Letter from the Publisher: Top 10 Energy Truths Worth Remembering

Heat Treat Today publishes eight print magazines a year and included in each is a letter from the publisher, Doug Glenn. This letter first appeared in Heat Treat Today's November 2022 Vacuum Heat Treat Systems print edition.

Immediate credit for the content of this column goes to Mark Mills, author of The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s, and podcast host of The Last Optimist, the source for most of the below content — see episode #20, “Congress & the ‘Groundbreaking’ Energy Spending Act: Top 10 Truths to Keep in Mind.”

Heat Treat Today interviewed Mr. Mills not long ago. If you’d like to listen to, watch, or read that interview, go to our website and search for “Mark Mills” or Bing/Google search for “Heat Treat Radio #73 Mark Mills.”

Here are some interesting thoughts from The Last Optimist podcast, episode #20.

1. Energy transformations are slow. In the last 20 years, the Western world has spent over $5 trillion to avoid using hydrocarbons, but reduced the percentage share by only 2%, from 86% to 84%. Remarkably, the burning of wood, today, provides 500% more energy to the world than all the world’s solar panels combined. Burning wood will most likely not change in the near future; in fact, more wood is burned today than 20 years ago.
2. Economic growth always produces more demand for energy. Wealthy economies use 500–5,000% more energy per capita than poor economies. Ironically, wealthy economies use energy more efficiently than poor economies but consume vastly more. Implication: the wealthier we become the MORE energy we will consume.
3. The shale revolution (mostly happening in America) is the world’s biggest energy revolution. From 2005-2020, the amount of energy provided from shale was TWICE the amount of energy produced from wind and solar arrays combined. This is the largest increase in energy supply in the history of the world, anytime, anywhere. The next closest “revolution” was the Saudi oil fields, but the shale fields have produced nearly DOUBLE the amount of energy.
4. Green energy is NOT carbon free. According to a study done by Volkswagen, the first 60,000 to 70,000 miles of driving a diesel-powered Volkswagen emits less CO₂ than driving an electric vehicle. Its only AFTER that many miles that the vehicle is a net saver of CO₂.
5. Energy tech cannot emulate the digital tech performance curve. The exceptionally high reductions in cost of computers and other digital technologies have been unprecedented in world history. Unfortunately, those who claim that green energy developments will see the same drastic reduction in costs are misled and ignore, at their own peril, the physics of energy conversion and transmission. That’s not to say there won’t be significant improvements in energy technology – in fact, there have already been and will continue to be vast improvements, but not to the scale of information/digital technology.
6. The energy transition hardware radically increases the demand for physical minerals and thus mining. The need for green energy minerals, the materials needed to build green energy materials like solar panels, electric vehicles, and wind farms, is 1,000% higher than building similar hydrocarbon-based hardware. In other words, the push for green energy will require a drastic increase in the need for minerals, requiring mining, which is currently a carbon intensive .
7. Energy transition policies — as currently presented — will cause prices to rise. This point ties in directly to point #6. If you increase the demand for materials, such as copper, cobalt, nickel, silicon, aluminum, and lithium, the price of these materials will increase precipitously and will therefore impact the price of all goods that use those materials. The energy sector is a minor user of these materials now, but if demand increase hundredfold, the energy sector will become a major user and will invariably push prices northward.

8. 

   Green energy isn’t cheap. Every country who has thus far embraced, even in part, some sort of green energy has experienced a 200%–500% increase in consumer energy costs.

9. China is the OPEC of green energy minerals. It’s not so much that the mining of these minerals and rare-earth materials is done in China (some is but not all), but a huge majority of these minerals are refined in China. They are truly dominant. China’s share of mineral refining is more than double OPEC’s share of the world’s petroleum market.
10. Markets and consumer want reliable AND cheap energy. The most radical transition in society over the past century has been the percentage of time that mankind has had to invest in acquiring food and fuel. For most of human history, roughly 60-80% of all human exertion was spent acquiring food and fuel for existence. Today, thanks primarily to the discovery and utilization of hydrocarbons, that number is more in the range of 15%. One measure of an economy’s prosperity is the amount of time designated to getting food and fuel. The lower that percentage, the more prosperous a society. It has never been lower than today.

The 30-minute podcast from which this information comes is well worth a listen.

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