SEP fields in overdrive

In all of this conundrum, it appears that the Somebody Else’s Problem field of Douglas Adam fame is used extensively:

“An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot… The Somebody Else’s Problem field… relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain…” (the Somebody Else’s Problem field figured prominently in Adams’ Hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem).

SEP fields magically hide the whole herd of “transport elephants”. The flurry of fields come out of the Tooth Fairy’s magical wand… and woof, the “elephants” disappear…

Besides the numerous invisible elephants concerning power grid management, another also conveniently hidden by the Tooth Fairy’s SEP field is called Lithium. Recently, a group of scientists from the French Academy of Science pointed out that energy storage in the “new brave world” implied by the current fad for EVs and SDs, is an unresolved issue, and by a wide margin. Powering large numbers of EVs from non-fossil sources, numbers large enough to replace current ICE fleets, means massive amounts of storage. Many parties imply the extensive use of Lithium-ion batteries. Our academics pointed out that France currently requires some 10TWh per week, all told, for its ongoing living (with only a negligible number of EVs connected yet). To store only 2 days of electricity use (say a winter period with extensive cloud cover and no wind — this happens), with the same kind of batteries used by Tesla, would require some 12 million tonnes of batteries using 360,000 tonnes of Lithium — while current global Lithium mining is about 40,000t/year…[9] These academics obviously forced the point to get the message across. Scaled to the global fleet, there is an obvious gap: not enough Lithium (in fact UBS has estimated the likely production increase required to achieve 100% EV globally: 2,898%).[10]

Batteries require more than Lithium. The main form of Li-ion battery requires 6g of cobalt per gram of Li. That means 10kg of cobalt per EV. The main sources of cobalt are Zambia and Congo (DCR), mined in distressing conditions, where quasi-slavery child labour is rife and wars/guerrillas also common place… Hence a shift to lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt-oxides (NMCs) in cell phones, and lithium-nickel-cobalt-aluminium-oxide (NCA) batteries, for example, in Tesla cars. However, nickel mining and smelting is highly polluting and energy intensive, ditto for aluminium, and this renders even more complex the yet unresolved issue of Lithium recycling — many more “elephants” hidden in that corner. EVs also require rare earth metal, graphite and many more materials. UBS estimates that in a 100% EV world cobalt requirements would increase by 1,928% relative to now, rare earths 655%, graphite 524%, and nickel 105% — no one has any clear idea as to where such amounts may come from, at what energy costs and what the ecological impacts would be…[11]

There is more and worse since the EV fad aims to get rid of ICE vehicles not only because of air pollution but also to combat global warming. As noted earlier, this means intensive use of PVs and WTs, at least in the minds of decision-makers and pundits. Globally a number of studies point at the need to move from the present 17TW of installed power to some 50TW possibly over 100TW of so-called “renewables” (recalling the low capacity factors of renewables). Here others point out that besides the above issues, said PVs and WTs require amounts of steel and concrete (and many other minerals, rare earth metals, etc.) that are substantially higher than for current coal fired power stations (about 7 times the amount of steel per kWh supplied, for example); ditto for copper use in PV farms (11 to 40 times more copper);[12] ditto for aluminium (90 times more aluminium).[13] A number of parties have raised such matters.[14]

Others have also pointed out that, Paris Agreement to combat climate change or not, present installed “renewables” (not counting existing hydro) are far from covering recent increases in global energy consumption up to 2012. That, is the world is nowhere near able to substitute fossil fuels with “renewables” even without considering the added potential demand of 100% ICE vehicle substitution with EVs, even in a TaaS context… Furthermore, since 2012 energy consumption increments have been low and so have new investment in “renewables”. This is officially all due to the “sluggishness” of “growth”. We do know that this sluggishness is caused by net energy from oil fizzling out, but that is the largest of our invisible elephants… They are all “somebody’s else problem”; why worry? EVs, SDs, Taas are so clearly the way to go, aren’t they?

And so, car manufacturers face some dilemmas. The EV-SD-TaaS fad is “new business, which is still losing money, is cannibalising its profitable existing one, creating incentives to delay the necessary change”.[15] Not one car manufacturer is likely to make decent money in the foreseeable future with EVs, SDs, etc., not the kind of money they made with ICE cars. But governments said it, EVs are the way to go, ICEs shall be banned…

There are many more elephants that we have not mentioned yet… Consider, for example, the dangers of hacking and cyber attacks. No software system has been shown to be 100% immune. SDs have been hacked. Mass EV-SDs fleets would entail substantial dangers against which there is presently no known cure (although some experts do their utter best to attract attention to the issues and work hard to develop solutions).[16]

Still, for now, the herd of elephants that we have singled out should suffice to show that, maybe, in the face of global urban air pollution and global warming, along EV hyper-real lines, the chief implied consequence is “good old” rationing of mobility by whatever other fancy name marketing and communications people will call it — the days of mass car ownership are counted, some will retain access to constrained mobility and others, probably the majority, mostly not.

To avoid misunderstandings, let’s stress it further — somehow, somewhere, in various parts of the world, there are experts working hard to address each of the invisible elephants. The chief issue is that they all remain under a SEP field. The still far too long timelines to solving each elephant and the interactions between them are not factored in coherently and rigorously by decision-making elites supposedly dealing with climate change, air pollution or energy matters.

Finally, recall that none of the above takes OFDK into account. Bring OFDK in, and it is in since 2012, and the already grim picture instantly darkens into a deep shade of black. Under OFDK the net energy from oil required to make, distribute, install, operate, and maintain all the fancy EVs, SDs, PVs, WTs, batteries, intelligent grids, TaaS, and so on, that are meant to save us from choking in air pollution and sweltering under global warming, that key net energy fizzles out by about 2022, with a final tapering out by 2030… Fizzling out is not a nice, smooth affair. It means disruption, erratic moves, breakdowns, and worse, well before 2030. So, a nice, happy substitution of ICE by EVs and SDs and TaaS by 2030? Most unlikely… And then what?

Well, the end of car ownership is exactly what TaaS promoters are about. Ironically, notwithstanding the flaws that we can see in RethinkX’s analysis (and that of others), while the demise of mass car ownership is unlikely to happen as they expect it, the drastic drop in privately owned and operated ICE vehicles is likely to turn out about correct, i.e. only about 5% of ICE passenger vehicles remaining in activity by 2030 in the USA, and not only in the USA but also globally…

Of course, EVs and some forms of SDs are likely to continue expanding between now and then but only as specialised, limited, market niches. Except in the fantasies of Tooth Fairy believers, this is not what can bring “salvation” to current car users from the impacts of the OFDK avalanche, including the impacts of pollution and global warming.

Furthermore, electrifying transport fantasies also leave out the remainder of transport, the trucks, buses, trains, the global merchant fleet of over 1.75 billion dead weight tonnes, and the over 362,000 active aircrafts. Yes, some electrification of trucks, including using overhead catenaries on some main roads, use of computer controlled kites for some merchant shipping, and electrically powered planes are feasible; research and development work is taking place in such areas; however, the matters of timelines, EROI, and costs remain intractable. What could be done if we had 50 years or even 30 years lead times is no longer doable within a mere 10 years during which we must expect that numerous disruptions will impede development.

So overall, no, the Tooth Fairy EV-SD-TaaS magic simply cannot work in time and many cracks are beginning to show, tearing the SEP fields apart, and revealing the rampaging elephants.

XTL, Petro-X, DTCBR — OFDK’s heart of darkness

It should be clear that we do need something else. Could it be found in the direction of those XTLs that have been under development since the 1980s and that are now central to BigMES? Sadly, the same fundamental thermodynamic and systemic issues as concerning the EV-SD-TaaS fad apply, translating into another herd of rampaging elephants — meaning that “salvation” the XTL way is no more likely than the present EV fad.

Many XTL projects that were being planned, even undertaken up to 2014 when oil prices were around $100/bbl or above were postponed indefinitely or abandoned when oil prices crashed. Of course, the thermodynamics are unfavourable and thus production costs for XTLs are high. In a generic sense, the XTL challenge is to use energy (a lot of it) to do rapidly what nature did over millions of years to produce the kinds of high energy density molecules found in sweet crude. To do so, there is a progression in complexity and energy costs in going from coal and natural gas, through various forms of biomass, to completely starting from scratch and using energy from wind or sun to produce electricity and use it to synthesise the right molecules from, say, atmospheric CO2 and water or some other sources of carbon and hydrogen. Energy returns on energy investments (EROIs) and overall energy efficiencies remain abyssal; well below what’s required for societal viability. Which means that the present situation is reminiscent of those Greek tragedies where the more the heroes endeavour to avoid their fate the more they precipitate it.

In the face of thermodynamics and cost reality, Tooth Fairy believers operating on “supply and demand” mythology count on an eventual major price increase, way above $100/bbl, to bring back XTLs into the main play. However, in earlier posts (The threat of an Oil Pearl Harbor; The end of the Oil Age, as we knew it; How is an Oil Fizzle Dragon-King created? — Parts 2 to 4 of Looking down the barrel), we have shown how and why oil prices are currently being thermodynamically driven to the floor (zero net energy results in zero oil value and the oil stays underground).

Except the odd, short lived, price flares caused by various parties taking inopportune pot shots at others and/or cutting pipelines or bombing oil terminals, and/or hurricanes, fires, floods, and large volcanic eruptions, there can’t be salvation by sustained oil price increases.

Sweet crude was never a “free lunch” but it certainly has been a bonanza, at least for some people, the 10% wealthiest. It is now mostly gone. We have said it; we repeat it, the old game is over — net energy from oil is fizzling out. Price flares of sorts may well become the norm, mostly on an overall downward trend, but they have become irrelevant. As we have also stressed, in the present OFDK BigMES, what matters is that the future for transport fuels prices is up and up and concerning security of supplies this future is erratically disrupted.

In other terms, we are now in an “everyone to themselves” world where what matters is who may manage to lay their hands on transport fuels at least for vital activities, where, when and how. Sadly, but of course, here “vital activities” include military ones — no matter what, pushing aside all other considerations, notably ecological and global warming ones, the matter increasingly will be to do “whatever it takes” to keep “things” running, flying, sailing.

This is where, for example, “Petro-X” comes in. So far the globalised industrial world (GIW) has only known the Petro-dollar, at least since President Nixon finally severed the last link between the US dollar and gold in 1971, and since subsequently, after the first oil shock, the US reinforced its already strong links with the Middle East that favoured trading oil almost exclusively in US dollars and reinvesting the surging OPEC profits in the US and more broadly in the West.

Since the early 1970s, there have been several attempts or dreams to trade oil in different currencies and create some other “Petro-X”. At best, most were unsuccessful (e.g. Gaddafi’s apparent dream of creating a new gold-backed African currency) or limited (e.g. Iraq’s shifting to the Euro in 2000 for its oil trading — reverted to the US dollar after the war).

More recently Iran has been using other currencies than the dollar, notably the Euro and Yuan. So has Qatar who could switch completely away from the dollar. Venezuela has also followed suit completely stopping its oil exports trade in US dollars and shifting to the Yuan (which seems to baffles most oil analysts). And now Russia seems intent in stopping using the US dollar in all its sea ports and is backing BRICS efforts in promoting international financial regulation reforms and changes to reserve currencies. None of this would matter a great deal if it were not for OFDK. Under OFDK’s BigMES there is mounting pressure to escape the Petro-dollar and carve out other Petro-X avenues able to outcompete the US.

China, the biggest oil importer, is preparing to launch a Yuan-denominated, gold-backed crude oil futures contract. Besides initially enabling countries like Russia, Iran and Venezuela to by-pass the US banking systems and US sanctions, this has potentially major BigMES implications. Combined with a series of deals in the Middle East and Russian support of BRICS efforts, the emergence of a Petro-Yuan may end up giving China a strong influence over some 40% of global oil and gas production (recall that Russia, Iran and Qatar hold the largest natural gas reserves, and by a wide margin).

Recall also that for oil importing countries, under OFDK, what matters is not oil production but oil available for export. For decades oil used domestically by oil producing countries has increased more and more, constraining oil available for exports. Many oil-exporting countries have also increasingly been exporting transport fuels rather than crude oil. Presently, export oil is dominated by “Chindia”, i.e. the oil imports by China and India. This results in a rapidly declining fraction of total exports available to older industrialised countries and everyone else. In recent years, China has also considerably increased its strategic oil reserve (while the US has been reducing its own). China’s Petro-Yuan move is thus very important in a BigMES context where what matters is who has access to what, at what price and for how long — knowing that the “music stops” by 2030 at the latest.

In Living on credit, the 10% & the Remainder (Part 9 of Looking down the barrel), we highlighted the emergence of “debt-that-cannot-be-repaid” (DTCBR) as a key post-modern form of tribute levying. We pointed out that the US invented it and is master at it. The Petro-dollar has until now been a major vector of this activity. Under OFDK’s BigMES every large player, private and public, has now no other choice but to be involved in that DTCBR game. With a total debt at 260% of its GDP, China is presently the most indebted large country in the world. The Petro-Yuan is another way of playing the DTCBR game in order to secure a substantial share of the last dregs of net energy from oil and to move on to transport fuels from XTLs.

Other important factors in the DTCBR game are how the various military powers and the global arms trade are evolving. Historically, military power has always been a key, and often the ultimate, factor to achieve tribute levying. Presently there are signs that the US military may no longer be what it used to be (recurring accidents plaguing its Pacific fleet, poor level of preparedness, high proportion of old, sometimes obsolete equipment).[17] Meanwhile the Syrian conflict has highlighted the power and advanced capabilities of some of the Russian technologies and the development of China’s military, especially its navy, has been well publicised, notably all along its oil supply routes.

In our previous post on food, Food (in)security & cognitive failure under the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King, we highlighted the extent of cognitive failure and the resulting inability of elites to think the unthinkable concerning one of the two most critical of the GIW’s support systems: food.

Here, concerning transport, the other most critical system, we enter OFDK’s “heart of darkness”.[18] As we stressed in The end of the Oil Age, as we knew it, some of the parties in play sense that matters are far from well — they have read some tea leaves and writings on walls. However, none has any clear notion of what they are flying into. And so they are positioning themselves and gearing up to play the big mad energy scramble, the BigMES game, in “wild west” poker players’ fashion, where cheating the other players is key, guns at the ready.

Beside the “guns”, militaries cum secret services, the main components of this game are the dregs of net energy from sweet crude that can still be had, by some but not by all, the ability to control and muster other primary energy resources to extend oil further and go XTL, albeit at unavoidable, substantial, unviable, thermodynamic deficits, the ability to impose some of the EV-SD-TaaS hyper-reality, also at unavoidable, large thermodynamic deficits, and above all the many forms of “cheating” thermodynamics financially, aka DTCBR by whatever name, to force others to pay for said deficits. Based on 20th century experience, including two world wars, colonial and decolonialisation wars, and ever since various forms of oil related turmoil notably in the Middle East and Africa now extending all the way to the so-called China Sea, the prospects are bleak to say the least. There is no way of telling how each player will fare, what sequence of events will eventuate, how far each will go during this end phase of the Oil Age. It is likely to be very messy. In the near future, we must expect to see the SEP fields of “supply and demand” and “free market” torn apart along with the growth of new preferential oil trading relationships along Petro-X lines, bartering deals, embargoes, blockades, “sanctions”, export bans, effective control of distant oil fields by various foreign states, maybe via oil majors, cutting off strategic pipelines by opposing interests, sabotages, cyber warfare, and worse forms of playing BigMES.

OFDK’s heart of darkness, that is now unfolding on the transport scene, is the tragedy of cognitive failure at its peak — while elites pursue fantasies of progress, mastery over nature, technical prowess, “going green to combat climate change”, all along fixing problems by adding more and more technology that in turn create more problems, their world, the GIW, is in the process of losing access to its sources of energy and is about to grind to a halt.

Beyond short-term expediency and rearguard delaying tactics, absolutely nothing can be gained at the EV-SD-XTL-Petro-X-DTCBR game by any of the players. By 2030 it all stops. Playing EV-SD-XTL-Petro-X-DTCBR can only precipitate what is in train and make it far worse. It does not and cannot lead to a viable “world after”, once the Oil Age has ended. It may instead, we should say it is likely to, lead to considerable hardship, loss of life and worsening of global warming and other ecological challenges.

Scrambling for Oil Age dregs or dreaming of magical alternatives is madness. The whole world demands something else. As we have stressed since the beginning of this series, there are other ways to make use of existing knowledge and technologies. Using them, it is feasible to re-invent the entire set of existing value chains within the remaining timeframe. This won’t happen at the initiative of elites plagued with cognitive failure, remaining firmly under the sway of a Tooth Fairy playing with SEP fields. It can only happen at the initiative of a few entrepreneurs who have intuited enough of the situation and seen the opportunities that it represents — as has always been the case historically since the early days of farming some 10,000 years ago. In our next and last post in this series we will outline the bases for such an approach. In the next series we will then present how we plan to address the emerging demand for something else — the urgent necessity of putting in place means of access to energy, a new class of networking and new cryptocurrency means.

* * * * * *

If you have followed our posts to this point, a reminder:

This series focuses on the emerging global demand for something else than what we currently have concerning energy and all other aspects of living in the globalised industrial world (the GIW). Most importantly it concerns money, the end of fiat currencies over the next few years and their unavoidable replacement with cryptocurrencies backed with sustainable energy supplies.

The posts gradually explain the rationale for the solutions that we are developing to address that global demand for something else. A subsequent series will explain our solutions themselves and our entire approach to creating a sustainable and scalable energy backed cryptocurrency.

You can find all the previous posts at: https://medium.com/@GeeeBee/

[1] International Energy Agency, 2017, Global EV Outlook 2017. https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GlobalEVOutlook2017.pdf

[2] Based on the recent and much criticised assessments of the feasibility of a full conversion to renewables by 2050 in order to stay below 1.5oC warming, e.g. by Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Zack A.F. Bauer, et al., 2017, 100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World. Joule 1, 108–121, September 6.

[3] Arbib, James and Seba, Tony, 2017, Rethinking Transportation 2020–2030, The Disruption of Transportation and the Collapse of the Internal-Combustion Vehicle and Oil Industries, A RethinkX Sector Disruption Report, RethinkX.com.

[4] See for example, Kinder Baumgardner, 2015, Beyond Google’s Cute Car — The Time to Think through the Impact of Self-Driving Vehicles on Architecture and City Planning is Now. http://www.swagroup.com/press/beyond-googles-cute-car/

[5] Todd Royal, 2017, Electric Vehicles: The High Cost Of Going Green. OilPrice.com, Sep 14.

[6] https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-vision-of-self-driving-cars-is-wayward-says-mit-prof/. This is a view he expands on in his recent book, 2017, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy, Viking.

[7] Jean-Louis Gassée, 2017, Autonomous Cars: The Level 5 Fallacy. https://mondaynote.com, 11 September.

[8] Chris Urmson Google’s Director of Self-Driving Cars from 2013 to late 2016 actually pointed that much: no hands on a driving wheel — at least 30 years into the future maybe never (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=SXSW and https://www.recode.net/2017/9/8/16278566/transcript-self-driving-car-engineer-chris-urmson-recode-decode).

[9] Members of the Energy Futures Committee, 2017, La question de la transition énergétique est elle bien posée dans les débats actuels ? [Is the matter of energy transition properly asked within present debates?], Institut de France — Académie des Sciences, Paris, 19 April.

[10] UBS Evidence Lab, 2017, Electric Car Teardown — Disruption Ahead? www.ubs.com/investmentresearch, 18 May and UBS Research, 2017, The massive impacts of EVs on commodities, http://cdn.oilprice.com//images/tinymce/zh16.jpg

[11] UBS, 2017, Op. Cit.

[12] Edgar G. Hertwich, Thomas Gibon, Evert A. Bouman, Anders Arvesen, Sangwon Suh, Garvin A. Heath, Joseph D. Bergesen, Andrea Ramirez, Mabel I. Vega, and Lei Shi,2017, Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies. PNAS. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1312753111.

[13] Olivier Vidal, Bruno Goffé and Nicholas Arndt , 2013, Metals for a low-carbon society. Nature Geoscience Vol 6, November. www.nature.com/naturegeoscience

[14] 2015, Ressources minérales et énergie [Mineral resources and energy], Rapport du groupe « Sol et sous-sol » de l’Alliance Nationale de Coordination de la Recherche pour l’Energie (ANCRE). See also, Daniele La Porta and Kirsten Hund, 2017, The Growing Role of Minerals and Metals for a Low Carbon Future, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/ World Bank Publications The World Bank Group www.worldbank.org; Nuss P, Eckelman MJ (2014) Life Cycle Assessment of Metals: A Scientific Synthesis. PLoS ONE 9(7): e101298. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0101298.

[15] Simon Hage, 2017, The Arrival of Tesla: German Auto Giants Face an Existential Challenge — Spiegel Online — International, 15 September.

[16] See for example, James Somers, 2017, The Coming Software Apocalypse. The Atlantic, 28 September. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/.

[17] John Cooper, 2017, The U.S. Military Is In Really Bad Shape. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-military-really-bad-shape-19446?page=show. 14February. See also, Dedefensa.org, 2015, La domination aérienne US globale est menacée [US airspace domination is threatened].http://www.dedefensa.org/article/la-domination-aerienne-us-globale-est-menacee. 16 September.

[18] In reference to Joseph Conrad, 1899, Heart of Darkness, Blackwood’s Magazine.