Today,
with plummeting oil prices and news reports of US oil production poised to
exceed that of Saudi Arabia’s, there is a perception on the street that there
is no energy crisis. Yet just a few years ago, we were all talking about one.
Have things changed so dramatically so fast? We paid considerable attention to
the energy crisis following the oil crunch in the 1970s, but then oil prices
plunged, and public attention waned, and with it the efforts at conservation
and improving fuel efficiency of vehicles. However, the underlying situation
and the challenges facing us had not changed, and nor have they changed this time.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and we seem to be doing it all over
again. I recently spoke about it with Artist Michael Killen.
Meeting
the global demand for energy remains a daunting task, and the energy sources we
choose to employ will have a profound effect on the lives of billions of people
around the world. People have to be involved in making the choice, or the
choice will be made for them. For a sustained, informed public debate on this
subject, it is necessary to have a common language that is readily understood
by the specialist and the non-specialist. A Cubic Mile of Oil
(Oxford University Press, 2010) provides a language to talk plainly yet
intelligently about energy, and how to assess our future needs and evaluate our
progress.
Energy
use is essential to our well-being—it is our sustenance. We use it in all
aspects of living: growing food, manufacturing, transportation, communication,
lighting, heating and cooling, earning our livelihoods, for entertainment, and
more. All these tasks require energy, and we derive it from many different
sources such as oil, coal, natural gas, hydro power, nuclear fission, and wind
and solar power. Unfortunately, energy from these sources is expressed in
different and often unfamiliar units, which makes it hard to assess their
relative contributions. We use kilowatt hours for electricity, gallons or
barrels for oil, cubic feet for gas, British thermal units (btus) or tons for
coal, and so on—it’s a veritable tower of Babel!
Further,
each of these units represents a relatively small amount of energy, and in
order to express energy use at a global or national scale, we have to use
mind-numbing multipliers like millions, billions, trillions, and even
quadrillions. To overcome this problem, my colleague Hew Crane came up with the
idea of expressing energy units from all the different sources in one large
volumetric measure that is commensurate with the scale of global energy
challenge and one for which we can form a mental image. The approximately
90 million barrels of oil the world currently consumes daily adds up to a
little over a cubic mile of oil in a year, or one CMO. A CMO thus becomes a
very convenient unit to express annual global energy production and
consumption. Imagine a pool a mile long, a mile wide, and mile deep, and you
have a cubic mile. That’s more than a thousand times the volume of a typical
sports arena.
In
2013, the global consumption of oil was 1.1 cubic mile. The world consumed an
additional CMO of energy from coal, about three-quarters of one CMO from
natural gas, and roughly a quarter of one CMO each from hydrothermal, nuclear
power, and wood burning, yielding a grand total of 3.5 CMO. All combined,
solar, wind, and biofuels produced less than a tenth of a CMO in 2013. How much
will we need in the future? That depends on how seriously we take the UN
millennium goals for human development. Between 1981 and 2005, China lifted
over 600 million people from poverty, reducing the poverty rate from 85%
to 16%. Concomitantly, the infant mortality rate declined from 2100 deaths per
day to 770 per day. This achievement was made possible by quadrupling energy
consumption.
Global
statistics on poverty are stark: 1.4 billion people subsist below the poverty
level, defined by the World Bank as living on $1.25/day; infant mortality is
17,000 children a day; 2.4 billion people rely on wood, charcoal, or dung as
their primary source of energy, and women and young girls spend more than 6
hours each day collecting fuel and water and completing other chores that deprive
them of opportunities for advancement through education and entrepreneurship.
Roughly 1.5 billion people have no access to electricity. Even after
implementing measures to conserve and markedly improving energy efficiency, it
is estimated that annual global energy consumption will have to increase by
several CMO/yr to remove the scourge of poverty and to allow all people to lead
healthy, productive lives.
The
challenge of supplying energy to the world’s population is really overwhelming.
Even at a modest growth rate of 2% per year (i.e., a doubling every 36 years),
the world’s energy demand by 2050 will be over 7 CMO per year. As we seek
solutions to the energy crisis, we have to ensure they scale to the CMO per
year level¾if not, we will just be nibbling at the edges. When you consider
what it takes to develop an infrastructure capable of producing even one CMO of
energy, it becomes evident there are no easy solutions, and it will take an
enormous effort sustained over many decades to effect meaningful change.
The
slide below illustrates how many power plants it will take to develop capacity
for producing 1 CMO/yr. For each resource, it shows the total number of
plants and the rate at which they must be built in order that in fifty years we
will have enough of them to produce 1 CMO/yr. Because such analyses are highly
dependent on the size and availability factors, I have also included those
details. The numbers are truly sobering.
In
case you are wondering about the impact of continued use of fossil fuels on
climate change, please read my post from June 2012, where I discuss the need
for a differentiated approach and a focus on things that matter. And oh, did I
mention it is also time to seriously look at nuclear again. Speaking of nuclear
power, I was recently informed that this unit was also used by President Jimmy
Carter, although—being a navy man—his preference was cubic nautical miles!
