[Peakoil] [Fwd: Rachel's #973: The General Motors Solution]

[karin at doctordemocracy.net]

This may be of interest to the members of this list, it is about energy
solutions:

Rachel's #973: The General Motors Solution

Energy_at_the_Crossroads

By Peter Montague

Vaclav Smil is a historian of technical advances -- particularly in
the field of energy -- and a Distinguished Professor at the University
of Manitoba in Canada. Over the years, Smil has written more than 25
books and many dozens of articles. In recent years he has been
examining human uses of energy over past millenia. As Smil says
"My firm belief is that looking far ahead is done most profitably by
looking far back."

His first conclusion is that energy systems change very slowly. The
modern world today relies on machines that were all invented in the
1880s -- the steam turbine, the internal combustion engine, plus
thermal and hydro-power for making electricity. These were
supplemented in the 1930s and '40s by gas turbines and nuclear fission
power. The photovoltaic solar cell for converting sunlight directly
into electricity was theorized in 1839 but not actually created until
1954 -- and today, 54 years later, solar photovoltaic power remains a
minuscule contributor to the world's energy needs.

>From the stone age until the 1890s, humans relied mainly on biofuels.
But Smil examines carefully, then dismisses, the dream of returning to
large-scale energy systems derived from biomass (capturing sunlight in
plants, then processing the plants to release energy) including
ethanol. To provide the world's transportation fuels with the most
efficient of these systems -- Brazilian ethanol from sugar cane --
would require a third of the planet's cultivated land, or nearly all
the agricultural land in the tropics, Smil points out. Furthermore,
such systems not only require too much land (thus disupting important
ecosystem services), they also require too much nitrogen fertilizer --
so the ecological impact would be unacceptably large. Excessive human
use of nitrogen fertilizer has been recognized as a global problem
for more than a decade. (See Smil's paper on this and other human
disturbances of <a
href="http://www.precaution.org/lib/global_material_cycles.070601.pdf"
target="_blank"><font color="#0066CC">global material cycles</font></a>.)

Despite massive government subsidies, nuclear power has no obvious
future, Smil believes. This results from a combination of things --
the rapid introduction of flawed reactor designs in the 1960s, the
Chernobyl accident, the "serial failure" of fast-breeder reactors, the
unsolved problem of nuclear waste, the unsolvable problem of terrorist
threats involving nuclear material -- all producing dismal public
acceptance of the technology (not to mention investor fear).

Nuclear fusion has been subsidized steadily at the rate of $250
million per year for the past 50 years, "with nothing practical to
show for it," Smil observes. He believes it is "extremely unlikely"
that nuclear fusion will play any significant role in future energy
scenarios.

This leaves solar energy and fossil fuels.

Smil points out that the sunlight reaching the surface of the earth is
truly enormous compared to human energy demands -- something like
10,000 times as large as all human energy needs. But the resource is
diffuse, not concentrated, so it will require 10 to 100 times as much
physical space to use sunlight instead of fossil fuels (or 1000 to
10,000 times as much space, if we opt for growing biofuels). Still,
direct conversion of solar energy into both low-temperature and high-
temperature heat, plus electricity, "could supply a lasting, planet-
wide foundation for non-fossil economies," Smil <a
href="http://www.precaution.org/lib/energy_at_crossroads.060516.pdf"
target="_blank"><font color="#0066CC">says</font></a>.

Fossil fuels began supplying humans with more energy than biomass
(wood, charcoal and crop residues) starting in the mid-1890s. However,
if fossil fuels are contributing substantially to the problem of
global warming because they emit carbon dioxide (CO2), then they must
be phased out, the sooner the better, and the transition to solar
power must proceed apace.

However, the fossil corporations have a different idea (shared by
their allies in the chemical, automobile, railroad and mining
corporations -- plus their loyal representatives in Congress and the
White House, plus the Presidential candidates of both major parties).
Their plan is an end-of-pipe solution -- to capture, compress into
liquid, and bury carbon dioxide in the ground. Given growing public
awareness of the large costs of global warming, this carbon-burial
plan -- as far-fetched as it may be -- is the only way the coal and
oil corporations can continue to burn fossil fuels until there are no
more fossil fuels left to burn.

Here (in a very long <a
href="http://www.precaution.org/lib/energy_at_crossroads.060516.pdf"
target="_blank"><font color="#0066CC">quotation</font></a>) is what Vaclav
Smil has to say about
burying carbon dioxide in the ground:

"Underground sequestration of carbon -- now routinely sold as both a
feasible and an effective solution to avoid global warming (Socolow
2005; IPCC 2006) -- is a prime example of what I call the GM approach
to engineering a desirable change. In the early 1970s, when faced with
the legislative fiat to cut automotive emissions of CO, NOx and VOC
the world's largest company chose not to lower them at all but to
install costly and resource-intensive three-way catalytic converters.
In contrast, Soichiro Honda, the founder of the eponymous and now
legendary engineering corporation, approached the challenge as an
ecologist and asked:

"'What would happen if catalytic converters were installed in a large
number of automobiles, emitting platinum, palladium, and other heavy
metals that would then enter human bodies? There are too many
unknowns.' (Sakiya 1982:181).

"Honda's engineers thus concentrated on developing their extraordinary
compound vortex controlled combustion (CVCC hence Honda Civic) and
theirs was the first engine to meet U.S. EPA's strict automotive
emissions requirements. Honda's way -- minimizing the production of
undesirable outputs rather than controlling them as an after-thought
-- should be always the guiding principle of any intelligent, far-
sighted, rational design. I do not have to belabor the wider lesson
taught by these two companies. Three decades after it surprised with
its innovative engine design Honda is the world's leading, and a
highly profitable, automotive innovator whose two dominant vehicles,
Accord and Civic, set the standard for car-making in compact and sedan
class while GM is a virtually bankrupt outfit (losing thousands of
dollars on every car sale) whose products include such ridiculous
monsters as Yukon (24 L/100 km [= 9.8 miles per gallon]) and H1, a
military assault vehicle weighing 4,700 kg [= 5.2 tons].

"I must hasten to add [says Smil] that underground CO2 sequestration
in the service of secondary oil recovery is most desirable, as is any
form of plant-bound sequestration, ranging from a gradual build-up of
soil organic matter to massive planting of trees. But beyond these
highly desirable actions the stress must be on reducing the emissions,
not hiding them in an uncertain and costly manner. There are simply
too many unknowns to commit enormous investments to an undertaking
whose results could be obtained in many more preferable ways. But
ignoring the avoidance principle that should guide any sound
engineering and environmental action does not turn sequestration into
a more practical proposition: even if we were to embrace this second-
rate option the magnitude of the enterprise needed to make a real
difference will defeat us.

"A key comparison illustrates the daunting scale of the challenge. In
2005 worldwide CO2 emissions amounted to nearly 28 Gt [gigatonnes, or
billions of metric tonnes]; even if were to set out only a modest goal
of sequestering just 10% of this volume we would have to put away
annually about 6 Gm3 [billion cubic meters] (assuming that all of the
gas is compressed at least to its critical point where its density is
0.47 g/mL [grams per milliLiter]). The current extraction of crude oil
(nearly 4 Gt [billion tonnes] in 2005) translates to less than 5 Gm3
[billion cubic meters]. Sequestering a mere 1/10 of today's global CO2
emissions (< 3 Gt [billion tonnes] CO2) would thus call for putting in
place an industry that would have to force underground every year the
volume of compressed gas larger than or (with higher compression)
equal to the volume of crude oil extracted globally by the petroleum
industry whose infrastructures and capacities have been put in place
over a century of development. Needless to say, such a technical feat
could not be accomplished within a single generation.

"The obvious question is why it should be even attempted given the
fact that a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions could be achieved by
several more rational, mature and readily available adjustments. The
most radical of these steps would be the reduction of the average
annual U.S. per capita energy (about 330 GJ [billion Joules]/year, or
roughly twice the affluent EU [European Union] level) by about 40%:
this transformation alone would reduce the global carbon emissions by
at least 2.5 GT [billion tonnes] CO2. Of course, this suggestion is
always met with derision and the chances of such a shift are judged to
be utterly impossible. But before you rush to join that dismissive
howl recall that when empires unravel their energy use shrinks.

"The last perfect example was the demise of the Soviet Empire: between
1989 and 1997 the primary energy use in the successor states of the
USSR fell by a third. Then consider the current U.S. trajectory of
enormous accumulated budget and trade deficits, more than twice as
large unfunded health and social security liabilities, absence of any
new domestic savings, gutting of the country's manufacturing, dismal
state of its education, acute strategic overstretch and a crippling
dependence on energy imports (as of 2005 even its net food imports!)
-- and you do not need a great deal of imagination to construct
scenarios of a major economic (choose one: crisis, pull-back,
collapse) to be accompanied by significantly reduced energy
consumption." [End of Smil quotation] (Smil has elaborated elsewhere
[<a
href="http://www.precaution.org/lib/unfolding_trends_next_50_yr.050601.pdf"
target="_blank"><font color="#0066CC">1.2 Mbyte PDF</font></a>] his
reasons for believing that America's global
empire is in the final stages of retreat.)

In sum, Smil believes that burying carbon dioxide in the ground is

(1) A monumentally dumb idea because the first principle of good
industrial design is to avoid production of undesirable outputs,
rather than controlling them as an afterthought.

(2) Fraught with uncertainties -- not the least of them being unknown
costs that are surely larger than what is being forecast on the basis
of almost no real-world experience;

(3) Could not be accomplished in a single generation because capturing
even 10% of human CO2 emissions would require creation of an
industrial infrastructure as large as the present-day global petroleum
industry, which took 100 years to build.

(4) Unnecessary because merely eliminating the most obvious forms
of waste from U.S. energy use -- making us as efficient as Europe --
would accomplish the same thing far more cheaply and far more rapidly
(with considerable health benefits from reduced pollution, I might
add).

Smil elaborated on this last point in <a
href="http://www.precaution.org/lib/energy_resources_and_uses_a_primer.020601.pdf"
target="_blank"><font color="#0066CC">a short paper</font></a> in 2002. He
pointed out that the U.S. requires 7 tons of oil equivalent (toe) per
person per year to maintain our present lifestyle. But he shows that a
top-notch lifestyle requires no more than 2.6 toe and arguably even a
bit less. "Our quest for ever higher energy use thus has no objective
or subjective justification," he concludes.

In sum, we could cut our energy use by more than 60 percent without
diminishing our lifestyle in any way -- and arguably it would be
enhanced because so much pollution would be avoided by the shift.

Burying CO2 in the ground is a General Motors solution when what we
need is a Honda solution.