With his book “Reinventing Collapse”, Dmitry Orlov reports to us from a collapse that he has actually experienced with the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s past is our future and Orlov’s book is a time machine to there.

[break]

Back in the mid 1990s, during the darkest time of the Russian economic crisis, the vagaries of my job of university researcher took me several times to Russia. Once, I came out of a train station in Moscow to face a long line of people standing along the wall of the building. Each one had something on sale in his or her hands: a pair of shoes, a shirt, a bottle of vodka, or something like that.

In any town, it is easy to see wretched people; especially rich cities seem to have more than the average share of beggars. But that line in Moscow was something different. These people were not bums coming out of the local skid row. They were ordinary Russians, the kind of people you saw normally taking the subway every morning to go to work; spending their time in front of a computer screen in an office; and, in the evening, back to the subway to go back home to watch TV. And now they had to stand on a line in front of the train station selling an old shirt of theirs. It wasn’t just a question of people having to sell their old shoes; Russia was in shambles: no money, no salaries, empty shops, little food.

At that time, I was completely baffled; what the hell was going on? The Russians themselves couldn’t understand. Mostly, there was some vague talk that all problems could be solved by adopting free market and democracy. That was being tried, but it didn’t seem to help.

What had happened became clear to me only much later, when I understood that, in Russia, I was looking to my own future. It was Douglas Reynolds, American economist, who explained it to me when he came to my university and he gave a talk on the Soviet collapse. The Soviet Union had not collapsed because it lacked democracy or free markets, even though, surely, the bloated bureaucracy and the mad military expenses had helped. It had collapsed because of peak oil. Soviet Oil production had peaked in 1987, together with the crash of oil prices in the world market. Without the revenue coming from oil exports, the Soviet Union simply went bankrupt and disappeared.

Later on, things changed again. Having reduced its military expenses and having cut on bureaucracy, Russia could invest considerable resources in upgrading the old oil fields. With oil production picking up again, the Russian economy started to recover. In Moscow, money came back, first it created an entire new class of super-rich, but eventually it flowed also to the pockets of ordinary people. Restaurants opened, the shops started selling goods again and you wouldn’t see any more lines of people selling old shoes in front of the train station.

Today, the dark years of the Russian economic collapse seem to be almost forgotten. Yet, it is a story that can still teach us something. If the collapse was a consequence of the Soviet peak oil, it was basically unavoidable. Then, it is unavoidable also for the whole world, as the global peak oil is approaching. Right now, in September of 2008, the turmoil that is taking place in the financial markets may be the first signs of the impending global collapse.

Several people have recognized the consequences of peak oil and have tried to imagine the future worldwide collapse. Among many others, Howard Kunstler has told us of the long emergency; Jay Hanson saw the global “dieoff” and Richard Duncan gave us the “Olduvai scenario”, that is the return to stone age. But none of those who are talking about collapse have actually lived through a real one. Except one: Dmitry Orlov. Born and raised in Russia, Orlov reports to us in his book “Reinventing Collapse” his view of someone who has really been there, as opposed to that of someone who has just heard of it.

The basic thesis of “Reinventing Collapse” is that the Soviet Union and the United States are similar organizations that are following identical paths, although shifted in time of a few decades. Sure, there were many obvious differences in the way things were managed in the two superpowers. But the bottom line was that they were two empires whose power was based on mineral resources – mainly crude oil. With the local peak oil in 1987, the Soviet Union had to close shop and disappear. The US saw its national peak oil in 1970, but managed to keep running by taking control of the Middle Eastern oil. However, that was just postponing the unavoidable. The destinies of the two countries are the same and now it is time for the US to experience collapse.

The book by Orlov is impressive in its details and its deep insight. I found it completely convincing on the basis of my own experience in Russia and Ukraine. The book is like a time machine, with Orlov coming back from the future and telling you all the details of it; including what you are going to eat, how you are going to take a shower, how you’ll find to find shelter and how to travel. That is, of course, if you’ll be able to do that; all these things are not at all granted during a collapse. But Orlov gives you plenty of useful tips on how to survive and even be – moderately – happy. Look at what is around you and ask yourself, “will it survive the collapse?” If it won’t; then start thinking how you can do without it. Then, be flexible and try to adapt. If you know what to expect, at least you won’t suffer of depression.

One last comment about this book is relevant to the members of the Western “peak oil movement”. According to Orlov, there was something similar in the Soviet Union. It was a clandestine movement which, nevertheless, managed to gain a good understanding of what was going to happen and to publish it in the “samizdats”, home printed documents; the only way to bypass the official information circle before the internet era. Those people got everything right but, of course, they were ignored. After the collapse, they were ignored as well. In a world where collapse had already occurred, there was no more interest in knowing exactly why it had occurred. So, if you are in the peak oil movement, don’t worry too much. Whatever you do or say, it won’t change a thing. So, take it easy!

Gail the Actuary has also reviewed Orlov’s book on The Oil Drum . Note also Dmitry Orlov’s blog “ClubOrlov” . You can find Orlov’s book here Reinventing collapse

Figure: Japanese researchers testing uranium extraction from seawater using a braided adsorbent fiber (JAEA 2006). Is this the way of mining of the future?

[break]

After a couple of centuries of mining, the best and most concentrated mineral ores are on their way to disappearance. In the future, we’ll have to extract from less concentrated deposits and that will be more expensive. It is not just a question of money; mining low concentration deposits costs more energy and, with fossil fuels being rapidly depleted, that is a serious problem. Our society cannot survive without a cheap supply of minerals; so, it may not be too early to look for new sources.

If mines on land are gradually becoming depleted, could the oceans become our new mines? There have been several proposals for mining the oceans’ floor, but that is just an extension of conventional mining and, besides, the task has proved to be complex and expensive. The real change of paradigm, instead, is in extracting ions dissolved in seawater.

The oceans are vast and contain immense amounts of minerals which, in principle, could be recovered without the need of digging, crushing, processing, and all the other complex and energy expensive procedures that we need for mining on land. Indeed, the extraction of minerals from seawater is a concept that periodically reappears in times of energy crisis. It had become popular with the first oil crisis of the 1970s, only to disappear during the phase of relatively low oil prices that followed. Nowadays, with the new crisis ongoing, recovering minerals from seawater is looking attractive again. For instance, over the web it is often stated as an obvious fact that any uranium supply problems that could occur in the future will be easily solved extracting uranium from seawater. Occasionally, we read that the same method could be used to solve all mineral shortages.

However, things are not so simple and we’ll see in the following that extracting low concentration minerals from seawater is a huge, expensive and complex task. We are not going to see minerals produced from seawater taking the market anytime soon and the dream of fishing uranium from the sea is destined to remain just that: a dream. But let’s go into the details.

1. Minerals in seawater

Open ocean water contains dissolved salts in a range of 33 to 37 grams per liter, corresponding to a total mass of some 5E+16 tons, (in the “E-notation”, E+16 means 10 elevated to the power of 16). In other words, the oceans contain some fifty quadrillion tons of dissolved material. It is a huge amount compared to the total mass of minerals extracted today in the world: of the order of “just” a hundred billion tons per year (OPOCE 2000). However, most of the mass dissolved in the oceans is in the form of just a few ions and these are not the most important ones for industry.

The four most concentrated metal ions, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, and K+, are the only ones commercially extractable today, with the the least concentrated of the four being potassium (K) at 400 parts per million (ppm). Below potassium, we go down to lithium, which has never been extracted in commercial amounts from seawater, with a concentration of 0.17 ppm. Other dissolved metal ions exist at lower concentrations, sometimes several orders of magnitude lower. None has ever been commercially extracted.

But let’s see exactly how we stand. In the table below I have listed the seawater concentrations and total amounts of some metal ions. The table excludes those already being extracted (Na, Mg, Ca and K) and those which exist only in traces so minute that extraction is simply unthinkable. The amounts available in seawater are compared with the reserves listed by the United States geological survey (USGS). The concept of “reserves” may be conservative but the results of a recent work (Bardi and Pagani 2007) show that it may be the most realistic estimate of what we can actually extract from land mines.

For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

As we see, there are huge metal resources in the sea. The question is how to extract them. The most general method consists in passing seawater through a membrane that contains functional groups that selectively bind to the species of interest. No known membrane is 100% selective for a single species, but it is possible to create membranes that can retain a small number of selected low concentration species. The adsorbates can be extracted from the membrane by flushing it with appropriate chemicals; a process called “elution”. After this stage, the metal ions can be separated and recovered by precipitation or electrodeposition.

In practice, it is very difficult to extract low concentration ions at reasonable costs. Lithium extraction was tried in the 1970s (Schwochau 1984) but the tests were soon abandoned. The idea of extracting uranium has been around for a long time, at least from the 1960s (see Nebbia 2007 for a review). But just a few grams were extracted in Japan in the late 1990s (Seko 2003). Then, there is the old dream of getting gold from the sea. The German chemist Fritz Haber tried that in the 1920s but the task of extracting gold ions at concentrations of a few parts per trillion (ppt) was nearly desperate and, indeed, the attempt was a total failure.

Evidently, we have big problems here. That is not surprising: there is a lot of water in the ocean and, in comparison, very small amounts of useful metals. So, we have to process huge amounts of water. Huge, in this context, means really huge , as you can see in the following table. Consider, as a comparison, that the total volume of water desalinated today is 1.6E+10 tons.

Table 2. Elements are ordered as a function of the mass of seawater that would need to be filtered in order to obtain the same amount of materials that we obtain today from traditional mining. That value is calculated in the optimistic assumption of 100% efficiency of the filtering membrane. For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

The table shows that, even for the best case listed, lithium, in order to recover the same amount we get today from conventional mining we would need to set gigantic facilities. We’d need to process at least ten times as much water as it is processed by desalination plants today. All the other metals would require to process amounts of water orders of magnitude larger.

Moving these gigantic amounts of water is not just a practical problem: it involves energy; a critical parameter especially if we consider the extraction of two elements that are to be used as energy sources: lithium and uranium. Uranium, in the form of the 235 isotope, is the fuel of the present generation of nuclear fission plants, whereas lithium, in the form of the 6-Li isotope could be the source of tritium to be used as fuel for a future generation of fusion power plants. In both cases, the feasibility of extraction is determined by the energy needed according to the well known concept of “EROEI” (energy returned for energy investment) (Hall 2008).

In the next section, we’ll see in detail the case of uranium, perhaps the most important for practical applications and the one for which we have the best data available. It will serve as a benchmark for evaluating the feasibility of extraction of all the other elements.

2. Uranium extraction from seawater

At present, the mining industry can provide only about 60% of the uranium needed for the currently operating reactors which produce about 16% of the world’s electricity. The gap is filled with stockpiled reserves, in large part obtained from dismantling old nuclear warheads. Raising mineral production to the level needed to satisfy demand is a huge and expensive task; even more if it were to occur together with the construction of new reactors. Whether we’ll develop a serious uranium shortage in the near future is hotly debated, but the problem cannot be ignored (see, e.g. EWG 2007).

So, extracting uranium from seawater is a subject often discussed and, as we saw in the previous section, the amounts theoretically available in the oceans are more than sufficient to stave off all worries of shortages for a long time. Indeed, already in the 1960s, the idea had started to be evaluated (Nebbia 2007). The development of a membrane able to recover uranium from seawater (Vernon and Shah, 1983) was an important step forward and it led to experimental tests performed in the 1990s by researchers of the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). In these tests, a few grams of uranium oxide were actually recovered from the sea. From a web page dated 1998 (JAEA 1998), we see that these tests were performed in 1996 and 1997 and the results are reported in detail in a paper in English by Seko et al. (Seko 2003). Some results with braided fiber used as adsorbent are reported in a web page (JAEA 2006).

However, JAEA seems to have stopped all activity in this field, at least from what can learned from the examination of their site in English . There are no reports of further experiments, demonstration plants or of scaling up tests being planned. Something went wrong here, clearly, but exactly what? The question is complex, but we can try to answer it using the concept of energy return of the energy invested, EROEI.

From table 2 we see that we would need to process 2E+13 tons of water every year in order to produce enough fuel for the present fleet of nuclear reactors. Considering that the present worldwide production of nuclear energy is about 2.5E+3 TWh (terawatt-hour) per year (WNA 2007), we arrive to determine that the “energy density” of seawater exploitable by the present nuclear technology is about 1E-1 kWh/ton (one tenth of a kWh per ton). It doesn’t look large but it is still much larger than the kinetic energy of the same mass of water moved by average strength currents (See note 2).

Now, in order to extract this uranium, there are two possible strategies: one is of actively pumping the water through the membrane, the other simply dropping the membrane in the sea and wait for the metal ions to migrate to the active sites. In both cases, energy is needed for a variety of operations: pumping, infrastructure building, moving the membranes, manufacturing them, etc. We don’t have enough data for a step-by-step evaluation of the energy necessary but we can try an order of magnitude estimate by comparing with known processes.

Let’s start with the first strategy: actively pumping water through a membrane. The process requires energy mainly because of the viscosity of water. This effect is described by Darcy’s law which says that the energy required is inversely proportional to a parameter called “permeability”. A finer membrane (e.g. sand) has a lower permeability than a coarse membrane (e.g. gravel). The permeability of a uranium extraction membrane is not reported in the available studies and it is probably not even known at the present stage. However, we can estimate the energy involved by comparing with a similar, known, process: desalination by reverse osmosis.

In reverse osmosis, seawater is pumped through a membrane that retains the dissolved ions; just as it would be done for uranium extraction. The energy involved in desalination by reverse osmosis is of the order of 2-4 kWh/ton; a value that includes all the energy used by the plant. For uranium, we would use membranes with a higher permeability, but the energy needed cannot change too much. If we take a value of 1 kWh/ton as a reasonable “order of magnitude” estimate, we immediately see that it can’t be done. If what we can recover from the uranium contained in a ton of water is about 1E-1 kWh, it makes no sense to spend 1kWh/ton for the extraction, even if we could do that at 100% efficiency. This result is nothing new and there are other kinds of calculations that lead to the same conclusion (Schwochau 1984). Pumping water through membranes is so energy expensive that it can’t be considered as a practical strategy for uranium extraction.

So, we are left with the second strategy: dropping the membrane into the sea and wait until currents or diffusion brings the uranium to the adsorbing sites. This method avoids the energy cost of pumping. Yet, it is also a less efficient way to use the membrane. As a consequence, we need larger amounts of membranes, a larger infrastructure, and we need to move the membranes in and out of the sea. All these are energy costs. We are looking at a complex and largely unknown process which is difficult to analyze in all its details. Nevertheless, we can try.

First of all, we can gain some idea of the size of the task. Dittmar (2007) has already noted that the task is huge, but exactly how much space would the adsorbing membranes occupy? We saw (see table 2) that we need to process at least 2E+13 tons of water per year. We also need a relatively shallow body of water, so that the infrastructure that carries the membranes can be anchored to the sea bottom at a reasonable cost. Now, consider the North Sea as a suitable area. It is a shallow sea (average depth less than 100 m) and it contains about 5E+13 tons of water. Assuming a recovery efficiency of 50% (which is probably optimistic), it means that we would have to appropriate the whole North Sea with adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world’s electric power production. For powering the whole world, we’d need the equivalent of at least six North Seas.

But it is unlikely that the North Sea would have sufficiently strong currents for sustaining uranium extraction for a long time. That is a problem which has not been studied in detail: where can we find currents strong enough to move the huge amounts of water we need?

Current strength is sometimes measured in “Sverdrups”, a unit that corresponds to one million tons of water per second, or 3E+13 tons of water per year. So, one Sverdrup is almost exactly the flow of seawater that carries enough uranium for the present needs of nuclear plants. Some currents are reported to be much stronger than one Sverdrup. For instance, perhaps the strongest current in the world is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) which carries about 135 Sverdrups. There is plenty of uranium being transported there. But the average depth of the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean is around 3000-4000 meters and the area is highly hostile to human activities. Anchoring there millions of tons of adsorbing membranes, together with all the processing facilities, is simply unthinkable.

Perhaps we could consider the Strait of Gibraltar as a more friendly environment where to find strong currents. Damming the strait in order to produce energy had already been proposed by Herman Sorgel in the 1920s with his concept of the “Atlantropa” dam. The dam was supposed to provide about 50 GW of hydroelectric power, a little more than 10% of the power presently provided by the nuclear industry today. The dam was never built; of course: it would have been a disaster for the Mediterranean sea.

Today, we seem to be a little more careful with these megaprojects, but still the Strait’s current is very strong and we could appropriate a fraction of it for uranium extraction. The flow of seawater through the strait is about one Sverdrup , enough to satisfy our current uranium needs. Let’s say that we could intercept 10% of it (and even that could have huge negative effects on the Mediterranean environment). In this case we’d need the equivalent of 10 Straits of Gibraltar just for satisfying the current needs of the nuclear fission industry and some 60 equivalent straits for raising production to match the present world’s demand. Do we have the equivalent of 60 Straits of Gibraltar in the world? We can’t say for sure that we don’t; but of one thing we may be sure: the task would be colossal, devastating for the environment, and expensive beyond imagination.

All this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to extract uranium from seawater in amounts comparable to our needs. But it gives us a certain perspective that we can use for the evaluation of the really critical parameter of the process: EROEI. The huge areas that we calculated to be needed bring us to compare uranium extraction to another industrial activity where large masses of materials are transported over the sea: oceanic fishing.

We have some data about the energy expenditure of the fishing industry (Mitchell and Cleveland (1993)) and we can estimate that the industry uses fuel for an energy of about 7 kWh for each kg of fish recovered. Another estimate derives from knowing that the total fish catch today is around 90 million tons (9E+10 kg) per year (FAO 2005) while the total amount of fuel used by the world’s fishing fleet in 2005 is of some 14 million tons of diesel fuel (FAO 2008) (2E+11 kWh, considering that the energy content of diesel fuel is 43 GJ/ton). The result is about 2 kWh of energy per kg of fish landed. These are rough estimates that only take into account the fuel cost. Yet, it seems that fuel is the main energy expenditure involved in ocean fishing. So, if we take a midrange value of 5 kWh/kg, we can’t be too far off in terms of the energy cost of extracting something from the open sea and bringing it back to land.

Now, if we want to use membranes for uranium extraction, it means that we have to carry the membrane at sea, submerge it for a while, raise it, bring it to land for processing, then back to sea, and so on. From the paper by Seko et al (2003) we see that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. We also read in the paper that the membranes were “pulled out of seawater using a crane ship every 20 to 40 days”. In other words, the membranes have to be brought back to the elution facility every month or so. Recovering one kg of uranium, therefore, would require processing at least 3 tons of membranes per year. For the present worldwide uranium demand (6.5E+4 tons/year) we’d need to move 2E+8 tons of membrane every year. That is about ten times larger than the weight of the total catch of today’s fishing industry. This is another indication of the colossal size of the task.

But the real problem is the energy involved. Using the ratio of 5kWh/kg that we calculated before for fishing, and assuming the yield and the conditions reported by Seko (2003) we can calculate a total energy expenditure of about 1E+3 TWh/year for the present needs of the nuclear industry. This is about the same as the total produced, ca. 2.5e+3 TWh/year. So, the energy gain (EROEI) is too low to be interesting.

Of course, there is a high level of uncertainty in this calculation. On the one hand, we need to consider that is possible to improve the efficiency of extraction process using braided membranes and working at higher sea temperatures (JAEA 1998, 2008). We might also build floating processing facilities in order to reduce the transportation costs. On the other hand, the calculation refers only to the fuel expenditures. To that, we need to all the costs for the infrastructure, for the chemicals used in elution, for the energy needed for recovering the species of interest and so on. We need also to consider that the membranes are synthesized starting from crude oil. Since there are no data available for how long a membrane could last in operation, we can’t calculate how much oil would be needed, but surely it would not be negligible (see note 3 for an attempt of calculating this value).

We can conclude that there is a high risk that uranium extraction from seawater in these conditions would have an EROEI smaller than one. Very likely, it would be too low to be interesting. In practice, nobody will provide the huge financial resources needed to embark in such a task while that uncertainty remains. Moreover, investors are not likely to appear when they can’t ignore that, at any moment, the development of an efficient fast breeder reactor would make their huge investments worthless. So, we don’t know for sure whether the nuclear industry will be facing a fuel shortage in the near future but, if it does, the best bet to concentrate on conventional land mining and on developing more efficient reactors. Extracting uranium from the sea is not a practical possibility.

4. Lithium and the others

The case of uranium gave us the tools that we need for the evaluation of the perspective of extraction of all the other elements. First of all, we should consider lithium, which is more abundant than uranium in the sea and that could also be used as an energy source. The 6-Li isotope can be transformed into an isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which could be the fuel of a future generation of fusion reactors.

Fasel and Tran (2005) estimate that a water-cooled lithium–lead breeder blanket reactor of 1.5 GWe power will need 787 tonnes of lithium per year. This reactor could produce 12 TWh of energy per year. From the data of table 2, we see that for producing 800 tons of lithium we need to process 4E+9 tons of seawater. In other words the “energy density” of seawater in terms of fusion plants would be about 3 kWh/ton, more than an order of magnitude larger than that of uranium (1E-1 kWh/ton).

If efficient selective membranes for lithium adsorption can be developed, the energies involved in extraction would likely be about the same as for uranium, but we would need ten times less water for the same amount of lithium, hence ten times less energy. Extraction by active pumping would still be very uncertain in terms of EROEI, but with submerged membranes the task appears possible without destroying the North Sea or damming the equivalent of dozens of Straits of Gibraltar. Still, it would be a huge task and its feasibility remains uncertain. However, Fasel and Tran (2005) also mention the possibility of more efficient ways of using lithium in fusion reactors. So, we can conclude that the extraction of lithium as nuclear fuel from seawater cannot be proven to be feasible in terms of energy return, but it is nevertheless a process worth investigating.

Lithium is also an essential element for the new generation of batteries used in road vehicles. Tahil (2006) studied the availability of mineral lithium if we were to substitute the present vehicle fleet with vehicles based on lithium batteries. He concluded that we would face a lithium shortage. This is not a problem for the near term future, nevertheless it could become serious one day. From a look to table 2 we see if we were to get the present lithium mineral production by filtering ocean water through a membrane, we’d need around 1.5E+3 TWh which is 10% or the present world production of electric power. It is a very large amount but not an unconceivable one. Using submerged membranes, we would be able to substantially reduce that amount of energy, perhaps of one order of magnitude. However, according to Tahil (2006), we would need to step up lithium production of approximately a factor of ten if we were to keep up with the present trends of growth. That is clearly impossible using lithium extracted from seawater, at least as long as we rely on the present energy sources. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that seawater could be one day a significant source of lithium for vehicle batteries, provided that lithium is recycled and vehicles are built in such a way to be lighter and more efficient.

For all the other elements listed in table 1, extraction from seawater seems to be impossible or, at least, extremely difficult. Consider copper as an example. The total amount that exists in the oceans is about 50 times the current yearly production (see table 2). So, in 50 years we would run out of copper from seawater, even if we were able to filter all the water in the planet’s oceans. But that is unthinkable, of course. Similar considerations hold for most metals of technological interest. The old dream of fishing gold from the sea remains just that: a dream.

5. Conclusion

Perhaps, one day, we might develop futuristic robotic facilities anchored to the deep sea floor. These machines would be powered by uranium extracted from seawater and would use marine plankton to manufacture organic “tentacles” for adsorbing mineral ions. Processing would be made in place and the recovered metals would be shipped to the surface in neat packages. But that looks like a dream of the 1950s, on a par with atomic planes and weekends on the Moon for the whole family. With the possible exception of lithium, the best we can conceive today is that mining the oceans could produce only truly “homeopathic” amounts of minerals, thousands of times lower than the presently produced amounts. In today’s industrial system, such amounts would be useless. This result is true also for uranium, where extraction from seawater can’t be seen as a solution for the present shortage of mineral uranium.

Adding together very large volumes of low concentration mineral resources easily leads to optimistic estimates of availability “when the market price will be right”. But this optimism is misplaced. Eventually, it is the paradigm of the “universal mining machine” (Bardi 2008) that rules. It is not the absolute amount of a mineral resource that counts but, rather, its concentration. Extracting from low concentration resources, no matter whether dissolved in seawater or in the earth’s crust, is so expensive in terms of the energy needed that it is beyond our possibilities for the present and for the foreseeable future.

_______________________________________________________________________

- Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Pietro Cambi and Joe Doves for their comments and suggestions about the energy involved in desalination.

- Notes

(1) data sources for the tables : seawater elements concentration from J Floor Anthoni (2000, 2006) www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm. Oceanic abundance calculated assuming a total ocean volume of 1.3E9 cubic km. Mineral reserves are from USGS 2007 mineral commodities summary (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/) except for uranium reserves which are from Energy Watch Group (www.lbst.de/publications/studies__e/2006/EWG-paper_1-06_Uranium-Resource…). All reserves are in terms of the pure element, except for Aluminium, iron, and titanium, given in terms of oxides.

(2) Comparison of the energy density of seawater in terms of fissionable uranium and as source of energy for underwater turbines . A strong sea current may move at speed of a few m/sec. Let’s consider a representative speed of 4 m/sec and calculate the energy as 1/2mv^2. In this case, one ton of water would carry about 2E-3kWh, much smaller than the value calculated before in terms of uranium content (ca. 1E-1 kWh/ton). However, an underwater turbine could well have a better EROEI than the complex process of uranium extraction from seawater and utilization in a fission power plant.

(3) Tentative calculation of the energy involved in manufacturing membranes for uranium extraction . From the only work published in the international scientific literature (Seko 2003) we can infer that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. Trying an educated guess on the basis of the paper by Vernon and Shah (1983) we might assume that repeated immersions of the membrane would degrade its performance and generate the need for replacing it approximately every year. A Russian site http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html says that the membrane can be “assumed” to be usable 20 times before it has to be discarded. If this is the case, it can be used for about one year and a half. Taking one year as the lifetime of the membrane, we would need to synthesize about 300 kg of activated fiber per year. Assuming an overall yield of 30% (again, an educated guess) for the synthesis process, we see that we need about one ton of crude oil in order to extract 1 kg of uranium per year. Since crude oil has an energy content of about 12 kWh/kg, we would be using some 12 MWh that, used in a high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine would produce about 6 MWh of electric power. One kg of uranium in a nuclear fission plant can generate about 40 MWh of electric power and, therefore, the process could have a reasonable EROEI of about 7. However, note also that, in order to obtain sufficient fiber for supplying enough uranium for the production of the total of the electric energy today, we’d need about 2-3 billion barrels of oil per year. This is a small amount compared to the present production (more than 30 billion barrels per year) but not negligible and would become more and more important as oil production dwindles down because of depletion.

References

Bardi U., Pagani, M., 2007, “Peak Minerals” http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3086

Bardi U., 2008 “The Universal Mining Machine” http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451

Busch, M. Mickols, B, “Economics of desalination— reducing costs by lowering energy use” Water and wastewater international, http://www.pennnet.com/display_article/208957/20/ARTCL/none/none/1/Econo…

Dittmar M., 2007, “The Nuclear Energy Option facts and fantasies”, Proceedings of the ASPO-6 conference, Cork, Ireland.
www.aspo-ireland.org/contentfiles/ASPO6/3-2_APSO6_MDittmar.pdf

FAO 2005 http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Fish/2005.htm

FAO 2008, http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0699e/A0699E08.htm.

Fasel, D., Tran. M.Q., 2005, Availability of lithium in the context of future D–T fusion reactors. Fusion Engineering and Design 75–79 pp. 1163–1168

Floor Anthoni, J., (2000, 2006) Oceanic abundance of elements, www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm.

JAEA 1998 Development of the Adsorbent at the Takasaki Research Laboratory http://www.jaea.go.jp/jaeri/english/press/980526/ref01.html

JAEA, 2006 “Confirming Cost Estimations of Uranium Collection from Seawater” JAEA R&D Review, http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html

Mitchell, C. and Cleveland C.J., 1993. “Resource scarcity, energy use and environmental impact: A case study of the New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA, fisheries. Journalof Environmental Management, volume 17, Number 3 / May, 1993, p. 305

Nebbia, G., 1970, “L’estrazione di Uranio dall’acqua di mare”
http://www.aspoitalia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&…

OPOCE (Office for official publications of the european communities) 2000. Environmental signals, http://reports.eea.europa.eu/signals-2000/en/page017.html

Schwochau, K., 1984, “Extraction of Metals from Sea Water”, Springer series “Topics in Current Chemistry” vol 124. http://www.springerlink.com/content/y621101m3567jku1/

Seko N., Katakai A., Hasegawa H., Tamada M., Kasai N., Takeda H., Sugo T., Saito K. 2003, “Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a Fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System” Nuclear Energy
Volume 144 · Number 2 · November 2003 · Pages 274-278

Tamada, M.; Seko, N.; Kasai, N.; Shimizu, T., 2005
Synthesis and practical scale system of braid adsorbent for uranium recovery from seawater
FAPIG (169), p.3-12(2005) ; (JAEA-J 00045)

Tahil, W, 2006, “The Trouble with Lithium Implications of Future PHEV Production for Lithium demand” http://tyler.blogware.com/lithium_shortage.pdf

Vernon, F., and Shah T., 1983, “The extraction of uranium from seawater by poly(amidoxime)/poly(hydroxamic acid) resins and fibre Reactive Polymers, Ion Exchangers, Sorbents Volume 1, Issue 4, October 1983, Pages 301-308

WNA, World Nuclear Association, 2007, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf16.html.

Ugo Bardi’s electric scooter, here driven by Ms. Donata Bardi, aka “the mad scientist’s daughter”
[break]

After three years of use, I have just passed the 10,000 km mark on my electric scooter, or about 6,000 miles. Not bad for a small scooter of this kind. I have always been thinking that electric vehicles are an answer to peak oil; not the definitive answer, of course, but at least a way to maintain some mobility on roads in the years that will come. Electric vehicles are a technology that exists and that works. So, for the past few years I have been testing the idea in practice.

So, let me give you some data about this experience. First of all, about the scooter itself. It is the “Lepton” model made in Italy by a company named “Oxygen”. It has a rated power of 1500 W, maximum speed (electronically regulated) of 45 km/h and a nominal range of 40 km. It is not on sale any more for private users, although it is still manufactured in a version for commercial transportation. Now you can find equivalent Chinese scooters that sell for about 2000 Euros. I think that the Lepton is much better than this new generation; but, in general, these small motorcycles are very similar in terms of performance and construction.

I have used the Lepton consistently for commuting from home to office. About 30 km round trip on hilly roads. According to the measurements I performed, the “mileage” of the scooter is of about 3kWh per 100 km. At the present prices of electricity in Italy, that is less than one eurocent per km. For me, it is actually zero, since I have photovoltaic panels on my roof that produce more than enough to recharge my scooter. In comparison, an equivalent gasoline powered scooter may need 3-4 liters of gasoline to run for 100 km. A liter of gasoline is about 10 kWh, so that the conventional vehicle is about 10 times less efficient than the electric one (!). Also, about ten times more expensive.

Those are, of course, just the raw energy costs. Battery replacement costs are higher. In my case, I used NiZn batteries, rather than the traditional lead acid ones. The experience has been moderately positive. NiZn batteries are lighter than lead ones and charge in about 1/3 of the time. However, after 10,000 km, the batteries show clear signs of fatigue and need to be replaced. Right now, I can’t make the whole 30 km round trip from home to office on a single charge. I have to recharge at a public charge point that – fortunately – exists at a few hundred meters from my office. Users of lead batteries report longer battery lives, although some had bad experiences, too. In terms of cost, if I had to buy now a set of lead batteries I should pay something like 500 euros. That would correspond to 5 eurocents per km. But I am moving to lithium batteries, more expensive, but should really be a quantum jump in terms of range and reliability.

There are other cost advantages of my electric motorcycle. I can pay about half of the regular insurance cost because of a special contract that some companies offer to electric vehicles. Then, for five years I don’t have to pay government vehicle taxes. In addition, the maintenance of an electric vehicle is really minimal. In 10,000 km the only maintenance I had to do was to lubricate the start button. These things are really sturdy.

But the idea of using electric vehicles is not so much to save money (although you can). The idea is to see if it is possible to move on roads without using oil derived fuels. Of course, an electric vehicle alone is not enough. If you want to be free from carbon based fuels, you also need PV panels or other sources of renewable energy to recharge your vehicle. But it is possible to do that with currently existing technology and PV panels are not beyond the means of someone who lives with the salary of a government employee, as I do. Think how things would change if a significant fraction of the currently running vehicles were battery powered. The next fuel shortage would not hit us so hard as we expect it will.

Unfortunately, I am also disappointed by my experience in the sense that I found very few followers. Over three years, I showed my scooter on my Italian blog, I took it to meetings and conferences, at ASPO-5 in 2006 in Pisa I used the little red thing everyday and all those attending saw it. But only my nephew and one of my coworkers actually followed my example.

All right, I understand that it has a short range, but if it is enough to go from home to work and back, does it matter? And, yes, I know that it takes a long time to recharge it. But if you plan ahead, what is the problem? Sure, I know that you can’t use it to go visit your aunt who lives in another city; but is it really so crucial? Yes, it is a little more expensive, but in the long run, you save money. And if it doesn’t make any noise it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t run.

But there is nothing to do. Most people just can’t believe that an electric vehicle is a “real” vehicle. They much prefer to dream about hydrogen vehicles that, after all, are supposed to have a proper “fuel” and may even produce the appropriate noise. It is an entrenched attitude that seems to make us believe that if it doesn’t burn, it is not really energy.

Well, what can I say? Here is a picture of the odometer that proves that I ran 10000 km with a vehicle without burning anything. It can be done. Try it.

Give also a look to our retrofitted Fiat 500, the post peak car . You can see it also at the the eurozev site

[break]
Russia has changed beyond recognition from the dull times of the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when I heard it described by an American acquaintance as “the most foreign country I know”. At that time, Moscow was a grey city covered in dirty snow. It had no shop windows, few lights, no restaurants outside those of the hotels. Walking along the streets, you would see people dressed in black, looking like they had nothing to do. There were plenty of beggars and of drunken men staggering along.

Things have been gradually changing. This July, I have been back to Moscow for a week and I found a city full of flowers and with shops, restaurants, malls, and everything that you expect to see in European cities. The traffic is heavy; the old Ladas are still there, but there are plenty of new cars, including SUVs. Beggars have disappeared, a few drunkards can still be seen, but the city is full of young people evidently in good health, well dressed, and looking happy. The cities around Moscow that I saw during my trip don’t look so shiny, but it is clear that the wealth that has concentrated in Moscow is gradually spilling out to the rest of Russia. According to Wikipedia, Russia is now the 7th country in the world in terms of GDP adjusted for parity purchasing power. In 2006 the average monthly Russian salary was equivalent to $640 and by now it is surely much more than that. It would be still hard to define Russia a rich country, but the trends are unmistakable.

The standard explanation for the present wealth of Russia is that it has embraced capitalism, leaving behind the obsolete and inefficient ways of Soviet communism. It may be, but the real explanation may have to do with oil. On this point, a common legend says that the West engineered the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, when Saudi Arabia could be convinced to inundate the market with cheap oil and cause the oil price to crash. That badly hit the profits that the Soviets were making by exporting their oil to the West.

As for many legends, also this one has a basis of truth. After the first world oil crisis that had peaked in the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia and the European countries facing the North Sea world had invested enormous sums in developing new fields. In the mid 1980s. these fields had started producing and nothing could prevent oil prices to fall down as the result. The price crash wasn’t engineering on purpose against the Soviet Union, but the effect was the same. The Soviet Union, at that time, was engaged in a costly war in Afghanistan and also needed to import grain from the West; and pay for it in dollars. Short of cash and on the brink of starvation, the Soviet Union simply couldn’t survive. It went bankrupt and disappeared.

But the fall of the world oil prices was not the only problem that the Soviets were facing. Also their internal oil production was in troubles. As we can see in the following graph, a first oil production peak for the Soviet Union took place in 1987 (figure from ASPO, www.peakoil.net).

Again, the standard explanation here is that oil production declined because of the fall of the Soviet Union. However, we may also argue that the opposite is true; that it was the peak that brought down the Soviet Union. This view has been convincingly argued by Douglas Reynolds and Marek Kolodziej. For instance, see this statement by Reynolds at the energy bulletin:

The Soviet Union experienced peak oil first hand—a 43% decline in domestic oil production between 1987 and 1996. This crisis caused Soviet society to fall into devastating economic impoverishment. Can this be proven? Yes. Here is the quick story: The oil decline in the Soviet Union preceded the GDP decline. A statistical test, Granger causality, shows this. Oil decline did not follow the GDP decline, it was ahead of it, and therefore it caused it.

For more details on this interpretation, see the two papers by Douglas Reynolds and Marek Kolodziej listed at the end of this post. In short, the Soviet Union was a victim of its internal peak oil, whose effects were amplified by other factors, such as the Afghan war, the drop in international oil prices, and the need for Soviet countries of importing food from abroad.

If this explanation is correct, and I believe it is, Russia has pulled off a major feat in recovering from peak oil. A feat comparable to that of turning back the German invasion during the second world war, or that of Napoleon in 19th century. Indeed, everyone knows that invading Russia, especially in winter, is never a good idea. Peak oil, however, was a different kind of enemy, one that could not be beaten using armies and enlisting “General Winter” to help. How did the Russians manage to find life after peak oil?

There are various explanations for the rebounding of the Russian oil production. Some have to do with factors such as the poor management of wells in Soviet times or the higher willingness of Russian entrepreneurs to take risks in a free market situation. Personally, I favour the interpretation that the recovery was possible because the Russian society was able to cut deeply in the bloated government expenses of Soviet times; mainly the army and the hypertrophic bureaucracy. The resources saved from these sectors could be invested in more exploration and in upgrading existing wells. With more effort, more equipment, and more drilling, oil could again flow out in increasing amounts.

If this is the case, victory against peak oil needed tremendous sacrifices from the Russian people, just as it was the case for the victories against Napoleon’s and Hitler’s armies. Indeed, the misery of the post peak times is well told by Dimitri Orlov in his book “Reinventing Collapse” and in his blog cluborlov . We learn from Orlov of the nearly complete collapse of most of the sectors of the Russian society. Government employees, most of the population, suddenly found their saving worthless, their salaries reduced to nearly zero, or to actually zero. For years, survival was possible mainly because of the food produced in small, private vegetable gardens, a heritage of the mismanaged food distribution system of Soviet times.

My personal experience in Russia in those years is in complete agreement with Orlov’s report. I came to know very well the situation of my colleagues working in universities and research institutes. During my visit, I was told that the number of researchers in Russia has been approximately halved since the times of the Soviet Union, from about 200,000 to 100,000, you can have some idea of what kind of “creative destruction” the Russian society went through. Except that it wasn’t so creative. Entire research institutes were abandoned and later transformed into office buildings or shopping malls. Researchers had to be creative in order to survive. Those who could, moved to Western Europe or to the US; others turned janitors or bodyguards. Others clung to their jobs trying to do the best they could with the limited – or non existing – resources available. This experience, incidentally, has made me perfectly aware of what is in store for me as a scientific researcher in a not too far future. The difference is that I won’t have a West to move to.

Now, with market prices going up again, Russian oil has become immensely more valuable than it used to be at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. The revenues in foreign currency could be used to rebuild the Russian economic infrastructure. The salaries of scientific researchers are back and even the Russian army has regained its former status of world power, as the recent events in Georgia show.

But, no matter how much effort is placed in revitalizing old wells, the amount of oil available remains physically limited. Russia’s oil production may have peaked a second time in 2008, as reported in the Financial Times.

Even with the second peak arriving, Russia may not be facing a second collapse. The first peak combined all the possible problems: decline of world prices, expensive wars ongoing, and the need of importing food from the West. Now, these conditions are reversed or much less important. For instance, Russia, a top grain importer at the times of the Soviet Union, seems to be now self sufficient in terms of cereal production . So, if Russia can avoid a drastic fall in oil production, for the coming years it can have sufficient oil for its internal needs and still obtain a good revenue from exports in a market that is likely to become more and more desperate for oil supplies. Short term perspectives look bright for Russia.

And in the long run? The second oil peak is likely to be the final one. This time, another economic contraction such as the one of the 1990s wouldn’t be enough to revitalize the old wells once again. Russia has also to worry about climate change: while it might mean that Russians can save on fur coats and hats, global warming may spell disaster for those Russian cities built mostly on permafrost. But Russia in the coming years has a window of opportunity to invest in an energy infrastructure that is not based on fossil fuels, a window that is probably closing or already closed for most Western countries.

The Russians have a still functioning nuclear industry. Russia has mineral uranium resources and a good number of nuclear warheads that could be reprocessed for nuclear fuel. It also has the only functioning fast neutron reactor in the world, at Beloyarsk, and has claimed to have solved the problem of building a “closed fuel cycle” reactor . That would be a major advance and would solve the problem of uranium shortage that may affect the present generation of reactors in the near future. I have no direct knowledge of the Russian nuclear situation but, from what I can say of other fields, Russia still has plenty of top class scientists and engineers, despite the non-creative destruction of the 1990s. Considering also the financial resources available, I would think that the Russian plans of boosting nuclear energy are serious.

As for renewables, Moscow is not the right place for solar panels but the Russian territory is immense and there must be plenty of places suitable for solar and wind energy. Probably there are also good possibilities for geothermal energy and Russia is so vast that it would also be the ideal place for high altitude wind power . Some good research work is being done in some areas of renewable energy, such as photovoltaics (this is the reason I went to Russia this July). It is too bad that it seems that renewable technologies don’t seem to be a priority for the present government. But that can surely be improved, Russia should never be underestimated (nor invaded in winter, of course).

Several years ago, at what seemed to be one of the darkest moments of the Russian collapse, I was walking in one of the avenues of Moscow. I noticed a series of large signs hanging from lampposts, showing traditional Russian buildings and landscapes. One of my Russian colleagues translated the text of the signs for me as saying, “Nobody will help Russia, so Russia will have to help herself”. Government propaganda? Sure, but that is what the Russian did. Never underestimate a country that has survived peak oil.

Two references

Two references on the Russian collapse and recovery. Both are available at www.sciencedirect.com (subscription required)

Former Soviet Union oil production and GDP decline: Granger causality and the multi-cycle Hubbert curve. Energy Economics, Volume 30, Issue 2, March 2008, Pages 271-289 Douglas B. Reynolds, Marek Kolodziej

Institutions and the supply of oil: A case study of Russia
Energy Policy, Volume 35, Issue 2, February 2007, Pages 939-949
Douglas B. Reynolds, Marek Kolodziej

Ryanair and the Italian government at odds with each other. This Ryanair advertising shows Italy’s ministry for reforms, Mr. Umberto Bossi, in an occasion where he was expressing his disagreement with the words of the Italian national anthem. In the text, the Italian government is accused of “supporting Alitalia’s high tariffs”, “supporting the frequent Alitalia strikes” and “not caring about the Italian passengers”. Ryanair is understandably angry at the preferential treatment that the Italian government is reserving to Alitalia, Italy’s national air carrier. Alitalia is in danger of bankruptcy and has been recently saved by a hefty injection of public money.

[break]
An airline is a small economic system that uses fuel derived from oil in order to carry on activities that generate profits. If oil is too expensive, profits disappear and, eventually, the system must disappear, too, bankrupted. Low cost airlines have appeared during the period of relatively low oil prices that ensued after the first oil crisis, in the 1980s. Can these airlines exist with oil over $100 per barrel?

A country is larger than an airline but it, too, needs fuel for its economic activities. And, if deficits run too high, countries can go bankrupt as well. Italy’s industrial economy had its moment of maximum growth in the 1950s and 1960s; in a period of low and stable oil prices. Can Italy’s industry exist with oil prices over $100 per barrel?

At TOD, we have been discussing economic collapse for a long time and Italy may provide for us an interesting test case (although Spain, too, may be in the race). Maybe collapse is too strong a word, but it is clear that things are not going well in Italy. We can find plenty of data about the Italian economy in the excellent blog by Edward Hugh “Italian economy watch” . His posts of the last months read like a horror story. Here are a few examples; first, Italy’s inflation:

Here is Italy’s industrial production:

And Italy’s business confidence:

Here is Italy’s GDP:

There are many other chilling data that you can read in Hugh’s blog, but let me show you a graph that I made myself about Italy’s oil consumption. I am sorry that the captions are in Italian, but I think you understand what it is about: Italy is using less and less oil; a sure sign of a slowing down economy:

And there is much more. For instance, we may give a look to the status of that ancient Italian organization which is the Mafia . On that, I found this graph made by the Italian ministry of interior.

Image from the site of Italy’s ministry of interiors , The red line shows mafia-related homicides, the black one all the other crime related homicides.

“Peak Mafia”, apparently, took place in 1991. Maybe Mafia methods are becoming gentler, but it might also be that even Mafia is in economic decline. After all, Mafia is an economic organization, although engaged in quite different activities than those of a typical airline. So, it may suffer because of the high oil prices, too. Of course, you might argue that homicides are a diseconomy for mafia and that the less homicides there are, the more efficient the organization is. Could be, but it is also true that number of all violent crimes in Italy seem to be stagnating or in decline, according to the report of the ministry of the interior. Maybe Italian criminals are becoming too poor to buy ammunition.

The economic decline seems also to be taking a toll on the health of the Italians themselves. Life expectancy had been constantly growing in Italy for the past 50 years. But, recently, the trend has stopped (see this article of mine , unfortunately in Italian). Is it due to a natural limit of to the deterioration of the Italian health care system and in general of the quality of life in Italy? We can’t say for sure, but the second hypothesis cannot be ruled out.

Now, I am not an economist and I am not qualified to interpret such things as macroeconomic indicators (or mafia trends). But, surely, what we are seeing needs to be explained. I can see two main possible reasons for the decline of the Italian economy. One is demography, the other the high prices of oil. About demography, there is no doubt that Italy is becoming a nation of old people. You can see that in statistics, but you also can get a visual impression of the large number of aged people by walking anywhere in Italy. Old people, of course, don’t produce goods and tend to buy less. That would explain, at least in part, the general economic decline of the country.

But, of course, high oil prices are also playing a role; perhaps the most important one. Although some oil and gas are being produced on the national territory, Italy is nearly completely dependent on imports for its energy production. Most of the electric power in the country is made using imported natural gas; Italy has no nuclear plants although it does import nuclear energy from France and Switzerland. Renewable energy exists mainly in the form of hydroelectric plants in the north of the country. Italy has been very slow in moving towards the new renewable technologies: wind and photovoltaics. So, high prices of fossil fuels badly damage an economy that needs to export manufactured products to survive. With high energy prices, Italian products become more expensive and therefore less competitive on the international market. So, exports decline and Italy is less and less able to pay for energy imports. In addition, high oil prices are also adversely affecting tourism; a traditional source of revenue for the Italian economy. With less money available and more expensive energy imports, what ensues is the deadly spiral of economic decline which we are seen in the data.

From here, I could tell you a lot on how Italians are reacting (actually, non-reacting) to the situation. In this hot summer of 2008, Italians are enjoying their vacations. They seem to be worried mainly about sports and convinced that all problems are due to crime, speculation and immigration. Most people seem to believe that the Euro currency is the culprit for the decreasing purchasing power their salaries. Nobody is discussing the possibility of an economic collapse. Whenever some data show that the economy has improved a bit, it is hailed with enthusiasm in the front pages of the newspapers. When the data show that it has gone down (much more often) it is written in small characters in an inner page. Italians may be unpleasantly surprised on coming back from their vacations, this september.

The government of Mr. Berlusconi has been elected a few months ago on the basis of plenty of promises that – as usual for governments – will be hard to maintain. Besides cutting deeply on expenses, including privileges of public employees, the government seems to think that all problems can be solved by a grand plan of public works that includes new nuclear plants, a giant bridge over the strait of Messina, high speed railways, highways, waste incinerators and more. The plan seems to be considered a good idea by most people, including the main opposition parties. But, of course, a lot of energy will be needed to carry out the plan. This energy will have to be imported and someone will have to pay for it. It doesn’t really matter whether the money will come from the government or from private funds, it is money that Italy doesn’t have. And you know what happens if you keep spending money you don’t have.

A slow collapse is a decline and a fast decline is a collapse. Whatever it is, as an Italian citizen, I am seeing it unfolding right around me. At least, I am fortunate enough in not being also an employee in a low cost airline.

Once, black caviar from the Caspian Sea was ubiquitous in Russia in its typical blue cans. Now, it has disappeared. “Peak Caviar” has taken place around 1980 in Russia

[break]

This July, traveling in Russia, one of the things that I noticed was the disappearance of black caviar. Once, it had been common and – in the days after the fall of the Soviet Union – very cheap for Westerners with dollars in their pockets. Now it was gone; conspicuously missing from the otherwise well stocked supermarkets and shopping malls of today’s Moscow.

I asked what had happened; the answer that I received was that the government had prohibited the sale of black caviar. This explanation came with some extra details, such as that the ban had come because the market had been taken over by some unspeakable Caucasian mafia which had set up a lucrative black market. Curious, because red caviar from the Far East was still on sale. People seem to try all the possible mental exercises before they are willing to use the dreaded word “depletion”.

Back home, searching the internet, I found that it is true that the Russian government has banned caviar sales in January 2008. It is also reported that there have been problems with illegal sales. The reason for all this, however, is a simple one: sturgeons, the source of black caviar, are nearly completely gone. “Peak sturgeon”, and as a consequence, “peak caviar (black)”, took place around 1980. This is something I know well since I had written a paper on the subject that I presented at the fourth ASPO conference in Lisbon in 2005. Here are some data from the paper (Bardi and Yaxley, 2005)

As you see, there has been an evident peak around 1980. Note also how prices (corrected for inflation) go up exponentially. It is the same that was observed with whale oil (Bardi 2008) and that we are seeing now with oil prices. In early 2008, Caspian caviar prices had skyrocketed to about 10-20 k$/kg (note that in the figure prices are per kg of sturgeon )

“Peak Caviar” is another confirmation of how common the “Hubbert” behavior is. It doesn’t matter if a resource is theoretically renewable, as sturgeons and whales are. If sturgeons or whales are killed much faster than they can reproduce, then they behave as a non renewable resource; just as crude oil. Note also something that we had not noticed in the first study. Initially, we had fitted the curve with a symmetric gaussian or derivative logistic function; that is what you can see in the figure taken from the paper. But, later on, we added more points to the graph and my coauthor, Leigh Yaxley, found that the fitting was much better using an asymmetric logistic. This graph is not in the paper presented in Lisbon.

As you see, the declining phase of the production curve is much faster than the growth phase. In my interpretation (Bardi 2005), these asymmetric curves appear when people make a large effort to continue increasing production. By means of increasing efforts and using the best technologies, it is possible to make production continue its growth beyond its “natural” peak at midpoint. This increase, necessarily, is paid with a more rapid fall after the peak. Renato Guseo (2008) and his coworkers have modeled the same behavior for the world’s crude oil production.

The model by Guseo et al. (2005)

If that happens today, that is if crude oil production falls so rapidly as we see in these curves, well, we are in deep trouble. Black caviar is something we can do without, but that is not true for black gold

References

Bardi, U, and Yaxley, L. 2005, proceedings of the 4th ASPO conference, Lisbon. Link at the Oil Drum

Bardi, U., 2005, The mineral economy: a model for the shape of oil production curves, Energy Policy, Volume 33, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 53-61

Bardi, U. 2008, “The Oil Drum”, May 15, http://www.theoildrum.com/tag/whale_oil

Catarci, C. 2004, FAO Fisheries Circular No. 990 http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/DOCREP/006/Y5261E/Y5…

Guseo, R., Dalla Valle, A. and Guidolin, M. 2005. World Oil Depletion Models: Price Effects Compared with Strategic or Technological Interventions, http://homes.stat.unipd.it/guseo/Ms05jeem.pdf

19th century whaling is today one of the best examples we have of a complete cycle of exploitation of a natural resource.

The production curves of whale oil and whale bone in the United States in 19th century (from “History of the American whale fishery” by A. Starbuck, 1878). Both show a clear bell shaped Hubbert’s curve. Click to enlarge.

[break]

A few years ago, I appeared in TV for the first time in my life. Oil had just passed 38 dollars per barrel and I was invited to speak in a national financial channel as the president of the newly formed Italian section of ASPO. When I said that I expected oil to rise well over 40 $/bl soon, everyone in the TV studio looked at me as if I had just said something very funny. All the other experts there hastened to contradict me and said that 38 $ per barrel was just a spike, speculation, and that prices would soon go back to “normal.”

Seen in retrospect, it was an easy guess that oil prices had to rise. You only had to know a little about Hubbert’s theory. As I am writing these notes, oil prices stand at around 120 dollars per barrel and may well keep rising. But for how long? The problem with Hubbert’s model is that it is good for predicting production, but it tells you nothing about prices.

There are all sorts of economic models that attempt to predict prices, but their record is very poor. So, maybe the answer can be found in historical examples. If we can find a resource that has peaked and declined to zero or near zero production in the past, then its historical prices could give us some idea of what to expect today for oil.

There are many resources that have peaked and declined at the regional level; crude oil in the United States is a good example. But the price of US oil doesn’t depend only on US production; it is affected by imports from other regions of the world. So that’s not useful for understanding price trends at the global level. What we are looking for is a global resource that has peaked worldwide or, at least, in an economically isolated region.

After much search, the best example that I could find is not that of a mineral resource but of a biological one: whaling in 19th century. Whales are, of course, a renewable resource but if they are hunted much faster than they can reproduce, they behave as a non renewable resource; just like oil. We have good data about whaling compiled in books such as Alexander Starbuck’s “History of the American whale fishery” (1878). In Starbuck’s times there was no such thing as a “global market” for whale products. But the reach of the whaling ships was worldwide and the effects of whale depletion were felt in the same way by all markets in the world. So, we can take the prices reported by Starbuck as directly affected by the behavior of the production curve.

So, here are the results for the two products of whaling; whale oil and “whale bone”. Whale oil was used as fuel for lamps, whale bone was a stiffener for ladies’ clothes, as were fashionable in 19th century.


Whale oil production and prices (adjusted for inflation) according to Starbuck’s data.

Whale bone production and whale oil prices (adjusted for inflation) according to Starbuck’s data.

The results are clear: whaling did follow a Hubbert style “bell shaped curve”, approximated in the graphs with a simple Gaussian. Whales did behave like a non renewable resource and some studies say that at the end of the 19th century hunting cycle there remained in the oceans only about 50 females of the main species being hunted: right whales.

Now, looking at the historical prices, we see an increase in the vicinity of the peak for both whale oil and whale bone. For whale oil we see a spike after the peak, for whale bone the trend is smoother. In both cases, the smoothed growth is nearly exponential. We can see this exponential trend in the smoothed data.


Smoothed whale bone and whale oil prices (adjusted for inflation).

It seems that what we are seeing now for crude oil parallels the historical data for whale oil and whale bone. There are also differences; for instance the prices of whale oil didn’t rise so much as crude oil has been doing lately. On the average, for whale oil we see a doubling of the price, followed by a plateau. For whale bone, we see a much larger increase, more than a factor of 10 from the beginning to the end of the whaling cycle. This increase is comparable to what we are seeing today for crude oil.

There is a reasonable explanation for these differences. First of all, neither whale oil nor whale bone were so crucial for life in 19th century as crude oil is today for us. There were alternative fuels for lamps: animal fat or vegetable oil, a little more expensive and considered as inferior products; but usable. Then, starting in the 1870s, crude oil started to be commonly available as lamp fuel. It probably had an effect in keeping down the price of whale oil. For whale bone, instead, a replacement didn’t really exist except for steel, which was probably much more expensive during the period that we are considering. But stiffeners for ladies’ clothes were hardly something that people couldn’t live without.

In comparison, crude oil is such a basic commodity in our world that it is not surprising that prices have risen so steeply. Airlines, for instance, have no choice in between collapsing and buying oil at any price. For other activities, the conditions of the choice may not be so stark, but still we can’t survive without oil. If the exponential rise of oil prices were to continue unabated for a few more years, we would be seeing some kind of demand destruction, indeed.

But the historical data for whaling tell us that an exponential rise of the prices is not the only feature of the post-peak market. The prominent feature is, rather, the presence of very strong price oscillations. We can attribute these oscillations to a general characteristic of systems dominated by feedback and time delays. Prices are supposed to mediate between offer and demand, but tend to overcorrect on one side or another. The result is an alternance of demand destruction (high prices) and offer destruction (low prices).

What we are seeing at present with crude oil is, most likely, one of these price spikes. Eventually, it will overdo its job of curbing demand and turn into a price collapse. We can imagine how, in the collapsing phase, everyone will start screaming that the “oil crisis” of the first decades of 21st century was just a hoax, just as it was said for the crisis of the 1970s. Then, a new upward spike will start.

Here, too, the history of whaling can teach us something in terms of the difficulty that people have in understanding depletion. In Starbuck’s book, we never find mention that whales had become scarce. On the contrary, the decline of the catch was attributed to such factors as the whales’ “shyness” and the declining “character of the men engaged”. Starbuck seems to think that the crisis of the whaling industry of his times can be solved by means of governmental subsidies. Some things never change.

In the end, the history of whaling tells us that what is happening now to crude oil shouldn’t have taken us by surprise. The future can never be exactly predicted but, at least, it can be understood from the lessons of the past. One of these lessons, however, seems to be that we never seem to be able to learn from the past.

__________________________________________

I reported the results of this study on whaling for the first time at the ASPO conference in Lisbon in 2005. Later on, I published a complete paper in “Energy Prices and Resource Depletion: Lessons from the Case of Whaling in the Nineteenth Century” by Ugo Bardi, Energy Sources part b. Volume 2, Issue 3 July 2007 , pages 297 – 304. You can find it on line here

If you like to play with Starbuck’s data, here is the complete set .

The logo of the ASPOItaly-2 conference. It shows, superimposed to the classic ASPO peak, the mythical “post peak car“, the battery powered, retrofitted Fiat 500

Conference report, many links and some pictures below the fold.

[break]

The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference’s language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the “post peak car”, the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don’t have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (http://www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the “Sun Country”, has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners’ canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

_________________________________________

Visit ASPO Italy (mainly in Italian) or the ASPO Italy Blog (all in Italian).

ASPO Italy members have been active in writing guest posts for The Oil Drum. Here is a list:

Peak Minerals by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani

The Post Peak car by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi.

Peak Water in Saudi Arabia by Ugo Bardi.

Peak Oil and the limits to growth by Ugo Bardi

France and Italy: is nuclear energy the way to energy independence? by Eugenio Saraceno

Cassandra’s curse by Ugo Bardi

An extended abstract of Euan’s talk is available here (in Italian) and a pdf of the abstract in English can be downloaded from the TOD server.

This is a guest post by Eugenio Saraceno, member of ASPO-Italy and consultant for energy sources management.

<A href=”//www.theoildrum.com/files/626px-Nuclear_plants_map_France.jpg
“>

France’s nuclear power plants produce almost 80% of the nation’s electricity. In contrast, nearby Italy has no nuclear plant in operation.

[break]

One of the main arguments of the present debate on energy is whether a nuclear energy program should be restarted or not. We can use the cases of Italy and France as a way for evaluating whether it is a good idea for a non nuclear country to get nuclear plants.

Italy is probably the only country in the world that has dismantled by law the existing nuclear plants. It was the result of a referendum against nuclear power that was held twenty years ago and that led to the stopping of all nuclear energy activities in the country. The only nuclear plant that was under construction at the time, Montalto di Castro on the Tyrrenian coast, was converted to natural gas. In the following years, the Italian government shut down the remaining nuclear plants even though it this was not required by the results of the referendum, probably due to economic and security considerations.

So, nuclear power was completely abandoned in Italy in the 1980s and the country focused on hydrocarbons for the generation of electricity. Years of low oil prices helped this trend but, after 2000, with rising oil prices the debate on nuclear power restarted. Nuclear supporters say now that stopping the Italian nuclear program was a mistake and that new nuclear plants will have to be built because of the very low price per kWh produced. The debate is ongoing in the Italian TV and in the press and, recently, the leading candidate for the right wing party for the coming April elections, Mr. Berlusconi, has stated that, if elected, his government will restart the Italian nuclear program.

In contrast to the case of Italy, France is engaged in the most ambitious nuclear program in the whole world, achieving the maximum ratio of nuclear energy to total electric power production, near 80%. France has 63 GWe of installed nuclear power, 58 reactors over 19 sites.

For a comparison, first of all let’s see some data about the energy consumption in both countries.

All data in the table are for the year 2005. Look at the yellow boxes for a quick assessment of the relevant differences and similarities between the two systems. Coal consumption is nearly the same for France and Italy, while oil consumption is larger for France, especially for the transport and household sectors. However, natural gas consumption is lower in France by nearly 30 Mtep. Italians have to burn about 26 Mtep of natural gas in order to generate electric power. This is the relevant advantage of nuclear power: without nuclear, the French would have needed 75 Mtep extra of natural gas.

However, it is also clear that nuclear energy cannot satisfy all energy needs of a country. So, even though France has nuclear power, the country still has to import coal and hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil derived fuels) whose prices are not influenced by the presence of atomic power. So in 2005 the energy imports bill for France and Italy was nearly the same, 37,5 G€ for France and 38,5 for Italy.

We can also compare energy prices in France and Italy. Here are the relevant data.

Note how oil products have nearly the same price in both countries. Natural gas prices for both France and Italy are very similar and lower than the EU-15 mean. The real advantage for France is the low cost of electricity, lower than the EU-15 average and much lower than in Italy. Again, we see that nuclear energy has an effect on the prices of electricity, but not on other energy sectors.

France is a large net exporter of electric power while Italy is the largest net importer in Europe, mostly from France, directly or via Switzerland. France produces electrical power mainly by nuclear energy and hydropower. Italy mainly burns gas in combined cycles or oil and coal in steam turbine plants. Italy has also a good quota of hydropower and the best geothermal production in Europe. The electricity use table shows consumption in various sectors. This time the yellow boxes are all for France. First, look at the distribution losses and plant services consumption (electricity generation sector). These data describe the efficiency of electricity generation and distribution services processes; this ratio is 11,2% for France and 9,5% for Italy. The scarce attention for efficiency in France is probably due to the abundant and cheap electricity available. Considering final uses, the interesting point is the huge French household and service consumption sectors, nearly twice as large as in Italy.

Surely electricity is cheap in France, but what is the real cost of the nuclear kWh? As a first approximation let’s consider the whole French production as if it was all nuclear. Then consider that electricity consumption of France is partitioned into two nearly equal parts, industrial (at an average price of 54,1 €/MWh) and domestic (at an average price of 92,1 €/MWh), so the average income for producers is 73 €/MWh. This cost is the maximum possible cost for nuclear energy; otherwise operators couldn’t make a profit. The value fits well with IEA World Energy Outlook 2005 that estimates costs between 60-70 €/MWh for nuclear electricity. This value is very far from values of 20-30 €/MWh reported from some optimistic sources. These values could be justified only by means of unrealistic assumptions, such as plant lifespan over 35 years, medium plant availability over 7500 hours per year, interest rate under 5%, building time time less than 5 years, building cost less than 2000 €/kW and others.

It appears that electricity prices in France remain low thanks to the huge past investments in nuclear power. French Families and small firms pay for electricity very low rates, nearly half than what Italians have to pay. On the other hand, they enjoy so much these good rates that household and services consumption of electric power is double than in Italy. So, in the end, French and Italian people spend the same in terms of their electricity bill. Evidently, Jevons’s paradox is valid also for nuclear power: if you have something cheap, you tend to waste it.

As a last relevant point, let us consider the problem of nuclear fuel availability in the coming years. See below some data in the figure

Produceable uranium at various extraction costs (reasonably assured resources and inferred resource)

EDF (Electricité de France), the Franch nuclear utility, estimates that there exist economically exploitable uranium reserves for 60 years of present consumption (67 kT/year). This fits well with the on uranium by energy watch group (EWG). And then? And what if many countries step up their nuclear energy production? A research effort is ongoing on new nuclear technologies such as fast neutron reactors and more efficent uranium mining methods, even from seawater. But concrete results on these issues seem to be very far, Commercial fast neutron reactors are expected to be on the market in 2040; perhaps too late to have an effect on the scarcity of mineral uranium. Uranium from seawater was experimentally obtained in small quantities, of the order of kilograms. We do not see a program for commercial exploitation of the industrial quantities that would be needed, of the order of ktons. Moving to mineral uranium very low concentrations (<0,1%) is possible, but there is a minimum value of the concentration that can be exploited because the energy required for mining it would exceed electric energy that could be obtained from it. The EWG reports that this limit is 0,01%, others report lower values but it is clear that today we have a strong uncertainty on the availability of mineral uranium and, as a consequence, on the role of nuclear energy in the future. This could be the real reasons for the modest growth of the nuclear sector in the last few years.

In the end, we see that complete independence in energy production with nuclear power was not reached by France, nor Italy could hope to reach it by revamping its old nuclear program at this point. To reach the French level of nuclear energy production, Italy would have to build almost 20 GWe of nuclear power, spend over 40 G€ and this would take some 10-20 years. Doing so, Italy couldn’t hope to become independent from hydrocarbon imports since we see that France couldn’t do that, either, despite all her nuclear reactors.

Energy independence for countries that have (or plan to build) nuclear energy could be obtained increasing the cost of electricity costs in order to avoid wasting power and using the extra incomes for financing energy efficiency and substituting hydrocarbons using plug-in hybrid or all electric veichles in urban areas and heat pumps for household and services. Obviously, this has not been done in France: in no country of the world politicians become popular by raising prices of utilities. So, France has not attained energy independence, despite the huge effort made on nuclear power. Whether the return to nuclear energy planned by Italy and other countries can do that, is all to be seen.

References

Several resources have been utilized for the preparation of this paper. Statistics on the energy use in France and Italy have been derived from the Eurostat site

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=0,1136239,0_4557144…

Specific data about italy have been obtained from
www.terna.it
www.mercatoelettrico.org/GmeWebInglese/Default.aspx
www.snamretegas.it (Italian gas utility)
www.autorita.energia.it

Specific data about France came from
www.rte-france.com
www.edf.com
www.gazdefrance.com
www.areva.com (French nuclear utility)
www.prix-carburants.gouv.fr/index.php?module=dbgestion&action=search

Data about uranium production and costs have been obtained from

www.world-nuclear.org/info/uprod.html World uranium production
www.uxc.com/review/uxc_Prices.aspx Uranium prices

The study by the energy watch group cited in the text can be found at
www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Uraniumreport_12-2006….

A general discussion on the cost of nuclear energy (in italian) can be found at http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/coiante/coiantecostonucleare.pd… http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/coiante/coiantenucleare2.pdf

Above: image from an Athenian red vase from 5th century BC: Cassandra falls victim of the usual destiny of those who tell inconvenient truths.

[break]

The first book of the “The Limits to Growth” series was published in 1972 by a group of researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens III. The book reported the results of a study commissioned by a group of intellectuals who had formed the “Club of Rome” a few years before. It examined the evolution of the whole world’s economy by means of a mathematical model based on “system dynamics”, a method that had been developed earlier on by Jay W. Forrester. Using computers, a novelty for the time, the LTG world model could keep track of a large number of variables and of their interactions as the system changed with time. The authors developed a number of scenarios for the world’s future in various assumptions. They found that, unless specific measures were taken, the world’s economy tended to collapse at some time in 21st century. The collapse was caused by a combination of resource depletion, overpopulation, and growing pollution (this last element we would see today as related to global warming).

In 1972, the LTG study arrived in a world that had known more than two decades of unabated growth after the end of the Second World War. It was a time of optimism and faith in technological progress that, perhaps, had never been so strong in the history of humankind. With nuclear power on the rise, with no hint that mineral resources were scarce, with population growing fast, it seemed that the limits to growth, if such a thing existed, were so far away in the future that there was no reason to worry. In any case, even if these limits were closer than generally believed, didn’t we have technology to save us? With nuclear energy on the rise, a car in every garage, the Moon just conquered in 1968, the world seemed to be all set for a shiny future. Against that general feeling, the results of LTG were a shock.

There is a legend lingering around the LTG report that says that it was laughed off as an obvious quackery immediately after it was published. It is not true. The study was debated and criticized, as it is normal for a new theory or idea. But it raised enormous interest and millions of copies were sold. Evidently, despite the general optimism of the time, the study had given visibility to a feeling that wasn’t often expressed but that was in everybody’s minds. Can we really grow forever? And if we can’t, for how long can growth last? The LTG study provided an answer to these questions; not a pleasant one, but an answer nevertheless.

The LTG study had everything that was needed to become a major advance in science. It came from a prestigious institution, the MIT; it was sponsored by a group of brilliant and influential intellectuals, the Club of Rome; it used the most modern and advanced computation techniques and, finally, the events that were taking place a few years after publication, the great oil crisis of the 1970s, seemed to confirm the vision of the authors. Yet, the study failed in generating a robust current of academic research and, a couple of decades after the publication, the general opinion about it had completely changed. Far from being considered the scientific revolution of the century, in the 1990s LTG had become everyone’s laughing stock. Little more than the rumination of a group of eccentric (and probably slightly feebleminded) professors who had really thought that the end of the world was near. In short, Chicken Little with a computer.

The reversal of fortunes of LTG was gradual and involved a debate that lasted for decades. At first, critics reacted with little more than a series of statements of disbelief which carried little weight. There were a few early papers carrying more in-depth criticism, notably by William Nordhaus (1973) and by a group of researchers of the university of Sussex that went under the name of the “Sussex Group” (Cole 1973). Both studies raised a number of interesting points but failed in their attempt of demonstrating that the LTG study was flawed in its basic assumptions.

Already these early papers by Nordhaus and by the Sussex group showed an acrimonious streak that became common in the debate from the side of the critics. Political criticism, personal attacks and insults against the LTG authors, and in general a rather rude attitude. For instance, the editor of the journal that had published Nordhaus’ 1973 paper refused to published Forrester’s response to it. With time, the debate veered more and more on the political side. In 1997, the Italian economist Giorgio Nebbia, noted that the reaction against the LTG study had arrived from at least four different fronts. One was from those who saw the book as a threat to the growth of their businesses and industries. A second set was that of professional economists, who saw LTG as a threat to their dominance in advising on economic matters. The Catholic world provided further ammunition for the critics, being piqued at the suggestion that overpopulation was one of the major causes of the problems. Then, the political left in the Western World saw the LTG study as a scam of the ruling class, designed to trick workers into believing that the proletarian paradise was not a practical goal. And this by Nebbia is a clearly incomplete list; forgetting religious fundamentalists, the political right, the believers in infinite growth, politicians seeking for easy solutions to all problems and many others.

All together, these groups formed a formidable coalition that guaranteed a strong reaction against LTG. This reaction eventually succeeded in demolishing the study in the eyes of the majority of the public and of specialists at the same time. This demolition was greatly helped by a factor that initially had bolstered the credibility of the study: the world oil crisis of the 1970s

The crisis had peaked in 1979 but, in the years that followed, oil started flowing abundantly from the North Sea and from Saudi Arabia. With oil prices plummeting down, it seemed to many that the crisis had been nothing but a scam; the failed attempt of a group of fanatic sheiks of dominating the world using oil as a weapon. Oil, it seemed, was, and had always been, plentiful and was destined to remain so forever. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “New Economy” appearing, all worries seemed to be over. History had ended and all what we needed to do was to relax and enjoy the fruits that our high technology would provide for us.

At this point, a perverse effect started to act on people’s minds. In the late 1980s, all what was remembered of the LTG book, published almost two decades before, was that it had predicted some kind of catastrophe at some moment in the future. If the world oil crisis had been that catastrophe, as it had seemed to many, the fact that it was over was the refutation of the same prediction. This factor had a major effect on people’s perception of the LTG study.

The change in attitudes was gradual and spanned a number of years, however we can locate a specific date and an author for the actual turning point, the switch that changed LTG from a respectable, if debatable, study to everybody’s laughing stock. It happened in 1989 when Ronald Bailey, science editor of the Forbes magazine, published a sneering attack (Bailey 1989) against Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics. The attack was also directed against the LTG book which Bailey said was, “as wrong-headed as it is possible to be”. To prove his point Bailey revived an observation that had already been made in 1972 by a group of economists on the “New York Times” (Passel 1972). Bailey said that:

“Limits to Growth” predicted that at 1972 rates of growth the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, copper, lead and natural gas by 1993.

In 1993 Bailey reiterated his accusations in the book titled “Ecoscam.” This time, he could state that none of the predictions of the 1972 LTG study had turned out to be correct.

Of course, Bailey’s accusations are just plain wrong. What he had done was extracting a fragment of the LTG text and criticizing it out of context. In table 4 of the second chapter of the book, he had found a row of data (column 2) for the duration, expressed in years, of some mineral resources. He had presented these data as the only “predictions” that the study had made and he had based his criticism on that, totally ignoring the rest of the book.

Reducing a book of more than a hundred pages to a few numbers is not the only fault of Bailey’s criticism. The fact is that none of the numbers he had selected was a prediction and nowhere in the book it was stated that these numbers were supposed to be read as such. Table 4 was there only to illustrate the effect of a hypothetical continued exponential growth on the exploitation of mineral resources. Even without bothering to read the whole book, the text of chapter 2 clearly stated that continued exponential growth was not to be expected. The rest of the book, then, showed various scenarios of economic collapse that in no case took place before the first decades of 21st century.

It would have taken little effort to debunk Bailey’s claims. But it seemed that, despite the millions of copies sold, all the LTG books had ended in the garbage bin. Or, perhaps, browsing one’s shelves was considered too much of an effort to be worth doing in a moment when, with the new economy starting to run, there were better things to do. Whatever the case, Bailey’s criticism had success and it started behaving with all the characteristics of what we call today “urban legends.” We all know how persistent urban legends can be, no matter how silly they are. At the time of Bailey’s article and book, the internet as we know it didn’t exist yet, but word of mouth and the press were sufficient to spread and multiply the legend of the “wrong predictions” of the LTG study.

Just to give an example, let’s see how Bailey’s text even reached the serious scientific literature. In 1993, William Nordhaus had published a paper titled “Lethal Models” which was meant as an answer to the second edition of LTG, published in 1992. Despite the title, a little aggressive to say the least, it was a serious study. In it, Nordhaus criticized the 1992 LTG study, but also corrected some of the most glaring mistakes of his first study on the subject (Nordhaus 1973). However, the paper was accompanied by a series of texts by various authors grouped under the title of “Comments and Discussion”. A better definition of that section would have been “feeding frenzy” as criticism of this distinguished group of academic economists clearly went out of control. Among these texts, we find one by Robert Stavins, an economist from Harvard University, where we can read that:

If we check today to see how the Limits I predictions have turned out, we learn that (according to their estimates) gold, silver, mercury, zinc, and lead should be thoroughly exhausted, with natural gas running out within the next eight years. Of course, this has not happened.

That, obviously, is taken straight from Bailey. Apparently, the excitement of a “Limits-bashing” session had led Stavins to forget that it is the duty of a serious scientist to check the reliability of the sources that he or she cites. Unfortunately, with this paper the legend of the “wrong predictions” of LTG was even enshrined in a serious academic journal.

With the 1990s, and in particular with the development of the internet, we can say that the dam gave way and a true flood of criticism swamped LTG and its authors. One after the other, scientists, journalists, and whoever felt entitled to discuss the subject, started repeating the same line over and over: the LTG study had predicted a catastrophe that didn’t take place and therefore the whole idea was wrong.

After a while the concept of the “wrong predictions” became so widespread that it wasn’t any more necessary to state in detail what these wrong predictions were. At some point, it became politically incorrect even to declare that LTG might have been, after all, not so wrong as some people thought. The criticism could also become aggressive and I can cite at least one internet page where you can read that the authors of the LTG book should be killed, cut to pieces, and their organs sent to organ banks. Hopefully, that was meant as a joke (perhaps). Today, we can use Google to find Bailey’s legend repeated on the internet literally thousands of times in various forms, with minimal variations. In hundreds of cases, it is exactly the same, cut and pasted as it is; in others it is just slightly modified.

At this point, we may ask ourselves whether this wave of slander had arisen by itself, as the result of the normal mechanism of human legends, or it had been somehow masterminded by someone, the result of what we call nowadays “viral marketing”. Can we think of a conspiracy organized against the LTG group, or against their sponsors, the Club of Rome?

The question is not unreasonable since the LTG authors were accused in all seriousness by ostensibly respectable researchers to be themselves the acting branch of an evil conspiracy organized by the oil multinationals in order to enslave most of humankind and create “a kind of fanatical dictatorship” (Golub and Towsend, 1977). Could it be that the LTG group were victims, rather than perpetrators, of a conspiracy?

On this point we can seek an analogy with the case of Rachel Carson, well known for her book “Silent Spring” of 1962 in which she criticized the overuse of DDT and other pesticides. Also Carson’s book was strongly criticized and demonized. Kimm Groshong has reviewed the story and she tells us in her 2002 study that:

The minutes from a meeting of the Manufacturing Chemists’ Association, Inc. on May 8, 1962, demonstrate this curious stance. Discussing the matter of what was printed in Carson’s serialization in the New Yorker, the official notes read: “The Association has the matter under serious consideration, and a meeting of the Public Relations Committee has been scheduled on August 10 to discuss measures which should be taken to bring the matter back to proper perspective in the eyes of the public.”

Whether we can call that a “conspiracy” is open to discussion, but clearly there was an organized effort on the part of the chemical industry against Rachel Carson’s ideas. By analogy, we could think that, in some smoke filled room, representatives of the world’s industry had gathered to decide what measures to take against the LTG study in order to “bring the matter back to proper perspective in the eyes of the public”

We can’t rule out that something like that took place, but it seems unlikely. Surely, think tanks and political groups financed studies that were likely to arrive to conclusions differing from those of LTG. But the demolition of the LTG ideas seems to have been mainly a spontaneous process, probably helped, but not directly caused, by economic interests. The 1989 article by Ronald Bailey was no more than a catalyst for something that, most likely, would have taken place anyway. It was the result of the tendency of our minds to believe what we want to believe and to disbelieve what we don’t want to believe.

Now, in the early years of 21st century the general attitude towards LTG seems to be changing again. The war, after all, is won by those who win the last battle and the LTG ideas are becoming again popular. One of the first cases of reappraisal has been that of Matthew Simmons (2000), expert on crude oil resources. It seems that the “peak oil movement” has been instrumental in bringing back to attention the LTG study. Indeed, oil depletion can be seen as a subset of the world model used in the study (Bardi 2008).

Climate studies have also brought back the limits of resources to attention; in this case intended as the limited capability of the atmosphere to absorb the products of human activities. In this field, the LTG study can be seen as having taken the right approach from the beginning; modeling for the first time the interaction of the environment with the human industrial and agricultural system.

But it is not at all obvious that a certain view of the world, one that takes into account the finite amount of resources, is going to become prevalent, or even just respectable. Consider that, in the 1980s – 1990s, a decade of lull in oil prices was enough to convince everyone that all worries about resource depletion were akin to the substance that male bovines produce from their rear end. Now, imagine that for some reasons the world’s average temperatures were to stabilize, or even slightly go down, for some years. Or imagine that oil prices were to stabilize or go down for some years. That wouldn’t change anything to the concepts of global warming and peak oil, which deal both with long term changes. But it would be sufficient to unleash a smear wave similar to that which engulfed LTG. It could easily do the same damage to the efforts against global warming and oil depletion.

Prophets of doom, nowadays, are not stoned to death, at least not usually. Demolishing ideas that we don’t like is done in a rather subtler manner. The success of the smear campaign against the LTG ideas shows the power of propaganda and of urban legends in shaping the public perception of the world, exploiting our innate tendency of rejecting bad news. Because of these tendencies, the world has chosen to ignore the warning of impending collapse that came from the LTG study. In so doing, we have lost more than 30 years. Now, there are signs that we may be starting to heed the warning, but it may be too late and we may still be doing too little. Cassandra’s curse may still be upon us.

References

Bailey, Ronald 1989, “Dr. Doom” Forbes, Oct 16, p. 45

Bardi, U. 2008, “Peak oil and the Limits to Growth: two parallel stories”, The Oil Drum. http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3550

Cole H.S.D., Freeman C., Jahoda M., Pavitt K.L.R., 1973, “Models of Doom” Universe Books, New York

Golub R., Townsend J., 1977, “Malthus, Multinationals and the Club of Rome” vol 7, p 201-222

Groshong, K. 2002, “The Noisy Response to Silent Spring: Placing Rachel Carson’s Work in Context!, Pomona College, Science, Technology, and Society Department Senior Thesis http://www.sts.pomona.edu/ThesisSTS.pdf

Nebbia, G. 1997, Futuribili, New Series, Gorizia (Italy) 4(3) 149-82

Nordhaus W., 1973 “Word Dynamics: Measurements without Data“, The Economic Journal n. 332.

Nordhaus W. D., 1992, “Lethal Models” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2, 1

Passel, P., Roberts, M., Ross L., 1972, New York Times, April 2

Simmons, M., 2000, “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?” http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/172.pdf