An unfolding collapse?
tullettprebon.com
As we have seen, energy is completely
central to all forms of activity, so the
threat posed by a sharp decline in net
energy availability extends into every
aspect of the economy, and will affect
supplies of food and water, access
to other resources, and structures of
government and law.
The story of modern agriculture
is one of feeding an ever-growing
global population from an essentially finite
resource base. At the time
of population theorist Thomas
Malthus (1766-1834), it would have
seemed inconceivable that the world
population could increase from 870
million in 1810 to 6,900 million in
2010. That this has been achieved
has been solely due to the application
of exogenous energy to agriculture,
a process which has created an
expansion in food production which
has exceeded the 7.9x increase in
human numbers over the same period.
Essentially, there are two ways in
which agricultural output can be
increased. The first is to bring more
land into production, which has indeed
happened, but virtually all viable
farmland was under cultivation
by 1960.
The second is to increase output per
hectare, which is what the “green
revolution” has achieved – between
1950 and 1984, for example, global
grain production increased by
about 250%.
The snag with this, of course, is
that the green revolution has,
overwhelmingly, been the product
of energy inputs. Most obviously,
planting, harvesting, processing and
distribution have been made possible
by fossil fuels, principally oil. Fertilizers
have been sourced from natural gas,
whilst most pesticides are made from
petroleum. The impact of energy
inputs on agricultural productivity
cannot be calculated exactly, but some
estimates suggest that these inputs
have increased output per hectare by
at least 85%. The apparent implication
– which is that food production might
decline by almost half if these inputs
became unavailable – is almost
certainly a severe understatement,
because it ignores both the leeching
of naturally-occurring nutrients and
the conditioning of the land to inputintensive
monoculture.
It seems highly probable that recent
food crises are directly linked to rising
energy costs, and that escalating food
prices owe at least as much to energy
constraint as to continuing increases
in the global population. Of course, the
cultivation of crops for fuels worsens
the squeeze on food availability and, as
we have seen, offers such low EROEIs
that it is a wholly futile response to the
squeeze on energy supplies.
The knock-on effects of energy
constraint go far beyond food
issues, serious though these are. The
production of most minerals would
be uneconomic without access to
relatively inexpensive energy. The
giant Bingham Canyon mine in Utah,
for example, produces copper at
concentrations of about 0.25%, which
means that some 400 tonnes of rock
must be shifted for each tonne of
copper produced, a process that is
hugely energy-intensive. Most plastics
are derived from either oil or natural
gas. Desalination is extremely energyintensive,
which means that any sharp
escalation in energy costs will undercut
an increasingly important source of
fresh water. Current plans call for
the quantities of water produced
by desalination to increase from
68 mmc3 (million cubic metres) in
2010 to 120 mmc3 in 2020, a plan
which looks wildly unrealistic if the
availability of net energy is declining at
anything like the rate that our analysis
of trends in EROEI suggests.
The logic of a deteriorating EROEI
suggests that investment in energy
infrastructure will grow much more
rapidly than the economy as a whole
in a process that has been called
‘energy sprawl’. In essence, declining
productivity means that the energy
infrastructure must increase more
rapidly than the volume of produced
energy, and this process is clearly
under way, though principally in the
emerging economies (where energy
demand continues to increase)
rather than in the developed world.
This is most evident in the massive
investment that is being poured into all
aspects of the energy chain in China.
The calculations here are daunting. If
we assume (for the sake of simplicity)
that real GDP remains constant over
a ten-year period in which the overall
EROEI declines from 20:1 to 10:1,
energy costs must rise at a compound
annual rate of 7.4% whilst the rest of
the economy shrinks by 0.5% per year.
knowing the score
Where the surplus energy equation
is concerned, one question remains –
how will we know when the decline
sets in?
The following are amongst the most
obvious decline-markers:
- Energy price escalation. The
inflation-adjusted market prices of
energy (and, most importantly, of oil)
move up sharply, albeit in a zig-zag
fashion as price escalation chokes
off economic growth and imposes
short-term reverses in demand.
- Agricultural stress. This will be most
obvious in more frequent spikes in
food prices, combined with food
shortfalls in the poorest countries.
- Energy sprawl. Investment in the
energy infrastructure will absorb a
steadily-rising proportion of global
capital investment.
- Economic stagnation. As the decline
in EROEIs accelerates, the world
economy can be expected to become
increasingly sluggish, and to fail to
recover from setbacks as robustly as
it has in the past.
- Inflation. A squeezed energy surplus
can be expected to combine with an
over-extended monetary economy
to create escalating inflation.
With the exception (thus far) of
inflation, each of these features has
become firmly established in recent
years, which suggests that the energysurplus
economy has already reached
its tipping-point. |
