Doug's Blog

A few days ago I posted on Twitter that after exhaustive research and extensive thought I had come to the conclusion that we need to develop nuclear generation capacity within this province or at least Western Canada, and that we need to do it now.  I also promised that a full and detailed accounting of why I had come to that conclusion would be posted here . . . and here it is.  Please note that this blog entry is not Government of Alberta policy and in no way reflects government policy or the viewpoints of any of my colleagues in government or in opposition.  This is strictly my position.

There are a few things that I hope you accept as we begin.  First, I did not begin this project so many years ago with the notion of gathering and documenting research, so I am afraid I will not be citing each source and statistic, but if you look around you will find all of the information and stats I use are pretty extensively accepted.  Second, you will likely be able to argue against points I make if you stand them in isolation, but what I talk about all ties together so please keep an open mind and think about your criticism before you send it to me.  Third, please understand that I could write a book, or a series of books, on what I am about to try to write, indeed, many books have been written on different parts of this, but this is a blog so I can't be as thorough as I would like.  And four, I want you to know that comments about the need for nuclear power were not and are not intended to mean we can and should exclude all others forms of energy production.  They are all potentially viable, and quite frankly necessary, but the adaption of nuclear appears to be critical, as I will explain.  So, on with the explanation . . .

The beginning of any discussion on energy must always begin with oil because globally we consume 81 million barrels of it per day.  Most people get the impression that oil is used to run our cars, and that's about it, but in reality those barrels go towards much more than that.  That oil also heats our homes, paves our streets, runs our tools, turns on our lights, produces our drugs, builds our hospitals and makes our hospital equipment, makes our furniture, makes our food, makes our make-up and our plastics and our clothes and . . . well, you get the idea.  That is pretty important stuff, at least some of it is, so it seems a good thing that the world is producing about 83 million barrels of the stuff per day, well, at least this year it is.

There was a gentleman named Marion King Hubbert who created a model in 1956, often called the Hubbert Peak Theory or Peak Oil Curve Model, which he correctly used to predict peak oil production in the United States.  Essentially, his premise was that any limited resource will follow a bell curve of production, meaning that each successive year will see an increase of production of that resource over the previous year, until there isn't, and then there will be a progressive decline of that resource every year until there is nothing left.  The top of the bell curve would be the peak of production, of oil in this case, before which production grows, and after which, production declines.  The problem he had with his model was that he couldn't predict the peak production time of the product so much as he could witness it after the fact, after the data had been collected, when the production peak had been passed.  So, how did Mr. Hubbert predict the peak of U.S. oil production?

Mr. Hubbert realized that if the production of that oil followed a bell curve model of increasing year over year production to a peak followed by a year over year decline in production, it would follow that the discovery of oil reserves must follow a similar pattern.  Essentially, since oil was first discovered in the mid 1800's, every year after that more oil was discovered than in the previous year, however, since oil is a finite resource that process cannot go on forever.  So, he posited, every year we discover new pools of oil on the globe, but we don't just discover more oil, we discover more oil than we did the year previous, until one year when we don't, and then slowly and gradual every year we will discover less than we did the previous year simply because it is going to become harder to find.  In essence, the oil production curve will be an echo of the oil discovery curve since the oil produced will be the oil that was discovered a few years earlier.  So, Hubbert collected the data on oil discovery rates with the U.S., and realized, and correctly predicted in 1956, that the U.S would hit peak oil before 1970. He was proven correct.  What that meant was that in or around (different sources cite different months) 1971-72 the United States officially used more oil that it could produce on its own.  Since then the U.S. has been reliant on off shore sources to make up for the oil they lack, and now the U.S. only produces about 40% of what it consumes in oil.  At some point the same scenario will occur globally, where the oil we consume will outpace the oil we produce on the globe. 

It is wonderful and fascinating, and frightening, to apply modified versions of Hubbert Peak Theory to the global situation. Now this is where some of the sources of information can get wonky.  I actually came across some pretty interesting cites that try to explain how the earth is producing oil as fast as we consume it and that we will never run out.  That is the height of delusion.  Then there is difficulty in obtaining numbers on what actual known and proven reserves are on the globe because nations such as Saudi Arabia protect those figures as state secrets.  As well, within OPEC there are games being played since each member nation is allowed to produce oil at rates based on what they have in reserves.  For many of these nations it has been political expedient to overstate reserves so that they could sell more oil to generate more wealth.  To be sure there have been some surprising and strange developments in recent years as large basins of oil in the Middle East that were proclaimed and expected to continue to produce unaided vast amounts of oil have, in recent years, required vast amounts of salt water to be pumped in to keep the oil flowing. Be sure when you research oil reserve rates to check with reliable sources. 

For the most part it appears that the reasonable international and scientific bodies are trending towards similar numbers, plus or minus a hundred billion barrels here and there (please keep in mind that sounds like a lot, but when we consume 81 million barrels of oil a day that amounts to 29.5 BILLION barrels in only one year).  The general consensus is that there were about 2 trillion barrels of oil in the ground and that we have used about half of that (1 trillion barrels) since the first barrel was used in the middle of the 19th century.  Please also keep in mind that the first trillion barrels used was the easiest and cheapest to get.  What remains yet to be tapped is under the Arctic and deep in oceans, so it won't be cheap, easy, or convenient.  Most of the applied models conclude that at today's rate of consumption we have between 40 and 50 years of oil left since numbers indicate that in the last few years we are using 3 times as much oil as we are discovering (everything above that I have said about oil also applies to natural gas as well, but its projected date of peak production is about 15 years later than oil).

The first reaction is that we have time to 'transition' our economy to one that uses other sources of energy such as solar, wind, biomass, hydrogen and so on.  Of course, we don't have that much time.  Remember, that time frame of 40 to 50 years is based on the same rate of consumption, but we are not consuming at the same rate.  Europe and North America continue to ramp up demand year over year, and that doesn't begin to account for the growth in developing nations.  India and China alone, if they continue their exceptional economic growth rates over the next ten years, will cause a doubling of the world's rate of consumption of oil.  Said another way, in ten years India and China alone will need every drop of oil that is produced in the world to feed their economies.  That would mean none for anybody else.  That is a frightening state when all of the models that I could find pegged the peak production of world oil happening somewhere between 2005 and 2020.  Thousands of sound, reasonable, rational global leaders are talking about exponentially increased global resource wars within a decade and a fivefold increase in the price of a barrel of oil with only a fifteen percent decline in production.  If we have or are about to hit peak production, hungry economies will mean both of those scenarios are very viable.

"Foolish, fearful, Doug," you say, "We will just have to hurry up with the solar and wind and geothermal and biomass and hydrogen energy production and all will be well."  Well, here is where the problems lie.  I know that any one of these forms of alternative energy will not completely replace oil, just as you do.  Imagine it, currently wind power is responsible for 10% of the electricity produced in the province , so if we had to rely on that to produce all of our electricity, we would need ten times as many windmills, which is itself an issue , on top of the fact that when and how hard the wind blows isn't always reliable.  So, we would need other forms of electricity production as well.  But wait, if we run out of oil and all switch to electric cars, which we would have to charge up with electricity regularly (the grand future we all assume will come), we would need 3 times the electricity currently produced, which means we would need a 30 fold increase in the number of windmills in the province (or a combination of all of the other forms of electricity production to back it up) just to meet current needs.  And that's just to light our homes and charge our cars.  The numbers get more astronomical when you factor in heating our homes with natural gas furnaces that would have to be converted to electric furnaces.

One of the problems is that solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, tidal, hydrogen, and so on can't produce energy on the cheap, efficient, effective scale that oil can, so they need to be much larger in scale and, as such, could pose new and potentially larger and more diverse environmental impacts, and astronomical costs. They aren't the suggested happy ending and solution to the oil woes.  As well, technologies such as hydrogen combustion have yet to even become practical and viable.  There are two bigger problems than that, however.  The first is that we have this notion that all of these new technologies will replace oil in some way and life will proceed as normal, but the fact is that there are many many things that oil does that cannot be replaced.  The second is the belief that these new technologies can replace oil when in fact they are simply a derivative of oil itself.

In North America it takes about 10 calories of fossil fuels to produce 1 calorie of food.  You are likely aware of all of the technology and fertilizers that are used in the production of our food.  It takes a lot of energy.  The technology is not available, solar or electric, to run much of the large equipment over and through the fields and for food processing that we currently use.  We see that small electric cars that haul a couple of people are coming onto the market that help you get 50 or more mpg, but I wonder about the length of time and potential of an electric tractor that needs hundreds of horsepower.  In my research I found nothing to proclaim it was viable, and lots of evidence that it wasn't. 

But here is the rub, in 1870 there were a billion people on the planet, in 1955 there were 3 billion, and today there are almost 7 billion.  The explosion of the globe's population has coincided with the use of oil.  The is very liklely because oil allowed us to move from self sufficiency or slight surplus in food production to massive surplus production of food because of large equipment and copious amounts of fertilizer, which is itself made from fossil fuels.  It is also because we converted fossil fuels to herbicides and pesticides, which gave us more control over production rates and helped us mitigate crop losses.  It is also because it gave us fridges and freezers and trucks so that we could haul our food around and preserve it while we did so.  In fact, the average distance a piece of food travels in the U.S. between where it is produced and where it is consumed is 1500 miles.  In Canada the distance is 4000 miles.

So even if we can use new technologies to keep the equipment running, we have a real challenge with the fact that without fossil fuels we cannot synthetically make fertilizers that keep our massive production levels up.  Neither can we produce the pesticides nor the herbicides that help us mitigate crop loss.  It is an accepted fact that without industrialized agriculture, which is completely dependent at many critical facets on petroleum and its byproducts, the carrying capacity of the earth is 1 billion people.  So, with no oil, what happens to the other 6 billion for food?  Fossil fuels are critical to agriculture production, not just as an energy source, but as an ingredient in our food production.

Agriculture is not alone in that, however.  Fossil fuels are in our roads, our medicines, our pharmaceuticals, and personal care products, they are in our clothes, building materials in our homes, in our batteries, and they make up all plastics.  Search on the internet to see what is made from oil, not as an energy source, but as an actual product of oil.  It is staggering.  So even if we find alternatives to heat our houses and power our cars, what do we do with the loss of all plastics, many life saving drugs, and such things as perfume, pantyhose, insulation, faucets, candles, garbage bags, detergents and all make-up.  Even computers and microchips and processors require the availability of oil in order to be made.

Oil is a cheap and incredibly efficient energy source that has propelled us to new advances in luxury in a very short amount of time.  We have literally taken hundreds of millions of years in stored solar energy (that is essentially what fossil fuels are) and consumed half of them within the last century.  We have not always lived with the luxuries that we currently do, and in fact, most of our recent history we have lived without them.  In the last one hundred years, however, we have used them extensively and come to rely on them for virtually everything.  I would even conclude that we almost expect that this style of life and energy consumption can go on forever, but in reality, can we put up enough turbines and solar panels to meet our energy consumption?  It takes 20 barrels of oil to produce one car, a one gram microchip takes 630 grams of fossil fuel to make, one tonne of copper requires almost 20 barrels of oil, and one tonne of aluminum requires 400 barrels of oil to produce.  We know that wind, solar, biomass, and any of the other forms of energy can't completely replace oil, but can they even give us the same punching weight or work ethic as oil has?  Can the other forms of energy replace the hundreds of millions of years of solar energy that we consumed in one century?  I think you know the answer.  And if you don't understand it yet, allow me to elucidate the last problem we have with new energy technologies replacing oil energy.

I mentioned above that all of the new energy technologies require oil to be viable, or specifically I said that the new technologies were all derivatives of oil.  Look at your computer right now.  If you are on a PC computer you may be aware that your computer is running some form of Windows.  Underneath that, however, your computer is running DOS, an operating system on which all of your computer programs, Office, Windows, Photoshop, Explorer, and so on, operates on.  Oil is much the same as DOS for your computer.  We can run solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, hydrogen, tidal, and so on, but without oil, we don't have anything on which these programs can run.  After all, without oil to manufacture the aluminum and steel and plastic how do we get the batteries and solar cells to run solar power? How do we make the concrete for the big nuclear plants?  How do we produce the aluminum and steel to build the big turbines, or the ships for building tidal, or manufacture the equipment that would manufacture the goods needs for these energy sources.  As one book pointed out as a prime example, it would take 21 wind generators operating for one year at full capacity in order to produce the energy just to produce one new wind generator.  All of the other energy sources currently run on an oil operating system, and the ones that may be able to get around it right now, can't produce enough energy replacement to ever get close to the energy we consume.

So, we may or may not run into an oil shortage in the next twenty years.  We may or may not have large international resource conflicts develop around the globe over the next decade.  But we do need oil not just for energy, but as a direct input in the fields of medicine and agriculture, as well as to develop technologies to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.  Here in Alberta we have plenty of oil and gas.  Next door to us we also have about 1/3 of the world's total uranium deposits.  We could spend our energies over the next decade trying to fine tune biomass energy production that could produce up to 4% of our current electricity needs.  We could spend our energies improving active solar cell technology that will still require large expensive batteries and large solar cells that need replacing every few years, are expensive to the individual, and still require fossil fuels as a direct input in order to make.  We could focus our energies on building windmills that will cover some of our current electricity needs, but require a huge amount of energy input to build, assemble, and raise which makes them viable as long as you use fossil fuels to build, assemble, and raise them. 

Or we could spend the next decade working on (because building one would take a decade) acquiring a nuclear power plant that could meet the majority of electricity needs in much of Western Canada for years to come, thereby ensuring that whatever else may come, the lights and the heat can stay on while we address the other issues we may face.  I am not saying we shouldn't work on the other options, some of which I have listen above.  In fact, we should work on them too, but not a single one of them can have such a significant impact on changing our reliance on oil, at least to heat and light our homes, as nuclear can.  We could right off nuclear and just stick with the other alternative sources of energy for fear of the nuclear waste issue, but I fear that would be tantamount to fiddling while Rome goes dark.  I know there is opposition, and there will be even more NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard), NOPEs (Not On Planet Earth), and CAVE people (Citizen's Against Virtually Everything) if the proposal ever does move ahead, but those people will also be very upset when the price of gas is $8 a litre, larger wars than Iraq are being fought over oil, they can't get food from the grocery store that can't get it from around the world, and their heat and power go out for a few days on some cold winter morning. 

The real question isn't, "what will we do when we run out of oil?"  The real question is, "what will the world do when we begin to run short of oil?" because that is when we will face immediate challenges and drastic decisions will have to be made, or more likely made for us by the competing desperate interest in oil.  That question will come far sooner than any question about what we do when there is no oil. We should be discussing whether we want the oil to run our trucks three blocks to the convenience store, or we want the oil to go into a life saving drug.  We should be discussing whether we want the oil to be used to manufacture more $300 shoes or to electrical wiring insulation.  We should be discussing whether we want the natural gas to go to heating our house or we want it to go to make fertilizer for food.  Of course those aren't necessarily questions we have the luxury of answering or enforcing, and so all we can control is how we prepare ourselves for the new reality we and the world will face. It is easy to ignore the question now when the commodity is cheap and there are no competing interests, but someday it will be very expensive, and there will be ferocious competition, and they will come at the same time.  The question is whether we want to address those questions now, when we have a choice and options, or later, when we have no choice, and few options.  I think we should discuss it now, openly and with an eye to the future that will come, which is why I have finally brought it up.

A special side note to a few environmentalists whom I would consider radical: One of the trains of thought you have expressed to me is that this is a great scenario, that the population is too large, we have all been living too large, and we need to reduce the population of the earth drastically, go back to a more natural lifestyle, and live within our means, so we should not prolong it with such technologies as nuclear power. One of the other trains of thought you have expressed to me is that all these new environmental technologies will replace all that oil does and we don't need nuclear power generation at all.  Well, I suggest to you that dreaming that new technologies are going to produce some utopia of the status quo, or believing that humankind just needs to virtually disappear are unacceptable.  You are delusional if you don't think that either situation would mean massive death, starvation, freezing, sickness and disease, and a lot of pain.  As a political leader, I can't accept those scenarios, and know we have to find some solutions, and we have to get working on them now.  I think the general population would agree with me, but hey, if they don't, they will vote me out, and maybe they will vote you in.