It's in the density

This book is about density""density of individuals who insist the world is going to face a major fuel crisis (oil will touch $100 tomorrow, maybe even $200) despite all evidence that each time around mankind has found a new fuel, each time far more efficient than the existing one.

And each time around, the fuel has been more dense than the previous one""that is, the new fuel has packed in a lot more energy (per kilogram, per ounce, whatever measure you choose to use), and has therefore, ironically, even resulted in less damage to the earth.

Trace the history of fuel, and it's pretty obvious that the authors, who have written and dealt with such issues extensively in The Bottomless Well, are making a compelling point.

As late as 1910, the US used 27 per cent of all its farmland to grow feed for the horses used for its transportation system""that's twice as much land used today for all the highways, roads, oil pipelines, refineries and oil wells, and therefore a lot less destruction of what could otherwise be forest land.

From forests for timber, and therefore heat, mankind moved to coal, which, pound for pound, stores about twice the heat; oil beats coal by around that margin once again, and one gram of Uranium 235 is worth around four tonnes of coal.

So, while it is true that an SUV looks a lot worse than a bicycle (if only because it needs to move 30 times the driver's weight in steel before it can even get started), it is actually better since crude oil (hydrocarbon) is at least 1,000 times more frugal than grain in terms of the land required to deliver the energy; and also converts petrol to locomotive energy twice as efficiently than human beings convert food to energy (carbohydrates) used for biking. (By the way, if you want to power New York with solar energy the way the Greens recommend, you'd have to cover every square centimetre of the city, twice over, with solar panels to collect the required energy.)

Indeed, it is this analysis of hydrocarbons versus carbohydrates that leads the authors to controversially conclude that, far from being a devourer of carbon molecules, the US is actually a carbon sink, giving back to mother nature more than it is taking away.

Today, the authors state the US' forest cover is between 20 million and 80 million acres higher than it was in 1920, and in recent years, around 3 million acres of trees get replanted each year, which is around a third more than those being cut.

Also, in comparison with the situation 70 years ago, about 40 million acres less of land is being harvested today (each horse required 2 acres of pasture to feed). Instinctively, that's an argument easy to dismiss (especially since the US is seen as the land of waste), but go through the arguments, and they are solid.

Apart from the fact that, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear energy (a fifth of US energy supplies are powered by uranium), mankind has responded with more efficient fuels each time around, the authors show just how wrong conventional estimates of the time before the taps-run-dry have been.

US oil fields were predicted to be able to supply just 30 billion barrels after 1979 but have already provided 67. The Oklahoma fields, assessed at 125 million barrels, have yielded 4.5 billion additional barrels.

More important, from the viewpoint of uses, energy costs just a fraction of the equipment used to either produce or use it""compared to a Maybach that costs several crore rupees, how important could the cost of fuel really be? In recent years, the authors tell us, the US spent $500 billion a year on raw fuel, an amount equal to the spending on capital equipment like new furnaces, generators, and cars to use this fuel.

This, of course, is why energy consumption increases each year despite its costs going up and efficiency levels going up (faster computing, for instance, just eats up power and Mr Dharam Singh, who's the chief minister of Karnataka, would do well to note that according to the authors' calculations, around 13 per cent of all US electric power today is used to power computers and the internet along with their power back-ups and cooling systems). The Pentium level to power used chart in front of me is almost a 45 degree line, and the slope's getting steeper.

Through a complex argument that engineers are better suited to understand and appreciate, the authors also explain just how what is traditionally called waste is actually increased efficiency! The simplest form of the argument, which even I can understand, is that when you create machines that gobble up power, you create the incentives to develop better power.

Then there's the hydrocarbons-versus-carbohydrates argument which postulates that even if a new technology is energy-inefficient (the early engines wasted 95 per cent of thermal energy) it is better than the old alternatives.

And since heat flows from hotter to colder, you need to get one side of an engine very hot (this is where the engineers come in!) to be able to get the energy to spin the compressor, for instance, more efficiently""the heat, needless to say, is dissipated into the atmosphere and more heat needs to be provided to complete the same cycle again.

As for the future, apart from new fuels (through deeper drilling for the same oil, more use of uranium and other radioactive fuels, even finding new ways to unlock the energy in deuterium present in seawater, and god knows what else), energy saving is going to come from (what Al Gore hoped for in his Earth in the Balance in 1992) the complete elimination of the (notoriously inefficient) internal combustion engine""the authors don't see this disappearing, but see a lot more silicon chips replacing parts of the heavy mechanical-hydraulic power train of a car. Of course, as in the past, more fuel efficiency will result in more fuel use. And greater productivity.

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THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
THE TWILIGHT OF FUEL, THE VIRTUE OF WASTE,
AND WHY WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF ENERGY

Peter W Huber and Mark P Mills
Basic Books
Pages: 214