Our Army of Invisible Helpers

A human power station from the BBC's 'Bang Goes the Theory' where human energy slaves were made to power a single household for 24 hours

When I started this blog almost three years ago it had a different title to the one you see today. Scratching my head for a good name for it I decided to call it the Peak Oil Dispatch. My idea was to provide a kind of online resource for peak oil news and other articles relating to the decline of industrial life and catabolic collapse. After all, I was unemployed back then and had plenty of time on my hands for such a project.

This idea didn't last long. Once gainfully employed again I found I didn't have time for such a project, so I decided to change the name and stick with the traditional blog format. I used the quote from Colin Campbell as a title. There was something about the number 22 that attracted me - I lived in flat number 22 in our block, my phone number started with '22' and so did our car registration - and there is irony in the Catch-22 situation our industrial societies find themselves stuck in in that we have to burn more oil to keep growing the economy which will eventually consume all the oil and destabilise the climate.

Colin Campbell, when giving a talk to the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) had said that every day oil provides humanity with the equivalent energy of 22 billion human slaves - or 'energy slaves'. These slaves do our bidding silently and are unnoticed by the masses, and the way he arrived at the figure, I am told, is by taking the total amount of conventional oil produced each day and dividing it up into 'drops'. Each drop of oil represents the work of one human in one day, and there are around 22 billion drops of oil produced each day.

Alexandre de Robaulx de Beaurieux, a geologist and board member of ASPO Germany, provided me with the following quote from Colin Campbell from the 2013 edition of Campbell's Oil and Gas Depletion:

"It was as if oil provided us with an army of unpaid and unfed slaves to do our work for us. It has been calculated that a drop of oil, weighing one gram, yields 10,000 calories of energy, which is the equivalent of one day’s hard human labour. In other words, today’s oil production is equivalent in energy terms to the work of 22 billion slaves. Financial control of the world has led to a certain polarisation between the wealthy West and the other countries which find themselves burdened by foreign debt as they export resources, product and profit. Many people have come to think that it is money that makes the world go round, when in reality it is the underlying supply of cheap, and largely oil-based, energy, that has turned the wheels of industry, fuelled the airliners and the bombers, and generally acted as the world’s blood stream. Midas-like wealth flowed to those who find themselves having a controlling position in the System."

The energy slaves in question were assumed to be involved in work that was the equivalent of lifting a ton of sand 2m into the air. This was all very well but I couldn't help thinking that the number of energy slaves seemed a bit on the low side. After all, if driving an average 120 horse power car down a motorway were to be done with the power of human slaves alone, you would need upwards of 500 human beings to pull you along (assuming they could run that fast!). And with around a billion cars in the world at present, plus millions of trucks, aircraft, ships, trains etc. the figure of 22 billion would seem very low indeed - and that's not even taking account of all the other uses for fossil fuels that we have, from heating to electricity generation and so on.

So it struck me that we should consider all fossil energy sources when trying to arrive at some figure of how much assistance we are getting from hydrocarbons. Given that I'm no Einstein when it comes to mathematics I asked for help in arriving at this figure, promising the one who could come up with the best answer a box of Cornish fudge. What I wanted to know was the answer to the following question:

If all the energy we currently derive from fossil fuels alone (i.e. not including nuclear or renewables) was suddenly unavailable, and we had at our disposal a few handy nearby planets populated with well-fed healthy adult human males that we could capture as our 'energy slaves', how many of them would we need to allow us to enjoy the same lifestyle currently being provided by fossil fuels?

Of course, this being an entirely imaginary exercise, we would have to overlook the fact that the slaves would need to be fed, and furthermore we would have to assume that they produced energy close to the point where it was needed (e.g. a coal power station would be replaced by serried ranks of energy slaves on exercise bikes fitted with power-generating dynamos). A further assumption is that a slave would only be able to work for 12 hours at a stretch.

Of the responses I received three stood out - and they all come to somewhat similar conclusions despite using different methods. 

Daniel Hägerby from Sweden, taking his data from the 2013 BP Statistical Review, concluded the following about how many slaves we would need per capita:

"Total amount of primary fossil energy consumed was 10848 Mtoe in 2012. Multiply by 42*10^6 to get the number of kilojules. Then divide by 3600 to get kWh (which I find easiest to think in terms of). Then divide by population, I used seven billion. That gets you a total of about 18 000 kWh per capita per year. 

Then we assume that each slave works 12 hour per day 7 days per week. We can also assume that each slave can yield 50 watts of productive power. With a human power efficiency of 20% that means each slave would consume 50/0,2*12*365 = 1095 kWh per year. 

Divide the two and you get about 17 fossil energy slaves per capita. I think ignoring the efficiency of human power conversion is cheating - because engines and power plant also have big thermal losses. So, if our slaves could eat fossil fuels and have no energy expenditure to survive (only to work for us) - we would need 17 slaves per capita, working 12 hour per day all year round. 

Then we can of course study the UK separately. That would give us around 30 fossil energy slaves, using the same method."

So that means that with around 17 energy slaves per unit of population, we would need a total of 119 billion energy slaves to keep things ticking over as they do today.

Also from Sweden, Gunnar Rundgren, who writes the blog gardenearth.blogspot.se, pointed out that he had already made such a calculation for his book Garden Earth. He relates the following:

"We can contrast the energy content in human beings with the external energy sources conquered, to give us an idea of the importance of the development of external energy sources. Let us do a back-of-the-envelope calculation.  A human being needs around 2500 calories per day (2.9 kWh ). We use around 80% of that just to stay awake, think, eat, sleep, breathe, etc. So a bit less than 600 Wh is perhaps left for work. Hard-working people could perhaps use 800 Wh, but they will also eat more. On a yearly basis, the average person consumes around a million calories, which corresponds to 1.16 MWh. 

The average American uses 7.71 tons of oil equivalents (toes) of energy (the average British 3.8, the Swede 5.65 and the Senegalese 0.25), which corresponds to 90 MWh, that is, the energy in the annual food consumption for 77 persons, or if we calculate on the basis of the 20% that we actually use for work it would correspond to roughly 380 persons. On the other hand, energy losses also occur for the conversion of external energy to useful work. If we assume that this is 40%, we arrive at a figure of 150 persons.

So, depending on how we count, each American has somewhere between 75 and 400 ‘energy slaves’ working for him or her, and the richer ones have thousands. The global average energy use is of course lower, and represents figures between 18 and 90, which translated to the total population would mean somewhere between 120 and 600 billion energy slaves. From this perspective, it is certainly no surprise that human beings have taken over the planet!

Another way of looking at it, from an economic perspective, is that a barrel of oil represents the energy of 25,000 hours of human toil, that is, 14 persons working round the year with normal Western labour standards. The cost for pumping the oil is not more than a few dollars per barrel, and even with an oil price of many hundred dollars per barrel, it is very cheap compared to human slave labour. The beauty of the oil slaves is that they don’t have to be feed at all. The slaves of the past, even under huge oppression and extortion, used a lot of the food themselves just to survive. From this perspective, our current wealth can be easily understood and demystified. Even hundreds of years ago, long before industrial society and capitalism, the person who had hundreds of others working solely for him or her could lead a comfortable life.

Any comments? I guess a difference is if you calculate in-energy or output energy for both fossil and human labour?"

As Gunnar points out, the calculation is necessarily a very rough one due to the nature of the underlying assumptions. There is no real way to substitute human labour for coal or oil, but his shot at estimating the true number of energy slaves is illuminating.

Finally, Alex from ASPO Germany, who is mentioned above, provided his own calculations, and brings EROEI and the energy subsidy provided by past slaves (i.e. what quality of oil is Colin Campbell assuming in his calculation?) into the conversation. Alex's way of looking at it uses a different way of arriving at a figure, but the conclusion he reaches is somewhat similar to the first two:

"  [T]he party with unconventionals is suddenly over as soon as you stop drilling more and more only in order to stand still [Red Queen effect]. So what we have is the good stuff with EROI-ratios over let's say 30:1 already gone. Now what the Americans do is trying to substitute conventinal oil with low EROI-sources below 10:1 à la tight oil or tar sands at home ...  So, just to project it over my thumb, I would say that if Dr. Campbell used let's say a ratio of 30:1 for his calculation and if you try to keep the same work done using the "sweet spots" of unconventional sources aka with a net energy surplus 5 times smaller, you are at ca. 100 billion energy slaves. I think this calculation should be done on a per-country-basis to get a better picture, but it will still be only about oil.

Now if you compensate some losses in conventional AND unconventional production [think of the decline-rates an order of magnitude higher than in conventional fields] by trying to incorporate "renewables" that are not renewable, not new and require oil from A to Z, I think you will need additional hundreds of billions of slaves. But this would depend on your conventional/unconventinal-ratio and also on the type of substitutes used. On the other hand, "renewables" are no substitutes for liquid fuels anyway [except local methanol on a small scale perhaps], and I remember a blog-post by Dr. Tom Murphy about algae fuel, comparing its EROI with that from old newspapers being fished out of a pond, dried and burned.

So let's take "renewables" again out of the equation and only keep liquid fuels from conventional and unconventional sources. If the minimum EROI required to fuel the most simple tasks in society is 3:1 [and I'm not talking about the military-industrial complex here with drones], and we had a ratio of 30:1 for our 22 billion slaves, this gives us a theoretical 220 billion "unconventional" slaves. All else being equal, if we consider that much over 90% of all transportation in the EU27 was based upon oil in 2006 ... and will still be at about 90% for a certain time to come, I think 200 billion pure "unconventional" slaves would be the maximum upper limit."


So although Colin Campbell's figure of 22 billion energy slaves looks safe when you consider decent EROEI conventional oil only, taking into consideration all of the other forms of fossilised life that we are currently extracting as fast as we can, we get much higher figures. Just to recap, these are the likely figures:

Daniel - 119 billion energy slaves
Gunnar - 120 - 600 billion energy slaves (average 360 BES)
Alex - 200 billion energy slaves

Taking an average of the above three results would give us a theoretical figure of 226 billion energy slaves.

What would 226 billion energy slaves look like? Humans occupy around only 2% of the surface of the planet, so assuming our energy slaves are distributed close to us rather than arrayed in horizon-filling ranks in the Gobi Desert or Antarctica, we can expect an energy slave population density as follows:

196,939,900 square miles - surface area of planet Earth
3,938,798 square miles - surface area of human populated areas
226,000,000,000 - number of fossil energy slaves in total (not including 'nuclear slaves' or 'eco slaves')
53,378 fossil slaves per square mile 

That's an awful lot of invisible men running around in your neighbourhood! The only question remaining for me now is whether I should change the title of this blog ...

PS. Tak to Daniel and Gunnar and danke to Alex - you'll all be getting some Cornish fudge in the post.

How Many Energy Slaves?

Sometimes life is a bit of a blur. I have good intentions to write a blog post a week but what with moving house, working on my woodland, doing freelance work and having kids I have been struggling of late. Anyone who has been following the electronic scribblings on these pages for the last three years or so might have noticed that I started off unfocused, writing mainly about random stuff, went through a period of writing focused relevant articles that even got aggregated by other sites, and have now come full circle and started writing randomly again. 

Apologies! My only excuse is that, in the great scheme of things, writing a blog for free comes fairly low down in the pecking order all things considered, when other things jostle their way to the front of the queue. Nevertheless, now that the heat of summer has dissipated and the cool September sea mists have begun to roll in off the Atlantic it is perhaps easier to be more reflective and calm again, which is the state of mind needed to effect any kind of lucid communication in this day and age.

That said, this week’s post is more of a news roundup than a fully rounded piece. You know how it is, you get an idea and think I must write  something about that, but before you do something new turns up and you add it to the mental pile. Before you know it, you’ve got a kebab skewer of ideas for a blog post and no idea which piece you should bite into first. So, without further ado, I’l dish out the chunks of fried meat, one morsel at a time.

***

Most people, when they move to Cornwall and drop out of mainstream society become impressionist artists, soapmakers, carpenters or, ahem, woodlanders. Not so Chris Abbot, whom I have come to know via the local Transition Penwith group. No, instead of setting up a little shop selling curios to tourists, or carving mushrooms out of logs, Chris decided to set up his own intelligence agency. 

He says it is the ‘world’s first civil society intelligence agency’ and it’s run from a small building down here at the tip of England. Okay, so Open Briefing hasn’t exactly got the CIA isn’t quaking in its boots just yet, but with several analysts with backgrounds in intelligence on the staff rostrum, it’s not a bad source of unbiased information about how our civil liberties are being systematically stripped away. Did I say unbiased? Well, of course it isn’t - it’s biased towards ordinary folk, rather than the military industrial complex.

I saw Chris last week when he popped around to pick up some citrus trees I had brought back from Spain. He looked tired and said he had been working hard on new report about drones. That report, entitled Remote Control War: Unmanned combat air vehicles in China, India, Iran, Israel, Russia and Turkey has now been released. 

Read it here (or a summary here) but don’t expect it to put you in a good mood. 

***

Yesterday saw the release of the IPCC’s report on climate change. There were not any real surprises in there, and if anything it has been toned down substantially so as not to rock the boat too much. I gave up hope in governments doing anything to tackle AGW several years ago when I was at the Copenhagen COP15 Climate Conference. It is now starkly clear that we either leave most of the fossil fuels in the ground, or we sign the death warrant of most human civilisations. 

The message seems to be getting through in some quarters, with most UK newspapers reporting on it as their main item. My jaw hit the floor however when I read the Daily Telegraph - the go-to newspaper for aggressive climate science denialists - write an article with the following:

It is surely past time, therefore, to take matters out of the hands of the zealots – on both sides. No one can deny that mankind is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates, or that this will inevitably have a warming effect on the climate (the reason for the current “pause”, scientists believe, is that the heat has been stored up in the deep oceans, as part of a natural cycle).

Did my eyes deceive me? Had I actually just read that? An anguished howl immediately went up from the rabid, frothing at the mouth climate science deniers in the comments section. 

Today, however, there is no mention of the IPCC report on The Telegraph. Perhaps the editors got a call from the tax-avoiding, big oil protecting, independent media bashing, liberal hating Barclay brothers ... who happen to own The Telegraph.

***

Still on the climate, the report states clearly that we are on course for a +5C warming by the end of the century on a business as usual (BUA) basis. BAU, in my opinion, won’t happen due to resource constraints, but assuming we can continue to plunder every gram of carbon based fuel from the Earth’s crust we will. 

Who’s to blame? All of us, of course. Some more than others. In fact, some a lot more than others. But blame isn’t a particularly useful response. To that end I’ve decided to plant 500 trees a year and have already started. This is happening on my land at Fox Wood, with 500 acorns due to be popped into soil-filled bags in a couple of weeks. I’ll be writing more about it on that blog in due course.

***

In other developments, I have long been threatening to write a book. That threat is now starting to be put into effect. I don’t know how long it will take me but I already have an idea, chapter by chapter, how it will pan out. In writing a book about the end of our industrial society one faces several challenging questions, such as:

Who is it for?

To what level of depth do I go into?

To what extent should it be empirical and full of references to statistics?

Should it be ‘a good read’ (i.e. with splashes of humour) or should it be po-faced?

Should it be self-published or should I seek a publisher?

I have managed to answer a few of those questions myself. The book, primarily, will be aimed at people in over-developed countries, and there will be a particular focus on Britain. After all, that’s where I live and am from. Why are most peak oil authors American? It is just not on the radar over here. I have some theories as to why that is so.

The book will be a primer. I don’t intend to go into much depth about the metaphysical underpinnings of our crises, although can’t entirely avoid that. I won’t be proposing any geo-engineering solutions, perpetual energy devices or happy endings (other than at the individual level). I can promise that it will have a dose of humour, however, as I don’t seem to be able to write the kind of dry fact-dense prose which features in most other books dealing with similar subjects. 

This doesn’t mean I won’t be having a crack at the following:

• Highlighting Cartesian/Baconian thinking as the departure point from which humanity began to get too big for its boots
• Drowning the civil religion of progress in a bucket of cold water
• Caricaturing the techno utopian fantasists as dangerous imbeciles
• Standing up the the ‘bloke in the pub’ talk about nuclear fast breeder reactors and the like
• Demolishing the myth of free market economics

On a more positive note, I’ll be focusing on what people, either as individuals, families or small communities, can do to prepare themselves for the future that is already upon us. The tentative title is When the Lights go Out: Surviving in the Age of Broken Promises.

***

Writing a blog about the abstract concept of the end of the age of abundance probably has its advantages, although I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Last week, however, was a bit different when 22 Billion Energy Slaves reader and doomstead diner Harry Lerwill turned up in my local tavern the Dolphin Inn. Harry had come over from California with his other half Barbara and found himself in the neighbourhood hunting for ghosts (the Dolphin has three). It was good to sink a couple of pints of Cornish ale and chat about economic collapse. Anyone else in the area feel free to drop me a line.

***

And finally ... how many energy slaves?

The title of this blog was gleaned from a comment made by petroleum geologist Colin Campbell. It refers to the number of human slaves equivalents we would need, working 24/7, to supply the same amount of energy that we currently get from easy oil. 

One or two people have commented that if we were to include everything else we get from fossil fuels, taking tight oil, shale gas, coal etc. into consideration, the true number would be closer to 200 Billion Energy Slaves. 

Alas, if I changed the title of the blog I’d probably lose a lot of links and readers. Saying that, anyone with a more mathematical bent than I is free to send in their calculations for how many energy slaves we actually would need if ALL non-renewable sources were taken into account. I would hope that it would include the reasonable assumption that slaves cannot work for more than 12 hours a day. 

I’ll send a box of Cornish fudge to whoever sends me an email (jasonhepp at gmail dot com) with the most comprehensive answer before the end of October. 

What's in a name?

Hello. The more observant of my readers will notice that the name of this blog has changed. Don't panic - it's still the same thing but I decided to change the name of it. I apologise for this.

Originally I didn't know what to call it but settled on the Peak Oil Dispatch because a) I thought that one day I could invite guest writers and turn it into a regular, perhaps even printed, publication (a habit of mine) and b) The initials were P.O.D. - which I liked.

I wasn't all that keen on the name, truth be told, and when I discovered all the other sites out there with similar names I began trying to think of a new one. I've come to realise that when it comes to peak oil there are two types of site.

1 - Those that focus on the raw numbers and report on every new discovery of fossil fuels. The patron saint of these kind of sites is M. King Hubbert, the late oil geologist of the peak fame.

and

2 - Those sites which take a much wider view and take the fact of peak oil/energy as a given but instead try to address the repercussions of our ecological overshoot. The patron saint of these kinds of site is William Catton.

This kind of site is of the latter variety, and is named after Colin Campbell's remark that today's fossil fuels provide us collectively with the equivalent energy of 22 billion slaves, working for us around the clock and never complaining.

This site doesn't aim to count slaves, argue in favour of a new type of more efficient slave or pretend that the slaves are not dying off. Instead I think it's better if we talked about what we are going to do as the slaves go away and figure out mindful ways to make that transition as least painful as possible for ourselves, our families and communities.

Thanks for reading!