Saving The Environment Might Not Be As Easy As We Think
By Robert Sorley
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As the public ‘conversation’ about climate change and sustainable development moves closer and closer to center stage, it is now important to step away from our entrenching positions, take a deep breath, and look at a different category of ‘big pictures’.
Let’s leave the ‘skeptic-advocate’ dipole for the moment and move toward a set of principles that no sane person could seriously refute. Start with a few simple questions:
- Should governments, corporations, communities and individuals use their resources and organizations to behave in an environmentally responsible manner? Yes, of course.
- Should a new technology or initiative have the net result of greater units of greenhouse gas emissions for each unit of input? No, of course not.
- Does the state of our technology have the capacity to improve our emissions, our lifestyles and a sustainable agenda? Well, yes and no.
If truth be told, the technologies which currently have critical mass can only offer incremental improvements. A technological revolution of the scale which saw the elimination of wood burning in favor of hydrocarbon burning is still quite far away.
Several significant obstacles and large scale experiments must be addressed before the ‘non-combustion’ (ie. Wind, Water, Solar, Geothermal & Biofuel) will ever have the critical mass to truly rival the global reach of hydrocarbons.
Note the exclusion of nuclear energy from the previous list. There is a lesson to be drawn from our brief and tentative experiment with nuclear energy. Public attitudes turned against nuclear very early in its life cycle. Who is to say that nuclear’s experience will not repeat when the true and full costs of a “renewable energy” become clear?
Three problem-solving features contained in the main hydrocarbon applications are:
- Energy Density
- Transportability
- Small production area requirements
We, as a civilization, must either develop new technologies to address all three of these issues, or accept the inferiority of new technologies in these areas. If we opt for the latter, we must accept a measurable decline in our quality of life. If that’s not acceptable, we have the option to stick with hydrocarbons, as long as they are still around. But this option means that we must accept that anthropogenic-induced climate change will worsen. It may be much harder to measure the decline in our quality of life due to climate change, whereas the former will be acute.
ENERGY DENSITY
A gallon of regular gasoline holds 125,000 btu of energy content, or 34 MJ per liter. To describe this in daily terms, that gallon will propel 6 people in a 2.5T SUV a distance of 17 miles….all for a cost of roughly $3.00. Put another way, each mile costs 17 cents, so each person pays 3 cents for the benefit of moving one mile. Not even a rickshaw driver in the poorest country in the world would offer you this price!
Our academics and innovators are struggling to identify a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine when it comes to transporting people and material. The fuel cell, which once showed great promise is now dormant, wrapped up in the weaknesses of its own value chain. We may occasionally watch a 3 minute expose on the strange looking vehicles (with large surface areas) in the “North American Solar Challenge”, but we intuitively know these will never be able to carry a bevy of school children to their field trips.
The electric car may be of interest, but that requires plugging into the mains, which requires, in turn, that the power grid be designed for the increased demand. Since most of our electricity comes from hydrocarbons (gas, coal and oil) as of this date, we may run the risk of making the problem worse – unless it is very well thought out. Of course, we could always increase capacity by installing solar panels (photovoltaic cells) and wind turbines, but hydrocarbons will remain the core energy input.
The rules of energy density relegate our transportation issue to one of incremental progress, not revolutionary step-change. The hybrid car and improved engine designs are the most realistic efforts to be made as of this date.
Note we haven’t even broached the subject of shipping or air transport which will have no access to power grids for long periods of time.
TRANSPORTABILITY
The next question that must be addressed is, once you have an energy source, how do you get it to the people who need it? Crude oil and its refined products are relatively easy to transport. So is coal. Natural gas is more difficult, but there is now good pipeline infrastructure in most countries, delivering the resource to market. Liquid Natural Gas also continues to grow as a viable transport network.
If one takes the transportability issue to the wind, solar, geothermal, hydro and tidal technologies, it becomes quickly apparent that we have an enormous challenge:
- How do you get energy from windy areas to cities?
- How do you deliver electricity from sunny areas to the northern hemisphere in winter?
You cannot package these raw materials into fuel tanks or pipelines and carry them to the places that need them – at least not in the critical masses that will be required.
An option could be to lay thousands of miles of conductive wire so that there is a “pipeline” of electrical energy running from areas of great sunlight (or wind, or tides, etc) to, say, Northern Europe. However, the raw material will have been converted into electricity close to its source (say in the Sahara), and the energy losses inherent in moving electricity over long distances may render the whole exercise too inefficient. These weaknesses will exacerbate the questionable logic of mining a bunch of copper so it can be processed into wire that connects sunny areas to cold, dark, cloudy cities.
Once again, it is more likely that the renewable energy sources will complement the core hydrocarbon power plants. Note the return of the words “incremental improvements”.
RESOURCE PRODUCTION AREA
The last issue which this commentary will address is that of production area. Put briefly, this is the ‘footprint’ we put down to access the energy that we require.
While giant oil and gas fields are expressed in billions of barrels or trillion cubic feet, the area required for production and refining facilities is comparatively small. The world’s largest oilfield, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, is 3250 sq miles (8400 sq km) and is produced primarily by 5 production wells. Apart from Canada’s tar sands and Venezuela’s heavy oil complex, the flow characteristics of oil and gas mean that the facilities to produce and refine the resource leave a comparatively small footprint per btu or MJ of energy extracted.
This will not be the case with solar, tidal and wind technologies. While it is popular to cite the extraordinary statistics about solar radiation (174 PW, 1370 watts per sq meter, etc), the fact remains that an area of around 200,000 sq km would be required to collect enough TeraWatts to match the world’s current power consumption. That is half the state of California. The “production” areas for this kind of energy extraction will be significantly larger than anything we have seen to date.
Similarly, a modern wind turbine may be specified to produce 1.33 MW in a year. Given that the world consumes 15 TW in power per year, this would imply that we would need 11 million strategically placed wind turbines to replace the existing infrastructure. That is one wind turbine for every 600 people; every city with 1M people would require 1700 turbines. Denver would require 850 turbines, which would correspond to one every 5 sq miles. Taking an average, the greatest distance that you could place yourself from a wind turbine eyesore in Denver would be about 1 & ¼ miles. At any given time, you would thus have 37 wind turbines in your field of view, assuming a flat terrain and a short tower. The taller the turbine, the bigger the visible number of units. New York City would require 13,800 turbines, or 45 turbines per sq mile. At any given time, a New Yorker would be no more than 262 yards from a tower, and would have 2544 in the field of view (flat landscape, short towers, no obstructions assumed). That’s a veritable forest…without the benefit of any trees.
Admittedly, one could put the turbines together in a more efficient wind farm outside the metropolis, but it would still be significant footprint in someone else’s back yard.
Next question…where is the wind? Oh yes, and what about growth in population/energy requirements? (Note that the above calculations are probably conservative for US cities, since the energy consumed per head is so much higher than in other countries).
It will be more realistic to use wind as an incremental addition to the existing grid.
In conclusion, each reader should ask the following question of himself or herself. How many times do you see an oil or gas production rig? How about a refinery? It is probably an uncommon event. In our effort to abandon hydrocarbons, are you prepared to look at a large photovoltaic panel complex AND several 240 ft (75m) wind towers with 300 ft (93m) rotors stirring noisily in the breeze? Note also that the land must be set aside for these energy capturing units, and the building materials must be mined, processed and assembled (probably in your back yard).
Sadly, there will be no way to make them beautiful nor to make them perfectly safe for people or wildlife.
It may all be worth it to thwart this climate change. But look at how quickly our society turned against nuclear, the ‘energy liberator’ of the 1970s. Nuclear has a lot to offer as a non-emitting technology, but its time has passed. It is not inconceivable that when the limitations of renewables become more fully understood, that there will be another outcry.
Let’s make sure that the skeptics and advocates of both existing and new technologies keep the debate open and balanced. We commoners want to do the right thing, but we’re getting a lot of bias from our green advocates, and no one would stoop to take an oil industry PR rep seriously. Now would they?
ROBERT SORLEY was trained as a Geophysicist in Canada before joining both French & Norwegian companies as a marine seismic contractor. His career has taken him to job postings and expatriations in West Africa, the North Sea, France, UK, SE Asia, Australia the USA and back to Canada. Working on the periphery of the oil exploration industry in both the developed and the developing world has introduced him to a wide range of stakeholders, nationalities and people of all walks of life, all of whom have a multitude of perspectives. Since the identification of energy resources is a strategic component of every country’s economy, Robert has frequently engaged with national oil companies, regulators and policy-makers. This, in turn, has evolved into a deep curiosity about how policies are debated, decided and implemented.
