April 19, 2004
Working Notes
NET ENERGY AND THE GALILEO SYNDROME
Thomas A. Robertson
"I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosopher of this university? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refuted, with the obstinacy of a gutted adder, to look at the planets, or moon, or my glass (telescope)!
...Why must I wait so long before I can laugh with you?
Kindest Kepler, what peals of laughter you would give forth if you heard with what arguments the foremost philosopher of the university opposed me, in the presence of the Grand Duke, at Pisa, laboring with his logic-chopping argumentations as though they were magical incantations wherewith to banish and spirit away the new planets (the satellites of Jupiter) out of the sky!."
Gallileo (In a letter to Kepler)
"We are not used to complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is disorganized, our passions out of kilter. Those who call themselves radical float helplessly upon a stream amidst the wreckage of old creeds and abortive new ones...those who make no pretensions to much theory are twisted about by fashions, crazes, at the mercy of milliners, and dressmakers, theatrical producers, and the premeditated gossip of the newspapers."
Walter Lippmann
For a while in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was like living in "energy-of -the-week-times."
Coal, solar energy, outer continental shelf petroleum resources, enhanced oil production, geothermal, photovoltaic electricity, fission, biomass, ocean currents and thermal power, fusion, gasohol, breeder reactors, synfuels, biomass, overthrust belt gas, wind power, geopressured gas, space solar satellites, conservation, and on and on...
Proponents of each of these would compete for our exclusive attention. Hardly a day went by when the following statement is not issued by someone:
"The (President, Senator, Representative, corporation president, professor, consumerist, environmentalist, or other, pick one) announced today that (insert energy technology of their choice) could produce enough energy by (chose a year in the future) to enable Americans to be independent of foreign energy supplies."
A companion comment was that the Nation that went to the Moon should surely be able to solve it’s "energy problem," even if it took an equal to the Apollo program.
Now, more than a quarter-century later, ask what happened to the technology of your or their choice. You find it is still in the running as a strong potential. It is also, still too expensive, and still needs more research and development, tax breaks, regulatory adjustment, financial incentives and guarantees, or other subsidies. Advocates for each technology tell us it is still in there, ready to solve the nation's energy problem—if only it can be subsidized a bit longer—"until it becomes economical."
What happened to all the certainty that surrounded our technologies and social programs of the '50s '60s, and early 1970s?
Indeed, why were we able to go to the moon and back—on time, safely, and more or less on budget—and still not solve the energy crisis? Why have all our apparent abilities to accomplish stated and specific goals in the past now deteriorated to such an uncertain morass of unfulfilled promises and unsatisfying expectations?
I suggest it is time to look beyond the promises and expectations. We are big people. It's time we discover the basis upon which those promises were made.
In other words, its time to “grow up” and ask a much larger question:
In terms of energy and other resources, ecology, and our culture, what really is happening to us and what we can do about it—while we still have the resource abundance and time to support what ever actions are necessary.
We have not been looking at our realities very well.
Uncertainty about ourselves and our world is creeping into every aspect of our personal lives: family life, social values, personal and national security, stress in our economy and our financial institutions, health and safety, the environment and so on. All this is happening in spite of the unprecedented social investment dedicated to knowing about our world that has been made in the past century.
And:
Never before in human history has there been the equal to today's ability to inquire, know, educate, communicate, and act in both beneficial and satisfying ways.
The "bottom line" in our societies return on its social investment in “knowing” is that much of our contemporary uncertainty does not have to be. We can build workable views of who we are, what we are doing, and what we can do. Our ability to know is not the problem. The barriers come in finding the will to look beyond our political, economic, and other myths about ourselves. We are far less ignorant than we are innocent, where ignorance is from not knowing and innocence is from not wanting to know.
So the question becomes: What rewards must we discover in order to motivate ourselves to seek the paths to our own self-preservation and self-satisfaction? How can we want to look into a less flawed and distorted mirror image of ourselves, confidently recognizing not only our own strengths and capabilities to deal with the world, however we find it—but our weaknesses as well?
In the early 1970's, a number of books and studies reflected an emerging interest and ability in knowing about ourselves as functioning systems of individuals, societies, in nature. Leading the way was Limits to Growth: A report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Universe Books, New York, 1972. Based on the Systems Dynamics concepts developed by Jay Forrester at MIT, the book was written by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III.
An interesting note relates to the critical review of Limits to Growth. Economists attacked it from every quarter. And yet none were as severe, or as effective, as those familiar with Systems Dynamics analytical processes itself, including the authors. The difference is that the systems Dynamics folks were trying to understand the complex processes at work in their world, while their economic based critics were trying to perpetuate their mythology of unlimited growth based on human value processes reflected in money and markets.
And yet the result was not to consider the possibilities of such inquiries. The reviews and comments about human capability to perform in the world tended to get caught up in arguments about whether or not there were limits to mankind's growth on this planet. Few saw how these books and studies could lead to new sets of questions and exciting opportunities. These would be working questions about how we could gain a better, more complete and positive view of our world.
The dominant literature of the 1980s reflected a very much different view.
Gone were questions of the role of pervasive non-human-directed forces on our society. We were told that all options leading to a better world came from our own initiatives. Ostensibly led by University of Maryland economist Julian Simon, we were told that there are no physical or ecological limits to human potential, that the more people there were, the more markets and the more opportunity there would be. (Simon Citations) Then, authors like George Guilder were gilding our human experience with the fundamental aspirations of greed unbounded by our ecosystem's ability to produce for us and carry off our waste.
Towards the last part of the 1980s, Allen Bloom was bringing us The Closing of The American Mind, and we seemed eager to see the world from his perspective, a world in which everything was relative—in terms of our human interests.
Thus, as we began the decade of the 1990s, we had been polarized by points of view in which on one very quiet and much ignored end of this spectrum, nature imposed her will with commensurate human options, and on the other, highly dominant end, human will would provide all the options we could ever desire.
There was also another set of books: The Titanic Effect, by K.E.F. Watt; Environment, Power, and Society, by H.T. Odum; Entropy and the Economic Process, by Nicholas Georgescu-Rogan; Design with Nature, by Ian McHarg; and Order and Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine.
These books mostly produced in the early and mid-1970s, told a different story about our world. They provided early examples of the new intellectual frameworks against which a larger set of questions about people and their world could and sometimes are being asked.
The conceptual viewpoint of this third set of books were summarized by H.T. Odum:
"Whereas men used to search among the parts to find mechanistic explanations, the macroscopic view is the reverse. ...already having a clear view of the parts in their fantastically complex detail, (we) must somehow get away, rise above, step back, group parts, simplify concepts, interpose frosted glass and somehow see the big patterns."
Environment, Power and Society
H.T. Odum, 1971
Thus, the real news in the work of the above people and others was that they were exploring—and discovering—ways of identifying and organizing the complex and changing information about the whole of our world and ourselves.
The implications of these new ideas are shown in Figure 1. Here, for the 130 year period from 1860 to 1990, energy production per capita is plotted against money supply as measured by the Federal Reserve's M2 series. What becomes obvious is that we are generating money at a rate that since the early 1970s is increasingly at odds with historical relationships. Further, this discrepancy is getting worse, not better—all indicating a need for more clear, complete, and coherent, frameworks for assessing our conditions and opportunities at any level.
Figure 1 energy per capita and M2.
Yet the realities of such arguments seem to make no impression on any but those who make them. There is a pervasive optimism that keeps much of our society from wanting to know its most likely reality. Washington journalist James Srodes calls it "Tinkerbelle Economics," and we are holding to it far longer than is good for our evolving interests.
The following is an example of how we fool our selves—and how we do not have to.
In the spring of 1974. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Representatives John Dingle of Michigan, and George Brown of California, took an extraordinary initiative. They provided the leadership to make an obscure concept called "net energy' a required element in the implementation of public Law 93-577, The Non-Nuclear energy Research and Development Act of 1975. "net energy" was to be a criterion in the evaluation of energy research and development proposals.
With the net energy provision in PL 93-577 a specific procedure to identify and measure the relative merit of energy technology performance was called for. By this procedure, called Net Energy Analysis, the relative merit of energy technologies could be compared to single or aggregates of competing technologies. The measure would be on a combined physical/monetary basis. This physical measure provided a value basis for technology evaluation and comparison that was independent of human will or desire.
"Net energy" is a relatively small, but critical, part of more complete analysis. "Net energy" means the same as "net money." (That was the first part of the "net energy" problems to come—the term was confusing.) Actually, "net energy" refers to net profit, measured by energy terms—the level of energy profit (or loss) returned from investments in various energy technologies. A better term might be "net energy profit analysis" or "Energy Return on Energy Investment."
"Net energy", what it is, how it is used and what it means is the subject of following chapters. However, simply put, "net energy" is based on the idea that it takes energy to get energy. The difference between the energy you get and the amount of energy you expended to get it is the "net energy" profit—again, similar to financial profit or loss. In sum, "net energy" refers to a bookkeeping concept—where the measure is of profit, is stated in physical terms.
The idea of "net energy" first gained notice after it was described by Howard T. Odum in an article titled Energy, Ecology, and Economics in the November, 1973 issue of Ambio, The Journal of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Washington, DC author and environmental activist Wilson Clark, who, with David Howell, was writing a comprehensive book on energy and society, picked up the Ambio paper. (Clark, Wilson, 1974, Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction, Anchor Press / Doubleday, New York) With Clark's enthusiastic prompting, Odum's concept of net energy analysis received substantial exposure, mainly in the Washington-based media. Thus, in short succession, articles on “net energy” were published in the Washington Monthly, Forbes, and Business Week. The Business Week article received world wide distribution due to its being one of the magazines many airline carried. Wilson Clark and David Howell wrote the Washington Monthly article. James Srodes wrote the article in Forbes, and Will Lepkowski wrote the one in Business Week
Joel Schats, director of the State of Oregon Energy Office, who was increasingly learning of the role net energy was playing in our energy circumstances, then carried out a substantial role in the propagation of the net energy concept.
Soon after the above articles, Representatives George Brown of California, John Dingle of Michigan, and Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon became involved in the issue. As a result, net energy analysis began to be considered by the U.S. Government. Also very much involved at the time (1973 - 1976) were legislative aids Tim Lynch (Rep. George Brown), Frank Potter (Rep. John Dingle), and Steve Hickok (Sen. Mark O. Hatfield).. From these activities, including several hearings, the concept of "Net Energy Analysis" or NEA became a provision of Public Laws 93-577 and 96-294. These laws are in effect to this day.
The net energy provision of these laws said that:
The potential for production of net energy by the proposed technology at the stage of commercial application shall be analyzed and considered in evaluating proposals. (P.L. No. 93-577, Section 5(a)(5).
The use of "net energy" analysis is similar to all the criteria and classifications we use in financial analysis. The term incorporates concepts such as: return on investment, gross and net income, sunken costs, etc. Recognizing the "net energy" profit of an energy technology gives us a physical measure for comparing and evaluating competing energy technologies and uses.
Further, we can use "net energy" analysis as a complement to financial analysis in assessing any energy technology's actual contribution to an industry, a community, or society in general.
In the mid 1970s, when the DOE was doing all its net energy "studies," an agency official informed me that they had just received their own net energy studies of nuclear power. (A 1984 survey of Department of Energy studies responding to the key phrase “net energy” returned 997 hits.)
I was told that "Nuclear power gives a positive return on energy invested. The pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant returns 4.2 energy units for each unit of energy invested."
The official did not want to hear what I was learning at the same time: that newer DOE studies, being done by scientists with more objective and advanced analytical techniques, were coming up with a 2.7 to 1 Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI) for nuclear power, and even that number did not include the back end of the fuel cycle (waste processing and storage), the cost of a potential accident (like Chernobyl,) decommissioning, and the new costs that are emerging as we learn more about our nuclear fuel processing industry.
We were also learning a number of other things about low-yield (under 6 to 1 EROEI) energy resource technologies (And none of what we were learning seemed to be interesting to DOE officials or their equivalents in any part of the private sector—whether in the so-called “alternative energy” arena or those in the heavy energy industries.)
The first thing we were learning, as shown in Figures 2A and 2B, is that there is a break in the EROEI curve as you go up the net energy yield curve. Doubling the yield from 6 to 1, with an 83% energy profit (EP) to 12 to 1 (92% EP) only increases the yield from a technology by a bit over 9 percent. Doubling the again, from 12 to 1 to 24 to 1 with an 96% EP only increases the yield from a technology by a bit over 4 percent.
That was the good news.
The less than good news was that when the EROEI declined to half of the 6 to 1 ratio, down to 3 to 1 with a 66% EP, there was 17 percent decrease in net yield. Reducing EROEI by half again, to 1.50 to 1 (approximately the yield their advocates find for biofuels and photovoltaics) decreases the EP by 41 %.
Because practically all the alternative energy sources are under 4 to 1 EROEI, (and mainly under 2 to 1) it becomes apparent that small changes in low EROEI energy technologies can mean large changes in energy profitability—as well as in the competitiveness potential of systems dependent upon such resources. (Figure 2A and 2B. Net energy curves for 70 to 1 EROEI and 7 to 1 EROEI.)
**************** net energy bar chart*********************
For those considering the role of energy in their lives, the circumstances related to understanding energy return on energy-invested means a number of things:
· during a time of international over-capacity in high EROEI energies such as oil and natural gas, energy prices do not reflect relative physical scarcity. This is mainly because physical limits, other than extraction, processing, and transportation costs, have no function in actual energy supply energy prices are thus depressed.
· These low prices promote the increased consumption of energy resources which are constantly declining in supply.
· As supplies begin to reflect physical limits to availability, particularly as oil and gas supplies in the world continue their current decline, a time will come when energy prices will increase due to actual physical shortage. When that happens, energy prices will head toward extraordinary levels.
· These high price levels will reflect the inability of the energy production system to replace high EROEI energy resources. Because of the physical, non-market aspect of this energy supply/price phenomenon, it cannot be anticipated by economic assessment alone, particularly during an energy-glut period;
· As energy-using systems come down the scale from operating on highly concentrated to lesser concentration energies, a point is reached where incremental declines in resource concentration have increasingly high impacts on energy system capability. For example, as the EROEI in crude oil is halved, from say a 20 to 1 EROEI to 10 to 1, the percentage change is 95 percent energy profit to 90 percent energy profit—which is still a high energy profit. However, as the EROEI of stripper well oil, which could be around 4 to 1 is compared to ethanol which has an EROEI of 1.7 to 1, a much more critical view of relative energy merit emerges. Energy with a 4 to 1 EROEI still produces 75 percent energy profit, whereas ethanol, which at best could have a 1.7 to 1 EROEI, only produces a 35 percent profit, with any error on the part of lower yield have an increasingly negative effect on an energy supply not profitability in energy terms..
· a key element in changing physical availability of energy resources/technologies will be price signal distortions. These distortions will tend to occur by extraordinary reductions in the cost of energy when energy is plentiful and when energy becomes limited, by increasing the price of energy in extraordinary ways.
· a moderator of energy price increases due to limited physical availability may also occur because such extraordinary circumstances (in terms of the history of energy and society) will bring on economic disruptions that could reduce energy demand around the world.
· where market prices for energy are applied to low yield technologies in a world dominated by high yield resource availabilities, substantial market signal distortions can occur;
· the true profitability of low yield energy technologies is extremely sensitive to subtle and often hidden costs, while benefits—measured in physical terms as btu, erg, joules, etc. outputs—are fixed;
· economies which create dependencies on low yield technologies with high associated downstream costs such as nuclear power, may find themselves having to deal with costs which were initially hidden or not well described by marketplace values. It is also likely that many of these costs will not present themselves for payment until the low-yield dependent economy is stressed and has little or no reserve latitude to pay for those ignored or unforeseen expenses; such as in Eastern Europe, where old nuclear power plant safety satisfies no one and investment capital for new plants, or equivalent replacement power is unavailable.
· low yield energy technologies, even those with negative yields, can still make positive contributions to an economy. This occurs where those technologies are incorporated into an economy to provide highly specific advantages in enhancing the net yield of the entire economic system. An example are photovoltaic power sources used to provide remote electricity. The key here is that instead of optimizing parts of systems, the whole of operating systems and their ability to compete are considered within a comprehensive analytical framework.
Given how critical a clear and accurate understanding of the relative merit of our energy system options are to our consequent ability to compete in a secure and satisfying way, our knowledge of such factors are in terrible shape.
For example, the EROEI of photovoltaic power will be very low if not negative, even with the recent advancements in technology. Even so, the use of photovoltaic power in specific ways can contribute to improving the net energy and economic capability of the system in which it is used.
In other words, the so-called alternative energy resources and associated technologies make most sense, and can make their most competitive contribution when they are considered in context with the entirety of the using system.
It is useful to think of the mix of energy technologies available to an economy in terms of an energy investment portfolio. In this energy investment portfolio available resources technologies are classified as to their net yield, the quantity produced, and the way the resource technology is used in the economy.
Using an energy investment portfolio provides a means of identifying a more complete set of systems economic, energy, and ecological characteristics of competing systems than is usually the case. Those making policy within an economy to rate the comparative merit of their energy capability with the capabilities of others, much the way one investor will compare various mixes of stock and bond portfolios.
Everyone knows that no banker lends, and no competitive business manager plans, solely on the basis of gross profits. And yet, all domestic assessments of energy supply and consumption at this time are in gross amounts. The emphasis on the "gross" in our national energy accounts implies that the energy itself is the reason for being—and that the competitive work the energy can do for us is unimportant. The same concept expressed in financial terms would describe an executive who strived for maximum gross profits—regardless of the cost of attaining those profits. In a clearly competitive environment, executives with such behavior could not survive for long.
By early 1981, and after spending billions of dollars on energy research, development, and commercialization, the Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), had also spent a million dollars or so on "net energy" studies. And yet "net energy," as a criterion for measuring the relative usefulness of various energy proposals was hard to find.
Similar to how, back in Galileo's time, the Pope and his minions tried to wish away the moons around Saturn (and keep our small planet at the center of their church's universe), DOE was repeatedly able to cloud and obfuscate the concept of NEA, with their contracted studies, statements, and inaction on the issue. The same confusion exists today, compounded by the fact that it has become institutionalized.
Since 1976, DOE aggressively avoided doing any analysis that would interfere with attaining politically desired results. There was a quiet, but very effective effort to not know that they could be developing the energy technologies that would fail because they were inherently uncompetitive. Reflecting mainly the innocent whims of successive administrations and Congressional majorities (and it made little difference whether Republicans or Democrats were in power), we ended up getting the synfuels program, sophisticated solar programs, additional investment in nuclear power, and a host of other initiatives that were doomed by the simple fact that they were not, in energy terms, productive enough to compete with conventional sources of energy.
Because of DOE's foot-dragging in this area, the public has not been warned of the of the transient nature of conventional energy sources and their declining availability, a situation that will, in one way or another, go critical in the next few years. In addition, the public has not been able to see the need and means by which they can realize a competitive, efficient and satisfying energy future. Predicting the timing of traumatic change must always involve uncertainty. What can be considered for the next few years, is that changes due to energy will make themselves known in many ways, most likely as shifts in the nation's primary production processes, inflation, energy market manipulation, and other, mainly indirect signals of changes in energy availability.
As a result, the United States, the most energy intensive society in history, continues to be stressed by problems in energy availability, prices, related inflation, and an inability to come to grips with new individual, national, and global realities.
To the extent energy was related to these national problems, the government did not have a generally understood and evaluated way of measuring the relative merits of any of its energy technology and use options.
In August of 1978, the General Accounting Office, Energy and Minerals Division (GAO/EMD) released its first net energy report, Net Energy Analysis: Little Progress and Many Problems (EMD - 77-57). The GAO made a number of recommendations to ERDA which were in turn "answered" by that agency. The result of that exchange was to make non-action on net energy an official policy position. ERDA's reply to the GAO "net energy" report consisted of statements that were either in error or described work that had not been done. GAO/EMD had done nothing by late 1980 to follow up on the administrations compliance with the "net energy" provision of PL93-577.
The GAO/EMD director said in the summer of 1980 that he had no plans to do further "net energy" work. This is all curious, given the fact that the GAO is the Congress's accountant, and the "net energy" could be a critical factor in producing more complete and accurate accounting on the allocation of tens of billions of dollars by the federal government to energy related projects and program.
In fact the General Accounting Office did revisit the issue in 1982. A different GAO division than EMD produced a report called, DOE Funds New Energy Technologies Without Estimating Potential Net Energy Yields, GAO/IPE-82-1, July 26, 1982. The second GAO net energy report said in effect the synfuels program and any other initiative of that kind should be considered in terms of "net energy" analysis.
Proposals sent to so-called "responsible offices" within DOE and elsewhere offering to clean up the concept of "net energy" were rejected for reasons such as:
· simply "not interesting" (from a senior energy official at the Office of Technology Assessment, and now an official with the Clinton White House Science Policy Office);
· the methodology "doesn't tell us anything new or more than we know from regular economics" (from many economists);
· "if net energy is right, then we wouldn't have nuclear power, and that's not acceptable. (From a senior energy analyst at the Congressional Research Service, 1974); and finally,
· "If net energy analysis were right it would wreck this initiative. (From a key official in the Carter Administration synfuels program.) See the Aspen Institute report on this subject;
· “There is no clear way to measure the net energy of any technology. The DoE funded numerous net energy studies and they simply all pointed in different directions with different results.” (And so the agency we fund with billions of tax dollars is unable/unwilling to clean up the net energy analysis and turn it into a meaningful and useful policy tool.)
We can also be sure that the above responses would be repeated today. Few people in the responsible agencies have any knowledge of the net energy issue on way or another.
As a result of such treatment, "net energy" has become a confused concept, most often used by energy technology advocates as an idea of convenience to "prove" or "disprove" the technological whims of the day. Seldom is "net energy" used in an analysis process to identify the comparative merits of proposed technological options.
A cursory look at "net energy" analysis done to date suggests some rather distressing things about current conditions and policy:
· We will not be able to produce our way out of the energy problem.
· Increased prices will have very little to do with increasing energy supplies when actual shortage begins to affect energy markets.
· Physical limitations are increasingly having an influence on what a society and each of its individuals can accomplish. For example, "Guns and butter" may no longer be economically possible without direct national consequences of which inflation is only one element.
· There are very likely other, more viable energy, economic, and political options from which to choose. Because of pre-existing frames of reference, these options will be very hard to identify and develop in a timely manner.
· The transition to a more energy efficient energy future must be initiated well in advance of economic stress driven by declining resource availability. This is necessary so many options can be identified, tested, and improved upon in terms of their contribution to the "social good."
· When signals of energy-driven economic hardship do become obvious to the economy, it is very unlikely there will be the reserves in time and resources required to make the necessary transition to a more efficient energy future.
Those who watch such things can already see messages telling us that all is not right. Consider for example, the experience of all who—while in office—have advocated, "solving the energy problem" by expanding energy production. They have almost always lost politically, and have made little impact on gross energy production.
In fact, the production of "net profitable energy" is probably declining at an acceleration rate. How much more unnecessarily unstable political and economic conditions must we endure because of our misconstrued perceptions of what is most real and most likely?
The ideas encompassed by "net energy"—as a part of a more complete analysis process—are valid, if for no other reason than they are presented for the test of competition in the "marketplace of ideas". "Net energy" as we know it will inevitably be used and incorporated into other, more complete analysis concepts. This evolving process will compete with, or often by complementing become a part of, the "conventional wisdom." All this will not happen because any of the ideas involved were "good" or "bad" per se, but because when applied, they worked better than less complete ways of thinking. In other words, ideas survive which when applied, contribute to the economic, political, and social survival of the users.
What can be seen at this time is that net energy is very much like a "miners canary," more an indicator than a thing in itself. Some of us may feel the bird is in a cage we carry more than others but I suggest this reaction is no different than that of a banker who woke up one morning and found profit to no longer be a viable criterion for financial evaluation. It is also probable that the unfortunate treatment of this one idea is an indicator of the avoidably errant state of our current analysis and related policy support environment.
The history of "net energy" is one part of the story of how people in this current and pervasive energy transition looked at themselves—and their myths and cliches—acknowledged what must be done, and did it...or didn't.
Unfortunately, and in spite of many efforts, few of us have the opportunity of using the extremely important insights that "net energy" could provide in our energy and economic policy deliberations. As a consequence of the failure of our analysis processes, due in the main to our inability to understand and find rewards for using "net energy" and related analysis capabilities, our national leaders are attempting to affect political and economic circumstances over which they often have little control. Declining energy and other resources represent physical determinants which respond to political, economic and cultural influences only when such influence is consistent with the limitations of the physical conditions themselves.
For example, working within the current monetary system, policy makers are often trying to control energy related inflation—which is increasingly caused by the declining availability of energy and other resources. Working within the monetary system alone, there is no way to get a methodological handle on the aspect of inflation.
The American public, and many of their leaders are caught in the middle of contemporary energy and economic experiences which contradict very recent history. They are consumed with uncertainty, and unable to take advantage of those choices that can still be made.
Those suggesting "net energy" has something to offer are often asked by congressional and administration staff (and consumer, industrial, financial, and environmental people), "what is 'net energy' good for?" An answer is: What is the use of knowing profit? Why do we have Arthur Anderson, Price Waterhouse, and your local bookkeeper? Why would anyone want to know the return on their activities and investments?
The world’s economies are tied to many of the same attributes of business and commerce that were important long before the first engines extended the power of humanity. In addition to science and technology, finance and our many other social institutions there was in every successful enterprise a profound ability to ask questions: what can it do, will it work, can it make a profit, and how much? The last two questions were the "bottom line" of industrial society in any of its forms. No profit, or not enough profit, and no technology, no industry, no business, no product, etc.
Tight bookkeeping was the key to much of the successes of the world’s early industrial organizations. Andrew Carnegie had a Henry Phipps to keep tabs on the books and thus, keep tabs on the available options. In back of Henry Ford, John D. Rockerfeller—and thousands of smaller, but no lesser entrepreneurs—were those accountants with their sharp pencils, working out the numbers on what ideas would and wouldn't work. Those who did the sharp accounting, in order to know the profits and how to find them, were as crucial to the success of our industrial enterprise as were technologies and abundant fuels. Often, in fact, it was the accountants and bookkeepers who found the ways to make losing propositions into profitable ones.
Our free enterprise industrial society may have been built with innovation and abundant resources, but it was founded on good information about what was possible. In business it's called "keeping good books." It may be tempting to do otherwise, but in the long run, (a year or less, these days) one must either keep good books or become more vulnerable. It's no different at the local, national, or international level.
And yet, if our economic system was founded on knowing what was competitively possible, our competitive edge was often by very small margins of profit. The better we knew our profit margins in competition, the more we were more aware of our risks. today, in a broad range of energy activities, we have little knowledge about what all our energy "profit" margins are. Because of price delays, regulations, subsidies, and other market distortions, traditional economics is unable to give us sufficient answers. If it could, we would have seen more clearly, as pointed out by William Baumol of New York University and past president of the American Economic Association, that energy technologies are successful because they produce competitive, unsubsidized energy. There would be less energy technologies, fewer calls for physically difficult, often impossible actions, and probably a better informed, more responsive public, willing to use our dwindling physical resources in more intelligent and survival-worthy ways.
Today, we need to know the "bottom line" more than ever. Emerging from an age of vast energy and material abundance we were able to draw on without question, its easy to confuse ourselves through the indiscriminate use of our remaining resources. Subsidies of all kinds distort our view of what is workable and what is not. We all know of examples where the results of a subsidy worked just the opposite of what was intended.
We need complete and accurate accounts of what we are doing, and of what we can—and con not do. Knowing "net energy" profit can assist in addressing that need. And, "net energy is only one of a broad range of more complete and appropriate analysis processes available to address our current and future condition.
<<The Global 2000 study team had to use the same critically flawed federal governments analysis processes they described to create their view of the state of the world.
In other words, the Global 2000 study revealed in elaborate detail that our policy makers are operating with unnecessary blindness. We are making policy without the rigorous, consistent and useful availability of information that could objectively and effectively support the policy process.
And still, a real finding of the Global 2000 * study was far more subtle. The study showed how our information and analysis activities fail for four primary reasons:>>
Further, the net energy problems are compounded by factors in our understanding processes:
· We are not troubled by a lack of information, but because there is too much;
· There is insufficient attention paid to the information organizing processes;
· We are unfamiliar with the techniques that would build a more complete order and synthesis of the many different kinds of information, seen over time, that must be considered in order to identify and carry out workable policies;
· Our analysis fails because there is seldom a positive reward for seeing and acting on circumstances which are contrary to, or unconsidered by the "conventional wisdom";
· We lack the motivation to build an effective context around the many parts of information we are so good at using. We are like a football team which is great at making first downs, but is not sure of the direction to the goal—or if we are in the right stadium.
Far too often we are also like a ship captain, who paints the direction we wish to go on our compasses. We then compound our problems by trying to make our fuel gauge numbers read as we want them to, rather than trying to objectively discover how much fuel we actually have to do our work for us.
Today's promises of abundant energy through "free" markets and increased production put those who make such promises in a position of responsibility to deliver on them.
If they can, wonderful.
However, our national experience since 1973 is that every new energy "czar" came on board with promises of increased production. Several months later the "czar" was unable to say enough about "conservation"; at which time some new entity arrives on the scene exclaiming, "enough of that old conservation stuff, lets get on with producing all that domestic energy the United States is so endowed with!"
This "energy macho" talk has, up to now, sold very well to many policy-makers and to much of the public. And since those domestic energy "endowments" are "proven" by their supporters with "statistics," there is little basis upon which the public may question this energy machismo. After all, it wasn't until the past decade that most of us learned that energy had anything at all to do with our lives—to say nothing of the extra knowledge necessary for being concerned with what energy was, and how to use it best. Few have looked for the rewards in facing our national energy and related economic realities and considered doing well with what we actually have available.
There are parallels here. Look at the Vietnam war. Look at the processes of inquiry and communication that were at play. Two books by David Halberstram, (The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be,) are a history of how circumstances evolved around a set of new and different circumstances. The Guns of August, written by Barbara Tuchman, describes the same human mechanisms at work in the opening month of the First World War. These authors describe, with abundant detail, how in both World War I and Vietnam, there were more rewards for maintaining the myths than there were for asking—and answering the hard question. In many ways the same distorted reward processes are at work today.
This is a more general condition than we might think. Every period of national and global trauma, at least during the past century or so, and particularly our wars and depressions, has been preceded by those who saw the trauma coming.
From 1910 to the mid-1940s, Roger Babson, publisher of a business newsletter and founder of the Babson colleges in Florida and Massachusetts, called almost every economic turn of the U.S. economy and was able to buy large chunks of Florida, Massachusetts and elsewhere with his earnings. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his book, The Great Crash: 1929, said "The methods by which he (Babson) reached his conclusions were a problem. They involved a hocus-pocus of lines and areas on a chart." Galbraith seemed truly bothered by Babson and his charts. Some 40 years after October 22, 1929, the day Babson told his subscribers to sell all their stocks and buy gold (and many did and were happy to have done so), Galbraith, writing in his book, still seems to align himself with the conventional wisdom—people who he says "were wrong, but for the right reasons.")
In November 1941, journalist Claire Booth Luce, wife of the founder of “Life” magazine, was visiting the Philippines. At dinner one night with commanders of U.S. forces in the Philippines, Mrs. Booth listened as the officers of mapped out the coming Japanese invasion of the Philippines. Her question about whether she, as a journalist, was being told military secrets, she should not hear, was answered by the statement that what she was hearing was set out by a military strategist-historian named Homer Lea—in 1902—more than forty years before the date of her Philippine meeting. Lea also saw with clarity the dynamic forces that were at work setting up WW I and II.Homer Lea's books, The Valor of Ignorance and The Age of the Saxon were not without some rough edges, but are nevertheless, good examples of how the future was seen by someone interested in trying to look.
In 1954, General Matthew Ridgeway, in response to mounting pressure for United States involvement in Viet Nam, did a study of what was involved in our intervention and the possible consequences. Today the study could be read as a history of what did happen during the next twenty years.
The early 1970 peaking out of United States domestic oil and gas production was suggested in 1949, and predicted in 1958 by M. King Hubbert, a geologist. (Incidentally, in the early 1930s Hubbert was involved in a comprehensive (and in many ways confused by his colleagues) study of the relationships of resources to our economy.)
People like Lea, Ridgeway, Hubbert, and many others, saw the flow of the large patterns in the great and changing tapestry of national and world affairs. They were seldom able to impress their peers with their vision. Contemporary rewards made that difficult. However, there are some stories of personal success which illustrated the wisdom of those who were clear about what was to happen putting their money where their thoughts were. For example, Babson Park, Florida, is a town built by a Roger Babson, who saw the depression coming in the early 1920s and was ready for it.
What set these people apart from fortunetellers and astrologists (who may have their own place in the scheme of things) was the quality of their thinking. First they knew their business. Second, and probably most important, their predictions were not hunches or endowed visions but the rigorous, and often tiresome acquisition and organization of facts. The basis for their pronouncements about what was most likely to happen could be seen and evaluated by anyone. These people did not really want to be believed as much as they wanted others to look at their data, add to it, if necessary, and see if there were alternative conclusions.
None of this is new.
It is worth reading the last forty-three pages of Tolstoy's War and Peace. In these few pages, you can see why the good Count spent six years of his life writing the preceding fourteen hundred or so pages of his great and sweeping novel.
Tolstoy speaks of power, the forces of human will, necessity, nature, and the repeating patterns of our world.
In the last three pages of his novel, Tolstoy steps to a higher level of human perception. He tells us that as Copernicus and Galileo destroyed the cosmology of the ancients who placed earth at the center of the universe, we must once again shift our conceptual universe. "...by admitting our free will (the power of the marketplace... TR) we arrive at an absurdity, while admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, on cause, (the power of the physical/ecological environment... TR) we arrive at laws." he says.
There is no disputing the role of money and markets in the human value process. There is also little awareness, particularly among economists, that the power of the physical/ecological environment exists, and is seldom considered in market processes. Virtually nowhere is it recognized that the most robust, coherent, and universal measure the power of the environment and its effects can be made with energy, as defined by the laws of thermodynamics. These energy measures let us know the ability of physical/ecological processes—independent of human value. This provides measures of physical activities that can avoid information distortions such as those in money systems which are subsidized, regulated, and in which the price system functions with price signal delays and other distortions.
In 1494, Fra Luca Pacioli, gave the first written description of double entry bookkeeping. Herbert J. Muller, in his book The Uses of the Past, said: Fra Pacioli's double entry accounting "probably had more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.""The Uses of the Past, Mentor Book
We can now add two new dimensions to the accounts we keep. The first is that we are discovering it is in our interest to begin what can be seen as double-double entry accounts. This is where debits and credits of what affects our lives are kept of in terms of physical energy transactions and transformations (This is the first double.) These physical debits and credits are merged with the fiscal accounts in monetary terms (the second double.) The combination of physical/ecological measures with cultural/ecological measures provides a complete basis for measuring the reality of our world.
The second dimension has to do with complexity. It is no secret that the world is growing more complex on a daily basis. What is well known is suggested by the old saying, that: "the total of a system is greater than the sum of its parts." In other words, every single day we address systems the systems around our lives in which physical/ecological systems behavior is interwoven with the behavior of the human culture/economic system. The result is the generation of a complex and dynamic structures and processes that are constantly beyond the ability of human understanding as long as they are not seen from a larger and more complete systems perspective.
For an example, in the 1970's, the Department of Energy's predecessor agencies set up an analytical program called the Project Independent Evaluation System, or PIES. This multi-million dollar number-crunching analysis was never able to present an acceptable reality of history, much less predict the future. And yet the sons and daughters of PIES are still with us. It’s difficult to do away with something that costs so much. And yet we certainly must not call the analytical progeny of PIES bastards, because we know who their parents are. The people who developed PIES are still around, still burping from their children large amounts of money, no longer in government, but still involved as government consulting and service firms—or in the even more enviable position of retiree..
We seldom realize that the real costs of inadequate analysis are in terms of mis-applied national resources and lost time. While the magnitude of analysis based losses are unknown, and we may never be able to assess their future consequences, we can be sure of one thing. Our mis-perceptions add up to opportunity and time lost—in a period when we have less and less individual and national resources to waste.
Misc...............
A pertinent question: Are all the incomplete and unworking energy and economic analyses done at this time some perverse equivalent of the * ? Do our contemporary myopic inquiries reflect more a societies' need to hold on to past myths and perceptions, than to the ability to identify and use the very capable perceptual processes available to us?
Energy and Social Action *
It is becoming painfully clear that alternative energy and economic energy policy proposals must be identified and considered, for both political as well as economic stability.
We must identify and quantify the full role of energy in our lives. How much energy we have now, and how much we can get in the future? How can we make this information available to the American public—so they can share their energy responsibility in terms of their own self-interest. An inherent part of these policy actions will be threefold:
First, establish a working conceptual basis for addressing energy and its role in society. this would begin by providing people with the ability to recognize energy as one of the necessary attributes of every action. We may not wish to be as hard as the physicist Boltzman who said, "Life is primarily the struggle for available energy, but we could come closer to Fred Cottrell who said, "The energy available to man limits what he can do and influences what he will do."
The myopic, fuel-limited view of energy in society would be replaced by more comprehensive concepts as individuals and the institutions in which they live begin to see the need for these more complete views—in terms of their own self interests.
Second, make every attempt to clean up the information about the availability of energy in our society. Initiate a highly levered, factual program that addresses energy awareness in terms how energy prices are distorted by factors such as time delays, subsidies and regulations. Let the market set prices on all products, * while at the same time beginning an aggressive effort to insure that regulation and subsidy programs are not acting to confuse energy availability information.
Third, recognize that the social consequences of more efficient information, coupled with true energy prices, would mean dramatic shifts in the way we see ourselves and act. positive steps must be taken to insure that new "reality based" policies are accompanied by sufficient, available choices for reducing the economic and political shock and stress that would be associated with adapting to our changing world.
Rewards in Changing Times. Our reward processes, such as answering the question "What's in it for me?" is, whether we like it or not, a fundamental basis for behavior.
We must question our reward processes. How do they work? How can these processes be changed? What can be done to insure that the rewards available to people motivate them towards behavior that strengthens the whole system in which we live— for the long—as well as the short run.
We should not forget that there are two different reasons for doing analysis in support of the policy process. Only part of our analysis done to discover what is happening and what can best be done about it. Much of our analysis is carried out to support pre-existing policy decisions. There may be nothing wrong in doing analysis in order to support existing policy decisions. Such behavior is often necessary for the policymaker to stay in the game. It is, of course, important that we recognize these differences in analysis purposes.
Our experience to date does not support the belief that the conceptual shortcomings of our government's existing analysis processes are a real indication of our national leaders' intentions in dealing with our problems. while our leaders are far less blind than they seem.
Contemporary modes of political and economic behavior have been highly reinforced by more than a century of success unprecedented in world history. Many are looking for workable options. The thesis of this author is that they, or their successors can and will find the perceptual processes that will lead to workable, economically and therefore politically competitive policy choices.
And yet, considerable experience by many indicates that there will be little reward for more accurate information until more accurate insights have a value to policy makers that exceeds those of the current perceptions. We will find it hard to look for new world views until they hold more promise than our existing concepts of our societies problems and opportunities.
The decontrol of oil and natural gas prices will be a powerful example of our reward processes at work. These policy initiatives will have individual, as well as national and global impact.
For better or worse, we must raise the price of the primary energy that runs this country. Clear signals must be sent to all energy users about the declining availability of our most concentrated energy sources: oil, coal, and natural gas.
Yet, as we do raise the cost of energy, the influence of these higher prices in the more "free market" of our economy is going to be profound, pervasive, and will probably occur much faster than in past energy policy actions. The fact that one week after decontrolling crude oil prices, gasoline prices increases were 300% times greater than the Reagan administration lead everyone to expect, is only one indication of the obvious tie of a policy act to apparent consequences.
In other words, "cause" will be closely tied to "consequence". The result could be a renewed level of uncertainty, and more stress experienced by most individuals. All of this new and extraordinary stress will be more clearly related to specific policy actions—and to those who claim responsibility for those actions.
Thus, we can expect three distinct stages in the reward processes related to energy price decontrol:
First, will be the negative reward stage. This occurs as those currently responsible for oil decontrol policy are recognized as the ones who raised energy prices. There will be little public awareness of other factors, such as preceding administration policy. Further, the resulting price rises will not be seen as limited to the primary energy such as fuels, but will include the extended "ripple effect" as primary energy price increases move through the economy. As the public connects increased prices to their own energy costs, they will also connect to their experience the policy maker who initiated the decontrol policy, and is still in office.
A second reward stage will be entered when it becomes obvious that the expected new energy sources, which were to result from investing the profits of decontrol, are far less productive and competitive with remaining conventional fuels.
A large body of reasonable and objective research suggests that decontrol, while creating a profitable climate for the energy industry, will produce little high grade energy for the national system. If we do get the additional energy, fine. However, if we don't get the energy, and after the public tires of looking for scapegoats, we can be expected to begin looking more closely for the many options that ore open to us. Many of these new options will more than likely be found by looking for better uses for what ever energy we have available.
As the public begins to address the new reality of energy availability, the third reward stage opens up. These are rewards which accrue not only to individuals, but to the nation as a whole. Many of the myths of technological omnipotence will have been questioned, if not replaced, with a more pragmatic view of looking for what is possible. this will be a time for real American Can-Do, as the realities of energy availability to the individual and national enterprise become clear.
The first two reward phases are negative to those recognized as the ones who initiated the first policy actions. The third phase can be positive, and can work for society as a whole. this positive stage can exist to the extent people are aware of the already ongoing, fundamental energy and other transformations in their lives.
The public, as can be expected, tends to react in negative ways to negative rewards for their traditional behavior. Unfortunately the public also tends to merely accept positive rewards, as if the good things in life were their due. Thus, while the initial response to policies like decontrol are likely to be negative, the long term success of such policy initiatives could be mere acceptance by the public. Public support through this whole process is therefore a tenuous condition, and can best be strengthened as the public is able to see and act on their role within the reality of the times. This means bringing to the public, in a careful manner, a candor about energy, economics and their lives that is as unusual as a policy to decontrol energy prices in a time of high inflation.
The key to a successful policy action like decontrol is to know enough about the full range of what is happening to recognize and balance all available related policy actions. Supporting policy actions, using carefully the full range of resources available to the executive will be the deciding factor in the overall success of the primary policy act. From such strategies, one should be able to stay in a leadership role during the negative reward stages, and thereby be able to enjoy and build upon the positive rewards of the third phase. One should be able to appreciate the parallel of the above to the Carter administration.
It may be useful to consider that much, if not most of our learning is through processes of defining differences. Some call it reductionist inquiry and learning. The consequence is that we find it hard to appreciate similarities. advocacy and controversy are reinforced over recognizing similarities and agreement as ways of resolving problems.
A further complication factor is that new insights must be presented in ways that are consistent with existing ways of doing business—particularly when the new ideas and insights contradict and threaten the old. We do not give up our most comfortable ideas and concepts easily.
Unfortunately, the communication of unfamiliar and initially disconcerting ideas and concepts takes time and money, as does the development of the new ideas themselves. Moreover, a comfortable rhetoric must be developed and tested by use and criticism. We have yet to set the priorities on how broader concepts of energy and related communication processes are to work, if they are to work at all.
The questions we must address are simple. However, they can be made manageable. It is important to stress that analysis must be done for the primary purpose of supporting policy process. These analyses are not the immense abstractions of academia, but the pragmatic development of working analysis tools. (And yet such analyses must be consistent with rigorous intellectual concepts.)
The purpose addressed here is not to seek the final word in precise number-crunching but to make a careful, responsible effort to provide accurate information about what is happening and what we can do about it in our most considered self-interest. The problem persists, however, in that the ability to see our most likely rewards call for objectively looking at the more complete and often contradictory information about our world. Fro many reasons, few are willing or able to do this. what may be seen about our possible future is certainly different from our past. There are probably many uncomfortable contradictions and inconsistencies. Yet, too often the vision seen is accompanied with value judgments of "good" or "bad," etc. And once a future view is labeled with any negative we will probably not choose to deal with it. (Consider the word "apocalypse." Its use generally implies the Four Horsemen; death, pestilence, etc., and yet the word, including its use in the Bible, means simply the act of viewing.)
The abilities of human adaptation and survivability are such that we can find and accept the necessary perceptions of the world we now live in. FA major factor in this continuing enterprise will be discovering that the real choices available during the past hundred years or so.
It may be important to remember that when events make the rewards for the most appropriate behavior generally obvious, many of our opportunities may have been lost. The policy opportunity to be gained from more accurate analysis, and the action it indicates, will increasingly diminish as the general public on their own, react to their new realities out of fear and the stress of extraordinary uncertainty.
The Analysis of Analysis
At this time there is no federal entity within which the analysis of our analytical processes is a recognized subject of investigation. This includes; all administration offices and agencies, including the Department of Energy and the National science foundation; and all committees, sub-committees and offices of Congress, including the General Accounting Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Library of Congress, and the Joint Economic Committee.
The Professional Audit review Team (PART), a review project made up of different offices of the Congress such as GAO, may have the authority to oversee some energy analyses projects, but it does not have the support or direction to be a strong effective force. NSF has one study currently being funded to evaluate energy systems analysis, but does not have the capability in itself to conduct such a review, and is not reviewing any other energy and economic analysis process or methodology.
Our national vulnerability due to inadequate analysis, and the need to evaluate our analysis processes was more or less implied in the final Global 2000 report, but this was not a focal issue. This de-emphasis and general omission was a genuine concern of the Global 2000 staff. However, the issue of analysis quality, regardless of its importance, and even where it was understood, simply was not attractive.
It seems to make little difference that all national policy is based on some kind of analysis, often done at tremendous expense—to say nothing of the expense of programs implemented on the basis of the findings of analyses—programs which do not work and are often counter-productive.
"Net energy" again offers an insight into our analytical inquiry. "Net energy," as noted before, is a product of energy and ecological systems analysis developed by Howard T. Odum and his colleagues at the University of Florida and elsewhere. Beyond "net energy" we find that Odum based energy and ecological systems analysis has been shown in independent studies done by the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Corps of Engineers to have superior merit over other methods of analysis and could be improved with additional research. For example, the DOT study showed the Odum ecological systems analysis process to have merit over 16 other analysis methodologies.
"Evaluations of the potential for application to transportation planning showed that, in addition to complying with the universal evaluation criteria far environmental assessment, the methodology can assess single and multi modal transportation alternatives without unreasonable demands on data availability or analytic expertise and can develop data or findings which may be useful for a variety of transportation needs." TABXX
. Energy resource concentration and relative merit
Introduction:
Resource concentration is the primary determinant of resource usefulness. The concentration of resources is determined by:
o how easy they are to find;
o their cleanliness both in feeding the resource use process and in terms of the wastes caused by their direct and indirect uses.
o how distant they are from using location
o what must be done to adapting resources to user needs;
o the total cost of gaining and competing for access and maintaining supplies;
o security from accidental of intentional (terrorist) release of destructive forces;
o investments required to ensure supply certainty;
o the costs of uncertainty in the entire resource using system, including the costs associated with dependencies that are jeopardized for whatever reason;
Resources with high concentrations that make little wastes—are very useful. In contrast, low concentration resources are hard to find, are far less useful because they need much work to be adapted to our needs, are far away, mixed with impurities, and when used, produce obnoxious by-products.
Because we tend to use the most concentrated resources first, we can expect resource concentration to decline over time. (For example, in the early 1930s, 300 barrels of oil were found for every foot of exploratory drilling. By 1991, every foot of exploratory drilling produced only six barrels of oil, and that number was declining.)
As concentrated energy resources decline in availability and are displaced by less concentrated alternatives, the natural energy subsidies our industrial society has known from the highly concentrated resources we have used for most of the past century will disappear. As a result, we will have increasingly less economic capacity to support our populations at current modes of living. The way a society lives can be seen as having two modes. Mode 1 reflects the overall resource use per capita. Mode 2 reflects the standard of living experienced by individuals in the population. This distinction allows for a high resource use society such as ours to also have a large number of people who know a low standard of living. It is also possible, though it requires special care, for a society to have low resource use and a relatively high standards of living.
Finally, while new technologies and energy use efficiency can make some difference, they cannot make up for the concentrated sources of energy, once they have been consumed. As difficult as it is for most people to accept in this age of technological advancement and promise, it is simply impossible for technologies like extremely high (nuclear and fusion power) or low concentration energy sources (solar and biomass) to make a substantial contribution to an economy which continues to run, for the most part, on oil and particularly natural gas resources which are far more close to ideal concentrations. (The exceptions, and there are some, will not only prove the rule, but will show the opportunity in knowing probable energy systems behavior and tendencies.)
Market processes relative to resource values accumulate economic signal distortions in which prices primarily tend to lag changes in resource concentration.
Started March 20, 1981
Last Rev date 04/19/2004 10:48 AM