The chart is missing food as energy source (converted to work by animals and people who ate it and used the energy it gave them to do manual labor). It's probably insignificant now, but should dominate the XVIII century part of the chart.
It's also missing the amount of sunlight Earth gets from the Sun that's not used as solar energy. Also the energy that plants receive as nutrients from soil and air. It's also missing the energy that a mother transfers to her child in the form of love.
Food as an energy source is actually an important aspect. Things like domesticated animals represent significant sources of energy, on the order of thousands of calories per day. More nutritious crops also confer a significant boost to available energy. This had significant impact on the disparate levels of development between Eurasia and the Americas before the early modern period.
"The Measure of Civilization" by Ian Morris is a book I'd recommend on this topic.
And there was a paper about how improved energy access was key in nomadic to sedentary evolution. People didn't get better, they found ways to get more energy by farming.
I assume the chart is only counting energy important for human economy (and not whatever it is that you're bringing up). Food as energy source was crucial part of the energy mix before fossil fuels - food-powered animals were tilling fields, hauling goods, powering machinery etc. (not to mention less savory aspects of it like slavery - slaves were essentially food-powered machines for picking cotton, harvesting sugar cane etc.). Nowadays majority of that work is done by machines powered by fossil fuels, and food is used mostly for us to sustain ourselves (i.e. prevent starvation) and not as an economically-productive resource.
I suspect food was the biggest energy source in the economy, above wood and renewables (i.e. watermills and windmills powering various machineries and pumps).
> also missing the energy that a mother transfers to her child in the form of love
probably simpler analysis to define a boundary around human population and only estimate energy flows that cross that boundary, ignoring internal flows
I was curious so I estimated. If we take daily intake at 8000 BTUs (~2000 calories), then we get 0.015Q BTUs in 1800 (US population: 5M[0]), 0.22Q BTUs in 1900 (US population: 76M), and 0.82Q BTUs in 2000 (US population: 223M).
That's only humans. Factoring in all working animals, maybe we assume some multiple of that. 2x? 10x? 100x seems too much.
In the end, I'm not convinced it would be significant enough to warrant inclusion - even if only because US population was so relatively small.
This does lead me to wonder what the graph looks like for energy consumption per capita.
I was rather confused by this until I saw the 2011 date. Things have changed quite a bit, it doesn't appear at all on this chart, but the US now consumes 3.0 quadrillion Btu from wind energy in 2021, more than any other renewable.[0]
Are you asking about the feedstock input to plastic, or the energy input? I doubt that the Energy Information Administration tracks feedstock inputs, as they are not consumed as energy.
Only the parts that are consumed in energy production (aka not physical elements in other products). Then the EIA kind of makes judgement calls where it's messy.
The difference is one is measuring ELECTRICITY (where 20% nuclear would make sense), and the other is TOTAL ENERGY (which is electricity + transportation + energy used in heating physical processes etc)
GP's link is renewables only. Nuclear isn't considered a renewable energy source. Neither are plastics or the petroleum products they're made from.
GP's chart should be considered a blow-up of the 20% of U.S. energy that your link shows from renewable sources. Within that context the numbers match up pretty well, except that biomass is much more heavily represented in [0] than in [1].
You can't run a plastic industry without high density energy - fossil is the best for that short of nuclear. Simple matter of Carnot. No way to fake it or break it.
Feedstocks also ONLY can come from oil. Not even coal works as well. You must have carbon in the supply chain.
Sadly a lot of Soviet-style propaganda and erasure of "inconvenient" information is absolutely happening with every .gov site these days.
For those who are as confused as me: BTU stands for British Thermal Units and 1 BTU is roughly equal to one kilo Joule (1.054 kJ to 1.060 kJ depending on definition) or just short of 0.3 watt hours.
Quads is also use in the USA (and by a nibling comment) as a short for quadrillion BTUs which is roughly equal to 1 exa Joule or just short of 300 terawatt hours. 3 quads is roughly equivalent to 3 EJ or 880 Twh
I'm not used to seeing BTUs outside of heating systems. It's bizarre. Also I often see GWh/yr or some other such. I don't get it. Just use Watts and Joules (or maybe watt-hours). It somewhat bothers me that batteries are labelled in amp-hours, though it makes partial sense because they typically have a fixed voltage. Still. I guess next we need to introduce the watt-hour-per-second?
The units for energy are indeed weird, even within the SI derived system we have Joule, erg, watt-hours and watt-seconds. Then marginally related to the SI system we have electron-volts and the Calorie. The Calorie is also weird because most often they mean kilo-calorie when then say calorie. At least on European packaging this is truthfully abbreviated to kcal while Amarican labels just lie and say Calories.
Then we have kilo-tonne, which could be a unit of weight (I wonder why mega-gram never became a thing in stead of the tonne) but is usually the explosive power of an equal amount of TNT.
And none of the above had any of the American eccentrism we all love to make fun of, which have in addition to the aforementioned BTU have their own foot-pound and foot-ounce (when I pound on your door I exert a force of around 4.5 newtons on your door; and my ounce of strength is just one-sixteenth of that force).
But I was told that the singularity was coming, whereupon I could upload my consciousness to the cloud and experience an eternal orgasm of exponentially increasing bliss, thereby nullifying all laws of physical constraints. Did that get cancelled?
A friend of mine told me that she owns shares in several oil wells in Kansas and Oklahoma. They were originally bought by her father back in the 1950s. She told me that her father was a Korean War veteran and they were presented some opportunities to purchase these shares in lieu of some other kind of money the government was going to give them. I don't know what it was, she didn't say.
But she did say that for basically her entire life (after her father passed away) she's been receiving checks from the oil companies. Usually very small like $40 a month. But sometimes, when USA gets into an oil war and they start pumping their own domestic oil, she gets monthly checks for ~$1,500.
I would be curious to know how much crude USA buys from Canada instead of pumping it domestically. I guess all the domestic oil is part of the strategic oil reserves though.
The US imports most of its crude oil from Canada and Mexico [0], but mostly from Canada. There's been a persistent, but false, narrative that the US needs oil from the Middle East. The US' concern with the oil in the Middle East is mostly to _protect_ the supply to Europe, and _control_ the supply to China. The US has never needed oil from Saudi Arabia.
This is not the same type category of data. OP is a graph on energy consumption, your link is a graph on electricity generation. These are substantially different. Most energy consumption is not for electricity generation, only ~1/3rd is. And obviously, nearly all of the energy consumption prior to the 20th century was not for electricity.
More & cheaper energy == better quality of life, more things, more progress, better society
Obviously, we need to be efficient. But energy directly correlates with prosperity. I personally want us to build nuclear everywhere, deregulate and build more coal plants.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 94.8 ms ] thread"The Measure of Civilization" by Ian Morris is a book I'd recommend on this topic.
I suspect food was the biggest energy source in the economy, above wood and renewables (i.e. watermills and windmills powering various machineries and pumps).
probably simpler analysis to define a boundary around human population and only estimate energy flows that cross that boundary, ignoring internal flows
That's only humans. Factoring in all working animals, maybe we assume some multiple of that. 2x? 10x? 100x seems too much.
In the end, I'm not convinced it would be significant enough to warrant inclusion - even if only because US population was so relatively small.
This does lead me to wonder what the graph looks like for energy consumption per capita.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48396
Also, according to that chart, 0% of the US energy comes from nuclear but [1] has it at 20%. What's going on?
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
Only the parts that are consumed in energy production (aka not physical elements in other products). Then the EIA kind of makes judgement calls where it's messy.
The difference is one is measuring ELECTRICITY (where 20% nuclear would make sense), and the other is TOTAL ENERGY (which is electricity + transportation + energy used in heating physical processes etc)
In terms of nuclear this link says 8 Quad BTU (out of who knows how many units in TOTAL ENERGY) https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10
and the other says 20% of electricity
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3
GP's chart should be considered a blow-up of the 20% of U.S. energy that your link shows from renewable sources. Within that context the numbers match up pretty well, except that biomass is much more heavily represented in [0] than in [1].
You can't run a plastic industry without high density energy - fossil is the best for that short of nuclear. Simple matter of Carnot. No way to fake it or break it.
Feedstocks also ONLY can come from oil. Not even coal works as well. You must have carbon in the supply chain.
Sadly a lot of Soviet-style propaganda and erasure of "inconvenient" information is absolutely happening with every .gov site these days.
Quads is also use in the USA (and by a nibling comment) as a short for quadrillion BTUs which is roughly equal to 1 exa Joule or just short of 300 terawatt hours. 3 quads is roughly equivalent to 3 EJ or 880 Twh
Then we have kilo-tonne, which could be a unit of weight (I wonder why mega-gram never became a thing in stead of the tonne) but is usually the explosive power of an equal amount of TNT.
And none of the above had any of the American eccentrism we all love to make fun of, which have in addition to the aforementioned BTU have their own foot-pound and foot-ounce (when I pound on your door I exert a force of around 4.5 newtons on your door; and my ounce of strength is just one-sixteenth of that force).
It is a poor convention, I assume brought about by marketing purposes.
Arithmetic, Population and Energy - a talk by Al Bartlett:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY
But she did say that for basically her entire life (after her father passed away) she's been receiving checks from the oil companies. Usually very small like $40 a month. But sometimes, when USA gets into an oil war and they start pumping their own domestic oil, she gets monthly checks for ~$1,500.
I would be curious to know how much crude USA buys from Canada instead of pumping it domestically. I guess all the domestic oil is part of the strategic oil reserves though.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy
Also a fun data point: from 2019 to 2020 the US energy consumption dropped from 100.2 to 92.9 quads. Mostly from petroleum transportation.
On a side note, they could have chosen better colors. I can’t differentiate between a couple of them.
Obviously, we need to be efficient. But energy directly correlates with prosperity. I personally want us to build nuclear everywhere, deregulate and build more coal plants.
We could change the world for the better!