One of my physical chemistry professors, the late R.N. O'Brien, was fond of saying the three laws of thermodynamics are very easy to understand: You can't win. You can't break even. And you can't quit the game.
He was paraphrasing, of course, but it is a fairly good synopsis of what the laws have to say. You can't win because energy and matter are conserved. You can't get more energy out of a system than what is in there in the first place. Or, put another way, the best you can hope for is 100 per cent return.
You can't break even due to the simple reality some energy will be lost to entropy. The universe places demands on every system and one of those is the dissipation of energy in the form of entropy. Put another way, you can never really get 100 per cent of the energy back out of a system.
You can't quit the game because thermodynamics rules everything. From the world of atoms to the universe as a whole, the laws of thermodynamics hold. Even in black holes. So there is no escaping the three laws.
At this point, if you are still reading, you are probably wondering if I mixed up my columns this week. No, I haven't but there is always a fair amount of science tied into many of the issues we face today - including energy production.
Last week, the Three Amigos met in Ottawa and one of the topics on the table was making the North American power grid green. The resulting "Leader's Statement on a North American Climate, Clean Energy, and Environment Partnership" is an ambitious document.
It states: "We announce a historic goal for North America to strive to achieve 50 per cent clean power generation by 2025. We will accomplish this goal through clean energy development and deployment, clean energy innovation and energy efficiency."
How is it planning to achieve this lofty goal?
"Scaling up clean energy through aggressive domestic initiatives and policies, including Mexico's Energy Transition Law and new Clean Energy Certificates, the U.S. Clean Power Plan and five-year extension of production and investment tax credits, and Canada's actions to further scale up renewables, including hydro."
It is the latter which should be of interest to British Columbians and even more so for northerners. Presently, Canada is a net exporter of electricity to the United States to the tune of about $3 billion per year. The plan is to triple that number and it is quite likely Site C plays a huge role in that plan.
We don't need the power in this province for another couple of decades but we can certainly sell it south of the border in the meantime.
The document goes on to discuss driving down short-lived climate pollutants such as methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons. Mexico is joining Canada and the United States in their commitment to reduce methane emissions for the oil and gas sector. Mexico is going further by committing to the development of natural gas power plants for electricity generation.
The intent is to deepen electric reliability cooperation by strengthening the integrated North American electricity grid.
It sounds good but there are flaws in the thinking. For example, burning methane still generates carbon dioxide. Yes, there are more kilowatt-hours available per kilogram of carbon dioxide generated by methane combustion compared to per kilogram of carbon dioxide from coal. After all, thermodynamics applies.
However, the process will never be 100 per cent efficient. Energy is lost through the chemistry involved and the process generates carbon dioxide and water. There is no way around this. More to the point, the electrical generation process is far from 100 per cent efficient based on the energy produced by the combustion reactions.
This isn't just an issue with methane power plants. Every process involved in building "environmentally friendly" energy solutions requires energy inputs. The question is one of return-on-investment. For example, it takes a windmill 18 years before it has paid back its carbon load. With a 20 year lifespan, that is not an outstanding return-on-investment. And that is assuming the windmill is operating at peak efficiency.
The Presidents and the Prime Minister have also committed to greening government vehicle fleets but the cost of new "clean vehicles" in terms of their carbon footprints is very much higher than conventional vehicles. The return-on-investment is questionable until better manufacturing and energy storage options are available - particularly if the electricity to run the vehicles is pulled from the grid.
This doesn't mean we should simply give up. But the problem we are facing isn't about coming up with better ways to try and beat thermodynamics.
Rather, we need to change our relationship with energy in all we do. The answer is to keep our standard of living but at a lower energy demand.
Only then might we win the game.
