Thanks for the nice note. The article you cite is relevant, but not specific to revolutionary new (is that redundant?) clean cheap and abundant energy technologies. EROI is definitely a factor, with too high of an EROI actually being dual-use and therefore dangerous.

Let me cite two recent developments. The first has a relatively low EROI, the new Bloom Box. You ought to be hearing more about it today (Wednesday, Feb 23) because it is due to be introduced, having been covered in a Sixty Minutes segment last Sunday evening. Basically, it is a fuel cell that converts natural gas (methane, swamp gas, whatever) to electricity on-site at about 2X current technology. Combined with what Dr Craig Venter is working (GM microbes that produce methane from compressed CO2), that ought to kick butt, but has a relatively low EROI.

On the other side of the spectrum is WSFM (please don’t make me spell that acronym out for you). You probably don’t believe in UFOs, if only because you simply disregard any reasonable analysis of the sightings. Anyway, I can credibly argue that an cheap clean and abundant with an extremely high EROI exists, but is being kept from the public because empires want to control access to fuel. I strongly suggest watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FEyV_-NGyk

For extra credit, read Defense Analysis Report DIA-08-0911-003 Technology Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance. Basically, LENR is now out of the closet (you know, cold fusion), and there is every reason to believe that if we can better understand the principle of why this phenomena occurs, we can solve the “energy crisis.”

To summarize, I learned in shop class in high school that gasoline fumes were the strongest non-nuclear explosive know, so it is fair to label oil as having a high EROI. Never the less, there is no reason to think that oil was our one-shot at energy nirvana. Yeah, we are wasting it big time, but lets face it, that black tar is gross, so I won’t miss it if we can find an intelligent replacement.

My wife and I visited Alaska, and we took a tour to where the 49ers mined for gold. There many people died from lack of a certain vitamin in their diet. What they didn’t know is that the flower that grows all over there had that vitamin in abundance. In other words, they died in ignorance while the very solution to their problem was all around them. Really gets you thinking, huh?

Optimal foraging
Resource patchiness

I agree, we COULD HAVE used oil as a stepping stone. If there are other bonanzas out there, we could have used oil to get at them, just as we used agriculture and charcoal to get to the Industrial Era. But we’ve blown oil and coal on a big party instead.

I’ve checked out your MySpace page, and you are obviously intelligent and well-read. Please do read the following article:

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Ten_fundamental_principles_of_net_energy

It will clarify many of the statements I have made in our discussion, and also show you were I have been wrong. (I am not claiming infallibility).

My central points remain the same:
1) Energy enables everything we do, and therefore also limits everything we do.
2) While energy is the very stuff of the universe, easily accessible energy is rare and scattered. It is a precious resource to be carefully managed, not a blank check.

Regards,
David Franklin

P.S. Nice dogs…

We can physically turn the crank with our hands or feet. Or, we can turn the crank with running water or the expansion of heated water. Or we can use the sun to produce electricity in solar cells to power an electric motor to turn the crank.

How much does the generation of electricity cost us? As long as the “cost” (i.e. the effort, resources, or time) is less than the cost of turning the crank with our bodies, then it seems like a good deal.

As far as an economy goes, economic activity is reflected in GDP (gross domestic product). GDP is in some ways absurd, since you can pay people to dig holes in the ground, then refill them, and you have increased GDP. I hear people complain that our economy isn’t generating enough jobs, but we could run a rickshaw company shuttling people around the city. That would generate plenty of jobs, but it would be inefficient compared to those people mining coal, oil, or natural gas, and using the fuel to power vehicles that they then drive.

What I am trying to say is that energy (the power to turn the crank) can be harvested from virtually unlimited wells at a low cost. It doesn’t necessarily have to result in radioactivity (a hidden cost). I will also observe that global warming is also probably contributed to by waste heat in oxidizing fossil fuels (I will furnish a peer-reviewed paper upon request). Another hidden cost.

My point is that there is plenty of energy in the universe that only needs ingenuity to harvest, not muscle power, or the exploitation of non-renewable resources. Once you gain access to such a clean cheap and abundant form of energy you can use it to expand your access to more resources. By the way, I am not specifically thinking of BlackLight Power and hydrogen, but am just making a generalized observation.

In summary, if mankind just had a method of accessing the wells of virtually unlimited energy that we know is out there, our ecosystem becomes a lot larger. If a problem is intractable (like the burning of fossil fuels to power our economy/civilization), then enlarge it. While the energy properties of fossil fuels is comparable to (for instance) zero point energy, it is inaccurate to say I am generalizing the desirable qualities of oil to all energy sources.

Instead, I am pointing out that the same human imagination that expanded our vistas by burning fossil fuels can be used to expand our vistas much further by installing a superior energy technology (whatever that ends up being). Think of oil as a stepping stone, not as a onetime sugar high.

You are understanding me correctly. Except my unbelief is more fundamental. I don’t believe in cheap, clean, and abundant energy. PERIOD.

Cheap energy is useless. Energy can be cheap, but it’s no help.

Point of clarity: I’m talking in terms of energy costs, which are the only REAL costs there are. Money is really only a convenient analogue for energy that we’ve invented. It doesn’t really exist. Think about it – have you ever touched money? Seen it? You’ve only touched bits of paper and metal, or seen figures on a screen. Money is only a symbol for the real thing: ENERGY.

Energy sources have to be PROFITABLE to us. Paying MORE than we get out won’t work. If a lion uses only 3000 kilojoules to kill an antelope, it’s made a cheap kill (thumbsuck on the figures, but it’s the concept that’s important).
That cheap kill is worthless if the antelope only yields 2900 kilojoules of usable energy to the lion.
Kills have to result in net profit for the lion. It has to get more energy from the kill than it expended – which it then uses to stay alive, breed, &c.

The same applies to us. Energy sources that we exploit have to give us a net energy profit. An oil well has to give more than one barrel of oil return for every barrel of oil used in extraction, or it is shut down. We’re not going to use two barrels of oil to extract one barrel!

Please search the term “energy return on energy investment” or EROEI for short.

But hang on, lions do kill antelopes! What gives? What gives is that there is continual energy inflow into the system from the sun. So on a cosmic scale, the laws of thermodynamics are not broken. They are only “broken” locally.
But there’s only so much energy inflow per unit time (a good thing, we don’t want to be fried to a crisp).
So what humans have done, is turn to energy that’s been stored away from an earlier time in the life of the universe, in an EASILY-ACCESSIBLE form. Oil. Coal. Uranium.

You are completely correct to point to e = mc2 and state that energy is abundant. The entire mass of the universe IS energy, so how on earth can I be saying that we don’t have enough?

The trouble is that it’s not easily accessible. Energy being present isn’t enough for it to be an energy SOURCE. That energy isn’t just sitting there waiting for us. It’s actually holding everything together, and to release it takes energy input.

To break a rock takes energy. The same applies to an atom. Granted, the two are on very different scales. But the same basic principle applies: energy INPUT is required.

There are some unstable elements around, itching to break down into simpler, more stable elements. We call them “radioactive”, and have used them in nuclear fission to provide us with energy.
It’s essentially the same as using oil. We are using energy stored in an easily accessible form.

Ok, why can’t we just find the next source? So we can only use energy once, is that a problem? That is where we might have breathing room for your approach. If we get off this planet, and find large quantities of uranium, we could keep a high technology going for a bit longer. But getting off, and finding the uranium, and extracting it, and building and operating reactors, all take (oh, bore) energy. Which has to come from somewhere.

Am I not overlooking fusion?
No. The trouble with fusion is that it only happens with matter in a plasma state. That requires enormous energy inputs, in the form of heat. That’s the other reason the sun’s running down: quite apart from using up the available hydrogen fuel, the amount of stored heat is declining.

Cold fusion? It’s twenty years away. And twenty years ago it was twenty years away. And twenty years from now it’ll be twenty years away. It doesn’t work. Not in practice. Something that doesn’t work in practice doesn’t work.

Finally, clean? There is no such thing as a clean source of energy. There is always loss of energy when converting energy from one form to another (first law of thermodynamics).
So, living organisms produce waste (oxygen, carbon dioxide, urine, faeces, sulfur compounds, etc.). The precise nature of the wate depends on the processes the organism uses, but all organisms produce waste.
Burning wood, coal, oil, gas – that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Nuclear fission produces all sorts of radioactive waste.
Any process of energy conversion produces waste; it’s simply the nature of the waste that is different. We only have a choice of whether we are going to have manure to deal with, or radioactive compounds. Manure can be used to grow plants in. Radioactive material is deadly. Tough choice, eh?

Energy can be cheap – that doesn’t help. Cheap is still running at a loss (money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is energy)
Energy can’t be clean – we only have a choice of what pollution to deal with.
Energy is abundant – but profitably accessible energy is not. It’s a rarity.

As far as I can see, you are making the mistake of generalising the desirable qualities of oil to all energy sources, and to energy itself.

I think you are wrong about no clean cheap and abundant energy technology existing.

Think about equation E=mc2, mass (m) is equivalent (=) to energy (E).

There are a multitude of places it can be gotten. Atomic fusion and fission are just two such examples.

Even empty space contains vast amounts of energy! “The energy of a cubic centimeter of empty space has been calculated to be one trillionth of an erg, based on the upper limit of the cosmological constant” (Wikipedia).

Have you ever heard of cold fusion? LENR (Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions) are a fact (I am now glancing at a paper by the DIA (US Defense Intelligence Agency) titled “Technology Forecast: Worldwide Research on Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions Increasing and Gaining Acceptance.”

I could keep going, but I am at work, and besides, you probably get the idea by now.

Am I getting this correctly, are you saying that clean cheap and abundant energy is a silver bullet, but you just don’t believe such technology is possible?

No, I’m not grossly underestimating how game changing a “clean cheap and abundant source of energy” would be. We need only look at the utter transformation wrought by oil to see how much of a game changer such a source of energy would be. Oil is clean, cheap and abundant – in the short term, thanks to dodgy accounting surounding its price, which emerges from the fundamental flaw of neoclassical economics – it does not acknowledge the role that energy and resources contribute. It deals with labour and capital only, forgetting that these are built on a foundation of real world resources.

What I saying is that a “clean cheap and abundant source of energy” does not exist. Oil isn’t really cheap, clean or abundant, we just kidded ourselves that it was.

Silver bullets don’t exist, because they are products of our fevered modern brains dreaming our modern mythology of “technological progress”. They are not realistic products of cold, hard science.
We cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics.

To build underground, synthesise food, and have “satisfying virtual experiences” (whatever those might be), we need ENERGY. We would actually need MORE energy than we are currently using: all of those processes are incredibly energy intensive.

That energy has to come from somewhere. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another.
The conversion is never one hundred percent efficient. Thus, the more changes of form, the greater the energy loss. This is the reason that we observe food pyramids, with a large biomass of primary producers (plants or other autotrophic organisms) supporting a smaller biomass of primary consumers, in turn supporting an even smaller biomass of secondary consumers.

Now, I know what you’re going to say in answer to that: we can improve on nature, because we are smart. We can do things more efficiently, because of our technology.

This is simply not true. We have not dodged around the constraints that other living things (and any energy-using system) face. We have simply tapped into huge reserves of energy, by accessing ancient sunlight locked away for millenia. We have expanded the base of the pyramid. But in doing so, we have been using up those reserves. When they are gone (beyond our practical ability to extract), they are gone. Then we must attempt to survive on the energy base provided by the sun.

We can do that – just not in huge numbers.

I checked out about Blacklight, and came across the following red flags:

self-perpetuating – its a perpetual motion machine. These don’t work, because of energy losses.

lower energy state of hydrogen – not allowed by quantum physics. Quantum is probably the most successful theory of physics ever, and just because it’s weird as Alice in Wonderland does not make it wrong.

catalyst – this is the big one. Catalysts are not magic. Enzymes can catalyse reactions in living organisms that otherwise could not happen. But because they are made of proteins, they need a lot of energy to make in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe quantum physics is wrong, and the Blacklight process really works. Maybe all of their measurements of energy in and energy out are correct.

But I’ll bet they haven’t measured how much energy went into making the catalyst. And that’s where the laws of thermodynamics are going to come back and bite, hard.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. The Blacklight process belongs in the same delusional box as interest and lottery winnings, the box that says you can get something from nothing.

Believe me, if there were a way to get such nice large amounts of energy from hydrogen, for next to nothing, it would have been done already. By bacteria.

We believe in magic nowadays, as did our ancestors, only now it really does work. We call it “technology” and it works because it burns oil (and coal, and some other stuff). It won’t work when those are used up.

The laws of thermodynamics (a loose phrasing):

1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even
3. You can’t get out of the game.

A cheap clean and abundant source of energy would be game changing all right – it would throw some of the fundamental laws of the universe out of the window.

Brad, I’m not really arguing with you. You appear to be a hopeless cornucopian. I’m posting this so that others who may be reading, will understand how irrevocably we are bound to the laws of thermodynamics, and prepare for what we are facing.

We are Faust, we made a bargain with the Devil, and now he’s coming to claim his due.

We won’t get out of this mess by striking another bargain with him. There isn’t another bargain being offered.

The only salvation is repentance…
We need to understand our place in the scheme of things, and accept it.

I would like to remind you that most of the current environmental degradation is the result of the efforts of a small minority of the people living way beyond our current capacity to sustain. If only a half billion people lived like that it would still be unsustainable with our current technology.

Obviously, on the current trajectory the carrying capacity of the Earth is going to dramatically shrink, but the silver bullet is a clean cheap and abundant source of energy, because with that we can adapt to living in ships (i.e. closed sustainable environments) sustainably.

Our current lifestyles have hit a barrier, but that is all. We must either adapt or die. The good news is that there is strong evidence that a clean, cheap, and abundant energy technology exists, and that it is being stifled by those power-brokers who want to control the fuel, and therefore the population. But that is beside the point I am trying to make.

My point is that a clean cheap and abundant source of energy would be a game changer that you appear to be grossly underestimating.

So yes, we are overpopulated. And it’s our consumption patterns that are a problem. They’re two sides of the same coin.

“The earth could probably carried a billion of us at our current level of consumption and industrial development!”
Two problems:
a) we wouldn’t be content with our current level. We’d want more, and more, and more (remember, the nature of the beast always comes out)
b) do you mean current levels of consumption in the West? Or the average for the whole globe? There’s a huge difference…

“I figure we can fit ten times more people if we use a cheap clean and abundant energy technology. Furthermore, if you connect all those people up on the internet, they will probably come up with better technology to increase that number another ten fold.”

“the X factor of improved technology.”

Brad, you’ve been seduced by our common cultural myths of “progress” and “the wonder of technology”. You’re looking at the “advances” made in the last couple of centuries, and thinking that they magically came from human ingenuity.

While human ingenuity did play a part, do you really think we suddenly got so much smarter than our ancestors thousands of years ago? What of the Antikythera Mechanism? What of Adam’s Calendar? Did we get a whole lot smarter than those people?
No. What changed is that we have had access to a lot more ENERGY than they did (coal, and then oil). Thus, we were able to apply our ideas. Yes, I am aware that one doesn’t just stumble over these things, that there was a “march of technology” over the previous centuries, that there was an accumulation of knowledge, etc. It was all possible thanks to harvesting ENERGY (why do you think Europe has so little forest cover now?).

Technology does ***NOT*** create energy. That would be the cart pushing the horse.

Technology HARNESSES energy. No energy, no technology. No horse, no cart.

A stone axe needs very little energy (solar energy, converted to food, burned by the person making the axe). Ditto for a small fire.
The larger and more complex the technology, the more energy it needs. The more durable the material it is made from, the more energy it requires to manufacture. It takes a lot more energy to process iron ore into steel than to process a tree into wood.
The Internet needs an enormous amount of energy. So does a car, or a brick building, etc. That energy has to come from somewhere.
Technology can only harness energy that is already PRESENT. It cannot harness energy that is NOT PRESENT. We don’t have enormous amounts of energy present on the surface of our planet. The big reserves of energy are underground, stored up over millions of years.

Our current “miracles of technology” are really miracles of oil. No more oil, no more miracles.
When you speak about “cheap clean and abundant energy”; you are speaking about oil. It’s cheap – for now. It’s clean – relatively. It’s abundant – at present.
All the renewables we can get our hands on are (theoretically) clean and cheap, but they are NOT abundant.

We’re currently burning oil at a rate of 1 cubic mile per year.
To replace that energy, we’d need to build either:

4 Three Gorges dams OR
104 coal-fired plants OR
32 850 wind turbines OR
52 nuclear power plants OR
91 250 000 solar panels

EACH YEAR, FOR 50 YEARS.

Do we have the political will to do so?
Do we have the OIL to do so? (it takes oil to build these things)
Will they even replace oil? No, because they’re providing energy in a different form, which would mean converting our infrastructure and technological base – which takes (I hope you guessed it by now)…

ENERGY

Brad, we’ve hit barrier. It’s that simple.

To make a long story short, I figure we can fit ten times more people if we use a cheap clean and abundant energy technology. Furthermore, if you connect all those people up on the internet, they will probably come up with better technology to increase that number another ten fold.

By the way, Malthus forwarded a social Darwinian philosophy that has been proven incorrect because of the X factor of improved technology. While I personally don’t hold human life to be anymore sacred than is relative, there is no reason to be mean and sow war, disease, and famine, if for no other reason than it is destabilizing and therefore is a waste of resources.

The problem with the planet is there are more people than the environment can support over time. Our numbers are breaking the bank as it were. We are looking at looming food shortages, water shortages, resources, etc. due to unsustainable population levels. These issues would still remain problems even if global warming were not an issue. In fact, we could have enjoyed the level of industrial development that we have if our population had been a good deal smaller than it is now. The earth could probably carried a billion of us at our current level of consumption and industrial development!

That’s the sad fact. It’s our numbers that are precipitating all of this. Malthus predicted a HUGE population crash when our population was approaching 1 billion. It is suggested that it did not happen because we discovered technologies to harness fossil fuels and become much more efficient. Out technological development has enabled our population to expand to something well beyond the pre industrial limits. If we were to completely drop technology and industry the we would truly revert to a hunter gatherer society. For some revelation read Richard Duncan’s “Olduvai Theory”. It discusses a population collapse he predicts will begin sometime within the next 5 years or so due to ever increasing demands for fossil in the face of ever dwindling supplies.

We are facing disaster from so many directions it is not funny!

Our intelligence has ultimately worked against us by allowing us to develop methods to sustain our population all the way to the point of crippling our environment.

We live in a fish bowl. It has finite limits. We broke them. The bigger the bowl, the longer the latency period before the inevitable becomes obvious.

See the movie, “Rapa Nui” then read the essay, “Easter’s End”:
http://dieoff.org/page145.htm

As a matter of fact, take a GOOD look at the web site that hosts this article. Richard Duncan’s article is there also.

Research the 6th mass extinction as well. We are in the middle of that right now.

It is all part of a BIG ugly picture that we have created by our excessive numbers!

You could argue the points individually and try to minimize them. But taken as a whole they present a VERY BLEAK picture that only the feeble minded would fail to grasp. You may have to STRUGGLE to see the gestalt exposed in all of this.

If you don’t think the mass extinction is REAL the check out the failure of the Cod Fisheries in Nova Scotia (North Atlantic) in the early 1990s:
http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/cbio/cancod.html

The seas are over fished. If you doubt it do some research on your own. In the eastern US, some bat species are threatened by White Nose Disease. Commercially kept hone bees die off a hive at a time. Salmon in the western US and Canada are threatened by reduced precipitation and water diversion. The list goes on and on and on.

Essentially, plants and animals are threatened by human over predation, human land use and human encroachment on habitat.

James Lovelock addressed these issues in bulk by discussing human over population and what it meant in general terms. if you want to attack specific points and claim he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, what does that say about you?

I know what I am talking about. I have looked at ALL the stuff I have mentioned (plus about 100 times more) and several of James Lovelock’s books as well. I arrived at the conclusion that we were pretty well screwed before reading ANY of his books. When he wrote the “Revenge Of Gaia”, I thought he was being nice about it. It his most recent book, “The Vanishing Face of Gaia”, I believe he tells it exactly how it is!

Our numbers are not sustainable. Peak Oil is just the first in a line of items that will affect our ability to MAKE IT in this world. The earth is over populated. It has been said that since about 1970 we have been annually consuming more than the earth produces. And each year we do it early in the year the the yea before. The first time it happened they estimated it was sometime in December. Now it happens sometime in October. Check out the special, “The End Of The Line”. It discusses the issues surrounding the over fishing of the seas.

A while back there was a news cast talking about space usage. It was claimed that all the folks in the world could be placed in the state of Texas and the population density would be less that in New York city. I won’t swear to the numbers but is was something in the neighborhood of 32 square feet per person. A coworker used this as an argument to demonstrate that the earth had a long way to go before it was over populated. What a joke this statistic is. The place a person may occupy temporally speaks nothing to the amount of space required to produce all the thing required to sustain a person annually.

I tried finds this figure. I read somewhere that it took around 23 hectares. The same article said that there was only about 15 hectares of arable land per person today. I won’t swear to the accuracy of these figures as I’m pulling them from memory but I will state that if they are inaccurate, they are not off by much.

An article on Dieoff.org talks about the land use a little differently. It comes up with some different numbers but it speaks to the same fact. In the US, withing 20 years, there will no be enough arable land to produce enough food for exports.

Overpopulated we are! Our population is damaging the environment to the point that species important to the support of the environment are becoming extinct. The rate of extinction is already a HUGE problem. Global warming will only assist in accelerating the inevitable. Oil supplies not capable of meeting the needs of an ever growing human population are just icing on the cake.

It’s not a pretty picture is it?

For comment, I can be reached at jhh at envirobat dot org

John Hayes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1iqa0dSJO0

Check out above link to a 2 and a half minute youtube video of a CNN report. What are the odds that the independent testimony below is fraudulent (not bloody likely unless you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist)? Here is a silver bullet technology: clean cheap and abundant energy.

In a joint statement, Dr. K.V. Ramanujachary, Rowan University Meritorious Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Dr. Amos Mugweru, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, and Dr. Peter Jansson P.E., Associate Professor of Engineering said, “In independent tests conducted over the past three months involving 10 solid fuels made by us from commercially-available chemicals, our team of engineering and chemistry professors, staff, and students at Rowan University has independently and consistently generated energy in excesses ranging from 1.2 times to 6.5 times the maximum theoretical heat available through known chemical reactions.”

Also, check out this article: http://green.venturebeat.com/2008/05/30/blacklight-power-claims-nearly-free-energy-from-water-is-this-for-real/

Brad Arnold
St Louis Park, MN, USA
dobermanmacleod@gmail.com
http://www.myspace.com/dobermanmacleod