When the Oil Age Ends, What Next?

***WARNING!!! Long post ahead.***

Mark from Section 15 wrote a comment I think intended to bring me down. After I wrote about how optimistic I was about our ability to overcome the problem of peak oil, Mark wrote:

But... we're having a hard time finding any energy alternative as efficient as oil.

What I mean by that is despite all the work we do to get oil, there's something like a 100 to 1 ratio of energy output to energy in. So the energy equivalent of 1 barrel of oil is needed to realize an output of 100 barrels (figures are memory estimates - it may be 50 to 1 or 80 to 1, the point is is a large ratio). Nothing else has that promise.

Solar cells seem practical, but some work shows they use more oil to make, transport and install than energy they make during their operational lifetimes.

Wind generators are great, but the ratio there, though positive, is much lower.

Pesticides, plastics are everywhere, and yet how are we to produce them without sufficient oil?

Okay, the following post is many things, but it is not any of the following:

• A) A slam at Mark, whose blog is here and you should read.

• B) A refutation of the idea that the end of oil will be a difficult transition.

• Or C) A technophile's fantasy about how technology will solve all our problems.

That said, I do disagree with Mark. First off, any analysis of full life-cycle energy inputs is going to show a long, long payoff time for most forms of energy. Any idea how much energy the energy industry uses? In most countries, it's the biggest single consumer of energy. Nuclear plants have a tough time paying off in the fairyland of finance - you can only imagine how bad they are if you evaluate them thermodynamically. This isn't to say that Mark isn't right about solar - the payoff is definitely in years, and possibly even decades. But I will say that this is true of most sources of energy. Yet we still use other forms of energy, showing that thermodynamics are not the only variable at work here. Rather, it's economics, and a bit of physics.

The energy source in question is oil (though much of the following will also apply for natural gas.) So what do we use oil for? "We" in this case is going to refer to the United States, because they're the largest single user, and because their data should also apply roughly to Canada, and most importantly, it's the data I have most easily at hand. From Winning the Oil Endgame, p. 36:

2000 US Oil End Use:

Chemical Feedstocks: 11.7%
Industrial (i.e., factory) fuel: 12.7%
Buildings (heating): 7.7%
Transportation fuel: 67.8%

So, obviously, transportation is the big one. But because that's the biggest slice of the pie, I'm going to deal with that last. Buildings can be heated electrically, and oil is essentially non-existent when it comes to electrical generation, so we can eliminate that 7.7%. Factory fuel is mostly used for heating, though in this case to generate much higher temperatures. Still, the aluminum industry has been using electricity to generate high temperatures to electrolyze bauxite for decades, because there's no other option when it comes to aluminum. Of course, recycling aluminum and other metals is much less energy-intense (often an order of magnitude or more), so maybe we'll see old landfills mined for their aluminum and steel content - certainly, the percentages will be much higher than most existing western mines.

Chemical feedstocks are a bit iffier for me to comment on, simply because I lack the prerequisite chemistry knowledge (damn you, grade 10!) but it's hard for me to believe that a barrel of oil would be useful for it's hydrocarbon contents, but a similar volume of biodiesel or methanol wouldn't. In any case, Engineer-Poet has a good post on one possibility for mass-producing fertilizer post-oil. I'd prefer we just go all-organic, but that might not be possible. The amount of various biofuels we can produce with a little effort is truly impressive, if we use the sources that are available to us - the forestry and paper industry, agriculture, even city landfills can produce useful amounts. Most nations on earth could probably be self-sufficient in fuel, even if they diverted their bio-hydrocarbon production to fuel use. However, I would argue this would be a mistake.

Lets go back to those figures for a moment. Transportation, as we saw, is the biggest single use of oil - indeed, it alone makes up a majority of oil use. If Oil Use were the US Congress, Transportation could amend the Constitution all by its lonesome. What I'm trying to say is, transport is important. How does it break down? Well, that 67.8% works out like this:

Cars: 23.3%
Light Trucks: 16.9%
Heavy Trucks: 11.3%
Airplanes: 7.8%

There's a bit more in there, but this is by far the lion's share of oil use for transportation. I guess the first thing I would ask is, does anyone truly need to fly? Well, if they really need to, the Nazis used to make aviation fuel from coal, so I suppose we could use that. However, what would make a lot more sense is if we simply invested in a continent-wide electrified rail infrastructure. Expensive? Hell yeah. More than running the cars and trucks post-Oil Peak? I doubt it. Even today, oil-fired trains are 8x more efficient than trucks. Running them off an electric grid would be even more efficient. That could eliminate most of the need for heavy trucks and aircraft.

As for cars and "light trucks" (Pickups and SUVs, mainly) I frankly think we'd be better off banning most of the larger ones, but then I'm an effete urbanite. If my wishes are difficult to make in to law (as they stubbornly seem to be) light trucks would be amenable to the same kind of fuel-saving technologies as most cars. Here too, the vast majority of our transportation needs can be met with electricity. Since most people don't commute more than 40 miles in a day, and almost none commute more than 60, a plug-in hybrid (PIH) that was able to drive 60 miles on batteries alone, without turning on the liquid-fueled engine, would eliminate something like 85-90% of daily commuter oil use. The tiny remaining fraction of transportation needs that require liquid fuels could be met by the US's current level of ethanol production - and far more efficient, cleaner, and abundant methods of production are already being developed, among them a Canadian firm called Iogen.

So is it this simple? Of course not. Like I said, this isn't a "yay technology!" piece. The biggest problem is getting from here to there, like in most cases. Ask a Marxist. However, the advantage to getting to an all-electrical future is simply this: By and large, the infrastructure is in place (unlike certain scenarios - coughcoughHydrogencough), and the energy "source" is one we already have more than a century's experience dealing with. I'm sure other experts could poke plenty of holes in this scenario, but I'll save them the bother and point out some the biggest stumbling blocks I can think of off the top:

1) This plan relies heavily on electricity. Coming up with new generating capacity, and expanding the grid to deal with it, will be huge problems.

This is a problem, if we stay in the mindset that new capacity is going to come from large new plants. If we instead think of the new capacity coming from increased efficiency, some interesting possibilities present themselves. For example, the US lobby group for major electrical utilities estimates that no new capacity would be needed until PIH's reached a market share above 30%, because most charging is assumed to be done in off-peak hours. If this is true, then the potential should be even greater if we make a serious national efforts to increase energy efficiency. If you're a libertarian or small-government conservative, then cover your eyes because this means lots and lots of subsidies. There's simply no other way to turn over existing stocks of fridges, air conditioners, and water heaters without huge subsidies. Banning single-pane windows and the incandescent lightbulb would also be a worthwhile policy.

Suppose this isn't enough. What then? Well, wind can probably deliver a maximum of 30% of our power before it's intermittency becomes a strain on the transmission grid. Solar is less intermittent, and more predictable, so I presume (but couldn't say for certain) that this is less of a problem. More importantly, solar is perfectly suited to deliver electricity when we in North America use it the most - on hot, sunny days. (Oddly, considering its climate, Canada has been a summer-peaking energy user since the 1960s.)

Okay, we've maxed out our wind production and every roof has solar panels on it. Let's say my numbers are all wrong, and we still need more energy - imagine we've all decided to cook turkeys in August at the same hour. What then? Well, if it comes right down to it, we can simply draw power off of our cars until the peak passes - each PIH would need to store something like 15 kilowatt-hours on-board, more than enough to get over the peaks. In fact, 15kwh is enough to run a family home for more than a day. But I find it hard to believe that solar, wind, and hydroelectricity would be unable to meet our energy demands, especially if we invested heavily in efficiency.

2) Aha! Solar power still has the same life-cycle costs, though! You haven't answered Mark's main criticism!

This is true, and damn you for catching me! All I can say is that the new Quantum Dot solar power systems seem to A) deliver far more power for less input, and B) seem to be far more amenable to mass-production. This is a layman's perspective, however. In all probability, solar panels will need to be designed to have decades of useful life to get a meaningful energy-payoff.

The other answer I will give is that most of the new biofuel methods of production have claimed payoffs of more than 200% in terms of energy-invested to energy-collected. Biofuels would by definition be a far larger form of solar energy in this scenario then our rooftops. Some crops, like switchgrass, basically require no maintenance or fertilizing to grow rapdily, and require no heavy machinery to harvest - a riding mower would be sufficient, up to a point.

3) Why make the biofuels if you want us all driving electric cars?

Well, not everyone is going to keep their daily driving to less than 60 miles, no matter what I want. We will still need liquid fuels. Moreover, other countries won't be able to make their own supplies of biofuels, whether because of climate or size. I have no doubt that a global trade in biofuels will come in to being, except that this time the new OPEC will be Canada, US, Australia, Brazil, and maybe some others. Also, in the longer term, ethanol and methanol are excellent hydrogen carriers, and thus excellent fuels for fuel cell-powered cars. We might then begin to see something that Amory Lovins has predicted - fuel cell cars selling their hydrogen-generated electricity on to the grid while they lie inactive for more than 90% of the time (the US average). Again, biofuels are generally compatible with our existing infrastructure of liquid fuels, so there's no need to deal with the biggest single problem with the Hydrogen Economy as imagined by Lovins, Rifkin et al.

Another use for biofuels might be to replace the oil we currently use for chemical feedstocks - at a certain point, a hydrocarbon is a hydrocarbon, right? Again, I lack the requisite chemical knowledge.

Things this scenario does not address, directly:
-Global warming. I wouldn't want people to use more coal, but any plan that emphasizes electricity over liquid fuels is likely to increase use of coal-fired electrical plants, at least in the short term.
-Natural Gas. Likely to peak relatively soon after oil, but largely used for the same purposes as oil. However, natural gas is easily replaced by electricity in the domestic sphere, and is largely confined to peak-production in electrical generation, meaning it should be easily replaced by solar.
-Politics. This, of course, is the part where the monkeys start throwing shit. Frankly, given that North America is dominated by small-government conservatives (yes, even the Liberals and Democrats) I can't see any intelligent planning to precede the onset of Peak Oil. Even after we've started to see gas lines again, I wouldn't bet on Texas Republicans or Alberta Conservatives admitting reality.

All right. Too much writing - time to shut up for a while.