Can Energy Production Scale?

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Can Energy Production Scale?

• Choices and Challenges for the Current Century

Our Waveform of Consumption
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Three Main Challenges

• Electricity Production ? per capita consumption
  is increasing faster than energy efficiency
• Electricity Distribution ? Aging grid already at
  capacity
• Fuel Usage ? 3.5 Billion gallons a day (would be
  more if not refinery limited) ? 400 million
  gallons a day in the US

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Production and Consumption on the Century
Timescale
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A Century of Change (1900 (1) vs 2000)

• Industrial Output 40
• Marine Fish Catch 35
• CO2 Emissions 17
• Total Energy Use 16
• Coal Production 7
• World Population 4

No More Fish by 2100 at this rate of Consumption
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Waveforms of Growth
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The Terrawatt Power Scale

• Currently we are a 14.5 TW Planet

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The Earth Limited Scale

• Scaling from the last century leads to the
  absurd 235 TW of required Power
• Well, what kind of facilities/infrastructure
  would need to be built to generate 235 TW of
  Power?

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Option 1

• Build 40,000 more of these worldwide

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Hey What about World Wide Wind?

• We would need to build 50 million of these 5 MW
  machines
• This requires 75 Billion Tons of Steel ? whoops,
  we aint got that much Steel left

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Option 3 Pave the Deserts

• We only need 30 million square kilometers spaced
  out continuously in each time zone.
• Note that the entire Sahara desert is 9 million
  square km.

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More Earth Limitations

• Total fuel cell production limited by amount of
  accessible platinum on the planet 500 million
  vehicles ? lithospheric exhaustion in 15 years
• Higher efficiency PVs limited by accessible
  amount of Cadmium or Gallium or Indium
• Conventional Transmission media limited by
  available new Copper
• Clear need for Carbon based materials (fiber,
  nanotubes) to overcome this.

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Business As Usual Scenario

• Population stabilizes to 10-12 billion by the
  year 2100
• Total world energy use from 2000 to 2100 is 4000
  Terra Watt Years (Current world use is about 14.5
  TW years)
• 40 TWyr is compromise between current 14.5 TWyr
  and scaled 235 TWyr

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Ultimately Recoverable Resource

• Conventional Oil/Gas
• Unconventional Oil
• Coal
• Methane Clathrates
• Oil Shale
• Uranium Ore
• Geothermal Steam - conventional

• 1000 TWy (1/4 need)
• 2000
• 5000
• 20,000
• 30,000
• 2,000
• 4,000

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Other Possibilities

• Hot Dry Rock
• Sunlight/OTEC
• Wind Energy
• Gulf Stream
• Global Biomass

• 1,000,000
• 9,000,000
• 200,000
• 140,000
• 10,000

In Principle, Incident Energy is Sufficient ? but
how to recover and distribute it in the most cost
effective manner?
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Dollars Per Megawatt per unit Land use per unit
Material Use

• 20 KW power buoy
• 5 MW Wind Turbine
• LNG closed cycle
• Wind Farm
• PV Farm
• Stirling Farm
• Pelamis Farm

• 850 Tons per MW
• 100 Tons per MW
• 1500 MW sq km
• 600 MW sq km
• 50 MW sq km
• 40 MW sq km
• 30 MW sq km