Remi Cornwall wrote:
Yeah but the taste of a nice steak... I don't care for being a vegan.
Progress in cultured meat will solve that problem. It will reduce
energy inputs to food production by a HUGE amount. The energy savings
are on the same scale as that which we can achieve with hybrid
automobiles. Plus a lot of that energy comes from oil which is used
in agriculture for both fertilizer and to power machinery.
This is the kind of thing Ed described here when he said that
innovation will reduce the demand for oil. Of course it will, and
that should keep the cost from going up to $500. But innovation will
not increase the supply of oil, and I doubt that it will decrease
overall consumption of oil by much before oil essentially runs out.
Some people say that innovation effectively does increase the supply
of oil by allowing more oil to be extracted, but as I said, what I
have read recently is that it does not increase the total amount you
can extract by much; mainly it speeds up extraction and depletes the
well sooner. (Improvements in the 1920s did greatly increase the
amount that can be extracted, according to Deffeyes.)
By the way, it is impossible to predict exactly when oil will run
out, but what constitutes "running out" can be defined with accuracy.
The event is likely to happen soon, and we will know instantly it has
happened. Oil will run out when it takes more energy to extract oil
than we get from burning the stuff. At present this "overhead" energy
is around 15 to 20%. In 1900 it was ~1%.
This condition is described in a quote I uploaded here before:
"Franco Battaglia at the University of Rome put it this way: 'You can
buy an apple for one euro. If you really want an apple, you might pay
five euros. You could even pay a thousand euros, but you would never
pay two apples.'"
Once the overhead required to extract oil exceeds the energy that you
get from the oil, oil will only be used for specialized applications
for which no substitute is available, such as aerospace. If it takes
110 J of energy to make 100 J worth of aviation kerosene, then you
can think of the kerosene as synthetic fuel. You might as well
replace it with some other synthetic fuel that is better suited to
the application, such as pure hydrogen. A hydrogen powered airplane
would have a longer range because the fuel is lighter per joule of
energy it produces. It would probably be safer in an accident, as
well. See: Hoffman, "Tomorrow's Energy."
Hydrogen powered airplanes would be a boon for the military, because
they could be refueled with nuclear power generator onboard an
aircraft carrier, or on land with portable nuke where there is any
supply of water. It does not take much water.
- Jed
