I have long been
a fan of Texas geologist and energy visionary Scott Tinker. I have also read
some of Mark Mill’s writings on energy realism and the resource intensity of
EVs. Tinker did some great videos with Switch and Switch On, and
I was able to catch a couple episodes of his energy discussion show on PBS. He has
been a leader in energy education.
Meeting society’s
energy needs requires physics and economics, they say. They note that balancing
energy and materials production with environmental impact is a long-pondered
problem and the best solutions involve “trade-offs grounded in informed
debate over how to reconcile aspirations with realities.”
“…energy is foundational for civilisation, as a guide for framing civil dialogue and deep thinking around the energy-environment balance, we propose herein nine energy principles, three each in three domains—Economics, Politics, and Science and Technology. These principles are underpinned by the laws of nature, fundamentals of economics, and standards of civil governance, rooted in what history teaches, and what is possible, practical, and reasonable.”
The authors utilize a smart selection of graphs to show the data behind their conclusions. I will show some of them in this review. The one below shows that our extraction of materials continues to grow, although between 2012 and 2019 there was no growth.
An outline of the principles is as follows:
I. Guiding Principles: Economics
1. Lifting up those in poverty to alleviate suffering and promote human dignity requires more energy.
2. Human flourishing requires more energy that is less
expensive and more reliable, not less energy that is more expensive and less
reliable.
3. In the pursuit of flourishing, humans continually invent new products and services, all of which necessarily use energy.
II. Guiding Principles: Politics
4. Energy security is a top priority for global
leaders, revealed in their actions, if not always their words.
5. When wealthy economies export energy production, they impose environmental impacts on less-wealthy nations.
6. Government mandates and/or excessive intrusion in markets stifles energy innovation, options, and freedoms.
III. Guiding Principles:
Science and Technology
7. Capturing and
delivering energy to society is about inventing, building, and perfecting
technologies based on what physics and engineering allow.
8. All society-scale energy systems have environmental
trade-offs.
9. The energy available in nature itself is fundamentally
unlimited.
I. Guiding
Principles: Economics
1. Lifting up those in poverty to alleviate suffering
and promote human dignity requires more energy.
The authors emphasize the importance of energy
affordability at scale for developing countries. Wealth and energy use are very
strongly correlated. This means that in order to reduce poverty we will need
more energy, much more. Energy poverty is real and getting out of it is
transforming for the energy poor. The authors suggest prioritizing the reduction
of energy poverty over CO2 emissions reduction for developing countries. Many,
including me, have made a similar argument.
2. Human flourishing requires more energy that is less
expensive and more reliable, not less energy that is more expensive and less
reliable.
The authors explain
the reliability limitations of wind and solar very well:
“Utility-scale wind and solar require vast areas of land,
which makes them inherently more vulnerable to storms and disasters. A more
fundamental challenge is converting episodic power to reliable power. Wind and
sunlight vary not only with time of day and weather, but also seasonally. To
compensate for that, utilities must maintain and operate a conventional grid as
backup, and store electricity at society-scales. Either or both of those
solutions mean, in effect, utilities need to over-provision grids, which in
turn leads to higher capital and operating costs. Reliability is expensive to
achieve with episodic power and leads to higher costs to the consumer.”
They compare natural gas – about $200 billion in excess capacity
can back up a wind and solar grid but it would take batteries trillions just to
provide a few days of backup. In addition to that the power grid would have to
be expanded by three to four times.
“Ironically, some of the most “progressive” energy
policies— i.e., incentivising and mandating solar, wind, and batteries, and
forcing fossil fuels from the market—result in regressive economic impacts.”
3. In the pursuit of flourishing, humans continually
invent new products and services, all of which necessarily use energy.
The authors note
the absurdity and impossibility of electrifying everything. They note that high-temperature processes require fossil fuels (though more and more are being
electrified). They note the societal value of plastics and fertilizers that require
fossil fuel feedstocks. They note that electricity demand will rise as more
things are electrified such as EVs and home heating. They note that conservation
(choosing to do less) should not be mandated and that efficiency (doing more
with less) is great but has limits. They mention the Jevons paradox – the idea that
as things become more efficient, they will be used more so overall energy use won’t
drop and may rise. While that has been true in the past and where there is a
need to do more, that does not always happen. There is proof that energy use is
decoupling from population growth and economic growth in developed countries.
They don’t mention that, but they should have. However, they are correct to
point out that when efficiency increases, energy becomes more affordable, and that
has the potential to increase demand where it is needed, in developing
countries. Thus the general trend is that efficiency increases tend to increase
overall demand. The graph below shows the relationships but again leaves out
the decoupling that has been occurring in developed countries.
II. Guiding Principles: Politics
4. Energy security is a top priority for global
leaders, revealed in their actions, if not always their words.
In this section about
securing affordable and reliable energy, they tell the story of Germany, whose
de-industrialization in recent years has been documented. The German push to
shutter nuclear plants and run on expensive and unreliable wind and solar has
led to high electricity costs and companies have moved out of the country to
survive. They note:
“Germany’s overall primary energy consumption began to
fall from around 2006, and today is about 20% below its peak. Solar and wind
surpassed coal as Germany’s leading source of electricity, and the fossil fuel
share of total primary energy declined from 84% to about 75% today.”
Germany’s economy has been growing much slower than the U.S.
since they took up their energy transition push. They have managed to decrease
emissions by 20% but at a high cost as they now need to import electricity.
They were hit very hard by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the Nordstream pipeline
was canceled. It was not a good idea in the first place to become dependent on the
sinister Russian regime. They were forced to fast-track LNG receiving terminals
and get that needed gas from the U.S. and Qatar.
5. When wealthy economies export energy production, they impose environmental impacts on less-wealthy nations.
I didn’t get this
statement at first but what they are referring to is simply the offshoring of
emissions by relying on countries like China for minerals, mineral processing, materials,
and products. Production of products for export in China involves using coal power
(47% of Chinese primary energy) and transporting them with diesel power. The graph
below of energy resource dominance shows that the U.S is indeed the dominant
producer and refiner of natural gas and oil and China is the dominant
producer of many minerals and of mineral processing. They argue correctly that exporting
those emissions distorts the emissions realities overall. Of course, proper
accounting for offshoring emissions does and should fix this.
6. Government mandates and/or excessive intrusion in
markets stifles energy innovation, options, and freedoms.
Their arguments
here are pretty good, that too much subsidization and mandates in particular distort
markets. There is proof that Americans are not embracing EVs at the rate expected.
Personally, I am in favor of robust subsidization but definitely not in favor
of mandates. I think a ‘carrots only, no sticks’ approach is best. I think
subsidization should be robust mainly to help the poor. They rightly point out
that when subsidies and mandates become pervasive, they erode both freedom and
choice. They mention future bans on ICE vehicles and current bans on natural
gas hookups, as pervasive. I agree. They
also note here that experts have been wrong in GDP forecasts more than they
have been right.
III. Guiding Principles: Science and Technology
7. Capturing and delivering energy to society is about
inventing, building, and perfecting technologies based on what physics and
engineering allow.
Their argument here
is that technological capabilities change as new technologies are discovered
and perfected. They use American oil & gas innovation as an example. From
1970s indications that we were nearing peak oil in the U.S. to now where have
doubled oil and gas production over the past decade and a half due mainly to
high-volume hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling advancements, ie. ‘fracking’
is a compelling example that resource recovery can be improved drastically with
successful new technologies.
Here they also
argue that EVs are more energy intensive than often realized due to the
required critical metals to be extracted. They do acknowledge, however, that breakthroughs
in electric motor and battery technologies can reduce that intensity. It
appears that will happen in the future at least on a small scale. They call EVs
impractical due to the lesser energy density of hydrocarbons. That is still
true now but will be less true in the future.
“…the primary growth in EVs will be in dense urban environments. China is the outlier with its enormous state subsidies marbled throughout its industrial ecosystem.”
They note that
understanding technology principles and limitations are important to get an
accurate understanding of the big energy picture.
8. All society-scale energy systems have environmental
trade-offs.
Here they argue that
trade-offs, negative externalities, and environmental impacts are inherent in
all energy systems and are not easy to quantify and especially hard to
forecast:
“However, quantifying the cost, or locus, of an externality becomes
increasingly difficult and less reliable the farther into the future the impact
is felt.”
They state that the
idea of a ‘circular economy’ is unrealistic due to the current high costs of
recycling. That is true to some extent but we still need to recycle many
things, though often at a lower percentage of the whole.
They do mention two
of the impact issues that arose with fracking, large water volumes to be reinjected
back into the ground and the effect of that reinjection inducing small
earthquakes. That problem has been partially addressed with technology and has
been less prevalent in recent years. Water management remains an important
issue in oil & gas development that must be addressed adequately. They also
mention the many trade-offs of wind, solar, and hydro energy including minerals
and materials requirements, daily and seasonal output fluctuations, droughts
affecting hydro production, and seasonal but often unpredictable wind “droughts”
affecting wind production.
They note the
significant air quality impacts of fossil fuel combustion but also note that
the higher energy density of fossil fuels allows them to reduce impacts in
other ways. The graph below shows the land use impacts of different energy sources.
This likely does not include the need to overbuild wind and solar and to add
battery storage.
They also note
here that the IPCC’s significant climate change impacts are predicted to occur
mostly from 2050 onward so the media-fueled attribution of every storm,
drought, and wildfire being due to anthropogenic climate change is simply incorrect.
They emphasize that acknowledging (and I would add quantifying) all of these
trade-offs is important:
“The real impediments to progress are an underlying
obliviousness to energy realities and associated denial of trade-offs.”
9. The energy available in nature itself is
fundamentally unlimited
While the above
statement is true, there is a huge caveat that technology needs to catch up for
us to be able to take advantage of it. We have been chasing nuclear fusion, geothermal,
and many other energy technologies for decades without much improvement. There are
huge cost hurdles and technological hurdles. They point out that all sources of
energy are increasing in use, that we burn more wood for fuel now than we ever
have, and that although coal’s share of the mix continues to drop its overall
use continues to rise.
“…no source of primary energy—wood, coal, oil, natural
gas, uranium, hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal—has yet seen its use
decrease, globally.”
They also note
here that it is technology that converts resources into reserves, focusing on
oil and gas, noting that we have centuries of supply that is currently considered
technically recoverable. However, they don’t mention that economic recoverability
will be an important factor. They do acknowledge that future tech may be
different, appearing faster or slower than predicted, so that all future
recoverability predictions are speculative.
Their conclusion
was weak, I think. They simply note that the fossil fuel-industrial age
allowed us to free up our economic power as the share of GDP required for food
and fuel dropped immensely. While this is absolutely true and shows how fossil
fuels have largely benefitted civilization, it is hardly a key argument for guiding
energy principles for the 21st century. Certainly, we should
acknowledge the importance of fossil fuels, but I just think they should not have
emphasized that as their conclusion.
References:
Energy
for the 21st Century: A Declaration of Guiding Principles. Mark Mills and Scott
Tinker. ARC Research. February 2025. Mark+Mills+and+Scott+Tinker+Energy+for+the+21st+Century.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment