The Four Pillars of Civilisation. By David Archibald.
The people on Australia’s east coast have volunteered to conduct a big experiment. The experiment is to close the Liddell power station in NSW and see what happens. Liddell’s operator, AGL, has applied to the NSW Government to blow up the power station rather than leave it in a form that can be restarted. This is the military equivalent of burning your bridges behind you — the expedition succeeds or you die. The grid operator on the east coast, Australian Energy Market Operator, is likely to gain valuable experience in cold starting a grid with violently fluctuating power inputs.
The restart process may take weeks at a time. … As petrol stations run on power from the grid, to obtain fuel you might have to take your generator down to the station and offer to power them while you are there. That presupposes you have a generator.
Hope you got one of these.
The closure of Liddell has coincided with the release of the public version of the Defence Strategic Review, which the Federal Government received on 14th February. As with the closure of Liddell, Australian governments of both persuasions spent the last 20 years effectively blowing up most of Australia’s refining capacity. When China attacks Taiwan, we will be in the invidious position of importing most of our petrol, diesel and jet fuel from the war zone. …
Wind yes, rooftop solar no:
The energy return on energy invested (EROEI) for wind is near 20 times, which is half-reasonable. This means that a wind farm will produce an amount of energy that is 20 times the energy it took to make it…. The problem with wind is that it needs … pumped storage of water up into dams, which doubles the capital cost and halves the EROEI to a level which will allow civilisation to tread water, at best. There is also a 20% to 30% power loss on the round trip through the storage dam. …
Solar has an EROEI of six, which is out of the question. It is also just once-through to the tip. It is not renewable if the major component, the photovoltaic panels, is not recyclable. …
Liquid fuels are just too reliable, convenient, and energy-dense to do without:
When the fossils fuels do run out, and they will run out, our energy system may be plutonium breeder reactors powering electric vehicles. There will be segments of the economy which will be hard to electrify, such as tractors in agriculture and long distance haulage.
So what will be the cost of converting the electric power produced by nuclear reactors to diesel? …
After coal runs out, it’s down to wood:
What is coming is similar to what happened to England in the 19th century. Coal gasification was so useful in making a lighting and heating fuel that just about every town over 3,000 people had a gasifier. Coal liquefaction will start with brown coal deposits with the highest hydrogen content. Surat Basin coals are particularly suitable for the Bergius process.
When the coal runs out, production will shift to areas with enough rainfall to support fast-growing eucalypt species, and also cities. For example, Perth produces annually 360,000 tonnes of organic garden waste and 203,000 tonnes of paper waste. This is enough feedstock for 2,500 barrels per day of diesel, which would fuel 72,000 cars each doing 20,000 km per annum. …
To supply Australia’s requirement of one million barrels per day would require close to 100,000 square kilometers of plantation forests — about 1.3% of Australia’s land area. …
EVs? Not yet, maybe never:
As to whether or not petrol and diesel vehicles will be replaced by electric vehicles, the International Energy Agency has a website which allows you to compare operating costs at different petrol and power prices. The operating costs are much the same. The capital cost of an electric vehicle is twice the price of a petrol or diesel one.
A telling indicator is that some 70% of people who bought an electric vehicle buy a petrol or diesel one as their next purchase. We will run out of oil but there are still plenty of forests left …
Diesel, plastics, cement, and steel:
Diesel is the first pillar of civilisation; the other three are plastics, cement, and steel.
In the world when fossil fuels have run out, plastics will be produced from the carbon and hydrogen in wood. Some four per cent of world oil production goes into making plastics. Assuming the same ratio holds in the post-fossil fuel world, this will be supplied by wood equivalent to four per cent of the wood used in making diesel. So for Australia this will be produced by an extra 4,000 sq km of plantation forest.
[Cement production will require] 2,160 sq km of plantation eucalypts. …
Steel production … will require 15,000 square kilometres of plantation forestry…
The 65 billion tonnes of brown coal in the Yallourn Valley of Victoria would yield 166 billion barrels of diesel on conversion. This is equivalent to 450 years at Australia’s present consumption level. Any fuel shortage that Australia experiences from here will be self-inflicted.
