Update: I found this response by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, one of the main groups advocating greater attention to peak oil. It mostly rehashes the usual explanation of peak oil and doesn’t answer the specific arguments that Lynch raised. If anyone knows of a response that specifically addresses Lynch’s arguments, please point me towards it.

No, really. It might seem like the answer is very complicated, but at some level it’s simple: sunshine. That’s actually an almost complete answer.

“What about hydro electricity”, you might ask, “doesn’t that come from falling water?” Yes, it does, but, to paraphrase Newton “what comes down must have gone up.” And what lifted the water, so that it could fall through the generator? The sunshine, which evaporated the water, lifting it into the air. As we look at other sources of energy, we come to the same conclusion. Oil, natural gas and coal are organic matter millions of years old. The energy in that organic matter is stored sunshine, captured by algae via photosynthesis. Windmills are turned by gusts that happen when sunshine warms the earth, in turn warming the air above it and causing that air to rise, creating air currents. Burning wood or other organics is liberating sunshine that was stored much more recently than that in fossil fuels.

There is an exception to the rule. Nuclear reactions also contribute to our energy supply. Nuclear fission reactors use radioactive elements created in the hearts of stars billions of years ago. Geo-thermal energy uses the heat released by natural nuclear decay inside the Earth.

What can we say about these sources? Well, nuclear fission energy relies on radioactive isotopes. These are found in the Earth’s crust and mantle in small amounts. We can only extract them from a certain depth, because it’s too hot if we dig farther. There is a limited supply within the crust, and there are different estimates of how long that supply will last, as well as how much energy we can get out, but the supply is certainly limited.

Sunshine has a similar limit. Quite a bit of it falls on the earth, but capturing it efficiently is difficult, so we are only able to obtain a very small percentage of the energy that reaches our planet. Most of the sunshine powers other processes that are useful to us, such as plants and animals in the biosphere, our own agriculture, the wind and rain, melting snow in the spring, making objects visible, etc. We wouldn’t want to use most of the sunshine to create energy even if we could.

It’s important to remember these limitations as we talk about alternative energy. Nothing produces limitless energy, so our planning for the future and our actions for today need to take into account the limits that we’re up against.

On the surface, it seems so reasonable. Nuclear doesn’t burn anything, so it doesn’t emit carbon dioxide. It produces lots of energy for a very small amount of fuel. What more could we ask? Well, quite a bit, actually. Rex Weyler has an excellent article explaining the shortcomings of nuclear; it’s too expensive to be economic, it produces more carbon than any energy source except fossil fuels, plants spend so much time shut down that it’s not reliable and our best solution so far for dealing with the waste is to dump it into the oceans.

It’s time for the debate about climate change to move beyond the quest for the next technological saviour. It used to be that nuclear fusion was going to be the answer to all our energy problems. Fusion produces huge amounts of energy out of hydrogen and the waste product is helium, an inert gas. It sounds like the perfect energy source, and for the last fifty years it’s been promised as right around the corner. But now, with fifty years of research behind it, we’re in an energy crisis and fusion is nowhere to be found.

Granted, fusion is a difficult technology, and it’s reasonable to believe that development times for other technologies could be shorter. But the point here is that estimates of how long it will take for a technology to fulfill a goal are typically underestimated by those who develop the technology.

So next time someone promises you that nuclear, geothermal, biofuels, wind or tidal are going to solve our energy problems, look them straight in the eye and ask them how the nuclear fusion reactor is coming along.

One of these two has to be wrong, and thermodynamics has been spot on for about four billion years, while economics has a spotty history of less than two hundred. It’s a disagreement whose reconciliation becomes more expensive as time goes on.

A few days ago, I came across a very good article explaining this issue with specific reference to oil. It’s clear, short and well supported. I hope you’ll take a look.

Nuclear has it’s own problems. The one environmentalists point to most often is that it produces extremely toxic waste that must be stored in perpetuity. It’s hard to exaggerate how big a problem this is, largely because of the statistical truism that no matter how unlikely something is, it’s guaranteed to happen if you wait long enough. But there are more immediate problems with nuclear power as well, including cost, insurance, fuel supply and efficiency. There’s an excellent article by the Earth Policy Institute that discusses these issues and concludes that nuclear power is unlikely to be a major replacement for fossil fuels and that renewable sources are more likely to play that role.

The EPI article misses one major argument in favour of nuclear. Solar, wind and tidal energy all have natural limits on the amount of energy they can produce, because the sun only shines so strong, the wind only blows so hard and the tides only rise so high, nuclear energy generation is only limited by the supply of uranium. Renewable sources are extremely unlikely to be able to produce energy on our current scale.

Good estimates say that about 20% of our current energy consumption can be replaced with renewables. That means that we have a choice. We can either go with nuclear, taking the risks of accidents, the high prices, the spread of radioactive materials and the perpetual waste storage time bomb, or we can adopt conservation and reduce our energy requirements.

Today, we see the environmental effects of the automobile in an entirely different way. Greenhouse gases and smog from over 500 million cars are causing serious environmental problems. One of the lessons that we learn again and again about our technologies are that they have unexpected and unintended consequences when used at large scales (densities actually, as a friend recently pointed out).

This is one of my favourite vignettes when I give talks about social consequences of technology, and I’ve been wondering what the analogue problems are when it comes to green energy like solar and wind power. So it was with quite a bit of interest that I read this article about potential environmental consequences of offshore wind power. The article discusses a new paper showing that the wind turbines may affect currents, potentially bringing nutrient rich deep water to the surface.

The article reminds us of how rarely our effects on the world can be easily classified as good or bad, and the importance of carefully assessing both sides of our technology and, even then, remembering that there will always be consequences that we have not foreseen.

There are some very obvious exceptions to this rule. Clean water is not substitutable for basic uses such as drinking and watering crops. Food, oxygen and other necessities are also non-substitutable. Less obviously, the ozone layer, decomposition of wastes, soil renewal, aquifer recharge, bee pollination and a wide variety of what are called ecosystem goods and services are not substitutable, at least not on any appreciable scale.

The destruction of species, forests and wetlands are severely curtailing ecosystem services on a local and a global level. This is causing all kinds of problems like water shortages, skin cancers, respiratory ailments, droughts, crop loss and increased hurricane intensity.

Amidst all this bad news, there’s another good that is soon going to be up for substitution. Oil, depending on who you talk to, will need to be replaced by wind power, solar power, biofuel, nuclear energy, hydrogen, tarsands or oil shale. Unfortunately, all of these turn out to be highly imperfect substitutes for the same reason; they all need oil, whether it be for production, deployment, growth, manufacturing or processing, and they really can’t get by without it. This means that as the cost of sweet, light crude goes up, the cost of all of these alternative energy sources will be going up as well.

Why is oil needed for all of these things? It has three crucial properties: high energy density, high stability and high chemical tractability.

High energy density means that you don’t need a lot of oil to get a lot of energy. That’s why a car can drive from Waterloo to Toronto and back on less than a tank of gas. Hydrogen, on the other hand, takes up a lot of space. A hydrogen tank that will permit you to drive as far as a tank of gas won’t fit in your car. Solar, wind and biofuel energy share the same problem. You can get a lot of energy out of a small oil fired power plant, while an equivalent amount of energy from solar, plant or wind sources requires much greater land use. An equivalent problem is that the amount of material extracted from the ground from a conventional oil well is much smaller than the amount extracted from tarsands, which in turn is much smaller than the amount that needs to be extracted from oil shale to make a litre of oil. As we move away from oil, the proportion of our land that will be devoted to energy will become much larger.

High stability, the second property of oil, means that oil doesn’t easily blow up or otherwise become harmful to be around. Movies where car accidents turn into a fireball don’t match reality. Nuclear energy, on the other hand, is not very stable. Even without considering catastrophic failures like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, the shielding required to protect workers from the radiation generated by normal use is big and heavy enough that nuclear powered cars are not likely any time soon. Hydrogen suffers from a similar problem.

High chemical tractability means that oil is easy to turn into lots of other things, like paints, plastics and pesticides. This happens because oil is carbon based, and the only alternative energy source that has a similar property is biofuel.

For all of these reasons, it seems unlikely that any of the potential substitute energy sources will provide an adequate replacement for oil. So where does that leave us? We need to aggressively lowerg energy demand, and that means moving from a growth economy to a steady state economy. This is a big change, but when the alternative is an unmitigated failure of the growth economy, change looks better than catastrophe.

For an excellent paper on what a steady state economy means, take a look at this essay by former Wolrd Bank Senior Economist Herman Daly.

What I found most valuable about the page was this graph:

It makes the plateau in oil production of 2005 obvious. I’m interested to see what happened before 2002 though, as you can see a flat part of the graph just before the 2002 border.

Those least likely to be disturbed by this trend are organic farmers who use crop rotation, nitrogen fixing plants and manure rather than artificial substitutes for fertilizers. They will likely see their own production costs remain more stable than conventional farmers and as a result see the price gap between organic food and conventionally grown food reduced.

This might seem like cause for celebration, now everyone can eat organic! Unfortunately, the yields per acre of organic farming appear to be lower than the yields per acre for conventional farming (though this is still a matter of debate). It is unlikely that a worldwide transition to organic farming would produce enough food to feed the world’s population. Some estimates put the maximum number of people who could be fed by organic farming as low as one and a half billion, but three or four billion seems more realistic.

This issue bears attention because fertilizer prices increases aren’t a random economic phenomenon. The price is going up because reserves of natural gas, the main ingredient in the chemical process that creates artificial fertilizer, have peaked in Canada and production is now declining.

What this means is that availability of food is going to become a major issue, and we’d better start focusing on it now.