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Thomas Manuel Ortiz, "Why We Struggle to Go Green: Hard Truths about the Clean Energy Transition" (Texas A&M Press, 2025)
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Michael Simpson
Specialoffer welcome to the New Books Network. Hello to the listeners. My name is Michael Simpson and I have the great pleasure of welcoming Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz to discuss his recently released book why We Struggle to Go Hard Truths about the Clean Energy Transition. Now. Tom is an energy engineer, author, and independent researcher with experience across academia, industry and public service. He brings to this book his 30 years of experience, which includes oil and gas exploration, production and refining, as well as having expertise in offshore wind siting, carbon sequestration in hydrogen power. Tom's research has focused on hydrogen, solar cogeneration, and the use of recycled carbon dioxide as a net zero refrigerant replacement. He is also the author of the popular substack newsletter Resource Realism. Now, Tom holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and an MBA in finance from Texas A and M University. Welcome Tom.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Thank you so much.
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Michael Simpson
Let's just start. How would you characterize the audience you were targeting with this book?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
My hope is that I can reach people who are interested in more than what they might read in mass media journalism and yet are not confident enough to tackle some of the academic literature. I'm trying to get that sweet spot between research and journalism that will engage people from wide varieties of backgrounds, not just technically educated people.
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Michael Simpson
That's commendable. As a professor myself, that that ability to translate things that are beyond normal people's understanding to a text that they can get into, both in breadth and depth, is commendable. So thank you for doing this. Now, your book subtitle is Hard Truths about Energy Transition. So to know if we have successfully made this transition, how do we know we are at the end of this? What are the indicators?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
That's a great question. And I actually talk about this in the introduction to the book. There really isn't an end point. We've never really made a hard transition. Humanity started out thousands, tens of thousands of years ago using animal muscle power, our own muscle power. We ended up learning how to harvest biomass, burning wood, and we switched to coal and then to oil and gas. And now we've learned how to produce solar power, wind energy, nuclear fission. And yet all of these old energy sources are still in use. There's a surprising amount of biomass still used in a large part of the world by people for cooking, for home heating. So there isn't going to be a hard end point. We're going to have to decide how much energy we really need to live, and then we're going to have to choose the energy sources that allow us to live within, the means that keeps the biosphere safe and that recognizes other planetary limits on material availability.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, so before we continue, I think it may be important to define for listeners what you mean by energy density, which you talk about in the book.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Energy density is the amount of usable energy that you can harvest from a given amount of material, a given mass of coal, or a given volume of crude oil, or a given surface area of solar panel deployment. The density of fossil fuels is very, very high. They pack an enormous amount of energy into every gallon of gasoline, every cubic foot of natural gas. And one of the reasons, or the primary reason for that, is that that energy has been concentrated geologically over millions of years. Everything that we use as an energy source ultimately comes from the sun. The sun beams down energy. Plants use that energy with the process of photosynthesis to grow. Those plants die. They end up being compressed into peat and into coal, and then into oil and gas. Those concentrated sources of energy are extremely useful because you can carry them around with you and you can drive, for instance, a long, long way on a tank of gasoline. Energy sources that are not dense that are what I call diffuse, like solar energy. They're very available. There is a virtually unlimited amount of it that comes down to us from space, but it's relatively hard to harvest. Actually, it's hard to gather that diffuse energy. And that's why we have not heretofore used as much of it as we are trying to do now.
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Michael Simpson
I'm sure some of our listeners may think that solar and wind, which as you said arguably is in a limited supply and has a smaller carbon footprint, should be where we should be focusing our research and technical innovation. Do you agree with this perspective?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
I think solar and wind are very important. I do not subscribe to the belief that there is one best energy source that we need to focus on. There are advantages and disadvantages to every kind of energy system. Solar photovoltaic power is probably not going to be very useful for transportation. There just isn't the density, as we've just as we've recently just talked about, to power large vehicles with arrays of solar panels. Those technologies are not likely to improve to a point where that becomes viable at the energy power and efficiency levels that we've come to expect. On the other hand, they might be good for things like ocean going vessels if we're going to accept a slower rate of transportation.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, so I must ask you in your home state, Texas, you know Texas is a nationwide leader in total wind energy generation, producing over 25% of all the US wind power. No other state comes close to that chair. So why is this oil rich, high density region going towards this green source of energy?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
You have to go back to the early 2000s when there was an administration in power in Texas that was very supportive of this new industry. And we're talking primarily about onshore wind because there's a big difference in the friendliness of Texas state government. They're much more friendly to onshore wind than they are to offshore wind. But back around 2005, 2008, there was a program at the US Department of Energy called CREZ, Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, I believe it was, although I might have that acronym wrong. But the CREZ program was designed to incentivize proactive construction of energy infrastructure. The power lines, the transformers, the things that were needed to get electricity from places where it could be produced cheaply, far west Texas, to places where it was badly needed, the major cities. And by putting the emphasis on infrastructure first and subsidizing that, it became very, very attractive for companies to then come out and build the wind turbines out in the middle of nowhere to produce energy, where it was, where it was most available in those high velocity wind corridors. It was a policy decision that was made. And it was made because it was good for the farmers, it was good for business. People who were having a lot of trouble making money raising cattle out there suddenly had a very reliable source of income and the cities needed the electricity. So it was a win win situation for, for everyone. Offshore wind has struggled because for one thing, people are very sensitive about the obstructive nature of wind turbines. They don't want them near picturesque beaches or near their homes. When you start building infrastructure closer to densely populated areas or tourist attractions even, you get a very different response from government.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, well then, then as a follow up in your book, you talk about national grids and distribution systems, you imply the complexity combined with the inefficiency or loss of energy through the transmission process that our current national grid system cannot support a true transition of going green. So might it not make sense to decentralize the grid to reduce both the complexity of management and the reduction of possible blackouts, not to mention shortening electricity distance of transmission, thus reducing the loss of energy? I ask you this. Since Texas has its own electric system.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Grid right now, I wouldn't call the ERCOT grid, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, our national grid of Texas, so to speak. I wouldn't necessarily call that a decentralized system because it works very much like the eastern interconnection and the western interconnection. They are, it is a large regional electric grid. Now there are reasons to decentralize power production and of course we have done a lot of that. I myself have rooftop solar panels here at the house. There are many people who are moving toward having homes that are more self sufficient in terms of energy production. Industrial buildings, commercial buildings that are, you call, they're called zero energy buildings. There's, there's a, there's a big push toward that and it does make some sense. But there are a couple of issues. One, in most cases, even if you have the ability to generate your own electricity at your home or commercial building site, you're still connected to the larger public grid because you have to be able, the grid operators have to be able to turn that system off. For instance, in our case, if the power goes out around us in order to safely maintain the rest of the grid, they can't have electricity flowing upstream while people are trying to repair the power lines in the, in the rest of the neighborhood. And that speaks to a larger issue of another reason why Decentralization has been challenging. When the electric grid that we have now was first created, it was designed specifically to support a few very large producers of electricity that were located far away from people, mainly because they belched a huge amount of coal smoke. And they were designed to funnel that electricity toward a large number of very small users. So the electric grid is not designed to support power flow in both directions. We need to beef up those distribution systems, which is billions and billions of dollars in infrastructure development. But the other problem with decentralization is that if you take the attitude from a policy perspective that every homeowner or every commercial business is going to be self reliant in terms of energy, I fear you're going to Balkanize the system such that we have poor neighborhoods that get absolutely no investment in in energy infrastructure and rich neighborhoods where everybody is doing just fine. So the value of those properties that suddenly now are on the bankrupt public grid, they're not going to be worth much anymore. They're going to be like properties that existed before rural electrification. And I don't think that's a very just way to bring us forward in the terms of transitioning to a new energy development infrastructure.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, I appreciate that answer about equity and justice. It's something I didn't think about when I was thinking about the economy. So I'm sure you remember the nuclear accident, Three Mile island, and listeners probably know about Chernobyl and Fukushima. But I must ask, what is your view on the potential of a nuclear based energy economy?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
I am pro nuclear energy. I think that nuclear fission can be a very valuable and meaningful source of electricity production. There are other countries, of course, France is the canonical example, who have done very, very well in building out a large, stable, safe nuclear energy production infrastructure. We could do that in this country. We could have done better. One of the mistakes we made early on is that we decided to take what was designed for nuclear submarine propulsion. And the saying is we beached it. We took that reactor design and we replicated it for civilian onshore power production. And it wasn't the best choice. It has flaws that we could have avoided had we started out with the mindset. What is the very best way to build a large scale civilian onshore electricity production network? And we're starting to realize some of those early design trade offs might be good to make now. And you see those things like making molten salt reactors, people are coming back to some of these earlier ideas, but it's expensive, it's always going to be expensive. And we still have not come to grips with our waste problem. We don't like to recycle or reprocess fuel because we're afraid that there are risks of weapons proliferation. And those risks do exist. They're not insurmountable risks. But we have to come to grips with whether or not we're going to find a place to store nuclear waste. Long term. Nobody wants it. We still have not sequestered any of the high level waste that We've generated over 60 years of civilian nuclear power production. It's a, it's. There's a huge political problem there and a social problem that has to be solved in addition to a technical problem. But we do have a lot of nuclear fuel that could be harvested if we decommission warheads. We did a lot of that with the Russians. We had the Megatons 2 megawatts program where we purchased a lot of material from the former Soviet Union and we turned it into civilian power plant fuel. We sure have plenty of that at home we could use. We could start reprocessing uranium. We haven't done much of that in a long time, but we certainly could. So there are options. It is not a panacea. No electricity source is. But we do have the potential to grow the nuclear industry in this country again if we want to.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, thank you for that. Interesting. As in my master's program, I went to visit a nuclear power plant and after that I went over the walls to protest about the nuclear power plant. So I have mixed emotions and it was because of the waste issue and what to do with the waste. Not by, not because of the energy source.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Right. So waste. If I can just follow up on that, there are good options for markedly reducing the amount of waste. You can recycle much of the spent fuel and reprocess it to reduce the mass of material that must be sequestered for hundreds or thousands of years. But that is something that we are leery of and we have to decide whether we can afford and whether we want to afford to tackle that problem. It's not a problem that cannot be solved.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, thank you for that.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
So good, so good, so good.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
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Michael Simpson
They see us.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance.
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Michael Simpson
Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts so from your perspective, do you see the evolution and growth of AIs of benefit to moving us faster towards a green transition?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
I do not. I am fairly dismissive of many of the trends that people are talking about. Thirty years ago, when I was a student, we all learned some of the most rudimentary elements of machine learning. Things like doing regression analysis and these techniques, these mathematical techniques, even neural networks. They've been around for many decades and one of the reasons that they have become so popular now is because computing power has increased to the point where you can run models with billions of variables. But these tools, they are not magical, they're not intelligent. They are really just a large scale version of what we engineering students used to call curve fitting. That is not going to save the world. They can be very useful. I think that very closely targeted neural networks or other machine learning systems that are designed to do one thing very, very well. Like perhaps search through billions of different molecules to find which ones may be the best candidates for drug discovery. There are applications like that where I think that the the machine learning community can make a lot of headway whether they're going to help us to go green. I think the answer is no. In fact, I believe really the opposite. With all of the the pressure that data centers are putting on the electric grid and on energy systems in General, I think we're going backward when we are looking at trying to double or triple the size of the electricity generation system to support these tools that have really a lot, in many cases, marginal benefits. So I'm. I am of the opinion that we should scale back these efforts, and I am pretty confident that within a few years, a lot of this hype will fade.
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Michael Simpson
Okay. You may have read in the last week or so, the government at Chandler, Arizona basically stopped the building of a AI computer processing center. And it was mainly over who was going to get the water either to cool the AI system or, you know, use it in Arizona, which is a drought state. You do talk about this connection between energy, water and food in your book. Can you expand on that a little bit?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
There is an intimate connection among those three commodities. Energy cannot be produced without water. Water cannot be produced without energy, at least in the sense of getting water to where it is needed by people and making sure that it is clean enough for human consumption. The days are long past where people just go down to the river with a bucket and fill it. Right. We have huge systems of pumps and treatment plants that take water from places that are far distant from population centers and bring it to us that energy is a significant drain. Some organizations, some industrial organizations even spend half of their electricity budget just moving air and water around various industrial processes, pumps and compressors are very expensive machines from an energy perspective. And then conversely, when you need to run huge amounts of machinery and especially computers, they generate massive amounts of heat and that heat will destroy them if it's not dissipated. So you have to cool computers. And the cooling of computers, especially these large data centers, is an energy drain that is equivalent to a large power plant in many cases. You're talking about sometimes gigawatts of cooling energy. It's. It's a huge drain. And water is one of nature's best heat transfer fluids. You are not going to get there with air cooling. You are not going to spend the money to develop some synthetic chemical heat transfer fluid that in quantities great enough to do the job. Water is really the only reasonable way to get that cooling energy in place. And it's a direct conflict with the people who need it for residential and commercial and agricultural use. So that is a very good point that they have in Arizona. And I completely understand and support that. I don't think it's necessarily a very good use of water in many cases.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, okay, so this may be coming out of left field, but in my training in both resource and environmental economics, we talk what has been called Jayvon's Paradox. In short, it posits as technological improvements increase the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource often increases rather than decreases. With your research, have you observed such a dynamic?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Well, yes. And Jayvons or Jevons, I'm not sure how you say that paradox is alive and well in every sector of the economy. We used to, I started out in the oil business back around the turn of the century at ExxonMobil. And we used to have a saying there. We would tell people that a gallon of our gasoline was cheaper than any other liquid that you could buy at the grocery store. Milk, orange juice, window washing fluid, anything. And it was true. But that really is an expression of the paradox. The more efficiently that you produce gasoline, and Jevons was talking originally about coal, but any commodity, you incentivize people to use it. If something is expensive, people won't waste it. If something is cheap, there's very little incentive to worry about using it in a way that is, that is responsible. So it may seem counterintuitive to people, but actually making energy more expensive is in some ways good. That's why some countries are, and especially in Europe, this is true, are so good about having a very stiff gasoline tax because they don't want the commodity to be wasted. They want it to be viewed as a more precious thing. And if I can just say one more thing about this, I think that is one of the dangers that people don't realize when some have this vision of a future where an energy source like nuclear fusion perhaps becomes more widespread. And they say, well, we'll have infinite amounts of basically free energy. This is not really realistic, but just for the sake of argument, let's say that we had an essentially free source of energy. All that would do was, would be to trigger Jevons paradox. For every other kind of material that we use. Suddenly now the efficiency of producing metals, of producing plastics, of producing any other kind of manufactured good would, would rise very sharply because the energy inputs would, would be considerably less. And in terms of economic resources, so we would switch from wasting oil to wasting metals, to wasting wood, to wasting every other kind of mineral that would go into producing resources. So having something be free or having something be very, very efficiently produced, whatever it is, is, is somewhat dangerous. Almost because of human nature, we, we will tend to waste it.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, so let me change track a little bit. Can you explain for the listeners what is demand side management in regards to electricity and how essential do you think this is in moving the needle in a more sustainable energy transition.
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Demand side management is instead of asking how can we get more power, electric power, or more energy generated to satisfy our wants and needs, we flip the question and we ask how can we curtail our usage or shift that usage such that we can stay within the limits of the energy that we can produce today? There are good opportunities for demand side management and I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but this is one of the primary takeaways I hope people will get from my book is that there are, there are no silver bullets, there is no panacea. Demand site management can't solve all of our problems. We can do some things like reducing the amount of air conditioning that we use. That's kind of a no brainer. People waste a lot of air conditioning. And demand side management, I think first and foremost should just be simply about conservation. Do you need to chill your home in Texas to 65 degrees during July or can you get by with 75? You probably can get by with 75, but people won't do it here. People are very stubborn about these things. Other kinds of demand side management are a little bit more subtle. Things like don't run your dishwasher in the middle of the afternoon when peak electricity demand has picked up as people are getting off work and cooking meals. Sure, that's a good idea. And maybe you can program your dishwasher to run at midnight. Closed washer, clothes dryer, same idea. There are natural limits to how much of that you can do. Of course, the natural limit would be if we took our aggregate energy demand, whatever it was, and just broke it up into even chunks throughout each of the 24 hours of the day. That would smooth out the demand curve about as much as we could do. But without actually reducing that demand, you're still going to run into certain problems that can't be solved. So demand side management, useful and important, but not a magical solution to our supply problems.
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Michael Simpson
So you're saying we must make some critical decisions of what not to do to limit the continued growth of our energy demand. But what you're talking about is more of a diffuse decision making among the populace. Is there some major decisions we should avoid? So do not grow our energy demand?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Well, I'll go back to AI I mean that would be number one on my most wanted list of technologies to reduce. And it's not just a diffuse decision making process. Our government and business leaders are massively pushing the accelerated development of these tools. And you have to ask for what? For generating cat videos? For having agents that can go out and search a website and buy groceries for you? Do you need that to have a good quality of life? Is it worth having to put such strains on our electricity production system? I say no. Cryptocurrency. Similar argument. If we have to build large numbers of new power plants, even keeping many old inefficient coal and natural gas burning power plants operating, just so we can solve the computer problems that are required to mine new bitcoins, is that improving human quality of life enough to justify that allocation of resources? I say no. And our governments have the ability to set policies to promote, through the use of subsidies and taxation schemes, business trends. We have chosen right now, especially in Texas, to go all in with both of those things. We're very, very pro AI, pro cryptocurrency in the state right now. We don't have to be. I would say one of the best ways we could, we could start reducing our demand is to stop making policies like that, space tourism. Although it's not as directly an electricity issue, it's certainly an energy and materials issue. Is this important? Are we really in bad need of having a nuclear reactor on the moon? Or should we be spending our time and effort refurbishing our terrestrial energy infrastructure first? These are policy and decisions that I think go hand in hand with making a green energy transition. And we're making the wrong ones right now.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, you raise a point about materials. So what is the sort of the linkage between materials on the planet and energy coming to the planet?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
We have a finite supply of all materials. It may sound a little melodramatic or philosophical, but all of the materials that we have on Earth were aggregated here as the planet was forming. There's nothing really much mass that is coming to Earth. The occasional meteorite, I suppose, but there is not a lot of additional material coming to us from space. So what we have is what we have to work with. And just like we talked about with energy density, there is material density as well. That's very important. Deposits of minerals, gold, iron, aluminum. Of course, now in the news you hear incessantly about rare earth minerals. All of these concentrated deposits of minerals were generated by geologic activity over eons. And the more we mine, the more we produce these materials, the fewer of these rich, thermodynamically dense deposits of materials will exist. And that's not something that we're going to reverse as a species. This is a one way street. So we should be more intentional about how we choose to use those concentrated sources of energy, the amount of environmental waste, the amount of energy required to extract minerals. These things are guaranteed to go up over time as we search for less and less rich veins of any of these materials. And it's something that we need to be aware of.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, thank you. Now, early in your book, you point out that the national debt is over $30 trillion. And later in the book, you point out it will take at least $2 trillion to upgrade our electrical infrastructure. So do you trust that the U.S. economic system is even capable of supporting such a transition to green energy?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
It's a good question to ask. We can't do everything. And one of the ideas that I offer at the very end of the book is that we should really try to come up, at least at first, with some compromise solutions that don't require as many of these massive investments. And one of those things would be synthetic fuels. Back in the 1970s, during the oil embargoes, the OPEC oil embargoes, there were a lot of people that started doing a lot of research into making familiar liquid fuels like gasoline and kerosene, which is jet fuel, diesel oil from coal, oil shale, things that were abundant in the continental United States but were more expensive to produce. Germany famously pioneered the synthetic fuel production industry back in the 1920s and 1930s. They didn't have a lot of crude oil, so they learned very quickly to make gasoline and diesel fuel and jet fuel, aviation fuel, rather, from, from coal, particularly, because they had so much of it. But we can do this today in a similar fashion with captured carbon dioxide and green hydrogen. And if we do that, maybe we can get at least a partial handle on some of our emissions problems without looking at replacing all of the cars that we drive with electric vehicles without doubling or tripling the size of the electric grid. We have to start thinking a little bit more strategically in that way. Even if it's not a total solution, it would at least get us on the right track. Right now, we haven't really even made a dent in carbon emissions at all. So I think that the economy, and especially because people are of the opinion still that if, if it's going to be successful, it's going to have to be something that makes money for private industry. If we, if we're wedded to that idea, we're not going to get there by proposing these mega projects. As you, as you say, I think that the economic system won't support that, at least in the short to medium term. So we will have to come up with more conventionally economical ways to get started.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, well, thank you for that. So do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners?
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Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
I hope that people will understand one, that the hype that goes along with new technologies, whatever they may be, and this can be anything from AI to nuclear fusion to solar panels. There are no magical solutions to these problems. At some point we simply have to decide that we will be satisfied doing less and having less energy per person. And that doesn't mean going back to the Stone Age and carrying around rocks and chasing woolly mammoths. It doesn't have to be be that dire a situation. We use 36% of the world's resources in the United States and we're only 4% of the population. That cannot continue. We have to be more realistic about what we should really be allowed and to be expected to consume as citizens so that the world can have a decent quality of life while also using much, much less. Because using less, and that's not just less energy, but fewer materials, it's the only way we're going to get a handle on the emissions problem. We have become spoiled over the last few generations, particularly since 1945. We can't continue to consume at this level. And I hope people will understand that that's true and that it's not the end of the world if we stop wasting so much.
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Michael Simpson
So can the listeners go to your Substack newsletter, resource Realism and stay abreast of what seems real?
- [44:39]
Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
Not absolutely. I encourage that. It's just, as you say, resource Realism and it's under my name, Thomas Manuel Ortiz, on substack. I try to post every week about some aspect of resource consumption and to have something practical to say about where we should be going next. And I hope people will, will, will consume that.
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Michael Simpson
Okay, well. Well, thank you, Tom, for the breadth and depth of your research and your thoughts you shared with us today.
- [45:13]
Dr. Thomas Manuel Ortiz
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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Michael Simpson
Oh, yeah, thank you. I enjoyed this. The book is why We Struggle to Go Green. Hard Truths about the Clean Energy Transition, and it's published by Stoney Creek Publishing.