Richard Sears: Planning for the end of oil

52,369 views ・ 2010-05-20

TED


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00:16
For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy,
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00:18
and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk.
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00:21
I'll try to spin a story about energy,
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00:23
and oil's a convenient starting place.
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The talk will be broadly about energy,
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but oil's a good place to start.
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And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff.
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You take about eight or so carbon atoms,
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about 20 hydrogen atoms,
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you put them together in exactly the right way
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and you get this marvelous liquid:
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very energy-dense and very easy to refine
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into a number of very useful products and fuels.
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It's great stuff.
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00:47
Now, as far as it goes,
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there's a lot of oil out there in the world.
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Here's my little pocket map
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of where it's all located.
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A bigger one for you to look at.
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But this is it, this is the oil in the world.
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Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is.
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01:01
This is about 100 trillion gallons
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of crude oil
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still to be developed and produced in the world today.
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01:09
Now, that's just one story about oil,
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and we could end it there and say,
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"Well, oil's going to last forever
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because, well, there's just a lot of it."
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But there's actually more to the story than that.
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Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil,
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1000 meters below where you're all sitting
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is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world.
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Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want.
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So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it.
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01:34
But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system?
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01:39
Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil,
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and it's been a dominant part of our energy system
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for most of those 150 years.
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Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about:
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For the last 25 years,
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oil has been playing less and less of a role
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in global energy systems.
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There was one kind of peak oil in 1985,
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when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply.
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Now, it's about 35 percent.
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It's been declining
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and I believe it will continue to decline.
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Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007
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and is declining.
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So oil is playing a less significant role
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every year.
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And so, 25 years ago,
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there was a peak oil;
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just like, in the 1920s,
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there was a peak coal;
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and a hundred years before that,
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there was a peak wood.
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This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems.
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02:33
And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades?
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Well, a lot of natural gas
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and a little bit of nuclear, for starters.
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And what goes on in the future?
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Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades
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is peak gas,
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and beyond that,
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peak renewables.
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Now, I'll tell you another little, very important
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story about this picture.
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Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total
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isn't increasing, it is --
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that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it,
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we'll fill in some of the details --
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but there's a very important message here:
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This is 200 years of history,
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and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing
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our energy system.
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Energy systems of the world
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becoming progressively -- year on year,
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decade on decade, century on century --
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becoming less carbon intense.
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And that continues into the future
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with the renewables that we're developing today,
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reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy
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by mid century.
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Now that might be the end of the story --
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Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables --
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but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that.
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And to tell the next part of the story --
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and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond.
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What is the future
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of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy?
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Well, we have to take a little excursion,
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and we'll start in central Texas.
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Here's a piece of limestone.
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I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas.
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It's about 400 million years old.
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And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it.
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Now, here's a piece of chalk.
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I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger.
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And it's different than this limestone, you can see that.
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You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff,
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and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this.
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Yeah, it's very different -- no, it's not different.
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It's not different, it's the same stuff:
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calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate.
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What's different is how the molecules are put together.
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Now, if you think that's kind of neat,
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the story gets really neat right now.
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Off the coast of California comes this:
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It's an abalone shell.
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Now, millions of abalone every year
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make this shell.
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Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing,
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it's calcium carbonate.
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04:39
It's the same stuff as this
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and the same stuff as this.
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But it's not the same stuff; it's different.
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It's thousands of times,
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maybe 3,000 times tougher than this.
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And why? Because the lowly abalone
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is able to lay down
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the calcium carbonate crystals in layers,
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making this beautiful, iridescent
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mother of pearl.
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Very specialized material
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that the abalone self-assembles,
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millions of abalone,
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all the time, every day, every year.
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This is pretty incredible stuff.
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All the same, what's different?
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How the molecules are put together.
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Now, what does this have to do with energy?
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Here's a piece of coal.
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And I'll suggest that this coal
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is about as exciting
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as this chalk.
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Now, whether we're talking about fuels
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or energy carriers,
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or perhaps novel materials for batteries
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or fuel cells,
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nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet
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because nature didn't need to.
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Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell,
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the survival of a species didn't depend
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on building those materials,
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until maybe now when it might just matter.
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So, when we think about the future of energy,
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imagine
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what would it be like
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if instead of this,
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we could build the energy equivalent of this
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just by rearranging the molecules differently.
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And so that is my story.
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The oil will never run out.
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It's not because we have a lot of it.
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It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills.
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It's because, well,
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thousands of years ago,
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people invented ideas --
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they had ideas, innovations, technology --
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and the Stone Age ended,
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not because we ran out of stones.
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(Laughter)
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It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology
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that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil.
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Thank you very much.
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06:42
(Applause)
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