A SERIOUS PROBLEM

Before twenty-five years, Humanity will run out of oil

the salvation of civilization by the sun

The famous Svante Arrhenius, one of the greatest contemporaries, director of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm, recently gave a few lectures at the University of Paris, one of which is devoted to “World Sources of Energy”, which is of direct interest to us.
On what is our current and high civilization based, asks Arrhenius? The improvement of machines has revolutionized the industry. which amounts to saying, adds the Swedish scholar, that the use of coal and oil is the basis of our material situation, itself necessary for our industrial progress. And so the question arises: will fossil fuels be consumed in a few thousand years? If this were the case, will we find any compensation that could save our civilization? This question is essentially pressing. Consumption of coal before the war doubled in a few years, with the result that we have consumed as much fossil coal in ten years as man has burned in all the past time. The development has been explosive, says Arrhenius, and we are heading towards catastrophe. This explosive progress is the characteristic sign of industrialism. It is not limited to the use of coal, but it extends to all raw materials: iron, aluminum, nitrates, etc.
As early as 1910, the geological congress in Stockholm was forced to express serious words of warning against the danger for terrestrial humanity of rapidly exhausting its iron. Three years later, the Geological Congress of Canada, dealing with coal, was even more pessimistic, because, if the used iron can partly give rise to recovery, the consumed coal does not allow any subsequent reconstitution of energy . It is considered that all of the remaining coal deposits correspond to 6,000 times the annual production figure; we should not conclude that we have coal for 6,000 years, because, on the one hand, consumption is increasing rapidly and, on the other, the numerous deposits at 1,800 meters are at a temperature of 70 degrees, which would not allow the stay of minors.
This for our entire globe. When we localize the issue, some cases seem serious. That of England, for example: it is considered certain that it will, at present, have exhausted its deposits in less than a century. And England cannot even be thrifty or prohibit the export of its coal, because if it did so, the English merchant navy would not have the best freight, and British maritime supremacy would be over. Moreover, for other reasons no less serious, the country across the Channel has already begun its descent of the slide. The situation in the United States is infinitely better; they would have coal for 1,500 years at the current rate, but consumption increases rapidly from one year to the next. The same is true in the oil sector. Despite the powerful sources of States, they are no longer satisfied with their own resources; They import Canadian and Mexican oil and have purchased South American deposits to build up a stock for the future. The United States currently consumes 65 percent of the oil used; they claim to already reserve 82 percent of it for themselves, leaving less than a fifth available to the rest of the world. And Arrhenius added melancholy: “It is not likely that we will make this concession to the United States, but that there will be serious disputes in the future to resolve this difficult question. »
In any case, at the increasing rate of annual consumption that we must record, oil will be exhausted in 60 years; from the local point of view, the best authorities agree in recognizing that the sources of oil in the United States will undoubtedly be exhausted before 1940, and it is anticipated that it will be necessary, even urgently, to regulate the consumption of the various countries by international treaties, especially because of the great military importance of oil. Alas! we are not close to the last war!
What to do in these conditions? and what will become of humanity. Energy sources. are solar radiation, the force of tides or winds, etc., but their use is still in its infancy. On the other hand, “white coal” (hydraulic power) has great value: France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway have indisputable superiority here, in the old world, but Europe, as a whole, is poor. America is rich, all the more reason to see it as the center of future civilization, and Africa is no less well divided. However, even if we could use all the hydraulic power, all the white coal in the world, they would hardly replace more than half of the annual consumption of fossil fuels, coal and oil. And the industry would then be transferred to the less accessible regions of Asia, Africa and America.
It is the sun that must save us. If we represent, in fact, by 100 the solar radiation on the earth's surface, the total energy of fossil coal and oil represents only 7. We thus see that the two richest sources of energy, those which could provide to our needs for heat and strength are the energies of the winds and solar radiation itself. They have the disadvantage of being scattered across the entire surface of the globe and not concentrated like coal or oil deposits, a concentration which gives them great superiority of use.
But solar radiation, if we can use it, will bring about a prodigious economic resolution. France must work on it, because of its colossal African empire. It was a Frenchman, Mouchot, who was the first to operate a small steam engine by concentrating solar rays on a boiler. Following the same principle, an American engineer, Shuman, mounted in recent years a large number of gigantic cylindrical-parabolic reflectors, the boiler being on the main focal line, even for a time it provided electrical energy to the city of Cairo. Its machines have just been transported to Aswan, where they will encounter higher temperatures. A very practical solution is still missing. We will find her. If this can be achieved, adds Arrhenius, the cradles of human civilization will become, once again, the seat of a civilization of primary importance for humankind.

C. Faroux.