“It’s a little known law of thermodynamics: the conservation of optimism – there’s only so much to go around.” – Andromeda
Okay, zero Kelvin is absolute zero. Thus, Kelvin is really the coolest name ever.
Economics is often called the dismal science. I’m sure that’s because economists look in a mirror, and are upset to see that the supply of economists is greatly in excess of the demand for them as dating partners. Thus, economists have their Saturday night open for Hot Pockets®, box wine and the Internet. See? Dismal. But if economics is dismal, thermodynamics will make you want to cut your wrists. Yeah. It’s worse than Hot Pockets™.
We know economics is defined as lying about the economy. But I hear you asking: “What the heck is thermodynamics and why are you ruining a perfectly good Wednesday morning by bringing this up?”
Let me explain.
Much like a three year old with a metal fork and an outlet, thermodynamics is the study of how energy flows. The father of thermodynamics was a Scot named William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin if you’re nasty. Proving once again that the British Empire was awesome for smart people, Lord Kelvin got rich and famous by being a total stud at physics and engineering. He even had a yacht that he tooled around the Mediterranean on and held massive seagoing parties – sort of like Mark Cuban, but smart and with a Scottish accent. Think Bill Gates with an artificial personality implant. Lord Kelvin even had unit of temperature, the kelvin, named after him. Top that, Elon Musk.
Lord Kelvin was the first to understand the fundamental and disturbing implications of the physics he was discovering. Energy moves from a highly organized state to a poorly organized state. A piece of firewood or a gallon of gas or a PEZ® is concentrated energy. Once it is combusted and the energy extracted, what’s left becomes diffuse, the molecules mostly turned into CO2 and H20 that are mixed into the rest of the atmosphere. You can never form that firewood or gasoline or PEZ© again – it’s a one way trip.
This is significant. Kelvin discovered that the Universe as a whole is like a pizza after delivery: it moves from a hot, high energy state on Saturday night towards a chaotic, cold, low energy state on Sunday morning.
But wait, what about oil the gasoline was made from? Doesn’t the formation of oil violate this? It went from icky goo and dinosaur bones into energy dense crude oil, right? That’s energy from nothing!
No.
Every drop of oil, every piece of firewood, and all the sweet PEZ© on this planet came from the input of thermonuclear energy – the Sun. Every time you use a gallon of gasoline in your car or a cubic foot of natural gas in your home heater, you’re burning millions of years of concentrated sunlight, which really ought to be a lyric in a pop song. Our Earth isn’t a closed system – it is bathed in the life-giving thermonuclear radiation every day from the Sun.
Tans are so sexy when I put it that way.
Outside of suntans for girls wearing bikinis, sunlight is a very weak energy source. It took millions of years to make your gasoline. Gasoline burns in a car engine at 500°F, and gallon of gasoline can move a modern car for 40 or 50 miles. It would take (at minimum, under the best conditions) a one square yard solar panel 60 days to produce the equivalent amount of energy as one gallon of gasoline. Add in storage losses and real weather conditions? It might take a year. Solar energy is weak and diffuse or else bikini girls would turn into piles of ash after a day lounging in the Sun. Gasoline is awesome and full of energy and great for your skin. I soak my hands in it while I drive, you know, for the ladies.
Okay, this is a picture of a really hot girl.
I thought you mentioned economists?
Oh, yeah. People confuse economic viability with thermodynamic viability. In economics, the idea is that you can’t continually produce something that’s worthless, unless you’re the government. If you’re the government, producing worthless things is your whole plan. But any business that did this would be bankrupt faster than a whimsical elf buying reefer. Economists have even developed a worse idea than that: Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs). Modern Monetary Theory is the equivalent of the government burning your country’s factories for lighting so you can make more fidget spinners at night, so of course certain people in Congress love Modern Monetary Theory. It’s making infinite money from nothing!
Even without dim Congressmen, economics still fails when it comes to energy, because economics neglects the physics of energy. An economist would say that if oil were $200 a barrel, why, there wouldn’t be a problem because while we’re running out of barrels of oil we can make at $10, there are LOTS of barrels of oil that we can pump if oil costs $200.
Sure. If only everything about oil was measured in the price of a barrel of oil. What economists miss is that producing energy takes energy. In 1920, each barrel of oil produced between 20 and 50 barrels of oil. We found and used the easiest oil first – we didn’t start off drilling in three miles of ocean. No. We went to Texas where oil was 10’ underground and you could pull it out in seemingly limitless quantities because it would jump into your truck like an obedient basset hound if you left the doors open. We didn’t frack horizontal wells with thousands of pounds of pressure and special chemicals. Why would we? In Pennsylvania and California it was seeping into the rivers. Natural gas? What a nuisance. Burn it at the well to get rid of it. They originally tried to smoke the natural gas in California, but they couldn’t figure out how to get it in a bong.
Fracking has been one of the bright spots in oil production – millions of barrels of fracked oil are produced daily in the United States, so it’s good? Well, maybe not. Each barrel of oil invested in fracking produces, at most, five barrels of oil.
Five to one, that’s awesome, right?
Well, no. That fracked oil is from the best portions of the shale. Just like we didn’t start off drilling in the frozen tundra of the Arctic Circle in 1850, we didn’t start off with the hardest fracked oil. It won’t get too much better, and if recovery technology improves, maybe we can stay the same. Rune Likvern was the first (that I can find) to use the analogy of the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland as applied to the energy problems we face (LINK).
“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
I’ll note that Likvern was quite wrong in that he felt the Bakken wouldn’t produce more than about 0.7 million barrels per day. It’s producing in excess of 1.2 million barrels a day now, and I don’t doubt that it will produce even more. Pipelines from the area clearly lower the cost of energy production, so the Bakken will continue to produce, at least for now.
But at least you can make cool jet noises and pretend, right?
Our civilization is built on energy, and the more energy it takes to produce energy, the more of our economy that will be devoted to it, we’ll be like the Red Queen and Alice, running faster and faster just to keep in place. Sooner or later you end up with the absurd situation where everybody has to be working to get the energy, all the time, and then who would give out free samples of aerosol “cheeze” at Costco™? Don’t kid yourself – energy is that important to the society we currently have structured. We don’t get fresh fruit in winter, daily commuting to the ‘burbs, climbing walls at colleges, pensions, Brady Bunch© re-runs, and all that health care without consuming a LOT of energy.
“But John,” you say, “certainly biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel and hemp-powered hippy busses will save us.”
It looks like (according to a lot of data) that corn ethanol and biodiesel actually consume more energy to make and transport than they provide. These fuels have a return of less than one. Why on Earth would we do that? It’s like eating your own foot because you’re looking for a snack, which is actually a quote by The Mrs. when I was explaining this topic in the hot tub. Well, farmers vote. And why would The Mrs. suggest that we start with a foot? I bet feet are all stringy, and not nearly as good as spleen.
If ethanol is so bad for the economy why would people make it, I mean, besides for drinking? Because it’s mandated to use a certain quantity of ethanol each year in gasoline because farmers who vote like to sell corn. That’s it. And if it’s mandated, you can make a profit at it, even as you waste energy that could be used to make PEZ® instead.
Thermodynamics is a tough master – you can’t win, and you can’t even break even. But at least there are Hot Pockets© and box wine . . . .
This is the first post in an occasional series about energy.
I am not sure about your Rankine of Lord Kelvin as the VERY coolest name.
The laws of Thermodynamics were once summarized as “You cannot win.”, “You cannot break even.”, “You have to play the game.”
Well, if we have to argue for absolutes . . . .
The laws of thermodynamics for normal people.
1. You can’t pour water into or out of a sealed container.
2. Everything always becomes more and more average.
3. The less things are different, the more average they are.
Unstated law – Things only make a difference when they are different. Identical things are very boring.
I like those! But there needs to be a note that you are always, always going to lose. And one that says, “have a nice day!”
I propose a new unit of measurement named after Musk. The number of millions of dollars conned out of idiots by a businessman selling science fiction fantasies. “Before being shut down, the factory was rated at 23 Musk’s worth of Tesla’s”
Heh heh, and he can afford his own space ship. Right?
Dude!
What happened to the carburetor that cold make all our cars run forever on water. Like the car companies in Detroit bought to keep the oil companies alive. And dude, who is hiding the nuclear fusion technology….
Like we had it all solved in the 70’s before the MAN screwed us buy stashing all the good stuff
I tried that “car running on water” but my insurance company didn’t like it. They said that they didn’t cover it when I hit an animal – okay, it was a fish, but still.