In the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley has an interesting article about the the claims that we will run out of “X”, except that human ingenuity always seems to grasp this and then “Y” comes along.
The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out
Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again
How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption.
“We are using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably produce, and unless we change course, that number will grow fast—by 2030, even two planets will not be enough,” says Jim Leape, director general of the World Wide Fund for Nature International (formerly the World Wildlife Fund).
But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way.
Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.
Full story here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156?mg=reno64-wsj
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Retired Engineer says:
April 27, 2014 at 12:40 pm
“Thorium may help, but “if it were that easy, someone would have done it by now” (Rule #3)”
Retired Engineer: here is a TED talk on thorium well worth 10 minutes of your time. http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_sorensen_thorium_an_alternative_nuclear_fuel
And the proponet site
http://energyfromthorium.com/
For some history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
After World War II, uranium-based nuclear reactors were built to produce electricity. These were similar to the reactor designs that produced material for nuclear weapons. During that period, the U.S. government also built an experimental molten salt reactor using U-233 fuel, the fissile material created by bombarding thorium with neutrons. The reactor, built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, operated critical for roughly 15000 hours from 1965 to 1969. In 1968, Nobel laureate and discoverer of Plutonium, Glenn Seaborg, publicly announced to the Atomic Energy Commission, of which he was chairman, that the thorium-based reactor had been successfully developed and tested:
So far the molten-salt reactor experiment has operated successfully and has earned a reputation for reliability. I think that some day the world will have commercial power reactors of both the uranium-plutonium and the thorium-uranium fuel cycle type.[7]
In 1973, however, the U.S. government shut down all thorium-related nuclear research—which had by then been ongoing for approximately twenty years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The reasons were that uranium breeder reactors were more efficient, the research was proven, and byproducts could be used to make nuclear weapons. In Moir and Teller’s opinion, the decision to stop development of thorium reactors, at least as a backup option, “was an excusable mistake.”
In reply to this comment:
“Oil is likely not fossil but mineral. And there is a lot of it but lower down.”
WebHubTelescope says:
Where do they find these people?
Let me educate you, Webster me boi:
Prof Freeman Dyson says that abiotic oil is a possibility. Argue with him if you like.
So the real question is: where do they fin people like WebHubTelescope? Is he an SkS refugee? Or is he independently ignorant?
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Retired Engineer says the government is:
2) making a mess of things, and
3) wasting a lot of money in the process.
(which takes us back to your item #1)…
I worry less about energy and climate “tipping” points and more about
the debt tipping point. At some point, folks will stop buying our debt, if
we try to print our way out … (think Germany in the late 20′s)
We know where that went.
Exactly. We are printing $85 Billion a MONTH! That tipping point cannot be too far off:
I can see severe problems developing as a result of schizophrenic energy policy. Energy is another area where will likely muddle through in the US. Increasing costs will drive more lifestyle changes leading to reduced energy consumption. The world will undergo a phenomenal demographic shift in the 21st century that will likely radically transform the nature of the 22nd.
WebHubTelescope? Where did you go? I was waiting for you to set us all straight. It’s been ages since my last epiphany. You came out swinging (kinda), and saying everybody here is wrong and I am on the edge of my seat to hear your reasoning.
If we had an unlimited supply of available energy to perform work, then, as you say we could just expend work to recycle and concentrate materials. However, this is not a realistic stance. Energy costs money and the increasing irreversibilities one encounters at increasing dilution of some resource have the practical effect of eventually making recycling too expensive to pursue.
Anyone asserting that desalination water can be used for grain production (Nullius) does not know what they are talking about. Anyone believing in hydrocarbon abiogenesis is ignorant of all sedimentary geology.
Please do figure out an economical way to bring methane to Earth from Titan. Or from the Sun, where there is more. Good grief people. Good grief. How can your correct rejection of CAGW result in such ridiculously blind equivalents? SAD.
Environmental activists are fond of saying we need 2.5 earths to sustain the current population. Closer to truth is we need 2.5 more population and we still won’t deplete earth’s resources. What is running out? Water? Desalinate seawater and it is physically impossible for humans to consume all the oceans. Food? Cultivate all the arable land in the world and it can feed 50 billion people. Even more if we use GM crops and mechanized farming. Energy? Arizona alone receives more solar energy than the output of all the power plants in the world. Land? If Alaska had the population density of New York City, we can put all 7 billion people in Alaska and it will still have vacant land larger than Texas, and the rest of the world will be uninhabited.
Maybe activists are running out of sensibility. BTW ecologists say more CO2 and warmer climate increase plant growth (including wheat) and conserve water.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-makes-growing-seasons-longer1/?&WT.mc_id=SA_ENGYSUS_20140424
That was a great presentation. Worrisome consequences if your view turns out to be correct.
Kevin Kilty,
Yes, yes, there is no such thing as unlimited anything. Eventually the Universe will die, all the energy exhausted. But for now and in the immediate future there is practically unlimited energy available for us to exploit in the form of coal and nuclear energy. All we need is the political will to get the government out of the way and let the markets work. Regulate yes, obstruct no.
@Rud Istvan:
Here’s how you do it: http://seawatergreenhouse.com/ presently in use for vegetables, saladings, and the like. Usable for grains if you wished. (though at present it is cheaper to use open land in the USA…) The “trick” is not to use a high tech desalinization plant, but a more simple application of well thought out natural forces in getting fresh water from sea water. Cheaper materials and more intelligent innovative design.
One presumes you think that abiotic oil can not exist. Hmmm…. explain please the hydrocarbons on Titan, and not just the methane, the complex ones as well. Must be those Titanic Dinosaurs?
There is no doubt what so ever that some of the hydrocarbons on earth are abiogenic. The real question is “What percent?”. Is it 80%? Or 10%? Or 0.000002%? Nobody knows. Yes, a lot of current oil is found in clearly biogenic settings. Yet other oil comes from places not so marked. See the Russian finds… using the abiogenic thesis.
@Jimbo:
Thanks for the links! Makes me feel like maybe it’s worth it 😉
BTW, I’m rather fond of this one:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
A thumbnail sketch of how to get unlimited energy for functionally all time, and at costs near present values. It’s practical. Will we ever do it? Probably not. I expect other technologies to keep prices undercut (in particular methane, thorium, and maybe the eCat if it really works… and since we now have high school kids doing cold fusion / LENR demonstrations it looks like LENR is pretty well real.)
Oh, BTW, Thorium has already been used in production reactors. The USA did it long ago. It can be used in our present crop of reactors if desired (don’t need new fancy designs, though they might be better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Station
It is my speculation that the Thorium to U233 path was shut down as we figured it was a shortcut to SNM (“boom stuff”) that didn’t need fancy enrichment. (Don’t waste time telling me you can’t make a bomb from it. India did, and the USA made a partly successful bomb with it. Even a “hot” and “lousy” bomb of “only” a couple of kilotons can ruin your whole day…)
Oh, and the Canadian CANDU eats up Thorium like chocolate. Not a problem fueling them with your choice of U, Th, Pu, “whatever” fissionable / fertile you have around. Likely also why the USA leaned on Canada to try to get them to go LWR instead … and why India used more CANDU type… and why India has bombs… ( i.e. the USA paranoids were right, but it didn’t stop anyone anyway).
FWIW, I’ve been following energy economics fairly intensely since about 1972 or so (Arab Oil Embargo stands out, along with other things). Also the original “Computer model driven Junk Science” of Doom And Gloom In Our Times “Limits to Growth” by Meadows et. al. Brought to you by the same folks who push the Global Warming agenda, and for the same reasons. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now (but they still want control of the economies of the world…)
(Actually had an Econ class focused on that book, and the things wrong with it. Prof. Gustafson, IIRC. A great guy with thick glasses and a keen insight into things… I owe him a lot. For 5 weeks he got us all fired up about how The End Is Near!… then handed out the bibliography of rebuttals… we were all chastened. Knew just how to get “buyers remorse” going 😉
At any rate, the bottom line is simple:
There are many powerful folks who have been pushing the “Running Out” idea as a way to scare mass populations into compliance for a very long time. They are now pushing CO2 also. It is all a matter of FUD. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Just a way to scare the children into running the direction they want… The Club Of Rome is pushing it, among others. They pushed “Meadows et. al.” too. (See attributions inside “Limits” covers. They don’t hide it.)
Well, enough for now. I’m a bit busy at the moment…
@Stephen Fisher Kopitz & Kevin Kilty:
Please notice that the places listed as reducing oil use are all involved in economic decline.
Please elaborate on the rate of increase of oil use in CHINA, then tell me folks are not willing to buy oil… Also explain why if we have run out of “affordable oil” the USA is producing more each year and is on track to become a net exporter.
Oil fuels economic growth. Where you have growth, you have more oil consumption. Where you have increasing oil consumption, you have economic growth. (See the Dakotas for a stellar example.)
Oh, and I see the “Energy Return On Energy Invested” spiral of doom canard has been floated. It’s a bogus argument. Along the California highway 101, you can see oil wells pumping away using electric motors. We will be pumping oil at a net energy loss for decades (centuries?) after the EROEI has gone negative. Maybe it will be solar from Barstow, or maybe nuclear power from Palo Verde. Doesn’t really matter. What matters it that we want the FORM of energy: high density petroleum fuels. Spending some energy to get that FORM of energy is JUST FINE with us. Please look at the EROEI of an Oil Refinery as a simple example. Less comes out than goes in. Yet we do it all the time… Because it’s a good thing to do.
Oh, and as a preemptive statement on “oil for plastics” and why we ought to save petroleum to make “petro” chemicals: They originally were made from coal. Just oil was cheaper. Now we mostly use natural gas. There’s a couple of companies use garbage or plants. Darned near any carbon source will do (even CO2 from the air – best removed by highly efficient scrubbers called “trees” and “grasses”… don’t need to invent new ones.) There is absolutely no need to “save” petroleum to make “petro” chemicals. Though it is a good example of the FORM of a product being more important than the EROEI and why EROEI is a bogus argument.
EMSmith, your posts above on desalination and hydrocarbon abiogenesis say all that needs to be said. Good that you are busy on something else, God Forbid.
Get back on those two of your assertions after you have some facts. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. You degrade the quality of discourse on this blog, which was already being challenged.
For the most part, I think this article is spot-on. I do have a minor quibble: some of the points made focus more on quantity than on quality.
E.g. the notion that we can grow more food with fertilizers and perticides. Technically it’s 100% right. But when you take into account human health, it’s not necessarily the better option.
Fertilizers and pesticides usually lead to a lower quality of food.
Had you bothered to watch Kopits presentation you might not have bothered to write your first three paragraphs as Kopits explained your observations well and in greater detail.
With regard to your paragraph four, I agree that EROEI is a bogus argument for certain forms of limited portable energy, for instance batteries, but for large scale use like transportation fuels one might look at the concept carefully. Perhaps it is still bogus, but there is more to the production of fuels than the electric motors running pump-jacks.
When oil costs $500 a barrel, we will “need” a lot less of it. I guarantee it.
Henry Clark says:
April 27, 2014 at 10:34 am
The cost of desalination of seawater has already dropped to such as $0.49 per cubic meter
========
that is quite an accomplishment. watering our boat we often paid $5-$10 / tonne (cubic meter) for water. A cubic meter of water doesn’t sound like much, until you try and carry it.
Rud Istvan says:
April 27, 2014 at 8:29 pm
Get back on those two of your assertions after you have some facts.
==========
http://www.edie.net/news/3/Black–Veatch-Designed-Desalination-Plant-Wins-Global-Water-Distinction/11402/
This has resulted in an expected first-year selling price of $0.49 per cubic meter – the lowest of any comparable project in the world.
limestone + water + iron + heat + pressure ==> methane + higher hydrocarbons
plate tectonics in action. scientists didn’t believe in plate tectonics either, for a long time.
not knowing about plate tectonics when the theories about oil and gas production were formed, it should come as no surprise that our theories didn’t consider it. continental drift was considered to be nonsense.
Everyone knows where oil and gas come from – it is written in the text books, so it must be true.
http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03/rocks-into-gas.html
But new research coauthored by Dudley Herschbach, Baird research professor of science and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in chemistry, questions that thinking. Published last fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study describes how investigators combined three abiotic (non-living) materials — water (H2O), limestone (CaCO3), and iron oxide (FeO) — and crushed the mixture together with the same intense pressure found deep below the earth’s surface. This process created methane (CH4), the major component of natural gas. Herschbach says this offers evidence, although as yet far from proof, for a maverick theory that much of the world’s supply of so-called fossil fuels may not derive from the decay of dinosaur-era organisms after all.
The fundamental step in producing methane that most people are not aware of is that steam and iron combine to produce hydrogen gas. Most people think you need to crack the water molecule using electricity in massive quantities to produce hydrogen. The same massive amount of energy released when hydrogen burns in oxygen.
But the process is much simpler and less expensive so long as you have a ready supply of heat and iron, which is plentiful in the earth’s core. Instead of cracking the water molecule, the iron reduces the water (think oxidation-reduction reaction) by binding with the oxygen, releasing hydrogen in the process. This hydrogen is then free to bind with the carbon from fossilized carbon dioxide in the limestone, to produce hydrocarbons.
Nuclear power from fission of uranium is a non-starter. The Truth About Nuclear Power series, of which 13 installments are now published and 17 more yet to be, shows that (one) modern nuclear power plants are uneconomic to operate compared to natural gas and wind energy, (two) they produce preposterous pricing if they are the sole power source for a grid, (three) they cost far too much to construct, (four) use far more water for cooling, 4 times as much than better alternatives, (five) nuclear fuel makes them difficult to shut down and requires very costly safeguards, (six) they are built to huge scale of 1,000 to 1,600 MWe or greater to attempt to reduce costs via economy of scale (but still cannot compete), (seven) an all-nuclear grid will lose customers to self-generation, (eight) smaller and modular nuclear plants have no benefits due to the reverse effects of economy of scale, (nine) large-scale plants have very long construction schedules even without lawsuits that delay construction, (ten) nuclear plants do not reach 50 or 60 years life because they require costly upgrades after 20 to 30 years that do not always perform as designed, (eleven) France has 85 percent of its electricity produced via nuclear power but it is subsidized, is still almost twice as expensive as prices in the US, and is only viable due to exporting power at night rather than throttling back the plants during low demand, (twelve) nuclear plants cannot provide cheap power on small islands, and (thirteen), US nuclear power plants are heavily subsidized yet still cannot compete. Links to all 13 articles are at:
see http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-truth-about-nuclear-power-part-13.html
“Anyone asserting that desalination water can be used for grain production (Nullius) does not know what they are talking about.”
Anyone making assertions like this without giving their reasoning will certainly give that impression.
Of course you can grow grain with desalinated water. It’s highly unlikely you would, because it’s more expensive than other sources of water, so it’s generally far cheaper to import the grain from somewhere else where it’s plentiful. But you can do it, for a small increase in price.
Some people confuse the fact that some things are never done (for economic reasons) for the belief that they can’t be done. We already have the hydroponics technology to affordably produce enough food for a person on about 36 square metres, which can be stacked into a 3x3x4 metre volume the size of a small room. We’ve been able to do it for decades. We choose not to, because it’s more expensive and we don’t have to.
“Anyone believing in hydrocarbon abiogenesis is ignorant of all sedimentary geology.”
Probably. I’m very, very sceptical of the idea myself. There are chemical reactions that can do such things, but I’d doubt you’d get more than traces – there’s no obvious entropy gradient to drive it. But I’ve no idea what goes on down there and I’m fairly sure nobody else does either. I don’t believe it, but I wouldn’t boldly assert that it was impossible either.
“Please do figure out an economical way to bring methane to Earth from Titan. Or from the Sun, where there is more.”
There’s no methane on the sun. Methane decomposes around 600-1600 K and breaks down into plasma at solar temperatures. You’re probably thinking of hydrogen.
There’s no need, of course. Nuclear fission can provide all the energy we need for the foreseeable future, and there are a whole pile of Fischer-Tropsch-like reactions for making liquid fuels from any convenient source of carbon – including CO2. Or with nuclear electricity driving it, we can use various batteries, or more easily cyclable metal fuel systems, or heaven knows what we’ll invent in a hundred years time. It’s like someone of 1900 trying to guess what technologies we will be using in 2000.
Mankind has one appetite that can never be satisfied: our thirst for knowledge. It never lost us the Eden of the past, and it is certain to bring us the Eden of the future.
Mining far away plants is a gross net loss of energy.
Burning stuff for energy – wood – oil – uranium (well not exactly burning there – but still) is always a gross net loss of energy. It is the second law. The real question – can you make a profit?
France has 85 percent of its electricity produced via nuclear power but it is subsidized, is still almost twice as expensive as prices in the US, and is only viable due to exporting power at night rather than throttling back the plants during low demand
Well – you got this fixed investment. We in the biz call it “plant”. If the plant goes all out continuously it minimizes the cost of “plant” fixed investment. In the biz it is called base load supply. Get some.
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WebHubTelescope says:
April 27, 2014 at 1:18 pm
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Webby, the thread-bomber extraordinaire! You won’t last long here unless you behave…