Deep Thinkers Part 1
what are you thinking if you are digging that deep
Getting to Tonight’s Topic
Sometimes my friends will ask me how I pick my topics. After sixty years of experience on this planet, I always consider the mega-project the stupid approach that we just cannot resist. Digging the deepest oil well offshore, or building a dam 20X the size of Hoover is ALMOST ALWAYS a fools’ errand to me. Once a technology matures, the only way to justify some measurable improvement is to go big. This story about real estate development in Saudi Arabia in tonight’s feature photo is what inspired today’s go big theme.
Upon returning to writing I have likely been a bit too enthusiastic. I like twice a week and it seems sustainable. What is NOT SUSTAINABLE is making these posts too long. When they publish, each of you gets a magic estimate from Substack on how long they will take to read. While I am struggling to figure out how this is computed, I know that some of my posts are TOO LONG. So starting today, my aim will become eight minutes or less. Seems a good goal and means sometimes I need to limit my message.
Today I am writing about power. I know a little bit about this as I toiled in the power industry (nuclear mostly) for a portion of my career. From the time of the first campfire, humans have used their ingenuity to stay warm, grab a little more light and nowadays even stay cool. My premise about power is that drawing a boundary between methods that supercharge the upper atmosphere and those that do not is a useful approach. There may be some of you who GENUINELY believe that CO2 doesn’t matter. For now, I think it likely matters and therefore it is worth our consideration and action because this is the only planet we have.
Fires were our first crude attempt. I am sure we were inspired by nature and lightning-induced fires. I would imagine lightning had to be associated with the Gods in the sky. It was awesome, seemed like magic, and hard to fathom the power that even shook the ground. Who would not have been impressed! Once you can repeat the trick for yourself, you could dry your wet clothes and start the barbeque. The early masters must have been real heroes.
The power industry (electricity and internal combustion) has followed the way of the world. The first electricity plant needed the ingenuity of Thomas Edison and the capital of J.P. Morgan to illuminate a quarter of a mile square of Manhattan. The World’s most famous inventor teamed with a man so wealthy and powerful he could and would bail out governments. They pooled their resources and about 2 1/2 blocks on a side got some light. While people focus on the incandescent bulb, distributing the power was the real trick. Edison commercialized the lightbulb in 1879 and the Pearl Street Station became the world’s first Powerplant. The incorporated business operates today as Consolidated Edison in NYC. How wise were they? The truth is they got almost everything wrong. Edison was sure that direct current was the answer. The better idea of alternating current, thanks to Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse would overwhelm this bad first idea like a tidal wave soon enough. Imagine if we built our homes nowadays the way Edison saw things? We would have a bunch of car batteries and would DIRECT wire stuff like our toasters to the batteries. It sure would discourage us from buying appliances of all sorts. “Hey son, could you grab a battery out of the garage, I want to make some coffee. In only ten years or so, Edison was removed from controlling General Electric and a merger made the idea of DC electric current a relic of another age. I figure that during the decade of 1880s people heard a lot of conspiracy theories rather than rational explanations about electricity to dissuade us from A/C. That is always the strategy of those that guard the past. That is how things work but the best solution eventually rises to the top no matter the extent of the lies and stupidity. I wrote about this a while back here:
Different people draw wildly different conclusions from the same evidence. We haven’t changed very much. A while back I had a post that mentions the human genome project as an example where folks cannot grasp what growing real fast means in a business. The government-funded project set out to map what makes us go. They allotted 15 years for the effort. After 7 years they were 1% complete. If nothing changed this 15-year project might become 700 years. The naysayers had their fifteen minutes of fame sure the project was a pork-barrel fantasy. The team finished the mapping of the genome with two years to spare (13 years). Once a better way of doing things emerges, it steamrolls the past regardless of nostalgia. Here is the greater story if you want a tangent.
The story of almost any collective technology breakthrough is CONSTANT innovation and tweaking the plan. Trial number one is just practice for what is to come. Now if you are a big business titan, you understand how hard the first effort will be. It will hardly be cost-effective. The payoff comes as the costs relentlessly fall. Business school types have begun to study the path of new technologies. Many of them follow an upside-down hockey stick shape. They aggressively improve for a while and eventually level out.
Sometimes, if you are NOT NARROW-MINDED and understand your goal, improvement can be relentless and seem to defy the hockey stick leveling out. Why is that? While burning wood, coal, gas, or splitting atoms each follows the hockey stick, when we stack them on top of each other as one displaces the other, the growth just continues. The growth continues BECAUSE sensible people abandon the old ways of doing things and push through to the future. It is almost as simple as starting to look for the next hockey stick before the current one flattens out and your life will be better.
Of course, if your way of life is tied to an old way of doing something, giving up is very hard. Regardless of the absurd lengths pursued to stick with the old ways, people eventually embrace the new.
Energy production will always be a big business as we have built our modern world around it. What has happened is the different methods to make energy cost so much to build and the facilities last so long, that we run them long past when they are no longer viable. Each of these old ways of doing things is saddled with absurd costs and risks but because they are external to the business, they continue to operate. So instead of thinking about power as a bunch of cavemen dragging trees and branches to the campfire, what if we can find something that will give us even more power when we fiddle with it? That is what wood » coal » oil » gas » fission » renewables are all about. Each of them has been useful and coexisted for a time. There are not too many large-scale powerplants that are burning wood although I am sure they exist. I know in Hawaii, the fuel of choice is often sugarcane stalks.
I am SURE that each time we pivoted from one fuel to another, even if the transition was slow, there were always old ornery folks who preferred the good ol’ days. I do not doubt that the whalers thought their lamps were way better than kerosene just like the kerosene salesman told folks the lightbulb was dangerous and would never be reliable. Not that different than people who were sure they didn't look good with LED lights and we should stick with incandescent. People do not change and for many, change is the enemy.
While I have quoted him before, my son N loves the expression “I miss the good old days when crime rates were higher and real GDP was lower.” Sure as the world makes a trip around the sun once a year, things have been getting better for as long as we have been keeping records. While there are blips, and descents into madness, the underlying trends are things get better.
So what is my point today? I grow so TIRED of the foolish statement that renewables only work when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. While people have been writing this for decades, shouting it on cable news, and ranting about it on talk radio what has happened? We now CLEARLY understand that technology grows often as an inverted hockey stick. It rises steadily and then flattens out. Once things flatten out to keep “progress” coming we always seem to go toward the mega-project. There is no underlying science, only a more extreme commitment to the method. This means a crazier way to mine coal, drilling for oil in the most difficult of locations, forcing oil out of the ground by breaking the rocks well beneath us, dams of unimaginable scale. The expression “go big or go home” comes to mind. Maybe it is time to go home with technologies that are long past their glory days. Seen through these eyes, it becomes easy to see which approaches long ago entered the rear-view mirror. What we also know is these mega-scale projects frequently fail in unexpected but catastrophic ways.
The fraction of ALL ENERGY generated by renewables rises without pause. The technologies improve while ‘the old ways’ exert massive effort to eke out the smallest of improvements. I like the analogy of polishing the apple. While its use is declining, burning coal is still significant. I saw a sad documentary about the incredible poverty endemic in Appalachia. No place exemplifies this better than West Virginia. As the coal industry winds down, the extractions become more violent and depressing. Rather than mining traditionally, West Virginia has pursued the blasting of the tops of mountains with the debris filling valleys and diverting or polluting the water. After the blasts, earth movers just bulldoze the exposed coal. The scale of the blasting exceeds Hiroshima-sized blasting. The extreme behavior for small returns only speaks to the tragic destruction of the land for a smaller and smaller output. Depressing, at least to me. Coal is not dying due to regulation. It is dying for the reason people no longer choose to write with a quill. While not for everyone if you are unfamiliar with mountain top decapitation mining, pour yourself a stiff drink and enjoy
I think that oil exploration is another excellent example and the pattern recurs as each technology meets decline or the end of innovation, the flat part of the inverted hockey stick. The first oil well drilled by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pennsylvania was 69 feet deep. Pennsylvania is where it all started and we can all still buy Quaker State motor oil. The Deepwater Horizon offshore well (it’s somewhat famous now) was sunk to a depth of over 35,000 feet and the water was over 4000 feet deep! I got an idea. Instead of investing in something that just keeps shrinking, gets more efficient, and costs less, let’s go out in the middle of the ocean and lug a couple of cranes out there. Once we make it out to a little less than a mile deep (about 4000 feet) let’s start digging! I figure if we drill about seven additional miles beyond the bottom there should be some oil down there. Keep in mind that the human body, well trained can dive about 60 feet without scuba gear. Nothing about what I am describing is reasonable or sensible. The Deepwater Horizon accident has been studied. I hope we learned some lessons.
Maybe there is a better way? Horizontal drilling and injecting chemicals into the ground to break shale and extract oil (and hopefully not disturb groundwater) is a remarkable innovation. My point with these examples is that the intellectual effort to build offshore oil rigs and drill seven miles underground is amazing. So is causing more earthquakes in Oklahoma than in California. Regulators in Oklahoma just figure earthquakes are not THAT scary. This is a monumental effort for a smaller and smaller return. The efforts in these industries are not to be minimized. However, in the long-term, they are a lost cause without large subsidies. They are competing with other bright minds playing on a completely different field, and the new players have an open field ahead for miles! I am amazed by human ingenuity.
Just because a particular power generation method isn’t based on carbon, doesn’t make it reasonable. We have renewable approaches that in my eyes are on the flat of the hockey stick. Their use these days depends on the pursuit of crazy complexity and scale. I believe this sort of thing is ALMOST ALWAYS doomed to disappoint us. That is what Part 2 will be about.
The Poll & Music
I have a cousin who has shared the now common local in-fighting over solar farms in his community. He lives in one of the most idyllic of areas amongst rolling hills, lakes, and farmland. If I lived there, I would want things to remain the same I suppose. His community, like many, is navigating whether having solar panels in their midst is a good or a bad thing. If you do not yearn for the good old days of candlelight, my poll tonight may be fun. I hope that tonight’s poll spurs strong participation. We live in a modern world and it brings many benefits. The modern world also means that none of the above is an option ONLY IF we want to return to rolling around in the dirt and wandering in search of a wooly mammoth.
The song seemed natural. Going big is fun and hard to resist. Let me know if you agree with my choice of a tune.
What’s Next
My next post is titled “Deep Thinkers Part 2”. I noticed I was getting a bit too enthusiastic with my writing and the lengths were getting a little too long. I was glad I noticed before folks started stepping away! The eight-minute goal seems like a great idea and lets me split the longer stories into pieces. Hope you prefer that. Part 2 of this story will stress that it is not just oil and gas that cannot resist bigger is better. I genuinely believe we only have one current way to make the power that starts small and stays small. It seems that is the best plan. If today’s post was not your thing, skip the next one and enjoy a free eight minutes.
I'd say gumdrop factory but I remember the smell every time I used to drive by the Yankee Candle scented candles factory. Gumdrops might get pretty cloying.
"It is dying for the reason people no longer choose to write with a quill." Nice!