I have long been influenced in this blog by a scientist named Vaclav Smil, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He has authored 40 books and more than 500 papers dealing with energy and its role in the world’s industrial economy.
In one of his books he writes about the 4 Key pillars of our industrial economy. They are steel, plastics, cement and ammonia. There are more pillars but Vaclav has chosen to list just these four. The key aspect of these four is that they all require specific fossil fuel inputs. I will take them individually. Take steel. Steel is not the same as iron. We have had iron for a very long time. One of the earliest sources was “bog iron” obtained during the Iron Age from about 1000 BC. These were chunks of iron that could be obtained from swamps and bogs without mining and was easier to smelt than using hard rock iron ore. The most valuable and useful use of iron is in the manufacture of steel. Steel is made by adding small amounts of carbon to iron and this carbon can be added from carbon sources such as charcoal , carbon monoxide or coal. The modern productions of steel didn’t really take off as an industrial product until the Bessemer process was invented in the 1800s by an Englishman of the same name. Even something as common as stainless steel didn’t come into broad use until about 70 years ago. The modern production of steel requires, indeed demands fossil energy inputs from diesel engines mining, and transporting the ore and coal to smelt and refine it into a product with the desired characteristics needed by its users. The Bessemer process demands the use of coal. Not only does coal provide the extreme heat needed to melt ore, it is essential as a cheap carbon source in order to convert iron into steel. You cannot make steel with the energy from a windmill or a solar panel or the Hoover Dam. OK, technically it is possible to use an electric arc furnace to melt and fabricate steel but for economical production of steel from ore you need an abundant and cheap carbon source and that is coal. IF coal disappears it may be possible to make steel in small quantities just as in former times by cutting down trees and using charcoal but when coal disappears, so will large scale steel production. It is theoretically possible to treat iron ore with hydrogen but it is far from economic given the paucity of industrial hydrogen almost all of which is derived from natural gas .
Plastics used in our current economy are made from natural gas and petroleum inputs such as natural gas liquids. There are hundreds of varieties but the petrochemical industry is entirely reliant upon these cheap fossil feed stocks. It is theoretically possible to make plastics or even any hydrocarbon from carbohydrates or algae or peanut butter but large scale economical production of plastics demands these fossil sources.
Cement is another pillar that is made at high temperature using fossil fuels which heat limestone to 2700 F mixed with silica sources. The resulting product is clinker which is ground down to a powder. If it is mixed with sand it becomes mortar which has been used for millennia to bind bricks and stone. If it is mixed with sand and pebbles it becomes concrete which is really the pillar of civilization. The energy involved in making cement is huge and limestone is fired with coal, gas or oil. In a town I used to live in (Pocatello ID) we had a cement plant that used to fire its kilns with scrap tires until the nearby inhabitants quashed that practice! This is another pillar that cannot be made by a windmill or a Chinese solar panel. If you think about it, our windmills are hundreds of tons of concrete at the base, steel as the structure, copper, neodymium in the alternator, and plastics, fiberglass and epoxy in the rotors. A windmill cannot replicate itself. It is technically possible to use less fossil energy to make cement but absent fossil energy (or tires!) without FF, you don’t have cement.
The final pillar is Ammonia, NH3 which is familiar to any house husband. Ammonia as a household cleaning chemical represents a tiny fraction of its utility. Ammonia is made by combining nitrogen which is 80% of our atmosphere with hydrogen. Ammonia can then be combined with a variety of salts like nitrate or sulfate to make fertilizer or with other compounds to make explosives. The process was invented in at the beginning of the 20th century. Fritz Haber developed the first significant method mixing gaseous nitrogen with a catalyst to bind the hydrogen in natural gas to the nitrogen. The technique was improved and refined by Bosch at the BASF chemical company just before World War 1 and is referred to as the Haber-Bosch process. It involves using large quantities of natural gas under very high pressures and temperatures. Ammonia’s most important derived product is commercial fertilizer which was introduced in the 1930s to increase crop production by providing nitrogen cheaply to plants and grains. This one single product has allowed the worlds’ population to more than triple since WW2. Vaclav Smil does not include pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides with ammonia but large scale industrial agriculture using ammonia would not exist without these products which are all made from fossil petroleum and natural gas.
These four pillars of industry consume a large percentage of all world energy and with the depletion of fossil energy sources their production will fall and this fact is beyond dispute, In the future we will still have access to these pillars but they will no longer be cheap and abundant. You cannot easily replicate these pillars with renewable energy sources, so called “green” energy sources. What is a green energy source anyway? Does such a thing even exist?
I will assume that by green energy they mean energy that does not produce CO2 emissions. Is it possible to produce energy or electricity from any process that does not involve burning /oxidizing carbon compounds? I have a degree in chemistry and the only process I know that produces such energy are the organisms on the deep ocean floor that use crustal emissions and minerals in seawater in hydrothermal vents. I know of no others. So I will say there is no such thing as green energy. The Hoover Dam produces energy from falling water releasing no CO2. So does a Tesla using battery energy going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. There is no CO2 produced by the solar panels on the roof of my tiny house to run my fridge or its lights and heat. But Building the Hoover dam involved huge quantities of diesel and coal to move the rock and make the concrete before it released even a single electron. What about the energy to make the turbines, the copper and steel and other metals as well as the copper or aluminum and steel transmission lines and towers demanding constant maintenance by workers driving diesel powered pickups. Is the Tesla S sedan green? The people driving them must think they are with their virtue signaling behavior as they silently fly past me going 80 on the interstate. Electric cars like the Tesla do indeed emit no CO2 emission when underway and there is certainly a place for them in some areas, such as countries with dense urban transportation networks with low average wind speeds and inexpensive and abundant hydro electricity. An electric car in Oslo makes a great deal of sense. Norway is a country with almost all its electricity produced from hydro dams with occasional fossil fuel backup from its abundant FF reserves. In fact 80% of all new cars sold in Norway today are electric. No CO2 from the tailpipe and none from the dam. What is not to like? Can’t we all be Norwegians? Wait just a cotton picking minute. The physicist Mark Mills says that some electric cars will emit more CO2 over their lifetime than an ICE car! What? . VW recently showed a graph recently promoting their new electric VW in which they showed a comparison between a green VW and a conventional VW. I will try to link the graph. The graph shows that by the time the electric VW hits the showroom it has consumed 14 tons of CO2 whereas the gasoline VW only 5 tons. As the miles pile up the gasser has to buy gasoline carbon fuel and the electric one does not. The graph shows that by 80000 miles the two graphs cross meaning they have emitted equal quantities of C02. By the end of their lives VW estimates that the electric will emit only about 20% fewer emissions. I have seen other similar comparisons, some by people not associated with car manufacturers. Mills says that electric cars are at best a wash in emissions and some certainly even over their lives will emit more than a ICE car!! The VW comparison assumes CO2 emissions at a steady temperature. What about a Tesla in my native Wyoming in the winter when the temperature is 30 below? Or in northern Norway in winter? Granted the electric motor is well over 90% efficient when working whereas the ICE is at best 30% or so. But this inefficient gas engine has a real advantage in a cold climate as its waste heat can be used to heat the car’s interior as well as parts of the engine and transmission. You can also fill up your ICE car in a few minutes in Wyoming. How long would you have to stand outside to charge up your Tesla? Lithium batteries perform very poorly if they are not kept warm. If you leave your cell phone in your car in Wyoming overnite in the winter you will have no usable phone in the morning. Here is some more battery info. A typical small 1000 lb lithium VW battery will involve mining 500,000 lbs of the earth for its battery components. Here are the components in this battery: about 11 kilograms of lithium, nearly 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics. I have also read as much as 1000 grams of silver. These are scarce metals imported largely from abroad . They are refined almost entirely in China, not in the US\. That is the amount in the base model VW electric car or the The Tesla S. The nicer Tesla Y has a battery over 1700 lbs. This gives the deluxe Tesla a weight of over 5300 lbs empty, the size of my 1998 Tahoe. Then of course there is the source of the charging current for your electric car. Most produced electricity, 70% or so is from Coal and natural gas. The US is not Norway or Canada with abundant hydro. CO2 may not flow from a Tesla but the electricity to charge it is emitted elsewhere . That CO2 may be released in SW Wyoming at our Jim Bridger Coal plant which exports electricity to California. Out of sight out of mind. All the emissions to make these batteries are emitted not where the car is driven but from somewhere else. The only conclusion I can make is that Electric cars may not be any greener than my aging Corolla . One of the worst things about these battery powered cars is that the battery is not recyclable even composed of all these scarce and expensive metals. The same is true of most of the batteries in today’s electronics. The world is burning through declining quantities of expensive diminishing metals and minerals and they will all end up in a landfill. At least when my little Toyota goes to heaven you will be able to recover much of the steels and aluminum.
There is another factoid to note. Governments here and in Europe are providing billions in subsidies to foster electric cars such as infrastructure and purchase subsidies. This is with the stated goals of reducing carbon emissions. From what I have written emissions may not be reduced for electric vehicles very much over their lifetimes. Perhaps as much as 20% at best, if at all. If you look at worldwide carbon emissions,, what is the contribution worldwide from passenger vehicles? Eight percent! A measly 8%. Air travel by comparison is 4%. The really big emitters are of course industry making the 4 pillars of the industrial economy: steel, concrete, plastics, and ammonia and of course power generation, heating and manufacturing. If you want to decrease emissions you go after the heavy hitters, not the ninth ball player in the lineup, passenger cars. I have read several amusing comments on the people promoting these measures as “putting a band aid on a bullet wound.” We are lemmings being led by lemmings or an incompetent pied piper. These are not solutions to reduce emissions. There is one solution and only one and that is to reduce emissions, you reduce energy use of all kinds. At some point some of the more intelligent lemmings amongst us will see that cliff face racing at us and demand a halt. There is recent evidence that the bloom is off the rose on electric cars .High cost, range anxiety, scanty infrastructure and phony estimates of range, cost and emissions savings are at last being noticed by consumers and the cars are now piling up on dealer lots unsold and unloved. Resale values of used models are plummeting and some well publicized battery fires result in temperatures of 5000 deg F which cannot be put out with water. Some tow services are refusing to carry them for fear of battery fires with the liability on the shoulders of the tow driver. A recent Consumer Reports article said that they are less reliable than ICE cars and with these cars now getting long in the tooth, repairs and battery replacements are looming. Scotty, a car YouTube poster listed the cost in Canada to replace the battery of a S Korean electric car at $50000 Canadian, about what it cost new! Complicating repairs and replacements are that third parties involved in the manufacturing process lack inventory for older models. The sheer cost and difficulty of a battery replacement of a pure EV probably dooms the whole concept.. Hybrid EVs are much more feasible given smaller and modular replacement not involving removing the entire chassis from the frame or the sub frame. Absent niche applications, large expensive Evs are a flawed experiment running quickly out of highway. I would avoid them. I may revisit them in future blogs but I have bigger fish to fry so I will close on that note.
Rendezvous Mountain Farm 
Great work!
Thank you