Cubic Mile of Oil - Replacement of Oil By Alternative Sources

Replacement of Oil By Alternative Sources

While oil has many other important uses (lubrication, plastics, roadways, roofing) this section considers only its use as an energy source.

The CMO is a powerful means of understanding the difficulty of replacing oil energy by other sources. SRI International chemist Ripudaman Malhotra, working with Crane and colleague Ed Kinderman, used it to describe the looming energy crisis in sobering terms. Malhotra illustrates the problem of producing one CMO energy that we currently derive from oil each year from five different alternative sources. Installing capacity to produce 1 CMO per year requires long and significant development.

Allowing fifty years to develop the requisite capacity, 1 CMO of energy per year could be produced by any one of these developments:

• 4 Three Gorges Dams, developed each year for 50 years, or
• 52 nuclear power plants, developed each year for 50 years, or
• 104 coal-fired power plants, developed each year for 50 years, or
• 32,850 wind turbines, developed each year for 50 years, or
• 91,250,000 rooftop solar photovoltaic panels developed each year for 50 years

The energy produced is the power rating of the source multiplied by the duration it is operational. These comparisons take into account the variability of available power (solar panels work only during the day, turbines work only when the wind blows). Also, whereas 1 kWh is equivalent to 3412 BTU of primary energy, in practice it takes closer to 10,000 BTU to produce 1 kWh of electricity from coal and other fossil sources. Thus, when considering sources such as wind and solar which directly produce electricity, the required installed capacity was calculated by using 1 kWh as equivalent to 10,000 BTU.

The environmental, social, and financial costs of such development projects are immense:

• The Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest, flooding 632 km2, displacing 1.25 million people, and costing roughly US$30 billion.
• A conventional nuclear power plant produces hazardous radioactive waste, raises fears of radiation or nuclear proliferation, requires 10 years to construct for a 40 year lifetime, occupies about 4 km2, and may cost upwards of US$5 billion.
• A 500 MW coal-fired power plant may contribute to acid rain, global warming, and air pollution, occupies about 2 km2, may obtain its fuel via controversial methods such as mountaintop removal, and costs about US$650 million.
• A large wind turbine requires a location with an abundance of steady wind, may be visually obtrusive, can interfere with aviation, needs about 0.16 km2 to avoid interfering with adjacent turbines, and costs about US$2 million.
• A 2.1 kW rooftop solar array requires technical skills for installation, needs a sunny location, presents few aesthetic or environmental problems, covers about 14 m2, but costs around US$15,000.

For comparison, US$3.2 trillion is the approximate gross domestic product of Germany, China, or the United Kingdom. The total land area of New Zealand is approximately 270,000 square kilometres (100,000 sq mi).

At a 2008 market price of US$120 per barrel (US$750/m3), the cost of one CMO was about US$3 trillion.