Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Lots of folks claim that the worst possible thing we could do is to allow the third world to actually develop to the level of the industrialized nations. The conventional wisdom holds that there’s not enough fossil fuels in the world to do that, that fuel use would be ten times what it is today, that it’s not technically feasible to increase production that much, and that if we did that, the world would run out of oil in the very near future. I woke up this morning and for some reason I started wondering if that is all true. So as is my habit, I ran the numbers. I started with the marvelous graphing site, Gapminder, to take an overall look at the question. Here’s that graph:
Figure 1. Annual income per person (horizontal axis, constant dollars) versus annual energy use per person (tonnes of oil equivalent, denoted “TOE”). I’ve added the horizontal red line to show the global median per capita energy use, in TOE per person per year. (The median is the value such that half the population is above that value, and half is below the value.) Click here for the live version at Gapminder.
So … how much additional energy would it take to bring all countries up to a minimum standard? We could perhaps take the level of Spain or Italy as our target. They each use about 2.75 tonnes of oil equivalent (TOE) per capita per year, and they each have an annual income (GDP per capita) of about $26,000 per year. If that were true of everyone on the planet, well, that would be very nice, with much avoided pain and suffering. So how much energy would it take to bring the billions of people using less energy than the inhabitants of Spain and Italy, up to that 2.75 TOE level of consumption? Now, here’s the wrinkle. I don’t want to drag the top half down. I don’t want anyone to use less energy, energy is the lifeblood of development.
So I’m not proposing that the folks using more energy than Spain/Italy reduce their energy consumption. Quite the contrary, I want them to continue their energy use, that’s what keeps them well-fed and clothed and healthy and able to take care of the environment and the like. As a result, what I wanted to find out was the following:
How much extra energy would it take to bring everyone currently using less energy than Spain/Italy up to their usage level of 2.75 TOE/capita/year, while leaving everyone who was using more energy than Spain/Italy untouched?
So, remembering that the figures in the graph are per capita, what say ye all? If we want to bring the energy use of all those billions of people up to a European standard, and nobody’s energy usage goes down … would that take five times our current energy usage? Ten times? Here’s how I calculated it
First, I downloaded the population data and the per capita energy use data, both from the Gapminder site linked to in the caption to Figure 1. If you notice, at the bottom left of the graph there’s a couple of tiny spreadsheet icons. If you click that you get the data.
Then, I combined the two datasets, multiplying per capita energy use by the population to give me total energy use. There were a dozen or so very poor countries (Niger, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, etc) with no data on energy use. I arbitrarily assigned them a value of 0.3 TOC/capita, in line with other equivalent African countries.
Then, I checked my numbers by adding up the population and the energy use. For total energy use I got 11,677 million tonnes of oil equivalent (MTOE). The corresponding figure for 2009 from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy is 11,391 MTOE, so I was very happy with that kind of agreement. The population totaled ~ 6.8 billion, so that was right.
Then for each country, I looked at how much energy they were using. If it was more than 2.75 TOE/capita/year, I ignored them. They didn’t need extra energy. If usage was less than 2.75 TOE/capita/year, I subtracted what they were using from 2.75, and multiplied the result by the population to get the total amount of extra energy needed for that country. I repeated that for all the countries.
And at the end? Well, when I totaled the extra energy required, I was quite surprised to find out that to achieve the stated goal of bringing the world’s poor countries all up to the energy level of Spain and Italy, all that we need is a bit more than 80% more energy. I’ve triple-checked my figures, and that’s the reality. It wouldn’t take ten times the energy we use now. In fact it wouldn’t even take twice the energy we’re now using to get the poor countries of the world up to a comfortable standard of living. Eighty percent more energy use, and we’re there.
In closing let me note a couple of things. You can’t get up to the standard of living of Spain or Italy without using that much energy. Energy is development, and energy is income.
Second, the world’s poor people are starving and dying for lack of cheap energy today. Driving the price of energy up and denying loans for coal-fired power plants is depriving the poor of cheap energy today, on the basis that it may help their grandchildren in fifty years. That is criminal madness. The result of any policy that increases energy prices is more pain and suffering. Rich people living in industrialized nations should be ashamed of proposing such an inhumane way to fight the dangers of CO2, regardless of whether those dangers are imaginary or real.
Finally, regarding feeding and clothing the world, we’re getting there. It’s not that far to go, only 80% more than current energy usage rates to get the world up to the level of the industrialized nations.
Anyhow, just wanted to share the good news. The spreadsheet I used to do the calculations is here.
w.
PS—Will this make the planet run out of fossil fuels sooner? Ask a person living on $3 per day on the streets of Calcutta if they care … but in any case, here’s the answer. As mentioned above, as of 2009 using about 11,500 MTOE per year. Total reserves of fossil fuel are given here as being about a million MTOE (although various people’s numbers vary). That doesn’t include the latest figures on fracked gas or tight oil. It also doesn’t include methane clathrates, the utilization of which is under development.
That means that at current usage rates we have at least 81 years of fossil fuels left, and under the above scenario (everyone’s energy usage at least equal to Spain and Italy) we have more than 46 years of fossil fuels left … ask me if I care. I’ll let the people in the year 2070 deal with that, because today we have poor people to feed and clothe, and we need cheap energy to do it. So I’d say let’s get started using the fossil energy to feed and clothe the poor, and if we have to double the burn rate to do that, well, that’s much, much better than having people watch their kids starve …
jrwakefield says:
August 23, 2013 at 5:22 am
BZZZT! Next contestant, please. Bad JR, no cookies. Claiming that studies support your ideas, and then refusing to cite them chapter and verse? That’s just handwaving.
w.
Patrick: My expectation is that almost all predictions are wrong.
My expectation is that all predictions are wrong. Hence my proposal to score the inaccuracies of the diverse predictions.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 23, 2013 at 7:08 am
It’s an interesting report. It also says that the average cost of non-wind power in the US is $0.03/kwh, meaning wind is still, after years and years of development, 33% more expensive than fossil and is totally unreliable.
How you (or anyone) thinks that is a good deal escapes me.
I asked you a direct question above, which as far as I know you declined to answer, viz:
Still curious …
My goodness, my constant importunings to run the numbers before making claims and predictions seem to be falling on barren ground. You might want to revise your prediction radically downwards in light of the following graph of worldwide production increases:
Data from the EIA.
Of interest:
1. The global annual increase in electric generation from solar has NEVER been greater than 66%.
2. The global annual increase in electric generation from wind has NEVER been greater than 48%.
3. The average annual increase in electric generation from wind over the last ten years is 27%.
In other words, your prediction that they will both go up by 100% just reveals that you didn’t do your homework …
w.
rogerknights says:
August 23, 2013 at 9:33 am
But 46 years is twice the lifespans of windmills and solar panels.
Well that would be a long lifespan. Was it not that solar panels lose some 10% per year in efficiency?
Wanted to double check but it is difficult to find some real articles on it, the internet is full of advertising and garbage when one searches.
rogerknights says:
August 23, 2013 at 8:40 am
Patrick, I’m not clear on why a country’s population should have some bearing on its per-capita energy use. The relevant factors in per capita use are usually cost (as Roger points out regarding hydro), national income, and population density. Figures on cost are elusive, but here’s the relationships.
Click here for the active Gapminder graph, you can identify the other countries. Note how the big users of energy tend to be in large sparsely populated countries (Australia, Russia, US, Canada) OR in oil producing countries where the cost is low OR in hydroelectric land (Sweden, Norway, Finland) where the cost is low.
All the best,
w.
Willis Eschenbach: Data from the EIA.
Yeh. Diverse sources make diverse claims. I put up links to two somewhat more favorable reviews.
What is the meaning of invest? well, here are some federal examples: TVA, REA, Panama Canal, aeronautics in general and turbine engines in particular; radar, Hoover Dam; Grand Coulee dam, DARPA net, epidemiological and bacteriological research, Interstate Highway System. That’s besides wind, solar, corn ethanol and other biofuels. It’s a mixed bag. If the costs of solar fall sufficiently, it will be as good an investment of federal tax money as turbine engines.
One of the links said that the current long-term contract cost of electricity from wind is $0.04 per kwh. My computations for solar (site-dependent) give costs between $0.06 and $0.08 per kwh, all costs included, at my house.
See you next year.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 23, 2013 at 9:09 pm
You are right. You put up links to two favorable reviews, which had no data about percentage growth year over year.
I put up a graph with links to the US IEA data about percentage growth year over year, which had no reviews, favorable or otherwise. You know … plain vanilla evidence? Facts?
So if you’d like to put your money where your mouth is, I’m happy to bet a thousand bucks on whether or not both wind and solar will double by next year. We can let Anthony hold the stakes, use the official US IEA figures.
Or not … I’m just saying, you haven’t done your homework. You claim you have … wanna bet? Because I bet you haven’t …
w.
Willis,
I was thinking about this some more. What do you think would be a reasonably sustainable year on year change in solar and wind power? You say the IEA data say there has never been a year with a greater than 66% year on year increase on total solar power — so perhaps 33% per year is sustainable. What will the year on year decline in price be? Maybe 5% — for solar the price of the chips declined 50% one year, but 5% is closer to the annual decline for whole systems, though my calculations for my home are closer to 10%.
Over what time span can you plan to increase total global fossil fuel consumption be implemented? For now, I’ll guess 20 years, but we can make this a “homework” assignment and get a good figure for next year. Will fossil fuel cost more or less than now, adjusted for inflation? Another homework assignment; recently, natural gas prices fell in the US (inducing conversion of coal-fired plants to gas), and then rose (inducing reconversion of some back to coal.) It is hard to see alternatives growing fast enough to quench demand for fossil fuels by much, so I expect it to cost more.
What will it all look like in 20 years? 300 times as much electricity from wind and solar as now? At a cost of 36% of what it is now? Maybe. I think more likely at least 500 times as much as now (helping to lower the cost of fossil fuels) and costing only 25% of what it costs now.
I prefer mean square error. I say 100% increase in each by next August, and 10% less costly than now. What do you think? Less than a 100% increase? Less than a 66% increase? Less than a 33% increase? You see the problem: if I bet on 100% and you bet on 80%, and the actual is 66%, that is a major increase for solar and wind, (in accordance with my other phrase of doubling every 1 – 3 years) but I lose the bet.
Meanwhile, do you think that total fossil fuel use will increase at 10% per year for a half century? Or even for 20 years? And stay at today’s costs?
Willis Eschenbach: So what do you mean by “invest”?
I provided a list of examples. A list of examples is called an “ostensive definition”, the most common kind of definition, usually the kind upon which other definitions are based. “Electricity” and “magnetism”, for example, were initially defined by the examples of how they are produced.
Perhaps you meant to ask “By whom?” I gave examples of successful federal projects. One of those, the Panama Canal, might not be deemed “successful”, might even be deemed a “boondoggle” because its construction was financed by tax money, and it always ran with a federal subsidy (the fees charged to ships that used it never covered its operations and maintenance costs.)
By “investment” I mostly refer to the time, money, and labor.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 24, 2013 at 10:05 am
Thanks, Matt, and my apologies, I’d missed them.
You have given several very different and entirely distinct categories under the term “invest”. You have included:
• Building out proven technologies that we know will work (TVA, REA)
• Paying for the development of military technologies (aeronautics, turbine engines, radar)
• Building transportation, water, and communications infrastructure (Panama Canal, Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, DARPA net, Interstate Highway System.)
• Doing basic research in health (epidemiological research)
So far so good. Those have all been proven successful, we’ve gotten good and sometimes great returns on all of those.
But then you add, in a throwaway line:
• Subsidizing Solyndra and solar
• Subsidizing (and requiring) ethanol
• Subsidizing wind generated electricity
Those have all been huge, costly, and unsuccessful boondoggles. Not only that, but the money spent is in the form of subsidies (or “minimum requirements”), rather than in the form of actually building something like the Hoover Dam. After decades of subsidizing those renewable technologies, they are still more expensive than conventional fuel.
So lumping all of those abject failures in subsidizing someone’s pet technologies on the one hand, with building the Panama Canal and the Grand Coulee dam on the other hand, and calling the mixture “investments” is a crime against the English language.
I did love your boondoggler’s refrain, though. They alway say what you did, they say just give it another year and it will all be wonderful … or in your words “If the costs of solar fall sufficiently, it will be as good an investment of federal tax money as [whatever] …”
Matt, I have the advantage of hearing Jimmy Carter say the same thing in different words about solar technologies when he wasted the first federal money on solar. Just wait until tomorrow, we were assured, it will all come right … bad news, Matt. Jimmy Carter gave his famous speech pushing the new idea of subsidizing solar energy in 1977. In it he said:
jrwakefield, you awake? You see why you guys’ claims that we have to throw more money at solar are not just crap, but old, tired, recycled crap? The President of the freakin’ USA said EXACTLY WHAT YOU GUYS ARE SAYING THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, scaring us about how we’re about to run out of oil and we have to “invest” in solar. Of course, back then we didn’t know better, we hadn’t realized the “peak oil” scam was just a way to pressure people to subsize your brilliant energy ideas.
Now you pop up and say the same thing, we have to throw money at solar, it will come good and this time we really, really mean it … and you expect to be believed?
Sorry, Matt, but after thirty-five years of listening to that kind of nonsense, some of us have wised up. Your technique, of wrapping up the money wasted in solar and wind and ethanol, with money spent building the Panama Canal, and calling it all “investments”, is far too reminiscent of the financial crisis—the banks mixed bad loans in with the good to sell the whole package. Invoking the name of the TVA and the REA doesn’t magically make the money wasted on ethanol an “investment”.
w.
Willis, meanwhile, tell us how and who will do it there will be an 80% increase in fossil fuel generation directed toward the people who don’t have electricity. We have a sort of contest of impossibilities here.
Invoking the name of the TVA and the REA doesn’t magically make the money wasted on ethanol an “investment”.
Shucks, I was hoping that you wouldn’t notice. Don’t forget to include the turbine engine development.
FWIW, I am as old as you, give or take a few years.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 23, 2013 at 11:26 pm
0%, because if all subsidies were removed nobody would buy them.
w.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 24, 2013 at 1:38 pm
Huh? All I was doing is trying to get an accurate handle on the SIZE of the project. Read my post again. I said nothing about who might do it or how it would be done. I was just correcting my (or others) misconception. See, I’d wrongly believed that the task was five or ten times that large.
But that was all I said, that the task is only a tenth of the size I’d thought. The rest of it, who would do what where by when, those are all good questions … but why would you look to me for an answer? I’m just pointing out that the job is nowhere near as big as I’d thought.
But heck, if you want part of an answer of who could do it, President Clueless could start by not denying a loan to Vietnam to build a coal plant, or by approving the KeystoneXL pipeline, or by stopping interfering with exploration for oil, or by stopping passing out millions in green subsidies to his pals and political contributors for imaginary electricity generating systems based on rainbows and methane from unicorn farts … but you knew that already.
w.
FYI …
SOURCE: WSJ (paywalled), data sources as indicated on graph
w.
RE: Thorium
One thing to keep in mind is that ‘Thorium’ is NOT a source of energy. It is only a source of artificial uranium that actually releases energy via nuclear fission. As long as there is sufficient natural uranium in the ground, there is no reason to develop the delicate and complicated mechanisms for transmuting thorium 232 into fissionable uranium 233. That need may be a millennium or so away.
The real advantage is the Molten Salt Fueled Reactor that can get six more times as much energy from a given amount of uranium because the fluid does not have to be replaced after only a small amount has been burned as is true for solid fuel rods, which bulge with accumulated fission products and must be removed early to prevent reactor jamming.
Here is a recent talk by Canadian Dr. David LeBlanc on the outlook for developing uranium fueled molten salt reactors.
David LeBlanc of Terrestrial Energy on Denatured Molten Salt Reactors @ur momisugly TEAC5
Uploaded by gordonmcdowell
1122 Views, 21 likes, 0 dislikes; 36:44 min:sec
Published on Jul 2, 2013
“Molten Salt Reactors are compared. Thorium vs Uranium. Burner vs Breeder. Single fluid vs two fluid. Fast spectrum vs thermal. Denatured & not. LeBlanc argues that denatured single fluid thermal spectrum molten salt reactor is the fastest reactor possible for certification, and still offers many benefits over solid fuel reactors.”
“Captured at TEAC5, the Thorium Energy Alliance Conference #5, held in Chicago on May 30, 2013.”
Willis: All I was doing is trying to get an accurate handle on the SIZE of the project. Read my post again. I said nothing about who might do it or how it would be done.
Yeh, I know. getting a good idea of the size of the problem was a good idea. I was thinking, counterfactually, what I would do with $3B to provide electric power to people who don’t have it. I’d be encouraged by your analysis, but I’d donate PV panels instead of launching a decades long process of government lobbying/planning to build adequate roads, pipelines, transmission lines, cooling towers, etc for the centralized facilities. Toting up all the costs, benefits, problems and such I think more good would come from distributed, roof-mounted PV power. I’d have not said so 10 years ago, and certainly not during Carter’s presidency.
As to reliability, the San Onofre power plant was disabled by a pipe manufacturing problem. That’s about 1800 GW of power that is equally unavailable night and day. Luckily, there’s backup. In some parts of the world there is barely enough water for subsistence, without any available for cooling large centralized facilities. San Onofre is on the coast where water is always plentiful and cool. In other parts of the US the nuclear plants have to slow down when the water levels decline or the water warms up.
The comparison of subsidy per kilowatt hour is informative. Most people think the subsidies to nuclear are larger than they are. Nevertheless, the table compares electricity actually produced over decades of nuclear, omitting the future decades of power produced by the solar installations to date. In 1955 one might have compared passenger miles per dollar of subsidies to reciprocating engines to passenger miles per dollar of subsidies to turbine engines — highly favorable to reciprocating engines. What exactly the payoff for solar subsidies will be is only a matter of conjecture now, but almost all of it will be in the future.
It’s a pleasure debating you, I should mention. You might be right.