My post yesterday made me think a bit about if we are capable of building a non-hydrocarbon economy within the next 30 years (roughly the time at which oil and gas will be really, really scarce). I assumed that we would aim to replace our current 13TW (from hydrocarbon sources) needs with other energy sources. I also (unrealistically) assumed that there will be no demand increase over that period of time just to keep things simple. And, remember, I’m not a mathematician and these really are ‘hand-wavy’ assumptions.

Annual increase in installed capacity for different non-hydrocarbon energy sources,

• Wind - increased by 20GW in 2006 (source)
• Solar- increased by 3.8GW in 2007 (souce)
• Hydro - increased by 16GW in 2005 (source)
• Biomass - ?
• Geothermal - ?
• Nuclear - increased by 8.9GW in 2002 (source)

If we currently consume about 13TW of energy from hydrocarbon sources then, to completely replace hydrocarbons as an energy source, it would take,

• 650 years to produce enough windmills or,
• 3,420 years to produce enough solar panels or,
• 810 years to produce enough hydro electric dams or,
• 1,460 years to produce enough nuclear power plants or,
• 265 years to fill our needs using all of the above technologies

1. live in a country where 99% of the electricity is generated by hydro. As a result, my family’s CO2-equivalent footprint has shrunk by about 3,000kg per year.
2. work for a company that puts safety first (their license to operate is dependent on it). As a reservoir geophysicist I do things like predict pressures in the subsurface to ensure safe well-drilling operations.
3. work with environmentally conscious colleagues. Believe it or not, my experience (in Norway) is that, on average, my colleagues are a lot more environmentally aware than they would be in North America.
4. promote my environmental concerns from within the industry. I personally feel that this can be effective activism.
5. understand that the problem does not lie (fully) with the oil industry. It lies also with the consumer (including those who often complain about the industry). Sure, oil companies make shitloads of money but, as far as Return-on-Investment goes, they only see about 8%. This is several times less than many IT companies (Google, for example).

Like it or not, we will, as a global population, extract every last drop of accessible oil from the subsurface. We’re a society of consumers who feel that we need stuff to make ourselves feel happy. And all that stuff requires lots of energy to make, move, use, and destroy. A fundamental awakening and change to the way that we think and act is clearly required, but, I think that it needs to be fast and scary. A quick, major collapse of the capitalist system would,

1. Hopefully wake us up. We need a clean slate to work from if we’re going to build a renewable energy economy.
2. Hurt a lot of people but, would hopefully allow us to find a simpler, more energy-independant way of life.   

Cool! It

My fear is that, if we awaken gradually (which I believe we’re doing) to the threat of environmental collapse and peak oil, we will just keep doing ‘business as usual’ and be caught unprepared. Sure we’ll be aware of the problems, but we’ll likely procrastinate until it’s too late. We’ll excuse ourselves by saying that we’re waiting for ‘xxxx technology to be developed.’ For example, why do we not see more electric cars (or a plugin Prius for that matter) on the road? We’re waiting for the next generation battery. To me this is a pretty weak argument when I see the success of companies like Kewet and Think. They may be funny looking, but they use existing technology and they’re available now (sort of).        

Changing to sustainable (energy-wise) economy will require massive amounts of energy and will not be cheap. We’re running on a finite supply of hydrocarbons which is dwindling at a rapidly increasing rate. But how much of the remainder is required to make the switch? If we make the simplistic, hand-wavy assumption that we could switch to 100% wind power (equivalent) then,

• the energy to construct and operate the windmills for 20 years is equivalent to about 8,100MWh (~4,800 barrels of oil equivalent) per 3MWh  wind generator while produced energy is equivalent to about 39MW (23 barrels of oil) per day.
• the planet currently consumes something on the order of 120,000TWh energy per year from fossil fuels. This means that we would need to produce the equivalent of 8,400,000 3MW windmills to supply all of our energy. This would require 40,200,000,000 barrels of oil equivalent energy which is equal to about 470 days at our current production rate of 85 million barrels of oil per day.
• but we can’t put all of our production into renewable development. Spare capacity globally is somewhere on the order of a few million barrels of oil per day. If it were, optimistically, 5 million barrels per day and we could devote it entirely to our production of more than 8 million ‘windmills’ then it will take us about 8,036 days (22 years) of hydrocarbon production.

So what does this mean? It means that, if we don’t act now, we could be screwed. The reason that I say this is that, as the increasing demand for energy in developing nations erodes our spare production capacity, less energy will be available to devote to the production of renewable energy sources. More reserves are, of course, being found but it’s not clear whether we can keep up with the rate of increase in demand. And, even if we knew where all of the remaining trillion barrels of easyish oil (oil shales and sands left out) were hidden and we were setup  with facilities to produce from all of them, we would still have less than 35 years of producable oil at 85 million barrels per day. Whew! We still have time to produce all of those ‘windmills.’ But wait, what if global energy consumption increases to the 98 million barrels per day in 2015 predicted by the EIA? Then we’re down to 27 years. That’s a bit scarier but, in theory, we could still do it. There is, however, an additional problem. All that I’ve accounted for above is the ability to supply power to an electrical grid. We also need to look at the energy that is going to be required to convert our existing hydrocarbon-driven transportation sector to (renewably-sourced) electricity. Which, since we’re talking about 625 million vehicles, isn’t going to be easy. But now my head hurts. Time for bed.  

Notes:

• Windmill/turbine could be replaced by ’solar panel’, ‘hydro dam’, etc. and the assumptions would still be valid. In a ‘hand-wavy’ sense…
• 1 barrel of oil has the equivalent energy of about 1700kWh
• 1 3MW wind turbine from Vestas generates about 284,600MWh over the course of 20 years or about 14,230MWh per year
• The above turbine generates about 35x more energy over its lifetime than was required to make it
• About 15% of the global energy supply could be considered to come from a ‘green’ source
• ~10^12 barrels of oil equivalent remain to be discovered/produced
• These arguments are very simplistic. Once we’ve reached plateau production (maybe we already have), global production will only decrease thereby making it more difficult to find the spare capacity that we need.
• I was never ‘good’ at math

Yum, Yum, sheep’s head… Sheep’s head, porridge, vegetable soup, fårikål (lamb with cabbage) and home-baked bread. This is everyday food to the kids at Knærten kindergarten in Bjerkås.

and reading further into the article…

Oskar and Tobias would rather have the tongue, the others will have the eyes, ears and skin. Apart from one who refuses to taste it, the other 43 kids throw themselves over the food. Here there are none that can say that children are ‘wimps’ (note: I’ve chosen to translate ‘kresne’ as ‘wimps’ although I’m sure that it means something else); except for a couple, none of the others have eaten smalahove before.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up here but I do think that this is a bit odd. A 4-year old eating a lamb’s head is a bit out of my comfort zone. Granted, there can’t be much meat on it so it is nearly vegetarian. Maybe I’ll go out and look for a tofu version at the organic food store on the hill.

For more info (warning: some of the pictures may be disturbing)…

Nam, Nam…

The Smalahove Portal

As I type this I’m a bit sore. I decided to go for a run today. Actually, I decided to go buy some speedskates and somehow convinced myself to run over to the shop. The roundtrip was about 20km. I figured that I should probably start working up to marathon distances if I’m going to do the Norseman Xtreme Triathlon. It’s a little over 10 months away and I’m concerned about my running. Today, I felt good for the first 15km. After that, I felt like a gelatinous pile of lutefisk. My lungs, muscles, and heart seemed to do okay. It was just my feet. My pronation, it turns out is not fully cured by the insoles that I’ve got. If nothing else, my shoes are at least good for whacking spiders. Spiders, it seems, get really big in The Hague. I suspect that it’s a combination of the ‘Frites met Mayonaise’ and herring that makes them so big. I had never really paid attention to spiders until a woman came up to me today while I was on my run and asked me something in Dutch. I explained that I didn’t know Dutch but that if she wanted to try in Danish, I’d be more than happy. After looking at me like I was an idiot, she explained that she is terrified of spiders and that there was a ‘big one’ on (of all places) her bike. ‘Could I help her with it?’, she asked. Of course I could. A spider was surely no match for a no-do-dickey-di, lilly-white collegiate boy like me. Did I say that it was big? It was big AND hairy. But, after stunning it with my map, it agreed to move to a better spot and I agreed to run away like the lilly-white collegiate boy that I am. She was thankful, I was gone. So after 20km I arrived back at my hotel with thoughts of lutefisk dancing in my head. There was only one thing to do. Go out for sushi.  And, as luck would have it, there’s a sushi restaurant close to my hotel. At €50 a person though, I decided that my money would be better spent at the Genki-Tei by the Grote Kerk in Den Haag. Mmmm, it was good. Succulent edamamme, spicy tuna, and fried salmon skin temaki. Tomorrow night I’ll try the blowfish (served a la ‘Rak’)…

Far, får får får?                            (Dad, do sheep have sheep?)
Nej, får får ikke får, får får lam.  (No, sheep don’t have sheep, sheep have lambs)

And if that’s not enough to seal my fate I’ll try,

A æ o æ ø i æ å, æ a! (~ I am from an island in the river, I am)

Apparently I’m one of those immigrants who resists integration.

With that out of the way I can now contemplate the sadism of wetsuit design. Last week I finally received my new swimming wetsuit. A 2xu C2 that I bought from Wiggle. The price was right and it came in my size - medium. At least I thought that was my size until I tried to put it on. I pulled, I stretched, I sweated, I even humilated my ‘manhood’ (yes, it is that tight) but, eventually, got it zipped up. This couldn’t be right so I asked a friend for his opinion. He confirmed that it should be really tight but, since I didn’t trust him, I googled ‘How tight should a triathlon wetsuit fit?’. It seems that the answer is ‘very tight‘. Maybe even ’scary tight’. Anyway, I’m relieved but a bit concerned that I kind of like the way it feels. Now I’m not saying that I’m a masochist or anything but I did have a weird bike ride into work today. At the 10km mark, I started wondering to myself whether I had just ridden through the broken glass that I had seen on the path last week. It was the ‘cushy’ ride that took me down that train of thought. How it would really suck to get a flat and have to walk the last 5km in uncomfortable bike shoes. The ‘cushy’ ride, of course, meant that I had, in fact, punctured. Since I wasn’t up for the walk I thought about calling someone to come pick me up. And then I thought about how I had left my phone at home. I still didn’t want to walk so I decided to run the last 5km. I took off my shoes and socks, lifted my bike to my shoulder and started running. I did okay. I made it about 500m before I realized how cold the pavement was and how little skin was left on the soles of my feet. It was clear that this wasn’t one of my brightest moments, so I stopped, put my shoes back on and ran the rest of the way. Click, click, click. The annoying sound of bicycle cleats on pavement is something that I’m sure that I’ll be dreamin about tonight.

No-knead bread recipe from the NY Times (originally)

Watch it on YouTube!

Now what about this Norseman Ironman thing? I haven’t forgotten. I’m just a bit sick right now. I’ve been a fair bit of riding lately but, must admit, I haven’t been out running in a few days. The marathon is going to kill me - that’s pretty clear. I’m aiming for something on the order of 7 hours. Only 5 hours slower than the winning Olympic marathon time today…

*I say ‘pseudo’ because fish don’t count in my book. Sure, a purist might disagree but I figure that, if I can kill it myself, I’ll eat it. So fish are on the plate (for now) but the cows and piggies are safe. Unless that’s what they put in hotdogs…