The uncertain future of industrial process heat: A mirror for our energy challenges

Few of us think about heat as an essential ingredient in the products we use every day. And, yet industrial process heat constitutes two-thirds of all energy used by industry. It is used to melt and form metals, to make ceramics, to refine crude oil, to make industrial chemicals, to dry crops, to process food, to sterilize medical instruments, and to heat the facilities within which industries operate. Practically, everything we use on a regular basis has at some point required heat to process. And it turns out that the challenges society faces obtaining process heat mirror in many respects the energy challenges for society as a whole.

Without process heat, much of the world would grind to a halt. That's why the ready availability of fuel for creating that heat is so important. Currently, fossil fuels dominate as energy sources for process heat, chiefly natural gas and coal. There are two reasons to be concerned about their supply.

First, evolving regulations regarding fossil fuel emissions in order to address both pollution and climate change may make fossil fuels more expensive and difficult to use (for example, due to the need for advanced scrubbers and carbon capture). Second, the underground supplies of fossil fuels may not be as plentiful as the public has been led to believe. (Regarding oil and natural gas, see this piece. For coal, see this piece.)

Can our current global system coexist with pandemics?

The first truly worldwide pandemic may have been the Russian flu which traveled from eastern Russia to the rest of the world in 1889 and 1890. (I'm certain someone will dispute this claim, but it won't affect my thesis.)

The death toll was estimated at around 360,000 which seems modest by our standards. The world population, however, was about 1.5 billion (circa 1900), so the presumed percentage of that population that died as a result of the Russian flu was about 0.02 percent. For comparison, the COVID-19 pandemic has so far killed 6.6 million people worldwide out of a population of approximately 8 billion. That's 0.08 percent of the population, and the COVID-19 pandemic is by no means over.

It's worth noting that some past pandemics have spanned decades (and even centuries if you count recurrences).

Taking a holiday break - no post this week

I'm taking a break this week for the Christmas holiday and expect to post again on Sunday, January 1.

I have seen the future and it is 'Ramp Hollow'

It is almost impossible for a modern person living in a so-called developed country to imagine growing, hunting and foraging for all the food one's family eats. Yet, not all that long ago in human history, that's what most of the people in the world did. Given the current fragility of modern industrial society, we humans may not be so far away from the collapse of that society and a return to an agrarian society that will demand the combined skills of the farmer, the forager, the lumberjack and the hunter. (This is my prognostication, not that of the author mentioned below.)

In historian Steven Stoll's Ramp Hollow the author focuses on one particular group of people, settlers in the Appalachian Mountains and the process by which they were forced out of a way of life that provided all their basic foodstuffs and some extra produce and crafts used to trade for tools and what were considered luxuries in the hollows.

Stoll does not ignore the dispossession of Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples whose lands were overrun by Europeans. He recognizes this seizure as part of a worldwide process of enclosure of the commons for the benefit of a few.

For those who don't know how this works, Stoll provides an explanation. In Great Britain the aristocracy conspired with law courts and Parliament essentially to seize land for its sole use, land that had been held in common by the Crown and was available to peasants to meet their needs through farming, foraging, and hunting.

With U.S. shale oil boom over, can world production climb?

Prior to the pandemic-induced downturn in world oil production, U.S. oil production growth was responsible for 98 percent of the increase in world production in 2018 (as reported in 2019). Almost all of that growth resulted from rapid increases in shale oil production which accounted for 64 percent of U.S. production (as of 2021).

Fast forward to today when OilPrice.com has declared that "The U.S. Shale Boom Is Officially Over." The reasons cited mostly have to do with management "discipline" regarding capital expenditure in favor of shareholder payouts and complaints about "anti-oil rhetoric" and "regulatory uncertainty."

But there might just be another reason for the slowdown in shale oil production in the United States: There isn't as much accessible and economical shale oil underground as advertised. Earth scientist David Hughes laid out his case for this view in his "Shale Reality Check 2021." (For a summary of Hughes' report, see my piece from December 2021 entitled, "U.S. shale oil and gas forecast: Too good to be true?")

Taking a 'COVID' break - no post this week

I'm taking a break to recover from COVID which I contracted last week. I expect to post again on Sunday, December 11.

Path to extinction? Sperm count accelerates its decline

For the second time in five years, scientists are warning about declining human sperm counts. (I wrote about this issue in "Declining sperm counts: Nature's answer to overpopulation?" early last year.)

Besides confirming the results of an important 2017 study, the authors now note an acceleration in the decline of sperm counts. In other words, whatever is causing that decline is getting worse. The rate of decline has doubled since 2000.

It's important to remember that when the fertility rate declines below replacement—currently 2.1 births per woman in so-called developed countries—populations shrink. This may not be a bad thing at first since overpopulation and overconsumption are huge barriers to building sustainable societies. But there comes a point when if fertility rates don't level off and then rise to replacement, extinction become a possibility.

Taking a short break - no post this week

I'm taking a short break this week and expect to post again on Sunday, November 27.

What I learned from steady-state economist Herman Daly

Herman Daly, the dean of the steady-state economists, died recently at age 84. His view that the Earth could only support a steady-state economy in the long run—rather than the perpetual growth economy imagined by most of those alive today—was based on an understanding he came to early in his career. As a doctoral student Daly became convinced that the economy was a system like any other in the universe and therefore governed by physical laws.

So here are three important things I learned from reading Herman Daly and hearing him once at a conference long ago:

1. The economy is a subset of the natural world and as such is governed by the laws of the natural world. Daly was particularly focused on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the Entropy Law, which establishes that we live a universe in which the distribution of energy and matter are becoming more and more disordered. That is the meaning of entropy, and this disorder will ultimately lead to the heat death of the universe. (Don't worry; this scary-sounding heat death is theorized to be 10¹⁰⁰ years away.)

   The practical significance of this realization is that human society is "using up" Earth's nonrenewable resources in the sense that resources:

   • Are being made into objects or products which erode and deteriorate over time thus scattering nonrenewable resources unintentionally.
   
   
   • Are scattered intentionally (think: phosphate rock fertilizers).
   
   
   • Are burned (think: fossil fuels).

   Once scattered or burned, they cannot be economically retrieved for reuse. That is, these processes cannot be reversed (except locally by creating more entropy).

   To build a civilization that could remain functioning indefinitely, we humans would have to 1) live in a way that does not exploit renewable resources faster than they can be replenished (think: trees and fish), 2) use nonrenewable resources at a rate that does not surpass our ability to find renewable substitutes before these nonrenewable resources become prohibitively expensive or inaccessible altogether, and therefore 3) limit consumption (and thus ultimately population) to a level that will allow this balance. This would be the steady-state economy.

Life (sort of) imitates art: Russian provocations in Norway

The 2015 Norwegian television series "Occupied" has what will strike viewers today as an upside down premise. In the fictional series Russia invades Norway on behalf of the European Union to restore oil and gas production shut down by Norway's new environmentally conscious government. Despite its odd premise, I found the series to be a gripping drama when I watched it a few years ago.

At that time the real Russian government was outraged by the suggestion that Russia would ever have any designs on Norwegian sovereignty. In a statement the Russian government said: "It is certainly regretful that in the year when the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Second World War is celebrated, the series’s creators decided to scare Norwegian viewers with a non-existing threat from the East in the worst Cold War traditions."

Fast forward to today and there is plenty for Norwegians to worry about. As the largest supplier of natural gas to an energy-starved Europe, the Norwegians now consider themselves a prime target for Russian sabotage of the country's oil and gas infrastructure as drones presumed to be Russian visit Norwegian offshore production platforms.