Is the world doomed to economic collapse

Calliban · 2020-11-08 14:40:09

Below is one of the most revealing articles that I have read in years. I would strongly recommend reading it as it explains many of the political and economic dynamics of the past two decades. The political and economics stresses that we are facing now, are a direct result of declining net energy delivered to the economy. This is squeezing out discretionary spending and leading to declining incomes in most sectors of the economy. The result is huge and growing inequalities in wealth that is driving political polarisation as the new poor increasingly reject the political ellites (think Brexit and the election of Donald Trump).
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/narrat … r-peak-oil

The 2008 financial crash occurred as a direct result of global peaking in conventional oil production. Because oil is used to manufacture and transport almost everything, rising oil prices led to rising inflation. The federal reserve raised interest rates in order to crush inflation, wrongly attributing it to a monetary supply imbalance. As a result, mortgages and other debts became unaffordable to marginal debtors and voilà the sub-prime crisis, leading to banking crisis and a financial crash.

The article predicts that industrial societies are close to being finished. Quite how that will play out in real life, I do not know. I am not looking forward to finding out. If the premise of this article is correct, industrial civilisation is about to hit a very solid brick wall with potentially billions of casualties. Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that we will be going to Mars unless and until we can find our way past the peak oil dynamic. And the political understanding of the problem is seemingly non-existant.

Last edited by Calliban (2020-11-08 14:48:32)

tahanson43206 · 2020-11-08 15:52:32

For Calliban re topic ....

Would you be willing to step back a notch?

I am under the impression all energy that is (or ever has been) available in the Universe we occupy was stored at the Big Bang.

Every transaction since then has been a transaction in which stored energy is consumed. That stored energy is often transformed into another form of energy, but in every case, there is a small amount of energy lost.

To say that the human race is running out of energy seems (to me at least) on the silly side.

Before stored energy was "discovered", wood was consumed, but that resource was readily restored by living creatures.

After stored energy was discovered, humans have increased their numbers so that we now are in the multiple billions.

In the 19th Century, stored nuclear energy was "discovered" by humans, and it has been gradually increased in use, but it is nowhere near its potential.

I have not read the article you offered for us to study. I'm deeply skeptical it contains anything worth reading.

The Sun has been pouring gigawatts at the Earth for billions of years, and humans have learned to tap a minuscule part of that generous flow.

(th)

Calliban · 2020-11-08 17:59:02

To cut a long story short, the world is running out of the concentrated, high grade fossil fuels that powered us through the industrial revolution and still supply some 90% of the global energy demand. By high grade, I mean low entropy, high EROI conventional oil and gas wells and coal resources that can be exploited at an affordable price.

We appear to be getting close to the point where remaining fossil fuels have too low EROI and insufficient surplus energy to power the infrastructure we use. At this point, its game over for industrial society as the infrastructure will no longer generate any surplus wealth. The energy content of diffuse sunlight is irrelevant unless it can generate sufficient surplus energy to do what fossil fuels do now (it cannot).

SpaceNut · 2020-11-08 18:21:03

Oil Prices Affect U.S. Gas Prices

kbd512 · 2020-11-09 10:32:39

Calliban,

Prior to COVID-19, the oil and gas produced from domestic fracking was very close to price parity with imported oil from conventional wells drilled in Saudi Arabia. We are simply not running out of coal, oil, or gas, fast enough to satisfy the merchants of despair. To your point, no resource is completely unlimited in nature. Contrary to what you believe, we're not running out within our lifetimes. However, even after the economically (at today's prices) recoverable coal and oil runs out, the prices will go up and we'll start going after more expensive coal and oil. That is why the Germans are burning the dirtiest type of coal available.

Notice how the merchants of despair are whining that it'll cost $100B to reprocess all of the spent Uranium fuel rods in the US, which represent 100% of our electricity consumption projections for the next 100 years, even with increases, but they take no issue with spending $93T on the "Green New Deal" idiocy. Solar thermal can chop the peaks off the power demand and nuclear can provide base load, which leaves the remaining coal / oil / gas for refining for powering vehicles. SOFCs can effectively double the remaining supplies of those resources by halving the consumption.

tahanson43206 · 2020-11-09 12:02:13

Calliban re discounting of solar energy ...

Solar energy loads up hurricanes with more energy than humans consume using fossil fuels and all other forms of stored energy ...

Google search for energy stored in hurricanes:

If we crunch the numbers for an average hurricane (1.5 cm/day of rain, circle radius of 665 km), we get a gigantic amount of energy: 6.0 x 10^14 Watts or 5.2 x 10^19 Joules/day! This is equivalent to about 200 times the total electrical generating capacity on the planet!
How much energy in a hurricane, a volcano, and an ...

My understanding is that either solar panels (in sufficient number) or wind farms (in sufficient number) would meet all current power needs.

When both are combined they can (presumably) meet future needs as well.

And this is ** without ** adding power collected by solar power satellites, which is NOT taken from energy delivered to the Earth when the SPS are outside the shadow region, which is more than half the time.

Nuclear power is needed and (I am confident) will be developed because of its many advantages.

Geothermal power is also said to have the potential to power the entire planet, and ** that ** energy comes (largely) from well contained radioactivity below the mantle.

All that said, a point that you ** may ** have been making is that humans who stick blindly to the only power sources they know are most surely depriving their fellows of the opportunity to enjoy lives enriched by the flow of abundant energy from the Sun.

(th)

Calliban · 2020-11-09 13:55:26

The critical issue around the quality of an energy source is its EROI (Energy Returned over Energy Invested). How much energy you need to invest to get a unit of energy out. That number basically determines the usefulness of an energy source. Large onshore conventional oil and gas fields and nuclear power plants come out at the high end. That is to say, small energy investments yield big returns. Solar, wind and tight oil are low EROI.

The problem that we face with using fossil fuels is that the high grade deposits were exploited first. To access a unit of fossil energy, one must first invest energy in developing the infrastructure. Until the 1970s, every barrel of oil consumed in the industrial world came from large onshore oil fields, which were relatively shallow and cheap to drill and had low depletion rates. It is no coincidence that the period between 1945 and 1970, represented a golden age of growth for the Western world, America in particular. It was a period in which economic growth was fuelled by cheap energy in the form of oil and gas. In the years since the peak in US conventional oil production in 1970, new oil supply has come from increasingly difficult and less profitable sources. First, Alaska and Siberia. Then, the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Recently, tight oil. In each case, the amount of energy that needs to be invested to obtain one unit of oil energy has increased and so has the break even price of oil that producers need to remain profitable.

Consider now that the economy is a thermodynamic machine. The wealth that it producers is simply a function of its energy supply. This should be obvious if you think about it. Everything that human beings call wealth, whether goods or services, is really just the result of the action of energy on matter; either processing it into something you want or moving it. The higher the EROI of its dominant energy sources, the more rapidly energy production can expand and the higher the rate of economic growth. Also, the less energy you need to reinvest into the energy supply, the more you can consume directly. This makes energy both cheaper and cheaper to expand, simultaneously. If EROI is low or falling, this virtuous cycle goes into reverse. Unfortunately, EROI has been falling since 1970.

Beneath a certain baseline EROI, the energy source becomes useless, because society can only afford to devote so much energy to maintaining its energy supply because it takes a minimum amount of energy to maintain our infrastructure. We have now reached the point where EROI of new fossil fuel energy sources are so low that they no longer allow new economic growth. Soon, growth will go into reverse. It has happened already for every Western country and is now effecting the developing world as well.

I recommend reading this to gain an understanding of the problem.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.files.wo … onomy2.pdf

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are not particularly helpful in solving the problem, because: (1) Their EROI is low due to their poor power density; (2) Dealing with intermittency reduces EROI even further. These sources only appear cheap at present due to artificially low interest rates and low bond rates.

As for remaining fossil fuel deposits, on paper the reserves are vast. There is enough coal under the British North Sea to theoretically power the world for centuries. There are also sufficient tar deposits in Venezuala and Canada to fuel the oil industry for decades if not centuries. The problem is that all of these deposits are low grade in so far as the energy invested to harvest them would be a substantial fraction of their energy content. This makes them functionally useless, because EROI needs to be greater than a threshold value to produce wealth using the infrastructure that we have. The threshold sustainable EROI is around 11, from estimates I have seen.

Kbd's proposed solid oxide fuel cell may very well be helpful in mitigating this problem. A large expansion in the use of nuclear power would definitely be helpful. But we need to expand deployment of these technologies rapidly right now, rather than speculating about their deployment. The political polarisation in the US and elsewhere, are symptoms of the declining disposable income of the average American and European since the turn of the century. People are getting poorer because surplus energy is declining. Our situation really is as simple as that.

Last edited by Calliban (2020-11-09 14:27:39)

kbd512 · 2020-11-09 14:11:02

tahanson43206,

If we had a solar farm that was spread over a significant portion of Earth's surface area and a radically altered power distribution scheme, then maybe we could use some of that awesome solar and wind power. It's that "in sufficient numbers" problem, but really "in sufficient numbers into perpetuity" problem that you have to solve. All the "true believers" in "green energy" refuse to acknowledge that fact. It's a religious organization that somehow believes in science but not math. Solar and wind is not a practical solution for all of our energy problems.

1. Solar supplies about 1% of the US energy consumption. Whereas the giant fusion reactor in the sky will shine on for billions of years, the photovoltaics that convert photons into electrons are not a "renewable resource" because there is no practical way to recycle them and all of those precious metals and silicon must be mined and refined.

2. Wind actually does significantly better in terms of US energy consumption, but again, there is no recycling of glass or carbon fiber or epoxies. The steel in the towers merely rusts in place and the concrete is not recycled, either. This is current reality, not wishful thinking about some fanciful future state that doesn't exist. When we start decommissioning old solar and wind plants and recycling the materials, I'll believe it's sustainable into perpetuity, rather than simply generating an enormous stream of electronic waste materials that we can't re-process.

3. If drilling unconventional oil wells is too expensive, then so is geothermal power. At best, the US thinks it could economically supply up to 10% of the total energy requirement. Globally, again, it is estimated that it could economically supply up to 10% of the demand by 2100. If screwing with the Earth's atmosphere by injecting excess CO2 is a bad idea, then extracting too much power from the Earth's core is, by far, one of the worst ideas humanity has ever had, presuming we like our magnetosphere and the terrestrial life it enables.

I still think solar thermal and nuclear have an edge over existing alternatives in terms of total operating time and costs when all is said and done. If we commit to smaller truck-transportable 250MW to 500MW reactors using Natural Uranium and CO2 plus liquid metals as heat exchange fluids driving Brayton rather than Rankine cycles, with excess thermal power used to produce LNH3 or LPG fuels, then we can have affordable CO2-free electrical power using recyclable materials, along with fuels that do not entirely depend upon drilling activities. If Russia doesn't have a problem with their reactor pressure vessels cracking because they use steel contaminated with Copper, then we can surely do the same thing here.

SpaceNut · 2020-11-09 19:13:17

Its why we will not go to mars with just solar as well...

Calliban · 2021-04-19 11:01:36

The latest article from Surplus Energy Economics. Well worth a read.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpres … threatens/

The upshot is that real global rates of inflation averaged 4.1% between 1999 and 2019 and 5.5% in 2020. In the US, Japan and Europe, the average person has gradually been getting poorer since the turn of the century. When taxation is factored in, citizens in some countries (i.e France) have gotten dramatically poorer, losing around one third of their (left in pocket) income since the turn of the century. The yellow vest riots were basically a rebellion of disgruntled citizens against an overbearing government. What is most astonishing to me is that policy makers still haven't cottoned on to what is actually happening.

Another noticeable trend is that high income economies have been more sensitive that low income economies to rising Energy Cost of Energy. This appears to be due to the greater complexity of OECD economies, which require lower real energy costs to continue growth. Eventually, governments will have to raise interest rates to bolster the value of their currencies. When that happens, we can expect the notional value of assets like housing, stocks and bonds, to plunge.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-04-19 11:13:42)

Calliban · 2021-12-21 10:50:34

An interesting video from commodity expert Steve St. Angelo on the implications of the approaching net energy cliff. This guy is not the world's greatest public speaker and needs to work on his delivery. But the essential message of the video, that the world is rapidly running out of surplus energy, is an existential crisis for advanced economies. And there appears to be close to zero understanding of the urgency of this problem.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-12- … ning-world

In other news, European natural gas prices are now at recession inducing levels. Why the problems leading to this point were not identified years ago by political leadership, is something that I just don't understand.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/e … eam-higher

As an aside, cracking in primary circuit pipework in French reactors teaches the importance of robust materials control in reactor fabrication and chemistry control in operation. Fail to use the proper grade of stainless steel and you wind up with heat sensitised welds and grain boundary precipitation. Combine that with poor chemistry control and thermal cycling and you get stress corrosion cracking. This could be life limiting for the reactors involved.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-12-21 10:56:24)

SpaceNut · 2021-12-21 10:56:24

Energy use in all forms are a problem since we are relying on others to produce then and we are so willing to pay for them rather than learning how to create what we use in the form that we need.

I have been looking towards how to provide cheaper transportation that uses self generated energy but its a challenge as it require highway road use laws to change to allow for the under 40 mph to make use of them since no one wants to drive miles of hilly or out of the way paths to get from point A to B daily as needed.

kbd512 · 2021-12-22 03:24:22

SpaceNut,

You will never "Fred Flintstone" yourself to work at normal highway speeds in any practical way, but you can make a very small plastic or composite car that's powered by a tiny internal combustion engine similar to what a lawn mower uses. The advantage to this concept is that you get to work as quickly as you would with a traditional car, at a fraction of the energy cost. The relative danger or lack thereof, regarding this approach, is entirely a function of the driving skills of yourself and your fellow motorists. NHTSA and the EPA are the primary impediments to practical small vehicle design, at least for on-highway use.

Calliban · 2021-12-22 04:08:19

kbd512 wrote:

SpaceNut,
You will never "Fred Flintstone" yourself to work at normal highway speeds in any practical way, but you can make a very small plastic or composite car that's powered by a tiny internal combustion engine similar to what a lawn mower uses. The advantage to this concept is that you get to work as quickly as you would with a traditional car, at a fraction of the energy cost. The relative danger or lack thereof, regarding this approach, is entirely a function of the driving skills of yourself and your fellow motorists. NHTSA and the EPA are the primary impediments to practical small vehicle design, at least for on-highway use.

This would seem to be the cost optimum approach.

Many observers get the wrong end of the stick when it comes to fossil fuel depletion problems. The problem is not running out of fuels as such. The resource base is like a pyramid, with the low cost, high net energy return resources at the top of the pyramid. Precisely because they are are high net energy return, they tend to be exploited first. They are technically easier to produce and cheaper to produce. What is left to us now is an enormous quantity of low grade fossil fuels. These greatly outweigh the quantity already produced. But the poorer EROI makes them more expensive to produce. This dichotomy is gradually squeezing the life out of the industrial economy, because: (1) The underlying energy intensity of the economy imposes limits on what consumers can afford to pay for fuels and electricity; (2) The cost of producing this energy is increasing; (3) There is now no price that is profitable for producers whilst also being affordable to consumers.

One way of solving this problem is to improve fuel efficiency. This allows fuel prices to gradually increase, which satisfies producers, whilst remaining affordable to consumers. A small, lightweight car, getting 100mpg average across its life, allows this to be achieved. The service that it delivers remains the same and its economic utility remains the same.

The first problem with all hybrid and all electric solutions, is that the energy stores are inevitably lower energy density than pure fuel based systems. This pushes up vehicle weight and rolling resistance. Rolling resistance dominates energy consumption in urban driving conditions. The systems involved in hybrid drives are also more complex and more expensive. The selling point of a hybrid drive is that it achieves net cost benefit by recovering breaking energy and reducing engine idling times. The cheapest and simplest way of doing this wins. Flywheels, hydraulic accumulators, springs, compressed air, electric have all been discussed. What we are ultimately trying to do is reduce the marginal cost of each mile travelled.

Jevons paradox is often cited as a reason why this is unlikely to reduce aggregate fuel consumption. If you reduce the cost of owning and operating vehicles, you make it more affordable and total vehicle ownership increases. This may not be applicable in Europe and North America, because the vehicle markets there are already quite saturated. But for the rest of the world, it probably will. None the less, a more efficient vehicle fleet makes more expensive fuel more sustainable. It makes biofuels and synthetic fuels more affordable. So a larger vehicle fleet need not imply higher effective CO2 emissions. A very lightweight ICE car, powered by fuels made from recycled CO2, is no less environmentally sustainable than any electric based solution. If it proves to be a more cost effective way of providing mobility then it is the way we should go.

Last edited by Calliban (2021-12-22 04:28:53)

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-03-06 07:30:04

Let the ruble collapse to remind Americans the value of a dollar
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rest … f-a-dollar

Ukrainian drone enthusiasts sign up to repel Russian forces
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Technology/w … s-83256532

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-04-18 04:19:10

'Probability Of Stagflation Is Increasing': Experts React To 8.5% CPI Inflation, Highest Since 1981

https://markets.businessinsider.com/new … 1031350378

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-04-20 06:27:24

Biden’s Only Good Pre-Midterm Play: Cancel Student Debt
https://newrepublic.com/article/166127/ … 2-midterms

Putin’s Ruble Standoff With Europe Risks De Facto Gas Embargo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles … as-embargo

How Inflation Destroys a Civilization
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/0 … ation.html
Nick Giambruno

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-06-27 04:42:21

Russia pitches into first major external bond default in century
https://www.aol.com/finance/russia-slid … 41020.html

The war in Ukraine is hurting the transition to low-carbon technologies
https://thebulletin.org/2022/06/the-war … hnologies/
But closer to home in Europe, the looming obstacles have much to do with fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Gas tax holiday would save drivers at pump, but experts say it could make inflation worse
https://www.thegazette.com/state-govern … ion-worse/
President Joe Biden has proposed a three-month suspension of the 18-cent federal gas tax

Terraformer · 2022-06-28 11:56:46

Intermittency isn't a problem if you're willing to build big reservoirs.

Global resource potential of seasonal pumped hydropower storage for energy and water storage

The estimated world energy storage capacity below a cost of 50 US$ MWh−1 is 17.3 PWh, approximately 79% of the world electricity consumption in 2017.

The trouble is that everyone is obsessed with batteries. And batteries will not work for grid storage, especially if storage is needed on the scale of days and weeks.

But grid scale storage is a solved problem, it's just a capital intensive project that requires thinking long term. Very long term. Like "the thing that will destroy this will probably be the ice sheets of the next ice age" long term. So it's leaving quite the inheritance for future generations

The Coire Glas project is claimed will cost £1 billion and provide 30 GWhr of storage, so that.s £33/kWhr of storage. Obviously the cost per delivered kWhr depends on how frequently it's cycled, but if it's used to replace natural gas backup that could easily be on a weekly or even daily basis. If weekly, after 10 years it would work out to something like 7p/kWhr provided... Britain at least has the mountains needed. We also get 40% of the wind in Europe, so wind + pumped hydro may even work out to be the cheapest and most secure route to go down.

Calliban · 2022-06-28 13:16:03

Dinorwig in North Wales is capable of storing up to 9.1GWh of energy. We would need 80 of them to store a single day of power for the UK. I do not know if there are sufficient UK sites. Given that greater storage capacity would be used only rarely, we could instead install open cycle gas turbines fuelled with a storable liquid fuel. These would be much cheaper than additional hydro plants that only rarely get used and because their capacity would only get used rarely, lifetime fuel consumption would be low.

Of course, wind and solar power are seasonal. More wind in the winter, more sun in the summer. The UK's solar resources are too poor to generate breakeven EROEI and would not be affordable in a world that didn't have Chinese coal available to make them.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-28 13:23:35)

Terraformer · 2022-06-28 13:27:28

Calliban,

There are *plenty* of sites. Though we shouldn't need more than a weeks worth of storage -- lulls are rare enough we can fire up turbines or diesel engines on those occasions. Coire Glas alone (3x Dinorwig) would double our total storage.

We've certainly got the elevation. The key determining factor is whether there are valleys that can be easily enclosed to form reservoirs. Here's a map of potential sites, from the Australian National University. Most of the potential is up in the highlands, as expected, though there's quite a clump in Wales (at 50GWhr of storage; there are more smaller sites available, though I imagine economies of scale will favour the big ones). Depending on the mood in Scotland, may be best for national security to go with the Welsh options...

kbd512 · 2022-06-28 14:13:13

Terraformer,

That seems incredibly cheap compared to nearly every alternative I've seen, assuming it's actually as cheap as claimed. One billion Pounds Sterling purchases 30GWh of storage, so about 3/4 of that in American dollars (I think). $135 billion USD for America's total energy storage requirements for 12 hours of power, by my math. Over ten years, that's a rounding error in our budget, or as we call it, a new aircraft carrier. A bigger question, though, is where you would put that much water and how far away people would have to live, in order to not be Katrina'd by the water if the reservoir ever failed. It would certainly be better than what we have now, which is basically zero stored power. For longer duration energy storage, it's probably still more cost effective to use natural gas, at least for America, maybe not so much for other places.

Calliban · 2022-06-28 15:31:07

Attached is a link to Gridwatch which tracks UK power generation and demand. Look at the generation pattern for last year. I don't think pumped storage is going to be enough.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/Wind

Terraformer · 2022-06-29 02:15:56

No, but it can get us a lot closer than we otherwise can be, with an energy generation system that uses almost entirely indigenously produced materials. We don't need perfection, but going from 50% wind to 75% wind would mean going from 50% turbine/diesel backup to 25%, halving the amount of expensive fuel we need to keep on hand so the lights stay on.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-07-10 03:26:33

Maybe not the World but Sir Lanka now...

EXPLAINER: Why Sri Lanka's economy collapsed and what's next
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wi … d-86538096

New Mars Forums

Announcement

#51 2020-11-08 14:40:09

Re: Is the world doomed to economic collapse

#52 2020-11-08 15:52:32

Re: Is the world doomed to economic collapse

#53 2020-11-08 17:59:02

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#54 2020-11-08 18:21:03

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#56 2020-11-09 12:02:13

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#57 2020-11-09 13:55:26

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#59 2020-11-09 19:13:17

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#60 2021-04-19 11:01:36

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#61 2021-12-21 10:50:34

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#62 2021-12-21 10:56:24

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#63 2021-12-22 03:24:22

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#64 2021-12-22 04:08:19

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#67 2022-04-20 06:27:24

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#68 2022-06-27 04:42:21

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#69 2022-06-28 11:56:46

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#70 2022-06-28 13:16:03

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#71 2022-06-28 13:27:28

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