End of Cheap Energy ::: Limits to Growth

[Guest guest]

Cheap Energy and Limits to Growth

 

Economists and people alike seem to think that if we pay more we can get more energy. But unlike other resources energy isn't like that. Money can't be converted to energy. We need to spend energy to get energy back! That is what oils (fossil fuels) do. A few years back for every unit of oil invested we could get 30 units of oil back. (This is called the Energy Returned on Energy Invested, EROEI). Currently this number stands at around 5-15. As oil wells dry up this would become lower. But the current economy is being addicted to EROEI values of 15 and above. There are no energy sources (apart from fossil fuels) that have EROEI values greater than 15. The best interms of alternate energy (including renewables - wind, solar, etc) has EROEI values around 5. And remember that this is the best!. And even the best is currently not scalable for the quantity of energy we need. So it is both the EROEI value and quantity of energy that needs to be higher. (Note that any EROEI value of 1 or below means that is not usable energy as you would invest more energy to get less).

 

Unfortunately in the present scenario, only fossil fuels meet this demand. Economists don't see this side of the picture at all and think supply-demand will fix this whole energy issue. All things we call economy is nothing but natural resources being sold in one form or the other. First land, then oil, now water, sooner air, etc. We steal the future resources, sell it in the present and call it economy, GDP and growth. We will soon run out of these resources - peak oil, depleting water aquifers, lack of top soil, and I could go on and on. Back to energy...Economists think that once oil becomes scarce, it will become pricey and the people with money can afford it. That is true but only for a while. After a point we can't get oil as well with good EROEIs and it will become so low that we would start (and be forced to) looking at alternate options. Once it becomes low the economy collapses rapidly!.

 

Here is a very nice video/presentation illustrating the point: http://www.warsocialism.com/limitsToGrowth.htm

 

 

And before you jump in saying this form of energy or that form of energy has higher EROEIs and is scalable, question yourself has to how much is the EROEI and whether all factors have been accounted for. For example, when it is often said that Nuclear is THE solution question the following: How much energy does it take to build the reactor? How much energy does it take to mine the Uranium fuel? How much Uranium is left (to know whether it is sustainable)? How much energy does it require to handle the wastes/pollution safely?

 

Pool in all the energy requirements (raw materials, transfering materials to the location of energy manufacturing, construction/manufacture of the equipment, handling pollution, transfering the energy to the point at use) to successfully run a new energy source and compare this with the final energy output we get and see if it can be sustained. And I can bet that this is a hard calculation and most often these numbers are not high unless the SUN has created and *stored* some form of energy for us to use (like fossil fuels, which we have used and have come to a state where its EROEI is getting closer to one).

If we try to find out the cause of why we have been led to this situation - It is because we had " cheap " energy - cheap interms of money. Oil is so damn cheap!!!! So people/industries have been using it like crazy. If only it had been costly the usage would have been restricted but then economy wouldn't have grown so much either . (The economy growth is nothing but This leads us to an important question of energy pricing. This needs to take into account the environmental externalities. Put a price for the energy based on the EROEI. (Lower this value, higher should be the price). And importantly, put a price for the pollution (not as low as what EU uses for carbon credits, cap and trade etc.). This number needs to be exorbitantly huge. Note that this may not affect the poor so much as it would affect the rich. The poor aren't so addicted to oil as the rich and developed. They would do well with local community farming (and not transporting it to the cities).

 

 

But the way it is going now and to maintain the development and growth, it looks like we might end-up fighting each other (as it has always been - fighting for natural resorce, also called wars sugar coated in the name of terrorism) for the remaining drop of oil/energy. Just that we will start seeing more frequent of these wars (and the last decade is an good example) and soon will hit the wall of growth and development.

The fundamental problem has been on the definition of development. Is it just economic growth? I sometimes (more frequently these days) question heavily on what we have been forced to believe as development. Is development leading to more happiness, better health, good air, good water, basic healthy food? We are starving in these but what we have is all the technological gadgets, more money, more diseases, more hospitals to treat them, more automobiles to create pollution, more inequality, etc. We have essentially multiplied our material resources but we are lacking in the very basic of resources and sometimes human values.

 

Well, didn't intend to write a long mail but once written didn't want to edit it... If you are still here, thanks for your time and reading .

 

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