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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (7879)	6/18/2008 10:53:32 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24212

Dan Gardner . Energy and innovation Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen Published: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 The easily obtained supplies were running out. To get more of the energy source that fuelled a nation, workers had to explore and dig to unprecedented depths. Costs rose steadily and some experts were certain there was no solution. Progress would halt. In the future lay crisis and collapse. The year is 1712. The nation is England. The energy source running dangerously low is coal. I didn't mention this at the beginning lest the reader think these facts are somehow obscure or irrelevant to the struggle for energy we face today. They are neither. It wasn't England's first energy crisis. That came in the 13th century, when population growth and deforestation led to a shortage of wood. The Black Death of the 14th century brought a brief respite but steadily increasing population and shrinking forests in the centuries that followed forced the English to shift to a much inferior source of energy: coal. When burned, coal gave off an acrid smoke that blackened lungs and walls and tainted the taste of food. It was even unsuitable in smelting furnaces. But with firewood having become an expensive commodity, Englishmen made do. They devised new technologies and techniques that reduced or eliminated coal's many failings. By the beginning of the 18th century, the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution could be discerned. But then, disaster. The seams of coal lying near the surface were dug to extinction. Miners had to burrow deep into the earth -- so deep the mines flooded with water. Teams of horses hitched to pumps could drain the mines, barely, but the cost of pumping was enormous and the price of the coal they produced soared. Just as an era of cheap energy passed when wood became scarce, so did the era of cheap coal. But not for long. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented a clanking, belching, hissing machine -- fuelled by coal -- that sucked water out of the mines at a fraction of the cost of horse-powered pumps. Flooded mines re-opened. New mines were sunk to depths previously unimagined. The era of cheap energy returned. And it brought the Industrial Revolution with it. Today, of course, we are told the era of cheap energy -- cheap oil in particular -- has passed. Again. And this time we are told it ain't ever coming back. The more excitable doomsayers foresee the end of the world as we know it -- whether due to gentle decline or apocalyptic collapse. I don't buy it. The history of civilization is the history of people running into walls and figuring out how to climb over, go around or tunnel under. We are an inventive species. The most important thing to remember about the energy crisis is that there is no energy shortage. We are awash in energy. The earth's core is a mighty furnace. Air and water swirl with unfathomable kinetic energy. In a single minute, enough solar energy hits the planet to fuel all of humanity's needs for a year. What we lack is cheap energy. A large, easily accessed, conventional oil deposit is a wonderful thing because it delivers a huge amount of energy in exchange for the very modest energy needed to pump the oil and put it to work. As oil companies drill in ever-more remote locations, the energy input required to get oil out of the ground and into the economy rises. The same is all the more true for unconventional forms of oil, particularly Alberta's tar sands. In 1712, there was plenty of coal. The problem was getting water out of the mines at a cost that didn't turn coal into an expensive energy source. With the prospect of great profit driving them on, investors backed Thomas Newcomen's work and the solution was found. With oil topping $100 a barrel, and $200 a barrel a realistic possibility, there are spectacular profits to be had by those who develop new forms of cheap energy. Venture capital is gushing into energy research as investors search for this era's Thomas Newcomen. Schemes, dreams, visions and inventions are leaping from mind to paper to reality. Lots of what's coming is familiar, whether it's improvements on solar energy, or hydrogen fuel cells, or wind turbines. In the skies, engineers are working on massive kite-like arrays which would capture the relentless energy of high-altitude winds. In the water, ever-bigger and more efficient turbines are being driven by the surge of tides and currents. A Canadian company has devised a process that sucks oil out of the contaminated tailings ponds left behind by tar sands development -- cleaning the water and delivering a new energy source at the same time. Biofuels fell out of favour when they were blamed for diverting food crops to fuel tanks, but the next generation of biofuels won't use corn or sugarcane. It will use grasses to produce ethanol -- or weeds, wood chips, or almost any plant matter imaginable. One British researcher is working on a process that would see farms dump straw and other refuse into a vat which would then be processed and shipped straight to the refinery. Then there's my personal favourite: A company called LS9 feeds wood chips or some other plant matter to genetically engineered bacteria and the bugs excrete crude oil. It would be "renewable petroleum." The process even promises to be carbon negative -- meaning it would suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits. Or maybe it won't work. Who knows? The point is that countless brilliant minds backed by powerful funders are exploring a plethora of possibilities. Most will fail and be forgotten. But not all. The hardships inflicted by rising energy costs are undeniable. Job losses. Declining income. Rising poverty. It's all too real. But history is also likely to record that this was a time when someone invented something that changed everything. Dan Gardner writes Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com. canada.com