If it could be said that if there ever was a cultural constant in Western Civilization, it could be the idea of technological progress. Certainly, progress more generally, whether it's political or scientific, is the more fundamental mythos of the West, but technology has come to the fore in many ways as we collectively consider the replacement of energy sources by which to power the civilization in the future. The rub comes at the source of energy and it's place in the technological advances which have been made over the past several centuries. It is the first time we have ever faced the problem of replacing a concentrated source, like oil or coal, with one or several which are not concentrated and the most promising of said sources produce only electricity.
The technological challenge for scientists and engineers now in replacing oil and coal is to make up for what nature had already accomplished in concentrating the energy for us. This is fundamentally a problem of thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are perhaps the biggest bummer physics has to offer as it constitutes nothing less than the ultimate heat death of the universe at some distant date. The problems humanity faces now, though much smaller in scale, are related. The first law states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The second law, called entropy, states that whenever energy changes form, from say chemical to electrical, some amount of the total energy is lost in the transformation through heat. It's why you have to repair things, like cars and shoes, and to reshingle the house. The energy leaving the system (your shoe) means that it is able to do less work, and more work from without is required to put it to rights again by fixing it.
Nature, over millions of years, did that for us in the case of fossil fuels and what was left was a highly concentrated energy source. In the case of oil, the remainder of the entropic process was a liquid hydrocarbon. That it is liquid is very crucial as that enables easier transport and to have a more finely tuned applications that occur in a car's engine. So far, the only replacement fuel even to make it to market, with bad results, is ethanol. The reasons for the bad results are many, but primarily it is due to the energy needed to gather and distill the source material (corn, grass, sugar cane) is so great that it nearly exceeds that which is produced from distillation and leaves us with little to no net energy gain.
The technology fix to this problem then has to climb the wall of millions of years of distillation in the ground in a matter of years. And make it economical. And scale it up to 85 million barrels a day over the course of oils decline plus 2% per year growth, perhaps only in a matter of a few decades. All to keep cars running. If this does not work in a meaningful way, we still have other options. We can gradually move to electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids so that Americans and the world can own cars and not feel much disruption in style of life. To date, all-electric and hybrid cars are not cost competitive until the price of oil reaches the roughly 80-90 dollar range and above, at which point the economy starts to falter and makes a recession likely.
If we decide we can live without cars, then we could still go to electric rail in and between cities which has the advantage of being more fuel efficient than cars. The problem, in the U.S. especially, is that the rail system has atrophied to the point that we have virtually no passenger rail service anywhere in America with the capacity to replace even a fraction of automobile travel. So an enormous investment would need to be made into electric rail immediately to have something usable over the next two decades as our energy supply tightens.
The viable options economically for alternative sources of energy really only produce electricity and perhaps heat in the case of geothermal energy. This is very important and we should be building the infrastructure to accommodate this new means of power generation. Ultimately, the trick may be in running our economies and societies entirely on electricity. What that would look like is hard to say. The implications are tremendous but not wholly undesirable. Much can be done with electricity and it's hard to imagine life without it.
Probably, this problem of oil depletion can be dealt with in a humane way and still enable humanity a prosperous future. If it weren't for the specter of global warming and rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. If we had the freedom to burn all the fossil fuels we are able to without permanent damage to the climate and our ability to live in it, then I'd say oil depletion is surmountable. But it is not an isolated problem. It is a central factor to many other problems that have to be negotiated concurrently. The thermodynamic challenges to replacing fossil fuels will guide our decisions over the coming decades about what is possible and what should be given up as impossible or not worth the trouble. Two issues that this subject leads into is climate change and ecological overshoot, which is what makes these problems so vexing. So these will be the next features in the "Mother" series of posts. Ciao.
No comments:
Post a Comment