What if the energy/climate crisis was solved?

The reality of Peak Oil is pretty much indisputable as far as I'm concerned. If we can't find an equivalent alternative energy source in a big hurry, there's no escaping that the world is going to change dramatically. That's the underlying premise of the Transition movement.

But what if we do come up with an alternative energy source? One which doesn't change the climate, which won't be as destructive to the landscape as coal mining, which doesn't require practically eternal waste management to avoid poisoning the biosphere, which is affordable and practical, and which can scale up fast enough to address the twin crises of Peak Oil and Global Warming?

It's an incredibly tall order. But I'm becoming increasingly hopeful about the possibility of one particular technology, which I've written about before: the thorium-fuelled molten salt fission reactor.

Environmentally-conscious people have an almost instinctive reaction against anything "nuclear", and I understand that. On the basis of long-lived radioactive waste alone I also agree with it, in respect to the current fleet of uranium-fuelled reactors. But the fact is that thorium-based reactors have been designed and even tested which don't suffer from any of the major drawbacks of uranium-based systems.

Features include:
- Abundant, stable, safe raw fuel (100% usable ore vs 0.7% usable from uranium)
- Passive reactor safety (cannot overheat, not pressurised, no complicated mechanical control system)
- Proliferation-resistant (in particular it produces no plutonium)
- Produces very small amounts of relatively short-lived waste (~300 years, certainly manageable)
- Can burn high-level waste from other reactors
- Simple enough to mass-produce in a factory and deliver on a truck
- Electricity probably cheaper than today's coal-based prices

It sounds so good, why wouldn't it have been done before? Well it actually was done before in the 60's and 70's, but the US at the time was more interested in creating plutonium for their weapons program. Hence the molten-salt reactor research program was shut down. Research has now restarted in eight or so countries, including the US, India, France and Japan. Incidentally, Australia has the world's largest reserves of thorium, followed by India.

There is a fairly real prospect of this kind of mass-produced, cheap, safe (enough) reactor technology being available within 15 or 20 years, with known fuel reserves sufficient to power humanity for several millennia.

So what if that came to pass?

Well... it would help. But it wouldn't be sufficient to solve the problems of over-population, destruction of ecosystems, resource depletion and so on. In some ways it could actually make them worse, by providing humanity with the means to continue on with its awful business as usual.

So even if we did solve the energy problem there'd still be plenty of reason to keep working on sustainability in general. That's probably the way I'll be approaching the Transition work - it's absolutely vital if we don't find a new energy source, and it's still hugely worthwhile even if we do.

Transition

I've had a link for the Transition Culture website in the sidebar over there for ages, and for the Sunshine Coast Energy Action Centre, too. In case you've never clicked on them, I ought to mention that the Transition movement is all about preparing communities for a decreasing availability of oil. It originated in the UK but has started to spread around the globe. SEAC is at its heart a Transition initiative for the Sunshine Coast... but being about an hour's drive away from me it seemed rather contrary to the point for me to try and get involved in the wonderful work I hear they're doing up there.

It's beyond me to start something like that in my own area. And it's especially challenging here because Brisbane is nothing like the kind of conglomerate town and village structure of the UK and even the Sunshine Coast. It's one enormous sprawl, with a big central city council. Not on the scale of somewhere like Los Angeles, but still big enough.

So I've been watching and waiting to see how a Transition initiative might get off the ground in Brisbane, and finally it has started to happen. I had the pleasure this morning of meeting with some of those involved in the early stages of a Brisbane transition "hub", which will play a role in fostering, supporting and connecting transition groups all around the city. (That's my paraphrase, not actually endorsed by anybody.)

Not surprisingly, this group has been brought into existence through the work of people who are already recognised for their efforts along parallel lines - people from FoodConnect (a local CSA cooperative) and the actively green communities based in some of Brisbane's inner suburbs. Links have been established with SEAC and, it seems, with a similar group based in Sydney.

At this stage there's a lot of "networking" going on, literally finding out who's doing what around the city and joining the dots. Apparently there's a very handy permaculture gardener who lives in Bald Hills but tills the soil down in Morningside. I'm hoping to make their acquaintance in the near future.

This is all very welcome as far as I'm concerned. The quiet on this blog has reflected the lull in my life with regards this kind of community engagement. Hopefully the opportunity I've been waiting for has arrived.

More good news about slime

I am frequently critical of "biofuels" technology because of issues like poor (or negative) payback in energy terms and the competition for food production and so on. Once or twice I have mentioned algae as a possible alternative "crop" which may be able to capture solar energy in a chemical form that's suitable for production of liquid fuels. Well, the prospects for a bright slimy green future just got better.

A mob in the US has announced that they have developed a process for producing gasoline from algae, using wastewater to support the algal growth. The key breakthrough is that the fuel they're making is chemically identical to the stuff that we put in our cars today rather than "biodiesel": this makes it a potential direct substitute fuel requiring no change to existing fuel processing and handling systems and no change to our engines.

Of course I'm still going to advocate radical efficiency improvements a la Amory Lovins, but if this technology turns out to be viable and scalable without significant drawbacks then it's going to make a huge difference.

Read more via this link.

About time I could tag a post with "hopes".

The best news I've had in ages

Check out this story in today's local newspaper, then come back to me.

With the exception of some of the public comments at the bottom, I am absolutely delighted to see this. No, I haven't finally gone mad, this is actually really good news.

Why? Two reasons.

First, because Andrew McNamara has been appointed as Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability by new Qld Premier, Anna Bligh. Andrew has been on my watch list for a little while now as both the Member for Hervey Bay and the patron of the Australian branch of ASPO - the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (and gas). This guy clearly understands that we are facing an enormous threat in the form of soaring fuel prices and he's now been placed in a position of authority where there's the potential for taking real action towards reshaping our society to cope with it.

Secondly, Peak Oil is now front page news. I've said in the past that I think it's a pity Climate Change got the public's attention first. In my opinion Peak Oil is the more critical problem - though of course our response to it must include a comprehensive strategy to deal with the climate issue. It was inevitable that people would bump into the oil problem eventually but I think today goes down in history as the day that South-East Queensland first took notice.

I wonder how long it'll be before Canberra does the same.

And now for something completely different

Chris Rhodes has come across some alternative theories about the origin of oil and natural gas, which if correct would somewhat defuse the peak oil time bomb.

Check it out here.

Would you pay an extra $3 per litre for fuel?

A little while ago I wrote about my very nice but fuel-thirsty car and the arrangement I've entered into which obliges me to drive at least 25,000 km per year in it for another two years. My real issue with that is not so much the CO2 emissions (which can be offset to some degree) but that it's consuming an excessive amount of non-renewable fuel.

As I promised to do in that post I've been looking into my options for switching to something more efficient. The car which has caught my attention is a small four-door with a continuously variable automatic transmission (aka CVT) and fuel economy rated at a very impressive 5.6L/100km. And to my surprise there's actually more headroom in that tiny car than in the one I have now. At about $23,000 on the road I think it'd be a good choice.

But there's a problem with the financial side of things when it comes to the car I have now. The lease company wants thirty grand as a payout, and the car's worth only twenty as a trade-in: so if I want to do this it's going to cost me ten thousand bucks.

What will $10K get me? Well, over the next two years it'll drop my fuel consumption by about three thousand litres, assuming I were to continue to drive the same distance. Divide the one by the other and you get $3.33 per litre as the amount I'd be paying for the sake of using less fuel. (That's ON TOP of the actual cost of fuel at the pump!)

Of course the new car would cost less to purchase and run, so there'd be some compensation along the way. I haven't done the sums yet to work that one out, but I can imagine it still being in the vicinity of $3/litre.

I'm not sure I'm willing - or able - to do that. And besides, there's still the issue of what happens with the old car. A huge amount of energy was consumed making the thing, and it still performs its intended function perfectly well. It probably wouldn't be helping the overall cause to prematurely dispose of it.

So I guess there are three things I can do for the next couple of years to minimise the overall impact of my use of the car I have now:

1. Drive as efficiently as I possibly can.
2. Purchase CO2 credits to offset the car's emissions.
3. Consider whether it's worth paying the tax penalties for not driving 25,000km a year.

That last one would also make the car more valuable at the end of its lease period. Hmmmm.

Understanding Energy - Part 2 of 2

Yesterday's bottom line was this: all the Earth's energy comes from the Sun, it provides life with the ability to grow and to modify the materials of the Earth, and the majority of it eventually heads back out into space as waste heat.

The ancient civilisations of places like Egypt and South America seemed to understand this much better than we do today. Modern man knows clever words like "photosynthesis" but has lost the deep understanding that the Sun is ultimately what puts leaves on the trees and life in our bones.

My best guess at why this is comes down to the discovery of fire, and of "non-living" things which could be burned. Of course I'm referring to coal, oil and natural gas.

Fire is a chemical reaction in which energy that was previously holding atoms together to form molecules is released as heat. Because there's a high concentration of heat energy in one place it's possible for us to channel some of it into causing desirable changes (such as pushing a piston in an engine, melting metal in a furnace or cooking food on a BBQ) before it dissipates and becomes "lost".

For many thousands of years the primary source of chemical energy which humans could harness by setting it alight was wood. Trees spend years soaking up solar energy and converting it to chemical energy that holds together the atoms which form the molecules that comprise its living tissues. At this level the connection between the Sun and the energy available to us in a wood fire is still somewhat intuitive. It's fairly obvious that the trees have to grow before they can be burned.

But coal, oil and gas don't have that same obvious relationship to the Sun. Instead of waiting for a tree to grow you can just dig them up and burn them. And what's more, the amount of chemical energy they contain is far greater than in their equivalent weight of wood. The industrial revolution was unleashed upon the world when people started to figure out more sophisticated ways of using that stored chemical energy to cause changes in materials and motion. That revolution never stopped - we are still living it at full throttle today.

There's just one little problem. Do you remember the two rules of the energy game from yesterday's post?

1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
2. Whenever energy is used, some of it gets "lost" and can't be used again.

All that energy in oil didn't just magically appear. Scientists are pretty darn sure that coal and oil and natural gas were formed from the accumulation, over hundreds of millions of years, of solar energy converted by plants into chemical energy and then trapped underground in landslides, floods or similar events. That's why they're called "fossil fuels".

It's like the Earth has an internal rechargeable battery. It's capable of storing an unimaginable amount of energy, and it's in a form which is wonderfully convenient for us to use. It took hundreds of millions of years to charge it up, but in the span of a couple of hundred years we've managed to run the battery down to about 50% charge remaining and at this rate it'll be fully exhausted by about the end of this century.

Let me say that again. We've consumed hundreds of millions of years worth of stored solar energy in just a few centuries, and now we're starting to run out.

The discussion about how much fossil fuel energy remains to be dug up and burned is a complicated one and is made worse by the unfortunate side-effect that we call climate change. I'm going to side-step the whole question of exactly when fossil fuels will cease to be able to meet our energy needs for transport and electricity production - but it will inevitably happen. In many parts of the world energy supply is already struggling to keep pace with demand.

But what else is there?

Governments and corporations the world over are turning to "biofuels" to try and compensate for falling oil production. But the math just doesn't add up: the rate of conversion from sunlight to chemical energy is far too slow to allow it to meet the current demand for oil. Besides which, studies seem to show that in many cases you use about as much oil producing the crop (for powering farm machinery etc) as you get back from the crop in the final product, making the whole enterprise a waste of oil and food at this point in time. Technological advances may make the process more efficient in the future, though, so continued research is worthwhile.

Solar photovoltaic technology - which uses tricks of physics to convert sunlight falling on a substance directly into electricity - has a similar problem. The technology keeps getting better but there's a limited amount of the raw materials needed to make the panels and producing them consumes significant amounts of energy. We probably can't produce enough of them and they don't give back enough energy to make them a silver bullet solution to our electricity dependency, but again more research is needed.

Heating water with solar collectors is a no-brainer and I applaud moves from the Queensland government to phase out the old electric-powered type. Wish it would happen sooner.

Using wind to generate electricty (converting kinetic energy from the moving air into electrical energy in the turbine) is also a pretty smart idea. The wind moves because the Sun heats the air, so tapping into that energy flow is sustainable in the true sense of the word. There are some concerns about the amount of energy used in construction vs the amount of energy the turbine can harness over its lifetime, but those issues can probably be solved through engineering.

Hydro-electric systems are also driven by the Sun. It's the Sun which heats the water and causes it to evaporate. It's the Sun which drives the wind that carries the vapour up over the higher land, imbuing it with gravitational potential energy. As the water flows down again towards sea level we can extract some of that energy to turn a turbine and convert it to electricity.

Wave and/or tidal energy. Waves are caused by the wind, which in turn is powered by the Sun, and there's a colossal amount of kinetic energy in the movement of the water. Harnessing that's a great idea. The tides are due to the gravitational pull of the Moon on the water. Taking energy from that system will actually cause the Moon to orbit more slowly and crash into Earth... but that's going to happen eventually anyway and it's unlikely we'll make any significant impact. (No pun intended.)

Geothermal (hot rocks). Not, strictly speaking, a renewable resource but definitely a clean one. Worth looking at where the geology is appropriate.

Nuclear. Ah, had to get to this eventually. Ultimately, nuclear energy is a form of stored energy that was locked into atoms by long-dead stars. It's completely natural but - like molten lava or the Sydney funnelweb spider - not something you want to get too close to. It's interesting to note that some of the geothermal heat which people want to harness was actually released during the radioactive decay of unstable nuclei. There is a lot of nuclear energy available to us here on Earth but like fossil fuels there are undesirable side-effects and it's not a renewable resource.

And that, pretty much, is it. We need to stop using fossil fuels now due to global warming but we will simply run out of oil soon anyway. Nuclear technology will continue to play a role in the global energy mix for a very long time, and it's possible that new developments could greatly reduce the risks associated with radioactive waste and other concerns. The rest of them are all important because none of them can supply so much energy in such a convenient form as fossil fuels have done for the past couple of centuries.

There's a lot of work needed to secure energy supplies and maintain a habitable planet, even just for the rest of this century. I've started doing my bit and you can too.

Thanks so much for reading this far. Questions, comments, corrections all are welcome.

I want a divorce - from my car

Early in the piece I laid out some concerns related to peak oil. Last weekend I expanded a bit on that and introduced the concept of localisation as an inevitable consequence of there being less fuel available for transport. More recently I've said some unkind things about biofuels in general and ethanol in particular. I finished with, "by far the most important thing to do right now is to simply use less fuel."

Alright, so I can talk the talk. But can I walk the walk? Well, I have a confession to make. And a real problem to sort out.

A bit over a year ago - well before sustainability concerns became part of my regular waking consciousness - I got a new car. My professional life requires a fair bit of travel and my employment package includes a vehicle allowance. I loathe log keeping and administration so I entered into a three year novated lease under which all of my vehicle expenses are automatically recorded and accounted for in a tax-effective manner.

That's all well and good, but now the sustainability issue has slammed me with a one-two punch. First, I chose a large six-cylinder car; and second, I'm obliged to travel at least 25,000 kilometers each year in it to avoid significant tax penalties. At an average fuel consumption of around 12 litres per 100km that's at least three thousand litres of fuel each year.

Remember that this is not just about greenhouse gas emissions, for which I could (and probably should) try to compensate through tree planting and other schemes. No, this is about the extravagant waste of a precious, irreplaceable and diminishing resource: oil itself. There were plenty of reasons at the time why this particular car seemed like a good choice but now, despite it being very well made and a pleasure to drive, I'm wishing I'd picked something a lot more fuel-efficient.

I'm going to look into my options for terminating the lease and work out whether I can afford to do so. I can't stop driving altogether (yet!) but I would feel much happier if I could replace this big car with a small motorbike or maybe a scooter. However, Michelle is terrified of me being smeared all over the road by a larger vehicle and so that may not be an option for the near future. That would leave me looking at a very small car or maybe a petrol-electric hybrid.

The big challenge - for every one of us - is to figure out how to live and work in a technologically advanced but transport-constrained society. And if peak oil is actually upon us then we need to start doing that right now just to prevent an enormous gap opening up between supply and demand which would result in spiralling prices and crippling fuel shortages.

--

"Yeah, I know we've had some great times together and you know I think you're great, and stylish and everything. It's just... I feel that you need more than I can afford to give. It's like we're not really compatible, not meant to be together, you know? So I uh, I really think that I need to spend some time with other vehicles. I'm really sorry. I... I want a divorce."

What do you want for dinner?

A simple question. It's been directed at me probably a couple of thousand times. That we can actually have trouble making a selection from the many choices on offer is a sign of how incredibly rich our lives are in comparison to the vast majority of human experience, in the past and the present day. I pray I'm never faced with my children asking, "Is there any food to eat tonight?"

Of course there's an abundance of food available to me this evening. But my choice is becoming even more difficult when I start to consider sustainability.

What do I want?

Something tasty and nutritious of course, and relatively easy to prepare in the next three hours or so. It should ideally be made from locally-grown ingredients which were produced using a minimum of irrigation and of fossil fuel input for fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery fuel and electrical generation for processing. Packaging - such as plastic wraps - should be avoided. Vegetables are preferable to meat. Poultry is better than beef, lamb or pork. And the meal preparation itself needs to use a minimum of energy for cooking.

I'm taking early steps towards growing some veges in the back yard and a chook pen isn't out of the question. But tonight... I'd better go check out what's in the freezer.

Visionary thoughts from the UK

I know I only just introduced Transition Culture last night, but the latest entry on that site is such a good, easy-reading summary of the ideas there that I can't resist plugging it again.

It's the transcript of an interview conducted with Rob Hopkins earlier this year and if you're at all interested in what I'm on about in this blog I urge you to check it out.

When I was a kid, we had something called a "car"

For the average Aussie nothing on this blog so far would have been too surprising. I've talked about global warming due to CO2 emissions, the terrible drought we're suffering and some fairly obvious approaches to reducing electricity and water consumption. So far I'm pretty much in the mainstream.

But to live up to the title of this blog we're going to have to go quite a bit further. Time to get back onto the topic of oil, I think, and how utterly dependent we are on the energy it provides us for transportation.

To recap, there are two essential problems with our oil supply: our burning of it is a major contibuting factor to global warming, and we're burning it so fast it's probably not going to last more than another couple of decades anyway. What's more, there aren't yet any technologies which we can confidently say will be ready to step in to keep our vast fleet of vehicles moving as the oil wells dry up and/or global warming gets so serious we don't dare drive any more.

Stop for a moment, and try to imagine a world with only half as much fuel available for transport as we have today, and at twice the price. Imagine that every second airline flight was cancelled. Imagine that you could only drive your car to work every second day (or for two car families that one car had to be taken off the road). Imagine half of all road-based goods delivery being cut. Half of the bulk cargo ships permanently anchored.

It should be immediately obvious to you that any significant decrease in oil supply is going to have a huge impact on the civilisation we call "the developed world". And in stark contrast to the basic assumptions of economic growth, the availability of oil would continue to decrease quite rapidly.

Civilisation in 2050 will either be based on some revolutionary transportation technology... or it will have dramatically restructured in a kind of reverse-globalisation. Actually there's already an accepted term for this: "localisation".

This idea is going to feature pretty prominently on this blog in the future. I know there's already plenty to worry about with the warming and the drought, but I think this one's probably just as important and equally urgent.

Tonight I'm going to add permanent links over on the side to two other blogs. The first is Chris Rhodes' Energy Balance and it's become essential reading for me. It can be a bit technical/analytical at times but frankly that's the value of it: Chris manages to put actual numbers against things like the comparison of present oil consumption vs the amount of land required to grow the equivalent amount of corn etc for producing ethanol. He helps separate fantasy from reality. And he has a great grasp on the implications.

Please take a moment to at least skim some of Chris's posts - this link gives you about half a dozen of them which include reference to localisation.

The other blog I would like you to check out is also from the UK. There's a fascinating movement springing up over there in which small communities (mostly rural but there's also some city action) are quite deliberately adapting their local economies and infrastructure to become vastly less reliant on oil. They're operating under the moniker of "Transition Towns" and there's a blog called Transition Culture dedicated to documenting their experience and promoting the broader adoption of the idea.

Now none of us can say for sure what will happen in the next forty years. Maybe we'll develop the technology to permit us to continue something like our current society in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way. But that's a bloody short period of time. It seems smarter to me that we should look for wisdom in the culture of our pre-oil ancestors rather than gamble the future of everything on us actually pulling off a technological miracle.

For the time being, my vision of 2050 involves a lot less moving about of people and products. We'll still have the ability to travel... but as with so many other things we'll have learned to appreciate it more and will use it much more wisely.

Water

Australia is suffering a devastating drought. We have no idea whether it's a temporary abnormality or a new weather pattern caused by global warming which is going to stick with us for the long term.

Brisbane's water storages have dropped to under 20% capacity. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on water infrastructure in this region alone, including new dams, pipelines, desalination and reclamation (recycling). It's appalling that our response to a drought which may be caused by global warming is a massive project which first burns oil to power the construction machinery and then coal to power the desal plant and all the pumps. It may in fact be our only option to survive the present conditions but still...

The nation's major food producing region (the Murray-Darling basin) has just been informed that in the absence of significant rain in the next couple of months there will be no water available for irrigation later in the year. If this eventuates, future recovery would take years as long-established trees and vines are likely to die.

All these water woes aren't restricted to humans though. Environmentalists have been telling us for years that our abuse of water destroys ecosystems upon which we all depend. Now the pressure on the environment is coming from both sides: what little rain there is is being consumed by us, with basically nothing left.

No Silver Bullets (re Peak Oil)

My previous post was about the tension between the growing demand for oil and predictions of declining availability, and the relationship of oil consumption to global warming.

I expect that many people reading that post would quickly reassure themselves by thinking about one or more of the following:
- biofuels (especially ethanol for use in existing cars)
- electric, hybrid or hydrogen-powered vehicles
- coal liquefaction (literally converting coal into a fluid form similar to oil)

Here's why none of those make me worry much less, if at all.

1. Biofuels

The basic idea is neat: instead of giving carbon a one-way trip from oil to the atmosphere, lets grow plants to take CO2 out of the air then convert it to fuel which when burned puts the carbon back where it came from. The overall amount of CO2 in the air stays constant and we don't need oil.

But already we've hit a fatal flaw with biofuels: in fact the production of ethanol from, say, corn requires massive inputs of oil in the form of fertilisers, pesticides and fuel for agricultural machinery and transport. It also requires significant electrical input which - especially in Australia - basically means burning coal. So we're still consuming oil and adding CO2 to the atmosphere even before the ethanol gets into our petrol tanks.

Fatal flaw #2 is so obvious I'm stunned we are even bothering to attempt growing fuel. Our cars and trucks and planes and ships consume enormous amounts of fuel. Even if we dedicated all the productive land on the planet to growing fuel crops we would only manage to produce a fraction of the fuel we need to keep everything running at the current pace - let alone meet the exponential demand predicted for the future.

There is some research being done into growing algae in tanks or ponds as an alternative to land-based fuel crops. This may lead to a significant, sustainable biofuel industry and I'd be encouraged by that. But from what I've read it's still not likely to ever be enough to match our current appetite for oil.

2. High tech cars

It's true. We can make cars which don't need to burn oil.

Some people are keen on cars similar to the ones we have today but which burn hydrogen gas (H2) instead. There's no "C" in hydrogen, so when you burn it you just get H2O. Water vapour. But hydrogen gas is highly explosive (can you say "Hindenburg"?) and it's very difficult to handle. Oh yeah, and water vapour is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

So there's a lot of attention on using hydrogen in fuel cells - basically little modules of hardware that generate electricity through chemical reactions and which you'd either swap in and out of your car like rechargable batteries in a camcorder, or top up with additional hydrogen. Fuel cells are real enough (they're used in the Space Shuttle, for example) but the technology needs a fair bit of development before it's suitable for use in everyday transportation.

Sounds good, huh? Uh-oh, here it comes.

Hydrogen's fatal flaw when it comes to the global warming / peak oil dilemma is that it generally isn't a source of energy but a carrier of energy. Hydrogen can't be mined*, it has to be produced. The simplest way to produce it is to push an electric current into water so that you give the hydrogen atoms the energy they need to escape their bonds to the oxygen atoms. That's how it acquires the energy which we want to use later on when we burn it in an engine.

Fuel cells and electric vehicles get lassoed with the same rope now. All these vehicles depend on large inputs of electrical energy. Hopefully you recall that our electrical consumption is already a major concern because of the CO2 we emit when we generate it. Unless we come up with a revolutionary large-scale way to produce electricity, these cars would simply drive us from the peak oil frying pan into the global warming fire.

3. Coal liquefaction

I only learned about this one recently, but it's old technology. During one of the Great Wars the British were astonished that their attacks on the German sources of oil didn't bring the Nazi machine to a halt. The Germans had prepared by switching to production of liquid hydrocarbons from coal.

The world does have heaps of coal (though calculations for "Peak Coal" are already being debated) and I get the impression that it's relatively simple and efficient to convert it to a liquid. On the positive side, this may help alleviate the shortage of raw material for plastics and fertilizers etc. But of course burning the stuff in cars is just as bad as burning it in power stations. As a greenhouse-friendly replacement for oil, coal is also fatally flawed.

Three bullets: shiny-looking, but definitely not silver.



* I am simplying things a fair bit with regards to hydrogen as an energy carrier but it's generally true that getting usable H2 on a very large scale would require massive energy input and that would predominantly come from coal at this point in time.

Peak Oil

The global warming prophets like to make graphs showing the world's predicted consumption of oil growing at an exponential rate through 2050. Their point is that we shouldn't be doing that because it will add so much more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and accelerate the warming.

However...

Another group of scientists and researchers reckon those graphs are plain silly because according to them there isn't enough oil left in the ground for us to consume at anywhere near that rate. Instead they predict that within a decade or two we're going to reach a point where oil extraction starts to steadily decrease as the wells dry up. They call that point "Peak Oil".

Some think we've already reached it.

So on the one hand there are predictions of skyrocketing demand and on the other they're talking about falling production. Those of you who owned a car in the 1970's might feel a sense of deja vu reading this. As I understand it at that time the constraint on supply was more political than practical but the effect is predictable: fuel prices went through the roof.

But the potential problem is much worse than high prices. Having a gap between demand and supply literally means there isn't enough oil to go around.

Transport would be the first thing to be affected. I was struck some years ago by a very simple phrase stuck to the back of a semi-trailer: "Without trucks, Australia stops." Think about it for a second or two. Then consider which is more important to you: the tractors and trucks which grow food and transport it to the shops, or the car which you drive to work to earn the money so you can drive to the shops and buy the food. In a world of diminishing oil, which one could you give up first? And what happens when the other one runs out of fuel too?

Oil is also a critical feedstock for industry. According to Wikipedia, it is "the raw material for many chemical products, including solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics; the 16% not used for energy production is converted into these other materials." The cost and availability of all these things and anything which depends on them would also be badly impacted.

It's kind of ironic that the worst predictions of CO2 emissions growth might never come to pass, due to us simply running out of hydrocarbons to burn. Lucky us.