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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Taking a fresh new look at the energy industry and how the Earth's resources are being developed, the aim of this book is to aid engineers and scientists in attaining sustainability in this field, both from an economic and environmental perspective.
The author herein presents engineering research and practice that is focused on achieving energy sustainability from a global perspective, as is also outlined in other Scrivener books, such as The Greening of Petroleum Operations and the author's own recently published book, Sustainable Energy Pricing, the companion volume to this book. The author applies the principles of economic sustainability developed there to re-examine actual engineering practices in fossil fuel and alternative energy (such as wind and tidal power) exploration and development.
One of the book’s unique features is its analysis of what is deficient in the thinking and analytical frameworks that inform engineering work done in the field. The book addresses the complex issues surrounding our quest for sustainability and the key causes of the challenges that face the energy industry and its resource development. From this standpoint, the book challenges the reasoning and conclusions drawn from the often-quoted theory of "peak oil".
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Seitenzahl: 898
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Contents
Cover
Half Title page
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Initial Remarks
2 Sustainability Criteria and Economic Theory
3 The Basis of Change and the Conditions of Change
4 Outline of the Contents of this Volume
Chapter 1: A True Sustainability Criterion and Its Implications
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Importance of a Sustainability Criterion
1.3 Criterion: The Switch that Determines Direction at a Bifurcation Point
1.4 Current Practices in Petroleum Engineering
1.5 Development of a Sustainable Model
1.6 Violation of Characteristic Time
1.7 Analogies with Physical Phenomena
1.8 Intangible Cause to Tangible Consequence
1.9 Removable Discontinuities: Phases and Renewability of Materials
1.10 Rebalancing Mass and Energy
1.11 Holes in the Current Energy Model
1.12 Tools Needed for Sustainable Petroleum Operations
1.13 Conditions of Sustainability
1.14 Sustainability Indicators
1.15 Assessing the Overall Performance of a Process
Chapter 2: “Alternative” and Conventional Energy Sources: Trail-Mix, Tom Mix or Global Mixup?
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Global Energy Scenario
2.3 Solar Energy
2.4 Hydroelectric Power
2.5 Ocean Thermal, Wave and Tidal Energy
2.6 Wind Energy
2.7 Bioenergy
2.8 Fuelwood
2.9 Bioethanol
2.10 Biodiesel
2.11 Nuclear Power
2.12 Geothermal Energy
2.13 Hydrogen Energy
2.14 Global Efficiency
2.15 Solar Energy
2.16 “Global Warming”
2.17 Impact of Energy Technology and Policy
2.18 Energy Demand in Emerging Economies
2.19 Conventional Global Energy Model
2.20 Renewable vs Non-renewable: Is There a Boundary?
2.21 Knowledge-Enriched Global Energy Model
2.22 Conclusions
Chapter 3: Electricity and Sustainability
3.1 Electrical Power as the World’s Premier Non-Primary Energy Source
3.2 Consequences of the Ubiquity of Electric Power Services
3.3 The Last Twenty Years of “Electrical Services Reform” in the United States
Document
Chapter 4: The Zero-Waste Concept and Its Applications
Part A. Petroleum Engineering Applications
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Petroleum Refining
4.3 Zero-Waste Impacts on Product Life Cycle (Transportation, Use, and End-of-Life)
4.4 No-Flaring Technique
Part B. Other Applications of the ‘Zero-Waste’ Principle
4.5 Zero-Waste Living and the Anaerobic Biodigester
4.6 Solar Aquatic Process Purifies Waste (Including Desalinated) Water
4.7 Last Word
Document
Additional Observations
Additional Observations
Additional Observations
Chapter 5: Natural Gas
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Divergence of Energy Commodity Pricing From Laws of Supply and Demand
5.3 Sustainability and the Increasing Fascination with Natural Gas
5.4 Natural Gas Pricing, Markets, Risk Management, and Supply
5.5 Natural Gas in Eurasia
5.6 Nature As The New Model
Documents
Chapter 6: OPEC — The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
6.1 Birthmarks — The First Twenty Years
6.2 OPEC’s Hard Choices in the Era of the Bush Doctrine
6.3 Monopoly, Cartel, Rentier — or Instrumentality for Economic Independence?
6.4 Postscript (Friday 21 October 2011)
Chapter 7: Concluding Remarks
Appendix
Opening Comment
A1 Taking Economics Backward As Science
A2 Developing a Theory of Marginal Information Utility Based on “The Alternative Approach of Beginning with Highly Simplified, Quite Concrete Models”
A3 Imperfections of Information, or Oligopoly and Monopoly?
A4 Afterword
Bibliography
Introductory Note
I. Bibliography
II. Websites
Index
Sustainable Resource Development
Scrivener Publishing
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Publishers at Scrivener
Martin Scrivener ([email protected])
Phillip Carmical ([email protected])
Copyright © 2012 by Scrivener Publishing LLC. All rights reserved.
Co-published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Hoboken, New Jersey, and Scrivener Publishing LLC, Salem, Massachusetts.Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
ISBN 978-1-118-29039-2
Acknowledgements
All errors and judgments expressed in this book (and in the preceding companion volume entitled “Sustainable Energy Pricing: Creating A Sustainable Environment and Economy Through a New Science of Energy Pricing”) are entirely my own. Along the way down this path, however, I have shared the company of various personal, intellectual and professional fellow-travelers. Here is where I acknowledge publicly my appreciation and thanks — some personally, some collectively but anonymously, some even posthumously — for their inspiration, help and support through the processes of this book’s eventual gestation and birth pangs.
First and foremost there is the incredible patience and support, ‘through thick and thicker,’ as she would put it, of fellow writer and professional colleague Rhoda Shapiro, the woman with whom I happily share a life sentence as well as a life of sentences. The love and support of our various networks of family and friends also proved critical for surmounting many obstacles along the way. The support at all levels of Isaac Saney, academic colleague and friend, has been constant and appreciated also beyond words, as has that of Charles Spurr, a salt-of-the-earth friend who always seems to be there when we need him.
A dense and often toxic fog of disinformation engulfs the truth about how the modern economy actually robs Humanity of so much of its true potential. The inspiration to produce a work about sustainable development that would cut through all that originated personally for me from the work of the Necessity for Change Institute. It elaborated the “necessity for change” analysis 45 years ago that continues — among its many other benefits too numerous to catalogue here in this brief space — to open the eyes of new generations about the tricks, traps and prejudices of Eurocentric outlook in world politics and economics.
The idea of taking such an outlook and applying it to examine how the economics and engineering of resource development could be turned towards to genuinely sustainable development that would no longer rape the natural environment was the gift of Prof. Mohamed Rafiq Islam, the editor of the series of which the present book forms part. His confidence in my ability to nail the question squarely and his unflagging personal, academic and intellectual support, along with that of his sons Jaan and Ali Omar, produced a number of life-altering moments en route to delivery of the final version of this book’s manuscript to the publisher.
Through Professor Islam’s research group, I enjoyed the rare privilege to work closely with some singularly gifted colleagues. In addition to those individuals mentioned in the Acknowledgements of Sustainable Energy Pricing, very special note must be taken in this Acknowledgement of the support from, and dialogue developed with, Mohamed Moniruzzaman Khan. Our Tuhin is a brilliantly innovative engineer and designer of such zero-waste technologies as the single-pressure refrigeration cycle and household bio-digester discussed in this book. In particular, I shall never forget the mettle he showed as a most tenacious defender of the truth of the nature-science approach launched within our research group. Despite a massive effort mounted from within the chemical engineering establishment to destroy and “disappear” his work, he conceded not even a nanometer to a tiny yet fanatical opposition in the ranks of the Engineering faculty housing our research group. In the teeth of extraordinary efforts undertaken to saddle him with a failing thesis examination committee — even going so far as to remove his thesis supervisor without just cause — M.M. Khan has nevertheless gone on elsewhere to complete his Ph.D.
Closing on a professional note, I have been once again very lucky to be able to collaborate with Phil Carmical and his team at Scrivener Publishing, whose confidence in my abilities sustained us through one or two darker moments.
Preface
This volume is organized into a chapter-length introduction, six chapters of detailed content, some concluding remarks and an Appendix. The central issues of sustainability are rendered from an engineering point of view. They are fleshed out with rich and detailed examples of technologies that both fulfill the requirements of true sustainability and are infinitely extensible. The Appendix discusses a very different approach to sustainability, exemplified by the 2001 Nobel Economics Prize lecture in which Professor Joseph P Stiglitz elaborates the significance of the economics of information for stabilizing market structures. The aim of including it in this book is to show how a number of key premises from Prof. Stiglitz’ award-winning work would in fact render sustainable engineering solutions impossible.
An introductory chapter discusses the central preoccupation of this book, viz., the renovation of engineering practice towards true sustainability across the board. Material is grouped under under two broad rubrics: a) how engineering practices themselves are transformed in the field of resource development; and b) the relationship of such renovation of practice to the renovation of economic theory so as to favor truly sustainable solutions.1
The concluding portion of the introductory chapter includes capsules that preview the main preoccupations and contents of the remaining chapters and appendix of the volume. Supplementary material is embodied in the footnotes of each of the chapters. These run in sequence, restarting from “1” at the beginning of each chapter. Some chapters are further supplemented with Documents — materials from government agencies, the court system, corporate reports and scholarly literature that further illuminate various issues raised in the chapter and the responses of various social elements to those issues.
1 All kinds of theories may come out of practice. As a “first approximation,” it seems reasonable to expect — indeed: almost trivially obvious — that the theory (or theories) that come out of sustainable practices will be the soundest. However, this still leaves open a crucial question, viz., on what criteria should we rely to illuminate the true sustainability of any practice(s) in particular? The answer(s) to this particular question, on the other hand, turn out to be highly fraught. For most of the Industrial Revolution of the last 250-plus years, the key criterion for sustainable development of a given resource was assumed to the sheer quantity, scale or geographic extent of the resource. (It was further assumed within this that the raw material would be subjected mainly, or at most, to some kind of usually mechanical primary process — digging, extraction, etc.) When it comes to discussing the Canadian tar sands, for example, this remains the key notion associated with the tar sands’ supposed sustainability. Over the last decade, the tar sands have been predicted theoretically to last anywhere between another six decades to another two centuries — always at “present” rates of exploitation. However, matters have changed dramatically since 2010 — as public criticism and demonstrations mounted in Canada and the United States. These protests have carved out stances of opposition in at least three directions: a) opposition to further development of the tar sands in the present mode of technologies being applied; b) opposition to government regulatory authority being bent or neglected; and c) opposition to the capture of value being limited almost entirely to export of the raw material. This last indignity is being inflicted by means of entities not owned or regulated in Canada, the host country. That is something that ensures further value-adding activities will not take place in Canada. Similarly, although no one in the last couple of years (when the dominance of the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan appeared headed for takeover by BHP Billiton) has ventured such predictions, the useful lifetime of the potash deposits in the southern one-third of the territory of that Canadian province were similarly being reckoned back in the 1980s to last another three centuries. The pattern seems to be as follows: first declare the arrival of El Dorado; then, the moment some of the less pleasant facts surface — such as the potential scale of the waste that would be created by applying current technologies to the extraction of these materials in their raw state — any further talk of the seemingly infinite character of the bounty (at least compared to anyone’s lifetime) suddenly and inexplicably ceases… This pattern suggests that the hosannahs originally sung to the sheer scale of the raw material, although heralded as assurances of the sustainability of the particular resource to be developed, signal exactly the opposite. The volume of these hosannahs is intended precisely to drown out, or intimidate into silence, any Cassandras pointing out the unsustainability of such development, or talking about how existing technologies might need re-examination and re-design first. It may be concluded from the above, then, that the sheer quantity of a raw resource and its scale ensure availability and some indication of the range of further possibilities of that quantity. However, quantity and its availability as things-in-themselves ensures nothing about sustainability. True sustainability is first and foremost a function of whether the process or technological means applied to the raw material violates the surrounding environmental norms attending the presence of that raw material within the natural order, or harmonizes these norms.
Introduction
1 Initial Remarks
Within the real-life subject-matter of this book and its companion volume, Sustainable Energy Pricing, a serious if largely silent struggle carries on beneath the surface of the exploration and production, in their original state, of both fossil fuels and “alternative” energy sources. As was pointed out in the introduction to that volume, it is a war that is under way on the one hand between the real value of these energy sources as “gifts of nature”, and the nominal value they acquire in the form of a market price on the other. What was not mentioned there but which must be mentioned here — although it would seem to go without saying — is that sustainable development of natural resources in general is actually premised on the sustainable engineering of energy resource development in particular.
Many features of this struggle lie as hidden from view (or otherwise just beyond our full understanding) as the earth’s reservoirs of oil and gas themselves, as the atmospherics driving the world’s wind farms, or as the solar fluxes reaching our planet. The veil concealing some of the relevant processes of research and engineering applications is being gradually lifted. That is the mission, for example, of the work to simulate exploration and production prospects as a “virtual reservoir” (Islam et al., 2006). This line of investigation has also provided a starting-point from which to reexamine many aspects of energy pricing that have long been taken for granted.
As also discussed and illuminated in Sustainable Energy Pricing, an entire “futuristic” energy-pricing model is implicit in the “virtual reservoir” concept. Equally implicit are technologies incorporating a high sustainability quotient. Some of these technologies, and the unifying principle of true sustainability underpinning them, form this book’s central preoccupations.
True sustainability entails that development of energy resources of all kinds, beyond fossil fuels or the conversion of thermal energy into electricity in various forms, be sustainable. As argued consistently throughout the previous volume, if the technology does not make use of what is available in the natural environment first and foremost, it will be anti-nature and inevitably unsustainable. When it comes to energy, however, probably the single greatest challenge arises from the general tendency to invest in those technologies whose source or output is electric power, delivered over “The Grid,” i.e., the existing system of electrical services. Although matter in all its forms possesses its electrical character, the technologies talked about here make little or no use of this naturally-based electrical potential. In general, it must be admitted that at present, of all the known energy-delivering technologies, “The Grid” represents probably the single greatest anti-Nature challenge.1
There is no immediate solution at hand or even visible on the horizon regarding this anti-Nature aspect of The Grid. What was pointed out in the Introduction to the previous volume on Sustainable Energy Pricing regarding problems with energy sufficiency, however, once again applies. There is a class of solutions that depends in the first place on a deliberate decision to render, as consciously as possible, all the knowledge gathered about available energy resources. This human factor, or what might be better described as “understanding based on acts of finding out,” is decisive.2 Repeatedly, society emerges from a stage of seeming beset by various problems to a stage of accomplishing solutions. Subsequent developments disclose how partial and incomplete previous solutions were. This movement itself becomes fundamental to how human beings socialize their relations in the realm of material production. One can imagine what life was like before The Grid about as clearly as one might imagine their life was like before they could read. At the level of theory and its cognition, this fundamental movement expresses itself as a process, or processes, of becoming conscious. Although the dawn of awareness is conventionally represented as a light bulb going on above the head, the movement being spoken of here expresses itself as a struggle waged to establish actual knowledge of a way forward to solutions. This process emerges as a two-phase movement. It has its “theory” phase and its “practice” phase. The work of Theory elaborates the essential principles of a solution. At the same time, Practice develops as the realm in which humans individually and in society sort out precisely how principles elaborated at the level of theory are to be applied in particular cases.
For engineers, theory comes out of practice and, in turn, serves practice. What is often overlooked, however, is that practice gropes in the dark without theory. There are theoretical assumptions embedded even in the questions formulated as a sequence for any step-by-step procedure. All that can be said for absolute certain, at the outset of any problem-solving process, is that
One specific class of solutions that envisions harmonizing human social demands on the energy front with what nature can usefully provide if a consciously worked-out program is followed are those that produce “zero net waste.”
As pointed out in Sustainable Energy Pricing, one of the most demonized modes of energy production in the world today is the extraction of crude oil from underground and-or undersea reservoirs. Ironically, however, the potential developed in that field to shift from demand-based to supply-based modeling is bound to increase the potential in the hands of those forces involved most directly in primary energy production.
2 Sustainability Criteria and Economic Theory
Is sustainability possible without inducing scarcity, deliberately or otherwise, somewhere within an economic process?
This question is crucial. Economics as a science is broadly associated with notions of producing, distributing or managing finite quantities of inputs and outputs, and often this finitude is interpreted as a relative scarcity. That can be misleading, however, and even highly so. What really counts is whether a process is sustainable. Sustainability is to be measured by more than mere availability or unavailability of some supply of raw material.
The primary criterion of sustainability is whether a given process, and all the other processes to which it connects, are “natural” – in the sense of characteristic – within whatever context the process normally unfolds. A secondary, derivative criterion is whether a process is truly “time-tested”, i.e., capable of persisting indefinitely (assuming no other elements on which it depends are removed from the environment). The extent to which the second criterion is fulfilled defines relative sustainability. The first criterion, which constitutes a definition of inherent sustainability, defines sustainable in an absolute sense. If the primary criterion is not met, no other criteria matter.
The question of sustainability addresses the matter of the pathway of a process. In our own day, this has emerged as the arena in which the supply-demand models of conventional economics fail most spectacularly. Under modern conditions, there are countless pathways by which potentially to finance, staff and operate the production of almost any given commodity for any market. It is even entirely possible that all of them are unsustainable. Nuclear energy production, for example, currently falls in that category and it appears — from the evidence discussed in Chapter 2 infra — almost certain to remain in that category for some time to come. Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the foundations of scarcity-based economics were laid, economic space was far more open. Markets, far from being saturated, were frequently and chronically undersupplied at various times of the year. Competition, while fierce in markets between purveyors of the same goods or services, was almost non-existent between technologies, i.e., between pathways.
This matter of pathway is an especially rich vein. In practical terms, as discussed in depth at Chapter 4 infra, it can provide the entry-point for introducing innovations in managerial and other practices as well as policies that impinge on sustainability, including many under-appreciated arrangements, such as green supply chains.3
The first level of observation & reflection employed by practitioners of what we have been calling the “nature-science” approach is something else that we call “root-pathway analysis.”
Root-pathway analysis falls within a class of what may be deemed “organic”—as opposed to, or distinguishable from, “mechanical” — analytical methods. Its greatest “weakness” would appear to be the lack of any elaboration of any pre-existing scientific laws or principles to account for phenomena observed in any portion of the time continuum proceeding from the root down to the present day. In fact, however, this is its greatest strength. Thus, phenomenon B may be observed following phenomenon A without assuming any inherent connection — be it a priori assumptions about the existence of either phenomenon, or assumptions about causation or even correlation between the phenomena.
Could awareness of the principles of sustainable engineering be far older than generally assumed? The author decided to test this idea by applying root-pathway analysis to an utterly familiar and almost three-millennia-old myth surrounding the “labors of Hercules” — the so-called Fifth Labor (to clean the Augean stables).
First, however, why bother?
Objectively considered, much of what is known within Anglo-American scholarship (and more generally throughout Eurocentric scholarship) as ‘myth’ actually comprises the recording and transmission for the present and future generations of important social or societal knowledge under conditions of general illiteracy and non-publication of research findings. This reality has become obscured by a focus on particular elements from the narrative of the myths themselves that seem physically impossible, standing in absolute contradiction to everything known or predicted by modern science. There is undeniably a widespread ready acceptance of such a dismissive characterization of the content of the ancient Greek myths today. Among most practicing scientists and engineers and other educated people, few see anything in these myths but charming fairy tales suitable for children. The author has noticed how such a dismissal fits into a larger overpowering sense of Anglo-American and Eurocentric cultural hubris — the same hubris identified in the Greek myths themselves as the most fatal of sins among their gods.4
Deconstruction of the historical circumstances of British academia between the 1860s and the First World War provides much to corroborate this hypothesis.
Charles Darwin provided and published extremely disturbing proofs that the norm throughout nature was neither stasis nor gradual evolution, but transformative change by leaps. During the last third of the 19th century, the impacts of this insight began to roil all areas of scholarly investigation, in the social and natural sciences.
This was especially the case in Great Britain, the global imperial superpower of its day. In a conscious effort at least to blunt if not entirely extinguish these impacts, British imperial scholarship invented the entirely new field of anthropology, including social anthropology.
The study of ancient mythology was promptly transformed into a branch of the new “science.” In the works of Edward Burnett Tylor at Oxford and more popular accounts such as James Frazier’s Golden Bough, far from being recognized as resistance by the subject population in defence of their own thought-material, “differences” between the British rulers and their subjects were ascribed to differences on the evolutionary scale in the development of tribal societies towards a reconciliation with or acceptance of modernity.
This notion of peaceful evolution towards modernity for less-civilized peoples provided a cosmetic screen serving to conceal a reality far less benign. On the North American continent in the 17th and 18th centuries, throughout the Asian subcontinent from the 17th to the 20th century and on the African continent since the 19th century, the reality of British policy was always and everywhere the genocidal extermination of indigenous peoples and tribes as first principle. This was also the case even when or where the British were compelled by circumstances to rule, as in India, through elite members from either these indigenous groups, or, as in Canada, from among the colonial settler population living otherwise more or less peacefully alongside local indigenous peoples.
The British ruling classes’ acceptance of a pseudo-Darwinian model of “civilization” as yet another organic evolutionary process from lower to higher stages was grounded in a crucial unstated assumption, viz., that civilization originated with the Greeks, sometime in the second or first millennia BCE.
The two-fold truth, meanwhile, was that:
It was therefore no accident that the structures and narratives of the Greek myths shared so many points in common with the mythologies of these other social formations. Indeed, Greek myth could be seen to embody the unity of human thought material across regions of the Eurasian continent lying to the west of China, including — most critically for the British ruling classes in general and the Raj in particular — the thought material of many peoples from northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
It was this very unity, however — something which would place their Indian subjects on an equal footing — that the British could never accept. As the imperial poet Rudyard Kipling would popularize: “East is East and West is West and never the ‘twain shall meet.”
By the end of the 19th century, within British scholarly discourse, two crucial foundational principles of human civilization-in-general would emerge:
According to the unstated principles of such a rigid hierarchy, the ancient Greek myths had a value already assigned by their place within this hierarchy. The important implication of such a position is that the Greek myths were trivial in themselves, and thus could never be usefully mined for insights into such recondite matters as the engineering practices of ancient Eastern civilizations.
Nevertheless, looking out upon the world beyond the Anglosphere without any Eurocentric blinders, and applying the key understanding of the role of myth — garnered from root-pathway analysis above as a record and transmittal of engineering ideas and thinking in the ancient world — a careful re-examination of the actual content of the story of Hercules’ Fifth Labor turns out to be most illuminating and instructive on this very point, and especially its connection to notions of true sustainability:
For the fifth labor, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to clean up King Augeas’ stables. Hercules knew this job would mean getting dirty and smelly, but sometimes even a hero has to do these things. Then Eurystheus made Hercules’ task even harder: he had to clean up after the cattle of Augeas in a single day.
Now King Augeas owned more cattle than anyone in Greece. Some say that he was a son of one of the great gods, and others that he was a son of a mortal; whosever son he was, Augeas was very rich, and he had many herds of cows, bulls, goats, sheep and horses.
Every night the cowherds, goatherds and shepherds drove the thousands of animals to the stables.
Hercules went to King Augeas, and without telling anything about Eurystheus, said that he would clean out the stables in one day, if Augeas would give him a tenth of his fine cattle.
Augeas couldn’t believe his ears, but promised. Hercules brought Augeas’s son along to watch.
• First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard.
• Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard.
When Augeas learned that Eurystheus was behind all this, he would not pay Hercules his reward. Not only that, he denied that he had even promised to pay a reward. Augeas said that if Hercules didn’t like it, he could take the matter to a judge to decide.
The judge took his seat. Hercules called the son of Augeas to testify. The boy swore that his father had agreed to give Hercules a reward. The judge ruled that Hercules would have to be paid. In a rage, Augeas ordered both his own son and Hercules to leave his kingdom at once. So the boy went to the north country to live with his aunts, and Hercules headed back to Mycenae. But Eurystheus said that this labour didn’t count, because Hercules was paid for having done the work.
• extracted from “The Augean Stables: Hercules Cleans Up,” The Perseus Project, Tufts University. The bulleted (•) sentences describe the actual engineering acts of this labor. (This description, and the descriptions of the other labors of Hercules, may be viewed online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/index.html)
The Greek myths have been deeply and extensively analyzed for centuries — almost invariably from the standpoint of mentioning or commenting on the moral lesson(s) which these stories have indeed been framed to extract and impress on the listener/reader. However, from a nature-science standpoint — meaning in this particular context, comprising both the overwhelming presence of living human labor power unassisted by the dead labor of machinery and the singular absence of “hi-tech”— the objective content of engineering interest here comes in the following five sentences:
“First the hero tore a big opening in the wall of the cattle-yard where the stables were. Then he made another opening in the wall on the opposite side of the yard. Next, he dug wide trenches to two rivers which flowed nearby. He turned the course of the rivers into the yard. The rivers rushed through the stables, flushing them out, and all the mess flowed out the hole in the wall on other side of the yard.”
The importance of this technical detail cannot be overstated: only as the byproduct of “something else” are the stables being cleaned, i.e., the obligatory task set by Eurystheus (in the name of the other gods) is accomplished. What Hercules’ labor has also accomplished, however, — indeed, it is actually the central accomplishment — has been to render Augeas’ entire livestock-raising operation truly sustainable for some lengthy period extending indefinitely into the future.
All versions of the story make it more than clear that King Augeas was dealing with Hercules in bad faith. The King assumed from the outset that the stable-cleaning task could not possibly be accomplished in the assigned time period of one day, and therefore he would never have to worry about rendering Hercules any payment whatsoever, much less a one-tenth ownership share of his herd. Then, after the task was accomplished, King Augeas acted like the thief who yells ‘Stop, thief!’ Claiming he had dealt with Hercules without knowing that Hercules was in fact under orders from Eurystheus, he sought to wriggle out of his obligation.
Eurystheus saddles Hercules with the final indignity of refusing to “count” the accomplishment as one of the twelve labors because an independent arbitration process by a judge has ordered King Augeus to pay Hercules. This order appears to settle a conflict of opposing human-social interests … but only at the cost of transforming the character of this particular labor of Hercules from that of an obligation discharged at the behest of the gods into mere labor.
From the vantage point of our particular interest in this story, the inner meaning may be summarized thus: a major feat of sustainable engineering is reported faithfully and stands on its own merit. However, recognition of the significance of Hercules’ using the opportunity presented by the immediate demand for stable cleaning to solve the far more significant problem of sustainable livestock raising is hindered and obscured by the hopeless tangle of human-social relations attending the working-out of conflicting lines of self-interest.
Reconsidered thus, the issue of “scarcity” raised at the opening of this section is in fact irrelevant. From a nature-science standpoint, at the dawn of the 21st century (as compared to the time of Hercules and King Augeus several millennia ago), unless there is a broad social movement and-or intellectual consensus standing behind them and occupying the space for change opened up by such accomplishments, how differently should present-day authorities be expected to respond to successful sustainable engineering solutions that appear as “one-offs”?
2.1 Sustainability for Whom?
For a new economic model, and a new energy-pricing model and other models within its paradigm, the question of “sustainability for whom?” is posed and answered as follows: any development that degrades or limits a society’s ability to reduce, reuse and-or recycle waste or excess products cannot be considered truly sustainable.
Here a serious gap emerges, however, between the notion of sustainability developed for the new theory on the one hand, and the conventional view of sustainability on the other. The conventional neo-Malthusian view long assumed that sustainability only arises as an issue in the first place either because resources are finite or because resources are maldistributed.5
The general method of the conventional approach consists of absolutising a single factor, then extrapolating its downward spiral to negative infinity. For example, much of the discussion of “global warming”, which entails an almost morbid preoccupation with carbon and CO2, assumes “climate is destiny” as it goes on to extrapolate Humanity’s doom. All choices among alternative courses are thus always rendered as Hobson’s Choices among equally unpalatable options. These analyses frequently come up badly short in the predictions department. However, they never fail to marginalise any role or relevance for human intentions and interventions. Sometimes it becomes necessary to stand up and call a spade a shovel: it is difficult if not impossible to see how any discussion of “sustainability” proceeding from premises of this kind can be helpful.6
It does not take long to discover that, for all their gloom about Humanity’s future prospects, proponents of this conventional view seem generally rather satisfied with the status quo. Although the ongoing need for science or research is not explicitly denied, the possibility of harmonising human strivings and Nature’s possibilities is ignored and largely dismissed.
3 The Basis of Change and the Conditions of Change
The basis of all real change is internal, whereas the conditions of change are external: this distinction is particularly important when it comes to accounting for the co-presence of tangible alongside intangible elements in any phenomenon — including technologies that are promoted less for their immediate than for their longer-term benefits. Assigning a proper place to what has been elaborated elsewhere as “the tangible-intangible nexus”7 is a key task of the program proposed here for renewing approaches taken to the fostering of technological alternatives whose greatest value may not be particularly dramatic immediately or in the short term. Here it specifically has two immediate implications:
The implications of the first point are profound.
As an enterprise entailing apprehension and comprehension of the material world existing external to consciousness, “science” — meaning: the scientific approach to investigating phenomena — requires examining both things-in-themselves and things in their relations to other things.
One of the fundamental issues of this exercise involves mastering and understanding “laws of motion,” so to speak, as they apply to the matter under investigation. The importance is simply that motion is the mode of existence of all matter. Whether it is energy, or matter that has become transformed into energy, or energy that became transformed into matter, there is no form of material existence that is not in motion.
Time and Information are two variables that have become especially critical for modeling and tackling the actual laws of motion of modern economic life. Both are utterly intangible. Up to now, however — and notwithstanding Prof. Stiglitz’ eloquence (in the Appendix infra) on the subject of information economics — they have been incorporated into economic analysis on the basis of rendering them tangible. This has become a procedure that may have created more problems than it solved.
4 Outline of the Contents of this Volume
CHAPTER ONE, entitled “A True Sustainability Criterion and Its Implications,” deepens the discussion of the introductory chapter on the basis of continuing the line launched back in Chapter One of Sustainable Energy Pricing (Zatzman, 2012a) regarding “sustainability.” A technology cannot be considered sustainable if it is not time-tested, and-or if it taxes the natural order beyond the regenerative capacities of the environment. Other issues surrounding sustainability criteria, such as the time characteristic of a natural process, and clearly-perceived gaps in current notions of “mass balance,” are discussed in the light of the sustainability aim.
CHAPTER TWO, entitled “Alternative and Conventional Energy Sources”, sorts out the explicit equating of non-renewability with unsustainability and the equally false implicit equating of renewability with sustainability. These together express the conventional consensus according to which all that counts is the quantum of economically profitable routes of access to the energetic raw material.
Within this conventional consensus, the highly critical area of the pathways by which technological changes are introduced in the actual mode of resource exploitation goes entirely AWOL, i.e., “absent without leave”. Indeed: these pathways are taken as given, or otherwise for granted, and left largely unexamined.
The real costs of sustaining many “renewable” energy sources are not borne by those involved in rendering these natural supplies as useful energy sources. These added costs fall most burdensomely on the vast majority of electrical utility service customers who lack any say or influence over power rates. This body of consumers remain hostage to the whims of the biggest industrial customers of The Grid, including the financial backers thereof. This is the force that signals exactly what changes this elite group are prepared to accept to officials in charge of the regulatory bodies, including what changes they would resist and what changes they might even flout at the risk of being assessed some financial penalty (that would itself end up being accounted as one of the costs of doing business).8
A similar game of three-card monte unfolds when it comes to “bio-ethanol” from corn — the main renewable form of transportation fuel undergoing expanded development at this time in the United States. Even before a single line of new regulations is gazetted in the Federal Register, the process of regulation, including the hearings and deliberations of special committees and subcommittees of Congress, unfolds potential new arrangements that preserve or expand the profit margins of the leading players at everyone else’s expense.9 Against these inherently fraud-infested exercises in so-called due process, the counter-intuitive argument is harnessed that the path to sustainable energy engineering will be shorter and socially much less painful if, instead of adopting any of the Establishment’s “faith-based” approaches to harnessing the last kilocalorie of sunlight or gigatonne of wind for The Grid, fossil-fuel production is re-engineered along the lines of nature-science.
CHAPTER THREE, entitled “Electricity And Issues Of Sustainability,” elaborates the complex contradiction that has emerged with the extension in depth and breadth of electrical services. The particular focus is the economic space of the continental United States. Most intensively during the middle third of the 20th century, nothing impeded the more-or-less rapid electrification, ubiquitously into even the remotest sub-regions of that transcontinental land-mass. The capabilities of The Grid — the combined networks of power stations and power transmission cables — were extended literally everywhere, supplemented by the ready availability of numerous highly portable electrical generators and generator-like appliances capable of delivering electrical power anywhere off The Grid for a wide range of non-industrial small-scale applications. Yet this very variety and availability of so many electrical service options, subsidized by various forms of public subscription, e.g., special bond issues approved by local and state referenda, is precisely what kept the so-called alternative energy sources such as solar, wind and tidal power shut out of the market entirely for decades on end.
Lacking such subsidies, solar, wind and tidal sources were categorized as financially inefficient alternatives incapable of delivering a kilowatt-hour’s-worth of electrical output at less than several times the final price of the so-called “conventional” sources, and marginalized for this reason.
Efficiency-wise, the highest and best use for these alternatives would be as sources of energy in non-electric form. What is rendering them increasingly attractive in the United States, meanwhile, — after decades of exclusion for being allegedly “too expensive for the consuming public” — is that the costs of technological development as cost-competitive sources of electric power have already been borne elsewhere, especially on the European continent. Hence, for the U.S. market and for U.S. sources of investment capital, the so-called “marginal rate of return” on such systems as additions to The Grid is comprised almost entirely of pure profit. The main sources of wind-power hardware and technological expertise are imported from Europe.
The ability of U.S.-based financial combines, meanwhile, to dominate the roll-out of technologies such as solar panels is being surpassed by large-scale PV-panel producers from the People’s Republic of China. Thus the conventional understanding up to now, viz., that the relative ease with which these alternatives can be added to The Grid — at least, in the U.S. — was rendering the energy-supply mix more sustainable in one of the most industrially-advanced societies on the planet at this time, is actually an illusion. As far as the financial and technological leadership enjoyed since the end of the Second World War by the United States in all fields of large-scale energy development and and commodification is concerned, it may turn out to have been symptomatic instead of a plateau, perhaps headed towards an eventual net decline, for the coming decade [2011–2020] and possibly even longer.
CHAPTER FOUR, entitled “The Zero-Waste Concept and its Applications” renders conscious the thought processes and engineering design that went into creating a biodigester that implements the zero-net-waste principle. The extremely broad range of potential applications for such technologies demonstrates that such advances are by no means doomed to be confined only to the richest developing countries.
CHAPTER FIVE, entitled “Natural Gas,” illustrates in some detail the scale on which applications of natural gas have developed increasingly as a replacement for refined petroleum in North America and Eurasia. Some of this has helped to slow the rate of environmental degradation due to crude oil refining and the exhaust output of gasoline-powered machinery and equipment. At the same time, however, the drive to meet future energy needs on the scale that crude oil and conventional natural gas provided to date has spurred a frenzy of shale-gas exploration and production.
With this development of so-called “unconventional” sources of natural gas has also come considerable resort to hydraulic fracturing. This is a procedure which appears to be responsible for unleashing an added load of toxic hydrocarbons into the environment well beyond that unleashed from conventional natural gas processing. Some of this hydraulic fracturing appears to be playing a role in other entirely unanticipated environmentally destructive phenomena such as localized earthquakes. In sum: natural gas development has a positive role to play in moving economic development away from utterly unsustainable resource development activities such as petroleum extraction and refining. At the same time, however, the degree to which unconventional sources of natural gas are being fitted specifically into the economic future of the United States (and increasingly as well in Europe) threatens to vitiate much of what has been accomplished at the global level on the positive side of the sustainability ledger. Further on this last point, a series of Documents appended to this chapter detail the degree to which the economy and infrastructure Canada, occupying the northern half of the North American continent, are becoming a source of the United States’ largest reserves of some of the most toxic sources of fossil fuel energy on the planet.
CHAPTER SIX is entitled “The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.” This chapter reviews the international context in which OPEC emerged, and the maneuvers of Great Powers to neuter and-or destroy it. It also assesses whether OPEC has survived more than 50 years as a cartel or as an anti-cartel. Answering the rightly-posed, as distinct from the wrongly-posed, version of that question is intimately connected to the matter of how oil and gas production from the relatively gigantic fossil fuel basins of OPEC’s member-states may be sustained and the instincts of the forces controlling the downstream energy business to reclaim domination over the upstream end held in check.
The war conducted in and over Libya by the United States and NATO forces between March and October 2011 marked the third occasion since the collapse of the former Soviet Union that the leading Western powers have attempted to gobble a major OPEC producer whole. It was preceded by the First Gulf War of 1991 “against” Saddam Hussein’s Iraq but actually waged partly in the oil fields of Kuwait, and by the invasion and occupation of Iraq underway since 2003. For most of the last half-century, the greatest force ranged against the rest of the members has been Washington’s alliance with Saudi Arabia to maintain the Kingdom’s oil reserves at a level permitting Riyadh (or the combined oil and gas reserves of Riyadh in league with the Emirate of Qatar, a fellow OPEC member and major gas producer on the Arabian Peninsula side of the Persian Gulf) to play the role of strikebreaker when any combination of other major producers within OPEC seek to increase the world oil price in conditions, or to levels unfavorable to, the immediate interests of the United States. The future of this tactical position has been seriously eroded over the last year, however, with the emergence of Venezuela as the OPEC member with the largest oil reserves of any member, including Saudi Arabia, and the simultaneous emergence as well of Iran, which coordinates policy and voting within OPEC with Caracas, as the source of the largest reserves of natural gas.
Throughout these and other threats to OPEC’s very existence, its members have been compelled by the circumstances of the global oil and gas markets and the power of the forces ranged against them to further develop some of the cooperative planning mechanisms that an international effort at large-scale sustainable oil and gas production would require.
CHAPTER SEVEN delivers “Concluding Remarks” about the theory and practice of sustainable engineering.
THE APPENDIX to this volume presents “The Economics of Information and the Intentions of Professor Joseph Stiglitz” for discussion and analysis. According to Prof. Stiglitz, “globalization” has been basically a good idea threatened by poor quality information reaching the key decision-takers in major international economic institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. This seems plausible… until one starts looking for any explicit criteria for assessing the elusive and utterly intangible notion of information quality. Although it is not explicitly set forth, Professor Stiglitz hews to the notion that we discover the quality of the information in its application, in its being acted upon in the real world and turned into actions. How is this different from the essential pragmatic philosophical position that “whatever works is true”? That pragmatic criterion, with its seeming echo of the longstanding idea of experimental verification as a criterion of scientific truth, actually incorporates a 100% discount of any theoretical explanations as to why a particular practice or course of action is successful whereas another is not. This becomes the opposite of scientific truth, whose practice and theory must be mutually internally consistent. Thus Prof. Stiglitz’ formulation of the foundation of information economics inherently dismisses the very possibility of true sustainablility … and we arrive at the myopia of Prof. Stiglitz: only those findings that fit a Newtonian schema are acceptable as “scientific,” while the nature-science criterion of time-testedness does not even exist.
1 The sustainable technologies examined in this book skirt this problem in various ways; they do not, however, tackle it directly. Perhaps another generation will take up how ultimately to convert all surplus electrical output into combinations of hydrogen and oxygen, i.e., water, that can be returned to the natural environment without harmful impacts.
2 This living involvement of the investigator is what invests knowledge and its gathering with actual purpose, with a direction or “intention” in the sense of the Arabic word “niyah” .
3 Advanced work around all these aspects of sustainability can be found in (Khan, 2006), (Khan & Islam, 2004), (Khan & Islam, 2005a), (Khan & Islam, 2005b), (Khan & Islam, 2005c), (Khan & Islam, 2006), (Khan & Islam, 2007a), (Khan & Islam, 2007b), (Khan et al., 2005d), (Khan et al., 2006) and (Khan et al., 2008).
4 Colleagues have asked if this is not qualitatively the same hubris on display in all its ugliness following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on 11 September 2001. Blaming this destruction of a 31-year old pair of skyscrapers on an allegedly Islamic hankering after mediaeval obscurantism and backwardness and hence a fanatical hatred of Western modernity, well-known public intellectuals across the political spectrum, ranging from the late Christopher Hitchens to Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, could not contain themselves to reflect, even if only for the briefest moment, on the fact that it was a non-Western, non-European, non-Anglo-American society that gave rise 31 centuries ago to the Egyptian pyramids which remain with us today.
5 This view is named for the English preacher Rev. Thomas Malthus. He argued in his Essay on Population (1798) that human population must always tend to grow in geometric progression so as to outstrip food supplies, which can only increase in arithmetic progression. The category of what are called neo-Malthusian arguments includes later writers who were compelled to acknowledge that Malthus was wrong, and incapable of taking into account already known facts that refuted his claim, not to mention extremely reactionary as well. Today’s neo-Malthusians have gone on to factor in food shortages and other catastrophic events in order to argue that the imbalance is the general problem, be it the “gap between the North and the South” (WCED, 1987), or a “technology gap”, or “global warming”. Malthus himself has modern-day emulators in Dr Paul Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb (1968), as well as the work of Garrett Hardin on “the tragedy of the commons” (Hardin, 1968).
6 The science of these scenarios — as distinct from their melodrama — remains ever thin on the ground. That has proven no impediment to their often being often put forward as the “left”-liberal version of, or response to, the Armageddon and “End of Days” scenarios popularised by various U.S. religious broadcasters (Website 3).
7 See Chapter 1, “The Tangible-Intangible Nexus,” esp. Figures 1–1 and 1–2 at p. 12 and p. 13 resp., in (Zatzman & Islam, 2007).
8 This kind of “horse trading,” which has developed to a very advanced level within the corporate and regulatory orders of the United States, comprises the main content of the “re-regulation” stage of the R-D-R’ pattern identified and discussed in Chapter 4 of Sustainable Energy Pricing (Zatzman, 2012a).
9 Patricia White, chief of staff for the Environmental Working Group — a public lobby group based in Washington DC — disclosed highly illuminating examples of these “preemptive strike” tactics before July 2011 congressional hearings into the science of “E15” ethanol. A YouTube video of her testimony can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkatpbOjUpM.
Chapter 1
A True Sustainability Criterion and Its Implications
1.1 Introduction
Within the context of today’s technology development, the terms “sustainable” and “sustainability” refer to a concept that has become something of a buzzword on which different social, economic and political interests can (and do) hang some self-serving definitions. What these self-interested definitions have in common is their employment of terms to imply the acceptability of a process for some particular duration of time. True sustainability, on the other hand, cannot be a matter of such partial and subjective “definition”, including the endless debates and interpretations that come with such subjectivity. Highlighting the importance of using the concept of sustainability in every model of technology development. This chapter attempts to clarify what is involved in elaborating a scientific criterion for determining sustainability. Far from being an idle preoccupation which at first blush, might look like “wishful thinking,” the fundamental insight informing this particular exploration is that the economic arrangements needed for securing the benefits of such sustainability for all, can only be realized if the underlying science and its engineering in various technological forms are themselves sustainable.
As argued in Sustainable Energy Pricing (the earlier companion volume to the present book), the only true model of sustainability to be found lies in Nature, the natural environment. Both in its root-source and in the pathway taken by its development, a truly sustainable process conforms to connected, and/or underlying, natural phenomena. Scientifically, what could this mean? In this book, it means that true long-term considerations of humans should include the entire ecosystem. Some label this inclusion “humanization of the environment” and have deemed its inclusion to be a precondition of true sustainability (Zatzman and Islam, 2007). Of course: the inclusion of the entire ecosystem becomes meaningful only when the natural pathway for every component of the technology is followed. Only such a design may assure that the process will produce both short-term (tangible) and long-term (intangible) benefits.
However, tangibles relate to short-term (and very limited) space—more like ∂s (“the rate of change of displacement”) rather than plain old “pure and simple”s (displacement itself, as some fixed quantity). Intangible elements relate to either long-term elements or other elements of the current time-frame. Therefore, an exclusive or dominating focus on the tangible will obscure longer-term consequences from our collective awareness. Without including and properly analyzing intangible properties, of course, these consequences cannot be uncovered. According to Chhetri and Islam (2008), by taking the long-term approach, the outcome is reversed from the one that emerges from the shorter-term approach. As discussed infra in Chapter 2, by examining the efficiency (η) of different energy sources as delivered by various technologies, this distinction may be demonstrated almost graphically. By focusing on just heating value, for example, a ranking appears that diverges into what is observed today as the “global warming” phenomenon. On the other hand, if a long-term approach were taken, the current energy crunch would have been entirely avoided as none of the previously perpetrated technologies would have been considered “efficient” and replaced with truly, i.e., globally, efficient technologies. Such is the inherent importance of intangibles — and of how tangibles should link to them. Exploring many previously unremarked links between microscopic and macroscopic properties, this approach opens up a new understanding of the relationship between intangible-to-tangible scales.
It has long been accepted that Nature is self-sufficient and complete. This renders Nature the true teacher of how to develop sustainable technologies. From the standpoint of human intention, this self-sufficiency and completeness becomes a standard for declaring Nature perfect. “Perfect” here, however, does not mean that Nature is in one fixed unchanging state. On the contrary, it is the capacity of Nature to evolve and sustain itself which makes it such an excellent teacher. This perfection makes it possible and necessary for Humanity to learn from Nature — not to fix Nature, but to improve Humanity’s own condition and prospects within Nature, in all periods and for any timescale. This holds a subtle yet crucial significance for such emulation of Nature. The most notable consequence is that technological or other types of development undertaken within the natural environment but lacking consciousness of Nature’s “perfection,” must necessarily end up violating something fundamental within Nature, even if only for some limited time. Understanding the effect of intangibles and the relations of intangibles to tangibles thus becomes extremely important for reaching appropriate decisions affecting the welfare both of human societies and the natural environment. A number of aspects of natural phenomena are explored in this chapter with the aim of further bringing out the relationships between intangibles and tangibles and the connection of that relationship to true sustainability. This provides an especially strong basis for the sustainability model argued for in this book. The mass-and-energy-balance equation, for example, is discussed here with the aim of further illuminating the influence of the intangible and the role of intention.
