Thought Experiment: world without fossil fuels

[Belz...]

So sure, necessity is the mother of invention. But without coal, the necessity that kicked off the industrial revolution simply didn't exist. Sure, there are various ways approximations to various bits of technology are possible, but that's all with the benefit of hindsight.

Very good post. Kinda summarises my thoughts about the matter, too.

 

[Myriad]

An old song:
I've got a mule. Her name is Sal.
15 miles on the Erie canal.
She's a good ol worker and a good ol pal.
15 miles on the Erie canal.
We've hauled some barges in our day. Filled with lumber coal and hay.......

oops. No coal in this imaginary uni and we already discussed the deforestation that was nearly complete and only halted just barely by the switch to fossil fuels. Would we really have gone to all that trouble for hay? I doubt it. Sure there would be some canals. But a huge network of them for transportation? Unlikely. Far more likely is a few for irrigation purposes. Transportation not so much. Remember the majority of people would still live on the land spread out. Not all concentrated in the cities. The old 40 acres and a mule model. The transportation requirements far less to supply them.

It's not a matter of transportation requirements, but transportation costs, which the Erie Canal (among others) reduced for some regions by an order of magnitude. A canal could (and did, in the case of the Erie) make the region it spanned more amenable to settlement, which settlements produced food that needed transportation, that allowed the terminal cities to grow, creating more demand for more settlement and more transportation. Just as the railroads did; the canals started doing it first until they were replaced by the railroads a mere few decades later.

I doubt that the commodities a songwriter listed to fit a rhyme scheme half a century later represents a complete or balanced economic assessment of the Erie Canal. Grain transport (and the counter-transport of goods needed by farms, like tools and dry goods, not to mention passengers) was one of the main reasons for building the Erie and would have sustained the canal system indefinitely had the railroads not obsoleted them. If straw ever was transported long distances inland in those days, it was only because the canal made it cheap enough to do so. Of course, the canals were available, and used, to transport coal and iron ore when they became abundant commodities, and the transport of timber, however unsustainable, would have helped pay the capital costs of canals in their early years of operation.

Canals don't have to form a "vast network" by themselves; they cross-link and extend the existing tree-structure of navigable rivers and other waterways. (Although, in a scenario with limited or delayed steamships, it becomes important to note that a canal with a tow path is easier to travel than natural waterways requiring oars or sail.) Direct inland canal connections between watersheds would be a logical development if feasible -- hence my hypothesis that steam-engine pumps might have made them feasible.

The bottom line is, many canals actually were built and used, despite the narrow window between the onset of their technological feasibility and their eclipse by the railroads. If your contention is that they were built primarily for coal and iron ore, or would not have been economical without them, you'll need more evidence than a folk song to convince me.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[Red Baron Farms]

It's not a matter of transportation requirements, but transportation costs, which the Erie Canal (among others) reduced for some regions by an order of magnitude. A canal could (and did, in the case of the Erie) make the region it spanned more amenable to settlement, which settlements produced food that needed transportation, that allowed the terminal cities to grow, creating more demand for more settlement and more transportation. Just as the railroads did; the canals started doing it first until they were replaced by the railroads a mere few decades later.

I doubt that the commodities a songwriter listed to fit a rhyme scheme half a century later represents a complete or balanced economic assessment of the Erie Canal. Grain transport (and the counter-transport of goods needed by farms, like tools and dry goods, not to mention passengers) was one of the main reasons for building the Erie and would have sustained the canal system indefinitely had the railroads not obsoleted them. If straw ever was transported long distances inland in those days, it was only because the canal made it cheap enough to do so. Of course, the canals were available, and used, to transport coal and iron ore when they became abundant commodities, and the transport of timber, however unsustainable, would have helped pay the capital costs of canals in their early years of operation.

Canals don't have to form a "vast network" by themselves; they cross-link and extend the existing tree-structure of navigable rivers and other waterways. (Although, in a scenario with limited or delayed steamships, it becomes important to note that a canal with a tow path is easier to travel than natural waterways requiring oars or sail.) Direct inland canal connections between watersheds would be a logical development if feasible -- hence my hypothesis that steam-engine pumps might have made them feasible.

The bottom line is, many canals actually were built and used, despite the narrow window between the onset of their technological feasibility and their eclipse by the railroads. If your contention is that they were built primarily for coal and iron ore, or would not have been economical without them, you'll need more evidence than a folk song to convince me.

Respectfully,
Myriad

Well Myriad,
It's a thought experiment, so I sincerely doubt there is going to be actual "evidence" one way or another. The reality is that those barges hauled primarily coal and even today the coal run still exists, fuel oil too. I know because before I retired from being a marine engineer I was on that run for a while. Yes that's right, on a tug pushing a barge full of fuel oil and gasoline through the canal system that was set up for that purpose. So I have no real problem with your vision of a possible alternate history. Only the scale of it.

 

[CapelDodger]

So sure, necessity is the mother of invention. But without coal, the necessity that kicked off the industrial revolution simply didn't exist. Sure, there are various ways approximations to various bits of technology are possible, but that's all with the benefit of hindsight.

I agree that our current society has evolved, and in different circumstances would have evolved into something else. Suburban living and the daily commute, with two foreign holidays a year to escape the horror of it, isn't necessarily the way things would have gone.

Some things would have been the same, including, of course, the laws of physics and the desire for profit and desirable mates. Powered looms would still be developed, and the laws of thermodynamics (by another name) would be discovered. The question of energy (how to get it and how to transport it) would be on every industrialist's mind, and hence on the minds of scientists. This is why I think electricity would have received more attention early on than it did, as would the means of harvesting it from the most glaringly obvious source - the Sun.

Travel used to be the preserve of the rich, the military, and such professions as cattle-droving. Without fossil-fuels I think it would still be much that way.

What, I wonder, might be the equivalent of cars as status symbols in the alternative society? What would be the babe-magnet of choice?

 

[jaydeehess]

Are you quite sure ? I mean, you probably mean that you can eventually understand and use the technology, but my question is, would you, if you didn't have the higher level of tech provided by the industrial revolution ? If you don't have mass production and cheap steel and commodities, you just don't get to that point. Nuclear is pretty hard to produce, so it would be very expensive, no ?

Also, I wager that there's quite a bit of what goes into a nuke plant that requires fossil-based materials such as insulation, etc.

Feel free to correct me, I don't know much about the actual technology.

What I am getting at is the concept of nuke energy certainly does not depend on first having developed fossil fuel as an energy source.

Having the concept and whatever materials that have or could be invented sans oil/coal , the people involved would work towards proving the theory just as happened in reality.

As for plastics and other oil based products, they are oil based because that is available, but they are simply carbon based materials. Oil and coal are simply plant products that have gone through a process. Therefore, although it would take longer and be more complicated , there are few products available now that could not be produced if there never was any oil or coal.

As said above, and I alluded to it myself before, the greatest impact would be on the rate of growth. Rate of population growth, rate of growth of transportation industries, rate of growth of heavy industries, all would have been slower if not for the availability of concentrated hydrocarbon fuels.


BTW, I notice above that it was said that the Titanic had 50,000 tons displacement and that if it used wood fuel that would require 10,000 tons of wood. It was characterized that 10k tons is a tiny fraction of the displacement. Since when is 20% a 'tiny' fraction?

 

[jaydeehess]

W/O fossil fuels, the drive to bring on nuke power may have had added incentive actually.
Electricity would have been discovered and possibly produced by hydro or wood fired plants. The former are problematic in that the best place to build electric power plants are not necessarily the places one needs the power. The later require vast tracts of forested land and intensive forest management.
Once the theory of nuclear energy was discovered there would be a huge impetus to prove, then develop, this technology.

I picture a slowly developing society getting to about the same level as we had at about 1940, but with much less international travel. What there would be, would primarily be wind powered but quite possibly airfoil type rather than simple sail.

Then nuclear power gets developed and within a generation a new much faster type of ship comes into being that is all weather, dependable and powerful. This launches the world into an era akin to our industrial revolution.

OK, so if we say that our reality and this hypothetical history are basically equal at about 1700 CE. I would guess that rather than seeing nuclear power come to being at approx 1950, that in this hypothetical world it would come into being about 2000 - 2050. Purely a guess but I believe that a century behind reality is not out of the question.

 

[CapelDodger]

But what about different ladders altogether? That's what interested me about the question, how things might have turned out very differently, even unrecognizably so.

If we crank back the clock to the ancient Greeks or the Romans, we can still have a civilization that's worthwhile, just different.

And not, you'll have noticed, unrecognisable. Human nature and needs would remain the same, as would the laws of physics. Capitalism is an emergent property of the combination .

I'm suggesting a more direct progression along the electricity path. When coal could provide energy at the point-of-use electricity was the preserve of shysters and showmen (while being a source of fascination for scientists, but heck, so's the Higgs Boson and they're still not in the shops; no demand for them, apparently). Electricity makes it possible to gather small packages of energy together into a useful amount, creating a market for anyone who can find a source. Make a better solar panel, make a fortune. Storage would remain a problem, of course, so I'd expect battery technology to advance more quickly as well. And/or other solutions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Mountain

The upshot (along with the transport issue) would be a leaner (that is, less energy-profligate), more distributed economy and society. Which, with the passing of cheap oil, is arguably a development we're seeing the beginnings of now.

 

[Myriad]

Only the scale of it.

Ah, different perceptions of the scale I'm thinking about could be the problem. The early 19th century canals I'm talking about (including the Erie as originally built, before it was repeatedly rerouted and widened) had channels typically about 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep. Propulsion really was a mule named Sal, not a tug, and you really would need to duck (if not lie down flat on deck) to pass under a low bridge.

This, not this.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[CapelDodger]

W/O fossil fuels, the drive to bring on nuke power may have had added incentive actually.

The military imperative would have been the same, and it was never the need for a new energy source that drove on the technology.

Electricity would have been discovered and possibly produced by hydro or wood fired plants. The former are problematic in that the best place to build electric power plants are not necessarily the places one needs the power.

The great advantage of electricity is that its inherently transportable. Generate it at Niagara Falls and light up Times Square.

The later require vast tracts of forested land and intensive forest management.

Indeed. There's only so much land, and it has to be shared between agriculture and forestry. Generating electricity from scrap wood is one thing, but it could never power an industrial society.

Once the theory of nuclear energy was discovered there would be a huge impetus to prove, then develop, this technology.

Yup. Get the bomb first. Fortunately the good guys did .

I picture a slowly developing society getting to about the same level as we had at about 1940, but with much less international travel. What there would be, would primarily be wind powered but quite possibly airfoil type rather than simple sail.

Good point.

Then nuclear power gets developed and within a generation a new much faster type of ship comes into being that is all weather, dependable and powerful. This launches the world into an era akin to our industrial revolution.

Dependable is what's crucial, and of course is what the steamship (fueled by anthracite and using the triple-expansion engine) provided in what passes for the real world.

OK, so if we say that our reality and this hypothetical history are basically equal at about 1700 CE. I would guess that rather than seeing nuclear power come to being at approx 1950, that in this hypothetical world it would come into being about 2000 - 2050. Purely a guess but I believe that a century behind reality is not out of the question.

Ain't nobody gonna prove you wrong .

Perhaps one day we'll have real examples to compare and contrast our experience with. And if we do crash and burn a future industrial species (developed, perforce, without the fossil fuels we'll have used up) can compare their experience with ours.

 

[jaydeehess]

The military imperative would have been the same, and it was never the need for a new energy source that drove on the technology.

However, without highly mechanized warfare, which was only possible with fossil fuels, the world wide warfare on the last century may well have not developed nor the military imperative for a nuke bomb. We are speaking of a vastly slowed down world. If diplomacy became more imperative in Europe due to the slower pace then.......

The great advantage of electricity is that its inherently transportable. Generate it at Niagara Falls and light up Times Square.

Yes, and no. The farther you transport it the more loss you see in the system itself. Heating up wires does nothing for you.

Dependable is what's crucial, and of course is what the steamship (fueled by anthracite and using the triple-expansion engine) provided in what passes for the real world.

Exactly my reasoning. Whereas coal drove indistrialization in reality, nuke power could do the same in this other world.

Ain't nobody gonna prove you wrong .

Perhaps one day we'll have real examples to compare and contrast our experience with. And if we do crash and burn a future industrial species (developed, perforce, without the fossil fuels we'll have used up) can compare their experience with ours.

Yeah, I said it was a pure guess so anyone's is just as good.

 

[ben m]

Possibly. The first being the ability to source that much wood, bearing in mind it's also fueling the construction of the roads, railways and their vehicles that are fetching the wood from the forests and then fueling the act of transport. The second being the motivation of a much smaller human population to even conceive of the need for ocean-going, steel-constructed, wood powered ships let alone aircraft. I'm unable to see why these woody people might even want to mimic the kind of development that fossil fuels have allowed us to evolve via, pretty often, pure curiosity.

OK, let's game it out. Let's try to launch a Titanic-like ship powered by 10,000 tons of wood. That's about 6000 cords of wood. Well-managed coppices can produce 2 cords/acre/year, so a one-way voyage requires a 3000 acre harvest. Titanic-class ships appear to have aimed for 10 voyages/year, so let's say White Star Line needs to own 30,000 acres of coppice land in the US and 30,000 acres in the UK. For that, it'll complete 48,000 passenger-crossings of the Atlantic. Not too bad: 1.25 acres of timber, held for a year, will produce 2.5 cords of wood and will move 1 passenger across the Atlantic in one direction, under wood-fired steam power, at 1914-level efficiency.

So, the question is: what does it cost to hold 1.25 acres of timberland for a year?

I clicked through to

http://www.wredcoland.com/PropertyList/Feature/Timberland

and see big timber lots selling for $1500/acre. To hold a $1500 mortgage costs about $75/year, so a one-way-trip's worth of wood requires a $93 mortgage payment on timberland.

Let's do it another way. A cord of wood today costs $50-$100 or so, which obviously includes BOTH land-rent AND harvesting and drying/splitting costs. So, our one-way trip, requiring 2.5 cords of wood, costs $125-250. Same order of magnitude as the timberland calculation.

So: that's a smallish number either way. It costs $600 (and many people happily pay $1000-2000) to cross the Atlantic on an airplane, a large portion of which is fuel costs. So, when I hear this sort of "no one would ever do it" argument---"My god, who would devote an acre of woodland to getting ONE passenger across the Atlantic? They'd stick with sail instead!"---I just don't believe it. By that logic, virtually any $300 luxury today sounds crazy.

"Geez, you drove a CAR cross-country? And spent $500 on gasoline? That's crazy! You'd need someone to drill for oil a MILE undersea! The drill rig would cost most of a billion dollars! No one would bother with such a thing. They would adapt to the resource constraint some other way."

"People buy diamonds? That's impossible, the Earth is practically a diamond-free planet. You have to excavate TONS of hard rock, probably deep underground, to find a single diamond, and that's only in a handful of locations. No one will bother with such a thing, they'll put their scarce resources towards farming or art or something."

"You say this society makes VLSI circuits? That's nearly impossible, it'd cost ten billion dollars to run that many fabrication and lithography steps. Surely they'd have gotten as far as the abacus, which is good enough for most things, and done wiser things with their limited resources then spend 20,000 person-years of effort building a giant fab. "

As a matter of interest, can suitable lubricant oils be synthesised from wood derivatives?

Yes, I think so. Wood pyrolysis leaves you with a wide range of hydrocarbons which I would imagine includes appropriate high-temperature compounds. The distillation is probably messier (not that petroleum distillation is a piece of cake of course.)

 

[CapelDodger]

Why not? Wood has 60-75% of the energy density of coal. The Titanic carried 6,600 tons of coal, a tiny fraction of its 50,000 ton displacement. It could have run the same distance on under 10,000 tons of wood, also a tiny fraction of its 50,000 ton displacement. Wood charcoal, if you're willing to eat the cost of producing it, is just as energy-dense as coal.

Volume, not weight, is the important issue. Even powdered charcoal is less energy-dense by volume than anthracite (all that air). Besides which, the Titanic carried a premium cargo and could make money with a 20% loss of capacity, but the technology behind it was developed on the back of bulk trade and narrow margins. The fact that it used coal and not bunker oil demonstrates that this was not a meaningful consideration.

Steamships might be developed, but they would be to normal transport as Americas Cup contenders are to normal sailing.

 

[Belz...]

Having the concept and whatever materials that have or could be invented sans oil/coal , the people involved would work towards proving the theory just as happened in reality.

Developing the theory is one thing, though, but constructing a working nuclear power plant seems like something you can only do if you have pretty solid infrastructures for doing so.

 

[CapelDodger]

However, without highly mechanized warfare, which was only possible with fossil fuels, the world wide warfare on the last century may well have not developed nor the military imperative for a nuke bomb.

There's always a military imperative. Here we are in the 21stCE, three centuries on from the Enlightenment, and what do we see in the world? War and rumours of war, just like always. So humanity jumps the Bllitzkrieg stage and goes straight to nuclear, it turns out the same. The cutting edge of technology is always to be found in the military sphere, and presenting your research as "defence related" has always been the way to get funding.

We are speaking of a vastly slowed down world.

I agree, but some things just don't change.

Yes, and no. The farther you transport it the more loss you see in the system itself. Heating up wires does nothing for you.

True, but the alternative (nothing, basically) is worse.

Yeah, I said it was a pure guess so anyone's is just as good.

That's the joy of idle speculation (which is to say, the kind you don't have any money riding on).

 

[jaydeehess]

There's always a military imperative. Here we are in the 21stCE, three centuries on from the Enlightenment, and what do we see in the world? War and rumours of war, just like always. So humanity jumps the Bllitzkrieg stage and goes straight to nuclear, it turns out the same. The cutting edge of technology is always to be found in the military sphere, and presenting your research as "defence related" has always been the way to get funding.

If the world got stuck on 19th century style warfare.....
One Napoleonic battle saw deaths the equivalent of a full 747 passenger jet crashing every 10 minutes from dawn to dusk(Gywnn Dyer in his docuementary "War" back in the 80's) so yeah its was not a peace, love, and granola world. However, its just possible that if war tech stalled for a while, reached a level at which it could get no faster, no Stuka's or Lancaster's, that diplomacy could catch up and the idiocy of mass death for religious or political reasons could take a back seat. Hey, its a hypothetical world, I can be wishful can't i?

True, but the alternative (nothing, basically) is worse.

Oh yes, I was just pointing out that with nuke power, especially if electricity is of greater import in a world w/o fossil fuels, would allow generation to be where it was needed most. That would be a greater incentive to spur R & D.

 

[Myriad]

So: that's a smallish number either way. It costs $600 (and many people happily pay $1000-2000) to cross the Atlantic on an airplane, a large portion of which is fuel costs. So, when I hear this sort of "no one would ever do it" argument---"My god, who would devote an acre of woodland to getting ONE passenger across the Atlantic? They'd stick with sail instead!"---I just don't believe it. By that logic, virtually any $300 luxury today sounds crazy.

"Geez, you drove a CAR cross-country? And spent $500 on gasoline? That's crazy! You'd need someone to drill for oil a MILE undersea! The drill rig would cost most of a billion dollars! No one would bother with such a thing. They would adapt to the resource constraint some other way."

"People buy diamonds? That's impossible, the Earth is practically a diamond-free planet. You have to excavate TONS of hard rock, probably deep underground, to find a single diamond, and that's only in a handful of locations. No one will bother with such a thing, they'll put their scarce resources towards farming or art or something."

"You say this society makes VLSI circuits? That's nearly impossible, it'd cost ten billion dollars to run that many fabrication and lithography steps. Surely they'd have gotten as far as the abacus, which is good enough for most things, and done wiser things with their limited resources then spend 20,000 person-years of effort building a giant fab. "

That's a good point. And in a way I already agreed that a wood-burning Titanic is at least plausible; it falls under the "ships specialized for expensive fast passage" category I mentioned before. In the greater scheme of things, a Titanic or two doesn't even matter, if most of the routine shipping of cargo is by sail. Steamships would be to sailing ships as, in the real world, cargo planes are to cargo ships.

On the other hand... at some point, some technology costs really can become too high to be worth the increment over an inferior but cheaper and workable substitute. The Concorde appears to be a real-world example.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[CapelDodger]

That suggests focusing on some specific questions of interest, instead of trying to generate an entire alternate world history all at once. For instance: what, instead of water pumping for coal mining, would the first major use of stationary steam engines have been?

One easy answer is other kinds of mining, but I could make a case for a different use: water pumping for canals for transport.

A very interesting point. Without fossil fuels, water transport would have retained its central position in economic life. Canals improved on what nature provided, but were still constrained by geography (the head of water). Some form of pumping would have got over that (and indeed did in many cases, using coal-fired steam engines).

 

[CapelDodger]

On the other hand... at some point, some technology costs really can become too high to be worth the increment over an inferior but cheaper and workable substitute. The Concorde appears to be a real-world example.

Titanic, Concorde, nuclear power ... the term "vanity project" does spring to mind .

Sometimes they work out, though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)

 

[iamcanjim]

One issue we are looking at is that timber harvesting in the last 200 years has been based around harvesting medium to large sized trees, as it is the wood (or fibres) that we are after, not the energy.

If we are after energy, coppicing is far more efficient, and more efficient again if we don't car about the size of the wood we are harvesting. Add to that the fact very little selection has been done on trees to maximise energy output.

It would be quite possible to mechanize a process that produces wood chips or charcoal based on pyrolysis of wood. Yes, you would see a lot of the earth's surface taken up by wood farms, and a lot of labour would be devoted to that, but it would produce enough energy to have an industrial society.

If the circumpolar taiga and the equatorial jungles were converted to semi industrial wood production based on coppicing, a lot of energy would be produced. It wouldn't be terribly environmentally friendly....

 

[jaydeehess]

One issue we are looking at is that timber harvesting in the last 200 years has been based around harvesting medium to large sized trees, as it is the wood (or fibres) that we are after, not the energy.

If we are after energy, coppicing is far more efficient, and more efficient again if we don't car about the size of the wood we are harvesting. Add to that the fact very little selection has been done on trees to maximise energy output.
It would be quite possible to mechanize a process that produces wood chips or charcoal based on pyrolysis of wood. Yes, you would see a lot of the earth's surface taken up by wood farms, and a lot of labour would be devoted to that, but it would produce enough energy to have an industrial society.

If the circumpolar taiga and the equatorial jungles were converted to semi industrial wood production based on coppicing, a lot of energy would be produced. It wouldn't be terribly environmentally friendly....

Interesting point. Here's a pie in the sky thought based on a personal anecdote. Quite a while back I purchased my first house. On the lot were three areas with lilac bushes but they had not been cared for at all for probably a decade. One aspect of lilacs is that they grow many stalks from the same set of roots and eventually some die off. I collected all the dead wood and stuffed it in a burn barrel(45 gallon steel barrel with top and bottom ends removed.) Well in about one minute after lighting it, you could have mistaken it for a rocket. A 24 inch wide , 10 foot tall blue flame was emanating from the barrel top. The top few inches of the barrel were red hot. Sure the wood wasd dry but apparently lilac contains a flammable oil.

In a world dependant upon wood for power generation, there would be a great impetus to breed strains of woody plants with high oil content.
My experience actually had me thinking along those lines since lilacs grow in marginal soils, grow and self propagate quickly. Our society bred various plants to optimize edible oil content. Even a subculture bred one species to vastly increase the content of psychoactive compounds. In a matter of a few decades marijuana's cannabinoid content shot up. That was done by basically, hobbyists.

I could see wheat farm sized tracts of boreal forests given over to single crop oil tree farming. The harvest would be dried out in similar fashion to tobacco farming practices, then the wood could be shredded and compacted for shipping. An automated hopper could feed the shredded, or pelletized, product into an efficient combustion chamber to power a steam engine.
Household sewage waste could be used to fertilize these farms.