Energy Innovation: Proving The Catastrophists Wrong

Robert Bryce has been writing professionally about energy, innovation, and other topics for nearly three decades. He is the author most recently of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong . Bryce is no climate change denier and recognises that energy innovation will decrease carbon emissions. But he does have a lot to say on the failure of wind and solar power to offer serious alternative energy sources. On a visit to Sydney, Robert Bryce addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 8 September 2014.

ENERGY INNOVATION: PROVING THE CATASTROPHISTS WRONG

ROBERT BRYCE

I am going to tackle this talk in four parts. First we have the problem of the modern-day Malthus, second there is the issue of super fuels and super engines, after which I shall look briefly at the scale challenge and, lastly, I want to discuss nuclear, solar, and storage issues.

Modern day Malthus.

In 2005, Lee Raymond, who was then the CEO of Exxon Mobil, declared that “gas production has peaked in North America.” [1] What has happened since then? In 2013, the US produced a record 24.3 trillion cubic feet of gas, an increase of about 34 per cent since Raymond made his claim back in 2005.[2]

To be clear, the former boss at Exxon was not a Malthusian, but his statement is indicative of a broad school of thought which is pessimistic about our future and in particular, our ability to produce enough energy – and food – for all of the people on the planet.  For instance:

A century ago, in 1914, the Bureau of Mines, a US government agency, predicted that world oil supplies would be depleted within ten years. In 1956, M King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist who became famous for his forecast known as Hubbert’s Peak, predicted that gas production in the US would peak at about 38 billion cubic feet per day in 1970. In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, which predicted that the world would be out of oil by 1992 and out of natural gas by 1993.[3] In 2003, Matthew Simmons, a Houston-based investment banker for the energy industry who was among the leaders of the peak oil crowd, predicted that natural gas supplies were about to fall off a “cliff.”[4]

Or consider this statement from Climate Change Australia’s website: “Climate change makes carbon reduction essential, peak oil makes it inevitable.” And of course, we’ve heard similarly dire predictions about food supplies. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his famous “An Essay on the Principle of Population.”[5][6][7] In it, he said that population growth “is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth, in the earth to produce sustenance for man”. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich came out with the Population Bomb, a book that was published by The Sierra Club. Ehrlich claimed that, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”[8]

Six years later, Ehrlich declared that that, “Within the next quarter of a century mankind will be looking elsewhere than in oil wells for its main source of energy.” So, what has happened? Let’s look at energy. In 1980, the world had about 683 billion barrels of proved reserves. Between 1980 and 2013, global proved oil reserves increased from about 700 billion barrels to nearly 1.7 trillion barrels – about 2.5 times the level recorded in 1980.[9] That reserve growth occurred even though during that three-decade time frame, residents of the planet consumed about 800 billion barrels of oil. In other words, over the past three decades or so, we have consumed more oil than analysts thought was available back in 1980. Not only that, we have more than doubled reserves compared to 1980.

Similar reserve growth has occurred in natural gas. Between 1980 and 2013, reserves increased from about 72 trillion cubic meters to about 186 trillion cubic meters. And those reserves increased even though during that same time period, we consumed about 77 trillion cubic meters of gas.[10] Innovation has allowed us to do something truly remarkable, namely: the more oil and gas we find, the more oil and gas we find.

What about food? Back in 1968, when Ehrlich predicted starvation for millions of people, the global population was 3.5 billion.[11] Today, the world has more than twice that many people (about 7 billion) and yet the death rate today is lower than it was when Ehrlich made his claim. Since 1950, the food supply per capita has increased by about 30 percent even though the amount of amount of land per capita has fallen by about half.[12]

Why are we producing more food? The answer is better farming techniques, hybrid seeds and, perhaps most important, the perfection of the Haber-Bosch process. The ability to convert natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia is probably the single most important invention in history.

In 1970, in the speech he gave while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, declared that, “If the high-yielding dwarf wheat and rice varieties are the catalysts that have ignited the Green Revolution, then chemical fertilizer is the fuel that has powered its forward thrust.”[13] Increased energy and food production is fostering an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Now, I’ll gladly stipulate that there remains plenty of conflict and poverty in the world. We have shooting wars from Damascus to Donetsk. In Africa, and in Southern Asia, hundreds of millions of people continue to live in squalor and dire energy poverty. But more people are living longer, freer, healthier lives than at any time in human history. That can be seen by looking at nearly any objective measure.

Since the 1970s, the number of countries that are considered “free” has nearly doubled.[14] Income levels among the poorest of the poor are steadily rising. Literacy rates, particularly among women and girls, are rising. In 1950, a little more than half of the adults on the planet were literate.[15] Today, about 90 per cent are literate.[16] A century ago, few women were allowed to vote. Today, women are able to vote in nearly every country in the world. In the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, for the first time, all of the countries taking part in the Games included women on their teams.

Why are humans prospering like never before? The principle reason is that we are using more energy, and we are turning it into useful power that we use to do more work. And that increasing ability to do work is creating wealth. Remember: energy is the ability to do work. Power is the rate at which work is done. Motive power is allowing more people to travel. Lighting power is allowing more people to defeat darkness and in doing so, work and study at night. Electrical power and digital communications are allowing unprecedented interchange of ideas all over the world.

And that travel, that lighting, those communications are all being driven by innovation in our energy and power systems. It’s being driven by the inexorable desire for Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.

Yes, that’s the title of my new book: Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your co-workers: You don’t have to read, it you just have to buy it. By the way, I’ve written five books. The first one was on the collapse of Enron. Collect them all. They make great gifts. And since this is a commercial: buy them for your Kindle. I get a better royalty that way.

Throughout history, we’ve become better and better at capturing energy and converting it into power. And, that improving capability of capturing and converting energy is the basis of modern society. For centuries, we were limited by what we could physically harness from the wind, the water, or the sun. Whether that was a sailing vessel, a waterwheel, biomass that we fed to draft animals — or food that we ate ourselves so that we could hunt or farm — those were are only options for doing work.

The energy density of the fuels was generally low. The fuels were highly variable, both geographically and seasonally, and the conversion devices we used were hugely inefficient. Then came key innovators Newcomen and Watt and, suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, hydrocarbons freed us from the vagaries of the sun, the wind and the rain. Harnessing coal in steam engines fostered the Industrial Revolution. Ever since the time of Newcomen and Watt, we have been on an unending quest to utilise ever-better fuels and ever-better engines. We’ve gone from feeding grass and oats to oxen and horses to using jet fuel and uranium in turbines and reactors.

Today, there’s a bias in the media and among politicians and pundits toward innovation in solar, or wind energy, or batteries, and other so-called “clean” energy sources. And, yes, there have been major advances in those areas. But that bias ignores the enormous amount of capital and momentum behind the hydrocarbon sector. Let’s look at the numbers.

Last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, global spending on renewables was about $254 billion.[17] That’s a lot of money. But global spending on oil and gas drilling is now about $1.3 trillion per year – more than four times as much as spending on renewables.[18] The US alone now spends about $300 billion per year drilling oil and gas wells. And all that spending has fostered innovation.

Over the past century, oil and gas drilling has gone from a business dominated by wildcatters armed with a hunch and a prayer to one that is more akin to the precision manufacturing that dominates aerospace and automobiles. Modern drilling rigs are so good that they can punch holes in the earth that are two miles deep, turn the drill bit 90 degrees, drill another two miles horizontally, and arrive within a few inches of the target.

Coal producers are using GPS-guided equipment, along with more powerful conveyors, draglines, bulldozers, and other machinery to increase their productivity. The innovation in offshore energy production has been even more impressive.

In 1947, the oil industry drilled the Kermac 16. It was the first oil well drilled out of the sight of land. That well was drilled in just 20 feet of water, at a location about 43 miles south of Morgan City, Louisiana.[19] Back in 1947, the deepwater resources now being exploited in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere may as well have been located on the dark side of the moon. One of the biggest oilfields found in recent years is the Johan Sverdrup field located offshore Norway. It’s in 120 meters of water. It may hold 3.3 billion barrels of oil.[20] BP is looking for oil in the Great Australian Bight off the South Australian coast, in water depths of 5,000 meters.[21]

Is there risk associated with these activities? Of course. We saw that with the Deepwater Horizon accident, in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. But new submarines, GPS-enable positioning systems, robots, all of these technologies are helping unlock enormous quantities of hydrocarbons.

Why are we so avid in our pursuit of oil? Simple: if oil didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. No other substance can match oil when it comes to cost, scale, energy density, ease of handling, or flexibility. Oil is a super fuel. And we are utilising that super fuel in super engines.

The Ford Model T began a mobility revolution that continues to this day. Launched in 1908, the original Model T had a 2.9-liter engine that produced 22 horsepower. Today, Ford is selling a super engine. It produces 123 horsepower, or 92,000 watts per liter of displacement.[22] That’s 16 times the power density of the engine in the Model T. It’s also about the same power density as what is found in the engine of the Bugatti Veyron, a car that costs $1.2 million. And yet, the 1-liter EcoBoost is available in the Ford Fiesta, which costs about $15,000.

Equally remarkable: the 1-liter EcoBoost produces eight times more power per unit of weight, and is about three times as fuel-efficient as the engine used in the Model T.[23]

Or let’s consider computing super engines.

In 1978, the year I graduated from high school, Intel released the 8086 processor, the brain for the first wave of personal computers. The 8086 chip sported 29,000 transistors on circuits that were 3 microns wide.[24] Today, the company’s flagship processor, the Core i7 has about 2.3 billion transistors.[25] Thus, between 1978 and 2013, Intel increased the computing power density of its best chips 78,000 fold while shrinking its circuits more than 130 fold. Over the last four decades, the per-transistor price for Intel’s microprocessors has dropped by a factor of about 50,000 while at the same time, the per-transistor power consumption of their chips have dropped by a factor of 5,000![26]

That computing engine is just one of a myriad of computer chips that we now use every day and we don’t think a thing about them. What once took an entire desk, we now carry in our pockets. This iPhone has 250,000 times more digital storage capacity than the computer that went to the moon onboard Apollo 11. Today, we are using massive amounts of computing power to find even more fuel and produce even better engines.

That’s innovation. And that’s the innovation we must encourage.

The scale challenge

My thesis is that we are proving the catastrophists wrong with ongoing innovation in our energy and power systems. And we are. But I am not glib about the challenges we face. Specifically, how do we bring even more people out of poverty and into the modern world?

According to the World Bank, at least 1.2 billion people – about 20 per cent of the world’s population – don’t have access to electricity. And another 2.8 billion people are still using solid fuels like coal, dung, and wood, for their cooking and heating needs.[27]

And, every year, smoke and pollutants from open cooking fires kill about 1.5 million people – most of them women and girls. They die by the thousands in poor countries from emphysema and other respiratory diseases.[28] And they are dying because they lack clean cooking fuels.

Where will get all the energy that we need? That’s the challenge. And in facing that challenge head on, we must face the tyranny of big numbers. Over the past decade, alone, global energy consumption has increased by about 28 per cent, or 56 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, that’s an increase of nearly 7 Saudi Arabias.[29] (Since 1970, Saudi oil production has averaged about 8.3 million barrels per day.)[30] Total global energy use is now about 256 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or about 1.5 exajoules per day.[31]

That’s 31 Saudi Arabias. Of that, 256 million barrels of oil equivalent per day of primary energy, we get 87 per cent – or about 222 million barrels of oil equivalent per day – from hydrocarbons.[32] That’s about 27 Saudi Arabias worth of energy production from coal, oil, and natural gas.

In all, we get: 10 Saudi Arabias in oil,
9 Saudi Arabias from coal,
7 Saudi Arabias from natural gas,
2 Saudis from hydro,
1.5 Saudis from nuclear,
0.7 Saudis from all non-hydro renewables. Put another way, we get about 40 times as much energy from hydrocarbons as we do from ALL of the political darlings of the moment: solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass.[33] Scale. Scale. Scale. In the last year alone, US oil production has increased by 1.2 million barrels per day.[34]

That increase alone, in US oil output, is equal to twice the contribution now coming from every solar-energy installation on the planet. (Those solar facilities are now supplying about 600,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.) BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014.

The hard reality – the truth – is that renewable energy, for whatever its merits, cannot even keep pace with the growth in hydrocarbon production. The punchline here is obvious: hydrocarbons are here to stay. And, if we want to bring more people out of poverty, we are going to have to continue relying on hydrocarbons. And to be more specific, that means coal, as well as oil and gas.

Since 1973, coal use has grown faster than any other form of energy.[35] Why?

The world wants electricity. No other energy form is as versatile or powerful. And countries all over the world – rich and poor alike – are using coal to produce electricity. In 2013 alone, coal use rose by 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. That was about 50 per cent more than the growth in petroleum and nearly three times the growth seen in natural gas.[36] Further, it was three times the contribution of all global solar.

I’m adamantly pro natural gas. I’m adamantly pro nuclear. But the global energy story is coal. By 2018 or so, according to the IEA, coal consumption is likely to increase by about 12 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.[37] [38] [39] If that occurs, global coal use will total about 92 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or nearly 10.4 Saudis of coal.

Last December, the International Energy Agency released a report which said, “coal demand knows only one direction: up.” If that occurs, coal could surpass oil in total share of global energy. That’s a stunning development. The last time coal consumption in the US was greater than that of oil was in 1949.[40]

Coal demand is growing because the fuel is abundant, deposits are widely dispersed geographically, supplies cannot be manipulated by any OPEC-like entities, and more than any other factor, it’s cheap.

I recently completed a paper for the Manhattan Institute on coal and, more specifically, on the issue of coal and scale. The results were remarkable. Between 1990 and 2010, about 1.7 billion people gained access to electricity. Of that number, about 800 million gained access due to coal. And about 65 million gained access due to solar and wind. Put another way, for every one person who gained access due to solar and wind energy, four gained access due to hydro; six gained access due to natural gas; and 13 gained access due to coal.[41]

Nuclear, solar and storage.

These are the frontier areas for energy innovation. I’m going to ignore wind and biofuels in this discussion because both of those energy sources are plagued by hopelessly low power density. To illustrate that point, if we wanted to replace US coal-fired capacity, which is now about 300 gigawatts, it would require covering a land area of about 300,000 square kilometers. That’s a land area the size of Italy. In Australia, you have roughly 30 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity.[42] To replace that coal-fired capacity with wind would require 30 billion square meters, or 30,000 square kilometers. That’s a land area two and a half times the size of Greater Sydney.[43] And here’s the kicker: because of the noise the turbines make, no people could live on that land.

Biofuels? I’m a long time critic of corn ethanol scam. The fundamental problem with biofuels, besides the fact that their use means taking farmland out of food production and into motor-fuel production, is low power density. The power density of biofuels is measured in fractions of a watt per square meter.

Even if we ignore the power-density problem, I have an even bigger problem with biofuels: we are burning food to make motor fuel. This is insane. The biofuel boom is over. So let me turn back now to nuclear.

Let me be clear about my stance. And it remains my stance with full knowledge of the problems at the Fukushima reactors: If you are anti-carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you are pro-blackout. So what does the situation at Fukushima mean for the future of nuclear?

It will slow development of nuclear, but will not, it cannot, stop the development of the global nuclear industry. Why? Power density. The power density inside a typical pressurised water reactor is about 338 megawatts (338 million watts) per square meter. A wind turbine has a power density about 1 watt per square meter. A photovoltaic solar cell has between 5 watts and 10 watts per square meter.

We have to get good at nuclear. And we are. But we are just at the beginning of the nuclear age. Coal has been in use by humans for about 3,000 years. It’s been in common industrial use for more than 250 years. The first commercial nuclear plant was Calder Hall, which began producing electricity in Britain in 1956.[44] We’re less than six decades into the nuclear age. Just as the first internal combustion engines were crude devices by today’s standards, so too, are the reactors we are now retiring.

So why should we think that the nuclear age is over? It’s not. It’s only begun. And yet, nuclear opponents, like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth Australia, want to kill the nuclear baby in the crib. We can’t downplay the challenges that are facing nuclear. Fukushima is a big issue. But the bigger issue for nuclear is cost.

In the US, the nuclear sector simply cannot compete with cheap natural gas. Based on the costs of the Vogtle 3 and 4 reactors in Georgia, building a new nuclear plant in the U.S. currently costs about $6.3 million per megawatt.[45] For comparison, a coal-fired power plant costs roughly $3 million per megawatt and a natural-gas fired power plant costs about $1 million per megawatt.[46]

Despite the cost challenges, we are seeing lots of activity in new nuclear technology. Venture capital dollars are flowing into the sector. New designs include modular reactors, molten-salt reactors,[47] and thorium reactors. There are a myriad of refinements and improvements to be made. And they are being made as we speak.

But let me be clear. The pace of innovation in nuclear is woefully slow. And the cost of nuclear is appallingly high. Unless or until that innovation can speed up, then nuclear will remain largely a spectator for the next couple decades at the very time that global energy demand is rising rapidly.

Now, to solar and batteries. I’m bullish on solar. I have 3,200 watts of solar panels on the roof of my house in Austin, Texas. To be clear, I’m opposed to all energy subsidies…unless I am getting them. Why did I put solar panels on my house? Simple. I got a big fat subsidy. The city-owned utility in my city, Austin, Texas, paid two-thirds of the cost.

The price of solar panels is falling dramatically. Since 1980, we’ve seen the cost of photovoltaic panels decline from more than $20 per watt to less than $1 per watt.[48] And some companies are claiming that they will cut the cost to $0.40 per watt by 2017.[49] In a recent report, Bloomberg New Energy Finance projected that solar will be the fastest-growing form of generation capacity through 2030.[50] BNEF expects some $2.5 trillion will be spent globally on renewables over that time period.[51] And solar is going to be the big winner. Asia alone will add 800 gigawatts of solar PV. The US and Japan alone are projected to spend about $350 billion on rooftop solar.[52]

If cheaper solar systems can be twinned with cheaper electricity-storage devices, we will see a transformation of electric grids around the world. That transformation will be particularly rapid in rural areas and island economies, where even relatively small batteries can make a big difference for electricity-starved populations.

So what about batteries? The short answer is that they are still too finicky and their energy density is too low. On a gravimetric basis, gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy as the best lithium-ion batteries. Furthermore, batteries don’t like extreme hot or cold and they aren’t very durable. We can store large quantities of coal, oil, and natural gas with relative ease. But our ability to store electricity is laughably small.

Globally, we are now consuming 22,000 terawatt-hours of electricity every year. If we could somehow collect all of the world’s car batteries – there are about 1 billion automobiles on the planet – and string them all together, the amount of electricity they could hold would only provide about 30 minutes worth of our global electricity needs.

But there are some promising developments. Consider what’s happening at Aquion Energy, a Pittsburgh-based company. Aquion is not working on batteries for the transportation sector. Instead, it’s working on grid-related applications. And it has developed a hybrid battery that is low cost and ultra reliable. Aquion has raised over $100 million in private equity and venture capital and it’s now starting to produce batteries for grid-scale storage.

The advancements in nuclear, in solar, in storage, along with the ongoing advances in hydrocarbon production and utilization are all extremely positive. Going forward, we are going to need more energy – a lot more energy, so that we can bring more people out of the dark. We need more energy and we need better engines of all kinds, so that we can more effectively convert energy into useful power – of whatever kind – computing power, motive power, and cooking power.

We are not running out of oil. Or coal. Or natural gas. The Malthusians are wrong. We have plenty of energy – enough to last decades, or even centuries. What we are lacking in many wealthy countries, like the US and Australia, and in Western Europe, is the political will to exploit the vast energy resources that we have.

We may, indeed, one day hit peak oil or peak natural gas. But we will never reach peak imagination. Energy is the master resource, but human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.[53]

That ingenuity — and the innovation that springs from it — is what makes me hopeful for the future. I am optimistic to the point of idiocy. And I hope that my remarks today have led you to be just a tad more optimistic as well.

ENDNOTES

[1] Reuters, “Exxon Says N. America Gas Production Has Peaked,” June 21, 2005, http://www.reuters.com/article/Utilities/idUSN2163310420050621.

[2] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9070us2a.htm

[3] Robert L. Bradley, Jr., and Richard W. Fulmer, Energy: The Master Resource, [Dubuque: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 2004], 81.

[4] Mike Ruppert, “Interview with Matthew Simmons,” August 18, 2003, http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/blackout.htm.

[5] http://climatechangeaustralia.org/Peak_Oil.html

[6] For the text of the book, see http://www.constitution.org/cmt/malthus/population.htm

[7] https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/malthus/ch01.htm

[8] Cited by Keith Fuglie, “Why the Pessimists are Wrong,” IEEE Spectrum, June 2013, http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/agricultural-productivity-will-rise-to- the-challenge

[9] BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014.

[10] BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014.

[11] Geohive.com data, http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history3.aspx

[12] Fuglie, op. cit.

[13] Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century, 196.

[14] http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/FIW%202012%20Booklet –Final.pdf, p 29

[15] http://www.unesco.org/education/GMR2006/full/chapt7_eng.pdf, 165.

[16] See UNESCO data. From 1990 to 2015, global literacy rates are expected to increase from 83% to 92%. Among females, the rate will go from 79% to 90%.

[17] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-16/clean-energy-investment-rises-9-led- by-solar-power.html

[18] IHS, “Total 2012 Upstream Oil and Gas Spending to Reach Record Level of Nearly $1.3 Trillion; Set to Exceed $1.6 Trillion by 2016, IHS Study Says,” April 30, 2012, http://press.ihs.com/press-release/energy-power/total-2012-upstream-oil-and-gas- spending-reach-record-level-nearly-13-tri

[19] Halliburton, “Brown & Root and Kerr-McGee Celebrate 50th Anniversary of First Producing Offshore Oil Well Out-of-Sight-Of-Land,” November 14, 1997. Available: http://www.halliburton.com/news/archive/1997/bresnws_111497.jsp

[20] http://www.statoil.com/en/NewsAndMedia/News/2014/Pages/13Feb_JohanSverdrup.asp

[21] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/bps-deep-water-drilling-potentially- risky/story-fn3dxity-1226865537854

[22] http://www.autoblog.com/2011/09/12/ford-1-0l-ecoboost-three-cylinder-finds-a- home-in-the-euro-spec/
See also: Max Giles, “Ford’s 1.0-liter EcoBoost wins engine of the year,” Autoweek.com, June 5, 2013, http://www.autoweek.com/article/20130605/CARNEWS/130609916

[23] Here’s the math: 22 hp in the Model T divided by 2.9 l = 7.6 hp/l. The Focus engine produces 123 hp/l. Thus, 118 / 7.6 = 15.5. For the Model T efficiency, see Ford.com, http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=858, which says the first Model T got between 13 and 21 mpg. For the EcoBoost, combined mileage is 32 to 41mpg. See: Ray Hutton, “2012 Ford Focus 1.0L EcoBoost,” Car and Driver, May 2012, http://www.caranddriver.com/news/2012-ford-focus-10l-ecoboost-first-drive-review

[24] Intel.com, http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm

[25] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_microprocessors., the chip referenced here is the Core i7 Sandy Bridge-E, which has 8 cores and 2.27 billion transistors.

[26] Intel.com, http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/22nm/pdfs/22nm_Fun_Facts.pdf

[27] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTENERGY2/0,,contentM DK:22855502~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:4114200,00.html

[28] Ibid.

[29] BP Statistical Review, 2014. In 2013, global energy use was 12.73 billion tons of oil equivalent. That’s 255.6 million bbls/d. In 2003, total use was 9.94 billion tons oil equivalent. Increase from 2003 to 2013 is 55.9 mmbbl/d, which is 6.7 Saudi Arabias.

[30] BP Stat Review 2013.

[31] BP Statistical Review 2014. In 2013, global energy use was 12.730 B tons of oil equivalent. That is roughly equal to 256 million barrels per day, or about 530 exajoules. Divided by 365 days per year, equals 1.45 EJ/d.
For reference, 1 quad ≈ 172 million barrels of oil equivalent ≈ 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas ≈ 1 exajoule.

[32] BP Statistical Review 2014.

[33] In 2013, HCs provided 221.5 mmboe/d to world economy. Renewables provided 5.6 mmboe/d.

[34] http://www.eia.gov/oog/info/twip/twip_crude.html#production

[35] BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014.

[36] BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014. Between 73 and 2013, oil use grew about 36 mmboe/d. Nat gas grew by about 40 mmboe/d. Coal use grew by about 46 mmboe/d.

[37] BP Statistical Review 2014. Oil use grew by 1.4M boe/d. Gas grew by about 700,000 boe/d.

[38] IEA, “Medium-Term Coal Market Report 2013,” December 16, 2013, http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/speeches/131216_MCMR13_launch_presentatio n_Sadamori.pdf, 6. The graphic shows that demand should reach about 4.6 billion tons of oil equivalent by 2018. At 7.33 barrels per ton of oil equivalent, that works out to 92.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

[39] IEA, “Tracking Clean Energy Progress 2013,” http://www.iea.org/publications/TCEP_web.pdf, 49. Note that the estimate for coal use goes from 155 EJ in 2011 to 180 EJ by 2017, or an increase of 25 EJ. That’s the equivalent of 4.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent. Divided by 365 days gives us 11.8 million barrels of oil equivalent per day.

[40] EIA data. Annual Energy Review 2008, Figure 5. “Primary Energy Consumption by Source, 1635-2008.” Available: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html

[41] Robert Bryce, “Not Beyond Coal:

[42] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-A- F/Appendices/Australia-s-Electricity/

[43] http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/learn/research-and-statistics/the-city-at-a- glance/metropolitan-sydney Note that this sources puts the size of Greater Sydney at 12,368 square kilometers.

[44] http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/mar/21/nuclear.world

[45] Total cost is expected to be $14B, see: http://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2013/09/03/georgia-psc-delays-decision-on- plant.html
Total capacity will be 2234 MW, (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant) for a cost of $6.26 million/MW

[46] EIA data on power plant capital costs, April 2013, http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/pdf/updated_capcost.pdf, 6

[47] http://www.technologyreview.com/article/412188/tr10-traveling-wave-reactor/

[48] National Renewable Energy Laboratory, “2010 Solar Technologies Market Report,” November 2011, http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51847.pdf, 60.

[49] Jonathan Gifford, “First Solar: Initial moves away from thin film?” April 11, 2013, http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/details/beitrag/first-solar–initial-moves-away-from- thin-film_100010855/#axzz2Wai4QgPC

[50] http://bnef.folioshack.com/document/v71ve0nkrs8e0/1lvoeb

[51] http://bnef.folioshack.com/document/v71ve0nkrs8e0/20nee

[52] http://bnef.folioshack.com/document/v71ve0nkrs8e0/1lvoeb

[53] https://www.masterresource.org/master-resource/simon-ultimate-resource/ How the Global Thirst for Low-Cost Electricity Continues Driving Coal Demand,” Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, in press.