Peak Oil: Preparing the Mind.

In my last posting, I intended to be modestly upbeat on the subject of oil-depletion. My message is that we should not simply throw-up our hands, and accept a sacrificial outcome as a forgone conclusion. Indeed, some perception of self-sacrifice is necessary, but that is not a draconian overnight switch which when thrown, puts us back to the stone-age. There is time left, but we must begin to act immediately, in order to avoid the worst case inference. It is both sad and telling - shameful even - that it has been clear for a good three decades that our oil provision is a finite resource. We have even seen examples of sky-rocketing oil prices, but these came about as a result of political and artificial restrictions on supply and monopoly control. Yet, while money was being made, the facts of it were not acted upon. Arguably they were swept under the carpet, and even now, there remain deniers of Peak Oil, and as the Christmas fanfare seems to blare ever earlier, there appears to be no shortage of consumer goods, or urges that we should swap our cash for them. In truth the oil bonanza is still at full rein.
As I noted in my previous article, we are on a kind of gravy-train, which if it is not accelerating, more passengers are trying to climb onto its back, since all the seats are taken - by the West. However, China and India want what they perceive we have, and who can blame them. In its stringent effort to sell the culture of 'more', advertising has not been slow to portray essentially the same (but with some cultural adjustments) plastic picture of 'wealth' that is the flavour of our daily consumption from the media. The fact, however, is that we need to begin applying the brakes steadily and firmly, rather than crashing them on at some later point of anarchy, when our fossil reserves are depleted to the point that attempting to implement alternative strategies is no longer possible. You do need energy to provide new energy. I am sure that 'the markets' will resist this as long as cash is flowing into pockets, and that will make the jolt rougher when it comes.
In any event, the oil-shift will be an uneven slow-down. It is unlikely to come over days or even a few years, and perhaps will take a few decades. Resources will become more expensive, once it is no longer possible to artificially restrain the costs of oil (as a basic manufacturing feedstock and as a fuel), and then the markets and the shops will have to take-up the slack. As fiscal tensions urge, there is a real danger that the markets may panic, and that could have very serious consequences. I remember the petrol rationing in September 2000. I had been working in Switzerland and returned to the U.K. in the midst of it - I remember thinking that society really does walk along a fine line close to the edge of instability, and it wouldn't take too much to ease it over into anarchy. So, panic is to be avoided, on all levels, and maintaining some essential baseline of supply is mandatory to realising that.
So, as a corollary to my last posting, some clear strategy will be necessary, and we should be able to look to our elected government to provide it. It needs to be done quickly at that. I remain convinced that we can be O.K., but not by continuing as we are. Cutting energy use is a priori, in any sustainable scenario, and probably can be achieved through a combined strategy of efficiency, technology and a degree of frugality. But let's not just give up, and turn ostrich, ignoring the catastrophic consequences of continuing to squander the irreplaceable resource of oil or meekly accepting them as an inevitable fait accomplis.

Peak Oil for Sure... but no Need for Panic.

There has been much written on the matter of Peak Oil, including by me in this blog. Peak oil is not that the world is running out of oil per se, but represents a maximum in the production of cheap oil, upon which the industrialised world has been built. The industrial revolution began its life on wood, and garnered momentum in earnest fired by coal. As the decades of the 20th century passed, the availability of cheap oil usurped the underpinning position of coal, and hence as the world production peak looms (friends of mine in the oil industry think it is already here), our accustomed way of life is under threat. Worst case protagonists foresee a "Die-Off", in which the current 6.5 billion world population falls below one billion. That is a simple statistic, and put in real human terms, it is probably unthinkable and certainly unimaginable. True, that huge number of us has only grown upon the cornucopia of cheap oil and gas - the latter being used to make cheap chemical fertilisers upon which we grow 99% of the world's food. Without it, starvation and war seems inevitable.
Die-off could happen, if we simply carried on consuming hydrocarbons (oil and gas) at present rates, until we hit a brick wall, and overnight there was effectively none left. It is more likely that the change will be of a more gradual kind, and things (food included) will become increasingly expensive, thus sifting lifestyles over decades not days. That does not mean that the circumstance will be pleasant, but we should survive. On the news this morning was a sound-bite about the U.K. being Europe's major debtor. If there is an economic recession - which seems possible, if raw-materials and energy become increasingly expensive - people may well lose their jobs, and if they are heavily in debt, they will be in some difficulties. Nonetheless, that is no reason to think that we will experience an immediate social disintegration of "Mad Max" proportions. In any event, the "jolt" of the oil-powered gravy-train we have all been on pulling-up suddenly can be made softer by applying the brakes steadily rather than slamming them on.
Without question, now is the time to rethink our fuel consumption, acceptable levels of transportation, city planning - even if we are best placed to do without cities in the formal sense that we are used to - means for energy efficiency, and energy generation. In my opinion smaller "pods" of up to say 20,000 people, supplied by local farms and provided for in terms of energy using micro-generation: hydro, wind, CHP systems and so on, might be the most practical way to live. A basic grid could be powered using renewables - according to the Oxford University Environmental Change Institute, 20% of our electricity, used nationally, could be produced from "sea-power" (wave and tidal stream), which is the same as is currently made from nuclear power, and so this option should be thoroughly investigated. It seems possible that a nuclear power station might be used on say a county level to run a basic grid, to be tapped into as necessary, but many communities could be exempt from it, running under their own steam, as it were!
Transportation remains a huge problem, consuming around a quarter of all energy used in the U.K. As I have demonstrated, bio-fuels and hydrogen cannot sensibly meet this massive demand. Electric hybrid vehicles could offer an option for providing transport to run on much less fuel (perhaps 80% less, but only if 'battery technology' improves and can be installed sufficiently), but more localised "pod" communities could cut down fuel use by 90% in any case, so there is room to manoeuvre around this issue.
How much time do we have? That is the crux of the matter. As noted, there are oil-experts (people in the oil industry who should know their subject) who think that the peak is with us already. That is, however, not the official stance of the industry. Estimates vary, but 3o years away is as clear to a consensus as I can find. There is of course, the vexed question of exactly how much oil is there in the ground? Conspiracy theorists suggest there is far less than e.g. Saudi claim, and Shell got itself into a lot of trouble a couple of years back, for overstating the volume of their reserves. The mere presence of even an elephant field somewhere (that is oil industry vernacular for a very big field) says nothing about the quality of the oil or the geology through which it must be extracted. I have noted previously that the more fractured is the surrounding rock strata, the less readily will a fluid permeate it. There is evidence too that modern "enhanced" extraction methods have damaged the physical integrity of some fields, and so getting the rest of the oil out may prove more difficult than originally estimated.
I think that the best dipstick for Peak Oil is how production in the existing fields is faring given the unprecedented high price of oil. While the price of West Texas Intermediate oil was above $70 a barrel for much of the first half of 2006, global production was down by over 100,000 barrels a day compared to the previous year. Much of the increase in oil production seen between 2003 and 2005 was due to the OPEC (Middle East, and mainly Saudi), and now there is little or no excess capacity to bring on-stream. There have been many successful new oil extraction projects in the past few years, and more planned for the next 5 years, but they cannot compensate for the decline in the world's many large fields. North Sea production has declined too, from 6.3 million barrels a day in 2001 to 4.5 million barrels daily this year. Mexican oil production is also down by about 100,000 barrels a day in 2006, compared with last year. Worst of all, the mega-giant fields in Ghawar (Saudi) and Burgan (Kuwait) are experiencing severe production difficulties which limits the ability of these countries to increase production.
All the evidence is that Peak Oil is with us (or we have just passed the zenith of production), and so we need to expect and prepare for the inevitable consequences, but not fear for our lives. Since we know all these things, any failure to act will be a fault of greed, since there are many with much to gain from maintaining the status quo for as long as the markets can bear it. Then the brakes will come-on with a slam, and there will be casualties!

Nuclear Fusion Remains a Distant Expensive Dream.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is due to be constructed in Cadarache, France, rather than in Japan, the other contender location. The project is not cheap since it is expected to run-up a bill of 10 billion Euros ($12.1 billion) over its 30 year lifetime, and even then, if all goes well, there will be no electricity produced from it. It is an experimental reactor (as its name states) and is intended to iron-out the practicalities of nuclear fusion, before any commercial exploitation is sought for the technology. Put another way, ITER is expected to take 10 years to build, run for another 20 years, and if all goes well, a more advanced (still research) machine will then be constructed. After another 30 years, if all still runs smoothly, the first commercial fusion-based electricity "might" come on stream. (60 years in all, and even then it is still "might").
Among the partners in the project are the E.U., France, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Russia and the U.S. In the case of the latter contributor, there has been some internal friction over the funding (1/11 th of the total, or just over £1 billion), because there is in effect competition for the funds with existing U.S. fusion science. This is "big science" in anyone's book, and ITER is the most expensive project after the International Space Station. I have explained in outline the essential principles underlying "nuclear fusion" in an early posting ("Feasible Fusion Power - I doubt it", which I wrote last December). In effect, two atomic nuclei (cores of atoms - in German the word for nucleus is "Kern", as in kernel) both carrying a positive charge must be made to collide with sufficient force to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between the charges, and get them close enough together so they "fuse", releasing a lot of energy in the process. Most of that energy is taken-up by neutrons, which are accelerated ("super-fast"), and then the trick will be to extract the neutrons into a heat exchanger made of some suitable material (no-one knows what, as yet), so and to ultimately generate steam to drive electric-turbines, rather as fission-based nuclear power stations do (and indeed, coal or gas-fired power plants).
The physics of handling such highly energetic neutrons remains another challenge to be met, and although nuclear fusion is hailed as the ultimate "green" power source (just like the Sun!), it isn't since the neutrons will activate the nuclei of the various materials used to construct the reactor itself, which will hence require disposal as radioactive waste. Agreed, these materials will be so intensely radioactive that they will not require disposal over hundreds of thousands of years, but handling such "hot" stuff will need robots not people, and any routine maintenance of the system will also need to be done by robots (another challenge, probably, since developments in robotics may be required?).
Extremely high temperatures are required to achieve fusion, the lowest being around 45 million degrees C, which is enough to bring a deuterium and a tritium nucleus close enough to fuse. To make two deuterium nuclei fuse requires around ten times that at 400 million degrees C. Under such conditions, any matter present exists in the form of a plasma, which is confined in a magnetic bottle arrangement, where the charged bits of atoms and electrons are held in the lines of force of a suitably engineered magnetic field. However, there are crucial difficulties to be overcome in achieving such "confinement", and still, no self-sustaining fusion reaction has so far been demonstrated - i.e. where the plasma can be confined for long enough to reach the "break-even" point, where as much energy is generated by the plasma as is used to produce it.
In view of so many uncertainties, the fact that even according to the best-outcome scenario there will not be any likelihood of a suitable commercial fusion device for 60 years, and the fantastic costs (probably another $100 billion to bring electricity on stream from it - even if it does work, of which there is no guarantee), it is more worthwhile to turn the huge resources involved to more immediate, and better demonstrated, technologies.
Sure, we must break our oil-dependency, but nuclear fusion is not going to do that for us. There must be more emphasis placed upon deriving a realistic plan for renewables (and to what extent they are indeed feasible: see my previous three postings on the subject of "bio-fuels"), and more immediate nuclear technologies (e.g. liquid fluoride thorium reactors, and other uranium-based nuclear programmes). I have commented before that if we were to use the "known" reserves of uranium for nuclear fission, it would probably be used up in about 50 years. However, there are alternative "fast-breeder" programmes possible, which could in principle eke that out for hundreds of years, just so long as we are happy with dealing with the attendant plutonium fuel this inevitably incurs.
Ultimately, small communities ("pods" I have called them), with their energy-needs met by electricity, and which require 90% less transportation fuel, may be our means for sustainable living. At the same time, all means to achieve a more efficient use of whatever energy we do end up with ultimately, should be explored. However, all means for the production of that electricity must be investigated thoroughly too, and there are so many technologies ahead of "fusion" to do that, certainly given the budget set aside for the latter. We are going to run out of fossil-fuel well ahead of any putative nuclear-fusion powered nirvana, and so must act in swift accordance with that inescapable reality.

Biofuels - a Comparison of Practicality.

In order to break the dependency of the West on imported oil, principally from the Middle East, alternative and indigenous sources particularly of fuel are urgently being sought. For example, in the U.K., according to the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) figures for 2003, 67.4 million tonnes of petroleum were used in that year in total, of which the lion's share, 54 million tonnes was used for transportation. Hydrogen is very frequently spoken of as a possible replacement for gasoline, but the case is far less simple than a straightforward substitution of one for another. Oil is a primary fuel, and can be dug out of the ground, along with gas and coal. Hydrogen on the other hand, must be made - using some primary source - as indeed electricity must, and hence both are "energy carriers" rather than fuels. Hydrogen is a problematic material in many ways. It has a very low boiling point and is a very "light" material. Hence, to achieve a workable fuel/tank weight ratio (at least 6%), it must be liquefied, rather than simply compressed, and this requires considerable energy - probably half the energy overall that will be extracted from the hydrogen itself, given the low well-to-tank efficiency in its production (i.e. most routes to hydrogen manufacture are fairly inefficient compared to the 88% efficiency incurred in extracting petroleum from oil-wells or gas from gas-deposits). The situation can be improved by storing the gas in zeolites (see recent posting), but these also need to be kept cold, or the gas is rapidly released, thus eliminating any real advantage of this technology. Hydrogen also has the habit of rendering metals brittle, and hence e.g. steel tanks and pipes used in a putative hydrogen-delivery infrastructure dangerous and leaky!
Most of the world's hydrogen is manufactured from natural gas (methane) by reforming. I have described this before, but it involves reacting methane with steam at high temperatures, when the oxygen from the water extracts the carbon atom from a methane molecule, leaving behind free hydrogen. The resulting carbon monoxide can go on and remove an oxygen atom from another water molecule, thus releasing yet more hydrogen. Most of the hydrogen is used to make ammonia by combining it with nitrogen in the Haber process, for manufacture of fertilizers, and so overall most of the world's food production depends on natural gas, supplies of which in the U.K. and the U.S. are diminishing, and food-production too will depend increasingly on imports of gas.
Therefore, making hydrogen may be worthwhile on a number of counts. Biohydrogen can be made from fermenting sugar, which in an ironic cycle of logic, requires chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas) to grow it. I concluded in the previous two postings that the amount of sugar needed to supply enough hydrogen to replace the 54 million tonnes of oil used to run transport, would vastly exceed the area of arable land in the U.K., even if the implicitly huge hydrogen infrastructure could be implemented.
However, another thought occurred to me. Hydrogen is not the only product of the sugar fermentation process required to generate it, since huge quantities of butyric acid and acetic acid must be produced simultaneously. I now estimate exactly how much of these materials are indeed produced and whether they might be themselves used as a fuel, rather than requiring wholesale disposal, and being wasted.

Burning one mole of butyric acid produces 521.87 kilocalories = 2181.42 kilojoules (kJ) of heat. Similarly, one mole of acetic acid would provide 873.70 kJ of heat.

We have calculated that to make enough H2 to substitute for the 54 million tonnes of oil (equivalent, since it is refined into other fuel fractions) requires the fermentation of 9.94 x 10*8 tonnes of sugar (C6H12O6).

Each tonne ferments as 0.75 tonnes x 58% x 88/180 = 0.213 tonnes of butyric acid; and 0.25 tonnes x 58% x (2 x 60)/180 = 0.097 tonnes of acetic acid. (88 and 60 are the molecular weights of butyric and acetic acids respectively).

Hence the process produces: 0.213 x 9.94 x 10*8 = 2.12 x 10*8 tonnes of butyric acid and
0.097 x 9.94 x 10*8 = 9.64 x 10*7 tonnes of acetic acid. The energy produced by burning these materials may be estimated as follows:

Butyric Acid: (10*6/88) x 2181.42 kJ = 24.79 Gigajoules (GJ), which is equivalent to:
2.12 x 10*8 x (24.79/42) = 125.1 x 10*6 tonnes oil (equivalent).

Acetic Acid: (10*6/60) x 873.70 kJ = 14.56 GJ, which is equivalent to:
9.64 x 10*7 x (14.56/42) = 33.4 million tonnes of oil.

So, out of our 9.94 x 10*8 tonnes of C6H12O6, we get the equivalent of 125.1 million tonnes (butyric acid) + 33.4 million tonnes (acetic acid) + 54 million tonnes (H2) = 212.5 million tonnes of oil, in total.

Hence, we actually need 9.94 x 10*8 x (54/212.5) = 2.53 x 10*8 tonnes C6H12O6 to provide 54 million tonnes oil equivalent of combined fuels. Grown on 2.53 x 10*8/16.53 = 15,281,000 hectares = 153,000 km*2 from sugar cane, or 132,000 km*2 from sugar beet. However, the fermentation vessels would still need to be filled with just over 30 cubic kilometers (km*3) of water, which is 20% of the entire U.K. freshwater capacity, which is already under pressure of supply for drinking, washing and for commerce. Fixing the leaky pipes would stem much of this shortfall, and so perhaps an additional demand could be met if the delivery infrastructure were shored-up!

This figure may be compared with 125,000 km*2 required to grow enough sugar to produce the 76.4 million tonnes of ethanol necessary to stand-in for 54 million tonnes of oil. So, bioethanol scores best in terms of requiring somewhat less land, although growing this amount would still use twice the available arable land area of the U.K. - so no more food production, and we can still only meet half the demand!! However, the amount of water required to run the process is only 2.4 km*3 which is "possible".

As a matter of interest, I note that in an early posting "Biofuels - how practical are they" I quoted that a yield of 2 tonnes of biodiesel/hectare could be obtained, and so 54 x 10*6/2 = 27 x 10*6 ha = 270,000 km*2 of land would be required to meet that fuel requirement (i.e. about twice as bad as for the other potential fuels produced by fermentation).

Hence, I conclude that all these schemes are unworkable on the full scale, without cutting the demand to be met in the first place. To meet a thus reduced scale, bioethanol seems to be the best bet. Hydrogen has all kinds of problems, and using the vile fermentation by-products of butyric acid (essence of sweat) and acetic (raw vinegar) acid would not only be extremely unpleasant (imagine how the world would smell!) but would not get past any health and safety regulations. The latter process is also highly demanding in terms of its water requirements, far more so than ethanol production. It seems that comparatively small quantities of biodiesel might be produced as a precious chemical feedstock, rather than as a fuel, to substitute for some of the (67.4 - 54) = 13.4 million tonnes of petroleum that is imported for use in industry.

Bioethanol - The Math.

In my last posting, I worked out how much land and water would be required to grow the sugar crop and ferment from it sufficient hydrogen to replace the U.K. current use of oil-based fuels for transportation. I concluded that the option is a complete non-starter, without an extreme curtailing of transportation use, per se. I now present a similar calculation for ethanol production from sugar which though "better" than hydrogen, still requires using more than twice the amount of arable land there is in the U.K., and hence bioethanol production on this scale would overrun our means for food production.
I shall make a direct comparison between gasoline and ethanol, assuming they are both intended to be burned in internal combustion engines. The efficiency of ethanol in terms of "tank to wheel" might be improved using fuel cells, but this is still firmly in the experimental stage. Currently, the U.K. uses 54 million tonnes of oil (equivalent), which provides:

54 x 10*6 x 42 x 10*9 = 2.268 x 10*18 Joules of energy (J).

Ethanol may be considered as a partially combusted form of fuel (since it contains oxygen, with oil doesn't, being entirely hydrocarbon), and so it delivers less energy when burnt. Specifically, burning one mole of ethanol (46 grams) releases 326.68 kilocalories of energy, and so one tonne of ethanol would provide (10*6/46) x 326.68 x 4.18 = 2.967 x 10*7 kJ = 29.67 Gigajoules (GJ).
This may be compared directly with the figure of 42 GJ quoted for burning one tonne of oil equivalent. Hence we see immediately that ethanol packs around 30% less of a punch than gasoline does, or put another way, a tank full of ethanol will take the car 30% less miles than an equivalent tank filled with gasoline.

We need, therefore, 2.268 x 10*18/29.67 x 10*9 = 76.4 million tonnes of ethanol, which might be produced by fermenting sugar, according to the process:

C6H12O6 --> 2C2H6O (ethanol) + 2CO2.

The process is supposed to be CO2 neutral because the same amount of CO2 produced in the fermentation and ultimate combustion steps will be absorbed by next year's sugar crop (in essence, although in practice the situation is not that good). Assuming that the process is 100% efficient, we can expect to get (2 x 46)/180 - that is the ratio of the molecular weights of ethanol to sugar - or 0.511 tonnes of ethanol per tonne of sugar.

Sugar cane yields a crop of 87 tonnes per hectare (ha), that produces 19% of its weight of sugar, which is 87 x 0.19 = 16.53 tonnes. Hence this should give us 16.53 x 0.511 = 8.449 tonnes of ethanol. Since the density of ethanol is 0.789 kilograms/litre, this would occupy a volume equal to: 8.449 x 1000 /0.789 = 10,706 litres.

The actual production figure is around 6,718 litres/ha, and so the process is 6,718/10,706 = 63% efficient. Indeed this is similar to the efficiency of the fermentation process designed to produce hydrogen from sugar.

6,718 litres of ethanol weighs 0.789 x 6.718 giving a yield = 5.3 tonnes/ha. Hence the sugar crop would require 76.4 x 10*6/5.3 = 14,415,094 ha = 144, 151 square kilometers (km*2). Sugar beet comes in slightly better at 19.1 tonnes/ha and so an equivalent crop would need (16.53/19.1) x 144,151 = 124,755 km*2.

Since the area of arable land in the U.K. is about 65,000 km*2 even of we used all of it and grew no food, we could just about meet half our current fuel requirements from ethanol. Perhaps if we could "seed" more land, we would still need around half the entire area of the U.K. mainland of 244,000 km*2 to produce it!

The message is once again that without severe cuts in transportation use, the situation is hopeless. My figures are rough, and the situation will perhaps be improved by new technologies - but only slightly. Using "bio" fuels to break the hold that imported oil has on us, is really a non-starter, at our current levels of fuel consumption. It is these we need to reduce first and foremost, but that will entail living quite differently ... and probably far more frugally. The option of a Die-Off in human population as energy resources run-out is far more uncomfortable, however.