In the ongoing dialogue of energy and technology, a local community member recently handed me a book entitled The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills. Based on some of the startling claims this friend was telling me, I was very interested in reading the source of them myself. Indeed, the book was so compelling and proudly written that I thought sharing a perspective from the high-tech camp themselves might stimulate some juices for us country folk where our “inconveniences are our virtue.”
The basic premises of the book are simple, bold, and seemingly fueled by a civic vision of a cup half full. First, humans will always demand more and more energy and we will always, despite the cost, find ways to get at it. Secondly, advances in technological efficiency will only be swamped by our continual blossoming of consumption, which equates to more energy, not less. And lastly, the high-speed, high-tech, SUV-owning technological marriage like “ours” should be implemented worldwide to restore order to the global environment and balance the “carbon books” better than they have since the rise of agriculture “five thousand years ago.” (Check your archeology, agriculture’s got more legacy than that!) Faster, smaller, more power, and “then still more,” that’s their theme.
From where do these claims arise? Logic. The logic of power, they say. There is sensical logic in their reasoning, yet it might not mean much to subsistence farmers in Bangledesh. From the regulator in James Watts steam engine of 1763, to the internal combustion of liquid petroleum in the engine of Nikolaus Otto in 1876, to the steam turbine of Gustaf de Laval in 1882, to the Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) of the alleged hydrogen economy, the ascent of engine combustion technology grew faster, smaller, hotter, and consumed more energy with each innovation. Coal and oil were, and still are, the cheapest sources of fuel to power these progressive embodiments of that which is “life-affirming.” Demand soared and the free market delivered the fuels to the eager public. No regulations or governmental policies made these advances happen, just the inevitable accretion of ideas, principles, and successes from one innovation to the next.
A similar scenario happened with the first “computer” of 1946. The Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator (ENIAC) had 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1500 relays, 6000 manual switches, and 5 million soldered joints. It weighed 30 tons and consumed 174,000 watts (10 watts for each logic operation or gate), “enough to brown out parts of the city of Philadelphia whenever it was fired up.” Today, a Pentium consumes about one millionth of a watt per transistor and does logic operations twenty thousand times faster than the first ENIAC. Power to logic conversion efficiency is also “cut in half about every fourteen months.” The gates are getting smaller and the power to run them is becoming less.
Yet, our consumption of well-ordered power extracted from the “poorly-ordered environment” is ever increasing--20-30% over the next ten years. This well-ordered power is coal or uranium-fired electricity that energizes microprocessor CPUs, not the “junk photons” that can grow grass. And waste heat is a necessary by-product of all power production and use, the authors firmly declare. From the hot side of the engine you have not useful “thermal liquid” but coolant; a coal fired electrical generating plant dumps half or more of its waste heat into cooling towers or the nearest river, and the computer-laden office or lab has to consume further electricity to cool equipment and working spaces via air conditioning and fans. In fact, 80-90% of the 100 Quads (quadrillion Btus) of American power consumption are spent in “purifying” and delivering energy. “Life and growth being inescapably dissipative processes, waste is as virtuous as life itself.”
The authors (Huber a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Mills a physicist who has worked in defense electronics) address environmental “pundits” and greens from around the world frequently throughout the book. They ask the grain-eating bicyclist, or the horse farmer independent of motor-based systems, to face up to some beguiling facts. For instance, “the carbohydrate-fueled stomach is a whole lot worse for the atmosphere than the hydrocarbon-fueled motor that has replaced it,” they purport.
The book does an amazing job of astounding and confounding but the one point it falls short of delivering is the bit about infinite energy. They seem to impetuously declare this out of spite for all the talk of Peak Oil, but in the end it is faith, hope, and brute force that keep the juice flowing. Politically speaking, they say no politician will let the lights go out, even if that “means putting much of Bangledesh underwater” or remaining aloof of the international Kyoto Protocol by emitting the world’s highest carbon levels.
This “insatiable” lust for power of the industrialized nations of Earth will propel us into new fuel sources, better technologies, and improved extraction abilities, they say. In addition to hopes of perpetual motion, there is 200,000 Quads of global coal, 10 million Quads of oil shale, vast Canadian tar sands, as well as 10 trillion Quads of deuterium under the sea, a fuel that will be unlocked through nuclear fusion. However, “We will want more-much more. And we will get it, easily. Unless, somehow, our optimism, drive, courage, and will give way to lethargy and fear.”
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It’s true. Humanity has a predisposition for the latest and most productive
technology. Since the flickering light of the Paleolithic, we have become hard-wired to seek and adopt the newest unit of cultural transmission to give us an edge over our environment. The latest approach in achieving a more functional stone tool, or the most successful method of harnessing fire, has given us 2.5 million years of technological adaptation. It made life easier, more secure, and safer. Most profoundly, a new technology usually meant the hunter-gatherer band had to practice less infanticide. If a tool could help us eek out more from the land on which we lived, then we could support more children and more people. We are creatures concerned with perpetuating ourselves. This is true.
The Bottomless Well by Huber and Mills is not only concerned with the perpetuation of their high-tech industrialized segments of humanity, but also of the political and free-market institutions that support them. The book is about those in control polishing their platform of the conquest of nature and less industrialized peoples through subjugation, enticement, and promises of plenty. As far as their association of fear and sluggish indifference with “green pundits,” it is actually they who fear an interruption to their lullaby to complacent suburban ears. Only a very awake, cross-cultural and ecological awareness can see through their unilateral incantations of American technological prowess. In short, the book could be described as Republican propaganda.
So, yes, we will continually need more energy to power our livelihoods. The Earth’s population is increasing and power consuming devices are becoming widespread. But at what cost and whose design?
Huber and Mills mandate that cost will not be a limiting issue. In fact, “environmental concerns are a separate matter...,” not to mention war, or the digital “disabling of human targets.”
They also don’t figure in total costs of a fossil fuel extraction, for example. Take the minute fuel window of the Canadian tar sands, for example. It has an already low EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) value of 1.5, and this is not including site preparation, restoration, environmental costs, or pollution, etc. How does this then become a viable fuel source? From the diminishing Middle Eastern oil EROEI value of 30, tar sands are a ridiculous attempt to preserve the present infrastructure. Like a crazed junkie at the height of a binge, the thought of an impending limitation is intentionally overshadowed by an obstinate determination.
“Energy supplies are-for all practical purposes-infinite.” Huber and Mills are simply speaking to their placid countrymen and colleagues without sufficient data to convince the skeptical. Except for cosmic differential temperatures, their lists of various fuel sources (oil, coal, uranium) are plainly stated in finite quantities. Ironically, they are not talking about inexhaustible wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy. According to figures from the Department of Energy in 1991, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas have enough harvestable wind energy to meet all of the United States electricity needs. With advances in wind turbine design since 1991, there is enough wind in just those three states to provide all our energy needs.
As far as Huber and Mills’ nemesis of emphasized efficiency, Amory and Hunter Lovins have noted: “Compared with 1975, the amount that energy efficiency now saves each year is more than five times the country’s annual domestic oil production, twelve times its imports from the Persian Gulf, and twice its total oil imports.”
It goes to show that if there is not any apparent limitation or awareness at the electrical socket or gas pedal, any efficiency will go unnoticed and unneeded. If, however, consumption can become a function of need and quantity, instead of a blind assumption, efficiency is like having excess power itself, as the Lovins’ say. This also includes the durable manufacturing of things meant to last, the intelligent designing of polycultural human communities, and the streamlining and identifying of needs and wants.
The Bottomless Well is an illusion created by senior fellows and White House consultants at the expense of the world’s ecosystems and agrarian people’s. Technology is not the issue. It is as much a part of humanity as bipedalism or opposable thumbs. Energy is not the issue either, as we are bathed in constant energy all around us. We just lack the ability or will to harness it. What is the issue is design. The hurdles to a fully-implemented “design science revolution,” as Buckminster Fuller coined, is that industrialized nations are progressing down established cultural trajectories, not because of any adaptive reasoning, but because the momentum is so great it can’t slow down or turn around.