With his book "Reinventing Collapse", Dmitry Orlov reports to us from a collapse that he has actually experienced with the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia's past is our future and Orlov's book is a time machine to there.

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Back in the mid 1990s, during the darkest time of the Russian economic crisis, the vagaries of my job of university researcher took me several times to Russia. Once, I came out of a train station in Moscow to face a long line of people standing along the wall of the building. Each one had something on sale in his or her hands: a pair of shoes, a shirt, a bottle of vodka, or something like that.

In any town, it is easy to see wretched people; especially rich cities seem to have more than the average share of beggars. But that line in Moscow was something different. These people were not bums coming out of the local skid row. They were ordinary Russians, the kind of people you saw normally taking the subway every morning to go to work; spending their time in front of a computer screen in an office; and, in the evening, back to the subway to go back home to watch TV. And now they had to stand on a line in front of the train station selling an old shirt of theirs. It wasn't just a question of people having to sell their old shoes; Russia was in shambles: no money, no salaries, empty shops, little food.

At that time, I was completely baffled; what the hell was going on? The Russians themselves couldn't understand. Mostly, there was some vague talk that all problems could be solved by adopting free market and democracy. That was being tried, but it didn't seem to help.

What had happened became clear to me only much later, when I understood that, in Russia, I was looking to my own future. It was Douglas Reynolds, American economist, who explained it to me when he came to my university and he gave a talk on the Soviet collapse. The Soviet Union had not collapsed because it lacked democracy or free markets, even though, surely, the bloated bureaucracy and the mad military expenses had helped. It had collapsed because of peak oil. Soviet Oil production had peaked in 1987, together with the crash of oil prices in the world market. Without the revenue coming from oil exports, the Soviet Union simply went bankrupt and disappeared.

Later on, things changed again. Having reduced its military expenses and having cut on bureaucracy, Russia could invest considerable resources in upgrading the old oil fields. With oil production picking up again, the Russian economy started to recover. In Moscow, money came back, first it created an entire new class of super-rich, but eventually it flowed also to the pockets of ordinary people. Restaurants opened, the shops started selling goods again and you wouldn't see any more lines of people selling old shoes in front of the train station.

Today, the dark years of the Russian economic collapse seem to be almost forgotten. Yet, it is a story that can still teach us something. If the collapse was a consequence of the Soviet peak oil, it was basically unavoidable. Then, it is unavoidable also for the whole world, as the global peak oil is approaching. Right now, in September of 2008, the turmoil that is taking place in the financial markets may be the first signs of the impending global collapse.

Several people have recognized the consequences of peak oil and have tried to imagine the future worldwide collapse. Among many others, Howard Kunstler has told us of the long emergency; Jay Hanson saw the global "dieoff" and Richard Duncan gave us the "Olduvai scenario", that is the return to stone age. But none of those who are talking about collapse have actually lived through a real one. Except one: Dmitry Orlov. Born and raised in Russia, Orlov reports to us in his book "Reinventing Collapse" his view of someone who has really been there, as opposed to that of someone who has just heard of it.

The basic thesis of "Reinventing Collapse" is that the Soviet Union and the United States are similar organizations that are following identical paths, although shifted in time of a few decades. Sure, there were many obvious differences in the way things were managed in the two superpowers. But the bottom line was that they were two empires whose power was based on mineral resources - mainly crude oil. With the local peak oil in 1987, the Soviet Union had to close shop and disappear. The US saw its national peak oil in 1970, but managed to keep running by taking control of the Middle Eastern oil. However, that was just postponing the unavoidable. The destinies of the two countries are the same and now it is time for the US to experience collapse.

The book by Orlov is impressive in its details and its deep insight. I found it completely convincing on the basis of my own experience in Russia and Ukraine. The book is like a time machine, with Orlov coming back from the future and telling you all the details of it; including what you are going to eat, how you are going to take a shower, how you'll find to find shelter and how to travel. That is, of course, if you'll be able to do that; all these things are not at all granted during a collapse. But Orlov gives you plenty of useful tips on how to survive and even be - moderately - happy. Look at what is around you and ask yourself, "will it survive the collapse?" If it won't; then start thinking how you can do without it. Then, be flexible and try to adapt. If you know what to expect, at least you won't suffer of depression.

One last comment about this book is relevant to the members of the Western "peak oil movement". According to Orlov, there was something similar in the Soviet Union. It was a clandestine movement which, nevertheless, managed to gain a good understanding of what was going to happen and to publish it in the "samizdats", home printed documents; the only way to bypass the official information circle before the internet era. Those people got everything right but, of course, they were ignored. After the collapse, they were ignored as well. In a world where collapse had already occurred, there was no more interest in knowing exactly why it had occurred. So, if you are in the peak oil movement, don't worry too much. Whatever you do or say, it won't change a thing. So, take it easy!

Gail the Actuary has also reviewed Orlov's book on The Oil Drum . Note also Dmitry Orlov's blog "ClubOrlov" . You can find Orlov's book here Reinventing collapse

Figure: Japanese researchers testing uranium extraction from seawater using a braided adsorbent fiber (JAEA 2006). Is this the way of mining of the future?

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After a couple of centuries of mining, the best and most concentrated mineral ores are on their way to disappearance. In the future, we'll have to extract from less concentrated deposits and that will be more expensive. It is not just a question of money; mining low concentration deposits costs more energy and, with fossil fuels being rapidly depleted, that is a serious problem. Our society cannot survive without a cheap supply of minerals; so, it may not be too early to look for new sources.

If mines on land are gradually becoming depleted, could the oceans become our new mines? There have been several proposals for mining the oceans' floor, but that is just an extension of conventional mining and, besides, the task has proved to be complex and expensive. The real change of paradigm, instead, is in extracting ions dissolved in seawater.

The oceans are vast and contain immense amounts of minerals which, in principle, could be recovered without the need of digging, crushing, processing, and all the other complex and energy expensive procedures that we need for mining on land. Indeed, the extraction of minerals from seawater is a concept that periodically reappears in times of energy crisis. It had become popular with the first oil crisis of the 1970s, only to disappear during the phase of relatively low oil prices that followed. Nowadays, with the new crisis ongoing, recovering minerals from seawater is looking attractive again. For instance, over the web it is often stated as an obvious fact that any uranium supply problems that could occur in the future will be easily solved extracting uranium from seawater. Occasionally, we read that the same method could be used to solve all mineral shortages.

However, things are not so simple and we'll see in the following that extracting low concentration minerals from seawater is a huge, expensive and complex task. We are not going to see minerals produced from seawater taking the market anytime soon and the dream of fishing uranium from the sea is destined to remain just that: a dream. But let's go into the details.

1. Minerals in seawater

Open ocean water contains dissolved salts in a range of 33 to 37 grams per liter, corresponding to a total mass of some 5E+16 tons, (in the "E-notation", E+16 means 10 elevated to the power of 16). In other words, the oceans contain some fifty quadrillion tons of dissolved material. It is a huge amount compared to the total mass of minerals extracted today in the world: of the order of "just" a hundred billion tons per year (OPOCE 2000). However, most of the mass dissolved in the oceans is in the form of just a few ions and these are not the most important ones for industry.

The four most concentrated metal ions, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, and K+, are the only ones commercially extractable today, with the the least concentrated of the four being potassium (K) at 400 parts per million (ppm). Below potassium, we go down to lithium, which has never been extracted in commercial amounts from seawater, with a concentration of 0.17 ppm. Other dissolved metal ions exist at lower concentrations, sometimes several orders of magnitude lower. None has ever been commercially extracted.

But let's see exactly how we stand. In the table below I have listed the seawater concentrations and total amounts of some metal ions. The table excludes those already being extracted (Na, Mg, Ca and K) and those which exist only in traces so minute that extraction is simply unthinkable. The amounts available in seawater are compared with the reserves listed by the United States geological survey (USGS). The concept of "reserves" may be conservative but the results of a recent work (Bardi and Pagani 2007) show that it may be the most realistic estimate of what we can actually extract from land mines.

For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

As we see, there are huge metal resources in the sea. The question is how to extract them. The most general method consists in passing seawater through a membrane that contains functional groups that selectively bind to the species of interest. No known membrane is 100% selective for a single species, but it is possible to create membranes that can retain a small number of selected low concentration species. The adsorbates can be extracted from the membrane by flushing it with appropriate chemicals; a process called "elution". After this stage, the metal ions can be separated and recovered by precipitation or electrodeposition.

In practice, it is very difficult to extract low concentration ions at reasonable costs. Lithium extraction was tried in the 1970s (Schwochau 1984) but the tests were soon abandoned. The idea of extracting uranium has been around for a long time, at least from the 1960s (see Nebbia 2007 for a review). But just a few grams were extracted in Japan in the late 1990s (Seko 2003). Then, there is the old dream of getting gold from the sea. The German chemist Fritz Haber tried that in the 1920s but the task of extracting gold ions at concentrations of a few parts per trillion (ppt) was nearly desperate and, indeed, the attempt was a total failure.

Evidently, we have big problems here. That is not surprising: there is a lot of water in the ocean and, in comparison, very small amounts of useful metals. So, we have to process huge amounts of water. Huge, in this context, means really huge , as you can see in the following table. Consider, as a comparison, that the total volume of water desalinated today is 1.6E+10 tons.

Table 2. Elements are ordered as a function of the mass of seawater that would need to be filtered in order to obtain the same amount of materials that we obtain today from traditional mining. That value is calculated in the optimistic assumption of 100% efficiency of the filtering membrane. For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

The table shows that, even for the best case listed, lithium, in order to recover the same amount we get today from conventional mining we would need to set gigantic facilities. We'd need to process at least ten times as much water as it is processed by desalination plants today. All the other metals would require to process amounts of water orders of magnitude larger.

Moving these gigantic amounts of water is not just a practical problem: it involves energy; a critical parameter especially if we consider the extraction of two elements that are to be used as energy sources: lithium and uranium. Uranium, in the form of the 235 isotope, is the fuel of the present generation of nuclear fission plants, whereas lithium, in the form of the 6-Li isotope could be the source of tritium to be used as fuel for a future generation of fusion power plants. In both cases, the feasibility of extraction is determined by the energy needed according to the well known concept of "EROEI" (energy returned for energy investment) (Hall 2008).

In the next section, we'll see in detail the case of uranium, perhaps the most important for practical applications and the one for which we have the best data available. It will serve as a benchmark for evaluating the feasibility of extraction of all the other elements.

2. Uranium extraction from seawater

At present, the mining industry can provide only about 60% of the uranium needed for the currently operating reactors which produce about 16% of the world's electricity. The gap is filled with stockpiled reserves, in large part obtained from dismantling old nuclear warheads. Raising mineral production to the level needed to satisfy demand is a huge and expensive task; even more if it were to occur together with the construction of new reactors. Whether we'll develop a serious uranium shortage in the near future is hotly debated, but the problem cannot be ignored (see, e.g. EWG 2007).

So, extracting uranium from seawater is a subject often discussed and, as we saw in the previous section, the amounts theoretically available in the oceans are more than sufficient to stave off all worries of shortages for a long time. Indeed, already in the 1960s, the idea had started to be evaluated (Nebbia 2007). The development of a membrane able to recover uranium from seawater (Vernon and Shah, 1983) was an important step forward and it led to experimental tests performed in the 1990s by researchers of the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). In these tests, a few grams of uranium oxide were actually recovered from the sea. From a web page dated 1998 (JAEA 1998), we see that these tests were performed in 1996 and 1997 and the results are reported in detail in a paper in English by Seko et al. (Seko 2003). Some results with braided fiber used as adsorbent are reported in a web page (JAEA 2006).

However, JAEA seems to have stopped all activity in this field, at least from what can learned from the examination of their site in English . There are no reports of further experiments, demonstration plants or of scaling up tests being planned. Something went wrong here, clearly, but exactly what? The question is complex, but we can try to answer it using the concept of energy return of the energy invested, EROEI.

From table 2 we see that we would need to process 2E+13 tons of water every year in order to produce enough fuel for the present fleet of nuclear reactors. Considering that the present worldwide production of nuclear energy is about 2.5E+3 TWh (terawatt-hour) per year (WNA 2007), we arrive to determine that the "energy density" of seawater exploitable by the present nuclear technology is about 1E-1 kWh/ton (one tenth of a kWh per ton). It doesn't look large but it is still much larger than the kinetic energy of the same mass of water moved by average strength currents (See note 2).

Now, in order to extract this uranium, there are two possible strategies: one is of actively pumping the water through the membrane, the other simply dropping the membrane in the sea and wait for the metal ions to migrate to the active sites. In both cases, energy is needed for a variety of operations: pumping, infrastructure building, moving the membranes, manufacturing them, etc. We don't have enough data for a step-by-step evaluation of the energy necessary but we can try an order of magnitude estimate by comparing with known processes.

Let's start with the first strategy: actively pumping water through a membrane. The process requires energy mainly because of the viscosity of water. This effect is described by Darcy's law which says that the energy required is inversely proportional to a parameter called "permeability". A finer membrane (e.g. sand) has a lower permeability than a coarse membrane (e.g. gravel). The permeability of a uranium extraction membrane is not reported in the available studies and it is probably not even known at the present stage. However, we can estimate the energy involved by comparing with a similar, known, process: desalination by reverse osmosis.

In reverse osmosis, seawater is pumped through a membrane that retains the dissolved ions; just as it would be done for uranium extraction. The energy involved in desalination by reverse osmosis is of the order of 2-4 kWh/ton; a value that includes all the energy used by the plant. For uranium, we would use membranes with a higher permeability, but the energy needed cannot change too much. If we take a value of 1 kWh/ton as a reasonable "order of magnitude" estimate, we immediately see that it can't be done. If what we can recover from the uranium contained in a ton of water is about 1E-1 kWh, it makes no sense to spend 1kWh/ton for the extraction, even if we could do that at 100% efficiency. This result is nothing new and there are other kinds of calculations that lead to the same conclusion (Schwochau 1984). Pumping water through membranes is so energy expensive that it can't be considered as a practical strategy for uranium extraction.

So, we are left with the second strategy: dropping the membrane into the sea and wait until currents or diffusion brings the uranium to the adsorbing sites. This method avoids the energy cost of pumping. Yet, it is also a less efficient way to use the membrane. As a consequence, we need larger amounts of membranes, a larger infrastructure, and we need to move the membranes in and out of the sea. All these are energy costs. We are looking at a complex and largely unknown process which is difficult to analyze in all its details. Nevertheless, we can try.

First of all, we can gain some idea of the size of the task. Dittmar (2007) has already noted that the task is huge, but exactly how much space would the adsorbing membranes occupy? We saw (see table 2) that we need to process at least 2E+13 tons of water per year. We also need a relatively shallow body of water, so that the infrastructure that carries the membranes can be anchored to the sea bottom at a reasonable cost. Now, consider the North Sea as a suitable area. It is a shallow sea (average depth less than 100 m) and it contains about 5E+13 tons of water. Assuming a recovery efficiency of 50% (which is probably optimistic), it means that we would have to appropriate the whole North Sea with adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world's electric power production. For powering the whole world, we'd need the equivalent of at least six North Seas.

But it is unlikely that the North Sea would have sufficiently strong currents for sustaining uranium extraction for a long time. That is a problem which has not been studied in detail: where can we find currents strong enough to move the huge amounts of water we need?

Current strength is sometimes measured in "Sverdrups", a unit that corresponds to one million tons of water per second, or 3E+13 tons of water per year. So, one Sverdrup is almost exactly the flow of seawater that carries enough uranium for the present needs of nuclear plants. Some currents are reported to be much stronger than one Sverdrup. For instance, perhaps the strongest current in the world is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) which carries about 135 Sverdrups. There is plenty of uranium being transported there. But the average depth of the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean is around 3000-4000 meters and the area is highly hostile to human activities. Anchoring there millions of tons of adsorbing membranes, together with all the processing facilities, is simply unthinkable.

Perhaps we could consider the Strait of Gibraltar as a more friendly environment where to find strong currents. Damming the strait in order to produce energy had already been proposed by Herman Sorgel in the 1920s with his concept of the "Atlantropa" dam. The dam was supposed to provide about 50 GW of hydroelectric power, a little more than 10% of the power presently provided by the nuclear industry today. The dam was never built; of course: it would have been a disaster for the Mediterranean sea.

Today, we seem to be a little more careful with these megaprojects, but still the Strait's current is very strong and we could appropriate a fraction of it for uranium extraction. The flow of seawater through the strait is about one Sverdrup , enough to satisfy our current uranium needs. Let's say that we could intercept 10% of it (and even that could have huge negative effects on the Mediterranean environment). In this case we'd need the equivalent of 10 Straits of Gibraltar just for satisfying the current needs of the nuclear fission industry and some 60 equivalent straits for raising production to match the present world's demand. Do we have the equivalent of 60 Straits of Gibraltar in the world? We can't say for sure that we don't; but of one thing we may be sure: the task would be colossal, devastating for the environment, and expensive beyond imagination.

All this doesn't mean that it is impossible to extract uranium from seawater in amounts comparable to our needs. But it gives us a certain perspective that we can use for the evaluation of the really critical parameter of the process: EROEI. The huge areas that we calculated to be needed bring us to compare uranium extraction to another industrial activity where large masses of materials are transported over the sea: oceanic fishing.

We have some data about the energy expenditure of the fishing industry (Mitchell and Cleveland (1993)) and we can estimate that the industry uses fuel for an energy of about 7 kWh for each kg of fish recovered. Another estimate derives from knowing that the total fish catch today is around 90 million tons (9E+10 kg) per year (FAO 2005) while the total amount of fuel used by the world's fishing fleet in 2005 is of some 14 million tons of diesel fuel (FAO 2008) (2E+11 kWh, considering that the energy content of diesel fuel is 43 GJ/ton). The result is about 2 kWh of energy per kg of fish landed. These are rough estimates that only take into account the fuel cost. Yet, it seems that fuel is the main energy expenditure involved in ocean fishing. So, if we take a midrange value of 5 kWh/kg, we can't be too far off in terms of the energy cost of extracting something from the open sea and bringing it back to land.

Now, if we want to use membranes for uranium extraction, it means that we have to carry the membrane at sea, submerge it for a while, raise it, bring it to land for processing, then back to sea, and so on. From the paper by Seko et al (2003) we see that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. We also read in the paper that the membranes were "pulled out of seawater using a crane ship every 20 to 40 days". In other words, the membranes have to be brought back to the elution facility every month or so. Recovering one kg of uranium, therefore, would require processing at least 3 tons of membranes per year. For the present worldwide uranium demand (6.5E+4 tons/year) we'd need to move 2E+8 tons of membrane every year. That is about ten times larger than the weight of the total catch of today's fishing industry. This is another indication of the colossal size of the task.

But the real problem is the energy involved. Using the ratio of 5kWh/kg that we calculated before for fishing, and assuming the yield and the conditions reported by Seko (2003) we can calculate a total energy expenditure of about 1E+3 TWh/year for the present needs of the nuclear industry. This is about the same as the total produced, ca. 2.5e+3 TWh/year. So, the energy gain (EROEI) is too low to be interesting.

Of course, there is a high level of uncertainty in this calculation. On the one hand, we need to consider that is possible to improve the efficiency of extraction process using braided membranes and working at higher sea temperatures (JAEA 1998, 2008). We might also build floating processing facilities in order to reduce the transportation costs. On the other hand, the calculation refers only to the fuel expenditures. To that, we need to all the costs for the infrastructure, for the chemicals used in elution, for the energy needed for recovering the species of interest and so on. We need also to consider that the membranes are synthesized starting from crude oil. Since there are no data available for how long a membrane could last in operation, we can't calculate how much oil would be needed, but surely it would not be negligible (see note 3 for an attempt of calculating this value).

We can conclude that there is a high risk that uranium extraction from seawater in these conditions would have an EROEI smaller than one. Very likely, it would be too low to be interesting. In practice, nobody will provide the huge financial resources needed to embark in such a task while that uncertainty remains. Moreover, investors are not likely to appear when they can't ignore that, at any moment, the development of an efficient fast breeder reactor would make their huge investments worthless. So, we don't know for sure whether the nuclear industry will be facing a fuel shortage in the near future but, if it does, the best bet to concentrate on conventional land mining and on developing more efficient reactors. Extracting uranium from the sea is not a practical possibility.

4. Lithium and the others

The case of uranium gave us the tools that we need for the evaluation of the perspective of extraction of all the other elements. First of all, we should consider lithium, which is more abundant than uranium in the sea and that could also be used as an energy source. The 6-Li isotope can be transformed into an isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which could be the fuel of a future generation of fusion reactors.

Fasel and Tran (2005) estimate that a water-cooled lithium–lead breeder blanket reactor of 1.5 GWe power will need 787 tonnes of lithium per year. This reactor could produce 12 TWh of energy per year. From the data of table 2, we see that for producing 800 tons of lithium we need to process 4E+9 tons of seawater. In other words the "energy density" of seawater in terms of fusion plants would be about 3 kWh/ton, more than an order of magnitude larger than that of uranium (1E-1 kWh/ton).

If efficient selective membranes for lithium adsorption can be developed, the energies involved in extraction would likely be about the same as for uranium, but we would need ten times less water for the same amount of lithium, hence ten times less energy. Extraction by active pumping would still be very uncertain in terms of EROEI, but with submerged membranes the task appears possible without destroying the North Sea or damming the equivalent of dozens of Straits of Gibraltar. Still, it would be a huge task and its feasibility remains uncertain. However, Fasel and Tran (2005) also mention the possibility of more efficient ways of using lithium in fusion reactors. So, we can conclude that the extraction of lithium as nuclear fuel from seawater cannot be proven to be feasible in terms of energy return, but it is nevertheless a process worth investigating.

Lithium is also an essential element for the new generation of batteries used in road vehicles. Tahil (2006) studied the availability of mineral lithium if we were to substitute the present vehicle fleet with vehicles based on lithium batteries. He concluded that we would face a lithium shortage. This is not a problem for the near term future, nevertheless it could become serious one day. From a look to table 2 we see if we were to get the present lithium mineral production by filtering ocean water through a membrane, we'd need around 1.5E+3 TWh which is 10% or the present world production of electric power. It is a very large amount but not an unconceivable one. Using submerged membranes, we would be able to substantially reduce that amount of energy, perhaps of one order of magnitude. However, according to Tahil (2006), we would need to step up lithium production of approximately a factor of ten if we were to keep up with the present trends of growth. That is clearly impossible using lithium extracted from seawater, at least as long as we rely on the present energy sources. Nevertheless, it is not impossible that seawater could be one day a significant source of lithium for vehicle batteries, provided that lithium is recycled and vehicles are built in such a way to be lighter and more efficient.

For all the other elements listed in table 1, extraction from seawater seems to be impossible or, at least, extremely difficult. Consider copper as an example. The total amount that exists in the oceans is about 50 times the current yearly production (see table 2). So, in 50 years we would run out of copper from seawater, even if we were able to filter all the water in the planet's oceans. But that is unthinkable, of course. Similar considerations hold for most metals of technological interest. The old dream of fishing gold from the sea remains just that: a dream.

5. Conclusion

Perhaps, one day, we might develop futuristic robotic facilities anchored to the deep sea floor. These machines would be powered by uranium extracted from seawater and would use marine plankton to manufacture organic "tentacles" for adsorbing mineral ions. Processing would be made in place and the recovered metals would be shipped to the surface in neat packages. But that looks like a dream of the 1950s, on a par with atomic planes and weekends on the Moon for the whole family. With the possible exception of lithium, the best we can conceive today is that mining the oceans could produce only truly "homeopathic" amounts of minerals, thousands of times lower than the presently produced amounts. In today's industrial system, such amounts would be useless. This result is true also for uranium, where extraction from seawater can't be seen as a solution for the present shortage of mineral uranium.

Adding together very large volumes of low concentration mineral resources easily leads to optimistic estimates of availability "when the market price will be right". But this optimism is misplaced. Eventually, it is the paradigm of the "universal mining machine" (Bardi 2008) that rules. It is not the absolute amount of a mineral resource that counts but, rather, its concentration. Extracting from low concentration resources, no matter whether dissolved in seawater or in the earth's crust, is so expensive in terms of the energy needed that it is beyond our possibilities for the present and for the foreseeable future.

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- Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Pietro Cambi and Joe Doves for their comments and suggestions about the energy involved in desalination.

- Notes

(1) data sources for the tables : seawater elements concentration from J Floor Anthoni (2000, 2006) www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm. Oceanic abundance calculated assuming a total ocean volume of 1.3E9 cubic km. Mineral reserves are from USGS 2007 mineral commodities summary (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/) except for uranium reserves which are from Energy Watch Group (www.lbst.de/publications/studies__e/2006/EWG-paper_1-06_Uranium-Resource...). All reserves are in terms of the pure element, except for Aluminium, iron, and titanium, given in terms of oxides.

(2) Comparison of the energy density of seawater in terms of fissionable uranium and as source of energy for underwater turbines . A strong sea current may move at speed of a few m/sec. Let's consider a representative speed of 4 m/sec and calculate the energy as 1/2mv^2. In this case, one ton of water would carry about 2E-3kWh, much smaller than the value calculated before in terms of uranium content (ca. 1E-1 kWh/ton). However, an underwater turbine could well have a better EROEI than the complex process of uranium extraction from seawater and utilization in a fission power plant.

(3) Tentative calculation of the energy involved in manufacturing membranes for uranium extraction . From the only work published in the international scientific literature (Seko 2003) we can infer that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. Trying an educated guess on the basis of the paper by Vernon and Shah (1983) we might assume that repeated immersions of the membrane would degrade its performance and generate the need for replacing it approximately every year. A Russian site http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html says that the membrane can be "assumed" to be usable 20 times before it has to be discarded. If this is the case, it can be used for about one year and a half. Taking one year as the lifetime of the membrane, we would need to synthesize about 300 kg of activated fiber per year. Assuming an overall yield of 30% (again, an educated guess) for the synthesis process, we see that we need about one ton of crude oil in order to extract 1 kg of uranium per year. Since crude oil has an energy content of about 12 kWh/kg, we would be using some 12 MWh that, used in a high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine would produce about 6 MWh of electric power. One kg of uranium in a nuclear fission plant can generate about 40 MWh of electric power and, therefore, the process could have a reasonable EROEI of about 7. However, note also that, in order to obtain sufficient fiber for supplying enough uranium for the production of the total of the electric energy today, we'd need about 2-3 billion barrels of oil per year. This is a small amount compared to the present production (more than 30 billion barrels per year) but not negligible and would become more and more important as oil production dwindles down because of depletion.

References

Bardi U., Pagani, M., 2007, "Peak Minerals" http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3086

Bardi U., 2008 "The Universal Mining Machine" http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451

Busch, M. Mickols, B, "Economics of desalination— reducing costs by lowering energy use" Water and wastewater international, http://www.pennnet.com/display_article/208957/20/ARTCL/none/none/1/Econo...

Dittmar M., 2007, "The Nuclear Energy Option facts and fantasies", Proceedings of the ASPO-6 conference, Cork, Ireland.
www.aspo-ireland.org/contentfiles/ASPO6/3-2_APSO6_MDittmar.pdf

FAO 2005 http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Fish/2005.htm

FAO 2008, http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0699e/A0699E08.htm.

Fasel, D., Tran. M.Q., 2005, Availability of lithium in the context of future D–T fusion reactors. Fusion Engineering and Design 75–79 pp. 1163–1168

Floor Anthoni, J., (2000, 2006) Oceanic abundance of elements, www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm.

JAEA 1998 Development of the Adsorbent at the Takasaki Research Laboratory http://www.jaea.go.jp/jaeri/english/press/980526/ref01.html

JAEA, 2006 "Confirming Cost Estimations of Uranium Collection from Seawater" JAEA R&D Review, http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html

Mitchell, C. and Cleveland C.J., 1993. "Resource scarcity, energy use and environmental impact: A case study of the New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA, fisheries. Journalof Environmental Management, volume 17, Number 3 / May, 1993, p. 305

Nebbia, G., 1970, "L'estrazione di Uranio dall'acqua di mare"
http://www.aspoitalia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&...

OPOCE (Office for official publications of the european communities) 2000. Environmental signals, http://reports.eea.europa.eu/signals-2000/en/page017.html

Schwochau, K., 1984, "Extraction of Metals from Sea Water", Springer series "Topics in Current Chemistry" vol 124. http://www.springerlink.com/content/y621101m3567jku1/

Seko N., Katakai A., Hasegawa H., Tamada M., Kasai N., Takeda H., Sugo T., Saito K. 2003, "Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a Fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System" Nuclear Energy
Volume 144 · Number 2 · November 2003 · Pages 274-278

Tamada, M.; Seko, N.; Kasai, N.; Shimizu, T., 2005
Synthesis and practical scale system of braid adsorbent for uranium recovery from seawater
FAPIG (169), p.3-12(2005) ; (JAEA-J 00045)

Tahil, W, 2006, "The Trouble with Lithium Implications of Future PHEV Production for Lithium demand" http://tyler.blogware.com/lithium_shortage.pdf

Vernon, F., and Shah T., 1983, "The extraction of uranium from seawater by poly(amidoxime)/poly(hydroxamic acid) resins and fibre Reactive Polymers, Ion Exchangers, Sorbents Volume 1, Issue 4, October 1983, Pages 301-308

WNA, World Nuclear Association, 2007, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf16.html.

Figure: Japanese researchers testing uranium extraction from seawater using a braided adsorbent fiber (JAEA 2006). Is this the way of mining of the future?

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After a couple of centuries of mining, the best and most concentrated mineral ores are on their way to disappearance. In the future, we'll have to extract from less concentrated deposits and that will be more expensive. It is not just a question of money; mining low concentration deposits costs more energy and, with fossil fuels being rapidly depleted, that is a serious problem. Our society cannot survive without a cheap supply of minerals; so, it may not be too early to look for new sources.

If mines on land are gradually becoming depleted, could the oceans become our new mines? There have been several proposals for mining the oceans' floor, but that is just an extension of conventional mining and, besides, the task has proved to be complex and expensive. The real change of paradigm, instead, is in extracting ions dissolved in seawater.

The oceans are vast and contain immense amounts of minerals which, in principle, could be recovered without the need of digging, crushing, processing, and all the other complex and energy expensive procedures that we need for mining on land. Indeed, the extraction of minerals from seawater is a concept that periodically reappears in times of energy crisis. It had become popular with the first oil crisis of the 1970s, only to disappear during the phase of relatively low oil prices that followed. Nowadays, with the new crisis ongoing, recovering minerals from seawater is looking attractive again. For instance, over the web it is often stated as an obvious fact that any uranium supply problems that could occur in the future will be easily solved extracting uranium from seawater. Occasionally, we read that the same method could be used to solve all mineral shortages.

However, things are not so simple and we'll see in the following that extracting low concentration minerals from seawater is a huge, expensive and complex task. We are not going to see minerals produced from seawater taking the market anytime soon and the dream of fishing uranium from the sea is destined to remain just that: a dream. But let's go into the details.

1. Minerals in seawater

Open ocean water contains dissolved salts in a range of 33 to 37 grams per liter, corresponding to a total mass of some 5E+16 tons, (in the "E-notation", E+16 means 10 elevated to the power of 16). In other words, the oceans contain some fifty quadrillion tons of dissolved material. It is a huge amount compared to the total mass of minerals extracted today in the world: of the order of "just" a hundred billion tons per year (OPOCE 2000). However, most of the mass dissolved in the oceans is in the form of just a few ions and these are not the most important ones for industry.

The four most concentrated metal ions, Na+, Mg2+, Ca2+, and K+, are the only ones commercially extractable today (Schwochau 1984), with the the least concentrated of the four being potassium (K) at 400 parts per million (ppm). Below potassium, we go down to lithium, which has never been extracted in commercial amounts from seawater, with a concentration of 0.17 ppm. Other dissolved metal ions exist at lower concentrations, sometimes several orders of magnitude lower. None has ever been commercially extracted.

But let's see exactly how we stand. In the table below (extracted from Floor Anthony, 2006) I have listed the seawater concentrations and total amounts of some metal ions. The table excludes those already being extracted (Na, Mg, Ca and K) and those which exist only in traces so minute that extraction is simply unthinkable. The amounts available in seawater are compared with the reserves listed by the United States geological survey (USGS). The concept of "reserves" may be conservative but the results of a recent work (Bardi and Pagani 2007) show that it may be the most realistic estimate of what we can actually extract from land mines.

For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

As we see, there are huge metal resources in the sea. The question is how to extract them. The most general method for recovering metals from the sea consists in passing seawater through a membrane that contains functional groups that selectively bind to the species of interest. No known membrane is 100% selective for a single species, but it is possible to create membranes that can retain a small number of selected low concentration species (Schwochau, 1984). The adsorbates can be extracted from the membrane by flushing it with appropriate chemicals; a process called "elution". After this stage, the metal ions can be separated and recovered by precipitation or electrodeposition.

In practice, it is very difficult to extract low concentration ions at reasonable costs. Lithium extraction was tried in the 1970s (Schwochau 1984) but the tests were soon abandoned. The idea of extracting uranium has been around for a long time, at least from the 1960s (see Nebbia 2003 for a review). But we remain stuck today with just a few grams of uranium extracted in Japan in the late 1990s (Seko 2003). Then, there is the old dream of getting gold from the sea. The German chemist Fritz Haber tried that in the 1920s but the task of extracting gold ions at concentrations of a few parts per trillion (ppt) was nearly desperate and, indeed, the attempt was a total failure.

Evidently, we have big problems here. That is not surprising: there is a lot of water in the ocean and, in comparison, very small amounts of useful metals. So, we have to process huge amounts of water. Huge, in this context, means really huge , as you can see in the following table. Consider, as a comparison, that the total volume of water desalinated today is 1.6E+10 tons.

Table 2. Elements are ordered as a function of the mass of seawater that would need to be filtered in order to obtain the same amount of materials that we obtain today from traditional mining. That value is calculated in the optimistic assumption of 100% efficiency of the filtering membrane. For data sources, see note (1) at the end of the text

The table shows that, even for the best case listed, lithium, in order to recover the same amount we get today from conventional mining we would need to set gigantic facilities able to process at least ten times as much water as it is processed by desalination plants today. All the other metals would require to process amounts of water orders of magnitude larger.

Moving these gigantic amounts of water is not just a practical problem: it involves energy. This energy is a critical parameter especially if we consider the extraction of two elements that are to be used as energy sources: lithium and uranium. Uranium, in the form of the 235 isotope, is the fuel of the present generation of fission plants, whereas lithium, in the form of the 6-Li isotope could be the source of tritium to be used as fuel for a future generation of fusion power plants. In both cases, the feasibility of extraction is determined by the energy needed according to the well known concept of "EROEI" (energy returned for energy investment) (Hall 2008).

In the next section, we'll see in detail the case of uranium, perhaps the most important for practical applications and the one for which we have the best data available. It will serve as a benchmark for evaluating the feasibility of extraction of all the other elements.

2. Uranium extraction from seawater

At present, the mining industry can provide only about 60% of the uranium needed for the currently operating reactors which produce about 16% of the world's electricity. The gap is filled with stockpiled reserves, in large part obtained from dismantling old nuclear warheads. Raising mineral production to the level needed to satisfy demand is a huge and expensive task; even more if it were to occur together with the construction of new reactors. Whether we'll develop a serious uranium shortage in the near future is hotly debated, but the problem cannot be ignored (see, e.g. EWG 2007).

So, extracting uranium from seawater is a subject often discussed and, as we saw in the previous section, the amounts theoretically available in the oceans are more than sufficient to stave off all worries of shortages for a long time. Indeed, already in the 1960s, the idea had started to be evaluated (Nebbia 2007). The development of a membrane able to recover uranium from seawater (Vernon and Shah, 1983) was an important step forward and it led to experimental tests performed in the 1990s by researchers of the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). In these tests, a few grams of uranium oxide were actually recovered from the sea. From a web page dated 1998 (JAEA 1998), we see that these tests were performed in 1996 and 1997 and the results are reported in detail in a paper in English by Seko et al. (Seko 2003). Some results with braided fiber used as adsorbent are reported in a web page (JAEA 2006).

However, JAEA seems to have stopped all activity in this field, at least from what can learned from the examination of their site in English . There are no reports of demonstration plants or of scaling up tests being planned. So, despite the present uranium shortage, nobody has come up with the money needed to develop a commercial process of extraction from seawater. Something went wrong here, clearly, but exactly what? The question is complex, but we can try to answer it using the concept of energy return of the energy invested, EROEI.

First of all, from table 2 we see that we would need to process 2E+13 tons of water every year in order to produce enough fuel for the present fleet of nuclear reactors. Consider also that the present worldwide production of nuclear energy is about 2.5E+3 TWh (terawatt-hour) per year (WNA 2007). Therefore, the "energy density" of seawater exploitable by the present nuclear technology is about 1E-1 kWh/ton (one tenth of a kWh per ton). It may not look like a large amount, but it is still much larger than the kinetic energy of the same mass of water moved by average strength currents (See note 2).

Now, in order to extract this uranium, there are two possible strategies: one is of actively pumping the water through the membrane, the other simply dropping the membrane in the sea and wait for the metal ions to migrate to the active sites. In both cases, energy is needed for a variety of operations: pumping, infrastructure building, moving the membranes, manufacturing them, etc. We don't have enough data for a step-by-step evaluation of the energy necessary but we can try an order of magnitude estimate by comparing with known processes.

Let's start with the first strategy: actively pumping water through a membrane. The process requires energy mainly because of the viscosity of water. This effect is described by Darcy's law which says that the energy required is inversely proportional to a parameter called "permeability". A finer membrane (e.g. sand) has a lower permeability than a coarse membrane (e.g. gravel). The permeability of a uranium extraction membrane is not reported in the available studies and it is probably not even known at the present stage. However, we can estimate the energy involved by comparing with a similar, known, process: desalination by reverse osmosis.

In reverse osmosis, seawater is pumped through a membrane that retains the dissolved ions; just as it would be done for uranium extraction. The energy involved in desalination by reverse osmosis is of the order of 2-4 kWh/ton. For uranium, we would use membranes with a higher permeability, but the energy needed cannot change too much. We can take a value of 1 kWh/ton as a reasonable "order of magnitude" estimate.

Now, if we compare with the value we had found before, the energy density of seawater in terms of uranium content, we see that it can't be done. If what we can recover from the uranium contained in a ton of water is about 1E-1 kWh, it makes no sense to spend 1kWh/ton for the extraction, even if we could do that at 100% efficiency. Even using lower permeability membranes would not help much. This result is nothing new and there are other kinds of calculations that lead to the same conclusion (Schwochau 1984). Pumping water through membranes is so energy expensive that it can't be considered as a practical strategy for uranium extraction.

So, we are left with the second strategy to consider: dropping the membrane into the sea and wait until currents or diffusion brings the uranium to the adsorbing sites. This method avoids the energy cost of pumping. Yet, it is also a less efficient way to use the membrane. As a consequence, we need larger amounts of membranes, a larger infrastructure, and we need to move the membranes in and out of the sea. All these are energy costs. We are looking at a complex and largely unknown process which is difficult to analyze in all its details. Nevertheless, we can try.

First of all, we can gain some idea of the size of the task. Dittmar (2007) has already noted that the task is really huge, but exactly how much space would the adsorbing membranes occupy? We saw (see table 2) that we need to process at least 2E+13 tons of water per year to fuel the present fleet of nuclear reactors. We also need a relatively shallow body of water, so that the infrastructure that carries the membranes can be anchored to the sea bottom at a reasonable cost. Now, consider the North Sea as a suitable area. It is a shallow sea (average depth less than 100 m) and it contains about 5E+13 tons of water. Assuming a recovery efficiency of 50% (which is probably optimistic), it means that we would have to appropriate the whole North Sea with adsorption structures in order to get enough uranium for just 16% of the present world's electric power production. For powering the whole world, we'd need the equivalent of at least six North Seas.

That gives us some idea of how huge the extraction task is. But it is unlikely that the North Sea would have sufficiently strong currents for sustaining uranium extraction for a long time. That is a problem which has not been studied in detail: where can we find currents strong enough to move the huge amounts of water we need?

Current strength is sometimes measured in "Sverdrups", a unit that corresponds to one million tons of water per second, or 3E+13 tons of water per year. So, one Sverdrup is almost exactly the flow of seawater that carries enough uranium for the present needs of nuclear plants. Some currents are reported to be much stronger than one Sverdrup. For instance, perhaps the strongest current in the world is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) which carries about 135 Sverdrups. There is plenty of uranium being transported there. But the average depth of the Southern (Antarctic) Ocean is around 3000-4000 meters and the area is highly hostile to human activities. Anchoring there millions of tons of adsorbing membranes, together with all the processing facilities, is simply unthinkable.

Perhaps we could consider the Strait of Gibraltar as a more friendly environment where to find strong currents. Damming the strait in order to produce energy had already been proposed by Herman Sorgel in the 1920s with his concept of the "Atlantropa" dam. The dam was supposed to provide about 50 GW of hydroelectric power, a little more than 10% of the power presently provided by the nuclear industry today. The dam was never built; of course: it would have been a disaster for the Mediterranean sea.

Today, we seem to be a little more careful with these megaprojects, but still the Strait's current is very strong and we could appropriate a fraction of it for uranium extraction. The flow of seawater through the strait is about one Sverdrup , enough to satisfy our current uranium needs. Let's say that we could intercept 10% of it (and even that could have huge negative effects on the Mediterranean environment). In this case we'd need the equivalent of 10 Straits of Gibraltar just for satisfying the current needs of the nuclear fission industry and some 60 equivalent straits for raising production to match the present world's demand. Do we have the equivalent of 60 Straits of Gibraltar in the world? We can't say for sure that we don't; but of one thing we may be sure: the task of damming 60 straits of Gibraltar would be colossal, devastating for the environment, and expensive beyond imagination.

All this doesn't mean that it is impossible to extract uranium from seawater in amounts comparable to our needs. But it gives us a certain perspective that we can use for the evaluation of the really critical parameter of the process: EROEI. The huge areas that we calculated to be needed bring us to compare uranium extraction to another industrial activity where large masses of materials are transported over the sea: oceanic fishing.

We have some data about the energy expenditure of the fishing industry (Mitchell and Cleveland (1993)) and we can estimate that the industry uses fuel for an energy of about 7 kWh for each kg of fish recovered. Another estimate derives from knowing that the total fish catch today is around 90 million tons (9E+10 kg) per year (FAO 2005) while the total amount of fuel used by the world's fishing fleet in 2005 is of some 14 million tons of diesel fuel (FAO 2008) (2E+11 kWh, considering that the energy content of diesel fuel is 43 GJ/ton). The result is that about 2 kWh of energy are needed per kg of fish landed. These are rough estimates that only take into account the fuel cost. Yet, it seems that fuel is the main energy expenditure involved in ocean fishing. So, if we take a midrange value of 5 kWh/kg, we can't be too far off in terms of the energy cost of extracting something from the open sea and bringing it back to land.

Now, if we want to use membranes for uranium extraction, it means that we have to carry the membrane at sea, submerge it for a while, raise it, bring it to land for processing, then back to sea, and so on. So, the membranes are the main weight to be shuttled back and forth. From the paper by Seko et al (2003) we see that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. We also read in the paper that the membranes were "pulled out of seawater using a crane ship every 20 to 40 days". In other words, the membranes have to be brought back to the elution facility every month or so. Recovering one kg of uranium, therefore, would require processing at least 3 tons of membranes per year. For the present worldwide uranium demand (6.5E+4 tons/year) we'd need to move 2E+8 tons of membrane every year. That is about ten times larger than the weight of the total catch of today's fishing industry. This is another indication of the colossal size of the task.

But the real problem is the energy involved. Using the ratio of 5kWh/kg that we calculated before for fishing, and assuming the yield and the conditions reported by Seko (2003) we can calculate the total energy expenditure needed for the processing of membranes in a quantity sufficient for the present uranium needs. It turns out to be about 1E+3 TWh/year. This is about the same as the total produced by the nuclear industry worldwide, ca. 2.5e+3 TWh/year. So, the energy gain (EROEI) is too low to be interesting.

Of course, there is a high level of uncertainty in this calculation. On the one hand, we need to consider that is possible to improve the efficiency of extraction process using braided membranes and working at higher sea temperatures (JAEA 1998, 2008). We might also build floating processing facilities in order to reduce the transportation costs. On the other hand, the calculation refers only to the fuel expenditures. To that, we need to all the costs for the infrastructure, for the chemicals used in elution, for the energy needed for recovering the species of interest and so on. We need also to consider that the membranes are synthesized starting from crude oil. Since there are no data available for how long a membrane could last in operation, we can't calculate how much oil would be needed, but surely it would not be negligible (see note 3 for an attempt of calculating this value).

We can conclude that there is a high risk that uranium extraction from seawater in these conditions would have an EROEI smaller than one. Very likely, it would be too low to be interesting. In practice, nobody will provide the huge financial resources needed to embark in such a task while that uncertainty remains. Moreover, even if it could be proven that the process has an acceptable energy return, investors are not likely to appear when they can't ignore that, at any moment, the development of an efficient fast breeder reactor would make their huge investments worthless. So, the best bet for the nuclear industry to face the uranium supply crisis is to stop dreaming about extracting uranium from the sea and concentrate on developing more efficient reactors.

4. Lithium and the others

The case of uranium gave us the tools that we need for the evaluation of the perspective of extraction of all the other elements. First of all, we should consider lithium, which is more abundant than uranium in the sea and that could also be used as an energy source. The 6-Li isotope can be transformed into an isotope of hydrogen, tritium, which could be the fuel of a future generation of fusion reactors.

Fasel and Tran (2005) estimate that a water-cooled lithium–lead breeder blanket reactor of 1.5 GWe power will need 787 tonnes of lithium per year. This reactor could produce 12 TWh of energy per year. From the data of table 2, we see that for producing 800 tons of lithium we need to process 4E+9 tons of seawater. In other words the "energy density" of seawater in terms of fusion plants would be about 3 kWh/ton, more than an order of magnitude larger than that of uranium (1E-1 kWh/ton).

Now, if efficient selective membranes for lithium adsorption can be developed, the energies involved in extraction would likely be about the same as for uranium, but we would need ten times less water for the same amount of lithium, hence ten times less energy. Extraction by active pumping would still be very uncertain in terms of EROEI, but with submerged membranes the task appears possible without destroying the North Sea or damming the equivalent of dozens of Straits of Gibraltar. Still, it would be a huge task and its feasibility remains uncertain. However, Fasel and Tran (2005) also mention the possibility of more efficient ways of using lithium in fusion reactors. So, we can conclude that the extraction of lithium as nuclear fuel from seawater cannot be proven to be feasible in terms of energy return, but it is nevertheless a process worth investigating.

Lithium may be considered also outside its possible role as nuclear fuel. Lithium is an essential element for the new generation of batteries used in road vehicles. Tahil (2006) studied the availability of mineral lithium if we were to substitute the present vehicle fleet based on reciprocating engines with vehicles based on lithium batteries. He concluded that we would face a lithium shortage if the number of vehicles were to keep growing as it has been doing so far. This is not a problem for the near or medium term future, nevertheless it could become serious one day. From a look to table 2 we see if we were to get the present lithium mineral production by filtering ocean water through a membrane, we'd need around 1.5E+3 TWh which is 10% or the present world production of electric power. It is a very large amount but not an unconceivable one. Using submerged membranes, we would be able to substantially reduce that amount of energy, perhaps of one order of magnitude. However, according to Tahil (2006), we would need to step up lithium production of approximately a factor of ten if we were to keep the present trends of growth in the number of road vehicles. That is clearly impossible using lithium extracted from seawater, at least as long as we rely on the present energy sources. However, it is not impossible that seawater could be one day a significant source of lithium for vehicle batteries, provided that lithium is recycled and vehicles are built in such a way to be lighter and more efficient.

For all the other elements listed in table 1, extraction from seawater seems to be impossible or, at least, extremely difficult. Consider copper as an example. The total amount that exists in the oceans is about 50 times the current yearly production (see table 2). So, in 50 years we would run out of copper from seawater, even if we were able to filter all the water in the planet's oceans. But that is unthinkable, of course. Similar considerations hold for most metals of technological interest. The old dream of fishing gold from the sea remains just that: a dream.

5. Conclusion

Perhaps, one day, we might develop futuristic robotic facilities anchored to the deep sea floor. These machines would be powered by uranium extracted from seawater and would use marine plankton to manufacture organic "tentacles" for adsorbing mineral ions. Processing would be made in place and the recovered metals would be shipped to the surface in neat packages. But that looks like a dream of the 1950s, on a par with atomic planes and weekends on the Moon for the whole family. With the possible exception of lithium, the best we can conceive today is that mining the oceans could produce only truly "homeopathic" amounts of minerals, thousands of times lower than the presently produced amounts. In today's industrial system, such amounts would be useless. This result is true also for uranium, where extraction from seawater can't be seen as a solution for the present shortage of mineral uranium.

Adding together very large volumes of low concentration mineral resources easily leads to optimistic estimates of availability "when the market price will be right". But this optimism is misplaced. Eventually, it is the paradigm of the "universal mining machine" (Bardi 2008) that rules. It is not the absolute amount of a mineral resource that counts but, rather, its concentration. Extracting from low concentration resources, no matter whether dissolved in seawater or in the earth's crust, is so expensive in terms of the energy needed that it is beyond our possibilities for the present and for the foreseeable future.

_______________________________________________________________________

- Acknowledgement: I wish to thank Pietro Cambi and Joe Doves for their comments and suggestions about the energy involved in desalination.

- Notes

(1) data sources for the tables : seawater elements concentration from J Floor Anthoni (2000, 2006) www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm. Oceanic abundance calculated assuming a total ocean volume of 1.3E9 cubic km. Mineral reserves are from USGS 2007 mineral commodities summary (http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/) except for uranium reserves which are from Energy Watch Group (www.lbst.de/publications/studies__e/2006/EWG-paper_1-06_Uranium-Resource...). All reserves are in terms of the pure element, except for Aluminium, iron, and titanium, given in terms of oxides.

(2) Comparison of the energy density of seawater in terms of fissionable uranium and as source of energy for underwater turbines . A strong sea current may move at speed of a few m/sec. Let's consider a representative speed of 4 m/sec and calculate the energy as 1/2mv^2. In this case, one ton of water would carry about 2E-3kWh, much smaller than the value calculated before in terms of uranium content (ca. 1E-1 kWh/ton). However, an underwater turbine could well have a better EROEI than the complex process of uranium extraction from seawater and utilization in a fission power plant.

(3) Tentative calculation of the energy involved in manufacturing membranes for uranium extraction . From the only work published in the international scientific literature (Seko 2003) we can infer that we need about 300 Kg of membrane per kg of uranium extracted per year. Trying an educated guess on the basis of the paper by Vernon and Shah (1983) we might assume that repeated immersions of the membrane would degrade its performance and generate the need for replacing it approximately every year. A Russian site http://npc.sarov.ru/english/digest/132004/appendix8.html says that the membrane can be "assumed" to be usable 20 times before it has to be discarded. If this is the case, it can be used for about one year and a half. Taking one year as the lifetime of the membrane, we would need to synthesize about 300 kg of activated fiber per year. Assuming an overall yield of 30% (again, an educated guess) for the synthesis process, we see that we need about one ton of crude oil in order to extract 1 kg of uranium per year. Since crude oil has an energy content of about 12 kWh/kg, we would be using some 12 MWh that, used in a high efficiency combined cycle gas turbine would produce about 6 MWh of electric power. One kg of uranium in a nuclear fission plant can generate about 40 MWh of electric power and, therefore, the process could have a reasonable EROEI of about 7. However, note also that, in order to obtain sufficient fiber for supplying enough uranium for the production of the total of the electric energy today, we'd need about 2-3 billion barrels of oil per year. This is a small amount compared to the present production (more than 30 billion barrels per year) but not negligible and would become more and more important as oil production dwindles down because of depletion.

References

Bardi U., Pagani, M., 2007, "Peak Minerals" http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3086

Bardi U., 2008 "The Universal Mining Machine" http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3451

Busch, M. Mickols, B, "Economics of desalination— reducing costs by lowering energy use" Water and wastewater international, http://www.pennnet.com/display_article/208957/20/ARTCL/none/none/1/Econo...

Dittmar M., 2007, "The Nuclear Energy Option facts and fantasies", Proceedings of the ASPO-6 conference, Cork, Ireland.
www.aspo-ireland.org/contentfiles/ASPO6/3-2_APSO6_MDittmar.pdf

FAO 2005 http://www.earth-policy.org/Indicators/Fish/2005.htm

FAO 2008, http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0699e/A0699E08.htm.

Fasel, D., Tran. M.Q., 2005, Availability of lithium in the context of future D–T fusion reactors. Fusion Engineering and Design 75–79 pp. 1163–1168

Floor Anthoni, J., (2000, 2006) Oceanic abundance of elements, www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm.

JAEA 1998 Development of the Adsorbent at the Takasaki Research Laboratory http://www.jaea.go.jp/jaeri/english/press/980526/ref01.html

JAEA, 2006 "Confirming Cost Estimations of Uranium Collection from Seawater" JAEA R&D Review, http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/2006/4_5.html

Mitchell, C. and Cleveland C.J., 1993. "Resource scarcity, energy use and environmental impact: A case study of the New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA, fisheries. Journalof Environmental Management, volume 17, Number 3 / May, 1993, p. 305

Nebbia, G., 1970, "L'estrazione di Uranio dall'acqua di mare"
http://www.aspoitalia.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&...

OPOCE (Office for official publications of the european communities) 2000. Environmental signals, http://reports.eea.europa.eu/signals-2000/en/page017.html

Schwochau, K., 1984, "Extraction of Metals from Sea Water", Springer series "Topics in Current Chemistry" vol 124. http://www.springerlink.com/content/y621101m3567jku1/

Seko N., Katakai A., Hasegawa H., Tamada M., Kasai N., Takeda H., Sugo T., Saito K. 2003, "Aquaculture of Uranium in Seawater by a Fabric-Adsorbent Submerged System" Nuclear Energy
Volume 144 · Number 2 · November 2003 · Pages 274-278

Tamada, M.; Seko, N.; Kasai, N.; Shimizu, T., 2005
Synthesis and practical scale system of braid adsorbent for uranium recovery from seawater
FAPIG (169), p.3-12(2005) ; (JAEA-J 00045)

Tahil, W, 2006, "The Trouble with Lithium Implications of Future PHEV Production for Lithium demand" http://tyler.blogware.com/lithium_shortage.pdf

Vernon, F., and Shah T., 1983, "The extraction of uranium from seawater by poly(amidoxime)/poly(hydroxamic acid) resins and fibre Reactive Polymers, Ion Exchangers, Sorbents Volume 1, Issue 4, October 1983, Pages 301-308

WNA, World Nuclear Association, 2007, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf16.html.

Ugo Bardi's electric scooter, here driven by Ms. Donata Bardi, aka "the mad scientist's daughter"
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After three years of use, I have just passed the 10,000 km mark on my electric scooter, or about 6,000 miles. Not bad for a small scooter of this kind. I have always been thinking that electric vehicles are an answer to peak oil; not the definitive answer, of course, but at least a way to maintain some mobility on roads in the years that will come. Electric vehicles are a technology that exists and that works. So, for the past few years I have been testing the idea in practice.

So, let me give you some data about this experience. First of all, about the scooter itself. It is the "Lepton" model made in Italy by a company named "Oxygen". It has a rated power of 1500 W, maximum speed (electronically regulated) of 45 km/h and a nominal range of 40 km. It is not on sale any more for private users, although it is still manufactured in a version for commercial transportation. Now you can find equivalent Chinese scooters that sell for about 2000 Euros. I think that the Lepton is much better than this new generation; but, in general, these small motorcycles are very similar in terms of performance and construction.

I have used the Lepton consistently for commuting from home to office. About 30 km round trip on hilly roads. According to the measurements I performed, the "mileage" of the scooter is of about 3kWh per 100 km. At the present prices of electricity in Italy, that is less than one eurocent per km. For me, it is actually zero, since I have photovoltaic panels on my roof that produce more than enough to recharge my scooter. In comparison, an equivalent gasoline powered scooter may need 3-4 liters of gasoline to run for 100 km. A liter of gasoline is about 10 kWh, so that the conventional vehicle is about 10 times less efficient than the electric one (!). Also, about ten times more expensive.

Those are, of course, just the raw energy costs. Battery replacement costs are higher. In my case, I used NiZn batteries, rather than the traditional lead acid ones. The experience has been moderately positive. NiZn batteries are lighter than lead ones and charge in about 1/3 of the time. However, after 10,000 km, the batteries show clear signs of fatigue and need to be replaced. Right now, I can't make the whole 30 km round trip from home to office on a single charge. I have to recharge at a public charge point that - fortunately - exists at a few hundred meters from my office. Users of lead batteries report longer battery lives, although some had bad experiences, too. In terms of cost, if I had to buy now a set of lead batteries I should pay something like 500 euros. That would correspond to 5 eurocents per km. But I am moving to lithium batteries, more expensive, but should really be a quantum jump in terms of range and reliability.

There are other cost advantages of my electric motorcycle. I can pay about half of the regular insurance cost because of a special contract that some companies offer to electric vehicles. Then, for five years I don't have to pay government vehicle taxes. In addition, the maintenance of an electric vehicle is really minimal. In 10,000 km the only maintenance I had to do was to lubricate the start button. These things are really sturdy.

But the idea of using electric vehicles is not so much to save money (although you can). The idea is to see if it is possible to move on roads without using oil derived fuels. Of course, an electric vehicle alone is not enough. If you want to be free from carbon based fuels, you also need PV panels or other sources of renewable energy to recharge your vehicle. But it is possible to do that with currently existing technology and PV panels are not beyond the means of someone who lives with the salary of a government employee, as I do. Think how things would change if a significant fraction of the currently running vehicles were battery powered. The next fuel shortage would not hit us so hard as we expect it will.

Unfortunately, I am also disappointed by my experience in the sense that I found very few followers. Over three years, I showed my scooter on my Italian blog, I took it to meetings and conferences, at ASPO-5 in 2006 in Pisa I used the little red thing everyday and all those attending saw it. But only my nephew and one of my coworkers actually followed my example.

All right, I understand that it has a short range, but if it is enough to go from home to work and back, does it matter? And, yes, I know that it takes a long time to recharge it. But if you plan ahead, what is the problem? Sure, I know that you can't use it to go visit your aunt who lives in another city; but is it really so crucial? Yes, it is a little more expensive, but in the long run, you save money. And if it doesn't make any noise it doesn't mean that it doesn't run.

But there is nothing to do. Most people just can't believe that an electric vehicle is a "real" vehicle. They much prefer to dream about hydrogen vehicles that, after all, are supposed to have a proper "fuel" and may even produce the appropriate noise. It is an entrenched attitude that seems to make us believe that if it doesn't burn, it is not really energy.

Well, what can I say? Here is a picture of the odometer that proves that I ran 10000 km with a vehicle without burning anything. It can be done. Try it.

Give also a look to our retrofitted Fiat 500, the post peak car . You can see it also at the the eurozev site

19th century whaling is today one of the best examples we have of a complete cycle of exploitation of a natural resource.

The production curves of whale oil and whale bone in the United States in 19th century (from "History of the American whale fishery" by A. Starbuck, 1878). Both show a clear bell shaped Hubbert's curve. Click to enlarge.

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A few years ago, I appeared in TV for the first time in my life. Oil had just passed 38 dollars per barrel and I was invited to speak in a national financial channel as the president of the newly formed Italian section of ASPO. When I said that I expected oil to rise well over 40 $/bl soon, everyone in the TV studio looked at me as if I had just said something very funny. All the other experts there hastened to contradict me and said that 38 $ per barrel was just a spike, speculation, and that prices would soon go back to "normal."

Seen in retrospect, it was an easy guess that oil prices had to rise. You only had to know a little about Hubbert's theory. As I am writing these notes, oil prices stand at around 120 dollars per barrel and may well keep rising. But for how long? The problem with Hubbert's model is that it is good for predicting production, but it tells you nothing about prices.

There are all sorts of economic models that attempt to predict prices, but their record is very poor. So, maybe the answer can be found in historical examples. If we can find a resource that has peaked and declined to zero or near zero production in the past, then its historical prices could give us some idea of what to expect today for oil.

There are many resources that have peaked and declined at the regional level; crude oil in the United States is a good example. But the price of US oil doesn't depend only on US production; it is affected by imports from other regions of the world. So that's not useful for understanding price trends at the global level. What we are looking for is a global resource that has peaked worldwide or, at least, in an economically isolated region.

After much search, the best example that I could find is not that of a mineral resource but of a biological one: whaling in 19th century. Whales are, of course, a renewable resource but if they are hunted much faster than they can reproduce, they behave as a non renewable resource; just like oil. We have good data about whaling compiled in books such as Alexander Starbuck's "History of the American whale fishery" (1878). In Starbuck's times there was no such thing as a "global market" for whale products. But the reach of the whaling ships was worldwide and the effects of whale depletion were felt in the same way by all markets in the world. So, we can take the prices reported by Starbuck as directly affected by the behavior of the production curve.

So, here are the results for the two products of whaling; whale oil and "whale bone". Whale oil was used as fuel for lamps, whale bone was a stiffener for ladies' clothes, as were fashionable in 19th century.


Whale oil production and prices (adjusted for inflation) according to Starbuck's data.

Whale bone production and whale oil prices (adjusted for inflation) according to Starbuck's data.

The results are clear: whaling did follow a Hubbert style "bell shaped curve", approximated in the graphs with a simple Gaussian. Whales did behave like a non renewable resource and some studies say that at the end of the 19th century hunting cycle there remained in the oceans only about 50 females of the main species being hunted: right whales.

Now, looking at the historical prices, we see an increase in the vicinity of the peak for both whale oil and whale bone. For whale oil we see a spike after the peak, for whale bone the trend is smoother. In both cases, the smoothed growth is nearly exponential. We can see this exponential trend in the smoothed data.


Smoothed whale bone and whale oil prices (adjusted for inflation).

It seems that what we are seeing now for crude oil parallels the historical data for whale oil and whale bone. There are also differences; for instance the prices of whale oil didn't rise so much as crude oil has been doing lately. On the average, for whale oil we see a doubling of the price, followed by a plateau. For whale bone, we see a much larger increase, more than a factor of 10 from the beginning to the end of the whaling cycle. This increase is comparable to what we are seeing today for crude oil.

There is a reasonable explanation for these differences. First of all, neither whale oil nor whale bone were so crucial for life in 19th century as crude oil is today for us. There were alternative fuels for lamps: animal fat or vegetable oil, a little more expensive and considered as inferior products; but usable. Then, starting in the 1870s, crude oil started to be commonly available as lamp fuel. It probably had an effect in keeping down the price of whale oil. For whale bone, instead, a replacement didn't really exist except for steel, which was probably much more expensive during the period that we are considering. But stiffeners for ladies' clothes were hardly something that people couldn't live without.

In comparison, crude oil is such a basic commodity in our world that it is not surprising that prices have risen so steeply. Airlines, for instance, have no choice in between collapsing and buying oil at any price. For other activities, the conditions of the choice may not be so stark, but still we can't survive without oil. If the exponential rise of oil prices were to continue unabated for a few more years, we would be seeing some kind of demand destruction, indeed.

But the historical data for whaling tell us that an exponential rise of the prices is not the only feature of the post-peak market. The prominent feature is, rather, the presence of very strong price oscillations. We can attribute these oscillations to a general characteristic of systems dominated by feedback and time delays. Prices are supposed to mediate between offer and demand, but tend to overcorrect on one side or another. The result is an alternance of demand destruction (high prices) and offer destruction (low prices).

What we are seeing at present with crude oil is, most likely, one of these price spikes. Eventually, it will overdo its job of curbing demand and turn into a price collapse. We can imagine how, in the collapsing phase, everyone will start screaming that the "oil crisis" of the first decades of 21st century was just a hoax, just as it was said for the crisis of the 1970s. Then, a new upward spike will start.

Here, too, the history of whaling can teach us something in terms of the difficulty that people have in understanding depletion. In Starbuck's book, we never find mention that whales had become scarce. On the contrary, the decline of the catch was attributed to such factors as the whales' "shyness" and the declining "character of the men engaged". Starbuck seems to think that the crisis of the whaling industry of his times can be solved by means of governmental subsidies. Some things never change.

In the end, the history of whaling tells us that what is happening now to crude oil shouldn't have taken us by surprise. The future can never be exactly predicted but, at least, it can be understood from the lessons of the past. One of these lessons, however, seems to be that we never seem to be able to learn from the past.

__________________________________________

I reported the results of this study on whaling for the first time at the ASPO conference in Lisbon in 2005. Later on, I published a complete paper in "Energy Prices and Resource Depletion: Lessons from the Case of Whaling in the Nineteenth Century" by Ugo Bardi, Energy Sources part b. Volume 2, Issue 3 July 2007 , pages 297 - 304. You can find it on line here

If you like to play with Starbuck's data, here is the complete set .

The logo of the ASPOItaly-2 conference. It shows, superimposed to the classic ASPO peak, the mythical "post peak car", the battery powered, retrofitted Fiat 500

Conference report, many links and some pictures below the fold.

[break]

The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference's language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the "post peak car", the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don't have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (http://www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

_________________________________________

Visit ASPO Italy (mainly in Italian) or the ASPO Italy Blog (all in Italian).

ASPO Italy members have been active in writing guest posts for The Oil Drum. Here is a list:

Peak Minerals by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani

The Post Peak car by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi.

Peak Water in Saudi Arabia by Ugo Bardi.

Peak Oil and the limits to growth by Ugo Bardi

France and Italy: is nuclear energy the way to energy independence? by Eugenio Saraceno

Cassandra's curse by Ugo Bardi

An extended abstract of Euan's talk is available here (in Italian) and a pdf of the abstract in English can be downloaded from the TOD server.

The logo of the ASPOItaly-2 conference. It shows, superimposed to the classic ASPO peak, the mythical "post peak car", the battery powered, retrofitted Fiat 500

Conference report, many links and some pictures below the fold.

[break]

The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference's language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the "post peak car", the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don't have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (http://www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

_________________________________________

Visit ASPO Italy (mainly in Italian) or the ASPO Italy Blog (all in Italian).

ASPO Italy members have been active in writing guest posts for The Oil Drum. Here is a list:

Peak Minerals by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani

The Post Peak car by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi.

Peak Water in Saudi Arabia by Ugo Bardi.

Peak Oil and the limits to growth by Ugo Bardi

France and Italy: is nuclear energy the way to energy independence? by Eugenio Saraceno

Cassandra's curse by Ugo Bardi

An extended abstract of Euan's talk is available here (in Italian) and a pdf of the abstract in English can be downloaded from the TOD server.

The logo of the ASPOItaly-2 conference. It shows, superimposed to the classic ASPO peak, the mythical "post peak car", the battery powered, retrofitted Fiat 500

[break]

The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference's language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the "post peak car", the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don't have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (http://www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

_________________________________________

Visit ASPO Italy (mainly in Italian) or the ASPO Italy Blog (all in Italian).

ASPO Italy members have been active in writing guest posts for The Oil Drum. Here is a list:

Peak Minerals by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani

The Post Peak car by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi.

Peak Water in Saudi Arabia by Ugo Bardi.

Peak Oil and the limits to growth by Ugo Bardi

France and Italy: is nuclear energy the way to energy independence? by Eugenio Saraceno

Cassandra's curse by Ugo Bardi

An extended abstract of Euan's talk is available here (in Italian) and a pdf of the abstract in English can be downloaded from the TOD server.

The logo of the ASPOItaly-2 conference. It shows, superimposed to the classic ASPO peak, the mythical "post peak car", the battery powered, retrofitted Fiat 500

[break]

The second national conference of the Italian section of ASPO, ASPO-Italy, was held in Torino on May 3rd. Among the speakers, many were well known to readers of TOD. We had Euan Mearns as guest of honor, but also Ugo Bardi, Pietro Cambi, Marco Pagani and Eugenio Saraceno; all of them have signed posts on The Oil Drum.

The conference's language was mainly Italian. It is a general problem: a lot of good work on depletion is being done in many non-English speaking countries. However, translations are expensive and time consuming; so the interaction with the rest of the world is limited. The best that I can do here is summarizing what was said so that you can have a feeling of what is being done in Italy and how the situation is here.

First, something about ASPO-Italy. It is not so much geology-centered as ASPO international is. It is mostly a group of technology-minded people, several are specialists in renewable energy. They have quickly understood the question of the peak and they have derived from it a sensation of urgency that something is to be done, and fast. It was for this reason that we chose as logo of the conference not just the traditional ASPO peak, but also the "post peak car", the retrofitted, battery powered, Fiat 500 created by Pietro Cambi. This little car has become a sort of symbol of the emphasis of ASPO-Italy for solutions.

ASPOItaly-2 was perhaps the first post-peak ASPO conference in the world. Recognizing that crude oil may be already in decline, we chose to focus on natural gas with the help of Euan Mearns, from The Oil Drum, who spoke about the security of European gas supply. I think I don't have to say that the picture that emerged out of the several talks on depletion was not optimistic. The second part of the conference was dedicated to solutions, with a presentation on what we might call the Italian answer to peak oil: high altitude wind power (http://www.kitegen.com) developed by Massimo Ippolito. It is a very promising idea but still in the early prototyping stage.

How about impact? Well, we had some but, despite crude at 120 $/barrel, peak oil is not mainstream news in Italy. We were interviewed in TV, something appeared in the newspapers, something more will appear in the coming days. On the whole, however, in Italy people are ignoring peak oil and everything that has to do with resource depletion; just as the rest of the world is doing. The day after the conference, going back home, we saw the A1 highway packed with cars: a long parking lot: hundreds of kilometers. It should not be a surprise: if we are at the production peak it is the historical moment of the largest amount of oil available. The point is for how long.

But it may well be that Italy will be the first industrialized country in the world to experience peak oil for real. Economically weak, strongly dependent on fossil fuels, Italy, despite being known as the "Sun Country", has done nothing exploit renewable energy to weaken her addiction to oil. Italy may well be the miners' canary of peak oil. The national carrier, Alitalia, may be the first major airline in the world to go bankrupt because of high oil prices. Not just Alitalia, but the whole country may go bankrupt if a major supply crisis arrives. It will be an interesting story; stay tuned!

_________________________________________

The site of ASPOItaly is at http://www.aspoitalia.net. It is mostly in Italian, but it has a small section in English. The blog of the association is at www.aspoitalia.blogspot.it, all in Italian

Here is a list of some of the posts that have appeared on TOD written by members of ASPO-Italy

"Peak Minerals", by Ugo Bardi and Marco Pagani
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3086

"The Post Peak car" by Ugo Bardi and Pietro Cambi. (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3275)

"Peak Water in Saudi Arabia", by Ugo Bardi
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3520

"Peak Oil and the limits to growth", by Ugo Bardi
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3550

"France and Italy: is nuclear energy the way to energy independence?" by Eugenio Saraceno
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3678

"Cassandra's curse" by Ugo Bardi
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3551

This is a guest post by Eugenio Saraceno, member of ASPO-Italy and consultant for energy sources management.

<A href="//www.theoildrum.com/files/626px-Nuclear_plants_map_France.jpg
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France's nuclear power plants produce almost 80% of the nation's electricity. In contrast, nearby Italy has no nuclear plant in operation.

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One of the main arguments of the present debate on energy is whether a nuclear energy program should be restarted or not. We can use the cases of Italy and France as a way for evaluating whether it is a good idea for a non nuclear country to get nuclear plants.

Italy is probably the only country in the world that has dismantled by law the existing nuclear plants. It was the result of a refer