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FOSSIL FUEL FACTS
By Alan E. Thompson © 2003.
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Everyone has heard of fossil fuels, coal, gas, and oil; how
important they are to the world economy, what we will do when they run out, and whether
they cause global warming.
It might be thought that there is little more to be said, but there are
gaps in the debate, which I hope to fill in some degree. To recapitulate briefly; although
the current focus of attention is on gas and oil, the major reserves are in the form of
coal, about eighty percent in fact. The coal mining industry is in decline not due to lack
of availability, but due to cost of extraction. Don’t sell the family coal mine just
yet though, we may well go to a methanol economy for fuel cells, and this is easily
produced from coal by blowing hot oxygen and steam through a red-hot coke bed. If you get
the steam hot enough, perhaps via an atomic reactor, you don’t need the oxygen. The
same plant will handle carbon from organic sources when the mines are finally closed, so
you will have a head start.
Extraction cost is largely due to mobility, or lack of it. Gas is
extremely mobile, all you have to do is drill a hole into a reserve, connect up piping,
and you are in business; there is very little to do in the way of pumping, refining, waste
disposal and so on, at least compared with oil and coal. This mobility is also one reason
for its relative scarcity; geologically fracture a gas field, and you lose your gas,
fracture an oil field and some of the oil will probably stay there, fracture a coalfield
and nobody will notice.
There are two other reserves, usually discounted, I would like to
mention. The first is Methane Hydrate; this is formed when methane is produced underwater
from organic decay. If the water is a few hundred feet deep, and not many degrees above
freezing, the gas does not bubble to the surface as from your average bog. Instead it
forms a loose association with the water, a sort of whitish ice, which is trapped in
layers in the mud and silt it was formed from. Although it could be argued that this is
not really fossil fuel, but part of the in-cycle biomass, some of it may have been there
for quite a long time. The amounts are uncertain, and harvesting is difficult. The real
interest however is not in its value as a resource, but in the fact that if we get global
warming, it is likely to bubble up spontaneously. This might be a cause for concern as it
is about one hundred times as effective as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, which will
cause more global warming and could lead to a runaway effect. It does not persist in the
atmosphere indefinitely as it will oxidise to carbon dioxide and water over a few hundred
years, but it could cause a boost of several degrees while it is doing so.
The next reserve is peat. Again, one can argue that it is not a fossil
fuel, for the top layer may still be alive, and the layers underneath are the past few
decades of dead leaves. Go deeper, and in some reserves you are going back tens of
thousands of years, so there is a grey area of definition. As with Methane Hydrate, it is
not rated much as a fuel reserve; it has less than half the energy of coal, is wet and
often a long way from where it can be used. There is quite a lot of it however, perhaps
six hundred cubic miles. Everybody has seen pictures of tropical rain forest, and has
heard how burning them contributes to global warming. In a rain forest, what you see is
what you get. Nearly all of the carbon is in-cycle with very little leaf litter or humus,
the temperature being high enough for bacteria and fungi to keep up with litter
production. In a peat bog there is not much to see on the surface, it is all underground.
There can be a lot more carbon in an acre of peat bog than in an acre of forest.
Unfortunately, as it is drained and as the climate warms up, it oxidises, and may
contribute more carbon dioxide than fossil fuel; much of a big swathe of land right across
the Arctic from Canada, through Russia to China is tundra.
Thus these two little rated resources may be traps for the unwary,
making a significant contribution to global warming for little if any gain. To factor them
into the energy equation one should really count the potential damage done by burning
fossil fuel twice over, once for the fuel and once again for the unwanted side effects of
peat and methane hydrate destruction.
With these two minor items out of the way I wish to examine in more
detail the process of formation for the major resources. Coal is generally reckoned to be
formed from fossilised vegetable remains. Often leaf imprints and bits of tree trunk are
found in, it so the evidence is not really disputable. Oil is more likely formed from
marine deposits and is derived from smaller algae; no major fossils, but some chemical
signatures that point to biological origin. Ignoring the minutiae, both are the result of
photosynthesis; that is the splitting of atmospheric carbon dioxide to utilise the carbon
for cell formation for plants and rejecting the oxygen as an unwanted by-product. For the
early plants it was actually quite useful, for it violently poisoned off the competition
in the immediate vicinity. Quite a good idea if you live in a soup of competing bacteria.
Oxygen is a highly reactive gas. If you want to look for life as we know
it on some distant planet, don’t bother with traces of water, or carbon compounds.
Look for oxygen! For extinct life, look for surface oxidation, principally of iron. For a
long time, several hundred million years, oxygen did not accumulate in the atmosphere;
instead the Earth rusted! Luckily there was plenty of carbon dioxide, and eventually
enough oxygen was left free for an ozone layer to form, blocking lethal ultra violet rays
from the sun and allowing plants to get out of the sea and onto the land. The process of
rusting has not finished however. At peak, in the late carboniferous, there may have been
twice as much oxygen in the atmosphere as there is now. Some early dragonflies had a
wingspan of three feet; if you bred them that big now they probably would not fly, as they
would have difficulty getting enough oxygen to do so. Half of this oxygen has gone now and
there is not enough carbon dioxide left to replace it.
True, we are making lots, but that does not help as we use atmospheric
oxygen to do so, apart from a little from iron and aluminium production, where the oxygen
comes from the metal oxide.
This leads to the obvious question: How much fossil fuel is there? The
answer, surprisingly, is rather a lot more than we have been led to believe! Dire warnings
of ‘running out’ of fossil fuel are way off the mark.
The trick is not to look for ‘known fuel reserves,’ which tend
to alter with time, but to look for oxygen! For every molecule of oxygen in the atmosphere
there must have been one molecule of carbon dioxide split. CO2 becomes O2 in the air and one atom
of carbon underground somewhere. We can roughly calculate how much there is. CO2 has a molecular weight of 44; that is, it weighs 44 times
as much as a hydrogen atom, which is take as unity, being the lightest atom. Of this the
carbon weighs 12 and the two oxygens 16 each. Very roughly we can say that two sevenths of
the weight of the original CO2 is now
underground as carbon. We can very easily weigh the atmosphere; try to suck mercury up a
tube by connecting it to a vacuum pump and you will get a height of about 30 inches, which
corresponds to a pressure of about 14.7 lbs per square inch. One fifth of this is oxygen,
or about three pounds, which gives rather more than a pound of carbon per square inch of
the Earth’s’ surface, seas included. This may not sound much, but it is well
over a hundredweight per square foot, or over a million tons per square mile, and there
are quite a lot of square miles to go.
We don’t really need to go much farther, for obviously, if we
burned all of this, there would be no oxygen left to breathe; in fact one percent of
carbon dioxide is lethal if you breathe it for long. Current levels are about four parts
per thousand, but they were three less than a century ago and they could double in the
next few decades. It could be argued that we might still run out because we could not find
much of this hidden reserve, or the cost of extraction would be too high. There is a bit
more left in the calculation however; to start with it is not only current levels of
atmospheric oxygen we need to consider. There is as much again dissolved in the sea for
example, and maybe ten times as much in those few million years’ worth of rust.
There might even be some ‘native’ carbon, that is, carbon that
never entered the biological cycle. Given this superabundance we are certainly likely to
find enough, if we could bring it all to the surface we would be five feet deep in the
stuff. The trouble is that we are likely to find more than enough, without looking very
hard, to greatly change the atmosphere.
So we are likely to have global warming. Once started it is likely to
motor on a bit under its own steam even if we do try to cut back on fossil burning. Given
that this is probably a fact of life, we have to ask whether this is such a big deal
anyway, after all, perhaps the carboniferous might have been a great time to live, no ice
caps! And warm seas! We could always shift a bit farther North if the tropics became too
warm.
Things might not be that simple however. To start with we could not eat
most of the plants that were around in the carboniferous, and our current crops don’t
seem to do too well under elevated temperature and carbon dioxide conditions. There would
be a need for some pretty fast plant breeding, maybe not a problem, but remember that more
than half of what we eat is grass seed, we are stuck with three varieties of one species
for most of our food. Worse, the sun is about a third hotter than it was in the
carboniferous, so we can’t go back there anyway; we would be more likely to boil the
seas than have a steamy swamp. Also, if we abandon ten degrees, from latitude twenty to
latitude thirty, the bit we might gain from latitude fifty to sixty is rather a lot
smaller, as a quick glance at a globe will confirm.
So there might be a problem. The fossil fuel industry has got its
calculations massively wrong; they are out by several orders of magnitude. It happens
sometimes. Once we thought that the world was flat, and that stones could not fall out of
the sky. The fact is that we shall run out of atmosphere long before we run out of fossil
fuel, and there never was, is or can be a shortage. Since we cannot burn it all, we need
to ask how much can we burn, and this may be close to what we have burnt already.
Eventually we must come to a zero burn economy and need to be halfway there well within
the next few decades; the length of the tail does not matter very much. Extraction for
plastics could go on for a while longer as most of this is re-fossilised in landfill
anyway.
The probability is that we will not achieve this; there are too many
vested interests, too many developing countries wanting to come on stream, a lack of
public perception and a lack of political will. Thus we will to go to plan B by default.
In this scenario we are quite likely to see a fall in food production and population
levels. Doubling of the population every thirty-five years probably was not such a good
idea anyway. If it halves in the same time period we are, (writing in 2003) only back to
1968 levels and nobody much complained then. After all, you cannot talk to all of them and
most people will know a few hundred others with a dozen or so friends whether they live in
a community of a thousand or a billion. We might lose a lot of our cities to rising sea
levels, 80% of us live in risk areas, but modern cities are in a constant process of
redevelopment. Come back to your hometown in a hundred years and only a few landmarks will
be left, so we can shift redevelopment to higher land. It is a question of rate rather
than total change, and sea levels are not rising all that quickly. We don’t need a
Canute mentality, or higher sea walls, we need a planned response to change. We can’t
save everything so we must get good value judgements on what is more important. While the
change might not be great fun it need not be a total disaster either. What is important is
to save centres of knowledge and learning, for that is the core of a civilisation, not its
numbers or buildings.
Plan B does not solve the problem however, it merely delays it and may
make it worse, halving the population will not make a very big impact on fuel use. Most of
the missing will be in poorer countries that don’t burn much fuel anyway, and those
that are left will be richer. Moving cities might accelerate fuel use for concrete
manufacture and building costs, so we still have to approach zero fossil fuel burning.
Luckily there are plenty of alternatives; we live near a star that
delivers about seventeen thousand-horse power per hour per acre of surface and we know how
to harness this. There is quite a lot of power available from wind and tides and we know
how to harness this also. Biomass, principally wood, has always been used although now not
on a sustainable basis, and we can convert this to motor fuel, carbon or gas. We might
even use nuclear power if we can achieve hydrogen fusion. Other nuclear routes seem a bit
expensive if you count the cost of tidying up afterwards and the unquantified risk of
accidents.
The main argument against the use of alternatives is cost. This is a
false argument for the cost of the damage done by burning fossil fuel is never entered
into the calculation. If we said petrol should be free, but one has to pay fifty dollars a
gallon for the oxygen to burn it with and the damage done, the balance is greatly in
favour of alternatives. I am not saying the cost of damage is really a fifty dollars a
gallon, but since both sides of the argument are unquantified it is as least as accurate
as the current lack of calculation, and therefore has equal status. It could of course be
a lot more if we lose the civilisation.
Another problem is that the new technology is emergent: that is, it is
not fully developed. Comparative costs are not really known and tend to leapfrog each
other, it is not readily available and there is great public ignorance. Most people, for
instance, are still using tungsten filament light bulbs instead of low energy ones which
give four times as much light for the same electricity and give them a return on capital
of over a hundred percent, while their savings languish at four percent. There are many
more examples.
Unfortunately, the largest industrial power base, America, is hog-tied
by lack of incentives. What is needed is to get fuel tax in America rapidly in line with
Europe so there is a level playing field, use the revenue as investment in new technology,
and then we might see some action! Current arguments are that such a fuel price hike will
damage American industry. Not doing so is likely to kill off large sectors of it rather
than damage them. If the rest of the world develops alternatives and America does not,
industry there is likely to be on a par with Russia at the end of the Cold War. Already
there is a big gap opening up with regard to steel production, motor manufacture and
agriculture, all of these industries are lagging in efficiency now. While they may be
propped with subsidies for a time, eventually the day of reckoning must come.
Obviously we need a transition phase, and there are some good indicators
here. For example, the current record for miles per gallon for a ‘car’, being a
three or more wheeled vehicle capable of carrying one person at an average of fifteen
miles per-hour, is over four thousand miles! While not suggesting that we should all drive
such spindly vehicles, we could get within two and a half percent of this figure and drive
a hundred miles on our gallon in the same time. All this could be achieved with bits off
the shelf. Engine efficiency could be doubled with known technology while weight could be
halved relatively easily to give a further boost. Thus the first halving of fossil fuel
use for transport could be achieved relatively painlessly.
Moving to fuel cells for area power needs and transport could give a
further halving, by which time we are well on the way. Biomass could be coming on stream
shortly after. We have some luck here also; the major limit to plant growth is carbon
dioxide availability, so long as they have plenty of light warmth and water, so there
might be a growth boost working in our favour. They might be the wrong kind of plants that
get ahead so far as the agronomists are concerned, but at least they will sequester some
carbon. Deforestation and desert growth might negate this, but that is something we could
try to control.
We could greatly increase plankton growth in the sea by fertilisation,
but this is something of a wild card and potentially risky, it could be used as a kind of
last resort however, and would buy some time while we tried to get other things right.
Another factor in our favour is that chalk, limestone and coral reefs
will dissolve more readily, sequestering carbon dioxide as bicarbonate, it was all
dissolved in earlier times and has been deposited by living things as the level of carbon
dioxide dropped. The process is slow however and is more of a long term buffering effect
over tens of thousands of years rather than a quick fix.
At all events we are starting into an era of rapid change. The correct
response is neither doom-saying nor defense of the old order. What is needed is some
planning for an orderly transition, and perhaps an element of ruthlessness in carrying out
change. If a few sacred cows drop along the wayside in the process this is no great
matter. As jobs go in the sunset industries, more will be created in the new, many of the
old ones are actually wealth destroying industries if the full balance sheet is examined;
there is little merit in profit for the few at expense of cost for the many. We cannot go
back, so we shall go forward, willingly or not - the secret is not to be pushed from
behind, but to be drawn by some reasonably accurate and achievable vision of the future.
It could be a good one too, pollution largely negated, wealth and leisure increased, a
slowly improving natural environment rather than a destabilised one.
Of course, at present we are not really headed in that direction, and
later means lesser, fewer people, less wealth, greater disruption and a longer recovery
period. We are looking at a window of opportunity at present, with many of the precursors
to change in place but not yet activated.
Rate is all. The country that gets ahead in the new technology is likely
to stay there for a good long while and pull the rest after it. Historically this has been
the case and there is no reason to suppose that it will not happen again.
Quite often the young want to destroy the old and rebuild the world
anew. This time we are likely to do the first part of the job for them. Let us hope they
rise to the opportunity!
About the Author
Alan E. Thompson was born in the United Kingdom in 1936. He was one of the
founding members of the World Future Society there and is also a member of the Institute
of Patentees and Inventors, and Mensa. Now retired, he still writes articles on
futures topics and has in the past written one of the early books on the subject in the
U.K. As an inventor he has always been interested in the side effects of invention, for
changing one element in a civilization always brings other changes, not always intended or
desirable.
All contents copyright © World Future Society, 2003.
All rights reserved.
