Hello, and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today, my guest is Thomas Manuel Ortiz, author of "Why We Struggle to Go Green: Hard Truths About the Clean Energy Transition."

Thank you so much for being here today.

My pleasure.

I want to start just by asking you to introduce this book to us.

Certainly.

This is a book written by a mechanical engineer about energy systems.

There are a lot of books written about climate change.

There are a lot of books written about renewable energy.

There are a lot of books written about the economics of changing our fuel production and consumption systems.

What I have tried to do with this book is give readers a taste of the technical challenges involved in each of the core pillars of a clean energy transition that is somewhere between what they might read in the newspaper and academic writing.

Which means, I think that this is a book that will appeal to people who might not have a scientific background, and yet really do want to understand what the ramifications of all these new technologies that we are being exposed to mean for the future of energy.

Great.

How did you become interested in this topic, or what made you want to drill down on it in this way?

Back in the mid 1990s, I started my career as a research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and I was working on the thermodynamics of high pressure hydrogen systems.

I went on to study for my doctorate at Purdue University, where I continued looking at hydrogen as a fuel for cogeneration plants, which are a combination of a power plant and an air conditioning system, or a power plant and a heating system for, a city or a small campus.

The topic of my dissertation, then, was the use of recycled carbon dioxide as a net zero substitute for refrigerants in air conditioning systems.

All of this, at that time, was fairly low-profile.

People were not heavily engaged for the most part in clean energy and hydrogen and re-use of carbon dioxide.

And I went into the oil and gas business.

That is where you got a job if you studied energy in those days, for the most part.

And now, all these years later, I see that these topics are front and center.

They are top-of-mind issues for policymakers, for consumers and entrepreneurs.

What I'm hoping to do is help people understand where we are with these technologies and perhaps tamp down a little bit of the hype surrounding some of them, because I worry that there are unrealistic expectations surrounding things like electric cars or carbon capture or hydrogen as a fuel source.

These are all very, very useful technologies.

None of them is a panacea.

Yeah, one of the, I think, the strengths of this book is that it's very clear-eyed.

It's very...

There is no- there's no magic answer.

There's no magic bullet.

There's no one great solution to solve all of our problems, which is true about most things in life, but a lot of books are trying to sell you on, "This is my answer," and your book is very, very, very clear about there are nuances, there are difficulties with all of these different resources that we have available to us.

Right.

You have to remember that everything that we have here on planet Earth was put here by an exploding star billions of years ago.

All of the elements that we rely on, everything that we use to build, the things that make our life easier.

All of these are in finite supply.

The only thing that we really get refreshed is energy from the sun and the products of photosynthesis.

Plants grow, animals eat the plants.

Those things are renewable in our... concept of a lifespan.

Minerals are not.

Lithium for batteries are not Iron to make steel...

This is- whatever we use was concentrated into geologic deposits, and every time we open a mine, we are consuming something that's essentially never going to come back.

Oil and gas are a little bit different; plants and tiny organisms continue to decay, so you can imagine that millions of years from now, you could see a new oil and gas deposit form.

But we use these fuels at a rate something like 13,500 times faster than nature can replenish them, so we have to come up with a solution to our energy consumption problems.

Even if you don't like to talk about climate change.

Yeah, as you say: It's a finite resource.

So putting all that debate aside, it's a problem we're going to need solved regardless.

And then when you add the fact that the global temperatures on Earth are increasing, that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are increasing, these are things we can measure.

Sea levels are rising.

We're going to need to adapt, and the only way we really have to adapt in the long term is to change the rate at which we produce greenhouse gases.

The greenhouse effect is very important; without it, we would all freeze to death, but there's too much of a good thing, and we have overshot overshot the range of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere That life has adapted - evolved - to tolerate.

And that is going to have ramifications for every species on earth, including us.

So why did you want to write this book in this moment?

What was your... What was your goal to put forth?

The... enthusiasm over the last few years about things like electric vehicles in particular led me to want to caution people that... while you can innovate and you can improve the rate at which you consume energy to make products, you can improve energy efficiency of things like air conditioners, heat pumps.

You cannot eliminate the costs that are associated with making and using things.

Everything that we make into a product consumes energy, and I think one of the biggest issues that people fail sometimes to recognize with a clean energy transition is that for the first time in history, we're going backward, in a sense, as a society.

Our ancient ancestors relied almost completely on their own muscle power, then on the muscle power of animals.

We learned to use wood and other forms of biomass to create energy.

We eventually figured out that coal was an excellent energy source, and then oil and gas.

All of these changes have been to more dense, more convenient sources of energy, and so our ability to use technology became enhanced to a much greater degree with each of those energy transitions.

The clean energy transition is not like that.

We are trading these very, very convenient, very dense sources of fuel that geology gifted us, essentially.

We're trading those for very diffuse, very hard to capture energy sources.

Sunlight, wind, water.

These energy sources are abundant, but they're not easy to get ahold of, and so the ability of humans to benefit from them is going to be less than it was using things like oil and gas for automotive transportation.

We're going to have to get used to having less energy per person.

Even the land use around things like wind and solar are something like an order of magnitude larger than building a gas-fired power plant.

You talk about using ten times as much land for something.

At the same time, the earth's population is expanding at an alarming rate.

We have 8.1 billion people on earth now.

We may have 10 or 11 billion people before we stabilize, so land use constraints coupled with this low density of renewable energy, I think that people need to understand that: that this is a transition that's going to be difficult.

It's going to be expensive, And that's not the Hollywood ending that a lot of people want to hear.

It's not the message that entrepreneurs who are selling solar panels or electric cars want front-and-center, but it is the truth.

I want to touch on the amount of energy that we're using.

The first chapter of your book is called "How Much Energy Do We Really Need?"

and I'm not just going to throw your own question back at you, but can you talk about how and why our energy needs have gotten so large over the past few decades?

And, as you say, we're going to have to reduce that.

How do we go about doing that?

So the beginning of the book and the end of the book really serve as bookends on that very exact topic.

The answer is we started out as a species using only the amount of energy that we needed for basic subsistence.

Hand-to-mouth existence.

Literally.

We could feed ourselves, we could reproduce, but we had very little in terms of technology.

We had to do almost all of our food production as a group.

There was no division of labor, which meant that there was no leisure, there were no consumer goods.

And this lasted for tens of thousands of years.

When we finally were able to develop agricultural societies, we finally started to take baby steps toward using more energy.

That allowed people to do something other than just find food, find where their next meal was going to come from, and that tiny, tiny improvement in the way that we lived was essentially static until we discovered hydrocarbons in the 19th century and started to produce coal at a substantial rate in Western Europe.

So for almost all of human history, we used very little energy.

How much we needed was how much it took us to keep us alive.

Period.

The answer now is much, much different.

We use so much energy that each one of us is essentially backstopped by the virtual labor of hundreds or thousands of people.

We... We rely on energy levels that are orders of magnitude greater than what our ancient ancestors had, and we think that we need this now, every bit of it.

And it doesn't stop there.

We want more.

We want to double or triple the amount of electricity that we're going to produce so that we can run artificial intelligence data centers, so that we can have cryptocurrencies, so that we can engage in space tourism, perhaps have a colony on another planet.

Do we need that energy?

Well, that's a good question, and I think it deserves some careful thought by society because in my opinion, we cannot do everything that we might like to do and live within our ecological limits in terms of energy and materials.

I do want to talk about electric cars.

You brought that up.

I think that's, as you say, it's becoming more and more popular.

There are brand names we're all more aware of now.

But you write in the book that it may not be the the solution or the instant fix for all of our problems.

Can you talk about the influence of electric cars on our society?

The range issue usually is the first thing that people mention.

I don't know that I can travel where I want to with an electric car.

There are solutions to those problems.

Things like bigger batteries, perhaps more efficient batteries, although there are limits to what we can achieve with battery technology, as well.

I worry about the mineral supply problem.

We already are engaged in a very contentious geopolitical competition with other nations over minerals, rare earth minerals, lithium.

I don't think that it's realistic for us or healthy for society to try to reproduce the kind of great power struggle that led to the carving up of the world's oil and gas provinces.

It's not a good way for us to relate to each other in an age where we have hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads.

If we go to war over the materials needed to dominate electric vehicle production, I don't think that anyone will will come out of that unscathed.

I think it would be a very, very disastrous outcome.

So more than range or even recharging speed, I think that the material constraints...

They give me pause when we talk about an all-in transition to electric vehicles.

Now, going back to those other two technical constraints though, they are real.

We don't have a network of charging stations in this country.

We don't have the political will or the... the economic resources to simply replace it.

We have around 145,000 gasoline stations in the continental United States.

We can't simply replace all of those with fast electric vehicle charging stations.

Now, you take a country like China: They can, and they have done this.

They are a very different place than the United States.

When their government wants to do something like that, they simply order it done and it gets done., and they have spent decades specializing in the mining and processing of critical minerals and in the production of electric vehicle batteries, and now, the entire vehicle value chain.

We have not done that.

We don't seem to want to do it.

Electric vehicle sales are down in this country even now.

It just doesn't seem like the place we want to be, and so, as a practical matter, I think we need to take a step back and look at other ways that we can try to decarbonize ground transportation, other than just saying we're going full steam ahead with electric vehicles.

Just think that we're in a different place in the U.S. than other countries - and, in particular, China - are with regard to that technology.

I mean, the American experience is much different, as you say.

You talked about the concept of universal electrification, the costs associated with that, and if you you think about - I like the analogy in your book about if you think about every home in New England that needs a new furnace, a new fireplace, a new stove, I mean, there are a lot of things that we're still using every day that are using fossil fuels or natural gas.

Just that: the idea, to me, of retrofitting every home, every gas station, it seems impossible.

It feels impossible.

Is that even a goal that we want to work towards?

I think in most cases, if you want to take the example of heat pumps, they are, in most climates, probably a much better idea than oil-fired furnaces that are... that were historically popular in New England.

There are places where gas heating does still make a lot of sense.

Heat pumps are not magical.

They essentially reverse the process of a thermal power plant, and in a thermal power plant, you say, burn gas or you use uranium fuel or you... you use some other type of fuel to turn heat into electricity.

And the... You get a ratio of about one unit of electricity for every three units of heat.

They're around very, very roughly 33% efficient.

The numbers vary somewhat from that.

But when you take a heat pump, what you're doing is essentially the reverse: you're taking electricity, and you're turning it back into heat, and you get about the same ratio in reverse.

You get about three units of heat for every unit of electricity that it takes to run the compressor in a very, very cold climate.

That's a heavy lift.

It's a lot of electricity.

It's not very efficient.

So in the far north, I think you're still going to want backup.

Natural gas heating.

I don't think that a 100% transition is feasible or necessarily even desirable.

On the other hand, things like gas stoves, other kinds of gas appliances.

I'm not sure there's a compelling reason to keep using gas heating.

Now, I'm not trying to say that gas stoves are terrible things for you.

I didn't really want to open that can of worms, but they're not an essential technology.

We can probably get by mostly with electric cooking appliances.

But if you look at everything that we use - transportation, cooking, heating, and cooling - replacing all of that is just a huge capital expense.

And if it happens, it's going to happen very, very slowly.

For that reason, I suggest something a little bit different and that is trying to come up with bridge fuels.

A lot of people talk about natural gas itself as being a bridge fuel to clean energy.

There are other ways that you can approach replacing fuels.

There was a man named George Ola.

He won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and he was a big proponent of what he called 'The Methanol Economy," where you would take recycled carbon dioxide and hydrogen, perhaps that you would create by splitting water with electrolysis, and you would create synthetic fuels: synthetic methanol, synthetic natural gas, synthetic hydrocarbons of all kinds.

This is a fairly mature technology, the creation or the synthesis of of larger liquid fuels, larger molecule liquid fuels from these simple building blocks.

We know how to do it, and if we use green hydrogen to do it, it can make a big dent in our greenhouse gas emissions while allowing us to use the same appliances with the same molecular fuels that we have always been using, just at a lower level of net carbon emissions.

And so I think we ought to we ought to look at that, and we ought to also look at that in terms of our ground transportation fleet.

For the same reason, if we suddenly junked every vehicle on the road to replace it with an electric car, we'd have a massive problem.

Not just an expense problem, but what an enormous recycling challenge for materials.

Let's try to meet in the middle and lower our carbon footprint, while retaining the use of all of this capital investment.

You also have to add to that the fact that around half of our country simply doesn't care or actively discourages transition to other fuel sources.

So if we can have this middle ground where we're reusing the same technology but in a more ecologically friendly way, we would be farther along than we are now.

Absolutely.

We are a little resistant to change, and I think this is a great "middle ground," as you say, to get us closer to where we need to be.

We are, unfortunately, running out of time.

This is such a fascinating and dense topic that we can't scratch the surface, so I hope people will read the book to learn more.

But in our final two minutes, what would you hope people take away from your book?

I hope people will understand that the size of the human economy is limited by the amount of resources that we have here on earth.

You can talk about trying to find resources on the moon, or mining asteroids, or setting up a colony on Mars, but you really don't change the fact that anything that we build is limited by the amount of stuff that we can get our hands on.

And if you really want to thrive as a society for thousands of years into the future, you're going to have to give future generations a way to live sustainably, which means living with less fuel materials, less energy.

That means you're going to have to give up certain things, and so I want society to think harder about what we can really give up in order to make do in a world where there's just less to go around.

Well, thank you so much for being here today, for writing this book.

I do want to say, as somebody who is not an expert in this field - I have an English degree, so I'm pretty far away from econ and the engineering of it all - but I have to compliment that you did write this book in a way that it was approachable.

The concepts were broken down well.

I really think this is a great resource for people who are maybe interested in the topic.

and want to read more than that newspaper article, as you say, but are intimidated by the journal or the academic stuff, so kudos on bringing this to a more popular audience.

Thank you very much.

That's all the time we have for today.

Thank you so much for joining us.

The book, again, is "Why We Struggle to Go Green."

Thanks for joining us, and I'll see you again soon.