Preface. This is a long preface followed by two articles about how supply chains and complex tractors may be affected by energy shortages and consequent supply chain failures in the future.Which we’re already seeing as massive numbers of ships sit offshore waiting to be unloaded, and a shortage of truckers to deliver goods when they do arrive.
Supply chain failures will only get worse, affecting food supply and making the prediction of 3 billion more people by 2050 unlikely. We are running out of time to replace fossil fuels with something else that is unknown and definitely not commercial for transportation, manufacturing and other essential services and products. Even the electric grid needs natural gas to stay up, no matter how many wind turbines or solar panels are built (Friedemann 2016).
The reason time is running out is that global conventional oil, where 90% of our petroleum comes from, peaked in 2008 (EIA 2018 page 45), and world oil production of both conventional and unconventional oil in 2018 (EIA 2020).
In the unlikely event you don’t know why this is scary, consider that we are alive today thanks to heavy-duty transportation, which runs almost exclusively on diesel, four billion of us are alive due to finite natural gas derived fertilizer, 500,000 products are made out of fossil fuels, and much of our essential manufacturing (cement, steel, metals, ceramics, glass, microchips) depend on the high heat of fossil fuels. There is not much time to come up with processes to electrify or use hydrogen to replace fossil fuels, which don’t exist yet, let alone rebuild trillions of dollars of infrastructure and a new unknown energy distribution system, triple the electric grid transmission system, and replace hundreds of millions of vehicles and equipment to run on “something else” (Friedemann 2021).
So how can new wind turbines and solar panels be made? They are entirely dependent on these industries which depend on fossil fuels for every step of their life cycle. The electricity they and nuclear generate doesn’t power heavy-duty trucks (tractors, harvesters, long-haul, mining, logging), locomotives, ships, airplanes, cement, steel, and so on.
As I write this in October of 2021, the economy has come rip-roaring back. But for how long? A looming energy crisis is likely as gasoline and natural gas prices keep increasing. Gasoline in my area is $4.69 today. But that won’t last — 11 of the past 12 recessions have been due to high energy prices (Hamilton 2013). Nor does it appear that Saudi Arabia will be able to increase production enough to lower oil prices (Watkins 2021).
A recession in turn is likely to drive businesses bankrupt, breaking essential supply chains. I’d nominate microchips to be the first to fail. They are also very vulnerable to an energy crisis since fabrication plants have hundreds of long supply chains, an incredibly high amount of purity required for air, water, gases, and chemicals — which is highly energy intensive to accomplish, and chip makers can’t afford to have power outages because they need reliable electricity for months around the clock.
As microchip production fails, there goes the rest of civilization, of oil and natural gas drilling equipment, solar panels, wind turbines, computers, and vehicles, and even as really simple gadgets like toasters. To give you an idea of how vulnerable they are, here’s a summary of “The Fragility of Microchips“:
Creating a chip begins by cutting a thin 12-inch slice, called a wafer, from a 99.9999999% pure silicon crystal, one of the purest materials on earth. Wafers require such a high degree of perfection — particles 500 times smaller than a human hair can cause defects — that even a missing atom can cause unwanted current leakage and other problems in manufacturing later on. Consequently, sometimes only 20% make it to the end. Traveling particles are insidious, and can cause a chip to malfunction, perform poorly, more slowly, or die later on. Since typical city air has 5 million particles per cubic foot but these processes require a maximum of 1 particle per square cubic foot, building chip fabrication plants is expensive, $10 billion dollars or more. City water, chemicals, and gases need to be 99.999999% or more pure, requiring energy intense and extensive complex treatments.
It’s even more complex than that though, as shown in “How are Microchips Made?”.
And their need for reliable electricity (chips can take 4 months to make) is not going to be possible in an electric grid dependent on unreliable wind and solar power without the backup storage that natural gas and coal provide now. The only energy storage battery for which there are enough materials on earth for just 12 hours of world electricity are Sodium Sulfur (NaS) batteries (Barnhart 2013), and you’d need at least four weeks of storage due to the seasonality of wind and solar. Yet only lithium energy storage batteries are being made commercially, competing with electric vehicles for limited amounts of lithium. Nor can we scale up pumped hydro or compressed air energy storage enough to store electricity (see energy storage posts for details).
Wafer fabrication for a chip can require several thousand steps using many kinds of machines, and if any of these need a new part that can’t be obtained, or a replacement bought, then then manufacturing stops. Here are just a few of the kinds of equipment needed: high-temperature diffusion furnaces, wet cleaning stations, dry plasma etchers, ion implanters, rapid thermal processors, vacuum pumps, fast flow controllers, residual gas analyzers, plasma glow dischargers, vertical furnaces, optical pyrometers, and many more.
The EROI of wind and solar don’t matter since they depend on fossil fuels for every step of their life cycle, especially for transportation, manufacturing, and products made out of fossil feedstocks.
On top of which the supply chains they and other technology depend on will break. In fact they have been for decades, we just haven’t noticed. Take for example the tractors provided by NGOs to farmers in poor nations. Years later the tractor breaks and rusts in the field due to lack of a part or mechanical know how.
The developed world is on the verge of these problems as well. Take tractors for instance. Farmers in the U.S. and elsewhere take pride in their self-reliance. The can get parts and fix their own tractors without help. But not any longer. On modern tractors the computer software that squeezes a bit more profit by precise planting, harvesting, and application of water, fertilizer and pesticides is proprietary. And parts that can be replaced are so hard to get that farmers are buying second planters and other equipment just to get replacement parts.
Liebig’s law of the minimum will grow as energy declines, supply chains break and eventually cause widespread failures, much as Ben Franklin put it: “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”:
“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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Waldman P, Mulvany L (2021) Farmers Fight John Deere Over Who Gets to Fix an $800,000 Tractor. Bloomberg.com
There’s a grassroots campaign being waged by farmers to restore a fundamental right most people don’t realize they’ve lost—the right to repair their own farm equipment.
But tractor makers like $68 billion John-Deer, who sell over half of all farm machinery in the U.S. and a third sold world-wide, say farmers have no right to access the copyrighted software that controls every facet of today’s equipment, even to repair their own machines. That’s the exclusive domain of authorized dealerships, creating a monopoly and destroying the age-old culture self-reliance.
Tractors are insanely complex today. When the cab door is opened the computer onboard sends notice to the cloud using a cellular transmitter. It continues to transmit moisture and nitrogen levels in the soil, precisely calculate where to pout seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. With such real-time data, farmers can optimize when to plant and harvest crops and use less fertilizer and pesticides.
Meanwhile, these complicated tractors shut down at times due to a computer fault, and it can take technicians many hours to show up to do a software fix. On top of that, these tractors are vulnerable to cyberattacks – an enemy could shut down thousands of tractors right at harvest time for example. Or a geomagnetic storm could do enough damage to shut the tractor down. Yet letting farmers update the software is risky, a mistake could send a 20 ton tractor to careen into the farmhouse.
Weinraub M (2021) ‘Desperate for tires’ – Components shortage roils U.S. harvest. Reuters.
Manufacturing meltdowns are hitting the U.S. heartland, as the semiconductor shortages that have plagued equipment makers for months expand into other components. Supply chain woes now pose a threat to the U.S. food supply and farmers’ ability to get crops out of fields.
As harvest ends, we will see farmers at equipment auctions not for the machinery – but for parts,” Peterson said. “We’re already hearing from guys talking about buying a second planter or sprayer, just for parts.”
For some farmers, the shortages are forcing them to reuse – or repair – old parts. Access to steel, plastic, rubber and other raw materials has been scarce during the pandemic, and manufacturers are preparing for even more shocks after power shortages forced several Chinese smelters to cut production in recent weeks.
One pain point for dealerships is an industry-wide shortage of GPS receivers, which are used to run tractor guidance and data systems.
At Ag-Pro, the largest privately-owned Deere & Co dealership in North America, staff in Ohio have been digging out GPS units that date back to 2004. Until now, they were essentially worthless.
Equipment manufacturers are faced with a painful choice this harvest season: Send parts to factories to build new tractors and combines to sell to farmers or redirect those parts into the field to repair broken equipment for existing customers?
CNH estimates that supply chain constraints ranging from increases in freight to higher raw materials prices have cost the company $1 billion. That lag has forced the company to turn some factory parking lots into storage lots. At CNH’s combine plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, hundreds of unfinished combines sit outside, waiting for parts.
References
Barnhart C et al (2013) On the importance of reducing the energetic and material demands of electrical energy storage. Energy Environment Science 2013: 1083–1092
EIA (2020) International Energy Statistics. Petroleum and other liquids. Data Options. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Select crude oil including lease condensate to see data past 2017
Friedemann A (2016) When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. Springer.
Friedemann A (2021) Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy. Springer.
Hamilton, J.D. 2013. Historical Oil Shocks in Routledge handbook of major events of economic history. Routledge.
IEA (2018) International Energy Agency World Energy Outlook 2018, page 45, International Energy Agency.
Watkins S (2021) The Facts Behind Saudi Arabia’s Outrageous Oil Claims. oilprice.com
