Increased flooding

Posted on September 8, 2021 by

Preface. It’s not just sea level rise, but increased precipitation, sinking land, hurricanes, and dam failures that will cause more floods in the future.

Dams will fail more often in extreme rain as at least half are older than their lifespan. In 2017 the Oroville Dam crisis in California forced more than 180,000 residents to evacuate after a spillway failure caused by massive rainfall. This is a good example of how existing infrastructure is already vulnerable to flooding.

The east coast is sinking, a hangover from the past weight of glaciers in the last ice age, increasing flooding. The San Francisco Bay Area is sinking too.

And as carbon levels rise, plants absorb less water from the air, allowing more rainfall to reach rivers and streams, increasing their flooding potential (Retallack 2020).

See “flooding in the news” at the end of this post for details.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Davenport FV, Burke M, Diffenbaugh NS (2021). Contribution of historical precipitation change to US flood damages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Intensifying precipitation contributed 36% of the financial costs of flooding in the United States over the past three decades from 1988 to 2017, totaling almost $75 billion of the estimated $199 billion in flood damages from 1988 to 2017.

Flooding in the news (from ScienceDaily)

Since California provides a third of U.S. food and exports food world-wide, rainfall variability and less snowpack will impact non-Californians:

  • 2018 Sinking land will exacerbate flooding from sea level rise in Bay Area. Subsidence combined with sea level rise around San Francisco Bay doubles flood-risk area: Hazard maps use estimated sea level rise due to climate change to determine flooding risk for today’s shoreline, but don’t take into account that some land is sinking. A precise study of subsidence around San Francisco Bay shows that for conservative estimates of sea level rise, twice the area is in danger of flooding by 2100 than previously thought. And in King tides and 100-year storms, the water level will rise even higher
  • 2018 Houston’s urban sprawl increased rainfall, flooding during Hurricane Harvey
  • 2017 USA threatened by more frequent flooding. The East Coast of the USA is slowly sinking into the sea: the states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina are most at risk. Cities such as Miami on the East Coast of the USA are being affected by flooding more and more frequently. The causes are often not hurricanes with devastating rainfall such as Katrina, or the recent hurricanes Harvey or Irma. On the contrary: flooding even occurs on sunny, relatively calm days. It causes damage to houses and roads and disrupts traffic, yet does not cost any people their lives. It is thus also known as ‘nuisance flooding’.  And this nuisance is set to occur much more frequently in the future.
  • 2018 Dramatic increase in flooding on East coastal roads:  High tide floods, or so-called “nuisance flooding,” that happen along shore roadways during seasonal high tides or minor wind events are occurring far more frequently than ever before. In the past 20 years roads along the East Coast have experienced a 90% increase in flooding — often making the roads in these communities impassable, causing 100 million hours of delays rising to 3.4 billion hours by 2100, as well as stress, and impacting transportation of goods and services.
  • 2017 Flooding risk: America’s most vulnerable communities: Floods are the natural disaster that kill the most people. They are also the most common natural disaster.

References

Retallack G et al (2020) Gregory Retallack et al. Flooding Induced by Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. GSA Today. DOI: 10.1130/GSATG427A.1

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Global Ice melting

Posted on September 5, 2021 by

Preface. As the Arctic ice melt accelerates due to climate change it could release more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic into the ocean over the next decade, possibly posing a major threat to marine life (Lewis 2014).

The rate at which ice is disappearing across the planet is speeding up, with 28 trillion tons of ice between 1994 and 2017 – equal to a sheet of ice 100 meters thick covering the whole of the United Kingdom (Slater 2021).

And 50 to 70% of Antarctic ice shelves could become weak and collapse from surges of melt water (Lai 2020).

Related:

2015: Plastic for dinner: A quarter of fish sold at markets contain human-made debris. Original article here]

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Slater T, Lawrence IR, Otosaka IN et al (2021) Earth’s ice imbalance. The Cryosphere.

Ice melt across the globe raises sea levels, increases the risk of flooding to coastal communities, and threatens to wipe out natural habitats which wildlife depend on. Overall, there has been a 65 % increase in the rate of ice loss over the 23-year survey. This has been mainly driven by steep rises in losses from the polar ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, where ice melt has accelerated the most int he world.  Sea-level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century.

The majority of all ice loss was driven by atmospheric melting (68 %), with the remaining losses (32%) being driven by oceanic melting.

The survey covers 215,000 mountain glaciers spread around the planet, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the ice shelves floating around Antarctica, and sea ice drifting in the Arctic and Southern Oceans.

Rising atmospheric temperatures have been the main driver of the decline in Arctic sea ice and mountain glaciers across the globe, while rising ocean temperatures have increased the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. For the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice shelves, ice losses have been triggered by a combination of rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures.

During the survey period, every category lost ice, but the biggest losses were from Arctic Sea ice (7.6 trillion tons) and Antarctic ice shelves (6.5 trillion tons), both of which float on the polar oceans.

Sea ice loss doesn’t contribute directly to sea level rise but it does have an indirect influence. One of the key roles of Arctic sea ice is to reflect solar radiation back into space which helps keep the Arctic cool.

Not only is this speeding up sea ice melt, it’s also exacerbating the melting of glaciers and ice sheets which causes sea levels to rise.”

Half of all losses were from ice on land — including 6.1 trillion tons from mountain glaciers, 3.8 trillion tons from the Greenland ice sheet, and 2.5 trillion tons from the Antarctic ice sheet. These losses have raised global sea levels by 35 millimetres.

It is estimated that for every centimeter (0.4 inch) of sea level rise, approximately a million people are in danger of being displaced from low-lying homelands.

Despite storing only 1 % of the Earth’s total ice volume, glaciers have contributed to almost a quarter of the global ice losses over the study period, with all glacier regions around the world losing ice.

Lewis R (2014) Arctic ice melt to release 1 trillion pieces of plastic into sea Increasing ice melt due to climate change will pose a major threat to marine life. Aljazeera.

This report, titled “Global Warming Releases Microplastic Legacy Frozen in Arctic Sea Ice,” said ice in some remote locations contains at least twice as much plastic as previously reported areas of surface water such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area of plastic waste estimated to be bigger than the state of Texas.

Researchers behind the report, published last week in the scientific journal Earth’s Future, said they found the unusual concentrations of plastics by chance while studying sediments trapped in ice cores. The researchers are based at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

Many scientists and activists have raised alarms over the massive amount of plastic waste building up in the world’s oceans. In the film “Midway,” documentary maker Chris Jordan showed how tens of thousands of baby albatrosses are dying – their bodies filled with plastic most likely from the Garbage Patch – on the Pacific atoll of Midway, one of the most remote islands on the planet.

Increasing ice melt due to climate change will likely release the even-higher concentrations of plastic trapped in Arctic ice into the sea, and thus into the food chain, the new report in Earth’s Future said.

“The environmental consequences of microplastic fragments are not fully understood, but they are clearly ingested by a wide range of marine organisms including commercially important species,” the report said.

The term “microplastics” refers to tiny particles created as plastic materials that break down but never biodegrade. They are being increasingly found on surface waters and shorelines around the world.

Plastic materials are introduced to the ocean by various means, including from cosmetic ingredients known as microbeads, from the release of semi-synthetic fibers such as rayon from washing machines, and from larger discarded plastic items. The plastics reach the sea via sewers, rivers, and littering along coastlines or at sea.

Researchers said in the new report that Arctic ice contains such high concentrations of plastics because of the way sea ice forms. It concentrates particulates from the surrounding waters, and the particulates become trapped until the ice melts. Scientists said in the report that they found 38-234 plastic particles per cubic meter of ice in some parts of the Arctic areas they studied.

In the next decade the scientists predict that at least 2,000 trillion cubic meters of Arctic ice will melt. If that ice contains the lowest concentrations of microplastics reported in the study, this could result in the release of more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic, the report said.

Researchers worry that a wide range of organisms could ingest the microplastics, leading to physical injury and poisoning.

Plastic products often contain potentially harmful additives to make them last longer, the report said. Other studies have shown that small fragments of plastic can act a bit like magnets, attracting pollutants from the environment and making them even more toxic.

Other recent scientific studies have shown that tiny plastic “microbeads,” added to many body cleansers and toothpastes, have been found in major lakes and other waterways used for drinking water. The studies said the plastic balls absorb toxic chemicals released into the environment, and are then eaten by fish and thus introduced into the food chain.

Mass production of plastic began in the 1940s, and by 2009 at least 230 million tons of plastic were produced each year – equivalent to the weight of a double-decker bus every two seconds.

References

Lai CY, Kingslake J, Wearing MG et al (2020) Vulnerability of Antarctica’s ice shelves to meltwater-driven fracture. Nature 584.

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Soil salinity and erosion

Posted on September 2, 2021 by

Preface.  Civilizations fail when their soils are ruined or eroded.  One way conquerors made sure that those they enslaved during wars was to salt their land and burn their homes so they had nowhere to escape to. Erosion is an even larger nation killer, since not all soils are prone to salinity.  These issues are also discussed in my post “Peak Soil”.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

Farm Journal Editors (2020) Conservation Practices Reduce ‘Rings Of Death’. Agweb.com

Farming requires a high tolerance for dancing with nature. That’s especially true for North Dakota producers where 15% of cropland has reduced productivity due to soil salinity and sodicity issues. This makes soil layers dense, slow down soil water movement, limit root penetration and, ultimately, hurts yield.

Why Salt Shows Up. Salts and sodium generally make their way into soil from parent material (what soil is formed from) and groundwater discharge.  When a soil has too much sodium and overall salt content, the soil’s clay particles repel each other and the ground becomes so hard it is difficult for plant roots to penetrate, and this lowers crop production. They’re hard to drive on when wet and very hard when dry.  The solution? Gypsum, which improves soil structure, pore space and water infiltration.  In this case it will come from a nonrenewable byproduct of coal-fired plants

Jonathan Watts. September 12, 2017. Third of Earth’s soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture. Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study. The Guardian.

The alarming decline, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts such as those seen in Sudan and Chad.

“As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is intensifying for land within countries and globally,” said Monique Barbut, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at the launch of the Global Land Outlook.

The Global Land Outlook is billed as the most comprehensive study of its type, mapping the interlinked impacts of urbanisation, climate change, erosion and forest loss. But the biggest factor is the expansion of industrial farming.

Heavy tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased 3-fold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled.  Over time this diminishes fertility and can ultimately lead to desertification.

Decreasing productivity can be observed on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of range land.

Industrial agriculture is good at feeding populations but it is not sustainable. It’s an extractive industry [of topsoil which takes 500 years to be geologically replenished].

Worst affected is sub-Saharan Africa, but poor land management in Europe also accounts for an estimated 970m tonnes of soil loss from erosion each year with impacts not just on food production but biodiversity, carbon loss and disaster resilience.

George Monbiot. March 25, 2015. We’re treating soil like dirt. It’s a fatal mistake, as our lives depend on it. War, pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil and we all starve. The Guardian.

Landowners around the world are now engaged in an orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world on average has just 60 more years of growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly reports, we have “only 100 harvests left”.

To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, 6m hectares (14.8m acres) of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12m hectares a year are lost through soil degradation. We wreck it, then move on, trashing rainforests and other precious habitats as we go.

The techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with starvation. A paper just published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the undisturbed sediments in an 11th-century French lake. It reveals that the intensification of farming over the past century has increased the rate of soil erosion 60-fold.

Another paper, by researchers in the UK, shows that soil in allotments – the small patches in towns and cities that people cultivate by hand – contains a third more organic carbon than agricultural soil and 25% more nitrogen. This is one of the reasons why allotment holders produce between four and 11 times more food per hectare than do farmers.

Milman, O. December 2, 2015. Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say. The Guardian.

The world has lost a third of its arable land due to erosion or pollution in the past 40 years, with potentially disastrous consequences as global demand for food soars. Nearly 33% of the world’s adequate or high-quality food-producing land has been lost at a rate that far outstrips the pace of natural processes to replace diminished soil.

The continual plowing of fields, combined with heavy use of fertilizers, has degraded soils across the world, the research found, with erosion occurring at a pace of up to 100 times greater than the rate of soil formation. It takes around 500 years for just 1 inch (2.5 cm) of topsoil to be created amid unimpeded ecological changes.

The University of Sheffield’s Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, which undertook the study by analyzing various pieces of research published over the past decade, said the loss was “catastrophic” and the trend close to being irretrievable without major changes to agricultural practices. “You think of the dust bowl of the 1930s in North America and then you realize we are moving towards that situation if we don’t do something,” said Duncan Cameron, professor of plant and soil biology at the University of Sheffield.

“We are increasing the rate of loss and we are reducing soils to their bare mineral components,” he said. “We are creating soils that aren’t fit for anything except for holding a plant up. The soils are silting up river systems – if you look at the huge brown stain in the ocean where the Amazon deposits soil, you realize how much we are accelerating that process.

The erosion of soil has largely occurred due to the loss of structure by continual disturbance for crop planting and harvesting. If soil is repeatedly turned over, it is exposed to oxygen and its carbon is released into the atmosphere, causing it to fail to bind as effectively. This loss of integrity impacts soil’s ability to store water, which neutralizes its role as a buffer to floods and a fruitful base for plants. Degraded soils are also vulnerable to being washed away by weather events fueled by global warming. Deforestation, which removes trees that help knit landscapes together, is also detrimental to soil health.

The steep decline in soil has occurred at a time when the world’s demand for food is rapidly increasing. It’s estimated the world will need to grow 50% more food by 2050 to feed an anticipated population of 9 billion people.  [Yet already, much of the world’s land is already being used to grow food]…Around 30% of the world’s ice-free surfaces are used to keep chicken, cattle, pigs and other livestock, rather than to grow crops.

Read a summary of the paper here as well: Grantham Centre briefing note: December 2015 A sustainable model for intensive agriculture

Posted in Peak Topsoil, Scientists Warnings to Humanity, Soil | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The Nitrogen Bomb: fossil-fueled fertilizers keep billions of us alive

Posted on August 30, 2021 by

Preface. There are two articles below that explain why natural gas fertilizers are keeping at least 4 billion of us alive today.  If you’re interested in this topic, here are a few more to read:

  • Erisman JW, Sutton MA, Galloway J, et al (2008) How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience.
  • Smil V (2004) Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food production. MIT Press.
  • Stewart WM, Dibb DW, Johnston AE, et al (2005) The contribution of commercial fertilizer nutrients to food production. Agronomy Journal 97: 1-6

We really ought to be transitioning to organic agriculture and composting to restore soil to it’s former health, which in turn protects plants from diseases, higher production, water retention, and more.  Since pesticides are also fossil fuel based (oil), and we’re running out of new ones just like we are antibiotics, there’s all the more reason to go organic before we’re forced to. It can take years for industrial farms to be restored to good soil ecosystem health.

Alice Friedemann    www.energyskeptic.com   author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Resistance Radio, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity, XX2 report

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Fisher D (2011) The Nitrogen Bomb. By learning to draw fertilizer from a clear blue sky, chemists have fed the multitudes.  Discover magazine.

They’ve also unleashed a fury as threatening as atomic energy.

In 1898, Sir William Crookes called on science to save Europe from impending starvation. The world’s supply of wheat was produced mainly by the United States and Russia, Sir Crookes noted in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As those countries’ populations grew, their own demands would outpace any increase in production. What then would happen to Europe? “It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities,” Crookes cried. “It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty.”

The crux of the matter was a lack of nitrogen. By the 1840s agricultural production had declined in England, and famine would have ensued if not for the discovery that the limiting factor in food production was the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Adding nitrogen in the form of nitrate fertilizer raised food production enough to ward off disaster. But now, at the end of the century, the multiplying population was putting a new strain on agriculture. The obvious solution was to use more fertilizers. But most of the world’s nitrate deposits were in Chile, and they were insufficient. Where would the additional nitrogen come from?

That question, and Crookes’s scientific call to arms, would trigger a chain reaction as far-reaching as the ones unleashed at Los Alamos four decades later. Historians often describe the discovery of nuclear power as a kind of threshold in human history— a fire wall through which our culture has passed and cannot return. But a crossing every bit as fateful occurred with research on nitrogen. Like the scientists of the Manhattan Project, those who took up Crookes’s challenge were tinkering with life’s basic elements for social rather than scientific reasons. And like the men who created the atomic bomb, they set in motion forces beyond their control, forces that have since shaped everything from politics to culture to the environment.

Today nitrogen-based fertilizers help feed billions of people, but they are also poisoning ecosystems, destroying fisheries, and sickening and killing children throughout the world. In ensuring our supply of food, they are wreaking havoc on our water and air.

Nitrogen is essential to the chemistry of life and, sometimes, its destruction. It winds its way through all living things in the form of amino acids— which are chains or rings of carbon atoms attached to clusters of nitrogen and hydrogen atoms— and it is the primary element of both nitroglycerin and trinitrotoluene, or TNT.

Nitrogen-based fertilizer is now so common, and the chemistry of explosives so well known, that any serious fanatic can make a bomb. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was blown up in 1995 with nitrate fertilizer sold in a feed store, combined with fuel oil and a blasting cap.

Nearly 80% of the world’s atmosphere is made up of nitrogen— enough to feed human populations until the end of time. But atmospheric nitrogen is made up of extremely stable N2 molecules that are reluctant to react with other molecules. Bacteria convert some atmospheric nitrogen first into ammonia (NH3), then into nitrites (NO2- ) and nitrates (NO3- ), but not nearly enough for modern agriculture. What was needed by the end of the 19th century was a way of imitating these microbes— of “fixing” atmospheric nitrogen into a chemically active form.

A few years before William Crookes gave his speech, lime and coke were successfully heated in an electric furnace to produce calcium carbide, which then reacted with atmospheric nitrogen. Crookes himself had shown that an electric arc can “put the air on fire,” as he described it, oxidizing the nitrogen into nitrates. But the electricity needed for either process was prohibitively expensive. Crookes suggested the use of hydroelectric power, but only Norway had sufficient hydroelectric power, and although the Norwegians constructed a nitrogen-fixation plant, it furnished barely enough nitrogen for domestic use. The rest of Europe still faced the specter of hunger. Into this disquieting scene stepped Fritz Haber.

Haber was a young German physical chemist who renounced his Judaism to enhance his career: Academic opportunities in Germany, as in most other European countries, were limited for Jews at that time. Haber’s first academic appointment after receiving his Ph.D. was as a porter, or janitor, in the chemistry department at the University of Karlsruhe. But he soon talked his way into a lectureship, and in 1898 he was appointed professor extraordinarius and was ready to begin thinking about the problem of nitrogen.

Haber began by considering the possibility of converting atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia directly by reacting it with hydrogen. Previous experimenters had found that the reaction would take place only at high temperatures— roughly 1,000 degrees Celsius— at which ammonia was known to break down instantly. But Haber’s own experiments confirmed that he could transform only about 0.0048 percent of the nitrogen into ammonia in this way. Moreover, a comprehensive investigation of thermodynamic theory confirmed what he had long suspected: that ammonia could be produced in large quantities only under high pressure— higher than was then attainable, but not impossibly high. The problem now became one of finding the right balance between pressure and temperature to get the best results, and of finding a catalyst that might allow the pressures to be brought just slightly back down into the realm of commercial possibility.

After a long search Haber found the element uranium to be just such a catalyst, and with a few further technical refinements he was able to produce nearly half a liter of ammonia an hour. Best of all, the process required little energy, and this obscure metal, having no other commercial use, was cheap.

The company Badische Anilin-& Soda-Fabrik (BASF) sent the chemist Alwin Mittasch and the engineer Carl Bosch to Haber’s laboratory for a demonstration. And, of course, everything went wrong. Haber begged them to stay while he fiddled with the apparatus. Time went by, and Bosch left. Then, just as Mittasch was preparing to leave, the ammonia began to drip out of the tubing. Mittasch stood and stared, and then sat down again, deeply impressed. By the time he left, the ammonia was flowing freely.

It took another three years for the company’s engineers, led by Bosch, to scale up the experiment to commercial levels, but by 1912 the Haber-Bosch process was a viable means of producing fertilizer. Haber and Bosch would later receive Nobel prizes for their efforts, the threat of famine was averted, and the world lived happily ever after. Well, not quite.

Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany in the early 1900s was the most powerful state in Europe, with the strongest army, the greatest industrial capacity, and a patriotic fervor to match. The Germans wanted their “rightful place” in the world order, yet their country could not grow except at the expense of someone else’s borders. Nor could Germany fulfill her ambitions through colonization— most of the undeveloped world had already been claimed.

With no room to grow, or even stretch, the kaiser’s fancy turned to thoughts of war. Three inhibitions, however, held him back. The first was the problem of nitrogen for fertilizer, since in these first years of the century Haber had not yet begun his work. Germany was the world’s largest importer of Chilean nitrates, and without a constant infusion of fertilizer, its poor, sandy soils got worse every year. The second problem was again lack of nitrogen, this time for explosives. The third problem was Britain’s Royal Navy, which ruled the seas. If Germany were to start a war, the Royal Navy would cut off its supply of nitrates from Chile, and the population would slowly starve while the armed forces ran out of explosive shells and bombs.

How wonderful for the kaiser, then, was Fritz Haber’s invention of industrial nitrogen fixation. In one stroke Germany would be able to produce all the fertilizer and explosives it needed— provided the war didn’t last too long. In 1913 the first nitrogen-fixing plant began operations at Oppau. A year later, Austria’s heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo. Germany soon pushed Austria to declare war and loosed its own troops both east and west.

World War I ended four years later with the establishment of Soviet Russia and the collapse of Germany, leading directly to the rise of Nazism with all its horrors and to World War II. None of this could have come about without the discovery of commercial nitrogen fixation. In trying to save Europe, Fritz Haber came close to destroying it.

And in trying to feed humankind, we may yet starve it. Civilization’s bloodiest century, sent on a rampage by nitrogen’s emancipation, has passed into history. But the paradox of nitrogen remains. First it was all around us and we couldn’t use it. Now we know how to use it, and it’s suffocating us.

The planet’s 7.7 billion humans (and counting) rely more than ever on fertilizer to augment the natural nitrogen in soils.

In fact, we now produce more fixed nitrogen, via a somewhat modified Haber-Bosch process, than the soil’s natural microbial processes do. Farmers tend to apply more fertilizer rather than take a chance on less, so more nitrogen accumulates than the soil can absorb or break down. Nitrates from automobile exhaust and other fossil-fuel combustion add appreciably to this overload. The excess either gets washed off by rainfall or irrigation or else leaches from the soil into groundwater. An estimated 20 percent of the nitrogen that humans contribute to watersheds eventually ends up in lakes, rivers, oceans, and public reservoirs, opening a virtual Pandora’s box of problems.

Algae, like all living organisms, are limited by their food supply, and nitrogen is their staff of life. So when excess nitrogen is washed off into warm, sunlit waters, an algal bacchanalia ensues. Some species form what is known as a “red tide” for its lurid color, producing chemical toxins that kill fish and devastate commercial fisheries. When people eat shellfish tainted by a red tide, they can suffer everything from skin irritation to liver damage, paralysis, and even death. As Yeats put it, “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.”

Algal blooms, even when nontoxic, block out sunlight and cut off photosynthesis for the plants living below. Then they die off and sink, depleting the water’s supply of oxygen through their decomposition and killing clams, crabs, and other bottom dwellers. In the Baltic Sea, nitrogen levels increased by a factor of four during the 20th century, causing massive increases in springtime algal blooms. Some ecologists believe this was the main cause of the collapse of the Baltic cod fishery in the early 1990s.

Every spring, the same process now creates a gigantic and growing “dead zone” one to 20 yards down in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, which drain 41% of the continental United States, wash excess nitrates and phosphates from the farmlands of 31 states, as well as from factories, into the Gulf. The runoff has created a hypoxic, or deoxygenated, area along the coast of Louisiana toward Texas that has in some years grown as large as New Jersey. This area supports a rich fishery, and dire consequences similar to those in the Baltic Sea can be expected if nothing is done. So Haber’s gift of nitrogen was not entirely a boon in the area of food: It increased food production on land, but now it threatens our supply of food from the sea.

Four years ago the Environmental Protection Agency formed a task force of experts to address the dead-zone problem. Their final plan of action, submitted in January, calls for increased research, monitoring, education, and more planning. Above all, the plan proposes incentives for farmers to use less fertilizer. But the addiction will be hard to break. Unlike nuclear energy, nitrogen fertilizer is absolutely necessary to the survival of modern civilization. “No Nitrates!” and “Fertilizer Freeze Forever!” are not viable slogans. At the end of the 19th century there were around 1.5 billion people in the world, and they were already beginning to exhaust the food supply. Today, as the population soon surges past 8 billion, there is no way humanity could feed itself without nitrogen fertilizers. As Stanford University ecologist Peter Vitousek told us recently, “We can’t make food without mobilizing a lot of nitrogen, and we can’t mobilize a lot of nitrogen without spreading some around.”

Algal blooms are just one of the many disastrous side effects of runaway nitrogen. In Florida, for example, nitrogen (and phosphorus) runoff from dairies and farms has sabotaged the native inhabitants of the Everglades, which evolved in a low-nutrient environment. The influx of nutrient-loving algae has largely replaced the gray-green periphytic algae that once floated over much of the Everglades. The new hordes of blue-green algae deplete the oxygen and are a less favorable food supply. So exotic plants such as cattails, melaleuca, and Australian pine have invaded the Everglades. Just as shopping-mall and subdivision developers have paved over most habitable land to the east and south, these opportunists have covered the native marshes and wet prairies where birds once fed. Beneath the surface, the faster-accumulating remains of the new algae have almost completely obliterated the dissolved oxygen in the water. Few fish can survive.

Nitrogen also contaminates drinking water, making it especially dangerous for infants. It interferes with the necessary transformation of methemoglobin into hemoglobin, thus decreasing the blood’s ability to carry oxygen and causing methemoglobinemia, or blue baby syndrome. The EPA has named nitrates, along with bacteria, as the only contaminants that pose an immediate threat to health whenever base levels are exceeded, and increasingly they are being exceeded. According to a 1995 report by the U.S. Geological Survey, 9% of tested wells have nitrate concentrations exceeding the EPA limit; previous studies showed that only 2.4% of the wells were dangerous.

Mass-produced Nitrogen made modern warfare possible. What other explosions lie ahead?

Beefing up agriculture not only contaminates our water, it corrupts the air. As fertilizers build up in the soil, bacteria convert more and more of it into nitrous oxide (N2O). Nitrous oxide is best known as “laughing gas,” a common dental anesthetic, but it is also a powerful greenhouse gas, hundreds of times more effective than carbon dioxide, and a threat to the ozone layer. Like a Rube Goldberg contraption designed to create and foster life on Earth, our ecosphere can apparently withstand little tinkering. Bend one little pole the wrong way, and the whole interlocking mechanism goes out of whack.

Scientists around the world are working to reverse the effects of eutrophication, as the introduction of excessive nutrients is called. But while fuel-cell car engines and other advances loom in the near future, and chlorofluorocarbons have largely been replaced with safer chemicals, there is no such substitute for nitrogen. “An enormous number of people in the underdeveloped world still need to be better fed,” says Duke University biogeochemist William Schlesinger, “particularly in India and Africa. When they come online agriculturally, sometime in the next 50 years, at least twice as much nitrogen will be deployed on land each year.”

Improving the management of fertilizer is one good way to decrease runoff. If we can better understand exactly when crops need to absorb nitrogen, farmers can learn to apply fertilizer sparingly, at just the right time. “When application and uptake are coupled,” says Schlesinger, “it minimizes the amount of runoff.” In some watersheds like the Chesapeake Bay, farmers have reduced their nutrient runoff voluntarily. In other areas, farmers haven’t had a choice: When the Soviet Union and its economy collapsed, fertilizer was suddenly hard to come by near the Black Sea. As a result, the hypoxic zone in the Black Sea shrank appreciably.

Another, less drastic strategy for reducing the use of nitrogen is called “intercropping” and goes back to Roman times. By alternating rows of standard crops with rows of nitrogen-fixing crops, such as soybeans or alfalfa, farmers can let nature do their fertilizing for them. Intercropping could be a godsend to the developing world, where fertilizer is hard to come by. The difficulty is devising new plowing schemes, and farmers, like everyone else, are reluctant to abandon tried-and-true methods. But even successful farmers in the United States might be convinced. Aside from protecting the global environment— a somewhat intangible goal— intercropping could save them money on fertilizer. And farming areas are often most affected by groundwater contaminated by nitrates.

Other researchers are developing natural processes to clean up our mess. Just as some bacteria can draw nitrogen from the atmosphere and expel it as nitrates, others can consume nitrates and expel nitrogen molecules back into the air. Denitrifying bacteria are too scarce to clean up all nitrogen pollution, but they could be used much more extensively. For example, some farmers in Iowa and near the Chesapeake Bay drain their fields through adjacent wetlands, where denitrifying bacteria are common, so that excess nitrogen is consumed before it reaches streams, rivers, and bays.

Biologists willing to brave a slippery slope might want to go further, adding denitrifying bacteria to soil or water contaminated with nitrates. In the last few years several bacterial strains that might be useful have been identified. Why not genetically modify them to do exactly what we want? To anyone familiar with the ravages of invasive species worldwide, the danger is obvious.

Genetically modified microbes would have to be spread over large areas, making them hard to monitor. And in developing countries, where the need is greatest, there are few experts to do the monitoring.

The specter of genetically engineered bacteria spreading beyond the targeted regions, and mutating into new strains, brings to mind a picture of biogeochemists in the 22nd century looking back on the halcyon days when people still had the luxury of worrying about nitrogen. Fritz Haber couldn’t have imagined that he was altering Earth’s environmental balance when he thought to heat up uranium, hydrogen, and air at high pressure. If we’re not careful, our attempts to rectify that balance will only trigger another, even more destructive chain reaction.

Haber’s uranium was Oppenheimer’s uranium in more ways than one.

Vaclav Smil. 2013. Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization.  Wiley.

Synthesis of ammonia remains the leading user of hydrogen, followed by refinery needs

Post-1950 expansion was rapid, with global ammonia synthesis rising from less than 6 Mt in 1950, to about 120 Mt in 1989, 164 Mt in 2011 (USGS, 2013).

Two-thirds (65–57%) of all synthesized NH3 has been recently used as fertilizer, with the total global usage more than tripling since 1970, from 33 to about 106 Mt N in 2010. Because ammonia is a gas under ambient pressure, it can be applied to crops only by using special equipment (hollow steel knives), a practice that has been limited to North America. The compound has been traditionally converted into a variety of fertilizers (nitrate, sulfate) but urea (containing 45% N) has emerged as the leading choice, especially in rice-growing Asia, now the world’s largest consumer of nitrogenous fertilizers; ammonium nitrate (35% N) comes second.

Compared to traditional harvests, the best national yields of these three most important grain crops have risen to about 10 t/ha for US corn (from 2 t/ha before World War II), 8–10 t/ha for European wheat (from about 2 t/ha during the 1930s), and 6 t/ha for East Asian rice (from around 2 t/ha).

High-yielding US corn now receives, on average, about 160 kg N/ha, European winter wheat more than 200 kg N/ha, and China’s rice gets 260 kg N/ha, which means that in double-cropping regions annual applications are about 500 kg N/ha. According to my calculations, in the year 2000 about 40% of nitrogen present in the world’s food proteins came from fertilizers that originated from the Haber–Bosch synthesis of ammonia (Smil, 2001).

Another great article about this is Vaclav Smil’s 1997 Global Population and the Nitrogen Cycle Feeding humankind now demands so much nitrogen-based fertilizer that the distribution of nitrogen on the earth has been changed in dramatic, and sometimes dangerous, ways (Scientific American)..

Posted in Farming & Ranching, Life After Fossil Fuels, Natural Gas, Overpopulation, Peak Food | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Can democracy survive peak oil?

Posted on August 27, 2021 by

Preface.  This is a book review of Howard Bucknell’s Energy and the National Defense.  University of Kentucky Press.

Bucknell was amazingly prescient as you’ll see in this review, especially about why democracy might not survive the energy crisis. Heck, it already is becoming authoritarian. I did not expect that until after an energy crisis, but then again the right-wing has been working on undoing the New Deal since it was enacted under FDR (see post “How corporations used evangelists to gain wealth, power, and undo the New Deal” and https://energyskeptic.com/category/fastcrash/politics/ which has the history of how they gained more power).

Authoritarianism is a problem because the most fair, compassionate, and just way to deal with the coming energy crisis is rationing. Sta Cox explains why we must ration and myriad ways to do so in his outstanding book “Any Way you Slice it“. But libertarian capitalism with its “every man for himself” and unfair distribution of wealth philosophy, is antithetical to rationing. Authoritarianism would go the opposite direction since most autocratic rulers are keen for power to loot the wealth of the nation into their own bank accounts. Sounds cynical, but read Vogl’s “The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption – Endangering Our Democracy” that documents this in great detail.

Bucknell was once the director of the energy and national security project at Ohio State University. He graduated in 1944 from the U.S. Naval Academy and commanded a number of ships, including nuclear-powered submarines.  He has a doctorate in political science from the University of Georgia.

This book is also about the energy crises of the 1970s.  At the time, President Carter, Kissinger, Bucknell, and others thought this was the start of energy descent. It’s interesting to see what actions were taken, how energy was dealt with politically, the institutions created to solve the energy crisis, and the issues, failures, and problems encountered when trying to take action in what turned out to be the “dress rehearsal”.

Bucknell’s wrote this book partly to warn military planners that lightning raids on oil fields in the Middle East would be a bad idea, and to get two main efforts started: liquefied synthetic fuels to solve the transportation problem, and energy conservation.

Today, 40 years later, we know there isn’t a synthetic fuel that can be made to replace diesel fuel for transportation, nor is electrification, hydrogen and so on a possibility (“When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”) and the same is true for manufacturing, which uses over half of fossil fuels (Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy).

Some other books on the evolution of authoritarianism in the USA: the first religious settlers, Pat Robertson, FOX news, our dying Democracy, “Conservatives without Conscience“, and the invention of Christian America by corporate America.  And many more in categories Politics and Religion.

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, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

Howard Bucknell III (1981) Energy and the National Defense.  University of Kentucky Press.

Energy and Democracy

Bucknell says that just as democracy in Greece was founded on slave labor,  democracy here was founded on cheap and plentiful energy.  Energy decline will be the “most serious and far-reaching challenge faced by our nation since the Civil War”.

Democracy requires a large and strong middle class, but an energy decline will shrink the middle class and make it more likely the United States will not be stopped from undertaking military adventures.

In times of emergency, the actions we take change our form of government. Bucknell wondered what an energy crisis that lasted for a decade or more would do to our government.

In 1975 Henry Kissinger said there was no issue more basic to the future than the energy challenge. Energy drove our economy and sustained modern civilization. Without energy, nations risked rivalry and economic depression. For Kissinger, the 1973 embargo meant we no longer had control over our economy or our progress, and our well-being was hostage to decisions made by others.

Bucknell doubts a democracy can make the decisions needed to survive before being overwhelmed by the coming energy crisis, because the public’s understanding of the energy situation is so far removed from reality.  When given uncertain and contradictory information, the public believes what they want to believe.  And politicians rarely attempt to educate the public factually.

How the transition is made is important as well – if prices are used to change energy consumption, there are issues of economic and social inequality.  If oil exporters set prices, we risk economic instability, which is likely to lead to social and political instability, which then leads to “demagogues and terrorism”.

The only way dictatorship can be avoided and democracy survive, is to start early and begin moving forward.  The faster the transition is made, the less social disorder there’ll be, and time may be shorter than we think.

Bucknell concludes his book with a call to all of us as citizens to intelligently work hard together during the dangers of the next decades.  It would be a shame if the epitaph of the great American experiment in democracy were “Canceled due to a lack of energy”.

Bucknell also wasn’t sure that our social, political, and economic structures could make it through the transition without being changed in terrible ways.  He felt it was impossible to take the required draconian measures in the very short time left without crushing democracy, and the results weren’t certain and might even be plain wrong [like Republicans treating covid-19 like a bioweapon because they thought more Democrats would die].  Within this “paradox lies the potential for chaos at home and disaster abroad”.

Energy Crisis as Seen in the 70s

Back in the 70s, the public was convinced oil companies were ripping off the public and engaged in conspiracies. Bucknell is exasperated that neither the public nor the energy task force Nixon commissioned in 1969 grasped that there was a finite amount of oil, gas, and coal to fuel civilization.  This fact has “yet to be, perhaps cannot be, accepted by the American people”.

The first energy crisis struck America in 1973, but in 1976, none of the presidential candidates discussed the issue, because the public did not believe there was an energy crisis.

Carter decided to give the public the painful news in 1977, building interest up in his speech by releasing a CIA report which portrayed oil reserves running out.  The four percent of the public that was concerned about energy grew to half the population by the time Carter spoke.

Carter was the first president to announce that the very foundation of our mechanized and industrialized mobile society was in danger due to declining energy.  His April 18, 1977 speech began with:

“Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us”.

William Simon, secretary of the treasury under President Ford, attacked Carters speech by saying that increased demand in the market place has always brought in more supply.

The Wall Street Journal published Gold’s theory and concluded that there might be enough oil for “20 million years at our present rate of fuel consumption”.

Bucknell concludes that economists ignore the fact that oil and gas are finite – they think that all you have to do is dig a hole and pour money into it when you want more.

He doesn’t believe the market can be counted on to solve the energy situation.  Indeed, he sees the unseen hand of the market as being able to “assume terrifying proportions to the individual as it moves in its awesome and uncaring way across a society.  Bankruptcies, breadlines, lost wars, and overthrown governments are often strewn in its wake”.

At the time Bucknell wrote, inflation was high due to energy prices.  He saw the decreasing soundness of the dollar as a danger to the international monetary system and inflation of the dollar possibly bringing on another Great Depression.

Making the Energy Transition

Bucknell summarizes past energy transitions and noted that it took 40 to 50 years of social, economic, and political adaptations to switch from wood to coal and coal to oil to natural gas (though we use all of them still, not really a “transition”, just larger shares of the energy pie). The 1973 and 1979 oil shocks alerted everyone the time had come to switch to other sources of energy, in a time frame much less than past energy transitions.

He felt it was hard for our government to prepare for the transition because planners had no idea what the likely reserves were, since private companies and foreign governments weren’t required to report verifiable data.

He explained why switching to new energy bases couldn’t be done easily, quickly, or cheaply, the need for multiple alternatives, and the economic and political problems in making a transition.

The economic barriers are formidable. Previous energy transitions were market driven.  But the new transition must be directed by the government due to the limited time and domestic oil supplies as well as the need for military protection during our vulnerability during the transition.

To make the switch in time, the federal government would need to direct and fund the research and initial capital investment.  The source and amounts of these funds is bound to become a major political issue.  Even with both private capital and public funds it’s not likely the nation could develop alternative energy resources in time to prevent social trauma. If imported oil was cut during the transition, the social disorder would become even worse.

He wasn’t sure how we could even find the capital to switch our energy base, since so much money was required, and the defense department would be competing for these funds.

Bucknell criticized the energy studies of the 1970’s for being overly optimistic since they ignored the fact you can’t substitute one energy source for another.  For instance, nuclear power can’t substitute for oil in transportation. These studies also ignored the “legal, ideological, technological, economic, and political difficulties” energy decisions move through.

He depicted one of the political barriers by asking the reader to imagine a politician announcing we’re “going electric”.  From now on, everything would be nuclear power driven.  Everyone would be up in arms, from the guy who just bought a car to the industrial, agricultural, transportation, and military sectors — all heavily invested in fossil fuel infrastructure. He’d be thrown out of office.

Another interesting aspect of Bucknell’s book were charts of how large a piece of the energy pie the military has always taken, will continue to take, and how enormous their slice would be if we entered a major war. He worried that during the transition, our weaknesses could lead to economic or military confrontations that would threaten our national security.

Most energy studies assumed there would be a growing dependence on imported oil and minimized the need to produce synthetic fuels. Bucknell felt that was a tragedy, since that would lead to continued voracious consumption of oil, shortening the time of our oil-based civilization and the time needed to make a transition.

Decreasing energy and higher prices would result in massive unemployment and depression, “even though a transition to a service economy is being made”.

He believed that if we wanted to preserve our society, our main preoccupation needed to focus on developing a number of energy sources, especially in transportation fuels.

It’s obvious that the social and economic future of industrial nations depends on energy at affordable prices.  The survival of our civilization “depends a great deal on what actions the United States takes, does not take, or even can take”.

War and Terrorism

Bucknell saw foreign policy as critical to how long a democracy could last, and thought our policies on oil were inept – we treated oil like any other mineral. Yet minerals and raw materials were useless without energy. That made us vulnerable, because we were importing half our oil from abroad, which put us in the position of having to go to war if there were energy shortages.

He also didn’t think that people understood how critical oil was to fighting a war, and has a chart on page 140 showing what percent of the nations energy the military consumed to fight several wars in the past.  He points out that the amount needed would deprive civilians as much as the Arab oil embargo did, which led to half a million people being unemployed.  At the time he wrote, the military was the largest consumer of energy in the United States, using 2% of the total energy budget (and we weren’t at war with anyone).

In energy wars of the future, there would be “no choices between guns and butter”.  There’d be a premium on using already existing machinery, since the energy to produce new weaponry would be energy-limited.

In 1973, Congressman Lee Hamilton asked the Congressional Research Service to study seizing foreign oil fields by force.  The study concluded that such an attack would be successful only if all of the following were accomplished: seize oil installations intact, secure them for years, restore the damaged assets quickly, be able to operate oil fields without the assistance of local staff, and be able to guarantee safe passage of supplies and petroleum.

Bucknell wrote that at that time, it appeared the administration was planning to field a military force of 100,000 men in the Middle East to guarantee political stability. The planners envisioned a “lightning raid on the oil fields followed by forceful adjudication to restore oil flow to the United States on favorable terms. That this is a naïve oversimplification is one of the messages of this book. Raids on oil fields cannot be counted upon to result in productive capacity.”

He believed that if we intended to have energy wars, we’d need a strong navy and nuclear arms, but that starting an energy war would be terribly dangerous, and that the “deprivations to be visited upon our population are beyond living experience in this country”.

Because of all of the above, Bucknell said that military planners tended to think in terms of short rather than long wars. But since we weren’t able to predict the length of the Korean and Viet Nam wars, he wonders why military planners think they can control the length of an energy war.

He believed that war was a foolish and dangerous risk, plus there was the reaction of the Soviet Union to consider. But if we didn’t rein in our rate of consumption of oil and develop alternatives meanwhile, we were likely to enter a war which our country and armed forces were ill-prepared for.

He pointed out that environmentalists who opposed energy developments at home (i.e. coal to liquids, shale oil, etc), had to consider the consequences – it was more likely there’d be energy wars abroad, requiring much higher defense expenditures, which would take money away from making an energy base transition.

There was also the chance we’d be attacked and need to defend ourselves.  The military runs on petroleum (except for nuclear ships), and we needed to figure out alternatives now, because we wouldn’t be able to invent them while fighting a war. New resources must be developed in times of peace – “the granaries of a nation are not filled during the years of famine”.

Bucknell predicted the alliances formed after World War II might not survive competition over energy resources and our declining ability to provide protection to our allies.

Within our own country, we’ve very vulnerable to terrorist attacks due to the centralization of power plants and electrical distribution, yet this wasn’t being considered in defense planning.

Externally, our supertankers were vulnerable to sabotage or missile attacks, oil loading ports might be attacked, and there was a large lifeline of oil tankers around the globe to be defended.

Intense competition for oil would also build up among the different regions of the United States, leading to potential problems.  There are regional disparities in energy supply and demand that have received little attention from Washington planners.  “Yet it is of crucial sociopolitical and economic import. Left unattended, it could throw our Republic back to the pre-Constitutional days of rampant interstate economic (and worse) warfare where “have” states defended their products and “have-not” states sought military redress”.

Bucknell on Solutions

Bucknell believed there was no one solution to replacing fossil fuels, and that synthetic fuels were critical to solve the transportation problem.  He also thought conservation very important, since it could mean the difference between having to wage war, and winning if attacked. The National Research Council Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Energy Systems reached similar conclusions in 1980, urging the development of synthetic liquid fuels, with an even higher priority on conservation of energy.

Bucknell believed that coal to oil was the best solution, but wasn’t sure how feasible it was [it is not feasible: see “Why liquefied coal and gas can’t replace oil“]. The ERDA “Coalcon” project, which attempted to convert coal to oil in an environmentally clean way, was terminated in 1977 [as have other projects since then].  He speculated it was shut down due to bad management or an inability to cleanly process high-sulfur coal.  He noted that scale-up factors and costs from a quarter-scale demonstration model to a full-sized plant are seldom linear.

Since liquid coal was unlikely within ten years, he foresaw that coal would be burned instead to generate electricity [true, that’s where 93% of U.S. coal goes], and create huge environmental problems.  Since the atmosphere at some point would become lethal, he said new liquid coal plants must be required to remove sulfur and other pollutants.

He was not hopeful about economic and political barriers being overcome to construct coal liquefaction plants. There was no chance the oil companies would build them, since they were driven by short-term profit-making goals.  Only the government could possibly build these plants, but when the Synthetic Fuel Corporation was proposed by President Carter, it was opposed by environmentalists as well as conservatives, who didn’t think the government should be involved in industrial production.

Other attractive fuels that could be liquefied, like heavy oils and tar sands, were more economic than coal liquefaction, but had the drawback of mainly being found outside the United States.

Bucknell knew that natural gas wouldn’t solve our problems, because production had peaked in 1973 [fracked gas and oil extended Business As Usual from 2005 to 2021, but are now in decline], and stated there were only 25 years of uranium reserves unless we built breeder reactors.

Nor could Saudi Arabia pump much more oil.  He quotes Clifton C. Garvin, Jr., chairman of the Exxon Corporation, as saying that the maximum sustainable pumping rate for Saudi Arabia was about 10 to 12 Mbpd [if you pump more, it will leave more oil in the ground that can’t be recovered].

Bucknell pointed out some of the limitations to solutions being proposed — city gas didn’t have enough heat content to support many industrial processes, and we needed more railroads to carry coal. He noted that the Department of Agriculture was in charge of alcohol production, which he said was already “a decision of questionable merit”.

Several quite adversarial debates in the typical “winner-take-all” fashion were preventing action from being taken.  Each side insisted their solution was the only approach.  For example, there was the “high-tech, hard science” group insisting centrally distributed electricity from large nuclear and solar plants was the only way to go, while the “low-tech” group countered with conservation and local wind and solar.

Then there were those who claimed we were finally about to get our comeuppance for using finite resources so wastefully.  They saw the energy crisis as a blessing, and sided with the environmentalists who argued against endless growth.  They believed pollution and other environmental harm needed to be factored into the cost of energy.

And how could you move forward when so many of the debates were about whether the energy crisis was real or not, politicians were blaming the opposite political party, and many were blaming the oil companies?

Agriculture and Energy

Bucknell throws out several statistics to show that while we’ve doubled food production in the three decades after 1940, we more than tripled the energy used in the same time period, which is not the direction we should be going in and is of basic importance in national policy considerations.

Lack of energy will eventually force us back to using human rather than machine labor. When Bucknell’s book was published, there were 4 million Americans employed on farms that consumed enormous amounts of energy. Just the nitrogen fertilizer alone consumed 68 million barrels of oil every year. Bucknell states that If the farm economy is de-mechanized, you’d need at least 31 million farm workers and 61 million horses.

The population of the United States has grown by at least 25% since Bucknell published his book. To de-mechanize now, we’d need 39 million farm workers and 76 million horses.  In 2002, we had 3.6 million horses and mules in America. The horsepower represented by farm tractors alone (i.e. not grain and bean harvesters, etc), equals 400 million horses.   Horse gestation takes 11 months, the foals are weaned at 4-8 months, and most fillies don’t bear foals until they’re 3-4 years old.  Given how much land horses themselves require to be fed –2 to 28 acres, depending on the quality of forage — the land to feed horses as well as people means there’s an upper limit to how many horses can replace human muscle power.

Bucknell wonders whether our population will accept a large-scale substitution of manual labor for energy use.  He wonders if food production will drop and food prices soar.

Conclusion

We don’t seem to have moved forward much at all since the 70s.  The same debates about which energy alternatives to pursue, or whether there even is an energy crisis are still happening.  And how can the public participate in energy debates when less than 5% of Americans are scientifically literate? The theory of evolution is rejected by 51% of Americans, 34% believe in UFO’s and ghosts, 29% in astrology, and students score near the bottom in math and science internationally.

Although it’s often said that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, I’m not sure that knowing how we failed in the past will prevent failure now, and I’m sure Bucknell would agree.  He doesn’t think that a democracy can cope with huge economic, technological, social, and political problems in a short time frame.

Appendix A   President Carter’s National Energy Plan  

Main Principles:

1)       The energy problem can be effectively addressed only by a government that accepts responsibility for dealing with it comprehensively and by a public that understands the seriousness and is ready to make necessary sacrifices.

2)       Healthy economic growth must continue.

3)       National policies for the protection of the environment must be maintained.

4)       The Unite States must reduce its vulnerability to potentially devastating supply interruptions.

5)       The program must be fair.  The United States must solve its energy problems in a manner that is equitable to all regions, sectors, and income groups.

6)       The growth of energy demand must be restrained through conservation and improved energy efficiency.

7)       Energy prices should generally reflect the true replacement cost of energy.

8)       Both energy producers and energy consumers are entitled to reasonable certainty about government policy.

9)       Resources in plentiful supply must be used more widely and the nation must begin the process of moderating its use of those in short supply.

10)   The use of nonconventional sources of energy—such as solar, wind, biomass, geothermal—must be vigorously expanded.

Carter’s proposed solutions:

1)       Annual limits would be placed on oil imports.  After some discussion this evolved to a figure of 8.2 mbpd for 1979 with the prospect of a cut to 4 to5 mbpd by 1990.

2)       A new cabinet-level energy mobilization board would be established with far-reaching powers to ensure that procedural, legislative, or regulatory actions spurred by environmentalists no longer cause extended delays in the creation or expansion of plants, ports, refineries, pipelines, and so forth

3)       A government-chartered energy security corporation would develop a synthetic fuel industry producing at least 2.5 mbpd of oil substitutes from shale, coal, and biomass.  88 billion dollars was earmarked for this task.

4)       A standby system for rationing gasoline would be prepared.

5)       Each state would be given a target for the reduction of fuel use, including gasoline use, within its borders.  Failure of a state to act would result in federal action.

6)       The ninety-four nuclear power plants now being built or planned would be completed.  Additional nuclear policies would be announced after completion of the Three Mile Island investigation.

7)       Owners of homes and commercial buildings would receive interest subsidies of $2 billion for extra insulation and conversion of oil heating to natural gas.

8)       Utilities would be required to cut their use of oil by half over the next ten years.  Conversion would be partially financed by grants and loan guarantees.

9)       Bus and rail systems would receive $10 billion for improvement, while $6.5 billion would be expended to upgrade the gasoline efficiency of automobiles.

10)   Low-income groups would receive $2.4 billion each year to offset higher energy prices.

11)   The installation of solar energy systems in homes and businesses would be subsidized by loans and tax credits.  A solar bank would be formed.

12)   About $142 billion in federal funds was involved in the Carter Plan over the next decade.  It was envisioned that most of this money would come from an energy security trust fund financed by a tax of about 50 percent on the windfall profits earned by U.S. oil companies as price controls are phased out.  An additional $5 billion would be raised through the sale to the public of bonds in the energy security corporation dedicated to the development of synthetic fuels.

Posted in Advice, Energy Books, Military, Politics, Rationing | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Index of best energyskeptic posts

Posted on August 26, 2021 by

This is an attempt to boil down 1500+ energyskeptic posts into the 200 of the best ones.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

Book Lists – buy books in hard copy to Preserve Knowledge

Introduction

Peak oil. We’re not running out, half is left

But since petroleum is the master resource that makes all other goods possible, including coal and natural gas, and our economy depends on endless growth, you’d want to start preparing for oil decline at least 10-20 years ahead of time (Summary of 2005 Department of Energy Peak Oil Production study).

If peak oil did happen in 2008  (IEA 2018 World Energy Outlook: Peak oil is here, oil crunch by 2023), or 2018 (EIA 2021 International Energy Statistics. Petroleum and other liquids. Data Options), then we have limited time left to start relocalizing, shifting our economy back to a steady-state and agriculture, rationing, and reducing consumption. Building wind, solar, nuclear and so on is pointless: transportation and manufacturing can’t be electrified or run on any other non-fossil energy resource as I explain in my books Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy and When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation

Limits to Growth

Overpopulation & Overshoot

When Trucks Stop running: Why diesel fuel can’t be replaced

Manufacturing uses over half of fossil fuels: see Chapter 9 Life After Fossil Fuels

Though not as thorough or up-to-date, this article will give you an idea of why manufacturing will be hard, perhaps impossible, to electrify or substitute anything for fossil fuels. Roberts, D. 2019. This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve. Low-carbon options for heavy industry like steel and cement are scarce and expensive. Vox

Biofuels

Wind Power   55 Reasons why wind power cannot replace fossil fuels

Solar Power  Why solar power can’t replace fossil fuels

Can Geothermal power replace declining fossil fuels?

HYDROPOWER

Nuclear Power

FUSION

Coal

Natural Gas

  • Peak Natural Gas
  • 2021-8-30: The Nitrogen Bomb: fossil-fueled fertilizers keep billions of us alive

Climate Change

Renewables are NOT renewable: they need fossil fuels every step of their life cycle

The Electric Grid

Energy storage

Mining & limits to minerals

Microchips are as important as oil and the electric grid

Collapse

Extinction

Agriculture

Politics  

Politics matters. If authoritarian leaders like Trump and other extremists are in power as oil declines, food and energy will go to the wealthy rather than be rationed. Given how Republicans can be credited with some percent of the 650,000 covid-19 deaths (Aug 2021) by discouraging vaccinations and wearing masks, and recommending ineffective horse tranquilizer ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, it is scary to think about the myriad ways they might increase mortality as energy declines, especially in a nuclear war.

Religion

Pandemics

Transportation: EV, cars, airplanes, rail

 

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Energy abundance depends entirely on the RATE of energy flow

Posted on August 24, 2021 by

Preface. Below are excerpts from two articles on why the FLOW RATE of oil is what matters for our fossil-fueled civilization. It’s like how, when filling up a bathtub, you want to turn the faucet on as high as it will go so you can get in and the water will still be warm. Likewise, since oil first gushed out of the ground over a hundred years ago, the flow kept increasing until world oil production reached a plateau in 2005. Once oil begins to decline, the bathtub will take longer and longer to fill up as the size of the tap shrinks.

Although we are clearly near peak oil production given the plateau we have been on since 2005, there is still a lot left — half at least, so we are not running out.  But our economic system depends on endless growth, of creditors being paid back by debtors. This has worked for 200 years thanks to coal, oil, and natural gas producing increasing every year and growing the economy (production and GDP are almost perfectly correlated). So as the oil flow rate declines, the economy will shrink, and someday, oil will be scarce as it drips rather than gushes.

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, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Andrews S, Udall R (2008) Peak oil: “It’s the flows, stupid!” ASPO-USA.

“In the public mind, peak oil means ‘running out.’”

Verbal shots from legendary political consultant James Carville land with the shock of a hand grenade. If the always-blunt and ever-controversial Carville were to grasp our oil dilemma and begin a peak oil education campaign, his war-room slogan would probably paraphrase his winning axiom from the 1992 Clinton campaign, using “It’s the Flows, Stupid!”

Peak oil is about peak flow. It’s that simple, despite all those lame statements (some from people who ought to know better) that “we aren’t running out.” That’s right, we aren’t, but who said we were!

“Running out” is a framing technique used with some success to belittle the legitimate peak oil concern. The “running out” epithet has been uttered often by Daniel Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. If you haven’t heard Yergin on CNBC saying, “this is the fourth or fifth time we were supposed to have run out of oil,” it could be because he’s up to “sixth time” by now.

Peak oil describes the maximum flow rate of oil from a well, an off-shore platform, a field, a basin, or a geographic area—state, nation, continent, and eventually the world.  Peak doesn’t mean the end or the bottom or the dregs.  In most areas of human life, peak is a high point, a cause for celebration.

When the USA hit its peak in October 1970, the record went unnoticed. Today, more than 50 nations have peaked, including Mexico and, it now appears, Russia. During the next few years the world will hit peak oil; it could be a sharp summit preluding a steep fall or perhaps a gentle bump on a long plateau.

Petroleum engineers know very well what peak oil means. Indeed, in larger projects they spend billions designing enormously complex systems to meet expected peak production. Consider Thunderhorse, BP’s offshore platform in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. If memory serves, when it begins operation later this year the platform will process 250,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

The American Petroleum Institute published a 56-page paper entitled “Are We Running Out of Oil?” in December 1995. The executive summary concludes with this red herring: “There is a very real danger that attempts by government to address the non-problem of resource exhaustion will distract from or even aggravate the real challenge of removing remaining institutional barriers to supply growth.” Peak oil does not mean “resource exhaustion,” though M. King Hubbert’s curve does show production declining to zero many decades into the future.

Why does the obfuscation of peak oil deniers matter? The coming end of the “supply growth” world will require an enormous paradigm shift: there will be a little less oil to divvy up among more people. We will need to conserve with a vengeance, and substitute ingenuity, intelligence, and efficiency where we can. Treating this immiment event as a non-problem could end up being enormously painful.

The math determining present and future flow rates is simple:

  • 85 percent of the world’s oil is produced by the 21 largest producers.
  • Production declines dominate the story in six of those large producers: the USA, Indonesia, the U.K., Norway, Mexico and Venezuela.
  • Flat or volatile production rules in five more: Russia, Iraq, Iran, Nigeria and Algeria.
  • Production is increasing in the rest. But China is nearing peak. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are not planning much more expansion. Canada and Libya can continue growing, within limits. Of this crowd, only Brazil, Kazakhstan and Angola are likely to grow production sufficiently to make a difference past 2010.

Some factors act like dragging anchors on these flow rates:

  • Geologic limits. We drilled the easy pickings first. Most new barrels—from offshore Brazil to the Bakken play in North Dakota and Montana—are smaller or harder to drill than the older giant fields they’re trying to replace.
  • Non-OPEC production is flat, “mature” and underperforming, with few prospects for change.
  • The world’s oil system lacks the skilled labor, equipment, and rigs to help us increase production off the recent three-year plateau. Delays from major projects like Thunderhorse are the norm.
  • OPEC’s reserves are increasingly off-limits, and prevailing petronationalism won’t quickly reverse. To quote an industry player, “yesterday’s Big Oil is today’s small oil.”
  • While investments to expand production are optional, depletion is mandatory and relentless. In a horse race with technology, eventually depletion will win the day.
  • Rising domestic demand by major oil producers Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Mexico drives down their exports. Expect peak exports to hit before peak oil.
  • Unconventional oil is more expensive and slow, with a small energy balance and a large environmental footprint. Unconventional oil will likely be a herd of turtles rather than the cavalry on which many are pinning their hopes.

Because they don’t understand peak oil, many reporters keep getting the story wrong. Because they don’t understand peak oil, some in the U.S. Congress and Senate now threaten to sue OPEC. Because they don’t understand peak oil, business journals keep whining that producer nations don’t practice rational economics.

And indeed they don’t. Lacking refinery capacity, Iran exports crude, imports finished gasoline, subsidizes it at 40 cents/gallon, and then rations its sale to curb consumption. Seems crazy, but Iran isn’t the only nation where cheap energy is the opiate of the people.

Summer sales tax holiday on U.S. gasoline, anyone? After all, we aren’t “running out.”

Steve Andrews and Randy Udall are two of the co-founders of ASPO-USA.

Kobb C (2013) The only true metric of energy abundance: The rate of flow. Resource Insights.

Energy abundance depends entirely on the RATE of energy flow.

Why is the rate of flow the key metric? Because in order to function the global economy depends entirely on continuous, high-quality energy inputs. We cannot shut down the world’s electric generating plants for six months or even three months without crashing world society into a state of irretrievable chaos and decline. We cannot shut down the world’s shipping fleet for even a few weeks without doing irreparable harm. Modern global society has become like a shark. It either keeps barreling forward or it dies.

If the rate of flow for oil declined by half in the next 20 years, we wouldn’t be running out of oil at all. We’d still be pumping about the same amount as we were in 1967, a year of exceptional economic vitality. But, we’d feel the crunch because there are twice as many people on the planet now as there were then. And, the per capita consumption of oil has risen considerably since that year.

New unconventional sources of hydrocarbons are more difficult and costly to extract than conventional ones, since they have very steep declines in their rate of production–so steep that in the tight oil fields of Texas and North Dakota drillers must replace about 40 percent of their production PER YEAR just to maintain current output. The decline rates for shale gas are no more encouraging: 79 to 95 percent after three years according to a comprehensive survey of 65,000 oil and gas wells in 31 shale plays. Shale natural gas and tight oil drillers face a task similar to climbing up a down escalator. Each must replace enormous fractions of their current production frequently just to keep production flat. A path to persistently rising global production of oil and gas far into the future cannot be built on production from such fields.

Some 60 percent of current production flows come from aging giant fields representing just 1 percent of the world’s fields, and as a group they are in decline.

But there’s more. The affordability of hydrocarbons will also matter greatly. Gail Tverberg has outlined in detail on her blog Our Finite World how the high price of hydrocarbons tends to suppress economic activity which then leads to a downturn that then causes oil and natural gas prices to fall due to falling demand. That fall in prices makes unconventional sources of oil and natural gas uncompetitive leading to a slowdown in their production even as production from conventional sources continues to decline. As prices rise with economic recovery, we begin the same cycle again. This suggests that there is a limit to how much of the modern economy’s financial and physical resources can be devoted to extracting energy without causing an economic contraction–something that the shark-like nature of the modern financial economy cannot withstand without the kind of severe repercussions we saw in 2008.

Despite our best efforts, we have only just been able to keep oil supplies from declining in the last seven years. Despite (possibly exaggerated) claims that we have more oil reserves than ever, we need to remember that the rate of flow, that is, our daily consumption, has grown by a factor of eight from 1950 to the present. And, half of all the oil ever consumed has been consumed since 1985. The available reserves may be large, but they are being consumed at such a colossal rate that supposedly record reserves have been unable to lift that rate appreciably above a plateau that started in 2005.

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Diesel is finite. Trucks are the bedrock of civilization. So where are the battery electric trucks?

Posted on August 17, 2021 by

Last updated: 2023-1-21

Preface. Heavy-duty diesel-engine trucks (agricultural, mining, logging, construction, garbage, cement, 18-wheelers, and more) are essential for doing the actual work of our fossil-fueled civilization. Without them, no goods would be delivered, no food grown, nothing manufactured, no garbage picked up, no minerals mined, no concrete hauled, no metals smelted, and more. If trucks stopped running, gas stations, grocery stores, factories, pharmacies, and manufacturers would shut down within a week and civilization would end (Friedemann 2016).

To understand why diesel engines are so amazingly powerful and why gasoline engines can’t substitute, watch this youtube video: Diesel vs EV vs Hydrogen vs LPG/CNG vs Biodiesel – Can We Ever Ditch Big Diesels?

Since world oil production peaked in 2018, replacing diesel trucks (and locomotives and ships) has become urgent. Yet there are no alternatives since biomass doesn’t scale up, and hydrogen is an energy sink. Nor can trucks run on batteries — they’re too heavy (see Friedemann 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy).  Battery development has also hit the brick-walls of the limited possible elements in the periodic table as well as the laws of physics and thermodynamics. There’s no reason to think a better battery will ever be invented, they’ve been around over 200 years and despite millions of “breakthroughs” are far from being able to move trucks for reasons explained in the post here.

Trucks that matter can haul 30 tons of goods and weigh 40 times more than an average car.  Batteries scaled up from cars for trucks are far too heavy.  For example, a truck capable of going 621 miles hauling 59,525 pounds, the maximum allowable cargo weight, would need a battery weighing 55,116 pounds, and carry 4,400 pounds of cargo (den Boer et al. 2013) that would take 12 hours or more to recharge.

Or as Ryan Carlyle, oil company engineer puts it: “As far as heavy trucking is concerned, there is no replacement for hydrocarbon fuels. The physics of power/weight ratios, and existence of legal road weight limits, means you simply can’t build an “electric semi” and expect it to haul anything comparable to what diesel trucks haul today. This is not an area where Tesla can build a 30% better battery pack and suddenly it’s feasible. The necessary energy density numbers are more like 50 times less than they need to be. The truck will use over half its payload capacity just carrying its own batteries. There are chemical limits to what batteries can do. Electrochemical galvanic cells physically cannot store enough energy — ever — to approach today’s large diesel engines (Carlyle 2014).

Microsoft founder Bill Gates agrees: ” The problem is that batteries are big and heavy. The more weight you’re trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle. But the more batteries you use, the more weight you add—and the more power you need. Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles (Gates 2020).”

FAST CHARGING can damage and shorten battery life. Fast charging trucks is essential. Truckers can not sit around for 12 unpaid hours honing life skills and learning to crochet while waiting for the battery to recharge. But fast charging trucks may never be possible. Scientists at U.C. Riverside recently fast charged batteries similar to Tesla batteries using existing highway fast charging technology. They found that batteries cracked, leaked, lost storage capacity, and suffered internal chemical and mechanical damage, reducing their lifespan. The high heat generated is also a danger that could lead to fire or explosion in the 7104 lithium-ion batteries in a Tesla Model S or the 4416 in a Tesla Model 3 (Quimby 2020).

Oxford professors estimated that the power needed to charge just one truck’s battery using fast charging in 30 minutes would use, over the course of a year, as much power as 4,000 households. Such fast charging is not possible yet and would put the electric grid under enormous stress (Harris 2017).

EV trucks in the news:

2022 Nikola has come out with a new class 8 electric truck, the Tre Bev. Most of these trucks will be bought in California and New York, where there are HVIP incentives of up to $150,000 for drayage clean air programs and $120,000 for non-drayage operations. Nikola expects to produce one a day 2022. Specs: 350 miles with 753 kWh battery pack. This is not a long-haul truck. It is a gigantic delivery truck clearly, since Nikola says it is designed for returning to base, frequent stops, short haul, multiple delivery locations, lighter payloads, average speed 25-45 mph, multiple delivery locations, and at 82,000 GCWR, too heavy to adapt to farm tractors and harvesters. Setting up charging has many steps and expenses, and requires many chargers and acres if the fleet has more than a few trucks, since it takes 1 or 2 chargers to charge 2 to 4 trucks a day. Charging can take up to 3.5 hours. Their cost is unknown, Forbes reported that Nikola said hundreds of thousands of dollars but wouldn’t be more specific than that. Nikola estimated their battery will cost $70 per kWh, so the 753 kWh battery alone would cost $52,710  and last 120,000 to 300,000 miles. And weigh 18,000 pounds, severely cutting into the amount of goods that could be carried (Sripad 2017).

Neely T (2022) Barriers Exist to Rural EV Adoption Witnesses Tell House Ag Committee Rural America Not Ready for Electric Vehicles. Progressive farmer. https://www.dtnpf.com/agriculture/web/ag/news/business-inputs/article/2022/01/12/witnesses-tell-house-ag-committee

[ my comment: the most important sector of transportation that needs to be electrified to cope with energy decline are agricultural diesel vehicles (i.e. tractors and harvesters) to continue to provide food. Doesn’t look like it will happen].

Witnesses told the House Agriculture Committee on Wednesday that rural America in particular faces a number of barriers to overcome (Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Geoff cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable fuels Association):

  • There are more than 267 million light-duty vehicles in the U.S. and just 2.3 million are battery electric or plug-in hybrid EVs, so even with increased electric vehicle sales in the years ahead, it would take decades to turn over the fleet
  • EVs still can’t meet the overall practical performance requirements, especially in rural areas, especially the length of time it takes to recharge EV batteries.  Instead of 5 minutes to fill a pickup truck’s tank, a standard level-two charger takes about 10 hours. So-called superchargers can drop that to 40 minutes, but that’s still 8 times longer. To match that means installing at least 10-fold more electric pumps superchargers than exist as gas pumps and superchargers cost twice as much as a gasoline pump — a 20-fold higher infrastructure cost.
  • Superchargers operate at 10-fold higher power levels than standard chargers requiring the rural logistical distribution infrastructure to be upgraded radically, an infrastructure that’s already far more expensive per household than in urban areas. Add in the hidden costs in rural areas where there are 50% more frequent power outages than urban areas.
  • Travel in rural outages is easily overcome with $100 of gasoline. But it would cost over $30,000 to buy a home-based battery storage system with enough backup power for just half of the pickup truck’s battery
  • Mass adoption of EVs would dramatically stress global supply chains and lead to higher battery prices in the coming years. Studies have shown that demand would increase from 400% to over 4,000% for the various critical minerals that are needed to build all the hardware on average.
  • Compared to a gasoline vehicle, an EV entails at least a 1,000% increase in the overall tonnage of materials that are extracted from the earth to deliver the same lifetime miles, a growth in demand for materials far greater right now than the rate at which the world’s miners are able to expand supply.
  • It will be difficult to electrify medium and heavy-duty vehicles.

For $5.1 million dollars, paid for by the state of California’s cap and trade program, the Port of Oakland received 10 Class 8 drayage Peterbilt Model 579EVs, ten electric charging stations, and a new electrical substation and power lines which took two years to complete.  In addition, in California they are eligible for a $150,000 Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP) voucher. The Peterbilt 597EVs have a range of 150 miles on their 396 kWh battery, and with a DC fast-charger can be recharged in 3 to 4 hours (Adler 2021).  For comparison, 10 diesel drayage trucks would cost about $1.2 million dollars with a range of over 1,000 miles.

Volvo has an electric class 8 truck that can go 150 miles with a $185,000 rebate from the NYC Department of Transportation’s Clean Trucks Program (O’Donnell 2021).

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, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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There are not any commercially available heavy-duty Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) outside the transit bus segment at this time. It is not expected that BEVs can penetrate into the long-haul trucking vocation in the next several decades, where significant high speed steady-state operations dominate the vehicles duty cycle, without significant advances in battery energy density and BEV recharging technologies. (ARB 2015).

There are however, demonstration projects with class 8 electric trucks.  The first, NFI, has two trucks running between Chino and the Ports of Los Angeles/San Pedro 135 miles round-trip using two of the five heavy-duty charging stations in Southern California. Only one round-trip can be made, there isn’t enough juice left in the battery to go again. The second, Penske is averaging 150 miles per shift on dedicated routes to a California quick-service restaurant chain with two battery-powered trucks in a relay system to make the most of the available electric charge.  And other demonstration projects are planned (Adler 2019).

Nikola claimed to have a working Nikola One truck and portrayed it as fully functional with a video called “Nikola One Electric Semi Truck in Motion.  But investment firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report claiming that the Nikola One wasn’t close to being fully functional. Even more incredible, Hindenburg reported that the truck in the “Nikola One in motion” video wasn’t moving under its own power. Rather, Nikola had towed the truck to the top of a shallow hill and let it roll down. The company allegedly tilted the camera to make it look like the truck was traveling under its own power on a level roadway, and has admitted that it didn’t have a working hydrogen fuel cell or motors to drive the wheels, the two key components (Lee 2020).

And the latest Nikola scandle from August 1, 2021: Nikola electric-truck prototypes were powered by hidden wall sockets, towed into position and rolled down hills. The prototypes didn’t function and were Frankenstein monsters cobbled together from parts from other vehicles. Nikola also overstated the number of pre-orders the company had received. Federal prosecutors have charged the founder of the Nikola Corp. (NKLA) with lying to investors about the supposed technological breakthroughs the company had achieved in order to drive up its stock price. Prosecutors said in the initial period following Nikola starting to trade publicly, the value of Milton’s shares shot up by $7 billion. After it emerged the company was under investigation, shares tanked causing many retail investors to lose tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars, prosecutors said. In some cases, some investors lost substantial portions of their retirement savings, they said. Nikola founder Milton was taken into custody and later released on a $100 million bond.

Electric trucks do exist, mostly medium-duty hybrid that stop and start a lot to recharge the battery.  This limits their application to delivery and garbage trucks and buses.  These trucks are heavily subsidized at state and federal levels since on average they cost three times as much as a diesel truck equivalent (Table 1).

But even these stop-and-start a lot to recharge the battery trucks may not be economically feasible. Nikola Motor Company’s plans to mass produce 5,000 garbage trucks for Republic Services, one of the nation’s largest waste management service providers, were canceled, the latest in a string of bad news for the electric truck and hydrogen cell maker (Alcorn 2020).

The most vital truck is a farm tractor to plant and harvest food. A battery-driven tractor would have to be very small or the weight would compact the soil and reduce crop productivity for many decades. The first one I saw appear in the search engine was the 7030 series John Deere battery pack tractor in December 2016, and it was pretty small.  But they never did make it, and it isn’t even mentioned anywhere on their website.

The latest tractor, not in production but promised in 2021, is the $50,000 Monarch Electric Tractor with peak power of 70 HP for a few seconds, otherwise 40 HP (Smith 2020). The farmers comments were interesting:

  • Most farmers I know frequently have to drive their tractors long distances, sometimes miles, just to get to the field of the day. And there’s no power out there…. Talk about range anxiety!
  • 40hp class tractors do not usually till fields. Where I am now, for these applications we see a 75hp class tractor at the very least, usually 90hp and up on larger farms
  • Take it from someone who is actually a farmer. This will never take over the heavy tractor work as there are constant interactions due to irregularities in the ground which require the operator to adjust the tractor or the attached implement to the terrain, ie. rocks, roots, animal burrows. drainage etc. Farming is extremely brutal on equipment and it must be durable enough and simple enough to fix so that we don’t miss very small time windows on each step of the process. Farming has ridiculously small margins so the economic proposition of service life vs. amortized and operating costs over that life must make sense no one wants to pay $4 for one onion.
  • I bought my MF 133 for $1200 USD and it works just fine for being 50 years old. Would I like 4WD? Yeah. Would I like an electric? Sure! Do I see this thing running very long in -10º with a snow-blower hanging off of the PTO? Color me skeptical.
  • As far as the “goal of 20-plus years of continuous service life” — uh huh. Considering my issues and my friend’s issues with getting EVs repaired, I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • I know a few farmers (corn, beans and hogs or cattle) and they dont really have a use for a 40-70hp tractor. This is likely to end up at grape vineyards or hobby farmers who use a tractor intensely for a few days or weeks of the year.
  • The grid is thin in the country, if battery tractors existed, could they all charge up at once in the narrow planting and harvesting seasons?

Tractors  do a lot of heavy work over rough ground, and today only internal combustion engines can provide efficient mobile and portable heavy-duty power (DTF 2003).

The Port of Los Angeles thought about using heavy-duty all-electric drayage trucks to improve air quality. Drayage trucks drive at least 200 miles a day back and forth between the port and inland warehouses. But it remained a thought experiment because electric drayage trucks cost too much, $307,890.  The 350 kWh battery alone is $110,880 dollars.  That’s three times as much as an equivalent diesel truck $104,360, and 100 times more than a used $3,000 drayage truck. And cost wasn’t the only problem (Calstart 2013a):

  • The range is too short because of the battery weight and size.  Drayage trucks need to go at least 200 miles a day, but at best an electric truck could go 100 miles before having to be recharged, which would take too long, and require expensive infrastructure to charge each truck several times a day.
  • The batteries/battery pack cost too much.
  • Overcoming the long time to recharge by using fast-charging may shorten battery life which would result in the unacceptable expense of a new battery pack before the lifetime of the truck ended
  • Although electricity is available almost everywhere, the quantities required for a fleet of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) drayage trucks are very high and could require significant infrastructure. Multiple costly high-power and/or fast-charging stations would be required
  • Roadway power infrastructure is complicated and expensive, and may be appropriate only in certain areas or applications. The impact on the grid and whether enough power could be supplied is unknown for the roughly 10,000 drayage trucks in the I-710 region
  • Large battery pack life-cycle and maintenance costs are unknown
  • Swapping stations are impractical and would require “industry standardization and ‘ruggedization’ of battery packs, as well as standardized software and communication protocols for batteries and system integration, plus many locations, and the storage space and operating space for multiple large trucks and hundreds of large battery packs.
cost of electric vs diesel trucks 2016Table 1. Electric trucks coust 3 times more than diesel equivalents (ICEV) on average. Source: 2016 New York State Electric Vehicle – Voucher Incentive Fund Vehicle Eligibility List. https://truck-vip.ny.gov/NYSEV-VIF-vehicle-list.php

Other costs

  • Battery cost is a major component in the overall cost, ranging from $500 to $700 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) range. This is substantially more than the cost for a conventional diesel powerplant. In their 2013 I-710 commercialization study, CALSTART estimated the cost of a 350 kWh battery system at over $200,000 in 2012.
  • A BEV 240 kW fast charger can cost can cost $1,500,000 (with $300,000 in additional costs). It can charge 5 heavy duty trucks (ICF 2016) per charger: $350,000 EVSE 450kW+ $150,000 to $200,000 installation costs per EVSE (Calstart 2015), or $350,000 for a specialized Proterra fast charger able to accommodate up to eight Proterra transit buses (ARB 2015)
  • Additional costs to upgrade the distribution system if the rated capacity of the installed electric equipment is exceeded. A fleet with 20 E-Trucks in Southern California had to upgrade a transformer on the customer side of the meter. The transformer cost $470,000. 100 medium-duty E-Trucks charging at the same time would demand 1.5 MW of power on the grid and 50 E-Buses would demand 3.0 MW. This is in the same order of magnitude as the peak power demand of the Transamerica Pyramid building, the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, CA (Calstart 2015)
  • Unlike electric cars, which can charge at night when rates are lowest (11 pm to 8 am for $0.05), e-trucks and buses need to run during the day at the highest peak hours (12 noon to 6 p.m. $0.20) and mid-peak charges (8 a.m. to noon and 6 pm to 11 pm ($0.10), doubling to quadrupling the price paid for electricity (Calstart 2015).
  • Earning money from V2G is not likely to be adopted by commercial fleets because they have rigid operating schedules while the grid varies constantly and unpredictably. If the grid tapped into e-truck batteries, it might reduce their range or delay availability (Calstart 2015)

Electric trucks are also not commercial yet because they have too many performance issues, such as poor performance in cold weather, swift acceleration, driving up steep hills, too short a range and battery life, they take too long to recharge, declining miles per day as the battery degrades, all of which make planning routes difficult and inefficient.

It is also much harder to develop batteries for trucks than cars because trucks are expected to last 15 years (versus 10 for cars) or go for 1 million miles.  Trucks also have to endure more extreme conditions of temperature, vibrations, and corrosive agents than autos (NRC 2015), and it is hard to make battery packs durable enough for this rougher ride, longer miles, and longevity.

Calstart interviewed many businesses about their reluctance to buy hybrid or all electric trucks, and found their greatest concerns were the purchase cost, lack of confidence in the technology, lack of industry and truck manufacturer support, lack of infrastructure, and the heavy weight (Calstart 2012).

Elon Musk recently tweeted that Tesla will build a semi-truck with absolutely no details, promising to tweet again half a year from now with more information. Why should I believe an Elon Musk tweet any more than a Trump tweet?  Especially since nearly all of the electric truck companies I studied for “When Trucks Stop Running” are out of business now, despite huge federal and state subsidies. Given that Tesla is nearly $5 billion in debt, he’s clearly angling to get drayage truck subsidies from the Ports of Los Angeles and San Pedro and more money from investors.  None of the electric trucks I studied or that are on the market now were long-haul or off-road tractors, harvesters, construction, logging, or other class 8 heavy-duty trucks (except garbage trucks).  They were all much smaller class 4-6 delivery trucks or buses, because they stop and start enough to use hybrid batteries, a far more commercially likely possibility than long-haul trucks, that can go for hundreds of miles before stopping, and be up to 80,000 pounds (and even more weight off-road).  This wired.com article points out other issues as well with electric trucks as well.

But if the devil is in the details, then read more below in my summary and excerpts of a paper about electric trucks.  Catenary trucks, which use overhead wires, will be covered in another post.  Both electric and catenary trucks are covered at greater length in “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer

Abbreviations:

  • BEV Battery Electric Vehicle
  • PEV Plug-in Battery Electric Vehicle
  • HEV Hybrid Electric Vehicle
  • ICEV Internal Combustion Engine Vehicle (usually diesel, also gasoline engines)

What follows is a summary and then details of the following paper:

Pelletier, S., et al. September 2014. Battery Electric Vehicles for Goods Distribution: A Survey of Vehicle Technology, Market Penetration, Incentives and Practices. CIRRELT. 51 pages.

SUMMARY

Financial

While commercial BEVs’ energy costs can be nearly four times cheaper than ICEV equivalents, the downside is that their purchase costs are around three times higher.

A study of drayage trucks on the I-710 corridor found that $3,000 old used trucks were used to take containers from Los Angeles ports to inland facilities that paid $100 per container delivered.   “Costs for a full BEV truck are not expected to go below $250,000 even past the 2025 time frame of this report. … The same is true for fuel cells” (Calstart 2013b).

Furthermore, the cost of the equipment necessary for charging the battery can be several thousand dollars. The high cost of level 3 Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) is still a significant barrier to a wider adoption of fast charging. Level 2 charging equipment costs approximately $1,000 per station and installation costs approximately $2,500 to $6,000 for one unit or $18,520 for 10 units. Level 3 fast charging is not used much yet because more research needs to be done on whether this shortens battery life.

PEV and HEV vehicles typically have significant autonomy and payload limitations and involve much larger initial investments in comparison to internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV). The battery pack is the most expensive component in PEVs and significantly augments their purchase cost compared to similar ICEV trucks.

Competing with compressed natural gas (CNG) and existing diesel (ICEV) trucks will be hard — significant improvements in ICEV efficiencies are likely in the future from the 21st Century truck partnership and other efforts to improve diesel engines.  BEVs will also have to compete with other fuel alternatives such as CNG, in which case their business case can be even harder to make.

Battery Issues

Can’t carry enough cargo: Battery size and weight reduce maximum payloads for electric vans and trucks compared to equivalent diesel trucks.  Even HEVs suffer from the extra weight of two power-trains reducing payload capacity.

Short range. Technical disadvantages include a relatively low achievable range. Typical ranges for freight BEVs vary from 100 to 150 kilometers (62-93 miles) on a single charge.

The miles a truck can travel declines over time.  In Germany and the Netherlands, the limited operating range of electric trucks caused less flexibility in planning trips and restricted ad-hoc tour planning, resulting in less efficient operations. Also, the range declined over time through battery aging, when carrying heavy loads, and in winter from heating, lights and ventilation. Furthermore, the range listed by EV manufacturers is based on measurements according to the New European Drive Cycle which, compared to real life energy consumption in urban last mile delivery, do not give a reliable indication of the expected range. The reliability of the EVs was dependent on the model; certain prototypes and conversions were judged as reliable, while others were reported as insufficient (Taefi 2014).

Short battery life. At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years.

Range is also shortened by: extreme temperatures, high driving speeds, rapid acceleration, carrying heavy loads and driving up slopes.   The efficiency and driving range varies substantially based on driving conditions and driving habits. Extreme outside temperatures tend to reduce range because more energy must be used to heat or cool the cabin. Cold batteries do not provide as much power as warm batteries do. The use of electrical equipment, such as windshield wipers and seat heaters, can reduce range. High driving speeds reduce range because more energy is required to overcome increased air resistance. Rapid acceleration reduces range compared with smooth acceleration. Hauling heavy loads or driving up significant inclines also reduces range (U.S. Department of Energy 2012b).

Long time to charge battery: It takes a long time to charge the batteries because of their low energy density.  Recharging time may take up to 4 to 8 hours, and even with quick-charging equipment, recharging a battery to 80% takes up to 30 minutes.

Charging issues:  The most common way of charging was to slow charge the vehicles over night at company premises. The in-house charging infrastructure had to be fixed several times when it was overloaded by the high capacity need of the e-trucks in Germany. Other charging related issues found were that the implementation of a smart grid and load management for large electrical fleets is not yet clarified; solutions to ensure charging in case of power outage are necessary; and charging plugs were too damageable, so only specially trained staff could handle the plug, which caused problems with replacement drivers and training issues.  The limited number of charging spots outside the cities and lack of battery swapping for larger vehicles was also an issue (Taefi 2014).

Batteries have low energy density — too low. Batteries are a critical factor in the widespread adoption of electric vehicles but have a much lower energy density than gasoline, partly caused by the large amount of metals used in their production.

Battery life too short: Lithium-ion batteries in current freight BEVs typically provide 1,000 to 2,000 deep cycle life, which should last around six years.

Some manufacturers are working on a 4,000 to 5,000 deep cycle life within 5 years, but there are often tradeoffs to be made between different lithium based battery chemistries. For example, lithium-titanate batteries already reach 5,000 full discharge cycles, but have lower energy densities than other lithium-ion technologies. Calendar life, on the other hand, is a measure of natural degradation with time and was in the 7-10 years range as of 2010 with a projected range of 13-15 years by 2020. Typical battery warranty lengths for electric trucks have been reported as being in the three to five year range.

Battery degradation. Battery health can be influenced by the way they are charged and discharged. For example, frequent overcharging (i.e., charging the battery close to maximum capacity) can affect the battery’s lifespan, just as can keeping the battery at high states of charge for lengthy periods. As expressed through deep cycle life, battery deterioration can also occur if it is frequently discharged to very deep levels . This generally implies that only 80% of the marketed battery capacity is actually usable. Using high power levels to quickly charge batteries could also have negative impacts on battery life, especially if used in the beginning and end of the charging cycle. The uncertainty regarding the effect of extreme operational temperatures on lithium batteries is another issue that should be further considered. All these potential deteriorating factors can speed up the reduction of maximum available battery capacity and shorten vehicle range and battery life.

Lithium-ion batteries.  At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years (AustriaTech 2014).

The Demands on the Electric Grid

Power Requirements to recharge batteries are high.  A battery electric truck with a 120 kWh battery would require a charging power level of 15 kW to be able to charge in 8 hours, and the same vehicle with a battery pack of 200 kWh would require a power level of 400 kW to be able to be charged in 15-30 minutes.

The impact of the high power demand from the electricity grid. This could limit the amount of vehicles in a depot which could simultaneously be charged with high power levels, potentially requiring further investments for transformer upgrades.

The stations would also need to recharge a very large amount of batteries at the same time, which could impact the electric grid.

Out of Business

Better Place was considered a fron-trunner in the battery swapping industry but it recently filed for bankruptcy (Fiske (2013)).

Some models have recently been discontinued due to manufacturers’ financial difficulties or restructuring plans; these include Azure Dynamics’ Transit Connect Electric in 2012, Navistar’s eStar in 2013, and Modec’s Box Van in 2011.

Commercial Vehicles are dependent on government subsidies

To see the New York State All-Electric NYSEV-VIF incentives, click here.

To see the California Hybrid Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP) incentives, click here.

Many U.S. companies which operate battery electric trucks also have received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  

Plug-in electric trucks and vans (class 2 to 8 vehicles) have generally only penetrated niche applications, while remaining dependent on government incentives. They attribute this to key industry players going out of business, the conservative nature of fleet operators when it comes to new technologies, renewed interest in natural gas, and the important cost premium of these vehicles.

Sales of HEV & BEV trucks are very low

The global stock of class 2 to 8 HEVs, PHEVs and BEVs was around 20,000 at the end of 2013, versus 15 million diesel and gasoline (ICEV) trucks sold in 2013.

The vast majority of expected sales are not fully electric plug-ins, but are Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) which do not require plug-in recharging (but which are only suitable for applications that require a great deal of stopping and starting, i.e. garbage trucks, delivery vans).

One of project FREVUE’s reports identifies other factors explaining the limited use of electric freight vehicles in city logistics, namely doubts regarding technology readiness, high purchase costs, limited amount of models on the market, and rapid technology improvements themselves can be a market barrier since fleet operators fear that an electric freight vehicle purchased today could quickly lose all residual value. The uncertainties surrounding the vehicles’ residual value also limit leasing companies’ interest in electric freight vehicles.

The bottom line is that a wider adoption of Battery Electric Vehicles can only be achieved if these prove to be cost-effective.

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[ Here are more details. ]

The worst possible use of an e-truck is daily mileage less than 40 km, never needs to return to the base, has little chance of charging while on operations, needs to be charged in 20 minutes or less, carry a full load equal to a diesel truck, carries the full load all day, goes the same speed much of the day, travels on freeways, hilly terrain, and charges at peak load. The best possible use of EV is 60+ km/day, returns to the base to recharge 3 to 6 times a day for 30 minutes a day, carries half a load, has very high variations in speeds traveled in flat urban areas and only charges off-peak (AustriaTech 2014b).

Cost Competitiveness of Battery Electric Vans and Trucks

While commercial BEVs’ energy costs can be nearly four times cheaper than diesel equivalents, the downside is that their purchase costs are approximately three times higher (Feng and Figliozzi 2013).

Furthermore, the cost of the equipment necessary for charging the vehicle’s battery, which can reach several thousands of dollars, should be considered. Maintenance costs should also be significantly less than for ICEVs (Taefi et al. (2014)) and this advantage should increase as the vehicles get older (Electrification Coalition (2010)). Because of these different cost structures between ICEVs and BEVs, the only way to appropriately compare the cost competitiveness of battery electric vans and trucks for goods distribution is to study their whole life costs (McMorrin et al. 2012), according to which all costs incurred over the vehicle’s life are actualized to a net present value. Whole life costs are also referred to as the vehicle’s total cost of ownership (TCO). The following are brief descriptions of the cost structure and TCO of battery electric freight vehicles compared to their conventional counterparts.

Cost Structure: High Fixed Costs and Low Variable Costs Purchase costs for medium duty battery electric trucks offered by AMP Trucks, Inc., Boulder Electric Vehicles, Electric Vehicle International, and Smith Electric Vehicles range from $130,000 to $185,000 US, while equivalent ICE trucks go within the $55,000 to $70,000 range (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014)). One way to decrease the cost premium of these larger BEVs is to be able to right-size the costly battery according to the application (Electrification Coalition 2013). However, while this measure could significantly improve the vehicles’ business case and allow for additional payload capacity, the smaller battery would require more frequent deep discharges, which could cause accelerated battery deterioration (Pitkanen and Van Amburg 2012). Another option for reducing upfront costs while also addressing fleet operators’ concerns about battery life is to lease the battery for a monthly fee based on energy consumed or distance traveled (McMorrin et al. 2012).

However, uncertainties regarding battery residual value limit many fleets’ interest in battery leasing (Pitkanen and Van Amburg (2012)), most likely because these uncertainties will be integrated into the leasing fee. Furthermore, battery leasing currently only seems available for a few battery electric vans but not for trucks, for whom it could significantly help the business case based on whole life costs (Valenta (2013)). Purchase costs for battery electric vans vary largely depending on GVWs and the availability of battery leasing. Large manufacturer products with battery leasing go for about $25,000 for GVWs close to 2,100 kg. Examples of these include Renault for its Kangoo Z.E. vans and Nissan for its e-NV200 van, with monthly battery leasing fees starting at approximately $100 per month and varying according to monthly mileage and contract lengths (Renault (2014c), Nissan (2014d)). Typical purchase costs with battery ownership range from approximately $25,000 for lighter battery electric vans (GVW starting at 1100 kg) with limited battery capacities, to about $100,000 for larger battery electric vans (GVW up to 3,500 kg) with higher battery capacities. Conventional cargo vans with GVWs close to 4,500 kg cost between $30,000 and $40,000, GVWs close to 3,500 kg are within the $25,000-$30,000 price range, and GVWs around 2,500 kg are closer to $20,000 (Nissan (2014a)).

Valuable sources for vehicle prices include Source London (2013) and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014), referred to as SL (2013) and NYSEV-VIF (2014) in the tables. Some models’ prices are simply not available, most likely because, as Lee et al. (2013, p.8025) point out, “commercial vehicle prices can vary depending upon negotiation between fleet operators and truck manufacturers, and truck volumes to be purchased”. This could also imply that the prices listed here could vary depending on specific purchasing contexts. Ranges for these class 3 to 6 trucks are from 115 to 200 km (71-124 miles) depending on battery size, vehicle weight

  • $133,000 AMP vehicles 100 kWh battery, 6350-8845 kg GVW
  • $130-150,000 Boulder 500-series 72 kWh battery, 4765-5215 kg GVW, payload 1405 kg,
  • $150,000 Navistar eStar 80 kWh battery 5490 kg GVW, payload 1860 kg
  • $185,000 EVI walk-in van 99 kWh battery, 7255-10435 GVW
  • $150,000 Smith Electric “Newton” 80 kWh, $181,000 with a 120 kWh battery

Den Boer et al. (2013) state that approximately 1,000 battery electric distribution trucks were operated around the world as of July 2013. CALSTART’s report on the demand assessment of electric truck fleets (Parish and Pitkanen 2012) claims that industry experts have estimated there were less than 500 battery electric trucks in use in North America as of 2012, with most sales made in US states like California and New York, which offered incentives for these vehicles. Also, approximately 4,500 hybrid electric trucks were sold in North America as of 2012. The large majority of hybrid and battery electric trucks sold were in medium duty and vocational applications rather than long-haul class 8 applications. Stocks of freight electric vehicles (vans and trucks) as of January 1st 2012 in Europe included 70 in Belgium, 106 in Denmark, 338 in Germany, 1,566 in France, 217 in the Netherlands, 103 in Norway, 38 in Austria, 13 in Portugal, 459 in Spain, and over 2000 in London (TU Delft et al. 2013). However, most of the electric vans in the UK are old low performance vans with lead-acid batteries, with only a few hundred modern electric vans with lithium-ion batteries sold in 2012 (Cluzel et al. 2013).

As previously noted, the advantage in the cost structure of BEVs comes from their lower variable costs (i.e., energy and maintenance costs) (McMorrin et al. 2012).

However, electricity rates incurred depend on geographical location, average consumption levels, and time of use (Hydro-Quebec (2014)). Charging during off-peak hours can allow for reduced electricity rates and seasonal price variations may also occur. It is therefore necessary to evaluate the potential of lower energy costs of commercial BEVs according to one’s specific context.

Gallo and Tomi´ c (2013) provide an overview of the performance of delivery BEVs (class 4-5) operated by a large parcel delivery fleet in Los Angeles. The findings showed that in comparison to similar diesel vehicles, the electric trucks were up to four times more energy efficient, offering up to 80% lower annual fuel costs. The report estimated maintenance savings ranging from $0.02 to $0.10 per mile, finding these savings “will vary widely depending on driving conditions, vehicle usage, driver behavior, vehicle model and regenerative braking usage”(p.53). Other findings included the need for drivers to be trained to adapt their techniques to electric trucks, that a minimum utilization of 50 miles per day is necessary to recuperate purchase costs in a reasonable time span, and that incentives are still necessary at this stage to make the vehicles a viable alternative. Additionally, some repairs needed to be provided by the vehicle manufacturers because of the limited experience of fleet mechanics with electric trucks. TU Delft et al. (2013) also reported several companies having experienced a lack of available resources for quickly solving technical issues with freight BEVs. This is important to consider because in order to profit from lower variable costs, companies must have access to reliable maintenance services and spare parts.

Figliozzi (2013) compared whole life costs of battery electric delivery trucks to a conventional diesel truck serving less-than-truckload delivery routes. The BEVs are the Navistar eStar (priced at $150,000) and Smith Newton (priced at $150,000), while the diesel reference is an Isuzu N-series (priced at $50,000). Different urban delivery scenarios were designed based on typical US cities values and different routing constraints. Thus, 243 different route instances were simulated by varying values for the number of customers, the service area, the depot-service area distance, the customer service time, and the customer demand weight. Different battery replacement and cost scenarios were also studied. The planning horizon was set to ten years, with the residual value of the vehicles set at 20% of their purchase price. In spite of the fact that the electric trucks had a higher TCO in 210 out of the 243 route instances, a combination of the following factors would allow them to be a viable alternative: high daily distances, low speeds and congestion, frequent customer stops during which an ICEV would idle, other factors amplifying the BEVs’ superior efficiency, financial incentives or technological breakthroughs to reduce purchase costs, and a planning horizon above ten years. With a battery replacement after 150,000 miles at a forecasted cost of $600/kWh, the diesel truck always had a lower TCO.

The need for a battery replacement significantly decreases thee business case for BEV Trucks

Battery electric freight vehicles currently fit much more into city distribution than long haul applications because of the battery’s energy density limitations (den Boer et al. 2013). Typical daily miles traveled by urban delivery trucks are often lower than the range already achieved by electric commercial vehicles (Feng and Figliozzi 2013). With limited payloads, this makes them more viable for last mile deliveries in urban areas involving frequent stop-and-go movements, limited route lengths, as well as low travel speeds (Nesterova et al. 2013), AustriaTech 2014b), Taefi et al. 2014)). With forecasted reductions in battery costs and evolution of diesel prices are compared to electricity prices, as time goes by, BEV distribution trucks should become more competitive with equivalent ICEVs based on their own economic proposition (den Boer et al. 2013). However, commercial BEVs will also have to compete with other fuel alternatives such as compressed natural gas, in which case their business case can be even harder to make (Valenta 2013). Furthermore, significant improvements in ICEV efficiencies are expected in upcoming years (Mosquet et al. (2011)). Nevertheless, for now, the appropriateness of using delivery BEVs ultimately depends on the context of their intended use, but the high purchase cost has been extensively pointed out as a huge cost effectiveness barrier, and the need for incentives at this stage of the market seems like a recurring requirement for a viable business case.

Financial Incentives

The goal of financial incentives is to reduce the upfront costs of electric vehicles and charging equipment (IEA and EVI (2013)). One form is purchase subsidies granted upon buying the vehicle (Mock and Yang (2014)). An example of this is the California Hybrid Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project (HVIP) which provides up to $35,000 towards hybrid truck purchases and up to $50,000 towards battery electric truck purchases to be used in California (Parish and Pitkanen (2012)). Eligible vehicles can be found in CEPAARB (2014). Another similar program is the New York Truck Voucher Incentive Program, which offers up to $60,000 for electric truck purchases to be used New York (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (2014)).

Companies are also eligible to receive similar purchase subsidies for participating in demonstration or performance evaluation projects (US DOE (2013b)).

Overviews of tax exemptions related to electric vehicles can be found in IEA and EVI (2013), Mock and Yang (2014), ACEA (2014), and US DOE (2012a).

Companies Experimenting with BEVs In North America, large companies using battery electric delivery vehicles include FedEx, General Electric, Coca-Cola, UPS, Frito-Lay, Staples, Enterprise, Hertz and others (Electrification Coalition (2013b)). Frito-Lay alone has been operating 176 battery electric delivery trucks in North America since 2010 (US DOE (2014b)). Fedex also operates over 100 electric delivery trucks (Woody (2012)). Many U.S. companies which operate battery electric trucks have received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to cover a portion of the vehicles’ purchase costs (US DOE (2013b)).

BEVs in city logistics have often been used for parcel delivery, deliveries to stores, waste collection and home supermarket deliveries. A few notable private initiatives identified in the report include Deret’s 50 electric vans for last mile deliveries to city centers in France, UPS’s 12 Modec vehicles for parcel and post delivery in the UK and Germany, Tesco’s 15 Modec vehicles for on-line shopping deliveries in London, Sainsbury’s use of 19 electric vans for supermarket

Drivers expressed concerns regarding the reduction in payloads.

Delivered products include parcel, courier, textiles, fast food, bakery, hygienic articles and household articles.

Negative factors experienced included the required investments (vehicles and EVSE), reduced payloads, limited range, the effect of cold temperatures on range, imprecise marketed vehicle ranges, the lack of resources to fix technical problems, incompatibility of vehicles’ connectors with public charging infrastructure, and the need to train drivers to better adapt to the vehicles. All in all, the case studies indicated that the vehicles were found to be most adequate for last mile and night deliveries.

Electric Tricycles carrying up to 440 pounds (200 kg)

Electric tricycle

Urban consolidation centers (UCC) are logistic facilities multiple organizations use, close to the area they serve. UCCs using BEVs for last mile deliveries also often use smaller vehicles ideal for tight urban areas, which can lead to increases in vehicle kilometers per ton delivered (Allen et al. (2012)). These smaller vehicles are typically electric tricycles, which have payloads of up to 200 kg (AustriaTech 2014b) and low driving speeds. These tricycles can find parking locations more easily than larger vehicles, can often use bicycle lanes for faster access to customers in congested and pedestrian areas, and from a cost point of view are more affected by driver costs than purchase costs and utilization rates (Tipagornwong and Figliozzi 2014). Allen et al. (2007) present an example of the use of electric tricycles by a UCC. La Petite Reine used a consolidation center in the center of Paris for last mile deliveries of food products, flowers, parcels, and equipment/parts with electric tricycles with a maximum payload of 100 kg (220 pounds). The initial trial in 2003 was deemed a success, with monthly trips growing from 796 to 14,631 and the number of tricycles from seven to 19 in the first 24 months. Operations are now permanent and La Petite Reine operates three locations in Paris with over 70 collaborators, 80 tricycles, 15 electric light duty vehicles and 1 million deliveries per year (La Petite Reine 2013).

Nesterova et al. (2013) present two other cases of two phased deliveries in Paris integrating to some extent electric bikes and tricycles. The first is Chronopost International, which offers express delivery of parcels and uses two underground areas in Paris for sorting last mile deliveries. The parcels are first transported from their facility at the border of Paris to their underground areas, where they are sorted per route and distributed to customers by electric bikes and vans in inner Paris. The second is Distripolis, a delivery concept tested by road transport operator GEODIS. A depot in Bercy receives shipments from three organizations and delivers the packages under 200 kg to multiple UCCs in the city center of Paris (heavier packages are directly delivered to the receiver). From here, electric trucks and tricycles are used for the last mile deliveries of the light packages. Distripolis operated 10 light duty electric vehicles (Electron Electric truck, GVW 3.5 tons) and one electric tricycle in 2012, and aims at having 56 tricycles and 75 electric vehicles by 2015.

BESTFACT (2013) provides another case of two-phased deliveries with electric vehicles. Gnewt Cargo operates a transhipment facility for the last mile deliveries of an office supplies company in London (Office Depot). They use an 18 tons vehicle to transport parcels from the office supplies company warehouse in the suburbs of London to the transhipment center in the city, where the parcels are transferred onto electric vans and tricycles for final delivery to customers. Initially a trial in 2009, the company has permanently implanted this system because it involved no increases in operational costs, and it plans to implement similar delivery systems in other cities (Browne et al. (2011)).

Other Interesting Distribution Concepts for BEVs

An interesting experiment regarding last mile deliveries with BEVs can be found in the context of project STRAIGHTSOL, during which TNT Express integrated a mobile depot into their operations in Brussels with electric vehicles during the summer of 2013 (Nathanail et al. 2013), Anderson and Eidhammer 2013), Verlinde et al. 2014). A large trailer equipped as a mobile depot with typical depot facilities was loaded with parcels at TNT’s depot near the airport in the morning. Next it was towed by a truck to a dedicated parking spot in the city center, where last mile deliveries as well as pick-ups were made with electric tricycles by a Brussels courier company, which then returned to the mobile depot with the collected parcels. At the end of the day, the mobile depot was towed back to TNT’s depot, from where the collected parcels were shipped. Challenges included gaining exclusive access to the parking location for the mobile depot, significant increases in operating costs, and decreases in the punctuality of the deliveries and pickups (Johansen et al. 2014), Verlinde et al. 2014).

They could find a niche application in short haul port drayage operations (CALSTART 2013b). One example of this practice is found at the Port of Los Angeles, where 25 heavy duty battery electric drayage trucks manufactured by Balqon were tested for operational suitability. In exchange for the purchase of the trucks, Balqon agreed to locate its factory in L.A. and pay the port a royalty for future sales (EVI et al. (2012)). The Port of L.A. also tested similar heavy duty battery electric trucks from Transpower and U.S Hybrid, as well as a fuel cell heavy duty truck (Port of L.A. 2014).

Incentives still play a critical role in the business case of these vehicles, but the long-term unsustainability of certain financial incentives and recent trends suggest their imminent phasing out (Bernhart et al. 2014) will require that these vehicles be cost competitive independent of such incentives. One could argue that these vehicles are not ready for this challenge, in view of current cost dynamics, recent financial setbacks of key industry players, often resulting in discontinued vehicle models (Schmouker 2012), Shankleman 2011), Truckinginfo 2013), Everly 2014), Torregrossa 2014)).

The market take-up of electric vehicles in urban freight transport is very slow, because costs are high compared to conventional vehicles and companies are still uncertain about the maturity of the technology and about the availability of charging infrastructure.

The worst possible use of an e-truck is daily mileage less than 40 km, never needs to return to the base, has little chance of charging while on operations, needs to be charged in 20 minutes or less, carry a full load equal to a diesel truck, carries the full load all day, goes the same speed much of the day, travels on freeways, hilly terrain, and charges at peak load. The best possible use of EV is 60+ km/day, returns to the base to recharge 3 to 6 times a day for 30 minutes a day, carries half a load, has very high variations in speeds traveled in flat urban areas and only charges off-peak.

Financially at least 50% public subsidies pay for it

At present, lithium ion batteries are most often used in electric freight vehicles with a current battery lifetime of 1000 to 2000 cycles (approximately 6 years). Also, the kilometer range declines over time, which may reduce peak power capacity and energy density. For these reasons electric vehicles are currently most suitable for daily urban distribution activities as the battery energy density is too low for regular long haul applications. At the moment, lithium ion batteries last for four years; however, practical experience has shown that the average period of use is only two years. Improvements in battery powered trucks are expected within five years in terms of the cost and durability of batteries.

Related Articles

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Posted in Batteries, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Trucks: Electric | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Book review: The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century

Posted on August 15, 2021 by

Preface. Nate Hagens and DJ White’s book is the kind of book I’d like to write someday. Like them, I’d publish only in paper to preserve knowledge because the electric grid will come down some day since it can’t outlast fossil fuels, as I explain in my books “When Trucks stop running” and “Life After Fossil fuels”. One reason is that wind and solar are intermittent, so if the grid comes down even for an hour or less then computer chips can’t be built. Making computer chips requires thousands of steps over several weeks — any power outage and they all have to be tossed out. Microchips are the pinnacle of technical achievement and therefore likely to be the first to go away during the coming decline (as you can see in the The Fragility of Microprocessors section of the Preservation of Knowledge).  Yet so many books, magazines, and journals are found only online that can only be read with electrical devices that depend on microchips. Poof! All that knowledge will be gone when the grid goes down.

White & Hagens book was written for college students at the University of Minnesota. I’ve seen many iterations as Nate perfected his teachings over several years.  You couldn’t find a better book to give to anyone who is energy blind, but especially younger people since this book might change what career they choose. The authors recommend young people follow their passion, but I think there are some pretty obvious careers and skills to pursue as we return to a world powered by muscle and wood as fossil fuels decline and the electric grid winks out. And they should pursue their passion in a place that’s under carrying capacity, as Hall & Day advise in “America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends”.

Much of their book is about human psychology, which is critical to understanding how the coming Great Simplification may play out.  What follows are some excerpts that I’ve cut or paraphrased.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

White DJ, Hagens NJ (2019) The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century. Essays on the Systems Synthesis of the Human Predicament.

The way things have been the last several hundred years is not the way they have been for the bulk of the human past, nor will be for the bulk of human future. You exist in a near-stroboscopic blip of time in which humanity is churning through millions of years of resources in a one-time pulse. This has ramifications both wonderful and terrible, and we should probably make ourselves aware of them if we are to make self-awareness actually good for anything.

The information to be covered is existentially challenging, but the human condition has always faced existential challenges of one sort or another which required living humans to rise to them. But there’s a psychological adjustment to make that has to do with the tapestry of expectations and beliefs about the future we’ve soaked up from the cultural narratives we exist within. 

The long-term story of complex life is steered as much b catastrophe as by stability with ~99.9% of all species ever to live now extinct (or speciated).

Mankind’s cleverness at opening new niches finally tapped the dead remains of fossil plants from earlier eras. This grew human biomass by an order of magnitude and granted a bolus of temporary energy wealth, which humans created the industrial society run the energy of these long dead organisms. This enabled us to take anything we wanted, which is now leading to mass extinctions. 

Why does something feel bad or good to us at all? It’s because the ancestors who “felt good” about doing things which happened to enhance their relative fitness at that time survived to pass on these tendencies and the behavioral rewards inherent in their particular brain structure. Sex feels great.  Eating high-energy-content food feels great. Being a high-status tribal member feels great. Hating outgroups feels great. And killing large prey (and outgroup members during wartime) feels great. To some of us that is such an uncomfortable thing to hear it feels incorrect.  Our ability to recognize the way our own brains function is limited because our conscious minds can access only the output results of the more-powerful brain regions which influence us, and not the processes they use to arrive at those results.

The mindless evolution of life across the ages has created a world of incredible wonder and diversity. Our current economics consider this to have zero value, but in our mind se (most of us) realize otherwise. Swimming over a coral reef, walking in a rainforest with its sounds, hiking a desert, we are surrounded by other species that have survived until now. 

Then on page 99 my favorite part of the book – how candy and oil are similar.  I used to trick-or-treat for three nights: beggars night, Halloween, and clean-up, so I loved this metaphor.  Author DJ White sets it up by explaining that he was the oldest of four siblings and found more candy than the others by getting up first, and hiding his easter basket with candy from the other siblings baskets in the basement.  Now a metaphor of candy and economics and oil:

You can only eat what you find.  My dog understands this, but the fact that hardly any large new oilfields are being discovered hasn’t filtered into the common wisdom. The filled Easter baskets have long since been emptied, but most Americans think the USA is now a net oil exporter. Not even close.

You can only eat it once. Once you eat it, it’s gone. The sophistication of this parable has leapfrogged neoclassical economics, which believes that demand creates energy and that resources will always be found if the price is right. I literally seethed with demand during the lean months, but it didn’t make any candy appear. I had no money, so it didn’t matter that the stores had candy.

Concentrations of energy are finite and unevenly distributed, and mostly found already. What is our oil doing underneath all those foreigners? There is such a thing as “abiotic oil”, but nobody has ever found enough to make it useful. DJ used to look for more candy in the yard after he ran out of the good stuff a week later, and compares his hunt to why oil companies are no longer actively looking for new oilfields. They know that what’s left is the equivalent of ant-covered jellybean remnants and rained-on marshmallow peeps.

The most aggressive competitors get to eat the most candy. The resources of weaker nations don’t do them much good and can cause stronger nations to take an unhealthy interest in them.

The quality of an energy source can vary. While it’s all called “candy”, there is a lot of difference between fresh Cadbury eggs and stale hairy jellybeans.

The biggest energy deposits get found and eaten first, so new discoveries get smaller and smaller.  The big concentrations (the Easter Baskets) are where everyone goes first. Today there are no more super-giant oilfields on earth. We’ve already drilled the good places, now we’re doing the equivalent of sticking our hands into suspicious holes in the backyard.

Sometimes an energy source is so marginal that it’s barely worth using, taking more energy than it’s worth and making a disgusting mess.  Once the holiday candy ran out, DJ bummed moldy Jell-O into candy, the equivalent of tar sands. We’ve always know they were there but haven’t been hard-up enough to actually eat them.

Energy and wacky ideas travel together. At any given time children believe that easter candy comes from giant pink rabbits. This is a fair parallel to the general state of energy knowledge in the USA, where we not only have a right to our own opinions, but to our own facts. So we say “drill baby drill” as though the process of drilling creates oil reservoirs, and when oil prices go up assume it’s a conspiracy. We think about energy in the same magical terms young kids think about candy, while being similarly uncertain as to its origin and prospects.

No kid saves his good candy. It’s not human nature to save stuff for the future, even though we know that it’s a long long time until the next sugar holiday, but we don’t care. Candy!

Nobody worries about diabetes until after they have it.  We believe what we want to believe.

And a few more excerpts:

There’s no reason to think that we humans aren’t fit enough to look at reality honestly. We became who we are by facing some daunting realities. We are kick-ass primates who until recently have dealt with some very hairy, scary realities. Plagues. Famines. Mile-high ice sheets and blizzards. Horrible parasitic diseases. Sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, cave bears. We kicked their asses into oblivion and made houses out of mastodon bones. So at what point in evolution did we become aristocratic weenie debate societies, …unwilling to take risks or endure hardship?

The big shock is not reality itself, but in abruptly finding out – after much of your life—that you’ve been told incorrect, incomplete, and wildly overoptimistic stories about the world by those around you who never questioned that what “feels good to believe” might not be true.  We think that if kids were taught the realities of energy, evolution, and ecology from a young age, they’d adjust to it, though more than a bit annoyed with the situation they’re being handed. 

Cleverness to find energy only works when there is energy around to be found, and a practical way to put it to work. An astronaut stranded on the moon will die even with an IQ of 300, because cleverness isn’t magic. If Einstein had been born in 1800 AD, he would not have discovered relativity. At that point human knowledge hadn’t advanced far enough. And Darwin wouldn’t have discovered evolution by natural selection if Britain hadn’t expanded greatly harnessing coal and able to finance scientific voyages.

The problem is that people forget energy is a fundamental driver of all life and technology.

Posted in Energy Books, Expert Advice, Nate Hagens | Tagged | 2 Comments

We’re Running out of Antibiotics

Posted on August 9, 2021 by

Preface.  A collection of articles I’ve run across about potential antibiotic shortages some day.  By no means definitive, and maybe the Scientists Will Come Up With Something.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of  “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer; Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

***

Gibson R (2019) Exploring the Growing U.S. Reliance on China’s Biotech and Pharmaceutical Products

The U.S. Has Lost Virtually All of Its Industrial Base to Make Generic Antibiotics. The nation’s health security is in jeopardy. The U.S. can no longer make penicillin. The last U.S. penicillin fermentation plant closed in 2004. Industry data reveal that Chinese companies formed a cartel, colluded to sell product on the global market at below market price, and drove all U.S. European, and Indian producers out of business. Once they gained dominant global market share, prices increased.  The U.S. can no longer make generic antibiotics. Because the U.S. has allowed the industrial base to wither, the U.S. cannot produce generic antibiotics for children’s ear infections, strep throat, pneumonia, urinary tract infections, sexually-transmitted diseases, Lyme disease, superbugs and other infections that are threats to human life. We cannot make the generic antibiotics for anthrax exposure. After the anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in 2001, the U.S. government turned to a European company to buy 20 million doses of the recommended treatment for anthrax exposure, doxycycline. That company had to buy the chemical starting material from China. What if China were the anthrax attacker?

More daunting topics from this document:

  • Beyond Antibiotics, the U.S. Industrial Base for Generic Drug Manufacturing Is on the Brink of Collapse. Generic Drugs are 90 Percent of the Medicines Americans Take (antibiotics, anti-depressants, birth control pills, chemotherapy for cancer treatment for children and adults, medicine for Alzheimer’s, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, Parkinson’s, and epilepsy, to name a few).
  • If China Shut the Door on Exports of Medicines and Their Key Ingredients and Raw Materials, U.S. Hospitals and Military Hospitals and Clinics Would Cease to Function Within Months, if Not Days
  • As the U.S. Rapidly Loses Control Over the Production and Supply of Vital Medicines, It Loses Control Over the Price of Medicines Consumers and Hospitals Pay
  • Risks of Contaminated and Potentially Lethal Medicines Are Increasing
  • Medicines Can Be Used as a Strategic and Tactical Weapon Against the United States
  • Medicines should be treated as a strategic asset similar to oil and other energy supplies and agricultural commodities such as wheat and corn. The United States would cease to function within days if supplies of energy and food commodities were disrupted. The same is true of medicines

Borland S (2014) Doling out too many antibiotics ‘will make even scratches deadly’: WHO warns that crisis could be worse than Aids

  • Spread of deadly superbugs that evade antibiotics is happening globally
  • It’s now a major threat to public health, the World Health Organization (WHO) says
  • It could mean minor injuries and common infections become fatal
  • Deaths from cuts and grazes, diarrhea and flu will soon be common as antibiotics lose their power to fight minor infections, experts have warned.
  • The World Health Organisation says the problem has been caused by antibiotics being so widely prescribed that bacteria have begun to evolve and develop resistance.
  • It claims the crisis is worse than the Aids epidemic – which has caused 25 million deaths worldwide – and threatens to turn the clock back on modern medicine.
  • The WHO warns that the public should ‘anticipate many more deaths’ as it may become routine for children to develop lethal infections from minor grazes, while hospital operations become deadly as patients are at risk of developing infections that were previously treatable.
  • Doctors are increasingly finding that antibiotics no longer work against urinary and skin infections, tuberculosis and gonorrhoea.

The WHO is urging the public to take simple precautions, such as washing hands to prevent bacteria from spreading in the first place.

Dr Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director for health security, said: ‘Without urgent, coordinated action, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.  Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine. Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections, and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating.  We should anticipate to see many more deaths. We are going to see people who have untreatable infections.’

SUPERBUGS: THE GUIDE TO BUGS RENDERING ANTIBIOTICS OBSOLETE

MRSA – Patients infected with MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) are 64 per cent more likely to die than those with a non-resistant form of S. aureus.
People infected by resistant superbugs are also likely to stay longer in hospital and may need intensive care, pushing up costs.

C. difficile – This bacteria produces spores that are resistant to high temperatures and are very difficult to eliminate. It is spread through contaminated food and objects and can cause blood poisoning and tears in the large intestine.

E. coli – this now accounts for one in three cases of bacterial infections in the blood in the UK and a new strain is resistant to most antibiotics. It is highly contagious and could cause more than 3,000 deaths a year.

Acinetobacter Baumannii – a common bacteria which is resistant to most antibiotics and which can easily infect patients in a hospital. It can cause meningitis and is fatal in about 80 per cent of patients.

CRKP – this is a bacterium that is associated with extremely difficult to treat blood infections and meningitis. It is resistant to nearly all antibiotics and is fatal in 50 per cent of cases.

Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis is estimated to kill 150,000 people globally each year.

NDM-1 – a bacteria detected in India of which some strains are resistant to all antibiotics.

In the largest study of its kind, the WHO looked at data from 114 countries on seven major types of bacteria. Experts are particularly concerned about bacteria responsible for pneumonia, urinary tract infections, skin infections, diarrhoea and gonorrhoea.

They are also worried that antiviral medicines are becoming increasingly less effective against flu.

Dr Danilo Lo Fo Wong, a senior adviser at the WHO, said: ‘A child falling off their bike and developing a fatal infection would be a freak occurrence in the UK, but that is where we are heading.’

British experts likened the problem to the Aids epidemic of the 1980s. Professor Laura Piddock, who specialises in microbiology at the University of Birmingham, said: ‘The world needs to respond as it did to the Aids crisis.

‘We still need a better understanding of all aspects of resistance as well as new discovery, research and development of new antibiotics.’

The first antibiotic, penicillin, was developed by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1929. But their use has soared since the 1960s, and in 1998 the Government issued guidelines to doctors urging them to curb prescriptions. Nonetheless, surveys suggest they are still prescribed for 80 per cent of coughs, colds and sore throats.

The Atlantic: We’re Running out of Antibiotics

Nicole Allan. Feb 19, 2014. The Atlantic

It’s difficult to imagine a world without antibiotics. They cure diseases that killed our forebears in droves, and enable any number of medical procedures and treatments that we now take for granted.

When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose Too

By Maryn McKenna,   2013.   Wired.com

If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance — and trust me, we’re not far off — here’s what we would lose. Not just the ability to treat infectious disease; that’s obvious.

But also: The ability to treat cancer, and to transplant organs, because doing those successfully relies on suppressing the immune system and willingly making ourselves vulnerable to infection. Any treatment that relies on a permanent port into the bloodstream — for instance, kidney dialysis. Any major open-cavity surgery, on the heart, the lungs, the abdomen. Any surgery on a part of the body that already harbors a population of bacteria: the guts, the bladder, the genitals. Implantable devices: new hips, new knees, new heart valves. Cosmetic plastic surgery. Liposuction. Tattoos.

We’d lose the ability to treat people after traumatic accidents, as major as crashing your car and as minor as your kid falling out of a tree. We’d lose the safety of modern childbirth: Before the antibiotic era, 5 women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of every nine skin infections killed. Three out of every 10 people who got pneumonia died from it.

And we’d lose, as well, a good portion of our cheap modern food supply. Most of the meat we eat in the industrialized world is raised with the routine use of antibiotics, to fatten livestock and protect them from the conditions in which the animals are raised. Without the drugs that keep livestock healthy in concentrated agriculture, we’d lose the ability to raise them that way. Either animals would sicken, or farmers would have to change their raising practices, spending more money when their margins are thin. Either way, meat — and fish and seafood, also raised with abundant antibiotics in the fish farms of Asia — would become much more expensive.

And it wouldn’t be just meat. Antibiotics are used in plant agriculture as well, especially on fruit. Right now, a drug-resistant version of the bacterial disease fire blight is attacking American apple crops. There’s currently one drug left to fight it. And when major crops are lost, the local farm economy goes too.

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