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Scenario 3. Technology Pushes Off the Limits to Growth

Here in this world of 2020, population has grown to 7.5 billion people, the annual economy is approaching US$75 trillion[1], and the wireless Internet 4.0 is now connecting almost half of humanity. Synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science (commonly known as NBIC technologies)[2] have dramatically improved the human condition by increasing the availability of energy, food and water, and by connecting people and information anywhere, anytime. The positive effects are to increase collective intelligence and to create value and efficiency while lowering costs.

The acceleration of technological development has opened the door to a continuous and rapid worldwide economic growth, and has in fact allowed the world to achieve energy sustainability using many different energy sources. The NBIC technologies are proving to be the key to a very bright future where

but they have had a smaller effect up to now.

After the oil shocks from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the price of oil declined in the 1990s and even dipped below US$10 per barrel in 1998. However, during the early 2000s, a long period of under-investment in the oil industry and the long and accelerating rise of China's economy made prices escalate to US$70 per barrel in 2005. That same year, a major hurricane, Katrina, hit the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed many offshore platforms plus several petroleum installations in Louisiana and Texas. Gasoline prices rose momentarily above US$3 per gallon in the USA and close to €2 per liter in some European countries. During the 2006 State of the Union address, the US president said that his country had an "addiction to oil" and that his country should reduce its dependence on oil from the Middle East by 75% by the year 2025.

The best way to eliminate the addiction to foreign oil was by accelerating breakthroughs in advanced energy technologies. Since 2001, the USA had spent nearly US$10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources. The plan was to accelerate breakthroughs in how homes and businesses used energy, and how automobiles were powered. There were programs to improve cars, make cleaner coal-burning power plants, convert coal into a gas and store its carbon dioxide emissions underground, and develop more efficient use of wind, solar cells, ethanol, and batteries for hybrid cars, etc.[4] The new subsidies for coal, wind, solar, nuclear and ethanol were intended to diversify energy sources, first in the USA and then in the rest of the planet. Since it consumed roughly a quarter of all the energy produced in the world at that time, these programs ultimately had a profound impact on the future of energy around the world.

Last month, the new U.S. president gave her 2020 State of the Union address. She, the first female president of the USA, underlined the great progress made in terms of energy independence and energy diversification in the USA. Although the promises of neither the hydrogen economy nor nuclear fusion have yet been fulfilled, the USA is almost energy self-sufficient thanks to advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology. In fact, biofuels now account for over 20% of US vehicle combustibles and long-life, automatically rechargeable nanobatteries are all the rage in electric, flexi-fuel and hybrid cars. Additionally, tailor-made artificial bacteria using photoelectrosynthesis are becoming a surprisingly reliable and novel source of electricity production in new power plants.

Similar advances have been pioneered in other major countries, and Europe particularly emphasized a massive conversion program for old power plants. Japan, on another front, has led the world in energy conservation practices. Additionally, China, a rising economic power is now leading the way in car technologies and

are continuously increasing the base of economically recoverable conventional and non-conventional oil. However, the price of oil - still below US$ 100 per barrel - is still high enough to motivate the search for alternative energy sources.

Figure 1: Oil resources according to production costs (US$ per barrel)

Source: Resources to Reserves--Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future. IEA, 2005

The worldwide bestselling book of 2019 was Life After Oil by Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize and founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA). In his latest book, Yergin wrote about all the new possibilities for energy generation in a world where gas is overtaking oil as the main energy supply, and where new sources of energy will also soon be overtaking gas and eventually substituting for most fossil fuel production in the planet. However, there will be plenty of energy opportunities for everybody in a continuously globalizing world, including abundance of solar energy in Africa and the Middle East, bioenergy in the USA and India, and space solar power satellites in the USA, China, Japan and Russia, for example.

Yergin argued again that the world will never really run out of oil, but that it will be replaced by other cleaner, cheaper and more abundant energy sources. He reminded us of the five previous times when many "experts" thought that oil was being exhausted: in the 1880s, after the first world war, after the second world war, in the 1970s with the first oil shock, and in the early 2000s with all the talk about an approaching global Hubbert peak (just like a previous Hubbert peak in the USA during the 1970s). However, Yergin showed that oil production, and even oil reserves, had continued to grow, if only more slowly, around the world, from the North Pole to the South Pole, and even below the poles. He ended by quoting the famous dictum by Saudi Arabian Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani: "the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil". In fact, in the early 2000s, BP, formerly British Petroleum, rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum and started working on solar energy and biofuels. That was a clear sign of how oil companies transformed themselves into full energy companies, leaving behind their humble beginnings in the restrictive petroleum fields. Even OPEC countries had to react and begin seriously thinking, for the first time, about Life After Oil.

By 2020, gas production has indeed caught up with oil production. The supply of gas doubled between 2000 and 2020, and it overtook coal production in 2016. Now, according to most forecasts, other energy sources will also catch up in the 2030s with gas and oil, which are both declining relatively. Even though there has never been any continuous shortage of coal, oil or gas, except for small local production problems sometimes caused by political disruptions or weather factors, the era of fossil fuels does seem to be reaching its zenith and might end in the next few decades. Indeed, other energy sources, including some not even considered today, will apparently be the dominant sector in the USA by 2040 (see Figure 2). These energy "waves" will also be seen soon in most of the world. They show a clear "decarbonization" trend going from hydrocarbon fuels with more carbon to those with more hydrogen: first, wood; second, coal; third, oil; fourth, gas; and maybe eventually pure hydrogen and solar energy (itself based on hydrogen).

Figure 2: Energy “waves” in the United States

Source: The Millennium Project based on US Department of Energy


Outside fossil fuels, nuclear energy has increased marginally and its share in the total generation of electricity has dropped by almost half, even though the third generation fission plants might eventually regain some terrain. Several nuclear reactors have been decommissioned in Europe, and the new nuclear plants have been concentrated in a list of very few countries. Many plants became obsolete and were closed without substitution, mostly in Europe, while new plants were opened in a few countries, mainly in Asia: first China, followed by India, Japan and South Korea. China has constructed 25 nuclear reactors in the last two decades, increasing its electrical capacity by 20 GW. Russia, similarly, built 30 reactors and brought up its share of nuclear energy to 25% of total electricity production, which allowed Russia to keep exporting more oil and gas. Otherwise, most other countries have not experimented much with nuclear energy because of its safety and environmental problems. Furthermore, nuclear fusion has not yet been successful. The ITER tokamak fusion reactor built in southern France by an international consortium (founded by China, Europe, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA) carried out its first plasma operations in 2018, with a budget overrun of 80% and two years behind schedule; however, it is estimated that much more research in plasma physics is needed before electricity-producing fusion power plants might become fully operational in one or two decades more. This will be an important step, since nuclear fusion is much more efficient than the chemical reactions using standard fossil fuels and it is substantially safer than nuclear fission (nuclear fusion is the energy process of the stars and it combines two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to create helium). However, the technical issues to sustain a controlled plasma interaction will still need a lot of future research and

Thus, plants use light and some simple chemical molecules to create carbohydrates, or hydrocarbons with oxygen (carbohydrates are really nothing more than hydrocarbons plus oxygen). Additionally, about 114 kilocalories of free energy are stored in plant biomass for every mole of CO2 fixed during photosynthesis. Solar radiation striking the earth on an annual basis is equivalent to 174,000 Terawatts (which is several thousand times the current global energy consumption) and only part of this light is used for photosynthetic energy capture (see Table 2). Approximately two-thirds of the net global photosynthetic production is terrestrial (i.e., land based), while the remainder is produced mainly by phytoplankton (microalgae) in the oceans which cover approximately 70% of the total surface area of the Earth. Since biomass originates from plant and algal photosynthesis, both terrestrial plants and water microalgae are appropriate targets for increasing biomass energy production.

Plants do it, most algae do it too, and even some very simple bacteria can fix carbon dioxide and water to produce carbohydrates and oxygen under the influence of light. In fact, many simple cells can do photosynthesis and similar biochemical processes. Making hydrocarbons is one of the simplest biological processes, as a famous report by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) explained late last century.[10] Hydrocarbons are not complicated molecules with thousands of atoms and a number of elements, like proteins and enzymes; they are just small molecules with two of the most common elements on Earth: hydrogen and carbon. Surprisingly, it took many scientists and many years to artificially create the first commercial hydrocarbons from living carbohydrates and not from fossil fuels.

Craig Venter, one of the biologists who sequenced the human genome in 2000, founded later a company whose purpose was precisely to create life. In fact, Venter famously said that he spent 20 years of his life trying to "read" life, and that he would expend another 20 to "write" life. His company Synthetic Genomics was one of the pioneers dedicated to using modified microorganisms to biologically produce alternative fuels like ethanol and hydrogen.[11] In fact, many other such enterprises followed soon, and the first artificial life forms, virus and bacteria, were created in 2003 and 2005, respectively. One of Venter's research associates, Mohan Kapoor from India, was the first who managed to create artificial bacteria to economically produce hydrocarbons in 2018. He had been working since 2015 with Clostridium acetobutylicum and other bacteria until he managed to tailor-make a new hybrid organism that efficiently produced hydrocarbons from carbon dioxide and water under controlled lighting.

Clostridium acetobutylicum is a commercially valuable bacterium, sometimes called the "Weizmann Organism", after Chaim Weizmann, who in 1916 helped discover how Clostridium acetobutylicum cultures could be used to produce acetone, butanol and ethanol from starch using the ABE (Acetone, Butanol, Ethanol) process to satisfy such industrial purposes as gunpowder and TNT production. The ABE process was an industry standard until the 1950s when low oil costs drove production to more efficient methods based on hydrocarbon cracking and petroleum distillation techniques. C. acetobutylicum also produces acetic acid (vinegar), butyric acid (a vomitous smelling substance), carbon dioxide and hydrogen. These technologies are proving so successful that they are now being used also to start factories that use cellular processes to create efficient organisms to digest heavy oil and get more of the residuals. Other planned energy projects involving these new biotechnological developments include

Some fundamentalist ecologists have started to complain that a full environmental impact analysis has to be performed on such artificial organisms, since they could destroy the delicate balance on Earth. They argue that the processes may work in the laboratory but may have large impacts when scaled up to achieve meaningful production quantities. They worry about escaping molecules, and interfering with natural evolutionary processes. There are even objections from religious fundamentalists of all sects. However, the public is realizing that this is nothing more than a new scientific breakthrough, like the "green revolution" that increased agricultural yields and avoided the starvation deaths of millions of Indians in the 1970s. More recently, the new bacteria can be compared to the biologically engineered Chinese chicken wings grown directly from chicken stem cells in 2014 without the need to actually reproduce a whole chicken to be killed later for its wings and other body parts; or the Japanese Kobe beef produced genetically from premium cow cells in 2015 without having to grow cattle to be later slaughtered. The "chickenless" Chinese chicken wings and the "cowless" Japanese Kobe beef are also over ten times cheaper to produce and totally avoid any risks of animal problems, including Avian flu or mad cow disease, respectively. Both of these products have been massively and successfully produced by GM2 (Guangzhou Meats & Meals, the main "meat creator" in Guangdong province) for worldwide exports since 2016. In fact, even McDonald's advertises its new "cowless" hamburgers based on ethical grounds, since they don't butcher any animals and the hamburgers are much cheaper and nutritious than the non-genetically produced ones.

Space and the future

The other important cells for current energy production are the fuel cells that convert biofuels into electrical energy. Fuel cells were first industrialized during the 1960s by NASA in order to generate electricity for the Apollo missions, and they were later used in the space shuttle and International space station. Fuel cells have very high efficiencies in converting chemical energy to electrical energy since they not constrained by the maximum Carnot cycle efficiency as combustion engines are. A combustible fuel reacts with oxygen in a fuel cell to transform chemical energy into electricity with efficiencies of more than 60% today, as compared to only 40% at the start of the century.

Fuel cells are being used almost everywhere, in homes, industries, cars or even rockets. They can also use many types of fuels, from pure hydrogen to landfill waste, in order to produce electricity. If pure hydrogen is "burnt" with oxygen, then water is the only emission. If hydrocarbons are used, then carbon dioxide is also produced; and the more carbonated the hydrocarbons are, the more carbon dioxide will be emitted. The main problem with fuel cells is their high cost, which has been reduced but it is still elevated in 2020, even with the current high-temperature and catalysis breakthroughs. Nanotechnology is currently being used to try to lower the manufacturing costs of fuel cells, just like was done with nanobatteries after 2015.[12]

Additionally, the fuel costs of using hydrogen combustible with fuel cells have come down from 8 cents per mile in 2000 to 3 cents per mile in 2020, but that is still 50% more than the cost of fuel for hybrid flexi-fuel internal combustion engines (ICEs). Compared with other hydrocarbon fuels, the cost of using fuel cells and ICEs are similar, which is why the Chinese EFHs do not use pure hydrogen as fuel. However, the cost of the fuel cell itself is still elevated and their disposal is dangerous since they are highly contaminating, but fuel cells convert energy with over 60% efficiency versus 20% for ICEs. Ethanol is an excellent combustible, since hydrogen-rich fuels like methanol or ethanol (methane hydrate, natural gas, gasoline, diesel and even gasified coal), just produce heat and water, plus some carbon dioxide depending on the hydrocarbon molecular weight.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element on Earth. It is the basic component of water, not to mention virtually every fuel ever used by humankind, wood, oil, coal and natural gas, all of which are made of hydrocarbons. Pure hydrogen, however, does not occur naturally: hydrogen must be harvested using electrical or chemical processes, which have their own hidden environmental consequences; besides, hydrogen is only an energy carrier and it has to be produced from water or hydrocarbons. Obviously, using renewable resources to power those processes could vastly reduce the environmental footprint of hydrogen production, but, at present, producing hydrogen for fuel costs several times more than conventional fuels.

Iceland has made a major effort to become the first "hydrogen economy" in the world, since the start of this century, and its advances by 2020 are notable. Nonetheless, Iceland is the special case of a country with over-abundant and readily available hydroelectric and geothermal energy that can be used to produce hydrogen as a carrier or storage of energy for later use. The hydrogen produced in Iceland is mostly for transportation since, for other activities, it is more convenient to create electricity directly, without intermediaries (just like making Japanese Kobe beef without the intermediate step of the cow). The hydrogen for cars is later used by the fuel cell to transform its chemical energy into electric and mechanical energy to drive the car. Iceland, a country with excess energy, has chosen to electrolyze water and began exporting the hydrogen contained in high pressure tanks, and in the form of metal hydrides, since hydrogen is released from the hydrides with just a bit of heat.

Hydrogen has not yet become the main energy source, as dreamed by many in the early 2000s, because it is still costly to produce, dangerous to store safely, difficult to transport, tricky to distribute, and its volumetric energy intensity is much lower than that of other liquid fuels like ethanol or gasoline (although not in the form of metal hydrides). Safety would be another problem and it would be an enormous job, and would take many years, to accomplish the logistics and infrastructure changes required for moving from standard liquid fuels to hydrogen. The best idea here seems to be the "hydrogen battery", a block of metal hydride storing hydrogen at densities higher than liquid hydrogen. When a hydrogen powered car needs a fill up, the "gas stations" of the hydrogen era would simply exchange the hydrogen batteries, probably automatically. However, continuous research is being carried out to increase the efficiency and reduce the costs of the so-called hydrogen economy. Even the use of advanced fission nuclear plants is still considered to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen. The theoretical potential of hydrogen as an energy source is certainly incredible, but