Time Is Running Out – Energy Strategy Part 1

Our culture today is like a donkey starving to death when he is sitting right between two piles of hay, but can’t decide between the two alternatives. I am referring here to the tension between the two camps regarding energy policy: one says that we must immediately drop all use of fossil fuels at the risk of imminent demise; while the other seems to bury their collective heads in the sand and expect that there are no consequences for the continuing growth in energy usage. This false choice causes us as a country to do little on either front, much less find a “third way” which best matches the reality of the situation.

For the moment, I’m going to avoid the biggest issue in this debate, which is the degree to which mankind will or will not experience serious or existential consequences going forward for the last century or so of burning fossil fuels, taking into account cascading environmental effects which may still be unrevealed. On the other side, there is the controversy as to whether science facts have been amplified, twisted, or even “made up” in order to sell us a Utopian dream where we will all give up technology and go back to nature.

Don’t worry, I will address this issue, but it requires more time to dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s as the push back from both sides can be intense, given the political sensitivity. In the interim, I just want to address the question, “when do we run out of fossil fuels?” And the answer seems to be, “pretty darn soon.” I refer to data listed on the excellent site, “Our World in Data“, which seems to be pretty reliable and non-partisan. Of course, the number of years left in the plot below is based on current usage. If we tried to switch to only using coal, for example, it wouldn’t last 139 years, because switching to just coal would more than triple our coal usage over current levels.

So effectively, we have about 50 years if we do nothing further. Much past then, and if the problem is not yet solved, the price of energy will grow so high it will greatly reduce our standard of living, and we won’t have enough economic resources left to build a new energy solution. Fifty years sounds like a long time, but it becomes way too short when you consider the clear need to eventually replace all those fossil fuel plants with entirely new systems which are just as effective, day and night, in season and out of season.

Obviously renewable energy is a growing force and will help here. Yet it seems to be reaching its limitations as a primary energy source due to problems with reliability and seasonality of many of these energy sources. There seems to be no highly efficient technology to readily store energy from wind and solar over and get it back again within a few hours as would be needed for primary usage. Instead, as Germany has learned, they actually had to go back and build fossil fuel-based generation plants to backfill renewables during their down times.

So both sides espouse an easy answer as their rallying cry: “switch to renewables” vs “just pump more oil.” Both easy answers are now shown to generally lead to failure when taken at face value. We must explore some of the more difficult answers available in order to have a hope of getting our technically sophisticated civilization through these dark times and out the other side to a more sustainable energy future.