Energy and Civilization
How Energy and Civilization Change Together
By Toby Kinkaid
Energy and civilization has always grown together. Two million years ago, or there about, human’s mastered the art of fire. Everything changed for the better – protection from predation, heat, light and the real game changer: cooking.
As human civilization developed around fire we begin to define different “ages” based on the material science we’ve come to master. In the stone age it was stone tools, knives, spears and all kinds of implements for scrapping, digging and even some protection. Hurling stones could also assist in bringing down prey from a safer distance.
As our fires grew hotter we entered the amazing age of metals. First Copper. The Copper age introduced a whole new era in material handling: forging. After thousands of years of learning how to smelt Copper from ores it was found adding about 9% Tin changes Copper to Bronze. Much more durable as tools and weapons the Bronze Age brought civilization to new heights of development leading then to the Iron Age.
The ancient Romans were of the Iron Age where hotter furnaces made possible the reduction of common iron-ore to Iron and then with further control of the Carbon content produced steel.
Jump forward thousands of years to three hundred years ago and the First Industrial Revolutions is at hand.
The jump from animal or human muscle to the steam engine were made possible with increased strength of materials, namely improved Steel for pressure vessels (the boiler) – all the result of hotter fires and furnaces.
The Second Industrial revolution was Electrical. With electrical equipment you can control mechanical equipment and together the modern age crawls out of infancy and into great leaps of transportation, communications, navigation and driving it all – the Steam Engine.
The 18th century gave us the Steam Engine and the dawn of the industrial ages. The 19th century moved the combustion from External (the steam engine) to Internal (the internal combustion engine) where combustion occurs inside the working cylinder. The 20th century brought us the Jet Engine Turbine. Using turbines power generation and transportation jumps again.
In all of these industrial revolutions, the 1st Mechanical, the 2nd Electrical, and the Third being optical, respectively, the world leaps again.
By the 1960s optical technology advanced with Lasers and industrial control of light intensity etching brings us the ability to use Optics, to control Electronics, to control Mechanics – and the true modern age is born.
However, even though we don’t expect people to use a Telegraph anymore when Smart phones are available, we still have one foot in the past when it comes to energy. Most of our electricity generation is still done in the same way your Great, Great Grand-Pappy used to do: we still boil water.
Worst yet, we use rivers of water to cool down the Condenser side of the steam engine so we can boil the water again. This may be revolutionary in the 1750s as James Watt’s Steam Engine surely was, but perhaps it’s now time to take another look and see if we can enter the modern century – and leave boiling water behind.
Energy and Civilization
Fuels Through the Ages
Energy and civilization run on fuels.
Fuels through the ages have followed a distinct pattern: they get more energy dense. Makes sense, as civilization develops more is demanded from our machines and the more energy dense the fuel the better. History surely bares this out.
For most of humanity, over 99.99% in fact, energy was entirely naturally occurring. Energy and civilization were mostly powered with muscle both human and animal. The next dense energy source was wood.
Wood, and later Charcoal by digging a pit, throw in wood setting it ablaze – then bury it. The Anaerobic conditions leached out impurities and left mostly Carbon – with lots of Hydrogen stuck to it.
Burning biomass directly yields a specific energy density of around 18 MJ/kg much higher than human or animal muscle. Most work done for most of humanity, with the exception of early water wheels, windmills, and wind for sailing, was all done by muscle. The specific energy density of muscle human or animal is around 8 MJ/Kg.
Around 300 years ago when we tapped into coal the specific energy density of the fuel – goes up. Coal has an energy density, depending on the quality, of around 33 MJ/Kg. A big jump over muscle and the result was the 1st industrial revolution.
The 18th Century saw this enormous increase in fuel energy density. In the 19th Century moving from External combustion to Internal combustion the fuel of choice – rock oil distillates.
Crude Oil has an energy density of around 44 MJ/Kg and again as machines improve in power density, so must the energy density of the fuel. In the 20th Century again fuel jumped up in energy density with the use of Natural Gas and refined aviation fuels.
Methane (Natural Gas) has an energy density of around 55 MJ/Kg as do some aviation fuels and other petroleum distillates. History shows us that through the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Industrial revolutions, respectively, fuel energy density goes up. It doesn’t go down – it most certainly goes up. The historical trend is for more energy dense fuels through the ages.
How does Hydrogen compare? Well, best of all. The energy density of Hydrogen is around 140 MJ/Kg. If history is any indicator the future fuel for our civilization is Hydrogen.
Engines and Fuel Through the Industrial Ages
Energy and civilization can be said “Energy and Engines.” They’re joined at the hip. Over the last three hundred years the world has become fossil fueled. This is a challenging entrenched industry with centuries of infrastructure as inertia.
Thousands of miles of pipelines are distributed throughout heavy-use corridors. The shipment of energy via fossil fuels is like the life blood coursing through our veins.
Unfortunately, that life-blood being toxic is a short term fix. The problem with fossil fuels is not only toxicity, inequity, economic volatility and constricted supply – it’s a commodity.
The economics of the world of energy is commodity based. You want fuel? Pay for it. You want it again? Pay for it again, and so on.
In the 21st century a technological revolution is at hand, just as we’ve seen over and over again. Each century of energy and civilization brings new capabilities. As it is today.
A better way of doing things, a way which increases profit to the consumer will ultimately displace the paradigm which existed before hand – where profit was limited to the supplier alone. It’s always true and we can trace it through history time and again.
The 21st Century industrial revolution will be just that – but with one thing more: an economic revolution. Energy and civilization are transforming again. Yes, energy will be a commodity for a while to come, but the innovation here, the big leap is that consumers have a choice. Buy energy, or provide it yourself.
This is impossible in a Fossil Fuel powered world, but very practical with a green hydrogen powered world.
Green Hydrogen systems from an economic perspective are a game changer. The previous economic model of only a few producing fuel and selling it to someone will be replaced with a new option: make it yourself onsite with no toxicity and fuel costs.
There is an old joke: “the coal mines? We own them, the oil fields, we own them too, the natural gas wells, they’re ours as well. What’s that you ask? Solar Energy? Well, that’s not practical.”
See the point? The oil industry has stood behind their racket for a long time convincing political and economic leaders that control the oil and you control the money. Which has been true. After all, energy is a big business. More money is spent on fuel costs in aggregate around the world than education and healthcare combined.
It seems when it comes to priorities, fuel, vital for economic function is job one. The paradigm shift of green hydrogen changes the “commodity” supplied by a third-party idea into a self-reliant idea. You can still buy energy from others, many able and willing will sell green hydrogen to a consumer. The big difference is before it was your only choice to buy and burn fossil fuels.
Today, you can build your own green hydrogen system anywhere in the world and produce modern products, heat your homes and offices, and run your factories largely on the footprint of land being used, and in conjunction with nearby parking lots and other dual use deployment of solar energy resources – the world takes on a new paradigm in the very energy on which we all depend.
Energy and Civilization is all about the Energy Density in Fuels
Fossil fuels are Hydrocarbons. They’re molecules made from Hydrogen and Carbon. If you shrunk yourself down to the world of molecules we can imagine a Carbon atom the size of a basketball. How large are the four Hydrogen in Methane, for example at CH4, compared with the Carbon?
Imagine four grains of sand arranged on the surface of the basket ball. In reality, the energy isn’t in the Carbon as the graphic to the right demonstrates. As you go from solid, to liquid to gases, such as coal, oil, and natural gas, respectively we see a curious thing.
The more you reduce the Carbon content of the fuel, the more energy density the fuel contains!
Coal has around 33 MJ/Kg. Oil at 44 MJ/Kg. and Natural Gas around 55 MJ/Kg. In each case the relative amount of Carbon involved goes down – and energy density goes up.
How about we remove the Carbon all together? Will the energy density go up or down? It goes up, of course, because as the relative amount of Hydrogen goes up – specific energy density goes up. Remove the Carbon all together and Hydrogen itself has the highest energy density of all. About three times higher by weight than gasoline.
The energy is in the Hydrogen bond. Always has been, regardless of fuel, and always will be. The industrial revolution of the 21st century is based on this fact.
The Evolution of Revolution
There’s an old saying “the only one who wants change is a baby with a full diaper.”
Something to be said for that. Rockefeller had a worldwide empire for lighting fuel called Kerosine. When electric lighting came on the scene by 1893 Rockefeller pivoted to the new fangled “Gasoline” and pushed for its adoption.
At the time one third of cars were electric. One third were flex fuel steam engines which could burn anything to fuel the boiler. Rockefeller decided to pivot to gasoline but he had his work cut out for him with such technological competitors.
Rockefeller was no dunce. He knew how to take over a market exactly the way he did it with Kerosine: control the pinch points, namely refining – which he had well in hand.
Leading up to World War I Rockefeller, a long hand at doing business with the government, lobbied heavily to the military and other government agencies to adopt diesel trucking over calvary.
The Diesel engine, a subject for another blog, offered chemical liquid fuels of respectable energy density which translates into range but also offered the power density to get the job done. Rockefeller built a new empire on energy and transportation fuels – a market two orders of magnitude larger than Kerosine.
Gasoline and Diesel fuels for larger engines fit perfectly into this modus operandi and set the course for every military conflict of this and the last century: control the oil fields and energy supply and you control the battle.
Internal Combustion Engines waste most of the Energy out of the Tailpipe
In the 21st Century, at the end of the day, how does it make any sense to go to so much trouble to extract, transport, refine, transport again – only to waste most of the energy out of the tailpipe?
And not just a little. Total global emissions are around 40 Billion tons per year. And, that’s just air pollution. If you want to consider soil, water, and biological pollution which results then the number becomes even more astronomical.
Our toxicity is our downing. Consider the supply chain for fossil fuels. If you didn’t know this is what we’ve done for centuries, you’d think the entire idea – well, nuts.
Let’s dig holes. Inject water and chemicals at great pressure. Fracture the rock and strata. Then extract, spill, leak and burn off anything you can’t use to transport often hundreds sometimes thousands of miles to process burning more fossil fuels. Fuel stores, railroads, pipelines, super tankers with on-loading and off-loading, refineries burning half the fuel to heat up the crude oil to fraction. Then, after all that, and so much more then you sell it piecemeal gallon by gallon to consumers who just want to get to work on time.
It’s not a scam, because there is a lot of energy still remaining in fossil fuels, but can we agree? It’s a racket. It’s a dirty business and always has been. The question now is what are we going to do about the present and the future? A business as usual world is a disaster as evidenced by species loss, water loss, increasing toxicity of air, water, soil, and biology, all due to burning toxic fuels.
There is a better way. And, it’s the only way which can scale and actually solve all of these issues and problems both locally and globally. The green hydrogen economy is the Industrial Revolution of the 21st century.
