As a species, we owe a lot to the humble combustion reaction. By some accounts, learning to handle fire was the evolutionary stepping stone towards the big-brained, straight-backed creatures that we are today. More recently, the industrial age could be just as easily recast as the age of combustion. Steam, coal, and gasoline powered the factories that rapidly expanded the definition of “the good life” to include clothes you didn’t make by hand, food that wasn’t prepared by you or someone you know, cars, computers, frequent air travel to the far corners of the world, and an inexhaustible library of audiovisual entertainment available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The industrial age started roughly in 1698, when Thomas Savery invented a commercial steam-powered water pump. He sold it to the king and to the Royal Society by way of a little booklet called The Miners Friend or, An Engine to Raise Water by Fire. It’s a short piece, illustrated with cherubic representations of the characters involved in the whole thing. Though the preferred materials have changed, the basic premise of the steam engine (differences in temperature could be used to do work) has remained the preeminent mechanism for generating electricity to this day.

In 1698 the idea that we could possible approach a time that combustion could be seen as wasteful seemed unreasonably distant. The entire world population in 1700 was roughly 600 million people! But in 2019, we’ve grown to more than 10x that number, and burning things for fuel seems old fashioned, at best. It’s unlikely that we would ever run out of things to burn, per se. Hydrocarbon fuels like coal, petroleum, and natural gas were called fossil fuels for many years, but recent discoveries in the solar system suggest these may not have the biological origin we used to think they had. The term has been on its way out since 2008, when NASA reported their spacecraft Cassini had discovered Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, was mostly hydrocarbon. In fact, the reserves estimated on Titan outstrip all known earth reserves.

What this means is that, despite the grim forecasts of peak oil, a moment in time where all known hydrocarbon reserves are tapped and begin a terminal decline, there’s almost no chance that we could run out. Weaning the world off of delicious combustion power is going to take a lot more than just allowing economics to run its course.

This is compounded by the fact that, although the growth rate of the world population has slowed, the population will still keep growing for some time. The forecast is that we’re going to add another three billion people to the world by the year 2100 - mostly in the developing world, places where education and birth control are difficult to access.

Most of these people will be born into a world that is still dependent on combusting fuel for doing work, with few cost-effective alternatives. They will be people for whom shoes have only recently been seen as a luxury. For the most part, they will live in places where it’s hot, where things can be very far away from each other. The hope is that their unique constellation of experiences will lead them to innovate unique approaches to sustainability. In the long-run, this is perfectly likely. However, the question is - what happens in the next twenty years as these countries go from developing to developed?

Let There Be Light

One of the main ways in which the world will change is through access to electricity. In places like Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan africa, at least two billion people will transition into an electrified existence over the course of the next hundred years.

Given what we’ve talked about earlier in this article, this process of electrification presents a problem that urgently needs to be addressed. Despite it being more than 300 years since we entered the industrial age, the market share of combustion alternatives take up a fraction of the whole pie. If you refuse to group ethanol-based biofuels in with renewables (since the problem is combustion, not running out), you’re left with only about 10% of the world running on non-combusting fuel sources.

One solution that has been proposed is carbon capture. In this condition, people continue to burn things to power their cars and generators, but the exhaust is filtered, the carbon dioxide saved and injected into the ground. It’s an idea that’s being championed by companies like Chevron… and says more about the margins of that industry than it does about feasibility. Global combustion results in 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide being released every year. The Gorgon plant would be able to capture 4 million tons of carbon emissions per year - which means 9,000 of these plants would need to be constructed in order to manage current levels of carbon emissions.

Technologists, like those who published a 2008 study in Science Magazine imagine a cyclic future, where hydrocarbons are still burned in the sorts of industries that demand them - Structural materials, long distance transport and shipping, but are sequestered after production so they don’t escape into the atmosphere.

On one hand, it’s an inspiring model of how it’s possible to provide an industrial solution to an industrial problem. In this model of a net zero-emissions industrial sector, carbon emissions are collected and buried, locked away for geologic timescales that are far beyond the window of a human lifetime. It’s a model that fits neatly into the narrative of industrial progress - the producing new technologies will be the answer for fixing the issues with existing technologies - but it fails to address the underlying problem, our human love of combustion.

Even more alarming is the fact that developing countries, the ones that are poised to start consuming just as the rest of the world is starting to slow down, can’t afford the extra layers of industrialization that are required for mitigating the impacts of increased consumption of resources. Their development fundamentally requires the kind of electricity production that we’ve come to take for granted, but methods for providing this kind of development at still scarce.

Atom and Eaves

Perhaps the best option that’s available for the developing world is the proliferation of thorium-based nuclear reactors. Thorium is less dangerous both from the meltdown standpoint - it’s less likely to produce a runaway thermonuclear reaction on meltdown - and because it’s harder to use in the production of a nuclear bomb.

Others suggest a stronger push towards renewable energy, subsidized by large conglomerates in developed countries, but this is a fundamentally uncomfortable proposition. The level of industrialization that’s necessary to manufacture, install, and maintain a renewable power grid is considerable - and due to the nascent nature of the technology, requires regular reinvestment in order to harvest sufficient electricity to provide stable power to the grid.

Early adoption works well in wealthy countries that have the financial structures that incentivize this kind of progress, but is much less fruitful in the developing world where large-scale infrastructure investment is still a long way off. Under these conditions it makes far more sense to invest in nuclear power.

So what prevents the change? Geopolitical maneuvering, industrial power plays, and a fear of nuclear energy. But while we argue about the cost-benefit analysis of thermonuclear reactors, developing countries with enormous populations continue to get their electricity the way they always have - by burning stuff. Lots of it.