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Minerals scarcity: A call for managed austerity and the elements of hope
Posted by Ugo Bardi on May 4, 2009 - 9:50am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Metal
minerals scarcity:
A call for managed austerity and the elements
of hope
Dr. A.M. Diederen, MSc.
TNO Defence, Security and Safety
P.O. Box 45, 2280 AA Rijswijk, The Netherlands
andre.diederen@tno.nl
March 10, 2009
Abstract
If we keep following the ruling paradigm of sustained global economic growth, we will soon run out of cheap and plentiful metal minerals of most types. Their extraction rates will no longer follow demand. The looming metal minerals crisis is being caused primarily by the unfolding energy crisis. Conventional mitigation strategies including recycling and substitution are necessary but insufficient without a different way of managing our world’s resources. The stakes are too high to gamble on timely and adequate future technological breakthroughs to solve our problems. The precautionary principle urges us to take immediate action to prevent or at least postpone future shortages. As soon as possible we should impose a co-ordinated policy of managed austerity, not only to address metal minerals shortages but other interrelated resource constraints (energy, water, food) as well. The framework of managed austerity enables a transition towards application (wherever possible) of the ‘elements of hope’: the most abundant metal (and non-metal) elements. In this way we can save the many critical metal elements for essential applications where complete substitution with the elements of hope is not viable. We call for a transition from growth in tangible possessions and instant, short-lived luxuries towards growth in consciousness, meaning and sense of purpose, connection with nature and reality and good stewardship for the sake of next generations.
Introducing metal minerals scarcity and managed austerity
Undoubtedly, the global economic growth of the last century, fuelled by and accompanied by exponential growth in population and consumption of resources like fossil fuels, water, food and metal minerals, is unsustainable. Now that we are nearing the second decade of the 21st century, we are beginning to notice the consequences of supply gaps of various resources. This paper focuses on the issue of metal minerals scarcity within the constellation of interconnected problems of scarcity of water and food, pollution and climate change and most notably scarcity of energy. In case of unlimited energy supply, metal minerals extraction would only be limited by the total amount of mineral resources. However, due to the scarcity of energy, the extraction rates of most types of metal minerals will cease to follow demand. Probably the only acceptable long-term solution to avoid a global systemic collapse of industrial society, caused by these resource constraints, is a path towards managed austerity. Managed austerity will have to be a combination of changes in technology and changes in both individual and collective human behaviour. Managed austerity could prevent non-desirable ‘solutions’ by doing much too little much too late (also known as ‘business as usual’) which could ultimately result in large scale conflicts, global chaos and mass starvation of the world’s population.
Energy scarcity
Humanity has depleted a significant part of its inheritance of highly concentrated energy resources in the form of fossil fuels. Although huge quantities of these resources remain untapped, the worldwide extraction rate (production flow) has reached a plateau and will soon begin to decline [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The result is an ever widening supply gap because sustained global economic growth requires sustained growth in available energy. Figure 1 gives the general depletion picture for oil and gas [1] in giga barrels of oil equivalent (Gboe) and the left part of the bell-shaped curve strongly resembles a logistic curve. The initial stage of growth is approximately exponential, growth slows as saturation begins (‘the low-hanging fruit has been picked’) and at maturity growth stops and a maximum is reached. The maximum production rate is referred to as the ‘peak’ and is not a sharp deflection point in the curve but rather a plateau region.
Figure 1: Depletion curve for oil and gas [1]
It is important to realise that the peak date in the depletion graph (figure 1) is not the same as the half date because production can continue for a long period after the peak. The actual depletion curve will presumably be asymmetric, having a peak date before the half date. Although the exact peak date for oil and gas is being contested (ranging from 2005 to somewhere during the next few decades), experts and authorities seem to converge on a peak date within the next few years. Oil and gas are currently the world’s most important energy sources. Transportation for instance is currently almost entirely dependent on oil. Coal will not be able to fill the energy gap after the peak in oil and gas. According to [7] coal may peak around 2025. Again, this does not imply exhaustion of coal reserves, it is quite possible that more coal will be left for extraction after the peak date than has been extracted in total in the years before. The crucial point is that a maximum production rate will be reached after which supply can no longer follow demand. It is estimated that oil, gas and coal combined will reach their ‘peak all fossil fuels’ close to 2020 [8]. All other energy resources combined (nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, biofuels, tidal, geothermal and so on) cannot fill the supply gap in time [9,10,11,12]. Timely and massive utilisation of these other energy resources is limited by various constraints like lack of concentration, intermittency, issues related to conversion and storage and last but not least the required massive input of fossil fuels and metal minerals. Therefore we will probably be confronted with a peak in global energy production within the next 10 to 15 years, despite progress in technology.
Metal minerals scarcity
The depletion graphs of most metal minerals will resemble the curve for oil and gas (figure 1). Figure 2 gives an example for zirconium mineral concentrates [13].
Figure 2: Depletion curve for zirconium mineral concentrates [13]
Many warnings in the past of impending metal minerals shortages have been proven wrong because of the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Every time the ratio of reserves to production of a certain metal mineral became uncomfortably small, the reserves of that mineral were being revised upwards because it became economically feasible to extract metals from the so-called reserve base or resource base. Reserves are defined as those ores that can be economically extracted at the time of determination and the term reserves need not signify that extraction facilities are in place and operative. The decades-old paradigm which states that reserves will be revised upwards (to include lower ore grades) as soon as supply gaps are looming, is no longer valid without cheap and abundant energy. Mining and extraction (concentration) consume huge amounts of energy. The energy required for extraction grows exponentially with lower ore grades. This is illustrated in figure 3 for iron ore and aluminium ore [14]. The highest ore grades have already been depleted or are already being mined. Because of energy constraints, the largest parts of mineral deposits are out of reach for economically viable exploitation, see figure 4 [15].
Figure 3: Relation between required energy for extraction and ore grade [14]
Figure 4: Mineralogical
barrier for most elements [15]
Below the so-called mineralogical barrier (the red shaded area in figure 4), one would essentially have to pull the rock chemically apart to extract all individual elements. This is of course prohibitively energy intensive. For this reason it is very doubtful that meaningful parts of the reserve base or resource base of many metal minerals will ever be upgraded to reserves [16]. It is even questionable whether all currently stated reserves are fully exploitable given the ever growing constraints with regard to energy required [13].
The trend of geologically and physically based minerals scarcity will be further enhanced by other factors. Global (‘average’) shortages will most likely be preceded by spot shortages because of geopolitics and export restrictions, as many important metal minerals are concentrated in just a few countries, often outside the western industrialized world (e.g. China).
Extraction rates and reserves of metal minerals
Known data of extraction and consumption rates of metal minerals and their reserves indicate that the so-called ‘peak production’ for most metal elements will lie in the near future. The data from table 1 and figures 5 through 9 support this statement.
Table 1 represents an overview presented by the US Geological Survey [17] of global annual primary production and global reserves of a large number of metal minerals. Their production goes into various products and compounds, part of them being steels, alloys and metal products. The remaining ‘lifetimes’ are calculated based on a modest consumption growth of 2% per year. The elements predicted to have a ‘lifetime’ of less than 50 years are summarized in figure 5. Of course, these minerals are not completely depleted in this period, but their peak production lies well before the estimated moment. Compare the result for zirconium with figure 2: the remaining ‘lifetime’ of zirconium is 19 years and the peak date is already behind us (1994). Although exact data fail, the elements strontium through niobium (of figure 5) will soon reach their peak production or have already passed their maximum extraction rates.
Figure 5: Years left of reserves at a sustained annual global primary
production growth of 2% (based on table 1)
Figure 6 through 9 depict in more detail global annual production rates and the known reserves. The annual primary production of iron dwarfs all other metal elements combined. Despite its huge reserves, iron will last less than 3 generations (less than 50 years) as far as cheap and abundant primary production is concerned, due to the enormous scale of its annual global consumption. The only viable long-term alternative to iron and in fact all metals at this scale of consumption would be magnesium. Magnesium reserves are virtually unlimited because of its abundance and associated accessibility in seawater [20].
Figure 6: Distribution of annual global primary production (based on table 1)
Figure 7: Distribution of annual global primary production without iron
(based on table 1)
Figure 8: Distribution of global reserves excluding magnesium (based on table 1)
Figure 9: Distribution of global reserves excluding magnesium and iron
(based on table 1)
On a trajectory of ‘business as usual’, we will have much less than 50 years left of cheap and abundant access to metal minerals. The production rate of metal minerals will start to decline well in advance of the depletion of reserves as it will take exponentially more energy input and metal minerals input to grow or even sustain the current extraction rate of metal minerals. To sustain and increase current production rates, resources have to be extracted at ever more distant locations (including deep mining and ocean floor mining) and at ever lower ore grades which require exponentially more energy to extract. In this sense it could even be stated that metal minerals scarcity aggravates energy scarcity.
Consequences of unmitigated metal minerals scarcity
During the next few decades we will encounter serious problems mining many important metal minerals at the desired extraction rates. Amongst them are all precious metals (gold, silver and platinum-group metals), zinc, tin, indium, zirconium, cadmium, tungsten, copper, manganese, nickel and molybdenum. A number of these metals are already in short supply (e.g. indium). Metals like gallium, germanium and scandium are not incorporated in table 1 by lack of data, but these metals suffer from a very low extraction rate as they are by-products (in very low concentrations) of other metal minerals; independent production growth is therefore not an option, thus making an increasing role for these elements impossible.
Besides the minerals with obvious constraints (low ratio of reserves relative to primary production), we can distinguish different ‘categories’ of metal minerals in table 1. First, several metal minerals which have a high ratio of reserves relative to primary production suffer from relatively low absolute amounts of reserves and associated low extraction rates, effectively making them non-viable large-scale substitutes for other metals which will be in short supply. It is up for debate for example whether lithium is a viable large-scale substitute for nickel in accumulators for electric energy as far as land mined lithium is concerned (it might be extracted from seawater in future [20], albeit at higher cost). Second, other metal minerals have no acceptable substitutes for their major applications, which is of special interest for those metals which will run out relatively fast at the present course, manganese being an important example. Third, even metals with a high ratio of reserves to primary annual production combined with large absolute amounts of reserves and associated extraction rates, can be susceptible to future supply constraints because they are located in just a few geographic locations. An example is chromium which is mainly located in Kazakhstan and southern Africa.
Without timely implementation of mitigation strategies, the world will soon run out of all kinds of affordable mass products and services. A few examples are given here. First, a striking example are cheap mass-produced consumer electronics like mobile phones, flat screen TVs and personal computers for lack of various scarce metals (amongst others indium and tantalum). Also, large-scale conversion towards more sustainable forms of energy production, energy conversion and energy storage would be slowed down by a lack of sufficient platinum-group metals, rare-earth metals and scarce metals like gallium. This includes large-scale application of high-efficiency solar cells and fuel cells and large-scale electrification of land-based transport. Further, a host of mass-produced products will suffer from much lower production speeds (or much increased tooling wear) during manufacturing owing to a lack of the desired metal elements (a.o. tungsten and molybdenum) for tool steels or ceramics (tungsten carbide). Among the affected mass-produced machined products are various household appliances and all types of motorized transport (cars, trains, ships and aero structures). The lack of various metal elements (a.o. nickel, cobalt, copper) for high-performance steels and electromagnetic applications will affect all sectors which apply high-performance rotating equipment. Besides transportation this includes essential sectors like electric energy generation (coal/oil/gas-based and nuclear power plants, hydropower, wind power). Also the vast areas of construction work in general (housing, infrastructure) and chemical process industries will be affected. The most striking (and perhaps ironic) consequence of a shortage of metal elements is its disastrous effect on global mining and primary production of fossil fuels and minerals: these activities require huge amounts of main and ancillary equipment and consumables (e.g. barium for barite based drilling mud).
These threats to the global economy require political, behavioural and governmental activities as well as technological breakthroughs. Of the breakthroughs, intensified recycling offers the opportunity to buy us time and innovative substitution may lead to sustainable options [18,19].
Efficiency: Jevon’s paradox
A potent partial solution for metal minerals scarcity would be a better extraction efficiency, if it wasn’t for Jevon’s paradox. Jevon’s paradox is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. So, technological progress on its own (without ‘control’) will only accelerate the depletion of reserves.
Recycling: delaying of effects
Recycling the current and constantly growing inventory of metal elements in use in various compounds and products is the obvious choice in order to buy time and avoid or diminish short- to medium-term supply gaps. Although recycling is nothing new, generally the intensity could be further enhanced. We should keep in mind though that recycling has inherent limits, because even 100% recycling (which is virtually impossible) does not account for annual demand growth. At the present course we need to continue to expand the amount of metal elements in use in order to satisfy demand from developing countries like China and India whose vast populations wish to acquire a material wealth comparable with the standard of living of the industrialized western world. Furthermore, recycling also costs lots of energy (progressively more with more intense recycling) and many compounds and products inherently dilute significant parts of their metal constituents back into the environment owing to their nature and use. So even with intense recycling, we will need a continued massive primary production to continue our present collective course.
Substitution: the elements of hope
It is self-evident that - at our current level of technology - substitution of scarce metals by less scarce metals for major applications will lead to less effective processes and products, lower product performance, a loss in product characteristics, or lead to less environmentally friendly or even toxic compounds. An important and very challenging task is therefore to realise the desired functionalities of such products with less scarce elements and to develop processes for production of these products at an economic scale. The best candidates for this sustainable substitution are a group of abundantly available elements, that we have baptised ‘elements of hope’ (see figure 10). These are the most abundant elements available to mankind and can be extracted from the earth’s crust, from the oceans and from the atmosphere. They constitute both metal and non-metal elements. Hydrocarbons for production of materials (including plastics) could be extracted progressively more from biomass, albeit at a much lower extraction rate than from concentrated (fossilized) biomass (oil, natural gas and coal). Not coincidentally, all macronutrients of nature (all flora and fauna including the human body) are found among the elements of hope: nature either uses these elements (metabolism, building blocks) or has shown to be tolerant to these elements (in their abundant natural forms). Substitution based on the elements of hope therefore is potentially inherently environmentally friendly.
Figure 10: The elements of hope; the green elements are macronutrients, the elements
within the thickened section are metals (Si being a metalloid)
Responsible application: frugal and critical elements
We can look at the remaining global reserves of metal minerals as a toolbox for future generations (see figure 11). An important part of the toolbox is reserved for the elements of hope. Another part of our toolbox is reserved for less abundant but still plentiful building blocks, the ‘frugal elements’. These elements should only be applied in mass for applications in which their unique properties are essential. In this way their remaining reserves will last longer (most notably copper and manganese). For the sake of completeness, also the non-metals belonging to this category are included in figure 11. Finally a small corner of the toolbox is reserved for all other metal elements, the ‘critical elements’, which should be saved for the most essential and critical applications. Not described in figure 11 but also belonging to the critical elements are other non-metals and the metal trace elements with high atomic mass (not previously mentioned in this paper by lack of data from [17]).
Figure 11: The toolbox
containing the elements of hope, the frugal elements and the critical
elements; (for a better resolution version of fig. 11, see this link )
PGM = Platinum-Group Metals;
REM = Rare-Earth
Metals;
the red elements are non-metals;
B,Si,Ge,As,Sb,Te
are metalloids
Conclusion: a call for action, ingenuity and responsible behaviour
Because of the surging scarcity of energy, even large-scale substitution and recycling cannot circumvent supply gaps in metal minerals. This is because production of metals consumes vast amounts of energy and so do substitution technologies and intensive recycling. The introduction of managed austerity is required to convince us all to live using less.
With this paper we call for action. We can increase the lifespan of the reserves of various materials by making a shift towards large-scale application of the elements of hope with a sensible use of the frugal and the critical elements. In order to do this mankind will have to mobilize its collective creativity and ingenuity. Technology alone is not enough to achieve this goal, nor can the challenge of metal minerals scarcity be treated as an isolated problem: it is part of a host of interrelated problems. A solution calls for nothing less than a globally co-ordinated societal response. The scarcity of energy, of food and water, of metal minerals and the effects of pollution and climate change all call for intervention by authorities to facilitate a transition towards collective responsible behaviour: managed austerity. They call for a transition from growth in tangible possessions and instant, short-lived luxuries towards growth in consciousness, meaning and sense of purpose, connection with nature and reality and good stewardship for the sake of next generations.
TABLE 1 (Table 1: Primary production and reserves in metric tons of element content, based on and derived from [17]])
(for a higher resolution version, see this link )
References
[1] Association for the Study of Peak Oil and gas (ASPO), Newsletter No. 97, compiled by C.J. Campbell, Staball Hill, Ballydehob, Co. Cork, Ireland, January 2009
[2] Energy Watch Group (EWG), Crude oil - the supply outlook, EWG-Series No 3/2007, Ottobrunn, Germany, October 2007
[3] International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2008
[4] Koppelaar, R., Meerkerk, B. van, Polder, P., Bulk, J. van den, Kamphorst, F., Olieschaarstebeleid (in Dutch), slotversie, Stichting Peakoil Nederland, October 15, 2008
[5] Simmons, M.R., The energy crisis has arrived, Energy Conversation Series, United States Department of Defense, Alexandria, VA, June 20, 2006
[6] The Oil Crunch – Securing the UK’s energy future, Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security (ITPOES), October 2008
[7] EWG,
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[9] EWG,
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[11] Peter, S., Lehmann, H., Renewable Energy Outlook 2030, Energy Watch Group / Ludwig-Boelkow-Foundation, November 2008
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[13] Bardi,
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[14] Meadows,
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[15] Skinner, B.J., Exploring the resource base, Yale University, 2001
[16] Roper, L.D., Where have all the metals gone?, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA, 1976
[17] United States Geological Survey (USGS), Mineral commodity summaries 2008
[18] Bardi,
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[19] Gordon, R.B., Bertram, M., Graedel, T.E., Metal Stocks and Sustainability, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., v.103, n.5, January 31, 2006
[20] Bardi, U., Mining the oceans: Can we extract minerals from seawater?, posted September 22, 2008 at the website The Oil Drum: Europe
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Thanks for a closer look at another piece of the "Limits to Growth" we are facing!
Most mitigation attempts assume that it will not be too difficult to build new infrastructure, but lack of minerals could be a real problem. Sometimes, if only a small amount of a rare mineral is unavailable, this can make expansion of a new technology problematic.
The article wisely steers clear of the prickly issue of uranium. Some have pointed out that newly fashionable indium is perhaps as abundant as silver but there is no silver shortage. Others suggest that there are many rich undiscovered mineral deposits they are just deeper and harder to find.
If there are strategic reserves for oil I guess there could be the same for hard rock minerals. Rather than an absolute amount a depletion protocol or relative extraction rate could be stipulated. For example if the production to reserves ratio must be constant that gives a negative exponential curve of production over time. That curve never quite exhausts the resource. The temptation of course is to exaggerate reserves to justify higher production. It also means that the resource must be used more and more efficiently to meet growing population; the major mineral example here being phosphate.
On lithium I'm not too worried as I think affordable electric cars will be slow and clunky but use improved nickel and lead batteries.
Long-time lurker here turned new member.
You are partly correct in that lithium needs to come down in cost. But it also needs to have a higher efficiency, higher charging cycles and less explosive nature (which cannot be ever achieved without radical innovation). Lithium explodes when coming in contact with water.
You see lithium is obtained from Bolivia and Chile. With Evo Morales acting like the second coming of Hugo Chavez, it will be a problem getting enough lithium on the market. :) Also, a new thing to watch for. China produces most of the rare earth elements and they have reduced exports to concentrate on domestic consumption. They tried to get one Australian mining company but failed in Rio Tinto. And now they might be successful in Lynas.
As an analyst, I can tell you that the new area of these metals are in CIGS/CIS cells and displays. Watch out for them in the future. :)
One more thing, Tesla uses 6500 Li-ion cells for its PHEV car. They need to be vigorously tested for explosiveness (Remember the exploding laptop batteries sometime back). So, GM is piggybacking on the wrong tech in Li-ion for its Volt car. NiMH is great not only because of the stability of lanthanum (another rare element from China) but its recycling network is as good as lead-acid batteries. Toyota has test cars running on NiMH
"The lithium-water reaction at normal temperatures is brisk but not violent"
I've seen a lump of lithium tossed into a tub of water. It was boring.
"Tesla Motors announced that the battery pack that will power the Tesla Roadster has been deemed safe by the United Nations Safety Requirements. The rigorous U.N. Testing Protocol for the Tesla Roadster ESS (Energy Storage System) included: altitude simulation, thermal cycling, vibration, shock and external short circuit."
It's unlikely that they would have been given authorization to sell the car without testing the battery pack. From what I've read, quite a bit of engineering went into exactly this problem.
Yes, and that's one of the nice aspects of electric vehicles: there are many different battery chemistries and many different ways to generate electricity, and they all work together - and with any electric motor - without having to do anything special. My understanding is that there are electric vehicles on the road right now being powered by Li-ion, by NiMH, and by lead-acid batteries.
Accordingly, electric vehicles have less of a choke point than internal combustion vehicles, as there is no one mineral or fuel that is key.
"Accordingly, electric vehicles have less of a choke point than internal combustion vehicles, as there is no one mineral or fuel that is key."
I understand what you are saying. But the point is that you have to consider the implications of metals scarcity in its complete context: if there is a growing gap between production flow rates and demand across a large spectrum of metals simultaneously in the next few decades, than there is no "safe haven" to substitute one specific metal with the other specific metal. You might get a cascade of multiple and simultaneuos substitutions where everyone is chasing after the same set of metals. So for instance there might be a large demand simultaneously for every metal suitable to make accumulators for electric vehicles, amongst others lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, lead.
Why are we stuck on the idea that cars can only be made of metals?
Sure there are some parts that probably are best suited to manufacture from metals such as copper in electric motors but renewables and composites could also play a part.
1854 - Henricg Globel, a German watchmaker, invented the first true lightbulb. He used a carbonized bamboo filament placed inside a glass bulb. ...
Electric Bamboo car
Please see my comment below on lithium, including the reference at the end - it looks very much like we have quite enough.
The Lynas deal looks like an absolute steal from where I'm sitting -the Chinese have got access to a world class 20+ year resource for 'cents on the Dollar'.
When we look back on this 'Chinese hard-Asset Grab" in decades to come it will be increasingly clear that we have "sold Manhatten for a string of beads..."
Nick.
Disclaimer: I am increasingly LONG Lynas !!
"GM is piggybacking on the wrong tech in Li-ion for its Volt car. "
Not at all. GM is using a different chemistry, which is more stable than Tesla's. Have you looked at A123systems? It was one of two chemistries that were finalists for the Volt battery cells. I haven't looked at the LG chemistry in as much detail, but it's significantly different from the cobalt li-ion used by Tesla.
"lithium is obtained from Bolivia and Chile."
Lithium is reasonably abundant, and reasonably widely distributed: it's mostly produced now in S. America, but China is expanding production, and there are substantial sources elsewhere. It can be recycled efficiently.
It's rather like uranium: in the short run there could be boom-bust cycles of supply expansion and shortfalls, but in the medium-term there aren't really resource limits.
There was a widely read analysis a couple of years ago that raised questions, but those questions have been answered pretty thoroughly. The amount used by each battery isn't that great:
One estimate is that most lithium chemistries require around 3+lb/kWh of lithium carbonate, so for a 16KWH Volt type battery we would need about 50 lbs of lithium carbonate. At $2.75/lb, that's only $137.50, or 3.4% of the likely Volt battery cost of $4k (wholesale in 2-4 years). A doubling in the price of lithium would only increase the cost of a $30K vehicle (after $7,500 credit) by $137.50. GM is assembling their battery from cells made by LG Chem, the largest li-ion cell producer in the world - I suspect LG is pretty good at getting long-term contracts for their supplies.
If you want a more detailed general discussion this is good, and for some debate go here.
I understand where you are coming from. And I agree with your assessment. However, the alternate way of looking at it is the technology.
LG Chem uses lithium-manganese oxide (LiMn2O4) chemistry while A123 uses lithium-iron phosphate (LiFePO4) chemistry. LiMn2O4 has a limited cycle life and operates poorly as the temperature goes higher. The energy density is getting better as they incorporate more elements into the overall setup. But it isnt yet there comparable with LiFePO4 yet.
Why is this so? Better battery management system to avoid short-circuiting. BMS helps to extend battery cycle life by avoiding any over-charge or discharge. But that doesnt mean that LiFePO4 is the best. It is limited by its working voltage and the maximum charge voltage which isnt high. But it makes up with a lot more charging cycles of over 2500 and a slower rate of capacity loss.
As for Tesla, they use lithium-cobalt-oxide (LiCoO2). LiCoO2 have slow charge and discharge rates. They also breakdown at high temperatures (thermal runaway).
I see research happening in Lithium Nickel Cobalt Manganese Oxide Li(NiCoMn)O2 and lithium titanate (LiTiO3) (for Eestor batteries) in addition to LiFePO4. Thats why the cost of these batteries are still high and they will be until you get the chemistry right. I dont see PHEV/EV becoming cost-effective until they get this chemistry nailed.
See an ANL study here: Cost of lithium for Electric Vehicles
Regarding the lithium presence in a battery, it varies according to the chemical composition. Find out the exact anode, cathode and electrolyte as Li will be present in all three. Find out the Li % in each and you get the amount of Li in the battery for that chemistry combination.
Sorry if this post comes as a pitch for a particular company. I do not work for any of these companies or promote their products. But as an analyst, I just wanted to clarify on what I know from talking to some of these guys in the industry.
The ANL study is quite old - the data in it is 10 years old, which is an eternity in this business. Here are some thoughts on battery cost:
A recent study Carnegie Mellon University argued that "plug-in" hybrid-electric vehicles, like the Chevy Volt, are too expensive. Are they right?
No. They assumed that the battery would cost $16,000 (or 1,000/KWH). As GM says, that's way too high. (Oddly, they also conclude that a plug-in with a 10 mile range would be better, because drivers would stop and charge every 10 miles!)
Similarly, $10,000 for the Volt's battery has been widely reported in the media, but we shouldn't rely on mass media! Really, no one knows how much the batteries cost. The $10K figure is purely speculation. Here's an example, in the CS Monitor. We see that it doesn't say $10K. Here's what the article says: "the race isn't over making a Chevy Volt battery designed to run 40 miles on a single charge that could (emphasis added) cost as much as $10,000." We can see that the reporter doesn't have a firm source for this cost figure.
Elsewhere, the article says: "Still others say that the cost of new battery power for PHEVs may drop faster and already be lower than what has been widely reported at perhaps $500 per kilowatt-hour or even less, says Suba Arunkumar, analyst for market researcher Frost & Sullivan.
"I do expect the price will come down to perhaps as low as $200 per kilowatt-hour when mass production begins in 2010 and 2011," she says."
Tesla's cost is $400/KWH - it's very likely that GM will pay $200-$300 in volume. The batteries won't be produced in large volumes for several years. They'll use less expensive materials than 1st Gen batteries; the larger format is much less expensive; and they'll have very, very large production volumes relative to most 1st-gen li-ion. Large production volumes reduce costs very quickly.
GM is pricing the Volt high purely to capture the early-adopter premium and the federal rebate - their official justification is that they're pricing in 100% replacement of the battery under warranty, which really isn't credible. We can expect the Volt to cost less than $30K with large volume production.
Is the battery too large?
Yes, they're only using 50% of the battery - a 50% depth of discharge (DOD) is very conservative. That means they have to use a 16 KWH battery to get an effective 8 KWH's. They could be more aggressive (and probably will be in the future), but they're very sensitive to the bad publicity that early battery failures would create.
Could they use a battery that allowed a deeper DOD?
No, there aren't any batteries on the market that are more durable as measured in charge cycles. Tesla's batteries aren't expected to last more than 400 cycles, and the Volt will do 5-10x as many. In theory, the Volt could have a smaller battery. That would mean a shorter range, which would still accomodate many drivers. That might more perfectly optimize costs, but then it wouldn't feel like a big step forward. It wouldn't feel like a real EV, with generator backup - instead, it would feel like an incremental hybrid. Both GM (for PR) and buyers want a large, step forward, I think.
Edit:
LG Chem uses lithium-manganese oxide (LiMn2O4) chemistry while A123 uses lithium-iron phosphate (LiFePO4) chemistry. LiMn2O4 has a limited cycle life and operates poorly as the temperature goes higher. The energy density is getting better as they incorporate more elements into the overall setup. But it isnt yet there comparable with LiFePO4 yet.
Why is this so? Better battery management system to avoid short-circuiting.
Could you expand on this? Are you suggesting that GM could have used a less sophisticated BMS if they had gone with LiFePO4?
"The amount" [of lithium] "used by each battery isn't that great ...."
Please also consider the shear absolute numbers. Take for instance cell phones. Most cell-phones contain a tiny amount of tantalum. But making half a billion new cell phones annualy and using small amounts of tantalum in roughly yet another half a billion other handheld electronic devices annualy amounts to a significant portion of annual global production of tantalum.
If you look at the references you'll see that there's quite enough lithium for all the EVs we might need.
Yes; "One of the greatest shortcomings of human beings is our incapacity to understand the exponential function."
Look also in this perspective at windenergy. Like with oilfields, extracting the easiest available oil first, they install windmills in the easiest available, most comfortable and/or best places first. After this comes the much more difficult places, like far offshore. Considering EV's what counts is the first year that the sell of internal combustion vehicles goes in terminal decline. More important than that all the big carmakers will produce EV's in 2011-2012 is: How many people can afford to buy an EV, above all when the economy is suffering ?
Good point on uranium. I think uranium is a "special" case: its application legitimates "extreme" efforts if necessary to concentrate the material. I don't have rule-of-thumb figures on uranium at hand, but I think one could make a kind of comparison with gold: we are willing to process roughly 200,000 tonnes of material to extract and concentrate 1 ton of gold. It's obvious that this isn't a viable option for almost all other metal elements, certainly not for many metals simultaneously.
I'm more concerned about availablity and affordability of certain metals to construct dozens of new nuclear fission reactors in a short timeframe, than about fueling them with uranium (or thorium).
(I posted this in another thread a while ago, but got no responses. So, sorry for the repetition, but perhaps most didn't see it last time and it is definitely on-topic here.)
As I see it, there is always the possibility to extract more given more effort/expenditure. For instance, when it comes to uranium, wikipedia states: "Kenneth S. Deffeyes and Ian D. MacGregor point out that uranium deposits seem to be log-normal distributed. There is a 300-fold increase in the amount of uranium recoverable for each tenfold decrease in ore grade."
Does anyone know whether this holds true for other mined chemical elements as well? I'd guess so, and therefore, my current hypothesis is that "reserves" in number of years are quite meaningless for those. The reason is that if you want to "run out" in 40 years instead of in 20 years, all you have to do is to increase the price of the element by 32%. (Assuming extraction costs are inversely proportional to ore grade.) Reserves are only meaningfully stated in relation to price.
OTOH, reserves could be stated in number of years if we by that mean that a certain use of the element will be impossible above a certain price. But typically, reserve statements in number of years are misused. For instance, uranium reserve statements are based on completely arbitrary prices - they are never put in relation to what nuclear reactor operators would be willing to pay before closing shop, for instance.
Good question. The problem is that nobody knows the answer. For Uranium, Deffeyes and MacGregor could arrive to their conclusion because it is possible to detect uranium deposits using their radioactivity. But for most other minerals you don't have this possibility, so their distribution in the crust is given at best as an educated guess. This is the essence of the "Mineralogical Barrier" that is not - definitely - a log normal distribution. In general, modelling this matter is extremely difficult
Actually, there is plenty of geochemical data on other elements too, but there are no easy answers, because each metal behaves differently, at least in principle, and different genetic types of deposits, even for the same metal, behave differently too. The presence of a "mineralogical barrier" is certainly the safest (most conservative) assumption, unless its absence can be demonstrated (as it can for many metals, including uranium).
I think the author does not take into account the drive of technological advances. This is essentially the revamped arguements of the Club of Rome that was saying the same thing forty years ago. It use to be said that a top of the line mens suit would cost one ounce of gold. There has been many technological advances in the extraction of gold since that was true. Gold is about 900 an ounce and an Armani suit runs 3 - 4 thousand.
You need to remember that the original beliefs about the inaccuracies of the Club of Rome report have proven false. This was shown recently in an analysis by Charles Hall and John Day that Dave Murphy wrote a post about for The Oil Drum. An independent study last year was done by Graham Turner in 2008 in Australia. It came to the same conclusion.
Japan's Science and Technology Foundation gave Meadows, one of the lead authors of the original Club of Rome study, its annual $500,000 award on April 23, 2009.
Technology has played a significant role in a few areas, like shale gas production, but in total, we are tracing the expected path fairly closely.
"This was shown recently in an analysis by Charles Hall and John Day "
Actually, no. Their analysis didn't show that at all. In fact, it showed that it did quite badly. As I said then:
First, the Limits to Growth predictions, as presented by the article, aren't very good. The birth and death projections are off quite badly (as Pitt notes, the "actual birth rate" presented in the article is dramatically incorrect). The population and industrial output per capita projections aren't any better than mainstream projections. The pollution projection cherrypicks worst offenders (CO2 and nitrogen), and yet even so misses quite badly (a projection of 3x 1972 levels, vs 2.0 and 2.1, respectively). The resource projection has to cherrypick light-sweet-oil and copper to look good (and there are some sharp objections earlier in the comments to the copper depletion assessment, to which I'd add that copper has very good substitutes for most of it's uses, and recycles very well). The only major resources that seem to fit the 50% depletion prediction are soil and fish, and calculations or sources aren't provided.
2nd, it hangs its resource case almost entirely on peak oil, and quickly dismisses wind and solar because they're not yet large energy sources. Yet, wind is cost-effective, has high EROEI, and an enormous resource base.
Both wind and solar are growing much faster than fossil fuels (roughly doubling every 2-3 years), and yet they say "the annual increase in the use of most fossil fuels is generally much greater than the total production (let alone increase) in electricity from wind turbines and photovoltaics." This is highly misleading. As an analogy, one could say that in the early 1980's that "the annual increase in the use of land line phones is generally much greater than the total production (let alone increase) in cell phones." Wind was about 1/3 of new generation in the US in 2008. It could easily provide all new generation in 5 years, and then start replacing coal.
Clearly, the overall fossil fuel resource base has declined much less than the 50% used in this article. More importantly, if one includes wind and solar resources, there is no significant decline at all - the whole question of energy "resources" becomes unimportant. Instead, we're looking at questions of investment and transition, which are entirely different.
Hi Nick,
I've listened to Dennis Meadows a couple of times, I mention this because he actively avoids using the word predictions, the authors refer to them as scenarios. Perhaps this is a more useful paper to frame the original post, Leverage Points.
If Peak Oil is nearly upon us, which I believe seems likely, then the Hirsch report would indicate that wind and solar aren't going to replace FF for much of the world. I think the problem is over simplified by saying 'we're looking at questions of investment and transition, which are entirely different.'
sunnata,"
The Hirsh report(2005) has been overtaken by developments in PHEV and EV's. It states "for now electric vehicles cannot be projected as a significant offset to gasoline use."
That was before all the major car manufactures had plans to introduce PHEV and EV's by 2011-2012.
Furthermore the Hirsh report considers fairly modest increases in CAFE to 35.5mpg after 3years and 41.25mpg 10years after peak oil. Considering that hybrids are getting better than 50mpg now, and the EU is putting in standards of >40mpg by 2010, can only think that Hirsh et al were expecting another 8 years of a Republican congress and president continuing to resist CAFE improvements.
Could one not say miniscule by comparison at this point?
Looking back of course one can see and even looking forward one could have seen that cell phones would overtake landlines. But both wind and solar are old technologies, albeit with new developments. It is quite reasonable to question whether they will be able to scale up from almost nothing in the way cell pones did. There were no great conceptual hurdles to cell phone scale up. There are several with wind and solar: intermittency, storage, transmission, conversion, and materials, just for starters.
Could one not say miniscule by comparison at this point?
No. 1/3 of all new US generation in 2008 was from wind. That's very important.
both wind and solar are old technologies, albeit with new developments.
"new developments" is an understatement. Both wind and solar power are much cheaper than they ever were before - that's critical.
There are several with wind and solar: intermittency, storage, transmission...just for starters.
Not really - I think Jerome addressed these.
conversion, and materials
I'm not sure what you mean, here.
Some interesting annual numbers (avg. of 2003-2006 unless otherwise noted):
- Current global wind generation: 260TWh, or 0.9 quads.
- Oil consumption increase: 3 quads
- Natural gas consumption increase: 3 quads
- Coal consumption increase: 7 quads
However, keep in mind that a great deal of fossil fuel energy is used to generate electricity; this is why BP uses a 3:1 ratio to compare electricity with primary energy (as the average primary->electricity efficiency is roughly 33%). Given that, the recent annual increases in oil and natural gas consumption are only barely higher than total wind production, and coal consumption is only 2-3 times higher.
Their dismissal of the contributions of renewable sources was true earlier this decade, but is now outdated. Annual increases from wind are now large enough to be comparable to increases from fossil fuel sources. The latter are still larger by a significant amount - 3-7x - but recent trends have been rapidly lowering this difference.
That's an interesting point. It's a very narrow view of the situation to fixate solely on depletion of one energy source and ignore the potential of other energy sources to compensate.
I suppose it's an easy mistake to make, though, as the situation is changing so fast. Five years ago, wind/solar production truly was ignorable, but the situation has changed and now that's no longer the case. Annual addition of wind+solar has reached the same ballpark as annual additions of fossil fuels, so well-reasoned arguments can no longer afford to ignore the potential of those energy sources.
Gail,
The "Limits to growth" focused on food, pollution and resources. Certainly food and mineral resources which had 10-50 years reserves in 1970 still have similar or more reserves. Crop yields have doubled,(in one scenario they assumed a food doubling by 2050, ie after 80 years not 40 years) but food could be an issue if everyone wants steak each day, pollution( mercury and lead) is not a serious issue, but CO2 is and in that sense the pollution issue is still a possible show stopper.
I would agree with Nick, about the Hall and Day article. Turner concludes about metals (page 26) " non-fuel materials will not provide resource constrains".
We need to remember that the limits to growth gave 9 scenarios to choose from, you can pick and choose to find a match in fact most match so far except for birth rates.
Since none of the scenarios predicted collapse until beyond 2009, what does it mean to say; "but in total, we are tracing the expected path fairly closely."
You're speaking of future technological advances.
How do you know they'll happen?
What you're telling us about is your faith. "Believe! The Lord - er, technology will come save us from ourselves!"
Maybe, maybe not. Speaking as a Jew, we've long experience of waiting for the Messiah, and our experience tells us that it's best not to hold your breath, better to plan for his not coming, and save ourselves.
There is no rational reason to expect that new technologies will do anything at all. Only faith.
Refering to your "long experience ...save ourselves"remarks...
If I were rich,I would have these words engraved in stone in lots of prominent places.
As a farmer,I have waited for the rain....We have had(broadly speaking) no starvation ,and no forced migration of farmers in America in my time,but we can still talk to the children of the farmers who experienced th Dust Bowl.When times on the farm have been bad in my corner of the country,where we are mostly one horse(read tractor) farmers,folks have been able in many cases over the last six decades or so to save themselves by taking a part time-I am as serious as a heart attack-job doing an extra forty at a furniture or textile plant.Of course the plants have mostly either closed or move over seas recently.
Over the years,most of the local farms,while still very productive, have degenerated into part time operations maintained partly for such profits as may be had, but mostly for love of the land and the work.Of course we have a few farmers around here who still manage to make a full time go of it,but if you know them,you also know that there is usually some sort of cushion such as a wife who teaches second grade,etc.
Our children have seen enough ,long since, and moved on into other work.
Some day the stream of miracles that have arrived from the universities and industrial labs and garage tinkerers which,taken collectively, have enabled us to live as we do today will fail... for a while at least.Not totally of course,there is always rain if you wait long enough.
Right now it appears that just maybe the arrival of the new exploration and drilling technology which is bringing on the boom in natural gas will enable us to muddle on for a few more years of BAU.
Suppose this particular technology were still five or ten years away? I cannot envision any other result other than widespread war and famine (conceivably even within the US)if oil goes thru the roof,unless this new gas serves to keep the price of fertilizer within reach... for a few more years...
(some readers may think I am inconsistent, but if you read carefully,you will find that when I say something in favor of for instance hybrids, it is usually qualified adding under current conditions.)
Commercial farmers could switch from hybrids to open pollinated crops pdq if necessary, but no technology exists (that can produce the quantity of food needed today except bau big ag)which can also be implemented in the real world in short order.
I am all in favor of community gardening in any form,localization, etc, but I have grave doubts as to whether such movements will mature fast enough to prevent an eventual train crash if the ff supply crashes. Those who are actually working hands in the dirt in such areas will probably be able to save themselves.Latecomers will find the growth/learning/experience curve too much to deal with in most cases.
You can garden successfully even the first year in a good spot with a little help from an experienced friend, but a backyard that had all or most of the topsoil hauled off or buried when the house was built is not a good spot.Shade from the house, from cherished trees, from the nieghbors house or tree, is as good as a death sentence.
If you expect to save yourself(assuming you see a need to do so) by gardening/farming on a small scale with little or no input of commercial fertilizers or pesticides,you better get started NOW.iF YOU WORK REALLY HARD,while you can still get truckloads of leaves all bagged up at the curb for free in most towns,you can turn that subsoil into a garden spot in maybe four or five years.
"You're speaking of future technological advances. "
Well, the key thing here is that we have all the tech we need.
EVs and PHEVs are 100 years old.
Wind turbines are scalable, high E-ROI, and cost effective.
Solar is isn't quite as cheap or high E-ROI as would be ideal, but it's cost and E-ROI are more than good enough to suffice.
We don't need any breakthroughs, just a bit of routine engineering and a buildout which is relatively modest: well within the normal investment levels for the energy business.
The only real problem we have is that we would ideally expand renewables and PHEV/EVs sufficiently quickly that we'd make some of the current infrastructure obsolete. That's not a terrible cost, but it does create thorny political problems. Worse, a lot of people's careers would be obsolete, and they're going to fight that as hard as they can. We'd do well to try to help them, instead of just giving them disrespect and creating governmental gridlocks.
"I think the author does not take into account the drive of technological advances."
You're right you have to factor in technological advances. But after the 1960's/1970's era, with some well-known exceptions (e.g. parts of the ICT-sector), generally speaking progress in technology has fallen below expectations. The problem is that at our current level of technology and complexity, further innovation might be subject to diminishing returns. So while innovation of course keeps its inherent advantages (diminishing returns are still returns), I very much doubt that technology alone will help us out here. Extreme example: experts involved in ITER claim 2040 or 2045 as the earliest time when commercial operation of nuclear fusion power plants might be operational. But we don't have 3 decades left to wait for such technofix.
Technological advances may buy us time, but without 'control', at the end of the day they will only help to deplete our resources more efficiently and more quicly.
That depends on your expectations.
If you were looking for fusion power, then sure. If you were looking for more efficient lighting, then CFL bulbs have delivered about a 4x improvement, and LED lights are poised to deliver another 4x within the next few years (they're already available, but still a little pricier). Similarly, there have been enormous improvements in batteries (Li-ion's power density is something like 4x that of 70s-era lead-acid), to the extent that electric cars are finally practical, and big improvements are continuing to come out (such as high-cycle-life lithium batteries). Also with wind and solar technologies - these are currently (wind) or nearly (solar) commercially viable, and are both highly practical, a far cry from their 70s-era status. Even boring old petrol cars have doubled in efficiency since the 70s.
I could go on, but hopefully you get the point: if you're not seeing substantial technological advances, it's because you're not looking.
Expectations for technological advance are a funny thing; we don't get to choose where breakthroughs will occur. We can bias things by putting more resources into one area or another, but it's never clear beforehand quite how close we are to a breakthrough. Accordingly, any individual expectation has a high chance of being unfulfilled, even though progress overall might be quite rapid. Fusion power might still be 30 years away, just like it was 30 years ago, but wind and solar power are now viable. The net result is a new energy source, even though 30 years ago we might have expected it to be a different one.
I agree with everything you said, except for one thing:
electric cars are finally practical
Electric cars have always been practical, they just haven't been competitive with dirt-cheap oil-based fuels.
A PHEV like the Chevy Volt was developed 100 years ago, by Ferdinand Porsche. But, when gasoline was $.20/gallon, it just didn't make any sense. It wasn't needed. A PHEV would cost roughly $.10/mile in 1909 and 2009 - that can compete with $2.50 gasoline in a Model T, (which got about 25MPG) and in the average US car (which gets about 22MPG).
Li-ion is more convenient: it takes up less space, and it weighs less. But, lead-acid would have worked just fine, if need be.
So, why wasn't it done in Europe, where fuel is more expensive? Because of the capital and regulatory barriers to entry; the lower miles/vehicle, which make capex relatively harder to justify; and the low ratio of fuel cost to capital cost, even in Europe.
Exactly. Very dangerous in case of conventional oil. I read several times that secondary recovery delays the peak of fields, however that the decline past peak could be much steeper. Easy to imagine. And oilcompanies are not different from other companies. They want to sell as much of their stuff as possible and don't care about the fate of the rest of the world. The 'oil and gas experiment' can be done only once, and it is done in a 'stupid' manner.
I think you have missed the point. The article mentions that reserve growth is based on the idea that we can use energy to expand mineral reserves by going after more diffuse ores with more energy intense strategies. But if energy is constrained, this goes up in price with greater use, which makes the cost to mine diffuse ores higher. As both of these deplete (energy and the mined mineral) it would seem that they should work synergistically and eventually hit a ceiling on useful production because, obviously, we cannot spend all of GDP (not even close to it) to mine copper and still run an industrial civilization. I believe the term used on this site is "receding horizons"...
We will have to address demand too. Really, most of the uses of most of these minerals is nonessential. We don't need aluminum packed vegetables in the quantity we use now if we relocalize most food production, for example. Most of these uses have to do with being more economically competitive (why not buy tinned goods from the other side of the world if they are cheaper?) and would go away when the practice becomes uneconomic.
There has to be way more emergy in the packaging than the food itself. I've always wondered that about yogurt too. How many calories did it take to make the container? How many calories in the food? At least the latter is on the side label.
Certainly a similiar relationship exists in precious metals. There are a great many currently uneconomical gold and silver deposits. Just check the Toronto Venture Exchange listed company websites.
Yes, there's more at lower grades. But extracting this takes more energy. Didn't you read the article?
It is in any case common sense. If in a tonne of rock in site Alpha there are 100kg of the metal I want, and then in a tonne of rock in site Bravo there are 10kg, it's obvious that getting the metal from Bravo will take more energy. And site Charlie with 1kg/t, or Delta with 0.1kg/t, and so on - more energy still.
The dollar price rising increasing "reserves" simply reflects the amount of energy which has to be spent; if you're willing to pay $100/kg I'll obviously be willing to spend more energy getting the metal from the mineral than if you're only willing to pay $10/kg. But the price can't go up forever. If we were willing to pay a billion dollars a barrel we could get oil from Titan; but it seems unlikely we'll ever do so, not many people have a billion dollars to blow.
Of course it takes more energy, and as you say, that is reflected in the price.
So my point was really that energy requirements rise very slowly. If we are willing to spend 32% more energy on extraction, we double our reserves (if other metals are distributed like uranium).
Another poster remarked that this increase will work synergistically with oil depletion. I agree, to some extent, but I belong to the crowd that believes our civilisation will have ample time to, for instance, switch to a wind powered (or even better, a gen-IV nuclear powered) ammonia economy. Thus, there is a limit to the impact of oil depletion.
switch to a wind powered (or even better, a gen-IV nuclear powered) ammonia economy
I think PHEV/EVs is the sensible path. I assume ammonia requires some conversion of vehicles, and it seems to be kind've a pain to handle.
If ammonia requires some conversion of vehicles, I don't see an advantage over PHEV/EVs. Do you have more info?
Conversion from gasoline to ammonia is not really an option, so you need to start from scratch.
To produce ammonia, you need to do electrolysis and then use the hydrogen in the Haber process to get ammonia. Then you burn it in an ICE. The electricity-to-wheel efficiency of this is less than 10%. The "price" at that efficiency should be around 2-3 kWh electricity per kilometer.
Given that efficiency, it is probably correct that EVs are preferable for most applications, so think of the ammonia economy as "at worst, we'll do that, but we'll probably find something better".
get ammonia. Then you burn it in an ICE.
I'm still not clear. Ammonia can be burned directly in an ICE, without some kind of conversion of the ICE?
Given that efficiency, it is probably correct that EVs are preferable
Yikes! That's 20x the energy per mile! Yes, I agree, that looks like a distant fall-back option.
Would it make more sense to synthesize diesel, or CNG?
"All you have to do is to increase the price ....".
That's exactly my point (and substitute price for energy): we will be forced to follow the path of ever diminishing returns. You cannot analyze one or the other metal in isolation in this context. If you consider metal minerals scarcity in its complete context, your solution of raising prices will seriously hurt us since we'll lack many metals simultaneously. Every extra effort (money, energy) you put in primary production of metals, you cannot put in other essential activities, unless of course you would still be living in a world with exponential growth.
Sure, but the question is how much it will hurt us. What is the energy requirements of global primary metal extraction today, and how much of that is electricity, how much is coal and how much is oil? My hunch is that it is not much of overall energy consumption, insignificant oil, and that the energy needs per kg increases very slowly. Please prove me wrong!
I think the precautionary principle is UnAmerican.
The world outside the United States of America should NOT expect to have any rights or access to any depleting resources, other than what we, the United States of America, allow onto the markets in the future.
Steven Chu and Obama are planning our future now, and they are not skeered. They have technology, and they have the World's Greatest Military armed with Super Duper Smart Weapons. Plus we have the world's greatest bankerz.
Seriously though, I doubt Chu or Obama understand resource limits. And even if they did, they would never be able to sell it to the public.
I get your point and second it.
Show it to ObamaChu. Show it too your neighbor.
It gets even more interesting if you take a look at how income percentages breakdown for the US population. http://www.demos.org/inequality/numbers.cfm
So assuming that income is correlated with consumption and economic clout, it becomes an even more stark picture. BTW ObamaChu work directly for that very slim segment of the economic pie. So they, in essence, are being paid not to do too much about this glaringly inconvenient little inequality.
"BTW ObamaChu work directly for that very slim segment of the economic pie."
Exactly. And the rest of the population is economic cannon fodder.
There are plenty of mineral and other resources left for that thin sliver of society that owns the Congress and Executive branch - as long as the rest of us are destitute (including most of the rest of the world's nations).
Thank godz we have a republic where the zombies smile when they vote.
Speaking for the rest of the world ;) (albeit from a currently comfortable, if vulnerable, perch in Europe), I thought the assumption was we could mostly become Americans, if lower-cost versions, courtesy of technology and growth-economics and competitive financial investment to keep it all rational and efficient as we made inevitable Progress. It had been essentially done - all we needed was to roll-it-out and deal with any pesky unreasonable roadblocks along the way. What now the prospects for this 'global industrialization and modernization project', when it is less than perhaps a third rolled-out, and given those pie charts?
Should we be surprised?
Seriously, 'the global project' looked like an impossible promise (rationalization) 30 years ago. Most must still believe it, though.
Roll on
This is why I think that we will see the real solution to peak oil and other resource constraints play out on the economic front. The obvious solution given the original graphs is to reduce the precentage of the population in the US that has financial clout to purchase resources. This means impoverishing the lower layers of the American social strata to ensure that upper layers continue to get what they want.
Probably we will continue to get close to the same overall percentage of the worlds resources say +/- 5% for some time China and India will probably grow but this will be against a backdrop of a overall shrinking in the total resource base.
What this means given a debt based economy is fewer and fewer people have access to credit as their future earning become ever more doubtful. Think about it.
The basis of our economic system is really that we have some growth and that the American worker can spend via credit all of the money he makes in thirty years today. This is done with long term loans and rolling credit. Eventually at the end of the day overall inflation is supposed to translate into wealth as people sell their homes and exist the stock market to retire to their second vacation homes.
Well its simply not going to work that way as credit is reduced because of the shrinking of the overall input of core commodities and resources the total amount of future assets that can be created declines.
This directly reduced the amount that can be safely loaned in the future and like a back to the future wave comes back to today in the form of credit defaults as growth stalls and the real economy shrinks.
Whats interesting is for credit its basically a boolean event either your credit worthy and can service your debt or you cannot. Either your capable of taking on more credit or you are not. Regardless of the dance the government plays the intrinsic situation is the same.
Now one can look at our base fractional reserve lending levels and its at 10:1 if one considers that we go back simply to a basically stagnant economy with lending at 1:1 we are talking about a 90% reduction in the part of the economy driven by credit. However we also have a secondary economy which I call the daily economy consisting of buying energy and food. This economy generally is not financed with long term credit its pretty much a cash or cash equivalent economy. We can take a guess at the ratio looking at the collapse of the housing market. The housing markets used a tremendous amount of resources and was financed with long term credit its collapse has lead to energy usage dropping about 6% while in the financial world the true impact is devastating at least a 50% decline or more in the financial economy.
I'd suggest once it all plays out we will see that our financial economy declined by 75% while our overall energy usage probably declines by only 15% or less.
As you can see the deleveraging and roll back of credit over the longer term probably cannot reduce consumption to make up for decline the interaction is complex but given the amount of leverage assuming the system does not collapse we have a increasingly tough time covering borrowing from the future for today.
The only way out is to reduce the pool of potential borrowers the trick is you keep your 10:1 leverage financial system it just simply operates for a smaller and smaller precentage of the population.
Globally this is effectively what happens right now credit availability is unevenly distributed there is no intrinsic reason that the US itself cannot accept a new underclass with demographics similar to the third world to support a smaller population that can still live a lifestyle similar to todays.
If you look at third world countries this is exactly how they operate the top of the pyramid lives exactly like they do in the US down through their supporting staff. Pay scales are quite similar and energy usage is about the same. Credit availability is effectively the same. The large population of poor skews the statistics to give a much lower per-capita energy usage but what you really have is a enclave of western level affluence in a sea of poverty with less than 10% of the population using 50% of the energy or more.
At least initially the political instability caused by rising poverty will allow one of the current political groups to tighten its hold on power.
One of the tipping point factors will be when the social support web created after the Great Depression is removed at some point you will see a ground swell of support for limiting social services. Collapsing state and local governments will probably make this a defacto situation without a vote. As people refuse to accept the crushing tax burden required to keep our current social services working as the country is overwhelmed with poverty they will simply cease to be available with no real changes in the law.
This is how its done in Communist countries all these services are supposedly available but there are few physical offices that allow you to claim your social support and you have huge lines and massive delays if you try to use the social services. I doubt for a while that the contract will be torn up it just simply will become impossible to fufill. I'd not be surprised in the least to see governments for example cut web access to jobless benefits and require you to fill out ever more paperwork in person and fewer and fewer offices.
I really don't see any reason as long as we try to follow the status quo that we simply won't see the poverty levels for the lowest rungs of the social ladder increase to allow the top to continue.
The biggest reason I reject the current concepts for our society to transform itself into a renewable one is that these proposals don't address how they deal with this much simpler and easier approach.
Its far far easier to allow the expansion of the impoverished level to include a growing precentage of the population of the first world countries. In fact by doing this it also works to remove the wage disparity that resulted in the large global trade imbalances in the first place. As wages are pushed down locally you will get localization as jobs are returned to reduce energy costs. ELP is agnostic to the way its implemented a society with dwindling real resources has no choice but to practice ELP. But it can be done in a good way or a bad way ELP is neither good nor bad intrinsically. It does not define how the fruits of a relocalized economy are distributed. As and example ELP was widely practiced in the Middle ages but obviously the serfs where probably not happy with this form of ELP.
There are only two solutions to preventing this. For the wealthy to wind down their lifestyles and allow the declining wealth to be redistributed and for a new renewable society to grow but minimizing the disparity. This does not mean we can maintain our current way of life but it would mean that we could if we worked hard ensure that the bottom is not one of deep poverty. If we also practice population control over time as population declines the per capita wealth is increased as the system becomes more renewable.
Its a slow and steady change but one thats doable if the top of the pyramid chooses.
Next assuming the above won't happen we can look at our lifestyles and change internally. I'm a big fan of Amish electricity (compressed air) since it allows local manufacture of a wide range of products which make life easier. What this approach does is leverage our scientific knowledge base to simply develop alternative lifestyles that allow people to live decent lives. This approach does not require massive renewable projects instead we identify at the consumer levels goods and services that can be substituted with local alternatives. As these become adopted the monetary system begins to operate in a closed loop with wealth cycling amongst the lower level of the pyramids and little or none actually being extracted by the top echolon. What we do is cut off the flow of wealth to the top of the pyramid by increasingly rejecting the produces and services they offer for sale. Relocalization using this method expands local employment and any concentration of wealth is is far far more likely to be reinvested expanding the level of localization. This is not communistic its really a return to a simpler form of commerce. With this transition you could then introduce banking based on Shari like laws which fits well with this sort of economy.
Both solutions are intrinsically the same and they involve cutting the wealthy off from the flow of funds to the top any real solution to our problem must work to isolate the wealthy from the creation of wealth allowing it to recirculate back in the economy to allow renewable approaches to grow even as the overall system contracts.
Thus any real solution simply must cut the wealthy off from their ability to concentrate wealth using the current system. They are certainly free to join the new system but only via investment and in a sense adoption of a local region. They could for example develop local banks again and resign themselves to taking a smaller piece of the pie and spending the money in the local economy.
It turns out the most important thing that must be recycled in a renewable economy is money.
If you can't show your plan causes money to be recycled then its not renewable.
Mega wind farms our fine not problem but they better be locally owned mega wind farms owned be the elite do no good but are simply a variant of the old landed estate model.
Certainly the wealthy can loan the local populace the money to build the mega wind farm and the sale of the electricity generated can be used to pay off the loan but this is how it must operate the ownership of resources and renewable energy generation must revert fairly quickly back to the local economy.
Once the loan is paid off future profits go to create a flow of wealth into the local economy.
This forces the wealthy to go and invest in another region as they are cut out of the flow of wealth from current investments.
Excellent points memmel!
One of the books in my meager library is Simon Velez's "GROW YOUR OWN HOUSE".
In it, among many wonderful pieces of bamboo architecture, is depicted a beautiful two story house that would cost around $5000 to build. It is made mostly of renewable resources and can be assembled by low skilled builders such as myself. However if one were to try and start building such structures you can be sure that it would not be allowed. You could never get a construction permit for something like it even though it probably surpasses our traditional cardboard energy hogs in all parameters.
Here is an excerpt from a reviewer:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3575/is_1279_213/ai_111105947/
We are currently locked into a system that will not freely let us off the hook. The wealthy are not going to easily give up their control, the rest of us will have to wrest it from them. I couldn't agree more with the idea that we have have to cut off their flow of wealth and with it their means of control over us.
You have to you have no choice. Just like any revolution thats ever happened eventually the population was forced well beyond the limit and they rose up to cut off the wealthy.
It can be done via a peaceful revolution like I'm suggesting. Indeed if you dig you realize that Ghandi and then Martin Luther King where successful because they where able to cut off the flow of funds into the coffers of the wealthy early via non-violent means. But peaceful our bloody the essence of a revolution to preserve prosperity for all when the system reaches the point that the wealthy have extracted to much is to cut off the flow of wealth and either force them to reinvest in the local economy by economic force or by seizure.
You have to force the best option become one of local reinvestment not extraction and wealth concentration. As far as the laws go I'd suggest that WT iron triangle is now reeling your 100% correct that one of the most important things is a return to the common person to be able to buy, create or build housing in exchange for a few years worth of labor. I'd suggest that in a sustainable society housing can only consume 20% of 5 years worth of labor. For example given a median wage of 40k over 5 years this is 200k 20% of this is 40k. Thus in a renewable society you must have good housing for 40k so the flow of cash from your labor at 40k a year is directed to purchasing locally made goods and supporting the local economy. I'm not saying your other living expenses won't rise significantly but the only way to survive as more money is spent staying alive is to dramatically lower housing costs.
Thus you can see that for housing at least the rule is really 1X annual income. And its very reasonable to expect people to save 10-20% of their income over 5-10 years to buy housing. Assuming a savings rate of 10% over 5 years implies that loans with 50% down are reasonable and the real interest burden is small since they would be five to ten year loans.
Can we build decent housing for 40k for most families in the US certainly!
It goes from there but I see that your understand exactly what I'm saying. With housing reduced to 1X income the wage slave is liberated and able to invest in more expensive local goods and with housing costs quickly eliminated most people would be in a position to float their own small businesses later as living costs are lower. Especially if they grow a garden. They can afford to run a small business that say cash flows only 20K a year if they have no housing costs. They would be just as well off as the person working for a wage making 40k and saving for a house.
In this strange world the workers actually make more than the employers but the employers have stored wealth in the form of both assets and lower cash flow requirements.
Maybe the make the same but the store owner owns a house and later sells it to his employee for a fancier house fine no problem but the wealth is being correctly transferred the differentials between the classes are very low and each step of the ladder is closely positioned you don't have dramatic disparity. The employeer's house is the same or only 2X as nice as his employees depending on the time and he only gets the better house after many years of real profit and savings from real production.
This is not and attack on earned wealth from real work its and attack on ponzi scheme based wealth.
It has to happen the only question is how its executed in all nuances of the word.
Memmel,
How do you create $40K housing for an average family? $40K won't even cover the cost of providing sewerage and and even the most rudimentary roadways while providing a block of ground large enough to have even a modestly productive garden.
Even if you just build a shanty shack the servciing cost of the land is very high. Allowing housing estates that don't have adequate sewerage systems is to invite very nasty diseases like cholera and typhus, which was the intial driver behind the creation of building codes in the first place.
It will take a huge crisis, possibly bordering on armed revolution, before TPTB relax the building/development codes sufficiently to allow $40K housing. Then there is the question of marketing this arrangement to the masses that will still be pining for their McMansion dreams long after reality has dealt that idea a fatal blow.
Most trailers sell for less than 40k
This company used to make standard homes in factories.
http://jimwalterhomes.com/index.asp
Its out of business now it just happens to be one I know about and I don't know of a similar company
off the top of my head.
As far as sewer goes its not needed you can use composting toilets and you can also pump out a closed system. For larger pieces of land that have room for a garden a traditional septic tank system should work.
Probably the best answer is a composting toilet chained to a septic system. There is really no intrinsic reason why you can't design a house with a simple cheap and complete waste treatment system.
Or even and apt building. Our shit and piss are actually very valuable.
Maybe I should also add my experience in third world countries has made me realize that a lot of our sanitation concerns are really fear mongering. They are not real. The third world generally does not suffer cholera and typhus outbreaks despite the primitive sanitation which could be improved dramatically with better design and not more expensive materials. I'm sorry I've lived under conditions that would freak most Americans out then after a while I realize they are not as unsanitary as people would have you believe.
Here is and example of someone actually catching a variant of typhus in Vietnam.
http://journal.shouxi.net/html/qikan/nkx/crbdxc/20069129/200808311639358...
And another case.
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSHAN30185320071111
And I assure you the rats are big and bold. I tried to kick one once while walking through a tunnel and the sucker almost attacked me. The point is it can be shockingly unsanitary yet in Vietnam three years passed without a outbreak of chlolera. I suspect at least 1-2 deaths in the most recent outbreak but lets compare this to the number of people that die in automobile wrecks each year or even struck by lightning in say Vietnam. A fast search show in one incident more people dead than from cholera or typus.
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSP157176
For all intents and purposes in many parts of the country you only have open sewers with effectively no real attempts at sanitation. Yet the actual number of deaths from cholera and typus remain low.
Yet it takes only a few minutes to find that you can readily solve these problems.
http://www.oursoil.org/
Next on to housing costs.
http://www.builderonline.com/construction/from-barn-raisings-to-home-bui...
No interior and not 40k but lets assume a 1200 sqft house almost half the size and not 3 porches.
I'd suggest that this would be in the neighborhood of 80k for the house.
Here is building in Thailand.
http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Size-House-Thailand-Build-40k-t245301.html
120,000 Bhat is about 4 thousand dollars for materials.
The Thai story is important notice that your not in a hurry building a house is something you do when you don't have another job.
And this is not even considering getting family or the community to help. If population is stagnant to declining the number of new homes that would have to be built is small. Most of the labor can be provided for free in the right community.
And I've of course not even gotten into the larger number of alternative construction methods.
Its very doable different from today but not impossible and with some thought the actual quality of life would not be worse than today. I simply don't see that its as impossible as you suggest.
And this does not even consider the other obvious aspect which is why not rebuild and refurbish existing houses ? If needed they can be enlarged but we could easily make far better use of our existing housing stock.
Well I've obviously been suggesting in most of my posts that this is indeed what we face. I am suggesting that the right answer is to look past what TPTB do today and into what we can do when we can safely challenge them. At some point after housing collapses and most people are broke they will have little choice but to accept alternative approaches. I agree that housing is a tough battle given all the work done to make it unfordable but all these rules don't matter if no one can afford a house then you have to deal with the real situation.
My key point is that I believe its critical to get housing costs down to only be 1X income allowing it to be paid for in 5-10 years.
Consider someone who works for 30 years in a stagnant society beyond daily living costs they need to do the following.
1.) Buy/Build a house.
2.) Save for retirement.
3.) Provide at least some nest egg money for their children.
Obviously if we can reduce the housing cost from 3X-4X annual income to 1X annual income this is a significant gain and brings with it the possibility of saving for retirement and for your children.
As far as I can tell its a must to allow you to make it in a stagnant society. Also of course you want to use cheap transportation for as long as you can. For example as long as your young and capable you should bicycle etc. There is more to it but I've reached the conclusion that the critical factor seems to be housing costs once these are reduced to 1X income its possible to solve a wide range of other problems easily. Next further examination seems to indicate 1X income is very doable. Certainly if you wish you can after you same the money move to a house thats 2X or 3X income but this would be your second house purchase your first one should be done at 1X income and it looks like a second better house purchase would occur after say 10-15 years of the first purchase.
A perfect chain of events using this scenario would be to purchase your first house probably a condo at 1X salary at 25-30 have one child or more in the 30-35 or even slightly older range. Your second home could be purchased before the oldest child was ten probably larger than the first giving room for teen agers and young adults assuming in the future most children actually stay home until they are 25 to drumroll save money for a house. By the time your 55-60 you no longer need the large home and can then downsize back to a smaller home and enter partial retirement if you wish. At 65-70 we can assume caring for the elderly returns and your own children now in their prime and with enough money to buy a larger home can also get one large enough to include the parents. Or assuming extended families a single house can simply be kept in a family if there is a stronger social contract to lower personal conflict.
Certainly its not easy but its doable and you can readily see that after a few generations in general you end up with a significant amount of real wealth in the form of paid off houses passed down from generation to generation. Done correctly and assuming reasonable population control after a few generations housing costs drop dramatically and your left with maintenance and refurbishing costs.
In fact after a bit I don't see why substantially more cannot but spent building a nice multi-generational dwelling. So you have a mix of large multi-generational geared homes and small homes for case where family politics or the occasional loss of your fortune makes this approach undesirable.
But it just seems that one of the key factors continues to be creation of decent 1X salary housing once you have that it provides the base to develop much better housing.
My thesis can be given some numerical support with the following graph.
http://www.investingintelligently.com/2006/08/30/historical-housing-pric...
This suggest we actually approached the 1X income mark at least for people with jobs during the depths of the depression. If this could have been carried forward with more people returning to work and housing slowly expanded probably using the alternative work approach i.e its done when better paying jobs are not available as a sort of fallback work then I believe we could have developed the real growth in wealth I envision. No reason we can't and should not try again in whats probably going to be the next great depression.
memmel, are you familiar with N55
Micro Dwellings
Another well worn book in my little library is Buckminster Fuller's Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Synergetics.
Hello,
there are ways to deal with human waste almost for free, see the Humanure handbook. Also the black soldier fly larvae feed on humanure, which is the way to go for people living in cities. Can make an excellent emergency source of protein, too :) Anyway, disposing the human waste via patable water is expensive, wasteful, unsanitary and unethical. It probably won't be an option in the future, anyways.
As far as urine is conserned, it comes out sterile and will stay that way unless mixed up with dung. You can keep the golden water for a few months in a closed container to make sure it ferments completely and use it as a fertilizer afterwards. Or you can use it straight.
It will violate the codes, but will be a rightful and safe thing to do.
I don't know how about roadways, but if you can pay your house off in a one year, you won't need them very much.
The cost of servicing the land doesn't need to be high, unless one insists on a fancy lawn. In that case fertilizers, pesticides, gas for the lawn mower, leaf blower etc. are required. The main price of organic garden is, on the other hand, a sore back.
...the main issue is not that a smaller part of the population pie is eating a much larger portion of the resource pie but that it is eating said pie of of someone elses table...
Up until 60 or so years ago this was cause for war but 'globalisation' has rationalised and legalised the current situation -making it appear 'normal'...
Nick.
I became interested in writing about this subject in the 60's and 70's, especially as it applied to medicine. There were many interesting problems from the lead to attenuate radiation to the mercury that was then in thermometers and accurate blood pressure units. The most interesting was silver, There was no chemical substitute for silver in the photographic process. Xray films were large and double coated with silver rich emulsions designed to decrease the need for high exposures. Recycling of silver from used hypo was limited but improved with the invention of the Rotex. Faraday's Laws of Electrolysis dictated that energy was required to plate the silver solution. During the Hunt fiasco silver became so expensive the film was being stolen - like copper in recent years- and some companies reduced the silver content resulting in bad film. Recycling became extremely popular. I also used B J Skinner as a reference for potential shortages, However with the development of substitutes for mercury and digital photography some problems became moot. Still there is a plethora of materials required for modern medical care.
There are anumber of other photo sentisive metals and compounds that can be subistituted. Silver just happens to be the cheapest at the present.
Name one with a speed comparable to silver halide.
I did not say that they were better in every way, I just said there were substitutes that could be use if silver wasn't available. Platinum and palladium metals will work as well as certain organic dyes.
True platinum and organic dyes will work but their photosensitivity is orders of magnitude less. They were worthless for xray film. Research to find a satisfactory chemical substitute dates to the 19th Century. There is no process with an ASA equivalent even close to 0.1 % of silver halide film? Even the skin is often photo sensitive. Given sufficient sun one can produce an image of a bikini.
robert,
Most people stopped using silver in photography 5 years ago when digital cameras replaced film and computers replaced developing prints. When was the last time you used either?
Neil1947, I mentioned that in the original post. Silver is not critical for medical care as it seemed in the 1970's to 1980's. Technology prevailed.
--To answer your question I have used a disposable camera this month. Some xray facilities still use conventional film. A computerized digital radiographic system is a huge financial investment requiring energy and material.
"Some xray facilities still use conventional film. A computerized digital radiographic system is a huge financial investment requiring energy and material."
True, but it pays off pretty quickly. No film, no developing chemicals, much less labor for film handling, no need for on-site film libraries taking up valuable sq ft, no need for time-consuming purging.
Also, much better service to physicians, as images can be transmitted wherever they're needed, and manipulated for easier reading by the radiologist or end-user physician.
All in all, an enormous improvement.
True, the digital revolution arrived just in time as a miracle to rival the internet. Here's hoping we find the energy to keep both going.
"Here's hoping we find the energy to keep both going."
The funny thing is, it probably takes less energy to run an LCD monitor than it took to power an old-fashioned x-ray light-box, and think of all the resources you save: silver, developer chemicals, messengers to carry those films from exam-rooms to the radiologist to the ER, etc, etc.
And the Internet? Think how much less power Craigslist requires than newspapers, with printing, and delivery, and killing all those trees!
In both cases you cite, Jevon's paradox prevails.
Uhm, no. Really not.
Labor, especially from the radiologist, is by far the largest part of the cost of radiology. Digital radiology may save $1-2/exam, or only about 1% of the cost of an exam.
Jevon's only applies where prices are falling. Sadly, medical costs haven't fallen anytime recently.
Actually, this is a good example of where Jevon's fails. We were originally talking about silver, and silver has been completely eliminated by digital radiography. So, no matter how many exams we do or pictures we take, silver consumption is still...zero.
Uhm, yes it does.
You were writing in both cases about the energy requirements in each process. I don't even have to research to know that vastly more energy is used today in x-ray technology than in the days of the old-fashioned x-ray light-box. Same trend is true for internet and computer use. energy consumption grows apace, else we have financial 'difficulties.'
You were writing in both cases about the energy requirements in each process.
No, I wasn't. Look back at the posts above - I was talking about silver.
I don't even have to research to know that vastly more energy is used today in x-ray technology than in the days of the old-fashioned x-ray light-box
Well, if you want to change the subject....yes, you do. There's the the embedded energy in the film itself (all that silver mining, which is where this all started....), chemical processing of the film, viewing of the film on a 50 watt light-box, the messengers transporting the film around, heating and lighting of the film library, transport of film to archives, the disposal of the film, etc, etc. Digital radiography involves creating an image, which uses milliwatts, reviewing a film for a minute or two on a 75 watt LCD screen, which might use .05 kilowatt-hours, and a tiny pro-rata power supply for the server which stores the images.
The old process was much, much more energy intensive.
To make another point: this looks like a classic example of two things: the power of substitution, and the unreliability of one's uninformed intuition.
"The funny thing is, it probably takes less energy to run an LCD monitor than it took to power an old-fashioned x-ray light-box,..."
You were talking about the energy involved.
And...are you actually going to claim that all x-ray technology and usage today uses less energy than in the "days of the old-fashioned x-ray light-box?" That would IMO be an incredible claim.
You were talking about the energy involved.
Ah, true, Robert Wilson did take the radiology/silver discussion towards energy.
"are you actually going to claim that all x-ray technology and usage today uses less energy than in the "days of the old-fashioned x-ray light-box?
By golly, that's just what I did. Please, re-read what I said, and see if it doesn't make sense. Digital radiology uses many fewer resources and much less energy. Physical film is an enormous pain, and physicians and healthcare adminstrators are very happy to be rid of it.
Now, as a wild guess, digital radiology probably uses 20% as much energy as old-fashioned radiology. Radiology may have grown by, say, 50% since things started going went digital, so overall energy consumption has fallen. On the other hand, the growth of radiology has nothing to do with falling costs, which is the other element of Jevon's.
Now... does a 'wild guess' somehow equal 'uninformed intuition?'
and, even if your conjecture is true, how many years will it take for overall radiology energy usage to overtake your postulated 'peak' of radiology energy use? Or do you deny this will happen? Jevon's paradox does not happen instantly.
does a 'wild guess' somehow equal 'uninformed intuition?.
Well, I was saying that precise quantification is difficult. OTOH, digital clearly uses a lot less resources.
More examples: 1) in the normal course of taking an x-ray, there are roughly 15-20% re-takes. These are mistakes, which waste film. Digital eliminates this waste. 2) There's no need for film copies for specialist consults, or referrals to other facilities: the image can be transmitted, or placed on a CD (these both are a lot cheaper, and use less in the way of resources). 3) conventional film can be lost or damaged, and that requires a whole new procedure to replace it - this happens more often that you'd like to think. 4) digital is more accurate, because the radiologist can manipulate the image - this reduces false positives, which greatly increase cost and energy consumption. 5) digital uses substantially less radiation. This reduces the power to the x-ray tube. Much more importantly, it also reduces the risk of cancer - for instance, conventional mammograms increase the lifetime likelihood of breast cancer by 1-2% for every mammogram! What's the E-ROI of reducing cancer incidence?
how many years will it take for overall radiology energy usage to overtake your postulated 'peak' of radiology energy use
First, I really meant to refer back to the original discussion about silver. 2nd, how does this support Jevon's? Energy is a tiny component of the cost of radiology; digital radiography never reduced fees; and health care consumption is highly insensitive to fees, in part because people are too scared to question them, and in part because of 3rd party payors. The whole point of Jevon's is that efficiency reduces prices, and that increases consumption - that doesn't hold here, for all the above reasons.
".... silver has been completely eliminated by digital radiography."
I think this is a good example of the potential benefit of 'dematerialization' as a powerful mitigation strategy to prevent scarcity. Dematerialization of this kind is one way of realizing the goal of "using less" (part of the concept of "managed austerity").
I agree on "the potential benefit of 'dematerialization' as a powerful mitigation strategy to prevent scarcity. "
On the other hand, I would emphasize that digital radiography is superior in every way - it's not a tradeoff, or compromise.
Similarly, PHEVs (which reduce liquid fuel consumption by 90% over the average US vehicle) are superior in every way to ICE vehicles: cheaper over the whole lifecycle (at current, relatively moderate gas prices), more powerful, easier to use, etc, etc.
I think these are examples which point to the likelihood that we don't need to approach things from the point of view of austerity.
A nice survey article. Thank you.
I have two concerns, not necessarily shortcomings of the author, but just issues I think need to be addressed.
1) "A solution calls for nothing less than a globally co-ordinated societal response." - Clearly, this is not a technical issue, nor even an entirely political one. Given our incredibly poor success at global coordination. What are the chances that we'll get together on something as abstract to the common person as mineral reserves?
2) Impact of declining energy on the "elements of hope" - the initial discussion about reserves and flow rates includes some insightful thoughts about the co-relation between energy cost and density and mineral extraction. It would be nice to see some consideration of the impact of reduced energy density/increased cost on the proposed solution. Especially if these are coming from a plant source, the relationship between agriculture and energy would have to be considered.
"What are the chances that we'll get together on something as abstract to the common person as mineral reserves?"
Close to zero. Nevertheless, it's the proper solution framework.
".... Especially if these are coming from a plant source, the relationship between agriculture and energy would have to be considered."
Good point. I have no answer to that. Anyone else?
Very interesting, and scary, post. Lots to think about.
I am confused about the elements of hope. You mention early on that iron (Fe) has a lifetime of about 50 years, and yet you place it as an element of hope, which are 'the most abundant elements available to mankind'. This seems to be a contradiction.
Don
Good point. The elements of hope are indeed no "end solution". In the end, the only thing that really helps is using less (by using less per capita and no further exponential population growth). The solution framework of the elements of hope can buy us time, necessary for some kind of transition.
This looks like desinformation.
Minerals are not scarce: related mining has just been suffering from under-investment for the past three decades. The TNO guy tries here the usual bias: "if oil has peaked, then everything has peaked".
It is particularly untrue for uranium, as we had highlighted in this article (sorry, in French, but links inside are in English).
We do recommend Dr. Diederen to spend more time in reading real geologists reports and less time in propagating lobbying materials such as the ones the Energy Watch Group is paid to disseminate.
Since he's in charge of Defence and Safety issues, one could imagine that he'd like to convince some (his customers ?) that resources wars are at the door. Let's hope we are wrong on such an intention.
So all we have to do is manufacture some wealth, pour it down the mine shafts and voilà we have infinite quantities of minerals. I guess that "Le Fonction exponentielle", is not understood in France either. C'est la Vie!
See my comment (on Boof) on uranium. Suppose that uranium minerals are indeed not scarce, this does not "proof" that all metal minerals are thus not scarce.
Can you substantiate your claim that it's all simply a matter of underinvestment?
If you read my paper, you would have noticed that I'm talking about scarcity of energy (not just oil) and that I'm focussing on metal minerals (not everything).
Unfortunately, the rest of your comment is not usable to comment upon. Please try to stick to the paper presented to you or the useful comments of others.
"Metals like gallium, germanium and scandium are not incorporated in table 1 by lack of data, but these metals suffer from a very low extraction rate as they are by-products (in very low concentrations) of other metal minerals; independent production growth is therefore not an option, thus making an increasing role for these elements impossible. "
This is grossly stupid and untrue. If I might, as someone who actually deals with these metals?
Gallium is extracted as a by product of the Bayer Process (bauxite to alumina) yes.....but the vast majority of Bayer Process plants in the world do not have the extraction kit. The Ga is just allowed to go into the red mud ponds. If we want more Ga to use, all we've got to do is add $50 million worth of kit to the side of the Bayer Process plants that already exist. ($50 million in mining terms is a very small sum of money BTW)
The same with scandium (my specialty). There are any number of mineral wastes that we can process Sc from. We just don't bother, because the world currently uses 5 tonnes a year or so. I have on my desk a plan (properly costed etc) to extract 60 tonnes a year from just one mineral waste stream from one plant. There are 37 plants around the world that this same technology could be added to.
If yer man is going to get obvious things like this wrong then I don't rate very much his views on anything else about metals.
For example, talking about Cu, he seems to have missed that in the 80s we discovered an entirely new set of ore resources. We worked out the SW/SX process. This gave us access to an entirely new set of ores.
Please, why not get people who actually understand the minerals business to write for you? This is embarrassing in its naivety.
Technology changes, or have you all missed that?
Large amounts of gallium can be extracted from the idaho phosphate plants fly ash waste along with silver zinc and phosphoric acid. About fifteen years ago I worked on this process. One of the waste streams contained rubidium which could be extracted at a rate of about one ton a month. Whoopy ding. The world demand for rubidium is 20 to 40 kilograms a year. Conclusion was why bother.
There must be hundreds of rubidium atoms on one of those atomic clock gadgets. Think how many clocks we could make!
IMO it's just another symptom of the profligacy of scale, or, our civilization gradually going insane. It's "oh, noes, the earth is running out of mineral X!", while the complainer stands in front of a stinking rubbish heap that is a better source of X than the ore from which it was once mined.
Tim,
Thanks for your comments. I think the problem is that Ugo is using "reserves"( drilled out deposits economic to extract at today's prices) when he should be using "resources"( known deposits or likely deposits based on geology, that may be economic to extract now or at some higher price).
I follow the definitions of reserves, reserve base and resource base as defined by the USGS (ref 17). In my paper I clearly explain why I use reserves instead of reserve base or resource base.
Funny your making a lot of assumptions about the amount of electricity we are willing to devote to refining aluminum.
I'd suggest from reading your comment that your answer is just as as naive since you don't consider important issues outside your own narrow realm of expertise.
Of course the oil industry makes very similar arguments about oil extraction.
The reason your probably wrong and this approach is correct is that the highest probability is that we will devote far less to resource extraction in the future than we do today. Consider that we devote 50% less money and energy to resource extraction.
If the resources are fairly depleted which can be determined from looking at the existing resource base and how much has been extracted given the above thesis its a good bet that we will face constraints across a wide range of mineral resources.
Thus in my opinion your the one thats both wrong and completely missing the point. I think its a very safe bet to expect the amount of energy, time effort and money we devote to resource extraction to dwindle in the future. If we have depleted our most easily accessible resources and our effort to extract declines then the total amount extracted will decline. Technical progress is almost completely irrelevant vs a 50% decline in effort to extract.
memmel,
If your argument is that we will not have sufficient renewable and nuclear energy to extract and process minerals, then we need to know how much energy is being used. Is it comparable to what domestic refrigerator use, or A/C or the total electric energy?
In Australia, of the energy used by industry(not domestic) mining accounts for 4%, refining(mainly aluminium ) accounts for 11%. Since Australia exports most of its mineral production , probably a better question is:
"will Australia be able to continue extracting and refining metals for export?".
Considering that we get most of our export earnings from coal and mineral exports, I think it's reasonable to assume that we will be able to space 15% of our energy for these purposes.
I would expect the US would be using a lot less than 15% of its energy budget for extracting and refining, metals. The energy use of refining will not change very much with declining ore grades, so its the <5% energy used for extracting. Do you have a better estimate than <5%??
The biggest uncertainty will be how much coal can be used in future for steel production? If we had to live manly using steel from recycled SUV's and beer cans would that be so difficult?
Googling around, it is easy to discover that the highest % of recycled steel usable in, for example, auto manufacture, is around 20% due to impurities (mainly zinc) in the recycle stream. It will take major changes, IMO, in the way we manufacture and recycle to get this % up to something reasonable like 80% or so.
Recycling is largely 'downcycling' simply postponing for a bit when a given commodity/resource gets sent to the landfill.
ET,
basic oxygen furnaces only use 20% recycled steel scrap, but electric arc furnaces use 95% recycled scrap that is used for long products such as construction beams. Electric arc dust captured in the flue has 20-30% Zn content. There are now methods to recycle this Zn and Fe.
"It will take major changes, IMO, in the way we manufacture and recycle to get this % up to something reasonable like 80% or so."
Even now, 50% of car steel comes from recycled inputs, and 95% of scrapped car steel is recycled.
"Even now, 50% of car steel comes from recycled inputs, and 95% of scrapped car steel is recycled."
Do you have references for this?
ET,
Here is one reference from Australia
http://www.sria.com.au/expertise/env.html
generally 15-20% recycled steel is used for cars, 95% for re-bars
He's doing no such thing; he's pointing out a major factual error in the article.
The claim was that production of metals like gallium could not be increased independently of production of the "host" metals. This claim is in error because so much of potential gallium production is wasted; simply building another processing unit would allow gallium production to substantially increase without any increase in aluminum production.
Indeed, it sounds as if gallium production could substantially increase even if aluminum production fell sharply, simply by building processing equipment on the remaining aluminum plants. So it seems as if you're the one making most of the assumptions about electricity and aluminum.
He was speaking strictly within the realm of his expertise. For you, who has no expertise in that area, to call him "naive" is incredibly arrogant.
Just because somebody doesn't agree with your pet theory doesn't make them wrong, and dismissing data you don't like is a sure course to self-delusion.
What is the total resource base of gallium? How much has been extracted? You have no idea what these numbers are. You're just pretending you do because it fits your argument to do so.
Total gallium resources are upwards of a million tons, as compared to 100 tons/year of current production.
Your opinion doesn't matter when it contradicts the facts.
Not when much more than 50% of a resource stream is being thrown away. 60% of 50% is still much more than 10% of 100%, meaning gallium production could increase substantially despite a 50% decline in aluminum production.
(Remember, the comment you're replying to was about gallium, and hence generalized rants don't apply.)
Unfortunately, yes. More unfortunately, there seems to be something of a trend in this regard, as the recent article on checking the Limits to Growth predictions suffered much the same problem. It sometimes seems as if people view peak oil as so true and so important that it's pointless to check the facts, which of course is fatal for constructing a credible argument.
"He's doing no such thing; he's pointing out a major factual error in the article."
See my comment on Tim, again please try to grasp the meaning and implication of the paper in its complete context. The 'easy' to concentrate metal minerals are depleting across a large part of the spectrum, you can not simply isolate one or a few metals and consider the case 'solved'.
That's not a useful comment, yet you keep making it. If readers keep not "getting" your article, then the problem is with the article's explanation and argument, not the readers.
There are major factual flaws in the article; address them or the article falls apart. Complaining that "you just don't get it" does nothing to address these specific and detailed complaints.
Your comment clearly indicates that you entirely missed the whole point of my paper. It's not the nitty-gritty details of some isolated element that are important, it's the whole context of lots of metals getting more scarce within the same timeframe.
Suppose your claim is correct about ramping up primary production of scandium to almost 2500 tonnes per year (and suppose providing 2 billion dollars investment is not a problem). What problem are you going to solve by substituting other metals with your scandium? Take a look at table 1, we need millions of tonnes of metals each year!
I might be confused about this, so maybe you can help me out. When I got my PhD, I learned that scientific articles, at least in applied science, are roughly structured like "$Data supports $Claim, see $Figure", and that, if $Data is wrong, the whole argument collapses. If somebody shows you that your $Data is seriously unreliable at one point, the correct reply is not to wave that off as a "nitty-gritty detail".
So far, by my count, four of the data points were demonstrated false or highly doubtful within hours by people casually strolling an internet forum. Even cautious extrapolation suggests there will be many, many more problems with the data, and hence the claims appear to be highly doubtful. Others point out that the whole reporting effort for reserves probably results in vastly underestimating the actual available reserves by orders of magnitude, which efficiently would nullify the whole quantitative part of argument being made.
Since I proved, by looking at a table, that we have 95GT more iron available than you initially thought, we have half a billion tonnes of metals for free every year, problem solved. Which is about as nonsensical as your statement.
This article's key assumption is that renewables (wind, solar) can't scale to replace Fossil Fuels, and therefore insufficient energy will be available for mineral extraction and processing. The references don't support that.
Two of the references are non-primary/popular material(Savinar, Wirth), and two are from the Energy Watch Group (EWG). One EWG study reference addresses uranium, and one deals with renewables [11]. Oddly, the Energy Watch Group renewables study [11] doesn't agree with the thesis that renewables can't scale to replace FF. Here are some quotes:
"The results of both scenarios show that – until 2030 – renewable capacities can be extended by a far greater amount and that it is actually much cheaper than most scientist and laypeople think. The scenarios do explicitly not describe a maximum possible development from the technological perspective but show that much can be achieved with even moderate investments."
"The scenarios show that renewable energy technologies have huge potential to help in solving the climate change problem, lowering dependence on fossil fuels, and making it possible to phase out nuclear energies. "
So, this article's most credible source doesn't support it's key assumption.
The Energy Watch Group has on its board several who are in the renewable energy field, based on this link. This membership doesn't mean that their conclusion is necessarily wrong, but I suspect their bias is in the direction of more renewable energy being the right direction to go.
Wouldn't you agree that this was by far the most credible reference used by the author? If the author's own reference disagrees with the article's key assumption...
The thing is that each time you go down an ore grade, you need more energy to get it out. Which means, absent fossil fuels, you need to build more renewable energy to extract it. And then that ore grade runs out, and you go to the lower grade, and you need to build more renewable energy still.
Put it this way. Currently the world uses 15.5TW of energy, 2TW of which is electricity; most of the rest is fossil fuels. Absent fossil fuels, either we make do with less energy overall, or the electricity must rise to match the total - adding 13.5TW.
There's a lot of scope for efficiencies - an electric train transports 1,200 people with less energy/km than if they were in 750 or so cars - so we could perhaps halve the total to 8TW or so. Of course, while 1.5 billion in the West (or Western parts of the Third World) are living in our ecotopias, the 5+ billion others would like to join us. So either they migrate to the West, or their lives improve along our lines. We can lower our requirements a bit more by eliminating waste, but worldwide we're looking at something like 22TW required for at most 9 billion people.
This 22TW is quite an increase on the 2TW we have today. The article tells us we'll be reaching some limits within 25 years, 50 at the latest. And of course, given that as one fossil fuel depletes we use another to substitute or boost it (eg natural gas burned to get oil from tar sands), the peaking of one fossil fuel tends to bring the others closer. So we can expect a fossil fuel crunch in the 2015-25 period. Maybe the recession will buy us a few more years, maybe we'll hit the Arctic or something and might stretch it out to 2030-35.
So by 2030, our renewable electricity must be able to start matching and then replacing fossil fuels in mining. Can we build generation quickly enough?
Over the past quarter-century, world electricity production has had a sustained increase of 2.79% annually. There were a few years where it managed 6%, usually when some Chinese hydro project had the switch flipped on, so we can take 6% as about the most the world can sustain in electricity generation growth. Let's imagine that today every country in the world agrees to build no more oil/coal/gas fired plants, only renewable energy.
At 2.79% increase annually, the 2TW is only 3.5TW by 2030, and becomes 22TW in 2096. At 6% it's 6.8TW by 2030, and reaches 22TW in 2050.
So even if from today all new generation is renewable, still from 2030 to some time between 2050 and 2096 we have a crunch, a period where the extra energy to extract lower grades of ore just isn't available. During such a crunch, could we stay on-track with our plan to keep building more? It's hard to say.
It always puzzles me that people on a website dedicated to talking about the depletion of one resource, people astounded that not everyone understands that there are limits, these same people are unable to accept that other resources have limits, too. The arguments against peak oil that The Market Will Provide or New Technology Will Save Us, these arguments they dismiss with a laugh when it's about oil, but happily trot out when it's some other resource.
"The thing is that each time you go down an ore grade, you need more energy to get it out. "
Sometimes. Methods change, different resources have different requirements. This is a very loose correlation, not a law of physics. Let me give an example: high quality Illinois Basin coal actually takes more energy to mine, because it's farther underground. Lower quality Powder River Basin coal can be strip-mined, (though it does tend to require more train transport). It's also more costly to burn, because of it's higher sulfur content.
"Which means, absent fossil fuels, you need to build more renewable energy to extract it. "
A lot of mining is electrical already, which fits nicely with renewables.
"And then that ore grade runs out, and you go to the lower grade"
Yes, but there tends to be geometrically more resource in that grade, so it lasts a while.
"Currently the world uses 15.5TW of energy, 2TW of which is electricity; "
While true from a straight BTU conversion point of view, that's highly misleading. 40% of primary energy, roughly 6 of those TW, are used to produce electricity. And, as you note, electricity is much more efficient (an EV uses about .2KWH/mile, while the average US ICE vehicle uses the equivalent of about 1.5KWH/mile. In the US, for instance, 45% of oil consumption could be replaced with EV/PHEV's, which would only require expanding electrical generation by 17%.
"we could perhaps halve the total to 8TW or so"
I'd say more like 5-6TW.
"5+ billion others would like to join us"
Yes, but they don't expect to do it by 2020.
"The article tells us we'll be reaching some limits within 25 years, 50 at the latest"
Ah, but that's circular.
"as one fossil fuel depletes we use another to substitute or boost it (eg natural gas burned to get oil from tar sands"
Only when it's really easy. Tar sands are moving fairly quickly to burning bitumen. Nasty, dirty and low E-ROI, but it works because there's an enormous amount of bitumen there.
"the peaking of one fossil fuel tends to bring the others closer."
Not really. US consumption of NG is pretty stable. Electrical generation has been the fastest growing consumer of NG, and that's being eclipsed by wind.
"by 2030, our renewable electricity must be able to start matching and then replacing fossil fuels in mining"
Easily. Wind can provide all new generation in the US in 4-5 years, and begin replacing coal and NG after that.
"There were a few years where it managed 6%"
That wasn't limited by supply, but by growth.
"At 6% it's 6.8TW by 2030, and reaches 22TW in 2050."
Which would work out just fine.
" The arguments against peak oil that The Market Will Provide "
This is mostly a myth, in effect a straw man. A good economist won't suggest that markets or tech will provide endless oil, just that it's realistic to expect a solution of some sort. And, it is.. in the form of renewable electricity.
More later...
Nick
My vote is with Kiashu.
Those pie charts higher up the comments are enough.
The 5 billion 'other', join us, even eventually? You have to be joking.
Re-cycling and efficiency and substitution ('technology') are necessary but nowhere likely to provide sufficient growth.
Straw men?
Sure, economists believe in growth and market solutions. And financial markets have created ponzi schemes based on growth. And the USA uses more than it produces. Where is the sustainable model? Maybe renewable electricity will be sufficient to allow reasonable life-support for a more secure life for world humanity, but that seems less and less likely if the 'transition resources' continue to get gobbled up by the current model
EDIT: I now address the right guy.
Re-cycling and efficiency and substitution ('technology') are necessary but nowhere likely to provide sufficient growth.
Could you provide more quantitative detail? You might want to read the conversation between me and Kiashu first.
economists believe in growth and market solutions.
That's not what I was addressing. I was talking about substitutes for oil. Again, You might want to read the conversation between me and Kiashu.
More importantly, what did you think of my point about the EWG study?
Nick
Sorry to be late to reply; I was out.
Quantitative detail?
Well, David Mackay the physicist at the Cavendish Lab, Cambridge Uni UK, has a try, mainly using British examples, in his book, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c18/page_103.shtml (Recommended several times by various persons on ToD.)
My point is not just whether 'we' can replace most of what, courtesy of fossil fuels, we do now, but whether 'we' can then still 'grow' along the lines of our current economic model (the model that has taken 100s of years to evolve). Recent financial events suggests the system depends on such 'growth'. Also, the idea that 'resources' can also grow to allow the 'other' 5 billion to do even a modest catch-up (that is to 'grow' using current economic methods), seems a vast stretch. See for example my point lower in the thread about the story of Japan, post WWII and Bunker's 2005 book Globalization and the Race for Resources.
Regarding Earth Watch Group. I don't know about nuclear but ...
"Help" and "lowering dependence" does not equate to allowing growth, as in BAU, and leaves unanswered the many other resource constraints, while I guess making the point that renewables are not necessarily as costly in current terms as is often assumed. Re-inventing, however, not withstanding the worthy attempt by EWG at honest counting, the basis of industrialization strikes me as as a very large and difficult project not without major resource, political and economic constraints.
We can hope we will in future be able to afford renewable electricity.
I've reviewed Mackay's book, and it's really quite unrealistic. He skews things against wind & solar at every turn.
We can get a clue to his attitude towards renewables from the second quote at the beginning of the chapter on wind, where he quotes Lovelock: "Wind farms will devastate the countryside pointlessly".
Here's an example - he says "the windiest 10% of the country with windmills (delivering 2W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person, which is half of the power used by driving an average fossil-fuel car 50 km per day."
Well, that's just goofy. We're not going to power FF cars with electricity, we're going to power electric cars. They'd only use 6 KWH to drive that far. Further, the average km/day/person in the UK is only 30, which would only need 4 KWHs.
It helps if you use [blockquote]quoted text[/blockquote] or [i]italicised text[/i] (with <> in place of []) to make reading of comment & response easier.
When we're speaking of dozens of different minerals over decades or centuries across the world, a "loose correlation" is good enough to say "each time you go down an ore grade, you need more energy to get it out."
You say that we could reduce energy consumption to 5-6TW. In one article ecotechnic-style energy use, and give a general sketch of efficiencies, reducing total energy use from 15.5TW to 7.6TW. If you have a sketch or detailed calculations with different figures, I'd be glad to see it. Until then, I stick to my own figures.
You say that the 5+ billion of the Third World don't expect to join us in a decent lifestyle by 2020. I didn't suggest that they did. But if we told them that it couldn't happen in the 21st century, I think they would not welcome that. People will put up with a lot for the sake of a good life for their children. But if not even their grandchildren will manage it...
So then we find that we have three basic possibilities:
In the first scenario, the demand on fossil fuels and minerals becomes very high indeed. Fossil fuel scarcity makes extracting minerals very expensive. In this scenario, we get a bell curve of production of things.
In the second, fossil fuel demand drops (or at least plateaus), but mineral demand goes up. However, as I outlined above, there's a pause where we're building up the enormous amounts of renewables we'd need to extract those low-grade ores. In this scenario - the pause while building up renewables, in that period we don't have enough fossil fuel or renewable energy to extract those low-grade ores. So we get a sine curve, where we hit a peak, decline, then rise up again.
As much as we in the West might like the Third World to choose the last option, it seems unlikely they will. That leaves the first two options.
US consumption of natural gas may be stable, but world consumption is not, and more relevantly, Canadian consumption isn't.
Canadian increase in oil production occurs at the expense of increased natural gas consumption. There's a reason they're thinking about building nuclear reactors to boil up the tar sands.
There exist numerous projects and proposals for converting vehicles to use natural gas, to turn coal to liquids, use natural gas to help distill biofuels, and so on. All of which supports my point: that when one fossil fuel becomes scarce, other fossil fuels are used to boost its production, or substitute for it. So the peaking of conventional crude in 2005 was masked by unconventional crude, biofuels and so on, but those masking agents could not have been created without expanded consumption of the other two fossil fuels - we delayed one peak by bringing other peaks closer.
Thus, the peaking of one brings the peaking of the other two together.
It's not a "straw man" to describe arguments made across the media and even on TheOilDrum. In this very thread people have said "this doesn't take account of improved technologies in the future" and the like. It's a prayer that The Market! or Science! will save us from having to actually do anything.
In my faith we have a saying, "pray as though everything depended on God, act as though everything depended on you." I won't be holding my breath expecting the same idiots who gave us CDOs, GM and the swine flu to save us.
hmmm. This has always seemed a bit clunky. Maybe italics would work better. I've avoided them because I like using them for emphasis, but I suppose I could use bold instead.
"When we're speaking of dozens of different minerals over decades or centuries across the world, a "loose correlation" is good enough to say "each time you go down an ore grade, you need more energy to get it out."
I'm not sure the correlation is as strong or consistent as that would suggest. Would you agree that it's not for coal? Neil, how would you describe that correlation for copper?
In one article ecotechnic-style energy use, and give a general sketch of efficiencies, reducing total energy use from 15.5TW to 7.6TW. If you have a sketch or detailed calculations with different figures, I'd be glad to see it.
I couldn't get the link to work.
You say that the 5+ billion of the Third World don't expect to join us in a decent lifestyle by 2020. I didn't suggest that they did. But if we told them that it couldn't happen in the 21st century, I think they would not welcome that.
Ah, so you feel that a timetable of, say, 60 years seems reasonable for the 3rd world. Ok, that's doable.
possibilities...the Third World tries to achieve a modern Western lifestyle exactly like ours, which puts huge demand on fossil fuels and minerals...In the first scenario, the demand on fossil fuels and minerals becomes very high indeed.
Well, this is where the timetable becomes important. A modern Western lifestyle won't need FF in 60 years for growth.
Canadian increase in oil production occurs at the expense of increased natural gas consumption. There's a reason they're thinking about building nuclear reactors to boil up the tar sands.
The likely solution appears to be burning bitumen. Again, nasty, dirty and low E-ROI, but it works.
There exist numerous projects and proposals for converting vehicles to use natural gas, to turn coal to liquids, use natural gas to help distill biofuels, and so on.
I wouldn't take them too seriously. NG for vehicles is reasonably big, but unlikely to expand. CTL isn't going anywhere. PHEV/EV's are the clear path forward.
It's not a "straw man" to describe arguments made across the media and even on TheOilDrum.
Oh, sure, someone, somewhere, is making them. But, you referred to "The arguments against peak oil that The Market Will Provide". That appears to be a reference to the idea that market forces will tend to solve depletion problems. If you want to criticize someone's vague argument..well, that's fine, but I think this discussion will be most productive if we stick to the best arguments.
Finally, Kiashu, what did you think of where I started: the point about the EWG study? Wouldn't you agree that it supports the idea that renewables are scalable?
Perhaps, but it gives a much better visual ordering of quotes and replies, and makes long or complex comments much easier to read. I can pretty much guarantee that more people will read a well-formatted comment than a wall'o'text, and using these kinds of tags will be a significant help with that.
So you don't like the italics much?
Anybody else have any votes on the topic?
I find it better not to break up other people's posts and do a line-by-line refutation, since it leads to endless nitpicking as end arguing over semantics of particular words, but if you prefer that style, then blockquote or italics, both are better than just quotation marks.
A timetable of 60 or so years for the Third World, it's not so much that it's "reasonable", more that the people will accept it and it seems technically possible. But as I've said before, the Agricultural Revolution took 300 years, the Industrial Revolution 150 years and it still hasn't reached the whole world or even all of Europe; we shouldn't expect an "ecotechnic" revolution to be any quicker.
But we ought to start on it right away.
Not sure what happened to the link, again here's ecotechnic-style energy use.
I think there's no doubt that renewables are scalable. However, one example I always bring up is Sweden. In the 1980s they voted to abolish nuclear, and built up other generation to substitute for it. But they found they enjoyed the extra power, and didn't switch off their nuclear.
So I think there's a similar danger with renewables, that we could have them as addition to rather than substitution for fossil fuels, so that overall our emissions stay the same or rise. Mandatory renewable energy targets set by countries don't seem to account for this. If my country has 1,000MW of coal, it could
and in each case, the country could say it's "20% renewable." But only in the first case would emissions drop, in the others they stay the same or rise.
"Your country has a lot of emissions."
"But we're 20% renewable!"
It's a bit the way people will sometimes buy a flash new energy-efficient fridge, and then stick the old one out in the garage as a beer fridge against a sun-facing wall. Despite the efficiency of the new one, overall power consumption goes up.
"How could my power bill go up? I bought an energy-efficient fridge."
It's not technology or money that's preventing our becoming a low-emissions society. Apart from outright denialist (actions speak louder than words) countries like Australia and the US, most will I think make strong effort to become low-emissions, and build out lots of renewables. But we may have to wait for the old fossil fuel-fired plants to wear out, or their fuel to become scarce, before they shut them down.
None of which addresses the 43% or so of emissions which do not come from burning fossil fuels, of course.
Sadly, I can't disagree. We have a lot of collective choices to make. Still, it's useful to know that renewables are perfectly doable.
I'm looking at your blog posting. I like it, and I'll give you some feedback soon, I hope (I've added one comment that's unrelated to this discussion).
Nick,
I refreshed my memory of the EWG 2008 study. While fairly positive about the prospects for renewable energy it specifically excludes looking at any growth in hydro except projects under construction. It also excludes nuclear so the two biggest non-FF sources are not being considered.
The "high variant" renewable projection of 500TWh(2010) 1,500TWh(2020) and 6,00TWh(2030) seem to imply a 15% growth rate for wind energy between 2020 to 2030. A 24% growth rate from 2010 would see 500TWh increasing to 64,000TWh(7TW average) by 2030, enough to replace all FF.
The increase in energy to extract lower grades of ores( such as copper) is only relevant if these activities use significant energy users. Since Australia only uses 5% of the energy used by industry to extract non-FF ores, I can't see a X2 or X4 fold increase in next 50 years being very relevant. People driving ICE vehicles ( or not driving ICE vehicles) is much more relevant.
See my comment on Nick on the EWG renewables study (ref 11). The high variant states that in 2030, 29% of electricity and heat could be provided by renewables (high scenario). The other 71% still has to be provided by fossil fuels (and nuclear fission).
in 2030, 29% of electricity and heat could be provided by renewables (high scenario). The other 71% still has to be provided by fossil fuels (and nuclear fission).
That's not what they said. In fact, they took pains to clarify they weren't saying that:
"The scenarios describe only two possible developments among a range of prospects, but they represent realistic possibilities that give reason for optimism. The results of both scenarios show that – until 2030 – renewable capacities can be extended by a far greater amount and that it is actually much cheaper than most scientist and laypeople think. The scenarios do explicitly not describe a maximum possible development from the technological perspective but show that much can be achieved with even moderate investments."
Don't look now, but the 'other' 5 billion are here and living down the street!
The greatest shortage in America right this moment is of people with some money in their jeans. No money means no buying of stuff, no shopping, eventually no stores, no houses being bought, no cars, no tax revenues being collected. It means banks going belly up, shopping centers, home builders, auto manufacturers, transportation companies, airlines, aircrft builders, Gallium processors ... just like what's happening right now, all across the country. Do you want to see the future of Gallium producers - or any other specialty metal producer? Go to a shopping mall.
No buying, no Gallium, Lithium Nickel, Copper, etc., simple as that.
Okay, okay ... things are getting 'better'. The 'recovery' is right around the corner ... right?
The absense of an immediate crisis is not a recovery. A recovery is when the 7+ million recently unemployed are re- hired at a salary that allows them to recover their economic position, then remove themselves from debt, then accumulate savings and purchasing power. A recovery is when the the rest of the workforce can do the same thing; when unemployment declines to historical levels and aggregate wages increase back to the historical means that existed prior Reagan- Clinton. A recovery is when the household balance sheets are rebuilt. A recovery is when prodcutive business activity supports families, communities and business, rather than credit from overseas pawn shops such as Dubai, Saudi Arabia and China. ... Rather than crooked Treasury Department handouts, Fed liquidity and Goldman- Sachs shenanigans. A recovery is something other than GS and Morgan- Stanley selling the same 30million shares back and forth to each other.
A recovery is when the resource balance sheets are in order as well.
It doesn't matter how much Gallium you can extract from a 'waste stream' for $50 million or even 25 cents if your company cannot sell its products to anyone other than the government under a 'stimulus package'. Right now, the government and its proxies are lenders of l;ast resort ... as well as borrowers of last resort. It is impossible to know at this minute when this nonsene will end, but end it must, and probably badly. The governments actions have not done one thing to address the structural deficiencies in the economy but instead have postponed any reckoning into the future. When this snapback or 'structural readjustment' finally takes place there wil be hard to find any business for Gallium at any price! The Gallium plants will close and its operators and highly paid traders and analysts will be selling apples from cardboard boxes on Wall Street or Commerce Street or 'Whatever Avenue' alongside the ex- 'highly paid' employees of GM and Chrysler.
I can say this is likely because it has happened, before. It has happened in the United States, it has happened many times in Europe and in Russia and in Japan and in most other countries. The US and the Eurozone are not so special to be exempt from the consequences of mismanagement.
This is the heart of the issue; all of the overpopulation, globalism and and resource squandering are supports to the regime of constantly expnding markets. The end is to provide more and more customers for more and more Gallium- filled products; this expansion of markets has not been drien by an expansion of wealth, rather an expansion of credit. The wealth instead is concetrated to the producers while the consumers are left with the bills.
It is impossible to say where this leaves the Gallium industry, perhaps a wealthy Lord might be found to buy all of it and he can keep it in a barn, next to his Ferraris and Rolls- Royces. A serf can take the time to polish it on occasion and gaze up from it questioningly with awe to his master's eye ... who will slowly turn and walk away.
Thanks for pointing out, rather vehemently, the flip side of the production statistics coin - demand. Why do most posters seem to be ignoring it? As I've mentioned in some previous posts dealing with metals (going back to 2007), in a peak oil situation, if the supply side doesn't bite you, the demand side certainly will. We're certainly seeing that now with practically every metal except gold. The same thing happened in the 1980's - the only (few) new mining jobs were in gold. Why should future economic downturns, whatever their cause, be different? If energy = money, most of us are likely to get poorer soon. (And if gold = money, you might as well start panning.)
Kiashu,
You start with a good question:
"So by 2030, our renewable electricity must be able to start matching and then replacing fossil fuels in mining. Can we build generation quickly enough?"
WHY would you use the growth rate of total electricity and NOT the growth rate of RENEWABLE and NUCLEAR electricity( ie non-FF)??
In the last 30 years hydro has doubled (a lot of hydro projects in Canada as well as China flipped a few switches). wind has been increasing at 30% for >10 years, nuclear as at least doubled, solar is increasing by about 50% per year. In 2008, the world had 121GW wind capacity(40GWaverage), at 30% growth that will be >4TWcapacity(>1.3TWa) by 2020 and could be much higher than 22TW by 2030. That's not including growth in nuclear and hydro(0.7TWa today) at least doubling by 2030.
Secondly how much energy is used for extracting metals? I am sure non-FF energy exceeds all energy used to extract and transport non FF minerals and metals. Iron, aluminium and cement probably use more energy to refine from ores but this won't change with lower ore grades. If you have figures to contradict this I would hope you would post.
Because I was using the growth rate of all generation, starting from the base of all generation.
If you want to use the growth rate of non-FF generation, then it's only fair to start from the base of non-FF generation.
And in fact, as I discuss here, just "non-FF" isn't good enough - we can't more than double hydro, and geothermal and tidal are limited in their expansion. We can vastly increase wind and solar PV/thermal. But wind and solar PV/thermal at end of 2007 made up only 80GW or so. Sure, they were increasing by 20% or more annually, but...
So you can have 2.79-6% of 2,000GW each year, or 20% of 80GW. I'll leave you to duplicate my calculations if you like, but I assure you, the deal I offered is the one which makes renewables look the best.
Basically, it takes a long time to transform a civilisation. The Agricultural Revolution took around 300 years to knock its way across Europe, the Renaissance 200 years or so, and the Industrial Revolution another 150 years - and it still hasn't reached most of the world, or even all of Europe.
I don't see why we'd expect an Ecotechnic Revolution to be any quicker.
Further to Kiashu's point about the roll-out of industrialization there is an instructive account of Japan's post-WWII rise in Bunker, 2005, 'Globalization and the Race for Resources', that includes the Japanese organization of peripheral supplies of minerals. For example, the requisite very large quantities of iron ore were obtained, even though it required going 900km into the Amazon jungle to Carajas, and the invention of super carriers and the ship yards to build the carriers. The contest for control according to Bunker was " ... not limited to iron and steel: Japanese and American firms were competing to mine ... [bauxite in the Amazon] "
The economics of the core strategies of any trade dominance are fascinating. As time went on " ... in many cases [long term contracts with Japanese firms] the peripherally owned mines had to continue operating in order to amortize the debts they had assumed, even when prices fell below their costs."
Educational.
wind and solar PV/thermal at end of 2007 made up only 80GW or so. Sure, they were increasing by 20% or more annually, but...
Wind was doubling every 2 years in the US, and every 3 years in the world. PV was doubling every 18 months. Every 10 doublings is an increase of 1,000:1. So, at those growth rates wind could expand 1,000 times in 20 years in the US, 35 years in the rest of the world, and PV could do it in 15 years.
Heck, if we take your 20% figure, that's a doubling every 3.8 years, which means we could go from 80GW to 22TW in 31 years. That gets us there in 2040. Not bad.
Really, electricity supply will be the least of our problems. Especially in the US, it's really quite unrealistic to suggest that we'll have basic electrical supply problems.
The bigger problems will be replacing consumer infrastructure, especially 3rd world transportation, and coal based electrical generation (to reduce CO2 emissions - at least in the US, there's plenty of coal).
Where energy is needed the most, like utility maintenance, and mining equipment, companies will easily outbid individual consumers for the few % points of energy they need. Individuals in the US will be inconvenienced (car-pooling - the horror!), but will often be hurt quite badly in the 3rd world. Let us hope that the world will get sufficiently well organized to get such things as PV flashlights and electric bikes to the 3rd world, to replace kerosene lighting and old gasoline vehicles.
As I noted elsewhere: in the US, the only real problem we have is that we would ideally expand renewables and PHEV/EVs sufficiently quickly that we'd make some of the current infrastructure obsolete. That's not a terrible cost, but it does create thorny political problems. Worse, a lot of people's careers would be obsolete, and they're going to fight that as hard as they can. We'd do well to try to help them, instead of just blaming them, and living with governmental gridlocks.
Wind is growing at about 30%/yr and solar faster; if we take 30% growth of 130GW (the combined 2008 total), that will pass 6% growth of 2,000GW in 25 years, and 2.79% in 12 years.
Wind and solar aren't going to maintain 30%/yr growth rates for another 25 years, of course, but then again neither are nuclear and hydro going to have zero growth.
It took less than 100 years for electricity to go from a scientific curiosity to a cornerstone of our society, 50 years for computers to go from esoteric and rare to deeply integrated into our lives, and about 25 years for mobile phones to overtake landlines.
Society is able to change quite quickly, at least when it comes to integrating useful new technologies.
Well, now we've come to a key difference. I think that transforming into an entirely renewable society, and ensuring everyone on the planet gets a fair share of that, that's a revolution - as profound as the agricultural or industrial revolutions were.
You think it's just a matter of a few gadgets like mobile phones.
I think the changes are more profound than a few gadgets here or there. A few gadgets can become ubiquitous within a generation or two. A revolution is a bit more than that.
Plus 1
No question.
OTOH, what we're trying to address here is whether renewables can be ramped up sufficiently to provide whatever energy is needed for mining and mineral processing. On that limited point, I think we agree: it's very possible, and not a realistic limit.
No, but it's closer to that than the industrial or agricultural revolutions were.
Those revolutions changed the livelihoods and living patterns of the vast majority of people they touched. Populations shifted en masse from farms to cities, and from fields to factories.
By contrast, switching to using renewable energy takes:
That's much, much closer to "switching from landlines to cellphones" than "switching from small rural farms to intensive urban factories".
Is that an "entirely renewable society"? Probably not, but that wasn't what we were talking about. We were talking about renewable electricity, and if you look at it objectively and quantitatively, it's really not all that complicated.
Again, I disagree that it's simply a matter of changing to renewable energy and having some electric cars. It's more profound than that. I say this for four basic reasons.
Of course, people who think we can continue with an enormous rich-poor gap in the world, or that every element except carbon will be easily available forever, or that non-fuel uses of fossil fuels are irrelevant, or that there is no climate change, such people will think "a few gadgets, awesome, that saves us from having to actually do anything."
Kiashu, here are a few thoughts.
First, I think it is a bit helpful to acknowledge that we're getting a bit off-topic here. The Original Post argued that mineral mining and processing would become difficult purely due to a lack of energy in the long-term. I think we agree that's unrealistic: renewable energy is practical in every way, and in the transition mining will be able to out-bid end consumers for oil.
2nd, I agree on the need for some serious changes in the world, if only to stop the mass extinctions that are occurring. I don't know quite what that will take, but it's important.
3rd, you said: if the West can't exploit the Third World, resources become very expensive for us
Could you expand on this? Clearly, oil imports can be eliminated. Agriculture is a net export for US/N. America - I suspect the OECD doesn't have a big net ag import deficit. What other resources do you see that would be important?
Do we seriously think that in 2050 or 2100 the world's 9-10 billion people will have around 8 billion electric cars, all eating 100+kg of meat and fish each, using 12,000kWh of electricity each annually? If not oil, something else will give.
I don't see any barriers to the cars or KWHs. The meat and fish, clearly, are a big problem, but how is limiting the expansion of meat eating all that big a change? It will take a fair amount of education, but otherwise, it's just eating what people eat right now.
fossil fuels are used in more things than just cars.
And, they're just as easily replaced, over a period of 40-50 years. About 25% of oil is used for electrical generation - clearly, that can be replaced with renewables. The only difficult thing is long-distance air travel, and that's not that hard, if that's the only thing for which we need really concentrated liquid fuels.
around 43% of current greenhouse gas emissions don't come from burning fossil fuels, but from deforestation, livestock, artificial fertiliser, rice-growing, cement-making and F-gas products. That takes more than a few gadgets to deal with.
Have you seen a nice guide to this breakdown?
"The Original Post argued that mineral mining and processing would become difficult purely due to a lack of energy in the long-term. I think we agree that's unrealistic: renewable energy is practical in every way"
To be precise: as I see it, it's unlikely we'll be willing and able to build enough renewables to make up for the lack of fossil fuels in the timeframe of the depletion of the various mineral reserves (1-2 generations, 20-60 years).
Rather than the total energy curve being a "shoulder" curve (quick rise then plateauing around 2050, with renewables replacing fossil fuels), I see it as peaking around 2020 or so, then declining as fossil fuels deplete and aren't replaced quickly enough with renewables. Optimistically, after that decline we have a rise again, returning to 2020 levels of energy production around 2080 or so; pessimistically, it never rises much again.
I imagine a time of lower energy availability, a trough from 2030 onwards, or from 2030-80. During that trough, we're not going to be getting magnesium from seawater or anything like that, so the richness/reserve limits of various minerals will kick in.
"you said: if the West can't exploit the Third World, resources become very expensive for us. Could you expand on this? Clearly, oil imports can be eliminated. Agriculture is a net export for US/N. America - I suspect the OECD doesn't have a big net ag import deficit. What other resources do you see that would be important?"
The West goes beyond the US. The West as a whole - more precisely, the First World - is a net importer of all kinds of raw materials, not just oil. For example, Japan is about two-thirds forest covered, but its domestic timber production supplies only 20% of its needs. Without countries like Malaysia and Nigera, Japan would have to cut its timber products use by 80%.
Or as another example, the mineral coltan containing tantalum, it's needed for capacitors for all our mobile phones, computers, and so on. Around half the world's production is from Australia, but the other half has blood on it. The miners in the Congo are essentially enslaved; if they were being paid an Australian miner's wage, our electronics would become a lot more expensive.
The conditions of coffee and cocoa production are fairly well-known, but you may answer they're not necessities. Well, how about margarine? 40% of Ghana's agricultural land goes to producing peanuts which almost all go to the EU to make margarine.
We can go on like this indefinitely. The First World absolutely depends on harsh and impoverished conditions in the Third World to ensure First World prosperity. We live on their backs.
"About 25% of oil is used for electrical generation - clearly, that can be replaced with renewables."
In principle, yes. In practice, most of the oil-fired generation is in Third World countries. They can't afford any new power plants, whatever their energy source. This is why I say that if we want to reduce emissions, it's a social justice, rich-poor gap sort of issue as well.
"how is limiting the expansion of meat eating all that big a change? It will take a fair amount of education, but otherwise, it's just eating what people eat right now."
It's not clear that education is very meaningful on its own. After all, worldwide we have around a billion overweight or obese people. Is it lack of education that makes them fat? Do they not know that eating McDs every day will make their bum big? Do people not continue to smoke even when the whole packet is a big warning not to? Of course they know, they just don't care.
It's less education and more simple information, but it must be combined with regulation and price/income incentives to work. That's what Australia's found with limiting water consumption, and Europe with fossil fuel consumption. Meat/fish will be the same.
A guide to the global emissions sources is here. That comes from the IPCC and others.
kiashu,
The argument was that a 2% growth rate in mineral use, the world will run out in 20-50 years because FF energy cannot be replaced by nuclear and renewable.
You are adding a straw man argument; " OK I might accept that you can replace FF with renewables , BUT that isn't going to help the third world have first world energy and metals use."
You may be right, if the third world follows China's example in fertility reduction possibly they can have a much higher standard of living than at present, probably not as high as US now, BUT that wasn't the argument of this article.
The greenhouse gas issue is also important but not relevant to whether FF can be replaced by renewables. If it can that will help to reduce emissions but other measures will also be needed.
If you want to put it in quotation marks, it's best to actually quote me. I never said that we could or couldn't replace FF with renewables in 20-50 years. I said it was physically and technically possible, but politically and culturally very difficult.
To mention Third World demand isn't a "straw man" argument. A "straw man" argument is where I make up my opponent's argument as being something it's not, so I can easily knock it down. In this case, I'm saying that Third World demand for minerals and energy simply wasn't mentioned.
Third World demand is rising, and Third World people are migrating to the First World, both legally and illegally. So whether these people are in the Third World or the first, they'll be wanting to consume more energy and minerals.
That's also the promise of globalisation and many development projects - basically, the whole world gets to live like Americans and Australians. Nobody is saying openly to the Third World, "look, you might get some buses and tvs and things, but sorry, you're not going to have burgers and SUVs - at some point, your rise in consumption is just going to stop - at a lower point than ours. You will never ever consume as much as us."
Thus, what we're ultimately talking about is the prospect of 9 billion people driving 6-8 billion cars.
Ain't gonna happen.
So a 2% annual rise in demand - it's likely to be more than that. Just as in oil reserve discovery or increase in exploitable reserves is less than our consumption and rise in consumption, so too will it be for minerals.
If you look at f.i. wind and solar, what counts are the percentages that they contribute.
Savinar is unpopular because it's a scary scenario. He did quite some research however, although one have to take into account that he wants to make money with his doomscenario. The numbers, percentages and facts are impressive and the conclusion must be that most people underestimate the power and importance of oil.
This is a keypoint. If oilproduction can remain on plateau until 2030 than mitigation is 'no problem'. But what if the plateau ends in 2012 ?
FF replacement represents a liquid fuel problem, much less a electricity generating problem. Other credible sources IMO are opinions from a.o. Pimentel, Youngquist and Hirsch.
If you look at f.i. wind and solar, what counts are the percentages that they contribute.
I'm not sure of your point. Yes, wind only provides about 1.5% of US electricity today. OTOH, it provided about 1/3 of new US generation last year. It could provide 100% in 4-5 years, and then start replacing coal, NG and oil.
Savinar is unpopular because it's a scary scenario.
The distinction is between a popular writer (i.e., one who writes for a general, untechnical audience), and a professional authority. Savinar is a lawyer with no technical training or experience. He provides entertainment and education, perhaps, but he's not an authority to which one can point to prove anything.
He did quite some research
No, he did some reading. That's not original research.
This is a keypoint. If oilproduction can remain on plateau until 2030 than mitigation is 'no problem'. But what if the plateau ends in 2012 ?
Then, we have a transitional problem. We can argue about the magnitude of this transitional problem, but that's not what this article is about - it's talking about a long-term, secular problem.
FF replacement represents a liquid fuel problem, much less a electricity generating problem.
I agree, especially for the US. I'd note that some countries do generate quite a lot of power with it: I believe about 25% of oil consumption around the world is for generation. Nevertheless, I agree. But, the author of this article either doesn't agree with us, or he doesn't understand that much mining and mineral processing is done with electrical power, and that the rest can be as well.
Other credible sources IMO are opinions from a.o. Pimentel, Youngquist and Hirsch.
Well, on the one hand, this author didn't use these sources. OTOH, I agree with the idea that PO is a serious liquid fuel problem, and that we need to replace oil (with renewably powered PHEV/EVs, mostly). As I note above, once we agree that that we don't need to be deeply concerned about electricity supplies, we can be confident that mining and mineral processing will have all the energy they need.
Then I look at 1,5%. 1/3 of new generation and the need rises every year. To reach 100% in 4-5 years is impossible IMO. Now 1,5 % are quite a lot of windmills. If you double these amount you have 3%, if you double that you have 6%, if you double that you have 12%. So only 12% are thousands of mills.
Install all these windmills on land and sea has some practical problems too.
In general lawyers are known for their deep investigations and their wish to know every detail in the big picture. He describes also the effects of peak oil on the financial system. What is happening now is nothing compared to what will happen if oil-exports start to run downhill.
You started to write about replacing FF with alternatives. This has only a good chance without doing much harm to the economy and industrialisation if oil-exports not fall of the cliff the next decade. If the middle case scenario of oil-exports for Saudi Arabie and Russia comes true life in a lot of countries is not going to be nice.
The problem is, and Savinar mentions this also, that this needs good cooperation. Besides, the urgency of the matter is not there. This problem needs governments to act NOW f.i. force car industries to make EV. If EV are made on a large scale even then it will take many years before 10-20% of all the cars on the road are EV. It doesn't go in the one and only direction that is necessary. Batterytech is developing, still there are many practical problems. If about 20% on the road are EV you need to generate significantly more electricity. A lot of nuclear power stations are old and need to be rebuilt soon. To replace all this power with windmills and solar will be possible but takes much more than 4-5 year. Most consider that it will be possible to reach 20% from windenergy in 2020.
Mining and mineral processing will be possible (though I think peak lithium could be a real problem)but if oil-exports go down (much more than in the 2006-2008 period)some hard choices have to be made and the economy will suffer terribly. Receding horizons or the 'paradox of production' is IMO more than a theoretical problem.
Then I look at 1,5%. 1/3 of new generation and the need rises every year.
Not really. US electricity consumption tends to grow about 1.8% per year, and this year it's pretty flat. There's a pretty good chance growth will slow down, but even if it doesn't, 1.8% is 8GW per year. That's only about 25GW of wind per year, which is really not much.
To reach 100% in 4-5 years is impossible IMO
And, why is that? It's not that hard to grow manufacturing production by 40% per year, and that's all it would take. The US ISO's have a backlog of 125GW of potential projects: there's more than enough potential projects already identified to keep us going for 5 years.
So only 12% are thousands of mills. Install all these windmills on land and sea has some practical problems too.
Not really. It just sounds like a lot.
In general lawyers are known for their deep investigations and their wish to know every detail in the big picture.
Seriously? You're suggesting that he's an authoritative source? No, he's acting as a journalist, compiling other people's ideas and reselling them.
You started to write about replacing FF with alternatives. This has only a good chance without doing much harm to the economy and industrialisation if oil-exports not fall of the cliff the next decade.
Then we have might have other problems, but limited mineral resources won't be among them.
This problem needs governments to act NOW f.i. force car industries to make EV.
They are. Both Toyota and GM, the two largest car companies in the world, are making hybrids and PHEVs central to their business plan.
Most consider that it will be possible to reach 20% from windenergy in 2020.
Which is fast enough -that's only 11 years away. Another 10 years of similar effort, and we can be at 40-50%, and have replaced the majority of coal and provided enough power for PHEV/EVs.
I was thinking on growth worldwide. 25 GW windenergy equals about 7500 mills.
In theory maybe it's not a lot. To use the right places on land and sea plays a role also. Other practical problem is credit availability past peak. With oil production on plateau there are allready problems. If the economy gets better, oilprices will rise until another economic downturn hits. A bad climate to make profits.
No, I don't suggest he is an authority. I think he understands the big picture. I can imagine, regarding the many advantages that oil has, that if 'the world' starts seriously with mitigation when peak oil is there, it will take about 20 years for the economy can grow again. How much damage is done in that 20 years ? Problably too many people jobless and the possibility of a few resource wars that can turn out bad.
Yes, but forced by government ? It will be survival strategy, but that means it's too little and too late. They should have started with this 20 years ago (supposing PO is (soon) here and the peak doesn't last for many years).
Again, maybe possible in theory. I doubt in 2030 the majority of coal is replaced by windenergy. There are plans to increase U.S. oil production from CO2-EOR with 2-3 mbd in 2020. For this to do the U.S. needs a lot more CO2 and this has to come from coalplants a.o. That is what is happening now: there is no good cooperation and there are too many plans to look at. There is no idea what is the best (in fact that must be very hard to discover) direction or best directions to go.
Well, world wind generation is growing quite quickly, even now with the credit crunch. PHEVs and EVs are being developed and put into production, in a very serious way and in a large scale. In the long-term, we're going to convert from oil to renewable electricity. Are we agreed on that?
Now, could Peak Oil cause some real problems in the short term? Are we going have some difficulty mustering the political will to shut down coal plants? Sure, but that's not what this article is about - it's about the long-term.
It's still growing, yes, but not with the speed it did in 2008. The point is that if oilprices stay high the urgency becomes clear (now the reason to do it is mostly GW) but on the same hand this damages the
economy.
In a large scale by some carmakers. You have to look also at the speed 'normal' cars are selled in China and India. I wonder in what year more EV's than normal cars are bought.
Not completely. The conversion from oil to something else for electricity generation started on large scale in the 70's when there were 2 oilcrises. A lot of countries are using more gas, coal, nuclear and/or hydro than oil to generate electricity.
Maybe in the U.S. they will shut down some, but what about their plans to use more CO2 for CO2-EOR ? In China they are opening a new coalplant every week still.
Yes, but if oil-export are starting to go down seriously, it will be a completely different world, with other 'rules' than now. Then the 'law' of receding horizons could become true.
Twice as much was installed in the first quarter of 2009 as in the first quarter of 2008.
18M electric bicycles were sold in China last year, or about twice the number of internal combustion vehicles.
"China is likely to continue cutting investment in coal-fired power plants as the lackluster economy may result in a power glut this year, but it will increase its efforts to build more nuclear reactors and wind farms to improve its energy mix, according to Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration (NEA)."
Surprises me, because the last months I read many articles on Drumbeat that windmill and solar factories are suffering with supply getting higher than demand.
Very good news. Because in China (and India) the percentage of people that have a car is very low, still a lot of IC vehicles wiil be sold however and what counts is: what will be the first year that there is a significant percentage of EV's on the road. Not much countries seem to have targets now, such as Denmark that wants 500.000 EV's on the road in 2015.
From today's Drumbeat:
Many gains and a big constraint for wind industry
CHICAGO – A nagging issue wound its way through the chatter at what was an otherwise celebratory event for the nation's wind industry in Chicago.
The U.S. has become the world's biggest wind-power generator and of the electricity production added in the country last year, 42 percent came from wind turbines. But as more megawatts come on line, the problem of getting power from wind-swept plains to places where people actually live becomes more urgent.
"In some ways we're reaching the glass ceiling," said Rob Gramlich, vice president of policy at the American Wind Energy Association. It was the organization's biggest annual conference to date, drawing 1,200 exhibitors and more than 20,000 people.
The country's grid is aging, often overloaded and, in the case of wide-open states like Wyoming and North Dakota — some of the best places to erect wind turbines — not nearly extensive enough to move electricity to major markets where customers wait.
Han,
So are you now saying instead of wind not growing very quickly, its growing so quickly that there is a shortage of transmission lines?
We should expect supply problems in many aspects of an industry growing at 30-50% per year, as one problem is solved new ones will arise, so what the main thing is the amount of wind energy is growing very rapidly.
Funding for national grid expansion has already been approved in first 3 months of Obama administration, it's not as though anyone is surprised by this limitation.
Not all research is original; it's quite reasonable to say an article is well-researched if it provides extensive and authoritative citations for its arguments.
Unfortunately, I would not characterize Savinar's writing that way. The main problem is that it tends to be biased in favour of his argument, which is also his business. One example is in his discussion of the amount of oil which goes into the construction of a car, where "energy" becomes "barrels of oil equivalent" becomes "oil". There's a highly misleading blurring of the difference between energy types that goes on in some discussions of peak oil, where bleak predictions about oil are projected onto non-oil uses of energy; nitrogen fertilizers are one of the most common examples of this.
Peak oil is much more about peak liquid fuels than it is about peak energy; the distinction is important (as it seems you agree).
The fact (or opinion) that some references are "non-primary/popular material" doesn't invalidate all information on these spots, furthermore the reference of Savinar contains multiple other references.
You claim that the EWG renewables study (ref 11) doesn't support my assumption that renewables can't scale to replace fossil fuels in time. It does. Even in the high scenario, the energy (electricity and heat) share of renewables in 2030 will be 29%. So, even in the renewables-optimistic scenario, in 2030 we still have to get 71% of our energy (electricity and heat) from fossil fuels (and nuclear fission).
Bottom line:
Do renewables have the potential to help? Yes.
Will renewables solve everything? No.
Yes, I think Savinar understands the magnitude of the problem and sees 'the big picture'. One can't rule out the possibility that his selection of references is not completely objective, since he advertises for packed food in the same publication.
The fact (or opinion) that some references are "non-primary/popular material" doesn't invalidate all information on these spots
It invalidates them as authoritative references. If one were to submit a paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with such a reference, they would send it right back and request something better.
in 2030, 29% of electricity and heat could be provided by renewables (high scenario). The other 71% still has to be provided by fossil fuels (and nuclear fission).
Again, that's not what they said. In fact, they took pains to clarify they weren't saying that:
"The scenarios describe only two possible developments among a range of prospects, but they represent realistic possibilities that give reason for optimism. The results of both scenarios show that – until 2030 – renewable capacities can be extended by a far greater amount and that it is actually much cheaper than most scientist and laypeople think. The scenarios do explicitly not describe a maximum possible development from the technological perspective but show that much can be achieved with even moderate investments."
Hello Andre,
Thxs for this keypost. For me, one frustrating way we waste valuable metals is the sad fact that we have not globally standardized fasteners, nuts, and bolts, common sense repair protocols, plus having two major sizing standards; metric tools [10mm, 12mm] and standard tools [7/16, 5/8, 11/32].
Thus, a mechanic, or even a person doing their own repair, has to invest large sums for multiple tool sets so that they can work efficiently and not get busted knuckles. Planned obsolescence has resulted in lots of devices having substandard, low metal quality fasteners that strip-out, or even worse, snap off when trying to be removed. Recall the safety scandal a few years ago when lots of airplanes and other critical tools were found to be using sub-grade fasteners.
IMO, Design for cheap & fast Manufacturability needs to be replaced by Design for Repairability & Recyclability. Why does one need to buy a set of star-nut tools for replacing a vehicle headlight, for example, when in the past hex-head tooling or a screwdriver worked just fine? I lament the fact that the thick Snap-On catalog and huge tool-sets are required nowadays, when it could be so much simpler.
Repairability and parts availability can also be greatly enhanced by Design Standardization: for example, make a simple, universal tail-light and headlight design for all cars. Compare to the hundreds of different designs now offered to merely enhance the 'chrome penis effect'. Don't get me started on ranting about designer rims and how this utterly wastes even more metals. Have you noticed how many different kinds of vehicle specific air filters are now required? Why not cut that down to just ten choices, easily available at any auto-parts store, plus many more parts, so that any shade-tree mechanic can easily maintain his devices for a long, long time?
The present marketing trend is actually inducing all kinds of potential Liebig Minimums when we go postPeak: people will simply not have the repair knowledge and available toolsets, plus not be able to get the specific part they need to keep their critical device functioning.
This is obviously a complex topic that needs much more discussion, but I believe it directly applies to your keypost on energy & metal depletion, and the resulting cascading blowbacks that will arise from this worsening situation.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Bob,
I agree with what you say. A sensible person would look at the situation and just call it silly.
That said, there are a number of drivers (pun intended) that will be difficult to address.
- Political pressure: IIRC the only countries in the world that are not officially metric are the USA and Liberia. No doubt manufacturers screamed blue murder about conversion costs etc. to their congressmen, which ultimately puts the US at a disadvantage. Electronics has mitigated this somewhat until, as you say, someone actually has to work on it.
- Proprietary fasteners and tools: The familiar star shape Philips head here has been largely superseded by Pozidriv in Europe. It has better self-holding properties and is less susceptible to stripping. Both self align better than the Hex head, or Allen socket screw. These pressures come from the manufacturing "bean counter" side. So, some times it is technology improvement, other times it is a way to get around patents or thwart easy (non-dealer) repair.
Yes, it is complex, but it speaks of a much bigger issue. Our entire system is geared towards obsolescence and non-repairability and there are a huge number of self-interested groups who want it to stay that way. Co-operation is by definition anathema to competition. IMO, Edward Bernays has done more damage to the world than Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tung combined.
A solution is unlikely if not impossible because it results in the "you go first" attitude, or should I say, the Kyoto effect. Changes will only occur by dictate, or when the majority realize that change and co-operation is in their personal best interest.
Like so many changes facing us, that will only happen when we are in a panic.
I share your frustration but wishing it were different is a waste of time. To anyone who has mechanical skills, buy lots of tools of the best quality, with exact duplicates if possible. Make sure everything is maintained and stored dry and preferably oiled. Taps and dies can get around the metric/imperial problem if necessary. As ugly as they are, pop-rivets are very versatile. A few hundred pounds in various sizes and material will likely be a boon in coming years, providing, again, that you have the tools.
My point is, it is becoming more and more apparent that localized resilience and adaptability is the only solution, because as Sharon Astyk says, it's already too late.
Hello Bob, I totally agree. This is an important aspect of strategies and solution frameworks to postpone or soften the impact of supply constraints. It's applicable to mentioned fasteners, nuts and bolts up to entire constructions. We have made our industrial civilization too complex in a number of ways, and complexity often goes hand in hand with inefficiency and waste. It's not a coincidence that some of the most successful ways of cost reduction are through simplification of products and processes.
thxs for the replies
The dependence of the metals extraction industry on carbon fuels needs to be broken. In Australia's case iron ore from the west coast meets up with coking coal from the east coast in Asian steel mills. If the coal supply was reduced then iron ore demand would decline in sync. The aluminium industry sucks up 11% of Australia's total electrical output. They claim to need continuous baseload power none of this fancy renewable stuff.
It appears to me that Australia's metals industries are mostly behind the postponement of the already weak cap and trade scheme. If electricity prices go up 2c per kwh for households that's tolerable but for the aluminium industry it generates a screaming fit. Big Metals are holding us to ransom when it comes to climate change. I'd like to ban aluminium cans so if you want a fizzy drink you have to hold your water bottle to a dispenser. Surprise surprise it could turn out the industry doesn't need so much energy after all.
Boof,
Another possibility is that the price of aluminium doubles and the aluminium cans of drink cost 1cent more, and double the recycling value. More energy is used keeping drinks cold in drink machines, that's were big savings can be made. 95% of aluminium energy is recovered by recycling.
That's a challenging thought; perhaps we should pay more for some things like metal cans. Opponents of carbon energy pricing schemes assume it is our God given right for everything to be cheap.
Let's replace deli fridges with bathtubs of cold water. If you want a can of drink reach into the water and tear off a can from a six pack.
OK, here's my lead-in again. Soda Pop, soft drinks, sugar water, whatever you call it, is a huge totally bad sin. No country can say anything is "TOO EXPENSIVE" if it is spending 60 E 9 bucks per year making itself fat and rot-toothed by swilling that stuff. All bad. Making it, selling it, transporting it, keeping it cool even in the winter, for god's sake!
Moonshine, weed, anything is better than that. We can't call ourselves serious about anything until we eliminate that stuff and redirect those assets to something even remotely important for our future.
And the same goes for fuzzy toys from China, as well as almost all clothing, especially that frilly crapola my daughter buys. Now I am gonna put on my rags and crawl under the house to look for water drips, like any right thinking citizen would do for diversion from such-like invincible outrages.
Andre,
Thanks for making this presentation, it does help to focus on this issue. I think you are wrong in your two major conclusions; 1) renewable and nuclear energy will not be able to replace FF and 2)you are using "reserves" to estimate how long mineral supply will last, when you should be using probable "resources".
Even within one mine, reserves can be only a few years supply. It's expensive to prove reserves, as it requires drilling and testing of ore for extraction rates. Many mines have had less than 10 years reserves for 50 years of operation.
The other factor is changes in technology. A good case is copper now extracted by heap leach( acid or bacterial), that allows both copper oxides and low concentration copper sulfides to be economically extracted even with much higher energy prices.
Nickel reserves are certainly way off, 67 million tonnes probably refers to nickel sulfides, nickel laterite ores(about 1% nickel) are very extensive. One mine is Australia in operation has several million tonnes of nickel reserves in deposits at the surface. It is now using acid leach to extract deposits. The major input is sulfur for sulfuric acid production. Many other deposits covering thousands of km^2 are present in Australia, and SE Asia. When nickel prices were high these ores were being added to pig iron directly without purification.
Iron ore reserves have been expanding very rapidly in Australia, Brazil and W Africa. These resources have been know of for 40 years, but companies having 100 years "reserves" have only bothered to "prove" additional resources into reserves when seeking long term finance for mine expansion. These are not 50% iron ore reserves as are used in China, these are >90% iron ore(>60% Fe content).
The bottom line is not how big are the reserves but have they been increasing or decreasing over last 50 years?
Agree about the problem of metal "reserves." This problem has come up repeatedly on TOD. Reserves are extremely expensive to drill out completely, have a strict legal and economic definition (for mining stock sales), and have even been taxed by some foolish governments. Therefore, using announced "reserves" as a guide to future metal production can be extremely risky!
Metalman, I agree with you that "reserves" can be extremely risky as a guide to future metal production and I hope this discussion on TheOilDrum might help to surface better or more reliable data. For now, the most comprehensive single-source (and thus hopefully consistent) global dataset available is from the USGS (ref 17).
Ah, I see. You intend this as a preliminary study, not something authoritative. Kind've like a "request for information", as used by governments when they start a project.
It's a good idea - it would be nice to have better data.
It might not be a bad idea for someone to start a wiki about mineral resources.
On the other hand, we'd have to be a bit more flexible about our definition of "reserves", as I suspect the USGS uses the published figures from mining companies, and those aren't going to change anytime soon.
Thanks for the explicit questions. See my other comments on reserves, renewables and technology.
For nickel and iron ore I used the USGS 2008 data (ref 17). Do you have more reliable or better data?
Andre,
Thanks for taking the time to answer specific questions.
Some of the criticisms may seem harsh, but I think most have been valuable and in good faith.
I would encourage you to do a follow up article considering perhaps 10 or so critical metals in more detail, including both reserves, and resources and some considerations of the energy costs associated with moving onto much lower ores. Most critical would be elements used to greatly expand nuclear and renewable energy that may limit the rate of FF replacement. Uranium was discussed a few months ago.
The case of Nickel in last 10 years is interesting. Nickel is essential for many stainless steel applications. When Nickel demand increased by China's rapid growth, the price went from $8,000 to $50,000/tonne. At that price lots of changes started to occur; some poorer quality stainless steel having Mn replacing Ni was used, low concentration laterite ores(1%Ni) were used in pig iron production, but caused some quality problems, but also new plants were commissioned to purify Ni from laterite ores, these are more expensive to operate and sulfur prices increased( due to more fertilizer use). Also new processes are being developed to extract Ni more like copper heap leaching.
The lessons for Ni are that it takes time and investment to convert resources into reserves, may need other minerals( sulfur) that are in short supply, and substitution is not always satisfactory. None the less longer term we can expand Ni availability greatly using new technology with not too much more energy use.
This may not be the case with some other minerals, and may take much longer or use much more energy. Having a strategic stockpile is valuable ( as China did) for short term problems.
If you want to contact me directly about a follow up article I would be happy to give private input.
hmmm. Nickel prices have gone back down to 10,466/tonne,( http://uk.reuters.com/article/UK_COMPRESULTS/idUKL551465720090505 ), and new production continues to come onstream, despite low prices ( http://uk.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/idUKN27... ).
Looks like classic boom and bust.
A fascinating and excellent post!
I call it radical retrenchment, you call it managed austerity. Radical retrenchment is weak in not mentioning management. Managed austerity is weak in, well, in its austerity. Materially austere, yes, but better in other ways as you recognize.
I wonder what the demand for Precious Metals & Gems would be if the jewelry or bullion purchaser had to also take the 50-100 tons of overburden, depleted ore, toxic chemicals, etc, with him when he exited the jewelry or PM coin store? Would the prospective bride be thrilled to wear his ring as he also spread this massive tonnage of waste across her property?
Much has been written before about blood gems & rare metal violence [please google]. Should a condition of jewelry ownership be that a purchaser has to not only take this 50-100 tons, but also a bag full of scabrous blood and decomposing body parts?
For any TOD newbies: from my feeble memory, the apparent consensus opinion among Emergy Experts is that is takes approx. ten ounces of FFs for every ounce of US food consumed.
Yet, most 'Murkans just ignorantly assume that Alaskan King Crabs and Maine Lobsters freely scurry across the continental landscape, eager to jump into a boiling pot, with chocolate and fresh bananas in their uplifted claws as additional gifts for us to gorge on.
And of course Americans can continue to pay for these self sacrificing lobsters :)
Although I hate to say this I'm going to enjoy the day that these brilliant American engineers are faced with trying to keep our economy running with a fraction of the wealth devoted to their engineering projects vs what was is currently devoted. Not only will the lobsters not come scurrying we won't even try to catch them. If we are lucky we might get a bit of renewal in our ecosystems more likely we will simply destroy whats left in easy reach. So although in the case of lobsters for example maybe they are no longer shipped worldwide but I suspect the local population will be able and willing to destroy the lobster fisheries even as the global market collapses. I think we are going to see a similar thing worldwide as investment pulls back whatever can be exploited will be pushed to the limit even as investment declines.
Yep, and there is a history of this. On the east coast, a small herring called the pogy fish was in such abundance that it was dumped straight onto fields as fertilizer. This was also done by native Americans, but on a much more judicious basis.
This is the origin of Atlantic Canada's term for welfare or unemployment insurance, "being on pogy", i.e. not being able to afford cod. (What's cod, daddy?)
Now, we catch fish, grind it up into pellets and feed it to other fish, at a horrendous EROEI.
Hey Bob Shaw, the answer is: "not even close!"
http://www.openblueseafarms.com/index2.html
Open Blue Sea Farms
Not perfect yet for sure, but starting to head towards sustainability at least as a goal.
Didn't the bondservants in 18th century Maine revolt because they were served lobster too often...maybe lobster needs a jet ride to gain some worth :-)
Andre,
Your depletion curve for Zirconium should take account of the fact that 90% of Zirconium is used in nuclear reactors, and fewer are being built than in 1980-1990.
This link gives Zirconium use of 900,000 tonnes/year with Australia having 9million tonnes of reserves and 30 million tonnes of resources
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/zirconium/zircomcs07.pdf
I very much doubt that Zirconium use is limited by supply. What evidence do you have for this? can Zirconium be recycled after nuclear reactors are decommissioned?
Agree about zirconium. A very poor choice of example. The original article and the following discussion mostly ignore demand as a fundamental control on production, and consider only supply. The apparent peak in zirconium production presumably represents a peak in demand, rather than any fundamental supply constraint. Zirconium metal can be recovered from the mineral zircon, zirconium silicate, a common and abundant accessory mineral in beach and other sands. It generally is cheaply co-produced along with other heavy (denser than quartz) minerals. Some zirconium is also recovered from the oxide mineral baddeleyite.
Incidentally, most zirconium (the element) is used as the silicate (zircon) or oxide (zirconia), in ceramics, refractories, foundry sands, glass, chemicals, and other uses, rather than as the metal (used in reactors). Don't be confused by the similar names.
Good point. It might hint to an "early peak" of zirconium by demand constraints rather than resource constraints. Nevertheless, according to USGS we are still using zirconium at a rather high speed (ratio of production to reserves) even without building lots of nuclear reactors right now. I used the USGS source (ref 17) as the only comprehensive single-source (thus hopefully consistent) dataset on global annual primary production rates and global reserves.
This string should not die without mention of the late economics professor Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and his controversial attempts to apply thermodynamic principles to minerals - a new 'Fourth Law of Thermodynamics'. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_1...
robert,
Can you give a summary of what he was saying?
To simplify consider silver. As the earth cooled there was epithermal deposition of rich silver bearing ores. This was essentially an enormous gift of low entropy. Energy and materials are used to mine and process the silver, further lowering the silver specific entropy. The silver is then dissipated by cloud seeding with silver iodide, allowing silver bearing photographic solutions to flow out to sea. burying electronic waste, circulating coins etc. etc., thus increasing silver specific entropy. Then apply this concept to copper and other minerals.
An observation to add to that is that hard rock metal deposits are typically over 400 million years old, say Precambrian to Devonian. Fossil fuel deposits are typically under 400 million years old, say Permian to Eocene. For humans in the last 1000 years this has worked out fine. Metal ores are dug up in one valley and coal is dug up (after the charcoal is gone) in the next valley. Voila, human progress. Shame it couldn't last.
It seems to me that while the author may have been overly pessimistic or less than well the informed concerning a couple of elements,as pointed out in certain earlier comments,he has ,broadly speaking,done a pretty good job describing the depletion picture.
I doubt his suggestions as to solutions will get much traction,although in principle they are good ones.BAU is my guess,and while the economists and techno geeks are often right when they talk about substitutes and new technologies,some things simply have no substitutes.
For example, there is no substitute for phosphorus in plant physiology, and therefore no substitute for phosphorus(one of the big three down on the farm) PERIOD if we expect to eat.Supplies are(historically) tight and they will get tighter. Farm output is most likely not going to be able to keep up with population growth if for no other reason than a lack of affordable phosphorus and potassium at some not too distant time.Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are extremely energy intensive-you might as well say that synthetic nitrogen is processed ff in pretty much the same sense as diesel,except that farmers feed it to thier crops(and sometimes directly to livestock as supplemental urea) rather than thier tractors.
I have been seeing the odd piece here and there on the net for awhile about governments and big biz quietly grabbing up farmland world wide wherever it can be had cheap and in large tracts.This trend has finally attracted the attention of the mainstream press and you will probably see it covered extensively soon at least on websites such as the Oil Drum.
The Independent, a Brit paper that I read often online, has a piece in thier business analysis section Tuesday May 5 that I think is worthy of a direct post here on the drum if it can be arranged.(I personally don't know beans about the process or who exactly is in charge of it).
You can read it on thier website.It is entitled "land grab:the race for the worlds farmland" and the title is in this case not the cute come on used so often these days.I gaurantee that you will find it a superb use of your time.
go to www.grain.org/front/ and search land grab for more info.
Yes, but it's a very small amount of total energy consumption. It currently requires a couple percent of world natural gas production, and could be done via electrolysis instead for a few percent of world electricity production. Phosphorus and potassium availability are legitimate concerns, but nitrogen much, much less so.
The energy required for I-NPK MUST include the transport to the final topsoil square foot or square meter. A huge mountain of I-NPK at the chem-factory or mine gate is essentially worthless--it only has value at the farmgate. Transport cost may be up to six times higher than the mfg cost, especially if it needs to move far inland and way up in elevation to the farmgate.
If transport cost were insignificant: nobody would be malnourished or starving. The Laws of Physics [mass, distance, elevation change] are a real bitch.
Completely false, sadly. Even if transporting fertilizer to topsoil was free and instant, there are still plenty of people who wouldn't be able to afford it in the first place, or to afford the food thus grown.
A timely and well organized argument. There are however, some questions:
Humanity has depleted a significant part of its inheritance of highly concentrated energy resources in the form of fossil fuels.
Shouldn't we add a qualification here, such as that we know of? Without getting into the matter of whether or not we have the energy to do so, we have only explored and assessed a thin layer of the surface of the globe. We may have inherited far more than we know of right now. Also, we're now only at a Level I civilization and have access only to the minerals on this planet, but there are other planets, solar systems and galaxies out there. We should not make what we know or believe now to be the case the standard for what we could know or discover in the future.
Without timely implementation of mitigation strategies, the world will soon run out of all kinds of affordable mass products and services.
You criticize BAU, yet the most basic principle of BAU is the one cited here--mass products and services, distributed to individuals. This is the assumption that we need to reject, not find a way to prolong it, which is what your argument amounts to. Does every single person need a family-sized car? Does every individual need one of everything that is available--washers, dryers, cooling systems, phones, big screen TVs and so on? While they are affordable and convenient, for example, no one ever uses all--or even most--of the functions and capabilities of their "personal" computers; going back to the old concept of a dumb (maybe we can make them smart) terminal and a centralized CPU (as in time-sharing) would save a lot of metals. We need to junk the concepts of marketing, production, economy and individual equality that underlie "mass" production and consumption.
Known data of extraction and consumption rates of metal minerals and their reserves indicate that the so-called ‘peak production’ for most metal elements will lie in the near future.
Again, that we know of...Also, you assume that once used, there is no reuse, because these days, at least in the US, we throw most things into landfills. Every town or city of any size also has at least one junk car lot filled with old cars that are salvaged mainly for their iron (or steel), but could provide a source of extraction for consumption.
They call for a transition from growth in tangible possessions and instant, short-lived luxuries towards growth in consciousness, meaning and sense of purpose, connection with nature and reality and good stewardship for the sake of next generations.
Good Luck! All the great religions have also called for something like this--and look how far they got.
Thanks for your explicit questions.
The qualification "that we know of" is omitted because of the precautionary principle: our future is at stake and we do not want mitigation of that risk be based on potentially unfounded optimism.
I do assume reuse and recycling (to some degree) for metal constructions and compounds above the ground. However, apart from the fact that recycling has its limitations, we also need (at our current collective course) an ever increasing absolute amount of metals (exponential growth).
The 'Good Luck!' part:
My final statement has a chance close to zero to become reality anytime soon, but I think it is nevertheless the right holistic solution framework.
This is an excellent,scholarly posting about a topic every bit as urgent as Peak Oil. I also think that Peak Oil pioneers here at TOD and elsewhere should take great pleasure in the citations.
Being my father's son, I know a few things about recycling metals down to nails, small fasteners, taking apart transformers and electric motors to get out the copper, and cutting into aluminum to drive out blind-hole pressed-in steel dowel pins and such.
A few days ago, to determine recyclability of that wonderfully green machine the bicycle, I completely disassembled a worn-out rear wheel, rim, hub, spokes, and all. Once again, "uncomingling" of the parts required sawing slots into the aluminum hub so I could pound out the steel bearing race. The whole effort took quite a bit of time for the yield of a mere few pounds of aluminum and carbon steel and stainless (spokes and nipples); clearly one is up against the Second Law.
Yet an even larger factor in general is the scant attention product designers give to recycling. I have a very simple plan to rectify that: require CEOs of manufacturing companies - consumer product companies in particular - to PERSONALLY disassemble and recycle at least one of their products. You want to claim your firm makes the "greenest" bicycle or washing machine? Let's see the parts, all sorted and ready for salvage!
I agree with your remark on product design taking recycling into account. The issue is related to the principle of "cradle-to-cradle".
Ugo Thanks for this post.
Dr. Diederen, Thanks Very Much for this fine paper. This question has been bothering me for a long time and you've quantified my concerns.
Once again Energy or lack thereof will determine when we truly run out of various critical elements. Will the world scale up use of Fast Neutron Reactors to continue pushing the resource envelope? Will we choose to limit human population or let it crash and burn? Must short term selfishness win over long term thoughtfulness?
If we assume that Peak Oil is almost upon us and that all forms of mitigation will be attempted once our predicament is realised then it seems clear to me that there exists a subset of mineral assets that are non-discretional from a PO perspective.
These are metals like:
1. Molybdenum -used to strengthen steel in oil and gas pipelines, used extensivley in the nuclear industry, used as a catalyst to crack heavy sulphur content oil...
2. Neodymium -used in the magnets for windmills
3. Uranium
4. Potash or Phosphor bearing minerals like Polyhalite needed to help feed Billions of people...
There are also metals that deplete because of discretional consumer demand that is likely to weaken post-peak and curb the demand (hence reducing pressure on that resource).
[I'm unsure about fiat-currency substitutes like Gold as they are likely to do well in the short/medium term but eventually long-term could be 'worthless' as they have no use (you cannot eat Gold). History teaches us that Gold has kept its value although what this means in a terminal decline scenario has yet to be determined.]
Hence we have at least two tiers depending on whether the demand is discretional or non-discretional and I can see the non-discretional PO-mitigating ones doing 'very well' in the decades ahead -in effect this is no different to the IEA saying that '$Trillions' will be needed to sustain/increase our energy supply...
Nick.
Senseless as it seems, gold will likely retain value in a full collapse scenario (terminal decline). Force will be with us always and gold will still be a reasonably reliable, portable contract medium in force negotiations.
The 'local' of terminal decline would have local warlords, protecting their food sources (for a very high percentage or the production) and local warlords will be paying tribute up the power ladders. Humans have organized themselves in something approximating this system with astounding regularity past and present.
There will be constant readjustments, of course. Those best able to protect absolutely critical resources and supply lines will keep gaining power until they are the new local empires. It will be in the interest of the powerful to have gold universally accepted as having worth, it is so unhandy to have to pay troops in kind.
A new egalitarian world is not what a collapse will lead to, cheap oil has given the first world the closest approximation of that (on a large scale) the world has ever seen. Continuing finding ways to keep energy relatively cheap is the egalitarian dreamer's best hope.
The absolute collapse scenario is of course the most egalitarian of all, all perish.
An interesting discussion, especially for anybody with interests in both the minerals industry and the issues around the consequences of peak oil.
Agree that the correct term is resources as opposed to reserves. The term "reserves" is extremely specific and refers to strictly-defined (usually by drillcore analysis) blocks of known grades and tonnages. There are either being mined right now, blocked-out for mining, being used to obtain finance for mining projects, being defined by exploration or mothballed until/if ever prices make their exploitation economical. Resources is a much broader term, but has always been vague by definition. It's one of those genuine cases where we simply don't know what we have!
Here in Central Wales, where I live, is an old mining district, the working of which mostly pre-dated the widespread availability of oil-based energy. Lead, silver, zinc and copper were produced and there's quite a bit of cobalt, nickel and antimony in places which was not recognised for what it was at the time. The mines were not deep by modern standards - the deepest went down ~350m below surface. The biggest produced ~100,000 tonnes of lead-zinc concentrates from orebodies getting on for a million tons in size.
Almost every mine was powered entirely by renewables - this is a hilly area with high rainfall. Water was pumped up the shafts, ore raised, ore crushed and concentrated, compressors driven once that technology came into being (it was hand-drilling before that) all via an intricate system of waterwheels, some 20m in diameter, others a bit smaller, and a hand-dug system of leats extending along the hillsides for miles.
It sometimes seems as alien a world, though it existed only 150 years ago, as the one hoped-for by some in which fleets of spaceships are busy heading out to mine asteroids - yet it DID exist!
Cheers - John
Two issues.
First, the very article [15] contradicts the author's conclusion, stating instead
I would think this stark difference in opinion in a directly quoted article should be mentioned in the spirit of intellectual honesty.
Secondly, the author misread the USGS figures for iron reserves, which are twice as high as he thinks - he took the iron content figure for the iron ore figure. Check the source yourself.
If I, with zero knowledge about minerals, can track down such an error within minutes, I have some doubts about the quality of the remaining article.
First, the one assumption in the conclusion you quote means that you need much more energy to dig up mineral ores at much greater depth and this invalidates the same conclusion if you take energy constraints into consideration.
Second, if you read my article and corresponding table 1 carefully, you would notice that I use iron element content, NOT iron ore. This is correct and entirely consistent with all other entries based on element content in table 1.
One might or might not agree with this, since at some places milling seems to be the major cost component, hence lifting and establishing of mining shafts might be not add prohibitively to costs if, as a bargain, milling becomes more rewarding due to higher ore concentrations.
Anyhow, this is an interesting story, and I do not think one should sweep it under the table.
This is somewhat puzzling, since the way I read it, USGS states 370 GT raw ore and 180 GT iron content.
If I read the USGS source correctly, the world was consuming 1.52B tons of ore in 2005, and the world ore reserve was 160B tons. I take it that you're making the assumption that the 370B ton reserve base won't be produced because miners won't substitute electricity or succeed in out-bidding other consumers of fuel (which I consider unrealistic).
If you use consistent data, isn't that 105 years of reserves?
double post, sorry. How to delete such?
Regarding the "mineralogical barrier", the comment that below that barrier, "one would essentially have to pull the rock chemically apart to extract all individual elements" is valid. But the next sentence, "This is of course prohibitively energy intensive" is not so obvious.
Rather, it would obviously be prohibitively expensive if one were talking about any single metal that one might seek to mine that way. But by the time mineral depletion progresses to the point that we're forced into it, it won't be any single metal or mineral that we'll be going for. It will be everything of any utility that the source rock might contain.
So we'd pulverize a ton of more or less ordinary rock, feed the powder through a sequence of processes, and end up with milligram quanties of uranium, gold, and other precious metals, gram quantities of a dozen still relatively scarce metals, kilogram quanties of iron, calcium, aluminum, and magnesium, and hundreds of kilograms of "waste" silica. If the various extraction and refining processes are sufficiently efficient and synergistic, the energy cost for the constellation of outputs might not be prohibitive.
That's not to say that anyone today knows how to do it. We won't be investing much in the R&D to accomplish it as long as more profitable high grade ores are still around. What we can say, however, is that there's no fundamental barrier (that we know of) that would preclude it. If we look at the energies of formation, reducing rock to its constituent atoms isn't all that expensive. In fact, if the refining process were able to avoid the reduction of silica and a few of the most common and low-value components of rocks, then in theory one ton of coal has enough chemical potential energy to process several tons of rock.