Samstag, 28. Januar 2012

The Role of Energy

I studied history. (And theology and literature). So it might be a bit odd for some of you that I have created a blog where energy will often act on center stage. Well, I’ll just put it this way: I am quite interesten in the big piture – where the human race is going from here, just the same as (in my studies) how we got where we are. And since, in my opinion, one of the largest elements of where we’re headed has to do with how we deal with our resources – especially our energy resouces. Well, energy ends up being a big part of the picture. If only for this reason, energy would be worthy of one’s (especially my) focus.

Energy in history

Now, most of us would not recall discussing the role of energy in and of itself over the ages in history class, making the connection even more opaque.

Nonetheless, it just so happens that history began at about the same time that civilizations began progressing metals – extracting ore, smelting out the metal, working out a finished product, etc.. Technically, the beginning of history is usually defined as the beginning of written history, which can be dated to about 5000 years ago. The Neolithic (farming using bones and stones) ended about the same time that the age of copper set in.

And we tend to forget: Working metals uses an enormous amount of energy, usually in the form of burning charcoaled wood – which on the energy side of things is no quantum leap for mankind; just more of the same, for burning wood predates the appearance of homo sapiens as a species. Only as the forests around the Mediteranean began to disappear would we be apt to make the obvious connection between energy and civilization.

Now, I’ve been up and down this track for a long time now without seeing Energy taking its due place in a history full of it. So I was quite pleased as Ian Morris tried to (among other things) quantify energy’s role in his tome "Why the West Rules - for Now". One of the four bases for how to measure the "advancement" of a civilization is the answer to: How much energy is being captured and therefore put to use per person in a given culture? For this has continuously been increased from the times of the first use of fire, the use of sails on the world’s waterways and the domestication and employment of draught animals. During the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe, the most important trades were those of Miller and Smith, both of which were occupied with transfering raw energy into work. Wood/charcoal and flowing water and sometimes wind were the sources that were captured and put to use.

With these sources, only so much civilization could be built. The methods were refined and multiplied but there seemed to be a lid on the amount of civilizatin and therefore on the reach of kings and emperors. This limit was reached by the Romans at around the time of Christ, by the Chinese at about 1150-1200AD (quite rudely interrupted by Genghis Kahn), 1600AD and perhaps 1840AD according to Morris and by Europe (Great Britain) around 1800. The Mid-East, India and Europe hovered somewhat below this border about one and a half millenium long. Even during the European Age of Discovery with its global reach and the parallel/corresponding proto-capitalism of the Fuggers and Medici, (while Great Britain e.g. was still having its diapers changed) Europe had no chance of raising civilization to new heights.

Industrial Evolution - just energy or what?

Now, I am hardly one that will claim that energy was the only limitting factor for civilization to advance. Certainly there was the matter of other technological and organisatorical restraints which had to be overcome in order that the new energies could be implemented. The restraining element for Watt’s steam engine, for instance, was not the modelling of separte chambers for heat expansion and for cooling but rather for making the pistons and shafts hard enough and tight enough to allow the invention to stay in one piece and not break apart or melt together and the necessary temperatures and pressures for the process. A new method for drilling canon shafts had to do the trick so that Boulton and Watt could even go into business.

The success of Boulton and Watt’s steam engine was the moment that many people tag as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution already had to be long into its development ("proto" stage) to allow the Industrial Revolution to make a jump start! And this jump start needed in comparison to past systems enormous amounts of energy – much more than Europe’s long failing forests and Holland’s plethora of wind mills could provide in the slightest. With it were born not only new technologies but also a ravenous appetite for fossil fuels.

Well, needles to say, this ravenous appetite has not diminished – instead it just keeps growing as our civilization advances. Only – with the United States having reached its absolute peak of oil production in 1971 (and a second near peak a decade after that with the added production of Alaska), and with a world that cannot or does not want to increase its carbon fuel exports nor its nuclear fuel capacity – it appears that our energy suppplies are severly restricted. The cheap stuff is only still to be found in uncertain reserves behind the Kingdom’s vail of rhetoric. The rest of the world is doomed to try increasing production by exploiting shale oil, oil sands or deep water / artic formations. These processes themselves are energy-eaters and often food consumers as well – if you include the insanity of Ethanol and/or bio-oil production.

The future, please..

Yes, let’s recommission Holland’s wind mills! And lay our laundery out to dry in the sun (and wind) like we did just two generations ago using solar power!

Please, would someone build me a Thorium reactor that throws a profit so that we can finally end this continual discussion on resource limits and put an air-conditioner in every Asian, African and American home!?

In short, while resources in general and energy inputs in particular are hardly the only factor involved in the growth of civilization, it is certainly one of several limitting factors at the moment. Technology and infrastructure have allowed us to exploit the “new” energy sources of coal, oil and natural gas the past two and a half centuries. And they have paved the way for a transition to atomic power the past half a century.

But the new calls are to abandon these plans (even having been legislated here in Germany) for wind and solar. I am afraid that our ambivilant choice of at least the past decade of neither nuclear nor renewables while courting both renewables and nuclear will leave us high and dry, poorly supplied. Supplying our fossil-fuel power plants with coal and our automobiles (ships and airplanes) with oil products will continue to get much more expensive for society while we vasilate between nuclear and renewables. If only price were the problem, then I wouldn’t be worried about the development of our civilization. As a matter of fact, the prices (since about 2004) are doing what they’re supposed to be doing – acting as a signal on the condition of actual supply.

Following Morris’s logic, it could be that we are reaching one of civilization’s hard upper barriers. Or it could be that we speed on by this barrier to the next level and to the next level’s restraints once we have settled into a new energy scheme. Our limitting factor will hardly be technology per se, but rather the restraints caused by energy inputs of our reigning energy infrastructure and paradigm.