugly Dave Springer, August 15, 2010 at 6:36 am, re hydrogen pipelines.
You can deny reality as much as you want, but this is a rather public place to do so. (50 million unique visitors from around the planet).
The indisputable fact is, to repeat myself, that here in the USA we have had hundreds of miles of commercially operating industrial-size hydrogen pipelines for decades. And that does not count the additional miles of piping installed and operating inside hundreds of refineries and chemical plants. For just one map of such pipelines along the Texas Gulf coast, see e.g.
https://apps3.eere.energy.gov/ba/pba/analysis_database/docs/pdf/hydrogen_pipline_map.pdf
I should know. I worked in those refineries and chemical plants for more than two decades myself, operated and performed engineering on hydrogen production processes, the purification plants, compressor stations, storage systems, and the associated pipelines, valves, control systems, etc.
There are similar processes with hydrogen piping around the world. Wherever there is a steam-methane-reformer plant, or a chlorine plant based on electrolysis, to name only two, these exist. see e.g.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1647406/air_products_hydrogen_pipeline_extension_strengthens_gulf_coast_network/
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.
Verity, I’ll try to look it up. The latest EROEI LCA number on dry mill corn ethanol plants was 2.3 : 1. That translates out to 0.43.
I’m not “promoting” heavy cars, just using that car as an example. Obviously, a 2,600 lb. car would be preferable. It’s true, with a savings of $0.50/gal it would take 5 years for the average driver to pay for the more expensive engine, But the odds are very good that gasoline will escalate in price much more rapidly than will switchgrass. 🙂
Nice chatting with you; later.
Haven’t read it, but will take a look.
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):
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
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.
@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.
@Mr.. Lynn
http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html
A technology predicted in the book has been employed to make it accessible free of charge. The whole original version is at the link above. As you read it note the technological milestones layed out that have been achieved in the 24 years since publication. The single most important one will be achieved in the next several years – the first biological assembler. There is some controversy over whether more durable (non-organic) assemblers are physically possible but the biological kind had been extant for billions of years before the book was written – we just didn’t have the technology to customize them for our own purposes. Now we do. The engineering opportunities from only biological assemblers are mind boggling. It doesn’t really matter that much if inorganic assemblers can be made or not.
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.
Jaye says:
August 15, 2010 at 10:48 am
“I could add my last name”
Then by all means do it. What’s the problem? Frightened? Embarrassed?
“I could post under another name that would be hard to verify”
Why would you want to do that?
Type my name into google scholar and you’ll find several inventions in the computer field with my name on them assigned to my former employer.
“as some sort of “proof” of something is extremely hollow. It is an anecdotal, unverifiable claim…frankly you should be embarrassed.”
I’m not at all embarrassed. You should be embarrassed. Liars are usually the first to suspect others of lying. I usually assume people are being truthful until proven otherwise.
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
Actually it takes more than much. High power microwaves are shuffled around in waveguides that are not easily tunable in the power output stage. Likewise acheiving the power density at the surface of that of a microwave oven would require a large physical change to the parabolic reflector.
In other words if it were going to be a weapon it would have to be designed to be a weapon and there wouldn’t be any way to disguise it.
I think you’ve been watching too many James Bond movies.
@roger Sowell
Oh, I almost forgot the last flaw in your weapon hypothesis. If you tune it to the frequency of a microwave oven it won’t penetrate the atmosphere very far. It’ll just heat the air on the way down and dissipate all its power before reaching the ground. That’s the sole reason for tuning it to a frequency where the atmosphere is transparent.
You appear to be arguing just for the sake of arguing now and are making things up as you go along.
I mentioned before (maybe not this thread) that carbon will become a limiting factor in the biotech era. Living things construct stuff with a lot of different materials (for example calcium is a biggie for durable structures like clam shells and coral reefs). Amino acid polymers (proteins) however are the mainstay as the atomic ingredients are nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. The limiting factor appears to be, ironically, oceanic and atmospheric CO2 is the source of carbon in amino acids. Hydrogen comes from water while nitrogen and oxygen compose almost all the atmosphere.
I wonder how quickly the global ocean (which has an immense store of CO2) will give up the dissolved gas once we start using more than we put back. And of course agriculture will suffer and the earth will cool down if we take much more than we emit.
It just occured to me that soon enough someone is going to try charging you for sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere when you want to grow durable goods out of proteins. If “they” can make you pay to emit it “they” can surely also make you pay to absorb it. What’s next – a tax on rain?
@ur momisugly Dave Springer: comment on nuclear power.
You don’t yet know the half of it. see e.g.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/nuclear-nuts.html and the several other posts on my blog with the word “nuclear.”
However, I do want to compliment you on providing such rare entertainment today. Please, keep coming back and share some more wisdom. It is rather amusing when you stray so far from facts.
Your dream of a death ray from the skies will never happen, because attorneys like me will see to it. There will be no space-based weapons, even those disguised as harmless microwave power.
Someone in the comments mentioned the amount of energy involved in distillation of ethanol and implied it was a lot. It isn’t.
Ladisch, 1979
Going from 12% hydrous alcohol to 99% anhydrous takes 1577 btu/pound of alcohol. Total BTUs in a pound of alcohol are 12760.
In other words the distillation process is nearly 90% efficient as demonstrated by Ladisch.
If there’s a lot more energy loss to be accounted for it’s in the growing and harvesting and processing and fermentation of the feedstock.
Someone in the comments mentioned the amount of energy involved in distillation of ethanol and implied it was a lot. It isn’t.
Ladisch, 1979
Going from 12% hydrous alcohol to 99% anhydrous takes 1577 btu/pound of alcohol. Total BTUs in a pound of alcohol are 12760.
In other words the distillation process is nearly 90% efficient as demonstrated by Ladisch.
If there’s a lot more energy loss to be accounted for it’s in the growing and harvesting and processing and fermentation of the feedstock.
Roger Sowell :
August 14, 2010 at 8:57 pm
________
Your response makes me doubt you actually looked at the LPP (not LLP) technology at all. Neither 1 nor 2 is relevant, since there is no physical containment at all, and since the process is not continuous, but pulsed for microseconds at a time. No unobtanium required.
Here are two Technical papers for you to gen up a bit:
Technical Paper I
Technical Paper II
and
Current Technical Reports
@roger Sowell
Actually I’m not very much of a nuclear power fan and am uncertain that there’s any net gain in energy when you tally up energy inputs in construction, operation, and decommissioning against energy output during the operational lifetime.
That’s not to say they aren’t profitable however. Profit can be acheived in the time honored tradition of buying low and selling high. If the upfront cost of energy (let’s include things like licensing and labor as “energy”) to bring the new plant online is low and the cost of energy rises significantly during the operating lifetime then in effect you’ve made an investment and have bought low and sold high.
On the other hand France, which generates 80% of its electricity from nukes, seems fairly happy with it. I didn’t mean to say you’d strayed from any facts about nuclear power as you didn’t make much if any comment on it. It was your shallow and erroneous assumptions about turning solar power satellites into microwave beam weapons I was talking about. I suggest you consult someone familiar with radar systems design about the implausibility of turning a radar dish into a beam weapon. I was trained in the military in theory and operation of radar systems. There’s a reason we don’t have microwave beam weapons on the ground right now. When you know what those reasons are you will know why it was so ridiculous to suggest that solar power sats could be used as microwave beam weapons.
@roger Sowell
You say there will be no space based weapons because lawyers like you will stop it.
I’m curious about the legal theory behind that statement. Space is not nationalized. Legally it’s like international ocean waters. The way I see it you have about as much chance of using the law to prevent space based weapons as you have in preventing battleships and submarines from being deployed in international waters. Where there is an international treaty which 98 nations have ratified it only prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit. Conventional weapons including kinetic, chemical, and directed energy are not proscribed.
So do tell. Exactly what law and within what juridiction will be the means and venue in your quest to save the world from the dangers of solar power sats?
@Dave Springer,
The obvious seems to have escaped you. Placing a microwave energy satellite into orbit – but which actually produces the death ray – is a bit of a problem. Who will verify prior to launch? Do you seriously think China or Russia or any other space-capable country will allow such verification? If you do, then you also believe that all nuclear reactors on Earth are merely for peaceful, power production purposes.
Re nuclear power, I suggest you search through the WUWT prior posts, where this has been flogged to death. Your grasp of economics is rather thin.
Re energy for ethanol production. Your comments are comical. Energy required for distillation is not a fixed value, but varies with many factors. Please, leave the chemical engineering to the chemical engineers.
@roger sowell
Your insults are as weak as the rest of your blather.
How about that legal theory whereby lawyers like you are going to stop the microwave death ray? lol
With an as yet undetermined appendage Roger Sowell writes:
“Re energy for ethanol production. Your comments are comical. Energy required for distillation is not a fixed value, but varies with many factors. Please, leave the chemical engineering to the chemical engineers.”
Actually Rog, I did leave it to a chemical engineer. I quoted from Ladisch 1979. Like duh.
http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~lorre/16/people/ladresume2.shtml
Michael R. Ladisch
Distinguished Professor and Director
Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering
Purdue University
Potter Engineering Center, Room 216
500 Central Drive
West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2022
Phone: 765-494-7022; Fax: 765-494-7023
ladisch@purdue.edu
If you have some issue with the 90% distillation efficiency he got with his process in 1979 I suggest you take it up with him.
I think you mean ‘speculate’ rather than ‘postulate’, unless it’s ‘expostulate’. 🙂
Either way, it’s all great fun. What I object to are politicians and bureaucrats, the ‘governing class’ if you will, betting on one future technology or another with my tax money. Chances are they’ll be wrong, and someone will have to undo all the mistakes they make, which of course will cost even more of my money.
/Mr Lynn