Energy, without the bells and whistles

This is energy right?  These things + magic + now I can charge my phone?  What more is there to know?

In common conversation when we talk about “energy” we actually mean electricity, gasoline, or maybe even how stressed we are.  Energy is really an abstract concept that seems to have lost a concrete definition over the years.  In this blog post I will be discussing Energy, the fundamental unit of change for the universe.  There is kinetic energy or thermal energy but at its core it is all just force being transferred by matter.  Everything we do takes energy and requires energy.  Every moment the universe flashes into your mind as colors, shapes, textures, and sounds.  The very act of breathing involves oxygen atoms being bound to hemoglobin and the expelling of carbon dioxide all due to little difference in energy/attraction between molecules.  Every visceral moment that you experience is full of energy flowing from one place to another around you and inside you.  In your body a quantity of only around 50 grams of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) being constantly recycled as a catalyst for biochemical reactions that release free protons (hydrogens) to drive other chemical reactions.

Nothing could go wrong here.  replace a million species per acre with one, no big deal.

This energy began as an errant photon from the sun perhaps millions of years ago, bouncing around the inner layers, until it burst through the periphery and began its long journey 92,960 million miles to the earth.  Being a photon he traveled that distance in about 8 minutes and 20 seconds.  This particular photon luckily hit a soybean leaf in a field near Maraba, Brazil.  The energy of this photon was absorbed into a chloroplast of the soybean plant was transformed via photosynthetic light reactions into glucose, thanks to the large amount of carbon dioxide in the air.  That glucose molecule was driven through the vascular network of the soy bean where it ended up in the fruiting body, the bean.  A month or two pass by and that glucose molecule in that bean gets dragged along and harvested by a combine harvester and put into a truck for processing.  We make our way to a processing facility in the city of Maraba in order to clear all the non-essential parts of the plant away and be packaged for shipping.  We make our way into a larger truck to be transported to the port city of Belem.  Once loaded into a shipping container, we are off riding the Gran Barco all the way to a port in Houston, Texas having traversed the Atlantic and Caribbean Seas.  Still in our shipping container, as a glucose molecule in a bean, we are lifted by a massive crane onto a train headed for Ft. Smith, Arkansas.

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Oh wait, that's seagulls.  Same thing.

After 9 hours we arrive at the train station in Ft. Smith and our container section is transferred to a distribution facility.  2 days later our little spec of potential energy is off via semi-truck to a Tyson chicken farm outside greenwood. Chicken farmer Fredrick Clyde and his buddies unload the soybean feed into the chicken pen.  Three days later we begin our third major transformation, as a chicken in a facility of 200,000 pecks up our soybean and begin digesting that same glucose molecule.  Digestion from the chickens gut starts to break down the carbohydrate chain that our all-important glucose molecule in situated on. Once isolated from out sister molecule we are absorbed into the bloodstream.  With some complex chemical messaging via insulin, we arrive in a cell which decides we need to be transformed directly into fat storage.  Our carbon and hydroxide groups are broken down and rearranged via biological catalyst, which act like tiny molecular scale-hands, spinning and arranging us into the proper geometry to become a triglyceride.  In our chicken adipose cell, we sit and wait for approximately three more months.  As a fat cell in a chicken, we wait to be slaughtered and arranged in a tray to packaged and shipped after chemical de-feathering, etc.  We happened to end up in an adipose cell in the juicy skin of a drumstick.  We are frozen, and shipped once again via long haul freight to a Wal-Mart in Norman, Oklahoma.  Once we are unpackaged and laid out for display on the meat aisle it has been approximately 3 weeks.  This where I, the writer myself, comes into contact with this package of chicken via a bimonthly grocery shopping spree.  I take the chicken package with all my other groceries and put them in my trunk for a 4 mile ride back to my apartment.

Mmmmmmm!  Year old photons!

I arrive back home and put the chicken in the freezer to eat another two weeks later.  Having my fiance prepare a crockpot recipe, she spends time preparing the stove and broiling the drumsticks and letting them simmer in a tasty honey mustard and coconut oil mix for around 6 hours.  Finally we get ready for our fourth major transformation, when I eat this particular piece of skin on this particular drumstick.  It takes an hour to digest from all the other parts of the adipose cell where it is then absorbed into the lining of my small intestine crossing the gut barrier, completing its rigorous test for molecular size and ph.  Once in my bloodstream the triglyceride is broken down further into a ketone via lipolysis and consumed in the citric acid cycle to provide free protons to drive other reactions in my body.   We have now become heat consumed by an exothermic (heat releasing) reaction.  The warm blood coursing through my veins loses or little photon derived energy into the air via conduction with the skin and air, slowly but steadily.  As disperse heat we are now at the death of our photon from so many years ago, at rest at last.

Adenosine Tri-Phoshate, There is really not much difference between this and the next picture, besides the size.

Energy is the basis for our lives and every action that we perceive and the many we don’t.   The reason why we can do any of the things we choose or are compelled to do is solely because of these little photons that originate from our sun.  All life on our planet, with the exception of some chemotrophic organisms at the bottom of the sea, originates with our sun.  The Mythos of Progress’s dogma of human agency asserts that all our accomplishments were due to our human ingenuity and grasp of knowledge alone.  However, this is only a small part of the picture.  Our accomplishments of the past 300 years in particular are not due to us human’s achieving dominion over the forces of nature.  It was chiefly because we started to utilize a vast store of ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuels.  Without coal, oil, and natural gas we never would have created the technology we did or had the “free time” available to do the things that arrived with this age.  The Mythos of Progress has blinded us to the importance of this ancient sunlight and how core it is to the people and society we are today. 

No wonder things got smaller.  It's not because we got better at things, it's because we ran outta steel!

In 1781 James Watt, designed a steam engine to harvest the power of coal.  Once the steam engine became widespread it was then that human beings went from being limited to the available sunlight that hits the earth every year, to accessing the accumulated stores of sunlight from over half a billion years of Earth’s history.   Humans could start to access an immense form of power in energy borrowed from the past.  We suddenly had multiple of years’ worth of sunlight per single year, at our disposal.  The only limit on how to get more sunlight years per year was in our minds.  This is the first addendum to the concept of human agency, “anything is possible with enough energy and time.”  This places a firm limit on what our “ingenuity” is actually capable of in the real world.  We are capable of many things but are limited in options due to how much energy we have available.  This is the necessary bit of information that idealist that wish for world peace utopias need to swallow.   The only idea’s that are worthwhile are the ones that are physically possible.

Too bad they invested all their coal energy into battleships instead of aircraft carriers.  However they did have great tea times!

In the years after the Industrial revolution economist such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx would debate theories on where the Wealth of Nations actually came from.  The source of this river of wealth however, was not so hotly debated.  It was always clear to men who had just shortly transitioned from an agricultural energy to a fossil fuel energy society, that human labor was the source of the wealth.  This was absolutely true in the days when humans only had access to sunlight in the form of agriculture.  However, once steam engines became widespread the source of wealth in fossil fuel energy was never properly acknowledged.  Such a notion was probably not very popular due to the downplaying of the role of humans in their own mythical creation story of technology.  The source of wealth was first coal which was mined from the rich seams in Great Britain and led to growth and fall of British Empire.  That coal was created by geology and time as the sunlight from ancient Carboniferous forest was concentrated in rock strata.  The reason all this coal existed was partly due to the fact lignin (woodbark, kinda) could not be decomposed until certain fungi evolved to take advantage of it many eons later.  The wood would not decompose and was eventually compressed by the folding and kneading of the Earth, further concentrating it.  Once the coal of the British Empire started to deplete and decline the less effectual it became.   The technology of using fossil fuels escaped to other European powers and eventually the United States.  

This asshole was responsible for genocide in the middle east 100 years later.  Thanks Drake!

The most intense and final chapter in this fossil fuel abundance came approximately 100 years later when Edwin Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania.  They drilled a 70 foot well that produced around 20 barrels of oil per day.  Oil wasn't all that useful at first because the technology to transform it into useful energy or work didn't exist right away.  However, it would soon become the most powerful source of energy in the world as it had twice the amount of energy concentrated in it by weight and even more by volume, compared to coal.  In a runaway process of intensification the oil industry developed into a titan that would use famous oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma to power the economic engine of the United States during World War 2. 

Good wages and cars for everyone!  The Oprah period of history...

The understanding of economics had still sadly, ignored the role of fossil fuel energy in the productivity of the economy and its role in the creation of wealth.  The cult of progress was in full swing happily espousing the glorious accomplishments of science and the human mind.  In this time period, human ingenuity had accomplished much, even all that it desired, but only because it had increasing amounts of energy available with which to accomplish those dreams.  Capitalism and the free market were hailed as  grand successes.  Capitalism didn't seem to exploit and alienate its workers like Marx and others had predicted.  Of course, the rapidly increasing wealth hid the darker sides of capitalism by providing an era of abundance for even the most disadvantaged in American society.

This is what the back of my leg looks like when I go fishing in marshes.  Except mosquitos instead of oil derricks.

    Much like the dwarves of Moria in Tolkien’s middle earth, the Americans of the 1960’s, dug too deep and awoke something foul and evil.  Rather than a Balrog, they awoke the specter of depletion.  It was in the 1960’s the world would discover the most amount of oil ever, and never again.  With 30-40 years being the time to acquire, develop, and produce an oil field it should have given us a timeline for the future as well.  The United States discovering most of its largest fields in the 1930’s should have expected trouble in 1970's, but they didn't.

Unless your currently wearing adult diapers look at 2035 and let it soak in as to what all this means.

It was M. King Hubbert a shell geophysicist that created the notion of peak oil and predicted a maximum in oil production for the United States in the early 1970’s.  He was derided and laughed at, mostly due to his theory being a direct contradiction to the Mythos of Progress.  The Myth of Progress does not allow for limits on human existence, because our minds and will are the ultimate creators of wealth.  It was this belief in human agency that led to everyone to ignore the clear peak in US oil production in 1971.  Even as I write to you in 2014, the United States has never surpassed its 1971 peak of approximately 10 million barrels per day.  The finite limits of geology and ancient sunlight were starting to strangle our delusion of progress and escape from the human condition.  Of course after a brief period of the Arab Oil Embargo the United States continued to pursue progress with the oil of other nations instead.  The United States used its geopolitical position and military superiority from World War 2 to ensure its control of global energy resources.  For a brief time from after WW2 to 1989, the Soviet Union challenged that control.  Business as usual continued until cracks started appearing in our perceived world without limits.

See that little green part.  That's what the news says energy independence is..... Really?

           In the 1970’s ecology and other systems sciences really started to take off.  These disciplines turned their back on the single cause-effect reduction focused approach to science and started to value the interconnected properties of complex systems.  One of the revelations of systems sciences was the realization of limits and their effects on systems as a whole.  It was not long after this that ecological systems based approaches started to be applied to economics.  Ecological economics as it was called originated with the idea of integrating the world of nature with the world of exchange and trade in human systems.  In the flow diagrams of human economies, energy is the life source of all economic growth, exchange and activity.   This approach proliferated into unique and insightful fields such as Thermo-economics and Biophysical Economics.

The Apex Predator of Earth sharpening his instincts.

            By setting aside the arrogance of the human mind and acknowledging the limits to growth of economies and nature, Biophysical Economics offered a unique perspective.   The idea of limits to energy flows and growth in human economies was essential to setting up the concepts in energy return.  These concepts were borrowed from zoology/biology which had been working on Optimal Foraging Theory.  The idea was that all plants and animals try to maximize their intake of energy per unit time.  If you have ever picked up fast food you know exactly what I am talking about.  You just wanted to get the most rewarding food in the quickest amount of time.  Cheetahs on the African Savannah do the same thing by selecting sick or injured gazelles to hunt rather than the largest meatiest gazelles.   This is because they are most likely to succeed in getting a large amount of food for the least energy expenditure.

We are at the loss/break even phase of industrial society.  Unless your dad works on Wall-Street, then lucky you!  Historical lesson: Avoid Boiling hot tar and feathers

            The human world calls this profit.  Profit is how much money you make after you spend some money to make some money.  Money is a proxy for energy, because it is only worth what you can get for it.  It is interesting that big cats on the Serengeti have such a striking similarity to the cold calculating nature of capitalist businesses.  It is ironic that while human beings spend so much time trying to separate themselves from animals that they end up thoroughly imitating them.

Look at all those little oil fields growing on that shrub.

           Understanding energy returned on energy invested or (EROEI) really isn't all that complicated.  Imagine yourself on a warm summer day with butterflies all around you in a field full of blueberry bushes.  There birds are singing and you’re just glad to be out and about harvesting blueberries for grandma.  All you have is a basket and a few hours on your hands.  Since we need to understand energy invested we need to keep track of how much effort we are putting into harvesting blueberries. 

Child labor, they think they're having fun! Ha!

            There you are in front of your first blueberry bush which was selected completely at random.  You grab the bunch closest to you at the height most comfortable and you put them in your basket.  Big deal, that was easy!  Well now the most convenient bunch is in your basket.  Let’s keep grabbing up blueberries around the same area of the bush having to adjust your arms a little up and down back and forth.  After a few minutes you have grabbed all the blueberries on the outside of the bush at a convenient height.  Well, those are gone.  What now?  Let’s get on our knees and harvest the blueberries on the outside of the bush at the bottom.  Once those are gone we have to reach over the sides bending and stooping awkwardly.  Now, you’re starting to sweat and the butterflies aren't as present in your mind.  Now that we've grabbed all the berries on the outside, we have to reach deeper inside the bush.  As we get wrist and then elbow deep into the bush we get a few scratches and have to torque our shoulders at awkward angles.  We are spending more time to even find and locate these berries in the deep interior.  Many more minutes have gone by.  You find that the time and effort you spend finding the last few berries in that bush took by far the longest.

Imagine how long it would take you to pick this whole field.  By the end you would hate blueberries.  Maybe that's why some of us hate oil.

            You can do the same exercise with the entire field of berries.  You start at a central gathering point and bring each basket of berries back to that point.  You start with the closest blueberry bushes first because they are the quickest and easiest.  Once you have harvested the 3 bushes closest to you, you have to walk out much farther for each basket of berries taking more effort and time.  If you harvested berries over time in this fashion and recorded how fast you harvested them, it would start to track a bell curve as you deplete the most energy dense resources first and then move onto the next and then next best option.  Your harvest rate increases at first and then decreases as each resource becomes slower and more intensive to pursue.  Non-renewable resources such as oil, coal, natural gas, wood, and minerals all follow the same sorts of distributions.

See blueberries you aren't alone!

Green jobs subsidized by a government going broke!  Hey, at least it makes us look like we know what were doing.

Now that you have a solid handle on where energy comes from and resource

consumption/depletion behavior, we can critically discuss some of the myths perpetuated by the mainstream media, that don’t hold up to the scrutiny of our systems science approach.

This is the part where she turns around and says " I'm pretty tired now, I think i'll go home."

Myth #1

The Law of Receding Horizons

The Law of Receding Horizons is the product of faulty supply and demand logic that gets used all the time in the energy sphere.  It’s called the Law of Receding Horizons because the farther you or faster you run towards the horizon it gets equally farther away. The idea in economics is that when the price of a product rises, the demand for alternatives of that product increases, because they are cheaper in comparison.  Everyone in Econ 101 always forgets the logical pre-condition known as “ceteris paribus,” which means, all other things held equal.  Energy is an input to the cost of harvesting/producing future energy, so it cannot be held equal when considering future energy cost.  The main example is that, “if fossil fuel prices increase, renewable energy will become cheaper in comparison and perpetuate itself, via the free market.”  With grid based solar and wind to electricity, kerogen shale oil, and nuclear power all the inputs to creating these energy systems are fossil fuel based.  The truck used to transport the 80 ft wind turbine blade does not run on sunshine.  Neither does the bauxite (aluminum ore) mining truck in that across the globe strip mine.  The wind and solar technicians are not riding to the power stations on bicycles or horses and the countless manufacturers that supply the factories are not using wind/solar power to power themselves.  When the price of fossil fuel rises the price of building a future “renewable” energy system rises equally because all the inputs are fossil fuel based.  The fallacy in the mainstream media is like saying “if the price of chocolate increases, then the demand for chocolate milk will increase, because chocolate milk will become cheaper.  This misleading logic guides millions of real dollars backed by trillions of megawatts of real energy into countless energetic dead ends.

Yes, this is what some people believe is the grand future utopia of America.  This is the aborted stepchild of oil, what geology never got around to dealing with.

Myth #2

The United States will soon become energy independent from shale oil.

Shale oil and fracking is the process of taking tight oil reservoirs and using explosions to create cracks which oil can flow through.  The source rock (where the oil is) in tight oil has the porosity of something like a brick whereas the porosity in conventional oil formations is more like a sponge.  Shale oil is massively expensive to produce operating on razor thin margins, which means little of that profit (energy/money based) is passed on to benefit society as a whole.  In the first three years of oil production shale oil wells have decline rates of 80% compared to conventional wells which are more like 7% after the field matures in 10+ years.  So once you frack the well, you get a very temporary gush of oil that slows to a trickle three years later.  That means the temporary production boost gained from fracking will only provide temporary relief for a few years at massive cost to society.  The United States still consumes around 21 million barrels of oil per day and produces around 7 million. Remember its maximum in 1971, at ~10 million bpd?  The entire fracking revolution increased US domestic production a little more than 1 million barrels per day, hardly a revolutionary glut of oil.

Yeah just take out the 3.400 horsepower engine and attach some batteries and a solar panel to the top. You can charge the drivers cellphone while the whole thing rust away.

Myth #3

Maybe we can’t use electricity for our heavy movers like long haul freight and international shipping but what about biodiesel or algal oil.   

This one is one of the easier ones to dispel.  Remember the many millions of years of sunlight stored in fossil fuels?  Plants and algae all require sunlight to transform the photons into sugars and plant fibers.  The idea that we can replace multiple years of stored sunlight per year with a single year of stored sunlight is ridiculous.  Also the idea we can afford  the energy cost of concentrating all this plant material or algae ooze into one place and transform it into biodiesel or ethanol form and come out with remotely similar energy returns to fossil fuels is silly.  Remember, that the concentration of ancient sunlight was done completely by millions of years of geology, so we don’t have to pay that cost for our fossil fuels.  Plant or other sources are too disperse (spread out/unconcentrated) to provide the energy return available to continue running our industrial society.  No amount of human ingenuity or technology will change that.  It is physics and biology which are interacting to place that limit and it is non-negotiable.  

Hey Boney, maybe you should feed your horse more often?  Is that a unicorn in heaven, WTF!?

STOP! Apocalypse Not!

We are headed towards a de-industrial future.  This is will be similar to the collapse of other civilizations such as the Roman, Maya, Babylonians, Indus Valley, multiple Chinese Dynasties, and Japanese periods.  Stop now! cry your tears for disco, karaoke, and watching your friends text all throughout dinner!  Don’t head in the polar opposite of Progress!  You are veering dangerously close to the chasm of apocalyptic thinking!  Apocalypse is another constantly rehashed narrative that gives you another excuse not to do anything.  Our civilization flourished in past 100 years of oil washed abundance industrialism.  It will stagnate in our present day squalor of scarcity industrialism.  As times continue as a whole we will shift towards salvage industrialism in a rusted heap of past titans.  This process will unfold over the next 200 years with some locations and peoples dealing with it much better than others.  What would some actual sustainable technologies look like and what would we have to work with.

The Seven Sustainable Technologies

Mainstream Media would be a little less flaky if they had to do things like these.  Nothing like manually arranging letters to form Justin Bieber headlines.

Yes those are two liter soda bottles.  This is what environmentalist in the 70's meant by recycle, not throw it away with style.  

Calculator?  Who needs it!  If you can work one of these babies you'll never need to buy another 150$ TI-69

Shortwave Radio, I rather like the idea of my grandchildren listening to one of these around the wood-stove rather than fixated on the Disney channels latest marketing tool.

Pump that water outta that well.  Wind to mechanical energy, much more sensible.  

Permaculture has a ton of potential to increase our health and feed us.  Best of all, you get to connect with nature.  The smell of dirt and bugs is imo, much better than the smell of car exhaust and cigarette smoke.

The great thing about the future is we will have a lot of metal and goods available to salvage into other purposes than they originally intended.  Metal and other material that was once scarce can be counted on to be available for the foreseeable future.  Hopefully, with your help, much of the knowledge and science of this time period can be saved to proliferate and keep the future from being so harsh.  

Navigational skills are sexy!  GPS is for dumb blondes in their daddies' Escalades.