Most of your analysis seems accurate, but there do seem to be some issues.
While you are correct that the until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, the same article you linked to notes that this was phased out as the major forests were cut down and demand went up. This is not a long-term sustainable process that was converted over to coal simply because it was more efficient. Even if one had forests grow back to pre-industrial levels (a not completely unlikely possibility if most of humanity has been wipe out), you don’t have that much time to use wood on a large scale before you need to switch over.
You also are underestimating the transformation that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. In particular, while it is true that industries operated on water power, the total number of industries, and the energy demands they made were much smaller. Consider for example chip making plants which have massive energy needs. One can’t run a modern economy on water power because there wouldn’t be nearly enough water power to go around. This is connected to how while in the US in the 1870s and 1880s many of the first power plants were hydroelectric, support of a substantial grid required the switch to coal which could both provide more power and could have plants built at the most convenient location. This is discussed in Maggie Koerth-Baker’s book “Before the Lights Go Out” which has a detailed discussion about the history of the US electric grids.
And while it is true that no country had major coal mining before 1790 by modern standards, again the replacement of wood and charcoal occurred to a large extent because they were running out of cheap wood, and because increased industry substantially benefited from the increased energy density. And even well before that, coal was used already in the late Middle Ages for speciaized purposes, such as metal working with metals that required high temperatures. While not a large industry, it was large enough that you had coal regulation in the 1300s, and by the 1620s it was economically practical to have coal mines that included large scale drainage and pumping systems so one could mine coal well below sea level.
Even mentioning oil in this context is pretty ridiculous—it only came to importance by about 1950-ish.
Wood ran out because forests weren’t properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest—and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
We don’t have enough hydropower to cover all our use, but it could cover very large fraction of our needs, definitely enough to jumpstart civilization, and there’s many times more of any of—wind, solar, biomass, or nuclear power than we need—none of them fully available to any new civilization.
The fact that we used something for a certain purpose is no evidence that it was necessary for this purpose, it’s just evidence that we’re not total idiots to leave a resource unused. Many alternatives which would work nearly just as well were available in pretty much every single case.
The key point of economics you are missing here is the price of wood was driven up by increased demand. Wood never ran out, but it did become so expensive that some uses became uneconomical. This allowed substitution of the previously more expensive coal. This did not happen because of poor management of forests. Good management of forests might have encouraged it, by limiting the amount of wood taken for burning.
This is especially true because we are not talking about a modern globalized economy where cheap sugar from Brazil, corn from Kansas, or pine from the Rockies can come into play. We are talking about the 19th century in industrializing Europe. The energy use of England could not have been met by better forestry. All stats from 200 years later are a red herring.
If there were other alternatives that were almost as good, please produce them. Not now, but at the time being discussed.
Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
Would you mind explaining how what I have said is ahistorical nonsense?
Yes, at the end of the 18th century there was transatlantic trade. However, it was not cheap. It was sail powered and relatively expensive compared to modern shipping. Coal was generally not part of this trade. Shipping was too expensive. English industry used English mined coal. Same with American and German industry. If shipping coal was too expensive, why would charcoal be economical? You have jumped from “transportation existed” to “the costs of transportation can be ignored.”
As for why industries weren’t located by sources of wood. I can think of several reasons. First is that they were sometimes located by sources of wood, and that contributed to the deforestation.
The second is that there aren’t sources of wood as geographically concentrated as sources of coal. There is 10 mile square of wood producing district that can provide as much energy consistently over time as a 10 mile square of coal mining district.
Third is that timber was inconveniently located. There were coal producing areas that were better located for shipping and labor than timber producing areas. Are you seriously suggesting that an English owned factory with English labor might have set up in rural Sweden rather than Birmingham as an almost as good alternative?
I thought that we would have been total idiots to leave a resource like coal unused.
Most of your analysis seems accurate, but there do seem to be some issues.
While you are correct that the until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, the same article you linked to notes that this was phased out as the major forests were cut down and demand went up. This is not a long-term sustainable process that was converted over to coal simply because it was more efficient. Even if one had forests grow back to pre-industrial levels (a not completely unlikely possibility if most of humanity has been wipe out), you don’t have that much time to use wood on a large scale before you need to switch over.
You also are underestimating the transformation that occurred in the second half of the 19th century. In particular, while it is true that industries operated on water power, the total number of industries, and the energy demands they made were much smaller. Consider for example chip making plants which have massive energy needs. One can’t run a modern economy on water power because there wouldn’t be nearly enough water power to go around. This is connected to how while in the US in the 1870s and 1880s many of the first power plants were hydroelectric, support of a substantial grid required the switch to coal which could both provide more power and could have plants built at the most convenient location. This is discussed in Maggie Koerth-Baker’s book “Before the Lights Go Out” which has a detailed discussion about the history of the US electric grids.
And while it is true that no country had major coal mining before 1790 by modern standards, again the replacement of wood and charcoal occurred to a large extent because they were running out of cheap wood, and because increased industry substantially benefited from the increased energy density. And even well before that, coal was used already in the late Middle Ages for speciaized purposes, such as metal working with metals that required high temperatures. While not a large industry, it was large enough that you had coal regulation in the 1300s, and by the 1620s it was economically practical to have coal mines that included large scale drainage and pumping systems so one could mine coal well below sea level.
It is relevant in this context in that it became important in part due to the rising price of coal (as easy to access coal had been depleted). It isn’t a coincidence that in World War II, a major goal of the German invasion of Russia was to get access to the Baku oil fields.
Wood ran out because forests weren’t properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest—and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
In 1990 3.5 billion m^3 of wood were harvested. With density of about 0.9kg/cubic meter, and energy of about 15 MJ/kg, that’s about 47 trillion MJ (if we burned it all, which we’re not going to).
All coal produced in 1905 was about 0.9 billion tons, or about 20 trillion MJ.
In 2010 worldwide biofuel production reached 105 billion liters (or 2.4 trillion MJ). But that’s very modest amount—according to the International Energy Agency, biofuels have the potential to meet more than a quarter of world demand for transportation fuels by 2050. And that’s not any new technology, we knew how to extract alcohol from plants thousands of years ago.
We don’t have enough hydropower to cover all our use, but it could cover very large fraction of our needs, definitely enough to jumpstart civilization, and there’s many times more of any of—wind, solar, biomass, or nuclear power than we need—none of them fully available to any new civilization.
The fact that we used something for a certain purpose is no evidence that it was necessary for this purpose, it’s just evidence that we’re not total idiots to leave a resource unused. Many alternatives which would work nearly just as well were available in pretty much every single case.
The key point of economics you are missing here is the price of wood was driven up by increased demand. Wood never ran out, but it did become so expensive that some uses became uneconomical. This allowed substitution of the previously more expensive coal. This did not happen because of poor management of forests. Good management of forests might have encouraged it, by limiting the amount of wood taken for burning.
This is especially true because we are not talking about a modern globalized economy where cheap sugar from Brazil, corn from Kansas, or pine from the Rockies can come into play. We are talking about the 19th century in industrializing Europe. The energy use of England could not have been met by better forestry. All stats from 200 years later are a red herring.
If there were other alternatives that were almost as good, please produce them. Not now, but at the time being discussed.
Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
Would you mind explaining how what I have said is ahistorical nonsense?
Yes, at the end of the 18th century there was transatlantic trade. However, it was not cheap. It was sail powered and relatively expensive compared to modern shipping. Coal was generally not part of this trade. Shipping was too expensive. English industry used English mined coal. Same with American and German industry. If shipping coal was too expensive, why would charcoal be economical? You have jumped from “transportation existed” to “the costs of transportation can be ignored.”
As for why industries weren’t located by sources of wood. I can think of several reasons.
First is that they were sometimes located by sources of wood, and that contributed to the deforestation.
The second is that there aren’t sources of wood as geographically concentrated as sources of coal. There is 10 mile square of wood producing district that can provide as much energy consistently over time as a 10 mile square of coal mining district.
Third is that timber was inconveniently located. There were coal producing areas that were better located for shipping and labor than timber producing areas. Are you seriously suggesting that an English owned factory with English labor might have set up in rural Sweden rather than Birmingham as an almost as good alternative?
I thought that we would have been total idiots to leave a resource like coal unused.