Comment on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:32:43 GMT

Energy economics is interconnected enough with politics to make me lower my expectation of rationality from both of us for the remainder of the discussion due to reference class forecasting. Also, we are several inferential steps away from each other, so any discussion is going to be long and full of details. Regardless, I'm going to go ahead, assuming agreement that market forces cannot necessarily overcome resource shortages (or the Easter Islanders would still be with us).

Historically, the world switched from coal to petroleum before developing any technologies we'd regard as modern. The reason, unlike so much else in economics, is simple: the energy density of coal is 24 MJ/kg; the energy density of gasoline is 44 MJ/kg. Nearly doubling the energy density makes many things practical that wouldn't otherwise be, like cars, trucks, airplanes, etc. Coal cannot be converted into a higher energy density fuel except at high expense and with large losses, making the expected reserves much smaller. The fuels it can be converted to require significant modifications to engines and fuel storage.

Coal is at least plausible, although a stop-gap measure with many drawbacks. It's your hopes for fusion that really show the wishful thinking. Fusion is 20 years away from being a practical energy source, just like it was in 1960. The NIF has yet to reach break-even; economically practical power generation is far beyond that point; assuming a substantial portion of US energy generation needs is farther still. It'd be nice if Polywell/Bussard fusion proved practical, but that's barely a speck on the horizon, getting its first big basic research grant from the US Navy. And nothing but Mr. Fusion will help unless someone makes an order of magnitude improvement in battery or ultracapacitor energy density.

No matter which of the alternatives you plan to replace the energy infrastructure with, you needed to start about 20 years ago. World petroleum production is no longer sufficient to sustain economic growth and infrastructure transition simultaneously. Remember, the question isn't whether it's theoretically possible to substitute more plentiful energy sources for the ones that are getting more difficult to extract, it's whether the declining EROI of current energy sources will remain high enough for the additional economic activity of converting infrastructure to other sources while still feeding people, let alone indulging in activities with no immediate payoff like GAI research.

We seem to be living in a world where the EROI is declining faster than willingness to devote painful amounts of the GDP to energy source conversion is increasing. This doesn't mean an immediate biker zombie outlaw apocalypse, but it does mean a slow, unevenly distributed "catabolic collapse" of decreasing standards of living, security, and stability.

Discuss