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139 comments on 10 Fundamental Principles of Net Energy Analysis
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139 comments on 10 Fundamental Principles of Net Energy Analysis
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That's a serious and fundamental misstatement of the long run challenge. Right up there next to "let them eat cake". Damn, where did I leave my magic wand?
We don't get "similar attributes" at declining EROI. We certainly do not get lower carbon intensity - short of photosynthesizing hydrogen or uranium. Like I said, magic wand. What we will get is rapidly increasing environmental degradation across all resource bases as we try to combat declining EROI. And the more we do, the worse it will be.
The short, medium and long run challenge is planning the path down. While there is still some ancient sunlight. What's the paradigm? 1/8 the energy we have now in maybe 20 years? What would be the EROI at that point? Crunch out what kind of economy and environment we can have.
cfm in Gray, ME
I think this is too pessimistic. Plug-ins and full EV combined with wind energy and nukes is a great solution and substitute for most transportation needs.
I like this chart to understand the difficulty of scaling energy sources to meet current need. Wind and Nukes make up a tiny % of total energy use (see position on left compared to USA total energy on far right).
And this does not even deal with energy quality issues. Such as the difficulty in replacing the energy density of oil in the modern transportation network.
Well its a nice looking graph but it doesn't show us anything about how effective the usage of energy is/ Consider for a moment if Nuclear turned out to be 5x as efficient in a role providing energy for transport for example -the nuclear bubble could easily cover for a drop in imported oil if this where the case...
Ones thing is for certain, we will look back on our present time as being one of vast inneficiency and since productivity is related to the amount of something you get out for a given input won't our future be one of much higher productivity? Come to think of it isn't increasing productivty one of the core definitions of economic progress?
Nick.
The core definition of progress, according the current economic orthodoxy, is an increase in total productivity. If increases in efficiency lag behind increases in the cost of energy, then the correct label for the situation will be economic contraction. Of course the current economic orthodoxy is functionally insane. The core principle of intelligent economic activity should be ecological modesty. If improved efficiency helps us to live an ecologically modest lifestyle then let's go for it. But if we actually have to give up wealth in order to live within the ecological budget of the earth, then only a zombie moron would say, "Give me my 3000 square foot home, my plasma screen televsion, and my personal automobile or give me death."
Which, of course, totally misses the point. Fulfilling your myopic "transportation needs" does less than nothing to solve the much larger multi-faceted problem of the whole world going down the backside, so to speak.
Then again, millions of equally clueless sapiens sitting in their shiny new "plug-ins" with no food or water will quickly solve the overpopulation problem, so maybe that's not such a bad thing after all. Long run or otherwise.
Cheers,
Jerry
"I think this is too pessimistic. Plug-ins and full EV combined with wind energy and nukes is a great solution and substitute for most transportation needs."
Dryki, I think waterpump found your magic wand. BLING!lol
Let's not be so quick to judge waterpump's lack of pessimism.
http://s.wsj.net/article/SB121746229279198963.html?mod=most_emailed_da…
It's not lack of, it's misplaced pessimism.
I personally believe that all these "new tech's" and devices are real and doable. I have personally seen some knock you on your ass amazing devices that if developed would have a profound effect on the area of their focus, and yet for too many reasons to list here will never see the light of day. One of the biggest reasons was TPTB couldn't/wouldn/t give it their ble$$ing (not that they had a clue as to the viability).
I just understand that the constraints we face are much bigger than anything we can invent.
The issue is a socioeconomic, cultural problem that is not even the 800 lb chimp in the room. IT'S THE ROOM ITSELF!
Could you please be more precise and specific? Why wouldn't a plug-in hybrid, full EV combined with a wind boom and more nukes (and perhaps some more coal use if needed) work?
Well, actually, they will work. The sooner we slam into the wall the better because there will be bigger pieces left for us bottom-feeders. Not everything will be gray-gooed. I'm starting to understand that a managed, steady decline is likely to be far more devastating - and all-consuming - than a fast crash.
Just for yucks, I reviewed the charts and assumptions in "Limits to Growth: the 30 year update" last night. Yuck. A pain in all the diodes down my left side. I had to put the book down fast.
Any assumption that we can fix or replace any portion of our infrastructure, where that assumption depends on infinite supply of something - fish, petroleum, wood pellets, phosphate, clean water, human ingenuity - they are all wrong. Everything is limited, even the human ingenuity (Tainter). The quality of all resources is declining - another double whammy.
To paraphrase Reagan, Obama and Souperman2, "tear down the room".
cfm in Gray, ME
How do you define "work"? Do you mean, is it possible to build one electric car and power it from wind/nuke/coal?
Or do you mean, replace all the energy provided by 20 million barrels per day of oil (and 20 tcf natural gas), and all the services provided by 200 million+ cars/trucks, ships, aircraft, on a time line of 20 years? Because that is the real challenge.
There are technology issues and rate of growth issues.
From Energy use in the US
Wind and Solar are too small to even display on this graph. The nuke industry is overrepresented here because no new nukes have been built in a very long time. Coal may already have peaked as an energy source (depends a bit on the Illinois basin) Energy Watch Group Coal Report Summery
I agree about misplaced pessimism. For energy we already have the technologies (nuclear, wind and hydro turbines, etc) to produce a high enough energy return to maintain a form of civilisation. This civilisation is unlikely to involve drive-thru KFCs, but then we managed without them for a couple of thousand years before, so I guess we could cope. In terms of total TWs of energy, we cannot perform an instant switch over to the same level of energy use we have at present, though we don't actually need to because: a) fossil fuels won't disappear tomorrow, and b) the greater use of energy efficiency and conservation. However, this time factor is important as the forced reduction in energy use IN SOME NATIONS due to lower available imports (plus lower net energy) will happen too quickly to adjust to without significant pain. But we also have additional ecological overshoot problems - limits to other resources (fresh water, minerals, cropland), ecosystem collapses due to biodiversity loss, and a climate that is rapidly warming to an extent last experienced on Earth 3 million years ago. This is all exacerbated by a human population growing by a quarter of million souls each day (a new Dallas + Boston each week; or a new Glasgow + Edinburgh + Aberdeen each week [I live in Scotland!]). Yet even each of these might be overcome, for example if we instituted a strict one-child policy, urban permaculture, electric rail & cycle priority, waste materials recycling, rainforest protection, fishing controls, land and wealth redistributions, etc, etc. But these won't happen, and that is the reason I'm pessimistic: these are inter-connected problems with a new level of complexity that require a higher level of critical thinking, but our brains have just not quite evolved far enough to consistently deal with this. It could happen, but the probabilities are that things will get tough for most and nasty for some (and that is without any Black/Grey Swans of nuclear weapon launches, disease pandemics, etc).
Misplaced pessimism again, GreenE. Doomers shouldn't project their own shortages of brain power onto the entire population.
You do realize that certain algae will photosynthesize hydrogen?
I came in contact with a hydrogen producing cyanobacteria last semester at Uppsala University. We had a series of experiments in the labs at the department of photochemistry and Molecular science. During our experiments we never surpassed 1 % efficiency sunlight to hydrogen and our professor Peter Lindblad told us that the bacteria isn’t going to be a viable energy source for many years to come. We also did some experiments with artificial photosynthesis but that technology is very immature (it doesn’t produce any hydrogen) but has a great potential.
You do realise, that the full hydrogen cycle - using any method is several times less energy efficient than a full chemical battery cycle (ref: Ulf Bossel)?
You do realise that replacing the gasoline infrastructure with a hydrogen infrastructure is more expensive than replacing it with an electricity infrastructure (ref: Ulf Bossel, Wilson & Burgh)?
You do realise that it took 50+ years to build the gasoline infrastructure, oil peak is probably 0-7 years away and transition to any new infrastructure will take c. 15-25 years minimum under a crash program (ref: Hirsch & Bezdek)?
You do realise that paper technologies just tested in the lab are not the same as mass-manufacture, mass-installed, mass-scaled and mass-sused infrastructure?
One could go on, but it should be obvious to anybody that there are high uncertainties on the way from here to algae hydrogen paradise.
It may happen, but it's unlikely to be within three years, unlikely to save us from a net liquid fuels decline in the near future and unlikely to 'save' us on it's own due to scaling issues.
And that again does not guarantee that the world will succumb into chaos (a reminder for those inclined to do dichotomic thinking and incapable of probabilistic reasoning).