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Powering Civilization to 2050
Stuart Staniford, The Oil Drum
This post is the start of an attempt to sketch out what an integrated solution to the world’s food, energy, land, climate, and economy problems might look like. My basic goal is to get to a somewhat defensible story of how civilization could get to 2050 in reasonable shape, despite the problems of climate change, peak oil, global population growth, etc.
Since it’s not possible for me to entirely solve this problem in a week of part-time work, I put this out as a hasty straw-man.
…My basic approach is as follows. Over the next fifty years, we’re going to phase out most burning of fossil fuels, but they will still be used for petrochemicals and fertilizer (manufacture of which will be mainly in the Middle East). We will cope with short term energy problems by efficiency improvements, but in the long term we will power society predominantly by massive amounts of solar PV, with smaller amounts of wind, and legacy hydro. We will use a global transmission grid to balance supply and demand between the nighttime and cloudy areas and the areas in the sun that generate power. Nuclear is avoided in the long term out of proliferation and waste concerns but is used in the short and medium term. Owners of fossil fuel infrastructure will be compensated at fair market value.
Ground transportation will be by a mix of electric cars and electrified public transport (in areas of high enough density). The car fleet will be moved through hybrids to plug-ins to full electrics as storage technology slowly improves. Developing countries will be encouraged to urbanize and develop as rapidly as feasible to reduce pressure on remaining wild ecosystems and to build public transport systems in their very dense cities.
Building heating and cooling will be transitioned predominantly to ground source heat pumps powered by electricity instead of burning fossil fuels.
Agriculture will remain predominantly industrialized, and ongoing yield improvements, particularly in the lower-yielding poor countries, are assumed to be able to feed the world. The residual oil production and modest and regulated amounts of biofuels will be used for certain applications where the advantages of liquid fuels are indispensible (predominantly heavy construction and agricultural machinery, shipping, and aviation). There is considerable scientific uncertainty on the extent of soil depletion, but the assumption here is that at-risk areas will be placed in conservation reserves, and that, later in the century when energy becomes cheap again, restoration and remediation will be attempted.
The overall economic approach for implementation will be a hybrid “markets-within-a-plan” approach. A pure free market approach is likely to be disastrous (eg starving the poor to make biofuels for the rich, which will result in riots and revolutions). However, markets are very powerful drivers of innovation and efficiency when well designed. We will set general goals with binding targets by treaty, and then use a combination of subsidy auctions, rights auctions, and reverse auction retirements of fossil fuel infrastructure to meet the binding targets. Market competition will improve the technology and drive down the required subsidies over time.
In general, this will require a massive global infrastructure project. It will be expensive, but it’s not impossible. It seems very cheap compared to further uncontrolled experiments with the climate, or to allowing the world to descend into starvation and chaos by adopting dysfunctional approaches to our energy challenges. It will place civilization on a tolerably sustainable footing for the longer term.
(28 January 2008)
Another blockbuster from Stuart. Agree or disagree, you have to admit that he’s laid out the problem and made a serious attempt at a strategy to deal with it. -BA
Will Peak Oil Drive Relocalization?
Jeff Vail, rhizome
Over the past week, Stuart Staniford and Sharon Astyk have written thought-provoking essays at The Oil Drum on the nexus of Peak Oil and relocalization, with Staniford suggesting that peak oil will not result in relocalization of agriculture because the industrialization of agriculture is a more efficient use of energy and is not practicably reversible, and Astyk rebutting that idea. I think that both essays make important points, but I would like to offer a third perspective: that we have insufficient information to reach a conclusion about when energy scarcity will result in relocalization of agriculture, but that we will likely cross this threshold in the not-too-distant future and should prepare accordingly.
… A. Why would centralization of agriculture increase efficiency? …
… B. Why would decentralization of agriculture increase efficiency? …
… If one extrapolates any of the various gloomier future scenarios for world energy production often presented it seems very possible that this threshold may be crossed within a generation or two. And, when we reach this threshold, those who have prepared or transitioned early will be better situated. There are, without doubt, vast uncertainties here, but the precautionary principle suggests that we prepare for the possibility that this point comes sooner rather than later. Finally, I would suggest that there are benefits of decentralized agriculture that reach beyond mere calculations of price, profit, and meeting minimal nutrition requirements (see notes below). There are, after all, reasons why people go on vacation to Tuscany instead of Kansas.
What are our goals—is it merely to meet our minimal nutritional requirements, or to amass the most material possessions? Who benefits from centralized processes vs. decentralized, and what political structures to they tend to support and accrete? Are we seeking to maximize the mean or median fulfillment of human ontogeny? These are ultimately moral and philosophical questions, and ones that I will not attempt to answer here. I do, however, wish to draw the reader’s attention to the complexities raised by trying to address this dilemma while simultaneously balancing the benefits of centralization and decentralization. For more on centralization vs. decentralization, consider my essay “A Theory of Power.”
(28 January 2008)
It’s nice to see that Jeff Vail is blogging again. His site looks like it’s been renovated. For more on his thinking, see What is Rhizome?.
Investment Guru Jim Rogers: ‘It Doesn’t Look Like $90 to $100’ Will Be High Enough to Slow Oil Demand (Part 1 of 3)
Energy Tech Stocks
Three billion, famed investor Jim Rogers pointed out during a recent interview with EnergyTechStocks.com, is the number of people “who weren’t even in the game” in the 1970s, the last time oil prices reached record highs.
On top of that, said the creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI), in the 1970s there were huge amounts of oil that people knew were eventually going to come on line, whereas today the world’s oilfields are in a state of decline.
Finally, Rogers emphasized, despite their rapid economic development, per capita oil consumption in China and India is still only a fraction of that of South Korea and other developed Asian nations.
Put it all together, Rogers indicated, and it should be clear that the bull run in oil is far from over. “It doesn’t look like $90 to $100 will do it,” he said when asked how high oil prices might have to go to dampen surging demand.
Speaking by phone from Singapore, Rogers didn’t predict how high he thinks oil prices will go, but in emphasizing that Asian oil demand hasn’t even gotten started yet, he indicated clearly that he thinks prices could go a lot higher in coming years
(29 January 2008)
Triple digit oil price regardless of peak (Audio)
Interview with Paul Horsnell of Barclays Capital
David Strahan, Global Public Media
The real value of oil is “way, way, way above $80” according to a leading analyst. Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research for Barclays Capital, says it is hard to see the price falling below $80, even allowing for a lot of pessimism about the economy, and that the long run price is likely to be in triple digits – but not because of resource constraints. At least not immediately.
In an interview with lastoilshock.comand Global Public Media, Horsnell argued that the market is in a period of ‘price discovery’, where it was not yet clear how high the price would have to rise in order to bring on additional supplies or reduce demand.
Speaking on the sidelines of the World Future Energy Conference in Abu Dhabi last week, Horsnell said the run-up to $90-$100 per barrel was not primarily due to geology, but to above ground factors such as the “short sighted” oil industry cost cutting of the 1990s. However he does acknowledge that decline rates are turning out to be higher than expected – “so you need to bring on more supply each year just to stay still”.
Looming recession in the West is unlikely to depress the oil price because of demand growth from China, the Middle East and India, which represents a “major economic transition, a big shifting of the tectonic plates of the global economy”.
Upward pressure on the oil price would also come from industry bottlenecks and growing demands on the budgets of producer nations, many of which need to provide for booming populations. But although producer nations need more cash, perversely a rising oil price may encourage them to produce less oil: “Russia does not need to be particularly aggressive about output growth if the price is $90”.
In these circumstances, bringing on large amounts of additional supply or constraining demand would require triple digit oil prices, even without a non-OPEC or global production peak. But if geological constraints do start to bite, the price is likely to go higher still
(28 January 2008)
