by Alex Epstein
THE SECRET TO ENERGY SUCCESS: NATURALLY CONCENTRATED, STORED, PLENTIFUL ENERGY
One lesson of the failure of renewables is that renewable is not a useful criterion for a good energy source. It says only that one of the inputs is derived from the sun; it says nothing about how long the other inputs will last, and, most important, it says nothing about whether the technology can generate energy that is cheap, plentiful, and reliable. There’s no reason to aspire to use an energy technology that we will use forever. The real question is: For the relevant time horizon, what’s the most efficient combination of elements that we can transform efficiently into the kind of energy we need in a way that is cheap, plentiful, and reliable?
And so far in history, there has been one necessary ingredient to that: instead of spending huge amounts of resources concentrating and storing a dilute and intermittent source, working with a source that nature has already concentrated and stored for us—such as water (hydropower), the forces holding an atom together (nuclear power), or the powerful chemical bonds of the copious amounts of ancient, dead plants lying around from previous eons (fossil fuels).
It is their preconcentrated, prestored, plentiful energy content that has made fossil fuels—and to a much less but still important extent hydroelectric power and nuclear power—cheap, plentiful, reliable energy sources.
HYDRO TECHNOLOGY: CHEAP, RELIABLE, MEDIUM-SCALE ENERGY
If you’ve ever been in a rapidly flowing river, you can feel the energy stored in the moving water. Hydroelectric energy technology transforms some of the power of that flowing water into usable, cheap, reliable electricity using a turbine—much like a wind turbine, except driven by a far more powerful and reliable force. Often a dam is used to store water near the source of a river and precisely control the downward flow.
Historically, hydropower has faced two types of limitations that have prevented it from producing much more than 6 percent of the world’s power.26 One category is natural limitations; the other is political limitations.
The main limitation of hydroelectric power is there aren’t nearly enough suitable water sites for it to be a global source of energy. In China and Brazil, the top two consumers of hydropower, you can get a lot of electricity from it; in Nebraska, you can’t.27 The United States has maintained a fairly constant hydropower consumption because we’ve run out of rivers to dam (which is unfortunate, because hydropower lasts for decades; the Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s).
But there is considerably more opportunity to develop hydro around the world. Based on the number of dammable rivers left, the International Energy Agency estimates that hydroelectricity has the technical potential to grow by 92 percent in Africa and 80 percent in Asia.28 Worldwide, according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency, hydro has the technical potential to produce twice as much energy as it does today; it is currently around 6 percent of global production.29 That is an exciting prospect . . . but not for most prominent environmental groups, whom you might think would welcome a four times greater supply of cheap, reliable, non- CO2-emitting hydroelectric energy.
Environmental activists have spent decades shutting down as many hydroelectric dams as possible, particularly large hydroelectric dams, despite hydro’s proven track record as a cheap, reliable source of CO2-free power, in the name of protecting species of fish, free-flowing rivers, and other justifications that focus on nonhuman nature.30 The Sierra Club on its list of accomplishments on its Web site lists dams it has prevented or shut down.31
If the standard is improving human life, those who believe that catastrophic climate change is coming unless we reduce CO2 emissions should favor damming every possible river to generate reliable CO2-free power. And for those who don’t believe CO2’s climate impact is a major problem, there’s still a huge burden of proof on anyone to justify depriving people of a cheap, plentiful, reliable source of energy.
NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY: RELIABLE, SCALABLE . . . CHEAP?
With hydroelectric, we saw that a naturally concentrated, stored source of energy was a big benefit. This is the reason why the potential of nuclear power has enchanted many in the energy world, this author included.
If natural concentration is a benefit, there is no more naturally concentrated energy source than the uranium or other radioactive metals used to generate nuclear power. Oil is an amazingly concentrated source of energy, which is why it is the transportation fuel of choice. Well, the concentration of energy in uranium is more than a million times that of oil and 2 million times that of coal—although given current technology, in practice it “only” delivers thousands of times more energy per unit of input.32
Nuclear’s presence in generating energy around the world is slowly growing. There are two factors, which can be hard to separate, that hold back nuclear’s progress: the difficulty of doing it cheaply and the perceived difficulty of doing it safely.
While many feel that the focus in the nuclear process should be on safety, I think the evidence shows that the real controversy should be on price.
Recall that to produce cheap, plentiful, and reliable energy, every element of the energy production process has to be cheap, plentiful, and reliable. Nuclear power uses uranium, which exists in enormous quantities around the world, and can also use thorium, an even more abundant material. Even using current technology, we are talking about time horizons upwards of thousands of years. The trickier part of the process is transforming that material into energy, which is much more complex than, say, burning natural gas to generate electricity. It involves producing energy by releasing the immense forces within a radioactive atom. Absent proper safety technology, human exposure to large amounts of radioactivity can lead to radiation poisoning or, in the longer term, cancers. At the same time, below a certain threshold, radioactivity is not harmful; we ourselves are radioactive and emit radioactivity. Unfortunately, radioactivity is commonly viewed as deadly as such, so critics of nuclear power can cite amounts of radiation coming from, for example, the Fukushima accident, and it sounds scary—even though the amount is not enough for anyone to die now (of radiation poisoning) or in the future (from cancer).
The issue of nuclear safety is full of so much rhetoric and emotion that it can be hard to sort through. But as a starting point, let’s ask: How do we know how safe it is? I think the most reliable indication of a technology’s safety is how many deaths it has caused per unit of energy produced. In the free world, nuclear power in its entire commercial history has not led to a single death—including from much-publicized failures at Three Mile Island and Fukushima.33
Unfortunately, activists use inaccurate characterizations to make it extremely time consuming and expensive to build new plants. Nuclear power is radioactive, they say—not mentioning that so is the sun and that taking a walk, let alone an airplane ride, exposes you to far more radioactivity than does living next to a nuclear power plant.34 A nuclear plant could be bombed by terrorists and bring about some sort of Hiroshima 2, they say—not mentioning that the type of uranium used in a nuclear plant literally can’t explode.
All of these fears are plausible because we have been taught to think of changing our environment in new ways as inherently dangerous. Nuclear power, in addition to requiring large industrial structures, deals in “unnatural” high-energy, radioactive materials and processes. Thus there is an expectation that it is uniquely dangerous, even though it is uniquely safe.
The opposition has led nuclear power to be considered far more dangerous than other sources, unjustifiably. And it means that the nuclear industry has become an essentially government-controlled industry—which, like many a government-controlled industry, has higher prices than others. Thus we don’t really know what nuclear would cost without the pseudoscientific opposition. What we do know is that, besides fossil fuel energy, it is by far the most scalable form of energy in the world.
In the best-case scenario, though, nuclear is still decades away
from scaling to becoming a leading global source of electricity, let alone somehow providing transportation solutions at the level oil can. Thus there is no prospect of nuclear “replacing” fossil fuels anytime soon.
3
THE GREATEST ENERGY TECHNOLOGY OF ALL TIME
FOSSIL FUEL POWER: CHEAP, PLENTIFUL, RELIABLE, SCALABLE—INDISPENSABLE
This is the challenge: finding a source of energy that is cheap, plentiful, reliable, and scalable. As we’ve seen, it’s a challenge that is incredibly difficult to overcome. Power from sunlight has the problems of diluteness and intermittency and so requires too many resources to concentrate and store in order to create an independent, scalable power source. And plants are a form of storing solar energy, but they don’t scale well because of the resources needed to grow them and the amount of land available to grow them on.
Well, there is good news. There is a form of solar energy, a biofuel that has none of these problems because nature has already concentrated and stored the sunlight of plants that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Those dead plants are called fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are so called because they are (in most theories) high-energy concentrations of ancient dead plants. Our entire civilization is based on burning these dead plants, which are made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms connected by powerful chemical bonds. When you burn gasoline in your car or coal in a power plant or gas to heat your home, those bonds break apart, releasing enormous amounts of energy. They exist in solid (coal), liquid (oil), and gas (natural gas) form.
If you’ve ever used charcoal instead of wood to grill food, you grasp the basic advantage of using ancient dead plant fuel. The charcoal can generate more heat in less space because it has been “cooked”—primarily, the water has been taken out of it, producing a higher concentration of energy (“burning” water doesn’t release much energy).1 Well, fossil fuels are naturally, thoroughly “cooked” plant energy. Over millions of years, as plants pile up and are covered by more and more layers of soil, the natural forces of the Earth heat them up and concentrate them into far purer forms of energy than wood or charcoal. Thus they have the advantage of being naturally concentrated and stored.
The other advantage they have is that they exist in astonishingly, astonishingly large quantities. For example, the world has an estimated 3,050 years (at current usage rates) of “total remaining recoverable reserves” of coal.2
But there is a big challenge to using fossil fuels for energy. These quantities of coal, oil, and gas aren’t lying around to be plucked. They are hidden and trapped underground—sometimes thousands and thousands of feet underground, often in forms, such as being trapped in stone, that are difficult to get out even if you know where they are.
Fortunately for us, the fossil fuel industry is very, very good at using technology to extract these hidden, trapped, and otherwise useless materials, which no one knew about or cared about through most of human history, and turning them into the energy of life.
The technical term for fossil fuels is hydrocarbons, because they are primarily made of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Also, there is some debate over whether all of them come from plants (fossils); some say that many or most of them come from deep in the Earth, far below where any plants could end up. In either case, there are astonishing quantities of hydrocarbons. With ever-evolving technology, they give us an unparalleled source of concentrated, stored, and scalable energy.
Fossil fuels come in three major forms—coal, oil, and natural gas—with different strengths and weaknesses.
COAL
Coal is the world’s leading fuel for electricity—producing 41 percent of the world’s electricity in 2011—and is expected to become the leading source of energy overall.3 In the developing world, it has been the overwhelming choice for every country that has industrialized recently.
Since the 1980s, the world has experienced record increases in coal consumption: in Brazil, by 144 percent; in India, by 425 percent; in China, by 514 percent.4 It is no coincidence that countries with increased coal consumption also experience better lives overall—as electricity consumption increases, infant mortality rate decreases rapidly and access to improved drinking water sources increases.5
The reason coal is particularly well suited for cheap electricity around the world is that it is plentiful, widely distributed, and relatively easy to extract. Coal is also relatively easy to transport. It exists in a convenient form, and unlike most mine products, which require you to separate large amounts of material from the small amount of material you want, coal requires relatively little processing.
But because of its plant origins and underground locations, some of coal’s carbon and hydrogen are bonded to potentially significant quantities of sulfur and nitrogen. When burned, these become sulfur dioxide and various nitrogen oxides, which above certain concentrations can be harmful, requiring various filtration and dilution technologies (more on this in chapter 6). Coal has the highest percentage of carbon atoms of all the fossil fuels, so when burned, it emits the most carbon dioxide, whose impact we will examine in chapter 4.
Coal has been used for transportation fuel and was the dominant form of energy for locomotives and steamships when the steam engine was still the main source of motive power.6 Eventually the steam engine was supplanted by the much more versatile internal combustion engine, which has nearly eliminated coal’s use as a transportation fuel in favor of oil. Because the fossil fuels’ value comes from their being hydrocarbons—combinations of hydrogen and carbon—each of them can be made to have many of the properties of the others, but that transformation requires energy and resources, like any transformation, and is not often worth it. But in the future, it might be worth it—which means that claims that we’ll “run out of oil” are misguided, as coal and gas can effectively produce oil if needed.
For example, coal can be transformed into liquid fuel; the South African energy company SASOL says it can be done for less than eighty dollars per barrel.7 Coal can also be transformed into methanol—methyl alcohol, an alcohol that like ethanol can come from plants but can also come from coal and gas. Methanol, like any fuel, has its own risks and by-products, and it has only half the energy per gallon as gasoline, but it is still a potential substitute for oil fuel as markets evolve.
Coal use is growing quickly and could grow even more quickly. The United States could be a major contributor; we have been called the Saudi Arabia of coal and have the potential to become a huge coal exporter, feeding cheap energy to machines around the world.
The bottom line: If people are free to use it and the industry is free to produce it, coal energy will provide billions with cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for decades to come.
NATURAL GAS
Natural gas is the world leader at an essential type of electricity—called peak load electricity.
Just as your energy use varies during the course of a day, so the electric grid as a whole uses different amounts of electricity at various times during the day. There is a minimum amount of electricity use that will almost always be needed, called base-load power. Above that, we need a technology that can quickly adjust to changes in electricity needs—such as powering a lot of air conditioners on a hot summer day so that we can be comfortable and avoid heatstroke. This is called peak load electricity, and it is natural gas’s specialty. (Coal, nuclear, and hydro specialize in base-load power.) Natural gas electricity, which uses the same basic technology as a jet engine, is very good at scaling up and down.
Natural gas is also an extremely clean-burning fuel, composed almost exclusively of pure carbon and hydrogen, which makes it ideal to burn for affordable home heating. In addition, it serves as an affordable, abundant raw material for thousands of “petroleum products”—which we will discuss in the next section.
The disadvantage of natural gas is in its name—it’s naturally a gas. Gases are harder to move long distances than liquids or so
lids due to their large volume. So while oil and coal can be moved relatively easily around the world, gas has long been a local market. This causes supply security issues in which one country is dependent on an unreliable country for gas supplies—the case with many European countries that depend on gas from Russia.
However, new technological developments are overcoming these obstacles.
One is shale energy technology, often referred to as fracking in the media and fracing in the industry. Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing, one of several technologies that can be used to get natural gas out of shale. This technology has attracted attention based on claims that it contaminates groundwater. As we’ll discuss more in chapter 7, the controversy here, as with nuclear, is more ideological than technical.
The shale energy revolution has led to a rapid increase in natural gas and oil production in the last decade and has the potential to do much more.8 The combination of horizontal drilling and fracking has turned previously known but economically unreachable reserves of natural gas into easily accessible and cheap natural gas. In the United States, proven reserves of natural gas have increased 46 percent since 2005.9
There are opportunities all around the world to produce shale energy, and the United States is a pioneer. There are estimated to be far more natural gas supplies in what are called methane hydrates, natural gas deposits in frozen form, which exist at the bottom of the ocean.10 Thus the potential supply of natural gas could extend many centuries, at least.
At the same time, advances in compressing and liquefying natural gas are making it more prominent as a fuel and make it easier to transport around the world. This is the source of opportunities and controversies for LNG (liquefied natural gas) terminals.