Part 13 (1/2)

END OF OIL?.

Today our planet is thoroughly wedded to fossil fuels in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. Altogether, the world consumes about 14 trillion watts of power, of which 33 percent comes from oil, 25 percent from coal, 20 percent from gas, 7 percent from nuclear, 15 percent from bioma.s.s and hydroelectric, and a paltry .5 percent from solar and renewables.

Without fossil fuels, the world economy would come to a grinding halt.

One man who clearly saw the end of the age of oil was M. King Hubbert, a Sh.e.l.l Oil petroleum engineer. In 1956, Hubbert presented a far-reaching talk to the American Petroleum Inst.i.tute, making a disturbing prediction that was universally derided by his colleagues at the time. He predicted that U.S. oil reserves were being depleted so rapidly that soon 50 percent of the oil would be taken out of the ground, triggering an irreversible era of decline that would set in between 1965 and 1971. He saw that the total amount of oil in the United States could be plotted as a bell-shaped curve, and that we were then near the top of that curve. From then on, things could only go downhill, he predicted. This meant that oil would become increasingly difficult to extract, hence the unthinkable would happen: the United States would begin importing oil.

His prediction seemed rash, even outlandish and irresponsible, since the United States was still pumping an enormous amount of oil from Texas and elsewhere in this country. But oil engineers are not laughing anymore. Hubbert's prediction was right on the b.u.t.ton. By 1970, U.S. oil production peaked at 10.2 million barrels a day and then fell. It has never recovered. Today, the United States imports 59 percent of its oil. In fact, if you compare a graph of Hubbert's estimates made decades ago with a graph of actual U.S. oil production through 2005, the two curves are almost identical.

Now the fundamental question facing oil engineers is: Are we at the top of Hubbert's peak in world oil reserves? Back in 1956, Hubbert also predicted that global oil production would peak in about fifty years. He could be right again. When our children look back at this era, will they view fossil fuels the same way we view whale oil today, as an unfortunate relic of the distant past?

I have lectured many times in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East, speaking about science, energy, and the future. On one hand, Saudi Arabia has 267 billion barrels of oil, so this country seems to be floating on a huge underground lake of crude oil. Traveling throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states, I could see an exorbitant waste of energy, with huge fountains gus.h.i.+ng in the middle of the desert, creating mammoth artificial ponds and lakes. In Dubai, there is even an indoor ski slope with thousands of tons of artificial snow, in utter defiance of the sweltering heat outside.

But now the oil ministers are worried. Behind all the rhetoric of ”proven oil reserves,” which are supposed to rea.s.sure us that we will have plenty of oil for decades to come, there is the realization that many of these authoritative oil figures are a deceptive form of make-believe. ”Proven oil reserves” sounds soothingly authoritative and definitive, until you realize that the reserves are often the creation of a local oil minister's wishful thinking and political pressure.

Speaking to the experts in energy, I could see that a rough consensus is emerging: we are either at the top of Hubbert's peak for world oil production, or are perhaps a decade away from that fateful point. This means that in the near future, we may be entering a period of irreversible decline.

Of course, we will never totally run out of oil. New pockets are being found all the time. But the cost of extracting and refining these will gradually skyrocket. For example, Canada has huge tar sands deposits, enough to supply the world's oil for decades to come, but it is not cost-effective to extract and refine it. The United States probably has enough coal reserves to last 300 years, but there are legal restrictions, and the cost of extracting all the particulate and gaseous pollutants is onerous.

Furthermore, oil continues to be found in politically volatile regions of the world, contributing to foreign instability. Oil prices, when graphed over the decades, are like a roller-coaster ride, peaking at an astonis.h.i.+ng $140 per barrel in 2008 (and more than $4 per gallon at the gas pump) and then plunging due to the great recession. Although there are wild swings, due to political unrest, speculation, rumors, etc., one thing is clear: the average price of oil will continue to rise over the long term.

This will have profound implications for the world economy. The rapid rise of modern civilization in the twentieth century has been fueled by two things: cheap oil and Moore's law. With energy prices rising, this puts pressure on the world's food supply as well as on the control of pollution. As novelist Jerry Pournelle has said, ”Food and pollution are not primary problems: they are energy problems. Given sufficient energy we can produce as much food as we like, if need be, by high-intensity means such as hydroponics and greenhouses. Pollution is similar: given enough energy, pollutants can be transformed into manageable products; if need be, disa.s.sembled into their const.i.tuent products.”

We also face another issue: the rise of a middle cla.s.s in China and India, one of the great demographic changes of the postwar era, which has created enormous pressure on oil and commodity prices. Seeing McDonald's hamburgers and two-car garages in Hollywood movies, they also want to live the American dream of wasteful energy consumption.

SOLAR/HYDROGEN ECONOMY.

In this regard, history seems to be repeating itself. Back in the 1900s, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, two longtime friends, made a bet as to which form of energy could fuel the future. Henry Ford bet on oil replacing coal, with the internal combustion engine replacing steam engines. Thomas Edison bet on the electric car. It was a fateful bet, whose outcome would have a profound effect on world history. For a while, it appeared that Edison would win the bet, since whale oil was extremely hard to get. But the rapid discovery of cheap oil deposits in the Middle East and elsewhere soon had Ford emerging victorious. The world has never been the same since. Batteries could not keep up with the phenomenal success of gasoline. (Even today, pound for pound, gasoline contains roughly forty times more energy than a battery.) But now the tide is slowly turning. Perhaps Edison will win yet, a century after the bet was made.

The question being asked in the halls of government and industry is: What will replace oil? There is no clear answer. In the near term, there is no immediate replacement for fossil fuels, and there most likely will be an energy mix, with no one form of energy dominating the others.

But the most promising successor is solar/hydrogen power (based on renewable technologies like solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and hydrogen).

At the present time, the cost of electricity produced from solar cells is several times the price of electricity produced from coal. But the cost of solar/hydrogen keeps plunging due to steady technological advances, while the cost of fossil fuels continues its slow rise. It is estimated that within ten to fifteen years or so, the two curves will cross. Then market forces will do the rest.

WIND POWER.

In the short term, renewables like wind power are a big winner. Worldwide, generating capacity from wind grew from 17 billion watts in 2000 to 121 billion watts in 2008. Wind power, once considered a minor player, is becoming increasingly prominent. Recent advances in wind turbine technology have increased the efficiency and productivity of wind farms, which are one of the fastest-growing sectors of the energy market.

The wind farms of today are a far cry from the old windmills that used to power farms and mills in the late 1800s. Nonpolluting and safe, a single wind power generator can produce 5 megawatts of power, enough for a small village. A wind turbine has huge, sleek blades, about 100 feet long, that turn with almost no friction. Wind turbines create electricity in the same way as hydroelectric dams and bicycle generators. The rotating motion spins a magnet inside a coil. The spinning magnetic field pushes electrons inside the coil, creating a net current of electricity. A large wind farm, consisting of 100 windmills, can produce 500 megawatts, comparable to the 1,000 megawatts produced by a single coal-burning or nuclear power plant.

Over the past few decades, Europe has been the world's leader in wind technology. But recently, the United States overtook Europe in generating electricity from wind. In 2009, the United States produced just 28 billion watts from wind power. But Texas alone produces 8 billion watts from wind power and has 1 billion watts in construction, and even more in development. If all goes as planned, Texas will generate 50 billion watts of electrical power from wind, more than enough to satisfy the state's 24 million people.

China will soon surpa.s.s the United States in wind power. Its Wind Base program will create six wind farms with a generating capacity of 127 billion watts.

Although wind power looks increasingly attractive and will undoubtedly grow in the future, it cannot supply the bulk of energy for the world. At best, it will be an integral part of a larger energy mix. Wind power faces several problems. Wind power is generated only intermittently, when the wind blows, and only in a few key regions of the world. Also, because of losses in the transmission of electricity, wind farms have to be close to cities, which further limits their usefulness.

HERE COMES THE SUN.

Ultimately, all energy comes from the sun. Even oil and coal are, in some sense, concentrated sunlight, representing the energy that fell on plants and animals millions of years ago. As a consequence, the amount of concentrated sunlight energy stored within a gallon of gasoline is much larger than the energy we can store in a battery. That was the fundamental problem facing Edison in the last century, and it is the same problem today.

Solar cells operate by converting sunlight directly into electricity. (This process was explained by Einstein in 1905. When a particle of light, or a photon, hits a metal, it kicks out an electron, thereby creating a current.) Solar cells, however, are not efficient. Even after decades of hard work by engineers and scientists, solar cell efficiency hovers around 15 percent. So research has gone in two directions. The first is to increase the efficiency of solar cells, which is a very difficult technical problem. The other is to reduce the cost of the manufacture, installation, and construction of solar parks.

For example, one might be able to supply the electrical needs of the United States by covering the entire state of Arizona with solar cells, which is impractical. However, land rights to large chunks of Saharan real estate have suddenly become a hot topic, and investors are already creating ma.s.sive solar parks in this desert to meet the needs of European consumers.

Or in cities, one might be able to reduce the cost of solar power by covering homes and buildings with solar cells. This has several advantages, including eliminating the losses that occur during the transmission of power from a central power plant. The problem is one of reducing costs. A quick calculation shows that you would have to squeeze every possible dollar to make these ventures profitable.

Although solar power still has not lived up to its promise, the recent instability in oil prices has spurred efforts to finally bring solar power to the marketplace. The tide could be turning. Records are being broken every few months. Solar voltaic production is growing by 45 percent per year, almost doubling every two years. Worldwide, photovoltaic installation is now 15 billion watts, growing by 5.6 billion watts in 2008 alone.

In 2008, Florida Power & Light announced the largest solar plant project in the United States. The contract was given by SunPower, which plans to generate 25 megawatts of power. (The current record holder in the United States is the Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, with a solar plant that generates 15 megawatts of solar power.) In 2009, BrightSource Energy, based in Oakland, California, announced plans to beat that record by building fourteen solar plants, generating 2.6 billion watts, across California, Nevada, and Arizona.

One of BrightSource's projects is the Ivanpah solar plant, consisting of three solar thermal plants to be based in Southern California, which will produce 440 megawatts of power. In a joint project with Pacific Gas and Electric, BrightSource plans to build a 1.3 billion watt plant in the Mojave Desert.

In 2009, First Solar, the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells, announced that it will create the world's largest solar plant just north of the Great Wall of China. The ten-year contract, whose details are still being hammered out, envisions a huge solar complex containing 27 million thin-film solar panels that will generate 2 billion watts of power, or the equivalent of two coal-fired plants, producing enough energy to supply 3 million homes. The plant, which will cover twenty-five square miles, will be built in Inner Mongolia and is actually part of a much larger energy park. Chinese officials state that solar power is just one component of this facility, which will eventually supply 12 billion watts of power from wind, solar, bioma.s.s, and hydroelectric.

It remains to be seen whether these ambitious projects will finally negotiate the gauntlet of environmental inspections and cost overruns, but the point is that solar economics are gradually undergoing a sea change, with large solar companies seriously viewing solar power as being compet.i.tive with fossil fuel plants.

ELECTRIC CAR.

Since about half the world's oil is used in cars, trucks, trains, and planes, there is enormous interest in reforming that sector of the economy. There is now a race to see who will dominate the automotive future, as nations make the historic transition from fossil fuels to electricity. There are several stages in this transition. The first is the hybrid car, already on the market, which uses a combination of electricity from a battery and gasoline. This design uses a small internal combustion engine to solve the long-standing problems with batteries: it is difficult to create a battery that can operate for long distances as well as provide instantaneous acceleration.

But the hybrid is the first step. The plug-in hybrid car, for example, has a battery powerful enough to run the car on electrical power for the first fifty miles or so before the car has to switch to its gasoline engine. Since most people do their commuting and shopping within fifty miles, it means that these cars are powered only by electricity during that time.

One major entry into the plug-in hybrid race is the Chevy Volt, made by General Motors. It has a range of 40 miles (using only a lithium-ion battery) and a range of 300 miles using the small gasoline engine.

And then there is the Tesla Roadster, which has no gasoline engine at all. It is made by Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that is the only one in North America selling fully electric cars in series production. The Roadster is a sleek sports car that can go head-to-head with any gasoline-fired car, putting to rest the idea that electric lithium-ion batteries cannot compete against gasoline engines.

I had a chance to drive a two-seat Tesla, owned by John Hendricks, founder of Discovery Communications, the parent company of the Discovery Channel. As I sat in the driver's seat, Mr. Hendricks urged me to hit the accelerator with all my might to test his car. Taking his advice, I floored the accelerator. Immediately, I could feel the sudden surge in power. My body sank into the seat as I hit 60 miles per hour in just 3.9 seconds. It is one thing to hear an engineer boast about the performance of fully electric cars; it is another thing to hit the accelerator and feel it for yourself.

The successful marketing of the Tesla has forced mainstream automakers to play catch-up, after decades of putting down the electric car. Robert Lutz, when he was vice chairman of General Motors, said, ”All the geniuses here at General Motors kept saying lithium-ion technology is ten years away, and Toyota agreed with us-and boom, along comes Tesla. So I said, 'How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this and we can't?'”

Nissan Motors is leading the charge to introduce the fully electric car to the average consumer. It is called the Leaf, has a range of 100 miles, a top speed of up to ninety miles per hour, and is fully electric.