March 28, 2024

PowerPoints: Bound for Glory?

by Terry Wildman, Editor-in-Chief

I’m neither a physicist or a mathematician. I do possess, however, an insatiable curiosity. Ideas surrounding energy in all its forms are a constant source of discovery and fulfilment to me. I often wonder how people like Albert Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, and Edward Teller found the heart to carry on with their work in the face of ridicule and abuse by their peers and a skeptical public.

In the late eighteen hundreds, German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald ran head-long into this treatment when he began to promote his theoretical foundation for chemistry, one in keeping with the first and second laws of thermodynamics. The first law maintains that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed – only transformed. The second holds that in any such transformation, the capacity of the energy to do useful work is diminished. The energy does not disappear – some has become what is known as ‘bound’ energy. In 1865, German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius labelled this degraded energy as entropy, which allowed the law to be stated categorically: within any thermodynamically closed system energy is conserved but entropy must increase.

Although he was not among the pioneers of energetics, Ostwald pushed the limits of these laws in developing a strict understanding of chemical transformation and soon became the central figure in its maturation. He concluded that the science of energy was not merely a subfield within physics but the very basis upon which physics is built. He immediately told physicists in his homeland their discipline needed to undergo a ‘radical reorientation’ to make room for these fundamental truths. Because matter is indestructible and energy degrades, energy must be the key: “From now on,” he claimed, “the whole of physics had to be represented as a theory of energies.”1

His peers mocked and jeered him. Ploughing through this he immersed himself deeper into the issue. All he saw was ‘energy.’ If energy cannot be created and cannot be recycled, then the energy allowance of the planet, and of the human economy on the planet, must be finite.

From that point on, Ostwald grew his doctrine of energetics claiming that all human understanding including: natural and earth sciences, history, economics, sociology, politics, and even ethics and moral philosophy. This, according to him, because the laws of thermodynamics implied a new unequivocal imperative: “Waste no energy!”2 It seems to me that Ostwald must have had a crystal ball.

The imperative spawned many scientists to look more intently at thermodynamic hurdles to the point where many disciplines began to take on different shapes. Not the least of which were the three outstanding problems in the Newtonian physics of the day – the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and black-box radiation – the very ideas that led a young Swiss patent clerk to his overthrow of the discipline’s mechanistic foundations with his general and special theories of relativity.

According to Daniel C. Foltz, increased interest in ecological and environmental history late in the twentieth century led to sustained inquiries that focused on the energy history of the human economy, such as Alfred Crosby’s Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy in 2006. Seen through the thermodynamic lens, what has been called the industrial revolution, a once-in-planetary-history drawdown of stored sunlight to do work and make wealth in the present.

The petroleum era will most likely depart as suddenly as it came; in a grand sweep of geologic time, our use of petroleum is just an instant, a brief burst of frantic activity that has produced exponential growth in wealth and human population – and in humanity’s impact on planetary ecosystems.3

Energy as a master resource points directly to an appreciation of a vital economic indicator that is more fundamental than the monetary price of energy – net energy uptake. This is the energy available to an economy once the costs of obtaining that energy are paid. In other words, the energy return on energy invested (EROI). A basic example might look like this: to make economic use of a barrel of oil requires not only drilling the well but also transporting the oil to a refinery, converting it to a variety of products, getting those to market, and finally to the end-user. Before drilling can commence considerable costs must be put into play such as research and development, workforce management, drilling apparatus, refinery equipment, tank trucks, cars, etc., etc.

The fly in the ointment is that when EROI is calculated, standard boundaries must be in place to ensure consistency. Analysts are having trouble establishing and agreeing on these parameters as there are so many small details to consider. Thus far, an agreed-upon standard for the EROI boundaries would allow for economically rational decision making between different energy systems. The biggest flaw generally encountered is choices that are made according to current market price, which is man-made, dependent on demand, subsidies, taxes, and rates at which a flow of energy is extracted from its global stock. Policymakers should be trying to maximize total sustainable deliverables thereby maximizing the EROI of a sustainable energy system. The following table shows relative EROIs and provides a good jumping-off point to determine monetary prices of different kinds of energy.

Average and High and Low Estimates for Energy Return
on Energy Invested4 (Different Energy Sources)
Energy Type Average High Estimate Low Estimate
Oil 19:1   5:1
Coal   85:1 50:1
Natural gas 10:1    
Hydroelectric   267:1 11:1
Nuclear   15:1 1.1:1
Wind 18:1    
Solar photovoltaic   10:1 3.7:1
Geothermal electricity   13:1 2:1
Geothermal heat pump   5:1 3:1
U.S. corn ethanol   1.8:1 <1:1
Brazilian sugar cane ethanol   10:1 8:1
Soy biodiesel   3.5:1 1.9:1
Palm oil biodiesel 9:1    
Tar sands oil 5:1    
Oil shale   4:1 1.5:1
Wave 15:1    
Tidal 6:1    

Experts continually warn against disregarding the climate consequences of burning carbon-based fuels noting that, in particular, the EROI of oil will decline further, as drilling increases, shipping to more remote markets becomes more commonplace, and reliance grows on energetically expensive oil from tar sands and shales.

Is there an EROI sweet spot that spells success to an economy and/or civilization? Studies show that an EROI of 3:1 would represent a: “bare minimum for civilization. It would allow only for energy to run transportation or related systems, but would leave little discretionary surplus for all the things we value about civilization: art, medicine, education and so on.”5 The same study indicates that an EROI of 5:1 from the world’s main fuels would be required to maintain anything that we would call civilization but would be unable to support military capabilities or any other means of securing an energy and resource-rich future.

One of the real bright spots, however, is renewable energies. These boast an EROI ranging from 10:1 to 50:1. There is a down side – can renewables be built out and exploited expediently enough to avoid having to determine what the minimum EROI might be before civilization falls below it?

At the end of the day, economics will have to recognize that we live on a finite planet and that the laws of thermodynamics apply to economic life as to all other life. British physicist Arthur Eddington observed nearly a hundred years ago that: “The second law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature.”6 Had economists been shown in the 1930s or 1970s that their theories opposed the second law, we would have made a great deal more progress toward the goal of establishing our economy and civilization on a sustainable flow of matter-and-energy.

On this very subject, foresters have developed a saying:

The very best time to plant a tree, like the best time to admit that energy is the master resource, is decades ago. The second best time is today.


1 Delte, R.J. “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics 1: Origins and Motivations.” Foundations of Chemistry, (January 2007): 33-35
2 Zencey, E. “Energy as Master Resource.” Is Sustainability still Possible? (2013): 74
3 Foltz, D.C. “Does Nature Have Historical Agency? World History, Environmental History, and How Historians Can Help Save the Planet.” The History Teacher (November 2003): 9-28: Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006
4 Heinberg, R. Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy ‘and the Fate of Industrial Society San Francisco and Santa Rosa, CA: International Forum on Globalization and the Post-Carbon Institute (2009):55
5 Hall, Charles A.S.,Stephen Balogh, David J.R. Murphy. “What is the Minimum EROI That a Sustainable Society Must Have?” Energies 2,1 (2009): 29-30
6 Eddington, Arthur S. The Nature of the Physical World. New York: MacMillan Company, 1928