Energy Quotes

“The technology that made possible long-distance pipeline construction was electric arc welding.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Falling water is the oldest source of industrial power other than muscle.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“When an atom of U235 fissions, it releases energy—heat—as well as two or more secondary neutrons. The secondary neutrons, if moderated in turn, can go on to fission other U235 atoms in natural uranium in an exponential chain: one releases two, two release four, four release eight, eight release sixteen, sixteen release thirty-two—doubling every few millionths of a second until the energy release from the atoms they fission is substantial enough to heat water to steam, which can then drive a turbine to spin a generator to generate electricity.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Uranium atoms are unstable. They’re as wobbly as water-filled balloons. The force that holds them together, called the strong force, is almost completely counterbalanced by the force that tries to push them apart: the positive electrical charge of the 92 protons that make up their nuclei. As the rule goes, opposite charges attract, but like charges repel. Uranium is the last natural element in the periodic table, element 92, because of this inherent instability. The elements beyond uranium—neptunium (93), plutonium (94) and so on—are all manmade”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“A nuclear reactor requires two basic materials: a fissionable element such as uranium and a moderator. The function of a moderator, as its name implies, is to slow down the neutrons that come bursting out of a uranium atom when it fissions, increasing their chance of encountering and penetrating another atom of uranium and causing another fission. For CP-1—Chicago Pile No. 1—the moderator was graphite. For most of today’s power reactors, the moderator is water. Moderators slow down neutrons by giving them a target—for graphite, the nucleus of a carbon atom—to bounce off of repeatedly, losing energy with each bounce, much as billiard balls do.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world’s first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction. Other than hand-operated cadmium control rods, nothing visibly moved in the garage-sized graphite and natural uranium assembly Fermi and his crew had stacked up by hand over the preceding two months. (Fermi called the assembly a “pile” in amused reference to its stacked arrangement.) The reactor required no radiation shielding. The energy it produced by splitting—“fissioning”—uranium atoms, held to a mere 200 watts, was not even enough to warm the unheated court.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“On the cold winter afternoon of 2 December 1942, in a disused doubles squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago football stadium, the Nobel laureate physicist Enrico Fermi, a refugee from Fascist Italy, calmly initiated the world’s first controlled nuclear-fission chain reaction.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“By 1950, then, the three primary fossil fuels—coal, petroleum, and natural gas—all fed the large energy needs of the United States and, in various portion, the rest of the developed world. If coal share was declining worldwide, petroleum was approaching dominance, and natural gas had only begun to penetrate the world market. In those immediate postwar years as well, an entirely new source of energy, nuclear fission, the first potentially major energy source not derived directly or indirectly from sunlight, languished behind walls of secrecy, released as yet only to military use.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Though the question of global warming had not yet emerged to public perception, natural gas—methane—is about thirty times more effective than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. No one has calculated how much the vast waste of natural gas across the decades of the twentieth century—in the United States and throughout the world—contributed to global warming. The percentage was certainly more than zero.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Wet gas—gas that flowed mixed with petroleum—was routinely vented into the atmosphere or flared off. Gas was often left to vent into the air, sometimes for years, when drillers abandoned dry holes. A 1935 US Federal Trade Commission report to Congress estimated that 20 percent more gas was wasted nationwide between 1919 and 1930 than was consumed:”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“town gas boosted to higher heat content with natural gas. By 1940, the national network of gas pipelines, though far from complete, spidered from Texas and Louisiana up through the Middle West and eastward into Pennsylvania.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Shipbuilding stalled postwar—the Great Depression came early to the shipbuilding industry—but welding advanced, finding a major new application in pipeline construction. In 1925 the Magnolia Petroleum Company of Galveston, Texas, rebuilt a leaky two-hundred-mile bolted natural-gas pipeline with acetylene lap-welded pipe. After five more years of development—other companies followed Magnolia—electric welding replaced acetylene, eliminating overlapping, using less pipe, and cutting welding time in half. Alloy steels were also important to pipeline improvement, as were improved ditching machines and gas compressors. By 1931, pipeline workers were laying the first thousand-mile natural-gas pipeline from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Caldwell concluded that welding equipment and materials would cost no more than riveting, while the cost of labor would be reduced substantially.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“The British had faced so great a demand for oxygen and carbide for oxyacetylene welding since the beginning of the war that they had taken up electric welding as a substitute—and found it superior in most cases for welding mines, bombs, small vessels, and even a barge.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“By 27 April, Dammam No. 7 had produced more than 100,000 barrels.30 Across the decades, until it was shut down in 1982, No. 7 alone produced more than 32 million barrels of oil.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Then, just in time, as in all good melodramas, Dammam No. 7 came through: on 4 March 1938, while the Socal board was still deliberating, No. 7, at a depth of 4,725 feet, started flowing at 1,585 barrels a day. Three days later, the flow was up to more than twice that volume, to 3,690 barrels, and to 3,810 barrels by the end of the month.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“A Gulf Oil geologist, Ralph Rhoades, a Missouri-born ex-marine inevitably called Dusty, had pinpointed a promising structure: a rocky, dome-like formation called a jabal, on Bahrain in 1928, before Socal acquired it.2 Then Fred Davies, a Socal geologist following up in 1930, had not only identified a well site on the Bahrain jabal but also had looked west across the strait to Saudi Arabia and spotted a cluster of jabals there as well. His identification would prove accurate: the Bahrain and Arabian jabals were related, both originally islands in the Gulf—the inland jabal now part of the land because sand had filled in the gap between it and the previous shoreline.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“across a narrow strait from its east coast, on the postage-stamp island of Bahrain, only thirty miles long and ten miles wide, oil had been flowing since June 1932 from Oil Well No. 1, at a site called Jabal al-Dukhan. Iran and Iraq had been the two important oil nations in the Middle East up to that time, their oil interests under British control. Bahrain was a minor exception, as Saudi Arabia would be a major. Through a series of sales and trades, motivated by what British engineers believed to be Bahrain’s unpromising oil geology, the island’s oil rights had devolved into the hands of one of the smaller international oil companies, Standard Oil of California (Socal).”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Saudi Arabia became a country officially in 1932, an absolute monarchy: 850,000 square miles, more than three times the size of Texas, with a population of only about 2.5 million people, much of the land uncharted desert.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“By 1963, more than 98 percent of US gasoline was leaded. When, a decade later, lead was finally ordered removed from the US gasoline supply, it was removed because it fouled the new catalytic converters mandated to fight smog, a different air pollution problem, not because it had been labeled a dangerous pollutant itself.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“By 1936, 90 percent of all US gasoline was leaded. Domestic consumption of tetraethyl lead reached a high of 5.1 million pounds in 1956. In 1959 the US Public Health Service supported an Ethyl Corporation request to increase the lead content of gasoline from 3 cc to 4 cc per gallon—because refiners had reached a limit in improving fuel through refining and were now losing yield to keep up octane.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Only when they had diluted their leaded gasoline by more than 1,000 to 1 were they able to produce knocking. Midgley rushed off to tell Kettering, who said later that day was the most dramatic of his entire research career.47 The new compound needed a name. For reasons never revealed, Kettering chose “ethyl,” which confused it with ethyl alcohol and left out the significant fact that it was a soluble compound of lead, a substance long known to be poisonous.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“United States crude oil production continued at the 1920 rate of about 443 million barrels, Hibbert cautioned, the domestic supply would be exhausted by 1933.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Engine knock became a serious problem around 1913, when the increasing demand for gasoline led oil refiners to maintain volume by distilling more crude into the product, lowering its octane further.23 Engineers believed that engine knock was the result of premature ignition of the fuel—that compression alone was the problem. No one knew for sure, because it was difficult to know what was going on inside the cylinders of an operating engine firing at thousands of revolutions per minute. If the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine was to serve as the predominant power source for the automobile, its fuel and engine-design problems needed to be addressed.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Even without its punitive tax, alcohol cost more to produce than gasoline, particularly since it lacked a supply chain from farm to refinery nearly as efficient as the pipelines and railroad cars of the Rockefeller-monopolized petroleum industry. (By 1882, the Standard Oil Trust controlled 85 percent of the world oil market, one reason the US Supreme Court in 1911 ordered it broken up.22) As with wood compared with coal in Elizabethan London, the cost of delivery disadvantaged alcohol compared with gasoline.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“Henry Ford designed his first production car, the Model T, with a flex-fuel system: it could run on either gasoline or alcohol, a feature that Ford continued to offer until 1931.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“The substitution of the automobile for the horse left farmers poorer. “By using the power produced by gasoline instead of by corn- and hay-burning horses,” a rural economist wrote in 1938, “we have deprived the farmer of a market for the crops from many million acres.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History

“For at least one steam carmaker, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company of Newton, Massachusetts, that advantage was lost in 1914, when an epidemic of deadly hoof-and-mouth disease among New England farm animals led veterinary officials to shut down the many public watering troughs along eastern roads where steamers had rewatered.”
― Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History