Can Jackson Hole be sustainable?


“Sustainability” is one of those words often used but misunderstood. The dictionary definition goes like this: Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It has three main pillars: economic, environmental, and social. In this valley I have often seen the word combined to produce an oxymoron, as in: sustainable growth. Unlimited economic growth is impossible on a finite planet because of limited non renewable resources like oil and metals and degraded renewable resources like soil and water. The dominant force driving economic growth is solar energy, primarily stored  fossil energy with a small contribution from so called “renewable” energy.. There is a direct correlation between energy use per capita and GDP going back almost to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Increasing energy use yields increasing economic growth, improvment in living standards and rising wealth. Environmental sustainability is assured if the organisms in the system can obtain the necessary nutrients to meet their energy needs using what is available in their environment’s “carrying capacity.” Social sustainability is a community which cares for, fosters and respects its member’s social, cultural, legal and economic rights and needs allowing loyal members to bind together as a community. It is my contention that we are entering what Jim Kunstler has termed “The Long Emergency.”  We are facing a host of predicaments: Global Warming, species extinction, digital surveillance, economic inequality, social disintegration and violence, political polarization, overpopulation, critical resource depletion, and massive debt issuance  just to name a few. The common cause is the growth and development path the world has followed for the past few hundred years which has been made possible by harnessing the cheap concentrated solar energy contained in fossil fuels, primarily oil. That rodeo is coming to an end. The worldwide production of cheap conventional crude oil has been essentially flat for more than 10 years. Expensive less useful “unconventional” oil has increased but too high oil prices imperil an economy and too low prices imperil the oil companies. The economy has become a highly complex networked, self organized and globalized entity. It has been characterized as a “dissipative structure” capturing and converting energy in much the same way as a hurricane or for that matter almost any living organism. This complexity has hit a point of diminishing returns where problem solving by implementing complex solutions has the effect of adding unanticipated problems. The most obvious problem for Jackson is the Just in Time(JIT) supply chains that allow this valley to survive. Everything and everyone coming to Jackson arrives by oil. We produce virtually no food besides cattle forage. Even the alfalfa pellets for the Elk Refuge arrive by truck. We saw the fragility of Jackson recently when the access corridors were largely closed by avalanches. Grocery shelves went empty as did most gas station fuel tanks.  What Jackson does is produce “services” to the inhabitants, most of whom are visitors able to visit because of their discretionary income. Environmental  sustainability exists when the individuals can live within the carrying capacity using  available resources and not contaminating the environment with their waste. What is the carrying capacity of Jackson Hole? It is effectively Zero for humans if food can’t be grown and stored over a long winter. It might be a few hundred or thousand under skilled agriculture and judicious harvesting of the flora and fauna to augment protein needs. JH a century ago had an operational fabric of social sustainability characteristic of small agricultural communities. I contend that is now degraded by vast income and class inequality, hyper tourism, expensive housing, and services provided by distant workers among other factors.  The decline of cheap energy will end growth as we have known it.  The decline may be swift and sudden going over a “Seneca Cliff “as recently noted in a book by Ugo Bardi. It may also be possible to obtain energy from renewable sources “decarbonizing” the economy as has been proposed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Ultimately we will have to obtain all our energy from renewable solar energy rather than non renewable solar energy from fossil sources.  It is vital to develop a risk management strategy as an intelligent response if we are to ever achieve sustainability in JH.





COP 24…a waste of energy?







The End of Oil Part 7

The End of Oil Part 7



I will give the abstract to their report……..










Hubbert’s curve








The End of Oil Part 6



The End of Oil Part 5


I n this post and in future posts I will attempt to explain the methodology of the Hills Group using thermodynamic principles to examine world petroleum depletion. I will try to do my best to simplify and explain concepts foreign to some readers and if I explain correctly and perhaps more simply, the interested reader might be better able to draw his/her own conclusions

Unfortunately the Hills Group doesn’t give background and history on how their research started. That might be a worthy subject for an extended magazine article but I will try to imagine the early steps. Keep in mind these guys are engineers, not poets and what counts with engineers are numbers and data.

In a recent lecture on Oil depletion Dr Alister Hamilton who is senior lecturer in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh pulled up a graph from the book “The Limits to Growth” in which he presented a graph of how the relative resource cost of the extraction of a resource ( eg oil) changed over time as the resource headed toward depletion. The graph showed that the relative cost remained relatively fixed until about 60% of the resource was consumed. After that point the cost started to climb ever more steeply as the remaining resource was extracted. This seems intuitive. IF I were to relate this to oil I would say that the early extraction up to about 60% represented the “Cheap oil”, the easy to get oil. That is in fact how the oil business has been run. In the early days of  the Spindletop Field in East Texas all they had to do was sink a pipe and the oil shot out under its own pressure. EROEI analysis of these early days estimated the energy output received versus  the energy input was enormous, perhaps 100:1 or more. This was the case for many of the early Texas and Oklahoma fields. This was fossil energy that was virtually free. It was the same case later in the Middle East where mammoth fields like the Ghawar in Saudi Arabia produced vast gushers of oil with little energy input or trouble. But today more than 60 years after the Ghawar was discovered the worlds petroleum industry has become long in the tooth and depletion of the early huge fields is an undeniable fact and except for the North Sea and Alaska North Slope discoveries, almost no new significant easily accessible fields have been found. There have been some significant discoveries in the deep sea and there is some hope that some big finds might await in some other regions such as Siberia and the Arctic but as yet almost all the great fields have been petering out declining at 5-8% a year.. Small oilfields decline twice as fast as big ones and HSBC reported recently last September  that the typical new oilfield size 40 years ago was 500 million to a Billion barrels whereas in the past decade that has fallen to only 75 million barrels, an amount only enough to power  the world for one day! Last year the exploration success rate hit a record low of 5% and the average size was a miniscule 24 million barrels enough to supply the world for less than 8 hours!  US tight oil had been one of the few bright spots and currently is providing about 4.6 mbpd, about 5% of world supply, but there has been declining production in almost all fields due to the natural 5-7% depletion rate and low world oil prices. However, world demand continues to grow at more than 1 million bpd. The Hills Group in their paper gave the USGS  resource estimate in 2000 of as much as 4.3 Trillion barrels . The world currently is using 33 Billion barrels a year. The world’s cumulative consumption since 1859 has been 1.29 Trillion barrels. So what’s the problem? It turns out that a resources depletion state has as much to do with the efficiency and cost with which it can be produced as it does with how much is in the ground and what it can be sold for. So to look at Depletion comprehensively Hill et al emphasize that the entire production system has to be looked at, not just the volume remaining and extraction at the well head. The term they use in the paper is what quantity in the resource or the reserve meets their engineering requirement which they define is “fit to use”.   Hill further states that each succeeding barrel in a field costs more in energy terms than the previous barrel in effect yielding less energy to the end user, a mandate of the second law. I understand this to mean that in addition to oil being removed, heat energy is also being removed. The temperature of the earth increases 1 deg/F for every 70 feet. A well 7000 feet deep might have a temperature 100 degrees higher than the surface. Early on in their project they must have realized that accurate prediction needed accurate data and trying to get data on 48000 fields all over the world from small and large oil companies and oil producing countries as well as knowing the geology would be impossible. Not only was the data incomplete or inaccurate or lost, oil resource and production was often kept secret by the producers for a variety of reasons, some of which are obvious. The group decided the most reliable data set was the cumulative production produced and that data was available from energy organizations such as the EIA and the IEA. Price history was readily available as well. The Hills group chose the data set from the EIA as their starting point starting arbitrarily in 1900.   At this point I will digress temporarily to explain a bit about the energy available to be used in the petroleum producing system.

Hill states that if crude oil is to be a useful as energy source it must be capable of delivering enough energy to support its extraction, processing and distribution. That is, oil provides the energy to produce oil.  The drilling energy used on most drilling rigs is diesel which may be used directly or by means of diesel powered generators which in turn generate electricity or power hydraulic pumps and air  compressors   and a variety of pumps to add or remove water or drilling muds for example.  Once oil appears at the well head it must be processed to remove undesirable contaminants, processed to separate the oil into component fractions and then moved to refineries to yield the various needed fractions of diesel, gasoline, asphalt and bunker fuel for ships. All this energy available to do this work is called its Exergy, which is defined as energy available to do work. Keep in mind that the energy contained in the oil is not destroyed. The available energy to do work, its exergy is what is consumed as the oil energy is transformed into work with a large part of the energy lost to heat as entropy which always increases in irreversible processes such as these. Once the exergy has done its work, its value falls to zero. It is necessary to keep in mind that in this inefficient exergy cascade, heat is lost, “wasted” all along the way. All those diesel engines and refining and transportation engines generate entropy and waste heat and energy prodigiously. Electricity in the oil production/processing system may come from a coal power plant   which is 35% efficient or generated by a gasoline or diesel engine which is 20-30% efficient. Let’s not forget the  175 pound workers arriving to work in 6000  pound trucks powered by those inefficient engines, the vast majority of energy being used  to move the 6000 pound truck  and  that transportation efficiency  (175/6175 lb) yielding an efficiency of 2.5%!  And I almost forgot to mention that the very process of combustion of the oil yields only 71% of the energy in the original crude. This is derived from the combustion equation for crude oil. That is, there are 140000 btu in a gallon of crude but after burning you are left with 99,400 btu as energy left to do work, as  crude’s Exergy or if you will, its net energy. The other 29% is wasted as heat, adding to the entropy in our world, contributing to global warming.  By now I hope the reader is getting an understanding  of the vast amount of energy flowing into the production system. The  MOST IMPORTANT POINT TO KEEP IN MIND  is that it is energy of the fossil fuels being returned as exergy to society  provides the vast majority of the wealth in our industrial civilization. Just like past civilizations, we still have slavery leveraging the work needed to be done but the slaves powering our industrial lifestyle are primarily the bond energy released from the carbon-hydrogen bonds in fossil fuels, the most important being oil. Oil Exergy to a huge extent is how wealth flows into society. By this I mean of course our current fossil fuel dependent industrial society. Energy or exergy always was the driver of wealth but in the pre-industrial era, that exergy came from our own backs and hands and the power of our animals whose energy came from eating plants grown by energy received from the sun. If follows then that if exergy from fossil fuels depletes, then wealth generation will also decline unless of course energy from another source can be found and substituted.    It also follows that if more and more work goes into the oil producing industry, energy is being subtracted from society, Wealth is being subtracted from society and diverted back to oil production. This means that we in society are getting poorer. The point is not far off when all the energy, the “wealth” is flowing into oil and nothing flowing back to soon to be poor little us. As Bob Dylan said “It doesn’t take a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing.” It doesn’t take an economist to understand that if wealth is subtracted from an economy, the economy will contract. I think it is very possible that our recession both here and world wide is partly caused by energy and wealth being diverted back to oil production and if energy available to the world economy declines then growth will decline, or stop or become negative in the not too distant future. So is it happening as the Hills Group seems to indicate and if so when will it happen? Will we have to pay more to fill up our Landcruisers here in Jackson Hole? Will we still be able to fly to Davos to the World Economic Forum and will all the central bank officials, bankers and hedge fund managers still be coming here every summer to strategize how to keep money flowing from the periphery of society into the financial elites? Stay tuned as I continue to try to unpack this little known and very complicated problem.

The End of Oil Part 4

In this post I will attempt to present the ground breaking research by the Hills Group who are a group of mining engineers and project managers who published a paper in December 2013 entitled “Depletion: A Determination for the world’s petroleum reserve: an exergy analysis employing the Etp model.” A second version was issued in March 2015  as an update with extensive graphs, data sets and equations explaining their methodology and that is the version I will refer to.  This report can be obtained as a 65 page monograph for a modest price from their website.I believe their work is a uniquely original Nobel Prize quality effort to look at oil production and depletion from an entirely new perspective far different from  the work previously performed by economists, oil executives and corporations, energy organizations and journalists , analysts and geologists. The traditional approach has involved cataloging oil resources and reserves worldwide with production history and estimates of future supply and demand. Their metrics have included cost, volumetric and quantitative considerations primarily. Interestingly, depletion of world energy supplies has been to date a lesser consideration. Some analysts have looked at the energy side of things employing concepts  like EROEI, that is energy return on energy invested  stating an obvious point that to obtain energy, you will need to expend energy.  But to my knowledge no one has looked at oil production, processing and distribution from a strictly energy and cost analysis perspective attempting to show energy flows into the petroleum industry and energy flows into our industrial society.     Energy flows are exceedingly important in all manner of fields from ecology, astrophysics, meteorology, and economics and as it happens oil production. The Hills Group went outside the envelope and decided to use physics and thermodynamics to see if depletion could be estimated more accurately than previous methods.  They also wanted to look at how the energy flows might influence and predict cost and availability of oil going forward. It’s my guess that when they started their work developing their hypotheses they had no idea what they would find and the impact of their conclusions.  I should say at the outset that their report is highly detailed and complex employing a myriad of equations, graphs, and data sets and the serious reader  will need at least a college level understanding of physics, mathematics and calculus to truly understand their approach.  I have that background but found that I had to go back and refresh long forgotten concepts of thermodynamics to plow through the paper which I have read and reread. What I find extraordinary is that I have not seen any peer reviews or criticism of their work anywhere outside of a few excellent energy bloggers and YouTube videos. The silence has been deafening and I continue to scan the Net for commentary on their work. If necessary I will contact energy analysts with whom I am acquainted urging them to study the work of the Hills Group and see if they can spot flaws in their reasoning. My understanding is rudimentary at best but so far I find their conclusions largely accurate but I would urge caution totally accepting their grim conclusions without additional study and research. I have a few quibbles with some of their work. For example they use scientific notation which clutters their rather crude graphs. Their explanations involving thermodynamic principles could be improved and their use of for example the BTU as their preferred unit of energy seems inappropriate given that the Joule is in most respects the more standard and useful metric. I have redrawn many of their graphs to improve readability for myself. They don’t state in their paper that energy consumption by the petroleum production system should be the energy of the marginal barrel although that is implied in their work. They also seem reluctant to address the greater implications of what their work might mean to an energy dependent Industrial civilization which could be profound to say the least. I have little doubt they are unaware of the impact of their preliminary conclusions. Their work by my understanding seems to predict the imminent demise of the International Oil companies. They don’t say that oil production will cease. They just say that when the energy cost of oil extraction matches the energy delivered that oil production could cease. They don’t mention that oil production could continue if subsidized by another energy source.  But of course this is already being done on a large scale in Alberta’s tar sands using natural gas as an input to tease out the bitumen.             There are some uses of oil that have no realistic substitutes. They also didn’t emphasize the overweening importance of oil energy to the rest of the worldwide energy infrastructure. For example The BP report of 2016 states that oil as a primary energy source supplied 32.9% of the world’s primary energy in 2015 but the fact is that oil underpins and subsidizes to a huge extent the production from all the other energy sources. Most importantly for the world industrial economy, oil is literally the driving force of everything that moves, and without oil almost nothing would move, no trucks would deliver goods, few mines would function, industrial food production would cease and the automobile transportation system would largely collapse. These possible scenarios are whoppers. Now I’ve saved the worst for last. The Hills Group shows their Etp curve hitting a wall as early as 2030 or 2031! More on that conclusion in a future post after I have tried to describe in detail the methodology of their work. I will also address policy implications for the economy and society in general and my native Jackson Hole region in particular.

The End of Oil Part 3

In my previous posts dealing with oil energy and depletion I’ve tried to get a handle on many aspects of oil production and use along with projected supply and demand using the conventional tools of most energy analysts such as resources and reserves with new reserve growth, field depletion, cost estimates along with production costs in my attempt to try to discern future use, cost and availability projections. I now know that this method is flawed because it ignores fundamental properties of the oil production and processing system. The first barrel commercially processed in 1859 in Titusville PA was our cheapest barrel to produce and every barrel since has cost more and every barrel in the future will cost even more. O f course I mean this generally, not literally but it turns out that a useful first tool could be to look cumulative production over a long enough period of time and compare that to cost and see what the relation might be. Another task might be to look at production and see if there might be a way to chart production cost say per barrel over time. Might there be a way to see how much energy the production side of things uses and see how much energy or wealth is delivered to the greater society from the distribution of that oil energy. Might there be a way to predict future depletion? We know that there is a correlation between energy consumption and economic activity which can be crudely measured in GDP. There are ways to measure how much GDP is generated by a unit amount of energy. For this analysis to proceed we will need first and foremost, accurate data sets. It turns out this is very difficult to acquire for many reasons. Among them are sloppy or absent record keeping, the desire of producers to conceal how much they produce or have as reserves and in some cases deliberate falsification of the figures for political or financial gain and so forth. It turns out that there are a few honest men who have made truth and transparency their goal. The best example is the Texas Railroad Commission who kept detailed records starting with the big oil boom in Texas earlier in the last century and there are other agencies which have done credible verifiable data collection. Another problem is there is a lot of data, a lot of DETAIL to handle and examine and for many reasons very few people bothered to look at this project. The first and most important person who did was M King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who presented a paper in Houston Texas in the late 50’s in which he showed a distribution function using a Gaussian curve showing oil production in the US up till then projected into the future. The most stunning part of his curve was he projected oil production in the US would peak in 1970 and world production would peak about the beginning of the 21st century. Allegedly loud guffaws and snorts were heard throughout the oil patch. The so-called Hubbert Curve was ridiculed and generally ignored by the oil executives and most petroleum geologists. But guess what happened? US production peaked in 1970 and world production peaked about the turn of century. This was in fact PEAK OIL, a term which can push some economists , executives,pundits and politicians into a lathering sputtering hissy fit at the sheer mention of the word.



The End of Oil Part 2

My post of Aug 11, 2016 entitled “the End of the Oil Age” laid out the probability that Oil Depletion is far more advanced than is generally assumed and that assumptions about how long the world’s oil supply will last may be severely erroneous. The Trump/Clinton election debacle included reams of what is now called “Fake News” put out by spurious sources in the media and the internet which was unverified, unresearched and untrue. It is my contention after reviewing data for many years on the world energy picture that there is fake news there as well. I have come to the conclusion that much of the information and opinions disseminated by economists, energy organizations, financial organizations and the mainstream media regarding the future of petroleum are at best misleading and incomplete and at worst completely wrong. It is not my intent to cast stones singling out particular people or organizations. My purpose is to point out what I perceive to be flawed assumptions, incomplete data and wishful thinking and to try to get at reliable methodologies in an attempt to determine how close we are to the End of the Oil Age.

I will state right at the first that trying to get reliable, verifiable information on something as important as oil energy is exceedingly difficult and time consuming. The questions that have been asked are how much oil do we have in the world? Who has it? How much can we use and for how long and how much will it cost us now and in the future? These sound like straight forward enough questions but unfortunately the answers are rarely straightforward.  I recall a quotation which goes something like : ”If they can stop you from asking the right questions, you’ll never come up with the right answers.”

Let’s start with the first question. How much oil is there in the world? Even that is the wrong question. What is oil? Well oil is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons with varying composition, purity, density and utility distributed within the world’s 48,000 oil fields.  The oil of greatest value is a specific variety of crude oil with a specific density described by the American Petroleum Institute as a density between 30 and 45 degrees . Light sweet crude oil is one of the names given to this valuable fraction. This variety of crude has the greatest deliverable energy, is easily refined and yields the most net energy after processing. It is unfortunately only about 40% of the world’s supply. It is the fraction that powers the transportation industry yielding the highest quantity of refined gasoline and diesel. There are lighter and heavier varieties of crude oil which can be refined into transport fuels but they need additional steps like dilution or combination, vacuum distillation or removal of undesirable contaminants like sulfur or heavy metals, and water, steps that add to the processing costs.. So there is oil and then, THERE IS OIL. I am talking about this premium variety of crude oil, 30-45 API, which has been called “conventional oil.” There are several varieties of “unconventional “oil, some of which are called oil but which are not, such as Oil Sands which contain bitumen, a tarry substance. There is  ”“tight” oil  which requires  fracking to release a very light oil trapped in rock of minimal porosity. Then there are synthetic biofuels derived from crops which can get grouped with oil supplies and production. Unless I state otherwise, my discussions are conventional oil and any associated lease condensate associated with crude API 30-45. I have and will probably use the term  “Peak Oil” when describing API 30-45 crude. Peak Oil has become a pejorative term by some segments of the media who deny that the world is “running out of oil.”  The very idea that the world could be running out of oil is anathema to them and the very mention of it is bad for business. The fact is the world has already hit a peak of conventional crude oil and we hit it about 2006 at around 72 million barrels per day(mbpd). Today when you read about oil production you will see far higher figures but they now include the unconventional oils, NGL’s(natural gas liquids), biofuels and the most absurd and misleading category “refinery gains”, a deliberately deceptive category which relates to the fact that after refining a 42 gallon barrel, you will get more than 42 gallons of gasoline and diesel. The energy content of course is unchanged, just the volume is different.

But now back to the first question: How much oil is in the world? If you do a Google search you will find a huge disparity of estimates. The highest I have seen is 4300 BILLION barrels in oil Resources. The terms resources and reserves are bandied around to serve the biases of the particular pundits or organizations.  You include in world resources all types of hydrocarbons in all   locations in all types of rocks at all depths…..Everywhere. With unlimited energy and if cost were no object, there is probably 4300 billion barrels. But cost is an object and the category of RESERVES  is a much smaller figure because it includes all the oil that is known  and can be economically extracted. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2016 states that world reserves in 2015 were 1697.6 Billion barrels. BP also states that to date we have used 1290 billion barrels. As new oil is discovered those reserves are added to the figure but new discoveries have dwindled for decades. Last year discoveries were less than 3 billion barrels and the chance of finding a really big field like the supergiant fields of the Middle East are probably remote.  One important fact that is rarely mentioned in the media is that discoveries of new oil have been below world oil consumption since the 1960’s. For example last year the world used about 33 Billion barrels and discovered less than 3 billion, a pattern which has persisted for decades. Are we then running out of oil? Of course we will eventually run out of oil that is cheap and accessible. We live on a finite planet and there are finite quantities of oil and other resources. Right now the world has a glut of oil but in the not too distant future there won’t be a glut of cheap oil. In fact the world will never run out of oil but at some point the cost of extraction will exceed the value. When the amount of energy invested to extract and process the oil exceeds the amount of energy in the oil, the party will be over. It will be over unless we can use other energy sources to extract the oil.  In future posts I will try to attempt to answer the other questions I posed about oil at the outset. I will also try to  explain how the newer methodologies around oil production and depletion offer a potentially more reliable answer to these questions. I will attempt to amplify and explain the work of the Hills Group which I have alluded to previously.

Best Energy Book of the Year

If you read just one book this year, When the Trucks stop running by Alice Friedeman should be that book. This book’s primary focus is the overweening importance of transportation energy which is 95% petroleum based to the country that uses the most oil and is the most dependent upon that oil. Her first chapter is entitled “When the trucks stop running, America stops” and she lays out a scenario  in  a 7 day period   exactly  what it would be like in the US on each of those seven days if the trucks stopped. Friedeman states  in exceedingly clear and graphic detail the danger of the United States’ over reliance on a finite resource, petroleum being the raison d’etre of our industrial civilization.  Her conclusion is that we are at or near peak oil which is the point where 50% of the world’s oil has been extracted and where supplies have entered terminal decline. She points out correctly that it doesn’t mean we are running out of oil because the world will never run out of oil. For example in 2030 we will have as much available oil as we had in 1980 but it does mean that what oil we have left should be used in the most efficient manner possible and not wasted. We should use the time and the oil we have left to prepare for a energy constrained future when we might obtain the energy to drive our industrial civilization on other sources which of course would include renewable sources of energy.  She states in exquisite detail with a well annotated source list exactly how and where we use energy and how much work is done by the end user. She states that trucks and trains and ships use the least amount of petroleum to do the most amount of work. For example she lists the amount of freight moved per ton mile and reveals some astounding facts. Take FedEx or UPS air freight. They use 600 times the energy to move a ton of freight as a ship and vastly more energy than their own trucks. Rail is 2-6 times more efficient than trucks. Helicopters use 1000 times the energy of that container ship.  66% of our transportation fuel is used by cars, light trucks and SUVs generating huge emissions and inefficiencies along 4 million miles of US roads and along the 47000 mile Interstate Highway network.  She points out that even though we have been using oil in this country since 1859 and have burned though half of the world’s oil, the other half   is still there to be extracted. Right? Well not exactly. It turns out that we have extracted the easy to get half, the cheap oil, and now what is left is the expensive to extract hard to get oil, the oil in deep water, the arctic, and from rock of low porosity. Many of the dominant oil exporters are politically unstable countries who cannot be relied upon. So Alice looks at alternative sources of oil energy. She examines in exquisite detail what these alternative energy sources could offer, what drawbacks exist to their adoption and whether they can be a replacement for cheap oil. She looks at various drop in fuels such as making transportation fuels from coal, from Natural gas, from biofuels as well as from unlikely sources such as algae and hydrogen fuel cells. She examines in great detail how electricity might be a source of transportation energy and whether we could switch from fossil fuels generating 75% of our electrical energy to renewable sources such as wind, solar, tides, and geothermal among others. She spends a large section of the book laying out the anatomy and physiology of the US electrical grid and what the consequences of adding wind and solar input to the grid and how the grid might be balanced with these diurnal and seasonal inputs. In order to utilize these new sources a reliable way to store the energy to balance out the peaks and valleys of electrical demand would have to be found and she explores again in great detail what that technology is and might be available in the future including pumped hydro as is used in Denmark, compressed air, utility scale batteries among other storage options. If oil declines before natural gas could the country move to natural gas as a “bridge” to the future not only generate the electricity but to move freight and to continue to provide the feedstock for plastics, petrochemicals and fertilizer production?

The strength of Friedman’s writing is her clarity, her parsimonious use of words and at times her humor and wit which shines through her arguments. I found it amazing that she could cover such a complex subject in such detail in just 131 pages. She draws most of her facts from official sources such as the IEA, EIA, and IPCC and government testimony before the House and Senate. Her detailed bibliography and annotation is stunning and she is to be commended for this magnificent work. As an amateur energy analyst I have a few criticisms of her effort. My strongest criticism is that this work is not likely to ever see the light of day and achieve the widespread dissemination it deserves. It was published as one of the many dozens of pamphlets issued by a remarkable academic publisher called The Springer Briefs in Energy started by the eminent academic Charles Hall. Her book is a paperback book of 131 pages and costs a mind boggling $54.99 from Amazon. I have yet to see a review of this book anywhere.  This book should have been published by a respected environmental house such as New Society Publishers or even by some of the big US publishers like Doubleday, Scribners or Penguin. I think it would have been better to be issued as a self Published work.  Unfortunately it is likely to be a gem buried forever unless someone can dig it up and give it the attention it deserves.

My other criticism is that Alice Friedeman does not explain the relation of energy to our Industrial Civilization and to the world of economics and how energy is the lodestone of societal wealth and standard of living in the world. And why cheap fossil energy isresponsible at least in part for the enormous explosion of new technology, inventions and innovations and wealth but also of pollution, global climate change and an unsustainable population explosion which has likely exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. Readers who would like to read more from this remarkable woman are urged to go to her excellent

Book Review

  I include this book review which I posted on Amazon because it deals with the American Industrial Revolution which was fostered by the American Energy Revolution. This review is  of Robert Gordon’s new book entitled: “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War”(The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (Hardcover)
     This is a remarkable book by noted economist Robert Gordon and his team of undergraduates and graduate assistants who did much of the heavy lifting collecting data and histories of the American experience of the last 145 years from 1870 to the present. His thesis briefly stated is that progress and the great inventions and innovations of the period primarily from 1870 to 1940 were transformational like no other period before or since and are not likely to be repeated. Gordon states that these great “innovations” were among others, the invention and distribution of electricity, the light bulb, the telephone, the radio, indoor plumbing, clean water, the invention of the internal combustion engine, the automobile and the airplane, cleaning up the food supply and elimination of the horse with its associated manure pollution were the great innovations of the period and responsible for the enormous growth and development of the United States. His conclusion is that this growth period is now over and not likely to be repeated. His economist critics say “Nonsense!”. The next epoch will have a whole new revolution of Artificial intelligence, robotics, and so forth to continue the growth process.Gordon’s conclusion is that the party is over as the title of the book implies. I have high praise for the first third of the book which covers the period from 1870 to 1940. The next 30 years were primarily improvements to the innovations of the first 70 years and the last 40 years to the present are remarkable only for the computer age and improvements in communications. The first third of the book is worth the price of the book and is a must read for the most dynamic period in American History and as a readable economic historian, Robert Gordon has few peers with the exception of perhaps J.K. Galbraith. The glaring flaw in this book is the same glaring flaw in most contemporary books by economists. Economists look at this enormously productive period and explain and measure it by outputs, productivity, GDP, income,capital flows, labor efficiency and productivity and a myriad of other statistical analyses. What these economists and what Gordon misses entirely are the causes of this incredible growth. Why did this period happen to this country when it did? Gordon says that it was an unprecedented flowering of genius and invention occurring in a new world of seemingly unbounded resources and promise far removed from the stagnation, wars and decay of the Old World. It was indeed that. But Why? How? Gordon almost nowhere in the book uses the term “Industrial Revolution” in his explication. But of course that is what it was. It was a continuation of the Industrial Revolution running on coal which began in England a hundred years before but in the case of the United States, it was a turbocharged industrial revolution. But again. Why here? Why then? This period happened when it did and where it did primarily for one single reason. It was a revolution powered by almost free energy never before available in the history of the world. The United States had fossil energy in huge quantities which came on line just before 1870. The first oil well was sunk in Pennsylvania in 1859 and invention of the first internal combustion engine followed just 15 years later. Firewood and coal were just becoming available in huge quantities and it was this cheap and abundant energy which allowed the utilization and exploitation of the other abundant resources of the New World. The jump in productivity was made possible because it was now machines instead of animal and human muscle that was unleashed by the energy from coal and oil. Amazingly in 762 pages, this is given scant attention . Energy to an economist is a subset of the economy. In fact the economy is a subset of energy in this writer’s opinion. Gordon also misses in his conclusions why growth in America is falling and will continue to fall. Earth is a finite planet with finite resources and finite energy resources. The wealth of America was facilitated by almost free energy which generated enormous productivity gains, innovations, a population explosion and sadly unimaginable pollution and societal complexity yielding ever more diminishing returns. It is stunning to me that Gordon misses this possible conclusion why American Growth is at an end