by Alex Epstein
Gas can also be turned into fuel oil and methanol, and it powers vehicles in compressed or liquefied form. Still, when it comes to transportation, nothing can yet compete with what is far and away the world’s leading transportation fuel: oil.
OIL
Oil is the most coveted (and controversial) fuel in the world because it is almost eerily engineered by natural processes, not just for cheapness, not just for reliability, not just for scalability, but also for another characteristic crucial to a functional civilization: portability.
Oil is an ultraconcentrated form of energy—liquid energy—so it’s ideal for any moving vehicle. Every portable power source needs to carry its fuel with it, which means that size and weight are of paramount consideration. Oil, in effect, has the ultimate strength to weight ratio. A gallon of gasoline has 31,000 calories—the amount of energy you use in fifteen days. Oil can be refined into stable, potent liquid fuels—gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Oil’s dominance as the transportation fuel has gone hand in hand with the development of mobile engines: the gasoline engines in most cars, the diesel engines powering semitrucks and global shipping, and the jet engines powering aircraft all eat oil fuel.
Oil is used for the vast, vast majority of transportation—93 percent in the United States.11 Other technologies struggle to mimic it.
Oil’s value leads to continuous large investments in exploration and extraction technology. Whereas oil deposits were once completely invisible to industry, today modern imaging, called 3D seismic imaging, can get us a far clearer idea of what’s going on below the surface and how it changes over time. We can get oil out of hard rock (shale oil). In oil sands, we’ve created technology that acts as a ground decongestant—releasing oil from the sands that have held it in place for decades.
Portability is valuable for many reasons. Personally, oil is the fuel of freedom—the fuel that liberated Americans to go where they want, when they want. Economically, oil is the fuel of trade. Our entire standard of living depends on specialization—on people doing what they do best, wherever they are, and then being able to cheaply move their products to those who most need them. The higher the price of portable power, the slower the world economy moves.
In the future, it is quite possible that battery-powered vehicles will replace oil-powered vehicles for certain purposes. The limits are based on the energy concentration or energy density of the batteries; for example, the Tesla Roadster battery has an energy density that is 107 times less than gasoline—though the battery’s electric motor can convert more than twice as much of that energy into usable energy as the engine in a gasoline-powered car, so in practice the Tesla battery might be 35 times less dense.12
For various technical reasons, progress in battery technology is extremely slow—electric cars have been around longer than gasoline-powered cars—and it may well be that another, nonbattery storage solution will win out. For now, though, oil is the greatest portable fuel the world has ever known, and we are willing to pay a premium for it; per unit of energy, we sometimes pay five times as much for oil as for natural gas.
Oil is also coveted as the world’s most versatile raw material for making synthetic materials. You are probably sitting in a room with at least fifty things derived from oil, from the insulation in your wall to the carpet under your feet to the laminate on your table to the screen on your computer. Oil is everywhere—that is how the average American uses 2.5 gallons each day.13
Like coal and gas, there is enormous future potential for oil production—if the industry can keep developing better technologies. The shale energy revolution is bringing supplies some never expected, and the Earth still contains many times more oil than we have used in the entire history of civilization.
FUTURE ENERGY RESOURCES
Here’s a trick question I like to ask when I do public speaking: “Is oil a valuable natural resource?” Almost everyone answers yes, even when I tell them it’s a trick question.
My answer is no. Because oil—or coal, or natural gas, or uranium, or aluminum for that matter—is not naturally a resource.
If we understand this, we understand why we can be incredibly optimistic about the future potential of fossil fuels and future sources of energy.
A resource is something that’s available and usable for human benefit. I’ll focus on oil here because that is the resource that people most fear will disappear.
Before the 1850s, oil was not a resource—it was naturally useless. It was a distinct raw material, to be sure, with the potential to become valuable, just as sand has the potential to become a microchip. But oil had very little use; in fact, in many cases, it was a nuisance. Drillers seeking underground saltwater deposits to distill into salt were annoyed by the presence of this “rock oil.”14 Additionally, oil was not a resource because it was hidden and trapped, invisible and inaccessible.
What turned oil from a potential resource to an actual resource was human ingenuity—the ingenuity of the chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr., who refined petroleum into kerosene, the ingenuity of George Bissell, who targeted Titusville, Pennsylvania, as a location likely to have underground oil, and the ingenuity of Edwin Drake, who created the first successful oil well in 1859 at 69.5 feet underground.15
It was only thanks to their ingenuity that useless goo became a resource.
The history of oil is a history of resource creation. For example, crude oil, through a process of boiling (distilling), could be refined into 50 or 60 percent kerosene, used for lighting. But then the rest of the crude oil wasn’t a resource—it was often pure waste, dumped in a lake—until human ingenuity made it so. In the nineteenth century, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil progressively figured out how to create value out of every “fraction” of a barrel—a barrel containing numerous types of hydrocarbons of different shapes, sizes, and masses. They created wax out of one part of the barrel, lubricants (over three hundred varieties) out of another, and asphalt out of another.
In the twentieth century, modern chemistry made oil not only the most important fuel, but also the most important raw material in civilization. Chemists can “crack”—break down—the molecules in a barrel of oil into small parts, and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of polymers, including modern plastics. While you think of oil in your car as in the gas tank, in fact there is more oil in the materials in the car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the plastic, dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars, the entire interior is one form of oil fabric or synthetic material or another—because oil is such a cheap and effective way to make things.
When a policeman has his life saved by a bulletproof vest, when a firefighter has his life saved by a fireproof jacket, that is oil—that is something that was once a useless raw material, now made into a resource.
What is true of oil is true of essentially every other resource: They need to be created by transforming potential into actual. Coal was not an electricity resource or a source of motive power until the coal-fired steam engine. Natural gas was actually a deadly force, something that exploded when you drilled for oil, until safe drilling and storage technologies could harness it. Aluminum, one of the most abundant elements in the Earth’s crust, was completely useless a few hundred years ago.
Ultimately, an “energy resource” is just matter and energy transformed to meet human needs. Well, the planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy—100 percent potential resource. To say we’ve only scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet’s potential we’ve unlocked. We already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands and thousands of years. For us today, that’s morally enough—it’s time to focus on the 7 billion of us, here and now, who will live better with more energy and live worse or not at all wi
th less.
What energy resources should we use now and in the future? We have a brilliant system for deciding this: the price system of supply and demand. All things being equal, if it takes fewer resources, including human time, to produce something, the price goes down; if it takes more resources, the price goes up.
Thus, prices reflect how efficient a use of existing resources it is to create a new resource for a given purpose. When the cost of computers comes down, that means that all the components and their composition can be created more cheaply than before. Similarly, the form of energy we use will be the one that, based on the best technology available (which is always evolving), can do the best job for the lowest price.
Every day, we make a choice. Is coal or oil or gas the best way of accomplishing a given goal—or is something else? For the last several hundred years, the answer to “What do we replace yesterday’s fossil fuels with?” has been “New fossil fuels.” As soon as that doesn’t make sense (typically, when it becomes prohibitively expensive or when a better alternative is available), it won’t happen.
Part of the process of resource evolution is that we will find new ways to get what is considered to be the same resource by more technically complicated means. This is often characterized negatively, with such expressions as “We’ve gotten all the easy oil, and now we’re going after the dirtiest oil” or “We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.”16 (The expression “scraping the bottom of the barrel” comes from the phenomenon of the oil in a barrel existing in different fractions, from heavy to light. The heavy fractions sit at the bottom of the barrel, and the heaviest, like asphaltum, which goes into asphalt, can be hard to scrape out and impossible to use.)
The view is that when we use a finite, nonrenewable resource like fossil fuels, we will have to go to progressively more difficult places to get it—which is assumed to be a bad thing. But why? Every resource technology involves starting with easier problems and moving toward harder problems.
When I read “We’re using dirtier and dirtier oil” or “We’re having to scour further depths to get oil,” I think, What is the “appropriate’” length to go to get oil? Should we have stopped at 69.5 feet? At every stage, one could be accused of “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” But think forward two hundred years. The Earth is full of elements at the crust and below. Ditto for the bottom of the ocean. Someday we will likely have technology to mine the ocean floor more efficiently than we can mine at the surface today. What is wrong with going to that frontier? How is that any different than going to space?
Now, it makes no sense to go to such great lengths to get oil if it’s not efficient, i.e., if there are better alternatives. But there will likely be some element that is most efficient to get from very far below the ground.
The most forward-looking policy toward energy use is to always use the most competitive form of energy. I like to call the most competitive ones progressive energy, because they are part of a process of continual improvement, of finding the best way to get energy from the Earth’s effectively unlimited stockpile of potential energy resources.
Our concern for the future should not be running out of energy resources; it should be running out of the freedom to create energy resources, including our number-one energy resource today, fossil fuels.
EVERY CALORIE MATTERS
Because we have never lived without fossil fuel energy, it’s hard to imagine life without its benefits. But given that thought leaders are proposing exactly that, it’s important to grasp just how big a difference fossil fuels have made in our lives.
To get a big-picture view of the difference energy and machines make in our lives, look at this graph of human progress from A.D. 1 to the present, featuring data from the Angus Maddison survey, the most comprehensive survey of quality of life over the last two millennia.
Figure 3.1: Fossil Fuel Use and Human Progress—the Big Picture
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2010); Bolt and van Zanden (2013); World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Notice that starting in the year 1800, the metrics of life expectancy and GDP rocket up. In school, we learn that this was the time of the Industrial Revolution—although at least in my case, the problems of it were emphasized much more than the doubling of human life expectancy and the far more than doubling of individual income. What exactly does the term industrial revolution mean? Well, it was a revolution in industry, which means in our ability to do physical work to be more productive, which in practice meant an energy revolution. Thanks to the world’s first source of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, coal-powered steam engine technology, every industry became more productive—agriculture, manufacturing, transportation.
The people who went through the industrial revolution had a perspective that is hard for us to recapture but is essential for us to get: an understanding of just how vital it is for us to have access to cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, because the more we have, the more ability we have, and the less we have, the more we see just how weak we are without high-energy machines. I stress “cheap, plentiful, and reliable” because anything less than that isn’t useful, just like the expensive, scarce, unreliable electricity at the Gambian hospital. Before the industrial revolution, there were machines and there were sources of energy—there just wasn’t cheap, plentiful, reliable energy for the vast majority of people.
Take this 1865 comment by William Stanley Jevons, a legendary theoretical and applied economist, in his book The Coal Question. Coal was then the cheapest and most reliable source of energy, not only for illumination, which is only one use of energy, but also for powering machines to do far more mechanical work than human beings can with our muscles.
Coal in truth stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do . . . new applications of coal are of an unlimited character. In the command of force, molecular and mechanical, we have the key to all the infinite varieties of change in place or kind of which nature is capable. No chemical or mechanical operation, perhaps, is quite impossible to us, and invention consists in discovering those which are useful and commercially practicable. . . .17
Jevons was worried that we were running out of coal (a concern we’ll discuss later in this chapter). Notice how emotional he is about it:
With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.18
A letter in response to Jevons is even more vivid about what the loss of coal energy would have meant:
Coal is everything to us. Without coal, our factories will become idle, our foundries and workshops be still as the grave; the locomotive will rust in the shed, and the rail be buried in the weeds. Our streets will be dark, our houses uninhabitable. Our rivers will forget the paddlewheel, and we shall again be separated by days from France, by months from the United States. The post will lengthen its periods and protract its dates. A thousand special arts and manufacturers, one by one, then in a crowd, will fly the empty soil, as boon companions are said to disappear when the cask is dry.19
And here’s how it ends: “We shall miss our grand dependence, as a man misses his companion, his fortune, or a limb, every hour and at every turn reminded of the irreparable loss.”20
One thing to note: This was at a time in history when, because of early-stage technology, coal pollution in England was far, far worse than, say, even China experiences today—and yet these commentators don’t even mention it; that’s how valuable they saw energy as being to their very ability to survive. Nothing was more important. As we’ll see looking at modern fossil fuel technology, we have progressed incredibly in pollution-reduction technology, but it’s worth remembering that to the people who experience the need for energy most directly, it’s worth pretty much any price, in the same way that you’ll put up with a lot of side effects t
o take a lifesaving drug. And lifesaving drugs, like everything else we value, depend on access to cheap, plentiful, reliable energy—to produce, to transport, to package, to refrigerate.
When we talk about different sources of energy, we are talking about different technologies that are better or worse at producing energy with the resources we have. If we choose the most capable technologies, we get more energy. If we choose less capable ones, we get less. It’s that simple. When someone says, “Let’s use solar,” he is, usually unwittingly, saying, “Let’s have less energy with which to improve our lives.” There is no limit to the amount of energy we can use to improve our lives. And in a world where we produce only one fourth as much energy as would be necessary for everyone to live like Americans, every machine calorie counts.
One realm in which energy is particularly life or death is in agriculture. The fossil fuel industry has revolutionized acriculture to the benefit of billions—and gotten no credit.
MORE FOSSIL FUELS, MORE FOOD: HOW THE OIL INDUSTRY SOLVED WORLD HUNGER
Paul Ehrlich declared in the 1968 sensation The Population Bomb that “the battle to feed humanity is over”—and he was in good company.21 In 1969, the New York Times reported: “While there have always been famines and warnings of famine, food experts generally agree that the situation now is substantially different. The problem is becoming so acute that every nation, institution, and every human being will ultimately be affected.”22 A group of leading American intellectuals wrote an open letter declaring: “The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000. . . . World food production cannot keep pace with the galloping growth of population.”23
