Malthus and Julian Simon

It's funny, because we have the technology to "grow" an eatable crop on the top of the Pacific now. Just like your friends with the uranium, the law is keeping us poor.

Really?

"It's funny, because we have the technology to "grow" an eatable crop on the top of the Pacific now"

I have not heard of this. What crop? What law?

Re: Really?

Fish, and the lack of Property law on the open sea. There are many plans for fisheries that are not being used because of the poaching problem. Right now the oceans are a commons, with all the problems that come with that.

shale oil and renewables

Your post has an element of (intentional?) unapparent unity:

The key to really exploiting shale oil is solar (and probably wind) energy. Petroleum takes energy to process, but that energy is much smaller than the energy yield.

Shale oil is much closer to requiring the same energy to process as the energy yield; whether you make a profit, break even or take a loss depends on the grade of shale.

But if we got the processing energy from sunlight or wind power, the energy cost would be zero, after the cost of setting up the solar or wind energy plant.

Re: shale oil and renewables

A nuke plant would probably be better because the power's more concentrated, and nuclear fuel is also "renewable:" breeder reactors.

Re: shale oil and renewables

I may not know economics well, but nuclear physics I can do. Breeder reactors can transmute U-238 into fissionable plutonium. Eventually though you fission all your U-235 and Pu-239, and you have no more.

Re: shale oil and renewables

There's a lot of U238. However, there's 3-5 times that much Thorium, which can be converted to U233, which is fissile like U235. There's more energy in Th on Earth than all other fossil and nuclear fuels combined. Only India is currently pursuing Thorium reactors directly, though, partly because U238 is so incredibly plentiful itself, energy-wise.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Nuclear power is not renewable.

Which is why I put "renewable" in scare quotes. You can get energy from the breeder reactors, and you can get energy from the fuel produced by the breeder reactors; that's the advantage of breeder technology, since neither Pu-239 nor U-233 (from thorium-232) is found in nature.

I shall be more precise: you can increase your reactor fuel supply from the (miniscule) amounts of U-235 available to substantial fractions of your total uranium and thorium supply. Once that's gone, it's gone. But the estimate for low-enriched uranium fuel supply is what, 50 years? Breeder technology can get us another couple of centuries.

I'm sorry for the confusion caused by my less-than-precise term.

Re: shale oil and renewables

In which case, why not use the solar and wind energy directly, and leave the shale oil in the ground? Then, instead of a zero energy cost, you have a net energy yield, with no loss of non-renewable resources.

Part of the answer, unfortunately, is that a solar energy plant itself consumes nearly as much energy in the manufacturing process as it yields during its expected operating lifetime. (In fact, I understand the net yield of solar cells was negative until a few years ago.) Even wind power is far more expensive per kilowatt-hour than conventional sources of electricity.

The only real solution to the problem of shale oil is to find a more efficient method of extraction. Fortunately, that’s not an unlikely development. For instance, much of the world’s current production of iron and gold, and most of the production of copper, comes from ores that would have been considered worthless rocks 50 or 100 years ago.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Maybe use wind power in a manner suited to its format?

The windmills I grew up with come to mind-- when the wind blows, it fills the holding tank with water.

If folks were *really* serious about renewable non-nuke energy, they wouldn't be bashing hydroelectric.

Re: shale oil and renewables

That’s a very appropriate way to use windmills. I just don’t see how it would help with extracting oil from shale.

I quite agree with you about hydroelectric power.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Well, shale has to be baked to get the oil out, right?

And some folks are already doing it in place-- I'd imagine that the heat isn't great for the electronics needed for a lot of pumps.

I don't know much of the details of shale oil mining, but I'm picturing basically making a well, trimmed with heating elements-- or whatever you're using to bake the oil out-- and the pump to save the electricity needed to get the oil up. Make the "well" sizable enough that a day's worth of not pumping won't hurt it any and it's workable.

Heating it below ground would also be likely to make less heat escape into the atmosphere-- less wasted energy.

Re: shale oil and renewables

I remember an episode of WGBH Boston's series NOVA that examined the extraction of shale oil. Shale oil extraction is begun by excavating galleries above and below the seam, and then driving a shaft between the two galleries. Into the shaft walls are drilled all of the needed blast holes to break up all of the rock between the two galleries. After the single large gallery is created, careful metering of the oxygen allowed into the gallery allows a fraction of the oil shale to be combusted to supply the process heat needed to bake the rest of the oil out of the rock.

Basically, much of the potential yield of the oil is sacrificed to make getting the rest a matter of pumping out the sump of the gallery. Substituting any other source for the process heat would increase the yield, but substantially drive up the cost of the shale oil.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Nuclear power is non renewable. Fission with known Uranium resources and breed reactors can power global energy needs for centuries by itself. Eventually you run out.

Re: shale oil and renewables

This raises the important question of what is meant by reserves. If reserves are only what can be economically extracted at the current commodity price, than we have a nearly literally endless supply of uranium. At ten times the price, nuclear powered electricity only increases in cost by ten percent and uranium can be economically extracted from seawater. According to wikipedia, a ten-fold increase in price expands reserves by a multiple of 300.

Uranium is literally as common as dirt, but no soils have a large enough concentration to be mined at current prices (the same is not true for thorium which, in parts of Iran and India, is the dirt).

Part of the problem with uranium is that it is not only as common as dirt, but there are few places on earth actually devoid of the stuff.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Weighing in late:

According to George Gamow’s calculations, the uranium content of one ton of ordinary granite, if extracted, refined, and used in breeder reactors, would yield energy equivalent to many tons of fossil fuels. (Going by memory of a recent re-reading, 320 tons; but I cannot now put my hands on the book.)

It’s difficult to construct any scenario in which we would ever run out of available granite. The limits to that resource are thermal rather than logistical: if we liberated that energy at a sufficient rate to deplete it noticeably in a human lifetime, the waste heat would be enough to turn the earth’s surface as white-hot as the core.

Re: "It's not easy being green"

Hydroelectric power is bad for the salmon
Coal is dirty and bad for the air
Oil is evil and foreign and stuff
Wind farms massacre migrating birds
Solar isn't cost effective
Nuclear is just OMG!!!!!! scary

So, why don't we all just live in caves and die already.

Re: shale oil and renewables

why not use the solar and wind energy directly

You're right, of course, except that we will need liquid fuel for transportation for the forseeable future. Batteries are not likely to have competitive energy densities anytime very soon, at least that's my somewhat educated impression of the state of the field.

Battery-powered cars all either (a) are teeny-tiny (b) have very short range (c) have very low maximum speed or (d) are hybrids with internal-combustion engines. Sometimes they are annoying combinations of (a), (b) and (c). The only ones with decent ranges (for us rural types, at least) are (d).

For hybrids, you're going to need liquid fuel. For that, shale oil might be needed. The alternative is corn ethanol (energetically no better than low-grade oil shale), sugar or biomass ethanol (still a problem because it mixes so readily with water) or biodiesel, which I doubt has the capacity to compete with fossil fuels in volume.

Of course we want more efficient extraction of shale oil, but the energy density is much lower than petroleum and so improving efficiency isn't going to improve utility that much unless the processing energy is very cheap.

a solar energy plant itself consumes nearly as much energy in the manufacturing process as it yields during its expected operating lifetime

Of course that's true, but the technology is improving and efficiency is likely to improve considerably in the near to mid term.

Re: shale oil and renewables

One more thing: the most efficient solar energy plants are solar thermal plants, which (as our host pointed out) are fiercely opposed by environmentalists because of the quantity of ground they cover with mirrors.

Re: shale oil and renewables

What we really need is off-Earth solar plants. Not only do we not have to worry about environmental factors, we get the sunlight undiluted by atmosphere.

'course we've got to get it back to Earth.

There are always complications.

Re: shale oil and renewables

Conventional oil still exists. If you use solar and wind energy for generating electricity, you reduce the need to use fossil fuels for the same purpose. If you use solar and wind energy to extract shale oil instead, then you need some other fuel to make electricity — which, in the present state of things, would have to be fossil fuel. What you gain on the roundabouts, you lose on the swings.

Re: shale oil and renewables

No argument, but if we're going to extract shale oil the higher energy cost for extraction and processing has to come from somewhere. Wind and solar are well-suited to the places where shale oil is found, far more than to cloudy, shady places like my home in the eastern midwest, where most of our electricity comes from coal and nuclear.

Conventional oil still exists, but for how long will it be cost-effective to burn it? At some point, it will cost as much to extract as shale oil. Making shale oil cheaper to extract will hasten that day and increase the supply of oil at that point in time.

I don't have a good estimate of the date to hand, and so won't provide one.

As an organic chemist, I really don't care where it comes from, but we do need fossil oil for more than fuel. (I once took a short course from Harold Wittkopf, a doyen of the field; his contention (supported by numbers) was that the only reason the world's population can be fully clothed is artificial fibers, which come from oil.)

Re: shale oil and renewables

There's fossil fuel and then there's fossil fuel. I don't think many commercial generation plants run on fuel oil except for New England and Hawaii, and the number is decreasing. Plants that use fossil fuel usually burn either coal or natural gas, entirely different beasts than either petroleum or shale oil.

You can interconvert natural gas and liquid fuels to some extent, but it costs yet more energy to do so. (I've seen proposals to convert Siberian natural gas into liquid fuel, but the only reason it was considered was that it might cost less to do so than to build a pipeline to get the stuff out of there.)

I think we're talking about 2 different things here. Energy is effectively unlimited in the long term between nuclear and solar (well, it'll be an issue in a few billion years, but I'm not worried yet). Some building materials (namely organic plastics and wood) are certainly economically renewable. Complex molecules can be rebuilt with the appropriate technology and energy.

However, there is only so much iron, so much iridium, so much gallium, etc on this planet. These elemental materials, or at least the easily accessible reserves, will eventually all be in some product or another. Certainly we may find another technology which makes one element or another less valuable, but there are set values for these elements. Once they've been used in a presumably valuable product, you cannot make any more of that product without recycling, finding more, or stealing more.

Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich

"However, there is only so much iron, so much iridium, so much gallium, etc on this planet. These elemental materials, or at least the easily accessible reserves, will eventually all be in some product or another. Certainly we may find another technology which makes one element or another less valuable, but there are set values for these elements. Once they've been used in a presumably valuable product, you cannot make any more of that product without recycling, finding more, or stealing more."

We are talking about the same thing. You are making the classic Malthusian blunder of assuming the value of the natural resource is related to its abundance. This blunder is corrected when you realize that the value of a resource is related to its current and projected use, but that where other ways can be found to serve that same use, the value declines proportionately.

I have seen both violins and motor cars made out of an experimental ceramic. Perhaps not in this decade, but certainly in this century, I expect to see a revolution the the strengths of lightweight building materials, perhaps even due to nanotechnology. If a guilder as strong as a steel beam could be made with a spaceage ceramic, the limit of the amount of iron found in the crust of the Earth is no longer the economic limit to building.

Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980. Simon, who understood the error Malthus made, predicted that five metals would go down in price over the next ten years: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Ehrlich, whose entire fame as a writer consists of spreading one easily-exploded error of Malthusian economics, bet the opposite. He reasoned that all five metals would be running out, and ergo the price would climb.

Ehrlich lost the bet. There is now a small cottage industry among True Believers to explain away that inconvenient fact.

Indeed, Ehrlich and his bogus predictions of doom is more popular than ever. Julian Simon could not account for this: he called it a reverse Cassandra effect, where the more inaccurate predictions Ehrlich made, the more people believed him. (Cassandra, if you recall was blessed with the gift of prophecy, but cursed that no one would believe her.)

Price has to do with the value to all potential buyers seeking use from that good. The total physical amount of a given raw material -- indeed, even whether it is considered a raw material or not -- is not directly related to the price. The total physical amount can drop, and the value does not necessarily go up.

The same holds true of Malthus' famous prediction about population outstripping farm land use, and creating a dieback die to starvation.