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332 comments on The Path from Petroleum Shortages to Electricity Shortages

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Engineer-Poet on August 13, 2008 - 10:00pm

I cannot help but note the single-dimensional nature of the analysis above.

Gail, you're correct to note the inter-relationships of the USA's energy systems. However, you seem to think that these will be unchanged by the various proposals she cites. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Gas-rig workers commute in petroleum-powered vehicles... today. Tomorrow they might commute in passenger vans running on CNG. The rigs themselves can be electrified; if we're going to run a pipeline to the site to take gas away, we can run a wire back along the same path.
You note that trains are powered by diesel, and that coal travels long distances by train. You then claim that irregularities in the supply of diesel fuel will affect the supply of coal, and thus coal-fired electricity. You do not reverse this analysis to note that the electrification of trains will eliminate the dependence of coal-fired electric systems on diesel fuel. (You also fail to note that low-speed diesel engines can be run on slurried coal.)
Coal mining equipment is largely electric, not diesel. The massive bucket-wheel shovels and longwall mining machines are all electric.
You note that large amounts of goods, including food, expend diesel fuel to arrive at store shelves. But what happens when transport moves from road to rail, or from diesel rail to electrified rail? That dependence shrinks and even vanishes, and diesel is freed to be used elsewhere.
Alternative sources of energy are increasing exponentially. Wind generation is increasing at more than 50% per year. What was 1% from wind in 2007 will be well over 2% by 2009, and probably 5% or more by 2011. This 5% by itself will be sufficient to power the electric rail and displace considerable natural gas. (I calculated some time ago that the power delivered to wheels from diesel in the USA was around 60 GW. Most of this goes to heavy trucks. Rail is about 3x as efficient as trucks, so if 2/3 of OTR freight moved to rail we'd need about 13 GW [1/3 of 40 GW] of electricity to move it. Average US electric generation from wind stands at over 4 GW already.)
Domestic US oil production is over 5.5 million bbl/day. US diesel fuel consumption is about 2.7 million bbl/day. If truck traffic can be reduced by 2/3, it's plain that we can run the remainder from domestic resources for quite some time.
It's absurd to talk about nuclear power being at serious risk from shortages of motor fuel. The amount of uranium needed to run a powerplant is so small, trucks powered by gasogenes using charcoal would be more than sufficient. Uranium enrichment is 100% electric, and gas centrifuges use 1/20 the energy of diffusion. The issue of uranium mining is open, but if any business could afford to convert all its vehicles to Zebra batteries, uranium mines could. At some price it will be feasible to recover uranium from seawater via ion exchange, and this process will not involve much in the way of trucks.

I've long seen people arguging that we cannot dig ourselves out of this situation, but their arguments are always full of self-contradictions and special pleading. I think the question of will we dig ourselves out is far more significant; if the Cape Wind project can be stalled by one pompous windbag and the US financial system can be undone by a single retiring senator promoting his next career, our ability to organize our technical abilities to meet this threat is the biggest unknown.

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Gail the Actuary on August 13, 2008 - 11:28pm

The major problem with this is where you get all of the capital from to accomplish this. If we lived in Saudi Arabia, maybe. In the United States, it won't happen.

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Engineer-Poet on August 14, 2008 - 1:46am

The USA still has a significant manufacturing base. Its products can be converted from consumption to investment. If a large fraction of e.g. the domestic auto industry was converted to making wind plants and heavy rail, that would do it.

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DaveMart on August 14, 2008 - 8:39am

Gail, your essential argument appears to be financial.
When many other of your arguments such as in a previous article of yours the contention that the grid was likely to progressively degrade were answered by several electrical engineers that although there were problems it should be possible to continue to supply power, the position you then took was that the financial system would collapse and so this would not be possible.
Presumably you have a similar outlook to other possibilities, such as moving more freight to rail.
It should be noted in this context that doubling the freight traffic does not entail a doubling of the rail network or anything like it, so the sums are fairly reasonable.

Indeed, the basis of your contention seems rather circular, as the finance system appears likely to collapse in your model largely due to increased energy costs, and nothing can be done about that due to the collapse of the financial system.

In the case of the US at least, the sums needed to alter the energy situation would be comparatively small against the total size of the economy - even coal with more transmission lines and more rail freight would essentially do most of the job.

So even if your basic thesis is correct, and the financial system collapses, why should that paralyse all the needed investment?

To take two examples of bankruptcy, the total collapse in the Weimer Republic did not prevent a vast program of rebuilding and re-armament just a few years later in Germany, nor did the collapse of the Ancien Regime in France prevent the huge outpouring of energy in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

So why should the US suffer the never-get-overs in the event of financial collapse?

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Gail the Actuary on August 14, 2008 - 10:53am

1. The increase in oil availability has fueled growth in the past. As we move toward the downside of the curve, there will be much more of a downward pull, instead of an upward pull.

2. Previous bankruptcies took place in very different environments. One can also find a lot of examples of societies that did not re-emerge after collapse.

3. Who would come to aid the US? How much aid could they really provide?

4. We have very long supply chains, and most all of them depend on electricity. Once they are broken, restarting with major electricity outages will be a problem.

5. This is an Associated Press article I ran across this morning, talking about the US's electricity problems, even apart from peak oil. Fixing these problems will take massive co-ordination among the various entities involved. There doesn't seem to be any way to make this work.

6. Geopolitical issues are likely to play a role also. I expect the US government will decline in influence or be replaced by more local governments.

7. I think that things are happening too fast for the various kinds of investment that you are proposing to be done in sufficient quantity to make a difference. Once the financial collapse comes, debt financing will not be available to either governments or others. Lack of imports will be a major impediment to investment as well.

The US does have resources, such as good farmland and above-average fossil fuel supplies. Long term, the US may be able to redevelop to some extent, but I expect that the redevelopment will look nothing like the current system. It may be that the US will break into smaller political units.

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DaveMart on August 14, 2008 - 11:40am

Point 1. above should surely read that fossil fuels have given rise to growth, rather than just focussing on oil, since a lot of growth took place before it's use.
At least in the US there is no imminent shortage of coal, and also at least immediately no shortage of natural gas.

On point 2 it should be noted that collapse has never happened in a society where so many are so far above subsistence, and so perhaps there are more possibilities to adapt.

On point 3, who would come to the US's aid - the rest of the world, given your basic thesis of energy shortages and perhaps food shortages will want American produce more than ever, so trade will still take place.

On 4 & 5, the same article that you quote says that many of the problems that the grid had in 2003 have been fixed.
A real shortage would focus minds, and I doubt that much NIMBYism would be tolerated, which is the largest factor in excess costs.

On 6 & 7 I don't think anyone is arguing that no disruptions will occur, or that transition to nuclear and renewables will be easy.
In my view however you are overstating the case by assessing it as more-or-less impossible, and particularly when much of the argument appears to be from the general to the particular, so that individual solutions to elements are dismissed because the whole system will allegedly collapse, and the whole system collapses because it's constituents do.

For perspective if we take the sky high estimates for nuclear power of $12bn GW installed, and guesstimate around the same for wind due to intermittency, then you might need around 20GW/year, say £240bn/yr plus money for extra infrastructure etc, so you might come out to around $350bn/yr - say up to 7% of the current GDP.
Of course, GDP would sink, but so would wage costs, and in the event of such a massive recession as you hypothesise so would raw materials costs, as, for instance, the US would hardly be producing 17 million vehicles a year.

I'd be curious to know whether you would have arrived at a more favourable prognosis for Weimar Germany - but after 40 years in spite of massive inflation and defeat in a major war they were still much more prosperous than they had been at that earlier date.

With it's huge mineral resources, massive agriculture and comparatively young population I can't get to the same point as you arrive at, where it is game over for the US.
Many areas in the rest of the world are far more doubtful.

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Gail the Actuary on August 14, 2008 - 6:03pm

I didn't say, "game over for the US". I said

The US does have resources, such as good farmland and above-average fossil fuel supplies. Long term, the US may be able to redevelop to some extent, but I expect that the redevelopment will look nothing like the current system. It may be that the US will break into smaller political units.

There are a lot of other places that aren't going to be doing well--Britain and Japan most likely are two of them. I didn't make a comparison as to who would be doing better/worse.

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DaveMart on August 14, 2008 - 6:43pm

Sorry if I have mis-stated your position.
The reason I used the term 'game over for the US' was that you appear to think that a Tainter-type progressive decline is unstoppable within the US at least, as that is where most of your argument is drawn from.

At least in the resource rich US this seems to me relatively unlikely, and to rely on the assumption that bad choices are fairly universally applied.
Of course this may be the case, but it seems to me far from certain.

To look at another area on which it may serve to demonstrate that rolling collapse may not be inevitable, by 2020 China plans to have production lines capable of producing 20 conventional nuclear power stations a year, aside from pebble bed reactors and coal, wind and solar.
If continued then these 20 a year are around the number China would need to provide all it's power, other contributions aside.
Although shortage of oil might be a great obstacle in doing this, it is difficult to see why it would not be possible - already much personal transport is by very energy efficient rail and EV bikes, and residual needs for oil where vital could surely be produced from coal.

With perhaps more political delay there seems no reason why something similar, perhaps with more wind power, would not be possible in the US.

Since most of the difficulty and cost in building power and transmission lines in the States lies in regulatory approval, raising times for instance from around 4 years for a nuclear build to around 10 and putting up costs hugely, it is perhaps improbable that nothing at all will be done when times get tough to reduce this.

If resources are available, even financial disaster may be engineered around - the re-financing in the early days of the Reich being the most prominent example.

In short, the gravity of the crisis in itself would seem likely to preclude business as usual, and to blow away many of the roadblocks to progress.

Although the new cost level of renewables and nuclear will likely be higher than fossil fuels, they are likely to drop over time, as are batteries etc, and so it would perhaps be just as reasonable to hypothesise a progressive recovery from a much lower level than present US standards as an on-going, ever-worsening deterioration.

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Gail the Actuary on August 15, 2008 - 10:32am

Some of what you say may be right.

One reason I think that outcomes will generally not be very good is that there will be a lot of things besides peak oil going on at the same time. It seems like peak minerals (or at least peak extractable minerals, with the resources we have on hand) will be taking place, making a drop in the cost of batteries or anything else made from metals unlikely. There will also be climate change, of some form or other. Water levels are already a problem, and are likely to get worse. These will be a problem in some parts of the world.

Time will tell what really happens.

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DaveMart on August 16, 2008 - 8:10pm

If we have enough energy most minerals can be got in sufficient quantity - problems only really start if you are very short of energy.
So although I quite agree severe financial and liquid fuel constraints will hit, it seems to me that the spread of outcomes will be much wider than might be inferred from a position which seems to perhaps rather discount those possible solutions on the grounds that systemic collapse will not allow them.

Should some areas come through in relatively good shape, then their influence seems likely to spread.

To move from a general argument to a particular one, perhaps it is worth looking at the position of an individual country, France.
If one assumes that some sort of relatively effective response happens there to the financial challenges,and that ethnic conflict is contained relatively successfully, then it is rather difficult to see why a technological civilisation should not maintain itself there, with high standards of living.

They can probably do this using about the same number of reactors as at present, with gradual capacity increases as they come to be replaced with new reactors.
They burn a lot of gas, but then again it has been cheap, and dearer gas would simply mean that they would need to accelerate their program of installing air source heat pumps - they are putting in around 50,000 a year at the moment.

More freight would need shifting to rail, and the existing program of installing electric car charging points in cities would likely be expanded, but the model that Nissan/Renault have of building electric cars and selling them whilst leasing the batteries seems robust.

Biofuels sufficient to provide for agricultural machinery and other essential uses would be well within the capabilities of French agriculture.

Concerns about uranium shortage would seem to be misplaced, as solutions ranging from thorium burning reactors to building breeder reactors or obtaining uranium from seawater are numerous.

If France then is relatively well placed to overcome the difficulties ahead, that provides a core around which Europe can be re-powered.

This is not to dismiss well founded concerns, many of which I share with you.
In this context it is interesting to note the severe longer-term problems of Europe, due to it's unfavourable demography,
as is extensively detailed in articles on this site:
http://demographymatters.blogspot.com/

The same demographic issues perhaps put the present more aggressive stance of Russia into perspective, as over the next 20 years it seems from the ELM that the present leverage provided by oil will evaporate, and the bind that demography will have got them in by this time seem to point to a much weaker Russia.

The outcome you hypothesise seems likely in some places, but my own feeling is that outcomes will be patchy, with relatively successful outcomes in some areas.

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Gail the Actuary on August 17, 2008 - 3:05pm

It seems like more local almost equates to patchy.

We have gotten used to having inputs from around the world. Once these are cut way back, I am wondering whether this will put an upper limit on how developed even the better-developed areas can be. This week we read about platinum possibly being in short supply. With electricity shortages, I expect the supply of a lot of metals to be cut back greatly--copper and aluminum are two in particular.

A lot of things will change. It is hard to understand the interdependencies.

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DaveMart on August 17, 2008 - 4:27pm

You've put your finger on what I find difficult or unproductive in some of the analysis here.
Of course, systemic failure may doom any response - I don't know.

However, if that is the working assumption then for a start the analysis tends to jump around from point to point of difficulty, by-passing often fairly simple remedies to particular issues.

I am also not a big fan of power down solutions - systemic collapse would certainly seem probable together with mass deaths under those scenarios in my view.

Considering that heating and air conditioning could be done with a fraction of today's energy inputs, and so could goods transportation and personal mobility, together with feeding the population with a much healthier diet with less, better quality meat, then the obstacles seem primarily institutional.

Focussing largely on the interdependencies rather than biting off bits that are chewable may make life too hard! :-)

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SamuM on August 14, 2008 - 5:25am

Engineer-Poet,

you make many a good point and in order to argue against, you also had to simplify.

So, let's try to make it more complex, shall we.

All risks have probabilities. If we say things can happen, we do not necessarily mean with 100% likelihood. Agreed?
Risks can have primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. effects. Some instant. Some delayed. Often most with negative feedbacks. Some may have positive feedbacks. Agreed?
A highly hard coupled system (i.e. not able to reconfigure in real time on the fly) with a high level complexity (many parts, distributed responsibility) and high pressure on utility (utilization with near max capacity, with decreasing safety margins) is more likely prone to catastrophic failure. Agreed?

Now, again, to restate - this doesn't mean that one is automatically doomer, believes in collapse or thinks the world will end tomorrow.

This is just a way to think about big risks, with perhaps even small probabilities, but potentially very big and hard to predict consequences.

With that away, let's consider a real world scenario of chained events.

Fast growing economy (US and worldwide) meaning high level of oil and electricity use. Utilization rates are high for all systems.
A statistically colder and longer winter, increasing heating and electricity use of all fossil fuels
Tight margins and very little spare capacity in oil and natural gas supply vs demand.
Already relatively high prices, but for the past relatively steady prices (i.e. not driving a lot of demand destruction, like price spikes do)
A fairly big, unexpected and unmitigated drop in availability of oil for refineries, transport and power generation (back up fuel).
Increased pressure on natural gas demand, leading to rationing and shortages.
People start compensating with electricity to heat their homes and buildings as availability of fossils for heating is limited.
Lack of natural gas and back up supply leads to local electricity rationing.
System utilization rates go near 100%, local power outages start to occur.
A failure in a grid causes a cascade that spreads fairly wide.
An attempt to raise production back online is crimped by remaining electricity load waiting for power to come back online. Power goes up only to be overloaded by demand on the network instantly and going down again.
Continued oil and natural gas shortage diminished back up fuel storage for power generation
Increased competition among fuel transporters to haul coal and oil to all demanding parties, esp. power generators.
Lack of back up fuel causes smaller local power generators not be able to come back online
Lack of proper emergency communication policy, downing of several mass media channels makes it harder to coordinate electricity load from residential buildings in order to get some power plants back online, when priority is given to commercial operators and those who pay most.
A lot of people act in uncoordinated manner and try to solve the situation ad hoc on the fly, as standard emergency and other procedures do not immediately bring desired result
Things continue chaotic for a while, until load is removed, backup fuel is deliver or the shortage of main fuels eases.

Now, above is just a one example of chained and causally reinforcing effects.

What is the probability for that? I don't know, but I'd guess it to be fairly low. Of course, there are geographical, national and fuel mix based differences between various places where that kind of situation might happen.

What I can say, that people who plan these are aware of these, but often they don't really know what to do with them.

Everybody's relying on things like SPR and other backup fuel reserves, but the logistics and coordination hasn't really been tested, in the case of multiple downside risks materializing roughly at the same time.

So, do I personally lose sleep over the above type situation? No.

Do I think that they will never happen? No, they might - even if the likelihood is probably very low.

Do I think the the consequences might be bad? Short term and for some actors, possibly yes - very hard to predict for systemic and esp. mid-to-long term effects. Is the situation recoverable: highly likely.

What I do know that such systemic risks cannot be cured or removed overnight.

Even if I had all the capital, knowledge and manpower in the world, it would indeed take a fairly long time to remove the major systemic risks from above scenario. It would mean a lot of rebuilding, redesigning and adding new capacity - not to mention reducing demand. Some of the risk factors (like peaking of oil, crunch on gas, etc) might not be removable at all. From an economic planning point of view, removing all risks is most of the times not worth it.

So, I think it is good to think about these situations, as I currently believe that the likelihood of such risks currently grows as a function of time as we continue doing BAU.

This does not of course mean that you necessarily think differently about this or that I'm some how arguing against you. This is merely a clumsy way to find some middle ground here.

our ability to organize our technical abilities to meet this threat is the biggest unknown.

Very well said and I think this applies to a lot of other systemic risks as well. Our ability is currently perhaps the biggest unknown :)

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Engineer-Poet on August 14, 2008 - 9:08am

What is the probability for that? I don't know, but I'd guess it to be fairly low.

I'd say approximately zero, because steps 9 and 11 would be forestalled by load-shedding if the grid managers are at all competent. That's what was done in 2003 (SE Michigan was brought back on line in phases), and I doubt the lessons could be forgotten anytime soon.

If we're looking for scenarios for collapse, we need to consider things either beyond our control or (like Cape Wind) where opposed interests block the necessary actions.

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SamuM on August 14, 2008 - 2:46pm

Might I remind you that's exactly what the operator's in Italy and Finland thought after the US east coast black outs "pfftt... incompetent, we know our stuff". Then they had their own blackouts, in Finland with a much much more up-to-date infrastructure, mind you.

BTW, the gist of those scenarios above are not my invention. They are by people in the operative side of the business.

I claim not to know the future, but I'm always weary of anybody who says the probability is 0% or 100% for any complex system with a human error built-in :)

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Engineer-Poet on August 14, 2008 - 11:21pm

I'm just telling you that a grid operator ready to use rolling blackouts to manage demand isn't likely to be caught flat-footed by a demand surge. A sudden plant or line outage, sure, but not excess demand. And the sort of staged return of power already used in 2003 is proof against re-collapse (which you'll note did not occur).

There are ways to manage this even further. If major loads all had control units which sensed voltage and phase and cut back if either suddenly dropped (easily done within a couple cycles), even a line outage such as the one which triggered the 2003 blackout would have failed to create a cascade. If we had substantial demand from (PH)EVs with V2G capability, it would take an even bigger upset to cause the system to fail.

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BC_EE on August 15, 2008 - 4:59pm

Those protections are in place on the major lines and generators (phase, voltage, power angle, etc). The problem is they are not integrally coordinated across the vastness of the interconnected systems. After all, the grid is an analog system and failure propagations can be difficult to isolate with the amount of power flow involved.

There are regional coordinating committees to handle these interconnection issues, but that is no guarantee the optimal systems and methods are in place.

Here's a decent analogy: If the grid were thought of as a mesh of cables, (which it is electrically, but I'm using mechanical here because it is more visible), as load and generation is increased it is like putting more tension on the cables. More load and generation, more tension until the cables near their snapping point. One fails, or has to disconnect and the rest of cables can start to cascade fail.

The protective switching and control equipment attempts to prevent these cascading failures, but the higher the voltage (hence power transfer) the faster it has to respond. >230 kV requires 3 cycles or less from detection to trip and that can be challenging to accomplish in complex networks - but it gets done every day.

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Engineer-Poet on August 15, 2008 - 9:30pm

as load and generation is increased it is like putting more tension on the cables. More load and generation, more tension until the cables near their snapping point.

And as they get near their snapping point, controls can drop some of the weights. The weights themselves can detect sudden accelerations downward as neighboring cables go, and reduce their pull to what the mesh can sustain.

the higher the voltage (hence power transfer) the faster it has to respond.

This makes no sense whatsoever.

The loads on the grid include a large fraction of electric motors, mostly induction and synchronous motors. One of the great features of motors is that their load drops as the grid frequency drops; if you get a sudden slip in phase, all the motors will pull less power for a fraction, and reduce the immediate grid load. This gives an energy buffer whose duration is independent of the size of the grid connection.

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Baz on August 14, 2008 - 6:17am

Don't forget that trains can run on coal, and have been for a very long time.

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neal on August 14, 2008 - 6:30am

Trains can also run on wood and other local fuels.

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Gail the Actuary on August 14, 2008 - 11:03am

Trains run on coal only if you make some modifications to make them do so, and set up new supply chains for this to happen. All of this requires capital, and is not going to happen over night.

My point is that it makes sense to look at what is doable, in the fairly long term. Making trains run on coal or wood is probably more do-able long term than making them run on electricity, because coal and wood have shorter supply chains.

I think we need to be thinking about this with a coherent view about what the future is likely to be like. Would we really be able to make coal or wood supply lines for trains work? For how long? Would the environmental damage be worth it?

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332 comments on The Path from Petroleum Shortages to Electricity Shortages

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