Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
oil into small parts, and then reassemble them into an unbelievable variety of polymers, including modern
plastics. While you think of oil in your car as in the gas tank, in fact there is more oil in the materials in the
car than in the gas tank. The rubber tires are made of oil, the paint and waterproofing are made of oil, the
plastic, dent-resistant bumper is made of oil, the stuffing inside the seats is made of oil, and in most cars,
the entire interior is one form of oil fabric or synthetic material or another—because oil is such a cheap
and effective way to make things.
When a policeman has his life saved by a bulletproof vest, when a firefighter has his life saved by a
fireproof jacket, that is oil—that is something that was once a useless raw material, now made into a re-
source.
What is true of oil is true of essentially every other resource: They need to be created by transforming
potential into actual. Coal was not an electricity resource or a source of motive power until the coal-fired
steam engine. Natural gas was actually a deadly force, something that exploded when you drilled for oil,
until safe drilling and storage technologies could harness it. Aluminum, one of the most abundant elements
in the Earth's crust, was completely useless a few hundred years ago.
Ultimately, an “energy resource” is just matter and energy transformed to meet human needs. Well, the
planet we live on is 100 percent matter and energy—100 percent potential resource. To say we've only
scratched the surface is to significantly understate how little of this planet's potential we've unlocked. We
already know that we have enough of a combination of fossil fuels and nuclear power to last thousands
and thousands of years. For us today, that's morally enough—it's time to focus on the 7 billion of us, here
and now, who will live better with more energy and live worse or not at all with less.
What energy resources should we use now and in the future? We have a brilliant system for deciding
this: the price system of supply and demand. All things being equal, if it takes fewer resources, including
human time, to produce something, the price goes down; if it takes more resources, the price goes up.
Thus, prices reflect how efficient a use of existing resources it is to create a new resource for a given
purpose. When the cost of computers comes down, that means that all the components and their compos-
ition can be created more cheaply than before. Similarly, the form of energy we use will be the one that,
based on the best technology available (which is always evolving), can do the best job for the lowest price.
Every day, we make a choice. Is coal or oil or gas the best way of accomplishing a given goal—or is
something else? For the last several hundred years, the answer to “What do we replace yesterday's fossil
fuels with?” has been “New fossil fuels.” As soon as that doesn't make sense (typically, when it becomes
prohibitively expensive or when a better alternative is available), it won't happen.
Part of the process of resource evolution is that we will find new ways to get what is considered to
be the same resource by more technically complicated means. This is often characterized negatively, with
such expressions as “We've gotten all the easy oil, and now we're going after the dirtiest oil” or “We're
scraping the bottom of the barrel.” 16 (The expression “scraping the bottom of the barrel” comes from the
phenomenon of the oil in a barrel existing in different fractions, from heavy to light. The heavy fractions
sit at the bottom of the barrel, and the heaviest, like asphaltum, which goes into asphalt, can be hard to
scrape out and impossible to use.)
The view is that when we use a finite, nonrenewable resource like fossil fuels, we will have to go to
progressively more difficult places to get it—which is assumed to be a bad thing. But why? Every resource
technology involves starting with easier problems and moving toward harder problems.
When I read “We're using dirtier and dirtier oil” or “We're having to scour further depths to get oil,” I
think, What is the “appropriate'” length to go to get oil? Should we have stopped at 69.5 feet? At every
stage, one could be accused of “scraping the bottom of the barrel.” But think forward two hundred years.
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