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 …
Marler: natural gas, oil, coal, hydro, and nuclear are all major sources of energy. That’s far more than ‘one basket’. Combined, they can fulfill The world’s energy needs far into the future, and unlike the alternative energies you cited, are already developed to an economical level. ‘Longer than necessary” is any time wasted debating the problem instead of deploying those known solutions.
“Willis Eschenbach says:
August 22, 2013 at 8:50 am”
I am just wondering where *all* that energy I am, apparently, consuming in Aus, is going. Oh! Oh, wait! Its an election year!
The peak oil crowd does not understand that the Red Queen is driving a turbo, and is just shifting to second gear. Here’s an extra 100 billion barrels in the most drilled up place on earth:
—————————————————————————————————————
DENVER, Aug. 12
08/12/2013
By Tayvis Dunnahoe
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2013/08/urtech-wolfcamp-play-dwa…
“The Spraberry Wolfcamp could possibly become the largest oil and gas discovery in the world,” said Pioneer Natural Resources Co. Chief Executive Officer Scott Sheffield while speaking Aug. 12 at the Unconventional Resources Technology Conference (URTeC) in Denver.
PNR is the largest acreage holder in the Spraberry field with 900,000 gross acres (730,000 net acres), the majority of which could be prospective for the horizontal Wolfcamp shale. Based on Pioneer’s extensive geologic database, petrophysical analysis, and successful drilling results to date, there is significant horizontal Wolfcamp shale resource potential in this acreage.
According to Sheffield, the company will test 13 zones over the next 3 years. With 50 billion boe in recoverable reserves to date, Wolfcamp is bigger than the Bakken in North Dakota and South Texas’s Eagle Ford shale. Sheffield noted that recoverable reserves are based solely on the Wolfcamp A, B, D, and the Jo Mill. “More reserves are yet to be discovered,” he said.
Geographically, Wolfcamp is comparable to other plays. A unique feature that puts it ahead of other plays is its variety of geological zones. The play contains 3,500-4,000 ft of shales, which is more like 3-4 million acres when considered in 3D space as opposed to 2D space.
“Compare that to the Eagle Ford shale formation, which is about 300 ft deep and the Spraberry Wolfcamp shale, with its 50 billion boe, begins to dwarf the Eagle Ford and the Bakken with 27 billion boe and 13 billion boe, respectively,” Sheffield said.
According to Sheffield, PNR’s success in Eagle Ford has provided a smooth transfer into Wolfcamp. “When compared by phases of development, we see the Wolfcamp trending higher than the Eagle Ford based on activity and production,” Sheffield said.
Based on recoverable reserves, the Wolfcamp is second only the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. “We believe this field will reach 100 billion boe recoverable reserves at some point in time,” Sheffield said.
———————————————————————————————————————
Imagine US oil and gas technology and infrastructure applied in basins all around the world
And the cornucopia of gas is far greater than oil
Save the elephant and the rhinoceros.
Currently under severe threat in Africa due to poaching. I can’t really blame the poachers, as they are poor and ignorant and need to sell the ivory and horns to support their families.
But if they were well off, and well educated, and had ample energy supply, then they would be far less likely to kill these big beasties.
So Willis’s plan is one that GreenPeace and WWF should (but of course, wont) support.
The conventional wisdom holds that there’s not enough fossil fuels in the world to do that,
I don’t know who believes that…probably no one except ‘low infoformation’ consumers. The amount of coal that exists geologically is enoough to more then quadruple CO2 levels.
The only question is will the extraction, transportation and conversion costs of all that coal be economically competitive with the alternatives. In much of the world, coal is not particularly competitive now.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 22, 2013 at 9:14 am
No. Your “desire” to put incremental and irregular “green islands” of limited and intermittent solar power and wind – and then requiring that they burn THEIR heat and food and fodder and cooking fuels by requiring they use biofools!! – into isolated villages and a few scattered plots condemns the remaining BILLIONS of people for 46 years into early death, disease, starvation and easily avoided poverty.
The US and Canada and Europe went from isolated cities of isolated single power plants into regional grids and state and national electric power systems in a half-generation between 1910 and 1935. The rural areas were completely electrified before 1940. AT NO POINT ANYWHERE in the world – until your idealistic, social-driven green dogma interfered with thinking adults – did isolated irregular power from windmills and other generators remain after more efficient, more reliable, more powerful electricity was available from the grid.
The ONLY reason Africa and the 3rd world are still mired in poverty is the greed, incompetence, socialism and corruption of the GOVERNMENTS (all dictators, kings, and thieves) in charge of the 3rd world countries. Many, like Nigeria and Indonesia and all across central Africa and the horn of Africa, EXPORT their immense energy (coal, oil, etc.) reserves NOW, and their even more valuable industrial chemicals and ores. (China, more reasonable than you) is buying these rigths across all of Africa now for more export. And the Chinese, for their ruthless enslavement of their own people, will do nothing for the remaining billions left in in the 3rd world.
There is no “risk” nor “development time” to get this power to the people for real development and industry and food production! It can be done immediately – well, 5 years from approval to building and delivery of the final grid elements- but the governments there would lose their power and their personal wealth. 2 years from order to delivery of each oil-fired or NG-fired gas turbine. 12 months for a big transformer and distribution net. 6 months to build the high-volt power lines.
So, you want to “give” isolated solar and wind generators to “the people” back in isolated villages and tribal camps?
And you think the local thieves (er, tribal chiefs and their family and the local warrior (leader) is going to sit there and let this “power” get distributed? He will IMMEDIATELY buy air conditioners and refrigerators and TV’s and fans and lights and ovens and microwaves and Mercedes and gold-plated bathtub faucets and ivory-handled knives FOR HIMSELF. He will IMMEDIATELY use that money he extorts from the “power island” (the other customers) to buy more AK-47’s and missiles and machine guns for HIS “guards” and thugs to get MORE power. And let the rest stay in their current poverty.
Peak oilers are funny.
Current worldwide oil demand is 92 million barrels per day. (Easily met and a new peak no less.) OPEC spare capacity is growing. Alberta oil production is growing, US oil production is growing. That doesn’t even take into account all the newly economic gas production in North America. Gas to liquids technology makes economic sense when the Gas price is ten times less than the oil price.
Needless to say peak oilers are spitting images of the CAGW crowd. All sizzle no steak.
Jtom: Marler: natural gas, oil, coal, hydro, and nuclear are all major sources of energy. That’s far more than ‘one basket’. Combined, they can fulfill The world’s energy needs far into the future, and unlike the alternative energies you cited, are already developed to an economical level.
What’s economical depends on place and purpose. Cell phones and small shops can be more economically and reliably powered by solar and wind in some places with current technology, whereas fossil and nuclear depend on large capital projects, roads and transmission lines, and government bureaucracies. The same is true for powering small to medium scale irrigation projects. The installed cost of a current 10kw facility is $5.30 per watt, which works out (in a place like the Imperial Valley or rural San Diego County, CA or Mariposa County AZ) to $0.07 – $0.12 per kwh. If you were building a new nursery and wanted the power for daytime irrigation, you might find that to be an attractive price. You’ll recall that calculations like that supported Anthony Watts’ decision to install solar power. I am a fan of nuclear power, but there is no good reason why all the small operators in the world have to wait for the nuclear power plants to be built when they can independently install nearly equally cheap power without waiting one more minute than is necessary.
The focus of Willis’ essay was the people who now have no electricity. I agree with you and Willis that it is a crime to deny them cheap power from coal-fired plants. But many of them could benefit from independently installing current wind and solar powered electricity generation.
RACookPE1978:
Thankyou for the dose of reality you provide by your post at August 22, 2013 at 10:04 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/21/double-the-burn-rate-scotty/#comment-1397257
It needed saying.
Richard
“A person earning an income defined as ‘poverty level’ in the US would be in the top 2% wage earners in the world. ” Except for one small issue, you are right.
That one small issue is that most of the so called income of below the poverty level is not earned. It is extorted at point of government gun (aka taxes) from those of us who actually do earn our income. A portion of that extorted wealth is given to the so called poor and disadvantaged. The rest (aka the lions share) of that extorted loot is consumed by a bloated government in order to continue to expand the government, to extort still more of our earnings, and to expand the poverty class so as to create more votes to keep the thugs in office.
The critical concept here is the earned as opposed to the merely taken by force either directly or indirectly. That difference is between being your brother’s keeper or not voluntarily and others taking from you by force and justifying it by keeping some sacred *other* whom you couldn’t care less about. The others are simply the boundless, bottomless pit of imaginary wants and needs who are unwilling to do anything for them to be fulfilled. If you want to take care of that pile of parasites, be my guest and use your own resources to do it. I won’t stop you. However, leave me out of the equation unless I voluntarily choose to help of my own free will.
Please note: “voluntarily” means to be without coercion of clubs, knives, guns, boots, or threats of being sent to a gulag backed up by gangs of thugs (aka government) and to be free to choose or not according to your own standards, principles, and personal circumstances. I understand that this is not today’s understanding of “voluntarily”. What “voluntarily” means today is that if 50% +1 of the voting population chooses to sacrifice you for any reason, your goose is cooked, rendered, deboned, and served to the momentary whim of the majority regardless of your rights, your life, your personal purpose, and your personal choice. More exactly, you are to be available without resistance for the use and disposal at the whim of your government who pretends to speak for that 50% +1. Otherwise, out come the clubs, knives, guns, … etc.
For not agreeing to the above, I am classed as selfish and therefor evil fully deserving of such treatment. However, isn’t it ironic that the 50%+1 and the government thugs who are the enforcers and primary beneficiaries of the theft, are considered noble and sanctimoniously unselfishly good because they say they intended it to be good for the sacred *other*. If you believe this is as it should be, it is way past time for you to check your premises about what is good and what is evil.
This would indeed be a lofty goal but would take time to achieve. If this could be done in by 2050, what would the population be then and how would this affect energy needs? Here are the U.S . census figures for population:
1818 1 billion
1927 2 billion
1960 3 billion
1974 4 billion
1987 5 billion
1999 6 billion
2011 7 billion
The doubling time (time to double the population) from after 1927 was 47 years and after 1960 it was 39 years. At that rate, using a simple linear extrapolation, we might then expect to reach a population of 11 billion by 2050 (i.e., in 37 only years). What will the energy needs be for 11 billion people and how might it affect Willis’s analysis? The U.N. claims that birth rates have declined by half since the 1960s, assumes another halving of the birth rate by 2020, and yet another halving of the birth rate by 2050. After 2062, the U.N. claims that world population will no longer increase. These projections seem overly optimistic.
Willis–you are a master of numbers. What do you make of the population growth and how will it affect energy needs. Any thoughts on this?
1000 year supply…
http://www.thegwpf.org/energy-for-1000-years-huge-natural-gas-from-methane-hydrates-process-developed/
For those who couldn’t find this article…
http://www.ogj.com/articles/2013/08/urtech-wolfcamp-play-dwarves-bakken-eagle-ford.html
RACookPA1978:The ONLY reason Africa and the 3rd world are still mired in poverty is the greed, incompetence, socialism and corruption of the GOVERNMENTS (all dictators, kings, and thieves) in charge of the 3rd world countries. Many, like Nigeria and Indonesia and all across central Africa and the horn of Africa, EXPORT their immense energy (coal, oil, etc.) reserves NOW, and their even more valuable industrial chemicals and ores. (China, more reasonable than you) is buying these rigths across all of Africa now for more export. And the Chinese, for their ruthless enslavement of their own people, will do nothing for the remaining billions left in in the 3rd world.
Mostly that was a witless diatribe against some straw man. I agree with you, however, that much of the poverty of the world is maintained by criminal governments. How that supports Willis’ plan for massive increases of fossil-fuel power to the exclusion of solar and wind and appropriate biofuels I do not see. The thieves who steal the solar power will steal the transmission lines and pylons (as they do now, along with stealing oil), so I think that the issue of thievery slightly favors local control, which favors local small scale wind and solar, which on the whole are easier to protect. I would happily see all the dung fires replaced with electric stoves powered by large fossil-fueled and nuclear-fueled plants, but a quicker, cheaper solution, with less dependence on government and other central planners, is to introduce solar power and robust solar stoves.
When the US etc electrified, the current wind and solar technologies had not been invented; for the same reason, the airline industries of the ’30s and ’40s did not adopt the federally subsidized turbine engines. Now they are all turbine powered except for a few niches like small planes, and large sunny and windy areas produce electricity.
I am glad that you believe China to be “reasonable”. That China is buying oil from some poor countries I already mentioned as one of the factors that leads to oil being too expensive for the poor people in some of the oil-producing countries. China, like the US, is installing massive (by historical standards) wind and solar farms in rural areas where the electricity from them is cheaper than the electricity from imported coal, oil and gas. China has been consistently doubling its wind and solar generating capacity every 1 – 3 years, and consistently reducing the price of production. If the Chinese are “reasonable”, then it is worthwhile to study why and where they are doing that. (As everyone knows, China install more fossil fuel generating capacity every year than wind and solar combined, and they have to import more and more fossil fuel every year. With respect to installed capacity, however, solar and wind generation are increasing at a higher percentage rate, and the power will be available 46 years from now [figure from Willis’ text] when there is no more coal, oil and natural gas for the Chinese to import.)
Don K says:
August 22, 2013 at 9:16 am
Don, my main issue is not actually the BTUs. It is the fact that I’ve provided a spreadsheet detailing my calculations. If you think there is an error in them, you need to point out where. Also, providing calculations in some other unit to contest a claim made in different units is just plain impolite.
In any case, since you seem unwilling to do the conversion, I did it. Your numbers are not much different from mine. Your back-of-the-envelope calculations are good, you say current energy use is 9,211 MTOE. I’ve given two different sources showing it to be on the order of 11,600 MTOE/yr.
Next, you set 300,000 btu/person/day of energy to be your goal. Curiously, this is exactly the goal I had picked, 2.75 TOE/person/day
Next, I had calculated the necessary additional energy needed to bring the world up to that 2.75 TOE/person/day level. I got 9,677 additional MTOE required … and you got 11,000 MTOE from your envelope.
Now, if you’d done that in the units I’d used, you’d have looked at your results and said “Dang, Willis’s actual calculated numbers from real data are a close match to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, looks like that bugger’s right.”
I disagreed with Tom on the first day he started his blog, 300quads, with his first post. He’s using market exchange rates for his future calculations, just like the IPCC did. Castles and Henderson took the IPCC to task for that, and rightly so. The exact same criticisms apply to Tom’s work. Tom refused to admit that, because he (like the IPCC) is an alarmist about the amount of energy we’ll need in the future. Hint. It’s unlikely to be 3,000 quads in 2075. Since he wouldn’t listen to either me, Castles, or Henderson, I let him go his alarmist way.
Tom has taken the highest numbers available for his estimate. He estimates that the world will have just under ten billion people in 2075. In fact the median estimate of the peak population has been dropping steadily since I was a young man. In 2004 the 2075 peak was estimated by the UN at 9.2 billion, and the number continues to drop.
He then estimates that if nine billion of those imaginary ten billion folks have a GDP about 50% higher than the current US GDP/capita, the world will use 3,000 quads of energy … so his calculations are correct, but his assumptions are way high in each instance.
As a result, overall, his blog is not “excellent”, it is badly misguided. Despite that, however, there are some very good individual posts to be found there, with accurate data and interesting ruminations on what it means.
The reason I bring this up, Don, is that you might not have noticed but I didn’t say anything about the future, about income growth to 2075, or about changes in population. Why? Because anyone claiming to know where we’ll be getting our energy in the year 2075 is just blowing smoke. It could be from some currently unknown source, and it might be “too cheap to meter” as we were told about nuclear energy. That’s all “pie in the sky” stuff, and I have to tell you this in all honesty, Don:
In a world where people are starving and dying because of the lack of cheap energy, my tolerance for fantasies about 2075, and for peoples’ inchoate fears of what might happen then, is vanishingly small.
As a result, I don’t care if we run out of fossil fuels in 40 years. At least we’ll have had 40 good years, years during which I’m sure we’ll figure out what to do next. I’m tired of people who are paralyzed to inaction, picking the biggest numbers that they can find, multiplying them together, and then gasping “3000 quads! How will we ever do it?” and clutching their pearls.
w.
I wrote : What we need to do in the next 46 years is invest consistently in all reasonable alternatives: solar, wind, biofuels, diverse nuclear options, and so on. I support increased fossil fuel use, but I don’t support diving off cliffs into unexplored water.
…. It will take time to increase fossil fuel production by 80% and we can’t be sure that we can do it anyway — known unknowns and unknown unknowns and all that.
RACookPE1978 turned that into : No. Your “desire” to put incremental and irregular “green islands” of limited and intermittent solar power and wind – and then requiring that they burn THEIR heat and food and fodder and cooking fuels by requiring they use biofools!!
That’s only one example of what I called a “witless” argument against some kind of straw man.
How many people here do not understand that in some poorly developed parts of the world wind and solar are less unreliable (though reliably “intermittent”) than deliveries of fossil fuels?
Don Easterbrook says:
August 22, 2013 at 10:27 am
Not a master in any sense, indeed, I am the slave of the numbers … in any case, the projected global peak population has been dropping for years. When I was a kid it was around 12 billion, then over the years it went down to 11 billion estimated, then 10. At present the peak is estimated to occur around 2060-2075 or so, and to be at around 9 billion.
My own research and estimates (using the first and second derivatives of the population as my variables) on this question give me an answer that’s about the same as that of the UN, 9 billion … which taken all together means it’s likely to be around 8.5 billion or so.
How will that affect energy needs? Well, if it’s 8.5 billion people in 2060, that’s only about a fifth more people than we have in the world now, and if it’s 9 billion in 2060, it’s a bit over a quarter more people … I’m sure you can do the math on that.
In either case, however, I plan to let the people of 2060 worry about their own energy needs.
All the best,
w.
Willis Eschenbach: I’m tired of people who are paralyzed to inaction,
Are there such people? I supported your thesis that developing more fossil fuels is a good idea, and said opposing large coal-fired plants in poor countries is “criminal”. What I see is a diversity of recommended actions, however, not paralysis.
In terms of making good use of the time that we have before fossil fuels run out or become prohibitively expensive for poor people, what do you recommend? In addition to what we have going on, I’d like to see increased federal funding for nuclear R&D. I don’t favor an approach that is either “all free market” or “all government”. Every successful large scale enterprise has been a combination, unless you think that the Panama Canal was an “all government” enterprise, or the Internet “all free market”.
richardscourtney says:
August 22, 2013 at 2:36 am
================
Sir, you speak/write true economics from my understanding. Thank you .
Not so sure about post modern times. There must be something wrong with modern education/academics.
I will now read the rest of the comments following yours.
richardscourtney:
Yes, I’m aware of the paradox, but I never said anything about conservation or decreased usage. Energy efficiency causes a surplus that can then an economic multiplier because it is available to do other things. Think of a situation where all the energy was expended heating homes. If you improve the efficiency of the heating system you now have that as surplus for economic activities that need energy that in turn create other actives that need energy and so on. Without those savings from technology, you stay stuck.
Matthew R Marler says:
August 22, 2013 at 11:09 am
Matt, always good to hear from you. I fear, however, that your analysis doesn’t go far enough when you say:
First, you are correct that installed windpower capacity is going through the roof in China, as is generation. Here’s a graph of the growth in actual Chinese wind power generation, expressed in MTOE:
Looks impressive, and it is. They’re avoiding burning more than six million tonnes of oil (MTOE) per year, that’s a lot of oil. So far so good … but as I mentioned, your analysis didn’t go far enough. Now here’s the same data on wind power, but this time including the total energy consumption of China …
I’m sure you can see the problem with your claim that they will run on wind and sunshine in forty years …
w.
Now, if you’d done that in the units I’d used, you’d have looked at your results and said “Dang, Willis’s actual calculated numbers from real data are a close match to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, looks like that bugger’s right.”
======================================
Assuming that your calculations are right, I agree. I doubt any of the numbers anyone uses except current world oil production and US/Canadian/EU/Japan energy usage are accurate to even plus/minus 15% so 9,677 and 11,000 are basically the same number. I’ll have to go think about why you say 80% and I say 200%. Presumably I’ll work it out. If not, I’ll email you or something.
The good news, AFAICS, there’s no chance of running out of fossil fuels in 40 years. Conventional oil, yes. I don’t think we’re at peak, but I don’t think at peak everybody on the planet will be getting 40% of their energy from conventional oil either. We can discuss that sometime, but read up on your Hubbert first. Old M King was a pretty bright guy and I’d love to have a beer with him. I suspect that you and he wouldn’t find much to disagree about if it weren’t for the inconvenience of his being dead and therefore unable to pick up the check.
Remember that even at peak, conceptually only about half the conventional oil is gone. Numbers for other energy sources are WAGS, but there’s probably twice as much heavy oil as conventional, and maybe as much coal as heavy oil. And a lot of natural gas. No one knows how much. There’s at least some methyl clathrate. And there’s always nuclear. And solar which really does seem to have the energy density to support any number of people that we can feed — after many decades of R&D and infrastructure buildout. The nearest time I can see the fossil fuels running out is 2100, and I expect they’ll last considerably longer. They may not be so cheap though. I think the ever so great grandkids will be able to handle the problems.
In any case, and I can’t emphasize this enough. Future energy usage is like Bob Dylan said “beyond our command”. It’s up to the leaders of China, India, and a bunch of smaller countries not the leaders of the G7. Given the G7s last decade, that may well be a good thing for humanity.
The times they are a’changin.
Matt, here’s another look at China …
Note that the 0.7% is all renewables except hydro, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal …
w.
The third world folk need inexpensive energy so they stop destroying their forests, DDT to kill the bugs that are killing them, and GM food stuffs so they can grow more food. The NGO’s of the western world hate all three of these things.
Willis Eschenbach: Matt, here’s another look at China …
I think I already wrote that China gets most of its power, and most of its incremental power, from fossil fuel, so that isn’t news. But in 50 years you projected that the fossil fuel sector will be 0%. In the mean time, solar and wind energy production in China doubles every 1 – 3 years. If they maintain 33% growth per year, in 50 years they’ll have 1.5 million times as much power from wind and solar as they have now. Well, nobody believes simple extrapolations like that, but you see the potential. I expect that in 50 years they’ll have more nuclear than wind and solar combined, but given their history of the last 150 years they’ll have two more revolutions, so who knows? In the mean time, solar and wind are decreasing in cost, whereas fossil fuels will increase in cost unless China curtails its fossil fuel consumption dramatically.