Chapter 2 - What civilisation actually eats

The chemistry that "electrify everything" ignores

This is Chapter 2 in a series walking through the core arguments of my book, "The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can't Work - And What Can". Start with Chapter 1 here.

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IN CHAPTER 1, I showed you the non-negotiable physics that sits beneath the energy debate: gradient, energy density, and power density — the thermodynamic floor that no policy can repeal.

That was the physics. This is the chemistry. And the chemistry is worse.

The menu

There is a community of people who believe that humans can live on air and sunlight. They call themselves breatharians. They hold conferences, publish books, and maintain a sincere conviction that the human body does not require food. Periodically, one of them dies.

The proposal to run an industrial civilisation on electricity alone is the breatharian diet of energy policy. It begins with a grain of truth — electricity is marvellous for many things — and extends it into a fantasy: that if we simply generate enough clean electricity, we can replace every industrial process that currently depends on hydrocarbons. “Electrify everything” is a slogan, not an engineering plan.

To see why, look at the four materials civilisation actually eats.

Steel

Steel holds up almost every building you have ever entered, every bridge you have ever crossed, every vehicle you have ever ridden in. Making it requires heating iron ore to around 1,500°C in a blast furnace, using coke — derived from coal — as both the heat source and the chemical agent that strips oxygen from the ore. The carbon is not optional. Without it, the iron stays as rock. Global production: roughly 1.9 billion tons a year. Without steel, there are no cities, no railways, no ships, no surgical instruments, no wind turbines.

Cement

Cement is the binding agent in concrete, the most widely used material on Earth after water. Making it requires heating limestone and clay to about 1,450°C in a rotary kiln. But here’s the thing: the calcium carbonate in the limestone releases CO₂ as an intrinsic part of the chemical reaction — not because the kiln burns fossil fuel (though it does), but because the chemistry itself produces it. Even if you powered the kiln with clean electricity, roughly two-thirds of the CO₂ emissions would remain. Global production: roughly 4 billion tons a year. Without it, there are no foundations, no dams, no roads, no runways.

Ammonia

Ammonia is the basis of virtually all synthetic fertiliser, which sustains roughly half the world’s food supply. Making it involves stripping hydrogen from natural gas and combining it with nitrogen from the air at 400–500°C under extreme pressure. The natural gas provides both the hydrogen feedstock and the energy to drive the reaction. Over 150 million tons a year. Without it, crop yields collapse and billions face starvation.

Plastics

Plastics are built from hydrocarbon chains derived almost entirely from oil and natural gas. The fossil fuel is not burned. It is restructured, molecule by molecule, into materials that are lighter than metal, cheaper than glass, and more versatile than either. Over 400 million tons a year. Without them, there is no modern medicine, no food packaging, no insulation, no electronics.

The common thread

Four materials. Four processes that require specific chemical inputs at extreme temperatures. Four dependencies on hydrocarbons not as a fuel but as a feedstock. Between them, these four account for roughly a third of global energy use — and they depend on hydrocarbons not merely as a source of heat but as a chemical input to the process itself. Remove any one and the system that feeds, houses, and sustains eight billion people begins to fail. Remove all four and it ceases to exist.

So what happens when someone proposes to replace these feedstocks with electricity?

The electric diet

To make steel without coal, you need hydrogen — vast quantities of it — produced by splitting water with electricity. To make cement without releasing process CO₂, you would need to reinvent the chemistry of calcium carbonate, a problem no one has solved at scale. To make ammonia without natural gas, you need the same clean hydrogen, in even vaster quantities. To make plastics without oil, you need synthetic hydrocarbon feedstocks built up from CO₂ and hydrogen — a process so energy-intensive that it makes the original fossil route look efficient by comparison.

Every one of these alternatives requires enormous amounts of cheap, reliable, high-density electricity that doesn’t exist.

And every one of them runs into a fundamental distinction: electricity is not a fuel. It is an energy carrier — manufactured, in real time, from a primary source, with losses at every step. You can’t mine electricity. You can’t store it in a barrel. You must generate it, transmit it, and use it in the same moment, or lose it. When someone says “replace fossil fuels with electricity,” they are not proposing a like-for-like substitution. They are proposing to replace a fuel with a carrier — and then asking that carrier to do the chemical work that only a fuel can do.

The circularity

Now consider this. Building the wind farms, solar arrays, battery storage, and transmission lines required by the plan requires vast quantities of steel, cement, and plastics — which can only be produced using hydrocarbons. And because these systems wear out and must be rebuilt every twenty to thirty years, the dependency is not temporary. It is permanent.

You don’t use the old system to launch the new one and then switch it off. You use the old system to sustain the new one, indefinitely.

The honest version

The honest version of “electrify everything” is this: electrify the things that electricity can actually do — lighting, computing, rail transport, heat pumps — and accept that the industrial core of civilisation will continue to require hydrocarbons as a chemical input for the foreseeable future. That is not a failure of ambition. It is an acknowledgement of chemistry.

The next essay will be on Monday: the fossil fuels we still depend on. They’re running out — and the timeline is shorter than almost anyone in politics realises.

Richard

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This is the third in a series previewing the core arguments of "The Energy Trap: Why the Renewable Energy Transition Can't Work - And What Can", coming later this year.

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