Canadian mennonite article series: #3: limits and energy

Canadian mennonite article series: #3: limits and energy - A tale of oil

Oil is essentially 200 million years of stored ancient solar energy, approximately half of which we have extracted and used in one hundred years. We are, therefore, using oil (and natural gas) roughly two million times faster than they formed. The fossil fuels which we flagrantly use are a one-time gift, not to be repeated until some half a billion years into the future.

And what are we doing with this billion-year gift? Sitting around in traffic jams, flying around the world complaining about jet-lag, and manufacturing (and throwing out) untold mountains of plastic junk. Won't the future be proud of us!

This article will look at limits to available energy; I'll focus on oil, however many of the issues raised here will apply equally to natural gas and coal. There are some one to three trillion barrels of oil remaining, therefore limits to oil may not seem very pressing, however there are four things to know about oil and fossil fuels:

We went after the easiest energy first.

Humans aren't stupid. The energy that was easiest to obtain (large reservoirs, not too deep) we accessed first. Therefore, by definition, the energy remaining to us and to the future is more difficult, more dangerous, or more expensive to obtain. Admittedly technological progress has made it viable to extract the more difficult energy, however ...

It takes energy to get energy.

We need to explore for oil, then drill, then pump it, refine it, build refineries, build pipelines etc. All of this has to happen before the rest of the world has one Joule of energy available to do those things we need energy to do. As we go after more difficult sources of energy (polar oil, deep-ocean oil, ethanol) an ever-larger fraction of the energy coming out of the ground is required to get this energy. For example:

Texas gusher, 100 years ago, perhaps 1% of the oil energy was needed to get the oil.

Modern polar oil/deep water oil/ethanol, perhaps 10% to 70% of the energy is needed.

Canadian tar sands, estimates range from 30% to 75% of energy is needed.

Whether oil is economically viable to extract from a reservoir depends on some economist's assumptions about future costs and prices. The critical question is whether it is energetically favourable to extract the oil: once it takes more than the energy in a barrel of oil to explore, drill, pump, and refine a barrel of oil, then that barrel of oil will stay in the ground. It won't matter whether reserves are one billion or 100 trillion barrels, if the reserves are energetically unfavourable, they are useless to you.

Despite improvements in technology, the fraction of energy retained is getting worse (decreasing), however even if we lose some fraction of the oil to its extraction and processing, admittedly a lot remains, however ...

There is a difference between energy flow and energy reserves.

We (the world) currently use 85 million barrels of oil (and ethanol, biodiesel etc) per day. Although virtually all newspaper articles about oil talk about reserves (how many billion barrels here and there), it matters very little to the world economy whether there are one or five trillion barrels of oil in the ground, what matters terribly is energy flow, whether 85 million barrels can be pumped today, 85 million barrels tomorrow, 90 million barrels every day in a few years, 100 million barrels every day a few years later etc.

That a lot of oil remains in the ground is not contested; however whether we can maintain the rate of oil extraction is much, much less clear. There are many indications that the rate of oil flow will peak some time in the relatively near future.

Superficially, it might appear that the energy rate is not a problem, after all, it is frequently quoted that every 20 minutes enough solar energy falls on the planet to provide all of the world's energy needs for a year! Thus the rate at which solar energy arrives is 26,000 times more than what we need! However ...

Energy is found in low-density and high-density forms

A barrel of oil contains a huge amount of energy, as much as what a single person could do in about 14,000 hours of physical labour. A single oil well is therefore a prodigious source of energy, making it worthwhile to build a pipeline, install pumps etc. An oil reservoir represents high-density energy.

On the other hand solar, wind, and ethanol (from agricultural crops) are all very dilute, geographically widespread, low-density forms of energy. The energy is distributed: infrastructure needs to be built to concentrate, collect, and move many tiny bits of energy around. This does not mean that solar and wind are a bad idea, not at all; however it is easy to mislead by quoting planet-wide rates.

Our reliance on oil and natural gas is clear: they are high-density, easily transported, energetically efficient, and have been available at high rates of flow. However old oil reservoirs are producing at lower rates and less new oil is being discovered. Clever new approaches to drilling allow for high flow rates in older reservoirs, but the onset of depletion can be much more sudden: the production of oil in England's North Sea plummeted in only six years, with similar experience in Mexico and Yemen. Even venerable fields in Saudi Arabia are producing increasing amounts of water mixed in with the oil, signalling a limit to the remaining production.

And yet we assume the indefinite availability of oil. In our industrialized world, energy is needed for everything we do: mining raw resources, producing fertilizer for food, keeping Internet servers running, transportating goods. Indeed, the amount of oil we are currently consuming is shocking:

We have, as a society, deluded ourselves into thinking it is “reasonable” to use thirty-six times as much oil as the average Indian and six times as much energy as the world average. What moral exception did God grant to North Americans regarding energy profligacy?

Energy is so precious, saving us from incalculable amounts of physical labour, so we should be using it carefully. Energy should be far more expensive, given its usefulness, however our society/economy would obviously grind to a halt. Our infrastructure, our work and living arrangements, our economy and globalization are all premised on cheap energy. Given this dependance, what will we do as energy limits are encountered? Will we allow countries to be invaded for their resources, will we allow the poor to be priced out of the energy market and have their societies fall, will we allow the poor to starve and to use their food as our energy?

Significant energy conservation and challenges to energy status-quo need to become a much higher priority. Changing your light bulbs – convenient conservation – will not suffice to address these questions. We will need real, substantial change.