The Sixth Estate

This year there have been great exultation from the pro-business sector about the fact that the shale gas revolution, new Arctic prospecting, and various other schemes mean the “peak oil” debate is over. And in a way I happen to agree. I think that the peak oil debate is less important than the peak humanity debate. There are more than enough fossil fuels in the ground to create a high-carbon atmosphere capable of choking off life as we know it. The logic behind this is very simple and I can flesh it out in a future post.

But in the meantime, it’s time to poke a pin through the new media balloon on the notion of our infinitely expanding energy supply. It’s hard to know where to begin. In response to Jeff Rubin’s recent prediction that high oil prices meant a permanent “end of growth,” the National Post printed a C.D. Howe Institute review arguing Rubin was wrong and that human ingenuity meant we would continue to find more, and cheaper energy supplies forever, even if we did run out of oil in the meantime. The author, a former StatsCan analyst, even labelled Rubin’s pessimism about our energy future as “the end of thought.”

Few of these new anti-Rubinists would go as far as the following commenter on the Post’s website, but “Erwin39″ still manages to capture all the rank idiocy in a single nutshell:

Just a few years ago, you would have been considered an idiot if you didn’t believe in “peak oil”… Then it became economical to exploit shale oil (why didn’t the so called experts forsee the exploitation of this obvious resource?) and there hasn’t been any talk of peak oil lately… Any economist who isn’t blinded by politics or ideology knows there is no such thing as peak oil. There never was and there never will be “peak oil” as long as the markets are free.

Which brings us back to the odious William Watson’s recent claim that the only thing that can get in the way of our bright, sunny, prosperous future is government planning. And of course, lest you think I’m just cherry-picking the biggest idiot from the usual collection of idiots that populates the online message boards, here’s Globe & Mail columnist Margarent Wente saying pretty much the same thing:

Far from running out of fossil fuel, we seem to have a new bonanza of it. Human ingenuity keeps finding new and better ways to tap the Earth’s resources. A technological revolution is unlocking vast new reserves of energy around the world, including, some day, from the Arctic Ocean. None of this will be zero-risk or problem-free. There’ll be setbacks, mishaps and, probably, occasional disasters. But there’ll also be a gusher of innovation, wealth and jobs.

I’m very sorry to disappoint Watson, and Cross, and Wente, and “Erwin39,” but humans will very soon face not only peak oil, but peak energy. The reason for this is fairly obvious: there isn’t enough energy available for us to keep growing at our present rate. This is cold, hard mathematics. Very soon now, we will reach a point at which we are unable to find energy sources capable of sustaining further growth. Shortly thereafter, we will be unable to find energy sources capable of sustaining our present energy consumption. Then it’s a long slide downhill towards cultural, maybe even biological, extinction.

The more we grow now, the sooner this crisis will come down the road. The fact that we’ve discovered a new, large source of oil shouldn’t be seen as an excuse to push a few more years of growth at the cost of future generations. It should be an opportunity to breathe a sigh of relief about the coming price shocks, and then back down to the hard work of rationally planning our futures, which we would have had to do anyways.

I alluded to cold, hard math, and I will now demonstrate that fact. First fact: the current annual energy budget of the world is around 500 exajoules. We get to that number by, amongst other things, about 32 billion barrels of oil and about 400 nuclear reactors, along with vast quantities of gas, coal, and new alternative energy sources. For the sake of an easy comparison, I’m just going to use the three numbers, though. Now, unlike Wente, Cross is intelligent enough to recognize that oil is finite and that we will eventually run out of it. So as we go along, not all of the energy actually has to come from barrels of oil or nuclear reactors. Those are just examples I’ve drawn from current use. But for growth to continue, whatever alternative energy source you invent will have to be able to produce the equivalent in energy to barrels of oil and to nuclear reactors. Hence, the inevitable problem.

Second premise: if growth is to continue, it will be at about 2.9% per year. This is a widely cited figure for the average American growth in energy consumption, spread over several centuries. Technically, of course, any number above zero means continuing growth. But I’m going to assume for my purposes here that the enthusiastic pseudo-economists I’ve quoted above all believe that growth is going to continue in the future as it has in the past, and maybe even (as some seem to think) even faster than that.

Interestingly, at 2.9% per year, energy consumption will increase sixteenfold over the course of a century. This means that for our present growth rate to continue, in the year 2112, we will be using 8000 exajoules per year of energy. We will use, in other words, as much energy in a year as we use in 16 years today. In less than a decade, we will use as much energy as we could use in an entire century at current rates. And to get there, we will require about 500 billion barrels of oil per year and over 6000 nuclear reactors.

It’s worth pointing out that it’s not just a matter of using energy at these vastly increased rates in the future. It’s also a matter of finding it. For Wente’s prediction of never-ending oil to come true, we will need to be 16 times as good at finding oil in a century as we are today. That seems pretty unlikely. We will also need to invent 16 new alternative energy sources for each one we’re inventing today, operate 16 uranium mines for every one that is open today, build 16 new hydroelectric dams for every one that is online today, and so on and so forth.

But Wente, Watson, Cross et al. assure me that human ingenuity can solve this problem, and that we will continue to discover new and exciting energy sources which are even better and cheaper than the ones we currently have. So we continue on.

Fast forward again, to the year 2312. Now energy consumption has increased another 16 times — or a total of 256 times current rates. That means 128,000 exajoules per year, drawn from, among other sources, 8 trillion barrels of oil per year and from 96,000 nuclear reactors. In 2312, we will use as much energy in a couple of days as we currently consume in an entire year today. The new shale oil gas reserves that everyone’s excited over today are, in short, less than half of the oil supply we will need in 2312 just to get through a single year of business-as-usual. Basically, every year, we will need to discover, prospect, and exploit something equivalent to two global shale gas reserves every year.

But Wente, Watson, Cross et al. assure me that human ingenuity can solve this problem, and that we will continue to discover new and exciting energy sources which are even better and cheaper than the ones we currently have. So we continue on.

Another century brings us to 2412. Energy consumption will have increased a total of 4000 times, to 2 million exajoules per year. We will be merrily burning our way through 128 trillion barrels of oil per year — equivalent to 20 quadrillion litres, or the equivalent in volume to the Great Lakes, each and every year. Alongside the grand oil bonfire we will have erected 1.5 million nuclear reactors. At this point, solar energy might still be able to keep our energy consumption growing. But we’ll have to pretty much blanket the planet in solar panels — efficient ones, not current ones — in order to do it.

I want to be clear about these numbers. That’s not the total that will have been used to date by that time. That’s the amount we’ll be using every year. That, or its equivalent in some new energy source which doesn’t yet exist.

But Wente, Watson, Cross et al. assure me that human ingenuity can solve this problem, and that we will continue to discover new and exciting energy sources which are even better and cheaper than the ones we currently have. So we continue on to 2512, just 400 years into the future, and our energy consumption is 65,000 times what it is today — 32 million exajoules. The annual energy budget of today, in other words, gets used up in less than an hour. We will be using the equivalent of 2 quadrillion barrels of oil per year, as well as 24 million nuclear reactors.

By this time, if some smart governments invest in the sort of research strategies that Watson cavalierly dismisses, we’ll probably have some revolutionary new power source, like hydrogen fusion, which means we can dispense with the increasingly silly estimates of barrels of oil shortly before we get to the point of claiming that each and every year humanity will burn a reserve of oil equal in size to the entire Pacific Ocean. So we can spare the economics crowd that particular indignity. Of course, they’ll be fresh on their way to a new indignity. I am quite certain that if we ever do manage to invent fusion power, economists will instantly announce that unlike past natural resources, this new power source will pretty much last forever.

But we soon reach a new problem. From 2512, let’s skip forward through 3012, by which time we’re using 32 million yottajoules of energy per year. At this point, we will need to start seriously thinking about building a Dyson sphere, since we’re well past the point at which blanketing the entire planet in 100%-efficient solar panels would be enough to meet our energy needs. Now that’s only 1000 years into the future. It’s quite a while, certainly, but it’s like us looking back to the Middle Ages — a while ago, but not that long ago. Does anyone seriously want to argue that our civilization has less time left than the time we’ve enjoyed since the Normans conquered England?

I could, if you want, assume that the human species is only halfway through its lifespan and run this thought-experiment out another 100,000 years. But in order to do that, you’ll have to explain to me how long it will take us to invent faster-than-light space travel. Because that’s what we’ll need, within the next thousand years, in order to find new power sources.