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The Red-Queen: On the Energy-Technology Spiral

Or

Peaked Oil: Why Peak Oil Arrived Yesterday


Preface



This book has a bit of a prosaic title, especially when coming from a historian (they usually come up with fantastically irresistible titles) - writing one too many academic papers must have gotten to the poor guy. I have suggested a few alternatives above in the guise of titles for my own summary-essay.

I cannot believe there is not a single review on ŷ������ for this fantastic book (9 ratings and 0 reviews on ŷ������ + 2 non-reviews on Amazon!). It would be a good wager that it is due to the strategically chosen title. But despite the seeming lack of interest in the book, it is a literal page turner. This is firmly among the top 3 environmental books that I have yet read.

What follows is more a summary than a review.  I have taken a few liberties in the process. For example, fracking is not covered in the book so I have tried to bring it into the analysis - integrating it into the argumentative framework to forestall criticism on that front. Being the only review on ŷ������ for such a good book, I am under a bit of pressure here. There is only so much a summary can do. I have to warn you that you might find that it is a very depressing book in many ways - the most essential sort.


Stein’s Law: “Trends that can’t continue, won’t.”��


The Unexpected Oil Spill (Or Not)

It was 9:15 p.m. on April 20, 2010, The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the BP oil spill/Macondo blowout) began in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM).

In the next four months, the oil gushing from the Macondo well spread over several tens of thousands of square miles of Gulf water - An entire region was under environmental siege. Countless of birds, turtles, dolphins, and an unknown number of fish and shrimp died. Tens of thousands of people lost their livelihoods and incomes, and a whole way of life was demolished.

Tainter and Patzek uses the story of this Gulf oil spill as the background for a wide-ranging discussion of how we got here and where we are headed. They emphasize that such events point to a systemic problem, and suggest that the spill was in fact more than likely given sufficient opportunities and time. The disaster and GOM (Gulf Of Mexico) in general is taken as a microcosm to explore the inevitability of disaster in our society.


Nature: A Mean Fractal

Starting from the basics is the best way to understand the basics. As far as Oil is concerned, the first thing we need to know is how much recoverable oil is waiting for us down there (in GOM, in this case). How much risk is involved in obtaining it and what is the trade-off. In other words, do the benefits outweigh the risks, for whom, and for how long?

Finding new oil in the deep Gulf of Mexico has not been easy. Historically, “dry holes,�� wells that never produced commercial hydrocarbons, have been numerous. To put the last number in perspective, 72% of all wells drilled in water depths greater than 5,000 feet were dry holes!

Why is this so?

The sizes of reservoirs are important - it turns out that over the entire range of reservoir sizes, hydrocarbon reservoirs follow a “parabolic-fractal�� law that says there is an increasing proportion of the smaller reservoirs relative to the larger ones.

If this law of reservoir sizes holds true, most, if not all, of the largest oilfields have already been discovered, and the smaller ones will not add much new oil to the total regardless of how many new oilfields are discovered.


The Paradigm of The Low-Hanging PEAK

We employ the Principle of Least Effort or Low-Hanging Fruit when we look for the resources that we need. We would never have considered looking for oil in deep water before we had fully developed the easy oil available elsewhere. We follow the same principle in the development of human society and in other aspects of history.

This is a variant of plucking the lowest fruit. The second fruit to pluck is the next one up, and so forth. At some point, however, the costs start to accelerate and the benefits of complexity, the ability to solve problems, increase more slowly and the risks start to become more than acceptable. This is a normal economic event, and it is known as the point of diminishing returns.

That should be how we redefine the point of Peak Oil . There is a need to shift the definition.


2020: The Year of the Boiled Frog

��Boiling a frog�� is a famous metaphor for the problem we all have perceiving changes that are gradual but cumulatively significant, that may creep up and have devastating consequences. Nothing changes very much and things seem normal. Then one day the accumulation of changes causes the appearance of normality to disappear. Suddenly things have changed a great deal, the catastrophe has arrived. The world is different.

We know how to boil a frog. Complexification is how to boil a society. Complexity grows by small steps, each seemingly reasonable, each a solution to a genuine problem.  A few people always foresee the outcome, and always they are ignored.


PEAK SCIENCE?

We are often assured that innovation (in technology or production or processes) in the future will reduce our society’s dependence on energy and other resources while continuing to provide for a lifestyle equivalent or better than such as we now enjoy. Could innovation reduce the energy cost of complexity?

Institutionalized innovation as we know it today is a recent development. In every scientific and technical field, early research plucks the lowest fruit: the questions that are easiest to answer and most broadly useful. Research organization moves from isolated scientists who do all aspects of a project, to teams of scientists, technicians, and support staff who require specialized equipment, costly institutions, administrators, and accountants.

Looking at today’s unending stream of inventions and new products, most people assume that innovation is accelerating. Ever-shorter product cycles would lead one to believe so. In fact, relative to population, innovation is not accelerating. It is not even holding steady.

Huebner found that major innovations per billion people peaked in 1873 and have been declining ever since. Then, plotting U.S. patents granted per decade against population, he found that the peak of U.S. innovation came in 1915. It, too, has been declining since that date.


Jesus Fracking Christ - A Saviour?

Patzek’s (One of the authors) research has emphasized the use of unconventional natural gas as a fuel bridge to the possible new energy supply schemes for the U.S. Fracking is an important such new technology that is posing as a sort of savior.  But we need to understand such improvements inside the framework of he technology-complexity spiral framework - that such improvements is ultimately an increase in complexity.

Does this mean that efficiency improvements and new technologies of extraction such as Fracking are not worthwhile? Of course not. Efficiency improvements are highly valuable, but their value has a limited lifespan. Technical improvements may merely establish the groundwork for greater resource consumption in the future. This in turn requires further technical innovation, but as we have just discussed, those technical improvements will become harder and harder to achieve. And as we do achieve them, they may serve us for shorter and shorter periods. We have a tendency to assume that technical innovations such as Fracking will solve our energy problems. This is unlikely.


It is the Thermodynamics, Stupid!

The Second Law of Thermodynamics defines what tends to or can happen in any energy system (the entropy of an isolated system never decreases). Considerable energy flows are required to maintain complex structures that are far from equilibrium, including living organisms and societies. We must breathe, drink, and eat for energy to flow continuously through our living bodies and maintain their highly complex, organized structures. Unfortunately, this tends to create a mess in the environment that surrounds us.

The same principle applies to the production of oil. The energy it would take to restore the environment damaged by the oil production processes such as Fracking (or inevitable disasters such as the BP spill) exceeds by several-fold the amount of combustion heat we get from burning the oil in our cars. In both examples, we cannot break even no matter how hard we try!


The Boiled Frogs: A Quick History of Civilizations

Although we like to think of ourselves as unique, in fact our societies today are subject to many of the same forces and problems that past societies experienced, including problems of complexity and energy. In some past societies, the growth of complexity ultimately proved disastrous, and all past societies found it a challenge. It might seem quaint to talk of ancient societies declining but it is infect quite easy to see the striking parallels. It takes being a Historian though.

(Much of the insight in this section draws upon the book ��The Collapse of Complex Societies�� which the reviewer has not read. Hence, it is not covered in detail in this summary.)


The Roman Cauldron

There was not much ancient societies could do to store extra solar energy except to turn it into something durable. This they did by turning surplus solar energy into precious metals, works of art, and people and into monetary units. When the Romans conquered a new people, they would seize this stored solar energy by carrying off the same precious metals and works of art, as well as people who would be enslaved.

One of the problems of being an empire is that eventually you run out of profitable conquests. Expand far enough and you will encounter people who are too poor to be worth conquering (the germanic tribes), or who are powerful enough that they are too costly to conquer (The Persians). Diminishing returns set in.


ROME: Hit that Decline Button - Sloowwly

The strategy of the Roman Empire, in confronting a serious crisis, was largely predictable -  They responded as people commonly do: they increased complexity to solve their problems, and subsequently went looking for the energy to pay for it.

This way of dealing with increasing complexity can be called The Roman Model. The society, in this model, increases in complexity to solve urgent problems, becoming at the same time increasingly costly. In time there are diminishing returns to problem solving, but the problems of course do not go away.


Byzantium - The Dark Age Solution

Third and fourth century Byzantine emperors had managed a similar crisis in a similar fashion by increasing the complexity of administration. This eventually led to a radical devolution of the civilization. The period is sometimes called the Byzantine Dark Age. This eventually led to a re-flowering of the empire.

This response is the Byzantine Model: recovery through simplification. It is a solution that is often recommended for modern society as a way to inflict less damage on the earth and the climate, and to live within a lower energy budget. In this sense, Byzantium may be a model or prototype for our own future, in broad parameters but not in specific details. There is both good news and bad news in this. The good news is that the Byzantines have shown us that a society can survive by simplifying. The bad news is that they accomplished it only when their backs were to the wall. They did not simplify voluntarily.


Europe: The Subsidized Continent

As discussed earlier, there is an overwhelming reason why today’s prosperous Europe emerged from so many centuries of misery - That they got lucky: they stumbled upon great, almost free subsidies.

Over the seas they found new lands that could be conquered, and their resources turned to European advantage. We are all familiar with the stories of untold riches that Europeans took from the New World.

This process is the European Model: of increasing complexity. Problem solving produces ever-increasing complexity and consumption of resources, regardless of the long-term cost. High complexity in a way of life can be sustained if one can find a subsidy to pay the costs.

This is what fossil fuels have done for us: they have provided a subsidy that allows us to support levels of complexity that otherwise we could not afford. In effect, we pay the cost of our lifestyle with an endowment from a wealthy ancestor.

This is fine, as long as the subsidy continues undiminished and as long as we do not mind damages such as the Gulf oil spill.

A Subsidized Planet: Living on Borrowed time - Literally

More recently, all societies of today, led by Europe, made the transition to financing themselves through fossil fuels, supplemented to varying degrees by nuclear power and a few other sources. This continues the European tradition of financing complexity through subsidies �� energy coming from elsewhere. In this case, the “elsewhere�� is the geological past.


Future Imperfect

The Deepwater Horizon is one of the latest manifestations of the evolutionary process of complexification. Problems such as the depletion of easy deposits and environmental concerns have been met by complexification: the development of technology that is increasingly capable, yet costly and risky (such as Parallel Drilling, Fracking, Arctic exploration etc). The cost comes not only in the money needed to design, purchase, and run such a rig, but also in the money to repair the environmental damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon spill. Yet despite these costs, we will continue to operate such rigs until they reach the point of economic infeasibility or, more important, the point where the energy returned on energy invested, and the resulting energy and financial balance sheets, make further exploration pointless.

Can anything be done about the energy–complexity spiral without diminishing our material quality of life? Two potential solutions commonly suggested are: Conservation and Innovation. But does either conservation or innovation provide a way out of the energy–complexity spiral? In this discussion, we have found that there might not be much hope.


Renewable? Schenewable. 

It is fashionable to think that we will be able to produce renewable energy with gentler technologies, with simpler machines that produce less damage to the earth, the atmosphere, and people. We all hope so, but we must approach such technologies with a dose of realism and a long-term perspective.

To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase. The usual approach to solving problems goes in the opposite direction. The Energy consumption of societies can only be on an upward trajectory - indefinitely (till supply chokes and dies).

To believe that we can voluntarily survive over the long term on less energy per capita is to assume that the future will present no problems (or fewer!). This would clearly be a foolish assumption, and this reality places one of the favorite concepts of modern economists and technologists, sustainable development, in grave doubt.

So, it is not clear whether renewable energy can produce even a fraction of the power per person that we enjoy now, let alone more energy to solve the problems that we will inevitably confront. Renewable energy will go through the same evolutionary course as fossil fuels. The marginal return to energy production will decline, just as it has with fossil fuels.

In this context, might be fun.


Back to the Hot Oil Bath of GOM

Cheap abundant energy, chiefly from oil, has come to be regarded as a birthright, and we all expect someone to drill and deliver that oil to support our energy-exuberant lifestyles. The tragedy aboard the Deepwater Horizon may be a rare event, like a Black Swan, but it does force us to reconsider the potential price for the complex and risky technological solutions that will continue to be required to bring the remaining oil to market.

The processes building up to an energy crisis have been growing in the background for decades, out of sight of most consumers. Then a tipping point is reached - a catastrophe, and suddenly the world has changed. Similarly, the complexity and riskiness of drilling in open water have been growing for decades, but growing in the background, away from most peoples�� sights.

So the Gulf spill appeared as a Black Swan when in fact it was a frog finally boiled to death.


All Excess Baggage Aboard: How to Jettison the Energy Dilemma

So, what now? We seem to have run out of options. At least, the easy ones.

We are not the first people to face an energy dilemma. We saw three examples of societies that faced problems of energy and complexity. Each found different solutions (?) to their problems, and from this experiment we can foresee possible options for ourselves.

To be sure, we will try to continue the European model of energy subsidies for as long as we can. Humanity will not forgo such rich, steep gradients. Even the threat of climate change will not deflect humanity from searching for oil in ever-more-inaccessible places, nor from burning through our mountains of sulfurous coal. Too many people find the short-term wealth and well-being irresistible.

For how long, though, can we follow the European model? Declining EROEI and the Laws of Physics suggests that the answer is: Not forever.

We cannot cannot continue on false optimism and expect to preserve our lifestyle. Do we then need to identify things we want to preserve of our culture and channel energy to those items? Should we jettison as much as possible and try to stay afloat? Is that the only way to avoid a devolution into another in the sequence of Dark-ages that civilizations have made a habit of falling into?

These are tough questions.


Wake Up and Smell the Boiling Oil

Our societies cannot postpone this public discussion about future of energy and the tough questions. The era of plentiful petroleum will someday end. We don’t know when this will happen, nor does anyone else. Surely it will happen sooner than we want.

We cant fool ourselves any more - we are running on fumes and dooming our grandchildren (or even ourselves - who can truly say?) to a pre-technological society. As the Red Queen said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, ��Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.�� Paying more and more to maintain the status quo is the very essence of diminishing returns to problem solving.

But it is, however, the direction in which we are headed. Someday, the physics of net energy will curtail our use of petroleum. A trend that cannot continue, won’t.


Suggested Reading:

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