Alternative energy will not replace oil

The SERVICE test for alternatives to oil

This basic checklist asks the key questions in testing alternatives to oil. If a renewable energy fails just one of the tests below, it is not going to replace oil. The more tests it fails, the less it can help to mitigate peak oil. The examples are illustrative only — although I will start to collect a list of energy critiques below this checklist.

The bottom line is that I have come to believe that no alternative energy can meet our liquid fuel needs in the timeframes required.

“Alternatives are not going to SERVICE our liquid fuel energy needs for many decades to come.”

S.E.R.V.I.C.E.

1. Sustainability

2. Energy payback

3. Rare materials

4. Volumes

5. Implementing Infrastructure in time

6. Constant supply of energy

7. Expense

1. Sustainability

How long will this alternative energy source last? How much fuel is there, how many cycles can the soil be put through, how renewable is the process?

EG: Bio-diesel depletes the soil just like any one way nutrient cycle would. Harvesting corn or candlenuts — it hardly matters — involves moving a mass of crop and converting it into fuel that is burned off site. How do the NPK fertilizers get put back? If the soil dies, the biodiesel or other biomass scheme is no longer viable.

Gas conversions to cars will just use up the LPG faster.
A "hydrogen economy" based on natural gas will just bring "peak gas" forward that much quicker, etc. (Gas production may have already peaked in North America anyway — and is expected to peak worldwide about a decade after oil.)

Nuclear power to hydrogen schemes? There's no good building hundreds of Nuclear Power plants and becoming addicted to uranium if uranium reserves are not large enough to even supply all our electricity for 6 years!

2. Energy Payback Ratio (EPR)

EPR. Do you get more energy out of a device that went into making it in the first place? Have you counted all the energy costs that go into the new energy infrastructure?
This is also called the ERoEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) or LCEA, (Life Cycle Energy Analysis.)

The Energy Production Ratio attempts to measure how much energy was returned compared to how much energy was invested. You basically try to figure out:—

1/ the total energy that you might receive from the power source over its lifetime

2/ the total energy consumed in getting that power source up and running

3/ Then you divide the total energy received by the energy cost, and you are left with the magic number that tells you whether or not a project is worth doing!

So in summary: The Energy Profit Ratio is:-

energy returned / energy invested (Also known as ERoEI).

If the EPR is 1, you may as well not do it because for all your effort you are only breaking even and just getting the same amount of energy back as you put in. The project was a waste of time, because over the whole lifetime of that power plant it only ever repays the energy it took to make it.

I will discuss other implications for the EPR below, as it is one of the most important considerations for alternatives to oil.

3. Rare materials

What rarer metals or materials are needed to produce the new energy infrastructure?

How much high grade silicon does the computer industry have to spare to allow for a massive increase in Solar Photo-Voltaic systems?

Electric Vehicles (EV’s) hold great promise, but what are the world’s current Lithium reserves and how many generations before we experienced “peak Lithium? How many decades would the lithium industry need to replace 800 million cars worldwide?”

Fuel cells use plantinum — how quickly can we ramp up platinum production for fuel cell vehicles?

4. Volumes are too low

Can the new fuel meet the sheer volumes necesary? Can it produce upwards of 84 million barrels of oil a day, or roughly a thousand barrels a second!?

EG: All Australian wheat into ethanol = 9% of liquid fuels and no bread! This alarming statistic takes into account the fact that we grow enough wheat for roughly 50 million people.

EG: Biodiesel... even if we managed to grow biodiesel crops without modern fertilizers and pesticides (through biofarming methods such as "crop and cow" rotation) there is just not enough arable land to grow the quantities we need. We would run out of land for food!

Some potential energy volumes are vast! Apparently just 40 km by 40 km of solar PV is all Australia's energy needs. So we will just switch to solar? Yes, maybe in another 50 years. We have left it too little too late to painlessly transition to solar or wind. Some renewables are potentially vast but presently tiny. Also, this is a liquid fuels crisis — not an electricity crisis. (I hope — fuel plays a large part in mining coal!) Energy from solar and wind might power future generations, but it is not going to prevent the current generation from experiencing a devastating 'Greater Depression'.

5. Implementing the Infrastructure

Is the fuel compatible with the current infrastructure?
What are the issues in implementing the new fuel at filling stations?
Is it easy to transport?
Can it be stored easily?
How energy dense is the fuel — and will you burn 90% of the fuel just to transport it to the filling station or where it is needed?
How long will this fuel take to grow or infrastructure take to install, and then what about all the other system changes. EG: Hydrogen stations need hydrogen cars — how many people do you know that buy a new car every 5 years?
What other time and financial factors are involved in converting filling stations over?

The Hirsch report (let me mention it once again) to the American Department of Energy has reported that it could take up to 20 years to prepare for a 2% per annum decline in oil after the peak. Hirsch has now stated that it might easily be around 4 to 8% per annum decline, meaning a longer preparation period. In a recent interview, he said:—

"This problem is truly frightening. This problem is like nothing that I have ever seen in my lifetime, and the more you think about it and the more you look at the numbers, the more uneasy any observer gets. It's so easy to sound alarmist, and I fear that part of what I'm saying may sound alarmist, but there simply is no question that the risks here are beyond anything that any of us have ever dealt with. And the risks to our economies and our civilization are enormous."

6. Constant supply of energy

The sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind does not blow for long periods.

In other words, we are about to face peak oil, then maybe peak gas (which affects electricity generation) and then later peak coal, in that order.

If we do manage to upgrade rail and tram services as peak oil begins to bite, the demand on reliable electricity generation and transmission will be even greater than it is now. We need steady and even transmission of energy. I believe we will need to electrify most of our transport systems.

What happens when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? We had better start to address this now, because the need for coal liquefaction after peak oil will of course bring peak coal forward. Our children will curse us if in our own blindess we plunge the entire world into darkness.

We need a system of energy that is reliable, or the power grids start to fail. How do we adapt to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources? What backup energy mechanisms are there?

How do we keep the energy grid running when expensive post-peak oil might bankrupt the coal mining and grid servicing industries?

7. Expense?

What is a proposed alternative energy infrastructure going to cost society?

I once calculated that it would take 80 years at a wartime economy of 5% GDP per annum for Australia to build all the solar chimney's we would need to produce hydrogen in volumes large enough to replace oil. Don't quote me on that as they were very 'back of the envelope' calculations — but you can see what I mean. While solar chimney to hydrogen might be technically feasible, it is not economically viable in the short timeframe we have.

The alternative would have to be as cheap as oil to prevent a financial crisis of unimaginable proportions. We are not running out of oil, we are running out of cheap oil. The costs for a solar to hydrogen fuel system would currently bankrupt any nation — we may as well use the original solar electricity to charge EV’s rather than bother wasting energy making Hydrogen. What the alternative costs is extremely important, and forms the crux of the peak oil crisis. We are not running out of oil, we are running out of cheap oil.

More on EPR

Measuring Energy Input is extremely complicated

All energy inputs have to be included or the EPR will not properly reflect just how much energy really went into building that power plant.

EG: In an oil field we could just measure the energy that runs the oil pump. The pump might run on electricity or something else, it doesn't matter, the total energy running the pump has to be measured by some uniform energy standard. We can calculate that and convert it into a common source of energy for comparison. British Thermal Units (BTU's) are commonly used, but it could be anything really — as long as the energy is converted consistently.

So the pump burns energy to work. Fine. But then how did the pump get made? Oh, now we have to count the making of the pump. Let's see, it came from a factory that used parts and electricity to weld it together. Then there's where the parts came from — so now we are back in the components factories, the standard nuts & bolts & screws factories, the drill bit factories, the artificial diamond factories where the diamonds are made to put on the drill bit head. What did these factories make their components from? Now we are back to the mining of the raw materials.

Oh, and let's not forget that all those employees had to be fed, clothed, and transported to the factory and back home again each day!

Now what have we forgotten? When you mine an oil field you first had to discover it! That meant employing people using satellites, planes, helicopters, and drilling platforms to first discover the oil field.

In other words, stacks of energy had to be burned years before you got any oil to the surface! A huge amount of energy was invested before you received a return on it.

(Indeed, there is another term called ERoEI which stands for Energy Returned on Energy Invested, which is ER / EI, which is just another way of saying EPR. See notes on why I prefer EPR to ERoEI below.)

Hydrogen as an example of EPR

We'll focus on Hydrogen because it is the most touted "saviour" for the modern motor car. I love the idea of Hydrogen. It’s clean, it’s as plentiful as water and electricity, and it is completely renewable — as long as you have abundant electricity! But electricity is the catch, because Hydrogen has a low EPR.

Let’s say we must make 1 tank of Hydrogen gas enough to fill your BMW Hydrogen combustion engine car tank, (or maybe a Fuel Cell Hypercar, but currently fuel cells are far too expensive and need platinum, which itself could "peak" soon). The car drives well and has a good range. What’s the catch?

Roughly speaking, let's look at the figures. (More exact studies provided below.)

Energy output was 1 (tank of hydrogen gas)
Energy Input was roughly 2
(equivalent units of electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then more energy was spent compressing or freezing the hydrogen into a fuel)

Energy output or return divided by input is 1 divided by 2 = 1/2 or 0.5! For every bit of energy you put into Hydrogen you only get half back. Hydrogen is a net energy LOSER!

Compare this to oil when we first started drilling. Sure it took a little energy to mine it. But the overall EPR was about 100! Now that we are so much closer to the production peak, the oil EPR is down to about 10 (or even less). But that is still workable. But of course this will change on the energy down slope the other side of Hubbert’s Peak. But having your energy multiplied by 10 sure beats your energy being halved!

A mispent inheritance (rant)

The problem is that we have not earned fossil fuel energy, we inherited it. The average citizen does not know the true value of energy because we did not have to work for it. The earth gave us a vast energy inheritance in fossil fuels. We are just about to discover how badly we have misused it.

EPR is about the difference between gaining an inheritance, and starting again from scratch. Every time we dig for oil we use energy, yet oil is so good that it has at times repaid the effort up to a hundred fold. It is our most valuable inheritance from millions of years ago. Yet every time we build a nuclear power plant we also use energy. But a nuclear power plant takes about 10 years to build and then 10 years to repay the cheap oil energy it took to construct it!

We have taken our inheritance for granted and abused it. Instead of savouring it as an interesting but finite source of chemical compounds for synthetic materials, we take this interesting series of complex molecules, strip them back to simpler molecules, and burn it! Dr Karl laments that his children will not have oil to build interesting new materials from. He says it is a crime to burn it for transport!

We could have saved oil for generations to come but became addicted to power and speed, and used it up in a gluttony of excess, the incredibly inefficient internal combustion engine.

Oil — the invisible servant

We currently enjoy the benefits of cheap oil right through the entire strata of our society. The cheap oil does so much for us that in the western world it is as if we each had 200 “ghost slaves”!

It might not feel like we have 200 personal slaves, but when you look at the fantastic homes and cities we live in it is clear that something has been helping us along. Just look at your home or apartment. To lumber the wood, build the bricks, stoke the steel and then transport it all by human muscle alone would require massive effort if unaided by our high-energy industrial society. Have another look at some of the structures in your city. Try to imagine the infrastructure that mined the iron ore and processed it into steel, and then shipped it into the right country. Then imagine the factories where it was shaped into the right beams, and the trucks that brought it to the construction site. Then imagine the cranes that lifted it. Then imagine the workers, all being fed and housed by a massive civilization that even grows its food with oil. We have been luxuriating in cheap oil energy. But now it's time to go to work. It's time to build a completely renewable energy infrastructure, because one day soon our children will be asking us why we let them hit peak coal without being ready!

Our inheritance runs down

We have allowed ourselves to be spoilt by this “free” energy. But our energy account is about to have the monthly oil allowance start to run down. We should have been investing our fossil fuel energy in massive renewable energy infrastructures before our fossil fuel peaked. But now it looks like oil will peak in 2008 and natural gas sometime later. (It is already peaking in North America, which will have to import even MORE of it's energy.) We have 50 years of restructuring to do in just 3 years!

We have not invested our energy wisely in areas that bring a return. We have bankrupted ourselves by investing our precious oil energy in a high-energy suburban "living arrangement that has no future." (See video preview.)

To replace petroleum energy is indeed impossible in the time we have left. I am just hoping world governments can rush through legislation prioritising the remaining oil and replacement fuels to essential services and infrastructure support, to give us a little time to adapt.

Peakniks not against renewable energy

The alternative fuel or renewable energy source in question might work for some small niche, but not enough to run our entire oil dependent economy. In other words, yes we need all the renewable energy options possible, yes we need to mass produce the high EPR sources now... but they are not going to run what we are running! Even the Hirsch report acknowledges this.

Peakniks are not against renewable energy, we are against the concept that society will smoothly switch over to something else and continue "business as usual". At this stage there are too many challenges involved, and we are going to have to radically redesign our lives. A renewable energy civilization is possible, but will require the replanning and rebuilding of almost everything we do around far less energy. (The shape of this civilization is sketched out under SOLUTIONS).

Links

For the other side of facts on alternative energy there are many sources, but again a great introduction...

The Simpler Way by Ted Trainer, University of NSW

For the latest on energy systems, try the comprehensive Energy Bulletin and run a search on your topic, or click systematically through all their renewable subject fields.

For some more encouraging material try World Changing or Big Gav.

Then, to bring you back down to a suitably serious mode of thinking, there is always Monbiot.

Then, if you have anti-depressants handy, try Wolf at the Door! :-)

FORUMS

If you have technical questions regarding energy matters, post a question at...
Energy Resources

Or try the famous www.peakoil.com

There is a lot to consider. But for now at least you know the main questions to ask before assuming that there is an easy answer.

Note on a similar system called ERoEI

There is also another system called ERoEI which stands for “Energy Returned on Energy Invested”, which many use in exactly the same way as EPR.

Energy Returned divided by Energy Invested = the amount of extra energy you generate for every unit of energy invested, or the ratio of input to output.

But some use ERoEI in a very different way. They are after the actual figure of energy for a given project. In this case, instead of a ratio, they want to know the actual energy return, in units of energy of their choice. They define ERoEI as "Energy Returned OVER Energy Invested, that is energy output minus energy input. While this system has its uses, I will stick with EPR. ERoEI is ambiguous because some use division to produce a ratio factor, and others use subtraction to give the total energy in units.