by Colorado-Valley » Tue 07 Jun 2005, 01:28:39
Irradiated Oil
by Stirling Newberry
(Stirling wrote this over at BOP News, and it seems feasible, although we may not like the kind of world it would create. What do you guys think?)
To drive a machine requires energy, the economic history of the West has seen three major shifts in the energy basis over the last five centuries. The first was the wind and water revolution, where technological improvements allowed the increasingly efficient harnessing of waterwheels and sails. The great leaps forward began with the creation of the mathematical physics of Newton, and the fluid mechanics of Borda, which made it possible to design improved hulls and water wheels. This would drive connecting more complex machines to water power, and open greater trade through faster ships. The force of fluid, not steam, drove early textile mills in England and America. It was the clipper ship and not the steam engine that crossed the Pacific in the early "China Trade."
This is why by 1820, Europeans faced an energy crisis. There were 60,000 water wheels in France, and almost every inch of head was being exploited already, and so, enormous prizes were offered for better designs. One winner was the undershot wheel of Poncelets, who, like Newton and Borda, was also an accomplished mathematician, as well as being a practical engineer. Another was Fourneyron, who developed the earliest turbine. In the United States the election of 1824 hinged on the completion of the "American System," which required the use of canals and internal trade to replace external trade lost by high tariffs. In 1828, Andrew Jackson chased John Quincy Adams from office, ending the project, and turning, instead, to a system of "every man for himself" competition.
In the end, it would be steam that would wash away many of the late water innovations, because their expense would have been very high for the cost of introducing them. By 1825, the water/wave economy was near its final stages, and the wins available for improvements were simply not worth the cost.
Coal would form the basis of this new economy, and railroads would be the means by which high-speed transportation occured. Coal would, in its turn, be replaced by petroleum, and the huge engines of the steam age be replaced by the compact engines of the combustion age.
In 1820 steam power was not yet ready for prime time, and dramatically expanding water power was too expensive. The result in the US was that the public took a third option: just do without, and let people fight over the limited allocation of access to opportunity. By electing Jackson, and by beginning an era of "free banking," the United States entered a holding pattern which would only gradually crumble as the cost of steam came down. The dam would finally break when American committed itself to a transcontinental railroad system.
By the 1970s, the petroleum age was reaching the same kind of crisis point that the wind and water age reached in the 1820s and 1830s. It was possible, through technological cleverness, to extend the old energy age a while longer. And this is precisely what the right wing has settled upon as its next scam to run on the public. I say scam because it will not work. I say next because the last 15 years have been devoted to one attempt after another to convince the public that the problem of the ending of the petroleum era would take care of itself.
The first was that there was no problem at all: that both global warming and any limits to petroleum production were myths. The weight of evidence has piled up so that now only the most reactionary and vicious of individuals seek to deny global warming, while the limits to petroleum production have been back handedly admitted by the right wing.
However, they are not going to use the phrase "peak oil" if they can avoid it. Instead the approved Newspeak is "quality of energy problem." What they mean is that while we are reaching the end of the easy-to-package forms of hydrocarbon - natural gas and light or intermediate petroleum - there are still large quantities of harder-to-package hydrocarbons out there. Their plan is to "boil the frog" - provide a series of intermediate steps that will allow the packaging of progressively worse sources of petrochemicals in order to leave the public with a constant series of false choices: what will seem like a way to "fix" the problem, with the implied promise that this repair will be the last. But it will be like an old car: each repair will lead to another, more expensive, repair.
The "upgrade path" of the petroleum economy is to gradually be able to package worse and worse sources of energy. The first step is what we hear when the Saudis state that "more refinery capacity is needed." The implication to the American public is that they are pumping plenty of oil, but that it is a lack of refinery capacity. That oil is piling up some place.
The reality is different: what they mean is that processing lower grades of petroleum into gasoline is going to be a necessity. This step - of refining lower quality fuels - is something the US has done before. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the quality of domestic US oil production went down, we put additives in gasoline to increase its power: lead, for example. The reason "unleaded" gasoline was expensive is not that lead is naturally found in petroleum and then removed, it is that it can be made with lower quality crude oil. The additive that we want to add now is hydrogen. The "hydrogen economy" isn't about fuel cells, it is about adding hydrogen to petroleum. This will allow the use of lower grades of petroleum.
The second phase is to extract kerogene, so called "shale oil," and tar sands. The road here is to pressure steam into the hydrocarbon-bearing rock, forcing out the mixture. This then needs to be synthesized into petroleum. There are large reserves of this kind of very low-quality hydrocarbon, but even generous extraction rates show that it too will run out relatively quickly.
The third phase will be packaging hydrogen and coal as petroleum. If one crushes coal, and heats it in the presence of hydrogen, the coal, which is carbon, combines with the hydrogen to produce hydrocarbons: namely, petroleum. The result of this is a low-quality petroleum, which can then be fed into the refinery system developed in the first phase, and sold to the public as gasoline. This phase runs out rather quickly as well. While we have "plenty of coal" we don't have plenty of coal if coal is to supplant petroleum. And certainly not if the affluent living standard is to be extended to the 2.5 billion people in China and India. In an irony, given the nature of the technology, this is called "clean coal."
Which is why the right wing is pushing fuel-cell technology: it is a pretty face to what is an ugly extractive reality. And that ugly extractive reality gets even uglier when one realizes that there is one crucial technology to all of these phases: so-called "heat process" nuclear power. A nuclear reactor of any kind produces neutrons and heat. Some of the neutrons split the next round of atoms, or in fusion enrich the hydrogen into tritum - but they produce no useful power directly. Instead the heat is captured by some means, and then made to do work. If electricity is the target, then heat is used to create steam, and the steam drives a turbine.
The only reason that one needs a "heat process" reactor is if one wants to package the energy in some form other than electricity. And all of the steps listed above need huge sources of heat. The heat can be used first to hydrogenate low-quality petroleum, then to extract nonconventional petroleum, and finally to hydrogenate coal.
In short, the proposal that Bush, Cheney, the oil companies and the Saudis are pushing is a system of irradiated oil.
The disadvantages of this system are numerous. First, each step is enormously expensive, and reduces the life-cycle output of the energy system at each step of the way. That is, we put more and more energy in for the energy we get out.
Second, through most of the life cycle of the irradiated petroleum oil, internal combustion, which produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide for the amount of energy we can get from it, is the means by which people use the energy which is packaged. In fact, "clean coal" is about adding carbon to hydrogen. Third, it is centralized. Individual people cannot produce these fuels, nor access them. One is stuck with the current top-down economy, where if you want energy, you buy it from the oil companies. A top-down energy system means a top-down economy. And a top-down economy means that there must be a large military to protect the sources of whatever it is supplies the key resources.
But the worst part about it is that after all that investment, after all that cost, this system runs out in a century or so no matter what. Given 30 years between generations, your great grandchildren - people you may well meet - will be faced with same problem we are being faced with right this very instant.