How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

Another product derived from crude oil is asphalt. Global output of this black and sticky material is now on the order of 100 megatons,

with 85 percent of it going to paving (hot and

warm asphalt mixes) and most of the re...

The shift from coal to crude oil took generations to accomplish. Commercial crude oil extraction began during the 1850s in Russia, Canada, and the US.

Diffusion of these new prime movers was slow, and the US and Canada were the only two countries with high rates of car ownership prior to the Second World War.

The largest Soviet discoveries were in 1948 (Romashkino in the Volga-Ural Basin) and in 1965 (Samotlor in Western Siberia).42

Mass-scale car usage in Europe and Japan and the concurrent conversion of their economies from coal to crude oil, and later to natural gas, began only during the 1950s, as did the expansion of foreign trade and travel (including the first jetliners) and the use of petrochemical feedstocks for the synthesis of ammonia and plastics.

In constant (inflation-adjusted) monies, the world oil price was lower in 1950 than it was in 1940, lower in 1960 than in 1950—and lower still in 1970 than in 1960.43

In 1950 the US still produced

about 53 percent of the world’s oil; by 1970, although still the largest producer, its share fell to

less than 23 percent—and it was clear that the country would need in...

the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) ...

OPEC, set up in 1960 in Baghdad by just five countries in order to prevent further price reductions, had time on its side: it wasn’t large enough to assert itself during the 1960s, but by 1970 its production share...

peaked in 1970), made it impossible to igno...

In 1971, Algeria and Libya began to nationalize their

oil production, and Iraq followed in 1972, the same year that Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia began their gradual takeover of their oilfields—which until that point had been in the hands

of

foreign corpo...

after the Israeli victory over Egypt in Sinai in October 1973, it embargoed all oil exports to the US.

On January 1 1974, the Gulf states raised their posted price to $11.65/barrel, completing a 4.5-fold rise in the cost of this essential energy source in a single year—and this ended the era of rapid economic expansion that had been energized by cheap oil.

the fall of the Iranian monarchy and the takeover of Iran by a fundamentalist theocracy led to a second wave of oil price rises, from about $13 in 1978 to $34 in 1981, and to

another 90 percent decline in the global rate of economic growth between 1979 and 1982.47

In 1995, crude oil extraction finally surpassed the 1979 record and then continued to rise, meeting the demand of an economically reforming China as well as the rising demand elsewhere

in Asia—but oil has not regained its pre-1975 relative dominance.

In large, populous nations, the complete reliance on these renewables would require what we are still missing: either mass-scale, long-term (days to weeks) electricity storage that

would back up intermittent electricity generation, or extensive grids of high-voltage lines

to transmit electricity across time zones and from sunny and windy r...

and industrial concen...

If energy, according to Feynman, is “that abstract thing,” then electricity is one of its most abstract forms.

In contrast, electricity is intangible and we can’t get an intuitive sense of it in the same way as we do with fuels.

For most of its inhabitants, the modern world is full of black boxes, devices whose internal workings remain—to different degrees—a mystery to their users. Electricity can be thought of as a ubiquitous and ultimate black box system: although many people have a fairly good understanding of what goes in (combustion of fossil fuel in a large thermal plant; falling

water in a hydro station; solar radiation absorbed by a photovoltaic cell; the splitting of uranium in a reactor) and everybody benefits from what comes out (light, heat, motion), only a minority fully understand what goes on inside the generating plants, transformers, transmission lines, and final-use devices.

And even in this era of high-tech electronic miracles, it is still impossible to store electricity affordably in quantities sufficient to meet the demand of a medium-sized city (500,000 people) for only a week or two, or to supply a megacity (more than 10 million people) for just

half a day.

Electricity is the best form of energy for lighting: it has no competitor on any scale of private or public illumination, and very few innovations have produced such an impact on modern civilization as has the ability to remove the limits of daylight and to illuminate the

night.

It is impossible to decide which class of electricity converters has had a greater impact—lights or motors. The conversion of electricity into kinetic energy by electric motors first revolutionized nearly every sector of industrial production and later penetrated every household niche.

And even basic car models now have between 20 and 40 small electric motors, with many more in expensive cars—adding to the vehicle’s weight and increasing the drain on its batteries.58

electricity still supplies only a relatively small share of final global energy consumption, just 18 percent.

A. J. Lotka, “Natural selection as a physical principle,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 8/6 (1922), pp. 151–154.