









Energy and the Hunter-Gatherer Period








Beginning of Agriculture – 7,000 BCE to 1 CE










Energy, Population, and GDP: Year 1 to 1820




























Addition of Oil to World Energy Mix 












Our Energy Niche Problem





Wrapping Up



I will look at some related issues in upcoming posts.

About Gail Tverberg



  1. The critical factor in the use of energy and its conversion to useful work is often omitted by writers on this subject.
    they almost invariably jump straight to the steam engine , but in order to build steam engines in quantity you need iron in vast amounts.
    Making iron in charcoal furnaces at that volume wasn’t possible, but in 1709 Darby figured out how to smelt iron using coal.
    After that, iron production was virtually unlimited, that’s how iron ships began to take over from wood in the early 19th century, and steam engines proliferated after about 1776.
    The early steam engines worked, but they consumed vast amounts of coal. Watt patented the first commercially viable steam engine in 1776 incorporating the same basic principles in use today.
    That conversion of energy source into effort drove our population from 1 billion to 7 billion, always interesting coincidences, that the steam engine and the American nation were created at the same time, and only a few years later Malthus wrote his famous treatise.

    • Thanks for filling in some of the “blanks”.

      It’s the vast amount of iron you need for almost any application that is the deal-killer without coal. That is how coal enabled farming with more use of horses. Electric light bulbs were also possible, if it was possible to make both the glass and metal parts with coal.

      When a person starts to thing what we wouldn’t have without coal, it is mind-boggling.

  2. Just to take issue on another point if I may-(your articles always bear re-reading), hydrocarbons have not defeated bacteria. Our attacks on them have merely kept them at bay for a century or so. What our obsession with ‘cleanliness” did was to wipe out 99.999% of germs, but like all species, some are immune to our attacks no matter what we do. They have mutated into stronger strains, and we have to consume more and more hydrocarbon energy to fight back.
    We are unfortunately outnumbered trillions to one, the outcome of the battle is a foregone conclusion.
    When our energy supplies run out, they will march back into our lives with all the power they had in previous times, and then some, thanks to hydrocarbon energy use, we have destroyed our own immune systems too.

  3. Mel Tisdale says:

    Leaves me very little to add, Leo, with the possible exception that despite the awful future that seems to await us, I think we would be wise to at least try to get the ship on an even keel; to continue your marine analogy, simply on the basis that hope springs eternal, if for no other reason. To that end, I will continue to fight for nuclear power, especially LFTRs because I think that thorium fuelled reactors could at least make life a little more bearable and are sufficiently far removed from uranium ones that they provide the Greens with a much needed excuse for a U turn – if they have the necessary backbone, of course?

    As for your “No political so called leader has had the courage to stand up and say that in fact, we will not return to normal growth, the recession is likely to be several decades long and its not inconceivable that it could last a millennium” I wonder if they are even aware of that sad possibility. If one listens to the U.K. government’s latest buckshot round of measures to stimulate growth, I rather think not, unless they are under instruction from the other side of the pond not to rock the boat before a certain election taking place in November.

    • Leo Smith says:

      I disagree only in detail from that.

      I support conventional uranium fission because right now that’s all we have that is reliable on cost and delivery estimates.
      I support continued use of fossil fuel because I don’t see that the sorts of models that produce alarming global warming can be correct, or it would have happened already many times.
      I support reserach into LFTR and so on, but we cannot rely on it short term,. Or fusion. But LFTR means HUGE amounts of fissile material available and fusion means ‘as long as there is seawater’ long term? Good bet. Right now? Doesn’t work.

      But be aware that even WITH access to essentially unlimited supplies of nuclear energy, loss of fossil fuel is still a massively serious issue. Its not QUITE as bad to my mind as Gail makes it out, but its still very tricky to handle. We will have to explore different ways of doing things, some of which simply wont work.

      What would be ideal would be a way to use off peak electricity or even waste heat to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. It can be done, but the economics are not good. IF a better reaction pathway could be found that would make a huge difference, since we have liquid fuel engines and infrastructure already in place.

      Short of some quantum level breakthrough in energy, that would be the optimal strategy: Investigate synthesising hydrocarbon fuels and loads of standard design reactors to drive them.

      EROI on that is good, but prices is not. A litre of diesel represents about 10Kwh of energy. at a notional nuclear cost price of electricity of 8p, a 100% efficient synthesiser of zero capital cost places that litre of diesel at 80p before any taxes profits or delivery charges are placed upon it. Current UK raw delivered domestic kerosene is under 60p. Whether nuclear synthetic fuels at say £2.50 a litre are possible I cannot say. And whether we could run a nations transport on that level of cost I don’t know either. Or the NHS. Because fuel taxation that takes 50p a litre kerosene and turns it into £1.50 a litre road fuel is a MASSIVE source of income for the government.

      BUT again, nuclear power puts an upper limit on the cost of hydrocarbon fuel. If its more expensive to pull it out of the ground than to MAKE it out of water and CO2, then you make it instead, if a demand exists at that price. The overall EROI is good. Because nuclear fuel has such a high EROI in itself. The energy outlay goes in plant construction, not fuel extraction.

      That’s as close as I get to a magic silver bullet. Dirt cheap nuclear power by standardised reactors in mass production driving synthetic fuel plants. And to get dirt cheap plant means considerable attention to sane regulation . Type approval rather than site approval for example.

      As far as synthetic fuels from atmospheric CO2 goes, no one has tried it. The Fischer Tropsch process could use electrolysed water to give hydrogen, and then pass that to a high temperature and pressure environment with pumped CO2 derived from distillation of liquid air injected. The net result would need cracking to get gasoline and are looking at a BIG multi-stage CHP nuclear unit that generates electrical power and also produces synthetic fuel, running on a 24×7 basis to maximise income stream.. It might be quite efficient, but it wouldn’t be cheap!

      There are a few solar boilers going this direction as well, but again, intermittency dilutes the capital plant cost, and in the end if its pure constant heat you want, a reactor is the way to do.

      It might be possible in principle to feed CO2 and hydrogen directly into a reactor core and get out a red hot mixture of hydrocarbons and oxgyen. Not very safe though if anything goes wrong 🙂

  4. Mel Tisdale says:

    I wonder just how realistic any costings that are arrived at via today’s economics will be when the ungarzi hits the fan. From what I have seen, there are many pundits in the financial arena who are quite convinced that today’s finance system, with its fiat money, simply cannot survive in its present state. It might come down to a more simple position where, if something can be done, it will be done, regardless of cost because any cost as such will only be set on a temporary basis. By that time the public will quite possibly accept any solution that is an improvement on their then current situation. Certainly, the U.K. government is showing signs of panic, and who can blame them when nothing seems to be doing what they thought it would.

    Leaving climate change to run its course, both politically and in reality, what we can say is that a fleet of uranium fueled reactors should reduce oil consumption to some extent, which with any luck will reduce its price, assuming the laws of supply and demand will still apply more or less as they do today. I just wonder what a reduced oil supply is going to mean for plastics and fertilizers, let alone its obvious transport usage. These are key ingredients to the economy.

  5. Pingback: Explaining How Coal Creates Energy | MYHEALTHCAREBLOG.NET

  6. Pingback: The Long-Term Tie Between Energy Supply, Population, and the Economy | Doomstead Diner

  7. Pingback: The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment, and Recession | Our Finite World

Comments are closed.