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 …
Willis:
Thankyou for your excellent essay.
I write to support your argument by – hopefully – clarifying some issues which have arisen in the thread.
Before doing that I state that in my view this is the major moral issue of our age: as you say
My points of clarification are as follows.
1. Reserves and resources
A reserve of a mineral (e.g. stone, metal ore, coal, crude oil, etc.) is the known amount of the mineral which can be obtained at economic cost using existing technology.
A resource of a mineral is the estimated amount of the mineral which can be obtained using existing or imagined technology.
Reserves usually INCREASE as resources are depleted.
This is because the value of a mineral is affected by its availability.
To understand this, please consider the simplified case of 3 men who each own a field which contains diamonds.
Man A has one diamond on the surface of his field.
Man B has 10 diamonds 10 meters below the surface of his field.
Man C has 100 diamonds 100 meters below the surface of his field.
The resource is 111 diamonds (i.e. 1+10+100 diamonds) but the reserve is only one diamond.
Man A can find and obtain his diamond at much cheaper cost than Man B and Man C can find and obtain theirs. So, Man A can undercut the price for a diamond demanded by the others.
Then Man A sells his diamond.
The reserve then increases to 10 diamonds because Man B can now undercut Man C, but the resource reduces to 110 diamonds. Also, the cost and price of diamonds increases.
Then Man B sells his diamond.
The reserve then increases to 100 diamonds but the resource reduces to 100 diamonds.
This, of course, assumes that the need for diamonds is such that there is no alternative to paying the cost of Man C to obtain his diamonds. Diamonds from somewhere else or an alternative to diamonds may be cheaper, and – in that case – the alternatives become the reserves.
2. Limits to minimum magnitude of reserves
People do not pay to find more reserves when they have the reserves they need.
This is why oil reserves were equivalent to ~40 years of supply throughout the twentieth century and will be at least ~40 years of supply throughout this century. Oil companies have a maximum planning horizon of ~40 years so pay for more oil to be found if they have less reserves than needed for the next ~40 years. But they do not pay to find more reserves when they have enough.
2. Limits to growth imposed by the finite nature of resources (aka Peak Oil)
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite. This also is a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to the resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
Both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources for crude oil have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
In your above article, Willis, you say
That “venerable process” would be the century-old Fischer-Tropsch process which has been developed into the SASOL process in South Africa. The existing price constraint on crude oil is the Liquid Solvent Extraction (LSE) process for coal into oil. We proved the LSE technology both practically and economically with a demonstration plant at Point of Ayr, Wales, in the early 1990s. (There are several papers on LSE in the public domain and UNESCO commissioned one on it from me when I was the Senior Material Scientist at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment where we devised and developed LSE. But the UK government owns some important technical details of it.)
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not significant a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
I hope these details assist understanding of your very fine essay.
Richard
PS The link to “the live version at Gapminder” does not work at least for me.
[FIXED. Thanks, -w.]
FYI, Hans Rosling, the Swedish scientist who developed Gapminder, is a hard-core AGW believer and following him on Twitter is a painful experience. No doubt in his mind that Carbon is a poison and that non AGW Church-goers are horrible big-oil supported, flat-earthers. What a shame.
If our ancestors 200 years ago had stopped mining coal in case it ran out, or stopped building railways and factories because of increasing GHG, where would we be now?
Still living the same short, brutish lives they had then.
Steven Mosher says:
August 21, 2013 at 10:45 pm
Interesting Video. It exactly reflects my view on how things ought to unfold however I noticed he mentioned he was trying to achieve it in 4 years and that there was a date on one of the documents of 2010. So I’m thinking he has only a year or so left to succeed. Good luck to him on that.
Just adding some additional examples for the commentary on reserve figures which other posters have already done well:
“Tin, copper, iron, lead, and zinc all had both production from 1950 to 2000 and reserves in 2000 much exceed world reserves in 1950, which would be impossible except for how “proved reserves are like an inventory of cars to an auto dealer” at a time, having little relationship to the actual total affordable to extract in the future.[59]”
(where reference 59 is http://books.google.com/books?id=yIbH4R77OtMC&pg=PA730%7COnline )
The truth is that ifd we let poorer nations develop they will have more political and financial power in the world. It’s all about greed, but then again why should we give power to others so willingly? Like Apple and Microsoft, nations use monopolised world market for their advantage because they got there first. Let’s also not forget that many of those undeveloped nations are unstable, often with ideology that is contrary to our own.
Ideally every person in the world should have access to cheap energy, but the end result might be more destabilising to the world than we’d like to believe. Ultimately the choice is whether we should put faith in the status quo or nature of mankind, and to be honest, judging from our past and present actions as human beings, I’d rather put faith in the status quo.
Great analysis. Period. 🙂
Doesn’t mean that anthropogenic global warming goes away, though: if anything, it actually appears, with a vengeance. Waste heat becomes the key problem of civilization to be solved! If we had inexpensive and simple nuclear fusion tomorrow and raised everyone’s energy consumption within a generation to that of the US, the real problem would be heat transfer: heat generated by transmission losses; heat generated by air conditioners (which, after all, simply remove the heat in a cooled room by pumping it outside); the list can be easily extended.
One aspect that Larry Niven, the science fiction writer, pointed out in his novel “Ringworld” is that for any seriously advanced civilization, heat becomes the primary source of “pollution”.
In Niven’s world (which is not the Ringworld, but rather the Kemplerer Rosette of the Puppeteer’s home world) solves the problem by moving the plant out from the sun to reduce irradiation effects and use the heat generated by trillions of Pierson’s puppeteers (they like each other’s company, the more the merrier) on five planets to prevent the planets from freezing.
But that’s ultimately an engineering solution that merely has to be implemented, n’est pas? 🙂
The energy deprivers forget that with development comes a reduction of birth rate due to improved child mortality rates. So energy would last longer than your calculations.
Another thing that must be stopped is growing food crops for fuel. This increased food costs by at least 70% but affected third world peoples far more that any.
rgbatduke:
I agree with much that you say in your post at August 22, 2013 at 12:05 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/21/double-the-burn-rate-scotty/#comment-1396823
but I write to dispute the technical feasibility of one suggestion and the desirability of one assertion which you make.
The suggestion is in this long sentence.
A “high capacity high efficiency multicycle energy storage” has great – and appealing – benefits. It is often expressed as a desire by advocates of intermittent energy supply systems (e.g. windfarms) because such energy storage would make intermittent electricity supplies useful to an electricity grid. More importantly, a “high capacity high efficiency multicycle energy storage” device would reduce need for power stations by about a third because it could store energy at times of low electricity demand for use at times of high electricity demand.
The problem is safety.
A fuel is an energy store that releases the energy in a controllable manner. Burn a kilo of coal and a kilo of gelignite and the coal releases more energy than the gelignite, but the gelignite burns faster.
A facility for “high capacity high efficiency multicycle energy storage” would provide a very high risk. For example, on a typical day the UK generates electricity equivalent to 30 Hiroshima A-bombs. Assume the facility stores a third of this and it would be storing the energy equivalent of 10 Hiroshima A-bombs. Unintended release of that energy would be a devastating disaster.
Few people would want to live near such a facility.
And you assert
I don’t want a “stable and sustainable global civilization”.
I want a growing civilisation with many varieties that provide human developments of population, wealth in all its forms, diversity, colonisation of all the Earth and elsewhere, the arts, the sciences, politics, philosophy and religion.
Richard
John F Opie:- yes I liked Larry Niven but they were only stories.
Willis.
First I agree that everyone on the planet should live at a decent level. And I’d further point out that whether they do or not is their choice and is not something within the control of the folks in the developed world who control the dialog. In my view China, India, Africa and Latin America will actually be doing the driving. The currently developed world is just along for the ride
That said, I’m pretty sure your math is wrong. My cocktail napkin says 1 billion folks in the developed world use about 400,000 btu each per day. 6 billion elsewhere use about 100,000 btu each. A reasonably decent lifestyle probably requires at least 300,000 btu for each person except for a few eccentrics who choose to live on less. That puts current energy usage at 10^15 btu and end of century energy usage around 3×10^15 btu. Closer to 200% than 80%. And it does require Americans and a few others to conserve a bit. Higher energy costs will take care of that I should think. (I project unending whining and finger pointing, but little actual hardship).
And no, there probably is not enough petroleum to support that. Some here think otherwise. Sorry folks. Get a grip on reality. You aren’t paying $100 bucks a barrel for crude because we’re wading in the stuff. Or because the evil oil companies are jacking the price up. (Well, OK, maybe a little, but not THAT much). BUT, there looks to easily be enough total fossil fuel — especially natural gas — to get humanity through this century. Someday — maybe 2100 — maybe 2400 we’ll have to move on. But nuclear (fission,fusion or both) and solar plus a little hydro and some wind and some other minor stuff should be more than adequate. If we keep breeding indiscriminately, I expect we’ll run out of resources to grow food before we run out of energy.
Actually, it’s the advancements in medicine and implementation of advanced medicine that lowers birth rates, but first it lowers infancy deaths, causing great suffering to families with many children and no means for providing for them. That creates dependancy on aid. It also increases life expectancy, increasing the problem even further.
Lower birth rates tend to fall after a generation or two of great strife. I’m not saying the alternative – the status quo is better, but in regions where arable land is in great contention, when famines can appear with relatively little warning, and with local energy problems still unresolved, a population boom can create great strife indeed.
Wu:
I write to draw attention to your post at August 22, 2013 at 3:10 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/21/double-the-burn-rate-scotty/#comment-1396899
It is a clear statement of the fear which encourages you and others to want the poor to be kept poor; i.e. why you say you want the status quo.
Thankyou. This discussion needed such an explanation of WHY, in the words of Willis’ article
Richard
Nick Stokes says:
August 22, 2013 at 1:35 am
—————————————————-
Forget the candles, fear the sunlight Nick, and pray. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. On September 7 Australia is letting the sunlight in. You and yours at CSIRO are finished. ACORN? Tmin exceeding Tmax in over 160 records? Forensic accountants call that clipping. You are not going to walk this one off. Not now, not ever.
September 14 was going to be whacking day, but sadly the mendacious bovine has had her rubenesque posterior kicked from office. His exulted Kruddulence is once again temporarily warming the seat. So now September 7 is weasel stomping day.
Like many Australians I have had to cast aside my Louisville Slugger Voters Special engraved with Gillards name. No matter, I have golf shoes. Were you hoping the stomping will stop with the end of the carbon tax Nick? Well, forget it. The stomping won’t stop until every pseudo scientist, activist, journalist or politician who ever supported the inane idea that adding radiative gases to the atmosphere would reduce the atmospheres radiative cooling ability is driven from public life. This is the age of the Internet. What you and yours have done is forever.
PS. I blame Willis for the rant, he did say something about doubling the burn rate. 😉
Wu:
At August 22, 2013 at 3:20 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/21/double-the-burn-rate-scotty/#comment-1396909
you assert
There many reasons why wealth reduces birth rates and “medicine” is a minor one.
The major reason why the poor have high birth rates is that having children provides a supply of care (from the offspring) at times of illness, infirmity and old-age. Children are a necessary insurance.
Wealth provides the possibility to purchase care at times of illness, infirmity and old-age: the insurance provided by many children is not needed.
Richard
Kurt Myrhagen says:
August 22, 2013 at 2:41 am
FYI, Hans Rosling, the Swedish scientist who developed Gapminder, is a hard-core AGW believer…
###########
That’s ironic. Given this presentation, you would think he would be an advocate of burn-baby-burn:
Great article! The conflict between the AGW scare and the struggle to bring developing countries up to a good standard of living is extremely important, and most warmists are amazingly ignorant of the dilemma. The warmists like to talk about “wealth transfer” to the poor parts of the world, but if you actually do what many of them wish for: quickly curb CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by international agreements that dramatically reduce fossil fuel production, of course the poorest will be hit first – since the immediate consequence will be a massive price hike!
The energy vs GDP curve has been well known for a long time; albeit in black and white.
A nice, 3-D view with the historic trends for countries might illustrate how declining/increasing energy use impacts GDP within e.g. the G20 countries.
It was primarily high infant mortality rate that made having many kids sense. When those children stop dying, the need for having many children passes. The other reasons you supply are bound to what I said – there’s a need for fewer children to achive those goals, i.e. old-age security.
The problem arises when cultures are slow to change, or when there’s enough food (like in India or through long-term food aid) and it’s possible to feed the children, but through severe poverty. It’s a dangerous, short-sighted and greedy way to behave as parents, but it still happens today despite the medicines. The goal there is to create as many children as possible so that at least 1 will be able to get into university and provide for the family. This culture has to change. However, I’d rather talk about more rational families who do not cling to their old ways or are highly irresponsible. Irresponsible because of the damaging childhood, and also high to certain possibility of starvation when the bread winner of the family cannot “win” food anymore.
Richard
I don’t want to keep the poor poor, however I am thinking pragmatically here. There’s always been a fight to do what’s right and what’s best. The deeper one thinks, the further these two trains of thought seperate. The problem arises when greed enters the mix. In terms of world development I think greed has always been there, and it’s hard to be rid of it. It’s also easy to fool oneself that actions are alturistic even when profits come pouring in. The higher profit the bigger the delusion.
However there is a need for foresight here. Alarmists keep harping on about our children and our childrens’ children. Well our grandchildren might have to contend with powerful warlords if we’re not careful. It might happen or it might not happen, but we must consider all possibilities. It would be highly irresponsible not to.
richardscourtney says:
August 22, 2013 at 3:37 am
The major reason why the poor have high birth rates is that having children provides a supply of care (from the offspring) at times of illness, infirmity and old-age. Children are a necessary insurance.
============================================
A lot of folks think that and it might be true in parts of East Asia except China where the One Child policy was imposed in 1980. But I suspect the real reasons for lower birth rates in developed countries are better access to effective birth control and the fact that as countries develop, even rural families are increasingly part of the cash economy. In a cash economy, the question of “Can we afford to raise a(nother) child?” becomes increasingly significant.
@Steven Mosher
I got as far as “Look at where the US is, we’re terrible!” (delivered with requisite smugness) before I gave up. I didn’t know or care who the lecturer was, but should I? It was quickly clear that he cherry picked a bunch of factors regarding energy use and GDP, assumed an over-simplistic linear relationship between them, then extrapolated everything to the year X (is he a climate ‘scientist’?) This done to support a trendy but sickeningly patronising and potentially damaging (from the point of view of the poor) world view beloved of self styled progressives and neo-Malthusians. As soon as I hear this kind of self-flagellating anti-US, anti development, population control bleating, the red flags go up and the eyes roll. Yes, there may be a case for population control, but it should be as a response to a real threat, not one fabricated through the statistical games of a bunch of over-privileged narcissists, fuelled by a misguided sense of heroism and a desire to play Cassandra.
What is still terrible about the USA is the divide between rich and poor; the fact that despite having the amongst the highest standards of living of any country in the world, a great many people continue to live below the poverty line. However, this can be said of any developed country. The US, through it’s “terrible” energy usage has at least managed to raise the standard of living of the majority of its population above subsistence level, which is, I believe, one of Willis’s points. He uses real, current figures, not baseless projections fuelled by a desire to attain the appearance of moral superiority, to support his vision of a possible (and more hopeful future). RGB, later on in these comments makes some excellent points about the sustainability of current energy consumption which tie in to Willis’s viewpoint, plus I didn’t have to sit through quarter of an hour of dull lecture by some bearded smart arse to absorb them.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that by posting a video without any summary or comment is another case of hit and run snideness. What point are you trying to make on Willis’s presentation exactly? If you have anything to say, can’t you say it yourself? It would far more interesting.
J Burns.
@richardscourtney:
Why assume that all that energy would be stored in one place? The combined energy stored in petrol tanks across the UK is probably a few Hiroshimas as well, but no disaster there. Assuming RGB’s transmission problems are solved, couldn’t energy be stored in cells where it is needed?
JJB MKI writes “I got as far as “Look at where the US is, we’re terrible!” (delivered with requisite smugness) before I gave up.”
and then…
“I could be wrong, but I get the sense that by posting a video without any summary or comment is another case of hit and run snideness. What point are you trying to make on Willis’s presentation exactly?”
Well you only got about 10 mins into the 78min presentation so at least you acknowledge you could have been wrong…which indeed you were. His presentation fwiw is very much on topic.
Energetic (@ur momisugly1:10) brought up a good point that there will be as many as 3.2 billion more people on earth by 2100 (actually, demographers say by 2050, but the newborns won’t be full-fledged energy consumers by 2100). So Willis’ estimate of an energy demand increase of 80% is probably low, possibly by a factor of 2.
Don K.(@ur momisugly 3:18) also brought up the point that oil @ur momisugly $100/barrel is at that price because the world demands oil and that’s the market price at current demand. But he alludes to the fact that higher prices will bring on-board more energy from a bunch of competing sources. I believe he underestimates the massive volumes of energy that will be recoverable from a multitude of energy sources as prices gradually increase with growing energy demand. The amount of energy from nuclear, fracked gas/oil and methane clathrates alone are mind-boggling. Those huge energy resources will essentially put a lid on how high and how fast energy costs will increase in the near and distant future. Basically, we will never run out of energy sufficient to provide for a comfortable existence for the entire world’s population.
My current CEO just formed this company. He wants to productize Thorium.
http://www.x-energy.com/
http://www.sgt-inc.com/gen.php?pageid=12#ghaffarian