Updates to Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy

Updates to “Life After Fossil Fuels”

Last updated 28 April 2024. Other posts related to this book here.

My book is about our many dependencies on fossil fuels, quickly depicted in these very short videos: Life without Petroleum A Day Without Oil Can You Go a Day Without Fossil Fuels?

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Chapter 2 We Are Running Out of Time

Norway-based energy consultancy Rystad Energy has warned that Big Oil could see its proven reserves run out in less than 15 years, unless Big Oil makes more commercial discoveries quickly, thanks to produced volumes not being fully replaced with new discoveries (Kimani A (2021) Big Oil Is In Desperate Need Of New Discoveries. Oilprice.com).

“Global oil and gas discoveries have been on a constant shrinking trend prior to and over the last decade, with oil discoveries reaching a low of 3.8 BBO (billion barrels of oil) in 2016; in 2020 it was 4.3 BBO. During the decade, 89 BBO were discovered while 289 BBO of reserves were produced, a ratio of over 3 to 1, which is unsustainable.” Rafael Sandrea, Energy Policy Research Foundation.

However alarming Figure 3 in Chapter 2 (IEA 2018) may be, reality is even more worrisome, because this chart doesn’t depict Business As Usual, rather, it is an optimistic forecast called the IEA Sustainable Development scenario shown in figure 1 as requiring far less oil supply than other projections to 2040 above it. The IEA Sustainable Development assumes that by 2030: global primary energy use declines 7% from 2019 to 2030 (compared to a 20% increase over the prior 11 years); solar generation grows by a factor of 5.6x, wind generation grows by a factor of 2.4x; nuclear generation increases by 23% (no decommissioning); coal use for power/heat declines by 51%; and electric vehicles sales reach 40% from today’s 4.5% levels (Cembalist 2021).

Figure 1. Oil “future production wedge”: demand vs existing field supply Million barrels per day

Chapter 4 We Are Alive Thanks to Fossil-Fueled Fertilizer

This chapter is about how we hit the wall at 1.6 billion in population in the early 1900s. Then natural gas based fertilizer was invented, which is responsible for allowing at least 4 billion more people to exist. USDOE (2020) points out the myriad other ways natural gas aids agriculture: “Natural gas also is used to dry these crops. Further, plastics made from hydrocarbons provide bags for hay and silage, greenhouse covers, bale wrapping material, mulch film to prevent weed growth, and plant nursery containers.”

This chapter also explains the many ways natural gas fertilizers damage soil and water, and emit greenhouse gases. Made worse by plastic coated fertilizers which creates greenhouse gases during decay and microplastics that kill soil organisms. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 100,000 tonnes of fertilizer encircled by plastic per year are dumped into the environment and now companies intend to add encapsulated chemicals (Nargi 2022).

Chapter 6 What Fuels Could Replace Diesel?

Peak diesel is the main civilization crusher, since heavy-duty transportation depends on it. Prices in March 2022 just hit an all time high, more than 2008. As the fuel of transportation, the price rally affects everything and everone, adding to inflationary pressures that are already running at a multi-decade high. This is partly because natural gas prices skyrocketed, which plays a key role in making diesel at refineries, where NG is used to produce hydrogen to remove sulfur from diesel. The spike in gas prices in late 2021 made that process prohibitively expensive, cutting diesel output. Low-sulfur crude is also in short supply: countries that pump that kind of oil, such as Nigeria and Angola, are unable to increase output. Any additional production has to come from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but both largely produce crude with high sulfur content. In the U.S., diesel stocks fell last week to their lowest seasonal level in 16 years (Blas J (2022) The Oil Price Rally Is Bad. The Diesel Crisis Is Far Worse. Bloomberg).

Non-renewable non-commercial exploding hydrogen. Most updates are in post “Hydrogen: The dumbest & most impossible renewable“, and Energy/Hydrogen.

7 Why Not Electrify Commercial Transportation with Batteries?

The U.S. would have to double today’s electric grid if 66% of all cars are EVs by 2050 (Groom 2021, NREL 2021). Yet the electric grid is falling apart, will be increasingly affected by climate change, and since wind and solar construction depends on fossil fuels for every step of their life cycle, their construction will be constrained by energy shortages due to peak oil happening in 2018 (chapter 2 in Life After Fossil Fuels).

Energyskeptic battery posts:

Chapter 9 Manufacturing Uses Over Half of All Fossil Energy

Energyskeptic manufacturing posts:

Geothermal power: Can Geothermal power replace declining fossil fuels?

2021-10-22 Hydrogen steel: From a scientist at LBNL on steel made from hydrogen: while hydrogen direct reduction can take pre-heated iron ore and convert it into direct reduced iron (H2 DRI), also known as sponge iron, even if done in an electric arc furnace (EAF) plant, it still needs carbon from coal or biomass charcoal to create steel. China produced 1.05 BILLION tonnes last year, of which only 14% was produced through the electric arc furnace process with scrap steel. Half of China’s iron & steel plants have been built since 2010. Are all of these going to be retired, replaced by H2 DRI, EAF capacity expanded, and sufficient non-fossil electricity provided to support the required H2 production in any time-frame that is relevant to the atmosphere? Even if china cut steel production in half by 2050, and DRI/EAF increased from 14% to 60% penetration, the electricity just to produce just the H2 alone would take over 200 TWh. Which is 150 GW of solar capacity dedicated to only creating hydrogen, a capacity nearly as much as the total installed capacity of Europe today.

2021-10-24 Biomass charcoal steel (private communication from Thomas Troszak): The problem is that a charcoal smelter is tiny because charcoal is fragile. All of the charcoal smelters in Brazil only supply enough pig iron to meet 20% of melting capacity of a single electric furnace in a plant that refines pig iron to grey iron (wiki definition), and casts grey ingots for auto manufacturers to remelt and cast into engine blocks. And they burn up thousands of hectares of eucalyptus in the process of supplying the charcoal pigs for that one furnace. As far as I know they aren’t even making steel from the charcoal pig iron. That would represent another whole level of unsustainability. But with charcoal alone, you’re looking at the technology available prior to the 1850s. but at extravagant cost in land area for forests. Abraham Darby mentioned that when he first put the coke in his furnace, his burden capacity increased by 30 times. And that was in the early 1700s. Charcoal smelters like that could produce something like 200 tons of iron per year. By the late 1800s I think there was a mega charcoal furnace in the US that could smelt up to 200 tons per day, but that was unusual. A modern coke smelter can produce 12,000 tons of pig iron per day. And a modern foundry could cast 250 tons of steel in a single pour. So charcoal furnaces can’t support the kind of furnace burden that would be necessary for billeting chunks big enough for the components of a modern bridge, or submarine or nuclear reactor or whatever, nohow.

There is a growing awareness that there are no “renewable” ways to replace fossils for essential products like cement and steel. This article is of interest because it explains why this is challenging, and ideas that I think you will see are unlikely from reading my book, and probably too late to make commercial if peak oil was in 2018 (true so far in 2022) as shown in chapter 2 (and also see “Peak Oil is Here!“).

Fennell P et al (2022) Cement and steel — nine steps to net zero. Nature.

Chapter 10 What Alternatives Can Replace Fossil Fueled Electricity Generation

Fusion. Updates are in Why fusion power is forever away and Energy/Fusion.

Nuclear Power. Updates are in Nuclear Power problems, Nuclear waste, and other Nuclear Power posts.

Chapter 12 Half a Million Products Are Made Out of Fossil Fuels

This chapter lists a few of the 500,000 products such as plastic made from petroleum. USDOE (2020) lists additional natural gas and NG liquids products: “Homebuilders use many natural gas-based materials to build affordable and safe homes, including plastic foam insulation and sheathing materials, vinyl siding, weatherproof window frames, high performance caulks and paints, asphalt roofing materials, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe, and chemically treated lumber. Within our homes, plastic foam insulation helps refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, and heating and air conditioning systems operate quietly and efficiently. Healthcare: Surgical gloves, antiseptics, medications, anesthetics, heart valves, surgical devices, prosthetics, eyeglasses, pacemakers, stents, joint replacements… Automakers have met increased fuel efficiency standards by replacing heavy metal parts with lightweight plastics, now 50% of car’s by volume and just 10% by weight, dramatically improving gas mileage, plus safety features like seat belts, air bags, interior cushioning, and crumple zones.

Paul Martin wrote “A mass shift from fossil petroleum to biomass sources for chemicals and materials is extremely unlikely in my view. Why is that? Simple. Biomass has an average general chemical formula of C6 H10 O5. There are exceptions- food oils being one example- but the greatest mass of biomass is cellulose and lignin, not vegetable oil. It is hydrogen deficient, and worse still, there’s nearly one oxygen atom for every carbon atom. To make most useful chemicals, those oxygens need to be removed by reacting them with hydrogen to produce water, or burned off to produce CO2. Both represent a huge loss of energy and mass (Martin 2024)”.

Chapter 15 Grow More Biomass: Where Is the Land?

Under the topic of “Genetically Engineer Plants to Grow Faster, Get Larger” I wrote: “Photosynthesis evolved about three billion years ago, and to this day, only converts a tiny fraction of sunlight into biomass. So seriously—we are going to enhance photosynthesis when Mother Nature did not figure that out over three billion years of random mutations? It is possible improved photosynthesis would make a plant less disease-resistant, or put more growth into leaves and stalks rather than edible fruit or grain, or require yet more water and soil nutrition. There are probably good reasons and limitations keeping nature from improving photosynthesis.”

Here’s another reason why we probably can’t improve photosynthesis — 14% of the energy goes into lifting water from the soil to their leaves, since photosynthesis requires water as well as light and CO2. Quetin GR et al (2022) Quantifying the Global Power Needed for Sap Ascent in Plants. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences DOI: 10.1029/2022JG006922

Chapter 16 The Ground is Disappearing Beneath Our Feet

More than one-third of the Corn Belt in the Midwest has completely lost its carbon-rich topsoil, which is critical for plant growth because of its water and nutrient retention properties. Thaler et al (2021) estimate the loss at about 100 million acres, which is 156,251 square miles — the size of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin combined. Degradation of soil quality by erosion reduces crop yields, which this research estimated has reduced corn and soybean yields by about 6%, almost $3 billion in annual economic losses for farmers across the Midwest.

Briggs H (2022) Farm machinery exacting heavy toll on soil – study. BBC
The weight of modern combine harvesters, tractors and other farm machinery risks compacting the soil, leading to flooding and poor harvests, according to researchers in Sweden. The researchers calculated that combine harvesters, when fully loaded, have ballooned in size from about 4,000 kg (8,800 pounds) in 1958 to around 36,000kg (80,000 pounds) in 2020. This makes it difficult for plants to put down roots and draw up nutrients, and the land is prone to flooding. The researchers think the growing weight of farm machinery poses a threat to agricultural productivity. Their analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests combine harvesters could be damaging up to a fifth of the global land used to grow crops. Thomas Keller, professor of soil management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden, says machinery should be designed not to exceed a certain load. “Compaction can happen within a few seconds when we drive on the soil, but it can take decades for that soil to recover,” he said.
Scientific paper: Kelly T, Or, D (May 16, 2022) Farm vehicles approaching weights of sauropods exceed safe mechanical limits for soil functioning. PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117699119

Lambert (2020: Just as replacing grasslands with crops caused the 1930s dustbowl, so too will the replacement of grasslands with corn crops bring on Dustbowl 2.0 and potentially desertification. From 2006 to 2011 there was a 10% increase in land growing corn for ethanol over 2046 square miles. Before that, grasslands protected the soil by holding it tightly in place. Dust storms remove nutrients from the soil, making it harder for crops to grow and for even more wind erosion to occur. This destructive cycle, now aggravated by drought, can eventually lead to desertification, and is also a health hazard. The ultrafine dust particles can penetrate cells in the lungs and cause lung and heart disease. Dust storms increased by 5% a year for a whopping 100% increase over the 20 years of the study from 1998-2018. Even the Midwest is seeing dust storms grow after the planting and harvesting of soybeans in June & October, an area also threatened by drought from climate change. The lead author of the findings in Geophysical Research Letters, Andrew Lambert, points out that “It’s particularly ironic that the biofuel commitments were meant to help the environment.” Lambert A et al (2020) Dust Impacts of Rapid Agricultural Expansion on the Great Plains. Geophysical Research Letters. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL090347

Chapter 19 Grow More Biomass: Dwindling Groundwater

Billions more people could have difficulty accessing water if the world opts for a massive expansion in growing energy crops to fight climate change. The idea of growing crops and trees to absorb CO2 and capturing the carbon released when they are burned for energy is a central plank to most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for the negative emissions approaches needed to avoid the catastrophic impacts of more than 1.5°C of global warming.

But the technology, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), could prove a cure worse than the disease, at least when it comes to water stress. The water needed to irrigate enough energy crops to stay under the 1.5°C limit would leave 4.58 billion people experiencing high water stress by 2100 – up from 2.28 billion today, especially in South America and south Africa (Vaughan 2021).

Chapter 21 Grow More Biomass: Pesticides

I’m adding updates to energyskeptic.com in the post below as well as others in category decline/pollution/pesticides here.

Chemical industrial farming is unsustainable. Why poison ourselves when pesticides don’t save more of our crops than in the past?

Chapter 24 Corn Ethanol. Why?

Renshaw J et al (2021) U.S. bread, doughnut makers urge Biden to roll back biofuel requirements. Reuters. A trade group representing some of America’s biggest baked goods companies is urging the Biden administration to ratchet back its biofuel ambitions, arguing that using fuel made from crops could raise the cost of donuts, bread and other foods. They met with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week to urge reduced blending mandates, particularly for biodiesel since supplies of soy and canola oil are running low (40% of soybeans go to biodiesel fuels).

From Chapter 24: Ethanol Raises Food Prices and Harms People and Businesses

The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandating ethanol has led to a shortage of corn for food and animal feed. From 2007 to 2012, prices were driven up so much that farmers planted 17 million new acres of corn rather than soybeans, wheat, hay, cotton, and other crops, driving their prices up to all-time records as well. Cattle feed prices were so high that herds were culled to levels not seen in 60 years, causing beef prices to rise an incredible 60% from 2007 to 2012.

Restaurants were also affected because corn, meat, and other crops rose in price. It appears the interests of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Cargill, and 3.2 million farmers were favored over those of us who eat food. That includes the 15.6 million Americans who work in the restaurant industry—about one in ten US workers.

Fraud in the RFS program will likely increase (Cohn 2022): The Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Joe Biden in August includes historic investments to combat climate change. It may also open new avenues for fraud by expanding a program that has given federal authorities fits for years. It does not include any new provisions to prevent fraud.

Peter Whitfield, a partner at law firm Sidley Austin in Washington, D.C said that in [the Renewable Fuel Standard] program you have little oversight, so there’s a way to generate a massive amount of money fraudulently with little effort, so possibilities for fraud will still exist, and is skeptical investigators’ will catch frauds as the programs expand. One issue is that biofuel feedstock is in short supply yet biofuel incentives are being increased, which will tempt some to cheat to get the lucrative biofuel credits.

One example of fraud happened in 2019 when members of a polygamous, Utah-based religious sect known as “The Order” pleaded guilty to conspiring with a Los Angeles businessman who called himself “The Lion” to bilk the federal government out of some $1 billion in a scheme involving Renewable Fuel Standard credits and related IRS tax credits. Using a series of shell companies and sham transactions, the team made it look like they were producing massive amounts of biofuel at a plant in northern Utah and shipping it far and wide. That allowed them to rake in millions of dollars in incentives, even though they were producing very little fuel. The extent of the scam came to light only after a member of the sect who happened to work in the accounting department broke away from the group — she said she was about to be forced to marry her cousin — and told authorities what she knew.

26 Fill ‘er up with seaweed (see energyskeptic post here).

Bever (2021) Fighting climate change by farming kelp NPR: An absurd project to cash in on carbon sequestration funds to haul kelp out to sea until it’s so heavy the buoy sinks and the kelp CO2 is sequestered on the ocean floor. What could go wrong: whales entangled, ship propellers snarled, beaches fouled? The price and energy to do this? And why? As Life After Fossil Fuels explains, peak oil occurred in 2018 and the decline of emissions at 4% a year now that will exponentially increase dwarves all sequestration and renewable contraption dreams and schemes.

Chapter 27 “The Problems with Cellulosic Ethanol Could Drive You to Drink”

Ethanol is pointless: trucks, locomotives, and ships don’t run on ethanol or diesohol. Only diesel matters, peak diesel is more apt than peak oil.

The main reason there is yet to be a commercial ethanol production plant is that “Except for fruits and protected seeds, the rest of a plant evolved over hundreds of millions of years to not be eaten by herbivores or microbes, with barriers of toxins, spines, and thick bark. The most formidable defense is a rigid structure of indigestible cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, which even after death can take a year or more for microbes and fungi to consume and break down into new soil. Scientists try to speed up the process with brute force. Bioreactors create high pressures and temperatures, other machines mill, radiate, steam explode, accelerate electrons, hydrolyze with acids, freeze, drench in harsh chemicals, expand fbers with ammonia or ozone, and infict other torments to get the sugars out. Nothing much works. They have hit a cellulosic wall.”

Or as Service (2022) writes: “…and the spearlike corn stalks and other woody biomass often jams machines designed to grind it up. The chemical industry is built on handling liquids and gases, it’s much harder with solids. This extra handling and processing mean jet fuel from biofuels will never be as cheap as fuel made from petroleum.

Service RF (2022) Can biofuels really fly? Science.

In this chapter I discussed why attempts to use termites to make ethanol haven’t worked out: “…Scientists have been trying for many years to replicate a termite’s ability to break down plants. Termites digest wood by outsourcing the work to the protists in their gut. Protists, in turn, outsource the work to many bacteria that use enzymes to break wood down further. Just like at a factory, each microbe performs one task, and excretes a different substance than it consumed. In a termite gut factory, one working microbes’ poop is ambrosia for another. This intricate chain reaction has proven difficult to synthesize. Too much of anything along the chain of reactions and it can kill the process. For example, in ethanol production, when yeast has raised the concentration of excreted ethanol from 12 to 18%, the yeast dies. So far scientists haven’t been able to get termite or ruminant gut organisms to expand from their tiny world into the expansive gut of a 2,000-gallon stainless-steel tank.”

Altamia’s 2020 paper discusses the bacteria of shipworms, which have been destroying wooden ships and docks for thousands of years. There’s a hope their enzymes can be used to break down wood to make biofuels, but they sound a lot like underwater termites to me. Shipworms are long, thin mollusks famed and feared for their ability to eat wood. But they can’t do it alone. They rely on bacterial partners that don’t reside in the gut, but inside the cells of their gills. Perhaps their enzymes can be used to breakdown lignocellulose into sugars, and then into ethanol.

Chapter 28 Biodiesel to keep trucks running

Last month, several airline CEOs met with Biden administration officials to discuss emissions and the options for government incentives for aviation biofuels as a way of reducing these emissions. But to increase biofuel production to 20 million barrels of oil equivalent a day could cause cooking oil to become unaffordable for millions of people, and result in large-scale deforestation as 100 million more acres of land were cleared to grow biofuel crops on. Reforesting 100 million acres would offset 8 times more CO2 emissions. The Center for Biological Diversity objects also, since far more CO2 emissions reduction could come from phasing out dirty, aging aircraft, and maximizing operational efficiencies (Slav 2021).

Chapter 29 Can we Eat enough French Fries

In this chapter I reported that a sewer in London was clogged with a record-breaking fatberg of 140 tons. Breaking news: that record has been broken with a 330 ton London fatberg (Picheta 2021). So that’s good news, more fat to propel our four ton autos. Or maybe not, there’s a new competitor: Insulation for homes made of cooking oil, wool, and sulfur (Najmah 2021).

No worries about finding enough human fat from liposuction. There are 390 million tonnes of humans, but just 22 million tons of wild animals. Lots of fat available from us, and our domesticated animals — 630 million tons of sheep, rodents, dogs, pigs, cattle, and more (Greenspoon 2023).

Chapter 30 Combustion: Burn Baby Burn

The Ryegate Power Station’s biomass plant in Vermont may shut down sooner than expected, the contract that expires in 2022 is only being renewed for 2 years, rather than the 10 expected due to the much higher cost of electricity, which Vermonters subsidize with $5 million a year. It’s pricey because it’s only 23% efficient — so for every four trees burned, only one tree is converted to electricity. Biomass plants like Ryegate have been closing throughout the region, with plants in New Hampshire and Maine not being relicensed (Gockee 2021)

Chapter 33 Conclusion: Do You Want to Eat, Drink, or Drive?

I wrote: “Declining oil means you can stop worrying about robots taking over. What energy could they be built with and run on after fossils? Not that a robot overthrow was ever an issue. The human cortex is 600 billion times more complicated than any artificial network. The code to simulate the human brain would require hundreds of trillions of lines of code inevitably riddled with trillions of errors.

Nor do you need to fear artificial intelligence (AI), which many otherwise intelligent people think is an existential threat. It isn’t. Nail (2021) describes how AI treats the brain like a computer with a very narrow range of tasks in a closed system where all possibilities are known, and breaks down when confronted with novel situations. But brains are nothing like computers, which have fixed logic gates are a binary 0 or 1. Brain neurons are analog, changing their firing thresholds, with chemicals that further alter activity, efficiency, and connectivity. And then there’s the role of dreaming, and much more that makes our brains neuroplastic in ways a computer AI never will be, see the article for details.

The European Union has initiated an ambitious plan called Farm to Fork (EU 2021) that hopes to cut pesticide and excess nutrient use by 50%, and converting 25% of farms to organic agriculture by 2030 (Rosmino 2021).

Do you want to eat or drive? Many energy companies plan to increase their biofuel capacity by 2030, mainly with corn and soybean oil. This is driving price inflation for vegetable oils, including palm oil, canola and soybean oil, doubling corn futures and tripling lumber costs. The accelerating demand for renewable biodiesel fuels is directly responsible for price inflation. Food costs have been pushed to their highest in seven years (Kimani 2021).

And there may be a lot less oil than the EIA, IEA, BP Statistical review, and other estimates of world reserves have estimated. Laherrere et al (2022) explain the various methods used to calculate world fossil reserves, and why their method is probably most accurate — this is what Laherrere has written about for the past 60 years so I find this paper very plausible. Many geologists who’ve modeled likely fossil fuel decline within the IPCC climate model predicted that the most likely outcomes were RCP 2.6 to 4.5 (see the last chapter in “Life After Fossil Fuels”), though their papers came out before it became likely that 2018 was the world peak oil production year, so I expect that the lower RCP 2.6 is most likely. This paper estimates RCP 3.0 since the global CO2 emissions for the period 2020–2100 are approximately 1000 for coal, 750 for oil and 650 for natural gas GtCO2, a total of 2400 GtCO2, with a further ~850 GtCO2 being emitted beyond 2100. Clearly such emissions are incompatible with the 580 GtCO2 limit to CO2 emissions to 2100 assumed by Welsby et al 2021 to meet 1.5 °C goal in the 2022 IPCC report. If the 1750 GtCO2 emitted so far has led to a 1.1 C increase, 3250 GtCO2 would add another 2 C for a total of 3 C above pre-industrial levels.

But oil makes all other resources possible, including coal and natural gas, and its decline is likely to lead to social unrest, depressions, war and civil wars, supply chain failures, natural disasters like hurricanes taking out offshore oil platforms, floods and earthquakes affecting refineries, and more that disrupt oil production, so much so that even Laherrere et al (2022) much lower estimates of oil production and CO2 emissions may be too high. Plus the FLOW RATES will be lower. Nor are unconventional tar sands (Canada) or heavy oil (Venezuela) likely to produce much oil since their energy return on invested is very low. So that leaves their estimate of remaining conventional oil of 1100 Gb (Table 1) to carbon of ~470 GtCO2, well under the 580 GtCO2 limit to CO2 emissions. To the extent that oil lasts despite wars and other disruptions, coal and natural gas emissions may go over the 580 GtCO2 limit. But again, if whatever is produced takes a very long time compared to today, the ocean and land sinks will absorb some of the CO2, lowering the ultimate temperature rise. Perhaps.

Book Reviews:

Ennos R (2021) The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization.

References

Altamia MA et al (2020) Teredinibacter waterburyi sp. nov., a marine, cellulolytic endosymbiotic bacterium isolated from the gills of the wood-boring mollusc Bankia setacea…. International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

Cembalist M (2021) 2021 Annual Energy Paper. JP Morgan asset & wealth management.

Cohn S (2022) Inflation Reduction Act’s expanded biofuel incentives raise concerns about fraud. CNBC.

EU (2021) Farm to Fork Strategy. European Commission.

Gockee A (2021) Is time ticking on the Ryegate Power Station biomass plant? vtdigger.org

Greenspoon L et al (2023) The global biomass of wild mammals. PNAS https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

Groom N et al (2021) EV rollout will require huge investments in strained U.S. power grids. Reuters.

IEA (2018) International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2018, figures 1.19 and 3.13. International Energy Agency.

Laherrère J, Hall CAS, Bentley R (2022) How much oil remains for the world to produce? Comparing assessment methods, and separating fact from fiction. Current research in Environmental Sustainability.

Kimani A (2021) Global Food Prices Soaring As Demand For Biofuels Continues To Climb. oilprice.com

Martin P (2024) The Refinery of the Future- a thought experiment. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/refinery-future-thought-experiment-paul-martin-4pfoc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via

Nail T (2021) Artificial intelligence research may have hit a dead end. “Misfired” neurons might be a brain feature, not a bug — and that’s something AI research can’t take into account. Salon.

Najmah IB et al (2021) Insulating Composites Made from Sulfur, Canola Oil, and Wool. ChemSusChem, Wiley.

Nargi L (2022) Plastic-coated agricultural chemicals are destroying human and planetary health. Salon.com

NREL (2021) Electrification Futures Study. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Picheta R (2021) A 330-ton fatberg is clogging an English city’s sewer, and it won’t move for weeks. CNN.

Rosmino C (2021) Meet the EU farmers using fewer pesticides to make agriculture greener. Euronews.com.

Slav I (2021) The Biofuel Boom Could Threaten Food Security. Oilprice.com

Thaler EA et al (2021) The extent of soil loss across the US Corn Belt. PNAS.

USDOE (2020) U.S. Oil and natural gas: providing Energy Security and supporting our quality of life. U.S. Department of energy, office off oil & natural gas.

Vaughan A (2021) Carbon-negative crops may mean water shortages for 4.5 billion people. NewScientist. Scientific article: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21640-3