Coal the Anti-Hero

Gregor MacDonald, of Gregor.us, left an outstanding comment on my previous post, What about the C in RE < C? which looked at how the cost of coal electricity generation has actually fallen during this past century of heavy coal use.

In this comment, he imagines coal as an “anti-hero” stuffed with “cheap BTUs.” It’s brilliant stuff, really. Check out this excerpt:

You’ll find that Coal, to the curious and open researcher, keeps inserting itself into just about every energy equation, both historically and contemporaneously. For a writer on a the trail of a narrative arc, coal is potentially both a protagonist and nemesis. An anti-hero, really. And it’s of course not for nothing nemesis coal appears again in such late iterations of advancement like google.org. I mean, you’d think one could simply ignore coal by now. That coal would have been rendered useless, dumb, mute. But no. There is anti-hero coal stuffed with cheap BTUs. And here is the cool thing about coal: coal causes so many problems, while being so useful, that it triggers the search for alternatives. And yet, coal has this really nasty habit of continually pricing–either in nominal “money” terms or in energy terms–just a notch or two below other fossil fuels.

Sigh.

Kind of mirrors what Steven Chu said a while back when he called coal his “worst nightmare.”

Image: flickr/untitledprojects

 

Histories of Steam and Capital

I’ve added a bunch of new resources to the “Steam” reading list, drawn from Google Books’ excellent scans of a series of histories from the early 19th century through the early 20th.

In particular, I’d draw your attention to the biography of Watt, who everyone knows, and Boulton, who far less people know. Watt made the steam engine work, but Boulton put up the money and built the business model — leasing their machines to coal miners — that allowed it to prosper. Boulton was part of the Lunar Society, which was a group of scientific thinkers that modern day investors like Andy Kessler want to claim as their forbears.

I’m interested in all this because the history of green tech is lousy with inventors who built prototypes, mockups, designs, pilot plants, or otherwise showed their ideas would work, but who never got the funding they needed. One type of money seems particularly lacking: commercialization capital, like what Silicon Valley provides today. The investors take on tons of technological risk knowing that if it works, there will be a market (i.e., if you can make ultracheap electricity, people will buy it). Just a flag to keep an eye on that part of the social history of green technology.

Image: CC/Chris Allen. “Grazebrook Engine: This is a Boulton & Watt beam blowing engine re-erected on the Dartmouth Circus Roundabout, on the A38(M) in Birmingham, UK.” It was originally built in 1817.

 

What about the C in RE < C?

After a recent discussion with an agent, I’ve been thinking really hard about the narrative arc of Inventing Green. Connecting a bunch of different types of people, technologies, and eras takes time and effort, it turns out. Particularly if at the end of the story, I want to give you something beyond a few dozen amazing anecdotes about the green tech of the past.

I’ve been kicking around a ton of ideas about how to tell this story — and what the takeaways will be. First, I said to myself, “Why am I interested in green tech, not green?” The answer is that “tech” is about progress, disruptive progress, often, but that works within the framework of a society. It’s end point is not (necessarily) a change in consciousness, but an industrial-technological change. In the simplest terms, the apotheosis for green tech is Google’s useful formulation, RE < C, Renewable Energy less expensive than Coal.

That’s important because while the public consciousness can and sure has changed over the last several thousand millenia, I’m not sure I can make the argument that the change in social consciousness precedes technological change. And the history of people trying to direct the public will away from consumption is pretty abysmal.

So, then I started thinking that my green tech story stems from tech. And tech stems from Silicon Valley and the ecosystem of capital and resources that’s developed.

The interesting thing about all the people making the jump from information technology to green technology is that the products in both cases couldn’t be more different. Electrical energy is the most commodity of commodities. It is exactly the same everywhere you plug into an outlet and 99.9% of Americans use it. You’re trying to make a direct replacement of one electrical energy with the same electrical energy just with a different, cleaner backstory. What a challenge! There is no differentiation possible; in fact, any differentiation would be a bad thing because people could not be more used to the awesome simplicity of the electrical outlet.

So what do you do? Well: RE < C. It becomes a cost game. That’s interesting because renewable energy technologies have improved substantially through the years. Some say that the cost of wind power from 1980 to 1990 dropped by 80 percent. It certainly fell from Palmer Putnam’s turbine or Marcellus Jacobs turbines before that. But here’s the problem: those cost drops have been outpaced by fossil fuel efficiency increases. In RE < C, the C hasn’t stayed constant. In fact, despite the inefficiencies and waste that remains, the C-folks have done a remarkable job increasing the efficiency of their means of converting C into KWh.

One historian shows that the maximum power output of a steam turbine skyrocketing from 4 kilowatts in 1885 to 5000 kilowatts in 1910. Try keeping pace with a 1000-fold increase in the total power availability. While wind and solar could do it now, they sure as hell couldn’t do it then. Meanwhile, the amount of steam consumption (directly related to the amount of coal you needed to burn) per kilowatt hour dropped from 200 to 13.2 pounds.

As laid out in a 1918 letter to the New York Times, check out the following numbers for the pounds of coal it was necessary to burn to get one horsepower (1 horsepower is about 3/4 of a kilowatt):

Twenty years ago [1898] a consumption of ten pounds of coal per horse power was not considered excessive; to-day the average will be between five and six pounds, and in the best plants about two and one-half pounds. It is anticipated that… [new] engines are capable of producing one horse power for each pound of coal burned.

In 1933, an economist estimated that on average, throughout the world, 4 pounds of coal were necessary to generate one horsepower-hour of work. (He used that to compute the daily work output of the world per day, which is kind of awesome, so I reproduced that chart to the right.)

Nowadays, a pound of coal produces about a kilowatt-hour of electricity, about 1.35 horsepower-hours. In 1885,  when fossil fuel power plants took dozens of pounds of coal to make a few horsepower, all kinds of people were working on solar and wind machines — because they were damn near competitive with the wonky early steam turbines and engines. But improvements in the thermal efficiency of steam plants drove down the cost of power below what the working renewable technologies of the day could compete with. By deriving more power from the same amount of fuel, fossil fuel electricity generators could offset almost any increase in the cost of fossil fuel, keeping their technology cheaper than renewable alternatives.

A hundred years later, though, that type of efficiency increase had leveled off. As a Power Engineering article stated back in 2002, “In the 20th century, steam turbines became the most powerful electric power generators available, accounting for more than 50 percent of the world’s installed power generation capacity. However, many people, even some power engineering professionals, had come to view steam turbines as a mature technology that would not experience any remarkable achievements in the near future. Indeed, by the late 1980s, the thermal efficiency of new steam turbines had practically stabilized.”

The same article, however, goes on to note that turbine efficiencies might be increasing again because of “new heat-resistant high-chromium-percentage ferritic-class steels” and better “steam path design.” Still, these gains seem likely to be incremental — and certainly nothing like the massive drops in the cost of wind and solar power.

But Vaclav Smil, one of the world’s primary energy analysts, has a nice chart in his Energy at the Crossroads, showing that despite the hopes of industry analyst types, the average efficiency of US generation, after huge increases from 1900-1960, has been stagnant since the early 1960s. He also points out that the average energy content of coal pulled out of the ground is dropping because we’re using lower-quality seams.

Which raises the question, and I don’t have answer to this yet: when was the exact moment when renewable energy started getting cheaper faster than traditional sources were getting cheaper on a kilowatt-hour basis?

The likeliest place to look, it would seem, would be during the 70s energy crisis when coal prices skyrocketed, as seen in the chart below, which the Energy Information Administration adjusted for inflation. My guess is, too, that the rising price led to some increases in efficiency in the burning of coal. The price came back down, so that in 1997, you see the cost of coal right back down where it was pre-70s. This is another tough thing about the RE < C. There are two steps in making energy from fossil fuel, extraction and production. The fuel cost goes up and down, even if RE can get out ahead for a while, C can suddenly plummet. The volatility of the entrenched power production methods makes it really difficult for investors who can suddenly find themselves wiped out. It takes a certain kind of risk-loving investor, a certain kind of disruptive capitalist to make that kind of investment. And I’m not sure they existed until the last 5 or 10 years, post-tech boom.

Anyway, I’m going to be looking for this type of information over the next week or so, mining my burgeoning green tech library. My completely uneducated guess is that 2005 might have been the year when RE costs started falling fast enough to jumpstart investment in that, as opposed to continuing to push down the price of C, as the logic of power pushed money towards the technologies most likely to generate cheaper energy.

 

Our Plundered Planet and Ecoapocaltyptophilia

Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.

Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades.  The third chapter of his book is titled, “The New Geologic Force: Man,” and it focuses on the truly global reach of humankind. As the inside flap puts it, “This book demonstrates brilliantly and unsparingly that we are following a course which one day may render our good earth as dead as the moon.”

Note that in the wake of the horror and suffering of World War II, Osborn raises the possibility humans could actually kill of all life on the planet, not just themselves. We could antiterraform the planet.

The impulse to write this book came towards the end of the Second World War. It seemed to me, during those days, that mankind was involved in two major conflicts — not only in the one that was in every headline, on every radio, in the minds, in the hearts and in the sufferings of people the world over… This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.

Osborn, writing at the very beginning of the post-WWII revolution in energy and materials use, began to glimpse the global — not just local or regional — impact that humans had begun to have on the Earth.

“…now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere. Never before in man’s history has this been the case,” he writes.

And that, unlike local agriculture, which did transform the globe a bit at at time, modern systems of commerce and distribution linked each and every plot of land and person.

“Further, due to the existence today of world-wide systems of commerce, combined with new and so-called higher standards of living, all nations are dependent upon others in varying degrees for products, materials or goods that have become a necessary part of everyday living for most of hte people on the face of the earth.”

 

World Oil Price Chronology – 1970-2007

Want to find interesting green tech innovations? Just look for periods with high positive acceleration.

Source: Energy Information Administration

 

Foreshadowing Google: Coal, Advertising, and the Cost Per Inquiry

“ENGINEERS have found that 43 percent of the coal used by the average industrial plant fails to produce power,” begins this advertisement for advertising, which compares the trials of engineers looking for efficiency with the tribulations of ad men trying to prove their worth.

“In advertising, as in fuel,” we read, “the big problem is to get maximum results at the lowest cost.”

The advertising copy writer, placing himself in the mocassins of the average businessman, reasoning, “Is every dollar I spend for advertising bringing full returns in sales or good will?”

Of course not, he answers himself, but not before placing advertising in the realm of economic prime movers. “Like coal, advertising is a basic industrial force that always has at least partial value — no matter how wastefully it is used.”

The following case study is presented. A certain manufacturer was running an advertising campaign with a coupon attached. Through this data collection method, they found that for every set of feet in the door, it cost them $3.50. BUT, through the genius of the J. Walter Thompson Company, the Cost Per Inquiry dropped all the way to $0.03.

This is a brilliant advertisement, I think, for an industry that was/is obviously considered kind of fluffy. Attaching metrics like Cost Per Inquiry, a Google-special, makes the functioning of consumer desire prodded by words and images sound like simple engineering. Not alchemy but science.

Google talks algorithms, J. Walter Thompson talks coal efficiency, but really it’s the same idea: clothing your business in the language of a dominant and respected industry.

Image: Library of Congress, American Memory: Advertising collection

 

The Amnesiac Civilization and Energy

I picked up Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads yesterday at Moe’s in Berkeley. A historian of technology at the University of Calgary, he points out that our large-scale “prime movers” were created before 1920. Turbines and internal combustion engines do almost all human work — and that gives them incredible social and technical inertia. Here’s a taste of his outlook from a presentation (pdf) he gave a couple years ago:

Appraisals of long-term prospects of technical and economic developments have become increasingly devoid of appropriate historical perspectives. But this blindness of progressively more amnesic civilization will not force a different outcome: future technical developments will not conform to simplistic notions of accelerated development and exponentially declining costs of new conversions. Recent costs of many renewable techniques have been actually increasing (Makower, Pernick and Wilder 2006). PV silicon prices have more than doubled, cost of structural steel, aluminum and plastics for wind turbines has been rising as has been the cost ethanol fermentation from corn because all of these techniques depend on large inputs of more costly fossil energies.

Image: The Georgetown Steam Plant, completed in 1917. Library of Congress: Built in America collection. “The Georgetown Steam Plant is an early reinforced concrete structure housing America’s last operable examples of the ‘first generation’ of large scale, vertical steam turbine electric generators. The structure contains sixteen, 500 horsepower stirling boilers which supply steam to two vertical turbines. The smaller 1906 unit generates 3000 kilowatts and a larger 1907 unit generates 8000 kilowatts. In 1917 Seattle Electric installed a 10000 kilowatt horizontal turbine generator unit manufactured by the General Electric Company. The Georgetown Steam Plant was used primarily as a standby and peaking facility. It provided alternating current for general use and direct current for the Seattle streetcar system. It is the last operative example of vertical curtis turbines in the United States.”

 

Coal: Solidified Sunbeams (Planted for Humanity)

Here we have one of the most poetic descriptions of coal that you’re likely to see. It’s from a National Geographic article written in the throes of World War I and titled, “Coal—Ally of American Industry.” The picture is captioned: Beneath These Bare Rocks Lie the Solidified Sunbeams Stored by Provident Nature for Resourceful Man. Solidified Sunbeams!  In the hands of this able chronicler and evangelist of/for coal, he — like the science he loves — transforms coal into much more:

Under [Man's] touch coal becomes comfort in the home or death at the battle front; yields a corrosive acid that burns lie fire or a sweetness that makes sugar seem insipid; gives off a gas that smells like a bad egg, but is as harmless as chicken; is transformed into colors that make the rainbow envious of their brightness and variety, and into explosives the thunderbolt jealous of their power.

Dang! No wonder we use so much of it. How many other substances do you know that can make both rainbows and thunderbolts jealous? Tell you what, potassium chloride isn’t gonna do that for you.

And indeed William Joseph Showalter puts his finger right on the problem with fossil fuels: they are just too damn useful. They are energy dense — so you can do a lot of work with them – and relatively abundant — so you don’t have to pay a lot for them. Put it together and you have enormous productive power at relatively low cost.

The problem is that we have run out before. First it’s happened locally, like Pennsylvania basically running out of coal. Then it’s happened nationally, like American oil peaking in 1970. Globally, we’ve never really run out of the major fossil fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — but it’s looking increasingly likely that we will and not in a long, long time, but soon.

Clearly, my reading — and reporting from the world’s biggest geology conference — have me thinking about the previous energy busts in history. David Rutledge, a Caltech professor ranging outside his field, came up with a new way to calculate the world’s reserves of a given resource. The shocking conclusion of his research is that we might actually pull — and burn — a lot less coal out of the ground than we previously thought. That has all kinds of implications for global warming, climate change policy, the future of the planet, the necessity of creating alternative technologies, etc. You can check out my story for Wired Science, if you want to here more about that stuff.

More importantly for my book is that he developed his method based on the history of previous energy production. He went back and looked at previous cases of resource exhaustion – whale oil, British coal, American oil (which peaked in 1970, if you hadn’t heard) — and fit curves to the data, looking for the “ultimate” amount that would ever be produced of the given resource. It turns out that using this model, which admittedly is pretty speculative, you could have predicted these previous peaks just based on how much coal or whale oil was coming out of the ground or oceans. He’s got a great set of slides that detail his methodology and provide a brief tutorial of the great busts of energy history (ppt).

It just so happened that I also began reading Petrolia, by Brian Black, which details the very first oil boom (and bust). From 1859 to 1873, the Allegheny mountains of Pennsylvania were the number 1 oil producing region in the world. Mostly because they had the petroleum market to themselves there at the beginning. What they were actually competing against was whale oil, increasingly scarce as whalers were forced to search more and more ocean to kill and eviscerate the same amount of whale, and various animal lards (I know: gross). By 1850, there was an $8 million whale oil market and a bustling trade in the stuff. Whalers would go out for three to five years to bring back a few thousand gallons of burnable oil.

In this early section of the book, Black presents some excellent evidence that earlier oil distribution systems and some lamp design innovations allowed for the rapid introduction of petroleum into the American economy. Because all these companies were playing in the same space: the light market. Something to burn to get out of the dark.  Illumination!

“Creating affordable lighting possessed the divine potential of increasing time in the day,” we read.

There is something godly about transforming geological history into human time, to taking these “solidifed sunbeams” that were “planted for humanity by a bounteous Providence in the Carboniferous Age” and turning them into the extension of human time, a few more hours allotted to each of millions of individuals.

The scale and size of the industry that arose seems totally out of step with the simple convenience that light provided.

To see them gathered at a rate of more than two million tons a day, transported hundreds of miles, and then, under the alchemy of science, transmuted into a thousand forms—heat for the fireside, light for the darkness, motion for the railroad train, power for the factory, fertility for the soil—is an illuminating lesson, showing how man, the creature of Nature, through science makes her wonderful forces his servants.

And then you run out. The year before Showalter wrote — though he probably didn’t know this — Pennsylvania anthracite coal hit its peak and has been declining ever since.

Images: National Geographic.

 

The Beasts of the Oil Burden

When the first real oil man, Edwin Drake made the first oil strike, and the stuff came gushing out of the ground, Black tells us that Vanity Fair ran a cartoon featuring gussied up whales at a gala celebration of the first oil well. We read: “As they danced and frolicked in celebration of the technological progress that had freed them, the whales knew the time had passed when the world’s need for illumination lay on their flukes. A good time had come at last.”

But Black takes us from the biological beast straight to the geological beast of the earth, which apparently does not give up her goods as easily as you might think. A contemporary observer of the world’s first well writes that “the earth seems to bleed like a mad ox, wrathfully and violently.”

Before 1859, people in crude-producing regions were familiar with oil, knew it quite well, in fact, as a kind of docile brown scum that sat atop streams. Native Americans soaked it up and used it for body decoration. Civil War soldiers bathed their aching bones in it. It was a cordial, an elixir — snake oil, perhaps, but no more fearsome than your average dose of resveratrol or gingko.

The drill transformed that oil, the kind that bubbled up,  into the kind that roared. The editor of the local rag, again:

We have no language at our command by which to convey to the minds of our readers any adequate idea of the agitated state at the time we saw [the well]. The gas from below was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with noise that was terrifying…When the gas subsided for a few seconds, the oil rushed back down the pipe with a hollow, gurgling sound, so much resembling the struggle and suffocating breathings of a dying man, as to make one feel as though the earth were a huge giant seized with the pains of death and in its spasmodic efforts to retain a hold on life was throwing all nature into convulsion.

That’s quite a lot of language for an editor with no words. It’s like a bad Shakespearean death scene with Pennsylvania land as the lead. Early Gaia thinking.

Image: LOC, American Memory Collection, part of Westward by Sea: A Maritime Perspective on American Expansion, 1820-1890

 

Petrolia: the landscape of america’s first oil boom

That’s the title of Brian Black’s 2000 book about the rise and fall of Pennsylvania’s oil country, which arrived on my doorstep today. It is part of a growing literature about previous energy crises and the human responses to them. This case is of particular interest because the exhaustion of PA’s oil fields gave early 20th thinkers the idea, the possibility that oil was a limited resource. The bare fact of dry wells sparked a wide range of alt energy ideas right about the time that cars were coming into wider usage. In fact, this was really a battle for which fuel would become the norm and which the alt. We know what won but the teams are fascinating and unexpected. Henry Ford, for example, was an early fan of biofuels. And the wonderfully-titled Horseless Age magazine, which I think of as the Wired of its day, looked at all kinds of locomotive possibilities.

I will be exploring Petrolia over the next few weeks, but I warn you that updates over the next few days could be slow. I’m at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting learning about the latest in Earth science. You can keep score at home by visiting Wired Science.