Energy: A Human History

Energy: A Human History

by Richard Rhodes

Main Points:

Primary Energy Substitution
by Cesare Marchetti, 1996

• Interesting to Note: Remarkable regularities from one major source of electricity to another
• Vienna Chart in 1970 (Applied Systems Analysis) - looked at the fraction of world energy for various world energy sources starting in 1850. Wood was in sharp decline in late 1800's, Coal was rising and reached its peak around 1930/1940, natural gas and nuclear came earlier. Oil did too. Because it takes so long to transition from 1% to 50% of the world energy supply, any new supply at the turn of the millennium it will not get too far.
• Energy as Life Graph: Life Expectancy at birth vs. Per Capita GNP where the egalitarian life expectancy of 70 years can be achieved if you have a per capita GNP of $4800. GNP graph has countries that has different energy intensities, and efficiency is very important.
• Rise in Temperature of the last 150 years: follows a sigmoidal curve
• Elizabethan England and Jacobian England

• Wood: Running out of firewood because as they cut down trees farther from London it got more expensive to wagon the wood to London. Firewood was too expensive for common people to afford, but their infrastructure was not setup for anything other than firewood. Only a raised stove platform, no chimneys. 
• Coal: had to switch and it was not compatible with their setup (very sulfurous material from Newcastle). Preachers concluded that it was the devil's excrement since it smelled funny and came from deep underground. 10 years later they discovered great quantities of natural gas, but because NG has more energy/volume than coal they had to retrofit their furnaces and stoves with the new product. The message of the Marchetti graph is that it takes historically 100 years to move from 1% to 50% of the world's energy supply. Once you start digging coal, you need to dig deeper. The deepest mines went down 800 feet below ground and if you go down too far, you intersect the water table and it floods the coal mine. 
• Steam: Water could not be moved out of the coal mines and horses were ineffective, so this led to the French invention of the pressure cooker, which led to the invention of the steam engine. Trevithicks created the portable steam engine and they realized if they could move coal across country, then you could move people too- the first railroads. People were convinced that if you went faster than a horse could run, you might not be able to breathe and might die. In the United States, steam engines went on steamboats. John James Audubon went exploring into the upper Midwest by taking a steamboat up the Mississippi/ Missouri River.
• Light
• Until the middle of the 19th century, most lighting was candlelight. Most peasant folk went to sleep when it was dark and stayed in bed until the sun went up. Typically it was vegetable oil or rushlight (large reeds growing by streams and peel down the exterior coating, you have a dry pith that can be soaked in bacon grease to coalesce). Spermaceti wax from whales could be used as candle wax.  Most common form of light was "burning fluid" from turpentine (like maple sap) and alcohol. 
• 1859- Drake's Well in Pennsylvania helped save the lighting industry- kerosene. Petroleum was used for lighting and lubrication of heavy industrial machinery. 
• 1880- Edison's lamp - his direct current DC program was local, and couldn't go too far. If you wanted to send electricity from Wall Street to 59th street in New York you would need copper wire the size of a man's leg. 
• The Automobile- Henry Ford's early cars like the Quadricycle rolled out in 1896. A competition between steamers (needed 15-20 mins to heat up), electric cars, and gasoline powered cars.  The solution for the Stanley Steamer car (most popular car in 1900) was to add a pilot light to keep the water hot in your steamer car. In 1914 they relied on the fact that rural areas kept troughs around for horses to drink from and an outbreak of aphid mouth disease and New England banned these troughs. Steamers no longer had access to water on the side of the road. 
• Model T- Ford had a flex fluid switch for the car to burn kerosene or alcohol. He encouraged the farmers to make grain alcohol from crops to meet this need. 
• Kettering from General Motors decided that he needed to increase the octane rating of automobiles, so he used tetryl-ethyl lead. And it wasn't until the use of the catalytic converter that was destroyed by lead, that they removed lead from the fuel.
• Little Big Inch pipelines- the very first way that natural gas was moved across the United States and has to do with German submarines. 
• Nuclear
• First nuclear reactor (CP-1) was built at the University of Chicago in the winter of 1942. 
• Bikini Baker on July 25, 1946 was one of the first large scale nuclear bomb tests
• Shippingport, PA was the first industrial scale commercial nuclear power reactor in 1957 which Hyman Rickover helped build. Pittsburgh wanted a new green source of power in their city like nuclear power. 
• First permanent nuclear waste disposal site on Finland's Olkiluoto Island - this is a reversible site where slugs of fuel can be encased in various materials below a bedrock of granite.
• Wind
• James Blythe's windmill in Scotland and Ohioan Charles Brush used lead acid batteries in his basement to store the power from these windmills.
• Modern wind turbine technology is now up to 550 feet tall
• Competition between Primary Energy supplies
• Instead of having primary energy supplies decline over time, they all seemed to plateau. This occurred and the relative fractions froze after the Arab Oil Embargo. 
• Today's Dilemma: we not only have to decarbonize the world's energy supply that is struggling with new nationalism, while the third world is clamoring for the levels of energy availability that the United States has enjoyed. 

As battery storage technology increases, how do you think this will impact renewables vs. nuclear?

• Rhodes says: Electric cars at the turn of the century got 30 miles on their batteries. Batteries are not that much better. Why not nuclear? Why do we want to exclude a major source of baseload electricity?  No energy source is free from waste. We get so much waste from coal that it is the major source of radioactivity on the population. 

Judging by your experience seeing the history of energy, when did humanity transition from seeing that energy is endless to humanity seeing energy is finite?

• Each of these energy sources reached a point where the price was too high to continue using. The transition came about after the Second World War. The environmental movement's origins were rooted in interesting beginnings. In the 1960's there was a great flush of discussion about overpopulation- a Malthusian assumption that increased populations in India and China would increase geometrically and they would starve. In Paul Ehrlich's book "The Population Bomb" he proposes that we don't help those countries and we can somehow have a smaller, safer world. What he missed was the agricultural revolution. Norman Borlog improved the quality of the crops and could grow more on the same plot of land. Now people expect that the population explosion to 10 billion by 2100 will remain steady state as the United Nations predicts. Alvin Weinberg saw nuclear power as the solution to the population problem and could counter the weight of the increasing population. 

Read David Baker's review of the book (and fair criticisms) in the SF Chronicle!

Listen to Richard Rhodes' lecture hosted by Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy!

For an overview of the book, read Professor O'Sullivan's New York Times review of the book!

Read about the Secret History of Lead by The Nation's Jamie Kitman!