Laughing Gas — nitrous oxide — could deplete ozone and cook the planet

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

2 Sep 2009. Laughing gas set to deplete the ozone layer. NewScientist.

28 August 2009. Lisa Grossman. Laughing gas is biggest threat to ozone layer. NewScientist.

21 July 2012. Michael Marshall.  Laughing gas may cook the planet. NewScientist.

The ozone layer shields Earth from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which increase the risk of cancer and threaten crops and aquatic life.

Nitrous oxide is also a heat-trapping greenhouse gas in the league of methane or carbon dioxide, so regulating it would also be good for the climate.

In fact the last ice age may have ended due to a huge release of nitrous oxide 14,500 years ago, when Europe warmed up by about 5 degrees centigrade due to a pulse of nitrous oxide, which is 310 times as warming as carbon dioxide.

The release came from arcitc plants such as peatlands, and could happen again as Arctic ice shrinks.

“If we have climate change proceeding very quickly, the huge amounts of nitrogen stored in our ecosystem may be released as nitrous oxide,” says Klaus Butterbach-Bahl of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), deplete ozone but aren’t regulated.  Human activity now accounts for nearly 40 per cent of N2O emissions (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176985).

N2O could become 50 per cent more destructive as stratospheric CFCs return to pre-industrial levels. That’s because nitrogen and chlorine compounds counteract each other’s effects on ozone: the more chlorine there is, the less destructive nitrogen is, and vice versa. “N2O is the most important ozone-depleting gas that’s being emitted,” says Ravishankara.

 

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Climate change concentrates toxins in plants – bad news for herbivores

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Michael Marshall. June 1, 2012. Climate change will create a toxic brew for herbivores. NewScientist.

A warmer world could lead to more concentrated and higher levels of toxins in plants.  Herbivorous animals are also less able to process toxins when they’re warm because their livers function less well. To some extent animals can work around this by eating a wider range of plants (Journal of Comparative Physiology B, DOI: 10.1007/s00360-012-0670-y).

The effect could also apply higher up the food chain – predators often have to deal with toxins produced by their prey, such as scorpion venom.

Nathalie Pettorelli at the Institute of Zoology in London says herbivores in dry regions, such as the Arabian oryx, have a limited range of plants to choose from, so if one becomes too toxic they may have little else to eat.

And just to make things a little more interesting, there is also evidence that plants produce more toxins as temperatures creep up. If that is the case, herbivores face a double whammy.

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Dying seagrass is releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

23 May 2012. Mowing down seagrass meadows will cut loose carbon. NewScientist.

SEagrass has as much carbon as the world’s forests and the carbon dioxide contained in them could be released as they are dying off from water pollution, dredging, and climate change.  They’re already declining 1.5% per year, releasing 299 million tons of carbon back into the environment (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1477).  So much carbon is stored by seagrass now and since the ice age in the top few feet of soil below, that if the seagrass dies, more than twice the Earth’s world-wide emmissions from fossil fuels in 2010 would be released.

“These are scary numbers,” says Kendrick, from the University of Western Australia. “It does look like there’s going to be a global tipping point for many of these environments.”

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Oil and Gas infrastructure are falling apart

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Beneath Cities, a Decaying Tangle of Gas Pipes

March 23, 2014. Patrick McGeehan et al. New York Times

It is a danger hidden beneath the streets of New York City, unseen and rarely noticed: 6,302 miles of pipes transporting natural gas.

Leaks, like the one that is believed to have led to the explosion that killed eight people in East Harlem this month, are startlingly common, numbering in the thousands every year, federal records show.

The chief culprit, according to experts, is the perilous state of New York City’s underground network, one of the oldest in the country and a glaring example of America’s crumbling infrastructure.

In 2012 alone, Con Edison and National Grid, the other distributor of natural gas in the city, reported 9,906 leaks in their combined systems, which serve the city and Westchester County. More than half of them were considered hazardous because of the dangers they posed to people or property, federal records show. (There are more than 1.2 million miles of gas main pipes across the country. Last year, gas distributors nationwide reported an average of 12 leaks per 100 miles of those pipes.)

“It’s like Russian roulette,” said Robert B. Jackson, a professor of environment and energy at Stanford University who has studied gas leaks in Washington, D.C., and Boston. “The chances are, you are going to be lucky, but once in a while, you’re going to be unlucky.”

Nearly half of the gas mains operated by Con Edison and National Grid were installed before 1940, according to federal records. More than half of the mains are made of cast iron, wrought iron, or unprotected steel — materials that are vulnerable to corrosion and cracking, especially in cold weather.

Communities across the country have been struggling to replace thousands of miles of these old, metal pipes with pipes made of plastic or specially coated steel that are less prone to leakage. Few, however, face as daunting a challenge as New York City.

To replace all of the old mains in its network right now would cost as much as $10 billion, Con Edison estimates. Much of that expense would fall on the residents and businesses that use the gas for heating and cooking.

Despite the high cost and logistical hurdles, alarmed regulators at the state’s Public Service Commission have ordered the company to significantly step up its replacement schedule, from 50 miles of pipe a year to 70 by 2016, in the city and in Westchester. Even at that rate, it would still take nearly three decades for the utility to finish swapping out what regulators have identified as the most leak-prone pipes.

Gas Infrastructure Is Falling Apart in Cities Around the Country

March 12, 2014. Lily Hay Newman. Slate.com

A report out Tuesday from the Center for an Urban Future reveals that New York City’s infrastructure is extremely old. It may not be surprising, exactly, given that New York is known to have been densely populated for hundreds of years, but seeing it all laid out is still pretty stunning.

The report notes that New York’s 6,300 miles of gas mains are 56 years old and that leaks in the system cause Con Ed to lose more than 2 percent of the gas it sends to customers every year. Additionally, 60 percent of New York gas mains are made of unprotected steel or cast iron, which are no longer used in gas main fabrication because they spring too many leaks.

And New York isn’t the only city with these problems. In January, researchers from Duke and Boston University mapped Washington, D.C.’s gas leaks and found 5,893 places where the city’s buried gas mains were leaking enough methane to detect it from the street. They also noted that many sites had the potential to cause explosions. A group including several of the same researchers had similar findings about Boston in 2012.

Floods Put Pipelines at Risk Records Suggest Erosion of Riverbeds Jeopardizes Oil and Gas Infrastructure

December 3, 2012. Jack Nicas. Wall Street Journal.

Floodwater causes pipelines to fail because it’s fast and weighs a lot, so flood water can scour dozens of feet of soil and gravel from a river bed, exposing pipelines buried below.

It’s likely that pipelines need to be buried under rivers a great deal deeper than they are now – just four feet, which river engineers say is grossly inadequate.

Future problems: 24 of the 55 oil and gas pipelines beneath the Missouri river are less than 10 feet below the riverbed.

After the Exxon pipeline rupture, Montana officials pushed pipeline operators to inspect their river crossings in the state. The review found that about a quarter of the roughly 90 pipelines inspected were dangerously close to exposure.

Those findings “tell me that we’re vulnerable. But not just in Montana. The whole pipeline system across the country’s vulnerable,” Mr. Opper said.

Some examples of failed pipelines:

  • An Exxon Mobil Corp pipeline on the Yellowstone River in Montana in 2011 released 1,000 barrels of crude
  • An Enterprise Products Partners pipeline burst in the Missouri River floodplain in Iowa, spilling 818 barrels of a gasoline additive.
  • In 1994, scouring on a flooded river near Houston exposed 37 pipelines, including eight that broke, spilling 35,000 barrels of petroleum.
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Asian medicine a major cause of biodiversity loss

Posted on July 8, 2013 by

I haven’t noticed any shortage of people in China – what a tragedy the men there feel like they need to eat endangered animal penises, and for the government not to stop it.

6 Mar 2003. S. Malik et al. Pinniped Penises in Trade: A Molecular-Genetic Investigation. Conservation Biology.

Our results confirm that penises from different pinnipeds are in international trade.  These findings are consistent with other recent evidence that the lucrative market for pinniped penises may be encouraging the unregulated hunting of seals, including protected species, and the harvesting of other unidentified mammalian species [for use in traditional Chinese medicine].

Deer Penis (Wikipedia)

The deer penis is typically very large and, proponents claim, for it to retain its properties it must be extracted from the deer while still alive.Often it is then sliced into small pieces, typically by women and then roasted and dried in the sun.

During the 2008 Summer Olympics, China banned deer penis potions from athletes’ diets. This is because according to traditional Chinese medicine, deer penis, especially if ingested while soaked in alcohol (deer penis wine), is an effective remedy for athletic injuries.  When consumed, a deer penis or tiger penis is also said to enhance virility, and is thought by some to be an aphrodisiac.

Tiger Penis (Wikipedia)

In traditional Chinese medicine, a tiger penis is said to have important therapeutic properties. However, modern science does not support the belief that the tiger penis possesses any special potency. Furthermore, the demand for tiger parts exacerbates the endangered status of the tiger by providing a market for poachers. While the tiger penis is consumed in parts of China and Southeast Asia, particularly in Laos and Cambodia, its preparation is generally condemned by modern nations.  The penis of a tiger when consumed is said to enhance male virility and be an aphrodisiac, although no scientific studies support these claims. In parts of southeast Asia it is seen as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. This has contributed to the poaching of tigers for their presumed benefits, the penis being just one of many of its assets. As a result the tiger penis is usually sold on the black market in China.

But it’s not just penises — virtually any kind of endangered plant or animal is used to the point of extinction.

9 March 2012. Xiuxiang Meng et al. Asian Medicine: Exploitation of Wildlife. Science.

Traditional asian medicine’s effects on wildlife conservation cannot be ignored. The endangered musk deer provides a typical example.

9 March 2012. Shixiong Cao and Qi Feng. Asian Medicine: Exploitation of Plants. Science.

As the market demand for wild Chinese herbs has grown, the production scale of the Chinese herb industry has expanded dramatically. However, concealed by the prosperity of the Chinese medicinal herb industry is a huge ecological problem. In recent years, intensive and unrestrained exploitation of wild Chinese herbs has damaged natural resources. An estimated 2000 wild Chinese herbs are at risk of extinction.  Severe ecological deterioration and soil erosion seriously threaten the habitats of many wild Chinese herbs, especially in fragile ecological environments such as high-altitude areas or arid regions.

Navjot S. Sodhi, et. al. Dec 2004. Southeast Asian biodiversity: an impending disaster. Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol.19 No.12.

Southeast Asia has the highest relative rate of deforestation of any major tropical region, and could lose three quarters of its original forests by 2100 and up to 42% of its biodiversity. If present levels of deforestation were to continue unabated, Southeast Asia will lose almost three-quarters of its original forest cover by the turn of the next century, resulting in massive species declines and extinctions. More importantly, this biodiversity crisis is likely to develop into a full-fledged disaster, as the region is home to one of the highest concentrations of endemic species. Many animal and plant products are used in traditional Chinese medicine, which dates back 5000 years. Trade in the raw materials of traditional Chinese medicine has a detrimental impact on many vertebrates in Southeast Asia, including tigers, bears, rhinos, turtles, snakes, tokay geckos, pangolins, monkeys and swiftlets. This is exemplified by the Sumatran tiger Panthera tigris sumatrae, from which body parts such as bones and penises are used in traditional medicine.

 

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The scientific consensus: we are screwed if we don’t act soon

Posted on June 28, 2013 by

May 21, 2013. Scientific consensus on maintaining Humanity’s life support systems in the 21st century.  Essential points for policy makers. Stanford University.

Earth is rapidly approaching a tipping point. Human impacts are causing alarming levels of harm to our planet. As scientists who study the interaction of people with the rest of the biosphere using a wide range of approaches, we agree that the evidence that humans are damaging their ecological life-support systems is overwhelming.

Science unequivocally demonstrates the human impacts of key concern:

  1. Climate disruption—more, faster climate change than since humans first became a species.
  2. Extinctions—not since the dinosaurs went extinct have so many species and populations died out so fast, both on land and in the oceans.
  3. Wholesale loss of diverse ecosystems—we have plowed, paved, or otherwise transformed more than 40% of Earth’s ice-free land, and no place on land or in the sea is free of our direct or indirect influences. Pollution—environmental contaminants in the air, water and land are at record levels and increasing, seriously harming people and wildlife in unforeseen ways.
  4. Human population growth and consumption patterns—seven billion people alive today will likely grow to 9.5 billion by 2050, and the pressures of heavy material consumption among the middle class and wealthy may well intensify

By the time today’s children reach middle age, it is extremely likely that Earth’s life-support systems, critical for human prosperity and existence, will be irretrievably damaged by the magnitude, global extent, and combination of these human-caused environmental stressors, unless we take concrete, immediate actions to ensure a sustainable, high-quality future.

We must all work hard to solve these 5 global problems immediately: climate disruption, extinctions, loss of ecosystem diversity, pollution, human population growth and resource consumption.

The document then lists over 520 names and institutions of the scientists who participated in this document

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Ministry of Defence Strategic Trends South Asia out to 2040

Posted on June 11, 2013 by

Strategic Trends Programme. Regional Survey – South Asia out to 2040. Ministry of Defence.

Nafeez Ahmed. June 2013. Rising energy prices will challenge western way of life – MoD report. The Guardian.

Converging global trends will dramatically lower prosperity in the future.

A combination of overpopulation water and food shortages, climate change, rising energy prices, and social unrest are likely to lead to internal chaos and external wars by 2040 in South East Asia (and elsewhere).

The depletion of cheap and easily extractable oil combined with food and water shortages from climate change and population growth will result and create sustained high energy prices.

When energy and food prices spike long recessions will likely follow, resulting in social unrest and rising nationalist movements.

Oil is like to reach $500 a barrel by 2040 because of the demand for fossil fuels in China and India as well as supply volatility in the Middle East.  This competition for resources could lead to clashes.

Climate change

Climate change will worsen matters greatly from flooding, heat-waves, drought, less food production, more and stronger storms. Rising sea levels will force millions of people to move elsewhere.

Water shortages

Over 2.5 billion people will suffer from water scarcity, not only limiting growth but creating a greater chance of war within and between China, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Food shortages

Lack of food from the above factors is likely to lead to mass migration, unrest, and war as millions of people flee after rice crops fail.  The crop failure from climate change, soil erosion, and increasing pests and weeds will at first affect mainly those at or below the poverty line.

Demographic time bomb?

China and India aren’t likely to be able to continue economic growth given all of the above factors. With nearly 40% of the world’s population it will be hard for them to prevent social chaos as food and water grow scarcer.  This scenario is even more likely because of the vast numbers of uneducated people, unfair distribution of wealth, ethnic tensions, awareness that it doesn’t have to be this way via the internet, and a huge amount of inequality and corruption throughout all institutions.

End of growth due to resource price spikes?

The West too is facing a dark future — the more resources that flow to Southeast asia, the rest there is for the West to consume.

The report concludes that the “western ‘way of life’” with its large  “variety of consumer choice” and cheap energy – will be “increasingly challenged as lifestyles follow GDP levels and ‘normalise’ across the globe.”

Within the US and UK, the bulk of the populations will be affected by: “… rising energy and resource prices, and the declining availability of finance to sustain discretionary spending. In such a context, this could lead to periods of sustained recession in the West, causing increasingly protectionist policies to be adopted.”

About The Report

This report was published by the MoD’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) as part of its Strategic Trends Programme in January. The DCDC is an MoD think tank within the Defence Academy site at Shrivenham.  The report used data from many government agencies and departments, including the MoD’s Strategy Unit, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Cabinet Office, and the Foreign Office – as well as two private institutions, Standard Chartered Bank and Now & Next.

The report concedes that the “‘relative’ decline of the West is likely to lead to a new power framework where alliances are constantly reassessed and negotiated.” This will also see “the declining influence of existing international institutions such as NATO and the UN Security Council.”

In this context, the report predicts an accelerating coalescence between nation states and global capital, noting that: “The line between government, and private industry protection of intellectual property of key technologies for security and wealth creation, may become increasingly blurred… [as] blueprints, patents and formulas will be increasingly seen as the foundations of wealth generation.”

The report echoes themes highlighted in a previous MoD global trends study, which warned in 2010: “Pressure on resources, climate change, population increases and the changing distribution of power are likely to result in increased instability and likelihood of armed conflict.”

If anything, this year’s DCDC study reveals not just the latest strategic thinking informing British security policy behind the scenes, but also the undoubtedly grim consequences of continuing business as usual.

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Relax! Solar energy can save us. Krugman says so. by Ted Trainer

Posted on June 9, 2013 by

Ted Trainer is the author of Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society and his “What to Do” can be found at The Simpler Way http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/, in The Transition to a Sustainable and Just World, Envirobook, 2010, and the papers at Simplicity Institute http://simplicityinstitute.org

In a recent article in the New York Times Paul Krugman tells us that the fall in the price of PV panels means that “…we can look forward to decarbonising electricity”, because “…drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are now within fairly easy reach.”

There are a few things Paul seems to have overlooked.

The first is that PV cannot meet more than about 4% of world energy demand. It is generally understood that the limit for PV is around 20% of electricity demand. This is because PV modules can only produce during the equivalent of about 6 full-sun hours a day, so if they were to contribute 100% of electricity needed then during those hours it would have to be feeding in at a rate 4 times demand, meaning a) a vast amount of PV generating plant would sit idle for 18 hours a day, and b) a vast amount of other renewable plant would be needed to resort to during those 18 hours, and it most of it would all sit idle for those 6 hours. For this reason the practical limit to PV might be around 15% of the electricity required.

But only 18% of rich world energy use is in the form of electricity, so PV can’t be expected to meet more than about 20% of 18% = 4% of our energy demand.

But wait, what about storing the PV electricity to use at night? Forget it. Yes electricity can be stored, but it is very difficult and costly to do this in large quantity. Your best bet is by pumping water into dams, but even if all dams could be retrofitted for pumped storage the total generating capacity would be about 15% of demand.

Hydrogen? Round trip efficiency from PV panel to hydrogen to fuel cell or gas turbine power would be around 20%, and we would need huge quantities of energy intensive and dollar costly plant to generate, compress, store and reconvert hydrogen.

Well then, batteries? The world’s biggest grid storage battery system, at Fairbanks Alaska, can store 4 MWh, at a cost of $30 million. To store the output of a normal big power station for 24 hours would involve capacity to hold 24,000 MWh.   To store this via a Fairbanks system would cost 6 times as much as the power station.

Locate enough solar thermal plant in the Sahara to supply Europe? Estimate the cost of doing that. How about storing energy in the heat tanks solar thermal stations have? They are starting to build units capable of running for 17 hours on stored heat, but that is nowhere near enough. And the recently completed Spanish Gemasolar plant with 17 hour capacity cost around $40,000/kW. A coal-fired power station costs only about $3,100.

The capacity to store very large quantities of electricity is not on the horizon. In winter Europe can suffer one or two weeks of more or less continual freezing cold, calm, and cloudy conditions. How are they going to get through these periods on renewables?

The second major point Paul seems not to be aware of is that several recent studies have found that when all relevant factors are included the ratio of energy produced by a PV module in its lifetime to the energy needed to produce it is not 10/1 as is commonly thought, or 60/1 as some advocates have claimed, but probably between 4/1 and 2.4/1.

Krugman mistakenly thinks the price of PV is the crucial factor. What matters most is its Energy Return on Energy Invested. If a PV panel produces in its lifetime only enough energy to produce three panels it can’t sustain an energy-intensives society. Estimates in the literature are that the ratio must be at least 7/1 for a technology to be viable. The ER for corn-based ethanol is around 1.4. For coal it is around 20 (…but falling fast.)

A third question for Paul is, where is he going to get the other 82% of energy we use that is not in the form of electricity? The answer is not biomass; there is far too little available on the planet for that.

How about running as many functions as possible on electricity? A good idea, but that multiplies the problems involved in integrating highly variable solar and wind energy sources into grids, which means greatly increased costs for equipment, interconnectors, storage, redundant plant and dumped energy.

“But many experts are telling us it can all be done by renewables, and at negligible cost.” This is true, but there is a small but increasing number of energy researchers who think those arguments are flawed and that there is a weighty case that it cannot be done at an affordable cost, given the kinds of difficulties sketched above.

“Well let’s forget about renewables and just use nuclear reactors.” If you are going to provide present rich world living standards to 9 billion people you will need tens of thousands of fast breeders, all involving reprocessing of plutonium…and operated by humans who never ever press the wrong switch. You choose.

So, what is the answer? If the question was, how can we keep our energy-intensive, affluent, growth obsessed society going, then the answer is … you can’t. Paul Krugman, like almost all economists, politicians, journalists and business leaders, seems to be totally unaware of the now enormous literature showing that there are savage limits to growth, that we have gone through them, and that it is the over-production and over-consumption of growth and greed society that is generating the many global problems threatening to destroy us. The magnitude of the overshoot is clear in the common “footprint” figures; the average Australian or US person is using about ten times as much productive land as will be available per capita in 2050 if it is shared among all expected 9 billion people. The problems cannot be solved unless we in rich countries not only abandon the quest for economic growth but go right down to something like our fair share of world resource use.

For sixty years now increasing numbers have come to see that the pursuit of growth and affluence has been a terrible, probably fatal mistake and that global problems cannot be solved unless we achieve a historically unprecedented transition to what some of us label as The Simpler Way. This cannot be done unless some of the foundational structures, assumptions, ideas and values of Western culture are scrapped, including almost all of the current economic system, but, most problematically, also the culture of individualistic, competitive, acquisitiveness.

Paul is reinforcing the faith that we don’t have to think about such a transition, because renewable energy and other tech-fixes will make it possible for us to go on pursuing affluence and growth for ever. Well if by 2050 9 billion have risen to the living standards we will have given 3% growth, then world annual levels of production and consumption will be about fifteen times as high as they are now. No problem Paul?

A sustainable and just society would of course run entirely on renewable energy, but at far lower use rates than we have now. Small numbers of people in the Global Eco-village, Transition Towns, Permaculture, Voluntary Simplicity etc. movements are pioneering a “Simpler Way” alternative vision and we have no doubt that it could provide all people with a far higher quality of life than most people in the consumer rat race have now.

—-

 

Posted in Photovoltaic Solar | 2 Comments

EROI downward spiral

Posted on June 7, 2013 by

Stephen Leeb. June 2013. Dangerous times as energy sources get costlier to extract. Forbes.

Remember the term “peak oil”? With all the oil now available from oil shale, tar sands, and other new sources, many analysts assume that the old talk of peak oil has been proven dead wrong.

The optimists believe that our energy problems have been largely solved. I wouldn’t bet on that. The real issue with oil isn’t how much we have or even whether we can continue to increase production.

Rather, what really matters is the cost of resources, in terms of resources required, including energy resources, to keep producing oil.  On that front, the U.S. is losing ground at an alarming pace.

Simply put, it takes energy to get energy. In today’s world, it takes rising amounts of energy to get all the new energy sources out of the ground and ready to use.

The critical concept is “energy return on investment,” or EROI. This means the amount of energy obtained from each unit of energy invested. When oil first began to flow, its EROI was around 100, according to State University of New York professor Charles Hall. Drillers would use one barrel to extract 100 barrels from the ground. As more wells were drilled and producers added infrastructure, the EROI ratio dropped. New wells over time grew less productive, further decreasing EROI. In the early 1950s the EROI associated with refined oil products like gasoline was about 20.  Today, it takes about one barrel of conventional U.S. oil to produce the equivalent of nine barrels, or 378 gallons of gasoline.

Meanwhile, the EROI for nonconventional oil, that is, oil produced from shale and tar sands, stands even lower, at about four. For every barrel of oil used to drill, producers obtain only four barrels of nonconventional oil, or 168 gallons of gasoline.

The lower the EROI, the less energy can be made available for the economy. If EROI were one, the economy would be channeling all energy produced into making energy. In other words, it would be curtains for our civilization.

SUNY professor Hall estimates that for an industrial society to function and grow, EROI should measure at least five to nine. Oil from tar sands and shale does not make that cut.

It’s telling that, based on 12-month averages, oil prices today are only some 5% below their all-time peaks, although, according to the Energy Information Agency, per capita consumption of oil has decreased 17% from its 2007 high. Why don’t we see a larger price decline? Economics 101 would suggest that greater supply coupled with lower demand should produce tumbling prices. That isn’t happening, since we funnel much of the extra oil made available by lower demand and rising production into oil production itself.

What explains the significantly lower EROI of non-conventional energy sources? To understand, we must realize that all resources are inextricably interconnected, and also require energy to produce. We can’t overlook the reality that drilling apparatus and infrastructure needed to extract oil from shale also demand large quantities of steel, derived from iron ore, whose production and refinery in turn require energy.

Huge energy costs are also inherent in the transport of water, chemicals and other materials essential to fracking.

Tar sands likewise require mining equipment whose manufacture and transport consume still more energy. Mining tar sands, moreover, also uses natural gas.

These added costs appear on the balance sheets of banks, where oil and gas lending is the fastest-growing category. Indeed, according to Schlumberger SLB, the industry’s capital expenditures for oil and gas have grown by about 12% annually over the last decade. Oil and gas production grew less than 2% a year in the same period. Clearly the more money and resources needed to maintain adequate production of oil and gas, the less money and resources available for other endeavors.

One vicious cycle playing out in America starts with the consumer, who has had to cut back on energy use.

  • Less energy translates into less mobility, less shopping, and in general fewer consumer expenditures.
  • Fewer consumer expenditures mean less demand and more pressure on corporations, which are also squeezed by higher resource costs.
  • Wages in turn get squeezed, but resource prices remain high, and the vicious circle is completed.
  • It is no surprise that this century has seen a 10% decline in real median income, which when measured in time and depth is probably the most protracted on record.

Things may be even worse than that, however. EROI refers to how much energy is needed to produce more energy. The concept leaves out a lot of linkages among resources.

  • Resource-intensive production of oil and gas increases the scarcity and costs of other resources such as water and therefore of food, which depends on water as well.
  • Other resources such as copper and iron ore that use lots of water and energy are also squeezed, and you have another vicious, potentially catastrophic, cycle.

It would take me too far afield to focus on all these interrelationships, but an examination of the more general concept of resource return on investment, or RROI, would probably find the U.S. in a lot worse shape than as measured only by EROI, or the amount of energy required to get more energy.

Chris Nelder, in Watts Up, Vaclav? writes:

It takes just 35 rigs operating in conventional fields in Kuwait to produce 2 million barrels a day of oil, while in Texas, it now takes 800 rigs in the Eagle Ford to produce the same amount. The gradual shift to increasingly poor sources is also why domestic oil extraction used to return more than 100 kilojoules of energy per kilojoule invested in the 1930s, but only returns between 11 and 18 kilojoules today.

 

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World Resources Institute: Within 12 years food production will go down

Posted on June 7, 2013 by

For a variety of reasons, this report concludes that food production is likely to go down within the next 12 years, not up.

The World Resources Institute recently came out with a report that throws into doubt our ability to feed the 9.3 billion people expected by 2050.  To do that we would need to double food production over the next 40 years.

Industrial agriculture is responsible for 24% of greenhouse gas emissions (methane from livestock, fertilizers release nitrous oxide, machinery releases CO2, cutting down rainforests and draining wetlands increases CO2, and so on).  Trying to double agriculture would drastically increase climate change.

And already, climate change is reducing crop yields from drought, extreme storms, flooding, and lack of freshwater from over pumping nonrenewable ground water to grow food.  In the future, rising oceans will flood a great deal of highly productive farmland.

Agriculture also uses up 70% of fresh water, and the nutrient runoff from fertilizers creates dead zones that kills of all the fish, shrimp, shellfish, and so on, reducing food even further.  Yet meanwhile, growing populations will need more fresh water to survive.

In the Nafeez Ahmed Guardian’s article “Peak Soil: industrial civilisation is on the verge of eating itself: New research on land, oil, bees and climate change points to imminent global food crisis without urgent action” they cite additional reasons and suggest that food production might do down far sooner than the report mentioned above:

Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil – equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined) – have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive. But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

Unfortunately, though, the report overlooks another critical factor – the inextricable link between oil and food. Over the last decade, food and fuel prices have been heavily correlated. This is no accident.

Last week, a new World Bank report examining five different food commodities – corn, wheat, rice, soybean, and palm oil – confirmed that oil prices are the biggest contributor to rising food prices. The report, based on a logarithm designed to determine the impact of any given factor through regression analysis, concluded that oil prices were even more significant than the ratio of available world food stocks relative to consumption levels, or commodity speculation. The Bank thus recommends controlling oil price movements as a key to tempering food price inflation.

The oil-food price link comes as no surprise. A University of Michigan study points out that every major point in the industrial food system – chemical fertilisers, pesticides, farm machinery, food processing, packaging and transportation – is dependent on high oil and gas inputs. Indeed, 19% of the fossil fuels that prop up the American economy go to the food system, second only to cars.

But high oil prices are here to stay – and according to a UK Ministry of Defence assessment this year, could rise as high as $500 per barrel over the next 30 years.

All this points to a rapidly approaching convergence point between an increasingly self-defeating industrial food system, and an inexorably expanding global population.

But the point of convergence could come far sooner due to the wild card that is the catastrophic decline in honeybees.

 

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