Power Hungry (14 page)

PHOTO 5
General Electric's GE90-115B is the world's most powerful jet turbine. The turbine's 4-foot-long blades—made from titanium, carbon fiber, and epoxy—are designed to move large amounts of air quietly. One of the blades was recently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Source
: General Electric, “GE90-115B Aircraft Engine,” n.d.,
http://ge.ecomagination.com/site/water/products/ge90.html
. On technical specifications, see GE press release, “It's Great Design, Too: World's Biggest Jet Engine Fan Blade at the Museum of Modern Art,” November 16, 2004,
http://www.geae.com/aboutgeae/presscenter/ge90/ge90_20041116.html
. For more technical data, see Museum of Modern Art, “Jet Engine Fan Blade,” n.d.,
http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=93637
.

In the late nineteenth century, Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg became famous thanks to Verne's novel
Around the World in 80 Days
. Today, thanks to high-speed jet airliners, Fogg could fly to almost any modern airport on the planet in thirty-six hours or less. In fact, if he were so inclined, Fogg could probably fly all the way around the world and be back at the Reform Club in London with a dry martini in his hand within seventy-two hours of his departure—if, of course, he kept his seatbelt fastened and his tray table in its upright and locked position.

Even if the world's leading politicians wanted to quit using oil, their ability to do so would be stymied, because global commerce depends on
the use of diesel engines and jet turbines. In fact, the ongoing improvements to those machines are likely to increase their dominance over the coming decades. Ever since Rudolf Diesel first patented the engine that carries his name in 1892, his design has been undergoing continual improvement.
⁹
Dramatic efficiency improvements are also being made to jet turbines—first flight-tested in the late 1930s—to make them quieter, more powerful, and more efficient. In 2008, General Electric, the world's largest producer of jet turbines, announced it was developing a new design, the Leap-X, which could cut fuel consumption by 16 percent compared to existing models.
¹⁰

The improving efficiency of the diesel engine and jet turbine—and their increasing popularity—provides yet more evidence of our centuries-long quest for horsepower. And the central role that oil plays in fueling those machines provides evidence that petroleum, and the many products and services that we derive from it, will remain irreplaceable for years to come.

Thus far, much of the discussion has focused on power density and energy density, while the issue of scale has largely been ignored. In the next chapter, the final chapter of Part 1, I will show just how daunting the challenge of replacing hydrocarbons will be. And in keeping with the themes of this book, I will provide those scale comparisons in both energy equivalents and power equivalents.

Twenty-Seven Saudi Arabias Per Day

T
HE GARGANTUAN SCALE of our energy consumption is almost impossible to comprehend. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy estimates daily global commercial energy use at about 226 million barrels of oil equivalent. Of that quantity, about 79 million barrels comes from oil, 66 million from coal, 55 million from gas, 12 million from nuclear, and 14 million from hydropower. Obviously, hydrocarbons are the biggest portion of the global energy mix, accounting for about 200 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. But how can we even imagine what those quantities of energy represent?

What is 226 million barrels of oil equivalent? Well, try thinking of it this way: It's approximately equal to the total daily oil output of twenty-seven Saudi Arabias. Since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, Saudi Arabia's oil production has averaged about 8.5 million barrels per day.
¹

Over the past few years, we have repeatedly been told that we should quit using hydrocarbons. Fine. Global daily hydrocarbon use is about 200 million barrels of oil equivalent, or about 23.5 Saudi Arabias per day. Thus, if the world's policymakers really want to quit using carbon-based fuels, then we will need to find the energy equivalent of 23.5 Saudi Arabias every day, and all of that energy must be carbon-free.

While Saudi Arabia provides an easily understandable metric for global energy use, this book focuses on our desire for power. So let's
convert those global energy consumption numbers into power terms. That will be easy, as they are provided in barrels of oil equivalent
per day
, and that means they are readily converted into our now-familiar power metrics: watts and horsepower.

Source
: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009,
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/renewables_section_2009.pdf
.

SI provides the easiest way to compute power. A barrel of oil contains 5.8 million Btu. That's equal to about 5.8 billion joules (5.8 GJ). To obtain watts, we must divide those joules by seconds. (Remember that power = energy/time.) We must therefore divide our 5.8 gigajoules by 86,400 seconds, which is the number of seconds in 24 hours. We must also account for the heat lost during the conversion of that heat energy into useful power. The result: Each barrel of oil equivalent produces about 22,152 watts, or about 29.7 horsepower. For simplicity, let's call it 30 horsepower per barrel of oil equivalent per day.
²

Multiplying global energy use (226 million barrels of oil equivalent in primary energy each day) by horsepower per barrel (30), we find that
the world consumes about 6.8 billion horsepower—all day, every day. Therefore, roughly speaking, the world consumes about 1 horsepower per person. Of course, this power availability is not spread evenly across the globe. Americans use about 4.5 horsepower per capita, while their counterparts in Pakistan and India use less than 0.25.

FIGURE 10
Per-Capita Power Consumption in the Six Most Populous Countries, in Watts

Sources
: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009,
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/renewables_section_2009.pdf
; Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
.

Although those numbers are telling, they are somewhat unwieldy. Thus, it makes sense to also look at global power consumption in watts. Using the numbers cited above, we find that global power consumption
is about 5.1 trillion watts, or 5.1 terawatts. Using watts allows us to see the disparity in power consumption much more clearly. For instance, the average resident of India consumes about 167 watts, while the average Brazilian uses 516 watts. Meanwhile, the average resident of the United States consumes 3,366 watts.

The wealth of power in the United States provides an obvious explanation for America's incredible economic success. U.S. residents have enormous amounts of power at their disposal that can be used for whatever bit of work they choose to do: running a spreadsheet, recharging an electric drill, mixing cookie dough, manufacturing computers, or running the air compressor in the garage in order to inflate the tires on the car.

In the never-ending quest for horsepower, the residents of the United States are leading the world, and they are doing so because America leads the world in the production of high-quality energy. The United States ranks first in the world in the production of electricity from nuclear reactors (ahead of France). It ranks second in coal production (behind China), second in natural gas production (behind Russia), third in oil production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia), and fourth in hydro production (behind China, Canada, and Brazil).
³
In all, the United States produces about 74 percent of the primary energy it consumes, a fact seldom mentioned by the many neoconservatives and energy posers who have been sounding the alarm about the evils of foreign energy.
⁴
America's enormously productive energy sector—combined with significant imports of oil—allows the United States to provide colossal quantities of power to its citizens. And it's that power availability that has turbocharged the American economy and made it into a powerhouse.

Furthermore, the United States has more hydrocarbon reserves than any other country. In October 2009, the Congressional Research Service reported that the proved hydrocarbon reserves of the United States totaled nearly 970 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The vast majority of that total (about 906 billion barrels of oil equivalent) is in the form of coal. Running second behind the United States in total hydrocarbon reserves is Russia, which has about 955 billion barrels of oil equivalent, followed by China with 466 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
⁵

Given America's enormous energy production and energy reserves, why are so many Americans willing to believe that they should trade reliable resources, such as nuclear energy, coal, oil, and natural gas—all of which have high power density—for unreliable, low-power-density sources, such as solar energy and wind power? The answer is that many Americans are too willing to believe the hype. They haven't bothered to investigate the claims or do the calculations that would allow them to see through the hype. Or perhaps the self-satisfaction they get from aligning themselves with such grand ideals is so alluring that they don't even want to try.

In the next section, I will expose many of the myths of “green” energy. In doing so, I will set the stage for Part 3, where I will explain why the most logical, or rather,
the inevitable
, energy policy for the future is N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

Wind and Solar Are “Green”

T
HE ESSENCE OF PROTECTING the environment can be distilled to a single phrase: Small is beautiful.

That phrase gained widespread traction in the early 1970s when British economist E. F. Schumacher published a collection of essays in a book that carried that title. As Schumacher made clear, when it comes to environmental protection, manmade disturbances of the natural world should be kept to a minimum. His maxim applies most particularly to energy production: The best energy sources have the highest power densities, that is, they generate lots of power from small pieces of real estate.
²
From a “deep green” perspective, that's ideal: small footprints and big power outputs.

Of course, every source of energy production takes a toll on the environment. The goal should be to minimize those costs, which, for hydrocarbons and nuclear power, include, but are not limited to, air pollutants, long-lived waste issues, oil spills, carbon dioxide emissions, the effects of drilling operations and pipelines, and the potential for catastrophic accidents. Those downsides are well known and have been accepted as a cost of doing business for many decades. And though these
costs are significant, hydrocarbons and nuclear power are prevailing in the modern energy diet because they satisfy the Four Imperatives.

The essential problem with renewables is that they fail the first test of the Four Imperatives: power density. The weak power density of renewables has become so apparent that the Nature Conservancy, one of the biggest and most conservative of the U.S. environmental groups, recently coined the term “energy sprawl,” a reference to the vast stretches of land that are needed for the production and transportation of energy from wind and solar installations.