The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [85]
Under the above scenario, the difference between oil supplied and oil demanded builds in each and every year after 2014, being driven by the 5 percent depletion of oil on the one hand and the “requirement” for 1.3 percent energy growth on the other.
Just by the numbers, once the scenario “settles down” in five years’ time (to account for the 30 mbd of projects described above to come on line), our 2019 scenario would require:
More than 200 nuclear plants would need to come on line each year and every year for the next 40 years, or:
Roughly 200,000 new wind towers would need to be sited and installed each and every year (delivering 1,700 TWh (terawatt hours), or more than 5 times the entire global installed wind base of 2009, (which generated 340 TWh),6 or:
More than 400,000 acres of land would need to be covered by solar PV panels, or:
More than 500 million acres of farmland would need to be converted to the production of liquid fuels.
Obviously we could utilize some combination of all four possible solutions, but seeing them individually helps to illustrate the scale of the problem. Ignoring other vital considerations for the moment, such as the fact that virtually none of our almost entirely oil-based transportation network can run on the electricity produced by nuclear, wind, and solar PV technologies, that’s the basic math. Just by the numbers, none of those alternatives looks very likely, but anything’s possible, right?
Now let’s look at the reality.
The Reality—Time, Scale, Cost
People who are hoping for a technological solution to our energy predicament sometimes overlook the realities involved in moving to a new energy technology. There are significant issues of time, scale, and cost involved. Above, we’ve used some simple math to illustrate the scale of the predicament.
From time to time I am accused of significantly underappreciating just how clever and resourceful humans are. Perhaps I do underestimate our species, but the scientist in me knows that cleverness cannot defeat the physical laws of the universe. And the former corporate executive in me knows just how difficult it can be to move from lab, to pilot plant, and then to full-scale operational delivery.
Historically, transitions from one energy source to another have been long, expensive, protracted affairs. Global energy use in the nineteenth century was dominated by wood, not coal, and it wasn’t until 1964 that petroleum overtook coal as the main source of transportation energy. Even a 20 to 30 percent share of a national energy market by a new entrant takes several decades, possibly a century or more. At least historically this has been true.7
Part of the reason is that the old form of energy has an enormous installed capital base that must be phased out. For example, as our shipping fleets moved from wind power to coal, sailboats were slowly phased out over a period of decades as new coal steamers were individually brought on line. Nobody wanted to dispose of their old capital simply because new technology was available; it wouldn’t have made sense economically. The same was true for the switch from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles. So if we want to move from gasoline-powered autos to electric cars, a good guess would be that several decades of transition will be involved. The current crop of petroleum-powered vehicles will have one or two decades of useful life that their owners will want to wring out of them; service stations will have to be phased out, with their pumps and tanks removed; electric charging stations will need to be installed everywhere; and electric grids will have