Nonrenewable Geology

 These days, we are constantly assured that our leaders and experts will do what’s necessary to promptly eliminate climate change, and open the gate to a clean green renewable utopia.  A golden bonus is that spending staggering amounts of money to radically alter the energy-related infrastructure of the entire world will be great for the economy, thrill investors, and create jobs, jobs, jobs!  If we have a fervent blind faith in this miracle, we can relax, keep our lives on autopilot, and shop till we drop.

According to bright green dreams, the answer to all our prayers is to simply abandon fossil energy right away, and power the global economy with wholesome carbon-free renewable electricity.  Not everyone agrees.  The mainstream media, and many environmental activists, have yet to acknowledge the grumpy skeptics who assert that it’s impossible for today’s industrial civilization, as we know it, to be entirely powered by any flavor of electricity, whether renewable or conventional.

Megan Seibert and William E. Rees explained why.  Their report relied heavily on research by Alice Friedemann.  Only fossil fuel can generate the intense heat needed to mass produce stuff like steel, concrete, silicon, and so on.  It’s also essential for keeping the current transport system on life support (trucks, trains, ships, planes, cars, etc.) — both manufacturing the machines, and fueling their lifetime operation.  A team led by Derrick Jensen focused additional attention on bright green hopium.

And now, at long last (sorry!), I shall get to the point of my message.  I recently learned about a thousand page report created by the Geological Survey of Finland, a government agency that employs 400 experts.  Geologists don’t believe in miracles, they believe in minerals — finite nonrenewable substances, resources that are diminished with each scoop of the power shovels.  Every passing year, the reserves get smaller, lower in quality, and more expensive to extract.

The Finnish geologists wondered if seemingly unbelievable miracles were actually possible in reality.  They contemplated what modifications would be needed to 2019 technology, in order to create a perfectly sustainable utopia by 2050.  The theoretical transition required super-massive global changes to be made in an unimaginably super-speedy manner.

The heroic geologists stumbled upon an important discovery.  One minor detail had somehow been overlooked by the clean green renewable dreamers.  Their primary focus had been on carbon, climate, positive thinking, and saving the world.  It seems there was little or no awareness that the miraculous global transition required huge amounts of specific minerals.  Some of the essential minerals were needed in quantities that far exceeded the world’s known resources and reserves.  The titanic dream smacked into an iceberg.  The geologist’s report focused on three subject areas: transport, electricity generation, and industrial manufacturing. 

[A quick vocabulary lesson.  “Reserves” are the amount of a resource that can profitably be extracted with existing technology at current prices.  “Resources” are the currently known amount of a resource, only a portion of which can be considered reserves.]

The Finnish report explained that the planet-thrashing monster we have created took more than a century to become uncontrollably catastrophic.  It was only made possible by guzzling staggering amounts of cheap and abundant oil, an extremely energy dense fuel.  Our monster has devoured massive amounts of high quality mineral resources.  At the peak of the joyride, folks in wealthy nations enjoyed a fantastic orgy of utterly idiotic waste.

And now, the monster must be ethically euthanized as soon as possible.  Energy is no longer cheap.  Mineral resources are lower in quality, and far less abundant.  Financial systems are loaded with debts, and full of surprises.  The planet’s ecosystems are disintegrating in front of our eyes, as the population explosion continues soaring.  World leaders are busy butting heads, shooting missiles, and cutting throats.  Alas, the Finnish geologists are not giddy with optimism for a quick and easy bright green future.

In the global energy system of 2018, fossil fuels provided 84.7% of the power, nuclear was 10.1%, and renewables were just 4.05% (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biofuels, etc.).  In other words, nonrenewable energy (fossil + nuke) provided about 95% of the monster’s life force.  The geologists focused on energy processes that involved minerals.  So, they didn’t mention humankind’s original energy resource, muscle power — it’s not a wildly exciting alternative, but it has a promising future.  Imagine everyone wearing bright green MAWA hats (Make America Walk Again).

Obviously, transport systems should rapidly eliminate carbon belching Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) technology.  Most green dreamers envision a shift to Electric Vehicle (EV) technology that utilizes rechargeable batteries or fuel cells.

EVs are a very trendy idea today.  Battery powered EVs are charged with electricity from the grid.  But if the grid is delivering electricity that’s maybe 95% nonrenewable, that’s what their batteries will be charged with.  How green is that?  Of course, an EV’s frame, fenders, battery, motor, etc., are not made of harmless green fairy dust.  Neither are solar panels, wind turbines, or roadways made of asphalt or concrete.  Walking has far less impact.

Fuel cell powered EVs use a chemical reaction to generate electricity from hydrogen.  During operation, they emit only water.  Hydrogen in pure form does not exist in the natural world.  Energy is required to separate hydrogen from other compounds.  The U.S. Department of Energy says that about 95% of hydrogen is made by processing natural gas (CH₄).  The Finnish report mentioned an uncomfortable fact: “A potential downside is that much less electricity is harvested from hydrogen in a fuel cell than the electricity required to produce that same volume of hydrogen.”

In 2019, the global transport fleet included about 1.416 billion cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles, of which 1.39 billion were ICE.  These ICE machines need to be sent to the crusher as soon as possible.  Is it possible (or ecologically intelligent) to replace them with EVs?

Batteries are a serious challenge for both transport and electricity generation.  I’ll chat more about batteries shortly.  First, let’s take a peek at electricity generation.  It produces energy that is the life force of the grid, the stuff that lights the night, powers appliances, and entrances glowing screen zombies.  As mentioned, electricity generation is currently fueled by energy that is maybe 95% nonrenewable, a huge drawback.

Currently, the grid is designed to reliably distribute electricity from large centralized power plants, something like a hub and spokes.  A renewable energy grid would have to distribute electricity produced by numerous, smaller, widely dispersed facilities (wind and/or solar).  These produce power intermittently, taking naps when the winds go calm, or the sunbeams stop — sometimes for extended periods.

Meanwhile, the end-user demand for electricity constantly rises and falls throughout the day.  Today’s power generation infrastructure is carefully designed to react to the frequent ups and downs of demand, by quickly delivering less or more electricity into the grid.  If this was not the case, life would have many more technological headaches.

On the other hand, a wind turbine farm pays no attention whatsoever to end-user demand.  More wind, more power.  No wind, no power.  The same is true for solar panel arrays, and the variable inflow of sunbeams.  For these systems to work, large scale battery infrastructure is needed to effectively store surplus energy when generation exceeds demand, and then later release stored energy whenever demand exceeds generation.  In northern regions, demand zooms higher when winter moves in, so the battery backup buffer would ideally need to store maybe four weeks of electricity — a huge challenge.  Nobody knows if this is even possible under real world conditions.

There are two forms of electricity, AC and DC.  The grid can only carry AC power.  When you plug a gizmo into a wall receptacle, it receives AC.  AC cannot be stored — once it is fed into the grid, it will either be used or lost.  Surplus AC can be converted to DC, which can be stored in a backup buffer battery, for later use.  When demand rises, DC in the battery can be converted to AC, and fed back into the grid.  Your cell phone and flashlight have batteries, because they run on DC.  Solar panels and wind turbines produce DC, which can be stored in batteries. 

And now, the plot thickens.  Lithium-ion batteries provide the most efficient storage.  To power 1.39 billion EVs, an estimated 282.6 million tons of batteries would be needed.  Plus, vastly more battery infrastructure would be needed to provide the storage buffer for the grid — an additional 2.5 billion tons!  So, to enable both EVs and grid buffer storage, an estimated 2.78 billion tons of batteries would be needed.  “This far exceeds global reserves of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and graphite.”  Without adequate storage buffers, “the wind and solar power generation may not be able to be scaled up to the proposed global scope.”

Indeed, the geologists wondered if there are adequate mineral resources to make batteries for just the 1.39 billion EVs.  They wrote, “Preliminary calculations show that global reserves, let alone global production, may not be enough to resource the quantity of batteries required.”  Oh, and those 1.39 billion EV batteries would have a useful working life of just of 8 to 10 years.  And the wind turbines and solar panels also have limited lifespans, 20 to 30 years or so.  Everything will need periodic replacement, from now to eternity.  For this reason, Alice Friedemann suggests that “renewable” should more accurately be referred to as “rebuildable.”  No free lunch.

Mineral resources are neither infinite, easily available, nor cheap.  The massive transition to renewables looks more like a frantic short term plastic bandage, rather than an effective, well planned permanent cure.  The geologists conclude that a transition to renewable energy seems to be seriously hobbled by the limited availability of nonrenewable minerals. 

The recipe for lithium-ion batteries requires five essential minerals: copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and graphite.  Are there adequate reserves of these minerals to manufacture all those batteries?  No, not even close.  EV transport would need 1.39 billion batteries.  “In theory, there are enough global reserves of copper if they were exclusively used just to produce lithium-ion batteries for just one generation of vehicles.”  Reserves of the other four minerals are not adequate to make all of those EV batteries.  See the chart on page six of the report’s summary. [LINK]

So, we’ve looked at transport and electricity generation, and their theoretical renewable options.  The third focus of the Finnish report was industrial manufacturing.  What are the theoretical options for running industrial systems on renewable energy?  The geologists can’t think of any.  See the chart on page two of the report’s summary.

Simon Michaux authored the Finnish report.  He wrote, “In conclusion, this report suggests that replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas, and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population.  There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations.  What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.  This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.  Inevitably, this leads to the conclusion that the existing renewable energy sectors and the EV technology systems are merely steppingstones to something else, rather than the final solution.  It is recommended that some thought be given to this and what that something else might be.”

 

Michaux, Simon P., “Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels,” Geological Survey of Finland, August 20, 2021.

I did not entirely read the 1,000 page report [LINK].  I did carefully read the fairly understandable eight page summary of the report [LINK].

Life After Fossil Fuels

In 2020, Jeff Gibbs’ documentary Planet of the Humans fell out of the sky.  It aimed a spotlight on the many ways in which solar and wind power were neither green nor renewable — no free pony.  In response, many “green” activists explosively soiled their britches and demanded that the film be banned.  Millions watched it.  Similarly, in 2021, Derrick Jensen and team published Bright Green Lies, which was soon followed by a documentary based on the book.  

These two projects were righteous fire-breathing exposés of the deceptions regularly made by folks promoting “green” technologies.  Passionate preaching can often get some folks to listen.  Sometimes it inspires minds to change.  Other folks prefer to have deeper understanding before revising their views.  Alice Friedemann’s book, Life After Fossil Fuels, will appeal to them. 

Without rage and condemnation, she calmly and carefully described why she thinks we would be wise to end our addiction to fossil fuels as soon as possible.  She evaluated the alternatives, and concluded that most are not free ponies.  Importantly, she carefully explained the benefits, limits, and faults of the various options, and meticulously cited the sources of her information — literally hundreds of them. 

Readers are introduced to the notion that alternative energy is not the magic key to a sustainable utopian wonderland.  The status quo is a high speed, ridiculously luxurious, one-way path into dark and treacherous realms.  We’ve been living like scruffy back alley gods on drugs.  The good news here is that no “green” solution can permanently keep the massively destructive status quo on life support — it’s going to end up where it’s headed.  “We are nearing the end of a one-time binge.”  Indeed!

So, my eyes began tap-dancing across page 1, and I was soon scrolling through a thrilling 86-page joyride.  Friedemann presented an informative and embarrassing birds-and-bees discussion of the horrific unintended consequences of our childlike obsession with living like crazy dysfunctional grownups.  I cheered with excitement with each new chapter.  It was so refreshing to experience such a sumptuous feast of clear and coherent bullshit free information. 

Readers are introduced to the important notion of EROI (energy returned on energy invested).  Each year it’s taking more and more energy to find, extract, process, and distribute fossil energy.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 per day, but the bridge toll for getting to work was $99.  For this reason, enormous amounts of fossil energy will remain in the ground forever, thank goodness!  About 65 percent of buried oil is technically or economically unrecoverable. 

The fracking industry is drilling like crazy, while more and more unlucky tycoons land with a splat in the tar pits of bankruptcy.  The richest discoveries were drilled and drained first.  “Globally, new oil discoveries have fallen for 6 years, with consumption of oil six times greater than discoveries from 2013 through 2019.”  Trouble ahead. 

In manufacturing, would it be possible to eliminate fossil energy by switching to wood-based fuel?  Take a wild guess.  Can we continue producing mountains of food when energy-guzzling synthetic fertilizers have become fond memories of the good old days?  Can industrial agriculture continue when energy-guzzling farm equipment runs out of affordable fossil energy to guzzle?  Will high speed horse carts haul fresh California veggies to Minnesota?

Can industrial civilization exist without energy-guzzling fleets of ships, planes, trains, and trucks?  “In the U.S., trucks deliver 80% of goods over 4.1 million miles of roads, with 80% of towns completely dependent on trucks.”  Can transportation systems shift to electric power?  “A truck with a driving range of 600 miles needs a battery pack weighing 35,275 pounds and can carry just 10,000 pounds.”  Oh, and cold weather reduces driving range by 35%.

“All contraptions that produce electricity need high heat in their construction.  They all need cement made at 2600°F.”  There is no known way to make concrete with electricity.  Making steel for wind turbines requires 3100°F (1700°C).  “Solar panels require 2700° to 3600°F (1500° to 2000°C) of heat to transform silicon dioxide into metallurgical grade silicon.”  Nuke plants still on the drawing board, in theory, might be able to generate 1562°F (850°C), but this is not hot enough for making cement, steel, glass, and lots of other stuff.

Friedemann’s key question is: could life as we know it continue in an alternative energy future?  By chapter 13, all contestants for powering a happy sustainable future were rejected, except one — biomass.  Prior to the fossil fuel era, heavy industry was powered by charcoal made from dead trees.  Brazil is still making steel with rainforest charcoal. 

“Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can generate the high heat needed by industry to make cement, iron, steel, aluminum, trucks, computers, electronic equipment, ceramics, bricks, and machinery.  Biodiesel is the only renewable drop-in fuel that can keep heavy-duty trucks, locomotives, and ships running.  Biomass, with a little help from hydropower, is the only renewable way to keep the electric grid up.”

Yikes!  This spooky paragraph sent a cold chill through my body.  Weird chapters followed.  I began to wonder if I had just wasted two entire days of the only life I may ever live.  But, by this point, I was aware that Friedemann had a whimsical side, so I kept reading, hoping for a sharp turn.  It came later.  Act two of the book was focused on contemplating how we could produce enough biomass to power industrial civilization, and prepare to feed the 3 billion additional folks expected for dinner in 2050.  Hope fiends will have a good cry.

Bummers obstructing the rise of a biomass utopia include climate change, freshwater scarcity, brutalized topsoil, and our addiction to countless fossil powered processes.  Turning biomass into a liquid fuel known as ethanol is idiotic.  Trucks can’t guzzle it, and it refuses to be pumped through pipelines.  It takes about as much energy to make a gallon as the finished gallon contains.  (Ethanol is a monster child fathered by gold plated government subsidies to Big Ag.) 

The bummer parade is long and unusual.  Make biodiesel with algae?  Make ethanol with seaweed, sorghum, or corn stalks?  Biodiesel could indeed replace oil-based diesel, if we were able to produce it in high volume.  This would require enormous amounts of cropland, and it would pummel the land as much as other types of agriculture.  If climate shifts blindside farm country, game over.

Bottom line: “The electric grid can not stay up without natural gas due to a lack of energy storage.  Transportation, agriculture, and manufacturing can not be electrified.  If transportation can not be electrified or run on Something Else, civilization as we know it ends.  Agriculture goes back to horses and human labor.”  When readers finally reach chapter 33 and slither across the finish line, their brains have been reduced to a bucketful of steaming glop.  It doesn’t look like we’re on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City.  The sky is full of flying monkeys.  What a book!

The pisser here is that this very important book is sold by a textbook publisher, and it’s very expensive.  It won’t be able to catch much of a ride on the wave of interest generated by Gibbs, Jensen, and others.  Its modest collegiate audience is mostly the well-dressed offspring of the idle rich, and desperate students who are massively in debt.  Non-billionaires may need to rob a gas station, or get a library card.

The bigger pisser is that 12 year olds don't already know this stuff.  Maybe it would be polite to inform youngsters about the challenging future they have inherited.  I hope that Friedemann is busy working on something like a Dick and Jane primer for school kids — an affordable, competent, un-redacted, easy to read, mind-expanding introduction to actual reality, warts and all.  Imagine that.

Friedemann, Alice, Life After Fossil Fuels, Springer, Cham, Switzerland, 2021.

NOTE TO ALL: Alice Friedemann has made THIS ENTIRE BOOK AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE on her website:
https://energyskeptic.com

Jeff Gibbs interview

 

Bright Green Lies

 

In an era when the info stream is running heavy on conspiracy theories, fake news, and balderdash, it’s not unusual to come across stories of green energy miracles.  For example, we might see that a progressive country somewhere overseas is now almost entirely running on wind or solar energy.  Oh, really?  In this era of deceptive “news” releases, truth can be a slippery rascal.

Bright green environmentalism is a mindset that has big hopes for a brighter future, and strongly advocates renewable energy.  Their primary interest is preserving our luxurious high-impact lifestyle and mega-profitable economy, while (hopefully) lightening our eco-footprint a wee bit, allowing us to feel slightly less uncomfortable.

The cat is out of the bag with regard to approaching fossil energy limits and the Climate Crisis.  The bad old-fashioned way of living has become unhip and embarrassing.  It has to go.  Bright green is a brilliant marketing strategy.  Look!  Here’s a new and improved way of living in the fast lane that’s friendly to the birds and trees!  It’s great for the economy, and it’s great for the planet!  Imagine that!  How totally cool!  (Um, the inconvenient truth here is that, no matter how hard we wish, we can’t have both industrial civilization and a living planet.)

Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of Bright Green Lies, which enthusiastically reveals all the kinky and creepy aspects of the bright green cult.  The three wordsmiths are apostles of a gospel called Deep Green Resistance, which passionately advocates defending the living world, to the highest degree possible, without delay.  (“No, that doesn’t mean killing all humans.  That means changing our lifestyle dramatically.”)  OK!

Once I made it across the border into chapter three, I suddenly became extremely excited!  I found myself exploring a fascinating, in-depth “birds and bees” discussion of the unfortunate realities, drawbacks, and limitations of alternative energy — lots of stuff they never taught me in school (and I wish they were teaching now).

My Admiral TV was made in 1946.  It doesn’t have a screen the size of a barn door.  I’ve never seen it work.  Watching a dead TV is boring.  Reading is a lot more interesting.  When you spend 25 to 30 years studying ecology, anthropology, and environmental history, you can learn a lot of stuff that mainstream folks don’t know — stuff more important than football scores, soap operas, game shows, celebrity shenanigans, and so on.

Folks who have working TVs, and thousands of channels, are often very well informed about countless subjects that are not especially important.  They are unlikely to be up to date on difficulties of lithium recycling, or why Big Mama Nature loathes and despises notorious bright green billionaires, or why the electric grid is so poorly designed for effectively distributing renewable energy that is intermittent, unpredictable, hard to control, and a pain in the ass.

They are likely to be blissfully ignorant about most of the countless eco-impacts of their consumer lifestyles.  The view outside their picture window is not strip mines, clear-cuts, forest fires, methane craters, oil fields, toxic spills, chemical plants, and landfills.  Out of sight, out of mind.  Most importantly, they are unlikely to understand why running today’s industrial civilization entirely on renewable energy is absolutely impossible, and why attempting a transition would provide little or no benefit — but a lot more damage to the planet.

Of course, everyone remembers William Jevons, who discovered something very strange in 1865.  In those days, the steam engine industry was making big gains in efficiency.  More work could be done with less coal.  Instead of reducing coal mining, demand for coal increased, because it was the greedy and profitable thing to do.  Jevon’s Paradox asserts, “Increased efficiency not only doesn’t generally reduce demand, but instead increases it.”

Bright greens still dance to the Jevon’s boogie.  Richard York, a University of Oregon wizard, studied data from 128 nations, and found that for every unit of “green” power brought online, only one-tenth as much fossil fuel was taken offline.  “Industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy, and fossil fuel is functionally irreplaceable.”  Electric cars can’t be made without it.  Nor can wind turbines, solar panels, planes, ships, concrete, cell phones, etc.  Oil is incredibly energy dense.

Solar power pauses for sunset or clouds, sometimes for days.  Wind turbines take a nap when it’s calm, sometimes for days.  Meanwhile, demand for electricity expects the grid to always provide our every need immediately, and demand can surge without warning.  This means that a conventional generation system (typically fossil powered) must constantly be kept running on standby, to immediately feed the grid when clouds pass, breezes calm, or demand suddenly spikes.  Brilliant, eh?

While coal or oil is energy that can be stored for millions of years, the grid delivers alternating current (AC) electricity, which is impossible to store — use it or lose it.  Batteries can store direct current (DC) electricity, but high capacity utility-scale batteries are not in common use.  There are other ways of storing energy, like hydro-electric dams, pumped hydro, compressed air, thermal, etc.  These can be used in unique locations, not everywhere.  Bottom line: “The grid was not built for renewables.”  Therefore, a new fantastically expensive state of the art grid is needed.

No storage systems are made of harmless green fairy dust.  All require a fossil energy powered industrial civilization.  In the world of batteries, lithium-ion is the most efficient.  Elon Musk is working hard to design and build lithium batteries for cars, homes, and industrial scale power storage.  Exponential growth in demand for lithium is predicted into the late 2020s and 2030s. 

Some fear that staggering demand for lithium could drive prices into the stratosphere, and close the gate to a beautiful green utopia.  Even worse, some predict that “not enough economically recoverable lithium exists to build anywhere near the number of batteries needed in a global electric-vehicle economy.”  This also applies to other gizmos that require lithium.  Oh-oh!

As a special bonus, readers are also taken on a naughty and exciting tour behind the curtains, to get a shocking peek at the steamy world of hardcore geology porn.  In addition to a long list of conventional minerals, “green” energy hardware requires exotic minerals, like lithium and rare earth metals, which are found in limited locations, and are not easy or “green” to mine.  The mining industry excels at creating enduring, toxic, eco-catastrophes.

The book explores a number of other subjects — power distribution grids, hydropower, recycling, green cities, biofuels, geothermal, and so on.  Near the end are 28 pages of “solutions,” all of which consumer society has zero interest in.  Consumer society wants to survive and grow until the planet can no longer breathe.  The authors suggest a more interesting path.

Put the plows away forever and bring back the grasslands, via holistic management (beneficial grazing).  Before long, the recovery of healthy wild vegetation will suck the excess carbon out of the air, and turn some of it into organic grass-fed meat.  Grass will save our ass!  Deal with overpopulation and extinctions.  Eliminate carbon emissions in five years.  Remove five dams per day and stop building new ones.  End logging.  And on and on.  In short, end the destruction, let the Earth heal.  Make America Walk Again.

Jensen has spoken to many audiences over 20+ years.  He asks each group the same question.  “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable society?”  No one has ever said yes.  This is exactly the point of his extreme recommendations.  There is no solution that leaves our way of life intact.  Our way of life has some really big issues.  This book will help you better understand some of them.  I liked it.

 

Jensen, Derrick, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies, Monkfish Publishing, Rhinebeck, New York, 2021.