Miracle substances

When miracle substances might not be all that miraculous

Robert Bryce is an evergreen gronk devoted to muddying the energy discourse from a Substack with a terrifyingly large number of subscribers (~16,000).¹ His platform churns out flawed climate-change-denying boomer maths, which is really just astrology for people who iron their hankerchiefs.

His latest [regurgitated] piece is on oil - a “miracle substance”. He opines about the value of oil to our society, arguing:

• Transportation is essential to commerce;

• commerce is essential to the economy;

• oil is essential to transportation; thus

• oil is essential the economy.

It’s a pretty clear and compelling argument using deductive logic. It’s also very wrong. It’s another strategy from the playbook of those looking to delay or deny the energy transition that is unfortunately appealing to a large audience. This week, we focus on this argument and explain where it comes apart.

Pumpjacks. Source

The not-so-iron law

Robert Bryce prides himself on coining the ‘Iron Law of Power Density’ and his argument for why oil is such a crucial, miraculous substance, is that it has a good energy density, is stable at room temperature and pressure, is easy to transport and is relatively cheap. Oil has an energy density of 43 MJ/kg, which “few substances this side of uranium come close to touching” (Uranium has an energy density of 3.9 TJ/kg).

Except it’s all rubbish. The argument might be elegant in a podcast bro kind of way, but it’s fatally flawed² by the simple fact that transportation is the essential bit to modern economies, not the technology powering the transportation. Oil (petroleum, not that oil), and with it oil-powered transportation, has only been a feature of our economy for a little more than 150 years. Did we not have commerce (or economies) prior? I bet there were some podcast bros³ in 1886 pretty smug about the role of rail freight in the economies of the day, arguing that trucking would never be a thing.

And “miracle substance” sure sounds good and essential to society, but you know what else was a miracle material? Asbestos. Excellent insulation properties, strong, stable at room temperature and pressure, easy to transport, and a superb fire retardant — all properties which made it very appealing in building materials. It was also cheap to boot.

Except, we know this story. Asbestos fibres are very small, and tiny airborne strands are are very good at embedding deep in people’s lungs leading to asbestosis and mesothelioma which are very, very nasty diseases. The people at highest risk were of course those mining and manufacturing products from it.

Like oil, asbestos is an excellent material which seems fantastic until you start to factor in the costs that come with their externalities.

Say it louder for those at the back:

Asbestos was only cheap for the people whose lives were not ruined by it.

I’m not here to argue that oil isn’t an excellent energy source, or that it hasn’t enabled transformative economic development over the 20th century (it clearly has). But the science is really clear on the externalities — burning oil contributes to climate change, contributes significantly to urban smog and air pollution, and the odd oil spill isn’t exactly a redeeming feature.

Any discussion of oil missing this context is meaningless.

An oil rig. Well, what’s left of one. Source

Oil is replaceable

The article barrages on to show us how definitively good oil really is by running some simplistic numbers astrology.

Bryce chooses the aviation industry to highlight how the miraculous properties of oil make it crucial to the industry, and why batteries would be uncompetitive. The energy density of oil is the killer feature, batteries simply can’t compete.

And of course they can’t — no one is proposing to build commercial jets with the current generation of available battery chemistries. Aviation, especially modern commercial jets, hinges on energy density.

Just to drive home the point, Bryce highlights the quantity of a ‘green’ energy required to fuel an aeroplane, like burning wood. Oh what a knee-slapper, a wood furnace powered aeroplane! Gather round the fireplace children, father has stories to tell.

Except, for someone who loves to talk about the immutability of physics and the IrOn LaW oF PoWeR DeNsItY, he forgot to mention that there’s another fuel with an energy density between uranium and oil — hydrogen. At 120MJ/kg it’s some 3 times denser than oil. Oops!⁴

And yes, hydrogen fuelled planes are not a commercial reality yet. And there are plenty of reasons to be sceptical about hydrogen as a fuel.⁵ But that doesn’t change that fact that it flies in the face of Bryce’s energy density argument. Or that there are a lot of people currently working on hydrogen plane designs… like Airbus. And startups working on smaller hydrogen turboprop designs hoping to get to market within a couple of years.

The article focusses on planes because it is currently difficult to address their emissions commercially. But, they’re the fruit sitting at the top of the tree – Bryce doesn’t talk much about the use cases for oil where there are already better options.⁶ Light vehicles are rapidly electrifying, including in Australia where almost 10% of new passenger vehicles are now electric. Buses, freight trains and trucks are likely to electrify, despite the supposed deficiencies of batteries compared to dinosaur juice. Robert Bryce is missing the wood for the trees. Oil might be energy dense, but electricity is cheap to produce, easy to transport and ubiquitous. These are material advantages that outweigh the properties that make Bryce want to bathe in the miraculous substance.

Diffraction is pretty. Source

Articles like this are dangerous in that they paint a picture that not only are we dependent on oil (we currently are), but that it’s the lifeblood of our very economic successes. That not only is it not going anywhere, but that it would be economically suicidal to do away with oil. They aim to convince readers that the energy transition is just some sort of unserious experiment, without a basis in reality, hand waved into existence by politicians without a commercial bone in their body.

But to the contrary, the energy transition is as much an artefact of technological progress as it is addressing the unrecognised external costs of fossil fuels. Human history is short and our heavy reliance on fossil fuels is shorter still. In the face of rapidly developing alternative technologies, it’s weirdly regressive to argue for our continued reliance on a specific type of fuel.

If that was our thinking, we’d probably still be getting around by horses. They were also cheap, strong and stable at room temperature.

1. This is an entirely separate thread to unpick here, but I think the story “everything is fine, oil is fine and it’s all just woke garbage” is a lot more comforting to a large number of people than “the world is fucked and extractive/exploitative capitalism has ruined it for everyone”.

2. Affirming the consequent if we’re being pedantic. Which we are.

3. You know they would have had the sickest moustaches.

4. Natural gas also has a slightly higher energy density of 55 MJ/kg, FYI.

5. Net zero aviation appears to be exploring three primary hydrogen development pathways — 1. hydrogen combustion in modified jet engines (turbofans, turboprops), 2. electric motors coupled with hydrogen fuel cells, 3. conventional jet engines utilising biofuels based on hydrogen.

6. In fact Bryce lazily tries to imply that electric cars are flawed by the same energy density problems that plagues aviation.