Re: SC11

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/3/30/174434/223

The private auto, the jet aircraft, and the planing heavy vessel are the ultimate worst case for fuelling, because they require high energy density (high burn rate), which is the costliest thing to achieve in a fuel. They work only by releasing very large amounts of energy very quickly and keeping up this high burn rate for extended periods. Thus they require the most grotesque conversion factors from raw (feedstock) calories in to calories out. [and the reason they do this is not only because of the physical inefficiencies of internal combustion and excessive carcass weight, but because we insist on using them for extreme time compression, i.e. extremely high speeds.]

We have traditionally got this staggering conversion factor by looting geological/evolutionary time, i.e. spending, in a scant century or two, the fossil wealth "wound up" out of biotic processes plus sunlight (heat) plus pressure plus geothermal heat plus aeons of time.

If we now try to produce this same energy density or burn rate using immediate biotic sources, we run into a little problem -- a time travel problem as it were: a normal growing season doesn't deposit that much energy in a vegetable crop. Our desired burn rate is grotesquely disproportionate to the growth rate of biotic sources, whether vegetable or animal -- you couldn't drive around carrying the amount of raw feedstock needed to produce the calories to keep the vehicle moving. So we have to invest a lot of heat/pressure (i.e. energy) to provide even a feeble approximation of the time compression we want. In other words, burn a lot of coal (or something else fairly dense) to make ethanol; and burn a lot of fossil fuel in artificial soil enrichments and fossil-powered factory farm equipment to force a higher-than-natural yield rate, to wrench as many calories per acre as we can from depleted soil. (Again trying to optimise density, not overall EROEI).

Heinberg once wrote in a whimsical "letter from the future" (in which he affected to look back from a life after the oil peak, and write to his real contemporaries today, me and you):
At first, most people thought the shortages could be solved with "technology." However, in retrospect that's quite ludicrous. After all, their modern gadgetry had been invented to use a temporary abundance of energy. It didn't produce energy. [...] With the exhaustion of fossil fuels, no technology could have maintained the way of life that people had gotten used to. But it took quite a while for many to realize that. Their pathetic faith in technology turned out to be almost religious in character, as though their gadgets were votive objects connecting them with an invisible but omnipotent god capable of overturning the laws of thermodynamics. [boldface mine]

And here's the rub. We don't produce energy. (Nor can we "produce" time.) There are only three processes that produce energy: sunlight striking the surface of the planet, the thermal activity of the molten core, and the instability of certain isotopes found in the crust [and many an astrophysicist would scoff at this and say that these things no more produce energy than a Duracell battery -- they merely release, over time, the tremendous initial energy of the Big Bang, the original Wound Up Spring].

What we do is harvest or concentrate energy -- what all life processes do, in fact.

We (humans) have a persistent and aggravated history of overharvesting stored energy, that is, consuming biotic energy resources at a rate that exceeds their regeneration or replacement rate -- whether this be for immediate alimentary needs or for more sophisticated applications like cooking, heating, clothing, etc. We have a history of looting the stored biotic wealth of topsoil, for example (formed by millennia of forestation) in an extractive mode so as to reap exaggerated harvests from it for a limited time -- depleting it so severely that after the boom period is over, our return on labour invested diminishes rapidly and we have to fall back through a (usually pretty quick) series of devolving crops and practises. This fallback and devolution is touched on by Jerome in the article; a frantic spiral downwards from one to another apparently cheaper (slower, less dense) substitute until either equilibrium is restored, or desertification and die-off or migration result.