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Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels?
An anonymous reader writes: We often talk about our dependence on fossil fuels, and vigorously debate whether and how we should reduce that dependence. This article at Aeon sidesteps the political bickering and asks an interesting technological question: if we had to rebuild society, could we do it without all the fossil fuels we used to do it the first time? When people write about post-apocalyptic scenarios, the focus is usually on preserving information long enough for humanity to rebuild. But actually rebuilding turns out to be quite a challenge when all the easy oil has been bled from the planet.
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke - a fossil fuel.
Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.
What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.
It's like trying to switch to an all self-grown, vegetarian diet after growing a single tomato and saying "See, it's easy to grow all your own food."
I so love this example. How many people even have enough space in their suburban yards to grow enough vegetables to meet their needs for even a few weeks, much less for a full year? Yea, you might get enough tomatoes out of that garden to put on your salads for a few months and even have enough to can a few jars worth, but you are NEVER going to feed even one person on a quarter of an acre.
Add to that this idea that we can just grow biodiesel producing plants to fuel our cars and I'm laughing. There is simply no way we have enough land, water and natural fertilizer to make that work on a world wide scale, unless you don't mind having a large fraction of the world's population starving...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
castor bean oil is an excellent lubricant used in many industrial situations.
If I had mod points today, I'd mod you up. Personally I'm skeptical that CO_2 will lead to a climate disaster, but either way burning all our oil and coal is incredibly stupid as they are the base stock for pretty much all organic chemistry synthesis, and while sure, if/when we master fusion or get off of our backsides and start burning thorium and drop PV solar to the point where it can interpolate or provide industrial daytime energy in suitable locations we can work comparatively inefficient magic with other materials, aside from methane the carbon itself is likely to be entropically downhill from where we'd like it to be and it will cost us a lot of energy to reverse that. I'm pretty skeptical, however, of electric cars -- maybe a bit less so of biofuels -- I don't think people realize that it would require 100% of an entire day's worth of clear-sky production of their $20,000 5 KW rooftop solar system to not-quite replace 1 single gallon of gasoline. No matter how you amortize that, it isn't going to be pretty. Biofuels have the same issue, they just get to the gallon via different route -- a lot of land surface, water, human effort, and capital investment per gallon equivalent of fuel.
Fusion is really the critical technology. If we master D-D commercially scalable fusion, as long as we can don't lose the knowledge and can bootstrap a single fusion plant we can "reboot" civilization. The problem we're soon going to be facing, however, is that all of our knowledge is going to be stored in a volatile form that will be absolutely unreadable post-apocalypse, and in another generation or two humans will get so lazy and dependent on instant access to information they had to at one time internalize that a collapse will lose nearly everything we know in a single generation. Paper isn't a perfect medium for preserving knowledge, but it does have the advantage of lasting for as long as centuries with reasonable care and not requiring any particular technology to read from it, and only very modest technology to produce it and print to it.
So let's all sing a canticle for Liebowitz and imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which priests are running around conserving -- usb sticks, old dvds, ancient hard drives, or little tiny chips of plastic with tarnished brass that individually could contain a good chunk of Wikipedia but are as useless as a boar's teats without a mountain of technology too high to imagine any primitive culture surmounting in any amount of time.
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Most electric plants are just fancy steam engines. Even the nuke plants. Boil water and drive the generators with the steam pressure.
Coal is just a more efficient version of wood. Wood is renewable and we already know we can run an industrial society on coal.
Also, look up the Stanley Steamer some time. We don't even need oil to have motor cars, just high enough quality metallurgy to build pressure containers. And if we save the books, we save metallurgy.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This, right here.
Asphalt gets worn down by rain and sunlight (yes, UV radiation.) Plants and ice force cracks into it. temperatures make it shrink and grow, causing mini tidal actions of a sort that eventually breaks it down. Landslides, erosion, and slow-motion soil subsidence will cover or tear off bits of it in all but the most level of terrains. Trees and wind will cover it in dirt until plants take root in that dirt and do the rest. Out here in the Pacific Northwest, moss and lichens will, if not treated, cover the road in a carpet and allow seeds to take root in it.
You'd be amazed how fast a modern-built road goes to hell. I think only the Romans were able to build a road that lasted for any real length of time with little-to-no maintenance, but only because they really over-engineered the things (on the plus side, even today a couple of millennia later some stretches are still used and routinely ignored maintenance-wise).
Put it this way: The Chinese have a saying that a new road is good for ten years, but bad for the next ten thousand. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You heard wrong. There is almost no anthracite of any appreciable quantity left. The best coal was all mined out ages ago. What is left is for mining today of poor quality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal
High-BTU anthracite coal peaked in 1914;[5] and declined from 44 million tons in 1950 to 1.6 million tons in 2007. Bituminous coal extraction has also been declining since 1990. The gap has been taken up by large increases in subbituminous coal extraction.[14]