(This is Part 22 of a series. Go back to Part 21.)
So: The world has been throwing a fantastic energy party for the last century or so. And the primary effect, as we've seen, has been an almost unbelievable increase in society's complexity—the rise of industrialism. This has brought many benefits, from vast food choices to electric lights to cheap transportation.
But of course, the secondary effects will make themselves known in due time. And as discussed in the last section, the first of these secondary effects is that this monumental structure of complexity is increasingly dependent upon an historic resource bonanza that is rapidly depleting.
The second of the four most significant secondary effects of industrialism is declining marginal returns. Consider these representative examples and symptoms:
–Up to 1920, the rate of oil recovery per foot of drilling was about 240 barrels/foot. In the 1930s, at the peak of oil discovery in the United States, this rose to 300 barrels recovered per foot of drilling. Yet at the present time the figure is less than 10 barrels/foot.
–Recall that the early decades of the oil era had yielded a net energy profit (EROEI) of over 100-to-1. That is, one barrel of energy investment yielded over 100 barrels of new energy. By 1916, though, the EROEI ratio for U.S. oil production was down to 28-to-1 (though that is still a colossal number). By 1985, the U.S. oil EROEI ratio was down to 2-to-1, a dramatic decrease by any standard.
The reality is that it is taking more and more energy to recover a barrel of oil. Wells are now drilled thousands of feet down in difficult terrain such as frozen tundra or the open ocean. This increasing difficulty is emblematic of a declining marginal return.
–World agriculture production has skyrocketed in the Industrial Age. A farmer who could feed four people in 1850 could feed more than 50 people a century later.
Yet this increased food production has come at the cost of using more and more fossil fuel. Consider: World food production increased another 34% from 1951 to 1966. But to achieve that increase required expenditures on tractors to increase by 64% and on nitrate fertilizers by 146%.
–During the 45 years of the Cold War, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. both dramatically increased military spending, as each side matched advances by the other. Yet the "benefit" from all this was mainly that the two countries didn't destroy each other in a nuclear exchange.
However, this vast expenditure drastically weakened both countries economically. The U.S.S.R. collapsed from the strain in 1990, and the continuing military expenditures of the U.S. are contributing to its current steady progression towards bankruptcy.
–Net world energy production per capita peaked in 1979 and has been declining ever since. As we'll see farther on, there is no conceivable energy source on the horizon—shale oil, tar sands, natural gas, biomass, wind, solar or what have you—that can reverse this decline.
The advent of the hydrogen economy, exciting as that prospect may be, will not change this. Hydrogen does not exist freely on the planet and must be produced—and it takes more energy to produce hydrogen, even in theory, than hydrogen yields as a fuel.
Hydrogen, then, is not an energy source but an energy carrier. Thus it will not materially affect the declining marginal returns of per-capita energy production.
(This is the end of Part 22. Go to Part 23.)
—jim sloman, 10.18.04 for Jul 16
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