IFRAME: [1]https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MSXMBZ3

IFRAME: [1]https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MSXMBZ3

Become a Friend of Aeon to save articles and enjoy other exclusive
benefits
[2]Make a donation

[3]×
Newsletter Privacy Policy

Aeon email newsletters are issued by the not-for-profit, registered
charity Aeon Media Group Ltd (Australian Business Number 80 612 076
614). This Email Newsletter Privacy Statement pertains to the
personally identifying information you voluntarily submit in the form
of your email address to receive our email newsletters

More generally, when visiting the Aeon site you should refer to our
site Privacy Policy [4]here.

This Email Newsletter Privacy Statement may change from time to time
and was last revised 18 May, 2020.

By clicking ‘subscribe’ you agree to the following:
* We will use the email address you provide to send you daily and/or
weekly emails (depending on your selection). We also send
occasional donation requests and, no more than once a year, reader
surveys.
* The email address/es you provide will be transferred to our
external marketing automation service ‘MailChimp’ for processing in
accordance with their [5]Privacy Policy and [6]Terms. We use
MailChimp to issue our newsletters, donation requests and reader
surveys. We have no control over, and assume no responsibility for,
the conduct, practices or privacy policies of MailChimp.

Unsubscribing

You can change your mind at any time by clicking the ‘unsubscribe’ link
in the footer of emails you receive from us, or by contacting us at
[7][email protected]

If you want to review and correct the personal information we have
about you, you can click on ‘update preferences’ in the footer of
emails you receive from us, or by contacting us at [8][email protected]

Security of your personal information

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. We have
taken reasonable measures to protect information about you from loss,
theft, misuse or unauthorised access, disclosure, alteration and
destruction. No physical or electronic security system is impenetrable
however and you should take your own precautions to protect the
security of any personally identifiable information you transmit. We
cannot guarantee that the personal information you supply will not be
intercepted while transmitted to us or our marketing automation service
Mailchimp.

Sharing your personal information

We will not disclose your personal information except: (1) as described
by this [9]Privacy Policy (2) after obtaining your permission for a
specific use or disclosure or (3) if we are required to do so by a
valid legal process or government request (such as a court order, a
search warrant, a subpoena, a civil discovery request, or a statutory
requirement). We will retain your information for as long as needed in
light of the purposes for which is was obtained or to comply with our
legal obligations and enforce our agreements.

Access to your personal information

You may request a copy of the personal information we hold about you by
submitting a written request to [10][email protected] We may only
implement requests with respect to the personal information associated
with the particular email address you use to send us the request. We
will try and respond to your request as soon as reasonably practical.
When you receive the information, if you think any of it is wrong or
out of date, you can ask us to change or delete it for you.

Charcoal production in Brazil. Photo by Franz Lanting/Getty
Essay/
Environmental history

Charcoal production in Brazil. Photo by Franz Lanting/Getty

Out of the ashes

It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they’re
almost gone. Could we do it again without them?

Lewis Dartnell

Charcoal production in Brazil. Photo by Franz Lanting/Getty

[11]Lewis Dartnell
is a UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester,
working in astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. His
latest book is The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch
(2014). He lives in London.

3,200 words

Edited by [12]Ed Lake
Syndicate this Essay

Aeon for Friends

[13]Find out more

Imagine that the world as we know it ends tomorrow. There’s a global
catastrophe: a pandemic virus, an asteroid strike, or perhaps a nuclear
holocaust. The vast majority of the human race perishes. Our
civilisation collapses. The post-apocalyptic survivors find themselves
in a devastated world of decaying, deserted cities and roving gangs of
bandits looting and taking by force.

Bad as things sound, that’s not the end for humanity. We bounce back.
Sooner or later, peace and order emerge again, just as they have time
and again through history. Stable communities take shape. They begin
the agonising process of rebuilding their technological base from
scratch. But here’s the question: how far could such a society rebuild?
Is there any chance, for instance, that a post-apocalyptic society
could reboot a technological civilisation?

Let’s make the basis of this thought experiment a little more specific.
Today, we have already consumed the most easily drainable crude oil
and, particularly in Britain, much of the shallowest, most readily
mined deposits of coal. Fossil fuels are central to the organisation of
modern industrial society, just as they were central to its
development. Those, by the way, are distinct roles: even if we could
somehow do without fossil fuels now (which we can’t, quite), it’s a
different question whether we could have got to where we are without
ever having had them.

So, would a society starting over on a planet stripped of its fossil
fuel deposits have the chance to progress through its own Industrial
Revolution? Or to phrase it another way, what might have happened if,
for whatever reason, the Earth had never acquired its extensive
underground deposits of coal and oil in the first place? Would our
progress necessarily have halted in the 18th century, in a
pre-industrial state?

It’s easy to underestimate our current dependence on fossil fuels. In
everyday life, their most visible use is the petrol or diesel pumped
into the vehicles that fill our roads, and the coal and natural gas
which fire the power stations that electrify our modern lives. But we
also rely on a range of different industrial materials, and in most
cases, high temperatures are required to transform the stuff we dig out
of the ground or harvest from the landscape into something useful. You
can’t smelt metal, make glass, roast the ingredients of concrete, or
synthesise artificial fertiliser without a lot of heat. It is fossil
fuels – coal, gas and oil – that provide most of this thermal energy.

In fact, the problem is even worse than that. Many of the chemicals
required in bulk to run the modern world, from pesticides to plastics,
derive from the diverse organic compounds in crude oil. Given the
dwindling reserves of crude oil left in the world, it could be argued
that the most wasteful use for this limited resource is to simply burn
it. We should be carefully preserving what’s left for the vital
repertoire of valuable organic compounds it offers.

But my topic here is not what we should do now. Presumably everybody
knows that we must transition to a low-carbon economy one way or
another. No, I want to answer a question whose interest is (let’s hope)
more theoretical. Is the emergence of a technologically advanced
civilisation necessarily contingent on the easy availability of ancient
energy? Is it possible to build an industrialised civilisation without
fossil fuels? And the answer to that question is: maybe – but it would
be extremely difficult. Let’s see how.

We’ll start with a natural thought. Many of our alternative energy
technologies are already highly developed. Solar panels, for example,
represent a good option today, and are appearing more and more on the
roofs of houses and businesses. It’s tempting to think that a rebooted
society could simply pick up where we leave off. Why couldn’t our
civilisation 2.0 just start with renewables?

Well, it could, in a very limited way. If you find yourself among the
survivors in a post-apocalyptic world, you could scavenge enough
working solar panels to keep your lifestyle electrified for a good long
while. Without moving parts, photovoltaic cells require little
maintenance and are remarkably resilient. They do deteriorate over
time, though, from moisture penetrating the casing and from sunlight
itself degrading the high-purity silicon layers. The electricity
generated by a solar panel declines by about 1 per cent every year so,
after a few generations, all our hand-me-down solar panels will have
degraded to the point of uselessness. Then what?

New ones would be fiendishly difficult to create from scratch. Solar
panels are made from thin slices of extremely pure silicon, and
although the raw material is common sand, it must be processed and
refined using complex and precise techniques – the same technological
capabilities, more or less, that we need for modern semiconductor
electronics components. These techniques took a long time to develop,
and would presumably take a long time to recover. So photovoltaic solar
power would not be within the capability of a society early in the
industrialisation process.

Perhaps, though, we were on the right track by starting with electrical
power. Most of our renewable-energy technologies produce electricity.
In our own historical development, it so happens that the core
phenomena of electricity were discovered in the first half of the
1800s, well after the early development of steam engines. Heavy
industry was already committed to combustion-based machinery, and
electricity has largely assumed a subsidiary role in the organisation
of our economies ever since. But could that sequence have run the other
way? Is there some developmental requirement that thermal energy must
come first?

On the face of it, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that a
progressing society could construct electrical generators and couple
them to simple windmills and waterwheels, later progressing to wind
turbines and hydroelectric dams. In a world without fossil fuels, one
might envisage an electrified civilisation that largely bypasses
combustion engines, building its transport infrastructure around
electric trains and trams for long-distance and urban transport. I say
‘largely’. We couldn’t get round it all together.

when it comes to generating the white heat demanded by modern industry,
there are few good options but to burn stuff

While the electric motor could perhaps replace the coal-burning steam
engine for mechanical applications, society, as we’ve already seen,
also relies upon thermal energy to drive the essential chemical and
physical transformations it needs. How could an industrialising society
produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick,
mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?

You can of course create heat from electricity. We already use electric
ovens and kilns. Modern arc furnaces are used for producing cast iron
or recycling steel. The problem isn’t so much that electricity can’t be
used to heat things, but that for meaningful industrial activity you’ve
got to generate prodigious amounts of it, which is challenging using
only renewable energy sources such as wind and water.

An alternative is to generate high temperatures using solar power
directly. Rather than relying on photovoltaic panels, concentrated
solar thermal farms use giant mirrors to focus the sun’s rays onto a
small spot. The heat concentrated in this way can be exploited to drive
certain chemical or industrial processes, or else to raise steam and
drive a generator. Even so, it is difficult (for example) to produce
the very high temperatures inside an iron-smelting blast furnace using
such a system. What’s more, it goes without saying that the
effectiveness of concentrated solar power depends strongly on the local
climate.

No, when it comes to generating the white heat demanded by modern
industry, there are few good options but to burn stuff.

But that doesn’t mean the stuff we burn necessarily has to be fossil
fuels.

Let’s take a quick detour into the pre-history of modern industry. Long
before the adoption of coal, charcoal was widely used for smelting
metals. In many respects it is superior: charcoal burns hotter than
coal and contains far fewer impurities. In fact, coal’s impurities were
a major delaying factor on the Industrial Revolution. Released during
combustion, they can taint the product being heated. During smelting,
sulphur contaminants can soak into the molten iron, making the metal
brittle and unsafe to use. It took a long time to work out how to treat
coal to make it useful for many industrial applications. And, in the
meantime, charcoal worked perfectly well.

And then, well, we stopped using it. In retrospect, that’s a pity. When
it comes from a sustainable source, charcoal burning is essentially
carbon-neutral, because it doesn’t release any new carbon into the
atmosphere – not that this would have been a consideration for the
early industrialists.

But charcoal-based industry didn’t die out altogether. In fact, it
survived to flourish in Brazil. Because it has substantial iron
deposits but few coalmines, Brazil is the largest charcoal producer in
the world and the ninth biggest steel producer. We aren’t talking about
a cottage industry here, and this makes Brazil a very encouraging
example for our thought experiment.

The trees used in Brazil’s charcoal industry are mainly fast-growing
eucalyptus, cultivated specifically for the purpose. The traditional
method for creating charcoal is to pile chopped staves of air-dried
timber into a great dome-shaped mound and then cover it with turf or
soil to restrict airflow as the wood smoulders. The Brazilian
enterprise has scaled up this traditional craft to an industrial
operation. Dried timber is stacked into squat, cylindrical kilns, built
of brick or masonry and arranged in long lines so that they can be
easily filled and unloaded in sequence. The largest sites can sport
hundreds of such kilns. Once filled, their entrances are sealed and a
fire is lit from the top.

The skill in charcoal production is to allow just enough air into the
interior of the kiln. There must be enough combustion heat to drive out
moisture and volatiles and to pyrolyse the wood, but not so much that
you are left with nothing but a pile of ashes. The kiln attendant
monitors the state of the burn by carefully watching the smoke seeping
out of the top, opening air holes or sealing with clay as necessary to
regulate the process.

Brazil shows how the raw materials of modern civilisation can be
supplied without reliance on fossil fuels

Good things come to those who wait, and this wood pyrolysis process can
take up to a week of carefully controlled smouldering. The same basic
method has been used for millennia. However, the ends to which the fuel
is put are distinctly modern. Brazilian charcoal is trucked out of the
forests to the country’s blast furnaces where it is used to transform
ore into pig iron. This pig iron is the basic ingredient of modern
mass-produced steel. The Brazilian product is exported to countries
such as China and the US where it becomes cars and trucks, sinks,
bathtubs, and kitchen appliances.

Around two-thirds of Brazilian charcoal comes from sustainable
plantations, and so this modern-day practice has been dubbed ‘green
steel’. Sadly, the final third is supplied by the non-sustainable
felling of primary forest. Even so, the Brazilian case does provide an
example of how the raw materials of modern civilisation can be supplied
without reliance on fossil fuels.

Another, related option might be wood gasification. The use of wood to
provide heat is as old as mankind, and yet simply burning timber only
uses about a third of its energy. The rest is lost when gases and
vapours released by the burning process blow away in the wind. Under
the right conditions, even smoke is combustible. We don’t want to waste
it.

Better than simple burning, then, is to drive the thermal breakdown of
the wood and collect the gases. You can see the basic principle at work
for yourself just by lighting a match. The luminous flame isn’t
actually touching the matchwood: it dances above, with a clear gap in
between. The flame actually feeds on the hot gases given off as the
wood breaks down in the heat, and the gases combust only once they mix
with oxygen from the air. Matches are fascinating when you look at them
closely.

Wartime gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram.
Today’s designs improve upon this

To release these gases in a controlled way, bake some timber in a
closed container. Oxygen is restricted so that the wood doesn’t simply
catch fire. Its complex molecules decompose through a process known as
pyrolysis, and then the hot carbonised lumps of charcoal at the bottom
of the container react with the breakdown products to produce flammable
gases such as hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

The resultant ‘producer gas’ is a versatile fuel: it can be stored or
piped for use in heating or street lights, and is also suitable for use
in complex machinery such as the internal combustion engine. More than
a million gasifier-powered cars across the world kept civilian
transport running during the oil shortages of the Second World War. In
occupied Denmark, 95 per cent of all tractors, trucks and fishing boats
were powered by wood-gas generators. The energy content of about 3 kg
of wood (depending on its dryness and density) is equivalent to a litre
of petrol, and the fuel consumption of a gasifier-powered car is given
in miles per kilogram of wood rather than miles per gallon. Wartime
gasifier cars could achieve about 1.5 miles per kilogram. Today’s
designs improve upon this.

But you can do a lot more with wood gases than just keep your vehicle
on the road. It turns out to be suitable for any of the manufacturing
processes needing heat that we looked at before, such as kilns for
lime, cement or bricks. Wood gas generator units could easily power
agricultural or industrial equipment, or pumps. Sweden and Denmark are
world leaders in their use of sustainable forests and agricultural
waste for turning the steam turbines in power stations. And once the
steam has been used in their ‘Combined Heat and Power’ (CHP)
electricity plants, it is piped to the surrounding towns and industries
to heat them, allowing such CHP stations to approach 90 per cent energy
efficiency. Such plants suggest a marvellous vision of industry wholly
weaned from its dependency on fossil fuel.

Is that our solution, then? Could our rebooting society run on wood,
supplemented with electricity from renewable sources? Maybe so, if the
population was fairly small. But here’s the catch. These options all
presuppose that our survivors are able to construct efficient steam
turbines, CHP stations and internal combustion engines. We know how to
do all that, of course – but in the event of a civilisational collapse,
who is to say that the knowledge won’t be lost? And if it is, what are
the chances that our descendants could reconstruct it?

In our own history, the first successful application of steam engines
was in pumping out coal mines. This was a setting in which fuel was
already abundant, so it didn’t matter that the first, primitive designs
were terribly inefficient. The increased output of coal from the mines
was used to first smelt and then forge more iron. Iron components were
used to construct further steam engines, which were in turn used to
pump mines or drive the blast furnaces at iron foundries.

And of course, steam engines were themselves employed at machine shops
to construct yet more steam engines. It was only once steam engines
were being built and operated that subsequent engineers were able to
devise ways to increase their efficiency and shrink fuel demands. They
found ways to reduce their size and weight, adapting them for
applications in transport or factory machinery. In other words, there
was a positive feedback loop at the very core of the industrial
revolution: the production of coal, iron and steam engines were all
mutually supportive.

In a world without readily mined coal, would there ever be the
opportunity to test profligate prototypes of steam engines, even if
they could mature and become more efficient over time? How feasible is
it that a society could attain a sufficient understanding of
thermodynamics, metallurgy and mechanics to make the precisely
interacting components of an internal combustion engine, without first
cutting its teeth on much simpler external combustion engines – the
separate boiler and cylinder-piston of steam engines?

It took a lot of energy to develop our technologies to their present
heights, and presumably it would take a lot of energy to do it again.
Fossil fuels are out. That means our future society will need an awful
lot of timber.

an industrial revolution without coal would be, at a minimum, very
difficult

In a temperate climate such as the UK’s, an acre of broadleaf trees
produces about four to five tonnes of biomass fuel every year. If you
cultivated fast-growing kinds such as willow or miscanthus grass, you
could quadruple that. The trick to maximising timber production is to
employ coppicing – cultivating trees such as ash or willow that
resprout from their own stump, becoming ready for harvest again in five
to 15 years. This way you can ensure a sustained supply of timber and
not face an energy crisis once you’ve deforested your surroundings.

But here’s the thing: coppicing was already a well-developed technique
in pre-industrial Britain. It couldn’t meet all of the energy
requirements of the burgeoning society. The central problem is that
woodland, even when it is well-managed, competes with other land uses,
principally agriculture. The double-whammy of development is that, as a
society’s population grows, it requires more farmland to provide enough
food and also greater timber production for energy. The two needs
compete for largely the same land areas.

We know how this played out in our own past. From the mid-16th century,
Britain responded to these factors by increasing the exploitation of
its coal fields – essentially harvesting the energy of ancient forests
beneath the ground without compromising its agricultural output. The
same energy provided by one hectare of coppice for a year is provided
by about five to 10 tonnes of coal, and it can be dug out of the ground
an awful lot quicker than waiting for the woodland to regrow.

It is this limitation in the supply of thermal energy that would pose
the biggest problem to a society trying to industrialise without easy
access to fossil fuels. This is true in our post-apocalyptic scenario,
and it would be equally true in any counterfactual world that never
developed fossil fuels for whatever reason. For a society to stand any
chance of industrialising under such conditions, it would have to focus
its efforts in certain, very favourable natural environments: not the
coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia
or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and
large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal
energy.

Even so, an industrial revolution without coal would be, at a minimum,
very difficult. Today, use of fossil fuels is actually growing, which
is worrying for a number of reasons too familiar to rehearse here.
Steps towards a low-carbon economy are vital. But we should also
recognise how pivotal those accumulated reservoirs of thermal energy
were in getting us to where we are. Maybe we could have made it the
hard way. A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanisation,
supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably
grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not.
We’d better hope we can secure the future of our own civilisation,
because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in
our wake.

For more information on this thought experiment on the
behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our world works and how you could
reboot civilisation from scratch visit [14]www.the-knowledge.org

Lewis Dartnell

is a UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester,
working in astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. His
latest book is The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch
(2014). He lives in London.
aeon.co
[15]Future of technology [16]The environment [17]Environmental history
13 April 2015
Syndicate this Essay

Aeon is not-for-profit
and free for everyone
[18]Make a donation
Get Aeon straight
to your inbox
Join our newsletter

A drunkard is challenged to walk in a straight line. Detail from
Walking the Chalk (1838) by Charles Deas. Courtesy the Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston
Essay/
Food and drink
[19]Drunks and democrats

Violent, lively and brash, taverns were everywhere in early colonial America,
embodying both its tumult and its promise

Vaughn Scribner
Video/
History of technology
[20]Fast-forward through a history of human artefacts, from arrowheads
to plastic toys

6 minutes

Physiognomies of Russian criminals from The Delinquent Woman (1893) by
Cesare Lombroso. Courtesy the Wellcome Collection
Idea/
Computing and artificial intelligence
[21]Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past

Catherine Stinson

Leonard Bernstein (far right) with members of the Ex-Concentration Camp
Orchestra on 10 May 1948 in Munich, Germany. Bernstein was on a working
tour of Europe when he conducted this small orchestra comprised of
Holocaust survivors at a displaced persons camp. Photo courtesy of
Sonia Beker, [22]United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Essay/
Meaning and the good life
[23]Humanity at night

A violinist plays in a concentration camp. A refugee carries a book of
poetry. Art sustains us when survival is uncertain

Sarah Fine
Video/
Art
[24]The Renaissance art illusion that proved everything is a matter of
perspective

14 minutes

A formal dinner at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Photo by Martin
Parr/Magnum
Idea/
Rituals and celebrations
[25]We need highly formal rituals in order to make life more democratic

Antone Martinho-Truswell

References

Visible links
1. https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-MSXMBZ3
2. https://aeon.co/donate?theme=friends&utm_medium=web&utm_source=friends-preview
3. https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
4. https://aeon.co/privacy
5. https://mailchimp.com/legal/privacy/?_ga=2.37985569.369556906.1526884532-1949438781.1481075689
6. https://mailchimp.com/legal/terms/?_ga=2.51018027.369556906.1526884532-1949438781.1481075689
7. mailto:[email protected]
8. mailto:[email protected]
9. https://aeon.co/privacy
10. mailto:[email protected]
11. https://aeon.co/users/lewis-dartnell
12. https://aeon.co/users/ejklake
13. https://aeon.co/friends?utm_medium=web&utm_source=friends-article-card
14. http://www.the-knowledge.org/
15. https://aeon.co/society/future-of-technology
16. https://aeon.co/society/the-environment
17. https://aeon.co/society/environmental-history
18. https://aeon.co/donate?utm_medium=web&utm_source=support-bar-article-essays
19. https://aeon.co/essays/taverns-and-the-complicated-birth-of-early-american-civil-society
20. https://aeon.co/videos/fast-forward-through-a-history-of-human-artefacts-from-arrowheads-to-plastic-toys
21. https://aeon.co/ideas/algorithms-associating-appearance-and-criminality-have-a-dark-past
22. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1167271
23. https://aeon.co/essays/in-times-of-crisis-the-arts-are-weapons-for-the-soul
24. https://aeon.co/videos/the-renaissance-art-illusion-that-proved-everything-is-a-matter-of-perspective
25. https://aeon.co/ideas/we-need-highly-formal-rituals-in-order-to-make-life-more-democratic

Hidden links:
27. https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
28. https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
29. https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
30. https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels
31. https://aeon.co/syndication?id=8fe4bf8c-29ad-47e2-a000-43c6e2c4d365
32. https://aeon.co/friends?utm_medium=web&utm_source=friends-article-card
33. https://aeon.co/syndication?id=8fe4bf8c-29ad-47e2-a000-43c6e2c4d365
34. https://aeon.co/essays/taverns-and-the-complicated-birth-of-early-american-civil-society
35. https://aeon.co/videos/fast-forward-through-a-history-of-human-artefacts-from-arrowheads-to-plastic-toys
36. https://aeon.co/ideas/algorithms-associating-appearance-and-criminality-have-a-dark-past
37. https://aeon.co/essays/in-times-of-crisis-the-arts-are-weapons-for-the-soul
38. https://aeon.co/videos/the-renaissance-art-illusion-that-proved-everything-is-a-matter-of-perspective
39. https://aeon.co/ideas/we-need-highly-formal-rituals-in-order-to-make-life-more-democratic