By Murray Grimwood*
Simeon Brown, our new Minister for Energy, has an impossible task ahead of him; on a par with King Canute (reportedly) attempting to stem the tide. Energy – as the Minister will find, but for political reasons is unlikely to articulate – is a slippery beast; we make our understanding of it no easier by using inaccurate words like ‘generate’ and ‘fund’ and ‘consume’.
Simply put
In simple terms, energy cannot be created or destroyed – but you don’t get something for nothing; every time you extract work from an energy flow you leave it degraded. The ultimate degradation is low-grade heat – too low to use. This is the heat from a cup of coffee left in a room – it is still there in the room, but it would take more energy to scoop it back up, than would be scooped. This inexorable process is known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics – which every budding Minister for Energy needs to comprehend.
Given the last paragraph, it obviously follows that the ratio of the energy required to obtain energy, compared to the energy thus obtained, is important. Indeed it has to be positive, to be bothered doing. All life-forms and all powered machines run at less than 100% efficiency and therefore need more energy in, than they turn into work. The ratio is short-hand-notated as EROEI – Energy Return on Energy Invested. The loss, of course, manifests as low-grade heat; your sweat, your radiator’s warmth.
Also, given that structural decay is inexorable and compounding, maintenance energy-requirements increase per item, over time. That plots as an exponential curve compounded by the exponential growth in the item-count.
Thus far
The history of humanity and energy has been one of us using more; exponentially more. The trend has been from firewood to coal to oil and gas, paralleled by efficiencies in applying energy to work. But at no stage has demand reversed because of efficiencies, nor have ‘renewables’ displaced global fossil energy dissipation (conventionally called consumption or use) – we’ve merely added them. And we have burned the best of the fossil stock; it’s gone. Generally speaking every ‘next’ option is of lower EROEI; alternatively, this can be thought of as ‘is of higher entropy’.
The regime we ran was to obtain as much energy as we could, as fast as we could, to do as much work as we could. We didn’t call that an energy frenzy, though; we called it economic growth and pursued it with willing blindness.
Inevitably the peak of net energy-flow would cause the cessation, then reversal, of said economic growth and the Minister’s cohort appears to be the one – there was always going to be one – caught holding the poisoned chalice. They have no excuse either; Labour’s ‘wellbeing’ initiative was on the right track; to quash those advances was a waste of the little time remaining (but to be fair, due to being too anthropocentric, much of the wellbeing initiative still fell short of qualifying as properly sustainable).
We have always fought over energy and wars are usually won by those showing up with the most; essentially throwing more projectiles carrying more explosive further/faster than their opposition. What we haven’t done until now, is to fight over who gets the last – albeit increasingly the worst – half of the most-concentrated and multi-useful energy-stock we have ever tapped into. This aggression will not go away unless we nuke ourselves into oblivion, or fight ourselves to a standstill. Put another way; 2025 is not coming back.
Brown’s appointment – likely reasons for
Nact have been caught ideologically flat-footed. In attempting defense of economic growth – getting back on track – they had to turn to the highest EROEI, lowest entropy energy sources. The fact that those were reducing both in availability and quality, was overlooked. Had to be overlooked. It was an approach that was doomed to fail; doubling-times being what the are and the little orb photographed from Artemis being what it is. It follows that decisions made would be found wanting – and it would seem that we will see the quiet reversal of the LNG pipedream; presumably an easier sell if coming from a different talking head.
Secondly, it may just have occurred to them that energy is perhaps important. High Priests from the church of economics – like Nordhaus – may well opine that this or that is a small percentage of GDP (energy included) and therefore get-by-without-able. But without energy no work is done – a fact which the threat of supply cessation has made clear. Besides being essential, energy is not fungible and what started as an ideological belief based entirely on the view seen through a chosen small rearview-mirror, has run into the rocks of reality.
What the Minister needs to factor in
It may be an ‘energy portfolio’; but as we are witnessing, geopolitics, scarcity and sheer human overshoot, are the backdrop. Making calls – like that idea of having an LNG terminal – in the face of non-supply, is no more useful than cargo-cultism.
This means the Minister must address a future-attainable maximum rate of turning energy into work; overlay that with material availability (our best-taken-first approach means that any given resource-residual will be ‘worse’) and guess a per-head rate of consumption/use. This will give him a ball-park figure for the human carrying-capacity of New Zealand, ex fossil input. So he will be advising his fellow Ministers of Immigration, Agriculture, Health, Local Government – indeed the ramifications are universal.
Beyond that is a Boolean algebra slash game theory tangle of options; based largely on what can – but more importantly what cannot – be maintained ex fossil input. Roads? (they’re made of, and laid by, fossil feedstock). The grid? (nobody has maintained one ex fossil energy). Cities? (how big a collection can be supplied and serviced, food in and wastes away, ex fossil energy?)
En passant, is the problem of transitioning from here to there. There is little point in adding to the collection of fossil-dependent infrastructure and plant – which is just about everything. That would be a waste of the remaining fossil resource, and by implication, the remaining lead-time. For instance; asking whether the Onslow battery proposition is viable depends on having a prior answer as to whether we can maintain the existing grid, ex fossil input?
Resilience/buffering/capacitance
Our trend has been towards specialisation and increasingly-discretionary complexity. One does not need automatically-switched lights or windscreen-wipers, nor GPS, to drive to the supermarket (itself a specialised piece of complexity dependent on fossil energy). As the pressure comes on, complexity will be abandoned in favour of simplicity; specialisation will be displaced by general knowledge. A unique feature of the coming transition will be triage: never before will there have been such a fleet of stranded-asset ‘stuff’; enough to cannibalise for decades.
Local and many – as the internet has proven – is more resilient than central and few. Transmission, which in any form needs energy to achieve, is reduced with localism and failures are partial rather than universal. Local PV (solar) and local hydro are therefore no-brainers; local wind perhaps less assured (depending on site).
Ultimately, solar capture per local acre is the energy key. It can only be used once, whether for food-production, biosphere continuance, or for conversion into (non-food) energy – typically into firewood and other biofuels, or into electricity. Within this limitation is our long-term safe operating space, remembering that the list of things that have never been built ex fossil energy, includes geothermal and nuclear power-plants…
Conclusion
The pace and scale of the change required energy-wise – and thus everything-wise - is far beyond the limitations of the Overton Window vis-à-vis voter ignorance. Thus the comment made at the beginning; the Minister has an impossible task. Moreover, it is increasingly likely that moves and plans that are made, get overtaken by events (as we are witnessing). But it is still valid to play the best cards possible, in sequence, even though the hand you’ve been dealt is less than optimal. Any move in the direction of resilience; of invulnerability, has to be a winner. Good luck Mr. Brown; this tanker will self-destruct in five seconds…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_4du5qkyEA&t=931s
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/resources
*Murray Grimwood comments on interest.co.nz as powerdownkiwi.
6 Comments
Readers should no doubt have noticed that this sort of narrative is almost entirely absent from the people who actually work with energy systems. Economists and scientists don’t support it. Governments don’t plan around it. Even the oil industry, which could find it beneficial to talk up scarcity, doesn’t support it.
Of course, this could be because of a wild conspiracy. They may be hiding the truth from the people. Let the people enjoy themselves before the inevitable apocalypse.
But how likely is that?
Quite unlikely when you consider that this narrative is full of the following:
Claims not supported by energy‑systems research.
Category errors (physics = economics).
Thermodynamics theatre - using physics as a rhetorical shield.
False analogies (finite tank = global system).
Unsupported assertions such as maintenance costs rise exponentially, decay compounds exponentially, infrastructure cannot be maintained without fossil fuels.
Misuse of EROEI
Ignoring substitution, technology, and system dynamics.
Treating history as destiny.
Predetermined conclusion - that collapse is inevitable (no data).
Adaptation to less available energy will occur....though it is highly unlikely it will occur by design.
Oil is relatively new. For instance the first oil fired vessel of the Royal Navy, HMS Spiteful was not commissioned until 1904. Oil though has, I would suggest, proved to be the most transformative substance ever introduced to human life. For instance not long after, post WW1 the redoubtable Lord Curzon remarked that the Allies had sailed to victory on a sea of oil. From there it has literally ventured into every form of our life, be it energy, clothing, pharmaceuticals, fertiliser and products galore. It is indeed the oil age following the three recognised earlier ones. At the moment though, asking about how long it will last is akin to asking the same question about our sun. In other words it is just taken for granted.
I wouldn't say that oil is taken for granted by those involved with the energy system. Maybe by layman that don't think about things awfully much. They wisely leave it to the experts. The factors surrounding oil extraction are reasonably well understood and the expectation is that fossil fuels will continue to serve us well as we transition to other energy sources and improve technology. Fossil fuels remain an important and valid part of the evolving energy system.
Yes your second sentence is what I was getting at. As always, I need to learn to express more specifics and less generalisations.
Like that time France built 56 reactors in 15 years and is now the world's largest electricity exporter?
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